Gaza’s Night of Death and Hunger

By Gideon Levy

It was a night of death and hunger. When it ended, at least 112 people had been killed and another 760 were injured. Israel tried to deny responsibility – the trucks hit them – but there is no denying its responsibility for what is happening now in the Gaza Strip: Israel is the occupying force there.

Not only that: Dr. Mohammed Salha, the acting director of Gaza City’s Al-Awda Hospital, told The Associated Press that of the 176 wounded brought to the facility, 142 had gunshot wounds and the other 34 showed injuries from a stampede. A physician at the city’s Shifa Hospital said that most of those treated there had gunshot wounds.

Trucks, as far as is known, don’t shoot. And the claim that Hamas security guards were the ones who fired such an insane amount of ammunition into the crowd is as credible as the initial claim that it was Palestinians who fatally shot the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin in 2022.

Nor do the edited videos distributed by the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit show people being hit by the trucks. In the videos, people flee for their lives like insects – black dots running around that reflect with marvelous precision the attitude directed at them and their lives – but none of the insects are being run over.

11:30 P.M. On Instagram, hundreds of people are seen gathering around bonfires in an attempt to relieve the winter chill. They are waiting for trucks that might arrive at the location where aid distribution has been carried out in recent days. At around 4 A.M., a convoy of trucks from Egypt that passed the Israeli checkpoint makes its way north on Al-Rashid Street. The Israel Defense Forces says there were 30 trucks, an eyewitness told the BBC there were 18.

At about 4:45 A.M., the convoy of trucks were surrounded by crowds of people as they approached the Nabulsi rotary. The IDF videos show four trucks surrounded by people as well as people lying on the road. Army vehicles are parked on the side. Al Jazeera showed a video filmed partly at the back of the convoy in which bursts of gunfire can be heard and people can be seen crawling on the trucks or sheltering behind them. Eyewitnesses said the shooting came from the direction of the Israeli vehicles. One witness, Mahmoud Awadeyah, said the Israelis prevented any access to the wounded.

Even if it is proved that it was IDF soldiers who shot at this horrifying assembly and who killed and wounded hundreds of starving people, no one in Israel will be upset by it. It’s a war, you know; October 7, remember. The minimal compassion for the Palestinians stopped completely in Israel on October 7 and has shown no signs of life ever since. It’s in a coma. We only feel compassion for ourselves, our soldiers and our hostages, and everyone else can just explode for all we care.

And explode they do: The Gazans literally and the world from anger. The danger of being a pariah is closer than ever: Israel has never been denounced, been renounced and provoked such hatred as it has today. You can shrug your shoulders, but soon every Israeli will feel it.

What else needs to happen? The spokesman for the World Health Organization, Christian Lindmeier, said Friday that a 10th child was officially registered in a Gaza hospital as having starved to death. What else needs to happen for Israelis to wake up from their complacency and activate their moral sensors about what has been happening since October 7? The time, which stopped in Israel that day, has moved on. For nearly five months, Gaza’s toll of dead, wounded, hungry and sick is soaring. It turns out that even the deaths of 30,000 people, two-thirds of them women and children, do not satisfy the appetite for revenge.

If the night of death and hunger, the night when body bags replaced the bags of food on the trucks and when blood mixed with flour, did not inspire resistance to the war in Israel, nothing will make Israel stop, if only to think about its actions and their cost: If not the horrific price that the nonhuman Gazans are paying, then at least the price that Israel will pay. From here on, we shall only whisper in vain: Enough.

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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