The weekend strikes showed that Israel needed others to defend it and is not free to choose how to strike back
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knew exactly what he was doing when he ordered the attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus two weeks ago, killing Iran’s top soldier Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, among other Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders.
This attack went well beyond the existing tactics of limiting the arms flow to Hezbollah, the Lebanese movement, or pushing back Iranian-backed groups from its northern border.
This was an attempt to eliminate the Iranian leadership in Syria.
After six months, the war in Gaza is going badly. Israeli ground forces are facing stubborn Palestinian resistance which shows no sign of surrendering or fleeing, amid the biblical scale of destruction and the real suffering of its people.
If anything, the mood among Hamas fighters has hardened. They feel they have survived the worst and have nothing to lose. The people of Gaza have not turned against them and the occupation of Rafah, they claim, would make no difference to them. They pour scorn on Israel counting Hamas’ strength in battalions. After such an onslaught, they have a limitless supply of recruits and weapons.
Multiple messages
As Israel’s offensive in Gaza stalls, opposition to Netanyahu’s leadership is mounting and there is real pressure to strike a deal that would start returning the hostages alive.
The differences with his chief backer, US President Joe Biden, are now out in the open and he is rapidly losing world opinion. Israel, under Netanyahu’s stewardship, has become a pariah state.
Once again, Israel needed to play the victim, to sustain the myth that it is fighting for its existence. What better time for Netanyahu, the gambler, to throw the dice and attack an Iranian consulate, knowing full well what that meant?
The US also knew what Netanyahu was doing, which was to try to drag America into an attack on Iran for at least the third time in 14 years. That is why the US told the Iranians directly they had nothing to do with the strike and only knew about it when the planes were in the air.
Iran bided its time. It saw what happened in the Security Council, when a statement drafted by Russia condemning the consulate attack was vetoed by the US, the UK and France. It then said it would not strike Israel if there was a ceasefire in Gaza. This, too, was ignored. Then every western country told Iran not to strike Israel. Biden had one word of advice for Iran: “Don’t”.
When it came, the strike was carefully choreographed to deliver a number of messages to the US, Israel and the Arab region.
Tehran wanted to establish a precedent that it could hit Israel directly without triggering a full-scale war. It wanted to tell Israel that it could hit it. It wanted to tell the US that Iran was a power in the Gulf that was here to stay and which controlled the Strait of Hormuz. It wanted to tell every Arab regime that kowtows to Israel that the same could happen to them.
Only a handful of rockets got through to their target, but every message they sent got delivered. The attack was thus a strategic success and a setback to the reputation of Israel as the chief bully boy on the block.
The delivery of these multiple messages started with the seizure by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards of a Portuguese-flagged container ship the MSC Aries which, according to the state news agency (IRNA), is managed by a company whose chairman is the Israeli-born billionaire Eyal Ofer.
It then launched swarms of cheap drones at Israel and told everyone they had eight hours to prepare. It cost Israel more than $1bn to activate its air defence systems, Brigadier General Reem Aminoach told Ynet news.
That is likely to be the smaller part of the bill.
At least four countries are known to have helped Israel shoot down the drones – the US, UK, France and Jordan. A fifth is most likely to have been Saudi Arabia as it was on the flightpath from southern Iraq to Israel and the sixth could well have been Egypt.
This was a major defensive aerial effort which, as some Ukrainians bitterly noted on Sunday, the same countries are choosing not to provide them. It could certainly not be done regularly.
In return, Iran used up 170 cheap drones, while 25 of the 30 cruise missiles were shot down by Israel. They were the decoy. The weapons were the ballistic missiles and a small number of those got through Israel’s defences and hit the Nevatim airbase in southern Israel.
Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari said those missiles caused light structural damage. We will never know, but the message was delivered to Israel that Iran has the capacity to strike it and hit their targets from a distance, without having to use Hezbollah, Ansar Allah of Yemen or its allies in Iraq.
The weapons used were a free sample of its real firepower. After the strike, Iran warned the US that if Israel were to reply in kind, their bases just across the water in the Gulf and throughout Iraq would become targets, as they were after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force in 2020.
The message to the US is equally forceful: Iran is ready to attack Israel with ballistic missiles and defy the West, including a direct warning to Biden. They could do the same against any US ally in the Gulf region. Iran does not want a war, but it is capable of responding.
So, if it does not want a war, the message to the US is that it has to restrain its wilful, adolescent child, Israel, the child that has been pampered by its parent for so long, it thinks it can do to the region whatever it wants.
Foreign policy blunders
Netanyahu is now in a dilemma. He could choose to satisfy the extreme right and deliver a crushing counterattack on Iran, but he would not have America’s help doing so. And if that did not materialise, he might find the airspace between Tel Aviv and Tehran slightly more difficult to navigate.
If Netanyahu attacks Iran, his shaky relationship with the US will go from bad to worse. He will also launch a major attack with real opposition from the defence and security establishment, which stopped him doing a similar thing in 2010.
If he does nothing, he looks even weaker than he does already and cedes ground to Benny Gantz, leader of the opposition and fellow member of the war cabinet who talked on Sunday of a diplomatic offensive against Tehran, exactly the same formula Arab states used each time they had received a crushing military defeat from Israel.
The US is similarly finding that for the fifth time in three decades a major plank of foreign policy is crumbling in its hands.
The decision to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the toppling of Libya‘s Muammar Gaddafi, the attempted toppling of Bashar al-Assad – all these foreign policy disasters are now topped by a fifth – the decision to back Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
It is, of course, slow to realise the scale of the misjudgement it made in backing Israel to the hilt after 7 October attack by Hamas. But it also took time to realise the scale of the blunder it made in invading Iraq.
US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin has testified to Congress that the US had no evidence that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza was eerily reminiscent of Colin Powell’s UN speech in which he said he had evidence of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Powell’s speech in 2003 was a seminal moment in the US’s loss of international credibility. It has been sinking faster each year since.
Powell later regretted what he said. Austin is destined in hindsight to do the same.
A hell hole
Israel has now led its backers into a hell hole in which there is no peace or even prospect of one, no defeat of Hamas, no prospect of a post-war government, dwindling deterrence to all the other armed groups in the region, and the prospect of a low-level regional war on all of Israel’s frontiers simultaneously.
Possibly the most stupid thing Israeli security sources did on Sunday was to crow publicly about the cooperation they got from the Jordanian air force which helped them shoot down the drones and the cruise missiles.
Israeli sources boasted that missiles headed for Jerusalem were intercepted on the Jordanian side of the Jordan Valley and others were intercepted near the Syrian border.
The message Israel wanted to put out was that despite appearances, Israel has allies in the region who are prepared to defend it.
But this is a foolish game to play if Israel wants to preserve a critically weak Jordanian monarchy, fighting a tidal flow of public opinion wanting to storm the border.
Jordan may have been two-faced in the past and King Hussein did pass intelligence to his fellow cigar-smoking friend, the late former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
But this is the first time I can remember that the Jordanian army, which still bears its original name from the time of the liberation from the Ottoman Empire as the “Arab Army”, actually joined in combat to protect Israel’s borders.
This is a huge mistake.
While the population of Jordan, both Palestinians and the East Bankers, cheered those missiles onto their targets, the Jordanian army shot them down on Israel’s behalf.
Israel only has relations with Arab leaders who defy their people’s will and impose their corrupt governance on them. Jordan’s action on Saturday may give short-term succour to Israel, but in the long term it spells trouble on Israel’s longest border.
Israel may be celebrating the fact they have real allies, but by doing so they are fatally undermining their friends’ legitimacy.
Iran has made its point and Israel is weaker as a result.
This is the first time it was attacked directly by Iran who, like Hamas, gave it the impression it was not interested in war. It is also the first time that Israel was told by Biden not to strike back. After such an attack the visuals look bad: Israel needs others to defend it and is not free to choose how to strike back.
The attack leaves its protector the US casting around for policy options.
All, at the moment, look bad.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
This article is available in French on Middle East Eye French edition.
David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia.
Journalists of wars prolonging U.S. and NATO nations media are providing cover for a monstrous genocidal crime against humanity by portraying the Israeli U.S. provisioned devastating bombing and air strikes on Israel’s military occupied Gaza Strip as ‘defensive war.’
“Israel can’t claim a right to defend itself from the people it oppresses and whose land it colonises,” UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, April 8, 2023.[1]
The successful Hamas guerrilla attack of October 7 was part of an ongoing many decades long Palestinian fight for freedom, and was so described by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addressing the UN General Assembly on October 24 pointed out a second time that:
“The October 7 Hamas attack didn’t happen in a vacuum, The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”[2]
By international law, Israel is legally responsible for the well being of its captive, confined and illegally militarily occupied Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, illegally militarily occupied and entrapped since 1967 in what amounts to an outdoor prison. Western journalists, dutifully serving as accessories to genocide, never mention this as Israel’s American warplanes go on (‘like shooting ducks in a pond.’) destroying the homes and murdering tens of thousands of Gaza’s residents, of whom most are women and children.
Under International Humanitarian Law, the occupying power must ensure the humane treatment of the population and provide for their basic needs, including food and medical care. Oct 30, 2023 GENEVA CONVENTION RELATIVE TO THE PROTECTION OF CIVILIAN PERSONS IN TIME OF WAR OF 12 AUGUST 1949, Article 60 II. Responsibilities of the Occupying Power. page 189
Since October 7, Israel has blocked, food, water, electricity and fuel from entering Gaza, with the unholy desired effect of the present famine with children now dying of malnutrition.[3] This has been very rarely even mentioned in pro-Israel journalism.
Newscast time is almost entirely devoted to the hostages.
Hegemonic Journalists Are Responsible For Prolonging the Genocide of Their Fellow Human Beings – almost Half of Them Children!!! by delaying the world from putting an end to Israel’s American provisioned and supported slaughter of Palestinians through air strikes and famine.
How many more children will soon die because Journalists working for the giant entertainment/news corporation conglomerates of the U.S.A. led hegemonic colonialist West have forsix months been underreporting this inhumane blockage of life sustaining aid, focusing its audiences attention instead on Israeli propaganda of mostly lies of horrendous atrocities* [4] during the Palestinian freedom fighters guerrilla attack on October 7, 2023, which Western journalists never fail to label a terrorist attack by Hamas repeating ‘which the U.S. and other nations have cited as a terrorist organisation.’
* U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on CSpan, YouTube, 12:19 PM · Oct 31, 2023, 3.4M Views
on family attacked by Hamas: “The father’s eye gouged out, the mother’s breast cut off, the girl’s foot amputated, the boy’s fingers cut off before they were executed, and then their executioners sat down and had a meal. That is what this society is dealing with.”
One Chris Christie tweeted in parody, “Is this before or after they beheaded 40 babies?” [Viewed in ‘Comments’ on Blinken’s…]
If the World had Peace Seeking Journalists Working for Honest Media –
they could remind Israelis that Hebrew terrorist organisations like the Irgun headed by Menachem Begin used terror to conquer Palestinian lands in 1948.
Excerpt of a Letter to the New York Times, December 4, 1948, from Albert Einstein and other prominent Jews.
“Attack on Arab Village [5]
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants ” 240 men, women, and children ” and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicised it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.”
Most importantly, todays robot-likejournalists (many of who must be aware of their perfidious role in working for permanent war investor controlled Western media conglomerates), avoid all mention that Hamas and other Palestinian guerrilla groups are fighting against Israel’s generations long oppressive, often murderous, illegal military occupation of Palestinian land and illegal 600,000 settler colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Western ‘news’ media coverage audiences over these last six months have been subjected to listening, reading and watching Israeli government leaders and the families of hostages interviewed with the obvious intention of seeking to justify the horrific and massive genocide being perpetrated on the Palestinian population of Gaza by Israel and America, which has reportedly taken the lives of 33,360 (as of April 9) fellow human beings of these journalists, journalists, who in their work are cooperating with the perpetrators of genocide. It can be assumed that many of these corporate journalists realise this, but need to keep their job. And their ‘job’ is to keep the focus on hostages, and away from the annihilation ongoing in Gaza.
Worldwide reaching colonialist media journalism will not report the truth that Israel admits Apache helicopters fired on their own civilians running from the Supernova music festival – even when Tel Aviv Ynet reports it to Israelis.[6]
Western media features a readiness to re-examine 7 October long after those events took place.
Each and every time Western media conglomerates consider it necessary to report the number of thousands killed in Gaza, its journalists repeat words to the effect that this is “a response to October 7 terror attack by Hamas — considered a terrorist group by the United States and European Union.”
However, during public hearings at the International Court of Justice on Palestinian representatives’ accusation that Israel is creating a permanent and illegal occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, China argued that Palestinians have the right to engage in “armed struggle” against Israel “in pursuit of the right to self-determination.”
[The Times of Israel, Feb. 22, 2024]
A single publication of something ‘uncomfortable to U.S.’
NATO member Turkey’s President Erdogan backs Hamas, calls Netanyahu’s Israel government ‘today’s Nazis’
[New York Post, March 9, 2024]
Turkey’s Erdogan says Hamas is not terrorist organisation, …
[Reuters, October 25, 2023]
January 1, tens of thousands of Turks poured on to the streets of Istanbul, chanting “Murderer Israel, get out of Palestine”. [BBC]
Simply not reporting reality is the most major crime in Western entertainment/news conglomerate journalism in hiding up to 90% of reality. Reporting, for example, as infrequently as possible, the reality of the immense and intense suffering of the Palestinians, which is the motive for the very existence of the Hamas militant group.
For more than half a century, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip has resulted in systematic human rights violations against Palestinians living there. Israel maintains an illegal air, sea and land blockade on Gaza and maintains a so-called “access-restricted area” or buffer zone within Gaza. These have cut off more than 2 million Palestinians from other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the outside world. [Amnesty International on its website reported back in 2017] [7]
Under Reporting Israeli Killing of Palestinians
This writer found noticeable that during much of December and January, many news hours began simply covering other world and local events to the exclusion of any or little mention of the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza. Not reporting the bombing, the air strikes, the continuing day by day devastation, the dying and the dead, the agony, the constant burials, the amputations, pain and despair. Instead, diverting public attention to other places in the world, except for an occasional reference to the hostages, Has this type of non-reporting of what is obviously genocide not greatly lengthened the time it is taking for world outrage to reach a point of some kind of intervention to halt the American provisioned maniacal genocide reflecting years of Israeli hate?
Not Defending from Hamas –
“Complete Siege” of Gaza’s Palestinians from the beginning
Right away, on October 9, Israel’s defence minister announced a “complete siege” of Gaza, describing the Palestinian fighters who attacked Israel over the weekend as “human animals.” “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza,” Gallant said. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”[Oct. 9, 2023 HuffPost]
Once Reported – Thereafter Made to be Forgotten
‘Erase Gaza’: War Unleashes Incendiary Rhetoric in Israel
WEBNov 15, 2023 · “Erase Gaza. Don’t leave a single person there,” Yair Golan an Israeli politician and senior military officer, said in an interview with Channel 14 on Oct. 15. New York Times Nov. 15, 2023
Shall one attribute the massive indifference and some good deal of enthusiasm of the Israeli citizenry shown toward the genocidally insane bombing of thousands of Palestinian children to death in their homes and the maiming even more thousands,
in part to word for word belief in their sacred Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. (which also forms the beginning of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible). Seems agood amount of enthusiasm must be based on genocidal commands in the Bible, which have gone uncommented upon or even covered by our Western obligated journalists even thoughmass killing has been called for by a number of rabbis.
Genesis 15:18
“On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates.”
Deuteronomy 2:16
“However, you must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. You must completely destroy them – the Hethite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite”
Joshua 6:21
“And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.”[8]
Once Reported – Thereafter Made to be Forgotten?
Netanyahu’s references to violent biblical passages raise alarm among critics [Published November 7, 2023, NPR]
The passage from 1 Samuel 1 15:3 referenced,“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
World Remains Ignorant of What Israelis Well Know of the Indescribable Horror It’s Military is Creating
APRIL 8, 2024, Times of Israel, “Radical Israeli rabbis come under fire amid settler violence” [9]
The King’s Torah, a 2009 book by firebrand rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, is perhaps one of the most provocative texts.
It quotes religious sages as permitting, under certain conditions, the killing of non-Jews, including babies, “if there is a good chance they will grow up to be like their evil parents.” The book says “thou shalt not murder” does not necessarily apply to non-Jewish victims.
Its authors have said it is meant to be seen as religious theory and not a guidebook. The book has been endorsed by other rabbis, among them Rabbi Dov Lior, a longtime symbol of religious and nationalist extremism, and US-born Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, who heads a yeshiva in the hard-line West Bank settlement of Yitzhar.
Critics blame Ginsburgh’s writings — including a pamphlet that praises Baruch Goldstein, a settler who killed 29 Muslim worshippers at a West Bank shrine in 1994 — for fuelling the attacks by extremist Jews against Palestinian property, mosques and churches.
Rabbi Dov Lior, a national- religious leader and the chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba and Hebron, published a letter saying that Jewish law permits destroying the entire Gaza Strip[Jerusalem Post, July 23, 2014]
Media Falsified ‘Search for Peace in the Holy Land
For seventy-five years, the powerful media of the ‘Colonial Powers renamed ‘Free World’ and finally ‘the International Community of Nations’ have kept up a murderously deceitful pretence of trying to bring peace to Palestine and the oil rich Middle East. A quick glance at the provisions of the 1946 proposed UN partition that were fully expected and obviously intended to incite violence and create deadly conflict, permanent hostilities, destabilisation and facilitate Western imperialist penetration, exposes this pretending to search for a peace which that financial element that rules the United States and Wall St. has never wanted.
75 years of pro-Israel journalism for the same U.S. war investing business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-Semitic in outlook, coldly indifferent and even complicit during the Holocaust its investments had made possible.
Colonialist Media Silence Re Horrible Injustice Perpetrated in 1948 with Anglo-American Backing
Palestinians were forced off their lands or fled en masse from deadly Jewish attacks during the civil war ignited intentionally by the announcement of a never meant to be implemented Partition Plan forced through a yet tiny United Nations by the United States that would eventually result in a Jewish population of 630,000 militarily occupying 77% of what had been British misgoverned Palestine, containing an Arab population of 1,970,000. This injustice of making refugees of so many Arab Palestinians whose homes and orchards were seized by Jews, is the basis for 75 years of massive bloodshed.
Genocide Enablers’: Gaza And The Corporate Media MediaLens, 5th April 2024
‘We have had genocides captured by video feed day by day.
‘We have IDF forces standing with their thumbs up as they blow up universities, mosques, hospitals, and apartment buildings—it’s unbelievable. We have members of the Israeli cabinet preaching hate.
‘We’ve seen these religious nationalist extremist rabbis talk about killing all the people in Gaza. “And do you mean the children?” the Rabbi is asked. “Yes, the children. They can grow up to be terrorists.”’
(Israeli troops laugh as they blow up a mosque in Gaza. https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cz1qTACALyr/)
Suddenly Western Press Freedom Shows Us
‘Nothing Left To Assault’
Australian writer Caitlin Johnstone wrote this week:
‘Israel has ended its assault on the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, because there is nothing left to assault. The facility — the largest medical complex in Gaza where hundreds of civilians had been sheltering — is now an empty, unusable, burnt-out husk. Witnesses report hundreds of corpses in and around the complex, with video footage showing human body parts protruding from the earth and bodies with zip ties on their wrists.’
British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who spent over a month treating patients at Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist hospitals in Gaza,
‘I blame the Western journalists, who perpetuated the narrative that militarised the [Al-Shifa] hospital as a justifiable and an acceptable target to the Israelis. These genocide enablers, these Western journalists, from the very beginning, peddled these stories that the Israelis were feeding them about Shifa being on top of this massive complex of a command-and-control center. And their job was to enable the genocide to take place.
Western Media Journalists Avoid Mention of IDF Videos Showing Israeli soldiers Laughing as Universities, Mosques, Hospitals, and Apartment Buildings Are Blown Up
As hegemonic news media makes sure this macabre inhuman slaughter goes on and on, we can recall what hero publisher of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, cried out during the barbaric U.S.UK led war on Iraq. Assange suggested we ask ourselves:
– “of the complicit media, (which is the majority of the mainstream press), what is the average death child count that could be attributed to each journalist?”
When we understand that wars come about and are continued as a result of lies peddled to the British public and the American public and the publics all over Europe and other countries then who are the war criminals?
“Journalists Are War Criminals!”
“It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists; journalists are war criminals. …the reality that is constructed around us is constructed by liars, …if wars can be started by lies, truth can be started, peace can be started by truth. So go and get the truth, and we’ll spread it all over the world.” [War By Media: “Journalists Are War Criminals,” Julian Assange “The Reality That Is Constructed Around Us Is Constructed By Liars.” Celia Farber, The Truth Barrier, Oct. 10, 2023]
Julian Assange spoke succinctly about those media journalists who read us selected, bent and twisted one-sided news to disinform, blind or subtly trick the public to support, accept or ignore ongoing atrocity wars even when massive amount of lives are being taken.
Julian Assange has brought to our attention the pleasant-looking evening news anchor who captivates TV audiences with alternating joviality and gravitas, asking whether they should be seen as insidiously evil as they generate support for horrific suffering, death, maiming and destruction.
Assange seems to have tasked us to awaken a critical number of decent but unwary citizens to the realisation that a trusted prime time personality of theirs is in fact a war criminal?
Countering the CIA-overseen giant entertainment/news/information conglomerates wars enabling deceptive journalism [11] with truth is more effective than attacking the wars ordering government officials, both those elected and those appointed, who in reality must take orders form the ‘deep state’ Financial-Military-Industrial-Complex ‘deep pocket’ war investors – just, for example, as President Eisenhower did when he ordered Laos bombed, and the Guatemalan and Congo governments overthrown.
The seemingly ubiquitous accessory to wars CIA overseen international media must and will eventually be taken down by a growing alternate media and new media from powerful greatly populated countries like China, India and other emerging nations of the awakening South. Today’s realities and their history will soon be apparent even to Americans.
Truth will out.
Notes
1. “Israel has a right to defend itself, but can’t claim it when it comes to the people it oppresses [or] whose land it colonizes,” [UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, tweeted on X, April 8, 2023]
3. In recent days, at least 15 children have died from malnutrition and dehydration at Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital. Additionally, almost 350,000 children under the age of 5 are at risk of starvation. This man-made crisis demands urgent attention and action to prevent further loss of innocent lives.
The international community must come together to address this humanitarian catastrophe and ensure the safety and well-being of the vulnerable population in Gaza.
4. Outrageous allegations, such as the story of Hamas “beheading 40 babies’ made headlines and the front pages of countless western news outlets. President Biden claimed to have seen “confirmed photos of terrorists beheading babies,” and that Israeli women were “raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies” The New York Jewish newspaper Forward’s article on 11 October reported that the Israeli military acknowledged they had no evidence of such allegations. (The White House spokesperson’s retraction received minimal media coverage.)
6. Survivor Speaks: Israeli forces shot their own civilians, You Tube
Israeli Apache helicopters killed own soldiers, civilians on …New footage corroborates previous reports that say the Israeli military is responsible for many of the Israeli casualties
The Cradlecradle.com/articles-id/11993
IDF combat helicopter targeting Hamas fighters at Nova festival massacre shot some partygoers by mistake, says Haaretz.
A Hebrew-language Haaretz newspaper article published on 20 October quotes a kibbutz resident survivor trembling as he spoke of Israeli Defence Force shelling houses with all their occupants inside in order to eliminate the terrorists. Photos show that only the heavy munitions of the Israeli army could have destroyed residential homes in this manner. Yasmin Porat, another survivor from Kibbutz Be’eri, said in an interview for an Israeli radio-show, hosted by state-broadcaster Kan, that Israeli forces “eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” going on to state that “there was very, very heavy crossfire” and even noted tank shelling.
Chris Hedges Max Blumenthal – What Really Happened on Oct 8
Israel described its clearly deliberate killing of seven humanitarian aid workers on April 1 as a “grave mistake”, a “tragic event” that “happens in war”.
Israel is, obviously, lying. This entire so-called war – actually genocide – in Gaza, has been based on a series of lies, some of which Israel continues to peddle.
For some, in the mainstream media, it took months to accept the obvious fact that Israel has been lying about the events that led to the war and the military objectives of its constant targeting of hospitals, schools, shelters and other civilian facilities.
So, it was only logical for Israel to lie about killing the six internationals, and their Palestinian driver, of the World Central Kitchen (WCK). Notwithstanding an event as atrocious as this, it is implausible for Israel to start telling the truth now.
Luckily, few seem to believe Israel’s version regarding WCK, or its continued massacres elsewhere in Gaza. Israel “cannot credibly investigate its own failure in Gaza,” the US-based NGO said in a statement on April 5.
The issue of targeting these internationals, however, has to be placed within a larger context.
Israel was hardly secretive about its intentions to deny Palestinians even the most basic necessities of survival in Gaza, epitomized in the words of Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant on October 9: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”
Initially, this statement, and many others, were understood at the time to be an outcome of Israel’s desire to punish Palestinians for the October 7 Al-Aqsa Flood operation, by resorting to its typical tactic of collective punishment.
With time, however, and based on statements made by other Israeli officials, it became clear that Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse Palestinians altogether.
The Israeli stratagem was immediately rejected by Egypt, Jordan, Arab countries and, eventually, by other governments around the world.
Israel, however, persisted. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians in Gaza is the “right humanitarian solution”. Netanyahu concurred.“Our problem is (finding) countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it,” he said.
But for ethnic cleansing to take place, several prerequisites had to be fulfilled:
One, the bulk of Gaza’s 2.3 million people had to be forced to the south, as close to the Egyptian border as possible. This has been achieved.
Two, all aspects of life had to be destroyed throughout Gaza, including all hospitals and clinics.
The most obvious examples were the grisly massacre of the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital on October 17, and the bloodbath and eventual total destruction of Gaza’s largest medical complex, Al-Shifa, on April 1.
When the Israeli military pulled out of the Shifa area, they left behind one of the most tragic scenes in the history of modern warfare. Hundreds of bodies were hurriedly buried in mass graves amid charred buildings and indescribable ruins. Limbs of children were sticking out of the dirt, whole families tied and executed together and other crimes that would take the world a long time to fathom, let alone explain.
Still, and nonchalantly so, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet said that “not one civilian” was killed in Al-Shifa. Again, Israel is lying.
Three, most shelters, bakeries, markets, electric grids and water generators had to, from an Israeli perspective, also be targeted so that the hapless population, especially of northern Gaza, would realize that life there is simply unsustainable.
Becoming fully aware of Israel’s ultimate plan of inducing a famine in Gaza, Palestinians fought back. The counter Palestinian strategy was predicated on ensuring that as many Palestinians as possible remained in northern Gaza, and that those concentrated in Rafah were not pushed into the Sinai desert.
Aside from the ongoing battle between the Israeli army and Palestinian Resistance in Gaza, there was another type of war taking place: Israel’s push for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the latter’s desire to survive and remain within the Gaza borders.
This is precisely why Israel killed countless Palestinians involved in the work of facilitating life in northern and central Gaza.
According to the United Nations, prior to the killing of the six internationals, Israel had already killed 196 humanitarian aid workers.
This number does not include doctors, medical staff, civil defense workers, police chiefs and officers, and anyone contributing to sustaining life in areas that Israel wanted empty of its inhabitants.
Even when, under international pressure, Israel had allowed limited aid to enter northern Gaza, the Israeli military repeatedly killed and wounded Palestinians who desperately gathered in the hope of receiving the life-saving supplies.
According to an April 4 report by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has killed 563 Palestinians and injured 1,523 when it bombed people waiting for aid at designated spots in northern Gaza, or when it bombed distribution centers and workers responsible for distributing the aid.
The Kuwait roundabout area, in Gaza City alone, witnessed the murder of 256 starving refugees, while 230 others were killed on Al-Rashid Street, elsewhere in the city.
Israeli bombing was not random, as Israel also targeted and killed 41 police officers who had worked with volunteers from various Gaza clans to help the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, distribute the aid among the famine-stricken population. Even the clans themselves were targeted in equally merciless bombardments.
And similar to the outcome of the attack on the WCK workers, each time the entity responsible for the aid would declare that they would no longer be involved in aid distribution. This is how Gaza’s hunger turned into outright famine.
The latest killing of the internationals in Gaza was done to serve the same goal: ensuring that no aid distribution mechanism is allowed.
Ironically, the involvement of the World Central Kitchen was itself an outcome of a US negotiated agreement that would deny the Gaza authorities and even UNRWA any role in receiving and distributing aid.
Israel must be stopped at any cost, and Israeli war criminals must be held accountable for one of the greatest genocides in modern history.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.
Israeli army officers believe that they can’t defeat Hamas and Israel’s war on HAMAS will have to last till 2026 and possibly 2027.
Despite the massive destruction of Gaza by the Israeli army and the terrible killings of civilians, the Palestinian resistance movement led by Hamas’ Izz Al Din Al Qassam Brigades and Saraya Al Quds of Islamic Jihad still remain a formidable force in the Gaza Strip.
The Americans know this and so do the Israelis although the latter don’t want to admit it and insist on continuing to create more havoc and destruction in Gaza, though the strip has been turned into mountains of rubble at 26 million tons at the last UN count.
Al Jazeera presenter Ahmad Mansour says that on this Eid Al Fitr festivities, there are three items of news which are to say the least “joyful” on the Gaza front.
The Jewish daily Yedioth Ahronoth states Israeli army officers no longer believe that Hamas will be defeated any time soon and in the light of the battles they fought around the 364-Kilometer enclave.
They predict, the defeat of HAMAS will not materialize before 2026 and even 2027 which is a great deal of worry for the soldiers, for the politicians and the Israeli economy that has long gone spiraled downwards after 7 October.
Further, many believe it is the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who is the one that is really facing defeat and his statements are full of “hot air.”
Senior United States officials according to CNN consider Netanyahu’s statement that no force in the world would prevent Israel from entering #Rafah as merely a bluster.
Although there are ongoing negotiations on Gaza in Cairo and Doha, the Wall Street Journal states the mediators between the protagonists (Hamas and Israel) say HAMAS has largely rejected the American proposal for an immediate ceasefire and is about to put it’s on special proposal on the table.
Dr Asmar is an Amman-based writer covering Middle East affairs
US President Joe Biden declared his “ironclad” support for Israel Wednesday, as Israeli bombing of Gaza intensifies and the mass starvation of the trapped Palestinian population worsens, threatening to kill more people in Gaza than the bombs and missiles.
Biden was speaking at a press conference at the White House, alongside visiting Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. In his brief opening statement, he went out of his way to make reference to the Middle East, rather than the US conflicts with China, which were no doubt the primary subject of the closed-door talks with the Japanese leader.
He cited what he claimed were new Iranian threats to strike Israel’s territory directly, presenting Israel and the United States as standing united against Iran. He declared in his brief opening statement, “As I told Prime Minister Netanyahu, our commitment to Israel’s security against these threats from Iran and its proxies is ironclad, ironclad.”
Biden said nothing about the unprecedented Israeli attack April 1 on the Iranian embassy in the Syrian capital, Damascus, in which a missile strike against a consular building killed at least seven people, including two top officials of the Quds Force, the overseas unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In a speech Wednesday to mark Eid al-Fitr, Iran’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that attacking an Iranian embassy “means that they have attacked our soil.” According to the state news agency IRNA, Khamenei warned, “The evil regime made a mistake and it should be punished and will be punished.”
Israeli foreign minister Israel Katz made a deliberately provocative response, writing on Twitter/X in Farsi (the majority language of Iran), “If Iran attacks from its territory, Israel will react and attack in Iran.”
US imperialism regards the Israeli onslaught on Gaza not as an isolated event, but as part of its build-up to a third world war, which would link the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, a war against Iran and its allied forces in the Middle East, and a looming conflict with China in the Asia-Pacific region.
Biden’s differences with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are provoked, not by any genuine care about the mass kililing of the Palestinians, but out of concern that the genocide in Gaza has aroused so much popular opposition worldwide that it threatens the broader imperialist campaign against Russia, Iran and China.
The US president provoked considerable press commentary with his interview with Univision television, where he made a number of criticisms of Netanyahu and called his current approach to the slaughter on Gaza a “mistake.”
That interview was broadcast Tuesday night, but it was recorded almost a week earlier, the previous Wednesday, before Biden’s half-hour telephone conversation with Netanyahu, which has been portrayed in the US media as contentious and even hostile.
At his press conference with his Japanese visitor Wednesday, Biden ignored a follow-up question from one reporter, asking whether his comments about Netanyahu meant that he was prepared to impose any conditions of military aid to Israel. The US accounts for 69 percent of all Israeli arms imports—nearly all paid for by the US government. Germany provides 30 percent of arms imports, while all other countries combined account for barely 1 percent.
According to numerous media accounts, Israel has stepped up bomb and missile strikes across the central portion of the Gaza Strip, north and east of the besieged town of Rafah in the south, where the majority of the Palestinian population, an estimated 1.5 million, are now sheltering.
There was incessant bombing Tuesday night and Wednesday of the eastern portions of Khan Younis, once the most populous part of southern Gaza, but now largely abandoned. Israel announced earlier this week that its troops were pulling out of Khan Younis to make room for refugees now in Rafah, who will be displaced by the promised Israeli ground attack on the only portion of Gaza not under its direct military control.
There were also numerous airstrikes in northern Gaza, where virtually every building has been hit, and most have been turned into rubble.
Both Israeli and Palestinian sources confirmed publicly that three sons of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, had been killed in a missile strike Wednesday, along with four of Haniyeh’s grandchildren, in northern Gaza.
The three men, Hazem, Amir and Mohammad Haniyeh, and the children, three girls and a boy, were reportedly visiting relatives in the Shati refugee camp, outside Gaza City. Such visits are traditional for Muslims with the end of Ramadan and the beginning of the celebratory Eid al-Fitr holiday.
Haniyeh, who now lives in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, issued a statement calling his sons “martyrs,” and saying that his family had only suffered what thousands of families in Gaza had already experienced.
Meanwhile, there were reports that Israel has done little or nothing to fulfill commitments supposedly made by Netanyahu in the course of his 30-minute conversation with Biden, about reopening the Erez crossing from Israel into northern Gaza to facilitate the movement of aid trucks.
The New York Times reported: “Facing international condemnation after an Israeli airstrike killed seven workers for an international aid group, Israel said it would reopen the Erez crossing between Israel and northern Gaza for aid delivery. But satellite imagery taken on Tuesday shows that the road leading to Erez on the Gaza side remains blocked by rubble from a destroyed building, a crater and other damage.”
Asked in a Senate hearing Tuesday about charges of Israeli-authored genocide in Gaza, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin responded, “We don’t have evidence of that.”
“We are committed to help assist Israel in defending its territory and its people by providing security assistance,” he added
Earlier that day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that a date was set for a ground assault of Rafah, hosting over 1.5 million Palestinians, the vast majority of them refugees. Netanyahu threatened, “There is no force in the world that will stop us.”
An invasion of Rafah would send the death toll in Gaza skyrocketing. According to the Gazan health ministry, the latest daily figures as of Tuesday were 153 killed and 60 injured, taking the totals to 33,360 and 75,993, not including those missing and unaccounted for. Among the dead are 14,500 children and 9,560 women.
The Israeli government knows the Palestinians in Rafah have nowhere to go. Its defence ministry has cynically put out a tender for just 40,000 tents, supposedly to house those expected to flee, which an official confirmed was part of preparations for the Rafah offensive.
UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken gave a sickening press conference in Washington attempting to cover up the expanding pattern of war crimes.
Cameron spoke of a “plan B” in the event of “conflict” in Rafah, apparently involving “go[ing] hard on getting aid into Gaza” while supporting “Israel in its legitimate right of self-defence to deal with the Hamas threat.” He was sure to add that the UK’s position on continuing to supply Israel with arms—roughly £42 million worth in 2022—remains “unchanged”.
Blinken praised Israel’s “initial actions” towards increasing the flow of aid into the Strip while claiming, “The ball is in Hamas’s court.”
The post-invasion reality facing Rafah is already on display in the rest of the Gaza Strip. Khan Younis, the next major city to the north of Rafah, is a wasteland. An estimated 55 percent of its buildings are destroyed or damaged, according to US-based mapping experts working from satellite imagery.
Air strikes against civilians continue daily. Five were killed in a single bombing Tuesday in the al-Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza Tuesday, including the head of the municipality council Hatem Al-Ghamri.
Hunger could soon become the biggest killer thanks to Israel’s deliberate strategy of starvation. Half the Gazan population is facing “catastrophic” levels of food insecurity, double the number in December. Another 38 percent are suffering “emergency” levels and 12 percent “crisis” levels of shortage.
According to Gaza’s health ministry, 32 people including 28 children had already died in hospital of malnutrition and dehydration as of April 1. Charity Save the Children confirmed the deaths of 27 children.
Alexandra Saieh, head of Save the Children’s humanitarian policy and advocacy, told Middle East Monitor a few days earlier, “We believe that in reality, the stats of 25 children dying from starvation so far is just the tip of the iceberg. These are the children whose parents actually managed to bring them to health facilities to try to get some help, and who have been recorded.
“One of my colleagues who was at one of the hospitals in Gaza said doctors had to discharge mothers immediately after delivering babies because they don’t have the capacity to support them. And then the children, babies and infants, just go back to the shelters and die because the mother is not able to feed her child.”
At Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya told Human Rights Watch on April 4 that 26 children had died after experiencing starvation in his hospital alone. The majority, 16, were under five months old, with the other 10 younger than eight. He told Middle East Monitor that the youngest died at just two days old after being born severely dehydrated due to his mother’s poor health: “[She] had no milk to give him.”
At al-Awda Hospital, also in the north, acting director Mohammed Salha told the Guardian, “Everyone here has lost more than a quarter of their body weight due to malnutrition. There is no food.”
Dr. Margaret Harris of the World Health Organization said this weekend that at least 15 malnourished children arrive at the drastically undersupplied Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza every day.
Disease is rampant. Anadolu Agency reported Monday that there have now been over one million recorded cases of infectious disease—almost half the Palestinian population—including 8,000 cases of hepatitis C.
Harris explained, “614,000 cases of upper respiratory infections and 330,000 cases of diarrhoea have been recorded among displaced people in shelter centres since October 7.” There have also been 83,500 cases of scabies, 48,000 skin rashes and 7,300 cases of chickenpox. Jaundice is being monitored in 21,300 people.
Harris added, “The cases of measles diagnosed in UNRWA health centres are worrying,” warning that 9,000 patients need evacuation for treatment, including 6,000 with severe psychological trauma and 2,000 suffering from serious chronic diseases like cancer. These are likely huge underestimates.
This burden is falling on a healthcare system that has been deliberately destroyed. Just 10 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partially operating.
A video posted by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society Tuesday showed the wreckage left in the wake of the Israeli rampage. The organisation commented, “The deliberate destruction carried out by Israeli occupation soldiers inside the PRCS al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis has resulted in extensive devastation, rendering the hospital incapable of providing services to patients and wounded individuals.”
Israel’s claims that its forces are allowing more aid into Gaza, repeated by Blinken and Cameron, have been challenged by the United Nations. According to the spokesman for its humanitarian office, Jens Laerke, trucks screened by Israeli soldiers are “typically only half-full. That is a requirement that they have put in place for screening purposes”.
Moreover, “counting day to day and comparing makes little sense because it does not take into account the delays that happen at the crossing and the further movement to warehouses”. Laerke noted that “Half of the convoys that we were trying to send to the north with food [in March] were denied by the very same Israeli authorities.”
According to UNRWA, crippled by the imperialist blockade on funding, it has been totally unable to bring food into north Gaza since January.
The World Food Programme suspended deliveries in February due to security concerns, but resumed them last month. Senior spokeswoman Abeer Etefa told the Guardian, “After many failed attempts, we managed to send a number of convoys to the north during March—we sent around 47 trucks. Since the beginning of January around 110 trucks managed to reach the north, but that’s nowhere near enough. We need 30 trucks going in every day.
“It’s hit and miss, sometimes there are clearance issues, sometimes there are safety and security problems, and sometimes we are turned away from checkpoints or left there for hours.”
According to Laerke, food convoys are “three times more likely to be denied than any other humanitarian convoys with other kinds of material.”
By assassinating members of the World Central Kitchen charity last week and forcing it to suspend its operations in Gaza, Israel pulled the plug on an organisation feeding 500,000 people a day.
Speaking to the Guardian, Care International and Juzoor doctor Umaiyeh Khammash described northern Gaza as “hell on earth,” explaining, “We have tried many times to get food supplies through; one time we were able to get a truck of food but it was hit and 20 people died.”
On February 29, at least 112 Palestinians were massacred and hundreds injured by Israeli forces while trying to collect flour from an aid convoy. Israel blamed the deaths on a “stampede”.
A CNN investigation published Tuesday, based on “analysis of dozens of videos from the night and testimonies from eyewitnesses casts doubt on Israel’s version of events. The evidence, reviewed by forensic and ballistic experts, indicated that automatic gunfire began before the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] said the convoy had started crossing through the checkpoint and that shots were fired within close range of crowds that had gathered for food.”
The Israeli aggression and genocide being committed in Palestine is the defining historical moment of our time, showing that colonialism as a system and a way of thought and life has not gone away anywhere in the so-called ‘postcolonial’ world order. Palestinians have been struggling and resisting against the occupation of their homeland and all the resultant oppression and suffering that comes with it for over 75 years, watching the whole world turn its back on them. Israel’s logic of occupation, domination, and ethnic cleansing follows the tried-and-tested model of settler colonialism wherein outsiders claim the right to expel the natives and take the land for themselves, bolstered by any number of mythologies and narratives. Israel as a state and as an idea could not have existed without the active support and intervention of the West, going back to the Balfour declaration adopted by Britain in 1917 and the British Mandate in Palestine granted in 1920, which saw a bloody and violent end in 1948 with the mass expulsion of Arabs, the Nakba.
Israel has perpetrated thousands of atrocities, injustices, and egregious violations of international law against the Arab population of Palestine ever since its inception. In a true settler colonial fashion, Israel has given to itself the true ‘right’ and ownership of the land, declaring themselves as its rightful ‘inheritors’, twisting itself into a rhetorical pretzel by insisting on a supposed ‘Biblical’ basis for the Jewish “right to return” to the land after thousands of years, but not the Palestinian right to return after only seven decades of expulsion. Israel has banned the very mention of the 1948 Nakba or any discussion around it even as it has perpetrated a second Nakba in these six months of unrelenting, inhumane campaign of genocide.
While the Western states are strategically invested in maintaining the Israeli state in the Middle East, they also share the foundational logic of settler colonialism and the original sin of widespread antisemitism which caused the horrors of the Holocaust and Shoah (genocide of the Jewish community) together with their great imperialist-capitalist ‘world wars’ over territory, influence, and resources. It is extremely hypocritical of these states to now adopt a sanctimonious stance on ‘antisemitism’ and professing a steadfast support for Israel on that basis, since it shows that their supposed ‘remorse’ does not include a totalized moral condemnation of those events but is cynically performative in the sense of saying ‘never again…. except if it’s Arabs or other brown people!’
No atrocity left to be seen, or even imagined!
In the months since the Hamas-led efforts to break out of the concentration camp that is Gaza on October 7, 2023, Israel went on an all-out war not only against the besieged Palestinian population in Gaza and the West Bank, but also against anyone anywhere in the world who dared to express the most basic human revulsion and opposition to their barbarities. The Israeli state, through its senior leadership, made numerous genocidal and dehumanizing statements against Palestinians, expressing their crystal-clear intent to perpetrate genocide. It openly announced its plans to starve and deny water to “human beasts” and committed heinous violations of all rules of war by bombing hospitals and targeting ambulances, which it first denied and then rationalized as targeting “terrorists” and “Hamas” supposedly hiding in tunnels under hospitals. It systematically destroyed all forms of life-sustaining infrastructure in the enclave including its limited bakeries, water supply, hospitals, schools, universities, and homes. As famine, disease, and desperation began taking hold, Israel worsened the hell-on-earth in Gaza by deliberately opening fire on hungry people attempting to get food from aid trucks (while ‘Israeli citizens’, i.e., a collective of criminal occupiers) trooped at the walls of Gaza and prevented aid trucks from coming in, gleefully declaring with their own children by their side that they intend to starve all the Palestinians to death.
Social media feeds on Twitter, TikTok, and Meta-owned platforms like Instagram and Facebook are choking up with extremely disturbing and heart-wrenching visuals of little children being starved slowly with each excruciating moment, malnourished and wasted. Even infants and toddlers have not been spared this fate. Their innocent faces and eyes are disfigured with the pain, horror, confusion, and shock at their conditions: some have had amputations, others suffered burns and all manner of horrific injuries that are hard to even think or write about. This is not to mention being buried under the rubble caused by Israeli bombs that rain down from the sky at the same time as the farcical American ‘aid’ that many in the West are patting themselves on the back for.
All these actions by Israel have drawn condemnation from all the legitimate institutions of the world because everyone can see that this state and society does not belong in the collective of civilized humanity and should have been punished and brought to its knees long ago, were it not for the backing of American money and muscle, which includes the choice gifts of autographed missiles and bombs dropping on the heads of Palestinians, crushing their skulls, rupturing their eardrums, blowing them limb from limb, and leaving families with the dismembered bits of their children to bury in mass graves. And yet, the Palestinians continue to offer heroic resistance like nothing ever seen in history. Their actions and faith hold up the mirror from which we cannot look away. Their fate will be shared by much of the world in the times to come as the climate catastrophe takes hold and fascist extractive capitalism sinks its fangs deeper into everybody’s flesh. If Gaza and the Palestinians are made into a precedent of how white supremacist, settler states can impose their will on the rest of the world with their guns, propaganda, and financial muscle, there is no telling who will be next.
The value of all the peoples in the world is only as much as its most marginalized and disposable. When we see the plight of the Palestinians and choose to look away or do nothing, we allow the aggressors to strip away a part of our own soul, and engage in a cheap bargain in which safety, convenience, and comfort is bought with the price of silence and indifference towards our fellow man. This is not just you and me in our own historical moment. What we do and say right now reflects on who we would have been in any of the eras when large-scale inhumanity was perpetrated. Our solidarity cuts across the bounds of our own location, language, and even lifetime. Let us raise our voices louder and redouble our efforts to end the Israeli genocide in Palestine.
Arjun Banerjee is a writer and political commentator. He is a postgraduate in English literature from the University of Delhi. He writes about current events and culture
[CODEPINK and other peace activists outside the German Consulate in Los Angeles/Ryan Wentz — CODEPINK]
From coast to coast, CODEPINK delegations protested at German diplomatic missions in support of Nicaragua’s case against Germany at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for complicity in Israel’s genocide that has killed or maimed over 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
On the first day of ICJ proceedings, April 8, 2024, in Nicaragua v. Germany, pickets and letter deliveries took place in DC, NYC, LA, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Houston, Miami and Seattle. Demonstrators echoed Nicaragua’s requests of the World Court to order Germany and the United States to stop supplying weapons to Israel. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the US supplies 69% of Israel’s arsenal; Germany supplies 30% of the weaponry.
Benjamin Alvarez Gruber, US correspondent for Deutsche Welle (DW), state-owned German state-television, covered the story at the DC German embassy, where CODEPINK organizers Medea Benjamin, Julia Norman and Palestinian American Motaz Salim led the delegation. Participants headed into the embassy office to deliver a “stop the arms, restore UNRWA aid” letter from CODEPINK. “We were fed a lot of formality,” said Norman, summarizing the embassy’s response for the crowd, “there needs to be a lot of investigations … investigations take a lot of time … there’s no way to prove yet that war crimes are occurring.”
“Shame, shame,” cried the crowd outside the embassy.
Norman continued, “While there was a sense of grief in that room, there was no sense of urgency.”
This despite the threat of mass starvation looming over Gaza as a result of Israel’s refusal to allow food, water and medicine into the densely populated coastal strip.
“It also leads me to believe that they are in total support of what’s going on,” Salim added.
In Los Angeles, an angry defender of Israel’s genocide confronted a protester before the action began, and when it looked like an assault might be imminent, building security called the police. Five officers responded, lining up patrol cars in front of the consulate building, as fifty picketers-some driving three hours to participate in the protest — chanted in front of the office building housing the German consulate on the fifth floor. Palestinian American Mirvette Judeh, whose family is from the West Bank, told the crowd it was the power of the people’s protests that propelled 40 members of Congress, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to sign a letter to President Biden calling for a halt to weapons shipments to Israel. When it came time to deliver the CODEPINK letter to German Consul General Andrea Sasse, the building security guard allowed only one member of the delegation, Judeh, up to the fifth floor.
While the doors to the consulate had earlier swung open to visitors, Mirvette said they were shut tight when she arrived with the letter for the German Consul General. She knocked. The door opened. “I said could I speak to someone about Germany needing to stop funding the genocide and ethnic cleansing, and providing weapons and support to Israel, and they said, ‘If you keep talking, we’re not going to deliver the letter.’
Later the Israel defender returned with three menacing others spewing four-letter words, itching for a fight and videotaping protesters.
Three Dubai women visiting relatives in San Diego drove three hours to participate in the protest. “We are forbidden from protesting in Dubai,” said the women, CODEPINK Instagram followers anxious to participate in another action.
In San Francisco, twenty picketers gathered in front of the German consulate in the city’s posh neighborhood of Pacific Heights, where CODEPINK participants took turns reading the letter, discussing the genocide, and attempting to go inside the consulate to deliver the letter. “The security guard asked the consulate staff if we could come in and the staff declined to allow that, but the guard took the letter inside for us and we confirmed that the staff received it and would pass it along to the Consul,” said Cynthia Papermaster, organizer of the delegation.
In Chicago, a 10-member delegation of Muslims and Jews met for over an hour with Michael Ahrens, German Consul General, who began the meeting saying Israel had a right to defend itself but listened intently and took notes while participants told heartbreaking stories from both Gaza and the West Bank.
In New York City, the German mission’s First Secretary Daniel Drescher came down to the street to meet with the CODEPINK delegation and receive their letter. Participant Leigha Gillespea spoke of the harm resulting from Germany’s UNRWA defunding, which was based on testimony now debunked as false confessions made under Israeli torture.
The German mission diplomat said no funding had actually been cut because this year’s budget had already been allocated. Gillespea retorted, “Then why did you announce that you were cutting the funding instead of merely investigating the allegations?”
Delegation organizer Robert Jereski said, “He had no sound answer and clearly understood the damage that Germany’s contribution to the campaign against UNRWA had done. He also had no answer to the disparate response of Germany to Israel’s bald allegations against UNRWA and the ICJ’s finding of plausible genocide, especially where the former had no proof while the decision of the highest court was replete with evidence.”
Imam Catovic, a former diplomat originally from Bosnia, who joined the Code Pink picket, urged the First Secretary to recognizee that Germany’s own history makes it particularly well placed to condemn genocide whenever and wherever is takes place, and that Germany’s guilty conscience should not cloud judgement about what is right, echoing the position of the Jewish activists present that Germany’s policies do not align with Jewish values or safety. They all underscored that a demand to end Palestine suffering is not antithetical to Jewish safety but in fact a requirement for the safety of all people.
In Seattle, a contingent delivered the CODEPINK letter to the honorary consulate, where a staffer welcomed antiwar activists into the office, only to have the Honorary Consul General Uli Fischer,, formerly in the German Air Force and a retired Boeing employee, refuse to meet with them. Nevertheless, participants said they could see through a crack in the door that the Consul General was reading the letter also signed by Veterans for Peace and the Seattle Antiwar Coalition.
In Boston, activists with Massachusetts Peace Action delivered the letter to the German consulate.
The pickets, rallies, and petition deliveries were part of an international call for solidarity with Palestinian-Germans who risk beatings and arrest when they protest Germany’s complicity in Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. Without US and German weapons, Israel’s genocide might well come to an end, sparing the lives of over a million Palestinians uprooted from their homes to struggle with mass starvation.
Marcy Winograd volunteers as the Coordinator of CODEPINK CONGRESS and a co-producer of CODEPINK Radio. She also co-coordinates CODEPINK’s World Court Campaign to support South Africa’s case against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
This is Israeli destruction. It is indeed graphic content people being killed and immersed in the rubble and debris of their homes. In this war, we’ve become used to seeing human limbs amidst the rubble, the odd arm, foot, face etc. We have become desensitized.
In one case however, the fingers of the hand in between the cracked stones and the edges of cement with a green supple is truly horrifying of what people are going through and experiencing in Gaza. They are being killed while holding the most precious things cherished by them.
Sadly, this could serve as a top image to be shown in the galleries, real content not those drawn by ordinary painters as pure art. This should be termed as “hateful art” or “destructive art” meted out by a godless Israeli war machine.
The people under the rubble might be over 10,000 or more. Nobody really knows. The latest number stands at 7000 but it has not be updated since November according to the New York Times. There has been no accurate figures because of the extent of daily bombing and destruction by Israeli warplanes and tanks from the air, sea and on-ground.
This is a war against unarmed civilians.
Gaza, all of its 364-kilometer has long become a landscape of debris with thousands of countless bodies. These are mainly women and children whose homes has been struck by Israeli one-ton bombs unashamedly supplied by the Americans through their aid program to Israel.
Of the Palestinian lucky few, they have been dug from under the rubble through ordinary hands and simple tools plowing through the debris. Here, there are no cranes, trucks or bulldozers to remove the rubble. There were international calls to bring in crews from Egypt and Jordan back in November but these fell on deaf ears.
But realistically even if heavy equipment were brought in to remove the mass rubble, it would be an near-impossible task. Where would such equipment move between the piles of debris along dug up roads and crater squares of fall down homes, buildings and apartments and would they be able to search for survivors?
Plus, and up until recently, the Israeli war machine have been involved in an around-the-clock bombing with the death toll going up.
If you are bombed below ground in Gaza, the chances were, over the past six months, is that you are still there, dying in a slow painful procedure thanks to the Israelis who have said facetiously everyone in Gaza is a Hamas operative even babies, kids and toddlers.
Last January it was estimated there was 15 million tons of debris in Gaza. But the figure has been long revised by the World Bank. Today Gaza stands on 26 million tons of wreckage and debris.
The United Nations is appalled. “Tragically, an unknown number of people lie under the rubble said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. And we will not be able to find out the exact number of the people buried underground until there is a complete ceasefire which many take months and years.
Dr Asmar is an Amman-based writer covering Middle East Affairs
Can it get any busier? The World Court, otherwise known as the International Court of Justice, has been swamped by applications on the subject of alleged genocide. The site of interest remains the Gaza Strip, the subject of unremitting slaughter since the October 7, 2023 cross-border attacks by Hamas against Israel. The retaliation by Israel has been of such brute savagery as to draw the attention of numerous states, including those not directly connected to the conflict.
Given that genocide is a crime of universal jurisdiction abominated by international law, and given the broad application of the UN Genocide Convention intended to suppress and punish it, countries not normally associated with the tormented and blood-drenched relationship between Israel and the Palestinians have taken a keen interest. South Africa got matters moving with its December application last year seeking a judicial determination that Israel was committing genocidal acts in the Gaza Strip.
Since then, Pretoria has convinced the court to issue two interim orders, one on January 26, and another on March 28. While the court has yet to decide the issue of whether Israel is culpable for genocide in waging in Gaza, the interim binding orders demand a lifting of restrictions on humanitarian aid, the prevention of starvation and famine, and observing the UN Genocide Convention. These all hint strongly at the unconscionable conduct on the part of the IDF against the civilian populace.
The implications of such findings also go to Israel’s allies and partners still keen to supply it with weapons, weapons parts, and support of a military industrial nature. Germany has been most prominent in this regard. In 2023 30% of Israel’s military equipment purchases totalling US$326 million came from Berlin. The Scholz government has also been a firm public supporter of Israel’s offensive. “There is only one place for Germany at this time, and that is by Israel’s side,” proclaimed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to German lawmakers on October 12 last year. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock curtly stated that “It was not the job of politicians to tell the guns to shut up.”
Baerbock’s remarks were all the more jarring given the 2006 views of Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who was then serving as Germany’s foreign minister. With puffed up confidence, he claimed then that Europeans and Germans had played a seminal role in ending the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon in “silencing of the guns.”
Cognisant of such a stance, Nicaragua is now taking the South African precedent further by alleging that Germany is complicit in a genocidal enterprise. While its own human rights record is coarse – the government of Daniel Ortega boasts a spotty record which involves, among other things, the killing of protesters – Nicaragua has form at the ICJ. Four decades ago, it took the United States to the world court for assisting the counterrevolutionary Contras in their attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government.
Its 43-page submission to the court insists that Germany is responsible for “serious violations of peremptory norms of international law taking place” in Gaza in its failure to prevent genocide “against the Palestinian people” and “contributed” to its commission by violating the Genocide Convention. It further alleges that Germany failed to comply with humanitarian law principles derived from the Geneva Conventions of 1949, its protocols of 1977 and “intransgressible principles of international law” in failing to “ensure respect for these fundamental norms in all circumstances”.
The application also compacts Israel’s attack on Gaza with “continued military occupation of Palestine”, taking issue with Germany’s alleged “rendering aid or assistance” in maintaining that status quo in the Occupied Territories while “rendering aid or assistance and not preventing the illegal regime of apartheid and the negation of the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people.”
Stretches of the Nicaraguan case would make troubling reading. It notes that “by sending military equipment and now defunding UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency] which provides essential support for the civilian population, Germany is facilitating the commission of genocide” and had failed, in any case, “in its obligation to do everything possible to prevent the commission of genocide”.
Such conduct was all the more egregious “with respect to Israel given that Germany has a self-proclaimed privileged relationship with it, which would enable it to usefully influence its conduct.”
With these considerations in mind, the application by Nicaragua argues that Germany is obligated to “immediately” halt its military support for Israel “that may be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such, or other war crimes”. Germany is further asked, not merely to “end its assistance to Israel” but “cooperate to uphold international law and to bring the perpetrators of these atrocities to justice.”
On April 8, the ICJ opened preliminary hearings. Alain Pellet, representing Nicaragua, argued that “Germany was and is fully conscious of the risk that the arms it has furnished and continues to furnish Israel” could be used in the commission of genocidal acts. Another legal representative, Daniel Mueller, called the provision of humanitarian airdrops to “Palestinian children, women and men” a “pathetic excuse” given the furnishing of “military equipment that is used to kill and annihilate them”. Nicaragua’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Carlos José Argüello Gómez, derided Berlin’s seeming inability “to be able to differentiate between self-defence and genocide.”
Berlin’s defence follows on April 9. A sense of its bitter flavour can be gathered from one of its top legal briefs, Tania von Uslar-Gleichen. “Germany completely rejects the accusations. We never did violate the Genocide Convention nor humanitarian law either directly or indirectly.” Berlin was “committed to the upholding of international law”.
If the defence fails to sway the judges, the case may well chart a line about third party responsibilities on preventing genocide in international humanitarian law. At this point, the momentum towards some clarity on the point seems inexorable.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.
