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By Dr Gideon Polya

On 5 July 2024  the leading medical journal The Lancet published a Letter estimating  186,000 Gazan deaths from violence and imposed deprivation in the ongoing Gaza Massacre and Gaza Genocide in the Gaza Concentration Camp. This news was widely reported by Alternative media but remains overwhelmingly ignored by the Western Mainstream. By way of proof of Orwellian Western lying a  Letter detailing this carnage has been sent to Australian MPs. The Silence is Deafening.

In George Orwell’s famous novel “1984” Big Brother asserted that “slavery is freedom”, “war is peace”, “ignorance is strength” and “2 plus 2 does not equal 4”. These flagrant untruths have in effect now been adopted by Gaza Genocide-ignoring  Western Mainstream journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat presstitutes who blindly dance to the tune of Zionist-subverted, Zionist-perverted, serial war criminal, egregiously mendacious, pro-Apartheid Israel and hence pro-Apartheid America.

However the mendacious Mainstream is not satisfied  with this general semantic reinvention and  normalizing of slavery, war, ignorance and arithmetic falsehood.  In Australia the Labor Government, the Coalition Opposition and the Mainstream media are overwhelmingly united in demands for  prohibiting access to Social Media by under-16 year old children. The morally degenerate, pro-Apartheid Israel and hence pro-Apartheid Australian Labor Government  dishonestly  implies  that those supporting Palestinian human rights (notably anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish activists, including the wonderful on-campus university  student protesters currently being persecuted by pro-Apartheid Israel university bosses) are “anti-semitic” and “damaging social cohesion” in “multicultural Australia”.

In relation to Palestine, the 57-years of  brutal military occupation, human rights  denial and  slavery are not freedom, the century of Zionist-imposed war, expulsion and genocide is not peace, ignorance of genocidal atrocities is not strength, and rejection of  primary school arithmetic is simply lunacy and egregious falsehood.

Orwellian Australia? Yes: Anti-racist Jews and ethnically Semitic Arabs and Palestinians protesting Apartheid Israeli crimes are falsely defamed as asserted “anti-semites”.  Zionists have  formally complained to the Australian Human Rights Commission  over unexceptional reportage by famed pro-human rights Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis.  Many wonderful, truth-telling Australian journalists and writers  have been threatened or “let go” for courageous reportage, the “honor roll” of those that I have publicly defended including Mike Carlton, Scott McIntyre, Dr Sandra Nasr, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Alan Seymour, Michelle Guthrie, Essam Al Ghalib, Emma Alberici, Stan Grant, Antoinette Lattouf and World hero and famed journalist  Julian Assange (finally released from 12 years of imprisonment  in London for reporting US war crimes after the spineless and US lackey but voter-conscious Australian Labor Government eventually concluded that “enough is enough”). The only Australian imprisoned over Australian war crimes in Afghanistan  is the whistle-blower who reported them. And so on …

Mainstream lying is de rigeur for look-the-other-way White Australia. Lying by omission is far, far worse than repugnant lying by commission because the latter can at least admit public refutation and public debate (subject to media gate-keepers, of course). For the same reason genocide ignoring  is far, far worse than repugnant genocide denial. Anti-racist Jewish South African  Australian genocide scholar, Professor Colin Tatz , wrote of the Australian Aboriginal Genocide 3 decades ago but reporting this atrocity (2 million Indigenous deaths from violence, dispossession, deprivation and introduced disease)  was dismissed by Australian Coalition PM John Howard as the “black arm band view of history”. The 1788 onwards  Aboriginal Genocide  was qualitatively the worst genocide and ethnocide in human history (of 350-700 unique Indigenous languages and dialects pre-1788 only 120 survive today with all but about 25 endangered). The 2-century British-imposed Indian Holocaust (1,800 million deaths from violence and violently imposed deprivation) was quantitatively the worst holocaust in human history. Yet Mainstream Australia ignores and most Australians are unaware of the WW2 Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Indian  Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine; 6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death in Bengal, Bihar, Assam and Odisha for strategic reasons by the British with food-denying Australian complicity; see my huge book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in global sustainability”).

I am a scientist and in science there is zero tolerance for lying. By way of proof (if further proof were needed) of Orwellian Australian Mainstream lying for genocidally racist Apartheid Israel I have composed the following Open Letter to Australian MPs. It has been sent to nearly all Federal Australian MPs and to nearly all Victorian State MPs (so far the Silence is Deafening):

Dear Senator (or Honorable Member as appropriate),

The Lancet: 186,000 Gaza deaths – Open Letter to Australian MPs re Gaza Genocide complicity

Whether a child is killed by bashing, bullets and bombs or is killed by deliberately-imposed deprivation, the death is just as final and the perpetrators are just as culpable.

Global avoidable deaths from deprivation have totalled 1,500 million since 1950 and in 2020 global avoidable deaths from deprivation totalled 7.4 million with 70% being of under-5 year old infants as set out in my huge book “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”.

Of course those like the Mainstream Australian journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat  genocide-ignorers  remorselessly denying the reality of  massive avoidable deaths from war-, occupation- and hegemony-imposed deprivation are simply lying and grossly violating the core messages from the WW2 Jewish Holocaust and indeed from all holocaust and genocide atrocities, to whit “zero tolerance for lying”, “zero tolerance for racism”, “bear witness” and “never again  to anyone”. Indeed they are violating the core ethos of Humanity, namely Kindness and Truth.

Of course genocide ignoring and holocaust-ignoring is far, far worse than repugnant genocide denial and holocaust denial because the latter at least permit public refutation and public debate (subject to media gate-keepers, of course).

The leading medical journal The Lancet has estimated 186,000 killed so far in the ongoing   Gaza Genocide, with this including (a) 37,000 killed violently (ignoring the circa 8,000 dead buried under rubble) and (b) 149,000 dying avoidably from imposed deprivation. Euro-Med Human  Rights Monitor has estimated that by Day 250 of the Gaza Massacre (7 October 2023 – 12 June 2024 or about 8 months and including 8,000 killed in the rubble) 45,000 Gazans had been killed,  including 16,000 children (35.6%), 10,000 women (22.2%), and 19,000 men (42.2%), 500 health professionals, and 152 courageous, truth-telling journalists.

Children killed in Gaza include (a) 0.356 x 37,000 = 13,172 (children killed violently) + (b) 0.356 x 8,000 = 2,848 (children killed under the rubble) + (c) 0.7 x 149,000 =104,300 (under-5 deaths from deprivation) + (d ) 0.356 x (149,000 – 104,300) = 15,913 (5 years and older child avoidable deaths) = 136,233 or about 136,000 children in total.

Children  killed in Gaza from imposed deprivation = 104,300 (under-5 deaths from deprivation) + 15,913 (5 years and older avoidable deaths) = 120,213. Accordingly adults killed from deprivation = 149,000 – 120,213 = 28,787 of which one can estimate 0.222 x 28,787= 6,391 (women killed from deprivation) ) and  0.422 x 28,787 = 12,148 (men killed from deprivation).

Accordingly women killed = 6,391 (non-violently) + 10,000 (violently) = 16,391, and men killed = 12,148 (from deprivation) + 19,000 (violently) = 31,148.

Thus of 186,000 Gazans estimated in The Lancet to have been killed by violence and imposed deprivation over 136,000 have been children, 16,000 women and 31,000 men.

The 136,000 children killed by Jewish Israelis in Gaza is 136,000  x 100/ 1,500,000 = 9.1% of the 1,500,000 children killed by Nazi Germans in WW2.

The rate of killing of children by Jewish Israelis in Gaza over 8 months  = 136,000 children / 8 months = 17,000 children killed per month, whereas the rate of Nazi German killing of Jewish children in WW2 (74 months) = 1,500,000 children/74 months = 20,270 children killed per month).

Indeed “People killed per day per million of relevant prisoner population” was 22.9 (Japanese killing of Australian prisoners of war in WW2 by violence and deprivation) versus for Jewish Israeli violent killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Concentration Camp 86.2 (total population), 132.3 (men), 66.7 (children), and 76.3 (women) [1].

On a per capita basis Apartheid Israel in Gaza leads the world for the rate of killing  of children and of journalists.

In 2021 I published an analysis of 52 Zionist- and Apartheid Israeli-Nazi Germany comparisons [2]. The utterly unforgivable Jewish Israeli mass murder of 136,000 children in Gaza  makes a 53rd shocking comparison.

In 1944 in response to the killing of 30 German soldiers in an Italian Partisan ambush, Nazi mass murderer Adolph Hitler ordered an Occupied/Occupier Reprisals Death Ratio of 10 and this was immediately effected with the execution of 335 Italian men and boys in the Ardeatine Massacre near Rome. About 1,200 Israelis were killed in the 7 October 2023 Palestinian Breakout from the Gaza Concentration Camp (with many likely killed by high explosive shells and missiles in the IDF response). Accordingly the  Occupied/Occupier Reprisals Death Ratio was greater than 186,000/1,200 = 155, 15.5 times greater than the Reprisals Death Ratio of 10 ordered by Hitler. Nazi is as Nazi does. Terrorist is as terrorist does.

Of course the killing continues with the war criminal US Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris Administration funding and supplying the bullets, shells and bombs. The US has supplied 69% of weapons imported by Apartheid Israel and an evidently unrepentant Germany has supplied 30%. Australia has a substantial 2-way arms trade with Apartheid Israel.

However there is a further horrible dimension to this appalling Zionist child abuse. Thus it has been expertly determined that 50% of Israeli children suffer physical, psychological or sexual abuse, with 18% suffering sexual abuse. Pro-Apartheid Israel and hence pro-Apartheid Australia is second only to the similarly pro-Apartheid US as a supporter of Apartheid Israel. 25% of Australian children and 18% of US children suffer child sexual abuse [3].

Children were about 47% of the pre-7 October 2023  Gaza population of 2.3 million (now about 2.1 million) and all must be horribly traumatized by the bombing, starvation, privation, and deaths from violence and deprivation totalling 8.1% of the pre-Gaza Massacre population. With an estimated 100,000 injured, the over 286,000  killed and injured so far is 12.4% of the pre-Gaza Massacre population. This is genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”).  Noting that the Australian Labor Government is complicit in the Gaza Genocide in 20 ways [4], Article 3 of the Genocide Convention states: “The following acts shall be punishable… (e) Complicity in genocide”.

Of course the killing must stop immediately and permanently. The civilized World must insist on the immediate end to the highly abusive, 57-year Occupation to permit entry of life-preserving water, food, shelter, sanitation , medicine and medical care that has been substantially denied by the Jewish Israeli IDF in gross violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War) that demand that an Occupier must provide the conquered Subjects with life-sustaining  food and medical requisites “to the fullest extent of the means available to it”. The Occupation must end immediately to also permit entry of forensic teams to determine exactly how many have died and how they were killed.

I am an anti-racist Jewish Australian with a sole allegiance to Australia and coming from a very famous Ashkenazi Jewish Hungarian family (ask any mathematician or surgeon). Zionism is a genocidally racist ideology  and Zionist settler-colonialism is Nazism without  gas chambers or mass executions of tens of thousands at a time (as at Babi Yar near Kiev), but with Apartheid Israel having 90 nuclear weapons (according to Nobel Prize-winning and Melbourne-founded ICAN, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) and one of the world’s largest high technology militaries.

Zionism has horribly trashed Jews, Judaism and the wonderful 3,000-year Jewish humanitarian tradition as exampled by the Ten Commandments, Jesus’ “love thy neighbour as thyself”), Baruch Spinoza (a Father of the Enlightenment who espoused observation and reason), and wonderful present era humanitarian Jewish scholars  from Hannah Arendt to Howard Zinn.

There are 2 kinds of people in the World, those opposing the mass murder of children and the utterly unforgivable others. The Zionist- and US-beholden Australian Labor Government has betrayed Australia and Humanity by falsely defaming anti-racist Jews such as myself critical of Apartheid Israel (anti-Jewish anti-Semitism), anti-racist Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims critical of Zionist crimes  (anti-Arab anti-Semitism) and a host of other decent, anti-racist Australians with a sole allegiance to Australia.  Instead of taking  advice from outstanding anti-racist  Jewish Australians (e.g. Sir Isaac Isaacs, and Professors Peter Singer, Dennis Altman, and Eva Cox ), Zionist-subverted  and craven US lackey Australia blindly follows the line of traitorous racist Zionists and Apartheid Israel that have an appalling record of damaging, subverting and perverting Australians, Australian institutions and Australia.

I have just published a huge book entitled “Free Palestine. End Apartheid Israel, Human Rights Denial, Gaza Massacre, Child Killing, Occupation and Palestinian Genocide”. The subtitle summarizes what must be done immediately to end the century-long suffering of the Indigenous Palestinian people who despite a century-long Palestinian Genocide (2.3 million killed through violence, 0.1 million, and imposed deprivation, 2.2 million) and 3 mass population expulsion atrocities (1948, 1967 and 2023-2024) represent over 50% of the Subjects of Apartheid Israel (yet 73% of them are excluded from human rights under highly abusive to genocidal military rule and from voting for the government ruling them i.e. they are subject to egregious Apartheid).  Australians treating their pets or livestock in the ways Apartheid Israel treats its  5.6  million (now 5.4 million) Occupied Indigenous Palestinian hostages would be tried and jailed.

Variously as  a Labor supporter (I door knocked for US-deposed Gough Whitlam), ALP member, unionist and branch union secretary I voted Labor for 40 years until like so many others was compelled to change to voting Greens 1 and Labor 2 for the last 15 years over the  continuing failure of Labor to properly address Australia’s huge Domestic plus Exported Greenhouse  Gas (GHG) pollution. However under a Labor Government Australia is second only to the US as a fervent supporter of Apartheid Israel and hence of the vile crime of Apartheid. Those supporting Apartheid  are  utterly unfit for decent human company, public life and public office.  It is impossible for decent, anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish Australians to vote for Labor or for the even worse Coalition.

The Australian Labor Government is unforgivably complicit in the Gaza Genocide in 20 ways [4] and lies in the interests of Australia-violating  Apartheid Israel in 15 ways [5]. Because Labor is actually in government and must be punished for its horrific Gaza Genocide complicity and for making Australia complicit in this unforgivable crime, decent, informed Australians will put Labor last in Australia’s preferential voting system. Those like Labor, the Coalition, most Independents and Mainstream media all supporting Apartheid Israel and hence the evil crime of Apartheid are unfit for public life in a one-person-one-vote and Domestic human rights-respecting country like Australia. Indeed out of 227 Federal MPs only 19 have supported Palestinian human rights and an immediate  and permanent end to the killing (15 Greens plus ex-Green Senator Lidia Thorpe, Dr Helen Haines, Andrew Wilkie, and ex-Labor Senator Fatima Payman) that in the unequivocal judgement of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) must be effected by an immediate end to the 57 year illegal Occupation by Apartheid Israel.

References.

[1]. Gideon Polya, “Comparing Mass Murder of Prisoners By Japanese (Australians, WW2) & By Jewish Israelis (Palestinians, Gaza)”, Countercurrents, 26 May 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/05/comparing-mass-murder-of-prisoners-by-japanese-australians-ww2-by-jewish-israelis-palestinians-gaza/ .

[2]. Gideon Polya, “A shocking list of 52 Zionist- & Apartheid Israeli-Nazi Germany comparisons”, Countercurrents,7 August 2021: https://countercurrents.org/2021/08/a-shocking-list-of-52-zionist-apartheid-israeli-nazi-germany-comparisons/ .

[3]. Gideon Polya , “Zionist-Perverted Western Mainstream Media Ignore Horrendous US Alliance And Apartheid Israeli Child Abuse”, Countercurrents, 29 April, 2014: https://countercurrents.org/polya290414.htm .

[4]. Gideon Polya, “20 Ways Anti-Semitic Australian Labor Government Complicit In Jewish Israeli Gaza Genocide”, Countercurrents, 5 March 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/03/20-ways-anti-semitic-australian-labor-government-complicit-in-jewish-israeli-gaza-genocide/ .

[5]. Gideon Polya, “Put Labor Last: Traitorous Australian Labor Government Deceives Australians For US & Genocidal Apartheid Israel”, Countercurrents, 21 May 2024: https://countercurrents.org/2024/05/put-labor-last-traitorous-australian-labor-government-deceives-australians-for-us-genocidal-apartheid-israel/ .

Yours sincerely, Dr Gideon Polya, Melbourne.

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia over 4 decades.

31 July 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Peter Symonds

Israel yesterday evening carried out a provocative strike inside a heavily built-up area of the Lebanese capital of Beirut targeting Mushin Shukr, a top military commander of the Iranian-aligned Hezbollah militia. While the Israeli regime claims its “targeted” strike killed Shukr, sources close to Hezbollah have told the media that he survived.

In separate late news, Israel carried out the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in an airstrike in Tehran this morning. The killing not only sabotages any prospect of a ceasefire deal in Gaza but makes clear that the Zionist regime, backed by Washington, is determined to transform its genocidal war into a region-wide conflict.

To justify its attack in Beirut, Israel seized on the killing of 12 children from the Druze community in a missile strike on Saturday in the occupied Golan Heights. For all of Israel’s bellicose, but unsubstantiated denunciations of Hezbollah, the circumstances remain unclear. Hezbollah has emphatically denied responsibility for Saturday’s missile strike.

The Israeli strike demolished at least five stories of an apartment block in a heavily populated suburb of southern Beirut. According to the Lebanese state-run newsagency NAA, three missiles fired from a drone struck the building, covering the surrounding streets in rubble and debris.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported that three people have been killed and 74 wounded in the strike. With the search for victims continuing, it said that the casualties to date included a woman and two children, a girl and a boy. It is unclear whether any of the surrounding buildings, which included the Bahman Hospital, were damaged.

The Israeli decision to attempt the assassination of a top Hezbollah commander is calculated to set off a wider conflict in Lebanon, making a mockery of Israeli claims that it is not seeking war with Hezbollah. Shukr is a senior adviser to Hezbollah leader chief Hassan Nasrallah and a member of Hezbollah’s top military council.

The extreme right wing of the fascistic Israeli regime has been braying for all-out war with Hezbollah for months. In late May, Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the military to invade and seize control of southern Lebanon to create a buffer zone to prevent Hezbollah attacks on northern Israel.

In response, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared that it was not enough to create a buffer zone, demanding instead that the Israeli military should storm Lebanon and “destroy Hezbollah in its entirety.” The following month Ben-Gvir visited northern Israel, where Hezbollah rockets had triggered fires and declared: “They’re burning [us] here. All Hezbollah strongholds should be burned, they should be destroyed. War!”

US imperialism gave Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the green light for war against Hezbollah during his visit to Washington last week where he addressed a joint session of Congress in bellicose language and received bipartisan backing. He cut short his trip following Saturday’s attack on the Golan Heights to return to Israel, where he met with military and intelligence chiefs and vowed that Hezbollah would “pay a heavy price for it, a price it has not paid before.”

On Sunday, the Israeli warplanes bombed weapons depots and infrastructure belonging to Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, in Shabriha and Burj al-Shemali near the southern city of Tyre, and the villages of Kfar Kila, Rab el-Thalathine, Khiam and Tayr Harfa.

On Monday night, the Israeli military carried out another series of strikes in southern Lebanon and southern Syria. The attacks in southern Lebanon included drone, artillery and airstrikes on some 10 sites of the Lebanese Hezbollah group in seven different areas.

While these strikes represented a significant escalation of the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel that has been underway since October 7, yesterday evening’s attack in Beirut was calculated to provoke Hezbollah’s retaliation and further enflame tensions throughout the Middle East.

The strike has provoked a wave of protests. Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib denounced the strike on Beirut and said that he would file a complaint with the United Nations. The Iranian Embassy in Lebanon condemned the Israeli strike on Beirut, calling it “cowardly and sinful Israeli aggression.” In April, Israel carried out a provocative strike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, killing two senior generals of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp and at least five other people, threatening to trigger a region-wide war with Iran.

CNN reported that the US had been informed of the Beirut strike in advance. US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin spoke with his Israeli counterpart Yoav Gallant by phone on Monday. While the official read-out paid lip service to the need for a diplomatic solution to the conflict with Hezbollah, Austin gave his “unwavering commitment to Israel’s security and right of self-defense,” effectively giving Israel carte blanche for the attack.

The decision to target Mushin Shukr was not accidental. The US State Department put a $5 million bounty on his head after branding him a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” in 2019. It claimed that he “played a central role in the October 23, 1983 bombing of the US Marine Corps Barracks in Beirut.” Four years earlier the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Shukr and two other Hezbollah leaders.

In the wake of yesterday’s strike, US Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, rapidly and emphatically declared her support for Israel, saying: “I unequivocally support Israel’s right to remain secure and to defend the security of Israel.” To emphasise the point, she added that, in particular, “it has the right to defend itself against the terrorist organisation, which is exactly what Hezbollah is.”

In the name of Israel’s so-called right to self-defense, US imperialism and its allies have backed Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza diplomatically, financially and militarily to the hilt and justified its atrocities. While Israel declares that Hezbollah has “crossed all the red lines” in its alleged killing of children in the Golan Heights, the Israeli military slaughters Palestinian children every day in Gaza. The official death toll of men, women and children in Gaza is over 40,000 since October 7, while an estimate in the highly respected Lancet medical journal puts that figure far higher at 186,000.

Now Washington is backing an Israeli war that threatens to plunge the Middle East into a far more devastating conflict that would lay waste to the region. Despite its nominal calls for a diplomatic solution, US imperialism, like the Zionist regime, regards the conflict in Gaza as one element of a far broader war against Iranian-aligned groups throughout the region and against Iran itself, which it regards as the chief obstacle to securing its domination in the energy-rich Middle East.

31 July 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

The assassination of the Hamas political bureau Ismail Haniyeh, Wednesday, in Tehran, shows there was a clear security breach, and Israel was looking for the right opportunity to carry out the murder  and found it in the Iranian capital, said military and strategic expert Nidal Abu Zeid.

[https://twitter.com/nabeel_AMU/status/1818527048752939114]

Although he didn’t elaborate on the security breach, he said the assassination will not have an impact on the war in Gaza. The Palestinian resistance will not be shaken by the martyrdom of one of its leaders, Abu Zaid told Jo24.

Hamas is an ideology that will continue and grow among the Palestinian masses despite the great sacrifices the Palestinians of Gaza are making. Already over 38,000 people have been killed in Gaza by Israeli warplanes, tanks and drones not to mention the fact that over 90,000 injured and the destruction of the Gaza Strip rife.

These sacrifices by its  leaders and elements in the field of fighters from different Palestinian factions – from Islamists, nationalist and leftists – will only increase their will, determination and resolve.

[https://twitter.com/SuppressedNws/status/1818512159673847851]

Abu Zeid expects the assassination of the Hamas leader who was elected  for the Hamas organization in 2017, will raise the level of military operations by the Palestinian fighters who are still in top form. He said revenge for the murder of Haniyeh who was killed along with one of his bodyguards on the streets of Tehran will not be delayed and Hamas along with its Izz Al Din Al Qassam military wing will respond quickly.

[https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1818537863769944507]

Abu Zeid explained that the resistance operations will continue to put pressure on the Israeli military occupation, especially in northern Gaza, to withdraw the remaining units of the 98th Paratroopers Division, as happened lately in eastern Khan Yunis, and in spite of the new wave of continual civilian displacements from the city.

He predicted that the losses of the Israeli occupation forces will rise in the coming period, and that the Palestinian resistance will carry out operations that will surprise Israel with new tactics in light of the state of crisis and caution it is experiencing, especially after the unconvincing response in the southern suburb of Beirut where an Israeli drone, Tuesday, devastated a building killing four people and injuring 80.

Now the assassination of Haniyeh, nearly a day later, will likely increase the military pressure on Israel.

[https://twitter.com/SyedaaAiman/status/1818505177889931483]

In a statement, Wednesday morning, Hamas said the assassination of the chief of the political bureau was a “treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran.”

Haniyeh was in Tehran to attend the inauguration of new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, Tuesday. It was his first time to be seen in public.

Dr Marwan Asmar is a writer based in Amman covering Middle East affairs

31 July 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Maureen Clare Murphy

Hamas announced early Wednesday that Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Palestinian faction’s political wing, was assassinated in Tehran, where he was present for the inauguration of the new Iranian president.

The assassination, in Iran no less, marks a major escalation that will likely have regional ramifications and came hours after Israel bombed Lebanon on Tuesday evening, killing three civilians, according to Lebanese state media. Israel claimed that it killed a senior Hizballah figure in the strike, but the Lebanese resistance group had not issued a statement on the matter at the time of publication.

Israel killed multiple members representing multiple generations of Haniyeh’s family in Gaza since October. Several leaders of Hamas have been assassinated by Israel before Haniyeh, only to be replaced and for the organization’s capabilities to grow.

In January, Saleh al-Arouri, the deputy head of Hamas’ politburo, was killed in a strike in Beirut along with several other cadres and commanders with the group.

Two weeks ago, Israel claimed to have killed Muhammad Deif, the secretive head of Hamas’ armed wing, in a strike in Gaza that killed at least 90 Palestinians in an area it had unilaterally declared as a humanitarian zone.

Israel continued to wage attacks across Gaza by air, land and sea amid heavy fighting and ground incursions on Tuesday.

The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said on Tuesday that 37 people had been killed in Israeli attacks over the past 24 hours, bringing the death toll to 39,400 since early October.

The actual number of fatalities is likely much higher, with thousands of people missing under the rubble or their bodies not yet recovered from Gaza’s streets.

The Israeli military withdrew from eastern Khan Younis, the largest city in southern Gaza, on Tuesday following an incursion lasting eight days and forcing another wave of mass displacement from the area.

Palestinians returned to Khan Younis to find evidence of what the government media office in Gaza described as “horrific massacres” for which it demanded international accountability.

“Palestinian rescue workers and civilians collected dead bodies from the streets of the abandoned battle zone, bringing corpses wrapped in rugs to morgues in cars and donkey carts,” Reuters reported.

The government media office said that the bodies of 255 people had been recovered and more than 30 others were missing.

During the incursion, the Israeli military fired on 31 homes with their residents inside, as well as more than 300 other homes and residential buildings.

The military also razed the cemetery in Bani Suheila and its surroundings on the eastern outskirts of Khan Younis:

Nearly all of Gaza under evacuation orders

Israel meanwhile issued new forced displacement orders in al-Bureij, central Gaza, “launching strikes there in apparent preparation for a new raid,” according to Reuters.

“Medics said an Israeli air strike in nearby al-Nuseirat killed 10 Palestinians as they fled from Bureij on Tuesday, and another strike killed four other Palestinians inside Bureij,” the news agency added.

More than 85 percent of the territory of Gaza is under an Israeli so-called evacuation order, the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) said on Monday.

But there is no safe place for people to go, and no assurance of protection for civilians who choose to stay or are unable to evacuate from designated areas.

Repeated displacement is also making it increasingly difficult for organizations, already contending with Israel’s near-total blockade, to provide aid and services to those who were forced to leave their homes with next to nothing.

The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said that it was no longer able to restore the functionality of the Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis after an Israeli evacuation order was issued on 27 July.

The Palestinian Civil Defense warned that overcrowding among displaced people in Gaza, who have insufficient access to water and sanitation, was leading to the proliferation of diseases, including conditions affecting children’s skin.

By early July, the World Health Organization had recorded nearly a million cases of acute respiratory infection, while other illnesses such as diarrhea, acute jaundice and cases of suspected mumps and meningitis, as well as scabies and lice, skin rashes and chicken pox are spreading among the population.

The UN health agency said on Tuesday that it was very likely that polio has infected Palestinians in Gaza after the health ministry in the territory declared a polio epidemic across the coastal enclave on Monday.

Detection of the virus in sewage samples collected in Gaza represents “a setback” against efforts to completely eradicate the disease worldwide, Christian Lindmeier, a World Health Organization official, said on Tuesday.

Al Mezan, a Palestinian human rights group based in Gaza, warned that more than one million children in the territory “are at risk of dying if not vaccinated” for the highly infectious virus.

“To prevent thousands of deaths, the international community must ensure Israel immediately ends its genocide, including the weaponization of water and sanitation facilities,” the rights group added.

According to WHO, the disease mainly affects children under the age of 5 and one in 200 infections “leads to irreversible paralysis.” Five to 10 percent of those paralyzed die “when their breathing muscles become immobilized.”

Collapse of essential systems

With the collapse of Gaza’s solid waste management system, conditions are ripe for the disastrous spread of diseases transmitted through contamination such as polio and hepatitis A – there have been 40,000 diagnosed cases of the latter since October.

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has seen a drop in polio vaccination rates in Gaza from 99 percent to 89 percent, according to a UNICEF spokesperson. The director of the World Health Organization announced that it was sending more than a million polio vaccines to Gaza to be administered to children “in the coming weeks,” UN News reported.

The virus, “transmitted by person-to-person spread mainly through the fecal-oral route,” according to WHO, is less frequently transmitted through contaminated water or food.

The “can emerge in areas where poor vaccination coverage allows the weakened form of the orally taken vaccine virus strain to mutate into a stronger version,” UN News added.

The vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 “had been identified at six locations in sewage samples collected last month from Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah – two Gaza cities left in ruins by nearly 10 months of intense Israeli bombardment.”

The spread of disease and epidemics is a predictable result of Israel’s genocidal military campaign, if not the intention.

In yet another case of Israeli soldiers destroying civilian infrastructure for no military purpose, soldiers recently recorded themselves detonating Canada well, the main water facility in Rafah, southern Gaza.

The Tel Aviv daily Haaretz reported on Monday that the facility “was destroyed last week with the approval of the commander of the soldiers … but without the approval of senior officers.”

But blaming lower-ranking soldiers may be an attempt to deter international courts scrutiny of more senior military personnel, while the pattern of behavior on the ground indicates that troops are ordered to destroy essential civilian infrastructure for no military purpose – a war crime.

Younis Tirawi, writing for Dropsite News, recounted that Giora Eiland, an adviser to Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant, described in October a strategy to destroy the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to pump and purify water within Gaza.

Monther Shoblak, the head of the water utility in Gaza, told Tirawi that the Canada well facility had remained functional until Israel’s ground invasion of Rafah in early May, as solar panels allowed it to operate despite Israel cutting off the supply of electricity to the territory in October.

Israel destroyed 30 water wells in the south this month alone, and displaced people have been forced to shelter in overcrowded conditions without suitable hygiene infrastructure or access to sufficient clean water, fuel, food and medicine.

The international charity Oxfam said earlier this month that “Israel damaged or destroyed five water and sanitation sites every three days since the start of this war,” reducing the amount of water available in Gaza by 94 percent to a mere 4.74 liters per person – “less than a single toilet flush.”

Israel attacks Beirut

Israel bombed southern Beirut on Tuesday, with its military claiming that it targeted Fuad Shukr, a senior Hizballah commander. Israel said that Shukr was killed but Arabic-language media said his fate remained unknown late Tuesday.

The area around Hizballah’s Shura Council in the Haret Hreik neighborhood of the Lebanese capital was also hit, that country’s state news agency reported.

Lebanon’s health ministry said that a woman and two children were killed, though “the search for more missing persons under the rubble continues.”

The Beirut strike took down a whole residential building, and the scale of destruction may have been intended to reinforce the threats made by Israeli leaders to inflict the same genocidal violence in Lebanon that it has in Gaza.

The strike in Beirut on Tuesday was an anticipated “retaliation” from Tel Aviv after a projectile killed 12 children at a sports field in Majdal Shams, a city in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights on Saturday. Israel blamed Hizballah but the Lebanese resistance group denied having any connection to the deadly blast.

Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, accused Hizballah of crossing a red line, though it is highly unlikely that the Lebanese resistance group would have deliberately targeted Majdal Shams.

Amal Saad, an expert on Hizballah, said that since 8 October, the group “has refrained from targeting Israeli civilians, much less Syrian Druze.”

“The strong support for the resistance movement among this community, which lives under Israeli occupation, makes it illogical for Hizballah to risk striking in this vicinity,” she added.

Targeting civilians, whether Syrian or Israeli, “wouldn’t be strategically beneficial for Hizballah when it would inevitably lead to all out war – a war which Hizballah has been very keen to avoid as demonstrated by its sub-threshold responses to Israeli strikes on Beirut and on civilians” in Lebanon, according to Saad.

She added the group has been careful to “avoid giving Israel any pretext for waging war” but “it’s entirely expected” that Israel would exploit the tragedy “in order to deflect attention away from its daily massacres of Palestinian children” in Gaza.

Not “a single drop of blood”

Majdal Shams residents chanted “murderer, murderer” at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he attempted to visit the site of the deadly strike on Monday.

Syrians reeling from the unprecedented mass casualty event in Majdal Shams issued a statement rejecting “that a single drop of blood be shed under the name of revenge for our children.”

After the deaths in Majdal Shams, Israeli media reported that Netanyahu canceled the exit of around 150 children from Gaza for medical treatment in the United Arab Emirates “for fear of public backlash,” the human rights group Gisha said.

In response to a petition from human rights groups, Israel’s high court on Sunday ordered the government “to inform it of its progress toward implementing a permanent mechanism for the medical evacuation of sick and injured Gazans,” The Times of Israel [reported]((https://www.timesofisrael.com/high-court-gives-government-7-days-to-come…).

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, announced that “85 sick and severely injured people,” including 35 children, were evacuated from Gaza to Abu Dhabi for specialized care on Tuesday.

“It is the largest medical evacuation since October 2023,” he said, adding that “63 family members and caregivers accompanied the patients.”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said on Sunday that the ongoing closure of Gaza’s crossings, preventing “the travel of urgent and lifesaving cases,” makes clear “Israel’s commission of genocide against the people of the Gaza Strip.”

“Those who have not been killed by Israel’s war machine are not spared by the complete Israeli siege and closure on Gaza,” the rights group added, “leaving thousands of wounded and sick doomed to certain death.”

Death is all but guaranteed due to Israel’s “deliberate destruction and collapse of the healthcare system and the weakening of its remaining lifesaving resources,” according to PCHR.

Around 14,000 sick and injured patients, most of them children and older people, require care that is not available in Gaza.

PCHR estimates that hundreds of ill people have already died due to lack of access to medical treatment but there are “no statistics available in this regard due to disruptions in official medical monitoring and documentation systems.”

Maureen Clare Murphy is senior editor of The Electronic Intifada.

31 July 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud

Why are many amongst us still tiptoeing around language when it comes to the horrific Israeli genocide in Gaza?

Layers of censorship imposed on Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices in corporate and social media seem to have blurred the judgment of some. They continue to speak of a ‘conflict’, calling on ‘both sides’ to use ‘restraint’ and, partly, blaming the Palestinian Resistance for the ongoing Israeli massacres.

Though such language is expected from the ‘sensible’ few of mainstream media, there are those who are counted as ‘pro-Palestine’ intellectuals, journalists and activists who often use similar language.

Throughout the years, the common wisdom is that, for a pro-Palestine voice to be published in mainstream US-western newspapers, he or she would have to adhere to a certain set of rules and avoid certain adjectives to describe Israel – even if such vocabulary is consistent with good sense, international law or the judgment of leading human rights organizations.

By ‘watering down the language’, one supposedly gains greater credibility, thus space to be heard or published.

Equally true, it is also practically forbidden to defend the Palestinian people’s internationally recognized rights to use all forms of resistance, or to support their democratic choices, because the outcomes of which are, maybe, not consistent with mainstream western thinking.

Some are even afraid to use the term ‘resistance’ altogether. But if Palestinians are denied their most basic right to resist, they become deprived of any human agency, let alone relevance as political actors. The notion would then suggest that Palestinians can only serve the role of victims, and nothing else. Not only is this untrue, and condescending, it is outright bigoted, as well.

All this tiptoeing around what should have been a clear language on Palestine, comes at a price. When the truth is masked or hidden, the space becomes open for lies, deceptions and quasi-truths.

In this alternative space, Israel is, at best, equally culpable for the ‘war’ in Palestine as the Palestinians themselves; and, at worst, the Israeli army is merely engaging in a state of self-defense.

Additionally, by tightly controlling the discourse on Palestine, the West has harmed its own interests. Indeed, by marginalizing authentic Palestinian voices, the West has lost its ability to understand the context behind the current Israeli war on Gaza, to accept or navigate its share of responsibility in the genocide and to play any meaningful role in bringing the atrocities to an end.

The outcome is an unavoidable cognitive dissonance – where western governments are violating the very rules they had created, opposing the laws they enshrined and investing in an Israeli genocide in Gaza, while criticizing war elsewhere.

I doubt that the West will ever succeed in claiming any moral authority, retrieve its lost credibility or build lasting trust with Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims or the Global South. The extermination of one’s people entitles a person to some degree of cynicism.

To further expose western duplicity in Gaza, however, we must learn to speak with no reservations, no matter the restrictions on the pro-Palestine voice or the censorship on social media.

Naturally, not all Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices agree on everything. There are those willing to risk everything, and those who want to tell some kind of truth without risking the loss of their privileges, careers or standing in society.

It is those in the former group who deserve platforms and must be celebrated for their courage.

One of the most inspiring examples are young students in US and western universities who have risked their own futures – as in being expelled from universities or denied their degrees – for raising awareness about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Those students are the true leaders of justice-based solidarity movements, now and in the future.

They have understood that, due to the unprecedented censorship of authentic Palestinian voices in all media platforms, their actions on campuses, in the streets and every available venue are critical.

The risks they have taken by speaking out for Gaza’s genocide victims will serve as a new threshold of courage that will inspire the youth of this and future generations.

Equally important is that these students have refused to compromise on their language, their demands and their priorities to simply fit in, to get published or use a genocide as an opportunity to build careers.

As for those who exploited the Palestinian suffering for their own benefit, neither history nor the rest of us will forgive their opportunism and intellectual timidity.

Those who are well-intentioned, but ‘water down’ their language to circumvent censorship, ultimately make little difference, because there are certain truths that cannot be softened or diluted.

Indeed, there is no other honest way of phrasing what is taking place in Gaza but as a genocide, one for which only Israel – a military occupier and apartheid state – can be blamed.

The only Palestinians who deserve blame or condemnation are those who are collaborating with Israel to ensure the outcome of the war remains consistent with their interests, financial status and false titles. No amount of money or prestige will ever redeem the credibility or honor of such people.

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act,” said George Orwell. Sadly, we live in these times. It is equally true that, in a time of genocide, not telling the truth is the most contemptible of all acts.

Please continue to speak out; be radical; be revolutionary and never equate between those carrying out the genocide and those resisting it – even if at the risk of not fitting in.

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

29 July 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Mike Head

Fresh from receiving assurances of continued backing from the Biden-Harris administration in Washington, the Israeli regime immediately seized upon an alleged rocket attack in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that killed 12 Arab Druze children to threaten an offensive into Lebanon that could trigger a wider US-backed war against Iran.

The circumstances surrounding the strike that hit a tiny soccer field in the occupied enclave remain unclear. Twelve boys and girls ranging in age from 10 to 16, were killed by Saturday’s blast in the Druze village of Majdal Shams, and dozens more were injured and taken to hospitals.

Some residents blamed the Israeli regime for the atrocity. They questioned whether Israel’s early warning system was working properly, because the strike came less than five seconds after the sirens sounded, giving the children no chance to escape into shelters.

Some residents shouted at the far-right Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who arrived to seek to exploit the deaths. In the hours after the strike, he had declared: “Lebanon as a whole has to pay the price.” Residents yelled: “[National Security Minister Itamar] Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are the culprits here,” accusing them of stoking further tensions.

Even while escalating their genocidal onslaught on the people of Gaza, Israeli leaders blamed Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, for the Golan Heights blast, despite Hezbollah “categorically” denying it was behind the strike.

Hezbollah said a falling anti-rocket interceptor projectile from Israel’s Iron Dome missile system was responsible for the deaths after Hezbollah had launched a number of attacks on Israeli military targets.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dramatically cut short his US visit to travel to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) headquarters in Tel Aviv. He then convened a meeting with Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and military and intelligence chiefs, vowing that Hezbollah would “pay a heavy price for it, a price it has not paid before.”

After the meeting, Netanyahu’s office said the security cabinet had authorised the prime minister and defence minister to determine the “type” and “timing” of Israel’s response.

In an initial attack, before that meeting, Israeli warplanes conducted airstrikes against Hezbollah targets “deep inside Lebanese territory” and along the border, according to a statement from the IDF on Sunday morning.

Netanyahu, a war criminal responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of children in Gaza, claimed to be “shocked” by the “murderous attack” in the Golan Heights. The hypocrisy was obscene. Netanyahu is responsible for the deaths of as many as 186,000 Palestinians in the last nine months, according to an estimate by the highly-respected Lancet medical journal.

On the same day as the Golan Heights blast, this bloodbath continued in another previous “safe zone” in Gaza. The IDF attacked a school and field hospital in central Gaza’s Deir al-Balah, killing about 30 people, claiming, as always, that Hamas had fired rockets from inside the area.

Just as quickly as Netanyahu, US Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democrat presidential candidate, also blamed Hezbollah. So did the White House National Security Council and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in Tokyo.

Harris’s national security adviser, Phil Gordon, stated: “Israel continues to face severe threats to its security, and [Harris’s] support for Israel’s security is ironclad.” He continued to insist that the US was working on a “diplomatic solution” to the Gaza conflict. But that claim has been made for months, while the genocide has intensified.

Gordon’s remarks echoed what Harris said last week after her private meeting with Netanyahu at the White House, reiterating her lifelong support for the Zionist state and its continued ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza. She specifically linked that support to a wider agenda against Iran.

“So I just had a frank and constructive meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu,” Harris said. “I told him that I will always ensure that Israel is able to defend itself, including from Iran and Iran-backed militias, such as Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Harris also condemned as “unpatriotic,” the thousands of protesters opposed to Netanyahu being hailed as he addressed a joint sitting of the US Congress. Her remarks could only be interpreted as a political green light to the Israeli regime to widen the conflict.

Smotrich was not alone in his bellicose declaration after the Golan Heights blast. Foreign Minister Israel Katz told The Times of Israel that Hezbollah had “crossed all red lines.”

Katz said Israel was “approaching the moment of an all-out war against Hezbollah and Lebanon,” pledging that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah would be destroyed along with his organisation, and that Lebanon would be severely damaged.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanani warned that any new Israeli military “adventures” in Lebanon could lead to “unforeseen consequences,” including “the broadening of the scope of instability, insecurity, and war in the region.”

Some 20,000 Druze Arabs live in the Golan Heights, an area Israel seized from Syria in 1967 during the Six-Day War and annexed in 1981. Considered occupied territory under international law and UN Security Council resolutions, the area is also occupied by about 25,000 Israeli Jewish settlers.

Most Druze in the area identify as Syrian and have rejected offers of Israeli citizenship. The Regional Council of Majdal Shams said on Sunday that none of the 12 children killed had Israeli citizenship.

Notably, the second half of Netanyahu’s fascistic address to the US Congress was devoted to presenting the genocide in Gaza as a component part of a broader US-led war throughout the Middle East.

Declaring America “the guardian of Western civilization and the world’s greatest power,” Netanyahu stated: “Iran understands that to truly challenge America, it must first conquer the Middle East… Yet in the heart of the Middle East, standing in Iran’s way, is … the State of Israel.”

This stands reality on its head. American imperialism sees the “final solution to the Palestinian problem” as a first step in a war against Iran, which itself is part of the escalating war against Russia and the confrontation with China.

A full-scale Israeli offensive against Hezbollah would dovetail with the Biden-Harris administration’s strategic aim in the Middle East to overturn the Iranian regime, which has long been regarded as an obstacle to US domination of the region. That is critical for the subordination of Russia and China, and control over the entire Eurasian landmass.

Since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza last October, it has been engaged in a relatively low-level conflict with Hezbollah, which has repeatedly edged closer to an all-out war. More than 350 people, including about 100 civilians, have been killed in repeated Israeli attacks on Lebanon, according to the UN.

Over 90,000 people have been displaced, forced to leave around 100 southern Lebanon towns and villages under threat of bombardment.

Any US-backed full Israeli offensive inside Lebanon would not simply be a repeat of Israel’s previous illegal and brutal invasions of the country, which date back to the 1980s. Just as it is doing in Gaza, Israel would not only seek to destroy Hezbollah’s military arm but also its social base among the impoverished Shiite population of Lebanon, laying waste to whole areas of the country.

Harris’s public statements are just the latest confirmation that a Democratic administration under her leadership would be no less aggressive than Biden’s in the genocide in Gaza or imperialist war against Iran in the Middle East, Russia in Ukraine or China in the Asia-Pacific.

As Netanyahu was delivering his diatribe to rapturous cheers in the US Congress, the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Party were holding a rally outside the Capitol, which advanced a program and perspective to oppose the genocide and imperialism.

In his remarks at the rally, David North drew the necessary conclusions that must flow from Netanyahu’s address, the genocide in Gaza and the support of the entire political establishment for it:

“The building of an antiwar movement requires the mobilization of the working class as an international force. It requires the establishment of the political independence of the working class. And it requires a perspective that has as its aim not protesting to the capitalists, appealing to them to adopt a peaceful policy, but explaining to the working class that if they want to put an end to these horrors, if they want to secure the future, they have to conquer power.”

29 July 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network joins the entire Palestinian national movement in condemning the assassination, mourning the martyrdom and saluting the life of the leader, Ismail Haniyeh, Abu al-Abed, the chair of the Political Bureau of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, in Tehran, Iran. 

Haniyeh was in Iran to attend the inauguration of newly elected Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian and also met with Imam Khamenei today, alongside Ziyad Nakhaleh of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement, and was assassinated along with his bodyguard and companion, the martyr Wassim Abu Shaaban, in the residence where he was staying by a “treacherous Zionist raid,” as Hamas stated in the movement’s first statement on the assassination.

The assassination policy of the Zionist regime has attempted to erase the leadership of the Palestinian people for over 76 years now. The names of the martyrs of assassination are great, shining figures of history. Ismail Haniyeh. Saleh al-Arouri. Abu Ali Mustafa. Fathi Shiqaqi. Ghassan Kanafani. Kamal Nasser. Abdel-Aziz Rantisi. Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Abu Jihad. Mohammed al-Najjar. Basil al-Kubaisi. Tareq Izzedine. Samir Kuntar. Kamal Udwan. Imad Mughniyyeh. Sheikh Khader Adnan. Ibrahim al-Rai: A parade of martyrs on the road to the liberation of Palestine.

Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated as part of a comprehensive policy of the Zionist regime that aims to eliminate the leaders, spokespeople and revolutionary voices of the Palestinian liberation movement.

This aggression was also an act of war against Iran, and came on the same day as the attempted assassination of a leader of Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance movement, through the Zionist bombing of the southern suburbs of Beirut,  and on a day that the US bombed Iraq, targeting the Iraqi resistance, assassinating three members of the resistance forces. It is also clear that this is not a Zionist crime alone, but a crime bought and paid for by the United States and its imperialist partners. 

These assassinations have not undermined the strength, solidarity, commitment and firmness of the alliance of resistance forces in the region. From Iran to Lebanon, Yemen to Iraq to Syria, and of course, to Palestine, where the people and the Resistance daily confront the genocidal Zionist regime, the people have the right and the determination to resist, to respond and to confront the assassins and genocidaires. Further, this crime does not demonstrate the “strength” of the Zionist entity but rather its desperation and decline. These assassinations and international aggressions come as the Zionist regime is rent with internal contradictions and riots as settlers and soldiers demand the right to rape imprisoned Palestinians, reflecting the death throes of a wounded colonial monster.

Ismail Haniyeh, 61, a husband, father and grandfather, was born a Palestinian refugee in al-Shati camp and struggled all his life for the liberation of the Palestinian people. From his days as a student, a football player, and a leader in the Islamic Bloc at the Islamic University of Gaza, he was dedicated to the Hamas movement and to Palestine. In 1989, amid the great popular Intifada and shortly after the founding of the movement, Haniyeh was abducted and imprisoned by the Zionist regime for three years, before he was among 415 Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders and members forcibly deported to Marj al-Zuhour in southern Lebanon on 17 December 1992, alongside Dr. Abdelaziz al-Rantisi, Sheikh Youssef Sarkji, Sheikh Saleh al-Arouri, Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahhar, and, among many others, Mustafa Abu Ora, the martyr of the prisoners’ movement just five days ago.

He headed the office of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Gaza and was elected the leader of Hamas in Gaza in 2004, following the assassination of Abdel-Aziz al-Rantisi. In 2017 Haniyeh was elected by the Hamas movement to lead its Political Bureau and was reelected to this position in 2021.

Haniyeh was the chief negotiator mandated by the Hamas movement and all of the organizations of the Palestinian Resistance, and this assassination aims to prevent him from seeing and directly welcoming the prisoners freed by the Resistance and once again underlines that the Zionist regime is only interested in continued genocide.

Over 60 of his family members have been martyred, killed by the Zionist regime in the past 10 months, including three of his children and five of his grandchildren. “The blood of my children is not more valuable than the blood of the people of Palestine and all the martyrs in Gaza are my children,” he said, cherishing all of the martyrs of Palestine.

“There is no difference between the martyrs, and they have all been chosen by the Most Merciful to pave our way to victory and freedom,” he said. “The blood of the martyrs demands that we do not compromise, do not relent, do not change or alter, do not weaken, and do not despair, but continue our path with determination.”

The martyr Tareq Izzedine, of the Islamic Jihad movement, gave his last statement before his assassination on the martyrdom of Sheikh Khader Adnan, himself assassinated through deliberate refusal of medical care in the Zionist prisons. His words remain resonant today (video by Resistance News Network): “Whenever a leader ascends, ten will emerge to replace them. When a martyr ascends, 100 martyrs will emerge to replace them. The march continues, and it does not stop until the defeat of the occupation.”

Just today, Ismail Haniyeh said, in his meeting with Imam Khamenei, “Yesterday marked the 300th day of the Gaza War, and we have now reached a critical and historic stage in which the Palestinian people and the Resistance Forces must sustain their heroism and victory.”

His last major statement was for the prisoners, and for popular mobilization, urging people everywhere to participate in the August 3 call to action for Gaza and the Prisoners. “Freedom is near for our dignified prisoners and honorable female prisoners, and victory is coming for our people and our valiant resistance.”

“We call for active and massive participation on this national and global day in defense of our prisoners and our people in the Gaza Strip, to expose the brutal crimes of the occupation against them, and to support their rights and just cause….We look forward to making the 3 of August a pivotal day in all parts of Palestine, in the refugee camps and the diaspora, in our Arab and Islamic world, & among all the free people of the world, to support our people in Gaza and our free prisoners in the occupation’s prisons.”

We must all mobilize, on August 3 and beyond. We must all act. We must all continue the struggle, to confront Zionism and imperialism everywhere and to hold them accountable for their crimes.

From Beirut to Tehran to Gaza to Haifa, to all of our communities, this is the time for action and confrontation. They have never killed the resistance and will not succeed in doing so today. 

Ismail Haniyeh and all of the martyrs live on, and their legacy of commitment, sacrifice and love for the people is an inspiration to generations to come. The defeat of Zionism is forthcoming, as is the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea. Every one of the honourable martyrs have sacrificed everything in order to make that vision a material reality that is closer every day.

Glory to the martyr Ismail Haniyeh and all the martyrs of Palestine and the Resistance. Return, liberation and victory to Palestine, all of Palestine, from the river to the sea.

30 July 2024

Source: samidoun.net

Since the establishment of “Israel’s” notorious Sde Teiman concentration camp, filled with thousands of Palestinian civilians from Gaza, rounded up and abducted from cities, refugee camps, schools and hospitals by the invading Zionist army as part and parcel of their genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, those who are released have spoken about the horror of their experiences at the hands of the occupation soldiers. Palestinian survivors have testified about rape and sexual assault, starvation and denial of food, people being handcuffed 24/7, forced amputations of limbs due to torture, denial of medical care, beatings, noise and sound torture, “hooding” and binding of detainees, attacks by trained dogs, and all other forms of abuse and torture.

Palestinian survivor after survivor have spoken on the record about their experiences. At least 38 Palestinian detainees from Gaza held at Sde Teiman have been martyred under torture and denied medical treatment, even though the full scope of the crimes are not yet visible due to the secrecy surrounding the torture camp. Palestinian lawyer Khaled Mahajneh, the first lawyer to speak to detainees held at Sde Teiman recounted multiple instances of rape and sexual assault, electric shock torture, dangerous hygiene conditions (the journalist he visited was “covered in dirt and bird droppings”) and brutal beatings. Even CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, imperialist outlets that have eagerly promoted Zionist propaganda about its genocide in Gaza, have covered the horror that is Sde Teiman — and, indeed, the entire Zionist prison system.

Sde Teiman is a systemic crime

Sde Teiman is not an aberration or an unusual case. It is part and parcel of the military system and the use of imprisonment to target Palestinians en masse. It is the labour camps of the 1947-1948 Nakba, the interrogation centres throughout occupied Palestine. Sde Teiman is, of course, also Guantanamo, and Abu Ghraib, as the US and the Zionist regime share strategies of torture, interrogation and abuse directed, largely, at Palestinian and Arab men. In short: Sde Teiman is Zionism and imperialism; it is the fruit of the perpetrators of the genocide; it is the experience of Palestinian prisoners and the entire Palestinian people, for over 76 years, distilled and condensed into a concentration camp to torture the victims of genocide.

Sde Teiman burst once more into global visibility on July 29, after nine Zionist soldiers were arrested by military police for their role in the mass rape and sexual assault of at least one Palestinian detainee, who was injured so badly that he was hospitalized due to the damage to his rectum and anus. The arrest is itself extremely uncommon, given that Zionist soldiers have been essentially given free rein to engage in a widespread, systemic campaign of torture, rape and abuse against the Palestinian people, part of the same genocidal campaign that has taken over 40,000 Palestinian lives in Gaza, from the bombing of water wells and treatment plants to the systematic destruction of hospitals and the health care system to the bombing of refugees in tents and children at play to the numerous TikTok videos made by Zionist soldiers boasting of their war crimes and displaying them to the world.

From the daily settler violence in the West Bank of occupied Palestine to the leading politicians of the regime ordering more genocide on a daily basis, complete impunity is built into the system. However, the growing international pressure, including the legal pressure at the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice — as well as, reportedly, new forthcoming restrictions on British arms trade with the Zionist regime, has mandated that the Zionist regime make at least the appearance of some form of discipline for the most extreme examples of abuse. The crimes at Sde Teiman were not perpetrated by nine occupation soldiers, but by the entire occupation regime.

Zionists demand the right to rape

However, the arrest of the nine soldiers did not stop there. Military police entered the compound and seized the soldiers, taking them away. It must be noted that this “raid” was conducted with far greater care and non-violence than the daily dozens of raids throughout occupied Palestine, where occupation soldiers blow the doors off Palestinian homes, steal children from their beds and terrorize families on a nightly basis. However, it is the response to the arrests that truly has put the reality of Zionism on display, if the past ten months of videos and photos of livestreamed genocide did not consolidate that reality: throngs of paramilitary settlers and fascist politicians rioting to demand the right to rape Palestinian detainees. These fascist mobs were allowed to engage in violent riots and invade military bases, in sharp contrast to the occupation opening fire with live bullets on Palestinian demonstrators.

This is the reality of Zionism: Masses of fascists screaming for their unlimited right to rape and abuse Palestinians, with Members of the Knesset affirming it openly, with Likud MK Hanoch Milvetsky declaring that “everything is legitimate” in response to a direct question about rape with foreign objects and politician after politician declaring it unacceptable that Zionist soldiers could be tried or arrested for their crimes. And, as expected, occupation authorities have reportedly “acknowledged mistakes” — not for allowing the rapes to continue, but for arresting the rapists too visibly! This is the point that the internal crisis and decay of the Zionist regime has reached, in full view of the world.

The rape-supporting riots and the exposure of the crimes at Sde Teiman have also thrown a sharp light on the campaign of lies and misinformation directed against the Palestinian resistance. Released “Israeli” detainees held by the Palestinian resistance and released in prisoner exchanges have, despite massive incentives to do otherwise, largely spoken of their well-treatment by the Resistance. The photos of released Zionist detainees, compared to those of released Palestinian detainees, speak for themselves. Despite conditions of genocide and starvation throughout Gaza, the captives of the resistance received all the food available, while the Zionist forces deliberately starve Palestinian detainees despite an abundance of resources supported and funded by the world’s imperialist powers, including the US, Germany, Britain, France, Canada and Italy.

The smear campaign against the Palestinian resistance

Further, the drumbeat of misinformation and misrepresentation about Al-Aqsa Flood and the 7 October military operation of the Palestinian Resistance is perhaps more exposed than ever. Despite the loud claims and propaganda campaigns of Zionist officials, U.S. officials, and even complicit international institutions, not a shred of evidence for rape and sexual assault as part of the Al-Aqsa Flood has been produced. Indeed, the unproven and fantastical allegations have largely been sourced from right-wing Zionist men, the same ones responsible for false allegations of “beheaded and burned babies.” Now, right-wing Zionist men are rioting against their own state for the right to rape, burn and kill Palestinians. Sde Teiman is not “revenge” for October 7 — the institutional crimes that are crystallized in Sde Teiman are part of the reason why the Palestinian resistance has been willing to undertake such tremendous sacrifices, before, during and after October 7 in order to liberate the Palestinian prisoners — and of course, to liberate Palestine, from the river to the sea.

It cannot be any clearer that the defamation of the Palestinian resistance is perhaps the clearest exmple of “every accusation is a confession” on the part of the Zionist regime. The Palestinian resistance forces have consistently and firmly conducted themselves with honour, faith and commitment to the liberation of their land and people, while the Zionist occupation forces have engaged in a genocidal orgy of destruction. After Sde Teiman, the reality must be clear to all.

Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the NYPD and Sde Teiman

Of course, the crimes of Sde Teiman are part and parcel of the Zionist alliance with imperialism as well. They are sharply reminiscent of the reliance on sexualized torture and abuse of Arab men at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, just as the torture in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib recalled decades of torture of Palestinian prisoners, so much that one chair used for torture was referred to as the “Palestinian chair” by U.S. interrogators. This practice is not confined to U.S. imperialism in the Arab nation, of course; NYPD cops’ rape of Haitian American Abner Louima with an object in 1997, so severe as to require three surgeries, once again highlighted the systematic violence against Black people carried out by US cops, including sexual violence directed at Black men and women.

Sexualized torture has not been confined to Palestinian and Arab men, of course; Palestinian women have been subjected to extreme sexual assault, torture and abuse. Rasmea Odeh exposed these crimes to the world at the United Nations and the Sunday Times in 1979; of course, she was later deported from the United States for her bravery. Algerian women were subjected to mass rape by French colonizers, including political prisoners jailed for their resistance to colonialism. Palestinians — and Zionists — documented the rape of Palestinian women and girls in the Nakba of 1947-48. The allegorical references to the rape of the land of Palestine by the occupation forces, their settlements and their land confiscation, are built on a material foundation of the physical rape of Palestinian women and men.

The Zionist regime is not only subjecting Palestinian prisoners — in Sde Teiman and in the “regular” Israel Prison Service prisons, directed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, one of the “right to rape” leaders — to severe torture and abuse, it is imprisoning the bodies of the martyrs after they are killed. Approximately 38 Palestinians have been confirmed to have been martyred at Sde Teiman, including famed surgeon Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, and approximately 21 in the Zionist prisons. Several of the martyrs’ and survivors’ stories are told in a new article in the Washington Post.

Organize, resist and act! 

Despite all of these crimes, the Palestinian prisoners’ movement continues to play a leadership role in the liberation struggle, to develop the movement and to organize together, confronting the Zionists with their bodies and lives on the line on a daily basis. The Resistance, led in Gaza, in the West Bank, throughout occupied Palestine, in Lebanon, in Yemen, in Iraq and throughout the region, is fighting to defend humanity and to bring these crimes to an end, once and for all. There can be no accomodation with the Zionist regime, a criminal regime built upon genocide, dispossession and destruction, but only its defeat and dismantlement.

As we join in the global outrage at the crimes of Sde Teiman, we must redouble our efforts to organize to end the genocide, to stand with the resistance, to liberate the prisoners and for a free Palestine, from the river to the sea. We urge all appalled by the “right to rape riots” to join in the global actions on August 3 for Gaza and the prisoners: take direct action, organize mass rallies, educate your communities, and shut down Zionism and imperialism. 

30 July 2024

Source: samidoun.net

By Amara Thiha

On the morning of July 28, a convoy of soldiers from the United Wa State Army (UWSA) drove through Lashio, the capital of the northern Shan State and home of the Myanmar military’s Northeastern Regional Command, taking control of the administration under the pretext of peacekeeping. This occurred amid renewed fighting in northern Shan State, as the Three Brotherhood Alliance of ethnic armed groups launched the second phase of its Operation 1027 offensive, massing their forces around Lashio. Without firing a single shot, the UWSA has gained control of three additional townships in Shan State since October 2023 – Hopang, Pan Lon, and Tangyan – and likely more in the coming weeks.

Sources in Naypyidaw indicate that the military State Administration Council (SAC) has agreed to have the UWSA and Shan State Progress Party (SSPP) step in as peacekeepers to prevent the renewed conflict from spilling over into other parts of Shan State. This indicates the SAC’s inability to maintain control and the potential total collapse of its authority in northern Shan State. The key question is: what are the strategic aims and implications of the UWSA’s entry into Lashio? To answer that question, here are five things you need to know about the UWSA, what it stands to gain from the northern conflict, and the broader regional implications.

A Role Model and Political Leadership

As the largest of Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups, the UWSA, which controls two non-contiguous territories in Shan State and has as many as 30,000 soldiers under arms, is widely viewed as a model and a source of inspiration for other ethnic organizations in Myanmar. “We have ambitions that are nothing less than Wa State,” said Twan Mrat Naing, leader of the Arakan Army (AA), during celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of the UWSA’s founding in Pangsang, the UWSA’s capital, in 2019. Newly formed ethnic armed groups are now drawing similar inspiration from the AA and its battlefield successes in Rakhine State since the launch of Operation 1027.

The UWSA has also established itself as a political leader among the 20-odd ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) in Myanmar. At the 21st Century Panglong Peace Conference convened by Aung San Suu Kyi’s government in 2017, the group submitted a proposal for a confederation model as part of an ethnic coalition known as the Federal Political Negotiation and Consultative Committee (FPNCC). Led by the UWSA, the FPNCC’s policy reflects the interests of the UWSA in two key ways: first, it advocates self-determination and authority over local security forces within designated areas until the establishment of a future federal system; and second, it advocates the creation of a security system that prioritizes local authorities and the self-defense of autonomous states through the formation of ethnic armies. This forms the foundational document of its political leadership. This significant demand for a parallel peace and political dialogue process in 2017 seemed ambitious at the time. However, seven years after the proposal, with the central administration at its weakest in decades and ready to negotiate, it appears achievable.

The FPNCC, which also includes the AA, SSPP, Kachin Independence Army (KIA), Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA), and Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), is now Myanmar’s largest ethnic coalition. It includes more than half of all EAO combatants in Myanmar and operates from the banks of the Mekong River to the Bay of Bengal. The FPNCC has held regular meetings since the 2021 coup, with a clear framework and vision and clear political demands. Since the military takeover, no other ethnic coalition has hosted summits or regular meetings on this scale or presented a clear political position like the FPNCC. De facto leadership of the FPNCC has made the UWSA the most politically influential armed group in Myanmar, a role historically contested by the Karen National Union and the KIA.

The existing FPNCC’s political framework differs significantly from the federal charter formulated by the opposition National Unity Government (NUG) and National Unity Consultative Council (NUCC). This difference is evident not only in the political process, but also in terms of fundamental visions, security arrangements, and relationship with the union administration. With its strength and influence, the FPNCC is unlikely to agree to participate in either junta or NUG processes, instead choosing to chart its own course.

Wa State and Vision

Using the FPNCC as a platform, the UWSA has aligned its political aspirations with the FPNCC’s principles. In addition to this, the UWSA submitted two other documents in 2017: a proposal for a consultation process with the Myanmar government over the creation of an autonomous Wa State from the territories under the UWSA’s control and a proposal for a new ceasefire agreement. These documents illustrate the UWSA’s inspiration and vision for Wa State.

These proposals left open the question of what exactly constitutes Wa State. This has again become a live question in the current context, which the UWSA is hoping it can use to extend its territory as much as possible. Taking advantage of the weak central administration, it has already created buffer areas around UWSA-administered areas. The critical issue is whether it can link the central Wa State, which lies along the border with China, with southern Wa State, along the Thai border, over which it established control in the 1990s while fighting against a Shan insurgency alongside the Myanmar military. In its 2017 proposal for a new Wa State, the UWSA requested the inclusion of Kengtung township in eastern Shan State.  This would link the southern and central Wa States, turning the eastern part of Shan State into an exclave under direct UWSA control. The UWSA attempted this territorial expansion in 2016. In September of that year, a force of 1,000 UWSA troops marched toward Mong La, an area under the control of the NDAA, creating tensions with the NDAA. A settlement with the NDAA was reached following talks between the UWSA leadership and Aung San Suu Kyi’s government.

All of this is to say that the UWSA’s territorial ambitions extend beyond the current status quo. Linking the southern and northern parts of Wa State is a crucial aim. Having been granted permission by the SAC to mobilize in northern Shan State, the UWSA will undoubtedly seize the opportunity to expand its areas of influence and control. Given these territorial aspirations, and the UWSA’s influence over the Three Brotherhood Alliance, particularly the MNDAA, since the start of Operation 1027, the UWSA now exerts possibly decisive influence in a long arc from the China-Myanmar border in the north of Shan State to the Thailand-Myanmar border in the south. This makes it the most influential and capable EAO in Myanmar’s modern history.

The Strategic Stalemate

In making its decisions, the UWSA has tended to act cautiously. In general, it has sought to maintain the status quo between the central administration, rival EAOs, and China. This strategic posture has been evident in its response to the coup and Operation 1027 offensive. While not directly involved, the UWSA has indirectly supported the MNDAA during the operation, for which the MNDAA leadership expressed gratitude in January.

By avoiding conflict with the SAC and maintaining its distance from the NUG, the UWSA has upheld its neutrality, at least officially. This neutrality has allowed the UWSA to increase its influence amidst the stalemate in the Shan State, not only among FPNCC members but also with those in southern Myanmar that are seeking supplies and arms. By preserving a relationship with the military junta and avoiding outright conflict, the UWSA’s strategic approach seems to have paid off, positioning it as a leading political entity in northern Myanmar. This unique position allows it to mediate the relations between various EAOs and the junta administration, as evidenced by the SAC’s request for the UWSA to deploy its forces in Tangyan and now in Lashio.

Despite the UWSA’s entry into Lashio, its FPNCC allies, particularly the MNDAA, are continuing their siege of the city, and the TNLA persists in its offensive in northern Shan State and parts of Mandalay Region. The critical question is whether the UWSA will allow its own alliance to become uncontrollable, potentially challenging its political influence and disrupting the new status quo. Alternatively, the UWSA might seek to maintain a stalemate in northern Shan State. Regardless of its chosen path, it is certain that the UWSA will continue to have a significant impact on Myanmar politics for the foreseeable future.

New Leadership, Rising Kingdom

The UWSA’s strategic shift is being driven by a new generation of leaders. Young and energetic leaders in their 30s and early 40s, including Zhao Ai Nap Lai (son of Zhao Nyi-lai) and Bao Ai Kham (son of Bao Youxiang), were introduced in strategic meetings with the MNDAA in April. Zhao Ai Nap Lai has succeeded his father as general secretary and head of the Politburo, while Bao Ai Kham is the UWSA’s new deputy general secretary.

These leaders, part of the generation that witnessed the fall of the Communist Party of Burma (from which the UWSA was created in 1989), bring different visions, views, and objectives. They lead the UWSA with heightened nationalism, seeking to preserve their legacy while seizing any opportunities that present themselves. However, their political ambitions may necessitate a recalibration of the UWSA’s decades-long strategy of maintaining the status quo and stalemate in the region, given the evolving political and regional context.

As China’s power grows and Myanmar’s central administration weakens, the UWSA is actively seeking a new status quo that can maximize its influence. This context is reminiscent of the rise of new kingdoms. With substantial tin deposits, rare earth elements, control over a critical juncture of Southeast Asia’s largest drug trafficking route, and the ability to produce small arms, the UWSA possesses the resources needed to achieve its strategic goals. Importantly, the Wa State territories straddle the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor and are relevant to the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation platform, both of which are crucial to China’s strategic expansion in mainland Southeast Asia.

Influencing and Threats to Thailand

Given that it is considered a natural ally of China, the UWSA maintains a close relationship with Beijing and the provincial administration in Yunnan. The UWSA’s influence in the heart of the Mekong region extends Chinese influence deep into Myanmar and down to the border with Thailand.

As the UWSA grows more powerful, its political model will become more attractive to other EAOs. If Chinese efforts to mediate the current conflict secure formal autonomy and territorial concessions for the UWSA, other groups along Myanmar’s borders might adopt the UWSA’s approach and choose to come under greater Chinese influence. This development could undermine all dialogue processes initiated by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) or the establishment of local administrative processes by the NUG and other ethnic Interim Executive Councils, which enjoy the backing of Western countries. The UWSA’s expansion along the Thai-Myanmar border means that states and entities influenced by China could soon surround Thailand. This new player in the region poses a critical question: Is Thailand, the last remaining U.S. ally in mainland Southeast Asia, prepared for this expansion?

Amara Thiha is a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Stimson Center.

30 July 2024

Source: hediplomat.com

By Samaa Abu Sharar

It took me about eight months to sit and write about Gaza. Like most people, I went through a wide range of emotionsthat ranged from severe depression to severe helplessness, accompaniedby crying from pain I have never felt and disappointmentfrom a “free” and “unfree” world.

Emotionally, I am no longer myself. As much as Gaza has hurt me, it changed me to the core.

Most of the concepts and beliefs we were raised on, studied, or dictated to us went down the drain and with them, fell my faith in all the outdated universal laws that claim to protect human dignity and rights.

Gaza taught me to trust nothing. Nothing at all. Human beings are not equal in international covenants. There is the law of the “white man” opposed to the rest of humanity. The law of the “strongest” and the law of the “weakest”. In all cases, Gaza remained on the margins of humanity, equating the victim with the executioner in all of its ugliness.

***

My dayssince 7 October are meaningless details. Gaza literally haunts me. I sleep, if I can sleep, on Gaza, and I wake up on Gaza. I can’t remember how many times I woke up from a fitful sleepto quickly grab my mobile phone to see if the weather was stormy or rainy there inGaza?

Scenes of displaced people trying to fix their fragile tents or drain the water – the desired and unwanted visitor – flooding the tents and their inhabitants, and the shivering of young and old from the cold and the world’s failure to them, lie before me.

I wait impatiently for winter, but this winter has come bitterly. My prayers were for a kind winter, kinder on our people in Gaza; and a gentle summer, gentler than theharshreality, unfathomable for the human mind to comprehend.

Even the weather conspired against the people of Gaza. The tents are unbearable, thr raging heat, accompanied by all the creepy crawlers of the earth and the flying creatures, making life a continuing nightmare.

No, there is no room for things we once took for granted. All have become luxuries for the people of the tiny Strip insize, immense in its spirit, sacrifices and people.

***

I was witness to many of the tragedies of the great Palestinian people, on both the personal and public levels. Nothing is similar to what happened and is still happening in Gaza, which exposed everyone and primarily the Palestinian himself. This new Nakba (catastrophe), the details of which we live every day has revealed the extent of our fragility in face of this historic event.

The fragility is evident on all levels, from our worn-out Palestinian political scene, to our crisis-ridden institutions to our weak official media scene drowning in political divisions unable to present the Palestinian narrative, unfit to us as a people and to our great and just cause and our right of resistance until the liberation of Palestine. A narrative also unfit to the  Arab and western public in search of a genuine Palestinian narrative, which will not hurt if it were a unified one.

Politically, the scene became more worn out than it was before 7 October. The major event did not unite us or solidify our position but increased our fragmentation, dispersion and division. With some exceptions by some individual Palestinian efforts who presented a solid narrative, the vast majority stood in contrast despite the enormous amount of sacrifice the people of Gaza made and continue to make.

“Protecting Palestinian national unity inside and outside the occupied homeland is one of our main weapons with which we fight our enemies and a condition for our victory,” once wrote the late Palestinian martyr and revolutionary Majed Abu Sharar.

Where are we from this unity? How do we face the consequences of what is happening or invest in the unprecedented international awareness and mobilization to support our cause?

How many of us have remained silent at the beginning “because this is not the time for criticism,” as the battle is big and ongoing and the enemy is one or so we thought! But apparently the enemy was never one for many, as factional alignments are more important than the momentous event and supreme cause.

We would be lying to ourselves if we would say that the genocide in Gaza united us; the opposite is true. Many mouthpieces, some of whom we have never heard and some we know too well, delivered statements that could have only come from an enemy, and in a chilling harmony with the Zionist viewpoint and that of global imperialism, instead of defending the Palestinian right to resist based on international laws.

Our political discourse has become a mirror image of our troubled reality. I am one of many Palestinians who did not find herself during this ongoing genocide and long before in any of the  official Palestinian narrative and Arab discourse.

***

The tragedy continues and human interaction with it is enormous. But the official Palestinian institutions were generally absent from what was happening on the ground despite the great need to unify efforts and address its enormity as dictated by the ongoing war of extermination.

My life, like the lives of many others, has become centered around possible ways to extend a helping hand to our people in Gaza, but all these efforts remain individual and unorganized despite the good intentions, thus cannot meet the huge needs in Gaza. One of the reasons for the institutional absence in these exceptional circumstances is the division and vacancy of a unified vision for an urgent relief plan.

The 1948 Nakba and the 1967 Naksa and all the massacres and pivotal events in the history of our long conflict with the enemy don’t seem to have taught us anything. The genocide in Gaza has clearly demonstrated this.

The unprecedented international mobilization and parallel awareness is heart warming! Who amongst us, and I mean Palestinians and Arabs, who still consider Palestine “as their cause”, ever dreamt of a similar scene to what we have witnessed in the last 10 months?

Awareness amongst young people in the West is equal to, if it does not precede that of many young Arabs and even Palestinians towards the Palestinian cause. And what young people in Europe and America are declaring in terms of adopting firm positions, many of our own hesitate even to think about. “Palestine from the river to the sea”, “Terminating the existence of Israel”, “Zionism equals Nazism”, “Israel is a criminal entity”… and others have become beliefs rather than slogans for many in the West, especially the youth.

***

Palestine is no longer the cause of the Palestinians and some Arabs. It has become an international, humanitarian cause adopted by hundreds of millions of people, and if that indicates anything, it shows how Gaza and its people were able to achieve what we have failed to achieve for many years.

Yes, and despite the pain and the catastrophic scenes, Gazans came to teach us lessons in pride, dignity, faith, adherence to the truth, and steadfastness. I often wonder how the people of Gaza are able to do this while living the impossible over the last 10 months?

I have not left out a single curse that I did not use in this painful genocide, maybe as an expression of anger and resentment towards this world or maybe as a form of venting. But not once have I heard a Gazan utter a curse.

All we have heard were terms ranging from “Thank God,” “God is sufficient for me, “God is the best Disposer of affairs”, “May God take revenge on you, Netanyahu,” and other “polite” utterings in light of the abominable reality to which Gazans have been exposed.

How many times have I wished to stop the rhythm of this world for the sake of Gaza, to stop this madness, how many times have I wanted to scream with all my heart in the hope that someone would hear me and stop a pain I have never imagined I could bear a portion of.

***

My private conversations with some friends and relatives in Gaza were not much different from what we all see and hear on television and all the available means of communication. Their responses when we dare to ask them about their well-being range from “thank God,” “may God end this war,” “we miss returning to our homes and lives,” and the most extreme is “we are tired, we are exhausted.” I honestly don’t recall a single time when someone uttered a word that crossed the boundaries of known politeness.

I sometimes wonder when someone from Gaza contacts me to check on me or even congratulate me on Eid- two Eids (El Fiter and Al Adha) have passed by under indescribable circumstances for the people of Gaza- I wonder where they get the ability to continue?

Over the past months, I have built friendships with many acquaintances where our communication previously did not go beyond a comment here or a like there, on social media. They might have needed an outside source of reassurance to ensure their presence in our existence, or perhaps any piece of news of a potential ceasefire for the ongoing madness or a glimmer of hope that this nightmare would end. My relationship with existing friends in Gaza were strengthened further. They allowed me into the details of their lives amidst the endless killing, displacement, exhaustion, anxiety and other complex human feelings.

My heart skips a beat every time I hear of a bombing close to their displacement places, until I hear from them to know they are well, until the next time comes. Sometimes, I hesitate to ask about their being, as they are definitely not well, despite everything they say to reassure us and/or not to burden us with the impossible life they are living.

***

I don’t know the limit of pain a person can bear.

What I do know is that amidst the ongoing genocide, we never once believed we could bear this unbelievable pain. The anxiety never leaves us, the helplessness that resides in us, the unparalleled disappointment… and the images that besiege us with their mythical cruelty.

How many times I wished to stop the rhythm of this world for the sake of Gaza, to stop this madness, how many times have I wanted to scream with all my heart so that someone would hear and stop a pain that I never imagined I could even bear a portion of. Yet hope remains that the nightmare will end.

Hope from which we derive our ability to continue for the sake of Gaza and its people, for the sake of Palestine.

The journey of recovery will be long, actually very long, and what awaits us may be more difficult than what we’ve already experienced. My hope remains in our ability to translate the pain into actions, so that the journey of freedom and liberation continues towards a homeland that we still dream of.

Samaa Abu Sharar is a Palestinian journalist and researcher living in Beirut.

28 July 2024

Source: countercurrents.org