Category: News

I saw settlers attack Palestinian shepherds with dogs, destroy their crops, and steal their homes – all under the aegis of rightwing Israeli leaders

2023 was the worst year on record for settler violence. Settlers attacked Palestinians and their property in more than 1,200 separate incidents. They killed at least 10 Palestinian people. They torched dozens of houses. And this was all before the Hamas attacks of 7 October. In the aftermath of the deadly violence, which left 1,200 Israelis dead and hundreds held hostage, Ben-Gvir explicitly ordered Israeli law-enforcement officers not to enforce the law in cases of Jewish nationalist violence. The Israeli military drafted and armedthousands of settlers, issuing them guns, uniforms and the protection of the state.

These policies have enabled settlers and Israeli armed forces to forcibly remove at least 198 Palestinian households (1,208 people, among them 586 children) from more than a dozen villages in the two months of November and December. As Yesh Din succinctly put it: “Settler violence is the policy of the Israeli government.”

It isn’t just this current government that’s the problem. During my months in the West Bank in 2022, the “government of change” led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid was in power, and it presided over what was, at the time, a record-setting year for settler violence. Since 1967, when Israel initially occupied the West Bank, every single Israeli government has made a choice to maintain Israel’s military presence there and enable the settlement enterprise.

Settler violence is not a glitch in the system. It is a feature. While the state pursues a slow and steady strategy of dispossession by issuing demolition orders, night raids of villages and onerous checkpoints, settlers like Levi and Federman use vigilante violence and illegal construction to more quickly and directly achieve the same goals.

The US, UK and France imposing sanctions on these individuals sends a strong message to the Israeli government, and settlers across the West Bank, that the international community will no longer tolerate this level of violence. But, truthfully, it is not enough. The leader of Zanuta, Fayez al-Tal, said in an interview after the sanctions were made public, that he hopes that Biden’s executive order will extend to officials such as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. Human rights leaders around the world agree that this would be a helpful next step, one that the administration is reportedly considering.

But targeting individuals, even powerful ones, fails on a basic level: it leaves intact the structures which allow Jewish Israelis to militarily, economically and legally dominate Palestinians in the West Bank. For the sake of both nations who live in the land between the river and the sea, we must uproot that system of Jewish supremacy in order to sow the seeds of a shared future for all Palestinians and Israelis.

Read more on The Guardian

Exclusive: UN special rapporteur on the right to food Michael Fakhri says denial of food is war crime and constitutes ‘a situation of genocide’

“The speed of malnourishment of young children is also astounding. The bombing and people being killed directly is brutal, but this starvation – and the wasting and stunting of children – is torturous and vile. It will have a long-term impact on the population physically, cognitively and morally … All things indicate that this has been intentional,” said Fakhri, a law professor at the University of Oregon.

Read more on The Guardian

Shortly after our communications were interrupted with the doctors and nurses in Khan Younis, we read Israeli spokespeople in the news leveling new accusations against Nasser hospital, as they have leveled accusations against one hospital after another in Gaza. This time they have justified the assault by alleging that Israeli hostages had been held in there. It’s almost impossible to refute every accusation that has been made, but it’s clear the intended and actual result of this campaign has been the systematic destruction of the healthcare infrastructure for Palestinians in Gaza, and that has been repeated from north to south.

The UN’s international court of justice has found plausible evidence of genocide in Gaza. While our clinical records may one day be entered as evidence in front of justices in The Hague in line with the Convention on the Prevention and Prosecution of the Crime of Genocide, it will probably not come in time to relieve the suffering of survivors.

It will not treat the wounded, nor bury the dead. It will not return the hundreds of dead healthcare workers to their families, communities and patients.

Our moral obligation as fellow physicians is to support our colleagues in Gaza in their attempts to treat their patients with the care and dignity that all human beings deserve. Without immediate and dramatic action by influential actors on the world stage to end the violence in Gaza, it’s hard to see how that will be possible.

Read the full article on The Guardian

International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Rule 52. Pillage is prohibited.

Soldiers describe how stealing Palestinian property has become totally routine in the Gaza war, with minimal pushback from commanders.

Israeli soldiers fighting in Gaza have not been shy about posting videos on social media gleefully documenting their wanton destruction of buildings and humiliation of Palestinian detainees. Some of these clips were even exhibited in South Africa’s presentation at the International Court of Justice last month as evidence of genocide. But there is another war crime being readily documented by Israeli soldiers that has garnered less attention and condemnation despite its prevalence: looting. 

In November, the Palestinian singer Hamada Nasrallah was shocked to discover a TikTok of a soldier playing the guitar that his father had bought him 15 years earlier. Other videos uploaded to social media in recent months show Israeli soldiers boasting about finding wristwatches; unboxing someone’s collection of soccer shirts; and stealing rugs, groceries, and jewelry. 

In a Facebook group for Israeli women comprising nearly 100,000 users, someone wondered what to do with the “gifts from Gaza” that her partner, a soldier, had brought back for her. Sharing a photo of cosmetic products, she wrote: “Everything is sealed except for one product. Would you use these? And does someone know the products or are they only in Gaza?” 

Indeed, since the start of Israel’s ground invasion in late October, soldiers have been taking whatever they can get their hands on from the homes of Palestinians who have been forced to flee. More than an open secret, the phenomenon has been widely — and uncritically — reported in the Israeli media, while rabbis from the Religious Zionist movement have been answering soldiers’ questions about what is permissible to loot according to Jewish law. 

Soldiers who returned from fighting in Gaza confirmed to +972 Magazine and Local Call that the phenomenon is ubiquitous, and that for the most part their commanders are allowing it to happen. “People took things — mugs, books, each one the souvenir that does it for him,” said one soldier, who admitted that he himself took a “souvenir” from one of the medical centers that the army occupied.

Read more at +972 Magazine

Like many people in the Pacific Northwest, my wife and I were hit pretty hard by the recent ice storm. We live on a patch of woodland just outside of Newport. We lost power and cable early and (since we are on a well) that meant no water. We were offline for almost six days. Our driveway was blocked for 2 days. Fortunately, we had a wood stove and barrels of rainwater so we could stay warm, heat food, boil water, and manually flush the toilet. Thankfully, we also have great neighbors, who pitched in with firewood, a generator to keep our freezer going, helped clear the road, etc. An event like this makes one truly value good neighbors. It also tends to make one think of all the other people going through the same thing as neighbors also. It can create an expanding set of circles of inclusion: the local town, the county, the state, the nation, and so on. It is this ability to include others in our ring of compassion that (I believe) could be salvation of humanity.

At times during the storm, I stood out on my deck just watching and listening. It came to me that I was basically living in a war zone. I winced as my family’s trees took a beating. Breaking twigs were like the crackle of small arms fire; larger branches broke with a sound like rifle or small cannon shots; the really big branches and were as loud as artillery rounds, and from time to time, a tree top or a whole tree would snap like a bomb blast and there were horrific crashing sounds as they slithered to the ground in piles of rubble. Meanwhile, the sky was occasionally illuminated as transformers blew—these were like airstrikes. All the time, we never knew where the next blow would fall—would it hit the house, the garage, the studio, the well, the road…? Do the crashes one hears mean the neighbors nearby or down the road have been hit? Should we rush out in the storm with branches raining down to check on them…? 

As I stand thinking about this, it occurs to me that we should consider the other storm that rages in Gaza today. We should include them in our circle of compassion and think of them as neighbors too. In an ever shrinking and connected world, they really are. Their suffering has not ended—there is no relief in sight. The suffering there has been going on for years. It started long before the October 7 attack by Hamas. People in Gaza have lived for years with severely limited light, heat, power, internet, and phone. The water from my rain barrels is probably much cleaner than any water they have had for years. 

Every twig that broke as I watched during our local storm was a person wounded in Gaza. Every branch that broke on my family’s trees was a son or daughter dying. Every treetop that came down was the death of a parent or two. Whole trees were families wiped out in a single airstrike. Can we really keep believing this is necessary or useful? 

The existential question facing people in Gaza is “where to go.” Israel told the civilians to move south. Now they have mercilessly bombarded the south. Meanwhile, the other pressing question is a simpler where to “go”? With disease spreading and badly contaminated water, people must still “go.” There are no functioning toilets and no water to flush. The stench must be horrible. We might hope it will rain, but that will rinse the raw sewage into already undrinkable water. Now Israel is pumping saltwater into the already badly compromised water table.

An ice storm is an odd thing. It wasn’t blowing or raining hard, there was just a constant transparent, misty drizzle. It strikes me that this is much like hatred—it just congeals on everything until it becomes brittle, the weight becomes intolerable, and something finally snaps.

Experiences like this are deeply traumatizing, especially to children. One of my earliest, most vivid memories is of the October 12, 1962 Columbus Day storm. I was only about 3 and half years old, but I still remember crouching under a heavy table in our basement while my father paced nervously as trees crashed down. One can only imagine what the survivors of Gaza will have to live with. It will stay with them for the rest of their lives. Forget all the nonsense you might have heard about the Palestinians “teaching hatred of Israel” in their classrooms. Gaza will teach them all they will ever want to know about the brutality of Israeli occupation.

Our recent storm gave us a very small taste of what people in Gaza endure. We were inconvenienced for a few days; they are now on day 117 of a major catastrophe (as of February 1). It is not over yet. Our ice storm was a natural disaster. Gaza is manmade. It could be stopped any day. Maybe our experience can help us imagine how much worse it could be and try to speak out for an end to this disaster. 

February 1, 2024

This article by the NY Times shows how Israel is systematically destroying what remains of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.

The damage caused by Israel’s aerial offensive in Gaza has been well documented. But Israeli ground forces have also carried out a wave of controlled explosions that has drastically changed the landscape in recent months.

At least 33 controlled demolitions have destroyed hundreds of buildings — including mosques, schools and entire sections of residential neighborhoods — since November, a New York Times analysis of Israeli military footage, social media videos and satellite imagery shows.

In response to questions about the demolitions, a spokesperson for the Israeli military said that soldiers are “locating and destroying terror infrastructures embedded, among other things, inside buildings” in civilian areas — adding that sometimes entire neighborhoods act as “combat complexes” for Hamas fighters.

…

“Israel’s plan is to destroy Gaza and make it unliveable and lifeless,” said Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to Britain. “Israel’s goal has always been to make it impossible for our people to return to their land.”

Two days after the 21 Israeli soldiers were killed in central Gaza, another demolition video was filmed. In it, a soldier says that, in their memory, 21 homes would be destroyed.

Read more on the NY Times

International aid organizations are warning of catastrophic levels of hunger. A report by The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) placed Gaza’s entire population in a situation of acute food insecurity, which it defines as “crisis or worse.” According to the UN, 80 percent of all the people around the world facing famine or catastrophic hunger are in Gaza. Palestinians in the north of the Strip have told CNN they are eating grass and drinking polluted water, because no aid is reaching them. 

Read more at 972Magazine.com

Feds United for Peace, group of workers from more than two dozen agencies, to stage one-day hunger strike on Thursday

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/29/government-employees-hunger-strike-gaza-crisis-biden

US government employees are planning a “day of fasting for Gaza” this week to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis in the territory and to denounce Joe Biden’s policy toward Israel.

Representatives for Feds United for Peace, a group of several dozen government employees frustrated with the Gaza crisis who organized an office walkout earlier in the month, told the Guardian that on Thursday its members will stage a one-day hunger strike. Participating federal employees are expected to show up to their offices dressed in black or wearing keffiyeh scarves or other symbols of Palestinian solidarity.

A federal employee speaking on behalf of the group said the Day of Fasting is a response to Israel’s use of “starvation as a weapon of war by intentionally withholding food from entering Gaza”, citing UN reporting that up 2 million people in the territory are at risk of famine.

The group says its members represent more than two dozen agencies, among them the departments of defense, homeland security and state, and include career public servants and political appointees. They expect hundreds of government employees to participate.

Read more on The Guardian because you just might not read find it in U.S. mainstream news . . .