Four Palestinian males are strolling within the metropolis of Khan Younis within the southern Gaza Strip via an space largely pulverised by Israeli bombardments. There is no indication that they’re carrying weapons or doing something apart from placing one foot in entrance of the opposite, as people do to get from one place to the following.
Suddenly, a direct air strike on the pedestrians takes out two of the boys. The third continues strolling and is shortly blasted to bits as nicely. The fourth is eradicated by one more strike after falling to his knees.
This episode, which reportedly came about in February, is depicted in Israeli drone footage released in March by Al Jazeera. Watching the defenceless males systematically picked off from the sky in a fanatical show of firepower, one is reminded of the Collateral Murder video revealed by WikiLeaks in 2010, during which a dozen Iraqi civilians have been exuberantly massacred by helicopter-borne United States navy personnel.
In the Khan Younis incident, it seems that the “crime” of the 4 males – meriting an instantaneous dying sentence – was their presence in one of the Israeli navy’s so-called “kill zones” in Gaza, the topic of a current expose within the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The article specifies that “there is no written order” stipulating kill zones within the Israeli military’s “rule book”, however it’s abundantly clear that they’re a really actual phenomenon with little or no institutional oversight. “Ultimately, the boundaries of these zones and the exact procedures of operation are subject to interpretation by commanders in that specific area,” the newspaper discovered.
Speaking to Haaretz, one Israeli reserve officer described the enterprise as follows: “In every combat zone, commanders define such kill zones. … As soon as people enter [a zone], mainly adult males, orders are to shoot and kill, even if that person is unarmed.”
So a lot for the world’s “most moral army”.
In sum, then, Palestinians may be slaughtered merely for locating themselves in an space that occurs to have been arbitrarily designated a “kill zone” by some Israeli commander or one other.
And if you happen to’re killed in a “kill zone”, chances are high you’ll be marked down by Israel as a “terrorist”, which actually helps when it comes to inflating the casualty rely of “bad guys” in a struggle that as of mid-March had already killed more than 13,000 Palestinian kids.
According to Haaretz, of the greater than 32,000 Palestinians estimated to have been killed in Gaza over the previous six months, the Israeli military says 9,000 or so have been “terrorists” – a declare that has didn’t persuade even many military commanders. As one officer who beforehand served in Gaza commented to the newspaper: “In practice, a terrorist is anyone the [military] has killed in the areas in which its forces operate.”
Not that the Zionist politico-military institution hasn’t been identified to deploy the phrases “Palestinian” and “terrorist” roughly interchangeably. Indeed, 75 years of perverse propaganda has sought to influence the world that the victims of continuous terrorisation by Israel are in reality those doing the terrorising.
Now the victims of “kill zones” get to be terrorists too. Never thoughts that, relating to the case of the 4 pedestrians in Khan Younis, a senior Israeli navy officer remarked to Haaretz: “They were unarmed. They didn’t endanger our forces in the area in which they were walking.”
The article goes on to cite the identical officer’s hypothesis that many civilians in Gaza had met their demise after coming into areas they thought the military had already deserted, probably within the hopes of discovering meals that had been left behind: “When they went to such places, they were shot, perceived as people who could harm our forces.”
An Israeli navy spokesperson has huffily denied the “kill zone” experiences. And but on the finish of the day, the Gaza Strip is one big kill zone – with actually no house off limits to killing. How else do you clarify massacres at Palestinian hospitals and United Nations shelters or the slaughter of individuals ready in line for meals support as kids starve to death?
To make sure, Israel has lengthy boasted of its alleged prowess in conducting surgically exact air strikes and focused killings. But even when the determine of 9,000 useless “terrorists” tallied by the Israeli military had any foundation in actuality, it’s tough to account for greater than 23,000 “collateral murders”, to borrow the WikiLeaks phrasing.
Unless, after all, collaterality has nothing to do with it and Israel is merely straight up focusing on civilians – which, in spite of everything, is how genocide works, isn’t it?
After six months of apocalyptic struggle, Gaza right now is a bunch of “kill zones” inside a bigger kill zone. And as Israel continues its quest to normalise depravity throughout the board, the present Israeli monopoly on terrorism will definitely be powerful to interrupt.
The views expressed on this article are the writer’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
