Jonathan Cook
The horrifying images from Gaza last week of fire consuming a Palestinian teenager confined to his hospital bed with an intravenous drip may come to define Israel’s genocide, as completely as earlier images of human depravity have defined the world.
Naked, skin-and-bone corpses thrown into mass graves in the death camps of the Nazi Holocaust. Radioactive fields of rubble, interrupted only by charred, skeletal trees, after the atomic levelling of Hiroshima by the United States. A naked Vietnamese girl, her burned skin peeling off, fleeing in terror from a napalm attack.
The flames that burned alive 19-year-old Shaaban al-Dalou, along with his mother and two others, in a tent on the grounds of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah were almost certainly unleashed by US- or German-supplied missiles, fired by Israeli pilots.
Dalou was in the tent recovering from an Israeli air strike a week earlier on Deir al-Balah that had killed 26 people. He was already malnourished and immunocompromised from many months of an Israeli blockade, which has denied the entry of food and aid into Gaza.
Dalou’s two sisters, father and younger brother all sustained severe burns from the fire caused by the strike. His 10-year-old brother succumbed to his wounds days later. The victims in Deir al-Balah were charred into oblivion - and with them the "rules-based international order” the West helped establish to prevent a repeat of the horrors of the Second World War.
The year-long genocide in Gaza is entirely a Western co-production. The US and Europe send the weapons, provide the diplomatic cover, orchestrate support from their pliant state- and billionaire-owned media, and stifle all domestic dissent.
The modern era of international humanitarian law that the West proclaimed, as well as the institutions the West championed to uphold it, are going up in flames.
The parties unravelling - week after week, month after month - the rules that kept in check the dangers of a third world war are not the so-called "terrorists”. It’s not Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. It’s not even Iran, Russia or China.
It is the West. It is Washington and its allies. They are the arsonists.
Nowhere safe
Anyone trying to give a true sense of the scale of destruction Israel has unleashed so quickly, or the indiscriminate nature of its bombing, has to grasp for decades-old comparisons, mostly from Vietnam, Korea or the Second World War.
However much Western politicians and media have denounced and sanctioned Moscow, and armed Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, the crimes there pale in comparison to Israel’s war on Gaza - and now on Lebanon.The carnage being unleashed in the Middle East is from another, much darker era. The humanitarian catastrophe Israel has engineered in Gaza has no precedent in the modern era.
Israel’s genocide is not just pitiless, like so many other wars. It has been brazen, celebratory even, in its orgy of destruction. The bombs strike the very "safe zones” Israel declares. They hit hospitals, schools serving as shelters for displaced families, bakeries, mosques and churches.
There is nothing secret about Israel’s long starvation of Gaza’s "human animals”: 2.3 million people, or however many of them are still alive after the enclave lost the capacity to count its dead months ago.Israel is now doing to Gaza precisely what it threatened to do long before it was able to exploit the pretext of 7 October. It is pummelling the enclave to send it "back to the Stone Age”.
It is not Hamas that is being eliminated in Gaza. It is the fundamentals of humanitarian law: the principle of "distinction” between combatants and non-combatants, and the principle of "proportionality” in weighing military advantage against the endangerment of civilians.
All of this is happening out in the open, concealed only by the refusal of Western politicians and media to admit what everyone else can see.
Israel is not "remaking the Middle East”. It is destroying the world as we have known it for generations.
What Israel has made clear, supported by Western capitals, is that there is no safe place, not even for those recovering in a hospital bed from Israel’s earlier atrocities. There are no "non-combatants”, no civilians. There are no rules. Everyone is a target.
And now that includes not just the peoples of Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon, but the very body supposed to serve as the guardian of the humanitarian codes of law created after the Second World War and the Holocaust: the United Nations.
Attacking peacekeepers
Israel’s repeated attacks on UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon - and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s "order” that they leave their posts or face the consequences - are being normalised by Western capitals as surely as Israel’s earlier, systematic attacks on Gaza’s hospitals were.
On Wednesday, an Israeli tank fired on a watchtower near the Lebanese village of Kafer Kela, damaging it and its cameras.
A week earlier, two peacekeepers were wounded after an Israeli tank fired at an observation tower at Unifil’s coastal headquarters in Naquora.
In another incident last Sunday, two Israeli tanks broke down the gates of a Unifil post in Ramyah. Shortly afterwards, Israeli forces fired smoke canisters that provoked skin irritations and gastrointestinal reactions in 15 peacekeepers.
Netanyahu has sought to justify these and other attacks with a familiar canard. He has claimed that UN peacekeepers are serving as a "human shield to Hezbollah terrorists”, just as his administration earlier justified the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and its wider infrastructure on the grounds that Hamas had built "command and control centres” under them.
In a clue as to how such strategies might be viewed by some in Washington, Matthew Brodsky, a former White House adviser, recently called for Israel to drop napalm on Irish peacekeepers in southern Lebanon.
Operating in the shadows
There are clear reasons - both immediate and more long-term - why Israel is targeting UNIFIL. The peacekeepers are there to observe and record violations of the laws of war between Israel and armed Lebanese groups, such as Hezbollah.
One of Israel’s early tasks in Gaza was to keep out foreign journalists and assassinate local Palestinian journalists to hamper the reporting of its war crimes in the enclave.
In Lebanon, Israel faces a bigger problem. The UN - a body whose humanitarian remit is to bring pressure on state parties to abide by international law - has not just eyes on the ground. It has experienced soldiers in fortified positions to observe proceedings on the battlefield Israel has made of southern Lebanon.
Its peacekeeping force is drawn from 50 countries, making all of them direct witnesses to Israel’s crimes against humanity. UNIFIL reports are sent to the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, and a network of UN human rights bodies.
That’s why the force needs the very watchtowers Israel is intent on destroying.
Israel wants to be able to operate in the shadows, off the radar, as it has done in Gaza, when it carries out its programme of war crimes in southern Lebanon.
Israel’s long-running campaign against the UN has dramatically stepped up a gear over the past year.
That is why Israel has declared Guterres "persona non grata” and banned him from entering the country. Israel’s foreign minister has accused Guterres of backing "terrorists, rapists, and murderers”, and called him "a stain on the history of the UN”.
(Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.)