A report from journalist Jonathan Cook
"The difficulty for Israel with the discovery of a mass grave in Gaza in which it had buried 15 emergency workers was that it could not easily fall back on any of the usual mendacious rationalisations for war crimes it has fed the western media over the past year and a half – and which those outlets have been only too happy to regurgitate.
Israel has destroyed Gaza’s hospitals, shot up large numbers of ambulances, killed hundreds of medical personnel and disappeared others into torture chambers, while denying the entry of medical supplies.
Israel implies that all of the 36 hospitals in Gaza it has targeted are Hamas-run “command and control centres”; that many of the doctors and nurses working in them are really covert Hamas operatives; and that Gaza’s ambulances are being used to transport Hamas fighters.
Even if these claims were vaguely plausible, the western media seems unwilling to ask the most obvious of questions: why would Hamas continue to use Gaza’s hospitals and ambulances, when Israel made clear from the outset of its 18-month genocidal killing rampage that it was going to treat them as targets?
Even if Hamas fighters did not care about protecting the health sector, which their parents, siblings, children and relatives desperately need to survive Israel’s carpet bombing, why would they make themselves so easy to locate?
Hamas has plenty of other places to hide in Gaza. Most of the enclave’s buildings are wrecked concrete structures, ideal for waging guerrilla warfare.
Even the usual excuses, as preposterous as they are, simply won’t wash in the case of Israel’s latest atrocity – which is why it initially tried to black out the story.
Given that it has banned all western journalists from entering Gaza, killed unprecedented numbers of local journalists, and formally outlawed the UN refugee agency Unrwa, it might have hoped its crime would go undiscovered.
But as news of the atrocity started to appear on social media last week, and the mass grave was unearthed on Sunday, Israel was forced to concoct a cover story.
It claimed the convoy of five ambulances, a fire engine and a UN vehicle were “advancing suspiciously” towards Israeli soldiers. It also insinuated, without a shred of evidence, that the vehicles had been harbouring Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters.
Once again, we were supposed to accept not only an improbable Israeli claim, but an entirely nonsensical one. Why would Hamas fighters choose to become sitting ducks by hiding in the diminishing number of emergency vehicles still operating in Gaza?
Why would they approach an Israeli military position out in the open, where they were easy prey, rather than fighting their enemy from the shadows, like other guerrilla armies – using Gaza’s extensive concrete ruins and their underground tunnels as cover?
If the ambulance crews were killed in the middle of a firefight, why were some victims exhumed with their hands tied? How is it possible that they were all killed in a gun battle when the soldiers could be heard calling for the survivors to be zip-tied?
And if Israel was really the wronged party, why did it seek to hide the bodies and the crushed vehicles under sand?"

Genocide in action and Perma Tan invites Netanyahu to the White House and failed to arrest him. The US are complicit in genocide and need to be called out by the UN.