Al-Qalam 
TOPSHOT - Palestinians evacuate the area following an Israeli airstrike on the Sousi mosque in Gaza City on October 9, 2023. Israel continued to battle Hamas fighters on October 9 and massed tens of thousands of troops and heavy Armour around the Gaza Strip after vowing a massive blow over the Palestinian militants' surprise attack. (Photo by Mahmud HAMS / AFP) (Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images)
Will the massacre at Al Ahli Hospital be treated as a mere statistic in Israel’s catalogue of horrors? asks Iqbal Jassat.
“In fact, I cannot think of any other country on earth that, in full view of nightly TV audiences, has performed such miracles of detailed sadism against an entire society and gotten away with it.” – Edward Said, September 25, 2003.
The massacre of hundreds at Al Ahli Baptist Hospital in the centre of Gaza caused by Israeli air strikes is the latest carnage resulting from Netanyahu’s public declaration to reduce Gaza to rubble.
The scale of the destruction at the hospital is beyond belief. Reports emerging from the ground reveal graphic details of body parts and limbs scattered across the precinct of the health facility.
As footage of the horror makes its way across TV broadcasts, many Muslim populations in Arab countries have taken to the streets in their thousands. In Jordan the Israeli embassy has been stormed and set alight.
Arab “normalisers” are under severe public pressure to reverse their unwise betrayal of Palestine. Protests have erupted in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Yemen as well as Morocco, Nigeria, Algeria and many more.
Public opinion has sharpened against America for allowing Israel to commit horrendous war crimes without accountability. Every word of encouragement to Netanyahu by the US president Biden has been interpreted as a license to kill Palestinians.
Has the world’s last settler-colony Israel bitten more than it can chew?
In addition to the Al Ahli hospital massacre, horrific devastation unleashed in besieged Gaza by the illegal regime’s army of terrorists, has turned into a nasty display of genocide in full view of a shocked world.
The empathy Zionists hoped to exploit by manufacturing fake news about beheading of babies, rapes, and murder of Jewish civilians, has turned sour.
Instead, global audiences of online news and live broadcasts via TV across most mediums, are horrified, outraged, and stunned by visuals of Israel’s barbaric carpet bombings.
Protests in western capitals and across the world stretching from Southern Africa to Asia and beyond, have brought to the surface a deep sense of grief including unconditional support for Palestinian right to resist Zionist injustice.
Though there has been a desperate attempt to demonise Palestine’s Islamic Resistance, led by Hamas, as terrorism, it has backfired.
Many commentators and analysts, who are familiar with Hamas, have not only disputed Israeli attempts to falsely depict it as ISIS, but have rejected the proposition as preposterous.
Much to their dismay, the colonial occupiers of Palestine are aware that they have suffered a major blow in the court of public opinion. And worse is that they are unable to reverse it.
The Netanyahu cabinet of extreme racist right-wingers have been under the illusion that having America’s back and misrepresenting the daring breakout by Hamas fighters as Israel’s “9/11”, will ensure empathy as well as justification for their slaughter of Gaza’s civilian population.
How wrong they are.
Just as their failure to anticipate and intervene has been attributed to Israel’s vulnerability despite being ranked as the world’s fourth best equipped army, so has the calculations they had relied on to demonise Hamas, proved to be amateurish and futile.
The slaughter of innocent civilians including old, infirm and babies, has not spared doctors, paramedics, and healthcare workers. In fact, media platforms such as BBC and CNN – traditionally allied to Israel – have had no choice but to report on the massive devastation of hospitals, residential buildings, schools and UNRWA’s institutions.
In other words, Israel’s inhumanity is being thoroughly exposed, minute by minute. Just as the bombings by American-funded F16, helicopter gunships, naval artillery and drones are relentless, so too is the coverage of mass killings.
Has Hamas destroyed the much-vaunted Zionist Utopia… is a question that has begun to shake the foundation of the colonial entity.
“Now, as Hamas prepares to battle the most powerful military in the Middle East, the militant group’s total annihilation was the only way to make Jews in Israel feel safe again”, said a prominent analyst at BESA Center, a think-tank at Bar-Ilan University.
His conclusion however is a reality Israelis are aware of as thousands are fleeing the “promised” Utopia.
“If Hamas can absorb the Israeli retaliation, then this is a major, major strategic defeat, because no Israeli will ever go back to live there”.
Gaza has repeatedly been indiscriminately targeted by Israel’s Occupation Forces (IOF) throughout the period of its suffocating blockade.
Palestinians in the world’s most densely populated Strip have borne the brunt of Zionist wrath, while most of the so-called international community looked away.
The current bloody Israeli bombardment has yet again reminded the world that the occupying regime has no red lines nor any regard or respect for international humanitarian laws.
Will the massacre at Al Ahli Hospital be treated as a mere statistic in Israel’s catalogue of horrors?
It is what the Zionist perpetrators would prefer. To do so would be a grave disservice to the thousands of families of victims who are demanding justice.
They deserve nothing less.
*Iqbal Jassat is an Exec: Media Review Network, Johannesburg.
