Pope Francis attends his weekly general audience in the Paul VI hall at the Vatican, on August 07, 2024 [Riccardo De Luca/Anadolu Agency]
Pope Francis on Saturday condemned the recent Israeli air strikes on Gaza, expressing sorrow over the bombing of children in the Gaza Strip the previous day, Anadolu reports.
“Yesterday, children were bombed. This is not war. This is cruelty. I want to say this because it touches my heart,” he told members of the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s central administration.
He also lamented that Israeli air strikes had prevented Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the highest representative of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land, from entering Gaza.
Israel has killed more than 45,000 people, most of them women and children, in Gaza since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, and reduced the territory to rubble.
On Nov. 21, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its military campaign in the enclave.
The pontiff has also called for an investigation to determine if Israel’s attacks in Gaza constitute genocide, according to excerpts from an upcoming new book.
A diplomat at the United States’ State Department has resigned over the White House’s policy towards Israel’s ongoing war on the Gaza Strip, in the latest such resignation by an American official over the genocide.
According to The Guardian newspaper this week, Mike Casey – a US army veteran who served in Iraq and who was until recently the US State Department’s deputy political counsellor on Gaza – told the paper that he had handed in his resignation to the government back in July, ending four years at the State Department.
Casey’s decision to resign was rooted in a growing disillusionment with US policy – or the lack thereof – towards Israel and Palestine, and particularly with Washington’s clear bias toward Tel Aviv in all matters relating to its oppression of the Palestinians.
“We don’t have a policy on Palestine. We just do what the Israelis want us to do”, the former diplomat said. “I was too embarrassed to continue being an American diplomat. I knew I couldn’t go to another assignment and function.”
Now reportedly working at a local bank in Michigan, Casey recalled that he and his colleagues “would write daily updates on Gaza”, which government officials and the president Joe Biden himself would seemingly ignore, leading the diplomat’s team to joke that no one would read the reports even if cash were attached to them.
One such incident he cited was when Biden publicly questioned and denied in October last year the enormous death toll in Gaza at the hands of Israel’s occupation forces, which Casey had personally documented in a report. “I was the one writing the reports”, he said. “What’s the point of me writing this stuff if you’re just going to disregard it?”
The former diplomat added that “I got so tired of writing about dead kids”, expressing his frustration at “constantly having to prove to Washington that these children actually died and then watching nothing happen.”
Casey and his colleagues were also reportedly frustrated at the Biden administration’s repeated rejections of their strategies they proposed for Gaza’s reconstruction – another issue that the Israelis dictated the Americans on. “Every idea we came up with, [the Biden administration] would just say: ‘Well, the Israelis have another idea’”, he said.
An Israeli counter-proposal which Casey cited included letting local clans run the Strip after the war, an idea that American diplomats explained in “numerous reports and cables” why it wouldn’t work as it is “not in our interest to have warlords running Gaza”.
Impact of Israeli airstrike on an UNRWA school in Khan Younis. Photo via UNRWA
After 14 months of Israel’s genocide on Gaza, conditions for the millions of displaced remain perilous and Israel’s airstrikes are unrelenting.
It has become background noise. We know it is happening, but we can almost forget that it continues at a barbaric rate. The United Nations deputy special coordinator for Palestine, Muhannad Hadi, released a statement on December 13, 2024, that simply makes no sense: “I am very concerned about the rapidly deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in Gaza.” How can anything deteriorate in Gaza? Isn’t the situation as bad as it could get, the genocidal war of the Israelis grinding on?
If you are paying attention, you will find that every day there are more and more reports of bombing in northern Gaza. These bombings pulverize entire buildings and massacre entire families. On December 17, the commissioner-general of the UN Palestinian Agency (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini put the situation clearest: “We are getting out of words to describe the situation in Gaza…. My colleagues when they come back, they basically describe a post-apocalyptic environment, and people are just living among [garbage], sewage water, in the rubble, and struggling because they are confronted on a daily basis with death, hunger, and disease.”
Dead bodies
The day before Hadi made his statement, an Israeli airstrike hit a housing development in the Nuseirat refugee camp and killed large numbers of the al-Sheikh Ali family. It has become part of counting the death toll to track the elimination of entire families by Israeli bombs. A Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report from October 2024 showed that 3,500 Palestinian families in Gaza “have suffered multiple losses since October 2023. Of these, 365 families have lost more than 10 members, while over 2,750 families have lost at least three.” These numbers will need to be updated. The Euro-Med report is called De-Gaza: A Year of Israel’s Genocide and the Collapse of World Order.
On December 11, 2024, before this round of bombardments and killings, a startling press briefing was given by Mounir al-Bursh (director general of the Palestinian Ministry of Health) and Mahmoud Basal (spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defense Agency). Al-Bursh said that the Israeli troops fired on ambulances and prevented rescue workers from getting to the buildings to recover the injured and the dead. As a result, he said, “bodies are left in the streets and are eaten by dogs.” Basal, meanwhile, said that many of the injured were dying under the rubble because the rescue teams no longer had regular access to the bombed buildings and did not have the equipment to save people. This means that the Israelis are not only bombing residential areas and killing unarmed civilians, but they are also preventing the injured from being rescued and the dead from an honorable burial. Journalist Hossam Shabat, reporting from northern Gaza, wrote, “Due to the rising Israeli bombings and killings in northern Gaza, we have run out of body bags to bury the dead, and now we resort to using any piece of clothing or a blanket for their burial.”
Reports
Over the past few months, two reports have been published whose honesty enables the reader to feel the atrocities being committed against the Palestinians in Gaza.
First, in October 2024, the remarkable UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, published her 32-page report for the UN General Assembly. Her finding is clear: “The current genocide is part of a century-long project of eliminatory settler colonialism in Palestine, a stain on the international system and humanity, which must be ended, investigated, and prosecuted.” The legal case for the end not only of genocide but its basis, the occupation, is made very strongly. Anyone who reads Albanese’s report with an open mind will come to that conclusion.
Second, in December, Amnesty International released a 296-page document called You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. The most painful section to read is the evidence presented clinically by Amnesty of the genocidal words of Israeli officials that are then enacted by their soldiers. It is worth reading a few sentences from the Amnesty report:
Amnesty International analyzed 102 statements made by Israeli government officials, high-ranking military officers, and members of the Knesset made between [October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024] which dehumanized Palestinians, or called for, or justified genocidal acts or other crimes under international law against them. Of these, it identified 22 statements that were specifically made by members of Israel’s war and security cabinets, who included Prime Minister Netanyahu, then Minister of Defense Gallant and other government ministers, by [high-ranking] military officers and by Israel’s president between [October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024]. These statements appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts.
Also, the language used by Israeli officials was frequently repeated, including by soldiers in Gaza, apparently explaining the rationale for their [behavior]. This is evidenced by Amnesty International’s analysis of 62 videos, audio recordings, and photographs posted online showing Israeli soldiers in which they made calls for the destruction of Gaza or the denial of essential services to people in Gaza, or celebrated the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools, and universities.
For example, before the Israeli offensive on Rafah, Israeli minister of finance Bezalel Smotrich said at a public event, “There are no jobs half done. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, destruction! Blot out the memory of [the people of] Amalek from under heaven.” This genocidal language was then replicated on the ground. Amnesty’s report affirms strongly that there is no other way to understand the Israeli campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza than as a genocide.
Rascal children
The Ministry of Health in Gaza says that since the genocide began, the Israelis have killed at least 45,059 Palestinians. Of them, at least 17,000 are children. Israel and its Western allies have spent considerable funds to deny these numbers. The right-wing Henry Jackson Society (based in the United Kingdom) has published a 40-page report that belongs in a juvenile debate. To complain about this or that individual case and not to see the extent of the bombardment and destruction, as revealed by reputed human rights organizations, is disingenuous. They would like to justify the killing of children by their dispute over statistics.
In 2014, during a previous terrible bombing of Gaza by the Israelis, the Palestinian poet Khaled Juma wrote about the children being killed then. Then, the Israelis killed 551 children, as recorded by the official UN inquiry. This time the number is 30 times as high and climbing. No debate about the exact numbers will change that.
Oh, rascal children of Gaza, You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window, You who filled every morning with rush and chaos, You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony, Come back— And scream as you want, And break all the vases, Steal all the flowers, Come back, Just come back…
Metropolitan Police officers form a cordon at Parliament Square to prevent protesters reaching Westminster Bridge during a Free Palestine Coalition demonstration in central London, January 6, 2024
A NEW film is warning that “police state tactics” are being used to silence pro-Palestine activists.
Producer Norman Thomas said that the film, Censoring Palestine, shows examples of counter terrorism laws being “stretched and perverted” to try to crush protest in Britain.
He said: “We are seeing dawn raids on journalists, academics being arrested for making speeches, protesters being jailed without bail for long periods — and all using false accusations of terrorism.
“This is all too reminiscent of a police state — and unless someone calls a halt, may lead to one.”
The film features interviews with victims of the use of counter-terrorism laws and their lawyers and legal advisers.
Mr Thomas said: “What we are hearing from them all is that laws supposedly meant to protect people from terror attacks are in fact being stretched and perverted in unprecedented ways to crush protest and free speech.”
He said that mainstream media had imposed a blackout on reporting the use of anti-terrorism laws against protesters.
later: Just remembered that this one is appropriate, one of my favourites ;) XXX
Keir Starmer confirms that his government is cnutier than Suella Braverman on killing the right to protest.Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Foreign Minister David Lammy confirms that UK government and military are active participants in Israel’s genocides and that the F-35 parts that they suspended from supplying to Israel are instead simply diverted via the United States. He says see https://youtu.be/QILgUHrdWRE
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a press conference in Tel Aviv on July 13, 2024 [NIR ELIAS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images]
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not participate in the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz for fear of being arrested following the arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.
The warrant was issued on charges of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the war on Gaza, according to reports by Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita on Friday.
The newspaper quoted Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, who is organising the ceremony scheduled to be held on 27 January, saying that his country is committed to respecting the decision of the ICC in The Hague.
The ceremony commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz is expected to be attended by many world leaders. The Polish newspaper predicts Israel will be represented by its Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, but Israeli media quoted Israeli officials saying that Education Minister Yoav Kisch will represent Israel in the ceremony.
The Polish newspaper reported that Israel did not request Netanyahu’s participation in the ceremony and that the Israelis knew how Warsaw would react if Netanyahu arrived in Poland.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog is not expected to participate in the ceremony. His predecessor, Reuven Rivlin, participated in the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
On 21 November, the ICC issued two international arrest warrants against Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant on charges of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, including starving Palestinians.
Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Lithuania and Slovenia have all confirmed they will arrest Netanyahu if he enters their territory, and outgoing Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo asserted: “There can be no double standards.”
Leaders from several countries are expected to attend the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Spanish King Felipe VI, British King Charles, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Hungarian President Tamas Sulyok.
Poland has invited US President-elect Donald Trump to the ceremony, but he is expected to be represented by his vice president, JD Vance, or his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the Polish newspaper reported.
