We speak with reporter Oren Ziv of +972 Magazine, whose latest investigation details how Israeli forces in Gaza have been authorized to open fire on Palestinians virtually at will. Six soldiers who fought in Gaza describe a near-total absence of firing regulations, with soldiers shooting as they please, setting homes ablaze, leaving corpses to rot on the streets and more. “It seems soldiers were…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has recently launched an extensive campaign to silence opposition, marked by a stark disregard for justice and human rights. This crackdown includes a series of arrests, summonses, and deportations targeting individuals who criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza, blatantly violating the right to freedom of speech. This disturbing trend continues the UAE’s long-standing restrictions on freedoms, which have only intensified in recent months.
Since formalizing relations with Israel in 2020, the UAE has increasingly stifled anti-normalization sentiments and critical voices regarding Israel’s actions, particularly after the events in Gaza on October 7, 2023. Recently, several Emirati nationals and foreign residents have been arrested and summoned for social media posts opposing Israeli military actions or normalization with Tel Aviv. For instance, ‘K.H.’, a Jordanian national of Palestinian descent working in Dubai for five years, was summoned by the State Security Service in Abu Dhabi on April 10, 2024, over a Facebook post condemning Israel. He was detained for three days without access to a lawyer and forced to leave the UAE without permission to submit any objection.
Similarly, an Egyptian national reported being interrogated by UAE security officials on March 25 for social media posts criticizing the Arab and Islamic response to the Gaza famine during Ramadan and demanding an end to normalization with Israel. After hours of questioning, he was fired from his job and given 48 hours to leave the country without legal recourse or opportunities to object to the decision. Additionally, UAE security services have reportedly launched intimidation campaigns in universities, threatening academics and student activists if they disobey orders to refrain from protesting against Israel.
These recent events add to the existing human rights violations by UAE authorities, particularly the State Security Service, which unlawfully detains foreign nationals for exercising their right to free speech. The Emirati government has a history of holding such individuals in inhumane conditions, interrogating them, and in some cases, torturing them physically and psychologically before deporting them on fabricated charges. The question therefore arises as to how the UAE can continue this violation of the right to free speech.
The explanation is that such actions are justified by the UAE through categorizing free speech as a terrorist crime. For instance, during the UAE ‘84’ mass trial against dozens of activists, human rights advocates, and dissenters who signed a petition demanding constitutional changes, Emirati authorities claimed these activities were part of a secret terrorist organization called the Dignity and Justice Committee. Furthermore, the government argued that the activities fell under the Emirati Anti-Terrorism Law of 2014, which penalizes individuals building such ‘organizations’ with life imprisonment or even the death penalty, distorting the true meaning of organizing a terrorist group.
The international community must pressure the UAE to end this repressive campaign. Human rights organizations should be granted access to detainees, and all individuals detained for expressing their opinions should be released unconditionally. The UAE must also repeal laws that violate human rights, including the 2014 Anti-Terrorism Law, to align with its constitutional and international obligations. Ensuring freedom of speech and protecting dissenting voices is crucial for the country’s progress and global reputation.
The post UAE’s Intensified Suppression of Freedom of Speech: The case of Israel appeared first on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.
This post was originally published on Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain.
On June 30, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took over Sinjah, the capital of Sinnar province in southeastern Sudan, and they have continued to expand their control over the surrounding areas since then. Tens of thousands of residents have fled this latest RSF incursion, deepening the crises of displacement and hunger that have spread across Sudan since war broke out between the RSF and the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy discusses ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, the ruling party in the Gaza Strip, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued hostility to compromise and the Biden administration’s ineffectual mediation. Contrary to its claims of brokering peace, the U.S. “will continue to send the weapons” Israel uses to devastate Gaza…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
New York, July 11, 2024—More than 60 media and civil society organizations have signed an open letter urging Israel to give journalists independent access to Gaza.
The organizations—which include the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, and The Washington Post—point out that no independent media access to Gaza has been permitted since the start of the war, increasing the pressure on domestic journalists, and creating a space for mis- and disinformation to flourish.
“More than 100 journalists have been killed since the start of the war and those who remain are working in conditions of extreme deprivation. The result is that information from Gaza is becoming harder and harder to obtain and that the reporting which does get through is subject to repeated questions over its veracity,” the organizations say in the letter, which was coordinated by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The letter comes ahead of a planned visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the United States, where he is set to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden and address the U.S. Congress on July 24.
CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg noted: “President Netanyahu describes Israel as a democracy. His actions with regard to the media tell a different story. International, Israeli, and Palestinian journalists from outside Gaza should be given independent access to Gaza so they can judge for themselves what is happening in this war—rather than being spoon-fed with a handful of organized tours by the Israeli military.”
In addition to news outlets, the signatories—who span more than 26 countries—include professional groups and organizations dedicated to defending press freedom.
About the Committee to Protect Journalists
The Committee to Protect Journalists is an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide. We defend the right of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal.
Read the full letter below
We, the undersigned, request that Israeli authorities end immediately the restrictions on foreign media entering Gaza and grant independent access to international news organizations seeking to access the territory.
Nine months into the war, international reporters are still being denied access to Gaza except for rare and escorted trips arranged by the Israeli military. This effective ban on foreign reporting has placed an impossible and unreasonable burden on local reporters to document a war through which they are living. More than 100 journalists have been killed since the start of the war and those who remain are working in conditions of extreme deprivation. The result is that information from Gaza is becoming harder and harder to obtain and that the reporting which does get through is subject to repeated questions over its veracity.
We fully understand the inherent risks in reporting from war zones. These are risks that many of our organizations have taken over decades in order to investigate, document developments as they occur, and understand the impacts of wars the world over.
A free and independent press is the cornerstone of democracy. We ask that Israel uphold its commitments to press freedom by providing foreign media with immediate, independent access to Gaza, and that Israel abides by its international obligations to protect journalists as civilians.
Signatories
This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
When all we have to rely on in understanding our relationship to the news media is the media’s self-proclaimed assessment of its own role, maybe it is no surprise that most of us assume the West’s “free press” is a force for good: the bedrock of democracy, the touchstone of a superior western civilisation.
The more idealistic among us think of the news media as something akin to a public service. The more cynical of us think of it as a competitive marketplace in information and commentary, one in which ugly agendas are often in evidence but truth ultimately prevails.
Both views are fanciful. The reality is far, far darker – and I speak as someone who worked for many years in the Guardian and Observer newsrooms, widely seen as the West’s most progressive newspapers.
As readers, we don’t, as we imagine, “consume” news. Rather, the news consumes us. Or put another way, the media uses the news to groom us, its audience. Properly understood, the relationship is one of abuser and abused.
Sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory?
In fact, just such an argument was set out many years ago – in more academic fashion – in Ed Herman’s and Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent.
If you have never heard of the book, there may be a reason. The media don’t want you reading it.
When I worked at the Guardian, there was no figure more reviled in the newsroom by senior editors than Noam Chomsky. As young journalists, we were warned off reading him. How might we react were we to start thinking more deeply about the role of the media, or begin testing the limits of what we were allowed to report and say?
Chomsky and Herman’s Propaganda Model explains in detail how western publics are “brainwashed under freedom” by a media driven by hidden corporate and state interests. Those interests can be concealed only because the media decides what counts as news and frames how we understand events.
Its chief tools are misdirection and omission – and, in extremis, outright deception.
Tribal camps
The Propaganda Model acknowledges that competition is permitted in the news media. But only of a narrow, superficial kind, meant to divide us more usefully into tribal, ideological camps – defined as the left and the right.
Those camps are there to keep us imagining that we enjoy a plurality of ideas, that we are in charge of our response to events, that we elect governments – just as we enjoy a choice between watching the BBC and Fox News.
But our herding into oppositional camps isn’t really about choice. The camps are there to keep us divided, so we can be more easily manipulated and ruled. They are there to obscure from us the deeper reality that the state-corporate media is the public relations arm of an establishment that needs us weak.
To survive, the western power establishment has to engineer two related kinds of popular endorsement:
First, we must consent to the idea that the West has an inalienable right to control the Earth’s resources, even at the cost of committing terrible crimes both against the rest of humanity, such as the current genocide in Gaza, and against other species, as we wreck the natural world in our pursuit of impossible, endless economic growth on a finite planet.
And second, we must consent to the idea that the richest and most powerful elites in the West have an inalienable right to cream off most of the profits from this industrialised rape of our only home.
The media rarely identifies this wasteful, greed system, so normalised has it become. But when given a name, it is called capitalism. It emerges from the shadows only when the media need to confront and ridicule a bogeyman caricature of its main ideological rival, socialism.
Immersed in propaganda
The news media have been fantastically successful at making a system of suicidal resource extraction designed to enrich a tiny number of billionaires seem entirely normal to their audiences. Which is why those same billionaires are as keen to own the news media as they are to own politicians. In fact, gain ownership of the media and you own the political class too. It is the ultimate two-for-one offer.
No politician can afford to take on key state-corporate interests, or the media that veils those interests – as Jeremy Corbyn soon found out in the UK a few years back.
I have spent the past 15 years or more trying to highlight to readers the true nature of our relationship to the media – the groomer and groomed – using the media’s coverage of major news events as a practical peg on which to hang my analysis. Talking about the abusive relationship purely in the abstract is likely to persuade few, given how deeply we are immersed in propaganda.
Understanding how the media carries out its day-to-day switch and baits, its omissions, deceptions and misdirections, is the key to beginning the process of freeing our minds. If you look to the state-corporate media for guidance, you are already in its clutches. You are already a victim – a victim of your own suffocating ignorance, of your own self-sabotage, of your own death wish.
I have expended many hundreds of thousands of words on this topic, as have others such as Media Lens. You can read a few recent examples from me here, here and here. Or you watch this talk I gave on how I freed myself professionally from the clutches of the corporate media and gained my freedom as an independent journalist:
Different narratives
But rarely do we have examples of propaganda so flagrant from our “free press” that it is hard for readers not to notice them. This week the state-corporate media made my job a little easier. Over the past few days, it has reported on two closely comparable events that it framed in entirely different ways. Ways that all too clearly serve state-corporate interests.
The first such event was an Israeli air strike last Saturday on a school in Gaza, where Palestinian civilians, including children, had been sheltering from months of a rampaging Israeli military that has slaughtered many tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed most of the enclave’s homes and infrastructure.
The massive scale of death and destruction in Gaza has forced the World Court to put Israel on trial for genocide – not that you would know from the media coverage. The genocide case against Israel has been largely disappeared down the memory hole.
The second event, on Monday, was a Russian air strike on a hospital in Kyiv. It was part of a wave of attacks on Ukrainian targets that day that killed 36 Ukrainians.
Let us note that on a typical day in Gaza, at least 150 Palestinians are killed by Israel. That has been happening day after day for nine months. And the death toll is almost certainly a massive under-estimate. In decimated Gaza, unlike Ukraine, officials long ago lost the ability to count their dead.
Let us note too that, despite huge numbers of Palestinian women and children being killed each day by Israeli missiles, the news media largely stopped covering the carnage in Gaza months ago. The BBC’s main evening news barely reports it.
The fact alone that the killing of 36 Ukrainian civilians attracted so much attention and concern from the western media, in a war that’s more than two years old, when there is a far larger daily death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which our governments have been directly aiding, and the slaughter is of more recent origin, is telling in and of itself.
So how did our most trusted and progressive media outlets report these comparable events, in Gaza and Ukraine?
The headlines tell much of the story.
In an all-too-familiar pattern, the BBC shouted from the rooftops: “At least 20 dead after ‘massive’ Russian missile attack on Ukraine cities”. It named Russia as responsible for killing Ukrainians, and did so even when there was still some debate about whether Russian missiles or Ukrainian air-defence missiles had caused the destruction.
Meanwhile, the BBC carefully avoided identifying Israel as the party that killed those in Gaza sheltering from its bombs, even though Israel long ago stopped pretending that feeble Palestinian rockets could cause damage on such a scale. The headline read: “Air strike on Gaza school kills at least 15 people.”
The Guardian’s headlines were even more revealing.
The paper did, at least, identify Israel as responsible for the killing: “Israeli strike on Gaza school kills 16, say Palestinian officials.”
However, the dry, matter-of-fact language about those Palestinian deaths, the suggestion that the deaths were only a claim, and the attribution of that claim to “Palestinian officials” (with the now widely accepted implication that those officials can’t be trusted) was intended to steer the emotional response of readers. They would be left cold and indifferent.
The framing was clear: this was just another routine day in Gaza. No need to be overly invested in Palestinian suffering.
Contrast that with the entirely different tone the Guardian struck in its headlines on the cover story (below) of the attack on Ukraine: “‘No words for this’: horror over Russian bombing of Kyiv children’s hospital.” The subhead reads: “Witnesses express shock and revulsion after deadly missile strike on Ukraine’s largest paediatric clinic.”
The emphasis is on “horror”, “shock”, “revulsion”. “No words”, we are told, can convey the savagery of this atrocity. The headline’s emphasis is on the targeting of “children” with a “deadly missile”.
All of which, of course, could be equally said about the horror of Israel’s targeting of Palestinian children day-in, day-out. But, of course, isn’t.
Swaying readers
If this isn’t convincing enough, take another example of the Guardian’s treatment (below) of comparable events in Gaza and Ukraine. Here is how the paper reported Israel destroying Gaza’s largest hospital back in November, when such actions had not yet become routine, as they are now, and when it had killed far larger numbers of civilians at the hospital in Gaza than Russia did in Ukraine.
The headline reads clinically: “IDF says it has entered Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital in ‘targeted’ operation against Hamas.”
The Guardian readily repeats the Israeli military’s terminology, conferring legitimacy on the carnage at al-Shifa hospital as a “targeted operation”. The fact that patients and medical personnel were the main victims is obscured by the Guardian’s repeating of the Israel’s claim that it was simply “targeting Hamas” – just as Israel’s wanton destruction of Gaza has supposedly been about “eliminating Hamas”, even as Hamas grows stronger.
Apparently there is no “horror, “shock” or “revulsion” at the Guardian over the destruction and killing spree at Gaza’s largest hospital. Such sentiments are reserved for Ukraine.
The same differences are illustrated in the US “liberal” media, as Alan MacLeod noted on X.
A day after Russia’s strike on Ukraine, Israel was attacking another school shelter in Gaza. The New York Times made it clear how differently readers were supposed to feel about these similar events.
Headline: “At Least 25 Reported Killed in Strike on School Building in Southern Gaza.”
Note the passive, uncertain treatment – this was, after all, only a report. Note too that the perpetrator, Israel, remains unidentified.
Headline: “Russia Strikes Children’s Hospital in Deadly Barrage Across Ukraine.”
In stark contrast, Russia is clearly identified as the perpetrator, the active voice is used to describe its crime, and once again emotional descriptors – “deadly” – can be readily deployed to sway readers into an emotional response.
Headlines and photos are the part of a story that almost every reader sees. Which is why their role in framing our understanding events is so important. They are the print media’s main means of propagandising us.
Skewed priorities
Broadcast media like the BBC work slightly differently in manipulating our responses.
Running orders – the channel’s way to signal its news priorities – are important, as are the emotional reactions of anchors and reporters. Just think of the way Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, half-stifles a sneer every time he mentions Vladimir Putin by name, or how he struggles to suppress a scoff at any of the Russian president’s statements. Then try to imagine any BBC reporter being allowed to do the same with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, let alone British leader Sir Keir Starmer.
Another way to make us invested in some events but not others is by concentrating on what are called “human-interest” stories, taking ordinary individuals and making their troubles and suffering the focus of a piece rather than the usual talking heads.
The BBC evening news, for example, has largely stopped reporting on Gaza’s suffering. When it does, reports occur briefly and late in the running order and they usually cover little more than the dry facts. Human-interest stories have been rare.
The BBC broke with that trend twice on Tuesday’s News at Ten – in the midst of Israel twice targeting schools that were supposed to be offering shelter to Palestinians driven from their homes by Israeli bombs.
Did the BBC tell the stories of the victims of those air strikes? No, those attacks received the most minimal coverage.
The first human-interest story concerned a Ukrainian mother, shown desperately searching for her child in the aftermath of the attack on the Kyiv hospital the previous day, as well as their later reunion.
The second human-interest story, this one from Gaza, didn’t concern any of the many victims of the Israeli attacks on school-shelters. It focused instead – and at great length – on a Palestinian man beaten in Gaza for opposing Hamas rule.
In other words, not only did the BBC consider the day-old deaths of Ukrainians far more important news than Israel’s killing that day of 29 Palestinian civilians, but it also considered the beating of a man by Hamas as a bigger news priority too.
When we are encouraged to care about Palestinians, it is only when the odd one is being brutalised by other Palestinians, not when millions of them are being brutalised by their occupier, Israel, in their ghetto-prisons.
The pattern to this skewing of news priorities, the constant distorted framing of events is the clue to how we should decipher what the media is trying to achieve, what it is there to do.
BBC news coverage all too often looks like it is exploiting any opportunity to highlight violence by Russia, in strict accordance with British foreign policy objectives. Equally, it all too often looks like the BBC is engineering pretexts to ignore or downplay violence by Israel, again in strict accordance with British foreign policy objectives.
Ukraine is a key battleground for the West in its battle for global “full-spectrum dominance”, Washington’s central foreign policy strategy in which it positions itself so that no other great power, such as Russia and China, can challenge its control over the planet’s resources. The US and its western allies are ready to risk an entirely unnecessary nuclear war, it seems, to win that battle.
Israel, meanwhile, a colonial fortress-state implanted by the West into the oil-rich Middle East, is a critically important ally in realising Washington’s dominance in its region. The Palestinians are the fly in the ointment – and like a fly, they can be swatted away with utter indifference and impunity.
With this as our framework, we can understand why the BBC and other media fail so systematically to fulfill their self-professed remits to reporting objectively and disinterestedly, and fail to scrutinise and hold power to account – unless it is the power of an Official Enemy.
The truth is the BBC, the Guardian and the rest are nothing more than conduits of state-corporate propaganda, masquerading as news outlets.
Until we grasp that, they will continue grooming us.
The post Why the news media’s job is to groom us first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Israeli forces have struck four schools in Gaza in four days, killing at least 50 Palestinians and injuring dozens more as the UN reports that the Israeli military has damaged or destroyed at least two-thirds of Gaza’s schools since October. The latest attack came on Tuesday, when Israeli forces killed 29 Palestinians at a shelter for displaced people near a school in Khan Yunis — an area that…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
We get an update from journalist Akram al-Satarri in Gaza, as Israel orders the full evacuation of all civilians from Gaza City after one of the deadliest days in Gaza in weeks. An Israeli airstrike killed at least 30 Palestinians at a school housing displaced people near Khan Younis, mostly women and children. “There’s no safe haven” anywhere in Gaza, says al-Satarri. “The people who are bearing…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A Palestinian man mourns a boy killed in an Israeli attack, Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, 9 July. 2024 ( APA images)
Palestinians in Gaza marked another grim milestone as Israel’s genocide entered its 10th month, with no end in sight, and as public health experts warned of a massive wave of secondary mortality even in the event of an immediate ceasefire.
On Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes hit people sheltering outside a school in eastern Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, killing at least 29.
Israel claimed to have targeted a Hamas fighter with a “precise munition” in the deadly strike but video broadcast by Al Jazeera shows the area filled with civilians enjoying a game of football at the time of the attack:
?HORRIBLE: Footage shows the final moments of displaced people at Abasan School in eastern Khan Younis/south #Gaza Strip , playing football in the schoolyard before the Israeli army bombed them, resulting in a horrific massacre that killed dozens and injured hundreds. pic.twitter.com/tyXN2hJI48
— Nour Naim| ???? (@NourNaim88) July 9, 2024
In central Gaza, Israeli strikes killed 60 Palestinians and wounded dozens of others, according to the government media office in the territory.
Israeli tanks pushed into an already battered Gaza City on Tuesday following renewed intense attacks. The Palestine Red Crescent said that it had received dozens of distress calls but the intensity of the bombing made it impossible for them to help.
The armed wings of the Palestinian resistance groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad said they were battling “Israeli forces with machine guns, mortar fire and anti-tank missiles and killed and wounded Israeli soldiers” on Gaza City’s front lines, Reuters reported.
The fresh Israeli attacks in Gaza City caused a new wave of mass forced displacement and Hamas said it may derail protracted negotiations towards a ceasefire and prisoner swap.
Hamas had in recent days reportedly attenuated its position that Israel end the war as a precondition to any agreement but was seeking guarantees that negotiations would lead to a permanent ceasefire.
Israel once again indicated that it would reject any deal that would leave Hamas as the de facto governing authority in Gaza. On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his position that he would only accept an agreement that would “allow Israel to return and fight until all the goals of the war are achieved.”
That position appears guaranteed, if not explicitly intended, to ensure that no deal is possible.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Channel 12 news reported on a recent military assessment finding that “much of Hamas’ tunnel network is still in a ‘good functional state’ in many parts of Gaza.”
The resistance group is still able to launch raids near boundary with Israel “and possibly even cross it,” according to the assessment, as reported by The Times of Israel. The military chiefs reportedly recommended in their assessment that Israel reach a negotiated deal with Hamas, even if it ends the war, in order “to get back the hostages.”
In his first video appearance in weeks, Abu Obeida, the pseudonymous spokesperson for the armed wing of Hamas, said on Sunday that all 24 of the Qassam Brigades battalions were intact and had recruited thousands of new fighters.
No relief as journalists killed
With ceasefire talks seemingly fated to reach another impasse, there is little sign of relief for Palestinians in Gaza who have endured relentless attacks, trauma and grief, and now increasing hunger and disease.
Between 4 and 6 July, six Palestinian journalists, one of them a woman, were killed in three incidents in Gaza City and Deir al-Balah, bringing to 158 the number of journalists killed since 7 October, according to the government media office in the territory.
On 6 July, an Israeli airstrike killed six Palestinian police officers in Rafah, southern Gaza.
The following day, the bodies of three Palestinians who were apparently executed with their hands cuffed were recovered from the area of Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Gaza.
“Abdel-Hadi Ghabaeen, an uncle of one of the deceased, said they had been working to secure the delivery of humanitarian aid and commercial shipments through the crossing,” the AP news agency reported.
“He said he saw soldiers detain them on Saturday, and that the bodies bore signs of beatings, with one having a broken leg.”
The government media office in Gaza announced that Ihab Ribhi al-Ghussein, an engineer and deputy labor minister, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on a school in Gaza City on Saturday.
The media office said that al-Ghussain’s wife and daughter were killed previously in an Israeli strike on a house they were sheltering in after being displaced from their home in Gaza City.
Also on Saturday, Israel carried out an airstrike targeting a United Nations-run school in central Gaza’s Nuseirat refugee camp, claiming that it was being used as a command center by Hamas operatives.
It is unclear why Israel thinks this would be a credible excuse when even its military admits that Hamas operates out of an extensive underground infrastructure that remains functional, largely intact and beyond reach.
The government media office in Gaza said that at least 16 Palestinians were killed and more than 75 were injured in the attack on the Nuseirat school, which the UN said was being used as a shelter for nearly 2,000 displaced people.
UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, said that 190 of its facilities in Gaza “have been hit, some multiple times, some directly” since 7 October, killing 520 people and injuring 1,600.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that by targeting UN schools used as shelters, Israel was demonstrating “a deliberate policy intended to prevent security across the entire Gaza Strip and deny displaced Palestinians stability or shelter, even if that shelter is only temporary.”
Gaza City evacuation orders
The Israeli military ordered tens of thousands of Palestinians in central and western Gaza City to immediately evacuate on Sunday and Monday.
On Sunday, Israel ordered residents of five blocs in Gaza City to evacuate to the western part of the city, only for that area to be ordered evacuated the following day, with Israel instructing people to move to Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
The areas affected by the new evacuation orders “encompass 13 health facilities that were recently functional, including two hospitals, two primary healthcare centers and nine medical points,” according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
“In addition, four hospitals are located in close proximity to the evacuation zones,” the UN office added.
Two health facilities – the al-Ahli Baptist hospital and the Patients Friends Association Hospital – evacuated “in fear of intensified military activities that would render them inaccessible or non-functional,” according to the UN.
?Breaking : Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in #Gaza : The Israeli army forced us to shut down the hospital after attacking its surroundings with drones, forcing the civilians and patients to leave hence endangering their lives. @QudsNen
pic.twitter.com/kHAwPdNFM5— Nour Naim| ???? (@NourNaim88) July 8, 2024
Critical care patients were transferred to the Indonesian and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern Gaza, which the director of the World Health Organization said “are suffering [a] shortage of fuel, beds and trauma medical supplies.”
The lack of fuel has forced the suspension of kidney dialysis services at Kamal Adwan Hospital, the director of the facility announced on Sunday, and has placed “the lives of newborns in the neonatal department and critical patients in the intensive care unit at risk,” OCHA said.
Following the hasty evacuation of the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis on 2 July, three hospitals have become non-functional since the beginning of the month, “leaving only 13 out of 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip partially functional at present,” according to OCHA.
Life saving care has disappeared from Gaza, obliterated by Israel’s mix of “evacuation” orders, systematic targeting of all medical facilities (none excluded), denial of fuel and medical aid as part of its siege. All this under carpet bombing and starvation. A genocidal policy. https://t.co/TbKGmJjlYs
— Nicola Perugini (@PeruginiNic) July 8, 2024
Doctors Without Borders warned on Friday that its teams at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis were at a breaking point and were “running on emergency medical stocks” to treat an overwhelming number of patients.
The medical charity said that the facility is the “main site for field hospitals to sterilize their equipment.” Should Nasser Medical Complex lose electricity, “sterilization becomes difficult, and the care provided at several field hospitals will come to a stop.”
Doctors Without Borders added that Israel denied entry of trucks carrying the organization’s medical supplies on 3 July. The charity said it hasn’t been able “to bring any medical supplies into Gaza since the end of April.”
Meanwhile, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor warned that the ongoing closure of Gaza’s crossings amounts to a death sentence for more than 26,000 sick and wounded people needing life-saving care outside the territory.
Only 21 sick and wounded patients have been evacuated out of Gaza since Israel closed Rafah crossing on 7 May.
Efforts to increase aid “wiped out”
A senior UN official said last week that a recent Israeli evacuation order affecting one-third of Gaza’s territory in southern Rafah and Khan Younis had “wiped out” efforts towards improving the humanitarian situation in the Strip.
Meanwhile, within Gaza, “insecurity, damaged roads [and] the breakdown of law and order” have also hampered the delivery of fuel and aid needed to sustain humanitarian operations, according to UN OCHA. This has caused food and other supplies to spoil during extremely high temperatures.
The lack of fuel has forced bakeries to close once again, including the largest bakery in Gaza, located in Gaza City. Only seven out of the 18 bakeries supported by its humanitarian partners, all of them located in Deir al-Balah, remain operational, according to the UN office.
Community kitchens are also struggling to stay open amid a lack of fuel and food supplies, “resulting in a reduced number of cooked meals prepared throughout Gaza,” OCHA added.
No commercial trucks have entered northern Gaza for months, according to the UN, resulting “in a near total lack of protein sources (e.g. meat and poultry) on the local market and only a few types of locally produced vegetables available at unaffordable prices.”
Palestinians flee the eastern area of Gaza City following Israeli military evacuation orders, 7 July 2024 ( APA images)
Meanwhile, ongoing military operations have caused people to leave their agricultural land untended and the destruction of greenhouses have harmed the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to produce their own food.
Assessments undertaken by OCHA and other groups at 10 sites hosting new waves of internally displaced people “show critical levels of need across all sectors,” the UN office said, noting a particular “dire need for safe drinking water” and access to emergency services.
On Friday, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor accused Israel of using water as a weapon of war through the “persistent, systematic and widespread targeting of the Gaza Strip’s water sources and desalination plants.”
The group said that “as a result of the genocide, the per capita share of water in the Strip has decreased to between three and 15 liters per day, while in 2022 it was approximately 84.6 liters per day.”
The World Health Organization says that “between 50 and 100 liters of water per person per day are needed to ensure that most basic needs are met and few health concerns arise.”
Dear Citizens of #Gaza,
The Gaza Municipality regrets to inform you that the ongoing water crisis affecting large areas of the city is due to the damage to the "Mekorot" water line caused by the continued incursion of Israeli occupation in the eastern part of the city.… https://t.co/00jR8lgRZu
— ????? ??? – Municipality of Gaza (@munigaza) July 9, 2024
People displaced in northern Gaza, including from Shujaiya and other areas around Gaza City, lack safe shelters.
UN OCHA said that “many were found sleeping amid solid waste and rubble, with no mattresses or enough clothing, and some had sought shelter in partially destroyed UN facilities and residential buildings.”
Visiting northern #Gaza's Jabalia refugee camp, our colleague, Sara Al-Saqqa, describes horrifying destruction amid overflowing sewage, piles of solid waste, and lack of clean water, food and health care.
“There is no life at all,” a returning resident told her.
? Hear more ??
— UN Humanitarian (@UNOCHA) July 5, 2024
With nine out of 10 people in Gaza currently displaced, most of them forced to move multiple times, people are “compelled to reset their lives repeatedly without any of their belongings or any prospect of finding safety or reliable access to basic services,” the UN office added.
“What’s happening in Gaza since last night is a return to the first month of genocide,” Dr. Mustafa Elmasri, a psychotherapist in Gaza, wrote on X (formerly Twitter), on Monday.
“Under relentless bombing, people are forced to wander aimlessly, driven south to be slaughtered there. These are the darkest and most dangerous days of the war,” Elmasri added.
What's happening in Gaza since last night is a return to the first month of genocide. Under relentless bombing, people are forced to wander aimlessly, driven south to be slaughtered there. These are the darkest and most dangerous days of the war.
— Dr. Mustafa Elmasri (@Gaza_Psych) July 8, 2024
Sally Abi Khalil, the Middle East director for the global charity Oxfam, said that “pushing hundreds of thousands more people into what is essentially a death trap, devoid of any facilities, is barbaric and a breach of international humanitarian law.”
She added that the areas unilaterally declared by Israel as safe zones are in fact “the polar opposite, leaving families with the horrific choice between staying in an active combat zone or moving somewhere that is already desperately overcrowded, dangerous and unfit for human existence.”
Gaza deaths vastly undercounted
The Lancet, an independent medical journal based in London, published an article by three public health experts stating that Gaza fatalities are vastly undercounted.
“Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza health ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure,” according to the Lancet article, which observes that the ministry “is the only organization counting the dead.”
“The ministry has had to augment its usual reporting, based on people dying in its hospitals or brought in dead, with information from reliable media sources and first responders. This change has inevitably degraded the detailed data recorded previously,” the authors added.
Not all identifiable victims of airstrikes and other forms of direct violence are are included in the health ministry’s list of fatalities. The some 10,000 people missing under the rubble of destroyed buildings amid the widespread destruction in Gaza are also not reflected in the official fatality figure of nearly 37,500 as of 19 June.
On Sunday, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called for international pressure on Israel to “bring in trucks, special equipment and sufficient fuel, given the urgent need to clear the debris, locate bodies, and recover them with special procedures to identify and bury them in marked graves.”
The group said that the presence of decaying bodies “poses a threat to public safety” amid a spread of epidemics, jeopardizing the coastal enclave’s “long-term environmental health … to the point of ecocide, rendering the Gaza Strip unfit for human habitation.”
Even higher than the number of victims of direct violence are those who lose their lives “from causes such as reproductive, communicable and non-communicable diseases” resulting from the conflict, according to the authors of the Lancet article.
These deaths are a result of destroyed health and sanitation infrastructure, malnutrition and lack of access to clean water, repeated displacement and the loss of funding to UNRWA, the organization with the largest humanitarian footprint in Gaza.
“There will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years,” according to the authors of the Lancet article, who conservatively estimate “that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
That represents approximately 8 percent of Gaza’s population of around 2.3 million Palestinians.
Journalist Hossam Shabat, based in northern Gaza, said that he knows from personal experience that “deaths are way higher” than what is being reported.
Israel’s “goal is annihilation and that’s what they are achieving,” Shabat said.
For someone who has been documenting every day, I absolutely can confirm the deaths are way higher than being reported . Whole cities have been wiped out, most buildings and houses were bombed, most with residents inside. Every day when I walk into the schools for the displaced,… pic.twitter.com/NYHKlHpiHh
— ???? ???? (@HossamShabat) July 8, 2024
Israel’s “goal is annihilation and that’s what they are achieving,” Shabat said.
UN experts declare widespread famine
On Tuesday, a group of independent UN human rights experts warned that “the recent deaths of more Palestinian children due to hunger and malnutrition leaves no doubt that famine has spread across the entire Gaza Strip.”
At least three children in central Gaza, where medical treatment is available, have died in recent weeks, leaving “no doubt that famine has spread from northern Gaza into central and southern Gaza,” the experts said.
They added that “Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza.”
The experts called for the prioritization of delivery of humanitarian aid through land crossings “by any means necessary” and called for an end to Israel’s siege and for a ceasefire.
• First published in The Electronic Intifada
The post Gaza facing “most dangerous days” of the genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The U.S. military will permanently remove its Gaza pier months earlier than planned, with the pier having delivered an essentially negligible amount of humanitarian aid and having been disconnected for longer than it was operational in the two months since it was installed. Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder said on Tuesday that the military will reattach the pier this week…
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A man who goes by the online moniker of @Travelingisraelinfo headlines his short video very curiously: Why do you care about Palestinians?
Even before listening to the video, the answer is so obvious. The Palestinians are humans aren’t they? Shouldn’t humans care for each other? Palestinians are being genocided. Genocide is a monstrous war crime. Caring humans should want to stop genocide.
Why would this dude ask such a question? I’ll call him dude because his name is not revealed, and being a dude is “cool.” His About page at his Youtube Traveling Israel Channel tells that he has a website that “is all about helping travelers to travel in Israel. You can find here info about planning your trip, sights in Israel and the Israeli society.” It seems he is an Israeli and that he has a business tied to encouraging travelers to Israel (i.e., historical Palestine). If people don’t want to travel to Israel anymore, then his business will presumably suffer.
He relates that there are so many demonstrations going on around the world in support of Palestinians, which leads him to pose a question: “Nobody is marching for the people of Yemen and Syria, and I’m asking you why?”
I want to ask this dude why he is deflecting attention away from genocide committed by Israelis?
He goes on to claim, “There are 800,000 dead in Syria and Yemen, and you are silent. Do you expect more from Israel than you expect from the Arabs? If so, that makes you a racist…. Another option is that you are a hypocrite. It is ‘cool’ to be pro-Palestinian, so although you know there are far greater atrocities happening in Muslim countries, you choose to ignore them. By the way, you don’t have to limit yourself, you can be both a hypocrite and a racist.”
If this dude wants to draw attention away from Israeli slaughtering Palestinians, then is he not a racist — or even worse, an accomplice to genocide?
Dude is so sure of himself that he invites viewers: “Have a better answer? Comment below and I will respond.”
A rebuttal hardly seems challenging.
Imagine that white people (I assume the dude’s remarks are primarily directed at westerners, who are preponderently white folk) who take the time and effort to oppose the genocide of brown people in Palestine are called racists! Why does he not vent his rage at Israelis who are genociding the Palestinians? This is going on in his backyard. He has, thereby, engaged in misdirection, otherwise known as the logical fallacy commonly referred to as a red herring.
The next logical fallacy that the dude is guilty of committing is the false dilemma. He says people people who do not oppose all grave crimes (notice that the dude does not deny the Israeli genocide or Israeli racism against Palestinians) must then be racists, hypocrites, or both. There are plenty of reasons that might well explain why there aren’t as many demos for Syrians and Yemenis as for Palestinians. For one, not everybody knows what is going on in the world. This is especially true if people are only relying on legacy media. Some people may only have found out about the genocide of Palestinians because they walked past a demo at the local university, became informed, and protested.
Presumably, the people who are protesting all the war crimes around the world are not racist or hypocrites; therefore, their criticism of Israeli war crimes is justified. However, is everybody protesting all wars and violence around the world? Is it possible? Ergo, by the dude’s illogic, no one should be protesting war and war crimes.
It is patently preposterous that one would be branded a racist/hypocrite for not being in attendance at demos against every cruelty meted out everywhere in the world.
Racism is defined as “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.”
The demonstrations against the killing of Palestinians are not based on the race of either the killers or those who are being killed, so this is a false premise; i.e., another red herring. Another logical fallacy is that he is attempting to shift the meaning of “racism”; in this case, he is guilty of the logical fallacy known as moving the goalposts.
Another false premise is that war crimes and genocide are based on the numbers killed. War crimes are based on the commission of outrages against humans; and in the case of genocide, the intention to disappear all members of a group.
Furthermore, the dude has set up a false comparison. Palestinians have been subjected to Zionist genocidaires for many decades as well as having their land usurped, whereas the war crimes against Syrians and Yemenis is more recent. The Palestinians are rendered stateless, whereas, the Syrians and Yemenis are not stateless. So the comparison is false. Nonetheless, Syrians and Yemenis have been victims of warring, and humans everywhere should care about humans in Syria and Yemen. It is also important to note that Israel is involved in the violence against Syria and Yemen, which the dude is unaware of or neglects to mention.
The dude also commits the logical fallacy of ad hominem, and in doing so he comes across as a supporter of Zionism and the grotesque crimes carried out by Zionists. He is, in fact, in the process of clearing a path for genocide.
A false premise is an incorrect proposition that forms the basis of an argument. The dude may have sounded convincing, but since the premise is incorrect nothing can be deduced about the validity of the argument.
Be open-minded and skeptical. Analyze what is being claimed, and question everything. This will stand one in good stead to see through false arguments.
The post Why Care about Palestinians? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
We get an update from journalist Akram al-Satarri in Gaza, as Israel orders the full evacuation of all civilians from Gaza City after one of the deadliest days in Gaza in weeks. An Israeli airstrike killed at least 30 Palestinians at a school housing displaced people near Khan Younis, mostly women and children. “There’s no safe haven” anywhere in Gaza, says al-Satarri. “The people who are bearing the brunt of those bombardments are the Palestinian displaced people.” He also responds to ceasefire talks.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
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A group of UN human rights experts have released a statement saying that famine is underway across the entirety of Gaza as a result of what they called Israel’s “genocidal starvation campaign,” as international powers have declined to issue a formal declaration on the matter so far. In a statement released Tuesday, a group of UN special rapporteurs and other experts cited the recent deaths of…
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As some progressives and Democrats rally behind Vice President Kamala Harris to replace President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, Harris spoke in an interview about horrific conditions created by Israeli forces in Gaza amid Biden’s staunch support of Israel that progressives have long warned have hurt his chances of winning in the fall. Speaking with Joan Walsh for The Nation…
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As Israel’s war on Gaza enters its 10th month, we speak with Mohammed Abu Hashem, a Palestinian American who ended a 22-year career in the U.S. Air Force after an Israeli airstrike in Gaza killed his aunt in October. “It was clear to me that I needed to step away,” says Abu Hashem, who served as a first sergeant in the 316th Civil Engineer Squadron of the U.S. Air Force. He recently co-signed a…
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Healthcare officials were joined by human rights experts on Tuesday in condemning Israel’s latest evacuation orders for Gaza City, which the World Health Organization director said would “further impede delivery of very limited lifesaving care” as hospitals in the area struggled to treat sick and wounded Palestinians. The Israel Defense Forces claimed on Tuesday morning that there was “no need to…
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
With the war on Gaza now in its 10th month, we speak with journalist Jeremy Scahill about the state of negotiations for a possible ceasefire and hostage deal between Israel and Hamas. Scahill recently spoke to senior Hamas officials about the ongoing ceasefire negotiations and the group’s broader goals. He is a co-founder of The Intercept, and he recently announced he was leaving after more than a decade to launch a new investigative journalism outlet, Drop Site News, alongside colleague Ryan Grim. Scahill’s new article, “On the Record with Hamas,” examines the militant group’s motivations to launch the October 7 attacks in Israel, as well as its stance on the negotiations, based on interviews with a number of senior Hamas officials and other sources. “October 7 didn’t happen in a vacuum,” says Scahill. “The primary motivation, Hamas members told me, was to try to shatter the status quo on Gaza. They felt that the situation was becoming untenable.”
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As Israel’s war on Gaza enters its 10th month, we speak with Mohammed Abu Hashem, a Palestinian American who ended a 22-year career in the U.S. Air Force after an Israeli airstrike in Gaza killed his aunt in October. “It was clear to me that I needed to step away,” says Abu Hashem, who served as a first sergeant in the 316th Civil Engineer Squadron of the U.S. Air Force. He recently co-signed a letter with 11 other former U.S. officials who rsesigned over the Biden administration’s policy toward Gaza, Palestine and Israel. “The American people deserve to have a government that follows ethical and moral standards,” says Abu Hashem, who also talks about briefly meeting Aaron Bushnell before the airman died by self-immolation in February to protest U.S. support for Israel.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Last month, the Jimmy Dore Show invited investigative reporter Ben Swann to speak to the myriad facts and evidence uncovered that point to the Israeli government and Israeli intelligence having known well in advance of the planned 7 October Hamas attack and welcoming it. It should be an explosive news piece if not for the self-censorship of the US legacy media. Swann, thankfully, has put together a 7-part series on this with his team at Truth in Media.
Nonetheless, aside from the otherwise splendid investigative reporting by Swann, the interview raised a question: Why is a legitimate Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation (the borders are sealed to Gaza and the seas are closed to Palestinian fishermen) and oppression described by Swann as an “horrible and evil thing”?
Is not the Israeli slow-motion genocide (since 7 October it has been accelerated), occupation, racism, discrimination, and oppression not the “horrible and evil thing”? Is the horrible and evil theft of historical Palestine by European Jews not the cause of Palestinian resistance? Is it not, per se, horrible and evil to deride a legitimate resistance against the evil of Zionism?
Back in 2008 when Israel was on an earlier mass murder binge against Palestinians and Hamas resisted, I wrote about “The Inalienable Right to Resist Occupation”:
Complicitly, the Whitehouse blamed Hamas, as did Canada’s government. Government officials in the US, Canada, and Europe spoke the same lame phrase, “Israel has a right to defend itself,” as if the slaughter being carried out by a world military power against a starving population could be construed as some kind of defense. Israel, the world’s most frequently cited violator of international law, a racist state, an occupation state built through violence and slow-motion genocide is being acknowledged as having the right to defend its criminality. This is preposterous; there is no right of an occupation regime to defend its occupation. Palestine, however, has a right to resist occupation!
Frequent guest of the Dore Show, comedian Kurt Metzger realizes the situation that Israel forces the Palestinians to live under: a “concentration camp.” The Palestinians in Gaza are presented with a choice to either live on bended knee or to resist.
However, Swann would double down on his vitriol against the Hamas resistance saying: “The Hamas attacks were violent and brutal.” The language is leading and unnecessary. Attacks by their very nature are usually violent and brutal. But why are these adjectives not applied to the violent and brutal Israeli occupation by Swann?
If there wer no occupation of historical Palestine, if there were not millions of Palestinians living outside their homeland as refugees, if Palestinians were not being systematically humiliated by Israelis, if Palestinians were not being weeded out of existence by Israelis, if Palestinians were thrown the crumb of the decency to live peacefully alongside their racist usurpers in their historical homeland, would not the rise of a resistance have been obviated?
A progressivist principle should hold that: The oppressor bears responsibility for all casualties because without the oppression, there would be no need for resistance. Ergo, criticism of the resistance of Hamas is unprincipled.
As the show’s cast rummaged over whether Israel was now carrying out a genocide, Jimmy Dore felt it necessary to describe Hamas as a terrorist organization. Hello! There are likeliest over a 100,000 Palestinians slaughtered resulting from this bogus intelligence failure, so who are the terrorists?
Ed Herman, the first author of the acclaimed media analysis, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, noted:
For decades it has been the standard practice of the U.S. mainstream media to designate Palestinian attacks on Israelis as acts of “terrorism,” whereas acts of Israeli violence against Palestinians are described as “retaliation” and “counter-terror.” This linguistic asymmetry has been based entirely on political bias. Virtually all definitions of terrorism, if applied on a nonpolitical basis, would find a wide array of Israeli operations and acts of violence straightforward terrorism. (p 119)
The commonly bandied about death toll of 30 something thousand Palestinians is atrocious, but serious voices point to a serious undercount.
On 5 July 2024, the Lancet ran its numbers: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
Ralph Nader had written months earlier: “From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.” [emphasis added]
This time, it appears that Zionist connivance has blown up in the connivers faces and the faces of the supporters of Zionism in western governments.
There has been a catastrophic blowback against the genocidaires. Houthis in Yemen have caused disruptions to Zionist-aligned shipping in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Even US and UK aircraft carriers fear Houthi attacks.
Former US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter sourced inactive Israeli generals: “Israel can’t win this war. Not only Israel can’t win this war, Israel is losing this war.”
Would an outcome where Zionist occupation, oppression, racism, genocide is defeated be a horrible and evil thing?
The post What is the “Horrible and Evil Thing” in Historical Palestine? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
By a crushing majority, the 17 judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled more than five months ago that Israel was “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza.
The highest court in the world put Israel on trial, accused of the ultimate crime against humanity.
Much has happened since that decision – and all of it is even more incriminating against Israel than the evidence considered by the World Court back in January.
Tens of thousands more Palestinian civilians are dead or missing, most likely under rubble. Gaza is now a wasteland, one that will take many decades to rebuild.
Till then, the population has nowhere to live, nor institutions such as hospitals, schools, universities and government offices to care for them, nor infrastructure like functioning electricity and sewage systems to rely on.
In violation of a second ICJ ruling, Israel has invaded and repeatedly bombed Rafah, a small “safe zone” into which Gaza’s population had been herded by Israel, supposedly for their own protection.
And Israel has intensified its blockade of aid, now to the point where there is famine across much of the enclave. Children, the sick and the vulnerable are dying in growing numbers from an entirely man-made catastrophe.
Presented with so much evidence, how is the World Court dealing with Israel’s genocide trial?
The answer: it is moving at a snail’s pace.
Most experts agree that the ICJ is unlikely to issue a definitive ruling for at least a year. Until then, it seems, the western powers will continue giving Israel a licence to shed far more of Gaza’s blood – that is, to continue much further on the trajectory of a plausible genocide.
At this rate, the court will determine conclusively whether Israel is guilty of genocide only when that genocide is all but finished.
Eyes tight shut
Back in the mid-1990s, the world was confronted by another genocide, in Rwanda.
Then, the West vowed that it and the legal institutions supposedly there to uphold international law and protect the weakest should never drag their feet again, permitting a crime of such monstrous proportions to unfold without hindrance.
But 30 years on, the West is not just dragging its feet in addressing the crimes against the people of Gaza. Washington and its closest allies, including Britain, are actively arming Israel’s slaughter, and assisting with its starvation of the population.
In ruling against Israel, the ICJ would, by implication, also be finding the sole global superpower and its allies guilty of complicity in genocide.
In the circumstances, the reasons for caution at the World Court, rather than urgency, are all too obvious.
The ICJ’s sister court, the International Criminal Court (ICC), showed late last month that it too was in no hurry to stop the slaughter and mass starvation in Gaza.
Whereas the World Court judges the behaviour of states, the ICC judges the actions of individuals. It is empowered to identify and put on trial those who carry out crimes on behalf of the state.
In May, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, incensed western capitals by announcing that he was seeking an arrest warrant for Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders.
All five were accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In Netanyahu and Gallant’s case, that included the crime of exterminating Gaza’s Palestinians, using starvation as a “weapon of war”.
In truth, the ICC swung into action very late indeed – some eight months after Israel began its war crimes spree.
Nonetheless, Khan’s decision offered a brief moment of hope to Gaza’s bereaved, destitute and starving.
While the World Court’s lengthy genocide trial offers the prospect of a remedy potentially years away, arrest warrants from the ICC pose a far more direct and pressing threat to Israel.
Once signed, those warrants would obligate all parties to the Rome Statute, including Britain and other European states, to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant should they step on their soil.
Israeli media have reported on panicked army commanders worried about carrying out orders in Gaza for fear they may be charged next with war crimes.
For a moment, it looked as though Israel might have to weigh whether it could afford to continue the slaughter of Palestinians.
Superpower bullying
But the ICC’s judges agreed to lift the sword from Netanyahu and Gallant’s necks – while leaving Gaza’s women and children, the sick and elderly, exposed once again to the full force of Israel’s bombs and starvation policy.
Rather than approving, as expected, the arrest of Netanyahu and his defence minister for war crimes, the ICC caved into pressure from the United States and Britain.
It revealed that it was willing to revisit the question of whether it had jurisdiction over Gaza – in other words, whether it had the authority to put Netanyahu and Gallant on trial for crimes against humanity.
It was an extraordinary moment – and one that confirmed quite how dishonest the West’s professions of humanitarianism are, and quite how feeble are supposedly independent institutions like the ICC and ICJ when they run up against Washington.
The question of jurisdiction in Gaza and the other occupied Palestinian territories was settled by the ICC long ago. Were that not the case, Khan would never have dared to request the arrest warrants in the first place.
Nonetheless, the ICC’s judges accepted submissions, secretly made by the outgoing British government, that question the legal body’s jurisdiction powers. The UK was undoubtedly waging this campaign of intimidation against the war crimes court in coordination with the US and Israel.
Neither have standing at the ICC because they have refused to ratify the war crimes statute that founded the court.
The UK’s move was a transparent delaying tactic, relying on a piece of standard Israeli sophistry: that the Oslo Accords, from 30 years ago, did not give Palestinians criminal jurisdiction over Israeli nationals, and therefore Palestine cannot delegate that power to the ICC.
The flaw in this argument is glaring. Israel violated the terms of the Oslo Accords decades ago and no longer considers itself bound by them. And yet it now insists – via Britain – that the Palestinians still be shackled by these obsolete documents.
Even more to the point, the Oslo Accords were long ago superseded by a new legal and diplomatic reality. In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to recognise Palestine as a state.
Three years later, Palestine was allowed to become a member of the ICC. After a long delay, the court finally ruled in 2021 that it had jurisdiction in Palestine.
Since then, and again at a snail’s pace, the ICC has been investigating Israeli war crimes, including atrocities against Palestinians and the building of armed, exclusively Jewish settlements on Palestinian territory, denying the Palestinians any chance to exercise their right to statehood.
In a properly functioning system of international law, arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Israel’s top brass would have been issued years ago, long before the current plausible genocide in Gaza.
Buying time
The question of jurisdiction is no longer a matter of legal debate. But revisiting it unnecessarily does buy time, time in which Israel can kill more Palestinians, level even more of Gaza, and starve more Palestinian children.
It is just such delays that lie at the heart of the matter. It is the endless deferments of accountability that directly enabled the current genocide in Gaza.
Israel’s cynical evasions in implementing the Oslo Accords of the mid-1990s led to a growing backlash from Palestinians, culminating in the eruption of a violent uprising in 2000.
The endless postponements by western powers, led by Washington, in recognising Palestinian statehood destroyed the credibility of the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians’ government-in-waiting.
The obvious futility of the Oslo process drove many Palestinians into the arms of militant rival groups like Hamas that promised to let Palestinians take back control of their fate.
The reluctance in the West to put any kind of pressure on Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories gave Israeli leaders the confidence to tighten their stranglehold: through settlement building and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and a blockade that led to the isolation and immiseration of Gaza.
Inaction in addressing Gaza’s increasingly dire conditions motivated Hamas to smash apart the status quo, one that was quietly suffocating the Palestinian population there. Hamas did so by carrying out a surprise and bloody attack on Israel on 7 October.
And the West’s refusal to intervene after 7 October opened the door to Israel’s current slaughter in Gaza, an extermination campaign designed to drive the people of Gaza out of the enclave, becoming someone else’s – ideally Egypt’s – problem.
The World Court’s delay in ruling on genocide, and the ICC’s delay in issuing arrest warrants, presage yet more, unpredictable disasters down the road.
One certainty, however, is that, through more bloodletting, Israel will be entirely unable to realise its professed goal of “eliminating” Hamas.
The most Israel can achieve by inflicting mass death and destruction in Gaza is to prove to Palestinians that Hamas is right: that Israel is unwilling to allow any form of Palestinian statehood, and has been since it belligerently occupied the Palestinian territories 57 years ago – long before Hamas even existed.
In killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, Israel has served as Hamas’ biggest recruiting sergeant. More young Palestinian men in Gaza are throwing their lot in with armed resistance, if only to avenge the deaths of their loved ones.
Israel’s approach is obviously self-defeating – but only if the goal is truly to live in peace with their neighbours, and not to be engaged in permanent war with the region.
Abuse to continue
Responding to the ICC’s latest delay, Clive Baldwin, a legal adviser at Human Rights Watch, observed that the UK had to end its “double standards in victims’ access to justice”.
He added: “The next government will need to immediately decide if it supports the ICC’s essential role in bringing accountability and defending the rule of law for all.”
That next government is now led by Sir Keir Starmer, who won last week’s general election with a landslide of seats based on a paltry share of the votes.
Starmer benefited massively from a split in the right-wing vote. But a near-record low turn-out and a fall in votes for Labour compared to his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, hinted at the profound lack of enthusiasm both for Starmer and his evasive platform.
Throughout his election campaign, Starmer was keen to send signals to Washington and the establishment media that – in keeping with the outgoing Conservative government’s stalling tactics – he would buy time for Israel too.
He paid a price for that at the election: he alienated many party workers and lost seats to a handful pro-Palestine candidates running as independents, including Corbyn himself, on huge swings of the vote. Several senior Labour MPs also found themselves within a hair’s breadth of losing their seats.
That may explain why Labour officials lost no time emphasising that Starmer had called Netanyahu to talk tough with him and was distancing himself from the previous government’s efforts to openly run interference for the US and Israel at the ICC.
According to a report this week in the Guardian, Starmer is expected to drop the current move to stall at the ICC over issuing arrest warrants.
Important decisions remain, however. Will Labour quickly restore funding to Unrwa, the UN refugee agency that is best placed to tackle the Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza? And will it halt arms sales?
But most crucial of all, will it recognise Palestine, sending a signal both to the ICJ and ICC and to Israel that a ruling protecting the Palestinians from genocide will be enforced by a major western power and close ally of Washington’s?
No good signs
Back in January, days before the World Court announced it was plausible that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza, Starmer quietly tore up the Labour Party’s long-standing policy on recognising Palestine as a state.
More than 140 other countries have already recognised Palestine, including recently Spain, Ireland and Norway.
Instead, Starmer declared that Palestine could only come into being once Israel agreed to such recognition. In other words, Israel – the serial abuser – will be the one to decide whether it will ever end its serial abuse of the Palestinian people.
Starmer, let us note, made his name as a human rights lawyer.
Next, in the final stages of the election campaign, Starmer’s aides briefed The Times of London of a further obstacle in the way of recognition of Palestinian statehood.
The paper reported that Starmer would refuse to recognise a Palestinian state until he had received the blessing of the United States, reportedly to avoid the risk of a diplomatic falling out. Israel is Washington’s most favoured client state.
Such a delay would once again reassure Israel that it can do as it pleases to the Palestinians.
And as should be all too clear by now, buying time for Israel means allowing it to carry out a genocide in Gaza and intensify ethnic cleansing policies begun decades ago.
Tissue of lies
Starmer’s own political trajectory suggests an uncomfortable truth about international power politics. The closer western leaders move to power, the more pressure they feel to do Washington’s bidding – and that invariably means casting aside principle.
Devotion to Israel – and a willingness to abandon the Palestinians to the death camp Gaza has become – has been one of the major conditions of entry into the West’s power club.
During the election campaign, Starmer passed that test with flying colours. Which is why he – unlike his predecessor – received an easy ride from the British establishment, including its public relations arm, the corporate media.
Ultra-rich donors, including those with close ties to Israel, have been lining up to throw money at Starmer’s Labour party, at the same time as membership numbers have plummeted.
The reality is that we live in a world where the powerful pay lip service to human rights and international law, a world where they profess to aid the weak even as they assist in their slaughter.
Oppression flourishes, obscured by their empty promises and endless dithering.
For three decades, the West has advertised its benevolence and humanitarianism. It has launched invasions and waged wars supposedly to protect the weak and vulnerable – from Kosovo to Ukraine, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya. Democracy and women’s rights have supposedly been the West’s watchwords.
But in truth, as Gaza demonstrates only too clearly, those claims were a tissue of lies. It was always about treating the world as a giant chessboard, and one where Washington’s right to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” was the driving principle, not protection of the weak.
Talk of humanitarianism was there to obscure a deeper, more savage truth: might still makes right. And no one is stronger than the US and those it favours.
The Palestinians, unlike Israel, have no weight in the international system. They are denied an army, and have no warplanes. They are denied control over their borders and their airspace. They have no real economy or currency – they are entirely reliant on the goodwill of Israeli financial institutions. They have no freedom to move from their slivers of territory, their ghettoes, unless Israel first agrees.
They cannot even stop Israel from bulldozing their homes, or arresting their children in the middle of the night.
No one on the international stage, least of all governments in Washington and London, really needs to take account of Palestinian interests.
Abusing Palestinians comes at minimal political cost. Protecting them would offer few tangible political gains. Which is precisely why their abuse continues day after day, month after month, year after year, decade after decade.
We live in a world of deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith. Britain’s new prime minister has shown he is already an arch-exponent of those dark political arts. Listen not to what he says, but watch closely what he actually does.
• First published in Middle East Eye
The post Starmer Learnt that the Price of Power was Support for Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
As Israeli forces indiscriminately massacre Palestinians across Gaza, they are using U.S.-made heavy equipment to maul people and hide bodies in an apparent effort to obstruct the death toll and prevent photos of decaying bodies from circulating online, a new report finds. An Israeli soldier told +972 Magazine and Local Call that Israeli forces clear out Palestinians’ bodies using D-9 bulldozers…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israeli officials instructed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers to target fellow soldiers and potentially civilians in the chaos of the October 7, 2023 attack that Israeli officials have used as a springboard for their genocide in Gaza, a prominent Israeli outlet has reported. According to Haaretz, IDF officials gave the order to execute the “Hannibal Directive” in at least three places on…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Public health experts have estimated that the true death toll in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza could be five times higher than the official toll reported by Palestinian officials — a chilling figure that they say is, in fact, a conservative estimate based on historical death tolls in times of conflict. In a letter published on Friday in prestigious medical journal The Lancet…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israeli forces on Saturday killed more than a dozen displaced Palestinians in a targeted attack on a United Nations-run school in central Gaza, the latest bombing of an education facility as Israel’s assault on the besieged enclave entered its 10th month. Video footage from the scene of the attack on the al-Jaouni school in central Gaza’s al-Nuseirat refugee camp shows puddles of blood on the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Ever since October 7, 2023, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN, PBS, along with BBC, DW, NHK other Western-aligned entertainment/news conglomerates and wire services like AP, UPI, Reuters and Israeli media have sought to keep their viewers, readers, and listeners attention on the hostages and away from any explanation, reason, or justification of Palestinians seeking to exchange the hostages for some of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
This is of course consistent with the under-reporting of the Palestinians suffering the illegal military occupation, subjugation, and often murderous treatment from the Israeli military which operates largely with impunity within Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and elsewhere.
Western media focus on the hostages is even more important in justifying Israel’s wholesale annihilation of much of the population of Hamas governed Gaza, homes, apartment buildings, mosques, schools, stores, bakeries, playgrounds all claimed by Israel to be in defence of the Palestinian guerrilla attack of Israel on October 7, 2023.
However, since the U.S. has built up the Israel military to be one of the most powerful in the world and perfectly capable of defending itself against any subsequent Hamas resistance attack, the Israeli obliteration of Gaza’s cities and its people is obviously not defensive, and after Israel’s generations of crimes against Palestinians, the October 7 invasion was hardly unexpected. UN Secretary General António Guterres said as much right after the October 7, 2023 event. Guterres noted that “these attacks did not happen in a vacuum”—highlighting the impact of 56 years of occupation on the Palestinian people. (United Nations Press).
Israel’s Responsibilities as an Occupying Power Under International Humanitarian Law
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, regarding Israel’s right to self-defense in the context of Israel’s (illegal) military occupation of Palestinian lands and people:
“Israel has the right to defend itself, but it cannot invoke this right to perpetrate acts that violate international law against a people it is occupying.”
In her report to the UN General Assembly in October 2022, Rapporteur Albanese noted,
“An occupying power has a duty to protect the occupied population and cannot invoke self-defense to justify the use of force against its own protected persons.”
Western news outlets refer to Palestinian freedom fighters as “terrorists” constantly reporting that some Western governments list Hamas and other armed groups fighting the Israeli occupation as terrorist organisations; however, China, as a permanent member of the Security Council, has backed the right of the Palestinian people to use arms. Zhang Jun, China’s UN ambassador, stated in an address to the International Court of Justice concerning Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land, February 22, 2024:
The struggle waged by peoples for their liberation, right to self-determination, including armed struggle against colonialism, occupation, aggression, domination against foreign forces should not be considered terror acts.
Beijing’s envoy said there were “various people (who) freed themselves from colonial rule” and they could use “all available means, including armed struggle.” (This seemed an indirect reference to the American War of Independence from Britain.)
As a conscientious peoples historian activist, I have allowed myself to be subjected to anti-Chinese, anti-UN, anti-Hamas, pro-Israeli news slants in the interest of knowing just how the average mainstream media addict comes to accept genocide as an inevitable condition of modern warfare and wars as an unpreventable source of financial gain.
Therefore NBC’s very poignant, even painful to look at and read, coverage of the Israeli Defence Force killing of 64 children during its freeing of 4 hostages on June 8, 2024, came as a surprise to this writer and life long sympathiser of the Palestinian inhuman predicament. This sorrowful coverage of the horrendous head wound and death of a lovely, four-year-old boy and the sight of a seven-year-old girl alive but with more than half her face gone, is perhaps one indication that just perhaps even the CIA overseen media of the hegemonic Western nations can no longer tolerate Israeli genocide in its ever more outrageously gruesome aspects.
Readers are invited to share some grief with Arab Palestinian families suffering soul crushing amount of anguish for the sheer numbers of the dead and dying children and the catatonic state of surviving kids. Just click on the hyperlink below:
NBC News June 8, 2024
Gazan families mourn children killed during IDF’s hostage rescue
WEB Gaza’s Health Ministry says at least 64 children were killed by Israeli fire during the June 8 raid to rescue four hostages being held by Hamas.
The four hostages — Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Shlomi Ziv and Andrey Kozlov — were safely extracted from the Gaza Strip and cameras captured their emotional reunions with their families after eight months of captivity.
The joy experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis during the first hostage exchange as they fell into the loving arms of waiting family and friends could have been repeated instead of this horrific bloodbath of some 270 Palestinians, among them 64 precious children on June 8, 2024
Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Shlomi Ziv and Andrey Kozlov will most likely never forget that their homecoming was one sided. No Palestinian got to welcome home family members long imprisoned with or without having been charged as seems to the case for so many incarcerated and more being seized every day.
Actually, how shall any of us ever forget that Americans have been backing and supplying these abominations of using weapons of mass destruction upon fellow human beings and their children in full knowledge of the profits being made by U.S. corporations.
The post IDF Killed 64 Children While Freeing 4 Hostages first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jay Janson.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.