Nusairat Hostage Rescue Operation Turns Into Palestinian Bloodbath

The rescue of four Israeli hostages held by Palestinian militants came in a veritable bloodbath at the Palestinian refugee camp of Nusairat on Saturday, where over two hundred people were killed in an assault that reportedly involved not only Israeli but American soldiers. What appears to have been a war crime, with the rescuers disguised as an aid convoy in the camp before opening fire as they made for the hostages, comes even as the United States purports to mediate between Israel and the Palestinians, and indicates direct complicity in a genocide that has slain tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

The American-Israeli rescue comes even as Washington insists, contrary to mounting evidence, that Israel has put forth a ceasefire plan that has been rejected by Hamas. In fact, the ceasefire plan, eerily similar to one that Hamas offered over the winter, has been rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu-Mileikowsky in what appears to be another humiliation for the nonetheless pliable would-be peacemaker Joseph Biden.

The Gazan health ministry, whose claims have been generally accepted as accurate, has at last count listed nearly three hundred victims of the Nusairat raid. According to the United States’ special rapporteur Francesca Albanese – whose office and role have been openly questioned by American officials because of her refusal to take Israeli claims at face value – the Israeli-American mission came disguised in an aid truck.

What transpired, even as the Israelis retrieved four hostages, was sheer carnage. Residents of the refugee camp described Israeli soldiers mowing down people in the street under air cover. Over sixty children have been confirmed slain among the hundreds of victims – though Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari, whose clumsy mendacity has become a byword during the conflict, claims to know of less than a hundred captives.

Given the centrality of military might to Israel’s self-image as a confident and virile ethnostate, the Israeli public has long been dismayed at the military’s lack of actual accomplishments over the bloody campaign. Most Israelis, indeed, claim that they have not gone far enough in a war that was estimated to have killed nearly forty thousand Palestinians four months ago, after which the count has been lost amid the destruction but is almost certainly at least twice as high.

An injured Palestinian woman lies in Al Awda hospital during an Israeli military operation in Al Nusairat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on, 08 June 2024. EFE/EPA/MOHAMMED SABER

Against this backdrop the raid’s success was hailed in Israel as a signal achievement; the sadistic brutality used to achieve this success was ignored. It seems a potential boost to the perennially brawling Israeli cabinet, which lost its seasoned member Benny Gantz – a former army commander and assembly speaker who has held a wide number of executive cabinet portfolios and who is a rival to Netanyahu-Mileikowsky – in a resignation. Rather than remorse over the senseless slaughter, Gantz’s resignation is on practical grounds, accusing the prime minister of a shortsighted strategy in a parting shot. The hype over the hostages’ release has the potential to obscure that criticism.

The most recognized of the retrieved hostages is Noa Argamani, whose capture was caught on camera during the Hamas-led raid in October 2023. Despite celebration by Tel Aviv, Hamas’ military wing claims that the Israeli attack’s victims included three Israeli hostages, of whom one was an American citizen. American citizens, such as the teenager Tawfic Abdul-Jabbar, have already been killed over the winter to no notable objection from their government, so it is safe to assume that Tel Aviv feels that the price is worth the positive press. Certainly, the deaths of hostages have never stopped Israel before.

If it is confirmed, as Albanese claims, that the attacking force were disguised as aid workers, then it amounts to an unambiguous war crime – quite apart from the summary mass executions that accompanied the attack. It has also been reported, notably by experienced journalist Afshin Rattansi, that the United States used the pier it had recently constructed on the Gazan shoreline to Nusairat’s northwest in order to support the attack. Washington has publicly rejected the claim in keeping with a pattern of denials; however, it appears certain that American soldiers participated in the raid.

If so, it will be familiar ground for Erik Kurilla, the generalissimo at Central Command, the United States’ military command for the mostly Muslim region of Southwest Asia. Kurilla cut his teeth in the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting in the major 2004 battle of Mosul before his promotion to lead raiding forces in Afghanistan. He then took charge of airborne troops at the premier American base in Afghanistan at Bagram, and supervised the scrambled withdrawal from the country in 2021 before his promotion to the Central Command, where in keeping with the job’s pattern he has been an unabashed supporter of Israel. Raids and “special operations” of the sort conducted in Nusairat have been a staple of Kurilla’s career.

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