Israeli airstrikes on Gaza Strip: A real face of state terrorism

The Israeli military said in a morning briefing Wednesday that a total of five Israeli civilians have now been killed since the start of the violent exchange of rocket fire and airstrikes between Gaza and Israel earlier this week.

by Anwar A. Khan

Israeli warplanes and helicopters conducted airstrikes in the blockaded Gaza Strip, Palestine on 10 May last. 2 banks in Rafah city, southern Gaza, also destroyed by Israeli fighter jets. 

Israeli warplanes pounded several spots on the Gaza Strip, including a residential building and two banks.

The al-Walid, a five-story building in western Gaza city, was razed to the ground. It housed residential apartments and commercial stores, in addition to the office of a Turkish relief group, Yardimeli.

Palestinian citizen Fahed al-Ghalayeni who lives in the destroyed building told Anadolu Agency that the residents were unable to take any of their belongings.

The strikes on Rafah also targeted a military site for Hamas' armed wing near the Palestinian-Egyptian border.

Israeli bombardment on Gaza has killed 69 Palestinians, including 17 children and seven women. At least 388 others have been injured, Palestinian health officials said.

More than 2,160 Palestinians were killed, most of them civilians, and some 11,000 injured in an Israeli onslaught against the Gaza Strip in 2014.

The Palestinian cause is a trickling genocide, slow but relentless, the president of the Confederation of Palestinian Communities in Latin America and the Caribbean (COPLAC) said Wednesday last. 

In an interview with Anadolu Agency, Rafael Araya Masry said “there are grounds to talk about state terrorism carried out by Israel” in the ongoing airstrikes in Gaza.  

“It’s not for nothing that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has launched an investigation against Israel for war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip with its bombings but adding a factor that is not minor: the colonization of the Palestinian territories. Colonization is a war crime,” Masry said.

Tensions have been running high since last week after an Israeli court ordered the eviction of Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem.

“This process of dispossession, basically in the holy city of Jerusalem, which Israel has declared its unique and indivisible capital, means what we say: the erasure of all human, graphic, written and cultural traces of a community who has lived there for many centuries. So, this is the violent continuation through state terrorism of a process that seeks the expulsion of the Palestinians from the eastern part of Jerusalem, which is destined to be the future capital of the Palestinian state,” Masry further said.

According to Masry, the Israeli government sends civilians -- settlers -- to bait and insult Palestinians before sending in the army to evict them from their homes.

“It is fascist to use the civilian population as a tool of a state policy to expel inhabitants. That is the tragic part of the story: the state succeeds in getting the civilian population to enter into a fascistized project.”

Besides the evictions in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Israeli authorities have harassed and attacked worshippers in the midst of prayers inside Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam, something that has escalated the violence.

Regarding a possible Intifada, Masry said "Palestinian deaths in Israeli bombings in Gaza are normal. It always happens. It seems like a conflict without a solution. How do people in the Gaza Strip, which is the world’s largest open-air prison, compete against the fourth or fifth strongest military power on the planet? Furthermore, with a state that has made military oppression the reason for invoking what they call ‘the right to defend themselves' and crush any protest or dissent, not only against Palestinians, but also against Israeli citizens and organizations who denounce what is going on with the Palestinian people.”

On the other side of the world, all but two Latin American countries recognize Palestine -- Mexico and Panama. So as a Palestinian representative in the region, Masry said the work of COPLAC is to raise awareness and gather the greatest possible support for Palestine to achieve its independence.

“For example, I asked Mercosur to issue a statement and to suspend the prerogatives it has granted to Israel by signing a free trade agreement, to put it on hold as a measure of pressure to stop the repression and bombings in the Palestinian territories.”​​​​​​​

The Palestinian Health Ministry said they have received multiple bodies believed to have died due to inhaling toxic gases.

Autopsies were conducted on the bodies at Al-Shefa Hospital in Gaza city, the ministry said in a statement, adding that the cause of death was determined to be suffocation after inhaling toxic gases.

To date, six Israelis have been killed in the recent violence – five of them in rocket attacks in addition to a soldier killed when an anti-tank guided missile struck his jeep.

As both sides traded airstrikes on Tuesday evening last, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the nation from Tel Aviv, saying, "We are in the midst of a significant operation."

The Israeli military said it had killed more than 15 militants.

Rockets were fired towards Tel Aviv in the early hours of Wednesday morning last. Sirens could be heard warning of an impending attack around 3 a.m. local time. It was not immediately clear if there were any casualties.

In the town of Ashkelon, two people were killed by rocket fire Tuesday last, according to an Israeli military spokesman. A third person died in the town of Rishon Lezion, south of Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening after a rocket attack, Israeli media reported citing the ZAKA emergency service.

A CNN team heard at least 50 explosions in the coastal town near Gaza, and rocket fire was also reported in the city of Ashdod. At least 17 Israeli civilians have been treated for injuries from rocket attacks, the military said.

On Wednesday last, Israel declared a state of emergency in the central city of Lod and dispatched border police battalions to the area for reinforcements, according to the Government Press Office. The mixed Jewish-Arab city has seen protests escalate into riots this week.

A CNN team driving through Lod early Wednesday saw roads strewn with rocks and burned-out cars. Overnight, a rocket hit a house in Dahamesh, just outside the city, killing a 52-year-old man and his daughter, both Israeli-Arab citizens.

The Israeli military said in a morning briefing Wednesday that a total of five Israeli civilians have now been killed since the start of the violent exchange of rocket fire and airstrikes between Gaza and Israel earlier this week.

Separately, in the early hours of Wednesday last, two separate buildings were hit, a three-floor residential building in which three people were killed, Gaza health officials said, and a 10-story building which suffered major damage but saw no fatalities. The larger building, known as the al-Jawahera building, houses media network companies and other offices.

Following the Israeli strike on the tower, a barrage of more than 200 rockets was then fired from Gaza into Israel.

Earlier Hamas had warned if residential tower buildings in Gaza were targeted, they would not sit idle and would respond with rocket fire.

The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, says it responded with 210 rockets fired towards Beer Sheva and Tel Aviv.

Palestinian Ministry of Health spokesman in Gaza Ashraf, Al Qidra, said many Gaza residents are now in a state of panic due to the ongoing Israeli airstrikes.

"The deliberate targeting of civilian houses and crowded residential neighborhoods puts more than half of the population of the Gaza Strip, including women and children, in a state of panic," Al Qidra said in a post to Twitter on Wednesday.

He said the ongoing Israeli airstrikes have "dangerous psychological repercussions due to frightening and successive sounds of explosions, scenes of destruction and victims."

Al Qidra also said 43% of the victims in Gaza are children and women.

Gaza's Interior Ministry's spokesman Iyad al-Bazam also said in a statement released Wednesday that dozens of Israeli airstrikes hit several areas in Gaza.

No signs of de-escalation as yet.

In the past two days, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza have fired at least 500 rockets into Israel, forcing the closure of Israel's main international airport, Ben Gurion, about fifteen kilometers east of Tel Aviv.

The militants say it is a response to the actions of Israeli police who fired stun grenades inside the Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem -- one of the city's holiest sites -- on Monday morning last. Hundreds of Palestinians went to hospitals for treatment after ensuing clashes with Israeli police, in the most serious violence seen in the city in weeks.

"We have the right to respond to the Israeli offensive and protect the interests of our people as long as the Israeli occupation continues the escalation," Hamas said in a statement.

The Israeli military has conducted more than 150 strikes in Gaza as of Tuesday afternoon, according to a military spokesman, who said Israel had also called up 5,000 reserve troops to active duty to "enhance" its operation in Gaza.

Israeli rescue teams evacuate a woman from a residential neighborhood in Ashkelon Tuesday after rockets were fired from Gaza towards Israel overnight amid spiralling violence. 

A number of deaths were reported in strikes in Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza. Among them were Amira Abdel-Fattah, 57, who was killed in her apartment along with her son who has special needs, Ibrahim al-Masri, 11, and his brother Marwan, 7, the Palestinian health ministry said. The Israeli army says it is investigating.

A Palestinian man in Gaza told CNN over the phone that the sounds of Israeli strikes throughout Monday night, as well as the sound of outgoing rocket fire, had been "horrifying."

The man, who declined to be named, described a mood of anger in Gaza over recent events in Jerusalem. "It's the fact the Israelis targeted Al Aqsa, during Ramadan, while people were praying" that has so riled people, he said.

The man added that Israel's actions would only embolden support for Hamas, and that he believed militants should continue firing rockets.

The mother of Palestinian Hussien Hamad, 11, is comforted by mourners during his funeral in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Arab citizens of Israel demonstrated Monday evening and Tuesday in the streets of several Israeli cities and villages, including Haifa and Lod, in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and Jerusalem.

In Lod, a 25-year-old Arab-Israeli man was shot dead by a 34-year-old Jewish resident who said he was responding to stones being thrown at him. Two people were arrested in connection with that incident, police said.

Israeli police said around 150 violent protesters had been arrested in multiple locations. Rioters attacked drivers, threw stones at passing cars, blocked roads and ignited trees tires and a car, according to police.

IDF soldiers fired tear gas at Palestinian demonstrators at the Qalandiya checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem, in the West Bank on Tuesday.

International community calls for calm!

The United States and European Union called for a de-escalation of violence while several countries in the Middle East, including Turkey, condemned the Israeli police response to tensions in Jerusalem.

One of the main sources of growing unrest in recent days has been the possible eviction of several Palestinian families from their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

Israeli police have clashed with Palestinians in the neighborhood, as well as other locations, for several weeks now, with Palestinians accusing Jewish nationalists of provocation and police of heavy-handed tactics.

Nearly a thousand Palestinians were injured in East Jerusalem, and over 200 in the West Bank, between May 7 and May 10, according to the United Nations and the Palestinian Red Crescent.

On Tuesday last, UN human rights experts expressed "grave concerns about Israel's aggressive response to protests in East Jerusalem, and called on Israel, as an occupying power, to immediately lift its threat to evict hundreds of Palestinian households from their legally protected homes." The UN also denounced Israeli airstrikes in Gaza as well as Palestinian rocket shelling.

Israeli Supreme Court delays hearing on Palestinian evictions from East Jerusalem neighborhood.

"Re-establishing calm in Jerusalem is important, but creating the conditions for justice and equality in the City are even more important," the experts said in the statement.

US President Joe Biden has received a briefing from his national security adviser on the ongoing violence between Israelis and Palestinians, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday.

Biden had directed his team to "engage intensively" with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, she said. "His team is communicating a clear and consistent message in support of de-escalation and that is our primary focus. The President's support for Israel's security, for its legitimate right to defend itself and its people is fundamental and will never waver." Look at his temerity which is irremissible!

US officials have "spoken candidly" with Israeli officials about the eviction of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, Psaki said, saying they worked against shared interests of reducing violence. "We believe Palestinians and Israelis deserve equal measures of freedom, security, dignity and prosperity," she said.

The worst fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in seven years intensified on Tuesday night last, as Israeli airstrikes began targeting Hamas’s offices in Gaza City and militants in Gaza fired rockets at the metropolis of Tel Aviv, the southern city of Ashkelon and Israel’s main airport.

Away from the military conflict, a wave of civil unrest spread across Arab neighborhoods as Palestinian citizens of Israel expressed fury at the killings in Gaza and longstanding complaints of discrimination inside Israel itself.

While the surge in strikes, the worst since 2014, brought fear to millions in Gaza and Israel, they nevertheless bolstered an unlikely pair: Hamas, the Islamist militant group that runs the Gaza Strip, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

You don't need to be Muslim to stand for Gaza. You just need to be HUMAN!

-The End –

The writer is an independent political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh who writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs