The following is a reposting of a moving piece by Palestine Will Be Free about the horrific massacre of Palestinians with 2,000 pound U.S supplied bombs who had taken refuge in the tents of the alleged “safe zone” of the Mawasi refugee camp.
Most large-scale atrocities produce enduring images that become symbolic. The napalm girl in Vietnam, the abused prisoner in a crucifix-like position in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, the mugshot of Dilawar in Bargam, Afghanistan, and the rows of men in the slave markets in Libya, etc. are all defining images of those wars of American imperialism. You see the picture and you know the context.
What would one pick as the defining image of the Gaza genocide being committed by Israel with the full backing and material and diplomatic support of the United States and its allies for nearly year? The boy who couldn’t stop shivering? The girl hanging from a rebar with her legs blown off? The headless baby raised in the air by a shocked relative? The tortured man with eyes seemingly about to pop out of sockets? The tortured man at Sde Teiman? The father carrying his son in two grocery bags? Bodies collected in grocery bags and handed out to relatives by weight? Or the latest in Israeli depravity: the metres-deep craters created by massive US-made and supplied bombs dropped by the Israelis on plastic tents housing hundreds of displaced in Al-Mawasi?
Every time you think you have seen the depths of human depravity and going any further down the depravity scale isn’t possible, the Israelis just go right ahead and lower the bar some more.
We have long known that there are no safe zones in Gaza. If anything, the Israelis assign the supposed safe zones only to ensure they get all the fish in the barrel before they begin target shooting. They did it again just after midnight on Tuesday when they dropped bombs on tent encampments in Al-Mawasi so massive that they produced craters several metres deep and wide.
Those bombs buried entire families several metres deep in the coastal sand by the Mediterranean Sea. They had to dig the sand out to get to the buried bodies, or whatever was left of them.
Following the latest episode of the Israeli war crime, Quds News Network shared these details from the Gaza Civil Defence Spokesman:
- Israeli airstrikes targeted a displacement camp consisting of at least 20 tents inhabited by displaced Palestinian families.
- The attack occurred in a place previously claimed as a ‘safe zone’ by the Israeli occupation.
- We are facing one of the bloodiest massacres during the genocide in Gaza.
- The Israeli occupation commits more massacres amid the silence of international institutions.
- At least 40 displaced Palestinians have been killed and 60 injured.
- There are entire families obliterated and buried in the sand as a result of the targeting.
By the first week of June, the Israelis had already dropped, according to one estimate, “70,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip since last October, exceeding World War II bombings in Dresden, Hamburg, London combined.”
Last week, the Gaza Health Ministry gave an update on the 335 days of the genocide. It had some grotesque numbers. The ministry put the total number of massacres in Gaza at 3,556 at an average of 10.6 massacres a day. That’s a massacre nearly every other hour for about a year, non-stop, against a population that has nowhere to run.
In one such massacre in Jabalia, north Gaza, in June, an elderly man lost over 70 members of his family. He looked old enough to have survived the 1948 Nakba as a child. (Nearly 80 percent of Gaza’s residents are refugees from historic Palestine.) His description of the massacre is the closest I have seen anyone capture the inhuman Israeli-American barbarism we have been witnessing for nearly a year.
“This is not a war, my brother,” he says. “This is a really big earthquake. This is an earthquake. This is complete destruction.”
He continues: “They don’t want to leave anything for us. Not a tree, not a rock, not a school, not a clinic, not a hospital.”
“The land has been decimated.”
The old man described Israeli barbarism as an earthquake. Israeli crimes are so depraved that they can only be described as a destructive natural phenomenon, as if to say that humans by themselves aren’t capable of producing horrors of such monstrous scale.
Earthquakes swallow buildings whole, taking with them entire families. Nothing like it happens in wars. Wars do not kill generations of families, like the Israelis have been doing as a matter of policy in Gaza. That’s what happened in Al-Mawasi last night. They eliminated entire families. Rescue workers were looking for traces of human flesh buried deep in the sand with their makeshift tools.
[I am not able to copy and paste the video Palestine Will Be Free had posted in their original blog below. However it is the same one I had flagged up to include in a post about the Al-Mawasi massacre. As such, although the video of the aftermath I am inserting below is the same as what the author had included here, the tweet is not.]
The 99th chapter of the Qur’an is titled Az-Zalzalah or The Earthquake. The eight verses of the chapter describe a scene of the end times when the earth will shake for one last time in a terrible earthquake and throw up its burdens before God, who will pass His final verdict on everyone’s fate.
Where earthquakes in this life swallow humans — as that elderly man alludes — the final earthquake will put forth its burdens.
In the mind of a man from just over a century ago, the kind of craters that Israeli terrorism produced last night could only have been caused by an earthquake.
The crater created by barbaric Israeli bombing in Al-Mawasi.
But it is not the handiwork of a natural phenomenon. It is deliberate destruction by the Jewish supremacists with the help of weapons supplied by their supporters in the West. Just last month, the US hit the landmark figure of 50,000 tons of arms supplies to its favourite genocidaires through more than 500 flights and 107 ships.
And we know for a fact that there will be no justice for the more than 40 Palestinians incinerated, decapitated, and buried in the Israeli craters in Al-Mawasi. Nor will there be any justice for the elderly man who lost more than 70 members of his family. Nor the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed since October 7. No one holds Israelis to account. They are above the law. The rules-based international ordershields the Israelis from justice, not make them face it.
In such an unjust world, perhaps the elderly man from Jabalia, those swallowed by the latest crater-creating, earthquake-simulating Israeli terror bombing, and the long-suffering Gazans can take solace from the last two verses of Az-Zalzalah, where, addressing mankind in the aftermath of the final earthquake, God says:
“So whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it. And whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it.”
Before you go
After 10 months, 94 articles, and a loss of employment due to my pro-Palestine activism (about which I will be writing soon), I have turned on paid subscription on this Substack. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to help me continue this newsletter.
The U.S., UK and everyone else who have been and are supplying Israel with 2,000lb bombs, ammunition, supplies for Israel’s F-35 fighter jets, intelligence and other weapons of war are aiding and abetting with genocide. They are complicit. They are committing war crimes and must be held accountable.
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There have been many times I have been ashamed to be a member of the human race. This completely insane Gaza genocide, insures Israel and its accomplices a place at or near the top of the list.
There have been many times I have been ashamed to be a member of the human race. This completely insane Gaza genocide, insures Israel and its accomplices a place at or near the top of the list.
Does Israel expect to ever have a days peace again after their inhumanity in Gaza.
Whatever grievances the muslim world held towards Israel, have been magnified immeasurably by their evil, barbaric, criminality.
At some point Israel will get repaid in full for this terror and they will have deserved it.