Don’t Look Away From the Inferno of Extermination in Northern Gaza
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On Sunday night (October 13), Palestinian civilians — including children and medical patients, and others displaced by Israel’s year-long genocide — were burned alive in a truly horrifying Israeli attack on the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital, in Deir al-Balah in northern Gaza.
One of those burned alive — a young man who was also a medical patient — was captured in a video filmed by a Palestinian journalist, writhing in agony, consumed by flames, and still lying on his hospital bed with his IV drip still clearly visible.
Yesterday it was revealed that he was Sha’ban Al-Dalou, a 19-year old software engineering student at Al-Azhar University (before it was destroyed, like all of Gaza’s universities), who was on an IV drip after surviving an Israeli strike on a mosque where he was sheltering with his family a week earlier, in which 20 Palestinian civilians were killed. Handsome, kind and popular, Sha’ban loved playing the guitar, and had once had great hopes for his future, but he had been displaced five times since Israel’s genocide began, and had ended up taking responsibility for his mother, and his three younger siblings, who are now orphans after his mother was also killed in Israel’s attack.
Four people in total were killed in the inferno, although 70 others — mostly women and children — were wounded, with many suffering severe burns, which the hospital lacks the resources to deal with adequately.
As the World Turns Away, Israel Renews Its Genocidal Assault on Northern Gaza
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Today, October 9, 2024, two days into the first anniversary of the start of the State of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, almost unimaginable horrors are taking place yet again, in the devastated northern half of the beleaguered territory, where around 400,000 of its residents remain, as Israel implements a plan for its complete ethnic cleansing, prior to it becoming a “closed military zone.”
Those who remain are those who resisted, or were unable to comply with orders to evacuate the north, which were implemented a week after the genocide began, to the consternation of US State Department officials, whose concerns about war crimes and the trampling of international humanitarian law, revealed by Reuters last week, now look like missives from a lost world in which morality still existed.
Over the last three days, untold numbers of Palestinian civilians have been killed in relentless bombing attacks, or have been murdered in the streets by armed drones and quadcopters, assassinated by snipers, and, it appears, summarily executed in house raids. The area’s three surviving hospitals — brought back into operation through the tireless dedication and ingenuity of Palestinian workers after they were shut down last November — have been ordered to evacuate, even though there is no place for the seriously ill to go, while journalists have been relentlessly targeted, with several of those who have survived Israel’s relentless execution of journalists over the last year being shot and wounded by snipers, while others have been murdered.
Genocide Continues in Gaza, Exposing The Unending Depravity of Israel, and the Ongoing Criminal Complicity of the West
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For 47 days, from October 8 until November 23, the State of Israel relentlessly bombed the 2.3 million trapped civilians of the Gaza Strip — held in “an open air prison” since 2007, when Israel imposed a total blockade on its inhabitants — with such ferocity that 20,031 people were killed, including 8,176 children and 4,112 women, according to the Geneva-based NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. The NGO also noted that over 36,350 people had been injured — many gravely so — and that 1.7 million people, almost three-quarters of the entire population, had been displaced, as nearly a quarter of a million homes were completely or partially destroyed.
To give some necessary perspective to those statistics, what it meant was that, for 47 days, Israel was killing 174 children every day — seven children every hour, or one every eight and a half minutes. To understand quite how grotesque and unprecedented the killing of children on this scale is, on November 7 Al Jazeera analyzed the death rates of children in other major conflicts of the 21st century — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen — establishing that the death rate of children in those conflicts was between 0.6 and three children per day.
This was carpet bombing on an industrial scale, using some of the heaviest and deadliest bombs ever invented by the depraved individuals who work in the arms industry, many of which were supplied by the US, and yet, despite international experts almost immediately recognizing that this was the collective punishment of an entire civilian population, in response to attacks by Hamas militants on October 7, in which, according to initial reports, 1,400 Israelis had been killed (a figure most recently revised down to 1,200), western leaders were united in their uncritical support for Israel’s unqualified “right to defend itself.”
Where Is The Outrage About Israel’s Profoundly Illegal ‘War on Hospitals’ in Gaza?
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Where is the outrage from western leaders, and the western mainstream media, about Israel’s ‘war on hospitals’ in Gaza?
Today, we hear that staff and patients at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital, which was invaded by Israeli soldiers three days ago, have been ordered to evacuate, on foot, to the south of Gaza, even though that is impossible for the seriously ill and for the 35 premature babies who are still alive, after their incubators stopped working days ago because the hospital ran out of fuel.
Four of these babies have died in the last few days, but the rest are tenaciously clinging on to life, although Al-Jazeera noted that another five are now “severely ill.” Yesterday, doctors at the hospital reported that everyone in the intensive care unit had died as a result of the fuel ban.
Most of those in the hospital — nearly all of the many hundreds of patients and their families, most of the medical staff, and thousands of internally displaced people whose homes were destroyed in Israel bombing raids, and who have been sheltering in the hospital’s grounds — were made to leave the hospital this morning, with numerous witnesses, including Dr. Adnan Al Barsh, Al-Shifa’s Head of Orthopedics, explaining that they were “forced to leave at gunpoint.”
The Siege of Gaza and Israel’s Premeditated Murder of Premature Palestinian Babies
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For several days now, I’ve been haunted by a photo posted by doctors in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City — the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip — of premature babies huddled together as doctors and medical staff attempt to keep them alive.
The babies were previously being kept alive in incubators, but as a result of Israel’s medieval-style “complete siege” of Gaza, imposed 38 long, blood-soaked days ago, on October 8, when Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant announced that there would be “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed”, adding, “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly”, the fuel required to power the generators to provide electricity to the hospital has run out.
The plight of these premature babies — the death sentence to which Israel has subjected them, unless the siege is lifted — is particularly poignant for me, because my own son, now a healthy 23-year old man, was also born prematurely, at 30 weeks.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
