The global humanitarian group Save the Children said Thursday that roughly 30% of the kids killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since last October were under the age of 5 — likely a significant undercount given that thousands of the child victims of Israel’s U.S.-backed assault have yet to be identified. Citing a recent list published by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, Save the Children noted that of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
What women face in Afghanistan is a crime against humanity, say activists pushing for recognition by UN
Explainer: What is gender apartheid – and can anything be done to stop it?
When Sima Samar and other Afghan women came up with the term “gender apartheid” in the 1990s to describe the systematic oppression faced by women and girls under Taliban rule, she never imagined it would have become a key weapon in the fight to hold a second Taliban regime to account for their crimes two decades later.
“When the first Taliban regime fell, the idea that we would once again see the persecution, isolation and segregational and systematic repression of half the Afghan population on the basis of their gender seemed impossible,” says Samar, who served as the minister for women’s affairs after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and now lives in exile. “But now, in 2024, it is happening again and this time we must find a way to fight for justice.”
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Israeli occupation forces have extended their genocidal campaign in Gaza to the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Using drone strikes, troops in armored vehicles and bulldozers, their regular raids since October 7, 2023, have escalated into extensive and deadly attacks. Between August 28 and September 6, Israel launched “Operation Summer Camps,” a major military invasion…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.
Plea for repatriation comes as high court refused appeal brought by Save the Children to return Australian families of slain Islamic State fighters
Australian children held in a Syrian detention camp for more than five years – some born in the camp and having never left it – are despairing as they watch hundreds of other foreign children leave for home.
“They can’t understand why they don’t have a chance to be saved like the other Australians and given a shot at a normal life,” one mother in the camp told Guardian Australia.
Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
To mark the centenary of the rights of the child, Save the Children has partnered with children from Indonesia, Syria and Ukraine to produce a unique and creative photo series reflecting their identities, rights and hopes for the future. Working with photographers Ulet Ifansasti (in Indonesia), Kate Stanworth (in Jordan), and Oksana Parafeniuk (in Romania), children were invited to create photo montages and write poems expressing who they are, what matters to them and how they feel about their rights
*Some names have been changed
Continue reading…This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.
The Thai government’s sudden closure of six schools in southern Surat Thani province has left nearly 2,000 Myanmar migrant children without access to education, school officials and parents told Radio Free Asia.
The government said the schools were operating illegally with teachers who didn’t have the legal right to live and work in Thailand. Children from the closed schools can enroll in public schools in the province, the government said in an Sept. 8 announcement.
A labor activist working on the issue of migrant workers in Thailand said 24 teachers were being investigated by Thai authorities and may face legal action under Thai law.
Thai officials also apparently don’t want the children singing Myanmar’s national anthem or dressed in different uniforms than at Thai schools, according to the founder of one of the schools who asked to remain anonymous so as not to draw attention from Thai authorities.
“They want the education system to be integrated with the Thai system, where a Thai teacher should lead the school, only the Thai national anthem should be sung, and the image of the King must be properly maintained,” he said.
One of the schools closed in Surat Thani last week served more than 1,000 students, according to Zaw Khaing Myo, the school’s principal. The Myittar Yeik School was established in 2022, he said.
“We have many children, and they are facing many difficulties. Now, parents cannot leave their children at home or take them to work, making it impossible for them to work without constant worry,” he said.
Children have already missed at least two years of education due to the COVID-19 pandemic, said Thein Aye, the father of two students at Myittar Yeik School.
“It is sad that this is happening just as they were finally able to return to school,” he said.
The National Human Rights Commission of Thailand on Sept. 8 called for a review of the school closures and emphasized the need to ensure that migrant children have access to education.
Aid workers specializing in migrant issues estimate that at least 50,000 Myanmar migrant children are currently studying in Thailand.
The Thai Ministry of Education has instructed local authorities to inspect other schools for Myanmar migrants to verify whether teachers have a permit to work in Thailand.
As a result, migrant schools in other parts of Thailand – such as Mae Sot – are now worried that they will be shut down, according to the Myanmar migrant school founder.
RFA has contacted both the Thai Embassy in Yangon and the Myanmar Embassy in Bangkok to inquire about this situation, but no response was immediately received.
Translated by Kalyar Lwin. Edited by Matt Reed.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
China’s National People’s Congress is considering amendments to the law that would expand compulsory military training at universities and ‘national defense education’ in high schools.
Under the amendments, branches of the People’s Liberation Army will be stationed in colleges, universities and high schools across the country to boost a nationwide program of approved military education and physical training to prepare young people for recruitment, state news agency Xinhua reported on Sept. 10.
“The second draft of the revised bill clarifies that ordinary colleges, universities and high schools should strengthen military skills training, hone students’ willpower, enhance organizational discipline, and improve the level of military training,” the agency said in a summary of the amendments.
China has long had a culture of military training in schools and universities, with military-style boot-camps for kids on vacation and ‘defense education bases’ catering to corporations and tour groups. The authorities in Hong Kong have also imposed such training on former young protesters, alongside “patriotic education.”
People’s Armed Forces departments already exist at every level of government, in schools, universities and state-owned enterprises to strengthen ruling Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, control over local militias, guard weapons caches and find work for veterans.
After decades of relative invisibility throughout the post-Mao economic boom, they are once more mobilizing to build militias in big state-owned companies and consolidate party leadership over local military operations.
But analysts say the amendments, if adopted, will standardize these activities under guidelines laid down by the CCP’s military arm, in a bid to create more potential recruits as part of preparations for war. While Chinese citizens have an obligation to serve in the People’s Liberation Army on paper, this hasn’t been implemented since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
‘Glorious’ military service
Under the planned amendments, high schools will also be obliged to teach children about military service, and create an atmosphere in which military service is seen as “glorious,” Xinhua said.
Primary and junior high schools are included in the plan, which calls on them to “combine classroom teaching with extracurricular activities,” according to the China News Service.
“Students in colleges and high schools are required to offer compulsory basic military training, while junior high schools may also organize such activities,” the report said.
According to a report in the Legal Daily newspaper, the amendments aim to build a nationwide program of military training that connects schools at all levels and of all types.
They also guarantee funding for these activities, which will include military camps and “national defense education bases,” the paper said.
“They want students to know about national defense, an awareness of who the enemy is, at a much younger age,” Shan-Son Kung, an associate researcher at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview.
“[They also] want kids to get basic military training, which is being extended lower down the system, so as to universalize basic military knowledge,” he said. “The aim is to step up preparations for a future war, so that there will be more conscripts available following the passing of the Mobilization Law.”
The National Defense Mobilization Law of the People’s Republic of China took effect on July 1, 2010, with the aim of setting up a nationwide structure for national defense mobilization.
Currently, the Chinese military mostly relies on recruitment, and most of the standing army are professional soldiers, Kung said.
“In the next few years, we could see growing tensions between China and the United States, and China may look to strengthen its economic and military mobilization as well as the frequency and scope of exercises sooner rather than later,” Kung said. “They may be making advance preparations for a large-scale war.”
‘Educational brainwashing’
China already requires graduates in fluid mechanics, machinery, chemistry, missile technology, radar, science and engineering, weapons science and other technical disciplines to join the People’s Liberation Army.
Taiwan-based Chinese dissident Gong Yujian said the Chinese Communist Party is aware that it may face great difficulty in recruiting young people to the military, given the shrinking of that age group due to the one-child policy, so it’s stepping up pro-military propaganda while they’re still young.
“They need to cultivate high school students to be loyal to the party and patriotic, and worship the People’s Liberation Army,” Gong said. “It’s educational brainwashing.”
“That way, they can join up after graduation and boost the People’s Liberation Army’s recruitment figures,” he said.
Gong said he still has memories of some military training exercises from when he was in high school.
“When we were in school, we had seven days’ military training, but it was just a formality,” he said. “The local armed police force sent soldiers to our school to teach the students how to march, and how to fold a blanket.”
“But we didn’t even so much as touch a firearm,” he said.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Roseanne Gerin.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Hsia Hsiao-hwa for RFA Mandarin.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Israel has attacked 16 schools in Gaza in the past six weeks, killing hundreds of Palestinians, rights group Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported this week — as hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza should have been starting a new school year. According to Euro-Med Monitor, Israel has killed 217 Palestinians across 16 schools now functioning as shelters in Gaza since the beginning of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The World Health Organization has completed the first phase of a critical polio vaccination campaign in central Gaza. After health officials confirmed Gaza’s first polio case in 25 years, the Israeli military agreed to calls for limited humanitarian pauses on its attacks in order for aid organizations to carry out vaccinations. But “there’s real practical, operational problems with this current pause,” says Yanti Soeripto, president and CEO of Save the Children US, whose staff is part of the vaccine drive. “It is not a ceasefire at all. It is an eight-hour pause every day.” As Israel has repeatedly attacked civilians awaiting the provision of aid over the course of its war, it is “difficult to reach normal coverage numbers” — especially for the two-dose vaccine course necessary to vaccinate against polio. Soeripto also discusses outbreaks in other current war zones, including the recent outbreak of mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and warns that “these diseases often cause even more casualties than bombs and bullets.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This post was originally published on IndigenousX.
This blog originally appeared here on Proof That I’m Alive.
A couple of weeks ago, I plunged into Lake Michigan. Unlike usual, the water felt warm. It was easy to run all the way in and easy to float over the waves. Montrose beach was crowded with families, pitching tents to keep out of the sun. Children played, laughed, and cried. Midwesterners who still hadn’t made it out into the sun crisped their pale shoulders. It would have been a perfectly relaxing day, but fighter jets circled above everyone’s heads — doing dives and turning every which way. Mothers plugged their children’s ears and I saw a baby wearing noise canceling headphones.
It was the Air and Water show — an annual proud display of American military capabilities. They are the same jets that fly over the shores of Gaza, dropping bombs on families. That’s what I thought about — it was just by happenstance that we were there watching these planes as a performance rather than in Gaza as a weapon of mass slaughter. The more places I travel to, the more I realize how much the world looks the same. People everywhere are really kind and generous — the only thing that separates us is if the stars align to have us born under the boot of the United States or not.
As the jets flew over our heads I felt my stomach sour. In two weeks, the Democratic National Convention would come to Chicago and it was a present opportunity to make clear the contradictions that kept me up at night. Once months and months away, the DNC was finally around the corner.
This week, members of the Democratic Party came from all parts of the country to convene in Chicago. They were coronating Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, a woman no one really voted for. Even in the face of this blatant lack of democracy, the party members were elated to choose her. They carried signs with her husband’s name and applause erupted from the tens of thousands of people in the United Center when she declared that the United States would have the “most lethal military” in the world under her leadership. To the people well aware of the millions of people the United States killed in the last twenty years alone, her statement was a threat.
The week was marked by the obvious gaps between the people going into the United Center and the people outside of it.
There was a young woman that sat outside the exit of the Democratic National Convention on its third night reading the names of the children Israel has killed in the last ten months. She did it for hours, until her speaker battery died. She did it alone, taking care to pronounce every child’s name correctly and to say their age at the time of their murder. Without her, many of the DNC guests wouldn’t necessarily be confronted with the carnage members of their party is carrying out.
Outside the gates of the DNC I saw a young woman making sure the children of Palestine weren’t just numbers, and I saw people laughing at her for doing so. They laughed loudly and mocked her voice. They mocked the names of the dead babies. They yelled at her to leave them alone. They left the coronation ceremony livid that they had to even hear about Gaza.
That night was demoralizing, and it’s something I will remember for the rest of my life.
Democrats laugh at the names of dead children. They openly refuse to let a Palestinian speak for two minutes at their four day long event. They order riot cops on people protesting a genocide. They have their parties, fundraisers, and happy hours while bodies pile up. If they really didn’t think the genocide was so bad, they wouldn’t get so mad at us for reminding them. They knew that the people they were rallying behind are cheering on mass slaughter — they’ve just weighed their fun, their careers, and their vanity against the lives of 180,000 Palestinians and decided that nothing could be more important than themselves. I don’t care what they said to me, or my friends, but I hope our faces and our presence made them feel even an ounce of discomfort. In the best case scenario, I hope they went to sleep hearing the echoes of the martyrs’ names. I still foolishly hope they turn a corner at some point.
There’s a lot to be said about the Democratic National Convention. It happened in the city with the largest Palestinian population in the United States. Plenty of our neighbors here have lost dozens and dozens of their immediate and extended families and Kamala Harris took to the stage to promise her ironclad support to their executioners. Riot cops filed into the streets, prepared to use the kettling tactics they used from the Israeli military. All of a sudden, the place I call home felt unrecognizable. The air of the coronation felt heavy — it didn’t feel like home. There were points where I was with thousands of other people, chanting in unison, but still felt so lonely. Luxury SUVs carried important people into important buildings for important events. And between us and the importance, there were police with rifles strapped to their chests.
But there were also good people. Like the girl outside the convention. And the thousand of people that marched with us. And the Shake Shack worker that joined us because he had 15 minutes before his shift started. And the security that had to kick us out to keep their job but told us how much what we were doing meant to them.
In the lead up to the DNC, we spent so much time thinking about the last DNC that happened here in 1968. Protests against the Vietnam war took to the streets in small numbers, demanding an end to the war. They were met with horrible police brutality, and mass arrests with long legal battles in their wake. Our mentors from ‘68 urged us not to be nostalgic for those days. I still admire them for going face to face with the Chicago riot cops, but I’ve also taken their reflections of ‘68 very seriously — they didn’t end the war on Vietnam. Many of them feel like they could have focused more on building a sustainable movement that people could join for the long haul. The 2024 DNC in Chicago presented us a unique opportunity — we had to take this huge moment of mass mobilization and make sure our efforts and organization doesn’t get washed away when all the balloons on the United Center floor are popped, and the important people fly out of O’Hare. When the dust settles and the most powerful people in the world leave our city, how will we keep fighting? I was happy when so many people asked us what was next, because it meant we were thinking long term.
In our own discourses on the left, the week was consumed by the discussion of tactics – what works and what doesn’t. An organizer I know reminded us about our responsibility to be a movement people want to join. There are plenty of people who are sympathetic to our cause but haven’t figured out how to be part of it. There’s millions of people without a movement home. Our cause is already popular, it’s already growing every day. Are we doing what we can to make sure people know where to go? Are we keeping our eyes on the prize or are we getting so wrapped up in nostalgia that we can’t see what we will be capable of a year from now if we move strategically? We are nothing without the people. Our responsibility is to the people —not to our egos, not to our careers, not to the vanity of our organizations, and not to our impulses. As a movement we generally have to be better at unlearning instant gratification and also embracing a diversity of tactics. But that’s something for another day.
It is easy to stand on a police line. It’s easy to yell at politicians. It’s easy to say things and do things by yourself. It’s hard to organize your neighbors and talk to new people about things they don’t immediately understand — my hope comes from the idea that once we get really good at that, the light at the end of the tunnel will be as clear as day.
Chicagoans are loud, principled, and good people and because of that there are 2.6 million reasons to love this city. For a few days Chicagoans made certain democrats couldn’t walk around our city without seeing and hearing about the people of Gaza. It’s my hope that we see that as a small success, and also my hope that we saw the week of mobilizations as a jumping off point for building the world we want to see.
Lake Michigan is connected to the ocean through narrow waterways along the northern border of the United States, and someone mentioned at a protest that it’s not unfathomable that the waves crashing onto the shores of Gaza were once here in Chicago, and vice versa. Even if we don’t have skies that are absent of fighter jets in my lifetime, every second spent moving us towards that kind of life was worth it. As long as we don’t throw in the towel, we are closer than ever to that reality.
The post You Will Hear the Names of the Dead: The DNC in Chicago first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Alaa Jamal’s pain and suffering is wound so tightly around her heart that it shields it from all the horrors she’s lived through. So even though she’s in the crosshairs of Netanyahu’s hatred’s sights, her heart beats unceasingly, in defiance of what the Occupation has done to her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to keep the remnants of her family alive: a one year old son named Eid and a three year old daughter named Sanaa. Alaa calls her daughter Princess, an apt nickname for Alaa’s life has always been a fairytale, just one punctuated by war every two to four years. Birth, war. School, war. Adolescence, war. Friendship, war. Family, war. University, war.
Then, when she was eighteen, Mohammed came, and Alaa forgot about the wars. Instead, she says, “A great love story arose.” Handsome, smart, and strong, Alaa knew they were meant for each other. He was a civil engineer, and she, a future architect. He proposed on Eid-al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice. Alaa’s parents agreed, and the lovebirds married. In photographs they’re the quintessential couple. He’s sharp in casual clothes, she’s dazzling demure in repose.
“I was so happy dressed in white,” she says, reminiscing about her wedding.
And for a moment, I could see Alaa, smiling with the groom in the midst of her fairytale. Two children later, it would end. Now, the only white garments worn in Gaza are shrouds for the dead.
When the war began, Alaa was at the hospital with her infant son. Eid had been born with an enlarged heart and needed close supervision whenever he was ill. Now, Alaa found herself trapped with him, as fighting raged on all around her. Israeli soldiers raided the hospital and dragged people out of their beds to kidnap or kill. Terrified, Alaa grabbed her son, ripped out the IV in his arm and ran out the back of the hospital, covered in his blood.
Alaa ran all the way home, but when she arrived, things got worse. The neighborhood children were playing in the street in front of her house. A missile landed on the next block, and a large piece of shrapnel was sent reeling from the resulting explosion towards the children, decapitating Mohammed’s 12-year-old cousin Badr as Alaa watched. Mohammed’s father was next.
Alaa was still in shock when the Israelis dropped leaflets ordering them to go south. She left first, taking the children. Mohammed was supposed to follow a few days later. In the meantime, their neighborhood was destroyed one block at a time. Dozens of Alaa’s friends and relatives were martyred—wedded to the land they loved in the ultimate sacrifice. Day-by-day, hour-by-hour, with each new message, Alaa learned of their deaths. And it was there, among the hordes of refugees walking south along the sea of Gaza, that Alaa’s fairytale life finally came to an end:
“My brother Bahaa was volunteering to drive refugees trapped in the fighting to safety. Mohammed was with him, when the Occupation shot up the car they were in. My brother was wounded, and Mohammed tried to drag him to safety. That’s when they shot my husband in the face. Somebody called an ambulance, but the Israeli soldiers wouldn’t let the paramedics through. They bled out for charity.”
Alaa began to weep.
“The Occupiers refused to let anyone collect the bodies for burial. My beloved husband and brother became food for stray dogs and crows.”
Alaa didn’t have time to properly mourn. Even after reuniting with her remaining relatives, things continued to get worse. As the days and weeks rolled by, they faced a lack of clean water, food and medical care. Winter came, and they had nothing to keep them warm. Everyone was malnourished and sick.
Eid and Sanaa went to the hospital to get treated for starvation with a nutrient IV drip. The elderly had no such luck. Three different times Alaa woke up on a cold morning to find one of her aunts dead. Their bodies simply couldn’t produce enough heat with so little food to eat. I wondered about her own health.
“How much weight have you lost since October 7th?” I asked.
“Thirty pounds,” she said.
I wanted to know more, but Alaa steered the conversation back to her children.
“My daughter Sanaa lost her ability to speak after her father died. She was in shock, depressed, and fell seriously ill. I tried to comfort her. Then one day she began to sing: ‘When I die, I will go to Heaven to be with my father.’”
Sanaa’s understanding of the afterlife allowed her to be a child again.
By April, when I met Alaa, the food situation had improved. But in May, Sanaa contracted hepatitis C and wouldn’t eat. The hospital fed her through another IV. In June, Eid got a bacterial skin infection on his face. Day-by-day I watched it spread in photographs Alaa sent me. The hospital in Deir al-Balah wanted one hundred dollars for the medication. One hundred more than what was reasonable. I used my connections in Gaza to get a charity to pay for it. But Alaa wouldn’t leave her children alone to retrieve the medicine. She was afraid she’d come back to find them dead. Her father went instead. Just in time too, because the skin on Eid’s face began to rot as it decayed. With all his other health issues, it could have been the end of him.
Eventually, Alaa realized that she needed to make a future for her children. She began to study online to finish her degree. She’s already started on her senior project: designing a rehabilitative mental health center for healing from PTSD. She wants to build it as soon as the war stops. It’s part of her overall plan: “I want to make Gaza beautiful again.”
In the meantime, she’s desperately trying to raise money to buy a tent. It’s crowded and unstable the way she lives, always shuffling around between her remaining relatives. Whenever I try to get a charity to help her, she asks if she can work for them. How can she simultaneously work, mourn, study, raise children and survive? Her life is one of incomprehensible contradictions.
“I hope God will compensate Alaa for her loss,” one of her relatives told me.
I concur, if things go well. If they don’t, Alaa tells me what will happen next: “I am an ambitious person, and I love life very much. But I know that one day my blood, and the blood of my children, will water this land.”
May God be pleased with her.
Alaa Jamal, Sanna, Eid with Mohammed
Alaa and her children
• You can learn more about Alaa Jamal here
• You can find more stories about Gaza at https://erossalvatore.com/
The post Gaza’s Last Fairytale first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
For years, public health experts have said that COVID-19 infections in children are “mild.” According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the most common symptoms of COVID in kids are a fever and cough. While some children with the coronavirus are admitted to the ICU and there are pediatric deaths, studies have found that underlying medical conditions including obesity…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Amnesty International and was authored by Amnesty International.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Israel has majorly escalated its campaign of shooting and killing children in the occupied West Bank since October, a UN report says, as Israel carries out its deadliest campaign in the West Bank on record amid its genocide of Gaza. In the 10 months since last October, Israeli forces tripled the number of Palestinian children they shot and killed in the West Bank than they did in the previous…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
There is only one country in the world right now, in the midst of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is guaranteed dozens of standing ovations from the vast majority of its elected representatives.
That country is not Israel, where he has been a hugely divisive figure for many years. It is the United States.
On Wednesday, Netanyahu was back-slapped, glad-handed, whooped and cheered as he slowly made his way – hailed at every step as a conquering hero – to the podium of the US Congress.
This was the same Netanyahu who has overseen during the past 10 months the slaughter– so far – of some 40,000 Palestinians, around half of them women and children. More than 21,000 other children are reported missing, most of them likely dead under rubble.
It was the same Netanyahu who levelled a strip of territory – originally home to 2.3 million Palestinians – that is expected to take 80 years to rebuild, at a cost of at least $50bn.
It was the same Netanyahu who has destroyed every hospital and university in Gaza, and bombed almost all of its schools that were serving as shelters for families made homeless by other Israeli bombs.
It was the same Netanyahu whose arrest is being sought by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, accused of using starvation as a weapon of war by imposing an aid blockade that has engineered a famine across Gaza.
It was the same Netanyahu whose government was found last week by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to have been intensifying Israel’s apartheid rule over the Palestinian people in an act of long-term aggression.
It was the same Netanyahu whose government is standing trial for committing what the ICJ, the world’s highest judicial body, has termed a “plausible genocide”.
And yet, there was just one visible protester in the congressional chamber. Rashida Tlaib, the only US legislator of Palestinian heritage, sat silently grasping a small black sign. On one side it said: “War criminal”. On the other: “Guilty of genocide”.
One person among hundreds mutely trying to point out that the emperor was naked.
Cocooned from horror
Indeed, the optics were stark.
This looked less like a visit by a foreign leader than a decorated elder general being welcomed back to the Senate in ancient Rome, or a grey-haired British viceroy from India embraced in the motherland’s parliament, after brutally subduing the “barbarians” on the fringes of empire.
This was a scene familiar from history books: of imperial brutality and colonial savagery, recast by the seat of the imperium as valour, honour, civilisation. And it looked every bit as absurd, and abhorrent, as it does when we look back on what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.
It was a reminder that, despite our self-serving claims of progress and humanitarianism, our world is not very different from the way it has been for thousands of years.
It was a reminder that power elites like to celebrate the demonstration of their power, cocooned both from the horrors faced by those crushed by their might, and from the clamour of protest of those horrified by the infliction of so much suffering.
It was a reminder that this is not a “war” between Israel and Hamas – let alone, as Netanyahu would have us believe, a battle for civilisation between the Judeo-Christian world and the Islamic world.
This is a US imperial war – part of its military campaign for “global, full-spectrum dominance” – carried out by Washington’s most favoured client state.
The genocide is fully a US genocide, armed by Washington, paid for by Washington, given diplomatic cover by Washington, and – as the scenes in Congress underlined – cheered on by Washington.
Or as Netanyahu stated in a moment of unintentional candour to Congress: “Our enemies are your enemy, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory.”
Israel is Washington’s largest military outpost in the oil-rich Middle East. The Israeli army is the Pentagon’s main battalion in that strategically important region. And Netanyahu is the outpost’s commander in chief.
What is vital to Washington elites is that the outpost is supported at all costs; that it doesn’t fall to the “barbarians”.
Outpouring of lies
There was another small moment of inadvertent truth amid Netanyahu’s outpouring of lies. The Israeli prime minister stated that what was happening in Gaza was “a clash between barbarism and civilisation”. He was not wrong.
On the one side, there is the barbarism of the current joint Israeli-US genocide against the people of Gaza, a dramatic escalation of the 17-year Israeli siege of the enclave that preceded it, and the decades of belligerent rule under an Israeli system of apartheid before that.
And on the other side, there are the embattled few desperately trying to safeguard the West’s professed values of “civilisation”, of international humanitarian law, of the protection of the weak and vulnerable, of the rights of children.
The US Congress decisively showed where it stood: with barbarism.
Netanyahu has become the most feted foreign leader in US history, invited to speak to Congress four times, surpassing even Britain’s wartime leader, Winston Churchill.
He is fully Washington’s creature. His savagery, his monstrousness is entirely made in America. As he implored his US handlers: “Give us the tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster.”
Finish the job of genocide.
Performative dissent
Some Democrats preferred to stay away, including party power broker Nancy Pelosi. Instead, she met families of Israeli hostages held in Gaza – not, of course, Palestinian families whose loved ones in Gaza had been slaughtered by Israel.
Vice President Kamala Harris explained her own absence as a scheduling conflict. She met the Israeli prime minister, as did President Joe Biden, on Thursday.
Afterwards, she claimed to have pressed Netanyahu on the “dire” humanitarian situation in Gaza, but stressed too that Israel “had a right to defend itself” – a right that Israel specifically does not have, as the ICJ pointed out last week, because Israel is the one permanently violating the rights of the Palestinians through its prolonged occupation, apartheid rule and ethnic cleansing.
But the dissent of Pelosi – and of Harris, if that is what it was – was purely performative. True, they have no personal love for Netanyahu, who has so closely allied himself and his government with the US Republican right and former president Donald Trump.
But Netanyahu simply serves as an alibi. Both Pelosi and Harris are stalwart supporters of Israel – a state that, according to the ICJ’s judgment last week, decades ago instituted apartheid rule in the Palestinian territories, using an illegal occupation as cover to ethnically cleanse the population there.
Their political agenda is not about ending the annihilation of the people of Gaza. It is acting as a safety valve for popular dissatisfaction among traditional Democratic voters shocked by the scenes from Gaza.
It is to deceive them into imagining that behind closed doors, there is some sort of policy fight over Israel’s handling of the Palestinian issue. That voting Democrat will one day – one very distant day – lead to an undefined “peace”, a fabled “two-state solution” where Palestinian children won’t keep dying in the interests of preserving the security of Israel’s illegal settler-militias.
US policy towards Israel has not changed in any meaningful sense for decades, whether the president has been red or blue, whether Trump has been in the White House or Barack Obama.
And if Harris becomes president – admittedly, a big if – US arms and money will continue flowing to Israel, while Israel will get to decide if US aid to Gaza is ever allowed in.
Why? Because Israel is the lynchpin in a US imperial project for global full-spectrum dominance. Because for Washington to change course on Israel, it would also have to do other unthinkable things.
It would have to begin dismantling its 800 military bases around the planet, just as Israel was told by the ICJ last week to dismantle its many dozens of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory.
The US would need to agree a shared global security architecture with China and Russia, rather than seek to bully and batter these great powers into submission with bloody proxy wars, such as the one in Ukraine.
The coming fall
Pelosi, remember, smeared students on US campuses protesting Israel’s plausible genocide in Gaza as being linked to Russia. She urged the FBI to investigate them for pressuring the Biden administration to support a ceasefire.
Netanyahu, in his address to Congress, similarly demonised the demonstrators – in his case, by accusing them of being “useful idiots” of Israel’s main foe, Iran.
Neither can afford to recognise that millions of ordinary people across the US think it is wrong to bomb and starve children – and to use a war with an unachievable aim as the cover story.
Hamas cannot be “eliminated” through Israel’s current bout of horrifying violence for a very obvious reason: The group is a product, a symptom, of earlier bouts of horrifying Israeli violence.
As even western counter-terrorism experts have had to concede, Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza are strengthening Hamas, not weakening it. Young men and boys who lose their family to Israeli bombs are Hamas’s most fervent new recruits.
That’s why Netanyahu insisted Israel’s military offensive – the genocide – in Gaza could not end soon. He demanded weapons and money to keep his soldiers in the enclave indefinitely, in an operation he termed as “demilitarisation and deradicalisation”.
Decoded, that means a continuing horror show for the Palestinians there, as they are forced to continue living and dying with an Israeli aid blockade, starvation, bombs and unmarked “kill zones”.
It means, too, an indefinite risk of Israel’s war on Gaza spilling over into a regional war, and potentially a global one, as tripwires towards escalation continue to grow in number.
The US Congress, however, is too blinded by championing its small fortressed state in the Middle East to think about such complexities. Its members roared “USA!” to their satrap from Israel, just as Roman senators once roared “Glory!” to generals whose victories they assumed would continue forever.
The rulers of the Roman empire no more saw the coming fall than their modern counterparts in Washington can. But every empire falls. And its collapse becomes inevitable once its rulers lose all sense of how absurd and abhorrent they have become.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post Only a Failing US Empire Would Be So Blind as to Cheer Netanyahu and his Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.
In just the last 10 months of its genocide, Israel has damaged or destroyed nearly 9 out of 10 schools in Gaza, the UN has reported. According to assessments by the UN-backed Global Education Cluster, almost 85 percent of school buildings in Gaza have been directly hit or damaged, as the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) highlighted on Friday.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Ismail Haniyeh during a video statement marking the 34th anniversary of the founding of the Hamas movement, December 2021. (Hamas Chief Office)
Hamas announced early Wednesday that Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Palestinian faction’s political wing, was assassinated in Tehran, where he was present for the inauguration of the new Iranian president.
The assassination, in Iran no less, marks a major escalation that will likely have regional ramifications and came hours after Israel bombed Lebanon on Tuesday evening, killing three civilians, according to Lebanese state media. Israel claimed that it killed a senior Hizballah figure in the strike, but the Lebanese resistance group had not issued a statement on the matter at the time of publication.
Israel killed multiple members representing multiple generations of Haniyeh’s family in Gaza since October. Several leaders of Hamas have been assassinated by Israel before Haniyeh, only to be replaced and for the organization’s capabilities to grow.
In January, Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy head of Hamas’ politburo, was killed in a strike in Beirut along with several other cadres and commanders with the group.
Two weeks ago, Israel claimed to have killed Muhammad Deif, the secretive head of Hamas’ armed wing, in a strike in Gaza that killed at least 90 Palestinians in an area it had unilaterally declared as a humanitarian zone.
Israel continued to wage attacks across Gaza by air, land and sea amid heavy fighting and ground incursions on Tuesday.
The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said on Tuesday that 37 people had been killed in Israeli attacks over the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll to 39,400 since early October.
The actual number of fatalities is likely much higher, with thousands of people missing under the rubble or their bodies not yet recovered from Gaza’s streets.
The Israeli military withdrew from eastern Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza, on Tuesday following an incursion lasting eight days and forcing another wave of mass displacement from the area.
Palestinians returned to Khan Younis to find evidence of what the government media office in Gaza described as “horrific massacres” for which it demanded international accountability.
“Palestinian rescue workers and civilians collected dead bodies from the streets of the abandoned battle zone, bringing corpses wrapped in rugs to morgues in cars and donkey carts,” Reuters reported.
The government media office said that the bodies of 255 people had been recovered and more than 30 others were missing.
During the incursion, the Israeli military fired on 31 homes with their residents inside, as well as more than 300 other homes and residential buildings.
The military also razed the cemetery in Bani Suheila and its surroundings on the eastern outskirts of Khan Younis:
#????? | ??? ?????? ??? ????? ????? ?? ????? ??? ????? ??? ??? ???? ???? ????? ?????? ??????*????.
?????? ??????*???? ???? ???????? ?? ??? ???????? ??? ????? ?????? ?????? ?????.
??? ??? ????? ???? ????? ??? ??? ??????? ???????? ?????? ????? ?????? ??? ??? ?? ??????? ???? ????… pic.twitter.com/8uqmdsbu1V
— EekadFacts | ????? (@EekadFacts) July 30, 2024
Nearly all of Gaza under evacuation orders
Israel meanwhile issued new forced displacement orders in al-Bureij, central Gaza, “launching strikes there in apparent preparation for a new raid,” according to Reuters.
“Medics said an Israeli air strike in nearby al-Nuseirat killed 10 Palestinians as they fled from Bureij on Tuesday, and another strike killed four other Palestinians inside Bureij,” the news agency added.
More than 85 percent of the territory of Gaza is under an Israeli so-called evacuation order, the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) said on Monday.
But there is no safe place for people to go, and no assurance of protection for civilians who choose to stay or are unable to evacuate from designated areas.
Repeated displacement is also making it increasingly difficult for organizations, already contending with Israel’s near-total blockade, to provide aid and services to those who were forced to leave their homes with next to nothing.
Palestinians return to eastern Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, after Israeli forces pulled out on 30 July ( APA images)
The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said that it was no longer able to restore the functionality of the Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis after an Israeli evacuation order was issued on 27 July.
The Palestinian Civil Defense warned that overcrowding among displaced people in Gaza, who have insufficient access to water and sanitation, was leading to the proliferation of diseases, including conditions affecting children’s skin.
By early July, the World Health Organization had recorded nearly a million cases of acute respiratory infection, while other illnesses such as diarrhea, acute jaundice and cases of suspected mumps and meningitis, as well as scabies and lice, skin rashes and chicken pox are spreading among the population.
The UN health agency said on Tuesday that it was very likely that polio has infected Palestinians in Gaza after the health ministry in the territory declared a polio epidemic across the coastal enclave on Monday.
Detection of the virus in sewage samples collected in Gaza represents “a setback” against efforts to completely eradicate the disease worldwide, Christian Lindmeier, a World Health Organization official, said on Tuesday.
Al Mezan, a Palestinian human rights group based in Gaza, warned that more than one million children in the territory “are at risk of dying if not vaccinated” for the highly infectious virus.
“To prevent thousands of deaths, the international community must ensure Israel immediately ends its genocide, including the weaponization of water and sanitation facilities,” the rights group added.
According to WHO, the disease mainly affects children under the age of 5 and one in 200 infections “leads to irreversible paralysis.” Five to 10 percent of those paralyzed die “when their breathing muscles become immobilized.”
Collapse of essential systems
With the collapse of Gaza’s solid waste management system, conditions are ripe for the disastrous spread of diseases transmitted through contamination such as polio and hepatitis A – there have been 40,000 diagnosed cases of the latter since October.
Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has seen a drop in polio vaccination rates in Gaza from 99 percent to 89 percent, according to a UNICEF spokesperson. The director of the World Health Organization announced that it was sending more than a million polio vaccines to Gaza to be administered to children “in the coming weeks,” UN News reported.
The virus, “transmitted by person-to-person spread mainly through the fecal-oral route,” according to WHO, is less frequently transmitted through contaminated water or food.
The “can emerge in areas where poor vaccination coverage allows the weakened form of the orally taken vaccine virus strain to mutate into a stronger version,” UN News added.
The vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 “had been identified at six locations in sewage samples collected last month from Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah – two Gaza cities left in ruins by nearly 10 months of intense Israeli bombardment.”
The spread of disease and epidemics is a predictable result of Israel’s genocidal military campaign, if not the intention.
In yet another case of Israeli soldiers destroying civilian infrastructure for no military purpose, soldiers recently recorded themselves detonating Canada well, the main water facility in Rafah, southern Gaza.
The Tel Aviv daily Haaretz reported on Monday that the facility “was destroyed last week with the approval of the commander of the soldiers … but without the approval of senior officers.”
But blaming lower-ranking soldiers may be an attempt to deter international courts scrutiny of more senior military personnel, while the pattern of behavior on the ground indicates that troops are ordered to destroy essential civilian infrastructure for no military purpose – a war crime.
Destroying water treatment plants is a war crime in its own right. Doing so in full knowledge that it will contribute to the spread of polio is evidence of genocidal intent. https://t.co/38PkBD4043
— Heidi Matthews (@Heidi__Matthews) July 27, 2024
Younis Tirawi, writing for Dropsite News, recounted that Giora Eiland, an adviser to Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant, described in October a strategy to destroy the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to pump and purify water within Gaza.
Monther Shoblak, the head of the water utility in Gaza, told Tirawi that the Canada well facility had remained functional until Israel’s ground invasion of Rafah in early May, as solar panels allowed it to operate despite Israel cutting off the supply of electricity to the territory in October.
Israel destroyed 30 water wells in the south this month alone, and displaced people have been forced to shelter in overcrowded conditions without suitable hygiene infrastructure or access to sufficient clean water, fuel, food and medicine.
The international charity Oxfam said earlier this month that “Israel damaged or destroyed five water and sanitation sites every three days since the start of this war,” reducing the amount of water available in Gaza by 94 percent to a mere 4.74 liters per person – “less than a single toilet flush.”
Israel attacks Beirut
Israel bombed southern Beirut on Tuesday, with its military claiming that it targeted Fuad Shukr, a senior Hizballah commander. Israel said that Shukr was killed but Arabic-language media said his fate remained unknown late Tuesday.
The area around Hizballah’s Shura Council in the Haret Hreik neighborhood of the Lebanese capital was also hit, that country’s state news agency reported.
Lebanon’s health ministry said that a woman and two children were killed, though “the search for more missing persons under the rubble continues.”
The apartment building in south Beirut has been decimated by what is said to be 3 missiles from an IDF drone. The strike that killed Hamas' deputy chairman Saleh al-Arouri in January left the building standing. This was meant to destroy it and take everybody with it. pic.twitter.com/OzSSD2ER3n
— Séamus Malekafzali (@Seamus_Malek) July 30, 2024
The Beirut strike took down a whole residential building, and the scale of destruction may have been intended to reinforce the threats made by Israeli leaders to inflict the same genocidal violence in Lebanon that it has in Gaza.
+The strike in Beirut on Tuesday was an anticipated “retaliation” from Tel Aviv after a projectile killed 12 children at a sports field in Majdal Shams, a city in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights on Saturday. Israel blamed Hizballah but the Lebanese resistance group denied having any connection to the deadly blast.
Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, accused Hizballah of crossing a red line, though it is highly unlikely that the Lebanese resistance group would have deliberately targeted Majdal Shams.
A building targeted in an Israeli strike in the southern suburb of Beirut, 30 July ( Xinhua News Agency)
Amal Saad, an expert on Hizballah, said that since 8 October, the group “has refrained from targeting Israeli civilians, much less Syrian Druze.”
“The strong support for the resistance movement among this community, which lives under Israeli occupation, makes it illogical for Hizballah to risk striking in this vicinity,” she added.
Targeting civilians, whether Syrian or Israeli, “wouldn’t be strategically beneficial for Hizballah when it would inevitably lead to all out war – a war which Hizballah has been very keen to avoid as demonstrated by its sub-threshold responses to Israeli strikes on Beirut and on civilians” in Lebanon, according to Saad.
She added the group has been careful to “avoid giving Israel any pretext for waging war” but “it’s entirely expected” that Israel would exploit the tragedy “in order to deflect attention away from its daily massacres of Palestinian children” in Gaza.
Not “a single drop of blood”
Majdal Shams residents chanted “murderer, murderer” at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he attempted to visit the site of the deadly strike on Monday.
After Netanyahu left Majdal Shams, local residents verbally attacked the head of the municipality, who invited Netanyahu to the town. People yelled at him "traitor, dog" and more. https://t.co/RIbUrWnZ7A
— B.M. (@ireallyhateyou) July 29, 2024
Syrians reeling from the unprecedented mass casualty event in Majdal Shams issued a statement rejecting “that a single drop of blood be shed under the name of revenge for our children.”
After the deaths in Majdal Shams, Israeli media reported that Netanyahu canceled the exit of around 150 children from Gaza for medical treatment in the United Arab Emirates “for fear of public backlash,” the human rights group Gisha said.
In response to a petition from human rights groups, Israel’s high court on Sunday ordered the government “to inform it of its progress toward implementing a permanent mechanism for the medical evacuation of sick and injured Gazans,” The Times of Israel [reported]((https://www.timesofisrael.com/high-court-gives-government-7-days-to-come…).
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, announced that “85 sick and severely injured people,” including 35 children, were evacuated from Gaza to Abu Dhabi for specialized care on Tuesday.
“It is the largest medical evacuation since October 2023,” he said, adding that “63 family members and caregivers accompanied the patients.”
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said on Sunday that the ongoing closure of Gaza’s crossings, preventing “the travel of urgent and lifesaving cases,” makes clear “Israel’s commission of genocide against the people of the Gaza Strip.”
“Those who have not been killed by Israel’s war machine are not spared by the complete Israeli siege and closure on Gaza,” the rights group added, “leaving thousands of wounded and sick doomed to certain death.”
Death is all but guaranteed due to Israel’s “deliberate destruction and collapse of the healthcare system and the weakening of its remaining lifesaving resources,” according to PCHR.
Around 14,000 sick and injured patients, most of them children and older people, require care that is not available in Gaza.
PCHR estimates that hundreds of ill people have already died due to lack of access to medical treatment but there are “no statistics available in this regard due to disruptions in official medical monitoring and documentation systems.”
• Article first published in The Electronic Intifada
The post Ismail Haniyeh assassinated in Tehran after Israel bombs Beirut first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The death toll in Gaza is way too low by every imaginable metric. We need to be stressing this – all the more so when Israel’s apologists are vigorously engaged in a disinformation campaign to suggest that the figures are inflated.
On 6 May, 7 months into Israel’s slaughter, there were reported to be 34,735 dead. That was an average of 4,960 Palestinians killed each month.
Today, nearly three months on, the reported death toll stands at 39,400 – or an increase of 4,665.
It should not need a statistician to point out that, were the rise linear, the expected number of deaths would stand by this point at around 49,600.
So, even by the simplest calculation, there is a large shortfall in deaths – a shortfall that needs explaining.
Such an explanation is easy to provide: Israel destroyed Gaza’s institutions and its medical infrastructure, including its hospitals, many months ago, making it impossible for officials there to keep track of how many Palestinians are being killed by Israel.
The death toll figures started to stall in the spring, around the time Israel completed its destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and kidnapped much of the enclave’s medical personnel.
More than a month ago, Save the Children pointed out that some 21,000 children in Gaza were missing, in addition to the 16,000 known to have been killed by Israel. Many are likely to have suffered lonely, terrifying deaths under rubble – gradually suffocated to death, or dying slowly from dehydration.
But again, even those shocking figures are likely to be a severe undercount.
The linear figure entirely misses the bigger picture. How?
1. Because in addition to the continuing Israeli bombardments, Palestinians have had to endure three more months of an intensifying famine. With each day of a famine, more people die than died the day before. The deaths in a famine are not linear, they are exponential. If 5 people died yesterday of starvation, 20 people will die today, and 150 tomorrow. That is how prolonged famines work. The longer you are starved, the higher the probability you will die of starvation.
2. Because Palestinians have had three more months deprived of medical care after Israel destroyed their hospitals and medical institutions. If you have a chronic illness – diabetes, asthma, kidney problems, high blood pressure, and so on – the longer you are forced to go without medical attention, the greater the chance you will die from an untreated condition. Again, the death rate in such circumstances is exponential, not linear.
3. Because without medical care, all sorts of other things that happen in everyday life become more dangerous. Childbirth is the most obvious example, but even cuts and grazes can become a death sentence. So given the fact that Palestinians now have even less access to medical care than they had in the first six months of Israel’s war on Gaza suggests that people are being killed by life-events in even greater numbers than was the case earlier in Israel’s slaughter.
4. Because, for exactly the same reasons, those injured by Israel’s continuing bombardments are likely to have poorer outcomes than those similarly injured in earlier attacks. Fewer doctors means less chance of treatment, means greater chance of dying from your wounds.
5. Because we know that – given the insanitary conditions, the lack of water and food, the weakened health status of the population, and the destruction of hospitals – epidemics now are breaking out. The WHO has already warned of a likely outbreak of polio, but there are sure to be other diseases emerging such as cholera, typhoid and dysentery that have yet to be isolated and identified. Even the common cold can become a killer when people’s health status is this compromised.
A letter from researchers to the Lancet medical journal this month warned about the likely massive undercount of the dead in Gaza, even relying, as they had to, on the established death toll.
Their point was that indirect deaths – of the kind I enumerate above – need to be factored in as well as the direct deaths from Israeli bombs. They very conservatively estimate that the total number who will die over the coming months – not just from bombs but as a result of the lack of medical care, insanitary conditions and famine – is 186,000, or 8 per cent of the population.
But that figure assumes that Israel’s current slaughter and starvation policies come to an immediate halt, and that international organisations are able to bring in emergency aid. There are precisely no signs that Israel is going to allow any of that to happen – or that western states are going to put any pressure on Israel to do so.
The medical researchers suggest a less conservative estimate could ultimately put the death toll in Gaza nearer 600,000, or a quarter of the population. Again, that assumes Israel reverses course immediately.
Remember too that for every person killed, several others are maimed or badly wounded. According to the current figures, more than 91,000 Palestinians are reported injured, many of them missing limbs. But again, that is likely to be a massive undercount too.
Harrowing as these figures are, they are just numbers. But Gaza’s dead are not numbers. They were human beings, half of them children, whose lives have been snuffed out, their potential erased forever, their loved ones left with an all-consuming grief. Many victims died alone in extreme pain, or endured unimaginable suffering.
None of their lives should be reduced to cold statistics on a graph. But if that is where we are at, and sadly it is, then at the very least we need to point out that the headline figures are a lie, that Israel’s barbarism is being grossly minimised, and that we are being lulled into a false sense complacency.
The post The official death toll in Gaza is a lie: The casualty numbers are far, far higher first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
BBC coverage of the attack on a football pitch in the Golan Heights on Saturday has been intentionally misleading.
The BBC’s evening news entirely ignored the fact that those killed by the blast are a dozen Syrians, not Israeli citizens, and that for decades the surviving Syrian population in the Golan, most of them Druze, has been forced to live unwillingly under an Israeli military occupation.
I suppose mention of this context might complicate the story Israel and the BBC wish to tell – and risk reminding viewers that Israel is a belligerent state occupying not just Palestinian territory but Syrian territory too (not to mention nearby Lebanese territory).
It might suggest to audiences that these various permanent Israeli occupations have been contributing not only to large-scale human rights abuses but to regional tensions as well. That Israel’s acts of aggression against its neighbours might be the cause of “conflict”, rather than, as Israel and the BBC would have us believe, some kind of unusual, pre-emptive form of self-defence.
The BBC, of course, chose to uncritically air comments from a military spokesman for Israel, who blamed Hizbullah for the blast in the Golan.
Daniel Hagari tried to milk the incident for maximum propaganda value, arguing: “This attack shows the true face of Hizbullah, a terrorist organisation that targets and murders children playing soccer.”
Except, as the BBC failed to mention in its report, Israel infamously targeted and murdered four young children from the Bakr family playing football on a beach in Gaza in 2014.
Much more recently, video footage showed Israel striking yet more children playing football at a school in Gaza that was serving as a shelter for families whose homes were destroyed by earlier Israeli bombs.
Doubtless other strikes in Gaza over the past 10 months, so many of them targeting school-shelters, have killed Palestinian children playing football – especially as it is one of the very few ways they can take their mind off the horror all around.
So, should we – and the BBC – not conclude that all these attacks on children playing football make the Israeli military even more of a terrorist organisation than Hizbullah?
Note too the way the western media are so ready to accept unquestioningly Israel’s claim that Hizbullah was responsible for the blast – and dismiss Hizbullah’s denials.
Viewers are discouraged from exercising their memories. Any who do may recall that those same media outlets were only too willing to take on faith Israeli disinformation suggesting that Hamas had hit Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital back in October, even when all the evidence showed it was an Israeli air strike.
(Israel soon went on to destroy all Gaza’s hospitals, effectively eradicating the enclave’s health sector, on the pretext that medical facilities there served as Hamas bases – another patently preposterous claim the western media treated with wide-eyed credulity.)
The BBC next went to Jerusalem to hear from diplomatic editor Paul Adams. He intoned gravely: “This is precisely what we have been worrying about for the past 10 months – that something of this magnitude would occur on the northern border, that would turn what has been a simmering conflict for all of these months into an all-out war.”
So there you have it. Paul Adams and the BBC concede they haven’t been worrying for the past 10 months about the genocide unfolding under their very noses in Gaza, or its consequences.
A genocide of Palestinians, apparently, is not something of significant “magnitude”.
Only now, when Israel can exploit the deaths of Syrians forced to live under its military rule as a pretext to expand its “war”, are we supposed to sit up and take notice. Or so the BBC tells us.
Update:
Facebook instantly removed a post linking to this article – and for reasons that are entirely opaque to me (apart from the fact that it is critical of the BBC and Israel).
Facebook’s warning, threatening that my account may face “more account restrictions”, suggests that I was misleading followers by taking them to a “landing page that impersonates another website”. That is patent nonsense. The link took them to my Substack page.
As I have been warning for some time, social media platforms have been tightening the noose around the necks of independent journalists like me, making our work all but impossible to find. It is only a matter of time before we are disappeared completely.
Substack has been a lifeline, because it connects readers to my work directly – either through email or via Substack’s app – bypassing, at least for the moment, the grip of the social-media billionaires.
If you wish to keep reading my articles, and haven’t already, please sign up to my Substack page.
The post More dead children: More BBC “news” channelling Israeli propaganda as its own first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
We speak with Palestinian human rights lawyer Noura Erakat about Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress, in which he defended Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, lied repeatedly about the dire humanitarian conditions on the ground and refused to talk about how to reach a ceasefire to end the bloodshed. Although more than 100 Democrats skipped the speech, Erakat says the jubilant reaction from lawmakers in attendance showed U.S. leaders cheering “for what is essentially a war on children.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.