The French newspaper Le Monde said that the Palestinian people, who have moved from one tragedy to another since the Nakba in 1948, have never endured nor have their children endured such suffering in such a short time, as they suffered during a month and a half of continuous and relentless bombing.

Historian and expert on Middle East issues, Dr. Jean-Pierre Filliot, explained - in his column in the newspaper - that the Israeli army may not have achieved any decisive success with this continuous bombing and destruction in the northern Gaza Strip, but it is preparing to destroy the southern Strip with the same systematic blindness with which it destroyed its north, so that the Palestinians will pay such a price. For a conflict in which they are innocent, as we must remember, as it was sparked by the attack of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) on the seventh of last October.

A killing that surpassed all that preceded it

The writer believed that the scale of this massacre today has never occurred over the past 75 years, despite the tragedies that have marked Palestinian history since then, as the death toll in the bloodiest of them reached a thousand people during the first Israeli occupation of Gaza, and a few thousand in 1970 in “Black September” in Jordan, then a few thousand in the 1976 massacres in Lebanon, and between 800 and 3,000 dead in the 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps, in addition to 1,200 in the suppression of the first intifada, 3,000 dead during the second intifada, and finally more than 4,000 dead at the end of the various Israeli attacks on Gaza from 2008 to 2022.

As for the number of deaths in the current war, it reached 14,854 martyrs in Gaza as of November 22, according to figures issued by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which means that a month and a half of hostilities has claimed more than 75 full years since the Nakba, and the number of children Those killed amounted to 6,150 children, or more than 40% of the victims.

Destruction of the largest city in Palestine

Since ancient times, the Gaza Oasis has served as a trade crossroads between Egypt and the Middle East, and for a century its port was a major export center for citrus and grains. Despite the siege and repeated wars, Gaza City remained 4 times more populated than the city of Hebron, 5 times more populous than the city of Nablus, and 20 times more populated than the city of Ramallah in the West Bank, as the writer says.

Today, between 40% and 50% of the buildings in the largest Palestinian city have been destroyed or damaged, and the water and electricity distribution networks in it are no longer usable, and only one hospital is operating in it, and even the Nakba did not witness such destruction.

Three-quarters of Gaza's population have been forced to flee their homes, and half of them are crowded into United Nations shelters, threatened by epidemic risks in the absence of drinking water, and all of humanity is witnessing such a disaster.

Source: Le Monde +Aljazeera