Israel often narrates relations between Israelis and Palestinians as replete with traumas that are never forgotten and are used “to legitimate the killing of Palestinians as an effective tool to preserve a secure Jewish state and prepare Israeli youth to be good soldiers and to carry on the practices of occupation”, as Israeli professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan argued in her 2010 study Legitimation of massacres in Israeli school history books.
At the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, when the intensive bombing of civilians began, the thought in my mind was: how will we Palestinians live with the Israelis after this? Twelve months later, with no relenting in the killings and the destruction of Gaza, with Israel spreading the conflict to the West Bank, where more than 700 Palestinians have been killed, and its escalatory attacks in Lebanon and Iran, the question has only become more pertinent.
In the course of these past 12 months many atrocities have been committed, starting with the killing by Palestinians of 1,200 Israeli soldiers and civilians, followed by the Israeli army killing more than 41,000 Palestinians, including more than 17,000 women and children, 287 aid workers and 138 journalists and media workers. This does not include those unaccounted for who remain under the rubble of the two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings that have been damaged or destroyed. Here is just one detail from this 12-month war: On 25 September, Israel returned a truck containing 88 bodies with no identifying details to Gaza.
Israel has been under the misguided belief that it could hide these atrocities from the world by limiting access to journalists. It has not allowed outsiders to do independent reporting in Gaza, which has made it easier to dispute Palestinian versions of events and the figures of those killed, and the extent of the damage caused. To shed further doubt, the tremendous number of lives lost is usually accompanied by the caveat “claims the Hamas-run health ministry”.
All of this made the Israeli army callous, and it has killed large numbers of Palestinians in single airstrikes. Benjamin Netanyahu made the killing or capture of Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader, a prime objective of the war for which no price was deemed excessive. Rather than use precision bombs when there was intelligence on Sinwar’s whereabouts, the Israeli military used 2,000lb (900kg) bombs, killing and injuring hundreds of innocent Palestinians. This has been repeated many times over this past year and has continued even after the US stopped supplying Israel with this type of bomb because of its use in civilian areas.
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the majority of whom are refugees from towns and villages in what became Israel in 1948, have been forced to relocate multiple times; Israel has treated the population as dispensable chattels that it can move around at will. In the months since Hamas’s 7 October attack, almost all of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million have been displaced from their homes….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/05/israel-destroying-palestinians-war-hope
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After the truth-shower 