Does Israel Target Civilians?

The evidence is overwhelming...

It is astonishing to behold how, now that, for the first time ever, there are hundreds of Israeli casualties, Western politicians and pundits have—no doubt after a great deal of agonized inner searching—found themselves abhorred by the massacre of innocent civilians in Israel-Palestine. Of course, however, this abhorrence does not extend to Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza’s unworthy victims.

Those now championing the Israeli onslaught will reply that the critical difference between Palestinian “terror” and Israeli “self-defence” is, whereas the horrific massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas a week ago was targeted and deliberate, Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is incidental and unintended. “Civilians … are very deliberately the target of Hamas operations,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued. “They are not the target of Israeli operations.”

However, to propagate the latter claim is to exploit an audience bereft of historical memory.

Lest it be forgotten, five years ago, the people of Gaza launched an unarmed, popular, and grassroots protest movement near the Gaza security fence. Dubbed the Great March of Return, these mass Palestinian demonstrations aimed inter alia at lifting the illegal and inhuman Israeli blockade, which after almost two decades of economic strangulation rendered the Gaza Strip—in the words of a few reputable observers—a “sinking ship” (International Committee of the Red Cross), “unlivable” (UN Country Team), a “ghetto” (Ha’aretz Editorial Board), and a “toxic slum”, in which Palestinians “are caged … from birth to death” (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Ziad Rifai).

And how did Israel greet Gaza’s non-violent, ghettoized, demonstrators? With a “murderous assault” (Amnesty International), involving “individual snipers safely ensconced hundreds of feet, even farther, away, targeting individual protestors and executing them one at a time.” (Human Rights Watch Near East Director Sarah Leah Whitson). An exhaustive investigation by a Commission of the UN Human Rights Council subsequently determined that, in brutally suppressing the demonstrations, Israeli snipers “deliberately targeted” Palestinian health workers, journalists, disabled people, and children for death.

Consider this small but representative sample of—what the UN Commission described as “emblematic”—Israeli Security Force (ISF) killings of Gazan demonstrators:

• Abed Hawajri was a 41-year-old man from El Nusseirat Refugee Camp. … The ISF shot him in the abdomen. According to information collected, Abed was standing near the back of a crowd when shot, with nothing in his hands, wearing jeans and a jumper, approximately 150 m from the fence. He was taken to hospital and died the same day. 

• Taher Madhi was a 24-year-old from Al-Shati Refugee Camp. The ISF shot him in the torso .... when he was roughly 300 m from the separation fence. Mahdi had been walking away from the fence towards the Camp of Return when he was shot. He died of lacerations to his internal organs.

• Talal Matar was a 16-year-old resident of El Nusseirat Refugee Camp. … ISF soldiers shot him in the head sometime around 2 p.m. on 14 May as he was standing on a sand hill approximately 300 m from the separation fence.

• The ISF shot 13-year-old Hussein Madi in the abdomen at the Malaka demonstration site east of Gaza City. According to an eyewitness … He … waited behind [a] tree for a few minutes, and when he came out, he was shot immediately with a single bullet. According to testimony, there was no warning before the shots came.

• The ISF shot 15-year-old Alaa Yihya Ismael El Zamli from Al Shaboura camp in Rafah in the neck with live ammunition as he stood among a crowd approximately 80 m from the separation fence. According to an eyewitness, the ISF used a laser sight to locate and target Alaa.

• The ISF shot 14-year-old Mohammad Ayoub from Jabalia Refugee Camp in the head at the demonstration site east of Jabalia. Mohammad was at least 200 m from the separation fence when the ISF shot him.   

• Wisal Sheikh-Khalil was a 14-year-old girl from Al Maghazi Refugee Camp. The ISF shot her in the head in the early afternoon of 14 May when she was approximately 100 m from the separation fence. The gunshot entered the right side of her skull and exited from the left side of her skull. She died instantly.

• Musa Abu Hassainen was a 35-year-old Civil Defense paramedic. ISF soldiers killed him with a shot to the chest … while he was wearing a high-visibility Civil Defense vest…. He was approximately 250-300 m from the fence when ISF soldiers shot him… Musa was clearly marked as a Civil Defense paramedic when he was shot.

• The ISF shot a 24-year-old freelance photojournalist from Khan Younis in the abdomen with live ammunition. He was standing with his back to the separation fence, around 300m away.

• Fadi Abu Salmi was a 29-year-old double amputee from Khan Younis. On 14 May, the ISF shot him in the chest at the Abasan Al Jadidah protest site … He died immediately. The ISF shot him in the chest with live ammunition as he sat in his wheelchair under a tree approximately 250-300 m from the separation fence with two friends.

The above vignettes scarcely convey the extent of the carnage.

Having investigated the deaths of all 189 Gazan demonstrators killed by Israeli forces in 2018, the Commission’s conclusion was unequivocal: With two “possible” exceptions, “the use of live ammunition by Israeli security forces against demonstrators was unlawful”. In every other case, “Israeli security forces killed and maimed Palestinian demonstrators who did not pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to others when they were shot”. Thousands more Palestinians were permanently maimed, as the “hunting ammunition” employed to punish the Gazan protesters left wounds “the size of a fist” and pulverised bones “into dust”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised this onslaught as “holy work”.

In other words, five years ago, Israeli snipers carried out a state-sanctioned and “calculated” “campaign of barbarism”—a massacre—against dozens of unarmed Palestinian civilians.

The ISF’s systematic targeting of Palestinian civilians in 2018 was not aberrant, but normative. Until the brutal Hamas massacre last week, Israel’s “wars” against Gaza have been uniformly one-sided slaughters, akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Operation Protective Edge, in 2014, is illustrative: in Gaza, there were 2220 killed, over two-thirds civilians; in Israel, 73 killed, just six civilians. In Gaza, 550 children were killed; in Israel, one child. In Gaza, 18,000 homes destroyed; in Israel, one home. What raw statistics suggested, human rights reportage confirmed: for 51 days, Israeli had leveled an unrelenting assault against prone Palestinian civilians. Helicopters firing indiscriminately at fleeing families; one-hundred one-ton bombs dropped on Shuja'iyya, Gaza’s most densely populated civilian neighborhood; “humanitarian” orders instructing Gazan civilians with nowhere to go to evacuate their homes, and then massacring them as they desperately tried to do so.

Human rights investigations will fill in the details in the coming months, but it is already apparent that Israel is pursuing the same savage method against Gaza now—only at ten times the intensity. Water, electricity, fuel, and other essentials for human survival have been cut off, with Israeli energy minister Israel Katz explaining that Gazans “will not receive a drop of water or single battery until they leave the world”. Political officials have similarly dismissed international humanitarian law’s cardinal civilian-combatant distinction. Israeli President Isaac Herzog proclaimed the “entire nation” in Gaza “responsible” for Hamas, while military spokesmen announced that “the emphasis” of Israel’s bombardment “is on damage and not on accuracy”. Referring to the bombardment’s killing hundreds of Palestinian children, an MK in Israel’s so-called liberal opposition declared that “the children in Gaza brought it on themselves”.

Meanwhile, in the first six days of the present assault, Israel dropped nearly as many explosives on tiny Gaza—six thousand bombs—than the United States did in an entire year in the whole of Afghanistan. In under ten days, some 2800 Gazans have been killed; the number of missing, “presumably trapped beneath the rubble, may exceed 1000”; without humanitarian aid, hospitals have run out of painkillers, leaving the wounded “screaming in pain”. To appeal now to an abstract distinction between “deliberate” and “unintended” civilian killing is to utter the incomprehensible: the mass indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians under Israel’s present bombardment can only be anticipatable and inevitable—a vile and vengeful policy of unremitting massacre.

If history is any guide, and if our eyes do not deceive us, Israel is once more doing its holy work of mass death and destruction: targeting the civilian population of Gaza for slaughter.