On October 7, we witnessed the horror of the killing of 1,400 people in southern Israel, with almost 200 survivors taken hostage.
This deplorable attack has caused unimaginable agony for those who have lost loved ones, and enduring anguish for those longing to be reunited.
In response, the Israeli government and army swung into action and announced they would destroy Gaza, couched as a war against Hamas.
As it stands, over 3,000 Palestinians have been killed. This is on top of the thousands of Palestinians who have been killed over the past decade. Not only in Gaza but in the West Bank too. Total war seems to be the only policy in town.
Pleas for a ceasefire by neighbouring countries, the UN, and political leaders from the global South have been resolutely rejected by Israel.
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Millions around the world are appalled by the killings of young Jewish people and the hostage taking in Negev, and are equally appalled by the bombs raining down on Gaza.
A human catastrophe is unfolding in real time on television, bodies strewn from hospitals and schools that innocent people assumed may provide at least a temporary haven from horror.
We will keep demonstrating as long as it takes to bring about an end to the indiscriminate killings. To bring about an end to the occupation. To bring about a just and lasting peace.
Home Secretary Suella Braverman is to question the Metropolitan Police commissioner about the force’s response to incidents during a pro-Palestinian protest in London.
A video posted online appeared to show a man chanting “jihad” during a rally by an Islamist group on Saturday.
The Met said no offences were identified in the clip of the protest, which was separate to the main march.
But the home secretary wants an explanation from Sir Mark Rowley.
The meeting between Ms Braverman and the Met Police chief was already in the diary to discuss the ongoing protests and combating anti-Semitism.
But a source close to the home secretary said she would use it to question Sir Mark for his views on his force’s response to Saturday’s incident.
Injured child is taken to Suheda al-Aqsa Hospital (Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital) in Deir al-Balah, Gaza as Israeli attacks on Gaza continue on the 15th day on October 21, 2023. (Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Collective punishment of two million people is a war crime and a moral outrage,” said one head of a medical relief group. “The siege must end, a ceasefire must be secured, and aid must be allowed to reach any who need it.”
Emergency aid groups and relief experts denounced the tiny “trickle” of humanitarian supplies that were finally allowed to pass through the Rafah crossing into Gaza on Saturday, especially as what was described by human rights watchdogs as a “loss of civilian life at a scale we have not seen in the modern history of Israel and Palestine” continues inside the besieged territory.
The 20 trucks authorized to deliver aid into Gaza through border with Egypt, said Médecins Sans Frontières/MSF in a statement, is “totally insufficient compared to the desperate needs of the people, who have been under complete siege and relentless bombing for two weeks.”
“Prior to the siege,” the group said, “hundreds of trucks with supplies entered Gaza every day as the Strip is crucially reliant on external aid. Food, water, and medicine are still desperately needed.”
“Gaza was a desperate humanitarian situation before the most recent hostilities. It is now catastrophic. The world must do more.” —UN Agencies
Guillemette Thomas, MSF’s medical coordinator for Gaza, said Saturday that inside Gaza “we have an extremely high number of injured people arriving in hospitals, very serious patients requiring complex care. According to our colleagues who still work at Shifa hospital, the hospital will soon run out of fuel and therefore electricity. This means that all the patients currently in intensive care units connected to ventilators and babies in incubators will die because of the lack of electricity. Operating theaters will no longer be able to function, patients will no longer be able to be operated on and the number of victims will increase significantly in the coming hours.”
Thomas warned that those in the intensive care were “just the tip of the iceberg,” warning that all injured and sick people Gaza remain at severe risk.
We are witnessing loss of civilian life at a scale we have not seen in the modern history of Israel and Palestine.
Human Rights Watch was among those who suggested that the refusal to allow fuel into Gaza—and the absence of efforts to restore or repair devastated the electricity grid or water systems—makes the paltry level stand out as intentionally inadequate.
“While aid agencies struggle to squeeze a few trucks of humanitarian aid into southern Gaza via Egypt, the Israeli authorities are keeping their crossings with Gaza closed and refusing to flick the switch for the water and electricity supply,” said Tirana Hassan, HRW’s executive director. “There is no excuse for denying water, food, and medicine to Gaza’s civilian population. It is cruel and contrary to international law.”
The “aid” trickle through Rafah crossing is a cynical public relations exercise to take your eyes off the ongoing genocide. “Israel” is committing the crime against humanity of cutting off Gaza’s supply of water, food, medicine and fuel. It must be stopped NOW. https://t.co/9Qk3FBSGhU
— Ali Abunimah is now on bluesky (@AliAbunimah) October 21, 2023
Melanie Ward, chief Eexecutive of the U.K.-based group Medical Aid for Palestinians said 20 trucks of supplies “does not even scratch the surface” of what’s needed in Gaza.
“It is appalling that fuel will not be allowed in, making the distribution of aid to the people who need it across Gaza impossible,” Ward said. “Without electricity, the lights will go out in hospitals, desalination and sewage plants will not function, and many more people will die.”
“Political leaders should remember that collective punishment of two million people is a war crime and a moral outrage,” she added. “The siege must end, a ceasefire must be secured, and aid must be allowed to reach any who need it.”
Ward’s group was also part of a Saturday effort to bring attention to 130 premature babies currently in hospitals throughout Gaza at risk of death if those facilities run out of power:
🚨 URGENT UPDATE: Doctors in #Gaza have issued an urgent warning that the lives of 130 premature babies are in imminent danger if fuel does not reach hospitals soon.
— Medical Aid for Palestinians (@MedicalAidPal) October 21, 2023
In a joint Saturday statement, UN agencies—namely the UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, WFP, and WHO—said while the “limited, shipment of life-saving humanitarian supplies” provided by the United Nations and Egyptian Red Crescent would “provide an urgently needed lifeline to some of the hundreds of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, who have been cut off from water, food, medicine, and other essentials,” it was “only a small beginning and far from enough” to address the depth of the crisis.
Citing the overwhelmed hospitals and acute shortages of power, food, and water, the agencies’ statement included a slate of demands, including a pause of Israel’s bombing campaign:
We call for a humanitarian ceasefire, along with immediate, unrestricted humanitarian access throughout Gaza to allow humanitarian actors to reach civilians in need, save lives and prevent further human suffering. Flows of humanitarian aid must be at scale and sustained, and allow all Gazans to preserve their dignity.
We call for safe and sustained access to water, food, health – including sexual and reproductive health, and fuel, which is necessary to enable essential services. “We call for the protection of all civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including healthcare facilities.
We call for the protection of humanitarian workers in Gaza who are risking their lives for the service of others. And we call for the utmost respect of international humanitarian law by all parties.
Gaza was a desperate humanitarian situation before the most recent hostilities. It is now catastrophic. The world must do more.
In a joint statement on Friday, top Human Rights Watch program directors—Omar Shakir, Yasmine Ahmed, and Akshaya Kumar—said that the world is “witnessing loss of civilian life at a scale we have not seen in the modern history of Israel and Palestine. With deadlock paralyzing international institutions, leaders should rise to the moment and act to prevent further mass atrocities before it’s far too late.”
HRW said Saturday that as the occupying power in Gaza it has the legal duty under international humanitarian law to “ensure that the basic needs of the civilian population are provided for” and that it is obligated to facilitate, not prevent, the flow of humanitarian aid.
“Israeli authorities need to act immediately,” said Hassan in her statement. “Lives are hanging in the balance.”
People take part in a ‘March For Palestine,’ in London on October 21, 2023, to “demand an end to the war on Gaza.” (Photo by Henry Nicholls / AFP via Getty Images)
The large-scale demonstration in the U.K. occurred as paltry levels of humanitarian aide were finally allowed through the southern border of Gaza, but nowhere near enough given the scale of death and destruction.
Organizers and participants said hundreds of thousands of people were in the streets of central London on Saturday to demand an immediate cease-fire in Gaza as the Israeli military continued its bombardment of the besieged enclave a full two weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
Organized by a coalition that includes the Solidarity Campaign, Friends of Al-Aqsa, Stop the War Coalition, Muslim Association of Britain, Palestinian Forum in Britain, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the march also called for Israel to “end its occupation of Palestinian land and apartheid rule over the Palestinian people.”
The demonstration began at Marble Arch, weaving its way through central parts of the city before ending at Downing Street, where a mass rally was held.
While many in the streets put the number of demonstrators in the hundreds of thousands, other outlets put the number closer to 100,000.
“As a Palestinian who’d like to return home one day, as a Palestinian who has brothers and sisters in Gaza, and family, I wish we can do more but protest is what we can do at the minute,” one marcher toldReuters.
Large Palestine solidarity protests all over the UK today: London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and many other cities, despite torrential rain in some areas.
Organizers tell me there were more than 300,000 in London: largest ever for Palestine, they say.
At a smaller protest in Cardiff, Maggie Morgan, from the local affiliate of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, explained to the BBC that demonstrators in the UK were “taking to the streets as a show of solidarity to the people of Gaza, to show our support for them, but also to make the government listen, and say ‘not in our name,’ we’re not having this.”
On Friday, protests against the assault on Gaza—which has already claimed over 4,000 lives and thousands more injured—were seen across the Middle East, from Cairo in Egypt, with specific demands to open the Rafah Border to allow refugees out and humanitarian supplies, to Iraq, Yemen, Jordan, Indonesia, and beyond.
“We want the border to be opened immediately so aid can reach people in Gaza,” one protester in Cairo’s Tahrir Square told a correspondent with the Middle East Eye.
Beautiful scenes in #London right now – hundreds of thousands marching through the rain to show international solidarity with #Gaza and the Palestinian people. ✊
The Rafah crossing was finally opened on Saturday, but only 20 trucks of supplies were allowed to enter Gaza, an amount described by the Associated Press as “a trickle” compared to what aid experts say is necessary.
Cindy McCain, the executive director of the World Food Programme, toldAl Jazeera in an interview that 20 trucks were simply inadequate given the scale of the humanitarian disaster Palestinians and others trapped in Gaza now face.
“The situation inside Gaza is dire. Not only is there no food, there is no water, electricity, or fuel. And that combination is not only catastrophic but can lead to more starvation and disease as well,” McCain explained. “We’ve got to get more trucks in.”
Medical agencies and other relief workers on the ground have said that the absence of fuel in Saturday’s convoy means that hospitals remain on the verge of collapse.
“Without fuel entering the Gaza Strip to support generating electricity, thousands of Palestinian lives are at risk of death in hospitals, ” said the Palestine Red Crescent Society in a statement. “Ambulance will no long be able to save lives. Bakeries will no longer be able to provide bread. It shall leave the population without potable water, and risk outbreak of diseases.”
In #Gaza, “without electricity, many patients will die… It is vital to get the hospitals back up and running. To do that, regular ceasefires must be guaranteed for medicines and fuel to be brought in.”
In a dispatch on Saturday, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini, who heads the UN agency mandated with administering humanitarian assistance and protection in Gaza, said the ongoing assault by Israel has put the lives of everyone inside the territory at great risk.
“For the past two weeks, the war has continued unabated,” said Lazzarini. “In the Gaza Strip, relentless air strikes and bombardments, coupled with evacuation orders issued by the Israeli Forces, have displaced nearly 1 million people and caused the death and injuries of far too many civilians.”
He continued: “Civilians—wherever they are—must be protected. The life of all civilians, the integrity of all UN facilities and premises, as well as civilian infrastructures, including hospitals, must be shielded from harm and protected at all times under international humanitarian law.”
With global condemnation directed at Israel for what international legal scholars have warned may be overt acts of genocide and collective punishment in response to Hamas’ attack, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres on Saturday, speaking from Cairo, said, “The people of Gaza need a commitment for much, much more—a continuous delivery of aid to Gaza at the scale that is needed.”
Guterres further demanded a humanitarian cease-fire to rescue Gaza from what he called “a godawful nightmare.”
And Lazzarini added, “Let me be clear: protecting civilians in times of conflict is not an aspiration or an ideal; it is an obligation and a commitment to our shared humanity. I echo the calls from the UN Secretary-General on all parties to reach an urgent humanitarian ceasefire. This is the only way out of this mayhem; any other way will plunge Gaza—and the world—deeper into fathomless, dark depths.”
Residents seek safety amid destroyed buildings and debris around the Palestinian Telecommunications Company in the Gaza Strip on October 10, 2023. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“The ongoing and imminent Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip are being conducted with potentially genocidal intent.”
More than 800 scholars of international law and genocide have signed a public statement arguing that the Israeli military may be committing genocidal acts against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as the total siege and relentless airstrikes continue to inflict devastation on the occupied territory.
“As scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies, we are compelled to sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” reads the statement. “We do not do so lightly, recognizing the weight of this crime, but the gravity of the current situation demands it.”
The scholars noted that Israel’s yearslong blockade on Gaza—which has left much of the territory’s population impoverished and without access to basic necessities—had previously been described as “slow-motion genocide” and cited a United Nations warning about Israelis’ use of dehumanizing language, which is often a prelude to mass atrocities.
But the new statement contends that Israel’s current assault on Gaza, launched in the wake of a deadly Hamas attack on October 7, is “unprecedented in scale and severity.”
“The Gaza Strip has been subjected to incessant and indiscriminate bombardment by Israeli forces,” the scholars wrote. “Israel’s defense minister ordered a ‘complete siege’ of the Gaza Strip prohibiting the supply of fuel, electricity, water, and other essential necessities. This terminology itself indicates an intensification of an already illegal, potentially genocidal siege to an outright destructive assault.”
The scholars also pointed to Israel’s evacuation order aimed at the entire population of northern Gaza—roughly 1.1 million people—and subsequent Israeli attacks on civilian convoys fleeing to the south.
“Statements of Israeli officials since 7 October 2023 suggest that beyond the killings and restriction of basic conditions for life perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza, there are also indications that the ongoing and imminent Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip are being conducted with potentially genocidal intent,” the scholars wrote.
They continued:
Language used by Israeli political and military figures appears to reproduce rhetoric and tropes associated with genocide and incitement to genocide. Dehumanising descriptions of Palestinians have been prevalent. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared on 9 October that “we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” He subsequently announced that Israel was moving to “a full-scale response” and that he had “removed every restriction” on Israeli forces, as well as stating: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.”
On 10 October, the head of the Israeli army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian, addressed a message directly to Gaza residents: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” The same day, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari acknowledged the wanton and intentionally destructive nature of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
Under international law, a party is guilty of genocide if it kills or severely harms members of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group with the “intent to destroy” that group.
Raz Segal—an Israeli historian, associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, and signatory of the new statement—argued in Jewish Currents last week that Israel’s actions in Gaza since October 7 constitute “a textbook case of genocide.”
“Indeed, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed,” Segal wrote. “Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.”
Israeli historian and genocide scholar Raz Segal says Israeli leaders' dehumanizing language about Palestinians in Gaza and the IDF's conduct are cause for alarm. "We're seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent. This is indeed a textbook case of genocide." pic.twitter.com/y9PaaViaHn
Segal and the 800 other statement signatories implored nations around the world to swiftly “take concrete and meaningful steps to individually and collectively prevent genocidal acts, in line with their legal duty to prevent the crime of genocide.”
“We call on all relevant U.N. bodies, including the Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, as well as the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to immediately intervene, to carry out the necessary investigations, and invoke the necessary warning procedures to protect the Palestinian population from genocide,” they added.
