Report
Netanyahu turns water cannons against his critics and rains bombs again on Gaza
The renewed ferocious assault has caused staggering casualties: 600 Palestinians killed in 72 hours since Tuesday, with more than a hundred on Thursday alone. This includes 200 children.
Water cannons, stinging spray, foul-smelling chemical liquid, barricades: thousands of Israelis marching towards Benjamin Netanyahu's Jerusalem residence were dispersed using the methods that have so far been reserved for Palestinian protesters in the Holy City. Unlike the protests in East Jerusalem, however, the repression didn’t use tear gas, beatings and indiscriminate arrests. But the direction is clear: the Prime Minister will not allow challenges, however slight, to his power and project to occupy every institution in the country.
A few thousand people were protesting on Azza Street (by an awful irony of fate, the premier lives on “Gaza Street”) against the dismissal of the head of the internal secret services, the Shin Bet. Ronen Bar, someone who has spent his life setting up systems of total surveillance of the Palestinian population as a form of oppression and apartheid, has now become the surreal symbol of the abuses of a now-overt authoritarianism.
Police blocked the march before it reached Netanyahu's residence and dispersed it when it attempted to cross the barriers. The same had happened the night before. Among the protesters pushed around by police was a former parliamentarian, Yair Golan: “Protests and strikes, more and more frequent, are showing the government's failure.”
“They will destroy our values, our justice and our morality,” one of the dispersed protesters told Haaretz.
Others invoke the hostages: 59 of them are still in Gaza and the government has now blatantly abandoned them in favor of far juicier political goals for the extreme right: the ultimate devastation of the Strip. To achieve the goal, Netanyahu has resumed the offensive, securing the return to the government majority of Jewish Power, Itamar Ben Gvir's supremacist party: with him at his side, Netanyahu is certain to sail through in next week's crucial budget vote.
Gaza is paying the price for all of this, while the protests inside Israel don’t mention it at all. The renewed ferocious assault has caused staggering casualties: 600 Palestinians killed in 72 hours since Tuesday, with more than a hundred on Thursday alone. This includes 200 children. The Israeli army claims “some members” of Hamas and one from Jihad Islami were among those killed. As well as five employees of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA: 284 UNRWA workers have been killed since October 7, 2023.
The death toll since Israel broke the ceasefire is likely to be undercounted: the civil defense is reduced to digging with their bare hands and cannot reach all the bombing sites (partly because of the threat of Israeli drones), while people are also dying inside hospitals, which are lacking in everything, of wounds that would be treatable in other settings.
In recent days, videos taken at the few medical centers still operating show doctors forced to amputate limbs from children and adults without anesthesia because there is none available, and for nearly three weeks Israel has been preventing the entry of all humanitarian, medical and food aid. Massacres have been recorded everywhere, from north to south.
In Khan Younis, a baby girl just 25 days old, Ella Osama Abu Dagga, was found alive after an Israeli raid hit the house where her family had sought refuge. "She was in the rubble for hours, since dawn. She was screaming, crying," a rescuer says. Her parents died.
And while leaflets calling for the extermination of Palestinians are again raining down on the Strip (there are many debates in Israel as to who is spreading them, whether it is at the initiative of the armed forces or ultra-right movements among the soldiers), the army has resumed its ground invasion from the south, in Rafah, and from the north in Beit Lahiya, a martyred town that has suffered months of total siege, executions on the spot, shelters set on fire, food cut off.
Slightly further south, in the re-occupied Netzarim corridor, Israel is reinstalling its abandoned infrastructure, widening the “buffer zone” (from 500 meters it has already reached eight kilometers, destroying the spontaneous tent camps that have sprung up in the two-month ceasefire) and blocking the passage of civilians. On Thursday, the army ordered more forced evacuations: at the moment, 68,000 Palestinians are being forced to run south again, in an endless cycle of loss and ouster.
In the afternoon, Hamas fired rockets toward Tel Aviv, with no damage reported, in the first attack since the ceasefire broke. Meanwhile, one of its delegations has reached Cairo to try to resume the negotiations. The Israeli team was also seen arriving. Basem Naim, of the Hamas politburo, said on Thursday that the differences between the Israeli proposal and theirs were being narrowed when all of a sudden Netanyahu carpet-bombed Gaza on March 18.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/disperse-le-proteste-anti-bibi-gaza-200-bimbi-uccisi-in-72-ore on 2025-03-21