[Salon] Israeli Massacres Continue in Gaza, as Returnees to North are Targeted and Refugee Camp is Bombed

https://www.juancole.com/2024/04/massacres-continue-returnees.html

Israeli Massacres Continue in Gaza, as Returnees to North are Targeted and Refugee Camp is Bombed

Juan Cole 04/15/2024

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The brief interlude of the Iranian rocket attack on Israel, in which almost all the projectiles were shot down or intercepted, did nothing to slow the Israeli assault on Gaza. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, no helpful foreign power is intercepting Israeli rockets fired at dense urban neighborhoods with deadly effect. The Israelis murdered another 43 people on Sunday, many of them from the sky.

Reporters for CNN, some of them stringers on the ground in Gaza, reported Sunday that thousands of civilians attempted to return from their 191-day exile in Rafah to their homes in the north. They appear just to have grabbed up their children and a few things, and hit the road, as rumors circulated that people were being let through the checkpoints by the Israelis. The rumors were untrue.

Al-Sharq reports that according to eyewitnesses, early on Sunday “dozens of displaced women and children were able to return from the south of the Gaza Strip to the north, without the Israeli army attacking them at the checkpoiint at Al-Shuhada Junction on the coastal road, Al-Rashid Street.”

Videos shared by women and children in this brave and successful exodus north appear to have started the rumor that it was safe to go home, which then created the rush of thousands of hopeful returnees.

Eyewitnesses told al-Sharq: “But fire was opened on another group of citizens hundreds of yards from the checkpoint.”

Mohammad Al-Sawalhi, Abeer Salman, Kareem Khadder and Zeena Saifi report in more detail for CNN that the group used donkey carts, bicycles, even some pick-up trucks to head north. They quote one Majd al-Aqqad as saying “I’m going to Gaza City. It’s enough. We need to go back to our homes and lands. We are tired of displacement… we heard people saying we can go back, but no one official told us. We’ll leave it to God.”

Another interviewee who went north, Um Mohammed, told them, “I don’t know anything about my house. It’s our home and our land. The Israelis displaced us and humiliated us,”

But then the Israeli troops began shooting, apparently an entire arsenal, including from helicopter gunships, when they saw some men with the refugees. A woman who appears to have declined to be identified told CNN, “We reached all the way to the checkpoint until we saw Israeli tanks. We headed back because they fired towards us. We didn’t see anyone make it to the other side. We risked our children’s lives to cross, but apparently it was all a lie,”

One little girl was shot in her mother’s arms and is now being treated in what is left of a hospital back south.

MEMO video: Gaza’s displaced retreat to the south after Israeli military blocks them

Meanwhile, Israel’s artificial intelligence programs went on mindlessly identifying supposed militants and directed air force pilots and drone operators to hit them at home with their families and neighbors.

According to Sharq the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza alleged, “the Israeli occupation committed 4 massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, as a result of which 43 dead [“martyrs”] and 62 wounded arrived at hospitals during the past 24 hours.” As a result of these bombings, “a number of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them.”

These 43 newly dead Palestinians brought the total since last October to 33,739, the Ministry said, with 76,371 injured. Some 70% of the casualties are women and children, and many of the others are noncombatant men. Since the Israelis are using an indiscriminate artificial intelligence program, we cannot know whether any of the men they are killing were in any way connected to the October 7 attack, which involved perhaps a couple thousand cadres. The operation was kept secret from all but a few persons in Gaza, and it appears that even the expatriate civilian leadership may not have known about it.

On Monday morning, Sharq writes, “the Palestinian Wafa News Agency reported that an Israeli airstrike killed 5 Palestinians in an area northwest of the Nuseirat refugee camp, in the central Gaza Strip.”

It continues, “Wafa reported, citing local sources, that Israeli fighters bombed a house northwest of the Nuseirat camp, and also a mosque inside the camp, while it indicated that Israeli army artillery bombed the [residential] Asar Tower [apartment complex] in Nuseirat.”

Unless Israeli troops were taking fire from the mosque, which seems unlikely, bombing it is a war crime. Bombing a residential apartment building, unless you know that no innocent civilians are in it, is also a war crime.

In fact, it is by now all a war crime. This is not “self-defense” or “defeating Hamas.” It is just bombing people you think may have served in the Hamas paramilitary at some point, and everyone around them. Some 10 percent of the AI identifications are admitted to be faulty. And the rationale for killing every single paramilitary member is weak, especially if it is done from the air, leaving them no opportunity to surrender, and especially if you are trying to kill their children and wives along with them.

As for Nuseirat Camp, according to UNRWA, just a few years ago it had about 85,000 Palestinian refugees, whose families had been ethnically cleansed by Zionist gangs and chased out of their homes in what is now southern Israel in 1948. It was about as populous as Santa Fe, New Mexico.

H/t UNRWA .

Poverty-stricken, their orchards and farms now in the hands of Israelis, they were crowded into makeshift structures and dense apartment buildings. They suffered from lack of potable water, inability to fish off the coast, and malnutrition and unemployment, all exacerbated by the Israeli blockade imposed in 2007 to punish them collectively for the fact that Hamas ruled them. Most have now been doubly made refugees, having been expelled to Rafah by the Israeli military, with no consideration for their welfare or well-being. Imagine almost everyone in Santa Fe being frog-marched south to huddle on the Mexican border with inadequate shelter, food and water.