The child can be your son……………
The superhumans of Gaza
Rifat Audeh
Close your eyes and visualize a child that you know and love dearly.
The child can be your son, daughter, sibling, nephew or niece, grandson
or granddaughter or even the child of a friend. Next, imagine that child
playing innocently. Now imagine a bomb falling fatally near that child
with his/her little body parts flying in different directions. If you
are repulsed from this mental exercise, good. That means you have at
least a shred or more of human feelings which I can address.
The issue is this: That mental exercise is not something imaginary
for the Palestinian people of Gaza, rather, it is their daily living
hell.
Genocide is defined in the dictionary as “the deliberate killing of a
large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or
ethnic group.” For close to a month now, Israel has been committing
genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. At the time of this
writing, 1600 Palestinians have been murdered by the Israeli military
with the vast majority of them being civilians according to global media
outlets and international human rights sources, although that number
keeps changing by the hour. Also at the time of this writing, 360 of
these civilians are children.
On July 12, 2014, Israel shelled a rehabilitation centre for persons
with disabilities in Beit Lahia, killing two disabled women who could
not have escaped in time even if they tried. It killed four children from the same family on July 16th, who were merely playing soccer on the beach in clear view and far from any infrastructure whatsoever. NBC reporter Ayman Mohyeldin witnessed the crime. It has shelled numerous hospitals in the Gaza Strip and on another occasion bombed children playing on the rooftop of their home.
On the first day of the Muslim holiday of Eid El-Fitr, marking the end
of the holy month of Ramadan, supposedly a time for festivity and
celebration, Israel massacred 10 civilians including 8 children at a playground.
Countless other cold-blooded indiscriminate killings have been
perpetrated by the Israeli military machine, funded primarily by US
taxpayers, and amongst the most prevalent is the repetitive shelling of
UN shelters/schools housing thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians
trying to flee Israel’s bombs. The latest such attack took place on
July 30, and finally drew condemnation from the White House. More than 3000 civilians
were seeking shelter in the UNRWA school because they thought that with
it being under the auspices of the UN they would be safe there and
because many peoples’ homes were completely destroyed by Israeli
bombing. According to UNRWA Commissioner General Pierre Krahenbuhl, the
exact location of the school was communicated to the Israeli authorities
17 times,
with the last notification made just hours before the shelling. More
than sixteen people were killed and dozens injured, with many victims
being women and children. It is no wonder that the UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness broke down and began crying after a live interview on the events in Gaza. Prior to the strike of July 30, there was also a strike on July 24, killing 13
and wounding more than 200 Palestinians. The shelling on July 24th was
the fourth in as many days by the Israeli military of a UN school or
shelter.
In much of the Western corporate-owned media and particularly in the
USA, one either does not see or hear all this –while the images are
being broadcast 24/7 on satellite channels in the Middle East and
elsewhere throughout the world – or one listens to incredulous
justifications by such news outlets and even US officials and others
parroting the Israeli line. Among the most outrageous of these claims is
that the resistance factions such as Hamas are placing their rocket
launchers among the civilian population and therefore are putting the
civilians at risk, as Israel is supposedly targeting these launchers
only and militants.
This is utter nonsense.
Firstly, no reporters on the ground have found any evidence to date
that civilians are being used as human shields. Actually to the
contrary, the BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen reporting from Gaza
has stated outright that this is not the case. Next, and as was
mentioned already, children were killed in open spaces and plain view on
a beach and in a playground. The exact coordinates of the UNRWA schools
and shelters full of civilians were conveyed and well-known to Israel’s
precision-guided munitions when they were directly hit by them.
Further, the aforementioned claim implies that the resistance factions
-which include Hamas and others- have descended on Gaza from abroad.
This is false. The freedom fighters of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Al-Aqsa Brigades and
others are from Gaza. This means they live there with their families and
that is where they earn their livelihoods and have shops, businesses,
schools, companies and universities. Does anyone in their right mind
believe that they would attempt to jeopardize the well-being of their
families, relatives, friends, colleagues and loved-ones by placing
weaponry near them? The Israeli lie is easily exposed for anyone willing
to open their eyes. A final point to be made in this regard is that
under international law, even if human shields were being used, Israel’s
obligations to protect these civilians would still apply.
Indeed, if one wishes to compare between the two sides, namely Israel
and the Palestinian resistance, it is clear that the resistance has
taken the moral high ground, although they are continuously being pushed
by Israel to the point of desperation with the barbaric murders Israel
continues to perpetrate. According to Israeli sources, 63 Israeli
soldiers have been killed thus far along with 3 Israeli civilians, while
there have been 1600 Palestinians killed and 8750 wounded. Therefore,
5% of the Israeli dead are civilians, while estimates of human rights
groups and the OCHA place the percentage of Palestinian civilian dead to
be no less than 64%. This means that the Israeli military is
deliberately and cowardly targeting civilians while the Palestinian
resistance is targeting soldiers. Undoubtedly, Israeli apologists will
argue as they constantly have, that the reason Israeli civilian
casualties are so low is because the Iron Dome has intercepted most of
the rockets fired by the resistance and therefore it is not due to a
lack of trying by the resistance or the “saboteurs” as these apologists
might call them. Yet according to Debkafile, an Israeli military
intelligence website, an analysis it published on July 23rd titled “IDF Commanders: Time for decisive war move after IDF victories in Shejaiya, E. Rafah and Khan Younes”
exposed the following: “Most of the nearly 2,000 rockets fired over the
last 16 days did not miss Israel’s urban centers by chance, although
many were deflected by Iron Dome interceptors. Hamas was focusing on
strategic targets, such Israeli Air Force bases and facilities in the
south and center.” To simplify, this hawkish Israeli site itself is
acknowledging that the Palestinian resistance is targeting military
sites and not “soft targets” of civilians. Clearly, if one looks closely
enough and scrutinizes, a crack appears every so often in the fortified
wall of Israeli lies and propaganda.
The statement from Debkafile above actually is consistent with the
announcement made by Mohammed Deif, the commander of Al-Qassam Brigades,
the armed wing of Hamas. In a televised speech broadcast on July 29, he
stated that “We have preferred to confront and kill the military and
the elite soldiers of the enemy as opposed to attacking civilians…at a
time when this criminal enemy sheds the blood of civilians, commits
massacres and destroys entire neighbourhoods upon the residents
thereof…”.
What evidence is there to Deif’s claim above? The Palestinian
resistance has been utilizing tunnels to carry out their operations
against the Israeli occupation forces. Several of these tunnels reach
behind enemy lines into Israeli territory and this was actually one of
the excuses that Israel used to launch its war against Gaza; namely to
destroy these tunnels. The resistance executed a number of operations by
infiltrating behind enemy lines through these tunnels and attacking
soldiers and military bases. The last such operation was conducted July
28 in broad daylight on a military base and videotaped and eventually
broadcast on Israeli media. The resistance fighters could have easily
targeted unarmed Israeli civilians during their infiltrations which
would have been much easier and more importantly less risky without
jeopardizing their own lives. Yet they chose not to do so.
It should be noted that to get a better idea of the racism and hatred
abundant in Israel today and among pro-Israel supporters, one needs to
merely view the comments on various stories on Israeli news websites.
Such comments include statements like “There are NO CIVILIANS in Gaza”,
“Stupid Israeli leadership, no ground troops needed, just level Gaza to
the ground”, “Modest proposal for a 2-state solution: Alive (Jews) and
Dead (Arabs). Now that’s a 2-state solution that has a chance of
working”, and others. To be fair, peoples’ comments do not necessarily
represent the policies of a state. However, they do reflect a prevalent
attitude in Israeli society.
In summary, Israel is no stranger to killing innocent civilians, and
this has been a long-standing practice of the state. The indiscriminate
killing of Palestinians at UNRWA schools for example is reminiscent of
the Al-Fakhura school murders.
Yet the killing of civilians by Israel has not been limited to
Palestinians. Rachel Corrie, an American activist, was deliberately
crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003. Thomas Hurndall, a
British activist, was shot by a sniper in the head the same year as was
Brian Avery, another American activist who was shot in the face. In
2010, ten Turkish activists aboard the Mavi Marmara ship in the Freedom
Flotilla were shot and killed by the Israeli navy in international
waters. Also in international waters, Israel killed 34 American sailors and wounded more than 170 aboard the USS Liberty
on June 8, 1967. Then, as now, Israel continues to act with impunity.
However, the list of Israeli crimes committed for decades is too long to
mention here. (It just came to the author’s attention that an Israeli
soldier named David Ovadia was bragging online about killing 13 children.)
The question that the Israel right-or-wrong crowd – who are always
quick to condemn Palestinians for basically refusing to die quietly –
must ask themselves, is this: If the opening “mental exercise” in this
piece was perpetrated against the infant child that they know, what
would they be capable of doing? And what would they do?
If anything, it is amazing how patient, disciplined and forgiving the
Palestinians have been thus far in the face of one of the ugliest forms
of genocide history has ever witnessed.
Rifat Audeh is a Palestinian-Canadian human rights activist and
media analyst. His activities included helping organize divestment
conferences throughout the USA, the co-founding of a media watchdog
group in Michigan and participation in the Freedom Flotilla. His
writings have appeared in numerous newspapers and websites.