Israel Launches Major West Bank Raid as Israeli Minister Vows Gaza-Like Attack
it is clear that Israel is aiming to do what it has done in Gaza to the occupied West Bank.
Israel is cutting off the northern West Bank, destroying roads, surrounding hospitals and implementing curfews there.
By Sharon Zhang , Truthout, August 28, 2024
Israel has embarked on its largest raid of the occupied West Bank in decades, launching attacks from the land and air against areas home to 80,000 Palestinians as Israel’s foreign minister is pledging “war” using the same genocidal tactics the Israeli military has used on Gaza.
Israel has attacked the West Bank with drone strikes and deployed military vehicles on the ground, with troops opening fire on Palestinians. Israeli forces are shutting down and destroying roads with bulldozers leading to Jenin, Tulkarem and Tubas in the northern West Bank, effectively cutting the cities off from the rest of the West Bank. Jenin has a population of roughly 39,000 Palestinians.
The raid is especially sinister as it comes amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, which experts say has been an opportunity for Israeli forces to test and hone violence against Palestinians. Alarmingly, Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz pledged that Israeli forces would handle the occupied West Bank the same way it has Gaza — where it has isolated the population and then carried out a genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign of unprecedented proportions.
………………….Experts warn it is clear that Israel is aiming to do what it has done in Gaza to the occupied West Bank. “What’s happening is absolutely horrifying, because what we see here is Israel trying to transfer the genocide war that is conducted in Gaza and the war of ethnic cleansing from Gaza to the West Bank,” Mustafa Barghouti, Palestinian physician, general secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative and West Bank resident, told Democracy Now!. “Their goal is very clear. It’s as the Israeli minister of foreign affairs said: it’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”…………………………………….. more https://truthout.org/articles/israel-launches-major-west-bank-raid-as-israeli-minister-vows-gaza-like-attack/
The Fajr massacre: Every 70 kg bag of human remains is considered a martyr
The bodies of Palestinians killed in the latest Israeli massacre in Gaza were destroyed so far beyond recognition that doctors have only been able to give grieving families an anonymous bag of human remains to bury.
Mondoweiss, By Tareq S. Hajjaj August 11, 2024
Zainab al-Jaabari, 79, sits a few dozen meters in front of the scene of the massacre. She is waiting for her family members to return from checking for her seven sons and grandchildren, who were in the prayer hall praying Fajr at the time it took place.
Her family members arrived to see the reality of the massacre with their own eyes: more than a hundred people were killed, and their bodies were now scattered and mixed in the prayer hall in the Daraj neighborhood in Gaza City. It is possible their delay in returning now is due to their horror at what they found, or perhaps because they can’t imagine how to tell Zainab that her seven sons and grandchildren have been killed.
At dawn on Saturday, August 10, the Israeli army bombed a mosque while dozens of displaced people were praying the Fajr prayer, the daily Islamic prayer offered in the early morning. The bombing killed more than a hundred people, most of whom were dismembered or destroyed beyond recognition. For this reason the identification of the bodies has so far been incomplete……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Every 70 kilograms of remains is considered a martyr
In the mosque, people stand in a row close to each other as they pray, and after the bombing, the worshipers remained intermingled as well, as remains and corpses. Large numbers of martyrs were not able to be identified, and entire families were wiped out.
Survivors of this massacre are describing a new and horrifying experience they are being forced to endure in aftermath of Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip: they cannot even identify the remains of their loved ones.
Because the rescue teams couldn’t identify many of the human remains collected due to the intensity of the bombing, the doctors at Baptist Hospital were not able to identify each martyr individually. Instead, the doctors have started collecting body parts in plastic bags and giving 70 kilos of remains to the family of a martyr who has gone missing.
Hassan Ahmad told Mondoweiss that he searched extensively for the body of his 6-year-old son Ali, and after hours of searching, he did not find a trace of him. He then went to the Baptist Hospital to ask about his son, or to find any part of his body so I could identify him and bury him. After a long search that did not yield any results, the doctors at the Baptist Hospital gave him a plastic bag containing 18 kilograms of human remains and told him, “This is your son; go and bury him.”………………………………………………………..
I saw my father’s carnage
Muhammad Hamida, 12, recounted to Mondoweiss how he found his father, who had been torn apart in the Israeli attack. He says that he went with his older brother to the prayer hall after the bombing to rescue their father, who was praying at the time.
When we arrived, we couldn’t enter because of the intensity of the fire, blood, and body parts, but we wanted to check on my father. Moments later, we could enter the prayer hall but we couldn’t bear the scene.”
“People were cut up, there was a lot of blood on the ground, and body parts and small pieces of worshipers’ bodies were scattered everywhere. We found my father lying on the ground there. We recognized him, and our relatives helped us drag him out of the prayer hall. We found a human head stuck between his feet when we took him out. I was stunned with fear. I have never seen scenes like this in my life. I hope I never see them again.”
“They will kill us all; we are here alone; no one cares about us. They killed my father, and a month ago, they killed my two uncles, and they will kill everyone who remains in Gaza.”
Fatima Hassona conducted the interviews for this report from Gaza. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/the-fajr-massacre-every-70-kg-bag-of-human-remains-is-considered-a-martyr/?ml_recipient=129461487750088454&ml_link=129461453864305971&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-08-12&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation
Why We Must Oppose Israel’s Dangerous Gamble Before It’s Too Late
Failure to stop Israel’s genocide of Palestinians gambles with the fate of humanity as a whole.
Kathy Kelly, Aug 10, 2024,
https://www.laprogressive.com/foreign-policy/israels-dangerous-gamble
Following World War II, Albert Camus posed a “formidable gamble” to those who had survived a tragedy of immense proportions. “We’re in history up to our necks,” he observed, yet we must wager that “words are more powerful than munitions.”
“Leave or die” are the horrid words threatening largely unprotected Palestinian civilians in Gaza as dismayed populations around the world demand moral decency, or at least some indication of sanity, from their non-responsive governments.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. For decades, Israel has flouted international norms by refusing to acknowledge its nuclear weapons arsenal. Nor has it signed relevant treaties governing the biological weapons it possesses. For years, Israel has flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of customary international law through its forcible acquisition of territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and through its transfer of Israeli settlers into the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Now, Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians living in Gaza have cost the lives of at least 39,677 people. Tens of thousands more are believed to be buried beneath the rubble, with at least 90,000 wounded and the overwhelming majority of its displaced 1.9 million population facing starvation.
Israel’s failure to comply with international treaties and humanitarian law signal an acute need for other countries to organize weapons embargoes, cease trade deals, and provide support for civilian peacekeepers to bring about a permanent ceasefire.
Instead of unwavering adherence to international law, the United States continues to arm and protect Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, which now includes using starvation as a weapon of war.
We must try to absorb what it means to live as a refugee in an open-air concentration camp—already one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, even before 70 percent of its housing was destroyed. More than 341 mosques and three churches have been destroyed. 2,000-pound bombs have been dropped on tents in places deemed safe areas.
Innocent civilians are being killed by snipers. Thirty-one out of thirty-six hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. Escape routes are cut off. Persistent restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into and around Gaza are driving a desperate shortage of food, fuel, and medicine. As access to humanitarian relief is deliberately choked off, children are being collectively punished while Israeli leaders denounce them as animals. The world watches in horror as surgeons are forced to amputate the limbs of wounded children with no available anesthetics.
A new polio epidemic emerges while Israel vaccinates its soldiers but leaves the Palestinian civilian population vulnerable. Newly released prisoners have said they were subjected to torture, including being waterboarded and raped.
Rather than bring suspects before international courts, Israel has resorted to assassinations of the very negotiators with whom it purports to be seeking peace, and in a manner clearly intended to expand the conflict into a global war involving multiple nuclear-armed nations.
In its July 19, 2024, authoritative Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Settlement Policy and Practices, the World Court clearly declared the Israeli settlement project in the Occupied Territories to be illegal. The Court outlined the obligation of all parties to the Geneva Convention and the Genocide Convention to discontinue any economic or trade dealings with Israel which might help perpetuate Israel’s occupation and unlawful presence in the territory. Countries that signed or ratified these agreements are obligated to immediately stop arms exports to Israel and to use political, military, and economic influence to stop Israel’s flagrant, escalating violations of international humanitarian law.
The World Court has provided strong, clear words denouncing Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. As during the Vietnam War, ordinary citizens can no longer abide with the lawless barbarism of continuing assaults against Palestinians.
“Rolling the bones” is a slang expression for gambling. With a regional war perhaps now unavoidable in the Middle East, the genocidal derangement of the United States and Europe over Israel’s actions may well lead to a nuclear war that ends the human species. Failing to use our words at this most crucial juncture for humanity would be, as Camus said, a formidable gamble indeed.
‘Heinous’: Children Among 100 Killed by Israel Bombing of Gaza School Just Hours After US Weapons Approval
“It is hard to comprehend how the Biden administration can justify rewarding Israel with new weapons, despite Israel’s persistent defiance of every single plea the Biden administration has made urging a modicum of restraint.”
Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and co-founder of Progressive International, asked the same on Saturday.
“Israel has now killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and wounded well over 92,000 others,” said Varoufakis. “Thousands more lie, uncounted, under the debris. Some 10,000 Palestinians have been abducted by Israel’s occupying forces. Question: Where is the ICC indictment?”
Jon Queally, Aug 10, 2024 https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-massacre-us-weapons
The Palestinian Authority’s Fatah government in the Occupied West Bank released a statement Saturday describing the attack on the al-Tabin school in Gaza City as a “heinous bloody massacre” that represents the “peak of terrorism and criminality” by the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Just hours after the Biden administration Friday announced approval of $3.5 billion in military funds for Israel and shipments for new weaponry, an Israeli bombing of a school-turned-shelter in Gaza has killed 100 people or more, including scores of civilian men, women, and children in what was described as a “bloody massacre” that struck during morning prayers, leaving body parts scattered “in pieces” and healthcare workers overwhelmed with the dead and wounded.
“Committing these massacres confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt its efforts to exterminate our people through the policy of cumulative killing and mass massacres that make living consciences tremble,” said the PA.
Footage taken by volunteers working alongside Palestinian medical units in Gaza City showed wounded small children and adults being taken to local hospitals as well as scenes of carnage from the scene of the bombing [Warning: Images are graphic]. Gaza journalist Motasem A. Dalloul also posted his reporting from the scene, including footage of the carnage [Also graphic].
Al-Jazeera spoke with witnesses at the scene of the massacre, one of whom said many of the dead—which included women, children, and old people who had been praying and others sleeping when the missiles struck—were collected afterward “in pieces”:
Tamer Kirolos, a regional director for Save the Children, called Israel’s attack on al-Tabin the “deadliest attack on a school since last October.”
“It is devastating to see the toll this has taken, including so many children and people at the school for dawn prayers,” Kirolos said. “Civilians, children, must be protected. An immediate definitive ceasefire is the only foreseeable way that will happen.”
Just hours before the bombing, the U.S. State Department announcement that a $3.5 billion tranche of funds—part of a larger $14.1 billion in overseas military aid approved by Congress earlier this year—would be released to the Israeli government for weapons procurement.
As CNNreported, while some of those weapons purchases made possible by the fund may take years, the “supplemental funding also allocated billions of dollars’ worth of equipment that the Pentagon can draw from its own stockpiles to send directly to Israel on a much faster timeline.”
Unverified reporting indicated that at least one of the missiles dropped on the al-Tabin school overnight may have been a U.S.-made MK-84 bomb weighing 2,000 pounds.
On Friday night, after the State Department announcement but before news of the latest bombing in Gaza broke, Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the human rights and advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), was among those confounded by the U.S. government’s continued determination to arm the Israelis in the face of the human suffering in Gaza and the repeated massacre of civilians, day after day and month after month.
“It is mind-boggling that despite the overwhelming evidence of the IDF’s unprecedented crimes in Gaza that has shocked the conscience of the entire world, the Biden administration is greenlighting the transfer of additional lethal weapons to Israel,” said Whitson in a Friday night statement following news that the State Dept. had greenlit the release of taxpayer funds for a new round of weapons destined for Israel.
Making a similar argument in a Saturday morning post on X, Sami Abou Shehadeh, leader of Israel’s leftist Balad Party, said that while President Joe Biden “could have stopped the genocide” by using his leverage of military aid to force the Israelis in a different direction, instead “he just released $3.5 billion for more weapons to kill civilians.”
Shehadeh warned that without any internal opposition “to the genocide” by Israel’s Zionist political parties, Netanyahu’s policies would continue, even as the region inches toward further destabilization over the crisis in Gaza that has also spread to Lebanon and beyond. Calling for the International Criminal Court to intervene, he asked, “If the ICC doesn’t take action now, then when?”
Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and co-founder of Progressive International, asked the same on Saturday.
“Israel has now killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and wounded well over 92,000 others,” said Varoufakis. “Thousands more lie, uncounted, under the debris. Some 10,000 Palestinians have been abducted by Israel’s occupying forces. Question: Where is the ICC indictment?”
It is truly horrific,” Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s policy director told Common Dreams via email Saturday. “Last night’s massacre was another example of how Blinken and Biden have blood on their hands.”
Referencing a separate decision by the State Department to suspend an investigation into documented abuse violations by the “notorious” Netzah Yehuda Unit within the IDF, Jarrar said the “decisions of sending weapons to Israel and not sanctioning Israeli human rights abusers are not just corrupt policy decisions, they are criminal acts.”
Nothing’s changed since 1948 – except now Israel’s excuses don’t work
8 August 2024 https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-08-08/1948-israel-excuses/
We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin
A headline about community displacements is about yet another Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the tiny, besieged and utterly destroyed enclave of Gaza, was published in yesterday’s Middle East Eye.
When I began studying Israeli history more than a quarter of a century ago, people claiming to be experts proffered plenty of excuses to explain why Israelis should not be held responsible for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes – what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.
1. I was told most Israelis were not involved and knew nothing of the war crimes carried out against the Palestinians during Israel’s establishment.
2. I was told that those Israelis who did take part in war crimes, like Operation Broom to expel Palestinians from their homeland, did so only because they were traumatised by their experiences in Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, these Israelis assumed that, were the Jewish people to survive, they had no alternative but to drive out the Palestinians en masse.
3. From others, I was told that no ethnic cleansing had taken place. The Palestinians had simply fled at the first sign of conflict because they had no real historical attachment to the land.
4. Or I was told that the Palestinians’ displacement was an unfortunate consequence of a violent war in which Israeli leaders had the best interests of Palestinians at heart. The Palestinians hadn’t left because of Israeli violence but because they has been ordered to do so by Arab leaders in the region. In fact, the story went, Israel had pleaded with many of the 750,000 refugees to come home afterwards, but those same Arab leaders stubbornly blocked their return.
Every one of these claims was nonsense, directly contradicted by all the documentary evidence.
That should be even clearer today, as Israel continues the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of the Palestinian people more than 75 years on.
1. Every Israeli knows exactly what is going on in Gaza – after all, their children-soldiers keep posting videos online showing the latest crimes they have committed, from blowing up mosques and hospitals to shooting randomly into homes. Polls show all but a small minority of Israelis approve of the savagery that has killed many tens of thousands of Palestinians, including children. A third of them think Israel needs to go further in its barbarity.
Today, Israeli TV shows host debates about how much pain soldiers should be allowed to inflict by raping their Palestinian captives. Don’t believe me? Watch this from Israel’s Channel 12: [on original]
2. If the existential fears of Israelis and Jews still require the murder, rape and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians three-quarters of a century on from the Holocaust, then we need to treat that trauma as the problem – and refuse to indulge it any longer.
3. The people of Gaza are fleeing their homes – or at least the small number who still have homes not bombed to ruins – not because they lack an attachment to Palestine. They are fleeing from one part of the cage Israel has created for them to another part of it for one reason alone: because all of them – men, women and children – are terrified of being slaughtered by an Israeli military, at best, indifferent to their suffering and their fate.
4. No serious case can be made today that Israel is carrying out any of its crimes in Gaza – from bombing civilians to starving them – with regret, or that its leaders seek the best for the Palestinian population. Israel is on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court precisely because the judges there suspect it has the very worst intentions possible towards the Palestinian people.
We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was always a settler colonial project. And like other settler colonial projects – from the US and Australia to South Africa and Algeria – it always viewed the native people as inferior, as non-human, as animals, and was bent on their elimination.
What is so obviously true today was true then too, at Israel’s birth. Israel was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin.
We in the West abetted its crimes in 1948, and we’re still abetting them today. Nothing has changed, except the excuses no longer work.
Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one given blessing by the West
Israel has learned that, the more routine its war crimes become, the less coverage they receive – and the less outrage they provoke.
Last week, western doctors who had volunteered in Gaza said Israel was packing its weapons with shrapnel to maximise injuries to those caught in the blast radius. Children, because of their smaller bodies, were being left with much more severe wounds.
In recent days, Israel has struck several United Nations schools serving as shelters, killing dozens more Palestinians. On Tuesday, another strike in the “safe zone” of al-Mawasi killed 17.
According to the UN refugee agency, Unrwa, more than 70 percent of its schools – almost all of them serving as refugee shelters – have been bombed.
Middle East Eye, Jonathan Cook, 19 July 2024
Women and children are being targeted intentionally, say Israeli whistleblowers. From ground troops to commanders, the rules of war have been shredded
hey just keep coming. On the weekend, Israel launched another devastating air strike on Gaza, killing at least 90 Palestinians and wounding hundreds more, including women, children and rescue workers.
Once again, Israel targeted refugees displaced by its earlier bombs, turning an area it had formally declared a “safe zone” into a killing field.
And once more, western powers shrugged their shoulders. They were too busy accusing Russia of war crimes to have time to worry about the far worse war crimes being inflicted on Gaza by their Israeli ally – with weapons they supplied.
The atrocity committed at al-Mawasi camp, packed with 80,000 civilians, had the usual Israeli cover story – one rolled out to reassure western publics that their leaders are not the utter hypocrites they appear to be for supporting what the World Court has described as a “plausible genocide”.
Israel said it was trying to hit two Hamas leaders – one of them Mohammed Deif, head of the group’s military wing – although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed uncertain as to whether the strike was successful.
No one in the western media appeared to wonder why the pair preferred to make themselves a target in an overcrowded, makeshift refugee camp, where they were at huge risk of being betrayed by an Israeli informant, rather than sheltering in Hamas’s extensive tunnel network.
Or why Israel deemed it necessary to fire a multitude of massive bombs and missiles to take out two individuals. Is that Israel’s new, expansive redefinition of a “targeted assassination”?
Or why its pilots and drone operators continued the strikes to hit emergency rescue crews dealing with the initial destruction. Was there intelligence that Deif was not just hiding in the camp, but had hung around to dig out survivors, too?
Or how killing and maiming hundreds of civilians in an attempt to hit two Hamas fighters could ever possibly satisfy the most basic principles of international law. “Proportion” and “distinction” require armies to weigh the military advantage of an attack against the expected toll on civilian life.
Biblical vengeance
But Israel has torn up the rulebook on war. According to sources within the Israeli military, it now considers it acceptable to kill more than 100 Palestinian civilians in the pursuit of a single Hamas commander – a commander, let us note, who will simply be replaced the moment he is dead.
Even if the two Hamas leaders were assassinated, Israel could not have been in any doubt that it was perpetrating a war crime. But it has learned that, the more routine its war crimes become, the less coverage they receive – and the less outrage they provoke.
In recent days, Israel has struck several United Nations schools serving as shelters, killing dozens more Palestinians. On Tuesday, another strike in the “safe zone” of al-Mawasi killed 17.
According to the UN refugee agency, Unrwa, more than 70 percent of its schools – almost all of them serving as refugee shelters – have been bombed.
Last week, western doctors who had volunteered in Gaza said Israel was packing its weapons with shrapnel to maximise injuries to those caught in the blast radius. Children, because of their smaller bodies, were being left with much more severe wounds.
Aid agencies cannot properly treat the wounded, because Israel has been blocking the entry of medical supplies into Gaza.
Committing war crimes, if western publics have not worked it out by now, is the very point of the “military operation” Israel launched in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s one-day attack on 7 October.
That is why there are more than 38,800 known deaths from Israel’s 10-month assault – and likely at least four times that number unrecorded, according to leading researchers writing in the Lancet medical journal this month.
That is why it will take at least 15 years to clear the rubble strewn across Gaza by Israeli bombs, according to the UN, and as much as 80 years – and $50bn – to rebuild homes for the remnants of the enclave’s 2.3 million people still alive at the end.
Israel’s twin goals have been biblical vengeance and the elimination of Gaza – a genocidal rampage to drive the terrified population out, ideally into neighbouring Egypt.
Shoot-everyone policy
If that was not clear enough already, six Israeli soldiers recently stepped forward to speak out about what they had witnessed while serving in Gaza – a story the western media has entirely failed to report.
Their testimonies, published by the Israel-based publication 972 last week, confirm what Palestinians have been saying for months.
Commanders have authorised them to open fire on Palestinians at will. Anyone entering an area the Israeli military is treating as a “no-go zone” is shot on sight, whether man, woman or child.
After months of an Israeli aid blockade that has created a man-made famine, Israel’s military has turned the people of Gaza’s ever-more frantic search for food into a game of Russian roulette.
This perhaps explains, in part, why so many Palestinians are unaccounted for – Save the Children estimates some 21,000 children are missing. The soldiers quoted in 972 say the victims of their shoot-everyone policy are bulldozed out of view along routes where international aid convoys pass.
A reserve soldier, identified only as S, said a Caterpillar bulldozer “clears the area of corpses, buries them under the rubble, and flips [them] aside so that the convoys don’t see it – [so that] images of people in advanced stages of decay don’t come out”. The soldier also noted: “The whole area [of Gaza where the army operates] was full of bodies… There is a horrific smell of death.”
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… A whistleblower from the Netzah Yehuda battalion who spoke to CNN said the commanders, drawn from Israel’s religious extremist ultra-Orthodox sector, stoked a culture of violence towards Palestinians, including vigilante-style attacks…………………………………………………………………………….more https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israeli-soldiers-tell-story-savage-cruelty-gaza-west-gives-blessing?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
‘Horrific Massacre’: Israel Bombs Gaza School Used as Refugee Camp, Killing Dozens.
“Schools have gone from safe places of education and hope for children to overcrowded shelters and often ending up a place of death and misery,” said UNRWA’s commissioner-general.
JAKE JOHNSON, Jul 10, 2024 https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/10/horrific-massacre-israel-bombs-gaza-school-used-as-refugee-camp-killing-dozens/
Israeli forces killed dozens of people Tuesday in an airstrike on a school-turned-refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, the fourth school Israel’s military has bombed in as many days as the country continues its massive assault on the enclave’s starving population.
At least 29 people were killed and dozens more were wounded in Tuesday’s attack, including women and children—who have made up roughly two-thirds of those killed in Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, which began following a Hamas-led attack in October. The death toll from Tuesday’s attack is expected to rise, as many of those injured were reportedly in critical condition and taken to the under-resourced and overwhelmed Nasser Hospital.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) acknowledged carrying out the airstrike—which hit the entrance of the school—but claimed to be targeting a Hamas militant “adjacent” to the complex. The IDF, whose internal investigations rarely result in accountability for atrocities, said the “incident is under review.”
Video footage posted to social media shows displaced Palestinians playing in the schoolyard when the airstrike hit, sparking panic and chaos. [Video on original –Warning: The footage is graphic]
Citing witnesses, the BBC reported that “the area was teeming with displaced people at the time” of the airstrike, which “resulted in widespread destruction and the deaths of women and children.”
“Body parts were scattered across the site and many people staying in tents outside the school were also injured,” the British outlet reported. “Ayman Al-Dahma, 21, told the BBC there had been as many as 3,000 people packed into the area at the time, which he said housed a market and residential buildings. Describing the number of casualties as ‘unimaginable,’ he said he had seen people whose limbs had been severed by the blast.”
Tuesday’s attack marked the fourth time in four days that the IDF has attacked a school in the Gaza Strip, according to Agence France-Presse. Over the weekend, Israeli forces killed more than a dozen Palestinians in an attack on a United Nations-run school in central Gaza.
Most of Gaza’s education infrastructure has been damaged or completely destroyed by Israeli forces, and the schools still standing are being used to shelter those displaced by the IDF assault, which is now in its 10th month. The United Nations estimates that 90% of Gaza’s population has been internally displaced since October, with some displaced up to 10 times.
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East called the IDF’s latest attack “a horrific massacre,” adding, “Annihilation is the point.”
“Nothing can justify Canada’s failure to act,” the group wrote on social media.
Canada is one of a number of major countries that have supplied weaponry to the Israeli government as it has carried out its utter devastation of the Gaza Strip, nearly all of which is now uninhabitable.
The United States and Germany together provided 99% of the arms Israel imported last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Germany’s Foreign Office called Wednesday’s attack “unacceptable” and demanded a swift investigation.
“People seeking shelter in schools getting killed is unacceptable. Civilians, especially children, must not get caught in the crossfire,” the foreign office said. “The repeated attacks on schools by the Israeli army must stop.”
Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), said Wednesday that “schools have gone from safe places of education and hope for children to overcrowded shelters and often ending up a place of death and misery.”
“Nine months in, under our watch, the relentless, endless killings, destruction, and despair continue. Gaza is no place for children,” he added. “The blatant disregard of international humanitarian law cannot become the new normal… Cease-fire now before we lose what is left of our common humanity.”
The Lancet study estimates death toll in Gaza 186,000 or even more
Maktoob Staff, 8 July 24, https://maktoobmedia.com/gaza-genocide/the-lancet-study-estimates-death-toll-in-gaza-186000-or-even-more/
Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death reported in Gaza, a new study published respected medical journal The Lancet said it is “not implausible” to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the genocidal war in Gaza.
The paper titled ‘Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential’, published on 05 July, stated that using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, the estimated death toll would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the besieged enclave.
On Sunday, the Palestinian health ministry said that at least 38,153 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 07 while more than 87,828 have been wounded in the besieged enclave. 15,983 of them are children.
The study by Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf, used the data from June 19, with the official death toll of 37, 396. The official record maintained by the Gaza Health Ministry doesn’t include over 10,000 people missing or buried under the rubbles.
“The Ministry has had to augment its usual reporting, based on people dying in its hospitals or brought in dead, with information from reliable media sources and first responders. This change has inevitably degraded the detailed data recorded previously. Consequently, the Gaza Health Ministry now reports separately the number of unidentified bodies among the total death toll. As of May 10, 2024, 30% of the 35,091 deaths were unidentified,” observed the paper.
It also pointed out that armed conflicts have “indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence”.
“Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases,” the paper read.
A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28,000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024.
The interim measures set out by the International Court of Justice in January, require Israel to “take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of … the Genocide Convention”.
“An immediate and urgent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip is essential, accompanied by measures to enable the distribution of medical supplies, food, clean water, and other resources for basic human needs,” the paper read.
Israel Has Forcibly Displaced 1.9 Million Palestinians in Gaza
Israel’s assault has displaced over 1 million people just since May, a UN human rights official said.
SCHEERPOST, By Sharon Zhang , TRUTHOUT, July 2, 2024
srael’s ongoing assault in Gaza has now forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, a UN humanitarian official reported on Tuesday as Israel forced another round of evacuations for hundreds of thousands of people across southern and central Gaza.
Israel’s brutal assault and humanitarian blockade has turned Gaza into an “abyss of suffering” and a “maelstrom of human misery,” said Sigrid Kaag, UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza, in an address to the UN Security Council.
“Following the Israeli offenses against Rafah, since the sixth of May, over 1 million people have been displaced once again, desperately seeking shelter and safety,” said Kaag. “One point nine million people are now displaced across Gaza.”
This amounts to over 86 percent of the 2.2 million person population of Gaza displaced — though the proportion may be larger when the number of Palestinians who have been killed, are missing under the rubble or have died in ways that officials aren’t recording are subtracted from the population estimates. The number of displaced people is up from 1.7 million Palestinians who UN officials said had been forced out of their homes in earlier estimates……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Meanwhile, Israeli forces are also fiercely attacking Gaza City in the north. This has sparked an “exodus” from the eastern part of the city, the UN reported, after days of intense bombardments and tanks entering the region.
According to the UN, about 84,000 Palestinians have been displaced by this massacre, with most families having already fled areas multiple times, their supplies and energy dwindling amid Israel’s intensified famine campaign.
UNRWA’s communications head Louise Wateridge reported from a recent trip to Gaza that the region is “apocalyptic — most people have lost their homes, either completely or partially, and have to flee with very few belongings; essentially what they can carry in their hands.” https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/03/israel-has-forcibly-displaced-1-9-million-palestinians-in-gaza/
Julian Assange Is Finally Free, But Let’s Not Forget the War Crimes He Exposed
Contrary to US government claims, WikiLeaks’s revelations actually saved lives — and drove demand for US accountability.
| By Editor on June 29, 2024 https://truthout.org/articles/julian-assange-is-finally-free-but-lets-not-forget-the-war-crimes-he-exposed/ |
After a 14-year struggle, including five years spent in Belmarsh, a maximum-security prison in London, WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange is finally free. Under the terms of a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice, Assange pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain documents, writings and notes connected with the national defense under the Espionage Act. Assange was facing 175 years in prison for 18 charges in the indictment filed by the Trump administration and pursued by the Biden administration.
The plea agreement requires that before entering his plea, Assange must have done everything he could to either return or destroy “any such unpublished information in his possession, custody, or control, or that of WikiLeaks or any affiliate of WikiLeaks.”
As stipulated in the plea deal, Ramona Manglona, U.S. Chief Judge of the District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, sentenced Assange to 62 months with credit for the time he served in Belmarsh Prison. The U.S. sentencing guidelines say the range for this “offense” is 41-51 months, so Assange served 11 to 21 months longer than this type of case would typically garner.
Assange was prosecuted because WikiLeaks exposed U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. In 2010, U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who had a “TOP SECRET” U.S. security clearance, furnished WikiLeaks with 700,000 documents and reports, many of which were classified “SECRET.”
These documents included the “Iraq War Logs,” 400,000 field reports documenting 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, as well as systematic rape, torture and murder after U.S. forces transferred detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad.
They also contained the “Afghan War Diary,” comprising 90,000 reports that documented more civilian casualties by coalition forces than the U.S. military had reported. And they included the “Guantánamo Files” — 779 secret reports containing evidence that 150 innocent people had been held at Guantánamo Bay for years. The reports explain how the nearly 800 men and boys there had been tortured and abused, which violated the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Manning also provided WikiLeaks with the infamous 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, which depicts a U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter crew targeting and killing 12 unarmed civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, as well as a man who came to rescue the wounded. Two children were injured in the attack. A U.S. Army tank drove over one of the bodies, severing it in two. In a conversation after the attack, one pilot said, “Look at those dead bastards,” and the other responded, “Nice.” The video reveals evidence of three violations of the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual.
WikiLeaks provided material for news outlets around the world to report on U.S.-led atrocities. Informing the public about the illegality of George W. Bush’s “war on terror” resulted in calls for accountability.
“10 years on, the War Logs remain the only source of information regarding many thousands of violent civilian deaths in Iraq between 2004 and 2009,” John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count (IBC), wrote in his submitted testimony for Assange’s extradition hearing in October 2020. IBC is an independent NGO that has done the only comprehensive monitoring of credibly reported casualties in Iraq since Bush’s 2003 invasion.
“WikiLeaks cables have contributed to court findings that US drone strikes are criminal offences and that criminal proceedings should be initiated against senior US officials involved in such strikes,” Clive Stafford Smith, co-founder of Reprieve and attorney for seven Guantánamo detainees, wrote in his submitted testimony.
“They took a hero [Assange] and turned him into a criminal,” Vahid Razavi, founder of Ethics in Tech, told Common Dreams. “Meanwhile, all of the war criminals in the files exposed by WikiLeaks via Chelsea Manning are free and never faced any punishment or even their day in court.”
The Iraq War Logs
The Iraq War Logs contained extensive evidence of U.S. war crimes. Several reports of detainee abuse were supported by medical evidence. Prisoners were blindfolded, shackled and hung by their ankles or wrists. They were subjected to punching, whipping, kicking, electrocution, electric drills, and cutting off fingers or burning with acid. Six reports document the apparent deaths of detainees.
Secret U.S. Army field reports revealed that U.S. authorities refused to investigate hundreds of reports of murder, torture, rape and abuse by Iraqi soldiers and police. The coalition had a formal policy of ignoring these allegations, marking them “no investigation is necessary.”
Although U.S. and U.K. officials maintained that no official records of civilian casualties existed, the logs document 66,081 noncombatant deaths out of 109,000 fatalities from 2004-2009.
The log describes video footage of Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar. It says, “The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army [IA] soldiers. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him and shooting him.”
The Afghan War Diary
The Afghan War Diary also revealed evidence of U.S. war crimes from 2004-2009. The reports describe how a secret “black” unit composed of special operations forces hunted down accused Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial. Secret commando units — classified groups of Navy and Army special operatives — used a “capture/kill list,” which resulted in the killing of civilians, angering the Afghan people.
Moreover, the CIA expanded paramilitary operations in Afghanistan, carrying out ambushes, ordering airstrikes and conducting night raids. The CIA financed the Afghan spy agency, operating it like a subsidiary.
A 2007 meeting between Afghan district officials and U.S. civil affairs officers was documented in the reports. Afghan officials are quoted as saying, “The people of Afghanistan keep loosing [sic] their trust in the government because of the high amount of corrupted government officials. The general view of the Afghans is that the current government is worst [sic] than the Taliban.”
The logs recorded numerous civilian casualties from airstrikes, shootings on the road, in villages and at checkpoints; many were caught in the cross fire. The victims weren’t suicide bombers or insurgents. Several deaths were not reported to the public.
The Guantánamo Files
The Guantánamo Files say that only 220 of the 780 people held at the prison camp since 2002 were classified as “dangerous international terrorists.” Of the rest of the detainees, 380 were classified as low-level foot soldiers and 150 were considered innocent Afghan or Pakistani civilians or farmers.
Many detainees were held at Guantánamo for years based on paltry evidence or confessions extracted by torture and abuse. Among the detainees, for example, were an 89-year-old Afghan villager with senile dementia and a 14-year-old boy who was the innocent victim of a kidnapping.
The files document a system aimed more at extracting intelligence than detaining dangerous terrorists. One man was transferred to Guantánamo because he was a mullah with special knowledge of the Taliban. A taxi driver was sent to the prison camp because he had general knowledge of certain areas in Afghanistan. An Al Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years to be interrogated about the news network.
Nearly 100 detainees were classified with depressive or psychotic disorders. Several joined hunger strikes to protest their indefinite detention or attempted suicide, the files revealed.
No One Was Harmed by WikiLeaks’s Revelations
Although the U.S. government alleged that WikiLeaks’s publication of information had caused “great harm,” they “admitted there was not a single person anywhere that they could produce that was harmed by these publications,” Assange’s attorney Barry Pollack said at a June 26 press conference in Australia.
The plea agreement says, “Some of these raw classified documents were publicly disclosed without removing or redacting all of the personally identifiable information relating to certain individuals who shared sensitive information about their own governments and activities in their countries with the U.S. government in confidence.”
The U.S. government claims that Assange endangered U.S. informants who were named in the published documents. But John Goetz, an investigative reporter who worked for Germany’s Der Spiegel, testified at the 2020 extradition hearing that Assange went to great lengths to ensure that the names of informants in Iraq and Afghanistan were redacted. Goetz said that WikiLeaks underwent a “very rigorous redaction process” and Assange repeatedly reminded his media partners to use encryption. Indeed, Goetz said, Assange tried to stop Der Freitag from publishing material that could result in the release of unredacted information.
Moreover, WikiLeaks’s revelations actually saved lives. After WikiLeaks published evidence of Iraqi torture centers established by the U.S., the Iraqi government refused then-President Barack Obama’s request to grant immunity to U.S. soldiers who committed criminal and civil offenses there. As a result, Obama had to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq.
Obama took credit for ending U.S. military involvement in Iraq. But he had tried for months to extend it beyond the December 31, 2011, deadline his predecessor negotiated with the Iraqi government. Negotiations broke down when Iraq refused to grant criminal and civil immunity to U.S. troops.
What Assange’s Plea Bargain Means for Free Speech
Before she accepted Assange’s guilty plea, Judge Manglona asked him what he did to violate the law. “Working as a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified,” Assange said. “I believed the First Amendment protected that activity, but I accept that it was a violation of the espionage statute.” Assange then added, “The First Amendment was in contradiction with the Espionage Act, but I accept that it would be difficult to win such a case given all these circumstances.”
Even though Assange will go free, his plea deal raises concerns for First Amendment advocates in the U.S.
“The United States has now, for the first time in the more than 100-year history of the Espionage Act, obtained an Espionage Act conviction for basic journalistic acts,” David Greene, head of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The New York Times. “These charges should never have been brought.”
Charlie Savage, who has covered the Assange case extensively for years, warned that Assange’s plea sets a “new precedent” that “will send a threatening message to national security journalists, who may be chilled in how aggressively they do their jobs because they will see a greater risk of prosecution.” But, Savage noted, since Assange pled guilty and didn’t mount a constitutional challenge to the Espionage Act, that eliminated the risk that the U.S. Supreme Court would ultimately sanction a narrow interpretation of First Amendment press freedoms.
“WikiLeaks published groundbreaking stories of government corruption and human rights abuses, holding the powerful accountable for their actions,” WikiLeaks said in a statement announcing the plea agreement. “As editor-in-chief, Julian paid severely for these principles, and for the people’s right to know. As he returns to Australia, we thank all who stood by us, fought for us, and remained utterly committed in the fight for his freedom.”
There is no doubt that but for the sustained activism of people around the world and the work of his superb legal team, Julian Assange would still be languishing behind bars for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes.
The Suspect Body Count: The Death Toll in Gaza is Much Higher Than We’re Being Told
Seymour Hersh Substack Thu, 27 Jun 2024 https://www.sott.net/article/492600-The-Suspect-Body-Count-The-Death-Toll-in-Gaza-is-Much-Higher-Than-We-re-Being-Told
The number of slain Palestinians in Gaza, including those believed to be Hamas cadres, has gone through a series of public recalibrations in recent weeks, as Israel’s reshuffled war cabinet has struggled to minimize international rage at the slaughter there. The reduced body count was little more than a sideshow because the Israeli offensive is continuing in Gaza with no signs of the ceasefire that the Biden administration has been desperately seeking.
Hamas triggered the war last October 7 with a surprise attack — there is so far no official explanation for Israel’s security failure that day — that killed 1,139 Israelis and injured 3,400 more. Some 250 soldiers and civilians were taken hostage.
Comment: There is plenty of evidence to strongly suggest that Israel allowed the incursion on Oct. 7th to happen and that parties unknown carried out most of the killing. This strategy fits with Israel’s decades-long goal of creating the right ‘conditions’ to justify implementing a final solution to their ‘Palestinian problem’.
The expected Israeli response began within days, with the bombing of the Gaza Strip. Some Israeli ground operations inside Gaza began on October 13, and two weeks later the expected full-scale offensive began. The war still rages, with one estimate concluding that by the beginning of April 70,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on targets throughout the 25-mile long Gaza, more tonnage than was dropped by Germany on London and by America and the United Kingdom on Dresden and Hamburg in World War II, combined.
The Gaza Health Ministry, which is under Hamas control, estimated as of Tuesday that the death toll from the Israeli attacks stood at 37,718, with more than 86,000 Gazans wounded. Last month the Israeli government issued a much lower estimate of the casualties, stating that its planes and troops had killed 14,000 “terrorists” — Hamas fighters — and no more than 16,000 civilians.
The Biden administration, on the eve of the first presidential debate, has said nothing about the new numbers, but there are many senior analysts in the international human rights and social science community who consider these numbers to be hokum: a vast underestimate of the damage that has been done to a terrorized civilian population living in makeshift tents and shelters amid disease and malnutrition, with a lack of sanitation, medical care, and medicines as well as increasing desperation and fatigue.
In days of telephone and email exchanges with public health and statistical experts in America I found a general belief that the civilian death toll in Gaza, both from the bombings and their aftermath, had to be significantly higher than reported, but none of the scientists and statisticians — appropriately — was willing to say so in print because of a lack of access to accurate data. I also asked one well-informed American official what he thought the actual civilian death count in Gaza might be and he answered, without pause: “We just don’t know.”
One public health expert acknowledged: “No clear and definite body count is possible, given the continuing Israeli bombing.” He added, caustically, “How many bombs does it take to kill a human being?”
Gaza was an ideal target for an air attack, he said. “No functioning fire department. No fire trucks. No water. No place to escape. No hospitals. No electricity. People living in tents and bodies stacked up all over . . . being eaten by stray dogs.
“What the fuck is wrong with the international medical community?” he asked. “Who are we kidding? Without a ceasefire, a million people are going to starve. This is not a debating point. How can you count something when the system is biting its own tail.” He was referring to the fact that the health system in Gaza — its hospitals and service agencies — “is being targeted and shattered” by Israeli aircraft and those responsible for the counting of the dead and injured “are themselves dead.”
The expert added that the lack of better casualty statistics is not only the fault of Israel. “Hamas has a vested interest in consistently minimizing the number of civilians killed “because of a lack of planning over the years when it was in charge of Gaza.” He was referring to ordinary Gazan citizens’ lack of access to Hamas’s vast underground tunnel complex that could have served as a bomb shelter for all. In Gaza during the Israeli bombing raids, “Is Hamas going to say that Israel” was able to kill all in Gaza “because we started a war without being able to fully protect our people?” His point was that Hamas has every reason, as does Israel, to minimize the extent of innocent civilians who have become collateral damage in the ongoing war.
Comment: Hamas did not start this most recent round of mass slaughter by Israel on Oct 7th. Hamas has never provided Israel with the justification it always sought to massacre Gazans wholesale. On Oct. 7th, Israel provided itself with that justification.
A prominent American public health official who spoke to me acknowledged that he was also concerned about the numbers of unreported dead in Gaza. In a crisis, he said, “we can start with a name-by-name count, but pretty soon the numbers of killed and missing exceed the capacity of any such approach, especially when the counters are being killed and the records [are] at risk.” He said that various postwar academic studies of mortality during the siege of Mosul — when a US-led coalition fought a door-to-door fight in 2017 against the Islamic State in Iraq, killing as many 11,000 civilians — “showed the large loss of life from the use of high-velocity weapons in urban areas. So we should expect similar in Gaza.”
Other data suggest that the published death figures are seriously misleading. Save the Children, an international child protection agency, issued a report this month estimating that as many as 21,000 children in Gaza are “trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” Other children, the agency said, “have been forcibly disappeared, including an unknown number detained and forcibly transferred out of Gaza” with their whereabouts unknown to the families “amidst reports of ill-treatment and torture.”
Comment: As if the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza is not enough, it is highly likely that a large number of Palestinian children have been abducted by Zionist state forces, likely to be tortured and killed or otherwise used for the depraved pleasures of some of the people that inhabit that “shitty little country”.
Jeremy Stoner, the charity’s regional director for the Middle East, said: “Gaza has become a graveyard for children, with thousands of others missing, their fates unknown. . . . We desperately need a ceasefire to find and support the missing children who have survived, and to prevent more families from being destroyed.”
Warnings about the inevitability of far more deaths among the ordinary citizens of Gaza have been around since last winter. In December, Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, wrote in the Guardian that the Gaza war was “the deadliest conflict for children in recent years” with as many as 160 children being killed daily. The surviving children do not have “the basic needs that any human, especially babies and children, need to stay healthy and alive. . . . Unless something changes, the world faces the prospect of almost a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population — close to half a million human beings — dying within a year.
“It’s a crude estimate,” Sridhar wrote, “but one that is data-driven, using the terrifying real numbers of death in previous and comparable conflicts.”
The New York Times and the Washington Post reported Wednesday that a new study endorsed by the United Nations found that as many as half a million Gaza residents are facing imminent starvation because of “a lack of food.” The study also said that more than one half of the surviving residents of Gaza “had to exchange their clothes for money and one-third resorted to picking up trash to sell.”)
One of the most avid early critics of the official statistics published by the Gaza Health Ministry and accepted by most in the American media, has been Ralph Nader. On March 5, he wrote a column in the Capitol Hill Citizen, a monthly newspaper he founded, about what he called “the undercount” of Palestinian casualties in Gaza. He quoted Martin Griffiths, the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs: “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.”
In my years as a journalist, I have often found an oddball story that says more with each retelling. Something like that happened in February when Al Jazeera ran an interview with a 64-year-old Gazan undertaker named Saadi Hassan Sulieman Baraka, whose nickname is Abu Jawad. He complained of working almost constantly since the Israeli invasion of Gaza began.
“I’ve buried about ten times more people during this war than I did across my entire 27 years as an undertaker,” he said. “The least was 30 people and the most was 800. Since October 7, I’ve buried more than 17,000 people.” He especially remembered the day he buried the 800 dead. “We collected them in pieces; their bodies so riddled with holes it was like Israeli snipers used them for target practice; Others were crushed like . . . like a boiled potato, and many had huge facial burns.
“We couldn’t really tell one person’s body from the other, but we did our best. We made one big deep grave, probably 10 meters (30 feet) deep and buried them together.”
It could be propaganda — of course, it could. But Abu Jawad made no mention of anyone from the Gaza Health Ministry coming to collect the names of the dead. He made no mention of any government official being involved in the process at all.
Israel’s leaked plan for annexing the West Bank, explained
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s plan to annex the West Bank would see over 60% of the territory becoming a part of Israel. But Palestinian experts say it is “already happening.”
BY QASSAM MUADDI Mondoweiss
The issue of Israel’s creeping annexation of the West Bank has resurfaced in recent days after a leaked recording of Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich revealed a “dramatic” plan to impose permanent Israeli control over the West Bank “without the government being accused of annexing it,” as Smotrich was recorded saying.
Smotrich’s statements, recorded by the Peace Now Israeli NGO and published by CNN and the New York Times, were made during a speech he gave to settler leaders earlier in June. Smotrich was recorded saying that he had elaborated a plan in the past year and a half and exposed it to Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, who was “fully onboard.”
The plan centers around transferring administrative authorities in the West Bank from the Israeli army to the civil authorities of the Israeli government. Smotrich said that he oversaw the creation of an entire administrative body directly linked to the government and that members of this body were already embedded in the Israeli army’s Civil Administration.
In 1967, Israel began administering the West Bank and Gaza under a military administrative body, the Military Government, and in 1981, the Civil Administration was established in its place. Following Netanyahu’s formation of the most right-wing government in Israel’s history in 2022, Smotrich was put in charge of the Civil Administration. Since October 7, Smotrich’s hardline policies pushing for settlement expansion have reached new heights, with the recently leaked annexation plan raising fears about the intentions of the self-described fascist toward the Palestinians living in the West Bank.
According to Smotrich, the administrative changes he wishes to implement represent a “dramatic change” equivalent to “changing the DNA of the system.”
Smotrich said that large budgets were allocated to infrastructure projects for settlement expansion and for “security measures” for the settlements, adding that the aim of such a plan is “to avoid the West Bank from becoming part of a Palestinian state.”
Smotrich plan ‘already happening’………………………………..more https://mondoweiss.net/2024/06/israels-leaked-plan-for-annexing-the-west-bank-explained/
Israeli Officials Hiding Data About Forced Starvation of Gaza Prisoners: Report
Former detainees say the Israel Prison Service “has significantly reduced their food rations, to the point of starvation, causing them to shed dozens of kilograms.”
BRETT WILKINS, Jun 27, 2024, Common Dreams,
Israeli prison officials are concealing information about reductions in food rations for Palestinians held in the Gaza Strip, where detainees—who have also reported horrific abuse including alleged rape and deadly torture—have been deliberately driven “to the point of starvation,” according to a report published Thursday.
Security sources told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that the Israel Prison Service (IPS) is intentionally cutting Palestinian prisoners’ caloric intake, a move confirmed by Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who called the policy a “deterrent.”
“The Palestinian detainees will receive the minimum rights and the minimum food, and I will ensure that this policy is implemented,” Ben-Gvir, who leads the far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, said Thursday in response to a query from Israel’s Supreme Court…………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-starving-prisoners
Ten Holocaust survivors condemn Israel’s Gaza genocide
Holocaust survivors say using the Holocaust to justify genocide in Gaza and repress student protest on college campuses is a complete insult to the Holocaust’s memory.
BY OPEN LETTER https://mondoweiss.net/2024/06/ten-holocaust-survivors-condemn-israels-gaza-genocide/
Below is a letter signed by ten Holocaust survivors condemning the genocide in Gaza and the misuse of antisemitism accusations by politicians.
The co-founder of Human Rights Watch, Aryeh Neier, has recently said that Israel is engaged in genocide in Gaza. He’s also said that using accusations of antisemitism to attack Israel’s critics “debases the whole concept of antisemitism.” As Holocaust survivors, we are writing to agree wholeheartedly with Professor Neier — who himself only survived the Holocaust by escaping Nazi Germany as a child in 1939.
At a recent Holocaust memorial, Netanyahu declared: “We’ll defeat our genocidal enemies. Never again is now!”
Meanwhile, at another memorial, Biden warned of a “ferocious surge of antisemitism” on college campuses.
In our opinion, to use the memory of the Holocaust like this to justify either genocide in Gaza or repression on college campuses is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust.
The dehumanization of Palestinians, describing them as “human animals,” the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, indiscriminate bombing, the destruction of universities and hospitals, and the use of mass starvation — these are clearly stages of ethnic cleansing and genocide. They cannot be defended any more than sending weapons to commit this genocide or refusing funding to UNRWA. With no better arguments, our politicians have resorted to misusing the memory of the Holocaust while claiming that protesting against Israeli genocide is somehow antisemitic.
As Holocaust survivors, we have no special authority on the Middle East but we do know about antisemitism. It’s simply wrong to claim that it’s antisemitic to oppose Israeli genocide. It’s also wrong to claim that calling for equal rights for Jews and Arabs “from the river to the sea” is antisemitic.
As Holocaust survivors, we are just a few individuals but we want to add our voices to the growing global movement to demand a permanent ceasefire, an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and for the West to stop arming and supporting genocide.
Signatories
Jacques Bude (Brussels Belgium), survived in hiding in Belgium, parents killed in Auschwitz.
Marione Ingram (Washington DC), survived in hiding in Nazi Germany.
Stephen Kapos (London UK), survived the Budapest ghetto.
H. Richard Leuchtag (Houston TX), escaped Germany in 1938.
Rene Lichtman (Southfield MI), survived in hiding in France.
Adam Policzer (Vancouver BC), survived in hiding in Hungary.
Lillian Rosengarten (Cold Spring NY), escaped Germany in 1936.
Suzanne Ross (New York), escaped Nazi-occupied Belgium
Suzanne Berliner Weiss (Toronto Ont.), survived in hiding in France, mother killed in Auschwitz.
Ervin Somogyi (Oakland, CA), survivor from Hungary.
1 This Month
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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