Health officials in Gaza said Thursday that the official death toll from Israel’s 10-month war has topped 40,000, though that is believed to be a vast undercount of the true figure. The grim milestone was reached just days after the Biden administration greenlit $20 billion in additional weapons sales to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter jets, tank ammunition, mortar rounds, tactical vehicles and advanced air-to-air missiles. The U.S. approved the sales despite growing calls for an arms embargo on Israel. “This is just a continuation of a policy that has been going on now for 10 months of the U.S. providing to Israel all the arms that it requests,” says Josh Paul, a veteran State Department official who worked on arms deals and resigned in protest over Gaza policy in October. “It is a dark day for American foreign policy.” We also speak with Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who says it’s “incomprehensible” that the U.S. keeps supplying Israel with weapons. “There should be no more arms going into that place before there is a ceasefire.”
Tag: palestine
‘Unlawful Transfer’ – Israel Issues New Evacuation Orders to Palestinians in Gaza
Today’s evacuation orders come a few days after the United Nations (UN) announced that 84 percent of the population in Gaza is under evacuation orders by the Israeli army.
The Israeli army issued new evacuation orders on Friday to Palestinians in various areas previously classified as “humanitarian safe zones” in central and southern Gaza.
The evacuation warnings came in the form of text messages sent to residents and displaced Palestinians alike along with flyers dropped in the northern area of Khan Yunis, in the southern Gaza Strip, and in neighborhoods in the eastern part of Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, according to Reuters news agency.
The Israeli army claimed that these areas were used by Hamas “as a base for firing mortars and rockets towards Israel,” Reuters said.
Israel has repeatedly claimed that Hamas uses civilian infrastructure and population as command centers for its operations.
The Palestinian group, however, has always denied operating from civilian facilities.
In 2014, following a deadly Israeli war on the Strip, Amnesty International investigated Israeli claims and reported that no evidence was found that the Palestinian group intentionally used civilians as shields.
Israel approves new West Bank settlement on UNESCO World Heritage Site
The Israeli government on 14 August officially approved municipal boundaries for a new settlement on a UNESCO World Heritage Site near Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank.
Jewish supremacist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said his office had “completed its work and published a plan for the new Nahal Heletz settlement in Gush Etzion,” a bloc of settlements south of occupied Jerusalem.
“No anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist decision will stop the development of settlements. We will continue to fight against the dangerous project of creating a Palestinian state by creating facts on the ground. This is my life’s mission, and I will continue it as much as I can,” the Israeli official, who lives in an illegal settlement, said via social media.
All of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank occupied since 1967, are considered illegal under international law, regardless of whether they have planning permission or not.
The Israeli Civil Administration published a blue line – a land survey process in which the administration ensures which lands are private and which are not – of 602 dunams (3.7 kilometers) for the establishment of the new Nahal Heletz settlement.
According to the Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now, the intended area of the new settlement was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO. “Smotrich continues to promote de facto annexation, disregarding the UNESCO Convention that Israel is a signatory to, and we will all pay the price,” the organization said in a statement.
Israeli forces using Palestinians as human shields to locate bombs in Gaza: report
The Israeli army has been using abducted Palestinian civilians as human shields in Gaza, an investigation by Ha’aretz has said, adding to previous allegations of a similar nature from Palestinian and Israeli sources.
The civilians, who the soldiers refer to as shawish, or ‘sergeant’ in Arabic, are used by the army to carry out dangerous search operations while dressed in Israeli army uniform, according to soldiers who spoke to the Israeli news outlet.
Soldiers deployed to Gaza who spoke to Haaretz said they were told it was preferable for a Palestinian to be killed by a booby trap bomb than an Israeli soldier.
In some instances, children and elderly people were abducted and forced to search tunnels for the army.
“There were times when really old people were made to go into houses,” one soldier said.
Another soldier, who said that reports on Israel’s use of human shields by outlets like Al Jazeera reflected their experience, recounted an instance when a 16-year-old was abducted by the army and forced to search a tunnel. While some civilians were detained for a day to be used for searches, some were kept for
“About five months ago, two Palestinians were brought to us. One was 20 and the other was 16. We were told: ‘Use them, they’re Gazans, use them as human shields,” the soldier said.
Why Did Washington Memory-hole Gaza?
Some are calling it Kamala Harris’s “Sister Souljah moment,” referring to when, in June 1992, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton publicly rebuked racist comments made by a popular female hip-hop artist as a way of distancing himself from extreme elements of the Democratic base.
For her part, Harris appeared to be drawing her own line Wednesday, shutting down chants from pro-Palestinian protesters at a Detroit rally on Wednesday, with a firm, “I’m speaking now.” The chants— “Kamala, Kamala, you can’t hide, we won’t vote for genocide”—received this stern rebuke from the vice president: “You know what? If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
Harris’s team said the Democratic nominee for president had already met with the protesters earlier so any suggestion she was ignoring this important segment of her constituency was wrong. Her defenders on social media applauded her willingness to call out disruptive tactics that feed into the notion that the party is divided. “At a moment when former President Donald J. Trump is attacking her as ‘radical’ her confrontation with protesters on the left offered a visual rebuttal,” wrote the New York Times’s Rebecca Davis O’Brien.
Heckling protesters and Sista Souljah moments aside, the incident raises another question, just as important—is Kamala hiding from the Israel–Gaza issue? And are the mainstream media and the Biden administration helping her do it?
Consider that just four months ago, her boss had stood up at the State of the Union and pledged a military “surge” of humanitarian aid into Gaza to save starving Palestinians on the ground. “To the leadership of Israel I say this: Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip,” Biden said. “Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority.”
Why raping Palestinians is legitimate Israeli military practice
The Israeli sexual torture scandal, whereby nine soldiers were arrested on 29 July for allegedly physically and sexually torturing Palestinian men, was depicted in western media as a deviation from Israel’s usual torture methods.
The idea is that Israeli torturers of Palestinian prisoners do not usually subject them to rape.
Four of the arrested soldiers were later released following widespread riots.
The US State Department, presumably appalled by such torture, described a video reportedly showing the alleged rape as “horrific” and insisted that “[t]here ought to be zero tolerance for sexual abuse, rape of any detainee, period… If there are detainees who have been sexually assaulted or raped, the government of Israel, the IDF [Israeli army] need to fully investigate those actions and hold anyone responsible accountable to the full extent of the law”.
The White House, also presumably a stranger to the practice of abusing political prisoners held in US dungeons, remained calm but found reports of Israeli sexual torture “deeply concerning”.
The European Union followed suit and claimed to be “gravely concerned”.
But this is hardly a new development in the cruelty of the Israeli colonial-settler regime. The Israeli army has been systematically using physical and sexual torture against Palestinians since at least 1967, as human rights groups revealed years ago.
Indeed, sadism has been characteristic of the Zionist colonists’ treatment of Palestinians since the 1880s, as even Zionist leaders complained at the time.
This sadism and the sexual torture that often accompanies it are rooted not only in European colonial hubris but also in orientalist views that Arabs only “understand force” and are allegedly more susceptible to sexual torture than white Europeans.
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.
EU’s Borrell Says ‘No Justification For These Massacres’ After Israeli Strike Kills Nearly 100 Gazans
The Washington Post and several international outlets are reporting another mass casualty event in Gaza – this time a reported Israeli airstrike on a school in Gaza City sheltering refugees. Gaza’s Civil Defense Force says the attack killed at least 93 people, including women and children.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it targeted a Hamas command center and has accused Gaza sources of inflating the death toll. However, gruesome images show many mangled and charred civilian bodies strewn all over the ground in the strike aftermath.
Gaza officials say the al-Taba’een school in Gaza City was housing about 6,000 internally displaced Palestinians before it was struck. Hamas-run emergency services have called it a “horrific massacre” and European officials have responded with condemnation.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell expressed shock and horror, saying on X: “Horrified by images from a sheltering school in Gaza hit by an Israeli strike, with reportedly dozens of Palestinian victims. At least 10 schools were targeted in the last weeks. There’s no justification for these massacres.”
“The recovery operations are indescribable … The schoolyard was filled with bodies,” one local emergency response officials has said. The IDF has reacted to the widespread reports by saying the information in the media does “not align” with its own intelligence and information.
The IDF claimed that terrorists have been “operating within a Hamas command and control center embedded in the Al-Taba’een school” and charged that Hamas has again used civilian population as “human shields”.
Zionism on the Brink: The Gaza War Beyond Netanyahu
The idea that the war on Gaza is essentially waged and sustained by and for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has, for long, dominated political analyses on the subject.
The notion is often kept alive by public opinion inside Israel.
Most polls produced since the start of the Israeli genocide on Gaza suggest that an overwhelming majority of Israelis believe that Netanyahu’s decisions are motivated by personal, political and familial interests.
This conclusion, however, is too convenient and not entirely accurate. It wrongly assumes that the Israeli people oppose Netanyahu’s war in Gaza though, in reality, they have been quite approving of all tactics used by the Israeli army, so far.
For example, over 300 days into the war, 69 percent of all Israelis support Netanyahu’s desperate tactics of assassinations, including the killing of Hamas’ top political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in Tehran on July 31.
While Netanyahu’s decision to target a political leader reflects his own failure and desperation, how is one to explain the Israeli people’s enthusiasm for the expansion of the circle of violence?
NATO member to join genocide case against Israel
Türkiye intends to formally join a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has announced, at a news conference in Cairo.
The ICJ case was launched in December by South Africa, which accused the Jewish state of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Since then, over a dozen countries have announced their intention to join the case. The Hague court has yet to issue a final ruling, but has ordered Israel to refrain from any acts that could fall under the UN Genocide Convention.
Fidan stressed that the Middle East can no longer tolerate Israel’s “provocations,” including its attacks on Lebanon and Iran, and accused the Jewish state of pursuing violence and “expansionism” while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aims “to set the entire region on fire.”
The minister condemned the “treacherous” assassination in Tehran last week of the Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh – who served as the Palestinian armed group’s chief negotiator in indirect ceasefire talks with Israel.
Iran and Hamas have accused Israel of being behind the strike, although the Jewish state has refused to confirm or deny involvement.
Hellbound and Down 
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