Israel is turning northern Gaza into a killing cage
by Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Abdel Kouddous
Oct 14, 2024
With the full support of the Biden administration, Israel is waging a merciless war of extermination against the 400,000 Palestinians remaining in the northern Gaza Strip as the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly considering a plan to annex the territory. No food, water, or medicine have entered the north since October 1 as Israeli forces have conducted a campaign of intense airstrikes and ground forces have invaded and encircled much of the area.
As it orders residents to flee the north, Israel has intensified its attacks on Deir Al-Balah, a city in central Gaza that has not suffered the vast scale of destruction unleashed by Israel in other parts of the Strip. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled to the city in recent months. In the early morning hours of Monday, Israel bombed a crowded tent encampment for displaced people on the grounds of Al Aqsa hospital, engulfing civilians in a massive ring of fire. Video from the scene showed patients—some of whom appeared to be in beds attached to IV cords—being burned alive as others in the encampment tried desperately to extinguish the fires with small buckets of water.
“I swear to God I saw people burning in front of me. By god, no one could do anything. The man, the woman and the little girl burning in front of me, I swear to God. In front of me they burned, in front of me. Their souls left in front of me, in front of us, in front of all our eyes,” said Saleh Al-Jafarawi, an independent Palestinian journalist who filmed the massacre. “No one was able to do anything, no one was able to advance and get them. We tried, but we couldn’t, the fire was so strong that no one was able to advance and pull them out of the fire. They were burned alive. Their bodies were charred. This is a crime that we have never seen and no one has seen like it,” he added in a video posted on his Instagram account. “I swear to God the scenes that will remain in our memories, will remain in our hearts forever. We will never forget the scene that I witnessed today: The scene of the child and he is burning in the heart of the fire and no one was able to help him.”
At least four people died and 70 others, mostly women and children, were wounded with many suffering severe third degree burns. The death toll is expected to rise dramatically, as local medical officials have described many of the injured as being in critical condition. The hospital was already operating well over capacity and many patients are treated on the floors or in hallways. “We’re already dealing with the overflow from mass casualty incidents and the general baseline level of trauma that we get and then you add to that we have patients who get significant, high percentage burns. Unfortunately their fate is sealed, they won’t even make it to the ICU. They will die. Many children, many women with significant burns die. That’s the reality on the ground here,” Dr. Mohammed Tahir, a surgeon from the UK who is volunteering at Al Aqsa Hospital, told Al Jazeera. “It’s a horror show here. It doesn’t feel real anymore. Honestly, sometimes I feel this is not real life, that this can go on and this degree of suffering is allowed to happen in this world. It’s unimaginable.”
Since January, Israel has attacked the tent encampments in and around the hospital at least seven times.
The Israeli military characterized its incineration of civilians in tents at the hospital as a “precision” strike against “terrorists who were working in a command and control complex that was established in an area previously known as the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.” The IDF, which vowed to continue such attacks, provided no evidence to support its claims about Hamas using the hospital. This pattern of justifying attacks on civilians and protected sites by claiming Hamas uses them as human shields or command centers has been a hallmark of Israel’s genocidal war, a lethal narrative that has been repeatedly bolstered by senior U.S. officials.
A recent report by an independent UN Commission found that “Israeli security forces asserted that over 85 percent of major medical facilities in Gaza were used by Hamas for terror operations, but did not provide evidence to substantiate that claim.” The commission accused Israel of war crimes in its attacks against hospitals, clinics, ambulances and medical workers. “Attacks on health-care facilities are an intrinsic element of the Israeli security forces’ broader assault on Palestinians in Gaza and…
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