“Similar to Sirilanks in the past, Israel has transformed safe zones into killing fields

Wise as we were watching Rafah’s “Block 2371” – the small area in south Gaza which the Israeli military announced as a ‘safe humanitarian zone’ on May 22 but shelled just four days after, killing at least 45 civilians hiding in the tents – we were brought back to a leaked 15-year-old cable which stated the horrifying sufferings of the civilian in the final stage of Sri Lankan civil war.

Dispatched in May 2009, sent from the US embassy in Colombo to the US Department of State in Washington, the cable details how the bishop of Mannar had called the embassy to persuade the embassy to help seven catholic priests who had been trapped in a so-called ‘No Fire Zone ‘ which had been established by the Sri Lankan armed forces.

The bishop observed, ‘There could still be between sixty to seventy-five thousand people imprisoned in that certain area, which is only a strip of land approximately twice the size of Central Park in New York.’ After the bishop’s phone call, the US ambassador called Sri Lanka’s foreign minister, asking him to notify the military that most of the individuals in the SAFEA zone were civilians. 

He was, apparently, concerned that because of the powerful firepower, the narrow coastal strip had evolved into a cage, and many soldiers would be unable to escape alive. Similar to the Israeli military attempts to evacuate Palestinian citizens from different areas of the Gaza strip into the so-called ‘safe humanitarian zone’ in Rafah, at some point in the recent past, the Sri Lanka military had attempted to similarly compel the civilian population to assemble in what the military declared ‘No Fire Zones’ through notifying them through leaflets drop from planes and loudspeaker announcements.

The UN set up tents in these areas as approximately 330000 internally displaced persons gathered in these zones, while along with many other humanitarian organizations, it started to distribute food and medical supplies to the people in need.

The Sri Lankan military, however, seemed to have also beaten a tactical withdrawal into these “No Fire Zones” of the Tamil Tigers – the armed group involved in a fight. Like other societies, the fighters had established a web of reserve defense buildings in these areas before launching their final defense with the military.

Thus, concurring with the everyday testimonies and the satellite images that reflect that while the Sri Lankan military assured that they were conducting “humanitarian operations” for “rescuing the civilians”, the army was shelling the alleged “No Fire Zones” with mortars and artillery, which turned the zones that were meant for the civilians’ safety into the killing zones.

This was the official US military evidence that suggested between 10,000 to 40,000 CIV residing in the safe zones in cages died. At the same time, thousands and thousands more were seriously wounded. Many of them, not only at Srebrenica but throughout Bosnia, were lying for hours and days on the ground with no possibility of getting medical help because almost every hospital – be it an ordinary one or an improvised one – had been shelled by the artillery. 

Like deja vu, Sri Lanka 2009 and Gaza 2024 are but two sides of a coin. In both cases, the military relocated several hundred thousand of them and explained to them that they were moving into “security zones” where they would not be killed.

In both instances, the militaries went ahead. They bombed as they targeted the so-called safe zones, which resulted in the loss of many lives and injuries to the civilian populace. Furthermore, the militaries also targeted life-saving medical units in the occupied territories.

In both scenarios, Military officials said that their armed forces targeted the safe zones and echoed that the Tamil Tigers and Hamas were at fault for killing the civilians since they used civilians as shields where they were hiding.