June 13, 2024
It began without warning. “Planes were bombing.
Tanks were firing. Quadcopter drones were shooting. People were running and
screaming. It felt like Judgment Day, as if we were living our last moments.”
Palestinians run through Nuseirat following an Israeli attack on the camp, June 8, 2024. (Khaled Ali/Flash90)
This was the scene at around 11 a.m. on Saturday,
June 8 in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. Aerial bombardment, as
described by a journalist in the camp who preferred to remain anonymous, was
accompanied by the entry of dozens of Israeli military and police special
forces personnel who emerged from aid trucks. “We couldn’t understand what was
happening,” the journalist added.
As later became clear, a major Israeli military
operation was underway to retrieve four hostages whom Hamas had kidnapped from
the Nova music festival almost exactly eight months prior. In doing so, Israeli
forces unleashed devastation on Nuseirat camp, killing at least 276
Palestinians and wounding approximately 700 more.
“The intensity of the bombing felt like an
earthquake,” Enas Al-Louh, a 45-year-old from Gaza City who had sought refuge
in the camp, recounted. “I thought my life would end right there. I was
screaming at my children not to leave my side so that we could die together.
For more than an hour, we lived through the horror of nonstop bombing and
shelling.”
For Amjad Al-Majdalawi, a 40-year-old who had been
staying in Nuseirat camp with his family since the start of the war, the sound
of explosions and people screaming in the market jolted him into a state of
panic. “My mind stopped, and I ran to check on my family,” he told +972. “While
running, I saw the martyrs and the wounded lying on the ground, and the
survivors begging for help.
“I arrived home to find my children and my family
screaming in fear,” he continued. “We tried to find some relief from the shock
of the event, but it continued to become more and more violent. The occupation
deceived the camp through the state of calm in which we lived for several days
[prior to the operation], without hearing the sound of reconnaissance planes.
Then came the attack, with such brutality. Everyone in the camp lost someone
from their family.”
‘We are cheap blood in this hypocritical
world’
As hundreds of wounded Palestinians began arriving
at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in nearby Deir al-Balah, the Israeli army called
the hospital staff and ordered them to evacuate, threatening to bomb the
hospital. Staff passed on the warning to those it could, but most were too
desperate to pay heed. The attack didn’t materialize, and it appears that the
threat was intended to sow further chaos and confusion as Israel’s operation
unfolded.
“All the photographers and journalists chose to
stay,” the journalist recounted. “By covering the events inside the hospital —
which continued to receive countless numbers of injured patients — we fulfilled
our work. We didn’t care about the evacuation order, because what we
experienced was more terrible than any other thought or feeling. The crying of
mothers and children was so intense.”
Khalil Al-Dakran, the hospital’s spokesperson, told
+972 that most of the wounded who arrived that day were women and children. But
due to the Israeli army’s continuous attacks on central Gaza in the previous
weeks, he explained, the hospital was unable to receive such large numbers.
“We treated the injured on the floor of the
corridors and outside in the tents, because there were no empty beds to receive
the wounded,” Al-Dakran continued. “They arrived in ambulances, civilian cars,
and animal-drawn vehicles.” The situation was so dire that the hospital was
forced to send patients to Al-Awda Maternity Hospital, which was closer to the
massacre in Nuseirat, despite it being ill-equipped to accommodate patients
with severe injuries.
Al-Aqsa’s dwindling resources further limited the
hospital’s ability to admit the influx of patients. “Some medical delegations
come to Gaza with supplies that can help our patients, but the Israeli army
confiscates these and prevents them from entering Gaza,” Al-Dakran explained.
“It inhibits the entry of fuel and medical equipment into hospitals and keeps
the wounded from seeking life-saving treatment abroad.”
The Nuseirat operation marked only the second time
since October 7 that Israeli forces have freed hostages alive. The first, on
Feb. 12, also came at a high cost to Palestinian lives, killing at least 74 in
Rafah’s Shaboura refugee camp in order to create a “diversion.”
Al-Louh is still struggling to make sense of what he
witnessed. “How is it reasonable to kill over 200 people for the sake of four?
We are cheap blood in this hypocritical world that does not know the meaning of
humanity, does not speak about the hundreds of martyrs and wounded, and does
not express its anger at this massacre.”
Jonathan Cook
Israel hasn’t just crossed the Biden
administration’s pretend “red lines” in Gaza. With its massacre at Nuseirat
refugee camp at the weekend, Israel drove a bulldozer through them.
On Saturday, an Israeli military
operation to free four Israelis held captive by Hamas since its 7 October
attack on Israel resulted in the killing of more than 270 Palestinians, many of
them women and children.
The true death toll may never be
known. Untold numbers of men, women and children are still under rubble from
the bombardment, crushed to death, or trapped and suffocating, or expiring
slowly from dehydration if they cannot be dug out in time.
Many hundreds more are suffering
agonizing injuries – should their wounds not kill them – in a situation where
there are almost no medical facilities left after Israel’s destruction of
hospitals and its mass kidnap of Palestinian medical personnel. Further, there
are no drugs to treat the victims, given Israel’s months-long imposition of an
aid blockade.
Israelis and American Jewish
organizations – so ready to judge Palestinians for cheering attacks on Israel –
celebrated the carnage caused in freeing the Israeli captives, who could have
returned home months ago had Israel been ready to agree on a ceasefire.
Videos even show Israelis dancing in
the street.
According to reports, the bloody
Israeli operation in central Gaza may have killed three other captives, one of
them possibly an American citizen.
In comments to the Haaretz newspaper
published on Sunday, Louis Har, a hostage freed back in February, observed of
his own captivity: “Our greatest fear was the IDF’s planes and the concern that
they would bomb the building we were in.”
He added: “We weren’t worried that
they’d [referring to Hamas] do something to us all of a sudden. We didn’t
object to anything. So I wasn’t afraid they’d kill me.”
The Israeli media reported Israeli
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant describing Saturday’s operation as “one of the
most heroic and extraordinary operations I have witnessed over the course of 47
years serving in Israel’s defense establishment”.
The chief prosecutor of the
International Criminal Court is currently seeking an arrest warrant for
Gallant, as well as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes and
crimes against humanity. The charges include efforts to exterminate the people
of Gaza through planned starvation.
State terrorism
Israel has been wrecking the
established laws of war with abandon for more than eight months.
At least 37,000 Palestinians are known
to have been killed so far in Gaza, though Palestinian officials lost the
ability to properly count the dead many weeks ago following Israel’s relentless
destruction of the enclave’s institutions and infrastructure.
Israel has additionally engineered a
famine that, mostly out of view, is gradually starving Gaza’s population to
death.
The International Court of Justice put
Israel on trial for genocide back in January. Last month, it ordered an
immediate halt to Israel’s attack on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah. Israel has
responded to both judgments by intensifying its killing spree.
In a further indication of Israel’s
sense of impunity, the rescue operation on Saturday involved yet another
flagrant war crime.
Israel used a humanitarian aid truck –
supposedly bringing relief to Gaza’s desperate population – as cover for its
military operation. In international law, that is known as the crime of
perfidy.
For months, Israel has been blocking
aid to Gaza – part of its efforts to starve the population. It has also
targeted aid workers, killing more than 250 of them since October.
But more specifically, Israel is
waging a war on UNRWA, claiming without evidence that the UN’s main aid agency
in Gaza is implicated in Hamas “terror” operations. It wants the UN, the
international community’s last lifeline in Gaza against Israel’s wanton
savagery, permanently gone.
By hiding its own soldiers in an aid
truck, Israel made a mockery of its supposed “terrorism concerns” by doing
exactly what it accuses Hamas of.
But Israel’s military action also
dragged the aid effort – the only way to end Gaza’s famine – into the centre of
the battlefield. Now Hamas has every reason to fear that aid workers are not
what they seem; that they are really instruments of Israeli state terrorism.
Nefarious motive
In the circumstances, one might have
assumed the Biden administration would be quick to condemn Israel’s actions and
distance itself from the massacre.
Instead, Jake Sullivan, President Joe
Biden’s national security adviser, was keen to take credit for the mass carnage
– or what he termed a “daring operation”.
He admitted in an interview on Sunday
that the US had offered assistance in the rescue operation, though he refused
to clarify how. Other reports noted a supporting British role, too.
“The United States has been providing
support to Israel for several months in its efforts to help identify the
locations of hostages in Gaza and to support efforts to try to secure their
rescue or recovery,” Sullivan told CNN.
Sullivan’s comments fueled existing
suspicions that such assistance extends far beyond providing intelligence and a
steady supply of the bombs Israel has dropped on the tiny Gaza enclave over the
past few months – more than the total that hit London, Dresden and Hamburg
combined during the Second World War.
A Biden official disclosed to the
Axios website that US soldiers belonging to a so-called American hostages unit
had participated in the rescue operation that massacred Palestinian civilians.
Additionally, footage shows
Washington’s floating pier as the backdrop for helicopters involved in the
attack.
The pier was ostensibly built off
Gaza’s coast at huge cost – some $320m – and over two months to bypass Israel’s
blocking of aid by land.
Observers argued at the time that it
was not only an extraordinarily impractical and inefficient way to deliver aid
but that there were likely to be hidden, nefarious motives behind its
construction.
Its location, at the midpoint of
Gaza’s coast, has bolstered Israel’s severing of the enclave into two, creating
a land corridor that has effectively become a new border and from which Israel
can launch raids into central Gaza like Saturday’s.
Those critics appear to have been
proven right. The pier has barely functioned as an aid route since the first
deliveries arrived in mid-May.
The pier soon broke apart, and its
repair and return to operation was only announced on Friday.
Now the fact that it appears to have
been pressed into immediate use as a beachhead for an operation that killed at
least 270 Palestinians drags Washington even deeper into complicity with what
the World Court has called a “plausible genocide”.
But like the use of the aid truck, it
also means the Biden administration is joining Israel once again – after
pulling its funding to UNRWA – in directly discrediting the aid operation in
Gaza when it is needed most urgently.
That was the context for understanding
the World Food Program’s announcement on Sunday that it was halting the use of
the pier for aid deliveries, citing “safety” concerns.
‘Successful’ massacre
As ever, for western media and
politicians – who have stood firmly against a ceasefire that could have brought
the suffering of the Israeli captives and their families to an end months ago –
Palestinian lives are quite literally worthless.
The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz
thought it appropriate to describe the killing of 270-plus Palestinians in the
freeing of the four Israelis as an “important sign of hope”, while the British
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak expressed his “huge relief”. The appalling death
toll went unmentioned.
Imagine describing in similarly
positive terms an operation by Hamas that killed 270 Israelis to liberate a
handful of the many hundreds of medical personnel kidnapped from Gaza by Israel
in recent months and known to be held in a torture facility.
The London Times, meanwhile, breezily
erased Saturday’s massacre of Palestinians by characterizing the operation as a
“surgical strike”.
Media outlets uniformly hailed the
operation as a “success” and “daring”, as though the killing and maiming of
around 1,000 Palestinians – and the serial war crimes Israel committed in the
process – need not be factored in.
BBC News’ main report on Saturday
night breathlessly focused on the celebrations of the families of the freed
captives, treating the massacre of Palestinians as an afterthought. The program
stressed that the death toll was “disputed” – though not mentioning that, as
ever, it was Israel doing the disputing.
The reality is that the savage
“rescue” operation would have been entirely unnecessary had Netanyahu not been
so determined to drag his feet on negotiating the captives’ release, and
thereby avoid jail on corruption charges, and the US so fully indulgent of his
procrastination.
It will also be very difficult to
repeat such an operation, as Haaretz’s military correspondent Amos Harel noted
at the weekend. Hamas will learn lessons, guarding the remaining captives even
more closely, most likely underground in its tunnels.
The remaining captives’ return will
“probably occur only as part of a deal that will require significant
concessions”, he concluded.
Leveraging murder
Benny Gantz, the politician-general
who helped oversee Israel’s eight-month slaughter in Gaza inside Netanyahu’s
war cabinet and is widely described as a “moderate” in the West, resigned from
the government on Sunday.
Although ostensibly the dispute is
over how Israel will extricate itself from Gaza over the coming months, the
more likely explanation is that Gantz wishes both to distance himself from
Netanyahu as the Israeli prime minister faces possible arrest for crimes
against humanity and to prepare for elections to take his place.
The Pentagon and the Biden
administration see Gantz as their man. Having him out of the government may
give them additional leverage over Netanyahu in the run-up to a US presidential
election in November in which Donald Trump will be actively trying to cosy up
to the Israeli prime minister.
The focus on Israeli politicking –
rather than US complicity in the Nuseirat massacre – will doubtless provide a
welcome distraction, too, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken tours the
region. He will once again wish to be seen rallying support for a ceasefire
plan that is supposed to see the Israeli captives released – a plan Netanyahu
will be determined, once again, to stymie.
Blinken’s efforts are likely to be
even more hopeless in the immediate wake of the Biden administration’s
all-too-visible involvement in the killing of hundreds of Palestinians.
Washington’s claim to be an “honest
broker” looks to everyone – apart from the reliably obedient western political
and media class – as even more derisory than usual.
The real question is whether Blinken’s
serial diplomatic failures in ending the slaughter in Gaza are a bug or a
feature.
The stark contradiction in
Washington’s position towards Gaza was exposed last week during a press
conference with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
He suggested that the aim of Israel
and the US was to persuade Hamas to dissolve itself – presumably by some form
of surrender – in return for a ceasefire. The group had an incentive to do so,
said Miller, “because they don’t want to see continued conflict, continued
Palestinian people dying. They don’t want to see war in Gaza.”
Even the usually compliant western
press corps were taken aback by Miller’s implication that a crime against
humanity – the mass killing of Palestinians, such as took place at Nuseirat
camp on Saturday – was viewed in Washington as leverage to be exercised over
Hamas.
But more likely, the seeming
contradiction was simply symptomatic of the logical entanglements resulting
from Washington’s efforts to deflect from the real goal: buying Israel more
time to do what it is so well advanced doing already.
Israel needs to finish pulverizing
Gaza, making it permanently uninhabitable, so that the population will be faced
with a stark dilemma: remain and die, or leave by any means possible.
The same US “humanitarian pier” that
was pressed into service for Saturday’s massacre may soon be the “humanitarian
pier” that serves as the exit through which Gaza’s Palestinians are ethnically
cleansed, shipped out of a death zone engineered by Israel.
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