By Jeremy Salt
Sinwar resisted to the end, fighting off the Israelis with grenades and even with his hand blown off by a tank shell.
We don’t need future historians to tell us that Yahya Sinwar was a hero of colonial resistance. We know it already. He spent 22 years in an Israeli prison before being released in a prisoner exchange. Far from learning the lesson Israel hoped to teach him, he returned to the battle and became one of Hamas’ most skillful strategists.
Sinwar resisted to the end, fighting off the Israelis with grenades and even with his hand blown off by a tank shell, throwing a stick at the drone sent in to identify him ahead of the sniper’s shot that finally killed over. A second tank shell destroyed the building and buried him under the rubble so that he shared the fate suffered by tens of thousands of other Palestinians in the genocide.
Although Israel claimed that he was found by accident, it is likely that it knew where he was. In his statement from the White House, Biden highlighted how closely and intensively the US had been working with Israel to find him. Given the enemy’s combined array of weaponry, from bunker-buster bombs to drones and the most advanced means of electronic surveillance, Sinwar knew that almost certainly they would get him one day and made his choice to fight to the end long ago.
Resisting occupation, Sinwar was no different from the French maquis or the Jews of the Warsaw uprising in resisting the Nazis. But just as the Nazis defamed those who dared to stand against them, so politicians and the western media abused Sinwar as a terrorist and the most evil man on the face of the earth.
There is nothing unusual in this. Africans who resisted invasion and occupation in the 19th century were the most evil men on the face of the face of the earth in their time. Alternatively, at the same time, they were also fanatics or just plain mad (the ‘mad mullah’ of Somaliland and the ‘mad Mahdi’ of Sudan, both proto-national heroes in the African history of resistance).
The gap between how western governments and media see the Middle East/West Asia and how the rest of the world sees it is now an unbridgeable gulf.
The most strident media voice in support of international lawlessness on a grand scale, including the mass murder of Muslims under the pretext of war (can anyone remotely suppose there would be such support if the skins were white and the religion Christian or Jewish?) is Murdoch’s News Corporation, incorporating in his Australian home country the arch-conservative Australian newspaper and Sky News.
The ghoulish gloating over the death of Sinwar coming out of the Murdoch stable is counterposed with the adulation of a man wanted for mass murder by the ICC (International Criminal Court), a man whose government has been found guilty of “plausible” genocide by the ICJ (International Court of Justice).
That was in January and the situation has grown much worse since then, Israel having completely ignored the ICJ’s findings and gone on to commit even greater crimes.
Here, it is worth referring in detail to the warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest issued by the chief prosecutor of the ICC, Karim Khan. The charges against him of responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity are listed as starvation as a method of warfare, wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, wilful killing, intentional attacks on a civilian population, extermination and/or murder, persecution as a crime against humanity and other inhumane acts.
Warrants were also issued for the arrest of Muhammad Deif, Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh for killing, hostage-taking and systematic attacks on a civilian population on October 7 but that was one day, not months – now more than a year – and as serious as these charges are, those against Netanyahu are far more extensive. Nothing could be more serious than the charge of extermination, nothing more disturbing to a people empowered by persecution than the charge of persecution.
The world hardly needs a prosecution and a court to see the enormity of the crimes committed by Israel, with the full approval of most of its people. These crimes range from the mass killing of civilians in bombing attacks to the assassination not just of senior figures in Hamas and Hezbollah but journalists, medical personnel and even, as in Lebanon recently, the mayors of local councils.
On the West Bank, the vandalism and murder by soldiers sanctioned by the occupying administration have the same objective as the onslaught on Gaza, which is the destruction of everything pertaining to the Palestinian civilian population, with its physical removal as the final goal.
Of the evidence of their contemptible behavior in their own videos, as they prance about in women’s clothes in the homes they have destroyed and cheer as the schools and universities they have mined come tumbling down, these louts in uniform are also war criminals.
The UN’s ‘Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel’ in a report issued on September 11, 2024, has focussed on the treatment of detainees and hostages in Israeli attacks on Gaza’s medical facilities after October 7.
It quotes the finding of the WHO that from October 7 to July 30, “widespread and systematic” attacks on 110 healthcare facilities had killed 747 people and killed another 969. Air strikes against hospitals and besieged hospital premises had been preceded by evacuation orders but safe evacuation had been prevented.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 500 medical staff were killed from October 7 to June 23, with many more obviously being killed after that date. Another 19 Palestine Red Crescent Society – equivalent of the Red Cross – staff or volunteers had been killed.
The hundreds of medical personnel abducted included three hospital directors, with at least two senior medical personnel dying in detainment and 128 health workers still detained. Direct attacks had been launched against medical convoys of the ICRC, the UN, the PRCS (Palestine Red Crescent Society) and NGOs, with 113 ambulances also attacked and 61 damaged.
The report refers to the killing of the Rajab family in their car, the attempt of an ambulance to reach the only surviving member, Hind, a girl of five, after the occupying force had cleared its safe passage to the site only for it to be destroyed by a missile and the two paramedics killed. Hundreds of bullets were fired into the car from a tank, finally killing Hind.
The report found that as of July 15, 2024, 20 out of 36 hospitals were completely non-functional and the other 16 were only partially operating. On the West Bank, 23 people had been killed in 520 attacks on healthcare facilities, with three patients, one of them paralyzed, murdered in their beds after Israeli ‘security’ forces disguised as women and medical personnel invaded Jenin’s Ibn Sina hospital in January.
In Gaza, the Awdah, Shifa and Nasr hospitals had been deliberately targeted by snipers. In February a handcuffed Palestinian had been sent into the Nasr hospital to tell people to leave, only to be shot dead when he left.
More than 500 bodies were later found in mass graves dug in the grounds of the Shifa and Nasr hospitals. The bodies included those of children and women. Some showed signs of torture and summary execution. Others had their hands tied, were still wearing hospital wristbands and surgical gowns or had been stripped naked. Although Israel denied digging the graves, it admitted to digging them up in the search for the bodies of Israeli captives (it found none).
The Turkish hospital in the Netzarim corridor was forced to close down because of damage caused by air strikes. As the only dedicated oncology hospital in Gaza, 10,000 patients were left without access to treatment. The Awdah Hospital, the main reproductive health care provider, was targeted repeatedly despite MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres) having given its coordinates to the occupying forces. Four doctors had already been killed when in December, all males over 15 were ordered to leave.
Several people, including medical staff and a pregnant woman, were killed as the hospital was emptied. From October 7 to December 23 the hospital provided care to 15,577 patients with just 75 beds and in February it was forced to partially cease operations.
Direct attacks on healthcare facilities have affected about 540,000 women or girls of reproductive age. With hospitals unsafe or unable to provide services, they are compelled to give birth in unsanitary conditions at ‘home,’ a tent or wherever they have managed to find shelter from Israeli bombing. In December 2023, even the Basmah IVF clinic was bombed, destroying 3000 embryos.
Already in June, the UN Children’s Fund estimated that 3000 malnourished children were at risk of dying. It is known that some did die and now starvation is not just an accusation against Netanyahu but is being openly promoted as a means of clearing Gaza of its civilian population.
The arbitrary arrest of thousands of Palestinians, their disappearance with no names or their whereabouts provided by the occupying regime, and the torture, humiliation and sexual assault on prisoners, most notoriously at the Sde Teiman torture center in the Naqab, are part of a picture of total destruction being perpetuated by the Israeli government and military command.
By July 15, the UN report found, at least 53 Palestinians had died in custody, 44 from Gaza, including 36 who had ‘died’ in Sde Teiman, and nine from the West Bank. More are certain to have ‘died’ since then.
The Israeli military has been committing mass murder every day for more than a year. Although the pretext is military, the real targets are the civilian populations of Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon. There is no limit to who or what Israel will destroy. Nothing and no one is safe and every law of war is violated. Every international institution holding Israel to account, from the UN and its secretary-general to the ICJ and the ICC is abused, and sneered at.
No atrocity is so bad for Israel that it cannot be surpassed. On October 14 2024 an Israeli warplane bombed tents outside the Aqsa hospital in Deir al Balah. Four people were burnt to death and 40 wounded. Three of the four dead were Alaa al Dalou, 37, the mother of Sha’aban, 19, and Abdurrahman, 12, who died of his burns several days later. On October 20, about 100 civilians were killed in more bombing of Deir al Balah. Dozens more were killed in the bombing of the Jabiliya refugee camp, with decomposing bodies left in homes or on the streets because it was too dangerous to retrieve them.
What is now taking shape is the ‘generals’ plan’, according to which the hundreds of thousands of people in north Gaza will be given an ultimatum to “surrender or starve” or be killed if they don’t leave for the Mawasi strip In the south.
The fuel, food and water situation is already desperate, with aid blocked almost completely. WFP (the World Food Programme) has not been able to send any aid to north Gaza since the beginning of October. A trickle is coming in from some NGOs but distribution is blocked by Israel either at the crossing point or by the constant bombing that makes delivery too dangerous.
Al Awda Hospital of Jabaliya, the Indonesian Hospital and Kamal Adwan Hospitals of Beit Lahiya have been ordered to evacuate all staff and patients irrespective of their condition. They remain under military siege.
The war crimes against humanity being committed by Israel are so outrageous and obvious that its collaborators in so-called ‘news’ outlets only make fools and lackeys of themselves by suppressing or distorting the truth and trying to present the perpetrator as the victim.
The horrible image of an arm waving from the midst of the blaze that killed the Dalou family shocked an already shocked world. These crimes are so heinous that some of Israel’s traditional ‘friends’ are starting to back away, even if Trump and Harris continue to support Israel’s ‘right’ to defend itself.
Yahya Sinwar was an extraordinarily courageous man. He was out in the open, not hiding in a tunnel, as the Israeli media repeatedly alleged, but armed and waiting to take on his enemies even with one of his hands blown off. Just as he enters history as a resistance hero, Netanyahu will enter it as one of the worst war criminals in modern history.
It will not be long before the Sinwar, Haniyeh and Nasrallah brigades join the battle against Israel. Britain’s murder of Shaikh Izz al Din al Qassam in the 1930s did not stop the Palestinian resistance and neither will these murders. On the contrary, they will put even more iron into the soul.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
