Al Shifa Revealed
Today the IOF has retreated from Al Shifa hospital complex. The first witnesses and responders saw exactly what the surviving evacuees had described last week: carnage. Devastation. Hundreds of bodies evidencing death in the most gruesome ways. The witnesses come from the rubble today. The bodies of Dr. Yusra Al Maqadma and her son, Dr. Ahmed Al Maqadma have been recovered along with between 200 and 400 others, according to the first reports from the ground. Everywhere. Crushed. Shot by snipers or tanks. Bombed. Buried alive. Fed upon by dogs.
We were hearing all last week of the atrocities, including rape taking place within Al Shifa at the hands of the Israeli military, and the Biden Administration responded by sending more weapons, including around 1,800 200lb. dumb bombs, which will undoubtedly be dropped on Gaza, each one with the power to leave a 15 foot crater in its wake. In the face of what witnesses were calling a week ago the worst six days of the genocide, Joe Biden, President of the United States sends some of the dirtiest weapons possible to the most violent army. This is beyond complicity, this is guilt of the vilest degree.
I think of Hoda Al Arouqi, her head bandaged from bombings, her wizened face pained and defiant, sitting in the rubble: The killing of children and civilians has become normal to them, she says of the occupying army, they want to wipe us out…they are forcing us to flee, but we will never leave. She was young when the war of 1967 saw the settlers seize all remaining occupied territories, further expelling and killing the indigenous population; she has seen every siege and bombardment and escalation of the ethnic cleansing to happen since. Her life, and those of her entire family have been shaped every day by the occupation and the perpetual goal of displacing all Palestinians, of cleansing Palestine, as Israeli’s like Mayor of Jerusalem Daniella Weissman make clear is and always has been the goal.
The first images out of Al Shifa are the most gruesome, vile and depraved to be seen in six months of barabarity, six months in which the western governments funding and arming genocide dither about self-defence and only democracy in the region and shared values while repeating debunked propaganda points, further green-lighting massacres such as the two week siege of Al Shifa, in which hundreds of medical staff were arrested (IOF is already claiming anyone kidnapped in their deranged siege of the hospital is a terrorist, as they claim for any Palestinian, living or dead). The first images are here and western media repeats debunked claims: tunnels, command posts, HAMAS!!!!
I think of what Aaron Bushnell said: “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.” This post, this statement included a link to facebook live, the link we all saw on 25 February, the video we all saw. Aaron Bushnell burning, yelling Free Palestine outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, while a police officer stands over the boy, his fire aim trained on someone incapable of posing a threat, a perfect demonstration of the struggle at hand.
