In pursuit of their genocidal aims, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) perpetrated a horrific massacre in the Nuseirat Palestinian Refugee Camp on 8 June, once again flagrantly defying international law and international human rights conventions.
In what international law might class as an act of perfidy, the IOF introduced special forces concealed in two aid trucks to carry out the massacre, though IOF officials deny this and claim they were civilian vehicles.
The operation, which engaged the IOF’s 8200 cyber unit, the intelligence agency Shin Bet, the Yamam counterterrorism forces, armoured vehicles, the Israeli Air Force, and US and British intelligence operatives, aimed to free four hostages. The combined forces brutally murdered 288 Palestinian civilians, including 64 children and 57 women, and left 700 wounded, including 152 children, 161 women and 54 elderly people.
It also devastated the crowded neighbourhood, totally destroying 100 houses and levelling an entire residential block. The attack occurred at the busiest time of the Nuseirat market in the centre of one of the most densely populated areas designated for Gaza’s enormous population of displaced persons. According to the Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, three Israeli soldiers were killed during the assault.
The Nuseirat Camp massacre coincided with the date Israeli War Cabinet member Benny Gantz said he would resign if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not produce a clear plan for the day after the operation against Gaza ends.
He then postponed this deadline by a day, delivering a slap in the face to Netanyahu the following day when Israel was still celebrating its blood-drenched freeing of four hostages after eight months in captivity.
In announcing his resignation, Gantz apologised to the families of the hostages for the government’s failure to free their relatives and he called on Netanyahu to resign and hold early elections. Soon afterwards, another War Cabinet member, Gadi Eisenkot, also submitted his resignation.
“Many observers believe that the resignation of Gantz, the leader of the National Unity Party, might convince prominent Likud figures like Defence Minister Yoav Gallant to stop supporting Netanyahu,” political analyst Mohsen Abu Ramadan told Al-Ahram Weekly.
“Gantz’s resignation could also put wind in the sails of the opposition, which closed ranks last week in their determination to oust Netanyahu through early elections.
Former defence minister Gantz and his colleague Gadi Eisenkot are both former Israeli army chiefs-of-staff who are widely respected in the Israeli military establishment. Their resignations will leave the remaining War Cabinet with only one military leader, the current Defence Minister Gallant, just as the Netanyahu government is preparing to launch an invasion of Lebanon.
The two ministers’ departure is likely to sap some of the support the Israeli government receives from its Western backers, who saw Gantz and Eisenkot as moderates. Certainly, their resignations will clear the way for further blackmail from the far right Religious Zionism and Jewish National Front Parties, led respectively by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Defence Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
According to sources close to Netanyahu, he is considering dissolving the War Cabinet, which was made up of three members – Netanyahu, Gallant and Gantz – and three observers – Eisenkot, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer and Shas Party leader Aryeh Deri.
The question now is whether the IOF’s operation to free the four Israeli hostages mark a turning point in the war.
The Weekly put this question to political analyst Nidal Khadra, who commented that “the operation was purely tactical and an attempt to create a fake victory. Freeing four out of 134 hostages 248 days into the war is hardly a great achievement. Moreover, the operation led to further domestic outrage against Netanyahu as other Israeli hostages were killed by gunfire from their own army, which is bogged down in Gaza.”
Khadra expects that Netanyahu will dissolve the War Cabinet and revert to his previous approach, which is to discuss security issues in a limited forum ahead of a regular cabinet meeting. The forum makes the important decisions which Netanyahu then tries to push through the cabinet.
“Netanyahu received another slap in the face when the day after Gantz and Eisenkot resigned, the Commander of the IOF’s Gaza Division Avi Rosenfeld also tendered his resignation,” he added, though Rosenfeld had claimed that his term of service was due to end soon.
Rosenfeld is the second senior IOF officer to have resigned in the fallout from the 7 October attack. The head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Division resigned in April.
The triumphalist mood in Israel triggered by the recovery of the four hostages has given a boost to the approach espoused by Netanyahu and his far right allies, which calls for maximum military pressure to free the hostages, as opposed to an exchange in the framework of a ceasefire.
The families of the more than 100 remaining hostages are of a different opinion, however. They intend to keep up the pressure on the Israeli government to go for a prisoner-exchange deal, a view that Gantz supported in his resignation speech on 9 June.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has called for a UN Security Council meeting to discuss the Nuseirat Camp massacre. Few expect results different from previous Security Council sessions on the atrocities Israel has been committing in Gaza over the past eight months, however.
Many observers believe that hopes for a ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel have receded in the aftermath of the massacre. Hamas has given clear signals that it would agree to the ceasefire US President Joe Biden announced on 31 May, provided that it leads to an end of hostilities and Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza.
But the active US-Israeli collaboration in the operation to free the hostages effectively put paid to efforts made up to then to promote a ceasefire agreement.
“In Hamas’ view, Washington’s celebration of the recovery of four hostages through the Nuseirat operation without mentioning the civilian victims destroyed the constructiveness that the US president showed when he laid out the outlines of a proposed ceasefire deal,” Palestinian resistance affairs expert Hani Al-Dali told the Weekly.
“Because of the US bias, the head of the Hamas Political Bureau said that the Nuseirat massacre had confirmed that any prisoner-exchange agreement would be contingent on a permanent cessation of the Israeli aggression and a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, so that we don’t fall into the American trap.”
While Washington has emphatically denied that the US floating pier off Gaza was used in the hostage-freeing operation, it did not deny that a US unit took part. In fact, it justified such participation on the grounds that 35 of those killed in the 7 October attack were US citizens and 11 Americans were among the hostages, of whom five have been killed as a result of Israel’s intensive bombardments.
In stark contrast to the widespread Arab condemnation of the Nuseirat massacre, the US and other Western governments have tended to ignore the atrocity, preferring to focus instead on the freed hostages.
Salah Abdel-Ati, chairman of the International Commission to Support Palestinian Rights (HASHD), told the Weekly that “with the Nuseirat massacre, the IOF has proven to the world that Israel is a rogue state. It practises systematic state terrorism as it exercises its loathsome Zionist racism that gives no value to Palestinian lives and rights. It is heedless of international humanitarian law and the principles of proportionality and avoidance of excessive harm, and it has reneged on all its obligations under international law and shed all principles of humanity.”
Describing the Nuseirat massacre as a war crime and consummate act of genocide, Abdel-Ati said that Israel must be brought to account. “Cases must be filed immediately with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) because the IOF clearly flouted principles related to military necessity, collateral damage, humanitarian law, proportionality, and the discrimination between combatants and non-combatants.”
Other Palestinian human rights organisations, such as the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, the Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights, and Al-Haq, said in a joint statement that “this operation exemplifies the IOF’s violation of the principles of proportionality and military necessity. It is a flagrant manifestation of its contempt for the lives of thousands of civilians by turning them into legitimate targets as part of the processes of exacting revenge, exerting political pressure, and perpetrating the crime of genocide.”
The organisations warned Israel’s partners that their active military support and political support for the Israeli occupation, or their complicity with it through silence, could make them accomplices in the crime of genocide.
They asked those governments to abide by their commitments under international law. They also demanded that they take practical steps to protect Palestinian civilians, stop the mass murder in Gaza, and prevent the completion of the genocide, which is now in its ninth month.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 June, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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