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Category: human rights violations

  • ‘Horror Is Growing By the Minute,’ Says Rights Group, as Israel Starves Gaza

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

    Children wait for food relief in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah on December 31, 2023. (Photo: Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua via Getty Images)

    “If current conditions persist,” said Israeli group B’Tselem, “there is significant risk that famine will be declared throughout the entire Gaza Strip within six months.”

    The Israeli government “can, if it chooses to,” save more than 2 million people who are starving in Gaza by ending its blockade on aid, an Israel-based human rights group emphasized in a report on Monday, condemning the country for continuing to allow just a fraction of the food needed in the enclave through border crossings as it relentlessly bombs civilian targets.

    “Everyone in Gaza is going hungry,” said B’Tselem in the dispatch, bluntly titled, “Israel Is Starving Gaza.”

    The organization pointed to a recent analysis by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Famine Review Committee from late last month, which found that about 93% of Gaza’s over 2 million people were suffering from “acute food insecurity” at Phase 3, while more than 15%—378,000 people—were already at the most dire classification, Phase 5, with “extreme food shortages, hunger, and exhaustion.”

    By February 7, the entire population of Gaza is expected to reach Phase 3, and “if current conditions persist,” said B’Tselem, “there is significant risk that famine will be declared throughout the entire Gaza Strip within six months.”

    “Such a declaration is made when 20% of households read Phase 5, when 30% of children suffer from extreme malnutrition, and when two adults or four children out of 10,000 die of hunger every day,” said the group.

    Before Israel began its U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’ October 7 attack, about 80% of Gaza residents relied on humanitarian aid to survive.

    Israel’s destruction of cultivated fields, bakeries, food warehouses, and factories has meant that residents now wholly depend on food supplies from outside Gaza.

    That aid is still available, B’Tselem stressed, but cannot reach people because “Israel is deliberately denying the entry of enough food to meet the population’s needs.”

    About 500 aid trucks entered Gaza daily before the assault began, but only about 120 trucks are allowed through just two crossings—Rafah and Kerem Shalom—on a daily basis.

    The Rafah crossing is a designed for passenger vehicles rather than “massive commercial transports,” and the recent opening of the Kerem Shalom crossing was “merely a token addition that has failed to alleviate the hardship,” said B’Tselem.

    “The little food that does get in is very difficult to distribute due to constant bombings, destroyed roads, frequent communications blackouts, and shelters overflowing with hundreds of thousands of [internally displaced people] crowding into smaller and smaller areas,” said the group.

    Israel’s continued blockade has resulted in “children begging for food, people waiting in long lines for paltry handouts, and hungry residents charging at aid trucks,” B’Tselem added. “The horror is growing by the minute, and the danger of famine is real.”

    Martin Griffiths, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the United Nations, said late last week that Israel’s air and ground assault on Gaza has rendered the enclave “uninhabitable.”

    “A public health disaster is unfolding,” said Griffiths. “Infectious diseases are spreading in overcrowded shelters as sewers spill over. Some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth daily amidst this chaos. People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.”

    “For children in particular, the past 12 weeks have been traumatic: No food. No water. No school,” he added. “Nothing but the terrifying sounds of war, day in and day out.”

    Last month, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of using starvation as a “method of warfare”—a war crime according to international humanitarian law.

    “Changing this policy is not just a moral obligation,” said B’Tselem. “Allowing food into the Gaza Strip is not an act of kindness but a positive obligation under international humanitarian law: Starvation as a method of warfare is prohibited, and when a civilian population lacks what it needs to survive, parties to the conflict have a positive obligation to allow rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian aid—including food.”

    “These two rules are considered customary law,” added the group, “and violating them constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.”

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

  • ‘Eradication of Journalism in Gaza’ Continues as Israel Kills Two More Reporters

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

    A press helmet is placed over the grave of Hamza Dahdouh, a Palestinian journalist who worked for Al Jazeera and was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Rafah on January 7, 2024. (Photo: Mohammed Talatene/picture alliance via Getty Images)

    The international community must “hold Israel accountable for its heinous crimes,” said the Al Jazeera Media Network.

    An Israeli airstrike in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Sunday killed two Palestinian journalists and seriously wounded a third, adding to the war’s grisly toll on media workers.

    The Al Jazeera Media Network said in a statement that the Israeli military targeted the journalists’ car as they were driving through the northern part of Rafah. The strike killed Hamza Dahdouh, the 27-year-old son of Al Jazeera‘s Gaza bureau chief, and Mustafa Thuraya, a freelance videographer working with Agence France-Presse. Hazem Rajab was injured in the Israeli strike.

    “The assassination of Mustafa and Hamza, Al Jazeera correspondent Wael Dahdouh’s son, whilst they were on their way to carry out their duty in the Gaza Strip reaffirms the need to take immediate necessary legal measures against the occupation forces to ensure that there is no impunity,” the network said, imploring the international community to “hold Israel accountable for its heinous crimes.”

    Hamza is the fifth member of Wael Dahdouh’s family killed in Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip. Earlier in the war, Israeli strikes killed Dahdouh’s wife, younger son, daughter, and grandson. Wael himself was wounded by an Israeli drone strike that killed Al Jazeera journalist Samer Abu Daqqa.

    “Hamza was everything to me, the eldest boy, he was the soul of my soul,” Wael said in anguished remarks from the cemetery where his son was buried. “These are the tears of parting and loss, the tears of humanity.”

    Christophe Deloire, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders, expressed “shock” in response to news of Dahdouh and Thuraya’s killing.

    “This unbearable massacre must stop,” Deloire wrote on social media. “Israel must be held accountable for this eradication of journalism in Gaza. We will continue to refer to the International Criminal Court so that maximum priority is given to crimes against journalists. Justice must be served.”

    (Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images)

    Since October 7, Israeli forces have killed dozens of media workers in the Gaza Strip, where around 1,000 journalists were working before the assault. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), more journalists were killed in the first 10 weeks of the war “than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.”

    “CPJ is particularly concerned about an apparent pattern of targeting journalists and their families by the Israeli military,” the group said last month. An investigation by Reporters Without Borders concluded that Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah and his colleagues were deliberately targeted in October 13 strikes in southern Lebanon.

    Reporters Without Borders has filed two war crimes complaints with the International Criminal Court since early October. The second complaint, submitted last month, accuses the Israel Defense Forces of intentionally killing seven Palestinian journalists.

    “Targeting reporters is a war crime,” the group wrote in a social media post on Sunday.

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

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  • Fury after former Labour MP threatens ‘hundreds of years of the right to protest’

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    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/fury-after-former-labour-mp-threatens-hundreds-of-years-of-the-right-to-protest

    Protesters block Westminster Bridge during a Free Palestine Coalition demonstration in central London, January 6, 2024

    PALESTINE campaigners responded with fury today after peer and former Labour MP John Woodcock said protest organisers should foot the bill for policing their demonstrations.

    As thousands once again thronged the streets of towns and cities across Britain demanding an end to the slaughter in Gaza, Mr Woodcock, now known as Lord Walney, the government’s independent adviser on “political violence and disruption,” made the call for police costs to be dumped on organisers in a review carried out for the Home Office.

    He specifically targeted protests by Palestine supporters who have campaigned tirelessly against Israel’s murderous actions for three months.

    The Stop the War Coalition (StWC) accused Lord Walney of attempting to end “hundreds of years of the right to protest” and said it was the police themselves who chose to mobilise thousands of officers for the protests.

    Stop the War co-convener Lindsey German told the Morning Star: “This is just the latest scheme to stop the demonstrations.

    “The government, the police and Lord Whatever should be clear that the demonstrations will continue as part of our democratic rights.

    “We completely reject the idea that we should be paying for the police. We do not ask the police to turn out. We police our demonstrations ourselves.”

    …

    https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/fury-after-former-labour-mp-threatens-hundreds-of-years-of-the-right-to-protest

    Morning Star: Labour turncoat Woodcock wants to ban protest by the back door

    BRITISH democracy is under attack. The threat comes not from foreign bogeymen but from our own overbearing state.

    Lord Walney — as hard-right ex-Labour MP John Woodcock renamed himself after his ennoblement for services against Jeremy Corbyn — wants to ban protests, at least if they aren’t bankrolled by the rich.

    The demand that protest organisers meet the cost of policing demonstrations is as dangerous as it is dishonest.

    Woodcock claims “disorder” at Palestine demos justifies billing the organisers.

    In fact the mass peace demonstrations (which Woodcock, who called on the public to vote for Boris Johnson in 2019 to dash prospects of a socialist government, terms “anti-Israel marches”) have been strikingly peaceful.

    Clashes with police, where they have occurred at all, have taken place away from the main demonstrations and certainly beyond the reach of the organisers’ stewards. They have been rare, with most arrests taking place for allegedly hateful speech or signage rather than violence or vandalism.

    It adds insult to injury that Lord Walney advises the Home Office to start charging people to protest when the most serious recent disorder on our streets featured far-right hooligans incited to mob the Cenotaph on November 11 by the then home secretary herself.

    …

    Palestine demos are huge because Westminster is at loggerheads with the people it claims to represent. There is a gulf between the government and opposition’s endorsement of Israel’s murderous war and the popular demand for peace.

    …

    Woodcock was made a lord precisely for betraying his party to help defeat that movement, something Lord Rooker (another ex-Labour MP) described as a “national service.” He was tasked by the serial liar he backed for PM with advising the British state on how to stop such movements arising again.

    …

    Morning Star: Labour turncoat Woodcock wants to ban protest by the back door

    Image of Fascists Mussolini and Hitler
    Woodcock gets saluted by Fascists. Image of Fascists Mussolini and Hitler

  • UN Relief Chief Says All-Out War Is ‘Looming Dangerously Close’

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

    A picture taken from Rafah on January 6, 2024 shows smoke billowing over Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip during Israeli bombardment.  (Photo: AFP via Getty Images)

    “This war should never have started. But it’s long past time for it to end,” said United Nations emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths.

    The United Nations’ emergency relief coordinator warned Friday that the threat of a broader conflict in the Middle East is growing rapidly as Israel’s assault continues in Gaza, which the U.N. official said has been rendered “uninhabitable” by near-constant airstrikes and a suffocating blockade.

    “The specter of further regional spillover of the war is looming dangerously close,” Martin Griffiths, the U.N.’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said in a statement, pointing to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, mounting Israeli attacks in the West Bank, and rocket attacks on Israel. “Hope has never been more elusive.”

    Griffiths, a longtime diplomat who has described the situation in Gaza as the worst humanitarian crisis he’s ever witnessed, issued his unsparing statement at the tail end of a week that saw Israel and the United States launch deadly strikes in Lebanon and Iraq, killing a senior Hamas official and the leader of an Iran-aligned militia.

    On Saturday, Hezbollah responded to Israel’s drone strike on an office building in the Lebanese capital of Beirut by firing rockets at a military base in northern Israel, heightening fears of an escalatory spiral.

    While the Biden administration insists it wants to avert a regional war, it continues to provide Israel with lethal military aid and oppose international efforts to enact a permanent cease-fire that analysts say is necessary to stop the conflict from spreading. The U.S. is also reportedly drafting plans to bomb Yemen in response to Houthi attacks on vessels in the Red Sea.

    The Houthis have said the attacks will stop once Israel ends its catastrophic assault on the Gaza Strip.

    Griffiths said Friday that the situation in Gaza is shockingly dire, with displaced families “sleeping in the open as temperatures plummet” and the territory’s remaining medical facilities “under relentless attack.”

    “The few hospitals that are partially functional are overwhelmed with trauma cases, critically short of all supplies, and inundated by desperate people seeking safety,” said Griffiths. “Infectious diseases are spreading in overcrowded shelters as sewers spill over. Some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth daily amidst this chaos. People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.”

    “For children in particular,” Griffiths added, “the past 12 weeks have been traumatic: No food. No water. No school. Nothing but the terrifying sounds of war, day in and day out.”

    Much of Gaza has been decimated by Israeli bombs, many of which were supplied by the United States. The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said Friday that around 68,000 housing units in Gaza have been completely destroyed by Israeli airstrikes.

    Roughly 4% of Gaza’s population—more than 90,000 people—has been killed, wounded, or left missing by Israeli attacks since October 7, the group estimated.

    “It is time for the parties to meet all their obligations under international law, including to protect civilians and meet their essential needs, and to release all hostages immediately,” Griffiths said. “It is time for the international community to use all its influence to make this happen. This war should never have started. But it’s long past time for it to end.”

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

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  • International pressure increases on Israel as it continues committing genocide in Gaza

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

    South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel has received widespread support as it faces increased criticism for its genocidal war on Gaza

    Israel has come under fire over comments from a number of ultra right-wing ministers and politicians who have called for the complete and permanent transfer and expulsion of the Palestinian population of Gaza. The officials have suggested that Gazans should be forcibly transferred to other countries in the region, as well as to countries in Africa.

    The United Nations, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, France, the European Union, as well as Israel’s primary backer, the United States, among others have condemned these statements and noted that such a move would constitute a grave violation of international law.

    Israel’s far right Minister of Security Itamar Ben-Gvir responded to the criticism from the US stating: “Really appreciate the United States of America but with all due respect we are not another star on the American flag. The United States is our best friend, but first of all we will do what is best for the State of Israel: the migration of hundreds of thousands from Gaza will allow the residents of the enclave to return home and live in security and protect the IDF soldiers.”

    Harsh criticisms have been lodged from progressives at the US and France who allege that their policies supporting Israel financially and politically throughout their genocidal war on Gaza have created the conditions for Israel to openly fantasize about this escalation of ethnic cleansing.

    The growing international alarm and condemnation comes just a week before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is scheduled to hold public hearings over the genocide case that South Africa has filed against Israel over its war in Gaza. Turkey and Malaysia, have both endorsed the South African case against Israel.

    Notably, the National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby rejected the case, an 84-page application, and called it “meritless”.

    Worsening humanitarian crisis across Gaza

    The United Nations has once again reiterated that the humanitarian situation in Gaza will continue to deteriorate if there is no ceasefire, emphasizing that a number of areas have been rendered completely inaccessible due to Israel’s shelling.

    The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) wrote in an update: “The UN and other humanitarian partners have been unable to deliver urgently needed life-saving humanitarian assistance north of Wadi Gaza for three days due to access delays and denials, as well as active conflict. This includes medicines that would have provided vital support to more than 100,000 people for 30 days, as well as eight trucks of food for people who currently face catastrophic and life-threatening food insecurity.”

    The office added, “Humanitarian organizations are calling for urgent, safe, sustained and unhindered humanitarian access to areas north of Wadi Gaza, which has been severed from the south for more than a month.”

    The OCHA along with the World Health Organization also reported that “more than 400,000 cases of infectious diseases have been reported since 7 October, with some 180,000 people suffering from upper respiratory infections.  There also have been more than 136,000 cases of diarrhea reported — half among children under the age of 5.”

    Humanitarian organizations have emphasized that there is an urgent, critical need for humanitarian assistance, including medical aid, to treat and save the lives of those suffering from diseases and illnesses and to alleviate the extreme suffering and hardships of the population of around 2.1 million, of which 1.9 million are currently internally displaced.

    Day 90

    Scores of Palestinians have been killed in fresh airstrikes and ground bombardment over the last 24 hours in Gaza.

    The total death toll since October 7 has risen to at least 22,438 Palestinians killed, including more than 9,000 children and 4,000 women, along with more than 57,614 injured, more than 75% of whom are women and children. 7000 other Palestinians are reported missing, feared to be trapped under the rubble of the widespread destruction and rubble of damaged buildings.

    Hospitals continue to be targeted by Israel. The al-Amal hospital and the surrounding areas in Khan Younis run by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) has been under Israeli attack for the past two weeks according to a PRCS statement which has endangered the lives of thousands of IDPs who were taking refuge there. “The displaced persons are living in an atmosphere of horror and panic. This has forced dozens of them to leave again this morning and yesterday, fearing for their lives after they took refuge in the PRCS as a safe place protected by international humanitarian law.”

    They reported that in addition to killing and injuring patients and displaced persons taking refuge at al-Amal, the Israeli bombing destroyed the transmitter station of the PRCS VHF communications which creates “a major obstacle to the response of ambulance crews to the wounded, the sick, and humanitarian cases.”

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