December 26, 2023
In the wake of Uvalde, you wondered
why we are willing to live with this carnage. Are Gaza's children not worthy of
the same empathy?
You’ve often spoken of how much you
care about children and how terrible it is when they’re murdered. “Too many
schools, too many everyday places have become killing fields,” you said at the
White House last spring on the one-year anniversary of the school shooting in
Uvalde. At the time of that tragedy in Texas, you had quickly gone on live
television, speaking gravely.
“There are parents who will never
see their child again,” you said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a
piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings,
and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left
behind.”
And you asked plaintively: “Why are
we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen? Where
in God’s name is our backbone to have the courage to deal with it and stand up
to the lobbies?”
This year you’ve asked similar
questions many times, as in the aftermath of shootings at a grade school in
Nashville, Michigan State University and the University of Nevada.
The massacre in Uvalde took the
lives of 19 children. For nearly three months, the ongoing massacre in Gaza has
taken the lives of that many children every few hours.
In mid-November, after five weeks of
Israel’s bombing of Gaza, the director-general of the World Health Organization
reported that children were being killed at an average rate of six per hour,
adding that “nowhere and no one is safe.” Palestinian civilians of all ages
continue to undergo slaughter, with the death toll surpassing 20,000.
You have continued to voice support
for Israel’s military assault on Gaza and its residents. After 10 weeks of the
carnage, when you got around to expressing a bit of concern about Israel’s
“indiscriminate bombing,” you were meanwhile still doing everything you could
to greenlight and fast track massive U.S. shipments of weapons and ammunition
to Israel so that the indiscriminate bombing could continue.
Even your belated and inadequate
words on Dec. 12 about “indiscriminate bombing” apparently caused you to have
second thoughts. The next day, Voice of America reported that “the White House
appears to be walking back” your comment about “indiscriminate bombing.”
Most important, of course, are not
words but deeds. As commander-in-chief, since early October you have approved
large-scale shipments to Israel of 2,000-pound bombs — described by the New
York Times as “one of the most destructive munitions in Western military
arsenals,” a weapon that “unleashes a blast wave and metal fragments thousands
of feet in every direction.”
In a Dec. 21 video report based on
analysis of “aerial imagery and artificial intelligence” — headlined “Visual
Evidence Shows Israel Dropped 2,000-Pound Bombs Where It Ordered Gaza’s
Civilians to Move for Safety” — the Times indicated that “Israel used these
munitions in the area it designated safe for civilians at least 200 times.”
Those 2,000-pound bombs have been “a pervasive threat to civilians seeking
safety across south Gaza.”
Since the war in Gaza began 11 weeks
ago, the Times reported, “the U.S. has sent more than 5,000 2,000-pound bombs”
to Israel. And after a long phone conversation with Israel’s Prime Minister
Netanyahu on Dec. 23, you told the press: “I did not ask for a ceasefire.”
With your ongoing help, Israel is
continuing to murder children and other civilians in Gaza just as methodically
as the gunman murdered children at the elementary school in Uvalde. And you
have continued to provide weaponry for the murders just as surely as the gun
shop in Uvalde sold firearms and ammunition to the man who went on to kill at
the elementary school.
But that is an unfair comparison —
unfair to the Uvalde gun-shop owner, who did not know the intended use of the
weapons and ammo. But you know what the billions of dollars’ worth of weapons
and bombs gifted by the U.S. government are being used for.
When three 9-year-old students were
among those shot to death at a school in Nashville last March, you spoke about
them the next day. “A family’s worst nightmare has occurred,” you said. “Those
children should all be with us still,” you said. And you said: “We know the
names of the victims.”
But you don’t know the names of the
children you’ve helped to murder in Gaza. And there are so many.
Palestinians Say Netanyahu 'Confessions' Reveal Truth of
'Genocidal War' in Gaza
December
26, 2023
The
Foreign Ministry said that the Israeli prime minister's push for what he terms
"voluntary migration" shows that ethnic cleansing of the besieged
enclave is the real goal of the ongoing bombing and ground invasion.
Amid
a ramping up of bombardments and military ground operations, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday he was working toward what he
referred to as a "voluntary migration" of Palestinians out of the
Gaza Strip, the Israeli newspaper Hayom Daily reported.
"Our
problem is the countries that are willing to absorb (them), and we are working
on it," he said, according to a translation from the Anadolu Agency.
The
remarks earned a swift condemnation from Palestinian leadership.
In
a statement posted on social media, the Foreign Ministry said that "frank
and clear confessions reveal the truth about the goals of the genocidal war led
by Netanyahu against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip," according
to The Siasat Daily.
The
ministry called for "a courageous international stance to immediately stop
the war on the Gaza Strip and stop the crime of ethnic cleansing and
displacement before it is too late."
It
further said that "Netanyahu's confessions regarding the displacement of
our people is a new blow to the countries supporting him in the genocidal war
on Gaza Strip."
Hamas,
meanwhile, said that Netanyahu's plan "would prolong the aggression,"
the Anadolu Agency reported.
"The
Palestinian people will not allow to pass any plan that aims to obliterate
their cause or to get them out of their lands and sanctities," the group
said.
Netanyahu's
remarks came during a Likud faction meeting, according to Hayom Daily. The
prime minister was responding to a statement by Member of the Knesset Shani
Danon.
"The
world is already discussing this matter. Canadian immigration minister Mark
Miller spoke about these matters publicly, as did Nikki Haley (the potential
Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency)," Danon said, according to a
translation from The Siasat Daily.
Danon
recommended "forming a team in the State of Israel that will take care of
this issue and make sure that anyone who wants to leave Gaza for a third
country can do so."
"This
must be organized, because of its strategic importance for the day after the
war," he said.
Netanyahu
responded that his government was working on it.
This
isn't the first time it has been suggested or hinted that Israel aims for the
expulsion of the civilian population of Gaza. Danon co-wrote an op-ed in The
Wall Street Journal in November with fellow Knesset member Ram Ben-Barak
arguing that Europe and the U.S. should help resettle refugees from the Gaza
Strip. Another opinion piece published in The Jerusalem Post on Monday argued
that the population of Gaza should be relocated to Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.
A
U.N. expert warned last week that a goal of forcible population transfer out of
Gaza was the only "logical conclusion" of Israel's assault on the
strip, which has internally displaced 85% of its 2.3 million people. Israel has
killed more than 20,000 people in Gaza since Oct. 7, when Hamas attacked
southern Israel and killed more than 1,100 people and took around 240 hostages.
In
retaliation for the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants,Israel has cut off the
flow of essential supplies into Gaza and flattened or damaged, homes,
hospitals, schools, and businesses with heavy, U.S.-made bombs in what military
historian Robert Pape called "one of the most intense civilian punishment
campaigns in history."
So
far, however, governments in the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. have
rejected any plans to transfer the population of Gaza to another country,
according to Middle East Eye. Both Egypt and Jordan have refused to accept
large numbers of Gazan refugees, wanting to avoid a repetition of the first
Nakba, in which Israel forced more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes
in 1948.
India’s turnaround on
Palestine has more than meets the eye
December 26, 2023
Indian
diplomacy is ending 2023 with a momentous turnaround. What began as a course
correction necessitated by the torrential flow of events in West Asia is
assuming strategic overtones.
Truly,
the aberration in India’s policies can be traced to the UPA rule (2004-2014)
but it is under the period since then 2014 that they accentuated phenomenally
and began creating contradictions undermining national interests. This
aberration also led to a serious erosion of India’s strategic autonomy in a
transformative international environment.
India’s
voting pattern in the United Nations with regard to the Israel-Palestine
conflict is lately marked by a calibrated distancing from Israel. Only a few
weeks ago, Israel’s ambassador in Delhi bullishly described the Indian stance
as one of “100% support” to his country. But that is no more the case today.
Delhi
has rejected the repeated Israeli entreaties to declare Hamas as a terrorist
organisation, marking its independent opinion regarding the ecosystem of
resistance movements. Indeed, this is a highly significant distinction that
Delhi is making vis-a-vis the Israeli and Western narrative about Hamas.
although India has not hesitated to condemn the violence directed against
Israel on October 7, it refused to name Hamas.
Considering
that Hamas had a chequered past of receiving patronage from Israel, Tel Aviv
has no right to expect Delhi to dance to its tunes. Equally, Hamas’ future is
far from an open and shut case. The fact that Sinn Fein and Irish opinion has
shown empathy towards Hamas, or that South Africa, which has itself been a
victim of apartheid, has recalled its ambassador and diplomatic mission to
Israel, calling the horrific Gaza killings as “genocide,” go to show that the
embers of national liberation struggle are still burning.
Although
India expressed “solidarity” with the Israeli people over the brutal violence
on October 7, it cannot condone the vastly disproportionate Israeli retaliation
since then, blithely calling it a matter of Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’.
On December 13, India voted in favour of a resolution in the UN General
Assembly that demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas
conflict.
This
was the first time India supported such a resolution since the war broke out
more than two months ago. Such a stance puts India on the right side of
history, as the 193-member UNGA overwhelmingly adopted the resolution at an
emergency special session, with 153 nations voting in its favour.
A
third aspect is that from a geopolitical perspective, Delhi has marked its
distance from the US-Israeli campaign branding Iran as the instigator of
extremist groups acting against Israel. Interestingly, on December 19, India
was one of only thirty states — along with Russia and China — who voted against
a UN resolution on “the human rights situation in Iran.”
The
running thread here is that India has reverted to its traditional stance on the
Palestine problem and jettisoned the tilt supportive of Israeli interests. The
unprecedented unity among the Arab countries, the close coordination between
Saudi Arabia and Iran, the huge groundswell of opinion in the Arab world
against Israeli atrocities against the Palestinian populations in Gaza and West
Bank — all this has created a new momentum in Middle East politics that has
pitchforked the Palestine problem to the centre stage, which is something India
cannot afford to ignore.
Nor
can Delhi be oblivious of the new reality that something has fundamentally
changed in the dynamics of the Palestine problem after the events since October
7. The Israeli ploys of dissimulation and evasiveness and deliberate wrecking
of dialogue process and negotiations may no longer work. Indeed, Israel’s
overwhelming military superiority vis-a-vis its Arab neighbours has lost its
relevance. Coupled with the US’ loss of influence and America’s waning global
hegemony alongside the sharp polarisation of opinion within Israel itself
internally add up to create grave uncertainties regarding the future of the
state of Israel as it exists today.
Suffice
to say, India feels the need to adapt to the new conditions in West Asia where
regional countries prefer to settle their issues by themselves, which in turn
undermines the rationale behind the creation of Israel as a cockpit of western
strategic interests. The way out of this impasse lies in Israel reinventing
itself. But the near civil war conditions in the country won’t permit that to
happen.
An
immediate fallout of all this is going to be that India is unlikely to join the
US-led alliance in the Red Sea gearing up to wage a war on terror against the
Houthis of Yemen. This is despite the US efforts to involve the Quad countries
in the Red Sea operations. By the way, both Japan and Australia have
dissociated themselves from joining the US-led coalition of the willing. Once
again, Delhi will be guided by the consideration that the US’s ill-fated move
to use military power against the Houthis has no takers among the regional
states.
The
US naval enterprise in the Red Sea is struggling to be born. The well-known
ex-CIA analyst Larry Johnson has written that “On paper it would appear that
Yemen is outnumbered and seriously outgunned. A sure loser? Not so fast. The
U.S. Navy, which constitutes the majority of the fleet sailing against Yemen,
has some real vulnerabilities that will limit its actions.”
Johnson
cites the expert opinion of Cdr. Anthony Cowden, a US Naval Reserve Officer,
that given the current configuration of the US Navy as a ‘forward-based navy’ —
as distinct from an ‘expeditionary navy’ — “US Navy no longer has sufficient
capability for sustaining expeditionary operations.”
After
all, the Chief of Staff of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Mohammad
Reza Naqdi was not far off the mark when he warned last week that the US and
its allies are “trapped” in the Red Sea and should prepare for the closure of
waterways stretching all the way to the western gates of the Mediterranean Sea.
The
Indian defence and security establishments have been unabashed votaries of
India’s strategic ties with Israel. Such excessive adulation of the Israeli
model as worthy of emulation by India was built on sheer naïveté, completely
overlooking that the two countries operate under vastly different conditions
and national ethos. It is patently absurd that India can emulate Israeli
methods of brutal repression or assassination as part of statecraft, apartheid
policies and so on and get away with it.
The
incidents of October 7 have been an eye opener for Indians, which has exposed
not only Israel’s frailties as a modern state but also its military’s bluster
and intelligence’s failure. The acolytes of Israel in the Indian strategic
community feel utterly disillusioned. Simply put, an influential constituency
in India and the interest groups that it spawned are no longer calling the
shots in Delhi. This is going to be consequential.
At
the same time, the entire ideological underpinning of the present government’s
tilt towards the Israeli leadership under Benjamin Netanyahu is unravelling. In
a brilliant essay recently, the well-known
French
scholar and author on right-wing politics in India, Christophe Jaffrelot wrote
that the emerging India-Israel alliance during the recent years was anchored
not only on the two ruling elites’ hostility to Islam but also on affinities
between Hindutva and Zionism, characterised by “ethno-nationalist ideologies
that prioritise factors like race, territory and nativism.”
Going
forward, such affinities are going to be hard for the Indian elite to sustain,
leave alone openly flaunt, as Israel turns into an apartheid state and gets
battered by the forces of history.
Dehumanizing
Palestinians
December 26, 2023
Last week we witnessed what the
Bible calls “you reap what you sow” when the Israeli army killed three fleeing
Israeli prisoners. Israel sowed a culture of hate where the life of
Palestinians, or non-Jews, was expendable. The Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood
of Shejaiya, Gaza, followed standard army procedures by shooting three
shirtless individuals waving white flags.
Was the killing a mistake, as
posited by the Israeli army, or intentional according to the Palestinian
resistance?
I disagree with assertions made by
the resistance spokesperson, Abu Obaida, —who increases news viewership
exponentially when he delivers his video messages — suggesting that the three
prisoners were deliberately killed by the Israeli army. I reject it because the
shooting was in keeping with the Israeli army’s lenient military rules when
encountering Palestinian civilians. The three were shot to death because the
Israeli army kills civilians with white flags. The trio were victims of their
own culture’s self-inflicted hate.
I, however, agree with the
spokesman’s premise that having Israeli prisoners alive poses a significant
challenge for Benjamin Netanyahu and upends his priorities. The Israeli prime
minister would rather wake up to the news that all of his prisoners are dead to
free his hand and expand the war. As previously discussed, prolonging the war
offers Netanyahu an opportunity to evade criminal accountability in Israeli
courts. Additionally, the killing of more Palestinians satiates a culture
thirsty for revenge and might diminish the public anger over his failures.
The Israeli systematic onslaught on
Gaza intending to inflict a high level of pain, both physical and psychological
suffering, is the product of a cultural mindset fixated on demonizing the
other. This is obvious in the lopsided casualties following the Israeli
invasion where the majority of the Israelis causalities are military personnel,
while the vast majority of Palestinian victims are civilians. Failing to
achieve any of its strategic objectives such as freeing Israeli prisoners, end
the resistance or killing known leaders, Israel resorted to indiscriminate
bombing of hospitals, and homes in an orgy of murder against the defenseless
civilian population.
To the extent where to be alive in
Gaza according to a report by Doctors Without Borders “is only a matter of
luck.” Those “lucky” ones still face the grim reality of starvation which is
used “as a method of warfare” as reported by Human Rights Watch. Yet, and
despite well-documented reports from international organizations, any portrayal
of Palestinian suffering in the Zio managed Western media, would typically
follow a decontextualized preamble qualifier to remind readers, over again, of
the “horrific Hamas” attack on October 7.
Within days this October 7, a herd
of Western leaders raced to pay homage to the leader of the most racist Israeli
government in the history of Zionism. The irony of racism is evident when these
leaders mourn the roughly 900 hundred Israeli civilians, while normalizing,
rationalizing, and providing material support to murder 20,000 Palestinian
civilians, 70% of whom were children and women. Western prejudice became even
more palpable when it took them more than 60 days to acknowledge the pain of
Palestinians and before calling for a pause in the genocide.
The hyperbolic reaction of the West
following the resistance counter attack against the post guards on the largest
open-air prison, coupled with the abject disregard of Palestinian life is part
of that ingrained subconscious racism. The same Western culture that once
ignored the dehumanization of Jews in Europe, is blinded today by a new sin
carried out by the progeny of those victims. Palestinians had paid for Europe’s
original sin 75 years ago, and continue to do so. The life of Palestinians is
being scarified today on the Israeli altar to atone for Western guilt and their
past history toward their own Jewish population.
The West has bred an alien
nihilistic Zionist culture of hate that grew to become a mirror image of
Western White supremacy. As an example, Jewish Americans represent
approximately 10% of the illegal Zionist settlers in the West Bank. These
supposed “Jews” supported by organizations that fought for equality and
integration in the U.S., but espoused racial/religious superiority and
segregation in the “Jewish only” colonies established on lands stolen from
Palestinians.
The descendants of the Holocaust
survivors did not grasp the lessons of the Kristallnacht. They replay the
November program, every November, every year, terrorizing Palestinians
harvesting their olive trees and leaving behind shattered branches in lieu of
glass. They did not learn from the stark black and white photos of European
Jews shipped in trains to gas champers, they updated the scene with colored
pictures of Palestinian men removed from “safe shelters,” stripped down to
their underwear and herded like sheep in open lories.
Hate is exemplified when the
profound lessons of the European concentration camps become examples to be
followed by Israelis advocating to flatten Gaza “just like Auschwitz” as
expressed by Israeli politician David Azoulai in a recent interview. Azoulai not
only called for making Gaza like Auschwitz, but also to order civilians to “go
to the beaches,” to be loaded on Israeli ships and dumped “on Lebanon’s
shores.”
Israeli dehumanization of
Palestinians has permeated into all aspects of Western culture, government,
media, movie industry, religious institutions, and public-school books. It is
now creeping into the most celebrated educational institutions and infringing
on the academic freedoms at the most prestigious and renowned American
universities in order to normalize racism against Palestinians.
As such, it wasn’t just another one
of Joe Biden’s gaffes when he dismissed the veracity of dead civilians in Gaza
ostensibly because it came from Palestinian sources. This holds significance
because he is directly engaged in promoting unverified Israeli falsehoods such
as non-existing photos of “decapitated” Israeli children, or baselessly
exonerating the murdering of civilians as human shields, or shamelessly
parroting the Israeli unfounded claim of a supposed military command center
under a hospital, and absolving Israel of the massacre at the al Ahli Baptist
hospital. The Israeli dehumanization of Palestinians has imbued the walls of
Biden’s White House, more deeply than he and his vice president are willing to
acknowledge. Furthermore, the calls from Biden’s administration and European
leaders for Israel to merely reduce killing, without demanding a cessation of
civilian murders, underline the entrenched intuitive bigotry against those
perceived as less than equal human beings.
As you celebrate the joy of
Christmas, take a moment to ponder the somber reality that the first
Christians, the original Palestinian Christians, will not be rejoicing in the
blessings of Jesus’s birth this year. Instead, in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem,
native Christians will gather to mourn the modern crucifixion of Jesus’s
message in Israel’s genocidal war on their brethren in Gaza, and to protest the
inherent Western bias against their people.
Netanyahu Advocates Ethnically Cleansing Palestinians of Gaza:
Believe him the First Time
December
26, 2023
The
extremist, fascist government of Binyamin Netanyahu continues to press its
monstrous, illegal and most of all completely implausible plan to push the 2.2
million Palestinians of Gaza out of the Strip into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula or
into other Arab countries. Netanyahu also pledged to continue the
high-intensity campaign against the people of Gaza.
This
blatant project of ethnic cleansing recalls the ways in which the dictators of
the 1930s and 1940s moved around entire ethnic groups. Stalin displaced the
Soviet Koreans to Uzbekistan or Siberia. I met some of their descendants in
Tashkent in the mid-1990s. The exile of the Crimean Tartars is recognized by
Ukraine as a war crime. Hundreds of thousands died in these paroxysms of ethnic
cleansing. Hitler ethnically cleansed millions, as well, and at the end of the
war there were 11 million displaced persons in Europe, 8 million in Germany.
After
the end of WW II, world authorities attempted to forestall such atrocities,
creating or strengthening International Humanitarian Law. In the Rome Statute,
which went into effect in 2002 and has been signed by 124 countries, one of the
offenses constituting “Crimes Against Humanity” is:
“Deportation or forcible transfer of population” ( Rome Statute
Art. 7 d ).
The
heinous character of these plans of the Israeli far right is not masked by the
phrase “voluntary” transfer. Helpless Palestinians made homeless and denied
food and water by the Israeli authorities can no more assent to exile from
their homeland of millennia than an enslaved woman can assent to sex with her
master.
On
Monday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu held a meeting of his Likud bloc and
told the other far right politicians there that he was still working on the
“voluntary” immigration of Gaza’s inhabitants to other countries. He said the
only problem is finding countries willing to absorb them. A Likud member of
parliament concurred, saying that such plans were already accepted by the
Canadian immigration minister and by US presidential candidate Nikki Haley. So
reports al-Ghad from Yisrael Ha-Yom.
For
its part, the Palestinian Foreign Ministry was scathing about Netanyahu’s
remarks, saying they were “a slap in the face to all the countries that
supported Israel in its war against our people, and still do, under the pretext
of self-defense, especially since it reveals a malicious conspiracy hatched by
the ruling Israeli right against our people with the aim of liquidating their
cause and existence.”
That
Netanyahu is talking in this desperate way, the ministry said, is a clear sign
that Israel has failed in its stated war aims.
That
is, the Palestine Authority correctly recognized that Netanyahu is using
revenge on Hamas as a cover story, and that the actual purpose of his total war
on the civilians of Gaza is to ethnically cleanse them.
The
Foreign Ministry called on other countries roundly to condemn Netanyahu’s
grotesque remarks.
No
one is going to take the Palestinians off the Israeli prime minister’s hands.
Egypt roundly rebuffed any such suggestion. In fact, the Egyptians have warned
of a severe rupture in ties with Cairo if Israel tries to push the Palestinians
south into the Sinai. So reported a prominent Egyptian television anchor.
Meanwhile
Al-`Arabi al-Jadid reported yesterday that the Egyptian military is bulking up
the number of troops it has stationed near the Rafah Crossing from Gaza into
the Sinai. It is also building more barriers and watchtowers. This activity
reflects Egyptian anxieties as the Israeli military campaign against the
Palestinians in Gaza stretches south to Rafah, raising the specter of mass
displacement. Apparently an unusual number of Palestinians are approaching
Egyptian border authorities pleading for asylum.
The
government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has spent a decade attempting to
wipe out the Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt, and has also repeatedly fought
heavy battles to assert Cairo’s authority in the Sinai Peninsula, the people of
which often feel badly treated by the government. The prospect of having 2.2
million angry, hungry and desperate Palestinians, many of them essentially
Muslim Brothers, plopped into a place famed for its lawless smuggling and
terrorism networks is a horror show for the Egyptian authorities. Egypt is a
country of over 100 million people and its military is ranked 14 out of 145
countries in the global firepower review. If its officer corps doesn’t want
that influx of Palestinians, it won’t happen. In some past incidents Egyptian
troops have simply shot down Palestinians attempting to enter Egypt.
Netanyahu’s
plans to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians of Gaza, which have been echoed by
many other Israeli politicians, including cabinet members, aren’t just plans to
commit crimes against humanity. They are also highly implausible fantasies. The
hard line, fascist government that Netanyahu has cobbled together dreams big,
but just isn’t that powerful in the real world, and nor does the Biden
administration want to see the Palestinians ethnically cleansed. Though, if it
somehow did happen, no doubt Washington would put lipstick on that pig for
Israel’s sake, as well.
Gaza’s rescue workers are haunted by those they couldn’t save
December 19, 2023
Civil
defense teams are working around the clock with minimal resources to help
Palestinians trapped under the rubble.
“I
cannot sleep, not even for one minute. I am constantly haunted by the voices
and screams of people under the rubble as they beg us to pull them out.”
This
is how Ibrahim Musa, a 27-year-old from Al-Bureij refugee camp in the center of
the Gaza Strip, described his life since the start of Israel’s bombardment. Not
only is he struggling to survive from one day to the next like everyone else in
the besieged enclave, Musa is also one of the more than 14,000 rescue workers
comprising Gaza’s civil defense teams, who lead the efforts after each Israeli
airstrike to save the lives of those trapped beneath the rubble.
Although
Musa has worked in Gaza’s civil defense for five years — including through
multiple Israeli aggressions on the Strip as well as times of relative “calm”
in which the job involves rescuing people from more routine kinds of
emergencies — he has never experienced anything like what is happening now.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, more than 8,000 people have gone missing
since the war began, the vast majority of whom are thought to be stuck under
rubble. Many of them have likely died despite the best efforts of civil defense
workers like Musa who are unable to contend with the scale of destruction being
ravaged upon Gaza in recent weeks.
“We
don’t have the equipment to remove the rubble,” Musa explained. “If it’s a
building of several floors, there’s not much we can do. It takes long hours and
many attempts to make any progress.”
Upon
arriving at a scene of destruction in the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike,
the civil defense workers must quickly try to get a sense of what they are
dealing with. “We usually don’t know who is stuck underneath or how many people
we are looking for, so we call into the rubble asking if anyone is alive who
can tell us how many people lived in this home,” Musa said. “We scream until
someone hears us. Sometimes we get a response immediately, but often we simply
hear groans, which we try to follow in order to save those people.”
A
scenario that Gaza’s rescue workers have been encountering regularly is having
to try to calm children who are stuck beneath the ruins of their home. “The
children call out from the rubble asking about their family members,” Musa
continued. “We sometimes lie and tell them everyone is okay so that they don’t
go into shock. Other times, they call out to tell us that a family member lying
next to them has been martyred.”
For
Musa, it often feels like he and his colleagues are fighting a losing battle.
“It’s not one or two houses being bombed, but entire residential complexes,” he
explained. “The whole area is completely erased and becomes a single pile of
rubble. We need to dig with our hands to remove injured people who are still
alive. We try to be careful because the weight of the rubble on their bodies
could mean that we could injure them, even costing them limbs, in our attempts
to save them.”
‘My
day began on October 7, and it hasn’t ended yet’
Ahmed
Abu Khudair from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza is another member of the civil
defense. Like Musa, he described this war as being “more aggressive and
violent” than all of Israel’s previous assaults on the Strip; in fact, he
believes that the Israeli army is actively seeking to inflict as much damage as
possible on Gaza’s civilian population.
Civil
defense workers themselves are not immune to Israel’s attacks: at least 32 have
been killed since the start of the war, including seven members of Abu
Khudair’s own team. He thinks this is no mistake.
“The
occupation forces deliberately target the civil defense and ambulance teams,”
Abu Khudair said. “I was injured while working at a house that had been bombed
in southern Gaza. We recovered the bodies of three martyrs and saved several
wounded people, but then the house was bombed again. When I went up to the roof
of one of the neighboring houses to search for people, we were exposed to two
more missiles.”
Musa
concurs with Abu Khudair’s assessment: “Everyone in Gaza is a target.”
Despite
regularly working 24 hours straight, civil defense workers are forced to accept
the fact that they are unable to save all the people trapped under the rubble.
“There is no equipment,” Abu Khudair said, explaining that they lack bulldozers
for removing large blocks of concrete and electronic devices that could
determine victims’ locations. “We operate only with human power.”
One
particularly devastating situation that has been seared into Abu Khudair’s
memory followed a midnight bombing near a gas station in the southern Gaza town
of Al-Qarara. “I went to the site and at first I could not find any victims,”
he recalled. “Then I heard moaning and headed toward the sound. I dug among the
rubble and found two stuck legs, which I freed — they belonged to a 12-year-old
girl named Aisha.” The girl told him that eight of her family members were
trapped under the rubble, in addition to other families, including 9 very young
children.
Despite
the best efforts of Abu Khudair and his colleagues, they simply did not have
the means to save them. He described it as “one of the harshest moments I have
experienced — leaving a place knowing that there are people alive under the
rubble, but you cannot do anything for them, and some of them will surely die.”
In
addition to trying to save people they don’t know every day, rescue workers
also have their own families to worry about. Musa has been away from his home
and family and working around the clock since the first day of the war, staying
at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital with his colleagues.
“During
times of war, those of us on rescue teams never know when our days will start
or end,” he explained. “For me, my day began on October 7, and it has not ended
yet.”
Being
away from his family means Musa doesn’t know how they are, only receiving
updates by phone. “Some days they take shelter in one of the schools due to the
heavy bombing of our neighborhood in Al-Bureij camp, and other days they return
home,” he said. “My children miss me as much as I miss them.”
Musa
has seen his wife and two children only once in more than two months — in the
aftermath of an airstrike near their home. “They told me that there had been a
bombing of a house in the camp,” Musa recalled. “I was very worried about my
family. As the civil defense vehicle drove, we got closer and closer to the
street our home is on, until I found myself at the door of our building.”
The
bombing, Musa continued, had targeted the home of his uncle, which is in the
same building as his own family’s home. “I heard everyone screaming and crying.
I went looking for my uncle and his children and whoever was in the house. I
learned that my 19-year-old brother Abdul Rahman had been with them, but I
couldn’t find a trace of him. His body had been cut into pieces, and my sister
recognized him only from the clothes he was wearing; she had bought them for
him as a gift from Egypt just a few days before the war.
“I
saw my kids and wife then, for a few moments,” Musa went on. “They were safe,
but terrified.”
Despite
the horrors they are facing, Musa and Abu Khudair both find real purpose in
their work. “We feel that these are our children, our siblings, our families
whom we are saving,” Musa explained. “We feel a sense of victory when we
succeed in safely removing someone from the rubble. But when we hear the cries
of help from children under the rubble, none of us can hold back our tears.”
“This
is our work,” said Abu Khudair. “Even though Israel does not respect
international law, the law is on our side and we are protected by the will of
God.”
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