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Israel kills 40 in Gaza “humanitarian zone”

Electronic Intafada Maureen Clare Murphy, 10 September 2024

Israel massacred at least 40 Palestinians by bombing tents housing people displaced from other areas of Gaza in al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis, early Tuesday, according to the government media office in the territory.

The health ministry in Gaza recorded the deaths of 19 individuals whose bodies were brought to hospitals. The media office explained that its higher fatality count includes 21 people whose bodies were not recovered because they were totally obliterated by the heavy weapons dropped on them.

Crews were still searching for missing persons, the government media office added. Video of the aftermath of the strike in al-Mawasi shows a 30-foot-deep crater in the sand where tents once stood:

Israel claimed without proof that it targeted a command center belonging to Hamas, which denied that any of its fighters were present.

This is a clear lie that aims to justify these ugly crimes,” Hamas stated. The resistance has denied several times that any of its members exist within civilian gatherings or use these places for military purposes.”

UN “deplores” attack

The UN human rights office stated that it “deplores” the attack on al-Mawasi, which Israel had unilaterally designated as a “humanitarian zone.”

Instead of ensuring the safety of displaced Palestinians, the Israeli military “continues to choose to use weapons with wide area effects in these increasingly densely populated areas … suggesting a complete disregard for the lives of Palestinian civilians.”

The vast majority of Gaza’s population, which stood at 2.3 million before the genocide, has been displaced from their homes. Many people have been displaced multiple times, with no safe place to go.

Even if Israel’s claims that Hamas fighters had embedded themselves in the camp were true, the UN office said, this would not relieve its military of its obligation “to comply with the fundamental international humanitarian law principles of distinction, proportionality and precautions in attack.”

Israel has instructed civilians to move to al-Mawasi, an open coastal area lacking infrastructure to meet the needs of displaced people, when issuing evacuation orders in other areas of Gaza. Israel most recently ordered Palestinians to evacuate to al-Mawasi on 24 August, the UN human rights office said.

In July, Israeli warplanes dropped bombs on al-Mawasi, killing dozens of Palestinians. Israel claimed that it had targeted Muhammad Deif, the head of the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, and the commander of Qassam’s Khan Younis Brigade.

Hamas has not confirmed whether Deif, who survived several previous attempts on his life, was killed.

American officials may have been involved in the July massacre in al-Mawasi. The New York Times reported last month that the US has been involved with intercepting the communications of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar and has also “provided ground-penetrating radar to Israel to help in the hunt for him and other Hamas commanders.”

Attacks on shelters in north

Israel has repeatedly struck facilities being used as shelters for displaced people in Gaza, often claiming without evidence that they were being used as command centers by Hamas and other resistance groups, despite the vast tunnel networks used by Palestinian fighters.

On 7 September, the Israeli military attacked the Halima al-Sadia school sheltering hundreds of displaced Palestinians in Jabaliya al-Nazla, northern Gaza. The attack, which occurred without warning, killed four people and injured several others, according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

That same day, four Palestinians, including a child, were killed when Israeli warplanes bombed the Amr Ibn al-Aas school north of Gaza City, which was also being used as a shelter.

“Since the beginning of August, the Israeli occupation army has bombed 16 schools being used as shelters in the Gaza Strip,” Euro-Med Monitor stated. All but one of the targeted schools are in the northern half of Gaza.

More than 215 Palestinians were killed in those attacks and hundreds more were injured, the rights group added, noting that Israel has escalated its targeting of civilians in Gaza City and the northern governorates of the territory.

The deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza’s north, including facilities serving as shelters, is part of Israel’s strategy to create a coercive environment in order to forcibly transfer the population to central and southern Gaza, according to Euro-Med Monitor.

Israeli plan to depopulate northern Gaza

The rights group pointed to reports in Israeli media about a plan drafted by Israeli reservist commanders and soldiers to depopulate northern Gaza.

The scheme, reportedly presented to Israel’s cabinet and other senior officials, was spearheaded by Giora Eiland, the retired major general and close advisor to Israel’s defense minister who called for creating conditions for the spread of epidemics in Gaza as a form of biological warfare.

It calls for an estimated 300,000 civilians to evacuate northern Gaza in a one-week period, after which the area would be besieged and Hamas fighters would be made to surrender or be killed.

According to Aluf Benn, chief editor of the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz, Israel has entered the second phase of its war, during which it “will strive to complete its takeover of the northern Gaza Strip.”

Benn added that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government will subject Palestinians in northern Gaza to “the fate of the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh: They were expelled from the region a year ago, overnight, in a rapid move by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Israel’s close ally.”

According to Benn, steps taken toward this new phase include Israel’s recent tapping of a colonel to head the Gaza equivalent of the Civil Administration in the West Bank and Netanyahu’s instruction for the military to prepare to distribute aid in lieu of humanitarian organizations.

“The motive is obvious: whoever distributes the food and medicine has their hand on the power switch,” Benn said.

He added that Netanyahu’s “relinquishment of the return of the Israeli hostages” is intended to deprive Sinwar of leverage in negotiations. Meanwhile, their continued captivity in Gaza will provide “Israel’s justification for continued warfare, siege and occupation.”

The ongoing warfare and siege in turn will compel Palestinians to leave Gaza for good, Benn projects…………………………….

At least 41,020 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since 7 October 2023, and some 94,925 have been injured, according to the health ministry in the territory.

Thousands more are missing and an unknown number of people have died as a result of Israel’s blockade and systematic attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and sanitation and water infrastructure.  https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/israel-kills-40-gaza-humanitarian-zone

September 13, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

The Fajr massacre: Every 70 kg bag of human remains is considered a martyr 

The bodies of Palestinians killed in the latest Israeli massacre in Gaza were destroyed so far beyond recognition that doctors have only been able to give grieving families an anonymous bag of human remains to bury.

Mondoweiss, By Tareq S. Hajjaj  August 11, 2024 

Zainab al-Jaabari, 79, sits a few dozen meters in front of the scene of the massacre. She is waiting for her family members to return from checking for her seven sons and grandchildren, who were in the prayer hall praying Fajr at the time it took place.

Her family members arrived to see the reality of the massacre with their own eyes: more than a hundred people were killed, and their bodies were now scattered and mixed in the prayer hall in the Daraj neighborhood in Gaza City. It is possible their delay in returning now is due to their horror at what they found, or perhaps because they can’t imagine how to tell Zainab that her seven sons and grandchildren have been killed.

At dawn on Saturday, August 10, the Israeli army bombed a mosque while dozens of displaced people were praying the Fajr prayer, the daily Islamic prayer offered in the early morning. The bombing killed more than a hundred people, most of whom were dismembered or destroyed beyond recognition. For this reason the identification of the bodies has so far been incomplete……………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Every 70 kilograms of remains is considered a martyr

In the mosque, people stand in a row close to each other as they pray, and after the bombing, the worshipers remained intermingled as well, as remains and corpses. Large numbers of martyrs were not able to be identified, and entire families were wiped out.

Survivors of this massacre are describing a new and horrifying experience they are being forced to endure in aftermath of Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip: they cannot even identify the remains of their loved ones.

Because the rescue teams couldn’t identify many of the human remains collected due to the intensity of the bombing, the doctors at Baptist Hospital were not able to identify each martyr individually. Instead, the doctors have started collecting body parts in plastic bags and giving 70 kilos of remains to the family of a martyr who has gone missing.

Hassan Ahmad told Mondoweiss that he searched extensively for the body of his 6-year-old son Ali, and after hours of searching, he did not find a trace of him. He then went to the Baptist Hospital to ask about his son, or to find any part of his body so I could identify him and bury him. After a long search that did not yield any results, the doctors at the Baptist Hospital gave him a plastic bag containing 18 kilograms of human remains and told him, “This is your son; go and bury him.”………………………………………………………..

I saw my father’s carnage

Muhammad Hamida, 12, recounted to Mondoweiss how he found his father, who had been torn apart in the Israeli attack. He says that he went with his older brother to the prayer hall after the bombing to rescue their father, who was praying at the time. 

When we arrived, we couldn’t enter because of the intensity of the fire, blood, and body parts, but we wanted to check on my father. Moments later, we could enter the prayer hall but we couldn’t bear the scene.”

“People were cut up, there was a lot of blood on the ground, and body parts and small pieces of worshipers’ bodies were scattered everywhere. We found my father lying on the ground there. We recognized him, and our relatives helped us drag him out of the prayer hall. We found a human head stuck between his feet when we took him out. I was stunned with fear. I have never seen scenes like this in my life. I hope I never see them again.”

“They will kill us all; we are here alone; no one cares about us. They killed my father, and a month ago, they killed my two uncles, and they will kill everyone who remains in Gaza.”

Fatima Hassona conducted the interviews for this report from Gaza. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/the-fajr-massacre-every-70-kg-bag-of-human-remains-is-considered-a-martyr/?ml_recipient=129461487750088454&ml_link=129461453864305971&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-08-12&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation

August 15, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Why We Must Oppose Israel’s Dangerous Gamble Before It’s Too Late

Failure to stop Israel’s genocide of Palestinians gambles with the fate of humanity as a whole.

Kathy Kelly, Aug 10, 2024,
https://www.laprogressive.com/foreign-policy/israels-dangerous-gamble

Following World War II, Albert Camus posed a “formidable gamble” to those who had survived a tragedy of immense proportions. “We’re in history up to our necks,” he observed, yet we must wager that “words are more powerful than munitions.”

“Leave or die” are the horrid words threatening largely unprotected Palestinian civilians in Gaza as dismayed populations around the world demand moral decency, or at least some indication of sanity, from their non-responsive governments.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. For decades, Israel has flouted international norms by refusing to acknowledge its nuclear weapons arsenal. Nor has it signed relevant treaties governing the biological weapons it possesses. For years, Israel has flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of customary international law through its forcible acquisition of territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and through its transfer of Israeli settlers into the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Now, Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians living in Gaza have cost the lives of at least 39,677 people. Tens of thousands more are believed to be buried beneath the rubble, with at least 90,000 wounded and the overwhelming majority of its displaced 1.9 million population facing starvation.

Israel’s failure to comply with international treaties and humanitarian law signal an acute need for other countries to organize weapons embargoes, cease trade deals, and provide support for civilian peacekeepers to bring about a permanent ceasefire.

Instead of unwavering adherence to international law, the United States continues to arm and protect Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, which now includes using starvation as a weapon of war.

We must try to absorb what it means to live as a refugee in an open-air concentration camp—already one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, even before 70 percent of its housing was destroyed. More than 341 mosques and three churches have been destroyed. 2,000-pound bombs have been dropped on tents in places deemed safe areas.

Innocent civilians are being killed by snipers. Thirty-one out of thirty-six hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. Escape routes are cut off. Persistent restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into and around Gaza are driving a desperate shortage of food, fuel, and medicine. As access to humanitarian relief is deliberately choked off, children are being collectively punished while Israeli leaders denounce them as animals. The world watches in horror as surgeons are forced to amputate the limbs of wounded children with no available anesthetics.

A new polio epidemic emerges while Israel vaccinates its soldiers but leaves the Palestinian civilian population vulnerable. Newly released prisoners have said they were subjected to torture, including being waterboarded and raped.

Rather than bring suspects before international courts, Israel has resorted to assassinations of the very negotiators with whom it purports to be seeking peace, and in a manner clearly intended to expand the conflict into a global war involving multiple nuclear-armed nations.

In its July 19, 2024, authoritative Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Settlement Policy and Practices, the World Court clearly declared the Israeli settlement project in the Occupied Territories to be illegal. The Court outlined the obligation of all parties to the Geneva Convention and the Genocide Convention to discontinue any economic or trade dealings with Israel which might help perpetuate Israel’s occupation and unlawful presence in the territory. Countries that signed or ratified these agreements are obligated to immediately stop arms exports to Israel and to use political, military, and economic influence to stop Israel’s flagrant, escalating violations of international humanitarian law.

The World Court has provided strong, clear words denouncing Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. As during the Vietnam War, ordinary citizens can no longer abide with the lawless barbarism of continuing assaults against Palestinians.

“Rolling the bones” is a slang expression for gambling. With a regional war perhaps now unavoidable in the Middle East, the genocidal derangement of the United States and Europe over Israel’s actions may well lead to a nuclear war that ends the human species. Failing to use our words at this most crucial juncture for humanity would be, as Camus said, a formidable gamble indeed.

August 14, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Nothing’s changed since 1948 – except now Israel’s excuses don’t work

8 August 2024  https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-08-08/1948-israel-excuses/

We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin

A headline about community displacements is about yet another Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the tiny, besieged and utterly destroyed enclave of Gaza, was published in yesterday’s Middle East Eye.

When I began studying Israeli history more than a quarter of a century ago, people claiming to be experts proffered plenty of excuses to explain why Israelis should not be held responsible for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes – what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.

1. I was told most Israelis were not involved and knew nothing of the war crimes carried out against the Palestinians during Israel’s establishment.

2. I was told that those Israelis who did take part in war crimes, like Operation Broom to expel Palestinians from their homeland, did so only because they were traumatised by their experiences in Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, these Israelis assumed that, were the Jewish people to survive, they had no alternative but to drive out the Palestinians en masse.

3. From others, I was told that no ethnic cleansing had taken place. The Palestinians had simply fled at the first sign of conflict because they had no real historical attachment to the land.

4. Or I was told that the Palestinians’ displacement was an unfortunate consequence of a violent war in which Israeli leaders had the best interests of Palestinians at heart. The Palestinians hadn’t left because of Israeli violence but because they has been ordered to do so by Arab leaders in the region. In fact, the story went, Israel had pleaded with many of the 750,000 refugees to come home afterwards, but those same Arab leaders stubbornly blocked their return.

Every one of these claims was nonsense, directly contradicted by all the documentary evidence.

That should be even clearer today, as Israel continues the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of the Palestinian people more than 75 years on.

1. Every Israeli knows exactly what is going on in Gaza – after all, their children-soldiers keep posting videos online showing the latest crimes they have committed, from blowing up mosques and hospitals to shooting randomly into homes. Polls show all but a small minority of Israelis approve of the savagery that has killed many tens of thousands of Palestinians, including children. A third of them think Israel needs to go further in its barbarity.

Today, Israeli TV shows host debates about how much pain soldiers should be allowed to inflict by raping their Palestinian captives. Don’t believe me? Watch this from Israel’s Channel 12: [on original]

2. If the existential fears of Israelis and Jews still require the murder, rape and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians three-quarters of a century on from the Holocaust, then we need to treat that trauma as the problem – and refuse to indulge it any longer.

3. The people of Gaza are fleeing their homes – or at least the small number who still have homes not bombed to ruins – not because they lack an attachment to Palestine. They are fleeing from one part of the cage Israel has created for them to another part of it for one reason alone: because all of them – men, women and children – are terrified of being slaughtered by an Israeli military, at best, indifferent to their suffering and their fate.

4. No serious case can be made today that Israel is carrying out any of its crimes in Gaza – from bombing civilians to starving them – with regret, or that its leaders seek the best for the Palestinian population. Israel is on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court precisely because the judges there suspect it has the very worst intentions possible towards the Palestinian people.

We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was always a settler colonial project. And like other settler colonial projects – from the US and Australia to South Africa and Algeria – it always viewed the native people as inferior, as non-human, as animals, and was bent on their elimination.

What is so obviously true today was true then too, at Israel’s birth. Israel was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin.

We in the West abetted its crimes in 1948, and we’re still abetting them today. Nothing has changed, except the excuses no longer work.

August 12, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one given blessing by the West

Israel has learned that, the more routine its war crimes become, the less coverage they receive – and the less outrage they provoke. 

Last week, western doctors who had volunteered in Gaza said Israel was packing its weapons with shrapnel to maximise injuries to those caught in the blast radius. Children, because of their smaller bodies, were being left with much more severe wounds. 

In recent days, Israel has struck several United Nations schools serving as shelters, killing dozens more Palestinians. On Tuesday, another strike in the “safe zone” of al-Mawasi killed 17. 

According to the UN refugee agency, Unrwa, more than 70 percent of its schools – almost all of them serving as refugee shelters – have been bombed. 

Middle East Eye, Jonathan Cook, 19 July 2024 

Women and children are being targeted intentionally, say Israeli whistleblowers. From ground troops to commanders, the rules of war have been shredded

hey just keep coming. On the weekend, Israel launched another devastating air strike on Gaza, killing at least 90 Palestinians and wounding hundreds more, including women, children and rescue workers. 

Once again, Israel targeted refugees displaced by its earlier bombs, turning an area it had formally declared a “safe zone” into a killing field. 

And once more, western powers shrugged their shoulders. They were too busy accusing Russia of war crimes to have time to worry about the far worse war crimes being inflicted on Gaza by their Israeli ally – with weapons they supplied. 

The atrocity committed at al-Mawasi camp, packed with 80,000 civilians, had the usual Israeli cover story – one rolled out to reassure western publics that their leaders are not the utter hypocrites they appear to be for supporting what the World Court has described as a “plausible genocide”. 

Israel said it was trying to hit two Hamas leaders – one of them Mohammed Deif, head of the group’s military wing – although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed uncertain as to whether the strike was successful. 

No one in the western media appeared to wonder why the pair preferred to make themselves a target in an overcrowded, makeshift refugee camp, where they were at huge risk of being betrayed by an Israeli informant, rather than sheltering in Hamas’s extensive tunnel network. 

Or why Israel deemed it necessary to fire a multitude of massive bombs and missiles to take out two individuals. Is that Israel’s new, expansive redefinition of a “targeted assassination”? 

Or why its pilots and drone operators continued the strikes to hit emergency rescue crews dealing with the initial destruction. Was there intelligence that Deif was not just hiding in the camp, but had hung around to dig out survivors, too? 

Or how killing and maiming hundreds of civilians in an attempt to hit two Hamas fighters could ever possibly satisfy the most basic principles of international law. “Proportion” and “distinction” require armies to weigh the military advantage of an attack against the expected toll on civilian life. 

Biblical vengeance

But Israel has torn up the rulebook on war. According to sources within the Israeli military, it now considers it acceptable to kill more than 100 Palestinian civilians in the pursuit of a single Hamas commander – a commander, let us note, who will simply be replaced the moment he is dead.

Even if the two Hamas leaders were assassinated, Israel could not have been in any doubt that it was perpetrating a war crime. But it has learned that, the more routine its war crimes become, the less coverage they receive – and the less outrage they provoke. 

In recent days, Israel has struck several United Nations schools serving as shelters, killing dozens more Palestinians. On Tuesday, another strike in the “safe zone” of al-Mawasi killed 17. 

According to the UN refugee agency, Unrwa, more than 70 percent of its schools – almost all of them serving as refugee shelters – have been bombed. 

Last week, western doctors who had volunteered in Gaza said Israel was packing its weapons with shrapnel to maximise injuries to those caught in the blast radius. Children, because of their smaller bodies, were being left with much more severe wounds. 

Aid agencies cannot properly treat the wounded, because Israel has been blocking the entry of medical supplies into Gaza.

Committing war crimes, if western publics have not worked it out by now, is the very point of the “military operation” Israel launched in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s one-day attack on 7 October. 

That is why there are more than 38,800 known deaths from Israel’s 10-month assault – and likely at least four times that number unrecorded, according to leading researchers writing in the Lancet medical journal this month. 

That is why it will take at least 15 years to clear the rubble strewn across Gaza by Israeli bombs, according to the UN, and as much as 80 years – and $50bn – to rebuild homes for the remnants of the enclave’s 2.3 million people still alive at the end. 

Israel’s twin goals have been biblical vengeance and the elimination of Gaza – a genocidal rampage to drive the terrified population out, ideally into neighbouring Egypt. 

Shoot-everyone policy

If that was not clear enough already, six Israeli soldiers recently stepped forward to speak out about what they had witnessed while serving in Gaza – a story the western media has entirely failed to report.

Their testimonies, published by the Israel-based publication 972 last week, confirm what Palestinians have been saying for months. 

Commanders have authorised them to open fire on Palestinians at will. Anyone entering an area the Israeli military is treating as a “no-go zone” is shot on sight, whether man, woman or child. 

After months of an Israeli aid blockade that has created a man-made famine, Israel’s military has turned the people of Gaza’s ever-more frantic search for food into a game of Russian roulette. 

This perhaps explains, in part, why so many Palestinians are unaccounted for – Save the Children estimates some 21,000 children are missing. The soldiers quoted in 972 say the victims of their shoot-everyone policy are bulldozed out of view along routes where international aid convoys pass. 

A reserve soldier, identified only as S, said a Caterpillar bulldozer “clears the area of corpses, buries them under the rubble, and flips [them] aside so that the convoys don’t see it – [so that] images of people in advanced stages of decay don’t come out”. The soldier also noted: “The whole area [of Gaza where the army operates] was full of bodies… There is a horrific smell of death.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… A whistleblower from the Netzah Yehuda battalion who spoke to CNN said the commanders, drawn from Israel’s religious extremist ultra-Orthodox sector, stoked a culture of violence towards Palestinians, including vigilante-style attacks…………………………………………………………………………….more https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israeli-soldiers-tell-story-savage-cruelty-gaza-west-gives-blessing?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

July 20, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment