Commentary: Dead Westerners turn the tide in Gaza

IT took the cold-blooded mowing down of British, Polish, Australian and American-Canadian emergency workers by Israeli soldiers for the West to finally stiffen its spine against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government.

The slaughter of 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the injury of 76,000, the deaths of 90 journalists and 196 welfare personnel, all in less than six months, the deliberate starving of two million people and the destruction of almost all hospitals, clinics and schools have not been enough to prompt Washington, London, Paris and Berlin to withdraw their material and moral support for Tel Aviv.

On the contrary, the Biden administration approved even more bombs, planes and tons of dollars for Israel just last week. If the International Court of Justice eventually confirms that Israel has committed genocide, America is at least clearly complicit.

Israel's excuse that the attack on a World Central Kitchen (WCK) convoy on Monday, in which seven people died, was a “mistake", is absurd according to overwhelming information about the attack.

The vehicles, which had just delivered food for the starving, were clearly identified on their roofs and doors as WCK vehicles. Not only were they on a route approved by the Israeli military, they were in communication with the soldiers in the area who knew exactly who and where they were.

Israel has boasted in the past that its drones can spot a “swastika on a boot" from the air.

And yet, a drone fired a missile at the first vehicle — photos show it went right through the WCK logo on the roof. The survivors immediately informed the soldiers of what had happened and the wounded were taken to the second vehicle. When they arrived there, a missile also struck that vehicle. The survivors then moved to the third vehicle, but they were hit by a third missile and all were killed.

Here is the founder of WCK, a legend in international relief, José Andrés:

This information about how the three attacks unfolded has been confirmed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, by the BBC, Sky News, CNN and several Western newspapers.

Haaretz reported that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) initially said there was a Hamas member in one of the vehicles. Shortly thereafter, they stated that this man had stayed in the warehouse. If they did think there was a Hamas operator in the convoy, the newspaper asks, how did they know he survived the first missile attack? If they knew of his presence, why did they wait until he was in the company of welfare workers?

“What this tells us is that the IDF will kill an almost unlimited or undefined number of civilians in order to kill one Hamas member of unspecified rank and commitment."

The Israeli military later dropped the story of the Hamas operator and just said the attack was a tragic mistake.

It was not a mistake; it is Israel's policy, Israeli writer and journalist Gideon Levy tells the BBC.

The death of the seven WCK workers distracted attention from another grotesque transgression, likely another war crime, shortly before: the total destruction of the largest hospital in Gaza, Al Shifa, in an operation that lasted more than two weeks. Television cameras later showed dozens of mutilated bodies and surviving doctors and nurses told how many of their colleagues were summarily shot dead. More than 300 bodies were later found.

Former Israeli national soccer player and prominent media personality Alon Mizrahi says even ISIS has not committed such a gruesome act:

A Norwegian medical specialist who has worked extensively in Gaza over the years, Dr Mads Gilbert, posted a press conference by surviving doctors from Al Shifa on Twitter/X:

The missile attacks on the WCK convoy were, from the perspective of the Israeli government, just a “mistake" because they brought so much negative publicity from the West. This kind of targeting of medical personnel, emergency workers and ordinary civilians, women and children, has happened every day since October 7 last year.

CNN, which loudly defended Israel and its war after the Hamas attack on Israel, for example, last month in a special report graphically showed how civilians waving white flags and visibly unarmed were shot or blown up by Israeli snipers on at least nine occasions.

Israel's +972 Magazine revealed this week that the Israeli military uses artificial intelligence without human intervention to identify people and buildings for assassination or bombing. The system is called Lavender and works in part on the likelihood that someone is a Hamas supporter.

According to +972, the policy is to wait until suspects arrive at their homes before bombing them and the women and children they live with — that's how so many entire families have been wiped out. The standard is reportedly that 20 civilians may be killed for every suspected Hamas operator, but for senior Hamas officials this number is more than 100.

Recent drone video footage from Gaza shows the almost total destruction of most homes and buildings, a scene reminiscent of the bombing of Warsaw or Dresden in World War 2.

According to CNN, US intelligence services have calculated that nearly half of the tens of thousands of tons of bombs dropped on Gaza were “dumb bombs" rather than guided or smart bombs. They were simply intended to destroy infrastructure and everyone nearby.

There is also no other reasonable explanation for the severe famine in Gaza than calculated starvation by Israel. Thousands of tons of food and supplies are waiting at the border with Gaza but Israel refuses to let them through. In just the last two weeks, 28 children have died of starvation and thousands of others are in an extremely weakened condition.

Long ago, America could have compelled Israel to open the transit routes to Gaza, but instead it is dropping small amounts of food by plane and now it wants to build a temporary port to transport food by sea.

How is it that Bibi Netanyahu has Joe Biden by the short and curlies?

Thousands of minors have already died in Gaza and many more have been maimed or orphaned. A British plastic surgeon working in Gaza, Ghassan Abu-Sittah, told The New Yorker last week: “This is the biggest cohort of paediatric amputees in history."

In short, Gaza is a horrific wound that will take generations to heal.

It has been inflicted by an aggressive, self-righteous, bloodthirsty government that sees Palestinian lives as inferior.

Israel has been emboldened in its evil by America, Britain and Europe to a level where it thought it could kill at will; the Holocaust made it immune.

When South Africa took the conflict to the International Court of Justice, the US government declared that the application was “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever". This was mostly echoed by the Western media, which gave Israel's unprecedented international propaganda campaign legs — at least until now.

The court then decided that it is “plausible" that acts of genocide are being committed and made strong recommendations. If the rest of the world had compelled Israel to comply with these recommendations, the tremendous human suffering would have ended long ago.

The Israeli government has declared any body or agency that criticises it or wants to help the Palestinians as enemies of Israel or anti-Semitic: the UN agencies, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Médecins Sans Frontières, Oxfam, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Red Cross.

No foreign media is allowed in Gaza, and this week Al Jazeera was banned from broadcasting from Israel.

We have moved beyond the debate about whether Hamas is a cruel terrorist organisation and triggered the latest conflict on October 7 last year. It is, and it did.

We must now focus on the completely disproportionate collective punishment of the people of Gaza and their treatment as untermenschen, or as animals, in the words of defence minister Yoav Gallant.

The equivalent from our own history would be if the South African military, after the 1983 ANC bomb in Church Street, Pretoria, blocked all access to Mamelodi, flattened it with bombs, killed thousands of residents and denied survivors food and water because they are black and may support the ANC.

Yes, you might say, but Hamas could end the war immediately if it surrendered. Would that be your advice to the people of Ukraine being bombed by Russia?

Were the Afrikaners of the Boer republics actually responsible for the cruel concentration camps because they wouldn't have been built if they had surrendered to Britain early?

In the words of the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, the Gaza conflict did not happen in a vacuum and history did not begin on October 7, 2023.

Yes, Hamas should release its remaining hostages — and Israel the thousands of Palestinians held in its prisons without trial.

But we already know that Netanyahu and company are less interested in the hostages than in completely breaking the Palestinian spirit. The war on Gaza would not have gone differently if there were no hostages.

Israel and Zionists' tendency, here and elsewhere, to dismiss any criticism of the country's actions in Gaza as anti-Semitic is bad for Jews everywhere in the world.

Like me, you can be a strong supporter of the right of the state of Israel to exist and sympathetic to bigotry against Jews — and at the same time shout from the rooftops about the terrible injustice happening in Gaza.

♦ VWB ♦

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