Tag: ethnic cleansing

More US lawmakers publicly blame Israel for starvation, deaths in Gaza

U.S. lawmakers who may have been silent for the last 22 months are now speaking out publicly and blaming Israel for the starvation and famine conditions in the Gaza Strip.

On CBS’s Face the Nation this Sunday, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and long-time Israel supporter, slammed Jerusalem for Gaza’s growing humanitarian crisis, declaring that “Israel is starving Palestinians with impunity.” Gazans are “systematically being starved to death because Israel is refusing to allow in the humanitarian aid that people need to keep alive,” Shaheen said.

When Brennan asked whether Shaheen should have spoken out earlier she replied, “We should be doing more and we should have done more… not just democrats, but also Republicans.”

Going further than Shaheen, 14 U.S. lawmakers have called Israel’s war on Gaza a genocide to date, including 13 Democrats and one Republican.

Those lawmakers are Reps. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), Al Green (D-Tex.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Hank Johnson (D-Ga.), Summer Lee (D-Pa.), Betty McCollum (D-Minn.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.).

To that end, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — the first Republican to do so — has been front and center.

“I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to pay for genocide in a foreign country against a foreign people for a foreign war that I had nothing to do with,” Greene said on X on Saturday. “And I will not be silent about it.”

While stopping short of calling Israel’s actions a “genocide,” others have also turned up the heat and have called for halting U.S. weapons aid to Jerusalem until it reverses course.

“Israel’s actions in the conduct of the war in Gaza, especially its failure to address the unimaginable humanitarian crisis now unfolding, is an affront to human decency,” Rep. Angus King (I-Maine) declared in a statement at the end of last month. He said he would no longer support aid to Israel, “until there is a demonstrable change in the direction of Israeli policy.”

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The Palestine Chronicle Case: When Truth Becomes the Crime

The Palestine Chronicle is not a militant organization. It is a modest, independent publication, sustained by small donations and animated by a singular mission: to bear witness. It tells the untold stories of Palestine, documenting dispossession, resistance, and the endurance of a people condemned to silence. In a media landscape dominated by powerful conglomerates repeating the language of governments, the Chronicle insists on a journalism of proximity – grounded in daily lives, in the rubble of Gaza, in voices otherwise erased. Its true offense, in the eyes of its detractors, is not invention but truth.

At the heart of this endeavor stands Ramzy Baroud. His career is the antithesis of clandestine. For decades he has written, taught, and spoken in public, producing books translated into multiple languages, contributing columns to international publications, addressing audiences in universities and public forums across continents. He is not a shadowy figure; he is a man whose work has been consistent, transparent, and intellectually rigorous. His life is not untouched by the tragedy he describes: many members of his family were killed under Israeli bombardments. Yet while mainstream media rushed to amplify unproven allegations against him, they remained deaf to his personal grief. His tragedy was ignored, his integrity overlooked, his voice distorted – because his engagement is unbearable to those who would prefer silence.

A Crime of Conscience, Not of Law

He is an engaged journalist in the noblest sense: independent, lucid, unflinching. His so-called crime is not collusion with violence but fidelity to memory. That is why he is demonized – not for what he has done in law, but for what he represents in conscience. America, unable to silence Palestinian voices through censorship alone, now instrumentalizes its justice system to achieve by indictment what it failed to achieve by argument. Having harassed universities, intimidated students, and punished professors for their solidarity with Gaza, it turns the courtroom into a new battlefield. And Congress, captive to the whims of its Zionist masters, joins the manhunt, targeting a journalist for the sole offense of telling the truth of his people. As for the mainstream press, it chooses cowardice: ignoring his family’s suffering, ignoring the emptiness of the charges, while echoing the accusations of power as if they were evidence.

Law Twisted into Weapon

The complaint filed against Ramzy Baroud and the organization (People Media Project) that runs the Palestine Chronicle rests on the Alien Tort Statute, grotesquely overstretched to criminalize editorial decisions rather than acts of war. It alleges that by publishing articles from Abdallah Aljamal – described by Israel as a Hamas operative killed during a hostage rescue – the Chronicle “aided and abetted” terrorism. But here lies the first fissure: this characterization of Aljamal comes exclusively from Israeli military sources, themselves a belligerent party. It has never been independently verified. The claim that he was both a journalist and a Hamas operative remains an allegation, not an established fact. To treat it as judicial evidence is to replace proof with propaganda.

Even if – hypothetically – Aljamal had, at the demand of a militant group, harbored hostages, such a circumstance would not in itself render him culpable: what ordinary civilian in a war zone can refuse the command of militants under threat of force? And even if it occurred, how could Ramzy Baroud have known of it? Even taken at face value, the allegation collapses upon scrutiny. No evidence demonstrates that the Chronicle or its editor had actual knowledge of Aljamal’s supposed operational role, nor that modest freelance payments – if any at all – bore any causal nexus to hostage-taking. The federal judge, in February 2025, dismissed the original complaint precisely for lack of proof of knowledge or intent. The plaintiffs returned with an amended filing, repackaged in rhetoric and pathos, but still devoid of the material elements required under international law: actus reus (a substantial contribution to the crime) and mens rea (intent or knowledge).

To equate the publication of articles with material support for terrorism is not jurisprudence but a juridical contortion. It is the substitution of law by politics, the criminalization of journalism under the mask of counterterrorism. What is sought is not justice but intimidation – to cast suspicion on every Palestinian voice, to brand their words as weapons, their witness as crime.

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In defiance of voter base, DNC rejects resolution calling for Israel arms embargo

On Tuesday, Democratic National Committee (DNC) members at the party’s summer meetings rejected Resolution 18, which called for the recognition of a Palestinian state, a ceasefire in Gaza, an arms embargo, and a suspension of military aid to Israel.

Instead, members backed a status quo resolution introduced by DNC Chair Ken Martin, which simply called for more aid to be allowed into Gaza and a two-state solution. Despite the support, Martin went on to withdraw the resolution.

“I know that there are some who are interested in making changes today, but as we’ve seen, there’s divide in our party on this issue,” said Martin. “This is a moment that calls for shared dialog. It calls for shared advocacy, and that’s why I’ve decided today, at this moment, listening to the testimony and listening to people in our party, to withdraw my amendment and resolution.”

Martin says he will establish a task force “comprised of stakeholders on all sides of this” so that they can “bring solutions back to our party.”

Resolution 18 had faced opposition from lobby groups like Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI).

“Should it advance, it will further divide our Party, provide a gift to Republicans, and send a signal that will embolden Israel’s adversaries,” claimed DMFI president and CEO Brian Romick. “As we get closer to the midterms, Democrats need to be united, not continuing intra-party fights that don’t get us closer to taking back Congress.”

Polling has consistently shown that Democratic voters are, in fact, united on Israel. A majority of them oppose the genocide in Gaza and want the Israeli government held accountable for its actions in the region.

This month, YouGov and The Economist published a poll showing that 69% of Democrats believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. That includes 77% of Kamala Harris voters.

According to a June Quinnipiac survey, 12% of Democratic voters sympathize more with Israelis than Palestinians, while a July Gallup poll found that just 8% of Democratic voters support Israel’s military actions in Gaza and only 9% support Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

An April poll from Data for Progress and Zeteo showed that 71% of likely Democratic primary voters think the United States should end arms transfers to Israel until it stops its attacks on civilians and supports the rights of the Palestinians.

80% of likely Democratic primary voters under the age of 45 believe that military assistance to Israel should be restricted.

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How Western Media Helped Turn Israel’s Genocide Into ‘Fake News’

Israel’s justification for the mass slaughter of Gaza’s people and their starvation – now officially confirmed as a famine engineered by Israel – was built on a parade of easily discredited lies from the start: of beheaded infants, of babies in ovens, of mass rape.

It should surprise no one that Israel continued advancing similarly outrageous lies as it set about – as all genocidal regimes must do – dismantling the most basic infrastructure of survival for Gaza’s population.

It cut off humanitarian aid delivered by the United Nations agency Unrwa, and destroyed the enclave’s hospitals, while killing, jailing and torturing its medical personnel.

Israel claimed it had documents proving the UN was a front for Hamas – documents it never produced. Meanwhile, all 36 of Gaza’s hospitals have been attacked – attacks whose implicit rationale was that they were built atop Hamas “command and control centres”, though those centres have never been found.

Expanding this narrative, Israel rounded up and jailed the enclave’s leading doctors, who had been working round the clock to treat the endless tide of maimed men, women and children, as supposed “Hamas operatives” in disguise.

Also as any genocidal regime must do – especially one that wishes to uphold the pretence that it is a democracy with the world’s “most moral army” – Israel laboured tirelessly to cast a pall of darkness over its atrocities.

It blocked western journalists from accessing Gaza, and then picked off Palestinian journalists in the enclave one by one, until more than 200 had been assassinated, 11 in the past couple of weeks alone, including contributors to Middle East Eye and Al Jazeera. Others have been forced to flee to safety abroad.

The western press corps, which barely raised a peep about its exclusion for most of the past 22 months of genocide, collectively shrugged its shoulders as its colleagues in Gaza were slowly exterminated. Nothing to see here.

That was until this month, when Israel celebrated an air strike that killed six Palestinian journalists, including the entire five-person team covering Gaza City for Al Jazeera.

The strike’s timing was extremely fortuitous. Israel is calling up 60,000 troops for a last push into the remains of Gaza City, where around one million Palestinians – half of them children – are holed up, being starved to death.

Those civilians will either be killed or rounded up into a concentration camp Israel is calling a “humanitarian city”, close to the border with Egypt. There, they will await their ultimate expulsion – possibly to South Sudan, a failed state where Israel provided the arms that fuelled civil war and violence.

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World’s Largest Sovereign Wealth Fund Divests From Caterpillar Over IDF Rights Abuses

In the latest demonstration of growing Western opposition to Israel’s devastating campaign in Gaza, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund on Monday announced it is divesting from Caterpillar, over concerns that the Israel Defense Forces are using Caterpillar bulldozers to violate human rights. Norway’s $2 trillion wealth fund — which springs from the country’s oil wealth — held a 1.17% stake in the Texas-headquartered company, valued at $2.1 billion as of June 30. 

While Caterpillar’s products are classified as “construction” equipment, the IDF regularly uses massive, armored Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers to destroy homes and other civilian infrastructure — not only in Gaza, but the occupied West Bank as well.

Sovereign wealth funds are rare among the world’s democracies. In Norway, divestment decisions are largely driven by the recommendations of an independent ethics council established by the Finance Ministry. After evaluating Caterpillar, the Council on Ethics reported: 

“There is an unacceptable risk that Caterpillar is contributing to serious violation of the rights of individuals in situations of war or conflict… Bulldozers manufactured by Caterpillar are being used by Israeli authorities in the widespread unlawful destruction of Palestinian property...There is no doubt that Caterpillar’s products are being used to commit extensive and systematic violations of international humanitarian law. The company has also not implemented any measures to prevent such use.”

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Palestinian Boys Allege Sexual Assault, Torture by Israeli Jailers

Palestinian teenagers kidnapped and imprisoned by Israeli occupation forces during the genocidal war on Gaza accused their jailers of torturing and sexually assaulting them in a report published Saturday by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“They took me from the aid distribution site and transferred me to a hospital in Rafah, where I was interrogated for an hour,” one 16-year-old boy identified by his first name Sami, who was abducted on June 29, told ABC. “They stripped me and conducted a body search. Then, they loaded me into a jeep and transported me to a prison in Israel.”

“During the interrogations, they tortured us – handcuffing us, beating us with sticks, and using electric shocks,” the teen continued. “They did countless things to break us.”

“I was tortured for a week until I lost all sense of time and awareness,” Sami said. “They put me in a one-square-meter cell, where I spent the entire week. I never saw daylight, never stepped outside. They only came to deliver food.”

“They asked if I knew anyone from Hamas, and whether I had crossed over on October 7,” Sami recounted. “They kept pressing me about who I knew and who I had seen. I told them I was just walking down the street – I didn’t know anything.”

“They would beat me. Each person that talked to me would beat me,” the teen alleged. “I was handcuffed, blindfolded, and they put electricity in my legs.”

Mahmoud, age 17, said that his Israeli abductors “began hurling insults, cursing at us, and accusing us of being with Hamas.”

“They stripped us of our clothes and took us to Kerem Shalom, completely naked, with nothing,” he continued. “There, the beatings and torture began.”

“The Israeli women soldiers beat us. They stripped us and ‘played’ here, and here, and there,” Mahmoud said, indicating his genitals. “They beat us with sticks. Got on us while we were lying on the ground. We were handcuffed like that and naked.”

Mahmoud said his captors wanted to humiliate him and other teenage boys in custody, accusing the troops of taking nude photos of them and sending female soldiers to mock and touch his body – an especially shameful ordeal for Muslims.

“When I was released from prison, I had a breakdown,” Mahmoud said. “I felt mentally exhausted and deeply disgusted. What I witnessed – no one should ever have to see.”

“I was tortured, we are children,” he added. “What have we done?”

ABC published photographs showing signs of torture on the teens’ bodies, including from shackling.

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The War on Truth: Why Are Palestinian Journalists Being Systematically Erased?

The killing of seven Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza on August 10 has prompted verbal condemnations, yet has inspired little to no substantive action. This has become the predictable and horrifying trajectory of the international community’s response to the ongoing Israeli genocide.

By eliminating Palestinian journalists like Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qraiqeh, Israel has made a sinister statement that the genocide will spare no one. According to the monitoring website Shireen.ps, Israel has killed nearly 270 journalists since October 2023.

More journalists are likely to die covering the genocide of their own people in Gaza, especially since Israel has manufactured a convenient and easily deployed narrative that every Gazan journalist is simply a “terrorist”. This is the same cruel logic offered by numerous Israeli officials in the past, including Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who declared that “an entire nation” in Gaza “is responsible” for not having rebelled against Hamas, effectively stating that there are no innocent people in Gaza.

This Israeli discourse, which dehumanizes entire populations based on a vicious logic, is frequently repeated by officials who fear no accountability. Even Israeli diplomats, whose job in theory is to improve their country’s image internationally, frequently engage in this brutal ritual. In comments made in January 2024, Israeli ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, callously argued that “every school, every mosque, every second house has access to tunnels,” implying that all of Gaza is a valid military target.

This cruelty of language would be easily dismissed as mere rhetoric, except that Israel has, in fact, according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports, destroyed over 70% of Gaza’s infrastructure.

While extremist language is often used by politicians around the world, it is rare for the extremism of the language to so precisely mirror the extremism of the action itself. This makes Israeli political discourse a uniquely dangerous phenomenon.

There can be no military justification for the wholesale annihilation of an entire region. Yet again, the Israelis are not shying away from providing the political discourse that explains this unprecedented destruction. Former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin chillingly said, last May, that “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy… not a single Gazan child will be left there.”

But for the systematic destruction of a whole nation to succeed, it must include the deliberate targeting of its scientists, doctors, intellectuals, journalists, artists and poets. While children and women remain the largest categories of victims, many of those killed in deliberate assassinations appear to be targeted specifically to disorient Palestinian society, deprive it of societal leadership, and render the process of rebuilding Gaza impossible.

These figures powerfully illustrate this point: according to a report released by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, based on the latest satellite damage assessment conducted in July, 97% of Gaza’s educational facilities have been affected, with 91% in need of major repairs or full reconstruction. Additionally, hundreds of teachers and thousands of students have been killed.

But why is Israel so intent on killing those responsible for intellectual production? The answer is twofold: one unique to Gaza, and the other unique to the nature of Israel’s founding ideology, Zionism.

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Israel destroyed Gaza’s water plants. Now a deadly condition is spreading like wildfire

From the grey rubble of Gaza’s bombed water treatment plants, a rare and deadly paralytic disease has emerged that has brought a new crisis to a region already devastated by starvation and illness.

An unprecedented surge in acute flaccid paralysis (AFP) – a condition which causes a rapid onset of muscle weakness and paralysis – has seen 110 people diagnosed in the past three months. In previous years, Gaza saw just one or two cases of AFP per year.

The symptoms occur when the body’s immune system is triggered by certain viruses, in some cases causing it to attack its own nervous system. In Gaza, the rapid spread of water-borne infectious diseases has led to a striking rise in AFP cases.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and Dr Ahmed al-Farra, head of paediatrics at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, told The Independent thatIsrael’s destruction of Gaza’s vital water treatment plants is largely responsible for the spread of these diseases.

“To see 110 cases, this is incredible. This is an outbreak, it is alarming for us to see that number,” Dr Farra said, describing the situation as “one of the most challenging” medical incidents Gaza has seen since 2023.

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Israeli military uproots thousands of Palestinian olive trees in West Bank

The Israeli military has destroyed about 3,000 olive trees in a village near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, the head of the local council says, as Palestinians face a continued wave of violence across the territory in the shadow of Israel’s war on Gaza.

The Israeli military issued an order to uproot olive trees in a 0.27sq-km (0.1sq-mile) area in al-Mughayyir, a village of about 4,000 residents northeast of Ramallah.

The army justified the measure by saying the trees posed a “security threat” to a main Israeli settlement road that runs through the village’s lands.

The destruction was carried out as al-Mughayyir has been under lockdown since Thursday after an Israeli settler said he was shot at in the area.

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