The cruelty of the Israeli army towards the civilian population of Gaza is neither coincidental nor the product of uncalculated military tactics. No. The first United Nations report on the war launched by Israel against that Palestinian territory in October 2023 underlines that Israeli soldiers have “White card” to attack the Palestinian population with a strategy aimed at “causing the greatest damage.”
This report, prepared by order of the UN by the International Independent Commission of Inquiry for Palestineexplains the brutality of the massacres carried out by the Israeli army, which have already left more than 37,000 Palestinians dead and almost 85,000 injured, and entire cities turned into rubble.
The report also accuses Hamas of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The report does not remove responsibility from Hamaswhom he also accuses of war crimes and crimes against humanity for that massacre of October 7 and for the almost 250 captives he took to the Strip. But the UN holds Israel, a supposed democratic state, responsible for committing the same crimes of “murders and intentional homicides” and for multiplying them, by attacking the more than two million inhabitants of Gaza and using, in addition to bombs and weapons most destructive, hunger as an instrument of repression and extermination.
According to this commission, chaired by the South African Navi Pillaythe Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the head of an extremist Government, made up of far-right and ultra-Orthodox religious, “gave carte blanche to its security forces to attack civilian targets widely and indiscriminately in Gaza.
An example of the atrocities denounced by this devastating document was experienced last week in the Nuseirat refugee camp. On Thursday an Israeli bombing already caused at least 40 civilian deaths. But it was only the prologue of the hell that the occupying army was going to unleash.
On Saturday, in the operation to free four of the Jewish captives who were held there, the Israeli armed forces killed 274 people in Nuseirat in one of the largest massacres caused by the invading army since the beginning of this war. .
The US no longer knows what to do in the face of Israeli closure
This massacre led the United States, Israel’s main ally, to accelerate its proposal for a six-week truce and to present a draft resolution before the UN Security Council that was finally approved this Monday and that demanded the implementation of that truce. Stop the fire.
Israel, as with all other resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council on Palestine, again turned a deaf ear to international pressure and intensified attacks on Gaza. The US, to avoid embarrassment and its ineffectiveness in breaking Israel’s destructive will, blamed Hamas for not doing enough to accept the truce.
Hamas agreed to the ceasefire with conditions, but Israel turned a deaf ear
The political leadership of the Islamist group actually agreed to the terms of the proposal, but insisted on outlining some points and clarifying the real duration of the ceasefire, as well as details about the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces.
The truce project, presented by President Joe Biden himself, advocates for a ceasefire in three phases, for six weeks. It contemplates the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from the most densely populated areas of Gaza. It also demands the release of the women, children and elderly who remain among the hundred hostages still in the hands of Hamas, who will be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners currently in Israeli jails.
Finally, it contemplates the rreturn of displaced Palestinians to their homes in Gaza and the increase in humanitarian aid and basic goods to the Strip.
Final victory at any cost
The United States insisted that Israel had approved the document, which was not entirely true. Tel Aviv has shown signs of acquiescence to all the truce proposals that have been presented, but at the last moment it has thwarted them.
Netanyahu himself has reiterated that there will be no truce in Gaza until Hamas has been annihilated and is no longer a “vital” threat to Israel. For this reason, the prime minister is committed to carrying out the military operation to the end and thus achieving the objectives of the campaign, which include “total victory” in Gaza.
Netanyahu is committed to carrying out the military operation to the end and thus achieving “total victory”
The disagreement over the scope of this strategy, as well as the fate of Gaza, led to the departure of the Government of Benny Gantz, the moderate Israeli leader, and two other ministers. Gantz has become the emblem of those in Israel, without giving up the defeat of Hamas, who do contemplate the possibility of coexistence with the Palestinians in two separate states.
Netanyahu and his extremist acolytes in the Government reject this Arab State and many of them consider that this “total victory” requires annihilation of the Palestinians and the annexation of Gaza, a step that even the United States opposes, where this war is costing Joe Biden a high cost that could be reflected in the presidential elections in November.
For the most radical Israelis, total victory must be achieved at any cost and this is what the UN denounces with this harsh report. The document adds that Israel’s strategy in Gaza responds to the “Dahiya doctrine“disproportionate and indiscriminate response.
Dahiya is a neighborhood in Beirut that was razed in 2006 by Israeli planes, in an attack against the pro-Iranian militia Hezbollah who took shelter there, annihilating both the guerrillas and the civilian inhabitants of that part of the Lebanese capital.
After the latest Hezbollah attacks this week and the way things are in southern Lebanon, perhaps what happened in Dahiya could be repeated not only in Gaza but in that neighboring country in the near future.
According to the UN report, many of the targets destroyed in Gaza were civilians and there was no doubt about that. Entire neighborhoods in Gaza City, Khan Younis or Rafah, were destroyed like this, without hesitation. Under its ruins there could be another 10,000 dead.
Hunger as a weapon
The 200 pages of the report include testimonies of summary executionstorture, senseless murders of civilians and forced displacement from their homes, always under the premise of what Israel’s own Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallanthas described it as a fight “against animals. The UN speaks directly of “extermination.”
Israel is also accused of using “the hunger as a weapon“. This Wednesday the World Health Organization (WHO) reported the death of at least 32 Palestinian children due to malnutrition, 28 of them under five years of age. In addition, “more than 8,000 children under five years of age have been diagnosed with malnutrition acute, 1,600 of them serious,” explained the director general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
UN Coordinator: “Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to deliver humanitarian aid”
The need to reach a truce is imperative at this time, not only to guarantee the survival of the hundreds of Israeli captives who remain kidnapped by Hamas. A ceasefire is necessary to guarantee arrival of humanitarian aid supplies to the hundreds of thousands of Gazans who do not even have drinking water and even less medicine in the very few hospitals that still function in the Strip.
Gaza is “the place most dangerous in the world for the delivery of humanitarian aid,” said Sigrid Kaag, UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction of the Strip. According to Kaag, the destruction in the Strip is “so dramatic” that describing this territory as “a hell in the land is correct.”
Blinken remains silent before Israel
This Wednesday, the North American Secretary of State, Anthony Blinkenmet with the emir of Qatar, Mohamed bin Abdelrahmanone of the mediators in the negotiations for a truce, along with representatives of the United States and Egypt themselves.
Blinken, it was shown critical of Hamas’ “numerous” objectionsto the US truce project, and called for “an immediate ceasefire, ensuring the release of all hostages, addressing humanitarian needs and ending the war in Gaza.”
But the problem, Blinken knows well, is not so much in Hamas as in Israel, willing to use again and again the humanitarian crisis unleashed in Gaza by its invasion. The US can reprimand Netanyahu as many times as necessary for the massacres in Gaza, but it is of little use if the Pentagon continues to supply Israel the same weapons with which these massacres are being committed.
Nor is it any use for Washington to defend Israel before the international courts of justice that have accused this country of genocide or that They have called for the search and capture of Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Israeli argument, accepted without hesitation by Republicans in the United States and by many right-wing and far-right parties in Europe, is that Palestinian civilians were simply in the wrong place and time. Just when the planes or the cannons and Israel dropped their bombs against the Hamas terrorists.
