Maureen Clare Murphy
The Electronic Intifada / July 17, 2024
Israel has escalated its attacks on United Nations facilities and other sites being used as emergency shelters for Palestinians displaced within Gaza in an apparent pressure tactic against Hamas and as part of a decades-long policy of massacring civilians to try to compel a surrender.
“The last week has been one of the deadliest weeks in Gaza since the war started,” Tamara Alrifai, a spokesperson for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, said on Monday.
Israel attacked five schools in Gaza in eight days, massacring dozens of Palestinians.
On Saturday, in one of the deadliest single attacks of the genocide, now in its tenth month, Israel killed at least 90 Palestinians in Al-Mawasi.
Israel had unilaterally declared Al-Mawasi a “humanitarian zone” despite a lack of infrastructure to support people it ordered to evacuate from other areas of Gaza.
Israel claimed to have targeted Muhammad Deif, the military chief of Hamas, and the resistance group’s battalion commander in the strikes on al-Mawasi.
Around half of those killed in the Al-Mawasi attack were women and children, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza, indicating that most of the fatalities were civilians. At least 300 others were injured, “many of them women and children who lost limbs and/or were paralyzed in the attack,” according to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
On Sunday, 17 people were killed and dozens more injured in an attack on a UN school being used as a shelter in Nuseirat refugee camp.
At least 539 people sheltering in UNRWA facilities have been killed since October, the UN agency said on Tuesday.
At least 141 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza during the past 24 hours, the Palestinian health ministry reported on Sunday, and another 80 people were reported killed on Monday.
Israel continued to shed Palestinian blood like water on Tuesday, killing at least 57 people.
Among them were 17 people killed in an area housing displaced Palestinians al-Mawasi, with Israel claiming that it targeted a senior Islamic Jihad fighter.
At least 23 people were killed in an Israeli airstrike on a UN school being used as a shelter in Nuseirat refugee camp. Journalist Muhammad Mishmish was among those killed, bringing to 160 the number of journalists killed in Gaza since October, the government media office in the territory said.
In that case too Israel claimed that it attacked “terrorists” it said were operating in the school.
‘Pattern of conduct’
Following Saturday’s massacre in Al-Mawasi, three prominent human rights organizations – Al Mezan, Al-Haq and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights – said that the attack is “part of a pattern of conduct in which Israel is destroying Palestinian life in Gaza.”
The attacks on the shelters housing displaced people are characteristic of the maximum pressure being exerted on civilians in Gaza as a key tactic of Israel’s military offensive since 7 October.
The vast majority of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have been displaced from their homes, in many cases repeatedly, undermining any sense of security and the ability of aid organizations to meet people’s needs in a sustained manner.
A near total siege on Gaza and the destruction of its food production capacity has caused the spread of famine and thirst. The bombing of health and sanitation facilities has promoted the proliferation of preventable disease while the systematic targeting of Gaza’s health facilities means that treatment is scarcely available.
Israel has attempted to justify its attacks on facilities sheltering displaced people without warning by claiming that members of Palestinian resistance groups were present – in total disregard for distinction, proportionality and precaution, the fundamental principles of the laws of war – and has repeatedly accused Hamas and other resistance groups of embedding among civilians, thereby using them as human shields.
The three Palestinian rights groups said that “Israel’s commission of such crimes under the pretext of targeting [Hamas] military leaders is nothing but an attempt to justify the mass killing of Palestinians, which has been a recurring pattern over the last 10 months.”
The use of weapons “with enormous destructive power in such a densely populated and active area, indicates Israel’s clear intention to cause the maximum damage to Palestinians,” the rights groups added.
The Euro-Med Human Rights monitor echoed the office of the UN human rights chief by stating that regardless of the adherence of one party to a conflict, such as Hamas, to international humanitarian law, “the other party is still legally required to abide by and honor the provisions of the law.”
The Geneva-based group added that the use of American-sourced weapons in Israel’s attacks that violate the laws of war “makes the US – and any other country that supplies Israel with weapons – partners in the killing, which is occurring at a rate never before seen in the history of modern warfare.”
Impunity prolongs genocide
Human rights groups in Palestine and beyond, as well as independent UN human rights experts have called for a halt on weapons transfers to Israel and other forms of sanctions, as well as criminal trials in international courts.
Instead, Israel’s powerful friends are keeping the arms flowing and working to undermine the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court’s application for arrest warrants against top Israeli officials, thereby prolonging the genocide in Gaza.
Middle East Eye reported last week that the US, which is not a state party to the court’s founding treaty but has supported its investigations of Russian leaders accused of war crimes in Ukraine, is “considering a legal bid” to challenge the ICC’s authority to issue arrest warrants against Israeli leaders.
The publication added that the deliberations in Washington “come amid a lobbying campaign at the highest levels of the Biden administration to prevent the UK from dropping its legal appeal against the ICC.”
The situation of international impunity preserved principally by the US has allowed Israel to attack Palestinian civilians as a negotiation tactic in its indirect talks with Hamas. On Tuesday, following another day of massacres, Hamas blamed the Biden administration for “the systematic killing of our people.”
Pressure
The prevailing analysis in Israel is that the assassinations of Hamas leaders like Muhammad Deif – though the resistance group denies he was killed on Saturday and Israel is unable to confirm his status – “will influence Hamas’ behavior in the negotiations over a hostage deal,” according to Amos Harel, a columnist with the Israeli daily Haaretz.
“The most widely held view in Israel is that targeted killings, together with the Rafah offensive and raids elsewhere in Gaza, have added a degree of military pressure on Hamas and may cause Yahya Sinwar, the organization’s leader in Gaza, to become somewhat more flexible,” Harel added.
That view was reflected by an unnamed Israeli government source who told Haaretz that Hamas’ “non-response” following Saturday’s attack in al-Mawasi “strengthens our view that our military action … is having an impact. Increasing the military pressure now will enable us to bring more hostages back alive.”
The CIA has reportedly made a similar assessment, according to comments made by director Bill Burns, the Biden administration’s point person in the indirect talks between Hamas and Israel, during a closed-door meeting as reported on by CNN.
But that perspective was challenged by Yossi Melman, another Haaretz analyst, who wrote that the Israeli military’s “operations in Lebanon and Gaza seem to show that the assassinations themselves have become an end in themselves.”
Politicians, military brass, the media class and public alike “hold that targeted killings will solve Israel’s war problems,” according to Melman, who warns that “people deceive themselves when they place hope in such tactics.”
Without agreement to end the war, “there will be no hostage deal,” Melman said.
The interminable war in Gaza, he added, proves that Israel, led by a prime minister who is solely motivated by his political survival, “has become indifferent to human life. Also for the lives of its own citizens, including the hostages.”
Failed strategy
History shows that the tactic of assassinating leaders and murdering civilians to be utterly futile, or even counterproductive from Israel’s perspective.
In 1997, Israel’s Mossad spy agency carried out a botched assassination attempt on Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman, leading to a short-lived diplomatic crisis with Jordan.
Tel Aviv has succeeded in assassinating countless senior and lower level Hamas leaders over the decades, including in 2004 its founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and its Gaza leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi. Jamila al-Shanti – founder of Hamas’ women’s organization, a former lawmaker in the Palestinian Legislative Council and Al-Rantisi’s widow – became the first member of the faction’s politburo to be killed by Israel when she died in an airstrike in October 2023.
Despite these murders, the group has only gone from strength to strength, developing ever more sophisticated military capacities that Israel has for nearly 10 months failed to seriously dent, despite the unprecedented levels of death and destruction in Gaza.
The same is true in Lebanon.
In 1992, Israel assassinated Sheikh Abbas al-Musawi, the secretary-general of Hizballah. He was succeeded by its current leader Hasan Nasrallah, who has built the organization into such a formidable military force that it is capable of deterring Israel from mounting a full-scale attack on Lebanon.
Indeed, it is Israel that appears to have suffered the most militarily. This week its army admitted a severe shortage of tanks and ammunition due to the war in Gaza. And facing a shortage of soldiers, it is moving to extend mandatory service for reservists.
Desire to break resistance fuels genocide
It is likely frustration over its military failure against the Palestinian resistance that is driving Israel to escalate its massacres of civilians in the hope that it can achieve through genocide what it has failed to achieve on the battlefield: a Palestinian surrender.
Israel has since its violent founding used massacres of civilians, including (if not especially) in Gaza, as its major strategy against those who resist it. This was codified into the so-called Dahiya doctrine, named for Beirut’s southern suburb where Israel systematically targeted civilian infrastructure during its 2006 war on Lebanon.
That did not save Israel from defeat in that war, and it only increased Hizballah’s resolve to further improve its ability to counter Israel militarily.
In the context of Gaza, this strategy is informally dubbed “mowing the grass” by Israeli leaders – the horrifying idea that periodic massacres will buy Israel a period of calm until the next massacre becomes necessary to maintain a Jewish state in Palestine.
With each episode, Israel has increased the number of people it is willing to kill, to the point that it is now committing genocide and there appears to be no limit to how far it is willing to go.
Hamas’ position, Netanyahu’s obstruction
For their part, Palestinians understand that without guarantees of a permanent end to the genocidal war and an end to their subjugation by Israel, any ceasefire will only be a prelude to the next massacre. That is why Hamas negotiators, while keen to end the bloodshed in Gaza, are holding firm to their fundamental demands.
An unnamed Palestinian official described as close to the negotiations told Reuters that “Hamas wants the war to end, not at any price. It says it has shown the flexibility needed and is pushing the mediators to get Israel to reciprocate.”
The Palestinian official said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is preventing an agreement from being reached by “adding more conditions that restrict the return of displaced people to northern Gaza, and to keep control over the Rafah border crossing with Egypt,” Reuters reported on Tuesday.
Netanyahu’s stalling tactics are seemingly buoyed as international attention has turned away from the plight of civilians in Gaza and as protest by outraged publics has failed to end their governments’ support for Israel’s extermination of the Palestinian people.
With the US and UK committed to regime change in Gaza, Israel’s genocidal campaign will continue to destroy all aspects of life in the territory. And each day that goes by without an end to the war increases the likelihood that it will bleed out into the wider region.
In a speech last week, Hizballah leader Hasan Nasrallah reiterated that the Lebanese resistance group would only stop firing toward Israel if an agreement is reached to end the war in Gaza, implicitly rejecting “the diplomatic off-ramp proposed by the US,” according to analyst Amal Saad.
Emphasizing that Hizballah is following Hamas’ lead, Nasrallah said that “we are with you until the very end.”
Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada
Ali Abunimah contributed background information and analysis regarding Israel’s assassination policy
