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54689
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza” says Israeli government
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Prem Thakker The government of Israel’s official Twitter account is not just running with “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza” — they are now boosting the tweet as an AdPrem Thakker@prem_thakker In other words, Elon Musk is receiving money from the government of Israel to boost a tweet that says there are no innocent civilians in Gaza Quote |
Responses:
[54713] [54748] [54751] [54692] [54690] [54703] [54695] [54696] [54704] [54697] [54702] [54708] [54694] [54693] [54698]
54713
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: No Way Out in Nuseirat: the Great Hostage Rescue Massacre
URL: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/14/no-way-out-in-nuseirat-the-great-hostage-rescue-massacre/
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JUNE 14, 2024 No Way Out in Nuseirat: the Great Hostage Rescue Massacre BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR "The Israelis usually make their abduction raids at night, when the streets are empty and their targets are sleeping. The raid on Nuseirat took place in mid- day at a refugee camp, when the roads and markets were packed with civilians, when children were playing, women doing their shopping, and old men drinking their tea. Some of the Israelis came dressed as Palestinians, speaking Arabic, and looking like refugees. Some came concealed in civilian trucks. Others hovered above in Apache attack helicopters, waiting to strike. The nearby Al-Aqsa Hospital was already overflowing with patients from the airstrikes of the previous few days, before it began receiving the wounded and maimed from the bloodiest day yet of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Al-Aqsa was already short on supplies, running low on drugs, water and power. The hospital’s hallways were already filled with moaning, bandaged patients, recovering from wounds and surgeries without painkillers. The staff was already overworked, tired and stressed out, when they heard the first explosions around 11 in the morning. Dozens of airstrikes were followed by volleys of small arms gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades. Some explosions seemed very close to the hospital. Someone said the IDF had called the hospital minutes before and warned the staff to evacuate because it too was a target. But the nurses and the doctors wouldn’t leave their patients. Maybe it was disinformation or just another rumor of a hellish war. Helicopters hovered overhead. Quadcopter drones darted in and out firing machine guns at the crowded streets. There was the unmistakable growl of tanks. The camp was surrounded. There was no way to flee. No air raid shelters to huddle in. No way out. Then the calls came for help, soon followed by the wounded, the burnt, the dying and the dead. The bodies of children and women, the old and young, shredded by shrapnel, riven with bullets, some with severed limbs and others with perforated eyes. “There were children everywhere, there were women, there were men,” said Karin Huster, who was working at Al-Aqsa with Médecins Sans Frontičres. “We had the gamut of war wounds, trauma wounds, from amputations to eviscerations to trauma, to TBIs, traumatic brain injuries. Fractures, obviously, big burns. Kids completely grey or white from the shock, burnt, screaming for their parents — many of them not screaming because they are in shock.” The tempo of the attack increased. The bombings and the gunfire and the tanks and the helicopters. The frenzied sounds of a war machine at full- throttle. For thirty minutes it went on. For an hour. For an hour and a half. It seemed interminable for those seeking shelter on the ground, cowering in buildings and the hospital. And then it was over, finally. And there were only the cries for help from the shattered streets and collapsed buildings. The cries of parents carrying dead children in their arms, the cries of children looking at the gutted bodies of their parents. What had just happened? Why had this refugee camp at Nusierat, home of so many homeless people, so many Palestinian families who had been displaced by bombs time and time again, come under such a savage sustained attack from the air and the ground, an attack that destroyed 90 homes and apartment buildings? An attack of such fury that it left the streets scattered with severed arms and legs, the bodies of children and their mothers and grandfathers left to bleed out in the marketplace that seemed to be a target of the attack. What could possibly justify this slaughter, this killing, this destruction that one Palestinian refugee in Nuseirat said felt like “Doomsday”? When the Israelis finally left, they took four people with them, four hostages who had been rescued by Israeli commandos and evacuated in helicopters that were stationed at or near Biden’s hapless “humanitarian” pier that had, coincidentally or not, just been reassembled and re-moored to the beach in central Gaza, after breaking apart in high seas last month. When the Israelis finally left with the four rescued hostages, who’d been captured by Hamas on October 7 while attending the Nova rave just outside the Israeli security fence that pens in and isolates northern Gaza, they left behind 274 dead Palestinians, including 64 children and 57 women. They left behind 700 wounded, many in critical condition, many of whom seem likely to die in the coming days and weeks. The great rescue mission turned into the worst massacre to date in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, leaving the streets of Nuseirat, in the words of Abu Asi, “halls of blood.” Everyone on the streets and inside the buildings of Nuseirat was a target that day. The gunfire and airstrikes were indiscriminate. Then entire camp was a kill zone. Nuseirat’s narrow streets were cratered, so clotted with rubble and bodies that ambulances couldn’t reach the victims, many of whom were wheeled to the hospital in hand carts and wagons. Many more were left to die on the streets from treatable wounds. “Aircraft struck dozens of military targets for the success of the operation,” the IDF brayed afterward. “Hamas, in a very cruel and cynical way, is holding hostages inside civilian buildings.” The attack came without warning. It came in one of the most densely populated camps in Gaza. The commandos came in disguise, one group in a truck filled with beds and furniture, as if to mock the very refugees they were about to slaughter. This is a war crime. The crime of perfidy, an act of treacherous deception in which one side promises to act in good faith with the intention of breaking that promise once they encounter their enemy. There’s a reason soldiers wear uniforms in combat situations. It’s to protect civilians. The Israelis said they came at mid-day as an element of surprise. But their own history of raids in Gaza and elsewhere says they usually come at night. This rescue operation was different. This rescue operation in broad daylight was designed to kill. To kill as many as possible, no matter who they were or what they were doing. To kill kids kicking soccer balls, young women standing in line at the bakery, and old men carrying bags of flour and rice. It even killed hostages. “We inform you that in exchange for these, your army killed three prisoners in the same camp, one of whom held American citizenship,” the military wing of Hamas announced in a video released following the attack. The Americans knew. The Americans helped. Did the CIA or Pentagon help with the targeting? It hardly matters. The Americans provided the bombs, the helicopters, the fighter jets, the bullets and the tank shells. The Americans watched the attack unfold. They watched from Biden’s pier. They watched from drones. They watched as the streets filled with blood, bodies and limbs. Afterward, the Americans praised the rescue operation and said nothing about the dead Palestinian children and women. Nothing about the amputees and the eviscerated. Nothing about the three hostages who were also apparently killed in the Israeli attack, including an American citizen. The Biden administration’s complicity in the Nuseirat mass slaughter shatters the last pretense of American diplomacy in the Middle East. It’s a sinister calculus that justifies killing and wounding 1000 people to rescue four–four people who could have been released through a ceasefire, a ceasefire the Biden administration claims it wanted to broker. The massacre at Nuseirat made clear once more that some lives are worth more than others. And to the Israelis and their American allies, at least, Palestinian lives don’t seem to be worth anything at all. Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. " |
54748
From: chatillon, [DNS_Address]
Subject: U.S. support helped Israel
URL: LINK
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U.S. support helped Israel carry out deadly Nuseirat massacre during hostage rescue operation 06/17/2024 // Cassie B. // 1.5K Views Sources for this article include: TheCradle.co NYTimes.com TheGuardian.com The U.S. played a major role in supporting Israel’s recent hostage rescue operation in Nuseirat that left hundreds of Palestinians dead, according to a new report. The New York Times reports that the U.S. worked with Israeli intelligence to prepare for the operation, which rescued four Israeli hostages who had been held in the Gaza Strip since October while killing 274 Palestinians and injuring more than 600. Military and intelligence officials from both countries worked together, sharing drone footage, satellite photos and communications monitoring to zero in on the hostages’ location. This is part of an ongoing effort, and the report said that while Israeli and American officials are not sure where many of the hostages are currently being held, there are also cases where they do have information about their whereabouts but cannot carry out a rescue mission. A crucial component of this weekend's operation’s success was wide-scale bombing across an area where Palestinian civilians are known to shelter, including the crowded Nuseirat refugee camp and a nearby market. And although the U.S. has tried to distance itself from civilian casualties in Gaza, the U.S. military has flown surveillance drones over the Gaza Strip continuously to aid the hostage rescue efforts that caused these casualties. A senior Israeli official told the Times that American and British drones have been able to get information Israeli drones could not gather. Although most of the hostages were initially believed to be held in the many underground tunnels in Gaza, officials believe that their captors quickly found that keeping them in apartments in different locations throughout the territory was more practical. We are building the infrastructure of human freedom and empowering people to be informed, healthy and aware. Explore our decentralized, peer-to-peer, uncensorable Brighteon.io free speech platform here. Learn about our free, downloadable generative AI tools at Brighteon.AI. Every purchase at HealthRangerStore.com helps fund our efforts to build and share more tools for empowering humanity with knowledge and abundance. Thanks to support from the U.S. and U.K., Israel was able to gather more intelligence about the hostages. Moreover, as Israel attacked more and more of the Gaza Strip, it left Hamas with fewer places to hide their captives, making it easier to track them down. It is believed that Israeli bombing has displaced 80 percent of the Gazan population, some of them multiple times, and rendering much of the area uninhabitable. Those holding the hostages were reportedly instructed by Hamas leaders to shoot them if they believed Israeli forces were approaching. Nevertheless, the report said that Hamas leaders strongly believe these individuals are their greatest bargaining chips when it comes to ceasefire negotiations. According to the New York Times, 43 of the 253 Israeli hostages being held by Hamas died in captivity. Although the report implied Hamas had killed them, their cause of death was not specified. Many Israeli captives, however, have said that the thing they feared most during captivity was being killed by Israeli bombings and that Hamas members tried to protect them from these attacks. Weekend rescue killed three Israeli hostages Three Israeli hostages were killed during the rescue operation at Nuseirat this weekend, according to Hamas, which is something that is often glossed over in reports applauding the rescue of the four Israeli hostages. Likewise, the hundreds of Palestinians who died in the operations are being largely ignored in mainstream media reports. One emergency doctor in Aqsa hospital, Ali Ibrahim Tawil, described the aftermath of the bombardment during the rescue. “Many were on the floor, beds were put in the courtyard, in a big tent outdoors, literally every place in the hospital was filled with the injured, the dead or their relatives. The emergency room was so full, you couldn’t squeeze through your body from the sheer volume of people,” he said. The role the U.S. played in the operation is just one of many examples of how its support has been contributing to the civilian casualties in Gaza that the Biden administration claims it is trying so hard to avoid. |
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54751
From: Redhart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: NaturalNews: most discredited/CTs/PseudoSci/extreme/very low cred
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Overall, we rate Natural News a Questionable source based on the promotion of quackery-level pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, as well as extreme right-wing bias. This is one of the most discredited sources on the internet. Detailed Report Bias Rating: FAR RIGHT CONSPIRACY-PSEUSDOSCIENCE Factual Reporting: VERY-LOW Country: USA Press Freedom Rank: MOSTLY FREE Media Type: Website Traffic/Popularity: Medium Traffic MBFC Credibility Rating: LOW CREDIBILITY |
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54692
From: old timer, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza” says Israeli government
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they have to make excuses as they are violating international law with the mass slaughter of civilians and world opinion is against them for this needless slaughter |
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54690
From: ao, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza” says Israeli government
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If you have a government and that government murders some other country’s people, is it on you? Gaza’s government attacked Israel. And, you know, I ain’t heard anyone in Gaza condemn their government. I ain’t heard anybody in Gaza petition for another government. So yeah, if you wage war you are gonna get war waged on you. And when you consider the size of Israel’s guns it insanity that Hamas has chosen to take their country to war against them. But they did. As long as you continue to pine for Hamas what do you expect? If you don’t like it why aren’t you calling for Hamas to end the fighting? Why aren’t you focusing your energy in a way that might help the situation? |
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54703
From: chaskuchar@stcharlesmo, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza” says Israeli government
| tthose words aPPLY TO ISRAEL |
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None
54695
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: October 7, 2023: This Gaza war didn’t come out of nowhere
URL: https://www.vox.com/2023/10/7/23907912/israel-palestine-conflict-history-explained-gaza-hamas
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This Gaza war didn’t come out of nowhere Everyone forgot about the Palestinians — conditions have been set for two decades, and Biden’s focus on Israel-Saudi talks may have lit a match. by Jonathan Guyer Oct 7, 2023, Jonathan Guyer covers foreign policy, national security, and global affairs for Vox. From 2019 to 2021, he worked at the American Prospect, where as managing editor he reported on Biden’s and Trump’s foreign policy teams. It took Hamas’s deadly attack today to remind Israel, the United States, and the world that Palestine still matters. The militant group based in occupied Gaza launched aerial attacks and broke through the heavily secured fence into the State of Israel. Hundreds of Israelis have been killed, a historic scale of violence for the country. The Israeli counterattack will inevitably lead to more death and destruction for Palestinians and a tightened occupation. [Related: Everything you need to know about Israel-Palestine] It comes after nearly two decades of the US and world leaders overlooking the more than 2 million people living in Gaza who endure a humanitarian nightmare, with its airspace and borders and sea under Israeli control. The attack comes amid an ongoing failure to grapple with the dangerous situation for Palestinians in the West Bank where Israel’s extreme-right government over the past year has escalated the already brutal daily pain of occupation. Instances of Israeli security forces and Israeli settlers antagonizing Palestinians through violence are on the rise, from the pogrom on the city of Huwara to a new tempo of lethal raids on Jenin. Israeli government ministers have been pursuing annexationist policies and sharing raging rhetoric; both incite further violent response from Palestinians and appear at a time when new militant groups have emerged that claim the mantle of the Palestinian cause. The now-regular presence of Israeli Jews praying at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, have further pressurized the situation. A Hamas commander cited many of these factors in his statement. Do you have questions about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian relations? Tell us by filling out this form. We’ll try to answer your questions in an upcoming story. But the ongoing reality of the occupation has not featured prominently in US or Arab leaders’ engagement with the region in recent years, even as circumstances for Palestinians worsened. The question must thus be asked to the Israeli government, the Biden administration, and Arab leaders: How did they forget about Palestinians? How did they so brazenly ignore Gaza? President Joe Biden has not reversed his predecessor Donald Trump’s policy of putting aside the question of Palestine and instead has exerted immense capital on the normalization of Israel’s relations with Arab states, no matter how extreme the policies of the Israeli government. In the current US-led diplomatic equation, there is no space for Palestinians, except for talk of minor concessions to ease daily humiliations. Biden said recently, as many of his surrogates often do, that the US remains intent on “preserving the path to a negotiated two-state solution.” But negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization have been frozen since 2014 under President Barack Obama, and most Palestinian analysts at this point acknowledge that US administrations since President Bill Clinton have engaged in a failed, asymmetrical process that never would have allowed for the conditions of an independent, sovereign state of Palestine. And so the symbolism of Hamas breaking through Israeli security barriers and wreaking havoc on Israel — including the kidnapping of at least one Israeli soldier as well as civilians — will resonate across Palestine, the Arab world, and beyond. Israel’s conflicts with Hamas, along with the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel conflict, have largely been rocket and artillery exchanges. Even in decades of large- scale Arab-Israeli wars, the battles were fought outside. “No Arab army has entered the territory of Israel since the 1948 war,” the preeminent Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University told me. “This is a huge strategic surprise.” [Related: What a “complete siege” of Gaza will mean for Palestinians] Israel and the United States have wished away Palestinians. The terrible bloodshed of today’s attacks underscores the cost of doing so. How Biden missed the plot on Gaza I’ve been to several Mideast policy conferences this month and spend probably too much of my time interviewing Washington experts and attending lectures on Middle East history. Palestinians are hardly represented in panels and keynotes. The Biden administration’s key players bring up Palestine as a secondary issue. Gaza does not come up anymore. But it remains central to how Palestinians and Arabs see Israel-Palestine and the Middle East — and how many Arabs perceive the US role in the world. Trump exacerbated the hopelessness for Palestinian political rights by cutting the Palestinians entirely out of the process, and instead helped seal normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. But the autocratic Arab leaders who made “peace” with Israel never represented their own citizens. With Biden’s Middle East team prioritizing a long-shot deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Biden’s inner circle has avoided talking about Gaza entirely. It’s all the more surprising because the two-week war between Israel and Hamas in May 2021 should have been an indication of Palestine’s enduring centrality to Middle East affairs. But as far as I can tell, there has been no policy reckoning in Washington about that war. No policy reviews. There was complacency. “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades,” Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan said only last week. It’s not even the first time that someone like Sullivan, who also served as a senior official in the Obama administration, has worked with his Egyptian counterparts to negotiate an Israel-Hamas ceasefire, as he is likely doing now. But now it’s clear that he and others treated Gaza peacemaking as a sideshow. It is not integral to Biden’s approach. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which Hamas administers some level of control over, remains as acute as ever. But because the US has long designated Hamas, the Palestinian militant political group with an Islamist worldview, as a terrorist organization, US officials can’t contact them and must work through third countries. It means that the US knowledge base and expertise on Gaza is not just low — it’s absent. The Palestine Liberation Organization’s leadership, with Chair Mahmoud Abbas still hanging on at 87 years old, lacks legitimacy among Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority, the body that exercises some administrative control over the occupied West Bank and that Abbas also runs, is seen by Palestinians as a collaboration arm of the Israeli occupation. A grassroots movement of Palestinian youth who engage in violent resistance against the Israeli security state, against settlers, and against civilians has emerged. Between the radical Israeli government and the sclerotic Palestinian leadership, the Biden administration chose to continue the path of Trump’s normalization deals, with Saudi Arabia as the prize. Biden’s team still states an allegiance to the pursuit of a Palestinian state while doing little more, all of which exposes the emptiness of the two-state solution. What this means for Palestinians Early on Saturday, Hamas sent bulldozers through the barriers that have hemmed in Palestinians in Gaza from Israel and the rest of the world. That image of resistance to the occupation will be widely circulated in the Arab world, and will endure long beyond this war. Its symbolic power cannot be underestimated. Gaza is in essence a refugee camp (about 70 percent of those living in Gaza come from families displaced from the 1948 war) and an open-air prison, according to human rights groups. The United Nations describes the occupied territory as a “chronic humanitarian crisis.” Israel has blockaded Gaza since Hamas assumed control of the territory in 2007, and neighboring Egypt to the south has also imposed severe restrictions on movement. Between them, Israel and Egypt monitor the entry and exit of all people, vehicles, and goods. They have not allowed enough construction materials and humanitarian items into the occupied Gaza Strip to enable the battered territory to rebuild from recurring episodes of deadly Israeli bombardments that are allegedly meant to target Hamas, but that often include civilian death tolls in the very dense territory. The current Israeli government has aggravated these realities, Khalidi explained, by increasing pressure on the Palestinians on multiple fronts: in Jerusalem, squeezing Gaza, assaults on Palestinian villages by settlers, with settler-politicians leading ministries in the Israeli government; and with annexationist policies like the recent major policy change putting the Israeli civilian government (not the Israeli military) in charge of the occupied West Bank. Hamas’s attacks on Israel won’t change life for Palestinians, and Israel’s government will now use the full force of its advanced military in response. And given Israel’s state of emergency, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is now in talks with the opposition parties to pull together a unity government for the country. But even if some of the most extreme settler voices currently in the Israeli cabinet are replaced by more mainstream Israeli voices, harsh policies against Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza will continue. [Related: Benjamin Netanyahu failed Israel] “This pressure being put on Palestinians — it just assumes that they’re insignificant and they will tolerate any degree of humiliation, and that’s just not true,” Khalidi told me. “If you had lifted the siege of Gaza, you would not have had this happen.” Now Israelis are experiencing terrible loss and a tremendous sense of danger, and Palestinians living in Gaza will endure more violence, including Israeli troops entering the territories and the extensive bombardment of alleged military sites that typically have a significant civilian toll. Global powers have been ignoring Gaza, but some in Israel haven’t forgotten. “The dread Israelis are feeling right now, myself included, is a sliver of what Palestinians have been feeling on a daily basis under the decades-long military regime in the West Bank, and under the siege and repeated assaults on Gaza,” writes the Israeli journalist Haggai Mattar in 972 Magazine. “The only solution, as it has always been, is to bring an end of apartheid, occupation, and siege, and promote a future based on justice and equality for all of us. It is not in spite of the horror that we have to change course — it is exactly because of it.” |
54696
From: ao, [DNS_Address]
Subject: and your posting articles about it will help how?
54704
From: chaskuchar@stcharlesmo, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: and your posting articles about it will help how?
| terlls me that israell is a bastard nation |
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54697
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: and your posting articles about it will help how?
| it will help others realize what a thoughtless clod you are. |
54702
From: ao, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: and your posting articles about it will help how?
| Is that what you want printed on your headstone? |
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[54708]
54708
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: and your posting articles about it will help how?
| drop dead, asshole. |
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54694
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination
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Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity Israeli authorities must be held accountable for committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, Amnesty International said today in a damning new report. The investigation details how Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has control over their rights. This includes Palestinians living in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), as well as displaced refugees in other countries. The comprehensive report, Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, sets out how massive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians are all components of a system which amounts to apartheid under international law. This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity, as defined in the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention. Amnesty International is calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to consider the crime of apartheid in its current investigation in the OPT and calls on all states to exercise universal jurisdiction to bring perpetrators of apartheid crimes to justice. Our report reveals the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime. Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights. We found that Israel’s cruel policies of segregation, dispossession and exclusion across all territories under its control clearly amount to apartheid. The international community has an obligation to act Agnčs Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General “There is no possible justification for a system built around the institutionalized and prolonged racist oppression of millions of people. Apartheid has no place in our world, and states which choose to make allowances for Israel will find themselves on the wrong side of history. Governments who continue to supply Israel with arms and shield it from accountability at the UN are supporting a system of apartheid, undermining the international legal order, and exacerbating the suffering of the Palestinian people. The international community must face up to the reality of Israel’s apartheid, and pursue the many avenues to justice which remain shamefully unexplored.” Amnesty International’s findings build on a growing body of work by Palestinian, Israeli and international NGOs, who have increasingly applied the apartheid framework to the situation in Israel and/or the OPT. Identifying apartheid A system of apartheid is an institutionalized regime of oppression and domination by one racial group over another. It is a serious human rights violation which is prohibited in public international law. Amnesty International’s extensive research and legal analysis, carried out in consultation with external experts, demonstrates that Israel enforces such a system against Palestinians through laws, policies and practices which ensure their prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment. In international criminal law, specific unlawful acts which are committed within a system of oppression and domination, with the intention of maintaining it, constitute the crime against humanity of apartheid. These acts are set out in the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute, and include unlawful killing, torture, forcible transfer, and the denial of basic rights and freedoms. Amnesty International documented acts proscribed in the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute in all the areas Israel controls, although they occur more frequently and violently in the OPT than in Israel. Israeli authorities enact multiple measures to deliberately deny Palestinians their basic rights and freedoms, including draconian movement restrictions in the OPT, chronic discriminatory underinvestment in Palestinian communities in Israel, and the denial of refugees’ right to return. The report also documents forcible transfer, administrative detention, torture, and unlawful killings, in both Israel and the OPT. Amnesty International found that these acts form part of a systematic and widespread attack directed against the Palestinian population, and are committed with the intent to maintain the system of oppression and domination. They therefore constitute the crime against humanity of apartheid. The unlawful killing of Palestinian protesters is perhaps the clearest illustration of how Israeli authorities use proscribed acts to maintain the status quo. In 2018, Palestinians in Gaza began to hold weekly protests along the border with Israel, calling for the right of return for refugees and an end to the blockade. Before protests even began, senior Israeli officials warned that Palestinians approaching the wall would be shot. By the end of 2019, Israeli forces had killed 214 civilians, including 46 children. In light of the systematic unlawful killings of Palestinians documented in its report, Amnesty International is also calling for the UN Security Council to impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel. This should cover all weapons and munitions as well as law enforcement equipment, given the thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been unlawfully killed by Israeli forces. The Security Council should also impose targeted sanctions, such as asset freezes, against Israeli officials most implicated in the crime of apartheid. Palestinians treated as a demographic threat Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued a policy of establishing and then maintaining a Jewish demographic majority, and maximizing control over land and resources to benefit Jewish Israelis. In 1967, Israel extended this policy to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Today, all territories controlled by Israel continue to be administered with the purpose of benefiting Jewish Israelis to the detriment of Palestinians, while Palestinian refugees continue to be excluded. Amnesty International recognizes that Jews, like Palestinians, claim a right to self-determination, and does not challenge Israel’s desire to be a home for Jews. Similarly, it does not consider that Israel labelling itself a “Jewish state” in itself indicates an intention to oppress and dominate. However, Amnesty International’s report shows that successive Israeli governments have considered Palestinians a demographic threat, and imposed measures to control and decrease their presence and access to land in Israel and the OPT. These demographic aims are well illustrated by official plans to “Judaize” areas of Israel and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which continue to put thousands of Palestinians at risk of forcible transfer. Oppression without borders The 1947-49 and 1967 wars, Israel’s ongoing military rule of the OPT, and the creation of separate legal and administrative regimes within the territory, have separated Palestinian communities and segregated them from Jewish Israelis. Palestinians have been fragmented geographically and politically, and experience different levels of discrimination depending on their status and where they live. Palestinian citizens in Israel currently enjoy greater rights and freedoms than their counterparts in the OPT, while the experience of Palestinians in Gaza is very different to that of those living in the West Bank. Nonetheless, Amnesty International’s research shows that all Palestinians are subject to the same overarching system. Israel’s treatment of Palestinians across all areas is pursuant to the same objective: to privilege Jewish Israelis in distribution of land and resources, and to minimize the Palestinian presence and access to land. Amnesty International demonstrates that Israeli authorities treat Palestinians as an inferior racial group who are defined by their non-Jewish, Arab status. This racial discrimination is cemented in laws which affect Palestinians across Israel and the OPT. For example, Palestinian citizens of Israel are denied a nationality, establishing a legal differentiation from Jewish Israelis. In the West Bank and Gaza, where Israel has controlled the population registry since 1967, Palestinians have no citizenship and most are considered stateless, requiring ID cards from the Israeli military to live and work in the territories. Palestinian refugees and their descendants, who were displaced in the 1947- 49 and 1967 conflicts, continue to be denied the right to return to their former places of residence. Israel’s exclusion of refugees is a flagrant violation of international law which has left millions in a perpetual limbo of forced displacement. Palestinians in annexed East Jerusalem are granted permanent residence instead of citizenship – though this status is permanent in name only. Since 1967, more than 14,000 Palestinians have had their residency revoked at the discretion of the Ministry of the Interior, resulting in their forcible transfer outside the city. Lesser citizens Palestinian citizens of Israel, who comprise about 19% of the population, face many forms of institutionalized discrimination. In 2018, discrimination against Palestinians was crystallized in a constitutional law which, for the first time, enshrined Israel exclusively as the “nation state of the Jewish people”. The law also promotes the building of Jewish settlements and downgrades Arabic’s status as an official language. The report documents how Palestinians are effectively blocked from leasing on 80% of Israel’s state land, as a result of racist land seizures and a web of discriminatory laws on land allocation, planning and zoning. The situation in the Negev/Naqab region of southern Israel is a prime example of how Israel’s planning and building policies intentionally exclude Palestinians. Since 1948 Israeli authorities have adopted various policies to “Judaize” the Negev/Naqab, including designating large areas as nature reserves or military firing zones, and setting targets for increasing the Jewish population. This has had devastating consequences for the tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins who live in the region. Thirty-five Bedouin villages, home to about 68,000 people, are currently “unrecognized” by Israel, which means they are cut off from the national electricity and water supply and targeted for repeated demolitions. As the villages have no official status, their residents also face restrictions on political participation and are excluded from the healthcare and education systems. These conditions have coerced many into leaving their homes and villages, in what amounts to forcible transfer. Decades of deliberately unequal treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel have left them consistently economically disadvantaged in comparison to Jewish Israelis. This is exacerbated by blatantly discriminatory allocation of state resources: a recent example is the government’s Covid-19 recovery package, of which just 1.7% was given to Palestinian local authorities. Dispossession The dispossession and displacement of Palestinians from their homes is a crucial pillar of Israel’s apartheid system. Since its establishment the Israeli state has enforced massive and cruel land seizures against Palestinians, and continues to implement myriad laws and policies to force Palestinians into small enclaves. Since 1948, Israel has demolished hundreds of thousands of Palestinian homes and other properties across all areas under its jurisdiction and effective control. As in the Negev/Naqab, Palestinians in East Jerusalem and Area C of the OPT live under full Israeli control. The authorities deny building permits to Palestinians in these areas, forcing them to build illegal structures which are demolished again and again. In the OPT, the continued expansion of illegal Israeli settlements exacerbates the situation. The construction of these settlements in the OPT has been a government policy since 1967. Settlements today cover 10% of the land in the West Bank, and some 38% of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem was expropriated between 1967 and 2017. Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem are frequently targeted by settler organizations which, with the full backing of the Israeli government, work to displace Palestinian families and hand their homes to settlers. One such neighbourhood, Sheikh Jarrah, has been the site of frequent protests since May 2021 as families battle to keep their homes under the threat of a settler lawsuit. Draconian movement restrictions Since the mid-1990s Israeli authorities have imposed increasingly stringent movement restrictions on Palestinians in the OPT. A web of military checkpoints, roadblocks, fences and other structures controls the movement of Palestinians within the OPT, and restricts their travel into Israel or abroad. A 700km fence, which Israel is still extending, has isolated Palestinian communities inside “military zones”, and they must obtain multiple special permits any time they enter or leave their homes. In Gaza, more than 2 million Palestinians live under an Israeli blockade which has created a humanitarian crisis. It is near-impossible for Gazans to travel abroad or into the rest of the OPT, and they are effectively segregated from the rest of the world. For Palestinians, the difficulty of travelling within and in and out of the OPT is a constant reminder of their powerlessness. Their every move is subject to the Israeli military’s approval, and the simplest daily task means navigating a web of violent control Agnčs Callamard “The permit system in the OPT is emblematic of Israel’s brazen discrimination against Palestinians. While Palestinians are locked in a blockade, stuck for hours at checkpoints, or waiting for yet another permit to come through, Israeli citizens and settlers can move around as they please.” Amnesty International examined each of the security justifications which Israel cites as the basis for its treatment of Palestinians. The report shows that, while some of Israel’s policies may have been designed to fulfil legitimate security objectives, they have been implemented in a grossly disproportionate and discriminatory way which fails to comply with international law. Other policies have absolutely no reasonable basis in security, and are clearly shaped by the intent to oppress and dominate. The way forward Amnesty International provides numerous specific recommendations for how the Israeli authorities can dismantle the apartheid system and the discrimination, segregation and oppression which sustain it. The organization is calling for an end to the brutal practice of home demolitions and forced evictions as a first step. Israel must grant equal rights to all Palestinians in Israel and the OPT, in line with principles of international human rights and humanitarian law. It must recognize the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to homes where they or their families once lived, and provide victims of human rights violations and crimes against humanity with full reparations. The scale and seriousness of the violations documented in Amnesty International’s report call for a drastic change in the international community’s approach to the human rights crisis in Israel and the OPT. All states may exercise universal jurisdiction over persons reasonably suspected of committing the crime of apartheid under international law, and states that are party to the Apartheid Convention have an obligation to do so. The international response to apartheid must no longer be limited to bland condemnations and equivocating. Unless we tackle the root causes, Palestinians and Israelis will remain locked in the cycle of violence which has destroyed so many lives Agnčs Callamard “Israel must dismantle the apartheid system and start treating Palestinians as human beings with equal rights and dignity. Until it does, peace and security will remain a distant prospect for Israelis and Palestinians alike.” Please see the full report for detailed definition of apartheid in international law. Further Reading Find out more about Israel's apartheid against Palestinians Q&A: Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: cruel system of domination and crime against humanity Read the report NEWS ISRAEL AND OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES |
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54693
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Israel’s occupation: 50 years of Palestinian oppression
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learn some history. Your ignorance is embarrassing. June 8, 2017 Israel’s occupation: 50 years of Palestinian oppression After 50 years of Israeli war crimes on Palestinian land, the world has to act and ban Israeli settlement goods. “Everyone has a right to live in his home and no one may uproot him.” These were the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a Knesset event this week marking 50 years of Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories in which he vowed to strengthen Israel’s “settlement enterprise”. The right elucidated in Netanyahu’s speech, it would appear, however, does not extend to Palestinians in the occupied territories. Israel’s unlawful construction and expansion of settlements and their related infrastructure on Palestinian soil is one of the most defining features of Israel’s occupation and has bred mass violations against Palestinians over the past five decades. Everyone has a right to live in his home and no one may uproot him Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech to Knesset about settlements Tens of thousands of Palestinian homes and properties have been demolished displacing entire communities from their homes and at least 100,000 hectares of land have been seized for Israel’s settlement project, including for construction and agricultural use. Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land do not just amount to war crimes under international law, they violate fundamental principles of international law triggering additional responsibilities among all states. Yet, for decades, Israel has openly defied international law by ruthlessly pursuing its settlement expansion. For decades, Israel has openly defied international law by ruthlessly pursuing its settlement expansion. Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International Palestinian natural resources such as fertile land, water and minerals have been extensively and unlawfully appropriated to sustain the Israeli settlements. At the same time, Israel has imposed restrictions on Palestinians’ access to – and use of – water, land and other natural resources, as well as restricting Palestinians’ freedom of movement, tearing families apart, stopping farmers from accessing their farmland and preventing people getting to work or earning a living. Over the years, as the Palestinian economy has steadily declined under the strain of these restrictions, Israel has simultaneously built a multibillion-dollar business out of Palestinian suffering – exporting hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of settlement goods internationally each year. This thriving enterprise helps to sustain the presence and the expansion of settlements and is a key driving force for the systematic violations we continue to witness against Palestinians today. For five decades, the world has stood by and watched as Israel has exploited Palestinian people, land and natural resources for profit to support its illegal settlement expansion, offering little more than condemnation of Israel’s unlawful acts. International lack of action Unless concerted international action is taken to stop and remove settlements, the already dire human rights situation for Palestinians in the occupied territories will only get worse. Under international law, states have an obligation not to recognise nor to render aid or assistance to the illegal situation created by Israeli settlements – yet many states continue to allow imports from settlements and permit their companies to operate on occupied Palestinian land. The vast majority of states, including all EU member states, publicly acknowledge Israeli settlements as illegal under international law and have been nearly unanimous in their condemnation of the settlement project. There have also been many UN resolutions passed demanding an end to settlement construction and expansion. As early as 1980, UN Security Council Resolution 465 called on all states not to provide Israel with any assistance “to be used specifically in connection with settlements in the occupied territories”. Time and again, the global condemnation of Israel's settlement policy has fallen on deaf ears Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International Yet, time and again, the global condemnation of Israel’s settlement policy has fallen on deaf ears. Israel has repeatedly made it clear that it couldn’t care less what the world thinks and is doggedly determined to continue its expansion of settlements in flagrant violation of international law. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech pledging his continued commitment to expanding settlements proves just that. Israel’s military-run Civil Administration is also set to approve thousands of new homes in existing settlements in the occupied West Bank announced earlier this year as well as plans to establish two new settlements, the first in years. Ban settlement goods It has become increasingly evident that merely condemning Israel’s settlement expansion is not enough. That’s why, to mark the 50 years of occupation Amnesty International is making a call, for the first time in the organisation’s history, on governments worldwide to uphold their obligations by banning settlement goods from their markets and putting in place laws and regulations to stop their companies from operating in settlements or trading in settlement goods. Governments worldwide have the responsibility to ensure that goods grown, produced or manufactured on stolen Palestinian land do not end up on our supermarket shelves. They have to show that their verbal condemnation of Israel is more than hot air. Failure of states to do so would undermine the legal principles that they claim to uphold. Fifty years on it’s easy to feel helpless about what can be done to address decades of injustice and Israeli violations against Palestinians. Banning settlement goods and stopping companies from operating in settlements are concrete steps that governments must take to meet their international obligations and to help to end an inherently discriminatory system that has brought suffering to millions of Palestinians. Philip Luther is Amnesty International’s Director for the Middle East and North Africa. |
Responses:
[54698]
54698
From: old timer, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Israel’s occupation: 50 years of Palestinian oppression
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if he’s not embarrassed by his support for the ongoing genocide i doubt he will be embarrassed by this |
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