Seymour Hersh, in a report on his Substack site yesterday, presented the horrifying account of a Canadian woman, who wished not to be identified, who has been working in Gaza as a researcher. She acknowledges the shock and horror of Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 but sees it in the context of decades of brutal Israeli suppression of life in Gaza, Hersh reports.
She began with the implications for the future of Israel getting away with its crimes. “The military campaign in Gaza has opened up a new terrain of violence against civilians. In the next war, whether in Lebanon or another part of the world, systematically targeting hospitals won’t be so shocking because we’ve seen the live raids of hospitals, four or five of them. And targeting journalists won’t be shocking. Multiple images of beheaded babies on a livestream won’t be shocking,” she said. “People don’t understand that what the Israelis are getting away with in Gaza is setting the stage for wars to come—everywhere. And when international organizations fail us in Gaza and UN Security Council resolutions are ignored, they are going to be ignored by everyone going forward.”
She notes that what sets this genocide apart is that it’s being televised live as it’s happening. “The visual element of this war is a part of setting the normalization. It is also part of the difficulty Israel is having in denying that things are happening because we are able to see and we’re able to locate it and to prove it,” she said. “They are not denying any more that they raided a hospital or that they bombed a school. They’re just saying that it is justified.” That, she said, is “part of the terror many of us are feeling.”
“Gaza has collapsed the past and the future,” she continued. “What is the message that Israel is being given by the United States? It is: ‘You can escalate but keep it contained.’ And that is what they are doing. They have been escalating. In the beginning, when we saw a handful of children blown up and shredded into pieces, it was shocking. Now we are seeing it over and over again. When I was in Gaza—I’m not a medical doctor—but the things that were happening to people’s flesh, it was shocking. I thought I was the only one in the room who was shocked. But when I looked around, among doctors who do this daily, heroically, they were as disturbed and traumatized and one hundred times as exhausted and overworked as I was.
