Israeli tanks left Rafah on Tuesday, leaving behind a bloody trail of death and destruction, reports Khaled Amayreh from Gaza Rafah's 140,000 inhabitants are counting the cost of Israel's latest and most brutal blitz of murder, terror and house demolitions. Palestinians see the Israeli aggression as "ethnic cleansing" and "a holocaust". Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, name it "war crimes against humanity". Even some Israeli ministers have admitted that the scenes of misery and destruction in Rafah are reminiscent of and similar to scenes from war-devastated Europe. According to Said Zurub, Rafah's mayor, the Israeli army reduced much of his town to "a graveyard of concrete rubble, twisted iron bars, sand mounds and depression". "I can't describe what happened in words. It is a holocaust," said Zurub shortly after he took part in the funeral of some 16 women and children whose bodies were kept inside refrigerators for several days as the local hospital's mortuary was filled to capacity with other victim's bodies. Zurub told Al-Ahram Weekly that the Israeli onslaught resulted in the death of at least 59 Palestinians, 90 per cent of them children and women and innocent civilians. He put the number of the injured at more than 200, many of them in critical condition, many of them sustaining serious disabilities that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. The number of buildings bulldozed or demolished between 15-25 May stands at 152 in which nearly 400 families were living. The latest demolitions brought to 1,740 the number of buildings the Israeli army has demolished in Rafah alone since the outbreak of the uprising in September 2000. As a result, between 15,000-20,000 Palestinians were rendered homeless. The Palestinian local authorities are desperately trying to find temporary shelters for the newly made homeless, in cooperation with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Unable to find shelter in Rafah, many of the people who lost their homes headed north to Khan Younis to find a refuge, or temporary accommodation with their relatives. According to Omar Al-Naqa, deputy-mayor of Rafah, Israeli bulldozers were literally making streets by bulldozing row after row of houses in the two refugee camps of "Barazil" and "Bloc-O". "I don't know what to tell you ... the scenes of death and destruction explain more eloquently than anything I can say," he said. Al-Naqa said the Israeli army utterly destroyed the infrastructure in Rafah, including the power, water and sewage networks. "Our infrastructure was ruined -- bulldozed. It will take us many years to rebuild. This hell is probably what Sharon intended." The Israeli rampage targeted everything. Even the small local zoo was not spared. Monkeys, ostriches and peacocks were either killed by Israeli soldiers' bullets or crushed to death under Israeli tanks. "I didn't know that my little monkeys were terrorists," said the owner of the zoo, which provided some recreation and entertainment for Rafah's tormented children. According to eyewitnesses and some foreign journalists covering the Israeli blitz in Rafah, Israeli soldiers were simply "going for blood". "It seems to me that the Israelis did not really care if the people they were killing were children, women or alleged resistance fighters. The important thing was that Palestinians were being shot and killed," said a British journalist in Rafah. At least two killings corroborated this view. One was the brazenly deliberate bombardment of a peaceful march, including mostly children and women, at Tel Al-Sultan on Wednesday in which at least eight people were killed and many more were maimed and seriously injured. The Israeli army admitted, though belatedly, that the carnage was deliberate. The sniper killing of 12-year old Saber Abu Libdeh by an Israeli soldier stationed on the rooftop of a nearby three-story building, also in Tel Al-Sultan, was typical of Israeli brutality. According to his family, Saber was trying to fetch drinking water for his family when the soldier spotted him and killed him on the spot. A few minutes later, his mother found his body 20 metres away, riddled with bullets, with three bottles of water nearby. The declared goal of the Israeli army in Rafah was to locate and destroy alleged tunnels used by Palestinian resistance fighters to smuggle weapons from the Sinai Peninsula. However, the fact of that the bulk of death and destruction took place at Tel Al-Sultan, several kilometres from the borders with Egypt suggests that the "tunnel issue" was just a pretext. Many Israeli commentators have argued that the real purpose of the "mini-holocaust" in Rafah was to boost the morale of the Israeli army following the death of 13 Israeli soldiers earlier this month in Gaza at the hands of Palestinian freedom fighters. Another goal was simply to enhance the political standing of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, particularly after the defeat of Sharon's "disengagement plan" in the Likud referendum on 2 May. One prominent rabbi, Dov Lior, was quoted in the Maariv newspaper this week as stating "it is permissible in times of war to kill non-Jewish civilians in order to save Jewish soldiers." Lior's attitude is common in Israeli circles. He is considered among the most erudite sages of the Torah and enjoys the respect and admiration of the religious-Zionist camp in Israel. The Israeli government, which includes some of the most notorious war criminals of our time, has not been shaken by international criticism of murder and terror in Rafah. One of Sharon's chief spokesmen, Ra'anan Geisen, said in an interview with the Israeli army radio (Gali Tzahal) Thursday that "we are only doing what the Americans did in Falluja and the Russians in Chechnya." "They are not in a position to lecture us. We saw what the Americans did recently in Falluja. And we know what the Russians have been doing in Chechnya. Rafah is our Falluja and Chechnya."
