Nora Barrows-Friedman
The Electronic Intifada / September 26, 2024
In Gaza, Israeli airstrikes and quadcopter drones attacked Palestinians in Beit Lahiya, Jabaliya, Rafah, Khan Younis, Bureij refugee camp and Nuseirat refugee camp.
Nearly 40 people were killed in attacks on Tuesday.
In Nuseirat, homes were flattened and people were killed as Israeli tanks pounded the area. Our contributor Abubaker Abed said that, according to residents in Nuseirat, Israeli snipers and quadcopters have been operating on the western edge of the camp.
Video footage shows mangled bodies laying in pools of blood on the street and people screaming over the bodies of children. At least 11 people were killed in the attacks.
The attacks come just a day after Israel bombed two schools that had been turned into shelters for displaced people in Nuseirat and Beach refugee camps, killing at least 10, including children.
The government media office in Gaza said that the attacks “come within the framework of the crime of genocide, as the number of shelters bombed by the occupation reached 183, including 163 schools housing hundreds of thousands of displaced persons.”
On Saturday, Israel carried out a massacre on a school in al-Zaytoun, an area of Gaza City, killing at least 22 Palestinians.
The Gaza government media office stated that most of those killed were women and orphaned children who had sought shelter in the school.
“In Gaza, schools are no longer places of joy,” stated the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA). “They have been turned into rubble or overcrowded places of refuge for displaced families living in fear. Children deserve to study in schools, not to have to shelter in them. It is high time to restore education in Gaza.”
Impacts of one year of electricity cuts
The Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has published an extensive report on the ongoing health, humanitarian, economic, agricultural and psychological effects of Israel’s deliberate destruction of electricity lines, generators and solar panels in Gaza for almost a full year now.
Euro-Med says that the cutting off of electricity to Gaza over 11 and a half months “has had catastrophic effects and long-lasting humanitarian repercussions, affecting every aspect of residents’ lives. The subjection of over two million individuals to deplorable living conditions by Israel, including cutting off their electricity, is a tool of its ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.”
The group adds that “many of the hundreds of thousands of Gaza Strip residents who are compelled to light wood fires in place of using cooking gas and electricity to cook and carry out daily tasks have already started to experience respiratory and vision issues that will likely have long-term or permanent effects on their health.”
Children used as human shields by Israeli army
A new investigation by Defense for Children International – Palestine has revealed that Israeli forces used Palestinian children as human shields during the siege of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in April.
The group’s field researchers in Gaza spoke with two Palestinian families who, along with their young children, were forced to walk alongside Israeli tanks as Israeli forces besieged Al-Shifa Hospital. Israeli forces have regularly used Palestinian children as human shields during the genocide in Gaza, according to documentation the researchers have collected.
On 18 April, “Israeli forces surrounded the area near al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City with tanks, military bulldozers, and ground forces,” DCI says.
“The tanks fired toward a building opposite the hospital, where Ahed and Taghrid A. were sheltering with their five children: Tala, 12, Ahmed, 11, Yazan, 8, and twins Amir and Jude, 1. Ahed and Taghrid raised white flags and shouted, ‘Civilians, civilians!’”
Tala told Defense for Children International – Palestine that the Israeli soldiers “put me, my mother and my brothers in the middle of the tanks and kept shooting over our heads, while the bulldozer was bulldozing around us. We were afraid to die. I was calling for my mother who was next to me, but my voice couldn’t come out!”
Israeli forces detained the family for more than five hours without food or water before they ordered them to move south.
The month before, in March, a 12-year-old boy Moayad was waiting for aid when Israeli tanks surrounded him and a group of other Palestinian children.
“Israeli soldiers forced them to strip in the bitter cold, assaulted them with rifles, and tied them up with plastic cords next to the tanks amid heavy gunfire that lasted for hours,” DCIP reports.
“The army told us to walk in front of the tanks and then stop at every building they wanted to search,” Moayad told DCIP. “They put us with the rest of the children in front of the tank for a whole day without food or water. I had not had anything to eat or drink for two days.”
Al-Jazeera’s Ramallah bureau attacked, closed by Israel
Turning to the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces raided the Al-Jazeera bureau in Ramallah on Sunday, ordering the broadcaster to close operations for a 45-day period.
“Heavily armed and masked Israeli soldiers forcefully entered the building housing Al-Jazeera’s bureau and handed the 45-day closure order to the network’s West Bank bureau chief Walid al-Omari early on Sunday,” the network reported.
Al-Omari said the Israeli military’s closure order accused the network of “incitement to and support of terrorism.”
The network’s Jivara Budeiri said Israeli forces “used tear gas in the vicinity of the Al-Jazeera bureau and Al-Manara Square in the heart of the occupied West Bank city.”
Israeli soldiers confiscated their cameras and other recording equipment.
Israeli military vehicles left Ramallah after the raid.
Al-Jazeera staff said that the closure of the West Bank offices are no surprise – Israel raided and closed the broadcaster’s Jerusalem bureau in May. The Israeli government has since shut down operations of the Al-Jazeera network in present-day Israel.
Israeli forces were filmed ripping down a poster of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian American journalist who was executed in Jenin in May 2022.
Earlier in the week, Israeli forces killed seven Palestinians during an invasion in the town of Qabatiya, near Jenin, backed by armoured bulldozers, fighter jets and drones, according to Al-Jazeera.
The network and local news outlets showed video footage of Israeli soldiers pushing the bodies of three Palestinians off of the roofs of homes that they had earlier raided and occupied. One soldier can be seen kicking one of the bodies until it falls off the roof.
The three Palestinians had been shot on the rooftop earlier.
And the WAFA news agency reported that a military bulldozer was used to confiscate the bodies after they had been thrown and kicked off the roof.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor stated that the killing of Palestinians and desecrating their bodies “defies the legal definition of war crimes as it is part of a systematic and ongoing pattern of dehumanization that Palestinians have endured for decades, rather than an isolated, exceptional incident committed by some soldiers.”
The crimes committed in Qabatiya, the group says, “reflect the ongoing genocidal practices Israel has carried out with impunity.”
Save the Children reported this week that on average, five Palestinian children have been killed or injured by Israeli forces every day in the West Bank since October.
“These actions are not isolated incidents; they are part of a trend of increasing Israeli military operations and use of force that are systematically eroding the safety, security, and fundamental rights of Palestinian children, who are paying the highest price in this escalating violence,” said Jeremy Stoner, the charity’s Middle East regional director.
War expands in Lebanon
Focusing now on Lebanon, after two days in a row of its terrorist attacks using personal communications devices last week, Israel bombed a building in Beirut on Friday, killing several high-level military commanders in Hizballah’s Radwan unit.
On Monday, Israel launched major airstrikes across southern Lebanon and in Beirut, killing nearly 500 people and injuring approximately 1,700. On Tuesday, 60 more were killed.
Lebanon’s health minister Firas Abiad said that 50 children and 94 women were among those killed in the past two days.
The attacks targeted medical centers, ambulances, civil defense teams and the cars of people trying to flee the bombing.
Israel hit more than two dozen separate areas in its attacks on southern Lebanon. This video shows a bombing of Mazraat Sinai.
The Israeli army said that it had bombed more 1,100 targets in 650 different attacks with more than 1,400 types of ammunition on Monday, claiming that the targets were locations where Hizballah weaponry had been stored inside civilian homes – the same excuses the army uses in its genocidal attacks on Gaza.
Israel killed Hadi al-Sayyid Hassan. a journalist with the broadcaster Al- Mayadeen, in an attack on his home on Monday.
On Tuesday, Israel again struck areas of the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut, killing at least six and injuring more than a dozen people.
Al-Jazeera reported Wednesday that the Israeli military continued to strike targets in Beirut and across southern Lebanon, hitting 20 villages in the early morning hours.
The Lebanese health ministry said that at least 50 have been killed and more than 200 wounded on Wednesday.
Hizballah has been hitting Israeli military targets in northern Israel, including the Atlit naval base south of Haifa, Al-Jazeera said.
The Dado base near the northern city of Safad, the headquarters of Israel’s northern military command, has also been targeted.
Hizballah has also launched rockets and missiles at Israeli settlement colonies inside the occupied West Bank and at the Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv.
Meanwhile, the US Pentagon announced that the Biden administration is sending additional American military forces to the region, with the department’s spokesperson Patrick Ryder declining to specify how many more US troops are being sent or what they would be tasked to do.
The US already has about 40,000 troops in the region. The Associated Press reported that on Monday, the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, two Navy destroyers and a cruiser set sail from Norfolk, Virginia, headed to the Sixth Fleet area in Europe on a regularly scheduled deployment.
“In light of increased tension in the Middle East and out of an abundance of caution, we are sending a small number of additional US military personnel forward to augment our forces that are already in the region,” Ryder said.
“But for operational security reasons, I’m not going to comment on or provide specifics.”
Palestinians in Gaza declared their unwavering solidarity with the people of Lebanon.
Highlighting resilience
Continuing on that thread of solidarity and shared struggles for liberation, this week in Gaza the psychiatrist Mustafa Elmasri posted this video of children showing off their gardens, immaculately cared for, in tent shelters.
And our contributor Abubaker Abed in central Gaza shared this photo of blooming jasmine, saying “My jasmine tree today … I’ll never lose hope.”
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)
