Daily Archives: 10 January 2024

2023 was deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005

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Original article by Abdul Rahman republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Israeli occupation forces obstructing the work of ambulances in Jenin. (Photo: Mohammad Mansour/WAFA)

Over 500 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank in 2023. Under its undeclared policy of collective punishment, Israel also destroyed a significant amount of civilian infrastructure such as roads, residential buildings, and hospitals in West Bank since October 7

Israel’s war on Gaza has entered its fourth month. It has killed over 23,000 Palestinians in the besieged enclave and injured around 60,000. Nearly 80% of all Gazans have been displaced due to the constant bombings. The amount of destruction and killing in Gaza is horrendous. The offensive has also extended to the West Bank where Palestinians have been facing a form of undeclared collective punishment both before and since the war in Gaza.  

Though the West Bank has always faced violent attacks from Israeli occupation, those attacks have increased manifold since the beginning of the war in Gaza. Despite the fact that Hamas does not rule the territory, Israel used the excuse of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood to justify its unprecedented attacks on civilians and their infrastructure there. 

Between October 7 and December 31, last year more than 340 Palestinians, including a large number of children, were killed in attacks carried out by both the Israeli forces and illegal settlers. 

The Israeli attacks targeted Palestinian civilians, including artists from the famous Freedom Theater, while homes were demolished, hospitals and medical facilities targeted, and roads and other civilian infrastructure uprooted.  

At least three Palestinian men were shot and killed by the occupying Israeli forces during the intervening period of Monday evening and Tuesday night in Tulkarm. Video footage of these attacks showed Israeli forces first shooting and killing the men and then running over the bodies of one of them with their military vehicle.

Israeli forces reportedly conducted similar night raids in Qalqilya, Nablus, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, among several other places on Tuesday night, arresting scores of people and destroying civic infrastructure.

Israeli occupation is targeting the Palestinians in the West Bank economically as well by refusing to transfer millions of dollars in tax revenue to the Palestinian Authority, leaving it with no money to pay the salaries to its over 140,000 employees. It has also refused to allow around 150,000 workers from the territory to return to their jobs in Israel since October 7.  

Deadliest Year since 2005

Israeli forces similarly attacked the Jenin refugee camp a couple of days ago and killed at least 7 Palestinians. They have targeted the camp repeatedly since October 7, killing over 60 Palestinians there and deliberately destroying most of the roads and other civil infrastructure. According to Al-Jazeera, Tulkarm too has been a center of Israeli attacks with at least 60 Palestinians killed since October 7.

In August, the UN had already declared 2023 to be the deadliest year for the West Bank as the number of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks had crossed 200, more than the previous high of 167 in 2022.

According to the latest data, the total number of Palestinians killed in 2023 has crossed 500 with over 13,000 more injured in the attacks carried out by both illegal settlers as well as Israeli soldiers.

More than 70 of the Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks were children. This is the highest number of the Palestinian children ever killed in the occupied West Bank in a year. Some sources say the death toll among children is even higher.

Settler Violence

According to Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, 2023 was also the most violent year for the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in terms of the number of attacks carried out by the illegal settlers. According to it, at least 10 Palestinians were killed in 2023 just in those attacks.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), at least 1,225 cases of settler violence were recorded in 2023.

The figure presented by the Palestinian officials for the same is almost double at 2,410. It also claims that the number of Palestinians killed in settler violence in 2023 was 22.

There are around 500,000 Israeli settlers living illegally inside the occupied West Bank. Most of these illegal settlers participate in attacks on nearby Palestinian villages under security cover provided by the Israeli occupation forces.

The settlers attack the villages, burn Palestinian houses, their farms and other properties, and attack people trying to prevent those attacks with the objective of terrorizing people to leave their villages and farms.

Record number of Palestinians detained

More than 11,000 Palestinians were also arrested or detained by Israel in the last year in the occupied West Bank alone, which is almost three times higher than the total number of Palestinians inside Israeli prisons before the beginning of the year.

Some of them were later released after a brief period of detention. Some others were released as part of the prisoner exchange deal between Hamas and Israel. Still the number of Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli jails has jumped from around 4,500 before the beginning of the year to over 7,000 at the end of it.

A joint statement issued by Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs Commission, the Palestinian Prisoners Society, Addameer, and others stated that 1,085 of those detained by the Israeli occupation forces from the West Bank in 2023 were children.

As per reports, scores of Palestinian prisoners have been killed inside Israeli jails with large number of them reporting torture and abuse by the prisoner authorities.

Original article by Abdul Rahman republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Continue Reading2023 was deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2005

Liverpool council approves ‘timebomb’ with ‘3-mile blast radius’ for site among 30,000 people

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https://skwawkbox.org/2024/01/09/liverpool-council-approves-timebomb-with-3-mile-blast-radius-for-site-among-30000-people/

Campaigner Gary Woollam and Garston independent councillor Sam Gorst after the council’s decision

Dirty tactics and diverted emails as council ramrods through permission for Veolia to process Flixborough-disaster waste chemical in vast quantities – with no benefit to locals

On Monday afternoon, Liverpool City Council’s planning committee approved plans for corporate giant Veolia to vastly increase its processing of a hugely explosive waste chemical, Cyclohexanone, in the middle of a residential area of some 30,000 people.

Cyclohexanone was the chemical involved in the 1974 Flixborough disaster in Lincolnshire, when a failure at an ICI plant processing some 47,000 tonnes of the chemical a year caused an explosion that killed 28 workers, severely wounded dozens of others and damaged buildings more than three miles away.

The new Veolia applications would see an additional 56,000 tonnes a year – broken down into two separate applications of 28,000 tonnes each, on top of a current capacity of around 56,000 (according to Private Eye). Government rules mean stricter vetting for applications of 30,000 tonnes a year. The company wants to take the waste chemical from Intel production facilities in Ireland.

During the meeting – described by veterans of Liverpool planning meetings as unprecedented in the number of councillors and officers in attendance – campaigners told the planning committee of the great risks and that one of the key recommendations of the inquiry into Flixborough was that Cyclohexane waste should never be processed close to residential areas. The council had already approved the processing of around 28,000 tonnes at the site – yet according to campaigners not a single document relating to safety issues has been filed by Veolia in its new or 2021 applications.

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Local independent councillors and residents accused the council of a complete failure to properly consult with local residents and health professionals. The area’s largest health centre has joined locals in objecting to the new development.

When campaigners asked for independent experts to assess the hazards, they were told that ‘we have to trust the [council] officers, they’re independent’. Last month, council officers were exposed diverting emails from campaigners away from their intended recipients – and Cllr Gorst has said that many emails to him and his independent colleague Cllr Lucy Williams had also been diverted:

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Continue reading the article at https://skwawkbox.org/2024/01/09/liverpool-council-approves-timebomb-with-3-mile-blast-radius-for-site-among-30000-people/

Continue ReadingLiverpool council approves ‘timebomb’ with ‘3-mile blast radius’ for site among 30,000 people

Israel Threatens to Bar Gazans From Returning to Their Homes in the North

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Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Residents and emergency workers carry out a search and rescue operation around the rubble of the building destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on January 8, 2024.  (Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“To explicitly describe forced displacement as a tactic of war two days before a major international trial on your war strategy begins is… an interesting choice.”

Israeli officials reportedly plan to tell U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday that Palestinians displaced from their homes in northern Gaza will not be allowed to return unless Hamas agrees to free additional hostages.

Denying a displaced population the right to return home is a violation of international humanitarian law, as many observers noted in response to Axios reporting on the Israeli threat. Around 130 hostages are still being held in Gaza, according to Israeli authorities.

“Israel is basically telling their weapon supplier that they’re going to use those weapons for ethnic cleansing—a war crime and an aspect of genocide,” wrote Mohammad Alsaafin, a senior producer at AJ+. “Under both U.S. and [international] law, the U.S. would be required to stop facilitating this. Biden’s choice is Israel or the rule of law.”

Unnamed senior Israeli officials told Axios on Monday that “while Israel doesn’t in principle oppose allowing Palestinians to return to northern Gaza, officials will tell Blinken such a move needs to be part of a new hostage deal.” One official was explicit: “We are not going to allow Palestinians to go back to their homes in northern Gaza if there is no progress with the release of hostages.”

The Axios story was published hours before Blinken arrived in Tel Aviv to meet with Israeli leaders as the deadly assault on Gaza entered its fourth month.

The U.S. has backed Israel’s latest war on the Gaza Strip from the start, supplying the country with more than 10,000 tons of military equipment and obstructing cease-fire efforts on the world stage.

U.S. law prohibits weapons transfers to countries that are “more likely than not” to use them to commit war crimes, but the Biden administration has refused to formally assess whether Israel is complying with international law and dismissed calls to apply conditions to its military assistance.

Last week, the U.S. State Department rebuked two high-ranking Israeli ministers for demanding the permanent expulsion of Gazans from the Palestinian enclave, much of which has been destroyed by Israel’s relentless bombing campaign. The U.S. insisted the ministers’ comments were not representative of the Israeli government’s position—a claim that Axios‘ reporting calls into further question.

“To explicitly describe forced displacement as a tactic of war two days before a major international trial on your war strategy begins is… an interesting choice,” HuffPost senior diplomatic correspondent Akbar Shahid Ahmed wrote on social media late Monday, referring to the International Court of Justice’s upcoming hearings on South Africa’s genocide case against Israel.

Around 90% of Gaza’s population has been displaced by Israel’s assault, which has destroyed more than two-thirds of all structures in the northern part of the strip. In recent weeks, Israeli evacuation orders have pushed increasingly desperate, starving Gazans into an ever-smaller segment of the enclave.

Israel said Monday that it is now focusing its military campaign on central and southern Gaza.

“The fighting will continue throughout 2024,” said Daniel Hagari, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces.

Original article by JAKE JOHNSON republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingIsrael Threatens to Bar Gazans From Returning to Their Homes in the North

Supreme Court Rejects Bid by API, Exxon, and Koch to Kill Climate Case

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Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

An oil and petroleum refinery is shown in St. Paul Park, Minnesota. (Photo: jferrer/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

“Big Oil companies will continue fighting to escape justice, but for the third time in a year, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied their desperate pleas,” said one campaigner.

For the third time in less than a year, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed a key case against the fossil fuel industry to proceed in state court, delivering a win for the movement to make polluters pay for driving the climate emergency.

“This decision is another step forward for Minnesota’s efforts to hold fossil fuel giants accountable for their climate lies and the harm they’ve caused,” said Center for Climate Integrity president Richard Wiles, pointing to the previous denials of other cases last April and May.

“Big Oil companies will continue fighting to escape justice, but for the third time in a year, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied their desperate pleas to overturn the unanimous rulings of every single court to consider this issue,” he continued.

“It’s time for these polluters to give up their failed arguments to escape state courts.”

As legal leaders of dozens of U.S. states and municipalities have launched climate lawsuits in recent years, the fossil fuel industry has attempted to evade accountability by shifting the cases to federal court—a strategy that’s proven unsuccessful.

Wiles argued that “after three strikes, it’s time for these polluters to give up their failed arguments to escape state courts and prepare to face the evidence of their climate deception at trial.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Monday decision came in a case filed in 2020 by Democratic Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison against ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and the American Petroleum Institute (API), based on the state’s consumer protection laws.

“The fraud, deceptive advertising, and other violations of Minnesota state law and common law that the lawsuit shows they perpetrated have harmed Minnesotans’ health and our state’s environment, infrastructure, and economy,” Ellison said at the time.

The justices declined Big Oil’s request to review the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ March decision that the case belongs in state court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, an appointee of former GOP President Donald Trump, would have taken the case, in line with his position last year.

“I appreciate the court’s consideration and decision,” Ellison said in a statement Monday. “It aligns with 25 federal court decisions across the country, all of which have found that cases like ours rest on these defendants’ failures to warn and their campaigns of deception around their products’ contributions to the climate crisis. The court’s decision confirms these cases are properly filed in state courts.”

“Taken together, the defendants’ behavior has delayed the transition to alternative energy sources and a lower-carbon economy, resulting in dire impacts on Minnesota’s environment and enormous costs to Minnesotans and the world,” he stressed. “Now, the case can move forward in state court, where it was properly filed, and we can begin to hold these companies accountable for their wrongful conduct.”

Cassidy DiPaola, communications director for Fossil Free Media and the Make Polluters Pay campaign, declared Monday that “today’s decision is an important step forward for accountability and justice.”

“The Supreme Court has now laid out an unmistakable path forward,” she added, “for not only Minnesota’s consumer protection case against ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and API, but the dozens of cases against the fossil fuel industry popping up across the county.”

This post has been updated with comment from Keith Ellison.

Original article by JESSICA CORBETT republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingSupreme Court Rejects Bid by API, Exxon, and Koch to Kill Climate Case

A million undecided voters believe Brexit has failed and want Labour to pursue closer ties to the EU

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/01/a-million-undecided-voters-believe-brexit-has-failed-and-want-labour-to-pursue-closer-ties-to-the-eu/

In all but one constituency in the UK, more voters said they wanted Keir Starmer to seek a closer UK-EU relationship

Party positions on Brexit could play a major role in winning over a million undecided voters at the next general election, a new poll has found.

The poll, carried out for campaign group Best for Britain, found that a million undecided voters could be persuaded to vote Labour, if it pledges to pursue closer ties with the European Union.

The poll findings come at a time when public regret at Brexit is at an all-time high. The latest poll by Best for Britain found that in all but one constituency in the UK, more voters said they wanted Keir Starmer to seek a closer UK-EU relationship, with undecided voters – who will be crucial in the general election – even more critical of Brexit.

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https://leftfootforward.org/2024/01/a-million-undecided-voters-believe-brexit-has-failed-and-want-labour-to-pursue-closer-ties-to-the-eu/

Continue ReadingA million undecided voters believe Brexit has failed and want Labour to pursue closer ties to the EU