A war on order: why Israel targets Gaza’s police forces
Palestinians search for bodies and survivors from the rubble of a police station after it was targeted by an Israeli army strike in Gaza City on 31 January 2026
Ghada Ageel writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 7 April 2026:
Gray, rectangular tents now line the once-elegant coastline of Al Mawasi. When two Israeli rockets strike at the center, there is a suspended moment, then the explosion, followed by a thick black cloud. Beneath it lie are eight civilians: Shukri Al-Sufi (37), Samer Al-Fassis (25), Raafat Abu Mashi (40), Mohammed Sheikh Al-Eid (24), Abdul Rahman Abdul Mohsen (24), Ashraf Armilat (37), Raed Abu Harb (41), and Ibrahim Sheikh Al-Eid (23). Three of them were police officers. The date was March 29.
Mother’s Day had passed just two weeks earlier, as Samer’s mother mourned the deaths of three of her sons. Today, she mourns a fourth. She has now lost all her sons to this genocidal war. n the span of 30 months, she buried them one after the other: Mohamed, Amir, Sahir, and Samer—the twin. One by one, they were taken.
Like Samer, Sahir is also a policeman, and was killed two years ago. Mohamed, still a child of sixteen, was killed 4 months ago on Gaza’s Sudaniyya beach. Amir, a resistance fighter, was killed in the north six months ago. And now Samar.
Samer had been arrested by Israeli Occupation Forces, IOF, and later released. His mother went to receive him at Nasser hospital after burying his brother Amir. Samer leaves behind a pregnant wife and a three-year-old daughter.
“I have had enough, I have had enough,” the mother says. “I suffered two strokes from these crimes. I am tired. Indeed tired. This is haram, haram. It is haram that this little girl becomes an orphan.” She hugs her granddaughter and weeps.
That same day, March 29, within mere kilometers, another mother was plunged into grief. Israeli occupation forces stationed east of Khan Younis opened fire on Muqbil Barbakh (15) as he was heading to collect a food parcel from a distribution point run by the World Food Programme on Salah al-Din Street. He was shot in the back and upper limbs and succumbed to his injuries.
In Gaza, what remains of an ordered society is held together by a thread. Those barely able to keep that thread intact—ambulance drivers, civil defense crews, and police officers—are themselves under attack.
To kill them is to dismantle life itself, to erase the very infrastructure that organizes daily survival, from distributing aid, managing crowds, or protecting the vulnerable. It is to produce chaos as a condition of existence. This is precisely the logic described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth, where he writes that “Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip… it turns to the past of the people, it distorts, disfigures and destroys.”