On Wednesday, the Israeli army bombed a UN school in Gaza where 12,000 Palestinian civilians were sheltering. This is the fifth time that the same facility, located in the Nuseirat refugee camp and protected by the Geneva Conventions, has been attacked by the Israeli military. They claim that for them the building is not a school, but a Hamas command centre. Israel is thus trying to justify a new violation of international law, and it does so by using the weak expedient of using a nomenclature that ignores the most basic criterion of verification, because the victims of the repeated bombings are always civilians.
On Wednesday, six employees of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) were among the 18 dead, in what constitutes the deadliest action against that agency since Benjamin Netanyahu ordered a disproportionate offensive against the Strip on October 7 following the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. From day one, the Israeli government launched a propaganda operation against the institution, which serves more than six million people, accusing it of collusion with Hamas for the alleged participation of some of its workers in the deadly attacks by the Islamist militia.
The investigations ordered by the UN and the evidence of the indispensable humanitarian work carried out by UNRWA have been of no use, because Netanyahu has settled on the fallacious narrative that it is the organisation that provides cover for Hamas. A few weeks after the first anniversary of the war, the number of UNRWA officials killed by direct attacks by the Israeli army has already risen to 220.
The repeated and indiscriminate attacks against schools and hospitals and – sarcastically – against areas declared safe for Palestinians by the Israeli authorities themselves, flout all international conventions and have a clear culprit: Benjamin Netanyahu. Meanwhile, Netanyahu remains impassive in the face of the condemnatory tone, no longer mincing words, used by senior foreign representatives such as the Director General of the World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who describes the situation in Gaza as “carnage”, or the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, who underlines “the disregard for the basic principles of international humanitarian law”.
Meanwhile, Madrid was the scene of a meeting between Arab and European countries on Friday to discuss the two-state solution as a way to end the devastating war in Gaza. It is the most logical way out, but it inevitably requires a first step that Netanyahu refuses to take: an immediate ceasefire.
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