I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
This is a rare example of a very direct message delivered by one government to another at the United Nations.
Samuel Moncada, Venezuela’s ambassador to the U.N., addressed the General Assembly on Tuesday.
Mr. President, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela
robustly condemns the Israeli aggression against the civilian population
in the occupied Palestinian territories. This is an operation of mass
expulsion of an entire people in order to annex their territory by the
occupying power. It’s a new cycle of expansionist terror, of so much
that has been suffered by the Palestinian people over 75 years of
occupation.
Over the last eight weeks we have seen an escalation of the crimes
perpetrated by the Israeli regime against the Palestinian people. Almost
15,000 innocent civilians have been murdered by the occupation forces
in the Gaza Strip, mainly women and children in an operation of ethnic
cleansing which has not even spared the staff of the United Nations who
have also been massacred.
It is repugnant to see how, despite the cruelty of the facts that on
view to the world, the government of the United States of America and
its satellites aim to justify the unjustifiable:
That the occupying power is carrying out a genocide against the
Palestinian people as defined in the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the Rome statute of the
International Criminal Court. We ask ourselves where are those who in
other cases rush to apply the responsibility to protect but now are
ignoring the human rights of Palestinians submitted to the Israeli
occupation?
Where are the activists on the code of conduct of the Security
Council against genocide or those advocating for a reduction in the
right of veto in the Security Council when mass atrocities are being
committed? Their silence makes them an accomplice in these crimes.
We call for a condemnation in the firmest terms of the criminal
policies of Israel against the civilian population. The United Nations
must act with determination including the Secretariat that has a crucial
role to play in preserving the right to life of millions of innocent
people. We cannot allow now that our actions and our omissions make us
jointly responsible for the annihilation of an entire people.
Mr. President, Israel has no intention of putting an end to the
occupation. On the contrary it aims to wrest control of the entire
occupied Palestinian territory while it alters the demographic
situation, repressing Palestinians and privileging Israeli settlers.
This is a case of the the imposition of a system of apartheid to this
reality.
We
must add the destruction of tens of thousands of dwellings, the forced
displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, as well as the
deliberate attacks against vital infrastructure. Mr. President, today we
must make progress as a matter of urgency in at least three critical
areas.
Firstly we must put an end to the cycle of impunity. Israel must be
held accountable by International Justice for the crimes against
humanity and war crimes that it has been committing over years, as well
as for the genocide underway today. The international impunity provided
to it by a government of one of its main partners that is a permanent
member of the Security Council, this encourages the crimes committed
daily by Israel.
Secondly whilst the occupying power continues with its policies of
shoot to kill, bombing schools, hospitals, housing, refugee centers or
food storage facilities as well as the systemic violence on the part of
Israeli settlers against the innocent civilian population. We must apply
provisional measures under international humanitarian law that will
guarantee the international protection of the Palestinian people.
And thirdly, an end must be put to the illegal settlement policy, the
evictions and demolition of homes, the expropriation of Palestinian
land, to the arbitrary detentions of innocent Palestinian civilians and
the persecution of civil society Palestinian organizations. We must
repudiate those who call for the use of weapons of mass destruction
against the Palestinian people and that encourage fanatical groups to
commit hate crimes or attack religious sites.
Mr. President, on the other hand we insist on our rejection of the
lack of compliance with the provisions of resolution 497 of the Security
Council, which for more than 40 years now has demanded the withdrawal
of Israel from the Syrian Golan and we also reject any actions taken by
the occupying power to change the demographic or legal situation of the
occupied Syrian Golan. We reject any measures that use force to exercise
jurisdiction and administration in this territory.
The time has come for this General Assembly to demand concrete action and that’s why we urge a vote in favor of all of the draft resolutions tabled today under items 39 and 40 of the program of work.
Finally we reaffirm our solidarity with the Palestinian people as
well as our support for self-determination and a Palestinian state that
is independent and sovereign within in the pre-1967 borders with East
Jerusalem as its capital and as a full member of the United Nations.
Sen. Bernie Sanders says he’s considering pushing a vote on conditioning extra military aid to Israel
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, November 28, 2023
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Tuesday dismissed
growing calls to condition military aid to Israel, calling them
“ridiculous,” as Israel has been killing civilians at a historic pace in
Gaza.
“Our relationship with Israel is the closest national security
relationship of any country in the world. And to condition, in effect,
our assistance to Israel on their meeting our standards, it seems to me
is totally unnecessary,” McConnell said, according to The Hill.
While the majority of Congress staunchly backs Israel and wouldn’t
want to place limits on US military support, there have been growing
calls from some Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to put
conditions on US aid.
“The United States must make clear that while we are friends of
Israel, there are conditions to that friendship and that we cannot be
complicit in actions that violate international law and our own sense of
decency,” Sanders wrote in The New York Times last week.
According to The Intercept, Sanders said he might push a vote on
conditioning the over $14 billion President Biden is seeking to fund
Israel’s onslaught in Gaza, which, according to the most conservative
estimates, has killed at least 10,000 civilians.
The mass slaughter of civilians has not fazed hawks in Congress. Sen.
Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has said there is “no limit” to the number of
civilians Israel can kill before it would lose US support.
While Graham is an ultra-hawk, his view reflects that of the Biden
administration, which has said it would not draw “red lines” for Israel
despite the massive civilian casualties. The US is issuing warnings over
Israel’s coming campaign in south Gaza, but there’s no sign it’s
looking to leverage military aid.
The
bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli bombardment and fire are
buried in a mass grave, after they were transported from al-Shifa
Hospital in Gaza City to Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on
November 22, 2023 [Reuters/Mohammed Salem]
The bitter reality for us, Palestinians in Gaza, is that we are
alone, beleaguered, under siege, and are seen as undesirables even by
some of those who are supposed to be our brethren. Forty-five days of
barbaric massacres have claimed the lives of more than 14,000 people,
including more than 6,000 children and 3,500 women.
Among the thousands of men who have been killed are university
students, doctors, nurses, shop owners and youth who were sent out by
their families to search for food or water.
More than 7,000 are still missing, including 4,000 children – most of them are dead, buried under the rubble of their homes.
More are dying in bombed-out hospitals rendered unoperational and in
the few that are still working but cannot cope with the tens of
thousands wounded due to the lack of staff and medical supplies. Soon
even more will be dying of disease, hunger and the winter cold.
Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilian homes has completely wiped
out hundreds of families from the population register. Some 1.7 million
people have been displaced.
For 45 days, Palestinians have been left alone to face the onslaught
of the world’s fourth strongest army, which possesses 200 nuclear
weapons, hundreds of F-16 jets, attack helicopters, gunboats, battle
tanks and armoured vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and
reservists.
As the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels,
some Arab regimes have done nothing more than issue timid statements,
denouncing and condemning. Nothing more.
In fact, Arab regimes have let down the Palestinians since 1948, and
to this day, official Arab positions are a combination of cowardice and
hypocrisy. They have failed to bring an end to the Israeli siege on Gaza
for 17 years now and are now failing to stop Israel’s genocide.
We in Gaza are now wondering how the timid expressions of support
coming out of the streets and capitals of the Arab nations can be turned
into concrete action in the absence of democracy. We wonder whether the
Arabs living under the rule of authoritarian, oligarchical regimes can
change them in non-violent ways.
We
exhaust ourselves trying to figure out the possible means available to
achieve democratic political change, because with the genocide in Gaza
and the apartheid regime in the rest of Palestine, we have not seen any
practical translation for the solidarity shown by some Arab peoples with
Palestine.
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Desmond Tutu, the late South African anti-apartheid activist and
Anglican bishop, once said, “If you are neutral in situations of
injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
As I argued during Israel’s brutal assaults on Gaza in 2009, 2012,
and 2014, the United Nations, the European Union, and Arab states have
not been neutral; they have remained largely silent about the atrocities
the Israeli forces have committed. Since thousands of corpses of women
and children have failed to convince them of the need to act, they have
taken Israel’s side.
This state of affairs put two choices before the Palestinians in
Gaza: dying dishonourably while thanking our killers for a trickle of
food and water; or fighting for our dignity, for ourselves and the
coming generations. It is now clear that after years of self-deception
that portrayed slavery to the occupier as a fait accompli, we have
chosen the second option.
But
instead of recognising our resistance as such and seeing it in the
context of the decades-long Palestinian struggle for freedom from
occupation and apartheid, the international community is instead
reducing it to a “conflict” between two “equal” sides.
The ongoing truce and the longer-term ceasefire initiative reflect
this attitude. They in no way take into account that Israel has two
clear objectives in its war on Gaza: the slaughter of the largest
possible number of Palestinians by targeting Palestinian civilians; and
the elimination of any possibility of resistance in order to maintain
stability in this open-air concentration camp.
It appears that what the international community is requiring of
Palestinians is to behave as “house slaves” and be grateful for the
crumbs their white masters are letting them have. They are to appreciate
the trickle of food and water that is allowed to sustain them barely
alive and accept their slow death. They are to concede that if they die,
it is their own fault.
But Palestinians in Gaza and beyond will not oblige.
Accordingly, any agreement that does not lead to the immediate
lifting of the blockade, the reopening of the Rafah crossing and all the
other crossings in a manner that allows the introduction of food, fuel,
medicine, and all other needs – in conjunction with an agreement that
ends the Israeli occupation and apartheid and upholds the Palestinian
right of return – will not be acceptable to the people of Gaza.
The biggest source of concern for the Israeli “masters”, their
Western allies, and their Arab lackeys, would be for us to raise the
ceiling of our demands to that level; to demand that the conflict be put
in the context of the multifaceted settler-colonial enterprise, the
occupation, the apartheid, and the ethnic cleansing.
October 7 is a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. Gaza and the
rest of Palestine yearns for a leadership that rises up to the level of
this historic moment, a leadership that would take the following
measures without any further delay:
Enacting a full cessation of security coordination with Israel;
Going to the International Criminal Court and suing Israeli political
and military leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity;
Reviewing all agreements signed with Israel, particularly the Oslo Accords and related agreements;
Declaring a clear position on any initiative that does not take into
account the need for the immediate end of the siege, the reopening of
all crossings, and the restoration of the full freedom of movement.
Any talk about improving the conditions of oppression in light of the
great sacrifices of Gaza is a betrayal of the Palestinian martyrs. It
is time to start discussing radical solutions away from the “interim
programme” and the Bantustan-like state, and adopt a clear slogan: end
the occupation, end the apartheid, and end settler-colonialism. This is
the only way the loss of thousands of lives in Gaza would not have been
in vain.
Haidar EidHaidar Eid is an associate Professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza.
The New York Times reported Saturday that Israel is killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza at a historic pace.
The
huge civilian death toll in Gaza is explained by the scale of the
bombing campaign and Israel’s willingness to drop US-provided
2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas that are packed with
civilians.
Marc
Garlasco, a former Pentagon analyst who advises the Dutch NGO PAX, told
the Times that he’s never seen anything like it. “It’s beyond anything
that I’ve seen in my career,” he said. Garlasco added that to find a
historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, one
would have to “go back to Vietnam or the Second World War.”
Israeli
officials have frequently cited the Allied strategic bombings of Japan
and Germany during World War II to justify their onslaught in Gaza. The
comparison includes the US fire bombings of Japanese cities, which
killed around 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in one night in 1945, as well
as the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Israel
has also invoked the US air campaign against ISIS, which killed tens of
thousands of civilians in Iraq and Syria. But even the most brutal
battle of the ISIS war does not compare to Israel’s onslaught in Gaza.
According to an AP investigation, between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians
died during the Battle of Mosul. About a third were killed by US-led
coalition airstrikes or Iraqi forces, a third were killed by ISIS, and
the cause of death for the rest is undetermined.
The
Battle of Mosul lasted for nine months, from October 2016 to July 2017.
In less than two months in Gaza, the Israeli bombardment has killed at
least 10,000 civilians, based on a conservative estimate cited by The
Times.
The
Times report said, “People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they
say, than in even the deadliest moments of US-led attacks in Iraq, Syria
and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human
rights groups.”
The
Israeli onslaught also dwarves the civilian casualties in the war in
Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022. In one year and nine
months of fighting, the UN estimates at least 10,000 civilians have been
killed in Ukraine, including 560 children. The last update released by
Gaza’s Health Ministry on November 10, after just 35 days of Israel’s
campaign, said over 4,500 Palestinian children had been killed in Gaza,
which the US State Department acknowledged was considered to be a low
estimate at the time.
Despite
the massive civilian and child death toll, the US continues to provide
Israel with unconditional military aid. The White House has acknowledged
that Israel is killing thousands of innocent people in Gaza but has
said there are no “red lines” that would impact US support.
Israel is carrying out a campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable. This
campaign includes destroying all of Gaza’s hospitals. The message Israel
is sending is clear – Nowhere is safe. If you stay, you die.
By Chris Hedges, ICH
Eve of Destruction – by Mr. Fish
Israel is not attacking hospitals in Gaza because they are “Hamas
command centers.” Israel is systematically and deliberately destroying
Gaza’s medical infrastructure as part of a scorched earth campaign to
make Gaza uninhabitable and escalate a humanitarian crisis. It intends
to force 2.3 million Palestinians over the border into Egypt where they
will never return.
Israel has destroyed and nearly emptied the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The Indonesian Hospital
in Beit Lahia is next. Israel is deploying tanks and armored personnel
carriers around the hospital and has fired rounds into the building,
killing twelve people.
The playbook is familiar. Flyers are dropped by Israel over a
hospital telling people to leave because the hospital is a base for
“Hamas terrorist activities.” Tanks and artillery shells rip away parts
of the hospital walls. Ambulances are blown up by Israeli missiles.
Power and water is cut. Medical supplies are blocked. There are no
painkillers, antibiotics and oxygen. The most vulnerable, premature
babies in incubators and the gravely ill, die. Israeli soldiers raid the
hospital and force everyone out at gunpoint.
This is what happened at Al Shifa hospital. This is what happened at
Al Rantisi Children’s Hospital. This is what happened at Gaza’s main
psychiatric hospital. This is what happened at Nasser Hospital. This is
what happened at the other hospitals that Israel has destroyed. And this
is what will happen at the few hospitals that remain.
Israel has shut down 21 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals, including Gaza’s only
cancer hospital. The hospitals still operating have severe shortages of
basic medicine and supplies. One by one the hospitals are being picked
off. Soon there will be no health facilities left. This is by design.
Tens of thousands of terrified Palestinians, forced to evacuate by
Israel, their homes blasted into rubble, seek refuge from the relentless
bombing by camping out in and around Gaza’s hospitals. They hope the
medical centers will not be targeted by Israel. If Israel abided by the Geneva Conventions
they would be correct. But Israel is not carrying out a war. It is
carrying out a genocide. And in a genocide, a population, and all that
sustains a population, is obliterated.
In an ominous sign that Israel will turn on the Palestinians in the
West Bank once it is done flattening Gaza, armored vehicles have
surrounded at least four West Bank hospitals. The Ibn Sina Hospital has been raided by Israeli soldiers along with the East Jerusalem Hospital.
Israel’s settler colonial state was founded on lies. It is sustained
by lies. And now, when it is grimly determined to carry out the worst
slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba, or
“catastrophe,” that saw 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed and
some 50 massacres by Jewish militias, it spits out one grotesque
absurdity after another. It speaks of Palestinians as a dehumanized
mass. There are no mothers, fathers, children, teachers, doctors,
lawyers, cooks, poets, taxi drivers or shopkeepers. Palestinians, in the
Israeli lexicon, are a single contagion that must be eradicated.
ICH Needs Your HELP: Click Here To Support Independent Media: People For Global Justice – Since 2001
Watch this video of Israeli school children singing, “We Will Annihilate Everyone” in Gaza.
Hitler Youth used to sing songs like this about Jews.
Those who embark upon projects of mass killing lie to avoid
demoralizing their own populations, lull the victims into believing they
will not all be exterminated and stop outside forces from intervening.
The Nazis claimed that Jews packed on trains and sent to extermination
camps were on work details and had good medical care and adequate food.
As for the infirm and elderly, they were cared for in rest centers. The
Nazis even created a mock camp for the “resettlement” of Jews “to the
East,” – Theresienstadt
– where international bodies such as the Red Cross could see how
humanely the Jews were treated, even as millions were being
exterminated.
At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were
massacred or died of exposure, disease and starvation during the
genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire from the spring of 1915 to
the autumn of 1916. The Armenian genocide
was as public as the genocide in Gaza. European and U.S. consular
missions provided detailed accounts of the campaign to cleanse modern
day Türkiye of Armenians.
The
Ottoman government, in an attempt to hide the genocide, banned
foreigners from taking photographs of Armenian refugees or the corpses
that lined the roads. Israel too has blocked the foreign press from
Gaza, carrying out only a handful of brief and carefully staged visits
arranged by the Israeli military. Israel periodically cuts off internet
and phone services. At least 43 Palestinian journalists and media
workers have been killed by Israel since the Hamas incursion into Israel on Oct. 7, many undoubtedly targeted by Israeli forces.
Armenians, like Palestinians, were forced from their homes, gunned
down and denied food and water. Armenian deportees were sent on death
marches to the Syrian Desert
where tens of thousands were shot or died from starvation, cholera,
malaria, dysentery and influenza. Israel is forcing 1.1 million
Palestinians into the southern tip of Gaza and bombing them as they
flee. These refugees, like the Armenians, lack food, water, fuel and
sanitation. They too will soon succumb to epidemics of infectious
diseases.
Talat Pasha, the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire, told the United States ambassador, Henry Morgenthau Sr.,
in words that replicate Israel’s stance, on Aug. 2, 1915, “that our
Armenian policy is absolutely fixed and that nothing can change it. We
will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert but nowhere else.”
The longer the genocide continues the more absurd the lies become.
There are big Israeli lies. The obliteration of Gaza and
wanton killing of thousands of Palestinians, Israel insists, is a
targeted effort to get rid of Hamas rather than a campaign to reduce
Gaza to a pile of rubble, carry out mass murder and ethnically cleanse
Palestinians.
There are small Israeli lies. Forty beheaded
babies. Al Shifa Hospital is a “Hamas command center.” A calendar in
Arabic on the wall of a hospital, according to IDF Spokesperson, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari,
is “a guardian [guard] list, where every terrorist writes his name and
every terrorist has his own shift guarding the people that were here.”An
Israeli actor
dressed up as a nurse and speaking heavily accented Arabic claims to be
Palestinian doctor and to have seen Hamas use civilians as human
shields. She says members of Hamas “attacked Al Shifa Hospital” and
stole “the fuel and medicine.” Palestinian militants, rather than
Israeli tanks, Israel says, are responsible for shelling Al Shifa
Hospital. Israel struck a car full of “terrorists” in southern Lebanon,
“terrorists” who turned out to be three girls, their mother and
grandmother. The explosion at the Al Ahli Hospital was the result of an
errant rocket fired by the Palestinians, a claim questioned by The New
York Times when it discredited the video based on analysis of its time stamp.
Israel said it “responded to the request of the director of Shifa
Hospital to allow Gazan citizens who were sheltering in the hospital and
who wish to evacuate from Shifa Hospital towards the humanitarian
crossing in the Gaza Strip via a secure axis,” a statement Mohammed
Zaqout, director general of hospitals in Gaza, said was “false,” adding
“we were forced to leave by gunpoint.” Israeli Lt. Col. Jonathan
Conricus, in a video pilloried by the BBC,
shows viewers a meager stash of automatic weapons in a promotional
video that magically increases once foreign reporters arrive for a
guided tour. The IDF later deleted it.
The
lies will be written into the Israeli school books. The lies will be
repeated by Israeli politicians, historians and journalists. The lies
will be told on Israeli television and in Israeli films and books.
Israelis are eternal victims. Palestinians are absolute evil. There was
no genocide. Türkiye, a century later, still denies what happened to the Armenians.
In wartime people believe what they want to believe. The lies fill a
hunger within the Israeli public that sees the conflict as a binary
struggle between “the children of light and the children of darkness.”
The lies are a defense against accountability, for if Israel refuses to
acknowledge reality, it is not forced to respond to reality. The lies
create cognitive dissonance, where fact becomes fiction and fiction
becomes truth. The lies make any discussion of genocide, or
reconciliation, impossible.
Israel, with the backing of the Biden administration, will continue
to snuff out all systems that sustain life in Gaza. Hospitals. Schools.
Power plants. Water treatment facilities. Factories. Farms. Apartment
blocks. Houses. Then Israel will pretend, like the killers in past
genocides, it never happened.
The lies used by Israel to absolve itself of responsibility will eat
away at Israeli society. They will corrode its moral, religious, civic,
intellectual and political life. The lies will elevate war criminals to
heroic status and demonize those with a conscience. Israel’s genocide,
as with the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia, will be mythologized, an
epic battle against the forces of evil and barbarity, just as we
mythologized the genocide of Native Americans and turned our settlers
and murderous cavalry units into heroes. The killers in the Indonesian
war against communism are cheered at rallies as saviors. They are
interviewed about the “heroic” battles they fought nearly six decades
ago. Israel will do the same. It will deform itself. It will celebrate
its crimes. It will turn evil into good. It will exist within a
self-constructed myth. The truth, as in all despotisms, will be
banished. Israel, a monster to the Palestinians, will be a monster to
itself.
Chris
Hedges is an American journalist, author, commentator and Presbyterian
minister. In his early career, Hedges worked as a freelance war
correspondent in Central America for The Christian Science Monitor, NPR,
and Dallas Morning News.
The US doesn't want public opinion turning more against Israel
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, November 22, 2023
There has been concern within the Biden administration that a pause in fighting in Gaza will give journalists the opportunity to expose more of the atrocities Israel has been committing, POLITICO reported on Tuesday. The concern was related to the hostage deal that was reached between Israel and Hamas that, if implemented, will include a four-day pause in the Israeli bombardment and ground campaign. The report said there was “some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.” Israel’s Gaza campaign has had an enormous toll on journalists. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 46 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israel since October 7. Other journalists have had their families slaughtered, including Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael Dahdouh, who lost his wife, son, daughter, and grandson. The killing of the Dahdouh family came around the same time Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked Qatar to tone down Al Jazeera’s coverage of the Gaza war over concerns about global public opinion on Israel. Al Jazeera is funded by Qatar but maintains it has editorial independence. The Israeli onslaught has also made it impossible for Gaza’s Health Ministry to count the dead, depriving journalists of the ability to gauge the destruction by the number of killed. The current unconfirmed estimate puts the death toll over 14,000, but the latest confirmed number from the Health Ministry was 11,078, including over 4,500 children, which was issued on November 10. President Biden previously accused the Palestinians of lying about the death toll when confronted about the massive civilian casualty rate. But since then, a senior State Department official said the true death toll is likely significantly higher than what the Health Ministry had been reporting, and that was before counting the dead became impossible.
Testimony from survivors of Al Aqsa Flood, combined with the
documented past actions of Israel’s armed forces against captured
soldiers and civilians, raise questions about what really caused the
high Israeli death toll.
For all the sensationalism surrounding the
events of Oct. 7, when Hamas broke through the Gaza fence and seized
territory in the Gaza Envelope as part of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, there
is still much that we do not know. The official Israeli death toll from
the attack is estimated at 1,200 civilians, revised from an initial
estimate of 1,400. Among this figure are several hundred civilians,
which Israel says were killed by Hamas militants. Other testimony from
survivors of Oct. 7 suggests an alternative explanation—that in its
fervor to defeat Hamas, Israeli commanders may have willingly targeted
and sacrificed Israeli soldiers and civilians in the crossfire. Max
Blumenthal of The Grayzone joins The Chris Hedges Report for an in-depth look.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
Chris Hedges: There’s growing evidence that in the
chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel on
October 7, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas
fighters but the Israeli captives with them. Tuval Escapa, a member of
the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, told the Israeli press, that he
set up a hotline to coordinate between kibbutz residents and the Israeli
army. Escapa told the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, that his
desperation began to set in. “The commanders in the field made difficult
decisions, including shelling houses on their occupants in order to
eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.” The newspaper
reported that Israeli commanders were, “Compelled to request an aerial
strike against its own facility inside the Erez Crossing to Gaza in
order to repulse the terrorists who had seized control.”
That base housed Israeli Civil Administration officers and soldiers.
Israel, in 1986, instituted a military policy called the Hannibal
Directive, apparently named for the Carthaginian general who poisoned
himself rather than be captured by the Romans following the capture of
two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah. The directive is designed to prevent
Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands through the maximum use of
force, even at the cost of killing the captured soldiers and civilians.
The directive was executed during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza,
known as Operation Protective Edge. Hamas fighters on August 1, 2014,
captured an Israeli soldier, Lieutenant Hadar Golden. In response,
Israel dropped more than 2,000 bombs, missiles, and shells on the area
where he was being held. Golden was killed along with over 100
Palestinian civilians. The directive was supposedly rescinded in 2016.
Joining me to discuss the reports of Israel shelling its own citizens
with tanks and missiles is Max Blumenthal, who investigated this for
The Grayzone. So you did a wonderful job piecing together these reports
that are coming out of Israel. Why don’t you lay out what Israeli
commanders faced after roughly 10 hours, several hours after this
incursion, and then perhaps give me some details about what you found
out?
Max Blumenthal: Well, thanks, Chris. I’m still
trying to piece together what happened on October 7. One reason that I’m
left investigating even after this report that I thought was
comprehensive was that in the face of so much death and destruction
caused by Israel’s military in Gaza – Which is basically tantamount to
genocide. You have systematic killing in Gaza – Everyone I know there
has … Luckily I don’t know anyone who’s been killed, but everyone I know
there has lost neighbors or relatives. They’ve all lost their homes. So
the Israeli military and the Prime Minister’s office, Netanyahu’s
office, are recycling October 7 atrocities and they’re also introducing
new deceptions in order to try to keep the media’s lens focused on
October 7 now that it is starting to hone in on the horror of Gaza. We
have all these new stories about babies baked in ovens, we’ve heard
stories about babies cut out of mothers’ wombs by so-called Hamas
terrorists, rape, gang rape, women after being taken, gang raped in the
streets in Gaza City.
All of these lies were spun out. The 40 beheaded babies was repeated
by Biden, who claimed he’d seen photographs. All of these lies were
repeated and put forward in order to give Israel the latitude to carry
out this genocidal assault that we’re now witnessing. And we can see
Biden was so stunned by the propaganda that was being pushed on him by
Netanyahu’s office and the pro-Israel media that he immediately caved.
Tony Blinken in his recent Senate testimony also repeated some of these
lies. So I’m still trying to unpack it because it’s these lies that went
beyond the actual killings and atrocities that were committed by gunmen
from the Gaza Strip on October 7 that have made it possible for Israel
to target and exterminate hundreds of entire families in the Gaza Strip
as well as hospitals and medical centers. So I started my investigation
when testimony started to filter out in Israeli media which contravened
the official story of October 7.
The official story, which has been told to Americans and Israelis, is
that Hamas “terrorists” stormed into Southern Israel and began shooting
and killing people at random. Then burned them alive, tied up entire
families in their homes, and then burned them all, somehow, melted cars
and burned people in their cars as they were trying to flee, and carried
out this gigantic mass shooting. It does appear clear that many Israeli
non-combatants were shot by Hamas gunmen but that’s where the official
story stops. What I was able to determine from these testimonies, as
well as basic and visual analysis of the photos that the Israeli Foreign
Minister and Foreign Ministry and Prime Minister’s office were putting
forward, was that Israel used disproportionate force on its own citizens
in order to dislodge a politically driven military offensive by Hamas
and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which was aimed at extracting political
concessions from the state of Israel, which had been besieging the Gaza
Strip for 15 years. So you read one of those testimonies, and I guess we
can go into some detail about them and how I came to my conclusions.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, let’s go in because, in your
article, which people can read on The Grayzone, you print pictures. I’ll
let you go from there. The photographic evidence seems to contradict
the statements that have come out of Jerusalem.
Max Blumenthal: It’s important to understand that
the main goal in this Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad military
offensive was to gather as many captives as possible, particularly
Israeli soldiers, in order to trigger the prisoner exchange that was
witnessed when Gilad Shalit in 2011 was released; The Israeli soldier
who was taken in 2006, who was operating a tank outside Gaza, was taken
in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners, including the current prime
minister of Gaza, Yahya Sinwar. So this entire Al Aqsa Flood operation
is understood against the backdrop of the Gilad Shalit prisoner
exchange. So gunmen were sent with detailed maps to population centers
and to military bases. In the military bases, they were obviously given
instructions to attack and kill Israeli soldiers who were maintaining
the siege of Gaza. Much of the Gaza division, which has also been
responsible for so many massacres inside Gaza over the years, was wiped
out. The Erez Crossing… I don’t know if you’ve been through there,
Chris.
Chris Hedges: Yeah, many times. Many times, yes.
Max Blumenthal: Okay. Yeah, because you’ve been to
Gaza, I’ve been through there three times. It is the nexus, the nerve
center of the siege of Gaza. It’s not only where you cross through if
you want to enter Gaza and return to, or if you’re a resident of Gaza
you’ll have to pass through there to get medical treatment outside. It’s
the home of the civil administration, the bureaucracy of the
panopticon-style occupation of Gaza. So that was immediately overrun by
gunmen as a military target, and with all these soldiers inside, the
head of the Gaza division actually went into an underground bunker. He
recounted this story to Haaretz and made the tough decision to
bomb Erez Crossing and they sent Hellfire missiles onto the Erez
Crossing from Apache helicopters. And this was basically the beginning
of the Iron Swords Operation that Netanyahu declared several days later,
which is essentially the carpet bombing of Gaza.
But Apache helicopters were scrambled in the morning. The assault
began around 6:00AM at daybreak, and by 10:30AM, according to Israeli
media accounts, all of the special force’s commando teams, and the
well-trained Hamas teams had already left. By that point, there were two
squadrons of Apache helicopters that had been scrambled, and they were
not even at full strength until 12:00PM. So you have action at Erez
Crossing, and then you have Kibbutz Be’eri, which is the site that
registered the most casualties of non-combatants. I counted something
like 150 among the confirmed death toll printed at Haaretz and
most of them, they were not soldiers. These were people who were caught
in the crossfire, Hamas gunmen had tried to take them captive, and there
were standoffs in their homes. And by the time Israeli special forces
arrived, many of those standoffs had either ended or they ended them
simply by shelling people’s homes with tanks.
According to Yasmin Porat, who had fled the electronic music festival
– Which had come under attack, which was held right between Kibbutz
Be’eri and Kibbutz Rahim, which also have military bases essentially
embedded within them – It was held on the road between these two
kibbutzim and came under attack. Many captives were taken. This woman,
Yasmin Porat, fled to Kibbutz Be’eri, went into a home with her partner,
and then they were taken captive momentarily by gunmen. She recounted
to Israeli National Radio that when the Israeli special forces arrived,
they started shooting everyone and that most of the captives, along with
the Hamas gunmen, were caught in the crossfire, and that everyone was
killed except for her and her captor, who used her as a human shield in
order to guarantee his own safety when he surrendered.
She saw her own partner, whose hands had been bound by her captors,
get shot by Israeli special forces, and then they lobbed two tank shells
into the home that she had been in. So if you look at the pictures of
Kibbutz Be’eri, they look like the homes in Gaza that I’ve seen, or you
may have seen that came under shelling from Israeli tanks and Israeli
artillery. There’s no way that Hamas gunmen could have done that much
structural damage to this entire kibbutz with the small arms that they
were equipped with; Kalashnikovs and some RPGs.
I24, an Israeli Foreign Ministry-sponsored propaganda network,
actually went to this kibbutz on a guided tour and said they saw tank
tracks everywhere. It’s obvious what happened there and it was stated
clearly by the security coordinator of Kibbutz Be’eri, who you quoted at
the top of this interview. He was on a hotline with the Israeli
Military Command and they decided to shell houses on top of their
occupants, including Israeli civilians. Now, why were they doing this?
As you mentioned, there’s the Hannibal Directive, this once-secret
directive that was introduced after Israel entered into a major prisoner
swap with I believe the PFLPGC, which operates out of Syria in exchange
for Ahmed Jabril and hundreds of other prisoners in order to get back
some Israeli soldiers who had been taken in the Lebanese Civil War.
Chris Hedges: It was only three. I don’t think it was a very –
Max Blumenthal: Yeah, it was three.
Chris Hedges: – Yeah.
Max Blumenthal: So this is a politically painful
prisoner swap, and the Israeli public was furious, and the right-wing
politicians were furious. So they introduced this directive named after
the Carthaginian general Hannibal – Who took his own life, he took
poison rather than being taken captive by the enemy – And it authorizes
Israeli commanders to kill their own soldiers if they’re taken captive
by the enemy in order to prevent such a prisoner swap from taking place.
And it was used again, this is when it got exposed in 2014 – August 1,
2014, what’s known as Black Friday in Southern Gaza – And I was actually
there in the aftermath of this massacre. A lieutenant named Hadar
Golden was taken by Hamas fighters. He was in the field when Israel
broke a ceasefire and started attacking around the southern city of
Rafa. The Israeli Military Command authorized airstrikes, artillery
strikes, and tank fire to bring the full wrath of the Israeli military
onto this area in order to make sure that this soldier did not get taken
alive.
Over 100 people in Rafa were killed in this massacre. The morgues
were filling up. It was hideous. I actually visited a hospital called
Kuwaiti Hospital, which is now under attack again, and because the
mortuaries were so full of bodies on this day, they actually had to
bring in ice cream coolers to store the bodies of babies. The doctor who
interviewed me, who I interviewed about that, his entire family was
killed about a week and a half ago, after he refused Israeli orders to
evacuate Kuwaiti Hospital. But back to the Hannibal directive. We have
to question whether it was put into play on October 7. Because we not
only have the Erez Crossing where many soldiers were killed – And if you
look at the aftermath, the roof was clearly brought down. There’s
serious structural damage to the roof of Erez Crossing – You have
Kibbutz Be’eri where there was tank shelling, and then you have these
Apache helicopter pilots in the air who were stating in their
testimonies in Hebrew to Israeli media that they had no intelligence, no
way of distinguishing civilian from combatant on the ground.
And yet they were told to empty their tanks, completely unload their
ammo, then head back to the base, get filled up again, reload, and then
go shoot as many cars and people as they could on the ground. Pure
chaos. These testimonies have been totally ignored, by the way, by
Western media. Were they encouraged to kill captives or shoot cars that
they thought contained captives? We don’t know. What we do know is there
were orders from the top to kill Israeli civilians if Hamas gunmen were
around them in order to get the gunmen. And it’s like the same military
doctrine that’s being employed in Gaza: Any civilian is a target if
they are the “terrorist’s next-door neighbor.” Israel actually calls it
the Neighbor Policy. They don’t know any other doctrine. They don’t have
any other means of targeting and they weren’t prepared, obviously, for
this military onslaught. So they went to their core doctrine of bombing
everything in sight.
That brings us to the third scenario. We talked about Erez Crossing
and Kibbutz Be’eri, then you have the chaos of the Nova Electronic Music
Festival. And it’s there that it appears clear that after a lot of
these Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad commando teams had left – This
is an element that’s left out in a lot of Western media – Many people
from Gaza started streaming in, including lower level characters from
the armed factions who may have had weapons but weren’t part of the
operation or weren’t trained, onlookers, people who wanted to see what
Israel looked like, to see the land that their families had been kicked
off. There were some heinous killings, and you could see actual captives
being taken by guys on motorcycles who didn’t even have weapons. They
were grabbing people.
A lot of this happened around the Nova Music Festival. There was a
lot of shooting between festival security guards and various gunmen, and
a lot of people were killed, but many people were fleeing the festival
by car. There is a video of some Hamas gunmen stopping cars and shooting
people. But then you have all of these images that the Israeli Foreign
Ministry put out of cars that are completely melted, and their corpses
inside are charred. And those to me are telltale signs of Hellfire
missile strikes from Apache helicopters, and the Apache crews, the
squadrons. They put out a video afterward of themselves shooting cars,
hitting cars with Hellfire missiles, and shooting people who were
pedestrians walking on the ground with cannon fire.
We don’t know who those people were, but if you look, a lot of the
cars were heading back to Gaza. So they were very likely cars of people
from Gaza who may have been taking captives and so many captives or
would-be captives were killed. Was one of them Shawnee Luke? This woman
whom the Israeli Foreign Ministry has been making such a big deal of who
was a festival partygoer, who was attractive, and was a German citizen.
There’s some video of her being taken. They say they found a skull
fragment from her.
Was she in a car that was hit by a Hellfire missile? Unclear. But
it’s very clear that many of these cars were hit by Apache helicopters
and the helicopter pilots said they had no idea who was in them. They
were shooting people on the other side of Gaza after they entered, by
the afternoon of October 7. It’s very clear to me that many people were
killed. Many Israelis were killed by Israeli forces, along with many
active duty, uniformed Israeli soldiers who were actively engaged in the
siege of Gaza were combatants.
Chris Hedges: I want to buttress that I went into
Kuwait after the first Gulf War and drove up the Highway of Death, which
was miles and miles of Iraqi military vehicles, all of which had been
hit by Apache helicopters. And when I saw one of the pictures, one of
the images of a car with two completely blackened corpses, that is what I
saw in vehicle after vehicle after vehicle going into Kuwait. Some of
these images which were disseminated by the IDF have been removed. And
maybe you can explain why you think they were no longer made available
to the public.
Max Blumenthal: Well, when I first went to Gaza in
2014, in the midst of Israel’s 51-day-long assault on Gaza, I came
across a car that was on the roadside that had been roasted by a
Hellfire missile along with its driver. The driver’s body had been
removed but it was undoubtedly charred and you could actually see his
sandal melted into the gas pedal. He had been hit by a Hellfire missile.
I embedded the picture in my article to compare it to the vehicles that
the Israeli Foreign Ministry was pointing to as evidence of Hamas
savagery, and it’s identical. By the way, he was a taxi driver, a poor
young guy named Fadi Alowa, who had taken a wounded Hamas fighter to the
hospital without even knowing that he had been a fighter. And so they
killed him.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry has a website called hamas-massacre.com.
And the UN Ambassador – This unhinged character named Gilad Iradan, who
used to be in charge of Israel’s meddling operations to attack college
students who were organizing to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel, or
forming Palestine solidarity student groups – Gilad Iradan whipped out
this QR code at his UN address, about two weeks ago, and the QR code was
supposed to lead to a Google Drive folder that contained all these
images of charred cars, melted bodies, and all sorts of other atrocities
that Hamas had committed. But all the pictures eventually disappeared.
My initial read was that they concluded that a lot of these pictures
were either fake, or they could have even depicted Hamas fighters who
had come in and been hit by Hellfire missiles. But then Gilad Iradan in
embarrassment later said that there was a technical error, and he tried
to repost the images.
And that makes sense because they have no shame. They lie
relentlessly, shamelessly and so it didn’t seem like they actually
deleted them out of shame. They deleted them because of a major
technical error, which is also ironic because Israel’s supposed to be
the technically savvy startup nation that’s teaching the world through
innovation and creativity how we can enter the AI future, but they can’t
even maintain a simple Google Drive.
And that shows the boneheadedness of this entire operation. But it’s
worked. It’s been very successful in convincing Brussels and Washington
that Hamas was ISIS. That is Israel’s message: Hamas is ISIS, they’re
irrational, they aim to simply kill Jews, they don’t have any political
demands, and the only response to them is the response that the US waged
on ISIS – After supporting ISIS, by the way, in Syria – Which was to
destroy much of Raha, ISIS’s base of operation, as well as Mosul in
Iraq. The man who actually oversaw those operations, James Glynn, the
marine officer, was sent to Israel to consult the Israeli military in
the immediate aftermath of October 7 on how they should respond. Now,
the Pentagon’s pulling back and saying, whoa, this is a little bit crazy
for us even. We don’t even know what you’re targeting, or where your
targeting is coming from. But they gave him the green light because they
fell for the propaganda shock and awe campaign of these photos.
And recently actually at a fundraiser for the Republican Jewish
Coalition – Which is funded substantially by the Adelson family of the
late laconic oligarch, Sheldon Adelson, but also many other wealthy
Republican, pro-Israel Jews in Las Vegas at Adelson’s Hotel – A
character named Ellie Beir appears on stage, who is a volunteer rescuer
and a religious nationalist orthodox Jew from New York, who is living in
Israel and had arrived as a first responder in October 7 through a
group called United Hatzalah. And this is obviously like a fundraising
speech. And he declares that a baby had been burned in an oven, had been
baked in an oven by Hamas “terrorists.”
I’m looking at his comments right now. I have them in front of me. He
actually had not seen any baby in an oven. It was someone named Ellie
Moskowitz, who is from his first responder United Hatzalah team. And
Ellie Moskowitz had not seen any baby baked in an oven. He said that he
found a small bag with contents of body parts that had been apparently
pressed against a heating element. These body parts were displayed by
Netanyahu filtered out on Twitter and sent to influencers by the Israeli
Foreign Ministry in the PM’s office after Netanyahu was embarrassed by
the retraction of the story about 40 beheaded babies. So if we go back
to October 8, CNN and Biden begin telling this phony story about 40
beheaded babies, they are both forced to retract, Netanyahu puts out an
image of some burned body parts, says it’s a baby, and then flash
forward to this fundraiser in Las Vegas where these first responders are
saying that there was a baby baked in an oven based on body parts they
had in a bag which were pressed against a heating element.
Now, put two and two together. What heating element could have
created that much heat to char a body part, which didn’t even belong to a
baby, but was put forward by Netanyahu to save face? It was likely a
Hellfire missile and body parts that had been blown to bits by a
Hellfire missile, which were likely an Israeli citizen but could have
been someone from Gaza, are being put forward as an Israeli baby. But if
you look at the confirmed death count, only one Israeli baby was
killed. It’s horrible and tragic. It was a 10-month-old baby named
Millie Cohen, who was accidentally shot by Hamas gunmen in an exchange
of fire.
And more reporting will come out about this, but you can look at the confirmed death toll at Haaretz.
There’s no other baby. There’s no baby burned in an oven, no one’s even
saying that. So what we’re looking at is the most horrific, lurid
propaganda, which is bogus, all derive from apparent friendly fire and
is being spun in order to justify the actual beheading of babies with
missiles in the Gaza Strip and the systematic extermination of an entire
society. A senior Israeli security source told Yedioth Ahronoth, the
top Israeli tabloid, that 20,000 people had been killed in Gaza. I
personally think that could be an overcount, and they’re trying to boast
to the Israeli public about how many people they’ve killed to satisfy
the bloodlust of the public after October 7.
But if that’s true, that’s like 1% of the entire population, which
definitely qualifies as genocide. So this propaganda has been used to
justify the realization of the lie. Many Israelis who are involved in
this military operation or who are seen torturing people in the West
Bank, workers in the West Bank on camera, are reenacting the lurid
propaganda that they believe to be true about October 7, and it could
lead to a regional war. Because the genocidal fury has overwhelmed
Israeli society, the propaganda, the shock and awe campaign, has
prevented Brussels and Washington from being able to put any check on
it.
Chris Hedges: What do you think this means for the hostages that are in Gaza?
Max Blumenthal: That’s a great question, and one of
the hostages answered it. I don’t know her name. She appears to be from
one of the kibbutzim that had the most captives taken, it’s called near
Nir Oz, and that’s where two of the elderly captives were released came
from. It’s a kibbutz that has many people, more from the left of the
Israeli political spectrum, who would be critics of Netanyahu, come
from. So he may not be – Netanyahu, his government, and the Israeli
population – Very favorably disposed to them. But one of these hostages,
an older woman, appeared on camera from wherever she was being held
inside Gaza and excoriated Netanyahu, and said, you have no desire to
get us. What are you doing? Have a ceasefire, negotiate for our release,
and get us out of here. You’ve already killed 50 of us. And that is
correct. At least 50 captives have already been killed in these
blitzkrieg-like Israeli bombings where they’re using 2,000-pound bombs
and Mark 82 bunker-buster bombs.
So I don’t think they’ll make it out alive. It would be a miracle if
they made it out alive. Everyone wants them to make it out alive,
whether they’re on the anti-Zionist side, or … Well, I shouldn’t say
everyone wants to make it out alive. It appears that those who want them
to make it out are those who are protesting Netanyahu outside his
office and outside the military headquarters who tend to be leftists or
anti-Zionists in Israel. And those who could care less about them
getting out are Netanyahu’s supporters the military supporters and the
military commanders themselves. Because what about this operation
suggests that they’re actually trying to rescue hostages? Nothing.
Absolutely nothing. And the political dynamics that have been put in
play by assaulting everyone in the Gaza Strip, are sending the message
that no negotiations are possible whatsoever.
Netanyahu could fall at any day as this operation goes on if certain
things take place. For example, if the soldiers that the Israeli
military has sent into the few unpopulated areas in Northern Gaza where
they’ve set up these defacto bases of Merkava tanks, if they actually
get out of their tanks and wade into the rubble or try to actually take
out tunnels themselves, they’re going to lose many, many lives, and
Netanyahu will likely fall, but he would also fall if he negotiated for
the release of these captives. Why? Because of the propaganda that he
put into play, the propaganda was so extreme and so lurid, and they went
so far beyond an already horrific reality on October 7 that the Israeli
public was whipped into such a fervor that they would not stand for any
negotiation with Hamas. So the only objective that can be put forward,
which has been reinforced by Tony Blinken, is regime change in Gaza. And
regime change in Gaza means months and months of grinding, genocidal
war in which no captive could possibly survive.
Chris Hedges: Isn’t it straightforward? They took
the captives because they wanted a prisoner exchange. Netanyahu could
empty the Israeli prisons of four or five, six, I don’t know, 10,000
Palestinian prisoners, and they would get there. The hostages would go
home, wouldn’t they?
Max Blumenthal: Yeah. This isn’t about Hamas per
se. Hamas does have the political mandate to carry out an armed
struggle. That’s why it was elected in 2006, including by people who are
not necessarily Islamists outside of its base. They actually won cities
across the West Bank. It wasn’t that they won Gaza, they won all of
Palestine that was able to vote. So their mandate is to do armed
struggle to resist where the Bata and the Palestinian authority
basically gave up, and they’re going to continue doing that. But
Palestinian armed struggle has always been driven by political demands
that were essentially rational and were related to ending ethnic
cleansing and ending the military occupation of Palestinians. The
leadership of Hamas put forward clear political demands at the beginning
of the Al Aqsa Flood as they did in 2014 during Operation Cast Lead.
They relate to preventing the incursions of fanatical religious
nationalists to the Al Aqsa Compound, the third holiest site in Islam,
they relate to ending the siege of Gaza so that they can actually
determine they can enjoy some sovereignty. They can actually fish in
their own seas. They can have an economy, they can visit Jerusalem.
Emptying the Israeli prisons, where something like 1,500 Palestinians
are now held without charges, 700 Palestinian children pass in and out
of these prisons every year. There are currently at least 150, now there
are probably 200 Palestinian children being held in these jails.
They’re hostages. They’ve been kidnapped. I’ve gone to their trials in
the Israeli children’s courts and they were kidnapped in their own beds.
Ahad Tamimi was kidnapped. I’ve known her since she was a child and her
village, Nabi Salih has been waging this unarmed struggle against the
Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Her dad was kidnapped, Basam, who’s
really the leader of that struggle and is an international hero.
And so it relates to the whole occupation. And the only way that they
could trigger some negotiation, they believe, was by taking captives,
because all diplomatic channels had been cut off. The entire West had
declared Hamas a terrorist organization that could not be negotiated
with. So the only way to spur negotiations is through violence. And
that’s what they did. And what they’ve done is forced the essential
dynamics of Zionism into an accelerated mode. Because Zionism, as a
settler colonial movement based on an anachronistic ideology, Heron Volk
ideology from the turn of the century Europe, has demonstrated its
unwillingness to accommodate the native population as it seeks to
consolidate its settler-colonial presence. And so it must move towards
genocide as all other settler-colonial movements have done. And so
that’s where we’re at right now, is the phase of whether Israel will be
able to finish the job that it began in 1948 or not.
And any negotiations that could have taken place with a rational
authority are off limits. This is also an obvious failure of American
and Western leadership to recognize not only what they’re dealing with
in the Gaza Strip, which is yet another Palestinian faction that is
using violence to spur political momentum because all diplomatic means
had been cut off for them, but also what they’re dealing with in Israel.
Where they’re dealing with a fundamentally genocidal political movement
and a genocidal society. This Israeli society is primed for genocide.
You can look at the viral videos. The videos that are going viral in
Israeli social media are parents actually enlisting their own children
as props to mock Palestinian children who are dying, dressing them up in
hijab to mock Palestinian girls who are dying, who are being starved,
who are thirsty because the water has been cut off.
There’s a new trend started by an Israeli journalist from Channel 13
in Israel of mocking Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank who are
detained for eight hours and forced to listen to a children’s song
endlessly to torment them, and they dance around mocking the video of
the prisoners. The singer of that children’s song was brought to perform
in an Israeli military base. You can look at the footage of all the pop
singers appearing at military bases or in the so-called Gaza Envelope,
where reservists are preparing to go into Gaza, and it’s straightforward
genocidal anthems about re-conquering Gaza, driving out its
inhabitants, and reestablishing Israeli settlements that are even bigger
than the former settlement of Gush Katif. The Israeli Ministry of
Intelligence has even introduced a think tank’s paper, which calls for
the full ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the forced transfer of its
residents to Egypt. They put it forward as an official blueprint for the
aftermath of this operation that they call Iron Swords.
So that’s what the US has green-lit here. And by trying to spur some
basic political momentum and relaxation of the siege – Hamas might’ve
just agreed to a relaxation of the siege to be able to deliver something
for their constituents – By trying to do that with violence when all
diplomatic channels have been cut off, what they’ve done is forced this
conflict into its final phase. I don’t think Israel will stop before it
believes that it has finished the job that it began in 1948.
Chris Hedges: Great. That was Max Blumenthal from
The Grayzone. You can read his article, “October 7 Testimonies Reveal
Israel’s Military Shelling Israeli Citizens With Tanks and Missiles” at
The Grayzone. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production
team: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You
can find me at chrisedges.substack.com.
Kibbutz Nir Oz resident Hadas Kalderon, whose
children have been taken hostage, and her mother and niece killed,
breaks down in tears while looking through the burnt out home of her
late mother Rina Sutzkever on October 30, 2023 in Kibbutz Nir Oz,
Israel. Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Israel has told civilians to flee areas of the southern city of Khan Younis
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, November 19, 2023
A US official said Sunday that Israel has the “right” to expand its military operations in southern Gaza but said the Biden administration is looking for a delay in the plan to account for the hundreds of thousands of civilians who have fled fighting from the north.
“In the event that we believe that Israel is likely to embark on combat operations, including in the south, we believe both that they have the right to do that, but that there is a real concern, because hundreds of thousands of residents of Gaza have fled now from the north to the south at Israel’s request,” US Deputy National Security Adviser Jon Finer told CBS News’s “Face the Nation.”
“We think that their operations should not go forward until those people – those additional civilians – have been accounted for in their military planning. And so, we will be conveying that directly to them and have been conveying that directly to them,” Finer added.
Israel has been bombing southern Gaza throughout the war, even after telling Palestinians in the north to flee to the south. Now, Israeli officials are vowing to further expand the war in the south, and ground operations are expected. Reuters reported on Saturday that more civilian casualties are expected in a southern offensive but that Israel is not deterred by that fact.
While Finer and other US officials are saying publicly that they want Israel to limit civilian casualties, the US is not using any leverage it has over Israel and continues to provide military aid unconditionally. Gaza’s Health Ministry said Sunday that the death toll in Israel’s assault has exceeded 13,000 Palestinians, including over 5,500 children.
Israel dropped leaflets on the southern city of Khan Younis, telling civilians to evacuate to unspecified shelters. After the leaflets were dropped, Israeli strikes hit the city, killing 26 Palestinians, mostly children, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa.
Most anti-fascist, anti-Zionist and anti-war readers and observers will heartily welcome this article by Chris Hedges. What the Zionists are doing in Gaza makes one wonder what Biden and his accomplices in Tel Aviv have planned to accomplish through this genocide and the destruction of the people living in Gaza. For them, killing and destroying the besieged Palestinians is not more than killing flies. The Israeli army has "conquered" the largest Al-Shifa hospital complex, and its staff, nurses and patients have vacated the place on the orders of the Israeli officers. Meanwhile, bombs are falling on schools and places of shelter, and Israeli aggressors are killing defenceless Palestinians.
The issue of international human rights and the observance of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit attacks on hospitals, has been and continues to be largely ignored. That is happening because President Biden and Netanyahu have decided to do so.
The imperial plan for a further expansion of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of the enclave is currently in place. The way to accomplish this plan is to make the lives of 2.3 million Palestinians so unbearable that they seek refuge in Egypt. This will allow the United States, Israel, and their accomplices to take possession of the untapped natural resources in and around Gaza, primarily oil, for their rich dividends.
Aftermath of an Israeli bombing of Al Shifa hospital in Gaza on November 3, 2023.
On Tuesday night, after two weeks of constant bombardment that killed
dozens of doctors, patients and refugees, Israeli forces entered
Al-Shifa hospital and raised the Israeli flag over it.
Just hours before, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre
asserted that “Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad use some
hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including Al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath
them to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold
hostages.”
The US media went even further, with Fox News describing Al-Shifa as a “hospital used as Hamas underground terror HQ.”
These claims proved to be a complete lie. The Israel Defense Forces
(IDF) produced no hostages, no underground bunker. After searching a
sprawling hospital complex that at one point housed 60,000 people in the
middle of an active war zone, the IDF could only show a few assault
rifles and two flak jackets as “evidence.”
The real reason Al-Shifa was attacked was symbolic. The hospital’s
medical workers, subject to continuous bombardment and sniper fire,
defied orders by the IDF to leave, saying they would rather die than
abandon their patients. Their courage and defiance in the face of
Israel’s genocide won the solidarity and support of millions of people
all over the world.
The First and Second Geneva Conventions of 1949 stipulate that
hospitals and other medical units must not be attacked and should be
protected at all times. This includes civilian and military hospitals.
Attacking hospitals and medical personnel is a war crime under
international criminal law.
In the face of emphatic declarations by the United Nations, the World
Health Organization (WHO), and countless human rights organizations
that hospitals are “not a target,” Israel and its imperialist backers
are sending a different message: Yes, they are.
While the US repeatedly attacked hospitals during the “war on
terror,” it sought to present these actions as accidents. In October
2015, a US airstrike killed at least 22 people in a Doctors Without
Borders (MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. At the time, US President
Barack Obama issued an apology, claiming the strike was a “mistake.
Now, however, the United States is upholding attacks on hospitals and
other war crimes as legitimate acts of “self defense.” As US officials
have repeatedly declared, in response to Israeli massacres at hospitals
in Gaza, that there are no “red lines.”
Since the start of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the WHO recorded at
least 137 attacks on healthcare facilities, resulting in 521 deaths and
686 injuries, including 16 deaths and 38 injuries of health workers.
These
statistics do not include the most horrific attack on a hospital, the
October 17, 2023 Al-Ahli Arab Hospital bombing that killed between 250
and 471 people, but which Israel and the United States, citing evidence
that was quickly disproven, claimed was the result of a rocket fired
from Gaza.
Israel’s war on hospitals is part of a systematic campaign of
genocide. The deliberate targeting of civilian populations, children,
medical workers and aid workers has been elevated to a governing
principle.
These war crimes have been carried out within the framework of public
declarations of genocidal intent, with Israel’s agriculture minister
proclaiming “Nakba 2023” and its interior minister proposing the
expulsion of the Palestinian people from the enclave.
Israel’s actions in Gaza are a “textbook case of genocide,” wrote
Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York office of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, in an October 28 resignation
letter. “Explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli
government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate,” he wrote.
While the United States has for decades systematically violated
international law, its open embrace of Israel’s actions against the
people of Gaza under conditions in which Israeli officials are bluntly
stating their intention to commit war crimes and genocide marks a
significant new stage in the normalization of war crimes.
Throughout the past 50 years, actions by the state of Israel have
been used to set a precedent for US policy. The most significant example
is the doctrine of “targeted killing,” that is, state-sanctioned
assassination. “Israel has used assassination and targeted-killing more
than any other country in the West,” noted Israeli investigative
journalist Ronen Bergman in 2018.
On September 17, 1948, a group of Zionist terrorists ambushed and
killed the Swedish mediator for the United Nations, Count Folke
Bernadotte, in Jerusalem. Yitzhak Shamir, who later became Prime
Minister of Israel, played a role in the approval and planning of
Bernadotte’s assassination.
In
November 2000, Israel became the first state in the world to “openly
acknowledge that it operated a policy of targeted killing,” wrote Nils
Meltzer, who served as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, in
2009. Soon after, the United States moved “to openly adopt the method of
targeted killing.”
“The term ‘targeted killing,’” writes Meltzer, “denotes the use of
lethal force attributable to a subject of international law with the
intent, premeditation and deliberation to kill individually selected
persons who are not in the physical custody of those targeting them.”
The US conducted its first known drone strike outside a war zone in
Yemen in 2002. In 2011, US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, both
US citizens, were killed in separate drone strikes in Yemen. In 2020, a
US drone strike in Iraq killed Qasem Soleimani, a high-ranking Iranian
military official, while on an official visit to Iraq.
As with the adoption of “targeted killing,” the war crimes now being
committed by Israel will become the new baseline for even greater crimes
by the United States and other imperialist powers. This is the
significance of their open acceptance of Israel’s genocide and war
crimes.
The US is engaged in escalating global warfare—an intensifying war
against Russia, preparations for war with Iran and China—which will
require violence on an unprecedented scale. The crimes Israel is
perpetrating, including the mass murder and forced displacement of an
entire population, are setting a precedent for the use of homicidal
violence, including the use of nuclear weapons. The ruling classes aim
to desensitize the population to the prospect of hundreds of thousands,
or even millions, being killed.
But the war abroad is a war at home. Facing a mounting strike
movement and mass protests against the slaughter in Gaza, the American
ruling class will increasingly use the tools of mass terror against
urban populations, being pioneered in Gaza, against mounting internal
opposition.
The
events in Gaza are a warning: The imperialist ruling classes, desperate
and cornered, will stop at nothing to secure their global interests,
including mass murder. The future of humanity requires breaking the
stranglehold of the financial oligarchy over society, which requires the
building of a mass socialist movement of the working class.
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