Every Place in Gaza—Including Schools—Is a Target

by Vijay Prashad

 August 16, 2024
Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photograph Source: Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif – CC BY 4.0

It is almost as if the Israeli army is trying to gather as many Palestinians as possible in one place and then kill them all. Ahmed Abed and his family fled the Dalal al-Maghribi school in early August after an Israeli airstrike displaced them. That airstrike killed 15 Palestinians who had taken refuge there after Israel had bombed their homes in the Ash Shujaiyeh neighborhood of Gaza City. The family arrived at the al-Taba’een school, a private school with an attached mosque, that sheltered 2,500 people. Since the Israelis began their most recent bombardment of Gaza in October 2023, Palestinians have taken refuge in private schools and in schools run by the United Nations (UN). The UN reports that in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli attacks have damaged 190 of their facilities, most of them schools. There are few sanctuaries left in Gaza. These schools—whether private or UN—are the only places that were seen as relatively safe.

At 4:30 a.m. on August 10, Israeli jet fighters flew over Gaza City and dropped U.S.-made GBU-39 250-pound bombs on the al-Taba’een school and mosque. During that time, a large number of the inhabitants had lined up at the mosque to go for the Fajr or dawn prayer. The bombs hit the people near the mosque, killing at least 100 Palestinians. It is a grotesque massacre that took place just when the United States decided to rearm Israel with these kinds of weapons. Sarah Leah Whitson, former Middle East and North Africa division director for Human Rights Watch, wrote that the arms sales to Israel by the United States on the day of this bombardment demonstrated a “Pavlovian conditioning for a feral army.”

The United States, despite occasional statements about withholding weapons, has consistently armed Israel during this genocidal war. Since 1948, the United States has provided $130 billion worth of weapons to Israel. Between 2018 and 2022, 79 percent of all weapons sold to Israel came from the United States (the next was Germany, which supplied 20 percent of Israel’s arms imports). The U.S. arms sales have come in deliberately small bunches of under $25 million per sale so that they do not require the scrutiny of the U.S. Congress, and therefore public debate. From October 2023 through March, the U.S. approved 100 of these small sales, which amount to over $1 billion in weapons sales, including the GBU-39. It is important to know that the bomb, created in the United States, was likely loaded onto an Israeli fighter jet by a U.S. technician seconded to the Israeli bases.

A Pattern of Targeting Schools

Mahmoud Basal, the spokesperson for Gaza’s civil defense unit, said that the medics who got to the scene at the al-Taba’een school, many of them already veterans of this kind of violence, were confounded by what they found. “The school area is strewn with dead bodies and body parts,” he said. “It is very difficult for paramedics to identify a whole dead body. There’s an arm here, a leg there. Bodies are ripped to pieces. Medical teams stand helpless before this horrific scene.” At least 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli bombings since last October, and 2 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes.

In the lead-up to the attack on al-Taba’een school, the Israeli forces have been escalating their bombings of schools in Gaza that serve as shelters. In July, the Israeli military struck 17 schools in Gaza, killing at least 163 Palestinians. In the week before August 10, Israel hit the Khadija and Ahmad al-Kurd schools in Deir al-Balah killing 30 Palestinians (July 27), the Dalal Moghrabi school in Ash Shujaiyeh killing 15 Palestinians (August 1), the Hamama and Huda schools in Sheikh Radwan killing sixteen Palestinians (August 3), the Hassan Salame and Nasser schools in al-Nassr killing 25 Palestinians (August 4), and the al-Zahraa and Abdul Fattah Hamouda schools killing 17 Palestinians (August 8).

This sequence of attacks on schools came before the August 10 bombing, which shows that there is a pattern of targeting civilians who are seeking shelter in schools. The massacre at al-Taba’een is the 21st attack by Israel against a school that has been serving as a shelter since July 4. Ahmed Abed lost his brother-in-law Abdullah al-Arair in the massacre at al-Taba’een. “There is nowhere else to go,” he said. “Every place in Gaza is a target.”

Israeli Denials

Israel accepted that it had bombed these schools but denied that it had killed civilians. In fact, Israel no longer names these places such as al-Taba’een and Dalal Moghrabi as schools; it calls them “military facilities.” The Israeli military said that it had killed at least 20 “terror operatives” since it is reported to have claimed to have hit an “‘active’ Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad command room embedded within a mosque.” The Israeli authorities released the names of at least 19 people who they claimed were senior operatives of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The EuroMed Human Rights Monitor, an independent organization based in Switzerland, studied the claims made by Israel’s military and found them to be factually wanting. The Monitor’s staff went to the school, did a survey of the survivors, and reviewed the Israeli-controlled civil registry for the names. The team’s “preliminary investigation found that the Israeli army used names of Palestinians killed in Israeli raids—some of whom were killed in earlier raids—in its list.” The three people killed earlier, but whose names appeared in the Israeli lists, include Ahmed Ihab al-Jaabari (killed on December 5, 2023), Youssef al-Wadiyya (killed on August 8, 2024), and Montaser Daher (killed on August 9, 2024). The Israeli list also had three elderly civilians who have no connection to any militant group, including Abdul Aziz Misbah al-Kafarna (a school principal) and Yousef Kahlout (an Arabic language teacher and deputy mayor of Beit Hanoun). The list also includes six civilians, “some of whom were even Hamas opponents.”

It is remarkable that even in their own statements the Israeli officials seem unsure about their claims. Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari of the Israeli military said that “various intelligence indications” show that there was a “high probability” that Ashraf Juda, a commander of the Islamic Jihad’s Central Camps Brigade, was in al-Taba’een school. But the Israelis could not confirm it. So, the Israelis killed 100 civilians even though they were not certain if their target was in the facility at that time.

The Israeli army has set up a pattern for its genocidal campaign. It first bombs civilian neighborhoods, sending terrified people into shelters such as schools and hospitals. Then, it announces blanket evacuation orders from an entire area, forcing people in these shelters to live in fear since many of them do not have the wherewithal to leave them for other places (indeed, “There is nowhere else to go,” said Ahmed Abed). Having made these evacuation orders, Israel then bombs the protected shelters, including hospitals and schools, with the argument that these are military targets. This formula was enacted in Gaza City and in other parts of Gaza.

Now, Israel has announced forced evacuation orders for people in Khan Younis, a city in central Gaza. Alongside these orders, Israeli forces have begun aerial and artillery attacks at the eastern edge of Khan Younis. We will now see these kinds of attacks on schools and hospitals that are shelters for desperate people in the center of Gaza, with every building seen by the Israelis as a legitimate target.

 This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad’s most recent book (with Noam Chomsky) is The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of US Power (New Press, August 2022).

Does Disability Pride Month include children in Gaza?

by Gary Smith

August 16, 2024

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A few weeks ago, I learned that July is Disability Pride Month in recognition of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in July 1990 (only 34 years ago) that breaks down legal barriers for inclusion of those with disabilities.

Being a person with a disability, you’d think I’d have known there was a month dedicated to recognizing people with disabilities. I suppose like my diagnosis, I’m a little late.

When I began to crawl, my parents noticed something was off. They took me to a doctor who said I had one leg that was shorter than the other. This took me down a years-long path of seeing orthopedists, surgeons, and other experts who either confirmed I had one shorter leg, or disagreed and said one hip was higher. Regardless of the cause, the effect was I walked with a limp.

I had heel cord surgery, a special shoe, metal braces, physical therapy, and more throughout my childhood years. Once I became an adult, I said no more surgeries, no more therapies, no more appliances, no more “fixes,” and resigned myself to the fact that I walk with difficulty.

It wasn’t until I was 37 and in need of bunion surgery from the toll walking takes on my body that the surgeon sent me to a neurologist before agreeing to the surgery The neurologist came back with the cerebral palsy diagnosis. A couple of weeks later, the foot surgeon sent me to a hip specialist who looked at my x-ray and said that he could indeed perform a surgical procedure to put the hip socket back into place, but that it would not improve my walking ability because this was a neurological issue, not a structural issue. He confirmed that I had cerebral palsy.

So, after 37 years of believing I had one leg that was shorter than the other, or something along those lines, I came face to face with the idea that I had a disability. A serious disability.

Being someone with depression and anxiety since I was five or six years old, I did what I normally would do when I was overwhelmed with life’s sufferings: I mostly ignored the diagnosis.

That sufficed until the past few years. Other medical conditions have arisen due to the cerebral palsy as well as my mobility problems, poor balance, and falls (on top of garden-variety aging). I found a doctor at UCLA’s Cerebral Palsy clinic. This doctor confirmed the CP diagnosis and said I was a Level 2 on the Gross Motor Function Classification System (GMFS), which uses a five-level system that corresponds to the extent of ability and impairment. A higher number indicates a higher degree of severity.

After the diagnosis at 37, I believed I had a mild case of CP. I was not wheelchair-bound, I had no speech impediments, I worked, I drove a car, I did all sorts of things people with severe disabilities didn’t do. But the CP doctor’s diagnosis concerned me, suggesting it is a more serious case, and was getting worse.

She did Botox injections in my right leg to help with the spasticity and dystonia (muscle contractions). I took a couple of different medications for essentially the same purpose and had a very expensive brace sculpted specifically to my body, none of which helped.

In a follow-up appointment, the CP doctor admitted that she has exhausted her tools. She suggested that I get in touch with companies that make walking implements like canes, walkers, and arm braces to help me walk more safely. I occasionally fall, and fall hard, resulting in wrist and hip injuries.

All of this exacerbated my depression, self-loathing and tendency to feel sorry for myself. As I started down rumination road, I thought about a photograph I saw recently in my social media feed of a very young girl in Gaza who had her leg blown off by the Israeli military and government. What was this little girl’s life like, living with a serious disability, trying to survive a genocide and famine caused by Israel? Was the amputation done with anesthesia? Did she have access to proper painkillers and other medicines while Israel continues to block food, water, medicine and fuel from getting into the territory?

Following her into the rabbit hole, I learned that prior to October 7, 21% of households in Gaza had at least one member with a disability. That is one-fifth of the population, and that was prior to Israel’s 10-month genocidal war.

Being a Jewish person who has made a point of following this war very closely, I needed to find out more. According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report, “It is reasonable to expect that there are between 2760 and 3600 limb amputations, though some anecdotal reports indicate this number may be higher. As with extremity injuries, the majority are likely to be lower limb injuries. At present, there are no operational prosthetic and orthotic services in Gaza. A scale up of sustainable prosthetic services is needed – in careful coordination with existing providers who are already planning surge capacities.”

The report further states that at least 17,000 children are orphaned or separated from their families. Every day since early October, an estimated 37 mothers are killed, leaving families devastated and children vulnerable.

A couple of weeks earlier, a report came out from the journal Lancet, which says that the true death toll in Gaza could reach more than 186,000 people. The Gaza Ministry of Health’s death toll reports more than 39,175 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its military offensive, and driven most of the 2.3 million citizens from their homes.

The U.N. human rights office and the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health also say that the true figures are likely higher than those published.

More than 90,923 people have been injured. How many of those 90,923 are now disabled? How many are children?

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently spoke in front of Congress, he received a standing ovation. The man leading the genocide, the man responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of people, two-thirds of whom are women and children, the man responsible for blowing off the leg of the little girl in my social media feed, was being honored by the U.S. political apparatus and elite. It was like living in some surreal world where killing and maiming children is love, and protesting genocide on college campuses is evil. These men and women cheering on a genocide, funding a genocide, and providing the weapons to blow off the limbs of children cannot represent me—a disabled person.

To see this occur during Disability Pride Month, well, that’s literally adding insult to injury.