Al Jazeera Arabic journalist Anas Al Sharif sent this report from Jabaliya, where heavy rain had led to a new disaster – flooding. What might have simply been a transient problem is turned into a disaster because Israel has destroyed all the municipal vehicles, and power supplies for pumps, as well as sewage treatment facilities and water supplies. The vision speaks for itself, but we might remember that we are only hearing this voice because of the dedication and bravery of these Palestinian reporters. Anas is surely on the Zionists’ hit-list, having already lost family members to their vindictive surveillance and killing technology.
Since he posted this video, shown on Al Jazeera English on January 6th, a missile fired from such a surveillance drone targeted and killed two journalists including the reporter son of Wael Al Dahdouh, Hamza, as they traveled in a car towards Rafah to report on an Israeli strike there. In his stead perhaps, Anas al Sharif visited the site of another massacre in Northern Gaza, reporting on his phone without a cameraman, and reporting raw and shocking footage. His report is tweeted here by Trita Parsi, significantly perhaps, as along with other specialist commentators in the West, he is putting distance between himself and the US state as it collaborates in Israel's genocide. The vision of all these remains of people amongst the mess of blankets and wreckage of the home in which they were surviving might just remind us of what lies beneath all the flooded rubble, and consider what this may mean for the hundred thousands still surviving around Jabaliya camp. Jabaliya in its various districts occupies most of the area towards Gaza's Northern boundary, as shown on this map, as provided by Simplicius:
Jabaliya has surely become another Guernica or Fallujah, being the site of one of ‘Israel’s’ first and worst bombing attacks – which killed at least 100 people while purportedly targeting a single ‘high-value target’. Day after day and week after week Jabaliya has been targeted, with the clear intent of terrorising its population to force them to leave. Much of the area has been flattened – so to speak, but this frame from Anas al Sharif’s video shows what that means; the piles of rubble are merely navigable, with a complete lack of machinery to remove them.
As I pointed out in my previous article, there has been no ability to retrieve most bodies from the rubble, either early on when there was a possibility of finding some still alive, or now when further bombings have covered them over as well as endangered the lives of searchers. While the dangers of rubbish and sewage in the flood waters is quite obvious - even though there is little that can be done to avoid them, the infinitely greater danger from decomposing human corpses seems to avoid peoples' attention. Or perhaps it is just too horrible to contemplate, particularly for those whose relatives are known to be lying there, awaiting a proper burial that can never come. What is surprising to me is that there is no attention drawn to this atrocious situation nor discussion of what may be done about it. As it was, the corpses till now were effectively entombed, but the flood now threatens this containment, enabling any number of hazardous organisms to escape in the water. The Geneva-based Euromed Monitor drew attention to this public health danger back in November, and predicting the spread of dangerous diseases and illnesses that is now occurring. As they also noted, the pain and distress for surviving family members at being unable to retrieve and bury their close relatives is enormous and unanswerable. When one thinks of the lengths to which people will go to discover and retrieve a lost relative - and then multiply that by eight thousand - one has the measure of Israel's crime. But the flooding of Jabaliya failed to attract even a minute of attention in Western media, who were ironically taken up with the losses from earthquakes and floods in various other parts of the world. Pictures of teams of rescuers looking for a single missing person amongst wrecked buildings in Japan and Ukraine highlighted the extreme double standards of Western media, for whom the 8,000 'missing presumed dead' are barely even a statistic. They are in fact still regarded as simply 'missing' as the bodies have not been recovered; Gaza's death toll is now over 30,000 people killed and presumed dead, by Israel.
DM 10th January 2023