Tag: ethnic cleansing

Google pockets $45m to fuel Netanyahu’s propaganda denying Gaza famine

Google is executing a $45-million advertising contract with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office to spread propaganda denying famine in Gaza, Drop Site News reported on 3 September.

The six-month campaign, launched in June, is run through Google’s YouTube and its Display & Video 360 service, and is described in the government contract as hasbara. 

The details were disclosed in official Israeli government contract filings from the state advertising bureau, Lapam, which reports directly to Netanyahu’s office.

A video produced by Israel’s Foreign Ministry declaring “There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie” was placed on YouTube in late August, gaining over six million views. 

Its wide reach was fueled by the ongoing ad campaign coordinated by Lapam.

Records show $3 million was also spent on ads with X, while the Israeli digital advertising company Outbrain (that recently acquired the French company Teads) is set to receive about $2.1 million. Other ads accuse the UN of “deliberate sabotage” of aid deliveries and promote the US-backed, deadly Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) aid scheme. 

Campaigns have also sought to discredit the Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF), which documents Israeli war crimes, labeling it tied to “extremist ideologies.”

The propaganda drive comes as famine spreads across Gaza. In late August, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) officially declared famine in Gaza City and its surrounding towns for the first time, and warned that Deir al-Balah and Khan Yunis were next by the end of September. By then, a total of over 640,000 people will face “catastrophic levels” of food insecurity – classified as IPC Phase 5 – across the strip.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Friday that the strip faced “a descent into a massive famine.” The Health Ministry in Gaza reports at least 367 deaths from hunger and malnutrition, including 131 children, since October 2023.

Despite these figures, Israeli officials have openly called for starvation as policy. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “No water, no electricity, they can die of hunger or surrender.” 

Israeli Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu declared that Palestinians “need to starve” and should flee under an emigration plan.

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Israeli intelligence data: Militants account for only 1 in 4 Gaza detainees

Only one in four Palestinians captured by Israeli forces in Gaza were identified by the army as militants, with civilians making up the vast majority of “unlawful combatants” detained in Israeli prisons since October 7, a joint investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian can reveal.  

This is what emerges from figures obtained from a classified database managed by Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate (known by the Hebrew acronym “Aman”), in addition to official Israeli prison statistics disclosed in legal proceedings. Testimonies from former Palestinian detainees and Israeli soldiers who served in detention facilities further indicate that Israel has knowingly abducted civilians en masse and held them for long periods in appalling conditions.

Detention figures cited by the state in May in response to High Court petitions revealed that a total of 6,000 Palestinians had been arrested in Gaza during the first 19 months of the war and held in Israel under a law for incarcerating “unlawful combatants” — a legal tool that allows Israel to imprison people indefinitely, without charge or trial, if there are “reasonable grounds” to believe they participated in “hostile activities against the State of Israel” or that they are a member of a group that has.

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‘Gaza City occupation may not affect Hamas’: Israeli army warns Tel Aviv

The Israeli military has expressed doubt over how effective the planned assault to occupy Gaza City will be in terms of forcing Hamas into submission, according to Israel’s Broadcasting Corporation (KAN). 

KAN reported on 4 September that an army representative addressed a closed-door panel of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee a day earlier. 

“Why would the occupation of Gaza City cause Hamas to budge at all? I did not say it would move Hamas; it is not certain at all. The city has symbolic significance,” he told the committee, according to KAN. 

The panel was also informed by the military representative that around 800,000 Palestinians reside in Gaza City. 

Israel has declared Gaza City a “dangerous combat zone” and has already initiated plans to forcibly displace the nearly one million residents. 

Previous reports have revealed heavy tensions between the government and Israeli army chief Eyal Zamir, who went to great lengths pressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the danger the occupation plan poses to the captives held by the resistance in Gaza.

Zamir also told Netanyahu that the operation will put further unnecessary strain on Israeli troops.

The army chief plans to tell the government that “there will be no choice but to impose military rule on all of Gaza from November,” Channel 12 reported on 3 September. Zamir has previously called on the government to accept an exchange and ceasefire deal.

On Wednesday, Hamas said it was willing “to enter into a comprehensive deal in which all enemy prisoners held by the resistance will be freed in exchange for an agreed-upon number of Palestinian prisoners held by the occupation.”

“This agreement will end the war on the Gaza Strip, result in the withdrawal of all occupation forces from the entire Gaza Strip, open the border crossings to allow the entry of all the Gaza Strip’s necessities, and start the process of rebuilding,” it added. “The Hamas movement is still awaiting the response of the Zionist enemy to the proposal.”

Hamas had said in a statement on 18 August that it accepted the latest Egyptian proposal for a ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal in the Gaza Strip.

However, Israel rejected the deal and insisted on going ahead with the occupation of Gaza City. 

“This is more spin by Hamas, containing nothing new,” Netanyahu’s office said in reference to Hamas’s statement. 

The premier’s office added that the war can end immediately if five conditions are met – the release of all captives, the disarmament of Hamas, the demilitarization of Gaza, Israeli security control in Gaza, and “the establishment of an alternative civilian administration that does not indoctrinate for terror, does not dispatch terror, and does not threaten Israel.”

A leaked Israeli army document obtained by Hebrew media has concluded that Operation Gideon’s Chariots, launched by the military in Gaza earlier this year, failed to achieve its goals. 

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Israel Systematically Flattens High-Rise Buildings In Gaza City

The war on the ‘high rises’ has begun, as shocking footage shows Israel’s military has begun pulling down buildings one by one as part of its operation to take over Gaza City, through powerful missile strikes at their base.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has sought to justify its actions by saying Hamas and Islamic Jihad hide in the buildings, as use them to organize assaults on Israeli troops.

Widely circulating images show that large buildings in the city center have been completely collapsed into their own footprint.

And on Friday, Al Jazeera reports that more are being targeted, amid IDF warnings issues to residents of certain buildings, saying that must immediately evacuate the premises.

“In the past half an hour, the Israeli army has issued a forced evacuation order for people living in Gaza City’s largest residential building,” according to Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud.

“We’re talking about a 16-storey building that houses at least 65 residential apartments and lots of department stores at the bottom of this residential tower,” Mahmoud described.

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Gaza’s Looming Cancer Epidemic

A week after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, a large explosion incinerated a parking lot near the busy Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, killing more than 470 people. It was a horrifying, chaotic scene. Burnt clothing was strewn about, scorched vehicles piled atop one another, and charred buildings surrounded the impact zone. Israel claimed the blast was caused by an errant rocket fired by Palestinian extremists, but an investigation by Forensic Architecture later indicated that the missile was most likely launched from Israel, not from inside Gaza.

In those first days of the onslaught, it wasn’t yet clear that wiping out Gaza’s entire healthcare system could conceivably be part of the Israeli plan. After all, it’s well known that purposely bombing or otherwise destroying hospitals violates the Geneva Conventions and is a war crime, so there was still some hope that the explosion at Al-Ahli was accidental. And that, of course, would be the narrative that Israeli authorities would continue to push over the nearly two years of death and misery that followed.

A month into Israel’s Gaza offensive, however, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would raid the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, dismantling its dialysis center with no explanation as to why such life-saving medical equipment would be targeted. (Not even Israel was contending that Hamas was having kidney problems.) Then, in December 2023, Al-Awda Hospital, also in northern Gaza, was hit, while at least one doctor was shot by Israeli snipers stationed outside it. As unnerving as such news stories were, the most gruesome footage released at the time came from Al-Nasr children’s hospital, where infants were found dead and decomposing in an empty ICU ward. Evacuation orders had been given and the medical staff had fled, unable to take the babies with them.

For those monitoring such events, a deadly pattern was beginning to emerge, and Israel’s excuses for its malevolent behavior were already losing credibility.

Shortly after Israel issued warnings to evacuate the Al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City in mid-January 2024, its troops launched rockets at the building, destroying what remained of its functioning medical equipment. Following that attack, ever more clinics were also targeted by Israeli forces. A Jordan Field Hospital was shelled that January and again this past August. An air strike hit Yafa hospital early in December 2023. The Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis in southern Gaza was also damaged last May and again this August, when the hospital and an ambulance were struck, killing 20, including five journalists.

While human-rights groups like the International Criminal Court, the United Nations, and the Red Cross have condemned Israel for such attacks, its forces have continued to decimate medical facilities and aid sites. At the same time, Israeli authorities claimed that they were only targeting Hamas command centers and weapons storage facilities.

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NYT Buries News That Experts on Genocide Say Israel Is Committing It

The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a resolution on August 31 declaring that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza, with 86% of voting members in agreement.

The declaration by the group, described as “the world’s biggest academic association of genocide scholars” (Reuters, 9/1/25), was widely seen as significant news. Prominent US media sources like CNN (9/1/25), NBC (9/1/25), ABC (9/2/25), CBS (9/3/25), PBS (9/1/25), NPR (9/2/25), AP (9/2/25), Time (9/1/25) and Newsweek (9/1/25) published stories on the IAGS resolution. They bore headlines like the Washington Post‘s “Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza, Leading Scholars’ Association Says” (9/1/25). So, too, did numerous international news sources, with the BBC (9/1/25) running the headline “Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza, World’s Leading Experts Say.”

But the New York Times (9/1/25), which has repeatedly come under fire for its bias against Palestinians during Israel’s two-year-long rampage in Gaza, buried the news in the 31st paragraph of a story headlined “Israel’s Push for a Permanent Gaza Deal May Mean a Longer War, Experts Say.” The article immediately followed the brief mention of the IAGS resolution with a response from the Israeli government that called it an “an embarrassment to the legal profession,” and “entirely based on Hamas’s campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others.”

The Times‘ treatment as an afterthought of the confirmation by genocide scholars of an ongoing genocide in Gaza recalls the paper’s real-time coverage of the Nazi Holocaust, which often relegated news of mass death to its back pages, and sometimes to the last paragraphs of unrelated stories (Extra!, Summer/89). Those pieces rarely quoted the genocidaires justifying their atrocities, however.

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Israel’s Attacks on Seed Banks Destroy Millennia of Palestinian Cultural Heritage

This summer, Israeli bulldozers rolled through the West Bank city of Hebron with ruthless efficiency, targeting not soldiers or weapons caches, but something deeply vulnerable: Palestine’s only surviving national seed bank.

Within hours of the bulldozers’ arrival on July 31, 2025, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees’ seed multiplication facility lay in ruins — its propagation materials scattered, its infrastructure demolished, and with it, generations of Palestinian agricultural heritage reduced to rubble.

What happened in Hebron fits the legal definition of ecocide — the deliberate destruction of ecosystems to undermine human survival. The Union of Agricultural Work Committees condemned this attack as “an act of erasure intended to sever the generational ties between farmers and their land.”

When ecocide operates within the context of genocide, as it does in Palestine, it functions as a temporal weapon that extends the logic of elimination far beyond the present moment, reaching into an indefinite future where recovery becomes systematically impossible.

The Union of Agricultural Work Committees’ seed facility housed over 70 baladi (heirloom) seed varieties, many of which no longer exist elsewhere, that Palestinian farmers had cultivated and perfected over centuries. These seeds — for rare, indigenous, hardy strains of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, and others collected from local farms in the West Bank and Gaza — weren’t just any seeds. They were living libraries of Palestinian agricultural knowledge, carrying genetic traits for drought resistance, soil adaptation, and nutritional density that commercial varieties lack.

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World’s Largest Group Of Genocide Scholars Finds Israel Guilty

The world’s largest group of genocide scholars has overwhelmingly approved a resolution asserting that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide. “The government of Israel has engaged in systematic and widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, including indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against the civilians and civilian infrastructure,” said the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), joining a growing list of institutions and governments who’ve reached the same conclusion. 

About a quarter of IAGS members participated in the balloting, with 86% voting to approve the resolution. IAGS second vice-president and University of the Bundeswehr Munich professor Timothy Williams told the Financial Times that “the association believes there is considerable merit to the largest group of genocide scholars saying: ‘Yes, we do believe this is genocide’.” As defined under the 1948 Genocide Convention, the term applies to actions taken with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” 

Israel’s foreign ministry swiftly condemned the group of academics, saying their “disgraceful” resolution is “entirely based on Hamas’ campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others…IAGS has set a historic precedent – for the first time, ‘Genocide Scholars’ accuse the very victim of genocide.” 

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Israeli army commander visited Nova festival moments before Hamas attack, took ‘no action’ despite warnings

A top Israeli military commander visited the site of the Nova music festival that came under attack on 7 October, but took “no preemptive action” despite receiving prior intelligence warnings, Haaretz reported on 2 September. 

Lieutenant Colonel Haim Cohen, commander of the Gaza Division’s Northern Brigade, “arrived at the site after receiving prior intelligence warnings, but he took no preemptive action,” the Haaretz report said. 

Cohen saw the huge crowds at the music festival and noted that only a small number of police officers were present, according to the report. But he told army investigators he had no information that would have forced him to act differently or disperse the festival. 

Haaretz said it is unclear exactly what kind of intelligence information Cohen was informed of. 

“It was a mistake not to consider canceling or dispersing the festival during the divisional assessment held that night,” says an army investigation obtained by the Israeli newspaper. 

The investigation also said that Cohen made a miscalculation when he did not assign a military force to the site, given the size of the crowd, the timing, and the location.

Cohen arrived at the site of the Nova festival at 5:30 am, about an hour before the launch of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Cohen was updated on the intelligence that was arriving as he was driving to the site. 

Throughout the night before the Hamas operation began, the Israeli army, military intelligence, and Shin Bet were receiving signs of “unusual” Hamas activity, as has been previously reported. 

Cohen “saw a force of the Yamam counterterrorism unit and another police vehicle positioned on Route 232,” but told army investigators that the increased police presence reassured him that the event was secure. However, the probe revealed only 50 officers were there, and that several had left by the time the attack started. 

“Even after Cohen arrived at the division’s base, and despite escalating alerts, he did not mention the festival in situation briefings nor change the military’s preparedness to secure it.” 

“Most sector forces were unaware it was taking place and therefore lacked knowledge … This information, however, was fully available to Cohen and fresh in his memory,” the report went on to say. 

Several reports have emerged since the war in Gaza began, revealing that Israeli authorities ignored multiple warnings about Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

Just weeks after resistance fighters flooded into the Israeli settlements surrounding Gaza, the Times of Israel cited eyewitness accounts from soldiers in Israel’s Combat Intelligence Corps, which is responsible for surveilling the Gaza border. 

They said warnings of Hamas training for such an attack were issued at least three months prior.

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IDF drones mistakenly drop grenades close to UNIFIL troops

The IDF mistakenly sent drones to drop grenades close to UNIFIL forces in southern Lebanon, believing they were Hezbollah forces, it said Wednesday afternoon.

Earlier on Wednesday, UNIFIL said Israeli drones had dropped four grenades close to its peacekeepers who were working on Tuesday morning to clear roadblocks that were hindering access to a UN position.

“This is one of the most serious attacks on UNIFIL personnel and assets since the cessation of hostilities agreement of last November,” UNIFIL said.

One grenade impacted within 20 meters and three within approximately 100 meters of UN personnel and vehicles, it said.

The IDF had been informed in advance of UNIFIL’s road clearance work in the area, southeast of the village of Marwahin, UNIFIL said.

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