The Israeli army’s invasion of Gaza City’s eastern Shuja’iyya neighborhood has entered its second week, and it is now spreading to other parts of the city. The entire city is being put under siege, with its some 300,000 remaining inhabitants trapped in the middle with nowhere to go.
The Shuja’iyya invasion started from the east as the Israeli army launched a surprise attack without prior warning to its residents. People suddenly found army tanks between their homes, leading people to begin leaving the al-Nazaz, al-Mantar, and al-Mansoura areas in droves. The people who remained were located in the northern and southern regions of Shuja’iyya.
The Israeli operation has followed a clear pattern so far. Military forces launch incursions into different neighborhoods at different points, storming one area after the other until they have deemed the resistance there eliminated. Often, the army encounters more fighting than expected, prompting an even wider invasion of large urban swathes in an attempt to snuff out the resistance. The operation swallows up more neighborhoods, and the army issues evacuation orders to the residents that have remained. Often the evacuation area is the same location in which Israeli forces operate.
On Sunday, July 7, the army ordered residents of different areas in Shuja’iyya such as al-Daraj and al-Tuffah, as well as residents of Gaza’s Old City, to leave their areas and head west. After residents obeyed the army’s orders, they found Israeli tanks coming in from the direction they were told to flee, indicating that the city was being surrounded from all sides. Thousands attempted to reach the United Nations headquarters in western Gaza but found the tanks stationed there, too. Gunfire, missiles, and “fire belts” surrounded them, leaving the displaced with nowhere to turn to.
Read also: The second invasion of al-Shuja’iyya is a war of attrition
Many of these refugees have been forced to spend the night in the street, especially after the army bombed a school two days ago housing a large number of displaced people in western Gaza City, killing dozens of Palestinians.
Testimonies gathered by Mondoweiss from Shuja’iyya residents confirm that the Israeli army operations continue to be met with fierce resistance, with several residents describing the marked intensity of the army’s artillery fire and airstrikes across the neighborhood.
Residents tell Mondoweiss that the bombing in al-Shuja’iyya, al-Tuffah, and the Old City does not stop. Several say the bombardment is “incomparable” to anything they have experienced so far.
Sleeping in the streets
Lina Hajj Ahmad, 31, who lives in the Daraj neighborhood, tells Mondoweiss that two days ago, she was preparing a meal for her four children when she heard people outside her house screaming and running in the streets. She did not finish preparing the food, instead going outside to find out what was happening. She learned that their area had just received an evacuation order. Her husband was out of the house, but she carried what she could and left with her children without waiting for his return.
On the way, she managed to meet up with her husband. They stopped to try to read where they were going, but when the sound of the bombing began and the advance of Israeli tanks could be heard in the distance, they began to run without deciding upon or knowing their destination.
“Even though I never left Gaza City, I have been displaced over ten times,” Lina tells Mondoweiss. “I can no longer count the number of times I had to carry my family and leave the house without anything to guarantee my return to my home.”
“Every time we return to our home after the most recent displacement, we find new parts of it destroyed or damaged,” she continues. “We try to restore it as much as possible, but I don’t know what will happen this time. They are blowing up entire residential areas and people don’t know where their houses are anymore.”
Throughout the night, she kept hugging her children and holding them in her arms, attempting to make them feel a little safer. They all slept on the ground, along with many other families in similar circumstances. When morning came, they carried their luggage again and started to search for shade from the sun’s heat.
Many similar testimonies continue to come out of Gaza City describing how displaced residents are gathering in what remains of public squares and parks, where they sleep out in the open. All other civilian shelters continue to be bombed, including the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, which was attacked in two raids and threatened with evacuation to prevent people from moving there.
When residents of the eastern parts of Gaza City heeded army orders to move west — only to be encountered by more tanks — eyewitnesses say that the resistance confronted the incursion coming in from the west.
Residents of the area say that the resistance has not stopped in Shuja’iyya. Several report that the army is trying to establish huge military zones in the neighborhood, which they say it is preparing by clearing large tracts of land after blowing up the housing blocks that used to be there. The army then sets up military sites by parking dozens of military vehicles there.
As large parts of the city become turned into military zones, instructions for where residents should go invariably lead them to dead ends or even more death and destruction.
“They are pushing us into a trap to kill us,” Lina tells Mondoweiss. “Anywhere we go, we find nothing but death, constant bombing, and dismembered bodies.”
What more people around the world now know, is not just the bestial atrocities of Israel today throughout Occupied Palestine, but the sadistic atrocities committed in 1947/48 and ever since.
Quote: The most notorious of these massacres occurred in Deir Yassin, a peaceful village where at least 107 Palestinians, including women and children, were murdered but more gruesome was the massacre in al-Dawayima on 29th October 1948.
According to a report received by the Israeli daily Al HaMishmar, soldiers from the 89th Battalion entered the village and killed 80 to 100 Arab men, women and children. “The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead.
One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house and blow up the house with them. The sapper refused. The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done.
One woman with a newborn baby in her arm was employed to clean the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby.”
The report was never published. In another village, Safsaf, a report submitted to the Mapam Political Committee listed the crimes committed by Israeli soldiers: “52 men tied with a rope and dropped into a well and shot. 10 were killed. Women pleaded for mercy. Three cases of rape…a girl aged 14 was raped. Another was killed.”
Ben Gurion wrote in his diary: “Soldier witnesses to these events concluded that cultured officers had turned into base murderers and this not in the heat of battle but out of a system of expulsion and destruction. The less Arabs remained the better. This principle is the political motor for the expulsions and atrocities.”
Israel isn’t the only settler state to be born in sin and blood but it may be unique in its strenuous efforts to deny, mythologise, tell lies about its history.
https://rosselson.medium.com/israel-what-is-it-and-does-it-have-a-right-to-exist-fe5923e1c2a8
Newspapers here and the NYT running shocking pictures of the bombing of the children’s hospital in Ukraine. Sudden outrage when the Russians do what the IDF has been doing for months. (And the NYT photo-essay about it has disappeared from its website. I wonder why.