Mourners gather around bodies of Palestinians killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, outside the hospital morgue in Deir al-Balah on October 9, 2024
ISRAEL’S latest operations in northern Gaza have killed dozens and threaten to shut down hospitals, Palestinian officials and residents said today.
The Gaza Health Ministry revealed that the death toll from one year of attacks has risen over 42,000, with women and children making up over half the dead.
Israel has issued an evacuation order to people in northern Gaza, but Philippe Lazzarini from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said that 400,000 people are trapped there where there is “no end to hell.”
“Hunger is spreading,” he warned.
An air strike in Jabaliya refugee camp early today killed at least nine people, including two women and two children, according to Al-Ahly Hospital in Gaza City which received the bodies.
Strikes in central Gaza killed another nine people, including three children, according to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.
Youth Demand cover Picasso’s ‘Motherhood’ at the National Gallery 9 September 2024. They are demanding an arms embargo of Israel by UK government.
Two supporters of Youth Demand have pasted a photo of a Gazan mother and child over a Picasso masterpiece at the National Gallery today to demand a two-way arms embargo on Israel.
At noon today the pair covered the protective glass cover of Pablo Picasso’s 1901 painting ‘Motherhood (La Maternité) with a photograph of a Gazan mother clutching her child. They then poured red paint on the gallery floor. Youth Demand is calling for a two-way arms embargo on Israel and for the new UK government to halt all new oil and gas licences granted since 2021.
The image used was taken by Palestinian journalist Ali Jadallah and shows a distressed and bloodied pair, coated in debris. His caption for it reads: “A mom holds [her] injured child after an Israeli attack, as Israeli airstrikes continue on twelfth day, at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City”. Israeli bombing raids in Palestine have killed at least 41,870 people, including 16,765 children, in the last year and since the photograph was taken in 2023, Al-Shifa hospital has been completely destroyed by the IDF.
One of those taking action today was Jai Halai, 23, an NHS worker from London who said
“I’m taking action with Youth Demand because at this point it’s been over one year of seeing my colleagues in the healthcare field decimated. Decimated by bombs, by bullets and by having to operate, with no medical equipment, on starved children.
“We need a two way arms embargo on Israel now; 87% of the British public want this and never before have they been more disillusioned with our Government and political class who do not represent us. We need a revolution in our democracy.
“Direct action is what gave us our rights and is the only way to move us towards proper justice. Civil resistance is our duty as young people: to defend those without a voice today and to defend our futures. It’s time to take to the streets; bring on the revolution!”
Also taking action today was Monday-Malachi Rosenfeld, 21, a Politics and International Relations student at Greenwich, London who said:
“I’m taking action because as a jew, I feel like it’s my duty to call out the genocide being committed in Gaza. I want the world to know this isn’t in the jewish name and I want to see a free Palestine. When Keir Starmer says Britain stands with Israel he’s wrong. We know very well that this is a genocide, not “self defense” and we as the people of Britain say enough is enough.”
Around 2,000 people in Lebanon of all ages have also been killed by Israeli airstrikes in the last year, on top of the death toll in Gaza and the West Bank. Missiles have also been launched at Iran on numerous occasions.
A Youth Demand spokesperson today said
“Our government is arming Israel to carry out a genocide against Palestinians and killing without restrain in Lebanon. It can’t be all carrots and no sticks: a two-way arms embargo is the least Britain can do to stop displacement, destruction and death! Young people will continue to resist genocide-as-usual“
Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
People mourn over the body of a victim of an Israeli attack on northern Gaza on October 7, 2024. (Photo by Abdul Rahman Salama/Xinhua via Getty Images)
One Palestinian journalist said that “the situation in the north is horrific and very dangerous” and implored people to “please share what’s happening.”
Israel’s latest dayslong assault on besieged northern Gaza intensified Tuesday as the nation’s tanks advanced deeper into the Jabalia refugee camp, where terrified residents reported being fired on by the Israeli military as they tried to flee.
Citing eyewitness accounts, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other news outlets reported that Israeli forces opened fire indiscriminately at people in Jabalia, who are under Israeli evacuation orders. Residents are being told to move to Al-Mawasi, a badly overcrowded so-called “humanitarian zone” in southern Gaza that Israel’s military has attacked repeatedly.
“Drones were firing at everyone passing by on the road,” 28-year-old Mohammad Sultan, whose family fled their home in Jabalia, toldCNN on Tuesday. Sultan said he and other civilians came under Israeli fire when he returned to grab food, water, and blankets.
“Three people were shot right in front of me,” he said. “My brother and I tried to help the injured get to the hospitals, but a little girl was shot in the neck, and her father was also injured.”
Reuters reported that the warning “Jabalia is being wiped out” was “repeated in many messages posted on social media by residents of Gaza” as Israeli forces assailed the refugee camp and nearby areas, killing dozens of people over the past several days.
“Jabalia is being bombed as if the war has just begun and the world is blind about it,” a 60-year-old father of five told Reuters.
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said Tuesday that “the threat of yet another massacre in northern Gaza is very real.”
” Israel must be ordered to stop assaulting the Palestinians trapped there and withdraw immediately from the occupied Palestinian territory, as already decided by the [International Court of Justice],” she added.
Hossam Shabat, a Palestinian journalist reporting from northern Gaza, wrote on social media Tuesday that “the situation in the north is horrific and very dangerous; there are currently hundreds of thousands trapped, and the shelling is nonstop.”
“Please share what’s happening in the north,” he added.
Israeli occupation forces have asked all residents of northern Gaza (300k+) to evacuate as a means of ethnically cleansing North Gaza . However, they then besieged Jabalia refugee camp, and when people tried to leave, they were shot at by snipers. Many residents are on the…
The northern part of Gaza has been utterly devastated by the Israeli military’s yearlong assault, carried out with the support of the United States and other world powers. The United Kingdom-based humanitarian group Christian Aid said Monday that mothers in northern Gaza have reported “losing up to 30kg of weight” as the region faces famine conditions fueled by Israel’s suffocating blockade and relentless airstrikes.
“We often survive on one meal a day if we can find one,” one mother told Christian Aid’s partners in Gaza. “My children cry and fall asleep hungry, and I spend nights crying because I am helpless and heartwrenched as their tears of hunger feel like a knife cutting through me, even though I always prioritized them over myself.”
Al Jazeera reported Tuesday that at least 56 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli airstrikes over the past 24 hours, while noting that “the number of deaths reported by sources vary” given the difficulties of counting casualties under Israeli bombardment.
Al Jazeera‘s Abu Azzoum said the Israeli army is “systematically working to empty northern Gaza.”
Such an effort would be consistent with reported Israeli proposals to “liquidate northern Gaza.” As +972 Magazinereported last month, prominent Israeli officials including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have “called on the military to carry out mass extermination in northern Gaza.”
“For some, it might be easy to write off Israeli proposals to ‘finish the job’ in northern Gaza as genocidal bombast, unlikely to be carried out,” the magazine added. “Regardless of what happens over the coming months, the very fact that open proposals to starve and exterminate hundreds of thousands of people are up for debate demonstrates precisely where Israeli society stands today.”
U.S. President Joe Biden was pictured with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting in the Oval Office of the White House on July 25, 2024. (Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“I’m afraid that if Israel will start a war, a comprehensive war against Iran… America will join in to help Israel,” said former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. “And that is what Netanyahu believes.”
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the British outlet Channel 4 on Monday that he believes current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to drag the U.S. into a war with Iran, an effort that the ex-Israeli leader called “reckless.”
Asked whether he thinks Netanyahu “wants to draw the United States into a confrontation with Iran,” Olmert replied, “I suspect that he does.”
“I think that’s reckless because I’m afraid that if Israel will start a war, a comprehensive war against Iran, and it will expand and Israel will not be in a very comfortable situation, America will join in to help Israel. And that is what Netanyahu believes to be the case,” said Olmert, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2006 to 2009 and was succeeded by Netanyahu.
Olmert expressed support for Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah—a move that prompted Iranian retaliation earlier this month—and said that “something needs to be done” with regard to Iran.
“What needs to be done needs to be done with care, with sensitivity, with responsibility, and with a sense of proportion,” Olmert added. “And I’m not certain that Netanyahu wants this proportion. He looks at the leadership of the international community, the Western world, and he says, ‘Who are they? I’m Bibi Netanyahu.'”
Watch the interview:
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert tells Channel 4 News that he ‘suspects’ Netanyahu wants to draw the US into a confrontation with Iran. pic.twitter.com/crCktsgmEn
Olmert’s remarks came amid growing concern that the U.S.-armed Israeli military could be preparing to bomb Iran’s nuclear energy facilities in response to Iran’s ballistic missile attack last week. The New York Timesnoted Monday that “there is a rising call inside Israel, echoed by some in the United States, to seize the moment” and strike Iranian nuclear facilities.
Former president Donald Trump, the 2024 GOP nominee, said over the weekend that Israel should “hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later.”
Speaking to reporters last Thursday, U.S. President Joe Biden said that the U.S. and Israel are “discussing” a possible attack on Iranian oil infrastructure. The president has said he would oppose an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Iran has pledged to retaliate against an Israeli attack with a “crushing” blow, heightening fears of a full-blown regional war as Israel continues its devastating assault on Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.
Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, said Monday that “President Biden needs to decide if he is finally going to rein in and end his unconditional arming of Netanyahu, or if he will let Netanyahu draw the United States and its forces into war with Iran—a country that is nearly four times the size of Iraq and has twice the population.”
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has done nothing to distance herself from Biden’s unconditional support for Israel despite vocal calls for her to back an arms embargo against the country.
In a closely watched “60 Minutes” interview that aired late Monday, Harris said that “Israel has a right to defend itself” while conceding that “far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”
But she did not say she would be willing to use U.S. military aid to Israel as leverage to secure a cease-fire agreement.
Harris also named Iran when asked which country she considers to be the United States’ “greatest adversary”—an answer that CBSdid not air as part of its televised broadcast of the “60 Minutes” interview.
Notable answer not included in the 60 minutes broadcast last night (was in Overtime)
Asked which foreign country she considers to be the US’s “greatest adversary,” Harris says:
“I think there’s an obvious one in mind which is Iran. Iran has American blood on their hands.” pic.twitter.com/yLefXJM1Cr
Harris went on to say that one of her “highest priorities” as president would be to “ensure that Iran never achieves the ability to be a nuclear power.” Asked whether she would take military action in the face of “proof that Iran is building a nuclear weapon,” the vice president responded that she is “not going to talk about hypotheticals.”
Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, called Harris’ answer on Iran “completely out of touch” and said it underscores “the irrational U.S. obsession with Iran, which is driven by politics and donor money, not U.S. interests.”
Last week, a coalition of more than 80 advocacy organizations warned the Biden-Harris administration that “it is not in the national interest for the U.S. to be led into a war with Iran by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel.”
“It is in the strong national interest to utilize diplomacy, backed by full American leverage—including withholding further offensive weapons transfers to Israel’s military—to move all the parties back from the brink and toward a ceasefire that ends the devastation of Gaza and Lebanon and reverses the slide to regional war,” the groups added.
Pro-Palestine protest outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 2024. | Fatih Aktas/Anadolu via Getty Images
A year on and no end in sight to genocide – thanks to US support for Israel, which will continue beyond election
A year on from the outset of Israel’s war on Gaza, Israeli forces have killed more than 42,000 Palestinians – and this is just the confirmed death toll. A recent study by the Lancet medical journal projected that the death toll could exceed 186,000 when counting indirect deaths – from starvation and diseases due to the Israeli blockade on humanitarian aid, food, water and medicines.
To take stock of where we’re at and whether this nightmare is likely to end any time soon, openDemocracy spoke to Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a foreign policy analyst based in New York and US Policy Fellow at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network.
openDemocracy: It’s been a year since this latest iteration of Israel’s war on Gaza commenced. Is the end in sight? What’s Israel’s end game?
Tariq: Unfortunately, I don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel here. There is no end in sight to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. And that’s mainly because Israel hasn’t faced an ounce of accountability or pressure to de-escalate from the international community (the US and other western benefactors) to end this.
I’ve tended to be doubtful when people insist that Israel doesn’t have a plan in Gaza and is just destroying and killing for the sake of it. Israel does have a plan and it has been acting on it. It truly sees this moment in history, as well as the blank check from the US, as a golden strategic opportunity to take leaps towards its ultimate goal of ‘maximum land with minimum Palestinians’ and wider regional domination through brute force.
Israel’s end game in Gaza is erasure, and for the last 12 months, they’ve been laying the foundation for a new reality in Gaza for us all to see. In addition to “thinning out the population,” as Netanyahu said, through genocide, collective punishment, and ethnic cleansing, Israel has been effectively chopping up the Strip into smaller, more controllable enclaves that will come to represent the new “facts on the ground.”
openDemocracy: Has anything about the conflict surprised you?
Tariq: I think one of the most surprising aspects about both the genocide in Gaza and now Israel’s escalation across the region is that it has gone on uninterrupted and without international intervention for so long, despite the fact that just about every massacre has been broadcast for the world to see on social media.
As someone who is part of a generation that grew up being taught that the phrase “never again” really meant something, this is what I have found most jarring. Of course, Gaza is not the first time the international “rules-based” order has been exposed as a crutch for Western hegemony. From Vietnam to Iraq, the West’s selective application of international law has long been exposed for what it is. But Gaza is the first postwar genocide both entirely perpetrated by a Western ally and funded, facilitated, and justified by the West itself, not to mention the first to be so thoroughly recorded for the world to see.
openDemocracy: Now with recent escalations including Iran, do you think realistically we’re on the verge of all-out war in the region?
Tariq: I think we are already seeing an all-out regional war by every definition of the term. Israeli fighter jets are bombing Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. This is not to mention the strikes the US, UK, and other Israeli benefactors have carried out on Israel’s behalf.
It boils down to this: Israel will continue to escalate across the region in hopes of achieving its extremist, expansionist goals as long as the US taxpayer continues to foot the bill and US assets and personnel are off the coast of Haifa to come to Israel’s defence if need be.
openDemocracy: It seems that the Biden administration actually gave Israel the green light to mount large-scale attacks on Lebanon. Has the US ever really been interested in stabilising the region? Does the US want an all-out war?
Tariq: The Biden Administration has either explicitly or implicitly (through uninterrupted weapons transfers and diplomatic shielding) given Israel the green light for a year of genocide and regional escalation.
I believe it is clear that the US ultimately shares the same strategic objectives as Israel, which range from silencing Palestinians once and for all to destroying groups like Hezbollah to causing significant damage to Iran. These are all outcomes that the US would celebrate (just take the public statement the US made following Israel’s assassination of Hassan Nasrallah as one example).
Does the Biden Administration wish Israel could go about some of their operations differently? Perhaps. But at the end of the day, the costs of Israel’s unparalleled violence, the mass death of Arabs and the destruction of their lands, is a price the US is willing to accept. If the US didn’t want an all-out war, they would stop giving Israel all the weapons and diplomatic space to keep escalating at will. Because while every US administration has been pro-Israel, other US presidents have stood up to Israel when they felt US interests were at risk.
openDemocracy: Do you think things will change after the US elections on November 5?
Tariq: Nothing will fundamentally change, regardless of who wins the elections on November 5. For Palestinians, the genocide will continue because neither candidate has exhibited any indication that they intend to hold Israel accountable for war crimes and genocide or use any of the ample leverage that the US has to influence Israel’s conduct.
In fact, it’s the opposite. Donald Trump insists he would let Israel “finish the job” in Gaza, while Kamala Harris promises that she will continue the Biden Administration’s policy of giving Israel “everything it needs” and continues to make it clear that she intends to be a carbon copy of the Biden Administration. The truth is, both Harris and Trump spell continued disaster for both Palestinians and the wider region, and there is no “lesser evil” here.
The truth is, the Biden administration’s resume on Israel-Palestine, even long before October 7, has in many ways mirrored that of Trump’s.
If Biden wanted to make good on his commitment to a “two-state solution,” he would have at least started by reversing the norm shattering pro-Israel policies of his predecessor. The Biden Administration has actually given Israel more military and diplomatic assistance than any previous administration.
The only substantial difference between Trump and Biden has been their rhetoric. But one could argue that Biden’s lofty, yet empty words actually does more harm than good by distracting us from the fact that he has given Israel everything it needed to get away with genocide right in front of our eyes. If Harris wins in November, it will be more of the same, and you don’t need to take my word for it, she has made it abundantly clear herself.
