Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, against whom warrants have been requested for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, made the case against him stronger with his massacre of innocent Palestinian civilians during the botched hostage rescue at Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp. As I write, the United Nations is reporting from Gaza health authorities that Israel fire killed 270 persons and wounded nearly 700. Netanyahu has deliberately damaged or destroyed all the hospitals in Gaza, so the Nuseirat health facility is woefully unprepared to deal with 600 wounded people, and there is no functioning morgue to hold the 270 corpses.
While it is great good news that the hostages have been rescued, and one’s heart goes out to their families, who have lived through hell since the Hamas war crimes of October 7, these statistics unfortunately suggest that each Israeli life is worth 67.5 Palestinian lives.
The raid is not the political victory for Netanyahu that he was seeking, however, since it was a cynical ploy on his part to justify his rejection of the Biden proposal for an at least temporary halt to the hostilities that would have resulted in the release of all the remaining hostages. Netanyahu was getting pressure not only from Biden but from the Israeli public, which has mounted large demonstrations against him for failing to negotiate the release of the hostages. Even Joe Biden has admitted that it is reasonable to conclude that Netanyahu insists on continuing his total war on Gaza in order to stay in power and avoid the court cases he is facing for corruption, which could send him to jail.
The operation did not dissuade opposition politician Benny Gantz from resigning Sunday from the war cabinet, the national unity government that was formed after Hamas’s October 7 atrocities. Gantz said that it had been a painful decision, which he took because Netanyahu stood in the way of attaining a genuine victory in Gaza. He said Netanyahu had obstructed essential strategic decisions, and called upon him to call an early election: “it is necessary to have a Zionist, nationalist, genuine unity government.”
Implicitly slamming the enormous human cost and limited benefits of the Nuseirat raid, he said, “I support the deal presented by Biden, which he asked the prime minister to have the courage to achieve it.”
“I say to the families of the kidnapped that we failed the test, and we were not able to return your children.”
Of the 120 or so remaining Israeli hostages in Hamas hands, it is thought that the Israeli military has killed up to a third of them with air strikes on Hamas targets.
As a former general, Gantz is well aware that Netanyahu’s Gaza campaign has been a military failure, with no end game in sight, and he is reported to have told the prime minister he would stand down if a clear post-war plan were not presented.
Al Jazeera English Video: “Benny Gantz resigns from Israel’s war cabinet”
The al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas paramilitary, announced that the raid left three Israeli hostages dead, including a dual American citizen. The Israeli army denied the report, but it is difficult to see how the Israelis would know, since they indiscriminately bombed the Nuseirat Camp as part of the operation. Until Hamas provides proof of the deaths, there is no way for outsiders to know the truth.
It is probably enough of a knock on the operation that it killed nearly 300 children, women and men and wounded nearly 700. The Biden administration and the US military appear to have been drawn into Netanyahu’s atrocity, which reflects poorly on the US as a superpower and on President Joe Biden’s judgment.
TRT World: “The death toll from Saturday’s Israeli attacks on Gaza has surpassed 270”
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