Pope Francis attends his weekly general audience in the Paul VI hall at the Vatican, on August 07, 2024 [Riccardo De Luca/Anadolu Agency]
Pope Francis on Saturday condemned the recent Israeli air strikes on Gaza, expressing sorrow over the bombing of children in the Gaza Strip the previous day, Anadolu reports.
“Yesterday, children were bombed. This is not war. This is cruelty. I want to say this because it touches my heart,” he told members of the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s central administration.
He also lamented that Israeli air strikes had prevented Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the highest representative of the Catholic Church in the Holy Land, from entering Gaza.
Israel has killed more than 45,000 people, most of them women and children, in Gaza since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, and reduced the territory to rubble.
On Nov. 21, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its military campaign in the enclave.
The pontiff has also called for an investigation to determine if Israel’s attacks in Gaza constitute genocide, according to excerpts from an upcoming new book.
A diplomat at the United States’ State Department has resigned over the White House’s policy towards Israel’s ongoing war on the Gaza Strip, in the latest such resignation by an American official over the genocide.
According to The Guardian newspaper this week, Mike Casey – a US army veteran who served in Iraq and who was until recently the US State Department’s deputy political counsellor on Gaza – told the paper that he had handed in his resignation to the government back in July, ending four years at the State Department.
Casey’s decision to resign was rooted in a growing disillusionment with US policy – or the lack thereof – towards Israel and Palestine, and particularly with Washington’s clear bias toward Tel Aviv in all matters relating to its oppression of the Palestinians.
“We don’t have a policy on Palestine. We just do what the Israelis want us to do”, the former diplomat said. “I was too embarrassed to continue being an American diplomat. I knew I couldn’t go to another assignment and function.”
Now reportedly working at a local bank in Michigan, Casey recalled that he and his colleagues “would write daily updates on Gaza”, which government officials and the president Joe Biden himself would seemingly ignore, leading the diplomat’s team to joke that no one would read the reports even if cash were attached to them.
One such incident he cited was when Biden publicly questioned and denied in October last year the enormous death toll in Gaza at the hands of Israel’s occupation forces, which Casey had personally documented in a report. “I was the one writing the reports”, he said. “What’s the point of me writing this stuff if you’re just going to disregard it?”
The former diplomat added that “I got so tired of writing about dead kids”, expressing his frustration at “constantly having to prove to Washington that these children actually died and then watching nothing happen.”
Casey and his colleagues were also reportedly frustrated at the Biden administration’s repeated rejections of their strategies they proposed for Gaza’s reconstruction – another issue that the Israelis dictated the Americans on. “Every idea we came up with, [the Biden administration] would just say: ‘Well, the Israelis have another idea’”, he said.
An Israeli counter-proposal which Casey cited included letting local clans run the Strip after the war, an idea that American diplomats explained in “numerous reports and cables” why it wouldn’t work as it is “not in our interest to have warlords running Gaza”.
Impact of Israeli airstrike on an UNRWA school in Khan Younis. Photo via UNRWA
After 14 months of Israel’s genocide on Gaza, conditions for the millions of displaced remain perilous and Israel’s airstrikes are unrelenting.
It has become background noise. We know it is happening, but we can almost forget that it continues at a barbaric rate. The United Nations deputy special coordinator for Palestine, Muhannad Hadi, released a statement on December 13, 2024, that simply makes no sense: “I am very concerned about the rapidly deteriorating security and humanitarian situation in Gaza.” How can anything deteriorate in Gaza? Isn’t the situation as bad as it could get, the genocidal war of the Israelis grinding on?
If you are paying attention, you will find that every day there are more and more reports of bombing in northern Gaza. These bombings pulverize entire buildings and massacre entire families. On December 17, the commissioner-general of the UN Palestinian Agency (UNRWA) Philippe Lazzarini put the situation clearest: “We are getting out of words to describe the situation in Gaza…. My colleagues when they come back, they basically describe a post-apocalyptic environment, and people are just living among [garbage], sewage water, in the rubble, and struggling because they are confronted on a daily basis with death, hunger, and disease.”
Dead bodies
The day before Hadi made his statement, an Israeli airstrike hit a housing development in the Nuseirat refugee camp and killed large numbers of the al-Sheikh Ali family. It has become part of counting the death toll to track the elimination of entire families by Israeli bombs. A Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor report from October 2024 showed that 3,500 Palestinian families in Gaza “have suffered multiple losses since October 2023. Of these, 365 families have lost more than 10 members, while over 2,750 families have lost at least three.” These numbers will need to be updated. The Euro-Med report is called De-Gaza: A Year of Israel’s Genocide and the Collapse of World Order.
On December 11, 2024, before this round of bombardments and killings, a startling press briefing was given by Mounir al-Bursh (director general of the Palestinian Ministry of Health) and Mahmoud Basal (spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defense Agency). Al-Bursh said that the Israeli troops fired on ambulances and prevented rescue workers from getting to the buildings to recover the injured and the dead. As a result, he said, “bodies are left in the streets and are eaten by dogs.” Basal, meanwhile, said that many of the injured were dying under the rubble because the rescue teams no longer had regular access to the bombed buildings and did not have the equipment to save people. This means that the Israelis are not only bombing residential areas and killing unarmed civilians, but they are also preventing the injured from being rescued and the dead from an honorable burial. Journalist Hossam Shabat, reporting from northern Gaza, wrote, “Due to the rising Israeli bombings and killings in northern Gaza, we have run out of body bags to bury the dead, and now we resort to using any piece of clothing or a blanket for their burial.”
Reports
Over the past few months, two reports have been published whose honesty enables the reader to feel the atrocities being committed against the Palestinians in Gaza.
First, in October 2024, the remarkable UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, published her 32-page report for the UN General Assembly. Her finding is clear: “The current genocide is part of a century-long project of eliminatory settler colonialism in Palestine, a stain on the international system and humanity, which must be ended, investigated, and prosecuted.” The legal case for the end not only of genocide but its basis, the occupation, is made very strongly. Anyone who reads Albanese’s report with an open mind will come to that conclusion.
Second, in December, Amnesty International released a 296-page document called You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. The most painful section to read is the evidence presented clinically by Amnesty of the genocidal words of Israeli officials that are then enacted by their soldiers. It is worth reading a few sentences from the Amnesty report:
Amnesty International analyzed 102 statements made by Israeli government officials, high-ranking military officers, and members of the Knesset made between [October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024] which dehumanized Palestinians, or called for, or justified genocidal acts or other crimes under international law against them. Of these, it identified 22 statements that were specifically made by members of Israel’s war and security cabinets, who included Prime Minister Netanyahu, then Minister of Defense Gallant and other government ministers, by [high-ranking] military officers and by Israel’s president between [October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024]. These statements appeared to call for, or justify, genocidal acts.
Also, the language used by Israeli officials was frequently repeated, including by soldiers in Gaza, apparently explaining the rationale for their [behavior]. This is evidenced by Amnesty International’s analysis of 62 videos, audio recordings, and photographs posted online showing Israeli soldiers in which they made calls for the destruction of Gaza or the denial of essential services to people in Gaza, or celebrated the destruction of Palestinian homes, mosques, schools, and universities.
For example, before the Israeli offensive on Rafah, Israeli minister of finance Bezalel Smotrich said at a public event, “There are no jobs half done. Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat, destruction! Blot out the memory of [the people of] Amalek from under heaven.” This genocidal language was then replicated on the ground. Amnesty’s report affirms strongly that there is no other way to understand the Israeli campaign against the Palestinians in Gaza than as a genocide.
Rascal children
The Ministry of Health in Gaza says that since the genocide began, the Israelis have killed at least 45,059 Palestinians. Of them, at least 17,000 are children. Israel and its Western allies have spent considerable funds to deny these numbers. The right-wing Henry Jackson Society (based in the United Kingdom) has published a 40-page report that belongs in a juvenile debate. To complain about this or that individual case and not to see the extent of the bombardment and destruction, as revealed by reputed human rights organizations, is disingenuous. They would like to justify the killing of children by their dispute over statistics.
In 2014, during a previous terrible bombing of Gaza by the Israelis, the Palestinian poet Khaled Juma wrote about the children being killed then. Then, the Israelis killed 551 children, as recorded by the official UN inquiry. This time the number is 30 times as high and climbing. No debate about the exact numbers will change that.
Oh, rascal children of Gaza, You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window, You who filled every morning with rush and chaos, You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony, Come back— And scream as you want, And break all the vases, Steal all the flowers, Come back, Just come back…
Over half a million Cubans filled the Malecón on Friday December 20 in a massive march against the US blockade. Photo: Presidencia Cuba
Hundreds of thousands of Cuban people participated in the mass demonstration against the six-decade US blockade of Cuba and the inclusion of Cuba on the US state sponsors of terrorism list.
“President Biden, take Cuba off the infamous list!” exclaimed the over half a million Cubans who marched on Havana’s malecón to the US Embassy. The mass march was called for by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel earlier this week to demonstrate the absolute and total rejection of the Cuban people to the six-decade US-imposed blockade on the island as well as the inclusion of Cuba to the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list (SSoT) which together have wreaked havoc on the island’s economy.
The march was led by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and General Raúl Castro who were flanked by over half a million Cubans from all sectors of life including students, doctors, construction workers, artists, and more. Cuban youth and students who participated in the massive mobilization carried banners reading “the youth will not fail!” and “this is the revolution!”
“The youth will not fail!” Photo: UJC
The mass mobilization began at the Anti-Imperialist Tribunal José Martí on the malecón, which is located directly in front of the US Embassy. There, the Cuban president delivered an address wherein he condemned the inaction of Joe Biden in reversing the policies of his predecessor Donald Trump which have tightened the economic and financial stranglehold on Cuba. Biden, he said, “has done nothing to move away from the line of reinforced blockade and economic asphyxiation of Cuba left as a legacy by the Republican administration that returns to the Oval Office in January.”
He also highlighted that people from across the US and the world have in the recent period called attention to the inhumane US policy that goes against international law, “In recent weeks and days there have been numerous pronouncements from US leaders and from other parts of the world demanding that Biden make use of his authority to at least remove the name of a nation that should never have been on this spurious list.”
He emphasized that, “When our international trade is persecuted and financial transactions are impeded, the people of Cuba are being denied food, medicine, fuel, goods, supplies and merchandise essential for their survival.”
In addition to condemning the illegal blockade, Díaz-Canel also alerted the Cuban people that there are currently paramilitary groups training in the south of Florida with the intention of carrying out terrorist attacks against Cuba. “They are based in South Florida and do not hide to train. They do it publicly, in plain sight and with the protection of local authorities, even violating their own laws and international treaties.”
The president’s announcement was both a warning and an attempt to expose the deep hypocrisy of calling Cuba a sponsor of terrorism, whilst in plain view of US authorities, these groups, “organize, promote and finance terrorist actions against social and economic structures in Cuba.” This phenomenon is not new and he reminded the people of how the US sheltered “self-confessed terrorists” and CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch who were the architects of numerous criminal attacks against the Cuban people, the worst one being the 1976 bombing of a Cuban aircraft which resulted in the death of 73 people. “Knowing such antecedents,” Díaz-Canel stated, “no US ruler can classify Cuba as a terrorist state.”
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel and General Raúl Castro marching on the malecón. Photo: Presidencia Cuba
The demand to end the over 60-year US blockade on Cuba and remove the country from the SSoT list has become even more urgent in light of the energy crisis on the island. In recent months, Cuba has suffered a series of blackouts due to its major challenge in accessing fuel to keep its power plants operating.
The election of far-right leader Donald Trump as president has also awoken fears that he may intensify existing unilateral coercive measures against Cuba.
However, as manifested in the mass mobilization, the Cuban people have vowed to remain firm in the face of any threat lodged at them by the US government and maintain that they are open to dialogue with any US administration based on mutual respect and equality.
In concluding his address, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel declared, “If the United States persists in its determination to undermine our sovereignty, our independence, our socialism, it will only find rebellion and intransigence! Every administration that has tried has been outlived by the Cuban Revolution, and it will continue to be so. This is a march, yes, a very anti-imperialist march! Against US imperialism and its pretension to impose itself in Cuba by force or seduction, we will march now and always!”
AN IDYLL THAT MAY NOT LAST: View of Puerto Ayora, Galapagos in 2020Photo: David C.S./CC
THE national government of Daniel Noboa approved a resolution that enables US ships and crews to use the Galapagos Islands for control and patrol activities in the area.
On February 15 2024, Noboa signed a series of military co-operation treaties with the US government, allowing ships, military personnel, armament, equipment, and submarines to be installed in the natural reserve, which Unesco declared a World Natural Heritage Site in 1978.
In doing so, Noboa ratified the Washington Agreement, signed by former president Guillermo Lasso. The agreement grants US soldiers and their contractors several privileges, exemptions, and immunity in Ecuadorian territory, similar to those enjoyed by members of diplomatic missions as agreed on in the Vienna Convention.
According to Resolution No. 23-CGREG-10-12-2024 adopted by the Governing Council of the Galapagos Provincial Regime, the execution of the so-called Integral Security Project in the Insular Region was approved, which empowers US troops to operate in the Ecuadorian islands without paying the administrative taxes that other entities have to pay.
The official document states that the arrival of US troops seeks to diminish the agency of local drug traffickers, which, in alliance with transnational cartels, have caused a serious security crisis in the country.
