From Ben-Gurion’s flamethrowers in 1948 to today’s incinerated camps, bombed hospitals, and white phosphorus raining down on civilians, fire has been Zionism’s chosen language of colonisation. Yet even as Gaza burns, these infernos are met with standing ovations in the very Western halls of power that midwifed Israel into existence to escape the shame of the Holocaust.
On the 26th of May, 2025, a Gazan child was captured on video fleeing a blaze sparked by an Israeli airstrike targeting a school sheltering displaced families in Gaza. The attack killed over 36 people—most of them children who were burned alive.[1]
Video footage also captured Ahmad Mansour, a journalist for the ‘Palestine Today’ news agency, engulfed in flames after an Israeli airstrike on a makeshift media tent outside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza.[2] He and those children are among the tens of thousands already exterminated by bombs, fire and buried alive[3] in Israel’s genocide.
Zionism has an atrocious history of burning people alive. From what began as a small laboratory in London to a budding research centre in Rehovot, future home of the Weizmann Institute, an Anglo-Jewish chemist named Sasha Goldberg led a secret venture to acquire and then manufacture a flamethrower.
The aim – to put Palestinian people, villages and farms to the torch during the 1948 Nakba.
By February 1948, the flamethrowers were officially deployed to “set fire to the fields and houses of Palestinians,” as Ben-Gurion himself eagerly noted.
This project was part of a clandestine program developing biological and incendiary weapons under Ben-Gurion’s direction. The overarching biological weapons programme (which included the flamethrower) was headed by scientist Ephraim Katzir. He later became a President of the new Zionist state.
In one correspondence with David Ben-Gurion, he notes,
“We are experimenting with animals… Good results. The animals did not die (they were just blinded). We can produce 20 kilos a day of this stuff.”
Later suggesting that the ‘stuff’ that was found to blind should be used on people.[4] [5] Katzir is remembered for revealing (in an apparently unguarded 1980s statement) that Israel had developed an arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Professor Illan Pappé documents, “the forces on the ground [used] heavy bombardments… on densely populated villages” and then moved in with flamethrowers to burn what remained.[6] Eventually, some 531 villages and 11 urban neighbourhoods were systematically destroyed or depopulated in 1948, many by fire.
From the very birth of the Jewish colony by a people ostensibly scarred by the Holocaust, incendiary methods have been an integral part of the Zionist military’s ethos.
Incinerating White Phosphorus in Gaza
The Zionist entity has repeatedly deployed incinerating white phosphorus against Palestinians. White phosphorus (WP) is a chemical substance that ignites upon contact with oxygen, producing intense heat, flame, and thick white smoke.
During Operation Cast Lead (2008–2009) in Gaza, Zionist forces repeatedly and concertedly blasted the white, burning plumes over densely populated neighbourhoods. Despite denials, Human Rights Watch and other organisations documented air-burst white phosphorous explosions and journalists in Gaza captured images of the cascades of white fire raining down. The chemical set homes, schools, hospitals, and humanitarian facilities ablaze while causing agonising burns and devastating smoke inhalation.
White phosphorus shells ignited fires at a UN school sheltering 1,600 people, killing two brothers and severely injuring their relatives. Similar strikes burned patients out of a hospital in Gaza City, hit the UNRWA compound, destroying over US $3.7 million in medical supplies, and scattered burning wedges throughout residential neighbourhoods. Many civilians were wounded or killed outright; others later suffered severe infections or organ failure, as the chemical burns reactivated upon contact with oxygen. Witnesses recalled thick, garlic-scented smoke and ‘embers’ too hot to extinguish with fire extinguishers, forcing them to use sand.[7] [8] This all happened some 15 years before October 7.
A Gaza physician, Dr. Ahmed Almi, recalled that many victims were “covered in a white powder” that burned down to the bone.[9] In 2013, under mounting pressure, Israel told a court it would phase out white phosphorus shells.[10] Yet again, now 10 years prior to October 7, white phosphorus returned to headlines. In the 2014 conflict (Operation Protective Edge), Gaza residents and observers reported WP use, and the earth-scorching methods were back in full force in October 2023.
Despite global outcries over Israel’s systematic use of chemical weapons on Gaza’s schools, by 2023, the world had grown desensitised. October 7 became the reset button for global morality—a tactical smokescreen behind which genocide could proceed unhindered. Human Rights Watch investigators verified video footage from 10–11 October 2023 that showed “multiple airbursts of artillery-fired white phosphorus” over Gaza City’s port area.[11] Now, the Jewish state’s doctrine of incinerating civilians emerged without pretext or restraint, revealing its scorched-earth ideology in full, unfiltered force.
War Ministers and Attorneys for Arsonists
Currently serving in Israel’s government, Itamar Ben-Gvir (National Security Minister) and Bezalel Smotrich (Finance Minister) have each cultivated far-right agendas that openly encourage burning against Palestinians. In 2015, Ben-Gvir emerged as the official Attorney for the Jewish settlers implicated in the Dawabshe family arson, a brutal firebombing in the West Bank village of Duma that killed an 18-month-old child and both his parents.
Framing the suspects as ‘victims’ of harsh interrogations,[12] Ben-Gvir downplayed the arson of a Palestinian family and signalled a broader acceptance of burning. Meanwhile, Smotrich publicly questioned the legitimacy of the detainees’ confessions and criticised Israel’s internal security service for ‘torturing’ the Jewish suspects. It comes as little surprise that these two defenders of arsonists and gang-rape[13] formally shape the post-2023 incineration of Gaza.
“Let It Burn”: Hospitals and Refugee Camps in Flames
In mid-November, 2023, the enclave’s largest medical complex where thousands of patients and displaced civilians had taken shelter was pounded by strikes, then “burned down,” including the vascular surgery department and other critical wards.[14]
A World Health Organization damage assessment in April 2024 found that most of the hospital’s buildings were destroyed or unusable, much of the equipment was “burned to ashes,” and fires had “significantly damaged the emergency department, surgical, and maternity ward buildings.” The WHO-led team concluded the entire complex was “non-functional” – Al-Shifa had been effectively annihilated as a hospital.[15] Patients were summarily executed. In a UNHR report:
“Subsequent to the withdrawal by the Israeli military, three mass graves were reportedly found at the hospital, with at least 80 corpses retrieved… Some of these bodies were reportedly found with catheters and cannulas still attached, suggesting they had been patients.”[16]
The incineration of a refugee tent camp in Rafah took place soon after. On 26 May 2024, during continued fighting, Israeli aircraft, US made GBU-39 bombs struck the Tel al-Sultan area of Rafah in southern Gaza, where a large makeshift camp of displaced families was located. The strike ignited a conflagration that tore through the tightly packed tents.
The entire camp was engulfed in flames within minutes. Videos showed a massive blaze consuming tents and crude shelters, with families trapped inside. Local civil defence teams and residents desperately tried to douse the fire and pull people out. Some 50 Palestinians were killed, many of them women and children burned to their death.[17]
Scenes of the Rafah Camp inferno were reminiscent of the Holocaust, when Nazi SS units herded civilians into barns and churches, before setting them ablaze. At Oradour-sur-Glane in 1944, over 450 women and children were burned alive in a church while in 1945, over a thousand inmates of the German Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp were locked in a barn and burned by the SS.[18]
Methods once used in European pogroms have been deployed by the ‘Jewish State’ against Palestinians. Holocaust scholarship recounts Nazis burning Jews alive in places like Jedwabne (340 Jews locked in a barn and set afire in 1941), ironically recalled by the Jerusalem Post in 2023, whose subsidiary. ‘Walla!’ gloated the burning of children in Rafah. And in Auschwitz, camp staff “burnt children alive” in 1944,[19] recalled when the Gaza of children likewise burned alive in their camps.[20]
Victim Gloaters and Supporters of People Burners
Zionist political and military leaders continue to be welcomed and even celebrated on the world stage. Nowhere is this dissonance more evident than in the halls of the United States Congress.
As Gaza incinerated, convicted war criminal Netanyahu received 79 ovations, including 58 standing,[21] while a year earlier, President Isaac Herzog, who famously justified genocide when he said that: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” received “29 bipartisan standing ovations” during his 40-minute speech.[22]
After the Rafah camp inferno, two Israeli media personalities posted gleeful reactions. Yinon Magal, former Chief-Editor of Walla!, which as mention, is owned by the Jerusalem Post, described the conflagration as “the main lighting of the year in Rafah”, likening the burning camp to the Kabbalic and celebratory Lag Ba’Omer bonfire. Another, Naveh Dromi, a journalist for Yedioth Ahronoth exclaimed “Happy Holiday.”[23] The same people who invoke the holocaust to emphasise the scale of the October 7 attack gloated at the burning of children.
From Ben-Gurion’s flamethrowers in 1948 to today’s incinerated camps, bombed hospitals, and white phosphorus raining down on civilians, fire has been Zionism’s chosen language of colonisation. Entire villages have been torched, families cremated in their homes, and communities reduced to ash—all in service of establishing and defending an ethno-supremacist state.
Yet even as Gaza burns, these infernos are met with standing ovations in the very Western halls of power that midwifed Israel into existence to escape the shame of the Holocaust. History has not yet delivered its reckoning—but it will. And when it does, those who once cheered will have to confront the flames their applause helped unleash.
References:
[1] Al Jazeera. (2025, May 26). Palestinian child filmed trying to escape fires after Israeli attack. Retrieved from: https://www.aljazeera.com/video/newsfeed/2025/5/26/palestinian-child-filmed-trying-to-escape-fires-after-israeli-attack
[2] Anadolu Agency. (2025, April 15). Palestinian journalist burnt alive after Israeli airstrike in southern Gaza. Retrieved from: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/palestinian-journalist-burnt-alive-after-israeli-airstrike-in-southern-gaza/3531149
[3] Al Jazeera. (2024, April 25). Signs of torture as nearly 400 bodies found at Gaza hospitals’ mass graves. Retrieved from: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/25/signs-of-torture-as-nearly-400-bodies-found-at-gaza-hospitals-mass-graves
[4] Ben-Gurion, D. (1948, January 30). Diary entry. In Ben-Gurion Diaries. Akevot Institute.
[5] Pappé, I. (2006). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications.
[6] Ibid
[7] Human Rights Watch. (2009, March 25). Rain of fire: Israel’s unlawful use of white phosphorus in Gaza. Retrieved from: https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/03/25/rain-fire/israels-unlawful-use-white-phosphorus-gaza
[8] Beaumont, P. (2009, January 21). Israel admits troops may have used phosphorus shells in Gaza. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/21/gaza-phosphorus-shells
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid
[11] Beaumont, P. (2023, October 13). Israel denies using white phosphorus munitions in Gaza. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/13/israel-military-white-phosphorus-gaza-lebanon
[12] Times of Israel. (2024, May 27). Shin Bet ‘broke my client,’ says attorney for Jewish terror suspect. Retrieved from: https://www.timesofisrael.com/shin-bet-broke-my-client-says-attorney-for-jewish-terror-suspect/
[13] Al Jazeera. (2024, August 9). ‘Everything is legitimate’: Israeli leaders defend soldiers accused of rape. Retrieved from: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/9/everything-is-legitimate-israeli-leaders-defend-soldiers-accused-of-rape
[14] World Health Organization. (2024, April 6). Six months of war leave Al-Shifa Hospital in ruins: WHO mission reports. Retrieved from: https://www.who.int/news/item/06-04-2024-six-months-of-war-leave-al-shifa-hospital-in-ruins–who-mission-reports
[15] Ibid
[16] Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2024, December). Pattern of Israeli attacks on Gaza hospitals raises grave concerns: Report. Retrieved from: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/12/pattern-israeli-attacks-gaza-hospitals-raises-grave-concerns-report
[17] Al Jazeera. (2024, May 27). Israel attacked Rafah at night; all the people burned. Retrieved from: https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/5/27/israel-attacked-rafah-at-night-all-the-people-burned
[18] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (n.d.). Gardelegen. Retrieved from: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/gardelegen
[19] Irish Times. (2000, May 5). Auschwitz children burnt alive. Retrieved from: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/auschwitz-children-burnt-alive-1.179084
[20] The New Arab. (2024, August 5). US envoy Witkoff denies Hamas accepted Gaza ceasefire deal. Retrieved from: https://www.newarab.com/news/us-envoy-witkoff-denies-hamas-accepted-gaza-ceasefire-deal
[21] Daily Sabah. (2024, August 10). A standing ovation to genocide. Retrieved from: https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/columns/a-standing-ovation-to-genocide
[22] Sprunt, B. (2023, July 19). Israel’s president talked about the unique bond Israel shares with the U.S. in speech to Congress. NPR. Retrieved from: https://www.npr.org/2023/07/19/1188739694/israel-s-president-talked-about-the-unique-bond-israel-shares-with-the-u-s-in-sp
[23] Haaretz. (2024, May 27). Right-wing Israeli journalists celebrate Rafah attack, likening it to Lag BaOmer bonfire. Retrieved from: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-05-27/ty-article/.premium/right-wing-israeli-journalists-celebrate-rafah-attack-likening-it-to-lag-baomer-bonfire/0000018f-b983-dca9-a5cf-bd832e6e0000
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