Gaza's genocide started with the Rabaa massacre

I am not a fan of conspiracy theories, but what I experienced eleven years ago in the Rabaa Al-Adawiya massacre and what I have been witnessing in the last ten months of genocide in the Gaza Strip makes me believe that the genocide of Gaza actually began on the day of the Rabaa massacre.

“Forgotten massacres are repeated” is a historical quote by Alija Izetbegovic about the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The phrase is true and includes a call to document and commemorate the massacre, prosecute its perpetrators and seek justice for its victims so that it is not repeated. However, in the case of Rabaa and Gaza, unfortunately the massacre has been repeated.

In the early days following 7 October, the Zionist propaganda machine worked alongside its agents in the Saudi and Emirati media to promote a set of lies related to raping women and burning children and beheading them, in an attempt to demonise the Gaza Strip and everyone in it to create a pretext for the genocide that Gaza would witness.

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The same scene took place in Egypt, days before the Rabaa Al-Adawiya massacre. The cheap propaganda machine worked to demonise the sit-in and everyone in it. Ahmed Moussa and his comrades talked about a world under the Rabaa Al-Adawiya platform. They described it as an armed sit-in, incited against it, demonised the protesters and described them as armed terrorists. When the massacre happened, we found degenerates dancing to the tune of “Tislam El-Ayadi”.

Psychological warfare was also a common factor between Rabaa and Gaza. In Egypt, Sisi dedicated and mobilised the Morale Affairs Department, accompanied by preachers such as Amr Khaled and Osama Al-Azhari, to incite public opinion against Rabaa. Planes dropped leaflets daily on the sit-in site, calling on the protesters to leave and return to their homes and promising to guarantee their safety.

The same thing happened in the Gaza Strip, as the Mossad and its men used Arabic-speaking journalists to incite public opinion against the Palestinian people, claiming that all of Gaza is Hamas, while the Occupation planes constantly dropped leaflets calling on the Palestinians to evacuate their homes and head to certain areas, and then they were bombed in those areas as well.

Millions of Muslims around the world were shocked when they saw the Israeli Occupation targeting mosques in the Gaza Strip, and the Zionist soldiers desecrating the mosques after bombing them. However, the same happened in Rabaa Al-Adawiya when the Egyptian army soldiers and Sisi’s men burned the Rabaa Al-Adawiya Mosque, desecrated it with their shoes and completely destroyed it in full view of the entire world.

In Rabaa Al-Adawiya, I still remember my fellow doctors inside the Rabaa Al-Adawiya field hospital, where the injured were killed in front of their eyes and a large number of them were arrested, then the field hospital was burned with those in it, with the charred bodies that remained inside it.

The scenes of doctors and patients inside the field hospital in Rabaa trying to hide from sniper bullets were witnessed by the whole world, and they are the same scenes that the world also witnessed, who saw the Occupation forces storming the Al-Shifa Medical Complex, arresting the doctors inside, and burning the building with hundreds of patients, the wounded, and dead bodies inside.

The method of killing and the similarity of the massacres between Rabaa and Al-Nahda Square and what is happening in all of Gaza confirm that everything began on this day, 11 years ago.

A few weeks ago, the Israeli Occupation committed a hideous massacre known in the media as the Tent Massacre, when its aircraft bombed the tents of the displaced in the city of Rafah, killing a large number of martyrs and burning many of the displaced alive inside those tents.

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Do not be surprised when you know that Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi committed the same crime on the day of the Rabaa massacre in Egypt, when his soldiers burned dozens of Egyptians alive inside the sit-in tents in Al-Nahda Square.

The scenes of burning are the same, the scenes of killing are the same, the criminal is the same, the killer is the same and the methods used in Rabaa and Gaza are identical.

The media also played a repulsive role in justifying the crimes. In Rabaa, Egyptian Media Production City (EMPC) channels lied on air and accused the protesters in Rabaa of killing each other, then accusing the police and army of killing the protesters. In Gaza, the Occupation, its spokesman, its army and its media told the lie that Hamas bombed the Baptist Hospital with a missile, which resulted in one of the most atrocious massacres since the beginning of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip.

In Rabaa, they targeted journalists, killing Ahmed Al-Sanousi, Habeeba Abdel Aziz and a Sky News cameraman. In Gaza, they targeted Ismail Al-Ghoul, cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa and the largest number of journalists killed in a single war throughout history.

The strange thing is that the scenes of arrest and detention are the same between Rabaa and Gaza, as if the perpetrator is one. There are hundreds of photos and videos between Egypt and Palestine, and it is difficult to tell which ones are in Rabaa and which ones are in Gaza. Soldiers point their weapons at prisoners who were stripped of some of their clothes and forced to either sit on the ground or stand with their hands raised.

When we talk about Rabaa and Gaza, you cannot help but think of the Egyptian child screaming next to his mother’s body in Rabaa, saying, “Wake up, mom, for God’s sake”, only to discover that, 11 years later, the same scene was repeated in almost the exact way with a Palestinian child sitting in front of his martyred father’s body and screaming loudly, saying, “Who will wake me up to pray Fajr, dad?”

Even the gloating of the Egyptian and Israeli soldiers after committing the massacre is almost largely identical. They stand next to the bodies, where the ground is covered in blood, and they raise their weapons while smiling with great pride. This similarity prompts you to ask: Who has learned this from the other, the Egyptian or the Israeli?

The annihilation of Gaza began with the Rabaa massacre, with Emirati and Saudi support, American blessing, Israeli happiness, Western complicity and popular silence. However, the truth is that Gaza would not have suffered this great suffering and been exposed to this genocide had Egypt not changed, become dwarfed and its conditions changed for the worse on the day the Rabaa massacre occurred.

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This article appeared in Arabic in Arabi21 on 14 August, 2024

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.