Remembering Shuja'iyya

Palestinian artist Eyad Sabbah has erected clay-covered fibreglass statues in Shuja’iyya, depicting Palestinians who fled their houses from Israeli shelling during Operation Protective Edge.

The statues stand amidst the rubble of buildings destroyed during the 3-day Israeli shelling, which claimed over 100 Palestinian lives and left over 400 injured.

Between the 20th and 23rd of July 2014, Israeli forces bombarded Shuja’iyya using F16, tanks, mortar and heavy artillery. The targeting of Shuja’iyya, according to veteran military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai, was about the Israeli army “cementing itself in the enemy’s psyche as a beast one should not provoke”. It is this “objective”, he wrote, that “is the essence of the deterrence” sought by Israel.

On the 20th of July, IDF officers boasted that they were “taking off the gloves“. Even as the ground offensive got underway late Thursday, Israeli tanks had “received an order to open fire at anything that moved“.

Citing Israeli media, MEMO’s staff writer Ben White previously highlighted, that the killing of civilians in the name of revenge and deterrence – that “heavy casualties” dealt to Israeli soldiers in Shuja’iyya contributed to “a furious response by the IDF“.

Images from ApaImages