- Post author:dizzy
- Post published:26 September 2024
- Post category:Fascism/genocide/human rights violations/Israel/Palestine/politics/Zionism
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Human rights lawyers renew calls for the release of 10,000 Palestinian prisoners
Original article by Ana Vračar republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
Legal experts and human rights advocates renew their call for solidarity with Palestinian prisoners detained by Israel since October 2023
Since October 7, 2023, approximately 10,000 Palestinians from across the West Bank and other occupied territories have been imprisoned by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in what human rights lawyers describe as an unprecedented assault on all branches of the resistance movement. Thousands more have been forcibly disappeared from the Gaza Strip, with little information available about their whereabouts.
Amid the increased use of torture and detention of the Palestinian people by Israel, international solidarity movements have intensified campaigns calling for their release.
Among those recently detained from the occupied West Bank is Khalida Jarrar, a prominent human and women’s rights activist, who has faced persecution by Israel on multiple occasions, and is now being held in Neve Tirza prison.
Watch: 11 months in Israeli prison: Shatha Odeh’s struggle for basic rights
At a briefing on Palestinian political prisoners, organized by the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA), Tala Nasir from Addameer Association for Prisoner Support and Human Rights, along with human rights lawyer Bilal Naammeh, highlighted the IOF’s violations of basic human rights among prisoners. Nasir pointed out that many arrests in the past year have targeted specific groups of professionals who play an important role in building the material basis of the community, including engineers and health workers. However, anyone can face arrest for something as minor as posting on social media, which occupation forces often manipulate into allegations of supporting resistance groups, including Hamas.
Israel is attempting to practically ban all political participation by Palestinians, Naammeh noted, a threat reinforced through military courts and remote trials designed to instill fear in the population. Since October 2023, these practices have become even more severe than before. Naammeh described how, in court, Israeli lawyers often accuse defendants of being involved in the resistance. When defense lawyers challenge these accusations due to insufficient evidence, they can be sanctioned or temporarily barred from representing clients.
As lawyers are currently the only point of contact between prisoners and the outside world, restricting their access—whether through sanctions or lengthy delays—has profound consequences.
Conditions inside Israeli prisons have also worsened significantly. Access to prisoners is limited, even for representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Prisoners face severe shortages of food and water, which has led to weight loss of up to 30 kilograms per person, and are allowed only one hour outside their cells each day, leaving them isolated for the rest of the time, according to Nasir.
Read more: Creating life from a life sentence: Sana’ Daqqah on the Palestinian prisoners’ movement
The lack of water and hygiene has led to mass outbreaks of disease and infection, including scabies. According to Naammeh, some prisoners with scabies have been tied to their beds to prevent them from scratching. Other reports indicate that the IOF moves prisoners with scabies between sections in order to purposely exacerbate the contagion. Despite the widespread health crisis, medical care remains out of reach for most. Naammeh highlighted that even the most pressing health issues can take up to two months to receive basic medical attention, leaving prisoners in prolonged suffering.
Conditions in the camps where Palestinians from Gaza are held are even worse, the two advocates suggested, but up-to-date information is nearly impossible to obtain. The only reports come from Israeli media or the testimonies of those who have been released. Nasir recounted stories of prisoners enduring extreme torture, including rape. Witnesses described prisoners being forced to bark for food and given only thin mattresses for six hours a day, making proper rest impossible. This treatment extends even to those who are supposed to enjoy specific protection under international law, such as health workers. Nasir explained that dozens of health workers abducted from Gaza are being held under the Unlawful Combatants Law, meaning they could remain imprisoned until the end of the conflict under such conditions.
In response to Israel’s blatant disregard for human rights and international law, Addameer and the IPA renewed their call for the immediate release of all political prisoners and urged international activists to escalate solidarity efforts, including by insisting on adherence to recent International Court of Justice rulings. The organizers reminded participants that even the simplest acts of solidarity can contribute meaningfully to the broader struggle for liberation.
Original article by Ana Vračar republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
Youth Demand spray ‘GENOCIDE CONFERENCE’ at the Labour Party conference
Two Youth Demand supporters have taken action at the Labour Party conference by painting ‘GENOCIDE CONFERENCE’ on the front entrance. Youth Demand are 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.
At around 10:50am two Youth Demand supporters walked up to the security check-in building, where all guests must pass through, of the Labour Party conference being held in Liverpool and spray pained ‘GENOCIDE’ and were part way through writing ‘CONFERENCE’ before they were tackled by plain clothes police officers and arrested.
A Youth Demand spokesperson said:
“Labour is still arming Israel despite a majority of the public backing a complete arms embargo. Despite admitting there is a ‘clear risk’ of ‘serious violation of international humanitarian law’, they have spinelessly suspended less than 10% of arms licenses.
“They claim their national conference is ‘democracy in action’. This is a joke when in reality Labour sold our democracy to arms and fossil fuel companies. Just last week it was revealed Starmer accepted a £4,000,000 donation from a hedge fund with hundreds of millions of pounds worth of shares in fossil fuels and weapons.“
One of those taking action today was Danny Lusardi, 23, a graduate from Lancaster. He said:
“The Labour government has admitted the arms it’s selling to Israel are being used for war crimes. But still they’re happy to keeping licensing 90% of those sales. We’re here to show them the British public can’t accept that.”
“It’s our duty as citizens to hold our government to account. When they won’t listen to the democratic will of the people, that means breaking windows and spraying paint.”
“As we approach a year of watching Israel’s genocide on the news and social media, it’s time to ask ourselves: are we serious about ending it now?”
The infanticide that is inherent in Israel’s genocide
Original article by Iqbal Suleman republished from Middle East Monitor under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Just as head chopping was central to Daesh as an expression of its military prowess and power, killing babies and children is central to Israel as an expression of its dominance in occupied Palestine. No one loves head chopping more than Daesh, and no one loves killing children more than Israel. That’s the message which comes through loud and clear on a near daily basis.
Such barbarism is cloaked in a religious garb but everything that Daesh does is contrary to the human rights and justice at the core of Islam, and everything that Israel does is contrary to the human rights and justice enshrined within Judaism. Israel and Daesh profess to be Jewish and Islamic State respectively, but the savagery of their conduct is more satanic than Godly.
The very notion of killing babies and children should be anathema to every human being, so what is it about the Zionist psychology that actualises baby killing? After the 7 October cross-border incursion by Hamas, South Africa’s Sunday Times reported the words of Saar Ben Hamoo, a South African Zionist and ardent supporter of Israel: “We will drink the blood of your children in Gaza,” he declared. The Zionist Ben Hamoo is guilty of hate speech, but also gave expression to Zionist infanticide in advance of Israel launching its genocide in Gaza.
READ: Israeli government chose revenge, not hostages: Ex-Mossad chief
Prior to last October, no one could have imagined the mercilessness of Israeli Zionists and their supporters in their desire to commit infanticide. How did Ben Hamoo know that baby killing would feature prominently in the genocide being carried out in revenge for 7 October?
Was it a guess? Or wishful thinking?
It is natural for human beings to express love, kindness and gentleness towards a child, whether a relative or a stranger. Anyone who thinks about hurting a child or even tries to hurt a child is considered a degenerate. To deliberately break the limbs of a child or even think about killing a child is beyond comprehension for normal people. The killing of a child has to be the most repulsive act that a human being can commit, but this is exactly what Israeli Zionists have been doing and continue to do in occupied Palestine, without compassion, and with full impunity.
In October 2023, after the outbreak of the Gaza war, Al Jazeera reported that Israel kills a Palestinian child every fifteen minutes. A recent article for MEMO pointed out that, “Israel has killed, on average, two Palestinian children every day for the past 24 years.”
The Vice Chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Bragi Gudbransson, told reporters on 19 September, “The outrageous death of children is almost historically unique. This is an extremely dark place in history.” The CRC monitors governments’ compliance with the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and released its findings about six governments, including the Israel regime.
The report states that the committee “is greatly concerned about the high number of children in Gaza killed, maimed, injured, missing, displaced, orphaned and subjected to famine, malnutrition and disease as a result of Israel’s “indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks.”
A week ago, the Gaza health ministry published the names of 710 new-born Palestinian babies killed by Israeli forces during the ongoing war. Since 7 October, the confirmed number of Palestinian children killed by Israel is 16,700. Moreover, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in June that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza as a result of Israel’s military attack on the enclave. Most of these missing children are presumed dead under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by Israel. At the very least, therefore, it is fair to say that the Zionist state has slaughtered 36,700 children in Gaza since last October alone.
READ: Gaza faces blood shortage as Israel strikes destroy blood bank of major hospital
Although UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez has said that, “Gaza has become a graveyard for children,” his comment underplays the fact that Palestinian children in Gaza are not just dying, they are being killed. More than just a graveyard, therefore, Gaza has become a slaughterhouse for children.
According to UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, children are “bearing the brunt” of Israel’s war. “This is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.” Save the Children UK insisted that, “We simply cannot accept the violence that Palestinian children continue to face as normal.”
And yet the infanticide in Gaza has been normalised.
International medics who have no political affiliation to Palestine but have gone to work in Gaza for purely humanitarian reasons, provide us with eyewitness accounts of Gaza post-7 October. Professor Nick Maynard is one such doctor. He worked in both Al-Aqsa Hospital and Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. “We saw a lot of children with their arms or legs blown off,” he told the Irish Times. “There were no painkillers to give the children.”
More than four hundred Palestinians were slaughtered by the Israeli attack on Al-Shifa Hospital when the occupation state claimed that the hospital was being used by Hamas. This claim was rejected unequivocally by Maynard. “I have never seen any evidence of Hamas there,” he insisted.
Firoze Sidhwa is a 42-year-old trauma and critical care surgeon at San Joaquin General Hospital in North California. He went with the World Health Organisation to work at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza. What Sidwha told Bruno Macaes of the New Statesman about the killing of children in Gaza is chilling: “Most of them have been killed in explosions where a lot of them would have been trapped under the rubble. Some are going to die immediately with a concrete block hitting their head or something like that but a lot of them just had their leg pinned under the rubble and because there is no heavy moving equipment, there is no way to get to them, they slowly died of sepsis while buried in the dark tomb alone, freezing during the night, boiling during the day. It would take three, four, five days for them to die in this way. It’s horrific to think of the scale of their suffering.” Horrific indeed.
Israel has been deliberately targeting and killing Palestinian children in Gaza. “We had kids shot in the chest and shot in the head, in other words clearly deliberate, clearly targeted,” explained Sidhwa. Another doctor from a different hospital in Gaza told him how often he encounters children being shot by Israelis: “All the time, every day, kids were coming in who had been shot in the head and chest.”
Sidhwa and other doctors who worked in Gaza’s hospitals penned a letter to the Biden administration to advocate an end to the infanticide in Gaza. The letter included the damning indictment that, “Every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.”
Despite such clear evidence of infanticide, the US continues to support Israel and provide it with more weapons to keep its baby-killing machine running. One wonders when the vampire-like thirst of Zionists like Ben Hamoo for the blood of Palestinian children will be satiated. “Israelis must ask themselves if they’re willing to live in a country that lives on blood,” wrote Gideon Levy in Haaretz on 15 September.
How many more babies in Gaza have to be killed before the US and Europe stops arming the baby killers in Tel Aviv and instead impose sanctions on the genocidal apartheid regime? How will we answer on that day when we all return and stand before our Creator, the Most Just, and are asked, “For what crime were the children of Gaza killed?” Whatever we think we might say then, we must act now to bring this infanticide inherent in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to an end.
OPINION: Israeli and international dehumanisation of Palestinians
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
Original article by Iqbal Suleman republished from Middle East Monitor under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
dizzy: The equality drawn between Daesh and Israeli actions is fully understood. There are so many – possibly all – made for television fake manufactured terrorism events that can be similarly equivalenced or attributed.
