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"U.S. funding of Israeli genocide is ballooning as the Israeli army uses ever more lethal bombs," said Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, said Sunday after bombing that killed 100 people, mostly civilians, in Gaza City.
The office of the Palestinian Authority's president is holding the U.S. government responsible for a weekend bombing in Gaza that killed an estimated 100 people, including at least 11 children. The victims of the attack on the al-Tabin school were blown to 'pieces,' according to video evidence and on-the-ground reporting, when U.S.-provided missiles were fired on a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City.
In the wake of the attack that stirred global outrage and condemnation Saturday, the Palestinian presidency's spokesperson Nabih Abu Rudeineh condemned the massacre and said the PA held the Biden administration "responsible for the massacre due to its financial, military, and political support for Israel."
Rudeineh demanded the U.S. pressure the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cease indiscriminate attacks that have left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians dead, wounded, and displaced over recent months. In addition, he said, the U.S. must conform to international law by ending its "blind support" to Israel "that leads to the killing of thousands of innocent civilians, including children, women, and the elderly."
As Common Dreams previously reported, the bombing of the al-Tabin school complex came just hours after the U.S. State Department announced the release of $3.5 billion in military aid for Israel and made new weapons transfers available to help refresh the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stockpiles.
"U.S. funding of Israeli genocide is ballooning as the Israeli army uses ever more lethal bombs," said Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, in an online post Sunday. "The ones used yesterday in the Al-Tabin School massacre sliced bodies to the point of making them unrecognizable. They are now identified by weight: 70kg bag = 1 adult. Revolting."
The head of Gaza's Government Media Office told Al Jazeera that the three bombs dropped on the school weighed 2,000 pounds each, matching the size of the MK-84 munitions provided by the thousands to the IDF by the United States over the last year.
"Another day of horror in Gaza, another school hit with reports of dozens of Palestinian killed among them women, children and older people,” said Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN relief agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA), Saturday in response to the attack. "It's time for these horrors unfolding under our watch to end. We cannot let the unbearable become a new norm. The more recurrent, the more we lose our collective humanity."
The UN human rights office said the latest attack was "at least the 21st strike on a school, each serving as a shelter, that the UN [the agency] has recorded since 4 July. These strikes have resulted in at least 274 fatalities, including women and children."
Responding to claims by the IDF that the bombing was aimed at militants it claimed were using the facility, OHCHR said in a statement that "co-location by armed groups of military objectives with civilians" does not release Israel from its "obligation to comply strictly with [international humanitarian law], including the principles of proportionality, distinction and precaution when carrying out military operations. Israel, as the occupying power, is obliged to provide the population it has forcibly displaced with basic humanitarian needs, including safe shelter."
Asked about the situation in Gaza on Saturday, Vice President Kamala Harris, now the Democratic nominee for president, said during a campaign stop in Phoenix, Arizona that she and President Joe Biden have been working "around the clock" to secure a ceasefire deal that would see the fighting end and Israeli hostages held by Hamas returned safely.
Specifically about Saturday's bombing of the school complex, Harris said, "Yet again, far too many civilians have been killed."
"Yet again, there are far too many civilians who've been killed. Israel has a right to go after the terrorists that are Hamas. But as I have said many, many times, they also have, I believe, an important responsibility to avoid civilian casualties."
-- Kamala Harris on Gaza pic.twitter.com/Ir0bysiFT9
— Howard Mortman (@HowardMortman) August 10, 2024
Despite global outrage over Saturday's attack, the Israeli military overnight Sunday issued new evacuation orders for southern Gaza.
"It is hard to comprehend how the Biden administration can justify rewarding Israel with new weapons, despite Israel's persistent defiance of every single plea the Biden administration has made urging a modicum of restraint."
Just hours after the Biden administration Friday announced approval of $3.5 billion in military funds for Israel and shipments for new weaponry, an Israeli bombing of a school-turned-shelter in Gaza has killed 100 people or more, including scores of civilian men, women, and children in what was described as a "bloody massacre" that struck during morning prayers, leaving body parts scattered "in pieces" and healthcare workers overwhelmed with the dead and wounded.
The Palestinian Authority's Fatah government in the Occupied West Bank released a statement Saturday describing the attack on the al-Tabin school in Gaza City as a "heinous bloody massacre" that represents the "peak of terrorism and criminality" by the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Committing these massacres confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt its efforts to exterminate our people through the policy of cumulative killing and mass massacres that make living consciences tremble," said the PA.
"If the ICC doesn't take action now, then when?"
Footage taken by volunteers working alongside Palestinian medical units in Gaza City showed wounded small children and adults being taken to local hospitals as well as scenes of carnage from the scene of the bombing [Warning: Images are graphic]. Gaza journalist Motasem A. Dalloul also posted his reporting from the scene, including footage of the carnage [Also graphic].
Al-Jazeera spoke with witnesses at the scene of the massacre, one of whom said many of the dead—which included women, children, and old people who had been praying and others sleeping when the missiles struck—were collected afterward "in pieces":
- YouTubeyoutu.be
Tamer Kirolos, a regional director for Save the Children, called Israel’s attack on al-Tabin the “deadliest attack on a school since last October."
"It is devastating to see the toll this has taken, including so many children and people at the school for dawn prayers," Kirolos said. "Civilians, children, must be protected. An immediate definitive ceasefire is the only foreseeable way that will happen."
Just hours before the bombing, the U.S. State Department announcement that a $3.5 billion tranche of funds—part of a larger $14.1 billion in overseas military aid approved by Congress earlier this year—would be released to the Israeli government for weapons procurement.
As CNNreported, while some of those weapons purchases made possible by the fund may take years, the "supplemental funding also allocated billions of dollars' worth of equipment that the Pentagon can draw from its own stockpiles to send directly to Israel on a much faster timeline."
Unverified reporting indicated that at least one of the missiles dropped on the al-Tabin school overnight may have been a U.S.-made MK-84 bomb weighing 2,000 pounds.
On Friday night, after the State Department announcement but before news of the latest bombing in Gaza broke, Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the human rights and advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), was among those confounded by the U.S. government's continued determination to arm the Israelis in the face of the human suffering in Gaza and the repeated massacre of civilians, day after day and month after month.
"It is mind-boggling that despite the overwhelming evidence of the IDF's unprecedented crimes in Gaza that has shocked the conscience of the entire world, the Biden administration is greenlighting the transfer of additional lethal weapons to Israel," said Whitson in a Friday night statement following news that the State Dept. had greenlit the release of taxpayer funds for a new round of weapons destined for Israel.
"It is hard to comprehend how the Biden administration can justify rewarding Israel with new weapons, despite Israel's persistent defiance of every single plea the Biden administration has made urging a modicum of restraint," she said, "and despite the very apparent fact that such sales violate black letter U.S. laws prohibiting weapons to gross abusers like Israel."
Making a similar argument in a Saturday morning post on X, Sami Abou Shehadeh, leader of Israel's leftist Balad Party, said that while President Joe Biden "could have stopped the genocide" by using his leverage of military aid to force the Israelis in a different direction, instead "he just released $3.5 billion for more weapons to kill civilians."
Shehadeh warned that without any internal opposition "to the genocide" by Israel's Zionist political parties, Netanyahu's policies would continue, even as the region inches toward further destabilization over the crisis in Gaza that has also spread to Lebanon and beyond. Calling for the International Criminal Court to intervene, he asked, "If the ICC doesn't take action now, then when?"
Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and co-founder of Progressive International, asked the same on Saturday.
"Israel has now killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and wounded well over 92,000 others," said Varoufakis. "Thousands more lie, uncounted, under the debris. Some 10,000 Palestinians have been abducted by Israel's occupying forces. Question: Where is the ICC indictment?"
"It is truly horrific," Raed Jarrar, DAWN's policy director told Common Dreams via email Saturday. "Last night's massacre was another example of how Blinken and Biden have blood on their hands."
Referencing a separate decision by the State Department to suspend an investigation into documented abuse violations by the "notorious" Netzah Yehuda Unit within the IDF, Jarrar said the "decisions of sending weapons to Israel and not sanctioning Israeli human rights abusers are not just corrupt policy decisions, they are criminal acts."
Update: This article has been updated from its original to include additional comment from DAWN.
The lack of such a "vision" does not entirely rest on Netanyahu's own failure to produce one, but due to his inability to determine, with any degree of certainly, if the war would yield favorable results for Israel.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is often criticized for failing to produce a vision for the "next day," meaning the day following the end of the Gaza war.
Some of these criticisms emanate from Israel's traditional Western allies, who are wary of Netanyahu's personal and political agendas, which are fixated on delaying his corruption trials and ensuring that his extremist allies remain committed to the current government coalition.
The criticism however is loudest in Israel itself.
"As long as Hamas retains control over civilian life in Gaza, it may rebuild and strengthen (itself), thus requiring the IDF to return and fight in areas where it has already operated," Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said in May, demanding a "day-after" plan.
Of course, there is an alternative to the neverending war scenario, namely permanently lifting the siege on Gaza, ending the military occupation, and dismantling the apartheid regime.
The same sentiment was conveyed by Israeli army chief Herzi Halevi. "As long as there's no diplomatic process to develop a governing body in the strip that isn't Hamas, we'll have to launch campaigns again and again," he was quoted in Israel's Channel 13 as saying.
It is true that Netanyahu has no post-war plan. The lack of such a "vision," however, does not entirely rest on his own failure to produce one, but due to his inability to determine, with any degree of certainly, if the war would yield favorable results for Israel.
Nine months of war have shown that Israel is simply incapable of maintaining its military presence in urban areas, even those that have been ethnically cleansed or are sparsely populated.
This has been proven to be as true in the southern as in the northern parts of Gaza, including border towns that were relatively easy to enter in the first days or weeks of the war.
For a post-war plan that fits Israeli interests to be produced, Gaza would have to be militarily subdued, a goal that seems more distant than ever.
At the start of the war, and many times since then, Netanyahu argued that Israel would have "overall security responsibility" for the Gaza Strip "for an indefinite period."
That too is unlikely, as Israel tried to establish such security control between 1967 and 2005—when it was forced, due to the popular resistance during the Second Uprising, to redeploy its forces out of the Gaza Strip, imposing a hermetic siege that has been in effect since then.
Recent events proved that even the Israeli blockade itself is unsustainable, as those who were entrusted with keeping Gazans locked in failed miserably at their main task.
This assessment is that of the Israeli military itself. "On October 7, I failed (in) my life's mission: to protect the (Gaza) envelope," the commander of the 143rd Division, Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld, said as he tendered his resignation on June 9.
This means that returning to the post-1967 war status is not a rational option, nor is the reactivation of the post-2005 so-called "disengagement plan."
While Washington is busy hoping to devise an alternative that ensures long-term security for Israel—with no regard to Palestinian rights, freedom, or security, of course—Netanyahu refuses to play along.
The problem with the American ideas, as far as the Israeli government is concerned, is that such language as "returning to negotiations" and the like is completely taboo in Israel's mainstream politics.
Additionally, Netanyahu rejects any involvement of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. This position, which was even advocated by other Israeli officials, seems to puzzle many, as the PA is already incorporated into Israel's security arrangements in the West Bank.
Netanyahu's real fear is that a return of the PA to Gaza would come at a political price, as it would give greater credibility to PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who is keenly invested in the U.S.-championed "peace process."
Not only does the current Israeli leadership reject the return to the old political discourse, but it has also fundamentally moved on, passing that language into that of military annexation of the West Bank, and even the recolonization of Gaza.
To re-colonize Gaza, per the expectations of Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, two consecutive events would have to take place: First, the pacification of the Gaza Resistance, then, a partial or total ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population there into Egypt.
While the Israeli army is failing at its first task, the second also seems unfeasible, especially since the recent Israeli operation in Rafah has pushed hundreds of thousands of displaced Gazans back, from the Gaza-Egypt border to the center of the strip.
Netanyahu does not seem to have an actual plan for Gaza, neither for now nor after the war. So, he prolongs the war despite the fact that his army is exhausted, depleted, and is being forced to fight on multiple fronts.
Blaming Netanyahu for failing to produce a "next day" vision for Gaza, however, is also wishful thinking as it assumes that Israel has all the cards. It has none.
Of course, there is an alternative to the neverending war scenario, namely permanently lifting the siege on Gaza, ending the military occupation, and dismantling the apartheid regime. This would grant Palestinians their freedom and rights as enshrined, in fact, guaranteed in international and humanitarian laws.
If the international community mustered the courage to force such a "next day" reality on Tel Aviv, there would be no need for war, or resistance, in the first place.