The police chief of Gaza City is dead. A drone fired three missiles into his car on Thursday in the Sheikh Ajleen neighborhood and killed him on the spot. The state that fired the drone called him a terrorist. Who, then, is the terrorist state now?
Gaza’s interior ministry identified the dead man as police chief Jamal Abu Kamil, 43. Palestinian Red Crescent crews said the aircraft targeted his vehicle and killed him instantly, wounding others nearby. The Israeli military posted its own video of the strike and said the dead man belonged to Hamas and had joined the October 7 assault. The two accounts do not agree.
A second strike the same day hit two men on a motorcycle near Khan Younis, killing one. Israel said the target was a Hamas commander preparing an assault on its soldiers. At least two people died on Thursday and several more were wounded. The strikes came days after Benjamin Netanyahu refused the US-backed 15-point plan that would have seen Hamas disarm as Israeli forces pulled back from Gaza, and they broke a quiet stretch of more than a week.
The killing of police chiefs is becoming a pattern. In late July, Israeli strikes killed Abdel-Nasser al-Maqadma, the police chief of northern Gaza. These are the people who keep order in a place that has almost nothing else left.
The word “terrorist” is the most powerful word in this war, because it is the word that licenses killing. Call a man a terrorist and the drone strike against him becomes legitimate, the video becomes evidence, the death becomes a success. Every side in this war uses the word for its enemies. Israel calls Hamas members terrorists. Hamas and its supporters call the Israeli state a terrorist state. The word has been stretched so thin that it now describes a policeman.
Consider what Abu Kamil’s job was. A police chief in Gaza City does not command rockets or tunnels. He runs traffic, investigates theft, tries to keep some order in a strip of land that has been bombed for years. If his killers are right and he was also a commander who joined the October 7 attack, the state that killed him was killing an enemy. If the interior ministry is right and he was a policeman, the state killed a public servant. Either way, the word used to justify the strike was “terrorist,” the man was a police chief, and the drone fired anyway.
This is what the question in the headline is for. It is literal: in a war where a man whose job is public order can be killed by a state that calls him a terrorist, what does the word still mean? Who gets to use it? On the evidence of Thursday, anyone with a drone and a video camera.
The wider picture is not better. The American plan is rejected, and the disarmament that was supposed to end the fighting is refused. Hamas says the deal will move only if Israel honors its side, pulling back and stopping the strikes. None of that happened this week. Instead, the strikes resumed, the police chief died, and the word was used again.
The question answers itself. Nobody needs to say it out loud. But since the word “terrorist” is being used to describe a man who kept order in Gaza City, it can be asked in public, without quotation marks, by anyone who still believes words should mean something.
Sources: Al Jazeera, The National, Xinhua (via NAMPA), RFI