Creating excuses to continue the atrocities

The remaining partially functioning hospitals were filled with wounded and injured people, and the bodies of martyrs were spread everywhere, on a bloody day in which the Israeli war machine launched 34 airstrikes within 24 hours on defenseless civilians in the stricken Gaza Strip, as Israel continued its horrific massacres within the framework of its black occupation, with shells claiming about 90 martyrs and dozens of wounded and injured people, amid a severe shortage in medical services.

A statement by the government media said, "What increases the horror of the crime is that the occupation army prevented both medical and civil defense crews from reaching the victims to evacuate the bodies that are still scattered in the streets and roads, especially in the Gaza Strip and northern Gaza Strip governorates, in a flagrant violation of all international norms and laws."

While the Government Media Office held the occupation fully responsible for these brutal crimes, reminding the international community and all international and UN institutions to assume their legal and moral responsibilities to stop the crime of genocide, and provide urgent international protection for our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, who are being subjected to the most heinous crimes and violations, and demanding that the leaders of the Israeli occupation be held accountable for their crimes that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, the news issued by the Hebrew media yesterday indicated clear Israeli plans to continue the war and increase its pace, by targeting civilians more, and imposing stricter measures on citizens.

The demand of eight members of the ruling right-wing coalition during the session of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee yesterday for the occupation’s Minister of Defense to change the pattern and mechanism of war and destroy all sources of water, food, fuel and energy in order to eliminate Hamas’ rule, impose military rule on the Strip, establish buffer zones, displace Palestinians to the south, and kill any citizen who moves in northern Gaza without raising a white flag, is another very dangerous declaration of war, which pushes the occupation army to commit more massacres as happened yesterday, far from achieving any military objectives.

These announcements are in line with new demands made by the extremist Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who called for stopping the supply of fuel to Gaza, suspending humanitarian aid, expanding the occupation of the Strip by one kilometer for every day that the detained Israelis are not handed over, and encouraging voluntary emigration. These are explicit calls to kill the people of Gaza, expel them, and destroy what remains of their livelihood.

Despite all the destruction, suffering and pain that has befallen Gaza, Israel is deliberately continuing its aggression in the Strip at this stage by spreading false justifications, claiming that the army estimates that there are nine thousand organized Hamas militants in the north and south of the Strip, and that there are about ten thousand unorganized militants spread out in other locations, and that the Islamic Jihad movement still has four thousand fighters, during a secret session held by the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee. All of these numbers and estimates are just justifications that Israel is pumping out in order to continue the aggression.

These calls, justifications and assessments are merely Israeli pretexts to continue the atrocities and massacres and to continue the occupation of the Strip for as long as possible, while emphasizing that the next stage will likely be more difficult, because Israel has no military goals to achieve, and the only goal set before it is the Palestinian people and their slaughter, killing, destruction, displacement and expulsion.