Tag: ethnic cleansing

Israeli army ethnically cleanses half of Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza: Schools burned, men kidnapped

Israel is in its third week of ethnically cleansing northern Gaza, particularly around the Jabalia refugee camp. And according to reports, about half of all the Palestinians there have been removed as Israeli soldiers burn down schools and kidnap people.

At the same time that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are launching airstrikes on the region, ground forces are going door to door looking for starving, unarmed Palestinians to forcibly remove from their homes and send elsewhere.

Heavy airstrikes and artillery shelling are destroying entire homes and buildings where the Palestinians are sheltering. Increasingly more displaced families have nowhere to go while IDF soldiers knock down schools, homes and other facilities to prevent the Palestinians from returning.

After burning down or leveling the structures, the IDF is forcing whoever is still alive to head south. Many of the refugees who obey end up dead anyway as Israel then proceeds to shoot and kill them for no apparent reason while they are fleeing.

Some of the refugees are disobeying the orders and heading west of Jabalia instead of south to a place called Beit Lahia. Others are trying to flee to Gaza City. No matter where they try to go, the Palestinians are being killed left and right.

“This is a genocide,” said a resident of north Gaza named Hasan. “They’re starving people, blockading people. There are still tens of thousands of people here in Jabalia.”

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NATO Disgraces Itself in Azerbaijan

Two years ago this October, Azerbaijan committed what had been, until the Israeli rampage of the past year, among the most egregious cases of ethic cleaning since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, when in the matter of days its armed forces took control of the Armenian enclave Nagorno Karabakh in which 120,000 Christian Armenians were forced to flee the land which had been their home for centuries. 

In the months that followed, Azerbaijan’s dictator, Ilham Aliyev, claimed that “present-day Armenia is our land.” An agreement reached between Armenia’s U.S.-backed Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Aliyev ceded four Armenian villages to Azerbaijan the following April.

Fast forward to the last week of September, when the U.S. ambassador to Armenia, Kristina Kvien, attended a memorial service the Armenians who died fighting Azerbaijan. To mark the occasion, the U.S. embassy issued a statement that read, in part, that “the United States is committed to working with the Armenian government to assist those who have lost their homes and livelihood.”

Yet such sentiments are difficult to take seriously when roughly a week later NATO sent a high-level delegation to Baku to kiss Aliyev’s ring.  According the contemporaneous reporting from Sergei Melkonian, a Research Fellow at the Applied Policy Research Institute of Armenia, “In just four days of October this year, Azerbaijan held two high-level meetings with NATO representatives,” including meetings between the chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Azerbaijan, Karim Valiyev, and the director general of the NATO International Military Staff, Lieutenant General Janusz Adamczak, in which they discussed, according to a statement released by NATO, “a new framework for cooperation with Azerbaijan with a special focus on defense education, interoperability, resilience and defense capacity building.” That a Pole like Adamczak finds himself, on behalf of an American-led alliance, supporting Islamist aggression against a Christian nation shows just how deep the rot goes in the West. 

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Israel to Establish Jewish-Only Settlements in Northern Gaza as Annexation Moves Forward

Israel has set its sights on a potential annexation of northern Gaza, framing it as a “closed military zone.” This comes one year after the same area endured an all-out ground assault. Coupled with Israel’s newly established “buffer zone” and the occupation of two corridors in central and southern Gaza, the territory is being gradually eroded.

In late October 2023, Israel launched its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip, concentrating primarily on the northern portion of the besieged enclave. At the same time, Israel issued demands for medical staff at all major hospitals to abandon their facilities.

It then released CGI imagery depicting a “Hamas headquarters” under al-Shifa Hospital, which was later debunked after the medical facility was bombed and invaded. It had also ordered some 1.1 million civilians to flee towards the South, where “safe zones” were said to be located. Today, Israel has again shifted its focus onto northern Gaza, ordering the civilian population to flee and signaling to the remaining staff of the Kamal Adwan, Indonesian and Al-Awda Hospitals that they should immediately evacuate or be subjected to consequences of another military assault.

Israel has now coupled its invasion of the Jabalia Refugee Camp with speculation that the government is moving forward with a plan reportedly considered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in secret meetings back in September. This plan, publicly supported by certain Israeli members of the Knesset and former military officials, involves seizing northern Gaza and declaring it a “closed military zone.”

According to Haaretz, Netanyahu’s administration is now preparing to enter the “next phase” of its war on Gaza, which could result in the de facto annexation of the area north of the Netzarim Corridor. This corridor, which has been occupied by the Israeli military, effectively splits the Gaza Strip in half. It played a crucial role in the breakdown of previous ceasefire talks, as Israel refused to agree to a permanent withdrawal from the area.

The possibility of allowing Jewish settlers to establish colonies in northern Gaza is also being discussed. Since January, the settler movement has held conferences promoting this topic, signaling growing support for the idea.

Additionally, on May 6, after Hamas agreed to a ceasefire proposal, the Israeli military immediately invaded the Rafah Crossing in southern Gaza. The invasion continued until Israel’s forces occupied the entire Palestine-Egypt border area, known as the Philadelphia Corridor. This, along with the destruction of infrastructure and agricultural land on Gaza’s outskirts over the past year to create a new “buffer zone,” has effectively reduced Gaza into an even smaller enclave. Over 1.5 million people are now crammed into overcrowded, unsanitary tent cities.

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Investigation reveals Israeli troops committing first ever ‘live streamed genocide’

Al Jazeera has released a new documentary, available on YouTube, detailing Israeli war crimes and human rights violations in Gaza, based on videos filmed and posted on social media by soldiers themselves.

“We live in an era of technology, and this has been described as the first livestreamed genocide in history,” Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa told Al Jazeera’s investigative unit (I-Unit).

Since the start of Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza last October, Israeli soldiers have posted thousands of videos and photos on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

Rodney Dixon, an international law expert featured in the film, says the videos are “a treasure trove which you very seldom come across … something which I think prosecutors will be licking their lips at.”

The film also includes information collected by Al Jazeera journalists working on the ground in Gaza, as well as Israeli military drone footage. It is unclear how Al Jazeera obtained the drone footage.

The videos show evidence of the Israeli army’s murder of unarmed civilians, wanton destruction, torture of detainees, and use of human shields in Gaza.

Many videos showed Israeli soldiers using explosives to demolish residential buildings and homes.

“The fact that they’ve been able to rig these buildings up with explosives shows very clearly that there’s no current threat from those buildings,” Charlie Herbert, a retired major general in the British Army and researcher for the project, told Al Jazeera.

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Kosovo’s Unknown Genocide

June 9th marked a little-known anniversary. On that day in 1999, Yugoslavia’s army withdrew from Kosovo, following 78 consecutive days of NATO bombing. In return for ceasing its criminal campaign, the US-led military alliance was permitted unimpeded, unchallenged freedom of movement and action throughout the province. The Yugoslav military’s exit instantly opened the floodgates for a genocide of the province’s Serb population to erupt, under the watchful eye of NATO and UN peacekeepers. To this day, the region lives with the cataclysm’s destructive consequences.

NATO’s March – June 1999 aerial assault on Yugoslavia was ostensibly waged to prevent an impending mass slaughter of Albanians in Kosovo. Yet, as a May 2000 British parliamentary committee concluded, all purported abuses of Albanian citizens occurred after the bombing began. Moreover, the alliance’s intervention was found to have actively encouraged Slobodan Milosevic to aggressively neutralise the CIA and MI6-backed, civilian-targeting narcoterrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), with which Belgrade was truly at war.

The KLA had for years by this point sought to create an ethnically pure Kosovo via insurrectionary violence, in service of constructing “Greater Albania” – an irredentist, Nazi-inspired entity comprising territory in modern-day Greece, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Yugoslavia’s military departing the province at last provided the Al Qaeda-linked terror group with a grand window of opportunity to achieve that mephitic goal. There was a gap of several days before thousands of NATO and UN “peacekeepers” – known as KFOR – arrived in Kosovo, on June 12th 1999.

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Kamala Harris Continues Support for Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza

Over 40,000 dead with thousands more buried under the rubble from tens of thousands of US bombs in Gaza has made no dent on Kamala Harris’s conscience. Nor has a death toll predicted by the UK medical journal Lancet that upwards of 185,000 will soon be dead from disease, starvation to go along with endless US weapons of civilian destruction in the most grisly genocidal ethnic cleansing this century.

Of course, Harris has more sense than to cheer on the Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Here campaign frames her support this way: “Harris has been clear: she will always work to ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups”. She claims to be troubled by the suffering caused by endless US bombs there, but refuses to support an embargo on genocide weapons.

Hubby Doug Imhoff chimed in “Let me just make this clear: the vice president has been and will be a strong supporter of Israel as a secure democratic and Jewish state, and she will always ensure that Israel can defend itself, period. Because that’s who Kamala Harris is.” If Imhoff were honest and decent, he’s could do so by simply replacing “democratic” and “Jewish” with “Apartheid” and “genocidal.”

When anti genocide protesters confronted her Harris about her genocide support during a campaign speech in Detroit, Harris shot back “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” That has become the go-to Democratic response to pushback against Democratic support for Israeli genocide in Gaza: ‘Don’t’ mention US enabling genocide… we’ve got an election to win.

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A Standing Ovation for Genocide

There’s no mention of their duty to the people in the oath of office that members of Congress take. It says they will support and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. Maybe, in some regard defending the Constitution would mean doing their job: representing the people that elected them. But today, the architect of the genocide against the Palestinian people walked in and out of the “people’s house” to a standing ovation. He was given more time with our lawmakers than any of us will ever get in our lifetime and he used it to insist he was a good man that was commanding a moral army – insisting they have not killed anyone who did not deserve to have their life ended in the blink of an eye.

There are one thousand indications that our government has no obligation to us. This moment was just one – but it was one I will never let slip my mind. These people are no different than the settlers that gather in lawn chairs, eat popcorn, and cheer when the Israeli military drops bombs on apartment complexes in Gaza. For as long as they’ve been in office, they’ve had a front row seat to the carnage and all they do is gawk and cheer from the sidelines. Every once in a while, someone they are supposed to work for pesters them about their complacency and we are swatted away like flies.

The majority opinion in the United States is against continued support for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. Stories come out every week that push the needle further. Last week, the story of Muhammad Bhar surfaced and was circulated around the world. Muhammad was my age, 24, and had Down Syndrome. The Israeli military raided his home and let their dog attack him, tearing his arm to shreds. They separated him from his family, and left him in a room all by himself. They ordered his family to leave the house and left Muhammad to die – alone, bleeding, and scared. His family found Muhammad starting to decompose in the room the soldiers left him in. He still had a tourniquet on his arm from when they tried to stop the bleeding. And they just left him there, like he was nothing.

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Facebook Ramps Up Censorship Amid Israeli Pressure

On July 10, it was announced that social media giant Meta would broaden the scope of its censorship and suppression of content related to the Gaza genocide. Under the new policy, Facebook and Instagram posts containing “derogatory or threatening references to ‘Zionists’ in cases where the term is used to refer to Jews or Israelis” will be proscribed. Unsurprisingly, a welter of Zionist lobby organizations – many of which aggressively lobbied Meta to adopt these changes – cheered the move. Emboldened, the same entities are now calling for all social media platforms to follow suit.

The Times of Israel noted that “nearly 150 advocacy groups and experts provided input that led to Meta’s policy update.” This prominently included Tel Aviv-based CyberWell, mundanely described by the outlet as “a nonprofit that has been documenting the swell of online antisemitism and Holocaust denial since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.” These malign activities have had a devastating impact on what Western audiences see and hear about the Gaza genocide on their social media feeds.

In January, CyberWell published an extensive report on how it was seeking to censor many prominent X accounts that expressed doubts about the official narrative of October 7, including the widely disseminated, proven-to-be-false libel that Hamas fighters beheaded dozens of infants. Users in the firing line included popular anonymous Zei Squirrel, Al Jazeera, The Grayzone chief Max Blumenthal, and famous rapper Lowkey, of MintPress News. CyberWell claimed such legitimate skepticism was comparable to Holocaust denial.

The impact of these lobbying efforts isn’t clear, although almost simultaneously, Zei Squirrel was abruptly suspended from X without warning or explanation, sparking widespread outrage. It was only due to relentless backlash that the account was reinstated. More recently, CyberWell submitted formal guidance to Meta on censoring the Palestine solidarity phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which Zionists falsely claim is a clarion call for the genocide of Jews.

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Israel Uses Water as a Weapon of Its Genocide in Gaza

Through persistent, systematic, and widespread targeting of the Gaza Strip’s water sources and desalination plants, Israel is using water as a weapon against Palestinian civilians. In addition to imposing famine, Israel is deliberately reducing the amount of water available to residents of the Strip—especially potable water sources—intentionally targeting the over 2.3 million people who live there as part of its genocide, ongoing since last October. 

On Monday, July 1, the Euro-Med Monitor field team observed significant damage to a desalination plant in the Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood, south of Gaza City, as a result of direct Israeli targeting. This also resulted in the killing of a young man who was filling a gallon with water, plus the wounding of other individuals. The station, which provided services to at least 50,000 people in several nearby residential neighbourhoods, sustained significant damage after being bombed by the Israeli army with a GBU missile that broke through multiple stories and detonated on the ground floor.

As summer temperatures rise, the people of the Gaza Strip are facing significant challenges in accessingwater. Estimates show that since October of last year, the per capita share of water in the Gaza Strip has decreased by 97% due to the extensive destruction of water infrastructure by Israel. Therefore, as a result of the genocide, the per capita share of water in the Strip has decreased to between 3 and 15 litres per day, while in 2022 it was approximately 84.6 litres per day.

In view of the ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people that deprive them of necessities for survival—such as the destruction of over 700 wells and water desalination plants since the start of the genocide—all areas of the Gaza Strip are experiencing a shortage of water, and the sewage system is collapsing. Meanwhile, certain areas of the Strip are suffering from a shortage of fuel, which Israel forbids from entering the Strip, despite the large number of casualties—including children—caused by infectious diseases and epidemics that spread through the accumulation ofcontaminated water due to inoperative sewage stations.

Continued destruction and devastation by the Israeli army is rendering the Gaza Strip unlivable, particularly after the army’s destruction of 9 out of 10 water tanks and half of the water networks, or 350 km out of 700 km.

Additionally, as a result of the crimes and arbitrary policies of Israel, all six wastewater treatment plants have been disrupted, approximately 65 sewage pumps stopped, and 70 km of sewage networks destroyed. This has resulted in the unchecked disposal of wastewater, estimated to be around 130 thousand cubic metres per day, onto Gaza Strip roads and shelters for displaced people.

According to United Nations estimates, about 96 percent of the Strip’s population (2.15 million people) faces high levels of acute food insecurity. While the whole territory is classified in Emergency (IPC Phase 4), over 495,000 people (22 per cent of the population) are still facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 5). In this Phase, households experience an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion of coping capacities.

Euro-Med Monitor warned last January that distress is engulfing Gaza City and the Strip’s northern regions in alarming ways—a result of Israel’s cutting off of the water supply in the Strip, systematic and intentional Israeli bombing of water sources and wells, and a lack of fuel required to run water conversion and distribution facilities.

The lack of drinking water in the Gaza Strip has become a matter of life and death, with residents currently being forced to drink unclean well water amid continued Israeli military attacks and lack of food, water, and fuel supplies.

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Israel turbocharges West Bank settlement expansion with largest land grab in decades

Israel has approved the largest seizure of land in the occupied West Bank in over three decades, a settlement tracking group said Wednesday, a move that is likely to worsen already soaring tensions linked to the war in Gaza.

Israel’s aggressive expansion in the West Bank reflects the settler community’s strong influence in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the most religious and nationalist in the country’s history. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself, has turbocharged the policy of expansion, seizing new authorities over settlement development and saying he aims to solidify Israel’s hold on the territory and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.

Authorities recently approved the appropriation of 12.7 square kilometers (nearly 5 square miles) of land in the Jordan Valley, according to a copy of the order obtained by The Associated Press. Data from Peace Now, the tracking group, indicate it was the largest single appropriation approved since the 1993 Oslo accords at the start of the peace process.

Settlement monitors said the land grab connects Israeli settlements along a key corridor bordering Jordan, a move they said undermines the prospect of a contiguous Palestinian state.

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