Another 34 Palestinians died as a result of Israeli shelling in the Rafah area – the last city in the Gaza Strip still in the hands of Hamas – according to the Gazeo Ministry of Health. An organ certainly governed by Hamas, but which has repeatedly demonstrated its reliability in counting deaths during every clash between Israel and Gaza. These latest victims join the others 34,454 dead and 77,643 injured caused by the operations that the Jerusalem army unleashed on the Strip. A war – let us remember – caused by the unjustified and illegal invasion of southern Israel by more than three thousand Hamas militiamen, in which 1,143 Israelis were killed (of which 767 civilians, including 36 children, and 376 soldiers) and another 3,400 were injured.
Padam, Israel’s Southern Military Command, was then tasked with entering the Strip to free the 247 Israeli citizens taken hostage in the terrorist action. However, the operation almost immediately also took on the very ambitious objective of eradicating Hamas from Gaza, the territory it has governed despotically since 2006. Seven months after the start of hostilities, both of these results are still elusive: 133 hostages remain in the hands of Hamas, barricaded in Rafah with 4 surviving battalions (“Tel al-Sultan”, “Shaboura”, “Yabna”, “Sharqia”) of its initial strength of 24; the extremist formation can also count on two other battalions – “Deir al Balah” and “Nuseirat” – still active in the center of the Strip, while in March a new one was formed in Khan Yunis (an area currently under Israeli control).
For Jerusalem, more than half of the hostages not yet released are now dead, with the negotiations underway in Egypt which aim to save around forty of them in exchange for the promise of a lasting truce in the fighting. It seems that the Hamas leaders are finally considering it seriously, especially since the alternative to this agreement is the imminent ground invasion of Rafah by the Israeli army. A bloody operation that the international community would like to avoid or at least see postponed in the aftermath of the evacuation of the million refugees present in this last remnant of the Strip.
The continuous aerial bombardment conducted from Jerusalem is part of the preparation for this operation, are also a pressure strategy. «The devices are dropped on the identified targets by two artificial intelligences: Habsora (“The Gospel”, which indicates buildings where Hamas militants are said to be operating) e Lavender (which instead reports individual suspicious people)» explains Alessandra Russo, a doctoral student at the Catholic University of Milan specializing in military applications of AI. «Human control over identified targets appears to leave much to be desiredwith an extremely low threshold of tolerance for error demonstrated by the killing of five children in the latest bombings.”
Actions that would constitute disproportionate conduct contrary to the rules of war, for which Benjamin Netanyahu could soon be held accountable in international criminal courts. Even a document recently leaked by the United States Agency for International Development raises the possibility that such bombings constitute war crimes, leaving Washington doubtful as to how to help Israel in the next and very delicate phases of this war.
Of Camillo Bosco
