A timeline of efforts to help Samer Abu Daqqa reveals that Israel was repeatedly pressed to allow for his rescue, but kept emergency crews at bay for hours.

“IT WAS AS if a storm had targeted us.” On the afternoon of December 15, an Israeli airstrike slammed into the Farhana school in Khan Younis where Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh and his cameraman, Samer Abu Daqqa, had just wrapped up filming the aftermath of an earlier bombardment in the area.

Dahdouh was thrown to the ground. “I lost balance to the point of faintly losing consciousness until I regained my strength,” he told The Intercept. “I tried to get up in any way because I was sure that another missile would target us — from our experience that’s what usually happens.” Dahdouh realized he was bleeding profusely from the arm and that if he didn’t get medical attention, he would die. He had also temporarily lost much of his hearing from the blast. He looked over and saw the three Civil Defense workers who had been accompanying the two journalists had been killed.

“In those milliseconds I thought I couldn’t offer him anything. I couldn’t. And he couldn’t move, he couldn’t get up.” Then, he saw Abu Daqqa lying on the ground some distance away. “He was trying to get up and it seemed like he was screaming,” Dahdouh said. “In those milliseconds I thought I couldn’t offer him anything. I couldn’t. And he couldn’t move, he couldn’t get up. I decided to take advantage of the remaining glimmer of hope, which was to try to go towards the ambulance.”

Dahdouh somehow managed to make his way across the rubble to an ambulance hundreds of meters away and was evacuated to a nearby hospital. But Abu Daqqa, wounded in the lower part of his body, could not walk to the ambulance and was left lying on the ground. Hours went by, but emergency workers were unable to reach him without approval from the Israeli military. As his life slipped away, Al Jazeera posted a live counter on its broadcast showing the number of hours and minutes since Abu Daqqa had been wounded. When emergency crews were finally able to reach Abu Daqqa over five hours later, he was dead.

  • girlfreddy@lemmy.caOPEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    It annoys me to no end when people believe, without question, that anti-semitism and anti-Zionism are the same gd thing.

    • Maeve@kbin.social
      0·
      10 months ago

      Because it’s not. The Palestinians are Semites; why aren’t people calling out Zionists as antisemitic?

      • samokosik@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        You can check meaning of antisemitism in the Oxford’s dictionary. It’s been adapted to the Jewish population despite the fact Palestinians are also semites.

        Basically it sometimes happens that the meaning of a word is adjusted based on how people use it. This can lead to some etymological inaccuracies.

      • girlfreddy@lemmy.caOPEnglish
        0·
        10 months ago

        Accrding to Merriam-Webster it means “opposition to the establishment or support of the state of Israel : opposition to Zionism”.

        Problems develop when people either don’t know, or forget, the history of it … because anti-Zionism was “created by Jews, not their enemies”.

        I recommend reading that NYT article to understand why many Jews, prior to WW2, weren’t enamoured with the idea of a Jewish state. Wikipedia also has some relevant info on the history of anti-Zionism.