Gaza

‘Nowhere Safe in Gaza’ as Evidence of Israeli War Crimes Mounts

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

Injured Palestinians, including children, are taken to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital for treatment after Israeli airstrikes hit the school at Al Bureij Refugee Camp in Deir Al Balah, Gaza on November 20, 2023. (Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Amnesty International accused Israel of committing war crimes with two recent bombings of a church and a home in a refugee camp.

Palestinians in Gaza and human rights advocates on Monday pleaded with the international community to see the ongoing killing of thousands of people in the blockaded enclave for what it is—a massacre in which Israel has shown “a chilling indifference to the catastrophic toll on civilians,” according to Amnesty International, and has committed numerous war crimes as it bombards civilian targets.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on October 19 and October 20, calling on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate the bombings as possible war crimes.

Amnesty investigators visited the sites of the bombings, Saint Porphyrius Greek Orthodox Church in Gaza City and a home in al-Nuseirat refugee camp near Deir al-Balah, and interviewed 14 people, including nine survivors of the attacks and two other witnesses. The group’s Crisis Evidence Lab also analayzed satellite imagery and and audiovisual material.

The two bombings, which killed a total of 46 civilians, including 20 children, “were indiscriminate attacks or direct attacks on civilians or civilian objects, which must be investigated as war crimes,” said Amnesty.

“These deadly, unlawful attacks are part of a documented pattern of disregard for Palestinian civilians and demonstrate the devastating impact of the Israeli military’s unprecedented onslaught has left nowhere safe in Gaza, regardless of where civilians live or seek shelter,” said Erika Guevara Rosas, director of global research, advocacy, and policy for the U.K.-based group. “We urge the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor to take immediate concrete action to expedite the investigation into war crimes and other crimes under international law opened in 2021.”

The group noted that on October 19, when the historic church was struck, the Israeli government released a statement saying that “IDF fighter jets struck the command and control center belonging to a Hamas terrorist involved in the launching of rockets and mortars toward Israel.”

But the IDF later deleted a video it had posted of the strike on Saint Porphyrius, and has provided no information to substantiate the claim that the church was a “command and control center.”

Before the strike, in the first days of Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, church officials had publicly said hundreds of civilians were taking shelter at Saint Porphyrius.

“Their presence would therefore have been known to the Israeli military,” said Amnesty. “The Israeli military’s decision to go ahead with a strike on a known church compound and site for displaced civilians was reckless and therefore amounts to a war crime, even if there was a belief that there was a military objective nearby.”

One of the families sheltering in the church was that of Ramez al-Sury, whose three children—aged 14, 12, and 11—were killed in the attack.

“We left our homes and came to stay at the church because we thought we would be protected here. We have nowhere else to go. The church was full of peaceful people, only peaceful people,” al-Sury told Amnesty. “There is nowhere safe in Gaza during this war. Bombardments everywhere, day and night. Every day, more and more civilians are killed. We pray for peace, but our hearts are broken.”

The day after al-Sury’s children were killed, Hani al-Aydi was sitting at home with family members at al-Nuseirat refugee camp, which is within the area the Israeli military had ordered Palestinians to evacuate to from the north.

Despite telling people the area was safe, the IDF launched a strike that destroyed the al-Aydi family home, which the military had no reason to suspect was a Hamas target, according to Amnesty.

“All of those present in the al-Aydi house that was hit directly and in the two nearby homes were civilians,” said Amnesty. “Two members of the al-Aydi family had permits to work in Israel, which requires rigorous security checks by Israeli authorities, for those obtaining the permit and their extended family.

Al-Aydi told the group that “everything collapsed on our head” suddenly when Israel bombed the house, killing 28 people including 12 children.

“All my brothers died, my nephews, my nieces,” said al-Aydi. “My mother died, my sisters died, our home is gone… There is nothing here, and now we are left with nothing and are displaced. I don’t know how much worse things will get. Could it get any worse?”

Amnesty noted that even if it had found in its investigation that there were plausible military targets in the vicinity of the two sites—which it did not—”these strikes failed to distinguish between military objectives and civilian objects. The evidence collected by Amnesty International also indicates that the Israeli military failed to take feasible precautions to minimize damage to civilians and civilian property, including by not providing any warning—at minimum to anyone living in the locations that were hit—before launching the attacks.”

The Geneva Conventions require parties in a conflict to take measures to protect the lives of civilians and prohibit collective punishment of a population for acts committed by a particular group.

“The harrowing accounts from survivors and relatives of victims describing the devastating human toll of these bombardments offer a snapshot of the mass civilian suffering being inflicted daily across Gaza by the Israeli military’s relentless attacks, underscoring the urgent need for an immediate cease-fire,” said Guevara-Rosas.

Amnesty made the request of the ICC as the death toll in Gaza surpasses 13,300 people in just over six weeks. At least 5,500 children have been killed.

Al-Mezan, a Gaza-based human rights group, also addressed the ICC on Monday, calling on the body to issue warrants for Israeli officials responsible for crimes against Palestinian children.

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

Continue Reading‘Nowhere Safe in Gaza’ as Evidence of Israeli War Crimes Mounts

‘We Are Too Humane. Burn Gaza Now,’ Says Senior Israeli Lawmaker

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Saluted by Fascists.
Israeli Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi speaks on March 9, 2021. (Photo: Nissim Vaturi/Facebook)

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

Deputy Knesset Speaker Nissim Vaturi is one of many Israeli leaders who have made genocidal statements against Palestinians.

Nissim Vaturi, the far-right deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, raised eyebrows and ire Friday after asserting on social media that Israel’s war on Gaza—which has killed and maimed over 40,000 people and displaced around 70% of the population—is “too humane.”

“All of this preoccupation with whether or not there is internet in Gaza shows that we have learned nothing,” Vaturi, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, wrote Friday after the country’s war Cabinet approved extremely limited fuel deliveries into the besieged strip. “We are too humane. Burn Gaza now, no less!”

“Don’t allow fuel in, don’t allow water in until the hostages are returned back!” Vaturi added, a reference to the approximately 240 Israelis and others kidnapped by Hamas-led militants during the October 7 infiltration attack that killed around 1,200 people in southern Israel.

When Israeli journalist Ben Caspit responded to the post with a comment that he feared Vaturi’s words could fuel “anti-Israel propaganda,” the lawmaker shot back: “Your fear will kill us. Stop being humane.”

The social media platform X—whose multibillionaire owner Elon Musk is in hot water for promoting an anti-semitic post—deleted Vaturi’s tweet, and others including one in which he wrote that Israel should leave just “one old man” alive in Gaza so he could “tell everyone” what happened there.

Vaturi recently pushed for the suspension of colleague Aida Touma-Suleiman, a member of the leftist Hadash party, for comments critical of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza and for calling for the protection of civilians on both sides, including by saying that “a child is a child,” whether Israeli or Palestinian.

Over 5,000 Palestinian children are among the more than 12,300 people killed during Israel’s 43-day bombardment and invasion of Gaza, which has also maimed at least 30,000 others, according to Gazan health officials. Half the homes in the embattled strip have been damaged or destroyed, with around 1.7 million Palestinians forcibly displaced. Thousands of people are missing and feared buried beneath rubble. In the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, more than 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers since October 7, while over 2,800 others have been arrested.

Vaturi is far from alone in making what legal experts call statements of genocidal intent.

Earlier this month, Israeli President Isaac Herzog asserted that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, while Defense Minister Yoav Gallant vowed to “eliminate everything” there.

Galit Distel Atbaryan, a member of the Knesset from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, said that “Gaza should be wiped off the map.”

Ariel Kallner, another Likud parliamentarian, urged a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48,” a reference to the forced expulsion and ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1947-49.

Yet another Likud lawmaker, Tally Gotliv, demanded nothing less than a “doomsday kiss”—that is, use of Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons. “Not flattening a neighborhood,” she clarified, but “crushing and flattening Gaza. Without mercy!”

Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, who said “we are now rolling out the Great Nakba,” was admonished by Netanyahu for saying the quiet part out loud.

Netanyahu said it out loud last month during a televised address when he called Israel’s imminent ground invasion of Gaza a “holy mission” and invoked Amalek, the ancient biblical enemy of the Israelites whom God commanded his “chosen people” to exterminate, in what critics called “an explicit call to genocide.”

Noting that statements of intent to commit genocide are a key element of the crime, Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal toldDemocracy Now! in an interview last month that “if this is not special intent to commit genocide, I really don’t know what is.”

“We’re seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent,” he added. “This is indeed a textbook case of genocide.”

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

Continue Reading‘We Are Too Humane. Burn Gaza Now,’ Says Senior Israeli Lawmaker

Palestinians File ‘Urgent Motion’ to Stop Biden From Backing Genocide

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Zionist president Joe Biden. 27 July 2021 image by Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz. Original public domain image from Flickr
Zionist president Joe Biden. 27 July 2021 image by Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz. Original public domain image from Flickr

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

“Our team has had to update more than once the numbers of our clients’ relatives who have been killed as we prepared this lawsuit and motion.”

A group of Palestinian Americans on Thursday urged a federal court to issue a preliminary injunction barring the Biden administration from providing any additional weaponry or diplomatic support to the Israeli military as it carries out mass atrocities in Gaza.

The “urgent motion” comes days after the group, represented by the U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), sued President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in a federal court in California, arguing that the top officials are “failing to prevent an unfolding genocide where they have influence over the state of Israel to do so, and directly abetting its development with weapons, funds, and diplomatic cover” in violation of international law.

The plaintiffs in the case are U.S. citizens with family in Gaza, which has been under relentless assault since a deadly Hamas-led attack on southern Israel last month. At least 116 of the plaintiffs’ family members have been killed in the Palestinian enclave since the latest Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza began.

“Our team has had to update more than once the numbers of our clients’ relatives who have been killed as we prepared this lawsuit and motion,” Astha Sharma Pokharel, an attorney at CCR, said Thursday. “There is no starker illustration of how urgently this injunction is needed.”

The Biden administration has opposed calls for a cease-fire and pledged unconditional support to the Israeli government as it wages war on the besieged Gaza Strip with the help of U.S. weaponry, including thousands of Hellfire missiles and army vehicles. That support has continued in the face of a horrific death toll and humanitarian crisis and amid global alarm over Israeli officials’ genocidal rhetoric.

In an emergency briefing paper released less than two weeks into Israel’s assault, CCR warned that the U.S. “is not only failing to uphold its obligation to prevent the commission of genocide, but there is a plausible and credible case to be made that the United States’ actions to further the Israeli military operation, closure, and campaign against the Palestinian population in Gaza rise to the level of complicity in the crime under international law.”

The lawsuit filed earlier this week echoes that case, stating that the “unfolding genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza has so far been made possible because of the unconditional support given by the named official-capacity defendants in this case”—Biden, Blinken, and Austin.

The lawsuit and push for a preliminary injunction are backed by leading scholars of genocide and the Holocaust, including William Schabas, a world-renowned expert on international human rights law.

In a declaration supporting the lawsuit, Schabas wrote, “There is a serious risk of genocide committed against the Palestinian population of Gaza and that the United States of America is in breach of its obligation, under both the 1948 Genocide Convention to which it is a party as well as customary international law, to use its position of influence with the Government of Israel and to take the best measures within its power to prevent the crime taking place.”

The new motion was submitted Thursday as Israel raided Gaza’s largest hospital and prepared for an assault on the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, prompting fears of a widening military campaign.

Meanwhile, little humanitarian aid has been allowed to enter the blockaded territory, leaving millions of lives at risk as most of the population lacks water, food, medicine, and other basic necessities.

The World Food Program warned Thursday that “nearly the entire population” of Gaza “is in desperate need of food assistance.”

“The small quantities of food that can be found are being sold at alarmingly inflated prices and are of little use without the ability to cook, forcing some to survive on one meal a day,” the U.N. organization said. “For the lucky, that includes more than solely canned food, though some people have resorted to consuming raw onions and uncooked eggplants.”

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

Continue ReadingPalestinians File ‘Urgent Motion’ to Stop Biden From Backing Genocide

Probe Demanded Over ‘Absurd’ Israeli Narrative About Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital

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2023.10.08 Pro-Palestinian Rally, Washington DC. Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
2023.10.08 Pro-Palestinian Rally, Washington DC. Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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

“Israel needs to offer the outside world more than a few rifles and other armaments to justify its attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and ill and injured civilians,” said Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

A human rights monitor in Geneva on Friday called on the United Nations to help get to the bottom of Israel’s claim that its bombing and raid of Gaza’s largest medical complex this week was necessary to stop Hamas from running a vast military compound beneath it—an allegation that more than two days after the attack began, has been backed up only by images Israel released of a small cache of weapons.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said the time has come for an independent international investigation into “Israel’s absurd narrative” about al-Shifa Medical Complex in Gaza City, and noted that administrators at the facility are also demanding a probe “that includes a United Nations inspection.”

Israel did extensive damage to al-Shifa’s cardiac care department, surgical ward, and a pharmaceutical warehouse when it began bombing the hospital at dawn on Wednesday in just one of more than 245 attacks on medical facilities in Gaza since October 7. Israeli officials said they expected to find “the beating heart” of Hamas’ military operations in the hospital.

But after searching basement areas and several health departments as well as conducting a “violent interrogation campaign” targeting displaced people and medical personnel, Euro-Med said, Israel has so far produced only a video showing a small number of weapons.

“The absence of any neutral international party’s involvement in the Israeli military raids and searches of al-Shifa Medical Complex and other hospitals in the strip raises widespread doubts about the Israeli narrative,” said Euro-Med. “Israel needs to offer the outside world more than a few rifles and other armaments to justify its attacks on Gaza’s hospitals and ill and injured civilians.”

“We are left with nothing—no power, no food, no water. With every passing minute, we are losing a life. Overnight, we lost 22 persons.”

Separately, the BBC aired a segment on Friday in which the network noted the Israel Defense Forces first released a seven-minute video displaying the weapons it found—a video that appeared to be edited despite IDF claims that it was filmed in a single shot with no edits, and that raised several other questions.

“This IDF video was posted, then deleted, then reposted, this time without a section referring to an Israeli soldier who’d been held hostage,” reported the BBC.

Reporters from the network arrived at al-Shifa a few hours after the IDF released the original video, and were shown a different selection of weapons than those that appeared in the military’s video.

“What we see in this IDF video doesn’t equate Israel’s description of an ‘operational command center for Hamas,'” the BBC reported.

The footage, released late at night “after long hours of searches and fruitless inspections,” said Euro-Med, “raises a lot of questions, especially since no gunman has been arrested and no evidence has been found to back the previous claims about the presence of tunnels beneath the hospital.”

The IDF has also claimed that Hamas “knew we were coming” and had likely “made off with or hidden traces of their presence” at al-Shifa, The New York Times reported.

Israel’s narrative about al-Shifa has also drawn scrutiny from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, who said that even if the hospital were being used as a command center for Hamas, “protecting [patients] is paramount.”

“Even if health facilities are used for military purposes, the principles of distinction, precaution, and proportionality always apply,” Tedros said.

The director of al-Shifa, Muhammed Abu Salmiya, toldAl Jazeera Friday that staff are still trying to save as many of the 7,000 patients and refugees in the hospital as they can amid Israel’s ongoing siege, but they “lost all those who were in the intensive care unit” following the attack on Wednesday.

“We are left with nothing—no power, no food, no water,” said Abu Salmiya. “With every passing minute, we are losing a life. Overnight, we lost 22 persons.”

The Biden administration, which has continued supporting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza as the death toll has grown to at least 11,470 in less than six weeks, said this week it believed the IDF’s claims about al-Shifa, with President Joe Biden saying it was a “fact” that Hamas has “their headquarters, their military hidden under a hospital.”

A day after the bombing, as observers awaited evidence of an extensive command center beneath the hospital, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matt Miller appeared less confident in Israel’s narrative, telling reporters that the White House “never said there were command posts in every hospital in Gaza.”

“We don’t want to see hospitals struck from the air,” said Miller. “We understand that Hamas continues to use hospitals in places where they embed their fighters.”

After the BBC reported on the IDF’s changing video documentation of its findings, Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft called Israel’s “propaganda” supporting its onslaught in Gaza “increasingly clownish.”

“Only Joe Biden seems to believe it,” said Parsi.

Journalist Jeremy Scahill pointed out that Israel itself is known to have built “an underground operating room and tunnels under the hospital” in 1983.

“This is not a secret,” Scahill wrote on social media, noting that Israel has claimed Hamas expanded the tunnels in recent years.

Allegations of a Hamas command center, supported by the U.S., said Scahill, “should be backed up by clear evidence, not a Geraldo Rivera/Al Capone’s vault-style video presentation featuring an English-speaking IDF soldier.”

“No matter what is or is not found, there is no justification for the repeated attacks against civilian hospitals—in fact al-Shifa is the largest hospital treating the most vulnerable people in Gaza, including NICU babies,” he added. “The mere existence of tunnels, originally built by Israel, does not prove the specific allegations made by the U.S. or Israel. The standard for such evidence should be very, very high.”

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

Continue ReadingProbe Demanded Over ‘Absurd’ Israeli Narrative About Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital

Gaza facing ‘immediate possibility of starvation,’ UN warns

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https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/gaza-facing-immediate-possibility-of-starvation-un-warns

Palestinians look for survivors after an Israeli air strike destroys a building, November 17, 2023

PEACE campaigners slammed Israeli authorities and world leaders today after the United Nations warned Gaza faced the “immediate possibility of starvation.”

Even before the fast approaching winter Palestinians are already struggling to survive in desperate conditions created by a lack of fuel, which means aid agencies are unable to transport urgently needed food and medical supplies to the besieged people of the territory.

UN World Food Programme (WFP) Mideast regional spokeswoman Abeer Etefa said that, since the beginning of Israel’s retaliation against Hamas’s October 7 uprising, Gaza has received only around 10 per cent of its required food supplies each day. Dehydration and malnutrition are growing as a result, with nearly all residents in need of food.

Speaking from Cairo, Egypt, Ms Etefa said: “Food production has come to an almost complete halt, markets have collapsed, fishermen cannot access the sea, farmers cannot reach their farms.

WFP executive director Cindy McCain said: “With winter rapidly approaching, shelters unsafe and overcrowded and a lack of clean water, civilians face the immediate possibility of starvation.”

…

https://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/article/gaza-facing-immediate-possibility-of-starvation-un-warns

Continue ReadingGaza facing ‘immediate possibility of starvation,’ UN warns