Al-Jazeera has published some before and after pictures of the Gaza Strip which are horrific. According to the UN satellite agency, UNOSAT:
“A recent assessment by the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) found that the number of destroyed structures across Gaza has increased by 9 percent since a “ceasefire” took effect nearly a year ago. Overall, about 82 percent of structures in Gaza, roughly 200,000 buildings, have been damaged, and about two-thirds of those have been destroyed, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA.”
Israe; now directly controls most of the Gaza Strip which was divided into three zones by Israel.
Thus far, over 74,000 Palestinians have died in the Gaza Strip, although this is a low estimate since it does not include bodies still buried under the rubble. The Guardian reports:
“‘The estimate of the total amount of rubble in Gaza is 61m tonnes. It is approximately 20 times the amount of rubble generated in all wars across the world over the last 18 years,’ said Jaco Cilliers, the UN Development Programme’s special representative in Palestine.”
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of +972 Magazine have produced a film entitled NAZA (the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage”) which interviews 24 Israeli intelligence officers (anonymously) in which the Gaza operations are described. Their summary of the film is chilling:
“The film’s title, “NAZA,” which is the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage,” is a critique of the way Israel portrays its killing of civilians — obscuring both the advance knowledge it has of how many people are likely to be killed in each strike, and the intent to destroy that has accompanied the military campaign from the outset.
“One of the officers we interviewed describes how he was fully aware in real time of hundreds of cases in which families were going about their normal lives — a man talking to his wife, the sound of a TV show, prayer, a crying baby — and then he gave the clearance to bomb them. When asked why, he explained: ‘You understand that the objective is to destroy.’
“Seen in this light, the presence of a person Israel deems an assassination target in a certain house becomes the ‘collateral’ matter; indeed, in many cases, the target turned out not to have been present at all. The killing itself was the point.”
It will be a very long time before we really know the truth about the Gaza operation. But the visual evidence is damning.
Leave a comment