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Genocide in Gaza still not on Kamala Harris’ moral radar

 ‘Don’t’ mention US enabling genocide…we’ve got an election to win.

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 11 Aug 24

Three weeks in, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris continues support for Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.

Over 40,000 dead with thousands more buried under the rubble from tens of thousands of US bombs in Gaza has made no dent on Kamala Harris’s conscience. Nor has a death toll predicted by the UK Medical Journal Lancet that upwards of 185,000 will soon be dead from disease, starvation to go along with endless US weapons of civilian destruction in the most grisly genocidal ethnic cleansing this century.

Of course, Harris has more sense than to cheer on the Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Her campaign frames her support this way: “Harris has been clear: she will always work to ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups”. She claims to be troubled by the suffering caused by endless US bombs there, but refuses to support an embargo on genocide weapons.

Hubby Doug Imhoff chimed in “Let me just make this clear: the vice president has been and will be a strong supporter of Israel as a secure democratic and Jewish state, and she will always ensure that Israel can defend itself, period. Because that’s who Kamala Harris is.” If Imhoff were honest and decent, he’s could do so by simply replacing “democratic” and “Jewish” with “Apartheid” and “genocidal.”

When anti-genocide protesters confronted her Harris about her genocide support during a campaign speech in Detroit, Harris shot back “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” That has become the go-to Democratic response to pushback against Democratic support for Israeli genocide in Gaza: ‘Don’t’ mention US enabling genocide…we’ve got an election to win.

Three weeks into her campaign to become the first woman US president, Kamala Harris’ moral compass is frozen in support of Israeli genocide in Gaza. She should ponder this eternal truth. What does it profit a person to gain the world, when she must sell her soul to achieve it?

August 12, 2024 Posted by | Gaza, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

We Must Oppose Israel’s Dangerous Gamble Before It’s Too Late

Failure to stop Israel’s genocide of Palestinians gambles with the fate of humanity as a whole.

CODEPINK Alert, By: Kathy Kelly, Aug 09, 2024,  https://codepink.substack.com/p/we-must-oppose-israels-dangerous?r=cqey&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true

Following World War II, Albert Camus posed a “formidable gamble” to those who had survived a tragedy of immense proportions. “We’re in history up to our necks,” he observed, yet we must wager that “words are more powerful than munitions.” 

“Leave or die” are the horrid words threatening largely unprotected Palestinian civilians in Gaza as dismayed populations around the world demand moral decency, or at least some indication of sanity, from their non-responsive governments. 

The stakes couldn’t be higher. For decades, Israel has flouted international norms by refusing to acknowledge its nuclear weapons arsenal. Nor has it signed relevant treaties governing the biological weapons it possesses. For years, Israel has flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of customary international law through its forcible acquisition of territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and through its transfer of Israeli settlers into the Occupied Palestinian Territories. 

Now, Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians living in Gaza have cost the lives of at least 39,677 people. Tens of thousands more are believed to be buried beneath the rubble, with at least 90,000 wounded and the overwhelming majority of its displaced 1.9 million population facing starvation. 

Israel’s failure to comply with international treaties and humanitarian law signal an acute need for other countries to organize weapons embargoes, cease trade deals, and provide support for civilian peacekeepers to bring about a permanent ceasefire.  

Instead of unwavering adherence to international law, the United States continues to arm and protect Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, which now includes using starvation as a weapon of war.

We must try to absorb what it means to live as a refugee in an open-air concentration camp—already one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, even before 70 percent of its housing was destroyed. More than 341 mosques and three churches have been destroyed. 2,000-pound bombs have been dropped on tents in places deemed safe areas.

Innocent civilians are being killed by snipers. Thirty-one out of thirty-six hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. Escape routes are cut off. Persistent restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into and around Gaza are driving a desperate shortage of food, fuel, and medicine. As access to humanitarian relief is deliberately choked off, children are being collectively punished while Israeli leaders denounce them as animals. The world watches in horror as surgeons are forced to amputate the limbs of wounded children with no available anesthetics.

A new polio epidemic emerges while Israel vaccinates its soldiers but leaves the Palestinian civilian population vulnerable. Newly released prisoners have said they were subjected to torture, including being waterboarded and raped.

Rather than bring suspects before international courts, Israel has resorted to assassinations of the very negotiators with which it purports to be seeking peace, and in a manner clearly intended to expand the conflict into a global war involving multiple nuclear-armed nations.

In its July 19, 2024, authoritative Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Settlement Policy and Practices, the World Court clearly declared the Israeli settlement project in the Occupied Territories to be illegal. The Court outlined the obligation of all parties to the Geneva Convention and the Genocide Convention to discontinue any economic or trade dealings with Israel which might help perpetuate Israel’s occupation and unlawful presence in the territory. Countries that signed or ratified these agreements are obligated to immediately stop arms exports to Israel and to use political, military, and economic influence to stop Israel’s flagrant, escalating violations of international humanitarian law.

The World Court has provided strong, clear words denouncing Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. As during the Vietnam War, ordinary citizens can no longer abide with the lawless barbarism of continuing assaults against Palestinians.

“Rolling the bones” is a slang expression for gambling. With a regional war perhaps now unavoidable in the Middle East, the genocidal derangement of the United States and Europe over Israel’s actions may well lead to a nuclear war that ends the human species. Failing to use our words at this most crucial juncture for humanity would be, as Camus said, a formidable gamble indeed.

August 11, 2024 Posted by | Gaza, weapons and war | Leave a comment

“Unspeakable”: Doctors Back from Gaza Say Death Toll “Much Higher,” Push Harris, Biden for Ceasefire

Democracy Now, AMY GOODMAN, 26 Jul 24

We speak to two doctors who are part of a group of 45 U.S. doctors, surgeons and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza since October 7 and wrote an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an international arms embargo of Israel. The group includes evidence of a much higher death toll than is usually cited: more than 92,000 people, which represents over 4% of Gaza’s population. The doctors write, “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas with no running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking.” The conditions in Gaza are “unacceptable,” and “people know this is wrong but no one is speaking up,” says Dr. Thalia Pachiyannakis, an obstetrician and gynecologist who volunteered at the Nasser Medical Complex. “We all saw evidence of a death toll that is certainly much higher than what is reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health,” adds Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who volunteered at the European Hospital.

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: As Israel carries out new airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency, known as UNRWA, is reporting nine in every 10 Palestinians in Gaza have been forcibly displaced. Meanwhile, the World Food Programme is warning Israel continues to block delivery of aid, and says it’s been forced to reduce food rations, quote, “to ensure broader coverage for newly displaced people,” unquote. U.N. experts are blaming Israel for the onset of famine in Gaza, accusing it of carrying out a targeted starvation campaign.

Here in the United States, days after launching her White House presidential campaign and skipping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s joint address to Congress, vice president and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris met privately Thursday afternoon with Netanyahu, who also met with President Biden. Harris spoke afterwards.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time, we cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb
to the suffering. And I will not be silent.

AMY GOODMAN: Harris described her private meeting with Netanyahu as “frank and constructive.” She said nothing about cutting U.S. military assistance for Israel, even as she reiterated calls to finalize a ceasefire deal.

This comes as a group of 45 U.S. doctors, surgeons, nurses who have volunteered in Gaza since October 7th have written an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an international arms embargo against Israel. The group of health workers include evidence of a much higher — they say there’s evidence of a much higher death toll than is usually cited: more than 92,000 people, which represents over 4% of Gaza’s population.

Two of the doctors join us now. In South Bend, Indiana, we’re joined by Thalia Pachiyannakis. She’s an obstetrician-gynecologist who returned from Gaza earlier this month after having worked at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis. And joining us from Stockton, California, is Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma surgeon who volunteered at European Hospital in Khan Younis in the early spring. He worked with the Palestinian American Medical Association in collaboration with the World Health Organization. He recently co-wrote the recent Politico article, “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.”………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….more https://www.democracynow.org/2024/7/26/feroze_sidhwa_thalia_pachiyannakis_gaza_war

July 31, 2024 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israeli Forces Have Killed 366 UN Workers and Family Members in Gaza: Leaked Report

Confidential figures shed additional light on what’s been the deadliest-ever war for United Nations staff.

Jake Johnson, Jul 24, 2024,  https://www.commondreams.org/news/un-workers-killed-in-gaza
A leaked report obtained by Drop Site estimates that Israeli forces have killed at least 366 United Nations staffers and their family members in the Gaza Strip since October, an indication of the grave threat Israel’s ongoing assault poses to humanitarian relief workers and the enclave’s broader civilian population.

Drop Site‘s Ryan Grim reported Wednesday that the confidential figures, assembled by the U.N.’s Crisis Coordination Center, show that three family members of World Food Program staffers and four dependents of U.N. Children’s Fund workers were among those killed by Israeli forces. The total number of U.N. staffers killed so far is 195, according to the data.

The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the primary aid agency operating in Gaza, has seen the largest impact on staffers and their family members. The leaked report estimates that Israeli forces have killed 158 dependents of UNRWA staffers since October.

Israel’s devastating military campaign in Gaza, aided by U.S. weaponry and diplomatic support, is by far the deadliest-ever war for U.N. personnel, who have repeatedly been targeted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

Over the weekend, Israeli soldiers fired on a U.N. convoy heading toward Gaza City. UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said that “the teams were traveling in clearly marked U.N. armored cars and wearing U.N. vests.”

“While there are no casualties, our teams had to duck and take cover,” he added. “Like all other similar U.N. movements, this movement was coordinated and approved by the Israeli authorities.”

Targeting humanitarian relief personnel is a war crime.

Grim noted that the leaked report is just “the latest in a series of alarming findings regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza,” much of which is facing famine conditions due to what U.N. experts recently described as a “targeted starvation campaign” by Israel.

During a 12-hour period earlier this week, Israeli forces killed at least 70 Palestinians and wounded around 200 others—mostly women and children—in a barrage of attacks on the city of Khan Younis, according to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor.

The confidential U.N. data emerged hours before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scheduled address to a joint meeting of the U.S. Congress on Wednesday afternoon. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers are expected to boycott the prime minister’s speech.

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the lone Palestinian American in Congress, argued Tuesday that Netanyahu “should be arrested and sent to the International Criminal Court,” alluding to that body’s request for an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister.

On Tuesday, hundreds of demonstrators were arrested on Capitol Hill during a peaceful Jewish-led demonstration against Netanyahu’s visit and U.S. complicity in the IDF’s mass atrocities in Gaza.

July 30, 2024 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one given blessing by the West

Israel has learned that, the more routine its war crimes become, the less coverage they receive – and the less outrage they provoke. 

Last week, western doctors who had volunteered in Gaza said Israel was packing its weapons with shrapnel to maximise injuries to those caught in the blast radius. Children, because of their smaller bodies, were being left with much more severe wounds. 

In recent days, Israel has struck several United Nations schools serving as shelters, killing dozens more Palestinians. On Tuesday, another strike in the “safe zone” of al-Mawasi killed 17. 

According to the UN refugee agency, Unrwa, more than 70 percent of its schools – almost all of them serving as refugee shelters – have been bombed. 

Middle East Eye, Jonathan Cook, 19 July 2024 

Women and children are being targeted intentionally, say Israeli whistleblowers. From ground troops to commanders, the rules of war have been shredded

hey just keep coming. On the weekend, Israel launched another devastating air strike on Gaza, killing at least 90 Palestinians and wounding hundreds more, including women, children and rescue workers. 

Once again, Israel targeted refugees displaced by its earlier bombs, turning an area it had formally declared a “safe zone” into a killing field. 

And once more, western powers shrugged their shoulders. They were too busy accusing Russia of war crimes to have time to worry about the far worse war crimes being inflicted on Gaza by their Israeli ally – with weapons they supplied. 

The atrocity committed at al-Mawasi camp, packed with 80,000 civilians, had the usual Israeli cover story – one rolled out to reassure western publics that their leaders are not the utter hypocrites they appear to be for supporting what the World Court has described as a “plausible genocide”. 

Israel said it was trying to hit two Hamas leaders – one of them Mohammed Deif, head of the group’s military wing – although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed uncertain as to whether the strike was successful. 

No one in the western media appeared to wonder why the pair preferred to make themselves a target in an overcrowded, makeshift refugee camp, where they were at huge risk of being betrayed by an Israeli informant, rather than sheltering in Hamas’s extensive tunnel network. 

Or why Israel deemed it necessary to fire a multitude of massive bombs and missiles to take out two individuals. Is that Israel’s new, expansive redefinition of a “targeted assassination”? 

Or why its pilots and drone operators continued the strikes to hit emergency rescue crews dealing with the initial destruction. Was there intelligence that Deif was not just hiding in the camp, but had hung around to dig out survivors, too? 

Or how killing and maiming hundreds of civilians in an attempt to hit two Hamas fighters could ever possibly satisfy the most basic principles of international law. “Proportion” and “distinction” require armies to weigh the military advantage of an attack against the expected toll on civilian life. 

Biblical vengeance

But Israel has torn up the rulebook on war. According to sources within the Israeli military, it now considers it acceptable to kill more than 100 Palestinian civilians in the pursuit of a single Hamas commander – a commander, let us note, who will simply be replaced the moment he is dead.

Even if the two Hamas leaders were assassinated, Israel could not have been in any doubt that it was perpetrating a war crime. But it has learned that, the more routine its war crimes become, the less coverage they receive – and the less outrage they provoke. 

In recent days, Israel has struck several United Nations schools serving as shelters, killing dozens more Palestinians. On Tuesday, another strike in the “safe zone” of al-Mawasi killed 17. 

According to the UN refugee agency, Unrwa, more than 70 percent of its schools – almost all of them serving as refugee shelters – have been bombed. 

Last week, western doctors who had volunteered in Gaza said Israel was packing its weapons with shrapnel to maximise injuries to those caught in the blast radius. Children, because of their smaller bodies, were being left with much more severe wounds. 

Aid agencies cannot properly treat the wounded, because Israel has been blocking the entry of medical supplies into Gaza.

Committing war crimes, if western publics have not worked it out by now, is the very point of the “military operation” Israel launched in Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s one-day attack on 7 October. 

That is why there are more than 38,800 known deaths from Israel’s 10-month assault – and likely at least four times that number unrecorded, according to leading researchers writing in the Lancet medical journal this month. 

That is why it will take at least 15 years to clear the rubble strewn across Gaza by Israeli bombs, according to the UN, and as much as 80 years – and $50bn – to rebuild homes for the remnants of the enclave’s 2.3 million people still alive at the end. 

Israel’s twin goals have been biblical vengeance and the elimination of Gaza – a genocidal rampage to drive the terrified population out, ideally into neighbouring Egypt. 

Shoot-everyone policy

If that was not clear enough already, six Israeli soldiers recently stepped forward to speak out about what they had witnessed while serving in Gaza – a story the western media has entirely failed to report.

Their testimonies, published by the Israel-based publication 972 last week, confirm what Palestinians have been saying for months. 

Commanders have authorised them to open fire on Palestinians at will. Anyone entering an area the Israeli military is treating as a “no-go zone” is shot on sight, whether man, woman or child. 

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tir36oMKWEM%3Fsi%3DyBS5FwmnGwWzXX0c

After months of an Israeli aid blockade that has created a man-made famine, Israel’s military has turned the people of Gaza’s ever-more frantic search for food into a game of Russian roulette. 

This perhaps explains, in part, why so many Palestinians are unaccounted for – Save the Children estimates some 21,000 children are missing. The soldiers quoted in 972 say the victims of their shoot-everyone policy are bulldozed out of view along routes where international aid convoys pass. 

A reserve soldier, identified only as S, said a Caterpillar bulldozer “clears the area of corpses, buries them under the rubble, and flips [them] aside so that the convoys don’t see it – [so that] images of people in advanced stages of decay don’t come out”. The soldier also noted: “The whole area [of Gaza where the army operates] was full of bodies… There is a horrific smell of death.”

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… A whistleblower from the Netzah Yehuda battalion who spoke to CNN said the commanders, drawn from Israel’s religious extremist ultra-Orthodox sector, stoked a culture of violence towards Palestinians, including vigilante-style attacks…………………………………………………………………………….more https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israeli-soldiers-tell-story-savage-cruelty-gaza-west-gives-blessing?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

July 20, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Israel using water as weapon of war as Gaza supply plummets by 94%, creating deadly health catastrophe: Oxfam

A new Oxfam report reveals how Israel has been systematically weaponizing water against Palestinians in Gaza, showing disregard for human life and international law.

July 18, 2024, by: The AIM Network,
 https://theaimn.com/israel-using-water-as-weapon-of-war-as-gaza-supply-plummets-by-94-creating-deadly-health-catastrophe-oxfam/

A new Oxfam report reveals how Israel has been systematically weaponizing water against Palestinians in Gaza, showing disregard for human life and international law.

The report, Water War Crimes, finds that Israel’s cutting of external water supply, systematic destruction of water facilities and deliberate aid obstruction have reduced the amount of water available in Gaza by 94% to 4.74 litres a day per person – just under a third of the recommended minimum in emergencies and less than a single toilet flush.

Oxfam analysis also found:

  • Israeli military attacks have damaged or destroyed five water and sanitation infrastructure sites every three days since the start of the war.
  • The destruction of water and electricity infrastructure and restrictions on entry of spare parts and fuel (on average a fifth of the required amount is allowed in) saw water production drop by 84% in Gaza. External supply from Israel’s national water company Mekorot fell by 78%.

  • Israel has destroyed 70% of all sewage pumps and 100% of all wastewater treatment plants, as well as the main water quality testing laboratories in Gaza, and restricted the entry of Oxfam water testing equipment.
  • Gaza City has lost nearly all its water production capacity, with 88% of its water wells and 100% of its desalination plants damaged or destroyed.

The report also highlighted the dire impact of this extreme lack of clean water and sanitation on Palestinians’ health, with more than a quarter (26%) of Gaza’s population falling severely ill from easily preventable diseases.

In January, the International Court of Justice demanded that Israel immediately improve humanitarian access in light of a plausible genocide in Gaza. Since then, Oxfam has witnessed firsthand Israel’s obstruction of a meaningful humanitarian response, which is killing Palestinian civilians.

Oxfam Water and Sanitation Specialist Lama Abdul Samad said it was clear that Israel had created a devastating humanitarian emergency resulting in Palestinian civilian deaths.

“We’ve already seen Israel’s use of collective punishment and its use of starvation as a weapon of war. Now we are witnessing its weaponizing of water, which is already having deadly consequences.

“But the deliberate restriction of access to water is not a new tactic. The Israeli Government has been depriving Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza of safe and sufficient water for many years,” she said.

“The widespread destruction and significant restrictions on aid delivery in Gaza impacting access to water and other essentials for survival, underscores the urgent need for the international community to take decisive action to prevent further suffering by upholding justice and human rights, including those enshrined in the Geneva and Genocide Conventions.”

Monther Shoblak, General Manager of the Gaza Strip’s water utility CMWU, said:

“My colleagues and I have been living through a nightmare these past nine months, but we still feel it’s our responsibility and duty to ensure everybody in Gaza is getting their minimum right of clean drinking water. It’s been very difficult, but we are determined to keep trying – even when we witness our colleagues being targeted and killed by Israel while undertaking their work.”

Oxfam is calling for urgent action including an immediate and permanent ceasefire; for Israel to allow a full and unfettered humanitarian response; and for Israel to foot the reconstruction bill for water and sanitation infrastructure.

July 18, 2024 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, water, weapons and war | Leave a comment

With Media Enamored by US Presidential Race, Israeli Massacres in Gaza Get Even Deadlier

“We must not lose sight of what is happening in Gaza, where an unprecedented humanitarian crisis continues to get even worse,” said U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.

By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams,  https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-gaza-massacres, 16 July 24

Israeli forces have massacred nearly 60 people in the Gaza Strip over just the past 24 hours, and the past week has been one of the deadliest since the war began more than nine months ago.

But you’d hardly know it by looking at the front pages of major newspapers in the United States, despite U.S. President Joe Biden fueling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault with diplomatic support and billions of dollars worth of weaponry.

While outlets such as Al Jazeera and Reuters have kept Israel’s onslaught at or near the top of their pages, coverage of the relentless war on the Palestinian enclave has largely been supplanted in the U.S. by presidential politics, particularly in the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump on Saturday—the same day Israeli forces killed around 100 people in an attack on a southern Gaza town that was previously designated a “safe zone,” as Common Dreamsreported.

Fresh Israeli airstrikes across Gaza on Tuesday killed dozens of people—including children—but the massacres didn’t receive mention on the front pages of the web versions of The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, each of which heavily featured coverage of the high-stakes U.S. presidential contest between two candidates who have backed Israel’s war on Gaza.

As of Tuesday morning, Gaza was entirely absent from the website landing pages of the Journal and USA Today. The Post‘s home page buried a story about the potential for an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah, while the Times‘ home page contained a piece about surging settler violence in the West Bank amid Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza.

In recent weeks, U.S. corporate media coverage of developments in Gaza has not reflected the extent to which Israel has intensified its aerial and ground attacks, even as recent cease-fire talks have sparked some hope of a pause.

After a 20-year-old gunman attempted to assassinate Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, pictures of the former president’s bloodied ear and raised fist were plastered across the front pages of major newspapers in the U.S. and around the world while the far more numerous images of child victims of Israeli bombs—many of them supplied by the United States—faded from view.

Israel does not allow journalists with major U.S.-based media outlets to enter the Gaza Strip unless they are embedded with Israeli forces and agree to let the military vet their coverage.

Al Jazeera, a Qatari-funded outlet that Israel’s far-right government has repeatedly targeted, reported Monday that “Israeli forces have attacked five separate schools in Gaza in just eight days, killing dozens of people sheltering in them.”

One attack on Sunday, the outlet noted, “struck the United Nations-run Abu Oreiban school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least 17 people and injuring about 80. Most of the victims were women and children, said Palestinian Civil Defense.”

Reporting from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Al Jazeera‘s Hani Mahmoud said he witnessed children “crying out in pain and agony” at the facility, which—like all of Gaza’s remaining hospitals—is under-resourced and only partially functioning.

“This is the result of incinerating bombs,” Mahmoud added.

The death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza is nearing 40,000—likely a dramatic undercount, given how many bodies are missing under the rubble that now dominates the landscape of the enclave and could take 15 years to clear.

Those who have survived Israel’s onslaught are now living amid sewage, decomposing bodies, and the ruins of their homes, shops, schools, and hospitals, with nowhere safe to flee. Famine and disease are spreading rapidly across the territory as the Israeli government continues to restrict the flow of humanitarian aid.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has urged the Biden administration to cut off all offensive weapons assistance to Israel, said in a statement late last week that “while much of the media is focused on the drama of the U.S. presidential election, we must not lose sight of what is happening in Gaza, where an unprecedented humanitarian crisis continues to get even worse.”

“We must end our support for Netanyahu’s war,” said Sanders. “Not another nickel to make this horrific situation even worse. I intend to do everything I can to block further arms transfers to Israel, including through joint resolutions of disapproval of any arms sales. The United States must not help a right-wing extremist and war criminal continue this atrocity.”

July 18, 2024 Posted by | Gaza, media | Leave a comment

Testimonies from the Mawasi massacre: 90 people buried in the sand

“I saw before my eyes one missile after another descending next to the tents. Missiles I have never seen in my life in all of Gaza’s wars. Isn’t this internationally forbidden? Shouldn’t the civilian population be protected and not face genocide and mass killing? Isn’t this forbidden?”

The Israeli army committed another massacre against displaced Palestinians in tent encampments, this time in the coastal Mawasi area, which Israel had designated as a “safe zone.”

BY TAREQ S. HAJJAJ   ,  https://mondoweiss.net/2024/07/testimonies-from-the-mawasi-massacre-90-people-buried-in-the-sand/

In a crater in the ground almost larger than a schoolyard, a group of young men dig through the sand and pull out the bodies. 

“His head is there! His head is there!” someone yells. A man emerges from the hole, carrying a child.

“Who knows who this child is? Who knows his family? Where are his parents?” he calls out. 

Behind him are dead bodies and severed limbs scattered across the ground. Some poke out from beneath the sand, half-buried.

When the Israeli army struck the coastal displacement camp in al-Mawasi, west of Khan Younis, there was no rubble. The Israeli-designated “safe zone” was little more than a sea of tents on the beach, so people were buried in the sand instead.

At 10 a.m. on Saturday, while people were starting their day, the Israeli military targeted the area with successive airstrikes, leading to a massacre that, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, has, as of the time of writing, killed 90 people and injured over 300 others. Half of them are women and children, the health ministry says.

Shaima Farwaneh, 16, was near the site of the massacre when it happened. She was preparing to make breakfast for her family when the bombs fell. 

People and sand scattered everywhere, limbs that were once attached to bodies flying over their heads. 

“A leg hit me, and I saw dismembered bodies a few meters away,” Shaima told Mondoweiss. “I saw a young child screaming. He lost his lower limbs and was crawling on his hands and screaming. The bombs didn’t stop, and suddenly the boy disappeared. I saw how he vanished before me while we ran and lowered our eyes to the ground, unable to do anything but run.” 

Shaima describes hearing seven explosions in short succession before it was over. “What a life we ​​live in these tents that we have to see the dismembered bodies of our siblings and families fly over our heads.” 

When the ambulance and Civil Defense crews arrived near a well-known crowded market for residents of the area, their vehicles were targeted as well, according to the director of the Civil Defense in Khan Younis, Yamen Abu Suleiman. Two Civil Defense workers were killed in the strike.

Abu Suleiman said that the occupation targeted Al-Mawasi with a large barrage of missiles, which led to many casualties. “The occupation targeted the area more than once to prevent us from any rescue operation,” he tells Mondoweiss, denouncing the silence of the International Committee of the Red Cross over Israel’s prevention of rescue teams from doing their work.

Israel claims that the airstrikes were an attempt to assassinate Muhammad al-Deif, the head of the armed wing of Hamas, the al-Qassam Brigades, as well as the commander of al-Qassam’s Khan Younis District Brigade, Rafi Salama. The Gaza government media office denies the Israeli claims, emphasizing that they are nothing but a way of diverting the world’s attention from the reality of the massacre the Israeli army committed as part of the genocide of Gaza’s people.

According to local sources, over 80,000 displaced people currently reside in tents in that area.

‘No state does this’

Fawzia Sheikh Youssef, 82, was buried in the sand from the bombing but survived. She describes what she experienced during the massacre as something she had never seen in her entire life. She tells Mondoweiss that she was already displaced during the Nakba of 1948 when she was only 6 years old, coming to the Khan Younis area and staying with her family for two years in a tent. 76 years later, she found herself back where she started, but this time witnessing massacres the likes of which she had never seen even during the Nakba.

“There is no country in all the world that does this to children, women, and civilians,” she says. “This isn’t how wars are.” 

Fawzia was eating her breakfast when the bomb ripped through her encampment, demolishing her tent and trapping her underneath it. She found herself covered in sand and trapped inside but was not critically injured. She began crawling on the ground and extricated herself from beneath the tent, eventually escaping to a place far away from the shrapnel and missiles, closer to the main road.

“I saw before my eyes one missile after another descending next to the tents. Missiles I have never seen in my life in all of Gaza’s wars. Isn’t this internationally forbidden? Shouldn’t the civilian population be protected and not face genocide and mass killing? Isn’t this forbidden?”

“They killed young people and old women. They do not respect humans. Aren’t we human?” she continues. “There is nothing to protect us from these missiles. The tents fell on our heads, and I was hit with two pieces of shrapnel in my leg. I may get poisoned, and I did not harm anyone.”

“These are not humanitarian actions,” Fawzia says. “A normal state would know that children have value, and women have value. Their lives are respected. Killing them is forbidden. There are wars. Some countries fight in the world, but not like this. Not like what happens with us.”

‘I left my son and fled from the horror of the bombing’

Samah al-Farra, a survivor of the massacre, says she fled from the horror of the missiles, leaving her son behind without knowing what she was doing. She describes what she saw after the incident as witnessing the horrors of the Day of Resurrection. The sound of the explosions, the panic of the people around her, the stampede in the attempt to escape, women leaving their tents without even wearing their clothes — Samah has to live with witnessing all these brutal scenes.

“People were running. There was sand in our eyes and fire over our heads. I left my son behind me and started running. I found the world turned upside down. The bodies of the martyrs were next to us, cut into pieces. It was a massacre. The fragments, sand, and bodies flew over our heads as we ran,” Samah describes.

She says that if this density of missiles had fallen on fortified buildings, it would have destroyed them. “But what about when they fall on tents whose owners are protected only by a piece of cloth?” 

She describes the scene as a shower of missiles falling four times in a row, with more than one explosion occurring during each shower. “We saved ourselves. If we had stayed where we were, we would have been cut up and buried under the sand.”

Media reports have said that the bombs used in the al-Mawasi attack were JDAMs made in the U.S., which turn highly destructive unguided bombs into more precise missiles. 

‘The entire area was overturned‘

Aziza Abu Tahir sits in front of the devastation after the bombing. Scattered bags of flour, gallons of water, vegetables, pillowcases, and utensils litter the area. She owns an oven and sits beside it every day. The women of the camp send their dough to her to bake for a small fee.

“When they dropped the bombs above our heads, all the people were running and screaming and saying that these were incendiary bombs, and this is the first time we have heard a sound like this,” Aziza tells Mondoweiss. “We ran away, and no one knew where to run. Some people went from one direction and were bombed, and some of them went from another direction and survived. But no one knew where they were going.” 

As she speaks, a small child is hugging her, the son of her neighbor. Aziza says his mother takes care of orphans, and explains that when the attack started, his mother was bringing some dough for Aziza to bake in order to then resell to get an income for her family. “She was just here, and I baked what she wanted, and she went to sell it. As soon as she walked away, the bombing started. I don’t know where she is now, and I don’t know if she will return. The entire area she was walking in was overturned, and everything was buried.” 

Hassan Suleih conducted interviews and provided photography for this report.

July 17, 2024 Posted by | Gaza, PERSONAL STORIES, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Tracking Dissent: US Officials Who Have Resigned Over The War on Gaza

https://youtube.com/watch?v=inwTRwxLo20%3Fsi%3Dzh0O-kc8Aoy8Yzpq

Kevin Gosztola

Until Israel’s assault on Gaza ends, this page will be a resource for tracking U.S. government officials and military officers who resign in protest

Support from President Joe Biden’s administration for the Israeli government’s war on Gaza has resulted in an unprecedented surge of dissent within United States agencies.

Several officials and military officers have resigned in opposition since the Israeli military launched a massive bombardment after Hamas fighters stormed Israel on October 7, 2023.

During the week of July 4, 2024, 12 individuals who resigned released a unified statement of opposition.

“America’s diplomatic cover for, and continuous flow of arms to, Israel has ensured our undeniable complicity in the killings and forced starvation of a besieged Palestinian population in Gaza,” the dissenters declared. “This is not only morally reprehensible and in clear violation of international humanitarian law and U.S. laws, but it has also put a target on America’s back.”

While outlining the “current crisis” and what they believe should be done, the dissenters appealed to their former colleagues to “amplify calls for peace” and hold their respective institutions accountable for the violence unfolding in Palestine.


“We recognize the systemic obstacles you face, both as you perform your work, and as you consider leaving it. We particularly embrace those of you representing America’s diversity who feel that your voices have been disempowered, ignored, and tokenized. We are with you, and we know that a better way is possible, but only when we are all brave enough to challenge institutions and outdated forces that attempt to silence us.”

The dissenters further declared, “We encourage you to keep pushing. In our experience, no decision point is too minor to challenge, so while you are in government service, use your voice, write letters to leaders in your agencies, and bring up your disagreements with your team. Speaking out has a snowball effect, inspiring others to use their voice.”

“There is strength in numbers, and we urge you to not be complicit. We encourage you to consult with your Inspectors General, with your legal advisors, with appropriate Members of Congress, and via other protected channels, to question the veracity and/or legality of specific actions or policies. There are resources, and you have advocates, including all of us, who can support you in speaking your truth,” they concluded.

Several of the dissenters are whistleblowers with firsthand knowledge of how Biden administration officials have enabled the Israeli government’s atrocities. All of them are courageous individuals, who have sacrificed their careers for peace, justice, and human rights.

Until the war ends, The Dissenter will keep this page updated and track U.S. officials and military officers who resign in protest. (If anyone is missing, please email newsletter@thedissenter.org)

Below is a list of all the people who have resigned from the U.S. government or military during the war on Gaza as of July 5 and in reverse chronological order.……………………………………………………………………………………

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9mNQ2c_Ye3w%3Fsi%3D5fdH18AQdUH1R_5R

and more videos …………………………………………………more https://thedissenter.org/tracking-dissent-us-officials-resigned-over-war-on-gaza/

July 12, 2024 Posted by | Gaza, politics, USA | Leave a comment

‘Horrific Massacre’: Israel Bombs Gaza School Used as Refugee Camp, Killing Dozens.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=dvMPDAUb_Hk%3Fsi%3DHWpfbe8dHAlD3hM1

“Schools have gone from safe places of education and hope for children to overcrowded shelters and often ending up a place of death and misery,” said UNRWA’s commissioner-general.

JAKE JOHNSON, Jul 10, 2024  https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/10/horrific-massacre-israel-bombs-gaza-school-used-as-refugee-camp-killing-dozens/

Israeli forces killed dozens of people Tuesday in an airstrike on a school-turned-refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, the fourth school Israel’s military has bombed in as many days as the country continues its massive assault on the enclave’s starving population.

At least 29 people were killed and dozens more were wounded in Tuesday’s attack, including women and children—who have made up roughly two-thirds of those killed in Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, which began following a Hamas-led attack in October. The death toll from Tuesday’s attack is expected to rise, as many of those injured were reportedly in critical condition and taken to the under-resourced and overwhelmed Nasser Hospital.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) acknowledged carrying out the airstrike—which hit the entrance of the school—but claimed to be targeting a Hamas militant “adjacent” to the complex. The IDF, whose internal investigations rarely result in accountability for atrocities, said the “incident is under review.”

Video footage posted to social media shows displaced Palestinians playing in the schoolyard when the airstrike hit, sparking panic and chaos. [Video on original –Warning: The footage is graphic]

Citing witnesses, the BBC reported that “the area was teeming with displaced people at the time” of the airstrike, which “resulted in widespread destruction and the deaths of women and children.”

“Body parts were scattered across the site and many people staying in tents outside the school were also injured,” the British outlet reported. “Ayman Al-Dahma, 21, told the BBC there had been as many as 3,000 people packed into the area at the time, which he said housed a market and residential buildings. Describing the number of casualties as ‘unimaginable,’ he said he had seen people whose limbs had been severed by the blast.”

Tuesday’s attack marked the fourth time in four days that the IDF has attacked a school in the Gaza Strip, according to Agence France-Presse. Over the weekend, Israeli forces killed more than a dozen Palestinians in an attack on a United Nations-run school in central Gaza.

Most of Gaza’s education infrastructure has been damaged or completely destroyed by Israeli forces, and the schools still standing are being used to shelter those displaced by the IDF assault, which is now in its 10th month. The United Nations estimates that 90% of Gaza’s population has been internally displaced since October, with some displaced up to 10 times.

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East called the IDF’s latest attack “a horrific massacre,” adding, “Annihilation is the point.”

“Nothing can justify Canada’s failure to act,” the group wrote on social media.

Canada is one of a number of major countries that have supplied weaponry to the Israeli government as it has carried out its utter devastation of the Gaza Strip, nearly all of which is now uninhabitable.

The United States and Germany together provided 99% of the arms Israel imported last year, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Germany’s Foreign Office called Wednesday’s attack “unacceptable” and demanded a swift investigation.

“People seeking shelter in schools getting killed is unacceptable. Civilians, especially children, must not get caught in the crossfire,” the foreign office said. “The repeated attacks on schools by the Israeli army must stop.”

Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), said Wednesday that “schools have gone from safe places of education and hope for children to overcrowded shelters and often ending up a place of death and misery.”

“Nine months in, under our watch, the relentless, endless killings, destruction, and despair continue. Gaza is no place for children,” he added. “The blatant disregard of international humanitarian law cannot become the new normal… Cease-fire now before we lose what is left of our common humanity.”

July 11, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

The Lancet study estimates death toll in Gaza 186,000 or even more

Maktoob Staff, 8 July 24,  https://maktoobmedia.com/gaza-genocide/the-lancet-study-estimates-death-toll-in-gaza-186000-or-even-more/

Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death reported in Gaza, a new study published respected medical journal The Lancet said it is “not implausible” to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the genocidal war in  Gaza.

The paper titled ‘Counting the dead in  Gaza: difficult but essential’, published on 05 July, stated that using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, the estimated death toll would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the besieged enclave.

On Sunday, the Palestinian health ministry said that at least 38,153 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 07 while more than 87,828 have been wounded in the besieged enclave. 15,983 of them are children.

The study by Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee and Salim Yusuf, used the data from June 19, with the official death toll of 37, 396. The official record maintained by the  Gaza Health Ministry doesn’t include over 10,000 people missing or buried under the rubbles.

“The Ministry has had to augment its usual reporting, based on people dying in its hospitals or brought in dead, with information from reliable media sources and first responders. This change has inevitably degraded the detailed data recorded previously. Consequently, the  Gaza Health Ministry now reports separately the number of unidentified bodies among the total death toll. As of May 10, 2024, 30% of the 35,091 deaths were unidentified,” observed the paper.

It also pointed out that armed conflicts have “indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence”.

“Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases,” the paper read.

A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28,000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024.

The interim measures set out by the International Court of Justice in January, require Israel to “take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of … the Genocide Convention”.

“An immediate and urgent ceasefire in the  Gaza Strip is essential, accompanied by measures to enable the distribution of medical supplies, food, clean water, and other resources for basic human needs,” the paper read.

July 9, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Israel Has Forcibly Displaced 1.9 Million Palestinians in Gaza

Israel’s assault has displaced over 1 million people just since May, a UN human rights official said.

SCHEERPOST, By Sharon Zhang , TRUTHOUT, July 2, 2024

srael’s ongoing assault in Gaza has now forcibly displaced 1.9 million Palestinians, a UN humanitarian official reported on Tuesday as Israel forced another round of evacuations for hundreds of thousands of people across southern and central Gaza.

Israel’s brutal assault and humanitarian blockade has turned Gaza into an “abyss of suffering” and a “maelstrom of human misery,” said Sigrid Kaag, UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza, in an address to the UN Security Council.

“Following the Israeli offenses against Rafah, since the sixth of May, over 1 million people have been displaced once again, desperately seeking shelter and safety,” said Kaag. “One point nine million people are now displaced across Gaza.”

This amounts to over 86 percent of the 2.2 million person population of Gaza displaced — though the proportion may be larger when the number of Palestinians who have been killed, are missing under the rubble or have died in ways that officials aren’t recording are subtracted from the population estimates. The number of displaced people is up from 1.7 million Palestinians who UN officials said had been forced out of their homes in earlier estimates……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Meanwhile, Israeli forces are also fiercely attacking Gaza City in the north. This has sparked an “exodus” from the eastern part of the city, the UN reported, after days of intense bombardments and tanks entering the region.

According to the UN, about 84,000 Palestinians have been displaced by this massacre, with most families having already fled areas multiple times, their supplies and energy dwindling amid Israel’s intensified famine campaign.

UNRWA’s communications head Louise Wateridge reported from a recent trip to Gaza that the region is “apocalyptic — most people have lost their homes, either completely or partially, and have to flee with very few belongings; essentially what they can carry in their hands.”  https://scheerpost.com/2024/07/03/israel-has-forcibly-displaced-1-9-million-palestinians-in-gaza/

July 5, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

The Suspect Body Count: The Death Toll in Gaza is Much Higher Than We’re Being Told


Seymour Hersh Substack Thu, 27 Jun 2024  https://www.sott.net/article/492600-The-Suspect-Body-Count-The-Death-Toll-in-Gaza-is-Much-Higher-Than-We-re-Being-Told

The number of slain Palestinians in Gaza, including those believed to be Hamas cadres, has gone through a series of public recalibrations in recent weeks, as Israel’s reshuffled war cabinet has struggled to minimize international rage at the slaughter there. The reduced body count was little more than a sideshow because the Israeli offensive is continuing in Gaza with no signs of the ceasefire that the Biden administration has been desperately seeking.

Hamas triggered the war last October 7 with a surprise attack — there is so far no official explanation for Israel’s security failure that day — that killed 1,139 Israelis and injured 3,400 more. Some 250 soldiers and civilians were taken hostage.

Comment: There is plenty of evidence to strongly suggest that Israel allowed the incursion on Oct. 7th to happen and that parties unknown carried out most of the killing. This strategy fits with Israel’s decades-long goal of creating the right ‘conditions’ to justify implementing a final solution to their ‘Palestinian problem’.

The expected Israeli response began within days, with the bombing of the Gaza Strip. Some Israeli ground operations inside Gaza began on October 13, and two weeks later the expected full-scale offensive began. The war still rages, with one estimate concluding that by the beginning of April 70,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on targets throughout the 25-mile long Gaza, more tonnage than was dropped by Germany on London and by America and the United Kingdom on Dresden and Hamburg in World War II, combined.

The Gaza Health Ministry, which is under Hamas control, estimated as of Tuesday that the death toll from the Israeli attacks stood at 37,718, with more than 86,000 Gazans wounded. Last month the Israeli government issued a much lower estimate of the casualties, stating that its planes and troops had killed 14,000 “terrorists” — Hamas fighters — and no more than 16,000 civilians.

The Biden administration, on the eve of the first presidential debate, has said nothing about the new numbers, but there are many senior analysts in the international human rights and social science community who consider these numbers to be hokum: a vast underestimate of the damage that has been done to a terrorized civilian population living in makeshift tents and shelters amid disease and malnutrition, with a lack of sanitation, medical care, and medicines as well as increasing desperation and fatigue.

In days of telephone and email exchanges with public health and statistical experts in America I found a general belief that the civilian death toll in Gaza, both from the bombings and their aftermath, had to be significantly higher than reported, but none of the scientists and statisticians — appropriately — was willing to say so in print because of a lack of access to accurate data. I also asked one well-informed American official what he thought the actual civilian death count in Gaza might be and he answered, without pause: “We just don’t know.”

One public health expert acknowledged: “No clear and definite body count is possible, given the continuing Israeli bombing.” He added, caustically, “How many bombs does it take to kill a human being?”

Gaza was an ideal target for an air attack, he said. “No functioning fire department. No fire trucks. No water. No place to escape. No hospitals. No electricity. People living in tents and bodies stacked up all over . . . being eaten by stray dogs.

“What the fuck is wrong with the international medical community?” he asked. “Who are we kidding? Without a ceasefire, a million people are going to starve. This is not a debating point. How can you count something when the system is biting its own tail.” He was referring to the fact that the health system in Gaza — its hospitals and service agencies — “is being targeted and shattered” by Israeli aircraft and those responsible for the counting of the dead and injured “are themselves dead.”

The expert added that the lack of better casualty statistics is not only the fault of Israel. “Hamas has a vested interest in consistently minimizing the number of civilians killed “because of a lack of planning over the years when it was in charge of Gaza.” He was referring to ordinary Gazan citizens’ lack of access to Hamas’s vast underground tunnel complex that could have served as a bomb shelter for all. In Gaza during the Israeli bombing raids, “Is Hamas going to say that Israel” was able to kill all in Gaza “because we started a war without being able to fully protect our people?” His point was that Hamas has every reason, as does Israel, to minimize the extent of innocent civilians who have become collateral damage in the ongoing war.

Comment: Hamas did not start this most recent round of mass slaughter by Israel on Oct 7th. Hamas has never provided Israel with the justification it always sought to massacre Gazans wholesale. On Oct. 7th, Israel provided itself with that justification.

A prominent American public health official who spoke to me acknowledged that he was also concerned about the numbers of unreported dead in Gaza. In a crisis, he said, “we can start with a name-by-name count, but pretty soon the numbers of killed and missing exceed the capacity of any such approach, especially when the counters are being killed and the records [are] at risk.” He said that various postwar academic studies of mortality during the siege of Mosul — when a US-led coalition fought a door-to-door fight in 2017 against the Islamic State in Iraq, killing as many 11,000 civilians — “showed the large loss of life from the use of high-velocity weapons in urban areas. So we should expect similar in Gaza.”

Other data suggest that the published death figures are seriously misleading. Save the Children, an international child protection agency, issued a report this month estimating that as many as 21,000 children in Gaza are “trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in unmarked graves, or lost from their families.” Other children, the agency said, “have been forcibly disappeared, including an unknown number detained and forcibly transferred out of Gaza” with their whereabouts unknown to the families “amidst reports of ill-treatment and torture.”

Comment: As if the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza is not enough, it is highly likely that a large number of Palestinian children have been abducted by Zionist state forces, likely to be tortured and killed or otherwise used for the depraved pleasures of some of the people that inhabit that “shitty little country”.

Jeremy Stoner, the charity’s regional director for the Middle East, said: “Gaza has become a graveyard for children, with thousands of others missing, their fates unknown. . . . We desperately need a ceasefire to find and support the missing children who have survived, and to prevent more families from being destroyed.”

Warnings about the inevitability of far more deaths among the ordinary citizens of Gaza have been around since last winter. In December, Devi Sridhar, the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, wrote in the Guardian that the Gaza war was “the deadliest conflict for children in recent years” with as many as 160 children being killed daily. The surviving children do not have “the basic needs that any human, especially babies and children, need to stay healthy and alive. . . . Unless something changes, the world faces the prospect of almost a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population — close to half a million human beings — dying within a year.

“It’s a crude estimate,” Sridhar wrote, “but one that is data-driven, using the terrifying real numbers of death in previous and comparable conflicts.”

The New York Times and the Washington Post reported Wednesday that a new study endorsed by the United Nations found that as many as half a million Gaza residents are facing imminent starvation because of “a lack of food.” The study also said that more than one half of the surviving residents of Gaza “had to exchange their clothes for money and one-third resorted to picking up trash to sell.”)

One of the most avid early critics of the official statistics published by the Gaza Health Ministry and accepted by most in the American media, has been Ralph Nader. On March 5, he wrote a column in the Capitol Hill Citizen, a monthly newspaper he founded, about what he called “the undercount” of Palestinian casualties in Gaza. He quoted Martin Griffiths, the United Nations under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs: “Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.”

In my years as a journalist, I have often found an oddball story that says more with each retelling. Something like that happened in February when Al Jazeera ran an interview with a 64-year-old Gazan undertaker named Saadi Hassan Sulieman Baraka, whose nickname is Abu Jawad. He complained of working almost constantly since the Israeli invasion of Gaza began.

“I’ve buried about ten times more people during this war than I did across my entire 27 years as an undertaker,” he said. “The least was 30 people and the most was 800. Since October 7, I’ve buried more than 17,000 people.” He especially remembered the day he buried the 800 dead. “We collected them in pieces; their bodies so riddled with holes it was like Israeli snipers used them for target practice; Others were crushed like . . . like a boiled potato, and many had huge facial burns.

“We couldn’t really tell one person’s body from the other, but we did our best. We made one big deep grave, probably 10 meters (30 feet) deep and buried them together.”

It could be propaganda — of course, it could. But Abu Jawad made no mention of anyone from the Gaza Health Ministry coming to collect the names of the dead. He made no mention of any government official being involved in the process at all.

June 30, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Can Israel defeat Hamas? Its own military doesn’t seem to think so, clashing with Netanyahu

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KCao9FPgj88%3Fsi%3DuIilNcS5qnSXN0Dl

The Israel Defense Forces’ top spokesman said “Hamas is an idea” that can’t be eliminated and that saying it could be was “throwing sand in the eye of the public.”

NBC News, June 20, 2024, By Chantal Da Silva

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may still be leading the country into its 258th day of war in Gaza, but on Thursday he stood increasingly alone — and at odds with his own military.

Long criticized at home as well as abroad, Netanyahu’s approach is now the subject of a deepening disagreement with his top brass, as well as his country’s top ally, the U.S.

Netanyahu dissolved his war Cabinet this week after former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, a political rival, stepped down, accusing Netanyahu of standing in the way of “real victory.”

Comment: Four politicians resigned recently, and, over recent months, various IDF officials have resigned.

And on Wednesday, the Israel Defense Forces’ top spokesman seemed to lay bare the rift at the top of the country’s leadership. The central stated goal of the war in Gaza — to destroy Hamas — was not possible, and to maintain it was meant “throwing sand in the eyes of the public,” Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said.

“Hamas is an idea. Anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong,” Hagari said in an interview with Israeli broadcaster Channel 13. “The political echelon needs to find an alternative — or it will remain,” he said, referring to Hamas.

Netanyahu’s office quickly rebuffed the comments, saying in a statement that “the political and security cabinet headed by Prime Minister Netanyahu defined as one of the goals of the war the destruction of Hamas’ military and governmental capabilities.”…………………………………………………………..

 Hagari’s comments reflected a growing push for Netanyahu to present an actionable plan for the day after the war in Gaza…………..

The absence of a postwar plan for Gaza was at the heart of Gantz’s reasoning for quitting Netanyahu’s war Cabinet, and it has also driven criticism from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

Comment: This idea of a post-war plan seems to be operating on the premise that there will be any Palestinians left in Gaza, whereas various officials have been clear that they intend to genocide all Palestinians that dare to remain.

Israeli forces pushed deeper into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, continuing a monthslong assault that local officials say has killed more than 37,000 people.

Comment: That estimate was valid months ago and it hasn’t increased much since then, which has led various analysts to put the number of, mostly women and children, slaughtered by Israel, at over 100,000.

……………………………………………… The U.S. sent an envoy to the region in a bid to prevent all-out war in Lebanon, but Netanyahu also sparked dismay in Washington when he accused it of “withholding weapons and ammunition.”

Comment: It seems that Israel intends to escalate the fighting between Hezbollah because it considers that as one way to drag the US into the conflict, which might be why the US sent an envoy to try to deter them (for the time being, anyway).

……………………………………………….. more https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-military-spokesman-hamas-defeated-netanyahu-war-gaza-rcna157991

June 23, 2024 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

‘Immense’ scale of Gaza killings amount to crime against humanity, UN inquiry says

Emma Farge, Wed 12 June 2024  https://uk.news.yahoo.com/news/immense-scale-gaza-killings-amount-070247585.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc290dC5uZXQv&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAE8HPcr-FwxjYBWBJjOvPs18KXTim4RNcN-godsX5YX41fMC7lw_jrtVU1-MxuWmywfp-JHc32RWkZntx35DRzp2lMCfrDUJBO9ZfyUj4cQQq1esBhASwVICNpPKfwUP3lrA83XfKI-Wh39AA2ZFjDPO2WQdeLFwaXz4qUyEPAva

GENEVA (Reuters) – Both Israel and Hamas committed war crimes in the early stages of the Gaza war, a U.N. inquiry found on Wednesday, saying that Israel’s actions also constituted crimes against humanity because of the immense civilian losses.

The findings were from two parallel reports, one focusing on the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and another on Israel’s military response, published by the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI), which has an unusually broad mandate to collect evidence and identify perpetrators of international crimes committed in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Israel does not cooperate with the commission, which it says has an anti-Israel bias. The COI says Israel obstructs its work and prevented investigators from accessing both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Israel’s diplomatic mission to the U.N. in Geneva rejected the findings. “The COI has once again proven that its actions are all in the service of a narrow-led political agenda against Israel,” said Meirav Eilon Shahar, Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva.

Hamas did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

By Israel’s count more than 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage in the Oct. 7 cross-border attacks that sparked a military retaliation in Gaza that has since killed over 37,000 people, by Palestinian tallies.

The reports, which cover the conflict through to end-December, found that both sides committed war crimes including torture; murder or willful killing; outrages upon personal dignity; and inhuman or cruel treatment.

Israel also committed additional war crimes including starvation as a method of warfare, it said, saying Israel not only failed to provide essential supplies like food, water, shelter and medicine to Gazans but “acted to prevent the supply of those necessities by anyone else”.

Some of the war crimes such as murder also constituted crimes against humanity by Israel, the COI statement said, using a term reserved for the most serious international crimes knowingly committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against civilians.

“The immense numbers of civilian casualties in Gaza and widespread destruction of civilian objects and infrastructure were the inevitable result of a strategy undertaken with intent to cause maximum damage, disregarding the principles of distinction, proportionality and adequate precautions,” the COI statement said.

Sometimes, the evidence gathered by such U.N.-mandated bodies has formed the basis for war crimes prosecutions and could be drawn on by the International Criminal Court.

MASS KILLINGS, SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND HUMILIATION

The COI’s findings are based on interviews with victims and witnesses, hundreds of submissions, satellite imagery, medical reports and verified open-source information.

Among the findings in the 59-page report on the Oct. 7 attacks, the commission verified four incidents of mass killings in public shelters which it said suggests militants had “standing operational instructions”. It also identified “a pattern of sexual violence” by Palestinian armed groups but could not independently verify reports of rape.

The longer 126-page Gaza report said Israel’s use of weapons such as MK84 guided bombs with a large destructive capacity in urban areas were incompatible with international humanitarian law “as they cannot adequately or accurately discriminate between the intended military targets and civilian objects”.

It also said Palestinian men and boys were subject to the crime against humanity of gender persecution, citing cases where victims were forced to strip naked in public in moves “intended to inflict severe humiliation”.

The findings will be discussed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva next week.

The COI composed of three independent experts including its chair South African former U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay was set up in 2021 by the Geneva council. Unusually, it has an open-ended mandate — a fact criticised by both Israel and some of its allies.

June 16, 2024 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel, Legal | Leave a comment

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