- Post author:dizzy
- Post published:24 October 2024
- Post category:Fascism/human rights violations/Israel/Palestine/politics/Zionism
- Post comments:0 Comments
Britain not reviewing Israel’s conduct in Lebanon for arms export decisions
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uk-government-admits-it-not-reviewing-israeli-conduct-lebanon-arms-exports
The UK government says there is “no legal requirement” to assess Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law in its military conduct in Lebanon as part of its decision-making on licensing UK arms exports to Israel.
Middle East minister Hamish Falconer said on Monday that the suspension of 30 arms export licences to Israel last month means there are “no existing UK arms licences to Israel for use in Lebanon” apart from UK-made F-35 fighter jet components.
“So there is no legal requirement to assess [international humanitarian law] compliance,” Falconer said in response to a written question from Labour MP Abtisam Mohamed.
Arms control experts and human rights advocates were surprised by the admission which several said appeared to show that the government had decided to forgo international law.
“Under its legal obligations, the UK government cannot refuse to do IHL assessments for any of its arms export licences,” Martin Butcher, policy adviser on arms and conflict for Oxfam told Middle East Eye.
…
‘Conquer, Kick Out, Resettle’: Israel’s Far-Right Gathers to Plan Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza
Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
“Each of you will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza,” said one prominent Israeli settler.
Hundreds of Israelis including numerous senior state officials gathered Sunday near the Gaza border for a festive two-day rally at which members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and leaders of the settler movement openly spoke of ethnically cleansing Palestinians in the embattled coastal enclave to make way for Jewish recolonization.
“We came here with one clear purpose: to settle the entire Gaza Strip… Every inch from north to south,” Daniella Weiss, who co-founded the extremist settler movement Nachala—which organized the rally backed by Netanyahu’s Likud party—told attendees on Monday as joyous music played in the background.
“We’re thousands of people and ready to move to Gaza at a moment’s notice,” she continued. “October 7 changed history. As a result of the brutal massacre, the Gazan Arabs have lost their rights to be here forever, they’ll not stay here.”
“We plan to take what we have acquired in the years of settling Judea and Samaria and to do the same thing here in Gaza,” Weiss asserted, referring to the historic Jewish names for the illegally occupied Palestinian West Bank territories being gradually usurped by Israeli seizure and settlement. “Each of you will witness how Jews go to Gaza and Arabs will disappear from Gaza.”
“I want to say to the world: This isn’t just for the Jews. We’re doing this for the benefit of the entire world,” added Weiss, who earlier this year was sanctioned by Canada for inciting violence against Palestinians in the illegally occupied West Bank. “Ending the evil powers is for everyone. I call on the democracies of the world to stand with us. Adopt the values of the Bible.”
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, told attendees: “What we have learned this year is that everything is up to us. We are the owners of this land.”
“Yes, we experienced a terrible catastrophe,” he added. “But what we need to understand, one year later—so many Israelis have changed their thinking… They understand that when Israel acts like the rightful owners of this land, this is what brings results.”
May Golan, Minister for social equality and the advancement of the status of women of Israel, told rallygoers, “We will hit them where it hurts—their land.”
“Anyone who uses their plot of land to plan another Holocaust will receive from us, with God’s help, another Nakba,” Golan added, referring to the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine by Jewish militants during the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Around two-thirds of Gaza’s population are descendants of Nakba refugees.
Sima Hasson of the group Mothers’ Parade told the audience that “I’m going to say something that not everyone here is prepared to say, but I am, and I know a lot of you are: Conquer, kick out, resettle.”
“I’m not just talking about one area of Gaza,” she continued. “I’m not just talking about northern Gaza. I mean every single sliver of land. It’s the only way we’ll save our boys from constantly going to war.”
“To everyone in Europe who has an opinion about what’s happening here, I say: Don’t get involved,” Hasson added. “Worry about yourselves. Radical Islam is taking over your whole continent. You want to help? Take in the Gazans who we want to leave Gaza.”
Other Cabinet members who spoke at the rally included Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionist Party and Negev and Galilee Minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf of Jewish Power. Knesset members in attendance included Ariel Kallner, Avichai Boaron, Osher Shkalim, Tally Gotliv, and Sasson Gueta of Likud; Tzvi Sukkot of the Religious Zionist Party; and Limor Son Harmelech from Jewish Power.
“We need to occupy the complete land of Israel. There are no innocent people in Gaza,” Gotliv toldMiddle East Eye. “Everybody who has refused to leave the north is a collaborator.”
“There are no innocent people in Gaza.”
While numerous Israeli officials called for the recolonization of a Gaza Strip prior to the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, such calls have accelerated since then. In January, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and other senior Israeli officials attended a similar but smaller conference hosted by Nachala on the Jewish recolonization of Gaza.
Last year, Amir Weitmann, who chairs Likud’s Libertarian faction, published a plan examining the economics of forcibly transferring Gazans to Egypt’s Sinai Desert. A separate 2023 proposal by then-Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel, who is also a Likud member, would ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza, forcing them into the Sinai.
Monday’s rally came as Israel’s military continued its relentless 381-day assault on Gaza, which has left more than 152,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and for which Israel is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
In recent weeks, Israeli forces have intensified attacks on northern Gaza—seen by numerous observers as the part of the coastal strip most likely to be seized by Israel—including Saturday airstrikes in Beit Lahia in which more than 120 Palestinians were killed, wounded, or are missing.
The intensified assault comes as some Israeli troops claim the Israel Defense Forces has launched the so-called “Generals’ Plan,” a blueprint for the starvation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from northern Gaza. The U.S., which provides Israel with tens of billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover, last week warned Israeli leaders against any such “policy of starvation,” which critics countered is already being implemented throughout Gaza with deadly results.
More than 20 Israeli settlements were built in Gaza following Israel’s conquest of the territory during the 1967 Six-Day War. While Israeli troops and settlers withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the besieged enclave is still considered occupied under international law, as Israel maintains a physical and economic stranglehold on the territory.
As in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s settlements in Gaza, as well as the occupation itself, were illegal under international law. In July, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion stating that Israel’s 57-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is an illegal form of apartheid that must end “as rapidly as possible.”
However, in language resembling the Palestinian liberation slogan “from the river to the sea,” Likud’s founding platform states that “between the sea and the Jordan [River], there will be only Israeli sovereignty.” On multiple occasions over the past year or so, Netanyahu has publicly displayed maps showing the Middle East in which there is no Palestine and all Palestinian lands are labeled as “Israel.”
Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)
- Israeli Officials’ Plans to Ethnically Cleanse, Recolonize Gaza Stoke ‘Second Nakba’ Fears
- Israel Ministers Call for Ethnic Cleansing of Gaza at Settler Conference
- Israeli Politician Quotes Hitler to Argue for Resettlement of Gaza
- Netanyahu’s Likud Party Backs ‘Preparing to Settle Gaza’ Event as Genocide Continues
Israel continues to block aid into Gaza and is killing people fleeing in the north, UN officials warn
ISRAEL’S military continued to block humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza today, and reportedly killed people trying to flee Jabalia in the north, UN officials warned today.
The Israeli military (IDF) began blocking all supplies of food, medicine and fuel to the people under siege in northern Gaza on October 1.
On the 15th, the IDF allowed what the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said was “a token amount of aid” to enter, but since then nothing else has been allowed in.
The Israeli government has called on all civilians in the north to leave, but has continued to bomb the area, making escape just as dangerous for the Palestinians as staying in their destroyed homes.
Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), said on social media today that humanitarian agencies must get access to north Gaza.
“Hospitals have been hit and are left without power, while injured people are left without care,” he said.
“UNRWA’s remaining shelters are so overcrowded, some displaced people are now forced to live in the toilets.
“According to reports, people attempting to flee are getting killed, their bodies left on the street. Missions to rescue people from under the rubble are also being denied.
…
I Went to Gaza. What I Saw Was a Holocaust
https://novaramedia.com/2024/10/18/i-went-to-gaza-what-i-saw-was-a-holocaust/
Unutterable destruction.
by susan abulhawa
Editor’s note: This article was commissioned by the Guardian US as part of its Rise against fascism series, which was published in September. It was spiked by editor-in-chief Katherine Viner following a disagreement about the author’s use of the term “holocaust” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza – the Guardian suggested she amend it to “genocide” and she refused. The context of the incident is documented in this report.
Novara Media has decided to publish the piece in full, including the term “holocaust”, following consultation with several scholars of genocide and Jewish history.
The author spells her name in lower case.
Content note: This piece contains explicit references to torture and sexual assault.
United Nations Resolution 3379 defined Zionism as “a form of racism” because at its core it is a supremacist ideology that seeks to privilege Jews at the expense, even detriment and demise, of non-Jews (the resolution passed in 1975 and was revoked in 1991 following pressure from Israel and the United States). Regardless of how one defines Zionism, it manifests, among other myriad ways, in the subjugation or displacement of indigenous Palestinians.
For the past 12 months, Israel has been implementing a long-held colonial fantasy of not only “finishing the job,” but doing so with a gleeful sadism that echos the social media posts of Tzipi Navon, Sara Netanyahu’s close advisor and office manager, who called for residents from Gaza who participated in the [7 October] massacre to be tortured live on broadcast television: “First removing the nails from the hands and feet … cut off [their] genitals and let [them] see [their testicles] fried in canola oil and [force them] to eat them … Keep the tongue to the end, so that it pleases us with its screams, the ears so that [they] can hear [their] own screams and the eyes so that [they] can see us smile.”
Polling data from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies suggests that a majority of Jewish Israelis do not think that soldiers accused of torturing Palestinians should face criminal charges.
In a rare moment of candour, the New York Times reported UN findings of systematic torture, including sexual torture. According to the UN’s report, Israeli soldiers have allegedly kept Palestinian captives in severely overcrowded prison cells, subjected them to sleep deprivation and forced nudity, threatened them with gang-rape, and penetrated or electrocuted male and female prisoners’ genitals and anuses with electrified batons and other objects. Released Palestinian hostages and Palestinian civilians in Gaza have reported being mauled and sexually assaulted by trained dogs. A lawyer who has been granted rare access to a Palestinian captive inside an Israeli detention centre reported the activation of a fire extinguisher inside the body of a 27-year-old man through a hose inserted into his rectum.
Many of those who were kidnapped, including prominent surgeons such as Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, director of the orthopaedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital, may have died after torture. Some emerged from Israeli gulags with such trauma that they have reportedly suffered memory loss; some were unable to speak; all of them broken by unspeakable torment in Israeli captivity. And they were the lucky ones who got out.
…
Article continues at https://novaramedia.com/2024/10/18/i-went-to-gaza-what-i-saw-was-a-holocaust/
Discontent Deepens Among Guardian Staff Over Palestine ‘Double Standard’
