Israeli forces kill 6 aid seekers, wound dozens

Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara highlights the complicity of Western leaders, portraying them as “useful idiots” for supporting Netanyahu’s genocidal war in Gaza.

He emphasises that despite being five months too late, Western criticism of the Israeli war on Gaza is now gaining momentum.

Bishara suggests that as Israel weaponises hunger and persists in its massacres, the international community must reassess its stance and take decisive action.

On the night of February 20, Ashwin Mangukiya’s phone rang. It was a WhatsApp call from his son Hemil, who told his family that he was speaking from a military dormitory in Donetsk, the eastern Ukrainian region occupied by Russia.

Hemil, 23, said he had been eating well and had warm bedding. But the father knew he was trying to “hide his turmoil inside him”, he said. Hemil was on the front lines of Russia’s war on Ukraine, his role very different from the task of a Russian “army helper” that he had signed up for.

“That night, he didn’t want to hang up the call and was consumed by a deep longing for home,” Ashwin told Al Jazeera over the phone from his home in Surat city in India’s western state of Gujarat. The call lasted an hour.

It would be their last conversation.

Two days later, they received another call. It was not Hemil.

“Hemil has been killed in a missile strike,” said the man on the call in Hindi, identifying himself only as Imran from the southern Telangana state.

Imran told them the missile attack took place on February 21 – the day after Hemil’s call to his family – while he was digging a bunker.

“I felt like our world had come crashing down,” said Ashwin. He said Hemil’s shocked mother has been hospitalised several times since the news was broken to them. “She stopped eating and did not talk for days.”

Ashwin learned from Imran that three Indians had carried Hemil’s body in a truck to a military base. Beyond that, he said, he did not know the details surrounding his son’s death.

YouTube video to recruit

In early December, Hemil was offered a job as a helper in the Russian army and promised a monthly salary of $1,800, which appeared to be a passport to prosperity for a family dependent on a small textiles shop in Surat. That is where Hemil worked too, helping his father until the dream of a future abroad took hold.

Hemil’s parents, along with a dozen relatives, travelled to Mumbai on December 14 to see him off at the airport, where two people – a man and a woman – who claimed to be employees of the recruiting firm that hired Hemil, received them and assured them their son would be safe from any actual fighting.

Hemil’s family said he was first taken to Chennai city in India’s south from where he flew to Dubai and was finally sent to Russia. The entire process, they said, appeared genuine until he reached Russia and was forced to undergo arms training. He was then deployed to the front lines, tasked with digging bunkers and transporting heavy weapons for the Russian soldiers, said his father.

But Hemil is not the only Indian lured by online recruiters offering “army helper” jobs in Russia. The jobs were posted by ‘Baba Vlogs’, a YouTube channel with 300,000 subscribers and purportedly operated by a Dubai-based Faisal Khan.

The job video on the channel, shot on the streets of the Russian city of Saint Petersburg, was posted in October and has garnered more than 42,000 views since. It promises the prospect of Russian citizenship and the flexibility to relocate to any other European country after six months of service.