Airstrike on school in Gaza further diminishes prospects of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas

Tahani Mustafa: Well, we know that there were families sheltering at the school. Gaza doesn’t have any shelters. So, really civil infrastructure, those sorts of buildings provide the shelter that people have. At the dawn prayer, there were a couple of strikes, actually, that ended up killing over 100 people, civilians.

Now, Israel says that Hamas had been using those civilians as human shields. It was using the school as a military base. Again, this has been completely unsubstantiated. And even the 15 names that Israel had released to claim that they were militants have been disproven by the head of Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, who knew nine of those people personally. Some of those supposed militants had actually been killed the day before.

And of the nine that the person that I just mentioned now, he knew them personally, and he claimed that they had absolutely no political affiliation to any faction and the one that could have actually had any affiliations, Hamas had a very contentious relationship with the movement itself.

We never have any independent organizations that have ever been able to corroborate any of these claims. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN, they’ve never been able to corroborate, even in previous wars where Israel has targeted civilian infrastructure on the basis that they have been used as military bases or supposed human shields. What’s worse is now Israel is systematically doing this for the last 10 months. And again, they have not allowed for any investigative bodies to even enter Gaza. So really, it’s taking the word of the IDF at face value.

We were told that Hamas’ command center was based in the north. We were then told later on that it was actually in the south. We’ve seen Israel have to go in numerous times in places where they’ve claimed to clear out Hamas, where Hamas has been able to reestablish itself. Israel hasn’t been able to even destroy a third of Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure so far. So, it’s very clear that Israel really doesn’t have much serious intelligence on the ground in terms of where Hamas is based.

Under international law, the use of force has to be proportionate to the threat posed, and that clearly has not been the case. That school that they had targeted on Aug. 10 was designated as part of the safe zone that Israel had told those people to evacuate to — and then later targeted.

I mean, it’s very abundantly clear that Israel has been systematically targeting everything in Gaza. There has been no safe place, even entities that should be considered protected under international law. If anything, over the last 10 months, we’ve seen it become more and more brutal, targeting more and more civilian infrastructure at this point.

Hamas is a resistance movement that is fighting an invading force in the Gaza Strip. Now, if we are to work on the basis that Israel claims, which is that they are using their civilian population as human shields, again, there has been no substantial evidence to really corroborate any of those claims.

If we’re talking about Hamas’ actions on Oct. 7, then that’s something else completely. And that is something that Hamas will have to eventually answer for. And it is something that its leadership has said that it will answer for what it is willing to go to international institutions and face whatever procedure it is due.

However, at this point, if we’re talking about what has now unfolded in the last 10 months, then it’s difficult to actually corroborate without any serious independent investigation to really determine whether Hamas has actually been putting its civilians in harm’s way on purpose.

No, not at all. Absolutely not. I mean, it was absolutely atrocious what happened on Oct. 7. It was clearly indefensible. And no Palestinian has tried to ever defend what happened on Oct. 7. But that does not again justify the response to which 2.3 million people have now had to answer for in the Gaza Strip, as well as the the remaining 3.2 million in the West Bank, who had absolutely nothing to do with the events of Oct. 7, but who have been subject to equal collective punishment. We’ve seen mosques, hospitals, schools, universities, Israel has effectively destroyed every university in Gaza.

You know, we have seen over 190 journalists that have been killed since the start of this onslaught. It’s difficult at this point to really corroborate the Israeli claim that they are trying to do all that they can to avoid civilian casualties.

What we have seen across the region, where Israel has conducted targeted assassinations in places like Beirut, in places like Tehran, where they can actually avoid civilian casualties, and when they do have the capability to conduct precise, targeted assassinations. But in the case of Gaza, they simply haven’t done that.