Shelling the Aid Seekers
Israel’s “Humanitarian” Project in Gaza
It’s official. If not, it ought to be. Israeli forces freely butcher Palestinians in Gaza of all stripes, standing and states of desperation. They do so casually or indifferently or maliciously. True, they might get the odd militant here and there, but the supposedly professional Israeli Defense Forces is rather good at killing civilians. In what is becoming an almost daily occurrence, Israeli security personnel are slaughtering those seeking humanitarian aid from facilities that are obscenely restricted and appallingly located. What is unclear in the process is how devastating Palestinian militias armed and supported by the Israelis have been in pushing up the mortality count.
In one incident on 17 June, Israeli tanks—not exactly a light form of population control—fired into a crown scrounging for aid from trucks in Gaza. The resulting death toll was impressively outrageous: 59 killed. A further 14 were also killed by IDF gunfire and air strikes in the enclave, taking the death toll for 17 June to 73. On this occasion, Israel’s normally mendacious publicity arm in the IDF seemed to concede that the firing had taken place. It followed that yet another cleansing review would take place.
According to Reuters, a witness by the name of Alaa interviewed at Nasser Hospital saw the following spectacle of gore: “All of a sudden, they let us move forward and made everyone gather, and then shells started falling, tank shells.”
The IDF breezily stated that it was “aware of reports regarding a number of injured individuals from IDF fire following the crowd’s approach. The details of the incident are under view. The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimise harm as much as possible to them while maintaining the safety of our troops.”
The previous day, 34 people awaiting to collect food were killed by IDF personnel near an aid centre operated by the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a body whose dubious credentials never cease to amaze. Eyewitnesses in the crowd, including Heba Jouda and Mohamed Abed, recall Israeli troops firing on Palestinians massed around 4 a.m. at the Flag Roundabout prior to the scheduled opening of the Rafah food centre. The roundabout is located some hundreds of metres from the GHF centre, and has been the site of numerous shootings. “Fire was coming from everywhere,” stated Jouda, a worn figure who has made the harrowing journey to the aid centre a number of times. “It’s getting worse by the day.”
The International Committee on the Red Cross (ICRC) confirmed receiving 200 people at its field hospital located in the Al-Mawasi area near Rafah. Up till that point, the ICRC stated that it had been “the highest number received by the Red Cross Field Hospital in one mass casualty incident.” Carrie Garavan, a British Red Cross nurse working at the field hospital, notes the daily flow of casualties into the facility, most of whom have been queuing for food. “We are having mass casualty incidents almost every day, sometimes twice a day.”
The GHF, for its part, is lukewarm to the fattening butcher’s bill. None of the shooting incidents, claimed a spokesperson to The Associated Press, “have occurred at our sites or during operating hours.” Implying that those seeking aid were responsible for their own demise, the spokesperson went on to explain that they had moved “during prohibited times … or trying to take a shortcut.” How irresponsible of them.
In oral evidence given to the UK Foreign Affairs Committee on 16 June, Anna Halford, the Médecins Sans Frontières emergency coordinator for Gaza, found it “difficult to overstate at what point this is neither a humanitarian enterprise nor a system.” The entire Israeli aid effort in Gaza, as things stood, “was basically lethal chaos.” Prior to the current lethal order of aid distribution, 400 to 500 community-level points were functioning for those seeking food. Kitchens cooking hot meals and bakeries supplying bread were plentiful. The numbers currently operating had plummeted to four.
Halford’s picture of what is being provided is grisly. The rations are only of the dry variety. There is an absence of clean water and cooking fuel, with no cooking gas entering the enclave since 2 March. Substitute kerosene has proven woefully inadequate, causing those using it burns. Food is cooked on broken wooden pallets, salvaged plastic taken from piles of rubbish or turned up cardboard boxes.
As for the justification given by Israel for the imposition of such onerous, cruel restrictions to the provision of aid—the deviation and theft of aid by Hamas or allied forces—Halford, speaking on behalf of MSF, was sharp in rebuke. While no aid system could ever guarantee against some deviation or theft of supplies, Israel had never offered any evidence to back its claims. “It is a strawman; it is a specious and cynical position meant to undermine a humanitarian system that was actually functioning.” And that is precisely the point of the current, sanguinary exercise.
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Articles like this make me think of a teenage child complaining about how hard their life is when they can't have all they want: the lack of context is so astonishing its like listening to a screaming upper middle class teen...except its supposed to be shining some insight into a complex situation that dates back to, well, the Ottomans? No, don't mention them....