CrossFireArabia
The Gaza Health Ministry has reported that 5 of its staff were killed and several others injured in an Israeli airstrike that struck the ministry’s storage facilities in Al-Musbah area south of Gaza Strip.
CrossFireArabia
The Israeli army mistakenly killed three of its captives, including two soldiers, during a raid on Gaza in December 2023 and concealed it from the public, local media reported Monday.
Israel’s Channel 12 said the three Israeli captives – Nik Beizer, Ron Sherman and Elia Toledano – were killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a senior military leader of the Palestinian group Hamas in northern Gaza.
According to the channel, the Israeli army did not know there were Israeli captives present along with the Hamas leader but has known the details of their deaths since February but chose not to publicize them.
In mid-December, the army said it retrieved the bodies of three Israelis from a tunnel who were captured alive by Hamas on Oct. 7 last year.
Commenting on the report, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari said the army is continuing to investigate the circumstances surrounding the deaths of the three Israelis and will present the results to their families according to Anadolu.
Similar incidents of killing Israeli captives were announced by the army in the course of its devastating bombardments across the Gaza Strip since 7 October, 2023.
Israel estimates that over 100 hostages are still being held by Hamas in Gaza, some of whom are believed to have been already killed.
Israel’s ongoing war on the Gaza Strip has killed nearly 41,100 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured nearly 94,800 others, according to local health authorities.
An ongoing blockade of the enclave has led to severe shortages of food, clean water and medicine, leaving much of the region in ruins.
Israel faces accusations of genocide for its actions in Gaza at the International Court of Justice.
CrossFireArabia
A large group of Columbia University students gathered at the university gates on the first day of the academic semester, reigniting protests that began last year in opposition to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The students called for an academic and economic boycott of Israel and urged their peers to boycott the first day of classes in response to the destruction of universities in Gaza according to the Quds News Network.
CrossFireArabia
The ongoing genocide on Gaza over the past 11 months have failed to move the Arab Street even one iota. This is an Israeli genocide but the Arab world continues to look on helplessly and hopelessly unable to fathom of what to do to stop it.
Despite the intensity of Israel’s war on the whole of the Gaza Strip since 7 October, 2023, and the consequent daily massacres perpetrated by the Zionist army, literally committed nonstop, the popular streets across the Arab world has largely been dormant, lethargic and ineffective, spectators to a deadly bloody match with vastly unequal partners.
Gone are the days…
People have been glued to their television sets, especially on Al Jazeera, stunned at the annihilation of Gaza by Israeli bombardment and missiles. But they have not been able to do anything except wonder in amazement at the scale of destruction of the Palestinian territory with men, women, children, toddlers, babies and infants standing alone to face the Israeli enemy only to be blown up to pieces.
Gone are the days when popular protest gripped the Arab world to-the-teeth and were a sense of nationalism, dignity, values and pride once held sway. This of course was not always this way.
The pan-Arab street have always been ripe with anger and frustrations and political awareness of right and wrong expressed in almost daily demonstrations right from at least 1956 when Israeli, Britain and France carried their tripartite attack on Egypt at the nationalization of the Suez Canal.
Then countries like Kuwait, Jordan and others took part in the protests against the three-country attack crying foul of neocolonialism and subjugation. But then was the period of the pan-Arab nationalist movement that grew up in Beirut and spread to other Arab cities in the wake of the fall of Palestine in 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel.
No new dawn!
Despite statist policies and autocratic governments popular protests continued across the Arab world sporadically, whether in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s with the central question being Palestine.
This culminated in the Arab Spring of 2011 when there was a new popular push forward and the promise of a new dawn across the region. With the economic squeeze increasing against the Arab masses Palestine was joined by calls for regime change and economic modernization to increase employment and lower the stinging rates of poverty.
Despite the fact that governments were brought down, here and there, starting with Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya, the Arab Spring – the great popular deluge of protests that was unprecedented in many ways – succumbed to the strong and powerful Arab state, together with its institutions, leaderships, bureaucracy and security apparatuses and military forces.
Whilst Arab governments were at first taken by surprise, they quickly recuperated, gained their power back and dominated the will of the majority and stomped the popular uprisings movement in their tracks; halting regime change there and then.
The popular Arab street may have erupted again in 2019 in particular in Lebanon, Sudan and Algeria but it once again failed in its demands to change the political status quo and reflected the dichotomies of awkward change. There was regime change in Sudan for instance, but the country degenerated into a civil war up till now with its power elites fighting each other over the seats of government.
Cool reaction
The present Gaza situation, and the Israeli onslaught on its people and resistance, must be understood within this context. The ebbs and flows of the popular street and its failure to change states, regimes and governments – starting from the radicals to the most conservatives – may explain why the present pan-Arab street is reacting in coolly to the present attacks on Gaza and which very quickly turned into a criminal genocide, in deed and practice.
People feel even if they continue to rally, and protests are continuing against the mass bombing of Gaza by countries like Morocco which has established a normalization deal with Israel, they will not be able to stop Israel from its daily war crimes in Gaza mainly because popular movements have limits. And that it is finally it is up to these states to make decision and pressure the United States and Israel to stop the genocide on Gaza.
It’s a strange situation with emotions dampened and cushioned despite the horrific images of babies cut to pieces, children dying in hospitals, women and men crying at loved ones and which have jam-locked the the social media. Growing daily statistics of the dead, buildings bombed, homes ripped apart have become just numbers regurgitated daily by televisions anchors or skimped through in newspapers and websites.
In this onslaught on Gaza, the apathy of the Arab street has reached a very low point – to the nadir because people are in a whirlpool of helplessness. They tried before and they failed and now these people have long become divided between poor and rich states in the Middle East region where consumerism and the high life has taken the better of them and where ideologies and nationalism are reduced to second place and where religion is interpreted differently.
This time around, the “popular world” erupted for Gaza, in Europe, across America, including in US university campuses and elsewhere like Japan, demonstrating time and again, against the genocide, but sadly this has not been the case in the Arab world.
Later on sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists would need to explain what happened this time around – almost total Arab silence against the Gaza genocide, why!
CrossFireArabia
The Israeli army has killed 2,100 Palestinian infants and toddlers under the age of two, out of the about 17,000 children it has killed in the Gaza Strip since the start of its genocide on 7 October 2023.
The number of Palestinian children—whether infants or children in general—killed by the Israeli army is horrifying, and the rate of their killing is unprecedented in the history of modern wars. It also represents a dangerous trend based on the dehumanisation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s military targets Palestinians and their children daily, methodically, and widely in the most heinous and brutal ways possible, and virtually without pause for 10 consecutive months.
Loss of limbs and heads
Due to the Israeli bombing of homes, buildings, residential neighbourhoods, shelter centres, and displacement tents, many children have lost their heads and limbs. This is a flagrant violation of the rules of distinction, proportionality, military necessity, i.e. the legal and moral obligation to take the necessary precautions to minimise the deaths of civilians and children.
The Euro-Med Monitor field team documented, 13 August, the killing of four-day-old twins Aser and Aysal Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan. The twins were killed this morning, along with their mother Juman and their grandmother, in an Israeli bombing that targeted a residential flat in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
After leaving the apartment to obtain a birth certificate for his two newborn children, the father of the infants returned to discover that all of his family members—including the twins’ grandmother—had been killed in an Israeli attack on the building.
Israel targeting of houses
Despite its advanced technological capabilities, the Israeli army targets houses and shelter centres knowing full well that they house civilians, including women and children. Nevertheless, it bombs these targets with highly destructive bombs and missiles, aiming to cause as many civilian deaths and severe injuries as possible. This is demonstrated by the Israeli army’s systematic, widespread, and repeated targeting of civilians in the Gaza Strip, as well as its use of highly destructive and indiscriminate weapons, particularly against areas with dense populations of civilians.
The case of the two babies Aser and Aysal are not unique; daily reports of child victims, including infants, are made in the Strip.
One of the most notable testimonies has been from 42-year-old Abdul Hafez Al-Najjar, the father of a child named Ahmed, who was among the many victims of an Israeli massacre on 26 May. The massacre targeted displaced people living in tents in the Barksat area, west of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. Ahmed, along with three of his brothers and their mother, was among a host of other victims that were all beheaded and killed.
Ahmed’s father told the Euro-Med team: “My child Ahmed was very beautiful. He was a year and a half old. He was beheaded in the Israeli bombing. His head was separated from his body. When I saw him, I felt distressed. He was buried without his head.”
According to the Euro-Med Monitor team, an Israeli airstrike on Rafah’s Al-Salam neighbourhood, in the southern Gaza Strip, killed another set of twin infants on 3 March. Six-month-old Wissam and Naeem Abu Anza were killed by the strike, along with their father and 11 other family members.
The mother of Wissam and Naeem, Rania Abu Anza, stated that she struggled for 10 years to become a mother before eventually giving birth to the two babies. “They implanted three embryos in me, two of them remained, and there they were,” she explained. “They bombed the house, killing my husband, my kids, and the rest of the family in the massacre.” Ten days ago marked six months since the death of the twins.
Shaimaa Al-Ghoul, meanwhile, was nine months pregnant when her home in the southern city of Rafah was bombed on 12 February. Her husband and two sons, Mohammed and Janan, were killed, and she suffered injuries from shrapnel that entered her abdomen, pierced her uterus, and ultimately lodged in the fetus.
Al-Ghoul stated that prior to her husband and two children’s deaths, her husband, Abdullah Abu Jazar, had made her “dates, sweets, and a [gift] bag in celebration of his expected newborn”. She said that she did give birth to a child, whom she named Abdullah, after his father, but the boy only lived one day. Baby Abduallah died from the wound caused by the shrapnel that had entered his mother. Thus, Al-Ghoul lost her husband and three children.
Euro-Med Monitor notes that numerous unborn children have died in hospitals over the past 10 months due to a lack of oxygen and electricity, inadequate care, and hospital targeting.
Israel continues to kill thousands of Palestinian men and women in the Gaza Strip, most of them in their reproductive age, including pregnant women, and thousands of children, including infants and toddlers. According to the meaning contained in the description of genocidal acts under Article (2) of the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, there is no doubt that Israel’s systematic and widespread killings of Palestinian civilians, who make up at least 92% of the total number of deaths due to the genocide, will have a negative impact on the population growth rates and reproductive capacity of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for generations to come. Approximately 50,000 Palestinians, including thousands trapped under the rubble for long enough periods of time that they are now presumed dead, have been killed by Israel since 7 October. In addition, 88,000 other Palestinians have been wounded by Israel since then. These deaths and injuries will undoubtedly affect the Palestinians as a national and ethnic group for several generations.
Every day, infant deaths in the Gaza Strip are reported as a direct result of Israeli crimes that are legally classified as acts of genocide, including starvation, thirst, blocking the entry of basic supplies like milk, and deprivation of medical care. The majority of these infant deaths are not included in the official victim count released by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, as there is no specific system to identify such victims.
Due to Israel’s crime of genocide, ongoing for the past 10 months, Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip are being denied their fundamental rights and are not being protected in any way by international law. They have become primary, direct, and deliberate targets of the Israeli army, and have even been subject to premeditated killings and direct executions.
Aside from being arbitrarily detained, Palestinian children have also been the victims of crimes of sexual assault; forced disappearance; torture and other forms of inhumane treatment; starvation; siege; severe psychological harm; deprivation of education due to the widespread destruction of schools; and denial of access to healthcare and other necessities of life. Many Palestinian children are also victims of family dispersion, and have lost parental care.
One of the main objectives of Israel’s genocide is to leave a lasting legacy of these crimes that will affect the victims for the rest of their lives. The majority of Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip have experienced psychological trauma that will likely be difficult to treat: Thousands of children have lost one or both parents; have had limbs amputated; have suffered severe burns or other serious injuries; and/or have suffered from hunger, malnutrition, and dehydration; all of which will have a detrimental impact on their physical and psychological development.
Most children in the Gaza Strip have lost their homes, their financial security, and members of their families, in addition to being deprived of an education. This will have serious, far-reaching consequences on their futures and their ability to enjoy their other rights, making them more vulnerable to poverty, unemployment, and exploitation. The Israeli military attacks on the Strip have caused the widespread destruction of civilian objects, including homes, private property, livelihoods, production, and the economic and commercial system, forcing Palestinians to migrate, whether directly or indirectly.
The international community must act swiftly and decisively to put an end to the crime of genocide, safeguard the lives of all Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip, prevent Israel from converting the Strip into the world’s largest cemetery for children in modern history, and end the egregious double standards that are applied to Israel and its powerful Western backers and allies.
Israel and its backers must be held accountable for blatantly violating international humanitarian law by killing and targeting Palestinian children and denying them access to food, shelter, clothing, and medical assistance, including vaccinations, as specified in the Geneva Conventions and their two 1977 Protocols—protocols which should enable them to realise their rights.
