Israeli PM orders evacuation of last Gaza ‘safe zone’
https://www.rt.com/news/592207-israel-plans-rafah-civilian-evacuation/ 11 Feb 24
Benjamin Netanyahu has directed his military to prepare for moving civilians out of Rafah ahead of a major ground offensive
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered his military to make plans for evacuating over a million Palestinian civilians crowded into Rafah, the last remaining refuge for displaced residents of the war-ravaged Gaza Strip. Israeli troops are preparing to launch a massive ground offensive against Hamas fighters in the area.
Netanyahu’s office announced the directive on Friday, saying the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) needed a “combined plan” for the mass evacuation of civilians and the destruction of the last Hamas stronghold in the Palestinian enclave. “It is impossible to achieve the goal of the war of eliminating Hamas by leaving four Hamas battalions in Rafah,” the statement said. “On the contrary, it is clear that intense activity in Rafah requires that civilians evacuate the areas of combat.”
The UN has estimated that around 1.4 million displaced Gazans have taken refuge in Rafah, located on the besieged enclave’s border with Egypt, since the Israel-Hamas war began in October. The city, which normally has a population of some 280,000, has become the last so-called “safe zone” for civilians as the IDF levels much of Gaza in its hunt for Hamas fighters.
The evacuation directive comes as the US and other allies step up pressure on West Jerusalem to reduce civilian casualties. The US State Department warned on Thursday that an Israeli military operation in Rafah without “serious planning” for protection of civilians would be disastrous. US President Joe Biden told reporters on Thursday night that the IDF’s operations in Gaza had been “over the top,” marking his most pointed criticism of Israeli war tactics since the conflict began.
Biden’s administration has refused so far to press for a ceasefire in Gaza and has criticized allegations that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. About 28,000 people have been killed in the territory since the war began, according to local health authorities. The UN has reported that 85% of the population has been displaced from their homes, and 570,000 Gazans are starving.
The war started when Hamas fighters launched surprise attacks against Israeli villages, killing more than 1,100 people and taking hundreds of hostages back to Gaza.
Pushing Gazans Into Rafah And Then Attacking Rafah, Killing UNRWA Funding Without Evidence
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, FEB 10, 2024, Caitlin’s newsletter.
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Israel is reportedly preparing to launch a ground assault on Rafah, the southernmost part of the Gaza Strip where Gazans have been pushed to flee to. Israel has instructed the 1.4 million refugees sheltering there to evacuate, along with the hundreds of thousands of people who were already living there before, but there doesn’t seem to be anywhere for them to go. This could wind up being the single deadliest phase of Israel’s onslaught to date.
So to summarize, the IDF has been packing the population of Gaza into the southernmost part of the enclave like toothpaste toward the end of a tube, and now they’re going to attack that southernmost part, but it’s totally not genocide and you’re an evil Nazi if you say it is.
This genocide is not a genocide. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
Can we all just stop and marvel at how successful Israel and its allies have been at moving the conversation from “The ICJ ruled that Israel needs to immediately cease killing Palestinians” to “Is it right or wrong to starve two million people based on unevidenced claims?”
Australian foreign minister Penny Wong has acknowledged that Canberra joined the US, UK and other allies in cutting off UNRWA funding without having seen proof of Israel’s claims against the organization. Empire managers are now openly admitting they suspended aid to Gaza without having seen evidence of the claims that call was based on; they cut the aid because they were told to, then waited for narratives to be provided to them as to why this was a good and righteous decision.
If you’re going to say that a bad thing happened and we therefore need to cut off aid to the most aid-dependent population on earth, then you’d better at least be able to prove the bad thing actually happened. If evidence exists, then show it. If you insist on starving two million people, you can’t do it on vibes alone.
How is this not obvious to everyone? How was it not immediately obvious the instant it came up? Time and time again we are asked to consent to the empire doing the most heinous things to the most vulnerable populations on secret, invisible evidence. We are expected to trust their secret evidence without getting to look at it, even though they’ve been caught lying about things like this over and over and over again.
They think we’re idiots……………………………………………………………….. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/pushing-gazans-into-rafah-and-then?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=141542598&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email—
Israel Does Not Speak for Jews Like Us
SCHEERPOST, byEDITOR,February 8, 2024
In the midst of the ongoing destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinians, the identity and authenticity of Jewish people calling into question the actions of Israel are being tarnished. A greater discussion of what it means to be Jewish, what it means to have a Jewish state and what Judaism has historically taught people is taking place among Jews around the world.
On this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast, Heyday Books publisher and former LA Times book editor Steve Wasserman and host Robert Scheer commit themselves to this conversation as Jews who have experienced these questions firsthand through their families in addition to having explored and reported on this topic throughout their careers.
Whether it was through Scheer’s reporting (with research by a youthful Wassernan) on the “Jews of L.A.” series for the Los Angeles Times and his reporting on the Six Day War in Israel and Gaza or Wasserman’s work with authors exploring Zionism and Israel, the pair have dealt in depth with the issue at hand.
Both stress the importance of Jewish culture in shaping their upbringing and viewing the world from a progressive, inclusive lens. Wasserman explains that for him Judaism encapsulates “The idea of being an honorable, ethical person, about making the world better, performing tikkun, helping to heal the world.”
As it pertains to his own familial history, Wasserman explains his mother’s brothers’ sacrifice: “They were premature anti-fascist. And they were eager to fight Hitler. And, they were killed within a week of each other… My mother has never gotten over their sacrifice. So, yes, we shed blood in the war against fascism.”
While delving into the idea of Israel, the two acknowledge the complexities of the history as it relates to the struggles of the diaspora and the Holocaust, but still, Wasserman acknowledges, “I’ve never thought that Israel or the State of Israel spoke for everyone. I’m a disciple of I.F. Stone, who said that all governments lie, including governments that you might be attached to for emotional and historical reasons.”
Transcript
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Scheer. I felt at home with the survival of a certain, international Jewish concern for the other, which, of course showed up in the American civil rights movement, with the important participation of American Jews.
Now, you look at Israel, and it’s a totally different picture, where the more fundamentalist religion is critical and indeed a formal part of the government, supported by very prominent right wing Jews like the late Sheldon Adelman and others in the United States, the leader of Israel and Netanyahu actually came to the United States when Obama was president and challenged his peace initiative with Iran in the US Congress, almost unheard of………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
What counts is the emotional attachment that peoples on every side, each of whom are hostage to fanatics and fundamentalists and extremists, but who believe with all their might that they have a near God given right to this bit of desert, and they are going to squander their best, the flower of their youth and the murderous rage to claim a right to live there. So, now we have 25,000 and counting deaths, many of them women and children. A murderous, vengeance, criminally prosecuted by a power-mad guy called Netanyahu. Other extremists on the other side. And as the old slogan in the ‘60s had, war is bad for every living thing. And, I see, at the moment, a pretty, forlorn and, hopeless situation here because, what Israel has done in its acts of vengeance is simply created, they have sowed the seeds for the dragon teeth that will arise.
Every Palestinian will seek revenge down the centuries. And the place is cursed. Reason has taken flight. Sobriety is nowhere in the picture. And we have a fever dream of nationalist yearnings by two peoples who somehow cannot find a way to live together in peace and harmony and the squandering of their national treasure, as I say, the flower of their youth is a heartbreak for everyone. So the question of the endangerment of Jews everywhere. I’ve never thought that Israel or the State of Israel spoke for everyone. I’m a disciple of I.F. Stone, who said that all governments lie, including governments that you might be attached to for emotional and historical reasons.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………And it was also, as I say, a convenient copout for the rulers of England and the United States and the Soviet Union to embrace Zionism. Good, the Jews who are troublemakers, they’re progressive, they’re radical, they write too much, they think too much. There is a wonderful tradition which you summarized before. They’re a threat to our stability wherever they are. Let them have a state of their own. Okay. So there was a cynicism that underwrote this, that Zionism could play on. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/08/israel-does-not-speak-for-jews-like-us/
Gaza: Chris Hedges: Let Them Eat Dirt
The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.
By Chris Hedges ScheerPost, 8 Feb 24, https://scheerpost.com/2024/02/08/chris-hedges-let-them-eat-dirt/—
There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.
Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza.
UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.”
UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective.
The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000 employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors, including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA relief trucks.
More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the rubble.
More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza, according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.
“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”
The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March.
Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.
I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as in Gaza, did little to intervene.
The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.
Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, they become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.
It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.
I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families.
In the abandoned town of Mayen Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattered strips of clothing. The palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane arrived. No one buried the dead.
Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count. They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is Israel’s masterplan.
There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.
US Blocks Yemen-Saudi Peace Deal
New sanctions on the Houthis will make it impossible for the first phase of the Saudi-Houthi peace deal to be implemented
by Dave DeCamp February 6, 2024 , https://news.antiwar.com/2024/02/06/us-blocks-yemen-peace-deal/
The US is purposely blocking a Yemen peace deal that was negotiated between the Houthis and Saudi Arabia, The New York Times reported on Tuesday.
The US decision to re-designate the Houthis as “Specially Designated Global Terrorists” will block the payment of public sector workers living in Houthi-controlled Yemen, who have gone without pay for years.
The payment of civil workers has been a key demand of the Houthis and is part of the first phase of the peace deal. The Houthis had asked for the salaries to be paid for using oil revenue that goes to the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, whose leaders are mainly based in Saudi Arabia. It’s unclear if the Saudi side agreed to the Houthi demand or if they decided to pay the salaries using other means.
The first phase of the peace deal would also fully open Yemen’s airports and sea ports that have been under blockade since 2015, another aspect of the deal that will be complicated by the new US sanctions, which will go into effect later this month.
A US official told the Times that the US would only allow the payment of Yemeni civil salaries if the Houthis choose the path of “peace” and stop attacking shipping in the Red Sea. But the Houthis, who govern the most populated area of Yemen, have been clear the operations will only stop once the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza ends.
Instead of pressuring Israel to stop its onslaught, President Biden launched a new war against the Houthis, which has dramatically escalated the situation. The Houthis are now targeting American and British commercial shipping, and there’s no sign they will back down.
Since January 12, the US has launched at least 18 rounds of missile strikes on Houthi-controlled Yemen. President Biden has acknowledged the strikes are not “working” since they haven’t stopped Houthi attacks. But he vowed to continue bombing Yemen anyway.
The US supported a Saudi/UAE-led coalition in Yemen in a brutal war that killed at least 377,000 people between 2015 and 2022. More than half of those killed died of starvation and disease caused by the bombing campaign and blockade.
A truce between the Saudis and Houthis has been held since April 2022, but a formal peace deal hasn’t been signed. Despite the new US bombing campaign, the Saudis and Houthis appear determined not to restart the war. When President Biden launched his bombing campaign in Yemen, Saudi Arabia urged the US to “avoid escalation.”
This week, a Houthi official said the Yemeni group was ready to formally make peace with the Saudis. “Sanaa is prepared for peace with Riyadh despite the challenges posed by the US and its associated Yemeni groups,” said Hussein al-Ezzi, the Houthi deputy foreign minister.
Some members of the US and Saudi-backed Yemeni presidential council are calling for a ground campaign against the Houthis. But the council does not have much influence and is known in Yemen as the “government of hotels” since many of its members are in exile.
On the brink of disaster: Israel threatens Lebanon with war – what could go wrong?
As mediation efforts fail to bear fruit, war between Israel and Lebanon seems to be matter of when, not if
Rt.com 7 Feb 24
srael’s Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz met his French counterpart on Monday, warning him that “time [is] running out to find a diplomatic solution in Lebanon,” and indicating that his country was prepared to go to war if diplomacy fails.
The reason is that, since October 7, Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based group linked to Iran, has carried out hundreds of attacks on Israeli targets. Fearing an influx of militants that could potentially invade and conquer parts of the country, some 60,000 northern Israelis have opted to leave, seeking refuge in the center, away from the hostilities.
Atalia Regev, from the community of Abirim about five kilometers from Israel’s border with Lebanon, left her home on October 7, when thousands of Hamas militants invaded southern Israel, massacring an estimated 1,200 people and injuring over 5,000.
“Back then, we were sure that a northern front would [soon] open, and we, too, would face the occupation of the Galilee, a scenario that had been talked about for a long, long time. There was so much fear. So, we packed our bags, took our kids and left,” Atalia recalls.
She was not the only one. As the fighting in the south intensified, some 60,000 Israelis left communities in the north, finding refuge in the center and in Jerusalem, with the hope that the rockets of the Iran-linked militia Hezbollah would not reach them there.
So far, Hezbollah’s attacks have been limited and measured. According to reports, the movement has staged more than a thousand anti-Israel assaults since the beginning of the hostilities. It has also targeted 48 border sites and at least 17 communities. But, for Regev, this was a good reason to stay where she was.
“Even when things calmed down [in the south], we realized we couldn’t go back. Our area was threatened all the time. Educational institutions for children have remained closed until recently. There were multiple power outages due to infrastructure damages [caused by attacks], and at times we had to spend long hours without electricity.”
Drums of War
Now, however, Regev fears, it may get even worse. On January 3 an explosion rocked the suburbs of Beirut, killing Salah Al Arouri, a senior Hamas leader. Although Israel didn’t claim responsibility for the attack, the finger of blame was directed at officials in West Jerusalem, with Nasrallah vowing that the assassination would not remain unanswered.
Since the killing of Al Arouri, Israel has beefed up its presence along the northern border, preparing itself for a potential full-fledged war.
Israel has a reason to worry. According to estimates, Hezbollah has an arsenal of up to 150,000 rockets and missiles. Many of them are long range, able to reach central and southern Israel. Apart from that, the Islamist group also boasts a well-trained army of fighters, and a commando unit – the Radwan force – waiting for an order to storm its enemy………………………………………………….. more https://www.rt.com/news/591907-israel-lebanon-hezbollah-war/
Walt Zlotow: Biden seeks $14 more billion to complete destruction of Palestinians in Gaza.
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 7 Feb 24
The genocidal madness of President Biden has no limits.
For 123 days he’s been in near total support of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing of 2,300,000 Palestinians in Gaza. He’s given them over 20,000 tons of war material to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroy three quarters of their housing, send two million fleeing US bombs just to be blasted by more US bombs while on the run. Most hospitals and schools are gone under US bombs. Hundreds of thousands are starving or dying from lack of medicine.
In addition, he’s given them public support and a veto protection at the UN Security Council which called for ceasefire. He’s dismissed the Court of International Justice genocide hearing on Israel’s genocide as “meritless.” Biden and his Israeli counterpart Netanyahu are joined at the bombsight in their combined genocide in Gaza. US deserved to be joined in the dock with Israel in the ICJ hearing.
Now Biden demands $14 billion more to complete the grotesque project he could have stopped on Day 1 simply by denouncing Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and cutting off every bloody dollar of aid.
Half of Americans polled say Israel has gone too far. Fully a third call it genocide. Biden calls it ‘helping our best ally.’ On Genocide Day 100, he honored Israel without a single mention of the 2,300,000 Palestinians whose lives were being degraded, if not destroyed with his help.
Joe Biden has supported every failed US war of world dominance for half a century. He won’t admit it, but the Israeli war to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians may already have failed. Palestinian resistance and worldwide revulsion and condemnation may bring about the downfall of Israel as well as Gaza.
Joe Biden is the 45th man to occupy the White House. He’s earning the dubious distinction of becoming the first Genocide President.
CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’
The push for more balanced coverage has been complicated by Israel’s block on foreign journalists entering Gaza except under IDF control and subject to censorship. That has helped keep the full impact of the war on Palestinians off of CNN and other channels while ensuring that there is a continued focus on the Israeli perspective.
Insiders say pressure from the top results in credulous reporting of Israeli claims and silencing of Palestinian perspectives
Insiders say pressure from the top results in credulous reporting of Israeli claims and silencing of Palestinian perspectives
Guardian, Chris McGreal, 4 Feb 24
CNN is facing a backlash from its own staff over editorial policies they say have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza.
Journalists in CNN newsrooms in the US and overseas say broadcasts have been skewed by management edicts and a story-approval process that has resulted in highly partial coverage of the Hamas massacre on 7 October and Israel’s retaliatory attack on Gaza.
“The majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” said one CNN staffer. “Ultimately, CNN’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice.”
According to accounts from six CNN staffers in multiple newsrooms, and more than a dozen internal memos and emails obtained by the Guardian, daily news decisions are shaped by a flow of directives from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta that have set strict guidelines on coverage.
They include tight restrictions on quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives while Israel government statements are taken at face value. In addition, every story on the conflict must be cleared by the Jerusalem bureau before broadcast or publication.
CNN journalists say the tone of coverage is set at the top by its new editor-in-chief and CEO, Mark Thompson, who took up his post two days after the 7 October Hamas attack. Some staff are concerned about Thompson’s willingness to withstand external attempts to influence coverage given that in a former role as the BBC’s director general he was accused of bowing to Israeli government pressure on a number of occasions, including a demand to remove one of the corporation’s most prominent correspondents from her post in Jerusalem in 2005.
CNN insiders say that has resulted, particularly in the early weeks of the war, in a greater focus on Israeli suffering and the Israeli narrative of the war as a hunt for Hamas and its tunnels, and an insufficient focus on the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths and destruction in Gaza.
One journalist described a “schism” within the network over coverage they said was at times reminiscent of the cheerleading that followed 9/11.
“There’s a lot of internal strife and dissent. Some people are looking to get out,” they said.
Another journalist in a different bureau said that they too saw pushback.
“Senior staffers who disagree with the status quo are butting heads with the executives giving orders, questioning how we can effectively tell the story with such restrictive directives in place,” they said.
“Many have been pushing for more content from Gaza to be alerted and aired. By the time these reports go through Jerusalem and make it to TV or the homepage, critical changes – from the introduction of imprecise language to an ignorance of crucial stories – ensure that nearly every report, no matter how damning, relieves Israel of wrongdoing.”
CNN staff say that some journalists with experience of reporting the conflict and region have avoided assignments in Israel because they do not believe they will be free to tell the whole story. Others speculate that they are being kept away by senior editors.
“It is clear that some who don’t belong are covering the war and some who do belong aren’t,” said one insider.
Edicts from on high
………………. In late October, as the Palestinian death toll rose sharply from Israeli bombing with more than 2,700 children killed according to the Gaza health ministry, and as Israel prepared for its ground invasion, a set of guidelines landed in CNN staff inboxes.
……………….CNN staff members said the memo solidified a framework for stories in which the Hamas massacre was used to implicitly justify Israeli actions, and that other context or history was often unwelcome or marginalised.
“How else are editors going to read that other than as an instruction that no matter what the Israelis do, Hamas is ultimately to blame? Every action by Israel – dropping massive bombs that wipe out entire streets, its obliteration of whole families – the coverage ends up massaged to create a ‘they had it coming’ narrative,” said one staffer.
The same memo said that any reference to casualty figures from the Gaza health ministry must say it is “Hamas-controlled”, implying that reports of the deaths of thousands of children were unreliable even though the World Health Organization and other international bodies have said they are largely accurate. CNN staff said that edict was laid down by Thompson at an earlier editorial meeting.
Broader oversight of coverage from the CNN headquarters in Atlanta is directed by “the Triad” of three CNN departments: news standards and practices, legal and fact-checking.
David Lindsay, the senior director of news standards and practices, issued a directive in early November effectively barring the reporting of most Hamas statements, characterising them as “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda”.
………. one CNN staffer noted that the network repeatedly aired inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda from Israeli officials and American supporters, often without challenge in interviews.
They noted that other channels have carried interviews with Hamas leaders while CNN has not, including one in which the group’s spokesman, Ghazi Hamad, cut short questions from the BBC when he was challenged about the murder of Israeli civilians. One staffer said there is a view among correspondents that it is “agony to get a Hamas interview past the Triad
…………………………………………………….. In addition to the edicts from Atlanta, CNN has a longstanding policy that all copy on the Israel-Palestine situation must be approved for broadcast or publication by the Jerusalem bureau. In July, the network created a process it called “SecondEyes” to speed up those approvals.
…………… One result of SecondEyes is that Israeli official statements are often quickly cleared and make it on air on the principle that that they are to be trusted at face value, seemingly rubber-stamped for broadcast, while statements and claims from Palestinians, and not just Hamas, are delayed or never reported.
One CNN staffer said edits by SecondEyes often seemed aimed at avoiding criticism from pro-Israel groups……………………………..
Some CNN staff fear that the result is a network acting as a surrogate censor on behalf of the Israeli government.
“The system results in chosen individuals editing any and all reporting with an institutionalised pro-Israel bias, often using passive language to absolve the [Israel Defense Forces] of responsibility, and playing down Palestinian deaths and Israeli attacks,” said one of the network’s journalists.
……………………………………………………………. Another presenter, Sara Sidner, drew criticism for her excitable report on unverified Israeli claims that Hamas beheaded dozens of babies on 7 October.
“We have some really disturbing new information out of Israel,” she announced four days after the attack.
“The Israeli prime minister’s spokesman just confirmed, babies and toddlers were found with their heads decapitated in Kfar Aza in southern Israel after Hamas attacks in the kibbutz over the weekend. That has been confirmed by the prime minister’s office.”
………………… Gold, who was part of the SecondEyes team approving stories, again said the report had been confirmed by Netanyahu’s office and she drew parallels with the Holocaust. She responded to a Hamas denial that it had decapitated babies as unbelievable “when we literally have video of these guys, of these militants, of these terrorists doing exactly what they say they’re not doing to civilians and to children”.
Except, as a CNN journalist pointed out, the network did not have such video and, apparently, neither did anyone else………………………………….
By the time of Sidner’s broadcast there were already good reasons for CNN to treat the claims with caution.
Israeli journalists who toured Kfar Aza the day before said they had seen no evidence of such a crime and military officials there had made no mention of it. Instead, Tim Langmaid, the Atlanta-based CNN vice-president and senior editorial director, sent an instruction that President Biden’s claims to have seen pictures of the alleged atrocity “back up what the Israeli government said”.
…….. CNN insiders said senior editors should have treated the story with caution from the beginning because the Israeli military has a track record of false or exaggerated claims that subsequently fall apart.
Other networks, such as Sky News, were considerably more sceptical in their reporting and laid out the tenuous origins of the story, which began with a reporter for an Israeli news channel saying soldiers had told her that 40 children had been killed in the Hamas massacre and that one soldier had said he had seen “bodies of babies with their heads cut off”. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) then used the claim to liken Hamas to the Islamic State.
Even after the White House admitted that neither the president nor his officials had themselves seen pictures of beheaded babies, and that they had been relying on Israeli claims, Langmaid told the newsroom it could still report the Israeli government assertions alongside a denial from Hamas.
CNN did report on the rolling back of the claims as Israeli officials backtracked, but one staffer said that by then the damage had been done, describing the coverage as a failure of journalism.
“The infamous ‘beheaded babies’ claim, attributed to the Israeli government, made it to air for roughly 18 hours – even after the White House walked back on Biden’s statement that he had seen the nonexistent photos. CNN had no access to photographic evidence, nor any ability to independently verify these claims,” they said.
……….. Some CNN staff raised similar issues with reporting on Hamas tunnels in Gaza and claims they led to a sprawling command centre under al-Shifa hospital.
The push for more balanced coverage has been complicated by Israel’s block on foreign journalists entering Gaza except under IDF control and subject to censorship. That has helped keep the full impact of the war on Palestinians off of CNN and other channels while ensuring that there is a continued focus on the Israeli perspective………………………………
The only foreign journalist to report from Gaza without an Israeli escort has been CNN’s Clarissa Ward, who entered for two hours with a humanitarian team from the United Arab Emirates.
……………. she was being prevented from conveying a fuller picture of the tragedy unfolding in Gaza because of the Israeli block on foreign journalists, putting the burden solely on a limited number of courageous Palestinian reporters who are being killed in disproportionate numbers.
“We must now be able to report on the horrific death and destruction being meted out in Gaza in the same way – on the ground, independently – amid one of the most intense bombardments in the history of modern warfare,” she wrote.
“The response to our report on Gaza in Israeli media suggests an unspoken reason for denying access. When asked on air about our piece, one reporter from the Israeli Channel 13 replied, ‘If indeed Western reporters begin to enter Gaza, this will for sure be a big headache for Israel and Israeli hasbara.’ Hasbara is a Hebrew word for pro-Israel advocacy.
Some at CNN fear that its coverage of the latest Gaza war is damaging a reputation built up by its reporting of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which led to a surge in viewers. But others say that the Ukraine war may be part of the problem because editorial standards grew lax as the network and many of its journalists identified clearly with one side – Ukraine – particularly at the beginning of the conflict.
One CNN staffer said that Ukraine coverage set a dangerous precedent that has come back to haunt the network because the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far more divisive and views are much more deeply entrenched.
“The complacency in our editorial standards and journalistic integrity while reporting on Ukraine has come back to haunt us. Only this time, the stakes are higher and the consequences much more severe. Journalistic complacency is an easier pill for the world to swallow when it’s Arab lives lost instead of European,” they said.
Another CNN employee said the double standards are glaring…………………………………………………
Years of pressure
Journalists working at CNN have varied explanations……………………………………………………….. more https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/04/cnn-staff-pro-israel-bias
Iran Plans More Nuclear Reactors Despite Serious Hurdles
Sunday, 02/04/2024, Umud Shokri, Iran International
Iran’s recently stated plan to build four more nuclear power reactors has raised questions about its feasibility as the country wrestles with economic crisis and isolation.
According to early estimates, work has started in the southern region with a five-thousand-megawatt total capacity in mind. With 4,000 employment prospects and an estimated $20 billion cost, the planned nine-year schedule raises questions under current economic circumstances.
The difficulties Iran has faced in building new power plants in the last ten years raise doubts about whether the 25,000 megawatts of new electricity that the previous national development plan sought to bring about can be achieved.
The Iranian government pledged to raise the percentage of renewable and clean energy power plants to a minimum of five percent in line with the sixth development plan (2017–2021). However, the share of nuclear power is currently one percent, which means that the program’s goals have been significantly missed………..
The only nuclear power plant in the country is a 1,000 megawatt facility that started up in 2011 with help from Russia. A 300 megawatt plant is reportedly under construction in Khuzestan.
Building times for nuclear power plants vary greatly due to factors like supply chain maturity, design revisions, and project management efficiency, but Iran faces a severe electricity shortage now. Consumption peaked at over 72,000 megawatts in 2023, surpassing the actual production capacity of power plants, capped at 60,000 megawatts during the warm season.
Iran is facing several obstacles in its efforts to build further nuclear power reactors, including financial and technological constraints, geopolitical and political instability, and international sanctions. The interplay of political and economic dynamics, together with worries about public opinion, safety, and international compliance, complicate Iran’s nuclear energy development scenario. Moreover, Mohammad Eslami, the head of Iran’s nuclear energy said last week that Tehran is planning to build the new reactors relying on domestic financing and knowhow……………………………………………………………….
Examining Iran’s foreign policy, one can see that the country is committed to scientific progress even in the face of external challenges, as seen by its tenacity in pursuing its nuclear program despite sanctions. Careful navigation is necessary to resolve the delicate dance between energy demands, geopolitical concerns, and the difficulties presented by international sanctions. Iran’s prospects for the energy sector both at home and abroad will depend on how well it can surmount these challenges https://www.iranintl.com/en/202402034292
Distorted news: for decades CNN, BBC, and surely others, obeyed Israeli government pressure
Guardian, Chris McGreal, 4 Feb 24
“…………………………………………………..Years of pressure
Journalists working at CNN have varied explanations.
Some say the problem is rooted in years of pressure from the Israeli government and allied groups in the US combined with a fear of losing advertising.
During the battle for narrative through the second Palestinian intifada in the early 2000s, Israel’s then communications minister, Reuven Rivlin, called CNN ‘‘evil, biased and unbalanced”. The Jerusalem Post likened the network’s correspondent in the city, Sheila MacVicar, to “the woman who refilled the toilet paper in the Goebbels’ commode”.
CNN’s founder, Ted Turner, caused a storm when he told the Guardian in 2002 that Israel was engaging in terrorism against the Palestinians.
“The Palestinians are fighting with human suicide bombers, that’s all they have. The Israelis … they’ve got one of the most powerful military machines in the world. The Palestinians have nothing. So who are the terrorists? I would make a case that both sides are involved in terrorism,” said Turner, who was then the vice-chairman of AOL Time Warner, which owned CNN.
The resulting storm of protest resulted in threats to the network’s revenue, including moves by Israeli cable television companies to supplant the network with Fox News.
CNN’s chair, Walter Isaacson, appeared on Israeli television to denounce Turner but that did not stem the criticism. The network’s then chief news executive, Eason Jordan, imposed a new rule that CNN would no longer show statements by suicide bombers or interview their relatives, and flew to Israel to quell the political storm.
CNN also began broadcasting a series about the victims of Palestinian suicide bombers. The network insisted that the move was not a response to pressure but some of its journalists were sceptical. CNN did not produce a similar series with the relatives of innocent Palestinians killed by Israel in bombings.
By 2021, the Columbia Journalism Review public editor for CNN, Ariana Pekary, accused the network of excluding Palestinian voices and historical context from coverage.
Thompson has his own battle scars from dealing with Israeli officials when he was director general of the BBC two decades ago.
In the spring of 2005, the BBC was embroiled in a very public row over an interview with the Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, who was released from prison the year before.
The Israeli authorities barred Vanunu from giving interviews. When a BBC documentary team spoke to him and then smuggled the footage out of Israel, the authorities reacted by effectively expelling the acting head of the BBC’s Jerusalem bureau, Simon Wilson, who was not involved in the interview.
The dispute rolled on for months before the BBC eventually bowed to an Israeli demand that Wilson write a letter of apology before he could return to Jerusalem. The letter, which included a commitment to “obey the regulations in the future”, was to have remained confidential but the BBC unintentionally posted details online before removing them a few hours later. The climbdown angered some BBC journalists who were enduring persistent pressure and abuse for their coverage.
Later that year, Thompson visited Jerusalem and met the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, in an effort to improve relations after other incidents.
The Israeli government was particularly unhappy with the BBC’s highly experienced Jerusalem correspondent, Orla Guerin. The Israeli minister for diaspora affairs at the time, Natan Sharansky, accused her of antisemitism and “total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror groups” after a report by Guerin about the arrest of a 16-year-old Palestinian boy carrying explosives. She accused Israeli officials of turning the arrest into a propaganda opportunity because they “paraded the child in front of the international media” after forcing him to wait at a checkpoint for the arrival of photographers.
Within days of Thompson’s meeting with Sharon, the BBC announced that Guerin would be leaving Jerusalem. At the time, Thompson’s office denied he acted under pressure from Israel and said that Guerin had completed a longer than usual posting. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/feb/04/cnn-staff-pro-israel-bias
US unleashes strikes across Middle East
RT Fri, 02 Feb 2024
Washington has launched a new bombing campaign against Iranian-backed fighters in Iraq and Syria.
The Pentagon has commenced retaliation strikes in response to a drone attack that killed three US troops at a secretive base in Jordan, targeting dozens of sites in Iraq and Syria linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated militia groups.
“Our response began today” and “will continue at times and places of our choosing,” US President Joe Biden announced on Friday night. The airstrikes started around midnight on Saturday local time and hit more than 85 Iranian-linked targets, the US Central Command (CENTCOM) said in a statement.
The bombings come nearly one week after a drone packed with explosives struck Tower 22, a US base in Jordan located near the Syrian and Iraqi borders, killing three soldiers and wounding more than 40 others. The attack, which the US blamed on the Iranian-backed Islamic Resistance in Iraq, marked the first deaths of American troops in a wave of assaults triggered by the Israel-Hamas war.
04 February 202416:35 GMTUS airstrikes on Syria, Iraq and Yemen over the last two days were only the “first round” of Washington’s military response to last week’s drone attack on a US base in Jordan, White House national security spokesman John Kirby told NBC.
“We intend to take additional strikes and additional action to continue to send a clear message that the United States will respond when our forces are attacked or people are killed,” he said.
Kirby promised “more steps – some seen, some perhaps unseen” in comments to CBS, while stressing that he would not describe the planned US actions in the region as “some open-ended military campaign.”
16:15 GMTFurther aggression from the US and UK will not sway Yemen’s Houthis from their decision to act in support of the Palestinians of Gaza, the group’s spokesperson Mohammed Abdulsalam said in a statement, adding that the movement’s military capabilities had been forged during years of brutal war and would not be easily destroyed.
14:51 GMT
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced on X (formerly Twitter) that British Typhoon fighter jets “successfully took out specific Houthi military targets in Yemen, further degrading the Houthis’ capabilities.”
He denounced as “unacceptable” the attacks on merchant vessels in the Red Sea being perpetrated by Yemeni Shiite Houthi militants. The PM added that it is London’s duty to “protect innocent lives and preserve freedom.”
Earlier in the day, the US Central Command revealed that a series of combined air- and sea-launched strikes had taken out at least 36 Houthi targets in 13 locations across Yemen…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The US-led coalition has targeted Yemen with 48 airstrikes in the past few hours, Houthi spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Saree has said on X (formerly Twitter). The US Central Command earlier announced that the bombing campaign had hit at least 36 targets in 13 locations in the country.
“These attacks will not deter us from our moral, religious and humanitarian stance in support of the steadfast Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip,” Saree insisted, adding that the actions of the US and the UK “won’t pass without response and punishment.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has affirmed his support of Washington’s latest military actions, calling the strikes “proportionate” and “retaliatory.”
“You can’t have the sort of attacks that we’ve seen and see no response – that’s whether it be the actions of the Houthis in targeting our trade, whether it be the attacks that occurred on Americans in Jordan,” Albanese told ABC on Sunday,
Albanese said he does not believe the US-led strikes could spark a wider conflict in the Middle East, insisting “we want to see the area settled down.” https://www.rt.com/news/591739-us-retaliation-strikes-updates/
Palestinians Uncover Dozens Killed Execution-Style in Schoolyard in Gaza
Palestinian civilians discovered bodies blindfolded and with their legs and hands tied back. By Sharon Zhang , TRUTHOUT https://truthout.org/articles/palestinians-uncover-dozens-killed-execution-style-in-schoolyard-in-gaza/ 4 Feb 24
ozens of bodies of Palestinians have been uncovered in a mass grave in a schoolyard in northern Gaza, with witnesses saying they appeared to have been killed “execution style” by Israeli forces. A human rights lawyer has said the killings are “clearly a war crime.”
Palestinians uncovered more than 30 bodies buried in northern Gaza in black bags with their hands and feet tied and blindfolded, according to witnesses.
“As we were cleaning, we came across a pile of rubble inside the schoolyard. We were shocked to find out that dozens of dead bodies were buried under this pile,” one witness told Al Jazeera on Wednesday. “The moment we opened the black plastic bags, we found the bodies, already decomposed. They were blindfolded, legs and hands tied. The plastic cuffs were used on their hands and legs and cloth straps around their eyes and heads.”
Video and photos appearing to show the bags containing the bodies show that they are zip-tied shut with tags with barcodes and writing in Hebrew.
The witnesses’ accounts line up with previous reports of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians execution style in other locations, including reporting that soldiers had lined up Palestinians, including newborn babies, and shot them point blank at another school in northern Gaza in December. Around the same time, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that Israeli soldiers had been killing dozens of elderly Palestinians in field executions after ordering them to leave their homes or after releasing them from being detained without charges.
Other videos and photos in December have shown Israeli soldiers stripping Palestinian men and making them kneel on the street in Gaza with their hands tied behind their backs. Israeli officials confirmed that soldiers were detaining them to check if they were members of Hamas forces.
The execution-style killings are further proof that Israel’s assault on Gaza is tantamount to a genocide, Palestinian Canadian human rights lawyer Diana Buttu told Al Jazeera on Thursday.
“This is precisely why Israel was taken to the International Court of Justice with the accusation that it is committing genocide,” Buttu said.
“Israel has been committing war crimes against Palestinians since 1948 and nobody has ever held Israel to account,” she continued. “This is clearly a war crime.”
Buttu added that the zip ties on the body bags and the state of the bodies show that Israeli soldiers feel “emboldened,” with Israeli soldiers and officials rarely facing consequences for war crimes in the past, she said.
The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is calling for an international investigation into the allegations that Israeli forces are killing people execution-style.
“The Ministry believes that the discovery of this mass grave in this brutal form reflects the scale of the tragedy to which Palestinian civilians are exposed, the mass massacres and executions of even detainees, in flagrant and gross violation of all relevant international norms and laws,” the ministry said.
U.S. admits it hasn’t verified Israel’s UNRWA claims, media ignores it
the media coverage, which is, once again, treating Israeli allegations as proven facts. Nor could you tell by the U.S. response. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated, “We haven’t had the ability to investigate [the allegations] ourselves. But they are highly, highly credible.”
That is a stunning statement. They are simply taking Israel’s word for it, and on that basis, they are suspending aid to nearly two million people who need that aid more than anyone in the world.
Secretary Blinken admits that the U.S. has been unable to investigate the “evidence” presented by Israel claiming 13 of UNRWA’s 13,000 Gaza employees participated in October 7. Biden took Israel’s word for it anyway.
In the latest demonstration of the boundless cruelty of U.S. President Joe Biden and his despicable administration, they have turned the backbone of what little aid Palestinians in Gaza receive into a political football, to be toyed with and batted around while jeopardizing that support for people who are already near the edge of what any human, however brave, can possibly endure.
It’s the latest in what feels like an eternal cycle of the United States and Israel beating up on the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for political gain. There have been many hearings on Capitol Hill over the years bashing UNRWA and calling for either a complete structural overhaul of the agency or its dismantlement and absorption into the larger United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).
The root of the attacks, prior to October 7, 2023, has been UNRWA’s unique mission which is to provide humanitarian assistance — including food, housing, medical aid, and the role that has taken up the bulk of its budget for years, education — to Palestinian refugees exclusively. Because of this mandate, Israel and its supporters blame UNRWA for the definition of “refugee” in the Palestinian context, which includes not only those made refugees by the 1948 and 1967 wars, but also their descendants born into refugee status.
Many on the pro-Israel and Israeli right and center believe doing away with UNRWA would essentially allow Israel to do away with Palestinian refugees because they believe UNRWA is the only thing maintaining that generational definition.
They’re wrong, of course. International law is clear on this point, as the UN states: “Under international law and the principle of family unity, the children of refugees and their descendants are also considered refugees until a durable solution is found. Both UNRWA and UNHCR recognize descendants as refugees on this basis, a practice that has been widely accepted by the international community, including both donors and refugee-hosting countries. Palestine refugees are not distinct from other protracted refugee situations such as those from Afghanistan or Somalia, where there are multiple generations of refugees, considered by UNHCR as refugees and supported as such. Protracted refugee situations are the result of the failure to find political solutions to their underlying political crises.”
There’s no ambiguity there, but that hasn’t stopped the controversy. ……………………………
Israelis have always known that they need the agency, despite all their hateful rhetoric about it. For years, Israel would bash UNRWA mercilessly in the media, but would always tell the United States that its operations were necessary, especially in Gaza. Without UNRWA, Israel would be expected to ensure that a humanitarian catastrophe did not ensue, so Israel needs the agency.
In 2018, emboldened by a reckless U.S. administration under Donald Trump, Netanyahu suddenly changed that position and called for the U.S. to dramatically cut its support of UNRWA. Trump eagerly did so. When Netanyahu made that sudden shift, it surprised and disturbed many in his own government who disagreed with the decision. Just about the only positive step Joe Biden took when entering office was to restore UNRWA’s funding. But Trump’s action made the question of UNRWA’s funding even more politically charged than it had always been.
Unable to investigate
The old cycle seems to be playing out again, but this time, the highly charged politics in Washington are more intricate.
On January 26, Israeli allegations against a dozen UNRWA employees surfaced. The agency immediately fired nine of them and said that two others were dead, hoping their swift and pre-emptive action would stave off rash U.S. actions. Nonetheless, the United States and a host of other countries immediately suspended funding for UNRWA, over the actions of 12 of over 30,000 employees, 13,000 of whom are in Gaza.
It’s worth pausing over that last fact for a moment. Twelve out of 13,000 Gaza employees have caused all of this, and it’s based on evidence that has not been made public. You’d never know that from much of the media coverage, which is, once again, treating Israeli allegations as proven facts. Nor could you tell by the U.S. response. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated, “We haven’t had the ability to investigate [the allegations] ourselves. But they are highly, highly credible.”
That is a stunning statement. They are simply taking Israel’s word for it, and on that basis, they are suspending aid to nearly two million people who need that aid more than anyone in the world.
Recall that Israel, in October 2021, labeled six Palestinian organizations as being connected to “terrorist groups,” specifically referring to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The “evidence” Israel presented was so threadbare that European countries dismissed it as baseless, and even the Biden administration, which has repeatedly supported Israeli claims based on no evidence that turned out to be false, could not accept the Israeli charges, though it avoided explicitly calling out Israel’s attempted deception.
Yet now, Israel has presented a “dossier” that contains its case against the twelve UNRWA workers. The actual evidence has not been made public, and even the United States, as noted above, has admitted it can’t verify the Israeli claims. But the U.S. suspended UNRWA’s funding anyway and led seventeen other countries to follow suit. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Biden’s incompetence and mindless cruelty
For Biden, the hearings, as well as the general tone and tenor in Washington after years of bashing UNRWA, present a problem. If he doesn’t restore UNRWA’s funding, conditions in Gaza will grow much worse very quickly, and calls for a ceasefire will be overwhelming, as will Biden’s downward trend in polls. If he restores UNRWA’s funding, he will find himself under attack from Republicans as well as some Democrats.
In the wake of the hearing this week, one of Israel’s leading advocates in Congress, Brad Schneider (D-IL), bluntly stated, “We have to replace UNRWA with something else. I support getting rid of UNRWA.”………………………………….
Had Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken not reacted in knee-jerk fashion to the unsubstantiated Israeli allegations, this would be less of a problem. They could have noted that UNRWA immediately fired the workers in question, that it had launched an investigation, and that its work was needed now more than ever. Biden could then have talked about reviewing UNRWA over the coming weeks and months, and made some political show of it without jeopardizing the aid to Gaza, which even the Israeli government doesn’t want to see cut………………………..
Even government officials from both the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government have been forced to acknowledge the crucial role UNRWA plays. That this has become a political hot potato is not just a testament to Biden’s incompetence, but also to his mindless cruelty and unquenchable hostility to the Palestinian people. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/u-s-admits-it-hasnt-verified-israels-unrwa-claims-media-ignores-it/—
U.S. Court Concludes Israel’s Assault on Gaza Is Plausible Case of Genocide
Center for Constitutional Rights, February 1, 2024
While Dismissing Case on Jurisdictional Grounds, U.S. Judge “Implores” Biden Administration to Stop its “Unflagging Support” for Israel’s Ongoing Siege of the Palestinian People in Gaza
January 31, 2024, Oakland, CA – After a federal court heard arguments and testimony in the case Defense for Children International – Palestine v. Biden on Friday, January 26, charging the Biden administration with failing in its duty to prevent, and otherwise aiding and abetting, the unfolding genocide in Gaza, a federal judge found that Israel is plausibly engaging in genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and that the United States is providing “unflagging support” for the massive attacks on Palestinian civilians in contravention of international law. The court’s decision follows a historic ruling by the International Court of Justice last Friday, which also found the Israeli government was plausibly engaged in a genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza, and which issued a series of emergency measures Israel must take to end its genocidal campaign.
The U.S. court based its assessment on the “uncontroverted” live testimony of seven Palestinian witnesses, including one from Gaza and one from Ramallah, who testified firsthand to Israel’s killing of their nieces, cousins, aunts, uncles, elders, and members of their community, to the mass displacement of their families reminiscent of the 1948 Nakba, and to the devastating conditions of life in their homeland as the siege leads to mass starvation. The court also relied on the expert opinion of genocide and Holocaust scholars who confirmed that Israel’s military assault and totalizing humanitarian destruction bears the hallmarks of a genocide based on legal and historical precedent. Nevertheless, the court reluctantly dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds. While the court recognized that the prohibitions on genocide are fundamental and binding international law, this was a “rare” instance where “the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the Court” and it found it lacked power to resolve the case because it implicated executive decision-making in the area of foreign policy.
Delivering a historic rebuke of Israel and the United States for its flouting of the Genocide Convention, the court wrote:
Both the uncontroverted testimony of the Plaintiffs and the expert opinion proffered at the hearing on these motions as well as statements made by various officers of the Israeli government indicate that the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people and therefore plausibly falls within the international prohibition against genocide.
The court recognized the substantial role of the United States in furthering the genocide and noted that “as the ICJ has found, it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide” and, therefore, the “Court implores Defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.”
The court stated, “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza.” ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
To watch a recording of the hearing, visit the court’s website.
To watch a recording of the plaintiffs’ press conference following the hearing, visit the Center for Constitutional Rights YouTube page.
For more information, see the Center for Constitutional Rights’ case page.
The Center for Constitutional Rights works with communities under threat to fight for justice and liberation through litigation, advocacy, and strategic communications. Since 1966, the Center for Constitutional Rights has taken on oppressive systems of power, including structural racism, gender oppression, economic inequity, and governmental overreach. Learn more at ccrjustice.org. https://ccrjustice.org/home/press-center/press-releases/us-court-concludes-israel-s-assault-gaza-plausible-case-genocide
2
In waging war on the UN refugee agency, the West is openly siding with Israeli genocide
Extraordinarily, the western media have done Israel’s PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel’s claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court’s decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.
By Jonathan Cook, Feb 1, 2024, – https://johnmenadue.com/in-waging-war-on-the-un-refugee-agency-the-west-is-openly-siding-with-israeli-genocide/
Israel has long plotted the downfall of UNRWA, aware that it is one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating the Palestinians as a people.
There is an important background to the decision by the United States and other leading western states, the UK among them, to freeze funding to the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main channel by which the UN disseminates food and welfare services to the most desperate and destitute Palestinians.
The funding cut – which has been also adopted by Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Finland – was imposed even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday that Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza. The World Court judges quoted at length UN officials who warned that Israel’s actions had left almost all of the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe, including famine.
The West’s flimsy pretext for what amounts to a war on UNRWA is that Israel claims 12 local UN staff – out of 13,000 – are implicated in Hamas’ break-out from the open-air prison of Gaza on October 7. The sole evidence appears to be coerced confessions, likely extracted through torture, from Palestinian fighters captured by Israel that day.
The UN immediately sacked all the accused staff, seemingly without due process. We can assume that was because the refugee agency was afraid its already threadbare lifeline to the people of Gaza, as well as millions of other Palestinian refugees across the region – in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria – would be further threatened. It need not have worried. Western donor states cut their funding anyway, plunging Gaza deeper into calamity.
They did so without regard to the fact their decision amounts to collective punishment: some 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza face starvation and the spread of lethal disease, while another 4 million Palestinian refugees across the region are at imminent risk of losing food, health care and schooling.
According to law professor Francis Boyle, who filed a genocide case for Bosnia at the World Court some two decades ago, that shifts most of these western states from their existing complicity with Israel’s genocide (by selling arms and providing aid and diplomatic cover) into direct and active participation in the genocide, by violating the 1948 Genocide Convention’s prohibition on “deliberately inflicting on the group [in this case, Palestinians] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light. Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the US and UK are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel’s crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.
Israel’s creature
The following is the proper context for understanding what is really going on with this latest attack on UNRWA:
The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light. Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the US and UK are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel’s crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.
1 The agency was created in 1949 – decades before Israel’s current military slaughter in Gaza – to provide for the basic needs of Palestinian refugees, including essential food provision, health care and education. It has an outsize role in Gaza because most of the Palestinians living there lost, or are descended from families that lost, everything in 1948. That was when they were ethnically cleansed by the fledgling Israeli military from most of Palestine, in an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or Catastrophe. Their lands were turned into what Israel’s leaders described as an exclusively “Jewish state”. The Israeli army set about destroying the Palestinians’ towns and villages inside this new state so that they could never return.
2. UNRWA is separate from the UN’s main refugee agency, the UNHCR, and deals only with Palestinian refugees. Although Israel does not want you to know it, the reason for there being two UN refugee agencies is because Israel and its western backers insisted on the division back in 1948. Why? Because Israel was afraid of the Palestinians falling under the responsibility of the UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. The IRO was established in the immediate wake of the Second World War in large part to cope with the millions of European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.
Israel did not want the two cases treated as comparable, because it was pushing hard for Jewish refugees to be settled on lands from which it had just expelled Palestinians. Part of the IRO’s mission was to seek the repatriation of European Jews. Israel was worried that very principle might be used both to deny it the Jews it wanted to colonise Palestinian land and to force it to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes. So in a real sense, UNRWA is Israel’s creature: it was set up to keep the Palestinians a case apart, an anomaly.
Prison camp
3. Nonetheless, things did not go exactly to plan for Israel. Given its refusal to allow the refugees to return, and the reluctance of neighbouring Arab states to be complict in Israel’s original act of ethnic cleansing, the Palestinian population in UNRWA’s refugee camps ballooned. They became an especial problem in Gaza, where about two-thirds of the population are refugees or descended from refugees. The tiny coastal enclave did not have the land or resources to cope with the rapidly expanding numbers there. The fear in Israel was that, as the plight of the Palestinians of Gaza became more desperate, the international community would pressure Israel into a peace agreement, allowing for the refugees’ return to their former homes.
That had to be stopped at all costs. In the early 1990s, as the supposed Oslo “peace process” was being unveiled, Israel began penning the Palestinians of Gaza inside a steel cage, surrounded by gun towers. Some 17 years ago, Israel added a blockade that prevented the population’s movement in and out of Gaza, including via the strip’s coastal waters and its skies. The Palestinians became prisoners in a giant concentration camp, denied the most basic links to the outside world. Israel alone decided what was allowed in and out. An Israeli court later learnt that from 2008 onwards the Israeli military put Gaza on what amounted to a starvation diet by restricting food supplies.
There was a strategy here that involved making Gaza uninhabitable, something the UN started warning about in 2015. Israel’s game plan appears to have gone something like this:
By making Palestinians in Gaza ever more desperate, it was certain that militant groups like Hamas willing to fight to liberate the enclave would gain in popularity. In turn, that would provide Israel with the excuse both to further tighten restrictions on Gaza to deal with a “terrorism threat”, and to intermittently wreck Gaza in “retaliation” for those attacks – or what Israeli military commanders variously called “mowing the grass” and “returning Gaza to the Stone Age”. The assumption was that Gaza’s militant groups would exhaust their energies managing the constant “humanitarian crises” Israel had engineered.
At the same time, Israel could promote twin narratives. It could say publicly that it was impossible for it to take responsibility for the people of Gaza, given that they were so clearly invested both in Jew hatred and terrorism. Meanwhile, it would privately tell the international community that, given how uninhabitable Gaza was becoming, they urgently needed to find a solution that did not involve Israel. The hope was that Washington would be able to arm-twist or bribe neighbouring Egypt into taking most of Gaza’s destitute population.
Mask ripped off
4. On October 7, Hamas and other militant groups achieved what Israel had assumed was impossible. They broke out of their concentration camp. The Israeli leadership’s shock is not just over the bloody nature of the break-out. It is that on that day Hamas smashed Israel’s entire security concept – one designed to keep the Palestinians crushed, and Arab states and the region’s other resistance groups hopeless. Last week, in a knockout blow, the World Court agreed to put Israel on trial for genocide in Gaza, collapsing the moral case for an exclusive Jewish state built on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.
The judges’ near-unanimous conclusion that South Africa has made a plausible case for Israel committing genocide should force a reassessment of everything that went before. Genocides don’t just emerge out of thin air. They happen after long periods in which the oppressor group dehumanises another group, incites against it and abuses it. The World Court has implicitly conceded that the Palestinians were right when they insisted that the Nakba – Israel’s mass dispossession and ethnic cleansing operation of 1948 – never ended. It just took on different forms. Israel became better at concealing those crimes, until the mask was ripped off after the October 7 break-out.
5. Israel’s efforts to get rid of UNRWA are not new. They date back many years. For a number of reasons, the UN refugee agency is a thorn in Israel’s side – and all the more so in Gaza. Not least, it has provided a lifeline to Palestinians there, keeping them fed and cared for, and providing jobs to many thousands of local people in a place where unemployment rates are among the highest in the world. It has invested in infrastructure like hospitals and schools that make life in Gaza more bearable, when Israel’s goal has long been to make the enclave uninhabitable. UNRWA’s well-run schools, staffed by local Palestinians, teach the children their own history, about where their grandparents once lived, and of Israel’s campaign of dispossession and ethnic cleansing against them. That runs directly counter to the infamous Zionist slogan about the Palestinians’ identity-less future: “The old will die and the young forget.”
Divide and rule
But UNRWA’s role is bigger than that. Uniquely, it is the sole agency unifying Palestinians wherever they live, even when they are separated by national borders and Israel’s fragmentation of the territory it controls. UNRWA brings Palestinians together even when their own political leaders have been manipulated into endless factionalism by Israel’s divide and rule policies: Hamas is nominally in charge in Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah pretends to run the West Bank.
In addition, UNRWA keeps alive the moral case for a Palestinian right of return – a principle recognised in international law but long ago abandoned by western states.
Even before October 7, UNRWA had become an obstable that needed removing if Israel was ever to ethnically cleanse Gaza. That is why Israel has repeatedly lobbied to stop the biggest donors, especially the US, funding UNRWA. Back in 2018, for example, the refugee agency was plunged into an existential crisis when President Donald Trump acquiesced to Israeli pressure and cut all its funding. Even after the decision was reversed, the agency has been limping along financially.
6. Now Israel is in full attack mode against the World Court, and has even more to gain from destroying UNRWA than it did before. The freeze in funding, and the further weakening of the refugee agency, will undermine the support structures for Palestinians generally. But in Gaza’s case, the move will specifically accelerate famine and disease, making the enclave uninhabitable faster.
But it will do more. It will also serve as a stick with which to beat the World Court as Israel tries to fight off the genocide investigation. Israel’s barely veiled claim is that 15 of the International Court of Justice’s 17 judges fell for South Africa’s supposedly antisemitic argument that Israel is committing genocide. The court quoted extensively from UN officials, including the head of UNRWA, that Israel was actively engineering an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Now, as former UK ambassador Craig Murray notes, the coerced confessions against 12 UNRWA staff serve to “provide a propaganda counter-narrative to the ICJ judgment, and to reduce the credibility of UNRWA’s evidence before the court”.
Extraordinarily, the western media have done Israel’s PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel’s claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court’s decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.
Equally a boon to Israel is the fact that leading western states have so quickly pinned their colours to the mast. The funding freeze cements their fates to Israel’s. It sends a message that they will stand with Israel against the World Court, whatever it decides. Their war on UNRWA is intended as an act of collective intimidation directed towards the court. It is a sign that the West refuses to accept that international law applies to it, or its client state. It is a reminder that western states refuse any restraint on their freedom of action – and that it is Israel and its sponsors who are the true rogue states.
1 This Month
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
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