Israeli Missile Attack Turns Refugee Camp Into Rafah Hellscape

MIKE WHITNEY • MAY 27, 2024

https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/israeli-missile-attack-turns-refugee-camp-into-rafah-hellscape/

On Sunday, Israel launched multiple missile strikes on a “safe zone” in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah. The explosions –which could be heard miles away– ignited a massive fire that swept rapidly through the encampment trapping many people in their tents where they were burned alive. The ghoulish scenes from the site appeared almost immediately on a number of social media channels where millions of viewers were able to see the effects of Israel’s murderous onslaught firsthand. Many of the videos that appeared on Twitter are almost too painful to watch. In one particularly horrible clip, a bearded man holds up the headless remains of a toddler who was blown to bits minutes earlier.

Another video shows desperate parents and neighbors trying to extract the charred bodies of their children from the rubble while the flames flicker in the background.

A third video shows six young men moving a victim in a quilt across a smokey debris-field, the bombed-out remnants of a residential building.

Watching these eerie, post-apocalypse videos is both traumatizing and sobering. We are clearly experiencing a level of homicidal barbarism not seen in the post-war era. Keep in mind, the victims of Israel’s attack had been ordered to move to their present location just days earlier. And — as soon as they had settled in– Israel mercilessly obliterated them with 1,000-pound bombs. How is that not cold blooded murder?

It is murder. As author Norman Finklestein said recently, “Israel is killing people in a concentration camp.”

He’s right, isn’t he? And even more shocking, is the fact that they are slaughtering women and children with a type of gusto that borders on clinical psychosis. But it’s not psychosis; it’s a strain of fanatical zealotry that has no equal in modern times. Keep in mind, there is zero strategic value in blowing up an encampment of displaced persons. It serves no military purpose at all. Which leads us to believe that the impetus for these atrocities is something altogether different; something much darker and more sinister. This is pure bloodsport; killing for the sake of killing. No one wants to admit it, but after seven months of relentless savagery it is no longer possible to ignore the plain truth; Israel is engaging in the most extreme forms of murderous violence because it reinforces their collective sense of superiority. It’s shocking. This is from an article at Aljazeera:

Gaza officials say the death toll from Israeli air strikes on a camp housing displaced Palestinians near Rafah in southern part of the strip has risen to 45…. Witnesses said at least eight missiles struck the camp – a designated safe zone – on Sunday night at about 8.45pm local time.

The Wafa news agency, quoting the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), said that many of those who died were “burned alive” inside their tents in the Tal as-Sultan area…

The International Committee of the Red Cross said its field hospital in Rafah was receiving an influx of casualties and that other hospitals also were taking in a large number of patients.

“The air strikes burnt the tents, the tents are melting and the people’s bodies are also melting,” one of the residents who arrived at the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah was reported as saying by the Reuters news agency.

Doctors without Borders said “dozens of wounded” had been brought to a facility that it supports.

“We are horrified by this deadly event, which shows once again that nowhere is safe,” the group wrote on the social media platform X, reiterating its call for an immediate ceasefire
Death toll in Israeli attack on displaced Palestinians in Rafah rises to 45, Aljazeera

All the victims of Israel’s attack have been forced to move numerous times in the recent past. The herding of massive groups of people from one spot to another is a form of psychological torment designed to intensify feelings of fear and insecurity. The ultimate aim of this psyops is to coerce Palestinians to flee the country whenever the opportunity arises. With their homes and cities now destroyed, their loved ones either dead or injured, their access to food and water terminated, and their entire civilization reduced to rubble, the expectation is that the Palestinians will leave their homeland voluntarily allowing Israel to control the entire area from the River to the Sea, which has been the Zionist plan from the very beginning. This is from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:

…the world-renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé called the “foundational myth” of Zionism: that the 1948 “Nakba,” in which 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, was a voluntary resettlement on the part of Palestinians, unprompted by the actions of Israeli forces.

Pappé’s 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, is a devastating exposure of all the lies of official Israeli historiography. It demonstrates that the 1948 displacement and mass killing of Palestinians was the outcome of a detailed and conscious plan.

In a chilling parallel to the events of the present day, Pappé explained that Israel cloaked its plans as a response to attacks by an Arab militia, noting, “The Zionist policy was initially based on retaliation against Palestinian attacks in February 1947, but it eventually evolved into an initiative to ethnically cleanse the entire country in March 1948.”

He added:

Once the decision was taken, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, close to 800,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and eleven urban neighborhoods emptied of their inhabitants. The plan decided upon on 10 March 1948, and above all its systematic implementation in the following months, was a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity. (P. 14)

The Gaza genocide marks a culmination of what Pappé explained were the goals “set by the Zionist movement very early on, when it had appeared in Palestine: to have as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinians in it as possible.”….

Every day, the actual US-Israeli policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing is becoming clearer. Securing the US-dominated reorganization of the Middle East, what Biden called the “dream of generations,” does, in fact, require the “end of Gaza,” i.e., the systematic crushing of organized resistance by the Palestinian people to Israeli domination. The assault on Rafah and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, World Socialist Web Site

The atrocities we now see playing out day-by-day in Gaza are fueled by a blunt urge to control every inch of historic Palestine and to expel its native people to establish a permanent Jewish majority within the contours of the new, expanded state. Last night’s massacre proves once again, that Israel will stop at nothing to achieve its objective.