Israeli soldiers stand near trucks carrying humanitarian aid just before they cross into the Gaza Strip at Erez crossing in southern Israel, October 21, 2024
ISRAEL’S military continued to block humanitarian aid from reaching Gaza today, and reportedly killed people trying to flee Jabalia in the north, UN officials warned today.
The Israeli military (IDF) began blocking all supplies of food, medicine and fuel to the people under siege in northern Gaza on October 1.
On the 15th, the IDF allowed what the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said was “a token amount of aid” to enter, but since then nothing else has been allowed in.
The Israeli government has called on all civilians in the north to leave, but has continued to bomb the area, making escape just as dangerous for the Palestinians as staying in their destroyed homes.
Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), said on social media today that humanitarian agencies must get access to north Gaza.
“Hospitals have been hit and are left without power, while injured people are left without care,” he said.
“UNRWA’s remaining shelters are so overcrowded, some displaced people are now forced to live in the toilets.
“According to reports, people attempting to flee are getting killed, their bodies left on the street. Missions to rescue people from under the rubble are also being denied.
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.UK Labour Party Shadow Foreign Secretary repeatedly heckled at a speech to the Fabian Society over his and the Labour Party’s support for and complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
People attempt to extinguish a fire at the site of an Israeli strike on tents sheltering displaced people at Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza, October 2024. Ramadan Abed/Reuters
Editor’s note: This article was commissioned by the Guardian US as part of its Rise against fascism series, which was published in September. It was spiked by editor-in-chief Katherine Viner following a disagreement about the author’s use of the term “holocaust” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza – the Guardian suggested she amend it to “genocide” and she refused. The context of the incident is documented in this report.
Novara Media has decided to publish the piece in full, including the term “holocaust”, following consultation with several scholars of genocide and Jewish history.
The author spells her name in lower case.
Content note: This piece contains explicit references to torture and sexual assault.
United Nations Resolution 3379 defined Zionism as “a form of racism” because at its core it is a supremacist ideology that seeks to privilege Jews at the expense, even detriment and demise, of non-Jews (the resolution passed in 1975 and was revoked in 1991 following pressure from Israel and the United States). Regardless of how one defines Zionism, it manifests, among other myriad ways, in the subjugation or displacement of indigenous Palestinians.
For the past 12 months, Israel has been implementing a long-held colonial fantasy of not only “finishing the job,” but doing so with a gleeful sadism that echos the social media posts of Tzipi Navon, Sara Netanyahu’s close advisor and office manager, who called for residents from Gaza who participated in the [7 October] massacre to be tortured live on broadcast television: “First removing the nails from the hands and feet … cut off [their] genitals and let [them] see [their testicles] fried in canola oil and [force them] to eat them … Keep the tongue to the end, so that it pleases us with its screams, the ears so that [they] can hear [their] own screams and the eyes so that [they] can see us smile.”
Polling data from Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies suggests that a majority of Jewish Israelis do not think that soldiers accused of torturing Palestinians should face criminal charges.
In a rare moment of candour, the New York Times reported UN findings of systematic torture, including sexual torture. According to the UN’s report, Israeli soldiers have allegedly kept Palestinian captives in severely overcrowded prison cells, subjected them to sleep deprivation and forced nudity, threatened them with gang-rape, and penetrated or electrocuted male and female prisoners’ genitals and anuses with electrified batons and other objects. Released Palestinian hostages and Palestinian civilians in Gaza have reported being mauled and sexually assaulted by trained dogs. A lawyer who has been granted rare access to a Palestinian captive inside an Israeli detention centre reported the activation of a fire extinguisher inside the body of a 27-year-old man through a hose inserted into his rectum.
Many of those who were kidnapped, including prominent surgeons such as Dr Adnan Al-Bursh, director of the orthopaedic department at Al-Shifa Hospital, may have died after torture. Some emerged from Israeli gulags with such trauma that they have reportedly suffered memory loss; some were unable to speak; all of them broken by unspeakable torment in Israeli captivity. And they were the lucky ones who got out.
Health workers, holding banners and placards, gather at the Nasser Hospital to protest Israeli army’s attacks on northern Gaza and the prevention of the entry of necessary equipment and supplies to the besieged hospitals in Khan Yunis, Gaza on October 19, 2024. (Photo by Doaa Albaz/Anadolu via Getty Images)
As the situation inside Gaza is increasingly described as “indescribable,” medical NGOs blocked from providing care to Palestinians trapped inside besieged territory demand world leaders to stop turning ‘blind eye’ to Israeli war crimes and violations of humanitarian law.
As more Israeli bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza killed dozens of people Saturday, health workers from both inside and out of the besieged territory are again pleading with world leaders to bring an end to the indiscriminate attacks and imposed humanitarian crisis that witnesses on the ground increasingly say there are no words to describe.
At al Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis and elsewhere in Gaza, doctors and other medical staff on Saturday staged protests and held press conferences to call attention to the ongoing attacks in northern areas, including the latest targeting of Jabalia in which reporting indicated anywhere from 33 to over 50 people—including civilian men, women, and children—were killed.
“The world is watching, and history will judge us by how we respond to this grave injustice. I call upon each and everyone one of you to join this fight for the preservation of our shared humanity.” —Dr. Khaled Saleh, FAJR Scientific
Al-Jazeera reports that hospitals, which have repeatedly been bombed by Israel over the last year, were not immune from this latest round:
Three partially functioning hospitals treating severely wounded patients and sheltering thousands of displaced Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza are now out of service after coming under intense Israeli fire, a Gaza health official told Al Jazeera, as the siege on Jabalia enters its third week, with at least 33 more people killed in the northern area.
Israeli forces bombed al-Awda Hospital in Jabalia early on Saturday, and have also shelled Kamal Adwan and the Indonesian hospitals in Beit Lahiya over the past few hours, Al Jazeera correspondents have reported.
Saturday’s attacks come days after Israel barred at least six medical service NGOs from continuing their life-saving work in Gaza. According to the Washington Post:
Two of those medical NGOs, Glia and the Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA), confirmed to The Washington Post that they were notified by the WHO this week about the bans. Both groups have worked in Gaza for years preceding the war.
“WHO is concerned about the impact of these denials on Gaza’s strained healthcare system,” the organization said Thursday in a statement. It added that international emergency medical teams (EMTs) deployed to Gaza are essential to keeping the system operational, as only 17 of the enclave’s 36 hospitals remain functionaland “healthcare needs far exceed the system’s capacity.”
Dr. Khaled Saleh, chair of FAJR Scientific, which provides surgical expertise and trauma specialists to war-torn regions and was another of the groups notified by the WHO that it had been barred from entering Gaza, said in a statement that the move by the Israeli government filled him with “deep sadness and concern for the current state of our global family, questioning our shared humanity and ethics.”
Blocked from providing aid to people in dire need, Saleh called on people worldwide to push for an end to Israel’s blocking of vital medical aid and those seeking to provide it.
“This is a devastating blow to humanity, representing a level of destruction that we have not witnessed since World War II, yet our world leaders turn a blind eye,” he said.
“As a member of the global community,” Saleh continued, “I implore all of you who value compassion, ethics, and the sanctity of human life to stand with us and raise your voices against this unconscionable decision. Together, we must advocate for the voiceless and demand restoration of the fundamental right to access to medical care.”
Israel’s ban on the medical NGOs comes after a string of healthcare professionals who spent time in the Gaza strip have gone public with what they witnessed on the ground, telling tales of unspeakable horror and trying to shake the world out of its complacency on what experts say is a genocide in motion being carried out by Israeli forces.
Earlier this week, the UN humanitarian office, OCHA, said that Israel’s continued blocking of food and medical supplies to Jabalia and other ares in the northern was “having life-threatening impacts” for the people there.
OCHA spokesperson Farhan Haq said the OCHA was calling on Israeli authorities “to allowed safe, sustained and unimpeded access to Jabalia and all areas of the north where people are in desperate need of assistance.”
In a post on Friday, Oxfam International mourned the killing of Dr. Ahmad Al-Najar and midwife Laila Jneid, both of whom worked with Juzoor, “killed by Israeli airstrikes on Jabalia,” the group said. “They were providing lifesaving health care in Gaza. Attacking aid workers is a war crime.” Oxfam repeated its demand for a “cease-fire now” and said healthcare workers should never be a target.
In a dispatch on Friday, Dr. Taghreed Al-Imawi, Juzoor staff and an OBGYN doctor at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, described the untenable situation on the ground.
“The situation is beyond horrific and is very difficult and indescribable,” said Al-Imawi. “Dead people, severed body parts and injured people everywhere. We are receiving emergency calls from all the areas of the north. Ambulances are not able to reach the injured. We have seen more than 23 pregnant women among the injured coming to the hospital since last week, wounded either by shrapnel or gunfire, suffering from fractures. Some were in a critical condition. Kamal Adwan Hospital and other semi-operational hospitals have received displacement orders but there is no way to evacuate in any case.”
“The pediatrics section is closed as it is full of injured people,” Al-Imawi added, “the surgery section is full of injured people, even the reception, the hospital has been shelled several times and targeted by snipers, people are terrified to come to the hospital now.”
Having recently returned from a field mission in Gaza, pediatric nurse Becky Platt, working through Save the Children—who posted her testimony Saturday—described a situation on the ground that was “like nothing I’ve seen before.”
Platt said the horrific situation is “both in terms of healthcare need and just in terms of the whole humanitarian context—seeing homes and landscapes completely devastated and seeing just the absolute level of human suffering and need as absolutely mind blowing.”
https://twitter.com/i/status/1847518629484478816
“No child should have to be in pain,” she said. “And it just feels like your hands are tied when you can’t do what you know that you could do easily at home or in another context. I think that when it really hits. It’s just—it’s just not fair. It’s not okay that we’ve got children with devastating injuries who don’t have access to pain relief.”
For his part, Dr. Saleh of FAJR Scientific, said it was up to everyone in the world to make their voices heard.
“The world is watching,” he said, “and history will judge us by how we respond to this grave injustice. I call upon each and everyone one of you to join this fight for the preservation of our shared humanity.”
An F-35 arriving back at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, June 24, 2019
LABOUR remains complicit in Israel’s war crimes despite imposing a partial arms suspension, a briefing from the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) has revealed.
The government suspended 30 export licences to Israel out of about 350 last month.
But the briefing by CAAT highlights that crucial elements have been excluded, including components for F-35 combat aircraft.
F-35 components are exempt if not sent directly to Israel, despite evidence that they have been used in violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL).
On the same day the suspension was announced, Danish NGO Danwatch revealed that an F-35 was used to drop bombs in an attack on a “safe zone” on Al-Mawasi in Khan Younis, killing 90 people.
CAAT warns this attack likely violated IHL.
Britain makes 15 per cent of all F-35s, with CAAT estimating the value of British components in the 39 planes delivered to Israel since 2016 at about £360 million — almost three times the value of other aircraft-related licences to Israel in the same period.
The F-35 is the largest and most important part of Britain’s arms trade with Israel and exports are made through an open licence, often excluded from media reporting as its financial value isn’t attached.
Freedom of information requests by CAAT revealed that the use of the Open General Export Licence for F-35 spare parts to Israel nearly tripled in 2023.
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.UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspeding 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.) speaks during a press conference to call for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. on November 13, 2023. (Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
“I care about human rights,” said the New York congresswoman in response to her Democratic colleague in the Senate. “I care that billions of U.S. tax dollars’ worth of weapons are carrying out unspeakable atrocities.”
New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized fellow Democrat and Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman on Wednesday for failing to hold the U.S.-armed Israeli military accountable for killing and harming civilians in the Gaza Strip.
Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks came in response to Fetterman’s dismissal of her earlier call for an arms embargo on Israel, which has received billions of dollars worth of weapons and other military aid since the Hamas-led October 7 attack.
“The tragedy in Gaza is 100% on Hamas,” Fetterman wrote on social media with a screengrab of a Hill headline outlining Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks. “Stop using civilians and hospitals as shields, surrender, and release all remaining hostages—and this ends.”
Ocasio-Cortez then retweeted Fetterman’s words with her own rebuttal.
“I dunno man. I care about little kids dying,” the New York lawmaker replied. “I care about human rights. I care that billions of U.S. tax dollars’ worth of weapons are carrying out unspeakable atrocities. I care enough for us to do better.”
“Hope this bleak dunk attempt gets you whatever it is you’re going for,” she concluded.
I dunno man. I care about little kids dying. I care about human rights. I care that billions of US tax dollars’ worth of weapons are carrying out unspeakable atrocities.
I care enough for us to do better.
Hope this bleak dunk attempt gets you whatever it is you’re going for. https://t.co/aGSDfSdrUI
The exchange comes as Israel has intensified its assault on northern Gaza in recent days, bombing homes and schools-turned-shelters in the Jabalia refugee camp and issuing new evacuation orders for the beleaguered region yet placing snipers on roofs and shooting people who try to flee. On Saturday, the Palestinian Deputy Observer to the United Nations Majed Bamya called Israel’s escalation in the north a “genocide within the genocide” and the World Food Program said that no food had been able to reach the area since October 1, warning that the ramped up attacks were having “a disastrous impact on food security for thousands of Palestinian families.” However, 50 trucks carrying aid including food were allowed to enter the north on Wednesday.
Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks that prompted Fetterman’s rejoinder came in response to the weekend’s atrocities.
“The horrors unfolding in northern Gaza are the result of a completely unrestrained Netanyahu gov, fully armed by the Biden admin while food aid is blocked and patients are bombed in hospitals,” she wrote on social media on Monday. “This is a genocide of Palestinians. The U.S. must stop enabling it. Arms embargo now.”
Ocasio-Cortez has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the U.S. response. She backed a House resolution calling for a cease-fire weeks into the war, and demanded an end to the flow of weapons from the House floor in March, when she described Israel’s actions in Gaza as an “unfolding genocide.”
Fetterman, meanwhile, has faced protests from some of his more progressive constituents over his hardline pro-Israel stance.
On Tuesday, news broke that the Biden administration had reportedly written a letter to the Israeli government threatening to cut off the flow of weapons to the country unless it took “urgent and sustained actions” to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza within 30 days.
