‘We Are Too Humane. Burn Gaza Now,’ Says Senior Israeli Lawmaker
Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi is one of many Israeli leaders who have made genocidal statements against Palestinians.
Nissim Vaturi, the far-right deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, raised eyebrows and ire Friday after asserting on social media that Israel’s war on Gaza—which has killed and maimed over 40,000 people and displaced around 70% of the population—is “too humane.”
“All of this preoccupation with whether or not there is internet in Gaza shows that we have learned nothing,” Vaturi, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote Friday after the country’s war Cabinet approved extremely limited fuel deliveries into the besieged strip. “We are too humane. Burn Gaza now, no less!”
“Don’t allow fuel in, don’t allow water in until the hostages are returned back!” Vaturi added, a reference to the approximately 240 Israelis and others kidnapped by Hamas-led militants during the October 7 infiltration attack that killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel.
When Israeli journalist Ben Caspit responded to the post with a comment that he feared Vaturi’s words could fuel “anti-Israel propaganda,” the lawmaker shot back: “Your fear will kill us. Stop being humane.”
The social media platform X—whose multibillionaire owner Elon Musk is in hot water for promoting an anti-semitic post—deleted Vaturi’s tweet, and others including one in which he wrote that Israel should leave just “one old man” alive in Gaza so he could “tell everyone” what happened there.
Vaturi recently pushed for the suspension of colleague Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the leftist Hadash party, for comments critical of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza and for calling for the protection of civilians on both sides, including by saying that “a child is a child,” whether Israeli or Palestinian.
Over 5,000 Palestinian children are among the more than 12,300 people killed during Israel’s 43-day bombardment and invasion of Gaza, which has also maimed at least 30,000 others, according to Gazan health officials. Half the homes in the embattled strip have been damaged or destroyed, with around 1.7 million Palestinians forcibly displaced. Thousands of people are missing and feared buried beneath rubble. In the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers since October 7, while over 2,800 others have been arrested.
Vaturi is far from alone in making what legal experts call statements of genocidal intent.
Earlier this month, Israeli President Isaac Herzog asserted that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to “eliminate everything” there.
Galit Distel Atbaryan, a member of the Knesset from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said that “Gaza should be wiped off the map.”
Ariel Kallner, another Likud parliamentarian, urged a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48,” a reference to the forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1947-49.
Yet another Likud lawmaker, Tally Gotliv, demanded nothing less than a “doomsday kiss”—that is, use of Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons. “Not flattening a neighborhood,” she clarified, but “crushing and flattening Gaza. Without mercy!”
Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, who said “we are now rolling out the Great Nakba,” was admonished by Netanyahu for saying the quiet part out loud.
Netanyahu said it out loud last month during a televised address when he called Israel’s imminent ground invasion of Gaza a “holy mission” and invoked Amalek, the ancient biblical enemy of the Israelites whom God commanded his “chosen people” to exterminate, in what critics called “an explicit call to genocide.”
Noting that statements of intent to commit genocide are a key element of the crime, Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal toldDemocracy Now! in an interview last month that “if this is not special intent to commit genocide, I really don’t know what is.”
“We’re seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent,” he added. “This is indeed a textbook case of genocide.”
Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
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Palestinians File ‘Urgent Motion’ to Stop Biden From Backing Genocide
Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
“Our team has had to update more than once the numbers of our clients’ relatives who have been killed as we prepared this lawsuit and motion.”
A group of Palestinian Americans on Thursday urged a federal court to issue a preliminary injunction barring the Biden administration from providing any additional weaponry or diplomatic support to the Israeli military as it carries out mass atrocities in Gaza.
The “urgent motion” comes days after the group, represented by the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), sued President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a federal court in California, arguing that the top officials are “failing to prevent an unfolding genocide where they have influence over the state of Israel to do so, and directly abetting its development with weapons, funds, and diplomatic cover” in violation of international law.
The plaintiffs in the case are U.S. citizens with family in Gaza, which has been under relentless assault since a deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel last month. At least 116 of the plaintiffs’ family members have been killed in the Palestinian enclave since the latest Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza began.
“Our team has had to update more than once the numbers of our clients’ relatives who have been killed as we prepared this lawsuit and motion,” Astha Sharma Pokharel, an attorney at CCR, said Thursday. “There is no starker illustration of how urgently this injunction is needed.”
The Biden administration has opposed calls for a cease-fire and pledged unconditional support to the Israeli government as it wages war on the besieged Gaza Strip with the help of U.S. weaponry, including thousands of Hellfire missiles and army vehicles. That support has continued in the face of a horrific death toll and humanitarian crisis and amid global alarm over Israeli officials’ genocidal rhetoric.
In an emergency briefing paper released less than two weeks into Israel’s assault, CCR warned that the U.S. “is not only failing to uphold its obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, but there is a plausible and credible case to be made that the United States’ actions to further the Israeli military operation, closure, and campaign against the Palestinian population in Gaza rise to the level of complicity in the crime under international law.”
The lawsuit filed earlier this week echoes that case, stating that the “unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza has so far been made possible because of the unconditional support given by the named official-capacity defendants in this case”—Biden, Blinken, and Austin.
The lawsuit and push for a preliminary injunction are backed by leading scholars of genocide and the Holocaust, including William Schabas, a world-renowned expert on international human rights law.
In a declaration supporting the lawsuit, Schabas wrote, “There is a serious risk of genocide committed against the Palestinian population of Gaza and that the United States of America is in breach of its obligation, under both the 1948 Genocide Convention to which it is a party as well as customary international law, to use its position of influence with the Government of Israel and to take the best measures within its power to prevent the crime taking place.”
The new motion was submitted Thursday as Israel raided Gaza’s largest hospital and prepared for an assault on the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, prompting fears of a widening military campaign.
Meanwhile, little humanitarian aid has been allowed to enter the blockaded territory, leaving millions of lives at risk as most of the population lacks water, food, medicine, and other basic necessities.
The World Food Program warned Thursday that “nearly the entire population” of Gaza “is in desperate need of food assistance.”
“The small quantities of food that can be found are being sold at alarmingly inflated prices and are of little use without the ability to cook, forcing some to survive on one meal a day,” the U.N. organization said. “For the lucky, that includes more than solely canned food, though some people have resorted to consuming raw onions and uncooked eggplants.”
Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
South Africa refers Israel to the International Criminal Court
SOUTH AFRICA has referred Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for an investigation into alleged war crimes committed in Gaza, President Cyril Ramaphosa said today.
This comes as the illegal Israeli assault on the largest hospital in Gaza failed to reveal the Hamas command centre that Israeli authorities had said was on the premises.
South African lawmakers were set to agree to a motion tabled by the Economic Freedom Fighters opposition party and supported by the ruling African National Congress on Thursday calling for the closure of the Israeli embassy in South Africa and the cutting of all diplomatic ties with the country until it agrees to a ceasefire in Gaza.
President Ramaphosa said: “We have put through a referral because we believe that war crimes are being committed there.
“And of course we do not condone the actions that were taken by Hamas earlier, but similarly we condemn the actions that are currently underway and believe that they warrant an investigation by the ICC.”
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EXCLUSIVE: Caroline Lucas says Labour is on ‘wrong side of history’ over Gaza ceasefire
The Green Party MP Caroline Lucas has said that Labour is on the ‘wrong side of history’ after last night’s House of Commons vote on a ceasefire in Gaza. MPs were asked to vote on an SNP amendment to the King’s Speech which called on the UK government to “join with the international community in urgently pressing all parties to agree to an immediate ceasefire”.
Despite 56 of Keir Starmer’s MPs breaking ranks and voting for the amendment, Labour whipped its parliamentarians to abstain.
Speaking to Left Foot Forward as part of an exclusive interview reflecting on her 13 years in parliament which will be published in full tomorrow, Caroline Lucas said: “I think it was incredibly disappointing that Labour is on the wrong side of history on this”.
Labour’s position is that Israel should allow ‘humanitarian pauses’ in order for aid to enter Gaza. Lucas told Left Foot Forward why she thinks this approach is wrong. She said: “I used to work for Oxfam and I’m really struck by the fact that how so many of those international NGOs are talking about just why humanitarian pauses are simply not up to the job”, later adding: “the scale of the suffering and the killing and the horror that is happening in Gaza right now [isn’t] all going to be solved by humanitarian pauses – it has to be a ceasefire.”
Lucas continued: “People like Oxfam are pointing out that in order to get aid in in any significant quantities, some of the roads are broken now so they need to be able to mend some of the infrastructure even to get aid in to the people who need it. So I very much hope that Labour will listen to people on the ground who are really calling for a ceasefire.”
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