Unspeakable: We Are Swimming In A Pool of Blood

Unimaginably, Gazans continue to endure the atrocities of a heedless Israel: Strikes on schools that kill mostly children, polio-tainted sewage "everywhere," catastrophic hunger, universal trauma, gutted hospitals, shattered families seeking small bodies rotting under rubble. To many, the ongoing savagery through 10 bloody months marks the moral deterioration of an Occupation increasingly acquiescent to the concept "there are certain groups of people who can be killed...They are not like us."

While it's tumbled off most front pages, Israel's blithe defiance of both world censure and ICJ rulings goes on apace. This week, the U.N's largest body of human rights experts hailed an earlier "historic" ICJ finding that Israel's Occupation is "unlawful" and must end; they declared Palestinians' right to "freedom from foreign military occupation, racial segregation and apartheid is absolutely non-negotiable," adding, "Israel must stop acting as if uniquely above the law." But that shift feels woefully distant in the wake of Netanyahu's chilling, rabid avowal before Congress to press on until "total victory." Meanwhile, 86% of Gaza is under ever-unrolling evacuation orders, with thousands perpetually forced to uproot; 96% of Gazans face acute food shortages, with communities "wasting away" and children "sleeping hungry" while often going up to 3 days without food; and public health experts cite the "ticking time bomb" of a polio epidemic from overflowing sewage - "The smell is killing us, we are begging to be saved from the sewers" - along with soaring cases of hepatitis, dysentery, gastrointestinal disease and skin infections.

Almost 40,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed, with over 90,000 wounded; visiting doctors say the actual death toll could top 90,000, with over 10,000 still missing under rubble, over half likely children. Officials say more than 14,000 children, about half unidentified, have been killed; the fate of another 21,000 is unknown - buried in unmarked and mass graves, detained by Israeli forces, brought to hospitals to be deemed WCNSF - Wounded Child, No Surviving Family - or lost in the chaos. Daily, the awful search for bodies, decomposing in the summer heat under 40 million tons of rubble that could take 15 years to clear, drags on. Families plead on social media for news of children as young as two: "Every day, we search for him among the living and the dead." Anas Juha, 28, lost 117 members of his family in an Israeli strike on their home on Gaza City; about half the bodies remain under the ruins; he has yet to find his parents, siblings, wife, and five and three-year-old children. The hardest thing is not knowing what happened to them: Did they survive the blast but then suffocate under debris?

After months of attacks across Gaza, Israeli forces are now launching assaults on areas where they already claimed to have eliminated Hamas. With each withdrawal, they leave hundreds of bodies; with each new assault, they issue displacement orders to thousands of people ceaselessly uprooted, targeted as they flee, often leaving their dead children behind. "We have been displaced under iron and fire," says one man. "We have been decimated. We are tired in Gaza." And of course there is no truly safe place to go: Officials sometimes order them to what is "not a safe zone, but a safer place than any other." Earlier this month, an air strike in the south killed at least 90 people in Khan Younis, a "humanitarian zone" where residents have returned to an "uninhabitable wasteland" to live in the remnants of their destroyed homes. Survivors describe evening quiet ripped by a blast, then screaming, wailing, running, people feverishly combing through body parts for their missing children. After a frantic search, one woman found her 8-year-old daughter; she was alive, but ravaged by shrapnel in her back and chest.

In a recent atrocity on Saturday, after a second evacuation order in a week, Israel killed at least 30 people and wounded over 100 when it bombed central Gaza's Khadija Girls' School in Deir al-Balah, another "humanitarian zone," where over 4,000 people were sheltering and a field hospital was operating. Video shows survivors keening, shrieking, scrabbling with bare hands through dust and rubble. Inside the school, people described blood-spattered walls, "children, women, heads, arms, legs, a scene of ghosts." A girl had been split in two, another was decapitated, a boy who'd already had his leg amputated was killed when the blast severed his other leg from his body. A mother found pieces of her dead daughter's body: "She found Tala’s small hand next to a plate of lentils...Then she found her daughter’s left foot." Most of the wounded were children, often with severe burns; they were brought to Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Hospital, which was overwhelmed. "We are swimming in a pool of blood," said one furious medic. "We demand the countries of the world and the leaders of the world to look at us."

"Swimming in a pool of blood": Gaza medic pleads for aid after Israeli strike kills at least 37www.youtube.com

Many others desperately seek an end to the awful carnage. In a letter to a complicit Biden administration still incomprehensibly funding it, 45 foreign doctors who worked in Gaza with the World Health Organization and other relief groups wrote to demand a prompt ceasefire and Gazan access to food, water, health care and medical supplies. 'We wish you could see the nightmares that plague so many of us since we have returned - dreams of children maimed and mutilated by our weapons, and their inconsolable mothers begging us to save them," they wrote. "We wish you could hear the cries and screams our consciences will not let us forget." With "marginal exceptions," they added, "everyone in Gaza is sick, injured or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman and child." Haunted by daily treating children shot in the head, ravaged by severe burns, gored by shrapnel from likely illegal weapons, they noted, "We are not politicians. We are simply doctors who cannot remain silent about what we saw in Gaza."

In interviews, some have tried to describe the "unspeakable" devastation they witnessed. A US plastic surgeon and former Army combat trauma surgeon who treated mostly children at European Gaza Hospital, performing about 115 reconstructive surgeries on gunshot wounds to the face along with amputations and care for severe burns, said it was more horrific than working in Sarajevo and Iraq. An orthopedic surgeon wrote, “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many." "Every day I saw babies die," said a pediatric nurse practitioner trying to provide maternity care. "They had been born healthy, but their mothers were so malnourished they couldn't breastfeed, and there was no formula or clean water. So they starved." "You try to save the ones you can save," said a Jewish American orthopedic surgeon who described two six-year-olds who ultimately died from two "perfect" gunshot wounds to head and chest. Specifically targeted?, he was asked. "Definitively," he said. "No toddler gets shot twice by mistake by the 'world's best snipers.'"

Doctors say civilian casualties are almost always children: "I've seen more shredded, incinerated children than I've ever seen - missing body parts, crushed by buildings, bomb explosions, shrapnel." The Palestine Children's Relief Fund has evacuated about 200 to Chicago for care. One boy on their list had "shrapnels in back and chest with spinal cord injury resulting in post- traumatic paraplegia, multiple surgeries, intracranial hemorrhage"; he died before they could get him out. Hazem Rahma and his wife ran an orphanage in Gaza City for 22 small children, over half disabled, until Israeli attacks forced them to flee, strangers helping carry the distressed kids, Rahma carrying Iyas, a blind, deaf, five-year-old with cerebral palsy. In Khan Younis, Iyas died of infections when his medicine ran out: "He was a very sweet boy and was suffering a lot." Now they are in al-Mawasi - "Fear fills our hearts" - with three-month-old Malek, two-month-old Yazan, infant Yaffa with Down’s Syndrome: "We have no idea where they are from. God willing, we will be their family for now. We will try to make up for what they have lost...Life has no meaning if it does not have mercy."

In truth, mercy has been grievously scarce amidst the suffering - from the "first grey children pulled from the rubble" and civilians picked off by drone missiles to the disabled young man attacked in his home by an IDF dog and left to die and the man caring for his mother with Alzheimer's shot, detained and only freed two months later, long after neighbors found her dead on her bed. Last week, after months of targeting water supplies "to create a situation of thirst and hunger," IDF forces blew up a key water reservoir in Rafah that U.S. activist Rachel Corrie spent her last month protecting. In a post on Instagram, a soldier celebrated the act "in honor of Shabbat" with a video of the explosion and a song vowing, "We will burn Gaza." It's been deleted; denial is vital to Israel. "The IDF has never, and will never, deliberately target children," they said in response to outrage over another child-slaughtering air strike always meant to target "a Hamas command center" with "precise munitions" after taking "numerous steps" to "minimize civilian harm." Still, they added, "Remaining in an active combat zone has inherent risks."

"Israel On the Brink of Savagery," declared a recent Ha'aretz article. On the brink of? That obscene ship sailed long ago. They were referencing Monday's storming by a right-wing mob, including Knesset members and lawmakers, of Sde Teiman, an IDF base that's become a notorious, Guantánamo-like detention center from hell for Palestiniains. Harrowing whistleblower accounts describe inmates subjected to torture, sexual abuse, revenge beatings, dog attacks, horrific filth, 18-hour days of handcuffed, blindfolded, silenced, crouched stress positions causing such severe injuries detainees have had limbs amputated, where the wounded are strapped to hospital beds in diapers, force-fed through straws, and "stripped of anything that (resembles) human beings," and where, since Oct. 7, nearly 40 detainees have died. This week's incursion, however, was not to protest that widely alleged, long-ignored brutality - conditions in regular prisons, where Israel has banned the Red Cross, aren't much better - but to angrily denounce the "vanishingly rare" arrest of nine IDF soldiers for inflicting it.

In Israel's longstanding culture of impunity, excessively violent soldiers, like rampaging settlers, are almost never held to account; just 4.4 % of alleged soldier abuses of prisoners are ever prosecuted. This week's arrest came almost entirely because after the victim, a Hamas suspect, was admitted to the hospital with grave injuries that required surgery, the hospital followed protocol for sexual assault victims and notified authorities. With the legal process underway, Israel military police - possibly aware of a world and world court watching them? - were obliged to raid Sde Teiman, arresting nine soldiers suspected of severe torture and sexual abuse of a detainee. In response, several hundred right-wing extremists, incensed that nice Zionist boys were being punished for doing whatever grotesquerie they did to a helpless Palestinian in their deranged, unbridled power, broke into the base and attacked soldiers holding them. It took teargas and several hours to disperse an enraged throng that, despite their government's countless crimes, for the first time included elected officials in its violent ranks.

For many, the spectacle of those in power rioting on behalf of sadistic thugs evinced the "deep moral deterioration" of a nation already deemed barbaric by much of the world - ghastly proof, writes Nesrine Malik, that despite rulings and protests, the war "has found its place, nestled within the status quo" of an apartheid Israel where there are no innocents in Gaza and "the most abject Palestinian suffering (is) normalized as just a part of life." This "dissolution (of) a fundamental human law...seems to say: Yes, this is the world we live in now. Get used to it," says Malik. "What does getting used to it look like? It looks like accepting that there are certain groups of people who can be killed...That it is, in fact, reasonable and necessary that they should die in order to maintain a political system (built) on the inequality of human life, (where) we exist and deserve freedom from hunger, fear and persecution (and) others have demonstrated some quality that shows they are not owed the same.""Justice, justice shall you pursue," Judaism teaches. In Genesis 18:19, "We are called to be just and righteous."God, if She's implausibly watching, weeps.