Israel said that its forces rescued four hostages on Saturday 8 June from a Gaza refugee camp. During their attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp they killed over 200 Palestinians and left hundreds wounded.
Of course, mainstream media and the West more broadly has been characterising this as a successful operation.
Apparently, this is a victory for all of us.
Well, you might ask (if you were born yesterday), isn’t it good that hostages got rescued?
For all these hostage lovers in the West, you may pay attention to the fact that in 2023 Associated Press reported that Israel held over 1,200 Palestinians without charge or trial. In other words, hostages. That number has undoubtedly increased in 2024. Has the international community even acknowledged those hostages, never mind called for their release? Has it fuck.
In Nuseirat, where the Israeli hostages were being held, Palestinians described coming under intense bombardment and heavy gunfire. After the massacre, the White House said it was a “daring” operation, Rishi Sunak said he was relieved, and plenty of UK papers called it a successful “mission.”
For the umpteenth time, we’re shown that Palestinian lives aren’t worth anything. After another weekend of devastation and destruction in Palestine horrific images on social media were awash with bloody deaths of children, men, and women.
‘Horror must stop’
Near Nuseirat on Saturday, an Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographer saw scores of Palestinians running for cover in fear of further Israeli strikes.
After the operation, piles of smouldering rubble and chunks of concrete clogged the streets.
The Hamas media office said that:
the number of victims from the Israeli occupation’s massacre in the Nuseirat camp has risen to 210 martyrs and more than 400 wounded.
Nuseirat resident Khalil Al-Tahrawi described hearing gun battles and shelling from his shelter. He said:
The Israeli warplanes began bombing us in all directions to cover up the withdrawal process.
The operation came days after an Israeli strike on the Nuseirat school run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, which a Gaza hospital said had killed 37 people and the military said targeted “terrorists”.
UNRWA condemned Israel for striking a facility it said had been housing 6,000 displaced people.
Israel accuses Hamas and its allies in Gaza of using civilian infrastructure, including UN-run facilities, as operational centres, charges the militants deny.
More accusations
There are more accusations abound, this time involving Israel and their backers, the US. In reports that haven’t yet been confirmed, the Quds News Network said:
According to Axios, citing a U.S. administration official, the American hostages unit in Israel assisted in the release of the four Israeli captives in Gaza.
Footage published by an Israeli occupation soldier confirms Israel's use of the American temporary pier in central Gaza… pic.twitter.com/GJJp1ZSA7T
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) June 8, 2024
In Middle East Eye, Jonathan Cook argued:
The pier was ostensibly built off Gaza’s coast at huge cost – some $320m – and over two months to bypass Israel’s blocking of aid by land.
Observers argued at the time that it was not only an extraordinarily impractical and inefficient way to deliver aid but that there were likely to be hidden, nefarious motives behind its construction.
Its location, at the midpoint of Gaza’s coast, has bolstered Israel’s severing of the enclave into two, creating a land corridor that has effectively become a new border and from which Israel can launch raids into central Gaza like Saturday’s.
He continued:
Those critics appear to have been proven right. The pier has barely functioned as an aid route since the first deliveries arrived in mid-May.
The pier soon broke apart, and its repair and return to operation was only announced on Friday.
Now the fact that it appears to have been pressed into immediate use as a beachhead for an operation that killed at least 270 Palestinians drags Washington even deeper into complicity with what the World Court has called a “plausible genocide”.
But like the use of the aid truck, it also means the Biden administration is joining Israel once again – after pulling its funding to Unrwa – in directly discrediting the aid operation in Gaza when it is needed most urgently.
After all that, it appears the pier isn’t even in use currently:
That was the context for understanding the World Food Programme’s announcement on Sunday that it was halting the use of the pier for aid deliveries, citing “safety” concerns.
Ceasefire ‘essential’
Israel faces growing diplomatic isolation, with international court cases accusing it of war crimes and several European countries recognising a Palestinian state.
That diplomatic isolation is already far too little and far too late for the people who had fled to Nuseirat to escape rampaging Israeli troops elsewhere. Mahmoud Al-Hawar, who survived the massacre, told Mondoweiss:
The planes bombed our neighbors’ house, and there was a girl under the rubble screaming to be saved. I went with my friends to try to save her, but the rubble was heavy, and we could not dig her out or even lift it to reach that girl, so we waited until the civil defense team arrived. A large number of young men gathered to try to rescue them. But the planes bombed us.
He continued:
I have not slept since the incident. I cannot sleep. I cannot forget anything I witnessed and saw. I cannot forget the people who were running in panic and fear, searching for their relatives and families amidst the destruction and dismembered bodies.
Tawfiq Abu Youssef, an 11-year-old child, was also caught in the massacre. He said:
I stayed under the rubble for hours. I did not think for a moment that I might survive and see life again. I had lived through death enough while I was under the rubble. That was death. I do not think I will forget or get over these moments
Thousands of people marched through London on Saturday calling for a ceasefire, while demonstrators outside the White House protested against Washington’s support for Israel amid Gaza’s deadliest-ever war. Thousands more will march this weekend, and the next, and the next. Western politicians and media are doing their best to sanitise massacres in Palestine.
We can’t let them get away with it. If nothing else, we must pay attention to the slaughter of Palestinians, and notice how the likes of the US are not allowing but enabling it to happen.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
Featured image via YouTube screenshot/BBC News
