Al Mayadeen – May 28, 2024
Day 235 of Israeli aggression:
36,096 killed, 81,136 injured in Gaza
All hospitals in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, are out of service except for Tal al-Sultan Maternity Hospital as the Israeli occupation continues its aggression.
The number of Palestinians killed in the Israeli aggression on Gaza since October 7 has risen to 36,096, in addition to 81,136 injuries, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported today.
The Israeli occupation committed 5 massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, killing 46 and injuring 110 in the past 24 hours, it added.
Many martyrs remain under the rubble and on the streets as the IOF prevent ambulances and civil defense crews from reaching them.
It is believed that these numbers are nowhere near the true number of victims of "Israel's" genocidal war in Gaza, as Palestinian healthcare authorities face significant challenges in accurately tallying the number of martyrs wounded and individuals dying beneath the rubble.
In addition, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said that since the start of the Israeli war on Gaza, "Israel" has killed 500 medical staff members.
Israeli aggression in Gaza puts more hospitals out of service
All hospitals in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip are out of service except for Tal al-Sultan Maternity Hospital as struggles on its own to continue functioning and providing services to patients in Rafah Governorate, Gaza's Ministry of Health reported.
Six hospitals have gone out of service as a result of the continuation and expansion of the Israeli incursion into Rafah and its deliberate targeting of several hospitals and primary care centers, causing severe damage and killing several crew members amid the difficulty of reaching these hospitals, which are as follows:
- Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital,
- Abu al-Walid Central Clinic,
- the Rafah Field Hospital (2),
- the Kuwait Specialized Hospital,
- the Indonesian Field Hospital
- Tal al-Sultan Clinic
- As part of the IOF's deliberate targeting of health institutions in Gaza, it targeted the Indonesian Field Hospital yesterday night and the vicinity of Tal al-Sultan Clinic, the Ministry said.
- It further urged all UN and international organizations to protect all hospitals, medical staff, and ambulances from the brutality and arrogance of the Israeli occupation.
- Regardless... 'Israel' is still attacking Rafah
- The Israeli occupation continues its massacres against Palestinians in Gaza as Al Mayadeen's correspondent reported on violent and continuous Israeli bombing, especially on Rafah, south of the Strip.
- "Israel" has been violently and continuously bombing Rafah through artillery shelling and aerial and drone bombing in parallel with its incursion toward Salah al-Din Gate in the western region along the border with Egypt.
- Al Mayadeen's correspondent confirmed that up until now, the Israeli bombing has not stopped as it has targeted most of the western areas of Rafah.
- Our correspondent also confirmed that Israeli occupation tanks were stationed on the Zo'rob Hill on the Palestinian-Egyptian border, while the IOF bulldozed the Zo'rob cemetery, west of Rafah.
- This comes as the death toll from the Israeli bombing of Rafah in only a few hours rose to 16.
- The IOF did not only randomly shelled and bombed the area, but they also launched a series of raids on the tents of displaced Palestinians northwest of the city, our correspondent said.
- Amid the Israeli aerial and artillery bombardment and attacks on several homes in the vicinity of the Zo'rob roundabout, Tal al-Sultan, and al-Saudi neighborhood, the area west of Rafah witnessed mass displacement.
- Our correspondent said that the Israeli occupation artillery shelled the minarets of several mosques in the al-Saudi and Tal al-Sultan neighborhoods, west of Rafah.
- In the Tal al-Sultan area as well, IOF vehicles opened fire on a civil defense ambulance as it was evacuating an injured Palestinian from the area.
- The internet and electricity have also been cut off from Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital since the morning of May 27.
- As for the north, IOF aircraft bombed a group of Palestinians attempting to return to al-Faluja in Jabalia camp, killing and injuring several of them.
- Bhttps://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/day-235-of-israeli-aggression--36-096-killed--81-136-injured
World Socialist Web Site – May 28, 2024
Israel massacres dozens in strikes on Rafah refugee camp
By Jordan Shilton
The Israeli regime’s deliberate massacre of at least 45 displaced people in a tent camp in Rafah marks yet another act of barbarism in its genocide against the Palestinians. Dozens of men, women and children, who had already fled multiple times in the past seven months, were massacred and maimed in a firestorm of American-supplied missiles fired by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
Sunday’s bombardment was a direct response by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fascistic government to Friday’s order from the International Court of Justice calling for an end to Israel’s military intervention in Rafah. The Zionist regime wanted to make clear that it will not be bound by any restrictions imposed by international law. It feels able to act so provocatively because it has full confidence in the unflinching support of the imperialist powers, first and foremost the United States, for its “final solution” of the Palestinian question.
The strike was carried out “with precise ammunition and on the basis of precise intelligence,” the IDF asserted. Its statement blandly noted that the military was aware that “several civilians in the area were harmed. The incident is under review.”
The most commonly used “precise ammunition” fired by the IDF at Gaza are weapons fitted with US-produced Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb kits, which transform standard weapons into GPS-guided munitions. US aerospace company Boeing accelerated the dispatch of at least 1,800 such kits to Israel in October 2023, as the Netanyahu regime’s genocide got underway. Since then, they have played a major role in slaughtering well over 36,000 Palestinians, the current official death toll.
The Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood of western Rafah, where the camp was located, was supposedly a “safe zone” for Palestinian civilians. According to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, many victims were “burned alive” in their tents. An estimated 249 people were injured in the strike, which eyewitnesses told CNN included at least eight missiles. One survivor, who made it to the Kuwaiti hospital, stated, “The air strikes burned the tents, the tents are melting, and the people’s bodies are melting.”
With Gaza’s healthcare system collapsing after months of repeated attacks by the Israeli regime, many of the injured will not survive. A doctor who spoke to Al Jazeera after returning to Britain from an aid mission in Gaza stated that hospitals in the enclave are providing “medieval medicine” to patients.
“It is what you would hear about or read about what would be happening in Europe maybe 300, 400 years ago,” commented Dr. Khaled Dawas, the head of gastrointestinal surgery at University College London. He added that injured Palestinians often avoid going to hospital because it “means pretty much a death sentence.”
One day after the massacre, the director of the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah, where many of the injured were treated, announced the closure of the facility due to Israeli attacks. Earlier in the day, two healthcare workers were reportedly killed in a strike on the facility’s gates. The al-Aqsa hospital in Deir el-Balah was also set to suspend all services due to a lack of fuel triggered by an IDF blockade that was initiated on the same day as the refugee camp massacre.
This latest atrocity has the Biden administration’s fingerprints all over it. The IDF’s onslaught on Rafah has proceeded over the past three weeks after the White House gave it the green light. Just two weeks before Israel attacked Rafah, Biden signed a supplementary military assistance bill passed with bipartisan support that included $26 billion in funding for Israel.
Biden has asserted that Israel is doing “all it can to ensure civilian protection,” while National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan insisted that the IDF’s assault has “not involved major military operations into the heart of dense urban areas.” This line has been maintained even as over 800,000 people have fled the city. Likewise, administration officials continue to claim that killing civilians in Rafah is a “red line,” even as the IDF does this every day with impunity.
The Biden administration’s lying claims that no “major” operations are taking place in Rafah and that it opposes killing civilians are no more credible than Netanyahu’s attempt to present the bombing of the refugee camp in comments Monday as a “tragic mistake.” The fact of the matter is that as horrific as Sunday’s massacre was, it is part of a pattern of systematic targeting of defenceless civilians by the IDF.
From the bombardment of the al-Ahli hospital, killing upwards of 500 people, to the storming of the al-Shifa hospital, and the destruction of Khan Younis, millions of workers and young people know all too well the brutality of Netanyahu’s regime and what it is capable of doing with imperialist backing.
The imperialist governments in the United States and Germany, Israel’s two most important weapons’ suppliers, reiterated their backing for the Zionist regime after Sunday’s massacre. Adopting the Israeli government’s propaganda wholesale, White House National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said:
Israel has a right to go after Hamas, and we all understand this strike killed two senior Hamas terrorists, who are responsible for attacks on Israeli civilians.
German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit labelled the strike a “mistake,” echoing Netanyahu. Hebestreit also noted that the Israeli military had launched an investigation to determine what happened, adding, according to Der Spiegel:
First of all, investigate what happened and then judge. And don’t come to an immediate judgement on the basis of pictures.
In other words, let the murderers investigate the crime scene and cover up any evidence that implicates them before we say anything about it.
No “investigation” is needed to determine what the motivation for Sunday’s massacre was. Israeli government and military officials have repeatedly asserted since the genocide began that their plan is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of Palestinians by killing them, starving them to death, or forcing them to flee the enclave, so that Israel can seize the territory.
Gaza’s inhabitants are viewed by the Zionist regime as “human animals,” as Defence Minister Yoav Gallant put it in October. Fascist National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who recently declared that he would like to live in Gaza, celebrated Sunday’s slaughter with a post on social media urging an intensification of the attacks. “Rafah with full force,” he wrote.
The imperialist powers support this barbarism because they view the Gaza genocide as a critical component of their plans to redivide the world in a rapidly escalating Third World War. The same indifference to the savage massacre of human beings in Gaza by the IDF with its never-ending supply of US-manufactured bombs is on display in Ukraine, where the US and its NATO allies have sacrificed some 500,000 Ukrainians in a war for imperialist plunder.
It was not for nothing that US Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson remarked in his denunciation of the application of the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor for arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant last week, “If the ICC is allowed to threaten Israeli leaders, ours could be next.”
The key lesson that must be drawn following the Rafah refugee camp massacre is that appeals to the powers that be, whether to imperialist governments, the United Nations, or international courts, to “stop the genocide” will fall on deaf ears.
The millions of workers, students and young people who have joined anti-genocide protests and encampments over recent months around the world must turn to the international working class, the only social force capable of leading a genuine struggle to halt the genocide against the Palestinians.
The mass political mobilisation of the working class, which produces all of society’s wealth, is the only way to stop the Israeli war criminals and their imperialist accomplices in their tracks. As workers are told in every country to accept sweeping attacks on conditions and public services to pay for militarism, war and genocide, a powerful basis exists to rally workers in struggle to stop the production and delivery of all conceivable military equipment to Israel and its allied imperialist war machines in North America and Europe.
The fight to build such a movement requires arming the working class with a socialist programme to defeat capitalist barbarism. That is the most urgent task of all for those who want to bring the genocide in Gaza to an end.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/05/28/wdtj-m28.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Israel’s Tents Massacre in Rafah Is a Heinous War Crime
By Siraj Assi
Sunday night, Israeli forces pounded a tent camp housing displaced people in a designated safe zone in north Rafah, killing at least 45 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and injuring hundreds others.
It was one of the most heinous assaults on Palestinian civilians in recent memory. Media reports show that Israel blitzed the tent camp with seven massive U.S. bombs, weighting 2,000 pounds each. According to eyewitnesses, the intensive bombing, which targeted Rafah’s Tal al-Sultan area, was a deliberate attack on Palestinian refugees sheltering in tents. The bombarded refugee tents, marked as Block 2371, had been designated by Israel as a “safe area” for civilians.
Widely circulated footage shows a night of unspeakable horror: bodies burned to ashes, charred and blackened beyond recognition; beheaded children, decapitated and ripped apart by U.S. bombs; parents clutching their dead and burned children, screaming in horror; rescuers pulling people’s charred remains from the burning tents; wounded victims transformed to the hospital with horrific and gruesome injuries.
The Rafah’s tents massacre is a horrific war crime carried out by Israel with unprecedented barbarity. Palestinians call it the “Tents Holocaust.”
Citing the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), the Palestinian news agency Wafa said the victims included women and children, many of whom were “burned alive” inside their tents. An eyewitness resident who arrived at the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah related, “Tents were melting and the people’s bodies were also melting.”
A horrified doctor who witnessed the carnage said: “In all my years of humanitarian work, I have never witnessed something so barbaric, so atrocious, so inhumane. These images will haunt me forever. And will stain our conscience for eternity.”
The Rafah’s tents massacre comes days after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to halt its military offensive there, and shortly after the International Criminal Court said it was applying for arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. In its barbaric retaliation against the ICJ ruling, Israel has bombarded Rafah with massive intensity and unprecedented brutality. Observers estimate that Israel has bombed the refugee town over 100 times since the ruling—a travesty of international justice and a slap in the face to the international court. Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, described Israel’s bombing of the Rafah camp as a “monstrous failure of humanity.”
The massacre has sparked a global outcry. International rights groups scrambled to find the words to describe the unfolding horrors in Rafah. The United Nations Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) described the images from Rafah as yet another testament that Gaza is “hell on earth.” Former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness called the massacre “the crime of crimes.”
Doctors Without Borders said it was “horrified” by the assault, which “shows once again that nowhere is safe.” ActionAid humanitarian group says it was “outraged and heartbroken” by the “inhumane, barbaric” assault on the Rafah camp: “The images coming from our partners of burned bodies are a scar on the face of humanity and the global community, which so far has failed to protect the people of Gaza.” Calling for action against Israel, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to housing wrote: “Attacking women and children while they cower in their shelters in Rafah is a monstrous atrocity. We need concerted global action to stop Israel’s actions now.”
Western leaders, meanwhile, have offered their usual bromides. Josef Borrell, the E.U. foreign policy chief, said he was “horrified by news coming out of Rafah on Israeli strikes killing dozens of displaced persons, including small children,” while French President Emanuel Macron said he was “outraged by the Israeli strikes that have killed many displaced persons in Rafah.” Yet it’s not immediately clear whether that “outrage” would lead to European sanctions on Israel.
Rafah is home to 1.4 million displaced Palestinians, most of whom are women and children sheltering in makeshift tents. The attack on the tent camp in Tal al-Sultan came shortly after Israeli forces bombed shelters housing displaced Palestinians in Gaza, including Jabalia, Nuseirat, and Gaza City, killing at least 160 Palestinians. So far Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has reaped over 35,000 victims, including over 15,000 children. It has displaced nearly 2 million Palestinians, mostly to Rafah, which has been mercilessly bombarded by Israel.
In a flagrant violation of international norms and humanitarian laws, Israel continues to act with total impunity in Gaza, enjoying Western complicity, and emboldened by U.S. unconditional military and diplomatic support. Amid global outrage and condemnation, Israeli leaders continue to call for the total annihilation of Gaza, with thousands of Israelis are now taking to Telegram groups to celebrate IDF atrocities with images of burned Palestinian children.
For over eight months, Palestinians in Gaza have been sharing live videos of their daily executions, pleading with the world to stop the carnage. But the Western political class has remained silent, piping up only to offer platitudes about human rights and international law, while refusing to rein in Israel’s unhinged barbarity, let alone impose sanctions on a genocidal state that is brazenly retaliating against the ICJ ruling by massacring even more Palestinians.
Seraj Assi is a Palestinian writer living in Washington D.C.
https://countercurrents.org/2024/05/israels-tents-massacre-in-rafah-is-a-heinous-war-crime/
Much of the World Awakens to a Decades Long Genocide
by Kim Petersen
Several times over the past two decades, I have written about the malevolence of Israel (and by that I mean Zionist Israel, which is predominantly Jewish, although there are likeliest quislings among the Palestinian ranks, e.g., Mahmoud Abbas). Israel is part of Historical Palestine. However, the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine wrested a chunk of Historical Palestine away from Palestinians.
Since its inception, Israel, the self-declared Jewish State, has been staunchly backed by the US with the tacit support of other western nations. Israel, indeed, has a powerful lobby.
Israel has managed to chip away at the original 1947 UN partition plan map, that set borders for Jews and Arabs in Historical Palestine, until Palestinians were left with a fractional land base. Yet, when many so-called pundits speak of a two-state solution, they invariably speak of the 1967 borders and not the 1947 borders. Meanwhile, Israel, which acknowledges no borders for itself, has become ensconced in Syria’s Golan Heights, Lebanon’s Shebaa farms, and chunks of the West Bank. 
Many Palestinians have been forced to live their entire lives outside their homeland. Ilan Pappe wrote a book called The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine which relates the plight of 800,000 Palestinians pushed outside Historical Palestine. In my review of Pappeﾒs book in 2007, I credited him with putting words to the Zionist crimes against Palestinians, but I (and my colleague Gary Zatzman) took issue with Pappe’s reluctance to call the “Israel-Palestine conflict” (Pappe’s wording) genocide.
I concluded,
Why is it an “Israel-Palestine conflict”? It implies an equivalency between the two sides. There is no equivalency. It is a Zionist genocide perpetrated against Palestinians, abetted by much of the by standing world. This is what it has always been and continues to be.
Finally, in 2009, Pappe demurred and called ethnic cleansing a “genocide in slow motion.”
Israeli academics had already argued that ethnic cleansing is genocide, although they eluded mention of the Nakba.
Following 7 October, Israel amped up its destruction of hospitals, schools, mosques, homes, etc; committed several massacres and war crimes; to which Israeli officials uttered openly racist epithets dehumanizing Palestinians which is just more of the same from Israeli officials, as racism and apartheid are Israeli policy. (See “Israeli Zionist Racism Unmasked” and the series: “Defining Israeli Zionist Racism” Parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12.).
Now, with the amping up of the destruction, massacres, and openly racist epithets by Israeli officials against Palestinians and Palestinian society, much of the fence-sitting world has recognized what this has always been: a genocide perpetrated by Israeli Jews (with polls indicating support by a majority of Israeli Jews, a stable sentiment over the years). Nonetheless, many western governments continue to provide cover for Israeli war crimes; for instance, sending in the gendarmes to crack down on the free speech rights of morally centered students opposed to the genocide against Palestinians. Or, in the US case, sending arms to Israel.
It took South Africa to have the fortitude to haul Israel before the International Court of Justice in the Hague.
And it seems the ICJ directives for Israel to halt further aggressions against Palestinians gave the International Criminal Court (ICC) the gumption toﾠissue warrants for the arrest of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant. For good measure, three Palestinians — Yahya Sinwar (Hamas leader), Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri (commander-in-chief of the military wing of Hamas), and Ismail Haniyeh — were also indicted, for alleged involvement in the October 7 attacks, even though Palestinians have the inalienable right to resist occupation and oppression.
They say justice delayed is justice denied; only time will tell if the international legal deliberations to protect Palestinians from Israeli war crimes will be successful.
Kim Petersen is an independent writer. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com.
https://countercurrents.org/2024/05/much-of-the-world-awakens-to-a-decades-long-genocide/
Egyptian Nasserist Party calls for cancellation of Camp David Accords
Following the martyrdom of an Egyptian soldier on the border with Palestine, the United Nasserist Party calls for a list of demands to be implemented in support of the Palestinian people.
The United Nasserist Party in Egypt condemned the "disgraceful positions" of Arab regimes, especially on the Israeli invasion of the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, Rafah.
The movement pointed out that Arab states are "true partners" in the genocidal crimes committed by the Israeli regime against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.
In a statement, the movement rejected the stance of the Egyptian government, saying that it has not taken any decisive and deterrent measures that reflect "the prestige and value of Egypt."
Specifically, the United Nasserist Party pointed to the inaction of the Egyptian government vis-à-vis the Israeli invasion of Rafah, which it believes has encroached on Palestinian lives and Egyptian national security.
Regarding the latter, the Nasserist movement is referring to the fact that the invasion of Rafah along the Palestinian-Egyptian border and the Israeli occupation of the Rafah border crossing are actions that violate the terms of the Camp David agreement and Egyptian sovereignty.
On that issue, the statement pointed to the recent clashes between Egyptian troops and Israeli occupation forces near the border, which led to the martyrdom of at least one Egyptian soldier. The movement said that the martyred soldier should be hailed as "a symbol and embodiment of Egypt's national conscience and its steadfast doctrine in war and struggle against the enemy."
In this context, the Egyptian United Nasserist Party called for a series of actions to be taken by the Egyptian government, including:
- Severing all ties with the Israeli regime, canceling all treaties, foremost of which are the "shameful" Camp David Accords and "peace agreement", and criminalizing all forms of relations and normalization with "the Zionist enemy";
- Providing all forms of support to the valiant Palestinian Resistance;
- Asserting Egypt's sovereign rights over the Rafah border crossing by opening it for humanitarian aid and the transfer of injured people without coordination with the Israeli regime;
- Lifting the security restrictions imposed on the citizens and releasing the prisoners of conscience, especially those detained due to their participation in pro-Palestine protests;
- Supporting campaigns boycotting the companies and products affiliated with the Israeli regime
- The movement also affirmed the right of the Egyptian and Arab people to utilize all means and methods of expression in support of the Palestinian people and their Resistance.
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