RAFAH, (PIC)
In a clear full view of the entire world and about 50 hours after the International Court of Justice’s decision ordering an end to the Israeli military attack on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) committed a massacre against the innocents in the displacement tents west of the city, in an area they claimed was part of the “safe” zones.
In the details of the massacre, the IOF fired more than 7 missiles and giant bombs, each weighing more than 2000 pounds of explosives, towards a gathering of displacement tents known as the UNRWA Displacement Center northwest of Rafah, which led to the ignition of fires in the tents, with the displaced persons inside, resulting in 40 martyrs and dozens of injuries.
Horrific scenes
Horrific scenes were captured in video clips from the first moments after the massacre in the camp that hosts more than 100,000 displaced persons, as the charred bodies of children and women were seen in heartbreaking scenes.
The targeted camp is located in Tel Al-Sultan, west of Rafah city, and sources reported that a big number of the casualties, mostly children and women, were taken to the Tel Al-Sultan clinic.
Eyewitnesses indicated that the bombardment led to the destruction and burning of a large number of tents in the Rafah camp, which is not within the area that the occupation army demanded to evacuate in the city of Rafah, where thousands of displaced persons reside.
Refuted claims
The occupation army attempted to justify its massacre by claiming that it carried out a precise strike on a Hamas Movement complex and killed Yassin Rabie, the director of the Hamas office in the West Bank, and another Hamas leader named Khaled Al-Najjar. However, Rights researcher Muhammad Ahmad refutes the occupation’s claims, confirming that the occupation’s claim of assassinating a Hamas leader does not justify this massacre, explaining that extrajudicial executions are crimes that violate the rules of international law.
Ahmad told the PIC that the IOF used tremendous firepower and bombed several tents sheltering the displaced, while knowing that they are civilians, and ultimately claims that it carried out a precise strike.
He explained that the IOF has precise military capabilities, whether in terms of shells and intelligence, and therefore was able, in the worst-case scenario, to carry out an assassination without any harm to civilians, but it decided with conscious intent to kill civilians in retaliation for the decision of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) demanding the cessation of the military attack on Rafah.
Deliberate targeting of shelters
What exposes the falsehood of the IOF narrative is that this targeting of the shelter center was not the only one. The Government Media Office (GMO) confirmed that the IOF bombed more than 10 UNRWA displacement centers in the past few hours, in areas the occupation considered safe.
The GMO confirmed the martyrdom and injury of 190 citizens in the IOF bombardment that targeted the shelters in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours.
It explained that the IOF message from targeting the displacement centers is that the holocaust against the Palestinians is ongoing. The GMO called on the ICJ and human rights organizations to prosecute Israeli war criminals.
The Office called for opening the Rafah crossing to help treat the wounded, given the collapse of the health system in Gaza.
Imposing sanctions
The Secretary-General of the Palestinian Initiative, Mustafa Al-Barghouthi, called on the world to impose immediate sanctions on Israel to force it to implement the ICJ decision to stop its attack on Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip.
He said that Israel is snubbing the ICJ decision and bombing the tents of displaced, defenseless people, burning them alive.
He described the massacre in Rafah as unprecedented brutality, reflecting Israel’s military and political failure, and a dangerous spirit of revenge.
The ICJ had said that Israel must immediately stop its attack on the city of Rafah, in a decision it issued last Friday, based on a request from South Africa as part of a comprehensive lawsuit accusing Tel Aviv of committing genocide crimes in the enclave.
The Israeli massacre against the displaced people in Rafah calls for immediate sanctions to be imposed on Israel, and any country that remains silent about this is complicit in the crime, as stated by Barghouti, who accused the government of Benjamin Netanyahu of being afflicted with a madness that has led it to accuse the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) of being a terrorist organization.
According to Barghouti, this Israeli madness can be stopped by imposing sanctions on Israel to deter it, and by halting the supply of weapons to it. However, he questioned the role of Western countries that claim to defend human rights and international law, while they watch Israel bomb Palestinian neighborhoods.
Barghouti denied the claims of the Israeli army that it had bombed a complex of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, in Rafah while there were senior militants inside, saying that this is a lie, and that it wanted to take revenge for the fact that its soldiers and intelligence personnel had been taken captive by the Palestinian resistance, reminding that the targeted area is the one that the Israeli army said was safe and that Palestinians were allowed to go to.
