Despite History of Fabrication, Press Uncritically Covers IDF-Provided Documents on Hamas
a pattern of Israel engineering misleading narratives to shape public opinion, and fabricating the evidence needed to do so.
Bryce Greene, FAIR, 1 Nov 24
Earlier this month, the New York Times (10/12/24), Washington Post (10/12/24) and Wall Street Journal (10/12/24) each published front-page articles based on different sets of documents handed to them by the Israeli military.
Israel claims it seized all the documents—in the form of meeting minutes, letters and planning documents—in its ground invasion of Gaza, and that they reveal insights into Hamas’s operations prior to the October 7 attacks. The documents include alleged evidence of Hamas’s pre-10/7 coordination with Iran, plans to blow up Israeli skyscrapers, and even a scheme to use horse-drawn chariots in an attack from Gaza.
Documents received directly from intelligence agencies should always be treated with skepticism, and that’s especially true when their government has a well-documented history of blatant lying. Yet leading newspapers took these Israeli document dumps largely at face value, advancing the agenda of a genocidal rogue state.
A history of lying
Israel’s use of fabrications to shape public perception is well known, and was put on display early in the assault on Gaza that began last October. After an explosion at Al Ahli hospital killed and injured hundreds (misreporting of which caused a great deal of confusion), the media naturally pointed the finger at Israel. The Israeli government, concerned about the public backlash, denied responsibility, claiming that the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. (See FAIR.org, 11/3/23.)
To back up their claims, Israel released a recording allegedly capturing two Palestinian militants discussing Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s responsibility for the strike. However, an analysis by the firm Earshot found that the audio was the result of two separate channels being edited together (Channel 4, 10/19/23). In other words, Israel engineered a phony audio clip in an attempt to clear itself of war crimes in the public mind.
Investigations based on open sources have since come to various conclusions about the attack (Guardian, 10/18/23; Bellingcat, 10/18/23; Human Rights Watch, 11/26/23; AP, 11/22/23; Michael Kobs, 2023; New Arab, 2/19/24), but Israel’s fraudulent attempt to manipulate evidence certainly suggests that they had something to hide, and demonstrates their lack of reliability as a media source. Recently, the UN released a report accusing Israel of systematically targeting healthcare infrastructure in Gaza, making their denials of this earlier attack far less credible.
In another instance, Israel presented 3D renderings of a supposed Hamas “command center” beneath Al Shifa hospital, claiming it was based on intelligence. However, no such command center was ever found (FAIR.org, 12/1/23). Upon storming the hospital, Israel staged scenes in order to bolster claims that the facility was used by militant groups. The deception was so blatant that mainstream outlets were openly calling it out.
Recently Israel was caught actually providing fabricated documents to the press with the aim of manipulating public opinion. Earlier this year, the Israeli government provided documents to both the Jewish Chronicle (9/5/24) and the German paper Bild (9/6/24) that purportedly showed that Hamas had no interest in a ceasefire, and had a plan to sneak the late Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar out of Gaza to Iran, along with some of the remaining hostages. The reports were then uncritically repeated in outlets like the Times of Israel (9/6/24).
Shortly after these documents were published, the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth (9/8/24) reported on an internal IDF investigation that found that they had been leaked to foreign media as part of a campaign to “shape public opinion on Israel.” The documents were determined to be forgeries, after a comprehensive search of all databases containing documents found in the wake of Israel’s operations. The IDF told the paper that an investigation was underway to determine the origin of the leak.
This non-exhaustive list of examples demonstrates a pattern of Israel engineering misleading narratives to shape public opinion, and fabricating the evidence needed to do so.
Questionable authenticity
Whether they are authentic or not, it is clear that the documents leaked to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post serve the same purpose of propagandizing on behalf of Israel. In an attempt to preserve some journalistic integrity, the Post and Times both gave separate justifications for why they believed the respective documents leaked to them were authentic.
The Post was quick to note that “the documents’ authenticity could not be definitively established,” but gave readers the impression there was reason to believe they were real. First, it claimed that the contents of the documents it received were
“broadly consistent” with US and allies’ post–October 7 intelligence assessments about Hamas’s long-range planning and complex relationship with Iran.
…………………………………………..While Haaretz made no note of the leaked documents provided to the Wall Street Journal, the article ironically acknowledged that
having them published by Fox News or even the Wall Street Journal would have looked like an Israeli public diplomacy operation rather than a legitimate journalistic investigative report.
Haaretz noted that the documents promote narratives that “Israel would be happy to burn into the world’s consciousness,” namely the well-known propaganda effort to equate Hamas with organizations that are universally reviled by Americans. The Post documents purportedly outlined a Hamas plan to blow up a skyscraper in Tel Aviv, evoking the September 11 attacks against the World Trade Center:
The Hamas documents are supposed to bolster Netanyahu’s claim that Israel isn’t fighting against a liberation movement seeking to free the occupied Palestinian people, or even against a paramilitary organization that is poorly funded and trained and lacks planes, the Iron Dome anti-missile system, tanks and artillery….
Rather, it is fighting a terrifying “axis of evil” led by Iran that threatens to destroy Western culture as a whole.
Haaretz also argued that this kind of propaganda campaign was designed to ensure that the violence continues to escalate:………………………………………………………….
………………….Israel’s campaign of genocide in Gaza and greater war in the Middle East has been successful in part because the Israeli government can count on Western press to present and contextualize facts in a way that advances their narrative. Despite Israel’s long history of fabrications, the corporate media will dutifully republish documents, statements and explanations with complete credulity. https://fair.org/home/despite-history-of-fabrication-press-uncritically-covers-idf-provided-documents-on-hamas/
Report: US Sitting on Nearly 500 Reports of US Weapons Killing Civilians in Gaza
Officials are reportedly ignoring the Biden administration’s own weapons guidance to continue fueling Israel’s genocide.
By Sharon Zhang , Truthout, October 30, 2024, https://truthout.org/articles/report-us-sitting-on-nearly-500-reports-of-us-weapons-killing-civilians-in-gaza/
iden administration officials are sweeping aside hundreds of reports of Israeli forces using U.S.-provided weapons to slaughter civilians in Gaza, new reporting finds, flouting the administration’s own policies regarding weapons to give Israel a pass.
According to a new report by The Washington Post published Wednesday, the State Department has received nearly 500 reports of U.S. weapons being used in attacks that caused “unnecessary harm” to civilians amid Israel’s genocide. But, despite policies requiring these reports to be urgently investigated, hundreds of the cases are still unresolved, former and current officials cited by the Post said.
In August of last year, the Biden administration established a process for responding to incidents of U.S.-made weapons killing civilians. Under the system, known as the Civilian Harm Incident Response Guidance, officials must recommend actions like a suspension of arms transfers if U.S. weapons are found to have been used to kill civilians by U.S. allies. At the time, the initiative was lauded as a step toward reducing civilian harm and boosting the U.S. commitment to human rights.
The State Department receives the reports from within the government, as well as humanitarian aid groups, media reports and eyewitness accounts. As media reports have demonstrated numerous times over the past year of the genocide, many reports are accompanied by photographic evidence of fragments of U.S. weapons at sites of attacks.
However, as the U.S. has done countless times over the last year of the genocide (and in the decades of Israeli apartheid preceding it), officials are ignoring their own regulations in order to continue fueling Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, and beyond.
Even though the guidance requires investigations to be done within two months, over two-thirds of the cases are unresolved, “with many pending response from the Israeli government, which the State Department consults to verify each case’s circumstances,” the Post writes.
Officials have not taken a single case to the final stage, where action is recommended, officials said, despite the deadlines.
One of the cases reportedly concerns the Israeli military’s killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab and the paramedics who came to save her — despite U.S officials’ public insistence that they are relying only on Israel’s own investigation into the killing. Another regards a horrific Israeli strike in July on the Gaza “humanitarian safe zone” in al-Mawasi, in which Israeli forces dropped eight 2,000-pound bombs on civilian areas and killed at least 90 Palestinians.
Humanitarian groups, Gaza officials and weapons experts — including ones within the State Department — have repeatedly said that Israel is making extensive use of U.S. weapons to commit war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza. In fact, experts have said that it would be impossible for Israel to carry out the level of destruction it has in Gaza without U.S. help.
The Washington Post report is the latest evidence that the Biden administration is purposefully sidestepping domestic law in its support of Israel.
In a bombshell finding last month, ProPublica found that, this spring, two U.S. agencies had recommended a suspension of weapons transfers to Israel, citing Israel’s humanitarian aid blockade and attacks on aid efforts.
But Secretary of State Antony Blinken lied to Congress about the findings, saying that the government did not assess that Israel has been blocking humanitarian aid just as Israel embarked on its Rafah invasion that would mark the beginning of an even harsher Israeli aid blockade. Now, months later, aid entry into Gaza has hit record lows, as disease and famine plague the population.
Yeah, Yeah, United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Is Hamas. Everyone Israel Hates Is Hamas.
Caitlin Johnstone Oct 30, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/yeah-yeah-unrwa-is-hamas-everyone?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=150919007&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The Israeli Knesset has banned UNRWA, an absolutely critical agency for getting humanitarian aid into Gaza, with the architect of the bill saying this was happening because “UNRWA equals Hamas”.
In addition to everything else this genocide has been, it’s been a colossal insult to our intelligence. UNRWA is Hamas. Hospitals are Hamas. Journalists are Hamas. Civilian infrastructure is Hamas. Ambulances, schools and mosques are Hamas. The women and babies — okay maybe they’re not technically Hamas, but Hamas is definitely hiding behind them and using them as human shields.
We are asked to believe self-evidently idiotic things, and if we don’t, we get called Nazi Jew-haters. We are being asked to turn ourselves into empty-headed morons to advance the information interests of a foreign state that’s allied with our government. Stupidity is being framed as a sign of patriotism. Gullibility is being framed as a sign of rejecting antisemitism. In this morally bankrupt and perverse civilization, the noblest thing you can be is a blithering imbecile.
Axios and its Israeli intelligence insider Barak Ravid have penned yet another White House press release disguised as a news story about how “concerned” the Biden administration is about Israel’s actions in Gaza.
“The Biden administration is ‘deeply concerned’ that two bills passed by the Israeli Knesset on Monday will exacerbate the already dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and harm Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” Ravid writes.
Oh shit you guys the Biden administration is deeply concerned that Israel is doing something bad in Gaza! You’re in trouble now, Bibi!
Like I said. Just one nonstop insult to our intelligence
CNN has issued an apology after its panelist Ryan Girdusky told fellow panelist Mehdi Hasan “I hope your pager doesn’t go off” after Hasan said he supports Palestinians. Israel supporters have been directing this “hurr hurr you should be murdered with an explosive pager” wisecrack at Israel’s critics for weeks, and apparently Girdusky just forgot where he was in the heat of the moment.
CNN was like, This network is shocked and appalled that our panelist joked about murdering a British Muslim journalist with an explosive beeper. That kind of language is only appropriate when directed at Muslims who live in the middle east.
Per the rules of the western empire you are a religious extremist if you want to fight against an occupying force who has been abusing you your entire life, but you are not a religious extremist if you want to carpet bomb the middle east to help fulfill a Biblical prophecy.
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MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is back to pushing her “Russians are interfering in the US election” narrative, so we know what we’ll be hearing again if Kamala loses. No matter who wins we can expect a bunch of outraged shrieking from the other side that the election was unfairly stolen from them.
The US presidential race is very openly a contest between two oligarch-owned Zionist war whores, and yet after the results are announced next week you’re still going to hear half the country going “OMG election interference! The election was stolen from us!”
It already was, you dopes. It was stolen before the race even started. The rest is just narrative.
I sure hope all the US progressives who obediently stopped talking about Gaza these last couple of months remember to start that thing up again after the election is over.
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I’m just gonna say this ahead of time so it’s out there: you don’t get to campaign on continuing a genocide and then blame other people when you lose. That is not a thing.
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“Trump will be worse on Gaza” is such an obnoxiously dishonest argument. It’s completely unfalsifiable and can’t even be tested after the election since abuses keep getting worse in Gaza anyway, and it’s based on nothing but the claim that very vague statements made by Trump prove he’ll facilitate Israeli atrocities more than the current administration already has been. It’s completely empty narrative fluff with no basis on the facts in evidence.
There are all kinds of legitimate cases to be made that Harris would be a little bit better than Trump on some aspects of domestic policy and the environment, but there is no case whatsoever to be made that he’ll be worse on Gaza than the administration that’s already committing genocide there. He could be worse, he could be a bit better, or he could be exactly the same. There’s no way to know, and there won’t be any way to know in a universe where we can’t observe alternate realities to compare what each presidential candidate would have done if they’d won. It’s an entirely unanswerable question that people are just pretending to know the answer to.
Harris and the Democrats have repeatedly attacked Trump for not starting a war with Iran when he was president. She criticized him for making John Bolton sad when he refused to bomb Iran. How is that less insanely pro-Israel than anything Trump has said?
If you want to argue that Harris will be better on reproductive rights or something then go ahead, but when it comes to Gaza don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.
Entire northern Gaza population at risk of dying – UN
Ongoing Israeli military operations in the region disregard basic humanity and the laws of war, a top humanitarian official has said
27 Oct, 2024 , https://www.rt.com/news/606581-un-northern-gaza-dying-population/
What Israeli forces are doing in besieged Gaza during their ongoing war against Hamas cannot be allowed to continue, the United Nation’s top humanitarian official has said.
“The entire population of north Gaza is at risk of dying,” Joyce Msuya, acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, warned on Saturday, in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
Israel has struck hospitals in the region, detained health workers and prevented first responders from rescuing people trapped under the rubble, according to the official.
“Shelters have been emptied and burned down…families have been separated, and men and boys taken away by the truckload,” she said, adding that “such blatant disregard for basic humanity and for the laws of war must stop.”
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, echoed the warning, having voiced deep concerns over the “catastrophic” situation in Gaza. He also highlighted the severe impact of the ongoing hostilities on healthcare in the region.
“Intensive military operations unfolding around and within healthcare facilities and a critical shortage of medical supplies, compounded by severely limited access, are depriving people of life saving care,” Ghebreyesus wrote on X on Saturday.
The WHO Director-General added that Kamal Adwan Hospital in the city of Jabalia, one of the few functioning medical facilities in northern Gaza, has been severely impacted, with only a limited number of staff remaining to care for nearly 200 patients after the detention of 44 male personnel.
Earlier this week, the Health Ministry in the Palestinian enclave claimed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stormed the hospital, detaining hundreds of staff, patients and displaced people.
The IDF insisted it was operating in and around the facility based on “intelligence information regarding the presence of terrorists and terrorist infrastructure in the area”.
“In the weeks preceding the operation, the IDF facilitated the evacuation of patients from the area while maintaining emergency services,” it added in a post on social media on Friday.
West Jerusalem has been repeatedly accused of indiscriminately targeting civilians in Gaza. According to the enclave’s health officials, over 42,000 Palestinians have been killed and nearly 97,000 wounded since the fighting between Hamas and Israel erupted in October 2023. The IDF has dismissed allegations of committing war crimes, arguing that Hamas is using Palestinian civilians as human shields.
More than a year into the conflict, around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million population has been displaced, most of them multiple times, according to UN estimates.
UN rapporteur: Israel carrying out ‘settler-colonial genocide’ against Palestinians
October 29, 2024, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20241029-un-rapporteur-israel-carrying-out-settler-colonial-genocide-against-palestinians/
The UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine issued a report late yesterday accusing Israel of a systematic campaign of forced displacement, destruction and acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
In the report, which was submitted to the UN General Assembly, Francesca Albanese described the “long-term, intentional, state-organised forced displacement and replacement” of Palestinians, particularly following 7 October, 2023.
The report focused on “genocidal intent, contextualising the situation within a decades-long process of territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing aimed at liquidating the Palestinian presence in Palestine.”
“The violence that Israel has unleashed against the Palestinians post-7 October is not happening in a vacuum, but is part of a long-term intentional, systematic, state-organised forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinians,” Francesca Albanese warned.
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The UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine issued a report late yesterday accusing Israel of a systematic campaign of forced displacement, destruction and acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
In the report, which was submitted to the UN General Assembly, Francesca Albanese described the “long-term, intentional, state-organised forced displacement and replacement” of Palestinians, particularly following 7 October, 2023.
The report focused on “genocidal intent, contextualising the situation within a decades-long process of territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing aimed at liquidating the Palestinian presence in Palestine.”
“The violence that Israel has unleashed against the Palestinians post-7 October is not happening in a vacuum, but is part of a long-term intentional, systematic, state-organised forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinians,” Albanese warned.
The report also accused Israel of obstructing international investigation efforts, including denying the entry of fact-finding teams from the UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
“The persistent denial of access to United Nations mechanisms and investigators of the International Criminal Court (ICC) may constitute obstruction of justice, in defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) order that Israel allow international investigators to enter Gaza and take measures to ensure the preservation of evidence,” it said.
She noted that the ongoing “genocide is doubtlessly the consequence of the exceptional status and protracted impunity that has been afforded to Israel.”
“Israel has systematically and flagrantly violated international law, including (UN) Security Council resolutions and ICJ orders,” she said. “This has emboldened the hubris of Israel and its defiance of international law.”
“As the world watches the first live-streamed settler-colonial genocide, only justice can heal the wounds that political expedience has allowed to fester,” she added.
‘Gaza has been made unfit for human life’
The report also drew attention to the magnitude of destruction in Gaza, saying it has prompted allegations of “domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and ecocide.”
It estimated that nearly 40 million tonnes of debris, including unexploded ordnance and human remains, contaminate the ecosystem.
Additionally, more than 140 temporary waste sites and 340,000 tonnes of untreated wastewater and sewage overflow have created breeding grounds for diseases such as hepatitis A, respiratory infections, diarrhoea and skin diseases.
“As Israeli leaders promised, Gaza has been made unfit for human life,” the report said.
The report also mentioned Israeli-imposed restrictions on resources essential for Palestinian survival, such as food, water and medical supplies.
“Systematic attacks on Gaza food sovereignty indicate an intent to destroy its population through starvation,” it said, recalling Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s remarks in August stating that starving the entire Gaza population was “justified and moral.”
Escalating genocidal risk in West Bank
The report warned that violence and systematic targeting are spreading beyond Gaza, raising serious concerns of genocidal risk in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
Since October 2023, Israeli occupation forces have reportedly conducted over 5,500 raids in the West Bank, with hundreds of Palestinians killed and thousands injured.
Albanese noted that this surge in violence has been fuelled by violent settlers, often supported by Israeli forces, and said these patterns echo the severity of Gaza’s devastation.
She cited alarming instances of Palestinian children being systematically targeted, with at least 169 children killed since October 2023, nearly 80 per cent of whom were shot in the head or torso.
“The devastation inflicted on Gaza is now metastasising to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” she warned, adding that some officials, including Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, have publicly supported harsh treatment and mass arrests of Palestinians, with 9,400 currently detained under severe conditions.
States ‘must intervene now’
Albanese called on the international community to act decisively, saying “member states must intervene now to prevent new atrocities that will further scar human history.”
She urged states to use all their political leverage – commencing with a full arms embargo and sanctions – so that Israel stops the assault against the Palestinians, accepts a cease-fire and fully withdraws from the occupied Palestinian territory in line with the ICJ advisory opinion of 19 July.
She asked them to formally recognise Israel as an “apartheid state and persistent violator of international law” while supporting independent and thorough investigations.
The rapporteur also called on states to ensure unhindered humanitarian assistance to Gaza and full financing and protection of UNRWA.
Lastly, she urged the ICC Prosecutor to investigate the commission of the crimes of genocide and apartheid by Israel.
Settlers prepare for ’resettlement in Gaza’
Voltaire Network | 25 October 2024, https://www.voltairenet.org/article221426.html
Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir took part in a two-day meeting on Israel’s southern border entitled “Preparing for our resettlement in Gaza” on the occasion of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. He said: “What we have learned this year is that everything depends on us. We are the owners of this land. Yes, we have experienced a terrible catastrophe. But we must understand that a year later, so many Israelis have changed their mentality. They have changed their mindset. They understand that acting as the rightful owners of this land brings results.
Referring to the Palestinian prisoners, he went on: “We took their jelly sandwiches. We took their chocolate. We took their televisions. We took their ping-pong tables and practice time. You should see them crying and weeping in their cells. This is our proof: when we decide we can, we do succeed.”
“We will encourage the voluntary transfer of all citizens of Gaza. We will offer them the opportunity to move to other countries because this land belongs to us,” he concluded.
• Spokesperson for the “Mothers’ Parade” Sima Hasson said “I’m going to say something that not everyone here is ready to say, but I am, and I know many of you are, ready to say it: “Conquer, expel and resettle”. I’m not just talking about an area of Gaza. I’m not just talking about northern Gaza. I mean every area of land. This is the only way to prevent our boys from constantly going to war. To all those in Europe who have an opinion about what is going on here, I say: do not meddle. Your entire continent is invaded by radical Islam!”
Pasionaria of the settler movement Daniella Weiss said: “We came here with a clear objective: to occupy the entire Gaza Strip… Every inch from north to south. We are thousands of people and we are ready to go to Gaza. October 7 changed history. As a result of the brutal massacre, the Arabs of Gaza have lost their rights to be here forever, they will not stay here.
• Minister of the Negev, Galilee and National Resilience Yitzhak Wasserlauf said: “For 2,000 years, we dreamed of returning to our Jewish homeland. I know that those who disagree with us call it messianism. I call it Zionism. We are true Zionists. We love our land, we love our people, and we value life. And we have a responsibility to create a safe, Jewish nation on the land God has given us.
• Minister of Social Equality and the Advancement of Women May Golan said: “We will hit them where it hurts: their land. Whoever uses his plot of land to plan another holocaust will receive from us, with God’s help, another Nakba [catastrophe].
In February 2024, the settler movement had already organized a “Conference for Israel’s victory – settlements bring security: return to the Gaza Strip and northern Samaria” in Jerusalem in which they threatened the United States and the United Kingdom with resurrecting the Stern terrorist group [1].
This is the editorial from our paywalled “Voltaire, international newsletter”, n°105. For more information, do not hesitate to subscribe: 500€ per year.
Translation
Gregor Fröhlich
South Africa Files 750 Pages of ‘Overwhelming’ Evidence in ICJ Genocide Case Against Israel
“The glaring genocide in Gaza is there for all who are not blinded by prejudice to see.”
By Brett Wilkins / Common Dreams, 30 Oct 24
South Africa filed 750 pages of “overwhelming” proof that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands on Monday, the deadline for submitting final evidence in the ongoing trial.
South African Ambassador to the Netherlands Vusi Madonsela delivered the legal document—known as a memorial—to the ICJ headquarters in the Dutch city. Under the court’s rules, the contents of the memorial cannot be made public at this time.
According to a statement from the office of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the memorial is a “comprehensive presentation of the overwhelming evidence of genocide in Gaza.”
The office said the document “contains evidence which shows how the government of Israel has violated the Genocide Convention by promoting the destruction of Palestinians living in Gaza, physically killing them with an assortment of destructive weapons, depriving them access to humanitarian assistance, causing conditions of life which are aimed at their physical destruction, and ignoring and defying several provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, and using starvation as a weapon of war and to further Israel’s aims to depopulate Gaza through mass death and forced displacement of Palestinians.”
South Africa filed 750 pages of “overwhelming” proof that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands on Monday, the deadline for submitting final evidence in the ongoing trial.
South African Ambassador to the Netherlands Vusi Madonsela delivered the legal document—known as a memorial—to the ICJ headquarters in the Dutch city. Under the court’s rules, the contents of the memorial cannot be made public at this time.
According to a statement from the office of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the memorial is a “comprehensive presentation of the overwhelming evidence of genocide in Gaza.”
The office said the document “contains evidence which shows how the government of Israel has violated the Genocide Convention by promoting the destruction of Palestinians living in Gaza, physically killing them with an assortment of destructive weapons, depriving them access to humanitarian assistance, causing conditions of life which are aimed at their physical destruction, and ignoring and defying several provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, and using starvation as a weapon of war and to further Israel’s aims to depopulate Gaza through mass death and forced displacement of Palestinians.”
“The evidence will show that undergirding Israel’s genocidal acts is the special intent to commit genocide, a failure by Israel to prevent incitement to genocide, to prevent genocide itself, and its failure to punish those inciting and committing acts of genocide,” Ramaphosa’s office added.
South Africa’s filing comes amid Israel’s ongoing 387-day assault on Gaza, which according to Palestinian and international agencies has killed at least 43,020 people—most of them women and children. At least 101,110 others have been wounded and over 10,000 Gazans are missing and believed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed homes and other structures. Millions more Palestinians have been forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened by Israel’s invasion and “complete siege” of Gaza.
The filing also comes one week after senior members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Cabinet and national lawmakers spoke at a conference advocating the ethnic cleansing and recolonization of Gaza.
Ramaphosa’s office lamented that “Israel has been granted unprecedented impunity to breach international law and norms for as long as the United Nations Charter has been in existence.”………………………………………………………………https://www.commondreams.org/news/south-africa-icj-genocide-israel
Israeli Knesset Passes Bill To Ban UN Palestinian Relief Agency
The collapse of UNRWA’s aid efforts in Gaza would ensure the starvation of more Palestinian civilians
by Dave DeCamp October 28, 2024 , https://news.antiwar.com/2024/10/28/israeli-knesset-passes-bill-to-ban-un-palestinian-relief-agency/#gsc.tab=0
The Israeli Knesset on Monday passed a bill banning the UN’s Palestinian relief agency, UNWRA, from operating inside Israel and another that will severely limit its ability to operate in Gaza and the West Bank. The legislation is expected to take effect in 90 days.
The first bill banning UNWRA in Israel passed in a vote of 92-10. The second bill aimed at ending UNWRA’s operations in the Israeli-occupied territories passed in a vote of 97-9.
The second bill prohibits Israeli authorities from having any contact with UNRWA, making it impossible for the relief agency to coordinate with the Israeli military on aid deliveries. The legislation does not outline any plan to replace UNRWA’s relief efforts in Gaza, which millions of Palestinian civilians rely on to survive.
Israel has waged war against UNWRA over the past year, killing over 200 of its staff members in Gaza. Israel has claimed a significant number of UNWRA’s staff are members of Hamas but has offered no evidence for the allegations, which have been strongly rejected by the UN agency.
The US took Israel’s claims at face value and cut off funding to UNWRA at the beginning of the year. Now, the US is warning Israel against implementing the bills banning UNRWA since it would starve Palestinian civilians.
“If UNRWA goes away, you will see civilians — including children, including babies — not be able to get access to food and water and medicine that they need to live. We find that unacceptable,” State Department spokesman Matt Miller said ahead of the Knesset vote.
“We continue to urge the government of Israel to pause the implementation of this legislation. We urge them not to pass it at all, and we will consider next steps based on what happens in the days ahead,” Miller added.
UNWRA was formed in 1949 to provide aid to about 750,000 Palestinians who were displaced when the state of Israel was founded in 1948, an ethnic cleansing known to the Palestinians as the “Nakba.” Today, Israeli ministers are calling for a new Nakba in Gaza to pave the way for Jewish settlements, and the Israeli military is currently imposing a starvation siege on northern Gaza to forcibly displace hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Oxfam reaction to Knesset decision
October 29, 2024, by: The AIM Network, https://theaimn.com/oxfam-reaction-to-knesset-decision/—
Oxfam Australia
In reaction to the Knesset passing bills banning UNRWA from operating in areas under Israel’s control, Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam Regional Director in the Middle East and North Africa said:
“Israel has bombed Palestinians to death, maimed them, starved them, and is now ridding them of their biggest lifeline of aid. Piece by piece, Israel is systemically dismantling Gaza as a land that is autonomous and liveable for Palestinians. Its banning of UNRWA today is condemnable and another step in this crime.
“The decision will further undermine the ability of the international community to provide sufficient humanitarian aid and to save lives in any safe, independent and impartial way.
“UNRWA was not only the biggest and most established agency that has been delivering aid and sustenance to the people of Gaza for years, it was also a thread that connected them in some hope of solidarity and security to the United Nations.
“We are in no doubt that Israel and its allies are fully aware of the terrible consequences that this decision will have on Palestinians living in Gaza, many of whom are already starving. We join others in warning again that this will result in more death, more suffering, and more forced displacement of people from their besieged homeland. It is impossible not to believe that this is their aim.”
Biden to Bibi: ‘OK to continue Gaza genocide till after election’
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coaliton, Glen Ellyn IL, 27 Oct 24
On October 14, President Biden sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu giving Israel 30 days to allow more aid of food, water and medicine into Gaza’s 139 square miles being utterly destroyed by Israel for the past year. It’s noteworthy that the 30 day time limit ends 9 days after the US election. Biden’s letter is brilliant politics and grotesque governance. Biden, who has been funding, supporting and enabling the yearlong genocide in Gaza, desperately needs to appear peace loving ahead of the election. He knows a majority of his Democratic voters are horrified by his genocide enabling. They want him to end the so far 50,000 tons of weapons he’s already given Israel to demolish Gaza.
The letter, designed to promote his concern for the devastation he’s enabled, will do nothing to end the genocide in Gaza. Netanyahu has ignored every one of Biden’s pleas for supplying life sustaining aid there. The letter doesn’t even state Biden will cut off aid to Israel. It merely implies that if US demands aren’t met, the US might consider enforcing foreign assistance laws. Those laws forbid the US from sending weapons to any nation committing wholesale destruction of civilian populations. But not one word about actually cutting off those weapons destroying Gaza.
Every day dozens, hundreds, even a thousand or more Palestinians die in Gaza, obliterated by Biden’s 2,000 lb. bombs, or killed more slowly from disease or starvation. Biden does not care. His toothless letter begging for more aid to the 2,300,000 Palestinians will do nothing to alleviate their suffering. But it may mollify his antiwar critics enough to help achieve Democratic victory Election Day.
Win or lose November 5, Biden is unlikely to do anything substantive to end the genocidal ethnic cleansing of Gaza. It goes against everything he’s believed in and supported about Israeli colonial domination of Palestine for his entire 52 year governmental career. But it will ensure he descends into historical infamy for enabling the worst genocide of the 21st century.
Israel’s War on Journalism
Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press.
All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.
To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years………..What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.
Chris Hedges, October 25, 2024, https://scheerpost.com/2024/10/25/chris-hedges-israels-war-on-journalism/
Israel has not defeated Hamas. It has not defeated Hezbollah. It will not defeat Iran. But it must convince its own public, and the rest of the world, it is winning. Censorship and the silencing of journalists who expose Israel’s war crimes and the suffering Israel inflicts on civilians is an Israeli priority.
It would be reassuring to call Israel an outlier, a nation that did not share our values, a nation that we support in spite of its atrocities. But of course, Israel is an extension of ourselves.
As the playwright Harold Pinter said:
US foreign policy could be best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it is so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.
In accepting the Nobel prize for literature, Pinter said: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
The most important impediment to Israel’s mass hypnosis are the Palestinian journalists in Gaza. This is why the kill rate is so high. It is why U.S. officials say nothing. They, too, hate real journalists. They, too, demand reporters domesticate themselves to scurry like rats from one choreographed press event to the next.
The U.S. government says and does nothing to protect the press because it endorses Israel’s campaign against the media, as it endorses Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Journalists, along with the Palestinians, are to be extinguished.
There are some 4,000 foreign reporters accredited in Israel to cover the war. They stay in luxury hotels. They go on dog and pony shows orchestrated by the Israeli military. They can, on rare occasions, be escorted by Israeli soldiers on lightning visits to Gaza, where they are shown alleged weapons caches or tunnels the military says are used by Hamas. They dutifully attend daily press conferences. They are given off-the-record briefings by senior Israeli officials who feed them information that often turns out to be untrue. They are Israel’s unwitting and sometimes witting propagandists, stenographers for the architects of apartheid and genocide, hotel room warriors. Bertolt Brecht acidly called them the spokesmen of the spokesmen.
And how many foreign reporters are there in Gaza? None.
The Palestinian reporters in Gaza who fill the void often pay with their lives. They are targeted, along with their families, for assassination. At least 128 journalists and media workers in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, have been killed and 69 have been imprisoned, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, marking the deadliest period for journalists since the organization began collecting data in 1992.
Israel bombed a building on Friday in southern Lebanon housing seven media organizations, killing three journalists from Al Mayadeen and Al Manar and injuring 15 others. Since Oct. 7, Israel has killed 11 journalists in Lebanon.
Al Jazeera cameraman Fadi al-Wahidi, who was shot in the neck in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza by an Israeli sniper earlier this month, is in a coma. Israel has refused permission for him to seek medical care outside of Gaza. Like most of the targeted journalists, including his murdered colleague Shireen Abu Akleh, he was wearing a helmet and flak jacket that identified him as press.
The Israeli military has branded as “terrorists” six Palestinian journalists in Gaza who work for Al Jazeera.
“These 6 Palestinians are among the last journalists surviving Israel’s onslaught in Gaza,” United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, said. “Declaring them ‘terrorists’ sounds like a death sentence.”
The scale and savagery of the Israeli assault on the media dwarfs anything I witnessed during my two decades as a war correspondent, including in Sarajevo where Serb snipers regularly took aim at reporters. Twenty-three journalists were killed in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars between 1991 and 1995. Twenty-two were killed when I covered the war in El Salvador. Sixty-eight journalists were killed in World War II and 63 were killed in Vietnam. But unlike in Gaza, Bosnia and El Salvador, journalists were usually not targeted.
Israel’s assault on press freedom is unlike anything we have experienced since William Howard Russell, the godfather of modern war reporting, sent back dispatches from the Crimean War. Its onslaught against journalists is in a category by itself.
Representative James P. McGovern and 64 House members sent a letter to President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken calling for the United States to push for Israel to allow unimpeded access for U.S. and international journalists. In July, over 70 media and civil society organizations signed an open letter calling on Israel to permit foreign reporters into Gaza.
Israel has not budged. Its ban on international journalists in Gaza remains in place. Its genocide grinds forward. Hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed and wounded daily. During October, Israel killed at least 770 Palestinians in northern Gaza. Israel spins out its lies and fabrications, from Hamas using Palestinians as human shields, to mass rape and beheaded babies, to a captive press that slavishly amplifies them. By the time the lies are exposed, often weeks or months later, the media cycle has moved on and few notice.
Israel’s wholesale censorship and assassination of journalists will have ominous consequences. It further erodes what few protections we once had as war correspondents. It sends an unequivocal message to any government, despot or dictator that seeks to mask its crimes. It heralds, like the genocide itself, a new world order, where mass murder is normalized, totalitarian censorship is permissible and journalists who try and expose the truth have very short life expectancies.
Israel, with the fulsome support of the U.S. government, is eviscerating the last shreds of freedom of the press.
Those who wage war, any war, seek to shape public opinion. They court the reporters they can domesticate, the ones who prostrate themselves before generals and, although they do not openly admit it, seek to stay as far away from combat as possible. These are the “good” journalists. They like to “play” at being a soldier. They enthusiastically assist in disseminating propaganda in the guise of reporting. They want to do their part for the war effort, to be part of the club. Sadly, they constitute the majority of the media in the wars I covered.
All CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review by the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to publication, a bureau that is required to abide by rules set down by Israeli military censors.
These domesticated journalists and news organizations are, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “prisoners of the language of power.” They dutifully parrot the official lexicon — “terrorists,” “peace process,” “two state solution” and “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
The New York Times, The Intercept writes, “instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.”
“The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine ‘except in very rare cases’ and to steer clear of the term ‘refugee camps’ to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars,” The Intercept notes. “The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.”
“There is no battle between power and the media,” Fisk noted. “Through language, we have become them.
Retired general David Petraeus, one of the authors of the 2006 U.S. Counterinsurgency Manual used by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, argues that persuading the public that you are winning — even if, as in Afghanistan, you are trapped in a quagmire — is more important than military superiority. The domesticated media is vital in perpetrating this deception.
Then there are the real journalists. They shine a light into the machinery of power. They tell the truth, for as the poet Seamus Heaney said, “There’s such a thing as truth and it can be told.” They make public the cruelty, mendacity and criminality of the powerful. They expose the collaboration of the domesticated media.
To the powerful, the war makers and the domesticated media, these real journalists are the enemy. This is the reason Julian Assange was mercilessly hounded and persecuted for 14 years. WikiLeaks published a 2,000-page Ministry of Defence document where British government officials equated investigative journalists with terrorists. The animosity is not new. What is new is the scale of Israel’s assault on journalism.
Crippling The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA): The Knesset’s Collective Punishment of Palestinians
UN Secretary-General Guterres was aghast at the two bills. “It would effectively end coordination to protect UN convoys, offices and shelters serving hundreds of thousands of people.”
October 26, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.com/crippling-unrwa-the-knessets-collective-punishment-of-palestinians/—
The man has a cheek. Having lectured Iranians and Lebanese about what (and who) is good for them in terms of rulers and rule (we already know what he thinks of the Palestinians), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been keeping busy on further depriving access and assistance to those in Gaza and the West Bank. This comes in draft legislation that would prevent the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from pursuing its valuable functions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The campaign against UNRWA by the Israeli state has been relentless and pathological. Even before last year’s October 7 attacks by Hamas, much was made of the fact that the body seemed intent on keeping the horrors of the 1948 displacements current. Victimhood, complained the amnesiac enforcers of the Israeli state, was being encouraged by treating the descendants of displaced Palestinians as refugees. Nasty memories were being kept alive.
Since then, Israel has been further libelling and blackening the organisation as a terrorist frontbest abolished. (Labels are effortlessly swapped – “Hamas supporter”; “activist”; “terrorist”.) Initially came that infamous dossier pointing the finger at 12 individuals said to be Hamas participants in the October 7 attacks. With swiftness, the UN commenced internal investigations. Some individuals were sacked on suspicion of being linked to the attacks. Unfortunately, some US$450 million worth of donor funding from sixteen countries was suspended.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini was always at pains to explain that he had “never been informed” nor received evidence substantiating Israel’s accusations. It was also all the more curious given that staff lists for the agency were provided to both Israeli and Palestinian authorities in advance. At no point had he ever “received the slightest concern about the staff that we have been employing.”
In April, Lazzarini told the UN Security Council that “an insidious campaign to end UNRWA’s operations is under way, with serious implications for peace and security.” Repeatedly, requests by the agency to deliver aid to northern Gaza had been refused, staff barred from coordinating meetings between humanitarian actors and Israel, and UNRWA premises and staff targeted.
Israel’s campaign to dissuade donor states from restoring funding proved a mixed one. Even the United Kingdom, long sympathetic to Israel’s accusations, announced in July that funding would be restored. In the view of UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, UNRWA had taken steps to ensure that it was meeting “the highest standards of neutrality.”
In August, the findings of a review of the allegations by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, instigated at the request of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres,were released. It confirmed UNRWA’s role as “irreplaceable and indispensable” in the absence of a political solution between Israel and the Palestinians, a “pivotal” body that provided “life-saving humanitarian aid and essential social services, particularly in health and education, to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.”
In identifying eight areas for immediate improvement on the subject of neutrality (for instance, engaging donors, neutrality of staff, installations, education and staff unions), it was noted that “Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence” that the agency’s employees had been “members of terrorist organizations.”
On October 24, UNRWA confirmed that one of its staffers killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza,Muhammad Abu Attawi, had been in the agency’s employ since July 2022 while serving as a Nukhba commander in Hamas’s Bureij Battalion. Attawi is alleged to have participated in the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im in October last year. His name had featured in a July letter from Israel to the agency listing 100 names allegedly connected with terrorist groups. But no action was taken against Attawi as the Israelis failed to supply UNRWA with evidence. Lazzarini’s letter urging, in the words of Juliette Touma, the agency’s director of communications, “to cooperate … by providing more information so he could take action” did not receive “any response”.
Having been foiled on various fronts in its quest to terminate UNRWA’s viable existence, Israeli lawmakers are now taking the legislative route to entrench the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. Two bills are in train in the Knesset. The first, sponsored by such figures as Yisrael Beytenu MK Yulia Malinovsky and Likud lawmaker Dan Illouz, would bar state authorities from having contact with UNRWA. The second, sponsored by Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, would critically prevent the agency from operating in Israeli territory through revoking a 1967 exchange of notes justifying such activities.
Even proclaimed moderates – the term is relative – such as former defence minister Benny Gantz support the measures, accusing the UN body of making “itself an inseparable component of Hamas’s mechanism – and now is the time to detach ourselves entirely from it.” It did not improve the lot of refugees, but merely perpetuated “their victimisation.” Evidently for Gantz, Israel had no central role in creating Palestinian victims in the first place.
By barring cooperation between any Israeli authorities and UNRWA, work in Gaza and the West Bank would become effectively impossible, largely because Jerusalem would no longer issue entrance permits to the territories or permit any coordination with the Israeli DefenseForces.
UN Secretary-General Guterres was aghast at the two bills. “It would effectively end coordination to protect UN convoys, offices and shelters serving hundreds of thousands of people.” Ambassadors from 123 UN member states have echoed the same views, while the Biden administration has, impotently, warned that the proposed “restrictions would devastate the humanitarian response in Gaza at this critical moment” while also denying educational and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem.
In their October 23 statement, the Nordic countries also expressed concern that UNRWA’s mandate “to carry out […] direct relief and works programmes” for millions of Palestinian refugees as determined by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) would be jettisoned. “In the midst of an ongoing catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza, a halt to any of the organisation’s activities would have devastating consequences for the hundreds of thousands of civilians served by UNRWA.”
The statement goes on to make a warning. To impair the refugee agency would create a vacuum that “may well destabilise the situation in [Gaza, and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem], in Israel and in the region as a whole, and may fundamentally jeopardize the prospects of a two-state solution.”
These are concerns that hardly matter before the rationale of murderous collective punishment, one used against a people seen more as mute serfs and submissive animals than sovereign beings entitled to rights and protections. Israel’s efforts to malign and cripple UNRWA remains a vital part of that agenda. In that organisation exists a repository of deep and troubling memories the forces of oppression long to erase.
Lying Western Press Scramble To Frame Israel’s Attack On Iran As Self Defense.
26 Oct 2024 JOHNSTONE radio, Israel has launched a round of airstrikes on Iran which the western news media are falling all over themselves to falsely frame as “retaliatory” strikes against an unprovoked missile attack by Iran.
Space Tech Is How Israel Targets Doctors’ & Journalists’ Homes For Bombing
The U.S. and Israel have been blocking a space weapons ban treaty (PAROS) at the United Nations for more than 25 years………. Space technology is playing a major role in the Gaza genocide.
The current wars in both Ukraine and Gaza are experimental laboratories for arms developers and showcases for their products
Resistance to building a rocket launch site in Maine
Lisa Savage, Oct 26, 2024, https://went2thebridge.substack.com/p/space-tech-is-how-israel-targets?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1580975&post_id=150711847&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=c9zhh&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
I hustled down to the Maine Space Conference yesterday morning in time to meet with a tv reporter but alas her story seems to have fallen by the wayside (if I find it later I’ll edit to include it.) I told her satellite technology is what enables Israel to target residential buildings where they know doctors and journalists live.
Similarly, an interview of Bruce Gagnon of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space by a reporter from Space News is nowhere to be found this morning. Or as Jonathan Cook put it, “Israel kills the journalists, Western media kills the truth.”
If you search for Maine Space Conference you’ll find plenty of adulatory articles about how exciting the space industry is and how each step toward turning our beautiful state into a militarized rocket launch site is to be applauded.
Folks in Kodiak, Alaska who had this experience continue to suffer the consequences. Though their launch site was built with assurances that all uses would be civilian in nature, that turned out to be a huge lie as even the Israeli military uses the launch site in Kodiak.
A recent report from a local resident highlights the pollution risks of hosting launch sites:
the Alaska DEC is keeping on top of a rocket fuel spill accident at the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska that happened the end of July. ABL Space was suppose to launch a rocket back in January and for 6 months all ABL did was ‘testing’ on the launch pad, no launch and closing off the state road to the public off and on during that time.
The end of July the rocket was setting on the pad for engine testing once again when the engine caught on fire, tipping the rocket over and spilled 1,800 gallons of fuel on the pad and surrounding soil. The soil is now in the process of being dug up, stored and covered until it can be shipped off island to a land fill in Washington state.
There was a Astra Space rocket accident last year and it took 6 months to dig up all the contaminated soil and ship it off island, which took until December. Rocket fuel also seeped into the ground water.
Yesterday in Maine we heard from Gagnon during the protest:
The Maine Space Conference is promoting the militarization of space. Efforts are being made to test hypersonic missiles at the former Loring Air Force Base. bluShit Aerospace is receiving funding from the U.S. Air Force and Space Force to launch ‘dual use’ (military/civilian) mini-satellites into dangerously congested Lower Earth Orbit.
Promises of lots of jobs, little to no environmental impacts, and peaceful exploration of space are the standard claims made at a myriad of potential sites the U.S. military is exploring around the world.
The U.S. and Israel have been blocking a space weapons ban treaty (PAROS) at the United Nations for more than 25 years.
Our nation cannot afford to pay for a new expensive arms race in outer space.
And we heard from Mary Beth Sullivan specifically about current wars that already depend on space-based technology:
Space technology is playing a major role in the Gaza genocide.
The current wars in both Ukraine and Gaza are experimental laboratories for arms developers and showcases for their products
Space is now an essential technical area being used in war fighting
Space is now an essential technical area being used in war fighting
BY FAR: the US is biggest spender on space programs, and the US launches more objects into space than any other nation
SpaceX developed the Starlight Satellite constellations to bring the internet and broadband to the world to connect us all to the internet, right? A commercial product to benefit the masses, right?
Did you know that SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are used by Israel in its genocide against Gaza, and its bombing campaign against Lebanon? It’s a primary enabler of the use of drones.
Militaries have developed a dependency on space systems to coordinate, command, and control activity at all levels over wide areas.
Israel also has it’s own space launch capability, and its own military satellites which are part of what’s called the Eros NG constellation. One of the most powerful intelligence collection systems in the world. They have satellites in constant orbit downloading info.
GPS Jamming by Israel being used in Gaza and Lebanon.
Also, the US and the UK use spy plane flights for Israel to aid in surveillance, facilitate propaganda, and much more
Australia has a spy base in Pine Gap which is downloading info from Gaza. Pine Gap sends the info to the US’s National Security Agency, who then sends to Israel. This clearly implicates Australia – and the US — in Israel’s genocide.
Same can be said for a spy base called Menwith Hill in the UK.
Reports show that Artificial Intelligence is enabling decision-making systems in Israel against the people of Palestine. Programs called Gospel, Lavender, and Where’s Daddy are trained to recognize features of people who might be affiliated with Hamas. The program tracks individuals and groups.
Techniques using AI and message interception are joined together.
Many nations in the region are developing their own space technology.
There have been no physical attack on a satellite as yet in this war but, if such an attack happens, new replacement satellites will need to be launched quickly. To that end, the US is operationalizing a “rapid response.”
For more information on resistance to the construction of a launch site in Maine visit NoToxicRockets4ME.org.
‘This is an extermination’: Israel’s assault on north Gaza’s last functioning hospital
Two weeks before Israel began the current siege, Netanyahu told Israeli lawmakers that he was considering the “Generals’ plan,” so named for the proposal put forward by senior Israeli army officials in early September based on the vision of retired Israeli general Giora Eiland, who wrote an Op-Ed a year ago explaining how northern Gaza should be emptied of the entire population through mass starvation and extermination.
Israel is emptying northern Gaza of its inhabitants during its ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign. One of the key strategies it is using to achieve this is by hospitals, and the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia has become a primary target.
By Qassam Muaddi October 23, 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/10/this-is-an-extermination-israels-assault-on-north-gazas-last-functioning-hospital/
Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians across northern Gaza have been forced on a death march by the Israeli army since Monday, October 21. Northern Gaza is being emptied of its inhabitants, and one of Israel’s strategies in achieving this goal is to take out the area’s few remaining social institutions: hospitals.
As part of its ongoing offensive on northern Gaza, the Israeli army has been trying to clear out the entire area north of Gaza City for the past 18 days. At least 200,000 people continue to stay there, many of them fearing, according to local testimonies, that they will be targeted on the way south or in Israeli-designated “safe zones,” which have been consistently bombarded over recent months. The ongoing siege includes a second siege-within-the-siege on the Jabalia refugee camp, accompanied by a massive bombing and shelling campaign that is forcing tens of thousands of people to leave their homes. Many of them have headed to Beit Lahia, and particularly to Kamal Adwan Hospital. Over the past 18 days, the hospital has been issuing daily calls for help, warning of an imminent humanitarian catastrophe.
The Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia is one of three functioning hospitals in the northern Gaza governorate. The hospital is the only fully functional medical center in the north, with a specialized neonatal section for newborns.
The two other hospitals in Gaza are barely functional. The Indonesian Hospital in the town of Sheikh Zayed went out of services last week after Israeli troops besieged it and invaded its surroundings. Al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia, smaller in size, has suspended most of its services and only functions at a limited capacity. On Tuesday, October 22, the al-Awda Hospital’s director, Bakr Abu Safiyeh, told al-Ghad TV that Israeli quadcopter drones were opening fire directly on the hospital.
Dr. Baker said that Israeli quadcopters were also opening fire on anybody moving in the streets, including ambulances. According to the hospital director, an Israeli strike targeted an ambulance carrying a mother who had just given birth. The mother was killed, Dr. Baker said, and the baby was later found alive by rescue teams and was taken to Kamal Adwan Hospital’s neonatal section.
Why targeting hospitals is the key to emptying northern Gaza
Named after Kamal Adwan, a Palestinian resistance leader assassinated by Israel in Beirut in 1973, the hospital has become a central destination for the wounded and the displaced. Like most other hospitals in Gaza over the past year of genocidal war, Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only remaining public space in northern Gaza that offers services and provides shelter, representing the backbone of Gazan civil society and social cohesion. That is why Israel is targeting it, with the aim of forcibly expelling the population in service of the Israeli plan to empty the north. This has now come to be called “the Generals’ Plan.”
Two weeks before Israel began the current siege, Netanyahu told Israeli lawmakers that he was considering the “Generals’ plan,” so named for the proposal put forward by senior Israeli army officials in early September based on the vision of retired Israeli general Giora Eiland, who wrote an Op-Ed a year ago explaining how northern Gaza should be emptied of the entire population through mass starvation and extermination.
The plan is an enhanced version of what Israel has already been doing for the past year, including targeting and forcibly evacuating hospitals. Israeli forces raided al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City for the first time in November, when the compound and its surroundings were crowded with displaced families, and forced medics, patients, and displaced people to leave. But in February, when Israeli forces began to withdraw from parts of Gaza, including Gaza City, Palestinians returned to al-Shifa and began to operate parts of it again as displaced families began to take over its spaces once more.
Then, in April, Israeli forces invaded al-Shifa a second time in a raid that lasted several weeks with the purpose of accelerating social collapse in Gaza City. The Israeli army combed the hospital building by building and floor by floor, destroying equipment and, according to survivor testimonies gathered by Mondoweiss at the time, executing hundreds of civil government employees and separating people into differently-colored bracelet. At the end of the operation, Dr. Marwan Abu Saada, Deputy Director of al-Shifa, told UN News that the destruction of al-Shifa “took out the heart of the health system in the Gaza Strip,” adding that “al-Shifa is finished forever.”
In December 2023, two months into the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Israeli forces raided the Kamal Adwan hospital and forced medical staff, patients, and displaced civilians to evacuate. The hospital resumed partial services in July after joint efforts by the World Health Organization and other international parties, coupled with pressure on Israel to allow limited quantities of humanitarian aid into the north.
As Israel set its eyes on Gaza’s northernmost governorate to execute Eiland’s plan, Kamal Adwan Hospital is now the last bastion of Palestinian steadfastness in the north. This makes it a prime target in the ongoing Israeli offensive. Kamal Adwan came close to completely shutting down multiple times, mainly due to the lack of fuel for power generators, saved every time by intensified pressure by international parties on Israel to allow limited quantities of fuel to pass through
Kamal Adwan Hospital weathers siege and overcapacity
“We need blood units, shrouds for the dead, doctors, and food,” Dr. Husam Abu Safiyeh, director of Kamal Adwan hospital, told the media on Wednesday, October 23, signaling that Israeli forces had cut off internet services from the area.
The day before, on October 22, Dr. Abu Safiyeh told the media that the hospital had run out of blood units, had a shortage of medical staff, that the available staff was hungry and exhausted, and that the power generators were about to run out of fuel.
Kamal Adwan Hospital weathers siege and overcapacity
“We need blood units, shrouds for the dead, doctors, and food,” Dr. Husam Abu Safiyeh, director of Kamal Adwan hospital, told the media on Wednesday, October 23, signaling that Israeli forces had cut off internet services from the area.
The day before, on October 22, Dr. Abu Safiyeh told the media that the hospital had run out of blood units, had a shortage of medical staff, that the available staff was hungry and exhausted, and that the power generators were about to run out of fuel.
“This baby girl here arrived after her family was targeted by [an Israeli] strike,” said Abu Safiyeh while filming one particular newborn. “Her mother and father were martyred, as well as her grandmother, and she is now alone with a wound to the head and a secondary inflammation,” he explained. “If fuel doesn’t arrive [for power generators] there will be a humanitarian catastrophe for these children,” he warned.
In the hospital’s sections, the medical staff described their working conditions. “There are cases of burning, internal bleeding, skull fractures, and limb amputations,” Dr. Ameen Abu Amshah, serving at Kamal Adwan, told Mondoweiss. “Out of every 10 to 15 wounded we receive at once, an average of seven are urgent cases for surgery. We just don’t have the capacity for all this, and we are forced to prioritize the cases that can be saved” said Dr. Abu Amshah.
“The occupation army has been ordering doctors to leave, including through phone calls,” said Abu Amshah. “This is an extermination. Northern Gaza is being exterminated, Jabalia is being exterminated, and Kamal Adwan hospital is being exterminated, but we will not leave.”
Forced death march
On Tuesday, October 23, Israeli drones dropped leaflets and aired voice messages at Palestinians who remained in the surroundings of Kamal Adwan and inside its premises, ordering them to leave. Meanwhile, hundreds of Palestinians were being gathered and forced to move out of other shelters after arresting men among them. Thousands were left stranded in the street far away from the last standing public facilities and forced to take the road yet again at gunpoint, as shown by footage aired by the Israeli army.
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of the week – Shut Down Drone Warfare!
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
Petition to revoke the licensing of the Near Surface Nuclear Disposal Facility (NSDF) at Chalk River. https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7247
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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