I have been engaged in researching the Holocaust for about 40 years. I never imagined in my worst nightmares that the Jewish state would bomb starving children to death
On March 18, Israel renewed its attacks on the Gaza Strip, after abandoning its commitment to negotiating a second stage of the cease-fire agreement with Hamas.
In a savage and murderous airstrike that was exceptional even in the context of the series of horrors of the ongoing mass murder of innocents in Gaza, more than 400 Gazans died, the vast majority of them children, women and other helpless civilians. Among the hundreds of victims were Nesreen Abdu (32), her children Ubaida (17), Omar (14) and Layan (9), along with her grandchildren Siwar (1 and a half years old) and Mohammed (5 months old).
Rami Abdu, Nesreen’s brother, went to the hospital to seek to find out what had happened to his relatives. In his testimony, he described the horror: “The hospital corridor was a river of blood in which I saw four bodies wrapped in blood-soaked prayer rugs. I tried to identify Nesreen by her braid, but it had been burnt. The rescue crews were gathering remnants of body parts using plastic gloves and aluminum foil. There wasn’t a single body bag they hadn’t used.”
Abdu buried his loved ones in a mass grave near the cemetery in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City.
On that same date, which will go down in Jewish history as an eternal disgrace, another woman lost her child. They were in Muwasi, an area that Israel had declared a humanitarian zone. The airstrike began early in the morning. The 32-year-old mother and 34-year-old father had been evacuated there from Deir al-Balah and had been sleeping in a tent that they rented for five shekels ($1.35) a night. On the night of the bombardment, their sons Bassan and Ayman were wounded by shrapnel. They died of internal bleeding within 40 minutes.
“My children died hungry,” said the mother. She was taken to the hospital and there she collapsed over her children’s corpses. The medical staff testified that the children had suffered from severe malnutrition. Bassan weighed 14 kilograms (less than 31 pounds) at his death and Ayman weighed 12 kilos. Since then, the bombing and starvation have continued. The number of dead since March 18 has risen to more than 1,600.
I have been engaged in researching the Holocaust for about 40 years. I have read countless testimonies about the worst genocide against the Jewish people and other victims. I had never imagined in my most horrific nightmares the reality in which I would read testimonies about mass murder carried out by the Jewish state, which in their chilling resemblance remind me of testimonies in the Yad Vashem archives.
The Gaza war, which in its current stages has become an indiscriminate slaughter of innocents, is also bringing extraordinary heroes to the forefront of public attention. I’m not referring to the individuals bestowed such recognition every evening on television whom former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, has described as “a nation of lions.” Today, the genuine Jewish heroes are the survivors of Hamas captivity and their families, who haven’t lost their innate humanity and who cling to humanitarian values and solidarity.
One such hero was Marek Edelman (1919-2009), one of the commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Edelman, a member of the socialist Bund in Poland, sounded a rare and clear voice in his strong opposition to Israel’s deeds in the territories, particularly in Gaza, while expressing sharp criticism over the use of memory of the Holocaust to justify violence and oppression. Edelman, who survived the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Poland and witnessed the elimination of the Jewish community in the Warsaw Ghetto, viewed Israel’s use of the memory of the Holocaust as a manipulation of morality that damages the authenticity of the universal lessons that must be learned from it.
In his view, Israel had transformed the story of the victims and the survivors into a political asset, exploiting it to justify the oppression of the Palestinians. In a well-known statement, he said: “Being a Jew means always being on the side of the oppressed, never on the side of the oppressors.” It is impossible, he said, to rely on the memory of the Holocaust and at the same time to commit acts that are no different in essence from the crimes that were committed towards Jews. During the war in Kosovo, in 1999, he said: “When people are being slaughtered, one must not stand by and do nothing. Even if you cannot stop the murder everywhere – you are obliged to try to stop it wherever you can.” President Bill Clinton made reference to Edelman when he explained his decision to dispatch aircraft to stop the war there.
Edelman warned against Israel’s hypocrisy in using the slogan “never again” while imposing a prolonged siege on Gaza and sowing destruction there. He was referring in his day to a period prior to October 7, 2023.
He also didn’t hesitate to criticize the murder of innocent people by Palestinians in the second intifada. In an open letter to Palestinian leadership, he argued that harm to innocent people, even in the name of a just cause of national liberation, is intolerable from a moral perspective. The ghetto fighters, he said, never thought of harming civilians.
Presumably, Edelman would have strongly denounced the terrible massacre that Hamas committed on October 7. But he would also not have spared Israel criticism, after having declared: “The cruel and immoral occupation the Jewish people is maintaining is incomprehensible, precisely because Jews should have understood the meaning of oppression better than anyone.”
- Photo: A woman reacts while holding the body of a Palestinian child killed in Israeli strikes, at the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip April 28, 2025.Credit: Mahmoud Issa/ REUTERS