Tag: israel

The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday that the IDF has recommended restricting aid deliveries to Gaza to 200 trucks per day. The Israeli military claims that this is the amount of aid required to sustain the Palestinians, and additional aid is given to Hamas.

Under the deal between Hamas and Israel brokered by President Donald Trump in October, Tel Aviv agreed to allow 600 aid trucks to enter Gaza each day. Throughout most of the ceasefire period, Israel has kept aid deliveries to a minimum. Over the past week, 600 trucks per day have entered Gaza. 

While the Israeli military claims the Palestinians are “flooded” with supplies, aid agencies say the people of Gaza are still struggling to survive. Most people in Gaza are displaced and living in tents. Israel is refusing to allow temporary housing to enter Gaza, leading to several children freezing to death. 

The UN’s humanitarian affairs spokesperson, Olga Cherevko, said aid organizations were still facing “severe limitations.”

The assertion that Hamas is stealing a large portion of the aid that enters Gaza has also been debunked by multiple investigations. 

In addition to restricting the number of aid deliveries into Gaza, the IDF wants to maintain that all aid going to Gaza enters through Israel. Gaza’s border crossing with Egypt is scheduled to be reopened within the coming week. The IDF wants to prevent cargo from entering the Strip via Egypt. 

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On 29th of December 2025, The New York Times reprinted an article entitled, “At Last, a Name for the Face of a Nazi in an Iconic Holocaust Photo.”

The photo was taken on July 28, 1941, and here is how the article describes what the picture shows:

“One man kneels at the edge of a pit filled with bodies. He knows that, within moments, he will be dead. His drawn face burns with defiance. Behind him stands a uniformed, bespectacled Nazi soldier. In his extended right arm, the soldier holds a pistol, just inches from his victim’s skull. A crowd of other Germans stand watching, curious but undisturbed.”

The man about to be executed remains nameless and is guilty of nothing other than being Jewish. But who was the executioner? His identity is the revealing part of the story.

“The killer was Jakobus Onnen, 34, a former teacher [he taught languages, French and English as well as physical education] from the town of Tichelwarf, near the German border with the Netherlands.”

His identity was finally matched to other named photos identifying Onnen and attested to by living relatives.

It turns out that Onnen may be seen as an example of “well-educated, prosperous [German] professionals in early middle age” who were transformed into genocidal killers during the era of Nazi influence. How did this occur?

An explanation is offered by Dr. Christopher R. Browning in his 1992 book, Ordinary Men. This is a history of a German reserve police battalion and its role in genocidal violence carried out in 1942 Poland.

Brown argues that most of the men in this battalion did not begin as conscripted Nazi fanatics, rabid antisemites, or congenital killers. Instead they allowed themselves to be remade by “years of propaganda” absorbed within a community environment that “discouraged independent thought”[my italics]. 

The same environment encouraged “conformity, deference to authority, adaptation to new roles and responsibilities, and the altering of moral norms to justify the resulting actions.” In the end, they “perversely believed [murder] to be a professional obligation.”

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In the Gaza Strip, the remaining Palestinian population, who have survived two years and three months of the most diabolically well-publicized and even relentlessly celebrated genocide in history, which is still ongoing, albeit at a slower pace than before, are squeezed into just 42% of their homeland — 60 square miles in total, less than the size of Washington, D.C.

The rest, the other 58%, has been occupied by Israeli forces since a ceasefire was declared on October 10, when they withdrew to an arbitrary “Yellow Line” that was meant to be temporary, a phase in a staged withdrawal from the whole of the Gaza Strip, but which is regarded by the occupiers as a new and permanent border with Israel.

Under the terms of the ceasefire deal, which was mainly negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the US, although Donald Trump, predictably, made it all about himself, even staging a “Peace Summit” in Egypt to which world leaders were invited to fawn over him, Israel was prevailed upon to stop its relentless bombing raids, and its ongoing and merciless ground invasion of Gaza City, in return for the immediate release of all the surviving Israeli hostages seized on October 7, 2023.

This was a considerable achievement, given how enthusiastically Israel had sunk into relentless genocidal depravity over the previous seven months since it deliberately broke the terms of an earlier ceasefire deal at the start of March, resuming its slaughter of Palestinians with horrific brutality.

However, although the death toll has dropped over the last three months from a daily average of somewhere between 60 and a hundred Palestinians, Israel has never honored the ceasefire in any meaningful sense, and has continued to break its terms on an almost daily basis, killing at least 465 Palestinians and injuring 1,287 since October 10.

In addition, Israel has resolutely refused to allow the unimpeded access into Gaza of 600 trucks a day of humanitarian aid, as stipulated in the ceasefire deal, including desperately needed shelter, medical supplies and medical equipment, as well as food and fuel, all very deliberately to try to ensure that the Palestinians will continue to die in significant numbers, as though the latest confirmed death toll of 71,548, with 171,353 injured, many grievously so — and itself a massive undercount — is still insufficient to placate its incessant bloodlust.

Israel is perpetually triggered by a refusal to recognize that the 1,200 or so people killed in the October 7 attacks on southern Israel cannot be perpetually obsessed over as the victims of an unprovoked day of horror, entirely unconnected to the previous 75 years of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing and dispossession of the Palestinians from their own land, and their relentless oppression and arbitrary imprisonment. Nor too, can they realistically be allowed to demonstrate a callous indifference, almost beyond belief, to the catastrophic death toll in Gaza over the last 27 months, which dwarfs the death toll on October 7 to a sickening degree.

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