Adding to the mountain of evidence that Israel is engaged in a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera on Thursday aired footage of what the news outlet reported was an Israeli drone targeting four Palestinians in Khan Younis last month.
Those killed by the unmanned aerial vehicle in the rubble of the southern Gaza city appear to be unarmed teenagers or young men. According to a translation of the coverage, they were not identified in the reporting.
Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. policy fellow, said: “This is among the worst footage I’ve seen. Not only were these boys clearly unarmed and present no threat whatsoever, but they were struck multiple times even after stumbling/crawling away. There is no way they could have been considered combatants. This is unreal.”
Why should I believe you or anyone, and not people who are on the ground there. We hear aid is provided, we hear aid is taken away from civilians by Hamas beating people, we hear people selling aid packages to others civilians. We hear all sorts of things. But all you people do is ignore whatever narrative you don’t like and focus on one thing. By that measure you can say USA is killing innocent civilians when they dropped that aid package which crushed some of them.
Which of these potentially terrible things negates what has been done to the people of Gaza? The destruction of their infrastructure - housing, universities, hospitals. The killing of civilians. The living conditions. The starvation.
So there is some, but not nearly enough aid. So some bad actors are taking advantage of the unimaginably fucked up situation there. How does that change the fact that Israel is at best using collective punishment (a war crime) and at worst committing genocide?
You don’t have to believe me, but I’m happy to show my work:
The state of Israel has always rejected the one-state solution and the right-of-return. (It makes political sense, as the Jews would be outnumbered in their own state in a few decades.) It has also rejected or sabotaged a two-state solution by expanding settlements, a process which has ramped up in recent months, so there’s nowhere for a second state to exist. Thus, the people of Palestine cannot live in Israel, and they cannot live in Palestine. No other nations would take that many refugees, so they also cannot leave. The, uhh, remaining solution is to kill them, and the IDF feels no compunction about doing exactly that. For decades, genocide hasn’t been the avowed goal of the state of Israel, just the inescapable conclusion of a cruel logic.
That brings us up to last October. So what would a genocidal regime do in Israel’s place, if it wanted to exterminate a group of people with enough plausible deniability to avoid triggering intervention by the rest of the world? Cut off incoming food, water, and energy? Check, Israel has done that. Contaminate the groundwater? Check. Destroy the energy, sanitary, and transportation infrastructure? Check. Render civilian homes destroyed or unlivable, and destroy businesses? Check. Destroy the health care system? Check. Drive the population toward the border with progressive waves of attacks? Gaza City -> Khan Younis -> Rafah, check.
And all of this, after several Israeli government officials stated explicitly that the goal is, at least, ethnic cleansing.