‘War Crimes, Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide’: If you were Palestinian, how would you respond? / By John Raby

_{^{Palestinians carrying some belongings walk past ammunition containers left behind by Israeli troops as they flee Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on Feb. 2, 2024. Photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP}}

_{Portland, Maine}

As this column goes to press, the Israeli government has just charged members of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza with being active in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, has fired the people so charged and pledged a through investigation to determine the accuracy of Israel’s allegations. None of this news negates what is not a case of strange arithmetic, though it may be a case of strange fruit. The details follow.

Since last October’s start of the current war between Israel and Palestine, the Israeli armed forces have killed over one percent of Gaza’s population, with 63,000 wounded. Forty percent of the dead are children. Add the women killed, and the proportion rises to 70 percent. Among those still living, everyone is food insecure, and one-half are starving. Ever since December, easily preventable contagions have been spreading. Almost all their homes have been reduced to rubble. Ever since the Israeli authorities began restricting food, fuel, and medical supplies to Gaza starting in 2007, anemia and stunted growth among Gaza’s children have been commonplace. In one particularly grisly incident in December, an Israeli detachment ran bulldozers over sick and injured people who were taking refuge from bombardment in a hospital, crushing them to death. Among the dead were children.

If you were Palestinian, how would you respond? Imagine the same proportions in the United States: 9,300,000 wounded and 3,900,000 dead; of the dead, 1,500,000 children and 1,200,000 women; nationwide, all of us food insecure, with 165,000,000 starving. With almost all our hospitals flattened and almost no food, fuel, clean water, or medical supplies allowed in, how would we minister to our ill-fed, sick, and wounded? How would we deal with increasing disease? With almost all our homes destroyed, where would we shelter, now that it’s winter? Where would we put the corpses, and who would be left strong and available enough to bury them? As an American, how would you respond?

Then there’s the West Bank. Ever since 1967, Israeli settlers have been steadily shoving Palestinians off the land, demolishing their homes, uprooting their olive orchards, and from time to time shooting to kill or merely blow away their knees. This has been going on under the protection of the Israeli armed forces, who have joined in the shooting every so often, and who arrest and detain Palestinians without a formal indictment or due process as a matter of routine. Those so detained have often spent years in prison. It should come as no surprise that from time to time, desperate Palestinians have replied with gunsmoke of their own, on a scale far smaller than what Israeli settlers and the IDF have wrought.

In response, the UN General Assembly passed a series of resolutions in 1982, with only the United States and Israel voting no. Here are excerpts from those resolutions:

_{· That Israel desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestinian refugees in the territory occupied by Israel since 1967 and from the destruction of their shelters.}

_{· That Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan, are illegal.}

_{· That all measures and actions taken by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory are in violation of the Geneva Convention.}

_{· That Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territory, its diversion of water resources, its depletion of natural and economic resources of the occupied territories, and its displacement of the population of those territories, are without legal validity.}

_{· That the Israeli occupation is contradictory to the basic requirements for the social and economic development of the Palestinian people. That hunger constitutes an outrage and a violation of human dignity.}

_{· That historical injustices have contributed to the poverty, marginalization, social exclusion, and instability that affect many people in the world.}

_{· That no derogation from the prohibition of racial discrimination, genocide, and the crime of apartheid is permitted.}

Lest all the foregoing seem like special pleading, consider this: how many of you have donated to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, or the International Red Cross? All five of these organizations see the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza as war crime, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. Meanwhile, the United States continues its unrestricted weapons shipments to the Israeli armed forces, all paid for with American taxpayers’ money. It all adds up. As was once written long ago, where our treasure is, there lie our hearts also.

_{John Raby is a retired history teacher and conscientious objector who is currently co-chair of Peace Action Maine. From 2014 to 2021, when he lived in New Hampshire, he was active with New Hampshire Peace Action and wrote the clean energy policy for New London, New Hampshire. He centers his activism around war and peace, environmental, and social justice issues.}

Doctors Without Borders Tells Key UN Body to Stop ‘Absolute Horror’ in Gaza / by Jake Johnson

_{^{Mourners gather next to the body of a person killed in Israeli airstrikes on the city of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on December 2, 2023 | Photo: Mohammed Talatene/Picture Alliance via Getty Images}}

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

“Israel has shown a blatant and total disregard for the protection of Gaza’s medical facilities. We are watching as hospitals are turned into morgues and ruins.”

The international president of Doctors Without Borders on Monday pleaded with members of the United Nations Security Council to do everything in their power to halt the Israeli military’s expanding assault on the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 15,000 people in less than two months and decimated the territory’s healthcare system.

In an open letter , Dr. Christos Christou wrote that “words fail us to describe the absolute horror being inflicted on Palestinian civilians by Israel as it carries out incessant and indiscriminate warfare in Gaza for all the world to see.”

“Israel has shown a blatant and total disregard for the protection of Gaza’s medical facilities. We are watching as hospitals are turned into morgues and ruins,” he continued. “These supposedly protected facilities are being bombed, are being shot at by tanks and guns, encircled, and raided, killing patients and medical staff… Medical staff, including our own, are utterly exhausted and in despair. They have had to amputate limbs from children suffering from severe burns without anesthesia or sterilized surgical tools.”

Hundreds of medical workers , including four Doctors Without Borders staff members, have been killed in Israel’s weekslong attack on Gaza. Following a seven-day pause that ended last week, Israel began broadening its ground offensive and bombardment to include swaths of southern Gaza—where many fled in response to Israeli evacuation orders in the north.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Sunday that the country’s ground assault now encompasses “all of the Gaza Strip,” leaving desperate Gazans—including many children—with virtually nowhere safe to go.

“The only solution is an immediate and sustained cease-fire and the unrestricted supply of aid to the entirety of the Gaza Strip.”

Since the end of the pause, Gaza hospitals supported by Doctors Without Borders—also known as Médecins Sans Frontières—have been “barely able to cope with the influx of patients,” the group said in a statement Monday as Israel continued to hammer the besieged enclave, bombing hundreds of targets including a school that the IDF claimed contained “terror infrastructure.” The IDF did not provide evidence to support the claim.

“In a military campaign that has lasted weeks, with only a brief respite, the speed and scale of the bombing continue to plumb the depths of brutality,” said Chris Hook, Doctors Without Borders’ medical coordinator in Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza. “Almost 2 million people are left without options. The only solution is an immediate and sustained cease-fire and the unrestricted supply of aid to the entirety of the Gaza Strip.”

Christou wrote in the group’s new open letter that while Israel claims to be targeting Hamas in retaliation for the group’s deadly October 7 attack, Israeli forces are in reality waging war “on all of Gaza and its people at any cost.”

Nearly 80% of Gaza’s population has been internally displaced , and U.N. experts warned last month that “time is running out to prevent genocide” in the strip.

“Thus far, world leaders, including permanent members of the Security Council, have been complicit, either by providing Israel with diplomatic cover, by supplying Israel with seemingly unconditional military assistance, or by failing to help stem the relentless bloodshed and atrocities being committed in Gaza,” Christou lamented.

“It is time,” he added, “to choose whether the council will continue issuing half-hearted calls for the respect of international law and the protection of civilians, or will fulfill its international peace and security mandate and exercise its full diplomatic leverage to convince the state of Israel that the death sentence it has handed the people of Gaza is inhumane, indefensible, and cannot continue to be carried out.”

In the nearly two months since Israel launched its latest bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip, the U.N. Security Council has been largely deadlocked, passing just one resolution that called for the release of hostages and humanitarian pauses.

The U.S., one of five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, vetoed an earlier resolution calling for humanitarian pauses because the measure “made no mention of Israel’s right of self-defense.”

Christou urged the council to immediately “take action to uphold our shared humanity.”

“‘We did what we could. Remember us.’ These are the words our Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, who has since been killed in a hospital strike, wrote on a Gaza hospital whiteboard normally used for planning surgeries,” Christou wrote. “When the guns fall silent and the true scale of devastation is revealed, will the council and its members be able to say the same?”

_{Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.}

Israel Reopens the Gaza Slaughterhouse / by Chris Hedges

_{^{Slaughterhouse – by Mr. Fish}}

_{Reposted from The Chris Hedges Report}

The skies over Gaza are filled — after a seven-day truce — with projectiles of death. Warplanes. Attack helicopters. Drones. Artillery shells. Tank shells. Mortars. Bombs. Missiles. Gaza is a cacophony of explosions and forlorn screams and cries for help beneath collapsed buildings. Fear, once again, is coiling itself around every heart in the Gazan concentration camp.

By Friday evening, 184 Palestinians — including three journalists and two doctors — had been killed by Israeli air strikes in the north, south and central Gaza, and at least 589 injured, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Most of them are women and children. Israel will not be deterred. It plans to finish the job, to obliterate what is left in the north of Gaza and decimate what remains in the south, to render Gaza uninhabitable, to see its 2.3 million people driven out in a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing via starvation, terror, slaughter and infectious diseases.

The aid convoys, which brought in token amounts of food and medicine — the first batch was shrouds and coronavirus tests according to the director of al-Najjar hospital — have been halted. No one, least of all President Joe Biden, plans to intervene to stop the genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel this week, and while calling for Israel to protect civilians, refused to set conditions that would disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance or the $14.3 billion supplemental aid package. The world will watch passively, muttering useless bromides about more surgical strikes, while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, where Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era.

Nothing is off limits. Hospitals. Mosques. Churches. Homes. Apartment blocks. Refugee camps. Schools. Universities. Media offices. Banks. Sewer systems. Telecommunications infrastructure. Water treatment plants. Libraries. Wheat mills. Bakeries. Markets. Entire neighborhoods. Israel’s intent is to destroy Gaza’s infrastructure and daily kill or wound hundreds of Palestinians. Gaza is to become a wasteland, a dead zone that will be incapable of sustaining life.

Israel began to bomb Khan Younis on Friday after dropping leaflets warning civilians to evacuate further south to Rafah, located on the border crossing with Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians had sought refuge in Khan Younis. Once Palestinians are pushed to Rafah, there is only one place left to flee — Egypt. The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence, in a leaked report, calls for the forcible transfer of Gaza’s population to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. A detailed plan to intentionally displace the Palestinians in Gaza and push them into Egypt has been embedded in Israeli doctrine for five decades. Already, 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza have been driven from their homes. Once Palestinians cross the border into Egypt — which the Egyptian government and Arab leaders are seeking to prevent despite pressure from the U.S. — Palestinians will never return.

This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against Palestinians.

Israeli strikes are generated at a dizzying rate, many of them from a system called “Habsora” — The Gospel — which is built on artificial intelligence that selects 100 targets a day. The AI-system is described by seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials in an article by Yuval Abraham on the Israeli sites +972 Magazine and Local Call, as facilitating a “mass assassination factory.” Israel, once it locates what it assumes to be a Hamas operative from a cell phone, for example, bombs and shells a wide area around the target, killing and wounding tens, and at times hundreds of Palestinians, the article states.

“According to intelligence sources,” the story reads, “Habsora generates, among other things, automatic recommendations for attacking private residences where people suspected of being Hamas or Islamic Jihad operatives live. Israel then carries out large-scale assassination operations through the heavy shelling of these residential homes.”

Some 15,000 Palestinians, including 6,000 children and 4,000 women, have been killed since Oct. 7. Some 30,000 have been wounded. Over six thousand are missing, many buried under the rubble. More than 300 families have lost 10 or more members of their families. More than 250 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, and more than 3,000 injured, although the area is not controlled by Hamas. The Israeli military claims to have killed between 1,000 and 3,000 of some 30,000 Hamas fighters, a relatively small number given the scale of the assault. Most resistance fighters shelter in their vast tunnel system.

Israel’s playbook is the “Dahiya Doctrine.” The doctrine was formulated by former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who is a member of the war cabinet, following the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Dahiya is a southern Beirut suburb and a Hezbollah stronghold. It was pounded by Israeli jets after two Israeli soldiers were taken prisoner. The doctrine posits that Israel should employ massive, disproportionate force, destroying infrastructure and civilian residences, to ensure deterrence.

Daniel Hagari, spokesman of the IDF, conceded at the start of Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza that the “emphasis” would be “on damage and not on accuracy.”

Israel has abandoned its tactic of “roof knocking” where a rocket without a warhead would land on a roof to warn those inside to evacuate. Israel has also ended its phone calls warning of an impending attack. Now dozens of families in an apartment block or a neighborhood are killed without notice.

The images of mass destruction feed the thirst for revenge within Israel following the humiliating incursion by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7 and the killing of 1,200 Israelis, including 395 soldiers and 59 police officers. There is a sadistic pleasure voiced by many Israelis over the genocide and a groundswell of calls for the murder or expulsion of Palestinians, including those in the occupied West Bank and those with Israeli citizenship.

The savagery of the air strikes and indiscriminate attacks, the cutting off of food, water and medicine, the genocidal rhetoric of the Israeli government, make this a war whose sole objective is revenge. This will not be good for Israel or the Palestinians. It will fuel a conflagration throughout the Middle East.

Israel’s attack is the last desperate measure of a settler colonial project that foolishly thinks, as many settler colonial projects have in the past, that it can crush the resistance of an indigenous population with genocide. But even Israel will not get away with killing on this scale. A generation of Palestinians, many of whom have seen most, if not all, of their families killed and their homes and neighborhoods destroyed, will carry within them a lifelong thirst for justice and retribution.

This war is not over. It has not even begun.

_{Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact.}