With international media coverage shifting to potential war with Iran, Israel is intensifying its campaign to obliterate the Palestinians of Gaza 

JEREMY SCAHILL AND SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS, DROP SITE NEWS, 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 the physical and demographic infrastructure of Gaza, as well as of efforts to expand the occupation,” the report charged. “The Commission finds that Israel has implemented a concerted policy to destroy the health-care system of Gaza.”

Gaza: “A never ending hell”

International media coverage of the genocide against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip has receded in recent weeks as focus has shifted to a potential war between Israel and Iran. The Pentagon announced on Sunday that the U.S. is delivering THAAD missile defense systems to Israel and deploying roughly 100 U.S. troops to operate them in the event of an Iranian counterstrike to an anticipated Israeli attack on Iran. Vice President Kamala Harris recently told 60 Minutes that Iran was the U.S.’s “greatest adversary,” a position that contradicts the conclusions of multiple U.S. intelligence and Pentagon assessments.  In the month since Israel began its open war against Lebanon, it simultaneously ratcheted up its mass killing operations throughout Gaza, sending a clear message that Israel’s aim is to obliterate any vestige of life, architecture or culture that existed before the October 7 attacks. 

The Biden administration, after a summer of promises that a deal to end the war was in sight, has pivoted away from any talk of a Gaza ceasefire. Both President Joe Biden and Harris have issued repeated statements proclaiming Israel’s right to self defense and have zeroed in on Iran as the center of their attention in the region. “They want to get to November 5 with as little friction as they can,” said Jasmine El-Gamal, a former Pentagon official, in an interview with Drop Site News. “So even though we’re literally watching the extermination of people, of children literally before our eyes, whether it’s slowly because of the lack of food, whether it’s because of the complete decimation of the healthcare system, whether it’s because they’re just being bombed to smithereens, is such a loud and clear message that they are not going to touch this between now and the elections.”

In a post on X on Sunday, Harris made no mention of Israel’s brutal military attacks in northern and central Gaza. “The UN reports that no food has entered northern Gaza in nearly 2 weeks. Israel must urgently do more to facilitate the flow of aid to those in need,” Harris wrote. “Civilians must be protected and must have access to food, water, and medicine. International humanitarian law must be respected.”

“The continued weapons assistance to Israel is framed as defense of Israel. That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.”

El-Gamal, the former country director for Syria and Lebanon at the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy under the Obama administration, said that some senior officials shaping U.S. policy in the region have embraced Israel’s wars as an opportunity to alter the political landscape in Lebanon and the broader Middle East, while others recognize the Gaza war as a political minefield that Harris’s election campaign should now avoid entering. “So you have this political, strategic, diplomatic, military enablement of Israel to basically have carte blanche in Gaza and Lebanon,” she said. “The continued weapons assistance to Israel is framed as defense of Israel. That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.”

Just hours before Israeli warplanes bombed the tent encampment at Al Aqsa hospital, Israeli tanks shelled a UN-run school that was housing displaced people in Nuseirat refugee camp. At least 22 people were killed in the attack and more than 80 others were wounded. The school was scheduled to operate a Polio vaccination site on Monday. “Gaza is a never ending hell. All of this must not become the new norm. Humanity must prevail,” wrote Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner of UNRWA, in a post on X.

The major Israeli military operation in northern Gaza that began nine days ago to cleanse the area of its residents has been particularly brutal. Israeli forces have surrounded and isolated a number of areas, including Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia, and Israeli tanks have reached the outskirts of Gaza City. Israel’s operations in northern Gaza have fueled speculation that the IDF is already implementing a plan promoted by a group of retired Israeli military officers led by Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, known as the “surrender or starve” plan. Palestinians in the north, according to the plan, would be given a week to leave and those who remain would be categorized as combatants by Israeli forces. Many residents of the north have refused to leave, in part because they believe that nowhere in Gaza is safe and all Palestinians are treated, by default, as legitimate targets by Israel.

The Gaza government media office said in a statement that around 300 Palestinians have been killed in the recent Israeli siege of the north and there are reports of dozens of bodies in the streets. Homes, schools, displacement shelters have all been targeted and destroyed. Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif, one of the few journalists who has not left northern Gaza since the launch of the Israeli assault over a year ago, said on Friday: “Without exaggeration, these are the most difficult days of the Israeli war on Gaza.”

Israel issued three renewed displacement orders earlier this month, calling on all civilians in northern Gaza to flee to the south while preventing them from being able to leave safely. Since then, Israeli tanks and troops have invaded and laid siege to different areas, particularly the Jabaliya refugee camp, where people are trapped and unable to move amid relentless bombardment, shelling and ground attacks. On Monday, Israel bombed a food distribution center in the camp, killing at least 10 people and wounding 30.

“We were staying at the Al-Yemen Al-Saeed Hospital, but they bombed it. About 20 people were killed. I don’t know what to do, at any moment we could die. People are starving. I am afraid to stay, and I am also afraid to leave,” a driver for Médecins Sans Frontières trapped in Jabalia camp, said.

Israeli troops have erected barricades and sand barriers blocking all exits to the city, with Israeli soldiers and quadcopters targeting anyone who moves.  “Anyone who approaches these barricades is targeted without warning,” a resident of Jabaliya told Drop Site News. “An entire family was targeted that was trying to displace and leave the camp, they were targeted in cold blood.”

Israeli forces are reportedly demolishing and blowing up homes left behind by the residents who did manage to flee. Tanks and bulldozers also stormed the Saftawi cemetery north of Gaza City on Sunday and exhumed several bodies, according to Mada Masr.

“Due to the Israeli occupation siege on Jabaliya camp, most injuries caused by the occupation’s bullets and shelling lead to death, as there are no medical resources or capabilities available to effectively treat the wounded,” Al Jazeera correspondent Hossam Shabat said in an online post. Shabat reported that the Red Crescent had stopped working in Jabaliya due to a lack of fuel as Israel issued another expulsion order. “The Israeli occupation army bombed civilians as they were fleeing these areas. The attacks have not stopped,” he said on October 12.

On Sunday, at least five children were killed when an Israeli drone attacked them as they were playing near a cafe in Al-Shati refugee camp, located on the coast, just west of Jabaliya. Commenting on the attack, Bisan Owda, an Emmy award-winning journalist, said through tears on Sunday: “These children were playing football in the street in the Shati refugee camp…They were playing in the middle of the rubble of partially destroyed places because they are children and they don’t know any way to face all of this but playing, and they were killed,” she said. “They died, just like the thousands of children before. These people did not evacuate the north of Gaza Strip, not only because they stick to their right to stay, but also because people are not safe in the south.”

Israel has continued to target Palestinian journalists in Gaza. Mohamed al-Tanani, a cameraman for Al-Aqsa TV, was killed while reporting in Jabaliya refugee camp and his colleague Tamer Labad was injured. Last week, Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi was shot in the neck, leaving him paralyzed and Ali Al-Attar was badly injured when shrapnel from an Israeli attack in Deir Al-Balah pierced his head.

“Bombings and killings are happening everywhere. Fear and terror have spread through every street and alley.”

Israel last week issued evacuation orders to three hospitals in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan, Indonesian, and Al-Awda, threatening that they would face “the same fate as al-Shifa hospital, with destruction, killing and arrest.”

Fuel to run electricity generators is running out amid the Israeli blockade, putting patients in ICU units at particular risk. A doctor at the ICU in the Indonesian hospital sent a video on Monday showing patients lying unconscious in hospital beds “This patient is hopeless and is going to die. The situation is very, very, very difficult,” the doctor says. “They hit a school near our division right now, you can hear the explosion,” he said in an accompanying audio note.

At Kamal Adwan hospital, those patients and staff that have tried to leave have been unable to do so. “The hospital has been directly targeted for over five days by drones, smoke bombs, and artillery shells near the hospital, on the hospital’s roof, and through its windows,” Dr. Eid Sabah, the director of nursing at the hospital, told Drop Site News. “Bombings and killings are happening everywhere. Fear and terror have spread through every street and alley. The hospital is in a terrible state.”

The United Nations Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, posted a photo on Sunday of the charred remains of its health center in Jabaliya. “Jabalia Camp has been the most affected area, with reports of families trapped in areas of ongoing military operations. Humanitarian access to Jabalia continues to be denied. Health facilities and workers are #NotATarget,” UNRWA wrote.

“In the past two weeks, over 50,000 people have been displaced from the Jabaliya area, which is cut off, while others remain stranded in their homes amid increased bombardment and fighting. A military siege that deprives civilians of essential means of survival is unacceptable,” said Muhannad Hadi, the UNOCHA Humanitarian Coordinator, in a statement on Sunday. “The latest military operations in northern Gaza have forced the closure of water wells, bakeries, medical points and shelters, as well as the suspension of protection services, malnutrition treatment, and temporary learning spaces. At the same time, hospitals have seen an influx of trauma injuries… Civilians must not be forced to choose between displacement and starvation.”