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By Asim Qadeer Rana
Israeli airstrikes hit two refugee camps in the central Gaza Strip on Sunday, killing scores of people. The strikes came as the U.S. keeps urging Israel to take a humanitarian pause from its relentless bombardment of Gaza and rising civilian deaths.
The Palestinian death toll in the Israeli war surpassed 9,777 with more than 4,888 of them children and minors. In the occupied West Bank, more than 140 Palestinians have been killed in violence and Israeli raids.
Gaza lost communications Sunday in its third total outage of the war, while Israel said it encircled Gaza City and divided the besieged coastal strip into two. The first Gaza outage lasted 36 hours and the second one for a few hours.
The violence has spurred protests across the world, with the planet’s billions outraged by the asymmetrical destruction of the Palestinian people.
It is not possible to look away from what the Israeli government is doing to Palestinians not only in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. Waves of Israeli aircraft pummel Gaza, destroying communications networks and thereby preventing families from reaching each other, journalists from reporting on the destruction, and Palestinian authorities and United Nations agencies from providing humanitarian assistance.
If the Israeli government claims that it is conducting a form of excising organized Palestinian forces from Gaza, the world sees Israeli aircraft and tanks as conducting nothing but genocide, displacing and massacring Palestinian refugees in Gaza. Eighty-one percent of its residents were expelled from, or are the descendants of those who were expelled from, what was declared Israel in 1948.
An attack on an ambulance convoy in Gaza City has killed many people, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel confirmed that it hit an ambulance, but said that Hamas fighters had been the target, without providing evidence. A school hosting displaced civilians and people evacuating south was also hit by Israel.
A number of Palestinians were killed and many others injured in an Israeli bombing that targeted ambulances in front of the main gate of the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. There were many casualties and injuries in an Israeli strike targeting an ambulance convoy that was heading south to reach the Rafah land crossing.
An Israeli bombing also targeted ambulances in two other locations on Al-Rashid Coastal Street that were carrying wounded people to the south to reach the Rafah land crossing to transport them to Egypt.
Medical teams were leaving with a convoy of first aid carrying injured people to the southern regions of the Gaza Strip for treatment in Egypt.
The Israeli bombing caused extensive damage to ambulances transporting the injured. The Health Ministry announced earlier that the movement of a convoy of ambulances carrying a large number of wounded was heading towards the southern Gaza Strip.
The Israeli army has widened its air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip, which has been under relentless airstrikes since the surprise offensive by Hamas on Oct. 7. More than 10,700 people have been killed in the conflict, including at least 9,227 Palestinians and more than 1,538 Israelis.
The head of the United Nations Antonio Guterres was horrified by a strike by Israeli forces on a convoy of ambulances in Gaza, adding that the conflict must stop. “I am horrified by the reported attack in Gaza on an ambulance convoy outside Al Shifa hospital. The images of bodies strewn on the street outside the hospital are harrowing,” Antonio Guterres said in the statement.
The UN chief said that for nearly one month, civilians in Gaza, including children and women were besieged, denied aid, killed, and bombed out of their homes. “This must stop,” he added.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza was horrific, he said. There was not nearly enough food, water, and medicine, while fuel to power hospitals and water plants was running out, he warned. UN shelters in Gaza are at nearly four times their full capacity and are being hit by bombardments, he continued.
Morgues are overflowing. Shops are empty. The sanitation situation is abysmal. We are seeing an increase in diseases and respiratory illnesses, especially among children. An entire population is traumatized. Nowhere is safe,” he said.
Guterres called for a cease-fire, and for hostages to be freed. He called again for all sides to respect international humanitarian law and protect civilians. All those with influence must exert it to ensure respect for the rules of war, end the suffering, and avoid a spillover of the conflict that could engulf the whole region, he said.
Multiple bodies were seen lying beside the damaged ambulance outside the hospital, which is overcrowded with civilians seeking shelter from Israeli bombing as well as those wounded.
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society has said one of its ambulances was struck by a missile fired by the Israeli forces just feet from the entrance to the hospital in Gaza City, in an attack it says killed 15 people and wounded more than 60 others. International pressure is increasing and demands for a ceasefire have become louder.
For over seven decades, Israel has been terrorizing Gaza, attacking and bombing the very people it ethnically cleansed from their homes in 1948. When finally on 7 October the Gaza concentration camp blew wide open, the ‘West’ feigned outrage and blamed Gaza.
What is Gaza? Gaza is an ancient region of Palestine. However, the world now knows it as the Gaza Strip, a specific area severed from the rest of Palestine by Israel’s acquisition of territory by force.
Although Gaza has been home to Palestinians since ancient times, most of Gaza’s people today are originally from land now under Israeli control, ethnically cleansed by Israel because they are not Jewish. Israel continues to block them from returning home for that singular reason, sealing the ‘strip’ as a ghetto for non-Jews.
In 1948, Israel began shooting Palestinians attempting to cross from Gaza to the West Bank. In 1967, Israel created bantustans out of the Palestinian land it seized in the Six-Day War and assigned all non-Jew ID cards for one bantustan or another.
Terrorism is deliberate violence against civilians to achieve a political end, precisely the tactic Israel was born by, and continues to exist by. Palestinian violence, terror or not, justifiable in means or not, is in self-defense against Israeli terror.
Israel uses terror to achieve its goals because those very goals constitute crimes against humanity. Palestinian goals are those of human rights, equality, and freedom, but the international community has denied them any conventional means of defense while empowering their tormentors.
Hamas’s capturing or killing of Israeli soldiers enforcing the concentration camp is legitimate self-defense. Hamas did indeed take civilian hostages. Yet Israel holds at any time five to ten thousand Palestinian kidnapped civilians, many of them children; but instead of calling them hostages, calls them ‘prisoners’, and we go along with it.
Contrary to the spin of US politicians, Hamas did not attack Israel because it hated Jews. Therefore, the end to this 75-year catastrophe lies entirely in the hands of Israel and its benefactors. There are no two sides to this. No Palestinian has ever occupied Israeli land, placed Israelis under apartheid, ethnically cleansed Israelis, or blocked Israelis from going home to get medical treatment, to school, or pursuing their dreams.
The present horror is not the result of evolutionary events but of the singular goal of the Zionist movement for well over a century: a messianic state based on racial supremacy and ‘purity’, achievable only through the dehumanization and elimination of other people.
All pictures coming out of Gaza show that Israel’s assault is unrelenting, sparing neither children nor women nor the elderly and sick. The failure of the world to stop massacre after massacre shows us the poor nature of our international system.
