A Palestinian father who had lost nine of his 10 children in an Israeli airstrike has died from wounds sustained in the same attack, local health officials have said.
Hamdi al-Najjar, 40, a doctor at Nasser hospital, was critically injured when Israeli forces bombed the family house in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis on 23 May, killing nine of his children. He had just returned home after accompanying his wife Alaa, a paediatrician at the Nasser medical complex, to work when the building was struck. He had initially survived alongside his son Adam, 11, who is still in hospital.
Even by the terrible standards of the Gaza conflict, their deaths had shocked the international community.
Footage shared by the director of Gaza’s health ministry and verified by the Guardian showed the burnt, dismembered bodies of Najjar’s children being pulled from the rubble of their house near a petrol station as flames engulfed what remained of the family’s home.
I wonder how many Gazan women find it frustrating that Hamas doesn’t accept women. To many like this man’s wife the prospect of lobbing IEDs at Jews is probably at least a little tempting.
Edit: I’m not trying to push Israeli talking points, though I guess it might seem that way; I just didn’t want to portray your average Palestinian as something they’re not. We don’t need to gloss over Palestinian antisemitism to believe that pretty much everything Israel did to Palestinians in the last 90 years was abhorrent.
Jews are a part of Palestine as much as other Semitic peoples, like Arabs. It’s Zionists and their industrial terror engine who are the real enemies of the people, chosen or otherwise.
True, but Palestinians (and Arabs in general) don’t understand that. The Middle East has fallen for the Zionist lie that they represent Jews everywhere hook, like and sinker, so the distinction between Zionists and Jews doesn’t really exist there. I mean hell, growing up I thought “Zionist” was another word for “Jew”. It’s another thing Zionists broke that needs fixing, but for example when Arabs hear of another Israeli atrocity thet don’t curse Zionists, they curse “the unjust Jews and those who support them”. So yeah, someone in this situation is going to want to lob IEDs at Jews, not Zionists (though it’s not like Israel has a significant number of non-Zionist Jews).
Yeah people tends not to act reasonably when you bomb their entire family.
People who support collective punishment deserve collective punishment.
Don’t spread the Zionists propaganda for free. They desperately want you to associate opposition to their colonial project with plain old bigotry.
I’m going to assume you mean well, but comments like your do the Zionists (who are mostly white, by the way) work for them.
So you deserve collective punishment?
I think it’s more in the sense of: if someone demonstrates that they are OK with collective punishment (i.e. by doing it), then they forfeit the right to complain about collective punishment when they are on the receiving end of it.
I oppose collective punishment, but if someone has already agreed to it being OK then I don’t have any reason to stand up in opposition when it happens to them. After all, they have already agreed to it and proven that it is acceptable to them.
If you oppose collective punishment, then that also means that you don’t engage in it. No getting to have it both ways. I’m not very tolerant of double standards.
She’s frantically busy saving/trying to save lives as a doctor in the same hospital, one of very few still running.
Only an idiot or an antisemitic asshole uses “Jews” as a stand in for “Israelis”.
Yes, that’s intentional. I mean don’t get me wrong I’m not trying to confirm Israeli propaganda, but it felt weird to say “Zionists” when thinking about a hypothetical Gazan who most likely wouldn’t be making that distinction.
They don’t see ‘jews’ attacking them and hate jews, they know what the IDF and the US is, of course there are likely antisemitic people there as there may be anywhere, but most people know the difference between Jews as a group and the people they see shooting and bombing them wearing the flag of Israel or the US.
Why do you think they wouldn’t make a distinction? Islamic texts reference Jewish and Christian prophets, they don’t just naturally automatically hate each other.
I’m extrapolating from my own experience (not Palestinian, but from a country in the vicinity). “Couldn’t Hitler have gotten rid of all of them and spared us the trouble” is pretty much a universal position from Morocco to Iraq, and I see no reason Palestinians—who have by far suffered the most under Israel—would be any different. This
Seems to confirm my suspicions. This is one of the things that I find very frustrating about my people, so I’m really not keen to sweep it under the rug.
Because they only ever have the misfortune of interacting with Jews who want to see them dead, would be my bet. Everything an antisemite in Palestine would think about Jews is confirmed by looking at their own lives, meanwhile there’s very little challenging those assumptions, so they persist.
Abbas is not necessarily the best source to quote, that quote in particular was something like 30 years ago and he had clarified his stance later emphasizing the horrific crime against humanity that the holocaust was, but he sucks anyway and has very low approval in Palestine, with a reported 90% of Palestinians wanting him to resign. But it is unfortunate that antisemitism like you describe is very common in the Arab world.
This is pure conjecture but it could be possible Palestinians would have a more accurate view of the situation because of their proxmity and history and therefore have less explicit antisemitism versus anti-Zionism, recognizing the distinction.
I assert that any Palestinian antisemitism will almost entirely evaporate the moment the Palestinians get national liberation. There is no deeply held, culturally rooted antisemitism in Palestinian culture, as exists for example in German or Russian culture. There is only the very understandable hatred of the oppressed for their oppressors. The same reason why for example Turks were traditionally hated throughout the Balkans. The problem is in fact that the Apartheid experience is creating such a culture in Palestinians, which is a moral catastrophe for which Israel is squarely responsible.
Certainly true, but by the time this all ends one way or another we’ll be looking at more than a century of Zionist colonialism, which I fear is more than enough to culturally root antisemitism in Arab culture. I certainly hope I stop hearing neo-Nazi conspiracy theories as fact from people I otherwise respect, but I think it’ll be up to the generation born after Zionist rule is over to fix this mess.
Yeah definitely, no argument there.