Alwaght- Since the start of the Israeli ground offensive on Gaza, many harrowing scenes have been circulating online and on news networks; from the bodies of children recovered from under the rubles of buildings to the premature babies in Gaza hospitals falling victim to the Israeli barbarism; from a father making game from the horrifying sound of the warplanes flying overhead and bombardment of houses to ease his children’s horror to exhausted nurses and doctors who all of sudden face bodies of their family members delivered to the hospital but have no opportunity to mourn their loved ones as they have to treat the thousands of injured people flooding the emergency rooms.
In two months of war, the Israelis have spared no opportunity to display their inhuman face, committing crimes rarely seen in recent decades. The public opinion, especially in West Asia and North Africa use a slang term to describe egregious actions against the civilians: Daeshi actions— a term formed after Arabic name of ISIS terrorist group and conveying the peak of barbarism and unlimited violence against a large number of the of people.
A look at the criminal behavior of the Israeli forces in Gaza allows us to draw parallels between the Israeli and ISIS actions far from being labeled an exaggeration. Actually, we can find many similarities between Israeli regime and ISIS in their dealing with the civilians, prisoners, war goals, takfiri ideology and saber-rattling through terrorizing media propaganda.
We can start from the latest similarity, where the Israelis in recent days claimed to have captured hundreds of Hamas fighters who are set in long lines unclothed along Gaza coast and are being transferred with Israeli military trucks to unknown locations with the hands tied.
Al-Mayadeen, citing Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, has reported horrific eyewitness stories of what happened. The sister of the detained reporter of Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed news told the rights organization that the occupation troops separated him away from his 7-year-old disabled child Neda and forced him to take off his clothes pointing gun at him. He was beaten like other arrestees.
The monitoring group also said that it has documented cases of direct shooting and killing by the occupying army against the displaced people around two schools, as well as targeting people who were trying to leave their homes despite raising white flags.
The organization cited words of a young man named Mohammad al-Raee who said he eyewitnessed Israeli shooting and killing of at least seven young men in separate events just because they refused to take off their cloths and submit to a humiliation the Israeli army sought to foist on them.
In reaction to the release of the captives images, Hamas leader Izzat al-Risheq stressed in a statement that searching the detainees, removing their clothes and taking pictures of them is an action that is only carried out by terrorist armed groups.
He also described the arrest of displaced citizens in a school in the northern Gaza by the occupation army and removing their clothes as a crime in retaliation for the blows dealt by the resistance groups on Israeli regime.
Activists on social networks also compared the occupation forces’ actions against civilian prisoners in Gaza to the same method used by ISIS before mass executions in Syria and Iraq.
This Israeli behavior did not remain solely a behavior, and shortly after images emerged, Israeli officials said they are ready to mass-execute the prisoners. Deputy Mayor of Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Aryeh King and the prospective candidate of National Security Minister Itmar Ben-Gvir for post of mayor of western Al-Quds posted images of the Palestinian prisoners on X and called for burying them alive. In brazenly racist words, he said: “Israel should bury these Nazis in this soil so that no human will see them forever.”
“If it was for me, I would bring four bulldozers and bury these prisoners alive because they are not human beings and should be treated as such,” he further posted, which was labeled as a violation of the rules of the social media platform and deleted automatically.
From another angle, what makes Israeli behavior look much like that of ISIS is the targeting of the civilians without any limits. So far, according to Gaza Health Ministry, over 17,000 civilians, with 70 percent of them women and children, were massacred, something displaying an Israeli tendency for genocide, for which ISIS was famous.
Systematic destruction of religious sites and mosques has been another example of Daeshi actions of the Israelis in the Gaza war. Recently, Hamas movement announced in a statement the destruction of another mosque.
“The Zionist enemy bombed the historical Omar Mosque in Gaza, resulting in its massive destruction. This is a heinous and barbaric crime,” said Hamas statement, adding that the Israeli regime bombed 104 mosques and three churches.
Destruction of religious places, which are even used as hospitals and shelters for civilians during the war, is one of the examples of war crimes committed by the Israeli military, evoking the memories of takfiri ideology of ISIS.
The heinous dealing with the Palestinian female prisoners was also among the appalling actions during the war. Zayna Abdu, a 18-year-old girl who was released from the Israeli prisons during the week-long truce in Gaza, published a video of her narrating the torture and abuses in the Israeli prisons. This Palestinian girl said that after being arrested by the Israeli soldiers, she was handcuffed and blindfolded and taken to a prison in Kiryat Arba, where she was threatened with rape.
“We are 20 soldiers here and we can do whatever we want with you, you are our prisoner of war,” she quoted words of Israeli soldiers to her.
During the ISIS caliphate, the fighters of this takfiri group, after capturing an area in Iraq and Syria, enslaved captive women and abused and raped them.
But among the behavioral and ideological patterns of similarity between Israel and ISIS on the battleground, the most fundamental factor is the way of narrating and interpreting the acts of unlimited violence under the name of holy war and driven by takfiri thoughts against the enemy, namely when like ISIS the Israelis recognize no respect or human rights for people under attack and the killing of children and women, rape, genocide, bombing mosques, and other criminal actions are considered ultimately legitimate and serving the ideology.
All Zionist groups are ideologically fed by a single source, all distinguishing between the Jews as the so-called chosen people of God and the non-Jews who, according to Jewish belief, stand off the sacredness circle. According to this Zionist belief, Arabs and Muslim are evil people and should be eliminated and their killing is a duty, and their elimination guarantees ascendance of the Jewish troops to the heaven. This both explains why Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu called for nuking Gaza to annihilate Gazans and also explains why the Israeli troops do not hesitate even to kill the infants that pose no threat to them.
Likewise, ISIS with such takfiri thoughts not only prepared its fighters’ minds for any crime, but also brainwashed children to make ruthless fighters for the future. Teaching anti-Islamic musics and telling stories to preschoolers and also making video games with similar content are long-term Israeli plans to nurture anti-Islamic generations.
In this recent war, pictures were published showing the Zionists asking their children to write memorials on the bombs, shells and rockets set to be fired on Gaza people, including on the children.
When ISIS was running rampant in Iraq and Syria, various reports by resistance forces and international media emerged to inform the world about the Israeli role in training, equipping, and intelligence supporting of terrorists. Now the similarity of actions and behavior between the two tell us that those claims were not baseless.
