Toddlers go up in flames, and the Israeli public celebrates, erases, chatters or yawns – that’s what our hell looks like. When you embark on a campaign of vengeance, as the saying goes, dig two graves; Israel has such a strong desire for revenge that it is slowly sinking in a dark abyss, hand in hand with the ruins of Gaza.
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. The Rafah’s tents massacre is a horrific war crime carried out by Israel with unprecedented barbarity. Palestinians call it the “Tents Holocaust.”
By Seraj Assi / Common Dreams
Last 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.
https://scheerpost.com/2024/05/28/israels-tents-massacre-in-rafah-is-a-heinous-war-crime
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Israel Is Blind to Rafah’s Inferno, but Its Own Ruin Is Entwined With Gaza’s
The sights from the explosion of the displaced persons camp in Rafah this week were horrifying, even for a war that is providing more and more unbearable pictures. Beheaded toddlers, scorched bodies and a huge fire that destroyed the rickety tents in which civilians were sheltering, in an area that Israel had declared “safe.”
“This is one of the most horrifying things I’ve seen in all the weeks I’ve been working in Gaza,” a British doctor told the New York Times, and a foreign journalist described it as “a real vision of hell
And meanwhile in Israel, in another vision of hell, there are some who enjoy seeing dismembered children and charred civilians. For example, the frenetic troll Yinon Magal, who shared a photo of the burning tents alongside the caption “The main bonfire this year in Rafah”; the security chief of the settlement of Kfar Adumim, Avihai Shorshan, who is known for harassing his Palestinian neighbors, expressed his enjoyment at the disaster with the words “Lag Ba’omer, Rafah version,” and my former colleague in the opinion section of Haaretz, Naveh Dromi, who shared Shorshan’s post and added: “Happy Holiday.”
In the State of Israel, the sheol (dark underworld) that is being built for us by insane, hard-hearted people like Magal, Shorshan and Dromi, happy holidays are days when dozens of innocents are killed and all the jokes are made about other people’s dead babies.
But as in Dante’s Inferno, even the hell to which Israeli society has sunk consists of different circles. Surrounding the heart of darkness, where people dance on the blood, resides a circle of self-declared or implicit deniers. From there comes the yelling and growling of all those who, at the sight of the bodies and the fire, could immediately say that these are fake propaganda videos, that it wasn’t a bombing by the Israel Air Force but “the launching of a failed rocket” (as invented by Channel 14 reporter Hallel Bitton-Rosen), that the numbers of dead are inflated, and why were Hamas terrorists in the displaced persons compound anyway?
In this circle, there are no monsters who are happy about dead children, only chatterboxes and fabulists who find sophisticated ways of erasing the suffering of others. As it is said: It didn’t happen, and if it did happen, so what?
In an adjacent circle, the verbal jugglers are jumping about: members of the government and the army who operate the euphemism mechanism that whitewashes the killing of civilians. “The attack was carried out in accordance with international law, using precise ammunition,” the Israel Defense Forces quickly reassured us. That doesn’t make dozens of people any less dead, but it may convince The Hague to refrain from issuing injunctions.
Alongside them, sitting on upholstered chairs, are all the submissive journalists, who refrain from reporting on Israel’s actions in Gaza. According to them, the horror that took place in Rafah really is a somewhat unpleasant matter, but not because of the children who lost their limbs, but because it harms public diplomacy efforts and photographs badly on the TV screens of the goyim.
And all these are surrounded by the largest circle of sheol, the place where the blind, deaf and simply bored sit. Here the silent majority proclaims its innocence, the people who don’t celebrate soot-covered civilians and don’t deny the terrifying sights – but are completely indifferent.
In 2002, after the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, commander of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza (who was far more senior that the duo who were assassinated this week in Gaza), the country was in an uproar and dozens of pilots declared that they would refuse to bomb concentrations of civilian population, because along with him 15 children and adult civilians were killed.
Today, about 45 incinerated refugees fill the role of “collateral damage” – and the country is silent before the sight of Rafah’s red sky. Toddlers go up in flames, and the Israeli public celebrates, erases, chatters or yawns – that’s what our hell looks like. When you embark on a campaign of vengeance, as the saying goes, dig two graves; Israel has such a strong desire for revenge that it is slowly sinking in a dark abyss, hand in hand with the ruins of Gaza.
Source: HAARETZ
**************************************************
The west’s complete contempt for the lives of Palestinians will not be forgotten
Patrick Lawrence: Deeper Into Depravity
Gaza and the End of Western Fantasy
Patrick Lawrence: The End of Global Leadership
The World Must Force Peace on Israel
Michael Brenner: The West’s Reckoning?
A Conspiracy of Silence / The Killing Floor of Gaza
Michael Brenner: Europe-Jews-Muslims
After the truth-shower 