Israel still has the green light to kill civilians in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. It enjoys the approval not only of political support and military aid from the United States and European countries, but also of a chorus of voices in some media outlets, always ready to legitimize even the most barbaric of its crimes.
The terror attacks that have spread across Lebanon this week are proof of this. During the two waves recorded last Tuesday and Wednesday, more than three thousand wireless devices – pagers and walkie-talkies – exploded and thirty-two people died, including an eight-year-old girl, an eleven-year-old boy and four health workers. In addition, about three thousand people were injured, four hundred of them seriously.
The girl, Fatima Abdullah, 9, had just started fourth grade. When the pager rang, he grabbed her and took her to her father. The explosion killed her instantly. Had she been Israeli rather than Lebanese, her story would likely have appeared in the major pages of the American and European press.
Dr. Elías Warrak says that on Tuesday alone, he had to remove at least one eye – in some cases both – from more than 60% of the patients he treated at Mount Lebanon Hospital in Beirut. Among the most common injuries faced by overwhelmed medical services are the loss of fingers, hands, parts of the face, eyes, internal bleeding or chest injuries. Among the injured are miners, nurses, doctors, social or charity workers, teachers and office administrators.
The devices were detonated in supermarkets, cell phone stores, cars, homes, cafes and on the streets. US and other intelligence sources confirmed to the New York Times that Israel was manufacturing the pagers and walkie-talkies through shell companies and Mossad fronts, to sell them to Hezbollah. Inside and outside Israel, some sectors welcomed the attacks and even distorted the reality, claiming that they were “surgical operations” and “precision attacks” against fighters of the Lebanese Shiite organization.
The attacks in Lebanon were indiscriminate: it was not possible to know who would hold the device when it exploded.
The facts refute these claims. Most of the explosions occurred in civilian areas. They were indiscriminate attacks, since it was not possible to know who was in possession of the wireless device at the time it was activated by remote control to detonate it. This was denounced by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who recalled that “attacking thousands of people simultaneously, without knowing who possessed these devices, and without knowing their location and surroundings during the attack, violates international law. “Those who ordered and carried out this attack must be held accountable.”
A UN committee of independent experts has expressed similar views, recalling that “killing anyone who does not pose an imminent threat and using violence to terrorize civilians are crimes,” and demanded that those responsible be brought to justice. Other international human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, have also stressed that “the use of common civilian objects as explosive devices endangers civilians, violates the laws of war” and constitutes an “indiscriminate attack.”
The Lemkin Institute for the Prevention of Genocide condemned the attacks and said that “a 9-year-old girl is not a terrorist, and neither is an 11-year-old boy.” “What we are seeing is a genocidal state that is completely out of control and supported by a Western world that is, to a large extent, too racist and Islamophobic to care,” it added.
However, voices in various European and American political and media spaces have praised the wave of extrajudicial and indiscriminate assassinations, calling them “brilliant”, “audacious”, “probably the most sophisticated intelligence operation of all time”, “impressive” or “the introduction of the contemporary Trojan horse”, among other examples. They have been famous and defended by people who present themselves as civilized, intelligent and honest. This support is essential to keep crimes happening.
The predominant discourse has been that of the normalization of extrajudicial executions committed by Israel over the years.
In fact, last Friday, Israel launched another attack on Beirut, killing thirty-seven people and wounding sixty-six. Among the victims were two senior Hezbollah officers, three children – aged 4, 6 and 10 – and a woman. Among the wounded, several children were seriously injured. In addition, seventeen people are missing in the rubble, including minors. The intensity of the bombing destroyed an apartment building in a southern suburb of the capital. The killing of these civilians has gone virtually unnoticed in many Western media outlets, which refer to these areas as “Hezbollah strongholds.”
These neighborhoods are inhabited by tens of thousands of civilians, families, women, men, minors, elderly people. Many vote for Hezbollah or allied parties in the elections, some work as doctors, nurses or teachers for the organization’s health and education committees, others are members, with exclusively civilian tasks, and there are also members of the armed organization.
Albert Camus wrote that “to call things evil is to increase the unhappiness in the world.” To include the victims of these attacks as targets to be defeated or as collateral damage to be assumed is wrong and actively contributes, with dangerous levity, to legitimizing their assassinations. The predominant discourse has been to normalize the extrajudicial executions committed by Israel over the years – during the Second Intifada, it killed hundreds of people in this way – to the point that they have been accepted and even praised.
If tomorrow in Israel there were an attack on a building populated by civilians that killed 37 people – including women and children – and it was justified by saying that the target was the perpetrator of a massacre of civilians in Gaza, what would be the reaction of Western governments? And how would the media say it? Would they use the expressions “selective attack” or “precision attack”?
Israel makes no secret of its determination to control the entire map of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Distracting attention from the Palestinian issue
The Gordian knot of this whole issue lies in the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, identified as such – illegal – in the opinion of the International Court of Justice last July, and condemned in several binding resolutions of the United Nations over the years.
Israel does not hide its determination to control the entire map of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. This is what its leaders have expressed over the years, and this is what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown in the maps he presents publicly. It does not have international law on its side – and it is losing the discourse of part of world public opinion – but it does have military force. This is why it continues to rely on weapons rather than diplomacy and negotiation, because it does not want to give up what does not belong to it.
Israel is trying to force a regional escalation to exclude the Palestinian issue from the discussions and reduce the scenario to a fight between “good and evil”, between the Western allies and the pro-Iranian axis, as if the Palestinian population did not exist. In recent months, it has launched attacks in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Iran and Lebanon. The Israeli government is seeking a context of major war to further deploy its military superiority, maintain its illegal occupation of Palestine – and even extend it to more territories – and divert attention from its cases of corruption, its management of the Hamas attacks and the hostages, the massacre in Gaza, apartheid and crimes in the West Bank.
Until pressure measures are adopted – arms embargoes, sanctions, suspension of trade relations, etc. – the Netanyahu government will continue to benefit from the impunity granted to it by the United States and its allies. The massacre continues, after more than 41,000 deaths and 97,000 wounded. In the last 72 hours alone, the Israeli army has killed more than 115 people in Gaza and attacked another children’s school.
Six months ago, the UN rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese, warned that unless measures were taken “to severely punish the genocide in Gaza and the way it is being implemented, a way of waging war that would target ‘the masses’ of civilians as deserving of death because they are close to the objective – family or friends – or as collateral damage. We are already there.
