Gaza is one big ‘kill zone’
Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in the central Gaza Strip, 1 April 2024
Belén Fernández writes in Al Jazeera on 5 April 2024:
Four Palestinian men are walking in the city of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip through an area largely pulverised by Israeli bombardments. There is no indication that they are carrying weapons or doing anything aside from putting one foot in front of the other, as humans do to get from one place to the next.
Suddenly, a direct air strike on the pedestrians takes out two of the men. The third continues walking and is quickly blasted to bits as well. The fourth is eliminated by yet another strike after falling to his knees.
This episode, which reportedly took place in February, is depicted in Israeli drone footage released in March by Al Jazeera. Watching the defenceless men systematically picked off from the sky in a fanatical display of firepower, one is reminded of the Collateral Murder video published by WikiLeaks in 2010, in which a dozen Iraqi civilians were exuberantly massacred by helicopter-borne United States military personnel.
In the Khan Younis incident, it appears that the “crime” of the four men – meriting an instant death sentence – was their presence in one of the Israeli military’s so-called “kill zones” in Gaza, the subject of a recent expose in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The article specifies that “there is no written order” stipulating kill zones in the Israeli army’s “rule book”, but it’s abundantly clear that they are a very real phenomenon with very little institutional oversight. “Ultimately, the boundaries of these zones and the exact procedures of operation are subject to interpretation by commanders in that specific area,” the newspaper found.
Speaking to Haaretz, one Israeli reserve officer described the business as follows: “In every combat zone, commanders define such kill zones. … As soon as people enter [a zone], mainly adult males, orders are to shoot and kill, even if that person is unarmed.”
So much for the world’s “most moral army”.
In sum, then, Palestinians can be slaughtered simply for finding themselves in an area that happens to have been arbitrarily designated a “kill zone” by some Israeli commander or another.