Many Australians will be ashamed that our nation has failed to speak and vote unequivocally at the United Nations during this crisis. As a nation we cannot continue to pretend that Israel has “a right to defend itself” while Palestine has no such right and is being systematically destroyed.
Biden can’t afford to antagonize Israel where else could he put his secret air base but in the 4th most armed state in the world.
With such a gulf between rhetoric and reality, the world’s most powerful cue card reader also made sure he would partake in the finest traditions of the IDF public relations effort, disputing the casualty lists released by the Hamas-run health ministry. “I have no notion that Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.” At a tag of over 7,000 dead and rising, that’s a considerable amount of expended innocence.
Should we be surprised? Why the US isn’t sanctioning Israel
Two months before Hamas attacked Israel, the Pentagon awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build U.S. troop facilities for a secret base it maintains deep within Israel’s Negev desert, just 20 miles from Gaza. Code-named “Site 512,” the longstanding U.S. base is a radar facility that monitors the skies for missile attacks on Israel.
A Forensic Report offered by Israel won’t be offered by Gaza to America’s “The Media Line” Agency at this point in time as there has been a shortage of personnel, equipment, and the piecing together of bodies in Gaza at the moment.
“Without fuel, there will be no water, no functioning hospitals and bakeries,” said the UNRWA. “Without fuel, aid will not reach those in desperate need. Without fuel, there will be no humanitarian assistance.”
‘First, the militant attack on Israeli civilians was unconscionable, inhumane and in violation of international law. Second, Israel’s collective punishment against Palestinian civilians and its actions in Gaza are unconscionable, inhumane and a violation of international law. And, third, one must address the context of occupation and apartheid in which this is unfolding if one is to maintain integrity and be able to plot a strategy going forward in which both Palestinians and Israelis can live in freedom and security.’
Now, let us conclude with those five Western leaders mentioned above. They are all leaders of democracies, and all of those democracies have histories ladened with the dead. France has Algeria; Italy has Libya and Ethiopia; the United Kingdom has most of the world; Germany has all of Europe; and the United States has all of Central and South America plus a good chunk of Asia. In all of these places, these standard holders of Western civilization have waged wars big and small, and killed so many people that it is a wonder there is such a thing as overpopulation. Thus, when we hear that all of them have pledged to stand firmly by Israel (a proven apartheid state), let us not be surprised—they are only being consistent.
Those that die of their injuries won’t be counted as victims of war
Entire Palestinian families massacred. Children slaughtered. Threats of a “second Nakba.” Israel’s war on Gaza isn’t a war on Hamas — it’s a war on Palestinian civilians.
Thousands are now suffering injury and death in Gaza. It was estimated that at least 500 children have died from Israeli air strikes on Gaza. This disproportionate response to Hamas may also have the purpose of compelling Palestinians to leave their ancestral land. Dispossession by whatever means is an ancient tactic, whether taking place in Ireland or in the expropriating of Indigenous land from Native Americans.
Since when do we praise Occupiers for brutal oppression? Words are used to confuse, obfuscate and detract from the truth of Palestine-Israel. Words such as terrorist, enemy, militants and murderous are often used to describe Palestinians who are, in essence, victims, freedom fighters, oppressed, occupied and ignored.
Israel has long preferred force to peace, segregation to equality. Its brutal air strikes on Gaza are a continuation of that policy — and will do nothing to bring peace and dignity to civilians on both sides.
The operation reflects a pattern of four wars and regular outbreaks of violence between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza since 2005, when Israel withdrew its military posts and forcibly removed 9,000 Israeli settlers from the territory.
A television crew with Sky News Arabia said that Israeli police assaulted them and damaged their equipment in the southern Israeli city of Asheklon, which had been hit by rockets fired from Gaza.
“The channel’s correspondent Firas Lutfi said Israeli police aimed rifles at his head, forced him to remove his clothes, confiscated the team’s phones, and made them leave the area under police escort,” the Committee to Protect Journalists said.
Shortly before the publication of this story, Al Jazeera reported that several journalists were killed and injured in an Israeli air raid targeting a residential tower west of Gaza City.
The shadowy leader of Hamas’ military wing, Mohammed Deif, said the assault, named “Operation Al-Aqsa Storm,” was in response to the 16-year blockade of Gaza, the Israeli occupation and a series of recent incidents that have brought Israeli-Palestinian tensions to a fever pitch.
Haggai Matar is an award-winning Israeli journalist and political activist, and is the executive director of +972 Magazine.
Contrary to what many Israelis are saying, and while the army was clearly caught completely off guard by this invasion, this is not a “unilateral” or “unprovoked” attack. The dread Israelis are feeling right now, myself included, is a sliver of what Palestinians have been feeling on a daily basis under the decades-long military regime in the West Bank, and under the siege and repeated assaults on Gaza. The responses we are hearing from many Israelis today — of people calling to “flatten Gaza,” that “these are savages, not people you can negotiate with,” “they are murdering whole families,” “there’s no room to talk with these people” — are exactly what I have heard occupied Palestinians say about Israelis countless times.
Yet I remember that everything that I am feeling now, which every Israeli must be sharing, has been the life experience of millions of Palestinians for far too long. The only solution, as it has always been, is to bring an end of apartheid, occupation, and siege, and promote a future based on justice and equality for all of us. It is not in spite of the horror that we have to change course — it is exactly because of it.
Israeli ordnance dropped on Gaza is an exceptionally perilous and noxious threat to the environment. Musleh, who participated in a study examining the destructive impact of Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza’s environment, noted that the bombings have contaminated crops and destroyed soil quality in agricultural areas.
“Rainfall causes the toxic components to seep into the groundwater,” Musleh said, noting that deep-buried bombs “pose a significant threat to the people and the environment.”
Back in Beit Hanoun, on Abu Jarad’s farm, the May 2023 bombing destroyed 50 olive trees and numerous seedlings, contaminating the soil with toxic components and harming the productivity of the farm.
“Trees can’t grow where the rockets bombed,” farmer Abu Jarad said. “When I run the tap water [which is from a well], I clearly see the gray and black polluted water.”
While the world’s attention is drawn away from the Middle East Israel’s Extremists take advantage
Bezalel Smotrich’s settlement plan is to annex the West Bank, increase settlements and bring an end to the Palestinian Authority. He works silently, away from the cameras and the Knesset podium. He is a professional politician who knows how to swim against the tide.
It is all but impossible, if you are a tourist, to enter Gaza. Entry via Israel is prohibited to everyone except Gaza residents, international aid workers, journalists, and diplomats; so too, under Israel’s watchful eye, is entry via Egypt. If you do not have a Gaza hawiyya (ID), do not expect to be allowed in.
three days of intense conflict have extracted a very heavy civilian toll in Gaza. The Palestinian Health Ministry reports at least 44 dead and over 350 civilians wounded. Reportedly among the dead were 15 Palestinian children, including five boys killed by a missile strike as they visited their grandfather’s grave.
Young girl among the dead as Israel launches wave of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip | The New Daily
A narrow strip of land where 2.3 million people live on a patch of 365 square kilometres, Gaza has been a constant point of conflict ever since Hamas took control.
The area has since been under blockade, with Israel and Egypt tightly restricting movement of people and goods in and out.
“We have not yet been able to reconstruct what Israel had destroyed a year ago. People didn’t have the chance to breathe, and here Israel is attacking again without any reason,” said Mansour Mohammad-Ahmed, 43, a farmer from central Gaza.
Human Rights Watch conducted a detailed study of military actions by Israel and the Hamas party-militia in Gaza and concluded that both committed war crimes during the Israeli assault on the Palestinian enclave this spring, but that deaths of Palestinians at Israeli hands were 21 times higher than Israeli deaths.Three of the Israeli airstrikes killed 62 Palestinians without any discernible military target in the area, wiping out entire families. HRW concludes that the seriousness of the war crimes justifies referral to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, a step Israel and the United States have resisted. The ICC nevertheless has determined that it has jurisdiction in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
A smashed sewing machine is one of the few things that Muhammad al-Madhoun has been able to retrieve from his workshop.He and his staff used to design and make clothes in the Shorouq tower. The clothes were sold – along with fashion accessories and cosmetics – in a store within the same building.Al-Madhoun had been hoping to do a brisk trade on 12 May.Eid al-Fitr – a holiday when many people don new clothes and give each other gifts – would begin that evening. In his own words, al-Madhoun wanted to “sell like crazy” as business had been badly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.“But on 12 May, we got a phone call that made us jump out of our skin,” he said. “We were told that a bunch of missiles would be fired at the building in 10 minutes.”Israel bombed and destroyed the Shorouq tower soon after that call.
“What the Israelis call ‘defense’ is not defense! We need the world to help us defend our families and homes against the occupation,” Ghabayne said. “We have been enduring this siege and occupation for a long time. We just wish that we Palestinians can finally live with a little peace. We don’t want wars, we don’t want occupation, we just want our families to live in a free Palestine.”
Days of Israeli strikes on Gaza and Hamas rocket attacks inside Israel have killed at least 232 Palestinians and 12 Israelis,wounded hundreds more leaving thousands injured and no health system to speak of.
The disproportion of the savage Israeli response to the tiny rockets Hamas has sent over the border can be easily seen when we consider that only a handful of Israelis have had their homes damaged and none have been made homeless. The ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths in the current conflict is on the order of 16 to 1. Disproportionate response and deliberately harming civilians are war crimes.
While Israel launched strikes against Gaza last week after Palestinians protested planned evictions in Jerusalem, a group chat of journalists in Canada was lighting up with notifications. They were frustrated with Canadian media coverage that painted the strikes without context and with a glaring absence of Palestinian voices. Some in the group, which included several Muslim journalists, shared frustrating experiences of advocating for nuanced coverage of international issues in their newsrooms. Some asked for advice on how to approach their editors about concerns with coverage, or lack thereof, of what was really going on in the region. So they drafted an open letter. “‘The Middle East is complicated. We need to hear both sides. Everyone has a lot of emotions about this.’ [sic] These are just some of the excuses news editors have provided to Canadian journalists trying to cover the escalating violence against Palestinians,” the letter read. “The lack of nuanced Canadian media coverage of forced expulsions and indiscriminate airstrikes over the last three days, which have so far killed at least 137 Palestinians, including 36 children, has been disappointing.” At the time of publ
At least 109 people were killed in Gaza, including 29 children, over the previous four days, Palestinian medical officials said. On Thursday alone, 52 Palestinians were killed in the enclave, the highest single-day figure since Monday.
Israel claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East. Yet its wanton, murderous bombing campaign in Gaza is slaughtering not just civilians, but scores of children.
The Palestinian health ministry said Monday that Israeli air strikes in Gaza killed nine people including three children—an attack that came the same day Israeli forces raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque and injured hundreds of Palestinians.
So all but a tiny number of Palestinians in Gaza do not take direct part in hostilities toward Israel. Half of the residents of Gaza are children. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz estimates Hamas to have 30,000 activists in its military wing. The smaller Islamic Jihad, which is not affiliated with Hamas and often defies it, is thought to have 6,000 fighters. So there are like 36,000 combatants in Gaza and nearly 2 million noncombatants, i.e. persons who do not take direct part in hostilities.
Police state America and apartheid Israel can never, never be trusted at any time, for any reasons, with no exceptions ever.
Negotiating with them on any issues is an act of futility and self-betrayal.
They operate by their own rules exclusively — extrajudicially, not lawfully, doing whatever they please, blaming victims for high crimes committed against them.
Last weekend, unprovoked Israeli terror-bombing killed and wounded Palestinians in Gaza, others in Damascus.
Terror-bombing Gaza continued for a second day. After both sides agreed to a ceasefire, Israel preemptively resumed terror-bombing.
At least 34 Palestinians were killed, largely civilians, including women and children, over 100 others injured — the latest example of Israeli Nuremberg-level high crimes, unpunished each time committed.
Rockets fired from Gaza at Israel virtually always are in response to Israeli aggression — self-defense when attacked, permitted under international law.
According to figures released by the United Nations this week, since the protests began last March 30th, Israeli forces have shot and killed 195 participants, including 41 children. More than 29,000 protesters were injured or wounded, more than half of them by Israeli gunfire. Some estimate even higher numbers.
Two Gazan journalists have been shot dead by Israeli forces since the Great Return March protests began in March. But journalists in the strip are also up against internal challenges, including censorship and lack of psychological support.
The General Federation of Palestinian Labor Unions reported, on Thursday, that the unemployment rate in the besieged Gaza Strip has doubled since Israel imposed a land, sea and air blockade 12 years ago.
The federation said, in a statement, that while the unemployment rate had reached 27.2% before the blockade, it has now reached 50%, including 283,000 workers considered unemployed in 2018.
The statement added that the poverty rate has reached 80%, indicating critical deterioration in the standard of living and economic performance in the Gaza Strip.
Israel has ordered that fuel deliveries into Gaza be halted, citing violence against Israeli soldiers and citizens by Palestinian protesters. It comes as six Palestinians were reportedly killed in clashes on Friday.
“As Israeli airstrikes persist and the living situation gravely worsens, Palestinians in Gaza are on the brink of a full-blown humanitarian crisis due to Israel’s 10-year siege. Everyday life in besieged Gaza is shaped by Israeli policy.”
According to Haaretz, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) intentionally targeted civilians “with the goal of causing the residents to understand the price of escalation and placing Hamas in a problematic situation.”
REALITY
While Israeli officials insisted that their large-scale attack on Gaza was in response to Hamas rocket fire, Haaretzreports that it was in fact the Israeli army that sparked the escalation by killing two Palestinians with tank fire, after they allegedly mistook a training exercise for an actual attack.
As Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, put it, the “current Israeli bombardment sequence in Gaza started when the Israeli military killed two Palestinians, lied about why, and later admitted to doing so just as a high level Palestinian delegation was on its way to Cairo to discuss longer term cease-fire.”
For over a year, my friends in Other Voice, comprised of residents of the towns and communities surrounding the Gaza Strip, have been protesting the government’s inability to find a viable solution for our situation. For more than a decade, members of Other Voice have been in touch with people in Gaza, and we believe it is possible to live in peace with our neighbors. Life there is unbearable, and without resolving the crisis in Gaza, our lives will continue to be a living hell.
These are the well-known yet forgotten facts: two million people in Gaza live on the verge of starvation, without running water, with limited hours of electricity a day, with a severe shortage of medicine and medical equipment, with rising unemployment, and massive destruction that has yet to be rehabilitated yet since the last war in 2014.
This is fertile ground for radical organizations that want to recruit hopeless youth in exchange for meager payments to their families. This is fertile ground for further entrenching hate toward Israel, which controls Gaza’s sea, land, and air. It is a fertile ground for the desperation that erupts in protests near the Israel-Gaza fence, where people fly incendiary kites and balloons, and attempt to cross the fence. All of those actions are backed by Hamas as well as various radical organizations.
Activist boat carrying 22 people from 16 different countries in protest against Israel’s decade-long blockade
Israeli warships on Sunday intercepted a Norwegian-flagged activist boat trying to break its more than decade-long blockade of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military and activists said.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition ship is named Al Awda (The Return) to underline the importance of this long-standing demand of Palestinians for the right to return to the lands they have been expelled from.
Palestinian pupils protest Israel’s blockade in Gaza city in February 2018. Ashraf Amra APA images
A nation ranked the eighth most powerful in the world has tightened the medieval siege it has imposed on a population of mainly refugees, half of them children, for more than a decade.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Monday that his government would close Gaza’s sole commercial crossing, preventing all exports from and imports to the territory, with the exception, at Israel’s discretion, of food and medicine.
Gaza fishermen, who already contend with Israeli navy fire while earning their bread, are now confined to sailing six nautical miles out to sea, rather than the nine that were permitted by Israel for the season.
The stated reason for the Israeli move is the ongoing rebellion among the two million Palestinians it has effectively imprisoned, in partnership with Egypt, in a densely populated strip of land roughly the size of Chicago.
Anthony Bourdain was the only major American celebrity who succeeded in depicting publicly the Palestinians as rational, caring human beings rather than as irrationally angry “inciters” to violence. He was the anti-Bernard Lewis. Lewis smeared the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims with the charge of “Islamic Rage” (as though large swathes of humankind are angry for no reason).
Bourdain said, “The world has visited many terrible things on the Palestinians, none more shameful than robbing them of their basic humanity.”
The Israel propaganda machine has even attempted to smear Razan al-Najjar, the 21-year-old nurse in Gaza who was shot dead by an Israeli-American sniper as she tended, unarmed and clearly wearing medic’s clothing, to injured Palestinians being shot with live ammunition by Israeli troops on the Gaza side of the border. Shooting Razan was a war crime. Razan was engaged in an act of unselfish bravery. We should all be so “complex.” That attempt to dehumanize one Palestinian is typical of the American and Israeli media in general. I can’t tell you how many “panels” on Palestine I’ve seen on CNN that included no Palestinian; often it was three middle aged males, and sometimes they lacked even religious diversity among them.
olddogthoughts 
You must be logged in to post a comment.