Jamal Kanj
CounterPunch / September 13, 2024
Fifty-two years ago, almost to the day, on September 8, 1972, I survived the first of many Israeli air and sea raids on my refugee camp in northern Lebanon. I was less than two hundred yards from the area across the river where a group of us young kids met every day, between 4 and 5 p.m., to play in the large field, swim in the river or in the Mediterranean Sea.
At first, I heard what sounded like a humming plane. Before I could even turn my head to look up at the sky, I was startled by the booming sound of low-flying fighter jets passing overhead, dropping massive rockets onto the open field. The first bomb exploded in the northwest corner of the field, creating a massive fireball—a black column of smoke intertwined with a glowing red blaze. The shockwave threw me off my bike. Soot filled the air and fragments rained down like strafing bullets all around me.
In less than 15 minutes, the once grassy green play area of approximately 20 acres was transformed into a lunar landscape, pocked with craters. One pit was so large and deep that groundwater filled the hole.
If the Israeli air raid had occurred just five or ten minutes later, I would have been in the middle of the field, playing with other 14-year-old kids. My friend Barakat, who was already there and likely have been eagerly anticipating my arrival, was killed. The raid left many unexploded devices and time-delayed bombs, making it difficult to recover his body until the next day. Our neighbor Mahdi was also killed, buried under the plowed soil. Years later, his skeleton was discovered when the area was being graded.
I’m reminded of this today, September 10, 2024, as I watch footage of the huge crater left behind by an American-made 2,000-pound MK-84 bomb. The bombs were dropped in the middle of the night on 20 tents housing displaced civilians in an Israeli-designated “safe area” in Al-Mawasi, southern Gaza.
Early in the morning, the Israeli army issued its disinformation boilerplate communiqué, declaring the raid was a “precise strike” on senior resistance members. But videos from the crater, where tents lay buried under the sand, suggest that Israel targeted civilians in a supposed safe area.
Reading about the “precise strike” on a BBC site took me back 52 years. Almost three hours after the raid on my camp, I remember my father and our neighbors gathering around the radio to listen to the 7 p.m. BBC Arabic news. I still recall how they stopped breathing, their eyes wide, mouths agape, as the BBC quoted an Israeli army spokesman claiming Israel had targeted a military base in Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon.
While I don’t remember the exact number of the killed and injured that afternoon, I know for certain that 100 percent were civilians—mostly boys and girls, with at least one elderly man among them. I felt then as helpless as many of those who were sleeping on September 10 in their “safe” tents, unable to tell their story to the world. The photos left behind by the US-manufactured 2,000-pound bombs, however, expose Israel’s lies and the complicity of the managed Western media,
It is utterly despicable that the lecterns at the White House and the State Department have become platforms to market such lies, emboldening Israel’s intransigence and whitewashing its genocide. Especially egregious is the disinformation spread by White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby, who blamed the Palestinians as “the main obstacle” to a ceasefire. This brazen lie comes less than a week after the leak of a document pointing to new conditions that were added in late July by Benjamin Netanyahu to Joe Biden’s proposal from May 27 which torpedoed the ceasefire agreement.
After the Palestinians rejected Netanyahu’s new conditions in late July, Israel intensified its systematic campaign of bombing displaced civilians in safe areas, including 16 UN schools converted into mass shelters. Unable to compel a ceasefire on its terms, Israel is using these attacks on designated safe areas as part of its bloody negotiations strategy to exert pressure by inflicting maximum suffering on civilians through murder and starvation.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to supply Israel with the means to commit these war crimes, while using the White House platform to spread disinformation, making Israel’s “lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
Jamal Kanj is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books
