Meanwhile, the slaughter goes on - in every way

"The neighborhood was one of the last undestroyed areas of Gaza City," writes The Wall Street Journal. And today was the last day of life for dozens of civilians killed in an Israeli airstrike on it. 

The final, and exact, number of the dead is not yet known. The WSJ leaves the count at a vague "dozen," the BBC reports that 70 were killed, and the civil defense agency says more than 90 are dead. Whatever today's reported number, it will rise; the hospital to which the wounded were taken says the severity of injuries "might lead to an increasing number of the dead."

"A lot of them were children and women," said 22-year-old neighborhood resident Amro Selim. The structures hit in the strike were a school and a mosque. The proportion of women and children killed today is being reported as unusually high. Still, the majority of casualties since the Gazan holocaust began have been young and female, and so unusually high is almost synonymous with normal.

In the WSJ's words, the Israeli military said "it took steps to mitigate harm to civilians before the strike." And these steps, in the words of the military, included "the use of precise munitions, aerial surveillance, and intelligence information." Precise munitions are of little life-saving value in crowded neighborhoods, however.  

Israel's regularly deployed rationalization of mass civilian deaths is that Hamas embeds itself in structures such as those hit today. No one doubts that that's true and everyone agrees that it's brutally unforgivable. Yet it's the Israeli government's decision to strike civilian-heavy areas from the air, rather than to use special ops.

Rationalizations are facile. But impossibly difficult to justify is that up to 90 innocent civilians, and possibly more, had to pay with their lives today for the deaths of an estimated 20 militants. The buildings hit also included the displaced — civilians whom the military encouraged to house themselves there.

Mr. Selim, the neighborhood resident, told the Journal that "the mosque and the first floor were targeted. I saw dead bodies over each other, body parts everywhere." He said on the first floor, where women were sheltering, a fire broke out. "We started to bring water trying to extinguish the fire, but a lot of women were burnt dead already."

Also impossible is the wholesale extermination of Hamas, which Prime Minister Netanyahu persists in promising. Yet easily accomplished are scenes like the above.

Easy ... and commonplace. The Journal reports that Israel struck two other schools on Monday. The BBC reports that "477 out of 564 school buildings in Gaza had been directly hit or damaged as of 6 July, with more than a dozen targeted since."

That's at least 87% of all schools. In confirmation of that is what's quoted in this post's opening sentence: that the school destroyed today was among the few still standing. Israel's war on Gaza has combined ethnic cleansing with the eradication of Palestinian youths' education.   

What the world is witnessing, what it's watching while standing back, is thus a thoroughgoing eradication. Lives are being violently taken, and minds are being ruthlessly closed. With that will come the end of cultural memory — and thus internal displacement assumes a double meaning.

There's physical displacement, of course, and its consequent disorientation. But there's also displacement of Gaza's mass psyche, which includes Palestinians' souls and spirit.

This generation is being forcibly thrust from all they have known, yet they remember. The next, vestigial generation will be strangers in their own land: ignorant of their past, ripped from their traditional upbringing and oblivious to their cultural uniqueness — because that is being methodically, systematically destroyed. 

Comments

[Betty White]

What is this, if not ethnic cleansing?

[PM]

That's exactly what it is, Betty.

[VoiceOfReason]

It's been going on since before 1948. The latest phase of the Nakba.