US-backed Israeli invasion of Gaza unleashes death and destruction
By Bill Van Auken
19 July 2014
The death, destruction and human suffering caused by Israel’s 11-day-old
onslaught against the impoverished and densely populated Gaza Strip
increased sharply Friday. Israeli troops and armored columns continued
pushing into the territory in an invasion launched the night before, even
as the bombardment from air, land and sea intensified.
The death toll rose rapidly to the 300 mark on Friday, while the number of
wounded climbed to well over 2,200. What is unfolding in Gaza is a
calculated and savage war crime against a largely defenseless population
carried out with the full and open support of Washington and the complicity
of the European Union, the Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority (PA)
of President Mahmoud Abbas.
It is no exaggeration to compare the lethal terror and collective
punishment being meted out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza with
the methods employed by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. Massive firepower
is being unleashed on a narrow strip of land bound on two sides by Israel
and its invading armies, on a third by the sealed Egyptian border, and on
the fourth by a sea filled with Israeli gunboats. Its total land mass is
roughly equivalent to that of the US city of Philadelphia, while its
population is some 20 percent greater.
In an act of psychological terror, Israel dropped leaflets ordering over
100,000 Palestinians in the border areas to flee their homes. The reality,
however, is that there is nowhere to hide from the assault. Those remaining
in their homes are designated as “terrorists” or “human shields,” who can
be killed without compunction.
Medics in the town of Beit Hanoun, on the northeast edge of Gaza, reported
Friday night that an entire family of eight was wiped out when a tank shell
demolished their home, leaving their bodies in the rubble. Emergency
services spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra identified the victims as the Abu Jurad
family, consisting of two men, two women, and four children. The children’s
names were Hania, Ahlam, Samih and Musa—two girls and two boys. One of them
was a five-month-old baby.
United Nations officials in Gaza reported Friday that the number of
internally displaced Gazans seeking shelter at UN facilities had doubled to
more than 40,000. But food is running out at these facilities, even as
electric power and water supplies have been cut off for the overwhelming
majority of the population.
In clear-cut crime against humanity, Gaza hospitals, which have been
overwhelmed by the influx of wounded even as they run out of the most basic
supplies, have themselves been repeatedly targeted for shelling and air
strikes since the initiation of the Israeli ground invasion.
The Al-Quds hospital was struck overnight, according to the Ma’an News
Agency. The bombardment ignited a fire that damaged several of the
hospital’s departments. Shells also fell on the Beit Hanoun Hospital,
damaging its top floors and panicking patients and staff. Tank shells also
struck the al-Wafa Hospital in Gaza City.
“Israeli tanks are shelling the hospital, they have hit several of the
floors, and several nurses have been injured,” the facility’s director,
Basman Alashi, told the AFP news agency. “There is no place safe in Gaza,”
he added. “If a hospital is not safe, where is?”
A report from the Nasser Hospital in the southern Gazan city of Khan Yunis
by AFP provides a sense of the horrific human toll being inflicted by the
Israeli aggression. Of those who arrived at the hospital Thursday night, it
said, many were children, and at least 11 died.
Among the patients was 25-year-old Khadija Abu Hama, who was grievously
wounded when tanks shelled her neighborhood. “Shrapnel ripped through most
of her body, embedding itself in her brain, breaking her left arm and
gouging out her left eye,” according to the report. “Next to her was
18-year-old Uday al-Astal, now paralyzed on his right side after shrapnel
entered his brain.” He was wounded in a bombing that killed four of his
relatives, including two children, ages four and six. A relative in the
same intensive care ward had his leg amputated.
Dr. Moataz al-Jubur, who is in charge of the ward, told the AFP: “The whole
world is watching while the Palestinians are being slaughtered. They are
innocent people, people sitting next to their homes, people sitting with
their relatives. Where should these people go?”
According to health officials, at least 63 Palestinians were killed in Gaza
on Friday. During the same period, one Israeli soldier died, apparently the
victim of “friendly fire” from an Israeli tank.
There are reports that Israel, which has called up another 18,000
reservists, bringing the total number of troops mobilized for the war on
Gaza to 65,000, has also been using internationally banned weapons such as
fletchette bombs, an anti-personnel weapon that saturates an area with
lethal darts, as well as poison gas.
In the midst of this slaughter, President Barack Obama Friday morning spoke
to Netanyahu, offering the Israeli regime unqualified US support for the
bloody operation in Gaza. Speaking to White House reporters afterwards,
Obama said he had “reaffirmed my strong support for Israel’s right to
defend itself.” He continued: “No nation should accept rockets being fired
into its borders.”
This, as missiles, bombs and shells rained down upon Gaza.
Obama then declared, “… we support military efforts by the Israelis to make
sure that rockets are not being fired into their territory. We also have
said that our understanding is the current military ground operations are
designed to deal with the tunnels, and we are hopeful that Israel will
continue to approach this process in a way that minimizes civilian
casualties.”
If the situation were not so tragic, Obama’s remarks would be almost
comical. The idea that this massive military undertaking is being carried
out to stop rockets that have in the space of 11 days killed one single
Israeli, or that the IDF is confining itself to destroying tunnels, is
ludicrous. The suggestion that Israel is acting to minimize civilian
casualties, who make up 80 percent of those killed, with fully a quarter of
these being children, is obscene.
Similarly, Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated Israel’s “right to
defend itself,” while urging a cease-fire “as soon as possible,” a phrase
that Tel Aviv correctly understood as a US green light to wage war on the
people of Gaza as it sees fit.
The assault on Gaza was prepared long before a single rocket was fired from
the territory. It was a response in the first instance to Hamas’s
acceptance of a “national consensus” government with Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas, joining the two separated territories of Gaza and
the West Bank under a single entity. Hamas held no posts in this
administration and for the first time in eight years restored at least some
authority in Gaza to the PA, a body that has been totally subservient to
Israel and the US. Nevertheless, Tel Aviv was determined to maintain the
separation between the two territories, even as Washington recognized the
new government.
The Netanyahu government set about to wreck the unity agreement, tightening
the blockade of Gaza and preventing the payment of salaries to its 43,000
public employees. At the same time, it seized upon the abduction of three
settler youth in the West Bank, who were later found dead, as a pretext for
a crackdown on Hamas’s members in the occupied territory, arresting some
600 people and launching a wave of repression in which at least 10
Palestinians were killed. It was this violent campaign of collective
punishment that provoked the first rockets fired from Gaza.
More fundamentally, war is the mode of existence of the Zionist state,
which continuously provokes armed confrontations as a means of diverting
outward the immense contradictions that have built up in one of most
socially polarized societies in the world.
The Obama administration, like previous administrations going back more
than half a century, supports Israeli militarism as a means of advancing US
imperialism’s own aims of asserting hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East.
Giving the lie to Obama’s rhetoric about Israel confining its operations to
destroying tunnels, Netanyahu Friday signaled that Israel is preparing to
escalate the Gaza bloodbath still further. “My instructions… to the Israeli
army, with the approval of the security cabinet, is to prepare for the
possibility of a widening, a significant widening of the ground operation,”
he told reporters at the Tel Aviv military headquarters Friday.
Significant elements within his own government, including Israel’s
fascistic foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, have demanded that the IDF
reimpose control over all of Gaza and kill, capture or expel all Hamas
members—war aims that entail the murder of tens of thousands of
Palestinians.


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