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By Dr Ramzy Baroud

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.

11 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

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.

https://www.palestinechronicle.com/hamas-defeat-not-feasible-in-near-future-israeli-officials-acknowledge-challenges/

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

11 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Patrick Martin

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.”

11 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Thomas Scripps

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.”

10 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Arjun Banerjee

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

10 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Marcy Winograd

[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.

10 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

https://twitter.com/OnlinePalEng/status/1777035462529417606

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

10 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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.

9 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

 

By Phil Pasquini

Today, the Republic of Nicaragua, a longtime staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause, presented its request for Provisional Measures to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague against The Federal Republic of Germany, soliciting the court to halt Germany from supplying weapons to Israel and to restore humanitarian aid to Gaza.

At the same time, Code Pink held rallies presenting letters to eight German consulates in the US and the German Embassy in Washington in support of The International Coalition to Stop Genocide in Palestine (ICSGP) as part of their campaign “…to help the Palestinians in Germany to turn up the pressure on the German government in stopping the genocide.”

As a point of reference, Provisional Measures may be issued by “International courts and tribunals…as temporary, urgent orders to protect the rights of parties involved in a dispute, before a final judgment is reached.”

The two-day ICJ public hearing before the court will consist of oral arguments concerning “…alleged violations by Germany of its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols, intransgressible principles of international humanitarian law and other norms of general international law in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly the Gaza Strip.”

Nicaragua cited the “extreme emergency” situation in Gaza for the court to review Germany’s “participation in the ongoing plausible genocide…” with “extreme and irreparable prejudice now being suffered by the Palestinian people – in particular the Gazan population.”

Nearly all the weapons being used by the Israeli military to destroy Gaza are being supplied by the US, (69%) and Germany (30%) according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. By providing weapons for use in Gaza, all countries involved are complicit in the ongoing genocide.

Prior to formally presenting the letter to the German consul general, the group took turns reading sections of it aloud at the consulate’s locked front gate to those assembled and those with business at the busy consular building and passersby. The letter addressed support for Nicaragua’s request before the ICJ and called for the resumption of UNRWA humanitarian aid to Gaza whose work has been suspended due to accusations by Israel that UNRWA employees had “confessed” to having collaborated with Hamas. UNRWA has reported, however, that the “confessions” instead had been made due to the use of “torture, waterboarding, beatings and threats to the workers families.”

Cynthia Papermaster of Code Pink presented the group’s letter to a security guard at the consulate who in turn forwarded it to the consulate receptionist. An immediate response was received through the consulate’s street intercom to Papermaster who was assured that it would be forwarded to the consul general for his review.

Over this past weekend it was widely reported that a letter dated April 5 and signed by 40 members of Congress including Nancy Pelosi has called the transfer of additional offensive weapons by the Biden administration to Israel as “unjustifiable.”

The letter was addressed to both President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken and in it the signatory expressed their “…shared concern and outrage regarding the recent Israeli airstrike which killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers, including an American citizen. We strongly urge you to reconsider your recent decision to authorize the transfer of a new arms package to Israel, and to withhold this and any future offensive arms transfers until a full investigation into the airstrike is completed. If this strike is found to have violated US or international law, we urge you to continue withholding these transfers until those responsible are held accountable. We also urge you to withhold these transfers if Israel fails to sufficiently mitigate harm to innocent civilians in Gaza, including aid workers, and if it fails to facilitate – or arbitrarily denies or restricts – the transport and delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza.”

Report and photo by Phil Pasquini

9 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

“We have been waiting for six months but we have seen nothing, nothing. We are all dying, just constant funerals day after day”

After six full months of genocide the Israeli army has nowhere near achieved its objectives to eradicate Hamas and bring back the hostages. If anything, many of them are feared to be dead through the merciless of the Gaza Strip.

The only objective achieved by Israel is to have bombed the whole of the Gaza into a primal age, mass debris and destruction everywhere where thousands continue to lie dead under the wreckage. The Israeli war on Gaza is mass genocide and ethnic cleansing of ordinary Palestinian civilians that were trying to live ordinary lives.

Without a flinch the Israeli army has killed over 33,000 people, injured over 75,000 and destroyed over 366,000 housing units.

https://t.me/QudsNen/101102

A displaced Palestinian woman recounts the horrors she has endured during the ongoing Israeli attacks in Gaza, urging an end to the Israeli genocide as reported by Al Quds Press.

“We are in a state of terror and fear,” she says in a videoclip.

“We can’t bear this anymore, I swear to God, we can’t bear it anymore. For the sake of God, find a solution and put an end to this situation, just for the sake of our children,” she echoes to anyone who cares to listen.

“We keep hearing about the fact there is going to be a truce and a ceasefire, but we keep waiting helplessly from Monday till Thursday, Monday till Thursday, but we haven’t seen anything till now,” the displaced lady adds. She is among the 1.9 million Palestinians out of a Gazan population of 2.3 million, who were forced to leave their homes.

“We have been waiting for six months but we have seen nothing, nothing. We are all dying, just constant funerals day after day,” adding this what has become of us.

“My daughter’s hair falls off every day out of fear. What has she done to deserve this?”

“They [Israeli army] told us to go to the Gaza Valley for our safety, so we came here for safety, but we don’t see any safety here, there is no security. Where is the safety they keep telling us about, there is no safety here. Its God we should trust in, His is the best purveyor,” she hammers in determination.

“Where is America, where are the countries, where are they! We don’t see anyone standing with us at all. No one is with us, but we have all God. He is the best provider,” she narrates.

“They are just bringing us two planes dropping aid on top of our heads. But we don’t want this at all, we don’t. What we want is a ceasefire. This is what we want.”

Dr Asmar is an Amman-based writer covering Middle East Affairs

9 April 2024

Source: countercurrents.org