Genocide: The New Normal
The genocide, and the decision to fuel it with billions of dollars, marks an ominous turning point. It is a public declaration by the U.S. and its allies in Europe that international and humanitarian law, although blatantly disregarded by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and a generation earlier in Vietnam, is meaningless.
By Chris Hedges ScheerPost January 7, 2025, https://scheerpost.com/2025/01/07/chris-hedges-genocide-the-new-normal/
Joe Biden’s parting gift of $8 billion in weapons sales to the apartheid state of Israel acknowledges the gruesome reality of the genocide in Gaza. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. This is a permanent, endless war designed not to destroy Hamas, or free Israeli hostages, but to eradicate, once and for all, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is the final push to create a Greater Israel, which will include not only Gaza and the West Bank, but chunks of Lebanon and Syria. It is the culmination of the Zionist dream. And it will be paid for with rivers of blood — Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian.
Minister of Agriculture and Food Security of Israel Avi Dichter was probably offering conservative estimates when he said “I think that we are going to stay in Gaza for a long time. I think most people understand that [Israel] will be years in some kind of West Bank situation where you go in and out and maybe you remain along Netzarim [corridor].”
Mass extermination takes time. It is also expensive. Fortunately for Israel, its lobby in the U.S. has a stranglehold on Congress, our electoral process and the media narrative. Americans, although 61 percent support ending weapons shipments to Israel, will pay for it. And those that express dissent will be frog-marched into Zionist black holes where their voices are silenced and their careers jeopardized or destroyed. Donald Trump and the Republicans have an open disdain for democracy, but so do the Democrats and Joe Biden.
The U.S. provided $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel from October 2023 to October 2024, a substantial increase from the already $3.8 billion in military aid the U.S. gives Israel annually. This is a record for a single year. The State Department has informed Congress that it intends to approve another $8 billion in purchases of U.S.-made arms by Israel. This will provide Israel with more GPS guidance systems for bombs, more artillery shells, more missiles for fighter jets and helicopters, and more bombs, including 2,800 unguided MK-84 bombs, which Israel has a habit of dropping on densely packed tent encampments in Gaza. The pressure wave from the 2,000-pound MK-84 pulverizes buildings and exterminates life within a 400-yard radius. The blast, which ruptures lungs, rips apart limbs and bursts sinus cavities up to hundreds of yards away, leaves behind a 50-foot-wide and 36-foot-deep crater. Israel appears to have used this bomb to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, in Beirut on September 27, 2024.
The genocide, and the decision to fuel it with billions of dollars, marks an ominous turning point. It is a public declaration by the U.S. and its allies in Europe that international and humanitarian law, although blatantly disregarded by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and a generation earlier in Vietnam, is meaningless. We will not even pay lip service to it. This will be a Hobbesian world where nations that have the most advanced industrial weapons make the rules. Those who are poor and vulnerable will kneel in subjugation. The genocide in Gaza is the template for the future. And those in the Global South know it.
The “wretched of the earth” who lack sophisticated weapons, who do not have modern armies, artillery units, missiles, navies, armored units and warplanes, will strike back with crude tools. They will match individual acts of terror against massive campaigns of state terror.
Are we surprised we are hated? Terror begets terror. We saw this in New Orleans where a man who was allegedly inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) killed 14 people when he drove his pickup truck into a crowd on New Year’s Day. We will see more of it. But let’s be clear. We started it. The moral void of the suicide bomber is birthed from our moral void.
Israel’s frustration at the dogged resistance in Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen and Lebanon increases the bloodlust. Members of Israel’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee sent a letter to Minister of Defense Israel Katz, calling on the government to intensify the siege of Gaza.
“Effective control of the territory and the population is the only means towards cleansing enemy lines from the strip, and naturally towards decisive victory, rather than treading [water] in a war of attrition, where the side that is most worn is Israel,” they write. “Therefore we end up inserting our soldiers again and again into neighborhoods and alleys that were already conquered by them many times.”
Israel, the letter reads, must carry out “remote elimination of all energy sources, that is fuel, solar panels and any relevant means (pipes, cables, generators etc.)” It should ensure the “elimination of all food sources including warehouses, water and all relevant means (water pumps etc.)” and it must facilitate the “remote elimination of anyone who moves in the area and does not exit with a white flag during the days of the effective siege.”
The letter concludes that “after these actions and the days of siege upon those who remain, [the] IDF must enter gradually and conduct a full cleansing of the enemy nests…. This should be done in the northern Gaza Strip, and similarly in any other territory: encirclement, evacuation of the population to a humanitarian zone, and effective siege until surrender or full elimination of the enemy. This is how every army acts, and so must the IDF act.”
In short, exterminate the brutes.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the 42-year-old U.S. military veteran who plowed his pick-up truck into a crowd of New Year’s revellers in New Orleans killing 14 people and injuring 35 others, spoke to us in the language we use to speak to the Arab world. Indiscriminate death. The targeting of innocents. The callous indifference to life. The thirst for revenge. The demonization of others. The belief that fate or God or western civilization has decreed that we have a right to impose our vision of the world with violence. Jabbar, who posted videos online in which he professed his support for Islamic State, is our murderous doppelgänger. He will not be the last.
“When a society is dispossessed, when the injustices thrust upon it appear insoluble, when the ‘enemy’ is all-powerful, when one’s own people are bestialised as insects, cockroaches, ‘two-legged beasts,’ then the mind moves beyond reason,” Robert Fisk writes in The Great War for Civilization. “It becomes fascinated in two senses: with the idea of an afterlife and with the possibility that this belief will somehow provide a weapon of more than nuclear potential. When the United States was turning Beirut into a NATO base in 1983, and using its firepower against Muslim guerrillas in the mountains to the east, Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Baalbek were promising that God would rid Lebanon of the American presence. I wrote at the time — not entirely with my tongue in my cheek — that this was likely to be a titanic battle: U.S. technology versus God. Who would win? Then on 23 October 1983 a lone suicide bomber drove a truckload of explosives into the U.S. Marine compound at Beirut airport and killed 241 American servicemen in six seconds…I later interviewed one of the few surviving marines to have seen the bomber. ‘All I can remember,’ he told me, ‘is that the guy was smiling.’
These acts of terrorism, or in the case of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Yemen armed resistance, are used to justify endless mass killing. This Via Dolorosa leads to a global death spiral, especially as the climate crisis reconfigures the planet and international bodies, such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, become hollow appendages.
We are sowing the Middle East with dragon’s teeth and, as in the ancient Greek myth, these teeth are rising from the soil as enraged warriors determined to destroy us.
All Of Western Civilization Owns This Genocide
Caitlin Johnstone, Dec 30, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/all-of-western-civilization-owns?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=153782822&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
It’s wrong to blame the Gaza genocide on Jews. It isn’t wrong because antisemitism is a major danger in our society (it’s not), nor because there’s a risk that people will start loading Jews onto trains again (there isn’t), nor because Jewish Israelis and their supporters are blameless (they obviously are not).
It’s wrong to blame this whole thing on Jews because it lets the rest of us off the hook.
This is our genocide. This is our crime. To blame it all on the Jews is to say that our society is perfectly fine and healthy and that none of this would be happening if not for the Machiavellian manipulations of a small Abrahamic religion. It’s to deny the reality that the middle east is on fire right now because of everything this perverse civilization is and always has been.
It is not a coincidence that the tendency to blame all society’s ills on the Jews is much more prevalent on the far right than anywhere else. Rightists are ideologically inhibited from seeing western civilization as a uniquely pernicious blight on this world, and from seeing capitalism and imperialism as the driving force behind the injustices and abuses it inflicts. If you have an ideological need to view all those things as fine and good, then you need to come up with some other explanation for why everything is shitty and evil. So they buy into this infantile narrative that western civilization would be just peachy if it weren’t for those darn Jews.
But western civilization is not peachy. It is a profoundly sick dystopia built by genocide and slavery and fueled by human blood. This would be true with or without Israel, and with or without Judaism.
The genocide in Gaza is happening because the western empire wants it to happen. Biden could have ended this with a phone call at any time. Our leaders are not being reluctantly pushed into this. They’re slaughtering innocent human beings as casually as they slaughtered them in past western military interventions which had nothing to do with Israel, and for the same reasons.
The western empire is constantly working to bludgeon the world into obedience and submission, aggressively targeting any population which insists on its own sovereignty. We’ve seen it in Latin America, we’ve seen it throughout Europe and Asia, we’ve seen it in Africa, and we’ve seen it in the middle east in the same way. Israel is a member state of the western empire and plays a pivotal role in helping to beat down disobedient populations like Iran, Ansar Allah, Hezbollah and Hamas who don’t submit to the will of the empire. I used to list Syria among those who stand against the empire, but the west and Israel have succeeded in smashing it down and absorbing it into the imperial blob.
The empire uses Zionism as one of many tools for enacting its will in the middle east, but if it wasn’t Zionism it would be something else. The violence would play out in different ways under different narratives, but there would still be a continuous violent bludgeoning of disobedient populations in this crucial strategic region which is rich in resources and critical trade routes.
This is just what we are as a civilization. A murderous, thieving, tyrannical empire constantly bullying and abusing the earth’s population into obedience and submission. Some people try to make Jews into the problem because they don’t want to face reality. And the reality is that the problem is us.
Look at Gaza. Really look at it. Watch the videos. Listen to the screams. Read the harrowing stories. This is who we are. This is what we have become. Not because of the Jews. Because of us. The sooner we own this, the sooner we can move toward healing all the entirely home-grown illnesses within us which gave rise to it. And the sooner we can start becoming something better.
Gaza babies ‘freezing to death’ amid Israel’s inhumane blockade: UNRWA
Saturday, 28 December, https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2024/12/28/739876/Gaza-babies-freezing-death-Gaza-Israel-blocakde
UNRWA is warning that more babies are losing their lives due to a severe temperature drop and lack of shelter in Gaza.
In the past week, at least four infants have died of hypothermia from low temperatures and a lack of warmth while living in tents in the besieged Strip.
On Friday, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, said in a message on X that Gaza babies “are freezing to death due to cold weather and a lack of shelter.”
“Blankets, mattresses, and other winter supplies have been stuck in the region for months waiting for approval to get into Gaza.”
Lazzarini once again called for an immediate ceasefire, urging “an immediate flow of much-needed basic supplies, including for winter.”
Such calls are apparently of no use within the international community given Israel’s relentless campaign of genocide in Gaza since October 2023.
Gaza health officials said on December 26 that a newborn baby died from the cold in a tent encampment in the refugee camp of al-Mawasi in southern Gaza.
According to Ahmed al-Farra, the head of pediatrics and obstetrics at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, staff in the neonatal ICU see at least five cases of hypothermia per day.
45,300 and counting. That is the number of Palestinians Israel has massacred in Gaza since October 7, 2023. The regime remains emboldened by the rock-solid support it receives from Washington.
Of that figure, more than 17,600 are children, according to Gaza health officials. As many as 17,000 children have been left unaccompanied or separated from their parents and caregivers.
UNICEF has said that babies are being “delivered into hell” in Gaza.
Israel Is Killing Civilians In Gaza On Purpose, And It’s Not Even Debatable.
Caitlin Johnstone, Dec 27, 2024
Just so we’re all clear, it is a fully established fact that the IDF is directly, deliberately killing civilians in Gaza. There was a time in the early days of the genocide when this could be disputed, but that is no longer true. The facts are in and the case is closed. It’s happening.
Israeli soldiers are telling the press that they’ve been knowingly killing civilians and then falsely categorizing them as terrorists afterward. Countless doctors have testified to routinely encountering dead and wounded children who’ve been shot in the head by Israeli snipers. Israeli media reports have revealed that the IDF is intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure and using AI systems to specifically target suspected Hamas members when they are at home with their families instead of out on the battlefield.
The debate is over. The “human shields” argument has been completely, thoroughly debunked. If you still deny that this is happening, its because your worldview is so false that it requires you to deny facts and reality.
❖
We were fed lies about what happened on October 7. We were fed lies about the Israeli abuses which led to October 7. We’ve been fed lies about what’s been done for the last 15 months under the justification of October 7. And yet Israel’s defenders still expect to be taken seriously when they babble about October 7 in response to criticisms of Israel’s actions.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We’re fed mountains of stories by the rich and powerful explaining why things must remain as they are — but they are only stories.
Every sociopolitical status quo throughout history has had power-serving narratives explaining why things are as they are and justifying why the people in charge live so much more comfortably than the ordinary folks doing the real work in this world. People used to be told that kings received their authority directly from God, and were therefore better and more worthy than the unwashed masses. Today we have different rulers with different narratives justifying their rule and explaining why vast inequality is fine and good, but those narratives are exactly as fictional as the old stories about the divine right of kings.
Today we are trained to believe that the plutocrats who rule our society attained their vast fortunes through hard work and clever innovation, and are entitled to every penny because they are the most productive members of our society. Just as the peasants of old were taught about the divine right of kings, we are taught that capitalism is the most fair and equitable of all possible systems and that the US-led world order ensures that freedom and democracy will be protected and promoted for the benefit of all.
These are all made-up stories, no truer than the story that monarchs were imbued with magical king powers by an invisible deity because their blood was special. But they are treated as serious facts by those who are responsible for training us how to think, and by those who swallow this indoctrination.
In reality we can change how things are whenever we want, and there’s no good reason not to. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of our rulers, and the oligarchs and empire managers who currently hold the steering wheel are destroying our biosphere while increasing inequality and exploitation and pushing us toward nuclear war on multiple fronts.
We have the ability to wrest that steering wheel away from them any time enough of us work up the will to do so. All the stories to the contrary we might believe are just fictional thought-fluff that our rulers put in our minds for their own benefit.
❖
There’s nothing wrong with being politically homeless at this point in history. Humanity as a whole is still wildly confused and dysfunctional in this particular slice of spacetime, and even the very best political factions are dominated by highly neurotic people who take no responsibility for their psychological state and internal clarity. If you’ve found a political party or faction you trust then that’s great, but if you haven’t then it is perfectly fine to stand as an individual while throwing your support behind worthy causes and movements on a case-by-case basis as they emerge without permanently hitching yourself to anyone else’s wagon.
We’ve still got a long way to go in maturing as a species, and it might be a while before a unified political faction arises that you can trust to consistently move in the highest interest.
Another expert report finds Israel is committing genocide. The West yawns
“Like in every other case of genocide in history, right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.”
a genocidal view widely shared in Israel, that “there are no innocents in Gaza”. Even Israel’s supposedly liberal President Isaac Herzog has said as much.
But like everything about this genocide, those accounts made no impact on the western political and media consensus. Nothing has stuck, even when it is the soldiers themselves documenting their atrocities, and even when it is Israeli Holocaust experts concluding that these crimes amount to genocide.
How is this permanent condition of mass denial possible? There is nothing normal or natural about it. The denial is being actively and furiously manufactured.
Nearly 15 months on, the Gaza genocide has become entirely normal, it has become just another minor, routine news item to be buried on the inside pages.
Jonathan Cook, 24 December 2024 , https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-israel-another-expert-report-committing-genocide-west-yawns
Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Medecins Sans Frontieres are all agreed. But the Gaza genocide is now just another routine news item, buried on the inside pages.
hree separate reports published this month by leading international human rights and medical groups have detailed the same horrifying story: that Israel is well advanced in its genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza.
Or, to be more accurate, they have confirmed what was already patently clear: that, for the past 14 months, Israel has been slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians with indiscriminate munitions, while at the same time gradually starving the survivors to death and denying them access to medical care.
Genocides can happen with gas chambers. Or with machetes. Or they can be carried out with 2,000lb bombs and aid blockades. Genocides rarely look the same. But they are all designed to arrive at the same endpoint: the elimination of a people.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) agree that Israel is striving for extermination. It has not hidden its intent, and that intent is confirmed by its actions on the ground.
Only the wilfully blind, which includes western politicians and their media, are still in denial. But worse than denial, they continue to actively collude in this, the ultimate crime against humanity, by supplying Israel with the weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover it needs for the extermination.
Last week, MSF issued its report, titled Life in the Death Trap That is Gaza, concluding that Israel was intentionally “unravelling the fabric of society”.
The medical charity observed: “The violence unleashed by Israeli forces has caused physical and mental damage on a scale that would overwhelm any functioning health system, let alone one already decimated by a crushing offensive and a 17-year-long blockade [by Israel].”
MSF added: “Even if the offensive ended today, its long-term impact would be unprecedented, given the scale of the destruction.”
Rebuilding the society and dealing with the health consequences will “span generations”.
Intention proven
MSF’s findings followed hot on the heels of an 185-page report by Human Rights Watch, which concluded that Israel was committing “acts of genocide”.
The organisation limited its focus to one Israeli policy: its systematic effort to deprive the population of access to water – a clear measure of intentionality, the critical yardstick for judging whether mass killing has crossed into genocide.
At a news conference, Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East director, said their research had proved Israel was “intentionally killing Palestinians in Gaza by denying them the water that they need to survive”.
Israel had done so in four coordinated moves. It had blocked pipelines supplying water from outside Gaza. It had then cut off power to run the pumps that Gaza’s own supplies from wells and desalination plants depended on.
Next, it had destroyed the solar panels that were the backup to deal with such power cuts. And finally, it had killed crews trying to repair the supply system and aid agency staff trying to bring in water supplies.
“This is a comprehensive policy preventing people from getting any water,” HRW’s acting Israel and Palestine director, Bill Van Esveld, concluded. He added that the group had made “a very clear finding of extermination”.
‘Pattern of conduct’
HRW echoed a much wider-ranging report by Amnesty International, the world’s best-known international human rights organisation.
In a 296-page report published in early December, Amnesty concluded that Israel had been “brazenly, continuously” committing genocide in Gaza – or “unleashing hell” as the organisation phrased it more graphically.
The period of Amnesty’s research ended in July, five months ago. Since then, Israel has further intensified its destruction of northern Gaza to drive out the population.
Nonetheless, Amnesty described a “pattern of conduct” in which Israel had deliberately obstructed aid and power supplies, and detonated so much explosive power on the tiny enclave – equivalent to more than two nuclear bombs – that water, sanitation, food and healthcare systems had collapsed.
The scale of the attack, it noted, had caused death and destruction at a speed and level unmatched in any other 21st-century conflict.
Budour Hassan, Amnesty’s researcher for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, said Israel’s actions went beyond the individual war crimes associated with conflicts: “This is something deeper.”
Agreeing with major Holocaust and genocide scholars, Amnesty concluded that the high bar needed to prove genocidal intent in law was crossed last May when Israel began destroying Rafah, the area in southern Gaza that it had herded Palestinian civilians into as a supposedly “safe zone”.
Israel had been warned not to attack Rafah by the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but went ahead anyway.
‘Mass denial’
For some time, leading Holocaust and genocide scholars – among them Israelis – have been speaking up to warn not only that a genocide is unfolding, but that it is nearing completion.
Last week, Omer Bartov even managed to get his message out on CNN. He told Christiane Amanpour that Israel was carrying out “a war of annihilation” on the Gaza Strip. “What the IDF [Israeli military] is doing there is destroying Gaza,” he said.
Amos Goldberg, another Israeli Holocaust expert, noted that Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish-Polish scholar who coined the term “genocide”, described its two phases.
“The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called ‘imposition of the national pattern’ of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements.”
Goldberg added: “Like in every other case of genocide in history, right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.”
Bartov’s invitation by CNN appeared to have been provoked by an article in Haaretz, Israel’s most liberal newspaper. It published last week testimonies from Israeli combat soldiers, in which they described committing and witnessing war crimes in Gaza. They paint a picture of systematic erasure that, even from their limited perspective, looks ominously like genocide.
The soldiers describe shooting dead anyone who moves inside undeclared so-called “kill zones”, even children, and then claiming them to be “terrorists”. The dead are left to be eaten by packs of dogs.
The only words one Israeli reservist found to describe Israel’s repeated and intentional killing of children in Gaza was “pure evil”.
According to a senior reserve commander recently returned from the enclave, the Israeli army has created “a lawless space where human life holds no value”.
Another says units compete to see who can kill the greater number of Palestinians, indifferent to whether they are Hamas fighters or civilians.
Others describe these units as operating like “independent militias”, unrestrained by military protocols.
‘Everyone is a terrorist’
How the Israeli army implemented the Gaza genocide is alluded to in the Haaretz article. After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, the military leadership devolved normally centralised decision-making to local field commanders.
Many of those commanders live in the most religiously extreme of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Not only are they Jewish supremacists, but they follow rabbis who believe all Palestinians, even babies, pose a threat to the Jewish people and must be exterminated.
Notoriously, a group of influential settler rabbis formalised their genocidal teachings into a book called The King’s Torah.
One senior commander identified by Haaretz is Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, a settler from Kiryat Arba, possibly the most extreme of all Israel’s West Bank settlements.
For many years, Vach headed the military’s officers training school, passing on his extreme views to a new generation of officers, presumably some of whom are now making decisions in Gaza.
Today, he heads Division 252, in which many of the soldiers who spoke to Haaretz have served.
One of his officers recounted how, after Hamas’ military leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in October, Vach held an official meeting to determine what to do with his body. He wanted to strip Sinwar’s corpse naked, put it in a public square, dismember it and pour sewage over the remains.
In an address to soldiers, he is reported to have echoed a genocidal view widely shared in Israel, that “there are no innocents in Gaza”. Even Israel’s supposedly liberal President Isaac Herzog has said as much.
But according to one officer, Vach has made this view an “operational doctrine”.
Vach’s view of Palestinians is that “everyone’s a terrorist”. And that means, given Israel’s current, explicit aims in Gaza, everyone must be killed.
Nothing sticks
None of this should surprise us. Israeli leaders from the very start announced their genocidal intent. And more than a year ago, Israeli soldiers serving in Gaza began telling us of the systematic nature of Israel’s war crimes.
But like everything about this genocide, those accounts made no impact on the western political and media consensus. Nothing has stuck, even when it is the soldiers themselves documenting their atrocities, and even when it is Israeli Holocaust experts concluding that these crimes amount to genocide.
It has been nearly a year since the ICJ, comprising more than a dozen internationally respected judges, decided that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
The judiciary is amongst the most conservative of professions.
The situation in Gaza is incalculably worse than it was last January when the court issued its ruling.
But the wheels of justice are required to turn slowly, even though Gaza does not have time on its side.
How is this permanent condition of mass denial possible? There is nothing normal or natural about it. The denial is being actively and furiously manufactured.
Only because we live in a world where billionaires own our politicians and media do we need courts and human rights groups to confirm what we can already see quite clearly being live-streamed to our devices.
Only because we live in a world owned by billionaires do those same courts and rights organisations spend long months weighing the evidence to protect themselves from the inevitable backlash of smears aimed at discrediting their work.
And only because we live in a world owned by billionaires is it possible, even after all those delays, for our politicians and media to ignore the findings and carry on as before.
The system is rigged to favour the imperial hub of the United States and its client states.
If you are an African dictator, or an official enemy of the so-called West, the most minimal evidence suffices to prove your guilt.
If you are under the protection of the US godfather, no amount of evidence will ever be enough to put you behind bars.
It is known as realpolitik.
Always another story
For many months, the western media’s role has been to gaslight us by pretending the genocide is something else.
First, the mass slaughter of Palestinians was presented simply as a natural desire by Israel to eliminate “terrorism” on its doorstep following the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.
It was chiefly a story of Israeli “self-defence” that conveniently overlooked the preceding decades in which Israel had driven Palestinians off their land, either out of their homeland entirely or into ghettoes, then colonised the land illegally with apartheid-style Jewish settlements, and subjected the Palestinian ghettoes to brutal Israeli military rule.
In the coverage after 7 October, the Palestinians – long the victims of an illegal occupation – were viewed as squarely to blame for their own suffering. To suggest anything else – to worry that a genocide was unfolding – was a sure sign of antisemitism.
Then, as the slaughter intensified – as Gaza was levelled, hospitals wrecked, the population collectively punished with an aid blockade – the official story faltered.
So a new narrative was advanced: of international efforts to reach a ceasefire ending “the cycle of violence”, of the focus on securing the release of the hostages, of Hamas intransigence.
We were back to the familiar framework of an intractable conflict, in which both sides were to blame – though, of course, the Palestinians more so.
Now, as it becomes impossible to continue pretending that Israel wants peace, to ignore the fact that it is expanding the slaughter, not reining it in, the media strategy has shifted once again.
As the genocide reaches its “final stage” – as the Israeli Holocaust scholars Omer Bartov and Amos Goldberg warn – the media have largely lost interest. If there is no way to both-sides the genocide, then it must be disappeared.
And in media-land, there is always another story that can be promoted. There will always be another front-page lead rather than the most disturbing one of all, in which western leaders and the media are full participants in the live-streamed extermination of a people.
BBC buries the news
That is the context for understanding the media’s collective yawn as the three genocide reports dropped one after another this month.
Israel’s accusations that Amnesty’s report was antisemitic were entirely expected. What should not have been was the media’s largely indifferent response.
The BBC was a case study in how to bury bad news. Its flagship television news programmes – the dominant news source for Britons – ignored the story completely.
Meanwhile, its poor cousin, the 24-hour news channel, which draws a far smaller audience, did mention the Amnesty report, but captioned it: “Israel rejects ‘fabricated’ claims of genocide.”
In other words, when the BBC did offer very limited coverage, it skipped the news story of Amnesty’s findings and went straight to Israel’s predictable, outraged reaction.
In an investigation for Drop Site News last week, Guardian columnist Owen Jones spoke to 13 current and recently departed BBC staff. They said the corporation’s coverage of Gaza was heavily skewed to present Israel’s actions in a favourable light.
In a WhatsApp chat for senior BBC Middle East editors, correspondents and producers, one participant – incensed by the “fabricated claims” caption – wrote: “FFS! – It’s an open goal for those who say we’re frit [afraid] of upsetting the Israelis and keep on couching our stories in an ‘Israel says’ narrative’.”
The BBC’s website, by far the most influential English-language online news source, inexplicably ignored the Amnesty report for 12 hours after the embargo was lifted.
Even then, it appeared as the seventh item. For the following week, it was not included in the “Israel-Gaza” index on the website’s front page, making it unlikely it would be found.
This pattern has long been true in the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Palestine, but it has become far more glaring since the stakes were raised for Israel by its genocide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vLrmM1KjxE
As Jones’s investigation discloses, BBC management has tightly restricted control over the Gaza coverage to a small number of journalists known to hew closely to Israel’s view of events – and despite their editorial role provoking what Jones calls a “civil war” in the BBC newsroom.
Notably, Jones did not publish his investigation in the Guardian, where there have been similar reports of staff indignant at the paper’s failure to give proper weight to the genocidal nature of Israel’s actions.
Rigged algorithms
What the BBC has been doing is not exceptional. As soon as a light is shone into the dark recesses of the state- and billionaire-owned media, the same picture always emerges.
Last week, an investigation revealed that Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, intentionally rigged its algorithms to suppress reports from the biggest Palestinian news sources after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.
Palestinian news outlets saw their views on Meta platforms fall significantly after the attack – on average by 77 percent – when they should have expected to see far greater interest. By contrast, views of Israeli news outlets rose sharply.
Paradoxically, the investigation was published by the BBC, though notably the research was initiated and carried out by the staff of its Arabic news service.
Also last week, more than a dozen whistleblowers from Deutsche Welle, Germany’s equivalent of state broadcaster the BBC, revealed to Al Jazeera that a culture of fear reigns in the newsroom when it comes to critical coverage of Israel.
Similar reports from whistleblowing staff have exposed the rigged nature of the coverage – always in Israel’s favour – in other major outlets, from CNN to the New York Times and the Associated Press news agency.
In reality, the same skewed news agenda can be found in every newsroom in every corporate media outlet. It just requires whistleblowers to come forward, and for there to be someone willing to listen and in a position to publish.
Why? Because a genocide unfolding in plain sight cannot be made to appear normal without an enormous expenditure of effort from institutional media to close the eyes of their audiences. To hypnotise us into indifference.
State of anxiety
Too many of us are susceptible to this process – and for a number of reasons.
In part, because we still trust these institutions, even though their chief function is to persuade us that they are there for our benefit – rather than the reality that they serve the interests of the larger corporate structures to which they belong.
Those western structures are invested in resource theft, asset-stripping and wealth concentration – all, of course, pursued at the expense of the global south – and the war industries needed to make this pillage possible.
But also, it is part of our psychological makeup that we cannot sustain attention on bad news indefinitely.
To watch a genocide unfold week after week, month after month, and be unable to do anything to stop it, takes a terrible toll on our mental health. It keeps us in a permanent state of anxiety.
The corporate structures that oversee our media understand this only too well. Which is why they cultivate a sense of powerlessness amongst their audiences.
The world is presented as a baffling place, where there are inexplicable forces of evil that act without any comprehensible causation to destroy all that is good and wholesome.
The media suggest international affairs are little different from a game of whack-a-mole. Whenever the good West tries to solve a problem, another evil mole pops up its head, whether it be Hamas terrorists, Hezbollah terrorists, Syria’s former dictator Bashar al-Assad, or the mad mullahs of Iran
With this as the framework for the Gaza genocide, audiences are left sensing either that what is happening to Palestinians, however horrifying, may be deserved or that investing too much concern is a waste of energy and time. Another crisis will be along in a moment equally demanding of our attention.
And so it will. Because that is precisely the way the corporate media works. It offers a conveyor belt of bad news, one bewildering event after another – whether it be another disgraced celebrity, or murdered schoolgirl, or an outbreak of war.
The media’s role – the reason states and corporations keep such a tight grip on it – is to stop us from gaining a wider picture of the world, one on which our hands look far more bloodied than the “terrorists” we sit in judgment on. One where a powerful western elite, its corporate empire headquartered in the US, runs the planet as nothing more than a wealth-extraction machine.
And so we, the publics of the West, shrug our shoulders once again: at “man’s inhumanity to man”, at “the cycle of violence”, at “the barbarians at the gate”, at “the white man’s burden”.
Nearly 15 months on, the Gaza genocide has become entirely normal, it has become just another minor, routine news item to be buried on the inside pages.
Israel’s War on Gaza Is a War on Children
Children in Gaza are not merely collateral damage; they are often actively being targeted.
By Henry A. Giroux , Truthout, December 21, 2024
In November, over a year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a report by the Gaza-based Community Training Center for Crisis Management produced a grim statistic: “Nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believe their death is imminent — and nearly half of them want to die.”
It is no wonder why the statistic, which came from a survey of families with disabled, injured or unaccompanied children, is so bleak. Amnesty International’s recent report lays bare the magnitude of the crisis: “Israel’s actions … have brought Gaza’s population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families.”
This unfathomable suffering — inflicted disproportionately on women and children — represents a moral abomination, a political travesty, and a militaristic cruelty of the highest order. The destruction of lives, institutions and essential humanitarian infrastructure goes beyond the annihilation of a people; it constitutes an assault on future generations and the very fabric of our shared humanity. Genocidal language dehumanizes and legitimizes the unthinkable: an indiscriminate war waged against the most defenseless — children.
Israel’s war on Palestinian youth is genocidal — not only in the starvation, maiming and unimaginable killing of children but in its relentless assault on any viable notion of what it means for these young people to be valued, human and alive with hope. It seeks to strip them of their dignity, rendering them invisible and unworthy in the eyes of the world, as if their lives are expendable, their dreams inconsequential. This overpowering violence amounts to what we may term childcide, which is the deliberate or systematic destruction of children, whether through direct violence, neglect, or the conditions of war and oppression that render them uniquely vulnerable. It is a traumatic manifestation of collective failure — a war against innocence, in which the fragile promise of childhood is extinguished before it can bloom. In Gaza, where children face relentless bombings, displacement and deprivation, childcide becomes not just an act of violence but a moral collapse: the erasure of futures, dreams and entire generations. It is a crime not only against the child but against humanity itself, leaving behind a void that no words can fill and no justice can fully repair…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://truthout.org/articles/israels-war-on-gaza-is-a-war-on-children/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=bdbe0251d9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_12_21_08_06_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-5f034c9084-650192793
Israel’s Crime of Extermination, Acts of Genocide in Gaza
Authorities’ Widespread Deprivation of Water Threatens Survival
Human Rights Watch 19 Dec 24
Israeli authorities have deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the population in Gaza by intentionally depriving Palestinian civilians there of adequate access to water, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths.
In doing so, Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide. The pattern of conduct, coupled with statements suggesting that some Israeli officials wished to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, may amount to the crime of genocide.
- Governments and international organizations should take all measures to prevent genocide in Gaza, including discontinuing military assistance, reviewing bilateral agreements and diplomatic relations, and supporting the International Criminal Court and other accountability efforts.
(Jerusalem) – Israeli authorities have intentionally deprived Palestinian civilians in Gaza of adequate access to water since October 2023, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths and thus committing the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
In the 179-page report, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water,” Human Rights Watch found that Israeli authorities have intentionally deprived Palestinians in Gaza of access to safe water for drinking and sanitation needed for basic human survival. Israeli authorities and forces cut off and later restricted piped water to Gaza; rendered most of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure useless by cutting electricity and restricting fuel; deliberately destroyed and damaged water and sanitation infrastructure and water repair materials; and blocked the entry of critical water supplies.
“Water is essential for human life, yet for over a year the Israeli government has deliberately denied Palestinians in Gaza the bare minimum they need to survive,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director at Human Rights Watch. “This isn’t just negligence; it is a calculated policy of deprivation that has led to the deaths of thousands from dehydration and disease that is nothing short of the crime against humanity of extermination, and an act of genocide.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 66 Palestinians from Gaza, 4 employees of Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU), 31 healthcare professionals, and 15 people working with United Nations agencies and international aid organizations in Gaza. Human Rights Watch also analyzed satellite imagery, photographs, and videos captured between the beginning of the hostilities in October 2023 and September 2024, as well as data collected and estimates produced by doctors, epidemiologists, humanitarian aid organizations, and water and sanitation experts.
Human Rights Watch concluded that Israeli authorities have intentionally created conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza in whole or in part. This policy, inflicted as part of a mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, means Israeli authorities have committed the crime against humanity of extermination, which is ongoing. This policy also amounts to one of the five “acts of genocide” under the Genocide Convention of 1948. Genocidal intent may also be inferred from this policy, coupled with statements suggesting some Israeli officials wished to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, and therefore the policy may amount to the crime of genocide.
Immediately after the attacks in southern Israel by Hamas-led Palestinian armed groups in Gaza on October 7, 2023, which Human Rights Watch has found amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Israeli authorities cut all electricity and fuel to the Gaza Strip. On October 9, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of Gaza, stating: “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed.”
That same day, and for weeks thereafter, Israeli authorities cut off all water and blocked fuel, food, and humanitarian aid from entering the strip. Israeli authorities continue to restrict the entry of water, fuel, food, and aid into Gaza and to cut Gaza’s electricity, which is required to operate life-sustaining infrastructure. This continued even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued provisional measures in January, March, and May 2024 ordering Israeli authorities to protect Palestinians in Gaza from genocide and, in so doing, provide humanitarian aid, specifying in March that this includes water, food, electricity, and fuel. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-extermination-acts-genocide-gaza
Finding the Unmentionable: Amnesty International, Israel and Genocide
Binoy Kampmark, December 16, 2024, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/16/finding-the-unmentionable-amnesty-international-israel-and-genocide/
It was bound to happen. With continuing operations in Gaza, and increasingly violent activities being conducted against Palestinians in the occupied territories, human rights organisations are making increasingly severe assessments of Israel’s warring cause. While the world awaits the findings of the International Court of Justice on whether Israel’s campaign, as argued by South Africa, amounts to genocide, Amnesty International has already reached its conclusions.
In a 296-page report sporting the ominous title “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”, the human rights body, after considering the events in Gaza between October 2023 and July 2024, identified a “pattern of conduct” that indicated genocidal intent. These included, among other things, persistent direct attacks on civilians and objects “and deliberately indiscriminate strikes over the nine-month period, wiping out entire families repeatedly launched at times when these strikes would result in high numbers of casualties”; the nature of the weapons used; the speed and scale of destruction to civilian objects and infrastructure (homes, shelters, health facilities, water and sanitation infrastructure, agricultural land”; the use of bulldozing and controlled demolitions; and the use of “incomprehensible, misleading and arbitrary ‘evacuation’ orders’”.
The report does much to focus on statements made from the highest officials to the common soldiery to reveal the mental state necessary to reveal genocide. 102 statements made by members of the Knesset, government officials and high-ranking commanders “dehumanized Palestinians, or called for, or justified genocidal acts or other crimes under international law against them.” The report also examined 62 videos, audio recordings and photographs posted online featuring gleeful Israeli soldiers rejoicing in the “destruction of Gaza or the denial of essential services to people in Gaza, or celebrated the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities, including through controlled demolitions, in some cases without apparent military necessity.”
From its alternative universe, the Israeli public relations machine drew from its own agitprop specialists, working on mangling the language of the report. The formula is familiar: attack the authors first, not their premises. “The deplorable and fanatical organisation Amnesty International has once again produced a fabricated response that is entirely based on lies,” came the howl from Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein.
Other methods of repudiation involve detaching Hamas and its war with Israel from any historical continuum, not least the fact that it was aided, supported and backed by Israel for years as a counter to Fatah in the West Bank. Isolating Hamas as a terrorist aberration also serves to treat it as alien, artificially foreign and not part of any resistance movement against suffocating Israeli occupation and strangulation. They, so goes this argument, are genocidal, and countering such a body can never be, by any stretch, genocidal. The pro-Israeli group NGO Monitor abides by this line of reasoning, calling allegations of genocide against Israel “a reversal of the actual and clearly established intent of Hamas and its allies (including its patron, Iran), to wipe Israel off the map”.
Israel’s closest ally and sponsor, the United States, proved predictable in rejecting the findings while still claiming to respect the humanitarian line. The US State Department’s principal deputy spokesman, Vedant Patel, expresseddisagreement “with the conclusions of such a report. We had said previously and continue to find that the allegations of genocide are unfounded.” Patel did, however, pay lip service to the “vital role that civil society organizations like Amnesty International and human rights groups and NGOs play in providing information and analysis as it relates to Gaza and what’s going on.” Vital, but only up to a point.
Far less guarded assessments can be found in the American pro-Israeli chatter sphere. These follow the usual pattern. Orde Kittrie, senior fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a name that can only imply that crimes committed in such a cause are bound to be justifiable, offers a neat illustration. Amnesty, he argues, “systematically and repeatedly mischaracterizes both the facts and the law.” Kittrie suggests his own mischaracterisation by parroting the IDF’s line that Hamas had “increased casualty counts by illegally using Palestinian civilian shields and by hiding weapons and war fighters in and below homes, hospitals, mosques, and other buildings.” This conveniently ignores that point that the numbers are not necessarily proof of genocidal intent, though it helps.
The report also notes that, even in the face of such tactics by Hamas, Israel was still “obligated to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid attacks that would be indiscriminate or disproportionate.”
Amnesty International’s report is yet another addition to the gloomy literature on the subject. Human Rights Watch, in November, pointed to violations of the laws of war, crimes against humanity, and the provisional measures of the ICJ issued urging Israel to abide by the obligations imposed by the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem stated in no uncertain terms in October that “Israel intends to forcibly displace northern Gaza’s residents by committing some of the gravest crimes under the laws of war”.
Battling over the designation of whether a campaign is genocidal can act as a distraction, a field of quibbles for paper pushing pedants. The “specific intent” in proof must be unequivocally demonstrated and beyond any other reasonable inference. A smokescreen is thereby deployed that risks masking the broader ambit of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But no amount of pedantry and disagreement can arrest the sense that Israel’s lethal conduct, whatever threshold it may reach in international law, is directed at destroying not merely Palestinian life but any worthwhile sense of a viable sovereignty. Amnesty Israel, while rejecting the central claim of the parent organisation’s report did make one concession: the country’s brutal response following October 7, 2023 “may amount to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.”
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Finding the Unmentionable: Amnesty International, Israel and Genocide
Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.com/finding-the-unmentionable-amnesty-international-israel-and-genocide/ 14 Dec 24
It was bound to happen. With continuing operations in Gaza, and increasingly violent activities being conducted against Palestinians in the occupied territories, human rights organisations are making increasingly severe assessments of Israel’s warring cause. While the world awaits the findings of the International Court of Justice on whether Israel’s campaign, as argued by South Africa, amounts to genocide, Amnesty International has already reached its conclusions.
In a 296-page report sporting the ominous title “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”, the human rights body, after considering the events in Gaza between October 2023 and July 2024, identified a “pattern of conduct” that indicated genocidal intent. These included, among other things, persistent direct attacks on civilians and objects “and deliberately indiscriminate strikes over the nine-month period, wiping out entire families repeatedly launched at times when these strikes would result in high numbers of casualties”; the nature of the weapons used; the speed and scale of destruction to civilian objects and infrastructure (homes, shelters, health facilities, water and sanitation infrastructure, agricultural land”; the use of bulldozing and controlled demolitions; and the use of “incomprehensible, misleading and arbitrary ‘evacuation’ orders’.”
The report does much to focus on statements made from the highest officials to the common soldiery to reveal the mental state necessary to reveal genocide. 102 statements made by members of the Knesset, government officials and high-ranking commanders “dehumanized Palestinians, or called for, or justified genocidal acts or other crimes under international law against them.” The report also examined 62 videos, audio recordings and photographs posted online featuring gleeful Israeli soldiers rejoicing in the “destruction of Gaza or the denial of essential services to people in Gaza, or celebrated the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities, including through controlled demolitions, in some cases without apparent military necessity.”
From its alternative universe, the Israeli public relations machine drew from its own agitprop specialists, working on mangling the language of the report. The formula is familiar: attack the authors first, not their premises. “The deplorable and fanatical organisation Amnesty International has once again produced a fabricated response that is entirely based on lies,” came the howl from Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein.
Other methods of repudiation involve detaching Hamas and its war with Israel from any historical continuum, not least the fact that it was aided, supported and backed by Israel for years as a counter to Fatah in the West Bank. Isolating Hamas as a terrorist aberration also serves to treat it as alien, artificially foreign and not part of any resistance movement against suffocating Israeli occupation and strangulation. They, so goes this argument, are genocidal, and countering such a body can never be, by any stretch, genocidal. The pro-Israeli group NGO Monitor abides by this line of reasoning, calling allegations of genocide against Israel “a reversal of the actual and clearly established intent of Hamas and its allies (including its patron, Iran), to wipe Israel off the map.”
Israel’s closest ally and sponsor, the United States, proved predictable in rejecting the findings while still claiming to respect the humanitarian line. The US State Department’s principal deputy spokesman, Vedant Patel, expressed disagreement “with the conclusions of such a report. We had said previously and continue to find that the allegations of genocide are unfounded.” Patel did, however, pay lip service to the “vital role that civil society organizations like Amnesty International and human rights groups and NGOs play in providing information and analysis as it relates to Gaza and what’s going on.” Vital, but only up to a point.
Far less guarded assessments can be found in the American pro-Israeli chatter sphere. These follow the usual pattern. Orde Kittrie, senior fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a name that can only imply that crimes committed in such a cause are bound to be justifiable, offers a neat illustration. Amnesty, he argues, “systematically and repeatedly mischaracterizes both the facts and the law.” Kittrie suggests his own mischaracterisation by parroting the IDF’s line that Hamas had “increased casualty counts by illegally using Palestinian civilian shields and by hiding weapons and war fighters in and below homes, hospitals, mosques, and other buildings.” This conveniently ignores that point that the numbers are not necessarily proof of genocidal intent, though it helps.
The report also notes that, even in the face of such tactics by Hamas, Israel was still “obligated to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid attacks that would be indiscriminate or disproportionate.”
Amnesty International’s report is yet another addition to the gloomy literature on the subject. Human Rights Watch, in November, pointed to violations of the laws of war, crimes against humanity, and the provisional measures of the ICJ issued urging Israel to abide by the obligations imposed by the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem stated in no uncertain terms in October that “Israel intends to forcibly displace northern Gaza’s residents by committing some of the gravest crimes under the laws of war.”
Battling over the designation of whether a campaign is genocidal can act as a distraction, a field of quibbles for paper pushing pedants. The “specific intent” in proof must be unequivocally demonstrated and beyond any other reasonable inference. A smokescreen is thereby deployed that risks masking the broader ambit of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But no amount of pedantry and disagreement can arrest the sense that Israel’s lethal conduct, whatever threshold it may reach in international law, is directed at destroying not merely Palestinian life but any worthwhile sense of a viable sovereignty. Amnesty Israel, while rejecting the central claim of the parent organisation’s reportdid make one concession: the country’s brutal response following October 7, 2023 “may amount to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.”
Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza
By Amnesty International 5 Dec 24
Amnesty International’s research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today.
The report, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, documents how, during its military offensive launched in the wake of the deadly Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel has unleashed hell and destruction on Palestinians in Gaza brazenly, continuously and with total impunity.
“Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
“Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now.
“States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide. All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end.”
Over the past two months the crisis has grown particularly acute in the North Gaza governorate, where a besieged population is facing starvation, displacement and annihilation amid relentless bombardment and suffocating restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid.
“Our research reveals that, for months, Israel has persisted in committing genocidal acts, fully aware of the irreparable harm it was inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza. It continued to do so in defiance of countless warnings about the catastrophic humanitarian situation and of legally binding decisions from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordering Israel to take immediate measures to enable the provision of humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza,” said Agnès Callamard.
“Israel has repeatedly argued that its actions in Gaza are lawful and can be justified by its military goal to eradicate Hamas. But genocidal intent can co-exist alongside military goals and does not need to be Israel’s sole intent.”
WHY IS THIS A GENOCIDE?
………………………………………………………………………… Amnesty International’s report examines in detail Israel’s violations in Gaza over nine months between 7 October 2023 and early July 2024. The organization interviewed 212 people, including Palestinian victims and witnesses, local authorities in Gaza, healthcare workers, conducted fieldwork and analysed an extensive range of visual and digital evidence, including satellite imagery. It also analysed statements by senior Israeli government and military officials, and official Israeli bodies. On multiple occasions, the organization shared its findings with the Israeli authorities but had received no substantive response at the time of publication.
Unprecedented scale and magnitude
Israel’s actions following Hamas’s deadly attacks on 7 October 2023 have brought Gaza’s population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families. It has caused unprecedented destruction, which experts say occurred at a level and speed not seen in any other conflict in the 21st century, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable.
Mohammed, who fled with his family from Gaza City to Rafah in March 2024 and was displaced again in May 2024, described their struggle to survive in horrifying conditions:
“Here in Deir al-Balah, it’s like an apocalypse… You have to protect your children from insects, from the heat, and there is no clean water, no toilets, all while the bombing never stops. You feel like you are subhuman here.”
Israel imposed conditions of life in Gaza that created a deadly mixture of malnutrition, hunger and diseases, and exposed Palestinians to a slow, calculated death. Israel also subjected hundreds of Palestinians from Gaza to incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment.
Viewed in isolation, some of the acts investigated by Amnesty International constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law. But in looking at the broader picture of Israel’s military campaign and the cumulative impact of its policies and acts, genocidal intent is the only reasonable conclusion.
Intent to destroy
To establish Israel’s specific intent to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza, as such, Amnesty International analysed the overall pattern of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, reviewed dehumanizing and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials, particularly those at the highest levels, and considered the context of Israel’s system of apartheid, its inhumane blockade of Gaza and the unlawful 57-year-old military occupation of the Palestinian territory.
Before reaching its conclusion, Amnesty International examined Israel’s claims that its military lawfully targeted Hamas and other armed groups throughout Gaza, and that the resulting unprecedented destruction and denial of aid were the outcome of unlawful conduct by Hamas and other armed groups, such as locating fighters among the civilian population or the diversion of aid. The organization concluded these claims are not credible. The presence of Hamas fighters near or within a densely populated area does not absolve Israel from its obligations to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Its research found Israel repeatedly failed to do so, committing multiple crimes under international law for which there can be no justification based on Hamas’s actions. Amnesty International also found no evidence that the diversion of aid could explain Israel’s extreme and deliberate restrictions on life-saving humanitarian aid.
In its analysis, the organization also considered alternative arguments such as ones that Israel was acting recklessly or that it simply wanted to destroy Hamas and did not care if it needed to destroy Palestinians in the process, demonstrating a callous disregard for their lives rather than genocidal intent.
However, regardless of whether Israel sees the destruction of Palestinians as instrumental to destroying Hamas or as an acceptable by-product of this goal, this view of Palestinians as disposable and not worthy of consideration is in itself evidence of genocidal intent.
Many of the unlawful acts documented by Amnesty International were preceded by officials urging their implementation. The organization reviewed 102 statements that were issued by Israeli government and military officials and others between 7 October 2023 and 30 June 2024 and dehumanized Palestinians, called for or justified genocidal acts or other crimes against them.
Of these, Amnesty International identified 22 statements made by senior officials in charge of managing the offensive that appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts, providing direct evidence of genocidal intent. This language was frequently replicated, including by Israeli soldiers on the ground, as evidenced by audiovisual content verified by Amnesty International showing soldiers making calls to “erase” Gaza or to make it uninhabitable, and celebrating the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities.
Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm
Amnesty International documented the genocidal acts of killing and causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza by reviewing the results of investigations it conducted into 15 air strikes between 7 October 2023 and 20 April 2024 that killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children, and wounded hundreds of others. Amnesty International found no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective.
In one illustrative case, on 20 April 2024, an Israeli air strike destroyed the Abdelal family house in the Al-Jneinah neighbourhood in eastern Rafah, killing three generations of Palestinians, including 16 children, while they were sleeping.
While these represent just a fraction of Israel’s aerial attacks, they are indicative of a broader pattern of repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects or deliberately indiscriminate attacks. The attacks were also conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population.
Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction
The report documents how Israel deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction. These conditions were imposed through three simultaneous patterns that repeatedly compounded the effect of each other’s devastating impacts: damage to and destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure and other objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population; the repeated use of sweeping, arbitrary and confusing mass “evacuation” orders to forcibly displace almost all of Gaza’s population; and the denial and obstruction of the delivery of essential services, humanitarian assistance and other life-saving supplies into and within Gaza.
After 7 October 2023, Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza cutting off electricity, water and fuel. In the nine months reviewed for this report, Israel maintained a suffocating, unlawful blockade, tightly controlled access to energy sources, failed to facilitate meaningful humanitarian access within Gaza, and obstructed the import and delivery of life-saving goods and humanitarian aid, particularly to areas north of Wadi Gaza. They thereby exacerbated an already existing humanitarian crisis. This, combined with the extensive damage to Gaza’s homes, hospitals, water and sanitation facilities and agricultural land, and mass forced displacement, caused catastrophic levels of hunger and led to the spread of diseases at alarming rates. The impact was especially harsh on young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women, with anticipated long-term consequences for their health.
The international community’s seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience.Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International
Time and again, Israel had the chance to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, yet for over a year it has repeatedly refused to take steps blatantly within its power to do so, such as opening sufficient access points to Gaza or lifting tight restrictions on what could enter the Strip or their obstruction of aid deliveries within Gaza while the situation has grown progressively worse.
Through its repeated “evacuation” orders Israel displaced nearly 1.9 million Palestinians – 90% of Gaza’s population – into ever-shrinking, unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions, some of them up to 10 times. These multiple waves of forced displacement left many jobless and deeply traumatized, especially since some 70% of Gaza’s residents are refugees or descendants of refugees whose towns and villages were ethnically cleansed by Israel during the 1948 Nakba.
Despite conditions quickly becoming unfit for human life, Israeli authorities refused to consider measures that would have protected displaced civilians and ensured their basic needs were met, showing that their actions were deliberate.
They refused to allow those displaced to return to their homes in northern Gaza or relocate temporarily to other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory or Israel, continuing to deny many Palestinians their right to return under international law to areas they were displaced from in 1948. They did so knowing that there was nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza to flee to.
Accountability for genocide
“The international community’s seismic, shameful failure for over a year to press Israel to end its atrocities in Gaza, by first delaying calls for a ceasefire and then continuing arms transfers, is and will remain a stain on our collective conscience,” said Agnès Callamard.
“Governments must stop pretending they are powerless to end this genocide, which was enabled by decades of impunity for Israel’s violations of international law. States need to move beyond mere expressions of regret or dismay and take strong and sustained international action, however uncomfortable a finding of genocide may be for some of Israel’s allies.
“The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity issued last month offer real hope of long-overdue justice for victims. States must demonstrate their respect for the court’s decision and for universal international law principles by arresting and handing over those wanted by the ICC.
“We are calling on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to urgently consider adding genocide to the list of crimes it is investigating and for all states to use every legal avenue to bring perpetrators to justice. No one should be allowed to commit genocide and remain unpunished.”
Amnesty International is also calling for all civilian hostages to be released unconditionally and for Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on 7 October to be held to account.
The organization is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose targeted sanctions against Israeli and Hamas officials most implicated in crimes under international law.
Background
On 7 October 2023 Hamas and other armed groups indiscriminately fired rockets into southern Israel and carried out deliberate mass killings and hostage-taking there, killing 1,200 people, including over 800 civilians, and abducted 223 civilians and captured 27 soldiers. The crimes perpetrated by Hamas and other armed groups during this attack will be the focus of a forthcoming Amnesty International report.
Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in-depth investigations into the multiple violations and crimes under international law committed by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects and deliberately indiscriminate attacks killing hundreds of civilians, as well as other unlawful attacks on and collective punishment of the civilian population. The organization has called on the Office of the ICC Prosecutor to expedite its investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine and is campaigning for an immediate ceasefire.
For the Hebrew translation of this press release, click here. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/
Gaza’s Civil Defense Says Nearly 100 Killed by Israeli Attacks Over 24 Hours
A strike on a house Jabalia killed over 40 Palestinians
by Dave DeCamp December 1, 2024, https://news.antiwar.com/2024/12/01/gazas-civil-defense-says-nearly-100-killed-by-israeli-attacks-over-24-hours/
Gaza’s Civil Defense said Sunday that Israeli attacks killed nearly 100 over the previous 24 hours as Israeli strikes continued to hit targets across the Strip.
“Nearly 100 martyrs were killed in the Gaza Strip within 24 hours as a result of the continuous Israeli bombing operations on homes and citizens’ gatherings,” the agency said, according to Al Jazeera.
Gaza’s Health Ministry put out a lower death toll in its daily update, saying 47 were killed, based on the number of dead and wounded Palestinians brought to hospitals. “The Israeli occupation committed six massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, resulting in 47 martyrs and 108 injuries arriving at hospitals during the past 24 hours,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.
The ministry noted that there are a “number of victims” trapped under the rubble or in areas where rescue crews cannot reach them. The Civil Defense statement said it has been unable to work in northern Gaza, which has been under siege since early October as part of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign.
“Until this moment, civil defense crews are prevented from exercising their duties in northern Gaza, and this has led to hundreds of citizens remaining under the rubble,” the agency said.
The Civil Defense statement said the most deaths occurred in an Israeli strike on a house sheltering displaced Palestinians in Jabalia, northern Gaza, on Saturday. More than 40 Palestinians were killed in the attack.
Also on Saturday, an Israeli strike on a vehicle in the southern city of Khan Younis killed five people, including three aid workers with the US-based World Central Kitchen. Israel claimed without evidence that one of the aid workers was a “terrorist.”
WCK said that it suspended its operations in Gaza following the strike. “We are heartbroken to share that a vehicle carrying World Central Kitchen colleagues was hit by an Israeli air strike in Gaza,” the group said in a statement.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said that its death toll since October 2023, based on its numbers, has risen to 44,429 martyrs, and the number of wounded has reached 105,250.
A group of American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza estimated in an open letter to President Biden in October that the US-backed Israeli onslaught has killed at least 118,908 Palestinians, a total that includes indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who led the letter, told Antiwar.com in a recent interview that the estimate was the bare minimum they came up with by looking at the available data.
Israeli snipers ‘shoot Palestinians for sport’
Eyewitness accounts reveal Israeli snipers are systematically targeting unarmed civilians, including children, using tactics that point to deliberate genocidal intent and a chilling policy of terror designed to annihilate a people, not just wage war.
Robert Inlakesh, The Cradle, NOV 25, 2024
Israel’s attempts to excuse the mass murder of civilians in Gaza as “collateral damage” fall apart in the face of mounting evidence that it employs deliberate sniper attacks. The targeted killing of unarmed people – using quadcopter drones and professional snipers – has restricted access to essential medical care, food, and water, exposing a chilling reality behind the occupation army’s actions.
The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are further testament to this not being a conventional war; it is a systematic targeting of civilians that points directly to genocidal intent.
Over the past year, debates have raged over what constitutes an “acceptable” level of collateral damage in Gaza. In July, the West Point US Military Academy’s Modern War Institute even published a piece that argued for a more surgical approach to be taken by the Israelis.
Similar discussions that also surround what constitutes a “disproportionate use of force” are all predicated on Tel Aviv’s approach being one of a conventional war. However, if Israel’s intention is not to wage war against Hamas and is instead to intentionally commit genocide and ethnic cleansing, these conversations prove meaningless. And no clearer evidence exists than the cold-blooded targeting of civilians by sniper fire.
Sniping civilians on live TV
Though there have been instances when sniper attacks on civilians captured the international media’s attention, this grim element of Israel’s military strategy is largely ignored, likely because of the damning implications.
The first major case to break headlines in the western media was the murder of two Christian women at Gaza City’s Holy Family Church on 16 December 2023. The incident even received condemnation from the Pope over the murder of the Palestinian Catholic mother and her daughter, who were deliberately killed while seeking refuge inside the church compound.
But today, these kinds of shootings are so commonplace that they even occur during live TV interviews with western news outlets. For example, in January, British broadcaster ITV captured the moment when 51-year-old Ramzi Abu Sahloul was shot through the chest, only moments after he had spoken on air. Sahloul was part of a group of civilians who were fleeing to Rafah in Gaza’s south while holding white flags on the orders of the Israeli military.
Another innocent civilian murdered while fleeing and with a white flag was Hala Khreis; she was shot and fatally wounded while holding her grandson’s hand as they were walking. The incident was also caught on camera. A CNN investigation was able to prove that Israeli soldiers stationed nearby were responsible.
Intimidation by assassination
Palestinian correspondent Motasem Dalloul, who is based in northern Gaza, testifies to The Cradle that his own son Yahya was murdered by an Israeli sniper on 29 May, after which the soldiers ran over his child’s body with a tank.
“I took my sons to our destroyed house, in Al-Sabra neighborhood, in order to pick up some clothes from under the rubble. When we were there, I saw my son fall to the ground and he started bleeding from his head. I got close to him and found that his head had exploded.”
He explains that although he couldn’t see the Israeli soldiers, he knew that they were positioned nearby with sniper weapons and states that when he approached little Yahya’s body, he was struck by the fact that he was motionless. He adds:
“Israeli tanks began shooting and firing everywhere. I knew that my son was dead … so I had to leave him on the ground and flee with my other sons to safety. I couldn’t return back to this place for 10 days, where I later found that an Israeli tank had run over his body and dismembered it, we could only collect some of his flesh and bones, which had been smashed by the Israeli tanks, and we put them in a piece of fabric, like a shirt, and took them, burying them in a makeshift cemetery.”
During Dalloul’s conversation with The Cradle, bombs exploding in the background are heard as he recounts:
“I think the reason Israeli occupation [word muffled by the sound of explosions] killed my son was to frighten the rest of us and warn us not to return to this area … as that area was later on destroyed and all the buildings were erased, turning it into a military buffer zone. This put much pressure on the residents of Gaza City who do not have homes and a lot of these displaced people were murdered.”
Psychological warfare and denial of medical care
The calculated targeting of civilians is not limited to sniper fire. On 20 September, a UN special committee reported to the General Assembly that there has also been a “deliberate denial of healthcare access by Israeli snipers” to lactating and pregnant Palestinian women.
After countless testimonies of deliberate shootings committed against civilians have been emerging, in December 2023, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a press release urging accountability and an investigation. The press release also highlighted the execution of 11 men in front of their families in the Remal Neighbourhood of Gaza City…………………………….. more https://thecradle.co/articles/israeli-snipers-shoot-palestinians-for-sport
Israel Has Killed Over 1,000 Doctors and Nurses in Gaza
“These people, they target everyone, but I swear, this will not stop us from continuing our humanitarian work,” said a Gaza hospital director injured in an Israeli strike.
Jessica Corbett, Nov 24, 2024, https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-has-killed-over-1000-doctors-and-nurses-in-gaza
More than 1,000 doctors and nurses are among at least 44,211 people killed in Israel’s 13-month assault on the Gaza Strip, officials in the Hamas-governed Palestinian enclave said Sunday.
“Over 310 other medical personnel were arrested, tortured, and executed in prisons,” Gaza’s Government Media Office also said in a statement, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency. “The Israeli army also prevented the entry of medical supplies, health delegations, and hundreds of surgeons into Gaza.”
“Hospitals have been a declared target for the Israeli army, which bombed, besieged, and stormed them, killing doctors and nurses, injuring others after directly targeting them,” the office said. The statement came after the director of the main partially functioning hospital in northern Gaza was injured in an Israeli strike.
Hussam Abu Safiyeh is the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital—which, according toAl Jazeera, Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked, damaging “the facility’s generators, fuel tanks, and main oxygen station.”
The wounded director said: “These people, they target everyone, but I swear, this will not stop us from continuing our humanitarian work. We will keep on providing this service no matter what it costs us.”
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in addition to killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israeli forces have injured at least 104,567 others. Along with attacking hospitals, they have destroyed many homes, schools, and religious sites, and displaced most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people.
More than 1,000 doctors and nurses are among at least 44,211 people killed in Israel’s 13-month assault on the Gaza Strip, officials in the Hamas-governed Palestinian enclave said Sunday.
“Over 310 other medical personnel were arrested, tortured, and executed in prisons,” Gaza’s Government Media Office also said in a statement, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency. “The Israeli army also prevented the entry of medical supplies, health delegations, and hundreds of surgeons into Gaza.”
“Hospitals have been a declared target for the Israeli army, which bombed, besieged, and stormed them, killing doctors and nurses, injuring others after directly targeting them,” the office said. The statement came after the director of the main partially functioning hospital in northern Gaza was injured in an Israeli strike.
Hussam Abu Safiyeh is the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital—which, according toAl Jazeera, Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked, damaging “the facility’s generators, fuel tanks, and main oxygen station.”
The wounded director said: “These people, they target everyone, but I swear, this will not stop us from continuing our humanitarian work. We will keep on providing this service no matter what it costs us.”
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in addition to killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israeli forces have injured at least 104,567 others. Along with attacking hospitals, they have destroyed many homes, schools, and religious sites, and displaced most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people.
Israel—which has been armed by the Biden administration and bipartisan U.S. Congress—faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice over its conduct in Gaza. Additionally, the International Criminal Court earlier this week issued arrest warrants for Israel’s current prime minister and former defense minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri.
Last month, 99 U.S. healthcare providers who have volunteered in Gaza since last fall sent U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris a letter detailing “the massive human toll from Israel’s attack” and urging them to “end this madness now!”
“It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population,” the Americans wrote. “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”
“We quickly learned that our Palestinian healthcare colleagues were among the most traumatized people in Gaza, and perhaps in the entire world,” they continued. “All were acutely aware that their work as healthcare providers had marked them as targets for Israel. This makes a mockery of the protected status hospitals and healthcare providers are granted under the oldest and most widely accepted provisions of international humanitarian law.”
They added that “we wish to be absolutely clear: Not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities. We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance, and murder.”
Despite such appeals and accounts, the outgoing Biden-Harris administration has declined to cut off weapons to the Israeli government and earlier this week most U.S. senators from both major parties rejected a trio of resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would have blocked some American arms sales to Israel.
Israel Attacks Kill 155 Palestinians in Gaza Over 72 Hours
Israel again targeted the Kamal Adwan Hospital and injured its director
by Dave DeCamp November 24, 2024, https://news.antiwar.com/2024/11/24/israel-attacks-kill-155-palestinians-in-gaza-over-72-hours/
Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip killed at least 155 Palestinians over 72 hours, according to death toll updates released by Gaza’s Health Ministry.
On Saturday, the Health Ministry said Israeli forces killed 120 Palestinians and wounded over the previous 48-hour period. On Sunday, the ministry said 35 Palestinians were killed and 94 were wounded in the past 24 hours.
The ministry’s figures are based on the number of dead and wounded Palestinians brought to hospitals and morgues. “There are still a number of victims under the rubble and on the streets, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.
Israeli strikes on Sunday included attacks on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza and in the Jabalia refugee camp in the north, which has been under a total siege since early October as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign. The Israeli military issued a new evacuation order for Shejaiya, an eastern suburb of Gaza City, resulting in more forced displacement of Palestinian civilians.
Israeli forces again targeted the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beith Lahia, another city that’s been under total siege. The shelling wounded the hospital director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, who has been drawing attention to the siege by releasing video statements and talking to media outlets.
According to Al Jazeera, Gaza Civil Defence spokesman Mahmoud Basal said that Abu Safia suffered an injury to his back and left thigh due to metal fragments but was now in a “stable” condition in hospital.
From his hospital bed, Abu Safia said the attack won’t stop him and other hospital staff from “completing our humanitarian mission, and we will continue to do this job at any cost.”
Gaza’s Health Ministry said the latest violence brought its death toll since October 2023 to 44,211 and the number of wounded to 104,567. A group of American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza estimated in an open letter to President Biden in October that the US-backed Israeli onslaught has killed at least 118,908 Palestinians, a total that includes indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege.
Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who led the letter, told Antiwar.com in a recent interview that the estimate was the bare minimum they came up with by looking at the available data.
A massacre within a massacre: How journalists reporting on Gaza deaths are being targeted
Over 160 media workers have been killed and 60 detained as the methodical destruction of the brutalized Strip continues.
Eva Bartlett, 9 Nov 24 https://www.rt.com/news/606860-journalists-killed-reporting-gaza/
In spite of experiencing two Israeli wars on Gaza, I never imagined the horrific scenes coming out of northern Gaza now: Israel is exterminating the population in broad daylight, broadcast for all the world to see.
And no one is doing a damn thing to stop it.
Israel has besieged northern Gaza for weeks, preventing most humanitarian aid from entering, putting the population of 400,000 already starving Palestinian civilians in the north at severe risk of full starvation. The Israeli parliament has voted to ban UNRWA, the United Nations agency for humanitarian aid, which has been the sole lifeline for many Palestinians.
Israeli forces have also bombarded water stations and wells, as well as cutting off communications with the outside world, depriving people of access to water, and leaving them trapped and isolated.
According to Euro-Med Monitor, in the last two weeks, 500 Palestinians have been confirmed dead in northern Gaza, “and thousands more have sustained injuries. Many remain unaccounted for, either in the streets or buried under the debris.”
As they have done elsewhere throughout the Gaza Strip during more than one year of genocide, Israeli forces are targeting hospitals in Gaza’s north. Euro-Med reported that, “Israeli army forces surrounded the Indonesian Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahia. They fired two artillery shells at the hospital, cut off its electricity, and targeted anyone moving in the area.”
The army is firing on medics and other rescuers, as they’ve done throughout 2023-2024, and as they did in 2009, when medics I was with came under Israeli sniper fire, and another medic I knew was killed by a flechette (dart) bomb. By killing the rescuers and destroying the hospitals, Israel ensures maimed Palestinians will go without medical care and probably die.
This is, of course, illegal under international law. But as Israel’s genocidal actions have shown the world, the Israeli government, army and settlers believe laws don’t apply to them. Take the horrific video of an Israeli drone precision-targeting a Palestinian child, killing it, and then bombing the civilians who ran to try to rescue the child. Par for the course for the Israeli army. Were the perpetrator one of the United States’ enemies, there would be calls for no-fly zones, sanctions and corporate media howling 24/7
Not content to merely murder Palestinian civilians by bombing, sniping and starvation, the Israeli army has reportedly been deploying robots with explosives and leaving booby trapped barrels to remotely detonate.
The scenes which journalists have been able to publish are surreal, like science fiction, with quadcopters policing the streets. A week ago, a friend told me in a message that he had to choose between starving or risking being shot dead by Israel soldiers or quadcopters if he tried to get bread.
Some days ago, he messaged me at 4 in the morning: Israeli tanks were outside his home, the audio he sent was terrifying. He chose to stay in his home rather than endure another Nakba.
I don’t know if he is alive now.
War on journalists
Earlier this month, Palestinian cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi was shot in the neck by an Israeli quadcopter, leaving him paralyzed. Aside from Al Jazeera, for which Fadi worked, most Western media and journalist projection organizations are unsurprisingly silent.
Reporters Without Borders, which I previously wrote about for its downplaying the number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israel, has no entry on Fadi. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP), at least, does. Its entry notes:
“Al Wahidi was critically injured in the neck by a bullet fired from an Israeli reconnaissance aircraft while Al Wahidi and correspondent Anas Al-Sharif were covering an Israeli siege on northern Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp. Both men were wearing “Press” vests and clearly identifiable as journalists.”
Anas al-Sharif – who continues to courageously report from northern Gaza – told CJP they’d been in an area “completely far from the areas of operations of the Israeli occupation forces,” and full of residents when, “an Israeli reconnaissance drone fired at us. After the shooting, we tried to move to another safer place and hide from any danger, but a bullet from the plane hit our colleague Fadi Al-Wahidi in the neck, which led to his complete paralysis.”
Wahidi has since fallen into a coma. His colleagues and friends are pleading for some sort of international intervention to allow him to be taken abroad for medical care, to save his life.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported, citing the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (PJS), that between 7 October 2023 and 10 October 2024 168 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in the Gaza Strip, including 17 women, 360 were injured, and 60 were detained.
The extermination campaign continues
It’s absolutely devastating to watch every day pass with alarming new updates from or on northern Gaza. Like Anas al-Sharif, Palestinian journalist Hossam Shabat courageously reports apocalyptic scenes of Israeli bombarding in northern Gaza.
In a live update on X recently, he said:
“We are witnessing genocide and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, specifically in Jabalia, which is under siege from all directions. Israeli occupation forces are bombing displaced civilians, detaining them, and attempting to ethnically cleanse them. They are targeting shelters for displaced civilians, and bodies are scattered everywhere in the north, along the roads. Thousands of civilians are being forcefully displaced (ethnically cleansed) from the north.”
Meanwhile, in a bout of meaningless theatrics, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin have “demanded Tel Aviv improves the humanitarian situation in Gaza within 30 days or risk losing US military aid and face possible legal action.”
But clearly Israel’s biggest backer is spouting nonsense: there will be no cut to military aid, there will be no legal action, the US will never take a position to force Israel to cease the massacre in Gaza. In fact, giving Israel one month before any supposed repercussion is, in my opinion, giving Israel a green light to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza as quickly as possible.
Israel seems hell-bent on implementing former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s ‘Five Fingers’ project, which envisioned carving Gaza into segments, all under Israeli security control. If this is Israel’s intent, we will see the same bloody scenes from northern Gaza repeated block by block Israel all over the rest of the already brutalized Strip.
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
-
Archives
- April 2026 (173)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
- May 2025 (261)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 