Following airstrike against children’s school, Gazans now occupied with Collecting Body Parts and putting them in Plastic Bags

Sheren Falah Saab for Haaretz

On Saturday, after the Israeli airstrike on the Al-Taba’een School in Gaza City, volunteers collected body parts weighing 155 pounds and placed them in plastic bags. The images and reports from the area of the school are unbearable. The evidence is horrific: burned bodies, some of them missing limbs; bloodstained mattresses.

The Al-Taba’een School, in the city’s Daraj Tuffah neighborhood, was attacked at dawn. When word of the strike spread, followed by harsh images on social media and international media outlets, the Israel Defense Forces said there were Hamas militants at the site.

Gaza’s schools have been closed since the war began, and the buildings serve as shelters for the displaced civilian population.

This is a well-known fact, even to the IDF. Some of the people sheltering there were sleeping, some were praying their morning prayers in the compound’s mosque. The Israeli public has heard nothing about them, certainly not from the Israeli media.

All over the world the media serves to reveal the truth, but in Israel it acts like a babysitter whose job is to protect the citizens so that they won’t be forced to know what is happening. The public must not be exposed to overly graphic images, for example of a headless corpse or a mattress with body parts of the people who had been sleeping on it.

And so, in between the selective reporting, it’s business as usual: ‘Big Brother Israel’ around the clock, the Olympics – seven Israeli medals, for October 7! ‘Dancing with the Stars Israel,’ cooking shows seasoned with an anesthetic for the conscience.

There are those who will say, ‘Okay, there were Hamas operatives there.’ If so, the day after the IDF attack on this Hamas command center headquarters, it is fair to ask: Was it worth it? Will this attack bring down Hamas? Will it bring back the hostages? Will any deal be signed in the near future?

Every decent human being knows the answer to these questions.

The story that ought to interest and concern every Israeli is that the decision to attack was made knowing that dozens of innocents would be killed. The IDF claimed that the number of fatalities reported by the government in Gaza – close to 100 – is ‘exaggerated.’

And what exactly does that mean, ‘exaggerated’?

If 100 is exaggerated, what about 70? Or 30? What about 20 innocent civilians killed, is that still exaggerated? Instead of recognizing that the death of every innocent person is a disaster, the IDF spokesman speaks of ‘inflated numbers,’ a statement that distills the process of dehumanizing the Gazans.

My friend, who fled from the Strip where her relatives remained, described it well a few days ago. ‘Our blood,’ she said, crying, ‘is too cheap.’

155 lobs of human body parts were collected Saturday in thin plastic bags, like the ones you and I use for fruits and vegetables in the supermarket. We wander the aisle, choosing beautiful apples, nectarines, tomatoes and cucumbers, cooking onions. We place them in bags, weigh them at the register, pay and take them home.

Bags just like these were used by the volunteers in Gaza City Saturday, but instead of putting fresh produce into them, they placed inside human body parts that can no longer be matched to their owners. 155 lbs at a time. Jumbled flesh, meat. By weight.

And what do Israelis have to say about this nadir of humanity?

Nothing. After 10 months of the government of destruction parroting the slogans ‘total victory’ and ‘the elimination of Hamas,’ Israelis believe all the lies that are fed to them.

Even Saturday they believed without questioning the IDF spokesman’s version and ignored, with the mediation of the media, any information that would contradict it.

Soon the number of Gazans killed in the war will reach 40,000, and the Israelis are still ignoring it.

In the first Lebanon war, the IDF invaded Beirut with the stated aim of removing the Palestinian resistance organizations from the city. On September 20, 1982, Haaretz published a ‘too harsh’ headline: ‘Piles of corpses swollen by heat in the streets of Sabra and Chatila.’

It was after hundreds of residents of the Palestinian refugee camps in West Beirut were massacred by Christian Phalangist militiamen, before the eyes of the IDF.

The times have changed, as have the names of the wars, but there is a line connecting Beirut and Gaza City – the end result: the bodies of innocent civilians who were killed alongside ‘terrorists’.

In 1982, the horrific sights brought 400,000 Israelis into the streets in protest. In the archive photos, older adults and young people waving banners saying ‘Stop the war,’ ‘Commission of inquiry into the massacre in Beirut,’ ‘There is no peace without the Palestinians’ and ‘No to fascism.’

To those Israelis, the Sabra and Chatila massacre was a moral stain on Israel and the IDF, even though it was carried out by the Phalangists. On Saturday, it was not the Phalangists who killed innocent civilians, but the IDF; bodies were collected in bags, the entire world condemned the attack – and the Israelis were silent.

Some will argue that the circumstances are different this time, that there is no comparison, that the public is tired of demonstrations and busy with its own trauma. Some will argue that I forgot October 7.

But I did not forget.

But it is precisely for that reason that the question remains: What use are the assassinations? And above all: What is the role of the Israeli public – and the media – at this terrible time? Do we want to keep watching from the sidelines as more and more blood is spilled on both sides under a government of destruction and lust for power?

Do we – in the absence of a diplomatic goal for the war, and when the promises of total victory and the elimination of Hamas were long since proved to be lies – want to continue with the applause and the blind justifications of the endless killing?