Before President Joe Biden leaves office, he will approve one more massive arms sale to Israel. The $8 billion sale of missiles and artillery shells comes as human rights groups have labeled Israel’s war in Gaza as a genocide.
Axios reported on Friday, “The State Department has notified Congress “informally” of an $8 billion proposed arms deal with Israel that will include munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters as well as artillery shells.”
Author Barak Ravid did not define what it means to “informally” notify Congress of the sale or if it fulfills the White House’s requirement to notify Congress of arms deals.
The massive arms sale to Tel Aviv comes after Amnesty International declared Israel’s onslaught in Gaza a genocide. “Amnesty International’s research has found sufficient basis to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the organization said in a landmark new report published today,” the report released in early December explained.
The sale includes AIM-120C-8 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, Hellfire AGM-114 missiles, 155 MM artillery rounds, small-diameter bombs, JDAM kits, and 500-pound bombs. Many of these munitions have been used by Israel during its campaign of extermination in Gaza, including in attacks on civilian targets.
In June, CNN reported that Israel used US small-diameter bombs in an attack on a school that killed 40 civilians. In October, The Washington Post noted, “The Biden administration has received nearly 500 reports alleging Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip.”
Amnesty International is calling on the US and other states that provide Israel with arms to cut off the flow of weapons to stop the genocide. “States that continue to transfer arms to Israel at this time must know they are violating their obligation to prevent genocide and are at risk of becoming complicit in genocide,” said Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of the organization.
“All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end,” she added.
Israel receives most of its weapons, 78%, from the US, and officials in Tel Aviv have acknowledged it would not be able to sustain its military operations with continued US support for more than a few months. Since the October 7 attack, the US has provided Israel with $22 billion in military aid.
Still, Biden has been routinely criticized by Republicans in Washington and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for not providing Israel with enough military support.
The Axios reports that some of the munitions will come directly from US stockpiles. However, many of the weapons will be delivered years into the future. The goal of the deal is “supporting Israel’s long-term security by resupplying stocks of critical munitions and air defense capabilities,” one official explained.
Several rights groups have warned there are “alarming indications” of torture and abuse of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, after he was abducted by Israeli forces in late December.
Safiya, who oversaw north Gaza’s last functioning hospital, is reportedly being held at Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman prison, where abuse – including torture, murder and rape – is rife.
According to information received by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the doctor’s health has deteriorated following his detainment.
“Euro-Med Monitor warns of the grave risk to [Safiya’s] life, following patterns of deliberate killings and deaths under torture previously suffered by other doctors and medical staff,” the Geneva-based NGO said.
Testimonies gathered by the group indicate that Abu Safiya has endured abuse after Israeli forces stormed the bombed-out Kamal Adwan Hospital.
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Examples of these abusive acts include being ordered to strip off his clothing and being physically assaulted and whipped with a thick wire.
The NGO also said that he was subjected to humiliation in front of other detainees and was transfered to several other locations before being finally held in Sde Teiman.
Despite mainstream media and rights groups locating Abu Safiya’s whereabouts to Sde Teiman, Israel claims it has ‘no indication’ of his arrest. That is despite a previous announcement confirming his arrest last week.
On Saturday, an Israeli army spokesman said Abu Safiya was transferred for interrogation after a raid on Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Israel ignores WHO appeals and attacks another hospital in northern Gaza
Physicians for Human Rights in Israel (PHR) submitted an official request earlier this week on behalf of the doctor’s family, but was denied information about his whereabouts.
An email by the army informed the group on Thursday that “Based on a search, we have no indication of the arrest or detention of the subject of the request.”
However, according to Israeli Channel 24, an Israeli army spokesperson alleged that Abu Safiyeh is under investigation by internal security agency Shin Bet for purported connections to Hamas, though no evidence has been presented.
Euro-Med Monitor has warned of the “severe implications of Israel’s denial of Dr. Abu Safiya’s detention”, adding that this reflects a “blatant disregard for binding legal standards.”
Torture, rape and murder at Sde Teiman
Israeli forces have detained thousands of Palestinians since the 7 October attacks, with most being held and interrogated at Sde Teiman, even if they are non-combatants.
Torture, rape and murder are widespread at the facility, with investigations by MEE, CNN and the New York Times finding examples of abuse.
The Palestinian Prisoners Society said in a recent statement that the risks to the fate of Kamal Adwan Hospital director are increasing as time goes by, especially as Israel has denied the existence of a record proving his arrest.
Sde Teiman: What abuses are alleged to have taken place in the Israeli prison?
“The case of Dr. Abu Safiya is one of thousands of detainees in Gaza who are facing the crime of enforced disappearance,” the group said.
“Despite the existence of clear evidence of the arrest of Dr Abu Safiya on 27 December, 2024, the occupation denies what it previously stated, as well as the existence of evidence such as the videos and photos it published.”
Over the past three months, Abu Safiya, a paediatrician, published dozens of videos and sent out pleas to the international community to act against the Israeli attacks on Kamal Adwan Hospital.
He repeatedly warned that the lives of patients and medical staff were at risk amid constant Israeli bombings and a siege preventing the entry of aid and food.
“Instead of receiving aid, we receive tanks… which are shelling the [hospital] building,” he said in a video two months ago.
In late October, Abu Safiya’s son died as a result of an earlier Israeli raid on the hospital, according to health officials. A month later, the doctor was wounded in an Israeli air strike on the hospital complex.
The Israeli military has been accused of deliberately targeting Gaza’s health system through constant attacks on hospitals, ambulances and doctors since the 7 October Hamas-led attack on southern Israel.
Israel intensified its offensive on Kamal Adwan and northern Gaza in early October when a controversial proposal to ethnically cleanse the area, known as the “Generals’ Plan”, was presented to the Israeli government.
Under the plan, anyone who chose to stay in the north would be considered a Hamas operative and could be killed.
Thick smoke billows from a residential building in Bureij refugee camp after it was hit by an Israeli airstrike, in Deir al-Balah, Palestinian Territories, on June 3, 2024.
The Israeli military has announced that it carried out over 1,400 air strikes on Gaza in December alone, amounting to dozens of strikes a day on average on Palestinians also suffering under famine conditions due to Israel’s enduring aid blockade.
This is the equivalent of over 45 airstrikes a day, with the attacks carried out by Israeli aircraft like fighter jets and drones, the Israeli Air Force said on social media.
This is a staggering amount of strikes in such a small period of time, coming after Israel has already destroyed roughly 70 percent of infrastructure in Gaza.
The military did not specify the firepower of the strikes. But rights groups noted that, within the first months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Israeli forces had already dropped the equivalent of multiple nuclear bombs on the Gaza Strip — a territory spanning only 25 miles long and with roughly the same land area as Las Vegas.
Israeli forces have claimed that they were striking military targets within Gaza, but many of the strikes documented by journalists and human rights groups have targeted civilian areas, including many children.
The population has declined by 160,000 people since October 2023, with at least 45,000 people killed by Israeli attacks. By Sharon Zhang , Truthout
January 2, 2025
These strikes have been carried out on Palestinians, adults and children alike, who were trying to find food or forced to take shelter in makeshift tents on the beach, in Israel’s designated “safe zone.” They have killed medical workers trying to save people’s lives after Israeli attacks, or those injured by attacks only to be struck again. In one strike in late December, Israeli forces bombed a press van and killed five Palestinian journalists near a hospital, where the wife of one of the journalists was giving birth.
Even as the military carried out these strikes, Israeli officials were taking part in ceasefire negotiations that appeared to be gaining steam, according to media reports. Like others before, these talks fizzled out as Israeli officials insisted on staying in Gaza even after a deal was struck and as reports have found that Israel intends to openly violate the terms of its ceasefire agreement in Lebanon.
The U.S. was party to these negotiations, but American officials have also played a major role in allowing Israel’s attacks to continue. In just the first year of Israel’s genocide, the U.S. sent $17.9 billion in military assistance to Israel — at minimum, according to a tally of just the publicly reported transfers.
More military sales are in the pipeline, all but guaranteeing that Israel can continue its aggression in the Middle East with the backing of the most well-funded military complex in the world. The Biden administration has pushed a massive $20 billion weapons sale to Israel — including tank rounds, JDAMs and fighter jets — while, just in November, reports emerged that the Biden administration is moving forward with a sale of thousands of JDAMs and small diameter bombs to Israel, worth $680 million.
Human rights groups and experts have documented dozens of instances of Israel using U.S. bombs to commit war crimes in Gaza. According to reporting by The Washington Post from October, the State Department has reportedly swept aside over 500 reports of Israel using U.S. weapons to kill civilians in Gaza and causing “unnecessary harm.”
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Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter and Bluesky.
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, you have stood for the social, political and economic rights of people in your constituency, migrants, migrant children, Native Americans, and coloured people steadfastly and consistently. When a war criminal addressed a joint session of Congress a few months ago, you were the only one who held a placard with the words ‘War Criminal’ and ‘Genocide’. You were the one who dared to tell the truth in this way, while most others were ecstatic in cheering the war criminal!
Some of us who follow your posts on your Page notice some vicious and negative comments by some right-wing people who firmly support and cheer on what Israel is doing in Gaza and the rest of the occupied West Bank, etc. However, you persist with your work and activities despite the misleading propagandists and trolls. For all that, I thank you on behalf of many people who are my readers and friends.
I wish you a happy new year and hope you will continue serving the causes and meeting the challenges in the new year as you have.
If there are men who contain a soul without frontiers, a brow scattered with universal hair, covered with horizons, ships, and mountain chains, with sand and with snow, then you are one of those.
Fatherlands called to you with all their banners, so that your breath filled with beautiful movements. You wanted to quench the thirst of panthers and fluttered full against their abuses.
With a taste of all suns and seas, Spain beckons you because in her you realize your majesty like a tree that embraces a continent.
Around your bones, the olive groves will grow, unfolding their iron roots in the ground, embracing men universally, faithfully. – Note: This poem honours an international soldier who fought in the Spanish Civil War. It depicts him as a symbol of universal brotherhood and sacrifice, embodying the spirit of those who fight for justice and freedom. The poet emphasizes the soldier’s selflessness and the universal nature of his struggle, transcending national boundaries.
There is a complicated and long historical background to this resolution. It was passed after the headquarters of the British mandatory administration in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem were blown up by the Zionist terrorists in 1946. The British made a quick retreat from Palestine in 1948, leaving the Zionists as the new masters.
However, the formality of the Resolution 181 was to give the stamp of approval to the imperial patronage of the Zionist objectives that had started with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and resulted in the establishment of Israel in 1948, soon followed by the expulsion of the people of Palestine from their land by Israel. What Israel is doing in its war on Gaza is the continuation of its project that started in 1948 or even before.
The United States has, particularly since 1967, been the bulwark for Israel’s expansionist dreams. US-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see.
In these difficult times, the voice of the late Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said is ever present, “Writing is the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
For more than fourteen painful months Israel has passed off its inhuman actions against the people of Gaza as “defensive.”
We are to believe that the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians and attacks on its Arab neighbors are somehow Israel’s “right.” Championed by the Biden administration, Tel Aviv has grown ever more bolder and barbaric in its efforts to crush the resistance and expand its “undeclared” borders; simply, because it can.
Since it proclaimed itself a state on Palestinian land in 1948, Israel has been and continues to be engaged in the largest dispossession of an ethnic group in modern history. And following its victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel has emerged an expansionist, occupying and annexationist power, ruling over vast Arab lands and people.
The United States has, particularly since 1967, been the bulwark for Israel’s expansionist dreams. US-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see.
Out of the ashes of World War II, the newly created United Nations, with US pressure, helped legalize land theft. In 1948, the General Assembly (made up of 58 nations) said “yes” to the creation of a Jewish state on 62 percent of historic Palestine. At the time of the unequal division, 68 percent of the population were Arab Palestinian Muslims and Christians, while only 30 percent were Jewish.
Zionist plans to seize all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, have never ceased, and are clearly stated in the Likud Party platform of 1977: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
The inhumanity, injustices and militarism that we see today in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen have deep roots in the founding of the Jewish state and its ongoing desire to create a hegemonic Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) throughout the Middle East.
The expansionist policies of the current Israeli regime are not an aberration. They are rather a continuation and the inevitable outcome of the Zionist political ideology espoused by Israel’s founding fathers, advanced by the Labour and Likud parties, and currently being prosecuted by the fanatics in the far-right Religious Zionism party.
Like the early Zionists, every Israeli leader believed in the Jewish right to all of Palestine and the right to expel the indigenous population to achieve an exclusive Jewish state. Their plans, goals and strategies have been blatantly stated and well-documented over many years.
European founders, men like the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904); Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), founder of Revisionist Zionism (precursor of today’s Likud Party); Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), the first president of Israel; and David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel’s first prime minister, agreed that increased Jewish immigration and removal of Palestinians were required to secure control over Palestine and to create a Greater Israel.
Following are a handful of the many citations that should be weighed to understand European Zionism and its ethnic cleansing schemes for Palestine and its people:
“When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country… Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” (Herzl, 1895) (to Herzl, Palestinians were “it”)
“There is no choice: The Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs… We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East… The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz Israel… (Muslims are) yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.” (Jabotinsky, 1939)
“By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.” (Weizmann, 1919)
“With compulsory transfer we (would) have a vast area (for settlement)… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” (Ben-Gurion, 1937) and “My assumption…is that a Jewish state on only a part (referring to partition plan) of the land is not the end but the beginning… every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole.” (Ben-Gurion, 1938)
From Israel’s founder, Herzl, to its first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, its goal has been “a land for Israelis, without Palestinians.”
Furthermore, by looking back on Israel’s expansionist strategies, we can better comprehend what Tel Aviv and Washington are currently plotting for Palestine and the larger region. Their schemes for becoming the hegemons of the Levant are revealed in the: 1948 Plan Dalet (Plan D); Oded Yinon Plan, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s;” and 1996 “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
The Dalet Plan—Blueprint for the Ethnic Cleansing
Long before the British terminated their mandate and pulled their army out of Palestine, a cabal of Zionist political and military leaders, led by Ben-Gurion, had been preparing military plans for the dispossession of the Palestinians once the British left.
Plan Dalet (Plan D) was officially put into effect on March 10, 1948. Military orders were given to the new Israeli army and Haganah militia to systematically and forcibly remove Palestinians from vast areas of the country.
The operational orders specified which population centers should be targeted and laid out in detail how to drive out the inhabitants and destroy their communities, using methods including intimidation, setting fires to homes, properties and goods, demolishing homes and planting mines to prevent inhabitants from returning. On April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, over 150 Palestinian men, women and children were massacred by Zionist terrorist militias (members of Irgun and Stern Gang).
After six months, when the Nakba (the catastrophe) ended, over 750,000 Palestinians had been uprooted, 531 villages destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods had been depopulated, soon repopulated with Jewish Israelis.
The destruction of Palestinian communities began during and after the 1948 Arab- Israeli War marked the beginning of Israel’s apartheid system on 78 percent of historic Palestine.
The Yinon Plan—’A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s’
In February 1982, an essay appeared in Kivinum (Directions), a journal of the World Zionist Organization. It was written by Oded Yinon, a journalist for the Jerusalem Post with close ties to Israel’s foreign ministry.
The Yinon Plan for the Middle East contained the key elements of the “Greater Israel” scheme reflected in the expansionist policies—underwritten by the United States—that Tel Aviv has implemented over more than eight decades.
Although the “de-Palestinization of Palestine” has been a priority, every Arab state has been a target of Zionist expansionism. The Yinon Plan emphasizes two key elements: To survive, Israel must become an imperial regional power; and to achieve that hegemony, it must weaken and divide neighboring Arab states. Israel’s aim has been to create small, sectarian-based Arab states with little choice but to yield to Israeli domination.
The Yinon Plan has been taking shape since the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Israel’s interest in weak states in the Middle East
has been borne out in its air and cyber-wars and numerous assassinations of prominent opposition figures.
Since 1967, Israel has swallowed up more Arab land. It has illegally annexed Arab lands in Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights; with plans, as recently announced, to colonize the devastated Gaza Strip and to annex the West Bank.
‘A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’
A US-Israeli neoconservative research group at the Institute for Advanced Strategies and Palestine Studies in Washington, D.C. prepared a policy document in 1996 for newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The report titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” laid out a plan of action on how Washington and Tel Aviv could integrate their policies to defeat Israel’s “foes” by reshaping the Middle East.
Notably, the authors of the manifesto worked in the George W. Bush White House, inside the Pentagon and Defense Department. Its lead author, former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs (1981-87), Richard Perle, was one of the key figures in the formulation of the disastrous 2003 Iraq war strategy adopted by the Bush administration.
To win American support, Netanyahu was advised to package the proposed policies in a language familiar to Americans; hence, standard-issue canards such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” and branding supporters of Palestinian rights as “terrorists.”
The strategies described in the “Yinon” and “Clean Break” plans were constructs for endless US-Israeli wars and chaos in the region. It should be noted, that the United States has engaged in or sponsored wars or conflicts—beneficial to Israeli strategy—in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (from 2011 to the present), in Lebanon, Yemen, occupied West Bank and Gaza; and with Iran if Israel continues to have its way.
To “secure the realm,” Israel was urged to pursue aggressive policies of preemption and regime change against governments in the region that resisted Israel’s expansionist aims. Netanyahu was advised to collaborate with Jordan and Türkiye to destabilize Iraq and to contain Syria through proxy warfare.
Consistent with “clean break logic,” the Bush administration, under the pretext that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Saddam and dismantled the ruling Ba’ath Party.
Iraq has yet to recover from America’s eight-year-long occupation and war.
Despite the Iraqi government’s request that the US leave, Washington has refused to withdraw its remaining 2,500 troops.
The US-Israel war on Syria, which led to the fall of President Assad in December 2024 began with the 1996 “Clean Break” strategy for the region. It escalated in 2011 when President Barack Obama covertly instructed the CIA to overthrow President Assad in Operation Timber Sycamore. Thirteen years of deadly war, frequent Israeli air strikes, and crippling US-led economic sanctions, left Syria impoverished, fragmented and unable to resist foreign invasion.
Israel got what it wanted in Syria, a Balkanized and weakened country. The United States, Türkiye and their forces dominate in the North, while Israel controls areas in the South. Tel Aviv now claims control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, and has declared its intent to expand its illegal colonies in the Golan Heights, declaring them part of the Israeli state “for eternity.”
Netanyahu has eagerly embraced “Clean Break” proposals on ways to “secure the realm” in Palestine. He has perversely sabotaged the Oslo Accords (1993/1995), completely written-off the so-called two-state solution (land for peace) and sown division within the Palestinian national movement.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) tasked with limited government over parts of the occupied Palestinian territories by the now-extinct Oslo Accords, has been reduced to an enforcement arm of the Israeli security state.
The recent (December 21) large-scale armed crackdown against Palestinian resistance groups in the Jenin refugee camp carried out by PA Security Forces exemplifies the extent of the collaboration.
It should be noted, that the assault was coordinated with Washington and Tel Aviv, and put under the direction of US Army Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel, who has served as US Security Coordinator of the Israel-Palestinian Authority since November 2021.
Clean Break strategists callously advised Israel, “to pursue Palestinians into all areas.” In its sinister belief that it can physically destroy the Palestinian national desire to return home to a free Palestine, Israel has ravaged and pulverized the defenseless Gaza Strip. And for more than 17 years, Netanyahu has made it his mission to kill as many Palestinians as the United States and its Western allies will tolerate.
Conclusion
From Herzl’s “spirit them out” to Netanyahu’s campaign of genocide, the message and actions have been the same—-remove all traces of Palestinians. And from President Harry S. Truman to President Joe Biden, the message has been: the United States will prevent Israel from failing, whatever the political or economic cost.
When President Biden asserts that he is a “committed Zionist,” he emphatically says to Israelis and Americans that the United States is in lockstep with Israel’s plans to erase Palestinians and their hopes for a sovereign Palestinian nation. Americans, too, many unwittingly, have become committed Zionists by financing Israeli supremacy and regional militarism.
In addition, by suppressing the truth about Israel’s expansionist plans, American politicians and the corporate media have fed the country’s addiction to regional supremacy and its dreams of a Greater Israel, without Palestinians.
Ben-Gurion’s words in a letter to his son in 1937 were menacing and foreboding:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
Israel’s current Zionist extremists have seized upon the Palestinian act of resistance on October 7, 2023, to make Ben-Gurion’s hoped for “opportune moment” a reality, believing that they, like their predecessors, can continue to disfigure history.
– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
On 19 December 2024, Human Rights Watch issued a 179-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International issued a 296-page report detailing Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes.
On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice found that a plausible case can be made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Given the West’s presumed commitment to human rights and especially to preventing genocide, one would have expected countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany, to have stopped the Israeli genocide in its tracks.
Instead, the governments in those three countries, especially the United States, have supported Israel’s unimaginable behavior in Gaza at every turn. Indeed, those three countries are complicit in this genocide.
Moreover, almost all of the many human rights advocates in those countries, and in the West more generally, have stayed silent while Israel executed its genocide. The mainstream media has made hardly any effort to expose and challenge what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Indeed some key outlets have staunchly supported Israel’s actions.
One wonders what people in the West who have either supported Israel’s genocide or remained silent tell themselves to justify their behavior and sleep at night.
The Israeli military has almost completely destroyed the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, once one of the most densely populated places on earth, turning it into a “ghost town,” Haaretz reported on Sunday.
First established in 1948 as a refuge for Palestinians driven from their homes by Zionist militias during the establishment of the modern state of Israel, the Jabalia refugee camp has been under a total siege since early October as part of a new ethnic cleansing campaign to move all Palestinians in northern Gaza to the south.
The IDF estimates that it has completely destroyed 70% of the buildings in the camp, and the ones that remain are damaged. “During a brief visit to the camp Friday afternoon, I could see that even the few buildings that are still standing were badly damaged,” wrote Haaretz reporter Amos Harel.
According to IDF data, the Israeli military has forcibly driven 96,000 Palestinian civilians out of the Jabalia refugee camp. The IDF also says it killed 2,000 Palestinians during the operation, claiming most were armed, but there is a significant amount of evidence that the IDF kills unarmed civilians and counts them as “terrorists.” The IDF says 35 Israeli soldiers have been killed in fighting in the camp since early October.
The Haaretz report says only 100 “terrorists” and a similar number of civilians remain in the camp. “Jabalia has become a ghost town. Outside, you mainly see pack after pack of stray dogs roaming around and hunting for scraps of food,” the report reads.
The ethnic cleansing campaign, which is based on an outline known as the “general’s plan,” has been focused on Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia. In each city, the IDF is demolishing every building in sight to ensure Palestinian civilians have nowhere to return, and the campaign will likely lead to the establishment of Jewish settlements and permanent Israeli occupation.
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