Demonstrators block a road during a protest demanding the immediate release of hostages held by Hamas and calling for the Israeli government to reverse its decision to take over Gaza City and other areas in the Gaza Strip, near Jerusalem, Israel, Aug. 17
Thousands strike to ‘save hostages and stop military escalation’ in Gaza
POLICE in Israel blasted protesters with water cannon and made dozens of arrests today as they clamped down on a one-day nationwide strike that disrupted transport and businesses across Israel.
The protests took place as Israel announced its intention to move Palestinians from combat zones to southern Gaza as plans move ahead for a widely slammed military offensive in some of the territory’s most populated areas.
The “day of stoppage” in Israel on Sunday was organised by two groups representing some of the families of hostages and the bereaved.
About 90 municipalities — Tel Aviv Yaffo the largest — three universities, the entire Kibbutzim movement, the lawyers’ bar, numerous high-tech companies, several small unions in the medical, legal and journalism fields and countless private businesses joined the strike.
The police clampdown comes as protesters demand an end to fighting they believe endangers the 20 hostages seized by Hamas on October 7 2023 believed to still be alive in captivity.
Protesters chanted: “We don’t win a war over the bodies of hostages” as they gathered at dozens of points throughout Israel, including outside politicians’ homes, military headquarters and on major highways, where they were sprayed with water cannon as they blocked lanes and lit bonfires.
Among the protesters in Tel Aviv was a woman carrying a photo of an emaciated child from Gaza. Such images were once rare at Israeli demonstrations, but have now begun to appear more often.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAUK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote Labour for Genocide.
U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood raises his hands to veto a draft resolution during a United Nations Security Council meeting at the U.N. headquarters in New York City on November 20, 2024. (Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
The U.S. government, said one human rights lawyer, “proves once again to the world that it is fully committed to the continuation of the genocide in Palestine.”
The Biden administration faced fierce criticism on Wednesday after using its veto power at the United Nations Security Council to block a resolution demanding an immediate, unconditional, and permanent cease-fire in Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.
The vetoed measure also called for all parties to implement a U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolution passed in June—which would lead to the release of all hostages—and to enable Gaza civilians’ immediate access to basic services and humanitarian assistance.
Jess Peake, who directs the International and Comparative Law Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, condemned the U.S. decision as “absolutely unforgivable” while Nina Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, declared that “this is absurd.”
Mai El-Sadany, executive director of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington, D.C., called it “yet another shameful abuse of the UNSC veto by the U.S. to perpetuate a war that violates U.S. law and U.S. international legal commitments.”
“Today’s message is clear to the Israeli occupying power—you may continue your genocide… with complete impunity.”
Human rights attorney Craig Mokhiber, who last year resigned as the New York director for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights over the United Nations’ response to Gaza, said Wednesday that “the U.S. has just vetoed another cease-fire resolution in the U.N. Security Council, and, in doing so, proves once again to the world that it is fully committed to the continuation of the genocide in Palestine.”
Mokhiber also called for action at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), where there is no U.S. veto power.
“Even as we seek accountability for Israeli perpetrators, we must also seek accountability for complicit U.S. actors,” he said. “Israeli/U.S. impunity threatens the entire world. And the U.N. must now move to take concrete action in the UNGA.”
The 14-1 vote at the UNSC marked the fourth time the United States has blocked a Gaza resolution since Israel began its retaliation for the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack. All five permanent members of the Security Council—the U.S., the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China—have veto power. The other seats are filled on a rotating basis and lack that authority.
The 10 nonpermanent members—Algeria, Ecuador, Guyana, Japan, Malta, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, South Korea, and Switzerland—were behind the push to pass this draft resolution. Those who supported it represent “the collective will” of the international community, Algerian Ambassador Amar Bendjama said after the vote, according to U.N. News.
“It is sad day for the Security Council, for the United Nations, and the international community as a whole,” Bendjama said, stressing that it has been “five months since the adoption of Resolution 2735, five months during which the Security Council remained idle—remained hand-tied.”
“Today’s message is clear to the Israeli occupying power—you may continue your genocide… with complete impunity. In this chamber—you enjoy immunity,” he added. “To the Palestinian people, another clear message—while the overwhelming majority of the world stands in solidarity with your plight, others remain indifferent to your suffering.”
Israel faces a South Africa-led genocide case at the International Court of Justice over its assault on Gaza, which as of Wednesday has killed at least 43,985 Palestinians, according to local officials. Another 104,092 people have been wounded, and most of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents have been repeatedly displaced as Israeli forces have devastated civilian infrastructure.
U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood said Wednesday that “we made clear throughout negotiations we could not support an unconditional cease-fire that failed to release the hostages.”
“This resolution abandoned that necessity,” he argued. “For that reason, the United States could not support it.”
The U.S. government has been widely accused of complicity in genocide for arming Israeli forces over the past 13 months—including by progressives in Congress. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday planned to force a vote on resolutions that would block American weapons sales to Israel on the grounds that they violate federal law.
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), joined by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), speaks at a news conference on November 19, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“The United States government is currently in violation of the law, and every member of the U.S. Senate who believes in the rule of law should vote for these resolutions,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
A group of U.S. senators led by Bernie Sanders of Vermont held a press conference Tuesday urging their colleagues to support resolutions that would block the sale of tank rounds, bomb kits, and other weaponry to the Israeli government, which has repeatedly used such arms to commit horrific war crimes in the Gaza Strip over the past 13 months.
“The truth of the matter is, from a legal perspective, these resolutions are not complicated; they’re cut and dry,” said Sanders (I-Vt.), who introduced the joint resolutions of disapproval in September alongside several other members of the Senate Democratic caucus.
“The United States government is currently in violation of the law, and every member of the U.S. Senate who believes in the rule of law should vote for these resolutions,” Sanders continued, pointing to U.S. statutes prohibiting the sale of weaponry to countries violating internationally recognized human rights or obstructing American humanitarian aid.
Sanders was joined at Tuesday’s press conference by Sens. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), each of whom made their case to fellow senators ahead of a scheduled floor vote on Wednesday.
“What’s unfolding before our very eyes right now is mass starvation and the spread of disease,” said Welch. “Is the United States and its foreign policy… forced to be blind to the suffering before our very eyes?”
Surrounding the senators as they spoke were photographs of destruction and emaciated children in Gaza, where most of the population is displaced and crowded into small segments of the enclave as Israeli bombs rain down and famine takes hold.
Watch the full press conference:
The resolutions will hit the floor for a vote Wednesday with the backing of a broad coalition that includes Jewish Voice for Peace Action, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, J Street, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Oxfam, and other organizations and activists.
“For over a year, the Biden administration has funded the Israeli government’s brutal genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, despite overwhelming opposition from across the country,” said Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, which said it has driven more than 56,200 letters and more than 20,790 phone calls to senators imploring them to support the measures.
“These joint resolutions of disapproval are one of the last chances that Senate Democrats have before Republicans take control in January to uphold human rights, honor the will of the American people, and stand on the right side of history by blocking weapons to the Israeli military,” Miller added.
“It is time to tell the Netanyahu government that they cannot use U.S. taxpayer dollars and American weapons in violation of U.S. and international law, and in violation of our moral values.”
Since the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, the U.S. has supplied its ally with more than 50,000 tons of weaponry and approved billions of dollars in additional arms and military equipment to be delivered in years to come. U.S. military support has helped Israel carry out a large-scale military assault on Gaza, killing more than 43,000 people so far—a majority of them women and children.
To sustain the flow of American weapons, the Biden administration has contradicted the findings of its own experts and outside analysts by declaring publicly that it has not found Israel to be illegally blocking U.S. humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, aid groups on the ground say humanitarian assistance has plummeted to an all-time low in recent weeks, with an average of just 37 aid trucks entering Gaza per day in October.
During Tuesday’s press conference, Sanders said the “most important point to be made” ahead of Wednesday’s vote is that “the United States of America is complicit in these atrocities.”
“That complicity must end, and that is what these resolutions are about,” said Sanders. “It is time to tell the Netanyahu government that they cannot use U.S. taxpayer dollars and American weapons in violation of U.S. and international law, and in violation of our moral values.”
This post has been updated to correct when Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced the resolutions.
Palestinians scramble to receive sacks of flour at a United Nations Relief and Works Agency aid distribution center in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on November 3, 2024. (Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“Restricting humanitarian access and at the same time dismantling UNRWA will add an additional layer of suffering to already unspeakable suffering,” said the U.N. agency’s commissioner-general.
Israel’s Foreign Affairs Ministry on Sunday formally notified the United Nations that it has terminated a decades-old legal agreement governing the country’s relations with the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, a move that aid workers and advocacy groups say will spell further disaster for Gaza’s besieged and famine-stricken population as winter approaches.
The director-general of the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry announced the decision to scrap the 1967 agreement in a letter to the president of the U.N. General Assembly, a message sent roughly a week after Israeli lawmakers approved legislation banning the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operating or providing services “in the sovereign territory of the state of Israel.”
The new letter states that the legislation “will enter into effect following a three-month period.”
The Washington Post reported Monday that Juliette Touma, UNRWA’s communications director, said that “the agency expected to continue its work coordinating the distribution of aid in Gaza and the West Bank at the operational level.”
But aid groups have warned that Israel’s UNRWA ban could inflict fatal damage to humanitarian operations in Gaza and the West Bank, given Israeli control over access to the illegally occupied territories. The legislation Israeli lawmakers passed last week bars the government from issuing work permits to foreign UNRWA staff and prevents the military from coordinating with the aid agency.
“The human cost of this ban is immeasurable,” Mara Kronenfeld, executive director of UNRWA USA, said in a statement last week. “This Israeli Knesset vote banning UNRWA is not merely an attack on the U.N. agency; it’s an attack on the fundamental rights and dignity due to all human beings. The consequences of this ban could result in the loss of tens of thousands, if not more, precious Palestinian lives. Where is the humanity?”
“You can hear children crying, people screaming, people running for their lives, and it has been nonstop for 24 hours. There’s nowhere to go. People are trapped.”
The U.S., Israel’s main ally and arms supplier, urged the Israeli government last week not to implement the newly passed legislation, even though the U.S. has yet to restore its own funding to UNRWA. The Biden administration suspended U.S. funding for UNRWA in January after Israel accused a small number of agency employees of taking part in the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
The U.N. fired nine UNRWA workers after an investigation determined that they “may have been involved” in the attack. UNRWA has roughly 13,000 staffers in the Gaza Strip, and the agency is the most important aid group operating in the enclave.
Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, argued that by terminating its agreement with UNRWA, “Israel is also further breaking U.S. law prohibiting the restriction of aid delivery.”
“It’s a definitive rejection of an explicit demand in the Biden administration’s October 13 letter and by law must result in halting U.S. arms and military aid to Israel,” Williams added.
The Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry’s announcement came as Israel’s military continued its bombing campaign and ground attacks across Gaza. Reuters reported that at least a dozen Palestinians were killed by Israeli airstrikes on Monday, including seven people in an attack on houses in northern Gaza.
“It is absolutely terrifying,” Louise Wateridge, an UNRWA spokesperson, told Al Jazeera on Saturday, referring to conditions on the ground in Gaza. “You can hear children crying, people screaming, people running for their lives, and it has been nonstop for 24 hours. There’s nowhere to go. People are trapped.”
Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, said Monday that Israeli authorities allowed an average of just 30 aid trucks to enter Gaza per day last month.
Prior to October 7, 2023, around 500 aid trucks were entering the enclave daily.
“This cannot meet the needs of over 2 million people, many of whom are starving, sick, and in desperate conditions,” Lazzarini said Monday. “Restricting humanitarian access and at the same time dismantling UNRWA will add an additional layer of suffering to already unspeakable suffering.”
“Only political will,” he added, “can put an end to a politically made situation.”
Protestors take part in a National March for Gaza in London, England on September 07, 2024 [Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images]
Just as head chopping was central to Daesh as an expression of its military prowess and power, killing babies and children is central to Israel as an expression of its dominance in occupied Palestine. No one loves head chopping more than Daesh, and no one loves killing children more than Israel. That’s the message which comes through loud and clear on a near daily basis.
Such barbarism is cloaked in a religious garb but everything that Daesh does is contrary to the human rights and justice at the core of Islam, and everything that Israel does is contrary to the human rights and justice enshrined within Judaism. Israel and Daesh profess to be Jewish and Islamic State respectively, but the savagery of their conduct is more satanic than Godly.
The very notion of killing babies and children should be anathema to every human being, so what is it about the Zionist psychology that actualises baby killing? After the 7 October cross-border incursion by Hamas, South Africa’s Sunday Times reported the words of Saar Ben Hamoo, a South African Zionist and ardent supporter of Israel: “We will drink the blood of your children in Gaza,” he declared. The Zionist Ben Hamoo is guilty of hate speech, but also gave expression to Zionist infanticide in advance of Israel launching its genocide in Gaza.
Prior to last October, no one could have imagined the mercilessness of Israeli Zionists and their supporters in their desire to commit infanticide. How did Ben Hamoo know that baby killing would feature prominently in the genocide being carried out in revenge for 7 October?
Was it a guess? Or wishful thinking?
It is natural for human beings to express love, kindness and gentleness towards a child, whether a relative or a stranger. Anyone who thinks about hurting a child or even tries to hurt a child is considered a degenerate. To deliberately break the limbs of a child or even think about killing a child is beyond comprehension for normal people. The killing of a child has to be the most repulsive act that a human being can commit, but this is exactly what Israeli Zionists have been doing and continue to do in occupied Palestine, without compassion, and with full impunity.
In October 2023, after the outbreak of the Gaza war, Al Jazeera reported that Israel kills a Palestinian child every fifteen minutes. A recent article for MEMO pointed out that, “Israel has killed, on average, two Palestinian children every day for the past 24 years.”
The Vice Chair of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), Bragi Gudbransson, told reporters on 19 September, “The outrageous death of children is almost historically unique. This is an extremely dark place in history.” The CRC monitors governments’ compliance with the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and released its findings about six governments, including the Israel regime.
The report states that the committee “is greatly concerned about the high number of children in Gaza killed, maimed, injured, missing, displaced, orphaned and subjected to famine, malnutrition and disease as a result of Israel’s “indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks.”
UNRWA chief says 70% of Gaza victims are children, women – Cartoon [Sabaaneh/Middle East Monitor]
A week ago, the Gaza health ministry published the names of 710 new-born Palestinian babies killed by Israeli forces during the ongoing war. Since 7 October, the confirmed number of Palestinian children killed by Israel is 16,700. Moreover, the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in June that more than 20,000 Palestinian children are missing in Gaza as a result of Israel’s military attack on the enclave. Most of these missing children are presumed dead under the rubble of their homes and other civilian infrastructure destroyed by Israel. At the very least, therefore, it is fair to say that the Zionist state has slaughtered 36,700 children in Gaza since last October alone.
Although UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez has said that, “Gaza has become a graveyard for children,” his comment underplays the fact that Palestinian children in Gaza are not just dying, they are being killed. More than just a graveyard, therefore, Gaza has become a slaughterhouse for children.
According to UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, children are “bearing the brunt” of Israel’s war. “This is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.” Save the Children UK insisted that, “We simply cannot accept the violence that Palestinian children continue to face as normal.”
And yet the infanticide in Gaza has been normalised.
International medics who have no political affiliation to Palestine but have gone to work in Gaza for purely humanitarian reasons, provide us with eyewitness accounts of Gaza post-7 October. Professor Nick Maynard is one such doctor. He worked in both Al-Aqsa Hospital and Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. “We saw a lot of children with their arms or legs blown off,” he told the Irish Times. “There were no painkillers to give the children.”
More than four hundred Palestinians were slaughtered by the Israeli attack on Al-Shifa Hospital when the occupation state claimed that the hospital was being used by Hamas. This claim was rejected unequivocally by Maynard. “I have never seen any evidence of Hamas there,” he insisted.
Firoze Sidhwa is a 42-year-old trauma and critical care surgeon at San Joaquin General Hospital in North California. He went with the World Health Organisation to work at the European Hospital in Khan Younis in Gaza. What Sidwha told Bruno Macaes of the New Statesman about the killing of children in Gaza is chilling: “Most of them have been killed in explosions where a lot of them would have been trapped under the rubble. Some are going to die immediately with a concrete block hitting their head or something like that but a lot of them just had their leg pinned under the rubble and because there is no heavy moving equipment, there is no way to get to them, they slowly died of sepsis while buried in the dark tomb alone, freezing during the night, boiling during the day. It would take three, four, five days for them to die in this way. It’s horrific to think of the scale of their suffering.” Horrific indeed.
Israel has been deliberately targeting and killing Palestinian children in Gaza. “We had kids shot in the chest and shot in the head, in other words clearly deliberate, clearly targeted,” explained Sidhwa. Another doctor from a different hospital in Gaza told him how often he encounters children being shot by Israelis: “All the time, every day, kids were coming in who had been shot in the head and chest.”
Sidhwa and other doctors who worked in Gaza’s hospitals penned a letter to the Biden administration to advocate an end to the infanticide in Gaza. The letter included the damning indictment that, “Every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.”
Despite such clear evidence of infanticide, the US continues to support Israel and provide it with more weapons to keep its baby-killing machine running. One wonders when the vampire-like thirst of Zionists like Ben Hamoo for the blood of Palestinian children will be satiated. “Israelis must ask themselves if they’re willing to live in a country that lives on blood,” wrote Gideon Levy in Haaretz on 15 September.
How many more babies in Gaza have to be killed before the US and Europe stops arming the baby killers in Tel Aviv and instead impose sanctions on the genocidal apartheid regime? How will we answer on that day when we all return and stand before our Creator, the Most Just, and are asked, “For what crime were the children of Gaza killed?” Whatever we think we might say then, we must act now to bring this infanticide inherent in Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to an end.
dizzy: The equality drawn between Daesh and Israeli actions is fully understood. There are so many – possibly all – made for television fake manufactured terrorism events that can be similarly equivalenced or attributed.
Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
Demonstrators block a road during a protest demanding the immediate release of hostages held by Hamas and calling for the Israeli government to reverse its decision to take over Gaza City and other areas in the Gaza Strip, near Jerusalem, Israel, Aug. 17
