Gaza’s Trail of Tears
The Scourging of Gaza: Diary of a Genocidal War
Still from Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal.
“Palestinians are the only people in the world who have to prove they’re dead.”
– Dr. Mads Gilbert
+ What Americans are witnessing in Gaza is a reiteration of our own history in real-time: Dispossess indigenous people, violently crush their resistance, blame any retaliatory “massacres” as an excuse to use overwhelming military power to wipe out their entire populations, confine the survivors to “reservations” on marginal sites, then invade even that land when gold, timber, oil or water is found, justifying the theft by citing your own stature as a superior society, which will put the looted land and resources to the highest use possible…
+ On Friday, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, described the rapidly deteriorating conditions in Gaza under the IDF’s unrelenting bombardment to the UN Security Council: “The situation on the ground is impossible to describe. Hospital corridors crammed with the injured, the sick, the dying; Morgues overflowing; surgery without anesthesia; tens of thousands of displaced people sheltering at hospitals; families crammed into overcrowded schools, desperate for food and water. More than 10,800 people have now been killed in Gaza, almost 70% of them women and children.”
+ After Joe Biden smeared the Gazan Health Ministry for allegedly inflating the death toll from Israel’s bombardment, Barbara Leaf, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, admitted during a congressional hearing that the real number of people killed by the IDF in Gaza is likely higher than that given by the Ministry, with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bodies still buried in the rubble.
+ What kind of war is this? The CIA estimates there are 25,000 members of Hamas, roughly one percent of Gaza’s population. The casualty count in Gaza now exceeds 36,478 (11,078 killed, 25,400 wounded.) So the IDF has already killed or injured 10,000 more people than Hamas’ total strength, yet 70% of those it’s killed are civilians.
+ Israel has now killed more civilians in Gaza in 30 days than Russia has in its entire war in Ukraine, which began over 600 days ago. Gaza population (2.3 million) is 1/20th the size of Ukraine’s (43.7 million).
+ In a single week, Israel dropped almost as many bombs on Gaza as the U.S. did in Afghanistan in one year, the heaviest year of bombing. Gaza is 141 square miles. Afghanistan is 252,071 square miles.
+ A Guardian analysis of satellite imagery of northern Gaza in the aftermath of the IDF’s saturation bombing show more than 1,000 craters visible within 10 square kilometers. One residential area, only a half square kilometer in size, has been bombed over 100 times.
+ More than 74% of the Gazans killed by the IDF are women (3027), children (4506) and the elderly (678) and a high percentage of the adult men killed are not “card-carrying members of Hamas (or even the ACLU).” If you know your airstrikes are going to kill civilians and they do, in fact, kill civilians and you continue launching them hour after hour, day after day, week after week, with the same bloody results, you can’t write these deaths off as collateral damage, accidental deaths, or cases of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’re predictable and intentional. They are the victims of a campaign of annihilation against a defenseless, starving population, cut off from the world, huddled together in the darkness, where there are no safe spaces against distant airstrikes, where, in fact, the shelters themselves seem to have become priority targets, where the commonly held laws of warfare don’t apply. Each death is a crime against what’s left of humanity. In short, they’re murders.
+ When Biden was asked if Israel’s “retaliatory strikes” are “working,” he replied, “Yes. I mean, they’re — they’re working in the sense that we’re hitting the targets they’re seeking.” Asked about the “chances of a Gaza ceasefire?” “None,” he said. “No possibility.” So it’s on him.
+ Instead of a ceasefire, Biden reportedly asked Netanyahu for a “tactical pause” in the IDF’s demolition of Gaza, which is at least a more honest way of describing what Bernie Sanders has been hawking as a “humanitarian pause,” which perverts the meaning of “humanitarian.”
+ Two weeks ago, Biden was chest-thumping that the US “is the most powerful nation the world – not the world – the history of the world.” Now he pretends to be powerless to restrain Israel as it commits war crimes with US weapons. Pretty rapid decline into impotence….
+ Is it any wonder why 82% of Michigan Democratic Arab and Muslim voters now view Biden unfavorably? 71% of MI Democrats support a ceasefire. Voters split on $14 billion to Israel but shift to majority opposed once they understand the U.S. has no control over whether weapons used to kill Gazan civilians.
+ LBJ knew when his time was up (or if not “when,” then at least that it was up)…
+ On Thursday, more than 500 veterans of Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign came together to demand a ceasefire. The signatories include staffers from Biden’s 2020 campaign headquarters, the Democratic National Committee, and state staff and leadership.
+ The tunnels of Gaza are made to sound sinister and deviant. Yet the Warsaw Uprising, the largest armed resistance movement against Nazi occupation, emerged literally from the underground, with resistance fighters, many Jewish, using the sewers as cover. See Andrzej Wajda’s harrowing film Kanal. The Nazi response to the uprising was to destroy nearly every structure in Warsaw.
+ Does anyone this side of Henry Kissinger still justify the use of napalm, Agent Orange and the saturation bombing of peasant villages by B-52s because the Vietcong used … tunnels?
+ 39 journalists were killed in the first month of the Israel-Gaza War, the deadliest month since the Committee to Protect Journalists started compiling statistics in 1992. 34 of those killed were Palestinians; nearly all died in Israeli airstrikes, many of them were killed in their homes along with their families.
+ On Sunday night, Israeli airstrikes near Gaza City killed Palestinian journalist Mohammad Abu Hasira along with 42 members of his family.
+ So many journalists have been killed, often at home, that it seems like the IDF has been targeting them. This week Danny Danon, who describes himself as Israel’s 17th Permanent Representative to the UN, Member of Knesset and Chairman of the World Likud, basically said as much on Twitter…
+ The IDF now includes photojournalists on their “elimination” (targeted assassination) “list.” This is a perilous standard for a military that requires reporters embedded with its forces to submit photos and stories for approval from IDF censors….It’s also a de facto war crime. (Moreover, the allegations made by “Honest Reporting” and the IDF against freelance photographer Yousef Masoud, are false. Legally so, it appears.)
+ Does this apply to journalists embedded with the IDF, Benny?
+ Gil Hoffman, the former Jerusalem Post reporter who now runs Honest Reporting, the so-called media watchdog group whose accusations about Palestinian photojournalists getting advance warning of Hamas’ raids against Israel on October 7, led to two leading Israeli politicians to call for journalists to be assassinated, now admits that he had no evidence that his claims were true and that he accepts the explanations from the journalists he targeted that, in fact, they did not know. Hoffman says he was merely asking questions: “They were legitimate questions to be asked. We don’t claim to be a news organization.” We don’t claim to be a news organization? Sounds like FoxNews’ defense of Tucker Carlson when they were both sued for defamation by former Trump paramour Karen McDougal: no “reasonable viewer” would believe that Carlson was reporting “actual facts.”
+ This week the Israeli parliament (Knesset) voted to amend the Counter-Terrorism Law to criminalize the “consumption of terrorist publications,” which is passive social media use, with a penalty of up to one year’s imprisonment. And it didn’t take long for the Israeli Police to start arresting people…
+ Haaretz reported that Arab residents of East Jerusalem have cut their social media use by 80% since the war broke out, fearing, and not unreasonably, that the police and the Shin Bet are tracking and arresting people who post messages identifying with the people of Gaza.
+ Since the war began, Israel has launched 146 criminal investigations for speech offenses, including the case of a man who posted on Instagram: “The eye weeps for the residents of Gaza.” Less than an hour later, 20 police officers surrounded his house to arrest him for supporting a terrorist organization.
+ The Palestinian historian, Sami Abou Shahadeh, who is the leader of the Balad/Tajamou’ Party, was detained by Israel police for attending an anti-war demonstration: “I have been released after 7 hours of detention for the “crime” of being a Palestinian citizen calling to end the war. By contrast, if I were a Jewish citizen calling for a genocide of Palestinians I could become a minister. This should be a wake-up call for Western governments that keep encouraging this racism by taking about ‘shared values’ with Israel.”
+ A similar move to use the Gaza war as an excuse to increase domestic spying is afoot here. Christine Abizaid, Director of the National Counterterrorism Center in the Biden Administration, used the Hamas attacks of October 7 to justify reauthorizing the US’s domestic surveillance program. “As evidenced by the events of the past month, the terrorist threat landscape is highly dynamic and our country must preserve [counterterrorism] fundamentals to ensure constant vigilance,” Abizaid said.
+ Prior to the current war the average person in Gaza received 80 liters of water a day. During emergencies, the UN says a minimum of 15 liters is needed for drinking, cooking and basic hygiene. Now the typical resident in Gaza has access to only three liters of water, much of it fetid, salty or contaminated. Moreover, the UN reported this week that there are no bakeries still operating in northern Gaza.
+ At least 101 UN aid workers have now been killed in Gaza by the IDF, more than have ever been killed in any single conflict in history. IDF airstrikes have destroyed 47 UN buildings, and more than 100 health facilities.
+ If you were killed in an IDF airstrike, you were Hamas. If you were wounded in an IDF airstrike, you are Hamas. If you treated someone wounded in an IDF airstrike, you’re Hamas. If you photographed an IDF airstrike, you are Hamas. If you looked such a photograph, you’re Hamas.
+ CNN obtained a US diplomatic cable from the embassy in Oman that warned the Biden Administration’s support for Israel’s devastation of Gaza is “losing us Arab publics for a generation.”
+ Every major trade union in India has called upon the Modi government to end its agreement with Israel to export Indian workers and appealed to workers to boycott Israeli products and refuse to handle Israeli cargo.
+ During their meetings with Anthony Blinken, diplomats from Jordan and Egypt told the Secretary of State “Israel’s war had gone beyond self-defense and could no longer be justified as it now amounted to collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
+ Pro-Israel lobbyist groups and individuals contributed nearly $31 million to American congressional candidates during last year’s election cycle — more than 6 times the contributions candidates received from the gun rights lobby…
+ AIPAC quietly spent over $350,000 trying to stop Ilhan Omar from being reelected in 2022. She narrowly prevailed over former Minneapolis city council member Don Samuels. Samuels later griped that he didn’t get enough help. Now Samuels is gearing up for re-match.
+ Rep. Jamaal Bowman excoriated AIPAC for the vile ads it’s running against him in his NYC district: “When little kids in my district sit down to watch a princess movie, AIPAC is forcing them to watch lies about the worst violence people could possibly do to each other. As a father, it makes me sick.”
+ Just a few months ago, the House Republicans held hearings on the corrosive threats to free speech in America, hearings which Democrat Daniel Goldman ridiculed as preposterous. Now the Republicans, joined by 22 Democrats, have censored one of the House’s own members, Rashida Tlaib, for speaking out about a brutal war, financed and armed by the US (over the objections of much of the US population), against a largely defenseless people that includes her relatives. The very essence of free speech. Guess who voted to gag her? Daniel Goldman. It’s one of the reasons people in his district have started referring to Goldman as a “Netanyahu Democrat.”
+ Rashida Tlaib on the move to censor her: “It’s a shame my colleagues are more focused on silencing me than they are on saving lives, as the death toll in Gaza surpasses 10,000. Many of them have shown me that Palestinian lives simply do not matter to them, but I still do not police their rhetoric or actions.”
+ Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat from Florida, told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “If a censure comes on [Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s] misinformation on the hospital bombing — which obviously we know was not true — that she continued to spread … and on ‘Fom the River to the Sea,’ I would support that censure…From the River to the Sea means the destruction of Israel and everyone who’s in it, okay? Just like ‘Mein Kampf’ is not a coloring book and the final solution means exactly what Hitler meant it to mean.”
+ Max Moran, a fellow at Revolving Door, DC: “I interviewed for a job with Rashida Tlaib in spring. She asked how I handle stress. I said that like most of my fellow Jews, I use humor as a coping mechanism. She smiled and told me she’d been to a bar mitzvah that weekend — the kid gave a whole sermon about Jewish comedy.”
+ If it’s anti-Semitic to criticize Zionism, is it anti-Catholic to denounce the Doctrine of Discovery? Anti-Protestant to abhor the burning of witches? Anti-Christian to oppose Nazism? Anti-American to reject Manifest Destiny? (Okay, you may have a point on that last one…)
+ Jeremy Scahill: “Rashida Tlaib has been slapped with a more severe punishment for standing up for Palestinian lives than Henry Kissinger ever has for being one of the greatest war criminals in history.”
+ The 22 Democrats who voted to censure Tlaib have been lavishly funded by AIPAC…
+ The day after the House censured Rashida Tlaib for saying that Israel had bombed the Al-Alhi Baptist Hospital in Gaza, the World Health Organization reports that it has documented 108 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza since October 7.
+ Beyond the censure, more than 60 Democrats, including such luminaries as Katie Porter, Steny Hoyer, Jerry Nadler and Adam Schiff, signed a letter condemning Tlaib for using the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” declaring it “genocidal,” despite the fact that it wasn’t considered anti-semitic even by the ADL as recently as last year. These same Democrats called for a ceasefire, but only for Hamas rockets, which don’t seem to have killed any Israeli citizens since October 8th, and not IDF airstrikes, which have killed more than 10,800 people, mostly women and children.
+ Greg Grandin: “If the River to Sea phrase is good enough for Likud, why is it not for Palestinians?”
+ The phrase is, of course, an aspirational call for the only real solution possible: one fully democratic state, from River to Sea, with equal rights for all–kind of like “Sea to Shining Sea”. (As I said, it’s “aspirational.”)
+++
+ The NYT has now taken to referring to the Nakba as a “migration.”
“More than 700,000 Palestinians either fled or were expelled from their homes in what is now Israel during the war surrounding the creation of the state in 1948. Many of their descendants are now warning that the current war will end with a similar “Nakba,” or catastrophe, as the 1948 migration is known in Arabic.”
+ Laila al-Arian: “My grandmother ‘migrated’ just after her father was killed by Zionist militias and thrown into a mass grave.”
+ Rami Ruhayem, the BBC Middle East correspondent, wrote an open letter to Tim Davie, the BBC Director of News, assailing the network’s Gaza coverage: “This is not about mistakes here and there, or even about systemic bias in favor of Israel. The question now is a question of complicity.”
+ Leave it to the Jewish Chronicle to recruit a piece from Douglas Murray, editor of the Spectator, arguing that Nazi death squads were somehow more humane than Hamas….
+ Awaiting the new exhibits at Yad Vashem and the Museum of Tolerance, exploring the deeply conflicted consciences of the Nazis–those unwilling, guilt-ridden mass murderers, who, after dozens of back-of-the-head kill shots (the kindest kind) during the day, numbed their sorrows at night with Schnapps and passages from Goethe.
+ In an interview Monday with ABC News‘s David Muir on Israel’s plans to re-occupy Gaza, Netanyahu didn’t hesitate to admit that Israel planned to re-occupy Gaza: “I think Israel will, for an indefinite period, will have the overall security responsibility [in Gaza] because we’ve seen what happens when we don’t have it. When we don’t have that security responsibility, what we have is the eruption of Hamas terror on a scale that we couldn’t imagine.”
+ Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, followed up Netanyahu’s remarks, saying that one of the main goals for the period after the war is to guarantee the IDF’s freedom of action in Gaza “without limitations.”
+ As usual, this left Anthony Blinken with the prospect of eating his own words, again, about what the Biden administration wants for a post-war Gaza: “No forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza. Not now, not after the war…No reoccupation of Gaza after the conflict ends. No attempt to blockade or besiege Gaza. No reduction in the territory of Gaza.” Which begs the question, or what? Especially, when many Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu’s Education Minister, Yoav Kisch, not only want to re-occupy Gaza militarily, they want to re-settle it.
+ The contradictions in Team Biden’s public diplomacy are so transparent no one should be fooled. The day after Blinken made these remarks, the State Department was celebrating Netanyahu’s “humanitarian bombing pause” for “four hours” a day so that, in the Biden Administration’s own words, Gaza residents could “flee” their homes.” At least, they didn’t call it a “migration.”
+ According to the UN, on 9 November, between 50,000 and 80,000 people–mostly walking, carrying as much of their belongings as possible– were forced to move from northern Gaza to the south, with no guarantee they’ll ever be able to return to their homes or if their homes will exist…
+ Gaza’s trail of tears…
+ Many Gazans who have tried use these “bombing pauses” to evacuate from the north to the alleged safe zones of the south say they’ve been fired at from the direction of Israeli tanks and, according to the UN, ”some arriving in the south reported having to cross Israeli checkpoints, where they said Israeli forces had been making arrests.”
+ Indeed, five US citizens from Pennsylvania were seriously injured when their bus out of Gaza was hit by an IDF airstrike. The family was on the State Department’s list of evacuees and was following the instructions for evacuation when they were bombed.
+ Dr. Jennifer Tierney, executive director of Doctors Without Borders: “We are doctors. What you are asking us to do with a humanitarian pause is to stitch people up and repair them and then to start the bombing again and for us to fix them [again]. That is not enough. We need a ceasefire.”
+ Adam Johnson: “I understand why many assume a “humanitarian pause” and ceasefire are interchangeable, on an intuitive level it makes sense. But they’re not and the main reason we know they’re not is the White House and pro-Israel groups are pushing one while threatening to punish anyone uttering the other.”
+ Hillel Rosen, a military correspondent for the Israeli Channel 14, called for a second Nakba for the residents of Gaza: “We must kick out the hostile population from the Gaza Strip and build new Jewish settlements there.”
+ The IDF has bombed 69 mosques in Gaza since October 7, including the Khalid bin al-Walid Mosque this week…
+++
+ The 239 hostages have been used as pawns by both the Israelis and Hamas. Hamas has exploited them to barter for the release of more than a thousand Palestinian detainees (hostages) and Israel has used them to justify the destruction of Gaza, which seems to be more important to Netanyahu, who rejected a five-day ceasefire for the release of some hostages in the early days of the war, than the lives of the hostages themselves, at least 50 of whom have been killed in the bombing since Hamas’s raid into southern Israel. The Qatar-led talks for their release stalled altogether after Israel launched its ground invasion.
+ When Fallujah’s the template…Netanyahu: “The Americans were here. They explained to us what was in Fallujah and what was here and there, and they are amazed at what we have achieved…We went in there and hit the enemy – this is a great success. We do not intend to stop; we intend to continue to the end.”
+ On Tuesday, the once stridently pro-Netanyahu paper Israel Hayom did an about-face and published an urgent call for the prime minister’s resignation.
+ In his memoir, the British historian Max Hastings recounts his interactions with Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Hastings met after he’d been asked by the Netanyahu family to write a biography of Bibi’s brother Yoni.
At Bibi Netanyahu’s dinner table in Jerusalem, I listened with crawling dismay to Bibi talking about the future of his country. ‘In the next war, if we do it right we’ll have a chance to get all the Arabs out,’ he said. ‘We can clear the West Bank, sort out Jerusalem.’ He joked about the Golani Brigade, the Israeli infantry force in which so many men were North African or Yemenite Jews. ‘They’re okay as long as they’re led by white officers.’ He grinned.
+ The White House authorized the emergency purchase of thousands of M16 rifles from American defense companies for Israel on the condition these would not end up in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, though there’s almost no way to enforce the provision, and Security Minister Ben-Gvir has been having photo-ops handing out assault rifles (100,000 of them, according to his own boasting) to settlers.
+ This is the week Israeli nukes came out of the closet. First Amihai Eliyahu, Minister of Heritage in the Netanyahu government, asserted that dropping an atomic weapon on Gaza is “one of the possible options,” Then a few days later, in an interview with the Japanese TV channel Asahi, Israeli author and political activist Yuval Noah Harari says Israel could use its nuclear weapons against Gaza: “Israel could defend itself with all the weapons it has, including nuclear capabilities.”
+ Is Eliyahu the first Israeli official to publicly admit Israel has nuclear weapons? Shouldn’t he be arrested? Mordechai Vanunu was renditioned from Italy and sentenced to 18 years in an Israeli prison (11 in solitary) for the same disclosure…
+ A Quinnipiac poll from November 2 found that 65 percent of all voters between the ages of 18 to 34—not just Democrats—oppose sending military aid to Israel, while only 29 percent support doing so.
+ With those kinds of numbers, it’s probably no surprise that the Biden Administration’s weapons transfers to Israel are being cloaked in secrecy. While the administration released a 3-page itemized list of weapons provided to Ukraine, including the number of ammunition rounds, the details about the weapons sent to Israel are almost non-existent. According to Biden’s NSA spokesman, John Kirby: “We’re being careful not to quantify or get into too much detail about what they’re getting — for their own operational security purposes, of course.” This seems ludicrous that Hamas would someone be more capable of exploiting this knowledge than the Russian military.
+ The U.S. Navy has sent a nuclear-powered submarine to the Middle East. The USS Florida (SSGN-728), which can carry more than 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles.
+ The United States provides the IDF with military and intelligence support, and is therefore required by the Geneva Conventions to ensure that Israel’s bombing raids in Gaza do not breach international law. Yet these “legalisms” don’t seem to trouble Biden administration very much, as revealed in Sam Husseini’s penetrating questions to the State Department’s hapless spokesman Vedant Patel …
+ Israel claimed it killed “a number of Hamas terrorist operatives” in a strike on an ambulance outside Gaza’s biggest hospital. Videos reviewed by The Washington Post showed women, children and others in civilian clothes among the dead and wounded.
+ Three Palestinian human rights groups, Al Haq, l Mezan, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, filed a brief this week with the International Criminal Court in the Hague, urging the court to investigate Israel for war crimes committed during its bombing and invasion of Gaza, citing “the suffocating siege imposed on [Gaza], the forced displacement of its population, the use of toxic gas, and the denial of necessities, such as food, water, fuel, and electricity”. The groups also called on the Court to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The brief pointed to the Court’s recent warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin as a precedent.
+ Even Emanuel Macron, who a month ago gave Israel his full backing and stayed mute while thousands of innocents perished, says it’s time for the IDF to stop bombing Gaza, telling the BBC: “De facto–today, civilians are bombed–de facto. These babies, these ladies, these old people are bombed and killed. So there is no reason for that and no legitimacy. So we do urge Israel to stop…I think the only solution we have is a ceasefire because it’s impossible to explain we want to fight against terrorism by killing innocent people.”
+ Macron’s statement, which took him 5 blood-drenched weeks to formulate, is one that any politician should be able to safely make, even those beholden to the Israel lobby, UNLESS…you believe there are no innocent people in Gaza, that even infants and the infirm are “terrorists.”
+++
+ New York’s governor Kathy Hochul’s most recent trip to Israel was funded by UJA-Federation of New York, a group that has sent “millions in tax-exempt dollars to organizations that support Israel’s illegal settlement program in the occupied West Bank,” which are war crimes (Art 49, 4th Gen Convention).
+ After the murder of Michigan Rabbi Samantha Woll, there was a concerted effort to blame the rhetoric (ie., a ceasefire to stop the killing of Palestinians and Israelis) of Rep. Rashida Tlaib for somehow inspiring the killer. CNN reports that investigators are treating her brutal death as a domestic dispute.
+ Craig Mokhiber, former Director in the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), who resigned in protest from his position last week: “In just four weeks, Israel with US backing has cut off food, water, power and then brutally exterminated more than 10,000 imprisoned civilian men, women and children in Gaza, destroyed their homes, churches, mosques, schools and hospitals because they are Palestinians. Name it? Genocide.” Mokhiber, a lawyer and specialist in international human rights law, had worked at the UN since 1992.
+ Here’s what the estimable John Mearsheimer told Judge Andrew Napolitano:
Israel waging a punishment campaign in Gaza, they are punishing the civilian population… The Israelis are interested in causing a huge amount of destruction in Gaza and in the process they are going to kill huge numbers of civilians… It seems to me that when you do that you’re committing war crimes. If the Israelis were going to great lengths to target just Hamas and avoid civilian casualties then you could make a coherent argument that this is not a case of them committing war crimes but they’re not doing that, they’re purposely tearing the place apart. This is a massive punishment campaign. Furthermore at the same time they’ve cut off all food, water and gas to Gaza and this means that in effect they’re going to end up starving out, or trying to starve out, the civilian population in Gaza. By my understanding of international law, this too is a war crime.
+ Spinelessness as policy: On Israeli efforts to minimize civilian casualties, NSC’s John Kirby said: “We have seen some indications that there are there are efforts being applied in certain scenarios to try to minimize, but I don’t want to overstate that.”
+ Saying that “another holocaust in the history of humankind is unacceptable,” the South Africa withdrew all of its diplomats from Tel Aviv.
+ Countries that have cut diplomatic ties with Israel over the bombing of Gaza: Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Jordan, Bahrain, Honduras, Turkey, Chad, and South Africa.
+ Jordan’s Prime Minister Bisher Khasawneh says attempts to ‘displace’ Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank would be ‘a red line’ and his country would consider it a ‘declaration of war’.
+ Calling “the rain of bombs” on Gaza “inhumane,” Belgium’s Deputy Prime Minister Petra De Sutter called on his own government to impose sanctions on Israel.
+ Palestinian doctors in Gaza responded to the dozens of Israeli doctors urging the IDF to bomb hospitals in Gaza: Palestinian doctors in Gaza in a message to Israeli doctors:
“We as doctors are ambassadors of peace. “We save lives. Israeli doctors who signed a letter promoting the bombing of hospitals with patients inside have committed a betrayal to their noble profession & bear responsibility.”
+ Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who in March 2023 denied the existence of a Palestinian people and now the de facto governor of the West Bank- called for “sterile no-go zones” around Israeli settlements and the major road leading to them in order to “prevent Arabs from entering” and to stop the olive harvest.
+ Far-right Israeli lawmaker Zvi Sukkot also urged Israel’s defense minister not to allow this year’s olive harvest in the West Bank, citing a danger to Jewish residents nearby.
+ Emily Calhoun, an American nurse who worked in Gaza during 26 days of bombardment, was asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper whether she would ever return to Gaza: “In a heartbeat, in an absolute heartbeat…my heart is in Gaza, it will stay in Gaza the Palestinian people I worked with were some of the most incredible people I’ve ever met…absolute heroes, if I could have a small amount of the courage they have I would die a happy person.” Calhoun said that a camp in Khan Younis with 50,000 displaced people had 4 toilets. There was no water and children with burns all over their bodies were discharged because there were no medical supplies.
+ Aisha Jung, former senior official at Amnesty International, was arrested on Saturday, while attending a pro-Palestine demo in London with her husband and sons, under the UK’s Public Order Act. Her offense? She was holding a sign describing Israel as an “Apartheid Cuntry”. “I’m trying to teach my children to speak up when they feel in their gut that something’s not right,” said Jung, who worked at Amnesty for 17 years. “My sign was using satire as well as fact to try and get our voices heard, to try to influence our potentially war criminal leaders to influence a ceasefire.”
The arrest of Aisha Jung for carrying a satirical sign at ceasefire protest in London.
+ Academic freedom in America cratered to a new low this week when Columbia University, where Bari Weiss got her start as a censor, suspended Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) as official student groups through the end of the fall term.
+ Many of the people stridently demanding that Palestinians should apologize for atrocities committed by Hamas are the same people who insist America should never apologize for Hiroshima or Nagasaki (or My Lai or Wounded Knee or slavery or, come to think of it, anything at all).
+ Gazan poet and peace activist Ahmed Abu Artema was badly injured in an Israeli airstrike last month that killed five members of his family. In a message from his hospital bed, Artema said: “The most horrible thing is that the world is allowing for this Israeli genocide to happen.”
+ Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya and a non-resident fellow at the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies, wrote in DAWN: “America’s unconditional support of Israel nevertheless masks an important development: a collapse in US confidence in the Israeli political and military leadership…and a collapse in US confidence in Israel’s military and intelligence capabilities.”
+ Semaphore reported that satellite companies like Planet Labs that made photographs readily available to journalists covering Russia’s war in Ukraine are now restricting images out of Gaza for Israel’s benefit.
+ This week Dior reportedly replaced Palestinian Bella Hadid with Israeli model Mai Tager as brand ambassador in their newest campaign. During World War II, Christian Dior, working for the French fashion house of Lelong, designed dresses for the wives of Nazi officers and French collaborators…
+ Poet Rupi Kaur declined an invitation from the Biden administration to read her work at Diwali celebration: “I refuse any invitation from an institution that supports the collective punishment of a trapped civilian population — 50% of whom are children.”
+ Every major trade union in India has called upon the Modi government to end its agreement with Israel to export Indian workers and appealed to workers to boycott Israeli products and refuse to handle Israeli cargo.
+ Senator John Fetterman has gone from a lovable eccentric to “I can’t believe what an asshole that guy is” in record time…
+ Israel’s Supreme Court denied legal filings challenging the decision by the Ministry of National Security to ban demonstrations against the IDF’s bombing and invasion of the Gaza Strip. court ruled that “despite the high standing of the right to protest, the complicated reality in which we find ourselves affects how it is balanced.”
+ On Wednesday, Volcker Tûrk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, after returning from a visit to the Rafah Crossing, accused Israel of war crimes, including collective punishment, forcible evacuations, attacks on medical facilities and personnel, as well as violating the obligation of an occupying power to ensure access to basic necessities.
+ A medical convoy of the International Red Cross was fired at by the IDF on Tuesday, while carrying medical supplies to Al Quds hospital in Gaza. “These are not conditions under which humanitarians can work and meet the urgent needs of the civilian population,” said William Schomburg, head of the ICRC sub-division in Gaza.
+ Citing a lack of fuel to run its generators, Al Quds Hospital in Gaza City shut down key services on Wednesday and Al Awda Hospital, the only provider of maternity services in northern Gaza, warned may have to close soon.
+ The Palestinian Red Crescent Society issued an alert on Friday saying Israeli forces opened fire on the intensive care unit at al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City. One person was killed and 28 injured in the sniper fire. The majority of the wounded were children, two of whom remain in critical condition. The report prompted the International Red Cross to call for the protection of patients, healthcare workers, and medical facilities in Gaza: “The rules of war are clear. Hospitals are specially protected facilities under international humanitarian law.”
+ Doctors Without Borders–Canada sent out this photo of the surgical board from one of Gaza City’s failing hospitals…
+ SuhailAl Kafaranah told the UN’s Martin Griffiths about the deaths of his family members in an IDF airstrike: “I am a lawyer from Beit Hanoun City. I lost more than 20 people of my close family. They killed them and I buried them with my own hands.” He went on to tell Griffiths, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, the names of each slain relative.
+ Former French Prime Minister and diplomat, Dominque de Villepin, who voiced France’s opposition to the Iraq War: ”The Israeli government, Benjamin Netanyahu, failed on October 7th and failed doubly. Firstly, in its ability to ensure the protection of the Israeli people by allowing massacres that are an abomination to occur. He bears direct responsibility for what happened. And his second failure is having encouraged a policy of occupation and colonization, which continues at this moment in the West Bank and constitutes another threat to Israel if a second front in the West Bank were to open.”
+ Maoz Inon, whose parents Bilha and Yakovi, both in their seventies, were slaughtered during Hamas’ raid on Netiv HaAsara: “If world leaders wait for the war to stop before they stop supporting the Israeli government, the war will never end…So I’m crying to the world: Don’t support Netanyahu. Don’t send us weapons, don’t send us ships of war, send us peace. Send us love. Send us reconciliation.”
+158 Palestinians have been killed by the IDF in the West Bank since October 7, according to officials at the UN.
+ According to Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, a reconstructive surgeon at Al-Shifra Hospital in Gaza, there are “120 wounded children with no surviving family currently at the hospital. These are the ones without even distant relatives surviving.”
+ Keep Dr. Abu Sitta’s stark statement in mind as we give the last word this week to RFK, Jr., founder of the Children’s Health Defense [sic] Network: “Israel is a bulwark for us… it’s almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. If Israel disappears, Russia, China, and BRICS+ countries will control 90% of the oil in the world and that would be cataclysmic for US national security.”
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn).