The Guardian reports that Israeli troops “killed 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers one by one”. “One by one” is another way of saying one person after another, which is another way of saying premeditated murder. Fifteen times over.
Dr Bashar Murad, the director of health programs at the Palestine Red Crescent, told reporters that one of the men who was executed by the Israelis was on the phone with colleagues. The victim had been injured and was requesting help.
“A few minutes later, during the call, we heard the sound of Israeli soldiers arriving at the location, speaking in Hebrew. The conversation was about gathering the team, with statements like: ‘Gather them at the wall and bring some restraints to tie them.’ This indicated that a large number of the medical staff were still alive.”
The Israeli army, for its part, claimed that the area was “an active combat zone”. Soldiers fired on the ambulances because they were “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals”.
No one believes the army’s lies at this point. They serve a purpose; like all shoddy propaganda or misinformation, they work to obscure what is heartrendingly clear: the destruction of all Palestinian life is a matter of policy for Israel’s army. The genocide is a policy matter in that country.
Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, explained his country’s logic early on: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true.”
For those who support its actions – most of the Israeli public, if polls are to be believed – the army misinformation is a signal that the leadership regards the executions as a non-issue. Carry on – Eurovision is just around the corner.
News of the executions come after an anonymous Israeli soldier wrote a column in the Israeli paper Haaretz entitled, “In Gaza, Almost Every IDF Platoon Keeps a Human Shield, a Sub-army of Palestinian Slaves.”
In it, he describes how widespread the practice of utilizing human shields is in the Israeli army:
“Today, almost every platoon keeps a [human shield] and no infantry force enters a house before a [human shield] clears it. This means there are four [human shields] in a company, twelve in a battalion, and at least 36 in a brigade. We operate a sub-army of slaves.”
I was born in Tal al-Sultan, where the Israeli troops executed the paramedics. I know how far the neighborhood is from the beach, and what the offshore wind feels like in the spring. I remember what the Philadelphi route – the barrier between Gaza and Egypt – looked like the last time the Israelis occupied it. Now, Tal al-Sultan is hell on earth, which is what an Israeli military leader promised to make it at the start of the genocide, 18 months ago.
When I first learned that Israeli men had zip-tied the paramedics before executing them, I thought of their terror – how I would feel in their place. I imagined them in constraints and lined up, facing the unbridled malice of their executioners. Did they think of their wives and children – the pain of being separated from them forever? Did they still their hearts – or find peace in their final moments?
Ashraf Abu Labda, Raed Al-Sharif, Mohammed Bahloul, Mohammed Hilieh, Mustafa Khafaja, Saleh Muammar, Rifaat Radwan and Ezzedine Shaat, and their colleagues whose names I haven’t been able to find were heroes. They spent their last hours on earth on a mission to render aid, to save people. Instead, we learn that they were in a race to the grave. And for what?
The murderers’ state of mind is hinted at by the aftermath of the crime. The Israeli soldiers dug a mass grave to hide their victims’ bodies. They crushed an ambulance under a bulldozer and attempted to bury that too. I wondered briefly if their crimes would haunt them, before I realized it didn’t matter.
The Israeli men who executed 15 unarmed paramedics got away with it. Whether the Israelis enjoyed themselves as they murdered their victims, or whether they will blitz their brains with drugs to forget doesn’t matter. Just as with the men who executed Hind Rajab, a five-year-old child, individually, they will have got away with it because their society offers them safe haven. All of Europe and the US is their playground.
Nor will global leaders intervene to end the mass murder which has been punctuated by this latest obscenity. Some of them – such as Emmanuel Macron, who called for a ceasefire, might appear to want to end the slaughter. After all, dead babies in incubators and paramedics in a mass grave are unpleasant garlands to wear. But 18 months in, they are too deeply implicated. Who can forget Ursula von der Leyen’s embrace of Netanyahu? Or Keir Starmer’s affirmation of Israel’s “right” to starve Palestinians in Gaza?
Today, those who are tasked with upholding international law have been co-opted by the Israeli leadership, whether they like it or not. The logic of gangland drug dealers and criminals – new members commit crimes to join, and are locked in – prevails.
So far from being complicit, US and European leaders are the authors of this latest atrocity by their Israeli colleagues in Gaza.
As for the rest of us, we can take note, and we can remember. There will be no Nuremberg for the Palestinians, but we can honor the memory of all those who fought to live. And who were exterminated for having lived at all.
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