Israeli soldiers shot ambulance drivers and buried them in mass grave
Even those who despise Hamas should be bothered by what we, Israelis, are doing in Gaza these days
By Yonatan Englender • Translated by Sol Salbe
Suspicious Lives
Who will forgive Israel for what has been happening in the Gaza Strip for the past month? Who would charitably accept wholesale killing of innocents for the sake of who knows what? Pressure to release abductees that has already proven ineffective? The “absolute victory” that everyone clearly doesn’t exist? Seizure of land in order to build settlements? Which country wants to be proud that it drops bombs on civilians in order to build Ma’ale Smotrich [Smotrich Heights] or Beitar Ben Gvir? The defence minister, Yisrael Katz, intoxicated by his power, announced this morning that Operation “Might and Sword “ (little might, a lot of sword) is expanding, and called on the residents of the Gaza Strip to “act to remove Hamas and return all the abductees,” and even stressed that “this is the only way to end the war.” Wait a second, Mr Katz, I’ll just finish burying my daughter that you killed and go out to demonstrate.
The latest reports about the IDF’s exploits in the Gaza Strip sound like what you find in books about dark chapters of the 20th century. At the beginning of the week, UN teams and rescue forces retrieved the bodies of 15 aid workers who were shot by IDF forces. According to them, the workers were buried in two large piles of sand. This thing has a name: a mass grave. The Ministry of Health in Gaza said that some of the dead workers’ hands were tied. One of those retrieving the bodies told Haaretz that one of the bodies had their legs bound, which raises the suspicion that at least some of the aid workers were executed. According to the IDF, the workers were shot dead because their vehicles “moved suspiciously” and without coordination with the IDF. Tonight, at least 40 people were killed in the Gaza Strip, some of them children. Evidently they lived suspicious way.
The question of the legality of the military’s actions does require discussion, but in Donald Trump’s world, that is not really important. The world’s most powerful superpower embraces Putin, belittles NATO, snorts contemptuously in the face of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Israel could kill 50 thousand Palestinians and then another 50 thousand and flatten entire cities, and the United States would still justify its ostensibly proportionate response to October 7. Above the mass graves, an all-inclusive resort will be built in the style of the “White Lotus”.
What should bother every Israeli, even if they rightly loathe Hamas and are more concerned with the abductees than with Palestinians they don’t know and who apparently hate those Israelis, is the soul of their country. Yes, countries have souls, and they are corruptible. Violence and indifference to human life know no borders, and the blood spilled in Khan Yunis will sooner or later flow in Ashdod or Jerusalem. Just as indifference to human rights in the Occupied Territories found expression within Israel’s borders in censorship, police brutality, and trampling on the law; Just as administrative detention spread from Palestinians to Jews; Just as “death to Arabs” has become “death to leftists”. What kind of citizen would the soldier be who shot to death — accidentally, indifferently or deliberately — an ambulance driver and then buried the driver in the sand? What dreams would a pilot who bombed a school dream? And how will you feel when your soldier offspring returns from Gaza, with a look in their eyes that wasn’t there before, and refuse to tell you what they did there?
