View allAll Photos Tagged Palestinian_Resistance
Palestinian resistance agrees to US/Israel permanent ceasefire plan; Israel doesn't stop bombing. This is what happens when negotiating with terrorist who do not view your people as humans. 04/09/2025 --- open.substack.com/pub/yourfavoriteguy/p/palestinian-resis..., Kernow/ Cernyw --- Fowey, Cornwall
Lavaret a ra Impalaerezh ar C'hornaoueg ez eo 'en emzifenn' ar feulster sionour, met graet e vez 'sponterezh' eus ar rezistañs palestinat ouzh an drevadennerien vac'hus. ▪️The Western Empire calls Zionist violence self-defence", but Palestinian resistance to the oppressive colonists is called "terrorism". ▪️ Naomh Séamus, Mala, Contae Chorcaí (1824) /// St James, Mallow, County Cork (1824) www.buildingsofireland.ie/buildings-search/building/20815...
Faris Odeh (December 1985 - 9 November 2000) was a Palestinian boy shot dead by Israeli military forces near the Karni crossing in the Gaza Strip while throwing stones in the second month of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.
A picture of Odeh standing alone in front a tank, with a stone in his hand and arm bent back to throw was taken by a photojournalist from the Associated Press on October 29, 2000. Ten days later, on November 9, Odeh was again throwing stones at Karni when he was shot in the neck by Israeli troops. Odeh and the now famous image of him have since become symbols of the Palestinian resistance to the occupation
The Israeli West Bank barrier, comprising the West Bank Wall and the West Bank fence, is a separation barrier built by Israel along the Green Line and inside parts of the West Bank. Israel describes the wall as a necessary security barrier against Palestinian political violence; whereas Palestinians describe it as an element of racial segregation and a representation of Israeli apartheid, who often call it "Wall of Apartheid". At a total length of 708 kilometres (440 mi) upon completion, the route traced by the barrier is more than double the length of the Green Line, with 15% of its length running along the Green Line or inside Israel, and the remaining 85% running as much as 18 kilometres (11 mi) inside the West Bank, effectively isolating about 9% of the land and approximately 25,000 Palestinians from the rest of the Palestinian territory.
The barrier was built by Israel following a wave of Palestinian political violence and incidents of terrorism inside Israel during the Second Intifada, which began in September 2000 and ended in February 2005. The Israeli government cites a decreased number of suicide bombings carried out from the West Bank as evidence of its efficacy, after such attacks fell from 73 between 2000 and July 2003 (the completion of the first continuous segment) to 12 between August 2003 and the end of 2006. While the barrier was initially presented as a temporary security measure at a time of heightened tensions, it has since been associated with a future political border between Israel and the State of Palestine.
The barrier has drawn criticism from Palestinians, human rights groups, and members of the international community, who have all argued that it serves as evidence of Israel's intent to annex Palestinian land under the guise of security. It has also been alleged that the construction of the wall aims to undermine the Israeli–Palestinian peace process by unilaterally establishing new de facto borders. Key points of dispute are that it substantially deviates eastward from the Green Line, severely restricts the travel of many Palestinians, and impairs their ability to commute to work within the West Bank or to Israel. The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion finding that the barrier qualifies as a violation of international law. In 2003, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution that charged Israel's building of the barrier to be a violation of international law and demanded its removal by a vote of 144–4 with 12 abstentions.
The walled sections of the barrier have become a canvas for graffiti art, with its Palestinian side illustrating opposition to the barrier, Palestinian resistance, their right to return, as well as human rights in general.
The barrier is described by the Israeli Defense Forces as a "multi-layered composite obstacle", with parts of it being consisting of a 9 metres (30 ft) high concrete wall, while others stretches consist of a multi-layered fence system, with three fences with pyramid-shaped stacks of barbed wire on the two outer fences and a lighter-weight fence with intrusion detection equipment in the middle; an anti-vehicle ditch; patrol roads on both sides; and a smooth strip of sand for "intrusion tracking".
Where the multi-layered fence system is employed, it contains an exclusion area of 60-metre (200 ft) in width on average,[33] with some sections having an exclusion area that reaches up to 100 metres (330 ft). The concrete wall has a width of 3 metres (9.8 ft), and the wall is 9 metres (30 ft) high.
The barrier runs partly along or near the 1949 Jordanian–Israeli armistice line ("Green Line") and partly through the Israeli-occupied West Bank diverging eastward from the armistice line by up to 20 km (12 mi) to include on the western side several of the areas with concentrations of highly populated Israeli settlements, such as East Jerusalem, the Ariel Bloc (Ariel, Karnei Shomron, Kedumim, Immanuel etc.), Gush Etzion, Givat Ze'ev, Oranit, and Maale Adumim.
The barrier nearly encircles some Palestinian towns, about 20% follows the armistice line, and a projected 77,000 ha (191,000 acres) or about 13.5% of the West Bank area is on the west side of the wall. According to a study of the April 2006 route by the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, 8.5% of the West Bank area will be on the Israeli side of the barrier after completion, and 3.4% partly or completely surrounded on the eastern side. Some 27,520 to 31,000 Palestinians will be captured on the Israeli side. Another 124,000, on the other hand, will effectively be controlled and isolated. Some 230,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem will be placed on the West Bank side. Most of the barrier[vague] was built at the northern and western edges of the West Bank, mostly beyond the Green Line and created 9 enclaves, which enclosed 15,783 ha (39,000 acres). An additional barrier, circa 10 km long, run south of Ramallah.
Israel states that the topography does not permit putting the barrier along the Green Line in some places because hills or tall buildings on the Palestinian side would make the barrier ineffective against terrorism. The International Court of Justice states that in such cases it is only legal to build the barrier inside Israel.
The barrier route has been challenged in court and changed several times. Argument presented to the court has reiterated that the cease-fire line of 1949 was negotiated "without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines" (Art. VI.9).
In 1992, the idea of creating a physical barrier between the Israeli and Palestinian populations was proposed by then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, following the murder of an Israeli teenage girl in Jerusalem. Rabin said that Israel must "take Gaza out of Tel Aviv" in order to minimize friction between the peoples.
Following an outbreak of violent incidents in Gaza in October 1994, Rabin said: "We have to decide on separation as a philosophy. There has to be a clear border. Without demarcating the lines, whoever wants to swallow 1.8 million Arabs will just bring greater support for Hamas." Following an attack on HaSharon Junction, near the city of Netanya, Rabin made his goals more specific: "This path must lead to a separation, though not according to the borders prior to 1967. We want to reach a separation between us and them. We do not want a majority of the Jewish residents of the state of Israel, 98% of whom live within the borders of sovereign Israel, including a united Jerusalem, to be subject to terrorism."
In 1994, the first section of a barrier (slabs of concrete contiguous for miles) was constructed. The section follows the border between Bat Hefer and Tulkarm communities.
In 1995, the Shahal commission was established by Yitzhak Rabin to discuss how to implement a barrier separating Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, prior to the Camp David 2000 Summit with Yasser Arafat, vowed to build a separation barrier, stating that it is "essential to the Palestinian nation in order to foster its national identity and independence without being dependent on the State of Israel".
In November 2000, during Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations in Washington, Prime Minister Ehud Barak approved financing of a 74 km (46 mi) fence between the Wadi Ara region and Latrun. Not until 14 April 2002, the Cabinet of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to implement the plan and establish a permanent barrier in the Seam Area. On 23 June 2002, the Ariel Sharon Government definitely approved the plan in principle and work at the barrier began.
At the end of 2002, due to government inaction, several localities who suffered the most from lack of a border barrier had already started to build the barrier using their own funds directly on the green-line.
By 2003, 180 km (112 mi) had been completed and in 2004, Israel started the southern part of the barrier.
The barrier and behind it Beit Surik. "The Beit Surik Case (HCJ 2056/04)" [HE] of the Supreme Court of Israel in 30 June 2004 set the standards of proportionality between Israeli security and the injury to the Palestinian residents and resulted in a change in the route of the barrier.
In February 2004, the Israeli government said it would review the route of the barrier in response to US and Palestinian concerns. In particular, Israeli cabinet members said modifications would be made to reduce the number of checkpoints Palestinians had to cross, and especially to reduce Palestinian hardship in areas such as the city of Qalqilyah which the barrier completely surrounds. On February 20, 2005, the Israeli cabinet approved the barrier's route on the same day it approved the execution of the Gaza disengagement plan. The length of the route was increased to 670 km (416 mi) (about twice the length of the Green Line) and would leave about 10% of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and nearly 50,000 Palestinians on the Israeli side. It also put the large settlement Maale Adumim and the Gush Etzion bloc on the Israeli side of the barrier, effectively annexing them. The final route, when realized, closes the Wall separating East Jerusalem, including Maale Adumim, from the West Bank. Before, the exact route of the barrier had not been determined, and it had been alleged by opponents that the barrier route would encircle the Samarian highlands of the West Bank, separating them from the Jordan valley. In June 2004, in exchange for Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's support Israel's planned withdrawal from Gaza, Prime Minister Sharon pledged to build an extension of the barrier to the east of the settlement Ariel to be completed before the finish of the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Despite the ICJ ruling that the wall beyond the Green Line is illegal, Ariel Sharon reiterated on September 8, 2004, that the large settlement blocs of Ariel, Ma'aleh Adumim and Gush Etzion will be on the Israeli side of the Barrier. He also decided that the Barrier would run east of Ariel, but its connection with the main fence be postponed. Israel appropriated Palestinian private land to build the fence upon and started preparations for constructing the wall to the farthest point ever inside the West Bank, 22 km (14 mi) beyond the Green Line, 3.5 km (2.2 mi) long, and 100 m (330 ft) wide.
In 2005, the Israeli Supreme Court made reference to the conditions and history that led to the building of the barrier. The Court described the history of violence against Israeli citizens since the breakout of the Second Intifada and the loss of life that ensued on the Israeli side. The court ruling also cited the attempts Israel had made to defend its citizens, including "military operations" carried out against "terrorist acts", and stated that these actions "did not provide a sufficient answer to the immediate need to stop the severe acts of terrorism. ... Despite all these measures, the terror did not come to an end. The attacks did not cease. Innocent people paid with both life and limb. This is the background behind the decision to construct the separation fence (Id., at p. 815)."
In 2006, 362 km (224.9 mi) of the barrier had been completed, 88 km (54.7 mi) was under construction and 253 km (157.2 mi) had not yet been started. On April 30, 2006, the route was revised by a cabinet decision, following a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. In the Ariel area, the new route corrects an anomaly of the previous route that would have left thousands of Palestinians on the Israeli side. The Alfei Menashe settlement bloc was reduced in size, and the new plan leaves three groups of Palestinian houses on the Palestinian side of the fence. The barrier's route in the Jerusalem area will leave Beit Iksa on the Palestinian side; and Jaba on the Israeli side, but with a crossing to the Palestinian side at Tzurif. Further changes were made to the route around Eshkolot and Metzadot Yehuda, and the route from Metzadot to Har Choled was approved.
In 2012, 440 km (273.4 mi) (62%) of the barrier had been completed.
In September 2014, eight years after approving the 45 km stretch of barrier enclosing Gush Etzion, no progress had been made on it, and Israel reopened the debate. The fence is scheduled to go through the national park, the Nahal Rafaim valley, and the Palestinian village of Battir. The Israeli land appropriated in Gva'ot would be on the Palestinian side of the barrier. On 21 September 2014, the government voted to not reauthorize the barrier in the Gush Etzion area.
In 2022, 45 km (28.0 mi) of the barrier that had been built as a multi-layered fence were replaced by new sections of the 9-meter high concrete wall.
Bethlehem (/ˈbɛθlɪhɛm/; Arabic: بيت لحم, Bayt Laḥm, pronunciation; Hebrew: בֵּית לֶחֶם Bēṯ Leḥem) is a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the State of Palestine, located about ten kilometres (six miles) south of Jerusalem. It is the capital of the Bethlehem Governorate, and has a population of approximately 25,000 people. The city's economy is largely tourist-driven; international tourism peaks around and during Christmas, when Christians embark on a pilgrimage to the Church of the Nativity, revered as the location of the Nativity of Jesus.
The earliest-known mention of Bethlehem is in the Amarna correspondence of ancient Egypt, dated to 1350–1330 BCE, when the town was inhabited by the Canaanites. In the Hebrew Bible, the period of the Israelites is described; it identifies Bethlehem as the birthplace of David. In the New Testament, the city is identified as the birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth. Under the Roman Empire, the city of Bethlehem was destroyed by Hadrian, but later rebuilt by Helena, and her son, Constantine the Great, who commissioned the Church of the Nativity in 327 CE. In 529, the Church of the Nativity was heavily damaged by Samaritans involved in the Samaritan revolts; following the victory of the Byzantine Empire, it was rebuilt by Justinian I.
Amidst the Muslim conquest of the Levant, Bethlehem became part of Jund Filastin in 637. Muslims continued to rule the city until 1099, when it was conquered by the Crusaders, who replaced the local Christian Greek Orthodox clergy with Catholic ones. In the mid-13th century, Bethlehem's walls were demolished by the Mamluk Sultanate. However, they were rebuilt by the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, following the Ottoman–Mamluk War.[8] After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, it became part of Mandatory Palestine until 1948, when it was annexed by Jordan during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. During the 1967 Six Day War, Bethlehem was occupied by Israel along with the rest of the West Bank. Since the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, Bethlehem has been designated as part of Area A of the West Bank, nominally rendering it as being under Palestinian control. Movement around the city is limited due to the Israeli West Bank barrier.
While it was historically a city of Arab Christians, Bethlehem now has a majority of Arab Muslims; it is still home to a significant community of Palestinian Christians, however it has dwindled significantly, mostly due to difficulties resulting from living under the Israeli occupation. Presently, Bethlehem has become encircled by dozens of Israeli settlements, which significantly hinder the ability of Palestinians in the city to openly access their land and livelihoods, which has contributed to the exodus of Palestinians.
The West Bank (Arabic: الضفة الغربية, romanized: aḍ-Ḍiffah al-Ġarbiyyah; Hebrew: הַגָּדָה הַמַּעֲרָבִית, romanized: HaGadáh HaMaʽarávit), so called due to its relation to the Jordan River, is the larger of the two Palestinian territories (the other being the Gaza Strip). A landlocked territory near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the Levant region of West Asia, it is bordered by Jordan and the Dead Sea to the east and by Israel (via the Green Line) to the south, west, and north. The territory has been under Israeli occupation since 1967.
The territory first emerged in the wake of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War as a region occupied and subsequently annexed by Jordan. Jordan ruled the territory until the 1967 Six-Day War, when it was occupied by Israel. Since then, Israel has administered the West Bank as the Judea and Samaria Area, expanding its claim into East Jerusalem in 1980. The mid-1990s Oslo Accords split the West Bank into three regional levels of Palestinian sovereignty, via the Palestinian National Authority (PNA): Area A (PNA), Area B (PNA and Israel), and Area C (Israel, comprising 60% of the West Bank). The PNA exercises total or partial civil administration over 165 Palestinian enclaves across the three areas.
The West Bank remains central to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians consider it the heart of their envisioned state, along with the Gaza Strip. Right-wing and religious Israelis see it as their ancestral homeland, with numerous biblical sites. There is a push among some Israelis for partial or complete annexation of this land. Additionally, it is home to a rising number of Israeli settlers. Area C contains 230 Israeli settlements into which Israeli law is applied and under the Oslo Accords was supposed to be mostly transferred to the PNA by 1997, but this did not occur. The international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be illegal under international law. Citing the 1980 law in which Israel claimed Jerusalem as its capital, the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace treaty, and the Oslo Accords, a 2004 advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice concluded that the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, remain Israeli-occupied territory.
Palestine (Arabic: فلسطين, romanized: Filasṭīn), officially the State of Palestine (دولة فلسطين, Dawlat Filasṭīn), is a state in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. Founded on 15 November 1988 and officially governed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), it claims the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip as its territory, all of which have been Israeli-occupied territories since the 1967 Six-Day War. The West Bank contains 165 Palestinian enclaves that are under partial Palestinian rule, but the remainder, including 200 Israeli settlements, is under full Israeli control. The Gaza Strip was governed by Egypt but conquered by Israel in 1967. Israel governed the region until it withdrew in 2005. The United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and various human-rights organizations still consider Gaza to be held under Israeli military occupation, due to what they regard as Israel's effective military control over the territory; Israel disputes this. Hamas seized power after winning the 2006 Palestinian legislative election. This has since been ensued by a blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel and Egypt.
After World War II, in 1947, the United Nations (UN) adopted a Partition Plan for Mandatory Palestine, which recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states and an internationalized Jerusalem. Immediately after the United Nations General Assembly adopted the plan as Resolution 181, a civil war broke out in Palestine, and the plan was not implemented. The day after the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, neighboring Arab countries invaded the former British Mandate and engaged Israeli forces in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Later, the All-Palestine Government was established by the Arab League on 22 September 1948 to govern the All-Palestine Protectorate in the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. It was soon recognized by all Arab League members except Transjordan, which had occupied and later annexed the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Palestine is currently recognized by 138 of the 193 United Nations (UN) member states. Though jurisdiction of the All-Palestine Government was declared to cover the whole of the former Mandatory Palestine, its effective jurisdiction was limited to the Gaza Strip. During the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
On 15 November 1988 in Algiers, Yasser Arafat, as Chairman of the PLO, issued the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which established the State of Palestine. A year after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was formed to govern (in varying degrees) areas A and B in the West Bank, comprising 165 enclaves, and the Gaza Strip. After Hamas became the PNA parliament's leading party in the most recent elections (2006), a conflict broke out between it and the Fatah party, leading to the Gaza Strip being taken over by Hamas in 2007 (two years after the Israeli disengagement).
The State of Palestine's mid-year population in 2021 was 5,227,193. Although Palestine claims Jerusalem as its capital, the city is under the control of Israel; both Palestinian and Israeli claims to the city are mostly unrecognized by the international community. Palestine is a member of the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the G77, the International Olympic Committee, as well as UNESCO, UNCTAD and the International Criminal Court. Following a failed attempt in 2011 to secure full United Nations member state status, the United Nations General Assembly voted in 2012 to recognize Palestine as a non-member observer state. On 26 February 2024, the Palestinian government collapsed, with the entire Palestinian government resigning, including the prime minister.
The Israeli West Bank barrier, comprising the West Bank Wall and the West Bank fence, is a separation barrier built by Israel along the Green Line and inside parts of the West Bank. Israel describes the wall as a necessary security barrier against Palestinian political violence; whereas Palestinians describe it as an element of racial segregation and a representation of Israeli apartheid, who often call it "Wall of Apartheid". At a total length of 708 kilometres (440 mi) upon completion, the route traced by the barrier is more than double the length of the Green Line, with 15% of its length running along the Green Line or inside Israel, and the remaining 85% running as much as 18 kilometres (11 mi) inside the West Bank, effectively isolating about 9% of the land and approximately 25,000 Palestinians from the rest of the Palestinian territory.
The barrier was built by Israel following a wave of Palestinian political violence and incidents of terrorism inside Israel during the Second Intifada, which began in September 2000 and ended in February 2005. The Israeli government cites a decreased number of suicide bombings carried out from the West Bank as evidence of its efficacy, after such attacks fell from 73 between 2000 and July 2003 (the completion of the first continuous segment) to 12 between August 2003 and the end of 2006. While the barrier was initially presented as a temporary security measure at a time of heightened tensions, it has since been associated with a future political border between Israel and the State of Palestine.
The barrier has drawn criticism from Palestinians, human rights groups, and members of the international community, who have all argued that it serves as evidence of Israel's intent to annex Palestinian land under the guise of security. It has also been alleged that the construction of the wall aims to undermine the Israeli–Palestinian peace process by unilaterally establishing new de facto borders. Key points of dispute are that it substantially deviates eastward from the Green Line, severely restricts the travel of many Palestinians, and impairs their ability to commute to work within the West Bank or to Israel. The International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion finding that the barrier qualifies as a violation of international law. In 2003, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution that charged Israel's building of the barrier to be a violation of international law and demanded its removal by a vote of 144–4 with 12 abstentions.
The walled sections of the barrier have become a canvas for graffiti art, with its Palestinian side illustrating opposition to the barrier, Palestinian resistance, their right to return, as well as human rights in general.
The barrier is described by the Israeli Defense Forces as a "multi-layered composite obstacle", with parts of it being consisting of a 9 metres (30 ft) high concrete wall, while others stretches consist of a multi-layered fence system, with three fences with pyramid-shaped stacks of barbed wire on the two outer fences and a lighter-weight fence with intrusion detection equipment in the middle; an anti-vehicle ditch; patrol roads on both sides; and a smooth strip of sand for "intrusion tracking".
Where the multi-layered fence system is employed, it contains an exclusion area of 60-metre (200 ft) in width on average,[33] with some sections having an exclusion area that reaches up to 100 metres (330 ft). The concrete wall has a width of 3 metres (9.8 ft), and the wall is 9 metres (30 ft) high.
The barrier runs partly along or near the 1949 Jordanian–Israeli armistice line ("Green Line") and partly through the Israeli-occupied West Bank diverging eastward from the armistice line by up to 20 km (12 mi) to include on the western side several of the areas with concentrations of highly populated Israeli settlements, such as East Jerusalem, the Ariel Bloc (Ariel, Karnei Shomron, Kedumim, Immanuel etc.), Gush Etzion, Givat Ze'ev, Oranit, and Maale Adumim.
The barrier nearly encircles some Palestinian towns, about 20% follows the armistice line, and a projected 77,000 ha (191,000 acres) or about 13.5% of the West Bank area is on the west side of the wall. According to a study of the April 2006 route by the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, 8.5% of the West Bank area will be on the Israeli side of the barrier after completion, and 3.4% partly or completely surrounded on the eastern side. Some 27,520 to 31,000 Palestinians will be captured on the Israeli side. Another 124,000, on the other hand, will effectively be controlled and isolated. Some 230,000 Palestinians in Jerusalem will be placed on the West Bank side. Most of the barrier[vague] was built at the northern and western edges of the West Bank, mostly beyond the Green Line and created 9 enclaves, which enclosed 15,783 ha (39,000 acres). An additional barrier, circa 10 km long, run south of Ramallah.
Israel states that the topography does not permit putting the barrier along the Green Line in some places because hills or tall buildings on the Palestinian side would make the barrier ineffective against terrorism. The International Court of Justice states that in such cases it is only legal to build the barrier inside Israel.
The barrier route has been challenged in court and changed several times. Argument presented to the court has reiterated that the cease-fire line of 1949 was negotiated "without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines" (Art. VI.9).
In 1992, the idea of creating a physical barrier between the Israeli and Palestinian populations was proposed by then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, following the murder of an Israeli teenage girl in Jerusalem. Rabin said that Israel must "take Gaza out of Tel Aviv" in order to minimize friction between the peoples.
Following an outbreak of violent incidents in Gaza in October 1994, Rabin said: "We have to decide on separation as a philosophy. There has to be a clear border. Without demarcating the lines, whoever wants to swallow 1.8 million Arabs will just bring greater support for Hamas." Following an attack on HaSharon Junction, near the city of Netanya, Rabin made his goals more specific: "This path must lead to a separation, though not according to the borders prior to 1967. We want to reach a separation between us and them. We do not want a majority of the Jewish residents of the state of Israel, 98% of whom live within the borders of sovereign Israel, including a united Jerusalem, to be subject to terrorism."
In 1994, the first section of a barrier (slabs of concrete contiguous for miles) was constructed. The section follows the border between Bat Hefer and Tulkarm communities.
In 1995, the Shahal commission was established by Yitzhak Rabin to discuss how to implement a barrier separating Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, prior to the Camp David 2000 Summit with Yasser Arafat, vowed to build a separation barrier, stating that it is "essential to the Palestinian nation in order to foster its national identity and independence without being dependent on the State of Israel".
In November 2000, during Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations in Washington, Prime Minister Ehud Barak approved financing of a 74 km (46 mi) fence between the Wadi Ara region and Latrun. Not until 14 April 2002, the Cabinet of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to implement the plan and establish a permanent barrier in the Seam Area. On 23 June 2002, the Ariel Sharon Government definitely approved the plan in principle and work at the barrier began.
At the end of 2002, due to government inaction, several localities who suffered the most from lack of a border barrier had already started to build the barrier using their own funds directly on the green-line.
By 2003, 180 km (112 mi) had been completed and in 2004, Israel started the southern part of the barrier.
The barrier and behind it Beit Surik. "The Beit Surik Case (HCJ 2056/04)" [HE] of the Supreme Court of Israel in 30 June 2004 set the standards of proportionality between Israeli security and the injury to the Palestinian residents and resulted in a change in the route of the barrier.
In February 2004, the Israeli government said it would review the route of the barrier in response to US and Palestinian concerns. In particular, Israeli cabinet members said modifications would be made to reduce the number of checkpoints Palestinians had to cross, and especially to reduce Palestinian hardship in areas such as the city of Qalqilyah which the barrier completely surrounds. On February 20, 2005, the Israeli cabinet approved the barrier's route on the same day it approved the execution of the Gaza disengagement plan. The length of the route was increased to 670 km (416 mi) (about twice the length of the Green Line) and would leave about 10% of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and nearly 50,000 Palestinians on the Israeli side. It also put the large settlement Maale Adumim and the Gush Etzion bloc on the Israeli side of the barrier, effectively annexing them. The final route, when realized, closes the Wall separating East Jerusalem, including Maale Adumim, from the West Bank. Before, the exact route of the barrier had not been determined, and it had been alleged by opponents that the barrier route would encircle the Samarian highlands of the West Bank, separating them from the Jordan valley. In June 2004, in exchange for Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's support Israel's planned withdrawal from Gaza, Prime Minister Sharon pledged to build an extension of the barrier to the east of the settlement Ariel to be completed before the finish of the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Despite the ICJ ruling that the wall beyond the Green Line is illegal, Ariel Sharon reiterated on September 8, 2004, that the large settlement blocs of Ariel, Ma'aleh Adumim and Gush Etzion will be on the Israeli side of the Barrier. He also decided that the Barrier would run east of Ariel, but its connection with the main fence be postponed. Israel appropriated Palestinian private land to build the fence upon and started preparations for constructing the wall to the farthest point ever inside the West Bank, 22 km (14 mi) beyond the Green Line, 3.5 km (2.2 mi) long, and 100 m (330 ft) wide.
In 2005, the Israeli Supreme Court made reference to the conditions and history that led to the building of the barrier. The Court described the history of violence against Israeli citizens since the breakout of the Second Intifada and the loss of life that ensued on the Israeli side. The court ruling also cited the attempts Israel had made to defend its citizens, including "military operations" carried out against "terrorist acts", and stated that these actions "did not provide a sufficient answer to the immediate need to stop the severe acts of terrorism. ... Despite all these measures, the terror did not come to an end. The attacks did not cease. Innocent people paid with both life and limb. This is the background behind the decision to construct the separation fence (Id., at p. 815)."
In 2006, 362 km (224.9 mi) of the barrier had been completed, 88 km (54.7 mi) was under construction and 253 km (157.2 mi) had not yet been started. On April 30, 2006, the route was revised by a cabinet decision, following a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. In the Ariel area, the new route corrects an anomaly of the previous route that would have left thousands of Palestinians on the Israeli side. The Alfei Menashe settlement bloc was reduced in size, and the new plan leaves three groups of Palestinian houses on the Palestinian side of the fence. The barrier's route in the Jerusalem area will leave Beit Iksa on the Palestinian side; and Jaba on the Israeli side, but with a crossing to the Palestinian side at Tzurif. Further changes were made to the route around Eshkolot and Metzadot Yehuda, and the route from Metzadot to Har Choled was approved.
In 2012, 440 km (273.4 mi) (62%) of the barrier had been completed.
In September 2014, eight years after approving the 45 km stretch of barrier enclosing Gush Etzion, no progress had been made on it, and Israel reopened the debate. The fence is scheduled to go through the national park, the Nahal Rafaim valley, and the Palestinian village of Battir. The Israeli land appropriated in Gva'ot would be on the Palestinian side of the barrier. On 21 September 2014, the government voted to not reauthorize the barrier in the Gush Etzion area.
In 2022, 45 km (28.0 mi) of the barrier that had been built as a multi-layered fence were replaced by new sections of the 9-meter high concrete wall.
Bethlehem (/ˈbɛθlɪhɛm/; Arabic: بيت لحم, Bayt Laḥm, pronunciation; Hebrew: בֵּית לֶחֶם Bēṯ Leḥem) is a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank of the State of Palestine, located about ten kilometres (six miles) south of Jerusalem. It is the capital of the Bethlehem Governorate, and has a population of approximately 25,000 people. The city's economy is largely tourist-driven; international tourism peaks around and during Christmas, when Christians embark on a pilgrimage to the Church of the Nativity, revered as the location of the Nativity of Jesus.
The earliest-known mention of Bethlehem is in the Amarna correspondence of ancient Egypt, dated to 1350–1330 BCE, when the town was inhabited by the Canaanites. In the Hebrew Bible, the period of the Israelites is described; it identifies Bethlehem as the birthplace of David. In the New Testament, the city is identified as the birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth. Under the Roman Empire, the city of Bethlehem was destroyed by Hadrian, but later rebuilt by Helena, and her son, Constantine the Great, who commissioned the Church of the Nativity in 327 CE. In 529, the Church of the Nativity was heavily damaged by Samaritans involved in the Samaritan revolts; following the victory of the Byzantine Empire, it was rebuilt by Justinian I.
Amidst the Muslim conquest of the Levant, Bethlehem became part of Jund Filastin in 637. Muslims continued to rule the city until 1099, when it was conquered by the Crusaders, who replaced the local Christian Greek Orthodox clergy with Catholic ones. In the mid-13th century, Bethlehem's walls were demolished by the Mamluk Sultanate. However, they were rebuilt by the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, following the Ottoman–Mamluk War.[8] After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, it became part of Mandatory Palestine until 1948, when it was annexed by Jordan during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. During the 1967 Six Day War, Bethlehem was occupied by Israel along with the rest of the West Bank. Since the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority, Bethlehem has been designated as part of Area A of the West Bank, nominally rendering it as being under Palestinian control. Movement around the city is limited due to the Israeli West Bank barrier.
While it was historically a city of Arab Christians, Bethlehem now has a majority of Arab Muslims; it is still home to a significant community of Palestinian Christians, however it has dwindled significantly, mostly due to difficulties resulting from living under the Israeli occupation. Presently, Bethlehem has become encircled by dozens of Israeli settlements, which significantly hinder the ability of Palestinians in the city to openly access their land and livelihoods, which has contributed to the exodus of Palestinians.
The West Bank (Arabic: الضفة الغربية, romanized: aḍ-Ḍiffah al-Ġarbiyyah; Hebrew: הַגָּדָה הַמַּעֲרָבִית, romanized: HaGadáh HaMaʽarávit), so called due to its relation to the Jordan River, is the larger of the two Palestinian territories (the other being the Gaza Strip). A landlocked territory near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the Levant region of West Asia, it is bordered by Jordan and the Dead Sea to the east and by Israel (via the Green Line) to the south, west, and north. The territory has been under Israeli occupation since 1967.
The territory first emerged in the wake of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War as a region occupied and subsequently annexed by Jordan. Jordan ruled the territory until the 1967 Six-Day War, when it was occupied by Israel. Since then, Israel has administered the West Bank as the Judea and Samaria Area, expanding its claim into East Jerusalem in 1980. The mid-1990s Oslo Accords split the West Bank into three regional levels of Palestinian sovereignty, via the Palestinian National Authority (PNA): Area A (PNA), Area B (PNA and Israel), and Area C (Israel, comprising 60% of the West Bank). The PNA exercises total or partial civil administration over 165 Palestinian enclaves across the three areas.
The West Bank remains central to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians consider it the heart of their envisioned state, along with the Gaza Strip. Right-wing and religious Israelis see it as their ancestral homeland, with numerous biblical sites. There is a push among some Israelis for partial or complete annexation of this land. Additionally, it is home to a rising number of Israeli settlers. Area C contains 230 Israeli settlements into which Israeli law is applied and under the Oslo Accords was supposed to be mostly transferred to the PNA by 1997, but this did not occur. The international community considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be illegal under international law. Citing the 1980 law in which Israel claimed Jerusalem as its capital, the 1994 Israel–Jordan peace treaty, and the Oslo Accords, a 2004 advisory ruling by the International Court of Justice concluded that the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, remain Israeli-occupied territory.
Palestine (Arabic: فلسطين, romanized: Filasṭīn), officially the State of Palestine (دولة فلسطين, Dawlat Filasṭīn), is a state in the Southern Levant region of West Asia. Founded on 15 November 1988 and officially governed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), it claims the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip as its territory, all of which have been Israeli-occupied territories since the 1967 Six-Day War. The West Bank contains 165 Palestinian enclaves that are under partial Palestinian rule, but the remainder, including 200 Israeli settlements, is under full Israeli control. The Gaza Strip was governed by Egypt but conquered by Israel in 1967. Israel governed the region until it withdrew in 2005. The United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and various human-rights organizations still consider Gaza to be held under Israeli military occupation, due to what they regard as Israel's effective military control over the territory; Israel disputes this. Hamas seized power after winning the 2006 Palestinian legislative election. This has since been ensued by a blockade of the Gaza Strip by Israel and Egypt.
After World War II, in 1947, the United Nations (UN) adopted a Partition Plan for Mandatory Palestine, which recommended the creation of independent Arab and Jewish states and an internationalized Jerusalem. Immediately after the United Nations General Assembly adopted the plan as Resolution 181, a civil war broke out in Palestine, and the plan was not implemented. The day after the establishment of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948, neighboring Arab countries invaded the former British Mandate and engaged Israeli forces in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Later, the All-Palestine Government was established by the Arab League on 22 September 1948 to govern the All-Palestine Protectorate in the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip. It was soon recognized by all Arab League members except Transjordan, which had occupied and later annexed the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Palestine is currently recognized by 138 of the 193 United Nations (UN) member states. Though jurisdiction of the All-Palestine Government was declared to cover the whole of the former Mandatory Palestine, its effective jurisdiction was limited to the Gaza Strip. During the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israel captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.
On 15 November 1988 in Algiers, Yasser Arafat, as Chairman of the PLO, issued the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which established the State of Palestine. A year after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was formed to govern (in varying degrees) areas A and B in the West Bank, comprising 165 enclaves, and the Gaza Strip. After Hamas became the PNA parliament's leading party in the most recent elections (2006), a conflict broke out between it and the Fatah party, leading to the Gaza Strip being taken over by Hamas in 2007 (two years after the Israeli disengagement).
The State of Palestine's mid-year population in 2021 was 5,227,193. Although Palestine claims Jerusalem as its capital, the city is under the control of Israel; both Palestinian and Israeli claims to the city are mostly unrecognized by the international community. Palestine is a member of the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the G77, the International Olympic Committee, as well as UNESCO, UNCTAD and the International Criminal Court. Following a failed attempt in 2011 to secure full United Nations member state status, the United Nations General Assembly voted in 2012 to recognize Palestine as a non-member observer state. On 26 February 2024, the Palestinian government collapsed, with the entire Palestinian government resigning, including the prime minister.
Me, Larry and Louise.
Negotiating a broken light socket fitting, jutting out into the hallway, and an overturned plastic chair blocking what looked an otherwise disused stairwell, we made our way up to the hostel on the first floor.
Osama had driven us to the hostel through the wet evening streets of Nablus in his beaten up Peugeot, all the while frantically gesticulating, trying to impress on us the severity of the situation in this city, perhaps seeing us as his or Nablus’s only chance to share a Palestinian perspective with some internationals. With one eye on the road and one arm on the back of the passenger seat, turning to talk to us in the back seat, Osama told us of the closures, the curfews, the checkpoints and the difficulty of moving about freely. Between narrowly avoiding oncoming cars as he occasionally veered into the opposite lane he told us of the nightly Israeli military incursions, the rocket attacks on the refugee camps, the shootings and assassinations, the house demolitions, the funerals and the loss of innocent lives. But for all we were told perhaps the most upsetting thing for me was to see this desperate attempt to squeeze as much information as possible into what was no more than a 10 minute car journey. Most, if not all, Palestinians have shocking stories to tell, and are more than willing to share their opinions about the occupation and the hardship it has created, but nowhere as much as Nablus have I felt that this to be a need and certainly never one so desperate. Osama questioned us, “What life is this? Where is my dignity? Where is my dignity? And what of my son? What life is there for him?” We had no answers. All we could do was sit solemnly and nod, the windscreen wipers jolting back and forth as we continued through the wet streets. My mind wandering, I remembered that very morning when we had come through Hawara checkpoint, just to the south of the city. As we passed through wire mesh walkways, not unlike the pens used for livestock herding before a final despatching at the abattoir, and crossed a wasteland to where Nablus bound minibus taxis waited in muddy pot-holed car park, I watched an old lady, perhaps of grandmother age, tiptoe through sloppy mud to a wheel spinning taxi, its back end sliding out down the slippery dirt mounds. The old lady hitched her traditional style black embroidered dress, at the same time trying to pass her plastic bagged wares to a fellow passenger, finally being dragged aboard before the mud sprayed taxi bounced and skidded off across the wasteland rank. I thought of my own grandmother in a similar scenario, humbled by the relative immobility of old age and humiliated by a blind oppressive system that continues to punish the innocent in ways that are slowly becoming an excepted norm. While the Palestinians continue to put up with life as it is, to see it anew with an outsiders perspective is shocking. It simply isn’t right. Osama’s question came back to me then as it always will whenever the immense disparity between freedom and oppression makes itself even subtly apparent. Where is the dignity? What life is this?
The hostel’s reception desk, tucked away in a dingy corner of a strip lit room, was dead apart from where between nicotine yellowed walls the proprietor sat, stooped over a cigarette and a game of cards with another of the guests. A television set flickered and chattered away, ignored in the corner, and from an ashtray on the card table a column of Brownian smoke rose from the lodger’s unstubbed butt. Creaking out of his low chair, and shuffling across the room he took a key from the wall behind the desk and beckoned us to follow him. The better of the two rooms we were shown had what looked to be a relatively new a bullet-hole in the window. Broken reflected light from the florescent on the rear wall accentuated the fissures emanating from the crude hole, and a dent in the opposite wall betrayed the bullets trajectory. “Don’t worry.” Osama told us, “It’s just a stray bullet, probably from children throwing stones at soldiers from the roof.” With that and a recommendation that we didn’t go out, just to be on the safe side, Osama left us. Deciding on a supermarket purchased bread and hommous dinner and an early night, we took Osama’s advice.
Later, back in the smoke-filled reception room I sat with Samer, a construction worker from Hebron, in the south of the West Bank. Over the game of cards he continued to play with the proprietor, communicating in broken Arabic and English I learnt that he had no choice but to stay in the hostel during the week due to the difficulty in travel between Hebron and Nablus. Hebron would be just an hours drive away, unhindered, but with at least three main Israeli military checkpoints, and the further possibility of “flying checkpoints”, a system of permanent structures manned only on what seems a random basis, travel has become extremely difficult with no guarantee of reaching work on time, if at all. This, coupled to the rise in oil prices and the longer tortuous routes Palestinians are forced to take around any Israeli territory, including the illegal West Bank settlements, has become a serious issue for travel between all of the West Bank’s major cities and regions. This inefficiency of flow through the West Bank, these restrictive measures upon money, trade and people, has to be looked upon as a very shrewd move by Israel that has a very predictable outcome; a slow death for the Palestinian economy and a gradual chipping away at any chance of a viable Palestinian state. Looked at in terms of Nature, impeding blood circulation between body organs is a sure fire way of killing any organism.
At least the closures and checkpoints benefit hostels. The dribs and drabs of tourists though Nablus are certainly too few to keep the hostel industry afloat. In the centre of the city the tourist information centre is now used as mission control for Nablus’s street cleaning operations. We dropped in just to share the fact of our tourist status only to be met with apparent confusion and asked if we wanted the Turkish Bath, Nablus’s biggest attraction. When we again tried to make ourselves understood, we were just met with a shaking head, a smile, and asked if we wanted tea.
Just a short walk through the bustling new city reveals obvious signs of ongoing violence. Bullet dents in shops’ steel shutters, shattered, bullet pierced windows in some of the high rise buildings, bill board sized posters of young and proud Kalashnikov toting “militants”, the latest to be killed or assassinated by the Israeli military; one even of a father with his arm around the shoulder of, presumably, his son, not older than 12 years old and bearing an AK47 machine gun. In the old city, these “martyr” bill posters can be found on every free wall and shop shutter, the older sunlight faded faces progressively covered with those of new victims. I can’t help but feel that these serious posters lend further an underlying oppressive air to the everyday comings and goings of an otherwise culturally peaceful society. While I understand the natural principle of action and reaction, these young militants must understand that their activity can only ever at best be a gesture of resistance, never the real thing.
Due to its geographical location in the mountainous north of the West Bank, Nablus was at one time a stronghold of the West Bank Palestinian resistance whose militants posed a real problem to Israeli troops during the second Intifada. Now, however, the grinding occupation, closure, siege, and continuing violence has seen this resistance all but crushed, and large parts of the city’s infrastructure damaged with little hope of near future repair. The destruction that Israel has caused the city, both infrastructurally and socially, in retaliation for the actions of relatively few Palestinian militants really amounts to a collective punishment of the city’s population, a population that still live in fear of nightly Israeli military incursions, and even, as a visiting friend experienced last year, sonic boundary breaking Israeli fighter jets flying just hundreds of feet above Nablus city rooftops. I hate to think of the effect these deafening sonic booms have upon the developing inner ear of any young child. Beyond 10 o’clock in the evening the city’s streets are abandoned to Israeli soldiers and whoever they manage to taunt into a showdown. In the narrow alleyways of the old city, Israeli soldiers have been known, locals say, to shout out to anyone in range, “Mujahideen. Show yourselves and fight.” Any rise, usually from stone throwing youths, will be met with live ammunition and more often than not new statistics to add to the ever growing discrepancy between Israeli and Palestinian casualties. The fight, slowly but surely, is becoming a one sided campaign that not only represents continued harassment of the local Palestinian population and provokes disenfranchised youths into bloody confrontations; this fight is even further polarising the impressionable minds of teenage Israeli soldiers, youths that grow up believing popular right wing media and what life in the military instils – hatred for a perceived enemy.
Earlier in the day I had visited Al Lod Charitable Society in Nablus’s Asker refugee camp. Asker camp along with the infamous “Balata”, are among the most frequently targeted areas on the Israeli military’s agenda, and where any trouble can rapidly escalate. These camps are the usual sites of stone, Molotov cocktail, and gunfire exchange between angry yet apathetic Palestinian youths in disbelief of their ability to affect social change through peaceful means, and young indoctrinated Israeli soldiers. It was, in fact, the riot in Balata camp following the funeral of a youth killed by an Israeli sniper in 2000, that is partly attributed to the sparking of the second Intifada. I had been sent to photograph some of the donations and projects funded by Muslim Aid UK, an NGO that channels money, food, and education to Al Lod and similar organisations. I sat with Jamal in his office at the Al Lod centre while, over a cup of tea, he showed me some of the centre’s work: charitable donations of meat and money during the Eid festival; computer and Internet facilities for the surrounding camp neighbourhoods; educational and school materials for local children; even a “Charitable Cheese Project”, distributing 400 tons of cheese to camp residents. Besides charitable donations the centre is also involved in art workshop programs that help children deal with internalised emotional issues. Jamal showed me a collection of some of the art produced. One workshop was based around each child producing two drawings; one of a world in which the children would like to live, and one with life as it is in the camp. Flicking through the pages I was met time and time again with the same, or similar images; the idealism of young minds, rainbowed pastures and sunny hillsides, large rabbits eating carrots from a child’s outstretched hand, kite flying and park scenes – nothing materialistic, simple desires. Contrasting these images to the scenes of perceived camp life, green men chain-sawing trees, tanks demolishing homes, barbed wire, walls, rocket launchers, and war planes, a faceless brutality, it is austerely apparent that the occupation is forging young minds warped to the extremity. As I played with local children, called in off the streets to model for a impromptu photo shoot, some of whom had probably produced the drawings I had seen, I realised that these are the Palestinians in need of real help. These are the children whose only contact with Israelis is with armed soldiers sent to demolish a neighbour’s house, or arrest and drag away a youth in the middle of the night. These are the children amongst which real seeds of anger are being sown. All the while Israel is busy tackling its own perceived “security threat”, it is in the process of creating another perhaps more real future threat. If this brutal contact between Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers, this inequality, is propagated much further into the future, Israel will only respond with ever more extreme measures; measures that will not only further escalate violence, but measures that will portray the State of Israel’s already tainted human rights track record as beyond all international acceptance. This further alienation of an already insecure state is not only dangerous; it is far from being in the global community’s interests. Without concerted effort and political pressure, Israel is itself in danger of becoming a “rogue” state.
That night, as I lay in bed, I could hear the distant bangs and echoes of stun grenades and bullet split air reverberate up and down streets and alleyways. Jeeps passed by outside, given away by the whirring of off-road tyres on tarmac, and their familiar throaty engine tone. I could not help but think that, in the morning, after sleep has come to us all, maybe, just maybe in those awakening moments, before the reality of the world we live in comes flooding back, before all the complex interactions that have formed the evolution of our social structures, there is a moment when all is well, when peace seems the only possible way, and every sole is equal. If only we could hold on to this innocence and let it permeate into our day.
The keffiyeh / kufiya or shemagh is a traditional Arab headdress fashioned from a square, usually cotton, scarf. It is typically worn by Arab men, as well as some Kurds.
The keffiyeh has been worn by Arabs residing in regions in Arabia, Jordan, and Iraq for over a century, but its prominence increased in other regions in the 1960s with the beginning of the Palestinian resistance movement and its adoption by Palestinian politician Yasser Arafat. The keffiyeh has been a fashion accessory in the United States since the late 1980s. In the early 2000s, keffiyehs were very popular among adolescents in Tokyo, who often wore them with camouflage clothing.
On Saturday 29 October 2023, at least 100,000 and possibly as many as 300,000 people demonstrated in London in solidarity with Palestinians. It was not just a reaction to the devastating bombing of Gaza and the blockade of energy, fuel, electricity, food and water from 2.3 million Palestinians living in the city and the surrounding strip.
في يوم السبت 29 أكتوبر/تشرين الأول 2023، تظاهر ما لا يقل عن 100 ألف وربما يصل إلى 300 ألف شخص في لندن تضامنًا مع الفلسطينيين. ولم يكن ذلك مجرد رد فعل على القصف المدمر على غزة والحصار شبه الكامل للطاقة والوقود والكهرباء والغذاء والماء عن 2.3 مليون فلسطيني يعيشون في المدينة والمنطقة المحيطة بها.
It was also a determination to see an end to -
كما دعا المتظاهرون إلى إنهاء جميع العوامل الرئيسية التي تغذي الصراع.
1) An end to Palestinian suffering from 75 years of Israeli occupation. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip since 1967 is officially recognised by the United Nations and most of the world despite the fact that the occupation is often ignored or sometimes even denied by Western media. As Amnesty International reports Israeli occupation has resulted in "systematic human rights violations against Palestinians living there."
نهاية معاناة الفلسطينيين من 75 عاما من الاحتلال الإسرائيلي. إن الاحتلال الإسرائيلي للضفة الغربية والقدس الشرقية وقطاع غزة منذ عام 1967 معترف به رسميًا من قبل الأمم المتحدة ومعظم دول العالم على الرغم من أن وسائل الإعلام الغربية غالبًا ما يتم تجاهل الاحتلال أو حتى إنكاره في بعض الأحيان. وكما أفادت منظمة العفو الدولية، فإن الاحتلال الإسرائيلي قد أدى إلى "انتهاكات منهجية لحقوق الإنسان ضد الفلسطينيين الذين يعيشون هناك".
www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2017/06/israel-occupa...
2) An end to Palestinians living under a highly restrictive Apartheid regime as recognised by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and War on Want. Across the West Bank Palestinians are banned from driving on numerous roads that cross the region and as War on Want explains "Jewish Israelis and Palestinians are treated differently in almost every aspect of life: housing, education, health, employment, family life, residence and freedom of movement. Dozens of Israeli laws and policies institutionalise this prevailing system of racial discrimination and domination."
وضع حد للفلسطينيين الذين يعيشون في ظل نظام فصل عنصري شديد التقييد كما اعترفت به منظمة العفو الدولية وهيومن رايتس ووتش ومنظمة الحرب على العوز. في جميع أنحاء الضفة الغربية، يُمنع الفلسطينيون من القيادة على العديد من الطرق التي تعبر المنطقة، وكما توضح مؤسسة "الحرب على العوز" الخيرية، "يتم التعامل مع اليهود الإسرائيليين والفلسطينيين بشكل مختلف في كل جانب من جوانب الحياة تقريبًا: السكن والتعليم والصحة والتوظيف والأسرة". الحياة والإقامة وحرية التنقل.. عشرات القوانين والسياسات الإسرائيلية تضفي الطابع المؤسسي على هذا النظام السائد من التمييز العنصري والسيطرة.
waronwant.org/news-analysis/israeli-apartheid-factsheet?g...
3) An end to restrictions on movement. Across the West Bank there are some 650 Israeli military checkpoints through which only some Palestinians are allowed to pass, often with humiliating questioning and delays, so that they can travel to other towns whether to visit families, seeking medical treatment or for any other reason. In Gaza, travel is even more difficult and only a tiny minority with work permits have been allowed to cross the border - the rest have to remain in what is often described as the world's largest open air prison - the densely populated Gaza strip housing some 2.3 million people.
إنهاء القيود المفروضة على الحركة. يوجد في جميع أنحاء الضفة الغربية حوالي 650 نقطة تفتيش عسكرية إسرائيلية لا يُسمح إلا لبعض الفلسطينيين بالمرور من خلالها، مع استجواب وتأخير مهين، حتى يتمكنوا من السفر إلى مدن أخرى سواء لزيارة عائلاتهم أو طلب العلاج الطبي أو لأي سبب آخر. وفي غزة، يعد السفر أكثر صعوبة ولم يُسمح إلا لأقلية صغيرة من حاملي تصاريح العمل بعبور الحدود - أما الباقون فيجب أن يبقوا في ما يوصف في كثير من الأحيان بأنه أكبر سجن مفتوح في العالم - وهو قطاع غزة المكتظ بالسكان والذي يضم حوالي 2.3 نسمة. مليون شخص.
4) An end to the 16 years of siege imposed by Israel on Gaza which means that around 56% of children were suffering from anemia and only 4% had access to safe drinking water even before the outbreak of conflict this month.
إنهاء الحصار الذي تفرضه إسرائيل على غزة منذ 16 عاماً. ويعني الحصار أن حوالي 56% من الأطفال كانوا يعانون من فقر الدم وأن 4% فقط كانوا يحصلون على مياه الشرب الآمنة حتى قبل اندلاع النزاع هذا الشهر.
www.unicef.org/sop/what-we-do/wash-water-sanitation-and-h....
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4391478/
5) The never ending process of Israeli expansion across Palestinian land, including the demolition of 55,000 Palestinian homes since 1967, occurring on a near monthly basis as well as the cutting down of fields of olive trees and the ploughing up of Palestinian farms to make room for yet more illegal settlements subsidised by the Israeli government.
These settlements are illegal under international law, which rightly recognises the 1967 border. However, since 1967, Israel has constructed 250 of them across the West Bank in which over 633,000 Israelis live in subsidised and often luxurious housing with swimming pools and manicured lawns, an unimaginable privilege to the vast majority of Palestinians.
وضع حد للتوسع الإسرائيلي الذي لا ينتهي عبر الأراضي الفلسطينية، بما في ذلك هدم 55.000 منزل فلسطيني منذ عام 1967، والذي يحدث على أساس شهري تقريبًا، فضلاً عن قطع حقول أشجار الزيتون وحراثة المزارع الفلسطينية. وترتكب هذه الجرائم ضد الفلسطينيين لإفساح المجال أمام إقامة المستوطنات الإسرائيلية غير القانونية التي تدعمها الحكومة الإسرائيلية
ومن الواضح أن المستوطنات غير قانونية بموجب القانون الدولي، الذي يعترف بحق بحدود عام 1967. ومع ذلك، منذ عام 1967، شيدت إسرائيل 250 منها في جميع أنحاء الضفة الغربية، حيث يعيش أكثر من 633 ألف إسرائيلي في مساكن مدعومة وفاخرة في كثير من الأحيان مع حمامات سباحة ومروج مشذبة، وهو امتياز لا يمكن تصوره لجميع الفلسطينيين تقريبًا.
icahd.org/2020/03/15/end-home-demolitions-an-introduction/
www.ochaopt.org/sites/default/files/westbank_a0_25_06_202...
6) Never ending acts of settler terrorism against Palestinians. Western media rightly condemns occasional Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians, including the appalling atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October. However, for years illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank have staged attacks against Palestinians, sometimes motivated sheerly by hatred, but often by the desire to inflict terror and to ethnically cleanse an area. The most recent incident was an attack on Wednesday 11 October in which masked settlers killed three Palestinian villagers and then killed a Palestinian father and son attending the funeral the next day.
وضع حد لأعمال الإرهاب التي يمارسها المستوطنون ضد الفلسطينيين. وتدين وسائل الإعلام الغربية عن حق الهجمات الفلسطينية العرضية على المدنيين الإسرائيليين، بما في ذلك الفظائع المروعة التي ارتكبتها حماس في 7 تشرين الأول/أكتوبر. ومع ذلك، ظل المستوطنون الإسرائيليون غير الشرعيين في الضفة الغربية لسنوات يشنون هجمات ضد الفلسطينيين، بدافع الكراهية في بعض الأحيان، ولكن في كثير من الأحيان بسبب التصميم على ترويع الفلسطينيين وتطهيرهم عرقيًا من منطقة ما. وكانت آخر الحوادث هي الهجوم الذي وقع يوم الأربعاء 11 تشرين الأول/أكتوبر، حيث قتل مستوطنون ملثمون ثلاثة قرويين فلسطينيين ثم قتلوا أبًا فلسطينيًا وابنه كانا يحضران الجنازة في اليوم التالي.
theintercept.com/2023/10/13/israel-settlers-gaza-palestin...
arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-dynamics-of-israeli-settler...
7) The division of Palestinian land by the separation wall. The 708 km Separation Wall, completed in 2005, was supposedly built to protect Israel from any Palestinians that might be able to enter the country without permission, but 85% of it runs up to 18 km inside the internationally recognised 1967 boundary ("Green Line"), frequently dividing Palestinians villagers from their farmland as well as running through the middle of farms and dividing arable land from key water supplies.
Some 10% of the West Bank now lies between the wall and the 1967 border, an area into which everyone, except Palestinians, is allowed entry. Not surprisingly, the International Court of Justice has issued an advisory opinion that the separation wall is a contravention of international law and in 2003 the UN General Assembly passed a resolution demanding its removal by 144 votes to just 4. Analysts also fear that the wall acts as a de facto annexation of all the Palestinian land that lies to the west of it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_West_Bank_barrier
8) The myth of Palestinian rejectionism. Western mainstream media usually maintains falsely that it is Palestinians that have constantly rejected a two-state solution, whereas the opposite is the case. Arab states and the Palestinians have frequently made clear their willingness to negotiate a future two-state solution on the basis of the 1967 frontiers, while Israel is committed to preventing any such solution and continuing its territorial expansion.
As early as 1976, Egypt, Syria and Jordan presented a two-state solution resolution to the UN Security Council based on the 1967 Green Line (in accordance with the international consensus) but it was vetoed outright by the United States, even though Washington at the time publicly acknowledged the illegality of all Israeli settlements across the Palestinian West Bank. The same happened again in 1980.
Later in 1988, the PLO put forward their position in a declaration by the Palestinian National Council calling for a Palestinian state alongside Israel with guarantees of security to both countries. However in May 1989, Israel's Likud-Labour coalition government made it crystal clear that they would not accept an "additional" Palestinian state between Jordan and Israel, regardless of what Jordanians, Palestinians or the rest of the world might think. The founding charter of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party still "flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan river."
9) The frequent killing by Israeli security forces of peaceful protesters, women, children, journalists and medics, including the assassination of renowned Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh in May last year. In the nine months of 2023 prior to 7 October, 248 Palestinians, 40 of them children, had been killed by Israeli soldiers, but these deaths attracted almost no attention in the Western media. Palestinian lives have always been very cheap.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMIZTiN-TrE
10) The current refusal of Israel to allow any journalists into the Gaza Strip so they can see and report on, obviously at their own risk, the destruction and casualties and suffering of the civilian population.
11) An end to "administrative detentions" across the West Bank under which thousands of Palestinians have been detained without any right to be told under what charges they are being held, let alone any right to a free trial. As the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem explains
"Administrative detention is incarceration without trial or charge, alleging that a person plans to commit a future offense. It has no time limit, and the evidence on which it is based is not disclosed. Israel employs this measure extensively and routinely, and has used it to hold thousands of Palestinians for lengthy periods of time. While detention orders are formally reviewed, this is merely a semblance of judicial oversight, as detainees cannot reasonably mount a defense against undisclosed allegations. Nevertheless, courts uphold the vast majority of orders."
www.btselem.org/topic/administrative_detention
12) An end to Israeli soldiers controlling access to and frequently preventing Muslims from visiting the Al Aqsa Mosque in Israeli occupied East Jerusalem [Al Quds], considered the third holiest site in Islam after Mecca and Medina. On several occasions, Israeli troops and/or police have also attacked worshippers using batons, stun grenades and tear gas, igniting understandable anger across the Islamic World. Radical Israeli settlers also sometimes enter under the protection of Israeli security forces and some also perform Jewish rituals in contravention of current agreements about non-Muslims being allowed in, but only as visitors.
www.newarab.com/news/israeli-settlers-storm-aqsa-compound...
www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/3/12/israeli-police-assault-w...
Kamera: Zero 612F
Film: Rollei Retro 400S @ box speed
Kjemi: Rodinal (1:25 / 10:30 min. @ 20°C)
Gary Moore: After the War (1989)
- The numbers as per 27 March 2024 -
Killed:
- Gaza: 32,490+ killed - including 13,790+ children, 9,100+ women, 1,049 elderly, 364 paramedics and medical staff, 152 UN staff
[* Above numbers are official numbers from the Gaza Health Ministry.
Israeli government claimed numbers are - Killed: 13,000-19,500 civilians (as of 10 March 2024) + 13,000+ resistance fighters (as of 29 Feb. 2024).
US Intelligence estimates are - Killed: 5,000-9,000 resistance fighters (as of 21 Jan. 2024).
Hamas numbers given are - Killed: ~6,000 resistance fighters (as of 19 Feb. 2024)]
- Israel: 1,475 killed - 819 civilians and 668 ‘servicemembers’ - (596 IDF soldiers + 62 police officers and 10 Shin Bet operatives) [* Note: The civilian numbers from Israel are upscaled and include 695 civilian Israelis + 72 civilian foreigners (dual nationals?) killed on Oct. 7 + 32 hostages and a few casualties in various Israeli towns unrelated to the war inside Gaza. IDF casualty numbers (596) are obviously severely downscaled.]
- Palestinian resistance fighters killed inside Israel (Oct. 7): 1,609 (+200 captured) [total number of raiders estimated at 3,000]
- West Bank: 435 killed (including 115 children)
- Lebanon: 322 killed (including 213 Hezbollah fighters, 32 Palestinian fighters, 6 Amal movement fighters and 63 civilians)
- Journalists: 200+ killed
- Syria: 135 killed (including 56 Iranian-backed militiamen, 31 Hezbollah fighters and 14 civilians)
Wounded:
- Gaza: 74,787+ - 75% women and children
- Israel: 10,580+ [mostly IDF in Gaza] (not updated since 31 Jan. 2024)
- West Bank: 4,700+
Hostages:
- Taken: 253 (*has previously been reported in an increasing manner as 239, 245, 248 and 250, 253, 254) - including more than 133 IDF soldiers, 120+ civilians (32 children), of whom 52 foreign or dual-nationals)
- Killed I: 70 (by Israeli bombing)
- Killed II: 44 («subsequently killed»; i.e. by IDF ground troops)
- Released hostages: 109 (through negotiations)
- Rescued hostages: 3 (with troops in Gaza)
- Remaining hostages: 27 - Do the math
- Remaining hostages (Israeli claim): 101 living hostages and 33 dead bodies
- Recovered hostages (Dead bodies): 11
Missing:
- Gaza: 8,000+ - 70% women and children (in the rubble)
- Israel: 1
Displaced / Refugees:
- Palestinians: 1,900,000
- Israelis: 200,000-500,000
- Lebanese: 76,000 [*not updated since 9 Jan. 2024]
Houses in Gaza destroyed by Israeli bombing:
- 10 October 2023: 1,000 houses
- 19 October 2023: 98,000 houses
- 22 October 2023: 42% of all houses
- * No longer reported on Wikipedia (but more than 60%).
Number of Israeli settlers in occupied Palestine since 1967:
- 1972: 10,531
- 1983: 99,795
- 1993: 269,200
- 2004: 423,913
- 2007: 467,478
- 2010: 512,769
- 2018: 645,800
- 2020: 671,700
- 2022: 733,000
- 2024: 800,000 (estimate)
- Sources: Wikipedia - Articles 'Israel-Hamas War' - 'Israel-Hamas war hostage crisis - ‘Israeli settlement’ & 'Killing of journalists in the Israel–Hamas war'.
Building Bridges of Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers, a 117-foot long mural on 24th Street and Capp Street, was executed in 1997 by Eric Norberg and Mike Ramos for HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) and project coordinator Nancy Hernandez.
The anti-Zionist mural, depicting "related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression", came under heavy protest from the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the HOMEY artists had to remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance.
Che visited the Shati refugee camp and was warmly welcomed by its Palestinian inhabitants. The image above which shows Che and other dignitaries with Ahmad Salim, the powerful Egyptian governor of Gaza. The press contingent was kept to a minimum, no iconic photographs were published and – so it seems – only a single image survived. Though Che and the Cubans visited several refugee camps, by day’s end, they dined with the Brazilian contingent of the UN Emergency Force.
Che Guevara, the Latin American revolutionary, came to visit the Gaza Strip in 1959 at Nasser’s invitation.
Guevara’s visit was momentous. It was the first time that a famous revolutionary had come to see the devastation created by Al Nakba first hand. He was met enthusiastically by resistance leaders, such as Abdullah Abu Sitta, leader of the fedayeen and leader of the southern front in the Arab Revolt of 1936 (to the far right in Arab dress) and Qassem el Farra (third from right), Secretary of Khan Younis Municipality who kept records of Fedayeen and their activities. Both were members of the Palestine Legislative Council.
Guevara told Palestinian refugees they must continue the struggle to liberate their land. There was no way but resistance to occupation, he said. He admitted that their case was ‘complex’ because the settlers occupied their homes. ‘The right must eventually be restored’, Guevara affirmed. He offered to supply arms and training but Cuban president Fidel Castro wanted this aid to be coordinated through Nasser.
Mustafa Abu Middain, leader of the Al Bureij camp, took Guevara to visit the camp and showed him cases of poverty and hardship. ‘We have worse cases of poverty’, Guevara shot back. ‘You should show me what you have done to liberate your country. Where are the training camps? Where are the factories to manufacture arms? Where are people’s mobilization centers?’
Guevara was accompanied by General Caprera, an expert in guerrilla warfare. Caprera met with community leaders to advise on methods of resistance. Guevara became the icon of Palestinian resistance and struggle for freedom.
After Guevara’s visit, Cuba gave scholarships to Palestinian students, granted citizenship for stranded Palestinians and held many conferences in support of Palestine.
Building Bridges of Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers, a 117-foot long mural on 24th Street and Capp Street, was executed in 1997 by Eric Norberg and Mike Ramos for HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) and project coordinator Nancy Hernandez.
The anti-Zionist mural, depicting "related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression", came under heavy protest from the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the HOMEY artists had to remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance.
Building Bridges of Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers, a 117-foot long mural on 24th Street and Capp Street, was executed in 1997 by Eric Norberg and Mike Ramos for HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) and project coordinator Nancy Hernandez.
The anti-Zionist mural, depicting "related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression", came under heavy protest from the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the HOMEY artists had to remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance.
Building Bridges of Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers, a 117-foot long mural on 24th Street and Capp Street, was executed in 1997 by Eric Norberg and Mike Ramos for HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) and project coordinator Nancy Hernandez.
The anti-Zionist mural, depicting "related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression", came under heavy protest from the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the HOMEY artists had to remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance.
11 Jan 2009, Jabaliya refugee camp, GAZA STRIP, --- --- Hamas militant, Ahmed Zakot who was killed during Israel's offensive rests besides a newborn baby that was placed next to him during his funeral in the northern Gaza Strip, 11 January 2009. Israeli forces are conducting an offensive against Hamas in Gaza by land, sea and air, while Palestinian rockets continue to hit Israel. Palestinian Islamic group Hamas refused a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution on 10 January 2009 saying that it would not help the Palestinian cause or Palestinian resistance, the Islamist group said in a statement. EPA/ALI ALI --- Image by
Building Bridges of Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers, a 117-foot long mural on 24th Street and Capp Street, was executed in 1997 by Eric Norberg and Mike Ramos for HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) and project coordinator Nancy Hernandez.
The anti-Zionist mural, depicting "related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression", came under heavy protest from the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the HOMEY artists had to remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance.
Kamera: Nikon FE2
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Kodak 5222 @ ISO 400
Kjemi: Fomadon Excel (stock / 9 min. @ 20°C)
Chris Hedges: To Kill A People (publ. 23 November 2024)
TRANSCRIPT
Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped — and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon — it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza. It will turn southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive, decimated by bombs and die from starvation and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon — 2,400 people have been killed and over 1.2 million Lebanese have been displaced — in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. It is already turning its genocidal fury on the West Bank. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei (b. 1939) and carry out airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear installations and oil facilities.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949) and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House — Antony Blinken (b. 1962), raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk (b. 1973), Amos Hochstein (b. 1973), who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan (b. 1976) — are true believers in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel’s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.
In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon’s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery — we call it terrorism — what was done to those slain in the previous generation.
Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created Hezbollah, should have taught us this.
But this is a lesson that is never learned.
How could the Bush administration imagine it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children.
Israel’s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst for Osama bin Laden’s (1957-2011) attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.
I see nothing to alt Israel, especially since the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties and cowed the media and universities. There is money to be made in war. A lot of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.
Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it uses to justify an occupation that is even more savage than that of apartheid South Africa. Its ‘democracy’ — which was always exclusively for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country towards fascism. Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are subject to constant state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within America’s democracy, along with a culture of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.
By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months more of warfare — its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation – which it successfully sold to its western audiences – will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy.
Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will atrophy. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will join the club of the globe’s most despotic regimes.
Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal.
Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity. When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses.
All Israel has left is escalating savagery, including torture and lethal violence against unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. The Israeli military has carred out 93 massacres in Gaza in the last year. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern Ireland and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the long term, it is suicidal.
The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas’ resistance fighters into heroes in the Global South. Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinian leaders, including Yahya Sinwar (1962-2024). It assassinated Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi (1947-2004), one of the founders of Hamas, who I knew, and Khalil al-Wazir (1935-1988), known as Abu Jihad, and who founded the PLO with Yasser Arafat (1929-2004), who I also knew. But the daily humiliation, forced impoverishment, indiscriminate violence, long prison terms and torture is fertile training ground for resistance leaders. There is no shortage of radicalized Palestinians who can take Sinwar's place. The long struggle for freedom by Palestinians has made this point over and over and over.
Run, the Israelis demand of the Palestinians in Gaza, run for your lives. Run from Rafah the way you ran from Gaza City, the way you ran from Jabalia, the way you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way you ran from Bani Suheila, the way you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we will kill you. We will drop GBU-39 bombs on your tent encampments and set them ablaze. We will spray you with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We will pound you with artillery and tank shells. We will shoot you down with snipers. We will decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and towns, your homes, your schools, your hospitals and your water purification plants. We will rain death from the sky.
Run for your lives. Again and again and again. Pack up the few belongings you have left. Blankets. A couple of pots. Some clothes. We don’t care how exhausted you are, how hungry you are, how terrified you are, how sick you are, how old, or how young you are. Run. Run. Run. And when you run in terror to one part of Gaza, we will make you turn around and run to another. Trapped in a labyrinth of death. Back and forth. Up and down. Side to side. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten times. We toy with you like mice in a trap. Then we deport you so you can never return. Or we kill you.
Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals die. We poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve. We created this hell. We are the masters. Law. Duty. A code of conduct. They do not exist for us.
But first we toy with you. We humiliate you. We terrorize you. We revel in your fear. We are amused by your pathetic attempts to survive. You are not human. You are creatures. Untermensch. We feed our lust for domination. Look at our posts on social media. They have gone viral. One shows soldiers grinning in a Palestinian home with the owners tied up and blindfolded in the background. We loot. Rugs. Cosmetics. Motorbikes. Jewelry. Watches. Cash. Gold. Antiquities. We mock your misery. We cheer your death. We celebrate our religion, our nation, our identity, our superiority, by negating and erasing yours.
Depravity is moral. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption.
This is the game of terror played by Israel in Gaza. It was the game played during the Dirty War in Argentina, which I covered as a reporter, when the military junta “disappeared” 30,000 of its own citizens. The “disappeared” were subjected to torture — who cannot call what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza torture? — and humiliated before they were murdered. It was the game played in the clandestine torture centers and prisons I reported on in El Salvador and Iraq. It is what I saw in the Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia.
Israeli journalist Yinon Magal (b. 1969) on the show “Hapatriotim” on Israel’s Channel 14, joked that Joe Biden’s red line was the killing of 30,000 Palestinians. The singer Kobi Peretz (b. 1975) asked if that was the number of dead for a day. The audience erupted in applause and laughter.
We know Israel’s intent. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way the United States annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews. The specifics are different. The goal is the same. Erasure.
We cannot plead ignorance.
But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a permanent ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt — the hospitals, the universities, the mosques, the housing. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.
The vaunted democratic values, morality and respect for human rights, claimed by Israel and the United States, has always been a lie. The real credo is this – we have everything and if you try and take it away from us we will kill you. People of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. The hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom of those outside the empire are worthless. Global domination will be sustained through racialized violence.
This lie — that the American empire is predicated on democracy and liberty — is one the Palestinians, and those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans, not to mention those who live in the Middle East, have known for decades. But it is a lie that still has currency in the United States and Israel, a lie used to justify the unjustifiable.
We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we, as Americans, are Israel, infected with the same white supremacy, and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our advanced weaponry.
The U.S. occupation forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, replicating what they did in Vietnam, deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children.
“After the war,” Nick Turse (b. 1975) writes, “most scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai came to stand for — and thus blot out — all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers’ perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”
Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over five million live in Gaza and the West Bank.
Israel’s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance.
What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia’s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath — much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs — decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.
This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.
The killers in the Indonesian war against “communism” are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their “heroic” battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the “Brownshirts” or the Hitler Youth — in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation.
We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.
Industrial slaughter – what the sociologist James William Gibson calls “technowar”— defines Israel’s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of “overkill.” Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deternece. It is what Israel, cynically, calls “mowing the lawn.”
The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.
Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents. Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.9 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.
The Israeli blockade of northern Gaza has left over 400,000 Palestinians are enduring a starvation siege and constant airstrikes in an attempt to depopulate the north. Israeli forces have killed 1,250 Palestinians in the assault, launched on October 5, a medical source told Al Jazeera. Reports from northern Gaza are difficult to obtain as internet and phone services have been cut and the few journalists on the ground continue to be killed. Civil defense units say they have been barred by Israeli forces from reaching the sites of strikes and their crews have been attacked.
Israel has ordered Palestinians to flee to designated “safe zones,” but once in these “safe zones” they have been attacked and ordered to move to new “safe zones.”
Israel has killed at least 42,600 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. It has wounded 99,800 others, many with life crippling injuries. It has killed at least 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. Two-hundred and thirty-three UNRWA workers have been killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, 2023, the highest death toll in U.N. history. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.
At the same time, Israel has turned Gaza inrto a toxic wasteland.
“Nearly 40 million tons of debris, including unexploded ordnance and human remains, contaminate the ecosystem,” the U.N. reports. “More than 140 temporary waste sites and 340,000 tons of waste, untreated wastewater and sewage overflow contribute to the spread of diseases such as hepatitis A, respiratory infections, diarrhea and skin diseases.”
In a further blow, the Israeli parliament approved a bill to ban UNRWA, a lifeline for Palestinians in Gaza, from operating on Israeli territory and areas under Israel’s control. The ban almost certainly ensures the collapse of aid distribution, already crippled, in Gaza.
Israel has expanded its “buffer zone” along the Gaza perimeter to 16 percent of the territory, in the process leveling homes, apartment blocks and farms. It has pushed over 84 percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza into “a shrinking, unsafe ‘humanitarian zone’ covering 12.6 percent of a territory now reconfigured in preparation for annexation.” Satellite imagery indicates that the Israeli military has built roads and military bases in over 26 percent of Gaza, “suggesting the aim of a permanent presence.”
Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated.
Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children.
Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building - including mosques, hospitals and schools - protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.
These accusations, Francesca Albanese (b. 1977), the U.N. Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”
“In August,” Albanese writes in her most recent report, “entry permits for humanitarian organizations nearly halved. Access to water has been restricted to a quarter of pre-7 October levels. Approximately 93 per cent of the agricultural, forestry and fishing economies has been destroyed; 95 per cent of Palestinians face high levels of acute food insecurity, and deprivation for decades to come.”
“In recent months, 83 percent of food aid was prevented from entering Gaza, and the civilian police in Rafah were repeatedly targeted, impairing distribution,” the report notes. “At least 34 deaths from malnutrition were recorded by 14 September 2024.”
These measures, she notes, “indicate an intent to destroy its population through starvation.”
The occupation and genocide would not be sustained without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance. The U.S. has spent $ 17.9 billion on military aid to Israel in the last 12 months, including providing 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 Thomas Friedman (b. 1953) telling Charlie Rose (b. 1942) on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this” ? That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.
As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wilfires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.
The scorched earth tactics in Gaza and Lebanon are becoming common in the West Bank.
Thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank towns of Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Tubas and Tulkarem live for days under curfew, making it difficult to access food and water. As in Gaza, the Israeli army targets ambulances, blocks entrances to hospitals and bulldozes streets, electricity and public health infrastructure.
Drones and war planes carry out airstrikes. Israeli roadblocks, checkpoints and blockades make travel difficult or impossible. Israel has suspended financial transfers to the Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the West Bank in collaboration with Israel. It has revoked 148,000 work permits for those who had jobs in Israel.
“The gross domestic product (GDP) of the West Bank contracted by 22.7 percent, nearly 30 percent of businesses have closed, and 292,000 jobs have been lost,” the report reads. Over 692 Palestinians — “10 times the previous 14 years’ annual average of 69 fatalities,” have been killed and more than 5,000 have been injured. Of the 169 Palestinian children who have been killed, “nearly 80 percent were shot in the head or the torso.”
Albanese’s report dismisses the claim that Israel is carrying out the assault in Gaza and the West Bank to “defend itself,” “eradicate Hamas” or “bring the hostages home,” charging that these claims are “camouflage,” a way of “invisibilizing the crime.” Genocidal intent, as Judge Dalveer Bhandari (b. 1947) from the ICJ points out, “may exist simultaneously with other, ulterior motives.”
Rather, the incursion into Israel by Hamas and other resistance fighters on Oct. 7 “provided the impetus to advance towards the goal of a ‘Greater Israel.’”
Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.
There is only one way to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh (1962-2024), that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.
The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump (b. 1946). Kamala Harris (b. 1964) has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden (b. 1942). There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter.
In short, we are impotent and must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the shipment of billions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.
Genocide, the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration. It is a moral issue. It is about the eradication of a people. Any surrender to genocide condemns us as a nation and as a species. It plunges the global society one step closer to barbarity. It eviscerates the rule of law and mocks every fundamental value we claim to honor. It is in a category by itself. And to not, with every fiber of our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in what Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) defines as “radical evil,” the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.
The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo Levi (1919-1987) stress, is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes very little. We can all become complicit, if only through indifference and apathy, in evil.
“Monsters exist,” Levi, who survived Auschwitz, writes, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
To confront evil — even if there is no chance of success — keeps alive our humanity and dignity. It allows us, as Václav Havel (1936-2011) writes in “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to suppress. It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It tells the victims they are not alone. It is “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position” and an “attempt to regain control over one’s sense of responsibility.”
What does it say about us if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds hundreds of innocents a day?
What does it say about us if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens of thousands will get sick and many will die?
What does it say about us if we permit for over 12 months the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to wipe out families and force survivors to camp out in the open or find shelter in crude tents?
What does it say about us when we accept the murder of 11,000 children, although this is surely an undercount?
What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools — including the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr, or dawn prayers — and other emergency shelters?
What does it say about us when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of Israeli troops, at times dressed in Israeli military uniforms?
What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of prisoners?
Are these the kinds of allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we want to embrace? What message does this send to the rest of the world?
If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible. Hope lies in the university encampments, in the occupation of buildings, in the hunger strikes, in the streets, and of course, in third parties that defy the empire. These people, who march to the beat of a different drummer, are the nation’s conscience.
A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.
“But what of the price of peace?” the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan (1921-2016), who was sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood:”
I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious. We are called to defy — through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance — the laws of the state, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers.
“Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths,” the Roman historian Tacitus (c. AD 56 - c. 120) wrote of those the emperor Nero (AD 37 - AD 68) singled out for torture and death. “Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”
Sadism by the powerful is the curse of the human condition. It was as prevalent in ancient Rome as it is in Israel.
We know the modern face of Nero, who illuminated his opulent garden parties by burning to death captives tied to stakes. That is not in dispute.
But who were Nero’s guests? Who wandered through the emperor’s grounds as human beings, as in Rafah, were burned alive? How could these guests see, and no doubt hear, such horrendous suffering and witness such appalling torture and be indifferent, even content?
Who were Nero’s guests?
We are Nero’s guests.
History will judge Israel for this genocide. But it will also judge us. It will ask why we did not do more, why we did not sever all agreements, all trade deals, all accords, all cooperation with the apartheid state, why we did not halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we did not recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime trade in the Red Sea was disrupted by Yemen an alternative overland route into Israel was set up by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, why we did not do everything in our power to end the slaughter. It will condemn us for not heeding the fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which is not that Jews are eternal victims, but that when you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable.
“The opposite of good is not evil,” Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) wrote. “The opposite of good is indifference.”
The Palestinian resistance is our resistance. The Palestinian struggle for dignity, freedom and independence is our struggle. The Palestinian cause is our cause. For, as history has also shown, those who were once Nero’s guests soon became Nero’s victims.
Source: The Chris Hedges Report: Chris Hedges at UCSB: To Kill a People (publ. 23 November 2024) [substack]
Building Bridges of Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers, a 117-foot long mural on 24th Street and Capp Street, was executed in 1997 by Eric Norberg and Mike Ramos for HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) and project coordinator Nancy Hernandez.
The anti-Zionist mural, depicting "related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression", came under heavy protest from the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the HOMEY artists had to remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance.
Building Bridges of Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers, a 117-foot long mural on 24th Street and Capp Street, was executed in 1997 by Eric Norberg and Mike Ramos for HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) and project coordinator Nancy Hernandez.
The anti-Zionist mural, depicting "related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression", came under heavy protest from the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the HOMEY artists had to remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance.
Building Bridges of Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers, a 117-foot long mural on 24th Street and Capp Street, was executed in 1997 by Eric Norberg and Mike Ramos for HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) and project coordinator Nancy Hernandez.
The anti-Zionist mural, depicting "related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression", came under heavy protest from the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the HOMEY artists had to remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance.
Building Bridges of Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers, a 117-foot long mural on 24th Street and Capp Street, was executed in 1997 by Eric Norberg and Mike Ramos for HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) and project coordinator Nancy Hernandez.
The anti-Zionist mural, depicting "related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression", came under heavy protest from the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the HOMEY artists had to remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance.
Protesters chant against Mubarak, and in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, as they try to break the police cordon around their protest in downtown Cairo...
We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.
Building Bridges of Solidarity: Breaking Down Barriers, a 117-foot long mural on 24th Street and Capp Street, was executed in 1997 by Eric Norberg and Mike Ramos for HOMEY (Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth) and project coordinator Nancy Hernandez.
The anti-Zionist mural, depicting "related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression", came under heavy protest from the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) and the HOMEY artists had to remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance.
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)
Linse: Nikkor-S Auto 50mm f1.4 (1970)
Film: Cinestill BWXX (Kodak 5222) @ ISO 200
Kjemi: Xtol (stock / 8 min. @ 21°C)
-Latest dispatch from Mahmood OD, an arab israeli from Haifa living in the UK who follows the news in both Israel and the arabic world and gives eloquent updates in english faster than most mainstream western news media.
Mahmood OD: Isra-Hell Day (published 23 Jan. 2024)
TRANSCRIPT
Hello everyone, welcome back to another video. We've had the most disastrous day on Israeli forces since the beginning of this war, following the 7th of October.
The Israeli Army admitted that 24 of its soldiers were killed when two houses detonated with all of the forces inside them. So what exactly happened, and why is Israel detonating homes in Gaza? They're detonating blocks of properties in Gaza.
I'm going to reach that in a sec, but firstly the Army spokesperson, he admitted that it was a very painful and disastrous day for Israel this morning he admitted that 24 were killed, and you need to make a note here, these are the numbers of soldiers who died after their families were informed. So Israel doesn't publish the numbers of the dead soldiers unless they notify their families. We also have 33 wounded. Now, the Telegram accounts in Israel were going mad this morning, many people reported hundreds of people dead, hundreds of Israeli soldiers in Gaza, and the IDF spokesperson he also said that people need to be considerate of the families and the people who lost loved ones, and they shouldn't spread rumours, so they were worried about the fact that people were already spreading rumours about the numbers of soldiers who died.
So what exactly happened? Israeli soldiers from Brigade 261 accompanied by engineering corps, they were planting explosives in 10 residential blocks of flats in Gaza. I'm going to get to why they're actually ruining these blocks in a sec. They were planting these devices, and all of a sudden a Palestinian resistance fighter from Al-Qassam brigades went out from a tunnel, most likely tens of meters away. Israel said that they went out from the bushes somewhere, and he targeted an Israeli tank. When he targeted the Israeli tank, apparently all of those explosives detonated, making a massive explosion. 24 were killed, 33 are wounded and 11 were in a critical condition.
These numbers don't include the soldiers with dual citizenship. Israel doesn't count them as Israeli soldiers who were killed, because they have a dual citizenship. So they could be from
Britain, or in any other part, but the fact that they're admitting to this number, the fact that we are having rumours of hundreds being killed, and the fact that Israel doesn't usually admit the real numbers of soldiers that are killed, all prove that this is the most difficult and lethal day since this war began.
We had joint press conferences for the first time in several weeks with Benjamin Netanyahu (b. 1949), Benny Gantz (b. 1959) and Yoav Gallant (b. 1958), to show a united front in front of the Israeli population, and obviously this event, it came down as a massive blast on the Israeli society. Many people are criticizing Israel, the whole campaign, the fact that so many people are dying, still over 107 days after this war started.
And it didn't just end with this disaster. Another Hannibal directive event took place today. Al-Qassam brigades reported that they targeted another Israeli tank with Yassin 105 RPG missile. Israeli rescue forces tried to rescue the soldiers who were remaining, who were wounded after they attacked this tank, and Hamas continued to attack them. After the Israelis saw that they are unable to rescue the soldiers, they landed multiple bombs from airplanes and killed all of their soldiers. This was confirmed by the Palestinian resistance. So, you're talking about further killings of IDF Soldiers by the IDF yet again.
This isn't the first time: Killing them in tunnels, running over them, killing them in friendly fire, we've had a report the other day, that one in five Israeli soldiers who were killed in Gaza was killed due to friendly fire; imagine that. Imagine the accuracy and competency of this Army, and we're seeing it yet again today with this tank event in Gaza.
Now, with regards to wiping down whole blocks: Why is Israel destroying blocks? Previously they had air strikes, and they were destroying civilian buildings to make life hell for the people of Gaza and to expel the population of Gaza, but now that they're done with the first round of taking down buildings from planes, why are they taking down civilian buildings, whole blocks with tens of dozens of houses in them?
Well, we've had an interview with Daniella Weiss (b. 1945). Daniella Weiss was a former mayor in Kedumim settlement [and a notable figure in the extremist Gush Emunim settlement movement since the 1970s], and she's the current director of an organization called Nahala. Nahala is a settler organization.
[Note: Nahala is the present-day successor to the Gush Emunim settlement movent that Daniella Weiss founded together with Moshe Levinger (1935-2015) in 2005. You can see her own presentation of the Nahala settler movement from 2015 on YouTube]
Now, this woman is a real far right activist, far, far, right in Israel. She works on building settlements and outposts in multiple parts of the West Bank, and now she has a plan for Gaza, which clarifies why the IDF is taking down these whole neighborhoods.
She was asked in that interview in Arutz Sheva; Channel 7, about the day after in Gaza. She said that their purpose is to make life hell for the Palestinians. They need to create a human crisis so that the Palestinians in Gaza can leave. She said that eventually, Egypt, Turkey and the EU will have to take these refugees; like they took Syrian refugees, and that some of them might go to America, some of them might go to Southern America; across the world. They need to go, and leave Gaza, and she showed maps in that interview; 3D maps of new settlements in Gaza over the ruins of the homes in Gaza that the IOF destroyed during their genocide campaign. And when she was pushed about the actual population living in Gaza, she said outright: I'm not thinking about the Arabs, I'm thinking about the Jews, I'm thinking about Israel, I'm thinking about the Jewish people, these people need to leave because Gaza is ours, it's part of Israel.
So this is clarifying, and thankfully we have these people who actually say things as they are. I mean, we've got hints from the Israeli political and military leadership that they're going to return Gaza to the Stone Ages, that they're going to make Gaza uninhabitable, that they're treating them as human animals, but when you also see these people with organizations with
maps, with plans about the day after in Gaza, the whole picture starts to be clear, and these people are preparing the settlers to go and buy property; so they're promising them in their brochures, that now you're going to have a home with a sea view, because the West Bank, they don't have sea view, it's mostly mountains and valleys, but now this woman is promising the settlers that they're going to have a sea view over the ruins of Gaza.
And that's one of the main reasons that Israel is targeting so many blocks and civilian buildings, when there's no real need to, because if you talk about the tunnels; the Palestinian
resistance already proved that they can get out from the rubble, even from destroyed buildings - as a matter of fact, all of the videos that they show, and that they have shown for the past 3 months show that they're going out of ruins. They're getting out of tunnels, going into destroyed homes and attacking the Israeli IOF forces.
Israel isn't making it easier for its soldiers in Gaza by destroying these places, because in urban warfare it's much more complicated to fight an enemy on ruins. You would rather have Block C, where you're going, everything is intact, and then have urban warfare, but when you're ruining everything, the resistance fighters have more dynamics when it comes to hiding; popping out, popping back in, and it's much more difficult for the Israeli Army to identify them. So there is no real military reason for this destruction. Clearly, these people ARE preparing for the day after, and they ARE preparing for their delusions and fantasies of establishing more settlements in Gaza; enforcing and expelling the Palestinian population, saying that the countries of the World will have to accept these people.
We're also having more criticism as to what happened on the 7th of October. Channel 13 [See the the program mentioned here: Military’s 7 October claims refuted by Israeli journalist ]; they released images of Israeli soldiers, some of them participate in having tours with journalists from the World about what happened, according to them, on the 7th of October, and they brought one soldier claiming that there was a massacre for babies, that babies were hung on ropes, and that there was a Holocaust survivor, apparently telling them about all of these horrors that happened on the 7th of October, and the news reporter was criticizing him, saying that the spokesperson, an executive spokesperson of Be’eri denied that there were any massacres of babies, or that babies were hung, and imagine, these people are bringing journalists and reporters from across the world, giving them that narrative, a false narrative, a facade narrative, a manipulation propagandist narrative that some people still repeat to this day on mainstream media and online; those who are slaves to the Zionists of course, and it's getting criticism from Israel, I mean, we've had them publishing images of the tanks in Be’eri, they published images of the helicopters shooting on the revelers in the festival, which all confirm that the big massacres, the REAL massacres of civilians on the 7th of October have happened from the Israeli forces, and I spoke about them many times previously in several videos, so there's more and more criticism happening from Israel, and it's also hinting that the distrust in the mainstream narrative is growing day after day; people have no trust in mainstream media altogether, but to try and keep some sort of faith in mainstream media they're posting these criticisms, and people are clearly not believing the political leadership, and also, and more importantly; they're not believing the military leadership, especially when it comes to deliberate killings of Israeli hostages in Gaza; whether it's through the gas tunnels, whether it's through bombings, previously, or when it comes to the recent Hannibal directive implementation on the tank with wounded soldiers that Israel failed to rescue.
We also had a very intense day in Lebanon. Today; Hezbollah attacked the Meiron Command Center in Northern Israel; they attacked it previously as retaliation for [the assassination of] Saleh al-Arouri (1966-2024). The Meiron is one of Israel's main command bases in the country. They have one in the South, Mitzpe Ramon, and they have one in Meiron, which is in charge of the surveillance and control of everything to do with the Israeli forces and uavs across the region in the northern part of Israel; so anything to do with Syria, with Lebanon, with Turkey, with the Eastern Northern part of the Mediterranean, and some other parts in the Gulf, some Gulf States as well.
So they attacked it again, now last time they attacked it, they launched 62 missiles, all of which landed, and we had confirmed hits, and today we saw the same thing confirmed, landings and Hezbollah declared that this is a retaliation to the assassinations that are happening in Lebanon against senior figures, so they're clearly sending Israel a message that we are still retaliating for those assassinations, and it didn't just end with the previous attack, they also attacked one of the main command centers in Safed a couple of weeks ago as part of their retaliation campaign for the assassinations, and Israel also published images of direct targeting of that base.
So, it's intensifying, it's not reducing, and yesterday we had the Israeli defense minister saying that we will continue even if Hezbollah stop the war to create a new security reality and allow our citizens to go back to the North. So, they're having massive problems with citizens going back to settlements where they were evacuated from. I mean, the Israeli spokesperson, the IDF spokesperson today said that in Gaza they still have resistance movements active in the borders of Gaza. He said that they were individuals, but they were still active, and that the IDF is still carrying out attacks against them to make it secure for the people of the South to go back, and none of these people are trusting the Israeli authorities; some of them are saying, we're not going to come back ever; many of them already purchased houses in Central Israel, and it's similar with the North: You're talking about a quarter of a million people unwilling to go back to their homes, on top of the Israelis who already fled the country: We have 2.5 million now who fled Israel, AND you're talking about these people inside of Israel, refusing to go back to these settlements, and some of them are very crucial to the Israeli economy, whether when it comes to agriculture, production factories, many of them are in the South because there are massive spaces of lands, and they're used for many production industries in Israel - So; they're facing a massive crisis when it comes to these people, and they're putting a pressure on them to reach a solution when it comes to eliminating the threat, or any potential of another seventh of October happening again to them.
The last thing that I wanted to talk about is an interesting interview we had today from Al Jazera with Sami Abu Zuhri who is a senior Hamas official. He was talking about a new discussion regarding a deal; a ceasefire deal. Now, in my video yesterday I spoke about a Mossad proposal to the Israeli War cabinet to try and reach a ceasefire. Obviously Hamas declared that they're not going to negotiate under fire; that for there to be any hostage deal, that Israel must COMPLETELY stop this war, withdraw from Gaza, keep Hamas in power as well, and Israel obviously doesn't want to do that, because it would be a complete humiliation for them; I mean, from the beginning of this war, I said that Israel's target of eliminating Hamas is a recipe for failure. They've done this previously, in 2008, 2009, 2012, 2014; they didn't eliminate Hamas and Hamas were much weaker from a military equipment and sophistication perspective, so in this war, when they said we want to eliminate Hamas, they wrote their destiny.
It's a recipe for failure, we're almost 110 days in this war, and Hamas is still, and the other resistance movements, are conducting VERY hard attacks on Israel, and they're proving that they're so sophisticated, they still channel weapons to Gaza and they're still attacking Israel in ANY part that it has people in, soldiers in, across all of the Gaza Strip.
So this deal that I spoke about yesterday, it was proposed by the Mossad to the war cabinet, they didn't release details of this offer, however from what Sami Abu Zuhri is saying, this could well be the proposal that the Mossad gave to the war cabinet. Obviously they're trying to reach some sort of an agreement, they can't continue this mess in Gaza, but they don't want to be seen as if they're completely submitting to the Hamas conditions, similar to what they've done in the temporary ceasefire we've had over two months ago.
So what is this deal exactly? Well, apparently there's a proposal for a two-month ceasefire where many Israeli hostages from Gaza will be released, and many Palestinian hostages and prisoners in Israel will be released from prison, INCLUDING many senior ones. Now, the key thing here, is the longevity of the ceasefire and the level of prisoners that Israel is going to release.
So is Hamas and the Palestinian resistance, are they going to show flexibility when it comes to this? Because previously, they said we need to END the war, the war must be ENDED, and Israel must withdraw from Gaza. Now, this could be a way out for Israel, they're obviously saying that it's going to be a long-term campaign, everything we're seeing is showing that this is going to be a long-term campaign; a war of attrition or an ongoing campaign battle where people are just going to try and eliminate each other. When it comes to Israel, they still persist on demolishing Hamas; but when it comes to Hamas, they're not backing down, they want their historical rights, and their rights that they deserve, for the Palestinian people, and they're getting more and more support, they're proving that their defensive measures are VERY, VERY high quality, and their leaders are already there; Israel wanted to release the hostages; they haven't released one single Israeli hostage who's alive, at least, as a matter of fact, they killed over 70 of them; they're killing their own soldiers by going in to Gaza - I mean, they knew they're going to be annihilated in Gaza when they went in, because they were already attacked so SEVERLY in the 2014 War when they went in partial invasions, not as intensive as they did this time, but now they're feeling the WHOLE bitter truth of trying to attack Gaza, because they prepared for this day very well; the Palestinian resistance, and they're showing no signs of weakness, and this is coming at the same time that [Pentagon press secretary] John Kirby (b. 1963) made some interesting statements: He said today that the future of Gaza will be without the Hamas leadership. Okay, now obviously what the US Administration say, it doesn't represent Israel; Israel, we clearly have a disagreement between them and the Biden Administration; they tried to reach a complete ceasefire by the end of December, max mid-January; we’re way past that, and Netanyahu is very stubborn, and there's clearly differences between him and the American Administration.
However; John Kirby saying that the future of Gaza will have no Hamas leadership; he previously said, the White House released some statements a few weeks ago, saying that you can't eliminate Hamas, so this is signalling that they’re potentially happy to agree that parts of Hamas will remain in Gaza, maybe with the Palestinian Authority, but the leaders of Hamas need to leave Gaza, which is obviously not going to happen, they're trying to create friction between some of the members of the Palestinian resistance and their leadership, and obviously seeing as they failed in reaching them, they're trying to kind of propose a deal for them to leave Gaza, which is is NOT going to happen, however, the situation when it comes to the recent offer that the Hamas official spoke about, it hasn't been rejected by Hamas, and they said that we're open to any offers, and we also didn't have lots of information from Israel, apart from the fact that Netanyahu said, we have our own initiatives, we don't wait for Hamas to do something, to do a proposal, but we have our own initiative.
So this could be Israel's latest initiative that was potentially proposed by the Mossad yesterday to the Israeli War cabinet, and in the next few days, potentially tomorrow or the day after, even, we will see if there's any potential for this coming to fruition; and these were the main things that I wanted to talk to you about today, I hope I added some beneficial information for you and I will see you soon in the next video; take care.
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
Kamera: Zenza Bronica SQ-Ai
Linse: Zenzanon PS 50mm
Film: Ilford Delta 100
Kjemi: Rodinal (1:25 / 9 min. @ 20°C)
1 April 2024: Very many quite significant events has happened during the last 24 hours:
1. Yesterday, Benjamin Netanyahu underwent a hernia operation under full sedation. Unfortunately, he is back on his feet again.
[ Source - AP News: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is to undergo hernia surgery (Publ. 31 March 2024) ]
2. Yesterday, after two weeks of heavy fighting around the Al-Shifa hospital, the IDF forces suddenly retreated. During their presence there, they carried out hundreds of extrajudicial executions. There is virtually nothing left of the hospital and it’s surrounding area. Close to 400 Palestinians have been killed inside the hospital or in the surrounding area. Horrendous scenes as the civilian population are digging up decomposing corpses of adults, babies and small children that the IDF has tried to conceal by bulldozing their bodies under the sand.
[ Source - Palestine Chronicle: Unveiling Horrors – Testimonies of Israeli Atrocities in Al-Shifa Medical Complex (Publ. 1 April 2024) ]
3. Yesterday, the Palestinian Authority provisional government was instated as the new PA government by palestinian Quisling president Mahmoud Abbas (b. 1935). The new PA prime minister is Mohammad Mustafa (b. 1954). As you may recall; one month ago the Shtayyeh government suddenly and unexpectedly resigned; paving the way for an obvious US-Israel plan to install the PA Israel-collaborators in Gaza. You should also recall that in the 2006 Palestine elections it was in fact Hamas who won and who therefore are the de facto legitimate government in Palestine.
[ Source - The New Arab: New Palestinian government (Publ. 1 April 2024) ]
4. Yesterday, PA troops were caught infiltrating Gaza by the united Palestinian resistance. The infiltration was two-pronged: One attempt was done in the North of Gaza, and another was done through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt; disguised as humanitarian aid security from the Egyptian Red Crescent Society. As you may recall; two weeks ago Yoav Gallant (b. 1958) and Yair Lapid (b. 1963) put forward that Majed Faraj (b. 1963), head of the Palestinian General Intelligence Service could be envisioned as a new governor of post-war Gaza. Faraj immediately started putting together a PA military force that would be deployed into southern Gaza.
[* Note: This whole scheme seems to be following an Israeli plan for a Palestinian state 'solution' referred to as the "Palestinian Emirates" or the "Eight-State Solution" consisting exclusively of the Gaza Strip and the cities of Jenin, Nablus, Ramallah, Jericho, Tulkarm, Qalqilya and 'the arab parts' of Hebron. These 'emirates' would be united in a sort of clan- and tribal confederation, and is a plan proposed in 2012 by Mordechai Kedar (b. 1952) - a man who has also said that the only thing that deters suicide bombers is if they know that their sister or their mother will be raped in the event that they are caught.]
[ Source - Palestine Chronicle: Involving the Shin Bet – Resistance Thwarts PA Intelligence Operation in Gaza (Publ. 1 April 2024) ]
5. Today, Israel’s national assembly Knesset passed a law to shut down Al Jazeera in Israel - the law also implies that any other foreign content from may be or become illegal for broadcasting in Israel. This shows the fascistic nature of the Zionist entity and is all the more a reason to follow news from Al Jazeera.
[ Source - Middle East Eye: Knesset passes law to close Al Jazeera office in Israel (Publ. 1 April 2024) ]
6. Today, we get to know that Israel has introduced a new and totally arbitrary terminology of ‘kill zones’. ‘Kill zones’, according to them, have ‘broad rules of engagement’ where anything that moves inside is a ‘legitimate target’. This is meant to legitimize all the killings for no apparent reason that we have seen IDF perpetrating against unarmed defenseless civilians.
[ Source - The New Arab: Israel created 'kill zones' in Gaza, targeting any civilian who enters them (Publ. 1 April 2024) ]
7. Today, Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria. This marks a sharp escalation in international affairs. In my opinion, Israel and Netanyahu seems to be trying to provoke the Iranians into retaliating and drawing USA into a larger regional war.
[Source - PBS: Israeli airstrike destroys Iran’s consulate in Damascus, occupants killed or wounded, Syria says (Publ. 1 April 2024)
8. Today, USA and Israel will hold a virtual meeting discussing Israel’s planned ground attack on Rafah. Obvously they will be discussing how they can get the corrupt PA collaborators to do their dirty work for them. Israel are not able to defeat the Palestinian resistance on their own, and USA will have 'no boots on the ground'. So - do the math. This just goes to show even more that the USA is not interested in peace at all, they are funding Israel, they are providing them with weapons, they are diplomatically protecting them in the UN and they are 100% complicit!
[Source - Axios: Scoop: U.S. and Israel set to hold a virtual meeting on Rafah Monday (Publ. 1 April 2024) ]
Let the Palestinians themselves choose their own government in free and open elections without any US or Israeli interference
Demonstration in solidarity with the Lebanese and Palestinian resistance, in front of the Press Syndicate in downtown Cairo.
The demonstrators were mainly Nasserists and MB supporters.
(Photos by Nasser Nouri)
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children
ready to print on any A4 sticker paper. Just cut and paste
Gaza Glory Campaign
حملة العزة لغزة
حول الصورة إلى ملصق أو بانر أو صورة بروفايل
غزة، فلسطين المحتلة، علم فلسطين، الشيخ أحمد ياسين، حركة حماس، كتائب عز الدين القسام، المقاومة الفلسطينية، مقاوم فلسطيني، حصار غزة، ارفعوا الحصار، العزة لغزة، قطاع يدافع عن قطعان، أسود في ليل أسود، شارة النصر، اطفال فلسطين
Gaza, occupied territories, occupied Palestine, Israeli aggression, Palestinian flag, Ahmed Yassin, Hamas Movement, ِAlqasam, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Palestinian resistance, Palestinian militant, Gaza siege, Free Gaza, Gaza Glory, defending the nations' dignity, knights of the night, victory sign, Palestinian children