By Gideon Levy
Palestinians look for survivors under the rubble of destroyed buildings following Israeli airstrikes in Jabaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, on Wednesday.Credit: Abed Khaled /AP
A Hamas terrorist was taken out of the debris, carried in his father’s arms. His face is covered with dust, his body jerking like a sack, his stare blank. It’s not clear if he’s alive or dead. He is a toddler of three or four, and his desperate father rushed him to the Gaza Strip’s Indonesian Hospital, which was already bursting with wounded and dead people.
Another terrorist was extracted from the wreckage. This time she’s clearly alive, her fair, curly hair is white with dust; she’s five or six, being carried by her father. She looks right and left, as though asking where help will come from.
A man in a tattered vest scribbles here and there, a white sheet folded like a shroud in his hands, covering an infant’s body, and he’s waving it in despair. It’s the body of his son, a newborn baby. This infant hadn’t yet had a chance to join Hamas’ military headquarters in the Jabalya refugee camp. He had only lived a few days – a butterfly’s eternity – and was killed.
Dozens of youngsters continued digging in the rubble with their bare hands in a desperate effort to extract still-living people or the bodies of neighbors, raising destroyed walls from the hand of a child sticking out of the ruins. Perhaps this child was a terrorist in Hamas’ Nukhba force.
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All around stood hundreds of men, dressed in rags, clasping their hands together hopelessly. Some of them burst into tears. An Israeli solar heater with a Hebrew sticker lies in the rubble, a reminder of days gone by. “We have no time for feelings now,” says camp resident Mansour Shimal to Al Jazeera.
On Tuesday afternoon, Israel Air Force jets bombed Block 6 in the Jabalya refugee camp. In Israel, it was barely reported. Al Jazeera reported that six bombs had been dropped on Block 6, leaving a huge crater, into which a row of gray apartment buildings fell like a house of cards. The pilots must have reported successful hits. The sights were horrific.
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When I went to Gaza’s Daraj Quarter in July 2002, the day after Salah Shehadeh’s assassination, I saw harsh sights. But they were pastoral compared to what was seen in Jabalya on Tuesday. In Daraj, 14 civilians were killed, 11 of them children – about a tenth of the number of people killed in the bombing on Tuesday in Jabalya, according to Palestinian reports.
In Israel, they didn’t show the Jabalya scenes. And yet, hard to believe, they did take place. A few foreign networks broadcast them in a loop. In Israel, they said the commander of Hamas’ central battalion in Jabalya, Ibrahim Biari, was killed in an air force strike in the most crowded refugee camp in Gaza and that dozens of terrorists had been killed. Shehadeh’s killing was followed by a penetrating public debate in Israel.
What took place on Tuesday in Jabalya was barely even heard about here. It happened before the bad news about the Israeli soldiers who were killed was released, while the wartime campfire was crackling away.
According to the reports, about 100 people were killed in the Jabalya bombing and some 400 were wounded. The pictures from the Indonesian Hospital were horrifying, no less. Burnt children thrown one beside another, three and four on one filthy bed; most of them were treated on the floor for lack of enough beds. “Treatment” is the wrong word. Due to the lack of medicines, life-saving surgery was carried out not only on the floor, but without anesthesia. The Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia is now a hell.
Israel is at war, after Hamas murdered and kidnapped with barbarism and brutality that cannot be forgiven. But the children who were extracted from the debris of Block 6 and some of their parents have nothing to do with the attacks on Be’eri and Sderot.
While the terrorists ran rampant in Israel, Jabalya’s people were huddled in their huts in Gaza’s most crowded camp, thinking how to pass another day in these conditions, which were worsened by the siege of the last 16 years. Now they will bury their children in mass graves because in Jabalya, there’s no room left for individual ones.
Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focus on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Levy has won prizes for his articles on human rights in the Israeli-occupied territories.
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Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Comments
14 responses to “These Are the Children Extracted After the Bombardment of Gaza’s Jabalya Refugee Camp”
They, them genocidal murderers must be saying .. Oh sh*t, we missed these children .. some of them are still alive..; No issues, we will get them in the next round.
We thought we had them
We thought we had them
Canned
Tight-up sealed confined
Sterile on shelves
For time ourselves.
And a tidbit now and then.
Just something anything, hon?
Something I need to munch,
With a bun.
Edible, usable, digestible?
Piecemeal gold, silk, or meat
Workable, wearable, comestible?
Surely something animal, or other.
We’re not greedy, though still needy
After bloody mess, and brother!
Why, there’s even now a plaza
Near mia casa, where once was Gaza.
And who knows where was Gaza?
But no not no not nooo!
Never again; them too?
Hit them, pound them, bomb them there.
As we fear, they’re still here!
The bloodshed and destruction must end immediately!
All that’s needed is for Hamas High Command to announce that Hamas is willing to sign the instrument of unconditional surrender, either on a mutually agreed mound of rubble or in the Hamas Command and Control Center under As-Shifa Hospital.
Allahu Akbar!
So you want the Palestinian Resistance to sign an unconditional surrender with their murderous and evil occupiers, do you? Do you think the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were terrorists and they should have signed an unconditional surrender? Or are you applying double standards.
Sir, this mentally blind a *ss ho *le does not know whether he is far *ting from his mouth or far *ting from his behind …. in either case, he spreads his stink .. ;
The Israelis claim that Hamas militants are hidden amongst the refugee camps, under hospitals, and in ambulances, and use this to justify bombing them. Their brilliant intelligence services assure us of this. These are the same brilliant intelligence services that were caught napping on October 7, despite having surveillance cameras throughout Gaza, and information on every Gazan, including their telephone numbers. This b******t is swallowed by the obedient Western media, and the cowards in the US gvt. One wonders if it will ever end.
The way it is flowing … it was actually a trap put in place by them Zionists intelligence & then Hamas fell in that trap like a rock … This way them Zionists now attacking Gaza have a plan to take over half of it … and the other half for remaining alive Palestinians … Occupy the half of Gaza & make land, houses & Kibbutzes for other White, Extremacist, Supremacist Criminal, Zionist Settlers … Somehow, actually the Palestinians intelligence went for a toss;
Israel’s iunsane dummy spitting rage is a sign the Palestinian Resistance totally gazumped the IDF and that is why they are hysterical. The tide has turned. Israel cannot kill 6 million non-Jewish Palestinians and neither can it drive them out. Palestine will be free.
Shaz, interesting theory. I hadn’t thought about that.
The Jewish terrorist groups hid their weapons in schools, kindergartens, hospitals because they knew the British would not attack them. No such qualms for the Israelis who have been targeting toddler ‘terrorists’ for years. Much easier to exterminate little kids because they can’t run very fast, even if there were somewhere to run, which there is not, and it means they don’t grow up to be inconvenient subhumans. What is most horrifying are the bigots who go along with the maniacal Israelis on this.
Why are the Palestinian Resistance terrorists when they are fighting against a brutal and murderous occupier, Israel, which continues to dispossess them and colonise their country?
If they are terrorists then the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were terrorists. Is that what you are saying?
An occupier has no right to defend itself against the people it seeks to murder and crush. None. This is not equal and whatever atrocities the Palestinian Resistance has committed they are nothing, absolutely nothing compared to the atrocities Israel has committed for more than 75 years.
I have heard there are many people in power in the US with Israeli & US citizenship. And true to form the yanks speak with forked tongue. “There must be peace and a two state settlement plan,” but untill there is, we will supply weapons and money to the tune of 14.3 BILLION to israel. (no capitol required, not worth it.)
644, anyone would be hard pressed to find anyone in Biden’s cabinet who wasn’t a Zionist, this is not to mention the state department where the likes of Tony Blinken, Victoria Nuland and their ilk create foreign policy. It’s no secret who owns and operates the US economy and the Treasury department. As prime minister Ariel Sharon once said, “we the Jewish people control America”.
Rev. 2:9 & 3:9 from the King James Version say it loud and clear to Me. My heart and prayers to those under life long attacks.