StoryMay 22, 2024
Category: Israel Crimes
Netanyahu says any comparison between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is “absurd and false,” writes Jonathan Cook. He’s correct and here’s why.
The crimes of October 7 do not provide Israel with blanket justification for its use of any and every means at its disposal even as a response to what it may interpret as an existential threat.
You are what you do not what you say!!
Source: Opinion | In Gaza, Israel Shows Wanton Disregard for International and Moral Law | Common Dreams
The tragic irony is that negotiations led by Egypt and Qatar for a ceasefire and release of hostages have come remarkably close to success. The failure to close the deal has led The Economist to ask if Netanyahu actually wants to accept a deal.
Source: “There is no Security:” Israel’s Invasion of Rafah will not Eliminate Hamas or End the War
Israeli definition of care so they can say, “We don’t kill medical staff any more”
Remaining health care workers won’t go until Israel stops blocking entry of new medical personnel.
Some 20 American and British medical workers who had been unable to leave Gaza were evacuated from the European Hospital in Khan Younis on Friday, though three American members of medical missions refused to evacuate until Israel allows additional humanitarian workers to replace them. They remain at work, along with doctors and staff from separate medical missions, serving a population trapped in Gaza with no escape.
Source: Medical Workers Evacuated From , but 3 Americans Refuse to Leave
AIPAC= Foreign Agent
With Bowman’s challenger handpicked by AIPAC, the Israel lobby is cementing its status as the biggest player in Democratic primary politics.
Source: AIPAC Spends $2 Million to Attack Rep. Jamaal Bowman
1948
1924
In light of the current Israeli assault on the Strip, Khoury’s work, and especially this recent book, poses a profound question: How do we read a story when we know that its plot has not yet come to an end? How do we tell the story of the Nakba when it is not over? How do we recognize when we have reached the conclusion?
Source: How do we tell the story of the Nakba when the plot hasn’t ended?
The legendary Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, whose works remain an influence on U.S. military officers today, wrote in his famous 19th-century treatise “On War” that “war is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” A military general himself advising on how best to wage an armed conflict, Clausewitz nonetheless reminded his readers that the purpose of war is to achieve political goals, not to pursue violence as end to itself, or as a wholesale substitute for diplomacy.
Clausewitz’s words would have been well-heeded by the U.S. and Israel before the start of the current war in the Gaza Strip, which has now reached a painful yet predictable impasse. So far, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded, Israel now faces genocide charges at the International Court of Justice, and Hamas control is already returning to parts of Gaza previously declared conquered by Israel.
Source: Israel Wants Endless War. Joe Biden Is Going Along for the Ride.
Israel, cruel, murderous, and otherwise criminal behavior has become state policy. Let’s review the signs of this meltdown:
— Establishing an apartheid state to satisfy a racist ideological doctrine.
— Committing “probable” genocide in Gaza.
— Committing mass executions at, among other places, Gaza hospitals.
— Issuing orders to shoot unarmed Palestinian civilians.
— Torture and murder of Palestinian detainees.
— Inducing an artificial famine in Gaza.
— Blocking humanitarian aid.
— Systematic destruction of most of the infrastructure needed to sustain human life in the Gaza Strip.
— Committing increasing numbers of pogroms against Palestinian villages and towns on the West Bank.
Lapid was raised, as he tells us, “an Israeli patriot.” That translates into being raised in a controlled, closed-information environment. So his point of view is predictable, but also consequently, lacking in an unbiased historical context.
Israeli Jews have never been at risk of being kicked into the sea. The State of Israel has never been seriously in danger of losing a war. What has always been dubious is Israel’s status as a democracy.
What is putting Zionist Israel in real danger is the growing international doubts on this score — on the Zionist state’s similarity to an apartheid state like the one South Africa used to be. Such states have, one hopes, no long term future in the modern world.
Israel’s war of “self-defense” on the Palestinians is only showing the rest of the world Israel’s capacity for barbarism — behavior Lapid excuses because “things are complex.”
Source: Israel Descends Into Barbarism
In conclusion, we cannot say with certainty that we have disproved with undisputed direct evidence the uniform assertions of the Nazi leadership that they are not intentionally operating extermination camps to destroy Jews.
Source: How Biden’s state department would assess Hitler’s extermination camps – Pearls and Irritations
While their publicity is different, Israel’s actions are proof enough of them lying
Israeli and U.S. claims that civilian casualties in Gaza are the result of Hamas’ use of “human shields” have figured prominently in Israel’s defense of the skyrocketing death toll in the enclave, but a report by a local independent human rights group details the recent experiences of three boys in the West Bank, who say they were used to shield Israeli forces from potential harm during their raid on a refugee camp.
Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) on Monday released its interviews with three boys in Tulkarem refugee camp, which was attacked by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on May 6.
Source: ‘A War Crime’: Rights Group Details Israel’s Use of Children as Human Shields | Common Dreams
A deadly attack on a convoy of World Central Kitchen aid workers which killed 7 people last month was not a one-off occurrence, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday, but rather representative of a documented pattern in which Israel military forces have targeted relief personnel and infrastructure despite being informed of the exact locations of those operations.
Source: Israel’s Deadly Bombing of World Central Kitchen Convoy Was No Anomaly: Report | Common Dreams
These elites in politics, business, media, and church have brought shame on themselves and us. Either covertly or overtly they have supported or wilfully ignored the genocide. History will be a very harsh judge.
Source: Gaza genocide protests by students shames the elites in the Western world – Pearls and Irritations
On Monday, the IDF seized control of the border crossing between Egypt and Gaza near Rafah. That crossing has been used to bring most aid into Gaza since October 7. Since Israel gained control of the Rafah crossing, aid trucks have been unable to deliver food and other lifesaving assistance into Gaza.
Source: Aid Agencies Are Running Out of Food as Israel Expands Assault on Rafah – ScheerPost
This week, Biden admitted for the first time that Israeli forces have used U.S. bombs to kill civilians. In December he stated that Israel was losing support over its “indiscriminate bombing” in Gaza.
“For over 216 days, the world has watched Israel use weapons provided by the United States to commit mass atrocities and gross violations against Palestinians in Gaza. Civil society organizations, watchdogs, and former administration officials have documented and verified countless examples that have shown Israel’s assurances were never credible nor reliable,” said Mohammed Khader, action policy manager at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action. “The report is grossly incomplete and is far from holding Israel accountable for violating U.S. and international law.”
Israel stated there were 40,000 Hamas forces, and they have killed 14,000 or 33%. Then the balance is in 4 battalions of approx 6000 fighters each. If 20 battalions have been destroyed, that will make a total of 144,000 Hamas fighters in total which makes Israeli IDF maths a joke and the above photo evidence of a plausible genocidal action
Israeli forces have massed tanks and opened fire close to built-up areas of Rafah after US President Joe Biden vowed to withhold weapons from Israel if its forces launch a major invasion of the southern Gaza city.
Thousands of people – including some of our colleagues and partners – are fleeing after evacuation orders were issued for the eastern part of the city on Monday, yet there is nowhere safe for them to go, nor do areas which have been designated as ’safe zones’ have the infrastructure or capacity to receive them. Al-Mawasi, for example is already hugely overcrowded with more than 400,000 people living there, according to UNRWA.
Source: Rafah residents call on the world to act – » The Australian Independent Media Network
What does this mean for aid deliveries into Gaza?
The Gaza Strip is now sealed off from the rest of the region. Shipments of crucial aid supplies to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing have been halted, despite the UN warning of a looming famine.
Leaflets dropped on 600,000 children telling them to fuck off the Israeli adults were coming
this week into Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military moved swiftly to take control of the Palestinian side of the border crossing with Egypt. The takeover severed the only corridor connecting Palestinians in Gaza to land not controlled by Israel. In a gratuitous symbolic act, an Israeli tank bulldozed the “I love Gaza” monument greeting visitors as they cross into the territory from Egypt.
Source: Palestinian Kids in Rafah Can’t “Evacuate” Safely: UNICEF
The U.K. government has provided special diplomatic immunity to scores of foreign officials accused of committing serious violations of international law, Declassified has found.
Since 2013, the Foreign Office has granted over 50 “special mission” certificates to military and political figures from Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Rwanda and Iran.
Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz was granted this protection as recently as March, even after the country was put under investigation for genocide in Gaza.
It comes as the International Criminal Court looks poised to indict two names on Britain’s list: Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and IDF chief of staff Herzi Halevi.
A full-scale Israeli assault on the crowded southern Gaza city “would bring catastrophe on top of catastrophe for children.”
Source: Nearly All 600,000 Kids in Rafah ‘Injured, Sick, Malnourished,’ Says UNICEF | Common Dreams
Let me conclude by saying, I must admit, I find it incomprehensible that members of Congress are spending their time attacking the protestors rather than the Netanyahu government which brought about these protests and has created this horrific situation.
Source: On the Nationwide Student Protests and the Ongoing Humanitarian Disaster in Gaza – CounterPunch.org
An independent expert report lays out how Israel systematically violated U.S. and International Law in Gaza, concluding that Israel launched indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on civilian areas due to “extremely relaxed rules of engagement.”
Source: How Israel Violates International Law in Gaza: Expert Report – ScheerPost
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Palestinians have dug up more than 400 bodies from mass graves at two Gaza hospitals. Some have shown signs of torture and possible executions. The International Court of Justice had already issued a preliminary order against Israel after finding that its actions in Gaza might amount to genocide. So how will the world respond to this?
US/ Israeli Circus
The IDF conducted an investigation and discharged two junior officers from the unit, but no legal action was taken. This is just one episode in a list of human rights violations allegedly perpetrated by members of Netzah Yehuda on Palestinian civilians that have come under investigation by the US government.
Source: Netzah Yehuda: the ‘Violent and Aggressive’ IDF unit the US is Thinking of Sanctioning
Israel breaches US law
Officials with four US bureaus have told Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, that Israel’s assurances that it is using American weapons in compliance with international law are not “credible or reliable,” according to an internal State Department memo reviewed by Reuters.
Source: US implicated as Israeli impunity nears its end | The Electronic Intifada
Haaretz reported that the Israeli government is working under the assumption that arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and IDF Chief-of-Staff Herzi Halevi could be issued as soon as this week. The report said that the US is already engaged in an effort to block the warrants.
The US backed the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for Putin
Source: US Working To Prevent ICC Arrest Warrant for Netanyahu – ScheerPost
The regimes in Israel and Palestine both claim to be victims in the violence that engulfs them. Interpreting the situation through “victimhood” assists in understanding the human forces that arise from age-old conflicts and that continue to cause so much horrific suffering.
“This is something that forces us to call for an independent investigation of all the suspicions and all the circumstances because it indeed creates the impression that there might have been violations of international human rights committed,” the EU’s spokesman, Peter Stano, declared.
‘Might have been’? There was evidence even without the discovery of mass graves, but the international community prefers to rest on speculation in the face of evidence. With one phrase, proof has been turned into an assumption. Can the international community, at least, stop sensationalising the horror of mass graves and focus on the entire genocidal process which wants to eliminate all traces of Palestinians? No independent investigation will cancel the fact that genocide unfolded with the international community’s blessing and, as a result, so did the mass graves.
As Palestinians reckon with the genocide being inflicted on them and their prospects for national liberation, it does them a disservice to flatten their political diversity and complex ongoing debates.
Motivated by vengeance and retribution, Israel is a narcissistic society wallowing in its own injury and using that injury as an excuse for its monumental crimes against the Palestinian people. Palestinians find Israel cruel, callous, and horrifying, and their first thought is “protect me from Israel.” Is this the Israeli society that Palestinians should be expected to live with in dignity and with equal rights?
Whatever the future holds, Palestinians need to be able to work through their devastating predicament collectively, democratically, and without fear. To insist on that is to boost their right of self-determination.
On the other hand, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has thumbed his nose at the court since it indicted him last year. His movements, however, have been affected, since when he travels abroad he risks arrest. He had to cancel a trip to South Africa last summer because Pretoria is an ICC signatory and may have been constrained to arrest him.
Source: Are Netanyahu & Co. about to face Arrest Warrants from the Int’l Criminal Court for Gaza War Crimes?
So two things are being asserted:
1. Famine in Gaza is now unavoidable and will kill many civilian noncombatants even if more food aid starts getting in now.
2. The responsibility for this starvation of children, women and noncombatant males lies squarely with Israel, which is obstructing food aid deliveries.
That is all you need to know. These experts have never seen a situation so bad.
Source: USAID: Israel has already Imposed Unavoidable, Exponential Famine on Gaza outpacing Somalia’s
( Human Rights Watch ) – (Jerusalem) – The Israeli military either took part in or did not protect Palestinians from violent settler attacks in the West Bank that have displaced people from 20 communities and have entirely uprooted at least 7 communities since October 7, 2023, Human Rights Watch said today.
“This genocide is the desired goal of the West. No other explanation is remotely plausible.”
This is not the work of Netanyahu operating as a rogue. It is the result of the machinations of a professional political class across the Western world welded to zionism, with the supremacy of Israel as an article of fundamental belief.
“Somehow I don’t think the U.S. State Department would defer to Russia as a credible source to investigate itself if a mass grave were discovered in Ukrainian territory it had occupied,” said one legal expert.
Source: US Dodges Growing Calls for Probe of Mass Graves at Gaza Hospitals | Common Dreams
Since 1948, Israel has invoked the Holocaust to justify the forced expulsion of Arabs from Palestine to create a Jewish state, but the systematic blueprint for ethnic cleansing was being drawn up years earlier by a Zionist zealot named Yosef Weitz.
A mass grave created by the IDF has been uncovered at a Gaza hospital, where Palestinian civilians appear to have been the victims of a gruesome massacre.
The media misrepresents the united front of protesters as being antisemitic when it’s fundamentally not. Mass graves are less critical than amplifying the feelings of some pro-Israel supporters.
The Guardian reported that “hundreds of members of the teaching cohort at Columbia walked out in solidarity with the students who were arrested” while “students put protest tents back up in the middle of campus on Monday after they were torn down last week when more than 100 arrests were made.”
Yonah Lieberman, co-founder of IfNotNow, a Jewish-led U.S. group that organizes against Israel’s apartheid, declared: “Solidarity with these faculty members. Shame on establishment politicians and agitators who are smearing the anti-war protest at Columbia as anything other than what it is: a courageous stand for freedom and peace.”
Source: Columbia Faculty Walk Out Over Student Suspensions, Arrest for Gaza Protests – ScheerPost
U.S. law prohibits “arms transfers that risk facilitating or otherwise contributing to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law,” according to a White House memo issued in February.
The U.S. State Department has said repeatedly that it has not found Israel to be in violation of international law, a position that runs directly counter to the findings of leading humanitarian organizations and United Nations experts.
Source: IDF Kills 18 Kids Hours After House Votes Billions to Israel
Unless a ceasefire is called, it appears certain that Gaza’s hospitals and medical workers will be subjected to further attacks, that disease will spread and that more people will die from conditions that are both preventable and curable.
Source: No protection from illness in Gaza | The Electronic Intifada
$26 B Israel aid, $14.5 B Military $11.5 B free to do as they want Vs Gaza and Bidn threatening nonsense
The blanket suspension of student protesters casts “serious doubt on the University’s respect for the rule-of-law values that we teach,” 54 law professors wrote.
Source: Columbia Law School Faculty Condemn Administration for Mass Arrests
“Israeli authorities have to date not provided any supporting evidence nor responded to letters from UNRWA in March, and again in April, requesting the names and supporting evidence that would enable UNRWA to open an investigation.”
The groups are the Swedish Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, the Norwegian Chr Michelsen Institute, and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.
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