A tragic story in six panels.
Some clarification is required. People did go back into the hospital later.
You may not want to read what they found.
The scene inside the Al-Nasr hospital ICU ward is chilling. The tiny bodies of babies, several still attached to wires and tubes that were meant to keep them alive, decomposing in their hospital beds. Milk bottles and spare diapers still next to them on the sheets.
The video inside the hospital was filmed on November 27 by Mohamed Baalousha, a Gaza reporter for UAE-based news outlet Al Mashhad. He shared an unblurred version with CNN, which shows the remains of at least four infants.
Three of them appear to be still connected to hospital machines. The bodies of the babies appear to be darkening and disintegrating from decay, with little more than skeletons left in some of the beds. Flies and maggots are visibly crawling across the skin of one child.
The IDF denies everything.
During an online Q&A for journalists Saturday, IDF spokesman Doron Spielman dismissed the story as merely a “rumor.”
“There were no premature babies that decomposed because of the IDF. There were probably no babies that decomposed whatsoever,” Spielman said. “But Hamas is in charge of Nasr hospital, we are not occupying Nasr hospital.”
Yeah, they only bombed the hospital and prompted a panicky evacuation. But it wasn’t their fault!
I said in the beginning that the usual exchange ratio in these wars is 10 Palestinians dead for every Israeli dead.
10:1 would be 12,000 Palestinians killed for the 1200 Israelis killed in the Hamas attack.
We are now over that at 18,787 Palestinians killed to 1200 Israelis.
I guess the next milestone will be 20 to 1, 24,000 Palestinians dead.
Half the population of Gaza is under 18 so many of these Gaza dead will be…children.
You expect these Israelite soldiers to be pro-life?
And the US continues pumping money to Israel, our leaders widely support it, and the media has been all out with propaganda labelling anyone who even dares call this out as genocide as antisemitic. I’ve always been frustrated with the Democratic party but at this point I hate every last one of them who refuses to speak up’s guts.
In Texas, a few assholes get to control whether or not a pregnant person can get an abortion for a fetus that will be stillborn and prevent complications. Meanwhile, my state’s senate just passed one of the most anti-trans bills in the entire country. Kids are gonna suffer and die because of it, and later bills are going to target trans adults (including myself and my family and community I’ve found and built up over the last decade) and barely anyone who isn’t already affected wants to do anything of substance. Death before detransition is a common refrain in my community, and a sentiment I feel as well.
Civil disobedience needs to be the bare minimum, active resistance (and absolutely fuck calls to adhere to “non-violence” against the people literally killing my loved ones) against the people in power perpetuating this shit and dismantling the systems that allow them power over so many lives in the first place needs to be the norm at this point. How many of us need to fucking suffer and die before you all start fighting back? The right gets on their pulpits and outright says they want to execute trans people, and “allies” are always silent when it comes to doing anything of actual substance. We’ll be led in the camps and libs still won’t call for action against fascists. START TAKING ACTION ALREADY BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.
One may wonder whether Netanyahu realizes he is creating new terrorists. Of course he does. Never-ending conflict suits him, and other sociopathic clowns like Putin, just fine.
This isn’t about perpetuating the conflict, it’s about advancing it to one undeniable end: Ethnic cleansing.
@5 ^this
Erlend Meyer @5: I disagree. If ethnic cleansing is his goal, he’s doing a piss-poor job of it. He and his kind need human faces to stamp their boots on forever. The Palestinian people have the misfortune of playing that role.
BTW, Netanyahu has played footsie with Hamas for years, allowing cash to flow to them, for the sole purpose of stymieing any hope of a Palestinian state.
There’s only one small problem. During an international furor, the hospital was evacuated on live international TV a month ago of all neonates.
But, it does match a pattern of psychological operations that’s been ongoing since this entire damned mess started, emotional strings get pulled, to override any critical thought or recollection of memory.
As it stands now, the IDF is doing a bang up job at recruiting for Hamas, without people listening to propaganda that, if they thought about it, was obviously born false (see the evacuation a month ago on live television).
Or should we let emotion rule reason and build big camps with big ovens and non-working showers again? They were and the few remaining examples are the most fetching shade of cyan.
Oh, in another wonderful victory, the IDF is flooding the tunnels under Gaza with water from the Med. The very tunnels the remaining hostages are supposed to be hidden in.
Because, Netanyahu shall allow none of his toes to remain unshot.
It’s fucking impressive how the IOF are denying the babies even existed, while their allies are dismissing the stories as a mere “antisemitic conspiracy theory” despite mounting evidence of what’s going on at the hospital.
Ah, the Israeli Terrorist Force is at it again…
While we’re at it, what’s going with the universities in America and why are they clamping down peaceful pro-Palestinian protests, especially considering that a lot of those protestors are Jewish?
Thornapple@11- I read recently that a large number of American Jews under the age of 30 (40?) are not sympathetic to Israel regarding the Palestinians.
In a nutshell: The evil axis of Netanyahu’s government and the Hamas leadership need each other. Hamas needs Netanyahu to kill innocent Palestinians for the purpose of recruiting more foot soldiers. Netanyahu needs Hamas for the purpose of discrediting any notion of Palestinian statehood. The gift exchange which keeps on giving ad infinitum and ad nauseam. How is this not obvious?
@#13, Rob Grigjanis: I realize that Israel, like the US, has not signed onto the Rome Statute and is therefore not subject to the ICC (which, in itself, is basically an admission of intent to commit war crimes; Russia isn’t a signatory, either), but international law says that armed opposition to a military occupation is legitimate. (It’s why countries who are subject to the ICC can support Ukraine. We’re supposed to like Ukraine, right? If the US were even remotely consistent, we’d either be arming Hamas and enforcing sanctions against Israel or else cheering on Russia for their occupation of Ukraine… but of course Ukraine is white.) If Israel faced the sort of inquiry that Nazi Germany did, their country would perforce cease to exist at this point, but Hamas would at worst get a slap on the wrist. Pretending that there is any moral equivalence between the two is grotesque.
Vicar (singular, definite):
Murdering and raping and kidnapping civilians is not legitimate; what Hamas did is not anywhere near legitimate. Understandable, maybe, but legitimate, no.
Yet here you are, doing just that. Comparing Hamas with Israel with Nazi Germany.
(Grotesquerie suits you)
If I might quote a not so famous American concerning what we should do with the Native Americans: “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians!… Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice. It does seem to me that is the goal of the IDF and Israeli leaders here.
Sorry that was John Chivington of Sand Creek fame.
This is why the rest of the world should treat Israel as the international pariah it is Why on earth the crumbling bastion of freedom and democracy, the USA continues to provide them with billions of dollars and the means to continue this genocide beggars belief. Cut them off from all food, all money, all trade and any other aid. Ban Israelis from entry anywhere and blockade their ports. In the absence of this, unfortunately, the only solution will be to deal the same death and destruction to Israel that they have dealt to the Palestinians.
Gaza is the largest open air prison/concentration camp on planet earth right now.
And Hamas is the prison gang that ended up on the top of the heap.
They aren’t elected and didn’t take power peacefully. Then won one election back in 2006 and then had an armed battle with the Palestinian Authority to take over. They rule by having most of the weapons in Gaza.
The NY Times story is paywalled so: https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/buying-quiet-inside-the-israeli-plan-that-propped-up-hamas/
Sharon played some dark realpolitik in quitting Gaza to evade the Palestinian demography timebomb and sidestep the peace plans of the Quartet and others, but Netanyahu goes and takes realpolitik to a different and darker level. That’s just some messed up stuff right there.
Square that with: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html
Another story you won’t see commented upon by the uncritical cheerleaders on that other blog: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/barak-causes-storm-by-telling-cnn-israel-helped-build-some-spaces-beneath-shifa/
What Hamas OTOH did on October 7th was neither understandable nor legitimate. Full stop!
The US needs to pull the plug on our support for what Netanyahu and the far right Israeli regime are doing in response. The cheerleaders love to brag how Israel made the desert bloom. If so they could do with a bit more self-sufficiency, no?
Rob Grigjanis @13
I think you nailed it!
@13
It’s slightly less complicated than that, even. Israel helped create Hamas, funding the group in order to defeat the more secular left-of-center PLO led by Yassar Arafat. It’s roughly analogous to how the United States funded Al Qaeda to fight the Soviets. And we all know how well that turned out: It created the circumstances necessary for the United States to gleefully engage in decades of ethnic cleansing in the Middle East.
and
and
The Netanyahu Israeli government demonstrated astonishing incompetence in preparing for the Hamas attack.
They had warning it was going to occur a year ago!!!
They were warned months ago.
They were warned weeks ago.
For Cthulhu’s sake, they were warned the night before it happened!!!
The IDF response to the attack was also astonishingly incompetent. It took them 3 days to get their act together and drive off Hamas with 200 Israeli hostages.
Some of the 1200 Israelis killed were killed by the IDF, who weren’t all that careful about who they were shooting at.
So really, what did we learn about Israel and the IDF from these atrocities?
The Israeli government and the IDF are the poster people for incompetence.
The Israeli Defense Forces do have one talent though.
They are very good at driving out and massacring more or less unarmed civilians. Give them a few hundred thousand unarmed Palestinian children, trapped in a prison camp, and no one can stop them.
Well, when the biggest kid on the playground supports one of the meaner kids, that kid can get away with shit.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-oks-potential-sale-tank-cartridges-israel-1065-mln-2023-12-09/
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/un-vote-delayed-demand-gaza-humanitarian-ceasefire-2023-12-08/
Et fucking cetera.
If you want an idea of what passes for commentary on that other blog:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/10/15/sunday-hili-dialogue-451/#comment-2063811
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/11/20/monday-hili-dialogue-439/#comment-2068153
Also in more comments on WEIT just today!:
In response to:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/12/14/questions-for-reader-discussion/#comment-2071892
Ummm…see:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-iron-wall-quot
From Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall” essay:
Colonization and then some in that essay by a founding father of the Israeli right. You just can’t make this shit up. Facepalm.
Yeah I bet Jabotinsky was some woke campus activist that guy.
Hamas, goes and rapes and kills people, men, women and children at a concert, Palestine civilians spit on and cheer as the women are gang raped and tortured. Some have their boobs cut off, others legs. Hamas, takes Hostages, runs and hides, rapes them, while attacking from schools and hospitals they’ve taken over. While still launching rockets at Israel and launching attacks from the places they’ve taken over. IDF -Okay, so this is where YOU want to make your stand. Bombs crap out of them. Hamas: “Look see how evil they are!” while releasing AI generated photos and vidoes, – western left world: “Yeah! evil jews!”
mean while…
Arabs are mass raping and genociding the native people of El Geneina. Western left world: “yeah but that’s boring, we can’t feel superior, intellectual and self-righteous, so we don’t care about that. Call me when jews are involved, then I can quote the holocaust, incorrect Middle East history and feel morally righteous again”.
In BBC news feed (plain text capture):
Oh, and “Israel Gaza: UN General Assembly demands immediate ceasefire”
(https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67699508)
wzrd1@8,
You might have bothered to read the linked article:
Alt-X@27,
There’s one big difference between the Israeli crimes in Gaza and those in Darfur which you don’t mention: western governments have not spent years supporting and arming those carrying out the latter.
And those thousands of Palestinian children slaughtered, hundreds of thousands displaced and deprived of food, clean water, fuel, power.. in Gaza – well, they’re born guilty, aren’t they?
Alt-X@27,
A couple more points:
1) Whataboutery is almost always a sign that the whataboutist knows they are defending the indefensible. And while I recognise that your target is the western left, it seems pertinent to ask what you yourself have done about the atrocities in Darfur? I’ve been on marches about Gaza, but my main political activity over the past year has been in support of the people of Ukraine – both supporting their right of armed resistance against the Russian invasion (and obtaining weapons for it wherever they can), and supporting civil society organizations such as trades unions against the neoliberal government.
2) While I recognise the existence of left antisemitism, and its possible role in the opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza, there’s an important point which doesn’t quite fit your narrative. Certainly in the USA and UK, I suspect elsewhere as well, a notable aspect of the demonstrations has been the presence of significant numbers of Jews, often marching under banners identifying them as such. To the best of my knowledge, and certainly at the events I’ve attended, they have been welcomed and their speakers have been applauded. But perhaps, as they oppose Israeli crimes, you consider that they don’t count as Jews.
It’s notable that the policies of the US and UK governments with respect to Israel-Palestine are completely incoherent. Both claim to support a “two-state solution” to the problem, but the Israeli ambassador to the UK and (in slightly less absolute terms) the President of Israel in advance of a mmeeting with Jake Sullivan, White House national security advisor have made clear they oppose this. Since they are obviously also opposed to a one-state solution, this would seem to leave only two options in Israeli policy: permanent subordination of the Palestinians in an apartheid state, or “ethnic cleansing”. In arming and supporting Israel, the USA, UK and other western governments are in effect supporting one or other of these outcomes, but lack the honesty to say so.
@KG:
I think a person like Netanyahu does not care about any solution or anything other than gripping to power. There are obviously a lot voices who support genocide (murder and eventual forced dislocation), even on the “left” or “center left” (e.g., see Jerry’s blog where the general tone is that it is not possible to live next to Palestinians and so they should be forced to move to other Arab countries) and also at least partially the Israeli strategy seems to be total destruction of civilian infrastructure to make the return more difficult. However, the Netanyahu government at least to me is not preparing the next stages of the genocide by having them shipped to other countries. There seems to be no plans for what comes afterwards.
As far as I can tell, the right-wing Israeli government is very happy to live next to the terrorist Hamas organization as long as they don’t cause too much damage. They don’t want Israelis to be totally safe because then they can’t fearmonger but also they don’t want them to feel too unsafe because then they might get blamed. They were in fact very happy with the level of aggression of the previous years when only few Israelis would die, just enough that people cannot forget the threat but not large enough casualties that the government would get blamed for not keeping the people safe enough. After Oct 7, this equation changed and it does not seem that the rightwing government has any plans on what they want to do afterwards. It seems the strategy is the old G.W. Bush strategy of “ya don change commander during war”.
@Rob #7: I don’t know if I want to be right or wrong here. But they do need to keep the appearance of self defense, so a straight up extermination wouldn’t work. The international fallout would be too great. So instead they force the enemy into a situation so desperate it has to end in violence.
@27
Really strange that the IDF resorted to fabricating all the evidence they’ve been caught fabricating if what you said was all true.
lotharloo@33,
It’s clear that not enough food (aside from other necessities) is being brought into Gaza to sustain the population, and this has been so continuously at least since the Israeli ground invasion began. If it goes on much longer, inevitably a large part of the population will either die, or leave (if permitted). Since this is an entirely predictable outcome of Israeli action, it must be considered intentional.
This is why I keep hoping for another meteor. Humans are not worth this planet’s trouble.
The Vicar @14
To be fair there seems to be a significant overlap between those who believe we’re too supportive of Ukraine, and even outright support Russia, and those who support Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Kome #22
The US government would say they supported the native Afghan Mujahideen not Al-Qaeda. The US government also lies…a lot.
I must have missed the Ukrainian incursion into Russia that killed over 1,000 people and took civilian hostages immediately before the Russian invasion. (Yes, I know Ukrainian fascists committed atrocities in 2014-15, but there was very little fighting between Ukrainian government forces and the “separatist” – i.e. Russian puppet – forces in the year before the 2022 invasion, and no signs of Ukrainian intentions to launch any attack.) But certainly, the USA should have told Netanyahu immediately after the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza began to stop it or lose all American support.
In the news: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/15/israeli-military-says-its-troops-shot-and-killed-three-hostages-by-mistake
Oopsies.
@36:
Yes, that’s collective punishment, Israel’s standard protocol since forever. They don’t really care about the Palestinian people. Remember the “land without a people for people without land”,. Palestinians are not “people”, they are savages with no individuality, so collectively punishing them is ok.
This is working out about as well as I and many others expected.
When Israel invaded Gaza, the Hamas fighters were just going to run, hide, disappear, go anywhere but Gaza.
So far, Israel has killed 18,000 Gaza people.
Most of them weren’t Hamas fighters.
I doubt if Israel really even knows how many Hamas fighters they have actually killed. When they are dead, Hamas fighters look like any other dead Palestinian.
The IDF says they will be in Gaza for more weeks and months looking for Hamas fighters. In the end I doubt they will even get half of them. The leaders may well have left Gaza and are hanging out in Cairo or Lebanon.