Israeli Attacks on Journalists Stifle Reporting on Gaza Horrors
By Ari Paul / Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), October 23, 2023 https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/23/israeli-attacks-on-journalists-stifle-reporting-on-gaza-horrors/
The ability of reporters to cover Gaza is jeopardized by the alarming number of newspeople Israel has killed since the crisis began.
he Israeli communications minister’s attempt to shut down Al Jazeera’s bureau in Jerusalem—on the grounds that the Qatari news outlet is biased in favor of Hamas and is actively endangering Israeli troops (Reuters, 10/15/23)—should inspire some déjà vu. In the last war in Gaza, an Israeli air strike destroyed a Gaza building housing both Al Jazeera and Associated Press offices (AP, 5/15/21). And just months ago, Al Jazeera (5/18/23) reported that “the family of Shireen Abu Akleh,” a Palestinian-American AJ journalist killed by Israeli fire while on assignment, “has rebuked Israel for saying it is ‘sorry’ for the Al Jazeera reporter’s death without providing accountability or even acknowledging that its forces killed her.”
Since the launch of the network’s English service, Americans interested in Middle East news beyond what can be found in US broadcasting have often turned to Al Jazeera, and even more so as the BBC’s foreign service has declined (Guardian, 9/29/22).
But the ability of Al Jazeera and other Arab reporters to cover the assault on Gaza is jeopardized by the alarming number of newspeople Israel has killed since the crisis began. The Committee to Protect Journalists (10/18/23) has counted 13 Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in Gaza since the crisis began, with two more missing or detained. Three Israeli journalists were also killed in Hamas’s October 7 attack, with another taken prisoner.
While the primary focus of this conflict is Gaza, journalists have wondered if a second northern front would open between Israel and the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, creating a multifaceted regional war (New York Times, 10/17/23; CNN, 10/17/23). Israeli fire in southern Lebanon injured Al Jazeera staffers, along with Agence France-Presse personnel, and killed a Reuters journalist (Reuters, 10/14/23). Lebanon has planned to file a complaint with the United Nations over the incident (TRT World, 10/14/23), calling the attack deliberate (Telegraph, 10/14/23).
Press advocates fear those numbers will rise, and it is all happening as the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens (UN News, 10/13/23).
The BBC (10/15/23) reported that its own journalists “were assaulted and held at gunpoint after they were stopped by police in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv,” and that they were “dragged from the vehicle—marked ‘TV’ in red tape—searched and pushed against a wall.”
In addition, the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said in a statement that the Israeli military caused “severe damage to 48 centers of press institutions,” including “the Palestine and Watan towers, and other buildings that include media institutions,” including the AFP office. It said that the army had also “completely or partially demolished the homes of dozens of journalists.”
‘Terror attack against democracy’
War reporting always carries risk. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented the deaths of media workers in the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria. Middle East conflicts have always been dangerous places for journalists; it’s hard to ignore high-profile deaths of journalists like Marie Colvin of London’s Sunday Times in Syria (CNN, 2/1/19), or freelance photographers Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington in Libya (Washington Post, 4/21/11). In that sense, the war in Gaza and a possible war in southern Lebanon are no exceptions.
But as FAIR (5/19/21) documented during the previous Israeli military operation against Gaza, Israel has a long history of targeting Palestinian journalists, as well as harassing foreign journalists and human rights activists entering the country. Over the summer, the International Federation of Journalists (7/4/23) reported that “several journalists have been directly targeted by Israeli snipers as they were reporting on Israel’s large-scale military operation in Jenin.”
Inside Israel, the situation for journalists is relatively safer, but the far-right government has—like authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary—attacked journalists and the ability to critically cover institutions in power. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2019 accused the owners of Israel’s Channel 12 of committing a “terror attack against democracy” for reporting on the corruption charges against him (Times of Israel, 9/1/19).
In 2020, Netanyahu (Ha’aretz, 6/11/20) indicated that “Channel 13 journalist Raviv Drucker should be arrested and jailed” for airing “recordings of Netanyahu crony Shaul Elovich and his wife, which demonstrated how they sought to tilt news coverage in the prime minister’s favor.”
Galit Distel-Atbaryan, who recently resigned from her role as public diplomacy minister (Jerusalem Post, 10/14/23), reportedly said this summer that she wanted the “authority to deny press credentials to foreign journalists critical of Israel” (Ha’aretz, 8/30/23).
‘You better be saying good things’
The threat to journalism has only become more explicit as Israel’s assault on Gaza escalates. An Israeli security officer interrupted a live report by Ahmed Darawsha, correspondent for Qatar-based Al-Araby news (Arab News, 10/15/23):
The officer then shouted at the camera: “Detestable! We’ll turn Gaza to dust. Dust, dust, dust.”
Israel’s siege of Gaza becomes more nightmarish as the days go on, and as that happens, the ability of journalists to document the horror becomes next to impossible. Palestinian journalist Sami Abu Salem told the International Federation of Journalists (10/12/23) about working in Gaza: “We have no internet service, there is a lack of electricity, no transportation, and even the streets are damaged. That’s why we cannot tell lots of stories—thousands of stories.”
Because audiences in the US and the Anglosphere depend on Al Jazeera, as well as local journalists in Israel and the Occupied Territories, to receive news from the region, these attacks do act as filters through which the truth is diluted. In many ways, Americans can see in real time how the powers that be attempt to control information coming out of the region. #Israel #Palestine
Israel-Hamas war fuels fears of nuclear weapons in the Middle East
Israel is widely believed to possess 90 plutonium-based nuclear warheads and to have produced enough plutonium for 100-200 weapons
i By Michael Day 23 Oct 23′
Israel’s war with Hamas, renewed fighting with Hezbollah and tensions with Iran have fuelled concerns that the spate of conflicts in the Middle East could turn nuclear.
Israel is thought to have a sizeable arsenal of air and submarine-launched nuclear warheads – while Iran has long denied attempts to develop nuclear weapons, but its true capabilities are largely unknown amid a failed nuclear deal with the US and longstanding tensions with the monitoring body, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Within Israel, there have already been calls by fringe figures for a scorched-earth policy, with the far-right Likud MP Tally Gotliv urging the Israeli government to use “everything in its arsenal” including “doomsday” weapons against Hamas.
Others have pleaded for level heads. “She [Tally Gotliv] is a complete idiot,” says Uri Bar-Joseph, professor emeritus in political science at Haifa University in Israel. “Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. The suggestion is idiotic.”
He notes that Gotliv is not a minister, and that far-right extremists in government, such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir have been excluded from the Israeli war cabinet and thus “will have been excluded from decision-making in the war with Gaza”.
But memories of how then Israeli defence minister Moshe Dayan asked prime minister Golda Meir to increase the readiness of Israeli nuclear weapons on the second day of the 1973 Yom Kippur Arab-Israeli War has led some to question whether Israel, under extreme duress, might resort to the use of such weapons in an expanded Middle East conflict.
“We know from internal cabinet documents that Golda Meir immediately said ‘no’ to that in 1973,” says Professor Bar-Joseph. Although some historians have claimed the mere fact that nuclear weapons were mentioned by Dayan prompted then-president Richard Nixon to order an airlift to Israel days later on 12 October.
If we had Golda Meir in power today, Biden would not have been less concerned,” says Bar-Joseph. “But Biden does not consider Netanyahu to be a responsible player.”
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has said that Israel’s presumed possession of nuclear weapons “significantly increases the risks associated with the conflict”.
……………………………………………….. The Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation thinks Israel possesses 90 plutonium-based nuclear warheads and to have produced enough plutonium for 100-200 weapons, but there have been questions over how ready the Israeli military is to use them in a conflict.
Israel has conducted few, if any, tests. The mystery that surrounds its nuclear programme has sparked questions among military experts about the nation’s actual deterrence capabilities.
But many observers, including Professor Bar-Joseph think that since it first acquired nuclear weapons capability in 1967, Israel has had more than enough time to ensure its military is able to fire them from land and sea………… https://inews.co.uk/news/world/nuclear-weapons-israel-hamas-war-risk-escalation-2706029 #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes
The Atlantic Magazine, Covering Palestine Without Palestinians
Two weeks in and 38 articles on the topic, the Atlantic has found only one token Palestinian to write about Palestine.
SCHEERPOST, By Adam Johnson / The Real News Network, October 23, 2023
Since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Southern Israel that killed 1,300 Israelis, The Atlantic has published 38 articles, podcasts, and Q&As on the assault and Israel’s subsequent retaliatory bombing campaign, which has killed over 4,000 Palestinians and counting. Only one of these pieces was written by a Palestinian, whom the story is, at least in theory, 50% about.
The writers The Atlantic has featured in the past two weeks are mostly Americans—there were also several Israeli and a few Lebanese and Lebanese-Americans, but only one Palestinian writer, Ghaith al-Omari, who is a senior fellow at the pro-Israel Washington Institiute for Near East Policy, which was founded by the pro-Israel lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The article, “How the Palestinian Authority Failed Its People,” is a fairly dry and academic breakdown of the positions of the Palestinian Authority on the current crisis. Beyond this one token entry, The Atlantic has not published any Palestinian writers.
That erasure is not an accident; it is consistent with The Atlantic’s almost-uniform pro-Israel bent and its long history of excluding Palestinian voices in discussions of Palestine. Even a cursory survey of their coverage throughout the years shows that the writers whose perspectives on the conflict have been published at The Atlantic have been overwhelmingly American and Israeli in nationality and perspective……………………………………………………………………………………………
The Atlantic is not alone. In a blockbuster report published last Friday, Semafor’s Max Tani documented how MSNBC was sidelining three Muslim anchors they felt were too pro-Palestine. Jewish Currents’ Mari Cohen detailed Wednesday how CBS producers took down an interview from its online archives with Palestinian-American legal scholar and human rights attorney Noura Erakat because she didn’t play the one-noted role of grieving victim and, instead, pushed back on the interviewer’s loaded questions. “They wanted me to be up there to lament our dead,” Erakat told Jewish Currents, “but not to establish international responsibility for [their deaths].”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
All of this paves the way to the latest iteration of The Atlantic’s coverage of the so-called Israel-Palestinian conflict. Readers of The Atlantic are fed a steady stream of standard pro-Israel talking points and framing devices that involve putting Palestinians in a specimen jar and examining them solely through an “anti-terror” framework that set up discussions about, rather than by, those most affected by the ongoing apartheid and siege imposed by Israel. The result is more of the same rote conversations and dehumanizing, dead-end War on Terror framing, while the dead in Gaza continue to pile up.
Listening to Americans, Israelis, and others is, of course, perfectly fine. But maybe, as the ongoing siege and potential ethnic cleansing of Palestinians escalates more and more by the day, the country’s most influential center-left publication could maybe bother publishing more than one token Palestinian. https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/23/the-atlantic-magazine-covering-palestine-without-palestinians/ #Israel #Palestine
UN Agency Warns Humanitarian Operations in Gaza on Verge of Total Collapse
October 23, 2023 https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/23/un-agency-warns-humanitarian-operations-in-gaza-on-verge-of-total-collapse/
“Without fuel, there will be no water, no functioning hospitals and bakeries,” said the UNRWA. “Without fuel, aid will not reach those in desperate need. Without fuel, there will be no humanitarian assistance.”
By Jon Queally / Common Dreams
The U.N. agency responsible for humanitarian aid and protections in the occupied Gaza Strip—battered relentlessly by Israeli airstrikes for the past two weeks—said Sunday that if fuel supplies are not restored within a matter of days, its operations will collapse entirely.
“In three days, UNRWA will run out of fuel, critical for our humanitarian response across the Gaza Strip,” said Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
“Without fuel, there will be no water, no functioning hospitals and bakeries,”
Lazzarini continued. “Without fuel, aid will not reach those in desperate need. Without fuel, there will be no humanitarian assistance. No fuel will further strangle the children, women, and people of Gaza.”
Noting that the UNRWA runs the largest humanitarian operation in the Gaza Strip, he said that without fuel, “we will fail the people of Gaza whose needs are growing by the hour, under our watch.”
Following the first “totally insufficient” convoy of aid trucks allowed to enter Gaza from Egypt on Saturday, another 17 trucks were permitted Sunday. Neither of the deliveries contained fuel, which medical personnel on the ground have said is vital if the health system is to remain capable of keeping the wounded and sick alive.
With Israeli officials saying the bombardment is set to intensify, not lessen, a global demand for a cease-fire has gone unheeded by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and its powerful allies, including the United States.
With large demonstrations in numerous U.S. and European cities over the weekend delivering the same message for a cease-fire also ringing out across the Middle East and beyond, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Saturday called for a stop in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza alongside a much larger delivery of aid.
“We must act now to end the nightmare,” Guterres said at the so-called Peace Summit in Cairo, Egypt.
Despite U.S. President Joe Biden’s continued backing of Israeli policy, including it’s bombardment of Gaza which legal scholars have said may amount to genocide—a poll last week showed two-thirds of U.S. voters back the call for a cease-fire.
As the civilian death toll continues to mount—with the latest weekend figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health putting the number killed at more than 4,600, nearly half of them children, and more than three times that wounded—UNRWA confirmed earlier on Saturday that 29 of its own staffers and volunteers, half of them school teachers, have been killed since the Israel bombing campaign began on Oct. 7.
“We are in shock and mourning,” the agency said in a social media post. “As an Agency, we are devastated. We are grieving with each other and with the families.”
In his statement on Sunday, Lazzarini called on “all parties and those with influence over them to immediately allow fuel supplies into the Gaza Strip and to ensure that fuel is strictly used to prevent a collapse of the humanitarian response.” #Israel #Palestine
Amnesty Probe Finds ‘Damning Evidence of War Crimes’ by Israel in Gaza
“Our entire family has been destroyed,” said one survivor of an Israeli bombing in the besieged Palestinian territory.
SCHEERPOST, By Brett Wilkins / Common Dreams 21 Oct 23
As Israel’s assault on Gaza continued Friday with 4,100 Palestinians—including over 1,600 children—killed and at least 13,000 others wounded by relentless bombardment that’s destroyed or damaged nearly a third of the besieged strip’s homes, Amnesty International shared “damning evidence of war crimes as Israeli attacks wipe out entire families.”
Amnesty interviewed survivors and eyewitnesses, analyzed satellite imagery, and verified photos and videos to investigate the Israeli aerial bombardments of Gaza, documenting “unlawful Israeli attacks, including indiscriminate attacks, which caused mass civilian casualties and must be investigated as war crimes.”
Agnès Callamard, Amnesty’s secretary-general, said in a statement: “In their stated intent to use all means to destroy Hamas, Israeli forces have shown a shocking disregard for civilian lives. They have pulverized street after street of residential buildings killing civilians on a mass scale and destroying essential infrastructure, while new restrictions mean Gaza is fast running out of water, medicine, fuel, and electricity.”
“Testimonies from eyewitnesses and survivors highlighted, again and again, how Israeli attacks decimated Palestinian families, causing such destruction that surviving relatives have little but rubble to remember their loved ones by,” she added.
Amnesty’s report focused on five specific incidents the group said amount to war crimes, including the October 7 bombing of a three-story residential building in the al-Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City that killed 15 members of the al-Dos family, including seven children.
“Two bombs fell suddenly on top of the building and destroyed it,” said Mohammad al-Dos, whose 5-year-old son Rakan was killed in the attack. “My wife and I were lucky to survive because we were staying on the top floor. She was nine months pregnant and gave birth at al-Shifa Hospital a day after the attack. Our entire family has been destroyed.”
The report also details an airstrike on the Gaza City home of the Hijazi family that killed 12 relatives, including three children, as well as four neighbors. Amnesty found no evidence of any military targets in the area at the time of the attack.
Amnesty’s report focused on five specific incidents the group said amount to war crimes, including the October 7 bombing of a three-story residential building in the al-Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City that killed 15 members of the al-Dos family, including seven children.
“Two bombs fell suddenly on top of the building and destroyed it,” said Mohammad al-Dos, whose 5-year-old son Rakan was killed in the attack. “My wife and I were lucky to survive because we were staying on the top floor. She was nine months pregnant and gave birth at al-Shifa Hospital a day after the attack. Our entire family has been destroyed.”
The report also details an airstrike on the Gaza City home of the Hijazi family that killed 12 relatives, including three children, as well as four neighbors. Amnesty found no evidence of any military targets in the area at the time of the attack.
According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, more than 50 entire families have been removed from the civil registry after most or all of their members were killed in Israeli attacks.
“The five cases presented barely scratch the surface of the horror that Amnesty has documented and illustrate the devastating impact that Israel’s aerial bombardments are having on people in Gaza,” Callamard said. “For 16 years, Israel’s illegal blockade has made Gaza the world’s biggest open-air prison—the international community must act now to prevent it becoming a giant graveyard.”………..
Other possible war crimes perpetrated by Israeli forces not specifically covered in the Amnesty report include but are not limited to collective punishment; an order to evacuate more than 1.1 million people from northern Gaza ahead of an expected ground invasion; Israel’s stated focus on “damage and not accuracy” in its war on Hamas; bombing a civilian convoy heeding the evacuation order that killed around 70 people on a route Israeli authorities said was “safe”; use of white phosphorus munitions in a densely populated area; bombing schools and civilian shelters; and deadly attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers on West Bank Palestinians.
Amnesty also said that Hamas and other Palestinian militants have committed war crimes including the deliberate killing of 1,400 Israelis—most of them civilians—during last week’s surprise attack on Israel, the taking of around 200 Israeli and international hostages during the incursion, and the indiscriminate firing of rockets at civilian targets.
“Amnesty International is calling on Hamas and other armed groups to urgently release all civilian hostages, and to immediately stop firing indiscriminate rockets,” said Callamard. “There can be no justification for the deliberate killing of civilians under any circumstances.”
The Amnesty analysis came amid reports of possible fresh Israeli war crimes, including an airstrike on the Church of Saint Porphyrius, an 873-year-old Christian Orthodox house of worship crowded with people seeking shelter from the bombing. Officials said at least 18 people were killed in the attack, including numerous children………………………………………………………………………………..
Earlier this week, lawyers with the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights warned that the Biden administration is rendering itself complicitin possible genocide against Palestinians by providing weapons, political support, and diplomatic cover for Israel’s war.
On Wednesday, the U.S. vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning violence against civilians in Israel and Gaza and calling for “humanitarian pauses” to allow aid to enter the enclave. https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/21/amnesty-probe-finds-damning-evidence-of-war-crimes-by-israel-in-gaza/ #Israel #Palestine
How Big Media Facilitate Israeli War Crimes in Gaza
Corporate media’s dehumanization of Palestinians, lack of historical context, and repeating hearsay as fact make the current tragedy unintelligible to Americans.
By Robin Andersen / Project Censored, October 22, 2023 https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/22/how-big-media-facilitate-israeli-war-crimes-in-gaza/
On October 6, 2023, Hamas broke out of Gaza, lobbed rockets, and sent fighters into Israeli territory. The attacks killed hundreds of Israeli soldiers and civilians. Images of violence and brutality were recorded and distributed widely over broadcast news over and over again, repeatedly showing abused, bloodied, and crying women and children. The violence was presented with voices of US and Israeli officials asserting that the attack was “unprecedented.” Israel retaliated immediately and bombed the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated places on the globe. Photographs of death and destruction ran side by side, each with only brief captions about location. Many news outlets reported that the violence came out of nowhere, offering no historical context. The attacks therefore were without motivation, attributed only to the pure evil of Hamas and Palestinian terrorists.
German media scholar Hektor Haarkötter, who partners with Project Censored for his work with the News Enlightenment Initiative, was recently in the US speaking on an international roundtable at a critical communication conference and said he was stunned by the coverage: “When I saw the images of such violence repeated many times, on rotation, I was shocked. This would not be considered news in Germany. It would have been seen as little more than sensationalism.”
On October 7, the AP reported that US President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States “stands with the people of Israel in the face of these terrorist assaults. Israel has the right to defend itself and its people, full stop.” On October 9, The Times of Israel quoted Defense Minister Yoav Gallant saying, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian directed his threat at all Gazans on October 10, declaring, “Kidnapping, abusing and murdering children, women and elderly people is not human.” He then announced, “There will be no electricity and no water. There will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”
In a piece published on October 8 titled “Media Calls The Attack On Israel Unprovoked: Experts Say That’s Historically Inaccurate,” the Huffington Post pointed to the Israeli government’s “apartheid against Palestinians” as a provocation. It quoted IfNotNow, an American Jewish group that opposes Israeli apartheid, expressing their dread for the loss of life and loved ones, Israelis and Palestinians alike. It continued, “Every day under Israel’s system of apartheid is a provocation. The strangling siege on Gaza is a provocation. Settlers terrorizing entire Palestinian villages, soldiers raiding and demolishing Palestinian homes, murdering Palestinians in the streets, Israeli ministers calling for genocide and expulsion” are all provocations.
Indeed, multiple international human rights groups have defined the long-term Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands as a system of apartheid. The death toll on each side exposes the false assertion that Israeli violence is always retaliatory and that of Palestinians is “unprecedented.” The UNOCHA documents 6,407 Palestinian deaths since 2008, compared to 308 Israeli fatalities. Gregory Shupak reported that since 2001, more than ten thousand Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces, with “nearly 9 out of 10 deaths this century have been on the Palestinian side.” In addition, the Israelis have made daily life in Gaza miserable. As UK journalist Jonathan Cook wrote, “[Gaza’s] inhabitants—one million of them children—are denied the most basic freedoms, such as the right to movement; access to proper health care, drinkable water, and the use of electricity because Israel keeps bombing Gaza’s power station.” But voices such as Shupak and Cook are virtually absent from US establishment news coverage of the violence.
The Hamas attacks were taken out of the context of ongoing violence, presented without cause, and in narratives that see only Hamas violence but have rarely featured or condemned equivalent Israeli violence against Palestinians. Establishment media’s one-sided pro-Israel coverage, established over many years, fed into the growing consensus that a major retaliation by Israelis would be forthcoming. Early corporate news reporting seemed to confirm its inevitability, with almost no voices of reason or caution allowed to enter the militarized revenge frame coalescing around a major attack.
The verbiage used by the New York Times on the Tribe of Nova music festival also illustrates Big Journalism’s sensationalized, inaccurate reporting. The Times wrote that the “massacre of its youth” and Israel’s “75-year-old quest for some carefree normalcy” met the “murderous fury of those long-oppressed Palestinians who deny the state’s right to exist.” The language of the Times’ report—using “murderous” and denial of Israel’s “right to exist,” with “long-oppressed Palestinians”—makes a mockery of what Gazans have experienced. Additionally, it is not true that Palestinians deny Israel’s right to exist. A quick look at the US State Department’s summation of the 1993 Oslo Accords states that the Palestinian Authority “renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace” and “Israel accepted the PLO as the representative of the Palestinians,” concessions that undergirded the two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. But Rashid Khalidi has called out the “empty words about a two-state solution while providing money, weapons and diplomatic support for systematic, calculated Israeli actions that have made that solution inconceivable.”
Most important among the systemic violence against Palestinians is the growing weaponization of Israeli settlers. As Israel was dropping bombs on Gaza, Common Dreams reported that the California-based Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) accused Israel’s far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, of enabling settler attacks by handing out thousands of military assault rifles to settlement residents. “The extremist settlers Israel is arming have spent years attacking Palestinian cities in lynch mobs, with full backing from the Israeli government.” IMEU continued, “This year alone, they have killed Palestinian civilians and set fire to cars and homes with families inside.” Such stories are virtually absent from establishment media.
Gregory Shupak examined the editorial pages of major US newspapers from October 7 to 9, concluding that none of them provided readers with “information necessary to comprehend what is happening and why, and they consistently mislead readers about key facts.” Some papers were openly ravenous in their demonization of Palestinians. For example, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed titled “The Moral Duty to Destroy Hamas,” telling its readers that “Israel is entitled to do whatever it takes to uproot this evil, depraved culture that resides next to it.” Calling for the destruction of Hamas and extending the call to exterminate the “culture” is a call for genocide. It mirrored and promoted Israeli announcements that they would turn Gaza into “hell,” “rubble,” and a “city of tents.”
Ironically, on October 8, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz offered more explanation and context than most US papers when it criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to “annex the West Bank” and “to carry out ethnic cleansing in…the Hebron Hills and the Jordan Valley.” It pointed to the massive expansion of settlements and increasing Jewish presence on Temple Mount, near Al Aqsa Mosque. In April 2022, Mondoweiss reported that the Israeli military attacked Palestinians on their way to pray at the Al Aqsa Mosque seven times in eight days, injuring dozens of worshipers and arresting hundreds of Palestinians. Israeli forces used remote-controlled drones to drop teargas inside the mosque. Meanwhile, Israel facilitated the entrance of thousands of Jewish settlers for the Passover holiday.
War Propaganda: Babies were Decapitated and Women were Raped
Sensationalized repetition and media saturation of decontextualized Hamas violence quickly evolved into full-blown atrocity propaganda with horror stories claiming that Hamas had slit the throats of forty Israeli babies, decapitating many of them. Visceral baby slaughter is classic war propaganda, first used in World War I with false claims that German soldiers joyfully bayonetted babies. Similar stories convincedskeptical Americans to support the First Persian Gulf War, with the fake news story about Iraqi soldiers tossing over three hundred Kuwaiti babies out of their incubators. Roundly debunked after the war, journalists published the story uncritically, just as they eagerly circulated the unverified decapitation story.
Alan MacLeod investigated the story that Hamas had slaughtered Israeli babies, finding that it came from an anonymous Israeli military source and was originally reported by Israeli i24 News.
Without verification, Fox News, CNN, MSN, Insider, and the New York Post picked up and repeated the incendiary propaganda in the US. The UK’s largest newspapers screamed outrage as the salacious story was flung across the front pages of the Times of London, the Independent, the Financial Times, and the Scotsman (as documented by Mint Press News).
The key source for the false claim was an Israeli soldier, David Ben Zion, a fanatical settler who has incited riots against Palestinians, describing them as “animals” who need to be “wiped out.”
Another propaganda trope circulated to justify war is the rape of women, made more devious by its actual use as a military strategy. The Intercept noted that unverified claims that Hamas was raping women had gone viral online, and President Biden claimed that women were “raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.” Caitlin Johnstone noted, “We’re seeing claims about mass rapes being uncritically pushed by the mass media, only to see them retracted as unverified after the narrative has taken hold.”Any legitimate journalist should recognize such war tropes, and if not, should at least track the stories’ origins and refrain from publication until those sources are verified. President Biden was forced to walk back his lie about seeing “confirmed pictures of terrorist beheading children,” while talking to leaders of US Jewish organizations at the White House.
What was the purpose of perpetrating such lurid fake news, the stuff of visceral propaganda? The Hamas attacks that killed civilians were met with outrage and widely condemned, even by those who advocate for Palestinian rights, express criticism of the “unprovoked” news frame, or have criticized Israel’s growing violence and worked to create humanitarian spaces amidst the cruelty. Certainly, the attacks alone could be considered justifications for Israeli retaliation. But as Caitlin Johnstone argued, that was not enough. Israel’s response was about to dwarf the initial Hamas offensive. Israel and its allies needed to frame the attack in “the most shocking and rage-inducing discourse in order to make Israel’s ongoing murder of civilians in Gaza look appropriate.”
War Crimes and Wiping Out Gaza
Writing for Declassified UK, Jonathan Cook detailed how Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Gaza violated numerous international laws and the Geneva Convention, pointing out that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were committing war crimes. “One of the fundamentals of international law—at the heart of the Geneva Conventions—is a prohibition on collective punishment: that is, retaliating against the enemy’s civilian population, making them pay the price for the acts of their leaders and armies.” He continued, “What Israel is doing to Gaza is the very definition of collective punishment.”
Two days earlier on October 11, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken spread what can only be called “fake news” on Sky News when he claimed, “What separates Israel, the US and other democracies…is our respect for international law and the laws of war.” By October 14, Al Jazeera reported that in the first seven days of the conflict, an estimated one million Gazans had been displaced, according to the UN, and aid groups said the situation in the besieged enclave was “catastrophic,” as fourteen Palestinians were being killed every hour. Israel had dropped the equivalent of “a quarter of a nuclear bomb on Gaza,” accordingto the Geneva-based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. And by October 16, Euro-Med posted, “The Stench of Death Looms Everywhere in #Gaza, Immediate Halt to the Killing of Civilians Required.”
The saturation bombing of Gaza, where entire apartment buildings filled with residents are destroyed, taking out entire families, amounts to horrific collective killings. Israelis are committing numerous violations of international law, as hospitals are on the verge of collapse, and food, water, and electricity are blocked along with humanitarian aid to Gaza. An Israeli air strike targeted a convoy, killing seventy-three Palestinians and injuring 130 others as they attempted to move south. Euro-Med Monitor condemned the deliberate targeting of civilians being forcibly displaced after Israel’s orders to leave. It was an open practice of forced transfer (transference) outside international law and a “blatant violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” NBC News reported the airstrike on the convoy but failed to report it as a war crime. A PBS news brief softened the blow with a baseless speculation that it was not clear “whether militants were among the passengers.”
Just as President Biden left for Israel, a bomb hit the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza, killing five hundred people, including patients and doctors: a war crime. Israel claimed that Hamas or Islamic Jihad was responsible for the precision strike and huge explosion. From the AP to the New York Times, establishment media framed the story as a dispute between Hamas and the IDF or as an exchange of air strikesbetween them. Jonathan Cook called it Western propaganda, saying, “If Hamas or Islamic Jihad could cause the kind of damage that happened last night, you would hear about it happening in Tel Aviv or Ashkelon too. You don’t, because they can’t.” Caitlin Johnstone included the text of a phone conversation presented by Israel and also argued the unlikely veracity of the evidence. Using altered or invented audio and video, Israel has succeeded in the past in delaying and planting doubt about their role in such violence, at least long enough to allow the story to do its damage. For example, an altered video was used to “prove” that an Israeli sniper did not assassinate Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh or the unprovoked Israeli violence perpetrated at her funeral.
It took time for the dozens of investigations to counter the gaslighting, and the delay facilitated President Biden’s failure to hold the Israeli military accountable. For the time being, once again, the denial allowed Biden to re-confirm US support for Israel, this time allowing Israel to carry on with the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.
Choosing Humanity Over Killing and Destruction
While condemning the Hamas attacks as a crime against humanity, the Center for Constitutional Rights also stated, “It is our commitment to human dignity and the preciousness of life that has long led our organization to stand with Palestinians as they resist Israeli colonization, occupation, and apartheid.” The Center’s statement expressed grief for “the many Israeli civilians killed in the assault on their communities on October 7,” while also decrying “Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, which is in danger of becoming a genocide.”
Common Dreams reported on protests calling for a ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Gaza, organized by IfNotNow and Jewish Voices for Peace. IfNotNow has stated, “We absolutely condemn the killing of innocent civilians and mourn the loss of Palestinian and Israeli life, with numbers rising by the minute. Their blood is on the hands of the Israeli government, the US government which funds and excuses their recklessness, and every international leader who continues to turn a blind eye to decades of Palestinian oppression, endangering both Palestinians and Israelis.”
US establishment media should consider these humanitarian narratives, in contrast to their standard militarized revenge frames, which only fan the flames of genocide that imperil the Palestinian people. #Israel #Palestine
Evidence That an Israeli Jet Dropped an Air Burst Bomb on the al-Ahli Hospital Courtyard
Joe Quinn, Sott.net, Sat, 21 Oct 2023
It’s true that Israel didn’t “bomb the al-Ahli hospital” in Gaza on the night of Oct. 17th 2023. The evidence suggests it did something much worse.
As is the case with all other hospitals in Gaza, al-Ahli hospital had become a refuge for the thousands of people internally displaced in Gaza due to Israel’s massive bombing campaign that began on Oct. 7th. On the night of Oct. 17th, hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children had congregated in the courtyard of the hospital (the hospital itself being already full) because they believed it to be a relatively safe haven from Israeli bombs.
Canon Richard Sewell, the dean of St George’s College in Jerusalem, told the BBC that about 1,000 displaced people were sheltering in the courtyard when it was hit, and about 600 patients and staff were inside the building.
Not only had the IDF already warned this hospital in the three consecutive days before the explosion that it would be attacked, they actually attacked it on Oct. 14th, hitting the cancer ward. Since Oct. 7th, the WHO has reported 59 attacks on healthcare establishments in Gaza City and 137 across the entire territory of the GazaStrip.
Note also that, in the past week, Israeli political and military elite have publicly stated that they view all Palestinian resistance groups as “literal Nazis” and by implication the Palestinian people as “Nazi sympathizers”, and therefore “subhuman” and not entitled to the same rights as “normal” human beings.
Initially, and based on claims by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and hospital staff, the media reported that Israel had bombed the hospital, “killing hundreds of people.” Within a day however, the IDF claimed that the explosion was in fact a result of a PIJ rocket that “misfired” and hit the area, and provided evidence to “prove” it.
Since then, both the UK’s Channel 4 and Al Jazeera (video below) have convincingly debunked this IDF claim, showing that the PIJ rocket in question was fully destroyed by the Iron Dome missile defense system about 7 seconds before the explosion at the hospital, and therefore could not have been responsible for the damage to the courtyard and the deaths of 471 people…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://www.sott.net/article/485298-Evidence-That-an-Israeli-Jet-Dropped-an-Air-Burst-Bomb-on-the-al-Ahli-Hospital-Courtyard
Does Israel have effective nuclear weapons? Chinese military experts have doubts
- As Israel’s war with Hamas rages on in Gaza, international groups worry about potential for nuclear conflict
- Chinese defence contractor says reliability of Israeli nuclear strike capabilities is ‘questionable’
SCMP. Victoria Bela, 20 Oct, 2023
“……………………………………………………………….. the extent of Israel’s nuclear capabilities – and whether the country could use them effectively in battle – remains an open question
Many international organisations and countries – including China – believe that Israel has nuclear weapons. But Israel has conducted few, if any, tests. The mystery that surrounds its nuclear programme has sparked questions among military experts about the nation’s actual deterrence capabilities.
Israel has long maintained a policy of “nuclear ambiguity” – meaning it has never directly confirmed or denied the existence of a nuclear arsenal.
Israel is universally believed to possess nuclear arms stored in a partially disassembled state,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association (ACA), told the Post via email on Thursday.
The nation is “estimated to have 90 nuclear warheads”, with the fissile material stockpiles to have over 200, he said.
Kimball added that the use of nuclear weapons, and even the threat of use, would make Israel “an international pariah and a target of foreign, conventional military attack”.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a 2017 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said in a statement on Monday that “Israel is a nuclear-armed state, the only such state in the Middle East”.
Alicia Sanders-Zakre, ICAN’s policy and research coordinator, told the Post via email that “Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons significantly increases the risks associated with the conflict and contributes to regional tensions”.
“Escalation is a real danger,” she said………………………………..
The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons considers the US, Britain, China, France and Russia to be “nuclear states”, because they built and tested nuclear explosives before 1967. Israel, Pakistan and India have never signed the treaty.
The five treaty-recognised nuclear powers “all have land, sea and air-based nuclear strike capabilities and maintain a higher level of nuclear combat readiness”, according to a paper published earlier this month in a journal run by China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation Limited, an aerospace defence contractor for the People’s Liberation Army.
But according to the paper, the effectiveness of nuclear strikes based solely on land-based capabilities, which is all the authors believe Israel possesses, is “questionable”.
The nuclear nations that have not signed on to the non-proliferation treaty have conducted fewer than 10 nuclear tests each, compared to nearly 50 conducted by China and over 1,000 conducted by the US, according to the United Nations……………………………
Sanders-Zakre noted that Israel was suspected of conducting a joint nuclear weapons test with South Africa in 1979, which was picked up as a flash by the US satellite Vela in waters close to South Africa.
Israel is not known to have conducted any other tests. However, the country did not build its nuclear programme alone.
n the 1960s, France helped Israel establish the Negev Nuclear Research Centre near the city of Dimona, which was capable of producing nuclear weapons. The US only discovered the facility after construction began, according to researchers at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based think tank.
Israel has US-made aircraft capable of delivering nuclear bombs and German-made submarines capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
Israel’s own Jericho ballistic missiles are also capable of delivering nuclear warheads over 1,500km (932 miles) to nearby nations, according to an article written by Clive Williams, a visiting professor at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre.
While the exact details of Israel’s nuclear warheads and delivery methods are unknown, its US- and German-made vehicles could act as reliable delivery methods if fitted for nuclear warheads.
In August, the IAEA’s director general wrote in a report that there was a “long-standing and fundamental difference of views” between Israel and other Middle Eastern states regarding the regulation of nuclear activity.
Kimball pointed out that Israel only has agreements to allow the IAEA to inspect specific facilities and does not – unlike most non-nuclear states – have a comprehensive safeguard agreement “to ensure that civilian nuclear activities and materials are not being diverted for nuclear weapons use.”
Kimball said that while Israel had a nuclear arsenal, the country had “no justification nor any military need to employ nuclear weapons”.
The ACA is “deeply concerned about a further escalation of violence against civilian populations,” Kimball said. “But we are not concerned that this might involve the use of nuclear weapons.”
Although Israel has insisted that it has no interest in “introducing” nuclear weapons to the Middle East, it has continued to avoid signing comprehensive safeguard agreements with the IAEA.
In a vote at the UN General Assembly last year, a vast majority of member states called for Israel to place all of its nuclear sites under IAEA supervision and to get rid of any nuclear weapons it possessed.
more https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3238708/does-israel-have-effective-nuclear-weapons-chinese-military-experts-have-doubts #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes
Israeli Politician Says “Children of Gaza Have Brought This Upon Themselves”
When children are explicitly framed as “not innocent,” all-out genocidal warfare is possible.
TruthOut, By Jonathan Ofir , MONDOWEISS, October 18, 2023
t really is hard to imagine a more malicious statement than “the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves” when children in Gaza are now being massacred by the hundreds. But this was actually said in a recent Knesset session. And it wasn’t someone considered an extreme right-winger, but a liberal centrist – Meirav Ben-Ari from Yair Lapid’s opposition party Yesh Atid.
The full, over-three-hour session from Monday can be seen here. Ben-Ari is evidently getting worked up as Palestinian lawmaker Aida Touma-Sliman (around two hours into the session) bemoans the loss of civilian lives “both in the area surrounding Gaza and in Gaza,” imploring to make an effort to release hostages and to “get the civilians out of the circle of blood.” “Jews as well as Arabs, Israelis as well as Palestinians.” “A child is a child,” Touma-Sliman reminds everyone, pointing out that at that point, over 900 children had been killed from Israel’s bombing of Gaza (a day later, that number swelled to well over a thousand).
All this humanity was just too much for Ben-Ari. She started shouting and heckling Touma-Sliman, saying, “There is not symmetry, there is no symmetry!”
“Between children there is symmetry,” she said.
Ben Ari went livid: “There is no symmetry!!”
Touma-Sliman emphasized: “A child is a child is a child.”
Twenty-five minutes after this unbearable episode, Ben-Ari came up to speak, admittedly unplanned. This is precisely 2.5 hours into the session video:
“I did not plan to speak, of course, but I have to say one thing that should be clear: There is no symmetry. There is no symmetry. Me, my friends, ok, were on the way to the synagogue on the day of Simchat Torah, and they were shot at, only because they were Jews in this state. That’s it. And friends of mine – their children went to the party, to celebrate – seculars, religious, doesn’t matter who, only because they were Jewish, they were murdered. So there is no symmetry! And the children in Gaza – the children in Gaza have brought this upon themselves! We are a peace-seeking nation, a life-loving nation. There is no symmetry – our children are kidnapped over there!” (My emphasis)……………………………………………………………………..
Ben-Ari’s genocidal rhetoric was actually echoing a comment just made by Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who is also known as a liberal, even from further left. At a recent press conference on October 13, Herzog answered a question by Rageh Omar from ITV, who asked him what Israel can do to alleviate the impact on the over two million civilians in Gaza, many of whom have nothing to do with Hamas. Herzog answered:
“We are working, operating militarily in terms according to rules of international law, period. Unequivocally. It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. …………………………………..
This is really unmistakable – Herzog is really implying that an “entire nation is responsible,” and the implication is that they are legitimate targets. However, he later denied that this is what he meant.
This rhetoric has a long history among Israeli politicians. In 2018, when Avigdor Lieberman was Defense Minister, he declared that “there are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip” because “everyone has a connection to Hamas.” This was in April 2018, when Israel was beginning to turkey-shoot unarmed Palestinian protesters in the Great March of Return. When a video filmed by Israeli snipers, where they celebrate their shooting of a motionless, unarmed Palestinian, surfaced on social media around that same time, Lieberman commented that they deserved a medal for their shots. I could just as well mention that Lieberman has advocateddecapitating “disloyal” Palestinian citizens with an axe and the drowning of Palestinian prisoners in the Dead Sea. Lieberman is now regarded as a Netanyahu critic who is considering joining the “unity government” so as to “join the war cabinet in order to bring about the fastest possible victory.”
You may say this is just rhetoric, but these words also lead to actions. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant’s comments referred to Palestinians as “human animals” as Israel closed all the water taps to Gaza, making the already unlivable living conditions there a genocidal nightmare. The relationship between words to actions is obvious. ……. more https://truthout.org/articles/israeli-politician-says-children-of-gaza-have-brought-this-upon-themselves/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=431d0bc2ba-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_3_20_2023_13_41_COPY_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-431d0bc2ba-650192793&mc_cid=431d0bc2ba&mc_eid=73e1cd43d0 #Israel #Palestine
Mass Media Reporters Aren’t Buying Israel’s Hospital Bombing Story
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, OCT 18, 2023 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/mass-media-reporters-arent-buying?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=138065016&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email
A huge blast in Gaza has destroyed the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, killing hundreds of people. The exact death toll is still unknown.
Details of who is responsible for the explosion are being hotly debated by all parties, and this is still a developing story with a lot of details yet to be revealed. But what I’d like to quickly document as things unfold is the highly unusual number of mass media reporters I’ve been seeing who haven’t hesitated to point to Israel as the probable culprit.
After noting that Israel is blaming the blast on a failed rocket launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), MSNBC foreign correspondent Raf Sanchez quickly pointed out that PIJ rockets don’t tend to do that kind of damage, but Israeli missiles do. He also noted that Israel has an extensive history of lying about this sort of thing.
“The Israeli military at this point is not providing any evidence to back up its claims that this was a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket; they are citing intelligence that they have not yet made public,” Sanchez said. “We should also say that this kind of death toll is not what you normally associate with Palestinian rockets. These rockets are dangerous, they are deadly, they do not tend to kill hundreds of people in a single strike in the way that Israeli high explosives — especially these bunker buster bombs that are used to target these Hamas tunnels under Gaza City — do have the potential to kill hundreds of people.”
“And we should say finally that there are instances in the past where the Israeli military has said things in the immediate aftermath of an incident that have turned out not to be true in the long run,” Sanchez added. “And the one example I’ll give you is that when the Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military initially said that she was killed by Palestinian gunmen, and it was only months and months later that they admitted that it was likely an Israeli soldier who fired the fatal shot.”
CNN’s Clarissa Ward said essentially the same thing.
“I will say, just based on seeing these rocket attacks many times over the years, that they don’t usually have an impact like that in terms of the size of the blast, in terms of the scale of the death toll and the scale of the damage,” Ward said. “It’s also not the first time, it’s important to add, that we have seen the IDF categorically deny something before being forced to kind of do an about-face after an extensive investigation.”
BBC foreign correspondent Jon Donnison gave basically the same opinion.
“It’s hard to see what else this could be, really, given the size of the explosion, other than an Israeli air strike, or several air strikes,” Donnison said from Jerusalem. “Because, you know, when we’ve seen rockets being fired out of Gaza, we never see explosions of that scale. We might see half a dozen, maybe a few more people being killed in such rocket attacks, but we’ve never seen anything on the scale of the sort of explosion on the video I was watching earlier.”
That’s three mass media reporters that I’ve seen just in my random information-gathering meanderings — not on their personal social media accounts, but live on air.
It’s highly unusual to see this degree of skepticism in the western press right off the bat when it goes against the information interests of Israel specifically or the US power alliance more generally. Typically we’ve been seeing the media uncritically report unverified claims about Palestinian militants while expressing rigorous skepticism solely toward any information which might benefit the Palestinian resistance, so there’s clearly something about this particular story which makes mass media reporters remarkably reluctant to push the Israeli narrative.
Maybe they’re getting information in their group chats which has caused them to keep Israel’s claims about the hospital bombing at arm’s length, or maybe they’re just looking at the facts and deciding this narrative is too flimsy to get behind. If it looks like Israel’s version of events will fall apart after investigation, they’re not going to want to stake their reputation and their pride on pushing it with their usual gusto during an Israeli military operation that is facing unusually intense scrutiny from the entire world.
Israel does after all have an extensive history of attacking hospitals and healthcare facilities, including in this current operation in Gaza, including apparently bombing this exact same hospital just a few days ago. ReliefWeb, which is run by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, recently published a report on the numerous Israeli strikes that have hit hospitals, ambulances and healthcare workers between October 12 and October 15, and listed among the hospitals hit is the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City — the same hospital that was just destroyed a few days later.
Citing “Al Jazeera V and Personal Communication,” ReliefWeb reports the following:
“14 October 2023: In Gaza city city and governorate, Ahli Arab Hospital was hit by Israeli airstrikes, partially damaging two floors and damaging the ultrasound and mammography room. Four people were injured.”
It’s also probably worth noting that according to the World Health Organization this hospital was one of the twenty hospitals which the IDF had ordered to evacuate because of the aggressions it was planning to inflict on that part of Gaza.
Again, information is still coming in and this developing story could possibly wind up looking very different from what it looks like right now. But if I was an Israel apologist, I don’t think I’d find the current winds in the mass media very encouraging. #Israel #Palestine
Israeli Military Has Killed 1 Child in Gaza Every 15 Minutes: Rights Group
“Additional children are unaccounted for and missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings, indicating the true death toll is much higher,” said Defense for Children International–Palestine.
By Jake Johnson / Common Dreams, https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/17/israeli-military-has-killed-1-child-in-gaza-every-15-minutes-rights-group/
Israel’s relentless bombing campaign in the occupied Gaza Strip has killed more than 1,000 Palestinian children—roughly one every 15 minutes—since it began on October 7, according to the latest tally from Defense for Children International–Palestine.
Children have faced some of the most horrific impacts of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, where roughly half of the population is under the age of 18. Israel has dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza—home to 2.3 million people—in the wake of Hamas’ deadly attack.
Mohammad Abu Rukbeh, senior Gaza field researcher at DCIP, said in a statement Monday that “the repercussions of this war will not only affect the victims we have lost, some of which are still trapped under the rubble of their homes, and not only the residential areas that have been completely destroyed, including our own homes, but the psychological impact on us civilians and our children will be catastrophic.”
Research released before Israel’s latest bombardment of Gaza found that four out of five children in the Gaza Strip reported living with depression, grief, and fear amid a yearslong Israeli blockade and frequent outbreaks of deadly violence.
Israel’s current military campaign in Gaza is its deadliest to date, and the unlawful total blockade it has imposed on the strip has further deprived children and the rest of the civilian population of food, fuel, electricity, and clean water. Some Gazans have resorted to drinking seawater and water contaminated by sewage, and hospital staff have reportedly had to drink from IV solution bags.
“Israeli authorities cut water supply to Gaza on October 9, and since then, all three water desalination plants in Gaza have been forced to cease operations,” DCIP noted Monday, citing the United Nations. “Even though Israeli authorities claimed to resume water supply to southern Gaza yesterday, there is no electricity to operate water pumps, Israeli airstrikes have damaged many water lines, and very little water in Gaza is drinkable in the first place.”
“Israeli authorities cut water supply to Gaza on October 9, and since then, all three water desalination plants in Gaza have been forced to cease operations,” DCIP noted Monday, citing the United Nations. “Even though Israeli authorities claimed to resume water supply to southern Gaza yesterday, there is no electricity to operate water pumps, Israeli airstrikes have damaged many water lines, and very little water in Gaza is drinkable in the first place.”
Al Jazeerareported that more than 70 people were killed in their homes on Tuesday “after Israel conducted air raids on Gaza’s Khan Younis, Rafah, and Deir el-Balah.”
Last week, the Israeli military ordered the entire population of northern Gaza to evacuate to the south ahead of an expected ground invasion and was subsequently accused of bombing supposed “safe routes” that civilians were using to flee.
Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement Tuesday that “appalling reports that civilians attempting to relocate to southern Gaza were struck and killed by an explosive weapon must be independently and thoroughly investigated, as must all allegations of serious violations of international humanitarian law.”
“Those who managed to comply with the Israeli authorities’ order to evacuate are now trapped in the south of the Gaza Strip, with scant shelter, fast-depleting food supplies, little or no access to clean water, sanitation, medicine, and other basic needs,” said Shamdasani. “We echo the U.N. call for a humanitarian pause to enable aid delivery and to prevent further suffering and deaths of the already much beleaguered civilian population of Gaza. Urgent immediate, unimpeded humanitarian access needs to be ensured.” #Israel #Palestine
Atrocity Propaganda
All of this was achieved under a cloak of respectability in Western media by using the images and stories of killed Israeli children.
Israel and its supporters in the West are helping to provide psychological cover for an ongoing massacre of Palestinian civilians, writes Elizabeth Vos.
SCHEERPOST, By Elizabeth Vos / Consortium News 18 Oct 23
As merciless bombing in Gaza continues, Israel and its supporters have weaponized dead Israeli children and false narratives about them to justify massacring Palestinian children on an unimaginable scale in Gaza.
First it was the “40 beheaded babies” story, then it was a series of images of apparently burned infants, which whether fake or real, were published by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an effort to further justify Israel slaughtering thousands of Palestinian children.
And slaughter we have seen. Israel so far has killed over 2,800 Palestinians, over 1000 of them children. Israel was reported to have bombed a pediatric hospital in Gaza with illegal white phosphorus, and shelled at least one school where dozens of children and their families sought shelter, killing at least 27 children. Entire extended families wiped out in their homes.
Civilians were told to flee to Southern Gaza, a potentially official ethnic cleansing in itself (if they are never allowed to return), before being bombed in their attempt to flee. (Israel says those were Hamas IEDs in the road to prevent people from leaving.) Medics were shelled in their effort to help the injured. [The WHO decried an Israeli order to evacuate 2,000 patients from 22 hospitals to southern Gaza.]
Dozens of journalists have been killed, or witnessed the death of their own families. Images and videos of dead Palestinian children pulled from the rubble have flooded social media (before Israel cut off the internet). All of this was achieved under a cloak of respectability in Western media by using the images and stories of killed Israeli children.
After the initial Hamas surprise attack, an oft-repeated rallying cry of Israel apologists was that Hamas had beheaded 40 Israeli babies. Despite the claims being referenced publicly by U.S. President Joe Biden (since walked-back by the administration), there has to date been no confirmation of such a story. According to The Grayzone, the claims were sourced to “David Ben Zion, a Deputy Commander of Unit 71 of the Israeli army who also happens to be an extremist settler leader who incited violent riots against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank earlier this year.”
Forced to Apologize
CNN journalist Sara Sidner, who first aired the narrative, was forced to publicly recant and apologize for her statements………………..
This wasn’t only a journalistic error. It was Western media falling in line with the Israeli government’s claim of an atrocity, only to walk back the narrative when Israel refused to confirm the story. Her apology came after the original story went wildly viral on social media and repeated in multiple corporate news outlets, as noted by Mintpress News. …………………………………………………………
One cannot accept the weaponization of such a crime, no matter how horrendous, in order to commit equally horrific crimes against other innocents. That an official Israeli government social media account would publish such images — and that Netanyahu would show them to U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to drum up support for the Israeli cause — represents a direct effort by Israel to weaponize the death and (so far alleged) imagery of dead Israeli babies to excuse a multitude of war crimes. …………………………………………………………………….
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis and musician Justin Bieber posted images of Palestinian children and land respectively, as if they were Israeli children and bomb damage, only to later delete their mistaken posts.
Footage of Palestinian children kept in chicken coop cages by Israeli forces circulated online, wrongly described as Israeli children captured by Hamas.
Other videos falsely purporting to show Hamas members with abducted children were widely circulated on social media.
A video of a woman being burned at a concert was found to have originated in Guatemala after going viral as a victim of Hamas. All of this, whether intentionally spread as misinformation or by mistake, acts to strengthen psychological cover for an ongoing massacre of Palestinian civilians.
Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, publicly stated regarding the cutting off of food, electricity, water and other necessities to all of Gaza that “we are fighting human animals and acting accordingly.” Even if his comments refer specifically to Hamas fighters, such collective punishment is illegal under international law and is one of the many war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinian civilians in the week since Hamas’s attack. ………………………………………………………………..
With Israel also having cut the internet to Gaza, there is now little opportunity for journalists to broadcast the unfolding atrocity to the rest of the world. Caitlin Johnstone and others argue that this is a direct effort to hide atrocities that previously had been documented by journalists and Gaza residents on their phones.
In the war of propaganda, Israel and its supporters have highlighted the deaths of Jewish children, spread false stories about alleged beheadings of Jewish babies, and dishonestly portrayed Palestinian trauma as Israeli trauma.
There is one conclusion to be drawn from the ongoing atrocity appropriation and the carnage it excuses: even if the crimes by Hamas as described by Israel were all true, it doesn’t justify ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, the targeting of civilians and the murder of children by bomb, by starvation, and lack of medical care. Nothing could ever justify this. https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/18/atrocity-propaganda/ #Israel #Palestine
Israel asks US for ‘emergency’ $10 billion military funding– New York Times
Rt.com 18 Oct 23
The White House has been working on a package that would combine aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, the newspaper said
srael has requested $10 billion in emergency assistance from the US, the New York Times reported on Monday, citing three unnamed officials. The White House and members of Congress are working on a package that would combine military assistance to Israel with aid to Ukraine and Taiwan, as well as funds to fortify the US-Mexico border, the paper said.
Speaking during a visit to Tel Aviv on Sunday, US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said lawmakers had discussed supplying Israel with new and replacement ammunition, precision-guided bombs and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) kits, which convert standard munitions into more accurate ones, according to the NYT…………………………………………..
On Monday, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Washington could afford to support Israel’s military needs as well as Ukraine’s. She insisted that the financial resources of the US are sufficient to back its allies abroad. However, the official acknowledged concerns over the potential economic impact of a wider conflict in the Middle East.
While top US officials insist that both Israel and Ukraine can be supported, CNN reported last week that the Pentagon had called on defense manufacturers to ramp up production to make up for shortfalls in stockpiles due to arms being transferred to Kiev, in order to ensure it can supply Israel.
On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that his country was prepared for a “long war” and would fight until it completely defeats Hamas. He added that Israel is willing to retaliate against the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah if it attempts to interfere in the conflict. https://www.rt.com/news/585154-israel-asks-us-10-billion/
Israel’s Violence Will Never Bring “Safety” to Anyone, Including Jews
As the horrific siege against Gaza escalates, we need to confront the violence of Israel’s ethnonationalist militarism.
By Sarah Lazare & Maya Schenwar , TRUTHOUT, October 18, 2023
he horror and heartbreak in Gaza reaches new proportions each minute: Israel’s siege has killed at least 3,400 people and injured more than 12,000 in the past week and a half, and a possible ground invasion threatens unspeakable levels of new violence. The Israeli forces and settlers have also killed 61 and injured 1,250 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The death tolls climb even as Palestinians and those in solidarity with them are marching and rallying worldwide in powerful and urgent protests.
For us, as anti-Zionist Jewish journalists, the past week and a half has been a flood of many griefs.
We grieve and struggle against the ongoing, now catastrophically heightened violence of Israeli colonization, occupation, apartheid and genocidal campaign against Palestinians, carried out by a government that is cynically invoking the names of Jews to intensify the oppressive policies it was already invested in.
And we watch with rising horror as the Israeli government instrumentalizes the grief of Jewish people who’ve lost loved ones in the Hamas attacks, which killed 1,400 people and injured 3,400. The Israeli government is fashioning this grief into a weapon, exploiting it to justify the annihilation of Gaza (even as some Israelis who lost loved ones in the attacks urge against taking vengeance against Palestinians).
Indeed, it is in the name of Jewish “safety” and Jewish grief that not only Israel but almost all of Europe, and certainly the United States, are marching lockstep behind the new unity government’s maximalist war, as it kills thousands and carries out a potential second Nakba, forcing an estimated 1.1 million people from their homes. Jewish “safety” is the rationale for deploying white phosphorus, which can cause severe toxic burns, in Gaza and Lebanon, as Israel’s defense minister declares “we are fighting human animals.” President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, nearly every member of Congress, and the likes of Lindsay Graham, an open affiliate of antisemitic pastor John Hagee, are all invoking Jewish safety to lend their unqualified support to what is clearly a massacre.
But a growing number of Jews — including many descendants of Holocaust survivors and pogrom survivors — are rejecting the idea that colonial violence ever brings “safety” for anyone. This includes, for some, recognizing that the political ideology of modern Zionism, and the military apparatus that has developed alongside it, is a danger to all, including Jews.
The actions of the state of Israel, whose 75-year history was forged in British colonialism, steeped in the blood and ethnic displacement of Palestinians, and politically and financially upheld by the U.S., are a tragic illustration of this reality. The events of the last week and a half clarify this further. Israel’s systems of occupation and apartheid, which have built upon an infrastructure of ever-increasing militarism and subjugation of Palestinians, are a deep well of violence. The roots of the tragic deaths we saw unfold on October 7 are, as Jewish Voice for Peace has pointed out, apartheid and systemic colonial oppression.
And Israel’s apparent lack of concern even for its own people, as it attacks Gaza wholesale while 199 Israelis are reportedly held hostage there, should remind us that human lives (including the lives of Jews) are not its top priority.
This disregard for human life, including Jewish life, is rooted in a specific history. Theodor Herzl, a founder of modern Zionism, said in his 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State that Israel will be “neutral” and will require only a “professional army.” However, the concept of “neutrality” on colonized land is a contradiction in terms, and predictably, Israel was established as a heavily militarized society in which, from the beginning, military service has been compulsory for Jews. In The Jewish State, Herzl called for the creation of a company to liquidate the business interests of Jews departing their home countries and organize commerce in the new country. To raise capital for this company, he wrote, “Not only poor Jews, but also Christians who wanted to get rid of them, would subscribe a small amount to this fund.” British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, who issued the declaration announcing Britain’s support for a Jewish state in Palestine, was motivated by his fear of what he termed the “undoubted evils” of Eastern European Jewish migration to Britain.
For the colonizers who pushed for the creation of Israel, safety for Jews was never the real goal. Instead, Israel presented a convenient alternative to welcoming large numbers of Jewish refugees into their own countries. The U.S. turned away and persecuted thousands of Jewish refugees, including those seeking asylum from Nazi Germany. The “Jewish state,” which is often portrayed as having emerged as a peaceful answer to antisemitic violence, was partly forged to serve the interests of actors who were either antisemitic or callous to the suffering of Jews. In supporting Israel, the U.S. and other colonizers were pursuing geopolitical power in a colonial context, a reality that continues today, at the expense primarily of Palestinians, as racist dehumanization undergirds modern Zionism.
While most Jews in the U.S. report that they view Israel as an important part of their Judaism, a significant number do not, and in fact forcefully reject the political ideology reinforcing an ethnonationalist state. It’s worth remembering that ever since modern Zionism has existed, it has had critics, including from the Jewish left.
Today, many such critics are involved in efforts, in coalition with Palestinian activists, to reject ethnonationalism and colonization, and instead work toward building a society based on justice and equality, in which Palestinians are neither besieged, occupied, exiled, nor treated as second-class citizens, and all can live in safety.
In the decades leading up to World War II, many leftist Jews did not want to throw in their lot with British imperialism, to which political Zionism was inextricably tied. And some recognized the antisemitism that propelled colonial powers to support the establishment of Israel, while others understood that imposing an exclusivist Jewish state was contrary to democratic principles……………………………………………………………
Anti-Zionist Jews recognize that we must do the opposite: Reject the negation of Palestinians, in all its forms.
While Jewish anti-Zionism isn’t a majority position, it is an undeniable force in U.S. politics today. Jewish Voice for Peace, a U.S. organization, released a statement in 2019 explaining why it takes an anti-Zionist position.
“Zionism has meant profound trauma for generations, systematically separating Palestinians from their homes, land, and each other,” it states. “Zionism, in practice, has resulted in massacres of Palestinian people, ancient villages and olive groves destroyed, families who live just a mile away from each other separated by checkpoints and walls, and children holding onto the keys of the homes from which their grandparents were forcibly exiled.”
The statement goes on, “In sharing our stories with one another, we see the ways Zionism has also harmed Jewish people. Many of us have learned from Zionism to treat our neighbors with suspicion, to forget the ways Jews built home and community wherever we found ourselves to be.” And the number of U.S. Jews who are willing to openly critique and question Israel’s occupation, even if they might not consider themselves anti-Zionists, has swelled since the Trump administration.
In the U.S., anti-Zionists, alongside critics of the Israeli government’s actions, also point to the massive military complex that sustains Israel — which spent $23.4 billion on its military in 2022, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute — and our own country’s complicity: Israel receives about $3.3 billion in military aid from the U.S. annually.
Today, members of Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and other Jews and allies are taking action in Washington, D.C., urging President Biden to use his leverage to force Israel to halt its assault on Palestinians in Gaza. They are saying, “No genocide in our name,” and many are taking arrests in acts of civil disobedience……………………………………………………………………………….
Some within Israel’s political system are moving to crack down on Israelis who oppose the siege on Gaza. Haaretz reported on October 15 that “Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi is promoting regulations that would allow him to direct police to arrest civilians, remove them from their homes, or seize their property if he believes they have spread information that could harm national morale or served as the basis for enemy propaganda.”
And there are some reports that Israelis who oppose the killing of Palestinian civilians are facing physical threats and firings. These are not the signs of a state that is truly invested in the safety of all Jews, let alone the 18 percent of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian.
Meanwhile, there is a deficit of coverage in the U.S. of what Palestinians are facing right now. Most U.S. press outlets are telling the stories of Israeli civilians killed but still giving shockingly little airtime to Palestinian civilians, even as Israel embraces war on a scale we have not seen in our lifetime.
Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank and throughout the world have been speaking out about this atrocity, sometimes at great personal risk to themselves……………
It is the “deadliest time for journalists in Gaza,” with at least 12 journalists already killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
With rising horror, we witness what Palestinians are facing — the immediate threat of annihilation. Accordingly, we should recognize that, even as we talk about how the reality of the modern Zionist project, helmed by a right-wing government, hurts Jews by offering a false promise of safety and peace, we must never obscure that the group of people most targeted by this political system is Palestinians. They are the ones who have been colonized, displaced and besieged even before Israel launched its relentless bombing campaign and cut
off electricity, food and water to a strip that is home to 2 million people, the majority of them children.
Palestinians are the ones living under military occupation in the West Bank, and as second-class citizens in Israel, thrown into administrative detention, evicted from their homes, facing tear gas canisters and live fire for the mere act of protest, forced to navigate apartheid structures that leave them traveling on different roads, suffering systematic dispossession.
Palestinians are the ones who have been exiled from their homes for generations, denied the most basic right to return. And now they are facing an extermination campaign.
There is no safety for anyone in a society based on ethnonationalist militarism. Safety can only come through collective liberation, throwing our grief into the struggle against Palestinian genocide, apartheid and colonization, toward a society premised on justice and equality. We have to confront the brutal history of Zionism and unequivocally reject the unspeakable violence against the Palestinian people carried out in our name. https://truthout.org/articles/israels-violence-will-never-bring-safety-to-anyone-including-jews/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=431d0bc2ba-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_3_20_2023_13_41_COPY_05&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-431d0bc2ba-650192793&mc_cid=431d0bc2ba&mc_eid=73e1cd43d0 #Israel #Palestine
Israel postpones ground operation in Gaza – NYT
https://www.rt.com/news/584962-nyt-israel-postpones-operation-gaza-weather/ 16 Oct 23
The offensive had been planned for the weekend but was rescheduled due to adverse weather conditions, the newspaper claims
Israel has decided to put off the start of its ground operation against Hamas in Gaza due to adverse weather conditions, the New York Times has claimed. The newspaper is also reporting that the incursion will likely come at quite a price for the Israeli military, given its scope as well as the fortifications built by the militants.
In an article on Saturday the media outlet alleged, citing anonymous Israeli officers, that the “invasion was initially planned for the weekend but was delayed by a few days, at least in part because of weather conditions.” These are so far precluding Israeli pilots and drone operators from providing ground forces with air cover, the NYT explained.
It quoted three unnamed Israeli officers as confirming that the imminent operation would involve tens of thousands of service members, including commando units, and tanks supported by warplanes, helicopter gunships, drones and artillery fired from land and sea. The alleged goal is the complete destruction of Hamas’ leadership, which has controlled the enclave since 2007.
The planned ground operation is expected to be the largest of its kind in over a decade, the NYT report continues, adding that it remains unclear if the IDF is planning to take control of only part of the densely-populated enclave or all of it. There is also a big question mark over whether Israelis are going to run Gaza or install a new Palestinian administration should they succeed in removing Hamas from power there, it wrote.
As for the imminent incursion itself, the anonymous Israeli officers told the NYT that it is likely to take months and to exact a large number of casualties on their side, as they will have to clear a vast network of Hamas’ underground tunnels.
Commenting on the ongoing Israeli air raids against Hamas on Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that his country had unleashed “unprecedented force.” He stressed, however, that “this is just the beginning,” adding that “our enemies have only started paying the price.”
According to the latest estimates, Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7 has resulted in at least 1,300 people killed, with nearly 3,500 injured. Dozens of people, both Israelis and other nationals, were taken hostage by the militants.
In Gaza, at least 1,900 Palestinians, including 614 children and 370 women, have been killed in the ensuing massive Israeli airstrikes over the past week, the Palestinian Health Ministry has reported.
Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian warned on Saturday that his country would respond should Israel go ahead with a ground operation in Gaza. #Israel #Palestine
1 This Month
23 April – WEBINAR – Why new nuclear reactors are the wrong tools for decarbonization Thursday, April 23 • 1 AM – 2 AM AEST
World Nuclear Power. Reactors 1951-2026, 75 Years of Nuclear Power.
Interactive Map– https://dv.worldnuclearreport.org/
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- April 2026 (231)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
- May 2025 (261)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 