Israeli Paper: Israel Is Deliberately Killing Civilians At Aid Sites.

Haartez, Israel's Top Newspaper Reported That The IDF Deliberately Killed Civilians At Aid Sites.

By far the most barbaric atrocity in recent memory has been Israel’s massacring of Palestinians- intentionally starved through the Israeli blockade on Gaza- through the setup of fake food aid sites.

Israel and the United States set up the “Gaza Humanitarian Fund,” a fake humanitarian aid organization used to lure Palestinians towards the south of Gaza to further Israel’s stated goal of ethnic cleansing.

As the Israeli scholar Yaakov Garb noted , “These ( Gaza Humanitarian Foundation) compounds do not bring food to needy populations, but rather entice, under conditions of severe duress, some portions of these populations into remote and highly militarized settings.”

He pointed out that the majority of these “remote and highly militarized settings” (ie, concentration camps) were located in the South of Gaza, exactly where the IDF plans to force Palestinians in Gaza for their ethnic cleansing plan.

As he wrote, “The fact that four of the five compounds lie south of the Morag corridor-- repeatedly indicated by Israeli officials as the intended destination for concentration of Palestinians to be displaced from the remainder of Gaza in an impending intensification of the military attacks—— is not reassuring.”

The reality is even more depraved. Not only has Israel used the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to lure Palestinians into concentration camps, but they have also used it to open fire on starving Palestinian civilians once they reach the aid centres.

Palestinians have taken to calling the “aid sites” death traps due to the daily IDF massacres that have been occurring against civilians once they reach the sites.

As the independent outlet Mondoweiss wrote, “incidents that have taken place at the GHF aid distribution points in southern and central Gaza on a near-daily basis. They have taken on a familiar pattern, in which thousands of starving civilians march in the predawn hours toward the distribution points, and upon arrival, are shot at by Israeli forces, leading to another aid massacre”.

The outlet noted that “These near-daily aid massacres have led Palestinians to regard the aid sites run by the U.S. organization as ‘massacre sites’ and ‘death traps.’”

The Israeli Magazine 972 similarly reported that:

Starving civilians gather in massive crowds, waiting for permission to approach. In many instances, Israeli troops have opened fire on the masses — and even during distribution itself — killing dozens as they try to collect a few kilos of flour or canned goods to bring home in what Palestinians have dubbed ‘The Hunger Games.’

Haaretz, one of Israel’s top newspapers, has reported that the order to intentionally fire on innocent civilians at aid sites has come from the top, in a new report titled “IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid”.

The paper reported that “Israeli soldiers in Gaza told Haaretz that the army has deliberately fired at Palestinians near aid distribution sites over the past month.”

The outlet found that “Conversations with officers and soldiers reveal that commanders ordered troops to shoot at crowds to drive them away or disperse them, even though it was clear they posed no threat”.

It noted that “549 people have been killed near aid centers and in areas where residents were waiting for UN food trucks since May 27 and over 4,000 have been wounded”.

One IDF soldier told the paper, “It's a killing field, where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They're treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

The soldier admitted that in all of these instances, the desperate, starving civilians posed no military threat, saying, “We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there's no danger to the forces. I'm not aware of a single instance of return fire. There's no enemy, no weapons”.

The paper reported that the IDF disgustingly compared the policy of shooting at starving civilians to prevent them from obtaining food aid to “red light green light”, writing “He also said the activity in his area of service is referred to as Operation Salted Fish – the name of the Israeli version of the children's game ‘Red light, green light’”.

The paper reported that the civilian massacres have been ordered by Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, writing:

A senior officer whose name repeatedly comes up in testimonies about the shootings near aid sites is Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, commander of the IDF's Division 252.

Now, an officer in the division says Vach decided to disperse gatherings of Palestinians waiting for UN aid trucks by opening fire. ‘This is Vach's policy,’ the officer said, ‘but many of the commanders and soldiers accepted it without question. [The Palestinians] are not supposed to be there, so the idea is to make sure they clear out, even if they're just there for food.’

The official excuse from the IDF is that these massacres are done to “disperse crowds,” but an IDF soldier admitted that they have fired on civilians who pose no threat and who have already begun to flee the gunfire.

He was quoted in the paper saying, “The teenagers waiting for the trucks hide behind dirt mounds and rush them as they pass or stop at distribution points, we usually see them from hundreds of meters away; it's not a situation where they pose a threat to us”.

He went on to say “Technically, it's supposed to be warning fire – either to push people back or stop them from advancing, But lately, firing shells has just become standard practice. Every time we fire, there are casualties and deaths, and when someone asks why a shell is necessary, there's never a good answer. Sometimes, merely asking the question annoys the commanders”.

The paper went on to note that “In that case, some people began to flee after the shell was fired, and according to the soldier, other forces subsequently opened fire on them”.

The soldier went on to say, “If it's meant to be a warning shot, and we see them running back to Gaza, why shoot at them? Sometimes we're told they're still hiding, and we need to fire in their direction because they haven't left. But it's obvious they can't leave if the moment they get up and run, we open fire”.

The paper noted that “The soldier said this has become routine”.

Another IDF reserve officer admitted that they fired on civilians at aid sites who “were not close to the forces” for no military reason and said that killing innocent people was “normalized”.

He was quoted as saying, “When we asked why they opened fire, we were told it was an order from above and that the civilians had posed a threat to the troops. I can say with certainty that the people were not close to the forces and did not endanger them. It was pointless – they were just killed for nothing. This thing called killing innocent people – it's been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops”.

Another field officer acknowledged that these massacres of civilians was due to the genocidal IDF ideology which believes there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, saying “My greatest fear is that the shooting and harm to civilians in Gaza aren't the result of operational necessity or poor judgment, but rather the product of an ideology held by field commanders, which they pass down to the troops as an operational plan.”

The paper also reported that Yasser Abu Shabab, the leader of a small ISIS-linked criminal gang, which is armed by Israel and has repeatedly looted aid with support from the IDF, has taken part in these massacres.

For context, as I reported recently, Yasser Abu Shabab’s Gang has put out videos of looted aid in concentration camps in Eastern Rafah in order to lure desperate Palestinians into the South of Gaza close to the border with Egypt.

Haaretz reported that Yasser Abu Shabab’s gang has taken part in aid massacres at these sites with support from the IDF, writing:

In addition to IDF fire, military sources say some of the fatalities near the aid distribution centers were caused by gunfire from militias that the (Israeli) army supports and arms. According to one officer, the IDF continues to back the Abu Shabab group and other factions.

‘There are many groups that oppose Hamas – Abu Shabab went several steps further,’ he said. ‘They control territory that Hamas doesn't enter, and the IDF encourages that.’

Another article in Haaretz wrote that “Two weeks after Goher Rahabour (a British surgeon working in Gaza) arrived at Nasser Hospital, on June 1, he observed that the profile of the wounds had changed. Instead of blast and detonation injuries, many more people began arriving with bullets in their body, after Israeli troops opened fire at the starved crowd.”

Goher Rahabour was quoted as saying that the IDF fired at Palestinians at aid sites while they were trying to evade shooting, and also shot a pregnant woman in the stomach, telling the paper, “With some of them you can see that they were shot while they lay on the ground, trying to evade being shot. Most of them were young men, but there was one woman in her early 30s, who was 24 weeks pregnant. The bullet went through the fetus. She survived but needed a hysterectomy, so no more children. When we opened the abdomen, we could see the hand and the formed foot of the dead fetus”.

Furthermore, the Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada has found that the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Fund”, “tells emaciated Gazans ‘come, we have food’, then minutes later says ‘Don't come, we're closed’”.

He noted that “as soon as people show up, the IDF empties their machine guns into the starving crowd & mows them down”.

In other words, the Gaza Humanitarian Fund posts to social media that they are open for food aid, to lure starving Palestinians into aid sites, just to post minutes later that they are now closed, to justify opening fire at the crowds of people once they arrive.

The vile U.S.-backed Israeli policy of starving the entire population of Gaza, and then setting up a fake aid organization to murder them, is one of the most evil acts in human history, with no words in the English language to describe the utter depravity and barbarity of this policy.

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