Genocide of Gaza Palestinians
Updated 2024-08-25
2024-07-09 Eyewitness To Genocide in Palestine Today on the Show: The Haiti action center protests the reoccupation of Haiti by US supported and armed Kenyan troupes. Also, Eyewitness to Genocide in Palestine; bay-area activists bare witness to the killing fields https://kpfa.org/episode/flashpoints-july-9-2024/
2024-08-22 “So Horrific”: Doctor Recounts Treating Patients in Gaza Injured in Massacres Enabled by U.S. Bombs Tanya Haj-Hassan is a pediatric intensive care physician who has volunteered in Gaza multiple times over the past 10 months. She joins us to recount what she witnessed there and to explain why she is calling for an end to U.S. support for the Israeli military and the resumption of comprehensive humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. Over the course of Israel’s assault, Haj-Hassan has treated victims of “massacre after massacre,” with injuries and casualties “enabled by American bombs.” She joins demands for Palestinian voices to be allowed to address the convention onstage and argues that Democratic Party leadership’s refusal is part of a systematic “process of dehumanization” targeting Palestinians. Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsmOCcyl8Gs
2024-08-15 As Gaza Death Toll Tops 40,000, Congress Urged to Block New Weapons to Israel “U.S. arms transfers to Israel have fueled unimaginable suffering in Gaza, including staggering levels of civilian harm,” said one embargo advocate.
As the Palestinian death toll from Israel’s 314-day assault on Gaza passed 40,000—a figure Palestinian and United Nations officials say is made up of mostly women and children and is likely a vast undercount—human rights groups this week decried the Biden administration’s approval of $20 billion worth of new weapons for Israel and renewed pleas for Congress to block further arms transfers to the nation’s far-right government. https://www.commondreams.org/news/arms-embargo-israel-congress
2024-08-11 Palestinians Say US Responsible for Latest ‘Massacre’ of Children in Gaza The office of the Palestinian Authority’s president is holding the U.S. government responsible for a weekend bombing in Gaza that killed an estimated 100 people, including at least 11 children. The victims of the attack on the al-Tabin school were blown to ‘pieces,’ according to video evidence and on-the-ground reporting, when U.S.-provided missiles were fired on a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City.
In the wake of the attack that stirred global outrage and condemnation Saturday, the Palestinian presidency’s spokesperson Nabih Abu Rudeineh condemned the massacre and said the PA held the Biden administration “responsible for the massacre due to its financial, military, and political support for Israel.”
Rudeineh demanded the U.S. pressure the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cease indiscriminate attacks that have left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians dead, wounded, and displaced over recent months. In addition, he said, the U.S. must conform to international law by ending its “blind support” to Israel “that leads to the killing of thousands of innocent civilians, including children, women, and the elderly.”https://www.commondreams.org/news/us-responsible-for-gaza-massacre
2024–07-31 Unspeakable: We Are Swimming In A Pool of Blood Unimaginably, Gazans continue to endure the atrocities of a heedless Israel: Strikes on schools that kill mostly children, polio-tainted sewage “everywhere,” catastrophic hunger, universal trauma, gutted hospitals, shattered families seeking small bodies rotting under rubble. To many, the ongoing savagery through 10 bloody months marks the moral deterioration of an Occupation increasingly acquiescent to the concept “there are certain groups of people who can be killed…They are not like us.”
While it’s tumbled off most front pages, Israel’s blithe defiance of both world censure and ICJ rulings goes on apace. This week, the U.N’s largest body of human rights experts hailed an earlier “historic” ICJ finding that Israel’s Occupation is “unlawful” and must end; they declared Palestinians’ right to “freedom from foreign military occupation, racial segregation and apartheid is absolutely non-negotiable,” adding, “Israel must stop acting as if uniquely above the law.” But that shift feels woefully distant in the wake of Netanyahu’s chilling, rabid avowal before Congress to press on until “total victory.”
Meanwhile, 86% of Gaza is under ever-unrolling evacuation orders, with thousands perpetually forced to uproot; 96% of Gazans face acute food shortages, with communities “wasting away” and children “sleeping hungry” while often going up to 3 days without food; and public health experts cite the “ticking time bomb” of a polio epidemic from overflowing sewage – “The smell is killing us, we are begging to be saved from the sewers” – along with soaring cases of hepatitis, dysentery, gastrointestinal disease and skin infections. https://www.commondreams.org/further/unspeakable-we-are-swimming-in-a-pool-of-blood
2024-07-31 Report From Gaza Aid Agencies Shows ‘Catastrophe on an Entirely New Level’ Israeli attacks on relief workers and designated “humanitarian zones” in Gaza, as well its tight control over borders and repeated evacuation orders, have devastated the ability to deliver much-needed aid to residents of the beleaguered strip, 20 non-governmental organizations warned in a report released Tuesday.
Israel has now issued “evacuation orders” that cover 86% of the Gaza Strip’s land area, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). This means that Gaza’s 2.1 million people are now expected to squeeze into only 14% of Gaza’s 141 square miles.
“We are doing everything we can to save children’s lives in Gaza, but our job becomes more and more challenging by the day,” said Jeremy Stoner, the Middle East regional director of Save the Children, one of the organizations behind the report. “Forcibly displacing civilians into areas that cannot accommodate them is causing a humanitarian catastrophe on an entirely new level.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/aid-agencies-gaza-catastrophe
2024-7-30 Whoever Wins in November, Our Movement Must Make Palestine Nonnegotiable While the world has become transfixed by the unfolding political crisis in the U.S. presidential election, Israel continues to lay waste to Gaza, expand settlements in the West Bank and massacre Palestinians in skyrocketing numbers.
In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Eman Abdelhadi — an academic, activist and writer who thinks at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and politics — discusses the ceasefire negotiations, Israel’s ongoing genocidal war, the Palestinian resistance, the upcoming U.S. presidential elections and the tasks of the Palestine solidarity movement.https://truthout.org/articles/whoever-wins-in-november-our-movement-must-make-palestine-nonnegotiable/
2024-06-15 America Crawls Further Into Global Isolation by Backing Gaza Genocide Aside from supplying Israel with the needed weapons to conduct its crimes in the Strip, the U.S. has gone as far as threatening international legal and political bodies that tried to hold Israel accountable, thus ending the “extermination” of Palestinians in Gaza —a term used on May 20 by the International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan.
Washington continues to behave in such a way despite the fact that Israel refuses to concede to a single U.S. demand or expectation regarding peace and negotiations. Indeed, Israel’s political discourse is deeply invested in the language of genocide, while the Israeli military is actively carrying it out.
The West Bank, where the bulk of the Palestinian state would supposedly take shape, is experiencing its own upheaval. Violence there is unprecedented compared to recent decades. Across the West Bank, tens of thousands of illegal settlers are torching homes, cars, and attacking Palestinians with total impunity, in fact, often alongside the Israeli army.
Yet, despite the occasional gentle reprimand and ineffectual sanctions on a few settlers, Washington continues to stand firmly by its declared policy regarding the two states and all the rest. Not a single mainstream Israeli politician, certainly not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government of extremists, is willing to entertain the very thought. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-isolation-gaza
2024-06-14 End the Israeli War on Gaza and Palestine Eight months ago, Israel began a genocidal war against Gaza and the further increase of repression in the West Bank including thousands imprisoned, and expansion of the settlements there. Torture is commonplace of Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank and especially of prisoners in Gaza. 90 per cent of the population of Gaza is hungry, famine is occurring. Besides the 15,000 children killed, almost all Palestinian babies and young children are likely to have permanent health problems if they live from Israel’s systematically starving them and destroying the health care and educational system. Over a million Palestinians were forced to move to Rafah in southern Gaza fleeing their homes beginning May 6th. A million Palestinians in Rafah have been forced to flee again, under the threat of immediate murder by Israel, with no safe place to go to, nor to a place that can sustain life.
Not only is the United States government complicit with and participating in Israel’s genocidal war but also many U.S corporations. https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/14/end-the-israeli-war-on-gaza-and-palestine/
2024-04-12 ‘Genocidal Actions’ Persist in Gaza as Israel Blocks Aid and US Weapons Flow A week after Israeli officials promised the Biden administration they would open a border crossing and a port to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, relief organizations and the United Nations reported Friday that life-saving supplies are still being blocked, and warned that the White House must take more decisive action to force Israel to stop starving Palestinians.
The U.N. reported that just 212 aid trucks entered Gaza on Tuesday, far lower than the 467 reported by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who promised to “flood Gaza with aid” after a tense phone call between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Joe Biden last Thursday.
But as The Guardian reported Friday, the Ashdod port has not been opened yet, and instead of opening the Erez crossing last Sunday as promised, Israel has opened another crossing into northern Gaza but has not yet allowed U.N. agencies to use it. https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-still-blocking-aid
2024-04-30 The student movement for justice in Palestine is exploding peacefully across America Today on the Show: The student movement for justice in Palestine is exploding peacefully across America, despite a violent police crack down on several campuses; we’ll feature live reports from New York City and Los Angles. Also Ziad Abbas is back for a frontline update on the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the west bank: And we’ll also have a rafa update on the threatened israeli invasion https://kpfa.org/episode/flashpoints-april-30-2024/
2024-04-07 World Marks Six Months of ‘Relentless Death and Destruction’ in Gaza Peace and human rights advocates on Sunday renewed calls for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and an increase in lifesaving humanitarian aid for its starving people as the embattled enclave marked six months since the start of Israel’s genocidal retaliation for the October 7 attacks.
In six months of bombardment by air, land, and sea following the Hamas-led attacks that killed more than 1,100 people in Israel—with over 240 people taken hostage—Israeli forces have killed or maimed more than 116,000 Palestinians, including people believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out homes and other buildings. Gazans—especially children—are starving to death as Israel severely restricts the amount of aid allowed to enter the strip. Women are “burying their newborns every day” as they have nothing to feed them.
Around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced, perhaps permanently, in what many Palestinians and international observers are calling a new Nakba, the ethnic cleansing catastrophe perpetrated by Jewish militants during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Gaza’s infrastructure has been obliterated, with reconstruction expected to cost $18.5 billion, or nearly Palestine’s entire annual gross domestic product. https://www.commondreams.org/news/gaza-genocide-2667714326
2024-03-19 Cornel West slams Joe Biden’s Gaza policy: ‘Most of our politicians are cowards’ | Real Talk Online Our guest this week is US independent presidential candidate Cornel West, and we ask him why he called Joe Biden a “war criminal”. He also explains why he feels Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a “gangster”, why Biden’s Gaza policy makes him a “hypocrite” and how Arab-American voters will turn their backs on him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRz5Bjv9KKM
2024-03-22 On the Blood of the Murdered Mothers and Children Cruelty upon cruelty: Today is Mother’s Day in Gaza, and across the Arab world. Still the slaughter, the wounding, trauma, hunger go on. Israel has killed over 12,000 Palestinian children, with many thousands more injured or orphaned ; each day, 37 more mothers are killed. Those who survive battle to keep their children alive, and mourn those they’ve lost. “The children are always ours,” said James Baldwin. But in Gaza, says one mother, “Today, like all mothers, I feel broken.”
This year, the Mother’s Day marked each March 21 is, for Gazans, a bloody travesty. The numbers still numb: More than 31,988 people have been killed in the ongoing) Israeli assault; another 74,188 have been injured, including over 32,800 children and 25,000 women, and 25,000 children have lost one or both parents. https://www.commondreams.org/further/on-the-blood-of-the-murdered-mothers-and-children
2024-03-12 We Need Feminism Without Condescension to Respond With Clarity to the Gaza Genocide I looked up the definition of “condescending” for this, just to see if it would provide anything I didn’t already know. What we immediately assume the word to mean if we have heard it before is something like patronizing, or talking down to people. But what is also included in the definition of condescension is “disdain.” Disdain is the feeling that someone is unworthy of your respect.
We know how mainstream Western feminists talk about Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim women. Examples include insisting, either directly or indirectly, that war and occupation will help them somehow or that their oppressors treat women better than they do. “Feminists” like Tammy Duckworth or Nancy Pelosi will always agree that Israel treats women great, as if Palestinian women who are murdered and abused at the hands of Israel don’t exist at all. The subtext of this being that Palestinian women couldn’t possibly know what’s good for them. That’s disdain. That’s not feminism.
Having a perspective on feminism that rejects condescension allows us to avoid the same pitfalls so many people didn’t when the U.S. was talking about invading Afghanistan under the guise of “liberating women.”
When The New York Times came out with a story about mass rape on October 7, we were able to ask, “Where is your evidence?” And we were right to ask those questions, right? And we should be asking a lot of questions when the intent of the story was to galvanize feminists in the West to support the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. They didn’t need evidence. They just needed Western women to consent to dropping bombs on Palestinian women to exact revenge for something that they completely made up. It demanded we value Israeli women over Palestinian women because that’s what they do.
Feminism that is free of condescension allows us to act with clarity in these moments. It allows us to act with humility. It allows us to be in genuine solidarity with women all over the world and not just in our hyper-specific contexts https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/feminism-without-condescension-gaza
2024-03-08 With Genocide in Gaza, the Word ‘Never’ Has Been Stripped From ‘Never Again’ The richest, most powerful countries in the Western world, those who believe themselves to be the keepers of the flame of the modern world’s commitment to democracy and human rights, are openly financing and applauding Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The Gaza strip has been turned into a concentration camp. Those who have not already been killed are being starved to death. Almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced. Their homes, hospitals, universities, museums, and infrastructure of every kind has been reduced to rubble. Their children have been murdered. Their past has been vaporized. Their future is hard to see.
Even though the highest court in the world believes that almost every indicator seems to meet the legal definition of genocide, IDF soldiers continue to put out their mocking “victory videos” celebrating what almost looks like fiendish rituals. They believe that there is no power in the world that will hold them to account. But they are wrong. They and their children’s children will be haunted by what they have done. They will have to live with the loathing and the abhorrence the world feels for them. And hopefully one day everybody – on all sides of this conflict – who has committed war crimes will be tried and punished for them, keeping in mind that there is no equivalence between crimes committed while resisting Apartheid and Occupation, and crimes committed while enforcing them. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/genocide-gaza-never-again
2024-03-07 Media Malpractice: Blacking Out Genocide and Disenfranchising Palestinian Pain America’s corporate media serves as a key cog in the machinery of genocide.
Rather than providing the kind of objective, fact-based reporting integral to an informed citizenry, our mainstream press bombards us with explicit and implicit biases, false narratives, dehumanization, and misdirection, serving to stifle public dissent and justify, rationalize, and conceal the systematic oppression and extermination of the people of Gaza.
As dependable propaganda tools for Israel’s aggression, our news censors truth not only by what they choose to cover and how they spin it—but what they deliberately omit. This orchestrated disinformation campaign helps ensure the ongoing and unconditional support of the U.S. government and its continued role as Israel’s dutiful genocidal benefactor.https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/media-malpractice-gaza-genocide
2024-03-06 Why Biden is hiding Biden’s team has taken to hosting smaller events and keeping locations a secret until the President arrives, lest he be heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters — and they’re reportedly considering hiring a private company to screen attendees ahead of a major fundraiser this month.
The facade of unquestioning U.S. support for the Israeli government is crumbling, thanks in large part to the immense pressure being exerted by the Palestine solidarity movement. Biden knows U.S. complicity in the Gaza genocide could cost him the 2024 election, and he’s willing to do just about anything to save face — except cut off the flow of U.S. dollars to Israel’s genocidal military. https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2024/03/06/why-biden-is-hiding/
2024-02-08 Instead of Diplomacy and Peace, US Chooses to Back Genocide and War The horror Americans feel at the plight of people in Gaza and the U.S. role in it is a shocking new low in this disconnect between the humanity of ordinary Americans and the insatiable ambitions of their undemocratic leaders.
At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been touring the shrinking number of capitals in the region where leaders will still talk to him, playing the United States’ traditional role as a dishonest broker between Israel and its neighbors, in reality partnering with Israel to offer the Palestinians impossible, virtually suicidal terms for a ceasefire in Gaza.
The position of the United States and Israel today is that ending a massacre that has already killed more than 27,700 people is not a serious option, even after the International Court of Justice has ruled it a plausible case of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide and drafted the Genocide Convention from his adopted home in New York City, must be turning in his grave in Mount Hebron Cemetery.
The United States’ support for Israel’s genocidal policies now goes way beyond Palestine, with the U.S. expansion of the war to Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to punish other countries and forces in the region for intervening to defend or support the Palestinians. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/genocide-ceasefire-war-middle-east
2024-02-08 Expanded Rafah Assault Would Be ‘Stain on Israel’ and Its Backers: Refugee Group Accusing Israel of waging war on a “gigantic refugee camp” where more than 1 million Palestinians have moved to escape air and ground attacks over the last four months, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council on Thursday called on the Israel Defense Forces to stop its shelling of the southern Gaza city of Rafah and halt further plans for an intensified assault.
With Israeli military officials reporting that they have not devised a plan to protect civilian lives in Rafah, NRC Secretary-General Jan Egeland said that a ground offensive in the city—previously designated a “safe zone” where more than 1 million Palestinians were told to go as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched air and ground attacks across the enclave—would be a “stain on both Israel and those nations providing arms,” including the United States.
“It would be a bloodbath, and among children and women, among the innocent,” Egeland told CNN, adding that reports of Hamas’ tactic of “blending in with civilians… does not in any way justify indiscriminate attacks.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-attacks-rafah
2024-02-05 Palestinian Groups Warn of Catastrophe as Israeli Forces Close in on Rafah A coalition of Palestinian human rights groups issued a joint statement Monday warning of impending catastrophe as Israel’s military signaled plans to expand its ground assault to Rafah, the small city near Gaza’s border with Egypt where hundreds of thousands of people have sought refuge from Israeli bombs. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), Al Mezan, and Al-Haq appealed to the international community to intervene and prevent an attack on Rafah, warning that an Israeli incursion “would significantly exacerbate the ongoing genocidal acts perpetrated by the Israeli military and authorities against the Palestinian population in Gaza and blatantly violates the provisional measures order issued by the International Court of Justice on 26 January 2024.”
Roughly half of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million is currently in Rafah, with many living in makeshift tents and struggling to survive without adequate food, medicine, and clean water. The city is so crowded that humanitarian relief officials have said there is just one toilet for every 500 people, conditions that are accelerating the spread of infectious diseases. https://www.commondreams.org/news/rafah-gaza-israel
2024-02-04 Death Toll Rises as Israel Continues to Target Homes, Besiege Hospitals According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 27,238 Palestinians have been killed, and 66,452 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7. Palestinian and international estimates say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.https://www.palestinechronicle.com/death-toll-rises-as-israel-continues-to-target-homes-besiege-hospitals/
2024-02-04 8,000 Missing, Presumed Dead – Gaza Genocide Death Toll Updated The Gaza Ministry of Health reported that the death toll resulting from the ongoing Israeli genocide on the enclave has climbed to 27,365, the majority of whom are women and children. The number of injured individuals has also surged to 66,663.
Medical sources further revealed that at least 8,000 people are unaccounted for, with many of them still trapped under rubble or scattered in the streets, as Israeli occupation forces are blocking access of ambulance crews and civil defense teams to many areas across the enclave.
Worse still, the aggression has resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly 2 million people from all of the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba. https://www.palestinechronicle.com/8000-missing-presumed-dead-gaza-genocide-death-toll-updated/
2024-01-24 In Gaza We Are Witnessing the 21st Century Version of How the West Was Won At least 25,000 Gazans, the vast majority children and women, have been killed or wounded. Twenty-five thousand is one-in-a-hundred Gazans and just over 20 times the number of Israelis killed in October. If we translate that proportionately into U.S. numbers, it’s the equivalent of more than 3 million U.S. people. Three percent of all Gazans have been either killed or wounded, and no end is in sight.
As a Jew, it is also painful to recognize, as I have for many years, that deep and profound Zionist racism lies at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and today’s genocidal war in Gaza. Many who escaped European pogroms, survived the Holocaust and Soviet antisemitism, and the banalities of American life carried Euro-American racism and colonial values with them to Israel and to the lands and people conquered in 1967.
That said, as Thomas Friedman has repeatedly written in The New York Times these last three months, there were other alternative responses that would have reinforced Israeli security and allowed it to retain the moral high ground. Instead, Netanyahu and the most right-wing and racist government in Israel’s history opted with to destroy Palestinian Gaza. Israeli General and War Cabinet member Yoav Gallant’s description of Palestinians as “human animals” announced the IDF’s racist, genocidal campaign. And as the South Africans documented in the Hague, similar expressions of racism and commitments to elimination have flowed from the mouths of Israeli President Isaac Herzog, other cabinet members, military leaders, and military units, as well as in the Israeli press.
One possible Netanyahu escape hatch is to widen the war in order to bring the U.S. more deeply into it on Israel’s behalf. This helps us to explain the drone assassination of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards intelligence chief in Damascus and the ultimatum Israel has delivered to the Lebanese government to contain Hezbollah in Lebanon, or else. Would that it was otherwise. President Joe Biden appears to be falling toward Netanyahu’s trap as our president widens the conflict with an unwinnable war against the Houthis in Yemen.
There is of course a way out: Biden could and should declare, “Enough!”, cease providing diplomatic cover in the United Nations and elsewhere for the IDF’s genocide, and end the deluge of weapons flowing to the IDF that makes the Gaza massacre possible. These and the firm resolve that constructive U.S.-Israel relations depend on an Israeli commitment to engage in credible diplomacy for either a two-state solution or another political framework that guarantees Palestinians national self-determination and the full exercise of their human rights. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gaza-21st-century-colonialism
2024-01-15 Day 101: 24,100 martyred, 60,834 injured The Ministry of Health in Gaza reported on Monday that the death toll resulting from the Israeli genocidal war on the Strip has reached 24,100 martyrs and 60,834 injuries after 101 days of of war. This death toll, however, remains provisional, as thousands of Palestinians remain missing or under the rubble since October 7. The ministry stated that, in the past 24 hours, the Israeli occupation committed 12 massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, resulting in 132 martyrs and 252 injuries.
Ashraf al-Qudra, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Health, told Al Mayadeen that the Israeli occupation is strangling the health system in Gaza, with most health centers going out of service. https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/day-101–24-100-martyred–60-834-injured
2023-11-25 Justifying the Unjustifiable in Palestine Ralph is joined by author and human rights activist Miko Peled. They discuss the excuses that Israel uses to defend the atrocities they commit against Palestinians, and the truth behind all the propaganda.
Miko Peled is an author, writer, speaker, and human rights activist living in the United States. He is considered by many to be one of the clearest voices calling for justice in Palestine, support of the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and the creation of a single democracy with equal rights in all of historic Palestine. Mr. Peled was born and raised in Jerusalem. His grandfather was a signer of the Israeli Declaration of Independence and his father was a general in the 1967 war. https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/justifying-the-unjustifiable-in-palestine
2023-11-23 “Text-Book Case of Genocide”: Top U.N. Official Craig Mokhiber Resigns, Denounces Israeli Assault on Gaza Hear from Craig Mokhiber, a longtime international human rights lawyer, who previously served as director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, on why he left his post while decrying U.N. inaction over what he calls a “text-book case of genocide” unfolding in Gaza. Mokhiber’s letter of resignation went viral last month. He spoke to Democracy Now! shortly after. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/23/dissenters
2023-11-21 Gregory Shupak on Gaza and Genocide US corporate news media’s initial response to Israel’s terror campaign against Palestinians, unleashed in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas, was characterized largely by legitimization, a rhetorical blank check for whatever Israel might do. Israel, the New York Times editorial board said, “is determined to break the power of Hamas, and in that effort it deserves the support of the United States and the rest of the world.”
We’re more than three months into that “effort.” The death toll for Palestinians is, conservatively, as we record on January 18, over 24,000 people. The UN secretary general calls Gaza a “graveyard for children.” So how does the Times’ assertion that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law” stand up now? We talk this week with media critic, activist, and professor Gregory Shupak. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto and is author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books.
First, Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at some recent press coverage of immigration. https://kpfa.org/program/counterspin/
2023-11-20 Israel Vows Extermination, Ignoring World Demand to End Gaza Genocide, w/ As’ad Abukhalil The Israelis and their US sponsors have created a world where it’s normal to fire on hospitals, journalists and UN workers while killing 5,500 children in 45 days. Rania Khalek will be joined by Prof. As’ad Abukhalil for a special live episode of Dispatches to discuss the genocide in Gaza, western double standards and racism towards Palestinians, Israel’s bad propaganda, and growing resistance from the Middle East to the streets of the US. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsbwUT-p8vo
2023-11-20 ‘Nowhere Safe in Gaza’ as Evidence of Israeli War Crimes Mounts Amnesty International accused Israel of committing war crimes with two recent bombings of a church and a home in a refugee camp.
Palestinians in Gaza and human rights advocates on Monday pleaded with the international community to see the ongoing killing of thousands of people in the blockaded enclave for what it is—a massacre in which Israel has shown “a chilling indifference to the catastrophic toll on civilians,” according to Amnesty International, and has committed numerous war crimes as it bombards civilian targets. https://www.commondreams.org/news/amnesty-israel-war-crimes
2023-11-20 Slaughter in Gaza Continues on World Children’s Day As of Monday, World Children’s Day, Israel’s six-week war on the Gaza Strip has killed at least 5,500 Palestinian children and threatens the lives of about a million more who are enduring the Israeli bombardment and raids of homes, schools, and hospitals. https://www.commondreams.org/news/children-in-gaza
2023-11-19 Intensified Israeli Airstrikes Push Gaza Death Toll Over 13,000 Israeli airstrikes on Gaza reportedly killed more than 100 Palestinians on Saturday—including upwards of 80 people in the hard-hit Jabalia refugee camp—bringing the Palestinian death toll in the 44-day war to over 13,000 as the Biden administration refuted reports of a breakthrough in cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas. https://www.commondreams.org/news/jabalia-bombing
2023-11-10 No more genocide in Gaza. Ceasefire now! w/Medea Benjamin | The Chris Hedges Report Israel’s devastating campaign of collective punishment against the people of Gaza has aroused international condemnation and popular mobilization in support of a ceasefire and an end to Israeli Apartheid. This movement has also spread to the US, where over a hundred thousand people flocked to Washington DC on Nov. 4 for the largest pro-Palestine march in US history. Support for a ceasefire in Gaza is widespread among the US public—with more than half of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike in favor of such a measure, according to Data for Progress. Yet the federal government continues to largely ignore calls for a ceasefire and an end to US aid to Israel, with only a minority of House Democrats willing to back a resolution for a ceasefire. Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, a key organization in the current Palestine solidarity movement, joins The Chris Hedges Report to explain what the movement is demanding from leaders in Washington to stop Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
Editor’s note: The death toll in Gaza from Israel’s bombardment campaign has now exceeded 10,000—including over 4,000 children. On Nov. 9, the White House announced Israel would observe a daily four-hour pause in bombing to allow Palestinian civilians to flee from northern Gaza. The Biden Administration continues to resist calls for a full ceasefire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN5FgiwYGp0
2023-11-10 Over 50 Bodies Pulled From Rubble of Gaza School Bombed Amid Israeli Assault Palestinian civil defense officials said Friday that more than 50 bodies were recovered from the rubble of a school in northern Gaza where civilians were sheltering when it was destroyed during overnight Israeli bombardment.
Palestine’s WAFA News Agencyreported civil defense and ambulance rescue teams removed the blasted and crushed remains of victims of Thursday night’s missile and artillery strikes on the al-Buraq School in the al-Nasr neighborhood of Gaza City. The outlet said that most of those killed were women, children, and elders. https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-bombing-schools-and-hospitals
2023-11-10 Global Cease-Fire Call Grows as Israel Wages ‘War Against Hospitals’ in Gaza “Children in Gaza are hanging by a thread,” said a UNICEF director, calling for attacks on healthcare facilities to stop immediately and the urgent delivery of supplies to hospitals. As Israeli forces waged what al-Shifa’s director described as a “war against hospitals” in Gaza on Friday, United Nations officials, human rights groups, and doctors demanded the protection of medical facilities and renewed calls for a cease-fire.
“Half of the Gaza Strip’s 36 hospitals and two-thirds of its primary healthcare centers are not functioning at all,” World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the U.N. Security Council. “Those that are functioning are operating way beyond their capacities. The health system is on its knees, and yet somehow is continuing to deliver some lifesaving care.”
Since the Hamas-led attack on October 7 that killed around 1,200 Israelis, the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) assault of Gaza has devastated civilian infrastructure, displaced about 70% of the strip’s 2.3 million residents—about half of whom are children—and killed over 11,000 Palestinians, including more than 4,500 children. Tens of thousands more are injured or missing. https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-bombs-hospital-in-gaza
2023-10-28 Obscuring Mass Murder As Israeli siege warfare cuts Gazans off from both electricity and communications, we’re seeing the lights go out in Gaza in more ways than one, writes Caitlin Johnstone. “This information blackout risks providing cover for mass atrocities and contributing to impunity for human rights violations,” Human Rights Watch correctly notes. And I’m going to go ahead and say that’s probably not just a convenient coincidence for Israel. A genocidal massacre in total darkness works very much to the advantage of those doing the massacring. https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/28/obscuring-mass-murder/
2023-10-27 With 7,300+ Gazans Dead, Israeli PM Adviser Says ‘Tonight We Are Starting Payback’ One critic declared that “a horrific slaughter is happening in plain sight, while the world watches and the U.S. shamelessly aids and abets it!”
Clearly undeterred by the mounting civilian death toll and global calls for a cease-fire three weeks into Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared Friday that “tonight we are starting payback.” Netanyahu adviser Mark Regev said: “You can be sure that if you’re in a Hamas bunker somewhere, if you’re in a Hamas tunnel, if you’re in a Hamas stronghold, then we’re gonna come and find you and we’re gonna eliminate that target. Hamas will pay for its crimes against humanity. Hamas will pay for slaughtering our people.”
After ordering about 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza to move south earlier this month, Israeli forces bombed a fleeing civilian convoy, killing 70 people, mostly women and children, according to Iyad Al-Buzm, a spokesperson for the strip’s Interior Ministry. “They’re taking revenge by killing our children,” said Wael Al-Dahdouh, the chief of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau, after he learned while reporting on-air Wednesday that his wife, son, daughter, and grandson were killed in an Israeli airstrike. “What happened is clear, this is a series of targeted attacks on children, women, and civilians.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-starting-payback
2024-10-24 Zionist think tank publishes blueprint for Palestinian genocide As Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza entered its third week, leaving over 5000 dead and at least one million residents displaced, a Tel Aviv-based think tank published a blueprint for self-proclaimed Jewish state’s final solution.
In a white paper released over a week after the Hamas-led surprise attack on Israeli military bases and kibbutzes, The Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy outlined “a plan for resettlement and final rehabilitation in Egypt of the entire population of Gaza,” based on the “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” that Israel’s latest assault on the besieged costal enclave provided.
Though Egypt has so far rejected Israeli pressure for a mass exodus of Gaza residents through the southern Rafah crossing, Weitman argued Cairo will welcome the mass exodus of Palestinian refugees as “an immediate stimulus” that will “provide a tremendous and immediate benefit to al-Sisi’s regime.”
Weitman claimed that Cairo’s major creditors — including France, Germany and Saudi Arabia — are likely to welcome a revitalized Egyptian economy, courtesy of “Israeli investment” in the Palestinians’ permanent removal. He surmizes that Western Europe will welcome “the transfer of the entire Gaza population to Egypt,” because it will significantly “reduce the risk of illegal immigration…a tremendous advantage.” Meanwhile, he expects Riyadh to embrace the move because the “evacuation of the Gaza Strip means the elimination of a significant ally of Iran.” https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/24/zionist-think-tank-palestinian-genocide/
2023-10-20 Gaza: The Combined West opts for genocide The grand strategy of Israel has been, like other settler-colonial states, incrementalism. Constant pressure on the Indigenous population. Constant encroachment. The use of the law to seize land. The assassination of leaders. The imprisonment of leaders. The suppression of cultural expression. Taking control of the means of survival and using that control. As Canada used the famines of the 1880s to force Indigenous peoples in the West onto reserves, at gunpoint and on pain of starvation, Israel uses aid to refugees whose access to land, water, electricity and food have been taken away (when Palestinians build infrastructure Israel bombs it) as a means of control. Periodically, there are crises – wars, uprisings – for Israel these crises are opportunities to increase the quotient of violence and get closer to the exterminist goal.
For Israel’s strategy to succeed there are a number of things that have to go well for them, and these things appear to have been going well for Israel since 1948. These are:
An unshakeable alliance with the dominant world power, the US (or rather, the US, UK, Europe, Canada, etc.). If US support were to wane for any reason, Israel might be forced to make concessions away from Netanyahu’s map.
Opponents must be divided with some of them working on Israel’s behalf (the Gulf monarchies, the Islamic State, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority) and others mired in internal wars or invaded by the US (Iraq, Syria). Netanyahu’s map can only be made reality if Israel’s neighbors are disunited.
A “qualitative military advantage” over any of their possible rivals (in the past Jordan, Egypt and Iraq, notably Syria, in recent decades Hezbollah and Iran, and of course the Palestinians). Without military superiority, Netanyahu’s map remains a colonizer’s dream. https://justinpodur.substack.com/p/gaza-the-combined-west-opts-for-genocide
2023-10-19 Israel may kill “600,000 civilians,” says Israel ambassador Israel could kill as many as “600,000 civilians” in Gaza, the entity’s ambassador to the UK suggested on Tuesday. In a blood-curdling TV interview with celebrity presenter Piers Morgan, Tzipi Hotovely compared Israel’s attacks on Gaza to Britain’s attacks against German civilians during World War II.
“There were many, many civilians [that] got attacked from your attacks on German cities,” she said. “Dresden was a symbol, but you attacked Hamburg, you attacked other cities, and altogether it was over 600,000 civilian Germans that got killed.”
Hotovely continued by comparing the Palestinians to the Nazis: “Was it worth it in order to defeat Nazi Germany? And the answer was yes.” https://asawinstanley.substack.com/p/israel-may-kill-600000-civilians
2023-10-19 Stop the Ethnic Cleansing & the Genocidal Israeli War on Palestine! India Stands WithPalestine We, the People of India, stand utterly shocked at the depravity & barbarism of the Israeli regime. The missile attack by the Israeli forces on the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza, which has killed more than a thousand innocent civilians, is more evidence of the genocidal intent of the fascist Neo-Nazi Zionist Netanyahu regime. Moreover, Israel has threatened the 1.1 Gazan population in the North with dire consequences if they do not move towards the South, even as they prepare to invade Gaza yet again. Sections of the Jewish Zionist radical leadership have further threatened the entire population if they do not move out to the Sinai desert in Egypt. The Palestinians know that once they leave their land, they will never be allowed to return back to their homeland and will be reduced to refugees.
This clearly constitutes a war crime by international law. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,1948 states: https://countercurrents.org/2023/10/stop-the-ethnic-cleansing-the-genocidal-israeli-war-on-palestine-india-stands-with-palestine/
2023-10-19 Gaza Death Toll Nears 3,800 as Israel’s Siege and Bombardment Enters 13th Day The human rights group Defense for Children International–Palestine reports Israeli strikes have, on average, killed one child every 15 minutes in Gaza since fighting escalated. This is Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a surgeon in Gaza City who narrowly survived Tuesday’s explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital, a blast Palestinians blame on Israel. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/19/headlines/gaza_death_toll_nears_3_800_as_israels_siege_and_bombardment_enters_13th_day
2023-10-18 U.N. Rapporteur for Palestine: Gaza War Risks “Largest Instance of Ethnic Cleansing” in Mideast History Francesca Albanese, United Nations special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, says the latest violence in Israel and Palestine has shocked even long-term observers of the conflict. She says Hamas atrocities cannot justify Israeli crimes in Gaza, where at least 3,300 people have been killed since Israel began pounding the territory with thousands of bombs. “What we are watching is a catastrophe of Olympian proportions,” says Albanese. “The only reasonable and necessary thing to ask for is an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, which of course must be also accompanied by the release of the civilian hostages that Hamas has taken.” She says the scale of Israel’s response cannot be considered proportional, and warns that the displacement of potentially millions of Palestinians from Gaza would constitute the “largest instance of ethnic cleansing in the history of this tormented land.” https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/18/un_special_rapporteur_palestine_albanese
2023-10-16 “This Is a Genocide”: Gazans Face Constant Israeli Attacks, a Closed Border as Essentials Run Out In Gaza, another half a million people, or one-quarter of its population, have fled their homes in the past few days, as Israel bombards the besieged enclave for the 10th straight day and amid an anticipated ground invasion. Last week, Israel ordered 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza to evacuate to the south of the territory, a virtually impossible task which would also constitute the war crime of forcible transfer. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/16/headlines/protests_across_the_us_call_for_israel_to_end_its_siege_and_genocide_in_gaza
Israel didn’t just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands, and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettoes inside those borders – as a holding measure until they could be expelled outside the borders. The ‘settler’ project, as we call it, is a misnomer. It’s really Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme. Israel even has a special word for it in Hebrew: ‘Judaisation’, or making the land Jewish. It is official government policy.
Gaza was the largest of the Palestinian reservations created by Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme, and the most overcrowded. To stop the inhabitants spilling out, Israel built a fence-barrier in the early 1990s to pen them in. Then when policing became too hard from within the prison, Israel pulled back in 2005 to the outer perimeter barrier. https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/what-the-media-forgets-to-tell-you
2023-10-14 The Punishment of Gaza Ralph welcomes Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy to discuss recent attacks by Hamas and the Israeli military in Israel and Palestine. Then, international law expert Bruce Fein speaks with Ralph about the recent violence, America’s response, and America’s historical culpability. https://www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/p/the-punishment-of-gaza#details
2023-10-13 Noura Erakat: Western Leaders & Media Are Justifying Israel’s “Genocidal Campaign” Against Palestinians The unfolding crisis in Gaza, where relentless Israeli bombardment has killed more than 1,500 people since Saturday, is “a humanitarian catastrophe,” says Palestinian American human rights attorney Noura Erakat. She says Western leaders and the mainstream media have relied on racist, Islamophobic tropes to build a false consensus “that war is inevitable and that whatever consequences come out is the fault of Hamas, thereby further blaming the victims for their own killing and massacres.” https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/13/noura_erakat_palestine_gaza_israel
2023-10-10 Refaat Alareer in Gaza: Israel’s “Barbaric” Bombardment Is Part of Ethnic Cleansing Campaign As hospitals in Gaza are overwhelmed by those killed and wounded in Israel’s massive bombing campaign, we go to Gaza City to speak with Palestinian academic and writer Refaat Alareer about conditions inside the besieged territory. Israel announced Monday it was completely cutting off all food, fuel and electricity to Gaza amid airstrikes of unprecedented intensity, launched in response to Saturday’s surprise attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel. Hamas has threatened to begin killing hostages if civilians inside Gaza are targeted without warning. https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/10/refaat_alareer_gaza_israel_bombing
2022-08-21 Gaza: New Killings, Old Narratives To say that Gaza was under attack this August is definitely correct as Israel’s most recent attack left 49 killed, 17 of them children. To say that Gaza is always under attack, as it has been under a brutal siege imposed by Israel and Egypt since 2007, is also correct, even when the hashtag #GazaUnderAttack isn’t trending.
Once again, we have seen images of people being pulled from under the rubble, children without limbs and parents holding the bodies of their dead children. And although these are the faces and the highest human cost imaginable of Israel’s attack on Gaza, they didn’t reveal anything new about the Israeli state-sponsored violence, at least not to the ones who have been following what’s happening in Palestine. https://codepink.substack.com/p/gaza-new-killings-old-narratives
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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