Monday, August 04, 2025

Hamas official calls for international intervention in Gaza

Aljazeera. com, August 4, 2025

Senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan has released the latest message from the group, saying “engineered starvation” and genocide is “a crime against humanity”, while calling for an immediate intervention by the international community.

“[It] will remain a stigma that haunts all the supporters of the occupation and those who fail to prevent and stop it,” he said in a statement released by Hamas’ official Telegram channel.

Hamdan accused the US and other Western countries of “double standards” due to their difference in attitude towards the Palestinian prisoners and the Israeli captives.

He said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “bears full responsibility for the lives of all prisoners held by the resistance due to his intransigence, arrogance, and evasion of a ceasefire agreement, while escalating the war of extermination and starvation against our people”.

Sunday, August 03, 2025

𝐇𝐚𝐦𝐚𝐬 𝐫𝐮𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐠𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐩 𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐬 ‘𝐢𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭, 𝐬𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐠𝐧’ 𝐏𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐞𝐝

 Middle East Monitor, August 2, 2025

The Palestinian resistance group Hamas said Saturday it will not give up its arms unless an “independent, fully sovereign” Palestinian state is established, Anadolu reports.

The statement came following reports by the Israeli daily Haaretz citing a recording attributed to US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff: “Hamas has said that they are prepared to be demilitarized.”

“We are very, very close to a solution to end this war,” Witkoff is also heard saying, according to Haaretz.

“Commenting on reports by some media outlets quoting US envoy Steve Witkoff as saying the movement expressed willingness to disarm, we reiterate that resistance and its weapons are a national and legitimate right as long as the occupation continues — a right recognized by international laws and conventions,” Hamas said in a statement on Telegram.

The group added that such rights “cannot be relinquished except with the full attainment of our national rights, foremost being the establishment of an independent, fully sovereign Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Witkoff met families of Israeli hostages in Tel Aviv on Saturday, as hundreds rallied to demand a ceasefire deal that would secure their release from the Gaza Strip, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported.

Witkoff’s visit, his third to Hostage Square since the war began, came shortly after Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad released footage showing two emaciated Israeli captives, Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski, prompting renewed outrage.

On Friday, Witkoff visited an aid center in southern Gaza operated by the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Diplomatic merchandise: Exploiting the issue of Palestinian recognition

He said the aim was to give US President Donald Trump “a clear understanding of the humanitarian situation and help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza.”

The visit comes amid mounting criticism of US-Israeli coordination in Gaza, particularly regarding the group’s distribution model, which Palestinians say serves as a tool for displacement under the guise of humanitarian relief as well as a “death trap” for many Palestinian aid seekers, with over 1,300 killed since May while waiting for relief supplies.

Hamas on Thursday denounced the visit as a “propaganda stunt” aimed at deflecting global outrage over what rights groups and UN officials have described as Israel’s systematic starvation campaign.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, at least 169 Palestinians, including 93 children, have died of hunger-related causes, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.

Rejecting international calls for a ceasefire, the Israeli army has pursued a brutal offensive on Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, killing more than 60,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children.

Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.​​​​​​​

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.

Thursday, July 31, 2025

This isn't a 'war' — Israel is destroying a population

 

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Gaza starvation children

Starvation is just one weapon if eradicating 'the enemy' is the Netanyahu government's ultimate objective

Analysis | Middle East

The prospects for negotiating a ceasefire and an end to the humanitarian disaster in the Gaza Strip appear as dim as ever. Israeli and U.S. representatives walked out of talks with Hamas in Qatar that had been mediated by the Qataris and Egyptians. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is talking about “alternative” means of achieving Israel’s goals in the territory.

President Donald Trump, echoing Netanyahu’s levying of blame on Hamas, asserted that “Hamas didn’t really want to make a deal. I think they want to die.” Trump went on to mention a need to “finish the job,” evidently referring to Israel’s continued devastating assault on the Strip and its residents.

I have been thinking for a long time about the negotiation of ceasefires. Nearly 50 years ago, I wrote a book, “Negotiating Peace: War Termination as a Bargaining Process,” which explored the diplomatic and military dynamics of how two belligerents negotiate a peace while simultaneously fighting a war.

What is taking place in Gaza now is mostly not a war, even though that term commonly is applied to the violence there. It is instead a largely unilateral assault on a population and its means of living. It is a situation in which one side, Israel, has — as Trump might put it — nearly all the cards.

The news stories emerging almost daily from Gaza are not about pitched battles between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Hamas fighters. They are mostly not about battles at all. Instead, they are about the latest large-scale killing by Israel of Gazans, mostly civilians, at a rate that has averaged about 150 deaths per day since the current round of carnage began in late 2023. Civilians are killed largely with airstrikes but also more recently through getting shot while seeking ever-scarcer food.

Mass starvation has become perhaps the most gut-wrenching part of the Gaza catastrophe, and one where Israel has again tried to shift blame onto Hamas. A longtime Israeli accusation in endeavoring to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)—the principal international organization with the mission of aiding Palestinian refugees, including in Gaza—is that Hamas supposedly was stealing UNRWA-supplied food. Trump has echoed that accusation.

A study by the U.S. Agency for International Development (before the Trump administration dismantled the agency) of reported incidents of loss or theft of U.S.-supplied humanitarian assistance in Gaza found no evidence that Hamas has engaged in widespread diversion of aid. More recent press reporting shows that the IDF itself has found no evidence of Hamas seizing or diverting aid.

Israel’s opposition to UNRWA has nothing to do with Hamas or with theft of humanitarian aid. It instead concerns how UNRWA — because it is a United Nations agency explicitly focused on Palestinians — constitutes an international recognition that the Palestinians are a nation and that many of them are refugees from their homeland.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza got worse once Israel succeeded in pushing UNRWA aside. The U.S.-backed and Israeli-controlled alternative aid scheme is not only woefully inadequate in meeting immediate needs but also designed as an adjunct to Israel’s ethnic cleansing objectives. The limitation of aid to a few distribution points facilitates the forced relocation of surviving Gazans into what amounts to a concentration camp, as a possible prelude to removal from the Gaza Strip altogether.

Some aid has recently been dropped into Gaza by air. Airdrops are an ineffective and inefficient way of trying to relieve the starvation. The amounts delivered are a tiny fraction of what is needed. The cost of delivery is far higher than by land. As demonstrated by an earlier U.S. effort to deliver aid this way, some of the supplies are lost because they fall into the sea or, even worse, kill people crushed by falling pallets. But for some donors, an airdrop serves as a visually dramatic conscience-calming gesture.

For Israel, it serves as a distraction from the fact that the biggest impediment to getting humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip is Israel’s continued land blockade of the territory. Valuing that distraction, Israel itself has joined in the airdrop gesture. At the same time, however, Israel continues to allow only a trickle of aid to cross the land border, with many hundreds of truckloads left to spoil and be destroyed by the IDF.

In my decades-old book, I identified a type of war ending that is an alternative to a negotiated settlement as “extermination/expulsion,” meaning that the militarily dominant side physically obliterates its opponent or pushes it out of contested territory. Extermination/expulsion of the opponent is an appropriate label for Israel’s objective in Gaza.

The prevailing Israeli conception of the opponent, or enemy, in Gaza is the entire Palestinian population, an attitude that was already well rooted on the Israeli Right before the Hamas attack in October 2023 and has grown even stronger and wider since then. The deaths already inflicted, directly or indirectly, by the IDF have significantly advanced the extermination objective. The expulsion part has mostly been the stuff of internal Israeli deliberations, although it came more into the open when Trump gave Netanyahu’s government the gift of endorsing the ethnic cleansing with his Riviera-in-Gaza proposal.

Israeli Forces Kill 103 Palestinians in Gaza Over 24 Hours

The dead include 60 Palestinians who were killed while attempting to get aid
 

Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Wednesday that Israeli forces killed 103 Palestinians and wounded 399 over the previous 24 hours as relentless US-backed Israeli attacks continue across the Strip.

The Health Ministry said that another body of a Palestinian killed in a previous Israeli attack was recovered from the rubble. “A number of victims are still under the rubble and in the streets, as ambulance and civil defense crews are unable to reach them until now,” the ministry wrote on Telegram.

The ministry said that the majority of the dead were killed while attempting to reach food aid. It said that it recorded the death of 60, and another 195 were wounded. Since the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began operating in May, the ministry has recorded the deaths of 1,239 aid seekers and the injuries of 8,152.

SENSITIVE MATERIAL. THIS IMAGE MAY OFFEND OR DISTURB Palestinians carry the body of a person killed by Israeli fire, as aid supplies that entered Gaza through Israel are transported, in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip, July 30, 2025. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas

Palestinians were killed on Wednesday while trying to reach UN aid trucks and distribution sites run by the GHF. According to The Associated Press, the al-Shifa Hospital said it received the bodies of 12 people who were killed when Israeli forces fired on a crowd awaiting aid trucks coming from the Zikim crossing in northern Gaza.

The Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, said it received 16 bodies of people killed by Israeli forces while waiting for aid trucks near the Morag Corridor, a strip of land controlled by the IDF between Rafah and Khan Younis. The Al Awda Hospital in central Gaza said it received the bodies of four Palestinians killed near a GHF aid site.

Photos from Gaza show crowds of people carrying Palestinians who were wounded or killed by the IDF while attempting to get aid. Hungry Palestinians continue to make the perilous journey to reach aid despite the risk of getting killed, demonstrating the severe starvation caused by the US-backed Israeli siege. The Health Ministry said on Wednesday that another seven people starved to death in Gaza, bringing the total number of malnutrition deaths to 154.

Israeli airstrikes also pounded targets across Gaza. At least 13 people were killed by strikes on the Jabalia refugee camp and the northern cities of Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun.

The Health Ministry said that the latest violence has brought its overall death toll since October 7, 2023, to 60,138 and the number of wounded to 146,269. Studies have found that the ministry’s numbers are likely a significant undercount.

 

𝐆𝐥𝐨𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐇𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐫 𝐌𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐨𝐫 𝐒𝐚𝐲𝐬 ‘𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐬𝐭 𝐂𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐒𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐨 𝐨𝐟 𝐅𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐎𝐮𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐚𝐳𝐚’

by Dave DeCamp , Antiwar. com, July 29, 2025

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global hunger monitor, said in an alert on Tuesday that the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip” due to the US-backed Israeli siege on the Palestinian territory.

The alert comes as Gaza’s Health Ministry has reported dozens of starvation deaths over the past week, and photos of emaciated children have increased international pressure on Israel to ease the blockade.

“Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths. Latest data indicates that Famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City,” the IPC said.
Palestinians climb onto trucks carrying aid supplies that entered Gaza through Israel, in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip, July 29, 2025. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas

The IPC said that the unrestricted flow of humanitarian aid and a ceasefire were needed to prevent further catastrophe. “Immediate action must be taken to alleviate the catastrophic suffering of people in Gaza. This includes scaling up the flow of goods, restoring basic services, and ensuring safe, unimpeded access to sufficient life-saving assistance. None of this is possible unless there is a ceasefire,” the monitor said.

The IPC also criticized the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which established four aid distribution sites in Gaza that have turned into death traps for hungry Palestinians and have done nothing to feed people in northern Gaza.

“Reaching these distribution points requires long, high-risk journeys, with unequal access across governorates. Operating on a first-come, first-served basis, the most vulnerable groups are largely unable to access this food,” the IPC said.

The IPC’s alert stops short of a formal famine declaration since the group lacks access to make that determination, but independent experts say it’s clear famine is already taking place. “Just as a family physician can often diagnose a patient she’s familiar with based on visible symptoms without having to send samples to the lab and wait for results, so too we can interpret Gaza’s symptoms. This is famine,” Alex de Waal, author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” told The Associated Press.

In response to the growing international outcry, Israel has announced several steps to slightly increase the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, but the UN and other aid groups say much more is needed, including a ceasefire, to bring real relief to the starving population.

Wednesday, July 30, 2025

The Genocidal Partnership of Israel and the United States

 The politics of genocide in the United States involves papering over the big gap between the opinions of the electorate and the actions of the U.S. government. While the partnership between the governments of Israel and the United States has never been stronger, the partnership between the people of Israel and the United States has never been weaker. But in the USA, consent of the governed has not been necessary to continue the axis of genocide.

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
 

For decades, countless U.S. officials have proclaimed that the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable. Now, the ties that bind are laced with genocide. The two countries function as accomplices while methodical killing continues in Gaza, with both societies directly – and differently – making it all possible.

The policies of Israel’s government are aligned with the attitudes of most Jewish Israelis. In a recent survey, three-quarters of them (and 64 percent of all Israelis) said they largely agreed with the statement that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” – nearly half of whom are children.

“There is no more ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ with regard to Israel’s evilness toward the Palestinians,” dissident columnist Gideon Levy wrote three months ago in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “It is permitted to kill dozens of captive detainees and to starve to death an entire people.” The biggest Israeli media outlets echo and amplify sociopathic voices. “Genocide talk has spread into all TV studios as legitimate talk. Former colonels, past members of the defense establishment, sit on panels and call for genocide without batting an eye.”

Last week, Levy provided an update: “The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza ‘Humanitarian’ Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success. Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who don’t manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most of these are children and babies…. They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies.”

Unimpeded, a daily process continues to exterminate more and more of the 2.1 million Palestinian people who remain in Gaza – bombing and shooting civilians while blocking all but a pittance of the food and medicine needed to sustain life. After destroying Gaza’s hospitals, Israel is still targeting healthcare workers (killing at least 70 in May and June), as well as first responders and journalists.

The barbarism is in sync with the belief that “no innocent people” are in Gaza. A relevant observation came from Aldous Huxley in 1936, the same year that the swastika went onto Germany’s flag: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” Kristallnacht happened two years later.

Renowned genocide scholar Omer Bartov explained during an interview on Democracy Now! in mid-July that genocide is “the attempt to destroy not simply people in large numbers, but to destroy them as members of a group. The intent is to destroy the group itself. And it doesn’t mean that you have to kill everyone. It means that the group will be destroyed and that it will not be able to reconstitute itself as a group. And to my mind, this is precisely what Israel is trying to do.”

Bartov, who is Jewish and spent the first half of his life in Israel, said:

“What I see in the Israeli public is an extraordinary indifference by large parts of the public to what Israel is doing and what it’s done in the name of Israeli citizens in Gaza. In part, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli media has decided not to report on the horrors that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is perpetrating in Gaza. You simply will not see it on Israeli television. If some pictures happen to come in, they are presented only as material that might be used by foreign propaganda against Israel. Now, Israeli citizens can, of course, use other media resources. We can all do that. But most of them prefer not to. And I would say that while about 30 percent of the population in Israel is completely in favor of what is happening, and, in fact, is egging the government and the army on, I think the vast majority of the population simply does not want to know about it.”

In Israel, “compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists,” Adam Shatz wrote last month in the London Review of Books. At the same time, “the catastrophe of the last two years far exceeds that of the Nakba.” The consequences “are already being felt well beyond Gaza: in the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers and settlers have presided over an accelerated campaign of displacement and killing (more than a thousand West Bank Palestinians have been killed since 7 October); inside Israel, where Palestinian citizens are subject to increasing levels of ostracism and intimidation; in the wider region, where Israel has established itself as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.”

The loudest preaching for a “rules-based order” has come from the U.S. government, which makes and breaks international rules at will. During this century, in the Middle East, the U.S.-Israel duo has vastly outdone all other entities combined in the categories of killing, maiming, and terrorizing. In addition to the joint project of genocide in Gaza, and the USA’s long war on Iraq, the United States and Israel have often exercised an assumed prerogative to attack Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, along with encore U.S. missile strikes on Iraq as recently as last year.

Israel’s grisly performance as “a new Sparta” in the region is coproduced by the Pentagon, with the military and intelligence operations of the two nations intricately entangled. The Israeli military has been able to turn Gaza into a genocide zone with at least 70 percent of its arsenal coming from the United States.

While writing an afterword about the war on Gaza for the paperback edition of War Made Invisible, I mulled over the relevance of my book’s subtitle: “How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.” As the carnage in Gaza worsened, the reality became clearer that the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces and U.S. Defense Department are essentially part of the same military machine. Their command structures are different, but they are part of the same geopolitical Goliath.

“The new era in which Israel, backed by the U.S., dominates the Middle East is likely to see even more violence and instability than in the past,” longtime war correspondent Patrick Cockburn wrote this month. The lethal violence from Israeli-American teamwork is of such magnitude that it epitomizes international state terrorism. The genocide in Gaza shows the lengths to which the alliance is willing and able to go.

While public opinion is very different in Israel and the United States, the genocidal results of the governments’ policies are indistinguishable.

American public opinion about arming Israel is measurable. As early as June 2024, a CBS News poll found that 61 percent of the public said that the U.S. should not “send weapons and supplies to Israel.” Since then, support for Israel has continued to erode.

In sharp contrast, on Capitol Hill, the support for arming Israel is measurably high. When Bernie Sanders’s bills to cut off some military aid to Israel came to a vote last November, just 19 out of 100 senators voted yes. Very few of his colleagues voice anywhere near the extent of Sanders’s moral outrage as he keeps speaking out on the Senate floor.

In the House, only 26 out of 435 members have chosen to become cosponsors of H.R.3565, a bill introduced more than two months ago by Rep. Delia Ramirez that would prevent the U.S. government from sending certain bombs to Israel.

“Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,” the Congressional Research Service reports. During just the first 12 months after the war on Gaza began in October 2023, Brown University’s Costs of War project found, the “U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations in the region” added up to $23 billion.

The resulting profit bonanza for U.S. military contractors is notable. So is the fact that the U.S.-Israel partnership exerts great American leverage in the Middle East – where two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves are located.

The politics of genocide in the United States involves papering over the big gap between the opinions of the electorate and the actions of the U.S. government. While the partnership between the governments of Israel and the United States has never been stronger, the partnership between the people of Israel and the United States has never been weaker. But in the USA, consent of the governed has not been necessary to continue the axis of genocide.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥𝐢 𝐅𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐬 𝐊𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝟗𝟖 𝐏𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐚𝐳𝐚 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝟐𝟒 𝐇𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬

Among the dead were 25 Palestinians killed by the IDF while seeking aid

by Dave DeCamp | July 28, 2025 at 11:10 am ET | Gaza, Israel, Palestine

Gaza’s Health Ministry said on Monday that Israeli Forces killed at least 98 Palestinians over the previous 24-hour period as relentless US-backed Israeli strikes continued and more aid seekers were gunned down by the IDF.

The Health Ministry said that the bodies of another two Palestinians were found in the rubble. “A number of victims are still under the rubble and in the streets, as ambulance and civil defense crews are unable to reach them until now.”

Israeli strikes on Monday included an attack that hit a house and neighboring tents in the al-Mawasi area of southern Gaza. At least 12 people were killed in the strike, including Soad al-Shaer, who was seven months pregnant.
Mourners react during the funeral of Palestinians killed in an overnight Israeli strike, according to medics, at Nasser hospital, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, July 28, 2025. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed

According to The Associated Press, after Shaer was killed, her baby girl was delivered in a complex emergency cesarean at the Nasser Hospital. The baby was placed in an incubator and was breathing with assistance from a ventilator, but died later in the day.

Another Israeli strike hit a house in Khan Younis, killing 11 people. According to officials at the Nasser Hospital, more than half of the dead were women and children.

Israeli strikes also hit other parts of Gaza, with Gaza’s Civil Defense agency reporting that it conducted rescue operations in North Gaza, Gaza City, Deir el-Balaha, Rafah, and Khan Younis. The heavy Israeli attacks continued despite the IDF announcing on Sunday that it would hold daily “tactical pauses” to facilitate more aid deliveries amid an international outcry as Palestinians are starving to death every day due to the Israeli siege.

The Health Ministry also said that Israeli forces killed 25 aid seekers and wounded 237. Since the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began operating at the end of May, the Health Ministry has recorded the Israeli killing of 1,157 aid seekers and the wounding of 7,758.

The ministry said that the latest violence has brought its overall death toll since October 7, 2023, to 59,921 and the number of wounded to 145,233. Studies have found that the ministry’s numbers are likely a significant undercount.

Monday, July 28, 2025

𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐠 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥 𝐚𝐬 𝐏𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐆𝐚𝐳𝐚 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐃𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡

After the US and Israel quit ceasefire talks, Trump suggested it was time for Israel to 'finish the job'

--by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, July 27, 2025

President Trump has shown strong support for Israel in recent days, while much of the world has been outraged over the images of Palestinians who are starving to death due to the US-backed Israeli siege on Gaza.

After the US and Israel quit ceasefire talks, Trump blamed the lack of progress on Hamas and suggested it was time for Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza. “I think they want to die, and it’s very, very bad,” Trump said on Friday, referring to Hamas.

For its part, Hamas has said that it was surprised by the US and Israel quitting the truce talks and that it was committed to continuing the process until a deal was reached.
Trump and Netanyahu at the White House on July 7, 2025 (White House photo)

In recent weeks, Trump has been claiming that a ceasefire deal was close, but now he is appearing to suggest that Israel should escalate its genocidal war. “They’re gonna have to fight, and they’re gonna have to clean it up. You’re gonna have to get rid of [Hamas],” he said.

Israeli officials told Axios that they weren’t sure if Trump’s comments were a negotiating tactic or a “green light” for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to use even more extreme military measures. The report said the Trump administration was rethinking its Gaza strategy, but there’s no sign it’s considering putting pressure on Israel to reach a ceasefire.

Israeli officials also told Axios that Trump has applied virtually no pressure on Netanyahu to end the slaughter in Gaza in recent months. “In most calls and meetings, Trump told Bibi, ‘Do what you have to do in Gaza.’ In some cases, he even encouraged Netanyahu to go harder on Hamas,” one official said.

While meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Scotland on Sunday, Trump was asked about the images of starving children in Gaza. The president said people were “stealing the food,” a reference to Israel’s unfounded claims that Hamas has been stealing massive amounts of aid, then quickly pivoted to different topics.

In other comments, Trump said the issue of food shortages in Gaza was an “international problem,” not a “US problem.” But Israel is reliant on US military aid to sustain its military operations in Gaza, and Trump has the power to end the genocidal war by leveraging that support.

Sunday, July 27, 2025

𝐀 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐒-𝐈𝐬𝐫𝐚𝐞𝐥𝐢 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐝𝐫𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐥 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐜𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐃𝐨𝐡𝐚

 

--Nasir Khan

The so-called negotiations in which the US and Israel were taking part were aimed at hiding the true objectives of US-Israel behind the smokescreen of a temporary 'truce'. After the end of the truce, they would have started their well-planned and barbaric slaughter of Palestinians with full force from air, land and the sea.

Obviously, an extremely difficult situation exists for the resistance movement, but no one can trust a single word coming from Mr Trump and his mentor, PM Netanyahu. No doubt, the leaders of the resistance movement are fully aware of all the deceptions and deviousness of the two close allies, engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Thursday, July 24, 2025

The Guardian view on starvation in Gaza: it will take more than words to halt Israel’s genocide

Condemnation is rightly growing. But until concrete action is taken, western allies will remain complicit with these horrifying crimes

July has been one of the deadliest months of the war in Gaza, with Israel killing one person every 12 minutes. The UN says more than 1,000 Palestinians have died trying to get food, mostly when they attempted to collect aid from hubs.

Behind these visible deaths lies the horror of systematic starvation: “minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed”, in the words of Prof Alex de Waal, an expert on humanitarian crises. More than 100 aid groups warned that it is spreading fast. At least 10 people died of hunger and malnutrition on Tuesday alone, said Gaza’s health ministry. Parents watch their children wither. Adults collapse on the street.

Never mind other essential needs – water, medical supplies, shelter. Even if food could be distributed fairly under the new system – and it cannot be – it is utterly insufficient. And even if more arrived, which might or might not happen if a ceasefire were agreed, life is not sustainable when brief periods of partial respite alternate with months of deprivation.

Starvation wreaks lifelong damage on physical and mental health, perhaps including that of future generations, and destroys societies as well as lives. People are forced to make impossible choices, such as deciding which of their children needs food most, and do desperate things, snatching food from others. These acts too leave lasting scars. While many aid groups have run out of everything, others say social breakdown has made distributing meagre supplies too dangerous for both staff and recipients. Israel blames looting by Hamas for the hunger. This, from a government which armed a criminal gang accused of seizing aid.

To deliberately inflict starvation upon a society is to take it to pieces. The genocide convention prohibits “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Even if the trickle of aid keeps most Palestinians alive – just – the deprivation can still destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a group.

Condemnation is rightly growing. On Monday, the UK and 27 other countries issued a tough statement attacking Israel for depriving Palestinians of “human dignity”. The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, called their assertion “disgusting”. But Israel’s other allies must keep working together. What matters is not what they say. It is what they do – including whether they impose sanctions and comprehensive arms embargos, and suspend preferential trade terms. Recognition of a Palestinian state is part of a necessary response, but not the only or most important issue.

Britain was right to place sanctions on far-right ministers, reinstate funding to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, and suspend many arms exports. But these measures came too late, and they are still much too little. Kaja Kallas, the foreign policy chief of the EU – Israel’s biggest trading partner – has said that “all options [are] on the table”. But the bloc has yet to agree on action.

Faced with the systematic destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, other states must together produce a systematic, comprehensive and concrete response. If not now, when? What more would it take to convince them? This is first and foremost a catastrophe for Palestinians. But if states continue to allow international humanitarian law to be shredded, the repercussions will be felt by many more around the world in years to come. History will not ask whether these governments did anything to stop genocide by an ally, but whether they did all they could.

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Israel's starvation of Gaza is a cruel display of the impunity of power

 

 
 
Israel's killing of starving Palestinians is built on a global order that has normalised the spectacle of violence, the silencing of dissent and the punishment of those who dare to resist
 
Palestinians, mostly children, push to receive a hot meal at a charity kitchen in the Mawasi area of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on 22 July, 2025 (AFP)

A grim and powerful act of protest has taken place in Gaza.

In the midst of the Israeli-US-imposed blockade on food and humanitarian aid - a policy that has already caused many Palestinians to die - a significant public figure has himself gone on hunger strike.

On Sunday, 20 July, Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza and long persecuted by the Israeli occupation for documenting conditions on the ground, announced a hunger strike.

"I am Mahmoud Basal, a Palestinian citizen, a free human being," he declared. "For days now, I have been living on scraps of food, like more than two million citizens. Due to the lack of basic food in the Gaza Strip, I declare a full hunger strike in protest against the catastrophic famine striking Gaza, and in solidarity with more than two million people who have been left to face death by starvation amid shameful global silence."

While Israel has long used food as a weapon - measuring out the bare minimum number of calories required to keep Gaza's population on the brink of malnutrition - we are now witnessing the radical consequences of restrictions and blockades that have been normalised over decades.

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This strategy was infamously outlined in a 2008 Israeli position paper, Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip - Red Lines.

'Unbearable loss'

Incremental yet relentless waves of dehumanising propaganda in western media and political discourse, reinforced by repeated Israeli assaults on Gaza that leave mass death and devastation in their wake, have brought us to the horrific present reality.

Now, Israeli forces target unarmed, starving people in search of food using snipers, artillery and drones - people who are then presented not as victims, but as trespassers on their own land.

Relentless propaganda and repeated Israeli assaults have brought us to this horrific present reality

On the same day Basal announced his hunger strike, poet and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mosab Abu Toha - displaced from his destroyed home in Beit Lahia to Egypt and, eventually, the US - posted on X: "Today was a day of unbearable loss. My cousin was killed, my wife's brother and another cousin were wounded, and many of my friends from the neighbourhood returned with amputated limbs. These were young men - sons, fathers - who had to set out, desperate to bring back even a little food for their families."

While Israel foments further chaos in Syria and Lebanon to divert attention and consolidate territorial control - part of a meticulously planned attempt to fully dominate the region - British surgeon Nick Maynard has reported consistent patterns of gunshot injuries at newly established aid distribution sites.

Noting "clear patterns of injury", Dr Maynard described victims - mainly teenage boys - as being deliberately targeted in different parts of the body, depending on the day.

"On one day they'll all be abdominal gunshot wounds, on another they'll all be head or neck gunshot wounds, on another they'll be arm or leg gunshot wounds...It's almost as if a game is being played, that they're deciding to shoot the head today, the neck tomorrow, the testicles the day after," he said. 

Campus complicity

Meanwhile, in the US, the news cycle functions as a constant distraction - through contrived political scandals, economic chaos driven by the tariff mood of the day, or congressional hearings on "antisemitism" at US universities.

At these show trials, the university administrators summoned for questioning are themselves among the institutional actors who have hollowed out academia to its core.

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Research fields that develop the technical means to kill and control populations that resist, while manufacturing consent for those very policies, receive institutional priority due to corporate sponsorship.

Yet these same administrators stand accused of not doing enough to ban, silence, arrest, or otherwise suppress any expression of free speech on campus - so long as that speech supports Palestinian liberation or criticises US or Israeli policy.

All of this reinforces the false dichotomies of US institutional discourse - as if most, if not all, institutions were not aligned with the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy.

Like a deer in headlights, Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez of the City University of New York (CUNY) feigned ignorance under Congresswoman Elise Stefanik's relentless interrogation, repeatedly claiming he "wasn't aware of" or "did not know about" this or that individual or event.

Yet even before the hearings, and in hopes of appeasing the insatiable bloodlust of genocide denial, Rodriguez had already offered up four contingent CUNY professors - the most precarious segment of academic labour - as sacrificial lambs, ensuring their dismissal without cause due to their involvement in Palestine-related activism.

How did we get here?

Fading empires

The famine in Yemen, a result of the US-supported Saudi intervention and blockade that began in 2016, was neither live-streamed nor regarded as a significant component of US foreign policy.

Thus, the steadfast support of Ansar Allah, Yemen's armed Houthi movement, for Gaza and Palestine can be made to seem "irrational" - as though there were no link between past atrocities and present resistance.


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As global power shifts towards multipolarity, and new alliances form along emergent trade routes, the US and EU have entered a phase of panic familiar to fading empires.

The years leading up to the sudden outbreak of the coronavirus in 2020 were characterised by some of the most massive public displays of political protest across the globe since the 1960s.

From the Great March of Return in Gaza and the Algerian Hirak, to mass uprisings in Iraq, Lebanon's 17 October popular uprising, the Yellow Vests in France, and demonstrations in Catalonia, Chile, Hong Kong and beyond, the world seemed on fire.

But those determined to maintain power were often more attuned to the global resonances between these movements than many of the participants themselves.

New feudal order

As with the post-9/11 moment, the policies enacted in response to the pandemic reshaped societies almost overnight: restricting basic human rituals, from funerals to visiting the sick and elderly, while enabling massive wealth transfers.

People were taught to fear one another - to fear contact, proximity and community. New digital powers and the complete relativising of the principles of free speech and unrestrained movement transformed societies almost overnight.

Changes in civil liberties, economies, supply chains, trade routes - and almost every aspect of life - seemed to bring the future, so to speak, back to the past.

There is no justification for starving and killing Palestinians in Gaza - and claiming it can't be stopped is a lie of the highest magnitude

That past is also the Cold War past that liberal democracies and a fading US empire continue to cling to, propped up by the perpetual manufacture of existential enemies.

In 1944, anthropologist Gregory Bateson - then working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA - remarked: "It is very important to sponsor spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors."

Historically denied the means to defend themselves by far more powerful states, the present anguish of unarmed Palestinians searching for food to survive yet another day - in a world that has betrayed them on every front - is a harbinger to all rational people with eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds to think, as we enter a new feudal order.

There is no justification whatsoever for the forced starvation and wanton killing of Palestinians in Gaza, now or ever. And the idea that mechanisms to stop it are unavailable or do not exist is a lie of the highest magnitude.

The day after Basal's declaration, a young Egyptian activist at the Hague chained shut the Egyptian embassy gates, scattered flour across the pavement, and smashed eggs against the entrance in protest. In that moment of small, defiant spectacle, a whole edifice of lies appeared to fall apart.

The only conclusion we can draw is that we are witnessing a deliberate effort to showcase the impunity of power, an effort designed to annihilate the very possibility of political reciprocity, justice and law.

This monstrosity must be defeated, at any cost - and everything must be remembered, in fine detail, to hold those responsible to account.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic and scholar. He is the author of more than 25 books, most recently Controlled Demolition: a work in four books, and his co-translation of Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece. He is Distinguished Professor at Queens College, CUNY, and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.

Tuesday, July 22, 2025

Scenes from the end of Zionism: Reflections on the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna

The first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, which drew 1,000 anti-Zionist Jews and their allies to Vienna, marked a significant moment in the rising tide against the settler-colonial state of Israel.
 

The decision to hold the first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress in Vienna was significant for historical reasons – being where Theodore Herzl formed the ideology that became modern Zionism, as well as Adolf Hitler’s birthplace – and for modern reasons – Austria, alongside Germany, provides unconditional support for Israel, a symptom of its guilt over the Holocaust. 

Western nations’ complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza has left the supposed ‘rules-based’ order they claim to represent in ruins. The U.S., UK, Europe, and their allies have provided Israel with the means to act with impunity through weapons, which flow freely, and information, which certainly does not. 

The Congress began just as Israel was bombing Iran, a reminder of the threat Zionism poses to global stability. Against this backdrop, over 1,000 anti-Zionist Jews and their allies from across the globe met in the Favoriten District in Vienna, June 13-15, 2025, at a time when the tide is turning, too slowly, but turning, against the settler-colonial ethnostate of Israel. 

Israel still has its well-funded lobby groups, and far too many people still believe its hasbara. It seems it’s up to a plucky group of not-so-well-funded anti-fascist dissidents in keffiyehs to turn the tide. While we have the truth and international law on our side, at times our goals seem insurmountable. But as several speakers highlighted, we must keep going, and we do not have the luxury of despondency. I was there representing South African Jews for a Free Palestine (SAJFP) alongside Roshan Dadoo, the conference’s only South African speaker and coordinator of the South African Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) coalition.

SAJFP sent me to Austria to advocate for a united, Jewish Anti-Zionist movement that is inclusive rather than Eurocentric. Our experience in fighting apartheid as South Africans is also significant, in terms of both our successes and our failures. As United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese pointed out via live stream: While the political system underpinning apartheid was defeated in South Africa, the economic and social systems that enabled it remained in place.  

Ilan Pappe addresses the Jewish Anti-Zionist Conference, held June 13-15, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. (Photo courtesy of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Conference)
Ilan Pappe addresses the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, held June 13-15, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. (Photo courtesy of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress)

While the First Congress did not definitively represent the entirety of global anti-Zionism – hopefully, in time it will, as the follow-up Congress is already being planned for 2026 and is rumored to be taking place in Ireland – the turnout showed the movement is alive, well, and growing. Leading Jewish anti-Zionists in attendance included Israeli-born historian Ilan Pappe, U.S. journalist and filmmaker Katie Halper, and Hungarian/British Holocaust survivor Stephen Kapos. 

The voice of Palestinians, crucially, was heard there too, through the presence of people such as Gazan journalist and author Ramzy Baroud, who argued that his people should become a model of resistance against imperialism worldwide. Palestinian physician, academic, and writer Dr. Ghada Karmi was there to emphasize the right of return and Europe’s role in having “created the monster” that is Israel, as was politician Awad Abdelfatah, who has worked from within the Israeli political system, advocating for one, democratic state with equal rights for all who live in it. 

Ramzy Baroud and Dr. Ghada Karmi on a panel at the Jewish Anti-Zionist Conference, held June 13-15, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. (Photo courtesy of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Conference)
Ramzy Baroud and Dr. Ghada Karmi on a panel at the first Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, held June 13-15, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. (Photo courtesy of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress)

The need to reclaim Judaism from Zionism – once seen as a fringe movement within global Jewry as UK writer and activist Tony Greenstein reminded us during a discussion – was a constant theme at the Congress, as was the need to embrace the Yiddish concept of doikayt, or hereness, the idea that Jewish people can, have and will live peacefully with their neighbors in countries across the globe, rather than needing to escape to a physical homeland.

We were also reminded that we were there not just as Jews, but as human beings, and that there is no place for exceptionalism of any kind in this struggle. We must join forces with anti-Zionists across the globe, and our primary duty is to the Palestinian people. Their suffering was highlighted through a video that made many in attendance emotional, in which a surgeon from Gaza detailed his attempts to keep going amid Israel’s systematic dismantling of the enclave’s entire medical system. 

The Congress demonstrated that some of the most effective opposition to the Zionist state comes from those born into it. Together with Pappe, others who were born in Israel or have lived there were heard. These included dissident activist Ronnie Barkan, filmmaker and academic Professor Haim Bresheeth-Žabner, and academic and activist Dalia Sarig. These voices provide hope that it’s possible to resist the propaganda that keeps most Israelis loyal to their state, regardless of its actions. 

Some speakers were not Jewish or Palestinian but simply anti-Zionists, reaffirming that this is an issue of common humanity. Alongside Albanese was Egyptian journalist Rahma Zein, providing another much-needed African perspective, and French/Palestinian juror and politician Rima Hassan, who managed to join the Congress virtually, despite having just been released from detention after Israel abducted her and other activists on the Madleen Flotilla.

Rahma Zein speaking on a panel at the Jewish Anti-Zionist Conference, held June 13-15, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. (Photo courtesy of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Conference)
Rahma Zein speaking on a panel at the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress, held June 13-15, 2025, in Vienna, Austria. (Photo courtesy of the Jewish Anti-Zionist Congress)

A declaration written with input from all speakers at The Congress seeks to capture the collective positions that were reached during the three days. The declaration condemns the genocide as well as Israel’s apartheid-driven policies, rooted in ethnic cleansing. The document documents Israel’s systematic war crimes in Gaza, “including ethnic cleansing, militarised apartheid, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, mass starvation”, and condemns Western governments, particularly the U.S., UK, EU, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, for enabling these actions through military and diplomatic support.

It calls for immediate sanctions, Israel’s suspension from the UN, adherence to BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), and nuclear disarmament under IAEA oversight. The declaration also affirms Palestinians’ right to resist occupation and demands an end to Zionist claims of representing global Jewry, urging Jews worldwide to reject Zionism and stand in solidarity with Palestinian liberation.

The signatories reject Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state, and note that Zionism is a racist ideology that endangers both Palestinians and Jews. They call for decolonization, the right of return for Palestinian refugees (per UN Resolution 194), and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from all occupied territory since 1948. 

The Congress could prove important only if all who attended absorb its message, take it back to our communities, and work hard to grow the movement. The need for greater collaboration between global anti-Zionist groups was evident, as was the need for anti-Zionist Jews to unite as one cohesive movement. Zionism is a highly funded, meticulously organized, and well-oiled machine, and we only have a chance of defeating it together. 

To me, more important than anything that came out of the Congress is that it happened, that we united to continue our work, and that it symbolized a return to the roots of Judaism as a religion of peace. Despite all the damage that has been done in our name, Jews can and must be part of building a better world. I believe deep down that a day will come when we truly can celebrate our achievements as anti-Zionists, Jewish or otherwise. But who knows how long that will take? For now, all I really know is that our work has just begun.