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US to Palestinians: ‘Tighten your belts, our food pier still 2 months away’

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL, 27 Mar 24

US ships heading toward Gaza to build American’s food delivering pier are sputtering along at 10 to 15 knots. The USVA Gen. Frank Besson Jr has been refueling in the Azores since Friday. Once underway it still has 5,000 miles to traverse before reaching destination. All other ships are behind the Besson, with 2 not having left the US yet.

With starvation rampant in Gaza, thanks to US enabling the Israeli genocide there, Uncle Sam sure is taking his sweet time creating infrastructure to deliver food aid. It won’t do much good even if completed since Israel blocks most aid in entering Gaza. Might be that our benevolent Uncle is giving Israel time to complete their genocidal ethnic cleansing so we can just pack up and go home.

If the US treated the Berliners being starved by the Russians in 1948 like they’re treating the Palestinians being starved in Gaza, Berlin would have fallen to the Russkies pretty damn quick.

March 28, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, USA | Leave a comment

“Man-Made Hell On Earth”: A Canadian Doctor on His Medical Mission to Gaza

“I saw scenes that were horrific and I never want to see again,” said Yasser Khan, a surgeon from Toronto.

Jeremy Scahill, Intercepted, March 23 2024,

THROUGHOUT THE PAST five and a half months, Israel has waged a full-spectrum war against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The United States and other Western nations have supplied not only the weapons for this war of annihilation against the Palestinians, but also key political and diplomatic support.

The results of the actions of this coalition of the killing have been devastating. Conservative estimates hold that more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed, including 13,000 children. More than 8,000 people remain missing, many of them believed to have died in the rubble of buildings destroyed in Israeli attacks. Famine conditions are now present in large swaths of the Gaza Strip. The fact that the International Court of Justice has found grounds to investigate Israel for plausible acts of genocide in Gaza has not deterred the U.S. and its allies from continuing to facilitate Israel’s war.

The massive scale of human destruction caused by the attacks would pose grave challenges to well-equipped hospitals. In Gaza, however, many health care facilities have been decimated by Israeli attacks or evacuated, while a few remain open but severely limited in the care and services they offer. Israeli forces have repeatedly laid siege to hospital facilities, killing hundreds of medical workers and taking captive scores of others, despite thousands of internally displaced Palestinians sheltering in the health care complexes. This week, Israel again launched raids on Al-Shifa Hospital, reportedly killing more than 140 people.

For months, doctors across Gaza have performed amputations and other high-risk procedures without anesthetics or proper operating rooms. Antibiotics are in short supply and often unavailable. Communicable diseases are spreading, as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are forced to live in makeshift shelters with little access to toilets or basic sanitary supplies. Many new mothers are unable to breastfeed and infant formula shortages are common. Israel has repeatedly blocked or delayed aid shipments of vital medical supplies to Gaza. Basic preventative medical care is nearly nonexistent, and medical experts predict that malnutrition will condemn a new generation of young Palestinians to a life of developmental struggles.

The result of the onslaught against medical facilities is that there is only one fully functional hospital remaining in the territory, the European Hospital in Khan Younis. Dr. Yasser Khan, a Canadian ophthalmologist and plastic surgeon, just left Gaza where he spent 10 days at the hospital performing eye surgeries on victims of Israeli attacks. It was his second medical mission to Gaza since the war began last October.

What follows is a transcript of a lightly edited interview with Khan.

………………………Yasser Khan: Well, I’m from the greater Toronto area here in Canada, and I’ve been in practice for about 20 years. I’m an ophthalmologist, but I specialize in eyelid and facial plastic and reconstructive surgery.

So that’s my sub-specialty and that’s what I’ve been doing for about 20 years. And I’m a professor. I’ve been to over 45 different countries on a humanitarian basis where I’ve taught surgery, I’ve done surgery, I’ve established programs. And so I’ve been to many types of areas and zones in Africa, Asia, and South America…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

So that’s the kind of mass chaos that I encountered initially, and then I was told that every time there’s a bomb, give it about 15 minutes and the mass casualties come. That was the other thing that at the time shocked me: What we’d been seeing livestreamed on Instagram, on social media or whatever, I actually saw myself and it was worse than I can imagine. I saw scenes that were horrific that I’d never witnessed before and I never want to see again…………………………………………………….

It was quite demoralizing. You’ve gotta be on the ground to see how bad it is. In two months, things were not only the same in a bad way, but they’re much, much worse because now, two months later, Khan Younis has literally been destroyed as a city. It was an active, hustling, bustling city. The Nasser Hospital, as you know, it’s destroyed now. It’s basically a death zone. And there’s decomposing bodies in the hospital now. It’s been evacuated. And I will add one thing: As a health care worker, I know fully well that to build a major, fully functioning hospital takes years to perfect and build and process, right? So it’s a sheer tragedy that it’s destroyed in mere hours, so it’s really unfortunate…………………………………

So now [at European Gaza Hospital] instead of 20,000 people, there’s about 35,000 people seeking shelter in a hospital that’s already beyond capacity. And so now, both outside and inside, there’s a mass of people. There’s no place to move now in the hallways. The sterility of the hospital has significantly decreased. The European Gaza Hospital, all you have to do is go online and look at their pictures before. It was a beautiful, gorgeous hospital. Well-built, well-run, good quality control — and now it’s reduced to a place that is a mess. It’s a mess. There’s people cooking inside the hospital hallways, there’s the bathrooms, there’s people mixed in with the people who are sick, with major orthopedic injuries, post op. There’s no beds. So sometimes people go and just sleep in their little makeshift shelters. And so infection is, if you can imagine, infection is rampant. So if you don’t die the first time or if your leg or arm is not amputated the first time, it is for sure with infection. So then they have to amputate it to save your life. So it’s much, much worse.

The other thing I noticed was now, more so than even before, the health care workers and nurses and the doctors, they’re just burnt out. I mean, they’re just spent. They’ve witnessed so much in almost six months now. They’ve seen so much on a regular, hourly, daily basis. When I operate [at a hospital in Canada], typically speaking, I’ve got a few mostly elective lists, elective kind of not urgent problems that you gotta fix. And then there’s some trauma, or something that comes in that’s a bit more urgent once in a while, right? That’s my usual list. But [Palestinian medical workers], they are working on a daily basis on the most horrific, explosive trauma that you’ve ever seen. They’re doing sometimes 14, 15 amputations, mostly on children, per day, and they’ve been doing it for six months now.

The thing I try to emphasize to people is that it’s not only the actual medical trauma, it’s the other trauma associated with it in that these patients come in, if you’ve been involved in an explosive injury, and you come in injured, guaranteed you’ve lost loved ones. Guaranteed. So you’ve either lost a father, a mother, a child, all your children, all your family, your uncle, aunt, grandparents, your house, whatever. You’ve lost something. So every patient that comes in, not only is severely injured, is dealing with this trauma.

I had one girl who basically lost all her siblings, 8-year-old beautiful girl, lost her siblings. She came in for a leg fracture, was under the rubble for 12 hours. And her mother died, all her siblings gone. And all her family [were] gone, her aunts and uncles. As you know, it’s a generational killing, like slaughter. Generations. There’s about 2,000 families that have been erased now completely, are gone. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………

This has been a systematic, intentional attack on the health care system. The bizarre thing of all of this is that the Israeli politicians have not hidden it. They have said open statements about creating epidemics. There’s been tons of open statements about what they intend to do. So you can’t even make this stuff up. It’s bizarre how they have openly said this, right? But having said that, I think over 450 health care workers have been killed — doctors, nurses, paramedics, over 450 — when they’re not supposed to be a target, right? They’re protected by international law. Doctors have been kidnapped, specific doctors who are of unique specialties have been targeted and killed.

Doctors have been kidnapped, and, yes, they have been tortured. They dehumanize the doctors and health care workers when they capture them. We’ve seen pictures of them, so we know this happens, and it does indeed happen. A few of the doctors went through torture, and one doctor that came back, he’s a general surgeon, he came back, I was speaking to his wife, and he’s not the same anymore. He was tortured and he still has torture marks over his body, and he’s a general surgeon. That’s it, just a medical professional. The assistant director of the hospital was basically declothed and beat up in front of all the other hospital workers just to kind of insult and degrade him because he’s their boss. And they’re beating him up and kicking him and swearing at him, and everybody witnessed this, and they did it purposely in front of his workers. So, it’s a further dehumanization of a human being. These doctors when they come back, the few that are released, there’s still a lot that are under custody with the Israeli forces, they’re not the same anymore. For me, as a surgeon, it’s really heartbreaking for me to see that. As a surgeon, we have people’s lives in our hands and we heal. And then to see them mentally reduced to nothing is hard to take. Yeah. It’s hard to stomach……………………………………………………………………………………………

What I saw — I’m an eye surgeon, an eye plastic surgeon, and so I saw the classic, what I penned “the Gaza shrapnel face,” because in an explosive scenario, you don’t know what’s coming. When there’s an explosion, you don’t go like this [cover your face], you kind of actually, in fact, open your eyes. And so shrapnel’s everywhere. It’s a well-known fact that the Israeli forces are experimenting [with] weapons in Gaza to boost their weapon manufacturing industry. Because if a weapon is battle-tested, it’s more valuable, isn’t it? It’s got a higher value. So basically they’re using these weapons, these missiles that purposely, intently create these large shrapnel fragments that go everywhere. And they cause amputations that are unusual…………………………………………………………………………………….

And so I saw these facial injuries, I saw limbs of children just kind of hanging off, barely connected. I saw abdominal wounds where you had, of course, the intestines exposed. And the thing is that the emergency does not have room, so they’re all over the floor. So you have these massive trauma, and [the patients] are on the floor. And sometimes they get forgotten in the mass chaos………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://theintercept.com/2024/03/23/intercepted-doctor-gaza-interview/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The%20Intercept%20Newsletter

March 25, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel, Reference | Leave a comment

PATRICK LAWRENCE: Authorized Atrocities

the true rupture lies with those in the West who are sucked into Israel’s utter immorality


Israel’s lawlessness has a history that those in the West share with the apartheid state. 

By Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News , 20 Mar 24

It is remarked often enough, including in this space, that Israel’s savagery in its determination to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza — and we had better brace for what is next on the West Bank of the Jordan — marks a turn for all of humanity.

In its descent into depravity the Zionist state drags the West altogether down with it. 

This is true, certainly, but we must put Israel’s criminal conduct, which warrants another Nuremberg trial at this point, in its proper context.

When we do, we find that Israel’s lawlessness has a history, an etymology, and if there is a road to Western salvation it must start with a recognition of a past that those in the West share with the apartheid state.  

We can say Israel’s crimes against Gaza’s 2.3 million children, women, and men are unspeakable, in other words, but this would not be right. They are altogether speakable, and it behooves us now to speak of them if we are to grasp where responsibility for this stain upon the human story truly lies.   

Pankaj Mishra has just published a thorough and thoroughly remarkable piece on these matters in the London Review of Books. 

The Indian author, essayist, and columnist takes up many things in “The Shoah After Gaza,” chiefly the extent to which Zionists have exhausted “the culture of conspicuous Holocaust consumption” — excellent phrase — in defense of a nation that, to quote Primo Levi, “was a mistake in historical terms.” 

Here is a passage in Mishra’s piece that is to our present point: 

“Israel today is dynamiting the edifice of global norms built after 1945, which has been tottering since the catastrophic and still unpunished war on terror and Vladimir Putin’s revanchist war in Ukraine. The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 — the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.”……………………………………………………………………………….

 I confine myself to the postwar decades to allow us to take a good, clear look at that “edifice of global norms” of which Mishra writes. 

When we do, we find the West has licensed the Israelis. They bear a pre-authorization by way of many precedents. There is one for more or less every shameful act the Israelis perpetrate against the Palestinian population — this in the West Bank as well as Gaza.  

And so we discover — or remind ourselves, depending on how attentive we have been to events — that the post–1945 edifice has looked from the start roughly as it looks now. Israel is at bottom an outcome, not the prime cause of anything.  

Insidious Mythology

Certainly the grotesque spectacle of mass murder and wholesale destruction we witness daily has marked a rupture, to stay with Mishra’s term. But to assert that this rupture lies in Israel’s conduct is to sustain an insidious mythology of innocence for the West.

No, the true rupture lies with those in the West who are sucked into Israel’s utter immorality and now come face-to-face with their amoral indifference or, for the best of them, discover the extent of their powerlessness despite their authentic efforts. 

As to Israel, I am with Primo Levi as Mishra quotes him. “The Jewish state” had already proven a mistake when he made his much-disputed remark in 1985.

The truth of it has since been demonstrated a hundred times over. Israel has proven a failed experiment, incapable of conducting itself as a legitimate nation-state. 

But whose mistake is Israel? It was the West, Britain in the lead, that created Israel by caving to the Zionists at the expense of indigenous Palestinians. This is the reality of power that should weigh most heavily on our shoulders. Israel ‘R’ us. 

Britain’s abandonment of the 1920 Mandate brings us to one of the deeper characteristics of our time, our postwar edifice. This is the ever more complete disregard of those in power for the principles, standards and broadly accepted ethics that give form and coherence to a stable civilization and keep its public space clean and well lit. 

In our crumbling edifice, everything is done according to its value as an expedient to a desired outcome. This, too, is a kind of depravity. And it is this depravity that produces the depravity we watch as we watch Israel’s effort to destroy an entire people.  https://consortiumnews.com/2024/03/20/patrick-lawrence-authorized-atrocities/

March 25, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, history, Israel | Leave a comment

‘Everyone in the World Needs to See This’: Footage Shows IDF Drone Killing Gazans

“There is no way they could have been considered combatants,” said one writer and analyst. “This is unreal.”

JESSICA CORBETT, Mar 21, 2024,  https://www.commondreams.org/news/palestinians-killed-by-israel

Adding to the mountain of evidence that Israel is engaged in a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, Al Jazeera on Thursday aired footage of what the news outlet reported was an Israeli drone targeting four Palestinians in Khan Younis last month.

Those killed by the unmanned aerial vehicle in the rubble of the southern Gaza city appear to be unarmed teenagers or young men. According to a translation of the coverage, they were not identified in the reporting.

While Al Jazeera deemed footage “too graphic” to be included on its daily live blog covering the war, a clip of it quickly spread on social media, where critics of the Israel Defense Forces operation expressed outrage.

“OUTRAGEOUS even after months of outrages,” declared Palestinian American political analyst Yousef Munayyer. “This video shows an Israeli military drone literally stalking four unarmed civilians posing no threat and eliminating them one after the other!!!”

Tariq Kenney-Shawa, Al-Shabaka’s U.S. policy fellow, said: “This is among the worst footage I’ve seen. Not only were these boys clearly unarmed and present no threat whatsoever, but they were struck multiple times even after stumbling/crawling away. There is no way they could have been considered combatants. This is unreal.”

Note: The following video contains graphic images. [on original]

Assal Rad, an author with a Ph.D. in Middle East history, said: “Have we ever seen so many war crimes take place right before our eyes? Any country still providing weapons and aid to Israel is complicit in these crimes.”

Exiled American whistleblower Edward Snowden asserted that “everyone in the world needs to see this. Note that this footage permits no room for ‘it was a mistake,’ showing repeated, specifically targeted strikes on the unarmed and even wounded.”

“The sort of behavior the ICJ explicitly forbid in the genocide ruling against Israel,” added Snowden, referencing the International Court of Justice’s preliminary order in January for an ongoing case led by South Africa.

Since the ruling, rights groups around the world have accused Israel of ignoring the ICJ order by continuing to bomb and starve people across Gaza. The mounting casualties—at least 31,988 killed and 74,188 wounded—have elevated demands for the U.S. government to end arms transfers to Israel.

The United States gives its Middle East ally $3.8 billion in annual military aid and since the Israeli assault was launched in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack on October 7, the Biden administration has sought $14.3 billion more while bypassing Congress to send more weapons. U.S. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin face a genocide complicity case in federal court.

While the Biden administration has repeatedly vetoed and opposed cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly, Nate Evans, a spokesperson for Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., confirmed Thursday that the United States plans to unveil a new one on Friday.

The resolution will “unequivocally support ongoing diplomatic efforts aimed at securing an immediate cease-fire in Gaza as part of a hostage deal, which would get hostages released and help enable a surge in humanitarian aid,” Evans told Al Jazeera. “This resolution is an opportunity for the council to speak with one voice to support the diplomacy happening on the ground and pressure Hamas to accept the deal on the table.”

Blinken said Thursday that “there’s a clear consensus around a number of shared priorities. First, the need for an immediate, sustained cease-fire, with the release of hostages. That would create space to surge more humanitarian assistance, to relieve the suffering of many people, and to build something more enduring.”

March 25, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel | Leave a comment

‘We are the masters of the house’: Israeli channels air snuff videos featuring systematic torture of Palestinians

It’s hard to imagine the depths to which Israeli society has sunk. The official tells the Channel 13 reporter that “the feeling is one of pride.”

Israeli TV channels aired a number of reports showing the torture and humiliation of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The videos are consumed by the Israeli public as entertainment, revealing the sadism of Israeli society.

BY JONATHAN OFIR   , https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/we-are-the-masters-of-the-house-israeli-channels-air-snuff-videos-featuring-systematic-torture-of-palestinians/

Over the past month, mainstream Israeli television channels have aired what can only be described as snuff films. They depict the systematic torture of Palestinians from Gaza in Israeli jails. Such videos have aired on at least three occasions — twice on Channel 14, and once on the public broadcaster, Channel 13. While Channel 14 is considered right-wing, so is about two-thirds of the Israeli public, and the more “mainstream” Channel 13 has shown no qualms about airing similar footage. 

The broadcasts follow prison officials into detention centers to document the mistreatment of prisoners, which seems to be something that the officials — and apparently the viewers — find satisfying rather than revolting. The airing of these snuff films is a demonstration of societal sadism. 

As Yumna Patel has recently reported, several rights groups have sounded the alarm over the widespread and systemic abuse that Palestinian prisoners face at the hands of the Israeli authorities. These groups’ calls have been unintentionally buttressed by Israeli soldiers’ unapologetic videos of themselves torturing or demeaning Palestinian detainees, which they boastfully post on social media. Now, it seems that the phenomenon has expanded to mainstream Israeli television.   

The two aforementioned reports on Channel 14 (threads with subtitles can be found here and here) contained footage of actual interrogation sessions during which torture was used. The Channel 13 report did not, but it exposed some of the worst prison conditions to be broadcast to the public. These conditions include forcing prisoners to live in inhumane conditions and subjecting them to torture and harassment. Here’s the 11-minute video with translated subtitles.

‘The feeling is one of pride’

“Here, we see the cells in which the Nukhba terrorists are held,” the narrator says.

The “Nukhba” refers to elite Hamas-led fighters who carried out the October 7 attack. In the cell, viewers notice metal bunkbeds without mattresses, and instead of a toilet, there is just a hole in the floor. The room is almost completely dark throughout the day, and prisoners have their hands and legs chained together. 

We hear attack dogs barking constantly as prisoners are made to kneel while bound and blindfolded, their heads touching the floor. 

“This is how it should be,” a guard says. “This is how a Nukhba prisoner should be…what happened on October 7 will never return.” 

In another scene, a guard shouts at prisoners as dogs continue to bark incessantly. “Heads down! Heads on the floor!” he yells. 

“There are many prisoners here that I personally saw at the [October 7] events,” a prison official says, taking pride in humiliating them. “The difference is that this time, he is afraid, shaking, with his head on the floor…no Allahu Akbar, nothing. You won’t hear a squeak from him.”

“They have no mattresses,” says a warden shift commander. “They have nothing…we control them 100% — their food, their shackling, their sleep…[we] show them we are the masters of the house.” Even without knowing the background to that phrase, to hear him say it is chilling. 

“Masters of the house” was the election slogan of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish Power leader and current Minister of National Security. Ben-Gvir declared war on Palestinian prisoners long before October 7, and this has included shutting down bakeries that supply bread to prisoners — described by Ben-Gvir as an “indulgence” — and drastically limiting prisoners’ water use. So now it’s become much worse. 

While one is tempted to believe that all prisoners here are “Nukhba” members, it turns out that many of them aren’t even suspected of that. Rather, they were rounded up in Gaza after October 7, during mass arrests in which hundreds of Gazan men were stripped and paraded in a most sadistic demonstration of power. The mass arrests also included hundreds of women, including pregnant women detained with their babies. Israeli security officials told Haaretz that by their own estimate, “only 10 to 15 percent of the hundreds of the semi-naked and bound Gazan men arrested in the Strip during the recent days are Hamas members or those who identified with the organization.”

Back to the Channel 13 coverage, viewers can hear the nonstop blasting of the Zionist anthem, Am Israel Hai (“the people of Israel live”). 

“The prison authorities claim that it is meant to boost the morale of the staff,” the narrator declares. “But it is clear that this is another part of the psychological warfare against the prisoners.” 

Torture, in other words. 

It’s hard to imagine the depths to which Israeli society has sunk. The official tells the Channel 13 reporter that “the feeling is one of pride.”

 The reason such sadism has become formalized as a matter of policy is because this is what the Israeli public demands. The Israeli Democracy Institute released a survey last week showing that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis oppose “the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents at this time,” even if “via international bodies that are not linked to Hamas or to UNRWA.” For right-wing voters, the opposition to aid jumps from 68% to 80%. 

This is not Israel’s Abu Ghraib moment, because when Abu Ghraib was revealed, most Americans were revolted. Israeli society, on the other hand, is thirsting for genocide. No wonder they consume such videos as entertainment on mainstream TV.

Thanks to Tali Shapiro, B.M.@ireallyhatyou, Hilel Biton-Rosen, and Dave Reed.

March 23, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel, Reference | Leave a comment

Aid Wars over Gaza: Resuming Funding to UNRWA

March 12, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark  https://theaimn.com/aid-wars-over-gaza-resuming-funding-to-unrwa/

The steady and ruthless campaign by Israel to internationally defund the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is unravelling. The lynchpin in the effort was a thin, poison pen dossier making claims that 12 individuals were Hamas operatives who had been involved in the October 7 attacks. Within a matter of days, two internal investigations were commenced, various individuals sacked, and US$450 million worth of funding from donor states suspended.

As the head of the agency, Philippe Lazzarini, explained at a press conference on March 4, he has “never been informed” or received evidence of Israel’s claims substantiating their assertions, though he did receive the prompt about the profane twelve directly from Israeli officials. Every year, both Israel and the Palestinian authorities were furnished with staff lists, “and I never received the slightest concern about the staff that we have been employing.”

Had Israeli authorities signed off on these alleged participants in bungling or conspiratorial understanding? Certainly, there was more than a pongy whiff of distraction about it all, given that Israel had come off poorly in The Hague proceedings launched by South Africa, during which the judges issued an interim order demanding an observance of the UN Genocide Convention, an increase of humanitarian aid, and the retention of evidence that might be used for future criminal prosecutions for genocide.

An abrupt wave of initial success in starving the agency followed, with a number of countries announcing plans to freeze funding. In the United States, irate members of Congress accused the agency of having “longstanding connections to terrorism and promotion of antisemitism.” A hearing was duly held titled “UNRWA Exposed: Examining the Agency’s Mission and Failures” with Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies frothing at an agency that supposedly incited “violence against Israel, subsidizes US-designated terrorist organizations, denies Palestinians their basic human rights, and blocks the pathways to a sustainable peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

The attempt to cast UNRWA into gleefully welcomed oblivion has not worked. Questions were asked about the initial figure of twelve alleged militants. News outlets began questioning the numbers.

The funding channels are resuming. Canada, for instance, approving “the robust investigative process underway”, also acknowledged that “more can be done to respond to the urgent needs of Palestinian civilians.” The initial cancellation of funding to the agency, charged Thomas Woodley, president of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, had been “a reckless political decision that never should have been made.”

The Swedish government was also encouraged by undertakings made by UNRWA “to allow independent auditing, strengthen internal supervision and enable additional staff controls”, promising an initial outlay of 200 million kroner (US$19 million).

The Minister for International Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade, Johan Forssell, promised that it would “monitor closely to ensure UNRWA follows through on what it has promised.” Aid policy spokesperson for the Christian Democrats, Gudrun Brunegård, also conceded that, given the “huge” needs on the part of the civilian population, that UNRWA was “the organisation that is best positioned to help vulnerable Palestinians.”

Much the same sentiment was expressed by the European Union, with the Commission agreeing to pay 50 million euros to UNRWA from a promised total of 82 million euros on the proviso that EU-appointed experts audit the screening of staff. “This audit,” a European Commission statement explains, “will review the control systems to prevent the possible involvement of its staff and assets in terrorist activities.” Having been found wanting in her screeching about-turn, the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen insisted that the EU stood “by the Palestinian people in Gaza and elsewhere in the region. Innocent Palestinians should not have to pay the price for the crimes of [the] terrorist group Hamas.”

Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi was stiffly bureaucratic in expressing satisfaction at “the commitment of UNRWA to introduce robust measures to prevent possible misconduct and minimise the risk of allegations.” At no point was Israel’s own contribution to the calamity, and its insatiable vendetta against the agency, mentioned.

The bombast and blunder of the whole effort by Israel was further discoloured by claims that UNRWA staff had been victims of torture at the hands of the IDF in drafting the dossier. In a statement released by the agency, a grave accusation was levelled: “These forced confessions as a result of torture are being used by the Israeli Authorities to further spread misinformation about the agency as part of attempts to dismantle UNRWA.” In doing so, Israel was “putting our staff at risk and has serious implications on our operations in Gaza and around the region.”

For its part, the IDF, through a statement, claimed that this was all exaggerated piffle: “The mistreatment of detainees during their time in detention or whilst under interrogation violates IDF values and contravenes IDF [sic] and is therefore absolutely prohibited.”

Increasingly on the losing side of that battle, Israeli authorities decided to cook the figures further, declaring with crass confidence that 450 URWA employees in Gaza were members of militant groups including Hamas. Sticking to routine, those making that allegation decided that evidence of such claims was not needed. Those employees, claimed Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, “are military operatives in terror groups in Gaza”. “This was no coincidence. This is systematic. There is no claiming, ‘we did not know’.”

In the fog of war, mendacity thrives with virile vigour; but the current suggestion on the part of various donor states is that the humanitarian incentive to ameliorate the suffering of the Gaza populace has taken precedence over Israel’s persistently lethal efforts. That, at least, is the case with certain countries, leaving the doubters starkly exposed.

March 15, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Israel Accused Of Torturing UN Workers To Obtain False Testimony About UNRWA

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, MAR 9, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israel-accused-of-torturing-un-workers

A recent UNRWA document says its staff report having been tortured while detained by Israeli forces, who pressed them to provide false statements about ties between the agency and Hamas.

“The document said several UNRWA Palestinian staffers had been detained by the Israeli army, and added that the ill-treatment and abuse they said they had experienced included severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members,” Reuters reports, saying UNRWA workers “reported having been pressured by Israeli authorities into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the Oct. 7 attacks.” 

This is another one of those stories about Israeli offenses that are so stunning that at first you can mistakenly believe you must not be reading it correctly — especially since the western political-media class haven’t been treating it like the jarring news that it is. If we had anything remotely like an objective news media in the western world, reports that Israel tortured United Nations staff to get them to make false statements against a UN aid agency would be the top story everywhere for days.

Many, including myself, speculated that torture was involved in obtaining the Israeli “intelligence” behind initial claims of UNRWA staff involvement in the October 7 attack when this narrative first surfaced back in January. A senior Israeli official told Axios at the time that Israeli intelligence agencies came upon the information about the UNRWA staffers largely through “interrogations of militants who were arrested during the Oct. 7 attack.” Israel has an extensive history of using torture in its interrogations, and there’s no reason to believe such methods haven’t been used on captured Hamas fighters in recent months — but reports that it was actual UN staff being tortured are something new.

We may be certain that if it was Hamas being accused of torturing workers for international aid agencies in order to extract false confessions, we’d never hear the end of it. To this day unsubstantiated rumors of mass systemic sexual violence on October 7 continue to dominate the headlines resulting in scandalous instances of journalistic malpractice, despite the Israeli spinmeisters behind those reports having a much worse track record than UNRWA in the truth-telling department and UNRWA standing much less to gain than Israel by lying.

But that’s what the information ecosystem looks like in the shadow of the empire. The flimsiest allegations against enemies of the US-centralized power alliance are spun as gospel truth and kept in the headlines for months, while even the most damning evidence against the empire never gets anything better than a cursory nod from the mass media and is then promptly memory-holed as the daily news churn moves on.

March 11, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

The lesson from the criminal H Bomb Bravo “test”- Hibakusha remind us

Race was, of course, a factor. During the Pacific War, The New York Times quoted a U.S. general as saying that he and his troops saw Japanese as “vermin” to be eradicated. The implicit assumption was that Marshallese were darker skinned primitives who could be sacrificed, ostensibly in the pursuit of world peace. In both cases, Japanese and Rongelap Hibakusha claimed that they were used as human “guinea pigs,” monitored by doctors and other scientists but not given medicine.

Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism. But those who gather in the Marshall Islands and Yaizu City in Japan will not only be marking the 70th anniversary of the devastating Bravo test and honoring those victimized and lost. We will also be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”

  

Hibakusha remind us just why a nuclear-free world is needed

By Joseph Gerson, 4 Mar 24,  https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/03/04/the-lesson-from-the-criminal-bravo-test/

Later this month I will return to Japan for the annual Bikini commemoration and the Gensuikyō, or Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, annual conference. There won’t be a bikini fashion show.

The commemoration of what can only be called the criminal U.S. Bravo H-bomb test on March 1, 1954, is one of two annual anchor events of the Japanese peace movement. Although Covid-19 is still with us, these events will play important roles in revitalizing the Japanese peace movement; one of the most effective in the world. 

Over the years, this movement has played a major role in preventing Japan from becoming a nuclear weapons state, and the testimonies of Hibakusha (victims and witnesses of the A-bombings) have played critical roles in inspiring the nuclear disarmament diplomacy and the international negotiations that resulted in the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Although I initially met several Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb survivors as early as the 1978 U.N. Second Session of Nuclear Disarmament, it wasn’t until I first traveled to Hiroshima in 1984 that I began what became a 40-year engagement with Hibakusha and the Japanese movement.

In an effort to compensate for his earlier support for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign and to bring nonexistent jobs bacon to Boston, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and, following him, the Massachusetts congressional delegation and the city’s business establishment were suckered into Reagan-administration planning to transform Boston Harbor into a nuclear weapons base.

Knowing the Navy’s record of nuclear weapons accidents, the ways that the base would ratchet up tensions with Moscow and violate the freeze, and with knowledge of better economic and social uses for the waterfront property, several of us organized at the grassroots level to prevent construction of the base. We prevailed, and I was invited to give a brief inspirational speech at the World Conference against A- and H- Bombs. Needless to say, my first trip to Hiroshima was a transformative experience.

Not long thereafter, I returned to Japan for the Bikini Day commemorations and was shocked by what I learned from the testimonies of Rongelap and Japanese survivors of the March 1, 1954, Bravo “test.” Bravo was by far the most devastating of the United States’ nuclear weapons explosions that pulverized Bikini between 1946 and 1958. It was detonated a year after the Soviets tested their first H-bomb and two years before a culturally explosive women’s two-piece swimsuit was first marketed in Paris.

Washington responded to the Soviet Union’s first H-bomb with a bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb that destroyed an entire city, initially killed 100,000 people—almost all civilians—and poisoned survivors, the environment, and future generations. Ninety-eight miles away from the Bikini H-bomb test site, inhabitants of tropical Rongelap Atoll were showered by and played with radioactive ash that they first thought was snow. Just 500 miles from the equator, they had never seen snow. Japanese fishing boats hundreds of miles from Bikini Atoll and fish that comprised a major portion of Japan’s ocean-based food supply were also irradiated.

Before the year was out, natives of Rongelap and Japanese fishermen began to die from radiation diseases and cancer. Still births and numerous birth defects including jellyfish babies (transparent skin and no bones), anencephaly (infants born without portions of their brain or skull), and other mutations followed.

Secrecy was immediately imposed by both the U.S. and Japanese governments. But as word got out following the return of the Lucky Dragon V tuna fishing boat’s sickened crew to Yaizu City, women with memories of Hiroshima launched a petition campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It garnered 25 million Japanese signatures, leading to the convening of the first World Conference against A- and H- Bombs, which attracted delegates from across Japan and around the world. 

Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb victims, many of whom had hidden themselves from the world due to their disfigurements, excruciating physical and emotional pains, and popular fears that their radiation diseases were contagious began to tell their stories. What became the world’s most powerful and long enduring nuclear disarmament social movement was born.

Two years after Bravo, in 1956, the first Godzilla film (released in Japan in 1954) was distributed in the United States. The original Japanese version, unlike the deracinated version shown in the US, was not the compelling story of a love triangle. It was a powerful expression of rage against the A-and H- bombs, a cry for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Watching it now, the desperate fear of nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini bombs—fears blunted over the decades—remains palpable.

Race was, of course, a factor. During the Pacific War, The New York Times quoted a U.S. general as saying that he and his troops saw Japanese as “vermin” to be eradicated. The implicit assumption was that Marshallese were darker skinned primitives who could be sacrificed, ostensibly in the pursuit of world peace. In both cases, Japanese and Rongelap Hibakusha claimed that they were used as human “guinea pigs,” monitored by doctors and other scientists but not given medicine.

This outrageous charge was difficult and painful to believe, bringing to mind as it did Dr. Josef Mengele’s murderous experiments at the Auschwitz death camp. But in 2000, in the course of hosting a “Global Hibakusha delegation” for a conference at the United Nations, several of us met with the senior Department of Energy (DOE) official who was responsible for studies of the impacts of radiation on people. I explained that in Japan I had heard Hibakusha cry out that they had been used as “guinea pigs” in experiments conducted by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. I said that I could understand victims thinking the worst of their tormentors, but expressed some doubt and asked if he could say it wasn’t so.

“No,” he responded. The experiments had indeed been conducted. And an Utah downwinder who was with us raged in response that the same was secretly being done across the western United States. She was a woman who had lost her father and father-in-law to uranium mining, her sister and daughter to Nevada test fallout, and who consumed a daily meal of pills simply to stay alive.

Some years later I experienced an equally sobering reverberation from the Bikini H-bomb. It came during a lunch break in a well-appointed conference site during another annual Bikini commemoration. A descendant of Rongelap Hibakusha was given a book about the Bikini H-bomb and its devastations. It included a list of the names of each of Rongelap’s inhabitants on that 1954 March 1 morning. One by one this young man placed a check mark next to the name of each person who had died of cancer and other radiation diseases from the Bravo “test.” I watched amidst very painful silence as he methodically checked off the names of nearly every person on the list. Some were women and men I had met along our ways

The disastrous underwater Baker atomic test at Bikini Atoll that preceded the even more out of control Bravo shot. (Photo: U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps/Wikimedia Commons)

Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism. But those who gather in the Marshall Islands and Yaizu City in Japan will not only be marking the 70th anniversary of the devastating Bravo test and honoring those victimized and lost. We will also be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”

The hands of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock are now set at 90 seconds to midnight. We face the risks of possible nuclear escalation in Ukraine, the Middle East, and over Taiwan tensions. With the post-Cold War order in free fall, all nine nuclear weapons states are escalating their arms racing, “modernizing” or expanding their nuclear arsenals. In these critical movements the messages from the Marshall Islands, Yaizu City, and nearby Shizuoka will be clear: The U.N. Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons must be universally signed and ratified to make way for a nuclear weapons-free world. And here in the United States, campaigns like Back from the Brink provide paths and hope for human survival.

What must be found is the will!

Dr. Joseph Gerson is the President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security. 

March 6, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Atrocities, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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