'Israel's' bombing of Gaza parallels WW2 carpet bombing campaigns: FT
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The Financial Times has shed light on the vast destruction that "Israel" has inflicted on the Gaza Strip, via US-supplied bombs.
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Palestinians search for survivors of the Israeli bombing of a residential area in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Palestine November 22, 2023. (AP)
The damage caused by "Israel's" bombing campaigns in the Gaza Strip has approached the UK and US's years-long bombing of German cities in the Second World War, an article published by the Financial Times revealed.
Rober Pape, a US military historian, and author of Bombing to Win, told FT that Gaza like Dresden, Hamburg, and Cologne "will also go down as a place name denoting one of history's heaviest conventional bombing campaigns."
"By any measure, Gaza is already a high civilian punishment campaign."
Robert Pape
Historic destruction
The expert made the remark in reference to the accumulating destruction caused by the Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip, which has left more than 60% of the buildings in northern areas severely damaged, the report revealed, citing analysis conducted by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Heok of Oregon State University.
Israeli bombs and shells have caused damage in seven weeks, which neared that caused by "years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the Second World war."
Citing estimates of damage to urban areas, military analysts say the destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the Second World War, the Financial Times said.
According to Scher and Van Den Heok, who depended on satellite radar images, the percentage of severely damaged buildings rises to 70% in certain areas. Moreover, 82,600 to 105,300 buildings in Gaza have been left in ruins. This includes any building where at least half of the structure was subject to damage.
In fact, the news website says the study's high-end estimate of severely damaged buildings in the northern Gaza Strip reached 68%, which surpasses numbers recorded in Cologne and Dresden. To put these numbers into perspective, in seven weeks the Gaza Strip experienced more damage than German cities did for two long years.
Read more: US supplied 'Israel' with 1-tonne bombs used in Jabalia massacre: NYT
US provides means for war crimes
Israeli Prime Minister had reportedly said that "Israel" needs "three things from the US: munitions, munitions, and munitions." Israel Today said that Netanyahu made this comment in a recording it had obtained from Netanyahu's meeting with local government officials.
The United States has more than happily obliged. In fact, a major cause of the damage to residential blocs caused by the Israeli aggression, are US-supplied bombs.
The falsehood of Israeli claims of "surgical" and "humane" operations has been exposed, as more than 16,248 people have been killed, including 7,112 children and 4,885 women. Israeli military activity in Gaza has also been dependent on US-made, M117s or "dumb bombs", which have been deployed in US wars on Korea and Vietnam. The Israeli Air Force has also deployed 2,000 lb GBU-31 bombs, which are four times larger than those recently used by the US military in Mosul.
Read more: Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza equivalent to 2 Hiroshima nuclear bombs
Although the ammunition has been marketed for deployment against reinforced bunkers, "Israel" has used these bombs to attack residential areas. Amnesty International has called for an investigation of war crimes, indicating that such a bomb was used in a strike that killed 43 people in a residential area.
Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former Pentagon intelligence analyst, discussed these weapons' effects with FT.
"Buildings pancake, their support disintegrates so they collapse in on themselves, and then there are the area effects — including the secondary fragmentation of cement, metal, peoples’ cell phones and everything else that flies out from the explosion at supersonic speeds," he explained.
The news website estimates that these bomb's effects can reach a radius of 300 m encompassing an area of 70,686 square meters.
Garlasco points to the "remarkable" widespread use of these bombs, as their only rational use would be to target the Palestinian Resistance's deep-lying tunnels.
