Justification of massacre at Al Shifa Hospital
Spokespersons of the US government have openly defended and justified the two-week long raid and brutal massacre by the Israeli forces, at the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza at the end of March.
According to Gaza’s government media office, the death toll of Israel’s assault on the hospital stands at over 400. The Euro-Med Monitor has reported that the total number killed, missing or injured could number over 1,500, in what it called “one of the largest massacres in Palestinian history.”
The massacre at the Al Shifa hospital is among the worst so far, in the six-month-long Israeli genocidal war in Gaza, which has so far killed more than 32,000 people.
Documentary evidence shared on social media by millions of people all over the world has shown countless decomposed bodies being exhumed from the hospital’s courtyards, where they had been buried by Israeli bulldozers. The bodies included women and children, as well as men with their hands zip-tied together. Eyewitness reports in Al Jazeera and other media platforms show that hostages were shot while handcuffed or thrown in ditches and buried alive by bulldozers. The entire hospital has been reduced to rubble and turned into a mass human graveyard. According to the Euro-Med Monitor, at least 22 patients were killed in their hospital beds during the siege, while severely ill patients were denied food, water and medical care.
For two weeks no medical supplies, food or water were allowed to enter the hospital, according to workers of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. Doctors and hospital staff were shot dead, or tortured and detained.
The images have evoked public anger in all countries, against Israel and the US and its allies backing Israel. People have come out in millions in protest, demanding an immediate end to the genocide.
The US government has unabashedly defended the massacre, claiming that Al Shifa hospital was a “legitimate military target” and alleging, without any evidence, that Hamas was using it as a headquarters. US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that “it was an attack on Hamas fighters hiding in the hospital”. White House spokesman Karine Jean-Pierre asserted that Hamas was “embedding themselves in the civilian population”, without providing a shred of evidence.
The US government has given the green signal for Israel’s planned assault on Rafah, where over 1 million displaced people are currently sheltering, cramped in refugee camps. To justify the assault, US and Israel have claimed, again without providing any evidence, that “there are Hamas operatives in Rafah”.
Endorsement of murder of food aid workers
On April 3, Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) deliberately and systematically targeted and bombed a convoy of food trucks, of the World Central Kitchen (WCK). The trucks were moving in a no-conflict zone controlled by the IDF, which had been informed by WCK of the movement of the convoy. The aid workers had just finished delivering 100 tons of food and were returning to deliver another remaining 240 tons when they were killed.
7 food aid workers were killed, systematically targeted car by car. The founder of WCK has dismissed as outright lies, all suggestions by Israel and the US, that the bombings were “accidental”.
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese has cautioned that Israel’s murder of the food aid workers was aimed at further slowing the entry of food into Gaza in order to more rapidly starve the population. “Knowing how Israel operates, my assessment is that Israeli forces intentionally killed WCK workers so that donors would pull out, and civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved quietly,” Albanese wrote. Already, the UN has stopped food delivery to Northern Gaza.
The US imperialists have fully endorsed this killing and reiterated their support to Israel. Immediately following the bombing of the food trucks convoy, the Biden administration announced its total and unequivocal support for Israel’s genocidal actions.
White House National Security spokesman John Kirby asserted, “We make no bones about the fact that Israel is going to continue to have American support for the fight that they’re in to eliminate the threat from Hamas.” He added that Israel has “every right and responsibility to their people to eliminate that threat …. And so, that support for Israel continues.” Other spokespersons of the US government have reiterated this stand.
Northern Gaza is in the grip of catastrophic famine conditions. At least 27 children are reported to have died of malnutrition so far, and the number is rapidly soaring day by day.
Six months have elapsed since Israel launched a genocidal war in Gaza. Since then, 32,957 Gazans have been killed, including 14,500 children, according to the Gaza government media office. Thousands more remain missing or are trapped under the rubble, suggesting that the real death toll is likely to be much higher. At least 2 million Palestinians are living in refugee camps in terrible conditions, and more than half of them are affected by infectious diseases, due to lack of food, water, hygiene and medicine.
US imperialism and its allies have been funding and supplying increasing amounts of weapons and military assistance to Israel to carry on the war. They continue to block all attempts by the countries and peoples of the world to bring about an end to the genocide. They shamelessly continue to justify the brutal massacre and devastation, the deliberate starving to death of millions of people and the murder of the thousands of sick and wounded by denial of medical care and medical supplies.
The US imperialists, the chief sponsors of Israel’s genocidal war, and their allies stand exposed today, in the eyes of the world’s people, as the worst enemies of humanity, who have the blood of millions of Palestinians on their hands.