Tag: palestine

New evidence emerges of Israel killing its own civilians

Did the Israeli military kill its own citizens on 7 October 2023? Regular readers of The Electronic Intifada know that it did.

Israel claims that Hamas or other Palestinian fighters killed 1,200 Israelis on 7 October, but as our reporting since that day shows, a significant, though as yet undetermined, number were killed by Israeli forces using tank shells and helicopter gunships.

These killings were due to a combination of panicked indiscriminate fire and application of the Hannibal doctrine, an Israeli military procedure that allows its forces to prevent the capture of Israelis by any means, even if that means killing them.

The video above, by the YouTube channel GDF, neatly summarizes much of The Electronic Intifada’s reporting in just over 12 minutes.

“Looking into friendly fire incidents on 7 October can make people targets for slander and misrepresentation. They can easily be described as conspiracy theorists and the like,” the narrator states, adding “one of the very few if not the only outlet that has continuously covered the topic is The Electronic Intifada.”

“By merely updating its readership on the known facts of friendly fire incidents over the course of 7 October and afterward they have been targeted with at least one attack article from The Washington Post where they were lumped in with right-wing Holocaust deniers, saying they exaggerated claims,” the narrator says.

Indeed, in January, The Electronic Intifada was the target of a scurrilous smear by that prominent American newspaper, an attack that has done nothing to deter us from pursuing the truth.

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US Official Admits Israeli Actions Make It ‘Virtually Impossible’ to Distribute Aid in Gaza

A US Middle East official explained that Israeli decisions to target police in Gaza have made the distribution of aid in the besieged enclave “virtually impossible.” The official added that Israel has failed to provide evidence for its claim that Hamas is stealing the aid sent into Gaza. Tel Aviv has used allegations that Hamas is tied to international humanitarian agencies and steals shipments to severely restrict aid deliveries into Gaza as hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are starving to death. 

David Satterfield, the Biden administration’s special Middle East envoy for humanitarian issues, explained that Israel had killed several members of the police force in Gaza that safeguarded aid deliveries. Targeting the police force led to them being unable to escort aid deliveries. 

“With the departure of police escorts, it has been virtually impossible for the UN or anyone else, Jordan, the UAE, or any other implementer to safely move assistance in Gaza because of criminal elements,” Satterfield said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Friday.

The Middle East envoy went on to admit that Israel has not presented “evidence of diversion or theft” of aid shipments into Gaza. Tel Aviv has used claims that assistance to the Palestinian people is exploited and stolen by Hamas to restrict the amount of food, fuel, and medicine that enters the enclave. Tel Aviv also restricts many medications, including painkillers, antibiotics, and anesthetics, from entering Gaza, claiming the aid could be used by Hamas militants. 

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What the Ukraine War, Taiwan, and Gaza Have in Common

In confronting all three foreign policy dilemmas, Washington needs to incorporate an understanding and acknowledgment of the things the United States has done that contributed to them.

Washington is grappling with seemingly intractable foreign policy dilemmas involving the Russian war in Ukraine, percolating tensions across the Taiwan Strait, and the conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. In each case, the United States has failed or refused to wholly confront its own share of responsibility for creating the problem. This has profound implications for establishing a stable peace in these three hotspots.

In the case of Ukraine, much ink has been spilled in the debate over the extent to which NATO expansion in the decades after the Cold War fueled Putin’s decision to launch the war. Washington’s response to the invasion has largely treated that debate as irrelevant. Instead, it has essentially adopted the premise that Putin never got over the collapse of the Soviet Union and always intended to reincorporate Ukraine into Russia forcefully. This perspective has largely ignored evidence and historical logic that the invasion was not inevitable and was contingent on external variables, including U.S. actions.

In his seminal 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russian and Ukrainians,” Putin wrote that after the Soviet collapse, Moscow “recognized the new geopolitical realities and not only recognized but, indeed, did a lot for Ukraine to establish itself as an independent country.” This was because “many people in Russia and Ukraine sincerely believed and assumed that our close cultural, spiritual, and economic ties would certainly last. . . . However, events—at first gradually and then more rapidly—started to move in a different direction.” These “events” included Ukrainian political developments that led to closer ties between Kiev and the West. “Step by step,” Putin wrote, “Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia.” But the West deflected Moscow’s concerns about this trajectory.

In his recent interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Putin reiterated this narrative. He said Russia had “agreed, voluntarily and proactively, to the collapse of the Soviet Union” because it “believed that this would be understood . . . as an invitation for cooperation and associateship” with the West. This could have taken the form of “a new security system” that would include the United States, European countries, and Russia—rather than the enlargement of NATO, which (according to Putin) Washington promised would extend “not one inch” to the east. Instead, there were “five waves of expansion,” and “in 2008 suddenly the doors or gates to NATO were open” to Ukraine. However, Moscow “never agreed to NATO’s expansion, and we never agreed that Ukraine would be in NATO.” Putin went on to blame the subsequent war on what he characterized as the U.S.-backed, anti-Russian “Maidan Revolution” in Ukraine in 2014, the West’s embrace of Kiev at Russia’s expense, and Washington’s persistent disregard of Moscow’s security concerns.

It is easy to dismiss Putin’s narrative as self-serving, disingenuous propaganda. He is indeed a monstrous figure, as the recent death of imprisoned Russian dissident Alexei Navalny demonstrates. But that does not address—instead, it evades—the historical question of whether U.S. policies toward NATO expansion in general and Ukraine’s candidacy in particular contributed to Putin’s ultimate decision to invade Ukraine. 

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Hochul Says Israel Should Have Annihilated Gaza, Offers Bizarre Scenario of Canada Attacking Buffalo

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who is not famous for her foreign policy expertise, told a Jewish group last week that Israel should have annihilated Gaza and compared it to a hypothetical scenario where Buffalo was attacked by Canada.

“If Canada someday ever attacked Buffalo, I’m sorry, my friends; there would be no Canada the next day,” the democrat told the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York on Thursday, according to CBS News.

Hochul, who has been a major backer of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, later apologized.

Hochul’s position is not unusual in the U.S. and in Israel, where most Israelis don’t think enough is being done to punish Palestinians.

Amichai Eliyahu, Israel’s Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage minister, stood by his comment that his country should strike the Gaza Strip with a “nuclear bomb” because there are no innocent civilians in the coastal enclave.

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Israel killing Gaza civilians in strikes with no military objective: report

Israeli strikes that killed dozens of civilians in Gaza had no legitimate military objectives, an investigation by Amnesty International has found.

Amnesty’s report details how 95 civilians, including 42 children, were killed across four separate strikes — three in December and one in January — in Rafah. Israel had previously designated the southern border city as a safe zone, causing around 1.5 million Palestinians to seek shelter there.

As part of the investigation, Amnesty went to the sites of the strikes, received witness testimony, and analysed satellite imagery in order to determine whether the strikes lawful.

It also analysed the Israel’s war diary published by the military, finding no reference to the strikes.

Amnesty International’s Senior Director of Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns Erika Guevara-Rosas said the strikes killed whole families who sought refuge from Israel’s military campaign.

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Israel deploys new military AI in Gaza war

The army has hinted at what the new tech is being used for, with spokesman Daniel Hagari saying last month that Israel’s forces were operating “above and underground simultaneously”.

A senior defence official told AFP the tech was destroying enemy drones and mapping Hamas’s vast tunnel network in Gaza.

New defence technologies including artificial intelligence-powered gunsights and robotic drones form a bright spot in an otherwise dire period for Israel’s tech industry.

The sector accounted for 18 percent of GDP in 2022, but the war in Gaza has wreaked havoc with an estimated eight percent of its workforce called up to fight.

“In general the war in Gaza presents threats, but also opportunities to test emerging technologies in the field,” said Avi Hasson, chief executive of Startup Nation Central, an Israeli tech incubator.

“Both on the battlefield and in the hospitals there are technologies that have been used in this war that have not been used in the past.”

But the rising civilian death toll shows that much greater oversight is needed over the use of new forms of defence tech, Mary Wareham, an arms expert at Human Rights Watch, told AFP.

“Now we’re facing the worst possible situation of death and suffering that we’re seeing today –- some of that is being brought about by the new tech,” she said.

More than 150 countries in December backed a UN resolution identifying “serious challenges and concerns” in new military tech, including “artificial intelligence and autonomy in weapons systems.”

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“They brought Israeli civilians to watch our nude torture”: IDF torture of Palestinian prisoners is turned into entertainment for Israeli viewers

The Israeli army introduced groups of Israeli civilians into detention centres and prisons holding Palestinian prisoners and detainees from the Gaza Strip, permitting the civilians to witness torture crimes against the detainees, with many allowed to film them on their own phones.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor received shocking testimonies from recently released Palestinian prisoners and detainees, in which they reported that the Israeli army invited a number of Israeli civilians during their interrogation sessions to witness torture and inhumane treatment, to which they were deliberately subjected in the presence of the civilians.

Arrested during ground incursions by Israeli army forces into the Strip, the prisoners and detainees were held for varying periods of time inside two detention centres: one located in the Zikim area on the northern border of the Gaza Strip, and another affiliated with the Naqab prison in southern Israel.

The released detainees told Euro-Med Monitor that the Israeli soldiers had purposefully presented them before Israeli civilians, falsely claiming that they were fighters affiliated with Palestinian armed factions and that they had taken part in the 7 October attack on Israeli towns on Gaza Strip borders.

According to testimony received by Euro-Med Monitor, groups of ten to twenty Israeli civilians at a time were permitted to watch and laughingly film Palestinian prisoners and detainees in their underwear while Israeli army soldiers subjected them to physical abuse, including beating them with metal batons, electric sticks, and pouring hot water on their heads. The detainees were also verbally abused.

This is the first time that these illegal practices have come to the attention of Euro-Med Monitor. It adds a new crime to the list of those committed by the Israeli army against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and specifically against prisoners and detainees who are subjected to cruel torture, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, and denials of a fair trial, among other atrocities.

Palestinian Omar Abu Mudallala, 43, told the Euro-Med Monitor team: “I was arrested at the checkpoint set up near the Kuwait roundabout, which separates Gaza City from the central region, as part of the Israeli random arrest campaigns. I was subjected to all types of torture and abuse for approximately 52 days,” pointing out that Israeli soldiers “brought Israeli civilians to watch our nude torture.”

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Let Them Eat Dirt

There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire.

Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation.

When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed. 

Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). 

The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza. 

UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.” 

UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA, after the ruling, of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated.

Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective. 

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The shocking inhumanity of Israel’s crimes in Gaza

Dozens of patients stand in line for hours outside the pharmacy booth in the Kuwaiti Hospital compound. They all start out by asking the pharmacist the same question: is my medication available? The answer for most is no.

Amid the long lines of the elderly, the ill, and mothers carrying their children, a man appearing to be middle-aged leaning on a young boy arrives, speaking in a loud voice and asking to be allowed to jump the line — he’s just been released from prison, and can barely stand.

“I spent sixty days of constant beating and humiliation,” he says. “They just released me, and I need to just get my medicine. Please let me take it without having to wait any longer.”

Everyone lets him through, allowing him to collect his medications from the booth and leave. 

I stand beside him in the hospital courtyard, asking him how he came to be arrested by the Israeli army — and how he was eventually released.

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