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12-08-2024
GAZA CITY: Medics and survivors of Israel’s latest attack on a Gaza City school turned shelter collected body parts of victims and searched for the missing as world leaders condemned the bombing that killed more than 100 people.
Israel’s military again warned Palestinians living in parts of southern Gaza to evacuate as its forces stepped up operations in the city of Khan Younis.
Jordan said it will not be a battlefield for any party and will not allow the violation of its airspace as the world continues to watch for an Iran-led retaliatory attack against Israel over the assassination of Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah’s Fuad Shukr in Beirut.
At least 39,790 people have been killed and 92,002 wounded in Israel’s war on Gaza. An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, and more than 200 were taken captive.
More from Roth, the former executive director at Human Rights Watch.
He said the Israeli military’s return to areas in the Gaza Strip that it previously had claimed were cleared of Hamas fighters demonstrates both the difficulty of eliminating the movement and Netanyahu’s desire to keep the war going.
“Hamas is first of all a political movement, it has many adherents,” said Roth but “even if you look at Hamas just as a fighting force, the idea that bombardment and missile attacks can destroy Hamas as we’ve seen now is just not true. So, they will clear an area and say, ‘we got rid of Hamas there’, and two to three weeks later, Hamas is back. So they have to re-invade.
“Then they have to tell all the people who were forcibly displaced from one place and then thought they could go home ‘no, you got to leave home and go back someplace else’. These people are being treated like ping pong, just batted around as if they are not human beings, not people who are entitled to live ordinary lives.”
Roth added that this was all part of Netanyahu’s desire for a “forever war”.
“He needs a ‘forever war’, because if the war ends, if there is a ceasefire that the Biden administration is pushing for, then it’s very likely that Netanyahu’s political coalition collapses, and he’s no longer prime minister and he then has to face the pending corruption charges from before,” said Roth.
“So his personal ambitions, his personal goals are taking precedence over obviously many Palestinian civilian lives but arguably, what’s even good for Israel, the release of the hostages alive, the likelihood of avoiding another war with Hezbollah, all of this depends on a ceasefire but Netanyahu is putting his personal needs above everything else.”
Journalists reporting fierce clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian fighters in Rafah as Israel’s military also launched artillery attacks on the southern city.
The Palestinian al-Aqsa channel meanwhile reported Israeli quadcopter attacks in central Deir el-Balah, as well as artillery and air attacks on the nearby Bureij refugee camp and the town of al-Qarara near southern Khan Younis.
The channel said a Palestinian girl was wounded in the quadcopter attack.
It also reported that Israeli gunboats shelled the coast of Gaza City in the north of the enclave.
Kenneth Roth, a visiting professor at Princeton University, said Harris, the US vice president did not “quite state international law correctly” when she emphasized Israel’s right to go after Hamas fighters in her response to the Israeli military’s latest deadly attack on a Gaza school.
“She’s partly right in that Israel has a presumptive right to attack Hamas fighters,” Roth said from New York, “but it is supposed to refrain from an attack if the foreseeable civilian harm will be disproportionate”. (Int’l News Desk)
