Gaza bloodbath: Reflecting on some of the unforgettable crimes by Israel

The widely shared photograph of Yezen Kfarna – the 10-year-old, skeletal-looking emaciated boy from Gaza – turned him into the face of starvation.

He’s one of at least 20 Palestinian children who’ve died from malnutrition and dehydration since October 8, 2023, according to the health officials in Gaza.

The UN has accused Israel of “intentionally starving” people in Gaza since it began its brutal war six months ago.

As many as 700,000 Palestinians face the threat of severe hunger in Gaza. According to the Palestinian foreign minister, some 80 percent of the world’s most hunger-ravaged people live in Gaza.

“Israel has openly destroyed more than 85 percent of the Gaza Strip, killed and starved children, and deprived the sick and injured of their basic right to treatment,” Riyad al Maliki said at an extraordinary ministerial meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in the Saudi city of Jeddah.

Israel’s scorched-earth military campaign has killed more than 31,000 people – mostly women and children – in Gaza in just over 150 days and turned the besieged Palestinian enclave into a dystopian wasteland.

Despite growing calls from the global community for an immediate ceasefire, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has refused to halt the genocidal campaign. Instead, he has announced his government’s decision to go ahead with an invasion of Rafah, which rights activists and military experts say could result in near-genocidal levels of violence.

As Israel continues to inflict death and destruction upon Palestinians in Gaza, here are some of the incidents that will haunt human history.

The ‘flour massacre’

On February 29, Israeli troops in the northern part of besieged Gaza opened fire on starving Palestinians scrambling for food aid. The horrific war crime resulted in the death of at least 112 civilians and left another 760 wounded.

Dubbed the ‘flour massacre’, the bloodshed sparked global condemnations, with Palestinian envoy to the United Nations saying dozens of the victims were “shot in the head” while trying to obtain humanitarian aid.

Meanwhile, medical sources and eyewitnesses said the Israeli army also targeted a humanitarian aid truck in the city of Deir al Balah in central Gaza on March 3, killing nine Palestinians and wounding several others.

The attack constituted the second in five days on displaced Palestinians in Gaza as they waited for humanitarian aid in the war-battered territory.

Death in Israeli detention

Twenty-seven Palestinian detainees from Gaza have died at Israeli military facilities since last October, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The detainees lost their lives at Israeli military facilities while being questioned by Israeli investigators, it reported.

Meanwhile, Israel is continuing with its policy of taking women prisoners. Around 240 Palestinian women have been detained by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank and Israel since last October, the Palestinian Prisoner Society, a non-government body, said on March 7.

“Targeting Palestinian women has been one of the most prominent and systematic policies of the Israeli occupation,” it said, adding that about 60 Palestinian women prisoners are still languishing in Israeli prisons.

Gaza’s biggest hospital under attack… repeatedly

Israeli forces raided Nasser Medical Complex, the biggest functioning hospital in Gaza, shortly after withdrawing from it, the Palestinian Health Ministry said on February 22.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said the hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza's second largest and crucial to the territory's crippled health services, stopped working a week ago after a days-long Israeli siege followed by the raid.

The UN refugee agency for Palestinians (UNRWA) reported on February 21 that eight patients died at Nasser Hospital amid an Israeli raid.

The Israeli army’s raid after a weeks-long siege forced thousands of displaced Palestinians inside the hospital to flee under heavy bombardment.

Meanwhile, WHO warned that the continuous outbreak of infectious diseases in Gaza may ultimately cause more deaths among Palestinians than the ongoing Israeli military offensive.

“Infectious disease is a major concern for us in Gaza,” Richard Brennan, regional emergency director at the UN health agency, told reporters in Cairo.

Blockade of aid

Delivering aid to Gaza requires coordination between UN humanitarian officials and Israeli authorities. A UN spokesperson said on March 8 that half of the 224 planned aid missions couldn’t succeed in February, further worsening the food crisis in the war-ravaged areas.

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the UN had to pause operations in north Gaza after Israel targeted a UN-coordinated food convoy heading there on February 5.

As a result, only 24 UN aid missions to the besieged north were planned in February — and just six were facilitated by Israeli authorities.

Of the 200 UN missions planned for areas south of Wadi Gaza where access required coordination with Israel, only 105 were facilitated by Israeli authorities, the UN spokesperson said.

Loot of Gaza heritage

Israel is waging a war on Palestinian narratives through the destruction and looting of museums and archaeological artefacts in Gaza, the Palestinian Minister of Culture Atif Abu Seif said on February 22.

"The destruction and looting of cultural heritage in Gaza is similar to what happened in the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, and even more horrific than what the Mongols did in Baghdad, in an attempt to detach Palestinians from their history and land,” he said.