Tag: israel

Israeli airstrike on humanitarian aid convoy leaves five dead

The Israeli military carried out airstrikes on a humanitarian aid convoy in Gaza on 29 August, killing five employees of the transport company working with the US-based aid group that organized it, The Guardian reported on 30 August.

The convoy was organized by the NGO Anera. It was carrying medical supplies and fuel to an Emirati-run hospital in Rafah, a city on the Gaza–Egypt border.

Its route had been coordinated in advance with the Israeli military under a deconfliction process intended to prevent aid vehicles from being bombed.

Anera’s Palestine country director, Sandra Rasheed, told The Guardian, “This is a shocking incident. The convoy, which was coordinated by Anera and approved by Israeli authorities, included an Anera employee who was fortunately unharmed.”

“Tragically, several individuals, all employed by the transportation company we work with, were killed in the attack. They were in the first vehicle of the convoy,” Rasheed added.

The Israeli military confirmed the route had been coordinated but claimed its forces struck armed men seeking to hijack the convoy.

Just hours before the airstrike, Israeli soldiers opened fire on a World Food Programme (WFP) vehicle clearly marked with UN insignia. Israeli forces fired 10 bullets into the windows of the vehicle as it approached an army checkpoint in the Wadi Gaza area.

Because the vehicle was armored with reinforced glass, none of the passengers were killed or injured.

Cindy McCain, the head of the WFP, called the shooting “totally unacceptable.”

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German envoy admits he spread lie about 7 October mass rapes

The German ambassador in Tel Aviv has admitted that he spread fabricated Israeli atrocity propaganda intended to give credence to Israel’s debunked claims of mass rapes by Palestinian fighters on 7 October 2023.

“I regret having believed – like so many others – that that suicide letter was real. It turns out it was a fake,” Ambassador Steffen Seibert posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday. “I find this an appalling act given that so many real lives were taken at the Nova festival, so many crimes committed, so many souls destroyed.”

Last week, Seibert shared a letter purporting to be from an Israeli who died by suicide because he was unable to live with the trauma he experienced at the Supernova rave on 7 October.

The fake letter was widely disseminated after it was shared by two notorious Israeli propagandists, Hen Mazzig, who translated it to English, and Aviva Klompas.

Mazzig had claimed that “After miraculously surviving the October 7 massacre, the young Israeli man decided to end his life after witnessing too many horrors, including the rape of a girl.”

“The overwhelming weight of everything he saw, heard and experienced, along with his inability to save the girl being assaulted nearby, made him feel incapable of continuing his life.”

Mazzig works for an Israeli propaganda outfit called the Tel Aviv Institute. Klompas, a former Israeli government speechwriter, is the CEO of another lobby group called Boundless Israel.

Both have been very active in pushing Israel’s debunked claims of mass rapes on 7 October.

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Harris Will Continue to Ignore U.S. Law and Arm Israel, If Elected

When President Joe Biden bowed out of his reelection bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, a wave of enthusiasm for a new face on the presidential ticket spread across the electorate. Boosted by memes and “Brat” tweets that portrayed Harris as a different kind of leader, many expressed hope that she would differ from Biden in her stance on supplying arms and diplomatic support to Israel for its war in Gaza.

When Harris chose progressive Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, who previously bent a listening ear to “Uncommitted” delegates who called for an arms embargo on Israel, cautious optimism grew, but questions remained.

But when Harris sat down for an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash on Thursday, her first since the start of her campaign, the vice president seemed to shut the door on the possibility of change. 

When asked whether Harris would “do anything differently” in her approach to ceasefire talks and withholding weapons shipments to Israel, Harris, with Walz by her side, doubled down on her “commitment to Israel’s defense and its ability to defend itself.”

“And that’s not gonna change,” she said, after evoking scenes from the October 7 attacks in Israel. Harris added the caveat that how Israel defended itself mattered, saying, “Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.” She then called for the end of the war and that the U.S. has to “get a deal done.”

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How Blinken’s Disinformation Perpetuates the Suffering in Gaza

After a three-hour meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Anthony Blinken professed Israel’s acceptance of a supposed ceasefire proposal. However, less than 48 hours later, it became evident that this proclamation was likely part of a PR disinformation strategy designed to dress the wolf in sheep clothing.

The complicity between Joe Biden Administration and Netanyahu became more apparent when White House National Security (Israeli) Communications Advisor John Kirby responded to a question about the Administration’s stance on Netanyahu’s conditions on the ceasefire, particularly regarding Israel’s control of Gaza’s southern borders and military stationed inside Gaza. Kirby’s subtle reply implied U.S. acceptance of Netanyahu’s conditions, stating that the Israeli army could have security responsibilities on the border. He added the focus should be now on the release of Israeli (100) captives and “six weeks of calm”—only a respite before Israel resumes its horrific crimes against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.

Meanwhile, it was revealed that Egypt and Israel were scheduled to discuss Netanyahu’s additional terms on the new American amended ceasefire plan. Following the conclusion of these meetings, Egypt reiterated its rejection of Netanyahu’s conditions to maintain an Israeli presence at Rafah and in the Philadelphia Corridor.

If Egypt and Israel do not agree on Netanyahu’s new conditions, why would Blinken expect the Palestinians to accept something Egypt wouldn’t allow? Is this part of an American-Israeli scheme to pressure the Palestinians into agreeing to terms that Egypt opposes? Could it be a tactic to use Palestinian acceptance as leverage against Egypt? Or, is Blinken, in effect, acting as a Zionist agent, colluding with Israel to maintain Israeli control over the Gaza-Egypt border, in violation of existing bilateral agreements?

In his distorted statement regarding the repackaging of Netanyahu’s conditions as a “bridged proposal,” Blinken went further by suggesting that the suffering of Gaza’s 2.3 million people is a consequence of the Resistance’s refusal to accept the new American/Israeli dictate, rather than being a result of Israel’s malevolence war. In other words, by refusing to surrender—one of Netanyahu’s key demands—the Palestinians are blamed for their own suffering.

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A Detailed Look at What the US Doesn’t Want You To Know About Weapons It Sends to the Jewish War Criminals in Occupied Palestine

The Biden administration recently approved five major arms sales to Israel for F-15 fighter aircraft, tank ammunition, tactical vehicles, air-to-air missiles, mortar rounds, and related equipment for each. Though technically sales, most if not all of this matériel is paid for by U.S. taxpayers — Israel uses much of the military aid Congress approves for it effectively as a gift card to buy U.S.-made weapons.

The total value of the five weapons sales exceeds $20.3 billion.

More extraordinary than the price tag of these arms deals is that the White House made them public. Prior to last week’s announcements, it had disclosed just two arms sales to Israel. By March, the Biden administration had already greenlit more than 100 separate weapons deals for Israel, or about one every 36 hours, on average. The administration presumably kept the value of each arms deal “under threshold” to avoid having to notify Congress.

From 2017 to 2019, the U.S. had approved thousands of below-threshold arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates worth a total of $11.2 billion. Exploiting this loophole helped the Trump administration avoid scrutiny of its enabling of a devastating and indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen. The Biden administration appears to be following the same playbook for the destruction it is enabling in Gaza.

The White House isn’t shy about publicizing arms transfers to other countries. For example, it has been very transparent about the military aid it sent Ukraine since February 2022. Biden promotes arming Ukraine as industrial policy, marketing the military aid as a boon for domestic manufacturing and jobs. The Pentagon not only itemizes what specific matériel the U.S. sends to Ukraine, but also shows on a map where in the U.S. those weapons and equipment are made.

By contrast, nearly all the publicly available information on U.S. arms transfers to Israel comes from leaks reported by the media. The Biden administration says very little about the weapons it delivers to Israel or how the Israeli military uses them. The following analysis is intended to shed light on both. In doing so, it helps explain why the Biden administration prefers to arm Israel in secret.

What follows is a non-exhaustive list of attacks by the Israeli military since October 7 that likely violated international law, grouped by the type of U.S.-supplied weapon involved in the attack.

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‘The End of Days’

Orit Malka Strook serves in the Netanyahu government as minister of settlements and national missions.

She has a seat in the Knesset representing the National Religious Party–Religious Zionism, a political amalgam formed last year when the Religious Zionism Party merged with the Jewish Home Party, which was itself a merger of three Zionist-extremist parties.

Orit Malka Strook’s political journey, this is to say, began on the far right and has proceeded to the far, far, far right of the Israeli constellation.

Orit Malka Strook was born in 1960 and is the product of a rigorous education in Israel’s most rigorously Zionist yeshivas. After she married in her late teens or very early twenties — the date is not clear in her publicly available biographies — Orit Malka Strook and her husband, a rabbinical student, moved to a Jewish settlement on the Sinai Peninsula.

When Israel handed the Sinai back to Egypt in 1982, the outcome of the Camp David Accords President Jimmy Carter negotiated four years earlier, Strook and her spouse moved to a Jewish settlement in Hebron.

To give an idea of Orit Malka Strook’s politics in practice, one of her sons was convicted 17 years ago of violently attacking a young Palestinian in Hebron and spent two and a half years in prison for his offense. We can infer with some confidence this must have been an especially vicious incident, as settlers’ attacks on Palestinians have been absolutely routine in the West Bank for many years.

Orit Malka Strook was horrified at her son’s criminal conviction, because the court accepted the word of Palestinians over the word of a Jew — so furthering the Palestinian cause, as she saw it, over the cause of the settlers, the Zionist cause.

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‘Deeply Complicit’: US Has Sent Israel Over 50,000 Tons of Weaponry in 11 Months

The Israeli government announced Monday that it has received over 50,000 tons of military equipment—including armored vehicles and munitions—from the United States during its assault on the Gaza Strip, where most of the population is now displaced and at growing risk of starvation.

The IMEU Policy Project, an affiliate of the Institute for Middle East Understanding, noted that according to the Israeli government’s figures, the Biden administration has on average sent the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) “a weapons shipment every 12 hours, for nearly 11 months”—arms “that are used to kill Palestinian civilians.”

The Israeli Defense Ministry said in a statement that the U.S. “equipment procured and transported includes armored vehicles, munitions, ammunition, personal protection gear, and medical equipment, which are crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

Josh Ruebner, policy director at the IMEU Policy Project, wrote that the new shipment numbers underscore that “the U.S. is deeply complicit in Israel’s genocide.”

“Weapons to Israel violate U.S. laws and policies that are supposed to prevent atrocities,” Ruebner added.

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Palestinian detainees electrocuted, raped with rifles by Israeli soldiers: HRW

Israeli troops are torturing Palestinians from Gaza, including through the use of electric shocks and anal rape using M-16 rifle butts, according to the testimony of a Palestinian medic published by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on 27 August.

Walid Khalili, a Palestinian paramedic and ambulance driver, was abducted by Israeli soldiers in Gaza in November and taken to the Sde Teiman and Negev (Al-Naqab) detention centers in Israel.

Israeli troops abducted Khalili after he was dispatched to the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City to rescue four wounded men.

When he arrived, he saw Israeli troops execute the men on Mughrabi Street, near the Labor Ministry building.

“I saw the four men being executed in cold blood,” Khalili said. “I saw it with my own eyes, I was three meters away. When they were shot, I hid under the ambulance, and next to it there was a building, so then I ran inside the building. The Israeli forces raided the building and started yelling at me to raise my hands.”

Soldiers kicked and beat Khalili with their rifle butts, breaking his ribs, before transferring him to the Sde Teiman facility in southern Israel.

HRW writes that Israeli soldiers dragged him on the ground, removed the cuffs on his ankles, and dressed him in adult diapers. They then took him to a warehouse where dozens of detainees, also in diapers, were suspended from the ceiling, with the chains attached to their square metal handcuffs.

Khalili said he was suspended from a chain so his feet would not touch the ground. The soldiers dressed him in a garment and a headband attached to wires. They shocked him with electricity and threw cold water on him every second day.

He told HRW, “The world was spinning around, and I fainted. They hit me with batons. I kept fainting and hallucinating. He kept asking me about the hostages, and moving Hamas hostages, and where I was on October 7. With every question I was electro-shocked to wake me up. He told me confess and we will stop torturing you.”

Every three days, he was taken to a new location and given an unknown drug in pill form before being interrogated further.

“The pill made me feel weird, it was the first time I have felt like this, as if my inner mind was speaking what was in my heart, not me. I felt like I’m flying. I saw hallucinations.”

An Arabic-speaking Israeli guard interrogated him, asking him about the captives taken by Hamas to Gaza on 7 October. Khalili said the interrogator knew “how many children I have, all their names, my address,” and threatened they would be killed if he did not confess.

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Record Number of Journalists Killed in Gaza

“In war, truth is the first casualty,” said Aeschylus. In the modern era, this includes the journalists devoted to uncovering that truth. On Aug. 22, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that at least 116 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since hostilities began. This is the highest death toll in any conflict since the CPJ began gathering data in 1992. 

That number will likely expand in the coming weeks. The group is still investigating nearly 350 additional cases of potential killings, arrests and injuries of journalists and media workers in Gaza. These numbers dwarf those of much larger and longer conflicts. During all of World War II, 69 reporters were killed. In the Korean War, 17. Sixty-three were killed in Vietnam. In the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in this century, 65 and 282. 

The most recent deaths in Gaza investigated by the CPJ occurred on July 31. Ismail al-Ghoul, a 27-year-old Palestinian journalist, and Rami al-Refee, a 27-year-old Palestinian cameraman, were freelancing for Al Jazeera when Israeli missiles hit a car they were using in the Al Shatei camp near Gaza City. According to Al Jazeera, al-Ghoul and al-Refee had been investigating the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and had been parked in front of his home for five minutes, when they were killed. In a statement, Al Jazeera Media Network called the attack by Israeli forces “a cold-blooded assassination” and pledged to “pursue all legal actions to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes” and that it “stands in unwavering solidarity with all journalists in Gaza.” 

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How Israel’s quadcopters traumatise, maim and kill Palestinians in Gaza

In the course of more than ten months, Israel unleashed an array of weaponry in its genocidal war on the Palestinians in the besieged coastal enclave, killing and wounding thousands. One of the most deadly weapons in Israel’s arsenal is the quadcopter. 

A drone with four propellers, the quadcopter follows its targets in different spaces, including narrow alleys of streets, tents, and inside houses. The 1.6-metre Quadcopter is electronically controlled remotely. It can easily take off and move vertically and horizontally for military or civilian service. It weighs about ten kilograms only. 

Usually, the Israeli army deploys quadcopters for intelligence purposes to facilitate its mission on the ground. Nevertheless, the Israeli army have equipped these drones with explosive devices, transforming them into deadly suicide attacks.

Dozens of quadcopters have so far killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians by launching guided missiles. 

“Quadcaptors have killed about 1,000 Palestinians, including 350 women and 150 children, during the current genocidal war,” the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza noted in a recent press statement. 

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