Dystopian “rules-based international order” must cease to exist!
Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them — little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.
Palestinians are under sustained attack because western countries such as New Zealand refuse to hold Israel accountable for its 75-year history of war crimes and systematic brutality against the Palestinian people.
As well as a permanent ceasefire the rallies will also be calling for:
Our political leaders to condemn Israeli war crimes just as they have condemned the killing of Israeli civilians
An international protection force to be put in place across all the Occupied Palestinian Territories - Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem
A well-resourced International Criminal Court investigation into war crimes committed on and since the 6th October attack on Israel -including the crimes of genocide snd apartheid
Kicking out the Israeli ambassador
BDS - Boycotts Divestment and Sanctions - against apartheid Israel just we did against apartheid South Africa
If you do only one positive thing today, let it be this, sign to kick out of our very own shores the genocidal monsters, por favor!! If you don't sign, you are complicit with apartheid, genocide and 21st century colonisation, so says Dancing Dave!!!
The situation in Gaza continues to deteriorate under Israel’s siege, aerial bombardment, and ground invasion. Civilians lost access to telecommunications infrastructure for the third time since October 7 as Israeli forces announced they’d encircled Gaza City. “Today there is north Gaza and south Gaza,” said an IDF Rear Admiral, calling the encirclement of northern Gaza a “significant stage” in Israel’s invasion, adding that IDF forces are likely to enter Gaza City within the next 48 hours.
As the IDF made its move into northern Gaza, the Al Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza was rocked by a massive explosion. The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said that at least 45 people were killed in the blast, which it blamed on IDF airstrikes. According to the UNRWA, Al Maghazi was home to about 33,000 people, who were squeezed into a 0.2-square-mile area.
The Gaza director of that same agency said that the average Palestinian living in Gaza is subsisting on two pieces of bread per day. The bread is made from flour brought into Gaza by the U.N. and whatever water people can find – another U.N. official said that many Palestinians have been forced to turn to brackish or saline groundwater for some of their needs. Fuel is also in increasingly short supply, as bakeries, desalination plants, and hospitals compete for resources.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited the occupied West Bank on Sunday before heading to Baghdad for talks with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani. Blinken said that the U.S. was “engaged in pursuing humanitarian pauses” in Gaza, but noted prior to the meeting that his country believes a ceasefire would only allow Hamas to regroup for another attack.
Oh, and a minister of Israel’s coalition government was suspended indefinitely after saying that dropping a nuke on Gaza is “one of the possibilities” in the conflict, stating that there are “no non-combatants in Gaza.”
" thanks to pictures taken by the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 satellite, researchers now have a better look at the damage done by IDF airstrikes. Their findings show that about 27% to 35% of all buildings in Northern Gaza have been damaged, and about 13% to 18% of all buildings across Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. That’s about 38,000 to 51,500 buildings. “It's just steadily increasing,” said one satellite imaging expert. “There's broad damage in areas where people live — cities, refugee camps.” The U.N. estimates that 1.5 million people have been displaced by the conflict thus far, and Gaza’s Health Ministry estimates that over 10,000 Gazans have been killed by the IDF and its bombing campaign."
Invoke the Genocide Convention Now!!!
“We have said it repeatedly. We are saying it again. No place is safe in Gaza, whether in the south, or the southwest, whether in Rafah or in any unilaterally so-called ‘safe zone.” – United Nations Relief and Works Agency Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini
Here's two totally related stories of interest. I wonder how much White Phosphorus would have rained on Palestinian children from a tanker load (19998 t DWT) of this phosphoric acid? SMFH
Israeli Phosphoric Acid seized
Israel's Illegal Use of White Phosphorus
If your position is based on truth and morality, you don’t need to make up lies to defend it, and you don’t need to hurl false accusations at those who disagree with it.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to circulate bogus atrocity propaganda about decapitated babies, babies cooked in ovens, and murdered pregnant women.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to circulate lies claiming actual dead Palestinian babies in Gaza are plastic dolls.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to falsely present phony audio clips as intercepted Hamas communications and claim they exonerate you of war crime allegations.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to circulate lies and propaganda about the hospitals you plan to attack being secret Hamas headquarters.
If your position was based on truth and morality, your official government social media accounts wouldn’t have to keep deleting posts after getting caught circulating lie after lie.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to circulate amazingly cringey propaganda videos like Israeli children singing about how great it will be to destroy Gaza and Israeli women doing yoga over the pictures of Israeli hostages.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t find yourself engaged in bizarre mental contortions trying to pretend history began on October 7 while sweeping all the mountains of murder and abuse which led up to it under the carpet.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t have to keep pointing at something that happened months ago to defend what you’ve been doing in the present moment in all the days since.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to resort to hurling false accusations of anti-semitism at those who criticize your side instead of producing robust counter-arguments.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to resort to accusing those who disagree with you of supporting terrorism and serving Hamas instead of defending your position like a normal adult.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t need to lie and claim that longstanding pro-Palestine slogans are actually calls for the genocide of Jews to try and get them silenced.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you wouldn’t feel the need to censor and silence everyone who disagrees with you online, on college campuses, and on all platforms of major influence.
If your position was based on truth and morality, you would get curious and do some self-examination when young people overwhelmingly reject that position instead of insisting that the young people are the problem and trying to kill TikTok and outlaw demonstrations.
If your position was based on truth and morality you would be defending it with facts, logic and rational argumentation instead of vitriol, online troll mobs and incendiary false accusations.
If your position is based in truth and morality, you can defend it in a truthful and moral way, instead of the exact opposite. Caitlin Johnstone
If we can't drive them out, we'll just starve them to death SMFH
CNN’s Clarissa Ward and her crew became the first western journalists to enter Gaza independent from Israeli forces since October 7, briefly visiting a 150-bed hospital that was recently constructed in a soccer stadium by the United Arab Emirates in the southern part of the enclave before leaving to report on the footage from Abu Dhabi.
Overall the segment on Ward’s visit is beneficial, providing some much-needed visuals to a mainstream audience for whom the human butchery in Gaza has largely been more of an abstract idea. CNN shows maimed victims of Israeli airstrikes in all their suffering and distress, and Ward interviews them with compassion, noting correctly that “record numbers of civilian casualties” have been inflicted by “Israel’s frenzied bombardment”. Ward emphasizes the “heroic, extraordinary work” of Palestinian journalists who’ve been covering what’s been happening in Gaza over the last two months, accurately noting that these reporters have been getting killed at an unprecedented rate in this onslaught.
So it’s an objectively good thing that this segment was made and that Ward and her crew did the work that they did. But because it’s CNN, there was also a lot of narrative distortion thrown on what people were shown which happens to benefit the information interests of the US empire.
Ward rightly stresses the fact that the hospital she and her crew visited is “not a microcosm” of the conditions of healthcare facilities in the rest of Gaza because it’s so new and has been supplied by the UAE, noting that other hospitals in Gaza are barely functioning at all. What Ward does not say is that this problem is largely due to the fact that Israel has been systematically attacking hospitals in Gaza since October 7, rendering dozens of them nonfunctional.
In fact, in a CNN segment about the death and suffering that’s being caused by an Israeli military operation, Israel itself plays a surprisingly small role. By my count the word “Israel” or “Israeli” was only mentioned six times in the entire 14-minute segment, with long stretches going by where the death and destruction is discussed more as a passive occurrence like the weather, rather than as a deliberate act of mass-scale violence.
For example, as CNN is arriving at the hospital an Israeli bomb goes off nearby, which a doctor says happens “at least twenty times a day”. But the word “Israel” never comes up, even when discussing it after the fact — when wounded are brought in from the bombing that happened ten minutes earlier, Ward refers to it as “the strike”, not “the Israeli strike”.
Nowhere does this AP article on a Palestinian-American's family casualties in Gaza name Israel as the one dropping the bombs. "the blast at a hospital", "a bomb hit her family's home"... Bombs just drop from the sky & spray shrapnel & flatten homes.https://t.co/jOqKCtcBdj pic.twitter.com/C6WVujucRJ
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) October 22, 2023
We’ve been seeing this bizarre divorcing of attacker and attack all the time in Gaza since October 7, with news outlets sometimes going entire articles speaking only of “blasts” and “bombings” without ever actually mentioning the state who is inflicting them. This failure to attribute the source of an attack is not something you see in places like Ukraine, where the words “Russian” and “Putin” always punctuate the reporting like freckles, and it’s certainly not something you ever see in discussions about October 7. At no time will you ever go minutes watching a news report about the Hamas attack without hearing any mention of who the attackers were.
While mentions of Israel are scant in CNN’s reporting, mentions of the United States are missing altogether. At no time in the 14-minute segment does Ward or anyone else make any mention of the fact that this relentless massacre can only happen because it is being backed by the US, and that the Biden administration could end it at any time by withdrawing that backing. It’s downright surreal watching an American outlet talking about the US-sponsored destruction of Gaza as though it’s some separate foreign conflict that Washington is just passively witnessing.
Contrast this type of missing attribution with the ubiquitous use of the phrase “Iran-backed” in the mainstream western press when talking about non-US-aligned forces in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. The fact that the US is backing Israel’s assault on Gaza is much, much more well-evidenced than any claims of Iranian backing ever are, but you never see phrases like “US-backed airstrike” or “US-backed bombing campaign” in western reporting on Gaza.
Moving and truly horrifying. Please watch. Ward does a good job, but her statistics are off. She says 2/3 of those killed are civilians. No, 2/3 are women & children. EVERY MAN IS NOT A COMBATANT! (Like the one wheeled in with a missing leg).pic.twitter.com/O1I4xrBqly
— Left I on the News (@leftiblog) December 14, 2023
Another distortion in the CNN clip comes when Ward talks about civilian casualties in Gaza.
“The death toll in Gaza as a result of Israel’s frenzied bombardment currently hovers at roughly 18,000,” Ward says. “If you do the math, extrapolating as the UN says that two-thirds of the casualties are civilians, that is about 11,800 civilians who have been killed in just over two months.”
This of course incorrectly assumes that all the men being killed in Gaza are Hamas fighters. Ward’s segment is full of footage that shows her surrounded by men who are plainly noncombatants, and if they’re killing women and children in Gaza then they’re also necessarily killing a lot of civilian men. Pointing out the number of women and children being killed in this operation is useful because it shows the indiscriminate nature of the killing, but this number should never be interpreted as the sum total of civilian deaths.
Watching the sloppy propagandistic spin of the western press reminds me of how grateful I am for all the real journalists in Gaza who’ve been doing the heavy lifting, even while their lives are in serious danger. Still, every little bit helps, and if the CNN segment opens one more pair of western eyes to what’s going on, I’ll take it.
Infectious diseases are tearing through Gaza, whose healthcare system has been rendered almost nonexistent, and people are beginning to starve in massive numbers. All of this is due to concrete policy decisions made by Israel in its horrific assault on the Gaza Strip.
In an article titled “Gaza’s health system is ‘on its knees’ as Israel pushes into Khan Younis,” The Washington Post reports that the mass displacement of nearly two million Palestinians in Gaza has led to overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions that are rapidly giving rise to disease.
“Meanwhile, the Gaza Health Ministry and other medical workers said they were recording new cases of acute hepatitis, scabies, measles and upper respiratory infections, mostly among children,” the Post reports. “Infectious diseases are spreading fast, said Imad al-Hams, a physician at the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah, as people crowd into tiny slivers of land to escape advancing Israeli forces.”
BREAKING: Doctors Without Borders official says the healthcare system in Gaza is 'completely collapsed at the moment'
— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) December 11, 2023
In a recent interview with CNN, Doctors Without Borders emergency coordinator Marie-Aure Perreaut described conditions in Gaza as “apocalyptic”, saying living conditions at the Al-Aqsa Hospital she’s working from “can barely be described as living conditions anymore.”
“The healthcare system is completely collapsed at the moment,” Perreaut told Al Jazeera.
The UN World Food Programme reports that half of Gaza’s population is now starving due to Israeli siege warfare and the collapse of civilian infrastructure. In northern Gaza that figure goes up to nine in ten.
All of this aligns perfectly with Israeli policies of massive forced evacuations, attacking healthcare facilities, and laying complete siege to the Gaza Strip.
A doctor named Hafez Abukhoussa writes the following in a new article for Time titled “What I’ve Seen Treating Patients in Gaza’s Remaining Hospitals”:
“Gaza’s health care system has almost completely collapsed as a result of Israel’s ongoing bombardment. Hospitals and ambulances have been repeatedly attacked. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, more than 250 medical workers have been killed so far, including two of my colleagues from Doctors Without Borders, who died while performing their duties in Al-Awda hospital in northern Gaza. Of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, only 11 are still functioning in any capacity, according to the World Health Organization. Hospitals in the north like Al-Shifa are barely functioning at all, as basic medicines and fuel have run out. My colleagues have been performing amputations by flashlight and without anesthesia. When Israeli soldiers raided Al-Shifa a few weeks ago — a move the head of the WHO called ‘totally unacceptable’ — doctors and staff were forced to abandon patients too sick or injured to evacuate. Some of those who refused to leave, including the hospital’s director, were arrested, alongside dozens of others. At Al-Nasr Children’s hospital, soldiers ordered staff to leave the patients, including four premature babies who required oxygen, who were later found dead.”
Netanyahu’s goal for Gaza: “Thin” population “to a minimum” https://t.co/viqCUXZsqo by @ryangrim https://t.co/viqCUXZsqo
— The Intercept (@theintercept) December 3, 2023
This all also aligns perfectly with the Netanyahu government’s reported agenda to “thin” the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip “to a minimum,” and with all the other calls for ethnic cleansing we keep seeing pushed by Israeli officials and thought leaders over and over again.
It also aligns perfectly with the suggestions made last month by an influential Israeli national security leader named Giora Eiland, a retired major general for the IDF.
“The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics,” Eiland wrote. “We must not shy away from this, as difficult as that may be. After all, severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring victory closer and reduce casualties among IDF soldiers.”
In an Op-Ed titled “Let’s Not be Intimidated by the World,” Israeli ret. Major General Giora Eiland argues that all Palestinians in Gaza are legitimate targets and that even a “severe epidemic” in Gaza will “bring victory closer.”https://t.co/miQhavMx57
— Mondoweiss (@Mondoweiss) November 29, 2023
Eiland was completely dismissive of the idea that there are innocent people in Gaza, a sentiment we’re seeing pushed harder and harder as Israel draws nearer and nearer to a very, very dark chapter in the history of human civilization.
“They are not only Hamas fighters with weapons, but also all the ‘civilian’ officials, including hospital administrators and school administrators, and also the entire Gaza population that enthusiastically supported Hamas and cheered on its atrocities on October 7th,” Eiland wrote, adding, “Who are the ‘poor’ women of Gaza? They are all the mothers, sisters or wives of Hamas murderers.”
“Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism,” Eiland adds. “Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
When people talk about genocide in Gaza, they’re not just talking about the thousands of civilians who’ve been killed in Israeli airstrikes. The policies Israel has been deliberately putting in place have the potential to kill many, many more people than that in the coming months, and if Netanyahu and his goons get their way, that’s exactly what will happen. Caitlin Johnstone
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports 68 journalists have been killed in Gaza from October 7 – December 19. Horrifyingly, the toll, just like the number of civilian deaths overall, ticked up repeatedly in the few days it took our team to finalize the text of this message.
The Israeli military has a deeply troubling history of targeting journalists, from the bombing of a building housing Al Jazeera and Associated Press offices in 2021 to the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank last year to a missile attack in southern Lebanon that killed Issam Abdallah, a cameraman working for Reuters, earlier this month. No one has ever been charged or held to account.
Journalists are a crucial voice in moments of crisis. We need verifiable information now more than ever — and that won’t happen if people in power fail to ensure the safety of the press, particularly in combat areas.
Today, the International Court of Justice overwhelmingly ordered Israel to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza. South Africa's case will proceed.
Today, Palestinians stand at the heart of empire to testify to its crimes. Biden administration officials have repeatedly refused to use their influence to place limits on Israel’s massive bombing and total siege of Gaza. Instead, their actions to fund, arm, and endorse Israel constitute a failure to prevent genocide and complicity in genocide. This includes denying Israel’s atrocities, offering unconditional support, bypassing Congressional oversight to send funding and weapons to Israel, and vetoing resolutions proposed by the United Nations Security Council.
We stand with the plaintiffs and their lawyers, including our partners @DCIP (Defence for Children International-Palestine), @al_haq_organization (Al-Haq), and @ccrjustice (Center for Constitutional Rights) as they take Biden administration officials to court for aiding and abetting genocide.
While America’s eyes were on the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, the IDF rained down missile strikes on Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, where over half of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million had been told to shelter by Israel. As of writing, the strikes killed 37 people and wounded dozens more, causing chaos as the missiles hit while Palestinian refugees were sleeping. Israel has confirmed that the “wave of strikes” hit “quality targets” in Rafah – residents have told news outlets that the missiles hit two mosques and several houses.
On Sunday, U.S. President Joe Biden reportedly warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that an attack on Rafah should not take place without a “credible and executable” evacuation plan. The statement is the latest in a surprising turnaround from Biden, who’s been one of Israel’s biggest supporters over his long political career. Just last week, the president began speaking out against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, calling it “over the top” and pushing for an increase in humanitarian aid.
Israel’s military confirmed that, before the strikes took place, the IDF was able to extract two Hamas-held hostages from Rafah. The two hostages were taken to an Israeli hospital but in good condition. Israel might now face significant diplomatic challenges following the strikes – Egypt has warned of “dire consequences” in response to an Israeli ground operation in Rafah, and a Hamas leader has said that a ground invasion would “blow up” ongoing hostage exchange negotiations.
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