After six months of apocalyptic war, Gaza today is a
bunch of ‘kill zones’ within a larger kill zone.
Belén Fernández
Al Jazeera columnist
Published On 5 Apr 2024
Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in the
central Gaza Strip, Monday, April 1, 2024. [AP
Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana]
Four Palestinian men are walking in the city of Khan
Younis in the southern Gaza Strip through an area
largely pulverised by Israeli bombardments. There is no
indication that they are carrying weapons or doing
anything aside from putting one foot in front of the
other, as humans do to get from one place to the next.
Suddenly, a direct air strike on the pedestrians takes
out two of the men. The third continues walking and is
quickly blasted to bits as well. The fourth is
eliminated by yet another strike after falling to his
knees.
This episode, which reportedly took place in February,
is depicted in Israeli drone footage released in March
by Al Jazeera. Watching the defenceless men
systematically picked off from the sky in a fanatical
display of firepower, one is reminded of the Collateral
Murder video published by WikiLeaks in 2010, in which a
dozen Iraqi civilians were exuberantly massacred by
helicopter-borne United States military personnel.
In the Khan Younis incident, it appears that the “crime”
of the four men – meriting an instant death sentence –
was their presence in one of the Israeli military’s so-
called “kill zones” in Gaza, the subject of a recent
expose in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The article
specifies that “there is no written order” stipulating
kill zones in the Israeli army’s “rule book”, but it’s
abundantly clear that they are a very real phenomenon
with very little institutional oversight. “Ultimately,
the boundaries of these zones and the exact procedures
of operation are subject to interpretation by commanders
in that specific area,” the newspaper found.
Speaking to Haaretz, one Israeli reserve officer
described the business as follows: “In every combat
zone, commanders define such kill zones. … As soon as
people enter [a zone], mainly adult males, orders are to
shoot and kill, even if that person is unarmed.”
So much for the world’s “most moral army”.
In sum, then, Palestinians can be slaughtered simply for
finding themselves in an area that happens to have been
arbitrarily designated a “kill zone” by some Israeli
commander or another.
And if you’re killed in a “kill zone”, chances are
you’ll be marked down by Israel as a “terrorist”, which
certainly helps in terms of inflating the casualty count
of “bad guys” in a war that as of mid-March had already
killed more than 13,000 Palestinian children.
According to Haaretz, of the more than 32,000
Palestinians estimated to have been killed in Gaza over
the past six months, the Israeli army says 9,000 or so
were “terrorists” – a claim that has failed to convince
even many army commanders. As one officer who previously
served in Gaza commented to the newspaper: “In practice,
a terrorist is anyone the [military] has killed in the
areas in which its forces operate.”
Not that the Zionist politico-military establishment
hasn’t been known to deploy the terms “Palestinian” and
“terrorist” more or less interchangeably. Indeed, 75
years of perverse propaganda has sought to persuade the
world that the victims of continuous terrorisation by
Israel are in fact the ones doing the terrorising.
Now the victims of “kill zones” get to be terrorists
too. Never mind that, regarding the case of the four
pedestrians in Khan Younis, a senior Israeli military
officer remarked to Haaretz: “They were unarmed. They
didn’t endanger our forces in the area in which they
were walking.”
The article goes on to quote the same officer’s
speculation that many civilians in Gaza had met their
demise after entering areas they thought the army had
already abandoned, possibly in the hopes of finding food
that had been left behind: “When they went to such
places, they were shot, perceived as people who could
harm our forces.”
An Israeli military spokesperson has huffily denied the
“kill zone” reports. And yet at the end of the day, the
Gaza Strip is one big kill zone – with literally no
space off limits to killing. How else do you explain
massacres at Palestinian hospitals and United Nations
shelters or the slaughter of people waiting in line for
food aid as children starve to death?
To be sure, Israel has long boasted of its alleged
prowess in conducting surgically precise air strikes and
targeted killings. But even if the figure of 9,000 dead
“terrorists” tallied by the Israeli army had any basis
in reality, it’s difficult to account for more than
23,000 “collateral murders”, to borrow the WikiLeaks
phrasing.
Unless, of course, collaterality has nothing to do with
it and Israel is simply straight up targeting civilians
– which, after all, is how genocide works, isn’t it?
After six months of apocalyptic war, Gaza today is a
bunch of “kill zones” within a larger kill zone. And as
Israel continues its quest to normalise depravity across
the board, the current Israeli monopoly on terrorism
will certainly be tough to break.
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