Rights and Accountability 13 June 2024
On Saturday 8 June, at 11 in the morning, as families and children were in the busy market in the densely-populated Nuseirat refugee camp, Israeli warplanes and attack helicopters started circling overhead while Israeli special forces using civilian vehicles invaded the camp.
According to eyewitness reports and documentation by human rights groups, the special forces raided two homes inside the camp, followed by attacks by Israeli tanks and quadcopters on three separate areas of the camp.
Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights states that the ground assault “coincided with Israeli warplanes directly striking five homes in the camp while their residents were still inside and intensively conducting airstrikes and fire belts in those three areas.”Al-Mezan adds that “the ground attack, combined with the Special Unit’s infiltration and relentless bombardment, took place when the Nusairat Camp’s market was overcrowded with thousands of shoppers. It is important to note that Nusairat shelters tens of thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinians from the eastern Middle Area and Rafah.”
The Israeli army announced that the attack was launched in order to release four Israeli captives, who were taken at the Supernova music festival on 7 October.
274 Palestinians, including 64 children, were killed in the attack which lasted around 75 minutes, al-Mezan reports.
According to initial information, al-Mezan says that the overwhelming majority of those killed were targeted while at home or on the streets, with some being killed as they were trying to flee the Israeli attacks from the camouflaged civilian vehicles.
Nearly 700 were wounded, including 153 children. Ambulance and rescue teams struggled to evacuate killed and injured Palestinians, many of whom had been shredded to pieces or decapitated by the bombing, the human rights group reports.
“This attack further proves Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians and blatant disregard for Palestinian life. The sheer scale of Palestinians killed and injured underscores a deliberate and callous indifference to Palestinian suffering, further emphasizing a systemic policy that views Palestinian lives as expendable,” al-Mezan stated.
Al Jazeera Arabic documented testimonies of Palestinians who survived the massacre and attacks.
Our contributor Ruwaida Amer spoke to several eyewitnesses and survivors of the Nuseirat massacre. “Around 11 am, Ahmad Labad heard the sound of missiles ‘falling one after the other,’” she writes. “It was terrifying,” he said. “I hugged my children and screamed that we had to leave the house and take shelter in a school.”
As they left their home, “we saw missiles exploding around us,” he added.
“People were screaming and calling for an ambulance,” he said. “I did not look back or around me.” Ahmad carried his children as they were too afraid to walk.
Israeli jets and helicopter gunships also struck areas in nearby Deir al-Balah at the same time on Saturday.
In Deir al-Balah, our contributor Abubaker Abed reported that “I opened my phone and started to film the attacks.”
“A blast occurred nearby and it felt like my eardrums had been pierced. A building mere meters away had been targeted.”
“Another airstrike destroyed a house in our area. Missiles kept falling around us.”
Abu Obeida, the spokesperson for the Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, said that some Israeli captives were killed during the operation.
Maureen Clare Murphy wrote that Israel has so far not reported any fatalities among the captives during the raid.
Abu Obeida said that “by committing horrifying massacres the enemy was able to liberate a few of its prisoners but at the same time it killed some of them during the operation. This operation will constitute a major danger to the enemy’s prisoners and will have a negative impact on their conditions and their lives.”
Murphy added that “Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of hiding among civilians to justify its targeting and destruction of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, in Gaza, while apparently using trucks disguised as humanitarian aid to carry out an operation that killed scores of civilians.”
Feigning civilian or non-combatant status, as Israeli forces appear to have done, and hardly for the first time, may constitute the war crime of perfidy under international humanitarian law, Murphy notes.The Israeli army habitually uses the tactic of disguising its soldiers as civilians in order to carry out extra-judicial assassinations and deadly raids, especially in the occupied West Bank.
American intelligence units provided intelligence to the Israeli army for the Nuseirat operation.
US National Security advisor Jake Sullivan stated on the day of the raid and massacre that “The United States is supporting all efforts to secure the release of hostages still held by Hamas, including American citizens. This includes through ongoing negotiations or other means.”
The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated at an international conference in Jordan on Tuesday that it was “high time” for a ceasefire along with the unconditional release of the remaining Israeli captives.
But he made no mention whatsoever of the thousands of Palestinian hostages, many held for years without charge or trial, and many being systematically tortured in various Israeli prisons and concentration camps.
Massacre at UNRWA school in Nuseirat
Two days before Saturday’s Nuseirat massacre that killed 274 and injured 700, Israeli forces bombed a United Nations school sheltering nearly 6,000 displaced people inside the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 40, including 14 children.
Maureen Clare Murphy writes that “Three prominent Palestinian human rights groups said that at least four missiles struck the southern building of the school in Nuseirat refugee camp.”
The Israeli-fired weapons “directly penetrated the roof of the second and first floors, causing damage to several classrooms and leading to almost total destruction of the three-story building.” Water tanks were destroyed.
“Both The Washington Post and CNN reported that US-supplied weapons were used in the deadly attack, which survivors said occurred without warning,” Murphy adds.
CNN stated that it had identified fragments “of at least two US-made GBU-39 small diameter bombs in video filmed at the scene by a journalist working for CNN.”
Meanwhile, Murphy notes, “Israel has previously lied about civilian infrastructure such as hospitals being used as military bases by Palestinian armed groups in an attempt to justify its attacks.”
And, of course, Israel has turned UN schools and hospitals in Gaza “into military barracks from which they may have conducted attacks on Palestinians.”
Our contributor Khuloud Rabah Sulaiman also reported on the bombing of the UN school in Nuseirat.
She writes that a man she spoke with, Ahmad Hassanein, spent hours digging in the rubble, trying to rescue people.
Some of the scenes he witnessed were especially gruesome.
“He saw a boy gathering his sister’s flesh before burying it in a pile of sand in the schoolyard,” she writes.
“He saw an injured man tearing his clothes to pieces as he grieved for his family, most of whom had been killed. He saw a girl sitting in a corridor at the school, trembling in fear and with blood streaming down her leg.”
Israeli airstrikes continued to target areas across Gaza over the last few days, including in Bureij and Maghazi refugee camps in the central areas.
On Tuesday, Palestinians captured this video of Israeli jets striking tents of displaced people on the beach in the al-Zuwaida area in central Gaza:
Palestinian health officials say that since the beginning of June, more than 800 people have been killed and more than 2,400 wounded in Israeli bombings, raids and ground offensives across Gaza.Brice de le Vingne, head of the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières emergency unit, said this week that “Since October (and certainly before), the dehumanization of Palestinians has been a hallmark of this war. Catch-all phrases like ‘war is ugly’ act as blinders to the fact that children too young to walk are being dismembered, eviscerated, and killed.”
Doctors Without Borders stated that “These attacks are the latest in a broad litany of atrocities and illustrate the type of war that Israel is fighting. Israel and its allies have repeatedly shown that there is no watershed moment, or red line in this violence.”
“The attacks now known as the flour massacre, the tent massacre; or the killing of aid workers and their families, the annihilation of hospitals and the health system more generally, have led to no more than weak diplomatic posturing, empty words, and staggering inaction,” the medical aid group added.
Gaza’s infrastructure in ruins
According to new statistics from the United Nations’ satellite imagery and analysis agency, 55 percent of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed by the Israeli military.
In a statement for World Environment Day on 5 June, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics warned that the accumulation of “mountains of tons of waste and rubble” in Gaza is “posing significant health and environmental risks.”The bureau added that the last eight months of Israel’s genocide and “excessive indiscriminate destruction of the Palestinians and their resources” has had a disastrous effect on all aspects of life in Gaza.
“Dumping thousands of tons of explosive and toxic materials causes significant pollution of soil, water and air, which negatively affects ecosystems and public health, and exposes them to threats,” the bureau stated.
“In addition, the destruction of environmental facilities such as wastewater treatment plants and desalination plants impedes the community’s ability to withstand and manage water resources, which exacerbates the risk of drought and the shortage of clean and potable water.”
The bureau added that “The United Nations Development Program estimates that at least 270,000 tons of waste (170,000 tons in south and 100,000 tons in north) have accumulated in temporary landfill sites recently that established by municipalities in close proximity to residential areas due to the lack of viable options. However, these wastes have no way to sanitary landfills, except by burning or accumulation.”
The Gaza municipality, which has been organizing ad-hoc community efforts to clear as much rubble and debris as possible, reports that its crews have been collecting and transporting garbage and other waste to the eastern part of Gaza City.
It said that along with the lack of fuel necessary to collect waste, the occupation’s destruction of vehicles, and the occupation’s prevention of municipal crews from reaching the main landfill east of the city, large quantities of waste has been left to accumulate in the streets.Destruction of hospitals amounts to “mass execution”
The Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights monitor stated this week that the Israeli army’s destruction of hospitals and medical facilities in northern Gaza, and the complete shutdown of the remaining partially operational ones, amounts to a decision for mass execution of patients.
“With the shutdown of these hospitals, all medical facilities in northern Gaza are now out of service. There are no places left to treat the wounded or sick, Maternal and child health programs are completely halted,” Euro-Med added.Following the two massacres in Nuseirat refugee camp this past week, doctors and medical staff at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in nearby Deir al-Balah in central Gaza say that the hospital has been functioning on just one remaining generator, and if it breaks down, the medical facility would be forced to close.
The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said that hospital generators are breaking down because of the blockade preventing fuel, of course, but also preventing the spare parts to repair them.On 10 June, the ministry warned that the only oxygen station in the Gaza governorate, which supplies health facilities and chronically ill patients with oxygen, could stop functioning due to the shortage of fuel.
Highlighting resilience
Finally, we wanted to bring you some images and videos from journalists and others in Gaza who are not just relentlessly documenting the unspeakable atrocities but also making sure to highlight the resilience, joy and determination of the Palestinian people.
Abdulaziz Mohammed, a volunteer with the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s ambulance crews, took a selfie with his colleagues in their ambulance this week, and posted it to Twitter with the caption “The voice of truth is much stronger than the sound of the weapon.” Physicians and medical staff at the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City posed for a photo to commemorate obtaining brand-new scrubs this week. A massive crowd gathered in central Gaza to help free a bird that became entangled in wires. And award-winning journalist Maha Hussaini posted this photo of kids she met who had just finished a lesson with their teacher in a shelter. Hussaini, who has been on this livestream before, won a 2024 Courage in Journalism award from the International Women’s Media Foundation on Monday. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy / APA Images)
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