By Brad Parker, Information Clearing House

A march in support of the people of Gaza, in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, 26 October 2023 (AFP)

On 25 October, when confronted with the escalating Palestinian death toll and asked if Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ignored his requests to minimise civilian casualties, President Joe  Biden took the opportunity to casually cast doubt on Palestinian death statistics and declared: “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war.”

Biden’s comments suggest he is completely unconcerned by the scope and scale of Palestinian civilian harm as a result of Israeli military attacks in Gaza, or the fact that, day by day, he is actively becoming evermore complicit in an Israeli military campaign where Israeli forces are killing Palestinian children with impunity, constituting the crime of genocide.

During the past 24 days of hostilities, Israeli forces have killed at least 3,542 Palestinian children in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, with estimates of over 1,050 children reported missing and presumed to be trapped or dead under the rubble, awaiting rescue or recovery.

During this same time, Israeli forces have killed 36 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank.

To put the intensity of the current Israeli bombardment into context, Israeli forces in the past 24 days have killed more than two times the number of Palestinian children killed in Gaza in all previous Israeli military offensives combined from January 2006 to 6 October 2023.

Prior to 7 October, my colleagues and I at Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) had documented and verified a total of 1,171 Palestinian children killed in Gaza.

Grave violations against children

I first worked with DCIP in the summer of 2009, just after the Israeli military offensive on Gaza during December 2008 and January 2009, known as Operation Cast Lead, where DCIP documented and verified 353 Palestinian children killed in Israeli attacks.

I pored over documentation collected by our DCIP field researchers in Gaza to draft evidence-based reports on Israeli attacks on schools and hospitals, civilian homes, and direct attacks on civilians. 

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The high water mark for Israeli war crimes against Palestinian children in Gaza was reset during the 50-day Israeli military offensive in July and August 2014, known as Operation Protective Edge. Our investigation into Palestinian child fatalities found overwhelming and repeated evidence that Israeli forces committed grave violations against children amounting to war crimes.

DCIP independently verified the deaths of 547 Palestinian children among the killed in Gaza, 535 of them as a direct result of Israeli attacks. Nearly 68 percent of the children killed by Israeli forces were 12 years old or younger. 

To put the scale of Palestinian children killed into a broader context, Israeli forces have killed more children in Gaza in the past 22 days than the total number killed in armed conflict globally over the course of a whole year, for the last three years.

International humanitarian law prohibits indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks and requires all parties to an armed conflict to distinguish between military targets, civilians, and civilian objects.

Deploying explosive weapons in densely populated civilian areas constitutes indiscriminate attacks and carrying out direct attacks against civilians or civilian objects amounts to war crimes. 

Yet, the near complete impunity delivered by the United States and enjoyed by Israeli officials and armed forces means they essentially know no bounds.

Each Israeli military offensive from Operation Cast Lead to now has been met with little to no international pressure to hold any actor accountable, simply perpetuating systemic impunity as the norm.

The previous failure of the international community to hold Israeli officials accountable for war crimes, and, maybe even more importantly, to sit back and not challenge the United States’ unconditional support for Israel, has led us to where we are now. 

Apartheid policies

Children in occupied Gaza account for nearly 50 percent of the total 2.3 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. Nearly all of them now have grown up under 16 years of Israeli siege and closure and repeated Israeli military offensives that created an increasingly unlivable human-made humanitarian situation prior to 7 October.

In the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Palestinian children experience an unceasingly oppressive and increasingly violent Israeli military occupation where Israel’s leadership is more intent than ever on relying on apartheid policies and intentional lethal force to manage an unjust, oppressive, and entirely unsustainable military occupation.

In addition to the current threat of indiscriminate Israeli air strikes on residential buildings and civilian infrastructure, Palestinian children face further imminent threats due to mass internal displacement and Israeli government restrictions on food, water, fuel, and other humanitarian assistance being able to reach them and their families.

The medical system in Gaza is collapsing as Israeli forces continue to escalate their bombardment of Gaza by air, land and sea.

Under international law, genocide constitutes the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group, in whole or in part. Genocide can result from killing or by creating conditions of life that are so unbearable it brings about the group’s destruction.

What we are witnessing, and in the case of DCIP documenting in real-time, is Israeli forces actively committing the crime of genocide against Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, as they carry out unlawful attacks with complete disregard to international law, in an attempt to depopulate Gaza. It is happening with the full and unconditional support of the United States government.

The United States, as a signatory to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, has a duty to both prevent and punish the crime of genocide. Beyond that, Biden and other US government officials should know that the Genocide Convention criminalises not just the commission of genocide, but also attempts to commit genocide and, importantly, complicity in genocide. 

Bold US leadership needed

The US is not simply standing by, failing to prevent or punish genocide against Palestinians – it is actively enabling and supporting the gravest crime under international law, making the US complicit.

Israeli warplanes are entirely US-sourced and the munitions killing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are overwhelmingly American-made weapons. 

When confronted with the widespread and systematic Israeli military attacks against an overwhelmingly youthful civilian population in Gaza and the routine unlawful killing of Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank, the Biden administration has responded with unconditional support to Israel.

It has used its diplomatic support to paralyse the United Nations Security Council to ensure Israeli forces can continue the onslaught, and has pledged another $10.6bn in US taxpayer-funded military assistance and American-made weapons.

This is on top of the $3.8bn in US military assistance already provided annually to Israel.

If Biden is not concerned about the current Palestinian death toll, then I have no illusions that obligations under the Genocide Convention will make him shift his policies.

With no end in sight, there is a dire need for bold US leadership to take immediate action to prioritise the preservation of human life, given the worsening hostilities and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

How many Palestinian children do Israeli forces have to kill before someone steps up to lead in an incredibly urgent humanitarian and political moment?

Brad Parker is an attorney and Senior Policy Adviser at Defense for Children International – Palestine. He specializes in issues of juvenile justice and grave violations against children during armed conflict and leads DCIP’s legal and policy advocacy efforts on Palestinian children’s rights. He is a co-leader of the No Way to Treat a Child campaign.

An image grab from an AFP TV footage shows balls of fire rising above Gaza City during an Israeli assault on October 27, 2023.

(Photo: AFP via Getty Images)

History shows that these costs of occupation and blockade tragically will continue to increase as long as the Israeli occupation and blockade of Palestinians continue.

Ann Wright

Ann Wright, Common Dreams, Oct 30, 2023

I deplore the killings done by Hamas on October 7, in which 1100 Israelis and 328 from other nations were killed.

And I deplore the massive retaliation and revenge that the State of Israel is wreaking as collective punishment on the civilians in Gaza in the name of destroying Hamas. Over 8,000 Palestinians, including over 3,000 children, have now been killed in the three weeks of massive air and artillery attacks on Gaza and over 20,000 have been injured with hundreds, if not thousands, missing under rubble.

As documented in Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center located in Jerusalem, in November 1940, 380,000 Jews were sealed inside the Warsaw ghetto. Over 80,000 Jews died as a result of the appalling conditions, overcrowding, and starvation. The State of Israel is doing the same to the Palestinians of Gaza.

2.3 million Palestinians are now being forced into the southern half of tiny Gaza, which is 140 square miles in size.

I live in the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaiian island of Moloka’i (261 square miles) is almost double the size of Gaza. Half of Gaza where 2.3 million are being forced by Israel into a Gaza ghetto would be about one-fourth the size of Molokai. Only 1.4 million live in the seven populated islands for the entire state of Hawaii.

We’ve seen the devastation that the Maui wildfire inflicted on the people in Lahaina and Kula, destroying homes, food, electrical, water, and sewage systems.

Now the State of Israel is purposefully destroying the food, electricity, water, medical, communications, and sewage systems in Gaza. Israel is telling hospitals to move their patients so they can bomb the buildings.

Israel has told the al Shifa, al Quds hospitals, and other hospitals that their facilities are going to be bombed. On October 29, Dr. Mads Gilbert of Norway who has been working in Gaza hospitals for over 30 years told Al Jazeera he has been all over the hospitals and there are no Hamas facilities in or under the hospitals, and that Israel has not provided any evidence. He said that the Goldstone report of the 2009 Israeli attack on Gaza documented the Israeli tactic of bombing hospitals and medical facilities. Gilbert said that he had spoken with a senior doctor in al Shifa hospital on October 29 and that 50 premature babies are in incubators, 70 patients are on ventilators, and 50 post-operative patients are in hallways due to lack of space. These patients can not be moved, and—more importantly—hospitals and medical facilities are “protected” under international law.

A genocide is taking place in the Gaza ghetto with the complicity of the United States government.

Israel has the largest, most powerful military in the Middle East. The United States provides Israel $3.5 billion annually for its military and protects illegal and criminal Israeli actions on Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.

Josh Paul, a State Department official, has resigned over the U.S. providing Israel more military hardware because of its use in human rights violations on Palestinians.

It is instructive to see the disproportionate level of actions that have killed civilians on both sides over the past 15 years, without counting the Nakba of 1948 in which Israeli militias forced over 800,000 Palestinians from their homes. They and their descendants are still living in refugee camps in Gaza, West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

In 2009, the 27-day Israeli attack on Gaza killed 1417 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed.

In 2012, the Israeli attack on Gaza killed 105 Palestinians. 4 Israelis were killed.

In 2014, the 50-day Israeli attack on Gaza killed 2310 Palestinians. 73 Israelis were killed.

In 2015-2016, the clashes in the West Bank killed 235 Palestinians and 38 Israelis.

In 2018, the Israeli attack on Gaza killed 19 Palestinians. 3 Israelis were killed.

In 2021, the 11-day Israeli attack on Gaza killed 284 Palestinians. 15 Israelis were killed.

In 2022, the Israeli attack on Gaza killed 49 Palestinians. No Israelis were killed.

From 2009 through October 6, 2023, 4,419 Palestinians and 145 Israelis have been killed in the occupation and blockade.

Between October 7 to October 28, 2023, an estimated 8,000 Palestinians, 1400 Israelis, and 328 from other nations have been killed.

More than half the estimated 220 hostages held by Hamas, at least 138, are from 25 countries, including 54 Thai, 15 Argentinians, 12 Germans, 12 Americans, six French, six Russians, five Nepalese, two Tanzanians, two Filipinos, one Chinese and one Sri Lankan. 82 hostages are Israeli citizens, apparently not dual citizens.

Israelis continue to hold 10,000 Palestinians with over 1,450 arrested since October 7 and over 4000 Palestinian workers unaccounted for.

Over 10,000 Palestinians are in Israeli jails, with 1,700 in administrative detention, including 147 children.

The cost of Palestinian and Israeli lives lost and destruction in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the 17-year blockade of Gaza is horrendous.

History shows that these costs of occupation and blockade tragically will continue to increase as long as the Israeli occupation and blockade of Palestinians continue. Gaza is a Ghetto.

As we have seen from U.S. military wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military operations and violence are not the solution to political issues.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Ann Wright

Ann Wright is a 29 year US Army/Army Reserves veteran who retired as a Colonel and a former US diplomat who resigned in March 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq. She served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. In December 2001 she was on the small team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. She is the co-author of the book “Dissent: Voices of Conscience.”

Full Bio >

by Norman Solomon, Antiwar.com, October 31, 2023

by Norman Solomon, Antiwar.com, Oct 31, 2023

For three weeks, President Biden has played a key role in backing Israel’s war crimes while touting himself as a compassionate advocate of restraint. That pretense is lethal nonsense as Israel persists with mass killing of civilians in Gaza.

The same crucial standards that fully condemned Hamas’s murders of Israeli civilians on Oct. 7 should apply to Israel’s ongoing murders that have already taken the lives of at least several times as many Palestinian civilians. And Israel is just getting started.

“We need an immediate ceasefire,” Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib wrote in an email Saturday evening, “but the White House and Congress continue to unconditionally support the Israeli government’s genocidal actions.”

That unconditional support makes Biden and the vast majority of Congress directly complicit with mass murder and genocide, defined as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” The definition clearly fits the words and deeds of Israel’s leaders.

“Israel has dropped approximately 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza so far and has reportedly killed multiple senior Hamas commanders, but the majority of the casualties have been women and children,” Time magazine summed up at the end of last week. Israel’s military has been shamelessly slaughtering civilians in homes, stores, markets, mosques, refugee camps and healthcare facilities. Imagine what can be expected now that communications between Gaza and the outside world are even less possible.

For reporters, being on the ground in Gaza is very dangerous; Israel’s assault has already killed at least 27 journalists. For the Israeli government, the fewer journalists alive in Gaza the better; media reliance on Israeli handouts, news conferences and interviews is ideal.

Pro-Israel frames of reference and word choices are routine in U.S. mainstream media. Yet some exceptional reporting has shed light on the merciless cruelty of Israel’s actions in Gaza, where 2.2 million people live.

For example, on Oct. 28, PBS News Weekend provided a human reality check as Israel began a ground assault while stepping up its bombing of Gaza. “As Israeli ground operations intensified there, suddenly the phone and internet signal went out,” correspondent Leila Molana-Allen reported. “So, people in Gaza, voiceless through the night as they were under these intense bombardments. People were unable to call ambulances, and we’ve heard this morning that ambulance drivers were standing at high points throughout, trying to see where the explosions were, so they could just drive directly there. People unable to communicate with their families to see if they’re alright. People this morning saying ‘we’ve been digging children out of the rubble with our bare hands because we can’t call for help.’”

While people in Gaza “are under some of the most intense bombardment we’ve ever seen,” Molana-Allen added, they have no safe place to go: “Even though they’re still being told to move to the south, in fact most people can’t get to the south because they have no fuel for their cars, they can’t travel, and even in the south bombardment continues.”

Meanwhile, Biden has continued to publicly express his unequivocal support for what Israel is doing. After he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, the White House issued a statement without the slightest mention of concern about what Israel’s bombing was inflicting on civilians. Instead, the statement said, “the President reiterated that Israel has every right and responsibility to defend its citizens from terrorism and to do so in a manner consistent with international humanitarian law.”

Biden’s support for continuing the carnage in Gaza is matched by Congress. As Israel began its fourth week of terrorizing and killing, only 18 members of the House were on the list of lawmakers cosponsoring H.Res. 786, “Calling for an immediate de-escalation and cease-fire in Israel and occupied Palestine.” All of those 18 cosponsors are people of color.

While Israel kills large numbers of Palestinian civilians each day – and clearly intends to kill many thousands more – we can see “progressive” masks falling away from numerous members of Congress who remain cravenly frozen in political conformity.

“In a dark time,” poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “the eye begins to see.”

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Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of many books including War Made Easy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in summer 2023 by The New Press.

— Nasir Khan

Zionists control the US and its media, which in turn influences the Western ruling elite, who always side with Israel and its crimes against humanity in Gaza and the West Bank. These crimes against the Palestinians are happening right in front of our eyes.

By denying access to the internet and electricity, Israel is preventing the spread of information about the heinous acts of murder and racial cleansing in the encircling territory of Gaza. America and its Western allies are complicit in what is happening in the Gaza Strip.

In passing, I should point out that that all Jews are not Zionists and all Zionists are not Jews. President Biden is a Zionist, but he is not Jewish. A few leading writers and academics in the US and Britain, who have staunchly upheld the cause of Palestinians over decades, are Jewish. For instance, Richard Falk, an expert on international and humanitarian laws who taught at Princeton University and Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian who teaches in Britain and is the writer of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, are both Jewish.

Jordan Shilton, WSWS.ORG, Oct 25, 2023

Palestinian health ministry officials reported Tuesday that 704 Palestinians were killed by Israeli air strikes over the preceding 24 hours, making it the deadliest day since Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began over two weeks ago. The grim statistic coincided with statements by representatives of American and French imperialism underscoring their support for the savage slaughter of civilians in the Gaza Strip.

Conditions in the enclave are worsening by the hour. Hospitals are being forced to reduce services due to a lack of fuel, which Israeli authorities are preventing from entering Gaza via the Rafah border crossing from Egypt. Even the UN Refugee Agency (UNRWA) reported that its operations in Gaza may have to be suspended within 24 hours if fuel supplies fail to arrive.

“We are hosting 600,000 people in over 160 underground facilities, including schools, medical facilities, and other buildings like warehouses … We’re so stretched that we have to open warehouses to receive the displaced,” said UNRWA director of communications Juliette Touma. “Supplies are also running out, so we will not be able to give any supplies to [Palestinians in Gaza]. We will not be able to do very simple things like start our fleet of cars or turn on the trucks and go pick up those supplies that are coming in from the borders.”

The World Health Organization called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” Tuesday to allow for fuel shipments to reach Gaza. Six hospitals across Gaza have shut entirely due to a lack of fuel, the WHO said, and the al-Shifa Hospital, the Indonesian Hospital and the Turkish Friendship Hospital are struggling to maintain critical services. “Unless vital fuel and additional health supplies are urgently delivered into Gaza, thousands of vulnerable patients risk death or medical complications as critical services shut down due to lack of power,” the WHO warned.

The Israeli government reiterated yesterday its bitter opposition to any fuel shipments entering Gaza. Only eight trucks passed through the Rafah crossing late in the evening, five carrying water, two food, and one carrying medical supplies for 2.3 million people. Israeli military spokesman Daniel Hagari asserted without providing any evidence that “Hamas uses it [fuel] for its operational needs.”

The Israeli military continued its indiscriminate bombing campaign throughout the day. It struck several targets in the south of the Gaza Strip, where Israeli government officials ordered over a million people to flee almost two weeks ago to ostensibly be “safe” from attacks. One air strike flattened a residential building in Khan Younis with dozens of casualties. Later in the day, a Gaza health ministry spokesman said that 50 people had been killed in air strikes within an hour.

Late in the evening, the Palestinian Red Crescent reported an air strike in the vicinity of its headquarters and the al-Amal hospital in Khan Younis, where some 4,000 civilians are sheltering from Israeli bombs. Initial reports indicated extensive damage and numerous injuries.

The ability of the far-right Netanyahu government, which is deeply unpopular within Israel, to resort to such brutal methods of collective punishment is due above all to the unconditional support it enjoys from the imperialist powers, first and foremost the United States. White House spokesman John Kirby emphasized Washington’s endorsement of the onslaught on Gaza, telling a Tuesday press conference, “This is war. It is combat. It is bloody. It is ugly, and it’s going to be messy. And innocent civilians are going to be hurt going forward.”

French President Emmanuel Macron became the latest leader from one of the major imperialist powers to visit Israel, appearing alongside Netanyahu at a Tuesday press conference to declare his unflinching solidarity with the genocide against the Palestinians. Macron proposed extending the international coalition formed to fight the Islamic State terrorist group in Syria and Iraq in 2014 to include Hamas. Countries fighting ISIS “should also fight against Hamas,” he said. An Elysee Palace official later added that France is available “to beef up what we are doing in the coalition against ISIS. We are available to include Hamas in [being targeted by] the coalition against ISIS depending on what Israel will ask us to deliver.”

The comparison of the present war with the multi-national operations against ISIS is revealing, since the savage US-led war in Syria and Iraq led to the indiscriminate killing of tens of thousands of civilians. The “liberation” of cities like Mosul and Raqqa from ISIS control was achieved through their virtual destruction.

The prospect of direct US and French involvement underscores how the Israeli regime’s war on Gaza is rapidly evolving into a region-wide conflict, or more accurately the Middle East front in a global war. The Biden administration has already dispatched two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region with over 15,000 personnel, while making direct threats against Iran.

On Tuesday, Pentagon spokesman Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder confirmed that American bases in Syria and Iraq came under attack 10 times between October 17 and 24. A report from NBC News later in the day revealed that two dozen US soldiers were injured in the attacks. Taking direct aim at Tehran, Ryder remarked menacingly, “We know that the groups [that] conduct these attacks are supported by the IRGC [Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps] and the Iranian regime. What we are seeing is the prospect for more significant escalation against US forces and personnel across the region in the very near term coming from Iranian proxy forces and ultimately from Iran. We are preparing for this escalation both in terms of defending our forces and responding decisively.”

At a UN Security Council debate, US secretary of State Anthony Blinken also took aim at Iran, accusing it of supporting Hamas, Hizbollah, and the Hauthis “for years.” Referring to the attacks on US bases, he added ominously, “If Iran or its proxies attack U.S. personnel anywhere, make no mistake:  We will defend our people, we will defend our security – swiftly and decisively.”

The UN Security Council debate also underlined the strident rejection by Israel and its imperialist allies of any recognition of the oppression suffered by the Palestinians over the past three-quarters of a century. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made some remarks that in previous conflicts in the Middle East would have been more or less widely accepted. “It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” he said. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”

Israel’s UN envoy Gilad Erdan responded by demanding Guterres’ resignation, calling his remarks “shocking,” while Foreign Minister Eli Cohen cancelled a planned meeting with the UN head. Opposition leader Benny Gantz, who was brought into the war cabinet by Netanyahu, labelled Guterres a “terror apologist.”

The looming threat of a regional expansion of the war and the Israeli regime’s brutal collective punishment of the Palestinian population can only be stopped by the development of a mass anti-war movement in the international working class. Workers around the world must demand an end to military aid for Israel and the massive military spending packages demanded by Biden and his European imperialist allies. Workers in Israel must fight for an end to the oppression of the Palestinians, which is the only way to oppose the Zionist regime’s attacks on the democratic and social rights of Israeli workers. Arab and Jewish workers must be unified across the region under the banner of a socialist program to put an end to imperialist domination, ethnic and religious divisions, and war.

Israel is not only decimating Gaza with airstrikes but employing the oldest and cruelest weapon of war — starvation. Israel’s message, on the eve of a ground invasion, is clear. Leave Gaza or Die.

By Chris Hedges, Information Clearing House

Made in Israel – by Mr. Fish

Israel, with the backing of its U.S. and European allies, is preparing to launch not only a scorched earth campaign in Gaza but the worst ethnic cleansing since the wars in the former Yugoslavia. The goal is to drive tens, most probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians over the southern border at Rafah into refugee camps in Egypt. The reverberations will be catastrophic, not only for the Palestinians, but throughout the region, almost certainly triggering armed clashes to the north of Israel with Hezbollah in Lebanon and perhaps with Syria and Iran. 

The Biden administration, slavishly doing Israel’s bidding, is fueling the madness. The U.S. was the only country to veto the U.N. Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to deliver food, medicine, water and fuel to Gaza. It has blocked proposals for a ceasefire. It has proposed a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that says Israel has a right to defend itself. The resolution also demands Iran stop exporting arms to “militias and terrorist groups threatening peace and security across the region.” 

The U.S. and its Western allies are as morally bankrupt and as complicit in genocide as those who witnessed the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and did nothing.

The conflict, which has taken the lives of 1,400 Israelis and at least 4,600 Palestinians in Gaza, is widening. Israel carried out a second airstrike on two airports in Syria. It daily trades rocket barrages with Hezbollah militias. U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria have been attacked by Shia militias. The USS Carney, a guided missile destroyer, shot down three cruise missiles on Thursday, apparently launched by the Houthis in Yemen and heading towards Israel. 

Israel is also struggling to quell daily violent clashes in the occupied West Bank. It carried out an airstrike on Sunday on a mosque in the Jenin refugee camp – the first air strike in the West Bank for two decades – that killed at least 2 people. Armed Jewish settlers have been rampaging through Palestinian towns in the West Bank. At least 90 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by armed settlers or the Israeli military since the Oct. 7 incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters, according to the U.N.’s humanitarian office. Some 4,000 workers from Gaza and 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested in the past two weeks, doubling the number of Palestinian prisoners to 10,000 held by Israel, over half of whom are political prisoners

“Many of the prisoners have had their limbs, hands and legs broken … degrading and insulting expressions, insults, cursing, tying them with handcuffs to the back and tightening them at the end to the point of causing severe pain … naked, humiliating and group search of the prisoners,” the Palestinian Authority’s Commission for Detainees’ Affairs, Qadura Fares, said at a press conference.

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, told the BBC that since the Oct. 7 attack, it had documented “a concerted and organized effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank.”

Inside Israel, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Jerusalem IDs are being harassed, detained, arrested and expelled from jobs and universities in what is described as a “witch hunt.” More than 152,000 Israelis have been evacuated from towns and villages near the borders of Gaza and Lebanon.

The U.S., in an effort to thwart a military response by Iran that could trigger a regional war, is deploying an additional 2,000 troops to the Middle East. It will redeploy one of its strike groups to the Persian Gulf and send additional air defense systems to the region. The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and its strike group — which last weekend was being deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to join the USS Gerald R. Ford — has been redirected to the Persian Gulf. A Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile battery, and Patriot missile defense system battalions, have also been sent to the Persian Gulf.

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Israel has unleashed its Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Death, Famine, War and Conquest. 

It has given Gazans two choices. Leave Gaza or die.

Palestinians will be killed not only from the bombs and shells, and eventually, with the ground invasion, bullets and tank shells, but from hunger and epidemics such as cholera. Without water, fuel and medicine and with the breakdown of sanitation, diseases will spread swiftly. The U.N. states that hospitals in Gaza “are on the brink of collapse.” Thousands of patients will die once fuel runs out for hospital generators.

A doctor from al-Shifa hospital in Gaza reported in an interview Saturday, “We are collapsing.” He spoke of a lack of oxygen, light and medical supplies, no water in some departments, concerns about cholera and the loss of doctors killed by Israeli airstrikes, including a dentist killed in Israel’s bombing of an Orthodox church that left at least 18 dead, including several children.   

The handful of trucks, 37 so far, of aid into Gaza is a cynical public relations gimmick demanded by the Biden administration. It will do little to alleviate the Israeli-engineered humanitarian crisis. The U.N. says it needs at least 100 aid tracks a day. Gaza’s last functioning seawater desalination plant shut down on Sunday because of a lack of fuel. 

Israel has no intention of lifting the total siege on Gaza. It announced it will increase its airstrikes. It will continue, as it has for the past two weeks, to extinguish the lives of Palestinians and terrorize and starve them into leaving Gaza. 

The ground assault on Gaza will not be quick. It will involve weeks, perhaps months, of street fighting. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin compared the looming battle in Gaza to the U.S. assault on the Iraqi city of Mosul, held by ISIS, in 2014. It took the U.S. nine months to recapture Mosul.

When Israel says this will be a “long war” they are, for once, telling the truth.

Israel has requested more military aid from Washington, $14.3 billion including $10.6 billion for air and missile defense. It will get it. Israel is rapidly depleting its stocks as it pounds Gaza, including in the south of Gaza where hundreds of thousands of displaced families from the north have fled. 

Israel will not permit the distribution of the $100 million in U.S. aid pledged for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, at least not until their scorched earth campaign is finished. But by then, Gaza will be unrecognizable. Israel will have annexed part or all of it. Maybe the money can go to building more illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. And pledging aid is not the same as appropriating it. So perhaps that, too, is part of the illusion.

Egyptian officials are acutely aware of what comes next. Up to half, maybe more, of the 2.3 million Palestinians will be pushed by Israel into Egypt on Gaza’s southern border and never be allowed to return.

“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refuge and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted,” Egyptian president Abdulfattah al-Sisi warned.

Reports out of Egypt contend that Washington has promised to forgive much of Egypt’s massive $162.9 billion debt, as well as offer other economic incentives in exchange for Egypt’s acquiescence to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The refugees, once they cross the border into Egypt, will be left to rot in the Sinai. 

“There is a grave danger that what we are witnessing may be a repeat of the 1948 Nakba, and the 1967 Naksa, yet on a larger scale. The international community must do everything to stop this from happening again,” said Francesca Albanese, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.

Israel has long used war to justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Government officials have openly called for another Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the term for the events of 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from historic Palestine and driven into refugee camps to create the state of Israel. During the 1967 war, which led to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel ethnically cleansed another 300,000 Palestinians during the Naksa, or “day of the setback,” which is commemorated every year by Palestinians.

Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, however, is not limited to wars. There has been an ongoing slow motion ethnic cleansing as Israel has steadily built more Jewish-only colonies and incrementally seized Palestinian land. Palestinians, denied basic civil liberties in Israel’s apartheid state, have been robbed of assets, including, often, their homes. They have faced mounting restrictions on their physical movements. They have been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling of produce. They have found themselves increasingly impoverished and trapped behind walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West Bank. At the same time, they have endured periodic Israeli airstrikes, targeted assassinations and near daily attacks by armed Jewish settlers and the Israeli army.

Israel prevented Palestinians who left the West Bank and Gaza Strip from returning at the rate of about 9,000 Palestinians per year following the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1994, according to the Israel human rights group HaMoked. Israel has also revoked the residency permits for some 14,000 Palestinians who lived in East Jerusalem since 1967 according to B’Tselem. 

Israel demolished 9,880 structures, including over 2,600 inhabited residential buildings, displacing over 14,000 people and affecting 233,681 in the West Bank alone between Jan. 1, 2009 and 7 Oct. 7, 2023, according to data from the  U.N Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Since the Oct. 7 attack, a further 38 homes and other structures were demolished in the West Bank affecting an additional 13,613 people and displacing at least 73.

Less than 2.2 percent of Palestinian requests for construction permits made between 2009 and 2020 were approved, according to data from Peace Now and the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

The number of Israeli colonists in the occupied territories, however, has gone from zero before the June 1967 war, to between 600,000 to 750,000 spread out across at least 250 settlements and outposts throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, all of them in violation of international law.

Israel makes no secret about its intentions. 

Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, told troops preparing to enter Gaza, “I have released all the restraints.” 

Knesset member Ariel Kallner, part of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called on X, formerly known as Twitter, for “a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48.”

The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops. Yachin was a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948, where over 100 Palestinian civilians, many women and children, were slaughtered. 

“Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them,” Yachin said addressing Israeli troops.

“Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live.” 

“Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them,” he said. “If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.” 

Where are our humanitarian interventionists? The ones who wept crocodile tears about the human rights of Ukranians, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans and Afghans, to justify massive arms shipments and war? Where is the old anti-war wing of the Democratic Party and the liberal class? What has happened to the public intellectuals who used to decry the slaughter of innocents and the U.S. war machine? Where are the jurists who uphold the rule of international law? Why are the few lonely voices speaking out about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians attacked, censored and doxxed?

“The previous president wanted to ban us and probably put us in concentration camps,” said Michigan Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, at a rally in support of a ceasefire on Oct. 20 in Washington in front of the U.S. Capitol. “This one wants us just to die. That’s how it feels. Shame on them.”

Israel will not halt its genocidal campaign in Gaza against the Palestinians until there is a U.S. arms embargo on Israel. Our weapons systems, munitions and attack aircraft sustain the slaughter. We must terminate the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives to Israel each year. We must support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and demand suspension of all free trade and other agreements between the U.S. and Israel. Only when these props are knocked out from under Israel will the Israeli leadership be forced, as was the apartheid regime in South Africa, to integrate Palestinians into one state with equal rights. As long as these props remain, the Palestinians are doomed. 

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–Nasir Khan

The British ruling elite have been imperialists and colonialists for many centuries. They supported the idea of Zionists to impose a colonial entity over Palestine when the Ottoman Empire fell during WWI. This colonial settler state was to take possession of what Palestine was, and, in 1948, it became a reality when the Zionist terrorists kicked the British out, who were a Mandatory power over Palestine, from Palestine and established their state in Palestine. Since then, they have gradually and systematically expanded their rule and power over Palestine by marginalising and ethnically cleansing the land of its rightful owners.

About 75% of the population of Gaza are refugees and their descendants, who were forced out of Palestine by the Zionists in 1948. Now, the rulers of the United States and the United Kingdom, in particular, are fully assisting militarily and diplomatically with Israel’s war on Gaza, thus facilitating the destruction of Gaza and its 2.3 million people.

— Nasir Khan

The Palestinians in Gaza have been virtual prisoners of Israel since Israel imposed its land, sea and air siege on the enclave in 2007. This siege was and is illegal under international law and amounts to a crime against humanity on a large scale. What the militants of the besieged Gaza did was a bold move to break the criminal siege.

However, the loss of life that occurred in the operation at that time is very saddening as I oppose the killing of any human being, which Israel has been mercilessly doing since 1948. The present Israeli war on Gaza, the destruction of its infrastructure and the indiscriminate killing of thousands of people there is something only lawless Zionists may defend, but for the rest of humanity they are a flagrant violation of international law and total disregard of the basic norms of humanity.

By Ilan Pappe, The Palestine Chronicle, Nov. 19, 2023

As soon as Israel declared war on besieged Gaza on October 7, Western leaders solidified behind their favorite Middle Eastern state. Most enthusiastic support came from Britain. 

Though other Western countries showed immediate sympathy and support for Israel, Britain’s support in particular, is worth a pause. 

Israel is not simply a British ally. It is also a British creation. In the article below, written only a few days before the start of the war between Israel and Palestinian resistance, historian Ilan Pappe argues that Zionism was actually an outcome of a Christian historical process, as opposed to being a purely European Jewish phenomenon. 

The West in general, and Germany in particular, have tried to make amends for centuries of antisemitism as indeed they should. Rather than contemplate the ills of racism that continue to guide Western societies, their penance usually translates to blind support for the state of Israel and its policies.

What the West – and in particular Britain and the USA – abhor is to assume any responsibility for Western Islamophobic historical attitudes that shaped the Zionist project. Nor have the British ruling classes – including parts of Anglo-Jewish aristocracy – recognized the role their imperial and antisemitic worldview played in facilitating and expanding the Zionization of Palestine.

The intriguing application of the settler colonial paradigm in the case study of Palestine has somewhat neglected to consider the imperialist contexts in which this settler colonial project operated. Without imperialist backing, settler colonialists could not have set foot in the countries of the indigenous people which they later dispossessed. 

The responsibility for what the late Patrick Wolfe called ‘the elimination of the native’ rests solely on the settler colonial movement, but the coalition of Evangelical Christianity (on both sides of the Atlantic), the British political elite and aristocracy (and in particular the Anglo Jewish members of this community) provided the imperial justification for a project that would result in disaster for the indigenous people of Palestine.

The Zionist settler colonial project led to the Nakba of 1948. This  ethnic cleansing continues to this very day, and was originally enabled by a strong coalition in the West that provided the infrastructure for the dispossession of Palestinians.

When the decolonization and liberation of Palestine turns from a dream into a reality, it will be achieved through other means. When this dream comes to fruition, a Western recognition would be enhanced by an Evangelical Christian willingness to be accountable for the role it played in the destruction of Palestine.

It is not always recognized that Zionism was originally a Christian Evangelical project. This genealogy of Zionism is usually overlooked when historians consider why Britain decided to support the Jewish Zionist project of colonizing Palestine and creating a Jewish state there. 

This is an important historical dimension that is crucial for understanding the Zionist’s success ever since 1917. Israel’s preparation for and conquest of Palestine had no need to defend moral and political challenges, even in a time when most of the world regarded colonialism as a stark violation of international law.

There were many factors that contributed to the success of Zionism and the international support enjoyed by the newly formed Zionist state. The Holocaust, and in particular Western guilt, Islamophobia, capitalist and industrialist interests, and American support, all played their role. But these were factors that sustained and protected the project rather than facilitating its very inception. The alliance between Evangelical Christians, on both sides of the Atlantic, the British ruling classes (and in particular the Anglo Jewish leadership and aristocracy) was there to enable the inception of the Zionization of Palestine.

This alliance is still alive today, and it continues to safeguard Israel and prevent just and moral pressure from the outside to stop the genocidal policies against Palestinians.

This alliance was forged between 1850 and 1918 and pushed Imperial Britain not only to covet a British Palestine – when it had still been part of the Ottoman Empire – but also to imagine it as a Jewish Palestine as well. 

The motives of Evangelical Christians were theological and were a strange mix of anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism. There was both a theological admiration for the role Jews play in God’s plans for the future on the one hand, and hatred to Judaism as a heretic religion, on the other (with many subscribing to the notion that the Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death). In order to reconcile the two, the Jews had to atone by playing a role in a divine scheme that would lead to the return of the Christian messiah, the resurrection of the dead and the end of times.  

Another way to reconcile the animosity and admiration was the tendency of Evangelical Christianity, particularly in Britain, to forsake the depiction of Judaism as a religion and to frame it as a race, nation or as a people. This Philosemitic depiction of Judaism had two conflicting outcomes: it influenced the emergence of similar ideas among Jewish intellectuals in mid-19th century Europe on the one hand and provided the ideological racist justification for the genocide of the Jews of Europe by the Nazis in the Second World War, on the other.

In a long process that culminated in the mid 19th century, Evangelical Christians in Britain persuaded their government that Palestine was strategically important in a post-Ottoman era. To their thinking, Palestine had to be Jewish both in order to precipitate the coming of the Messiah and as a way to rid Europe of its Jewish population.

In the early 20th century, these ideas became a strategy and were contemplated in tandem with the new political movement of Zionism, established by Theodore Herzl in 1897. Both Herzl and leading Anglo-Jewish aristocrats sold the Jewish “return” to Palestine as applying only to Eastern European Jews. The Anglo Jewish elite did not themselves welcome these Jews who fled from the east and sought refuge from antisemitism in Britain.

This resentment created an alliance between the Jewish aristocracy with political leaders such as Arthur Balfour. Since 1905, Balfour lobbied ardently against Jewish immigration. He also worked closely with Anglo Jewish aristocrats such as Herbert Samual to move the British government towards a clear strategy of ceding Palestine from the Ottoman Empire, in order to create a Jewish state there. 

These two recruited David Lloyd George, an Islamophobic and Francophobic Prime Minister, who dreamed of reinstituting the crusader glory in the “Holy Land”, before the French could. He was later rewarded when a Jewish settlement was named after him, built on the confiscated land of the destroyed village of Malul in Marj Ibn Amer Valley (Ramat David).

Turning Palestine into an Anglo-Jewish state was already an official British policy in 1915 before it was publicized in 1917 in the infamous Balfour Declaration.

The Zionist dream came about after seventy years of lobbying in Britain. Lobbying efforts were passed on like a baton in a relay race. The lead on the colonization project of Palestine was taken over from the Evangelical Christians, who handed it over to the Anglo-Jewish aristocracy. This group – with the help of leading British politicians –  created an effective Zionist lobbying machine that helped to generate a pro-Zionist British policy that would eventually allow the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. 

Their success – which already matured in 1915 –  had disastrous consequences for the Palestinians. The Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948 was not just an outcome of Britain’s decision to take over Palestine, but to make Palestine a Zionist state.

Apologizing and making amends for antisemitism in the West is morally just and necessary. But at this moment in time, a Judeo-Christian reckoning of its role in the destruction of Palestine and its people is even more urgent.

– Ilan Pappé is a professor at the University of Exeter. He was formerly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa. He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, The Modern Middle East, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, and Ten Myths about Israel. Pappé is described as one of Israel’s ‘New Historians’ who, since the release of pertinent British and Israeli government documents in the early 1980s, have been rewriting the history of Israel’s creation in 1948. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

Bombardment of southern districts continues even as large numbers of Palestinians have moved there to flee a looming Israeli ground offensive.

Aljazeera, 19 Oct 2023

Israel has pounded the southern Gaza Strip with more air raids, destroying homes despite its earlier directive for Palestinians residing in the north of the besieged enclave to move there in advance of an expected ground offensive.

Medical staff at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis said on Thursday they had received at least 12 dead and 40 wounded.

Sirens wailed as emergency crews rushed to rescue survivors from one building, where many were believed trapped under the rubble of misshapen bed frames, broken furniture and concrete chunks. Nearby buildings had balconies and facades blown off.

The United Nations says about half of Palestinians in Gaza have been made homeless, still trapped inside the enclave, one of the most densely populated places on earth.

Health officials in Gaza say the Israeli bombardment has killed nearly 3,500 people since October 7, when Hamas fighters launched an unprecedented attack inside Israel that has killed some 1,400 people.