Archives: Articles

By Philip Giraldi

The sucking up to Israel and its backers by the political class in America never seems go away. Indeed, it if anything increases during the lead up to national elections. In the latest manifestation of Judeophilia, Rudy Giuliani, self-described as “America’s Mayor,” has now informed us that

“They [the Israelis] are our best friends. I worked for Ronald Reagan for eight years and Ronald Reagan said that we have to always be there for Israel always because Israel is always there for us! Hamas is not there for us, the Iranians are not there for us, they want to kill us and the Palestinians are taught to kill us at two years old! They won’t let a Palestinian in Jordan. They won’t let a Palestinian in Egypt. And [Kamala] Harris wants to bring them to you! They may have good people, I don’t care, but I won’t take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at two! I’m on the side of Israel! You’re on the side of Israel! Donald Trump is on the side of Israel! And they [the Democrats] are on the side of the terrorists.”

Giuliani said all that and more at a Donald Trump election rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden, where he was breathing fire in a speech [at minute 17:27] that one media outlet described as “unhinged” to rouse the overflow crowd to hate Israel’s enemies, which apparently includes the Democratic Party if they should regain the presidency. I would not want to disagree with a man of Giuliani’s psycho-phantasmagoric stature about facts, but I do not recall when the United States was actually threatened by Israel’s enemies to include Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran or a place we once called Palestine, but then again, I am getting older and my memory might be failing. Nor can I recall anything at all that Israel has done for what was once my country apart from take huge bundles of our tax money equivalent to one quarter of a trillion dollars while also corrupting our politicians and undermining both our rule of law and our Bill of Rights, but, then again, blame it on my memory since I cannot imagine a warm and friendly chap like Benjamin Netanyahu doing anything nasty or naughty.

AMB Chas Freeman : Will Israel Self-Destruct ?

In trying to score political points, Giuliani does not seem to get that the adoration of the Jewish state is a bipartisan thing, that the US government, no matter who wins elections, will continue to supply the Israelis with money and weapons to expel or kill as many of its neighbors as possible. The carnage will create a new metaphoric “land without people” empty space between the Euphrates and Nile Rivers that will become a great nursery for establishing and populating the Eretz or “Greater Israel” Chosen by Yahweh to rule the Middle East.

One good thing about Giuliani and his master Donald Trump is that they do not even pretend to want to help Palestinians and other “lesser breeds without the law” to resist the occupation and eradication by their Jewish masters. Trump would like to have the job of extermination finished so Israel’s public relations image would not be further damaged. Kamala, on the other hand, would keep handing out weapons and money while piously calling for a cease fire, an objective that is routinely rejected by a stern Netanyahu. How the Biden-Harris rule of foreign relations vis-à-vis the Middle East operates is to pretend one thing while doing something else. It has been reported that Biden’s peace negotiators Amos Hochstein, an Israeli who served in the IDF, and Brett McGurk, who were ostensibly working to help avoid expansion of the Gaza crisis into Lebanon, were doing quite the opposite. They have been working “behind the scenes” to encourage Israel, and they are now describing Israel’s Lebanon operations that have included a major land invasion as a “history-defining moment” — one that will “reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.”

And there’s more. The US Ambassador to Lebanon one Lisa Johnson has been meeting with the various parties and groups that make up the Lebanese government and its social and religious mix with a proposal that it organize to prepare the country for a “post-Hezbollah era” by mobilizing “internal” forces to eliminate the Islamic resistance movement while it is engaged in fighting the Israeli Army. Johnson, a Joe Biden appointee to her post, certainly reflects White House and State Department thinking on the Middle East. She reportedly told Lebanese politicians,

“Israel cannot achieve everything through war; it’s time for you to do your part and launch an internal uprising under the banner of ‘Enough.’ The Lebanese people must show their desire to rise-up and get rid of Hezbollah.”

Johnson challenged the politicians,

“Why do you seem afraid? Hezbollah has been defeated, its leadership is destroyed, and we are with you, and the entire free world stands by your side… We do not only want to limit Hezbollah’s influence, but we will strike its support lines, and we are working non-stop to bring down the regime in Iran as well.”

Someone should remind Ms. Johnson as well as McGurk and Hochstein that we are not legally at war with Lebanon, nor with Iran, and nor even with the Palestinians whose genocide we are enabling.

The reality is that Gaza and Lebanon are America’s war in the sense that Israel’s onslaught against its neighbors would not be either possible or sustainable without Washington picking up the costs and supplying the weapons. A recently released report by the Israeli news outlet Calcalist reviewed Israeli military spending on wars since fighting began on October 7^th. It determined that Washington has over the past year funding directly 70% of Tel Aviv’s total military costs. That has amounted to more than $20 billion in military aid, a figure close to the $22.57 billion billion estimated by several US sources including Brown University’s highly respected Cost of War Project which has likewise looked at the numbers. And, one assumes there are also substantial hidden expenses consisting of armaments shipped directly from US arsenals without any accounting procedure as well as money concealed in other projects.

As a bottom line, one has to conclude without direct US support, Netanyahu’s war would simply be unaffordable for the Jewish state. Calcalist concludes that “Therefore, it is doubtful whether this war would have been conducted as it is – neither in intensity nor in scope – without the American assistance.” So in a very real sense it is and has been America’s war while the secret objective by the US government to destroy Hezbollah as well as Hamas and even overthrow the regime in Iran indicates clearly that Netanyahu’s hegemonical and genocidal plan to make Israel the supreme power in the Middle East is shared by many in Washington.

3 November  2024

Source: globalresearch.ca

By Iman Abid

For nine months this past year, I carried my Palestinian son, a baby born to grow the olive trees of tomorrow, born in the midst of unbearable pain for his people. I waited for his first breath as I witnessed death around me—the suffering of my people enduring a genocide that my child will inherit the resilience to resist.

I thought often of our Palestinian mothers who give birth to life while facing death, whose babies lie buried beside them under rubble, whose children never have the chance to simply live.

The juxtaposition of carrying life amid so much loss hasn’t left me; it drives me to fight for a world my son and all Palestinian children deserve.

I want him to know that even as he grew in my womb, we carried on. Through the exhaustion, the nausea, and the heartbreak, we pushed forward because our privilege of relative safety demands that we do. The guilt remains heavy—knowing I am here, able to hold my son, while so many mothers are grieving their own children. But I will continue to use this privilege to push forward every single day. I have no other choice.

Now, as I’m returning to work at USCPR, I’m met with both opportunity and stark political reality.

While we organize around Sen. Bernie Sanders’ historic Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to block Biden’s $20 billion in weapons that fuel genocide, we must acknowledge that these measures are unlikely to pass. That anti-Palestinian racism and AIPAC bribes run deep in Congress. That for the United States to use its power to end this genocide, we must first completely upend its political reality.

That is the work I am driven toward, and the work I am asking you to join me in today. If you’re able, please chip in to fuel our movement building efforts.

If you want to organize alongside us at the local, state, or federal levels, please check out USCPR’s newly updated Stop Gaza Genocide Toolkit.

It pains me more than you can know, but the fight for Palestinian liberation will not end this year. This genocide is unlikely to end this year. This election won’t change this. What happens on November 5 won’t end the suffering of our people.

This is the worst stage of the genocide yet, and now Israel is working to “finish the job.” Just yesterday, Israel banned the UNRWA aid agency to cut off Gaza from any little aid that remains and starve Palestinians to death.

While President Biden and Vice President Harris have repeatedly shifted their language as Israel’s genocide has become brazen, they have not shifted U.S. policy one inch. They are still sending the bombs that murder our children and our people.

Met with that reality, we have no choice but to do everything in our power to resist. To change the circumstances. To fight for our peoples’ right to live.

That includes both 1.) political advocacy to fight for an immediate arms embargo to halt weapons to Israel in Congress, and 2.) grassroots organizing for a People’s Arms Embargo to disrupt the weapons pipeline, targeting complicit corporations like Maersk and Chevron.

With enough grassroots power, with enough action for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS), and with enough people organizing and fighting for human rights year after year, we can and we will end the oppression of our people.

That’s why two weeks ago, I took my son to his first protest.

Whether it takes 1 year or 10, I am committed to fighting alongside you. For my son, for all of our children, and for everyone back home who doesn’t have the privilege of relative safety we in the U.S. do.

No matter who wins on November 5, we have a lot of work to do to build undeniable movement power, elect leaders who genuinely support Palestinian rights, and end U.S. military funding to Israel once and for all.

If you’re able, please chip in to sustain our work, or visit this toolkit to find ways to take action—whether through BDS tactics, mobilizing your community, or pressuring elected officials in your city council, your state legislature, or Congress.

Our people have a right to liberation, and with your support, we will make it happen.

Onward to liberation,

30 October 2024

Iman Abid
Organizing & Advocacy Director

Source: uscpraction.org

By Radha Surya

For the millionth time, Palestinians have won the moral victory.  Defiant to the very end the Hamas leader died fighting the genocidal occupier.  For an entire year the occupier insisted he was skulking in the tunnels and using the hostages of October 7, 2023 as human shields.  He had left the fighting and the dying to Hamas militants and abandoned civilians to the trauma and devastation of unrelenting aerial bombardment and ground invasion.  On October 16, 2024 unremitting Zionist propaganda was countered by the leader himself in a manner that exposed the baseness of the enemy in the most decisive way possible.  With the release of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) video  of the Hamas leader’s last moments, Israeli Zionists dealt the death blow to their own propaganda.

The sequence is well known to whoever is watching the genocide in the occupied Palestinian territories.  In an encounter that took place off camera, the Hamas leader and his comrades engaged Israeli soldiers equipped with state of the art armaments.  On the Palestinian side the combatants were limited by their primitive weaponry.  Following the firefight they separated and took refuge in bombed out buildings.  Somehow the Hamas leader managed to stagger and stumble into a building from which the owners had fled and collapse into an armchair.  Hunted for months with a bounty on his head and cornered by his enemies, he was crippled in his vastly unequal confrontation with the armed to the teeth occupier and his right hand had been severed.  With his single remaining arm he hurled a primitive missile at the automated emissary of the hated and despised occupier.  In a final—and culminating—act of resistance he brought down the drone that his cowardly antagonists had flown into the building to film him.  At the very moment of defeat and imminent death, the Hamas warrior seized victory and an honored place in the annals of armed resistance to colonial rule and oppression.

As images of the sorely wounded and dying Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s fierce defiance of the Israeli occupation spread across the world like wildfire and took the internet by storm, spin masters and genocide apologists in the mainstream Western media were filled with consternation.  At this moment surely chaos and uncertainty reigned in the newsrooms.  This was not the hoped for craven death that was to be gloated over, televised, live streamed and shared on social media around the world in the modern era’s equivalent of the triumphal processions of Roman conquerors.  The Western news media knew—who better than they–that the IDF video of the dying leader’s last moments would have a galvanizing effect on global viewers who had been taking to the streets since October 7 2023 in their thousands or tens even hundreds of thousands and calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal warfare in the occupied Palestinian territories.  They quailed when the possible termination of the Israeli campaign of extermination loomed before them.  No matter that the genocidal assault on a trapped and defenseless population, cut off from the world,  devoid of an air force and modern weaponry had been orchestrated with great enthusiasm by the US and other NATO powers.  No matter that the inexorable flow of arms could be expected to continue.  Somehow the sheen had to be stripped from the fallen leader’s dying moments.  Somehow it was incumbent on the media cheerleaders of genocide to swiftly put forth commentaries that imparted a negative spin to the heroic last stand of the leader of the Palestinian liberation movement.  Accordingly they swung into damage control mode.

And as they started pouring out their columns, one is reminded for the umpteenth time of the observation that has been made since the launch of the Israeli genocide in the occupied Palestinian territories—that without the willing dissemination of Zionist propaganda by the mainstream Western media, the genocide could never have continued into its second year.  “It is impossible to overstate the role that the incendiary media coverage played in the events that would unfold after Hamas and its allies broke down the fence that surrounds Gaza,” declared Jeremy Scahill of Drop Site News.  The New York Times occupies pride of place in this regard.  In mid April 2024, The Intercept published an exposé of a memo that showed the New York Times had instructed its journalists to limit the use of words like genocide and ethnic cleansing and to avoid using the phrase occupied territory when writing about Palestine.  Reporters were also asked to not to use the term refugee camps to refer to enclaves in Gaza where Palestinian refugees had settled when they fled the ethnic cleansing that went hand in hand with the founding of the state of Israel.  If the hundred years war on Palestine by colonial and post colonial powers was to be airbrushed out of history well the New York Times was more than happy to do that.  The right kind of lexicon was all that was needed.

The journalist Jason Burke’s Guardian article of October 17 follows the lexical recommendations of the New York Times.  In the entire article there is not a single mention of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.  The article quotes the testimony of an Israeli former interrogator who said:  “He’s 1,000% committed and 1,000% violent, a very, very hard man.”  Well, if the inescapable and overpowering context of the Israeli occupation is excluded from the article, obviously Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s commitment to militant resistance will appear to result from an inherently violent personality.  Some of the points made by the journalist are truly risible.  For instance:  “Sinwar threw up a smokescreen, lulling Israel into false security…”   What exactly does that mean?  Is the leader of a resistance movement supposed to disclose military plans to the occupier by making a public announcement?  The article ends with:  “…he died as he had lived: with an unremitting commitment to Hamas and its ideology, and to violence.”  The implication seems to be Israeli warfare has an unremitting commitment to non-violence.  A merciful genocide perhaps?  The international security correspondent of the liberal Guardian newspaper seems unaware that UNGA resolution 37/43 affirms the right of occupied peoples to armed struggle.  Because his article emphasizes the Islamist ideology of Hamas, one would never find out that the Hamas movement seeks national liberation and an end to Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.  Readers are to be kept in the dark at all costs.

In the BBC article Yahya Sinwar: Who was the Hamas leader? the security correspondent Frank Gardner writes:  ‘An Israeli government assessment of Sinwar during his time in prison described his character as “cruel, authoritative, influential and with unusual abilities of endurance, cunning and manipulative, content with little… Keeps secrets even inside prison amongst other prisoners… Has the ability to carry crowds”.’  The assessment of Ehud Yaari, fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is also quoted in some detail.  Why for heaven’s sake is the expert opinion cited in the article limited to the input of an Israeli interrogator and the researcher at a pro-Israeli think tank?  Observers of the genocidal campaign in Gaza might be interested for instance in the views of the Palestinian analyst Tareq Baconi, author of a book on the Hamas movement.  But not the BBC or the BBC security correspondent.  Fo them, an informed Palestinian perspective on the crisis in the leadership of the Hamas movement holds zero interest.  Predictably the article gives a positive representation of Israel:  “Israelis feel they were lulled into a false sense of security in the mistaken belief that by offering Hamas economic incentives and more work permits, the movement would have lost its appetite for war.”  So the Israelis sought to maintain a nice, benign occupation and were foiled by the Hamas movement’s addiction to armed struggle against occupation.

Then there is the contribution of David Remnick, author and editor of the prestigious New Yorker magazine.  In The Killing of Yahya Sinwar, along with obligatory reminders of the Hamas leader’s ruthlessness and capacity for violence, we are told that the IDF’s photographs of the slain Yahya Sinwar showed “closeups of a gaunt Palestinian man with sharp cheekbones.”  A gaunt Palestinian man with sharp cheekbones?  The use of the word gaunt is surely ill-advised in the context of the savage genocide taking place in the occupied Palestinian territories.  That single word goes like a knife through the heart and the mind.  It’s merely a truism to say people become gaunt when they are subjected to starvation diet for more than a year.  Is David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker magazine, Pulitzer prize winner, author of several books, not aware of this elementary fact?   Northern Gaza is now the scene of a genocide within a genocide.  Among the hundreds of thousands who have been squeezed into a small space where food and aid supplies have been cut off since the beginning of October, there will be numerous gaunt men and women.  Let’s not even go into the issues of irreversible physiological and psychological damage to the survivors—if any–of a genocide that has entered its second year and shows no sign of being brought to a halt.

The parsing of mainstream commentaries that swiftly followed the release of the damaging IDF video of the dying Hamas leader could be continued ad infinitum.  Or ad nauseum.  The point has been made.  There’s nothing to be gained by a deep dive into what CNN said and the New York Times.  Or who regurgitated the fully debunked stories about the beheading of babies and the systematic weaponizing of sexual assault in the Hamas led attacks of October 7, 2023.  Like the altogether fictitious weapons of mass destruction used to create public support and justify the illegal and unconscionable invasion of Iraq in 2003, the stories of beheaded babies and women who were raped en masse will be laid to rest some day.  But the time for that has not come.  For now the atrocity propaganda is serving the essential purpose of justifying and sustaining the genocide in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Little wonder that presidential candidate Kamala Harris chose to revive the sexual assault propaganda in September in the presidential debate with Donald Trump:  “Women were horribly raped,” she claimed during the debate. “And so absolutely, I said then I say now Israel has a right to defend itself. We would.”  It would be surprising if there were no incidents of rape during the Hamas led attacks of October 7, 2023.  The allegation of weaponization and cold-blooded use of sexual assault by Hamas fighters is an altogether different matter.  It is on par with the deadly lies about Saddam Hussain’s weapons of mass destruction.  In the build up to the Bush administration’s illegal invasion of Iraq, the mainstream media led by the New York Times was fully on board with the administration’s push to war.  Speaking of the New York Times it is relevant to recall that the leading newspaper has yet to retract its sensational—and discredited–story of December 2023,  ‘Screams Without Words’:  Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.  The article begins by declaring “Hamas Subjected Israeli Women to Horrors Before Killing Them, Evidence Shows” and despite rambling on at great length fails to provide evidence that stands up to rigorous scrutiny.  The lurid allegations in the article were swiftly punctured in an item by item examination by the journalist Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada.  He brought out the unreliability of the NYT’s so called key witnesses–given that their stories have changed over time–and the complete absence of forensic evidence that substantiates their stories.  In its exposé of February 28 The Intercept concluded that the “Times’s mission was to bolster a predetermined narrative.”

For now some of the stories of the US-Israeli genocide linger in the public memory—eighteen year old Shaban al-Dalou, software engineering student who was burned alive still connected to an IV drip when Israeli bombing set fire to a tent camp of displaced Palestinians outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, five year old Hind Rajab, trapped for hours in a car from which she made desperate calls for assistance and killed by artillery from Israeli tanks, leading Gaza surgeon Adnan Al-Bursh,  head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, captured by Israeli soldiers in December and declared dead in April after undergoing months of torture in an Israeli prison.  Soon these will be supplanted by the harrowing stories of more recent victims of the ongoing genocide.  And Yahya Sinwar?  The man who told the Italian journalist in 2018:  “I want the end of the siege. You walk to the beach at sunset and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like…I want them to be free.”  What form will remembrance take?

Who dares to take the name of that foul monster Yahya Sinwar without condemning him with the strongest adjectives at their command?  Was he not a twenty-first century Genghis Khan whose terrorist, barbarian hordes breached the security fence behind which they had been safely entrapped and imprisoned in a siege that began in the 90’s as a result of the Oslo process and intensified as the decades went on?  Are we not speaking of a brutal and ruthless operator who masterminded the unprecedented surprise attacks in which thousands of baby killers and rapists broke out of their prison and poured into the territory wherein gentle, civilized Israelis resided?  Never mind the forefathers of present day Palestinian fighters had for centuries inhabited that very territory.  No matter parents and grandparents of Hamas militants had fled those villages in the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 or in subsequent expulsions of the native population.  The things that count for the ruling class of the Western world are the artfully invented stories of decapitation of forty Israeli babies and weaponization of sexual assault on Israeli women by Hamas fighters.  One can only hope those diabolical fictions will not be revived by some candidate in US elections four years from now.

The deaths of over 1100 Israelis still remains to be discussed here.  About 800 of those who died were civilians,  What goes unmentioned in the leading news media is the uncertainty about responsibility for civilian killings on October 7 and subsequent days.  The question of whether the Israeli army’s notorious Hannibal directive was implemented in thrusting back Hamas militants was raised as far back as October 2023 in the alternative news sources Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss and revived by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper in July 2024.  Since then a meticulous year long investigation by the journalist Asa Winstanley of the Electonic intifada has shown that the number of Israelis who became collateral damage as Israeli forces struggled to repel Hamas fighters is far higher than previously thought.  The journalist’s conclusions are based on information found in unimpeachable sources such as Israeli news reports and a UN Human Rights Council report.  What remains once the atrocity propaganda has been refuted and the Israeli hand in the killing of Israeli citizens exposed?  The answer is—a spectacularly successful hostage taking operation intended to obtain the freedom of thousands of Palestinians held for years in Israeli prisons, many of them without being charged.  Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was held in Israeli prisons for 22 years.  After his release in a prisoner exchange in 2011, he regarded it as his moral duty to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.

Armchair analysts have no conception of the treacherous terrain in which revolutionaries operate beset as they are by prowling enemies who are constantly seeking internal collaborators who will undermine the movement from within.  We want our revolutionaries and leaders of movements for national liberation to be saintly and pure as driven snow.  Robespierre fails that test.  So do Lenin and Che Guevara.  Yahya Sinwar was far from being merely a sweet and gentle theorist of revolutionary and anti-colonial, anti-imperialist politics.  The words of the Irish poet WB Yeats come to mind as one reflects on the life of Yahya Sinwar and the complexities of his personality and his politics:

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone…
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart…
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died.  (Easter 1916)

Theirs was an anti-colonial struggle in a different era.  Thankfully (or so one thinks in the time of genocide) their colonizer was not genocidal.

Yahya Sinwar’s parents were refugees who had been violently uprooted from their native village of al-Majdal Asqalan in historic Palestine in Israel’s ethnic cleansings of 1948.  Historic Palestine’s village of Al-Majdal Asqalan has since been appropriated into the present day Israeli city of Ashkalon.  Yahya Sinwar was born in 1962 in a refugee camp in Khan Younis, Gaza.  In his boyhood as well as throughout his adult life, he was placed on a collision course with a brutal and violent occupation that inexorably tightened its stranglehold over the Palestinian territories.  In his last recorded interview in 2021 with Vice news journalist Hind Hassan the so-called terrorist reasoned as follows:  The battle between us and the occupation…is an open ended battle. We know that we don’t want war or fighting because it costs lives, and our people deserve peace. For long periods of time we’ve tried peaceful resistance…Unfortunately the world stood by and watched as the occupation war machine killed our young people…What are we supposed to do? Should we raise the white flag? That is not going to happen.”  He was far from being an apostle of non-violence. Throughout his life and with his dying breath he fought the occupation of his homeland with all the strength at his command. He dedicated his remarkable abilities to the cause of the liberation of his homeland. His untimely death in the second year of the US-Israeli genocide denied him the joy or the relief of witnessing the event and the process that he had envisioned.

Radha Surya is a freelance writer. Her articles have appeared on Znet and Countercurrents.

30 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – Euro-Med Monitor strongly condemns the Israeli parliament’s two new laws banning UNRWA from operating in Israel and barring Israeli authorities from interacting with the organisation. These laws represent a direct attack on the United Nations, international law, and humanity, and put millions of Palestinian refugees at risk of deprivation of what remains of their basic human rights.

The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, overwhelmingly approved two draft laws that would effectively and completely remove the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) from the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The first law forbids the organisation from operating in East Jerusalem, while the second law effectively paralyses the organisation’s operations in the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by forbidding communication between the agency and Israeli authorities. Given Israel’s complete control over the Occupied Palestinian Territory, evidenced by its military checkpoints and barriers throughout the West Bank; Palestinians’ need for permits to enter or work in East Jerusalem; and the arbitrary siege of the Gaza Strip; the agency will not be able to function and carry out its activities without coordination with Israel.

In the Gaza Strip, over two million Palestinians—the majority of whom are refugees—face imminent death due to Israeli crimes of starvation as well as deprivation of medical care and basic life-saving materials amid ongoing killings, attacks, and suffering due to widespread physical injuries. UNRWA will likely become unable to provide humanitarian aid, education, health care, and other basic services that serve as the main lifeline for millions of Palestinian refugees, half of whom are children. As a result, Israel is denying these individuals of their basic rights.

Israel’s insistence on legalising its years-long series of actions against UNRWA is tantamount to declaring war on the Palestinian refugee community, one of the most vulnerable groups in Palestinian society. At a time when they are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance, Israel continues to prevent them from returning to the homes and lands from which they were forcibly displaced. The majority of these refugees are experiencing a serious decline in all aspects of their lives as a result of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, ongoing for more than a year now, as well as its military actions and all-encompassing siege.

Israel is determined to demonstrate to the world that it sets itself above the United Nations, UN agencies, and international law in general, and has consistently maintained a hostile posture toward UNRWA, accusing the UN agency of sustaining the Palestinian refugee crisis by granting refugee status to generations.

Following a string of earlier crimes by Israel, such as the killing of 233 UNRWA staff members in the Gaza Strip and the destruction of roughly two-thirds of its facilities in the enclave, UNRWA’s work will be further undermined by Israel’s new ban. This is a dark chapter in the history of the global system, which is headed by the UN. The intergovernmental organisation has failed to defend even its own agencies, workspaces, and decisions.

In an attempt to end the Palestinian refugee crisis, evade its legal obligations, and avoid any future legal ramifications, Israel is taking advantage of the shameful international silence surrounding all of its crimes. Its elimination of UNRWA is intended to prolong famine and deny the Gaza Strip’s population access to essential services in the context of the ongoing genocide, forcing the Strip’s inhabitants to relocate and thereby paving the way for Israel’s proposed “solutions”—all of which infringe upon the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and to sovereignty over their territory. Israel’s most recent efforts have involved separating the populace into distinct, fenced-in, and besieged communities, and then contracting with private American businesses to distribute humanitarian supplies.

In its recent advisory opinion on the illegality of Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, the International Court of Justice stated that closing UNRWA’s headquarters in East Jerusalem—illegally occupied Palestinian territory—is a blatant violation of both the UN Charter and international law. Additionally, the application of Israeli laws in this area is a violation of both the rules of international law and Israel’s obligations as an occupying power.

Furthermore, Israeli legal experts violate the International Court of Justice’s ruling, which includes precautionary measures related to facilitating the entry of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians through the United Nations. Israel’s actions will further hinder the UN agency’s work and put the entire international humanitarian response in the Gaza Strip, which is experiencing alarming levels of food insecurity and famine, at risk.

Despite the fact that the two laws against UNRWA will go into effect 90 days after they are passed, the Israeli Knesset has claimed that the organisation is a vital lifeline for the Palestinian people, because it offers social, health, and educational services to approximately 5.7 million Palestinian refugees spread across camps in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, and Syria.

An estimated 1.7 million people, or more than 70% of the Palestinian refugee population, are refugees in the Gaza Strip who rely on UNRWA’s services to help them manage their lives in the wake of the Israeli blockade that has been in place since 2006.

Since its founding in 1949 to aid Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, UNRWA has played a significant role on the global stage. It has both provided services and served as a symbol to remind the international community of its obligation to address the Palestinian refugee problem in a just and lasting way while also meeting the population’s humanitarian needs and ensuring its safety.

The legal status that international law guarantees Palestinian refugees has not been, and will not be, impacted by Israel’s repeated attempts to abolish UNRWA or its total and categorical denial of its legal obligations to these refugees after causing them suffering for more than 70 years.

By prohibiting UNRWA’s operations, Israel is disregarding all international calls to guarantee the entry of humanitarian supplies into the Gaza Strip and stop the famine there from worsening.

The world’s nations, including the United States—which has not yet resumed funding the international organisation—must publicly support UNRWA, fully fund it, and demand that Israel repeal the new laws intended to stop the agency’s work. Israel must also be compelled by the international community to permit UNRWA and other international humanitarian agencies to continue operating in the Gaza Strip and across the entire Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

30 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jake Johnson

Humanitarian groups and United Nations officials issued dire warnings Tuesday about the potentially catastrophic consequences of Israeli lawmakers’ vote to ban the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, the body primarily responsible for delivering lifesaving aid to the people of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

James Elder, a spokesperson for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said Tuesday that if the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is unable to operate due to the measures passed overwhelmingly by the Israeli Knesset on Monday, “it’ll likely see the collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza.”

“So a decision such as this suddenly means that a new way has been found to kill children,” said Elder.

The legislation that Israeli lawmakers passed in a 92-10 vote bars UNRWA—a frequent target of Israeli smear campaigns and military attacks—from operating or providing “any service” within “in the sovereign territory of the state of Israel.”

Israeli lawmakers also passed a measure declaring UNRWA a “terror” group, barring Israeli officials from engaging in any contact with the agency.

The Guardiannoted that the newly passed measures—which are set to be implemented within 90 days—are “expected to lead to the closure of UNRWA’s East Jerusalem headquarters and would effectively block the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza via Rafah.”

“The severing of diplomatic relations would preclude Israel from issuing entry and work permits to foreign UNRWA staff and prevent coordination with the Israeli military to permit aid shipments,” the newspaper added.

Agnès Callamard, the secretary-general of Amnesty International, warned in a statement Tuesday that the measures represent “an outright attack on the rights of Palestinian refugees.”

“It is clearly designed to make it impossible for the agency to operate in the occupied Palestinian territory by forcing the closure of the UNRWA headquarters in East Jerusalem and ending visas for its staff,” said Callamard. “It amounts to the criminalization of humanitarian aid and will worsen an already catastrophic humanitarian crisis.”

“This appalling, inhumane law will only exacerbate the suffering of Palestinians, who have endured unimaginable hardship since the horrific attacks by Hamas and other armed groups in southern Israel one year ago, and whose need for global support is greater than ever. The international community must be quick to condemn it in the strongest possible terms and exert any influence they have on the Israeli government to repeal it.”

The U.N. General Assembly established UNRWA in the aftermath of the 1948 Nakba, and the agency is central to humanitarian operations in the famine-stricken Gaza Strip—a role that aid groups described as necessary and irreplaceable. According to a World Health Organization official, roughly a third of the healthcare workers assisting the polio vaccination campaign in Gaza work with UNRWA.

“UNRWA plays a critical role in serving civilians in desperate need in Gaza,” the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said Tuesday. “Humanitarian actors rely on coordination with UNRWA to deliver aid and alleviate suffering. UNRWA cannot be replaced by NGOs like IRC.”

“The bill passed in the Israeli parliament is an unprecedented attack on a U.N. agency and, if implemented, would only worsen the humanitarian catastrophe,” IRC added. “We strongly urge that this legislation is not applied. We continue to advocate for an immediate ceasefire to get aid in, to release the hostages, and to meet the growing and dire needs of the civilian population.”

Sam Rose, deputy director of UNRWA affairs in Gaza, said in a CNN interview that “the entire humanitarian system” in the Palestinian enclave “relies every minute of every day on UNRWA to deliver services to 2 million people living in the worst possible conditions.”

Implementation of the ban, Rose warned, “would be devastating for us, devastating for other aid agencies—but more importantly, for the population here that’s suffering so much.”

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

30 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

In the worst single massacre since Israel launched its campaign to ethnically cleanse Northern Gaza this month, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bombed a five-story residential building in the town of Beit Lahia Tuesday, killing 93 people, including 25 children.

That day, at least 143 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes throughout Gaza, with the vast majority—132—killed in Northern Gaza, Al Jazeera reported.

With the Palestinian civil defense almost entirely out of commission due to targeting by Israeli troops, dozens of people remained buried under the rubble, where they will most likely die awaiting rescue.

“A number of victims are still under the rubble and on the roads, and ambulance and civil defense crews cannot reach them,” Gaza’s health ministry said in a statement.

Footage from the scene of the horrific Israeli massacre in Beit Lahiya, North Gaza where at least 93 civilians, including 25 children

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for the Palestinian civil defense agency, said “There are appeals and stress calls for Civil Defense teams to save the wounded,” but civil defense forces have been either arrested by Israeli troops or “forcibly displaced due to the Israeli aggression in North Gaza.”

Witness Ismail Ouaida said in a video verified by Reuters, “There are tens of martyrs (dead)—tens of displaced people who were living in this house. The house was bombed without prior warning. As you can see, martyrs are here and there, with body parts hanging on the walls.”

Another survivor, a Palestinian mother, told Al Jazeera, “Both my sons with their entire families were killed. My unmarried daughter was also killed. And my other daughter with her five children. All killed. What wrong did they do? What did those innocent people do to be slaughtered like this?”

The health ministry said in a statement Tuesday that the wounded will not receive medical care as nearby doctors had been forced by Israeli troops to evacuate at gunpoint. “Critical cases without intervention will succumb to their destiny and die,” the ministry said in a statement.

With consummate hypocrisy, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller called the bombing a “horrifying incident with a horrifying result.” In reality, the massacre is completely in keeping with US policy. The Biden administration has provided Israel with more than 14,000 2,000-pound bombs, which have been used to systematically target populated areas with the deliberate aim of killing as many people as possible.

Last week, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss the so-called “General’s Plan” to ethnically cleanse Northern Gaza. Despite Netanyahu’s refusal to publicly disavow the plan, Blinken emerged from the meeting to give a blanket statement of support for Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

The official death toll in the Gaza genocide now stands at over 43,000 with tens of thousands more still missing and likely buried under the rubble. An article published in The Lancet earlier this year estimated the actual death toll—including from the effects of starvation and disease—as exceeding 186,000.

The massacre in Beit Lahia is part of a systematic effort by Israel to ethnically cleanse Northern Gaza through bombing and starvation and to kill everyone that remains. Over the past three weeks, at least 700 people have been killed in Northern Gaza as part of this campaign. At the start of this month, there were 400,000 people remaining in Northern Gaza. Now, that figure is estimated at around 100,000 people, with those that remain completely without food, fuel or medical supplies.

Tuesday’s massacre followed the passage by Israel’s parliament of a law banning the UN relief agency UNRWA from operating inside Gaza, further dismantling any remaining humanitarian operations in the region. UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini described the move as “nothing less than collective punishment,” declaring that the move violates the UN Charter and violates the State of Israel’s obligations under international law.

In a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, UN chief Antonio Guterres said that the move would have “devastating consequences” for Palestinians. “Israel, as the occupying power, continues to be required to ensure that the needs of the population are met.”

Stephane Dujarric, a spokesperson for Guterres, said that “UNRWA is the principal means by which essential assistance is supplied to Palestine refugees in the occupied Palestinian territory, and there is no alternative to UNRWA,” adding that “UNRWA is indispensable.”

James Elder, a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), warned, “If UNRWA is unable to operate, you would likely see the collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza. … So a decision such as this suddenly means that a new way has been found to kill children.”

The amount of aid entering the Gaza Strip has fallen to the lowest level since the start of the genocide, the UN said. Only 704 trucks of humanitarian aid entered Gaza between October 1 and October 22, compared to the already extremely low level of 3,000 truckloads in September. “The areas that are being depopulated right now have received nothing,” Scott Paul, Oxfam America’s director for peace and security, said.

According to the IPC (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), a global initiative for measuring food security, nearly 800,000 people in Gaza are facing “emergency” or “catastrophe” levels of hunger. The UN’s World Food Program warned that “by November more than 90% of Gaza’s population will face severe food insecurity.” In a statement, the UN’s World Food Program said that only 5,000 tons of food has entered Gaza this month.

The hospitals are facing total breakdown. Hussam Abu Safia, director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Northern Gaza, told Al Jazeera that “The hospital is left with no resources. No medical supplies and no medical staff.” He continued, “This is because many of our specialized doctors and surgeons have been detained. It is only me together with a single pediatrician—who cannot perform any surgery on the wounded—that are left inside the hospital. Above all, patients and the injured are strewn all over the hospital floor.”

Meanwhile, Israeli forces continued to push further north into Lebanon, with 77 people killed in strikes throughout the country. In a first-hand report, Al Jazeera wrote, “On Monday, the Israeli army set about maniacally bombarding the southern Lebanese coastal city of Tyre, striking residential buildings and converting the scene into a typical Israeli-induced horrorscape. Israel does its best to bomb the life out of Tyre.” The city is one of humanity’s oldest continuously-inhabited urban areas and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

On Tuesday, Israeli officials threatened further strikes on Iran following a bombardment of military facilities over the weekend. “We will once again know how to reach Iran, with capabilities that we did not even use this time,” said Herzi Halevi, chief of the Israeli military’s general staff.

30 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- As Israel continues to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza under a plan labeled ‘the Generals’ Plan,’ witnesses describe horrifying scenes of suffering, deprivation, and death unfolding daily. Blocked from receiving life-saving aid, civilians are left to fend for themselves under conditions that officials and human rights advocates decry as a systematic strategy of starvation and extermination.

Dr. Ezzedine Shaheen, a local physician, shared a heartbreaking account from Jabalia, where Yusuf, a young boy, is wounded and bleeding. “He’s bleeding from his neck and eye,” he said. “One of the neighbors tried to bandage him, but the bleeding hasn’t stopped since morning. He’s leaning against a red car on Al-Ajarama Street.”

With no ambulances, doctors, or emergency resources available, Shaheen pleads for awareness: “This is what’s happening in northern Gaza… and anyone who reads this and remains silent is complicit in this crime.”

In Beit Lahia, survivors of Al-Louh massacre echo these sentiments. According to Dr. Munir al-Bursh, Director General of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, survivors are calling urgently for medical aid amidst complete devastation of civil and medical services. “Israel’s ongoing blockade has crippled humanitarian agencies,” Al-Bursh said. “There’s no support left here.”

[https://twitter.com/Dr_Muneer1/status/1851329715933438137]

People on the ground are left as both victims and responders in the crisis. Al Jazeera reporter Hossam Shabat poignantly captured the harrowing reality: “My brother is my medic, my mother pulls me from the rubble, my neighbor is my healer. The wounded are also the rescuers and the martyrs.”

Journalist Abdul Qader Sabah highlighted how futile appeals to the Civil Defense have become. “Appeals are met with silence; #CivilDefense is completely paralyzed by the unrelenting Israeli assault, with personnel either detained or displaced.”

One of the most devastating massacres in recent days took place in Beit Lahia’s Abu Nasr neighborhood. Dr. Ezzedine Shaheen, who lives nearby, reported that “over 150 people were killed or went missing in a single morning… The bodies of children lay mingled with the rubble and steel. Those faces, many of whom I knew, are no longer here.” Shaheen added that no ambulances came to retrieve the dead, who were eventually loaded onto carts pulled by donkeys. “A large extended family that always filled the neighborhood with noise and commotion; they were all killed by Israel, and the world kept turning without anyone stopping to read their names. They couldn’t find an ambulance to transport them, nor anyone to pray over them or mourn their bodies. O God, this is the end of times; we believe in You and Your noble Prophet. In this way, everyone in Gaza awaits their turn in the massacre, waiting to see how Israel will slaughter us, who will remain, and who will die. There is no escape from human fate, but how can our deaths be so transient and easy? And no one can stop the monster? There is no power and no strength except through God.”

“They were a family of poor, destitute people; no one paid attention to the quality of their lives or their deaths. No one mourned for them, no protests were organized, and their deaths did not create any uproar. They quietly slipped from life to death, buried in the market. They couldn’t find ambulances to transport them, and their bodies were simply piled onto carts pulled by donkeys.”

[https://twitter.com/Countercurrents/status/1851549376683876367]

Elsewhere, Mohammed Haniyeh from SAND News Agency described one mother’s agonizing search for her daughter Haneen. “Haneen, just 26, was frail and her mother searched for her remains through the ruins.”

Gaza’s Civil Defense released statements pleading for international intervention as they face their seventh consecutive day of incapacitation due to Israel’s blockade. “We are unable to respond to countless pleas for help from homes bombarded in Jabalia,” said Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Civil Defense. “To the international community: northern Gaza is being slaughtered from vein to vein.”

Quds News Network (QNN) is the largest independent and comprehensive Palestinian youth electronic news network.

30 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Bhabani Shankar Nayak

The simmering border conflict between India and China in the Himalayan region has come to an end, with both nations committing to cooperate in resolving their border disputes. Both countries recognise that such conflicts hinder the progress of peace and prosperity in the region, posing obstacles to establishing a multipolar world and the democratisation of global geopolitics. This diplomatic achievement has disrupted the agenda of imperialist blocs that sought to escalate the conflict into a full-blown war between India and China, threatening peace, stability, and prosperity in both countries and around the world.

The border conflict between India and China acted as a key catalyst for reviving NATO’s waning influence by promoting the establishment of an “Asian NATO” through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD), comprising Australia, Japan, India, and the United States. The QUAD considers itself as ‘a force of good’ for regional peace and security. In reality, the QUAD is neither designed to promote peace in Asia nor to promote mechanisms for resolving colonial-era border conflicts within the region. India was drawn into this desperate attempt to establish the QUAD, which aims to contain both India and China, facilitating continued imperialist and neo-colonial exploitation of Asia’s natural resources and people while expanding hegemonic imperialist control over world. So, the India-China cooperation and the decline of QUAD are positive developments for peace in Asia and the world.

Trilateral military and security alliances such as AUKUS and JAUKUS, involving Japan, Australia, the UK, and the US, are designed not only to contain China but also to contain India in the future. The containment of China is not a policy specific to China, but rather a strategy employed by imperialist Western countries led by the US to undermine all post-colonial nations and their efforts to free themselves from various forms of colonialism. The imperialist and colonial bloc led by these countries is intolerant of peace and prosperity in Asia, Africa, Middle East and Latin America. The strategies of wars, conflicts and containments are central to their imperialist and colonial hegemony, as well as the exploitation of natural and human resources. The military-industrial complex continues to serve as the foundation of all imperialist ventures aimed at upholding the interests of corporate capitalism in its various forms. It undermines cooperation and human solidarity, transforming these values into conflicts in the name of democracy, religion, culture, territory, and the sovereignty of the nation-states.

The Westphalian ideology and its narratives surrounding territorial national interests serve the corporate interests promoted by imperialist countries led by the US. India-China cooperation must move away from narrow territorial national interests and instead prioritise the interests of the people beyond borders. This approach can offer alternatives to the militarised capitalism perpetuated by European and American ruling and non-ruling hegemons. There is no alternative to be found within European and American exceptionalism. It only perpetuates wars and conflicts in the name of democracy and human rights while keeping people marginalised and deprived of a dignified life.

In the context of the broader interests of working people, cooperation between India and China must embrace an internationalist outlook that extends beyond merely resolving border disputes. It should aim to establish long-term mechanisms that promote anti-imperialist and anti-colonial global institutions, to ensure the democratisation of international politics and the consolidation of global peace and stability. As imperialist powers fuel wars and conflicts to conceal their failures and sustain their dominance, people worldwide continue to suffer. Working people in Europe and the United States are increasingly experiencing the impacts of corporate-driven imperialist hegemony and exploitation. Therefore, major countries like India and China have a shared responsibility to collaborate in pursuit of global peace and the prosperity of all working people.

Bhabani Shankar Nayak is a political commentator

29 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – In a dangerous increase in crimes targeting civilian gathering places, particularly in the northern Gaza Strip, the Israeli occupation army has targeted shelter centres 39 times since the beginning of October. These attacks aim to forcefully displace the Palestinian population from the area, and have killed 188 people and injured hundreds more.

Since the beginning of August 2024, the Israeli army has targeted schools, hospitals, clinics, and shelter halls 65 times, including 39 times in the current month of October, killing 672 Palestinians and injuring over 1,000 more, according to the Euro-Med Monitor field team. Fifty-seven of the targeted locations were located in Gaza City or the northern Gaza Strip, while the remaining eight were in the central part of the Strip.

The Israeli targeting has included shelling, direct shootings, killing forcibly displaced people and their families, or making them leave schools-turned-shelters under fire and/or with orders to relocate. These schools are then burned or otherwise destroyed by Israeli forces in order to render them uninhabitable and stop displaced people from returning to them.

A summary of these attacks, based on Euro-Med Monitor documentation, is provided below:

Targeting	Date	Area	School
Aerial bombardment	1 August 2024	Shuja’iyya – East Gaza City	Dalal Al-Maghribi School
Aerial bombardment	3 August 2024	Gaza City	Al-Rafidain School
Aerial bombardment	3 August 2024	Gaza City	Al-Huda School
Aerial bombardment	3 August 2024	Gaza City	Hamamah School
Aerial bombardment	3 August 2024	Beit Lahia Project – North Gaza Strip	Muscat School
Aerial bombardment	4 August 2024	Sheikh Radwan – Gaza City	Hassan Salama School
Aerial bombardment	4 August 2024	Sheikh Radwan – Gaza City	Al-Nasr School
Aerial bombardment	8 August 2024	East Gaza City	Al-Zahra School
Aerial bombardment	8 August 2024	Yaffa Street – East Gaza City	Abdul Fattah Hamoud School
Aerial bombardment	10 August 2024	East Gaza City	Al-Tabi’in School
Aerial bombardment	20 August 2024	Gaza City	Mustafa Hafez School
Aerial bombardment	21 August 2024	Gaza City	Salah Al-Din School
Aerial bombardment	26 August 2024	Nuseirat – Central Gaza Strip	Al-Ezz Bin Abdul Salam School
Aerial bombardment	1 September 2024	Zeitoun Neighbourhood – Gaza City	Safad School
Aerial bombardment	7 September 2024		Halima Al-Saeeda School
Aerial bombardment	7 September 2024	Sheikh Radwan – Gaza City	Amr Bin Al-Aas School
Aerial bombardment	11 September 2024	Nuseirat – Central Gaza Strip	Al-Nuseirat Girls’ Preparatory School (A)
Aerial bombardment	14 September 2024	Zeitoun Neighbourhood – South East Gaza City	Shuhada Al-Zeitoun School
Aerial bombardment	15 September 2024	Beit Hanoun – North Gaza Strip	Ghazi Al-Shawa School

Aerial bombardment	18 September 2024	Shuja’iyya – East Gaza City	Ibn Al-Haytham School
Aerial bombardment	21 September 2024	Zeitoun Neighbourhood – South East Gaza City	Al-Zeitoun School (C)
Aerial bombardment	22 September 2024	Al Shati’ Camp – West Gaza City	Kafr Qasim School
Aerial bombardment	23 September 2024	Nuseirat Camp – Central Gaza Strip	Khaled Bin Al-Walid Secondary School for Boys
Aerial bombardment	24 September 2024	Zeitoun Neighbourhood – South East Gaza City	Al-Fakhari Government School
Aerial bombardment	26 September 2024	North Gaza Strip	Al-Faluja School
Aerial bombardment	29 September 2024	North Gaza Strip	Umm Al-Fahm School
Aerial bombardment	1 October 2024	Nuseirat – Central Gaza Strip	Al-Nuseirat Girls’ Preparatory School (C)
Aerial bombardment	1 October 2024	Shuja’iyya – East Gaza City	Al-Shuja’iyya Boys’ School
Aerial bombardment	2 October 2024	Al Tuffah – East Gaza	Muscat School
Aerial bombardment	2 October 2024	Nuseirat – Central Gaza Strip	Al-Nuseirat Girls’ Elementary School (A)
Aerial bombardment		Beit Lahia Project – North Gaza Strip	Khalifa School
Aerial bombardment	3 October 2024	Deir al-Balah – Central Gaza Strip	Deir al-Balah Mixed Basic School
Aerial bombardment	4 October 2024	Jabalia Camp – North Gaza Strip	Baghdad Hall
Aerial bombardment	9 October 2024	Jabalia al Balad – North Gaza Strip	Al-Rafei School
Aerial bombardment	9 October 2024	Jabalia Camp – North Gaza Strip	Yemen Happy Hospital
Aerial bombardment	10 October 2024	Deir al-Balah – Central Gaza Strip	Rufaidah Elementary School
Aerial bombardment	10 October 2024	Al-Saftawi Neighbourhood – North Gaza	Abdul Rahman Ibn Auf School
Aerial bombardment	10 October 2024	Gaza City	Al Ramal Clinic
Artillery shelling	11 October 2024	Jabalia Camp – North Gaza Strip	Hafs School

Bombardment	14 October 2024	Jabalia Camp – North Gaza Strip	Hafsa Al Fouqa School
Bombardment	17 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	Abu Hussein School
Bombardment	17 October 2024	Beit Lahia Project – North Gaza Strip	Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed School
Bombardment	19 October 2024	Gaza City	Asma School
Shelling	19 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	Abu Hussein School
Shelling	20 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	Abu Hussein School
Bombardment	20 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	Hafsa School
	21 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	Jabalia Preparatory School
Aerial bombardment	21 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	One of the Al Fouqa schools
Evacuation	21 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	One of the Al Fouqa schools
Evacuation	21 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	One of the Al Fouqa schools
Evacuation	21 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	One of the Al Fouqa schools
Evacuation	21 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	One of the Al Fouqa schools
Evacuation	21 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	One of the Al Fouqa schools
Evacuation	21 October 2024	Beit Hanoun – North Gaza Strip	Palestine School
Aerial bombardment	21 October 2024	Beit Hanoun – North Gaza Strip	Al Shawa School
Evacuation	22 October 2024	Beit Hanoun – North Gaza Strip	Khalifa School
Evacuation	22 October 2024	Beit Hanoun – North Gaza Strip	Kuwait School
Evacuation	22 October 2024	Beit Hanoun – North Gaza Strip	Aleppo School
Bombardment	22 October 2024	Beit Hanoun – North Gaza Strip	Zaid Bin Haritha School

Bombardment	23 October 2024	Gaza City	Al Zahraa School
Bombardment	24 October 2024	Nuseirat – Central Gaza Strip	Shuhada Al-Nusairat Secondary School for Boys
Bombardment	24 October 2024	Jabalia – North Gaza Strip	Abu Hussein School
Bombardment	25 October 2024	Beit Lahia Project – North Gaza Strip	Tal Al Rabi School
Bombardment	27 October 2024	Gaza City	Salah Al Din School
Bombardment	27 October 2024	Gaza City	Asma School

Israel’s systematic policy of destroying shelters further restricts the options available to residents in terms of places to seek refuge, which helps the country achieve its objectives of destroying and forcibly displacing Palestinians and altering the demographic makeup of the Strip. This is particularly apparent in northern Gaza, where Israeli officials with varying degrees of authority have made it clear they intend to annex and settle.

The most recent Israeli targeting of shelters and ensuing waves of forced displacement in the north have caused dozens of Palestinian families to be dispersed and their members to be separated from one another, which has doubled their psychological suffering, and especially that of the children.

Targeting shelters is a crucial component of Israel’s strategy to continue to weaken the social structures of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip; erode their physical and psychological well-being; and eradicate any communal areas that might, even in small ways, provide social and emotional support.

Additionally, targeting shelters has a negative impact on the likelihood that families and individuals will receive humanitarian aid, because many of these spaces serve as distribution points for charitable organisations. If they are forced to relocate, they might end up in places where there is no access to the already limited amount of humanitarian assistance available in the Strip. In this way, the Israeli targeting of shelters worsens the already-dire humanitarian situation and the suffering of the Palestinian populace in the Gaza Strip.

The Euro-Med Monitor field team reported, on the afternoon of Sunday 27 October, that the Israeli air force bombed the Asmaa School in the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City. The school-turned-shelter was home to thousands of displaced people, and the bombing killed 11 Palestinians—including four journalists, two of whom were women—and injured dozens more. The Israeli air force had bombed the same school eight days prior, killing eight Palestinians and injuring others.

The Israeli air force had bombed the Shuhada Al-Nuseirat Secondary School for Boys earlier, on Tuesday 24 October. This school was home to thousands of displaced people in the central Gaza Strip’s Nuseirat refugee camp, and the bombing killed 18 Palestinians, including 12 children and three women, and injured 52 more, according to the Euro-Med Monitor field team.

According to a review by the Euro-Med Monitor field team, none of the victims—which include 54-year-old professor Ashraf Yaqoub Al-Jadi, Dean of the Islamic University of Gaza’s Faculty of Nursing—were militants.

At least 10 schools in northern Gaza are currently being evacuated by the Israeli occupation army, which is also setting the majority of them on fire. The evacuation of these schools occurred after the Israeli occupation army sent quadcopters or Palestinian detainees and told those inside to leave and head to checkpoints. Some of these schools were bombed without any prior notice, such as the Jabalia Preparatory School, in which 10 displaced people were killed on 21 October, and the Zaid Bin Haritha School, in which seven displaced people were killed on 22 October.

All nations should fulfill their international obligations by preventing Israel from completing the crime of genocide and other serious crimes in the Gaza Strip; protecting civilians there; making sure Israel abides by international law and the rulings of the International Court of Justice; enforcing effective sanctions against it; and halting all forms of military, financial, and political support and cooperation, including by immediately suspending military aid, export licenses, and arms sales to Israel.

Additionally, all nations who engage in criminal activity alongside Israel, particularly those that offer Israel support or assistance in any way, should be held responsible. This includes aiding Israel and entering into contractual agreements in the areas of military, intelligence, politics, law, finance, and the media, among other areas that could help Israel continue to commit its crimes.

At the international, regional, and local levels, the path of universal jurisdiction must be seriously and cooperatively activated in order to hold the perpetrators of crimes against Palestinian civilians accountable before the national courts of nations that adopt such jurisdiction.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

29 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jessica Corbett

Over a year into Israel’s obliteration of the Gaza Strip, Israeli lawmakers faced sharp criticism on Monday after voting for a pair of bills targeting the United Nations agency responsible for humanitarian aid in the illegally occupied Palestinian territories.

The first bill, which says that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) “will not operate any missions, won’t provide any service, and won’t hold any activity—directly or indirectly—in the sovereign territory of the state of Israel,” passed the Israeli parliament 92-10.

The second legislative proposal—under which the Israeli agency that handles humanitarian issues, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), will have to cut off contact with UNRWA—passed the 120-member Knesset 87-9. Critics called the votes “grotesque” and “outrageous.”

The Israel-based organization Adalah said in a statement that “despite widespread international pressure and condemnation, the Knesset has nearly unanimously passed two bills aimed at dismantling UNRWA, all while Israel continues its genocidal assault on Gaza and intensifies violence across the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

“This legislation threatens a vital lifeline for over 2.5 million Palestinian refugees throughout the occupied Palestinian territory,” the group warned. “It represents a deliberate attempt to fundamentally undermine UNRWA and its essential mission of supporting the relief, education, and human development of Palestinian refugees. Specifically, the laws aim to strip Palestinians—who were forcibly displaced from their homes during the 1948 Nakba and the 1967 war—of their status as refugees and their right of return.”

The United Nations General Assembly created UNRWA in 1949, in the wake of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” when more than 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homeland to establish the modern state of Israel—whose officials have claimed without providing evidence that a dozen of the agency’s 13,000 staffers in Gaza were involved with the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.

“This legislation not only contravenes the basic principles of human rights that led to the U.N. General Assembly’s founding of UNRWA, but also violates a range of Israel’s international legal obligations, including those under the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” said Adalah. “The international community must hold Israel accountable.”

[https://twitter.com/theIMEU/status/1850998793510003058]

Although Israel faces a South Africa-led genocide case at the International Court of Justice over its war on Hamas-controlled Gaza—which has killed at least 43,020 people and injured another 101,110 since last October—governments around the world have not acted to stop the bloodshed. The U.S. Congress and President Joe Biden’s administration have even provided Israel with billions of dollars in military aid and blocked cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations.

Earlier this month, the Biden administration finally threatened to cut off weapons if the Israeli government does not take “urgent and sustained actions” to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s letter specifically raised concerns about the legislation that passed the Knesset Monday.

Asked about the Israeli bills on Monday, Matthew Miller, a U.S. State Department spokesperson frequently slammed for his statements about Israel, pointed to the secretaries’ criticism of the legislation in the recent letter and acknowledged that UNRWA serves the West Bank and plays “an irreplaceable role” in Gaza, where Palestinians are starving to death.

[https://twitter.com/AssalRad/status/1850987206397346288]

Sally Abi Khalil, Oxfam’s regional director in the Middle East and North Africa, said Monday that “Israel has bombed Palestinians to death, maimed them, starved them, and is now ridding them of their biggest lifeline of aid. Piece by piece, Israel is systemically dismantling Gaza as a land that is autonomous and liveable for Palestinians.”

“Its banning of UNRWA today is condemnable and another step in this crime,” she argued. “The decision will further undermine the ability of the international community to provide sufficient humanitarian aid and to save lives in any safe, independent, and impartial way. UNRWA was not only the biggest and most established agency that has been delivering aid and sustenance to the people of Gaza for years, it was also a thread that connected them in some hope of solidarity and security to the United Nations.”

“We are in no doubt that Israel and its allies are fully aware of the terrible consequences that this decision will have on Palestinians living in Gaza, many of whom are already starving,” she added. “We join others in warning again that this will result in more death, more suffering, and more forced displacement of people from their besieged homeland. It is impossible not to believe that this is their aim.”

Leading up to the votes, human rights advocates have been sounding the alarm. On Saturday, over 50 groups including Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, and ActionAid released a joint statement demanding action and warning that “dismantling UNRWA would be catastrophic for Palestinians especially in Gaza and the West Bank as they are deprived of essentials such as food, water, medical aid, education, and protection. It will also have catastrophic consequences for millions of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, where essential humanitarian aid is crucial for both the refugees and the host communities.”

[https://twitter.com/KarimMakdisi/status/1851005575238210013]

Philippe Lazzarini, the UNRWA commissioner-general, delivered a similar warning on social media Monday, declaring that the Knesset action not only “is unprecedented and sets a dangerous precedent” but “it opposes the U.N. Charter and violates the state of Israel’s obligations under international law.”

“This is the latest in the ongoing campaign to discredit UNRWA and delegitimize its role towards providing human-development assistance and services to Palestine Refugees,” he continued. “These bills will only deepen the suffering of Palestinians, especially in Gaza where people have been going through more than a year of sheer hell.”

“It ⁠will deprive over 650,000 girls and boys there from education, putting at risk an entire generation of children,” Lazzarini added. “These bills increase the suffering of the Palestinians and are nothing less than collective punishment.”

Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

29 October 2024

Source: countercurrents.org