This, by now, familiar pantomime is playing out in the shocking residue of a massacre of more than 100 desperate Palestinians who surged at aid trucks carrying the stuff of life denied to them by a fanatical regime intent on killing them quickly or slowly. This time, the terror took place on al-Rashid Street in the southwest outskirts of what remains of Gaza City, where thousands of homeless Palestinians had gathered in the open night air. Cold. Sick. Thirsty. Starving.
What happened in that place and at that time was not an “incident” or a “chaotic scene”. It was, instead, more lethal evidence of the genocide that is being committed by a ruthless, occupying power against an imprisoned, powerless people with deliberate and malignant efficiency. “We went to get flour. The Israeli army shot at us. There are many martyrs on the ground and until this moment we are withdrawing them. There is no first aid,” one witness
told Al Jazeera.
Another witness
added that: “The Israelis just opened random fire on us as if it were a trap.”
Then, after strafing Palestinians, Israeli tanks moved forward and ran over the dead and injured, al-Ghoul said. What witnesses appear to be describing is the military tactic known as the “double tap”. The initial strike hits the intended target. A second strike is aimed at bystanders drawn to help the dead and injured. In any event, when the carnage was over, the breathtaking tally of dead and injured Palestinians had grown as it has every day for the past five months with unrelenting ferocity.
When daylight arrived, the true measure of the appalling slaughter had become apparent. Ambulances could not reach the dozens of dead and disfigured since roads, like much of Gaza, had been destroyed. The dead were loaded onto the flatbed portion of one of the aid trucks turned mobile mortuary, their limp, lifeless bodies intertwined in a grotesque heap of humanity.
The deluge of injured Palestinians who survived the attack descended on overwhelmed hospitals and the caregivers who still populate them. “Hospitals are no longer able to accommodate the huge number of patients because they lack fuel, let alone medicine. Hospitals have also run out of blood,” al-Ghoul said.