IDF In Gaza Pursuing Deadly Terrorism

"The strike eliminated terrorists who had planned to carry out terror attacks and advance imminent terror schemes against our forces."

"Many steps were taken before the strike to minimize the risk of harm to uninvolved people [including analyzing aerial footage and making use of precise intelligence]."

Israel Defense Forces statement

Youths inspect damage to a storage container that was hit by an Israeli strike at the Asmaa school, run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), in Gaza City's Shati refugee camp, June 7, 2024. The IDF says a Hamas cell was operating from the container. (Omar Al-Qattaa / AFP)

A compound  within a United Nations school located in central Gaza saw the usual Hamas formula being played out with Hamas operatives using a school, generally viewed by the international community as being off limits to any kind of military operations, for their own purposes, of shielding themselves from direct confrontation with the Israeli military using school pupils, and in this particular instance, Palestinian internally displaced citizens who were sheltering at the school as human shields. 

The Israel Defense Forces has, over time, and experience with Hamas subterfuge and its deliberate endangerment of its own civilian population, established protocols of its own in dealing with the imminent threat posed by the terrorists while at the same time doing its utmost to prevent if at all possible in conditions of conflict, collateral damage from military actions that have the potential to injure or take the lives of men, women and children not engaged in combat.

 

A UN school housing displacing Palestinians that was hit by an Israeli strike in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, on June 6, 2024. The IDF said it hit a compound where Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists were gathered, killing many of them. (Bashar Taleb/AFP)

 

There are, as usual two conflicting versions of what came next. The IDF explained its precautions taken in an effort to reduce any harm to civilians with the use of its "precise strike" on  a compound embedded within a UNRWA school in Nuseirat. Its target was between twenty to thirty terrorists known to be sheltering at the compound, among them participants in the October 7 invasion and slaughter that took place in southern Israel on October 7. 

 

These terrorists, known to have been involved in that singular atrocity must face justice and the kind of justice meted out ensures they pay the ultimate penalty.

While the members of the terror groups were gathered in three classrooms held separately from the areas where civilians displaced by the war were sheltered, they were struck and killed. The media office of Hamas made claim to 27 people having been killed in an Israeli "massacre". The number of those who were reported dead, according to UNRWA's communications director, was held to be between 35 and 45; the actual numbers unconfirmed, the individual admitted.

The IDF identified the Hamas Nukhba force involved at the school, known to have taken part in the October 7 massacre of Israelis. They, as well as members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad "directed terror attacks from the area of the school, while exploiting it as a civilian location and as shelter", the army further explained. The strike in question was fine-tuned with the intention of avoiding harm to civilians, and as such had been twice postponed.

 

A graphic issued by the IDF in the aftermath of a strike at the Asmaa school run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), in the Shati camp west of Gaza City on June 7, 2024. The IDF says a Hamas cell was operating from the container (Israel Defense Forces)

 

That Hamas uses schools, UN offices and other civilian infrastructures such as mosques and hospitals where it is known that civilians take shelter, is a well-established reality. As the governing body of the Gaza Strip, Hamas is not held accountable for the dire harm it brings to the Palestinians dependent on the terrorist group for security, yet the target of Hamas's lethal campaign against Jews and Israel, is held accountable by the international community for the outcome of a situation where Hamas deliberately places its own population in harm's way for propaganda purposes.

 

What is even more difficult to digest, is the resounding success Hamas realizes from its slanderous propaganda holding Israel accountable for all the human suffering that Hamas alone, along with other Palestinian terrorist groups, is responsible for. 

 

The ancient curse of the Jews exemplified by the Phoenix-like flare ups of antisemitism is reawakened by terrorist-dominated public relations aimed at the West whose legacy media, government agencies, academic institutions and unions weigh accounts emanating from terrorists as equal in credibility to those coming from a democracy whose system of laws and strict adherence to human rights responsibilities reflect their own.

 

A graphic issued by the IDF on June 7, 2024, shows eight Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives, in addition to nine previously identified, whom the army says it killed in a June 6, 2024 airstrike on a UN school in central Gaza’s Nuseirat (Israel Defense Forces)