Nora Barrows-Friedman
The Electronic Intifada / October 31, 2024
Israel has continued to slaughter Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip as a complete siege on the area continues for the fourth week.
This is the scene in northern Gaza, stated reporter Anas al-Sharif on Tuesday:
After a massacre this week in Beit Lahiya, Anas’ colleague, journalist Hossam Shabat tweeted, “No cemeteries, no hospitals, no doctors, no civil defense, no ambulances. The living are under the rubble and no one can rescue them, the situation in north Gaza gets more horrific by the minute.”
At least 109 Palestinians were killed in the airstrike that completely destroyed a five-story building sheltering displaced families in Beit Lahiya.
The Gaza government media office reported that “the occupation army knew that this residential building contained dozens of displaced civilians, and that the majority of them were children and women who were displaced from their civilian residential neighbourhoods.”
“This new crime comes in conjunction with the ‘Israeli’ occupation’s plan to destroy the health system in the northern Gaza Strip governorate and destroy the four hospitals and put them out of service, as well as in conjunction with the occupation’s prevention of the entry of treatments, medicines and medical supplies,” the media office added.
People searched through the rubble with their bare hands, trying to rescue survivors.
Another airstrike in Beit Lahiya killed at least 10 people later in the day on Tuesday. According to reporters, many of the people sheltering in Beit Lahiya were displaced from nearby Jabaliya, which has been under heavy siege and brutal attacks over the last several weeks.
Early on Tuesday morning, Israeli forces burned the United Nations’ Al-Fakhoura School in Jabalia camp, north of the Gaza Strip.
Last Thursday, 24 October, Gaza’s civil defense corps reported that the Israeli military carried out a “major massacre” in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, destroying at least 10 residential buildings.
According to local news agencies, approximately 150 people were killed or injured in the attack.
Journalist Anas al-Sharif reported that because of the complete destruction of medical services in northern Gaza, “anyone who is injured will be martyred. Jabaliya camp is being exterminated on the heads of its residents.”
The next day, journalists reported that the Israeli army stormed Kamal Adwan hospital, kidnapping medical personnel and patients.
The soldiers rampaged through the hospital, destroying equipment and personal belongings while laying siege to the building itself.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor stated that “in addition to separating the men from the women and children, the occupation forces began questioning, abusing and assaulting anyone over the age of 13, including medical personnel.”
The Israeli army, the rights group added, “bombed the hospital’s oxygen station, threatening the lives of the 15 patients in the intensive care unit, including children. There is also preliminary information that several children have already died from the oxygen shortage. Communication is completely cut off within the hospital, in light of the danger to everyone’s lives. The hospital was stormed just hours after the arrival of an international delegation carrying a limited amount of medicine and fuel supplies.”
The young son of the hospital’s director, Hussam Abu Safiya, was killed inside the hospital by Israeli tank shelling that day.
This video shows Abu Safiya and his colleagues in the courtyard of the hospital, performing burial rites for his son Ibrahim:
Abu Safiya said that after the Israeli army’s withdrawal from the hospital, more than 30 of his colleagues were taken or arrested, leaving just him and a colleague to care for nearly 150 patients, some of them in need of surgeries that he cannot perform.
Speaking to Al-Jazeera, Abu Safiya said on Saturday that “we have lost everything in this hospital, even our children. Everything we have built, they have burned. They burned our hearts. They killed my son. My son was killed because we are carrying a humanitarian message. Our children are being killed. I buried my son beside the hospital wall.”
On Tuesday, Abu Safiya again spoke to Al-Jazeera in the aftermath of the Israeli siege on the hospital.
“The Kamdal Adwan Hospital and the entire vicinity is a warzone. The hospital is left with no resources. No medical supplies and no medical staff,” he said.
“We appeal to the entire world to have a safe humanitarian passage opened immediately, and without any delay. We need specialized medical staff in all major disciplines to be allowed in,” the doctor said.
“I received a wounded child who is in dire need of abdominal surgery, to stop his internal bleeding before he loses his life. Many children have their bones sticking out of their bodies, requiring urgent orthopaedic surgeries. Many are suffering from brain injuries and require delicate procedures.”
On 24 October, al-Shuhada school in Nuseirat camp was hit and a fire reportedly broke out. Seventeen Palestinians were killed, including 13 children, and more than 50 others were injured.
On 26 October, Israel committed a massacre in Beit Lahiya. Journalist Anas al-Sharif reported that dozens were killed and injured when Israel bombed five homes.
Israel also attacked sheltering families in Nuseirat refugee camp and Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, as well as in Gaza City, just south of Beit Lahiya, over the last few days.
On Monday, local news agencies reported that three Palestinians, including a child, were killed by Israeli bombs in al-Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps in central Gaza. According to local reporters, the child in Maghazi was shot by an Israeli drone.
Israel attacked Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis early Wednesday morning, bombing tents sheltering displaced people.
Civil defense forced to cease operations in north
Israel’s mass forced expulsion of Palestinians, attacks against hospitals and medical workers and the magnitude of destruction in northern Gaza is “an unforgivable, relentless campaign against a population, who do not have another choice,” according to the emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders this week.
Last week, the Palestinian civil defense corps announced that it was forced to completely stop operations in the north of Gaza due to Israel’s non-stop massacres and targeting of firefighting and search and rescue vehicles.
According to the civil defense, along with the complete siege of all three hospitals in the northern area, five of its members were arrested by Israeli soldiers and abducted to an unknown location.
Israeli tanks, it added, shelled and destroyed the only remaining fire truck. And three of its members in Beit Lahiya were targeted by an Israeli drone.
Following the storming and rampant destruction of Kamal Adwan hospital earlier this week, the Palestinian ministry of health in Gaza stated: “We do not understand how the world allows itself to stand by and watch the most heinous genocide and the most widespread systematic operation to destroy the health system and kill and arrest patients and medical staff without doing anything.”
The United Nations said this week that “children in Gaza are not only dying from bombs, bullets and shells, but also because those who survive are prevented from leaving Gaza to receive life-saving care. According to UNICEF, only 127 children in critical condition have been allowed to leave the Strip since May.”
Joyce Msuya, the acting undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and the emergency relief coordinator for the United Nations, stated over the weekend that “what Israeli forces are doing in besieged North Gaza cannot be allowed to continue.”
She said, “Hospitals have been hit and health workers have been detained. Shelters have been emptied and burned down. First responders have been prevented from saving people from under the rubble. Families have been separated and men and boys are being taken away by the truckload. Hundreds of Palestinians have reportedly been killed. Tens of thousands have been forced to flee yet again.”
“The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying,” Msuya said.
Similar statements were made by the UN’s human rights chief Volker Turk, who said that the “darkest days of the Gaza conflict are unfolding.”
The UN Human Rights Office said it was “appalled” by the attacks in Beit Lahiya, and called for a “prompt, transparent and detailed investigation into the circumstances of this strike and responsibilities for it.”
Meanwhile, the spokesperson for the US State Department, Matthew Miller, called the Beit Lahiya massacre a “horrifying incident with a horrifying result” but of course insisted Washington had contacted Israeli officials and “made clear we want to know exactly what happened, how you could have a result that produces, according to reports, dozens of children dead, and we don’t yet know the answer to that question.”
Five journalists killed
Israel has killed five more journalists this week in Gaza, bringing the number of media workers killed since October 2023 to more than 180, according to the government media office.
Saed Radwan from the local Al-Aqsa TV, Hamza Abu Salmiya from the Sanad News Agency, and Haneen Baroud, who worked for Al-Quds Foundation, were killed in Israeli airstrikes.
In separate attacks, Nadia Imad al-Sayed, a media professional, producer and presenter with radio stations and media outlets, and Abdul Rahman Samir Al-Tanani, who worked with Zaman and Sawt al-Shaab radio stations were also killed, the government media office stated.
Israel bans UNRWA
This week, the Israeli parliament passed bills to ban the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees, the latest in a series of measures aimed at debilitating and destroying the agency over the last year.
UNRWA, which supports Palestine refugees in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, as well as in Lebanon and Syria, provides education, healthcare, social services and emergency relief to people who have been expelled from their original land and villages in historic Palestine for the last 76 years and counting.
Phillippe Lazzarini, the head of the agency, admonished the Israeli government’s move to ban UNRWA and said that it sets a dangerous precedent in that it opposes the UN charter and violates Israel’s obligations under international law.
Of course, since the agency’s inception a year after the Nakba in 1949, there has always been one very simple alternative to UNRWA, and that would be forcing Israel to end its colonial project and let the millions of Palestinian refugees return home.
Israel strikes Lebanon world heritage site
Turning northwards, Israel has continued to escalate its bombing attacks against civilians across Lebanon in recent days.
The United Nations reports that recent strikes on the governorates of Baalbek-Hermel and Beqaa, in eastern Lebanon, have killed at least 60 people and injured dozens, according to local authorities.
Lebanon’s health ministry reports that at least 2,700 people have been killed and nearly 13,000 wounded in Israeli attacks since October 2023.
The ministry reported that at least 77 people were killed on Tuesday alone in airstrikes across the country.
In the ancient city of Tyre, or Sour, a UNESCO world heritage site, Israel has carried out a series of bombing attacks on buildings.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor says that Israel has increased its use of internationally banned white phosphorus bombs on Lebanon.
“Israel is escalating its crimes against civilians and protected objects in Lebanon by using internationally prohibited weapons and highly-destructive bombs for the fourth consecutive week since the start of its large-scale assault,” the rights group says.
Last week, Israel killed several journalists in the south of Lebanon in what media outlets say was a targeted attack.
Ghassan Najjar, a cameraman for the Lebanese channel Al-Mayadeen, the channel’s broadcast engineer Mohammed Reda and Al-Manar’s cameraman Wissam Qassem were all killed in the airstrike.
The killings came just a day after Al-Mayadeen’s Beirut office was bombed.
According to the news outlet, Al-Mayadeen had evacuated the premises at the onset of the aggression against Lebanon. Over the past year, Al-Mayadeen’s journalists have been threatened, assaulted and killed.
Expressing defiance and resilience
Finally, as we always do, we wanted to share videos of people expressing defiance and resilience in the face of Israel’s widening campaign of destruction.
Artist and content creator Jaber Thabet uploads photos and videos of Palestinian children, well-loved dogs and cats, and his family. This is a video he took of a children’s choir practice in a shelter in Nuseirat camp, in central Gaza.
Nora Barrows-Friedman is a staff writer and associate editor at The Electronic Intifada, and is the author of In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine (Just World Books, 2014)
