Netanyahu’s Botched Hostage Rescue Killed 270, failed to prevent Collapse of his War Cabinet

JUAN COLE06/10/2024

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, against whom warrants have been requested for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, made the case against him stronger with his massacre of innocent Palestinian civilians during the botched hostage rescue at Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. As I write, the United Nations is reporting from Gaza health authorities that Israel fire killed 270 persons and wounded nearly 700. Netanyahu has deliberately damaged or destroyed all the hospitals in Gaza, so the Nuseirat health facility is woefully unprepared to deal with 600 wounded people, and there is no functioning morgue to hold the 270 corpses.

While it is great good news that the hostages have been rescued, and one’s heart goes out to their families, who have lived through hell since the Hamas war crimes of October 7, these statistics unfortunately suggest that each Israeli life is worth 67.5 Palestinian lives.

The raid is not the political victory for Netanyahu that he was seeking, however, since it was a cynical ploy on his part to justify his rejection of the Biden proposal for an at least temporary halt to the hostilities that would have resulted in the release of all the remaining hostages. Netanyahu was getting pressure not only from Biden but from the Israeli public, which has mounted large demonstrations against him for failing to negotiate the release of the hostages. Even Joe Biden has admitted that it is reasonable to conclude that Netanyahu insists on continuing his total war on Gaza in order to stay in power and avoid the court cases he is facing for corruption, which could send him to jail.

The operation did not dissuade opposition politician Benny Gantz from resigning Sunday from the war cabinet, the national unity government that was formed after Hamas’s October 7 atrocities. Gantz said that it had been a painful decision, which he took because Netanyahu stood in the way of attaining a genuine victory in Gaza. He said Netanyahu had obstructed essential strategic decisions, and called upon him to call an early election: “it is necessary to have a Zionist, nationalist, genuine unity government.”

Implicitly slamming the enormous human cost and limited benefits of the Nuseirat raid, he said, “I support the deal presented by Biden, which he asked the prime minister to have the courage to achieve it.”

“I say to the families of the kidnapped that we failed the test, and we were not able to return your children.”

Of the 120 or so remaining Israeli hostages in Hamas hands, it is thought that the Israeli military has killed up to a third of them with air strikes on Hamas targets.

As a former general, Gantz is well aware that Netanyahu’s Gaza campaign has been a military failure, with no end game in sight, and he is reported to have told the prime minister he would stand down if a clear post-war plan were not presented.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Benny Gantz resigns from Israel’s war cabinet”

The al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas paramilitary, announced that the raid left three Israeli hostages dead, including a dual American citizen. The Israeli army denied the report, but it is difficult to see how the Israelis would know, since they indiscriminately bombed the Nuseirat Camp as part of the operation. Until Hamas provides proof of the deaths, there is no way for outsiders to know the truth.

It is probably enough of a knock on the operation that it killed nearly 300 children, women and men and wounded nearly 700. The Biden administration and the US military appear to have been drawn into Netanyahu’s atrocity, which reflects poorly on the US as a superpower and on President Joe Biden’s judgment.

TRT World: “The death toll from Saturday’s Israeli attacks on Gaza has surpassed 270”

 ,,,INFORMED COMMENT

 

Doctor at Israeli Detention Camp for Gazans Blows Whistle on War Crimes

in Palestine

by Brett Wilkins

05/04/2024

A doctor at an Israeli field hospital inside a notorious detention center where hundreds of Palestinian prisoners are temporarily held is sounding the alarm about torture and horrific conditions at what some human rights defenders—including Israelis—are calling “Israel’s Guantánamo Bay” and even a “concentration camp.”

In a letter to Israel’s attorney general and defense and health ministers viewed by Haaretz—which reported the story Thursday—the anonymous physician describes likely war crimes being committed at the Israel Defense Forces’ Sde Teiman base near Beersheva. Palestinian militants captured by IDF troops, as well as many civilian hostages ranging in age from teenagers to septuagenarians, are held there in cages, 70-100 per cage, until they are transferred to regular Israeli prisons or released.

“From the first days of the medical facility’s operation until today, I have faced serious ethical dilemmas,” the doctor wrote. “More than that, I am writing to warn you that the facility’s operations do not comply with a single section among those dealing with health in the Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law.”

Gazans arrested and detained by Israeli forces are not legally considered prisoners of war by Israel because it does not recognize Gaza as a state. These detainees are mostly held under the Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law, which allows the imprisonment of anyone suspected of taking part in hostilities against Israel for up to 75 days without seeing a judge.

Human Rights Watch has warned that the law “strips away meaningful judicial review and due process rights.”

Sde Teiman detainees are fed through straws and forced to defecate in diapers. They’re also forced to sleep with the lights on and have allegedly been subjected to beatings and torture. Other Palestinians taken by Israeli forces have described being electrocuted, mauled by dogs, soaked with cold water, denied food and water, deprived of sleep, and blasted with loud music at temporary detention sites.

The whistleblowing Sde Teiman physician said that all patients at the camp’s field hospital are handcuffed by all four limbs, regardless of how dangerous they are deemed. In December, Israeli Health Ministry officials ordered such treatment after a medical worker at the facility was attacked. Now the camp’s estimated 600-800 prisoners are shackled 24 hours a day.

At first, the cuffs were plastic zip ties. Now they’re metal. The doctor said that more than half of his patients at the camp have suffered cuffing injuries, including some that have required “repeated surgical interventions.”

“Just this week, two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event,” he told Haaretz.

The whistleblower also alleged substandard medical care at the facility, where there is only one doctor on duty, who is sometimes a gynecologist or orthopedist.

“This ends in complications and sometimes even in the patient’s death,” he said. “This makes all of us—the medical teams and you, those in charge of us in the Health and Defense ministries, complicit in the violation of Israeli law, and perhaps worse for me as a doctor, in the violation of my basic commitment to patients, wherever they are, as I swore when I graduated 20 years ago.”

The doctor claims in his letter that he warned the Health Ministry’s director-general about the appalling conditions at Sde Teiman, but that there have been “no substantial changes in the way the facility operates.”

An ethics committee visited the camp in February; the physician said that its members “are worried about their legal exposure and coverage in view of their involvement in a facility that is operated contrary to the provisions of the existing law.”

Last month, Haaretzrevealed that 27 detainees have died in custody at the Sde Teiman and Anatot camps or during interrogation in Israel since October 7. While some were Hamas or other militants captured or wounded while fighting IDF troops, others were civilians, including some with preexisting health conditions like the diabetic laborer who was not suspected of any offense when he was arrested and sent to his death at Anatot.

One former Sde Teiman detainee claims that he personally witnessed Israeli troops execute five prisoners in separate incidents.

Responding to the 27 detainee deaths and invoking the U.S. military prison in Cuba known for torture and indefinite detention, the Haaretz editorial board wrote last month that “Sde Teiman and the other detention facilities are not Guantánamo Bay and… the state has a duty to protect the rights of detainees even if they are not formally prisoners of war.”

“Israel’s indifference to the fate of Gazans, at best, and desire for revenge against them, at worst, are fertile ground for war crimes,” the editors said. “Indifference by Israelis and desire for revenge must not constitute license to shed the blood of detainees… The fact that Hamas is holding and abusing Israeli hostages cannot excuse or justify the abuse of Palestinian detainees.”

In December, the Geneva-based advocacy group Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor—which has also accused IDF troops of allowing Israeli civilians to witness the torture of Palestinian prisoners—demanded an investigation of what it called the “new Guantánamo.”

Israeli rights groups and individuals have also condemned the abuses at Sde Teiman, which, like Guantánamo, has been described as a “concentration camp.”

“Enough, just enough. We have to stop this gallop into the abyss,” urged Hebrew University senior lecturer Tamar Megiddo on Wednesday. “This war has to end. This government needs to end.”

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Originally published in CommonDreams.org

ISRAELI WAR CRIMES

Stripped, blindfolded, and bound Palestinian civilians are taken prisoner and ordered into a line by Israeli occupation forces in Gaza in December 2023. (Photo: Social media post by Israeli soldier)