Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 03.03.2024
On Thursday morning more than 100 Palestinian dis and 700 were injured. These were people waiting for humanitarian aid south of Gaza City.
Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy said on X on Thursday
“IDF (Israel Defense Forces) forces did not shoot at the convoy. IDF forces did not shoot at people looting the trucks. IDF forces used fire when masses ran toward them in a way that threatened their lives. They were there in the first place to secure the convoy.
“The spokesperson later on deleted his post and repeated claims by the Israeli army, accusing civilians of killing each other in a stampede. Those poor people were killed when they were crushed in a stampede and in some cases run over by the Gazan truck drivers as they tried to get out. But go ahead, blame Israel,” Levy said later” [1]
Like usual the Israeli spokesperson is telling another lie:
“On Thursday morning, Israeli forces shelled a crowd of Palestinians waiting for humanitarian aid south of Gaza City at the “al-Nabulsi Roundabout” area, leaving at least 112 Palestinians dead and 760 others injured, according to the Gaza-based Health Ministry.” [2]
“Witnesses and survivors described bullets hitting crowds around the aid trucks, and Mohammed Salha, acting director of the al-Awda hospital, which treated 161 casualties, said most appeared to have been shot” [3]
“Ali Awad Ashqir, who said he had gone to get some food for his starving family, told the news agencyAFP he had been waiting for two hours when trucks began to arrive.
“The moment they arrived, the occupation army fired artillery shells and guns,” he said” [4]
“At least 30,228 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have since been killed in Gaza, and 71,377 others injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.
“The Zionist war on Gaza has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN” [5]
Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Netanyahu’s government to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.
This massacre and the lie are not the only lie Israel is telling. On February 27 the intercept writes:
“Volunteers of the Israeli ultra-Orthodox NGO ZAKA collect samples in one of the houses attacked by Palestinian militants on October 7, in Kibbutz Holit in Israel’s southern district south of the Gaza Strip on October 26, 2023. Thousands of civilians, both Palestinians and Israelis, have died since October 7, 2023, after Palestinian Hamas militants based in the Gaza Strip entered southern Israel in an unprecedented attack triggering a war declared by Israel
Volunteers of the Israeli ultra-Orthodox organization Zaka collect samples in one of the houses attacked by Palestinian militants on October 7, in Kibbutz Holit in Israel’s southern district south of the Gaza Strip on Oct. 26.
Israeli media has debunked the ultra-Orthodox group’s stories, but the New York Times won’t say so.
YOSSI LANDAU IS the head of operations for the southern region at Zaka, an Israeli search-and-rescue organization. Assigned to collect human remains after the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, Landau and his fellow Zaka members riveted media outlets worldwide with the horrific atrocities they saw.
Speaking through tears at the Jerusalem Press Club shortly after the attack, Landau described finding a pregnant woman in Kibbutz Be’eri in a “big puddle of blood, face down.”
“Her stomach was butchered open,” Landau said. “The baby that was connected to the cord was stabbed.”
In Be’eri, he said, he also found a family who was tied up, tortured, and executed with a bullet to the back of the head: father, mother, and two small children around 6 or 7 years old. An eye was missing, fingers chopped off. Landau later told CNN, “The terrorists were having a ball,” with Palestinian militants devouring a holiday meal set out by the family. Landau broke down recounting the tale, as a CNN reporter comforted him.
Long after Landau’s emotional recollections were replayed, repeated, cited, and quoted in the global media, a problem emerged: No one could find any evidence that the two massacres ever took place — in Be’eri or elsewhere.
In the case of the butchered mother and fetus, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz concluded the killing “simply didn’t happen.” As for the tortured family, no one killed in Be’eri matches Landau’s account. The one brother and sister to die in the kibbutz were 12-year-old twins, killed when an Israeli general ordered a tank to fire on a house where Hamas militants were holding them hostage. Nevertheless, Landau told these stories unchecked in interviews and press conferences.
Landau spread his tales far and wide with little pushback — telling similar stories on camera to CNN, Fox News, and the Media Line, and at an outdoor press conference. Even after reporters showed his accounts lacked any substantiation, news organizations continued to let him off the hook. The New York Times recently interviewed Landau as part of a profile about Zaka, but it did not mention either of his atrocity stories.
Western Media Whitewash
Zaka stories have been essential to justifying Israel’s all-out war against Gaza, which has killed around 30,000 Palestinians in less than five months. Speaking at the United Nations in December, Zaka deputy commander Simcha Greiniman broke down while describing alleged atrocities. He later told the same stories to a meeting of British parliamentarians.
Given its prominence, Zaka has been scrutinized by the Israeli press but not the U.S. media. A blockbuster Haaretz report found after October 7, senior military leaders sidelined Israel Defense Forces soldiers specializing in recovering bodies and preserving evidence and sent in untrained Zaka volunteers instead. Zaka reportedly turned massacre sites into a “war room for donations,” used corpses as fundraising props, “spread accounts of atrocities that never happened,” and botched forensics that are central to Israel’s claim that Hamas carried out a premeditated campaign of mass rape” [6]
Down with the Zionist apartheid from the river to the sea!
Block any transfer of weapons and ammunition to Israel!
For Palestine red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[1] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-admits-army-shot-dead-over-100-palestinians-seeking-aid/3153081#:~:text=Israel%20admitted%20that%20its%20forces,at%20people%20looting%20the%20trucks.
[2] Ibid
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/29/more-than-a-hundred-dead-after-israeli-troops-opened-fire-near-aid-trucks-say-gaza-officials
[4] Ibid
[5] https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/israel-admits-army-shot-dead-over-100-palestinians-seeking-aid/3153081#:~:text=Israel%20admitted%20that%20its%20forces,at%20people%20looting%20the%20trucks.
[6] https://theintercept.com/2024/02/27/zaka-october-7-israel-hamas-new-york-times/