Gaza: Christmas in hell

Israel has wiped out 1% of Gaza's population

It’s hard to imagine a more jarring image than millions of people around the world gathering to celebrate Christmas while Palestine — the birthplace of Christ — continues to be the site of one of the most brutal massacres in modern history — one that the “Christian” West is diplomatically, politically and militarily enabling.

Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza shows no sign of abating, as the IDF continues to pound the Strip by air, land and sea — and to slain scores of civilians. This week, the already staggering death toll broke a new grim record, as Gazan authorities reported that more than 20,000 people — most of which women and children — have been killed by Israeli forces in less than three months.

That’s 1% of Gaza’s pre-war population.

The true death toll, however, is likely to be much higher, considering that that 8,000 people are estimated to be missing under the rubble. More than 50,000 people have been injured.

Meanwhile, 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced and wide swathes of the enclave — over two-thirds of all structures in northern Gaza and a quarter of buildings in the southern area of Khan Younis, where Israel had told people to flee — have been completely destroyed. Indeed, in an impressive visual investigation, the New York Times confirmed that “Israel dropped 2,000-pound bombs [in southern Gaza] where it ordered Gaza’s civilians to move for safety”. Entire neighbourhoods, especially in the north, have been razed to the ground, often in a single strike.

There’s not a single place in the Strip that has been spared — and nowhere Gazans can flee to.

For a detailed satellite analysis, see this New York Times visual report.

Fadi Abu Shammalah, the head of Gaza’s General Union of Cultural Centers, described the inhumane conditions he was able to escape in Gaza. “Every city in the Gaza Strip is beyond our imagination”, he said. As the heads of several American human rights organisations wrote in the New York Times:

We are no strangers to human suffering — to conflict, to natural disasters, to some of the world’s largest and gravest catastrophes. But as the leaders of some of the world’s largest global humanitarian organizations, we have seen nothing like the siege of Gaza.

“Everything [about the ongoing attack on Gaza]” — the number of civilians killed, the number of UN staff killed, the level of destruction, the number of people displaced — “is absolutely unprecedented and staggering”, said UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.

Indeed, by several metrics, Israel’s offensive is the deadliest and most destructive military campaign in recent history — by far. As AP reported:

In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the US-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.

The extent of the destruction is almost inconceivable. By several measures, destruction in Gaza has outpaced Allied bombings of Germany during World War II.

Between 1942 and 1945, the allies attacked 51 major German cities and towns, destroying about 40-50% of their urban areas, said Robert Pape, a US military historian. Pape said this amounted to 10% of buildings across Germany, compared to over 33% across Gaza, a densely populated territory of just 360 square kilometers (140 square miles).

“Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history”, said Pape. “It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever”.  

The destruction is so extensive that “Gaza is now a different color from space. It’s a different texture”, said Corey Scher, an expert in mapping damage during wartime.

There are several reasons for such unprecedented levels of death and destruction: not only is Israel conducting its bombing campaign in a totally “indiscriminate” manner, as even Biden recently admitted — or, even worse, deliberately targeting civilians — but it is also using a very high percentage of so-called dumb bombs, which have a low accuracy but high impact area.

Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon weapons expert now at PAX, a Dutch NGO which focuses on civilian protection, says the Israeli figure is “shocking”. The last time America dropped unguided weapons in populated areas was probably its use of cluster bombs on the outskirts of Baghdad more than 20 years ago.

At this point, it should be clear to anyone that Israel’s ultimate aim has always been to make Gaza uninhabitable — and to drive as many Gazans as possible out of the Strip.

The first part of the plan has been largely achieved. As UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said: “Gaza is not really a habitable place any more”. Israel is even demolishing what remains of many houses — to make sure the displaced Gazans have nowhere to return to.

Israel is now executing civilians in cold blood

On top of the relentless bombing and shelling of civilians, several reports have now emerged of Israeli forces executing civilians in cold blood. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a report alleging that Israeli forces carried out a mass execution of civilians in northern Gaza, separating 11 men from their families and summarily shooting them.

In another chilling episode, Israeli forces attacked a Catholic church complex in Gaza City, executing three captives who were seeking safety.

Israeli forces shot and killed two women — a mother and daughter — inside the Holy Family Parish complex in Gaza City, “where the majority of Christian families [have] taken refuge since the start of the war”, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem said.

The women, identified as Nahida and Samar Anton, “were shot in cold blood inside the premises of the parish, where there are no belligerents”, the patriarchate added.

During his weekly blessing, Pope Francis condemned the attack as “terrorism”.

Similar attacks were reported on several hospitals throughout Gaza.

Last week, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said that Israeli artillery fire had hit the maternity ward of the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, “leading to several casualties”. 12-year-old Dunya Abu Muhsen, who was being treated for a leg she lost in air strike that killed her entire family, was herself killed in the attack.

The same day, Israeli forces stormed Al-Awda Hospital, which has been under siege for several days. Medical staff, as well as patients and their companions, were shot by Israeli snipers; a nurse and a pregnant woman’s sister-in-law were killed.

Even more shockingly, Al Jazeera interviewed witnesses who said “civilians were deliberately targeted” in the bulldozer attack and “buried alive”. Several videos shared on social media appear to show people crushed under the rubble in front of the hospital.

Israeli soldiers are so trigger-happy that on December 16 they even accidentally killed three Israeli hostages that were holding up a white flag, presumably because they mistook them for Palestinian civilians; Israeli forces have a long and well-documented history of killing Gazans while they are waving white flags.

Israel’s systematic attacks on Gaza’s hospitals have left the Strip’s health system in tatters. Only nine of its 36 health facilities are still partially functioning, all located in the south, according to the World Health Organization.

Using starvation as a weapon of war

Meanwhile, according to a detailed Human Rights Watch report, the Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which is a war crime.

For most of the war, Israel has prevented the entry of food, water, fuel and other supplies except for some truck convoys of aid from Egypt, which cover only a fraction of the needs in Gaza.

Because of insufficient aid entering Gaza, hunger has reached epidemic proportions, according to the UN and other organisations. Nine in 10 people in Gaza are going to bed hungry, the United Nations’ World Food Program reported.

More than half of the population — over 63% — reported going for days without food. “Hunger stalks everyone”, the UNRWA wrote in a statement on Twitter. “Too many people haven’t eaten now for two, three days in the Gaza Strip”.

UN Special Rapporteur on Food Michael Fakhri told Al Jazeera Arabic that “every single Palestinian in Gaza is going hungry”, identifying the deliberate creation of famine-like conditions as “genocide”.

To make matters even worse, Israel is continuing to push displaced civilians into ever-smaller areas of the south as troops focus on Khan Younis, Gaza’s second-largest city — where residents from the north had been told to flee.

A second wave of mortality

The combination of these various factors — the destruction of the hospital’s health system, the lack of food, the concentration of millions of displaced Gazans into smaller and smaller areas — are now causing a second wave of indirect deaths, on top of those directly caused by Israeli bombs and shells.

As the Palestinian Ministry of Health said: “There have been significant increases or increased risk of outbreak in some communicable diseases and conditions such as diarrhea, influenza, chicken pox, meningitis, jaundice, impetigo acute respiratory infections, skin infections and hygiene-related conditions like lice and scabies”.

Several American human rights organisations reported the following hellish conditions:

The bombardment is not the only thing brutally cutting lives short. The siege of — and blockades surrounding — Gaza have led to a critical food scarcity, cutoffs of medical supplies and electricity, and a lack of clean water. There is barely any medical care to be found in the enclave and few medications. Surgeons are working by the light of their mobile phones, without anesthetics. They are using dishcloths as bandages. The risk of waves of waterborne and infectious disease will only grow in the increasingly overcrowded living conditions of the displaced.

To be clear, these are not just unintended side effects of Israel’s military campaign — they are part and parcel of the military operation.

UN Security Council passes a resolution calling for aid for Gaza — but no immediate ceasefire

Despite the mind-boggling scale of the ongoing massacre, the international community continues to prove unable to go beyond purely symbolic acts.

After many delays, the UN Security Council adopted a watered-down resolution on Friday calling for immediately speeding up aid deliveries to desperate civilians in Gaza.

The United States won the removal of a tougher call for an “urgent suspension of hostilities” between Israel and Hamas. It abstained in the vote, as did Russia, which wanted the stronger language. The resolution was the first on the war to make it through the council after the US vetoed two earlier ones that called for humanitarian pauses and a full ceasefire.

The resolution has been described as “insufficient” and “meaningless” by human rights organisations.

All efforts to address the “unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza must be welcomed, said Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, but emphasised that “nothing short of an immediate ceasefire is enough”.

She said the resolution “was watered down significantly” and “insufficient” and added that it is “disgraceful that the US was able to stall and use the threat of its veto power to force the UN Security Council to weaken a much-needed call for an immediate end to attacks by all parties”.

“This resolution has been watered down to the point that its impact on the lives of civilians in Gaza will be nearly meaningless”, MSF-USA Executive Director Avril Benoit said in a statement.

No wonder the people of Gaza “feel like the entire world has abandoned them”.

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Best regards,

Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

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