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By Priti Gulati Cox

What follows is the final installment of ‘October 7: A History in Threads,’ which connects the present to the past 141 years of Zionism and Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Please go here to see all of the 11 threads in this series that includes embroidered portraits of the ongoing Palestinian struggle for liberation.

According to professor Joseph Massad, “European Christian colonization of [Palestine] throughout much of the 19th century was the prelude to Zionist Jewish colonization at the end of it… By the 1850s, Palestine’s population was under 400,000 people, including about 8,000 Jews.”

As Israeli historian Ilan Pappé says, It was in the year 1882 — “the date of the first Zionist colony in Palestine” — that the settler colonization of Palestine began. Thirty-five years later, on November 2, 1917, UK’s foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour completely changed the face of historic Palestine with the stroke of a pen by issuing the infamous “Balfour Declaration,” which favored the establishment in Palestine “of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Pappé tells us that soon after the 1967 war, defense minister Moshe Dayan opened the West Bank to Israelis for settler tourism: “Our guides were from the ‘Israel Exploration Society,’ founded in 1913 in an attempt to substantiate the Zionist claim for Palestine with archaeological finds.With such tour guides, you see what allegedly had been there thousands of years ago, but you do not see the present. You gaze at ancient ruins while ignoring the humanity around them. The early Zionists, pre-state, were taken on a similar tour upon their arrival to the ‘land without people.’”

Only a settler Zionist, head full of phantom ideas, could lay claim to a “land without people” while surrounded by the people of that land.

And only a settler Zionist backed by US arms could do this to one of their own, and then blame Hamas for it…

… or this to a beloved Palestinian educator…

… or this to the niece of 22-year-old Palestinian journalist and commentator Abubaker Abed…

… or this to the library of a Palestinian writer & poet…

… or this to a Palestinian toddler…

… or this to the great martyr and resistance fighter Yahya Sinwar…

… or this to a Palestinian prisoner…

…who was gang raped by a group of reservists in the infamous Sde Teiman detention camp in the Negev desert, east of the Gaza Strip, prompting this year’s “right to rape” riots in which Israeli protesters, politicians and TV commentators defended the right of soldiers to rape Palestinian prisoners in detention.

On November 13, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor released an infographic that included a host of shocking statistics. Since the start of the war on Gaza, the Israeli military has engaged in a scorched earth policy, completely destroying “the strip’s civilian infrastructure, property and essential buildings,” including 845 mosques, 3 churches, and 203 heritage sites. 90% of hospitals, 74% of the buildings, and 85% of the schools and universities have been destroyed or damaged.

Furthermore, 90% of the population has been forcibly displaced, violently driven to “relocate in schools and makeshift tents.”

At least 52,030 Palestinians have been killed, according to Euro-Med, with 33% of the casualties being children and 21% women. And of 46,410 civilians killed, 190 of the casualties were journalists, and 2,313 were healthcare professionals, including 83 doctors.

Out of the 108,320 Palestinians injured by Israeli attacks, “several thousand have suffered amputations or permanent impairments, with over 10,000 children losing at least one leg.”

To make matters worse, adds Euro-Med, “97% of the per capita share of the water has decreased due to the extensive destruction of water infrastructure; [and] 96% of the population face high levels of acute food insecurity. Around 100 Palestinians, including 42 children, have died due to severe malnutrition.”

According to HuMedia, the most dangerous place in the world to be a child is the Gaza Strip, where, among other horrors, 17,000+ children have been killed by Israel since October 7; 90% suffer from severe hunger, and 1 million are in dire need of mental health support.

Reporter Abubaker Abed—who, in the face of a Zionist genocide that has engulfed him and his people (a holocaust supported by Western governments, especially the United States), has been taking care of a yellow rose bush, among other plants—told The Electronic Intifada in an April 27 interview, “This is our yellow rose [and] we see hope through it. Despite the destruction, despite the truly unbearable circumstance we are living under at the moment, we still seek out hope [and] we see hope in you.”

I later asked Abubaker to elaborate a little on the situation on the ground in Palestine, and the role of the West in stoking this genocide with no end in sight.

Q: Abubaker, what are your earliest memories of your family under the siege? And what did your parents do for a living?

It has been all wars since 2008. It was a normal life where we would wake up, have our breakfast, and go to school. But at any time, you could expect a war to rage on. It’s just like this. My mom is a housewife. My dad is an art teacher at UNRWA.

Q: What is your message to the governments of the most powerful countries in the western world who have done nothing to hold Israel and the United Staes accountable for this genocide happening in clear view of the world in real time?

My message is, I am not a party to this war, and you’ve forced me to dream to live, while you and your sons and daughters live to dream. You’ve forced hell on me, and this is something I’ll never forget or forgive you for, no matter what you do in the future. You killed my friend and my aunt’s family and forced this horror upon me. Every single moment will never fade away from my mind. It pains me that my biggest dream has become a cup of clean water. This is a symptom of your barbarity.

Q: How, in your view, has the mainstream media and the so-called international community failed you and your people?

In every way. They’re paid propagandists. What they do is just dehumanize us as Palestinians. I’ll never forget these people, who I call “linguistic criminals.” Just robotized journalists who’ve remained silent and never shown Palestinian journalists or people support. They were afraid of being humans, and that’s why they will remain “cheap” for all eternity, just as they preferred money and sold their humanity.

Q: Do you believe that one day the Israelis and their children will be haunted by what they have done?

I never wished and will never wish hardships for children. Children are the birds of the world. If they have a good environment they’ll be educated. I wish eternal peace, ease and comfort for all the people around the world. But again, there’s no such thing as an “Israeli.” Israel is a colonial state that has expelled Palestinians from their lands. And the children of Israel will someday understand that their grandparents were just murderous and vile. I believe they will be haunted. The day of tasting what has been inflicted upon us will come to them. And it’ll be unprecedented.

Q: And what do you have to say to people who insist on asking, “Well, do you condemn Hamas?”

Regardless of political affiliations, do you really condemn someone who defends you and has your back against a terrorist state? Israel has been butchering, dehumanizing, torturing, and bombing us for 76 years. And it has really imposed a strict siege on us in Gaza for 17 years. In this context, where does this question fit? It’s incredibly enraging that people are trying to justify Israel’s genocide by asking such silly questions.

Q: In light of Donald Trump’s victory, what is your message to the Democratic Party and the people who voted for Kamala Harris?

I don’t have trust in you. I am sure you’ll continue the legacy of genociding us. I don’t care about the U.S. administrations. But I do care about its human and noble people.

*  *  *

Joseph Massad said the following in 2008, and it remains true today: “Palestinians have resisted and resist the Nakba with steadfastness and a refusal to leave their lands… While land acquisitions started in the 1880s and the en masse theft of the country occurred in 1948, Israel has still not been able to take over the entire land… [and] while Israel has used this situation to project itself as a victim of its own victims who refuse to grant it legitimacy to victimize them, Israel understands not only in its unconscious but also consciously that its project [of the Nakba] will remain reversible.”

The holocaust that is going on in Gaza didn’t start on October 7, 2023, when Hamas launched “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.” A century-and-a-half-long thread connects us to the origins of that day. A thread that was wound up in a messy clump of  Zionist occupation, siege, death, destruction, torture, displacement and ruin. This ball held within it an indigenous struggle that on that October morning finally breached a hole, and Gaza’s resistance fighters broke free from their prison, out of the clump, and carried out a successful military operation. As pointed out by Asa Winstanley’s groundbreaking reporting for The Electronic Intifada on the first anniversary of the breakout, “Al-Aqsa Flood was the first time in history that Palestinian armed groups were able to retake Palestinian territories lost since 1948, however briefly.”

Through these threads, I have sought to make the point that October 7 is not separate from this ball of loose threads; it’s the thread that got away and might just bring down Zionism and the military occupation once and for all, Insha’Allah. Whether through Refaat Alareer’s Expo marker, or martyr Yahya Sinwar’s stick, or Abubaker’s hope-giving yellow rose, occupied Palestine is sending us a clear message that we need to heed. We — the privileged West — must not stop exposing our government’s complicity in this genocide. Abubaker and Aylool and all of Palestine are counting on us.

Zionism will be defeated. Palestine will be free.

‘October 7: A History in Threads’ is inspired by Tatreez which is an ancient art of Palestinian folk embroidery. There is a stunning film directed by Carol Mansour titled Stitching Palestine that you can watch at Solidarity Cinema.

Priti Gulati Cox, (@PritiGCox), is an artist and writer.

28 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

Dear Refaat,

We are not silent. We are being silenced. The students who, during the last academic year set up encampments, occupied halls, went on hunger strikes and spoke out against the genocide, were met this fall with a series of rules that have turned university campuses into academic gulags. Among the minority of academics who dared to speak out, many have been sanctioned or dismissed. Medical professionals who criticize the wholesale destruction by Israel of hospitals, clinics and targeted assassinations of health workers in Gaza have been suspended or terminated from medical school faculties with some facing threats to revoke their medical licenses.

Journalists who detail the mass slaughter and expose Israeli propaganda have been taken off air or fired from their publications. Jobs are lost over social media posts. The tiny handful of politicians who condemn the killing have seen millions of dollars spent to drive them from office. Algorithms, shadow-banning, deplatforming and demonetizing – all of which I have experienced – are used to marginalize or ban us on digital media platforms. A whisper of protest and we are disappeared.

None of these measures will be lifted once the genocide ends. The genocide is the pretext. The result will be one huge step towards an authoritarian state, especially with the ascendancy of Donald Trump. The silence will expand, like a great cloud of sulfurous gas. We choke on forbidden words. They killed you. They are strangling us. The goal is the same. Erasure. Your story, the story of all Palestinians, is not to be told.

The Zionists and their allies have nothing left in their arsenal but lies, censorship, smear campaigns and violence, the blunt instruments of the damned. But I hold in my hand the weapon that will, ultimately, defeat them. Your book, “If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose”.

“Stories teach life,” you write, “even if the hero suffers or dies in the end.”

Writing, you told your students, “is a testimony, a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world. We lived for a reason, to tell the tales of loss, survival, and of hope.”

It has been a year since an Israeli missile targeted the second-floor apartment where you were sheltering. You had been receiving death threats for weeks online and by phone from Israeli accounts. You had already been displaced multiple times. You fled in the end to your sister’s home in Al-Sidra neighborhood in Gaza City. But you did not escape your hunters. You were murdered with your brother Salah and one of his children and your sister and three of her children.

You wrote your poem “If I Must Die” in 2011. You released it again a month before your death. It has been translated into dozens of languages. You wrote it for your daughter Shymaa. In April 2024, four months after your death, Shymaa was killed in an Israeli airstrike along with her husband and their two-month-old son, your grandson, who you never met. They had sought refuge in the building of the international relief charity Global Communities.

You write to Shymaa:

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

You have joined the martyred poets. The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. The Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti who wrote his final verses on a death march. The Chilean singer and poet Víctor Jara. The Black poet Henry Dumas, shot dead by New York City police.

In your poem “And We Live On…” you write:

Despite Israel’s birds of death

Hovering only two meters from our breath

From our dreams and prayers

Blocking their ways to God.

Despite that.

We dream and pray,

Clinging to life even harder

Every time a dear one’s life

Is Forcibly rooted up.

We live.

We live.

We do.

Why do killers fear poets? You were not a combatant. You did not carry a weapon. You put words on paper. But all the might of the Israeli army and intelligence services were deployed to track you down.

In times of distress, when the world is enveloped by cruelty and suffering, when lives are perched on the edge of the abyss, poetry is the sad lament of the oppressed. It makes us feel the suffering. It is intuitive. It captures the mix of complex emotions — joy, love, loss, fear, death, trauma, grief — when the world falls apart. It creates in its beauty a salvific meaning out of despair. It is an absurd act of hope, a defiant act of resistance, taunting those who dehumanize you with erudition and sensitivity. Its fragility and beauty, its sanctification of memory, experience and the intellect, its musicality, mock the simplistic slogans and cant of the killers.

In your poem “Freshly Baked Souls” you write:

The hearts are not hearts.

The eyes can’t see

There are no eyes there

The bellies craving for more

A house destroyed except for the door

The family, all of them, gone

Save for a photo album

That has to be buried with them

No one was left to cherish the memories

No one.

Except freshly baked souls in bellies.

Except for a poem.

Writing, as Edward Said reminds us, is “the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”

Violence cannot create. It only destroys. It leaves nothing of value behind.

“Don’t forget that Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry,” you said in a lecture given to your students in Advanced English Poetry at the Islamic University in Gaza. “When the Zionists thought of going back to Palestine, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, let’s go to Palestine.’”

You snapped your fingers:

It took them years, like over fifty years of thinking, of planning, all the politics, money, and everything else. But literature played one of the most crucial roles here. This is our class. If I tell you, ‘let’s move to the other class.’ you need guarantees that we’re going to go there, we’re going to find chairs — right? That the other class, the other place, is better, is more peaceful. That we have some kind of connection, some kind of right.

So, for fifty years before the occupation of Palestine and the establishment of the so-called Israel in 1948, Palestine in Zionist Jewish literature was presented to the Jewish people around the world [as]… ‘a land without a people [for] a people without a land.’ ‘Palestine flows with milk and honey.’ ‘There is no one there, so let’s go.’

Killers are trapped in a literal world. Their imaginations are calcified. They have shut down empathy. They know poetry’s power, but they do not know where that power comes from, like an audience left gaping at the deft skill of a magician. And what they cannot understand they destroy. They lack the capacity to dream. Dreams terrify them.

The Israeli general Moshe Dayan said that the poems of Fadwa Tuqan, who was educated at Oxford, “were like facing twenty enemy fighters.”

Taqan writes in “Martyrs Of The Intifada” of the youth throwing stones at heavily armed Israeli soldiers:

They died standing, blazing on the road

Shining like stars, their lips pressed to the lips of life

They stood up in the face of death

Then disappeared like the sun.

Many Palestinians can recite from memory passages of the poems “To My Mother” and “Write Down I am an Arab” by Palestine’s most celebrated poet Mahmoud Darwish. Israeli authorities persecuted, censored, imprisoned and kept Darwish under house arrest before driving him into exile. His lines adorn the concrete barriers erected by Israel to wall off the Palestinians in the West Bank and are incorporated into popular protest songs.

His poem “Write Down I am an Arab” reads:

Write down:

—I am an Arab

And my ID number is 50,000

I got eight kids

And the ninth is due after summer.

So will you be mad?

—I am an Arab

And I work along with my labor buddies in a stone quarry

And I got eight kids

I secure them bread, clothing and notebooks

Hacked out of the rocks

And I don’t beg for charity at your door,

And don’t lower myself at the footsteps of your court

—So will you be mad?

Write down:

—I am an Arab.

I am a name without an epithet,

Patient in a country where everything

has a tantrum.

—My roots

—Were deeply entrenched before the birth of time

—And prior to the ushering of eras,

—Before cypresses and olive trees,

—And even before the grass grew.

My dad hails from a family of plowers, not blue-blood barons

My grandpa was a farmer, totally unknown

Taught me about the zenith of the soul before teaching me how to read

And my home is a cabin made out of sticks and bamboos

So are you displeased with my status?

I am a name without an epithet!

Write down:

—I am an Arab.

Hair color: coal-like; eye color: brown

Distinguishing marks: I wear a headband on top of a keffiyeh

—And my palm is rock-solid, scratches whoever touches it

As to my address: I am from an isolated village, forgotten

—Its streets are unnamed

—And all its men are in the field or in the stone quarry

—So will you be mad?

Write down.

—I am an Arab

You stole the meadows of my ancestors and a land I used to cultivate

—Together with all my kids

—You didn’t leave to us or to my offspring

—Anything – except these rocks

—So will your government take them away as well, as it’s been announced

—In that case

—Write down

—On the top of the first page:

—I don’t hate people and I don’t rob anyone

—But… If I starve to death, I’m left with nothing else but

—The flesh of my usurper to feed from

—So beware, beware of my hunger and anger

You wrote about your children. Your words were to be their legacy.

To your daughter Linah, then eight-years-old, or as you say “in Gazan time, two wars old,” you told bedtime stories when Israel was bombarding Gaza in May 2021, when your children “all sat up in bed, shaking, saying nothing.” You did not leave your home, a decision you made so “we would die together.”

You write:

On Tuesday, Linah asked her question again after my wife and I didn’t answer it the first time: Can they destroy our building if the power is out? I wanted to say: “Yes, little Linah, Israel can still destroy the beautiful al-Jawharah building, or any of our buildings, even in the darkness. Each of our homes is full of tales and stories that must be told. Our homes annoy the Israeli war machine, mock it, haunt it, even in the darkness. It can’t abide their existence. And, with American tax dollars and international immunity, Israel presumably will go on destroying our buildings until there is nothing left.”

But I can’t tell Linah any of this. So I lie: “No, sweetie, they can’t see us in the dark.”

Mass death was not new to you. You were shot by Israeli soldiers with three rubber-coated metal bullets when you were a teenager. In 2014, your brother, Hamada, your wife’s grandfather, her brother, her sister and her sister’s three children were all killed in an Israeli strike. During the bombardment Israeli missiles destroyed the offices of the English Department at the Islamic University of Gaza, where you stored “stories, assignments, and exam papers for potential book projects.”

The Israeli army spokesman claimed they bombed the university to destroy a “weapons development center,” a statement later amended by the Israeli defense minister who said “IUG was developing chemicals, to be used against us.”

You write:

My talks about tolerance and understanding, Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) and nonviolent resistance, and poetry and stories and literature did not help us or protect us against death and destruction. My motto “This too shall pass” became a joke to many. My mantra “A poem is mightier than a gun” was mocked. With my own office gone by wanton Israeli destruction, students would not stop joking about me developing PMDs, “Poems of Mass Destruction,” or TMDs, “Theories of Mass Destruction.” Students joked that they wanted to be taught chemical poetry alongside allegorical and narrative poetry. They asked for short-range stories and long-range stories instead of normal terms like short stories and novels. And I was asked if my exams would have questions capable of carrying chemical warheads!

But why would Israel bomb a university? Some say Israel attacked IUG just to punish its twenty thousand students or to push Palestinians to despair. While that is true, to me IUG’s only danger to the Israeli occupation and its apartheid regime is that it is the most important place in Gaza to develop student’s minds as indestructible weapons. Knowledge is Israel’s worst enemy. Awareness is Israel’s most hated and feared foe. That’s why Israel bombs a university: it wants to kill openness and determination to refuse living under injustice and racism. But again, why does Israel bomb a school? Or a hospital? Or a mosque? Or a twenty-story building? Could it be, as Shylock put it, “a merry sport”?

The existential struggle of the Palestinians is to reject the barbarity of the Israeli occupiers, to refuse to mirror their hatred or replicate their savagery. This does not always succeed. Rage, humiliation and despair are potent forces that feed a lust for vengeance. But you heroically fought this battle for your humanity, and ours, until the end. You embodied a decency your oppressors lacked. You found salvation and hope in the words that captured the reality of a people facing erasure and death. You asked us to feel for these lives, including your own, which have been lost. You knew that there would come a day, a day you understood you might never see, when your words would expose the crimes of those who murdered you and lift up the lost lives of those you honored and loved. You succeeded. Death took you. But not your voice or the voices of those you memorialized.

You, and they, live on.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organizations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans.

28 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- Ramy Abdu, Chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, stated that they have obtained “harrowing testimonies of sexual violence” committed by Israeli occupation soldiers against nurses, patients, and their companions following Friday’s Israeli raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.

The testimonies included horrific details of degrading assaults, where soldiers forced women to strip under threats and humiliation at the Kamal Adwan Hospital and in front of al-Farid Hall.

One testimony mentioned that a soldier forced a nurse to remove her pants and groped her. When she tried to stop him, he slapped her forcefully across the face, causing her nose to bleed.

Another testimony stated that the soldiers threatened the women, saying, “Take it off, or we will strip you by force.”

When one woman refused to remove her hijab, a soldier assaulted her by tearing her abaya, exposing part of her body.

One of the victims described being dragged by a soldier across his chest as he told her, “Take it off now,” while using obscene language.

Other young women suffered similar assaults, as soldiers grabbed their heads, tore at their hair violently near one of the hospital halls, and used degrading gestures and words.

[https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1872781448224145890]

On Friday morning, Israeli occupation forces stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, forcing patients, the wounded, and medical staff to leave, arresting others, including the hospital director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, and torching large sections.

28 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- Gaza’s Health Ministry confirmed on Saturday that Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, has been abducted by Israeli occupation forces following a raid on the last remaining medical facility in the area.

In a statement on Saturday morning, the Ministry said Abu Safiya has been arrested by the Israeli forces. Abu Safiya’s fate was unknown.

On Friday morning, Israeli soldiers stormed Kamal Adwan Hospital, torching large sections and ordering hundreds of people to leave.

The Ministry said that contact had been lost with staff inside the hospital in Beit Lahiya, which has been under siege and heavy pressure from Israeli forces for weeks. It had no information on the fate of patients who were inside, it added.

The Israeli army issued a statement confirming it launched a raid on the Kamal Adwan Hospital, claiming without evidence that the medical facility “serves as a Hamas terrorist stronghold in northern Gaza”.

The Ministry said Kamal Adwan is “suffering from a stifling siege, as the operating and surgery departments, laboratory, maintenance, ambulance units and warehouses have been completely burned”.

The Ministry also added , “the [Israeli] occupation army is forcibly transferring patients and the injured under the threat of weapons and gun barrels to the Indonesian Hospital, which lacks medical supplies, water, medicines, and even electricity and generators.”

Munir al-Bursh, the director of the Ministry, said the Israeli army had ordered 350 people to leave Kamal Adwan for a nearby school sheltering displaced families. This included 75 patients, their companions, and 185 medical staff.

Last night, the Ministry reported that Israeli forces took dozens of Kamal Adwan Hospital staff, including Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, to a detention center for interrogation. This followed threats made against the director, warning him of arrest if he did not comply with their orders.

“Too Late”

On Monday, Abu Safiya urged the international community to act “before it is too late”, calling the situation “horrifying”.

He said obeying an Israeli order to empty the facility would be “next to impossible” because nearly 400 civilians remain inside, including babies who need oxygen and incubators.

“The bombing continues from all directions, affecting the building, the departments and the staff. This is a serious and extremely horrifying situation,” Abu Safiya said.

Abu Safiya said: “The world must understand that our hospital is being targeted with the intent to kill and forcibly displace us,” adding that the Israeli bombing did not stop throughout Sunday night, destroying homes and surrounding buildings.

“We urge the international community to intervene quickly and stop this fierce assault on us to protect the healthcare system, the workers and the patients within it,” the hospital director said.

The hospital was running out of any meaningful medical care, given the hardship and the fact the past two months have been very strict in terms of what can enter the northern part of Gaza as there is a complete siege, military siege, on the area with no humanitarian aid – medical supplies, water, or life-sustaining resources – available to people there because of the ongoing deliberate prevention by the Israeli military.

28 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- The World Health Organization (WHO) condemned Israel’s ongoing attacks on Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure, stating that these actions are systematically dismantling the health system. The latest raid, which occurred this morning, targeted Kamal Adwan Hospital, the last major health facility in North Gaza, rendering it inoperable while the fate of dozens of the hospital’s medical workers is still unknown after Israel’s army kidnapped them.

Key departments were severely damaged during the raid, and 60 health workers, along with 25 critically ill patients, remain in the hospital, according to the WHO. Many patients, including those on ventilators, were forced to evacuate to the nearby Indonesian Hospital, which is also non-functional and emptied of medical workers.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1872760436124467487]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1872757069562175787]

WHO expressed deep concern for the safety of those still in the hospital, highlighting that these attacks are part of a broader pattern of Israeli hostilities that have repeatedly targeted or occurred near the facility since early October.

The organization warned that the continued destruction of Gaza’s health system is putting the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians at risk. The UN body called for an immediate ceasefire, stressing that healthcare must be protected in accordance with international law.

The Israeli occupation forces set large sections of Kamal Adwan Hospital on fire, leading to the deaths of some medical staff while they attempted to extinguish the flames.

28 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Mazin Qumsiyeh

Shocking statistics on the 450th consecutive day of the genocide on the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Government Media Office published an update on the most important statistics (deemed reliable even by the UN, WHO and even USA). PLEASE READ and disseminate that Israeli occupation forces (with US tax money and munitions and to a lesser extent other countries) did this:

– Dropped 88,000 tons of explosives on the Gaza Strip (more than dropped on Vietnam, and four times the explosive power of a Hiroshima-size nuclear bomb in an area of a mere 360 sq km or 250 square mile)

– Committed 9,973 massacres (killing many people at one time by bombing or shelling; 70% women and children)

– 56,714 killed and missing persons: 45,514 reached hospitals (Ministry of Health recorded), 11,200 missing persons did not reach hospitals (under rubble or bodies missing). Those killed and documented include:
*1,413 Palestinian whole families gone (no surviving members) while 3,467 Palestinian families had only one surviving family member, and the number of members of these families is 7,941 martyrs. (Ministry of Health).
*17,818 children killed (most under age of 5 years, 238 infants were born and killed n the period of the genocide).
*12,287 women killed
*1068 from the medical staff (Ministry of Health).
*94 civil defense/first responders and 728 police officers (civil)
*201 journalists (higher than those killed in WWII)
*520 exhumed from seven mass graves on grounds of targeted hospitals.

-The numbers do not include those dying from lack of food, medicine, water, from diseases and from cold. Specifically
+ 44 children were recorded starved to death, many hundreds are not recorded
+ Six infants died from hypothermia in tents, many hundreds are not recorded
+ Data do not include deaths among the 12,500 cancer patients (largely lacking treatments)
+ Data do not include deaths or debilitation from infectious diseases: 2,136,026 cases of such diseases due to displacement forcing unsanitary conditions including hepatitis, polio, skin diseases, lung disorders, intestinal disorders (Ministry of Health)
+ + Data do not include deaths or debilitation from chronic disease patients (350,000 patients such as diabetes) due to the occupation preventing the entry of medicines or allowing operation of facilities like kidney dialysis

-108,189 wounded and injured arrived at hospitals including 399 journalists and media professionals), 12,650 wounded need to travel abroad for treatment. (Ministry of Health)

-21 displacement centers (declared “safe zones”) targeted by the Israeli occupation (only 10% of the area of the Gaza Strip is claimed by the Israeli occupation to be “humanitarian areas”)

-35,060 children live without their parents or without one of them (orphans).

-12,125 women lost their husbands during the genocidal war.

-More than 60,000 pregnant women lack of OB/GYN healthcare (risk)

-Nearly 10,000 were abducted and incarcerated without trial including 331 medical, 43 media, and 26 civil defense personnel. Over 30 died under torture in Israeli prisons (3 medical personnel executed in prison by torture)

-2 million displaced people in the Gaza Strip. 110,000 tents were worn out and became unfit for the displaced.

-Infrastructure including most buildings were destroyed intentionally (in most cases after Israeli infantry occupied them). This includes

*135 schools and universities completely and 353 schools and universities partially destroyed (12,780 students were killed during the war): 756 teachers and educational employees in the education sector were killed by the occupation during the war. 148 scientists, academics, university professors and researchers were executed by the occupation. 785,000 students were deprived of education by the Israeli occupation.
*823 mosques were completely destroyed and 158 mosques were severely destroyed by the occupation and need to be restored.
*3 churches targeted and destroyed.
*19 cemeteries were completely or partially destroyed by the occupation out of 60 cemeteries. 2,300 bodies were stolen by the occupation from several cemeteries in the Gaza Strip.
*161,600 housing units completely destroyed and 194,000 housing units are partially destroyed
*162 health care facilities targeted by the occupation (most clinics and hospitals destroyed and/or rendered out of service).
*136 ambulances targeted
*213 government civil headquarters
*206 archaeological and heritage sites.
*3,130 kilometers of electricity networks.
*125 number of underground electricity distribution transformers destroyed.
*330 kilometers of water networks destroyed.
*655 kilometers of sewage networks destroyed.
*2,835 kilometers of road and street networks destroyed.
*42 community facilities, playgrounds and sports halls destroyed.
*717 water wells destroyed by the occupation and put out of service.
*This is 86% destruction rate in the Gaza Strip. $37 billion is the initial direct economic losses of the genocide war
*This does not include the environmental damage; some of it not repairable and some areas of Gaza are now uninhabitable for decades to come….see our research papers on this such as this one: https://www.palestinenature.org/research/Impact-of-the-Israeli-military-activities-on-the-environment.pdf

Mazin Butros Qumsiyeh is a Palestinian scientist and author, founder and director of the Palestine Museum of Natural History and the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University where he teaches.

30 December 2024

Source: popular-resistance.blogspot.com

By Richard Falk

Rarely has the crystal ball used to divine the near future seemed so clouded by uncertainties. The year 2024 was dominated by disappointments, disturbing surprises, and continuing devastation in Ukraine and Gaza. It was also a year that underscored the inability of the UN to stop the most transparent genocide ever in Gaza, a senseless war in Ukraine, and mass slaughter in Sudan.

Is 2024 a turning point?

There were a variety of multilateral efforts in 2024 to escape from US international dominance after the Cold War. This dominance had fueled a global politics of resentment and a search for an alternative world order that is law-governed and not subject to the geopolitical maneuvers of the five winners of World War II. These powers were granted unrestricted veto rights in the UN Security Council under the UN Charter, which has long paralyzed efforts to ensure compliance with international law. This produces a deep contradiction in the way the world is organized, allowing the most powerful and dangerous countries, all five being nuclear-armed states, to be legally free of any obligation to respect international law.

The question in many thoughtful minds is whether these developments in the prior year will continue in the year ahead. One near certain development is the rightward turn of internal politics in the West, given a dramatic twist by the prospects of radical change associated with the second coming of Donald Trump as US president. Trump has already appointed highly controversial political figures to his Cabinet, with the expectation of implementing an ultra-right domestic agenda. However, what is his approach to foreign policy? As well, the leading governments of Europe, including Germany, France, and Italy, all exhibit signs of leaning further toward authoritarianism.

Crisis areas in the world

There are some hopeful signs. Trump seems likely to push for a negotiated peace in Ukraine and bring to a close US President Joe Biden’s “geopolitical war,” involving fighting Moscow by supplying and funding Kyiv with ever more provocative weaponry while turning his back on diplomacy and urging NATO to join in the fight with Rusi to the last Ukrainian. Such a posture raised risks of a confrontation with Russia that could also result in catastrophic nuclear warfare. Trump wants to cut spending on distant and expensive foreign adventures with no genuine American security interest and stand before the world as a peacemaker. Ukraine was a war that never should have been, as a diplomatic compromise between Russia and Ukraine was from its inception in the interest of Ukraine and world peace, as well as being attainable by responsible statecraft.

In contrast to Ukraine, the context of Israel/Palestine is far bleaker. There is every indication that Trump intends to outdo Biden by being an even more unconditional ally of Israel, fully supportive of the Netanyahu-led project entailing the establishment of Greater Israel. This is a plan to erase the Palestinian challenge through the annexation of the West Bank, parts of Gaza, and to support Israel in extending its “buffer zones” in Syria and Lebanon. The plan also includes intensified efforts to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and promote regime change in Tehran by force. The rightward turn of major governments in the West is likely to repress civil society opposition to the continuation of Israeli genocide and expansionism.

Militarism versus symbolic victories: The calculus of legitimacy wars

The efforts by countries in the Global South to have recourse to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and International Criminal Court (ICC) are a notable expression on the part of non-Western states to invoke international law to serve the causes of peace with justice. And the ICJ has responded in an encouraging professional manner, ruling in favor of provisional measures in response to South Africa’s submission and issuing a separate opinion invalidating Israel’s continuing occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem in an authoritative near-unanimous exposition of applicable international law. Of course, it is expected that Israel will defy these developments, as it has consistently done in the face of adverse rulings by international tribunals. Nevertheless, such rulings sympathetic with Palestinian grievances are symbolically important, delegitimizing Israel and mobilizing civil society activism that gives rise to global solidarity initiatives of a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) variety.

The fate of the arrest warrants issued by the ICC, ordering the arrest and transfer to The Hague for prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant after a long delay is highly uncertain. Israel has mounted a legal challenge, and its government has made clear that the arrest warrants for the Israeli leaders are antisemitic outrages, and any implementation would be denounced and disrupted no matter what the ICC might decide. As with the ICJ genocide and occupation cases, the mere issuance of arrest warrants by the ICC was a significant symbolic Palestinian victory in the Legitimacy War, which may yet surprise the world in 2025 or shortly thereafter, by its overall impact on the viability of the Israeli state as now operative. It should be appreciated that the anti-colonial wars of the past 50 years were won by the weaker side militarily that managed to prevail on the symbolic battlefields of the Legitimacy War, which gives decisive weight to law, morality, and perseverance of a repressed people. The establishment of the civil society Gaza Tribunal in November of 2024 is a further legitimizing development in the Palestinian struggle for basic rights that seeks to activate global solidarity initiatives that shifted the balance in the global movement against South African apartheid, and before that of the global anti-war movement that nullified US military superiority in the Vietnam War.

The rise of multipolarity in 2025?

At the same time, global society is experiencing a surge of multilateral initiatives. Strengthening the impulse to create autonomous multipolar networks of the sort modeled by the BRICS, and especially to mount challenges to dollarization of trade and finance, which, to the extent successful, will produce a backlash in the form of high tariffs and the economic menace of a trade war, aggravated by an increase in the tendency to replace workers with digitally sophisticated substitutes for human labor to promote profitability and efficiency.

Above all, 2025 will witness growing tensions between the unified governance of global security by continued US hegemony and a resurgent challenge mounted by the Global South in the ongoing Legitimacy War with the West.

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years.

26 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja

Western Leaders Watch the Israeli Massacres as Spectators

President Biden and Secretary Blinken knew and witnessed  the ferocious and tragic abnormality of Israeli planned killing of civilians and genocide in Gaza but their interest and policies were aligned to unthinking of evilmongering in Palestine. Continued occupation, forcible displacement and daily killings of civilians are the strategic goals, the Israeli extremist political leadership encouraged by the US hired supporters envisage plans of ‘greater Israel’ inclusive of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and parts of Egypt. The neo-colonial installed puppets – the former tribal agents – now self-made  kings, princes and presidents follow the European and American dictum for their survival. They are immune to logic and advice from Muslim scholarly experts in global affairs. The US and few West European leaders neglecting their own history masked their warmongering not knowing the consequences of their own viciousness against humanity. When life and human survival faces critical challenges, the thinking people and global institutions should respond with a collective will to stop the civilian massacres and genocide. Not so, in-waiting are the Arab-Muslim leaders to see if anything would happen out of nowhere to stop the Israeli carnage of planned killing and destruction of Gaza and the rest of Palestine. Please see:

“America-Israel War on Gaza a Prelude to Conquest of the Arab World.” https://www.uncommonthought.com/mtblog/archives/2024/01/05/america-israels-war-on-gaza-a-prelude-to-conquest-of-the-arab-world.php

The UNO failed miserably its Charter obligations, for millions of people with nowhere to go, nowhere to find a place of safety and life protection. Everyday is a killing day- bombardments of innocent civilians, places of worship, hospitals, UNRWA’s school shelters, Israeli freely use weapons of mass destruction conveniently made available by the US Government. The war scenario emboldens Netanyahu‘s political absolutism – an egoistic leader with a controversial profile will do utmost to regain unbridled ambition either by manipulation, violence or new conflicts. The current paradigm links directly to PM Netanyahu  affiliated with extreme Jewish Ultra Nationalists to deny the Palestinian people their rights of existence as an independent State and to dismantle the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Please see: “Al-Aqsa Mosque Waiting for the Arab Leaders” https://www.uncommonthought.com/mtblog/archives/2023/04/14/al-aqsa-mosque-waiting-for-the-arab-leaders.php

The Arab-Muslim Leaders Friends of Israel and America

The US media reports of the Saudi and Emirati leaders having financial investments in Israeli technology and manufacturing industries. Ironically, they lack a sense of time and history and how they could be punished by God for their treachery and dishonesty to the interest of Arab masses. There are no Arab leaders having moral and political integrity to represent the masses and no Arab armies to defend Islam. Simply put, they are puppets and hired agents of the Western imperialism. Netanyahu needed a powerful political and intellectual challenge to rethink his egoistic belligerency against Arabs but it was nowhere to be found. Israel bulldozed and occupied Egyptian Rafah crossing to Gaza but President Sissi took no action in defense. The Saudi, the UAE and others stooges kept silent profile while massacres of innocent killing embolden Israel to put finishing end to Gaza. Several thousand Israeli citizens regularly protest against the Netanyhau Government in Tel Aviv’s military defense complex calling for an immediate ceasefire and return of the 100 hostages and peace talks. Are the historic Israelities (progeny of Jacob) and the followers of Moses versus the Zionists, the same?

Israel and the US Need War, Not Peace as the End Game

“Fear God” and ‘do not violate the covenants of peace and trust on earth’, the Divine reminders echoed by Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Mohammad – Prophets of God to humanity for peace and global brotherhood. (The Quran:33:72):

We did indeed offer the Trust to the Heavens and the Earth And the mountains but they refused to undertake it, being afraid thereof. But man undertook it, he was indeed unjust and foolish.

Those bombing and causing catastrophic events to destroy planet Earth and mankind and all of its treasures and enrichments are not normal human beings but sadistic people and leaders. The followers of Moses – the generations of Israelite are reminded by God (The Quran 2: 84-85 ): And remember, We took a Covenant from the Children of Israel (progeny of Jacob), Worship none but God; ….shed no blood amongst you, Nor displace people from  homes: and Ye solemnly ratified, And to this ye can bear witness…. It was not lawful for you to banish another party, then it is only a part of the Book that ye believe in…. And on the Day of Judgment they shall be consigned to the most grievous penalty,For God is not unmindful what ye do.

The Israeli leaders and the US Biden administration are on the same page to conquer and control the oil exporting Arab states. More than worst is yet to come when President-elect Donald Trump will take office on January 20^th. Was the animosity built-in to the Israeli extreme political psyche and ideology to expel Palestinains from their homeland? Are the Israeli leaders driven by the lust of American weapons and economic power to commit genocide? Those doing so are not conscious of their own end game. PM Netanyahu and his extremist regime would try to put an end to the freedom of Palestine. Gaza is the experimental lab for that end game.We, the People of knowledge speak logically about the Nature of Things affecting our lives, morals and our hopes for a sustainable future. Are you willing to explore the Nature of Things? There is something you as intelligent human beings do not understand about God, the sanctity of human life, the working of the universe in which we live, the earth as a trust and its systematic understanding which could change your inner thoughts, values and rational thinking. The stern warning from the Divine Revelations is clear (The Quran: 35:44): Do they not travel through the earth and see what was the End of those before them. Though they were superior to them in strength? Nor is God to be frustrated by anything whatever; in the heavens or on earth: For He is All Knowing – All Powerful.

If time and history are a reference point, we humankind stand at a critical juncture of our own complicity to have allowed ignorance, hatred, fear, failure and animosity to destroy our life, culture and existence. God created you as human beings – the most intelligent creation on this planet with moral and intellectual capacity, obligations and accountability. Regardless of the phony claim of ethnic superiority, If you defy the Laws of God, you will be held accountable like other aggressors in the past. You cannot pretend to think and behave like animals. Animals live and do not reflect on the imperatives of life, human rights, freedom and justice whereas, we, the human beings cannot act like animals as we are supposed to be intelligent and responsible species on this Earth. At the edge of reason, the notion of evil leads to realization of evil and tyranny of war must be stopped by all means and those responsible for the genocide and crimes against humanity must be held accountable to restore the manifestation of equal human rights, freedom, peace and security for all.

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution and has spent several academic years across the Russian-Ukrainian and Central Asian regions knowing the people, diverse cultures of thinking and political governance and a keen interest in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution, and a forthcoming book: Global Humanity and the Remaking of Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution beyond the Lens of Human Consciousness.

26 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Brett Wilkins

At least three Palestinian infants have frozen to death in Gaza in recent days amid winter temperatures and inadequate shelter due to Israel’s 446-day U.S.-backed assault and blockade of the besieged coastal enclave, according to medical officials there.

Gaza Health Ministry Director Dr. Muneer Alboursh said that Sila Mahmoud Al-Faseeh, a 3-week-old baby girl, died Sunday “from the extreme cold” in a tent where her forcibly displaced family is sheltering on a beach in al-Mawasi, an Israeli-designated “safe zone” for displaced Palestinians.

Sila’s father, Mahmoud al-Faseeh, told The Associated Press that he wrapped the infant in a blanket and tried to keep her warm as the temperatures fell to 48°F (9°C)—below the fatal threshold for hypothermia—on a windy night in their unsealed tent on cold ground.

“It was very cold overnight and as adults we couldn’t even take it,” al-Faseeh explained. “We couldn’t stay warm.”

Al-Faseeh said that when he woke up, he found his daughter unresponsive and stiff, her body “like wood.”

Warning: Video contains images of death.

[https://twitter.com/Dr_Muneer1/status/1871853524574736766]

Sila was rushed to a field hospital where doctors unsuccessfully tried to revive her. Ahmed al-Farra, director of the children’s ward at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, confirmed to the AP that the girl died of hypothermia and said that two other babies, ages 3 days and 1 month, were also brought to the hospital within the past 48 hours after freezing to death.

Gazan officials and international humanitarian agencies say that at least 18,000 children are among the more than 45,361 Palestinians killed in Gaza since Israel began bombing, invading, and besieging the coastal strip after the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack. More than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza have also been wounded, forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.

Israel’s conduct in the war is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case led by South Africa. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, which in November issued arrest warrants for the pair and for Hamas leader Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.

[https://twitter.com/arjunsethi81/status/1871965510851842342]

Most of the verified Palestinian deaths in Gaza during the first 10 months of the war were children aged 5-9, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“For over 14 months, children have been at the sharp edge of this nightmare,” United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) communications specialist Rosalia Bollen said last week. “In Gaza the reality for over a million children is fear, utter deprivation, and unimaginable suffering.”

“The war on children in Gaza stands as a stark reminder of our collective responsibility,” Bollen added. “A generation of children is enduring the brutal violation of their rights and the destruction of their futures.”

UNICEF has called Gaza “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.”

In June, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres added Israel to his so-called “List of Shame” of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts.

On Tuesday, Philippe Lazzarini, who heads the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, said that “in Gaza, one child gets killed every hour.”

“These are not numbers,” he stressed. “These are lives cut short.”

Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

26 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents Collective

Five journalists have been killed in an Israeli strike in the vicinity of a hospital in central Gaza. The journalists from the Al-Quds Today channel were covering events near al-Awda Hospital, located in the Nuseirat refugee camp, when their broadcasting van was hit by an Israeli air strike.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1872080602771738762]

Footage from the scene circulating on social media shows a vehicle engulfed in flames.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1872199667179761815]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1872078942364205455]

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1872084861437264127]

A screenshot taken from a video of the white-coloured van shows the word “press” in large red lettering across the back of the vehicle.

The deceased journalists have been named as Fadi Hassouna, Ibrahim al-Sheikh Ali, Mohammed al-Ladah, Faisal Abu al-Qumsan and Ayman al-Jadi.

Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif said that Ayman al-Jadi had been waiting for his wife in front of the hospital while she was in labour to give birth to their first child.

[https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1872198996103667896]

[https://twitter.com/AnasAlSharif0/status/1872070605799035002]

Civil defence teams retrieved the bodies of the victims and extinguished a fire at the scene, the Quds News Network said.

Israel’s military said it had carried out a “targeted” attack against a vehicle carrying members of Islamic Jihad and that it would continue to take action against “terrorist organizations” in Gaza.

“Prior to the attack, many steps were taken to reduce the chance of harming civilians, including the use of precision weapons, aerial observations, and additional intelligence information,” the military said in a post on X.

According to Gaza health authorities 201 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Israeli attacks since the start of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The most recent attack occurred earlier this morning when five journalists were killed in an Israeli strike on their vehicle in the central Nuseirat refugee camp. One of them was awaiting the birth of his child.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has been considered the deadliest for journalists and media workers in the world in 30 years, according to media freedom organisations.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) earlier this month condemned Israel’s killing of four Palestinian journalists in the space of a week, calling on the international community to hold the country accountable for its attacks against the media.

At least 141 journalists have been killed in Israel’s war in Gaza since October 7, 2023, according to the CPJ.

26 December 2024

Source: countercurrents.org