The Israeli army completely destroyed 161,600 housing units, it turned 81,000 other units uninhabitable while partially destroying 194,000 houses according to a statement by the Government Media Office.
The destruction also affected about 216 government headquarters and 42 facilities, that included playgrounds and sports halls.
Drone footage captures the destruction caused by the Israeli war machine in Gaza City. Israel has destroyed more than 75% of the buildings, facilities, and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. #GazaGenocidepic.twitter.com/ojOLPO7uiB
Regarding the health sector, the Media Office statement said that 34 hospitals were burned, attacked or put out of service, while the army put 80 health centers out of service and targeted 162 institutions.
This is not a detainment camp in World War II, nor a prison in the Holocaust, this is Gaza in 2024. A chilling reminder that history repeats. A holocaust is happening right before our eyes and the world is silent.
It is unthinkable for “culture” to be destroyed by wars, yet in Gaza it is. Culture, its monuments and symbols have long become military targets crushed in a sadistic and criminal context where the aggressor targets the human and civilizational components of the subjugated party. This is what the Israeli occupation wants from its war on the Gaza Strip, brutal images committed for more than 14 months.
كان يحتضن أمسيات شعرية ومعارض فنية.. نازحون يقيمون خيامهم داخل قاعات المسرح والمعارض في مركز رشاد الشوا الثقافي غرب مدينة غزة الذي دمر الاحتلال الإسرائيلي أجزاء كبيرة منه خلال حرب الإبادة التي يشنها على القطاع pic.twitter.com/bvvknJnCbN
The Rashad Shawa Cultural Center (RSCC) is evidence of the Israeli “scorched-earth” policy on the Gaza Strip. The center was transformed from a cultural symbol receiving hundreds of people daily as part of its intellectual, cultural, and artistic activities, exhibitions, and communicating with the world in seminars addressing all local and global issues, into a destroyed, desolate place now for displaced people who seek shelter from the Israeli Nazi Holocaust the occupation is waging across the Strip.
Following 7 October, 2023, the Israeli aggression began targeting all cities and regions of the Strip, especially the northern governorates, and spreading death everywhere with the residents of Gaza finding themselves forced to move from one place to another, seeking nothing more than escape from the Israeli cauldrons of death.
Weeks passed after the start of that aggression while temporary truces only lasted for a few days, allowing the people of the Al-Rimal neighborhood in Gaza City to return to their wrecked homes, only to be shocked by the the gutted Center that had become a thing of the past, after the Israeli army and occupation bombed it.
The residents had long been accustomed to seeing this great cultural edifice. Inside were chants, competitions, and humming of readers in the library that held more than 100,000 books in the sciences, knowledge, and arts, and a source of pride for the residents of Gaza becoming a destination for visitors from all over the world; a beaconed intellectual window that expresses Palestinian civilization with its diverse spectrums and openness to the world, in addition to what it represented of dear memories, now turned upside down by the brutality of the occupation into a pile of dirt.
The Gaza Municipality condemned the Israeli destruction of the Center, as part of its barbaric aggression on the Gaza Strip, killing thousands of civilians, destroying the city’s main landmarks, and erasing the cultural memory of the Palestinian people according to the Palestine Information Center.
The municipality called on UNESCO to intervene and condemn the occupation’s crimes against cultural centers, libraries, and historical and archaeological landmarks of the city.
#شاهد | حينما تتحول منارة الثقافة إلى ملاذ للنازحين .. مركز رشاد الشوا الثقافي في مدينة غزة يروي فصول المعاناة في ظل الحرب المستمرة. pic.twitter.com/P9rrFs3QDi
The RSCC was the first of its kind to be built in Palestine, and named after Rashad Shawa, who served as the mayor of Gaza between 1972 and 1975, and built this center to become a Palestinian cultural beacon.
The architectural and engineering plans for establishing and designing the center began in 1978 and it first opened its doors in 1985 and its printing press began the following year with the center slowly expanding its activities reaching a peak in the 1990s and especially after 1994 when the Palestinian Authority took its seat there.
The RSCC center had a distinctive design that give it a modernistic outlook spread over two floors with a spiral stairway and an impressive triangular roof. In 1992, it was nominated for the Aga Khan Award for Creativity in Architecture. Before its destruction, those in charge took care of it and restored it periodically to preserve its distinctive architectural appearance.
The building witnessed important events in the history of the Palestinian cause, including: Hosting sessions of the National and Legislative Councils, and visits by heads of state, including former US President Bill Clinton in 1998 met by the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, and many world figures.
Cultural isolation
Before its destruction, the center worked to end the cultural and civilizational isolation the Palestinians suffered from as a result of the Israeli occupation, and its attempt to erase the Palestinian identity and steal its heritage.
Even before its destruction, the center faced global isolation because of the continued Israeli siege that was imposed on Gaza since 2007 and the worsening economic situation that was created and which was reflected in the social and cultural aspects of life in the Strip.
Major destruction to the Rashad Al Shawa Cultural Center in #Gaza as a result of its targeting by the #Israeli occupation army.
As with all aspects of life in Gaza, nothing has remained the same, the buildings no longer stand, the patterned landmarks destroyed, families scattered while institutions reduced to brick and mortar if not plotted out.
Culture usually plays its role in awareness and enlightenment but here and over the past months, it has become a witness to the tragedies of massacres, separation of family and friends, and the endless journeys of people forced to move with the center reduced to housing refugees who place plastic bags on its walls to protect themselves, and light fires to try and keep warm from the harsh winter.
In its ongoing aggression on the Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation targeted the cultural and scientific centers of Gaza, its universities, and all outlets expressing the identity, civilization and heritage of the Palestinian people to obliterate their cultural landmarks so that the barbarism of occupation is entrenched in their public memory and the identity of the right of the owners to the land and holy places erased.
Israel Will Not Succeed
The RSCC was not the only architectural and cultural victim of the Israeli aggression as the destruction machine flattened universities and other cultural centers, including Al-Saqa Palace in Gaza City’s Shuja’iyya built at the end of the Ottoman period during the reign of Sultan Muhammad IV.
In November 2023, Abaher Al-Saqa, professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Birzeit University, wrote: “Beit Al-Saqa, or as people call it, Qasr Al-Saqa, was built by my late grandfather’s cousin, Ahmad Al-Saqa, one of the city’s major merchants. Its walls are studded with sandstone and the ceilings are Roman marble. It is 350 years old and was designated by the family to be turned into a cultural center after it was restored by the Islamic University. It was bombed as part of the brutal colonial bombing. The colonial authorities are exterminating the city’s urban and architectural history, in parallel with the genocide.”
Riwaq, the Palestinian Center for Popular Architecture, based in the West Bank city of Al-Bireh (which participated in the restoration of Beit Al-Saqa with the Iwan Center of the Islamic University of Gaza), noted in a recent post the house was completely bombed on 9 November, according to Aser Al-Saqa, a member of the family that owns the historic building in Shuja’iyya.
بيت السقا، أو كما يسميه الناس "قصر السقا" الذى يقع في حي الشجاعية غزة، أسواره منصّعة بالأحجار الرملية والأسقف الرخامية الرومانية، عمره اربع قرون وبناه احمد السقا كبار تجار المدنية في ذلك الوقت، تحول الى مركز ثقافي بعد ترميمه، تم قصفه ضمن القصف الاسرائيلي الوحشي. تقوم سلطات… pic.twitter.com/hw9e0y9yPW
Years from now academics from many different disciplines, will sit and examine what has now long become recognized as the Gaza Holocaust with its own dramatic features and tools, willingly and determinedly perpetrated by the Israeli military and political leaderships while the rest of Israeli society looked on and the world watched aghast, in complicity and helplessness.
Political scientists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and economists will seek to examine every aspect of horror committed by the Israelis against the Palestinian people of Gaza, in terms of destroying and ruining a functional Palestinian society that once existed but no more.
We are not allowed to use the words War Crimes.
We are not allowed to use the word Genocide.
We are not allowed to use the word Holocaust.
What do you call the massacre of over 40,000 civilians in Gaza in ten months then: pic.twitter.com/OngGcP61mU
As well as death and murder, Gaza has become a rubble heap and an enduring wreckage with former buildings, towers and skyscrapers raised to the ground.
The Gaza holocaust will become a new term and course taught in world universities alongside traditional courses of holocaust studies committed by the Nazis in World War II.
Only this time, the Gaza holocaust will focus on how the Jews – now in the form of an Israeli state, institutions and a powerful military and security apparatus – turned from being the victim of racist, fascist horror, to those committing the worst massacres against Palestinian people.
The Gaza holocaust will be real-time, modern sets of murders and heinous acts of killing and destructions committed by what is regarded as a professional Israeli army with one of the most sophisticated technological gadgets in the world committing unspeakable crimes against women, children and the old in a tiny geographical strip and an enclave called Gaza.
The Gaza holocaust will be about introducing new concepts, ideas, methods and methodologies about introducing new meaning to atrocities, extermination, destruction, elimination, eradication, genocide, slaughter, decimation, excision and obliteration.
All of the above words have become common currency in the new Israeli holocaust against Gaza plotted out by men in blue suits in Tel Aviv and occupied Jerusalem and willingly committed by officers and soldiers in uniform aided and abetted by a destructive machine of warplanes, tanks, missiles, artillery and naval ships.
Similar to the Nazis and Hitler, this Gaza Holocaust will be remembered for its external angle. Israel is committing murder with the help of the United States who are shipping the weapons – planes, tanks, artillery and mass bombs – to help the country bomb the Palestinian enclave to the ground.
History will show that the United States has been part-and-parcel of the Gaza holocaust, willingly arming Jewish state to the teeth and without it, Israel wouldn’t have been able to wage the war for so long, currently in its 11-month.
Similarly, other world states including the UK, Britain, France Germany, Italy and more like India has been willing partners in the supply of weaponry to beat the people of Gaza with while at the same time – and like Washington – professing peace talks, ceasefire and two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
"STOP THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA!"
A Holocaust survivor Stephen spoke out about the Israeli atrocities being witnessed in Palestine, calling for an end to the genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza during the protests in London today. pic.twitter.com/fwF9IItEYo
This Gaza holocaust, once entering the text-books for research, will be mind-boggling for its intensity of the ‘’kill factor”, huge bombs dropped on Gaza – 82,000 tons of explosives were hurled down on the Strip by the end of July starting from October, 2003 – and the enormous destruction this caused to the environment and ecosystem of a land that is no more than 364 square kilometers.
This mad holocaust – 2000 pound bombs, that’s two-ton bombs were willing and continuously dropped on residential squares – will take years to fathom, understand and put into perspectives with theoretical models that must be introduced to understand what and how it was triggered and how it was dealt with.
“Pogrom” is a Russian word which means an organized act of cruel behavior or killing done to a large group of people based on their race and religion.
The word caught the attention of Europeans in the third quarter of the 19th century after many Jewish communities in towns and cities across the south-eastern parts of the Russian Empire, mainly Poland, Ukraine and Odessa, were attacked and harassed by the larger community, followers of the Russian Orthodox Church. They saw members of the smaller Jewish communities exploiting and blackmailing them, for financial and commercial gain.
The wave of pogroms spread to other countries in Europe in similar fashion and continued for three years in the early 1880s. These events paved the way for some Jewish activists like the Hungarian-born, Theodor Herzl, a writer, journalist and lawyer, to start a political movement to defend the Jews against such attacks. Herzl later became the founder of Zionism.
Another most important reason for the repeated pogroms was the assassination of Russia’s Tsar Alexander II at the hands of a Jew. The Tsar was blamed for encouraging his people to attack members of the Jewish community.
It's horrifying but not surprising to hear Smotrich say it's 'justified and moral' to starve 2 million Palestinians in Gaza to death. This vile rhetoric is just the tip of the iceberg. Smotrich is a minister in a government that Western leaders claim shares their values. pic.twitter.com/6QKCmfStcd
— Jehad Abusalim جهاد أبو سليم (@JehadAbusalim) August 5, 2024
In addition to killing, setting on fire, and vandalizing Jewish properties in the above-mentioned cities and towns, tactics of starvation and deprivation were systematically employed to further harass and punish the Jews.
Later in the early and mid-1940s and under the watch of Adolf Hitler, the founder of Nazis, European Jews especially in Germany were brutally persecuted in a process that led to what the Jews call the “ Holocaust”; this became a decisive turning point in Jewish-European relations.
Enter Smotrich
Today, almost 140 years after the pogroms, and 80 years after the Holocaust, a descendant from the Ukraine, the land of the pogroms and holocaust atrocities, the name of Bezalel Smotrich emerges from the smoke of guns over the strip of Gaza, to openly call for the expulsion of all Palestinians from their ancestral home land that today forcefully became Israel.
It also happens that he is also the actual Finance Minister in Netanyahu’s extreme-right government, and head of the National Religious Party.
Although he was born, according to international law, in an illegal settlement on the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, his last name should be a reminder of his ancestors’ village (Smotrych) west of Ukraine today!
If the expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank who refuse to recognize his “greater Israel”, according to this man doesn’t work, Israel must resort to every possible tactic to drive them out of their homes.
These tactics must include but not limited to exterminating as many Palestinians as possible in Gaza and/or starving them to death, and that will be just fine for him and even moral as he recently made clear.
It is ironic that the an offspring of survivors of the pogroms and Holocaust, gives himself the right and liberty to borrow the same ugly tactics applied against his own ancestors, to be practiced against those who had nothing to do with European pogroms and Holocaust atrocities! Such a bizarre and mind-boggling analogy makes one wonder what kind of character we are dealing with here?
This man, I strongly believe, has more than one little problem! He has a short and selective memory; has an overdose of instinct hatred against those who oppose him; and an extreme sense of superiority versus any different ethnic or religious group.
Finally one simple advice for, hopefully, the last fallen angel of death and starvation: Ask your Sephardim compatriots who lived and thrived in many Arab countries, like Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen and Syria before the establishment of your “little Israel” in 1948, if any heard about or experienced any kind of pogrom behaviors at the hands of their Muslim and Christian compatriots, who lived in peace and harmony for more than two and half millennia long before your ancestors survived the atrocities of European pogroms and Holocaust and decided to take refuge in this part of the world?
UN Human Rights Chief @volker_turk is shocked & appalled by words of Israeli Minister Smotrich for whom letting 2 million Palestinians in #Gaza starve to death could be “justified & moral” in order to free hostages.
This opinion was especially written for Crossfire Arabia by Saleem Ayoub Quna who is a Jordanian author writing on local, regional and international affairs and has two books published. He has a BA in English Literature from Jordan University, a diploma from Paris and an MA from Johns Hopkins University in Washington. He also has working knowledge of French and German.
CrossFireArabia
Saleem Ayoub Quna
