4. The Hospital Massacre
As most of the Israeli military has withdrawn their ground forces from Gaza, they are now sending in the Yeshiva groups. A yeshiva is a religious school where Jews are brainwashed in the destructive teachings and commands in the Talmud. In the Middle East, the yeshiva system came to an end in the 13th century, during the Mongol invasions.
It was re-started in the mid-1700s in Lithuania by Chaim Volozin, a fanatic Talmudist. Eastern Europe was the home base of the Khazar Jews- aka the Ashkhenazi. When Edmond Rothschild moved Russian Jews to Palestine in 1882, this system also followed.
Today, in Israel. This is the most extreme group within the far-right groups in Israel. Students are thought Talmudic doctrine, which turns them into monsters as they grow older. It is this group that Israel has sent into Gaza and the West Bank in the past two months.
It is the carbon copy of the Azov battalion in Ukraine, made up of murderers, thugs, sadists, rapists, etc. And the Resistance groups are destroying these yeshiva graduates on a daily basis. Due to the large withdrawal of the IOF thugs from Gaza, the vacuum was filled by these yeshiva thugs. And they were told to go” – and do your worst”.
Just to cite examples of this group’s actions:
The Yeshiva sadists invaded, the Shifa Hospital on the 12 of March, and it lasted for 2 weeks. It has been invaded by the Yeshiva thugs.
- While a pediatrician was operating on two small children, these thugs just killed him at point blank range
- These thugs transported several hundred men from northern Gaza to the Shifa hospital. Put them on the first floor, and started killing them for no reason.
- Many female staff, patients and civilians were raped by these thugs in front of their families and other men. These are some of the acts conducted by these thugs.
- Patients with drips still attached to them were found with hands bound and executed.
- After the Yeshiva sadists left, Gaza health officials were discovering mass graves with these bodies in tem. To date, more than 400 such bodies have been found. The same discoveries were made at another hospital- the Nasr Hospital.
Israel leaves al-Shifa Hospital in ruins and littered with human remains. Dozens of mutilated bodies have been found at Shifa Hospital after the withdrawal of Israeli soldiers following a two-week massacre in Gaza’s largest medical facility has been left in ruins.
Apr 2024
Israel has withdrawn its forces from Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital following a two-week operation, leaving behind scenes of devastation. The Israeli military confirmed the sudden pullback on Monday, saying it had completed operational activity in the area of the hospital and claiming to have killed and captured numerous Hamas fighters. Witnesses report a swath of death and destruction at the medical complex, where a large number of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. “Troops have completed precise operational activity in the area of the Shifa Hospital and exited the area,” the Israeli military said.
The army launched the raid on Gaza’s largest hospital, in the northern Gaza City, on March 18. It says it was targeting Hamas fighters who were using the complex as a base.
Israel forces have made similar claims throughout the war that broke out in October as they have besieged several hospitals in Gaza. Hamas has denied operating from al-Shifa or other health facilities.
Al-Shifa, which endured a previous siege in November, now appears to be largely in ruins. People are trying to salvage what they can, reports Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul from al-Shifa, noting that the hospital was serving as a shelter for displaced people, as well as housing numerous staff and patients.
“There is no life here. The complex is in ruins and cannot be revived,” he reports.
“Buildings in all departments have been burned, and the structure of the complex has been damaged from the inside,” al-Ghoul continued. “From what we can see, it appears the occupation forces deliberately targeted the health sector and destroyed the largest medical complex in Gaza City.”
Israel’s military has described the raid as one of the most successful operations of its war in Gaza, which has now run for nearly six months. It claimed to have killed many Hamas fighters, including senior operatives. A spokesman said around 900 people suspected of being “militants” had been arrested, and weapons, valuable intelligence, and over $3 million in different currencies, seized. The army also insisted that the raid on the hospital had been conducted “while preventing harm to civilians, patients and medical teams”. Medical sources told Al Jazeera that hundreds of bodies were found inside the complex and in surrounding streets. Video footage circulating online showed heavily damaged and charred buildings, mounds of dirt that had been churned up by bulldozers and patients on stretchers in darkened corridors.
On Sunday, the head of the World Health Organization Tedros Ghebreyesus said 21 patients had died since Israel began its siege.
During the previous Israeli raid in November, the Israeli military had alleged that Hamas maintained an elaborate command and control centre inside and beneath al-Shifa, showing video of a handful of tunnels and rooms. Hamas has dismissed Israel’s claims, calling them “lies and cheap propaganda”.
Israeli siege turns Gaza’s Nasser Hospital into ‘a place of death’
UN staff who helped evacuate critically wounded patients from Gaza’s Nasser Hospital describes ‘appalling’ conditions at the facility.
Officials from the United Nations who conducted evacuation missions from Gaza’s Nasser Hospital have described “appalling” conditions at the enclave’s second-largest medical facility, saying an Israeli military operation there has transformed a “place of healing” into a “place of death”. The comments, in videos posted online, came amid growing concern for the dozens of patients and staff who remain trapped inside the hospital as Israeli forces intensify their bombardment of the area.
The hospital, in Gaza’s Khan Younis city, stopped functioning last month after a week-long Israeli siege followed by a raid, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The global health agency, along with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), has so far managed to evacuate some 32 critical patients, including injured children and those with paralysis. Jonathan Whittal, an OCHA official who took part in the evacuation missions on February 18 and 19, said patients at the hospital were in a “desperate situation” and were trapped without food, water and electricity. “The conditions are appalling. There are dead bodies in the corridors,” he said. “This has become a place of death, not a place of healing.” The rescue mission has previously said they had to navigate through pitch-black corridors with flashlights to find patients against a backdrop of gunfire. They had to arrive on foot because a deep, muddy ditch near the hospital has made roads near the site impassable. “You can think about the worst situation ever. You multiply that by 10 and this is the worst situation I have seen in my life,” said Julio Martinez, a WHO staff. “It’s the debris; it’s the light – working in the darkness. Patients everywhere.”
According to Palestinian health authorities, at least eight patients have already died at the facility, mostly due to fuel a lack of fuel and oxygen. They say the lives of those remaining were directly threatened and accused Israeli forces of effectively converting the site into “military barracks”.
Chris Black, a WHO communications officer, said the entire neighborhood around the hospital has been “damaged and destroyed”. “The hospital itself has no electricity, has no food, has no water,” he added.
The WHO said some 130 severely injured patients and 15 medics remain at the site. Despite the desperate situation, doctors and nurses at the hospital were pleading not for evacuation, but for the functions of the hospital to be restored, according to a former colleague of theirs.
“The last week has been miserable. It’s been a nightmare [for workers in the hospital]. The things they’re seeing are traumatising and they’re asking for some sort of help,” said Dr Thaer Ahmad, a United States-based emergency physician who spent several weeks volunteering at the Nasser Hospital in January. “They’re asking, actually, not to be evacuated from the hospital but for the hospital to function. For the lights to be turned back on, for the medicine they need to treat the patients that remain,” he said. “I spoke to one of the last surgeons remaining there, who sent a message to a group of physicians here in the US, and he asked us to advocate for the patients who are there. He told us, ‘I’m staring at patients, and they need my help, they need my care, and there’s nothing that I can do’,” added Ahmad.
The WHO said it was continuing efforts to evacuate further patients. The agency, in a statement earlier this week, described the dismantling and degradation of the Nasser Hospital – the latest medical facility to become a theatre of war in the conflict between Israel and Hamas – as a “massive blow” to Gaza’s health system. It said the remaining facilities in the south were “already operating well beyond maximum capacity” and barely able to receive additional patients.
Malnourished Palestinians wait to receive food aid in Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza on March 27, 2024
Some victims found at two hospitals were ‘buried alive’ while others were ‘executed’ by the Israeli military.
Mass graves found in two hospitals in the Gaza Strip containing 392 bodies, including those of women, children and the elderly, showed signs of torture and executions, officials in the enclave have said.
On the sixth consecutive day of digging up bodies in southern Gaza, Palestinian Civil Defence officials revealed horrifying new details about the mass graves around the Nasser and al-Shifa hospitals. Ten of the bodies were found with bound hands while others still had medical tubes attached to them, indicating they may have been buried alive, said civil defense member Mohammed Mughier. “We need forensic examination for approximately 20 bodies for people who we think were buried alive,” Mughier said.
Yamen Abu Sulaiman, the head of the civil defence department in southern Khan Younis where Nasser Hospital is located, said three separate mass graves were found at the facility – one behind the morgue, one in front of the morgue, and one near the dialysis building. Only 65 bodies have been identified by relatives of 392 recovered due to decomposition, mutilation and torture, or other difficulties, he said, adding that bodies were “stacked together” and showed indications of field executions having taken place.
At a news conference in southern Rafah , Abu Sulaiman called on the international community to exert pressure to “put an immediate end to this aggression against our people”, as well as for humanitarian organisations and international media to be let into Gaza to “examine these crimes”.
Mughier, who provided photographic and video evidence of the remains of children, said “why do we have children in mass graves?”, adding that the evidence shows Israeli soldiers committed “crimes against humanity”.
The United Nations human rights chief, Volker Turk, called for an “independent, effective and transparent investigations” into the deaths. “Hospitals are entitled to very special protection under international humanitarian law, and the intentional killing of civilians, detainees and others who are hors de combat is a war crime,” Turk said this week. “We want answers. We want to see this thoroughly and transparently investigated,” US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters.
Israeli army spokesman Major Nadav Shoshani claimed the graves at Nasser Hospital were “dug by Gazans a few months ago”. The Israeli military has also confirmed digging up bodies from graves, but in a stated effort to look for captives still held in the enclave. Reporting from Washington, DC, Al Jazeera’s Heidi Zhou-Castro pointed out that Sullivan did not call for an “independent” investigation, meaning that the United States is content with Israel looking into the matter. “That is the major difference between the US’s call for an investigation into the mass graves compared to that of other world leaders and of the UN High Commissioner [for human rights],” she said.
“This is a new level of criminality that I thought the Israelis were too smart to get involved with,” said Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst. “The ugliness and the tragedy of the scenes and the mindset behind it – done by the Israelis against the hospital, against the refugee camp – is something that we have never seen before and that is something that is going to stay with us for a while,” he added.
Palestinian Red Crescent to Establish Field Hospital with Kuwaiti, Egyptian Help
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) says it has received trucks loaded with medical devices and equipment belonging to the Kuwaiti Red Crescent via the Rafah border crossing in southern Gaza.
The aim, it says, is to establish a field hospital in the Mawasi area near Khan Younis in southern Gaza to provide medical services to “hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians”. As the Israeli military continues its attacks on the southern parts of the enclave and also plans to invade Rafah from the ground, the PRCS is undertaking this project with help from Kuwaiti and Egyptian counterparts.
5. Starvation & The Aid Issue
The humanitarian situation in Gaza has grown significantly worse in 2024 as the Israeli army blocks the arrival of aid and has effectively imposed starvation as a weapon of war.
Nearly all 2.3 million people trapped in Gaza now face starvation, with the UN saying famine will take hold in various parts of Gaza by May. Northern Gaza, which was the first to be decimated by an Israeli ground invasion, is the worst-hit – Israel continues to severely restrict access to the north, blocking routes and subjecting aid convoys to delays or cancellations. Babies and young children have died from dehydration and malnutrition in northern Gaza, but Israel is still blocking many humanitarian missions. The US ‘humanitarian’ strategy in Gaza offers false salvation for real starvation.
For two weeks now, American media has given plenty of airtime and front-page space to US humanitarian aid initiatives in Gaza. The United States Air Force has started participating in aid airdrops on Gaza, while US President Joe Biden announced plans to build a temporary floating dock in order to increase the supply of food and other essential goods to the 2.3 million Palestinians under Israeli siege and bombardment. These initiatives may sound like a noble effort to save Palestinian lives, but the reality is very different. This is because the American plan is not a serious attempt by a credible and disinterested state to relieve Palestinian suffering. Rather, it is just another diversionary ruse, which – with the help of the media – has been deployed to cover up what really is a diplomatic band-aid for an Israeli-made famine and to divert attention away from the Israeli genocide the US itself has enabled.
The American government regularly uses its military abroad for spectacular feats that often have three common characteristics: they do not achieve their main aim, they mainly respond to domestic American political dictates, and they offer theatrical displays of America’s impressive power. Yet the power in action behind these mediagenic moves ultimately reflects Washington’s inability to conduct rigorous foreign policy that is anchored in global realities.
Indeed, the US could achieve its declared goals of saving Palestinian lives more quickly and at far less cost, if it forces Israel to stop its genocidal campaign in Gaza and allow normal levels of food and medical aid to flow into the territory. This is doable because without US arms, funds, and diplomatic protection, Israel could not carry on its aggression and siege.
Furthermore, many analysts also question the technical efficacy of the temporary pier because so many crucial dimensions remain unclear. Who will distribute the imported food, medicines, and basic life supplies? Can we expect these goods to reach all Palestinians in need, while Israel continues its campaign of bombing, assassinations, and scorched-earth attacks? Will the humanitarian imports only reach the centre and south of Gaza, as Israel continues to make northern Gaza an uninhabitable buffer zone along the southern Israel border? And if Israel provides the security to protect the pier facility, will this represent a permanent Israeli armed presence in the middle of Gaza? Will Israel close all other border points and only use this new one? Could Israel quietly use the dock in the near future as an exit route for Palestinians forced out of Gaza?
If security for food shipments by road is not guaranteed across all of Gaza, will lawless conditions allow gangs and organised criminal groups to resume their recent theft of some aid trucks and selling the contents for profit? Will Israel and the US compel some hapless and desperate Palestinians who get contracts to deliver food and medicine into becoming local accomplices who cement Israel’s long-term control of Gaza – just as the shameless “South Lebanon Army” did in the 1980s before it fled for its soulless life when Hezbollah and other Lebanese resistance groups liberated the south? Apart from the lack of clarity on effectiveness and feasibility, this plan sets a dangerous precedent: America has directly and enthusiastically supported Israel’s genocide by starvation for five months, and then in month six, it steps in with emergency humanitarian action. This relieves Israel of its legal responsibility to protect civilians under its belligerent control, and may shield it from being held accountable for its war crimes.
The US will probably continue deploying the same diversionary tactics in the coming months while also extending its military support for its ally, which in the first five months of the war amounted to more than 100 deadly weapons transfers carried out without congressional approval. The mainstream media in the US and other Western states will play a crucial role in promoting this show in the weeks and months ahead, as it has already done. It will relay the American and Israeli official announcements without much scrutiny, conveniently forgetting the many American and Israeli pronouncements in the last five months that later proved false. Then we will see regular television and video reports of how the military does its magic – in the desert, in the sea, in the air, anywhere that entertainment producers and directors can shape a failed foreign policy into a spectacle of genuine technological awe alongside the false human caring. Some American and British journalists will open their reports by noting that in this region where Jews “made the desert bloom” and God parted the waters for Moses and his people to find refuge, the Anglo-Americans today miraculously turn the sea into a source of salvation from starvation. But in the end, the deployment of the US military to carry out a “humanitarian” mission in Gaza will remain a captivating but delusional display, much like the ones we saw in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Indeed, not only has the US-Israel combine used starvation as an instrument of war and a negotiating tactic, but it has also tried to cover up this grotesque show by launching the dazzling spectacle of the US military’s astounding global reach and capabilities.
What is the alternative? A more logical and less expensive way forward was laid out by the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell at the United Nations Security Council earlier this month. Borrell made clear that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war and blocking humanitarian land routes, which are the only effective way to deliver aid to Gaza. It could also end the clown shows of razzle-dazzle entertainment, hocus-pocus illusions, and now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t war crimes that emanate from Tel Aviv and Washington, and propel the Palestine-Israel conflict into its second gruesome century.
The Flour Massacre – when Israeli soldiers shoot at hungry Palestinians
In mid-February, the Israeli army fired into a crowd of the hungry and the starving at al-Rashid Street in Gaza City, an incident that has been dubbed the Flour Massacre. However, for the families of the 118 civilians killed by Israel during the early hours of Thursday morning, it is the moment their lives would forever be divided into before and after. That ]massacre has been followed by two subsequent killings by Israeli forces of hungry Palestinians scrambling for aid, on Saturday and Monday night, adding to the mounting death toll among the uncounted and malnourished thousands battling the first signs of starvation. When word went around that a convoy would be coming to Gaza City, thousands headed out to camp on the street and wait for it along its expected route. After weeks of blockade, Gaza’s hunger was – and remains – so extreme that the convoy had to stop as thousands of people gathered, clambering up the sides of the truck to try to grab any amount of flour to take home to their starving families. According to the Israeli army, the convoy contained 30 trucks – witnesses put the number at about 18 – overlooked by several Israeli military vehicles, including tanks.
In the early hours of Thursday morning, as thousands of malnourished Palestinians tried to claw their way to some food, the soldiers opened fire. This was done using quad-copter drones.
According to Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul, who was at the scene, the firing took place in two bursts, the first as people seized the goods and the second when the crowd returned to the trucks. “After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,” he said. By the time the shooting died down, dozens of people had been killed and hundreds injured. Accounts of what led the Israeli forces to fire vary and Israel claims that many Palestinians died in the stampede for food, not because they were shot. Accounts from the thousands of Palestinians who were there are clearer: Israeli forces fired indiscriminately into the crowd which killed dozens of people and led to a stampede in which more people died.
‘The blood was everywhere’
Thirty-four-year-old Mohammed al-Simry, a father of four, had been undecided whether to go and wait for the aid convoy. On the one hand, he felt the large crowd offered too tempting a target to Israeli snipers, on the other, he and his family were dying anyway. He had nothing to lose, he felt, so along with his cousin, Amer, he left to sleep at the Nabulsi Roundabout in advance of the convoy’s arrival. Nothing prepared him for the carnage that followed. According to witnesses, the Israeli forces fired into the crowd of hungry civilians clamouring for food for one and a half hours. “The blood was everywhere,” he recalled. Mohammed continued, describing how thousands tried to flee the scene, their faces and clothing covered in blood, many carrying the dead bodies of their friends. In the confusion, Mohammed stumbled across Amer’s body – they had gotten separated in the tumult. “We’d talked about what we needed how we would bring it to our starving children and eat until we finally beat the hunger,” he said. “Sadly, that never happened. Not only did I leave the convoy hungry, I left without a loved family member who had only wanted a bite of bread,” he said.
He paused, unable to understand why Israel would delay aid shipments to the point where people were so hungry that it “tears their bodies apart”. “I’m never returning to wait for aid again there,” Abu Shaar said, recalling the live fire from the Israeli forces that the crowd endured.
Like Mohammed, he was aware of the risks of gathering in such large numbers. Like Mohammed, his hunger and that of his family left him with no choice. Like Mohammed, nothing could ever have prepared him for the ferocity and scale of the massacre. “It was so huge that nearly everyone was either killed, shot, injured,” he said. “I was among the very few lucky ones, he said, recalling how he had felt the wind of the bullets pass him by. “I was hit in the leg by shrapnel from an artillery shell that landed nearby.” “I saw bodies being scattered all across the road. It was horrific,” he recalled. “We’ve faced similar situations before, when Israeli tanks fired at us, killing and injuring many. But this time the world paid attention, maybe because we were killed on camera,” he said.”I don’t know if we are lucky or damned,” he said. “This bag of flour turned out to cost the life of its bearer, it’s the most expensive food ever made.
“This is happening right now. Right here. In Gaza.”
On Friday, the United Nations described the likelihood of famine within the Gaza Strip as “almost inevitable” as aid into the small strip of land is choked off under Israel’s siege. Israel is ranked by the IMF as having the 13th-highest per capita income in the world and is a significant recipient of military and economic aid from the United States and Europe. Aid into Gaza, an area reliant upon external relief, dropped from 500 to 600 trucks a day to just 98 daily in February. Malnutrition, particularly among children, pregnant women and the elderly has become the norm, a UN report warned in January, and conditions have deteriorated since then.
Last week, Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Mhawish, who contributed to this report, was told that he and his family, including his two-year-old son, had been diagnosed with malnutrition, the condition that precedes starvation.
On October 9, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant labelled Palestinians in Gaza “human animals” and declared a complete siege of the enclave. Since then, aid into the south has been extremely limited, with the bulk of deliveries to the north blocked since December, the UN said.
Coordinating aid and services for Palestinian refugees for 75 years, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) is barely able to function in Gaza given the danger its staff faces from Israeli attacks, restrictions on movement within Gaza, and a catastrophic funding shortfall. UNRWA is missing more than $450m in funding stopped by major donors, including the US, after Israel accused some agency staff of taking part in an attack on Israel, resulting in the summary dismissal of many staff. However, diplomats who saw last week’s preliminary report from the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, which had been tasked with investigating the allegations, said Israel had produced no evidence to support its initial allegations. With UNRWA at “breaking point”, the effects are being felt throughout Gaza. However, “once a famine is declared, it is too late for too many people”, Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN humanitarian agency OCHA, warned.
Aftershocks
For Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem, the implications of the massacre were more immediate.
“The Israelis are fully responsible [regardless of what happened],” said Mohamad*, who watched news of the incident on television. “All the talk of their ‘red lines’ in this war [from the global community] is nonsense. Did you see the children running into the water to get food?” he said, referring to airdrops of aid that starving Palestinians run into the sea to retrieve.
Ahmad*, for his part, does not believe reports that most of the victims died any other way: “They died from Israeli shelling or gunfire. How else could they have died? There are more than 100 people dead.”
The Palestinians in Israel who spoke to Al Jazeera asked that their names be withheld, out of fear.
“We’re not ‘citizens of Israel’. We just have residence permits. We can be punished by Israel, any time,” he added, referring to Israel’s crackdown on Palestinian citizens of Israel for expressing sympathy or support for civilians in Gaza after October 7. International indignation, much of it from countries that have supported and armed Israel throughout the war, was quick.
Commenting shortly after the killings, Israel’s characteristically bellicose national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, praised the soldiers who had fired into the “mob” and claimed that the massacre justified his calls for halting all aid into the strip. Translation: Total support must be given to our heroic fighters operating in Gaza, who acted excellently against a Gazan mob that tried to harm them. Today it was proven that the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza is not only madness while our abductees are being held in the Strip under substandard conditions, but also endangers the Israeli soldiers. This is another clear reason why we must stop transferring this aid, which harms the Israeli soldiers and is oxygen to Hamas.
Israel’s message: ‘Don’t Feed the Palestinians’
The killing of the seven aid workers in Gaza is a direct consequence of Israel’s brutal ‘rules of engagement’.
Last month, Israeli forces deliberately killed seven foreign aid workers in three targeted, consecutive strikes on a convoy of cars over a stretch of 2.3km, prompting some aid organizations to suspend services.
UN staff inspect the remains of a car used by US-based aid group World Central Kitchen that was hit by an Israeli air raid in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on April 2, 2024 [AFP]
The invading Israeli army ought to have erected signs throughout Gaza that read: “Don’t feed the Palestinians: Punishable by death.” Here’s why.
To understand why seven aid workers were killed by Israel earlier this week in Gaza only requires a short-term memory. Their deaths were not a “tragic event … that happens in war”, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed in a statement meant to blunt the “outrage” over the killings.
No, the seven souls, employed by World Central Kitchen (WCK) travelling in a convoy in Deir el-Balah after unloading 100 tons of food aid at its central Gaza warehouse, were casualties of a directive issued by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9. Gallant’s remarks were televised to convey to the world Israel’s uncompromising resolve and intent. “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” Gallant said. Gallant has kept his word. Famine is rampant in Gaza. Israel’s aim is to starve Palestinians into submission and capitulation. Anyone, from anywhere who feeds the Palestinians is, de facto, a legitimate military target and Israel has acted “accordingly”.
The WCK staff were not considered humanitarians by Israel’s occupation forces, but collaborators aiding and abetting the Palestinians who perpetrated the October 7 assault on Israel and subsequently seized captives turned negotiating pawns. That is why the WCK convoy was fired upon, and the occupants summarily killed. Gallant made clear the “rules of engagement” on October 9.
No one of any consequence in Washington, London or Paris demurred, let alone objected, to Israel’s designs to lay “siege” to Gaza in any way, and by whatever means, it, and it alone, saw fit. That is also why the so-called “outrage” that the killings provoked in Western capitals has struck me is largely hypocritical, as have the perfunctory demands for “independent” probes into the lethal attack.
Beyond offering Gallant their unqualified consent to do whatever he wanted to do in Gaza, the presidents and prime ministers now expressing their calibrated outrage have, year after disgraceful year, granted Israel carte blanche to imprison Palestinians, torture Palestinians, invade Palestinian homes, steal Palestinian land, destroy Palestinian crops, and, of course, shoot, maim and kill Palestinians at will. These same, suddenly outraged presidents and prime ministers have watched, approvingly, as Israel has gone about systematically denying the Palestinians shelter by obliterating their homes and; denying them care and comfort by storming and obliterating hospitals; denying them education by obliterating their schools and universities; denying them places of worship by obliterating their churches and mosques; denying them their roots and past by obliterating their libraries, museums and historical sites.
These same presidents and prime ministers nodded in fulsome agreement with Gallant: Israel’s adversaries – without distinction – were indeed “human animals” and the inevitable consequences of the “siege” of Gaza were not only acceptable but warranted. But, the funny thing is that there is no outrage from the West over the killing of brown people, only when white people get killed by the Zionist sadists. Remember, these are the same presidents and prime ministers who instantly dismissed reports produced by human rights groups which established that, for decades, Israel has committed “the crime against humanity of apartheid” in its methodical persecution of Palestinians.
The reports stood not only as indictments, but warnings of what was inevitably to come if the injustices set out in such clinical and persuasive detail were not finally acknowledged and addressed in tangible ways by a galvanised “international community”. Predictably, those prescient warnings went unheeded. The result: a still unfolding genocide and all the murderous madness on unrelenting display.
Ah, but Israel’s apologists will say: Israel admits its “errors” and punishes those responsible. In this “unfortunate” case, two Israeli officers have been “fired” and three others “reprimanded” for “violating” the “army’s rules of engagement”. When the outrage ebbs – as it already has – the “punished” will, in due course, be rehabilitated since, as Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has in effect said, the “abandoned” officers were just following Gallant’s orders. Their penance will be short. Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu, will close ranks behind “the fighters” who did what they were told to do by Gallant on October 9. When your foe is a “human animal”, the only rule of engagement is “acting accordingly”.
The other part of this pantomime is steeped in politics. Nervous Democrats can count. In recent presidential primaries, more than 500,000 Democrats have registered their fury with Joe Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu’s plan to erase Gaza and, ultimately, to absorb it and the occupied West Bank. They have voted “uncommitted” – or a variation of the term – in states that the president had carried by slim margins in 2020. So, to mollify a movement that some silly observers insisted was confined to Michigan’s suburbs, Biden’s reliable surrogates, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, are – surprise, surprise – signing a letter dipped in Pixie dust advising Biden to make US military support to Israel contingent on the protection of Palestinian civilians in the wake of the deadly ambush of the aid workers. The letter is 35,000 dead Palestinians too late. It is not going to convince the growing legion of “uncommitted” Democratic voters that “Zionist” Joe is poised to change his engrained attitudes towards Israel or his steadfast support for razing Gaza along with extinguishing Hamas.
Come November, the Democratic Party establishment will have to reckon with this fact: A Democratic president sacrificed the presidency and democracy – his strained rhetoric, not mine – to save Netanyahu and assuage Israel’s killing rage.
The Story continues in Part 3 —-
