With Yahya Sinwar’s Death, Israel’s Genocidal Aims Are Exposed More Than Ever Before

Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader, who was killed by Israeli forces today, October 17, 2024.

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With the death of Yahya Sinwar, Israel’s mendacity and its genocidal intent stand exposed like never before.

Sinwar, the 62-year old leader of Hamas, who never abandoned his homeland, had been portrayed by Israel as hiding deep underground, surrounded by hostages, but in the end that was just another lie, to add to the mountains of lies that Israel has pumped out over the last year. In the end, Sinwar was killed in a chance military encounter in Rafah, not hiding out at all, but engaged in combat with the enemy — in military uniform, and with an AK-47.

His death was the opposite of the humiliation meted out by the US to Saddam Hussein or Moammar Gaddafi, when they were finally seized after the illegal invasions of Iraq and Libya. Nothing could be more inspiring for a resistance movement than for their leader to be killed in active combat, having refused to hide, or to be cowed by the enemy.

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Don’t Look Away From the Inferno of Extermination in Northern Gaza

A screenshot of the fire caused by Israeli attacks on tents for displaced Palestinians and medical patients outside Al-Aqsa Hospital on the night of October 13, 2024.

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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. Although his father and his three younger siblings survived the attack, his mother was also killed. 

Sha’ban Al-Dalou, photographed on October 5, 2023, two days before the attacks on southern Israel and the start of Israel’s genocide. The 19-year old was just starting his second year at university, having achieved high grades in his first year.

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.

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UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals

Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip, attacked by the Israeli military in November 2023, and, again in March 2024, when it was almost completely destroyed. (Photo: Omar al-Qattaa).

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With grimly appropriate good timing, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel issued a hugely significant report on October 10 in which it found that, as described in an accompanying press release, “Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.”

The timing was grimly appropriate because, although its focus on Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals only covers the period from October 7, 2023 to August 2024, a terrible, genocidal version of Groundhog Day is currently taking place yet again in the Gaza Strip, where, although its relentless slaughter has not stopped for the last year, it is currently amplifying its horrors in northern Gaza, ordering the evacuation of the last three remaining partly-functional hospitals there, as part of a new plan to ethnically cleanse the whole of the north — where an estimated 400,000 civilians remain, having refused, or been unable to comply with evacuation orders issued a year ago — with a renewed depravity plumbing previously unthinkable depths.

Because the wheels of international justice revolve so slowly, it has taken over three years for the Commission’s report to be compiled and published. It was initially commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021, with a brief to investigate “all alleged violations of international humanitarian law and all alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law leading up to and since 13 April 2021.”

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Andy Worthington

Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker, singer/songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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