It goes sickeningly on: Israeli forces just dropped U.S.-made bombs on displaced Gazans, mostly women and children, sleeping in a UN school in Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 40 and injuring hundreds in yet another massacre of innocents that "contradicts all human values." The victims will be added to a steadfast documenting of losses that, despite the horrors - "blood and screaming, blood and screaming" - seeks to share their stories "in loving memory," and insist, "They were never numbers."
Israel has now killed almost 37,000 Palestinians in Gaza - most civilians, too many children - and wounded, often devastatingly, over 83,000; tens of thousands remain under rubble. Last Sunday, in a merciless new low, Israel dropped seven massive, U.S. bombs, which ghoulish Nikki Haley autographed with "Finish Them!", on a crowded tent city of sleeping, displaced people in Rafah. The resulting fires burned alive at least 45, mostly women and children, and injured hundreds; the most horrifying image from the hellscape showed Abdel Hafez holding up the beheaded body of his 18-month-old son Ahmad, killed with his mother and two siblings and later buried without his head. Despite international outrage, Doctors Without Borders describes an "insane escalation of violence" across Gaza, with Israeli attacks and a Rafah border closed to humanitarian aid creating "apocalyptic" conditions for Palestinians trapped there.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society says Israeli forces are firing on them in the West Bank even as they try to remove the dead and injured; UN officials worry warm weather and dirty water mean "cholera may become prevalent"; experts say that nine of 10 children suffer severe lack of food, over a million people could "face death and starvation" by mid-July without more aid, and thousands have been effectively killed by months of extreme hunger, with malnutrition causing permanent damage to many children. Within a decimated health system, exhausted doctors and nurses work alongside an "unbearable...odor of blood," patients are strewn everywhere, dead bodies "brought in plastic bags" pile up, the body of a dead woman lies on the floor, cut open, next to the body of her dead fetus. A young doctor describes being evacuated from hospital to hospital; each time, she says, "It was a different place, but the same horror." (more...)
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