Israel’s deadly strike on Al-Mawasi, one of the bloodiest attacks in more than nine months of war in Gaza, used massive payload bombs provided by the United States, according to weapons experts.
The bombing of the Israeli-declared “safe zone” transformed the tent city on the Mediterranean coast into a charred wasteland, with nearby hospitals overrun with casualties.
According to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory, the barrage killed at least 92 people and wounded more than 300.
The Israeli military said it targeted two “masterminds” of the October 7 attacks by Hamas that triggered the war. It said a top commander, Rafa Salama, was killed in the strike, but uncertainty remains over Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif.
AFP videos of the attack showed a white mushroom cloud billowing over a busy street, leaving behind a huge crater strewn with the wreckage of tents and a building blown to bits.
Here is what we know about the weaponry used in the attack:
Two weapons experts said that a sliver of munition seen in a video of the blast site circulating online was a tail fin from a US-made Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). AFP could not independently verify the video.
The GPS-aided kit converts unguided free-fall bombs — so-called “dumb bombs” — into precision-guided “smart” munitions that can be directed toward single or multiple targets.
The United States developed the kit to improve accuracy in adverse weather after Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
The first JDAMs were delivered in 1997 and, according to the US Air Force, have a 95 percent system reliability.
Tag: palestine
Israeli ‘siege tactics’ block aid groups to access Gaza: NGOs
Access to war-torn Gaza has become increasingly difficult for humanitarian groups, 13 leading NGOs warned on Monday, accusing Israel’s military of blocking much-needed aid from reaching the besieged Palestinian territory.
Denouncing “Israel’s systematic obstruction of aid and its ongoing attacks on aid operations”, the humanitarian organisations said that Israel had facilitated only 53 — less than half — of the 115 relief missions they had planned.
The aid groups slammed what it called Israel’s “siege tactics” in its struggle against Palestinian militant group Hamas.
It said the so-called “humanitarian zone” where most of the strip’s population of 2.4 million people now reside had become “an active combat zone” and “extremely unsafe”.
The charities also criticised the bombing of United Nations schools used as shelters by displaced Palestinians.
At least six schools have been hit over the past nine days.
“These recent events are exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe at a time when NGOs continue to come up against the obstacles imposed by the continuation of Israeli military operations on the ground,” a press release summarising the 13 NGOs’ views warned.
Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and the Norwegian Refugee Council were among the charities to contribute to the document.
Israel Uses Water as a Weapon of Its Genocide in Gaza
Through persistent, systematic, and widespread targeting of the Gaza Strip’s water sources and desalination plants, Israel is using water as a weapon against Palestinian civilians. In addition to imposing famine, Israel is deliberately reducing the amount of water available to residents of the Strip—especially potable water sources—intentionally targeting the over 2.3 million people who live there as part of its genocide, ongoing since last October.
On Monday, July 1, the Euro-Med Monitor field team observed significant damage to a desalination plant in the Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood, south of Gaza City, as a result of direct Israeli targeting. This also resulted in the killing of a young man who was filling a gallon with water, plus the wounding of other individuals. The station, which provided services to at least 50,000 people in several nearby residential neighbourhoods, sustained significant damage after being bombed by the Israeli army with a GBU missile that broke through multiple stories and detonated on the ground floor.
As summer temperatures rise, the people of the Gaza Strip are facing significant challenges in accessingwater. Estimates show that since October of last year, the per capita share of water in the Gaza Strip has decreased by 97% due to the extensive destruction of water infrastructure by Israel. Therefore, as a result of the genocide, the per capita share of water in the Strip has decreased to between 3 and 15 litres per day, while in 2022 it was approximately 84.6 litres per day.
In view of the ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people that deprive them of necessities for survival—such as the destruction of over 700 wells and water desalination plants since the start of the genocide—all areas of the Gaza Strip are experiencing a shortage of water, and the sewage system is collapsing. Meanwhile, certain areas of the Strip are suffering from a shortage of fuel, which Israel forbids from entering the Strip, despite the large number of casualties—including children—caused by infectious diseases and epidemics that spread through the accumulation ofcontaminated water due to inoperative sewage stations.
Continued destruction and devastation by the Israeli army is rendering the Gaza Strip unlivable, particularly after the army’s destruction of 9 out of 10 water tanks and half of the water networks, or 350 km out of 700 km.
Additionally, as a result of the crimes and arbitrary policies of Israel, all six wastewater treatment plants have been disrupted, approximately 65 sewage pumps stopped, and 70 km of sewage networks destroyed. This has resulted in the unchecked disposal of wastewater, estimated to be around 130 thousand cubic metres per day, onto Gaza Strip roads and shelters for displaced people.
According to United Nations estimates, about 96 percent of the Strip’s population (2.15 million people) faces high levels of acute food insecurity. While the whole territory is classified in Emergency (IPC Phase 4), over 495,000 people (22 per cent of the population) are still facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 5). In this Phase, households experience an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion of coping capacities.
Euro-Med Monitor warned last January that distress is engulfing Gaza City and the Strip’s northern regions in alarming ways—a result of Israel’s cutting off of the water supply in the Strip, systematic and intentional Israeli bombing of water sources and wells, and a lack of fuel required to run water conversion and distribution facilities.
The lack of drinking water in the Gaza Strip has become a matter of life and death, with residents currently being forced to drink unclean well water amid continued Israeli military attacks and lack of food, water, and fuel supplies.
Israel Used US-Provided Bomb on School Sheltering Civilians
Israel used a US-provided bomb in a strike on a school in a town east of the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis that was sheltering civilians, CNN reported on Wednesday.
The airstrike hit tents on the outside of the school in the town of Abassan on Tuesday. Officials at the nearby Nasser Hospital said 31 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attack, including eight children.
Footage from Al Jazeera shows children playing soccer in the schoolyard as the strike hits the school’s entrance. Weapons experts told CNN that a video of the aftermath showed remnants of a US-made GBU-39 small-diameter bomb, a 250-pound munition.
Israeli soldiers turn Gaza into ‘free fire zone littered with corpses’
Israeli troops are authorized to “open fire on Palestinians virtually at will, including civilians,” and have turned Gaza into a “landscape littered with corpses,” +972 Mag reported on 8 July.
Journalists from the Tel Aviv-based news magazine interviewed six Israeli soldiers who have participated in the Gaza invasion and occupation in recent months.
The sources, including five who wished to remain anonymous, recounted how Israeli soldiers “routinely executed Palestinian civilians” simply because they entered areas designated as “no-go zones.”
“There was total freedom of action,” said B, a soldier who operated in Gaza. “If there is [even] a feeling of threat, there is no need to explain – you just shoot.”
When soldiers see someone approaching, “it is permissible to shoot at their center of mass [their body], not into the air,” B continued. “It’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.”
B went on to describe an incident in November when soldiers killed 15 to 20 Palestinians, including children, who evacuated the wrong way when a gunfight broke out near a school.
“Everyone who went to the right was killed … There was a pile of bodies,” he told +972.
Another soldier, S., stated that a fellow soldier shot and killed a Palestinian family just for walking around near the soldiers’ protected compound.
“At first, they say ‘four people.’ It turns into two children plus two adults, and by the end, it’s a man, a woman, and two children. You can assemble the picture yourself.”
A., an officer who served in the army’s Operations Directorate, explained that he was supposed to get authorization before shooting at “hospitals, clinics, schools, religious institutions, [and] buildings of international organizations.”
But in practice, “I can count on one hand the cases where we were told not to shoot. Even with sensitive things like schools, [approval] feels like only a formality.”
Israel calls for Gaza TRUCE after coming up short on “munitions, motivation and troops”
Despite claiming strength and success publicly, Israel’s army leaders are in a state of fear and trembling over their failed operation in the Gaza Strip coupled with what is now coming down the pike from Lebanon.
According to reports, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are privately pushing for a comprehensive ceasefire in Gaza as the “best way” to recover the more than 100 hostages that still remain. A Gaza ceasefire will also help Israel to “reach a deal with Hezbollah” to prevent any further expansion of the war.
Six current and former security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to The New York Times revealed that Israel’s top brass is scared of getting stuck in a “forever war” that can never be won because Israel’s “army is short of spare parts, munitions, motivation, and even troops.”
“Under-equipped for further fighting after Israel’s longest war in decades, the generals also think their forces need time to recuperate in case a land war breaks out against Hezbollah,” reported the Times.
“Fewer reservists are reporting for duty … [and] officers are increasingly distrustful of their commanders,” the report reads, further explaining that some of Israel’s tanks in Gaza “are not loaded with the full capacity of the shells that they usually carry.”
Israeli outlet confirms IDF killed its own people on Oct. 7th
After nine months of an Israeli mass murder campaign in Gaza, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has confirmed what my colleagues Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada (EI) and Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone reported back in October: that Israel invoked the Hannibal Directive and killed its own citizens on Oct. 7th.
According to one Israeli military source, Israeli forces were ordered to turn the boundary area around Gaza into a “killing zone” — thereby knowingly killing Israelis in that zone. Under the Hannibal doctrine, Israel’s aim was to kill its own people rather than let them be traded in a future exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons. The Israeli military has suppressed this killing of its own people on Oct. 7th all while manufacturing support for its rampage in Gaza ever since.
The same establishment media outlets that have long ignored this aspect of Oct. 7th smeared my independent media colleagues at Grayzone and EI for reporting it. This includes two hit pieces in the Washington Post, and even more brazenly, three pieces in Haaretz — which is now acknowledging what it has repeatedly attacked Max and Grayzone for reporting.
I went on “Piers Morgan Uncensored” to debate this issue and related matters. I was joined by the veteran, courageous Israeli journalist Gideon Levy along with two other Israelis — one a former IDF spokesperson who was not keen on letting me speak.
Biden Admin ‘Undeniably Complicit’ in Israel’s Starvation Campaign in Gaza : Ex-Officials Say
A dozen former Biden administration officials signed a letter posted on X Friday describing the U.S.’s unrelenting support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza and how the backing ultimately puts America’s interests at risk and a “target” on its back.
“It has not made his rallies any safer, it has emboldened extremists while it has been devastating for the Palestinian people, ensuring a vicious cycle of poverty and hopelessness, with all the implications of that cycle, for generations to come,” the wrote.
Ben-Gvir says Palestinian prisoners should be killed, boasts of ‘abominable’ prison conditions
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has reiterated his call for Palestinian prisoners to be executed, amid a spat with Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service on the state of Israel’s prisons.
The far-right minister took to X to respond to Shin Bet accusations that the government had ignored months of warnings about prison overcrowding with at least 21,000 Palestinian detainees held since 7 October.
“Since I assumed the position of Minister of National Security, one of the highest goals I have set for myself is to worsen the conditions of the terrorists in the prisons, and to reduce their rights to the minimum required by law,” Ben-Gvir said.
The minister appeared to boast about the squalid conditions Palestinians are kept in, in remarks some observers have called an open admission that Israel is running concentration camps.
“Everything published about the abominable conditions” of Palestinians in Israeli jails “was true”, Ben-Gvir said, boasting that he had reduced food and shower times for prisoners, removed electrical devices, and stopped financial deposits.
Israel turbocharges West Bank settlement expansion with largest land grab in decades
Israel has approved the largest seizure of land in the occupied West Bank in over three decades, a settlement tracking group said Wednesday, a move that is likely to worsen already soaring tensions linked to the war in Gaza.
Israel’s aggressive expansion in the West Bank reflects the settler community’s strong influence in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the most religious and nationalist in the country’s history. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself, has turbocharged the policy of expansion, seizing new authorities over settlement development and saying he aims to solidify Israel’s hold on the territory and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.
Authorities recently approved the appropriation of 12.7 square kilometers (nearly 5 square miles) of land in the Jordan Valley, according to a copy of the order obtained by The Associated Press. Data from Peace Now, the tracking group, indicate it was the largest single appropriation approved since the 1993 Oslo accords at the start of the peace process.
Settlement monitors said the land grab connects Israeli settlements along a key corridor bordering Jordan, a move they said undermines the prospect of a contiguous Palestinian state.
Hellbound and Down 
You must be logged in to post a comment.