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1,500 Killed While Seeking Aid in Gaza Since May: UN.

 August 5, 2025, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250804-1500-killed-while-seeking-aid-in-gaza-since-may-un/

Around 1,500 people have been killed in Gaza since May while seeking humanitarian aid, the UN said Monday, Anadolu reports.

“The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says that many people reportedly continue to be killed and injured, including people seeking food along the UN convoy routes and militarized distribution points. Some 1,500 people have been reportedly killed since May,” Farhan Haq, UN deputy spokesperson, told reporters.

He added that a health care worker with the Palestine Red Crescent Society was killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunus, southern Gaza.

Since May 27, a US- and Israeli-backed aid scheme in Gaza has been widely criticized as being ineffective as well as being a “death trap” for starving civilians.

Asked by Anadolu whether the UN secretary-general believes the UN’s reputation and effectiveness can be salvaged given its failure to stop Israel’s actions, including plans to expand the annexation of Palestinian land, Haq responded: “He certainly does.”

Haq said the UN’s record includes “successful diplomatic negotiations” and humanitarian aid that continues to “keep billions of people alive.” He emphasized that lack of international unity, particularly within the UN Security Council, hinders the organization’s effectiveness.

Gaza’s Government Media Office said Monday that Israel had allowed in just 674 aid trucks since July 27 – only 14% of the strip’s minimum daily requirement of 600 trucks.

It said most of the 80 trucks that entered on Sunday were looted amid what it called “a deliberately engineered climate of chaos and starvation,” accusing Israel of weaponizing hunger to undermine Palestinian resilience.

Rejecting international calls for a ceasefire, the Israeli army has pursued a brutal offensive on Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, killing nearly 61,000 Palestinians, almost half of them women and children. The military campaign has devastated the enclave and brought it to the verge of famine.

August 11, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Israel Preparing To Escalate Military Offensive in Gaza

An Israeli official said Netanyahu is pushing for ‘the release of hostages as part of a military resolution’

by Dave DeCamp | August 3, 2025 https://news.antiwar.com/2025/08/03/israel-preparing-to-escalate-military-offensive-in-gaza/

The Israeli military is drawing up plans to escalate its genocidal war in the Gaza Strip that will soon be presented to Israeli political leadership, Haaretz reported on Sunday.

An Israeli official said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is pushing for the release of hostages as part of a military resolution,” and he is set to discuss the matter with his cabinet on Tuesday. According to the Haaretz report, the idea is to extend ground operations into sensitive areas, including Gaza’s central refugee camps, where Israeli captives are believed to be held.

Israeli officials are now claiming that Hamas doesn’t want a deal, even though the group has long said it is willing to release all remaining Israeli captives in exchange for a permanent ceasefire. Officials are pointing to Hamas’s denial of a claim by US envoy Steve Witkoff, who said the group was willing to disarm. Hamas responded that it would only give up its weapons if an independent Palestinian state were established.

Witkoff was in Israel on Friday and Saturday and met with family members of Israelis being held in Gaza. He told them that President Trump no longer seeks a temporary ceasefire deal but wants a comprehensive one that will free the remaining 20 living Israeli captives. However, Netanyahu hasn’t shown interest in a deal, and there’s no sign that Trump is willing to put pressure on him.

The family members of Israeli captives in Gaza want a diplomatic solution and are against military escalation. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum has criticized the reported plans for the expansion of military operations, warning that “expanding the war endangers the lives of the hostages, who are already in immediate danger of death.”

Netanyahu claimed on Sunday that the videos of two emaciated Israeli captives released by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) show that Hamas “doesn’t want a deal” and vowed that he would work to “eliminate” the Palestinian group. For its part, Hamas insisted that the Israeli prisoners eat “what our fighters and our people eat” and said that the Red Cross could deliver aid to them if Israel permanently opened humanitarian corridors and halted airstrikes during aid deliveries.

Israel has been under significant international pressure to allow more aid into Gaza as Palestinians are starving to death due to its blockade. The Haaretz report said that the US and Israel appear to be moving toward expanding Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) distribution points in north Gaza, which would require Israel to occupy more territory.

Nearly 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF near GHF distribution sites, according to the UN. Anthony Aguilar, a retired US Army Green Beret who worked at GHF sites, has blown the whistle on the operation and says that the sites were designed purposely so Palestinians seeking aid would have to walk through combat zones where they can be killed. He said that he witnessed the IDF commit war crimes by firing into crowds of hungry civilians.

Despite the massacres near GHF sites, the operation has received a resounding endorsement from the Trump administration. On Friday, Witkoff and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee visited a GHF site, a move that was criticized as a PR stunt.

August 7, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Chris Hedges: The Gaza Riviera

Text originally published July 26, 2025.

Scheerpost, By Chris Hedges / The Chris Hedges Report, August 4, 2025 , https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/04/chris-hedges-the-gaza-riviera-2/

TRANSCRIPT:


Israelis do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who they have starved to death as a curse. They do not see the slain families they gun down at food hubs — designed not to deliver aid but lure starving Palestinians into a massive concentration camp in the south of Gaza in preparation for deportation — as a war crime. Israelis do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily, as anything extraordinary. They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric. They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition, as savage. They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors as well as journalists, 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror.

Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code. Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor. https://scheerpost.com/2025/08/04/chris-hedges-the-gaza-riviera-2/

August 7, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Chris Hedges: The Gaza Riviera

 July 27, 2025 ,By Chris Hedges / ScheerPost, https://scheerpost.com/2025/07/27/chris-hedges-the-gaza-riviera/

Israelis do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who they have starved to death as a curse. They do not see the slain families they gun down at food hubs — designed not to deliver aid but lure starving Palestinians into a massive concentration camp in the south of Gaza in preparation for deportation — as a war crime. Israelis do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily, as anything extraordinary. They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric. They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition, as savage. They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors as well as journalists, 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror.

Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually. They view the genocide through the lens of a bankrupt media and political class that tells them only what they want to hear and shows them only what they want to see. They are intoxicated by the power of their industrial weapons and license to kill with impunity. They are drunk on self-adulation and the fantasy that they are the vanguard of civilization. They believe that the extermination of a people, including children, condemned as human contaminants, makes the world, especially their world, a happier and safer place.

They are the heirs of Pol Pot, the killers that carried out the genocides in East Timor, Rwanda and Bosnia and, yes, the Nazis. Israel, like all genocidal states — no population since World War II has been dispossessed and starved with such speed and ruthlessness – has a final solution that would have earned the stamp of approval from Adolf Eichmann.

Starvation was always the plan, the preordained final chapter of the genocide. Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies. It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of Oct. 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.

Over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and U.S. mercenaries in the chaotic scramble to get one of the few food packages distributed during the brief blocks of time, usually an hour, at the four aid sites set up by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office.

Once Gaza was turned into a moonscape after 21 months of saturation bombing, once Palestinians were forced to live in tents, under crude tarps or in the open air, once clean water, food and medical aid became nearly impossible to find, once civil society was obliterated, Israel began its grim campaign to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza.

One in three people in Gaza are going multiple days without eating, according to the U.N.

Starvation is not a pretty sight. I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took an estimated 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs — scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not.

I watched hundreds of skeletal figures, ghosts of human beings, trudge at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never got up. Many were the remains of entire families.

The starved lack enough calories to sustain themselves. They eat anything to survive — animal feed, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from constant diarrhea. They have trouble breathing because of respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it in a vain attempt to hold off the gnawing hunger pains.

Starvation reduces the iron needed to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, which affects heart and brain function. Anemia sets in. The body, in essence, feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.

It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates. This is the future Israel has preordained for the two million people in Gaza.

But it is not the future Israelis see. They see paradise. They see an ethno-nationalist Jewish state where Palestinians, whose land they stole and occupied and whose people they have subjugated and forced into an apartheid existence, do not exist. They see cafes and hotels rising up where thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of bodies lie buried under the rubble. They see tourists frolicking on the Gaza beachfront, a vision enhanced by an Artificial Intelligence-generated video uploaded to social media by Israeli Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology, Gila Gamliel. It is what a Gaza devoid of Palestinians would look like, echoing the absurdist AI video posted by Donald Trump.

In the new video, carefree Israelis eat at seaside restaurants. Anchored in the sparkling Mediterranean are luxury yachts. Gleaming hotels and office high rises, including a Trump Tower, dot the beachfront. Attractive residential neighborhoods stand where now there are broken, jagged mounds of concrete. The video shows Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, as well as Trump and Melania, strolling along the seaside.

Gamliel, like other Israeli leaders and Trump, cynically uses the term “voluntary emigration” to describe the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. This omits the stark choice Israel actually offers the Palestinians — leave or die.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for a “security annexation” of the northern Gaza Strip and vowed that Gaza will become an “inseparable part of the State of Israel.” He made the remarks at a Knesset conference called “The Gaza Riviera — from vision to reality,” which presented proposals for the building of Jewish colonies in Gaza. Smotrich said Israel would “relocate Gazans to other countries,” and that Trump endorsed the plan.

Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, who once proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, declared that “All Gaza will be Jewish.” The Israeli government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu said. He described Palestinians as Nazis. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.’”

Genocidal killers embrace fantasies of eradicating a native population and expanding their ethnonationalist state. The Nazis carried out their genocidal assault, which included mass starvation, on Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other indigenous people, dismissed as Untermenschen, or subhumans. Colonists were then to be shipped to Central and Eastern Europe to Germanize the occupied territory.

These killers do not reckon with the darkness they unleash. The upscale beachfront properties dreamt of by Israel will never appear, just as the modern, exclusively Serb capital, with its golden domed cathedral, imposing presidency building, 15-story clock tower, state-of-the-art medical center and national theater with a 72-foot revolving stage was never built on the ruins of Bosnia.

Rather, there will be ugly apartment blocks, populated by the usual miscreants, proto-fascists, racists and mediocrities who live in the Jewish colonies in the West Bank. These ultranationalists, who have formed rogue militias to seize Palestinian land and joined the Israeli army in murdering over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, will define Israel. They are the Israeli version of the 3-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the Brown Shirts or the Hitler Youth — that in 1965 helped carry out the genocidal mayhem that left half a million to one million dead.

These rogue militias, equipped with automatic weapons provided by the Israeli government, lynched Saifullah Musallet, a 20-year-old Palestinian-American, who was attempting to protect his family’s land two weeks ago. He is the fifth U.S. citizen killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7.

Once these Israeli goons and thugs are done with the Palestinians, they will turn on each other.

The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code. Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor.

July 28, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, Religion and ethics, USA | Leave a comment

Intentional Policies: Dystopian Killing Fields and Starvation in Gaza

27 July 2025 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/intentional-policies-dystopian-killing-fields-and-starvation-in-gaza/

Starvation as a way of life. Starvation as a way of death. Starvation as policy, justification and vengeance. As the state of Israel hums along frittering, scratching and violating international human rights conventions, the chroniclers are kept busy on the morgue’s relentlessly growing inventory and peace’s loss. Of late, a vast number of humanitarian organisations have decided to express their collective outrage in a statement at what is happening in Gaza.

The statement as run by Doctors Without Borders on July 23 is stark: “As the Israel government’s siege starves the people of Gaza, aid workers are now joining the same food lines, risking being shot just to feed their families. With supplies now totally depleted, humanitarian organisations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste before their eyes.” Two months after the implementation of the controlled aid scheme by Israel, utilising the grotesquely named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, over 100 organisations were “sounding the alarm and urging governments to act: open all land crossings; restore the full flow of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items, and fuel through a principled, UN-led mechanism; end the siege; and agree to a ceasefire now.”

Outside Gaza, and even within the Strip, abundant supplies of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter items and fuel sat untouched. Humanitarian organisations had been prevented from accessing them. “The Government of Israel’s restrictions, delays, and fragmentation under its total siege have created chaos, starvation, and death.” A paltry figure of 28 trucks a day were being allowed into the Strip.

The relevant gore is recounted: massacres at food sites in the Gaza Strip are impossible to ignore; the figures from the UN suggest that 875 Palestinians had been slaughtered while seeking sustenance as of July 13. The frequency of these “flour massacres” is also receiving comment from those in the employ of the operation being run by GHF, policed by private contractors and the IDF. Retired US special forces officer Anthony Aguilar, who resigned from working with the GHF, told the BBC that he had “witnessed the Israeli Defense Forces shooting at crowds of Palestinians.” During his entire career, he had never seen such “brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population.”

The NGO statement goes on to note the rise of cases of acute malnutrition, most prevalent among children and the elderly. (The World Food Programme has warned that one in three Gazans do not eat for days at a time, with 90,000 women and children requiring treatment.) “Illnesses like acute watery diarrhea are spreading, markets are empty, waste is piling up, and adults are collapsing on the streets from hunger and dehydration.”

In the face of this, international law’s decrees appear like the neglected statues of a distant land. The three sets of Provisional Measures Orders from the International Court of Justice, handed down since 2024, have warned Israel to observe its obligations under the UN Genocide Convention and address the humanitarian crisis in the Strip. In its modifying order of provisional measures handed down on March 28, 2024, the ICJ instructed Israel to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address famine and starvation and the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza.” These include the provision of “food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care” and “increasing the capacity of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary.”

The latest concession from Israel to deal with this engineered humanitarian catastrophe is a promise to open humanitarian corridors to permit UN convoys into the Strip. In addition to that, COGAT, the Israeli military agency overseeing humanitarian affairs in Gaza, has announced that Jordan and the United Arab Emirates will be permitted to parachute humanitarian aid to those in Gaza. UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has made a small team of British military planners and logisticians available to assist Jordan in this endeavour. On July 27, the IDF also released a statement claiming it had made the first airdrop including “seven packages of aid containing flour, sugar, and canned food.” These efforts, in their practical futility, are a reiteration of the humanitarian airdrops conducted by the US military and Jordan’s air force in March last year.

These drops will do little to alter the cruel, strangulating model of aid delivery in place, emboldening the fittest recipients capable of outpacing their adversaries. Those recipients will also be fortunate not to be injured or killed by the dropped packages, instances of which were recorded in March last year. “Why use airdrops,” asks Juliette Touma, chief spokeswoman for the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, “when you can drive hundreds of trucks through the borders?” Using trucks was “much easier, more effective, faster, cheaper.” Precisely why using them is so unappealing to the IDF.

Instead of focusing on isolating Israel, its allies prefer piecemeal approaches that prolong the suffering of the Palestinians. Measures such as those announced by Starmer to “evacuate children from Gaza who need medical assistance, bringing them to the UK for specialist and medical treatment” only serve to encourage the Israeli war machine. The aid drops serve to do much the same. The objective is one of inflicting a sufficient degree of harm that will encourage the eventual depopulation of the enclave. Israel’s allies, with intentional or unintentional complicity, will clean up.  

July 28, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

They’re Starving Civilians To Steal A Palestinian Territory, And They’re Lying About It

Caitlin Johnstone, Jul 26, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/theyre-starving-civilians-to-steal?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=169279261&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Just so we’re all absolutely clear about what we’re watching here, Israel is intentionally starving civilians in order to bring about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and steal a Palestinian territory. That’s all this is, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

This isn’t a theory. This is what’s happening. The facts are in and the case is closed. Israeli officials aren’t even hiding it anymore.

Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu is telling the Israeli media that “the government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” and that “all Gaza will be Jewish.”

Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir is tweeting in Hebrew that a “complete halt of ‘humanitarian aid’” will allow “encouragement of migration” and “settlement” in the Gaza Strip.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz announced earlier this month that the official plan is to build a giant concentration camp for Gaza’s population on the ruins of Rafah while working to deport the population to other countries.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself made it clear back in May that implementing Donald Trump’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza was a precondition to having peace in the enclave.

Trump made it clear back in February that his plan was for “all” Palestinians to be removed from the Gaza Strip on a “permanent” basis.

Within days of Israel’s assault on Gaza in October 2023, Israel’s Intelligence Ministry was circulating a plan for the entire population of Gaza to be moved to the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, and an Israeli think tank had drawn up a strategy for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”

Indeed, Israel has been on record scheming to find a way to relocate the population of Gaza for many decades.

That’s what this is all about. That’s all this has ever been about. It’s not about hostages. It’s not about Hamas. It’s not about Israel defending itself. It’s about stealing a Palestinian territory, and anyone who says otherwise is lying.

And the lies have been erupting like a geyser in recent days. Israel and its apologists have been frantically pushing the narrative that Gaza is starving because the UN isn’t allowing aid in (swiftly refuted by Drop Site News), that Gaza is starving because Hamas is stealing the aid (swiftly refuted by Reuters), and that Gaza is starving because Hamas attacks people who try to go to aid sites (already refuted by Israeli soldiers telling the Israeli press that they’re the ones shooting the aid seekers).

The more evil Israel gets, the more frenetic its apologists need to get with their lies to justify its behavior.

Starvation deaths in Gaza are skyrocketing. Many of those still alive have already suffered permanent damage, and even with a massive influx of aid and complete reversal of Israeli policies it will be very difficult to undo the effects of the famine.

Western governments are beginning to speak out against the mass atrocity in Gaza, far too little and far too late. We can expect Israel and the United States to respond to this outcry by saying that Palestinians need to be evacuated out of Gaza as quickly as possible in order to rescue them from this deliberately manufactured humanitarian crisis. We can expect them to denounce anyone who opposes this ethnic cleansing operation as evil monsters who want to starve the poor Palestinians.

And it will all be lies. They lied this entire time.

It’s about the most evil thing you could possibly come up with, really. If this is not evil, then nothing is.

July 28, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

Four Major News Agencies Warn Gaza Staff Face Starvation Due to Israeli Blockade

Gaza’s Health Ministry said two more Palestinians starved to death under the siege

by Dave DeCamp | July 24, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/07/24/four-major-news-agencies-warn-gaza-staff-face-starvation-due-to-israeli-blockade/

Four of the world’s major news agencies have issued a rare joint statement warning that their journalists in Gaza are unable to feed themselves due to the US-backed Israeli blockade, as Palestinians continue to starve to death under the siege.

“We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families,” AFP, The Associated Press, Reuters, and BBC News said. “For many months, these independent journalists have been the world’s eyes and ears on the ground in Gaza. They are now facing the same dire circumstances as those they are covering.”

The news agencies said that journalists “endure many deprivations and hardships in war zones. We are deeply alarmed that the threat of starvation is now one of them.” They urged the “Israeli authorities to allow journalists in and out of Gaza” and said it was “essential that adequate food supplies reach the people there.”

On top of the starvation, journalists in Gaza continue to be targeted by the IDF. On Wednesday, Walaa al-Jabari, who worked for local news outlets, was killed along with her husband and four children. Al-Jabari was pregnant at the time of her killing, and the Gaza Government Media Office said her death brought the total number of journalists killed by Israel since October 7, 2023, to 231.

The statement from the news agencies came as Gaza’s Health Ministry said another two Palestinians had starved to death over the previous 24-hour period. Starvation deaths have spiked over the past week, with dozens, mostly children, dying of malnutrition due to Israeli-imposed restrictions and the killing of aid seekers. The Health Ministry said it has recorded a total of 113 starvation deaths.

Palestinians in Gaza also continue to be gunned down while attempting to reach food aid. Since the end of May, more than 1,000 aid seekers have been killed by Israeli forces, mainly near distribution sites run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Sabreen Abu al-Kass, a mother of 10 in Gaza, told Al Jazeera on Thursday that she attempted to get aid from a GHF site on Thursday but failed. “I went to get food, to support my children, and I fainted there. No one helped me,” she said. “I couldn’t bring back any aid at all. We returned home empty-handed, just like we came. Out of maybe 50 attempts, I was only able to get some food once. One time, among thousands of women.”

July 27, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, media | Leave a comment

‘One Meal Every Three Days’: Journalist & Aid Worker Back from Gaza on Stark Reality on the Ground

By DemocracyNow! 25July 25

The BBC, Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse have all called on Israel to allow journalists in and out of Gaza as starvation there becomes imminent. In a statement, the news outlets said, “We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.” We speak with Afeef Nessouli, a journalist who just returned from Gaza, where he volunteered as an aid worker. “It has been an incredibly awful experience to see people sort of become sicker and sicker from hunger,” says Nessouli, who describes visiting community kitchens in Gaza that have run out of food. “Many of us would just have one meal a day,” he says of his seven weeks in Gaza. Now his colleagues who remain in Gaza “are having one meal every three days.”

Transcript………………………………………………………………………..https://scheerpost.com/2025/07/25/one-meal-every-three-days-journalist-aid-worker-back-from-gaza-on-stark-reality-on-the-ground/

July 26, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

Precisely Designed Mass Starvation”: Aid Access as Weapon in Israel’s War on Gaza, Researchers Find

July 21, 2025

The starvation crisis in Gaza is deepening under Israel’s brutal blockade and amid regular massacres of civilians attempting to secure aid at the only officially sanctioned aid sites, run by Israeli troops and American mercenaries. The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the onset of famine are the subjects of a new report by analysts Davide Piscitelli and Alex de Waal for the research organization Forensic Architecture on the “architecture of genocidal starvation” in Gaza. “I’ve been working on this field of famine, food crisis and humanitarian action for more than 40 years, and there is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today,” says de Waal, who is also the author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: In one of the deadliest days yet for aid seekers in Gaza, Israeli forces killed at least 115 people on Sunday, including 92 who were killed while seeking aid. In the deadliest attack, at least 79 people at the Zikim crossing in North Gaza were massacred as they gathered near an aid convoy sent by the U.N. World Food Programme in northern Gaza in the hopes of getting flour. In a statement, the U.N. agency said, quote, “As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire,” unquote.

These latest killings come as the starvation crisis in Gaza continues to deepen. UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, has accused Israel of starving civilians, including a million children. The entire population, more than 2 million people, lack access to sufficient food, putting their lives at immediate risk. Health authorities in Gaza say 19 people died of starvation over the last day, including at least one infant. This is the uncle of 3-month-old Yahya Al-Najjar.

ANAN AL-NAJJAR: [translated] He died due to malnutrition and the unavailability of baby formula at the Gaza Strip. We urge the entire world, all Arab countries and everyone with a living consciousness, humanity and dignity, to just stand with the children, just to let baby formula get into the Gaza Strip.

AMY GOODMAN: Since late May, when militarized aid sites run by the U.S.- and Israeli-backed so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation were established, nearly 900 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to access aid, and more than 5,700 have been injured……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….https://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/21/forensic_architecture

July 25, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

It’s A Genocide, But It’s Also So Much More Than That

Caitlin Johnstone, Jul 23, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/its-a-genocide-but-its-also-so-much?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=169008966&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

The mass atrocity in Gaza is a genocide, obviously, and is an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation.

But it’s also a lot more than that.

It’s an experiment — to see what kinds of abuses the public will accept without causing significant disruption to the imperial status quo.

It’s a psychological operation — to push out the boundaries of what’s normal and acceptable in our minds so that we will consent to even more horrific abuses in the future.

It’s a symptom — of Zionism, of colonialism, of militarism, of capitalism, of western supremacism, of empire-building, of propaganda, of ignorance, of apathy, of delusion, of ego.

It’s a manifestation — of violent racist, supremacist and xenophobic belief systems that have always been there but were previously restrained, meeting with the unwholesome nature of alliances that have long been in place but have been aggressively normalized.

It’s a mirror — showing us accurately and impartially who we currently are as a civilization.

It’s a disclosure — showing us what the western empire we live under really is underneath its fake plastic mask of liberal democracy and righteous humanitarianism.

It’s a revelation — showing us who among us really stands for truth and justice and who has been deceiving us about themselves and their motives this entire time.

It’s a catalyst — a galvanizing force and a rallying cry for all who realize that the murderous power structures we live under can no longer be allowed to stand, and a blaring alarm clock opening more and more snoozing eyes to the need for revolutionary change.

It’s a test — of who we are as a species and what we are made of, and of whether we can transcend the destructive patterning that is driving humanity to its doom.

It’s a question — asking us what kind of world we want to live in going forward, and what kind of people we want to be.

It’s an invitation — to become something better than what we are now.

July 24, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Gaza Isn’t Starving, It Is Being Starved

Caitlin Johnstone Jul 21, 2025 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/gaza-isnt-starving-it-is-being-starved?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=168826710&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza are beginning to climb, with the health ministry reporting 18 in a single 24-hour period. Doctors report that people are “collapsing” in the street, and Gaza journalist Nahed Hajjaj is warning the world not to be surprised if the remaining reporters in the enclave are soon silenced by starvation.

Unless something drastically changes, things can be expected to get much worse very rapidly.

Meanwhile Israeli forces are setting new records with their massacres of starving civilians seeking aid, with 85 killed in a single day on Sunday.

If this isn’t evil, then nothing is evil. If Israel isn’t evil, then nothing is.

So what’s the plan here? Do we just sit and watch Israel starve Gaza to death with the support of our own governments?

And then what? We just go along with our lives, knowing that that happened? That this is what we are as a society? That our civilization is comfortable allowing something like that to happen? And that our rulers could do the same thing to another inconvenient population at any time?

We’re just meant to be cool with that? And go on living like it’s normal?

I’m genuinely curious. How exactly is everyone planning to go about living their lives after that point? How does that work, exactly?

I’m asking because I don’t know. I mean, I know what my own government and its allies should do, but I don’t know what we as ordinary members of the public are supposed to do.

You’ll see western pundits and politicians asking “How do we get a ceasefire in Gaza?” or “How do we end hunger in Gaza?” as though it’s some kind of ineffable mystery, which is kind of like a man strangling a child to death while saying “The child is being strangled, but HOW do we stop the child strangulation from occurring?”

It’s not some mystery how to get a ceasefire in Gaza; the empire is the fire. It simply needs to cease firing. Israel’s holocaust in Gaza is made possible only by the support of its western backers, primarily the United States. Numerous Israeli military insiders have acknowledged that none of this would be possible without US support. If the United States and its western allies ceased backing Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, a ceasefire would have to occur.

Likewise, it is not a mystery how to get food into Gaza. You just drive the food on in and give it to people. They’ve got roads and gates right there. The only reason people in Gaza are starving is because western governments (including my own Australia) conspired to pretend to believe that UNRWA is a terrorist organization to justify cutting off critical aid, while doing nothing to pressure Israel into allowing aid to flow freely.

And now Israel and the US empire are monopolizing the delivery of “aid” through the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose facilities now see civilians massacred every day for the crime of attempting to obtain food.

The organizations, funding and delivery systems to feed Gaza are all 100 percent fully available (at no cost to Israel, by the way). They’re just not being allowed to provide aid because the goal is to remove all Palestinians from Gaza via death or displacement. The people of Gaza are starving because the west is helping Israel starve Gaza. It really is that simple.

This isn’t some kind of unfortunate famine caused by a drought or natural disaster. It is a deliberately manufactured starvation campaign, implemented with genocidal intent.

To paraphrase Utah Phillips, Gaza isn’t starving, it is being starved. And the people who are starving it have names and addresses.

July 22, 2025 Posted by | Gaza, Israel, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Francesca Albanese: “A revolutionary shift is underway”

Remarks of Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, at the Hague Group Emergency Conference of States in Bogotá, Colombia.

By Francesca Albanese / Progressive International, https://progressive.international/wire/2025-07-16-francesca-albanese-a-revolutionary-shift-is-underway/en

Excellencies, Friends, 

I express my appreciation to the government of Colombia and South Africa for convening this group, and to all members of the Hague Group, its founding members for their principled stance, and the others who are joining. May you keep groing and so the strength and effectiveness of your concrete actions. 

Thank you also to the Secretariat for its tireless work, and last but not least, the Palestinian experts—individuals and organisations who travelled to Bogota from occupied Palestine, historical Palestine/Israel and other places of the diaspora/exile, to accompany this process, after providing HG with outstanding, evidence-based briefings.  

And of course all of you who are here today,

It is important to be here today, in a moment that may prove historical indeed. There is hope that these two days will move all present to work together to take concrete measures to end the genocide in Gaza and, hopefully, end the erasure of the 

Palestinian for what remains of Palestine—because this is the testing ground for a system where freedom, rights, and justice are made real for all. This hope, that people like me hold tight, is a discipline. A discipline we all should have.  

The occupied Palestinian territory today is a hellscape. In Gaza, Israel has dismantled even the last UN function—humanitarian aid—in order to deliberately starve, displace time and again, or kill a population they have marked for elimination. In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, ethnic cleansing advances through unlawful siege, mass displacement, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, widespread torture. Across all areas under Israeli rule, Palestinians live under the terror of annihilation, broadcast in real time to a watching world. The very few Israeli people who stand against genocide, occupation, and apartheid—while the majority openly cheers and calls for more—remind us that Israeli liberation, too, is inseparable from Palestinian freedom. .

The atrocities of the past 21 months are not a sudden aberration; they are the culmination of decades of policies to displace and replace the Palestinian people.  

Against this backdrop, it is inconceivable that political forums, from Brussels to NY, are still debating recognition of the State of Palestine—not because it’s unimportant, but because for 35 years states have stalled, refused recognition, pretending to “invest in the PA” while abandoning the Palestinian people to Israel’s relentless, rapacious territorial ambitions and unspeakable crimes. Meanwhile political discourse has reduced Palestine to a humanitarian crisis to manage in perpetuity rather than a political issue demanding principled and firm resolution: end permanent occupation, apartheid and today genocide. And it is not the law that has failed or faltered—it is political will that has abdicated. 

But today, we are also witnessing a rupture. Palestine’s immense suffering has cracked open the possibility of transformation. Even if this is not fully reflected into political agendas (yet), a revolutionary shift is underway—one that, if sustained, will be remembered as a moment when history changed course.  

And this is why I came to this meeting with a sense of being at a historical turning point —discursively and politically.  

First, the narrative is shifting: away from Israel’s endlessly invoked “right to self-defence” and toward the long-denied Palestinian right to self-determination—systematically invisibilised, suppressed and delegitimised for decades. The weaponisation of antisemitism applied to Palestinian words, and narratives, and the dehumanising use of the terrorism framework for Palestinian action (from armed resistance to the work of NGOs pursuing justice in international arena), has led to a global political paralysis that has been intentional. It must be redressed. The time is now. 

Second, and consequentially, we are seeing the rise of a new multilateralism: principled, courageous, increasingly led by the Global Majority it pains me that I have yet to see this include European countries. As a European, I fear what the region and its institutions have come to symbolize to many: a sodality of states preaching international law yet guided more by colonial mindset than principle, acting as vassals to the US empire, even as it drags us from war to war, misery to misery and when it comes to Palestine: from silence to complicity. 

But the presence of European countries at this meeting shows that a different path is possible. To them I say: the Hague Group has the potential to signal not just a coalition, but a new moral center in world politics. Please, stand with them.  

Millions are watching—hoping—for leadership that can birth a new global order rooted in justice, humanity, and collective liberation. This is not just about Palestine. This is about all of us. 

Principled states must rise to this moment. It does not need to have a political allegiance, color, political party flags or ideologies: it needs to be upheld by basic human values. Those which Israel has been mercilessly crushing for 21 months now. 

Meanwhile I applaud the calling of this emergency conference in Bogota to address the unrelenting devastation in Gaza. So it is on this, that focus must be directed. The measures adopted in January by the Hague Group were symbolically powerful. It was the signal of the discursive and political shift needed. But they are the absolute bear minimum. I implore you to expand your commitment. And to turn that commitment into concrete actions, legislatively, judicially in each of your jurisdictions. And to consider first and foremost, what must we do to stop the genocidal onslaught. For Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, this question is existential. But it really is applicable to the humanity of all of us.  

In  this context my responsibility here is to recommend to you, uncompromisingly and dispassionately, the cure for the root cause. We are long past dealing with symptoms, the comfort zone of too many these days. And my words will show that what the Hague Group has committed to do and is considering expanding upon, is a small commitment towards what’s just and due based on your obligations under international law. 

Obligations, not sympathy, not charity. 

Each state immediately review and suspend all ties with Israel. Their military, strategic, political, diplomatic, economic,  relations – both imports and exports –  and to make sure that their private sector, insurers, banks, pension funds, universities and other goods, and services providers in the supply chains do the same. Treating the occupation as business as usual translates into supporting or providing aid or assistance to the unlawful presence of Israel in the OPT. These ties must be terminated as a matter of urgency. I will have the opportunity to elaborate on  the technicalities and implications in our further sessions but lets be clear, I mean cutting ties with Israel as a whole. Cutting ties only with the “components” of it in the oPt is not an option. 

This is in line with the duty on all states stemming from the July 2024 Advisory Opinion which confirmed the illegality of Israel’s prolonged occupation, which it declared tantamount to racial segregation and apartheid . The General Assembly adopted that opinion. These findings are more than sufficient for action. Further, it is the state of Israel who is accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, so it is the state that must be responsible for its wrongdoings. 

As I argue in my last report to the HRC, the Israeli economy is structured to sustain the occupation, and has now turned genocidal. It is impossible to disentangle Israel’s state policies and economy from its longstanding policies and economy of occupation. It has been inseparable for decades. The longer states and others stay engaged, the more this illegality at its heart is legitimised. This is the complicity. Now that economy has turned genocidal. There is no good Israel, bad Israel. 

I ask you to consider this moment as if we were sitting here in the 1990s, discussing the case of apartheid South Africa. Would you have proposed selective sanctions on SA for its conduct in individual Bantustans? Or would you have recognised the state’s criminal system as a whole? And here, what Israel is doing is worse. This comparison— is a legal and factual assessment supported by international legal proceedings many in this room are part of.  

This is what concrete measures mean. Negotiating with Israel on how to manage what remains of Gaza and West Bank, in Brussels or elsewhere, is an utter dishonor to international law. 

And to the Palestinians and those from all corners of the world standing by them, often at great cost and sacrifice, I say whatever happens, Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter—not as a footnote in the chronicles of would-be conquerors, but as the newest verse in a centuries-long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, colonialism, and today more than ever neoliberal tyranny.

July 21, 2025 Posted by | civil liberties, Gaza | Leave a comment

Ominous Plans: Making Concentration Camp Gaza

18 July 2025, Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/ominous-plans-making-concentration-camp-gaza/

The odious idea of a camp within a camp. The Gaza Strip, with an even greater concentration of Palestinian civilian life within an ever-shrinking stretch of territory. These are the proposals ventured by the Israeli government even as the official Palestinian death toll marches upwards to 60,000. They envisage the placement of some 600,000 displaced and houseless beings currently living in tents in the area of al-Mawasi along Gaza’s southern coast in a creepily termed “humanitarian city”. This would be the prelude for an ultimate relocation of the strip’s entire population of over 2 million in an area that will become an even smaller prison than the Strip already is.

The preparation for such a forced removal – yet another among so many Israel has inflicted upon the Palestinians – is in full swing. The analysis of satellite imagery from the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) by Al Jazeera’s Sanad investigations unit found that approximately 12,800 buildings were demolished in Rafah between early April and early July alone. In the Knesset on May 11 this year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave words to those deeds: “We are demolishing more and more [of their] homes, they have nowhere to return to. The only obvious result will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip.”

Camps of concentrated human life – concentration camps, in other words – are often given a different dressing to what they are meant to be. Authoritarian states enjoy using them to re-educate and reform the inmates even as they gradually kill them. Indeed, the proposals from the Israel’s Defense Department carry with them plans for a “Humanitarian Transit Area” where Gazans would “temporarily reside, deradicalize, re-integrate, and prepare to relocate if they wish to do so.”

The emetic candy floss of “humanitarian” in the context of a camp is a self-negating nonsense similar to other experiments in cruelty: the relocation of Boer civilians during the colonial wars waged by Britain to camps which saw dysentery and starvation; the movement of Vietnamese villagers into fortified hamlets to prevent their infiltration by the Vietcong in the 1960s; the creation of Pacific concentration camps to detain refugees seeking Australia by boat in what came to be called the “Pacific Solution.”

Those in the business of doing humanitarian deeds were understandably appalled by Israel’s latest plans. Philippe Lazzarini, head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), stated that this would “de facto create massive concentration camps at the border with Egypt for the Palestinians, displaced over and over across generations.” It would certainly “deprive Palestinians of any prospects of a better future in their homeland.” Self-evidently and sadly, that would be one of the main aims.

A few of Israeli’s former Prime Ministers have ditched the coloured goggles in considering the plans for such a mislabelled city. Yair Lapid, who spent a mere six months in office in 2022, told Israeli Army Radio that it was “a bad idea from every possible perspective – security, political, economic, logistical.” While preferring not to use the term “concentration camp” with regards such a construction, incarcerating individuals by effectively preventing their exit would make such a term appropriate.  

Ehud Olmert’s words to The Guardian were even less inclined to varnish the matter. “If they [the Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing.” To create a camp that would effectively “clean” more than half of Gaza of its population could hardly be understood as a plan to save Palestinians. “It is to deport them, to push and to throw them away. There is no other understanding that I have at least.”

Israeli political commentator Ori Goldberg was also full of candour in expressing the view that the plan was “for all facts and purposes a concentration camp” for Gaza’s Palestinians, “an overt crime against humanity under international humanitarian law”. This would also add the burgeoning grounds of illegality already being alleged in this month’s petition by three Israeli reserve soldiers of Israel’s Supreme Court questioning the legality of Operation Gideon’s Chariots. Instancing abundant examples of forced transfer and expulsions of the Palestinian population during its various phases, commentators such as former chief of staff of the IDF, Moshe “Bogy” Ya’alon, are unreserved about how such programs fare before international law. “Evacuating an entire population? Call it ethnic cleansing, call it transfer, call it deportation, it’s a war crime,” he told journalist Lucy Aharish. “Israel’s soldiers had been sent in “to commit war crimes.”

There is also some resistance from within the IDF, less on humanitarian grounds than practical ones. To even prepare such a plan in the midst of negotiations for a lasting ceasefire and finally resolving the hostage situation was the first telling problem. The other was how the IDF could feasibly undertake what would be a grand jailing experiment while preventing the infiltration of Hamas.  

This ghastly push by the Netanyahu government involves an enormous amount of wishful thinking. Ideally, the Palestinians will simply leave. If not, they will live in even more carceral conditions than they faced before October 2023. But to assume that this cartoon strip humanitarianism, papered over a ghoulish program of inflicted suffering, will add to the emptying well of Israeli security, is testament to how utterly desperate, and delusionary, the Israeli PM and his cabinet members have become.

July 19, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

The New York Times Finally Stops Avoiding The G-Word

Caitlin Johnstone, Jul 16, 2025, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-new-york-times-finally-stops?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=168435877&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

The New York Times has published an op-ed by a genocide scholar who says that he resisted acknowledging the truth of what Israel is doing in Gaza for as long as he could, but can no longer deny the obvious.

It’s an admission that may as well have come from The New York Times itself.

In an article titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”, a Brown University professor of Holocaust and genocide studies named Omer Bartov argues that “Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza,” and denounces his fellow Holocaust scholars for failing to acknowledge reality.

“My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people,” Bartov writes. “Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.”

And resist he did. In November 2023, Bartov wrote another op-ed for The New York Times saying “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.”

Apparently he is seeing the proof now and has stopped resisting what’s been clear from the very beginning. And it would seem the editors of the Gray Lady have ceased resisting as well.

The New York Times, which has an extensively documented pro-Israel bias, has frenetically avoided the use of the g-word on its pages from the very beginning of the Gaza onslaught. Even in its opinion and analysis pieces the NYT Overton window has cut off at framing the issue as a complex matter of rigorous debate, with headlines like “Accused of Genocide, Israelis See Reversal of Reality. Palestinians See Justice.” and “The Bitter Fight Over the Meaning of ‘Genocide’” representing the closest thing to the pro-Palestinian side of the debate you’d see. During the same time we’ve seen headlines like “From the Embers of an Old Genocide, a New One May Be Emerging” used in reference to Sudan.

In an internal memo obtained by The Intercept last year, New York Times reporters were explicitly told to avoid the use of the word “genocide”, as well as terms like “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territory”.

“‘Genocide’ has a specific definition in international law,” the memo reads. “In our own voice, we should generally use it only in the context of those legal parameters. We should also set a high bar for allowing others to use it as an accusation, whether in quotations or not, unless they are making a substantive argument based on the legal definition.”

Earlier this year the American Friends Service Committee cancelled its paid advertisement in The New York Times calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza, saying the outlet had wanted them to change the word “genocide” to “war” in order for their ad to be published.

So there has been a significant change.

To be clear, this analysis by Omer Bartov is not significant in and of itself. He is only joining the chorus of what has already been said by human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, United Nations human rights experts, and the overwhelming majority of leading authorities on the subject of genocide.

What is significant is that even experts who’ve been resisting acknowledging the reality of the genocide in Gaza because of their bias toward Israel have stopped doing so, and that even the imperial media outlets most fiendishly devoted to running propaganda cover for that genocide have run out of room to hide.

The Israel apologists have lost the argument. They might not know it yet, but they have. Public sentiment has turned irreversibly against them as people’s eyes are opened to the truth of what’s happening in Gaza, and more and more propagandists are choosing to rescue what’s left of their tattered credibility instead of going down with the sinking ship.

Truth is slowly beginning to get a word in edgewise.

Keep pushing. Keep fighting. Keep resisting.

It’s working.

July 17, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel, media | Leave a comment

Israeli Minister: ‘Gaza must be in Ruins for Decades,’ as Airstrike Kills Children seeking Water

Juan Cole07/14/2025. https://www.juancole.com/2025/07/minister-airstrike-children.html

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In an interview with Israel’s Channel 14, Minister of Energy Eli Cohen said that “Gaza must remain in ruins for decades to come” and that Israel will not help rebuild its civilian infrastructure. The Israeli army has damaged or destroyed some 90% of the Gaza Strip’s housing stock, as well as destroying most hospitals and all schools and universities, as well as water purification plants and other essential infrastructure, leaving over 2 million people to try to live in rubble.

Note that Cohen is a member of the ruling right wing Likud Party headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rather than being from the extremist Religious Zionism bloc that is in coalition with the Likud. A former accountant and teacher of business at Tel Aviv University, Cohen has been listed among the top 100 most influential Israelis.

Keeping millions of Palestinians in Gaza, half of them children, living in ruins for decades is not the sort of goal announced by sane, civilized, ordinary European politicians. At least, not since the 1930s. If a Likud Party stalwart like Cohen openly speaks like this, imagine what the Religious Zionism and Jewish Power cabinet members and members of parliament sound like.

Also on Sunday, the Associated Press reports from an eyewitness, Ramadan Nassar, that some 14 adults brought 20 children to collect water from a distribution point in Nuseirat in central Gaza. As though out of nowhere, an Israeli missile struck them, killing six children and four adults. AP says that the Israeli military alleged that the strike was a technical error. There seem to be a lot of those, since over half of the 58,000 Palestinians Israel has killed since October 2023 have been women and children, and many of the rest were noncombatant men.

Most water in Gaza is not potable, since Israel has deliberately destroyed water purification plants, and ground water is full of bacteria. Watery diarrhea, which can lead to dehydration and even death, is common in the Palestinian population of Gaza, including among vulnerable infants and children.

Just as civilized politicians don’t talk about making millions of people live in rubble for decades, civilized militaries don’t have rules of engagement that allow for 20, or 50, or even 100 civilian deaths for every militant targeted.

NATO is refusing to do joint military operations with Israel because of these unacceptable rules of engagement, which would get any NATO officer court-martialed who tried to implement them.

In addition, Palestinian media sources reported that Israeli airstrikes and attacks left 95 people dead on Sunday, 52 of them in Gaza City.

On Monday, UNICEF announced that it recorded 5,800 cases of malnutrition among children in the Gaza Strip during the month of June, as IMEMC reports:

Severe acute malnutrition involves muscle wastage and pencil-like arms, and produces permanent brain damage.

About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

July 16, 2025 Posted by | Atrocities, Gaza, Israel | Leave a comment

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