Airplanes are seen on a tarmac. (Photo: Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash)
Organizers demonstrated to call attention to the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians and the denial of their right to return home.
More than two dozen human rights campaigners were arrested on Wednesday for blocking Interstate 678, the Van Wyck Expressway, in New York—the road that leads to John F. Kennedy International Airport—in one of the latest highway protests demanding justice for Palestinians.
The protesters blocked the road at about 11:30 am and continued the action for about 20 minutes, The Messenger reported, displaying banners that read, “Right to Return, Right to Remain” and “Divest From Genocide.”
Independent journalist Talia Jane reported that the protesters aimed to call attention to the Israeli government’s denial of the Palestinian people’s right to return to their homes, which they were forced to flee in 1948 when the state of Israel was created.
Happening now: Activists have blockaded entry to JFK International Airport on one of the busiest travel days of the year to bring attention to the humanitarian right to return home, which has been withheld from Palestinians for decades. pic.twitter.com/p0Hhqv7V4E
The protest was held on the 81st day of Israel’s U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza, which has killed at least 21,110 people and injured more than 55,000, as well as displacing more than 80% of the blockaded enclave’s population.
The campaigners linked arms and blocked the expressway days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly said the government’s objective is the so-called “voluntary” migration of Gaza’s 2.3 million people—another mass displacement of Palestinians nearly 75 years after they were driven from what is now Israel.
Some travelers headed for JFK on the busy holiday travel day exited their vehicles and walked to the airport with their luggage.
At least one told the demonstrators, “Good luck,” as she climbed over a highway barricade to get to the airport.
26 activists blockading the expressway to JFK Airport have been arrested and loaded into a bus. Travelers exited their taxis and walked to the airport, most silent but one saying “Good luck” and “I support you guys.” pic.twitter.com/968WTmOupX
The Port Authority of New York told The Messenger that 26 people were arrested “for disorderly conduct and impeding vehicular traffic” and that officials dispatched two buses to offer rides to travelers.
The outlet reported that protesters carrying signs that read, “Land Back” also assembled outside Los Angeles International Airport, blocking travelers from entering.
— People's City Council – Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) December 27, 2023
National Jewish-led Palestinian rights groups Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have blocked bridges and highways and organized mass protests in other travel hubs since Israel began its total blockade and air and ground assault in Gaza, which has threatened the population with starvation and disease as well as bombings.
Neither group had claimed responsibility for Wednesday’s protests at press time.
Reports show that Israeli forces are executing Palestinian civilians in Gaza in front of their families and keeping detainees in open air concentration camps in violation of international laws on warfare
Photo: Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor
A new video has emerged showing occupying Israeli forces using different forms of torture against scores of Palestinian detainees from Gaza in complete violation of established rules of warfare and human rights norms.
The video footage, released this past week by several media channels, showed Israeli forces stripping dozens of Palestinian detainees in an open field (apparently a stadium) and making them sit in a single file line. Some of the Palestinian detainees were blindfolded with their hands tied behind their backs and it is clear that there were children and toddlers among the detainees.
No, this is not a video from Nazi #Germany in the 1940s.
It is a video showing the Israeli occupation rounding stripped #Palestinian detainees in a stadium.
A child and a toddler can be seen in the horrific video.
This was second such incident in less than a month where Israeli forces have been found clearly violating norms of warfare, laws related to prisoners of war, and laws prohibiting torture.
On December 7, a similar set of videos and photos were broadcasted on an Israeli TV channel in which dozens of men stripped to their underwear were seen sitting in the middle of a street or taken away in a truck by Israeli forces. The report had claimed these were men affiliated to Palestinian resistance group, Hamas. Israelis also circulated a video wherein some of the detainees appear to surrender weapons.
Following the publication of those photos and videos, individuals on social media had questioned the claims of Israeli forces and identified their relatives, friends, and colleagues among those detained. They alleged that most of those in the video had nothing to do with Hamas and they were detained, humiliated and tortured by the invading Israeli forces. Many have also claimed that the Israeli forces who had filmed the Palestinian detainees, staged a fake surrender.
Al-Jazeerareported later that most of the men in the video were kidnapped by the Israelis from Khalifa Bin Zayed and New Aleppo schools used by the UNRWA to shelter some of the nearly 2 million displaced Palestinians, forced out of their homes because of Israeli bombings.
Urgent and impartial investigation in Israeli crimes is required
Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Palestinian National Initiative Party wrote on X (formerly Twitter), on December 20, that more than a thousand detainees, including the director of Al-Shifa hospital, are being subjected to brutal torture and severe beatings by the Israeli forces.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based human rights organization, has been gathering the testimonies of the Palestinians tortured under Israeli detention, and has called for an urgent and impartial investigation into those allegations of human rights violations and war crimes.
Some of the Palestinians released from Israeli detention narrated their harrowing experience to the media saying that they were drugged and beaten by the Israeli forces to force them to admit they were Hamas fighters.
Some of them had visible marks of torture on their bodies. The released detainees also said that some of their fellow prisoners have not been released and have probably been killed.
Two such former detainees, 22-year-old Nayef Ali and 55-year-old Khamis al-Bardini were quoted by the AFP saying that Israeli forces, after arresting them from eastern Gaza’s Zaitun suburb, tied their hands behind their backs for two full days.
“We were not allowed to eat or drink, neither we were…allowed to use toilets” Nayef Ali had stated. He also added that during the entire time of their detention they were beaten up by the Israeli troops who also “threw cold water on us before transferring us to a prison.” They were beaten up and tortured in the prison as well.
Breaking: Released Gaza residents share harrowing accounts of Israeli forces' brutal torture. From beatings, verbal abuse, and forced hallucinogenic pills for confessions to degrading acts like making them howl like dogs, stripping them naked, and falsely portraying them as Hamas… pic.twitter.com/anmf5roOwv
Israeli soldiers have also been accused of killing Palestinians detainees in Gaza at point blank range on several occasions since October 7. Some of these killings have been acknowledged by the United Nations.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a statement on December 20 confirming the news of 11 Palestinians killed in cold blood, in front of their family members, by the Israeli armed forces in Al-Remel neighborhood in Gaza on December 19.
The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has also documented that one of the camps run by the Israeli forces to keep the Palestinian detainees, Sde Teman, is like a new Guantanamo Bay, the infamous US detention center created during the so-called war on terror on occupied Cuban land used to torture hundreds of detainees allegedly involved in terrorist activities.
Children crying following the Israeli bombing of Khan Yunis, Gaza on October 15, 2023. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)
Congress is poised to send $14.3 billion to Israeli militarism—a “genocide tax” on U.S. taxpayers—without public hearings. What can be done to stop this madness?
The unstoppable Israeli U.S. armed military juggernaut continues its genocidal destruction of Gaza’s Palestinians. The onslaught includes blocking the provision of “food, water, medicine, electricity and fuel,” openly genocidal orders decreed by Netanyahu and his extreme, blood-thirsty ministers.
The stunning atrocities going on day after day is being recorded by U.S. drones over Gaza and by brave Palestinian journalists directly targeted by the Israeli army. Over 66 journalists and larger numbers of their families have been slain. Israel has excluded foreign and Israeli journalists for years from Gaza.
This no-holds-barred ferocity came out of the Israeli government’s slumber on October 7th which allowed a few thousand Hamas and other fighters to take their smuggled hand-held weapons and attack soldiers and civilians before being destroyed or driven back to Gaza.
Seventy-five years of Israel military violence against defenseless Palestinians and fifty-six years of violently and illegally occupying their remaining slice of the original Palestine provides some background for Israel’s Founder, David Ben-Gurion’s candid statement: “We have taken their country.” (See, his full statement here).
The overwhelming military superiority of Israel – a nuclear armed nation – in the Middle East has produced a more aggressive Israeli government. Being more secure than ever before doesn’t seem to temper the expansionist missions of right-wing Israeli colonies in the West Bank.
Presently, the narrow Netanyahu majority in the Parliament believes that “nothing can stop us.” Presently, they are right.
Joe Biden and Congress are vigorously enabling the annihilations. The UN is frozen by the Joe Biden administration’s vetoes in the Security Council against ending the carnage in Gaza. The Arab nations either lay in ruins – Syria, Iraq – or are too weak to cause Israeli generals any worry. The rich Arab nations in the Gulf want to do business with prosperous Israel and, other than Qatar, care little about their Palestinian brethren.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are no obstacle. Israel, along with Russia and the U.S. do not belong to the International Criminal Court. The Palestinian Authority is a party, but the practical difficulties of investigating Israeli war crimes in Gaza and apprehending the accused are insurmountable. The ICJ’s jurisdiction requires a country to bring Israel before the Court for war crimes or genocide. In any event, the Court’s lead-footed procedures trespass on eternity. So much for international law and the Geneva Conventions. Netanyahu rejects the moral authority of seventeen Israeli human rights groups, including Rabbis and reservist soldiers. Their open letter to President Biden in the December 13, 2023 issue of the New York Times on “The Humanitarian Catastrophe in the Gaza Strip” was ignored by the media despite the truth and courage it embodied.
In the U.S., protests and demonstrations are everywhere. Many are organized by Jewish human rights groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, Standing Together, Veterans for Peace and various student organizations. Everywhere Biden travels there are people from all backgrounds protesting.
A few days ago, the first protests by labor union members occurred in Oakland, California. Union activists could turn their attention to why, for years, union leaders put billions of dollars into riskier lower-interest Israeli bonds rather than U.S. Treasuries or bond funds investing in America. Like U.S. weapon deliveries, purchases of Israeli bonds by states, cities and unions have surged since October 7th.
Pope Francis, informed of the Israeli attack on the only Catholic Church and Convent in Gaza, which housed people with disabilities, killing and injuring Christians sheltering there, sorrowfully said: “Some would say, ‘It is war. It is terrorism.’ Yes, it is war. It is terrorism.”
In 2015, over 400 Rabbis from Israel, the USA and Canada called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop the practice of demolishing hundreds of Palestinian homes as being contrary to international law and Jewish tradition. Their successors Rabbis for Human Rights are being ignored by the regime.
The Head of the U.S. Bishops Conference and the National Council of Churches, representing millions of parishioners, condemned the bombings but received little coverage.
There is only one institution that could stop Netanyahu’s mass military massacres of the Palestinian people. That is the U.S. Congress. As long as over 90% of the politicians there automatically support AIPAC, the Israeli Government Can Do No Wrong Lobby, even a peace-loving Joe Biden cannot deter Netanyahu. Bibi (his nickname) could simply say to a hypothetically transformed Biden “Joe, take it up with OUR Congress.”
How has AIPAC achieved such domination on Capitol Hill? By years of relentless lobbying and the smear of “anti-semitism” to anyone defying them. AIPAC and its chapters don’t bother with marches or demonstrations. They personally focus on the legislator – one by one. Carrots or sticks. Praise, PAC money and junkets are the Carrots. The Sticks are smears and money for selected primary challengers in their Districts or States. Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) called AIPAC “a Hate Group.”
There are about 300,000 citizens spending significant time back in the states working Congress in AIPAC’s favor. They know the doctors, lawyers, accountants, clergy, local politicians, donors, golf champions and other friends of the Senators and Representatives, and forcefully promote Israeli expansionism backed to the hilt by the U.S. government.
AIPAC is proficient in part for lack of any organized opposition. It is also practicing state-of-the-art non-stop grassroots lobbying.
Congress is poised to send $14.3 billion to Israeli militarism—a “genocide tax” on U.S. taxpayers—without public hearings. While growing public opinion in the U.S. is against unconditional backing of the Israeli regime, it has not changed a single vote in Congress. Someday, more organized support for America’s national interest will.
(For calls to your legislators, the Congressional switchboard is 202-224-3121.)
A survivor of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza makes her way through the rubble of the al-Zahra neighborhood on October 19, 2023. (Photo: Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” said a U.S. military historian as Israel’s use of arms including 2,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs pushed the Palestinian death toll over 20,000.
As the Palestinian death toll from Israel’s 10-week annihilation of the Gaza Strip passed 20,000, warfare experts said this weekend that the retaliatory campaign ranks among the deadliest and most destructive in modern history.
Gaza health officials said Friday that 390 Palestinians were killed and 734 others wounded in the besieged strip over the previous 48 hours, driving the death toll from 77 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks to 20,057, with another 53,320 people injured. More than 6,000 women and over 8,000 children have been killed—approximately 70% of all fatalities.
That’s more than twice the number of civilians—and over 14 times as many children—as Russian forces have killed in Ukraine since February 2022.
Thousands more Palestinians are missing and feared buried beneath the rubble of the hundreds of thousands of buildings destroyed or damaged by Israeli bombardment.
“The scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in such a short period of time appears to be the highest such civilian casualty rate in the 21st century,” Michael Lynk, who served as the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories from 2016 to 2022, told The Washington Post on Saturday.
In 75 days, Israel killed 20,000 Palestinians and obliterated 308,000 homes in Gaza. That's 70% of the residential buildings in Gaza.
To put it in perspective, it's as if over 100 million homes in the USA were destroyed.
Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian and University of Chicago professor, told The Associated Press that “Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.”
“It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever,” he added.
By comparison, the 2017 U.S.-led coalition battle for Mosul, Iraq during the war against the so-called Islamic State—widely viewed as among the most intense urban assaults in recent decades—killed approximately 10,000 civilians, around a third of them from aerial bombardment.
Pape said that by some measures, Israel’s bombing of Gaza is surpassing the Allied “terror bombing” of German cities during World War II.
He noted that U.S. and U.K. airstrikes obliterated about 40-50% of the urban areas of the 51 German cities bombed between 1942-45, and that around 10% of all buildings in Germany were destroyed. In Gaza, approximately 1 in 3 buildings have been destroyed. In northern Gaza, over two-thirds of all buildings have been leveled.
“Gaza is now a different color from space. It’s a different texture,” Corey Scher, who studies natural disasters and wars using satellite remote sensing at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, told the AP.
Parts of Gaza look like a wasteland from space: Before and after | AP News https://t.co/7r1p6lA67p
Experts point to the types of munitions being used by Israeli forces as a major reason why so many Gazans are being killed and injured. These include U.S.-supplied 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound guided “bunker-buster” bombs, which Israel says are necessary to target Hamas’ underground tunnels.
These massive bombs turn “earth to liquid,” Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon defense official and war crimes investigator for the United Nations, told the AP. “It pancakes entire buildings.”
Garlasco said that 2,000-pound bombs mean “instant death” for anyone within about 100 feet of the blast, with shrapnel posing a deadly danger for people up to 1,200 feet away.
Sometimes 2,000-pound bombs leave craters in the ground where they strike that are approximately 40ft in diameter. Leveraging this fact, we trained an object detection AI algorithm to find craters visible in satellite imagery of south Gaza pic.twitter.com/JjGdZsFBkI
In a separate interview with CNN, Gerlasco said that the intensity of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has “not been seen since Vietnam,” when U.S. airstrikes killed up to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians. The U.S. dropped more bombs on tiny, non-belligerent Laos than all sides combined unleashed during World War II.
“You’d have to go back to the Vietnam War to make a comparison,” Garlasco added. “Even in both Iraq wars, it was never that dense.”
The use of such heavy ordnance in close proximity to critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals has alarmed observers.
“What we have been witnessing is a campaign that was planned, it was a plan, definitely, to close down all the hospitals in the north,” Léo Cans, head of mission for Palestine with Doctors Without Borders, told the Post.
The Israeli army published footage of them bombing an entire neighbourhood in Gaza.
Satellite images from the first month of the conflict reveal over 500 impact craters, each with a diameter exceeding 12 meters, consistent with the marks left by 2,000-pound bombs pic.twitter.com/ihH3XJByEA
Aided by AI-based target selection systems, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commanders are approving bombings they know will cause large numbers of civilian casualties. In a bid to assassinate a single Hamas commander, the IDF dropped at least two 2,000-pound bombs on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp on October 31, killing more than 120 civilians.
Although the United States—which has killed more foreign civilians this century than any other armed force in the world—provides Israel with thousands of 1,000 and 2,000-pound bombs, its own military avoids using such massive ordnance in civilian areas due to the devastation they cause.
“It certainly appears that [Israel’s] tolerance for civilian harm compared to expected operational benefits is significantly different than what we would accept as the U.S.,” Larry Lewis, research director at the Center for Naval Analyses and a former U.S. State Department senior adviser on civilian harm, told CNN.
That includes the risk of killing Israel’s own citizens and others held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.
Another Israeli who was released from captivity in Gaza says she thought she would be killed by Israeli bombing, not by Hamas.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu lies to the public and says more bombing will compel Hamas to release captives. pic.twitter.com/B1ikrp6dk8
Lewis added that the Jabalia strike was “something we would never see the U.S. doing.”
That isn’t entirely true; during the 1991 Gulf War the U.S. dropped a pair of 2,000-pound Raytheon GBU-27 Paveway III laser-guided bombs on the Amiriyah air raid shelter in Baghdad, killing at least 408 Iraqi civilians in one of the deadliest single airstrikes in modern history. U.S. officials claimed they thought the shelter, which was used during the Iraq-Iran war, was no longer a civilian facility.
“The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover,” John Chappell, advocacy and legal fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Center for Civilians in Conflict, told CNN.
Even more concerning for some experts is Israel’s use of unguided, or “dumb” bombs, against civilian targets in Gaza.
While IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said that “we choose the right munition for each target so it doesn’t cause unnecessary damage,” the death and destruction in Gaza—and Israeli officials’ own words—tell an entirely different story.
Early in the war, Hagari declared that “Gaza will never return to what it was,” clarifying that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
Meanwhile, numerous Israeli officials advocated the complete destruction of Gaza, with more than a few government figures—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Cabinet members—making statements supporting genocide against the Palestinian people.
U.S. President Joe Biden—who has affirmed his “unwavering” support for Israel and is seeking $14.3 billion in additional military aid for the country, which already gets almost $4 billion annually from Washington—has implored Israeli leaders to stop the “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza, even as his administration thwarts international cease-fire efforts and restocks the IDF’s arsenal.
Chappell stressed that “the devastation that we’ve seen for communities in Gaza is, unfortunately, co-signed by the United States.”
“Too much of it is carried out by bombs that were made in the United States,” he added.
Ahmed Abofoul—a Gaza-born, Netherlands-based attorney with the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq who has lost 60 of his relatives to Israeli bombing— said in Friday interview with Democracy Now! that “the American government is complicit in this genocide.”
“There is blood of Palestinian children on their hands,” he added. [Biden] said Israel is engaged in indiscriminate bombing. This is a war crime. So, the question is: Why do you then send weapons to Israel? The position of the U.S. is quite hypocritical.”
A Palestinian man carries the body of his grandson who was killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, at the hospital Rafah, southern Gaza, December 22, 2023
NO EVENTUAL US green light to allow aid into Gaza — where a quarter of the population are starving — can disguise its wrecking role throughout the UN process.
The urgency of getting food, water and fuel to more than a million displaced Palestinians has not deterred Washington from delaying a UN resolution repeatedly, insisting on the removal of calls for a ceasefire, watering down the demand that Israel open air, land and sea routes for humanitarian assistance and blocking a proposal for the UN rather than the Israeli military to approve deliveries.
As with the security council ceasefire vote a fortnight ago — which the US alone opposed, with Britain alone abstaining — the mask has slipped.
Everyone in the world can see who facilitates Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza even while crying crocodile tears about civilian victims.
We know that Joe Biden’s reproaches to Benjamin Netanyahu for bombing hospitals and unleashing a wave of settler terror in the West Bank are accompanied by a steady flow of munitions to ensure the Israeli Defence Forces can keep killing.
We know too that the copycat expressions of regret from British leaders are meaningless while we permit the US to resupply Israel from the RAF’s Akrotiri airfield on Cyprus, which we can assume it is doing since ministers won’t answer questions on the flurry of US flights to Israel from that base.
Britain and the US stand isolated and exposed. There will be geopolitical consequences.
The brazen hypocrisy of supporting Israeli war crimes while condemning Russian ones in Ukraine has not gone unnoticed, and will further undermine efforts to convince the global South to abide by US and EU sanctions against Moscow, as European diplomats admit.
Normalisation of Israel’s relations with Arab states, a priority aim of US diplomacy in recent years, lies in tatters. Following the China-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement and the invitation to five Middle East and north African states to join the Brics bloc of developing countries in 2024, this war could be catastrophic for US power in the region, accelerating a shift to Beijing already under way.
We have little influence over such developments. Not so the domestic political fallout. The medics’ vigils for Gaza, the hundreds of local demonstrations and fundraisers, the gigantic national peace marches, have changed British politics.
The British and US governments are not just exposed in the eyes of the world, but before their own peoples. In Britain, the Palestine movement has thrown open doors our whole Establishment have spent the last four years nailing shut — it is again possible to question Britain’s role in the world, its uniquely close alliance with the United States and the sinister character of our military operations and armaments industry.
As we learned in 2017, when Jeremy Corbyn pointed to the links between British foreign policy and terrorism and found a majority agreed with him, there is mass scepticism about our rulers’ claims about the world and an openness to building a different kind of Britain, one that promotes peace and co-operation instead of war and plunder.
The ruling-class response to Corbyn’s popularity was ferocious. The response on Palestine will be no less so.
Human Rights Watch has already pointed to Facebook parent company Meta’s complicity in a global censorship operation targeting Palestine solidarity work.
In Britain, we have seen off one home secretary trying to ban peace marches, but should the movement falter or the numbers dwindle the government will be tempted to revisit this.
Our movement must go on the offensive, ensuring politicians who will not back a ceasefire fear for their seats, and demanding a reversal of all the attacks on Palestine activism of recent years, including the bids to ban the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
This Christmas the traditional call for peace on Earth must be turned from an abstract seasonal aspiration to a practical mobilising demand.
