'Another Night of Killing and Massacres' in Gaza

Entire families are being annihilated one airstrike at a time.

The Associated Press reports that dozens more civilians were killed in last night’s airstrikes in northern Gaza:

“It was another night of killing and massacres,” said Saeed Moustafa, a resident of the Nuseirat camp. He said people were still crying out from the rubble of a house hit by an airstrike on Wednesday.

“We are unable to get them out. We hear their screams but we don’t have equipment,” he said.

Among those killed in these strikes were 12 members of a journalist’s family. Entire families are being annihilated one airstrike at a time. In one such strike over the weekend, a UN Development Program staff member and over 70 members of his extended family were all killed. Many extended families have suffered comparable losses. The Financial Times reported earlier this month:

The tradition of extended families living together in multistorey buildings, compounded by relatives moving in together for safety in wartime, has meant that hundreds of multigenerational families have suffered the same fate as the Aghas, all but wiped out in single or multiple strikes.

About 1,550 families have lost multiple members, according to health officials in the Hamas-controlled territory. At least 312 families had each lost more than 10 people by November 23, the officials said.

Those numbers keep growing every day that this war is allowed to continue.

Israel’s military campaign has only intensified in the last few weeks. The Netanyahu government continues to ignore the Biden administration’s empty warnings about complying with international law because they know that they face no consequences for anything that they do in this war. Biden sends one top official after another to Israel to make it look as if he is doing something, and each time the official reaffirms unwavering U.S. support for a campaign of mass killing that Washington pretends is something else.

According to The Washington Post’s analysis from last week, the war already ranks as one of the most destructive in this century. The pace of civilian deaths in this war is greater than any other recent conflict:

“The scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in such a short period of time appears to be the highest such civilian casualty rate in the 21st century,” said Michael Lynk, who served as the U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories from 2016 to 2022.

Based on the official tally, 1% of the population has already been killed in less than three months, and that tally does not include the many thousands trapped under rubble. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has kept a running count that includes these missing victims, and according to them the death toll is now nearly 30,000, including more than 11,000 children. Starvation and disease threaten to send that number skyrocketing as winter sets in.

How many more nights of killing and massacres will the U.S. support and enable? How many more families have to be wiped out with U.S.-made weapons? How many thousands more innocent civilians have to die before our government stops providing a government run by war criminals with the means to commit more atrocities? These are the questions that the president and his allies in Congress should be forced to answer every day.

We are witnessing one of the gravest crimes of our time. Our government is aiding and abetting the perpetrators. It is up to people in this country to make our government cut off all support for this war and to press for an end to the war itself.