By Jon Queally / Common Dreams
Just hours after the Biden administration announced on Friday the release of $3.5 billion in military funds for Israel and the delivery of new weapons, an Israeli bombing of a school converted into a temporary shelter in the Gaza Strip killed at least 100 people, including scores of civilians, men, women and children. The massacre occurred during morning prayers and was described as a “bloody massacre.” Body parts lay scattered “in pieces,” and health workers were overwhelmed with the dead and injured.
The Fatah government of the Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank issued a statement on Saturday calling the attack on the Al-Tabin school in Gaza City a “heinous, bloody massacre” that represented the “culmination of terrorism and criminality” of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The commission of these massacres confirms beyond doubt their efforts to exterminate our people through a policy of mass killings and mass massacres that make every living conscience tremble,” the Palestinian Authority said.
Footage from volunteers working with Palestinian medical units in Gaza City shows injured young children and adults being taken to local hospitals, as well as images of the carnage at the bombing site (warning: the images are graphic). Gaza journalist Motasem A. Dalloul also posted his reporting from the scene, including footage of the carnage (also graphic).
Al Jazeera spoke to witnesses at the site of the massacre, one of whom said that many of the dead – including women, children and elderly people who had been praying and others were sleeping when the rockets hit – were recovered afterwards “in pieces”:
Tamer Kirolos, regional director of Save the Children, described the Israeli attack on al-Tabin as “the deadliest attack on a school since last October.”
“It is devastating to see the casualties this has caused, including so many children and people who come to school for morning prayers,” Kirolos said. “Civilians and children must be protected. An immediate, final ceasefire is the only foreseeable way to achieve this.”
Just hours before the bombing, the US State Department announced that a $3.5 billion tranche would be made available to the Israeli government for weapons procurement. The tranche is part of a larger $14.1 billion military aid package approved by Congress earlier this year.
As CNNWhile some of the weapons purchases made possible by the fund could take years, it is reported that “the additional funds also provide billions of dollars worth of equipment that the Pentagon can take from its own stockpiles and send directly to Israel much more quickly.”
According to unconfirmed reports, at least one of the rockets dropped on the Al-Tabin school that night may have been a 2,000-pound American-made MK-84 bomb.
On Friday evening, after the State Department statement but before news of the latest bombings in Gaza broke, Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the human rights and advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), was among those who were utterly baffled by the U.S. government’s continued determination to arm the Israelis, given the human suffering in Gaza and the massacres of civilians that are repeated day after day and month after month.
“It is incomprehensible that the Biden administration is giving the green light to supply more deadly weapons to Israel, despite overwhelming evidence of the unprecedented crimes committed by Israeli forces in Gaza that have shocked the conscience of the entire world,” Whitson said in a statement Friday evening after it was announced that the U.S. State Department had given the green light to release taxpayer money for a new round of weapons for Israel.
“It is difficult to understand how the Biden administration can justify rewarding Israel with new weapons, despite Israel’s steadfast defiance of every single call by the Biden administration for a minimum level of restraint,” she said, “and despite the very obvious fact that such sales violate strict U.S. laws prohibiting weapons to gross abusers like Israel.”
Sami Abou Shehadeh, leader of Israel’s left-wing Balad party, made a similar argument in a Saturday morning post on X, saying that while President Joe Biden “could have stopped the genocide” by using the power of military aid to force Israelis in a different direction, instead “he simply released $3.5 billion for more weapons to kill civilians.”
Shehadeh warned that Netanyahu’s policies would continue without any internal opposition “to the genocide” by Israel’s Zionist political parties, even as the region continues to become more destabilized due to the crisis in Gaza, which has also spread to Lebanon and beyond. He called for the International Criminal Court to intervene, asking: “If the ICC does not intervene now, when will it?”
Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister and co-founder of Progressive International, asked the same question on Saturday.
“Israel has now killed almost 40,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, and injured well over 92,000 others,” said Varoufakis. “Thousands more lie uncounted under the rubble. Around 10,000 Palestinians have been abducted by Israeli occupation forces. Question: Where is the indictment from the International Criminal Court?”
“It is truly appalling,” said Raed Jarrar, political director of DAWN Shared dreams by email on Saturday. “Last night’s massacre was another example that Blinken and Biden have blood on their hands.”
Referring to another decision by the US State Department to close an investigation into documented human rights abuses by the “notorious” Netzah Yehuda unit within the Israel Defense Forces, Jarrar said the “decisions to supply weapons to Israel and not to sanction Israeli human rights violators are not just corrupt political decisions, but criminal acts.”
Update: This article has been updated from the original to include additional comments from DAWN.
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Jon Queally
Jon Queally is senior editor of Common Dreams.
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