Israeli attacks intensify on Gaza, Lebanon, with no end in sight – Day 364
[email protected] October 6, 2024 Emmanuel Macron, Gaza, Lebanon, massacre, West Bank
Palestinians inspect the rubble of mosque, which was damaged in Israeli attack in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on October 6, 2024. (Anadolu Agency)
Compilation of news reports – IAK staff

The Israeli army killed 23 more Palestinians and injured 66 in attacks on the Gaza Strip, the Health Ministry in the enclave said on Saturday.

These figures do not include the death toll from the overnight bombardment across Gaza.
Israeli strikes across Lebanon Saturday killed 23 people and injured 93 others, according to the country’s health ministry.

Anadolu Agency reports:

NORTHERN GAZA: Israel carried out more than 100 airstrikes in northern Gaza overnight, killing at least 30 Palestinians and injuring dozens, marking the deadliest Israeli escalation since May.

Following the attack, the Israeli military ordered residents to evacuate their homes and relocate to the Al-Mawasi “safe” zone in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, claiming “the region remains an active combat zone.” (WATCH How safe is Gaza’s al-Mawasi ‘safe zone’?)

CENTRAL GAZA: At least 24 Palestinians, including children, were killed, and 93 others injured early Sunday morning in two separate Israeli airstrikes targeting a mosque and a school that were sheltering displaced civilians in central Gaza.

BEIRUT: Israeli warplanes carried out more than 30 overnight airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburb, marking the “heaviest night” of attacks since Israel expanded its military offensive against Lebanon on Sept. 23.

Israeli officials claimed that the strikes were based on “precise intelligence,” and targeted Hezbollah infrastructure, as well as weapons caches, which Israel alleges are stored in residential buildings.

Palestinians flee to safety with whatever belongings they can take with them after the Israeli army’s heavy air and artillery attacks in Gaza City, Gaza on October 06, 2024.
Palestinians flee to safety with whatever belongings they can take with them after the Israeli army’s heavy air and artillery attacks in Gaza City, Gaza on October 06, 2024. (Hamza Z. H. Qraiqea – Anadolu Agency)
Israeli military claims bombed mosque was Hamas command center

Al Jazeera reports:

The Israeli military has claimed, without providing evidence, that the “Shahada al-Aqsa mosque” it bombed in Deir el-Balah was being used as a “command and control complex”.

Posting on X, the Israeli military also claimed that “many steps were taken to reduce the chance of harming civilians” before bombing the mosque, which was housing displaced Palestinians.

At least 18 people have been confirmed killed so far. Footage of the aftermath of the attack, verified by Al Jazeera’s Sanad fact-checking agency, shows rescue crews scrambling to pull bodies from under the rubble.

NOTE: Israel justifies every strike with essentially the same words, “the site was a Hamas command and control center”; it makes the same claims, “many steps were taken to reduce the chance of harming civilians,” often adding that it used “precise” munitions.

The bombing sites consistently show no evidence of Hamas use, attacks are often carried out without warning to civilians to evacuate, and cause massive damage and loss of life. (More here.)

The occupation launched a bombardment on the Al-Wasifi family's house in Al-Nuseirat camp (Anadolu)
Site of an Israeli bombing of the home of the Al-Wasifi extended family, Nuseirat refugee camp, Gaza, in September (Anadolu)
Israeli army admits to targeting mosque in southern Lebanon

Anadolu Agency reports:

The Israeli army admitted on Saturday that it targeted a mosque in southern Lebanon, claiming that Hezbollah members were present and using it as an operations base.

The Israeli army claimed in a statement that its airforce carried out a “precise strike late Friday night on Hezbollah fighters operating from a command center located within the mosque near Salah Ghandoor Hospital in Bint Jbeil.”

The Israeli army claimed that Hezbollah members were using the mosque for “planning and executing attacks against Israeli forces.”

This is the same pretext that the Israeli army used to destroy mosques and churches in the Gaza Strip.

Lebanese Red Cross teams conducted search and rescue operations in the rubble of collapsed buildings following an Israeli army attack in Nabatieh province of southern Lebanon, on September 27, 2024.[Ramiz Dallah – Anadolu Agency]
Lebanese Red Cross teams conducted search and rescue operations in the rubble of collapsed buildings following an Israeli army attack in Nabatieh province of southern Lebanon, on September 27, 2024. (Ramiz Dallah – Anadolu Agency)
West Bank: Israeli Forces Kill a Former Prisoner Near Tubas

IMEMC reports:

Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian young man, on Saturday, after abducting him in the village of Wadi al-Far’a, southwest of Tubas in the northeastern part of the occupied West Bank.

Kamal Bani Oda, the director of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) in Tubas, reported that Israeli forces shot Ahmad Mustafa Ahmad Awaisa, 30, with several live rounds, before abducting him.

He added that the slain young man was a former prisoner who was released in September 2024, after spending two years in occupation prisons.

Media sources said that a large army force stormed Wadi al-Far’a village, on Saturday morning, and surrounded the home of the Awaisa family, before invading the home, shooting the former prisoner with several live rounds, and abducting him.

NOTE: The entire West Bank has been under Israeli occupation since 1967; all its official entrances and exits are controlled by Israeli soldiers, making its Palestinian inhabitants virtual prisoners. Many are families that were ethnically cleansed from Israel during Israel’s founding war (see this and this and this) and its 1967 war. Israeli forces often invade them; one example is here.

In a landmark advisory opinion on July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice declared Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land “illegal” and demanded the evacuation of all settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Two senior Hamas commanders killed in Lebanon strikes


Middle East Eye reports:

Two senior Hamas commanders were reportedly killed in Israeli strikes in northern Lebanon.

Field commander Saeed Atallah Ali was reportedly killed in a strike targeting the Beddawi camp for Palestinian refugees near the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.

Mohammed Hussein al-Lawis was killed in another strike targeting the Beqaa Valley town of Saadnayel.

Hamas confirmed both deaths.

NOTE: These men are just the latest in a string of Israeli assassinations of resistance leaders, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iranian officials. Analysts suggest Israel is leaving itself no one to negotiate a ceasefire with.

Global leaders denounce Israel’s latest escalations

Anadolu Agency reports:

Irish foreign minister expresses ‘deep’ concern over escalation in Lebanon

Spain’s king calls for end to ‘indescribable destruction’ in Gaza

UK foreign secretary condemns Israeli strikes on Lebanese health facilities

German foreign ministry deplores deadly Israeli attack on West Bank refugee camp

French president buckles under pressure from Netanyahu

Various agencies report:

Anadolu Agency: French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday called for halting arms shipments to Israel over its operations in Gaza, stressing the need to prioritize a political solution in the region.

Macron claimed that France was not sending weapons to Israel for use in Gaza, and insisted that Israel should adhere to international and humanitarian law.

AFP continues the story: Hours later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed French President Emmanuel Macron for calling for a halt to arms supplies to Israel, which is fighting wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

“As Israel fights the forces of barbarism led by Iran, all civilized countries should be standing firmly by Israel’s side.

“Yet, President Macron and other Western leaders are now calling for arms embargoes against Israel. Shame on them,” Netanyahu said in a statement issued by his office.

“Israel will win with or without their support, but their shame will continue long after the war is won”, Netanyahu added.

Then. from Middle East Eye: Macron’s office walked back his statement, emphasizing that he “supports Israel’s security and demonstrates it,” that he mobilized France’s military to aid Israel twice, and that he “personally told the Iranian president of France’s commitment to Israel’s security.”

“It is in this context that the president calls for an end to arms exports intended for use in Gaza,” the statement continued. “We must return to diplomatic solutions.”

“France is Israel’s steadfast friend,” the Elysee concluded.


MORE NEWS:

IMEMC Daily Reports.

The Guardian (Raja Shehadeh): When will this horror end? When Israel realizes that the cost of destroying us is too high

Mondoweiss: The United States and Israel set out to remake the Middle East, again


STATISTICS OCTOBER 7, 2023 – OCTOBER 5, 2024:

Palestinian death toll from October 7, 2023 – October 5, 2024: at least 42,611* ( 41,870 in Gaza* – 11,308 women (30%), 16,859 children as of September 5. [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]

This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 741 in the West Bank (~160 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children). Euro-Med Monitor reports 49,032 Palestinian deaths.

Lancet: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

Ralph Nader earlier estimated 300,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.

At least 45 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 25 from West Bank).
At least 41 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition (at least 37 of them children)**.
About 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are currently displaced.
Almost 500,000 Gazans are currently experiencing catastrophic levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7 – October 5, 2024: at least 103,366 (including at least 97,166 in Gaza and 6,200 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how many Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]

Reported Israeli death toll from October 7, 2023 – October 5, 2024: ~1,457 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 293*** military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza; 25 military and civilians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel) and~10,000 injured.

The death toll in Lebanon since October 8, 2023 is at least 2,011 (at least 127 children, 194 women) and 9,535 injuries (690 of them children). An estimated 1.2 million have been displaced.

The death toll from Israeli strikes on Lebanon has reached 2,011, with 9,535 wounded since Oct. 8, 2023, according to local authorities on Friday.

NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries of Israelis on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.

*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.

**Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.

***The figure does not include the reportedly 56 Israeli soldiers – nearly 16% of the total Israeli military deaths – killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents.

† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.

Hover over each bar for exact numbers.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org

Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
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https://israelpalestinenews.org/israeli-attacks-intensify-gaza-lebanon-no-end-in-sight-day-364/

Yes, American-made bombs killed Hezbollah leader Nasrallah (and thousands more) – Day 358
[email protected] September 30, 2024 ecocide, farming in gaza, Gaza, genocide, Jared Kushner, Lebanon, pope francis, us weapons to israel
Palestinians living in makeshift tents in the Hamad area of Khan Younis, Gaza migrate with their belongings following Israel’s evacuation warning on August 16, 2024 [Doaa Albaz – Anadolu Agency] (photo)
Compilation of news reports – IAK staff

Israel killed at least 28 people in the Gaza Strip Sunday.

At least four Palestinians were killed and several others injured in an Israeli airstrike on the Umm al-Fahm School in the town of Beit Lahia, which serves to shelter displaced civilians in the northern Gaza Strip.
The Lebanese health ministry has reported that Israeli air strikes on Sunday killed at least 109 individuals and left 364 others wounded across the country.

An entire family of 17 members was wiped out by an Israeli airstrike on Sunday in the town of Zboud, in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, Lebanese media said.
In Yemen, at least four people were killed and 49 others injured in Israeli airstrikes on the western city of Al Hudaydah on Sunday, the Houthi group said.

Around 17,000 children killed in Israeli war on Gaza, Palestinian authorities say

Anadolu Agency reports:

Around 17,000 Palestinian children have been killed in Israel’s ongoing war on the Gaza Strip since last October, according to local authorities on Sunday.

“Around 25,973 Palestinian children now live in Gaza without one or both parents due to the Israeli aggression,” Ismail al-Thawabta, who heads Gaza’s government media office, told Anadolu.

He said at least 16,859 children, including 171 infants, have been killed in Israeli attacks since Oct. 7, 2023.

The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has repeatedly warned that “Gaza’s children have endured unimaginable horrors” under relentless Israeli attacks.

A child holds a doll among the rubble of a heavily damaged house as nine people, including three children, were killed in an attack by the Israeli army on the house of Akram al-Najjar, a lecturer at University of Jerusalem in the Jabalia Refugee Camp in Jabalia, Gaza, on September 11, 2024. Mahmoud ssa / Anadolu via Getty Images
A child holds a doll among the rubble of a heavily damaged house as nine people, including three children, were killed in an attack by the Israeli army on the house of Akram al-Najjar, a lecturer at University of Jerusalem in the Jabalia Refugee Camp in Jabalia, Gaza, on September 11, 2024.
Mahmoud ssa / Anadolu via Getty Images (photo)
Gaza: Israel’s destruction of agricultural land is expression of its insistence on committing genocide

Euro Med Monitor reports:

Israel has once again destroyed hundreds of dunams of agricultural land, depriving Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip of agricultural land and resources vital to survival, all in support of its illegal blockade of the Strip and tight restrictions on the entry of food supplies for almost a full year. This is an expression of Israel’s insistence on committing genocide against Palestinians in the enclave.

Israel has forced over 75% of agricultural land in the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian people’s hands, either by isolating it in preparation for illegally annexing it to its military “buffer zone” or by bulldozing or otherwise damaging it, thereby destroying the Strip’s supply of fruits, vegetables, and meat.

This destruction is part of a larger Israeli plan that dates back to last October. Under this plan, Israeli forces have worked to eliminate almost 80% of the agricultural land in the Gaza Strip from use by Palestinians. Israel has done this either by isolating it in preparation for its forcible annexation to the so-called “buffer zone” or by bulldozing or destroying it by other means, such as bombardment—all of which are in violation of international law.

According to the Euro-Med Monitor field team, Israeli forces stormed the area of Al-Shimaa in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza, early on Tuesday morning (25 September 2024). Accompanied by military bulldozers, the forces began their bulldozing operations, destroying more than 500 dunums of newly replanted agricultural land, which was supposed to sustain the needs of the people living in northern Gaza, who are subject to an arbitrary siege and systematic starvation by Israel.

The Israeli destruction of these agricultural lands, the majority of which were filled with eggplants, reflects Israel’s insistence on preventing the Palestinian people from depending on the region’s agricultural food basket during a period when sufficient supplies of vegetables and other foods are being kept out of the northern Gaza Strip. This has led to a severe famine, to the point where a significant portion of the people in the north have been forced to eat tree leaves and bake ground-up animal feed instead of flour.

(Read the full report here.)



Palestinian security in Gaza says spying devices found in displacement camps

Middle East Monitor reports:

The Palestinian security services in Gaza have in recent days seized Israeli spying equipment planted in a shelter for displaced families in the southern Gaza Strip, a Palestinian resistance media platform reported on its Telegram channel yesterday.

The platform quoted a security officer as saying that “the [Israeli] occupation intelligence had disguised the seized spying devices with different shapes, so they appear as part of the surrounding and natural environment including in the form of a rock.”

The officer suggested the Israeli intelligence planted the spying devices via Quadcopter drones, calling on everyone “not to tamper with any suspicious devices and to contact the security officers immediately.”

Tent camp near Al-Aqsa Hospital that was hit by a deadly Israeli air attack [Abdallah FS Alattar/Anadolu]
Tent camp near Al-Aqsa Hospital that was hit by a recent deadly Israeli air attack [Abdallah FS Alattar/Anadolu] (photo)
From Gaza to Lebanon: Israel’s Bombing Campaign Backed by Media Propaganda

MintPress News reports:

Western corporate media outlets, including the BBC, CNN, and The New York Times, have been working overtime to justify Israel’s recent assault on Lebanon, which claimed the lives of approximately 600 people in a single day. These reports have repeatedly claimed that the Israeli strikes were targeting “Hezbollah positions,” an assertion that has been widely echoed without substantial scrutiny.

Israel’s large-scale onslaught against civilian areas throughout Lebanon, which began on Monday, was covered by Western corporate media as “strikes on Hezbollah.”

CNN’s story on the first day of the assault, after around 500 people had been killed across Lebanon, was titled, “Israeli Strikes Targeting Hezbollah Kill Hundreds Across Lebanon.” The New York Times set up a live events feed labeled “Israel Strikes Hezbollah Targets in Lebanon.” Even Reuters and the Associated Press, two of the most reputable Western news providers, framed the events as an escalation from “both sides,” covering Israel’s attack on Hezbollah.


A Reuters article published Tuesday opens with a telling lede: “An Israeli airstrike on Beirut killed a senior Hezbollah commander on Tuesday as cross-border rocket attacks by both sides increased fears of a full-fledged war in the Middle East, and Lebanon said only Washington could help end the fighting.”

Israel has made no secret of the fact that it is targeting civilians, as demonstrated by its release of a CGI video showing mockups of Lebanese villages, where missiles are allegedly stored in homes. Despite this, much of the Western media has yet to acknowledge these admissions.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dispelled any remaining doubt when he delivered a message in English to the people of Lebanon in which he claimed, “Hezbollah has been using you as human shields.” He further stated, “They’ve placed rockets in your living rooms” and “missiles in your garage.”

(Read the full analysis here.)


Garbage situation in Gaza is catastrophic

Various agencies report:

UNRWA, the United Nations group serving Palestinian refugees, says: Mountains of garbage are piling up in Gaza middle areas as sewage leaks onto streets. Families have no choice but to live beside the accumulated waste, exposed to the reek and the threat of a looming health disaster. Sanitary and living conditions across Gaza are inhumane.

According to ReliefWeb, the waste management system in Gaza, already limited before the war, has now completely collapsed as collection vehicles have been destroyed and access to official landfills is refused by the Israeli military.

Waste attracts rodents and insects resulting in the spread of infectious diseases such as cholera or skin diseases, while waste burning, a disposal method that locals use to manage the current emergency, worsens air pollution which in turn can result in further respiratory problems. People, many of whom are children, scavenging waste for food and sustenance, face additional risks from hazardous materials, which include medical waste and industrial chemicals.

There are also growing indications that conflict pollution is risked with the spread of antimicrobial resistance, a development that can deepen the medical health crisis.

Large waste dumps are also a threat to the soil and groundwater, as leachate, a toxic mix that spills from the waste, seeps into the land and affects groundwater, while in the long-term, increased methane release from landfills contributes to an increase of greenhouse gas emissions.

Mountains of garbage in Gaza
Mountains of garbage in Gaza (photo)
Mountains of garbage in Gaza
Mountains of garbage in Gaza (photo)
Lebanon says around 1 million people displaced due to Israeli attacks

Anadolu Agency reports:

Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said Sunday that around one million people have been displaced due to Israeli attacks, marking the largest wave of displacement in the country’s history.

“Lebanon is experiencing the largest wave of displacement in its history,” he told a press conference following a meeting of the government’s emergency committee in Beirut.

“Our priority is to stop the ongoing Israeli aggression through continued diplomatic efforts. We have no other choice,” he noted.

Mikati also reaffirmed Lebanon’s commitment to United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which calls for a cessation of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.

Thousands of Lebanese and Syrian people fled to Syria, many through the al-Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria, 45 km from the Syrian capital Damascus
Tens of thousands of Lebanese and Syrian people fled to Syria, many through the al-Masnaa border crossing between Lebanon and Syria, 45 km from the Syrian capital Damascus (photo)
Israel’s state comptroller accuses army of obstructing investigations into Oct. 7 failures

Anadolu Agency reports:

Israeli State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman accused the military on Sunday of hindering investigations into the failures that led to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.

“No external body has shown objectivity in examining the failures,” Englman said during a conference by Israeli media outlets The Jerusalem Post, Maariv and Walla.

He said his office is conducting a series of investigations related to the failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack.

“We are nearing completion of this report, but to finalize it, we need to meet with three individuals in the military,” Englman added.

He emphasized that Army Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi believes that the State Comptroller’s office should not intervene in military issues, declaring him “wrong.”

The State Comptroller’s office is Israel’s central institution for overseeing various state agencies to ensure public financial accountability.

View of the damage after Israeli forces targeted the Ibn al-Haytham School east of Gaza City. [Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu]
View of the damage after Israeli forces targeted the Ibn al-Haytham School east of Gaza City, mid September. [Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu] (photo)
US senator confirms Israel used US one ton bombs in Nasrallah strike

Reuters reports:

The bomb that Israel used to kill Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut last week was an American-made guided weapon, a U.S. senator said on Sunday.

Mark Kelly, chair of the Senate Armed Services Airland Subcommittee, said Israel used a 2,000-lb (900-kg) Mark 84 series bomb, during an interview with NBC. His statement marks the first U.S. indication of what weapon had been used.

“We see more use of guided munitions, JDAMs, and we continue to provide those weapons,” Kelly said, using an abbreviation that stands for Joint Direct Attack Munitions. “That 2,000-pound bomb that was used, that’s a Mark 84 series bomb, to take out Nasrallah,” he said.

The Israeli military said on Saturday it had eliminated Nasrallah in a strike on the group’s central command headquarters in Beirut’s southern suburbs.

The Israeli military has declined to comment on what weapons were used in the attack. The Pentagon was not immediately available for comment.

JDAMs convert a standard unguided bomb using fins and a GPS guidance system into a guided weapon.

AL JAZEERA ADDS: Israel media says about 85 so-called “bunker-buster” bombs were used in the attack on Hasan Nasrallah.

Also known as “ground penetration munition”, these missiles burrow deep into the ground before they detonate.

They have the power to destroy underground facilities and reinforced concrete buildings.

The crater left by the IDF's strike on Nasrallah's underground bunker in Dahieh, Beirut | Photo: Arab media
The crater left by the IDF’s strike on Nasrallah’s underground bunker in Dahieh, Beirut | Photo: Arab media (photo)
Washington’s failure to condemn Israel’s pager terrorism “can only be called racist”

Ralph Nader writes in Common Dreams:

Furtively booby-trapping a consumer product like a pager or two-way radio opens a new phase of warfare. This savagery prompted Leon Panetta, former director of the CIA and former secretary of defense, in an interview on the CBS “Sunday Morning” news show to charge Israel with “terrorism.” No prominent national security figure has ever assailed Israel this way. Herewith his words:

The ability to be able to place an explosive in technology that is very prevalent these days. And turn it into a war of terror. Really, a war of terror. This is something new.

I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism…This is going right into the supply chain, right into the supply chain. And when you have terror going into the supply chain, it makes people ask the question, what the hell is next?

Panetta would never have uttered these words without the concurrence of the CIA and the Department of Defense. Still no consequences for Netanyahu by the U.S. government.

Netanyahu has made the push button a trigger for mayhem and murder—acts of large-scale terrorism. He and his predecessors have always characterized offensive acts violating the laws of war as “acceptable” defensive tactics.

The supine Congress and White House regularly rubber-stamp their violations of several U.S. laws on behalf of the Israeli government. (See the letter sent to John Kirby on September 12, 2024).

Consider the aftermath. No denunciation by U.S. President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Alarmingly, there were no editorials in the following week criticizing Netanyahu in The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Imagine if Hezbollah did this to Israeli society. The devaluation of Palestinian and Lebanese lives can only be called racist.

U.S. blowback analysts are apprehensive about the spread of Israeli-style “red button” explosives and the ingenious, and ever-cheaper armed drones. They see such technologies as potential threats within the U.S.

Such is the peril of nations whose leaders wage constant profitable, preventable wars and decline to wage muscular peace with comparable determination.

Ambulances are being dispatched to the area in Beirut, Lebanon while security forces take precautions after at least eight people, including a child, were killed in a mass explosion of wireless communication devices known as pagers on September 17, 2024 [Houssam Shbaro – Anadolu Agency]
Ambulances are being dispatched to the area in Beirut, Lebanon while security forces take precautions after at least eight people, including a child, were killed in a mass explosion of pagers on September 17, 2024 [Houssam Shbaro – Anadolu Agency] (photo)
Pope says Israel’s bombings in Lebanon, Gaza ‘immoral’

Anadolu Agency reports:

On Sunday, the pope was asked about Israel’s targeted killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Friday’s strike on Beirut, which led to many casualties and reduced several buildings to rubble.

“Every day I call the parish of Gaza. More than 600 people are there, inside the parish and the college, and they tell me about the things that are happening, including the cruelties that are occurring there,” he told journalists.

“[D]efense must always be proportionate to the attack,” he added.

“When there is something disproportionate, a domineering tendency that goes beyond morality is evident,” the pope said.

“A country that, with its forces, does these things—I’m talking about any country—that does these things in such a “superlative” way, these are immoral actions,” he added.

“Even in war, there is morality to be safe-guarded. War is immoral, but the rules of war indicate some morality. But when this is not respected, you can see—as we say in Argentina—the “bad blood” of these things.”

Jared Kushner says Israel must ‘finish the job’ in Lebanon

Al Jazeera reports:

Jared Kushner, who served as a senior adviser during former US President Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House, has said calling for a ceasefire in Lebanon is “wrong”.

In a post on X, Kushner said Israel “cannot afford now to not finish the job” and dismantle Hezbollah completely.“They will never get another chance. After the brilliant, rapid-fire tactical successes of the pagers, radios, and targeting of leadership, Hezbollah’s massive weapon cache is unguarded and unmanned,” said Kushner, who is also the Republican candidate’s son-in-law.
He added that the “right move” for the US is to allow Israel to “finish the job. It’s long overdue”.

In March, Kushner sparked controversy when he publicly praised the “very valuable potential” of “waterfront property” in Gaza, in comments that gave a window into what Trump’s policy on Palestine could be during his second term.

During Trump’s presidency, Kushner played a major role in negotiating the “Abraham Accords”: normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. Palestinians slammed the agreements as “a stab in the back of the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people”.

At one point, Trump’s son-in-law described Gaza as having no historical context – “It was the result of a war – you had tribes that went different places and then Gaza became a thing.”

Before leading in the creation of Trump’s so-called Deal of the Century, Kushner claimed his expertise on the subject came from reading 25 books about Palestine.

Russian foreign minister urges Israel to abandon ‘essentially terrorist methods of settling political scores’

Anadolu Agency reports:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov urged Israel on Saturday to abandon “essentially terrorist methods of settling political scores” as he commented on the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Lavrov said at a news conference in New York that he had the impression that Israel is trying to provoke Iran and the Lebanese resistance group, Hezbollah, to push the US into direct involvement in the conflict in the Middle East.

The Russian diplomat noted that Nasrallah’s murder was not the first provocative step by Israel. Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was killed in July in the Iranian capital of Tehran where he went to take part in the funeral of President Ebrahim Raisi. Before that, Israel attacked the Iranian diplomatic mission in the Syrian capital of Damascus.

“Apparently, Israel wants to create a reason for the US to get involved in this war. And in order to create this reason, it has been provoking both Iran and Hezbollah. In this situation, Iranian leadership is behaving extremely responsibly,” he said. “I don’t think this is the right course, I am convinced that the bloodshed must be stopped.”

Asked about Israel’s willingness to implement UN Security Council resolutions, Lavrov said: “I do not see Israel’s desire to carry out any peace plans.”

Lebanese Red Cross teams conducted search and rescue operations in the rubble of collapsed buildings following an Israeli army attack in Nabatieh province of southern Lebanon, on September 27, 2024. [Ramiz Dallah – Anadolu Agency]
Lebanese Red Cross teams conducted search and rescue operations in the rubble of collapsed buildings following an Israeli army attack in Nabatieh province of southern Lebanon, on September 27, 2024. [Ramiz Dallah – Anadolu Agency] (photo)
IMEMC Daily Reports.

Foreign Affairs: America Needs a New Strategy to Avert Even Greater Catastrophe in the Middle East

Palestine Chronicle: ‘Only the People Save the People’ – Spain Goes on General Strike against Genocide in Gaza

Anadolu Agency: Germany to deny citizenship to those using pro-Palestinian slogan on social media

Anadolu Agency: Thousands rally across Australia calling for cease-fire in Gaza, Lebanon



STATISTICS OCTOBER 7 – SEPTEMBER 29:

Palestinian death toll from October 7, 2023 – September 29, 2024: at least 42,334* (41,615 in Gaza* – 11,308 women (30%), 16,859 children as of September 5. [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]

This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 719 in the West Bank (~148 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children). Euro-Med Monitor reports 49,032 Palestinian deaths.

Lancet: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

Ralph Nader earlier estimated 300,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.

At least 45 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 25 from West Bank).
At least 41 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition (at least 37 of them children)**.
About 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are currently displaced.
Almost 500,000 Gazans are currently experiencing catastrophic levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7 – September 29: at least 102,059 (including at least 96,359 in Gaza and 5,700 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how many Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]

Reported Israeli death toll from October 7, 2023 – September 29, 2024: ~1,457 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 293*** military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza; 25 military and civilians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel) and~10,000 injured.

The death toll in Lebanon since October 8, 2023 is 1,640 (104 children, 194 women) and 8,408 injuries. More recently, since September 16, 1,030 have been killed, 6,352 have been injured., with 6,352 injuries, the Lebanese Health Ministry said on Saturday, September 28.

NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries of Israelis on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.

*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.

**Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.

***The figure does not include the reportedly 53 Israeli soldiers – nearly 16% of the total Israeli military deaths – killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents.

† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.

Hover over each bar for exact numbers.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org

Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
You can’t arm a genocidal state into moderation. So why does the West keep trying?
How Does Israel Justify Mass Killings? It Starts in the Schools.
From the Americas to Gaza: Spreading disease has long been used by colonizers to commit genocide
Contrived charges of antisemitism are the new ‘Red Scare’
How Israel’s quadcopters traumatize, maim and kill Palestinians in Gaza
Israeli society’s dehumanization of Palestinians is now absolute
The unpublished genocide diaries of Refaat Alareer
An arms embargo on Israel is not a radical idea — it’s the law
Israel is redrawing the West Bank, cutting into a prospective Palestinian state
Gaza breakdown: 20 times Israel used US arms in likely war crimes
U.S. universities spent the summer strategizing to suppress student activism. Here is their plan.
‘Words like Slaughter:’ A comparative study of The New York Times reporting in Ukraine and Gaza
Cracks in the Dome: Israel’s security mirage
Israel Suddenly Has A Problem With Attacks On Population Centers
Americans are always the last to know…about Israel’s crimes
Does Any Other Country besides Israel have the Right to Defend Itself?
‘Raped by female soldiers’: Palestinian in leaked Sde Teiman photo speaks out
Alison Weir trending on social media – what the buzz is about
Israeli media’s coverage of the rape of Palestinian detainees shows support for sexual violence in service of genocide
Inside Israel’s torture, rape, and dehumanization centers
I’m a pediatrician. The scars I saw on Gaza’s children will take generations to heal.
What Harris’s Jewish outreach director said at a private DNC afterparty
‘Strong record of supporting the U.S.-Israel relationship’: a look at Tim Walz’s votes on Palestine as a member of Congress
Nearly Two-Thirds of All Campaign Funds for Cori Bush Challenger Came From AIPAC
Israeli army probe covered up “friendly fire” killings on October 7
Are US officials’ investments of public funds in Israeli bonds ethical? How much is too much?
Honoring the memory of a Gazan Olympic hero: Majed Abu Maraheel


https://israelpalestinenews.org/yes-american-made-bombs-killed-hezbollah-leader-nasrallah-and-thousands-more-day-358/

Why Israel Can’t Win in Lebanon
If the IDF has been unable to defeat Hamas—a group that has operated, trained, and fought within the confines of an open-air prison with limited supply lines—after a year of conflict, the idea of taking on a far larger, better-equipped, and more sophisticated military force is simply unrealistic.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor
September 29, 2024

VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

$ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

At this stage of Israel’s war in the north, a ground invasion will not occur. The reason is straightforward: Israel simply cannot launch one. A combination of manpower and equipment shortages, a depletion of aerial munitions after 11 months of relentless bombings in Gaza, and the absence of clear, attainable strategic goals ensures that the Israeli military will continue its standard approach. This involves extensive aerial bombardments of densely populated civilian areas, accompanied by a push for victory through information operations.

Despite Israel’s information operations, resistance groups in Gaza, though significantly degraded, continue to conduct combat operations and are expected to do so for the foreseeable future. If the IDF has been unable to defeat Hamas—a group that has operated, trained, and fought within the confines of an open-air prison with limited supply lines—after a year of conflict, the idea of taking on a far larger, better-equipped, and more sophisticated military force is simply unrealistic.

Therefore, Israel is likely to continue its long-standing strategy of conducting mass bombings and unconventional attacks, aimed at deterring Hezbollah from invading—an event that remains highly improbable—and coercing the group into submission by using the lives of Lebanese civilians as leverage.

In the past 24 hours, the Israeli Air Force has launched a series of aggressive and indiscriminate kinetic strikes on towns and villages in southern Lebanon. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s earlier declaration of “turning Beirut into Gaza” now appears to be coming to fruition.

The production of AI and CGI videos alleging that secret Hezbollah weapons caches are stored in every house in southern Lebanon is eerily reminiscent of the lead-up to the first bombing of Al-Shifa hospital last November. At that time, CGI videos were used to depict an intricate “Hamas tunnel system” beneath the hospital, which served as the justification for its destruction and the subsequent targeting of other hospitals in Gaza. However, the supposed sophisticated command center in the heart of Al-Shifa never materialized—only CDs of MRI scans were found.

These videos provided a pretext for escalating aerial violence against civilians and civilian infrastructure, leading to the collective punishment of the entire population in an attempt to pressure Hamas in Gaza. This blatant disregard for the Law of Land Warfare and International Humanitarian Law is likely to be repeated in southern Lebanon, targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure once again.



Furthermore, based on this unsubstantiated military propaganda, the IDF has ordered mass evacuations of Lebanese civilians from the Beqaa Valley, mirroring the catastrophe seen in Gaza.



After the heavy blows dealt to Hezbollah by Israeli intelligence services last week—beginning with the pager attacks and culminating in targeted strikes on senior commanders of the elite Radwan Unit—the group, though temporarily disrupted in its command and control, remains resolute. Hezbollah cannot, and will not, cease its operations against an increasingly aggressive Israeli military.



While the current situation is undeniably bleak, join us tonight on State of Play as we examine how Israel’s efforts to deter Hezbollah are destined to fail. We will explore how its overarching strategy, like much of its policy, is ultimately self-destructive.

Greg Stoker is a former US Army Ranger with a background in human intelligence collection and analysis. After serving four combat deployments in Afghanistan, he studied anthropology and International Relations at Columbia University. He is currently a military and geopolitical analyst and a social media “influencer,” though he hates the term.

MintPress News is a fiercely independent media company. You can support us by becoming a member on Patreon, bookmarking and whitelisting us, and subscribing to our social media channels, including Twitch, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.


ATTENTION READERS

We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed
In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.

About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT.

https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/09/why-israel-cant-win-in-lebanon/

Scott Ritter Warns: Israel Could Face Total Collapse if This War Continues!
Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor
September 29, 2024
VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

$ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.

“Karma has come for Israel, and their economy is falling . 60,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy, 2.5 million people have left Israel. People are boycotting Israel and treating them like outcasts.”



“Israel lost heavily in Gaza. NATO, America and Israel defence force lost in Gaza. Just imagine the entire western world lost to Gaza which is no more than a village in Palestine.”



Christian Zionism and Dispensationalism have aligned ideologically with the Synagogue of Satan—the very system that persecuted the early church, from the Book of Acts to the Book of Revelation and even throughout the early centuries.



Satanism entails a deliberate assault on the incarnate Logos. In essence, to be a Satanist is to be anti-Christ. Christian Zionism and dispensational theology have spent more than half a century searching for a particular figure, yet they often overlook the very book they claim to hold dear.




ATTENTION READERS

We See The World From All Sides and Want YOU To Be Fully Informed
In fact, intentional disinformation is a disgraceful scourge in media today. So to assuage any possible errant incorrect information posted herein, we strongly encourage you to seek corroboration from other non-VT sources before forming an educated opinion.

About VT - Policies & Disclosures - Comment Policy
Due to the nature of uncensored content posted by VT's fully independent international writers, VT cannot guarantee absolute validity. All content is owned by the author exclusively. Expressed opinions are NOT necessarily the views of VT, other authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, or technicians. Some content may be satirical in nature. All images are the full responsibility of the article author and NOT VT.

https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/09/scott-ritter-warns-israel-could-face-total-collapse-if-this-war-continues/

VIDEO: The “Lock Step” Simulation Scenario: “A Coronavirus-like Pandemic that Becomes Trigger for Police State Controls”

First published on February 5, 2020 at very outset of the Covid-19 Crisis, in-depth analysis of the Simulation of a pandemic conducted in 2010 under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation.

By now, those following the novel coronavirus epidemic are familiar with Event 201, the pandemic simulation staged by Johns Hopkins University in conjunction with the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Johnson & Johnson, and other ruling-class heavy hitters in October. The media establishment has already picked the story clean, set up and eviscerated a straw man (“No, Bill Gates didn’t cause the coronavirus epidemic, silly conspiracy theorists!”), and convinced the group itself to issue a statement denying their exercise was meant to predict the behavior of the actual virus to follow.

But few are aware that the epidemic playing out in China and two dozen other countries, including the US, is unfolding in line with a decade-old simulation titled “Lock Step” devised by the Rockefeller Foundation in conjunction with the Global Business Network. The scenario, one of four included in a publication called “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development” in 2010, describes a coronavirus-like pandemic that becomes the trigger for the imposition of police-state controls on movement, economy, and other areas of society.

The Lock Step scenario describes “a world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback.” In “2012” (i.e. two years after the report’s publication), an “extremely virulent and deadly” strain of influenza originating with wild geese brings the world to its knees, infecting 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million people in just seven months – “the majority of them healthy young adults.” It devastates global economies and ruptures international trade. But not everyone, the Rockefeller Foundation makes clear, is hit equally.

Countries of Africa, southeast Asia, and central America suffer the worst “in the absence of official containment protocols” – it wouldn’t be the Rockefeller Foundation if someone wasn’t licking their lips at the thought of a mass die-off in the Global South – but western “democracies” also pay the ultimate price. “The United States’ initial policy of ‘strongly discouraging’ citizens from flying proved deadly in its leniency, accelerating the spread of the virus not just within the US but across borders,” the report warns. But remove such obstacles as ‘individual rights’ and you have a recipe for surviving, even thriving in the event of a pandemic, the Foundation gushes:

“A few countries did fare better – China in particular. The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing-off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter post-pandemic recovery.”

The message is clear – police state good, freedom bad. And other governments rapidly get the message, according to the simulation. First and third world nations alike follow suit by “flexing their authority” and imposing quarantines, body-temperature checks, and other “airtight rules and restrictions” – most of which, the report is careful to note, remain in place even as the pandemic recedes into the past. “In order to protect themselves from the spread of increasingly global problems – from pandemics and transnational terrorism to environmental crises and rising poverty – leaders around the world took a firmer grip on power.”

This global power-grab is facilitated by a frightened citizenry who “willingly gave up some of their sovereignty – and their privacy – to more paternalistic states in exchange for greater safety and stability…tolerant, and even eager, for top-down direction and oversight.” Everything from tighter biometric identification to stricter industrial regulation is welcomed with open arms. It takes over a decade for people to “grow weary” of the authoritarian controls imposed in the wake of the pandemic, and hints that even the civil unrest that ultimately manifests is focused on the developed world. After all, a popular uprising in the technocratic police state envisioned by the simulation would be all but impossible – as it will be in real life once 5G makes real-time total surveillance of all cities a reality.



Pin the blame on the dragon

It remains unclear what – or who – unleashed the novel coronavirus in Wuhan. The initial claim that it originated in bats from a “wet market,” in which live animals are sold and then butchered in front of the customer, couldn’t have been more perfect from a western point of view – wet markets are reviled in the West, where consumers prefer that the animal cruelty required to put meat on their tables happens behind closed doors. While wet markets would seem to improve food safety by making it impossible to sell “mystery,” mislabeled or expired meat, time and again they are fingered as disease vectors by the disapproving West, every time followed by calls to ban them entirely. However, the Huanan seafood market hadn’t sold bats for years, meaning – if the “wet market” hypothesis is to persist – an “intermediate host” species would be required to get the virus to humans. Snakes were nominated, even though scientists weren’t sure they could be infected by a coronavirus – it was more important that they eat bats and were sold at the market. Three weeks after the Huanan seafood market was shuttered and disinfected, a Lancet study put the last nail in the hypothesis’ coffin, revealing the first several coronavirus cases had no exposure to the market at all. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has not discouraged the media from continuing to blame it for the epidemic.

Beyond the disintegrating “official story,” rumormongers have pinned the blame on the Chinese government, suggesting that through malice or incompetence Beijing released a virus cooked up in a top-secret bioweapons program operating in the city’s high-security lab. The chief purveyor of this theory is Dany Shoham, an Israeli biosafety analyst, which should raise a forest of red flags in anyone familiar with Israel’s own experiments in gene-targeted biowarfare even before taking into account Shoham’s own history of fraudulently blaming Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for the 2001 anthrax attacks. Other outlets spreading this theory cite American biosafety consultant Tim Trevan, who opined in a 2017 Nature article – published before the Wuhan lab even opened! – that “diversity of viewpoint” and “openness of information” are both critical to the safe functioning of such a high-risk lab and alien to Chinese culture. The persistence of the “lab accident” theory of coronavirus’ creation thus owes more to cultural chauvinism and sinophobia than any fact-based clues.

While many alt-media outlets have fingered Event 201 as the replica “drill” that so often coincides with a false flag event, few are aware that on the day after that simulation, the 2019 Military World Games kicked off in Wuhan, bringing 300 US military personnel to the city.

As of February 4, there are over 1,000 times more coronavirus cases in China than outside of it, and the foreign cases appear to be ethnically Chinese where reported. This is not a coincidence – a recent scientific paper revealed the enzyme which serves as a receptor for novel coronavirus is produced by a certain type of lung cell found in “extremely large numbers” in Asian men compared to those of other ethnicities. Even more intriguingly, those lung cells are involved in the expression of “many other genes that positively regulating [sic] viral reproduction and transmission.” The paper’s authors stop short of suggesting the virus came out of a lab, instead drily observing that it seems to have “cleverly evolved to hijack this population of [lung] cells for its reproduction and transmission,” but one man’s clever viral evolution is another’s expert bioweapon development.

Certainly, American researchers have been surreptitiously collecting Chinese DNA for decades. A notorious Harvard School of Public Health program in the mid-1990s drafted village medics to administer “free physicals” to locals “with asthmatic symptoms.” These “checkups” were conducted as part of a genetic project that also involved the US National Institutes of Health and Millennium Pharmaceuticals, supposedly aimed at “identify[ing] and characteriz[ing] genes that play a role in causing asthma and other allergic disorders.” It later emerged that the researchers had secured the required consent forms from neither the local experimental ethics board nor the test subjects themselves. A government inquiry was commandeered by an insider and squelched. Over 200,000 DNA samples were thus collected and spirited out of the country.

US military literature has been lusting after genetically-targeted weapons for at least 50 years. The infamous Project for a New American Century, whose members have been steering the US ship of state into a series of icebergs since the George W. Bush administration, described gene-specific bioweapons as a “politically-useful tool,” part and parcel of the “new dimensions of combat” in which the future’s wars would unfold. In 1998, the year after PNAC’s formation, reports Israel was working on just such a weapon to target Arabs while leaving Jews untouched flooded the media – part PR campaign, part warning. And it is DARPA and other divisions of the US military, not the Chinese, that has been intensively studying bat-borne coronaviruses for years, even as their own high-security biowarfare labs are being shut down for shoddy safety procedures.

Meanwhile, the likelihood of the Chinese government unleashing a genetically-targeted virus on its own population is vanishingly low. Unlike popular attitudes of “white guilt” in the West born of a hangover from colonialism, the Chinese do not traffic in racial self-loathing – indeed, outsiders have accused the Chinese of an unspoken, unshakeable belief in their own racial superiority, and regardless of whether that belief is problematic, it is unlikely to lead to intentional self-genocide. Even if behavior-correcting false flag was sought by Beijing in Hong Kong, where US-backed pro-“democracy” protests have raged destructively for months, such an event would not have been unleashed hundreds of miles away in Wuhan.

Never let a good crisis go to waste?

The real-life coronavirus is much less virulent than the pandemic described in Lock Step, with an official death toll of “just” 427 and a global infection toll of “only” 20,629 as of February 4, and the dead were mostly over 60 with preexisting medical issues. Economies worldwide are nevertheless in free-fall just like the simulation predicted. This drop is fueled by scare-stories percolating in establishment media and alt-media alike (the name of an actual article in ZeroHedge by a Rabobank analyst: “What if we are on the brink of an exponential increase in coronavirus cases?”) while videos of dubious origin appearing to show horrific scenes from within China keep the virus viral on social media. Adding to the fear is coronavirus’ lengthy incubation period, up to two weeks in which a carrier could be blithely spreading it to everyone they meet, creating a constant threat of a “boom” in cases just around the corner.

China’s economy, of course, is being hit the worst, and the epidemic’s timing could not have been more disastrous from Beijing’s point of view, coming on the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday. At this time, some 400 million Chinese travel around the country to see family, mostly in the high-speed bullet trains that have their hub in – you guessed it – Wuhan. With much of this travel having occurred before the city was quarantined, cases are likely in their incubation phase all over the country, making today’s numbers look like a rounding error.

Correspondingly, the situation couldn’t be better for the American ruling class: a pandemic that targets Asians striking China just when it’s most vulnerable is a powerful blow to the rising superpower. And in case anyone still believes the circumstances of the virus’ ascendance are merely an extended string of coincidences, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross took that plausible deniability and stomped on it last month, unable to stop himself from gushing that coronavirus would “help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America” in an interview with Fox News. Prefacing his victory lap by saying he didn’t “want to talk about a victory lap over a very unfortunate, very malignant disease,” he pointed out that businesses will be forced to take China’s inexplicable susceptibility to deadly viruses into account when reviewing their supply chains. Unmentioned, but adding to the perfect economic storm, was Trump’s signature on the USMCA trade agreement, supposed to bring in an extra 1.2 percentage points in GDP growth.

“On top of all the other things, you had SARS, you had the African Swine virus there, now you have this,” Ross said, hammering home the point by linking coronavirus to other suspect plagues. Just as many scientists concluded SARS was a manmade bioweapon, many – scientists and statesmen as well as alternative media – have raised the alarm about coronavirus. Good luck finding any of their statements on Google, however. Facebook, Youtube and Twitter have been hard at work removing coronavirus “rumors,” and Google has memory-holed hundreds of search results regarding Chinese accusations of biowarfare. Even on platforms that don’t censor on government orders, the baseless claims from Shoham and other disinfo artists about Chinese biowarfare have muscled any comments from Chinese officials out of the way. Even the former Malaysian PM’s comments are obscured behind a Farsi language barrier – his original comments inexplicably missing from English-language media and reprinted only by Iran’s IRIB News Agency (this author can no longer even find the tweet that alerted her to those comments, but would like to thank that person).

Coronavirus is not the doomsday epidemic it is being portrayed as by irresponsible media actors. But as the Lock Step scenario makes clear, one does not need massive die-off or victims exploding in geysers of blood in the streets to achieve desired social goals. It’s possible the novel coronavirus epidemic is a “dry run,” a test of both China’s readiness to handle an outbreak and of the international community’s reaction to such a plague. It’s even possible, though unlikely, that the epidemic was a mistake – that the virus escaped from a lab, likely American, by accident.

It’s also possible the plague may suddenly become more virulent. Certainly the media buzz the first week of February is that coronavirus is close to being declared a “pandemic” by the WHO, which will necessitate the type of control measures hinted at in Lock Step and described more exhaustively in Event 201. From “limited internet shutdowns” and “enforcement actions against fake news” to government bailouts of “core” industries, mandatory vaccinations, property seizures, and other police-state provisions laid out in the Model State Emergency Health Powers Acts passed in many US states in the paranoid aftermath of 9/11, the totalitarian nature of these provisions is limited only by the imagination of the regime carrying them out. Once events proceed to that stage, it is extremely difficult to reverse them. We would be wise not to allow this to happen.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. Her work has appeared on RT, Global Research, Ghion Journal, Progressive Radio Network, and Veterans Today. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski or follow her on Twitter at @velocirapture23. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.


VIDEO: The “Lock Step” Simulation Scenario: “A Coronavirus-like Pandemic that Becomes Trigger for Police State Controls”

First published on February 5, 2020 at very outset of the Covid-19 Crisis, in-depth analysis of the Simulation of a pandemic conducted in 2010 under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Read here: https://www.globalresearch.ca/all-sectors-us-establishment-lock-step-deep-states-latest-bio-war/5702773

Beyond Blue Beam
ByWindlander September 25, 2024
Hello readers, welcome back to another episode of Beyond Blue Beam. We continue our journey into the realms of mystery and intrigue. Is it fiction or is it reality? “Red is grey and yellow white but we decide which is right and which is an illusion” (The Moody Blues) You decide! Share your thoughts in the comments. Also please feel free to add whatever other information you have to add to the article in the comments. Meanwhile, relax and enjoy the read.

Today, we embark on another thrilling journey through time, space, and possibly even different realities. As usual, buckle up for an intriguing exploration of diverse topics.

We begin our journey with more information regarding,

ANTARTICA

For those asking to see more on that giant alien like head in Antarctica here is how you get to it! Also a few more bonus google earth finds!

Plus we have some some information on area 122 in Antarctica. Hidden From the public.

Today, we have several interesting articles and videos to share with the readers. Check them out and please give us your comments.

AMMON ATMOSPHERIC GENERATOR

This is taken from the link below.

This “free energy” technology has been making the rounds online for quite a while but there are no useful leads to learn more about the reality of it. After reading this blog post, you’ll have a few more leads because I’m posting references to links relating to the Ammann family and related but there’s still nothing that leads to validating the claims and certainly not replicating it.

Let’s start with a couple articles from the early 1900’s. I left remnants of the ads on either side in order to capture the source and date at the top. Also, it’s an interesting synchronicity that this so-called free energy running automobile article is next to an add discussing the Pierce-Arrow, which is supposed to be the car that Tesla drove around with some wireless free energy as well. Although, most of what is claimed about the Tesla Pierce-Arrow story is complete fraud and misinformation, it is interesting. Another interesting connection, at least for me, is the reference to Spokane, Washington since I live here.

There are several photos and further links in the article. For the free energy enthusiasts.

https://emediapress.com/2024/01/08/ammann-atmospheric-generator/

Plus this link for more details

A Review Of Select Atmospheric Water Generators In The Market:

https://saniwater.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/image3.png

THE OLD WORLD

The Old World would be impossible to replicate today. We are not an advanced civilization.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF EARTH

Where is the massive South American discovery covered up by the World Archaeological Council (WAC). More research is needed. Maybe the readers can help and give us your comments.

Monsanto-Templar Castle Ancient Ritual Energy Site In Portugal

Monsanto is located southeast of Serra da Estrela, the highest mountain range in mainland Portugal. The region has a rich history. People lived there in the Paleolithic Era, and archaeologists have found evidence of Roman, Visigoth, and Arabian occupations.

A Lusitanian fortress in the area was conquered and improved by the Roman Army, and it was then occupied by the Visigoths, the Alans, and others during the 8th century.

Finally, the place was conquered by the Christian Army of the first king of Portugal, Afonso Henriques, also known as Afonso the Conqueror.

The Lusitanian fortress was entrusted to Gualdim Païs, Master of the Templar Order in Portugal, who rebuilt it to protect the new kingdom’s southern border. He finished the works in 1171, that is to say, two years after building the fortress of Tomar.

Tomar was originally a 12th-century Templar stronghold, but when the order was dissolved in the 14th century, the Portuguese branch became the Knights of the Order of Christ

King Afonso Henriques conquered Monsanto from the Moors, and in 1165, the city was given military orders to maintain the reconquered city with Christian hands.

King Alfonso granted it to the Templar monks, who built the Castle under the orders of Gualdim Pais, Grand Master of the Order of Knights Templar.

King Sancho I (1190) and King Afonso III (1217) confirmed the Charter. King Sancho I of Portugal reconstructed and repopulated the fortress because it was severely damaged during the wars with the king of Leonese, an independent kingdom founded in AD 910 and situated in the northwest region of the Iberian Peninsula.

In 1308, King Dinis granted it a Charter, which allowed a fair to occur near the Chapel of São Pedro de Vir-a-Corça. King Manuel I granted it a New Charter in 1510, giving it the right to be a ‘town.’

However, Monsanto and its inhabitants could not contemplate a quiet life.

In the middle of the 17th century, Luis de Haro, Minister for Filipe IV, tried to siege Monsanto, but his attempts were unsuccessful.

Later, at the beginning of the 18th century, the Duke of Berwick also laid siege to Monsanto. Still, the Portuguese Army, commanded by the Marquis of Minas, defeated the invader on the slopes of the hill. In 1758, Monsanto was a municipality, having kept this privilege until 1853.

Unfortunately, the impressive medieval Castle of Monsanto was destroyed in the nineteenth century because of an accidental explosion in the ammunition depot of the Castle.

In 1938, Monsanto bestowed the “most Portuguese Village of Portugal.” It might seem a little odd because most villages in Portugal don’t have houses squeezed between gigantic boulders.

The ancient population carved dozens of narrow streets and passageways right through the center of the boulders. The passages lead the residents upwards and downwards over the rocks and through the village.

One can easily say that this unique village is frozen in time. Its appearance hasn’t changed in centuries.

Is the story of Easter Island a lie?

It seems there is a lot we have not been told. These may very well be other locations that have been kept hidden by the elite controllers.

Check out this video and give us your thoughts.

The Alien Agenda

It seems that the powers that be are pushing for the Project Blue Beam scenario as they prepare the people for alien interaction one way or another. They use the Entertainment Industry’s biggest “stars” to push their agenda.

Taylor Swift Changes Into a UFO-Embellished Sequin Mini Dress Mid-2024 VMAs

Taylor Swift’s second 2024 VMAs outfit was out of this world, literally.

Swift and stylist Joseph Cassell Falconer have pulled their share of party looks before, beaded by Clio Peppiatt to illustrate starry skies, but this custom VMAs mini by Monse hit different. Its intricate detailing created a still-life of a flying saucer’s countryside invasion. The UFO sequins were enhanced by an asymmetric skirt gathered at her left hip and cargo utility straps at her shoulders.

There are photos of her dress in the link below:

https://www.marieclaire.com/fashion/taylor-swift-ufo-sequin-mini-dress-2024-vmas/

The Ariel School UFO Incident: Zimbabwe’s Unexplained Encounter

On September 16, 1994, something extraordinary happened in the quiet town of Ruwa, Zimbabwe. At the Ariel School, 62 children—aged 6 to 12—claimed to witness an event that still stirs intrigue and debate to this day. During their morning break, the children saw one or more silver craft descend from the sky and land in a field near their school. What followed was even more astonishing: beings, described as creatures dressed in all black with large, almond-shaped eyes, approached the children.

The children reported that these beings did not speak, but instead communicated telepathically, delivering a message that left a lasting impression. The beings conveyed a warning about the future—telling the children that humans needed to take better care of the environment and avoid technological advancement at the cost of nature.

What’s particularly intriguing about this incident is the consistency in the children’s stories. Despite being separated and interviewed individually, their descriptions of the craft, the beings, and the telepathic message were strikingly similar. Many of them drew detailed pictures of what they had seen—images that eerily matched across the group.

The event drew attention from researchers and UFO enthusiasts alike. The late John E. Mack, a Harvard psychiatrist, traveled to Zimbabwe to interview the children. He believed their testimonies were genuine and not the result of imagination or mass hysteria. The children’s emotional responses, the fear, and the clarity of their accounts deeply moved him and others who investigated the case.

To this day, the Ariel School encounter remains one of the most compelling UFO sightings in modern history. No concrete explanation has been provided, and the event continues to spark discussions about extraterrestrial life, consciousness, and humanity’s relationship with the planet.

The question lingers: were these children witnesses to something beyond our understanding, or is there another explanation for what they experienced that day in Ruwa? Either way, the Ariel School incident remains a powerful and mysterious moment in UFO lore.

We come near to the end of our journey this week with part 5 of the Annunaki/Enki story.

The Lost Book Of Enki Part 5

The UFO Videos

These videos are not little light dots in the sky. Much clearer images. We trust you will enjoy them. The next best thing to hopping on for a ride.

1. UFO seen over the ocean in Mexico September 5, 2024

2. A mother ship seen above the clouds with a smaller craft below. México 30.08.2024

3. A partially cloaked TR3-B seen over the boarder with Mexico. September 10, 2024

4. A UFO seen somewhere along the coast in South America September 7, 2024

End of Transmission>>>>>>>>>>

https://benjaminfulford.net/beyond-blue-beam-27/

How Does Israel Justify Mass Killings? It Starts in the Schools.
Palestinian identity in Israeli schoolbooks is either infantilized, demonized, or ignored, according to Israeli scholar Nurit Peled-Elhanan.

[email protected]
September 25, 2024
Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Israeli scholar (photo)
By George Yancy, reposted from Truthout

In The Black Image in the White Mind, historian George M. Frederickson writes, “In the years immediately before and after 1800, white Americans often revealed by their words and actions that they viewed [Black people] as a permanently alien and unassimilable element of the population.” Within the context of white American domination, anti-Black racist stereotypes framed Black people as inherently unfit, innately problematic and divorced from the category of the human, a category that is synonymous with whiteness.

The French-Tunisian scholar Albert Memmi, in The Colonizer and the Colonized, understood these racist rationalizations as a series of negations, observing: “The colonized is not this, is not that. [They are] never considered in a positive light; or if [they are], the quality which is conceded is the result of a psychological or ethical failing.” Within these racist binary regimes, it is necessary that a specific group functions as “other.”

Throughout the world, there are groups that are deemed “other,” and their “otherness” is imposed by those who control dominant forms of discourse — those who have the representational power to demean, to marginalize and demonize. Historically, schools and religious institutions have helped to underwrite such dehumanizing discourse.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan is a retired lecturer in language education at Hebrew University and at the David Yellin Academic College in Jerusalem, and the author of several books. In this exclusive interview, she discusses how Israeli schoolbooks (and by extension, Israeli schools) powerfully frame anti-Palestinian discourse and inculcate Israeli children with suspicion, fear and hatred of Palestinians. Peled-Elhanan’s work provides a powerful analysis of the relationship between Israeli state pedagogical power and racist, anti-Palestinian ideology.

[NOTE: Nurit Peled-Elhanan is an Israeli philologist, professor of language and education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, translator, and activist. She is a 2001 co-laureate of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought awarded by the European Parliament. She is the author of Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education.]

George Yancy: Provide a few examples of how Palestinians are portrayed in racist ways through the medium of Israeli schoolbooks.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan: Schoolbooks always, not only in Israel, are meant to legitimate the state and its actions. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have schoolbooks, they would just be books. So, the raison d’être of schoolbooks is to legitimate the state, and especially the controversial actions of the state such as what are called the founding crimes, and so on.

In Israel, what must be legitimated is the colonization of Palestine and the ongoing occupation. Israel must justify its policies. So, like all colonizers, Israel portrays the colonized as primitive, evil or superfluous. Israel portrays them as a racialized group that cannot change and never will change.

For instance, in one geography schoolbook, there is a passage about factors that “inhibit” the development of the Arab village. So, they say that Arab villages are far from the center, the roads to them are difficult, and they have remained out of the process of change and development. They say they are hardly exposed to modern life, and there are difficulties connecting them to the electricity and water networks.

You would think we’re talking about somewhere the size of Australia. But Israel is smaller than New Jersey. So where are these remote villages that have stayed out of development? Or, they say that the Arab society is traditional and objects to changes by its nature, reluctant to adopt novelties. Modernization seems dangerous to them, and they are unwilling to give anything for the general good.

They also are portrayed as a problem and a demographic threat, as a security threat. And because they are deemed a demographic threat, this legitimates the massacres and their elimination. One schoolbook says one of the massacres, the Deir Yassin massacre that caused the panicked flight of the Palestinians, solved a frightening demographic problem. And even Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, called the flight of Palestinians a miracle.

The idea is that Israelis must outnumber Palestinians. If we outnumber them, then we shall be safe.

They compare the numbers of Arabs versus Jews all the time in the schoolbooks, in every subject, especially multiplication. Schoolbooks refer to Palestinians as Israel’s Arabs or the non-Jewish sector. You never find the label Palestinian except when attached to terror.

The Bedouin community, for example — the Bedouin tribes that have been on the land for thousands of years — are called the Bedouin diaspora, to give the impression that they don’t belong. The maps in schoolbooks completely ignore the existence of Palestine and Palestinians. Even in a map that shows the Arab population, you don’t find one Arab city, not even Nazareth.

They justify racist laws, such as the law of citizenship, which does not allow a couple — one of which is an Israeli citizen, and one of which comes from the occupied territories — to live together. They justify this kind of racist and illegal and unconstitutional law by quoting the former president of Israel’s Supreme Court, who said Palestinians’ “human rights shouldn’t be a recipe for national suicide.”

So, the whole image is that you know they are a threat, and therefore they should not be treated as people. So, the whole discrimination and elimination and confinement of Arab citizens is legitimated by this excuse — the need to be a majority, to maintain the Jewish character of the state. Once there was a policy to encourage four children for every family in the Jewish sector to outnumber Arabs. There were rewards for families. They called them “blessed families.”

Today, this policy no longer exists. When Benjamin Netanyahu became the finance minister, he stopped the allowances that big families receive. But it was a policy, one designed to outnumber them.

George Yancy: How early are these books introduced to Israeli children?

Nurit Peled-Elhanan: It is from kindergarten. Schoolbooks reflect the discourse. It’s as linguist Gunther Kress said: Texts are a punctuation of semiosis or meaning-making, that is, at a certain point of time. That’s why schoolbooks change from one government to another. So, this is the discourse, the social discourse. It is reflected in schoolbooks; schoolbooks don’t invent this kind of discourse.

George Yancy: What your work shows is that schoolbook pictures are not benign, inconsequential or just meant for sheer entertainment. What you show is that racist images have deep existential implications. The dehumanization of Palestinians through Israeli schoolbooks enables their decimation.

After all, if Israeli children are raised accepting the “unconditional truth” of what is written or portrayed through pictures in their books and pedagogical spaces, then to kill Palestinians through collective punishment doesn’t carry the same ethical weight as the loss of Israeli lives.

In Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, you write, “Palestinian non-citizens in the occupied territories are often depicted as terrorists, and this depiction reinforces the policy, presented in schoolbooks as an agreed-upon necessity, of constant control, restriction of movement and even extra-judicial assassinations.”

There is a certain deep irony here. We know that Jewish people were subjected to dehumanizing propaganda spread by Nazi Germany. Jewish people were depicted as “parasites” that had to be removed, exterminated from the purity of the “Aryan race.” Palestinians are clearly the out-group.

How do you specifically see Zionism as an ideological force that creates an in-group that must not be “sullied” by the out-group? After all, Zionism as a form of nation-building means not just the use of racist stereotypes, but also the control of geographical space. Could you discuss how you see these two forms of violence working in tandem through the very project of Zionism?

Nurit Peled-Elhanan: Israeli identity is a territorial identity. National and territorial identity are one. And so, of course, territory is a very important factor of our identity. We are of the land, and we must occupy the land. But I think the way they treated, since the beginning of Zionism … is the way all colonialists treated Indigenous populations — they are said to be primitive, and we bring progress. And they are said not to exist. They’re considered part of the landscape. I think all colonialist powers treated the local population in the same way.

So, Zionism was a European national movement. Like all European national movements, Zionism defined who is human and who is “other.” And the other is the Eastern one, the “Oriental” one. All they wanted was to get rid of the East, because Jews were called Easterners in Europe, as if they were an “Oriental” race, and they wanted to get rid of it. They wanted to Westernize themselves.

And this is one of the things that is emphasized greatly in the schoolbooks: We are the West. The history of Jews in the East or in Muslim countries is not even mentioned, although they had very harmonious and enriching lives in Muslim countries for thousands of years. But it’s not even mentioned.

So, they wanted to Westernize themselves and to erase the history of the country to reproduce the myth of continuity, as if the Jews who come from Europe are coming home to their land. So, the history and the culture, and everything that existed before on the land of Palestine or Arab Israel was erased.

They did it in archaeology, too. You hardly have any archaeological findings from Palestine or from Ottoman time. The Ottomans ruled here 600 years, but you hardly have anything. If you go to a park in Israel, they tell you this was such and such place for the Romans, for the Byzantine, for the Crusaders, for the British and for the Zionists. Two-thousand years of history are erased.

So, all these things together can explain the Israeli attitude. And of course, like all colonialists, Zionist leaders use racist discourse to vilify the Indigenous populations, and to legitimate its discrimination and its elimination.

George Yancy: Ethiopian Jews might be said to be a group that experiences a kind of “otherness” within Israel. In your book, Holocaust Education and the Semiotics of Othering in Israeli Schoolbooks, you discuss how Arab Jews and other non-European Jews are themselves also victims, as a result of Zionism. In your book you characterize non-European Jews who settled in Israel as “the victims of the victims.” How do Zionist narratives contribute to the “othering” of non-European Jews?

Nurit Peled-Elhanan: As I mentioned, the Zionist movement was a European movement. Ever since they came to Palestine, they wanted to Westernize themselves and Indigenize themselves at the same time — as if they’re coming back. The idea was to create a homeland for European Jews. They were not interested in other Jews, especially not from Arab or African countries.

But after the Holocaust and the extermination of European Jews, they needed people to populate the future state of Israel. So, they looked for them in other countries, and they found them in Muslim countries. But the idea was that they were barbaric and primitive, and full of germs and illnesses, and so on, and that they should be confined in camps until they could integrate.

They should give up their culture, their Arabness or their Africanness, and their language, their music, their customs, their religion, and adopt this other religion, this other Judaism that was developed in Eastern Europe. There are many people who write about it — Ela Shohat, and others. So, they turned them into the victims of the victims, because the ones who treated them this way were really the victims, the survivors.

They were held in what is called inner colonialism or internal colonialism. To this day, four generations after they came to Israel, their grandchildren are still called Moroccans, or even “dirty Moroccans.” They are called by their ethnicities — the Ashkenazi Jews, however, are the norm, the unmarked. They are not called an ethnicity.

But the non-Ashkenazi, although they’ve been on the land for four generations, are still called by their ethnicities. The gaps in education, in employment, in wealth, are growing, not diminishing.

Now that was a horrible thing, and the way they were treated has ruined them. It ruined the family; it ruined the community. It was a disaster. In fact, Israel didn’t want the Ethiopians to come for many years. The Ethiopian Jews, or Beta Israel (the house of Israel) as they call themselves, wanted to come to Zion, for religious reasons.

The Arab Jews were largely not Zionist either, although some of them were in Zionist movements, but mainly their motives were religious, not political. They wanted to come to Jerusalem, and that’s all. And the Ethiopian Jews, who thought they were the only Jews in the world, wanted to come to Zion. When they heard that there was a possibility, they began to ask to come. But Israel didn’t want them.

It was only after the UN General Assembly, in 1975, declared Zionism a racist movement that they decided to bring them to prove that they allow Black people in. But it took more years until they started to come.

The way they brought them was disastrous. They made them walk to Sudan and then wait in Sudan in no living conditions at all for months and months on end. The death toll was in the thousands. And then they defined it, or crowned it, as a wonderful underground operation of “our brave soldiers.” They brought them in, and they were put in these camps, which they called absorption camps, absorption centers.

They were completely dependent on the Israeli bureaucracy. They couldn’t make decisions regarding their own welfare. They had to give up all their customs, their religious leaders, their religion because they went by the Bible and not by the Halachah which was developed in Eastern Europe — they didn’t even know about it. And they could not choose schools for their children.

Schoolbooks reproduce this even today by treating Ethiopian Jews as a “problem” that the state had to cope with. And today, over 40 years after their arrival, they’re still treated as a problem. They must study all kinds of texts that were written by Europeans in the last century, in the ‘60s, about life in Ethiopia and hear that they are patriarchic, and they are primitive, and they marry their daughters off at the age of 9, and so on.

Nothing is mentioned about their contribution to the country. There are artists, singers, dancers, scientists, everything. They are only mentioned when they are “good soldiers.” All the books mention that. They are separated into special programs for Ethiopians, even if they were born in Israel, even at the university, nursing school, the army.

These special programs are meant to Westernize them the way Israel is Western, which is nonsense. And yet they must read these texts. All texts about them are written by Ashkenazi Jews. There isn’t one Ethiopian text in all the programs, although they have writers (and sociologists and psychologists) that have received awards.

And today, Ethiopian Israeli intellectuals have begun to object and to refute the narrative of rescue. Today, there is a movement of resistance to all of this. But it’s very hard.

The police treat them as the police treat Black people in America and in England. They shoot them in the streets. Recently, a trial was brought to completion. A policeman shot an Ethiopian Israeli 18-year-old, and the policeman was acquitted. For the whole trial, the judges treated the policeman as if he was the victim and treated the parents of this kid as if they were an obstruction. The chief of police said: Yes, what can we do? They’re Black. And this comes into the schoolbooks.

The schoolbooks tell you that they cannot integrate, or they find it hard to integrate, because they have all kinds of customs for which we are not used to, such as respect for elders, parental authority! Horrible things like that. And skin color. So, the schoolbooks replicate the racism of the state. They always show them, in photographs, slouching on the ground in some desert and you don’t see their faces even.

I always ask my students, where did the Ethiopian Jews live in Ethiopia? And they say, in the desert, which is false. They lived on top of hills because they needed water for the herds. During COVID, an Ethiopian lecturer in David Yellin Academic College gave a lecture to the staff and she asked the same question: “Where do you think they lived?” The lecturers all said, “in the desert,” because this is the only picture of Ethiopian Jews that we see. This is horrible.

I used to volunteer with children in an absorption center near my house. The living conditions were awful, and so was their treatment at school. The racism in schools excludes them from participating in all the activities that the white kids get to do. Of course, they were wonderful and brilliant children, and I’m in contact with some of them to this day. And one of them was in the Israeli Air Force working as a technician.

Well, me and my husband went to her wedding and there wasn’t a single white person at this wedding, not any of her former military peers, not any of her present peers, not even one. But how can this be? I’m sure she invited everybody. This is an anecdote, but I mention it to show you the attitude towards Ethiopian Jews. I heard teachers say that they stink. I heard teachers say that they are not sacred because they slaughter the cows themselves.

George Yancy: This reminds me of the horrible reality of the Stolen Generation, where white Australians forced Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their parents. The objective is to erase any signs of their cultural identity.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan: Yes. In this case, the whole education of Ethiopian Israeli children is meant to change them, not to get to know them, not to learn from them, or to recognize their contributions to a multicultural society.

I asked a teacher if she thought that these changes would disconnect them from their culture and their community and their family. And she said, yes, I hope they teach their parents, too. So, yes, it was the same colonial processes that took place in Australia and in Canada. It is the same “civilizing mission.” It is the white man’s civilizing mission. And Ethiopians were shocked when they came because they thought they came to “Jerusalem of Gold” and suddenly they were treated like non-Jews, which caused a lot of suicide cases. They were treated as beasts, which has not changed to this day.

George Yancy: What do you envision as an effective way of dismantling the anti-Palestinian stereotypes in Israel that do so much violence? How might rethinking education and a radical rethinking of the curriculum in Israel make a difference?

Nurit Peled-Elhanan: One could have an entirely new curriculum if one wanted. I’ve been talking about books until around 2014, because after that you don’t find Palestinians in the schoolbooks at all, and you don’t find Ethiopians in the schoolbooks at all.

You have some abstract problems of terror, but nobody speaks about them as people. There was some change at the end of ‘90s when new historians talked about the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), but today there’s nothing; it is as if they don’t exist. These books are like evangelistic pamphlets. Even the pictures you see, all the photos of people in schoolbooks are blonde with blue eyes. In reality, most Israelis are not blonde.

And I asked one graphic designer, who designed a schoolbook, why he did that. He said, “Well, it looks good.” These books are really propaganda books.

Every year I check to see if there are new things in these books, but there are no “others” in them at all, not even as others.

So, it’s getting worse. But of course, if you want to mandate, you have to construct a new curriculum, which will not only be what is called the pedagogical narrative, but the performative narrative, the narrative of the people who are never included within the pedagogical narrative or the official narrative, the people whose voices are not heard — narratives written by the Bedouins, the Circassians, the Druze, the Palestinians, the Ethiopian Jews, the Arab Jews, the Russian Jews — because Israel is a place with so many languages, so many groups of people who have nothing in common, by the way. It’s not multicultural, but it has a lot of cultures within it.

The only way forward is to have a narrative of the liminal people, what Indian scholar and critical theorist Homi Bhabha calls the performative narrative, the one that matters, the one that really affects the lives of people. In Israel, nobody has history except Zionist history. We don’t know anything, even about European Jews. We don’t know anything, except that they were exterminated.

The Palestinian Lebanese writer Elias Khoury wrote a book called Children of the Ghetto: My Name Is Adam in which he tells the story of a Palestinian man’s journey of pain and sorrow. In the book there is the story of a man who was brought to bury and burn the cadavers after the massacres.

Khoury calls these people Sonderkommandos. He tells the story of one of them, makes him an individual human being who has a story. And when you read this story in contrast to the Israeli story told in the history books, this is the difference from a pedagogical or official narrative, it is the narrative of the marginalized, the narrative of the people who have become collective objects. And that’s the way you should do it, to give voice to the voiceless.

But you don’t have the history of Ethiopian Jews written by Ethiopian Jews. It’s all anthropological, and it’s all from a Eurocentric point of view, a racist point of view. I think the only way to do it is not to confront the two official narratives, Palestinian against Israeli. This has been done. Neither Israel nor Palestine allow it to be used at school.

But we must take the narratives of all the people, and that’s where you’ll find fascinating things about the common life that was in this place during the Ottoman period and before, which was rich and harmonious culturally, economically, agriculturally. People were so cosmopolitan. Everything was together without anybody losing their identity and their religious affiliation. I would like to see that.

We tried to do it before the 2009 onslaught on Gaza. We tried to form a group of experts who would start writing this curriculum. A wonderful group came, all volunteering. But then Israel attacked Gaza, and the Palestinians didn’t want to and couldn’t come anymore.

But I think there are many people who would love to do it, because it’s always so much more interesting than all this political propaganda that you get in the schoolbooks, which is all about pogroms and wars and the massacres of Jews.

Today, the idea that unites the people here is that we are all victims of the Holocaust, and we can be victims of the Holocaust again, if we’re not careful. That’s the idea. You must traumatize the children to make them loyal, so they don’t leave the country. And it’s written in all the books. What happened in Europe to the Jews happened because they did not have a state and an army. You compel people to stay, young people, you frighten them to death.

You know, people say, “Don’t go to Turkey, they hate us.” What do you mean? They hate us. They love me when I come to the market and buy rugs. I remember when I took my son to Greece when he was 8, his cousin said, “Don’t go there! They exterminated us.” Five-thousand years ago, they destroyed the temple. And that attitude is very strong in Israel. Don’t go to Athens. They are antisemitic. Don’t go there, there are Arabs there.

So, the Holocaust is what unites everybody, and hovers above us all the time, along with a contempt for the real Holocaust victims because, you know, they didn’t fight back.

George Yancy: This sounds like a process of Nazification of Arabs.

Nurit Peled-Elhanan: Yes! Ever since Israel befriended Germany in 1953, and accepted the reparation money, the role of the potential exterminator passed to the Arabs, otherwise we have no reason to be here, and to be armed to our teeth. The Arabs received the role of potential exterminators with no reason, with no cause. I mean Arabs never exterminated Jews. Muslims rarely pogromized Jews.

There were some incidents, yes, but they never thought of a Final Solution. And David Ben-Gurion said, in 1953, I’m taking German reparations money so that we can defend ourselves against the Nazi Arabs, and that coined it — the “Nazi Arabs.” And then they said, we live in Auschwitz borders. And Menachem Begin said the attack on refugee camps in Lebanon saved us from “another Treblinka.”

This is the discourse. And even today they call Palestinians in Gaza Nazis. What happened on October 7 was immediately compared to the Shoah, to the Holocaust. Immediately. And it works. We are a nuclear power, and they have nothing, but they are depicted on one hand as primitive, superfluous human beings, and on the other hand, as almighty Nazis. And it works.

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. A post-publication correction was made to clarify that one Israeli schoolbook described the Deir Yassin massacre as solving rather than resulting from a “frightening demographic problem.”

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books.

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https://israelpalestinenews.org/how-does-israel-justify-mass-killings-it-starts-in-the-schools/

Israel kills American activist, terrorizes prisoners, as Biden admin shrugs – Day 335
CNN reports: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday was as clear as he has ever been that he does not believe a ceasefire and hostage deal is likely in Gaza in a sharp rebuke to the Biden administration’s insistence it’s close at hand. “There’s not a deal in the making,” Netanyahu told Fox News. “Unfortunately, it’s not close.” His comments stand in stark contrast to the relentlessly hopeful messaging from the Biden administration over the past months. On Sunday, President Joe Biden claimed that the parties were on the verge of a deal, and on Wednesday, a senior administration official claimed 90% of the agreement had been completed. That, Netanyahu said, is “exactly inaccurate.” UN Humanitarian Affairs: Israel is blocking entrance of explosive ordnance disposal equipment OCHA reports: The ongoing escalation of hostilities is resulting in widespread contamination by Explosive Ordnance (EO). While the exact number of EO-related casualties is unknown, there have been cases of people who died due to the explosion of EO, according to humanitarian partners. On 3 September, a Palestinian girl was reportedly critically injured by the explosion of an EO in southwestern Khan Younis and succumbed to her wounds on 4 September. Children face a heightened risk of being exposed to EO, as they usually play outside, tend to search for scraps amongst rubbish and rubble, and lack an awareness on the dangers of EO. Despite ongoing efforts by humanitarian partners to conduct in-person and digital Explosive Ordnance Risk Education (EORE) campaigns, educational material as well as minimum standard Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) equipment are refused entry into Gaza by Israeli authorities, therefore limiting the capacity of the mine action response. The Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Cluster is concerned with the staggering increase in the cost of basic hygiene items. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), in July, the price of soap has increased 1,177 per cent and shampoo has increased 490 per cent across the Strip, compared to July 2023. Israeli army kills Palestinian girl in West Bank: Health Ministry Al Jazeera reports: A 13-year-old girl succumbed to her wounds after being shot by Israeli forces in Qaryout, a village south of Nablus, in the occupied West Bank. The village was reportedly attacked by Jewish settlers backed by Israeli forces when Bana Amjad Bakr was shot in the chest by an Israeli soldier. The Palestine Red Crescent Society said its teams dealt with the “serious” injury after confrontations broke out in the village. Amjad Bakr was shot while she was in her bedroom, her father said. She was taken to a nearby hospital where she died. Settler attacks are common in the West Bank and have increased in scale and intensity since October 7. The Israeli army and settlers have displaced more than 1,200 Palestinians and destroyed hundreds of structures, according to UN figures. Israel pulls out of Jenin, but denies end of West Bank offensive Middle East Eye reports: Israeli forces have pulled out of Jenin after a 10-day assault, but the military has denied it is ending its operation in the occupied West Bank. The offensive, which has so far left at least 39 Palestinians dead, saw soldiers backed by armored vehicles and bulldozers targeting the city and its adjacent refugee camp, forcing the flight of many of the residents. Palestinians started returning to their Jenin homes on Friday, while those who had been trapped by the offensive were able to venture outside for the first time in more than a week. Israel said on Friday that it would continue its operation in Jenin until its “objectives are achieved”. The Palestinian Ministry of Health says at least 40 people (6 of them youths) have been killed in the West Bank since August 28 when Israeli forces launched a large-scale incursion into several towns and cities: 21 Palestinians were killed in Jenin; 8 in Tubas; 8 in Tulkarem; and 3 in Hebron. Footage originally shared by Israel’s Channel 14 correspondent showed Israeli soldiers detaining Palestinian children, women and men in Jenin, occupied West Bank, and forcing them to walk in one line. This is not Gaza. This is in the West Bank Israeli soldiers share footage with Netenyahu’s channel 14 depicting them humiliating young Palestinian girls, women and elderly in Jenin during their invasion to the city pic.twitter.com/y2DZz1rImP — Younis Tirawi | يونس (@ytirawi) September 6, 2024 France arrests nurse who volunteered in Gaza Middle East Monitor reports: France yesterday arrested then released nurse Imane Maarifi who spent 15 days volunteering as a medic in the Gaza Strip. Notably, the arrest took place at a time when French soldiers who fight in Gaza enjoy total impunity. Thomas Portes, a lawmaker from the La France Insoumise, or France Unbowed (LFI) party, wrote that Maarifi has been released from custody. “The search of the home in front of the family leaves no doubt about the desire to intimidate the voices that are raised to support the Palestinian people and demand an immediate ceasefire,” he wrote on X. Maarifi attended pro-Palestinian rallies in France to share her testimony about the crippling situation in Gaza. She has also expressed her demand for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and a boycott of companies supporting Israel.
[email protected] September 7, 2024 Ayşenur Eygi, btselem, ceasefire, international solidarity movement, israeli settler violence, palestinian prisoners, Tally Gotliv, unexploded ordnance, west bank death, white phosphorus, Yuli Novak
Photos and videos obtained by Haaretz show dozens of detainees lying on their stomachs while handcuffed, some without clothes, as a guard dog barks over their heads. The Prison Service described this as a "routine exercise." (screenshot)
Compilation of news reports – IAK staff

Israeli army kills American International Solidarity Movement volunteer during demonstration in West Bank

Various sources report:

During the weekly demonstration in Beita, Palestine, on the morning of September 6th, 2024, the Israeli army intentionally shot and killed an International Solidarity Movement (ISM) human rights activist named Ayşenur Eygi. The demonstration, which primarily involved men and children praying, was met with force from the Israeli army stationed on a hill. Initially, the army fired a large amount of tear gas and then began using live ammunition.

Ayşenur, who we (ISM) consider a martyr in the struggle, was the 18th demonstrator to be killed in Beita since 2020. She was an American citizen of Turkish descent.

She was involved with the Faz’a campaign, an organization that aims to support and protect Palestinian farmers from violations by illegal Jewish settlers and military forces.

The Israeli forces fired two rounds. One hit a Palestinian man in the leg, injuring him. The other round was fired at international human rights activists who were observing the demonstration from a distance, striking the human rights activist in the head.

Neither Ezgi nor the other wounded person posed any threat to the soldiers stationed on the hills adjacent to the site of the weekly march.

Eygi died shortly after being transported to a local hospital in Nablus.

The Israeli military admitted to firing at the demonstrators and said it was looking into reports that a foreign national was killed. The Israel Defense Forces said it “responded with fire toward a main instigator of violent activity who hurled rocks at the forces and posed a threat to them”.

The US has not said whether Eygi had been shot by Israeli troops. “We are urgently gathering more information about the circumstances of her death, and will have more to say as we learn more,” Matthew Miller, a state department spokesperson, said.

Asked if the US would take action against Israel, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “First things first – let’s find out exactly what happened and we will draw the necessary conclusions and consequences from that.”

Eygi’s family released a statement declaring, “A US citizen, Aysenur was peacefully standing for justice when she was killed by a bullet that video shows came from an Israeli military shooter,” adding, “Given the circumstances of Aysenur’s killing, an Israeli investigation is not adequate.”

“We call on President Biden, Vice President Harris, and Secretary of State Blinken to order an independent investigation into the unlawful killing of a US citizen and to ensure full accountability.”

Ayşenur Eygi, 26, ‘was not a naive traveler – this experience was, according to one of her professors, the culmination of all her years of activism. Her friends say she was a longtime activist “bearing witness to oppression.”

She was remembered by friends and former professors as a dedicated organizer who felt a strong moral obligation to bring attention to the plight of Palestinians.

Eygi, who is also a Turkish citizen and leaves behind her husband, graduated from UW earlier this year with a major in psychology and minor in Middle Eastern languages and culture, Fani said. She walked the stage with a large “Free Palestine” flag during the ceremony, Fani said.

Ezgi is the third ISM volunteer to be killed by the Israeli forces in occupied Palestine. Rachel Corrie was killed in Gaza’s Rafah in 2003 after an Israeli soldier crushed her with a bulldozer. Tom Hurndall was killed in Gaza in 2004 by an Israeli sniper. An Israeli soldier shot Brian Avery in the face in Jenin in 2003. He survived the attack but was permanently maimed. The bullet ripped through his cheek and smashed his eye socket and jaw bones.

RECOMMENDED READING: Instead of Taylor Force Act, Congress should consider Rachel Corrie Act, Orwah Hammad Act




Israeli Prison Guards Filmed Abusing Detainees; Prison Service Says It’s a ‘Routine Exercise’

Ha’aretz reports:

Israeli Prison Service personnel in the security wing of Megiddo Prison handcuffed and humiliated detainees on Friday morning, despite no unusual incident occurring in the prison.

Photos and videos obtained by Haaretz show dozens of detainees lying on their stomachs while handcuffed, some without clothes, as a guard dog barks over their heads. The Prison Service described this as a “routine exercise.”

The Prison Service said in response that it “maintains an operational routine for the safety of the prison inmates and the public. In this case, too, in an operation that includes intelligence [gathering], soldiers of the ‘Nachshon’ unit…raided terrorist cells, searched them and seized assault weapons and prohibited materials.” The service failed to present any of the assault weapons allegedly seized.

The Palestinian Prisoner’s Society (PPS) has urged the United Nations to open an independent investigation.

The group has also said that the Israeli authorities are “deliberately” leaking images and footage of the torture of Palestinian detainees, explaining in a statement that this was “part of the competition between the ministers of the current government over who tortures and kills Palestinians more”.


UNICEF says Israelis refusing to facilitate polio vaccine campaign

Al Jazeera reports:

UNICEF says it is making every effort to distribute the polio vaccine in Gaza during the agreed-upon pauses in fighting.

However, it reported that Israel continues to deny medical teams access to communities in certain areas of southern Gaza.

Nearly 355,000 children have received the vaccine in spite of Israel’s lack of cooperation.

Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary reports from Khan Younis:



Israeli legislator calls on police to probe B’Tselem activist for ‘aiding the enemy’

Middle East Monitor reports:

Israel’s Likud Party Knesset Member Tally Gotliv called for the execution or life imprisonment of human rights activist Yuli Novak following her speech at the UN Security Council on Wednesday.

Novak, the executive director or Israeli rights group B’Tselem, told the UNSC: “Since Israel was founded, its guiding logic has been to promote Jewish supremacy over the entire territory under its control.”

She added that the far-right Israeli government has been “cynically exploiting” its citizens’ “collective trauma” since the 7 October 2023 infiltration of Israel by Palestinian resistance fighters.

It is doing this, she explained, “to violently advance its project of cementing Israel[i] control over the entire land … committing war crimes almost daily.”

Gotliv called for Novak to be probed by Israel Police “for the suspected serious crime of assistance to the enemy in war.”

She said that such a crime was an offense under the penal law, “which carries the death penalty or a life sentence”.

“Novak has shamefully put the state of Israel, currently engaged in a war for survival, at risk and assisted Israel’s enemies on various fronts,” the lawmaker wrote, accusing the activist of telling lies about Israel committing war crimes.

Gotliv was among the legislators that joined Israeli crowds to protest the arrest of soldiers accused of gang-raping a Palestinian detainee from Gaza held in the Israeli Sde Teiman prison.

NOTE: B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories strives for a future in which human rights, liberty and equality are guaranteed to all people, Palestinian and Jewish alike, living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Such a future will only be possible when the Israeli occupation and apartheid regime end. That is the future we are working towards.

B’Tselem (in Hebrew literally: in the image of), the name chosen for the organization by the late Member of Knesset Yossi Sarid, is an allusion to Genesis 1:27: “And God created humankind in His image. In the image of God did He create them.” The name expresses the universal and Jewish moral edict to respect and uphold the human rights of all people.



Netanyahu is unequivocal about ceasefire and hostage agreement with Hamas: ‘There’s not a deal in the making’


Israel shells Lebanon with white phosphorus bombs, performs ground invasion drills

The Cradle reports:

According to Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA), Israel targeted southern Lebanon with white phosphorus on Friday. “The area between Tal Nahas and Al-Hamams towards the Marjayoun plain is being subjected to artillery shelling with phosphorus shells, which caused fires to break out,” NNA said.

Israeli threats against Lebanon have escalated once again. The Israeli military said on 6 September that its Yiftah Brigade carried out drills this week simulating a ground invasion of Lebanon, moving along a “mountainous route” and “complex terrain.”

NOTE: Use of white phosphorus in civilian areas is considered a war crime due to its extremely dangerous effects on the human body.

White phosphorus ignites instantly when in contact with oxygen. It can burn through the human body, including through bone, causing severe, excruciating damage.

It can also cause extreme harm when inhaled, with risks of suffocation, cardiovascular failure, coma, death, and other lifelong effects. The substance burns at temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

MORE NEWS:

IMEMC Daily Reports.

The Cradle: Israel’s energy insecurity: How blackouts could paralyze the occupation state

+972 Magazine: Under cover of war, Israel is demolishing home after home in Silwan

Middle East Monitor: ‘Game of demographics’: How Israel aims to wipe out Palestinians from Occupied East Jerusalem

Middle East Eye: ‘I recognized her by her roller skate’: Israeli strike on Gaza kills children playing in the street

The New Arab: Is Israel using Gaza’s ‘mowing the lawn’ strategy in the West Bank?





STATISTICS OCTOBER 7 – SEPTEMBER 5:

Palestinian death toll from October 7, 2023 – September 5, 2024: at least 41,546* (40,878 in Gaza* – 11,308 women (28%), 16,715 children (41%) as of September 5. [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]

This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 691 in the West Bank (~148 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children). Euro-Med Monitor reports 49,032 Palestinian deaths.

Lancet: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

Ralph Nader earlier estimated 200,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.

At least 45 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 23 from West Bank).
At least 41 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition (at least 37 of them children)**.
About 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are currently displaced.
Almost 500,000 Gazans are currently experiencing catastrophic levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7 – September 5: at least 100,098 (including at least 94,454 in Gaza and 5,700 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how man Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]

Reported Israeli death toll from October 7, 2023 – September 5, 2024: ~1,452 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 288*** military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza; 25 military and civilians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel) and~10,000 injured.

NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries of Israelis on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.

*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.

**Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.

***Approximately ten of the deaths listed above were Israeli soldiers killed by Hezbollah in fighting at the Israel-Lebanon border. The figure does not include the reportedly 53 Israeli soldiers – nearly 16% of the total Israeli military deaths – killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents.

† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.

Hover over each bar for exact numbers.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org

Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
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Israeli media’s coverage of the rape of Palestinian detainees shows support for sexual violence in service of genocide
Inside Israel’s torture, rape, and dehumanization centers
I’m a pediatrician. The scars I saw on Gaza’s children will take generations to heal.
What Harris’s Jewish outreach director said at a private DNC afterparty
‘Strong record of supporting the U.S.-Israel relationship’: a look at Tim Walz’s votes on Palestine as a member of Congress
Nearly Two-Thirds of All Campaign Funds for Cori Bush Challenger Came From AIPAC
Israeli army probe covered up “friendly fire” killings on October 7
Are US officials’ investments of public funds in Israeli bonds ethical? How much is too much?
Honoring the memory of a Gazan Olympic hero: Majed Abu Maraheel
An American was just shot in the West Bank. The American press can’t be bothered.
Understanding what motivates ultra-orthodox Jewish attacks on West Bank Palestinians
Palestinians’ harrowing stories of rape by Israeli soldiers (including female soldiers)
A Palestinian journalist visited Ismail Haniyeh’s home in Gaza to report on his death. Israel assassinated him too.
I reported a piece for the New York Times on antisemitism. I found a major error, but the Times didn’t care.
How Israel plans to whitewash its war crimes in Gaza
Why the West Bank is on the verge of economic collapse
Netanyahu’s plan to involve US in regional war on its behalf
Western media continue to withhold the truth about Israel and Gaza – 4 stories
“Well What SHOULD Israel Have Done After October 7?”
Welcome to Hell
More dead children. More BBC ‘news’ channelling Israeli propaganda as its own
U.S. media downplays and ignores ICJ ruling declaring Israeli occupation illegal
Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one given blessing by the West
Searching for Gaza’s missing children

https://israelpalestinenews.org/israel-kills-american-activist-terrorizes-prisoners-as-biden-admin-shrugs-day-335/

https://donshafi911iamthefaceoftruth.blogspot.com/2024/09/israel-kills-american-activist.html

US Is Dishonest, Biased, Partner in Genocide to be Mediator in Gaza
September 6, 2024

VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

$ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.


“CNN “Meanwhile in America”

CNN in a Byline dated September 6 by Stephen Collinson, Caitlin Hu and Shelby Rose raised the question in Meanwhile in America “Why the US keeps failing and trying again to reach a Mideast ceasefire deal?

“When an administration repeatedly predicts s a foreign policy goal is in sight but fails to deliver, as this one has, it risks shattering its credibility and looks like it botched one of its top priority”.

“despite its frustration, the White House has yet used all possible leverage on Netanyahu-and properly wont’” Biden is a deeply pro-Israel president “unwilling to do the right thing?

We all know, and all America knows Mr. Biden never cared about the lives of any Palestinian whether they die in the thousands or hundreds of thousands. He does not give a damn.

ZETEO “US Silence Despite Americans Attacked in Occupied West Bank”
Prem Thanker writing for Zeteo (September 5) raises the question of “US Silence Despite Americans Attacked in Occupied West Bank” He referes to the Israeli forces alleged throwing “stun grenade” at US citizens, a teacher from New Jersey, in support of Jewish settler’s attacks.

“Israeli violence against US citizens in the occupied West Bank intensified this week following near radio silence from Washington after Israeli forces shot a New Jersey teacher last month.”

“Settlers on Wednesday allegedly attacked a shepherd in the Palestinian village of Qusra, in the West Bank. After he initially drove them out, American demonstrators arrived to support the shepherd and his sheep. A handful of minutes passed before the settlers returned in with reinforcements. The Americans began to run, but the settlers caught up to them and began throwing rocks and beating them.”

Today September 6, the Israeli army shot and killed in cold blood an American Alsenure Eygi who was with other Americans protesting Israeli settlers in the City of Nablus.


Of course the Justice Department, only open cases where American Jews are killed and murdered but not others American Muslims, or Christians or Arabs. Their lives do not matter. Both the Justice Department and the US State Department only wait for the release of the Israeli finding into the death… we all know what the report will say, as in the case of deliberate cold blooded murder of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu-Akleh. Both government agencies do not see it is worth to open its own investigation on the murder and killings by Israel of lives of Non-Jews. Not that Jewish lives does not matter it does, but we do expect our government, a government of all the people, for the all the people, should rethink that all other American lives does and should matter.

Special Note: Thanks to CNN and to Zeteo.


ATTENTION READERS

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https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/09/us-is-dishonest-biased-partner-in-genocide-to-be-mediator-in-gaza/

Israeli-inflicted Palestinian injuries in Gaza, West Bank surpass 100,000 – Day 332
[email protected] September 4, 2024 arms sales to israel, columbia university, david cameron, David Friedman, Gaza, hamas, Merrick Garland, palestine erased, Palestinian journalists, West Bank
Israeli forces organize a raid with bulldozers on Jenin in the West Bank on September 01, 2024. [ Issam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency] (photo)
Compilation of news reports – IAK staff

‘3,000 operatives’: Hamas regains capabilities in northern Gaza – report

Jerusalem Post reports:

Hamas has managed to regain some of its capabilities in the northern Gaza Strip, according to a Monday Channel 12 report, citing a security source.

The report specified that Hamas had enlisted some 3,000 new operatives into its ranks in that area of Gaza.

Additionally, the resistance group reportedly provided them with weapons, ammunition, and payment.

According to the Channel 12 report, while some Israeli forces remain in northern Gaza, the absence of large troop deployments has allowed Hamas to operate more freely in that area.

At the beginning of the war with Gaza, Israeli forces invaded northern Gaza, reportedly destroying much of the Hamas infrastructure there.

In mid-July, the IDF ended a re-invasion of northern Gaza to concentrate on the central Gaza Strip.



Israel to classify West Bank as ‘combat zone’ amid dramatic escalation

Israel Hayom reports:

Recent events have triggered a major policy shift in Israel’s approach to the West Bank, Israel Hayom has learned. Previously designated as a “secondary arena” requiring stable maintenance, the Israeli military now operates under a new paradigm, viewing the West Bank as the second most critical front, immediately after Gaza.

A series of operations across the West Bank are imminent. “The Jenin operation is just the beginning,” security officials emphasize.

Security officials recommend launching extensive operations. One security source described it as “not just mowing the lawn, but uprooting the problem at its source.”

NOTE: In reality, International law supports the efforts of resistance groups against an occupying power, even to the point of armed resistance. Hamas has clearly and openly stated that its enemy is not the Jewish people, but the racist ideology of Zionism – the ideology under which Israel dispossessed 750,000 Palestinian people, exiled them to Gaza and other locations, and continues to oppress and ethnically cleanse their population.

Israeli forces carry the dead body of a Palestinian after an operation in Hebron, West Bank on September 1, 2024. [Mamoun Wazwaz – Anadolu Agency]
Israeli forces carry the dead body of a Palestinian after an operation in Hebron, West Bank on September 1, 2024. [Mamoun Wazwaz – Anadolu Agency] (photo)
Some West Bank updates: Israel continues killing spree

various media outlets report:

The Israeli aggression, since dawn last Wednesday, on the West Bank until now, has killed at least 32 Palestinians: 19 in Jenin, 6 in Tulkarem, 4 in Tubas, and 3 in Hebron, bringing the number of slain Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023, to at least 685.

The total number of injuries in the West Bank and Gaza combined has surpassed 100,000 (94,398 in Gaza, 5,700 in the West Bank) – even as healthcare facilities in both areas remain under siege.

JENIN AREA: Israeli forces today directly targeted four journalists in the town of Kafr Dan, west of Jenin, as they covered the Israeli aggression in the town.

The occupation forces fired live bullets directly at the vehicle of the two photojournalists while they were trying to reach the location of the other journalists in the village of Kafr Dan.

“We narrowly escaped death,” one of the victims explained. “If we hadn’t sped up a bit in our car, they would have killed us. It was a direct assassination attempt.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Israeli soldiers shot a Palestinian teenage girl and prevented medics from reaching her until she succumbed to her wounds in Kafr Dan town, west of Jenin, in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said its medics moved the slain child, Lujain Osama Abdul-Rauf Mosleh, 16, to a hospital in Jenin.

TULKARM: A Palestinian minor was killed Tuesday dawn by Israeli occupation forces during the ongoing raid on Tulkarm camp.

Medical and local sources said that Mohammad Kanaan was killed after being shot in the head by the occupation forces’ snipers while he was with his father in one of the camp’s neighborhoods, while his father was shot in the abdomen by the occupation forces.

On Tuesday evening, two Palestinians were killed after the army surrounded a home and fired at it, in the Thannaba Suburb in Tulkarem.

Media sources said that the attack killed two young men inside the home before the soldiers took their corpses to an unknown destination. (More on Tulkarm here.)

HEBRON: After closing the Ibrahimi Mosque to Muslim Palestinian worshippers, the Israeli army allowed thousands of illegal settlers to hold a concert and perform their rituals at the site in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Mosque director Moataz Abu Sneineh said that the Israeli settlers held a concert in the mosque’s courtyards “in a blatant violation of the places of worship and the privacy of Muslims.”

Some of Tuesday's victims of Israeli attacks in the West Bank
Some of Tuesday’s victims of Israeli attacks in the West Bank (photos)
Unprecedented number of Palestinian journalists arrested by Israel since October 7th

The Committee To Protect Journalists reports:

Since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, an unprecedented number of journalists and media workers have been arrested — often without charge — in what they and their attorneys say is retaliation for their journalism and commentary.

As of September 4, CPJ has documented a total of 54 arrests of journalists in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza and in the city of Jerusalem, claimed by both Israel and the Palestinians as a capital, since the war began on October 7, 2023. Israel arrested 51; Palestinian authorities arrested three.

Nineteen of these journalists, including the three held by Palestinian authorities, have since been released, while 35 remain under arrest.

At least 14 of the journalists arrested by Israel are being held under administrative detention, a policy under which a military commander may detain an individual without charge, typically for six months, on the grounds of preventing them from committing a future offense. Detention can be extended an unlimited number of times.

(Editor’s note: These numbers are being updated regularly as more information becomes available. The tally includes all arrests documented by CPJ. As is our global practice, journalists who request anonymity out of concern for their safety are not named in the list below.)

“Since October 7, Israel has been arresting Palestinian journalists in record numbers and using administrative detention to keep them behind bars, thus depriving the region not only of much needed information, but also of Palestinian voices on the conflict,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna in New York. “If Israel wants to live up to its self-styled reputation of being the only democracy in the Middle East, it needs to release detained Palestinian journalists and stop using military courts to hold them without evidence.”

CPJ ALSO REPORTS: Since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, journalists and media across the region have faced a hostile environment that has made reporting on the war exceptionally challenging.

In addition to documenting the growing tally of journalists killed and injured, CPJ’s research has found multiple kinds of incidents of journalists being targeted while carrying out their work in Israel and the two Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank.

These include 54 arrests, as well as numerous assaults, threats and harassment, cyberattacks, and censorship.

(Find details and examples here. Find an up-to-date list of journalists killed here.)

RECOMMENDED READING: CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’

Int’l Criminal Court likely to decide whether to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant ‘over coming days’

Ha’aretz reports:

Justice Ministry officials expect the International Criminal Court (ICC) to decide in the coming days on whether to issue arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, but are cautiously optimistic that the court will decide against the warrants.

The officials said the government’s refusal to set up a state commission of inquiry to investigate the events of the war, as recommended by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, along with the fact that Israel has been lagging in its own investigations of alleged war crimes – something that would preempt ICC action under the principle of complementarity – strengthen the likelihood that the court will accept Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for the warrants.

The officials said they expect the court to issue its decision within days, or at most a few weeks.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 13, 2023.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 13, 2023. (photo)
US Justice Department files criminal charges against Hamas

Al Jazeera reports:

The US announced criminal charges against Hamas’s top leadership, including the group’s chief Yahya Sinwar, accusing them of leading efforts to kill civilians and destroy the state of Israel.

“As outlined in our complaint, those defendants — armed with weapons, political support, and funding from the Government of Iran, and support from Hezbollah — have led Hamas’s efforts to destroy the State of Israel and murder civilians in support of that aim,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

Other Hamas leaders charged include Marwan Issa, the deputy leader of Hamas’s armed wing in Gaza, Khaled Meshaal, a deputy of slain former Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and a former leader of the group, Mohammed al-Masri and Ali Baraka.

NOTE: Garland’s nomination was endorsed by pro-Israel groups such as the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which advocates for Israel.

HA’ARETZ ADDS: U.S. National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby acknowledged Tuesday that the events of the weekend will dictate U.S. actions moving forward.

“I’d be lying to you if I said the work going on in the days ahead are not going to be shaped or colored by our outrage about what Hamas did,” he said.

RECOMMENDED READING: US charges Hamas leaders over October 7, Gaza mediation role under question

Netanyahu once again erases Palestine during address

Middle East Monitor reports:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a map of Israel that erases the occupied West Bank, marking it as Israeli territory, in an address to the media yesterday.

The Israeli premier appeared standing in front of a wall-sized digital map that obliterated the West Bank. Palestinians decried the move as an explicit annexation of the occupied territory by Tel Aviv.

Speaking about the importance of the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt, Netanyahu used a map which showed the entirety of the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem as being annexed to Israel and only had the Gaza Strip outlined.

“Netanyahu’s map reveals the truth of the colonial and racist agendas of the extremist right-wing government,” the Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“Netanyahu continues and repeatedly uses a map that includes the West Bank as part of the occupation state, in clear and explicit recognition of this racist colonial crime, and disregard of international legitimacy and its resolutions, international will for peace and the signed agreements,” the ministry said.

NOTE: Israel’s supporters criticize the pro-Palestine slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” because they claim it calls for the erasure of Israel. In reality, the phrase is, in the words of Palestinian American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.” Netanyahu’s map says, in essence, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall not exist.”

RECOMMENDED READING: No more “shrinking map of Palestine” – it’s gone

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu used a map of Israel that erases the occupied West Bank to address the media [Screenshot/Anadolu]
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu used a map of Israel that erases the occupied West Bank to address the media [Screenshot/Anadolu] (photo)
Trump advisor pushes to divert Palestine aid funds for Israeli annexation of West Bank

The Cradle reports:

Former US ambassador to Israel and advisor to Donald Trump, David Friedman, proposed in his new book that Congress should redirect $1 billion allocated for Palestinian aid to support Israeli plans for an annexation of the occupied West Bank.

“Israel will need financial assistance to assert and maintain its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria,” Friedman wrote in his new book, using the biblical term used by Israel to refer to the West Bank.

Friedman writes in his book, titled One Jewish State: The Last and Best Hope for Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, that the US could divert $1 billion in current aid to the Palestinians – which includes funds for Palestinian Authority (PA) security services – to fund the Israeli annexation plan.

Friedman also compares Palestinians living under Israeli occupation to Puerto Ricans, who live on an island considered US territory.

“Palestinians, like Puerto Ricans, will not vote in national elections. Palestinians will be free to enact their own governing documents as long as they do not conflict with those of Israel,” he wrote.

Friedman argues the US should support Israel’s annexation “based first and foremost on biblical prophecies and values”, saying that such a policy “hearkens back to basic Judeo-Christian values of kindness, human dignity, humility and prosperity”.

Friedman said he has not yet shared his idea for funding the annexation with Trump. “I hope to share it with him at the appropriate time.”

NOTE: “Biblical prophecies” do not speak anywhere of a modern Jewish state. Pro-Israel (and in many cases, antisemitic) interpretations of Biblical prophecies have twisted the words of the sacred text to imply that a modern Jewish state is a precursor to the endtimes and the return of Christ.

RECOMMENDED READING: Friedman drove the radical overhaul of US policy on Israel-Palestine and Trump Is Desperate for Miriam Adelson’s Cash. Her Condition: West Bank Annexation

President Donald J. Trump, joined by White House senior staff members, delivers a statement announcing the agreement of full normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020, in the Oval Office of the White House (David Friedman, L).
President Donald J. Trump, joined by White House senior staff members, delivers a statement announcing the agreement of full normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020, in the Oval Office of the White House (David Friedman, L). (photo)
U.S. Still Talking Up a Hostage Deal, but Privately Despair About Netanyahu

Ha’aretz reports:

The Biden administration continues to insist publicly that it is committed to negotiations on a hostage and cease-fire deal in Gaza Strip, but senior officials in the government are expressing despair and frustration about the state of the talks, especially after Israel’s security cabinet approved a resolution last week opposing withdrawal from the Philadelphi route in the context of an agreement.

The aim of the administration’s public messages, according to one of the officials, was to allow the talks to continue, in the hope that a breakthrough might occur nonetheless. “It has no real connection to reality,” he said.

President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security spokesman John Kirby repeat every few days that progress has been made in the talks, the gaps between Israel and Hamas can be bridged and an agreement is within reach, if both sides agree to compromise.

Behind the scenes, however, the administration is well aware that the talks have reached an impasse due to Netanyahu’s insistence on the issue of the Philadelphi route, and it seems that both the prime minister and Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas and the organization’s top official in Gaza, are refusing to take the necessary steps to reach a deal at this time. “We want this agreement more than they do,” the American official said.

HA’ARETZ ALSO REPORTS: A source inside the Netanyahu coalition who is closely involved in and a part of the government said, “Benjamin Netanyahu decided some weeks ago that he does not want a deal, and when it became possible, he got nervous and did all he could to torpedo it. He figured out that [he could use] the Philadelphi corridor” to stall the process.

“The media fell for this spin and is consumed all day long with the question of yes or no to the Philadelphi, when the real question is really the fate of the hostages versus the fate of the coalition,” the source added.

“Not one minister, including those who know that Netanyahu is sabotaging a deal, will do anything,” the source says. “They are bound to one another, their political survival depends on the government’s survival, and therefore this situation will continue. Netanyahu will pursue an endless war because that’s what is good for him.”

Netanyahu, centre, chairs a cabinet meeting at the Kirya, which houses the Israeli Ministry of Defense, in Tel Aviv
Netanyahu, center, chairs a cabinet meeting at the Kirya, which houses the Israeli Ministry of Defense, in Tel Aviv (photo)
David Cameron sat on advice that there was breach of law in Gaza, officials say

The Guardian reports:

As far back as February, UK’s former foreign secretary David Cameron sat on advice that arms export licenses to Israel should be banned.

The recommendation was based on clear evidence that Israel was violating international humanitarian law in Gaza, for which the UK risked being complicit, a former Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) adviser said.

The source, who contributed to the drafting of the advice, was speaking after the Labour government banned 30 of about 350 arms export licenses due to a clear risk cited in a government memorandum published on Monday that they might be used in serious breaches of international humanitarian law.

“The tragedy has to be considered: how many lives might have been saved if the arms export licenses had been stopped [in February and not in September, and what the potential ripple effect might have been on how other countries would have reacted in ceasing trade.”

NOTE: While the Biden administration has claimed often to be “working day and night” on a ceasefire, in reality, it has been working relentlessly to keep Israel armed – including through secret arms sales – to enable its genocidal war on the Palestinian people. American arms shipments to Israel since October 7th have surpassed 50,000 tons.

Most Americans are opposed to arms transfers to Israel.

RECOMMENDED READING: An arms embargo on Israel is not a radical idea — it’s the law

Then-Foreign Secretary David Cameron meets Antony Blinken, United States Secretary of State for a bilateral meeting and press conference at the US State Department in Washington D.C., December 2023
Then-Foreign Secretary David Cameron meets Antony Blinken, United States Secretary of State for a bilateral meeting and press conference at the US State Department in Washington D.C., December 2023 (photo)
Which countries have banned or restricted arms sales to Israel?


Britain is the latest country to shift its position on arms sales to Israel, which has been dependent on international weaponry for an 11-month assault on Gaza that has killed more than 40,000 people.

Here is how different countries have responded to Israel’s war:

Banned or restricted arms sales

Britain
Italy
Spain
Canada
Belgium
The Netherlands
No ban on arms sales

The US
Germany
Denmark
(For details on each country listed, go here.)



There Is No Argument For Supporting Israel That’s Both Logical And Moral

by Caitlyn Johnstone:

It’s wild when you realize that nobody can actually articulate a reason why Israel should be supported that is both logically coherent and morally defensible.

Westerners grow up being indoctrinated with the understanding that this tiny country in the middle east is super duper important and needs to be supported and defended at all cost, but if you examine the reasons given for why this is so as an adult, you find that none of them really hold water.

“Israel is the only place where Jews can be safe!”
“The Jews deserve a homeland!”
“Israel is the only liberal democracy in the middle east.”
“I support Israel’s existence but I oppose the mistreatment of Palestinians.”
“Israel is essential for protecting our interests in the region.”
(Read Caitlyn Johnstone’s rebuttal to each of these statements here.)

Palestinians remove whatever belongings they can salvage from the area as the devastation left by the Israeli army’s withdrawal comes to light in eastern Deir al-Balah, Gaza on August 29, 2024. [Ali Jadallah – Anadolu Agency]
Palestinians remove whatever belongings they can salvage from the area as the devastation left by the Israeli army’s withdrawal comes to light in eastern Deir al-Balah, Gaza on August 29, 2024. [Ali Jadallah – Anadolu Agency] (photo)
Columbia U students will not be silenced on Palestine

Palestine Chronicle reports:

The students at Columbia University in New York City inaugurated their first day of the fall semester on Tuesday by staging pro-Palestine demonstrations.

This resulted in the arrest of two students by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) outside of Barnard gates, as reported by the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine.

The group live-streamed on the social media platform X parts of the protests, stating that the NYPD officers were “extremely aggressive with students, shoving protestors against the barricades”.

The student group stressed that as long as their university remains complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza “there is no business as usual during a genocide.”

“We refuse to live in a world where the mass murder of Palestinians is normal, acceptable, and profitable. Columbia University is complicit in genocide. Their investments in weapons manufacturers & defense contractors, companies such as Lockheed Martin, are fueling the genocide,” the students said on X.

The students also posted photos and footage of the statue of Alma Mater, on the steps of Columbia’s library, soaked in red as a sign of their university’s financial support for Israel and repression of pro-Palestine voices amid genocide, per the group.

The statue of Alma Mater, on the steps of Columbia’s library, was soaked in red as the protests resumed. (Photo: via NationalSJP TW Page)
The statue of Alma Mater, on the steps of Columbia’s library, was soaked in red as the protests resumed. (Photo: via NationalSJP TW Page) (photo)
MORE NEWS:

IMEMC Daily Reports.

The Guardian: Australia’s security chief says person who likes tweet supporting 7 October attacks on Israel could fail visa security test

The Cradle: Amnesty blasts UK ‘gesture politics’ after suspension of less than 10 percent of arms export licenses to Israel

Caitlyn’s Newsletter: The West Truly Doesn’t See Palestinians As Human

Al Jazeera: Paralympics: Palestine’s Aldeeb sees himself as the voice of his people

+972 Magazine: ‘This is also America’s war’: Why the U.S. isn’t stopping Israel’s Gaza onslaught




STATISTICS OCTOBER 7 – SEPTEMBER 3:

Palestinian death toll from October 7, 2023 – September 3, 2024: at least 41,546* (40,861 in Gaza* – 11,445 women (30%), 16,251 children as of July 22. [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]

This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 685 in the West Bank (~147 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children). Euro-Med Monitor reports 49,032 Palestinian deaths.

Lancet: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

Ralph Nader earlier estimated 200,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.

At least 45 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 23 from West Bank).
At least 41 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition**.
About 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are currently displaced.
Almost 500,000 Gazans are currently experiencing catastrophic levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7 – September 3: at least 100,098 (including at least 94,398 in Gaza and 5,700 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how man Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]

Reported Israeli death toll from October 7, 2023 – September 3, 2024: ~1,452 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 288*** military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza; 25 military and civilians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel) and~10,000 injured.

NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries of Israelis on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.

*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.

**Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.

***Approximately ten of the deaths listed above were Israeli soldiers killed by Hezbollah in fighting at the Israel-Lebanon border. The figure does not include the reportedly 53 Israeli soldiers – nearly 16% of the total Israeli military deaths – killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents.

† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.

Hover over each bar for exact numbers.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org

Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
Alison Weir trending on social media – what the buzz is about
Israeli media’s coverage of the rape of Palestinian detainees shows support for sexual violence in service of genocide
Inside Israel’s torture, rape, and dehumanization centers
I’m a pediatrician. The scars I saw on Gaza’s children will take generations to heal.
What Harris’s Jewish outreach director said at a private DNC afterparty
‘Strong record of supporting the U.S.-Israel relationship’: a look at Tim Walz’s votes on Palestine as a member of Congress
Nearly Two-Thirds of All Campaign Funds for Cori Bush Challenger Came From AIPAC
Israeli army probe covered up “friendly fire” killings on October 7
Are US officials’ investments of public funds in Israeli bonds ethical? How much is too much?
Honoring the memory of a Gazan Olympic hero: Majed Abu Maraheel
An American was just shot in the West Bank. The American press can’t be bothered.
Understanding what motivates ultra-orthodox Jewish attacks on West Bank Palestinians
Palestinians’ harrowing stories of rape by Israeli soldiers (including female soldiers)
A Palestinian journalist visited Ismail Haniyeh’s home in Gaza to report on his death. Israel assassinated him too.
I reported a piece for the New York Times on antisemitism. I found a major error, but the Times didn’t care.
How Israel plans to whitewash its war crimes in Gaza
Why the West Bank is on the verge of economic collapse
Netanyahu’s plan to involve US in regional war on its behalf
Western media continue to withhold the truth about Israel and Gaza – 4 stories
“Well What SHOULD Israel Have Done After October 7?”
Welcome to Hell
More dead children. More BBC ‘news’ channelling Israeli propaganda as its own
U.S. media downplays and ignores ICJ ruling declaring Israeli occupation illegal
Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one given blessing by the West
Searching for Gaza’s missing children

https://israelpalestinenews.org/israeli-inflicted-palestinian-injuries-gaza-west-bank-surpass-100000-day-332/

Israeli-inflicted Palestinian injuries in Gaza, West Bank surpass 100,000 – Day 332
[email protected] September 4, 2024 arms sales to israel, columbia university, david cameron, David Friedman, Gaza, hamas, Merrick Garland, palestine erased, Palestinian journalists, West Bank
Israeli forces organize a raid with bulldozers on Jenin in the West Bank on September 01, 2024. [ Issam Rimawi – Anadolu Agency] (photo)
Compilation of news reports – IAK staff

‘3,000 operatives’: Hamas regains capabilities in northern Gaza – report

Jerusalem Post reports:

Hamas has managed to regain some of its capabilities in the northern Gaza Strip, according to a Monday Channel 12 report, citing a security source.

The report specified that Hamas had enlisted some 3,000 new operatives into its ranks in that area of Gaza.

Additionally, the resistance group reportedly provided them with weapons, ammunition, and payment.

According to the Channel 12 report, while some Israeli forces remain in northern Gaza, the absence of large troop deployments has allowed Hamas to operate more freely in that area.

At the beginning of the war with Gaza, Israeli forces invaded northern Gaza, reportedly destroying much of the Hamas infrastructure there.

In mid-July, the IDF ended a re-invasion of northern Gaza to concentrate on the central Gaza Strip.




Israel to classify West Bank as ‘combat zone’ amid dramatic escalation

Israel Hayom reports:

Recent events have triggered a major policy shift in Israel’s approach to the West Bank, Israel Hayom has learned. Previously designated as a “secondary arena” requiring stable maintenance, the Israeli military now operates under a new paradigm, viewing the West Bank as the second most critical front, immediately after Gaza.

A series of operations across the West Bank are imminent. “The Jenin operation is just the beginning,” security officials emphasize.

Security officials recommend launching extensive operations. One security source described it as “not just mowing the lawn, but uprooting the problem at its source.”

NOTE: In reality, International law supports the efforts of resistance groups against an occupying power, even to the point of armed resistance. Hamas has clearly and openly stated that its enemy is not the Jewish people, but the racist ideology of Zionism – the ideology under which Israel dispossessed 750,000 Palestinian people, exiled them to Gaza and other locations, and continues to oppress and ethnically cleanse their population.

Israeli forces carry the dead body of a Palestinian after an operation in Hebron, West Bank on September 1, 2024. [Mamoun Wazwaz – Anadolu Agency]
Israeli forces carry the dead body of a Palestinian after an operation in Hebron, West Bank on September 1, 2024. [Mamoun Wazwaz – Anadolu Agency] (photo)
Some West Bank updates: Israel continues killing spree

various media outlets report:

The Israeli aggression, since dawn last Wednesday, on the West Bank until now, has killed at least 32 Palestinians: 19 in Jenin, 6 in Tulkarem, 4 in Tubas, and 3 in Hebron, bringing the number of slain Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023, to at least 685.

The total number of injuries in the West Bank and Gaza combined has surpassed 100,000 (94,398 in Gaza, 5,700 in the West Bank) – even as healthcare facilities in both areas remain under siege.

JENIN AREA: Israeli forces today directly targeted four journalists in the town of Kafr Dan, west of Jenin, as they covered the Israeli aggression in the town.

The occupation forces fired live bullets directly at the vehicle of the two photojournalists while they were trying to reach the location of the other journalists in the village of Kafr Dan.

“We narrowly escaped death,” one of the victims explained. “If we hadn’t sped up a bit in our car, they would have killed us. It was a direct assassination attempt.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Israeli soldiers shot a Palestinian teenage girl and prevented medics from reaching her until she succumbed to her wounds in Kafr Dan town, west of Jenin, in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said its medics moved the slain child, Lujain Osama Abdul-Rauf Mosleh, 16, to a hospital in Jenin.

TULKARM: A Palestinian minor was killed Tuesday dawn by Israeli occupation forces during the ongoing raid on Tulkarm camp.

Medical and local sources said that Mohammad Kanaan was killed after being shot in the head by the occupation forces’ snipers while he was with his father in one of the camp’s neighborhoods, while his father was shot in the abdomen by the occupation forces.

On Tuesday evening, two Palestinians were killed after the army surrounded a home and fired at it, in the Thannaba Suburb in Tulkarem.

Media sources said that the attack killed two young men inside the home before the soldiers took their corpses to an unknown destination. (More on Tulkarm here.)

HEBRON: After closing the Ibrahimi Mosque to Muslim Palestinian worshippers, the Israeli army allowed thousands of illegal settlers to hold a concert and perform their rituals at the site in the West Bank city of Hebron.

Mosque director Moataz Abu Sneineh said that the Israeli settlers held a concert in the mosque’s courtyards “in a blatant violation of the places of worship and the privacy of Muslims.”

Some of Tuesday's victims of Israeli attacks in the West Bank
Some of Tuesday’s victims of Israeli attacks in the West Bank (photos)
Unprecedented number of Palestinian journalists arrested by Israel since October 7th

The Committee To Protect Journalists reports:

Since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, an unprecedented number of journalists and media workers have been arrested — often without charge — in what they and their attorneys say is retaliation for their journalism and commentary.

As of September 4, CPJ has documented a total of 54 arrests of journalists in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza and in the city of Jerusalem, claimed by both Israel and the Palestinians as a capital, since the war began on October 7, 2023. Israel arrested 51; Palestinian authorities arrested three.

Nineteen of these journalists, including the three held by Palestinian authorities, have since been released, while 35 remain under arrest.

At least 14 of the journalists arrested by Israel are being held under administrative detention, a policy under which a military commander may detain an individual without charge, typically for six months, on the grounds of preventing them from committing a future offense. Detention can be extended an unlimited number of times.

(Editor’s note: These numbers are being updated regularly as more information becomes available. The tally includes all arrests documented by CPJ. As is our global practice, journalists who request anonymity out of concern for their safety are not named in the list below.)

“Since October 7, Israel has been arresting Palestinian journalists in record numbers and using administrative detention to keep them behind bars, thus depriving the region not only of much needed information, but also of Palestinian voices on the conflict,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna in New York. “If Israel wants to live up to its self-styled reputation of being the only democracy in the Middle East, it needs to release detained Palestinian journalists and stop using military courts to hold them without evidence.”

CPJ ALSO REPORTS: Since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, journalists and media across the region have faced a hostile environment that has made reporting on the war exceptionally challenging.

In addition to documenting the growing tally of journalists killed and injured, CPJ’s research has found multiple kinds of incidents of journalists being targeted while carrying out their work in Israel and the two Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank.

These include 54 arrests, as well as numerous assaults, threats and harassment, cyberattacks, and censorship.

(Find details and examples here. Find an up-to-date list of journalists killed here.)

RECOMMENDED READING: CNN staff say network’s pro-Israel slant amounts to ‘journalistic malpractice’

Int’l Criminal Court likely to decide whether to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant ‘over coming days’

Ha’aretz reports:

Justice Ministry officials expect the International Criminal Court (ICC) to decide in the coming days on whether to issue arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, but are cautiously optimistic that the court will decide against the warrants.

The officials said the government’s refusal to set up a state commission of inquiry to investigate the events of the war, as recommended by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, along with the fact that Israel has been lagging in its own investigations of alleged war crimes – something that would preempt ICC action under the principle of complementarity – strengthen the likelihood that the court will accept Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for the warrants.

The officials said they expect the court to issue its decision within days, or at most a few weeks.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 13, 2023.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 13, 2023. (photo)
US Justice Department files criminal charges against Hamas

Al Jazeera reports:

The US announced criminal charges against Hamas’s top leadership, including the group’s chief Yahya Sinwar, accusing them of leading efforts to kill civilians and destroy the state of Israel.

“As outlined in our complaint, those defendants — armed with weapons, political support, and funding from the Government of Iran, and support from Hezbollah — have led Hamas’s efforts to destroy the State of Israel and murder civilians in support of that aim,” US Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement.

Other Hamas leaders charged include Marwan Issa, the deputy leader of Hamas’s armed wing in Gaza, Khaled Meshaal, a deputy of slain former Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and a former leader of the group, Mohammed al-Masri and Ali Baraka.

NOTE: Garland’s nomination was endorsed by pro-Israel groups such as the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which advocates for Israel.

HA’ARETZ ADDS: U.S. National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby acknowledged Tuesday that the events of the weekend will dictate U.S. actions moving forward.

“I’d be lying to you if I said the work going on in the days ahead are not going to be shaped or colored by our outrage about what Hamas did,” he said.

RECOMMENDED READING: US charges Hamas leaders over October 7, Gaza mediation role under question

Netanyahu once again erases Palestine during address

Middle East Monitor reports:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used a map of Israel that erases the occupied West Bank, marking it as Israeli territory, in an address to the media yesterday.

The Israeli premier appeared standing in front of a wall-sized digital map that obliterated the West Bank. Palestinians decried the move as an explicit annexation of the occupied territory by Tel Aviv.

Speaking about the importance of the Philadelphi Corridor between Gaza and Egypt, Netanyahu used a map which showed the entirety of the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem as being annexed to Israel and only had the Gaza Strip outlined.

“Netanyahu’s map reveals the truth of the colonial and racist agendas of the extremist right-wing government,” the Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“Netanyahu continues and repeatedly uses a map that includes the West Bank as part of the occupation state, in clear and explicit recognition of this racist colonial crime, and disregard of international legitimacy and its resolutions, international will for peace and the signed agreements,” the ministry said.

NOTE: Israel’s supporters criticize the pro-Palestine slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free,” because they claim it calls for the erasure of Israel. In reality, the phrase is, in the words of Palestinian American congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, “an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence.” Netanyahu’s map says, in essence, “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall not exist.”

RECOMMENDED READING: No more “shrinking map of Palestine” – it’s gone

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu used a map of Israel that erases the occupied West Bank to address the media [Screenshot/Anadolu]
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu used a map of Israel that erases the occupied West Bank to address the media [Screenshot/Anadolu] (photo)
Trump advisor pushes to divert Palestine aid funds for Israeli annexation of West Bank

The Cradle reports:

Former US ambassador to Israel and advisor to Donald Trump, David Friedman, proposed in his new book that Congress should redirect $1 billion allocated for Palestinian aid to support Israeli plans for an annexation of the occupied West Bank.

“Israel will need financial assistance to assert and maintain its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria,” Friedman wrote in his new book, using the biblical term used by Israel to refer to the West Bank.

Friedman writes in his book, titled One Jewish State: The Last and Best Hope for Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, that the US could divert $1 billion in current aid to the Palestinians – which includes funds for Palestinian Authority (PA) security services – to fund the Israeli annexation plan.

Friedman also compares Palestinians living under Israeli occupation to Puerto Ricans, who live on an island considered US territory.

“Palestinians, like Puerto Ricans, will not vote in national elections. Palestinians will be free to enact their own governing documents as long as they do not conflict with those of Israel,” he wrote.

Friedman argues the US should support Israel’s annexation “based first and foremost on biblical prophecies and values”, saying that such a policy “hearkens back to basic Judeo-Christian values of kindness, human dignity, humility and prosperity”.

Friedman said he has not yet shared his idea for funding the annexation with Trump. “I hope to share it with him at the appropriate time.”

NOTE: “Biblical prophecies” do not speak anywhere of a modern Jewish state. Pro-Israel (and in many cases, antisemitic) interpretations of Biblical prophecies have twisted the words of the sacred text to imply that a modern Jewish state is a precursor to the endtimes and the return of Christ.

RECOMMENDED READING: Friedman drove the radical overhaul of US policy on Israel-Palestine and Trump Is Desperate for Miriam Adelson’s Cash. Her Condition: West Bank Annexation

President Donald J. Trump, joined by White House senior staff members, delivers a statement announcing the agreement of full normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020, in the Oval Office of the White House (David Friedman, L).
President Donald J. Trump, joined by White House senior staff members, delivers a statement announcing the agreement of full normalization of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates Thursday, Aug. 13, 2020, in the Oval Office of the White House (David Friedman, L). (photo)
U.S. Still Talking Up a Hostage Deal, but Privately Despair About Netanyahu

Ha’aretz reports:

The Biden administration continues to insist publicly that it is committed to negotiations on a hostage and cease-fire deal in Gaza Strip, but senior officials in the government are expressing despair and frustration about the state of the talks, especially after Israel’s security cabinet approved a resolution last week opposing withdrawal from the Philadelphi route in the context of an agreement.

The aim of the administration’s public messages, according to one of the officials, was to allow the talks to continue, in the hope that a breakthrough might occur nonetheless. “It has no real connection to reality,” he said.

President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and White House national security spokesman John Kirby repeat every few days that progress has been made in the talks, the gaps between Israel and Hamas can be bridged and an agreement is within reach, if both sides agree to compromise.

Behind the scenes, however, the administration is well aware that the talks have reached an impasse due to Netanyahu’s insistence on the issue of the Philadelphi route, and it seems that both the prime minister and Yahya Sinwar, the head of Hamas and the organization’s top official in Gaza, are refusing to take the necessary steps to reach a deal at this time. “We want this agreement more than they do,” the American official said.

HA’ARETZ ALSO REPORTS: A source inside the Netanyahu coalition who is closely involved in and a part of the government said, “Benjamin Netanyahu decided some weeks ago that he does not want a deal, and when it became possible, he got nervous and did all he could to torpedo it. He figured out that [he could use] the Philadelphi corridor” to stall the process.

“The media fell for this spin and is consumed all day long with the question of yes or no to the Philadelphi, when the real question is really the fate of the hostages versus the fate of the coalition,” the source added.

“Not one minister, including those who know that Netanyahu is sabotaging a deal, will do anything,” the source says. “They are bound to one another, their political survival depends on the government’s survival, and therefore this situation will continue. Netanyahu will pursue an endless war because that’s what is good for him.”

Netanyahu, centre, chairs a cabinet meeting at the Kirya, which houses the Israeli Ministry of Defense, in Tel Aviv
Netanyahu, center, chairs a cabinet meeting at the Kirya, which houses the Israeli Ministry of Defense, in Tel Aviv (photo)
David Cameron sat on advice that there was breach of law in Gaza, officials say

The Guardian reports:

As far back as February, UK’s former foreign secretary David Cameron sat on advice that arms export licenses to Israel should be banned.

The recommendation was based on clear evidence that Israel was violating international humanitarian law in Gaza, for which the UK risked being complicit, a former Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) adviser said.

The source, who contributed to the drafting of the advice, was speaking after the Labour government banned 30 of about 350 arms export licenses due to a clear risk cited in a government memorandum published on Monday that they might be used in serious breaches of international humanitarian law.

“The tragedy has to be considered: how many lives might have been saved if the arms export licenses had been stopped [in February and not in September, and what the potential ripple effect might have been on how other countries would have reacted in ceasing trade.”

NOTE: While the Biden administration has claimed often to be “working day and night” on a ceasefire, in reality, it has been working relentlessly to keep Israel armed – including through secret arms sales – to enable its genocidal war on the Palestinian people. American arms shipments to Israel since October 7th have surpassed 50,000 tons.

Most Americans are opposed to arms transfers to Israel.

RECOMMENDED READING: An arms embargo on Israel is not a radical idea — it’s the law

Then-Foreign Secretary David Cameron meets Antony Blinken, United States Secretary of State for a bilateral meeting and press conference at the US State Department in Washington D.C., December 2023
Then-Foreign Secretary David Cameron meets Antony Blinken, United States Secretary of State for a bilateral meeting and press conference at the US State Department in Washington D.C., December 2023 (photo)
Which countries have banned or restricted arms sales to Israel?


Britain is the latest country to shift its position on arms sales to Israel, which has been dependent on international weaponry for an 11-month assault on Gaza that has killed more than 40,000 people.

Here is how different countries have responded to Israel’s war:

Banned or restricted arms sales

Britain
Italy
Spain
Canada
Belgium
The Netherlands
No ban on arms sales

The US
Germany
Denmark
(For details on each country listed, go here.)




There Is No Argument For Supporting Israel That’s Both Logical And Moral

by Caitlyn Johnstone:

It’s wild when you realize that nobody can actually articulate a reason why Israel should be supported that is both logically coherent and morally defensible.

Westerners grow up being indoctrinated with the understanding that this tiny country in the middle east is super duper important and needs to be supported and defended at all cost, but if you examine the reasons given for why this is so as an adult, you find that none of them really hold water.

“Israel is the only place where Jews can be safe!”
“The Jews deserve a homeland!”
“Israel is the only liberal democracy in the middle east.”
“I support Israel’s existence but I oppose the mistreatment of Palestinians.”
“Israel is essential for protecting our interests in the region.”
(Read Caitlyn Johnstone’s rebuttal to each of these statements here.)

Palestinians remove whatever belongings they can salvage from the area as the devastation left by the Israeli army’s withdrawal comes to light in eastern Deir al-Balah, Gaza on August 29, 2024. [Ali Jadallah – Anadolu Agency]
Palestinians remove whatever belongings they can salvage from the area as the devastation left by the Israeli army’s withdrawal comes to light in eastern Deir al-Balah, Gaza on August 29, 2024. [Ali Jadallah – Anadolu Agency] (photo)
Columbia U students will not be silenced on Palestine

Palestine Chronicle reports:

The students at Columbia University in New York City inaugurated their first day of the fall semester on Tuesday by staging pro-Palestine demonstrations.

This resulted in the arrest of two students by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) outside of Barnard gates, as reported by the Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine.

The group live-streamed on the social media platform X parts of the protests, stating that the NYPD officers were “extremely aggressive with students, shoving protestors against the barricades”.

The student group stressed that as long as their university remains complicit in the ongoing genocide in Gaza “there is no business as usual during a genocide.”

“We refuse to live in a world where the mass murder of Palestinians is normal, acceptable, and profitable. Columbia University is complicit in genocide. Their investments in weapons manufacturers & defense contractors, companies such as Lockheed Martin, are fueling the genocide,” the students said on X.

The students also posted photos and footage of the statue of Alma Mater, on the steps of Columbia’s library, soaked in red as a sign of their university’s financial support for Israel and repression of pro-Palestine voices amid genocide, per the group.

The statue of Alma Mater, on the steps of Columbia’s library, was soaked in red as the protests resumed. (Photo: via NationalSJP TW Page)
The statue of Alma Mater, on the steps of Columbia’s library, was soaked in red as the protests resumed. (Photo: via NationalSJP TW Page) (photo)
MORE NEWS:

IMEMC Daily Reports.

The Guardian: Australia’s security chief says person who likes tweet supporting 7 October attacks on Israel could fail visa security test

The Cradle: Amnesty blasts UK ‘gesture politics’ after suspension of less than 10 percent of arms export licenses to Israel

Caitlyn’s Newsletter: The West Truly Doesn’t See Palestinians As Human

Al Jazeera: Paralympics: Palestine’s Aldeeb sees himself as the voice of his people

+972 Magazine: ‘This is also America’s war’: Why the U.S. isn’t stopping Israel’s Gaza onslaught

STATISTICS OCTOBER 7 – SEPTEMBER 3:

Palestinian death toll from October 7, 2023 – September 3, 2024: at least 41,546* (40,861 in Gaza* – 11,445 women (30%), 16,251 children as of July 22. [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]

This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 685 in the West Bank (~147 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children). Euro-Med Monitor reports 49,032 Palestinian deaths.

Lancet: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

Ralph Nader earlier estimated 200,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.

At least 45 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 23 from West Bank).
At least 41 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition**.
About 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are currently displaced.
Almost 500,000 Gazans are currently experiencing catastrophic levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7 – September 3: at least 100,098 (including at least 94,398 in Gaza and 5,700 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how man Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]

Reported Israeli death toll from October 7, 2023 – September 3, 2024: ~1,452 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 288*** military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza; 25 military and civilians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel) and~10,000 injured.

NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries of Israelis on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.

*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.

**Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.

***Approximately ten of the deaths listed above were Israeli soldiers killed by Hezbollah in fighting at the Israel-Lebanon border. The figure does not include the reportedly 53 Israeli soldiers – nearly 16% of the total Israeli military deaths – killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents.

† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.

Hover over each bar for exact numbers.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org

Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
Alison Weir trending on social media – what the buzz is about
Israeli media’s coverage of the rape of Palestinian detainees shows support for sexual violence in service of genocide
Inside Israel’s torture, rape, and dehumanization centers
I’m a pediatrician. The scars I saw on Gaza’s children will take generations to heal.
What Harris’s Jewish outreach director said at a private DNC afterparty
‘Strong record of supporting the U.S.-Israel relationship’: a look at Tim Walz’s votes on Palestine as a member of Congress
Nearly Two-Thirds of All Campaign Funds for Cori Bush Challenger Came From AIPAC
Israeli army probe covered up “friendly fire” killings on October 7
Are US officials’ investments of public funds in Israeli bonds ethical? How much is too much?
Honoring the memory of a Gazan Olympic hero: Majed Abu Maraheel
An American was just shot in the West Bank. The American press can’t be bothered.
Understanding what motivates ultra-orthodox Jewish attacks on West Bank Palestinians
Palestinians’ harrowing stories of rape by Israeli soldiers (including female soldiers)
A Palestinian journalist visited Ismail Haniyeh’s home in Gaza to report on his death. Israel assassinated him too.
I reported a piece for the New York Times on antisemitism. I found a major error, but the Times didn’t care.
How Israel plans to whitewash its war crimes in Gaza
Why the West Bank is on the verge of economic collapse
Netanyahu’s plan to involve US in regional war on its behalf
Western media continue to withhold the truth about Israel and Gaza – 4 stories
“Well What SHOULD Israel Have Done After October 7?”
Welcome to Hell
More dead children. More BBC ‘news’ channelling Israeli propaganda as its own
U.S. media downplays and ignores ICJ ruling declaring Israeli occupation illegal
Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one given blessing by the West
Searching for Gaza’s missing children

https://israelpalestinenews.org/israeli-inflicted-palestinian-injuries-gaza-west-bank-surpass-100000-day-332/

Gaza records first polio case in 25 years – Day 314
[email protected] August 17, 2024 arms embargo, ceasefire, DNC, freedom flotilla, from the river to the sea, humanitarian aid, icc arrest warrant, Jayson Gillham, Mark Smith FCDO, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, pogrom, polio, safe zone, UC Irvine, uncommitted movement
Smoke rises from the Hamad area following an Israeli attack, which came immediately after Israel issued an evacuation warning to the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis on August 16, 2024 [Doaa Albaz/Anadolu Agency] (photo)
Polio epidemic begins; new flyers about Gaza to distribute; just 11 percent of Gaza for Gazans; Israeli settlers carry out pogrom in Palestinian town of Jit; Gaza Freedom Flotilla drawing near – will it break Israel’s blockade?; Israeli leaders mull how to dodge ICC arrest warrants; German courts grapple with the meaning of “from the river to the sea”; awaiting UC-Irvine’s fall policy on Palestine protest; Dems want ceasefire and arms embargo, but will Kamala listen?; senior UK diplomat resigns over Gaza; Australia’s classical music scene scuffle over Gaza; “Blue Vote Red Line” movement continues to gather signatures; more.

By IAK staff, from reports.

Gaza records first polio case as UN calls for truce to tackle virus

Al Jazeera reports: The Health Ministry in Gaza has said that it detected the first polio case in the besieged enclave, hours after United Nations officials called for a pause in the fighting to enable a vaccination campaign for children against the virus.

In a statement on Friday, the Health Ministry blamed the “difficult” conditions in Gaza – including the spread of sewage water in the streets, shortages of medical supplies and lack of personal hygiene products due to the Israeli blockade – for the emergence of the virus in the territory.

Hours earlier, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had called for humanitarian pauses in the war in Gaza to conduct a polio vaccine campaign.

“It is impossible to conduct a polio vaccination campaign with war raging all over,” he told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York.

Guterres appealed for assurances of humanitarian pauses to be provided immediately from the warring parties as he warned that preventing and containing the spread of polio in Gaza would take a massive coordinated and urgent effort.

“Let’s be clear: The ultimate vaccine for polio is peace and an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” Guterres said. “But in any case, a polio pause is a must.”

(Read the full article here.)

Details of the proposed vaccination campaign are here.

After Israel destroyed Gaza's water and sewage systems, filthy water runs or stands stagnant all over the enclave, carrying polio and other diseases.
After Israel destroyed Gaza’s water and sewage systems, filthy water runs or stands stagnant all over the enclave, carrying polio and other diseases. (collage)
New fact sheets about Gaza to be distributed in Chicago and around the country

If Americans knew has produced two new flyers printed front and back with facts about Gaza for educating Americans.

These will be available in Chicago at the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention for everyone to distribute widely. To obtain these, email [email protected]. Below is one of the flyers:


Front and back sides of one of the new factsheets about Gaza. (IAK)
Latest evacuation order leaves just 11 percent of Gaza for Gazans; food kitchens in crisis

OCHA reports: The Israeli military issued an order on 16 August that affects six blocs in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis, including two within the Israeli-designated zone in Al Mawasi in western Khan Younis.

This is one of the largest evacuation orders affecting the zone to date, and it shrinks the size of the so-called “humanitarian area” to about 41 square kilometers, or 11 per cent of the total area of the Gaza Strip.

Initial mapping indicates that this order affects 122 internally displaced persons sites, makeshift shelters, and collective centers that are collectively hosting over 170,000 people.

There is an urgent need for increased hot meal capacity in Gaza due to recurrent waves of displacement, the World Food Programme (WFP) reported on 12 August. Many community kitchens in central and southern Gaza struggle due to unstable supplies of humanitarian cargo and the lack of food and fuel.

The situation has worsened since 22 July following the issuance of multiple evacuation orders in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis, which forced the relocation of four kitchens and the closure of 19 food delivery points.

Moreover, in Deir al Balah, about 1,400 metric tons of food stocks in one of the warehouses became inaccessible and only one WFP warehouse with about 3,000 metric tons of commodities is currently accessible but is insufficient to meet the August cycle requirements.

In July, 70 community kitchens in Gaza supported by WFP provided around 11.5 million hot meals to more than 200,000 people, the majority in central Gaza.

Of the total food cargo entering through Kerem Shalom Crossing in July, only eight per cent was humanitarian aid and the rest were commercial trucks. There was reportedly a slight improvement in food availability and diversity in Deir al Balah and Khan Younis, but a deterioration in other governorates, and persistent challenges to market functionality including high food prices, lack of liquidity and the emergence of “thieves markets.”



Israeli settlers rampage across Palestinian town in latest West Bank pogrom

The Cradle reports: More than 70 armed Jewish settlers invaded the Palestinian town of Jit in the occupied West Bank on 15 August, firing bullets and tear gas at residents and setting several homes and cars and other property on fire, CNN reported.

Settlers killed 23-year-old Rashid Sedda during the pogrom. The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health confirmed the 23-year-old Palestinian died due to a gunshot wound to the chest.

“We have attacks but nothing to this level,” the head of Jit’s village council, Nasser Sedda, told CNN. “We haven’t seen anything like this before, and without a prior warning. They caught the people off guard – women, children, and elders were there.”

“Dozens of Israeli civilians, some of them masked, entered the town of Jit and set fire to vehicles and structures in the area, hurled rocks and Molotov cocktails,” the Israeli military said in a statement.

Haaretz reported that the only person arrested after the settler raid on the village of Jit was suspected of interfering with a policeman and was released. No arrests have yet been made for those involved in the pogrom.


New film from the Freedom Flotilla Coalition:



And as this IAK video reported eight years ago, Israeli blockades of Gaza began years before Hamas came to power:



Gaza Freedom Flotilla: Activists prepare to defy Israel naval blockade of Gaza

Reuters reports: Peace activists from several countries are setting out on a converted trawler to defy an Israeli blockade and deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“The purpose of this mission is to send a message that civil society is not OK with what’s happening in Gaza,” said Fellipe Lopes, the Portuguese media coordinator of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition on board the ship, “Handala” during a stopover in Malta.

It will be a trip fraught with danger. Another coalition ship on a similar mission to Gaza in 2010 was stopped and boarded by Israeli troops, and nine activists died. Other ships were similarly stopped and boarded, without loss of life.

“We expect to encounter resistance throughout our mission,” said Australian activist, Michael Coleman.

“Ours is not an illegal activity in any shape or form. The International Court of Justice has asked them to grant unfettered access to aid into Gaza and I implore them to let us and other aids through immediately,” he said.

The “Handala” was visited in Malta by 78-year-old retired US Army Colonel and diplomat, Ann Wright, who was on board another coalition ship boarded by Israeli troops in 2010, in the incident in which nine activists died.

“These people are very brave, because we don’t know what’s going to happen. If the Israelis stop them, we know it’ll be brutal,” Wright said.

The brightly colored “Handala” carries activists from Italy, France, Norway, Australia, the Netherlands, Syria and a number of Palestinians. It has made several port calls around Scandinavia and the Mediterranean to raise awareness about the situation in Gaza.

Its hull carries slogans reading: “Free Palestine”, “Gaza you are not alone” and “Stop the Genocide”, while its humanitarian aid cargo consists mostly of medicines.

The trip along the Eastern Mediterranean to Gaza will take a week but organizers said they might stop over in another harbor on the way.

NOTE: The flotilla movement was begun by activists Greta Berlin, Paul Larudee and associates.

The ship named Handala, belonging to the Freedom Flotilla (Ship to Gaza), which set sail from the capital of Norway, Oslo, on May 1st with the aim of delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza arrives in Rotterdam, Netherlands on 25 May, 2024 [ Abdullah Asiran/Anadolu via Getty Images]
The ship named Handala, belonging to the Freedom Flotilla (Ship to Gaza), which set sail from the capital of Norway, Oslo, on May 1st with the aim of delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza arrives in Rotterdam, Netherlands on 25 May, 2024 [ Abdullah Asiran/Anadolu via Getty Images] (photo)
Israeli leaders strategize about how to dodge ICC arrest warrants

Andalou Agency reports: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant met with other officials Thursday to discuss efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants against them.

“The Attorney General reiterated her position regarding the establishment of a State Commission of Inquiry to examine the humanitarian situation in Gaza even though, according to the view of the Attorney General herself, there is no certainty that establishing this commission would lead to the cancellation of the request to issue the warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said in a statement.



‘From the river to the sea’: six words that are testing freedom of speech in Germany

The Guardian reports: Is it legal to say the words “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in Germany? The answer appears to be yes: you can shout them from the rooftops in German, English, Arabic or Hebrew, so long as a court accepts that you are not doing so to indicate support for Hamas or its murderous assault of 7 October.

This distinction came to bear on the activist Ava Moayeri last week, when she was convicted of “condoning a crime” for leading a chant of the slogan at a Berlin rally on 11 October. If the speaker of the phrase is understood to mean, for instance, that they support the peaceful liberation of Palestinians, then the utterance would be protected.

But the presiding judge, Birgit Balzer, didn’t think that was possible in this case, citing the date of the protest in her decision. Moayeri is expected to challenge the verdict in a higher court.

The slogan has come to symbolize a rift running through German society amid Israel’s war in Gaza. For some people, the expression is implicitly genocidal, especially because of its long history of use by Hamas and other terrorist organizations. The judge reportedly said that it was clear to her that it “denied the right of the state of Israel to exist”, while Germany’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, has declared it to be a Hamas slogan.

(Read the full article here.)



Student protesters at UC Irvine were suspended with no chance to defend themselves. Will courts return them to campus?

The Intercept reports: Amid the brutal police crackdowns at more than 100 campus protests against the war in Gaza the spring, one university in California stood out for its especially harsh treatment of student protesters. The school effectively eliminated any due process for the students by suspending them without making specific allegations of misconduct or allowing the students to respond to vague charges.

Last month, student protesters at University of California, Irvine sued the school regents and chancellor for suspending them without any notice or a chance to present evidence in their defense. On Tuesday, plaintiffs in the suit filed a motion to ask the Superior Court of California to step in.

The five students are asking the court to force the school to halt the suspensions and allow students to resume their studies, register for fall classes, go back to campus jobs, and regain access to campus housing.

More than 3,000 people were arrested during brutal police crackdowns on campus protests this year, according to a protest tracker developed by The Appeal. UCI is still an outlier — it’s one of the only schools in the country that issued interim suspensions banning students from campus before they had a chance to respond. The university’s approach was, a representative for the students said, unprecedented.

(Read the full article here.)

Are these people Hamas? Photo by Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images
Are these people Hamas? Photo by Justin Tallis/AFP via Getty Images (photo)
‘Not Another Bomb’ to Israel Demand Grows Ahead of Democratic Convention

Common Dreams reports: Leading up to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago next week, calls for the U.S. government to stop arming Israel’s devastating assault on the Gaza Strip—widely denounced around the world as genocide—continued to mount on Friday.

“We join the millions of people who’ve taken action the last 10 months, taxpayers who don’t want to pay for genocide and are demanding an immediate arms embargo on Israel,” U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) executive director Ahmad Abuznaid said in a statement Friday.

“We know that politicians won’t change their unjust policies until it’s in their own self-interest to do so,” he continued. “We must double down on our demands ahead of the DNC, where we’ll be marching in the streets for the liberation of all.”

Pro-Palestine protests in Chicago are set to start Sunday, a day before the DNC officially begins. They will continue throughout the week, according to a schedule shared Friday by the Chicago Sun-Times. The March on the DNC is planned for Monday afternoon.

(Read the full article here.)

NOTE: If Americans Knew has created fact sheets about Gaza that will be distributed at the protests shown above. IAK will also have a digital billboard truck in Chicago during the convention and large posters about Gaza will be plastered around the city.

Protesters in Atlanta, Georgia, demand a ceasefire in Gaza on June 27, 2024. Photo by Octavio Jones/Getty Images
Protesters in Atlanta, Georgia, demand a ceasefire in Gaza on June 27, 2024. Photo by Octavio Jones/Getty Images (photo)
New Poll Suggests Gaza Ceasefire and Arms Embargo Would Help Dems with Swing State Voters

A new poll, just released Wednesday by YouGov and the Institute for Mideast Understanding (IMEU) showed that in three key battleground states, “About a quarter of those surveyed across these states say the violence in Gaza will sway how they vote,” and that “60% or more disapprove of more weapons to Israel.”

Even more stunning, the number of Democratic and Independent voters who would be less likely to vote for Harris if she vowed to stop arming Israel is minuscule. In Pennsylvania, only 7% said they would be less likely to vote for Harris if she pledged to stop sending weapons to Israel; in both Arizona and Georgia, that figure was just 5%.

The gaps are huge. In those same states, the numbers saying they would be more likely to vote for Harris if she pledged to stop arming Israel were 34% in Pennsylvania, 39% in Georgia, and 35% in Arizona. The rest said it wouldn’t affect their vote.

“This polling clearly shows that if the Democrats want Vice President Harris to be the strongest nominee possible going into November, then they should be demanding that President Biden stop the flow of weapons to Israel and secure a permanent ceasefire immediately,” IMEU Policy Project Executive Director Margaret DeReus said in a statement. “Not only are these policies popular, but they actually move voters from the ‘undecided’ or ‘not voting’ column and into the Democrats’ column in the states Democrats will need to win.”

It is clear that the idea that forcing Israel into a ceasefire by withholding weapons would be beneficial to Harris, and all the more so if Israel then stops its genocide, and Iran and the rest of the Axis of Resistance stand down, as has been promised, and is the overwhelmingly likely result.

Harris leads Trump in Pennsylvania by 2.1%, Arizona by 0.7%, and Georgia by 0.1%, according to the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages as of Aug. 14.

An Israeli soldier carries a 155mm artillery shell near a self-propelled howitzer deployed at a position near the border with Lebanon in the upper Galilee region of northern Israel on October 18, 2023. (Photo: Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images)
An Israeli soldier carries a 155mm artillery shell near a self-propelled howitzer deployed at a position near the border with Lebanon in the upper Galilee region of northern Israel on October 18, 2023. (Photo: Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images) (photo)
Senior diplomat resigns over UK’s complicity in ‘war crimes’ in Gaza

Middle East Monitor reports: A senior British diplomat has resigned from the Foreign Office over the UK’s continued arms sales to Israel, which he said have “no justification”.

Mark Smith, the head of Africa Programmes and Expertise Department and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, submitted a resignation letter entitled “FCDO complicity in War Crimes” reports revealed yesterday.

“It is with sadness that I resign after a long career in the diplomatic service,” he wrote, “however I can no longer carry out my duties in the knowledge that this Department may be complicit in War Crimes. ”

“Each day we witness clear and unquestionable examples of War Crimes and breaches of International Humanitarian Law in Gaza perpetrated by the State of Israel,” he continued.

He went on to highlight how “senior members of the Israeli government and militar have expressed open genocidal intent, Isralei soldiers take videos, deliberately burning destroying, and looting civilian property and openly admit to the rape and torture of prisoners.”

Melbourne orchestra leaders voted out for removing pianist over Gaza tribute

Middle East Eye reports: Musicians at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) have passed a vote of no confidence in its board after it cancelled a show by a pianist who had dedicated a performance to Palestinian journalists killed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

In a letter to the management, the musicians said, “We believe it is the duty of senior management to lead and manage in accordance with the MSO’s values and behaviors, however, it has become apparent that these values no longer appear to be aligned with those of the orchestra and staff.”

On Sunday, British-Australian pianist Jayson Gillham premiered a five-minute piece called Witness, which he performed after a brief comment on Israel’s killing of journalists in Gaza, which he referred to as a war crime.

Following the concert, MSO announced that it had cancelled Gillham’s upcoming performance, which was to take place on Thursday, due to “a series of introductory remarks” he made.

It said that it had sought “independent security advice” following Sunday’s concert, and in light of the advice, “had no option but to cancel” Gillham’s next show.

AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW ADDS: After a litany of protest from its staff, some subscribers and members of the public, the MSO had by Thursday relented and released a statement admitting its cancellation of Gillham had been “an error”, and that it was working to program a new concert with him shortly.

The backdown has in turn upset some Jewish stakeholders.

“The MSO got it right the first time,” said the co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Peter Wertheim.

Jayson Gillham has been involved in the Palestinian issue in the past.

“Blue Vote Red Line” movement continues to gather signatures

The “Blue Vote Red Line” movement seeks to collect 1 million voters to pledge a vote for the Democratic ticket if, and only if, it commits to 1) enforce an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, as ordered by the World Court and UN Security Council Resolution 2735 or 2) end all military aid to Israel.

Their goal is to “force the Democratic Party to listen to its voters and not just its donors. The pledge can be viewed and signed here.

MORE NEWS:

IMEMC Daily Reports.

BBC: ‘On verge of an explosion’: Policeman’s killing part of spiraling West Bank violence

The Cradle: Canada violates UN arms treaty with ‘unofficial’ shipments to Israel via US

DropSite News: While Elon Musk battles the UK and EU over social media censorship, Israel is jailing citizens for Instagram posts

Palestine Chronicle: Deceptive Optimism – What is really happening at the Gaza ceasefire talks (analysis)


STATISTICS OCTOBER 7 – AUGUST 16:

Palestinian death toll from October 7 – August 16: at least 40,706* (40,074 in Gaza* – 11,445 women (30%), 16,251 children as of July 22. [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]

This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 632 in the West Bank (~145 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children). Euro-Med Monitor reports 46,848 Palestinian deaths.

Lancet: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

Ralph Nader earlier estimated 200,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.

At least 45 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 18 from West Bank).
At least 41 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition**.
About 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are currently displaced.
Almost 500,000 Gazans are currently experiencing catastrophic levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7 – August 16: at least 97,957 (including at least 92,537 in Gaza and 5,420 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how man Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]

Reported Israeli death toll from October 7 – August 16: ~1,454 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 290*** military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza; 25 military and civilians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel) and~10,000 injured.

NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries in Israel on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.

*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.

**Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.

***Approximately ten of the deaths listed above were Israeli soldiers killed by Hezbollah in fighting at the Israel-Lebanon border. The figure does not include the reportedly 41 Israeli soldiers – nearly 16% of the total Israeli military deaths – killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents.

† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.

Hover over each bar for exact numbers.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org
Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
Understanding what motivates ultra-orthodox Jewish attacks on West Bank Palestinians
Palestinians’ harrowing stories of rape by Israeli soldiers (including female soldiers)
A Palestinian journalist visited Ismail Haniyeh’s home in Gaza to report on his death. Israel assassinated him too.
I reported a piece for the New York Times on antisemitism. I found a major error, but the Times didn’t care.
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Why the West Bank is on the verge of economic collapse
Netanyahu’s plan to involve US in regional war on its behalf
Western media continue to withhold the truth about Israel and Gaza – 4 stories
“Well What SHOULD Israel Have Done After October 7?”
Welcome to Hell
More dead children. More BBC ‘news’ channelling Israeli propaganda as its own
U.S. media downplays and ignores ICJ ruling declaring Israeli occupation illegal
Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one given blessing by the West
Searching for Gaza’s missing children
What Would You Do With An Extra $320 Million?
Assassination of Haniyeh an intentional, dangerous escalation – Parsi, Macgregor
When Israel Burned Refugees Alive, Establishment Media Called It a ‘Tragic Accident’
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US Should Arrest Benjamin Netanyahu When He’s in Washington
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Hesen Jabr paid the price of conscience
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https://israelpalestinenews.org/gaza-records-first-polio-case-in-25-years-day-314/

Saved by @InstantMediaBot

Palestinian Reverend Munther Isaac to U.S. Faith Leaders: If You Are Silent, You Approve of Genocide
Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-desc-yt

Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's war on Gaza, according to the official death toll, though the true casualty figure is likely far higher with thousands of the dead unaccounted for. Meanwhile, Israeli forces have raided towns and villages across the occupied West Bank, and settlers under military protection have repeatedly stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in recent days. This all comes as the State Department on Tuesday announced the approval of $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel, including scores of fighter jets. We speak with the Reverend Munther Isaac, pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, who joins us in our New York studio for an in-depth conversation. He is in the United States on a speaking tour to encourage faith leaders to oppose U.S. support for...

‌Johann Spischak (Twitter)

Palestinian Reverend Munther Isaac to U.S. Faith Leaders: JI You Are Silent, You Approve of Genocide

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRn9allxnIg?si=2woZf2CJH4Dvu6W_
Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's war on Gaza, according to the official death toll, though the true casualty figure is likely far higher with thousands of the dead unaccounted for. Meanwhile, Israeli forces have raided towns and villages across the occupied West Bank, and settlers under military protection have repeatedly stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in recent days. This all comes as the State Department on Tuesday announced the approval of $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel, including scores of fighter jets. We speak with the Reverend Munther Isaac, pastor at the Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, who joins us in our New York studio for an in-depth conversation. He is in the United States on a speaking tour to encourage faith leaders to oppose U.S. support for Israel's onslaught. "We're still calling for a ceasefire, and it feels like we're still calling for the world to humanize the people of Gaza, to humanize Palestinians," says Isaac. "If you're silent, knowing how your money is being spent, that means you approve."

Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.
#UNseatIsrael #AirBlockade4Israel #NoFlyZone4Israel #ICJ_Breach #ICC4Israel #GazaGenocide #PalestinianGenocide #StopArmingIsrael #BoycottOlympics #SanctionIsrael #RegimeChange4Israel #BoycottAdidas #AnatomyofGenocide

US approves “historic” $20B arms sale to Israel, as Gazans die – Day 311
[email protected] August 14, 2024 ben gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, ceasefire, free speech on campus, Iran, israeli gang rape, Josep Borrell, palestine olympics head, twins in gaza, weapons to israel
Destroyed buildings last month in Beit Lahia, one of the northernmost cities in the Gaza Strip.Credit...Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images (photo)
More weapons for Israel; newborn twins killed in Gaza; Israel shoots American activist; two Palestinians killed in West Bank; Israel detains Palestine Olympic head; California mulls anti-free speech on campus bill; Ben Gvir leads provocative march on Temple Mount; EU leader calls for sanctions against Israeli Smotrich for calls to starve Gazans; house arrest for gang-rape suspects; yes, Netanyahu has been messing with ceasefire details;

Iran says Europe’s silence on “inhumane crimes” in Gaza encouraged Israel to continue atrocities while threatening global peace; more.

By IAK staff, from reports.

US State Department Approves Over $20 Billion Arms Package for Israel

AntiWar reports: On Tuesday, the State Department approved a series of potential weapons sales to Israel worth over $20 billion that includes F-15 fighter jets and tank munitions. The approval comes as Israeli airstrikes continue to slaughter civilians in Gaza, including newborn twins who were killed hours before the State Department announced the new support for Israel.

Ha’aretz reports the transaction as “among the most significant arms sales to Israel in American history.”

In total, the US announced five new arms deals for Israel. The biggest is for 50 F-15 fighter jets and related equipment, worth $18.8 billion. Israel will also receive $102.5 million in advanced air-to-air missiles, about 33,000 120mm tank cartridges worth $774 million, 50,000 high-explosive 120mm mortar rounds worth $61.1 million, and $583.1 million worth of medium tactical vehicles.

It’s unclear how much of the massive weapons sale will be funded by US military aid. The announcement came a few days after the State Department said it was releasing $3.5 billion in military assistance for Israel in the form of Foreign Military Financing, a program that gives foreign governments money to buy US weapons.

It will take years before the F-15s and other weapons will be delivered to Israel, although, according to Reuters, the tank rounds would be almost immediately available for delivery. The notification begins a period where Congress could potentially block the sales, but it’s expected to breeze through since only a few dozen progressive Democrats are opposed to arming Israel.

The U.S. has sent Israel more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs and thousands of Hellfire missiles since the start of the Gaza war in October, U.S. officials told Reuters in June.

RECOMMENDED READING: Rafah attack: Netanyahu’s lies expose the truth about Israel

An Israeli soldier carries a 155mm artillery shell near a self-propelled howitzer deployed at a position near the border with Lebanon in the upper Galilee region of northern Israel on October 18, 2023. (Photo: Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images)
An Israeli soldier carries a 155mm artillery shell near a self-propelled howitzer deployed at a position near the border with Lebanon in the upper Galilee region of northern Israel on October 18, 2023. (Photo: Jalaa Marey/AFP via Getty Images) (photo)
Newborn twins killed in Israeli strike in Gaza as father collects their birth certificates

Andalou Agency reports: Newborn twins were killed in an Israeli airstrike in the central Gaza Strip on Tuesday as their father went to collect their birth certificates.

The two babies were born on Saturday in the city of Deir al-Balah, but an Israeli strike on their apartment shattered the family’s joy of their newborns.

“I have just obtained the birth certificates for my newborn babies Aysel and Asser,” their father Mohammad Abu al-Qumsan told Anadolu as tears rolled down his cheeks.

“They were born on August 10. I was outside the house, finalizing the paperwork, and then I got the call… I didn’t expect to find them all gone.”



Israeli hardliner Ben-Gvir “put lives at risk” with Jerusalem prayer call

Reuters reports: Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir on Tuesday visited the Al-Aqsa mosque compound known to Jews as Temple Mount, and said Jews should be allowed to pray there, freshly challenging rules covering one of the most sensitive sites in the Middle East.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly denied there would be any change to rules prohibiting Jews from praying at the site, which is holy to Muslims as well.

The Al-Aqsa compound, revered by Jews as a vestige of their two ancient temples, is administered by a Jordanian religious foundation and under rules dating back decades, Jews are allowed to visit, but may not pray there.

“Our policy is to allow prayer,” Ben-Gvir said as he passed a line of Jewish visitors who prostrated themselves on the ground, while others sang and clapped their hands in celebration. The Waqf, the foundation that administers the site, said around 2,250 Jews entered the site on Tuesday.

The spokesperson for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas denounced Ben-Gvir’s visit as a “provocation” and called on the U.S. to intervene “if it wants to prevent the region from exploding in an uncontrollable manner”.

HA’ARETZ ADDS: What happened on the Temple Mount Tuesday categorically puts lives at risk, and is further evidence of the chaos being caused by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and his irresponsible leadership.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and another minister ascended the Temple Mount (known as Al-Aqsa to Muslims), and dozens of Jewish visitors prayed on the compound in violation of the status quo. All this happened in front of the police who were stationed there, but they refrained from enforcing the ban on Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount.

The fact that Ben-Gvir oversees the police doubles the threat he poses, because the police exist in part to deal with criminals like him. But when the criminal is the very minister in charge of the police, who can you turn to? When the person endangering national security is the minister in charge of preserving it, what do you do?

And the helplessness becomes absolute when you realize the prime minister can’t be relied upon in this situation, since Netanyahu is the one who appointed Ben-Gvir despite very well knowing that he is dangerous.


An American was just shot in the West Bank. The American press can’t be bothered.

DropSite News reports: Last Friday, Amado Sison, an activist from New Jersey with the solidarity group Faz3a, joined fellow demonstrators near the West Bank village of Beita. In an interview with Drop Site after being discharged from the hospital, Sison said he was taking part in a “protective presence” exercise aimed at defending Palestinian citizens living in the West Bank from settler and military violence.

“The Palestinians were holding a rally and doing chants, when Israeli soldiers at a nearby outpost started shooting tear gas and aiming weapons at us,” said Sison. “

This was only my second demonstration, but some of the more experienced demonstrators shouted that live rounds were being fired and everyone began to run.”

Sison and others ran from the gunfire into a nearby olive grove. It was then that he felt a “blunt impact” in the back of his leg. He initially thought he had been hit by a tear gas canister.

It turned out to have been a live bullet, which entered his thigh and exited from the front of his leg.

In video of the incident taken by Anthony C., an activist with Faz3a, and provided to Drop Site, a group of protesters and local Palestinians can be seen screaming as they attempt to carry a wounded Sison to safety after the shooting.

(Read the full article here.)

West Bank: Two Palestinian young men killed by Israeli forces

WAFA reports: A Palestinian teenager succumbed to serious wounds he sustained earlier Tuesday after being shot by Israeli occupation forces in the town of Anata, east of occupied Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem Governorate Media Department said in a statement that Shadi Wisam Shehada, 17, was shot by the Israeli occupation in the town of Anata while he was working at his privately-owned car wash shop in the area, for allegedly throwing stones at the occupation soldiers.

Another Palestinian young man, Moataz Sarsour, was shot and killed by Israeli occupation forces during a raid on the cities of Ramallah and Al-Bireh at Tuesday dawn.

Shadi Wisam Shehada and Moataz Sarsour, killed by Israeli forces
Shadi Wisam Shehada and Moataz Sarsour, killed by Israeli forces (photo)
Israeli authorities detain head of the Palestine Olympic Committee

Middle East Eye reports: Jibril Rajoub, who is also a member of Fatah’s Central Committee, was reportedly detained by Israeli authorities upon his return from the Paris Olympics while en route to the occupied West Bank.

The 71-year-old was searched, had his passport confiscated, and was summoned for questioning at the Ofer military compound near Ramallah on Tuesday.

Rajoub has previously faced threats of imprisonment from some members of the Israeli government due to his efforts to have Israel barred from the Olympics and the football World Cup, citing violations of the Olympic Charter and FIFA regulations against apartheid in sports.

In May, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz threatened to revoke Rajoub’s travel pass.

“We will work to thwart his plans, and if he doesn’t stop, we will imprison him in the Muqataa [presidential compound in Ramallah], where he will be left to play stanga by himself between the walls,” Katz said, referring to a popular Israeli street game involving a football.

Anti-free speech California bill inspired by opposition to pro-Palestine campus protest

The Intercept reports: A bill making its way through the California legislature would stifle free speech on public university and college campuses, specifically around protests against Israel’s war in Gaza and its occupation of Palestine, according to civil rights advocates.

The American Civil Liberties Union in California is ringing the alarm bell on Senate Bill 1287, saying that it will “set a dangerous precedent of chilling speech on campuses across the state.”

The bill, introduced in February by Democratic state Sen. Steve Glazer, would require schools to adopt and enforce rules against harassment, discrimination, or any behavior that “creates a hostile environment on campus.”

The bill’s supporters include a host of pro-Israel advocacy groups. [Glazer has made many trips to Israel and lived in Israel for six months working on a kibbutz.]

Among the bill’s most vocal detractors has been ACLU California Action, which said in a letter sent last week to Glazer’s office that the bill would suppress free speech. In the letter, obtained by The Intercept, the ACLU highlighted areas of the bill that are “overly broad” and vague, such as leaving terms like “harassment,” “discrimination,” and “hostile environment” with no clear definitions that may allow institutions to apply them in ways that prohibit students’ free speech.

Across the U.S., lawmakers on the state and federal level have introduced bills cracking down on campus protests. In Congress, Republican lawmakers proposed a slate of bills, including measures that would revoke visas and deport any international student convicted of a crime related to protests on campus; bar students convicted of a protest-related crime from receiving financial aid; make federal accreditation and funding for schools contingent on their policies toward protests; barring a student of faculty member from student loan forgiveness if they are expelled or fired due to protests; and withholding federal funds from schools that don’t clear encampments.

Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican from Tennessee who is behind several of the bills, also introduced one that would require a student convicted of a protest-related offense to do community service in Gaza for six months.

(Read the full article here.)

RECOMMENDED READING: Unmasking counterprotesters who attacked UCLA’s pro-Palestine encampment

In early May, police arrested around 200 protesters from the anti-war encampment at UCLA, with the campus police restricting access to the area, and police helicopters hovering overhead.
In early May, police arrested around 200 protesters from the anti-war encampment at UCLA, with the campus police restricting access to the area, and police helicopters hovering overhead. (photo)
Iran says silence of UK, France, Germany on “inhumane crimes” in Gaza encouraged Israel to continue atrocities while threatening global peace

The Cradle reports: Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian told UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer in a phone call that the silence of the international community in the face of Israel’s “unprecedented and inhumane crimes” in Gaza encouraged it to continue committing atrocities while threatening regional and global peace and security, IRNA reported on 13 August.

Pezeshkian added that war in any part of the world is not in the interest of any country while emphasizing that a “punitive response to an aggressor is a legal right of states and a way to stop crime and aggression.”

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani issued a similar message Tuesday, saying the Islamic Republic will defend its national security and sovereignty and does not ask for permission to exercise its rights.

Kanaani made the statement in response to a letter published by the UK, France, and Germany, urging Iran not to retaliate for the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 1 August.

The Foreign Ministry spokesman added that the three European countries have been indifferent to Israel’s continued “genocidal acts and war crimes against defenseless Palestinians.”

He stated that the European nations’ request that Iran not respond to the Hamas leader’s assassination would “encourage the criminals to continue massacre, genocide, and crime against humanity.”

The spokesman said if those mentioned countries were really after peace and stability in the region, they should stand against Israel and seek to end the war on Gaza and the killing of children and women.

Israeli troops accused of gang raping Palestinian detainee released on house arrest

The Cradle reports: The Israeli military attorney’s office and defense lawyers agreed on the release to house arrest of the five soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian man in the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp, Haaretz reported in Hebrew on 13 August.

The Israeli army spokesman said the five soldiers will be released to house arrest for 10 days during the investigation.

On 8 August, a leaked surveillance video from Sde Teiman was broadcast on Israeli news network Channel 12, showing the Israeli soldiers gang-raping the Palestinian man.

Members of the Knesset and Hebrew media have strongly criticized the military for detaining the soldiers, arguing that it is morally acceptable to do anything to Hamas fighters, including rape.

Military police officers who arrested the soldiers have faced death threats.

Israel’s military advocate general, Major General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi responded to criticism over the arrests by saying they were crucial for shielding Israel from war crimes charges in international courts and ensuring continued weapons deliveries from the US and European nations.

RECOMMENDED READING: Hostages of Israeli revenge in the Gaza Strip: Testimonies of 100 released Palestinian detainees reveal crimes of torture, cruel treatment.



Documents confirm Netanyahu responsible for obstructing Gaza ceasefire

New York Times reports: For weeks, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has denied that he is trying to block a cease-fire deal in Gaza by hardening Israel’s negotiating position.

Mr. Netanyahu has consistently placed all blame for the deadlocked negotiations on Hamas, even as senior members of the Israeli security establishment accused him of slowing the process himself.

But in private, Mr. Netanyahu has, in fact, added new conditions to Israel’s demands, additions that his own negotiators fear have created extra obstacles to a deal.

According to unpublished documents reviewed by The New York Times that detail Israel’s negotiating positions, Israel relayed a list of new stipulations in late July to American, Egyptian and Qatari mediators that added less flexible conditions to a set of principles it had made in late May.

The documents reviewed by The Times make clear that the behind-the-scenes maneuvering by the Netanyahu government has been extensive — and suggest that agreement may be elusive at the talks set to begin this week.

(Read more here.)

Israel defense ministry expects 100,000 disabled veterans by 2030, half to be related to mental health

Ha’aretz reports: A recent forecast by the rehabilitation division of Israel’s Defense Ministry expects there to be 100,000 disabled IDF veterans by the year 2030, with half being related to mental health.

According to the data, since October 7 the rehabilitation division has seen 10,056 wounded individuals. The Defense Ministry is now discussing a strategy to absorb and treat those wounded in the war, on top of approximately 62,000 disabled IDF veterans already being treated by the division before the war.

NOTE: Over 92,000 Gazans have been injured in just ten months – at least 3,000 children have had a limb amputated. Mental health issues are widespread, including nearly every child in Gaza.

Josep Borrell calls for sanctions against Israeli ministers for ‘incitement to war crimes’

The Cradle reports: EU Foreign Policy chief Josep Borrell [from Spain] said on 11 August that the bloc must consider imposing sanctions against Israeli far-right ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for “incitement to war crimes.”

Borrell urged the Israeli government to clearly dissociate itself from individuals who incite war crimes and to work seriously towards a ceasefire deal.

The high-ranking EU official also denounced Ben Gvir for urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt all humanitarian aid and fuel to the Gaza Strip amidst the ongoing genocide.

Finance Minister Smotrich’s comments about starving two million Gazans by withholding aid in exchange for Israeli captives as “sinister,” in stark contrast to the Israeli minister’s assertion that the approach is “justified and moral.”

MORE NEWS:

IMEMC Daily Reports.

The Guardian: Why should US troops pay the price for Biden’s failure to rein in Netanyahu?

Mondoweiss: The ICJ finds that BDS is not merely a right, but an obligation

+972 Magazine: In Jenin and Tulkarem, Israel’s war on Palestinian armed resistance is failing

CNN: Rep. Ilhan Omar will win primary in Minnesota, CNN projects, breaking ‘squad’ losing streak

STATISTICS OCTOBER 7 – AUGUST 13:

Palestinian death toll from October 7 – August 13: at least 40,590* (39,965 in Gaza* – 11,445 women (30%), 16,251 children as of July 22. [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]

This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 625 in the West Bank (~145 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children). Euro-Med Monitor reports 46,848 Palestinian deaths.

Lancet: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

Ralph Nader earlier estimated 200,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.

At least 45 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 18 from West Bank).
At least 41 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition**.
About 1.7 million, or 75% of Gaza’s population are currently displaced.
2.15 million (out of total population of 2.3 million) are projected to face Crisis or worse levels of food insecurity.
Palestinian injuries from October 7 – August 13: at least 97,714 (including at least 92,294 in Gaza and 5,420 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how man Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]

Reported Israeli death toll from October 7 – August 13: ~1,486 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 331 military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza; 16 in the West Bank) and~8,730 injured.

Times of Israel reports: The IDF listed 41 soldiers killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents – nearly 16%.

NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries in Israel on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.

*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.**

Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals.

† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.

Hover over each bar for exact numbers.
Source: IsraelPalestineTimeline.org
Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
Palestinians’ harrowing stories of rape by Israeli soldiers (including female soldiers)
A Palestinian journalist visited Ismail Haniyeh’s home in Gaza to report on his death. Israel assassinated him too.
I reported a piece for the New York Times on antisemitism. I found a major error, but the Times didn’t care.
How Israel plans to whitewash its war crimes in Gaza
Why the West Bank is on the verge of economic collapse
Netanyahu’s plan to involve US in regional war on its behalf
Western media continue to withhold the truth about Israel and Gaza – 4 stories
“Well What SHOULD Israel Have Done After October 7?”
Welcome to Hell
More dead children. More BBC ‘news’ channelling Israeli propaganda as its own
U.S. media downplays and ignores ICJ ruling declaring Israeli occupation illegal
Israeli soldiers tell story of savage cruelty in Gaza – one given blessing by the West
Searching for Gaza’s missing children
What Would You Do With An Extra $320 Million?
Assassination of Haniyeh an intentional, dangerous escalation – Parsi, Macgregor
When Israel Burned Refugees Alive, Establishment Media Called It a ‘Tragic Accident’
Israel has turbocharged West Bank housing demolitions under the cover of war
Western media ignores Israeli confirmation of Hannibal Directive on 7 Oct
US Should Arrest Benjamin Netanyahu When He’s in Washington
Airwars investigation: Israeli airstrikes uniquely lethal (video)
Hesen Jabr paid the price of conscience
Gaza genocide denial
Why the news media’s job is to groom us
‘Disappeared, buried, detained’: The horrors of Gaza’s missing children

https://israelpalestinenews.org/us-approves-historic-20b-arms-sale-to-israel-as-gazans-die-day-311/