Israel dropped bombs on the west of Rafah. On a tent city, where people who had nowhere else to go clung desperately to life.
The bombs blew children to pieces. A baby was beheaded, and its limbs partially severed. Some children, and adults too, died when their internal organs exploded in the blast wave. Others were horribly injured by shrapnel. There is little healthcare in Gaza now, so they received only basic first aid. Many died of their wounds.
The bombs started a fire in the camp. We don’t know exactly how: some Israeli reports say a bomb hit a fuel store, others say the bombs detonated an explosives cache that Hamas hid near the camp. Whatever the cause, the fire ripped through the camp, burning people alive in their tents. Rescuers tried to pull people out of the blaze, while firefighters struggled to control it.
When the fire eventually died out, all that remained of the devasted camp was the ghostly skeletons of tents and piles of ashes and embers, the pitiful remains of people’s lives. And in the ruins, the blackened husks of what had once been human beings, many so badly burned they could not be identified.
Forty-five people died, and nearly 200 were seriously injured. Many more died in the ensuing days and weeks.
Israel’s armed forces knew they were dropping bombs near a vulnerable civilian encampment with a high risk of fire, and they did not warn the civilians. Whatever the cause of the fire, if Israel had not dropped those bombs, the fire would not have happened. And if it had warned the civilians, there would have been far fewer deaths.
The massacre shocked the world. Global leaders condemned it. Doctors Without Borders called for sanctions on Israel. In response, Israel briefed to the Western press that the tent city was not in a humanitarian zone and the occupants of the tent city had failed to follow orders to evacuate. The press dutifully reported it. Within a few days, the international furore died down.
An investigation by Forensic Architecture later revealed that the encampment was in an area the IDF had previously declared a humanitarian zone. Three weeks before the attack, the IDF had moved the humanitarian zone, thus excluding the Tel Al-Sultan encampment. But it didn’t tell the residents. Indeed, Forensic Architecture found evidence that contradictory and confusing instructions from the IDF led evacuees from other areas to enter the encampment, believing it was safe.
In the same report, Forensic Architecture warned that Israel was bombing areas in humanitarian zones, citing two other attacks. But no-one took any notice.
The Tel al-Sultan massacre was in May 2024. Less than three months later, on 4th August, Israel bombed a tent encampment in the grounds of Al-Aqsa hospital, killing four people and starting a fire which injured dozens more.
In October, Israel bombed the same tent encampment again, starting a raging fire which burned four people alive. One of them was 19-year-old Shaaban al-Dalou. A video of his horrific death spread all over the world.
The world that had become numb to daily images of dismembered children was horrifed by the video. Mainstream Western press published obituaries of the burned teenager and expressed horror and grief at his death.
But Israel said he was the unfortunate victim of a “precision strike” on a “Hamas command and control centre” in the hospital. The press dutifully reported this - and the world moved on. Shaaban was forgotten, like all the other Palestinians whose violent deaths have briefly shocked the world.
January’s ceasefire brought respite to the beleaguered people of Gaza. But in March, Israel broke the ceasefire - and the massacres resumed. Wave after wave of air strikes struck all over Gaza, destroying already-damaged buildings and setting tents ablaze. An estimated 400 people died. Many more were injured.
Nightly attacks have continued ever since. Because many people now live in tents, the attacks often set off fires, causing catastrophic burns. There are hardly any medical supplies and not much water in Gaza. Burns like this mean an agonizing death.
On 7th April, Israel bombed a tent encampment outside a hospital in Khan Younis, starting a fire which engulfed several tents, one of which was full of journalists. The world watched in horror as Ahmed Mansour of Palestine Today, unable to move from his chair because of a previous injury, burned like a torch live on camera. Remarkably, he was rescued from the blaze alive, but he later died from his injuries. He was not the only one. Ten people died in this conflagration, including another Palestine Today journalist, Helmi al-Faqawi. Many more were injured.
Israel said the strike was targeting a photojournalist, Hassan Aslih, whom it accused of being a member of Hamas. Aslih survived the attack, though he was injured. The press duly reported Israel’s claim, and the world nodded its head and turned to other matters.
And still the horror continues. But the world is no longer interested. The massacres don’t even make the news.
On Thursday last week, Israel bombed tents in the al-Mawasi “humanitarian zone”, setting off a fire that burned 15 people to death. Eight of them were children.
Two days ago, Israel bombed a school in which displaced families were sheltering, setting off a major fire. Eleven people died, most of them children. Most burned to death. The IDF didn’t bother to provide an excuse for this atrocity, so the geniuses at the Guardian invented one: “Israeli officials say fighters from Hamas and allied factions hide behind civilian infrastructure”.
Every day, every night, brings new strikes and new horrors. Parents pick the body parts of their dismembered children off the ground. The bloodstained faces of babies peep out of shrouds. Children carry bags containing all that is left of their relatives. Medics scurry to provide what little relief they can to the wounded. Bodies, and bits of bodies, pile up in the hospital morgues. The screams of the injured and dying fill the air. Flames light the sky red.
This is what a holocaust looks like.
Some people would have us believe that the word “holocaust” should mean one thing only, and that is the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis. But no-one has exclusive rights to a word. The Oxford Dictionary says “holocaust” means “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war”. What is happening in Gaza is unquestionably slaughter on a mass scale: Israel has killed nearly 2,000 people since it broke the ceasefire in March, and well over 50,000 since the start of the war. And increasingly, it is by fire.
There is another meaning too, that should give us pause: “a sacrifice in which the offering was burned completely on an altar.” Innocent people, many of them children, are being burned to death in Gaza. They were not responsible for the attacks on 7th October 2023, but they are paying the price with their lives. They are a burnt offering to the spawn of Moloch, the evil men whose bloodthirsty pride and insatiable lust for power is fed by the murder of innocents.
I do not mean to deny or denigrate the Holocaust (note the definite article and capitalization). It remains the most horrific genocide of our time. But there are other holocausts too: Armenia, Namibia, Rwanda, Gaza, Sudan… the list is long, and growing. Mass slaughter of humans by other humans, simply for being the wrong sort of human, is a past and present reality. We must not be so fixated on the horrors of the past that we fail to see today’s holocaust.
Image from Wikimedia Commons, by محمد الفلسطيني - “Own work , i taked it by my mobile cam”, CC BY-SA 4.0
Related reading:
Not to forget the Holodomor in Ukraine. Which most people are sadly unaware of.
Israeli Jews and their supporters elsewhere use the history of the Holocaust as a warped justification for Israel’s behaviour over the last 77 years. Criticism even of blatant war crimes, is dismissed as anti semitism, alienating those who would instinctively be hostile to anti semitism. And Israel and its supporters now align themselves with the far right of politics, the home of real antisemitism.
This will not end well.