Tag: israel

U.N. Reduces Estimated Number of Women, Children Killed in Gaza by Half, Blames Error on ‘Fog of War’

The United Nations has seemingly revised the estimated number of women and children it believes have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s war on Hamas, blaming the “fog of war” for the mistake.

In a graphic featured within OCHA’s recent daily briefing on May 6th, it was claimed that approximately 9,500 women had lost their lives in the ongoing conflict. The organization also cited data sourced from the Hamas-administered Ministry of Health in Gaza asserting that since hostilities began last October, roughly 14,500 children had been killed.

Yet just two days later, the U.N. agency appeared to revise these figures significantly downward in its subsequent report. The updated data indicated that approximately 4,959 women and 7,797 children had lost their lives.

The conflict erupted following a brutal attack by Hamas militants in southern Israel from Gaza, resulting in the deaths of over 1,200 individuals, predominantly civilians, and the taking of approximately 240 individuals as hostages.

A reporter from the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) asked the U.N. about the revision, with the spokesperson blaming the “fog of war” for the errors.

“The revisions are taken … you know, of course, in the fog of war, it’s difficult to come up with numbers,”  Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, said at a press conference last Friday.

“We get numbers from different sources on the ground, and then we try to cross check them. As we cross check them, we update the numbers, and we’ll continue to do that as that progresses.”

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Strapped down, blindfolded, held in diapers: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center

At a military base that now doubles as a detention center in Israel’s Negev desert, an Israeli working at the facility snapped two photographs of a scene that he says continues to haunt him.

Rows of men in gray tracksuits are seen sitting on paper-thin mattresses, ringfenced by barbed wire. All appear blindfolded, their heads hanging heavy under the glare of floodlights.

A putrid stench filled the air and the room hummed with the men’s murmurs, the Israeli who was at the facility told CNN. Forbidden from speaking to each other, the detainees mumbled to themselves.

“We were told they were not allowed to move. They should sit upright. They’re not allowed to talk. Not allowed to peek under their blindfold.”

Guards were instructed “to scream uskot” – shut up in Arabic – and told to “pick people out that were problematic and punish them,” the source added.

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UN Relief and Works Agency Staff Stealing, Reselling Humanitarian Aid Meant for Gazans

On Wednesday, a UNWatch report revealed that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency staff have been stealing humanitarian aid materials meant for Gazan civilians, and reselling the materials at a profit. 

UNRWA staff are stealing aid and selling it for profit, while those who report it face reprisals, according to numerous reports published by Palestinians in an UNRWA-related chatroom.

The posts expose a deep frustration by employees that senior UNRWA employees are engaged in the abuses, and that the agency is doing nothing about it. This comes amid a recent call by UNRWA Commissioner-General Phillipe Lazzarini for countries to increase direct cash assistance to Gazans because, although “there is more food available… it still does not mean that the food is accessible.”

The chatroom is run by a former UNRWA employee, Haitham al-Sayyed, who was removed from UNRWA in 2016 after he publicly called out the agency for hiding an UNRWA school map that denied the existence of Israel, covered up with a white cloth to hide it from the cameras while UN chief Ban Ki-moon was holding a press conference in June 2016.

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Former General Mark Milley in Bizarre Defense of Israel

Retired US General Mark Milley offered a bizarre defense of Israel’s actions in Gaza when he opined that “we” in America also “slaughtered people in massive numbers.”

Milley made the comments during a panel discussion at the Ash Carter Exchange on Innovation and National Security in Washington, DC.

“Before we all get self-righteous about what Israel’s doing, and I feel horrible for the innocent people in Gaza that are dying, we shouldn’t forget that we in the United States killed a lot of innocent people,” said Milley, going on to talk about Iraq and French soldiers dying in Normandy.

“We destroyed 69 Japanese cities, not including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we slaughtered people in massive numbers – innocent people who had nothing to do with their government,” he added.

“War is a terrible thing, but if it’s gonna have meaning, if it’s gonna have any sense of morality, there has to be a political purpose and it must be achieved rapidly and with the least cost,” said Milley.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp then asserted that “the peace activists are the war activists,” referring to college campus pro-Palestine protesters, who he called “an infection inside our society” and a reason why Hamas will continue to fight.

“They’re out there supporting a terrorist organization whose very written charter calls for death of all Jews, not just in Israel but worldwide, I mean come on now, if you’re gonna support that, you’re on the wrong side,” responded Milley.

The former general’s comments about pro-Palestine protesters are somewhat odd given that he previously defended BLM protesters during the Trump era, despite the fact that they are essentially the same people.

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Mitt Romney Says Congress Supports Banning TikTok for Israel

In a conversation with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) acknowledged that banning TikTok has such strong support in Congress because the social media platform has hurt Israel’s public relations battle.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature,” Romney said at the McCain Institute this past Friday. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

The official justification for targeting TikTok is the unfounded allegation that it’s a Chinese spy tool because its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China. But Romney’s comments suggest the real purpose of the renewed push to ban the app after a similar effort failed years ago was to censor news coming out of Gaza and pro-Palestinian content.

Blinken blamed social media in general when asked by Romney why Israel was losing the global PR war. Palestinian journalists have been able to broadcast to the whole world the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza using social media, including graphic videos of dead or wounded children being dug out of rubble following an Israeli airstrike.

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Drafter of Leahy law says it was never applied to Israel

Following immense pressure from Israel and its most fervent supporters, the Biden administration announced recently that it will keep giving weapons to five Israeli units that had committed “gross violations of human rights,” including a notorious battalion whose soldiers killed an elderly Palestinian-American man in the West Bank in 2022.

The decision drew sharp backlash from legal analysts and former officials, who noted that the State Department’s own experts had found the units in violation of the “Leahy law,” a 1997 statute that is supposed to stop foreign militaries from using U.S. weapons in war crimes.

In a sense, the move was standard. Israel has long been able to dodge U.S. laws surrounding arms transfers, and it even gets a special process for Leahy vetting that leaves more room for political interference, according to a former State Department official.

Indeed, the Biden administration has shown little public interest in holding Israel accountable for alleged war crimes even as Israel begins its assault on Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians have sought shelter amid the war. While the White House has reportedly held up a pair of weapons transfers in recent days, it’s carefully avoided giving a reason for the move, leaving open the possibility that the delay was caused by logistical problems.

Tim Rieser brings a unique perspective to these issues. During a long tenure as an aide to former Sen. Patrick Leahy, Rieser drafted the law that Israeli units now stand accused of violating. Today, he’s pushing for real enforcement of U.S. policy on weapons transfers as a senior adviser to Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.).

In an email exchange, RS asked Rieser about whether the Leahy law has ever really been applied to Israel and why policymakers should care. The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

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How Israel Supported Hamas Against the PLO

Since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel has been executing a devastating assault on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip, blocking humanitarian aid, internally displacing 75% of Gaza’s population, systematically destroying civilian infrastructure, and otherwise bombing indiscriminately. To date, over 34,000 Palestinians have been killed, including over 9,500 women and over 14,500 children.1 More than 10,000 additional Palestinians are missing under the rubble, and over 77,000 have been injured.2 Children have been dying from hunger and malnutrition due to Israel’s use of starvation as a method of warfare.3

In a case brought against Israel by the government of South Africa, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has deemed Israel’s military operation a plausible genocide.4 The U.S. government under the administration of Joseph R. Biden has been absolutely complicit in Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.5

In reporting on the situation, the American mainstream media has tended to start their timeline for reporting on October 7, with little to no historical context provided to help news consumers understand why Hamas’s armed wing would break through the armistice line fence surrounding Gaza to perpetrate what it called “Operation Al Aqsa Flood.”6

Editors at The New York Times even instructed journalists to avoid describing the West Bank and Gaza as “occupied territories” despite Israel being occupying power in both territories under international law, with its belligerent occupation ongoing now for nearly 57 years, leading UN bodies and international human rights organizations to describe it as an apartheid regime.7

Times reporters were additionally told not to use the term “ethnic cleansing” on the grounds that it is “historically charged,” even though about 80% of Gaza’s population are refugees or their descendants from the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, which was the means by which the self-described “Jewish state” came into existence.8

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Israeli Officials Say Flow of US Weapons Is Uninterrupted Despite Report of Ammunition Delay

Israeli officials said on Sunday that the overall flow of US weapons shipments to Israel is “uninterrupted” despite a report from Axios that said the Biden administration put a hold on an ammunition shipment.

The Axios report cited two Israeli officials who said the hold on the ammunition raised “serious concerns” in the Israeli government, but the sources did not give a reason why the US delayed the shipment. CNN later reported that the pause had nothing to do with Israel’s plans to invade Rafah and wouldn’t impact future weapons shipments, meaning it doesn’t reflect a change in US policy.

“The stream of security shipments from the US to Israel is ongoing. While individual shipments might be delayed, the overall flow remains uninterrupted, and we are not aware of any policy suspending it,” an Israeli official told Ynet.

Israel’s public broadcaster Kan cited a political source who said Israel “is not aware of any US decision regarding stopping or reducing military support to Israel.” The source added that it was “possible that one shipment or another will be delayed, but the flow continues, and we are not aware of a political decision to stop it.”

When asked about the paused ammunition shipment, a National Security Council spokesperson vowed the US would continue arming Israel. “The United States has surged billions of dollars in security assistance to Israel since the October 7 attacks, passed the largest ever supplemental appropriation for emergency assistance to Israel, led an unprecedented coalition to defend Israel against Iranian attacks, and will continue to do what is necessary to ensure Israel can defend itself from the threats it faces,” the spokesperson told CNN.

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Rebuilding Bombed-Out Gaza Could Take Into Next Century: UN

Gaza will need rebuilding on scale not seen since World War 2, the United Nations has said in a new report which seeks to assess the immense scale and scope of damage after almost seven months of war.

The report released by the UN Development Program (UNDP) said that Gaza needs “approximately 80 years to restore all the fully destroyed housing units” and that rebuilding all that’s been destroyed in the Strip could even drag into the next century.

“Unprecedented levels of human losses, capital destruction, and the steep rise in poverty in such a short period of time will precipitate a serious development crisis that jeopardizes the future of generations to come,” UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner said in a statement.

The report tallies that some 80,000 homes have been fully destroyed while at least 370,000 have been damaged. The UN also indicated there’s a possibility that rebuilding could be completed by 2040, but only if “construction materials are delivered five times as fast as in the last crisis in 2021” and if there war were to immediately stop.

According to more via Reuters, “In a scenario where the war lasts nine months, poverty is set to increase from 38.8% of Gaza’s population at the end of 2023 to 60.7%, dragging a large portion of the middle class below the poverty line, the report said.”

One UN official referenced in international reports said that Israel’s bombardment of the Strip has resulted in a “moonscape” of destruction.

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Cosmic Rays, Tree Rings, and the Real Story of the Building of Jerusalem

A new archaeological study of ancient Jerusalem is forcing experts to reevaluate some of their past assumptions about the history of that holy city. New research has presented evidence that Biblical accounts of that history are more accurate than previously believed, and that Jerusalem was already a growing city even before the reign of the legendary King David, who ruled the United Kingdom of Israel in the early 10th century BC.

In a report just published in the journal PNAS, a team of archaeologists and researchers from the University of Tel Aviv, the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Weizmann Institute of Science explain the exciting and revolutionary results of their detailed study, which emerged from the application of newly refined radiocarbon dating technology. With the most accurate dating results ever obtained from the old city of Jerusalem, the archaeologists claim to have shown infrastructure projects there were initiated centuries earlier than other research had suggested.

“Until now, most researchers have linked Jerusalem’s growth to the west, to the period of King Hezekiah – just over 2,700 years ago,” said study co-author Yuval Gadot, an archaeologist from Tel Aviv University, in an interview quoted in the Daily Mail Online.

“The conventional assumption to date has been that the city expanded due to the arrival of refugees from the Kingdom of Israel in the north, following the Assyrian exile. However, the new findings strengthen the view that Jerusalem grew in size and spread towards Mount Zion already in the ninth century BC. This was during the reign of King Jehoash – a hundred years before the Assyrian exile.”

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