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Thousands of demonstrators gather at the Sebin Street after Friday prayers to show solidarity with Palestinians and protest against Israeli attacks on Gaza, following a call of the Iranian-backed Houthis in Sanaa, Yemen on March 08, 2024. [Mohammed Hamoud – Anadolu Agency]
A Hebrew report said the Houthis have transferred missiles, rocket launchers, drone systems, and other equipment to several provinces, while restoring communication and technology infrastructure damaged by US strikes.
According to Line of Defence, a platform specialised in security and military affairs, Yemeni security sources said on Sunday that the Ansar Allah movement (Houthis) moved advanced weapons and military equipment to the western coastal areas overlooking the Red Sea. They also redeployed naval, coastal, and defensive munitions in the western mountain range.
The platform quoted the sources as saying the Houthis had relocated missiles, rocket systems, drone technology, and guidance equipment to Hodeidah and Hajjah provinces, as well as to western areas of Raymah, Dhamar, Mahwit, and Ibb, in addition to the parts of Taiz under their control. The report, published by Maariv, questioned whether the Houthis were preparing for a long-term confrontation.
The report added that the transferred weapons also included “missile batteries and radar systems” positioned near Hodeidah city, its port, and several areas in the north. It noted that the Houthis also redeployed naval and aerial assets in key strategic mountain locations overlooking the Red Sea and Bab al-Mandab, placing them in secure bases and shelters, some of which are new.
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Press vests lie on a table outside Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip. [Abdallah F.s. Alattar – Anadolu Agency]
Another Palestinian journalist was killed by Israeli army fire in Gaza, taking the death toll since October 2023 to 239, local authorities said on Tuesday, Anadolu reports.
Islam Al-Koumi, a journalist working with several media outlets, lost his life late Monday when Israeli fighter jets bombed his house in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City, local media said.
Gaza’s Government Media Office said the new fatality brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed in the Israeli war in Gaza since October 2023 to 239.
The office condemned “Israel’s systematic assassination of Palestinian reporters in Gaza” and called on human rights and media institutions to “condemn these systematic crimes against Gaza journalists.”
Israel has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave, which is facing famine.
Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his 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 war on the enclave.
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Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.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 Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
Palestinians gather in the ruins of Gaza City in the hopes of obtaining humanitarian aid packages dropped from planes | Mahmoud Abu Hamda/Anadolu via Getty Images
It’s clear that Netanyahu’s ‘messianic fantasy’ is full control of the territory. Staying silent is complicity
As its appalling onslaught in Gaza and treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank are broadcast around the world, Israel is increasingly encountering international opprobrium. Yet Binyamin Netanyahu’s position is still not under threat from the country’s domestic opposition, whose criticism of his government scarcely stretches to the war.
While that may be starting to change, the Israeli prime minister’s rule will likely persist as long as he can rely on the support of Donald Trump, which shows no sign of abating. In any case, he could probably rectify any significant shift in domestic attitudes by engineering another crisis with Iran.
Why support for the war persists in Israel needs to be understood, and it is worth recalling that before the Hamas attack nearly two years ago, Israeli Jews thought that they were at last achieving a measure of lasting security.
At the time, the occupied West Bank has seen a steady increase in the number and size of Jewish settlements, along with all the strategic roads, checkpoints and patrols that went with them. That helped to ensure Israel could more effectively control the whole area, which was already enclosed by the heavily guarded border with Jordan and the separation barrier with Israel.
More widely, Israel had overwhelming air superiority in the region, which enabled it to project power in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. It was far from complete, given the presence of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the theocratic regime in Iran, but Israel’s ever-present connection with the United States offered further protection.
Perhaps the most reassuring element was how Gaza had been subdued after the shock of the 2006 Hamas election victory over Fatah, a secular nationalist party that had previously had a majority on the Palestinian Legislative Council.
That election had been held across all the Palestinian territories and was followed by violent Israeli and international opposition to the onset of Hamas rule, as well as conflict between Fatah and Hamas. Within months, Fatah had regained control of the West Bank, while Hamas ran Gaza, which almost immediately became subject to a near siege by Israel.
The first of the four, in 2008, was a 22-day Israeli military offensive that killed around 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. This was followed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) assassinating Hamas’s military chief of staff, Ahmed Jabari, and conducting eight days of air raids in 2012.
Then, mid-2014 saw a seven-week IDF offensive after Hamas kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers. That bitter air and ground offensive led to the deaths of more than 2,100 Palestinians and 73 Israelis. Israeli losses were mostly IDF ground troops, which is one reason why many senior Israeli soldiers are now reluctant to put troops into Gaza City.
More recently, in May 2021, the IDF killed 260 Palestinians in Gaza, and 13 Israelis died in rocket fire from Gaza. Thirty more Palestinians were killed in further attacks in 2022.
Amid these short but intense wars, many Israelis became used to brief bursts of warfare, which were often seen as a necessary means to control Palestinians. Israeli military personnel even referred to such violence as “mowing the grass”, according to foreign correspondent and author Phoebe Greenwood, whose vivid insights into reporting on the years of war do much to explain the lack of balance in the mainstream media when it comes to Israel and Palestine.
In total, in the 15 years leading up to 2023, in the wake of the first and second Intifadas (Palestinian uprisings) and the control of Gaza, Israeli military operations killed close to 5,000 Palestinians and wounded thousands more. That this was well over three times the Israeli death toll on 7 October counted for little among the great majority of Israeli Jews, enabling the Netanyahu coalition to go to war with those Palestinian “human animals” to destroy Hamas once and for all.
Within weeks, it became clear that Hamas would not easily be defeated. From very early on in the war, the IDF was pursuing the Dahiya Doctrine of punishing the civilian population to undermine support for Hamas. That is failing to the extent that while Hamas has lost thousands of its paramilitaries, there are many thousands more ready to take their place.
As a result, Israel is using increasingly extreme measures, including killing medics and paramedics, destroying hospitals and medical centres, and starving people by cutting off food supplies.
At the same time, the Netanyahu government is conducting an international propaganda exercise, especially in the UK and Germany – two of the states where support is most urgently needed.
In an interview with LBC journalist Iain Dale last year, Hotovely suggested that “every school, every mosque, every second house” in Gaza had access to underground tunnels and that this justified Israel’s bombardment.
“But that’s an argument for destroying the whole of Gaza, every single building there,” said LBC presenter Iain Dale. “Do you have another solution?” she responded.
That response starkly supports Nimer Sultany’s assessment of the situation in an article in The Guardian this week. Sultany, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who is a reader in public law at SOAS University of London, wrote: “Israel is pursuing the messianic fantasy and the criminal enterprise of a ‘Greater Israel’, with the goal of ‘maximum land, and minimum Arabs.’”
Ambassador Hotovely’s views certainly support Sultany’s argument, as does the announcement this week that Israel’s security cabinet has approved a plan to take full control of Gaza City. From there, it seems likely that the rest of the Gaza Strip would be next, followed by the West Bank.
Sultany is right to call this aim a “messianic fantasy”. Western political leaders must recognise it as such and radically change their policies on selling arms and sharing intelligence with the IDF, as well as introducing sanctions on trade with Israel. Given the UK’s long-term relationship with Israel, and its close military and security links with the IDF (which exceed those of any other nation bar the US), Keir Starmer should take the lead in this.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote Labour for Genocide.
World War II did not end by handing over part of Germany to the Nazis. The conflict will not end by handing over part of Palestine to Zionism.
Haidar Eid is a Palestinian professor who used to teach postcolonial and postmodern literature at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza. That university no longer exists thanks to the missiles and the Zionist minds that fired and guided those missiles. His book “Decolonizing the Palestinian Mind” was recently published in Spanish by La Trocha publishing house in Santiago, Chile. I met Haidar earlier this year. His home was completely destroyed, and perhaps we could be ironic and say that he was lucky to have been warned by the criminals who gave him five minutes to evacuate.
Not everyone was so “lucky”. Since October 7, 2023, 60,038 people have been killed, of whom 18,592 are under the age of 18. These figures could be underestimated if we review the assessments reported in the journal The Lancet, which in June 2024 already estimated the death toll at 37,336, to which we should add 14,400 missing persons and so-called indirect deaths, that is, deaths from starvation, which have risen alarmingly in the last month. The aggression carried out by the state of Israel in the Gaza Strip has destroyed more than 70% of homes, displaced some 2.3 million people, and has been openly and selectively directed against the civilian population, attacking and destroying schools, universities, mosques, churches, hospitals, shelters, and even shooting at people at food collection sites. Journalists, health workers, humanitarian workers, UN personnel, and especially children have been killed as part of a plan aimed at wiping out the Palestinian people. This plan unambiguously qualifies as a crime of genocide.
The history of this aggression did not begin on October 7. The Zionist project dates back more than a century. It is a colonialist, racist, and supremacist project that has used murder and forced displacement as policy, all endorsed by a world that looks on with indifference at what is happening there.
The occupation of Palestinian lands by European Zionism began with the purchase of land in the early 20th century, supported by the British government. The process of dispossessing the Palestinian population before 1936 was described by the writer and activist Ghassan Kanafani in his book “The 1936-1939 Revolution in Palestine”, published by 1804 Books. Kanafani recounts that by 1931 some 20,000 peasant families had already been displaced from their lands. This interesting and fundamental text recounts the conditions to which the British Mandate subjected the Palestinian population, which included not only the loss of their lands but also the closure of their productive spaces and the imposition of disadvantageous labor regimes.
The use of terrorist tactics became the modus operandi of Zionism with the aim of displacing the indigenous population of Palestine. Many massacres were committed by Zionism, especially during and after the Nakba in 1948. On April 9, 1948, for example, squads from Irgun (a Zionist terrorist organization) entered the village of Deir Yassin, killing more than 100 Palestinians, including the elderly and children who were unable to escape. On July 11 of that year, commandos under the command of Moshe Dayan attacked Lydd, killing 426 people. Moshe Dayan would later become Israel’s Minister of Defense. Between October 14 and 15, 1953, the infamous Battalion 101, led by Ariel Sharon, entered the village of Qibya, killing 69 people. Sharon himself, who would become Prime Minister of Israel, would oversee the Sabra and Shatila massacre in 1982, in which at least 3,500 people were killed.
But it is not only massacres of this kind that Israel has committed. The selective assassination of individuals has been common practice and state policy. These are murders planned and carried out anywhere in the world by Israel’s secret service, the Mossad, known on the streets of Tel Aviv as “the Institute”. Recent examples include the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, spokesperson and official negotiator for Hamas, on July 31, 2024, in Tehran, and the assassination of Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah in Beirut on September 27, 2024.
Israel is not a state, it is a European colonial project whose founders were not native to that land. Theodor Herzl was Hungarian, David Ben Hurion and Shimon Peres were Polish, Golda Meir was Ukrainian, Moshe Dayan was the son of Ukrainians, Ariel Sharon was the son of Belarusians, to give a few examples. The manipulated biblical account is just a convenient excuse that serves to create a mythical narrative that gives a foreign population rights of occupation over a supposed promised land. In practice, what we have is a state founded on massacres, murders, and the forced displacement of the original population in permanent violation of international law. An apartheid state that distinguishes between first-class citizens who enjoy rights and second-class citizens with limited or no rights. The aggression that has been taking place since October 2023 is nothing more than the continuation of a project of dispossession, extermination, and replacement of an entire people, endorsed, sponsored, and financed by the US and carried out by Israel. This project is perpetuated because it is also generating extraordinary profits for a significant number of multinational corporations in the Global North, as recently evidenced in the report A/HRC/59/23 prepared by the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestine, Francesca Albanese.
How is it possible that such horror can occur and cannot be stopped? How is it possible that the mere veto of the US in the Security Council is enough to prevent action from being taken? How is it possible that even those who support Palestine continue to uphold the “two-state solution” as a solution? Haidar Eid, in the book we referred to at the beginning, seriously questions this “solution”. Two states means that we normalize the existence of a state that uses death as a practice, a state that normalizes and teaches racism and hatred in its schools, a state that does not hide its desire for expansion through violence and the extermination of other peoples. World War II did not end by handing over part of Germany to the Nazis. The conflict will not end by handing over part of Palestine to Zionism.
A ceasefire is imperative, but not enough. A crime is being committed and those responsible must be held accountable. It is time for the money used to kill to be used to repair the damage and begin reconstruction. Palestine has a right to exist and it is obvious that a red line that makes a “two-state solution” unviable, has been crossed. Only a democratic and sovereign Palestinian nation can be considered a solution. A solution that respects the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and right to exist. A nation that allows coexistence, regardless of religion or ethnic origin. It seems like a utopia, but it is utopia that allows us to move forward. Let’s make it our slogan! So far, there has been no progress. The United Nations is proving ineffective, and Palestine cannot wait.
Guillermo R Barreto is Venezuelan and holds a PhD in Science (Oxford University). He is a retired professor at Simón Bolívar University (Venezuela). He was Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, President of the National Fund for Science and Technology, and Minister of Ecosocialism and Water (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela). He is currently a researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Transformations-IVIC.
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 Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote Labour for Genocide.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces Eyal Zamir (C) conducts a field tour with senior commanders of the Israeli army. [Israel Defense Forces (IDF) – Anadolu Agency]
Israeli Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir on Tuesday set out the phases of a plan to fully occupy Gaza City, despite indirect negotiations on a possible ceasefire and prisoner swap deal between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, Anadolu reports.
According to Israel’s public broadcaster KAN, Zamir endorsed the plan on Sunday, with Defense Minister Israel Katz expected to give his approval on Tuesday.
Earlier this month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government adopted a broader proposal to gradually reoccupy the entire Gaza Strip, starting with Gaza City.
The plan envisions forcing nearly 1 million Palestinians southward, encircling the city, and carrying out ground raids into residential districts.
On Aug. 11, as part of the first steps, the Israeli army launched a wide assault on the Zeitoun neighborhood in southeastern Gaza City. Witnesses said the operation involved blowing up homes with explosive-laden robots, artillery fire, indiscriminate shooting, and mass displacement.
According to the Israeli outlet Walla, Zamir’s plan incorporates “key principles and lessons” aimed at making the occupation more effective.
It also calls for reinforcing army units in northern Gaza to pave the way for the city’s takeover, in line with Israel’s campaign to tighten military pressure on Hamas and capture areas under its control. Most of the tasks, the report noted, would be assigned to regular forces.
The Israeli preparations to occupy the city come despite the ongoing ceasefire negotiations, with Hamas having accepted a proposal brokered by Egypt and Qatar for a 60-day halt to hostilities. The group has repeatedly voiced readiness to free Israeli captives in exchange for an end to the war, a full withdrawal of Israeli forces, and the release of Palestinian prisoners.
Israel has killed more than 62,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave, which is facing famine.
Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his 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 war on the enclave.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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 Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote Labour for Genocide.
