This is exactly the time to increase the pressure even more, to bring home all the hostages – the living and the dead – and to achieve all the war objectives.
He rammed home the point in a speech to parliament, saying:
We have got them by the throat; we are on the road to absolute victory.
What does absolute victory look like for the ghoul of Gaza? As many of us have seen on our social media feeds, apparently it looks like children being killed while they play football, body parts scattered around bomb sites, and entrails from children lying on the ground. It looks like bombing zones the Israeli military have designated safe. As Al Jazeera reported:
The Israeli attacks on Tuesday hit the UN’s al-Razi school in the central Nuseirat refugee camp and a main street lined with market stalls in the southern al-Mawasi area, where thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought shelter.
And:
Among those killed was local journalist Mohammad Meshmesh. His death takes the number of journalists killed in the conflict to 160, the Gaza Government Media Office said.
Netanyahu has never hidden his ambitions. Clearly, his definition of “absolute victory” is the ethic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.
Shelters bombed
In southern Gaza, two people were killed in Israeli bombardment of the Shakush area, northwest of Rafah, a medical source at Nasser Hospital said.
At least 90% of Gazans have been forced from their homes, many of them seeking refuge in UN-run schools. Seven of them have been hit by Israeli strikes since 6 July.
Nearly 70% of UN-run schools across Gaza have been hit during more than nine months of fighting, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Tuesday. Umm Mohammed al-Hasanat, sheltering with her family at a UN-run school in Nuseirat, said:
Why do they target us when we are innocent people?
We do not carry weapons but are just sitting and trying to find safety for ourselves and our children.
The UNRWA said:
Over 95% of these schools were used as shelters when hit. 539 people sheltering in UNRWA facilities have been killed. Nowhere is safe. The blatant disregard for UN premises and humanitarian law must stop.
‘Nowhere is safe’ in Gaza
A professor of international law at Queen Mary University, London, Neve Gordon, explained:
If Netanyahu and his government succeed in rendering Israel’s version of proportionality acceptable among other state actors, then the laws of armed conflict will end up justifying rather than preventing genocidal violence. Indeed, the very architecture of the entire international legal order is now in the balance.
As the West’s continued inaction has shown, the entire international legal order will indeed be upset.
Netanyahu and his cabinet have never hidden their view of Palestinians as less than human. “Absolute victory” is a chilling phrase that, after nine months of relentless and brutal bombing, promises nothing less than the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
Featured image via YouTube screenshot/Channel 4 News
