Israel’s killing rage

A familiar pantomime plays out in the shocking residue of the massacre of more than 100 desperate Palestinian aid seekers.

Another day, another outrage.

That is the inevitable lot of Palestinians in the grim, dystopian wasteland that is Gaza.

It is inevitable because it does not matter the scale, nature or manner of the outrages, Palestinians have been, and always will be, considered disposable human fodder by Israel’s army of unrepentant enablers and apologists.

They are, of course, hard at work trying, as they are conditioned to do, to find an explanation, an excuse, a rationale to absolve Israel of responsibility for the crimes against humanity that it has committed with impunity in Gaza and beyond.

In their myopic calculus, Israel is never to blame, never responsible, never the perpetrator, never guilty. To admit that Israel is to blame, responsible, the perpetrator or guilty, would mean, in effect, admitting their guilt too.

The usual pallet of lies, distortions, and obfuscations is being deployed, on cue, by the usual suspects in the usual capitals and newsrooms to deny or obscure the obvious.

Blindness is a necessary extension of their complicity. They refuse to see what the rest of us can see. Their evangelical allegiance to Israel trumps the truth and decency. It always has. It always will.

This, by now, familiar pantomime is playing out in the shocking residue of a massacre of more than 100 desperate Palestinians who surged at aid trucks carrying the stuff of life denied to them by a fanatical regime intent on killing them quickly or slowly.

We know what happened in that place at that time because media’s Ismail al-Ghoul was there. He was not in Tel Aviv or occupied East Jerusalem. He was not in a television studio in Washington, DC, New York, London or Paris, relying on an account from a preening Israeli spokesperson. He was there.

This is what al-Ghoul reports he witnessed.

Dozens of Palestinians heard that trucks carrying precious flour were about to arrive. While they waited in anxious anticipation early Thursday morning, Israeli soldiers began shooting. You can hear the crackle of gunfire on video that captured the murderous madness.

“We went to get flour. The Israeli army shot at us. There are many martyrs on the ground and until this moment we are withdrawing them. There is no first aid,” one witness told media.

Another witness added that: “The Israelis just opened random fire on us as if it were a trap.”

Then, after strafing Palestinians, Israeli tanks moved forward and ran over the dead and injured, al-Ghoul said.

What witnesses appear to be describing is the military tactic known as the “double tap”. The initial strike hits the intended target. A second strike is aimed at bystanders drawn to help the dead and injured.

Ambulances could not reach the dozens of dead and disfigured since roads, like much of Gaza, had been destroyed.

The dead were loaded onto the flatbed portion of one of the aid trucks turned mobile mortuary, their limp, lifeless bodies intertwined in a grotesque heap of humanity.

The deluge of injured Palestinians who survived the attack descended on overwhelmed hospitals and the caregivers who still populate them.

“Hospitals are no longer able to accommodate the huge number of patients because they lack fuel, let alone medicine. Hospitals have also run out of blood,” al-Ghoul said.

A Palestinian physician preparing to help the wounded amid the bloody bedlam admitted that there was little he could do.

“The majority of cases need surgery and operation rooms,” he said. “To be honest, I don’t know what we can do. The situation is … horrendous.”

The situation has been “horrendous” for a long time. But the so-called “international community” dithers. Worse, it spouts meaningless platitudes “calling on” Israel to stop killing civilians.

Clearly, the dithering and platitudes are not working. The crimes against humanity go on and on and on.

At first, Israel said that Palestinians were responsible for killing and harming Palestinians.

The Palestinians were crushed and trampled, Israel said, when they rushed towards the aid trucks. It’s not our fault.

Predictably, this sick line of “reasoning” fails to address why hordes of Palestinians are having to charge aid trucks.