Israel Massacres 100 Innocents in Gaza School Attack
It is the dawn of a new massacre, a slaughter, yet another carnage. Like every day for 309 days. This time too, the Israeli air force has attacked a school full of refugees, that of al-Tabin in the Daraj area of Gaza City. More than 100 Palestinians were literally torn to pieces and hundreds were injured.
The toll is still uncertain. As always, the IDF declared that it had hit a “terrorist” shelter. which served as the headquarters of Hamas. According to local media reports, citing survivors’ testimonies, at dawn this morning the bomb hit a prayer room in the school with about 250 people inside. Not a “den” of Hamas, but rather a “hive” of families. From the first information gathered on the field, it would appear that most of the dead and wounded are women, children and elderly people. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said that the Israeli army had once again forced the evacuation of more than 60,000 to 70,000 Palestinians from Khan Younis, who were ordered to move to the already densely populated al-Mawasi area. At least 35 Palestinians have been killed in the latest Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip there, including 19 in Khan Younis alone, medical sources told Al Jazeera Arabic.
Hani Mahmoud, a Palestinian journalist and field correspondent for Al Jazeera, reports that in addition to those killed in the school’s prayer room, there were other victims, mostly women and children, who were killed in nearby classrooms, hit by flying shrapnel from the bombs. Parts of the building have collapsed, others have caught fire. Many victims taken to hospital are bleeding badly or have severe burns due to shrapnel. Mahmoud also said that the staff at al-Ahli hospital have so few resources that they are forced to use recycled materials to treat the wounded, materials that in any other context would simply be thrown away. Many of the victims’ bodies are in pieces and are therefore difficult to recognize. “Relatives who are looking for their relatives are struggling to find a way to identify them.” Elsewhere in Gaza, there is a succession of attacks and bombings. Al Jazeera reports that the Nuseirat refugee camp has also been hit by Israeli gunboats from the sea, while helicopter gunships have fired heavily northwest of Nuseirat camp, in the az-Zahra area.
Gaza is a hell on earth, where over 2 million people, half of them children, are being starved with methodical cynicism. Among yesterday’s victims, in the so-called “safe” area of Khan Younis, there are Palestinians burned alive, as in Rafah, following Israeli air strikes that hit a refugee camp crowded with tents and families. While this carnage continues unabated, with the complicity and support of Western “democracies”, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has stated that starving two million civilians in Gaza “could be justified and moral”, if necessary for the release of the hostages. This seems to be the “new normal” of Israel and the Western world. The one where a nation that exterminates, to date, at least 39,700 people, half of whom are children, and injures over 91,800, not counting the tens of thousands of people missing, disappeared, left under the rubble, is not only legitimized to do so and is supplied with weapons, but is unanimously considered “a victim who has the right to defend himself”. And yet, no victim has ever been seen besieging his oppressor and bombing him 24/7 for a full 309 days. Nor has a state ever decimated health infrastructures like Israel did in Gaza and been supported in doing so instead of being condemned for multiple violations of international law. Israel has scientifically targeted hospitals, health workers, massacring hundreds of doctors and nurses, many of whom were kidnapped and deported to Israeli detention centers converted into torture camps for Palestinians (see https://www.affaritaliani.it/esteri/palestinesi-detenuti-da-israele-torture-in-carcere-benvenuti-all-inferno-932030.html). Many of the doctors and nurses transferred to Israeli prisons did not come out alive.
Fatah, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, immediately condemned the attack on the Gaza City school, calling it a “heinous, bloody massacre” and saying it represented “the height of terrorism and criminality.” He also called on the international community and human rights organizations to “intervene immediately and stop the systematic war of extermination against our people.” In a statement released this morning, he also said that “Committing these massacres confirms beyond any doubt Israel’s efforts to exterminate our people through the policy of cumulative killings and mass slaughters that shake the consciences of the living.” Ismail al-Thawabta, head of the government media office in Gaza, said that Israel used 2,000-pound (907 kg) bombs to target the Daraj school, adding that he was aware of the presence of displaced people inside the school.
It is worth noting that in the hours preceding this latest massacre of women and children, a spokesperson for the US State Department announced that the Biden administration intends to provide another $3.5 billion to Israel to spend on weapons and military equipment made in the USA. And this despite the suspicion of genocide underway in Gaza and despite the increasingly overwhelming evidence of serious and widespread abuses perpetrated by the Israeli military against the occupied Palestinian territory and its inhabitants. So, with one hand Biden – and with him Harris – is desperately pushing on the accelerator of the plan for a ceasefire in Gaza to avoid going down in history as the supporter of Israeli “crimes” and the genocide of the Palestinians; with the other he continues to continuously supply Israel with weapons, thus accepting one of the many imperative requests made by Netanyahu during his speech to the American Congress last July 24: “Give us the tools quickly, and we will quickly finish the job”.
A speech, that of Netanyahu in the Sancta Sanctorum of American politics, which seemed more like the harangue of a CEO to his first, second, third lines, rather than the intervention of a head of government, with over 150 thousand dead and wounded on his shoulders, and a series of crimes ranging from corruption to war crimes and against humanity, from fraud to breach of trust, as a report by the New York Times has exposed. An encyclopedic list collected over decades of “honorable service”. The speech, because that is what it was, to the submissive and complacent audience of congressmen, who in 52 minutes gave 39 standing ovations, had the tone of those that are given in the key moments of a company, aimed at stimulating a sense of belonging, reinvigorating teamwork, energizing spirits. A sinister impression that transforms into something more if you line up everything that happened after Netanyahu’s visit to the USA. From the escalation of attacks in Gaza, where the massacres followed one another at an increasingly rapid pace, to the escalation with neighboring states, the targeted assassinations, including that of Ismail Haniyeh, blown up in his bed while he was a guest in Tehran.
To date, 90% of the population has been forced to evacuate not once but dozens of times. This is also a crime. In addition, almost 80% of the buildings in the Strip have been pulverized, destroyed by multiple bombings, when not mined to make them collapse on themselves. In many cases they have been “bulldozed”, demolished by bulldozers. Why persist in bombing the dust? There are approximately two million Palestinians in the area. No place is safe anymore, especially those declared as such by the IDF. So, where should these desperate people go, where will those who have survived this manhunt be moved in the end?
A week after the Hamas attack, the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence released a secret ten-page document outlining the expulsion of the Palestinian population of Gaza into northern Sinai, Egypt, in the following order: “1. Order Palestinian civilians to leave northern Gaza before ground operations; 2. Sequential ground operations from northern to southern Gaza; 3. Routes through Rafah must be cleared; 4. Establish tent cities in northern Sinai and build cities to resettle Palestinians in Egypt.” According to the Jewish website Mekomit, which originally published it, the document was verified by an Intelligence Ministry official, and like all Intelligence documents, it is advisory and non-binding. Yet, if you read it carefully, it seems that they have all been implemented, as ordered. The only one that is still missing is the last one.
Is there a solution now to stop this bloodbath? Yes. The way has been shown by the United States and the European Union with their sanctions on Russia in the context of the war in Ukraine: reduce the financial power of the aggressor, boycott everything that finances aggression and, in the case of Israel, stop all arms supplies, without exception. The deliberate and continuous slaughter of defenseless civilians, the massacre of children – almost half of the dead – is the “starring evidence” that demonstrates, beyond any reasonable doubt, Israel’s will not to end the war in Gaza. The ceasefire invoked (in vain) by many and desperately sought by Biden has only one meaning and only one possibility of implementation, which is certainly not the one that Netanyahu wants to give it, who has always repeated “I have no intention of stopping until I finish the job”.
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