CBS’ 60 Minutes Exposes the Biden Administration’s Complicity in Gaza Genocide, Interviews the Whistleblowers
Here is the segment on YouTube:
Biden policy on Israel-Gaza sparks warnings, dissent, resignations | 60 Minutes
Juan Cole, 01/13/2025 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/administrations-complicity-whistleblowers.html
– The amazingly brave Cecilia Vega at CBS’ 60 Minutes did a groundbreaking segment on Sunday in which she interviewed US government officials involved with the Israeli war on Gaza, who resigned in protest either explicitly or implicitly. She also screened the sort of horrific footage of the aftermath of Israeli attacks in Gaza, with the gory parts left in. Here is the transcript.
American television news has almost completely ignored Israeli (and US) war crimes in Gaza, which have been taking place daily, but are not apparently deemed “news” at CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CBS, ABC, etc.
Here let me just excerpt some statements by the former US government officials:
Hala Rharrit was an American diplomat working on human rights: “What is happening in Gaza would not be able to happen without U.S. arms. That’s without a doubt.”
“I would show the complicity that was indisputable. Fragments of U.S. bombs next to massacres of– of ch– mostly children. And that’s the devastation. It’s been overwhelmingly children.” (Emphasis added.)
“I would show images of children that were starved to death. In one incident, I was basically berated, “Don’t put that image in there. We don’t wanna see it. We don’t wanna see that the children are starving to death.”
Hala Rharrit: The level of anger throughout the Arab world, and I– I’ll say beyond the Arab world– is palpable. Protests began erupting in the Arab world, which I was also documenting, with people burning American flags. This is very significant because we worked so hard after the war on terror to strengthen ties with the Arab world.
[Cecilia Vega: You believe that this has put a target on America’s back, you’ve said.]
Hala Rharrit: 100%.
Hala Rharrit: Yes. I don’t say them lightly. And I say it as someone that myself has survived two terrorist attacks. My first assignment was in the U.S. Embassy in Yemen. I survived a mortar attack. I say it as someone who has worked intensely on these issues and has intensely monitored the region for two decades.
After three months of the Gaza War in 2023, she was told her reports were no longer needed.
Josh Paul spent 11 years as a director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political – Military Affairs.
Josh Paul: Most of the bombs come from America. Most of the technology comes from America. And all of the fighter jets, all of Israel’s fixed-wing fleet– comes from America.
Josh Paul: There is a linkage between every single bomb that is dropped in Gaza and the U.S. because every single bomb that is dropped is dropped from an American-made plane.
Josh Paul: After October 7th, there was no space for debate or discussion. I was part of email chains where there were very clear directions saying, “Here are the latest requests from Israel. These need to be approved by 3:00 p.m.”
Josh Paul: “This came from the president, from the secretary and from those around them.”
Josh Paul: I would argue exactly the opposite. I think the moment of October 7th was a moment of incredible worldwide solidarity with Israel. And had Israel leveraged that moment to press for a real, just and lasting peace, I think we would be in a very different place now in which Israel would not be facing this increasing isolation around the world and in which its hostages would be free.
Andrew Miller was the deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs.
Andrew Miller: The Israelis were using those bombs in some instances to target one or two individuals in densely packed areas. And in enough instances, we saw that was in question, how Israel was using it. And those weapons were suspended.
Andrew Miller: There were conversations from the earliest days about U.S. desires and expectations for what Israel would do. But they weren’t defined as a red line.
Andrew Miller: I’m unaware of any red lines being imposed beyond the normal language about complying with international law, international humanitarian law, the law of armed conflict.
Andrew Miller: I believe the message that Prime Minister Netanyahu received is that he was the one in the driver’s seat, and he was controlling this, and U.S. support was going to be there, and he could take it for granted.
Andrew Miller: There is a danger– that if the U.S. was not providing support to Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran would see that as an opportunity to go after Israel. However, we could have said, we are taking this step because we believe this class of weapons– is being used inappropriately. But if you use this moment to accelerate your attacks against Israel, then we are going to immediately lift our prohibition.
Andrew Miller: Yes. I think it’s fair to say Israel does get the benefit of the doubt. There is a deference to Israeli accounts of what’s taken place.
Here is the segment on YouTube:
Biden policy on Israel-Gaza sparks warnings, dissent, resignations | 60 Minutes
Lancet Study: Gaza Health Ministry Undercounted Death Toll By 41%
The study doesn’t account for indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege
by Dave DeCamp January 9, 2025, https://news.antiwar.com/2025/01/09/lancet-study-gaza-health-ministry-undercounted-death-toll-by-41/
A new study published in the British medical journal The Lancet found that the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip has significantly undercounted the number of Palestinians killed by Israel’s genocidal war.
The study reviewed the period between October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024, and found there were 64,260 “traumatic injury deaths” in that timeframe. At the end of June 2024, Gaza’s Health Ministry said there were 37,877 dead, an undercount of about 41%.
As of October 2024, the study said the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli military action likely exceeds 70,000. The latest numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry put the death toll at 46,006.
Explaining the methodology, the study said it used “capture-recapture methods to estimate total deaths from traumatic injury in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024. By combining three data lists—official hospital lists, an MoH survey, and social media obituaries—we provide an estimate of mortality that accounts for under-reporting.”
The study accounts only for deaths caused by violence and not indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege and the destruction of medical and other civilian infrastructure.
The figures coming from Gaza’s Health Ministry have been under significant scrutiny from Israeli officials and their supporters in the West. In the early days of the genocidal war, President Biden cast doubt on their accuracy, but a high-level US State Department official later acknowledged the real number of dead was likely higher than what the Health Ministry was reporting.
The number of indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege is unclear but is likely significantly higher than the violent deaths. A letter written by experts and published by The Lancet in July 2024 estimated that if the war ended at that time, the conflict could account for 186,000 deaths, including 37,396 violent deaths (based on June 2024 Health Ministry figures) and indirect deaths.
Genocidal President, Genocidal Politics
The presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Jan 6, 2025, Norman Solomon, https://www.laprogressive.com/war-and-peace/genocidal-president?utm_source=LA+Progressive+NEW&utm_campaign=c01ae947cf-LAP+News+–+%288%29+18+NOVEMBER+2022_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_61288e16ef-c01ae947cf-287023764&ct=t(EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_11_17_2022_10_46_COPY_01)&mc_cid=c01ae947cf&mc_eid=02629a6e14
Then news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.
It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.
Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.
While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.
For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”
Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”
After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”
Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”
The conformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.
For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television. “There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”
The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.
While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”
Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.
The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric — unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse — rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.
Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.
When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
Genocide: The New Normal
The genocide, and the decision to fuel it with billions of dollars, marks an ominous turning point. It is a public declaration by the U.S. and its allies in Europe that international and humanitarian law, although blatantly disregarded by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and a generation earlier in Vietnam, is meaningless.
By Chris Hedges ScheerPost January 7, 2025, https://scheerpost.com/2025/01/07/chris-hedges-genocide-the-new-normal/
Joe Biden’s parting gift of $8 billion in weapons sales to the apartheid state of Israel acknowledges the gruesome reality of the genocide in Gaza. This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. This is a permanent, endless war designed not to destroy Hamas, or free Israeli hostages, but to eradicate, once and for all, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. It is the final push to create a Greater Israel, which will include not only Gaza and the West Bank, but chunks of Lebanon and Syria. It is the culmination of the Zionist dream. And it will be paid for with rivers of blood — Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian.
Minister of Agriculture and Food Security of Israel Avi Dichter was probably offering conservative estimates when he said “I think that we are going to stay in Gaza for a long time. I think most people understand that [Israel] will be years in some kind of West Bank situation where you go in and out and maybe you remain along Netzarim [corridor].”
Mass extermination takes time. It is also expensive. Fortunately for Israel, its lobby in the U.S. has a stranglehold on Congress, our electoral process and the media narrative. Americans, although 61 percent support ending weapons shipments to Israel, will pay for it. And those that express dissent will be frog-marched into Zionist black holes where their voices are silenced and their careers jeopardized or destroyed. Donald Trump and the Republicans have an open disdain for democracy, but so do the Democrats and Joe Biden.
The U.S. provided $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel from October 2023 to October 2024, a substantial increase from the already $3.8 billion in military aid the U.S. gives Israel annually. This is a record for a single year. The State Department has informed Congress that it intends to approve another $8 billion in purchases of U.S.-made arms by Israel. This will provide Israel with more GPS guidance systems for bombs, more artillery shells, more missiles for fighter jets and helicopters, and more bombs, including 2,800 unguided MK-84 bombs, which Israel has a habit of dropping on densely packed tent encampments in Gaza. The pressure wave from the 2,000-pound MK-84 pulverizes buildings and exterminates life within a 400-yard radius. The blast, which ruptures lungs, rips apart limbs and bursts sinus cavities up to hundreds of yards away, leaves behind a 50-foot-wide and 36-foot-deep crater. Israel appears to have used this bomb to assassinate Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, in Beirut on September 27, 2024.
The genocide, and the decision to fuel it with billions of dollars, marks an ominous turning point. It is a public declaration by the U.S. and its allies in Europe that international and humanitarian law, although blatantly disregarded by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and a generation earlier in Vietnam, is meaningless. We will not even pay lip service to it. This will be a Hobbesian world where nations that have the most advanced industrial weapons make the rules. Those who are poor and vulnerable will kneel in subjugation. The genocide in Gaza is the template for the future. And those in the Global South know it.
The “wretched of the earth” who lack sophisticated weapons, who do not have modern armies, artillery units, missiles, navies, armored units and warplanes, will strike back with crude tools. They will match individual acts of terror against massive campaigns of state terror.
Are we surprised we are hated? Terror begets terror. We saw this in New Orleans where a man who was allegedly inspired by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) killed 14 people when he drove his pickup truck into a crowd on New Year’s Day. We will see more of it. But let’s be clear. We started it. The moral void of the suicide bomber is birthed from our moral void.
Israel’s frustration at the dogged resistance in Gaza, the West Bank, Yemen and Lebanon increases the bloodlust. Members of Israel’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee sent a letter to Minister of Defense Israel Katz, calling on the government to intensify the siege of Gaza.
“Effective control of the territory and the population is the only means towards cleansing enemy lines from the strip, and naturally towards decisive victory, rather than treading [water] in a war of attrition, where the side that is most worn is Israel,” they write. “Therefore we end up inserting our soldiers again and again into neighborhoods and alleys that were already conquered by them many times.”
Israel, the letter reads, must carry out “remote elimination of all energy sources, that is fuel, solar panels and any relevant means (pipes, cables, generators etc.)” It should ensure the “elimination of all food sources including warehouses, water and all relevant means (water pumps etc.)” and it must facilitate the “remote elimination of anyone who moves in the area and does not exit with a white flag during the days of the effective siege.”
The letter concludes that “after these actions and the days of siege upon those who remain, [the] IDF must enter gradually and conduct a full cleansing of the enemy nests…. This should be done in the northern Gaza Strip, and similarly in any other territory: encirclement, evacuation of the population to a humanitarian zone, and effective siege until surrender or full elimination of the enemy. This is how every army acts, and so must the IDF act.”
In short, exterminate the brutes.
Shamsud-Din Jabbar, the 42-year-old U.S. military veteran who plowed his pick-up truck into a crowd of New Year’s revellers in New Orleans killing 14 people and injuring 35 others, spoke to us in the language we use to speak to the Arab world. Indiscriminate death. The targeting of innocents. The callous indifference to life. The thirst for revenge. The demonization of others. The belief that fate or God or western civilization has decreed that we have a right to impose our vision of the world with violence. Jabbar, who posted videos online in which he professed his support for Islamic State, is our murderous doppelgänger. He will not be the last.
“When a society is dispossessed, when the injustices thrust upon it appear insoluble, when the ‘enemy’ is all-powerful, when one’s own people are bestialised as insects, cockroaches, ‘two-legged beasts,’ then the mind moves beyond reason,” Robert Fisk writes in The Great War for Civilization. “It becomes fascinated in two senses: with the idea of an afterlife and with the possibility that this belief will somehow provide a weapon of more than nuclear potential. When the United States was turning Beirut into a NATO base in 1983, and using its firepower against Muslim guerrillas in the mountains to the east, Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Baalbek were promising that God would rid Lebanon of the American presence. I wrote at the time — not entirely with my tongue in my cheek — that this was likely to be a titanic battle: U.S. technology versus God. Who would win? Then on 23 October 1983 a lone suicide bomber drove a truckload of explosives into the U.S. Marine compound at Beirut airport and killed 241 American servicemen in six seconds…I later interviewed one of the few surviving marines to have seen the bomber. ‘All I can remember,’ he told me, ‘is that the guy was smiling.’
These acts of terrorism, or in the case of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Yemen armed resistance, are used to justify endless mass killing. This Via Dolorosa leads to a global death spiral, especially as the climate crisis reconfigures the planet and international bodies, such as the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, become hollow appendages.
We are sowing the Middle East with dragon’s teeth and, as in the ancient Greek myth, these teeth are rising from the soil as enraged warriors determined to destroy us.
Gaza babies ‘freezing to death’ amid Israel’s inhumane blockade: UNRWA
Saturday, 28 December, https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2024/12/28/739876/Gaza-babies-freezing-death-Gaza-Israel-blocakde
UNRWA is warning that more babies are losing their lives due to a severe temperature drop and lack of shelter in Gaza.
In the past week, at least four infants have died of hypothermia from low temperatures and a lack of warmth while living in tents in the besieged Strip.
On Friday, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, Philippe Lazzarini, said in a message on X that Gaza babies “are freezing to death due to cold weather and a lack of shelter.”
“Blankets, mattresses, and other winter supplies have been stuck in the region for months waiting for approval to get into Gaza.”
Lazzarini once again called for an immediate ceasefire, urging “an immediate flow of much-needed basic supplies, including for winter.”
Such calls are apparently of no use within the international community given Israel’s relentless campaign of genocide in Gaza since October 2023.
Gaza health officials said on December 26 that a newborn baby died from the cold in a tent encampment in the refugee camp of al-Mawasi in southern Gaza.
According to Ahmed al-Farra, the head of pediatrics and obstetrics at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, staff in the neonatal ICU see at least five cases of hypothermia per day.
45,300 and counting. That is the number of Palestinians Israel has massacred in Gaza since October 7, 2023. The regime remains emboldened by the rock-solid support it receives from Washington.
Of that figure, more than 17,600 are children, according to Gaza health officials. As many as 17,000 children have been left unaccompanied or separated from their parents and caregivers.
UNICEF has said that babies are being “delivered into hell” in Gaza.
US-Funded Group Removes Report Warning of Famine in North Gaza After Complaint From US Ambassador
In a statement denouncing the report, the US ambassador to Israel acknowledged Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in northern Gazaby Dave DeCamp December 26, 2024
The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a project funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has removed a report from its website that warned it was “highly likely” famine is occurring in northern Gaza after a complaint by the US ambassador to Israel.
The report noted that Israel has imposed a “near-total blockade of humanitarian and commercial food supplies” on the North Gaza Governorate, which includes the cities of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Jabalia. The report said 65,000 to 75,000 civilians remained in the area, “including civilians who have been unable to or prevented from evacuating.”
US Ambassador Jack Lew issued a statement slamming the report, saying there are far fewer civilians in those areas, an acknowledgment of the ethnic cleansing campaign that Israel has been conducting in northern Gaza since early October.
“The report issued today on Gaza by FEWS NET relies on data that is outdated and inaccurate,” Lew said. He claimed that there are somewhere between 7,000 and 15,000 civilians in the North Gaza Governorate.
“At a time when inaccurate information is causing confusion and accusations, it is irresponsible to issue a report like this,” the US ambassador said.
FEWS Net said it used UN numbers from mid-November and that it would update its report with the latest figures. But the group did not withdraw its assessment that famine was likely occurring in north Gaza.
Last month, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said there was a strong likelihood famine was occurring in north Gaza.
Lew also claimed that the US has worked to ensure more humanitarian access in north Gaza, but the area has been under a total siege, and only 12 aid trucks have been able to make deliveries since October 6. Israel has forcibly displaced civilians from the area under the threat of death, either by shooting, bombing, or starvation, following an outline known as the “general’s plan.”
Israel Is Killing Civilians In Gaza On Purpose, And It’s Not Even Debatable.
Caitlin Johnstone, Dec 27, 2024
Just so we’re all clear, it is a fully established fact that the IDF is directly, deliberately killing civilians in Gaza. There was a time in the early days of the genocide when this could be disputed, but that is no longer true. The facts are in and the case is closed. It’s happening.
Israeli soldiers are telling the press that they’ve been knowingly killing civilians and then falsely categorizing them as terrorists afterward. Countless doctors have testified to routinely encountering dead and wounded children who’ve been shot in the head by Israeli snipers. Israeli media reports have revealed that the IDF is intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure and using AI systems to specifically target suspected Hamas members when they are at home with their families instead of out on the battlefield.
The debate is over. The “human shields” argument has been completely, thoroughly debunked. If you still deny that this is happening, its because your worldview is so false that it requires you to deny facts and reality.
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We were fed lies about what happened on October 7. We were fed lies about the Israeli abuses which led to October 7. We’ve been fed lies about what’s been done for the last 15 months under the justification of October 7. And yet Israel’s defenders still expect to be taken seriously when they babble about October 7 in response to criticisms of Israel’s actions.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We’re fed mountains of stories by the rich and powerful explaining why things must remain as they are — but they are only stories.
Every sociopolitical status quo throughout history has had power-serving narratives explaining why things are as they are and justifying why the people in charge live so much more comfortably than the ordinary folks doing the real work in this world. People used to be told that kings received their authority directly from God, and were therefore better and more worthy than the unwashed masses. Today we have different rulers with different narratives justifying their rule and explaining why vast inequality is fine and good, but those narratives are exactly as fictional as the old stories about the divine right of kings.
Today we are trained to believe that the plutocrats who rule our society attained their vast fortunes through hard work and clever innovation, and are entitled to every penny because they are the most productive members of our society. Just as the peasants of old were taught about the divine right of kings, we are taught that capitalism is the most fair and equitable of all possible systems and that the US-led world order ensures that freedom and democracy will be protected and promoted for the benefit of all.
These are all made-up stories, no truer than the story that monarchs were imbued with magical king powers by an invisible deity because their blood was special. But they are treated as serious facts by those who are responsible for training us how to think, and by those who swallow this indoctrination.
In reality we can change how things are whenever we want, and there’s no good reason not to. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of our rulers, and the oligarchs and empire managers who currently hold the steering wheel are destroying our biosphere while increasing inequality and exploitation and pushing us toward nuclear war on multiple fronts.
We have the ability to wrest that steering wheel away from them any time enough of us work up the will to do so. All the stories to the contrary we might believe are just fictional thought-fluff that our rulers put in our minds for their own benefit.
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There’s nothing wrong with being politically homeless at this point in history. Humanity as a whole is still wildly confused and dysfunctional in this particular slice of spacetime, and even the very best political factions are dominated by highly neurotic people who take no responsibility for their psychological state and internal clarity. If you’ve found a political party or faction you trust then that’s great, but if you haven’t then it is perfectly fine to stand as an individual while throwing your support behind worthy causes and movements on a case-by-case basis as they emerge without permanently hitching yourself to anyone else’s wagon.
We’ve still got a long way to go in maturing as a species, and it might be a while before a unified political faction arises that you can trust to consistently move in the highest interest.
Another expert report finds Israel is committing genocide. The West yawns
“Like in every other case of genocide in history, right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.”
a genocidal view widely shared in Israel, that “there are no innocents in Gaza”. Even Israel’s supposedly liberal President Isaac Herzog has said as much.
But like everything about this genocide, those accounts made no impact on the western political and media consensus. Nothing has stuck, even when it is the soldiers themselves documenting their atrocities, and even when it is Israeli Holocaust experts concluding that these crimes amount to genocide.
How is this permanent condition of mass denial possible? There is nothing normal or natural about it. The denial is being actively and furiously manufactured.
Nearly 15 months on, the Gaza genocide has become entirely normal, it has become just another minor, routine news item to be buried on the inside pages.
Jonathan Cook, 24 December 2024 , https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-israel-another-expert-report-committing-genocide-west-yawns
Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Medecins Sans Frontieres are all agreed. But the Gaza genocide is now just another routine news item, buried on the inside pages.
hree separate reports published this month by leading international human rights and medical groups have detailed the same horrifying story: that Israel is well advanced in its genocide of the Palestinian population in Gaza.
Or, to be more accurate, they have confirmed what was already patently clear: that, for the past 14 months, Israel has been slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians with indiscriminate munitions, while at the same time gradually starving the survivors to death and denying them access to medical care.
Genocides can happen with gas chambers. Or with machetes. Or they can be carried out with 2,000lb bombs and aid blockades. Genocides rarely look the same. But they are all designed to arrive at the same endpoint: the elimination of a people.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) agree that Israel is striving for extermination. It has not hidden its intent, and that intent is confirmed by its actions on the ground.
Only the wilfully blind, which includes western politicians and their media, are still in denial. But worse than denial, they continue to actively collude in this, the ultimate crime against humanity, by supplying Israel with the weapons, intelligence and diplomatic cover it needs for the extermination.
Last week, MSF issued its report, titled Life in the Death Trap That is Gaza, concluding that Israel was intentionally “unravelling the fabric of society”.
The medical charity observed: “The violence unleashed by Israeli forces has caused physical and mental damage on a scale that would overwhelm any functioning health system, let alone one already decimated by a crushing offensive and a 17-year-long blockade [by Israel].”
MSF added: “Even if the offensive ended today, its long-term impact would be unprecedented, given the scale of the destruction.”
Rebuilding the society and dealing with the health consequences will “span generations”.
Intention proven
MSF’s findings followed hot on the heels of an 185-page report by Human Rights Watch, which concluded that Israel was committing “acts of genocide”.
The organisation limited its focus to one Israeli policy: its systematic effort to deprive the population of access to water – a clear measure of intentionality, the critical yardstick for judging whether mass killing has crossed into genocide.
At a news conference, Lama Fakih, HRW’s Middle East director, said their research had proved Israel was “intentionally killing Palestinians in Gaza by denying them the water that they need to survive”.
Israel had done so in four coordinated moves. It had blocked pipelines supplying water from outside Gaza. It had then cut off power to run the pumps that Gaza’s own supplies from wells and desalination plants depended on.
Next, it had destroyed the solar panels that were the backup to deal with such power cuts. And finally, it had killed crews trying to repair the supply system and aid agency staff trying to bring in water supplies.
“This is a comprehensive policy preventing people from getting any water,” HRW’s acting Israel and Palestine director, Bill Van Esveld, concluded. He added that the group had made “a very clear finding of extermination”.
‘Pattern of conduct’
HRW echoed a much wider-ranging report by Amnesty International, the world’s best-known international human rights organisation.
In a 296-page report published in early December, Amnesty concluded that Israel had been “brazenly, continuously” committing genocide in Gaza – or “unleashing hell” as the organisation phrased it more graphically.
The period of Amnesty’s research ended in July, five months ago. Since then, Israel has further intensified its destruction of northern Gaza to drive out the population.
Nonetheless, Amnesty described a “pattern of conduct” in which Israel had deliberately obstructed aid and power supplies, and detonated so much explosive power on the tiny enclave – equivalent to more than two nuclear bombs – that water, sanitation, food and healthcare systems had collapsed.
The scale of the attack, it noted, had caused death and destruction at a speed and level unmatched in any other 21st-century conflict.
Budour Hassan, Amnesty’s researcher for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, said Israel’s actions went beyond the individual war crimes associated with conflicts: “This is something deeper.”
Agreeing with major Holocaust and genocide scholars, Amnesty concluded that the high bar needed to prove genocidal intent in law was crossed last May when Israel began destroying Rafah, the area in southern Gaza that it had herded Palestinian civilians into as a supposedly “safe zone”.
Israel had been warned not to attack Rafah by the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but went ahead anyway.
‘Mass denial’
For some time, leading Holocaust and genocide scholars – among them Israelis – have been speaking up to warn not only that a genocide is unfolding, but that it is nearing completion.
Last week, Omer Bartov even managed to get his message out on CNN. He told Christiane Amanpour that Israel was carrying out “a war of annihilation” on the Gaza Strip. “What the IDF [Israeli military] is doing there is destroying Gaza,” he said.
Amos Goldberg, another Israeli Holocaust expert, noted that Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish-Polish scholar who coined the term “genocide”, described its two phases.
“The first is the destruction of the annihilated group and the second is what he called ‘imposition of the national pattern’ of the perpetrator. We are now witnessing the second phase as Israel prepares ethnically cleansed areas for Israeli settlements.”
Goldberg added: “Like in every other case of genocide in history, right now we have mass denial. Both here in Israel and around the world.”
Bartov’s invitation by CNN appeared to have been provoked by an article in Haaretz, Israel’s most liberal newspaper. It published last week testimonies from Israeli combat soldiers, in which they described committing and witnessing war crimes in Gaza. They paint a picture of systematic erasure that, even from their limited perspective, looks ominously like genocide.
The soldiers describe shooting dead anyone who moves inside undeclared so-called “kill zones”, even children, and then claiming them to be “terrorists”. The dead are left to be eaten by packs of dogs.
The only words one Israeli reservist found to describe Israel’s repeated and intentional killing of children in Gaza was “pure evil”.
According to a senior reserve commander recently returned from the enclave, the Israeli army has created “a lawless space where human life holds no value”.
Another says units compete to see who can kill the greater number of Palestinians, indifferent to whether they are Hamas fighters or civilians.
Others describe these units as operating like “independent militias”, unrestrained by military protocols.
‘Everyone is a terrorist’
How the Israeli army implemented the Gaza genocide is alluded to in the Haaretz article. After the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, the military leadership devolved normally centralised decision-making to local field commanders.
Many of those commanders live in the most religiously extreme of the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Not only are they Jewish supremacists, but they follow rabbis who believe all Palestinians, even babies, pose a threat to the Jewish people and must be exterminated.
Notoriously, a group of influential settler rabbis formalised their genocidal teachings into a book called The King’s Torah.
One senior commander identified by Haaretz is Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, a settler from Kiryat Arba, possibly the most extreme of all Israel’s West Bank settlements.
For many years, Vach headed the military’s officers training school, passing on his extreme views to a new generation of officers, presumably some of whom are now making decisions in Gaza.
Today, he heads Division 252, in which many of the soldiers who spoke to Haaretz have served.
One of his officers recounted how, after Hamas’ military leader Yahya Sinwar was killed in October, Vach held an official meeting to determine what to do with his body. He wanted to strip Sinwar’s corpse naked, put it in a public square, dismember it and pour sewage over the remains.
In an address to soldiers, he is reported to have echoed a genocidal view widely shared in Israel, that “there are no innocents in Gaza”. Even Israel’s supposedly liberal President Isaac Herzog has said as much.
But according to one officer, Vach has made this view an “operational doctrine”.
Vach’s view of Palestinians is that “everyone’s a terrorist”. And that means, given Israel’s current, explicit aims in Gaza, everyone must be killed.
Nothing sticks
None of this should surprise us. Israeli leaders from the very start announced their genocidal intent. And more than a year ago, Israeli soldiers serving in Gaza began telling us of the systematic nature of Israel’s war crimes.
But like everything about this genocide, those accounts made no impact on the western political and media consensus. Nothing has stuck, even when it is the soldiers themselves documenting their atrocities, and even when it is Israeli Holocaust experts concluding that these crimes amount to genocide.
It has been nearly a year since the ICJ, comprising more than a dozen internationally respected judges, decided that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was carrying out a genocide in Gaza.
The judiciary is amongst the most conservative of professions.
The situation in Gaza is incalculably worse than it was last January when the court issued its ruling.
But the wheels of justice are required to turn slowly, even though Gaza does not have time on its side.
How is this permanent condition of mass denial possible? There is nothing normal or natural about it. The denial is being actively and furiously manufactured.
Only because we live in a world where billionaires own our politicians and media do we need courts and human rights groups to confirm what we can already see quite clearly being live-streamed to our devices.
Only because we live in a world owned by billionaires do those same courts and rights organisations spend long months weighing the evidence to protect themselves from the inevitable backlash of smears aimed at discrediting their work.
And only because we live in a world owned by billionaires is it possible, even after all those delays, for our politicians and media to ignore the findings and carry on as before.
The system is rigged to favour the imperial hub of the United States and its client states.
If you are an African dictator, or an official enemy of the so-called West, the most minimal evidence suffices to prove your guilt.
If you are under the protection of the US godfather, no amount of evidence will ever be enough to put you behind bars.
It is known as realpolitik.
Always another story
For many months, the western media’s role has been to gaslight us by pretending the genocide is something else.
First, the mass slaughter of Palestinians was presented simply as a natural desire by Israel to eliminate “terrorism” on its doorstep following the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.
It was chiefly a story of Israeli “self-defence” that conveniently overlooked the preceding decades in which Israel had driven Palestinians off their land, either out of their homeland entirely or into ghettoes, then colonised the land illegally with apartheid-style Jewish settlements, and subjected the Palestinian ghettoes to brutal Israeli military rule.
In the coverage after 7 October, the Palestinians – long the victims of an illegal occupation – were viewed as squarely to blame for their own suffering. To suggest anything else – to worry that a genocide was unfolding – was a sure sign of antisemitism.
Then, as the slaughter intensified – as Gaza was levelled, hospitals wrecked, the population collectively punished with an aid blockade – the official story faltered.
So a new narrative was advanced: of international efforts to reach a ceasefire ending “the cycle of violence”, of the focus on securing the release of the hostages, of Hamas intransigence.
We were back to the familiar framework of an intractable conflict, in which both sides were to blame – though, of course, the Palestinians more so.
Now, as it becomes impossible to continue pretending that Israel wants peace, to ignore the fact that it is expanding the slaughter, not reining it in, the media strategy has shifted once again.
As the genocide reaches its “final stage” – as the Israeli Holocaust scholars Omer Bartov and Amos Goldberg warn – the media have largely lost interest. If there is no way to both-sides the genocide, then it must be disappeared.
And in media-land, there is always another story that can be promoted. There will always be another front-page lead rather than the most disturbing one of all, in which western leaders and the media are full participants in the live-streamed extermination of a people.
BBC buries the news
That is the context for understanding the media’s collective yawn as the three genocide reports dropped one after another this month.
Israel’s accusations that Amnesty’s report was antisemitic were entirely expected. What should not have been was the media’s largely indifferent response.
The BBC was a case study in how to bury bad news. Its flagship television news programmes – the dominant news source for Britons – ignored the story completely.
Meanwhile, its poor cousin, the 24-hour news channel, which draws a far smaller audience, did mention the Amnesty report, but captioned it: “Israel rejects ‘fabricated’ claims of genocide.”
In other words, when the BBC did offer very limited coverage, it skipped the news story of Amnesty’s findings and went straight to Israel’s predictable, outraged reaction.
In an investigation for Drop Site News last week, Guardian columnist Owen Jones spoke to 13 current and recently departed BBC staff. They said the corporation’s coverage of Gaza was heavily skewed to present Israel’s actions in a favourable light.
In a WhatsApp chat for senior BBC Middle East editors, correspondents and producers, one participant – incensed by the “fabricated claims” caption – wrote: “FFS! – It’s an open goal for those who say we’re frit [afraid] of upsetting the Israelis and keep on couching our stories in an ‘Israel says’ narrative’.”
The BBC’s website, by far the most influential English-language online news source, inexplicably ignored the Amnesty report for 12 hours after the embargo was lifted.
Even then, it appeared as the seventh item. For the following week, it was not included in the “Israel-Gaza” index on the website’s front page, making it unlikely it would be found.
This pattern has long been true in the BBC’s coverage of Israel and Palestine, but it has become far more glaring since the stakes were raised for Israel by its genocide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vLrmM1KjxE
As Jones’s investigation discloses, BBC management has tightly restricted control over the Gaza coverage to a small number of journalists known to hew closely to Israel’s view of events – and despite their editorial role provoking what Jones calls a “civil war” in the BBC newsroom.
Notably, Jones did not publish his investigation in the Guardian, where there have been similar reports of staff indignant at the paper’s failure to give proper weight to the genocidal nature of Israel’s actions.
Rigged algorithms
What the BBC has been doing is not exceptional. As soon as a light is shone into the dark recesses of the state- and billionaire-owned media, the same picture always emerges.
Last week, an investigation revealed that Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, intentionally rigged its algorithms to suppress reports from the biggest Palestinian news sources after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023.
Palestinian news outlets saw their views on Meta platforms fall significantly after the attack – on average by 77 percent – when they should have expected to see far greater interest. By contrast, views of Israeli news outlets rose sharply.
Paradoxically, the investigation was published by the BBC, though notably the research was initiated and carried out by the staff of its Arabic news service.
Also last week, more than a dozen whistleblowers from Deutsche Welle, Germany’s equivalent of state broadcaster the BBC, revealed to Al Jazeera that a culture of fear reigns in the newsroom when it comes to critical coverage of Israel.
Similar reports from whistleblowing staff have exposed the rigged nature of the coverage – always in Israel’s favour – in other major outlets, from CNN to the New York Times and the Associated Press news agency.
In reality, the same skewed news agenda can be found in every newsroom in every corporate media outlet. It just requires whistleblowers to come forward, and for there to be someone willing to listen and in a position to publish.
Why? Because a genocide unfolding in plain sight cannot be made to appear normal without an enormous expenditure of effort from institutional media to close the eyes of their audiences. To hypnotise us into indifference.
State of anxiety
Too many of us are susceptible to this process – and for a number of reasons.
In part, because we still trust these institutions, even though their chief function is to persuade us that they are there for our benefit – rather than the reality that they serve the interests of the larger corporate structures to which they belong.
Those western structures are invested in resource theft, asset-stripping and wealth concentration – all, of course, pursued at the expense of the global south – and the war industries needed to make this pillage possible.
But also, it is part of our psychological makeup that we cannot sustain attention on bad news indefinitely.
To watch a genocide unfold week after week, month after month, and be unable to do anything to stop it, takes a terrible toll on our mental health. It keeps us in a permanent state of anxiety.
The corporate structures that oversee our media understand this only too well. Which is why they cultivate a sense of powerlessness amongst their audiences.
The world is presented as a baffling place, where there are inexplicable forces of evil that act without any comprehensible causation to destroy all that is good and wholesome.
The media suggest international affairs are little different from a game of whack-a-mole. Whenever the good West tries to solve a problem, another evil mole pops up its head, whether it be Hamas terrorists, Hezbollah terrorists, Syria’s former dictator Bashar al-Assad, or the mad mullahs of Iran
With this as the framework for the Gaza genocide, audiences are left sensing either that what is happening to Palestinians, however horrifying, may be deserved or that investing too much concern is a waste of energy and time. Another crisis will be along in a moment equally demanding of our attention.
And so it will. Because that is precisely the way the corporate media works. It offers a conveyor belt of bad news, one bewildering event after another – whether it be another disgraced celebrity, or murdered schoolgirl, or an outbreak of war.
The media’s role – the reason states and corporations keep such a tight grip on it – is to stop us from gaining a wider picture of the world, one on which our hands look far more bloodied than the “terrorists” we sit in judgment on. One where a powerful western elite, its corporate empire headquartered in the US, runs the planet as nothing more than a wealth-extraction machine.
And so we, the publics of the West, shrug our shoulders once again: at “man’s inhumanity to man”, at “the cycle of violence”, at “the barbarians at the gate”, at “the white man’s burden”.
Nearly 15 months on, the Gaza genocide has become entirely normal, it has become just another minor, routine news item to be buried on the inside pages.
Israeli Attacks in Gaza Kill at Least 32 More Palestinians Over 24 Hours
Many children were killed by Israeli strikes across the Strip on Sunday
by Dave DeCamp, December 22, 2024 , https://news.antiwar.com/2024/12/22/israeli-attacks-in-gaza-kill-at-least-32-more-palestinians-over-24-hours/
Gaza’s Health Ministry said Sunday that Israeli attacks killed at least 32 Palestinians and wounded 54 over the previous 24-hour period as children were slaughtered across the Strip.
The ministry’s numbers only account for dead and wounded Palestinians who arrived at hospitals and don’t factor in those missing under the rubble or in besieged areas rescuers are unable to access.
“There are still a number of victims under the rubble and on the streets, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” the ministry said.
Israeli attacks on Sunday included the bombing of a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City. According to Gaza’s Civil Defense, the strike killed at least eight Palestinians, including four children.
Israeli strikes also targeted Jabalia, northern Gaza, which has been under total siege since early October as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign. According to Al Jazeera, the strikes killed at least five Palestinians, including four children.
Another child was killed by an Israeli drone attack on a group of people in the Burej refugee camp in central Gaza.
Overnight Israeli strikes hit a home in Deir el-Balah, central Gaza. According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, at least five were killed, and women and children were among the dead.
A day earlier, Al Jazeera reported that an Israeli strike that hit a home in Jabalia on Friday evening killed at least 12, including seven children. “All of the martyrs are from the same family, including seven children, the oldest aged six,” Gaza’s Civil Defense said in a telegram post about the strike.
Later on Sunday, Israeli strikes hit the al-Mawasi camp, which Israel has labeled a so-called “safe zone” but has come under repeated IDF attacks. At least seven were killed in the camp by strikes that targeted tents.
The Health Ministry said the latest violence brought its recorded death toll since October 2023 to 45,259 and the number of wounded to 107,627.
In October, a group of American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza estimated in an open letter to President Biden that the US-backed Israeli onslaught has killed at least 118,908 Palestinians, a total that includes indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who led the letter, told Antiwar.com in a recent interview that the estimate was the bare minimum they came up with by looking at the available data.
Israel’s War on Gaza Is a War on Children
Children in Gaza are not merely collateral damage; they are often actively being targeted.
By Henry A. Giroux , Truthout, December 21, 2024
In November, over a year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a report by the Gaza-based Community Training Center for Crisis Management produced a grim statistic: “Nearly all children in the embattled Palestinian enclave believe their death is imminent — and nearly half of them want to die.”
It is no wonder why the statistic, which came from a survey of families with disabled, injured or unaccompanied children, is so bleak. Amnesty International’s recent report lays bare the magnitude of the crisis: “Israel’s actions … have brought Gaza’s population to the brink of collapse. Its brutal military offensive had killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, including over 13,300 children, and injured over 97,000 more, by 7 October 2024, many of them in direct or deliberately indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families.”
This unfathomable suffering — inflicted disproportionately on women and children — represents a moral abomination, a political travesty, and a militaristic cruelty of the highest order. The destruction of lives, institutions and essential humanitarian infrastructure goes beyond the annihilation of a people; it constitutes an assault on future generations and the very fabric of our shared humanity. Genocidal language dehumanizes and legitimizes the unthinkable: an indiscriminate war waged against the most defenseless — children.
Israel’s war on Palestinian youth is genocidal — not only in the starvation, maiming and unimaginable killing of children but in its relentless assault on any viable notion of what it means for these young people to be valued, human and alive with hope. It seeks to strip them of their dignity, rendering them invisible and unworthy in the eyes of the world, as if their lives are expendable, their dreams inconsequential. This overpowering violence amounts to what we may term childcide, which is the deliberate or systematic destruction of children, whether through direct violence, neglect, or the conditions of war and oppression that render them uniquely vulnerable. It is a traumatic manifestation of collective failure — a war against innocence, in which the fragile promise of childhood is extinguished before it can bloom. In Gaza, where children face relentless bombings, displacement and deprivation, childcide becomes not just an act of violence but a moral collapse: the erasure of futures, dreams and entire generations. It is a crime not only against the child but against humanity itself, leaving behind a void that no words can fill and no justice can fully repair…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://truthout.org/articles/israels-war-on-gaza-is-a-war-on-children/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=bdbe0251d9-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_12_21_08_06_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-5f034c9084-650192793
Israel’s Crime of Extermination, Acts of Genocide in Gaza
Authorities’ Widespread Deprivation of Water Threatens Survival
Human Rights Watch 19 Dec 24
Israeli authorities have deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the population in Gaza by intentionally depriving Palestinian civilians there of adequate access to water, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths.
In doing so, Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide. The pattern of conduct, coupled with statements suggesting that some Israeli officials wished to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, may amount to the crime of genocide.
- Governments and international organizations should take all measures to prevent genocide in Gaza, including discontinuing military assistance, reviewing bilateral agreements and diplomatic relations, and supporting the International Criminal Court and other accountability efforts.
(Jerusalem) – Israeli authorities have intentionally deprived Palestinian civilians in Gaza of adequate access to water since October 2023, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths and thus committing the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
In the 179-page report, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water,” Human Rights Watch found that Israeli authorities have intentionally deprived Palestinians in Gaza of access to safe water for drinking and sanitation needed for basic human survival. Israeli authorities and forces cut off and later restricted piped water to Gaza; rendered most of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure useless by cutting electricity and restricting fuel; deliberately destroyed and damaged water and sanitation infrastructure and water repair materials; and blocked the entry of critical water supplies.
“Water is essential for human life, yet for over a year the Israeli government has deliberately denied Palestinians in Gaza the bare minimum they need to survive,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director at Human Rights Watch. “This isn’t just negligence; it is a calculated policy of deprivation that has led to the deaths of thousands from dehydration and disease that is nothing short of the crime against humanity of extermination, and an act of genocide.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed 66 Palestinians from Gaza, 4 employees of Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU), 31 healthcare professionals, and 15 people working with United Nations agencies and international aid organizations in Gaza. Human Rights Watch also analyzed satellite imagery, photographs, and videos captured between the beginning of the hostilities in October 2023 and September 2024, as well as data collected and estimates produced by doctors, epidemiologists, humanitarian aid organizations, and water and sanitation experts.
Human Rights Watch concluded that Israeli authorities have intentionally created conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza in whole or in part. This policy, inflicted as part of a mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, means Israeli authorities have committed the crime against humanity of extermination, which is ongoing. This policy also amounts to one of the five “acts of genocide” under the Genocide Convention of 1948. Genocidal intent may also be inferred from this policy, coupled with statements suggesting some Israeli officials wished to destroy Palestinians in Gaza, and therefore the policy may amount to the crime of genocide.
Immediately after the attacks in southern Israel by Hamas-led Palestinian armed groups in Gaza on October 7, 2023, which Human Rights Watch has found amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity, Israeli authorities cut all electricity and fuel to the Gaza Strip. On October 9, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of Gaza, stating: “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed.”
That same day, and for weeks thereafter, Israeli authorities cut off all water and blocked fuel, food, and humanitarian aid from entering the strip. Israeli authorities continue to restrict the entry of water, fuel, food, and aid into Gaza and to cut Gaza’s electricity, which is required to operate life-sustaining infrastructure. This continued even after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued provisional measures in January, March, and May 2024 ordering Israeli authorities to protect Palestinians in Gaza from genocide and, in so doing, provide humanitarian aid, specifying in March that this includes water, food, electricity, and fuel. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/12/19/israels-crime-extermination-acts-genocide-gaza
Finding the Unmentionable: Amnesty International, Israel and Genocide
Binoy Kampmark, December 16, 2024, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/12/16/finding-the-unmentionable-amnesty-international-israel-and-genocide/
It was bound to happen. With continuing operations in Gaza, and increasingly violent activities being conducted against Palestinians in the occupied territories, human rights organisations are making increasingly severe assessments of Israel’s warring cause. While the world awaits the findings of the International Court of Justice on whether Israel’s campaign, as argued by South Africa, amounts to genocide, Amnesty International has already reached its conclusions.
In a 296-page report sporting the ominous title “You Feel Like You Are Subhuman”, the human rights body, after considering the events in Gaza between October 2023 and July 2024, identified a “pattern of conduct” that indicated genocidal intent. These included, among other things, persistent direct attacks on civilians and objects “and deliberately indiscriminate strikes over the nine-month period, wiping out entire families repeatedly launched at times when these strikes would result in high numbers of casualties”; the nature of the weapons used; the speed and scale of destruction to civilian objects and infrastructure (homes, shelters, health facilities, water and sanitation infrastructure, agricultural land”; the use of bulldozing and controlled demolitions; and the use of “incomprehensible, misleading and arbitrary ‘evacuation’ orders’”.
The report does much to focus on statements made from the highest officials to the common soldiery to reveal the mental state necessary to reveal genocide. 102 statements made by members of the Knesset, government officials and high-ranking commanders “dehumanized Palestinians, or called for, or justified genocidal acts or other crimes under international law against them.” The report also examined 62 videos, audio recordings and photographs posted online featuring gleeful Israeli soldiers rejoicing in the “destruction of Gaza or the denial of essential services to people in Gaza, or celebrated the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools and universities, including through controlled demolitions, in some cases without apparent military necessity.”
From its alternative universe, the Israeli public relations machine drew from its own agitprop specialists, working on mangling the language of the report. The formula is familiar: attack the authors first, not their premises. “The deplorable and fanatical organisation Amnesty International has once again produced a fabricated response that is entirely based on lies,” came the howl from Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesperson Oren Marmorstein.
Other methods of repudiation involve detaching Hamas and its war with Israel from any historical continuum, not least the fact that it was aided, supported and backed by Israel for years as a counter to Fatah in the West Bank. Isolating Hamas as a terrorist aberration also serves to treat it as alien, artificially foreign and not part of any resistance movement against suffocating Israeli occupation and strangulation. They, so goes this argument, are genocidal, and countering such a body can never be, by any stretch, genocidal. The pro-Israeli group NGO Monitor abides by this line of reasoning, calling allegations of genocide against Israel “a reversal of the actual and clearly established intent of Hamas and its allies (including its patron, Iran), to wipe Israel off the map”.
Israel’s closest ally and sponsor, the United States, proved predictable in rejecting the findings while still claiming to respect the humanitarian line. The US State Department’s principal deputy spokesman, Vedant Patel, expresseddisagreement “with the conclusions of such a report. We had said previously and continue to find that the allegations of genocide are unfounded.” Patel did, however, pay lip service to the “vital role that civil society organizations like Amnesty International and human rights groups and NGOs play in providing information and analysis as it relates to Gaza and what’s going on.” Vital, but only up to a point.
Far less guarded assessments can be found in the American pro-Israeli chatter sphere. These follow the usual pattern. Orde Kittrie, senior fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a name that can only imply that crimes committed in such a cause are bound to be justifiable, offers a neat illustration. Amnesty, he argues, “systematically and repeatedly mischaracterizes both the facts and the law.” Kittrie suggests his own mischaracterisation by parroting the IDF’s line that Hamas had “increased casualty counts by illegally using Palestinian civilian shields and by hiding weapons and war fighters in and below homes, hospitals, mosques, and other buildings.” This conveniently ignores that point that the numbers are not necessarily proof of genocidal intent, though it helps.
The report also notes that, even in the face of such tactics by Hamas, Israel was still “obligated to take all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid attacks that would be indiscriminate or disproportionate.”
Amnesty International’s report is yet another addition to the gloomy literature on the subject. Human Rights Watch, in November, pointed to violations of the laws of war, crimes against humanity, and the provisional measures of the ICJ issued urging Israel to abide by the obligations imposed by the UN Genocide Convention of 1948. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem stated in no uncertain terms in October that “Israel intends to forcibly displace northern Gaza’s residents by committing some of the gravest crimes under the laws of war”.
Battling over the designation of whether a campaign is genocidal can act as a distraction, a field of quibbles for paper pushing pedants. The “specific intent” in proof must be unequivocally demonstrated and beyond any other reasonable inference. A smokescreen is thereby deployed that risks masking the broader ambit of war crimes and crimes against humanity. But no amount of pedantry and disagreement can arrest the sense that Israel’s lethal conduct, whatever threshold it may reach in international law, is directed at destroying not merely Palestinian life but any worthwhile sense of a viable sovereignty. Amnesty Israel, while rejecting the central claim of the parent organisation’s report did make one concession: the country’s brutal response following October 7, 2023 “may amount to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.”
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
Airwars Finds Israel Killed Over 5,000 Civilians in Gaza in October 2023
In that same 606 incidents Airwars reviewed, the group only found 32-60 militants were killed, a ratio of about 85 civilians killed to one militant
by Dave DeCamp December 12, 2024 , https://news.antiwar.com/2024/12/12/airwars-finds-israel-killed-over-5000-civilians-in-gaza-in-october-2023/
The monitoring group Airwars released a new report on Thursday that found Israeli forces killed a minimum of 5,139 civilians during the first 25 days of its bombing campaign in Gaza starting on October 7, 2023.
Airwars examined 606 incidents of civilian harm and found that only 32-60 militants were killed in those same strikes. Using the higher estimate of 60 militant deaths, the ratio of civilians to combatants killed in the 606 incidents is about 85:1. Using the lower estimate of 32 brings the ratio to about 160:1.
Airwars said the scale of civilian harm was incomparable to any other 21st-century conflict and that the number of civilians killed in the first 25 days was “nearly four times more civilians reported killed in a single month than in any conflict Airwars has documented since it was established in 2014.”
The report detailed the huge number of children killed in Gaza during the first 25 days. “Airwars recorded a minimum of 1,900 children killed by Israeli military action in Gaza. This is nearly seven times higher than even the most deadly month for children previously recorded by Airwars,” the report reads.
Airwars recorded a minimum number of 1,213 women were killed in the 606 incidents they reviewed. Women and children were mainly killed in residential buildings in strikes that often slaughtered many members of the same family.
“Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their
homes. More than nine out of ten women and children were killed in
residential buildings. In more than 95 percent of all cases where a woman
was killed, at least one child was also killed,” the report reads.
The report said that Airwars assumes each person killed is a civilian unless there is evidence to the contrary. “Using publicly available information, Airwars makes every effort to investigate connections between individuals killed and militant groups. Evidence includes any suggestion in local sources that directly associate individuals with participation in hostilities or membership in a militant group,” the report reads.
Airwars said it does not “capture” incidents where militants are killed and there’s no evidence of civilian harm. The group stresses in the report that the 5,139 civilians recorded killed is the minimum number based on the 606 incidents. Airwars is also still assessing other incidents that caused civilian harm during that 25-day period.
“This report considers the most conservative estimates or the lowest possible estimates. Upper estimates of civilian harm are included in each incident published on Airwars’ fully public archive,” the report reads.
The Airwars report aligns with a November 2023 report from 972 Magazine, an Israeli publication, that revealed last year the Israeli military was intentionally bombing civilian targets, including high-rise residential buildings, public buildings, and infrastructure, which it labeled “power targets.”
The 972 report said the purpose of bombing “power targets” was mainly to “harm Palestinian civil society: to ‘create a shock’ that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and ‘lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas.’” Israeli sources said the Israeli military was generally aware of how many civilians would be killed in a particular strike and would launch an attack to kill one Hamas militant, knowing hundreds of civilians would be killed.
“Nothing happens by accident,” a source told 972. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”
Earlier this year, another report from 972 revealed how the Israeli military was using AI to track Hamas militants and create targets, which makes errors and can falsely label people as militants who are not. One system, called “Where’s Daddy,” was used to track Hamas members to bomb them when they were in their homes with their families. In one incident, the Israeli military authorized the killing of approximately 300 civilians to kill one Hamas commander.
The Biden administration has continued to provide weapons and political support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza despite the overwhelming evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israeli officials have admitted that without US support, the Israeli military couldn’t sustain operations in Gaza for more than a few months.
Gaza’s Civil Defense Says Nearly 100 Killed by Israeli Attacks Over 24 Hours
A strike on a house Jabalia killed over 40 Palestinians
by Dave DeCamp December 1, 2024, https://news.antiwar.com/2024/12/01/gazas-civil-defense-says-nearly-100-killed-by-israeli-attacks-over-24-hours/
Gaza’s Civil Defense said Sunday that Israeli attacks killed nearly 100 over the previous 24 hours as Israeli strikes continued to hit targets across the Strip.
“Nearly 100 martyrs were killed in the Gaza Strip within 24 hours as a result of the continuous Israeli bombing operations on homes and citizens’ gatherings,” the agency said, according to Al Jazeera.
Gaza’s Health Ministry put out a lower death toll in its daily update, saying 47 were killed, based on the number of dead and wounded Palestinians brought to hospitals. “The Israeli occupation committed six massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, resulting in 47 martyrs and 108 injuries arriving at hospitals during the past 24 hours,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.
The ministry noted that there are a “number of victims” trapped under the rubble or in areas where rescue crews cannot reach them. The Civil Defense statement said it has been unable to work in northern Gaza, which has been under siege since early October as part of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign.
“Until this moment, civil defense crews are prevented from exercising their duties in northern Gaza, and this has led to hundreds of citizens remaining under the rubble,” the agency said.
The Civil Defense statement said the most deaths occurred in an Israeli strike on a house sheltering displaced Palestinians in Jabalia, northern Gaza, on Saturday. More than 40 Palestinians were killed in the attack.
Also on Saturday, an Israeli strike on a vehicle in the southern city of Khan Younis killed five people, including three aid workers with the US-based World Central Kitchen. Israel claimed without evidence that one of the aid workers was a “terrorist.”
WCK said that it suspended its operations in Gaza following the strike. “We are heartbroken to share that a vehicle carrying World Central Kitchen colleagues was hit by an Israeli air strike in Gaza,” the group said in a statement.
Gaza’s Health Ministry said that its death toll since October 2023, based on its numbers, has risen to 44,429 martyrs, and the number of wounded has reached 105,250.
A group of American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza estimated in an open letter to President Biden in October that the US-backed Israeli onslaught has killed at least 118,908 Palestinians, a total that includes indirect deaths caused by the Israeli siege. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who led the letter, told Antiwar.com in a recent interview that the estimate was the bare minimum they came up with by looking at the available data.
Israel Has Killed Over 1,000 Doctors and Nurses in Gaza
“These people, they target everyone, but I swear, this will not stop us from continuing our humanitarian work,” said a Gaza hospital director injured in an Israeli strike.
Jessica Corbett, Nov 24, 2024, https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-has-killed-over-1000-doctors-and-nurses-in-gaza
More than 1,000 doctors and nurses are among at least 44,211 people killed in Israel’s 13-month assault on the Gaza Strip, officials in the Hamas-governed Palestinian enclave said Sunday.
“Over 310 other medical personnel were arrested, tortured, and executed in prisons,” Gaza’s Government Media Office also said in a statement, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency. “The Israeli army also prevented the entry of medical supplies, health delegations, and hundreds of surgeons into Gaza.”
“Hospitals have been a declared target for the Israeli army, which bombed, besieged, and stormed them, killing doctors and nurses, injuring others after directly targeting them,” the office said. The statement came after the director of the main partially functioning hospital in northern Gaza was injured in an Israeli strike.
Hussam Abu Safiyeh is the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital—which, according toAl Jazeera, Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked, damaging “the facility’s generators, fuel tanks, and main oxygen station.”
The wounded director said: “These people, they target everyone, but I swear, this will not stop us from continuing our humanitarian work. We will keep on providing this service no matter what it costs us.”
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in addition to killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israeli forces have injured at least 104,567 others. Along with attacking hospitals, they have destroyed many homes, schools, and religious sites, and displaced most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people.
More than 1,000 doctors and nurses are among at least 44,211 people killed in Israel’s 13-month assault on the Gaza Strip, officials in the Hamas-governed Palestinian enclave said Sunday.
“Over 310 other medical personnel were arrested, tortured, and executed in prisons,” Gaza’s Government Media Office also said in a statement, according to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency. “The Israeli army also prevented the entry of medical supplies, health delegations, and hundreds of surgeons into Gaza.”
“Hospitals have been a declared target for the Israeli army, which bombed, besieged, and stormed them, killing doctors and nurses, injuring others after directly targeting them,” the office said. The statement came after the director of the main partially functioning hospital in northern Gaza was injured in an Israeli strike.
Hussam Abu Safiyeh is the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital—which, according toAl Jazeera, Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked, damaging “the facility’s generators, fuel tanks, and main oxygen station.”
The wounded director said: “These people, they target everyone, but I swear, this will not stop us from continuing our humanitarian work. We will keep on providing this service no matter what it costs us.”
Since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, in addition to killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israeli forces have injured at least 104,567 others. Along with attacking hospitals, they have destroyed many homes, schools, and religious sites, and displaced most of the enclave’s 2.3 million people.
Israel—which has been armed by the Biden administration and bipartisan U.S. Congress—faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice over its conduct in Gaza. Additionally, the International Criminal Court earlier this week issued arrest warrants for Israel’s current prime minister and former defense minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, as well as Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri.
Last month, 99 U.S. healthcare providers who have volunteered in Gaza since last fall sent U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris a letter detailing “the massive human toll from Israel’s attack” and urging them to “end this madness now!”
“It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population,” the Americans wrote. “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”
“We quickly learned that our Palestinian healthcare colleagues were among the most traumatized people in Gaza, and perhaps in the entire world,” they continued. “All were acutely aware that their work as healthcare providers had marked them as targets for Israel. This makes a mockery of the protected status hospitals and healthcare providers are granted under the oldest and most widely accepted provisions of international humanitarian law.”
They added that “we wish to be absolutely clear: Not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities. We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance, and murder.”
Despite such appeals and accounts, the outgoing Biden-Harris administration has declined to cut off weapons to the Israeli government and earlier this week most U.S. senators from both major parties rejected a trio of resolutions from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that would have blocked some American arms sales to Israel.
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