Tag: ethnic cleansing

Israel In Turmoil – IDF Says Can’t Defeat Hamas Quickly, Reservists Not Showing Up, West Bank Annexation Proceeding

The war on all fronts in Israel is affecting military capability and readiness reports local press. In addition, policy towards current Palestinian areas is attracting global negative attention.

The Netanyahu administration believes Gaza must be completely conquered to move forward and ensure Israeli security, and is looking to transport the current population to 3rd party countries and rebuild the area. President Trump seems to be involved in this agenda, as he published a video to such.

Israel is debating annexing parts of the West Bank in response to planned recognition of Palestine by Western countries, reports Axios.

Israeli officials warned Europe that Israel may annex West Bank land, with Ron Dermer saying it could extend to all of Area C (60%).

European officials warned annexation could bring EU sanctions; Arab officials said it could harm peace deals and halt Saudi normalization. Trump previously blocked Netanyahu from annexations in 2020. His administration’s current position remains undecided.

In addition, Israeli defense chiefs told Netanyahu that Gaza City’s takeover won’t defeat Hamas and urged a limited hostage deal instead, reports Haaretz. They warned an invasion could drag on for a year, cost many lives, and worsen Israel’s global standing. Some Likud ministers even likened Gaza to becoming “Israel’s Vietnam.”

Israel is struggling to get enough reservists to report for duty as it prepares a new Gaza City invasion.  A commando master sergeant said after 400 days of fighting — “People are dying for nothing… Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political survival,” reported Clash Report.

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The Price of Genocide: How US Funding Sustains an Unraveling Israeli Economy

In an important step toward the economic isolation of Israel due to its genocide in Gaza, Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global has decided to divest from yet more Israeli companies.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is the world’s largest, with total investments in Israel once estimated at $1.9 billion. The decision to divest was taken gradually but is consistent with the Norwegian government’s growing solidarity with Palestine and rising criticism of Israel.

Taking a leading role along with Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia, Norway has been a vocal European critic of the Israeli genocide and man-made famine in Gaza, actively contributing to the International Court of Justice’s investigation into the genocide, and formally recognizing the state of Palestine in May 2024. This diplomatic and legal stance, coupled with its financial divestment, represents a coherent and escalating effort to hold Israel accountable for the ongoing extermination of Palestinians.

The Israeli economy was already in a state of freefall even before the genocide. The initial collapse was related to the deep political instability in the country, a result of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist government’s attempt to co-opt the judicial system, thus compromising any semblance of “democracy” remaining in that country. This resulted in a significant lowering of investor confidence.

The war and genocide, beginning on October 7, 2023, only accelerated the crisis, pushing an already fragile economy to the brink. According to reports from the Israel Ministry of Finance, foreign direct investments in Israel fell by an estimated 28% in the first half of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.

Any supposed recovery in foreign investments, however, was deceptive. It was not the outcome of a global rallying to save Israel, but rather a consequence of a torrent of US funds pouring in to help Israel sustain both its economy and the genocide in Gaza, along with its other war fronts.

Israel’s Gross Domestic Product was estimated by the World Bank to be around $540 billion by the end of 2024. The war on Gaza has already taken a considerable bite out of Israel’s entire GDP. Estimates from Israel itself are complex, but all data points to the fact that the Israeli economy is suffering and will continue to suffer in the foreseeable future. Citing reports from the Bank of Israel and the Ministry of Finance, the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist reported in January 2025 that the cost of the Israeli war on Gaza had already reached more than $67.5 billion. That figure represented the costs of the war up to the end of 2024.

Keeping in mind that the ongoing war costs continue to rise exponentially, and with other consequences of the war – including divestments from the Israeli market by Norway and other countries – future projections for the Israeli economy look very grim. The Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics reported that the Israeli economy, already in a constant state of contraction, shrunk by another 3.5% in the period between April and June 2025.

This collapse is projected to continue, even with the unprecedented US financial backing of Tel Aviv. Indeed, without US help, the precarious Israeli economy would be in a much worse state. Though the US has always propped up Israel – with nearly $4 billion in aid annually – the US help for Israel in the last two years was the most generous and critical yet.

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A Moment Of Truth About Killing Gaza’s Children

“It doesn’t matter if they are children.”

That’s Ex-Israeli Intelligence Chief Aharon Haliva’s brutally honest assessment of the 50,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza. His remarks were recorded shortly after Israel reached that bloody milestone in March of this year. He resigned from the IDF’s Military Intelligence Directorate a year earlier in response to the security failures surrounding Hamas’ October 7th massacre.

That means he was not speaking officially.

But he was speaking candidly. And his blunt admission suggests something other than physical proximity to a suspected member Hamas is at play when the IDF kills underage non-combatants in bunches.

It’s been clear since the end of December 2023 that there is no meaningful restriction on the number of children Israel’s soldiers and pilots can kill, maim and orphan. The IDF set a heady pace during the five weeks, killing one child every ten minutes. Nearly nine thousand children were killed during the first eleven weeks of bombing.

On December 5, 2023, the IDF reassured the public (particularly in the US) it was only killing two civilians per Hamas fighter. The Times Of Israel also cited unnamed officials who claimed “the IDF was deploying high-tech mapping software to try to reduce noncombatant deaths.”

Those assurances didn’t match the reality reported by the BBC just the day before. It introduced the world to the acronym “WCNSF.” It’s shorthand for “Wounded Child No Surviving Family” and it’s assigned during triage because injured children without parents, siblings or legal guardians require specific attention and additional resources.

Obviously, Gazans do not have the infrastructure or resources to care for a generation of battle-scarred orphans. Imagine the trauma of being Injured, trapped and then pulled from a collapsed apartment building, only to discover your mother, father and siblings are dead. That’s exactly what happened to Noor, a 14 year-old Palestinian girl who became a WCNSF twenty months after the BBC’s story first aired:

On August 6, at around 3:00 a.m., an Israeli airstrike hit the apartment where my sister Somaiya, 35, her husband Anas, 35, and their daughters Noor, 14, Hoor, 13, and Sham, 9, were staying. The airstrike killed my sister’s family except for Noor, who survived with an arm fracture that required surgery. When Noor was admitted to the hospital on August 8 and rushed to the operating room, she called out to her parents, who were gone forever.

Her story comes via her uncle “Yousef,” a Gaza-based coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers). She does still have an uncle, though, which sets her apart from other WCNSFs who have lost their uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents.

One hundred thirty-two members of the Abu Naser family died on October 29, 2023, when the family-owned apartment building was struck by the IDF, which said the intended target was an “enemy spotter” on the roof. NPR asked for visual evidence to back up the claim. The IDF declined. Even if there was one spotter on the roof, does that warrant destroying an entire building? Is there another way to neutralize one spotter on the roof of a multi-family apartment building? Could bullets be used instead of bombs?

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US-Israel plan aims to empty Gaza of Palestinians, build AI-powered ‘smart cities’: Report

A postwar plan for Gaza circulating within President Donald Trump’s White House envisions demolishing the strip, confiscating all public land within it, paying small amounts to remove the entire population of more than 2 million Palestinians, and building “a gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub” on its ruins, The Washington Post reported on 31 August.

A 38-page prospectus seen by The Post envisions placing Gaza in a trust controlled by Israeli and American investors. The trust will then serve as the vehicle for the development of the strip into a high-tech commercial, residential, and tourist hub resembling Dubai.

The Post reports that the proposal to establish the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT Trust, was developed by some of the same Israelis who created the deadly, US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which was used as a pretext to block the delivery of food aid by the UN.

Financial planning for the GREAT Trust project was carried out by a team from the Boston Consulting Group, which also worked on establishing the GHF.

The plan calls for the “voluntary” departure of Gaza’s residents to another country, making them refugees, or herding them into “restricted, secured zones” amounting to concentration camps, within the strip.

In exchange for abandoning their land, Palestinians would be “offered a digital token by the trust in exchange for rights to redevelop their property,” The Post writes. The token could allegedly be used to “finance a new life elsewhere or eventually redeemed for an apartment in the new ”AI-powered smart cities'” to be built in Gaza.

“Each Palestinian who chooses to leave would be given a $5,000 cash payment and subsidies to cover four years of rent elsewhere, as well as a year of food,” The Post further wrote.

After beginning his term as president in January, Trump boasted that all Palestinians would be removed from Gaza, never to return, and the strip redeveloped as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

“I looked at a picture of Gaza, it’s like a massive demolition site,” Trump stated just two days after taking office.

“It’s got to be rebuilt in a different way.” Gaza, he said, was “a phenomenal location … on the sea, the best weather. Everything’s good. Some beautiful things can be done with it.”

Trump appointed Steve Witkoff, a Jewish real estate developer from New York, as his Special Envoy to the Middle East and point man for alleged negotiations with Hamas to reach a ceasefire.

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IDF: Gaza City declared as ‘dangerous combat zone,’ bodies of 2 hostages recovered

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have announced that Gaza City has been declared a “dangerous combat zone.”

On Friday, the IDF said that the pauses in fighting, previously implemented in certain parts of Gaza to allow humanitarian aid distribution, would no longer apply inside Gaza City as the offensive there has moved up.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that the body of Ilan Weiss, one of the 251 people kidnapped during Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, had been recovered within Gaza City.

Netanyahu added that the remains of a second hostage were also recovered from Gaza and are undergoing identification by forensic experts.

The IDF stressed that it will continue to facilitate humanitarian assistance throughout most of the enclave, but not in Gaza City, while simultaneously pressing forward with “offensive operations against terror groups in Gaza to protect Israeli civilians.”

The IDF once again urged civilians in Gaza City to evacuate southward.

Also on Friday, the IDF reported that soldiers operating in the Zeitoun district of Gaza City spotted “a group of terrorists hiding in a military compound about 100 meters away.”

According to the statement, Israeli forces “called in an Air Force aircraft, which struck the building and killed the terrorists.” 

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State Department Says It’s Denying Visas to Palestinian Officials Ahead of UN General Assembly

The Department of State denied visas to Palestinian leaders to attend the U.N. General Assembly in New York City next month and will revoke visas that were previously granted to those individuals.

A statement from a State Department spokesperson said that Secretary of State Marco Rubio is both denying and revoking visas from individuals who belong to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) ahead of the U.N. meeting, which will be held between Sept. 9 and 28.

“It is in our national security interests to hold the PLO and PA accountable for not complying with their commitments, and for undermining the prospects for peace,” the statement reads.

The department said that before either “can be considered partners for peace, they must consistently repudiate terrorism,” and that includes the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas that left more than 1,200 people dead and more than 250 hostages being taken into Gaza.

“The PA must also end its attempts to bypass negotiations through international lawfare campaigns” such as appealing to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), along with attempts to create the recognition of a Palestinian state, the statement added.

The State Department said those actions have “materially contributed to Hamas’s refusal to release its hostages, and to the breakdown of the Gaza ceasefire talks.”

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Even the media’s Gaza ‘investigations’ hide the real story of Israel’s atrocities

An investigation by CNN into Israel’s strike on the Nasser Hospital this week – an attack that killed more than 20 people, including emergency workers and five journalists – is a case study in how even well-intentioned journalism, ostensibly examining Israeli crimes, ends up concealing more than it reveals.

CNN’s detailed examination of footage of Monday’s strike on the hospital in Khan Younis found that Israel’s so-called “double-tap” actually involved three missiles.

The first strike hit a fourth-floor stairwell close to a hospital upper balcony. Then, 10 minutes later, as emergency crews and journalists scrambled to help the victims, a second and third strike hit precisely the same spot.

A munitions expert who examined the footage notes that the second and third missiles were almost certainly fired from two different tanks in very close succession.

As he and CNN conclude, that removes any last trace of doubt on whether the attack on the hospital was, as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims, “a tragic mishap”. Rather, it was a highly coordinated precision strike.

CNN reiterates a further and important contextual point that should obliterate Israel’s subsequent justification for its attack, following what Israel terms an “initial investigation”.

Let us note in passing that the Israeli military is pretending to investigate itself only to dampen the rare furore that has erupted over the strike, chiefly because the new atrocity was caught on camera and killed journalists working for major western news organisations. Israel has abandoned almost all of its previous investigations as soon as the western media could be provided with a fresher atrocity to report on. And Israel seems to have an endless production line of atrocities with which to distract them.

All too predictably, Israel’s “initial investigation” found a “Hamas” excuse.

According to the Israeli military, it hit Nasser Hospital’s stairwell because it had identified a camera there supposedly being used by Hamas.

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Washington stands alone at UN Security Council defending manmade famine in Gaza

All but one of the 15 members of the UN Security Council – the US – declared that the famine in Gaza is a “manmade crisis” and warned that using starvation as a weapon of war is prohibited under international law and constitutes a war crime, during a meeting on 27 August.

The 14 council members announced in a statement that they support an immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire, the release of all hostages, a significant surge of aid throughout Gaza, and for Israel to immediately and unconditionally lift all restrictions on relief deliveries.

“Famine in Gaza must be stopped immediately,” the statement read. “Time is of the essence. The humanitarian emergency must be addressed without delay and Israel must reverse course.”

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has officially declared famine in Gaza for the first time in a report issued on 22 August, and warned it will likely spread. 

The assessment found that 514,000 Palestinians – nearly a quarter of the enclave’s population – are already experiencing famine, a figure projected to rise to 641,000 by the end of September.

Israel demanded that the IPC retract its findings, dismissing them as false and biased. Tel Aviv claimed the assessment relied on partial data from Hamas and failed to consider what it called a recent influx of food.

At the UN Security Council meeting on Gaza, acting US Ambassador Dorothy Shea also attacked the IPC report, saying it “doesn’t pass the test on either.” 

She acknowledged that hunger is widespread and that humanitarian needs “must be met,” but framed addressing those needs as a US priority rather than endorsing the IPC’s declaration.

Since its creation in 2004, the IPC has declared famine only five times, most recently in Sudan last year. Its decision to apply the same classification to Gaza underscores the severity of the crisis.

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Video confirms Israeli troops fired three tank shells at Gaza’s Nasser Hospital

New video shows that a double-tap attack carried out by Israeli forces on a hospital in Gaza involved three separate munitions, one in the first strike and two in the second, CNN reported on 28 August.

The 25 August attack on Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Yunis in Gaza killed 22 people, including health workers, emergency response crews, and five journalists.

On the morning of the strike, Reuters journalist Hossam al-Masri was operating a live stream from an exterior stairwell on the top floor of the Nasser Hospital.

At 10:09 am, an Israeli munition targeted Masri, killing him and one other man.

Journalists and rescue workers rushed to the stairwell to look for survivors.

At 10:17 am, as rescue workers were carrying a body down the stairwell, a second and third Israeli strike, just milliseconds apart, targeted the stairwell, killing 20 more. 

“One shell hits the staircase where first responders had gathered; a fraction of a second later, another explodes at almost the same spot,” CNN wrote, describing the video.

N.R. Jenzen-Jones, director of Armament Research Services, said the munitions were likely fired by two separate tanks at the same time.

“The impact of two projectiles at nearly the exact same moment suggests two tanks may have fired on the target simultaneously,” Jenzen-Jones told CNN. “It’s hard to read too much into that, but it suggests a more carefully coordinated attack, rather than a single vehicle firing at a ‘target of opportunity.’ Modern tank guns, supported by the sensors and systems of modern tanks, are very precise.”

“In gruesome video filmed after the second and third strikes, scores of bodies can be seen on the staircase on both the top floor and the floor below,” CNN added.

The five journalists killed were Reuters journalist Hossam al-Masri, Al Jazeera cameraman Mohammad Salama, Independent Arabia and AP journalist Maryam Abu Daqqa, and NBC journalist Muath Abu Taha. 

Journalist Ahmad Abu Aziz later succumbed to his wounds, which were sustained in the same attack. 

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US-Israeli scheme for Lebanon includes forced displacement, turning Beirut suburb into ‘refugee camp’: Report

There is a new US plan for a “clampdown” on Beirut’s southern suburb, which could potentially see the area come under the control of a foreign or Arab security force, according to a report released by Al-Akhbar newspaper on 27 August. 

The southern suburb, a strong base of support for Hezbollah, was heavily bombarded by Israel during its brutal war on Lebanon last year. The suburb has been repeatedly hit by airstrikes since the ceasefire took effect. 

According to Al-Akhbar, the plan aims to “treat the southern suburbs just like Palestinian refugee camps.”

The 1969 Cairo Agreement for years allowed Palestinian groups a degree of autonomy over refugee camps in Lebanon. Despite the agreement being declared null in the 1980s, the status of the camps has remained more or less the same. 

However, Lebanese troops maintain checkpoints and a heavy presence around the camps. Palestinian camps in Lebanon have recently begun a symbolic disarmament process in line with the state’s efforts to monopolize control of weapons in the country. 

The Al-Akhbar report frames the new US plan as part of Washington’s broader goal of disarming Hezbollah, which the Lebanese government vowed to achieve in a cabinet session in early August. 

“The US proposal envisions checkpoints at all entrances [of the Beirut suburb], thorough searches of individuals and vehicles, and a tight control on goods, materials, and money flows. This mission would not be handed to the Lebanese army. Instead, the plan calls for a foreign security force, possibly an Arab one, to take on the task,” it said. 

Al-Akhbar also said the plan falls in line with US efforts to “empty the southern border region.”

A recent report by Axios said there is a US plan for a “Trump economic zone” near the southern border, aimed at preventing Hezbollah from re-establishing its presence there. The report said this would happen with the help of Gulf financing. 

During a press conference in Lebanon’s Presidential Palace on Tuesday, US envoy Tom Barrack confirmed plans for the economic zone. 

“We have to have money coming into the system. The money will come from the Gulf. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are partners and are willing to do that for the south (of Lebanon) if we’re asking a portion of the Lebanese community to give up their livelihood,” Barrack said. 

“We have 40,000 people that are being paid by Iran to fight. What are you gonna do with them? Take their weapon and say ‘by the way, good luck planting olive trees?’ It can’t happen. We have to help them,” he added, referring to Hezbollah members.

“We, all of us, the Gulf, the US, the Lebanese are all gonna act together to create an economic forum that is gonna produce a livelihood,” he went on to say.

This economic zone reportedly serves as an ethnic cleansing plan to remove residents of the southern border villages and prevent the return of those already displaced from there. 

Lebanese MP and former head of Lebanon’s General Security Directorate Jamil al-Sayyed said in a post last week that “Envoy Tom Barrack has received the Israeli response to his mediation over the south.”

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