Tag: palestine

‘Legacy of Horror’- White House Staffers Slam Biden’s Policy towards Israel

Around 20 White House staffers have criticized United States President Joe Biden for not enforcing an ultimatum on Israel to take “concrete measures” to improve humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip or face potential restrictions on arms provisions, Politico reported.  

“You are running out of time to do the right thing, but decisive action could save precious lives in the next two months,” the staffers wrote, according to a letter obtained by the American news outlet.  

According to Politico, the staffers who signed the letter – on condition of anonymity for fear of career retribution – work across the White House executive office of the president but are not directly involved in Middle East policy.  

“One thing that drew me into this was legacy,” a senior White House staffer who signed the letter told Politico, stressing that, “if the course is continued, it will be a legacy of horror.”  

Keep reading

Israel ignores Biden ‘ultimatum’ over Gaza aid, but U.S. will continue sending weapons regardless

Last month the Biden administration announced that the Israeli government had 30 days to increase humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza or else the country could lose access to some U.S. weapons.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin established the deadline in a letter to Israel’s ministers, in which it laid out 16 conditions that Israel would have to meet. “Failure to demonstrate a sustained commitment to implementing and maintaining these measures may have implications for U.S. policy,” it read.

When asked about the move during a press briefing State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller reiterated the need for Israel to act.

“The bottom line is we felt it was appropriate, if we are making clear to the Government of Israel that there are these changes that need to be implemented, that we give them an appropriate period of time to implement it – implement them,” he told reporters. “We didn’t think it was appropriate to send a letter and just say this has to happen overnight; we gave them a – made clear there’s a short window in which we want to see changes, because the humanitarian situation is so dire on the ground.”

That deadline has now passed and a group of aid organizations (including Oxfam and Save the Children) have published a detailed report showing that Israel has failed to meet any of the conditions mentioned in the Blinken/Austin letter.

Keep reading

Section 12 means British police are treating their own officers as terrorists now

A police officer has been arrested by counter-terrorism police in Gloucester over social media posts regarding Israel and Palestine. It’s no longer just journalists and social media users that police are targeting, it’s their own officers now.

The officer is suspected of “supporting Hamas” in breach of Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Police have explained they’re going through the officer’s devices for analysis and say we should not jump to conclusions.

This is fair enough, and given the details are sparse, I’m not going to discuss the ongoing investigation, or the officer’s potential guilt or innocence. I am, however, going to discuss how police have handled similar cases in which they appear to have overstepped the mark because there are concerns to be addressed. Those concerns involve whether the law is being followed in this and similar investigations.

Police recently visited the home of journalist Asa Winstanley and took his devices for analysis, even though he was not under arrest. It seems they wanted to look through his devices to find the excuse to arrest a journalist.

If police were correctly applying the law in this instance, this would tell us that our laws are authoritarian. If they were not correctly applying the law, this would tell us they are acting in an authoritarian manner. Either way, we would be witnessing a form of authoritarianism. It is therefore reasonable to ask in each case if police are correctly applying the law. We need clarity because we have the impression our rights are under attack. This is obviously unacceptable in a so-called free society.

Keep reading

Amid Gaza’s Humanitarian Catastrophe, US Claims Israel is not Hindering Aid

The State Department Deputy Spokesperson, Vedant Patel repeatedly declined on Tuesday, after being pressed by reporters, to say if the criteria mentioned in the American letter had been met

The State Department announced on Tuesday that it has concluded that Israel is not hindering humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip and thus Tel Aviv is not breaching US law, Reuters news agency reported.

The declaration came on the day of a deadline previously set by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a letter on October 13 for Israel to implement a set of steps within 30 days to attend to the dire humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip.

The letter had warned that “failure to do so may have possible consequences on U.S. military aid to Israel.”

The US administration’s denial that Israel is impeding aid entry to the besieged enclave also coincided with a scorecard issued by eight aid organizations indicating that Israel has indeed failed to comply with a number of requirements.

The State Department Deputy Spokesperson, Vedant Patel repeatedly declined on Tuesday, after being pressed by reporters, to say if the criteria mentioned in the American letter had been met, Reuters said.  

Keep reading

Israeli army ‘will not leave Gaza before 2026’: Report

The Israeli army is rapidly accelerating its plans to establish a permanent presence in the Gaza Strip, where it will likely remain until at least the end of 2025, according to a 13 November report by Israel’s Haaretz newspaper. 

“The work is progressing at full speed,” the newspaper reported. 

“Wide roads are being built, cellular antennas are going up, water, sewage, and electricity networks are going in, and of course, there are the buildings, some portable and others less so,” it added. 

These plans have included the systematic destruction of buildings across Gaza, with the aim of ensuring that resistance fighters cannot hide in them. 

Israeli forces, as part of their extermination and expulsion campaign in northern Gaza, have forced tens of thousands out of their homes to transform the area into a military zone. Haaretz confirms that many Palestinians have refused to leave, despite artillery shelling which targets areas that remain inhabited. 

The construction work and setting up of permanent outposts have not been limited to the north.

“According to the plan that is being carried out, the army is acting to hold no fewer than four large areas in different parts of the Strip. One of the most prominent of them is the Netzarim corridor,” Haaretz said. 

The Netzarim corridor, which cuts Gaza into two and prevents the return of displaced Palestinians to the northern strip, was established in the early months of the Gaza war and has since been transformed into an extensive military facility with detention centers and permanent housing for soldiers.

The Haaretz report adds that a “combat graph for 2025” has been distributed to troops in recent weeks. 

“The way it looks on the ground, the IDF won’t leave Gaza before 2026,” a brigade officer in Gaza told the newspaper. “When you see the roads being paved here, it’s clear that this isn’t intended for the ground maneuvers or for raids by the troops into various places. These roads lead, among other places, to the places from which some of the settlements were removed.” 

“I don’t know of any intent to rebuild them; that isn’t something we’re told explicitly. But everyone understands where this is going,” the officer added. 

Hebrew newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported on 10 November that the Israeli army has established permanent military installations across Gaza aimed at setting up a long-term presence and splitting the strip into three separate zones. 

According to the report, the Israeli army plans to separate northern, central, and southern Gaza from each other. Several new land corridors have been established in recent months, including one which aims to cut off the northern cities Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, and Jabalia from Gaza City. 

Keep reading

US walks back threat to suspend Israel arms shipments as famine worsens in Gaza

The US government has confirmed it will not limit arms shipment to Israel despite worsening famine conditions in Gaza, walking back an official warning issued last month by top officials to “pressure” Tel Aviv into lifting its blockade.

State Department spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters on 12 November that the progress to date must be “supplemented and sustained” but that “we at this time have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of US law” by blocking the entry of food, water, and medicine for two million Palestinians.

“We are not giving Israel a pass,” Patel stressed, adding that “we want to see the totality of the humanitarian situation improve, and we think some of these steps will allow the conditions for that to continue progress.”

Keep reading

MIT suspends student and bans magazine for article opposing Gaza genocide

Last Friday, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) issued an immediate “interim” suspension of graduate student Prahlad Iyengar for penning an article titled “On Pacifism” in an MIT student magazine, Written Revolution, opposing Israel’s genocide against the people of Gaza. The publication itself has been banned from campus.

Zionist groups and the MIT administration have falsely claimed the article incites violence and have attempted to paint Iyengar as a terrorist. The article, which appeared in the fifth edition of the magazine, which is an American Sociological Association-recognized publication, does nothing of the sort as is obvious from the text of the article itself which is academic in character.

The World Socialist Web Site opposes this flagrant attack on free speech and academic freedom and calls on workers, students and youth to demand the immediate rescinding of all administrative measures against Iyengar.

As Iyengar wrote in a statement opposing the ban, “The administration has also banned Written Revolution outright, meaning students who disseminate or read this publication on campus may face discipline.” Some students reading the magazine were approached by the police. According to a recording of the call made to police, it was to stop the handing out “banned pamphlets.” Students face Orwellian disciplinary actions for distributing or merely reading the article on campus. 

The suspension and ban represent an escalation of the bipartisan campaign led by the Biden administration and Democratic Party against opposition on the campuses to the Gaza genocide. It takes place after over 186,000 people in Gaza have been massacred by Israel, according to an estimate by The Lancet from July. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has warned that everyone in northern Gaza “is at imminent risk of dying,” while there is a massive and unprecedented amount of photographic and video evidence both from the victims and killers themselves on social media documenting the genocide, which could correctly be described as the first live-streamed genocide in history.

Iyengar, a second-year electrical engineering Ph.D. student, was summarily banned from campus under the bogus justification that he presented an immediate risk of violence, with the administration falsely claiming his article supports “terrorism.” This was done solely on the basis of anonymous allegations by Zionist students’ claims that statements in the article “could be interpreted as a call for more violent or destructive forms of protest at MIT.” The rule for interim banning of students is ostensibly aimed only at those who actually present a risk of violence, like those suspected of rape, murder or assault. This is clearly not the case.

Essentially no evidence has been presented beyond a People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine poster being used as an illustration in Iyengar’s article. The administration falsely used this to claim that the article supported terrorism. The banning opens a veritable Pandora’s Box of avenues for censorship, meaning all manner of media from textbooks and dictionaries which have pictures of real or supposed “terrorist” organizations to documentaries and non-fiction books and even news articles in the mainstream press could be banned.

Keep reading

Criminalizing UNRWA: How Israel Is Delegitimizing the United Nations

On October 28, the Israeli Knesset passed a second reading of two bills that effectively ban the United Nations agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) from carrying out “any activity” in Israel and occupied Palestine.

Simply put, the decision is catastrophic, because UNRWA is the main international body responsible for the welfare of millions of Palestinians throughout the occupied territories, and throughout much of the region.

Israel followed its decision by attacking and damaging an UNRWA office in the Nur Shams refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. It was the Israeli government’s way of demonstrating its seriousness regarding the matter.

This is not the first time that Israel has pursued an anti-UNRWA agenda and, contrary to claims by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israel officials, the decision is not linked to the current genocidal war on Gaza, or the unfounded claims that UNRWA supports ‘terrorism’.

An independent review commissioned by the UN revealed that Israel “made public claims that a significant number of UNRWA employees are members of terrorist organizations”, but that it “has yet to provide supporting evidence of this.”

Israeli claims, however, did a great deal of damage to the organization, as 13 countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany and Italy, withheld badly needed funds which were helping Gaza stave off a horrific famine.

Eventually, most of these countries reinstated their financial support, though without apologizing to the Palestinians who were adversely impacted by these countries’ initial, unfair decision.

Keep reading

Palestinians will not be allowed to return to homes in northern Gaza, says IDF

Israeli ground forces are getting closer to “the complete evacuation” of northern Gaza and residents will not be allowed to return home, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has said, in what appears to be the first official acknowledgment from Israel it is systematically removing Palestinians from the area.

In a media briefing on Tuesday night, the IDF Brig Gen Itzik Cohen told Israeli reporters that since troops had been forced to enter some areas twice, such as Jabaliya camp, “there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes”.

He added that humanitarian aid would be allowed to “regularly” enter the south of the territory but not the north, since there are “no more civilians left”.

International humanitarian law experts have said that such actions would amount to the war crimes of forcible transfer and the use of food as a weapon.

On Thursday, an IDF spokesperson said Brig Gen Cohen’s comments had been taken out of context during a discussion about Jabaliya, and did not “reflect the IDF’s objectives and values.” The spokesperson also said that the briefing had been on background, and the brigadier general should not have been quoted in Hebrew media reports that emerged.

The Israeli army and government have repeatedly denied trying to force the remaining population of northern Gaza to flee to the relative safety of the south during a month-long renewed offensive and tightened siege. Residents still clinging on in the north have said the new operation has created the worst conditions of the war to date. Israel said the push is necessary to combat regrouped Hamas cells.

Rights groups and aid agencies have alleged that despite the denials, Israel appears to be carrying out a version of the so-called “generals’ plan”, which proposes giving civilians a deadline to leave and then treating anyone who remains as a combatant.

It is unclear how many people remain in northern Gaza; last month, the UN estimated there were about 400,000 civilians unable or unwilling to follow Israeli evacuation orders. On Wednesday social media footage showed waves of several dozen displaced people carrying children and rucksacks and walking south through flattened areas of Gaza City.

Keep reading

Report Details Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing Campaign in Beit Lahia, Northern Gaza

A report from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published on Wednesday detailed the situation in Beit Lahia, a city in northern Gaza near the Israeli border where Israeli forces are implementing an ethnic cleansing campaign.

At the beginning of October, Israel ordered hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in northern Gaza to head south. Many ignored the order since there was nowhere safe to go, and the Israeli military focused its renewed assault on the north on Beith Lahia and neighboring Beit Hanoun and Jabalia, where it imposed a full siege to starve out civilians.

The Israeli military has said it forcibly expelled 55,000 Palestinians from the Jabalia refugee camp, and it has no intention of allowing them back. According to Haaretz, only a few thousand civilians remain in Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun.

“There is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes,” IDF spokesman Brig Gen Itzik Cohen told reporters on Tuesday.

Keep reading