B’Tselem

Israeli Rights Group Leader Tells UN It’s Clear Netanyahu ‘Does Not Want’ a Hostage Deal

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Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under a CC licence.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at a press conference in Jerusalem on September 4, 2024. (Photo: Abir Sultan/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Israel’s far-right government is “cynically exploiting our collective trauma” to “violently advance its project of cementing Israel’s control” over Palestinian land, said B’Tselem CEO Yuli Novak.

The head of a leading Israeli human rights organization told the United Nations Security Council on Wednesday that Israel’s far-right government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, obviously “does not want” to reach a hostage-release and cease-fire agreement with Hamas.

Yuli Novak, the CEO of B’Tselem, said in an address to the U.N. body that the Netanyahu government is “cynically exploiting our collective trauma” in the wake of the October 7 Hamas-led attack to “violently advance its project of cementing Israel’s control” over Palestinian land.

“To do that, it is waging war on the entire Palestinian people, committing war crimes almost daily,” said Novak. “In Gaza, this has taken the form of expulsion, starvation, killing, and destruction on an unprecedented scale.”

Watch Novak’s full speech:

Novak’s remarks came days after Israelis poured into the streets en masse over the weekend following their government’s announcement that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers recovered the bodies of six hostages in Gaza, heightening outrage over Netanyahu’s obstruction of cease-fire talks.

In a speech on Monday, Netanyahu doubled down on his new hardline demands that have dampened hopes of a deal to end Israel’s U.S.-backed assault on Gaza and free the more than 60 living hostages still in captivity in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

Hamas has rejected the prime minister’s demand that any deal include indefinite Israeli military control of the Philadelphi Corridor—a narrow strip of land along Gaza’s border with Egypt—leaving cease-fire talks at a standstill as the war on Gaza nears the 11-month mark.

Gershon Baskin, a longtime Israeli hostage negotiator who has engaged in back-channel talks with Hamas since the October 7 attack, told Democracy Now! on Wednesday that the Philadelphi Corridor demand “is a made-up issue by Netanyahu to create… a new excuse for Israel to remain in Gaza.”

“It’s very clear that Netanyahu doesn’t want to end the war,” Baskin said.

In a social media post earlier this week, Baskin accused Netanyahu of “sacrificing the hostages on an altar of his own personal political survival.”

The view that Netanyahu is deliberately sabotaging hostage-release talks is hardly fringe: As Jacobin‘s Branko Marcetic observed Wednesday, that assessment has become commonplace across Israeli society, including inside Netanyahu’s government.

Marcetic cited recent reports from dozens of mainstream Israeli and U.S. media outlets casting Netanyahu—who faces corruption charges in his country—as the primary obstacle to a cease-fire agreement.

One unnamed Israeli official, identified as a senior member of the country’s government, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz over the weekend that the blood of hostages “is on [Netanyahu’s] hands.”

“He knew the hostages are living on borrowed time, that the sand in their hourglass was running out,” said the senior official, referring to the six hostages who, according to the Israeli Ministry of Health, were shot at close range sometime around last Thursday.

“He knew there were orders to kill them if there’d be rescue attempts. He understood the significance of his orders and acted in cold blood and cruelly,” the Israeli official continued. “They all knew he is corrupted, a narcissist, a coward, but his lack of humanity was fully revealed in all its ugliness in recent months.”

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under a CC licence.

Continue ReadingIsraeli Rights Group Leader Tells UN It’s Clear Netanyahu ‘Does Not Want’ a Hostage Deal

Israeli Leaders Demand Probe of IDF Rape Video—To Find Out Who Leaked It

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich speaks during a rally in Sderot, Israel on October 26, 2022. (Photo: Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images)

“This is what Israelis rioted to protect, what the Knesset debated—the right to rape Palestinians,” said one critic.

While human rights groups called for an investigation of a leaked recording apparently showing Israel Defense Forces reservists gang-raping a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman military base and detention center, Israeli leaders including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Wednesday also furiously demanded a probe of the video—not to seek justice for the victim, but rather to find and punish whoever leaked it.

Smotrich took to social media Wednesday to call for “an immediate criminal investigation to locate the leakers of the trending video that was intended to harm the reservists and that caused tremendous damage to Israel in the world, and to exhaust the full severity of the law against them.”

Israeli media on Tuesday aired footage in which Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reservists are seen attacking a Palestinian man at Sde Teiman while trying to hide their actions with shields.

According to Israeli media reports, the victim was hospitalized with a severe anal injury, ruptured bowel, broken ribs, and lung damage.

Nine alleged assailants—who include members of Force 100, the military unit tasked with guarding Sde Teiman prisoners—were arrested last week in connection with the attack. A mob of far-right Israelis including senior government officials subsequently stormed two military bases in an attempt to free the suspects.

While many Israelis condemned the alleged rape, others rallied around the accused reservists. Smotrich described them as “heroic warriors.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called them “our best heroes.”

Far-right Israeli lawmaker Zvi Sukkot—who took part in last week’s riot—joined Smotrich in demanding an investigation of the video leak.

“Leaking and disclosure of investigative materials is a criminal offense that harms the proper legal process, the rule of law, public trust, and the principle of justice,” he said Wednesday.

Israeli media reported Wednesday that two of the accused reservists lied on polygraph tests when asked if they had sodomized the prisoner.

Numerous Israelis continued to express support for the accused rapists. Israel Today political reporter Yehuda Schlesinger said Wednesday on a popular morning show that “I don’t give a rat’s ass what they do to Hamas man.”

https://twitter.com/i/status/1821121616094412908

“First of all, they deserve it,” Schlesinger said of the abuse at Sde Teiman and other Israeli military prisons. “It’s great revenge that we need to give them.”

“It’s just a shame that we don’t do it in an institutionalized way, as part of regulations for torture of prisoners,” he added, “because then the next guys who think about doing another October 7 will say, ‘Do you see what they’re doing to [us] in Israel?'”

Etan Nechin, the New York correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, accused the media of being the “main culprit” that “has normalized the most extreme voices, letting genocidal brutes, racists, and messianic zealots into Israeli’s TV sets.”

Some American media critics drew attention to the scant coverage of abuse at Sde Teiman in the U.S. corporate media.

“U.S. taxpayers continue to support this military and its torture camps,” Palestinian American author and political analyst Yousef Munayyer wrote on social media. “How is this not front-page news?”

In the United States—which supports Israel’s war on Gaza with billions of dollars in military aid and diplomatic cover—State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller said during a Wednesday press conference that “there ought to be zero tolerance for sexual abuse, rape of any detainee. Period.”

“It is appropriate that the IDF in this case, has announced an investigation, has arrested a number of people who are alleged to have been involved, and I won’t speak to the outcome of that investigation, but it ought to proceed swiftly,” Miller added.

Critics noted the IDF’s chronic failures to credibly investigate its alleged crimes. The Israeli rights group Yesh Din said in late 2022 that less than 1% of Israeli soldiers accused of harming Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza were indicted over the previous five years.

The Israeli Supreme Court on Wednesday took up a petition by rights groups seeking to close Sde Teiman, where widespread—and sometimes deadly—torture has been reported. Last month, Israel’s High Court issued a conditional order seeking to shut down the prison in response to the flood of reports of torture there.

Former prisoners including children and Israeli whistleblowers at Sde Teiman—often called “Israel’s Guantánamo Bay”—have described rampant torture and abuse at the facility, which is used to imprison Palestinians captured in the Gaza Strip. According to their testimonies, prisoners have been raped, electrocuted, mauled by dogs, burned with cigarettes, severely beaten, starved, and subjected to 24-hour shackling sometimes leading to amputations.

The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said this week that at least 60 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October.

More than 1,100 Israelis and others died during the Hamas-led attack on October 7, during which more than 240 other people were kidnapped. Israel’s response—which is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case—has left more than 142,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing, according to local and international officials.

Smotrich suggested earlier this week that it is “moral and justified” to starve 2 million Palestinians to death. So far, at least dozens, mostly children, have died from malnutrition, dehydration, and lack of medical care in Gaza amid Israel’s crippling assault and siege.

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue ReadingIsraeli Leaders Demand Probe of IDF Rape Video—To Find Out Who Leaked It

‘Horror Is Growing By the Minute,’ Says Rights Group, as Israel Starves Gaza

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Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Children wait for food relief in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah on December 31, 2023. (Photo: Rizek Abdeljawad/Xinhua via Getty Images)

“If current conditions persist,” said Israeli group B’Tselem, “there is significant risk that famine will be declared throughout the entire Gaza Strip within six months.”

The Israeli government “can, if it chooses to,” save more than 2 million people who are starving in Gaza by ending its blockade on aid, an Israel-based human rights group emphasized in a report on Monday, condemning the country for continuing to allow just a fraction of the food needed in the enclave through border crossings as it relentlessly bombs civilian targets.

“Everyone in Gaza is going hungry,” said B’Tselem in the dispatch, bluntly titled, “Israel Is Starving Gaza.”

The organization pointed to a recent analysis by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Famine Review Committee from late last month, which found that about 93% of Gaza’s over 2 million people were suffering from “acute food insecurity” at Phase 3, while more than 15%—378,000 people—were already at the most dire classification, Phase 5, with “extreme food shortages, hunger, and exhaustion.”

By February 7, the entire population of Gaza is expected to reach Phase 3, and “if current conditions persist,” said B’Tselem, “there is significant risk that famine will be declared throughout the entire Gaza Strip within six months.”

“Such a declaration is made when 20% of households read Phase 5, when 30% of children suffer from extreme malnutrition, and when two adults or four children out of 10,000 die of hunger every day,” said the group.

Before Israel began its U.S.-backed bombardment of Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’ October 7 attack, about 80% of Gaza residents relied on humanitarian aid to survive.

Israel’s destruction of cultivated fields, bakeries, food warehouses, and factories has meant that residents now wholly depend on food supplies from outside Gaza.

That aid is still available, B’Tselem stressed, but cannot reach people because “Israel is deliberately denying the entry of enough food to meet the population’s needs.”

About 500 aid trucks entered Gaza daily before the assault began, but only about 120 trucks are allowed through just two crossings—Rafah and Kerem Shalom—on a daily basis.

The Rafah crossing is a designed for passenger vehicles rather than “massive commercial transports,” and the recent opening of the Kerem Shalom crossing was “merely a token addition that has failed to alleviate the hardship,” said B’Tselem.

“The little food that does get in is very difficult to distribute due to constant bombings, destroyed roads, frequent communications blackouts, and shelters overflowing with hundreds of thousands of [internally displaced people] crowding into smaller and smaller areas,” said the group.

Israel’s continued blockade has resulted in “children begging for food, people waiting in long lines for paltry handouts, and hungry residents charging at aid trucks,” B’Tselem added. “The horror is growing by the minute, and the danger of famine is real.”

Martin Griffiths, undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator at the United Nations, said late last week that Israel’s air and ground assault on Gaza has rendered the enclave “uninhabitable.”

“A public health disaster is unfolding,” said Griffiths. “Infectious diseases are spreading in overcrowded shelters as sewers spill over. Some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth daily amidst this chaos. People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner.”

“For children in particular, the past 12 weeks have been traumatic: No food. No water. No school,” he added. “Nothing but the terrifying sounds of war, day in and day out.”

Last month, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of using starvation as a “method of warfare”—a war crime according to international humanitarian law.

“Changing this policy is not just a moral obligation,” said B’Tselem. “Allowing food into the Gaza Strip is not an act of kindness but a positive obligation under international humanitarian law: Starvation as a method of warfare is prohibited, and when a civilian population lacks what it needs to survive, parties to the conflict have a positive obligation to allow rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian aid—including food.”

“These two rules are considered customary law,” added the group, “and violating them constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.”

Original article by JULIA CONLEY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue Reading‘Horror Is Growing By the Minute,’ Says Rights Group, as Israel Starves Gaza

Human Rights Group Slams Israeli Occupation for Holding Over 1,100 Palestinians Without Trial

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https://daysofpalestine.ps/human-rights-group-slams-israeli-occupation-for-holding-over-1100-palestinians-without-trial/

The Israeli use of administrative detention, a controversial practice that allows the Israeli occupation to hold suspects without trial for months or even years, has reached its highest level since 2003, according to a report by an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem.

B’Tselem said that as of November 2021, there were 1,128 Palestinians in administrative detention, including 10 minors and two women. The group said this was the largest number of such detainees since the end of the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising, in 2003.

The group accused the Israeli occupation of using administrative detention as a “tool of oppression” and a “means of collective punishment” against Palestinians, especially those involved in political or social activism. It said that most of the detainees were held based on secret evidence that they and their lawyers could not challenge in court.

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https://daysofpalestine.ps/human-rights-group-slams-israeli-occupation-for-holding-over-1100-palestinians-without-trial/

Continue ReadingHuman Rights Group Slams Israeli Occupation for Holding Over 1,100 Palestinians Without Trial

Tories announce pro-apartheid bill

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Original article republished from the Skwawkbox for non-commercial use.

Anti-boycott law would have forced public bodies to do business with racist South Africa in the 1980s – and will force them to do business with apartheid, racist Israel now

Parliamentary friends of apartheid visit the illegal wall

The government has published its ‘anti-boycott bill’, which aims to prevent public bodies from choosing not to use products or services from countries with appalling human rights records – and in particular, to neuter the pro-Palestinian ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) campaign against the use of products, services and companies involved in illegal Israeli expansion onto Palestinian territory.

BDS has long been targeted by official and ‘cut-out’ organisations of the Israeli government, which has rightly been condemned by human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and, in Israel, B’Tselem, for its apartheid policies that the latest hard-right regime is entrenching even further – and the apartheid regime is avidly supported by the Tories (and ‘without qualification’ by the so-called ‘opposition leader’ Keir Starmer.

So there is no expectation of any significant parliamentary opposition to the bill and it is left to human and civil rights campaigners and organisations to mount resistance, such as Liberty, which has today published a statement on the anti-democratic bill, co-signed by unions, human rights groups and others, noting that such a policy would have forced public bodies to do business with apartheid South Africa and scuppered the campaign that eventually helped bring down that regime:

As a group of civil society organisations made up of trade unions, charities, NGOs, faith, climate justice, human rights, cultural, campaigning, and solidarity organisations, we advocate for the right of public bodies to decide not to purchase or procure from, or invest in companies involved in human rights abuse, abuse of workers’ rights, destruction of our planet, or any other harmful or illegal acts. We therefore oppose the government’s proposed law to stop public bodies from taking such actions.

The government has indicated that a main intention of any legislation is to ensure that public bodies follow UK foreign policy in their purchasing, procurement, and investment decisions, particularly relating to Israel and Palestine. We are concerned that this would prevent public bodies from deciding not to invest in or procure from companies complicit in the violation of the rights of the Palestinian people. We affirm that it is the right of public bodies to do so, and in fact a responsibility to break ties with companies contributing to abuses of rights and violations of international law in occupied Palestine and anywhere else where such acts occur.

From bus boycotts against racial segregation to divestment from fossil fuel companies to arms embargoes against apartheid, boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaigns have been applied throughout history to put economic, cultural, or political pressure on a regime, institution, or company to force it to change abusive, discriminatory, or illegal policies. If passed, this law will stifle a wide range of campaigns concerned with the arms trade, climate justice, human rights, international law, and international solidarity with oppressed peoples struggling for justice. The proposed law presents a threat to freedom of expression, and the ability of public bodies and democratic institutions to spend, invest and trade ethically in line with international law and human rights.

We call on the UK government to immediately halt this bill, on opposition parties to oppose it and on civil society to mobilise in support of the right to boycott in the cause of justice.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has also spoken out to underline the importance of BDS in opposing apartheid and pledge his support in fighting the latest anti-democracy bill:

The evening has also seen the Glastonbury festival cancel its planned showing of the excellent film exposing the sabotage of Corbyn’s Labour and the smear campaign against him – many are presuming that his principled stand and the cowardly Glastonbury decision are not unconnected.

Original article republished from the Skwawkbox for non-commercial use.

Continue ReadingTories announce pro-apartheid bill