#mawasi

In a designated safe zone again.

When aid workers came to help, they were killed too.

Israel claims this was to target one Hamas member.

But if they had intelligence on him, why not target him directly instead of large munitions bombs that kill tens off people at a time?

It turns out he wasn't even killed. So 100 people were simply murdered for nothing.

For everyone who says that every American president would be like this, a reminder that Biden is actually uniquely genocidal, to the right of George Bush even.

Incidentally, there was another killing of 20 people praying.

There is NO excuse for repeatedly bombing civilians at designated humanitarian zones & other “safe zones” and at refugee camps - not even to “get the bad guys.” Knowingly killing scores and scores of innocent civilians just to “get Hamas” is a villainous, morally bankrupt defense. It’s premeditated mass murder and collective punishment.

I DO NOT for one second buy the, “Hamas is using human shields so that is why we bomb so many civilians” lie that Israel constantly uses, but I put this rhetorical question to you: who is more evil, the group who uses human shields or the group who knowingly and intentionally murders the innocent people who are used as human shields??

Israel’s constant bombings of civilians is not accidental. These are war crimes committed by genocidal war criminals.

by Seth Mandel

However much contempt one has for the Hamas cheering squads in the West and its stenographers in the media, it will never surpass the contempt Hamas itself has for them.

The latest example: Hamas has finally admitted that when Israel claimed to have eliminated senior Hamas official Muhammad Deif over the summer, the Israelis were telling the truth. The IDF had announced Deif’s death in August, though the strike that killed him was delivered in July.

When Deif was killed is highly relevant to where Deif was killed, as well as why Hamas refused to acknowledge it during active hostilities. Here’s the New York Times:

“The strike that killed Mr. Deif also killed at least 90 Palestinians on the ground, the Gaza health ministry said, hitting within the Al-Mawasi area of southern Gaza, a part of a humanitarian zone designated by Israel. The health ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its death tolls.”

So Deif, a major Hamas commander and next to Yahya Sinwar probably the most important target inside Gaza, was using a humanitarian zone as a shield. We don’t know how many people were killed in the strike because the numbers come from Hamas, which was lying about who was there in the first place. But there is no way around it now: The strike that media like the New York Times covered as an Israeli bombing of civilians in a designated humanitarian zone turns out to have been a legitimate strike of a legitimate target and any collateral damage was unambiguously the work of Hamas not the fault of Israel.

More from the Times:

“The zone was a large expanse filled with hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians, many living in makeshift shelters, according to the United Nations. Israel said that Hamas was operating from the targeted compound within the zone.”

“Israel said”? But I just read that confirmed in the New York Times. So maybe it should be “The New York Times said that Hamas was operating from the targeted compound within the zone.”

On the other hand, the Times was only reporting what had been confirmed by the spokesman for Hamas. So the sentence should read: “Hamas said that Hamas was operating from the targeted compound within the zone.”

Let’s be clear, then, on exactly what was happening through the war: Israel was constantly moving large amounts of civilians out of harms way while Hamas was scheming to put those same civilians in grave danger. Hundreds of thousands, we are told, were moved into the humanitarian zone. That is many times the 25,000 or so civilian deaths in Gaza caused by the war. In Mawasi, we now know, Israel was able to save most but not all of the displaced Gazans from Deif’s attempt to get them killed.

Now that hostilities have paused, Hamas is taking stock of what it has and what it has lost. It has lost Deif, but it has gained a bunch of useful idiots for whom it has nothing but contempt. Hamas was very happy to have its advocates repeat its propaganda like caged parrots, of course. And it appreciates the ability to direct foreign media with a wave of its hand. But that very process assures that it will not have much respect for those doing its bidding.

Hamas is much more self-aware than some people seem to think. It knows how evil it is. It knows how unworthy of moral support it is. It knows that it represents man’s inhumanity to man. It knows that every word out of the mouths of its propagandists is a lie. Hamas needs its Western supporters to trust it, but it would never be so foolish as to believe what it says.

Palestinos tomando banho no mar Mediterrâneo próximo à área de Mawasi, na Faixa de Gaza.

Al-Mawasi, Palestina, 12 de setembro de 2005 /// Foto por Muhammed Muheisen

"Os palestinos de Gaza sentiram pela primeira vez o gosto da liberdade na segunda-feira, depois que as tropas israelenses se retiraram da faixa costeira. Centenas de pessoas atravessaram a fronteira com o Egito para se reunir com parentes após décadas de separação, adolescentes entraram nas águas de praias antes proibidas e pais guiaram seus filhos pelos destroços de assentamentos judeus abandonados."

Testimonies from the Mawasi massacre: 90 people buried in the sand

The Israeli army committed another massacre against displaced Palestinians in tent encampments, this time in the coastal Mawasi area, which Israel had designated as a "safe zone."

The Israeli army classified Mawasi as a humanitarian zone and directed Gaza's civilian population there. But despite its humanitarian classification, the IDF has never refrained from striking it – and the UN says attacks there have intensified recently

The strikes in Mawasi are different in character from the bombings in urban areas. Rather than destroying buildings – from which dust-covered, panicked wounded are pulled – strikes on Mawasi involve huge bombs that leave giant craters in the dunes. There are some reports of people completely disappearing due to the intensity of the explosion and the lack of shelter that could protect against the bombings.

"It looks like Nagasaki," said Georgios Petropoulos, head of the Gazan branch of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "They counted the bodies, but there are people who simply vaporized. Ten or twenty people who were known to be in the tents have simply vanished," he said. "I was at the hospital after the bombing, it looked like a slaughterhouse, blood everywhere." It was reported that a family was buried in sand that covered their tent from the same bombing.

A New York Times investigation on the kinds of weapons that the Israel Air Force uses in Mawasi indicated that it sometimes uses one-ton bombs. The explosions cause huge damage and create 15-meter-diameter craters. The U.S. administration has delayed deliveries of these bombs to Israel in recent months, due to allegations that they cause extensive environmental damage and kill civilians.

On November 30, Doctors Without Borders staff who run a clinic in Mawasi learned that the IDF was about to strike the area. It announced that it had not received an official announcement from the IDF and learned about the strike from residents. "We had only minutes to flee," said an employee. "The explosion was huge and afterwards we found the facility with destroyed equipment." The Abu Taha family was reportedly killed in the same strike.