On this day 25 years ago, the world watched, as Jamal al-Durrah tried to protect his 12-year-old son Muhammad from Israeli bullets that rained down on them in Gaza for 40 minutes. Despite pleads, Israeli soldiers intentionally shot Muhammad in the stomach- whose final moments of fear and horror were caught on camera and streamed by France TV, and injured his father.
Muhammad became the defining and haunting image of the Second Intifada.
The grand theft at Tembisa Hospital should never have happened.
It’s one thing to calculate the R2 billion that was stolen, but another to remember that an honest person lost her life — and a family is forever changed.
Even more damning is the silent cost: the patients who went without care, the lives put at risk, because funds meant for healing were siphoned off into Lamborghinis and luxury.
This is not just about greed — it is about the failures of our government. A system so broken, so compromised, that it allowed theft on this scale to flourish in a place meant to save lives.
A car bought with blood money should not impress us. It should repulse us.
More than R2 billion of public funds intended for essential healthcare to the most vulnerable in our society was instead spent liberally on gratification and the purchase of frivolities with the sole aim of enjoyment. This is the world we live in.
No one deserves to be shot brutally in public, sliced open by the bullet of a cowardly sniper.
Hence, I condemn in the strongest terms the targeted assassination of at least 1500 Palestinians by snipers - many of whom were women and children collecting food - by the IDF cowards in Gaza.
And I condemn in the strongest terms the shooting of over 1000 Palestinians living in the West Bank in 'clashes' instigated by Isareli forces.
And I also condemn in the strongest terms the bombing and intentional killing of over 70,000 civilians in Gaza by the genocidal regime of Netanyahu.
Anyone who justified or mocked those deaths deserves no sympathy and is no hero - even as the same verdict above holds true for them as well.
Dying by violence does not cleanse a legacy of justifying violence.
If you aren’t sick to your stomach, if you aren’t maddened beyond belief, if you aren’t heartbroken, if you aren’t feeling rage or grief or something else, then you aren’t paying attention.