THE SET-UP: It’s become something of a ritual. I sit down at around 3:30 A.M. to build another RUNDOWN and I soon find myself typing in “gaza children killed.” And every day Google’s search engine delivers another story of children killed by an Israeli airstrike. It’s been a constant throughout the war. During the first months of the Israeli campaign I repeatedly asked if “there is an upper limit on the number of children Israel can kill?”
It didn’t take long to reach the conclusion that there is no upper limit. That’s certainly been true since Netanyahu terminated the ceasefire. Israel has been killing children in bunches, and a majority of the American people couldn’t care less.
It’s not inexplicable.
Right-wing Evangelicals just saw one of their own confirmed as Ambassador to Israel. Mike Huckabee actually believes a supernatural being deeded a chunk of land to the people of Israel and, therefore, Palestinians have no human right to live there. Their presence is an affront to Huckabee’s God. Palestinians are, according to Huckabee’s “logic,” impediments to God’s will.
It’s dehumanization on a theological level.
History shows that nothing is quite as deadly as the religious belief that “those people over there” are inherently against God. Violence comes very easily to those who see violence as the fulfillment of the Almighty’s plan … particularly when people believe they are manifesting their God-given destiny to take what’s rightfully theirs. Look no further than the Puritans’ massacre of the Pequots in 1637. It set a Joshua at Jericho-style template for the eventual cleansing of a continent … the so-called “Winning of the West” … which was, conveniently, just the manifestation of destiny.
It wasn’t ethnic cleansing. It was destiny.
It was just like the God-authored destiny Israel is fulfilling right now in Gaza and the West Bank. The Palestinians are against God. Killing them is the expression of God’s divine plan. They’ve basically franchised the American model. And that’s why they can operate with unparalleled impunity when it comes to killing children. Maiming them, too. It’s theological dehumanization and it leads to the unavoidable conclusion that Palestinian children are not really human.
Human shields, maybe … but not human beings.
As agents of God, Israel is free to kill anyone standing in-between them and their perceived destiny. They are free to kill aid workers (remember World Central Kitchen?), journalists, and paramedics. And they can do so with bombs provided by American taxpayers. Sen. Bernie Sanders has tried to wake America up to the fact that We, The People are accessories to a crime against humanity. It hasn’t worked because most Americans see no crime. They see prophetic fulfillment.
That’s why Trump’s audacious plan to “take” Gaza away from Gazans might come to fruition. Netanyahu has made it unlivable. Now he’s squeezing its perpetually dislodged masses, herding them like cattle into an ever-smaller pen … one that doubles as a bombing range. Non-combatant status doesn’t exist inside the pen. All the Israelis have to say is “suspected Hamas” and they can kill anyone they want.
Deprived of land, water and food … and even the most basic human rights … isn’t it only a matter of time until we see another Trail of Tears? That’s what Bibi and Trump are banking on.
If nothing else, monotheists do seem to have a knack for dreaming-up self-fulfilling prophecies. Unfortunately, their dreams tend to be somebody else’s nightmare. - jp
TITLE: ‘Dad, help me… we were targeted by the Israelis’: Audio and video capture last moments of aid workers killed in Gaza
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/07/middleeast/gaza-aid-workers-killed-audio-intl-invs/index.html
EXCERPTS: When paramedic Hassan Hosni Al-Hila felt too sick to continue his late-night assignment with the Palestine Red Crescent Society on March 23, his son gladly agreed to cover his shift.
That shift would prove to be 21-year-old Mohammad’s last.
Within a few hours, while the young paramedic was dispatched with a convoy of emergency vehicles to find a missing ambulance crew in Rafah, southern Gaza, Mohammad called his father pleading for help amidst intense Israeli military gunfire.
“’Come to me, Dad, help me… we were targeted by the Israelis, and they are now shooting at us directly,” Al-Hila recalled his son telling him over the phone. “The call ended after that.”
His fate would remain unknown for over a week, until rescue teams granted permission by the Israeli military to access the area uncovered a horrific scene: a mass grave containing the bodies of 15 first responders buried along with their crushed emergency vehicles.
A growing trove of evidence detailing the final moments of the first responders has blown apart the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) initial narrative of what unfolded that day, in which it claimed without offering evidence that some vehicles were moving suspiciously without headlights or flashing lights toward the Israeli troops and that members of the emergency teams were militants.
A CNN review of video capturing the gunfire, photos and satellite imagery of the site, along with interviews with forensic experts and family members provides a detailed account of the Israeli military’s targeting and burial of clearly marked rescue crews from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, Civil Defense, and the United Nations. A CNN interview with a survivor of the attack and exclusive audio from a medical worker recorded in his final moments also contradict Israel’s account.
For Saleh Muammar – one of the PRCS paramedics killed and buried in the mass grave – this was not the first time he had been shot while on duty, according to his wife Hadeel.
Two months earlier, Saleh was shot in the chest by the IDF, Hadeel told CNN in an interview. She said that he survived the attack, getting “a new lease on life” and returned to work as a paramedic.
“We bade him farewell every time he left, we expected that he would be martyred,” Hadeel said. “I felt that he would leave this world because the nature of his work is full of risks.”
International aid and humanitarian organizations have repeatedly condemned the Israeli military’s attacks on medical facilities and personnel.
More than 400 aid workers have been killed in Israeli attacks in the enclave since October 7, 2023, according to OCHA’s latest update released last week. The PRCS says the number of its staff killed in line of duty by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023 has now reached 27.
TITLE: Israeli army fired more than 100 shots in Gaza medics' killing, audio suggests
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg55q1w58jo
EXCERPTS: Israeli troops fired more than 100 times during an attack in which they killed 15 emergency workers in Gaza, with some shots from as close as 12m (39ft) away, a forensic audio analysis of mobile phone footage commissioned by BBC Verify has found.
Two audio experts examined a 19-minute video authenticated by BBC Verify, showing the incident and the moments leading up to it near Rafah on 23 March.
The findings support a claim made by the Palestinian Red Crescent that the workers were "targeted from a very close range". On 5 April an Israeli army official said aerial footage showed troops opening fire "from afar".
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) declined to comment on the analysis directly when approached by BBC Verify.
A spokesperson said it was investigating the attack and repeated claims that six of the people killed were linked to Hamas, without offering evidence. The Palestinian Red Crescent rejected the allegation, as did a ninth paramedic who survived and was detained by the IDF for 15 hours.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said the full video was recovered from the phone of a medic killed and buried in a shallow grave by the IDF.
Video filmed by medic Rifaat Radwan who was killed in the incident showed the convoy driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights. At least one medic can be seen wearing a high-vis jacket.
Faced with this, the Israeli army changed its account, admitting that its initial statement that the convoy approached "suspiciously" with its lights off was inaccurate.
Experts told BBC Verify they used sound waveforms and spectrograms to measure the distance of the gunfire from the microphone of the mobile. Shortened time gaps indicate that the distance between the microphone and the gunfire decreased as the video progressed.
They concluded that the first shots were fired from around 40m to 43m away. But towards the end of the video, gunfire came from around 12m away.
At a briefing on 5 April, an IDF official told reporters that surveillance showed the troops were at some distance when they opened fire, adding: "It's not from close. They opened fire from afar."
One military expert told BBC Verify that any engagements under 50m to 100m would be considered as being within close range.
Robert Maher, an audio forensics expert at Montana State University, said towards the start of the footage one firearm is discharged about 43m away from the mobile phone.
Mr Maher and another expert, Steven Beck, independently corroborated one another's view that in the final few moments of the audio, shots are fired as close at 12m away.
Mr Beck, a former FBI consultant who now runs Beck Audio Forensics, said: "The shooter(s) at these times is much closer, with distances of 12m to 18m. There is a strange pop sound that may be a tire hit by a bullet."
He added: "The shockwaves indicate that the bullets are passing close to the recorder microphone - meaning they are being shot at."
Chris Cobb-Smith, a former British Army officer with over 20 years experience in conducting investigations in conflicts zones, said that at 50m the Israeli troops would have "definitively been able to identify the convoy as humanitarian" and would have been able to "determine that the personnel were unarmed and not posing a threat".
TITLE: ‘I operated on more children in Gaza in one night than I do in the U.S. in a year’
https://www.972mag.com/feroze-sidwha-gaza-hospital-bombing-children/
EXCERPTS: On the evening of March 23, Feroze Sidwha, a trauma and critical care surgeon who had recently arrived in Gaza from California as a volunteer medic, was on his way to the surgical ward in Nasser Hospital when an Israeli airstrike tore right through it. Israel’s army said the strike was targeted at Ismail Barhoum, a senior figure in Hamas’ political bureau who was being treated for wounds sustained in a previous airstrike only days earlier, but the bombing also killed a 16-year-old boy and wounded several more patients.
The slain teenager, named Ibrahim, was Feroze’s patient. “Ibrahim was supposed to go home today,” Feroze said when we spoke the day after the bombing. “He had some injuries to his distal colon which we repaired, but they were pretty destructive so we gave him a protective colostomy. He was recovering on the ward, and was in good shape. I never expected to have a patient killed in his hospital bed.
“If I hadn’t been pulled into the intensive care unit, I probably would’ve been killed standing next to Ibrahim,” he continued. In response to the claim that the airstrike targeted a Hamas leader, he added: “It’s one of the most cherished aspects of humanitarian law that when a person is wounded, not participating in combat, and being attended to by a doctor, they are a protected person.”
The bombing of the hospital was not, in fact, the most dramatic event Feroze experienced during his latest visit. A few days prior, on March 18, Israel carried out what has come to be known as the “Ramadan Massacre,” simultaneously attacking around 100 locations from the air during the suhoor meal. More than 400 Palestinians were killed, of whom 174 were children.
“When the bombing started at 2 in the morning, the door to our living quarters was actually blown open, and it slammed into the cabinet behind it — that was what woke me up,” Feroze recalled. “I think we saw a total of 130 patients in that six-hour period. I did six operations immediately and three more over the course of the day. Half of those were on small children, which I am not used to at all. I did more pediatric trauma that night than I do in a year in the United States.”
For comparison, Feroze recalled the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, when he was working as a resident at the Boston Medical Center. “That day, every major trauma center in the whole city of Boston — with a combined capacity of about 4,000 beds and over 100 capable surgeons — all of them together saw the number of patients that we saw in one night in Nasser Hospital on March 18,” he explained. “Only 10 of the injured were children, whereas here a third to a half of patients were children.
“So this was a huge mass-casualty event, but it wasn’t even the worst they’ve seen here,” he continued. “The surgeons [at Nasser Hospital] remember days when the surgical department did 100 operations in one day. That is more resource utilization in this one hospital than any other hospital on earth has ever experienced, not even in New York after 9/11 — and they were doing this day in and day out for months.
Feroze explained how, as is customary during mass-casualty events around the world, medical staff divided incoming patients into color categories: green for “walking wounded,” meaning no risk of life; yellow for possible risk of life but seemingly stable, so they can wait to be evaluated; red for immediate evaluation — usually due to airway, breathing, or circulation problems; and black for beyond help.
“When someone is marked as black, they are taken directly to the morgue,” he said. “Either they are decapitated, have fixed and dilated pupils with no heartbeat, or they’ve been ripped to shreds or disemboweled. It’s culturally impossible to black-tag children here and tell the ambulance driver to take them directly to the morgue. That’s why there’s a designated area for children to die, alongside other dying children, where their families can stay with them and pray.”
The first thing Feroze did when the victims began arriving in the early hours of March 18 was tell a father to take his child to this area. “She had agonal breathing and a very thready pulse with very bad shrapnel injuries to her brain. There was no neurosurgeon here, and we had to tell her father, ‘Sorry, she isn’t going to survive.’
Feroze is fully aware that his decision to volunteer in Gaza is putting his life at risk. “This is the most violent place I’ve ever been by a huge margin,” he said. “It’s probably the most violent place on earth in the last 60 years.”
Feroze is no stranger to conflict and disaster zones, having previously volunteered in Ukraine, Haiti, and Zimbabwe. But the situation in Gaza, he emphasized, is incomparable. “I’ve been to Ukraine three times since the Russian invasion — which, before Gaza, was the worst country in the world for attacks on health facilities,” he said. “At no point did I expect to just be blown up by the Russians. It’s completely crazy.”
This is the first thing he says to any physician who contacts him to discuss following in his footsteps. “They have to understand that they’re going to a place where if the Israelis want to murder you, they will, and they will get away with it — and your own government will do absolutely nothing about it.” (The day before we spoke, a clerk from the U.S. Embassy in Israel had called to check up on Feroze upon seeing his tweet about the hospital bombing. “Can you please tell the Israelis to stop bombing Nasser Hospital?” he told her. “You know, that isn’t really our role,” she replied.)
“Maybe it’s a defense mechanism, but it’s not the suffering that gets to me, it’s the fact that I know I bear a huge amount of moral responsibility,” Feroze continued. “This is not an Israeli attack on Gaza — it’s a U.S.-Israeli attack. When I was jaw-thrusting a little girl and I had three or four minutes until her intubation was set up, I was just thinking: ‘Was it my tax dollars that put the shrapnel in this girl’s brain, or was it my neighbor’s?’”
SEE ALSO:
Heartbreaking images show devastation in the heart of Gaza as children pulled from rubble
https://www.themirror.com/news/world-news/heartbreaking-images-show-devastation-heart-1081784
French parliament suspends session after lawmaker shows pictures of children killed in Gaza
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/french-parliament-suspends-session-after-lawmaker-shows-pictures-of-children-killed-in-gaza/3532079
Injured Palestinian children from Gaza arrive in Malta for medical treatment
https://lovinmalta.com/news/injured-children-from-gaza-arrive-in-malta-for-medical-treatment/
Injured Gaza children arrive in Chicago for medical treatment after bombings
https://www.newsnationnow.com/good-news/gaza-children-in-chicago-medical-treatment-bombings/