Maureen Clare Murphy
The Electronic Intifada / August 15, 2024
In Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, on Tuesday, newborn twins Ayssel and Asser Abu al-Qumsan were killed along with their mother, Jumana Arafa, a doctor, and their grandmother, Reem al-Batrawi.
At the time that their apartment building was hit, the twins’ now anguished father, Muhammad Abu al-Qusman, was out to collect the birth certificates for the babies, who were born a few days earlier.
“My wife is gone, my two babies and my mother-in-law. I was told it’s a tank shell on the apartment they were in, in a house we were displaced to,” he told media.
The young father carried the birth certificates to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, where his twins, wife and mother-in-law lay dead in the morgue.
The day before she was killed, the twins’ mother had sent a voice message to the US charity HEAL Palestine to thank them for supporting her during her pregnancy in which she struggled to access food and maternity care.
“There needs to be an immediate ceasefire to stop the daily killing of innocent women and children in Gaza,” said Steve Sosebee, the founder of HEAL Palestine, following the killing of Jumana Arafa and her family.
That has been the resounding call from UN organizations trying to fend off a famine in Gaza and the spread of the highly contagious polio virus, which has been detected in wastewater in the territory.
The World Health Organization plans to send 1.2 million polio vaccines to Gaza, with the first round scheduled for 17 August, pending Israeli approval. But a ceasefire and freedom of movement of health workers is necessary to allow for the administration of vaccines.
“It is a public health emergency wherever polio virus is detected,” Hamid Jafari, a polio specialist with the World Health Organization, said in an interview with Al Jazeera English last week.
The virus could spread outside of Gaza to Israel, the West Bank and beyond – to Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, Jafari said.
“This can spread very fast internationally,” Jafari added, “and most importantly it’s a direct threat to the children of Gaza, that this could start paralyzing children very, very rapidly.”
US frustration
The UN Security Council adopted a demand for a ceasefire in Gaza in March – after the US vetoed multiple draft resolutions calling for a truce – and the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt genocidal acts in Gaza in January.
But the US, which continues to provide the weapons Israel is using to carry out the genocide, insists that a ceasefire be reached through bilateral negotiations.
Instead of ending the bloodshed, the US-led negotiations towards a ceasefire, also involving Qatar and Egypt, have prolonged the genocide in Gaza, where more than 16,450 children are among the nearly 39,900 fatalities confirmed by the health ministry.
In a context in which international law has long been treated as null and void, Palestinians are being made to negotiate an agreement to end their extermination with the party that is carrying out the extermination.
While fully committed to regime change in Gaza, and Israel’s war aim of removing Hamas as the de facto governing authority in the territory, Washington is frustrated that a ceasefire has not yet been reached.
This frustration does not grow out of moral outrage over all of the Palestinians killed in Gaza, but rather from Israel’s failure and incompetence at achieving any strategic success. After 10 months of Tel Aviv’s deliberate murder of civilians and destruction on an unfathomable scale, the resistance on the ground in Gaza continues to fight back, inflicting heavy losses on Israel.
Senior US officials are now trying to manufacture the image of a major Israeli blow against Hamas while warning that Israel has nothing more to gain in Gaza – far from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vague and unreachable aim of “total victory” against the Palestinian resistance.
The Biden administration doesn’t value the lives of Palestinians in Gaza – and didn’t even give them a token mention in the White House statement issued on day 100 of the war – but it claims to have worked nonstop to secure the freedom of Israelis and Americans held captive there since 7 October.
If Washington really did care about them, it would have imposed a ceasefire long ago by cutting off military aid to Israel. Instead, the Biden administration has repeatedly obstructed international efforts to end the relentless and indiscriminate Israeli attacks that have killed many of them, principally through its veto at the UN Security Council.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government led by Netanyahu and his far-right allies seem all too willing, if not eager, to sacrifice the lives of the captives for “total victory” – an aim that defense minister Yoav Gallant reportedly described as “gibberish” in a closed-door meeting with lawmakers on Monday.
Coercive diplomacy
Earlier this month, Netanyahu told Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, that “as long as we keep pressuring them, Hamas will give up more and more.”
And by “keep pressuring them,” Netanyahu meant massacring more Palestinian civilians.
Military analyst Elijah Magnier writes that coercive diplomacy was at play in the massacre that Israel perpetrated at Tabaeen school in Gaza City on Saturday.
Around 100 Palestinians were killed by Israeli-fired, US-made missiles that struck the school without warning while displaced people sheltering at the facility were performing dawn prayers.
While Al-Jazeera broadcast horrific scenes of dismembered bodies, the carnage narrated by its shocked correspondent Anas al-Sharif, Israel claimed that it had targeted and eliminated around 20 Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives using the school as a command center and published the names and ID photos of those supposed operatives.
Israel’s Arabic-language military spokesperson accused al-Sharif of lying and “covering up the crimes of Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad taking shelter inside schools.”
The accusation has been understood by many as a threat against al-Sharif’s life.
Just around one week earlier, al-Sharif found the bodies of his Al-Jazeera colleague and friend Ismail al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami al-Rifi after they were killed in an Israeli drone strike, after which Israel accused al-Ghoul of being a Hamas commander.
In the case of the Tabaeen school massacre, as in so many other attacks on civilians and civilian objects in Gaza, it soon became apparent that Israel was retroactively fabricating a justification for a blatant war crime.
Three of the resistance operatives that Israel claimed were killed at Tabaeen school on Saturday had in fact been killed in previous incidents, including one in December. Other people among the supposed Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives named by Israel were old men or known opponents of Hamas.
Muhammad Shehada, communications director of the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which exposed Israel’s fabrication, said that “basically, what Israel did was bomb a random fajr [dawn] prayer at an overcrowded school, assuming Hamas members are religious, so there’d probably be some of them among worshipers.”
“They claimed to be targeting a nameless ‘senior commander’ then took 16 hours to come up with names,” Shehada added. “Why 16 hours if they knew exactly who they were targeting?”
The Israeli military “waited for Gazans to post the names of their dead on social media” and then assembled a list of supposed operatives “because who’s gonna check? Mainstream media? Biden? The EU?”
Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights group, said that its forensic architecture unit found nothing to support Israel’s claims about the school being used as a base for armed groups.
The aim of Israel’s lies
But its claims being exposed as lies matters little to Israel, whose leaders know that after a couple of days of toothless international condemnation of its crimes – much like the ritualistic and empty thoughts and prayers offered by politicians after mass shootings in the US – the matter will be forgotten by its powerful allies, which are keen to carry on business as usual.
So why does Israel bother inventing lies to justify its crimes, if the international outrage blows over so quickly, and with no material consequence?
According to analyst Mouin Rabbani, Israel claims that Hamas uses schools and hospitals as military bases “to put meat on the bones of its trope that Palestinians are using the civilian population of the Gaza Strip …. as ‘human shields.’”
This allows Israel to shift responsibility for the mass killings it has inflicted onto Palestinians in a classic victim-blaming scenario, according to Rabbani.
Demonstrating the effectiveness of this strategy, following the Tabaeen school massacre, instead of condemning the killing of civilians, US and European officials implied that Hamas was to blame for the deaths of scores of Palestinians by Israeli-fired American weapons by repeating the human shields claim.
Meanwhile, the Tel Aviv daily Haaretz reported this week that the Israeli army is using Palestinians including children and older people as literal shields in Gaza by sending them into potentially booby-trapped tunnels and homes before troops enter, in some cases forcing the Palestinians to wear Israeli military uniforms.
Palestinians have already testified to this practice, which was exposed by Al Jazeera long before the publication of the Haaretz investigation. But soldiers interviewed by the paper confirmed that it is a matter of policy, despite the Israeli military spokesperson’s claims that the use of human shields is prohibited.
Osloized ceasefire negotiations
An investigative report by Al Jazeera found that the attack on Tabaeen school on Saturday was “deliberately timed to cause maximum casualties” with a “large number of displaced people deliberately targeted.”
The aim of coercive diplomacy – in this case killing large numbers of civilians – “is to break the opponent’s will to fight … thereby forcing them to accept the terms imposed,” according to Magnier.
“This strategy demonstrates destructive power, instills fear and weakens the opponent’s morale by suggesting that continued resistance will lead to even more civilian casualties and suffering,” Magnier adds.
Israel “has been using this tactic for months” in Gaza, Magnier writes, and a lack of international accountability has allowed the atrocities against civilians to continue as the primary means by which it is bringing pressure to bear on Hamas.
Israel’s attacks on civilians are flagrant violations of international humanitarian law – the rules of war.
But for decades, powerful actors have treated Palestine as a place where international law does not apply.
The endless US-led bilateral negotiations between the occupier and the colonized to end a genocide is a grotesque mutation of the peace process paradigm that has sought to relieve Israel of its legal obligations while treating Palestinians’ basic rights as bargaining chips.
The sham peace process, led by the US under the banner of the Oslo accords, fostered a situation of impunity and allowed Israel to accelerate its colonization and brutal subjugation of the Palestinian people.
As this author wrote in March, the indirect ceasefire talks, like the peace process before it, allow Israel to negotiate in bad faith as it continues its blatant violations of international law in pursuit of its genocidal aims. And then Israel, along with Washington and its European allies, gets to blame the inevitable breakdown of talks on the Palestinians and regional resistance actors.
And so newborn twins are killed alongside their mother and grandmother in Gaza. And Palestinian parents bury bags of flesh, not knowing if they contain the remains of their children or someone else’s. And the US sends more weapons to enable the killing to go on and on.
Under the new leadership of Yahya Sinwar, Hamas announced on Sunday that it would no longer participate in endless rounds of fruitless negotiations and insisted that mediators submit a plan to implement the proposal that the resistance movement agreed to in early July.
On Monday, Abu Obeida, spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, issued a vague announcement saying that two of its fighters assigned to guard Israeli captives in Gaza killed a captive and seriously injured two others in two separate incidents.
Attempts were being made to save the lives of the injured captives and the incidents would be investigated, according Abu Obeida, who offered no further information.
While Hamas has previously announced the deaths of several captives as a result of Israeli military attacks and botched rescue attempts, Abu Obeida’s announcement on Monday was the first time that Qassam said that guards had killed a captive.
If it wasn’t the intent, Qassam’s statement will surely increase pressure within Israel to secure a deal to save the dwindling number of captives who are still believed to be alive.
And driving home the message that it has not been defeated and will not surrender to genocidal Israel, on Tuesday Qassam fired two rockets towards Tel Aviv for the first time since May. No casualties or damage were reported.
It should be clear by now that an end to the war must be imposed on Israel.
With the US buying Israel more time and sending more weapons to continue the slaughter, it is falling on the shoulders of Iran and Hizbollah to finally force an end to the bloodshed.
Iran has signaled clearly that it is willing to forgo retaliation against Israel for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran two weeks ago, if a ceasefire is reached without delay.
Failing that, the abject failure of nearly all other international actors to uphold their positive obligation to prevent and punish genocide may engulf the region in even more catastrophic loss of human life.
Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada
