They’ve started again

I woke up yesterday morning to a message from a friend in Pakistan. It just said: ‘They’ve started again.’ I did not wonder who ‘they’ were. He could only have been referring to Israel. And I knew what they must have started again: mass killing in Gaza. The fact that he had sent me a message meant the bombing had to be much heavier than it had been for the weeks since the 20 January ceasefire. I sent an expletive back.

I sent a message to my friend Marwa in Gaza to see if she was OK. ‘Hamdulillah we are fine.’ Only then did I check the news. I used to think the Israeli government’s publicity machinery was disingenuous, but slick. During the 2008-9 bombardments of Gaza which killed 1383 Palestinians, including 333 children, many of the army spokespeople were women with blonde highlights, often filmed with potted plants behind them. They would talk of ‘collateral damage’, of roofs being ‘knocked’ by warning bombs, of (unsuccessful) efforts to avoid medical facilities. We are in a different era. In less than 24 hours, 404 Palestinians were killed and 562 wounded. In this attack Israel killed ‘81 children in 50 minutes’, according to Dr Ghassan Abu Sita, ‘174 children in 24 hours’.

Last night’s attacks on Deir al-Balah, Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah came when most of the population was sleeping. Footage from Khan Younis hospital shows women and children wrapped in blankets, floppy dead babies smeared with blood. On social media there are pictures of young families, like the Garghoun family of Rafah, who have been ‘erased from the civil record’ with the killing of seventeen family members. Israeli spokespeople do not say that these pictures are distorting their intent or giving rise to misunderstanding. The threat that this is ‘only the beginning’ is broadcast loud and clear, together with the desire for ‘total victory’, which they appear happy to equate with the annihilation of Gaza’s population. The US has green lit the killing and supplied most of the fighter jets. Lawyers seeking arrest warrants for American politicians’ complicity in war crimes have just had their cases strengthened.

‘The willingness of Israelis to join in their hundreds of thousands and enter Gaza on the ground is much less resilient than it was on 8 October 2023,’ Ori Goldberg, an Israeli political commentator, told al-Jazeera. ‘Israel is bombing because that is the only thing Israel can do to demonstrate its quote unquote “strength”.’ Goldberg listed the allegations being levelled against Netanyahu, the demonstrations planned against him, the resignations at the security services and Shin Bet. ‘Hamas is right in its claims that Israel has been violating the ceasefire,’ Goldberg said, ‘not just tonight but throughout its duration.’

Jehad Abusalim, a Palestinian writer, argued on X that Netanyahu’s motives are ‘to pass a budget widely seen as problematic, bring back Ben Gvir to salvage his fragile coalition and distract the Israeli public from serious accusations of corruption and wartime misconduct.’

Hamas announced that Israeli prisoners in Gaza are being ‘left to an unknown fate’ by Netanyahu’s actions. The Israeli Hostages and Missing Families Forum said that ‘the Israeli government chose to give up the hostages.’

A key term of the ceasefire deal, one of many that Israel has failed to comply with, is the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza. ‘Rather than abide by the second phase of the ceasefire & prepare to withdraw from Gaza,’ the British Palestinian Committee said yesterday, ‘Israel’s leaders are once again demonstrating to the world the decades-old intent of this settler colonial project: the most Palestinian land possible with the fewest Palestinians possible.’ The Associated Press meanwhile reported on a Israeli-US plan to deport Palestinians from Gaza to Sudan, Somalia and Somaliland.

There is a risk that each new horror eradicates previous ones, diminishing the viciousness of Israel’s deliberate strangulation of human life. On Sunday, Israel cut off electricity supplies to Gaza and said it would not rule out cutting off water. Gaza is a terrain of broken grey cement, the skeletal remains of burnt buildings. In one of most densely populated areas on earth, there is hardly a building left standing. By 11 February, three weeks into the ceasefire, only one-tenth of 200,000 agreed-on tents had been allowed into Gaza. The average temperature drops to 9°C at night in February. Few people returning to the north had more than a rucksack on their back. Most went home to rubble.

‘In the past,’ Leila Molana-Allen said at the Frontline Club earlier this month, ‘the Israeli government would say things like there are security issues with some of the aid they’re trying to send through’ but ‘now they freely admit that they’re just blocking it and they’re not going to let it in.’

When pushed, Western diplomats point to humanitarian aid as the fig leaf for their political inaction or complicity with the genocide, but few of them seem prepared to protest when a UN member state prevents it from reaching a population of whom 876,000 are facing emergency levels of food insecurity and 345,000 catastrophic levels, in a place where 92 per cent of housing has been destroyed, 81 per cent of the road network and 88 per cent of commerce and industry. Last year, the UN found Israel to be using starvation as a weapon of war.

Anyone who has worked at the United Nations can attest to its fastidious editorial and fact-checking processes. This has often led to what Palestinians consider conservative underreporting of the conditions they endure under Israeli occupation. On 13 March, the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel presented a fifty-page report on ‘Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since 7 October 2023’ to the Human Rights Council (the US and Israel have consistently sought to discredit, defund and dismantle both UN bodies). The report finds a ‘sharp increase’ in such violence by Israeli security forces and settlers:

Entire families in Gaza have been killed together in their homes in unprecedented numbers; experts have found that, during the first month of the war, more than nine out of ten women and children killed were in residential buildings, and 95 per cent of women were killed together with at least one child.

On 16 December 2023, at a Catholic church in Gaza City:

Israeli soldiers were deployed in the street behind the church complex and shouted in Arabic that it was forbidden to move outside. The two women left the building to go to the bathroom inside the church complex when they were shot.

According to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, seven other people were shot and wounded in the same incident, when they ran to the courtyard to help the women. The Latin Patriarchate stated that there were no militants inside the Parish at the time of the shooting and no warning was given prior to the attack.

The report includes testimony describing women bleeding to death in hospital for lack of adequate equipment; of a hospital filled with rubbish as it wasn’t safe to leave the building to get rid of it; of a woman dying of septicaemia following a Caesarean section; of a woman and her newborn twins being killed in an airstrike on their apartment while the father was out registering the birth; of 99 per cent of ‘households with lactating mothers’ reporting ‘difficulties developing enough breastmilk’; of ‘limited access to water’ leading to an increase in vaginal and urinary tract infections, among other diseases.

The Commission also documented a deliberate attack in mid-November 2023 on a women’s rights centre working with survivors of gender-based violence in Gaza City. The attack against the centre appeared to have a clear gendered dimension, with soldiers leaving gendered and sexualised insults directed against the Palestinian women in graffiti in Hebrew on the walls of the centre, for example: ‘You sons of bitches, we came here to fuck you, you and your mothers, you bitches’ and ‘The dirty pussies of your prostitutes, you ugly Arab you ugly, you sons of bitches, we will burn you alive you dogs.’

Based on photographic evidence, the Commission assessed that the fifth floor of the building, which sheltered abused women and families, was directly targeted and completely destroyed. The rest of the five-floor building remained intact. The Commission found the damage to be consistent with firing from a tank.

Men, too, are subjected to sexual violence. Speaking of his abuse at the Sde Teiman detention centre, one victim told the Commission:

They took me into an interrogation room and suspended me by my arms behind my back. My toes barely touched the floor. A male guard inserted a metal stick in my penis on several occasions, about twenty times in total. I started bleeding. The pain was excruciating but the humiliation was worse.

The report also documents the depravity to which settlers and soldiers will sink to threaten Palestinians into leaving their land in the West Bank. The rape culture of Sde Teiman is directly cited by settlers and soldiers as a form of intimidation.

The complicity between settlers and soldiers in the West Bank is evident in the Oscar-winning film No Other Land, which documents the steadfast resistance of the Palestinians of Musafar Yatta to the systematic attempts to destroy their community. In the film, Basel Adra, one of the filmmakers, emphasises to his dispirited colleague, Yuval Abraham, after yet another house demolition, that the need is to focus on the long game.