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By Dr Marwan Asmar

Over 1000 children in Gaza have had their limbs amputated without anaesthesia. It’s a doctor’s nightmare with little medical supplies.

The number has just been released by UNICEF, the UN children’s agency and points to the devastating situation of children in Gaza.

A doctor amputated his son’s limb without anaesthesia. The pain was so sever the son couldn’t take it and died. More than 75 per cent of those killed – over 60,000 – in Gaza are women and children.

Then there is the case of the doctor who amputated the limb of his niece on the kitchen table by a knife. It was a below-the-knee operation done without anaesthesia. It’s horrendous coming out of a true horror story with over 10,000 children dead by Israeli gunfire since 7 October.

Then there is the case of the doctor who amputated his 16-year-old’s daughter’s foot without anaesthesia. “What have we done to deserve this, please God have mercy on us…” he says choking.

The kids in cement

The Israeli horrors continue. An unbelievable image of two kids in cement after a house caved in on them as a result of the “friendly” air strikes.

Hamas kids that are a threat to Israel!

His future is lost. Will there be no end to white shrouds? How much longer the world needs to wake up to child killers and prosecute this madness.

And then there is the little girl who cries on the top of her mother wishing her to come out of her recently dug grave.

The massacres continue. We await for those to stop but will they? This is genocide that will not end and is remembered as one of the historical horrors of mankind.

Dr Marwan Asmar is a journalist from Amman, Jordan

19 January 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Vijay Prashad

(This is Part-1 of a two-part article)

In October 2023, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published its annual Trade and Development Report. Nothing in the report came as a major surprise. The growth of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues to decline with no sign of a rebound. Following a modest post-pandemic recovery of 6.1% in 2021, economic growth in 2023 fell to 2.4%, below pre-pandemic levels, and is projected to remain at 2.5% in 2024. The global economy, UNCTAD says, is ‘flying at “stall speed”’, with all conventional indicators showing that most of the world is experiencing a recession.

The latest notebook from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, The World in Depression: A Marxist Analysis of Crisis, questions the use of the term ‘recession’ to describe the current situation, arguing that it acts as ‘a smokescreen meant to hide the true nature of the crisis’. Rather, the notebook explains that ‘the prolonged and profound crisis that we are experiencing today is… a great depression’.

Most governments in the world have used conventional tools to try and grow their way out of the great depression, but these approaches have placed an enormous cost on household budgets, which are already hit hard by high inflation, and have curbed the investments needed to improve employment prospects. As UNCTAD notes, central banks ‘prioritise short-term monetary stability over long-term financial sustainability. This trend, together with inadequate regulation in commodity markets and continuous neglect for rising inequality, are fracturing the world economy’. Our team in Brazil explores these matters further in the recently launched Financeirização do capital e a luta de classes (‘Financialisation of Capital and the Class Struggle’), the fourth issue of our Portuguese-language journal Revista Estudos do Sul Global (‘Journal of Global South Studies’).

There are some exceptions to this rule, however. UNCTAD projects that five of the G20 countries will experience better growth rates in 2024: Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, and Russia. There are different reasons why these countries are exceptions: in Brazil, for instance, ‘booming commodity exports and bumper harvests are driving an uptick in growth’, as UNCTAD writes, while Mexico has benefited from ‘less aggressive monetary tightening and an inflow of new investment to establish new manufacturing capacity, triggered by the bottlenecks that emerged in East Asia in 2021 and 2022’. What seems to unite these countries is that they have not tightened monetary policy and have used various forms of state intervention to ensure that necessary investments are made in manufacturing and infrastructure.

The OECD’s Economic Outlook, published in November 2023, is consistent with UNCTAD’s assessment, suggesting that ‘global growth remains highly dependent on fast-growing Asian economies’. Over the next two years, the OECD estimates that this economic growth will be concentrated in India, China, and Indonesia, which collectively account for nearly 40% of the world population.

In a recent International Monetary Fund assessment entitled ‘China Stumbles But Is Unlikely to Fall’, Eswar Prasad writes that ‘China’s economic performance has been stellar over the past three decades’. Prasad, the former head of the IMF’s China desk, attributes this performance to the large volume of state investment in the economy and, in recent years, to the growth of household consumption (which is related to the eradication of extreme poverty).

Like others in the IMF and OECD, Prasad marvels at how China has been able to grow so fast ‘without many attributes that economists have identified as being crucial for growth – such as a well-functioning financial system, a strong institutional framework, a market-oriented economy, and a democratic and open system of government’. Prasad’s description of these four factors is ideologically driven and misleading. For instance, it is hard to think of the US financial system as ‘well-functioning’ in the wake of the housing crisis that triggered a banking crisis across the Atlantic world, or given that roughly $36 trillion – or a fifth of global liquidity – is sitting in illicit tax havens with no oversight or regulation.

What the data shows us is that a set of Asian countries is growing very quickly, with India and China in the lead and with the latter having the longest sustained period of rapid economic growth over at least the past thirty years. This is uncontested.

What is contested is the explanation for why China, in particular, has experienced such high rates of economic growth, how it has been able to eradicate extreme poverty, and, in recent decades, why it has struggled to overcome the perils of social inequality. The IMF and the OECD are unable to formulate a proper assessment of China because they reject – ab initio – that China is pioneering a new kind of socialist path. This fits within the West’s failure to comprehend the reasons for development and underdevelopment in the Global South more broadly.

Over the past year, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has engaged with Chinese scholars who have been trying to understand how their country was able to break free of the ‘development of underdevelopment’ cycle. As part of this process, we collaborate with the Chinese journal Wenhua Zongheng to produce an international quarterly edition that collects the work of Chinese scholars who are experts on the respective topics and brings voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America into dialogue with China.

The first three issues have looked at the shifting geopolitical alignments in the world (‘On the Threshold of a New International Order’, March 2023), China’s decades-long pursuit of socialist modernisation (‘China’s Path from Extreme Poverty to Socialist Modernisation’, June 2023), and the relationship between China and Africa (‘China-Africa Relations in the Belt and Road Era’, October 2023).

The latest issue, ‘Chinese Perspectives on Twenty-First Century Socialism’ (December 2023), traces the evolution of the global socialist movement and tries to identify its future direction. In this issue, Yang Ping, the editor of the Chinese-language version of Wenhua Zongheng, and Pan Shiwei, the honorary president of the Institute of Cultural Marxism, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, contend that a new period in socialist history is currently emerging. For Yang and Pan, this new ‘wave’ or ‘form’ of socialism, following the birth of Marxism in nineteenth-century Europe and the rise of many socialist states and socialist-inspired national liberation movements in the twentieth century, began to emerge with China’s period of reform and opening up in the 1970s. They argue that, through a gradual process of reform and experimentation, China has developed a distinct socialist market economy. The authors both assess how China can strengthen its socialist system to overcome various domestic and international challenges as well as the global implications of China’s rise – that is, whether or not it can promote a new wave of socialist development in the world.

In the introduction to this issue, Marco Fernandes, a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, writes that China’s growth has been sharply distinct from that of the West since it has not relied upon colonial plunder or the predatory exploitation of natural resources in the Global South.

Instead, Fernandes argues that China has formulated its own socialist path, which has included public control over finance, state planning of the economy, heavy investments in key areas that generate not only growth but also social progress, and promoting a culture of science and technology. Public finance, investment, and planning allowed China to industrialise through advancements in science and technology and through improving human capital and human life.

China has shared many of its lessons with the world, such as the need to control finance, harness science and technology, and industrialise. The Belt and Road Initiative, now ten years old, is one avenue for such cooperation between China and the Global South. However, while China’s rise has provided developing countries with more choices and has improved their prospects for development, Fernandes is cautious about the possibility of a new ‘socialist wave’, warning that the obstinate facts facing the Global South, such as hunger and unemployment, cannot be overcome unless there is industrial development. He writes:

this will not be attainable merely through relations with China (or Russia). It is necessary to strengthen national popular projects with broad participation from progressive social sectors, especially the working classes, otherwise the fruits of any development are unlikely to be reaped by those who need them the most. Given that few countries in the Global South are currently experiencing an upsurge in mass movements, the prospects for a global ‘third socialist wave’ remain very challenging; rather, a new wave of development with the potential to take on a progressive character, seems more feasible.

This is precisely what we indicated in our July dossier, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory. A future that centres the well-being of humankind and the planet will not materialise on its own; it will only emerge from organised social struggles.

As we near the end of another year, I want to thank you for all your support.

***

First published in thetricontinental.org. December 28, 2023.

https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/economic-outlook-2024/

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist.

18 January 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Binoy Kampmark

What a cowardly act it was.  A national broadcaster, dedicated to what should be fearless reporting, cowed by the intemperate bellyaching of a lobby concerned about coverage of the Israel-Gaza war.  The investigation by The Age newspaper was revealing in showing that the dismissal of broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf last December 20 was the nasty fruit of a campaign waged against the corporation’s management.  This included its chair, Ita Buttrose, and managing director David Anderson.

The official reason for that dismissal was disturbingly ordinary.  Lattouf had not, for instance, decided to become a flag-swathed bomb thrower for the Palestinian cause.  She had engaged in no hostage taking campaign, nor intimidated any Israeli figure.  The sacking had purportedly been made over sharing a post by Human Rights Watch about Israel that mentioned “using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war in Gaza”, calling it “a war crime”.  It also noted the express intention by Israeli officials to pursue this strategy.   Actions are also documented: the deliberate blocking of the delivery of food, water and fuel “while wilfully obstructing the entry of aid.”  The sharing by Lattouf took place following a direction not to post on “matters of controversy”.

Human Rights Watch might be accused of many things: the dolled up corporate face of human rights activism; the activist transformed into fundraising agent and boardroom gaming strategist.  But to share material from the organisation on alleged abuses is hardly a daredevil act of dangerous hair-raising radicalism.

Prior to the revelations in The Age, much had been made of Lattouf’s fill-in role as a radio presenter, a stint that was to last for five shows.  The Australian, true to form, had its own issue with Lattouf’s statements made on various online platforms.  In December, the paper found it strange that she was appointed “despite her very public anti-Israel stance.”  She was also accused of denying the lurid interpretations put upon footage from protests outside Sydney Opera House, some of which called for gassing Jews.  And she dared accused the Israeli forces of committing rape.

It was also considered odd that she discuss such matters as food and water shortages in Gaza and “an advertising campaign showing corpses reminiscent of being wrapped in Muslim burial cloths”.  That “left ‘a lot of people really upset’.”  If war is hell, then Lattouf was evidently not allowed to go into quite so much detail about it – at least when concerning the fate of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli war machine.

What also transpires is that the ABC managers were not merely targeting Lattouf on their own, sadistic initiative.  Pressure of some measure had been exercised from outside the organisation.  According to The Age, WhatsApp messages had been sent to the ABC as part of a coordinated campaign by a group called Lawyers for Israel.

The day Lattouf was sacked, Sydney property lawyer Nicky Stein buzzingly began proceedings by telling members of the group to contact the federal minister for communication asking “how Antoinette is hosting the morning ABC Sydney show.”  Employing Lattouff apparently breached Clause 4 of the ABC code of practice on impartiality.

Stein cockily went on to insist that, “It’s important ABC hears from not just individuals in the community but specifically from lawyers so they feel there is an actual legal threat.”  She goes on to read that a “proper” rather than “generic” response was expected “by COB [close of business] today or I would look to engage senior counsel.”

Did such windy threats have any basis?  No, according to Stein.  “I know there is probably no actionable offence against the ABC but I didn’t say I would be taking one – just investigating one.  I have said that they should be terminating her employment immediately.”  Utterly charming, and sufficiently so to attract attention from the ABC chairperson herself, who asked for further venting of concerns.

Indeed, another member of the haranguing clique, Robert Goot, also deputy president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, could boast of information he had received that Lattouf would be “gone from morning radio from Friday” because of her anti-Israeli stance.

There has been something of a journalistic exodus from the ABC of late.  Nour Haydar, an Australian journalist also of Lebanese descent, resigned expressing her concerns about the coverage of the Israel-Gaza conflict at the broadcaster.  There had been, for instance, the creation of a “Gaza advisory panel” at the behest of ABC News director Justin Stevens, ostensibly to improve the coverage of the conflict.  “Accuracy and impartiality are core to the service we offer audiences,” Stevens explained to staff.  “We must stay independent and not ‘take sides’.”

This pointless assertion can only ever be a threat because it acts as an injunction on staff and a judgment against sources that do not favour the accepted line, however credible they might be.  What proves acceptable, a condition that seems to have paralysed the ABC, is to never say that Israel massacres, commits war crimes, and brings about conditions approximating to genocide.  Little wonder that coverage on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel in the International Court of Justice does not get top billing on in the ABC news headlines.

Palestinians and Palestinian militias, on the other hand, can always be written about as brute savages, rapists and baby slayers.  Throw in fanaticism and Islam, and you have the complete package ready for transmission.  Coverage in the mainstays of most Western liberal democracies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as the late Robert Fisk pointed out with pungency, repeatedly asserts these divisions.

After her signation Haydar told the Sydney Morning Herald that, “Commitment to diversity in the media cannot be skin deep.  Culturally diverse staff should be respected and supported even when they challenge the status quo.”  But Haydar’s argument about cultural diversity should not obscure the broader problem facing the ABC: policing the way opinions and material on war and any other divisive topic is shared.  The issue goes less to cultural diversity than permitted intellectual breadth, which is distinctly narrowing at the national broadcaster.

Lattouf, for her part, is pursuing remedies through the Fair Work Commission, and seeking funding through a GoFundMe page, steered by Lauren Dubois.  “We stand with Antoinette and support the rights of workers to be able to share news that expresses an opinion or reinforces a fact, without fear of retribution.”

Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, expressed his displeasure at the treatment of Lattouf for sharing HRW material, suggesting the ABC had erred.  ABC’s senior management, through a statement from managing director David Anderson, preferred the route of craven denial, rejecting “any claim that it has been influenced by any external pressure, whether it be an advocacy group or lobby group, a political party, or commercial entity.”  They would, wouldn’t they?

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University.

18 January 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Law number one in the ‘law of holes’, is that “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” Law number two, “if you are not digging, you are still in a hole”.

These adages sum up Israel’s ongoing political, military and strategic crises, 100 days following the start of the war on Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was faced by the unprecedented challenge of having to react to a major attack launched by Palestinian Resistance in southern Israel on October 7.

This single event is already proving to be a game changer in the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Its impact will be felt for many years, if not generations, to come.

Netanyahu was already in a hole long before the Al-Aqsa Flood operation took place, and he has no one else to blame but himself.

To stay in power and to avoid three major corruption cases and subsequent trials, Netanyahu labored to fortify his position at the helm of Israeli politics with the help of the most extreme government ever assembled, in a state whose very existence is an outcome of an extremist ideology.

Even the anti-Netanyahu mass protests throughout Israel, which also took place for months prior to the war, did not alert the Israeli leader that the hole was getting deeper, and that the Palestinians, living under a perpetual military occupation and siege, could possibly find in Israel’s political and military crises an opportunity.

He simply kept on digging.

October 7 should not be perceived as a surprise attack, since the entire Gaza Division, the massive Israeli military build-up in the Gaza envelope, exists for the very purpose of ensuring that Gaza’s subjugation and siege were perfected according to state-of-the-art military technology.

According to the Global Firepower 2024 military strength ranking, Israel is number 17 in the world, mainly because of its military technology.

This advanced military capability meant that no surprise attacks should have been possible, because it is not humans, but sophisticated machines that scan, intercept and report on every perceived suspicious movement. In the Israeli case, the failure was profound and multi-layered.

Subsequently, following October 7, Netanyahu found himself in a much deeper hole. Instead of finding his way out by, for example, taking responsibility, unifying his people or, God forbid, acknowledging that war is never an answer in the face of a resisting, oppressed population, he kept on digging.

The Israeli leader, flanked by far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Amichai Eliyahu worsened matters by using the war on Gaza as an opportunity to implement long-dormant plans of ethnically cleansing Palestinians, not only from the Gaza Strip but also the West Bank.

Were it not for the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and strong rejection by Egypt and Jordan, the second Nakba would have been a reality.

All mainstream Israeli politicians, despite their ideological and political differences, unanimously outdid one another in their racist, violent, even genocidal language. While Defense Minister Yoav Gallant immediately announced that “there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed” to the Gaza population, Avi Dichter called for “another Nakba”.

Meanwhile, Eliyahu suggested the ‘option’ of “dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza”.

Instead of saving Israel from itself by reminding the Tel Aviv government that the genocidal war on Gaza would also bode badly for Tel Aviv, the US Biden Administration served the role of cheerleader and outright partner.

Aside from an additional $14 billion of emergency aid package, Washington has reportedly sent, as of December 25, 230 airplanes and 20 ships loaded with armaments and munitions.

According to a New York Times report on January 12, the CIA is also actively involved in collecting information from Gaza and providing that intelligence to Israel.

US support for Israel, in all its forms, has been maintained, despite the shocking reports issued by every respected international charity that operates in Palestine and the Middle East.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said that 1.9 million out of Gaza’s entire population of 2.3 million people have been displaced. Israeli rights group B’tselem said that 2.2 million are starving. Save the Children reported that over 100 Palestinian children are killed daily. Gaza’s government media office has said that about 70 percent of the Strip has been destroyed.

Even the Wall Street Journal concluded that the destruction of Gaza is greater than that of Dresden in WWII.

Yet, none of this concerned US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited the region five times in less than 100 days, with the same message of support for Israel.

What is so astonishing, however, is that Gaza’s threshold of resilience continues to prove unequaled. This is how determined the Palestinians are to finally achieve their freedom.

Indeed, fathers, or mothers, in a scene repeated numerous times, would be carrying the bodies of their dead children while howling in pain, yet insisting that they would never leave their homeland.

This dignified pain has moved the world. Even though Washington has ensured no meaningful action will be taken at the UN Security Council, countries like South Africa sought the help of the world’s highest court to demand an immediate end to the war and to recognize Israel’s atrocities as an act of genocide.

South Africa’s efforts at the International Court of Justice soon galvanized other countries, mostly in the Global South.

But Netanyahu kept on digging, unmoved, or possibly unaware that the world around him is finally beginning to truly understand the generational suffering of the Palestinians.

The Israeli leader still speaks of ‘voluntary migration’, of wanting to manage Gaza and Palestine, and of reshaping the Middle East in ways consistent with his own illusions of grandeur and power.

100 days of war on Gaza has taught us that superior firepower no longer influences outcomes when a nation takes the collective decision of resisting.

It has also taught us that the US is no longer able to reorder the Middle East to fit Israeli priorities, and that relatively small countries in the Global South, when united, can alter the course of history.

Netanyahu may continue digging, but history has already been written: the spirit of the Palestinian people has won over Israel’s death machine.

Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

18 January 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Sunita Viswanath

Much has been said and written about the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, by Hindu extremists in 1992, the waves of communal violence that have plagued India since then, and the anti-Muslim pogroms that took place in Gujarat under Narendra Modi’s watch as a new Chief Minister.

Today, I am watching in utter despair as most in my extended family and community are celebrating and venerating the Ram Temple being inaugurated in Ayodhya. This feels like the biggest leap being taken by India towards being a Hindu supremacist totalitarian state. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will become the first head of state to also conduct national puja ceremonies, conflating religion and state.

As a progressive Hindu activist, my work has been to build a community and movement of Hindus who are centered on love and unity, an alternative to the path of violence and hatred offered to us by the BJP, RSS, and mainstream Hindu institutions.

Ayodhya is a city every Hindu child learns about. It is the city in the Ramayana where Rama and his siblings Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna are born; the city that Rama was exiled from for 14 years; and where he returned from exile to rule as King. It is also the city from which Lord Rama himself banished Sita Devi because she had been kidnapped by Ravana and spent time as Ravana’s captive in Lanka. Sita was made to enter fire to prove her chastity, and she emerged untouched by the flames. But Rama banished her anyway. Lord Rama’s reasons for banishing Sita Devi are complex, and we are taught to weigh and consider Lord Rama’s dharma (duty) as a ruler and his dharma as a spouse.

As an ordinary Hindu, I am empowered to make choices in life because my Gods themselves weigh the various priorities, pressures, and limitations, to arrive at difficult decisions. As a Hindu, I am allowed to disagree with some of the decisions made by the very Gods I revere. The oldest scripture, the Rig Veda, instructs us to “let noble thoughts come from all directions.” To me, this is an instruction to keep an open mind, and not fall into the trap of constrained dogmatic thinking.

My mother raised me with the teaching that there is no pure good and pure evil. If Rama was pure good, he would not have unjustly banished Sita. And if Ravana were pure evil, he would have brutalized Sita while she was his captive. We all have the capacity for good and evil, and the best we can do is to strive to be good. Lord Krishna says in the Gita that the ideal devotee is concerned with lokasangraha (wellbeing of all), and is “para dukha dukhi” (seeing the joys and sorrows of others as one’s own).

I have been raised to believe that the best Hindu devotee strives to be kind and generous, compassionate, non-violent, truthful, altruistic, open-minded, and open-hearted when it comes to ideas and people who are considered as “other.”

When the Supreme Court of India made its decision in 2019 that though they declared it a crime that Hindu extremists destroyed the Babri Masjid, the land on which it stood would be granted to Hindus for a Ram Temple anyway. My message was clear: My Ram would not want a temple on the site of such carnage.

“As an ordinary Hindu, I am empowered to make choices in life because my Gods themselves weigh the various priorities, pressures, and limitations, to arrive at difficult decisions.

I expressed support for the efforts of Ayodhya Hindu priest Yugal Kishore Shastry, Gandhian peace activist Sandeep Pandey, and Kudhai Kidmatgar’s National Coordinator Faisal Khan, to build a center for interfaith peace and harmony in Ayodhya. This center never came to be.

When I tried to travel to Ayodhya in January 2020 with Sandeep Pandey to meet Yugal Kishore Shastry to discuss this communal harmony center, we were stopped by the police and barred from entering. I asked why I could not travel to Ayodhya to pray and pay my respects to Mahant Yugal Kishore Shastry, and the police cited Section 144 of the criminal code which exists to prevent people from gathering in large numbers and causing disturbance.

A few days later, I managed to drive to Ayodhya from Varanasi without any trouble. It was our first time in Ayodhya, and we were expecting a town like any other Hindu holy place: streets lined with stores selling flowers and puja items, the sounds of prayers and bhajans, and a general air of festivity. However, we were met by a silent ghost town with armed soldiers on every corner. We needed to get permission to enter the road that led to Sastriji’s humble Ram Janki temple. His family fed us, and local Muslim and Dalit community members came to meet us. We felt menacing eyes on us as we took some photos of the fenced-off site of the demolished mosque, where construction was yet to begin.

I traveled to India again a year ago, on Hindus for Human Rights’ “Prema Yatra” (Pilgrimage of Love). Spurred by the hatred and genocidal intent that was shared by Hindu religious leaders in Haridwar in December 2021, we made this pilgrimage to ashrams throughout North and South India. We spoke to Hindu religious leaders – mahants, swamis, sadhvis – about their feelings about the country at large, but also about the Hindutva ideology that has taken over Hindu religious spaces. The more progressive and inclusive Hindu religious leaders we met were isolated and alone, rather despondent, and some spoke only on condition of anonymity. Our Prema Yatra report did not divulge their names but shared our findings.

One of the places along our Prema Yatra route was Ayodhya: the most challenging stop of all. Because we weren’t traveling with any of India’s heavily surveilled human rights defenders, we had no problem entering Ayodhya. We stayed in a new and modern hotel in the adjacent town of Faizabad. In fact, Faizabad was full of construction, clearly being readied for an influx of religious tourists from all around the world. Ayodhya itself was not the ghost town I had visited just three years before. The town was crowded, and there were bulldozers everywhere, demolishing old structures and getting ready for new constructions. We went to the old part of town where the Babri Masjid once stood, and now the Ram Mandir was being constructed. Armed police guarded the entrance to the area known as RJB Corridor. Ram Janma Bhoomi (birthplace of Lord Rama) was now an acronym with a corporate logo.

We weren’t allowed to take phones and cameras past the entrance, or into the temple. The winding, meshed-in corridor leading to the main shrine had huge advertisements all along the way, not advertisements for the temple or for anything to do with the temple. Rather, they were advertisements for all the major Indian banks. Every leg of this pathway to the inner sanctum had armed guards, many of them women, watching us silently. There was a female recorded voice telling us about the temple, its timeline, its designer, its cost, and other facts that must be impressive to most pilgrims. When we reached the main sanctum, we were greeted with the ironic truth that this whole temple, the destruction and death that paved the way here, the business and tourism venture that this temple has become, all of it, center in this inner sanctum, where Ram Lalla will reside. Ram Lalla is the name given endearingly to Baby Rama, since this site is believed to be his birthplace.

My colleague and I looked at each other in horror and disbelief. No Lord Rama we could embrace would tolerate this. And no baby, God or Human, would care about any of this. It took us some days to recover from the dystopian reality that was Ayodhya. The only saving grace was that the religious leaders we met in Ayodhya (I will not share their names, to protect them) were deeply saddened by this aberration and perversion of the Hindu faith.

Today sees the inauguration of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya by Modi himself. Progressive priests and renunciants who have voiced any opinion in opposition to this temple have not been permitted to come to Ayodhya this week. Hindu religious leaders who live in Ayodhya, and have spoken in the past against this temple have all left Ayodhya this week for their own safety. Our one brave Ayodhya-based Hindu religious leader who has not left town, Mahant Yugal Kishore Shashtri, will be holding a multi-faith satsangh in his tiny Ram Janki Mandir.

At least there will be one space in Ayodhya representing my Hinduism and my Lord Rama.

Jai Siya Ram.

________________________

Sunita Viswanath is the Executive Director of Hindus for Human Rights.

21 January 2024

Source: americankahani.com

By Stephan Shaw

‘It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what I have to say.’
‘Consciences can again be seduced and obscured: even our own.’

– Primo Levi

Not This Israel, Not this Jew

For a long, long time I packed away my Jewish education and my soft spot for Jewish ethics and philosophy. It went to a dusty corner that I learned to forget. The notion of “Jewish ethics” once weighty and important, could seem quaint today, if not entirely outrageous. Jewish ethics are so plastic it seems that they now encompass and countenance genocide. It’s now obvious to all who care that Judaism has become what the theologian Martin Buber had warned of last century, a victim of the dehumanized colonization and dispossession of others. It turned long ago into nationalism and a question of sovereignty, not of God, but of land. The Atzei Chayim in the Ark of the Covenant was replaced by two hellfire missiles, and we went from sanctifying the Sabbath and thanking God for life to sanctifying our hatred and praying to God for the annihilation of the Palestinian. If there is anything positive from this moment in history in Gaza, it’s that the fig leaf cover of Israel’s viciousness is falling off.

Since I was a young boy born into a secular Jewish household, I’ve struggled in the space between professed “Jewish values” and actual Jewish politics. My grandparents came here as children, fleeing pogroms and discrimination. By the time my grandfather was forty, he was a small business owner and standing proudly on his feet. America had become a beloved home for my secular, jewish family.

I never experienced anti-semitism growing up. I wondered about that, because I was always hearing about it, told that it lurked in every corner. I was the first in my family to have a formal American, Jewish education. It’s an unusual, almost biblical story: I was essentially sold into the religious institution for my older brother’s sake. He had decided out of nowhere at the age of twelve that he wanted to be Bar Mitzvahed. The Rabbi told my parents that because he was already nearly thirteen, he couldn’t do a traditional Bar Mitzvah. However, he told my parents, if they enrolled their youngest son, he would bend the rules. And so, at the age of seven, I was enrolled in what they call in the US a Hebrew School, and my brother had his shotgun Bar Mitzvah.

In my first year, the curriculum was divided between learning to read Hebrew (not to understand it, mind you, but just to read the script so we could recite from the Torah) and “current events”. The current events class was, in retrospect, our introduction to what is called Hasbara (which can most succinctly and fairly be defined as sophistry.)  We learned that Israel was an empty desert that the Jews made bloom. We learned that though it was called the land of milk and honey in the Torah, it had lain fallow until Jewish refugees brought their hearts, minds, and labor. Oddly, the lion’s share of each class was a discussion of the Israeli military, including inventories of weaponry and histories of tactical brilliance. We were taught about the Holocaust and how, as Joe Biden would have it today, there is no safety for Jews except for Israel.  We learned to intone the phrase “never again” with complete conviction.  All this took place in my Hebrew school in Long Island, NY, which felt for me in the 70’s a very safe place for a Jewish boy with mostly Christian friends.

I was eventually Bar Mitzvahed, but as far as I was concerned, it was the end of my being Jewish. There was little in Hebrew School that spoke to me.  We were, of course, taught some of the beautiful parts of Judaism, like Tikkun Olam, the Jewish command to repair the world – but back then, in my school, Tikkun Olam boiled down to raising money to plant trees in Israel. I planted dozens. I didn’t know it then, but Israel was uprooting as many olive trees in the West Bank as we could raise money for trees somewhere else. Today, Tikkun Olam has expanded for some to include raising money to arm West Bank settlers with AK47s.

Abraham Joshual Heschel, a shining light of Jewish theology and philosophy, long bemoaned Jewish education in the United States, fearing that many Jews would fall from the faith if they were not nourished on ethics and tradition. He wrote that American Jews would do a better job than Hitler in erasing Judaism from the planet. One of the oldest Jewish commandments, he taught, was the refusal of idolatry along with the core principle that Judaism was not about place or land, but service and rejoicing in the Sabbath. My entire religious education seemed to have just two pillars: worshiping the golden calf of Israel and fearing for my safety, neither of which I wanted any part of, but as a kid it didn’t make much difference to me. I moved on.

It was only in college, when Israeli documents from the first half of the 20th century had been made public and the New Historians of Israel, like Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe, published the truth of the founding of Israel, that I fully woke from the lull instilled in me throughout Hebrew School. The reckoning of Jewish history – from the terror of European pogroms and the Holocaust, to committing outright terror, murder and appropriation in Israel – was and is not easily absorbed. That it was so flagrantly counterintuitive helps to explain how little it penetrated into Jewish spaces. It also explains the outright shock that so many Jews feel today at the genocide case before the ICJ. As Ilan Pappe wrote years ago, liberal Zionists “find themselves confused and disoriented, representing the oppressor, the colonizer and the occupier.“ There is a mental dissonance in the contemporary situation that it seems most minds cannot process; an identity crisis created by an attachment to a mythos that no longer carries any water. It is often deflected by blaming Netanyahu for all the problems, but that is like blaming all of America’s problems on Trump.

It was in 2008, when Israel had launched another “mowing of the lawn”, the sardonic and vicious euphemism for indiscriminate use of force and deliberate murder of civilians, that I, counter-intuitively, found my way back to being a Jew. In 2008 I felt one thing acutely – I could not tolerate the worst crimes in international law going down in my name. At the time my reclamation felt perverse, like it had something in common with the way Nazism forced secular Germans to be Jewish when they had only considered themselves German previously.  Primo Levi discussed how the Nazis stamped him into a Jew: ‘If it hadn’t been for the racial laws and the concentration camp, I’d probably no longer be a Jew, except for my last name … the racial laws and the concentration camp, stamped me the way you stamp a steel plate.” It was the unimaginable events of the Shoah that forced Levi to wear the insignia of Judaism.  But towards the end of his life, and certainly a factor in his suicide he began to show signs of shame and disgust. “It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what I have to say.” Elsewhere, he added, “Consciences can again be seduced and obscured: even our own.” At the end of his life, he confessed, “I retain a close sentimental tie with Israel, but not with this Israel.”

Levi committed suicide months after the first intifada. It is my sense that he could not bear the crooked timber of humanity any longer – the sense that all of us are capable and complicit in genocide. His own history of victimization was not capable of silencing the victimization of others. He did not see a path forward for himself as a human or a Jew. Today, the majority of Jews are, in Heschel’s words, accomplishing what even the Nazis could not – undermining Judaism itself. My great heritage for thousands of years was ethics – “justice shall you pursue,” Deuteronomy proclaims – but since I was a child it has only been about power and land. Half of the Ten Commandments now lie shattered at the feet of innocents in Gaza. If to kill one person is to destroy a world, we have destroyed universes.

But there is a different path forward for Jews, even now. I am a Jew of conscience, not in unending victimization and war, but in truth and reconciliation. The bombing of Gaza stamped me the way one stamps a steel plate. The way Levi was stamped. In my case, it is with the revulsion and direct knowledge that it is we who are acting out the larger share of this tragedy, and that therefore we can stop it. I’ve come to believe that louder voices have for too long told all the wrong lessons of the Holocaust. I’ve come to believe that solidarity with Palestinians is the true counter-testimony to Auschwitz and the way forward for Jewish ethics. Far from being anti-semitic, the protests I’ve been going to are philo-semitic and in the deepest interest to Jews everywhere. Think what you want about the Orthodox Jewish Neturei Karta, the visual epitome of Jewishness that have been showing up with their children at all the demonstrations in the US, but they are embraced, celebrated and loved by everyone there. It is not the same as the Israeli embrace of Christian Zionism which is shortsighted and nihilistic.

At the end of his life, Levi spoke about the Jewish future. “The center of gravity is in the Diaspora,” he wrote, “I, a diasporic Jew, much more Italian than Jewish. I would prefer that the center…of Judaism remained outside Israel.” He concluded his statement by calling all Diaspora Jews to fight against the degradation of political and ethical life in Israel.

I have never felt more Jewish than when I joined Jewish Voice for Peace at Grand Central Station on October 27th, our shirts declaring “Not in my name.” To quote Heschel again, it felt as if I was praying with my feet; it felt as if I was praying for the first time. I am as certain as I am of anything that every one of my fellow Jews in handcuffs, atheists and orthodox alike, prayed that night more deeply than at any other time in their lives. Since that day, I’ve marched and been arrested with friends from every walk of life, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Punk, chanting together that there is no safety or future in occupation and murder.

I am a Jewish man and I will not be forced to condemn Hamas as a litmus test or a catechism to be recited. At this point it feels to me an act of trivialized routine or a justification for Genocide. I am against all killing but I have a particular obligation to call out the killing by Jews. There has never been a dearth of condemnation for the actions, both wretched and noble by Palestinians. There has always been a dearth of condemnations of Israel for fear of being anti-semitic. I am with Judith Butler in asking how we might release the region from violence such as this rather than simply condemning. But I know we cannot fulfill any spiritual destiny without coming to terms with the Palestinians who languish in the way that we did once, we who were slaves in Egypt – something we are reminded of every Passover. The story of Exodus, our liberation from bondage, is the core of what it means to be a Jew. But this simple truth must be acknowledged: freedom cannot exist on the backs of other people. Too many consciences have been seduced into believing there is a Jewish exception to this rule.

Uncritical support of Israel is destroying the spiritual core of Judaism itself – a dagger in the Jewish heart. Heschel wrote that “good and evil live in promiscuity but our powers of discernment have been stupefied.”  He warned long ago, as the Vietnam War raged and the Jewish conscience refused to speak up for fear of angering American power, that we risked becoming value-blind. As I listen to the increasing calls for genocide in Israel and in the US, as I watch the grimmest images since the Shoah of the first televised genocide in history, I need no more evidence of this truth. Christians had to reckon with their deeds after the Holocaust. Jews need to do that now. Israel may have a right to exist, but not this Israel. It’s counter-intuitive and difficult to digest but conscience can be seduced and obscured: even our own.  I promised never again. Never again is now.

Stephan Shaw is a musician and Hegel scholar, activist in Jewish Voice For Peace, a proud husband of Sunita Viswanath and father of three marvelous boys.

22 January 2024

Source: forsea.co

By Michel Chossudovsky

Introductory Note

In 2014 President Obama launched a “counterterrorism campaign” allegedly directed against the Islamic State (ISIS-Daesh). The operation consisted in providing a justification for the extensive bombing of Iraq and Syria, largely targeting residential areas and civilians.

In turn, ISIS-Daesh was covertly supported and funded by the U.S. and its allies including Israel.

Israel was directly involved in President Obama’s “counterterrorism” bombing raids directed against Syria, while also supporting Al Qaeda and ISIS mercenaries out of the Golan Heights.

—Michel Chossudovsky, January 14, 2024

_______________________________________

The incursion of the Islamic State (IS) brigades into Iraq starting in June 2014 was part of a carefully planned military-intelligence operation supported covertly by the US, NATO and Israel.

The counter-terrorism mandate is a fiction. America is the Number One “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” 

The Islamic State is protected by the US and its allies. If they had wanted to eliminate the Islamic State brigades, they could have “carpet” bombed their convoys of Toyota pickup trucks when they crossed the desert from Syria into Iraq in June.

The  Syro-Arabian Desert is open territory (see map below). With state of the art jet fighter aircraft (F15, F22 Raptor, CF-18) it would have been — from a military standpoint — a rapid and expedient surgical operation.

It could not have been undertaken without the unbending support of the Western media which has upheld Obama’s initiative as a counter-terrorism operation.

Twenty Six Things

A. The Historical Origins of Al Qaeda

1. The US has supported Al Qaeda and its affiliated organizations for almost half a century since the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war.

2. CIA training camps were set up in Pakistan. In the ten year period from 1982 to 1992, some 35,000 jihadists from 43 Islamic countries were recruited by the CIA to fight in the Afghan jihad.

“Advertisements, paid for from CIA funds, were placed in newspapers and newsletters around the world offering inducements and motivations to join the Jihad.”

3. Since the Reagan Administration, Washington has supported the Islamic terror network.

Ronald Reagan called the terrorists “freedom fighters”. The US supplied weapons to the Islamic brigades. It was all for “a good cause”: fighting the Soviet Union and regime change, leading to the demise of a secular government in Afghanistan.

4. Jihadist textbooks  were  published by the University of Nebraska. “The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings.”

5. Osama bin Laden, America’s bogyman and founder of Al Qaeda was recruited by the CIA in 1979 at the very outset of the US sponsored jihadist war against Afghanistan. He was 22 years old and was trained in a CIA sponsored guerrilla training camp.

Al Qaeda was not behind the 9/11 Attacks. September 11, 2001 provided a justification for waging a war against Afghanistan on the grounds that Afghanistan was a state sponsor of terrorism, supportive of Al Qaeda. The 9/11 attacks were instrumental in the formulation of the “Global War on Terrorism”.

B. The Islamic State (ISIL)

7. The ISIL brigades were involved in the US-NATO supported insurgency in Syria directed against the government of  Bashar al Assad.

8. NATO and the Turkish High Command were responsible for the recruitment of ISIL and Al Nusrah mercenaries from the outset of the Syrian insurgency in March 2011. According to Israeli intelligence sources, this initiative consisted in:

“a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria. (DEBKAfile, NATO to give rebels anti-tank weapons, August 14, 2011.)

9. There are Western Special Forces and Western intelligence operatives within the ranks of the ISIL. British Special Forces and MI6 have been involved in training jihadist rebels in Syria.

10. Western military specialists on contract to the Pentagon have trained the terrorists in the use of chemical weapons.

“The United States and some European allies are using defense contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, a senior U.S. official and several senior diplomats told CNN Sunday. (CNN Report, December 9, 2012)

11. The ISIL’s practice of beheadings is part of the US-sponsored terrorist training programs implemented in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

12. Recruited by America’s ally, a large number of ISIL mercenaries are convicted criminals released from Saudi prisons on condition they join the ISIL. Saudi death row inmates were recruited to join the terror brigades.

13. Israel has supported the ISIL and Al Nusrah brigades out of the Golan Heights.

Jihadist fighters have met Israeli IDF officers as well as Prime Minister Netanyahu. The IDF top brass tacitly acknowledges that “global jihad elements inside Syria” [ISIL and Al Nusrah] are supported by Israel. (See image below)

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Moshe Ya’alon next to a wounded mercenary, Israeli military field hospital at the occupied Golan Heights’ border with Syria, 18 February 2014″

C. Syria and Iraq

15. US Senator John McCain has met up with jihadist terrorist leaders in Syria.

16. The Islamic State (IS) militia, which is currently the alleged target of a US-NATO bombing campaign under a “counter-terrorism” mandate, continues to be supported covertly by the US. Washington and its allies continue to provide military aid to the Islamic State.

17. US and allied bombings are not targeting the ISIL, they are bombing the economic infrastructure of Iraq and Syria including factories and oil refineries.

18. The IS caliphate project is part of a longstanding US foreign policy agenda to carve up Iraq and Syria into separate territories: a Sunni Islamist Caliphate, an Arab Shia Republic, a Republic of Kurdistan.

D. The Global War on Terrorism (GWOT)

20. U.S.-sponsored Al Qaeda terror brigades (covertly supported by Western intelligence) have been deployed in Mali, Niger, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Somalia and Yemen.

These various affiliated Al Qaeda entities in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and Asia are CIA sponsored “intelligence assets”. They are used by Washington to wreck havoc, create internal conflicts and destabilize sovereign countries.

21. Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al Shabab in Somalia, the Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) (supported by NATO in 2011), Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM),  Jemaah Islamiah (JI) in Indonesia, among other Al Qaeda affiliated groups are supported covertly by Western intelligence.

22. The US is also supporting Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist organizations in the Xinjiang Uighur autonomous region of China. The underlying objective is to trigger political instability in Western China.

Chinese jihadists are reported to have received “terrorist training” from the Islamic State “in order to conduct attacks in China”. The declared objective of these Chinese-based jihadist entities (which serves the interests of the US) is to establish a Islamic caliphate extending into Western China. (Michel Chossudovsky, America’s War on Terrorism, Global Research, Montreal, 2005, Chapter 2).

E. Homegrown Terrorists

24. The homegrown terrorist threat is a fabrication. It is promoted by Western governments and the media with a view to repealing civil liberties and installing a police state. The terror attacks by alleged jihadists and terror warnings are invariably staged events. They are used to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation.

In turn, the arrests, trials and sentences of “Islamic terrorists” sustain the legitimacy of America’s Homeland Security State and law enforcement apparatus, which has become increasingly militarized.

The ultimate objective is to instill in the minds of millions of Americans that the enemy is real and the U.S. Administration will protect the lives of its citizens.

25. The “counter-terrorism” campaign against the Islamic State has contributed to the demonization of Muslims, who in the eyes of Western public opinion are increasingly associated with the jihadists.

26. Anybody who dares to question the validity of the “Global War on Terrorism” is branded a terrorist and subjected to the anti-terrorist laws.

The ultimate objective of the “Global War on Terrorism” is to subdue the citizens, totally depoliticize social life in America, prevent people from thinking and conceptualizing, from analyzing facts and challenging the legitimacy of the inquisitorial social order which rules America.

The Obama Administration has imposed a diabolical consensus with the support of its allies, not to mention the complicit role of the United Nations Security Council. The Western media has embraced the consensus; it has described the Islamic State as an independent entity, an outside enemy which threatens the Western World.

The Big Lie has become the Truth. 

Say no to the Big Lie. Spread the message.

The truth is ultimately a powerful weapon.

[Read this article on Global Research.]

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.

18 January 2024

Source: michelchossudovsky.substack.com

By Michel Chossudovsky

[This article was first published by Global Research on November 13, 2023, updated on January 14, 2024.]

1. In Solidarity with Palestine

By Countercurrents Collective

The Israeli military has been “astonished” by the size and quality of the tunnels Hamas has built under Gaza, according to an article published in the New York Times on Tuesday.

The tunnel network was originally estimated to include 250 miles (400 km) of underground passages and bunkers. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has since revised these estimates to 350-450 miles (560-725 km) or more.

Two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there were close to 5,700 separate shafts leading into the tunnels under Gaza. None of the numbers could be independently verified.

Flooding Tunnels Have Failed

It could take “years” to disable the tunnels, one Israeli official told the New York Times. They need to be mapped, checked for Israeli captives, and “made irreparable,” he said, acknowledging that the recent attempts to destroy the tunnels by flooding them with seawater “have failed.”

Hospitals Schools Mosques

According to another official, Israel is using a “triangle” model to locate the tunnels, which assumes they will be found under any hospital, school or mosque in Gaza.

The Israeli military has underestimated the “extent and importance” of the tunnels to Hamas, which the New York Times described as an “intelligence failure.”

The IDF has not disclosed the number of soldiers killed and wounded in tunnel warfare. Officially, almost 190 soldiers have been killed and 240 or so seriously wounded in the fighting since the start of the ground campaign in Gaza.

One soldier, who spoke with the New York Times on condition of anonymity, said that he had taken part in destroying about 50 tunnels in Beit Hanoun, in the northeast of Gaza. All of them were rigged with bombs and other explosives, wired to be activated remotely.

The militant group Hamas, which maintains de facto control over Gaza, struck at nearby Israeli settlements on October 7, claiming the lives of approximately 1,200 Israelis. Another 240 were taken into the Palestinian enclave as captives. Israel responded by declaring war on Hamas and launching air and artillery strikes on Gaza, followed by ground troops in November.

Almost 30,000 Palestinians have been killed and another 60,000 wounded in the first 100 days of fighting, according to the Gaza health ministry.

Intensive Stage Of War Will End Soon, Says Israeli Defense Minister

A CNN report said:

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on Monday that the “intensive maneuvering stage” of Israel’s military offensive in northern and southern Gaza will “end soon.”

The Israeli military is working to “eliminate pockets of resistance” in northern Gaza, Gallant said, adding: “We will achieve this via raids, airstrikes, special operations and additional activities.”

After the October 7 attacks, Gallant said the original plan was for the “intensive maneuvering stage” of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza to last approximately three months. But, he cautioned the Israeli military adapts its operations “in accordance with the reality on the ground” and “our intelligence.”

The IDF has announced one of its army divisions had exited the Gaza Strip on Monday night, in the most significant sign yet of a shift to a new phase of fighting that some Israeli officials have been promising.

The IDF said its 36th division, which comprises armored, engineering, and infantry companies, withdrew from the Gaza Strip after 80 days.

The brigade operated in the areas of Zeitun, Shati, Shejaiya, Rimal, and the Central Camps, the Israeli military added. The IDF did not respond to CNN’s questions about whether the withdrawal was temporary, what was behind the withdrawal, or how many troops it involved.

Israel And Hamas Agree On Medicine For Hostages, Aid To Gaza

Another CNN report said:

Qatar says it has brokered a deal between Israel and Hamas that will see medicines delivered to Israeli hostages in Gaza in exchange for the delivery of medicine and humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians.

“Medicine along with other humanitarian aid is to be delivered to civilians in the Gaza Strip, in the most affected and vulnerable areas, in exchange for delivering medication needed for Israeli captives in Gaza,” the Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Tuesday in a statement posted on X.

The medications and aid will leave Doha on Wednesday and head to Egypt before being transported to Gaza, the ministry added. It is unclear when the medicines are expected to reach Gaza.

Relatives of the more than 100 remaining hostages believed to be alive in Gaza have been calling for medications to be passed on to their loved ones.

It has been more than three months since Hamas fighters attacked Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostage. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an advocacy group for the victims’ families, say that each new day in captivity further endangers their lives and health.

At least a third of the hostages have chronic illnesses and require medications, the forum said in a report released last week, adding that “others suffer from illnesses related to the harsh captivity conditions, which include mental and physical torture.”

Severe shortages of medicines and medical supplies in Gaza have led to operations being performed on children without anesthesia, according to UNICEF and a British surgeon who led an emergency medical team at the Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza.

Key Broker

The Qatari announcement comes days after the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said the director of Mossad, Israel’s  spy agency, David Barnea, had reached an agreement with Qatar on the delivery of medicines to hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

Qatar played a key role in brokering an agreement between Hamas and Israel that led to the brief truce in November and the release of more than 100 hostages, as well as hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which helped facilitate the release of the hostages in November, has been unable to visit the remaining captives in Gaza and does not know where they are, it told CNN.

It is unclear if the Red Cross will help pass the medication to the hostages. Over the weekend, an official familiar with the discussions told CNN that the Red Cross would not have a role in the deliveries.

The medicine is destined for more than 40 hostages thought by Israel to need it, according to the official, who also said that Hamas only agreed to the deal if more medicine was sent to hospitals and Palestinians in Gaza.

Throughout the war, Israel has allowed a limited amount of aid and medicines to enter Gaza but far more is needed, humanitarian groups say. The UN has complained that Israel has been rejecting missions to deliver supplies to northern Gaza.

An estimated 1.9 million people, or 85% of Gaza’s population, are now internally displaced, says the UN, while only 15 of the enclave’s hospitals remain operational.

More Than 10,000 Children Killed

At least 10,600 children have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since October 7, the Hamas-run Ministry of Health said. And the UN emergency relief chief warned Israel’s war has brought famine with “such incredible speed.”

17 January 2024

Source: countercurrents.org