September 13,
2024
Fifty-two years
ago, almost to the day, on September 8, 1972, I survived the first of many
Israeli air and sea raids on my refugee camp in northern Lebanon. I was less
than two hundred yards from the area across the river where a group of us young
kids met every day, between 4 and 5 p.m., to play in the large field, swim in
the river or in the Mediterranean Sea. 
At first, I
heard what sounded like a humming plane. Before I could even turn my head to
look up at the sky, I was startled by the booming sound of low-flying fighter
jets passing overhead, dropping massive rockets onto the open field. The first
bomb exploded in the northwest corner of the field, creating a massive
fireball—a black column of smoke intertwined with a glowing red blaze. The
shockwave threw me off my bike. Soot filled the air and fragments rained down
like strafing bullets all around me.
In less than 15
minutes, the once grassy green play area of approximately 20 acres was
transformed into a lunar landscape, pocked with craters. One pit was so large
and deep that groundwater filled the hole.
If the Israeli
air raid had occurred just five or ten minutes later, I would have been in the
middle of the field, playing with other 14-year-old kids. My friend Barakat,
who was already there and likely have been eagerly anticipating my arrival, was
killed. The raid left many unexploded devices and time-delayed bombs, making it
difficult to recover his body until the next day. Our neighbor Mahdi was also
killed, buried under the plowed soil. Years later, his skeleton was discovered
when the area was being graded.
I’m reminded of
this today, September 10, 2024, as I watch footage of the huge crater left
behind by an American-made 2,000-pound MK-84 bomb. The bombs were dropped in
the middle of the night on 20 tents housing displaced civilians in an
Israeli-designated “safe area” in al-Mawasi, southern Gaza.
Early in the
morning, the Israeli army issued its disinformation boilerplate communiqué,
declaring the raid was a “precise strike” on senior resistance members. But
videos from the crater, where tents lay buried under the sand, suggest that
Israel targeted civilians in a supposed safe area.
Reading about
the “precise strike” on a BBC site took me back 52 years. Almost three hours
after the raid on my camp, I remember my father and our neighbors gathering
around the radio to listen to the 7 p.m. BBC Arabic news. I still recall how
they stopped breathing, their eyes wide, mouths agape, as the BBC quoted an
Israeli army spokesman claiming Israel had targeted a military base in Nahr
el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon.
While I don’t
remember the exact number of the killed and injured that afternoon, I know for
certain that 100 percent were civilians—mostly boys and girls, with at least
one elderly man among them. I felt then as helpless as many of those who were
sleeping on September 10 in their “safe” tents, unable to tell their story to
the world. The photos left behind by the US-manufactured 2,000-pound bombs,
however, expose Israel’s lies and the complicity of the managed Western media,
It is utterly
despicable that the lecterns at the White House and the State Department have
become platforms to market such lies, emboldening Israel’s intransigence and
whitewashing its genocide. Especially egregious is the disinformation spread by
White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby, who blamed the
Palestinians as “the main obstacle” to a ceasefire. This brazen lie comes less
than a week after the leak of a document pointing to new conditions that were
added in late July by Benjamin Netanyahu to Joe Biden’s proposal from May 27
which torpedoed the ceasefire agreement.
After the
Palestinians rejected Netanyahu’s new conditions in late July, Israel
intensified its systematic campaign of bombing displaced civilians in safe
areas, including 16 UN schools converted into mass shelters. Unable to compel a
ceasefire on its terms, Israel is using these attacks on designated safe areas
as part of its bloody negotiations strategy to exert pressure by inflicting
maximum suffering on civilians through murder and starvation.
Meanwhile, the
Biden administration continues to supply Israel with the means to commit these
war crimes, while using the White House platform to spread disinformation,
making Israel’s “lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
Ruwaida Kamal Amer & Mahmoud
Mushtaha
September 12, 2024
Displaced Palestinians inspect the damage from an Israeli airstrike, in
Al-Mawasi, September 10, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
In the early hours of Tuesday
morning, Israeli missiles rained down on a designated “humanitarian zone” in
the coastal area of Al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis. For months, hundreds of
thousands of displaced Palestinians have taken shelter there upon Israel’s
orders to evacuate from almost everywhere else in the Gaza Strip. But even in
this supposed sanctuary, safety for Palestinians is an illusion, and the
displaced remain as vulnerable as ever.
For three harrowing hours,
search-and-rescue teams, illuminated only by the dim glow of flashlights and
the occasional flare of burning wreckage, sifted through the sand, desperate to
find survivors. Instead, they unearthed the bodies of men, women, and children
who were torn apart and buried under the very earth on which they had sought
refuge. Tents were set ablaze, and the bombs left deep craters in the earth.
According to Gaza’s Health Ministry,
the airstrikes killed at least 19 people and wounded dozens more. It was
Israel’s fifth attack on the area since designating it a place of refuge, and
Tuesday’s bombings brought the total death toll from these attacks to more than
150.
The Israeli military claimed that it
had “struck significant Hamas terrorists who were operating within a command
and control centre embedded inside the humanitarian area.” Hamas denied the
allegation.
One of the martyrs, Ahmed Al-Qadi,
was only 3 years old. He had been living in Al-Mawasi with his mother and two
siblings since early July, when Israeli forces invaded their neighborhood in
Gaza City and arrested Ahmed’s father. On the night of the bombings, Ahmed’s
mother, Fatima, was jolted awake by the sound of explosions.
“I woke up to a noise so loud that I
thought it was the end of the world,” she told +972, her voice trembling. “When
I looked around, my children were gone. I was surrounded by darkness, smoke,
and screaming. I couldn’t see or breathe.”
Rescue workers found Ahmed hours
later, buried under a mound of sand. His small body lay still, his face frozen
in terror.
His two siblings, aged 6 and 8,
survived the attack, but with severe injuries. “I found them covered in blood,
their legs crushed,” Fatima recounted, tears streaming down her face. “Their
upper bodies were above the sand, but their legs were trapped beneath it. I
don’t know how we will ever recover from this.”
‘Israel is pursuing us to this area
in order to bury us in the ground’
The Israeli army began directing
Palestinians to Al-Mawasi in the first months of its bombardment of the Strip.
Home to only 6,000 people before the war, it quickly swelled into a mass
displacement camp accommodating hundreds of thousands in makeshift tents.
Israel’s invasion of Rafah in May triggered a further influx of refugees to the
coastal area.
Israa Al-Attar, 60, came to
Al-Mawasi after her home in the Shujaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, where she
worked as a falafel seller, was destroyed. “I worked to raise my eight children
so that they could obtain university degrees,” she told +972. “I built an
eight-story building for them, so they could have separate apartments after
they got married and had children.”
But in the first weeks of the war,
the Israeli army decimated their home with a single airstrike. “The stones that
the house was built from could describe the suffering I lived throughout my
life,” she said.
Al-Attar was asleep next to her
grandchildren when the intensity of several explosions on Tuesday morning woke
her up. “We were close to it,” she recounted. “Stones and dust were scattered
on us. Many people were injured from the falling shrapnel. Everyone was
screaming and running and asking for help.”
Umm Tareq Al-Tawil, 44, also
witnessed the massacre. She has been living in Al-Mawasi for the past five
months after escaping Israel’s bombings in the Nasser neighborhood of Gaza
City.
“The assault was brutal,” she told
+972. “We heard five explosions that felt like an earthquake shaking the entire
area. It was pitch black, and we were all asleep when the bombs fell. The
children ran out, crying and terrified. People were torn to pieces, most of
them women and children.”
“I rushed out of the tent with my
husband and children, screaming, not knowing what was happening or where to
go,” Al-Tawil continued. “Out of sheer terror and fear, I ran without even
covering my hair, completely frightened and disoriented.
“We believed we were safe here, and
there were no resistance fighters among us,” she affirmed. “I’ve been here for
five months and haven’t seen any fighters in this area. Everyone here is either
a woman, child, elderly person, or just ordinary people.”
Israel’s previous bombardment of
Al-Mawasi, on July 13, was even deadlier: that attack killed 90 Palestinians,
with Israel claiming it had targeted Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif.
The extent of the destruction on Tuesday suggests that, like in that attack,
the Israeli military dropped 2,000-pound bombs on the densely-packed tent camp.
For survivors, the latest massacre
in Al-Mawasi has only reaffirmed their conviction that Israel is not actually
fighting Hamas, but rather using that as an excuse to target Palestinian
civilians and erase entire families from the civil registry. “Israel is
pursuing us to this area in order to kill us and bury us in the ground,”
Al-Attar said. “This is a war of extermination.”
A desperate search for survivors
The emergency response to Tuesday’s
attack was hindered by a lack of equipment and infrastructure — the result of
nearly a year of war in Gaza and a decade and a half-long siege.
Mohammed Badr, 30, who works in the
Civil Defense, arrived in Al-Mawasi at 1 a.m. after receiving news of the
massacre. The scene when he got there was like something out of a horror film.
“There were body parts everywhere,” he recounted. “It was clear that entire
families had been killed. A fire broke out in about 20 tents and there was a
crater nine meters deep.”
In the darkness, Badr’s team
struggled to search for survivors. “There was no lighting, so residents lit up
the place with their phones,” he said. “The situation was difficult and
everyone was crying, screaming, and checking on their family and relatives. We
did not stop searching until daybreak.”
Ahmed, a 24-year-old volunteer
paramedic (who preferred not to give his full name for fear of being targeted),
was among the first responders to arrive at the scene, having been stationed
nearby. “As soon as I arrived, I saw limbs scattered everywhere,” he recalled,
his voice hoarse from exhaustion. “I’ve seen a lot of terrible things, but
this… this was pure horror.”
Ahmed and his team worked
tirelessly, pulling bodies from the sand and hoping to find someone still
alive. “We found a little girl, maybe 5 or 6 years old, buried up to her neck.
She was still breathing, but barely. We managed to get her out, but she died on
the way to the hospital. I keep thinking about her, about all the children we
couldn’t save. I wonder if I could have done more.”
Badr echoed this sentiment. “This
relentless targeting exhausts the Civil Defense because we have no capabilities
to save people,” he lamented. “We stand helpless in the face of these
massacres.”
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