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Israel has not only completely disregarded the orders of the International Court of Justice to cease its assault on Rafah as we expected it to do, but has actually ramped up its ruthlessness as though trying to make a point. There were reportedly more than 60 Israeli airstrikes on the southernmost city in the Gaza strip in the 48 hours after the ICJ ruling, including a horrifying massacre on a displacement camp full of civilians in tents.
The ABC reports:
Israeli air strikes have killed at least 35 Palestinians and wounded dozens in an area in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah designated for the displaced, Palestinian health and civil emergency service officials said.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said women and children made up most of the dead and dozens of wounded.
The strike took place in Tel Al-Sultan neighbourhood in western Rafah on Sunday, local time, where thousands of people were taking shelter after many fled the eastern areas of the city where Israeli forces began a ground offensive over two weeks ago.
The video footage coming out about this massacre is extremely graphic and will stay with you for the rest of your life if you choose to watch it.
It shows charred and dismembered bodies, and small children whose heads are missing and partly missing. On social media I’ve seen numerous people observing that the lies about Hamas beheading babies on October 7 have been used by Israel to justify atrocities in which actual babies are really being beheaded.
Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah notes that this was at a camp which just days ago Israel had told civilians was a safe zone that they should move to.
The Gaza media office reports that the attack took place next to an UNRWA logistics base, which is about as clear an answer to the UN court’s order to cease its genocidal massacres in Rafah as you could possibly ask for. As Maya Angelou said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
This happens to have occurred at precisely the same time viral attention is coming to an article The Atlantic published a few days ago which includes the assertion that killing children is legally permissible under certain circumstances.
Writing that allowing journalists into Gaza would be a “risk” for Israel because “war is ugly”, The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood uses the phrase “legally killed child” to argue that journalistic footage of dead children which Israel killed lawfully would still be damaging to Israeli PR interests.
“To rebut Hamas’s allegations by letting journalists see the war up close would be a calculated risk,” Wood writes. “Even when conducted legally, war is ugly. It is possible to kill children legally, if for example one is being attacked by an enemy who hides behind them. But the sight of a legally killed child is no less disturbing than the sight of a murdered one.”
Think about the kind of worldview which could publish something like that. This made it through the entire editing process in a mainstream liberal publication.
Anyone who’s been following the Gaza genocide on social media today will be seeing this phrase “legally killed child” alongside footage of children ripped apart by Israeli military explosives in a civilian displacement camp — a pairing which, if you have a beating heart in your chest and a functioning empathy center in your brain, will spark a very special kind of rage inside you.
The way these two points dance together just says so much about what we’re dealing with here, when you take a step back and really look at it. It says so much about Israel. It says so much about western civilization. It says so much about the western press in general and liberal war propaganda rags like The Atlantic in particular. It says so much about the kind of mainstream political worldview which could allow for such a thing to exist. And it says we live in a civilization that has gone completely, utterly insane.
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