The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor field team documented a compound and comprehensive crime against a civilian family comprising an elderly woman and her four children, including three young women and a one-and-a-half-year-old granddaughter.
The family was attacked with gunfire and bombs after Israeli forces stormed their house on Thursday evening, 27 June. They were later taken outside and detained for over three hours despite their injuries in their home, near Israeli tanks in a dangerous combat zone, where they were used as human shields. The 65-year-old mother, identified as Safiya Hassan Musa Al-Jamal, was run over by an Israeli tank and killed in front of her son.
“I had assumed that we would be taken to a medical facility so that my mother could be treated, but instead they tackled me and my mother, putting her on the ground. After a few minutes, I realised we had arrived at the Mushtaha Roundabout, at the end of Al-Nazzaz Street. I inquired as to my location. "Your mother will be taken by ambulance," he said. My mom was on the ground, unconscious. There were two tanks on the right and left surrounding the roundabout. After the soldiers entered the tank, it started to move backward and ran over my mother.
Euro-Med Monitor has previously documented many instances of the Israeli army killing Palestinian civilians by intentionally running over live civilians with military tanks. Sixty-two-year-old Jamal Hamdi Hassan Ashour was one such victim. He was deliberately run over in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood on 29 February after he was arrested. The father of five was subjected to harsh interrogation by members of the Israeli army, who bound his hands with plastic zip-tie handcuffs before running him over with a military vehicle from the bottom to the top of his body.
Larger testimony:
"After sunset, we heard gunfire in the street, and then I realised that the soldiers had stormed the house after blowing up a wall. When they found us in the room, they started firing at the walls randomly and threw five bombs amid gunfire. They were shouting in Hebrew, and we did not understand what they were saying. I was hit by shrapnel in my back, along with my sisters. My mother was struck by a large piece of shrapnel in her chest while my sisters were screaming, “We are civilians.” The soldiers then moved forward one by one, yelling, “Shut up,” before dragging me away. They forced me to take off my clothes and put me against the wall. After my mother and sisters entered with a female soldier, the soldiers pointed their weapons at me for half an hour.
“They asked me to carry my mother on my back. After that, a different soldier ordered me to place her on a stretcher, so I did. I then carried her with another soldier out through the opening that the army attack had made. We then went to a nearby area and were placed in a tank, where I placed the stretcher in front of me before exiting. After that, they brought me back to the house. They later took me down and handcuffed me. My sisters were at the tank’s door when a soldier arrived at roughly 9:45 p.m. and asked them to wait before he removed the handcuffs and put shackles on my hands and a blindfold on my eyes. He stopped me on a sand hill, and he was shining a laser at me. I felt that they were going to execute me. Then he turned on the tank and ordered me to get into it. It was a different tank from the one my mother was in. Later, the tank shifted and swung around. After that, they dropped me in what appeared to be a set of stairs, and I had no idea where I was. I was asked to follow their directions as I moved. This went on for about 15 minutes while rude remarks were made. Then I was grabbed by the neck by one of the soldiers. After I moved fifty meters, they put me in yet another tank. I moved in, then they took me down and put me in a tank that contained the stretcher that we used to transport my mother. Later on, the tank moved.
“I had assumed that we would be taken to a medical facility so that my mother could be treated, but instead they tackled me and my mother, putting her on the ground. After a few minutes, I realised we had arrived at the Mushtaha Roundabout, at the end of Al-Nazzaz Street. I inquired as to my location. “Your mother will be taken by ambulance,” he said. My mom was on the ground, unconscious. There were two tanks on the right and left surrounding the roundabout. After the soldiers entered the tank, it started to move backward and ran over my mother.
“When I saw the scene, I thought I had gone insane and began to cry and scream… I fled, fearing for my life, as the tank on the right tried to run me over. However, the two tanks moved in another direction, and the tank on the left was trying to run my mother over once more, but that did not happen. Afterwards, the tanks pivoted and pointed their weapons towards me. Out of fear, I hid by taking cover. All I could hear as I started to scream was the sound of gunfire. Dogs were getting closer to my mother’s body and I shoved them away as they were going to eat her body. This was on Friday just after midnight, around 1 a.m. The soldier in the tank knew where he had placed her and was able to avoid her, but he deliberately ran over her. I could not bear the situation amid the heavy gunfire, and I could not carry my mother after the tank ran over her. I was shocked by what had happened, but I could hardly cover my mother and ran from the place, thinking if there had been an ‘ambulance,’ as he said, he would not run over her. I went looking for my sisters, as I did not know their fate. I kept crying as I walked through the intense gunfire until I came across someone on a balcony who offered me a bottle of water and directed me along a safe route that would get me to my friends’ location in a stairwell. I made every effort to get in touch with my sisters, and eventually I found out that they were receiving medical care at Baptist Hospital. They inquired about my mother, so I told them.”
So it wasn’t an accident that they ran over the mother, and she wasn’t the only one they tried to kill by running them over with a tank. We’ve heard this often enough now that it seems to be normal operating procedure for the IDF.
Horrifying
And then they wonder why hamas exists
They funded hamas. There is no “wonder” there, there is a goal spanning decades that they are getting away with.
I know but what they are doing is fueling hamas even more
They funded hamas
I know that they turn a blind eye on the money coming in from Qatar but I am not in the know of money coming directly from them. Can you direct me to the source where I can get the info?
There’s an entire section of Hamas’ Wikipedia page dedicated to it. The gist is that there’s testamony that Israel explicitly funded Hamas in order to counter the PLO. This was to ensure a Palestinian state would never materialize.
I have not researched the matter due as enough to have a full opinion, though I’ve heard multiple individuals state that it is almost indisputable that it happened.
Zionists are Nazis and not only do we need to de-colonize Palestine, we also need to de-nazify it. I’m wondering though how to de-nazify a state where almost everyone is complicit in this genocide in some way.
Israel in its current form can’t be allowed to exist same with Russia.
How did fucking west enable this idiocy…
Liberal inclusive democracy for us? Ethno state for white Jews?
Biggest fucking psyop in history
I don’t know how every adult in Gaza hasn’t decided to take up arms. This isn’t even my mother and I feel like getting violent over it. Poor Palestinians getting Holocaust’ed when all it would take is Biden waking up from his coma long enough to order a drone strike on that yahoo.
This is why I don’t “condemn Hamas”. Israel has been doing this kind of thing to them for decades, I would violently resist people who kill my family too
Yeah, you want to know how to radicalise people and create the next generation of terrorists/freedom fighters?
Do exactly this.
The Americans caused 6 million excess deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and nobody batted an eye except the leftists that time too.
And yet you see all the liberals today acting like they weren’t cheering for genocide for the last 20 years and Iraq was totally a mistake they totally didn’t vote for.
Genocide is a feature of capitalist democracy, not a failure.
Find someone whose unit worked with the 101st airborne in Iraq and they’ll have more war crime stories than you have time for.
Most moral army in the world
Western countries especially US UK Germany France CANADA, are all complicit in this genocide happening in Gaza.
Complicit?
Dawg we are providing material support and blank politcal check for it.
When the chicken comes home to roost, we will be blamed as much as Waffen-IDF
Holy fucking shit running over civilians with tanks, what is this Tiananmen Square?!
More martyrs
Can I just say how appreciative I am of Lemmy for calling this what it is- a genocide, and highlighting exactly what atrocities are being committed?
Every time I read news about Palestine (on Reddit especially), all the comments are either filled with the most racist vitriol I’ve seen, or it’s about how Gen Z is being brainwashed by Tiktok to support terrorism. It’s fucking wild.
Fuckin murderers.
Horrifying. I can’t imagine going through that nightmare.
