At 10 p.m. on the night of October 28, 2024, the Israeli air force struck a five-story building in Beit Lahiya, in the northern area of Gaza. Northern Gaza has been pummeled by the Israelis since October 8, 2023. There has been no respite for the residents of this town, which is north of the Jabaliya refugee camp. During the early months of the bombing, Sahar (age 42) fled the area with her 11-year-old son and the rest of her family. This was, she told Human Rights Watch, “because of the excessive bombing to civilian houses, which killed entire families.” Asma (age 32) left Beit Lahiya for the supposedly safe area of al-Mawasi. “We live in a disaster,” she says. “And we are hopeless, starving, and besieged.”
The Abu Nasr family did not leave Beit Lahiya. In fact, large parts of the extended family sought shelter in their family building, thinking that its presence in a residential area might give them some immunity from the Israeli attacks. On the night of October 28, 2024, there were 300 people living in the 10 apartments in the building. It was congested, but they felt safe.
When the missile struck at 10 p.m., it destroyed the stairwell and therefore blocked the ability of any escape from anywhere but the ground floor of the building. Muhammed Abu Nasr (age 29) lived on the ground floor with his wife and children. They jumped over the perimeter wall and went to stay with a neighbor. Later, Muhammed told the writer Asil Almanssi: “I didn’t sleep that whole night, thinking about my parents, my brothers, my nieces, and nephews. How could I have left them and run away? Was I really a coward, a traitor? Thoughts tormented me, and I couldn’t tell whether I had done the right thing or not.” But it was the only thing he could have done. To have stayed in a building with a bombed-out stairwell would have been senseless. Families trapped in the building called the Gaza Civil Defense. There was nothing that could be done for them till the morning. They packed their bags and waited for dawn when they hoped that they could be rescued from the upper floors of the damaged building.
Then, as if they had anticipated it all night long, at 4 a.m. the Israelis struck this residential building once more. This time, they hit the core of the apartments. Muhammed Abu Nasr, now lying in a neighbor’s house, heard “an explosion louder than anything I’d ever heard. It felt like an earthquake had shaken the entire area, with the ground trembling violently and parts of the walls in the house I’d taken refuge in collapsing.” It was an enormous bomb. Muhammed heard his family crying for help and screaming that they had dead bodies amongst them. There was nothing to be done. Israeli aircraft filled the skies. Another strike was possible.
When the rescuers began to remove the rubble, they found survivors, wounded with broken legs and punctured lungs. But they also found that over 100 people from the Abu Nasr family had been killed. This was a horrendous massacre of a family in a well-known residential area. Carts and strong shoulders carried the wounded to Al-Helou Hospital, which is a maternity hospital that faced Israeli attacks in November 2023 but now remains partly functional. It was in the hospital that Asil Almanssi heard Bassam Abu Nasr (age five), the only survivor from his immediate family, say, over and over, “I want my father.” But his father had been killed by the Israelis.
Why at 4 a.m.?
During the Great War (1914–1919), both sides used aircraft to carry bombs that could be dropped on enemy targets, including on residential areas. These aircraft did not have very good navigation devices, but their adversaries also did not have anything beyond searchlights to find them in the sky. To have flown slow bombers in daylight would have exposed them to the swift fighter jets, which is why they flew under cover of darkness at night. This is why bombing runs during the Great War and into the Second World War took place at nighttime. After the Great War, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin told the House of Commons the truth about the use of aerial bombardment in that era: “The bomber will always get through. The only defense is in [offense], which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourself” (November 10, 1932).
Baldwin’s comments in 1932 came seven years after two other European powers (Spain and France) encouraged rogue mercenaries from the United States to bomb the Moroccan town of Chefchaouen in broad daylight. Spain and France wanted to put down the rebellion led by Abd el-Krim known as the Rif War (1921–1926). The pilots from the United States, who formed the Lafayette Squadron, flew in Breguet 14 biplane bombers and carried out 350 bombing runs. Since the Rif fighters had decent anti-aircraft weapons where they were located, the Lafayette Squadron was instructed to bomb undefended areas such as the city of Chefchaouen and its surrounding villages.
“Our objective,” wrote Captain Paul Rockwell, “was Chefchaouen, the holy city of the Djebala tribesmen.” The city, he noted, “had been bombarded previously, and because of its prestige and sacredness as a holy shrine, an air attack against it was expected to intimidate the Djebalas and be effective in detaching them from the cause of Abd el-Krim.” In other words, the bombing was not to hit military targets, but to cause psychological distress amongst the Rif fighters. The squadron bombed the city and its surrounding area about five times a day, dropping “over four tonnes of projectiles,” which was a lot for those days. They even bombed a village that had already surrendered. We do not know the civilian death count. It has not been recorded.
“The city looked lovely from the air,” wrote Rockwell, “hugging its high mountain and surrounded with many gardens and green cultivations.” The city was bombed to send a message to the Rif rebels. This was colonial warfare at its most effective. And because it took place in the colonies, the massacre in Chefchaouen has been forgotten (unlike, for example, the Spanish and German bombing of Guernica—a European town—in 1937, now memorialized in Pablo Picasso’s famous painting).
In the 1970s, the municipal authorities mandated that the walls of the city be painted blue to attract tourists and—some say—to repel mosquitoes; the city, when I visited it a decade ago, is remembered for the blue walls and not the massacre of 1925. We never learn the lessons of history.
The people of Gaza have no anti-aircraft capabilities. They cannot shoot down the Israeli aircraft. At most, they have been able to hit low-flying drones. The aircraft that bomb Gaza’s residential areas do not fly at night because they are afraid of being shot down. They fly at night because they are able to strike total fear in the population by killing entire families in their homes and thereby threatening other families with annihilation. “Intimidate the Djebalas,” wrote Rockwell, which can easily be updated to “intimidate the Palestinians.” A bomb that falls on a home at 4 a.m. is guaranteed to kill the civilians who are sleeping there. It makes civilians want to flee their homes. Creating the conditions for such flight is the war crime of ethnic cleansing. “We live in a disaster,” said Asma, who fled her home but has not left Gaza.
Something Unthinkable
For so many Palestinians, even after this horrendous year of genocide, to leave Gaza is to lose Palestine, to be part of the permanent Nakba (Catastrophe) that was set in motion by the Israelis in 1948. They will not be moved, even by the waves of nighttime bombings that exterminate family after family. By now, almost 1,000 families have been totally killed. An Al Jazeera investigation notes that 393 members of the al-Najjar family have been killed, 226 members of the al-Masry family, and 225 of the al-Astal family.
On October 10, 2023, at 8:30 p.m., a 2,000 lb. bomb landed on the al-Najjar family home in Deir al-Balah in the center of the Gaza Strip. The bomb killed 21 members of the family, part of the 393 al-Najjar family members killed over the course of the past year. Suleiman Salman al-Najjar (age 48) was at the al-Aqsa Martyr’s Hospital that night. He survived the bomb. But his wife, Susanne Subhi Asalam Najjar (age 40), and four of his children—Farah (age 23), Nadim (age 20), Yazan (age 14), and Safa (age 17 months)—died. He later told Amnesty International that while he was able to recover the body of his son Nadim, with his daughter Safa he could only find a hand. “Everybody was under the rubble. The house was completely pulverized. The bodies were reduced to shreds. Our lives have been destroyed in a moment. Our family has been destroyed. Something that was unthinkable is now our reality.”