Abby Zimet: In What Is Called A War (Trigger Warning — graphic violence)

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We apologize. The unprecedented human tragedy in Gaza hurtles on; we can record only pitiless catastrophe afflicting the innocent, its numbers and names. Over 3,400 Palestinian children have been killed and 6,300 wounded; Israel is hitting ravaged hospitals without fuel or light with de-facto bombings; their mad “leader” is quoting Biblical bloodbaths, declaring a “holy mission” of annihilation, and refusing to stop in the name of vengeance: “This is a time for war.” Once again: Murdering children is not “war.”

Writer Ahmed Nehad bitterly documents a grim former “normal” Gaza: Scarce food, water, electricity, hospital beds, jobs, hope. That “normal” was long met with “deafening global silence” until the Oct. 7 killings of Israeli civilians: Then, “the world sat upright and saw the horror of blood spilled in historic Palestine, when the blood took on a different hue.” In just over three weeks, Israel has dropped over 12,000 tons of bombs on Gaza; they have killed over 8,300, but their “true cost, says UNICEF’s Catherine Russell, “will be measured in children’s lives.” Over 420 children a day are killed or injured, roughly one every 10 minutes; over 2,000 children are missing under the rubble, and likely dead; 70% of the dead are children and women; frantic rescue crews must decide between retrieving dead bodies or trying to dig out wounded ones; entire families have been wiped out, leaving young survivors as orphans asking where their parents are; over 16,000 people have been wounded, with little medical help available; over 1.4 million people, more than half the population, have been displaced; and there is “no safe place in Gaza.”

Including, grotesquely, hospitals, where many have sought shelter. Over 50,000 people have taken refuge at al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital; perhaps 12,000 have fled to al-Quds hospital, the next biggest. But under a siege that has blocked all fuel and medicine, and with over a third of the city’s hospitals shut down, the rest are struggling. Doctors dependent on one generator are operating by flashlight, rationing anesthetics, sterilizing with vinegar or laundry detergent, cutting back on dialysis and chemo treatments, having to choose, “like God,” which of two intensive care babies to save. Meanwhile, “If the electricity goes, it just becomes a mass grave.” Israel has ordered hospitals to “evacuate,” knowing well that’s impossible; says Nebal Farsakh of the Palestinian Red Crescent, “Evacuating them means killing them.” Israel has also issued cruelly pointless “warnings” to “evacuate” before bombardments, face-saving mockeries of humanity that “do not make targeting hospitals less of a war crime,” says Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah: “A crime is a crime, even if you make it by appointment.”

On Democracy Now, Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian physician who’s helped provide emergency care in Gaza for 16 years during “very hectic periods” – Israeli assaults in 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014 – cites an “urgent fear” among colleagues Israel will move to bomb hospitals directly, as opposed to its “de facto” bombardments of nearby sites. He particularly condemns Israel’s threat to bomb the (clearly civilian) al-Shifa based on their claim Hamas’ command center is under it – a claim he’s heard since 2009, with no proof forthcoming despite having walked freely there, slept there, filmed there for years. As he anxiously waits in Cairo for entry to Gaza, he praises health workers who remain, “moral compasses” and “cornerstones of a social fabric” that’s been largely ripped away. “It’s completely absurd that (we) have a state army threatening to bomb hospitals and killing children” – 5,300 to date – “in what is called a war,” he says, blasting Biden’s refusal to demand a ceasefire. “This has to stop. I don’t need to use the word ‘genocide.’ It’s enough to say ‘mass murder of civilians.’ We need to stand up and say we don’t accept this.”

As to Netanyahu, his blood lust is far from sated. On Monday, in a chilling speech experts deemed “an explicit call to genocide,” he termed Israel’s slaughter of innocents “a holy mission” and invoked their ancient foe from the Old Testament: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible: ‘Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.'” Calls for a ceasefire, he declared with stunning cognitive dissonance, are “a call for Israel (to) surrender to barbarism…The Bible says there is a time for peace and a time for war. This is a time for war.” Still, mournfully, Ahmed Nehad nonetheless pleads for the trifling mercy of a ceasefire, that “a mere handful might endure.” “Grant us the luxury of one last hug,” he writes. “Our end is nigh, rest assured.” Those already dead and documented – name, age, ID number – total 6,747; the number excludes thousands still under rubble or not yet identified. To read the list, you must keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. May their memories be for a blessing.

Injured child at Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital after Israeli airstrikes. Photo by Saeed Jaras/APA Images

First published in Common Dreams. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Abby Zimet has written Common Dreams’s Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women’s, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues.