Israel
Carries Out Deliberate
Massacre In Gaza
By Chris Marsden
11 November 2006
World
Socialist Web
Israel’s
November 8 massacre of 19 civilians at Beit Hanun in Gaza has sparked
angry protests throughout the Palestinian territories and within Israel
itself.
The government of Ehud Olmert
has insisted that the shelling by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) was
an accident due to technical error, and Israeli military officials said
the artillery was aimed at a target about 500 metres away.
This claim is not credible.
The incident follows an offensive by the IDF that has claimed 53 lives
in Beit Hanun over the last few days, supposedly aimed at ending Qassam
rocket-fire across the Gaza border into southern Israel. This in turn
follows on from Israel’s major “Operation Summer Rains”
offensive, mounted on the pretext of rescuing Corporal Gilad Shalit.
The Israeli soldier was captured
near Gaza by Palestinian militants on June 25, in revenge for an Israeli
attack that was strikingly similar in both method and intent to that
mounted on Beit Hanun. The June 9 shelling of a Gaza beach that led
to the deaths of eight people—including seven members of the same
family, of which three were children—deliberately inaugurated
a military campaign to destroy the economic, social and political infrastructure
of Gaza that continues to this day. It is an offensive that is bound
up with Olmert’s aim of establishing a Greater Israel through
the permanent annexation of much of the West Bank and East Jerusalem
and that also motivated the war waged by Israel against Lebanon in July
and August.
Since the end of June, more
than 450 Palestinians had been killed in the Gaza strip. The latest
attack on Beit Hanun has served the essential political purpose of paving
the way for a further stepping up of Israeli military aggression, ending
any possibility of resuming efforts towards a negotiated settlement
and making discussions on a unity government between Fateh and Hamas
increasingly difficult.
Eyewitness accounts paint
a terrible picture of human suffering that claimed the lives of 18 members
of the Al-Athamna family. The 19 dead is the highest Palestinian civilian
toll in a single incident since the second Intifada began in September
2000.
All the family members had
only just returned home after the pull-out of Israeli troops the previous
day. That night, between 12 and 15 shells hit the neighbourhood in a
15-minute barrage. Many were killed as they fled their homes in panic.
Eight children and seven women were among the dead. At least seven houses
in Beit Hanun were hit and at least 40 people were wounded, all civilians.
One witness told reporters,
“It is the saddest scene and images I have ever seen. I saw people
coming out of a house covered in blood. I started screaming to wake
up the neighbors.”
A boy of 14, who was wounded,
said, “We were asleep and we were awakened by shells hitting the
house of my uncle next door. Then the windows to our houses were blasted
away. We fled the house only to be hunted outside. The shells killed
my mother and sister and wounded all my siblings.”
Akram Al-Athamna, a family
member, said he had seen “smoke coming out of the house of my
uncle Saad.” Later, “Projectiles were fired directly onto
the people who were rushing out of the house. There was blood everywhere.
I saw my neighbor, Sakher Adwan; he went to get his sister, and he was
killed.”
Rahwi Hamad said, “I
opened my window and I looked out and I saw a shell hit a neighbor’s
house.... When I came out, another shell had hit the house. There was
a stench of blood and (burned) flesh.”
Surviving relatives sat weeping
in front of the buildings. According to one report, a man dipped his
fingers in a puddle of blood and daubed it on his face. “God avenge
us, God avenge us,” he cried. Firefighters had hosed the blood
off buildings and cobblestones, while ambulance crews gathered body
parts from nearby streets and gardens.
Later that day, the head
of Hamas’s Qassam rocket unit, Ahmed Ouad, was killed along with
another Hamas militant in an Israeli Air Force strike in the southern
Gaza Strip. Ouad is the son-in-law of Palestinian Foreign Minister Mahmoud
Zahar of Hamas. Another two Hamas militants were killed and four others
wounded in northern Gaza. And five Palestinians, including four Al-Aqsa
Martyrs Brigade commanders, were killed in the West Bank.
The Olmert government and
the IDF would have both predicted and counted on the angry response
of the Palestinians.
On Wednesday, several violent
incidents were reported in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In East
Jerusalem, three days of mourning closed down businesses and schools,
and protests were mounted involving hundreds. Some 200 Palestinian schoolgirls
held a spontaneous protest at the Temple Mount and were fired on with
stun grenades by riot police.
On Thursday, tens of thousands
attended the funeral of the victims. Their coffins were draped in the
yellow Fateh flag. About 20 gunmen fired sporadically into the air.
Abdel al-Hakim Awad, a Fatah spokesman, warned, “The residents
of Sderot, the residents of Ashkelon, even the residents of Tel Aviv,
are not going to enjoy security or peace as long as you are suffering,
our beloved people in Beit Hanoun.”
Hamas, which heads the Palestinian
Authority government, denounced the attack.
Khaled Mashaal, the political
leader of Hamas in exile in Syria, canceled the cease-fire with Israel
in operation since February 2005. “All Palestinian groups are
urged to activate resistance despite the difficult situation on the
ground. Our confidence in our military wing to respond is great,”
he said.
Hamas’s military wing
also called for attacks on American targets, issuing a statement that
“America is offering political, financial and logistic cover for
the Zionist occupation crimes, and it is responsible for the Beit Hanoun
massacre.” However, Ghazi Hamad, spokesman for the Hamas-led Palestinian
government, said the group had no intention of attacking American targets.
He urged “the Arab nation and the governments of the Arab countries
to protest the world’s silence and the American bias.”
Islamic Jihad said it would
carry out suicide bombings in response to Beit Hanun, and leaflets attributed
to Fateh’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades also called for the resumption
of attacks in Israel.
Palestinian Authority Chairman
Mahmoud Abbas of Fateh condemned the “terrible, despicable crime”
but called for restraint.
Palestinian Prime Minister
Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas had announced on Wednesday that he was freezing
talks on establishing a unity government with Fateh, but later said
that negotiations would resume shortly. Mustafa al-Barghouti of Fateh,
who is acting as a mediator, also insisted that talks would continue
despite “the bloodbath in Beit Hanun.”
Aside from launching a perfunctory
internal investigation by the army, Olmert has done everything he can
to make sure that hostilities worsen. Olmert, speaking in English at
a business conference yesterday, expressed regret for the “mistake,”
but insisted that Israel will continue its military operations in Gaza
as long as Palestinian rocket attacks persist and that further tragedies
were possible. “It may happen,” he said.
Israel has responded to the
humiliation it suffered in the Lebanon with a sharp shift to the right.
It is offering its services to Washington as a regional proxy for mounting
provocations against Iran and Syria in return for America’s tacit
backing for its own territorial ambitions. Olmert will meet US President
Bush in Washington later this month to coordinate policies over Iran’s
nuclear programme.
Prior to the IDF’s
latest offensive in Gaza, Olmert brought Avigdor Lieberman of the far-right
Yisrael Beitenu into his coalition government, appointing him as deputy
prime minister and “Minister for the Strategic Threat” with
a specific remit on Iran. At a meeting to “complete preparations
and training for an extensive action” in Gaza, Lieberman said
that Israel should do “as the Russians do in Chechnya.”
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