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.
Haidar Eid is an associate Professor at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza.
Aljazeera, 27 Nov 2023
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.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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.
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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.
by Chris Hedges, The Real News Network, November 17, 2023
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
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.
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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.
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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