Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
September 26, 2024
Israel Rejects Ceasefire Calls, Prepares for Possible Ground Invasion as Lebanon Death Toll Tops 620
Sep 26, 2024
Israel has rejected a possible ceasefire as it continues its assault on Lebanon. The U.S., France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia had called for a 21-day ceasefire as the death toll in Lebanon topped 620 people, at least 72 of those killed on Wednesday. Despite resounding international warnings against escalating attacks, Israel is doubling down, with its military chief Herzi Halevi telling troops Wednesday, “You hear the jets overhead; we have been striking all day. This is both to prepare the ground for your possible entry and to continue degrading Hezbollah.”
Half a million people in Lebanon are now believed to be displaced. Hospitals are overrun with victims of Israeli attacks. This is Dr. Adel Raee, director of the Raee Hospital in Sidon.
Dr. Adel Raee: “Since Monday until today, we have received 136 wounded, including 36 martyrs. Among those 36 martyrs, 18 were torn to pieces. There are still bodies in the morgue that require DNA testing for identification.”
We’ll go to Lebanon for the latest later in the broadcast.
“Israel Is Violating Our Sovereignty”: Lebanon’s Prime Minister Pleads with UNSC to Do Its Job
Sep 26, 2024
Here in New York, Lebanon’s interim Prime Minister Najib Mikati pleaded with the U.N. Security Council Wednesday to intervene to stop Israel’s bombardment during an emergency session. Mikati said, “Israel is violating our sovereignty by sending their warplanes and drones to our skies.” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi spoke from the sidelines of the Security Council meeting Wednesday.
Abbas Araghchi: “The Security Council must act now to halt Israel’s war and enforce an immediate ceasefire, and by that, to save innocent lives. If not, the region risks full-scale conflict, and history will hold Israel’s enablers, especially the United States, responsible. … Iran will not remain indifferent in case of a full-scale war in Lebanon. We stand with the people of Lebanon with all means.”
This comes as a new Oxfam report is calling for urgent reform of the “colonial and archaic” Security Council. Oxfam says the UNSC’s five permanent members — the U.S., Russia, China, the U.K. and France — are “failing people living in conflict” as they consistently abuse their veto power in their own interests, blocking opportunities for peace around the world.
One Year into Genocide, Palestinians in Gaza Warn Israel Is Poised to Subject Lebanon to Same Fate
Sep 26, 2024
In Gaza, displaced Palestinians are expressing solidarity with Lebanese people under Israeli attack.
Umm Muhammad Abu Shaqfa: “What is happening to us in Gaza is happening to Lebanon now. I have been displaced from the north for the last five months. And the world is quiet and is still standing by Israel. How is it the world is standing by it? In what viewpoint are they standing by them? How did they see the oppressor, and how did they see the oppressed? I don’t understand how. I don’t know how to comprehend this in my head, this mass genocide, the massacre of children, women, elderly, and making us live in tents and crisis that have no end. And now they are doing the same to Lebanon. But the war will not end unless it ends in Lebanon. If it ends in Lebanon, it will end in Gaza.”
Israel Dumps Truck with 88 Unidentified Palestinian Bodies in Gaza
Sep 26, 2024
In Gaza, the Palestinian Health Ministry refused to receive an Israeli truck filled with the unidentified remains of 88 Palestinians killed by Israel. A distraught mother searching for her missing son went to meet the truck.
Umm Tamer Yassin: “I got a call telling me there are dead bodies coming from Israel. I came running to see if my son is fine or dead. I want to know if he is among the dead bodies. … Look! These are dead bodies being thrown. They throw it to the people, left them to the streets, and their families cannot identify their bodies. Here is the truck. The bodies are inside. We cannot see them.”
Journalist Mujahed al-Saadi Arrested Amid Unprecedented Israeli Assault on West Bank Reporters
Sep 26, 2024
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports an unprecedented number of journalists and media workers have been arrested by Israeli forces across the occupied West Bank over the past year. CPJ has documented a total of 54 such arrests since October 7; 36 remain jailed, including 14 held without charges under Israel’s “administrative detention” policy. Among them is Palestinian journalist Mujahed al-Saadi, who was beaten along with his wife by Israeli soldiers during a violent raid on their home in the early hours of September 19. He has since had no contact with his lawyer or family.
“It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive” Wins Emmy for Outstanding Hard News Feature
Sep 26, 2024
Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda has won a News and Documentary Emmy for her AJ+ report “It’s Bisan from Gaza and I’m Still Alive.” A group of Hollywood celebrities and pro-Israel groups unsuccessfully attempted to disqualify Owda’s widely acclaimed report, which chronicles her family’s forced evacuation of their home in Beit Hanoun after Israel launched its assault on Gaza.
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“Hell Is Breaking Loose in Lebanon”: Israel Rejects Ceasefire Proposal as U.N. Chief Calls for Peace
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
September 26, 2024
Israel is continuing its bombardment of Lebanon and preparing for a possible ground invasion of the country, with the Netanyahu government rejecting a proposed 21-day ceasefire put forward by the United States, France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. About 500,000 people in Lebanon have been displaced, and the Health Ministry reports at least 72 people were killed and nearly 400 wounded in Israeli attacks on Wednesday, bringing the death toll to over 620 in recent days. “There is a lot of suffering. There is a lot of hardship right now,” says Beirut-based journalist Lara Bitar, who details how Israel has repeatedly attacked and invaded Lebanese territory going back decades. “The source of this pain can be pinpointed to the presence of the Israeli settler state in our region that continues to wreak havoc in Palestine, in Lebanon and across most of the world.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We turn now to Lebanon, where some 500,000 people have been displaced by Israel’s bombardment. The Lebanese Health Ministry reports at least 72 people were killed and nearly 400 wounded in Israeli attacks on Wednesday, bringing the death toll to over 620 in recent days. Earlier today, Israel rejected a proposed 21-day ceasefire that had been called for by the United States, France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, Israel has called up two brigades to the Lebanese border in a sign that a ground invasion could be imminent. U.N. Secretary-General António Gutteres called for peace on Wednesday.
SECRETARY-GENERAL ANTÓNIO GUTERRES: Hell is breaking loose in Lebanon. … An all-out war must be avoided at all costs. It would surely be an all-out catastrophe. The people of Lebanon, as well as the people of Israel and the people of the world, cannot afford Lebanon to become another Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: We go now to Beirut, where we’re joined by Lara Bitar, editor-in-chief of The Public Source, a Beirut-based independent media organization.
Lara, if you can talk about what’s happening on the ground in Beirut? And here we are in New York right next to the United Nations. You have this international call for a ceasefire, but apparently the Netanyahu government of Israel is saying no, the Israeli general in charge of the IDF forces rallying troops, saying he’s preparing them for a ground invasion of Lebanon.
LARA BITAR: Good morning.
Here in Beirut, nobody really has any hope in these processes in the United Nations, in the words of the Biden administration or in the words also of the Netanyahu government.
I wanted to share with you some things that were relayed to me by one of our journalists who is now working in the south. He is going around to different schools that are hosting people who have been displaced from their homes but remain in southern Lebanon. So, first, he relayed to me that people are very, very tired. They’re unable to sleep for longer than a few minutes at a time because of the relentless bombardment by Israel. And he said that the shelters are full with elderly people, who have lived through so many massacres and witnessed so much horror inflicted by the Israeli settler colony. And he shared the story of one woman in particular. He said that she was in her eighties. She was wearing her house key as a pendant. And she told him that this is nothing in comparison to what they have lived through over the past few decades. And she mentioned the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut, the first Qana massacre in 1996, the second Qana massacre in 2006, and so on and so forth.
And the one thing that I want to relay here is that for a lot of these people who have been displaced from their homes, whose homes have been destroyed, their attachment to their land only grows stronger. And this is a prevailing sentiment among those who have been displaced. And this is not uncommon for Lebanon.
So, if you will just allow me 30 seconds or so, I would like to read a brief passage that I came across yesterday, written by Mahdi Amel, who was a Marxist intellectual. And he wrote this a few months after the 1982 invasion of Beirut. And he writes, “They said that the war in Lebanon would be swift and that in a few days those who have not knelt and who understand only the language of force would kneel. They declared that there would be no salaam, but shalom, and that Israel is the Rome of our modern times. To the kings of Israel, to the scum of our nation and our foul Arab regimes, to the petty fascists and to their imperialist masters, we say: It pleases us to spit in your faces. We will fight you even with our nails. Our fists are the compass of history. And the bullet of our freedom will pierce your hearts. To them, we say, brick by brick, we build a world on your graves. You are the dustbin of history, and Beirut is the city of the free. We have vowed that we will resist you.”
And this is not to say that everyone in Lebanon shares this sentiment, and definitely not the over 200,000, up to half a million people who have been displaced from their homes over the past few weeks, because there is a lot of suffering. There is a lot of hardship right now. People are struggling to find housing, shelter, food, diapers, milk. Hospitals are at capacity. People are really exhausted and suffering across the board. But for the most part, this pain can be pinpointed — the source of this pain can be pinpointed to the presence of the Israeli settler state in our region that continues to wreak havoc in Palestine, in Lebanon and across most of the world.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Lara Bitar, you talked about this quotation that you read from 1982, when Israel invaded in 1982, and you’ve said that you don’t have much faith in a ceasefire. So, if you could provide some context to a possible imminent invasion, Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Talk about what happened in not just 1982, but also in 1978 and 2006.
LARA BITAR: I think we have to take very, very seriously every genocidal intent that is now being uttered by different government and military officials in Israel. Lebanon has a long history of invasions and occupation and terror by the Israeli state. And we can go even further back, to ’47, ’48. Lebanon [sic] seized over a dozen Lebanese towns and villages in ’78. There was also an invasion in ’82. The ’82 invasion lasted until the liberation in May 2000. There was also an attempted ground operation in 2006. And in terms of the 2006 attempted ground invasion into Lebanon, soldiers who returned home recounted how traumatizing it was for them, how they felt that they were fighting with ghosts. They could not see the fighters on the other side.
So, I think it’s important to note that coming into Lebanon is deeply traumatizing and frightening experience for the Israeli soldiers, who are accustomed to throwing bombs from the safety of the airspace. But on-the-ground battle, on-the-ground confrontation with real fighters who are fighting for their land, for their country, for their people, they don’t stand much of a chance.
And to the point of pushing for a ceasefire or for a truce or for the Biden administration having any kind of redline, we saw exactly what happened in Gaza over the past 11 months. The Biden administration was repeatedly saying that Rafah was a redline, that a ground invasion into Gaza was a redline. But the Israeli state, there were absolutely no repercussions, no ramifications for any of the actions that the Israeli state was doing. And this is what compelled it to continue to escalate, to continue to escalate its massacres, its terror of the Palestinian people in Gaza, who to this day continue to endure daily massacres that are not being reported on as much as they were at the beginning of the war.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Lara Bitar, so, if you could tell us a little bit more about how you think Hezbollah might respond to a possible invasion? And also explain Resolution — U.N. Resolution 1701, because the U.N. secretary-general, speaking Wednesday, he warned that Lebanon is at the brink, calling for an urgent ceasefire, but he also called for the implementation of U.N. Resolutions 1559 and 1701.
LARA BITAR: I can’t really predict how Hezbollah will respond, but what we know is that, so far, Hezbollah has continuously tried to deescalate. Hezbollah is not targeting civilians or civilian infrastructure. They have consistently aimed their weapons at military infrastructure and sites and soldiers, even after the pager attack, the walkie-talkie attack, repeated campaigns on Dahieh. Just a few minutes ago, before I joined you, Dahieh was yet again bombarded by the Israelis. I think this is the eighth attack on the Lebanese capital. Despite all of this escalation from the Israeli side, Hezbollah remains restraint, continues to try to deescalate. And the only ask here, which is not a really unreasonable ask, is for Israel to immediately end its war on the Palestinian people of Gaza after 11 months.
As far as U.N. resolutions, for the most part, they’re not legally binding. For the most part, they’re not respected. The 1701 Resolution, that was adopted after the 2006 war, is habitually, if not daily, violated by the Israelis in a variety of different ways. That’s why the majority of the Lebanese population is not holding its breath waiting for a U.N. resolution or for the Security Council or even for the international community. I think not just the people in Lebanon, but people around the world have completely lost faith in the so-called international order, the rule of law.
So, right now we can only expect things to get significantly worse. So long as the international community does not take any action to halt the insanity and the barbarism of the Israeli state, so long as the Western world continues to supply the Israelis with weapons, with support, with diplomatic cover, we have very little chance of seeing an end to this campaign anytime soon.
But on the other hand, what people can do, people anywhere can boycott Israel, can put pressure on their institutions, on their universities, on the corporations in which they work, and to divest from Israel. The only chance that we have is for the world and for comrades around the world to put this kind of pressure on their governments and on their institutions to isolate Israel, because Israel will only stop this campaign and this war around the region if it becomes too costly for it. And right now it’s not paying any kind of price for its actions.
AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, Lara Bitar, there is a protest that is approaching the United Nations now, especially people protesting what’s happening in Gaza. You have Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, who delayed his trip by a day. He was supposed to address the U.N. General Assembly today; he’s going to do it tomorrow. What do you expect him to say? And in the U.S. media, on television, they’re saying that Blinken has been desperately, you know, rallying countries on the sidelines to get this 21-day ceasefire that the U.S., France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are now calling for. But you have The Guardian reporting that, in fact, an effort by France and Britain to secure a joint statement by the U.N. Security Council calling for a ceasefire has stalled in the face of U.S. objections. Your final thoughts, Lara?
LARA BITAR: At the risk of repeating myself, I don’t see —or, we, for the most part, don’t really believe anything that’s coming out of the Biden administration, neither its White House spokespeople or Blinken and others who are representing the U.S. And again, we have seen these maneuvers and this manipulation of public opinion, manipulation of the press for 11 months. They are not serious about a ceasefire, neither in Gaza nor in Lebanon, regardless of what they’re saying, regardless of what narrative they’re trying to sell us. We’re simply not buying it.
AMY GOODMAN: Lara Bitar, I want to thank you for being with us, editor-in-chief of The Public Source, a Beirut-based independent media organization, speaking to us from Lebanon.
Next up, Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, two government bodies concluded. Antony Blinken rejected them. We’ll speak to the reporter who exposed this story in ProPublica. Stay with us.
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U.S. Gov’t Agencies Found Israel Was Blocking Gaza Aid. Blinken Ignored Them to Keep Weapons Flowing
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
September 26, 2024
We speak with Brett Murphy, the ProPublica reporterbehind a blockbuster exposé that revealed the Biden administration ignored warnings from its own experts about Israel blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza in order to keep supplying the country with weapons. USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the State Department’s refugees bureau both concluded earlier this year that Israeli authorities routinely impeded delivery of food and medicine into the devastated Palestinian territory, where hunger, disease and displacement have wreaked havoc on the civilian population. Although U.S. law requires the government to stop arms shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed aid, Secretary of State Antony Blinken ignored the findings and told Congress Israel was not restricting humanitarian assistance — helping to keep weapons flowing to the Israeli military to continue its assault on Gaza.
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: ProPublica has revealed USAID and the State Department’s refugees bureau both concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza, but U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top Biden officials rejected the findings of the agencies even though they’re considered the two foremost U.S. authorities on humanitarian assistance. Blinken’s decision allowed the U.S. to keep sending arms to Israel. Under U.S. law, the government is required to cut off weapons shipments to countries preventing the delivery of U.S.-backed aid. Days after receiving the reports, Blinken told Congress, quote, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”
On Tuesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, called for Blinken’s resignation, accusing him of lying to Congress. [Blinken] was asked about the ProPublica report Wednesday on CBS. This was his response.
SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN: So, this is actually pretty, pretty typical. We had a report to put out on the humanitarian situation in Gaza and what Israel was doing to try to make sure that people got the assistance they needed. And I had different assessments from different parts of the State Department, from other agencies that were involved, like USAID. My job is to sort through them, which I did, draw some conclusions from that. And we put our report, and we found that Israel needed to do a better job on the humanitarian assistance. We’ve seen improvements since then. It’s still not sufficient.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, that was U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
We’re joined now by the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Brett Murphy, a reporter at ProPublica, where his new piece is headlined “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.”
Can you respond to Blinken’s response to your report, Brett?
BRETT MURPHY: Yeah. So, he said, basically, it was his decision to make. He was getting a lot of information, and he ultimately decided that it was not the assessment of the State Department that the Israelis were deliberately blocking aid.
What he didn’t mention and what’s really important to note here is that the two agencies that had told him that they were in fact deliberately blocking aid, one being USAID, are the foremost experts in this, as you said. They are the ones responsible for delivering humanitarian assistance into Gaza, into war zones all over the world. In addition to that, his own refugees bureau had made a similar conclusion called that a law called the Foreign Assistance Act should have been triggered because the Israelis were restricting aid.
The other assessments he was receiving were nowhere near as detailed as what he received from USAID. They sent a 17-page memo with detailed evidence describing exactly what they knew to be the truth on the ground, and he ultimately rejected those findings in what he told Congress.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, if you could elaborate, Brett, also on what U.S. obligations are under the Foreign Assistance Act?
BRETT MURPHY: Sure, yeah. So, it’s this law that has not been used very much systematically, but it basically says a foreign partner or ally that is receiving military assistance from the U.S. cannot at the same time be blocking U.S.-backed humanitarian assistance into a war zone. If it is the conclusion of the U.S. government that that is happening, the U.S. government is then required to cut off the military assistance. That’s what the law says.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Is there any other context in which this has occurred, that the U.S. has denied that a country is preventing U.S. aid from getting in in a conflict zone?
BRETT MURPHY: The last time it came up was in Turkey and Armenia. That was kind of the original context of the law itself. But, like I was saying, we have never truly been applying this in a systematic way. So, this has really been an obscure provision in the Foreign Assistance Act, but this year lawmakers, activist groups have been calling for the Biden administration to be using this exact provision.
AMY GOODMAN: We interviewed two people: Stacy Gilbert, the former senior adviser in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration — she resigned over this after 20 years in service — and Alex Smith, a former contractor for USAID, who was forced to resign over the Biden administration’s support for the war on Gaza. Talk about the significance of what they did, and Antony Blinken understanding full well what they understood and why they left.
BRETT MURPHY: Stacy Gilbert worked on the report that Secretary Blinken ultimately delivered to Congress. She was working on the drafts of that report. She was in the refugees bureau. She had a very clear understanding of what was going on. And what she ultimately said, when she resigned, when she saw the final version of what he had told Congress, she said, “We know this not to be true. We, the experts inside of the government, know that the truth on the ground is that the Israelis have been blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza.” This is what she said, and this is what she resigned over. And she said in her resignation letter that this report, what he told Congress, “is going to haunt us.”
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And can you explain: How detailed was that USAID memo that Blinken saw?
BRETT MURPHY: It was extremely detailed. It’s 17 pages of evidence that they were bringing to bear. The example that stuck out to me the most was on food, food shipments that were being held up just 30 miles outside of Gaza. There was enough flour, USAID said, to feed 1.5 million Palestinians for at least five months. But at the time — this was in the February to March timeframe — Israelis were not allowing flour into Gaza, because they said it was going to the U.N.’s branch there that had been accused of having ties to Hamas, so they were not allowing the flour in.
And this is what — this is the kind of thing that was really bothering USAID and frustrating their efforts. They couldn’t get food in. They couldn’t get medicine in, other supplies. A lot of their trucks, from, like, the Red Crescent, other humanitarian groups, were being turned around because of items in there the Israelis were not allowing in. Aid workers had been killed. Their convoys had been targeted. These were all the types of examples that USAID was telling Secretary Blinken.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And basically, there’s no recourse now, right, because it’s done? Or is there anything that the U.S., the Biden administration could now do differently?
BRETT MURPHY: Yeah, the law is not — it was not just a one-time shot. And this is what the U.S. government said, too, in response. They said, “We’re currently — we’re always assessing the situation.” They said that they believed that the situation was improving since after they applied leverage with this. The folks I talked to, both inside the government and in the humanitarian world, said that’s not true at all. The situation is as bad as it’s ever been, including since the Rafah incursion. But this law does not only have — you know, whenever Blinken addresses Congress to it; it can be applied at any point.
AMY GOODMAN: That they could cut off, that the U.S. government could cut off aid to — military arms to Israel.
BRETT MURPHY: Absolutely. If it assesses that the Israelis are deliberately blocking humanitarian assistance at any point, they can apply this law. That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: Brett Murphy, we want to thank you for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for ProPublica. We’ll link to your new article, “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.”
And this update from the streets of New York: Twenty-five protesters have been arrested outside the United Nations ahead of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s arrival to address the U.N. on Friday. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.