JERUSALEM / ISTANBUL
Israel's war on the Gaza Strip has turned into a relentless act of revenge, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz said on Thursday, in a forceful editorial responding to images of Palestinian children killed in Israeli airstrikes.
The editorial criticized the growing normalization of graphic images circulating on Israeli social media of children’s bodies in Gaza, parents carrying wounded sons and daughters, and families bidding farewell to their dead.
“We can continue to ignore the number of Palestinians in the Strip who have been killed, to question the credibility of the figures, to use all of the mechanisms of denial and justification. None of this will change the bitter fact: Israel killed them. Our hands did this."
“The images from which we avert our eyes, so as not to see what we have done. ‘They brought it upon themselves,’ we say to ourselves, and go on justifying a war that had long since become an unchecked fit of vengeance,” the newspaper said.
Haaretz said Israeli fighter jets struck a school sheltering displaced civilians in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza on Tuesday, killing 32 Palestinians, including nine children, and four women.
“Israelis can continue to avert their eyes from any documentation that brings them face-to-face with the sights of the killing in Gaza. The media can continue to be derelict in its duty and not expose Israelis to what is being done in its name and by means of its children,” it said.
Israeli media outlets have largely refrained from publishing images of Palestinian women and children killed in Gaza since the start of the war. Coverage has instead focused on photos of destroyed homes and streets, or Israeli warplanes bombing residential neighborhoods.
But with the editorial, Haaretz published a picture of a Palestinian girl injured in the Israeli strike on the school-turned shelter.
“We do not want to see the girl in this picture. If we see her, we will feel guilty. We do not want to feel guilty because October 7 happened to us, not them. And we are unwilling to let go of this feeling, even when we kill thousands of children in its name."
“We must not avert our eyes. We must wake up and cry out loudly, Stop the war.”
The Israeli army has launched a brutal military onslaught on Gaza, killing nearly 52,800 people, mostly women and children, since Oct. 7, 2023.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants last November for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.