Mawasi Massacre: Over 90 Killed in Israeli Airstrikes on Tent Camp in Gaza “Safe Zone”

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, broadcasting from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Israeli warplanes and drones continue to bombard areas across the Gaza Strip, killing over 80 Palestinians in the last 24 hours. The continued assault comes in the wake of Israel’s attack on Saturday on al-Mawasi, an area in Khan Younis designated as a safe zone, that killed at least 90 Palestinians, half of them women and children, and injured over 300 in one of the deadliest attacks in Gaza in weeks. The U.N. and several countries condemned the bombing, which targeted thousands of displaced Palestinians crowded in tents.

The Israeli military claimed, without evidence, that it was targeting Hamas military chief Mohammed Deif; however, Hamas denies that Deif was killed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a televised news conference Saturday it wasn’t clear whether he had been killed. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant nevertheless praised the attack, saying Hamas was losing its ability to organize, arm itself or care for the wounded.

Also on Saturday, the Israeli military struck a makeshift mosque during noon prayer in the Shati refugee camp in west Gaza City, killing at least 20 Palestinians. Then, on Sunday, Israeli airstrikes on a United Nations school sheltering thousands of displaced Palestinians in the Nuseirat refugee camp killed at least 22 and injured over a hundred people.

Meanwhile, rescue workers say they found at least 60 bodies under the rubble of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood of Gaza City following Israel’s withdrawal from the area last week, after leaving it in ruins.

This weekend, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told a donor’s conference for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, quote, “Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse in Gaza — somehow, appallingly, civilians are being pushed into ever deeper circles of hell,” he said.

For more, we go to Muhammad Shehada, a writer and analyst from Gaza, chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, columnist for The Forward newspaper, a Jewish weekly in New York. He’s joining us from Copenhagen, Denmark.

Muhammad, welcome back to Democracy Now! First of all, talk about this safe zone that Israel struck on Saturday, killing 90, injuring hundreds of others.

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Thanks so much for having me, Amy.

Well, the first thing is that this is not the first time where they conduct such an atrocity, such a carnage, a bloodbath, with immense magnitude, and then claim there was a Hamas leader there, to cover it up. It was done dozens and dozens and dozens of times in Gaza. So, a few weeks ago — couple of weeks ago, Israel pounded an entire residential block in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City and claimed that Raed Saad, a commander of the Qassam Brigades, was there. We never heard any updates about that ever since, not even a confirmation or an allegation that he was killed. So, this has been done repeatedly.

The way the carnage unfolded is atrocious on every single level possible. So, Israel used what they call “fire belts,” which is almost like carpet bombing. They drop simultaneously about five bombs — each is about 2,000 pounds — on top of what they have designated themselves as Gaza’s only humanitarian safe zone. Now, they’ve been crowding hundreds of thousands of people there by force, and then bomb them to kill and wound over 400 people.

So, it didn’t stop even there. After the carnage unfolded, as soon as ambulances and firefighters came to the area, Israel started to bomb and target those, as well. They killed multiple firefighters and attacked ambulance crews to delay the rescue mission in that area.

What this reminds me of is, basically, if you remember in 2002, Israel assassinated Hamas’s top most wanted, most dangerous militant commander, Salah Shehade, the founder of the Qassam Brigades. Back then, the airstrike killed about 14 civilians. Seven of them were children. The Bush administration, George W. Bush, he came out and condemned Israel in unprecedented terms and said, “This is heavy-handed, and this impedes and prevents peace.” That was George Bush at the time. Now we are in a situation where it’s so insane that Biden was not only silent, dead silent, not a word on this, but he’s the one that provided all the weaponry, all the bombs that Israel very gladly obliged and rained down on the refugee humanitarian safe zone. You also had — at that time, you had about 27 Israeli pilots in 2002 that declared they will not participate anymore in reserve service in the IDF because of the human casualties, the high death toll — seven children. Only seven. At this point, what you have is near unanimity in the Israeli political and defense establishment of saying this was more than justified, this was a great operation, although they cannot until now confirm or provide any evidence that al-Deif, the commander of the Qassam Brigades, was even there.

So, we’ve got to a situation where Israel is being told, “You can do whatever you want, anything you want at all.” That’s basically the message they’re getting from the Biden administration and from the European Union, as well, from European member states. The only red line that Biden is implementing — and that’s something that I keep hearing from sources close to the White House — is that, just don’t engage in a regional conflict that involves Iran and Lebanon and bogs the United States down into that war; otherwise, carry on with whatever you want. We heard a lot of red lines about Rafah from Biden in May. And as soon as Israel went in, turned Rafah into what humanitarian workers are now calling a wasteland — nothing is left there. Almost virtually nothing is standing. They burned, destroyed homes on their way systematically, left dozens of bodies to rot and decompose and get eaten by dogs and cats on the street, and sometimes they scoop it with bulldozers and bury it with the rubble, if there’s a humanitarian mission coming in. We saw unimaginable, unique, unprecedented ugliness that violate every norm not only of international law, but of common humanity. And Biden is unwilling to put down a foot and say, “You violated any of my red lines.”

It’s the same message they’re getting from Europe. So, I was recently at a meeting with a top European official. He gave us his tablet, circled it around the table and showed us satellite imagery of Gaza before and after, the EU has been gathering. And he said, “Look at this. What Israel is doing, they are wiping out the place.” And he said, quote, “Their goal is to make Gaza unlivable, uninhabitable, so if the war ends, nobody can live there anymore. People have to leave” — so, in other words, to finish the Gaza question, take it out of the equation completely. So, those European officials, they know. But the same official said that he doesn’t have much to — that he’s incapable of doing much, because about 80% of European governments just want Israel to carry on and do whatever they want, without sort of stopping them or challenging this atrocity or genocide that’s unfolding. The only thing that they’ve been asking for — so, for instance, the German foreign minister went to Tel Aviv or Israel about eight times. The only thing she asked for was: Continue the killing, just kill fewer people. Spread the killing across time so it does not look spectacular. Occasionally, Israel violates that and kills over a hundred people. But as long as they keep it about a hundred people per day — again, I cannot imagine that this number is acceptable. A hundred people per day, this is OK for European and capitals in Western governments.

AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad Shehada, we’re here in Milwaukee covering the Republican National Convention. Can you talk about President Trump’s policy when it comes to Israel? Talk about his relationship with Netanyahu. Talk about what happened during the Great March of Return, moving the embassy, etc.

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: Well, basically, Trump is — his second term is a nightmare for people in Gaza, because he’s been very clear during the Biden-Trump debate, the presidential debate, that Israel wants to carry on and continue this war indefinitely, and he’s willing to indulge in that, to let them finish the job, as he said. That is basically — when I talk to people in Gaza, they react with immense fear about a second term for [inaudible] for sure is that he’s going to empower every fundamentalist lunatic, extremist right-wing hawk, to put them in charge of Middle East peace, as he did during his first term. He put a messianic Israeli American settler, David Friedman, from Bet El — he put him as the American ambassador to Israel to take what was termed at the time the sledgehammer policy: destroy everything that would be there to enable a Palestinian state to be established, expand settlements, recognize settlements as not necessarily illegal under international law, remove the labeling of settlement products, recognize Jerusalem as —

AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad, we have 10 seconds.

MUHAMMAD SHEHADA: — and defund hospitals. But the problem is that Biden administration hasn’t been any better in many ways. The last three years have been the deadliest there is in Palestinian-Israeli relations since records began in 2005.

AMY GOODMAN: Muhammad Shehada, I want to thank you for being with us, writer and analyst from Gaza, chief of communications at Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, columnist for The Forward newspaper, a Jewish weekly in New York.

That does it for our broadcast. We have a job opening of development director, in charge of fundraising at Democracy Now!. Go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, broadcasting from Milwaukee.