“Oh hell, what do mine eyes
with grief behold?”
– John Milton, Paradise Lost
People were saying their evening prayers when the IDF attacked the refuge camp at Tel al-Sultan in southern Gaza, where thousands had fled from the Israeli invasion of Rafah. They were told by the Israelis this was a safe zone, a secure place to shelter their children and grandparents.
“For your safety, the Israeli Defense Force is asking you to leave these areas immediately and to go to known shelters in Deir el Balah or the humanitarian area in Tel al-Sultan through Beach Road,” read one of the leaflets dropped in Rafah a few days before. “Don’t blame us after we warned you.”
The safe zone was a tent city amid the dunes–one of dozens scattered along more than 16 kilometers up the Gaza coast. The tents were made of plastic, which whipped and frayed in the coastal winds–a thin layer of protection against the sun and sand that soon turned into a death trap.
The lure of safety was the only thing Tel al-Sultan had going for it. The conditions in the camp were wretched. Thousands of starving people crammed together with little fresh water, meager rations, few toilets and nothing much to do except scavenge the beach for scraps of food, dig pit toilets in the sand and pray that someone will intervene to put an end to the war.
When the Israeli bombs strafed the safe zone, the plastic tents caught fire, sending flames leaping two meters high, before the melting, blazing structures collapsed on the people inside, many of them children who’d just been tucked in for the evening.
There was no water to put the flames out. No firetrucks to stop the inferno. No ambulances to rush the wounded to the hospital. No functioning hospital to treat the burned and the maimed.
At least 45 people, most of them women and children, were killed and nearly 300 injured with shrapnel wounds, burns, fractures and traumatic brain injuries.
“No single health facility in Gaza can handle a mass casualty event such as this one,” said Samuel Johann of Médecins Sans Frontières. “The health system has been decimated and cannot cope any longer.”
The attack came two days after the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its military operations in Gaza, open the border crossings so food, water and medicine could reach the starving Palestinians and allow human rights investigators into the Strip. This malicious act of defiance against the edicts of international law occurred on the same day Israeli tanks entered the central region of Rafah in what the Israelis had basely billed as a “limited military operation.” In the first 48 hours after the ICJ ruling, Israel bombed Rafah at least 60 times.
Tel al-Sultan in western Rafah is an official displacement camp, so designated by the Israelis. The Israelis called it: “Block 2371.” It is located next to UN aid warehouses. Desperate Palestinian families were told they would be safe here. Then the Israelis set it on fire, claiming they were targeting two Hamas operatives. The IDF said it didn’t think civilians would be harmed when it bombed the refuge camp it had told civilians to flee to.
Disingenuousness is the IDF’s calling card these days. Yet after one massacre after another, perhaps only the Biden administration believes it. Most Israelis don’t. Some prominent Israelis cheered the burning of civilians. The Israeli TV journalist and newspaper columnist Yinon Magal posted a video of the burning refugee camp with the caption: “The central bonfire this year in Rafah”–a reference to the traditional bonfires for the Jewish holiday of Lag Ba’Ome.
“I lost five family members,” said Majed al-Attar of the “bonfire.” “We were sitting in tents when suddenly the camp was bombed. I lost five family members, all burned completely. Among the victims were pregnant women. They kept telling us this area was safe until we were bombed.”
Israel said its targets were two Hamas operatives: Khaled al-Najjar and Yassin Abu Rabia. Al-Najjar was said to be a “senior staff officer.” Abu Rabia, the Israelis claimed, was Hamas’ West Bank staff commander. Were they really part of Hamas’ leadership? Who’s to say? It is known that both men had been released from Israeli prisoners in 2011 by Netanyahu in the prisoner swap that freed captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Both men were also originally from the West Bank and had been expelled by the Israelis to Gaza. Had long had Abu Rabia and al-Najjar been on the IDF’s so-called “target bank,” a hit list of Palestinians the Israeli army and intelligence can kill at will for acts committed years in the past.
“Bombing a tent camp full of displaced people is a clear-cut, full-on war crime,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, former head of disaster relief for US AID. “Even if Hamas troops were present, that does not absolve the IDF of the obligation to protect civilians. It does not turn a tent camp into a free fire zone.”
Who picked the targets? Who tracked them to the tent camp? Who okayed the airstrike? Was it the Israelis Lavender AI software program, which permits 20 “uninvolved civilians” to be killed for each targeted junior member of Hamas and 100 civilians to be killed “in exchange” for a senior member?
“We were sitting safely and suddenly we find bodies thrown on the ground, blood splattered on the ground — heads cut off, hands cut off,” said Malak Filfel. “This is not a life. There is no safety. We’re not getting out. No matter where we go, we will die here.”
Video of the attack showed babies thrashing in pain, women with their skin blackened to a crisp, men with their faces melted to the skull, a decapitated child, parents clutching the bodies of their burned children in their arms, a boy screaming in anguish as he watches his father being burned alive inside a flaming tent. “We pulled out children who were in pieces,” Mohammed Abuassa told the Associated Press. “We pulled out young and elderly people. The fire in the camp was unreal.”
Israel defended itself by saying the murderous attack stayed within the boundaries Biden and Blinken had outlined for such massacres. They used small bombs (smaller at 250 pounds than the 2000-pound blockbusters Biden briefly decried to CNN, anyway) that were precision-guided to their target (a refugee camp in the humanitarian zone they had designated).
And so they did. The GBU-39 bombs that burned the Rafah tent camp were made in the US by Boeing (a company the Portland State students targeted in their occupation of the campus). Biden has sold Israel more than 1,000 of these incendiary weapons since October. “They send us chickpeas,” one Palestinian said. “And to the Israelis they send weapons.”
Still, days after CNN and the New York Times confirmed that Israel bombed the tent camp with US-made weapons, the Biden administration refused to cop to it, claiming ignorance. The State Department’s hapless PR flack Vedant Patel was sent out to try, ineptly, to deflect attention from Israel’s use of a bomb made and designed in the US which the Biden administration has repeatedly urged the Israelis to use more frequently in its war on Gaza–a bomb designed to spray shrapnel fragments as far as 2,000 feet.
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.
CounterPunch
