U.S. Backing Has Given Israel License to Kill & Maim

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 15, 2024

Israeli Attacks Kill 55 in Gaza as WHO Begins Second Round of Polio Vaccinations
Oct 15, 2024

Israel has intensified its ground assault on the northern Gaza Strip, where an estimated 400,000 people remain trapped amid a dire humanitarian situation. Over the past 24 hours, Israeli attacks have killed at least 55 Palestinians, including 10 people who were killed by an Israeli tank shell as they lined up for food at a distribution center in Jabaliya. Dozens more were wounded in the assault, children among them.

On Monday, the World Health Organization began its second round of an emergency polio vaccination campaign, after Israel’s assault decimated Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure, prompting a polio outbreak. Parents who brought their children to receive a booster dose said they have much more to fear than the spread of disease.

Alaa Afana: “Today, I came to vaccinate my children against polio. We administered the first dose, and now we’ve administered the second dose, as we are scared of diseases that are widely spread here in Gaza. However, with disease and this fear, we fear the occupation more, because even though we are protecting them and vaccinating them, the occupation is still bombing them.”

Gaza Teen Burned to Death in Israeli Strike on Hospital Identified as Sha’ban al-Dalou
Oct 15, 2024

One of the victims who burned to death after Israel bombed Al-Aqsa Hospital early Monday has been identified as 19-year-old Sha’ban al-Dalou. He was an engineering student at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University who just started his studies in September 2023. He had built the tent shelter his family was living in when Israel bombed them. At least four others were also killed in the fire.

Israeli Forces in Occupied West Bank Kill 2, Including Child, in Assault on Jenin
Oct 15, 2024

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed two Palestinians, including a child, and injured four others during an hourslong assault Monday on the city of Jenin and its refugee camp. Twenty-three-year-old Mahmoud Ma’moun Abu al-Rub died of gunshot wounds, as did 17-year-old Rayan Ibrahim al-Sayyed. Their killings bring the death toll from Israeli assaults on the West Bank over the past year to 755, including 165 children.

21 Killed, Including Children, in Israeli Strike on Northern Lebanon Village
Oct 15, 2024

In Lebanon, at least 21 people were killed Monday when Israel bombed a four-story apartment building in the northern village of Aitou. The U.N. Human Rights Commission reports 12 women and two children were among the victims. On Monday, a top UNICEF official warned of a “lost generation” of children in Lebanon, with some 400,000 youths among the estimated 1.2 million people displaced by Israel’s bombs. This is Jalal Ferhat, a 40-year-old father of five whose family crossed Lebanon’s border into Syria Monday seeking refuge.

Jalal Ferhat: “There are strikes in our neighborhood and destruction, and they struck near my house. I have children. You can’t just stay where you are. We tried going to another place. We moved from Baalbek, where they struck near my house. We had to leave again. I have children. You can’t stay. We are going to Syria because it could be safer than where we are.”

Netanyahu Again Threatens UNIFIL as European Leaders Condemn Israeli Attacks on Peacekeepers
Oct 15, 2024

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doubled down Monday on his warnings to the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, telling U.N. peacekeepers to “heed Israel’s request and to temporarily get out of harm’s way.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “The charge that Israel deliberately attacked UNIFIL personnel is completely false. It’s exactly the opposite. Israel repeatedly asked UNIFIL to get out of harm’s way.”

Netanyahu’s remarks came after Israeli troops fired on a UNIFIL watchtower and destroyed part of a UNIFIL base near the Israeli border. At least five UNIFIL members have been injured by Israel’s assaults. Despite the repeated attacks, UNIFIL’s chief has said peacekeepers would remain in their positions. On Monday, Britain, France, Germany and Italy issued a joint statement calling Israel’s attacks on peacekeepers a violation of international law, and the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell condemned Israel’s attacks on UNIFIL as “unacceptable.”

Josep Borrell: “The 27 members agreed on asking Israelis to stop attacking UNIFIL. Many European members are participating in this mission. Their work is very important. It’s completely unacceptable, attacking United Nations troops.”

USAID Routinely Meets with Israeli Officials at Sde Teiman, Site of Israeli War Crimes and Torture
Oct 15, 2024

The Guardian is reporting USAID officials have been holding regular meetings with Israeli counterparts at Israel’s notorious Sde Teiman prison since late July, after the Israeli agency overseeing aid relocated to the military base. Sde Teiman has been labeled a “torture camp” where Palestinians abducted by Israeli soldiers in Gaza have described harrowing physical, sexual and psychological abuse. The Guardian says it’s not clear if the USAID employees have observed the part of the base that is used as a torture camp, but affected officials told the newspaper, “I can’t sleep at night knowing that it’s going on,” and that Israel’s relocation of its aid coordination group to the prison “seems like trolling.” Click here to see our past coverage of Sde Teiman and the reports on it.

Jewish Activists Take on NYSE as Antiwar Protesters Disrupt Army Conference over Gaza Genocide
Oct 15, 2024

Here in New York City, hundreds of Jewish activists and their allies rallied outside the New York Stock Exchange Monday demanding an Israeli arms embargo and an end to war profiteering by companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Police forcibly removed peaceful protesters as they blocked the entrance to the stock exchange, arresting over 200 people. After headlines, we’ll speak with Elena Stein, director of organizing and strategy for Jewish Voice for Peace, who was detained at Monday’s action.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., activists with CodePink disrupted an annual conference at the Association of the U.S. Army.

CodePink protester: “The blood of hundreds of thousands of people is on your hands. Your pockets seep in the blood of Palestinians, of people in the Global South. From the Philippines to the Congo to Haiti, we have 800 military bases decimating the planet and decimating people. The future that you talk about, we have no future. You all are making a killing off of killing.”

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Ex-U.S. Army Major Who Resigned over Gaza Warns Against Biden Sending 100 U.S. Troops to Israel
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 15, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/15 ... transcript

The Biden administration is sending an advanced anti-missile defense system and 100 U.S. troops to Israel in advance of expected retaliatory strikes against Iran. This marks the first significant deployment of American troops to Israel since the beginning of its assault on Gaza, though the U.S. has spent an estimated tens of billions of dollars on the Israeli military and related operations. “The irony here is the Iranian missile attack is only going to happen if we help Israel strike Iran first,” says Win Without War’s Harrison Mann. With the deployment of troops to Israeli military installations, says Mann, “Israel now has its own sort of American human shields” and “a new mechanism to drag America into a war with Hezbollah and Iran.” Mann, who is Jewish, is a former U.S. Army major who resigned from his position at the Defense Intelligence Agency in protest of U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza, a decision he says was inspired by student antiwar protests on U.S. campuses.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The Washington Post is reporting Israel is planning to launch retaliatory strikes against Iran within the next three weeks, ahead of the U.S. election. Iran fired nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israeli military and security sites on October 1st. At the time, Iran said the strikes were retaliation for the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, who was killed in an explosion in Tehran in July on the day of the inauguration of the new Iranian president. According to the new report in The Washington Post, Israel is now considering striking military sites inside Iran, but not Iran’s oil or nuclear facilities.

This comes as the Biden administration is sending an advanced anti-missile defense system and 100 U.S. troops to Israel in advance of Israel’s attack on Iran. In a statement, a Pentagon spokesperson said, quote, “This action underscores the United States’ ironclad commitment to the defense of Israel, and to defend Americans in Israel, from any further ballistic missile attacks by Iran,” unquote. The missile defense system is known as THAAD, Terminal High Altitude Area Defense. Over the past year, the U.S. has sent over 50,000 tons of armaments and military equipment to Israel, but this marks the first significant deployment of U.S. troops to Israel over the past year. A new study by the Cost of War Project at Brown University estimates the U.S. has spent nearly $23 billion on the Israeli military and related operations over the past year.

We’re joined now by Harrison Mann, a former U.S. Army major who worked at the DIA. That’s the Defense Intelligence Agency. Mann, who is Jewish, resigned to protest U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza. He’s now a senior fellow at Win Without War, a network of activists and organizations working for a more peaceful, progressive U.S. foreign policy.

Harrison Mann, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you can talk about the significance of what the U.S. is doing right now, sending the THAAD missiles and the 100 U.S. troops?

HARRISON MANN: Yeah. Thanks, Amy.

This deployment, I think, sends a very strong message, unfortunately, to the Netanyahu government, which is that if you continue to escalate with Iran, you will be rewarded with the protection of additional U.S. systems and troops. And it also, unfortunately, sends the message that, you know, we’ve seen the people burning in tents, and we’ve seen you publicly muse about starving everybody in northern Gaza to death, and that’s not a deal breaker.

In terms of the capability that this provides, the radar that this system depends on, the AN/TPY-2, has actually already been located in southern Israel since 2008, operated by U.S. troops. So, that detection capability is already there. We’re now sending a battery that has about six launchers with a total of 48 interceptors. And the reason that I want to mention that number is, really, all that we’ve added materially is the ability to shoot down another 48 ballistic missiles if Iran adds them to a barrage. So, I see this, in many ways, as a symbolic show of support that can be easily neutralized if Iran just fires more missiles next time.

And then, the other issue here is that we are, indisputably, putting more U.S. troops at risk by sending them to Israel. They’re going to be operating out of Israeli military installations. And we’ve seen, both with the October 1 Iranian attack and then more recent Hezbollah attacks, that Israel’s adversaries can penetrate its air defenses and can strike targets within Israeli bases. So, we have to be very clear that these troops are entering a combat zone. They are going to be at risk, especially as escalation continues. And unfortunately, they’ve been sent there, I think, with no consultation with Congress, with no clear legal justification, without the argument that they are needed to go there for urgent self-defense needs.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Harrison Mann, I wanted to follow up specifically on that issue. Is it your sense that to send troops like this into an existing war, in effect, combat, that — what the requirements are in terms of Congress’s approval?

HARRISON MANN: Yeah, to introduce troops into hostilities, per the 1973 War Powers Act, you either need an authorization from Congress, or there needs to be some urgent and imminent self-defense threat. In this case, the supposed self-defense threat is an Iranian missile attack. But the irony here is the Iranian missile attack is only going to happen if we help Israel strike Iran first.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I also wanted ask you about a report in The New York Times, a front-page article, the lead article in The New York Times today, which talks about the — Israel’s use of Palestinian detainees as human shields in Gaza, forcing the detainees to, according to The New York Times, to go into tunnels, in case they were booby-trapped, ahead of Israeli troops, in essence, using them as potential victims in order to protect Israeli troops.

HARRISON MANN: Yeah. So, this is based off the reporting and investigations from a Israeli group called Breaking the Silence. I had the honor of meeting their CEO, Nadav Weiman, when he was in D.C. a couple months ago. And he told me about this very project and his efforts to document this process. So, I can say it is very real. It’s, unfortunately, a systemic practice by Israeli troops, kidnapping Palestinians, sometimes putting GoPros on them, putting Israeli uniforms on them, so if they go up to an enemy position, they are going to look like Israeli soldiers.

And at this point, this is kind of the least offensive and illegal thing that we have the Israeli Defense Forces doing in this conflict. So, again, going back to the THAAD deployment, I wish we were not reinforcing and encouraging this behavior as the U.S. government.

AMY GOODMAN: What is your sense, Harrison Mann, of why President Biden is doing this? He is not a — it is not as if he embraces Netanyahu, though, certainly, in terms of sending weapons, he has done that to the fullest. He recognizes he is clearly a Trump ally. Clearly, Netanyahu wants Trump to win. Trump is former president of the United States who could face prison if he doesn’t win, and Prime Minister Netanyahu could face prison if he is no longer prime minister. Their fates are intertwined. So, why is Biden embracing him in this way?

HARRISON MANN: Yeah. The administration for the past year has adhered to this bear hug strategy, the idea being that we have to keep giving Israel support and protection, and that’s the only way we can get them to listen to us. I think it’s obvious that that has not worked. The thinking right now is that by offering this system to Israel’s defense, we can at least convince them to avoid striking more sensitive targets in Iran, like nuclear facilities or oil infrastructure. And, you know, that might actually succeed in the short term, but we have to understand, once these troops and this system is deployed in Israel, I don’t know what incentive Netanyahu has to continue keeping his word and not keep escalating.

And if you’re asking why would we keep supporting or why would the president keep supporting Netanyahu, even when he knows that he’d rather have a Republican president, Donald Trump, in office, I think they just can’t imagine another strategy. And it’s really unfortunate to see that this administration — and to a certain extent, the Harris campaign — would rather risk her election than distance themselves from Israel and from the genocide.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what is your sense of the impact of this recent decision to deploy these batteries to Israel, the impact that’s going to have on Iran or other enemies of Israel in the region?

HARRISON MANN: Yeah. So, in the near term, I don’t think it’s going to have a big impact, because Iran knows where these troops will be deployed, and if it responds to Israel’s next strike, it can probably successfully avoid hitting them or avoid hitting near them. Unfortunately, as the escalation continues and if we move beyond symbolic messaging strikes to an actual war of annihilation, these troops are going to become targets, even if it’s by accident, right? They probably have a survivability plan. That means they displace to another location in a combat situation. So, we’re going to get to a point where even if they want to avoid killing Americans, Iran and Hezbollah may do so by accident.

And then, the other side of this is that Israel now has its own sort of American human shields that it can leverage to try and avoid a certain level of attacks from Iran, knowing that Iran does not want to kill Americans. And it knows it’s got a new mechanism to drag America directly into war with either Hezbollah or Iran, since now it’s much more likely that U.S. troops can be killed on Israeli soil.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you something that’s not exactly in your wheelhouse, but I’m just curious what you think as a former official at the Defense Intelligence Agency about Donald Trump calling for the National Guard or the U.S. military to be deployed on U.S. soil to target what he called “radical left lunatics.” Trump made the call during an interview on Fox News. This is what he said.

DONALD TRUMP: I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they’re the — and it should be very easily handled by — if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response, Harrison Mann?

HARRISON MANN: Yeah, I’ll just say, as somebody who’s had friends and colleagues who were deployed to D.C. in 2020 or been deployed on the border mission, I trust the noncommissioned officers and officers in the Army and the National Guard to not be aggressive against political activity. But I think the danger here is that if you do this deployment, which units might not refuse, you’re then in a situation with really unclear guidance about what you’re supposed to do with protesters or what you’re supposed to do with whatever group the president has told you to target. So, I think, fortunately, our forces know the right thing to do. But when they end up in a situation with very unclear or maybe contradictory guidance between what the president is saying publicly and their own commanders are telling them, you have the risk of unintentional violence or uncontrolled violence.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Harrison Mann, we are just going into a segment on one of the largest arrest actions outside the New York Stock Exchange. Over 200 Jewish activists and their allies were arrested, calling for the U.S. to stop arming Israel. As a former U.S. Army major who resigned to protest U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza, as a Jewish American, your thoughts? And also, how activists on the outside, in the streets — I often think about Dan Ellsberg when I think of this, you know, who was at the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation and talked about seeing those protesters outside. You were on the inside. What does this mean — you’re out now, but many of your colleagues are still in — when they see these kind of mass actions?

HARRISON MANN: Yeah. First, I appreciate that you mentioned that I’m Jewish, too. And with respect to these protesters and my own advocacy, I think it’s incredibly important for American Jews to talk about this, especially to demonstrate that Israeli Zionism is not the same as Judaism, and the actions of the Israeli state do not represent all Jews and certainly don’t represent American Jews, because, unfortunately, that’s a claim that both Israeli politicians and American politicians like to make, which is that if you care about Jews, you have to support what Israel is doing in Gaza, West Bank and Lebanon right now, and that’s just patently untrue.

And then, I can tell you, both myself and some of the other officials who publicly resigned, we were influenced and affected by protest activity that we saw. In our case, in terms of the timing, the student protests were extremely affecting in feeling like — I’ll just speak for myself — that I could no longer justify staying silent, when we had 19-year-olds going to get beat up and risk their futures for this cause. So, I can’t promise that this is going to fix everything, but the people on the inside of our institutions do, in aggregate, notice this activism.

AMY GOODMAN: Harrison Mann, I want to thank you for being with us, a former U.S. Army major, a Jewish American, who resigned to protest U.S. support for Israel’s war on Gaza. He’s now a senior fellow at Win Without War, a network of activists and organizations working for a more peaceful, progressive U.S. foreign policy.

When we come back, we’ll be joined by one of those activists outside the New York Stock Exchange, believed to be one of the largest mass arrests there in U.S. history. She was arrested. She’s with Jewish Voice for Peace. Stay with us.

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“Stop Profiting Off Genocide”: 200 Arrested at Jewish Voice for Peace Protest at NY Stock Exchange
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 15, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/15 ... transcript

“There is nothing antisemitic about fighting for people’s right to live,” says Jewish Voice for Peace organizer Elena Stein, who on Monday joined hundreds of protesters arrested to block entrances to the New York Stock Exchange. We discuss the historic mass protest, which called for an Israeli arms embargo and an end to war profiteering by companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. “We are filled with horror beyond words and are attempting to embody just an ounce of that refusal,” Stein says of the moral urgency of protesting Israel’s actions in the Middle East, which she describes as a “war of extermination … done with U.S. cover.” She says JVP chose the stock exchange in order to draw attention to the role of U.S. financial and corporate interests in arming the Israeli military.

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 Juan González.

Protests over the U.S. arming Israel are continuing. On Monday morning, more than 200 Jewish activists and their allies were arrested as they blocked entrances to the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. The protesters were calling for an Israeli arms embargo and end to war profiteering by companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.

PROTESTERS: Let Gaza live! Stop arming Israel! Stop arming Israel! Let Gaza live! Let Gaza live! Stop arming Israel! Stop arming Israel! Let Gaza live! Let Gaza live! Stop arming Israel!

AMY GOODMAN: The protest was organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, which said the action was the largest act of civil disobedience in history outside the New York Stock Exchange. Participants in the protest included descendants of Holocaust survivors, as well as Emmy Award-winning comedian Eric André, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, the acclaimed artist Nan Goldin, the Oscar-nominated actress Debra Winger and the artist Molly Crabapple. Police forcibly removed many of the peaceful protesters, including our next guest, Elena Stein. She’s director of organizing and strategy for Jewish Voice for Peace. She was arrested, held for eight hours.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Elena. There’s a very dramatic picture of you being taken out, held, carried by police on your back. You’re wearing the T-shirt you’re wearing right now, “Stop Arming Israel.” Explain what this action was all about.

ELENA STEIN: First of all, thank you so much for having me, Amy and Juan. Been watching Democracy Now! every morning for about 15 years, so so appreciate everything you all do.

Yesterday, 500 Jewish New Yorkers and friends shut down business as usual at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, demanding — you know, the epicenter of global capital — demanding that the U.S. stop arming Israel and stop profiting from genocide.

And, you know, as we arrived in the morning, we were learning the news that just that night Israel had bombed the Al-Aqsa Hospital and had set at least 30 tents ablaze full of people who had already been displaced, who still had IVs in their arms from being at the hospital, burning people alive. And this comes after days and days of massacring whole families in the Jabaliya refugee camp as part of the larger strategy to block off, to starve, to essentially complete the ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, where 400,000 people are.

This is being called a genocide within a genocide. People are posting their final goodbyes. So we are filled with horror beyond words and are attempting just to embody just an ounce of that refusal in our actions.

And, of course, what’s so important for all of us here in the U.S. to understand is that this is being done with U.S. bombs, those bombs that are massacring family after family in this war of extermination — because, make no mistake, that is the goal: extermination. It is being done with U.S. bombs, with U.S. weapons and with U.S. cover, with shielding Israel from accountability at any international institution.

Now, the Biden administration wants you to believe that the reason the U.S. is arming and funding and covering the Israeli government like this is for the sake of Jewish safety. Right? This is the moral cover that they use. This is the justification used to cloak the entire enterprise.

And so, we are there to say we reject this myth, this sick myth, with every fiber of our beings. We refuse to let our histories, our identities, our traditions be used to torture, to starve, to massacre, to erase Palestinians. And we are there to say the true interests of the Biden administration, the true interests of the U.S. government are this: its own imperial interests and its own financial interests. And so, we are there to say to the U.S., “Stop arming Israel. Stop profiting from genocide.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Elena, could you talk about why you chose the stock exchange? Because the reality is that every war that the United States has ever fought, some people have made money off of, some sector of American capitalism. And in this case, could you talk about the arms makers and the huge, obscene amounts of money they are making from this war, companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin?

ELENA STEIN: That’s exactly right. So, most know that every year the U.S. sends $3.8 billion in military funding to Israel. Now, first thing to know is that this is an unprecedented amount of money. There is no amount of public taxpayer money going annually to any other country like this.

The next thing to know is that none of that money is used — when we hear the word “aid,” we might think, “Oh, that’s for recovery from a natural disaster or for housing or education.” No, all of this money has to be used on the Israeli military, for military purposes. And not only that, but all that money has to be used then back in the United States on U.S. defense contractors, on U.S. weapons corporations. So we see here that the entire enterprise has the goal of propping up the U.S.’s war economy.

Now, $3.8 billion is just the amount of money typically going in taxpayer public funding. It is nothing to say of the billions going in private funding. But this year, the U.S. sent — in public funding, the U.S. government sent 18 — 18 — billion dollars in taxpayer funds to the Israeli military. There are no words to describe how unprecedented this is.

And so, when we say that it’s all in the service of propping up the U.S.'s war economy, it works. This year, the stock prices of weapons manufacturers were skyrocketing. Last year, if you were to invest $10,000 in Raytheon, right now you would have $18,000, in just one year. That's an 80% return in one year. Raytheon is the firm making the bunker buster bombs, that are prohibited from use in civilian areas, that Israel is currently using right now in southern Lebanon.

Now, not only that, 50 — over 50, at least, members of Congress and their spouses are invested in Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, two of the leading weapons manufacturers. So, we can see they are, quite literally, profiting from this genocide. And these are the people who are voting on increased funding and arms to the Israeli military. Our elected officials should never be able to profit off of genocide. They are there to carry out, supposedly, the will of the people.

And you think about this: Just last week, Hurricane Helene ravaged communities across Appalachia — right? — killing hundreds of people, displacing thousands. This is just one week before Hurricane Milton did the same, ravaged Florida. And before the wreckage could even be accounted for after Hurricane Helene, FEMA reported a $9 billion shortfall. At the exact same time, President Biden announced that he’d be releasing another $8.7 billion in military funding to the Israeli military. This is almost the exact same amount of money. So what we are seeing is that, quite literally, the United States government is choosing to massacre en masse Palestinians over supporting our communities here in the United States who are trying to recover from this devastating climate crisis, as well as the chronic disinvestment from their communities.

And so, that’s why we were there with 500 people yesterday to say, outside of Wall Street, this epicenter of global capital — and, yes, as you said, Juan, you know, Wall Street has been profiting off of genocide, every genocide of this country since the founding of this country, since the founding genocides. Wall Street was actually built as the first marketplace to trade enslaved people kidnapped from the shores of Africa in — and then traded in 1711 on Wall Street by the European settlers, who had also carried out the genocide against the Indigenous people of Manahatta. And we were there yesterday on Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and so that’s part of why this history is so important to root in.

And we pay homage to the many movements that have been protesting Wall Street ever since, from ACT UP, that actually had its founding protest on Wall Street in 1987, delaying the bell — and, actually, one of the organizers of that demonstration was with us yesterday in jail, which is so meaningful — to Occupy Wall Street to many Palestinian-led demonstrations at Wall Street this year. And so, that is why we were there, to say, all together, fund FEMA, not genocide; fund housing, not genocide; fund healthcare, not genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Sumaya Awad of Adalah Justice Project. She’s a Palestinian who participated in the protest you were arrested at the New York Stock Exchange. She’s speaking here to CBS News.

SUMAYA AWAD: We refuse for our government to continue doing this, using our tax dollars while our country is suffering from climate disaster, from lack of healthcare.

AMY GOODMAN: I also want to turn to 82-year-old Ros Petchesky, a MacArthur fellow, former anti-Vietnam War activist, current member of Jewish Voice for Peace. On Monday, she was one of the oldest people to chain herself to the Wall Street gates. She told CBS why she participated in the protest.

ROSALIND PETCHESKY: A lot of our resources are going to war. Jews have a long tradition of opposing war.

AMY GOODMAN: Ros Petchesky is a professor emeritus at Hunter. As we hear those voices, Elena, you yourself are the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor. Talk about that, how that informs your activism today, as the back of your T-shirt, that says “Stop Arming Israel” on the front, says “Not in Our Name.”

ELENA STEIN: The day that my grandmother’s entire family and village was massacred in a different genocide, the Holocaust, my grandmother just happened to be absent. I grew up knowing this fact and understanding that it means that, first of all, I’m not supposed to be here. My life is a fluke. And I also grew up agonizing over the question of “Where were the neighbors?” Why did they just stand by? Why didn’t they hurl their bodies between the killers and my family? And so, today, it’s with all of my Jewish ancestors at my back, the one who survived, my grandmother, and all those who didn’t, that we, I and all of them together, say loudly, more profoundly than ever before, “We refuse to be neighbors who just stand by.”

And I think so many of us in these demonstrations, especially as we watch the Israeli government cynically use the excuse, use the conflation of Judaism and Zionism — let’s be clear, Judaism is our rich thousands-year-old tradition; Israel is a 76-year-old apartheid state. The cover has been pulled off Israel. People can see it for what it is and for the Zionist project and the project of ethnic cleansing and genocide and the full, the full expansionist goals that it has, and it will use any means it can to make that project a reality. And the only excuse they have left, the only cover they have left, is to call any resistance to it antisemitism. We refuse this. There is nothing antisemitic about fighting for people’s right to live, to live on their land, to thrive, to be safe at home. We refuse to let our traditions, our identities, our histories be used to allow for the mass torture, the mass starvation, the massacre and the erasure of Palestinians.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The protest on Monday was the latest in a long string of nonviolent protests led by Jewish Voice for Peace — at Grand Central Terminal during rush hour, at the Statue of Liberty, at the Manhattan Bridge. Do you feel the Biden administration is hearing your voice?

ELENA STEIN: May it be so. Listen, the Biden administration is watching all of us. They have watched the needle move. I mean, two-thirds — the polls are showing that two-thirds of Americans now want an arms embargo. Two-thirds of Americans are saying that they don’t want arms to go to Israel. This is astonishing. And let’s understand it for what it is, which is an extraordinary win by the Palestinian-led movement for Palestinian liberation. And, of course, we see the Biden administration not listening. We see Congress not listening. All of us are asking, “Why is this?”

Well, first of all, it’s because we don’t live in a democracy. They don’t have to listen to us. It is for their own imperial and financial interests. It is for their own interests in controlling the region, which have been broken open and uncovered in so many of the interviews you’ve done here on Democracy Now! And it’s for their financial interests and financial gain, because we know of the corporate control of this country.

And so, we see this moment of — I mean, to be quite honest, we see a lot of despair and a lot of hopelessness right now, especially as Israel expands its war of extermination deeper into Gaza and then throughout Lebanon and, you know, bombing Lebanon and Syria and Yemen and the West Bank, and the risk, the threat to soon be bombing Iran at the same time. To watch them not just listen but to expand it at the same time is truly extraordinary, and to feel so many millions more terrorized as they’re watching their loved ones in these other countries now fleeing for their lives, as well.

And we refuse to give up. Right? We take inspiration from all of the movements that came before us that never gave up after one year of not winning. We take inspiration especially from the Palestinian struggle, that has been here fighting for 76 years and has never thrown in the towel because it is such an uphill battle. And all of us here in the belly of the beast, where we know is in control of these arms and this funding, we must do the exact same. We cannot give up. We must double down right now. And even if the path to that arms embargo is getting increasingly muddled as we see them refuse to listen to us, we know that what all of us must be doing is applying this pressure from every angle possible, and that every single one of us has a role to play.

AMY GOODMAN: Elena Stein, I want to thank you for being with us. She is the Jewish Voice for Peace director of organizing strategy, a descendant of a Holocaust survivor. On Monday morning, she was arrested along with about two [sic] other Jewish activists and allies in one of the largest acts of — 200 Jewish activists and allies in one of the largest acts of civil disobedience the New York Stock Exchange has seen, demanding the U.S. stop arming Israel.

[admin]

Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 16, 2024

U.S. Threatens to Cut Military Assistance If Israel Keeps Withholding Aid for Gaza
Oct 16, 2024

Oxfam and over 35 other humanitarian groups have issued a dire warning about Israel’s siege on northern Gaza. In a statement, the groups said, “The Israeli forces’ assault on Gaza has escalated to a horrifying level of atrocity. Northern Gaza is being wiped off the map.” Israel has barred nearly all food into the area, while attacks on displaced people continue.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has sent Israel a written warning that the U.S. may cut off military assistance if Israel does not boost humanitarian aid access to Gaza within the next 30 days. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote, “We are now writing to underscore the U.S. government’s deep concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, and seek urgent and sustained actions by your government this month to reverse this trajectory.”

The Biden administration has continued to arm Israel despite findings by its own experts at USAID and the State Department that Israel has routinely impeded delivery of food and medicine to Gaza, in violation of U.S. law. On Tuesday, State Department spokesperson Matt Miller faced numerous questions about U.S. policy. This is Reuters journalist Humeyra Pamuk.

Humeyra Pamuk: “Given you are already saying humanitarian assistance is very low, and putting in front of Israel a bunch of concrete measures on how to improve it, why are you waiting for another 30 days to implement the law?”

Matthew Miller: “Because we believe it’s appropriate to give them a chance to cure the problem.”

Humeyra Pamuk: “Other outlets have reported that — Reuters has reported all the way back in April that officials from this department have assessed in internal memos that Israel, quote, 'is persistently and arbitrarily impeding aid in Gaza.' So, if the law is already being, like, I mean — if it’s already doing it, why is the United States waiting?”

Matthew Miller: “So, first of all, that has not — so, we’ve been over this before, I know, from this podium. There are people that reach that conclusion, and there are people inside this building who reach the opposite conclusion. So I think it’s important to state that for the record.”

Israel Bombs Municipal Building in Lebanon, Killing 6, Including Mayor of Nabatieh
Oct 16, 2024

In Lebanon, Israel attacked a municipal building in the southern town of Nabatieh, killing six people, including the town’s mayor. The BBC reports the mayor and other city workers were killed while holding a meeting to discuss coordinating aid for civilians remaining in the area. Israel also bombed the village of Qana, striking a healthcare center and several homes, killing at least 15 people. Israel also bombed the southern suburbs of Beirut just hours after the U.S. State Department said it opposes the “scope and nature” of Israel’s attacks on Beirut.

As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismisses calls for a ceasefire, the U.N. Refugee Agency is warning 25% of Lebanon is now under forced evacuation orders from Israel.

Rema Jamous Imseis: “Israeli airstrikes and Israeli evacuation orders continue to increase the areas impacted. So, now that we have over 25% of the country under a direct Israeli military evacuation order, just yesterday we had another 20 villages issued with an evacuation order in the south of the country.”

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Israel Is Routinely Shooting Children in the Head in Gaza: U.S. Surgeon & Palestinian Nurse
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 16, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/16 ... transcript

As the official death toll in Gaza passes more than 42,400, the true number may be impossible to know until Israel’s war is over. But medical workers who witnessed the carnage in Gaza’s hospitals are speaking out. We speak with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa about his op-ed in The New York Times that features harrowing stories from dozens of healthcare workers and CT scans of children shot in the head or the left side of the chest. The Times called the corresponding images of the patients too graphic to publish. “I personally wish that Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs,” says Sidhwa. “I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.” We also speak with Palestinian nurse Rajaa Musleh, who worked at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “I will never forget the dogs were eating the dead body inside Shifa Hospital at the front of the emergency department. This will be stuck on my mind for my whole life,” says Musleh. “My message for the whole world: We are human beings. We are not numbers. We have the right to receive healthcare inside Gaza.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: As the official death toll in Gaza passes more than 42,400, the true number may be impossible to know until Israel’s war is over. But medical workers who witnessed the carnage in Gaza’s hospitals are speaking out.

We begin today’s show with a surgeon who volunteered at the European Hospital in Khan Younis and wrote a devastating opinion piece in The New York Times headlined “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza.”

In a minute, we’ll be joined by Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who begins the piece writing, quote, “I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8. I’ve volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti, and I grew up in Flint, Mich. I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones. But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total.

“At the time, I assumed this had to be the work of a particularly sadistic soldier located nearby. But after returning home, I met an emergency medicine physician who had worked in a different hospital in Gaza two months before me. 'I couldn't believe the number of kids I saw shot in the head,’ I told him. To my surprise, he responded: 'Yeah, me, too. Every single day,'” he said.

The piece quotes dozens of healthcare workers and includes three X-rays or CT scans of pediatric patients who were shot in the head or the left side of the chest. The person who provided the scans was Dr. Mimi Syed, who worked in Khan Younis from August 8th to September 5th and said the children usually arrived at the hospital either dead or in critical condition after suffering a single shot.

On Tuesday, The New York Times opinion section editor issued a statement refuting claims circulating online that the images were altered, saying the editors had, quote, “photographs to corroborate the CT scan images,” but, quote, “because of their graphic nature, we decided these photos — of children with gunshot wounds to the head or neck — were too horrific for publication.”

For more, we’re joined by Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, the trauma and general surgeon who wrote this piece. He also spearheaded an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris signed by 99 U.S. medical professionals who served in Gaza, testifying to the unprecedented scale of the healthcare catastrophe and calling for an immediate ceasefire and the end to all U.S. support for Israel.

We are also joined in Chicago by Rajaa Musleh, the country representative in Gaza of MedGlobal, a medical humanitarian aid group. She previously worked as a nurse at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, let’s begin with you. Thank you for joining us in the studio. We heard from you in Gaza and spoke to you right when you came out. This is very significant, this New York Times op-ed, first that the Times agreed to run it, and then the controversy around it, what they published and what they didn’t publish. Tell us the story.

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Yeah, the Times piece was interesting. Actually, the opinion section reached out — the visual opinion team reached out to me and asked me to write the piece. And, you know, so we came up with the idea together. And that was after we wrote an open letter, like you mentioned. We wrote one in October, but we also wrote one in July to the Biden administration. That was when the Times reached out to me and said, “Can we get information about exactly who wrote or who saw what in Gaza?” So we did. We designed a poll. I got everybody to answer it that I could. And we went on from there.

You know, the controversy that you mentioned about the images is just manufactured nonsense. It’s got no connection to reality whatsoever. These pictures are — there’s no reason to doubt them at all. Furthermore, I’ve seen the full CT scans. I’ve seen the photos of the actual wounds on the children. It’s not surprising. And these were common injuries in Gaza. I mean, like, almost everybody saw the same thing. Everybody saw kids get shot in the head. Almost everybody saw severely malnourished children.

And yeah, so, it seems like the piece has had an effect. It seems like it’s making its way around and people are seeing it, and they’re kind of horrified by what they see, which they should be.

AMY GOODMAN: And then, talk about the whole issue of whether to show the dead or dying children and their injuries.

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Yeah. So, that was never — so, in the piece as I wrote it, that was never part of the plan, I guess you would say. But after — once all this nonsense about people saying the images are faked came out, The New York Times, I guess they — and I wasn’t involved in that decision at all, but they had to decide whether or not to put, you know, the picture they’re talking about. She’s probably a 4- or 5-year-old girl. Her eyes are closed. She has a breathing tube down. And she has a bullet wound right here. There’s some brain matter that you can see on her hair. You know, I’m a trauma surgeon, so I’m used to seeing things like that, but I can understand what they mean when they say that they’re too horrific to publish. I personally wish that Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs. I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Did the Times also do a news piece on this, given the level of the scans you had, the pictures you had?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Yeah, we collected a lot of documentary evidence from people who — or, from healthcare workers who had been in Gaza quite a bit. And all of them have quite a bit more. Yeah, everyone takes a lot of photographs and videos and things like that when they’re there. And they’re all date- and location-stamped. They’re not faked.

I don’t know if the Times news section has reached out to other people who — because, you know, their names are mostly public. I don’t know if they’ve reached out to them or not for specific comment about specific things.

I have been contacted by, I don’t think I’m exaggerating if I say, dozens of journalists since coming back from Gaza, news journalists, saying that “We want to publish about the children being shot in the head, the extent of malnutrition, especially small infants dying of malnutrition and dehydration.” And they all say that they need an overwhelming — they need a way of just kind of overwhelming their editors’ skepticism. They need just a humongous mass of evidence. So, like, I know — I probably shouldn’t name them, but I know editor — or, I know journalists at the Post, at the Times, at BBC —

AMY GOODMAN: The Washington Post.

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Sorry, The Washington Post, yes — who have been working on such stories for months, but still not out, despite having massive amounts of evidence.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dr. Sidhwa — Dr. Sidhwa, what is the implication of so many children being shot in the head, when you would assume that if children are, as the Israelis claim, unfortunate collateral damage of their bombing attempts to kill militants in Gaza, how — what does this mean to you, that so many children are being found to be shot in the head?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Yeah, it’s a good question. So — excuse me. So, you know, as physicians and nurses, we can’t say that this particular child or that particular child was shot on purpose or by Israel or somebody else. That’s not what we can possibly do. We’re not war crimes investigators.

But I think it’s pretty clear that when there’s a pattern of, if in every catchment — in the catchment area of every hospital in Gaza, every time any international has been around, for an entire year, on a daily basis, a child has been shot in the head in a place of 2 million people, it seems unlikely to me that that’s an accident. You know, if you look at the differential of killing between Ukraine and Israel — it depends on what day you calculate it, but the differential is literally hundreds of times. The rate of killing of children in Gaza is hundreds of times higher than it is in Ukraine. So, it’s very hard for me to believe that this is just a byproduct of a war that’s being fought in otherwise just ways. I find that hard to believe.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you mentioned other battles in other wars. Your experience in those other war zones, what is the difference from what you see, aside from the children being shot in the head, other specific differences between what’s happening in Gaza and what you’ve seen in other places?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Well, there’s a few. One is the massive level of destruction. Not only have the hospitals been attacked, the universities, it’s getting down to the level of destroying the water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure and concentrating an entire population on the Mawasi — in the Mawasi area, which is basically just the beach of Gaza. Oxfam wrote a report where they estimated that when there were 500,000 people in the Mawasi area, there was one toilet for every 4,130 people there. That’s just totally outrageous. I mean, those numbers don’t exist anywhere else on the planet. Now there might be a million. Nobody really knows how many people have been pushed to the Mawasi. But these are just totally outrageous numbers.

So, you have a largely child population. Gaza is very young. It’s been incredibly concentrated. It’s been starved for a year. And the winter rains are coming, which are going to lift, you know, all the sewage and everything up out of the ground. Every sewage plant has been destroyed. Ninety percent of the water, sanitation and hygiene infrastructure has been destroyed. And the healthcare system has been destroyed. So, that’s pretty unique in my experience.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and I also wanted to ask you — you recently were supposed to speak at Columbia Medical School, but your event was canceled at the last minute. Could you talk about what happened?

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Yeah. I wouldn’t call it my event, just because I wasn’t the organizer. But yeah, you know, I was invited with Adam Hamawy, who is an American veteran and a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, and Dr. Mark Perlmutter, who is an orthopedic and hand surgeon, a Jewish American — I think he’s been on Democracy Now!; he’s definitely been on Democracy Now! before — and Lana, whose name, last name, I just can’t pronounce, who is a surgical nurse who also was working in Gaza, and she was actually one of the first internationals to go into Gaza.

You know, we had a medical talk planned. It was a technical exercise in surgical and medical care in an extremely difficult setting. It wasn’t a political talk. But the organizers were smart. They recognized that it was very likely to be canceled at the last minute. It was canceled as we walked in the building, from what I can tell. And so, they had organized a bookstore down the street to be available. And so, smart on their part. It’s not surprising, but I think it’s pretty shameful, to be perfectly honest.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring in, in addition to Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, Rajaa Musleh, who is the country representative in Gaza of the medical humanitarian aid group MedGlobal. Earlier this year, she worked as a nurse at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. She’s currently joining us from Chicago.

Rajaa, thank you so much for being with us. You sheltered at Al-Shifa. And, of course, the head of Al-Shifa Hospital was arrested by the Israeli military. Can you describe what the situation was like then, when you were there, and what you understand, as you deal with Gaza every day, even as a nurse in Chicago, is happening now and what you’re calling for?

RAJAA MUSLEH: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Sorry.

Actually, I’m has trapped. I have trapped, actually, for hospital for more than 40 days. And what I’m witnesses in this period, actually, I can describe it as crimes, because we received at the hospital a huge number of injured persons coming to the emergency department, and the majority of the cases, unfortunately, women and children. And the massive of the injured for these cases was severe. It is the first time of my whole life I’m witness this kind of injury. Many people or many children come without legs, without arms. And even I’m witness a father, like, hold his children in two bags. This is the first time of my life I’m witness that severity of the bombing that using during this war.

The situation in Shifa Hospital was really very critical and very bad. There is no access to food, because there’s more than 80,000 IDPs inside the Shifa Hospital. There’s no electricity. They cut the electricity. They cut the water. And, you know, he situation was very bad.

One of the cases that I will never, ever forget it, for a girl, her age is 10 years. She was completely burned. Ninety percent of her body was burned. And she asked me to stay beside her and hold her hand, until the moment — I will never, ever forget her burned skin at my hands — until the moment I feel that, until the moment I feel guilty because I did not obey or stay beside her in the bed, because she requested that, and I did not do that; until the moment I feel guilty when she asked me about her mother and father and sister, brothers, and I cannot respond to her request, because the whole family has been killed during bombing her house.

I will never forget the dogs were eating the dead body inside Shifa Hospital at the front of the emergency department. This will be stuck on my mind for the whole life.

I will never, ever forget a boy, after the operation, his leg has been amputated, and he asked me to move his leg. What I should respond for a kid — his age is 9 years — when he asks me, “Just move my leg”? I pretend that I move his leg, and I ask him, “Is that OK?” He said, “Yes.” In this moment, I feel like my heart is broken, because the suffering of my people inside Shifa Hospital and in the whole Gaza Strip.

Now the situation on the ground, I receive calls from my colleagues from the north of Gaza. There’s no access to food, no access to water, no access to fuel for the hospitals to operate the centers or to operate the hospitals here in north Gaza. The situation is very, very critical.

I’m here in Chicago just to send my people’s message: We need ceasefire now. We need ceasefire now. Enough is enough. More than one year, and the people inside Gaza are suffering from and taste many types of death. Enough is enough. Three hundred sixty-five days, and the people inside Gaza taste all kind of death.

I’m witness the horrible of this war. I’m witness four wars before, and this war is completely different, the death everywhere, the suffering everywhere. The people just eat one time. They save the food for the children. And the children are suffering from malnutrition inside Gaza.

My message for the whole world: We are human beings. We are not numbers. We have the right to receive healthcare inside Gaza. We have the right to raise up our children. We have the right to return back our lives, our dignity. We have the right to rebuild our universities, our schools. We are human beings, and we are not numbers.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Rajaa Musleh, I wanted to ask you, the interactions you had, if any, with the Israeli soldiers. How did they treat the medical personnel, especially those who had come from other countries?

RAJAA MUSLEH: Yeah, actually, now we send the doctors from outside Gaza through Karem Abu Salem. But, you know, they prevent the Palestinian people, even they are American, to enter Gaza. So, all the people we send from outside Gaza go through Karem Abu Salem, because of Rafah border now is completely closed.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, as we hear this devastating description from Rajaa Musleh, who worked at Al-Shifa and is a Palestinian American nurse, comes from Gaza City, as you talk about the spaces being closed in this country — I mean, the lack of follow-up on your piece, when you try to speak at, for example, Columbia, it’s shut down. You have to go to a local independent bookstore. And yet the Times did publish this column. And what it’s meant, the kind of response that you’ve gotten? You haven’t stopped since you’ve come back, as you organize with doctors and nurses and medical personnel to describe what’s happening there. I also wanted to ask your response to the latest letter of the Biden administration, saying if they don’t stop — improve the situation in Gaza, if Israel doesn’t, the U.S. will cut off weapons — not this week or next week or the next week, but in a month.

DR. FEROZE SIDHWA: Yeah. So, I think the Times piece is significant in that it might represent a shift in elite opinion about just, like, Rajaa said, enough is enough, and how much more destroyed do they want Gaza to be? And that opens up some possibilities for us to be able to do things that can actually help the people of Gaza, and not just Gaza, but elsewhere, as well.

Like you mentioned, The Times of Israel, there was a letter leaked, apparently, to The Times of Israel that the Biden administration sent on Sunday — excuse me — to Ron Dermer and Yoav Gallant, the strategic affairs and defense ministers in Israel, saying that Israel has — needs to start immediately, but has up to 30 days to improve the humanitarian situation.

And they pointed out some interesting things in that letter. They said that in September, the lowest amount of aid that has ever — that’s gone into Gaza in the past year went in, in September, which means the least amount that has ever gone into Gaza. Of course, the Israelis will deny that, but it’s nevertheless quite obviously true.

And they raised the possibility of what they called consequences under NSM-20 and other American laws, meaning the laws that prevent the provision of arms to human rights abusers. Well, I think you played a Reuters journalist pointing out earlier there’s no reason to wait 30 days. It’s not like Israel hasn’t been attacking Gaza for a year. So, this has been going on for, like Rajaa said, long enough. We can stop sending them arms tomorrow, and the U.S. can lead an arms blockade against not just Israel, but Israel and all Palestinian and Lebanese armed groups. And that can stop, or at least dramatically decrease, the fighting, the death and the misery immediately.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a surgeon in California, the San Joaquin General Hospital, his New York Times op-ed, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza.” And Rajaa Musleh, country representative in Gaza of MedGlobal, a medical humanitarian aid group, previously worked as a nurse at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. She is a Palestinian from Gaza.

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Uncommitted Co-Founder Abbas Alawieh on U.S. Election & Family in Lebanon Fleeing Israeli Bombs
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 16, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/16 ... transcript

Less than three weeks from the election, Kamala Harris is campaigning in Michigan. Will she lose votes over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza and expanding war on Lebanon? Meanwhile, Republican candidate Donald Trump has opened a new campaign office in the swing state. “It feels like Vice President Harris is not doing what it takes to be both humane and compassionate and sensitive to the political realities in Michigan that are necessary to engage with in order to beat Donald Trump,” says Abbas Alawieh, co-founder of the “uncommitted” movement to change U.S. policy toward Israel and Gaza. “What are we even talking about as Democrats if we speak so much to the value of human life, of the dignity of workers, when our party’s official policy is to send more and more weapons to a fascist government that is on a killing spree?”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

Less than three weeks from the election, Kamala Harris is campaigning in Michigan. Will she lose votes over the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza and expanding war on Lebanon? Republican candidate Donald Trump has opened a new campaign office in the swing state.

For more, we’re joined by Abbas Alawieh. He is co-founder of the “uncommitted” movement, which grew out of concerns by Democrats over President Joe Biden’s policy toward Israel and Gaza. Abbas Alawieh is a former Capitol Hill chief of staff for Democratic Congressmember Cori Bush of Missouri, before that, former longtime congressional staffer. In recent weeks, his relatives in Lebanon have had to flee their homes over Israeli airstrikes.

Abbas, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. We also saw you at the Democratic convention leading the sit-in overnight, or sleep-in, if you will, outside the DNC, demanding a Palestinian American voice be heard on the stage, which the DNC did not agree to. But first, tell us about your family. Tell us what’s happening in Lebanon to your grandmother and everyone else there.

ABBAS ALAWIEH: Thank you so much, Amy. It’s great to be on with you and Juan.

On my way in, I was on the phone with my family. These days, when it’s as hard as it is for Dr. Sidhwa and others to have the very — the kernels of truth that we can get from Gaza exposed, I’m finding myself relying more and more on the firsthand accounts of my family members on the ground to really understand what’s happening, because I think what gets lost in the thousands and thousands and thousands, the numbers of humans, of people, of universes, of people we know and love that are being harmed and killed, they’re not numbers. They’re real people.

I’ll tell you about my grandmother. My grandmother is an elderly person. She’s in her eighties. She has numerous health conditions. Her mobility is severely impaired. She’s been forced to flee four different times now since the increased aggression by the Israeli military against Lebanese civilians. She loves being in her home. She loves going out to the stoop, the few steps that she’s still able to take, so that she can enjoy the breeze. Right now she’s in a foreign place. She’s someone who feels like she’s at the end of her life. And she fears that maybe she won’t get to die in the home that she knows and loves. She’s in a foreign apartment, just sitting there waiting, as a lot of people are.

But that’s not the only experience we’re having. On my way in, I was talking to my aunt. My uncle had gone to Nabatieh. He’s a first responder. And at the top of your show, Amy, you were talking about the municipal building in Nabatieh, where my family is from, that was targeted by the Israeli military today. In that building, the mayor of Nabatieh was killed, as were numerous city officials. And my uncle was in that building. We couldn’t get a hold of him for a little bit. And we were able to get a hold of him. Some of his friends died, were killed. And this isn’t the first time he’s had friends killed as a first responder. As a first responder, five of his colleagues recently, as they were trying to administer — or, as they were trying get humanitarian aid out to people, they were seeking shelter in a church in Daraya in Lebanon, and the Israeli military bombed the church, that had only first responders in there.

You know, my family has very extensive experience — indeed, expertise — at surviving Israeli military violence. You know, southern Lebanon was occupied from 1982 until 2000. And so, I have family members who have endured the torture, the abuse, the targeting. What my family members are reporting now is a level of inhumanity, of violence, of belligerence that we haven’t seen before. People are afraid to show up to the sites that have been destroyed, because what the Israeli military is doing now is they’ll bomb whoever shows up to pull bodies out from under the rubble. And that’s what my uncle is. He’s a first responder whose job it is to show up and pull out the bodies from under the rubble. And now even people like him are being targeted, not once or twice, but systematically.

And so, I’m an American. I feel like I have a specific responsibility in the world, since my country is the one that is sending the weapons that are being used systematically to harm and kill civilians. And the best that I’m being told my government can offer is this leaked letter that you just referenced, the Biden administration officials warning the Netanyahu government that if they keep blocking that humanitarian aid, in 30 days they’ll strongly consider what happens with the weapons that we’re sending. Our leverage over the Israeli government is not about humanitarian aid. Our leverage with the Israeli government is about the weapons. The more weapons we send them, the more babies they kill. That’s just how it works. And so, stop sending the weapons.

What the folks in that municipal building where my uncle was in Lebanon, what they were doing is they were having a meeting about two trucks of humanitarian aid that had just gotten to Nabatieh. And they were — it was volunteers and first responders and city officials meeting, thinking together: How are they going to get this aid out? What happened? The people administering the aid were the ones targeted and harmed and killed and traumatized.

And so, our leverage with the Israeli government is not in how many humanitarian trucks get in. It’s in how many 2,000-pound bombs we send them to obliterate entire societies. I think our government would do better at actually using the leverage that it has.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Abbas, I wanted to ask you, in terms of the displacement, an estimated 1.2 million people just in a few weeks: Where are these folks supposed to go as Israel continues to advance into Lebanon?

ABBAS ALAWIEH: Yeah. Thank you for the question, Juan.

Virtually everyone I know in Lebanon has been displaced. Most of my family lives in south Lebanon or in the southern suburbs of Beirut or in Beirut, the city proper. You know, it’s a situation where in the immediate aftermath of the very intense escalation, we had family members, friends with literally nowhere to go, staying on whatever is available of the Beirut beach, you know, just staying there waiting, waiting for the bombs to stop.

You know, people are in these really weird situations where they’re trying to find somewhere else in Lebanon to go, and they’re being asked for a month’s rent — or, sorry, a year’s rent in advance if they are able — in order to be able to seek shelter. This is a country that, prior to this specific inhumane escalation by the Israeli military, was already in a state of economic freefall. Most of the people being harmed are people who either live in poverty or live with, you know, the complexities of human life.

I have a cousin just a few days ago who showed up to my aunt’s house after where he lives, in central Beirut, was bombed, and he showed up to my aunt’s house covered in debris, with him — it was him and his wife and their two college-age children. Both he and his wife are people who are blind.

And so, you know, think about the complexities of human life that we try to account for. I’m a Democrat, so we talk about, you know, the care economy. We talk about wanting to support people as they age, wanting to support people in their disabilities. People in all of their complexities are living through the complexities of their everyday life, and, simultaneously, the walls around them are caving in on them, are slamming down on their heads. What are we even talking about, as Democrats, if we speak so much to the value of human life, of the dignity of workers, when our party’s official policy is to send more and more weapons to a fascist government that is on a killing spree, on a baby-killing spree?

And so, it’s the realities of being displaced. It’s not just sort of I’ll move from one apartment to another. It’s everything around you. Your entire existence is uprooted. It’s a violent, violent reality.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Abbas —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I wanted —

AMY GOODMAN: Oh, go ahead, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you: What do you — what have you asked, you and others in the “uncommitted” movement, of the Harris campaign? What’s been their response? And what do you say to people who say, “Well, let’s get Harris elected into office, because Trump is too dangerous, and we’ll work on shifting her position once she’s in the White House”?

ABBAS ALAWIEH: My message to every Democratic voter who’s voting for Harris, to every person who identifies as a progressive, to every person who believes in the sanctity of every child, the sacredness of every child, of every elder, of every worker, the time to say that you will hold Harris accountable is not after the election. It’s now.

If you intend on voting for Harris — you know, the great leader and Palestinian American scholar Noura Erakat came out with a thread yesterday on Twitter where she’s urging everyone who is voting for Harris: Don’t vote for Harris in private. State publicly that you are voting for Kamala Harris, and be specific about how you will be accountable to the people, the Palestinian Americans who are currently — who currently have family enduring a genocide. How will you be accountable to them? How are you insisting, even through your vote, that you will hold Democrats accountable to stop the weapons that are flowing to harm and kill civilians?

So, that’s my message to every voter hearing this. If you’re going to vote for Harris, if you believe — I believe that we’ve got to block Donald Trump. If you believe that, then state that publicly and say, “And once we block Donald Trump, here’s how I will hold Harris accountable, that during her first hundred days, she must achieve a ceasefire, and the way to achieve a ceasefire is to stop sending the weapons.” So, we have to state that publicly.

And we have been doing everything we can to offer Vice President Harris opportunity after opportunity to meet the community that is experiencing this immense level of pain where they are. It just so happens that Vice President Harris needs every vote she can get in a state like Michigan. And a lot of us in Michigan are currently in a state of mourning, of mourning. My friend’s father, Hajj Kamel Jawad, was someone who was, you know, like the people today in Nabatieh, trying to get humanitarian aid to people, and was killed for doing so by an Israeli military airstrike. He was an American. This is a community in a state of grief. And so, as we have been urging the vice president’s team, please, please, meet with people who are directly impacted. Meet with Lebanese Americans and meet with Palestinian Americans who have had family killed over there by the bombs that the vice president’s and the president’s administration is sending.

What we’ve been told repeatedly is, “You know, the vice president is very busy. She’s on the campaign trail. She can’t really be meeting, taking meetings like that right now.” And then, the next day, we’ll see the vice president has met — you know, they put out a release saying she met with Muslim Americans, Arab Americans. But she only meets with people who have endorsed her campaign. That’s an inappropriate posture to have at this moment. If you are going to Michigan and asking these people for their vote, you need to recognize that Arab American and Palestinian American communities right now are in a state of grieving. And you have an obligation, a responsibility to sit down and hear from them.

We’ve heard over the past year repeated reports of the administration prioritizing meetings with the families of Israeli Americans who have family being held hostage in Gaza. It’s important that the administration hear from those families. Why is it — why is it that the president, that the vice president have not taken the time to sit down with Palestinian American families who have family over there? I have asked this question repeatedly of the vice president’s team. I was told that, you know, she’s spoken to some families in the past. She’s had sit-downs in the past. But also I was told explicitly that she has not sat down with a single Palestinian American family who has family killed in Gaza this year, in the year 2024. What are you waiting for, Vice President Harris?

And, you know, Amy, you had Dr. Sidhwa here. Those doctors, those U.S. medical workers, they have been asking Vice President Harris to sit down with them. She won’t do it. President Biden won’t do it.

And so, in my estimation, it feels like Vice President Harris is not doing what it takes to be both humane and compassionate and sensitive to the political realities in Michigan that are necessary to engage with in order to beat Donald Trump. And so, we — you know, everybody who’s going to try and beat Donald Trump despite that needs to make a public commitment now that they’ll hold Vice President Harris accountable, especially during her first hundred days, to stop the weapons from flowing to Netanyahu’s killing spree.

AMY GOODMAN: Abbas Alawieh, I want to thank you for being with us, co-founder of the “uncommitted” movement.

[admin]

CAN BIDEN REIN BIBI IN? As Israel sets its sights on Iran, the US declares nuclear targets out of bounds.
by Seymour Hersh
Oct 16, 2024


Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the United Nations General Assembly in New York City on September 27. / Photo by Stephanie Keith/Getty Images.

This week, according to a report in the Washington Post, an active and fully involved President Joe Biden finally set a limit on what Israel could do with the untold numbers of American bombs that Israel has recently been dropping on Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. The Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been debating how and when to respond to an earlier Iranian missile attack on Israel and an anxious world has been watching as the military madness of the Middle East, fueled by American weapons, continues to escalate.

Biden had stepped up, the Post reported, and told the Israelis that “he would not support an Israeli strike on nuclear-related areas” in Iran. Biden and Netanyahu had had their first talk in seven weeks, and the Israeli leader got the message. He agreed to limit Israel’s retaliation to military targets in Iran and avoid any nuclear or oil installations. The Post described the Israeli turnaround “as a sign of restraint” that could avoid a wider war. The newspaper’s assessment came amid what can already only be described as a wider war.

Why is Biden, on his way out of office, continuing to seek the limelight instead of doing all he can to promote the competence and strategic know-how of Kamala Harris, his vice president who is now struggling, amid some adverse internal polls, to defeat Donald Trump in an election three weeks away? If Harris does not win next month, Biden’s pettiness and need for attention in these last weeks will not be forgotten. Harris was on Biden’s call with Netanyahu, but she should have been taking the lead on all serious foreign policy matters in these weeks. Biden seems intent on upstaging his loyal vice president, and doing so on the front pages of the nation’s major newspapers.

The sad fact is that the president has lost the support of many young Americans through his continued backing, in the form of tens of billions of American dollars in military aid, of Ukraine’s war against Russia and Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza and against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Netanyahu has long believed that Iran is intent on becoming a nuclear power. In fact, as I reported in the New Yorker in 2011, the US intelligence community has concluded in two secret assessments, known as National Intelligence Estimates, that there is no evidence that any of the enriched nuclear materials in Iran have been diverted to a secret nuclear weapons program. There is no such program in Iran, although its nuclear industry continues to produce and store uranium that has been enriched to 60 percent. (Uranium at that level of enrichment has no medical use and is not powerful enough for a bomb, but publicly storing uranium at that level is seen not as an arbitrary choice by some nuclear arms control experts here. Rather, it can be understood as a chilling political message to enemies: “We have gone this far in response to provocation from Israel and other enemies without producing weapons-grade uranium, but we are capable of doing so.”)

There’s something bizarre in the spectacle of a US president negotiating with Israel about what targets to hit instead of doing whatever he can to stop further bombing. Why is a president of the United States negotiating with the leader of any nation, ally or not, about which targets his air force is going to attack next? And why are he and his foreign policy aides telling the media about it?

The tragic truth is that Biden and his foreign-policy team, headed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, will depart office having left the United States mired in wars in Ukraine and the Middle East with no immediate way out. Russia is more than holding its own in its war with Ukraine, with no end in sight, and is now in the process of upgrading Iran’s sophisticated S-300 air defense missile system with the next generation of technology, capable of tracking the most advanced ballistic missile firings.

I have been reporting on Iran’s suspected bomb program for more than two decades. In 2011 one of Iran’s senior diplomats confided to me that he was appalled by his country’s official lying about its secret purchase of what are known as dual-purpose goods: machinery that could be made capable of enriching raw uranium ore to the 5 percent level needed to drive a nuclear power plant, and but also to the 90 percent enrichment level needed to develop a nuclear bomb.

The hardline Iranian revolutionary government that came to power in 1979 after the overthrow of the pro-American Shah was convinced even a decade later that the path to nuclear arms would be blocked to Iran on the open market. The regime also believed, correctly, that any effort to buy the equipment and low-grade uranium ore needed to run a nuclear reactor for peaceful use could never take place on the open market. Its double-dealing efforts on the nuclear black market quickly became known to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a watchdog tasked with getting all nations to comply in peaceful uses of the atom. It was headed from 1997 to 2009 by Mohamed ElBaradei, an Egyptian diplomat who was skeptical that Iran was ever scrambling for weapons-grade uranium.

I got to know ElBaradei during his directorship, after he had concluded on behalf of the IAEA that the Iranian leadership had come to terms with its wrongdoing on the black market. At that point, Iran got IAEA approval to activate their one reactor for commercial energy use. The US and Israel remained skeptical but continued their close monitoring of the Iranian nuclear program at Natanz, Iran’s main enrichment center 200 miles southeast of Tehran. The goal of the surveillance was to ensure that none of the partially enriched uranium was diverted for use, once fully enriched, in a bomb. There has yet to be evidence, then or now, of a diversion of any enriched material at Natanz and any other Iranian nuclear site for potential military use.

In October 2015, after years of intense negotiations, there was a major breakthrough in the control of the bomb. The United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union joined with Iran in signing a treaty putting restrictions—to be monitored by tamper- and radiation-resistant cameras—on all aspects of Iran’s nuclear operations, including enrichment and possible diversion activities. In return, the signatories agreed to ease an extreme set of sanctions that had been put in place on Iran, including those involving trade and transactions with the international financial system. One hundred billion dollars soon flowed into the Iranian treasury. The treaty, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was fiercely opposed by Donald Trump, who won the presidency the next year. Trump withdrew from the JCPOA agreement in the spring of 2018, to the dismay of most in the worldwide arms control community, after promising that he would negotiate a better deal. He did not do so before leaving office.

With the JCPOA gone, the rigid Iranian leadership surprised some by announcing it would continue the nuclear enrichment monitoring obligations that were imposed by its membership in the IAEA. Netanyahu continued his public insistence that Iran was cheating its way to a bomb.

There turned out to be a poorly understood condition to do with monitoring in the JCPOA treaty that has enabled many of Iran’s enemies to suggest in recent years that Iran’s nuclear officials have been cheating in an effort to move quickly to the bomb. Avril Haines, director of the Office of National Intelligence, reported to Congress last July that Iran has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.” Similarly, Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, angered some on his staff early this year when he claimed Iran was “not entirely transparent” about its nuclear program at an international meeting in Dubai. Grossi further distressed IAEA technical experts by saying that he and others were “concerned about the ability of my inspectors to be able to put the jigsaw puzzle together again.”

The inevitable impression left by such remarks was that Iran, no longer bound by the JCPOA strictures, was finding ways to accumulate weapons grade uranium and improve its potential to become the only other nuclear power in the Middle East besides Israel, which has yet to publicly acknowledge its nuclear capability. It is believed to have a fleet of more than one hundred warheads—likely far more than that—in storage or ready to be fired on command in underground bunkers. Inevitably Israel is concerned about any competing nuclear power in the Middle East, but nuclear parity is unlikely to occur anytime soon.

In a recent exchange, a former high-level IAEA official expressed exasperation to me at what he saw as the willingness of the senior managers in Vienna, home of the agency’s headquarters, to cast doubt publicly on the efficacy of the current IAEA camera coverage of Iran’s major nuclear facilities. The implication was that some of the vital camera coverage had been lost with the cancellation of the JCPOA. This was not so, he told me: the Iranian government is still required by the IAEA to provide round-the-clock camera coverage of the main “enrichment plant at Natanz” and other enrichment plants scattered around the nation. The office of Director General Grossi also gets reports, he said, “on the cyclonical machines”—centrifuges—“that spin at high speed to produce low-enriched fuel for commercial reactors and, at concentrations of 90 percent or more, fuel for nuclear weapons.”

The bottom line is that Iran is still producing large quantities of uranium that in some cases is being enriched to 60 percent of purity for reasons explained above, but there is no evidence of an active bomb program at any of the known Iranian nuclear research facilities. US and allied intelligence services have looked hard for evidence of an underground facility filled with scientists and technicians capable of fabricating a hotter-than-hell collection of spun-up uranium gas into a solid nuclear core that could be fitted into a bomb or a rocket. So far, I have been told, the US, even with the world’s best spotters of underground exhaust pipes, has yet to spot an Iranian underground nuclear weapons facility.

So there is no evidence of an Iranian nuclear bomb amid an awful lot of partially enriched uranium that is far from making a bomb that can go boom. Will such facts stop Netanyahu from his constant talking of the Iranian nuclear threat? Not likely. He has his own muse, and his own demons, and a lot of blood on his hands.

[admin]

GAZA AFTER A YEAR OF WAR. A new documentary chronicles destruction and abuse
by Seymour Hersh
Oct 08, 2024

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A Palestinian child is seen following the Israeli airstrike on Ibn Rushd School in Al-Zawaida, sheltering displaced people, in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on October 6. At least 24 Palestinians, including children, were killed, and 93 others injured early Sunday morning in two separate Israeli airstrikes. / Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images.

Last week Al Jazeera released Investigating War Crimes in Gaza. The 81-minute documentary is a searing indictment of the treatment of those who always suffer most in war—women and children—during Israel’s retaliation for the horrid murders Hamas inflicted inside Israel a year ago this week.

Israel’s initial ground attack failed to rescue all the Israeli hostages or to destroy the several hundred miles of the Hamas tunnel system. The ongoing air attacks have resulted in the indiscriminate killing of men, women, and children, day and night, in houses, apartments, and office buildings. Home to more than two million Palestinians, Gaza has been torn apart, with immense casualties from the bombings that have eventually left little sign of civilization: no hospitals, universities, markets, restaurants, or civic life.

The war in Gaza has extended into the West Bank and now to Lebanon. The Israeli leadership, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with religious fanatics in charge of key ministries, has edged the nation into economic misery, and they continue a campaign of assassinations and bombings. Sirens sounded throughout Israel yesterday morning—a tragic anniversary—as a few easily intercepted missiles were fired from a still operating tunnel by a remnant of Hamas. Hezbollah’s much more formidable arsenal of missiles remains operational, and capable of striking deep into Israel. The Israeli Air Force struck what were described as Hamas targets last weekend in Gaza, and the IDF continues the air and ground war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. There has been fear of an Israeli attack on Iran in retaliation for Iran’s missile attack on Israel following Israel’s assassinations of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last month in Lebanon and a senior Hamas official last summer in Tehran. Murder is in the air in the Middle East and there is no international leader—certainly no one in the Biden administration—with the standing and the will to keep it from happening.

In all of this, Netanyahu’s administration has been constantly supported by the Biden administration which has reportedly provided Israel $18 billion in military aid since last October 7. Biden remains publicly resolute in his support of Israel, as does Vice President Kamala Harris. His foreign policy aides, headed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, are now quiet. Blinken and his colleagues have spent the past several months telling Americans that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas would happen, and some or all of the remaining hostages would be recovered. All along Netanyahu had other plans.

The destruction of Gaza, observed daily online and on television by the world, is the background for one the major themes of the documentary: the callous indifference of Israeli soldiers operating amid the devastation. There is little contact throughout with Hamas, which has been battered by Israeli bombing and has not posed a significant above-ground threat. There also is no evidence today of a continuing intense Israeli hunt for the remainder of the more than 250 hostages initially seized by Hamas and others. The usual signs of intense urban warfare in the Middle East—ambushes and door-to-door and house-to-house fighting—do not appear in the Al Jazeera documentary because the anticipated intense ground war with Hamas never came to be.

Instead we have video after video, taken by Israeli soldiers and relayed to family and friends, of bored Israeli soldiers ransacking the apartments and homes of Gazan families who fled in panic, perhaps because of an Israeli warning that their neighborhood was to be targeted. Such warnings did take place, but surely were not seen as a humanitarian gesture by Gazans who fled to the streets despite being terrified to venture outside.

The documentary showed that some apartments, once vacated, were ransacked by Israeli fighters, with flak jackets off, weapons down, and their cellphones filming away. With their commanding officers watching and participating, the Israeli soldiers filmed themselves pawing through the apartments, destroying appliances, smashing furniture, and making fun of Arab food. There is a hunt for money, and, as young males in wartime will do, a ransacking of the clothing of women and the usual fascination for women’s underwear that often is worn by a prancing IDF soldier as his colleagues record away.

The videos, which were forwarded by social media to friends and families back home, reek of contempt for Palestinians, as if all the men in Gaza and their wives and children were hardcore members of Hamas. The documentary shows us that they turned out to be big hits at the many early pro-war dance parties back home. There is not much dancing today in financially stricken Israel. Other scenes in the video show clusters of Israeli soldiers, in uniform and on duty in Gaza, standing in close quarters on the top of emptied buildings—no bombs were coming their way—and cheering as a cluster of apartment buildings ten or so stories high a few hundred yards away began to tremble, obviously because of unseen bombs set off below ground, and then slowly fold away.

As the journalist who broke the stories of the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam and of the photographs of sexual abuse of prisoners in Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison by untrained American Army Reserve prison guards, I understand that soldiers in combat do horrid things, including rape and murder, to noncombatants. But the Abu Ghraib photos were circulated only among the members of the unit on duty; they were not meant for outsiders, including the Army chain of command. It was understood that their actions, if made known to higher-ups at headquarters, would lead to prosecution.

That was not the case with the photos taken in Gaza and passed around widely, including among the soldiers’ commanding officers. Such evidence of enduring corruption among the officer class may be impossible to cure in the short term, given the degradation of Israel’s political and military leadership today.

There were other photos that I found far more troubling in the documentary, specifically the scenes of a forced march to the south, monitored by Israeli soldiers, by families who had found sanctuary in a hospital in Gaza City. The march was widely reported at the time, but the documentary added facts that were not known. The marchers—including young children and the elderly, some hobbling on crutches in the daytime heat—were ordered to wave a white flag in one hand and hold their IDs in another as they walked. Those who dropped either of these were not allowed to stop walking to retrieve the dropped goods. It was a form of gratuitous collective punishment seen rarely since World War II. It was shaming to watch.

A clandestine image of a forced march from a Nazi camp at the end of the second world war. Photograph: US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Netanyahu and the religious zealots in control today in Israel obviously have their eyes on Gaza and West Bank as real estate that will soon be open to the possibility of future settler domination. Just who will rule the two million or so surviving residents of Gaza is not known, but any such leadership will be approved by Israel. Self-rule is not going to happen for the desperate surviving Palestinians—if they are allowed to stay in Gaza. A precise death toll in the last year of the war is not yet possible; estimates vary today from the official Gaza health ministry count of more than 41,000 to academic projections four times as high.

Netanyahu has been clear in his view of the Palestinians’ future. Last October 28, he told Israeli troops about to go into battle: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” It was a reference to a biblical command in which God gave the Israelites permission to entirely destroy an enemy known as the Amalekites. “And we do remember,” Netanyahu said.

17 Remember what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. 18 When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. 19 When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!

-- Deuteronomy 25

Chapter 15.3 of the first Book of Samuel has God commanding Samuel: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”

Netanyahu is not alone in his modern day fanaticism. Last April 30, Bezalel Smotrich, the extremist Israeli finance minister and member of the security cabinet, who is a close associate of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the equally fanatical minister of national security, returned to the Bible in publicly calling for the “total annihilation” of Israel’s enemies. He specifically cited three cities in Gaza that should be destroyed. “There are no half measures,” he said before quoting Deuteronomy: “‘You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. There is no place under heaven.’”

Smotrich ominously said that after Hamas is destroyed, Israel must “clear out, with God’s help, with one blow, wicked Hezbollah in the north, and really send a message that what will happen to those who harm the Jewish people is the same as those who tried to harm us in the past—they will be destroyed, destroyed, destroyed. And it will echo for decades to come.”

Netanyahu has begun bombing “wicked” Hezbollah in Lebanon. Can anyone doubt the fate of Gaza and the West Bank? I cannot. This is no longer the civilized Israel I have visited and reported upon for many decades.

Is anyone in the Biden White House paying careful attention to the words of Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir as America continues to ship more bombs and other arms to a deeply traumatized and terrorized Israel?

[admin]

Investigating war crimes in Gaza
Al Jazeera Investigations
Al Jazeera English
Oct 3, 2024

This feature length investigation by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit exposes Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year long conflict.

The I-Unit has built up a database of thousands of videos, photos and social media posts. Where possible it has identified the posters and those who appear.

The material reveals a range of illegal activities, from wanton destruction and looting to the demolition of entire neighbourhoods and murder.

The film also tells the story of the war through the eyes of Palestinian journalists, human rights workers and ordinary residents of the Gaza Strip. And it exposes the complicity of Western governments – in particular the use of RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus as a base for British surveillance flights over Gaza.

“The west cannot hide, they cannot claim ignorance. Nobody can say they didn’t know,” says Palestinian writer, Susan Abulhawa.This is “the first livestream genocide in history … If people are ignorant they are wilfully ignorant,” she says.




Thousands of families are trying to flee Gaza City at the same time.


Moving to the South you had to do it on foot.


No cars were allowed to drive in in that area.




There were tanks all over the place.


Above drones and planes. Tanks everywhere. Snipers everywhere.


It is forbidden to look right or left. It's forbidden to stop. If you dropped your ID card, you are forbidden to bow to pick it up. You have to keep walking.


We were asked to walk holding a white flag in one hand, raising the ID on the other hand -- everyone, including the children.


They would stop people while they were walking, then they say, "This person, wearing this color shirt, get out of the line." And then they would make them strip completely to their underwear in front of everyone.








I saw corpses on the ground. They were shot dead in the street.






I saw burnt cars. This was not a safe passage. Those who were killed, everything was left on the ground for the people who were crossing to see. I made my children promise me that they would not look at the ground at all -- not once. I just instructed them to look straight, to not look at the ground. Do not look down.  

[admin]

NETANYAHU’S LEBANON GAMBIT. The second front has restored the prime minister’s political standing
by Seymour Hersh
Sep 26, 2024

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Smoke billows from a site targeted by Israeli shelling in Zaita, in the southern Lebanon, on September 23. / Photo by Mahmoud Zayyat / AFP via Getty Images.

One way to understand the dramatic events of the past week, and the restitution of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political standing in Israel, is to recall a famous statement of Admiral Ernest King, the US chief of naval operations throughout the Second World War. As the war neared its end, so the story goes, King was told by an aide that a group of reporters wanted an interview with him. “When it’s over,” he replied, “tell them who won.”

It could be Netanyahu’s motto today. I was surprised to be told recently by a well-informed official in Washington that things had changed dramatically in the war in Gaza—in Israel’s favor. There is no longer a possibility or a need for a ceasefire in Gaza, the official said. I further learned that ceasefire talk had been muted because, obviously, there is now a renewed Israeli war against the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. Amid the continuing carnage, Bibi’s standing inside Israel has soared as the death toll in Lebanon has risen.

The Israeli high command now believes, as has been reported in the Israeli media, that Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who orchestrated the murderous attack on Israel on October 7, may be dead and the Israeli Defense Force “is now in a ‘mopping-up phase’ of the tunnel war with Hamas.” The American official told me that “there’s been no communication from Sinwar in the past two or three weeks.” The implication was clear: somehow Israeli or American intelligence had been tracking or monitoring Sinwar’s communications, if not his precise underground location. There is little hope that any of the remaining Israeli hostages will be left alive. This is a conclusion that has yet to be shared with the increasingly anxious Israeli public.

(I must note here that the six hostages who were executed in a tunnel late last August were not killed, as I inaccurately recently reported, because their Hamas captors heard the noises of an Israeli sapper team whose mission was to destroy tunnels. The mission took place because the tunnel location of the hostages had become known and an Israeli special forces team was assigned to attack the site and seize the hostages. The six were found dead because there was no other exit for the guards. I do not know whether the guards were killed in a shootout or took their own lives. The full, tragic story was not made known at the time by the Israeli military, a decision that is hard to question.)

There are other facts, I was told, that indicate the Gaza war is in a mopping-up phrase. There have been no Israeli bombing missions over Gaza since last Friday (although Al-Jazeera reported that fifty people were killed in Gaza on Tuesday in various attacks), and many of the Israeli reservists who have been heavily involved in the war since last fall are in the process of being replaced by regular Israeli army soldiers.

There have been no ceasefire meetings or significant discussions with Hamas since the Israeli assassination last July 31 of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas who was in Tehran to celebrate the inauguration of President Masoud Pezeshkian, a four-time member of the Iranian parliament. Pezeshkian, a moderate, repeatedly says that he wishes to play a constructive role in world affairs, beginning with renewed talks on Iran’s nuclear program.

Just a few weeks ago, Netanyahu was in trouble at home and abroad as the war in Gaza seemed to be an endless pit of horror. Hamas still seemed to be capable of putting up a fight, and the world was recoiling from the constant Israeli bombings of Gaza, the growing casualties, and the desperation of the surviving residents there. Netanyahu was continuing to disregard the anxieties of President Joe Biden and his foreign policy aides, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who were in seemingly endless meetings in Egypt and Qatar and failing to achieve a ceasefire that would result in a bombing pause and the return of the surviving Israeli hostages.

The IDF, composed largely of reservists who had been called up for what was turning out to be an endless commitment, was fraying as the war dragged on, and the Israeli reservists inevitably turned on the civilian population in Gaza. Just last week a group of IDF soldiers were caught on video throwing four bodies—it was assumed all were dead—from the roof of a battered building in the West Bank to the street.

The American official, who has long dealt with Israeli issues, ruefully explained his view of the long-standing Middle East impasse: “The Israelis want the Palestinians to be peaceful and accept their fate. The Palestinians objected and fought back. A new day in the Middle East will never come.”

Last week, as the current Israeli impasse with Hezbollah was turning murderous, I had a long talk with an Israeli hero of earlier war—he served in an elite commando unit—whose grandchildren are nearing a one-year deployment in Gaza. He was full of contempt for Netanyahu and his refusal to agree to a ceasefire. There are families in Tel Aviv, he told me, who are leaving the country every day “to get their children out of the kill.”

He remains convinced that the war with Hamas was lost well before the October 7 attack when those in charge of Israel’s most important intelligence unit, dealing with signals intelligence, ignored the reports of a senior female officer who repeatedly warned of the coming Hamas attack. The Israeli veteran, who spent his career in special units, said he understood what happened. The men running the unit told the woman, a colonel, in essence, that “you ladies are here to bring me coffee.”

-- The Women Soldiers Who Warned of a Pending Hamas Attack – and Were Ignored: Over the past year, the Israel Defense Forces’ spotters situated on the Gaza border, all women, warned that something unusual was happening. Those who survived the October 7 massacre are convinced that if it had been men sounding the alarm, things would look different today, by Yaniv Kubovich, Haaretz

It’s increasingly evident that a full inquiry into the military and intelligence failures of October 7, once promised by Netanyahu, will not take place as long as Netanyahu is still in office.

The retired officer, whose negative views of Netanyahu I have heard about for years, also told me he is totally supportive of Bibi’s current war against Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and the Hezbollah militia. “We will nail Hezbollah,” he said, because its defeat would be a blow against Iran, “and Iran controls Hezbollah.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And this whole issue of blaming Iran as directly responsible for these attacks? Every time we hear of one of these resistance groups, it’s always with the adjective the “Iran-backed” or the “Iran-financed” group. Is it your sense that these groups have their own independent life, or is the Biden administration correct in ascribing all of the real motivation coming from Iran?

TRITA PARSI: I think there’s two exaggerated narratives here. One is the Iranian one, in which they’re essentially claiming that they have no control over these groups at all and that they’re completely independent. That is not true. But also the other narrative, the Washington narrative, is not true, one that claims that the Iranians completely control these different groups and that they have no agency of their own. Clearly, they do have agency of their own. On numerous occasions they have acted against the express wishes of the Iranians, particularly in the case of the Houthis. And even in the case of these Iraqi militias, what has happened just in the last 48 hours is that, clearly, there’s been a lot of back-door diplomacy between the Iranians and the United States, and now the Iraqi militias have come out and said that they’re ceasing their attacks on the U.S. troops at this point. And it’s clear that the Iranians have put some pressure on them to essentially deescalate.

-- Biden’s Middle East Policy “Leading Us into a War Whose Aims We Have Not Defined”, by Amy Goodman

Netanyahu, seemingly on the political ropes inside Israel and around the world, is suddenly in full bloom as the leader of the expanding war against Hezbollah. Most Israelis fear Hassan Nasrallah, its Shiite leader, for his close ties to Shiite Iran, long viewed by Israel as a potential nuclear power and its most dangerous enemy. The Biden administration and Congress are joined to the hip with Israel when it comes to Iran, though its closeness to nuclear weapons capability has long been exaggerated.

Hezbollah demonstrated its support for Sunni Hamas after the devastating Israeli bombing of Gaza began by initiating a series of missile and rocket attacks on Israeli cities and villages as far as 35 kilometers south of the border with Lebanon. The Hezbollah attacks eventually led to the evacuation of some 67,000 Israeli citizens, who were moved into temporary housing. Israel responded by bombing Hezbollah and other targets in southern Lebanon. That war has exploded with renewed ferocity in the past two weeks. Nasrallah added to the tension by authorizing his missiles to strike targets up to 50 kilometers south of the Israeli border, putting the historic Israeli city of Haifa in peril as well as Tel Aviv.

The missile and bomb exchanges remained at a low intensity until last week, when Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, triggered explosives that had earlier been implanted in a shipment of 6,000 foreign-made pagers that were purchased by Hezbollah and distributed to its senior leadership and soldiers. Many of the pagers inevitably ended up with the family members of Hezbollah officials and fighters, and the ensuing chaos when all were triggered by an Israeli signal became front-page news around the world.

Israel’s electronic reach was demoralizing and terrifying, both for the technology involved and the obvious conclusion that Netanyahu had escalated his confrontation with Hezbollah while ignoring pressure from the Biden administration to agree to a ceasefire. I had a talk with another well-informed Israeli veteran, who was seriously wounded in an earlier war, who explained that the Israeli decision to trigger the explosives was not the planned act of war that it seemed to be. He said the embedded materials were triggered only because Mossad learned that its action had been inadvertently discovered by a few Hezbollah officials who had brought their pagers in for routine repairs. It was that discovery that led Netanyahu or one of his aides to authorize the attack.

I got no answer when I asked how anyone in Mossad or any Israeli intelligence service could uncover such a random fact. Instead, I was told Israel’s secret triggering of the pagers was “a brilliant special op but not a plan to start a war.”

The pager blasts are estimated to have killed dozens of people, including children, and injured thousands across Lebanon. The Israeli veteran also said more than three thousand Hezbollah soldiers were injured, many of them seriously.

If there was concern at the top of the Israeli military or civilian authority about a rebuke for such tactics from Washington, it was misplaced. There was no reaction from the Biden administration and the American media has consistently viewed Hezbollah primarily as a terrorist organization, despite its presence in the last decade as a significant member of the Lebanese parliament and government. If anything, the reaction was awe and respect for the attack. David Ignatius, the Washington Post columnist, noted that Israel had not taken immediate credit for the attack: “it didn’t need to. An attack of this sophistication and daring in Lebanon could not have been staged by any other nation. The video scenes of Hezbollah fighters being blown to the floor by their own communication devices sent an unmistakable message to the Iranian-backed militia. We own you. We can penetrate every space in which you operate.”

The next day, Israel doubled down and triggered explosions in walkie-talkies throughout Lebanon. Newspapers reported the death of at least twenty civilians and the wounding of 450 more amid widespread panic and terror throughout the county.

Michael Walzer, a renowned political theorist, writing in the New York Times, described Israel’s actions in blunt language as “terrorist attacks by a state that has consistently condemned terrorist attacks on its own citizens.” Walzer has written on just and unjust wars and supported Israel’s ferocious response to the Hamas attack on October 7 as justified. But the wrongdoing in this case, Walzer wrote, “was Israel’s, and the plotters had to know that at least some of the people hurt would be innocent men, women, and children.”

The main plotter was Israel’s prime minister, who authorized the use of the militarily useless terror attacks that could only bring Hezbollah and Lebanon closer to war. Netanyahu has understood that a war with Hezbollah is a way to bolster his declining popularity in Israel and perhaps some of the world.

The Biden administration has supplied Israel with an estimated 68 percent of its arms, and Netanyahu has treated the president and his secretary of state and other diplomatic officials as pawns to be led on. In his farewell speech this week to the UN General Assembly, Joe Biden talked about his ceasefire proposal, seemingly unaware that the fate of hostages had been overtaken by events, beginning with the assassination of Haniyeh. But Biden did say, referring to the current crisis between Hezbollah and Israel: “Full scale war is not in anyone’s interest.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has been silent on the issue in the closing weeks of her presidential campaign, as has Donald Trump. The political axiom that foreign policy has little to do with presidential campaigns remains safe for now. The one political figure left standing and talking is Netanyahu, still the man of the hour in Israel.

It was déjà vu for a retired Lebanese government official and longtime resident of Beirut who lived through the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel that ended with the saturation bombing of South Beirut, a Shiite area where Hezbollah was dominant. “There is no Washington now,” he told me. “It is a vacuum. As for Bibi, it is a historical opportunity. And the war he is seeking will be awful. He is awful. And it will take a long time, and he will be exhausted in Lebanon.”

I have written about the 2006 war between Israel and a seemingly outgunned Lebanon in which the powers that be in Israel were confident of success. In the end it was, by all accounts, as I wrote then, a wash.

An all-out war this time will be torrential.

[admin]

MY MEETINGS WITH NASRALLAH. The assassinated Hezbollah chief had a vision for his country
by Seymour Hersh
Oct 01, 2024

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Young demonstrators in Basra, Iraq, on Sunday carry posters of Hassan Nasrallah after the Israeli attacks in Lebanon that killed the Hezbollah leader. / Photo by Haidar Mohammed Ali/Anadolu via Getty Images.

I must confess that I liked Hassan Nasrallah. I had a few long meetings with him that began in the winter of 2003. It was a few months after the US invasion of Iraq, a response George W. Bush and Dick Cheney decided on two years earlier, in the aftermath of 9/11, even though Iraq was led by the secular Saddam Hussein who had no connection to Al Qaeda.

I was working for the New Yorker, and my beat was the war on terror. It brought me to Berlin that spring for a breakfast about 9/11 with August Hanning, the head of German intelligence. There was no need for a discussion of ground rules: Hanning and I understood we were talking strictly on background.

At some point I asked Hanning about a strange connection I’d learned of between former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who during a distinguished army career was a commander of the Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s most secret commando unit, and Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, the Shiite militia based in southern Lebanon. The issue was a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hezbollah that took place after a lot of back and forth between Nasrallah and Barak, who was refusing to return one of the prisoners. Nasrallah’s backchannel talks with Israel via Hanning continued with Ariel Sharon, who replaced Barak as prime minister in 2001. It was stunning news. Sharon had led Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 1982 and had played a key role in the infamous massacre of two Palestinian refugee camps there. He and Nasrallah were the oddest of couples.

I didn’t take notes at breakfast, but I came away most interested in Nasrallah. I had friends in Beirut who knew the Hezbollah leadership and arranged a meeting. I don’t remember where the first meeting took place, but it had none of the intense security that came later, after Israel and Hezbollah fought a bitter war in 2006 that had no winners, as I later wrote in the New Yorker. That first meeting involved little more than a casual security check: my jacket was patted down, and my old-fashioned tape recorder was briefly opened and glanced at.

Nasrallah was round and plump in his religious garb, and I asked him via an interpreter whether he saw himself as a terrorist or a freedom fighter in his constant border skirmishes with Israel. He said his military had attacked Israeli soldiers along the border and would do so again, if it came to a war. He surprised me by adding that if full rights and a meaningful peace agreement somehow could be worked out between the Israelis and Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, he would of course honor it. Cookies and tea were served, and he insisted that we partake, pushing the cookie platter toward me. The talk was largely a tutorial, from his point of view, about the US war in Iraq. Nasrallah’s prediction was that the quick American victory would be followed by years of bitter warfare as the disbanded Iraqi army would link up with tribal and political opposition. He was pretty much right.

I had a second meeting with Nasrallah a few weeks before the January 30, 2005 parliamentary elections in Iraq. It was the first general election since the US overthrow of Saddam and, as I later reported, the Bush administration was doing all it could to fix the vote to insure that the Sunni candidates favored by the White House would win a plurality. I had been told by a friend in the US intelligence community that election ballots, supposedly but not necessarily blank, were being printed in the United States and flown to Iraq.

Nasrallah was amused by the idiocy of Washington sending diplomats and other officials to Iraq who knew little about the country and could speak no Arabic. He told me that America had no idea how to fix elections and seemed to believe that the winning party needed a majority of 50 per cent or better. He then told me that the winning party would be Shiite and have 48.1 percent of the vote. “Americans,” he said, “do not know how to fix elections here.” (The verbatim transcript of this and other interviews with Nasrallah are stored among 95 boxes of my papers and were not available to consult on short notice.) The election was won by the Shiite Ibrahim al-Jaafari with 48.19 percent of the vote.

The election was essentially boycotted by Sunni Arabs, and in one key Sunni precinct only two percent of those registered cast ballots. The Sunni community obviously got the message that the election would be fixed, as the US diplomatic and military community did not. There were at least forty-four deaths around polling places on election day.

I had written a book alleging that Jack Kennedy fixed an election in Chicago, but I never thought to ask Nasrallah how he knew that al-Jaafari would win and could predict his score within one tenth of one parentage point of his vote total.

1960 United States presidential election in Illinois
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/17/24

The 1960 United States presidential election in Illinois took place on November 8, 1960, as part of the 1960 United States presidential election. State voters chose 27 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.

In the nation's second-closest race following Hawaii, Illinois was won by Senator John F. Kennedy (D–Massachusetts), running with Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, with 49.98% of the popular vote against incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon (R–California), running with former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., with 49.80% of the popular vote, a margin of victory of only 0.18%. As of 2020 this is the last time that a Democrat would win Illinois by only a single digit margin of victory...

Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, head of the Cook County Democratic Party, promised to deliver Kennedy the support of Cook County's delegates, so long as Kennedy won competitive primaries in other states....

A myth arose that Daley held back much of the Chicago vote until the late morning hours of November 9. However, when the Republican Chicago Tribune went to press, 79% of Cook County precincts had reported, compared to just 62% of Illinois's precincts overall. Moreover, Nixon never led in Illinois, and Kennedy's lead merely shrank as election night went on. Earl Mazo, a reporter for the pro-Nixon New York Herald Tribune and his biographer, investigated the voting in Chicago and "claimed to have discovered sufficient evidence of vote fraud to prove that the state was stolen for Kennedy."

A special prosecutor assigned to the case brought charges against 650 people, who were acquitted by a judge who was considered a "Daley machine loyalist. Three Chicago election workers were convicted of voter fraud in 1962 and served short terms in jail. Mazo, the Herald-Tribune reporter, later said that he "found names of the dead who had voted in Chicago, along with 56 people from one house." He found cases of Republican voter fraud in southern Illinois but said that the totals "did not match the Chicago fraud he found."

My last visit with Nasrallah came in December 2006, a few months after Hezbollah fought a stunned Israel to a standoff in a brutal war. (I republished the article I wrote about that war a few weeks back.) The failure to carry that day has played a role in preparing Israel for the day when its prime minister would, as he did last week, call for a knockout blow.

Nasrallah had been in hiding since the aftermath of the 2006 war. I took a taxi to a meeting point in south Beirut, home to many Shiites, where a Hezbollah aide took me by taxi to a garage. There I was searched with a handheld scammer and placed into the back of a dark sedan, its windows blocked, and driven to two or three more garages, changing cars each time, and finally to a garage in what turned out to be a modern apartment building. It was more interesting than alarming, and I didn’t immediately connect the hyper-security to the war with Israel. Once in the correct garage, I was walked to an elevator that took me directly to the top floor of what seemed to be a 12-story building.

I understood that Hezbollah’s success in standing up to Israel had made him a hero to both Shiites and Sunnis. Nasrallah shooed away an aide who wanted to do a full body search of me. I was taken aback by the security and essentially asked him, “What the fuck is going on?”—only in more polite language. He explained the summer war had started when he ordered the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. It was a mistake. “We just wanted to capture prisoners for exchange purposes,” he told me. “We never wanted to drag the region into war.”

As we got into it again, over cookies and tea, a clearly rattled Nasrallah blamed President Bush for what he said was Bush’s goal of “drawing up a new map for the region” by partitioning the Middle East, where many religions had long mingled peacefully, into segregated Sunni and Shiite states. “Within one or two years at the most,” he said, “there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. Even in Baghdad, there is a fear that it might be divided into two areas, one Sunni and one Shiite.”

A few months later, I wrote a long piece, based on my interview with Nasrallah, little-noted Congressional testimony, and interviews in Washington and the Middle East, about a Bush Administration decision “to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East.” I wrote: “In Lebanon, the administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the new American foreign policy, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there was “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East” that would separate “reformers” and “extremists.” Most of the Sunni were at the center of moderation and Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, along with Sunni Syria and Hamas, were on the other side of that divide.

Whatever one might think of Rice’s analysis, a policy shift did emerge and eventually did bring Saudi Arabia and Israel to the brink of a new strategic embrace via the Abraham Accords. Both nations viewed Iran and Hezbollah as existential menaces. The Saudis, I wrote then, believed that greater stability in Israel and Palestine would give Iran less leverage in the region.

That report was published more than seventeen years ago. It is stunning today to consider how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has destroyed this fragile chance for a political realignment in the Middle East, especially because Iran is now led by a forward looking and moderate president who may soon be on Netanyahu’s hit list.

We will never know whether Nasrallah, who was born in Lebanon and told me more than once that he was determined to bring Hezbollah more into the political, economic and social of life of his country—would have been successful in doing so.

The way forward now, with mighty Israel on the attack on the ground and in the air, is dark and deadly.

[admin]

GAZA SEEN FROM THE GROUND. A view from inside the war
by Seymour Hersh
Sep 19, 2024

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Scene of the destruction following the Israeli airstrike on the Zeitoun Martyrs School, a shelter for displaced Palestinians in Gaza City, on September 14. At least five Palestinians, including two children and a woman, were killed, and several others were injured in the attack. / Photo by Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images.

This week I spoke to a Canadian citizen who has been working as a researcher in Gaza. She speaks Arabic and knows the people and the territory, once a Mediterranean oasis of grand gardens and exotic fruits from ancient times that, since the Hamas attack last October 7 and the Israeli response, has become a barren death trap. I am not at liberty to tell you much more about her. She acknowledges the shock and horror of Hamas’s attack on Israel last October 7, but sees it in the context of decades of brutal Israeli suppression of life in Gaza.

She has come over the years to know the Palestinian people well and to admire what she calls “their willingness to adjust and accommodate. Let’s put it this way,” she said, “if you had to destroy one particular group of people—what can I tell you? The military campaign in Gaza has opened up a new terrain of violence against civilians. In the next war, whether in Lebanon or another part of the world, systematically targeting hospitals won’t be so shocking because we’ve seen the live raids of hospitals, four or five of them. And targeting journalists won’t be shocking. Multiple images of beheaded babies on a livestream won’t be shocking.

“People don’t understand that what the Israelis are getting away with in Gaza is setting the stage for wars to come—everywhere. And when international organizations fail us in Gaza and UN Security Council resolutions are ignored, they are going to be ignored by everyone going forward.

“People are not that stupid, and they are not going to forget. We knew what was coming in October, and we were screaming at the top of our lungs: stop it! Stop it now! And this is why people are so terrified and enraged. I’m terrified for what is to come, but do not misunderstand me. Why is what is to come going to be any worse than what has just come? This is the most televised genocide in history. We haven’t had a live stream of people as their homes are being bombed, mobilizing TikTok, Snapshot, Twitter, and Instagram—a very young population in Gaza who are well versed technologically, who speak English, and who are telling you in real time as things are happening and also using social media to raise money so they can survive.

“It’s incredible and that’s what sets it apart. The visual element of this war is a part of setting the normalization. It is also part of the difficulty Israel is having in denying that things are happening because we are able to see and we’re able to locate it and to prove it. They are not denying any more that they raided a hospital or that they bombed a school. They’re just saying that it is justified.

“Israel is not unique in this. What is unique is the visual evidence that we have even though we don’t have many international journalists doing their work independently on the ground. And yet it is still continuing, almost a year on. I think that is what’s different about it. And that’s part of the terror many of us are feeling.

“Gaza has collapsed the past and the future. What is the message that Israel is being given by the United States? It is: ‘You can escalate but keep it contained.’ And that is what they are doing. They have been escalating. In the beginning, when we saw a handful of children blown up and shredded into pieces, it was shocking. Now we are seeing it over and over again. When I was in Gaza—I’m not a medical doctor—but the things that were happening to people’s flesh, it was shocking. I thought I was the only one in the room who was shocked. But when I looked around, among doctors who do this daily, heroically, they were as disturbed and traumatized and one hundred times as exhausted and overworked as I was.

“So you don’t think Palestinians are human? Okay, it’s on you but it’s not going to stop there. And we’re already seeing that in the region. And we have a government in Washington that is absolutely incapable of putting any pressure on Israel and the next one will not, either. I don’t have much hope for the Democrats or the Republicans.

“We’re not documenting this only for ourselves now. We’re documenting it for the future. We’re going to look back and try to understand how in the fuck did it get to a point where the main demographics that are being killed and shredded are women and children? Whether it is children being hit by a single sniper rifle shot to the head, which shows intent, or children being flattened by bulldozers, or dying from infections, this is a genocidal intent.

“A woman giving birth in Gaza is in total hell. She has two or three hours to give birth, and the moment she does she is sent home. And being sent home means walking for hours with the new infant in your hands or sitting on a donkey cart, which is horrific—full of animals and it’s dirty. You and your child are going to be infected. Women are a target.

“Another thing I want to share with you is about men, because men are very much understudied in this iteration of the genocide. We have stories of men being humiliated, raped. People need to see the footage of men to see what Israel has been doing to men since October. Multiple doctors have told me of what they’re seeing as a pattern of young men in their twenties being shot by Israeli snipers in the groin area. It prevents their ability to have children.

“Is there some empirical evidence of this?” she asked rhetorically. “I doubt it. I mean, who has statistics?”

The researcher made it clear that she was all for mobilizing students at universities worldwide to put political pressure on the United States and other nations in Western Europe to stop supplying Israel with bombs and other weapons. There was another issue that she found profoundly unsettling—the posts that some Israeli soldiers on leave overseas after a rotation in Gaza, many with dual citizenship, displayed graphically showing what she said were videos of their violations in Gaza. “These soldiers are openly posting and bragging” about their violations of military law “before returning to Gaza,” she told me. “I think we should be going after them.”

I asked about her view of the Western press and its coverage of the Gaza war. “I think about it,” she said, “but my struggle is not to redeem the Western media. They are showing themselves and they are failing in this moment. I mean academia, media, courts, the street, right? Who gets to speak on the street? Who gets to hold up a sign? Who gets to chant? Who gets to wear a scarf around their neck? These are existential moments for the media and they are failing to step up to the plate. I’m not interested in saving the New York Times or the Washington Post from themselves.”

[admin]

Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 17, 2024

Israel Kills at Least 25 in Jabaliya U.N. Shelter as It Tightens Its Chokehold on Northern Gaza
Oct 17, 2024

Israel’s two-week siege on northern Gaza continues. Rescue workers say dozens of bodies remain buried under collapsed buildings in Jabaliya, where Israeli strikes earlier today on a U.N.-run school sheltering displaced Palestinians killed at least 25 people, including children. Hospitals warn food and fuel is running out. Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, recorded this video late last night.

Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya: “The nursery is full of cases. They are critical cases in nature. This baby here was only a few hours old when his mother was targeted right after giving birth, so his mother, father and grandmother were martyred. This baby is now alone and has an injury to his head, which led to a secondary infection, and now he is receiving the needed treatment.”

U.S. Ambassador to U.N. Claims U.S. Will Hold Israel Accountable If It Starves Palestinians
Oct 17, 2024

At the U.N. Security Council Wednesday, U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield suggested the U.S. would start to demand evidence from Israel it is not intentionally starving Palestinians.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield: “A policy of starvation in northern Gaza would be horrific and unacceptable and would have implications under international law and U.S. law. The government of Israel has said that this is not their policy, that food and other essential supplies will not be cut off. And we will be watching to see that Israel’s actions on the ground match this statement.”

This comes as a new report by Politico reveals a top Biden administration official told aid groups in late August that the U.S. would not restrict arms and funding to Israel, even if Israel blocked food and other aid from entering Gaza. Lise Grande, Biden’s special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, reportedly told the heads of over a dozen aid groups the U.S. would never “hold anything back that [Israel] wants.”

Inside Gaza, Palestinians say Israel’s deliberate, man-made famine has been evident for months. This is Karam Safi, a displaced Palestinian in Khan Younis who has been working with aid groups to provide food to up to 16,000 people.

Karam Safi: “Due to the closure of the aid crossings and the permanent siege of the north and south, we were compelled to distribute these lentils, and with very simple resources and capabilities so that we can serve these people. … I expect a very big catastrophe. A very big catastrophe. I mean of a special kind. Why? Because most of the adults and children will die of hunger. And the Israelis are doing this intentionally. They are carrying out this siege to kill the people one way or another, not by strikes, but by famine. The goal is to humiliate the Palestinian people.”

Meanwhile, UNRWA, which has been defunded by the U.S. since January, is warning it may soon no longer be able to function.

Philippe Lazzarini: “And I will not hide the fact that we might reach a point that we won’t be able anymore to operate. And if we cannot operate anymore in Gaza, it’s not just UNRWA as the main provider of services, but you have also the rest of the U.N. system, which very much relies and depends on the platform that the agency has offered so far. So, we are very near to a possible breaking point. When would it be? I don’t know. But we are very near of that.”

Israel Expands Assault on Lebanon, Attacks Beqaa in East, Compounding Displacement Crisis
Oct 17, 2024

Israeli airstrikes have hit eastern Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley shortly after Israeli forces warned residents it will attack the region. Before the latest warning, 25% of Lebanon was already under forced evacuation orders from Israel. Meanwhile, the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon reports its peacekeepers have once again come under “direct and apparently deliberate fire” in southern Lebanon. We’ll go to Beirut to speak to journalist Rania Abouzeid after headlines.

Meanwhile, Syrian media reports at least two people were injured when Israel launched an airstrike on the port city of Latakia.

*******

“The Gaza Playbook”: Israel Brings Displacement, Death and Destruction to Lebanon
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 17, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/17 ... transcript

We get an update on Israel’s war on Lebanon from journalist Rania Abouzeid in Beirut. “We are seeing a definite escalation that started a month ago and doesn’t show any sign of letting up,” she observes, describing unrestrained attacks by Israel throughout the country, on all sectors of society, as Israel carries out its “Dahiya doctrine” in an attempt to foment division among the Lebanese population. “This is the Gaza playbook. … The sentiment here is that this is now a war on Lebanon,” Abouzeid says.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show in Lebanon. The United Nations says Israel’s war on Lebanon has displaced 1.2 million people, including 400,000 Lebanese children. Earlier today, the Israeli military attacked the Beqaa region in eastern Lebanon after ordering more people to flee their homes.

This comes as the death toll from Israel’s attack on a municipal building in the city of Nabatieh has risen to at least 16. Lebanese officials denounced the attack, which killed the city’s mayor and five other city workers who were holding a meeting to discuss distributing aid in the region.

Meanwhile, the U.N. says its peacekeeping forces in Lebanon came under, quote, “direct and apparently deliberate fire” from an Israeli tank on Wednesday. The tank fire damaged a U.N. watchtower and destroyed two cameras.

In other developments, video has emerged of Israel blowing up a historic neighborhood in the Lebanese village of Muhajbib. On Wednesday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller was questioned about the attack by Matt Lee of the Associated Press.

MATT LEE: I want to go just to Lebanon for a second, because there was this footage that appeared, I guess overnight, of Israel blowing up an entire village in southern Lebanon. What do you make of that?

MATTHEW MILLER: So, I’ve seen the footage. I cannot speak to what their intent was or what they were trying to accomplish, what their targets were. I don’t know what they were. Obviously, we do not want to see entire villages destroyed. We don’t want to see civilian homes destroyed. We don’t want to see civilian buildings destroyed. We understand that Hezbollah does operate at times from underneath civilian homes, inside civilian homes. We’ve seen footage that has emerged over the course of the past two weeks of rockets and other military weapons held in civilian homes. So, Israel does have a right to go after those legitimate targets, but they need to do so in a way that protects civilian infrastructure, protects civilians.

MATT LEE: All right. I’m not sure I understand “I cannot speak to what their intent was or what they were trying to accomplish.” Isn’t it pretty clear that they —

MATTHEW MILLER: So —

MATT LEE: — what they were – what their intent was and what their —

MATTHEW MILLER: So — so —

MATT LEE: Whether they had a specific target in mind or not, blowing up an entire village, that seems to be pretty self-revelatory.

MATTHEW MILLER: So, I don’t — I don’t know what was in those buildings. I don’t know what was potentially underneath those buildings. That’s why I said I can’t speak to what they were trying to accomplish.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller being questioned by Matt Lee of the Associated Press.

Well, we go now to Beirut, where we’re joined by Rania Abouzeid. She’s a Lebanese Australian journalist and author based in Beirut. Her new piece for The New Yorker is titled “War Comes to Beirut.”

Rania, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you could respond to the latest news, the places and the scale of the Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, actually, a month ago today, the war in the south became the war in Lebanon with Israel’s mass detonation of thousands of pagers across the country. And that was followed the next day with a similar triggering of explosives in walkie-talkies. And it heralded an escalation that continues to this day. So, Israeli attacks have been ramped up in terms of the scope of the attacks, in terms of the frequency, the geographical location and also the targeting.

You mentioned in your intro the attack yesterday on Nabatieh’s municipal building. Now, Nabatieh is a provincial capital in southern Lebanon. The Israelis had earlier called on its residents to evacuate. Some were unable or unwilling to. And the local councilmembers, some of them, including the mayor, stayed behind to provide aid, bread, to distribute bread to those people, and they were killed.

Just in this past week, you know, we have seen airstrikes on homes that have been sheltering displaced people. This week, there was an attack on a house in northern Lebanon, which is the opposite end of the country from the Israeli border, and it killed more than 20 people. So we are seeing a definite escalation that started a month ago and doesn’t show any sign of letting up.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Rania, if you can talk about Israel saying they are only targeting Hezbollah? Talk about the map of who is getting bombed. And also talk about what Hezbollah is responsible for, not only a military wing.

RANIA ABOUZEID: Yes, no, Hezbollah is not only a military wing. It is also a political party. It has members of Parliament, more than a dozen of them. It has ministers in this government and certainly in governments over many years past. It has a very vigorous and active social services arm, which includes first responders. They have also come under attack by the Israelis, and many of them have been killed. So, it’s a multi-armed organization which is an integral part of Lebanon’s social and political and military fabric.

In terms of the victims of these Israeli strikes, I mean, I can tell you that the death tolls, the daily death tolls, are in the double digits. And most of those people who are killed are women and children. In that attack in northern Lebanon that I mentioned, there was an 80-year-old woman who was killed, along with two babies. So, it’s not just going after Hezbollah. We’ve heard this before. We’ve heard this in Gaza, that they’re only going after Hamas. And it’s the same thing that we’re hearing here. I mean, yesterday, as you mentioned also in your intro, Israeli troops rigged an entire village in southern Lebanon which is very close to the border, and they blew it up. This is the Gaza playbook.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: You are in Beirut. For your latest piece for The New Yorker, you’ve been speaking to people who have been displaced. There are tens of thousands. If you could tell us what they were saying and what the situation in Beirut is as more and more people are displaced from areas around Lebanon?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, first of all, the Israeli drones don’t seem to leave the air. They don’t seem to leave the skies over Beirut. And they’re not just over the southern suburbs, which is where Hezbollah had offices and a presence. It’s everywhere, across the city. It is this incessant buzzing.

The displaced are being housed in more than a thousand facilities across the country, including more than 700 schools and educational facilities. There are also many people who are still on the streets. Just yesterday, I was with a group of hundreds of displaced people who are in an area very close to the coast, to the Lebanese coast, in an area called Biel. And they’re staying — I can’t even call them tents, because the four sides were completely open to the elements. It was just a piece of canvas overhead. And these people are displaced from all over Lebanon, not just from the south. They were displaced from the southern suburbs of Beirut, an area known as Dahiyeh, and as well as the Beqaa, which has also come under bombardment, and elsewhere. There were Syrians among them, too.

So, yes, the government has opened more than a thousand shelters, but it’s not enough, given the sheer volume of people who have been displaced. Many have also been taken in by Lebanese into their homes. And that is why some of these houses — you know, we’ve seen some of these displaced people who were taken in by Lebanese in other parts of the country — come under Israeli attack.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Rania, if you could talk about the number of people you spoke to who consider themselves anti-Hezbollah? How are they feeling now?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, it’s definitely — the sentiment here is that this is now a war on Lebanon and that there is no safe space. When Christian villages in the north and in the south can also be targeted, there is a sense that you just don’t know who Hezbollah — sorry, who Israel is targeting. They claim that they are chasing Hezbollah operatives. Who knows? There are question marks about that. Is there any proof of that? Like yesterday, when they blew up the village in the south, they said that there were Hezbollah tunnels under this. You know, they seem — again, this is part of the Gaza playbook. They can say that there is a command center, Hamas command center, under one of the hospitals and blow it up.

So, there is a sense that, you know, there are certainly Lebanese who disagree with Hezbollah’s decision to open what it called a support front to ease the pressure of Gaza. That was how Hezbollah described its support front. There are Lebanese who disagree with that. There are Lebanese who blame Hezbollah for dragging — for, they say, dragging the country into the war. And there are many others who see Hezbollah as the frontline defense against Israeli not only airstrikes and attacks, but also there have been attempts over the past two-and-a-half weeks or so for Israeli ground troops to enter southern Lebanon. And they have faced very fierce resistance from Hezbollah fighters in the south.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, if you could respond, Rania, to what Netanyahu has said about Israel’s intentions in Lebanon? He said that the Lebanese basically need to eliminate Hezbollah. Unless people of Lebanon, he says, quote, “take the country back” and free themselves from Hezbollah, Lebanon would be turned into Gaza. I mean, your response? People are saying, suggesting that what he wants, what Israel really wants, is to instigate a civil war in Lebanon. Is that the general sentiment?

RANIA ABOUZEID: That is the general sentiment, and that is a sentiment that was conveyed from some of the country’s top politicians down to some of these displaced people who are still on the streets of Beirut. That is very — I mean, that’s how it was interpreted, that he’s basically saying, “Turn on each other, or we will turn you into Gaza.”

And, you know, we see these efforts to try and foment this suspicion among Lebanese. There are — in all of those cases that I mentioned, when displaced people who were taken into homes in other parts — and let me be frank, in non-Shiite areas of Lebanon, were targeted by the Israelis, there is this sense that the Israelis are trying to make Lebanese fear each other, to try and make people of the south almost outcasts and to make people afraid to take in the displaced into their homes and into their communities.

This is compounded by the fact that in recent days Israeli journalists just casually tweet something, saying, “Hey, you know, what’s happening in a garden in a particular neighborhood?” And that causes widespread panic, when the Lebanese fear that perhaps that garden — they’re saying that because that garden or that facility might be targeted. Just before we went on air, there was a report that the Al Jazeera offices in central Beirut have also received a similar warning and that they have now been evacuated. So, there is this panic and this sense Israel can target whatever it wants, whenever it wants, and that they’re — with complete immunity.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response also to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Rania, saying that he’s demanding UNIFIL soldiers get out of combat zones, alleging their presence is providing a human shield for Hezbollah? And overall, talk about the significance of saying that the peacekeepers — I think there are about 10,000 of them in southern Lebanon — should get out of the way, many saying they want them — that Israel wants them out because they don’t want international observers describing what’s happening there. But how UNIFIL is seen in Lebanon?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, I’ll tell you how UNIFIL has responded to those threats. And UNIFIL has said that they’re not going anywhere. UNIFIL is the peacekeeping force that is stationed along the U.N.-delineated Blue Line, which is the border between the two states. It is their role to stay there and to monitor what is happening there.

We’ve seen four, I think five, attacks now, direct Israeli attacks on UNIFIL bases. They have wounded peacekeepers. They have taken out surveillance cameras on some of these bases. They’ve also, on one occasion, actually used a bulldozer to try and bring down a wall on one of these UNIFIL bases.

So, it’s all part of this effort to sort of intimidate and to attempt to discredit not just UNIFIL, but the U.N. We’ve seen the same thing with UNRWA, which is the U.N. agency which is tasked with dealing with Palestinian refugees. Beyond that, I mean, we saw Netanyahu himself at the U.N. General Assembly stand on the podium there and call the U.N. antisemitic. Israel has declared the U.N. secretary-general persona non grata in Israel. So, it’s all part of this coordinated effort to try and discredit the U.N. if it points out things like international law and the laws of war and international humanitarian law, and, in fact, UNIFIL’s mission and why it is in southern Lebanon.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Rania, could you explain, you know, this idea, this doctrine, the Dahiya doctrine, and whether — which is named, of course, after the area outside Beirut which has come under fire from Israel, and whether you think that’s actually in effect now? And I just want to just quote a brief passage from your New Yorker piece where you point out — I mean, just to give a scale — a sense of the scale of Israel’s assault, you know, a number of health workers have been killed, health facilities targeted. You quote Airwars, a British conflict monitor, who told The Washington Post that Israel’s offensive in Lebanon was, quote, “the most intense aerial campaign that we know of in the last 20 years” — of course, with the exception of Gaza. So, if you could explain the Dahiya doctrine and your sense of whether it’s in effect now?

RANIA ABOUZEID: Well, the Dahiya doctrine was created, basically, after the 2006 war. And to put it very bluntly, the idea is that you cause so much pain to a community that you try and pry public support from the group, from the nonstate actor — in this case, Hezbollah. So, the idea is that you inflict so much pain on Hezbollah’s support base, on what is known here as the resistance community, that it turns against the group.

And this is why we’re seeing, you know, the scope of the targets is so wide. It is not just — you know, Israelis are not just targeting Hezbollah infrastructure and military targets. They are also targeting, as I said, people, displaced people who escaped parts of the country that are very far away from the border. They’re targeting — Lebanon’s public health minister has said that he — you know, there are hospitals that have been bombed and closed their doors because of the threat of Israeli strikes. More than a hundred paramedics have been killed. Medical centers have been targeted. So, it is a very — the targeting is very broad.

And the idea is to try and, as I said, pry that support, to say — actually, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general, Sheikh Naim Qassem, said this, not in his last speech, which was a few days ago, but in the one before that. He said this is the war about who screams first. So, it’s about inflicting pain on the other side and who is going to say “enough” first. And the Dahiya doctrine thinks that if you inflict enough pain on Hezbollah supporters, you will pry them away from the party.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Rania Abouzeid is a Lebanese Australian journalist and author based in Beirut. Thank you so much for joining us. We’ll link to your piece for The New Yorker, “War Comes to Beirut.”

RANIA ABOUZEID: Thank you.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Coming up, as aid groups warn Israel is wiping northern Gaza off the map, the Biden administration is threatening to cut military assistance to Israel in 30 days if more aid is not allowed into the area. We’ll speak to former State Department official Josh Paul, who resigned in protest last year. Back in a minute.


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Ex-State Dept. Official: Israel Is Starving Gaza Now. We Can’t Wait Another 30 Days to Take Action
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 17, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/17 ... transcript

Aid groups warn Israel is wiping northern Gaza off the map, and the Biden administration is threatening to cut military assistance to Israel — but not for at least 30 days. This comes as the U.S. has continued to arm Israel despite findings by its own experts at USAID and the State Department that Israel has routinely impeded delivery of food and medicine to Gaza. We speak with Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned last October over the push to increase arms sales to Israel. He and Tariq Habash, who resigned in protest from the Education Department, have launched a lobbying organization and a political action committee called A New Policy to push for a new approach on Israel/Palestine amid what Paul calls a “deep-rooted and very entrenched” pro-Israel consensus in U.S. politics.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh in New York, with Amy Goodman in Washington, D.C.

“Northern Gaza is being wiped off the map.” That’s the warning from Oxfam and 35 other humanitarian groups who say Israel’s siege on northern Gaza has reached a, quote, “horrifying level of atrocity.”

Earlier today, Israel’s military bombed an UNRWA school in Jabaliya housing hundreds of displaced Palestinian families. Al Jazeera reports the death toll from the attack has climbed to 25, with many children among the dead.

As Israel continues its siege on northern Gaza, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sent Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a letter Sunday threatening to cut off U.S. military assistance if Israel does not boost humanitarian aid access to Gaza within the next 30 days. The Biden administration has continued to arm Israel despite findings by its own experts at USAID and the State Department that Israel has routinely impeded delivery of food and medicine to Gaza in violation of U.S. law.

Politico has revealed that in August, Biden’s special envoy for Middle East humanitarian issues, Lise Grande, met with leaders of more than a dozen aid organizations and directly said the U.S. would not suspend arms to Israel. One person who attended the meeting told Politico, quote, “She was saying that the rules don’t apply to Israel.” Grande also reportedly said the United States will not, quote, “hold anything back that they want.”

We are joined now by Josh Paul. He’s a former veteran State Department official who resigned in protest of the push to increase arms sales to Israel amid its assault on Gaza. He’s a former director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs in the State Department. On Wednesday, he and Tariq Habash, who resigned in protest from the Education Department, announced the formation of a new lobbying organization and a political action committee called A New Policy to push for Washington to take a new approach on Israel/Palestine.

Josh Paul, welcome back to Democracy Now! We’ll talk about this new organization and the PAC that you’ve formed, but first if you could respond to the letter that Austin and Blinken sent to Netanyahu, what it said and what it means that they gave Israel 30 days? Of course, in 30 days, that’s after the U.S. elections will take place and a new administration will be in power.

JOSH PAUL: Yes. Thank you, Amy. And good to join you this morning.

So, I want to clarify, to begin with, that the letter that Biden — sorry, that Blinken and Austin sent to their counterpart in the Israeli government didn’t actually threaten to cut off arms or to suspend security assistance. It simply said that there could be consequences under National Security Memorandum 20 and under U.S. law. What those consequences are, I think, remains to be seen, if at all. We have seen repeated expressions of concern from the United States government over the course of the last year.

And yet, what this letter makes clear, in its detail — and it is a detailed letter. It lists, I believe, 15 steps the United States would like to see Israel take to facilitate the entry of humanitarian assistance into Gaza. What it does by doing so is demonstrate that the U.S. is currently in breach of its own laws. U.S. law says the U.S. cannot provide security or any form of assistance to a country that is restricting the delivery of U.S.-funded humanitarian assistance. Here we have, in writing from this administration, a list of the ways in which Israel is doing so, and yet U.S. military assistance continues to flow.

And, of course, nowhere in the law does it say, you know, “Give them 30 days to see if they can fix it.” The law is very clear that when it is made known to the president that assistance is being restricted, U.S. assistance cannot be provided. So, I think that there is, you know, plenty of reasons for skepticism here. And, of course, while people are starving on a daily basis in Gaza, dying of malnutrition, the time for this to be fixed is now. The time for it to be fixed was actually almost a year ago, but it is certainly now, not in 30 days.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Josh Paul, if you can talk — although you left the State Department protesting U.S. policy on Israel, and you were the person who approved weapons sales within the State Department, you clearly still have contacts within the State Department. Can you talk about what people are saying? I mean, everything from the revelations of ProPublica, also us speaking to other people who quit over reports coming out of the State Department saying clearly Israel is cutting — preventing humanitarian aid from coming in, and yet Blinken turns these reports around. What people are saying? Are there more resignations within the State Department? And what the U.S. accomplishes, since Netanyahu is such a clear ally of Trump and wants him to win, yet Biden still embraces him, supports him, and even with this warning letter, as you said, you know, the election will happen by the time they were to cut off aid if Israel doesn’t comply with what the U.S. is demanding?

JOSH PAUL: Yes. That last part, in particular, has been a bit of a mystery to me and, I think, lots of other people, because it has been very clear that Prime Minister Netanyahu has long had a preference for the Republican Party and for President Trump. He made that clear again when he came to Washington. He has made that clear in running rings around President Biden repeatedly over the course of the last year. So, what the thinking there is on the part of Democratic strategists, I just can’t fathom.

You know, with regard to how things are playing out within the State Department, it’s actually been a year to the day since I handed in my resignation at the State Department. And, you know, there was a significant increase in dissent, in protest within the department in the initial months of this conflict. I think the challenge is that none of that really led to any policy, because what we — or, policy changes, because what we have is a very tightly controlled set of decisions that are being made on a very political and politicized basis from the very top levels of the U.S. government.

You noted that within the State Department, there has been increasing transparency and pushes from USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and from, for example, the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, to submit to Secretary Blinken evidence that Israel is restricting U.S.-funded humanitarian assistance. I think it is worth noting that when ProPublica’s piece came out two weeks ago, reporting that these reports had gone to Secretary Blinken and he had cast them aside, those reports also — that report also noted that one of those officials, Julieta Valls Noyes, assistant secretary for population, refugees, and migration, had been asked if she felt that Section 620I of the law, that says we cannot provide assistance in these circumstances, had been triggered, her initial response was “Yes.” When she was pressed, she backed down. I think it’s worth noting that she quietly resigned a week ago, shortly after the ProPublica story came out.

So, I think there is a degree still of concern, and certainly of shame, amongst high-level officials. I know that amongst lower-level officials, there is immense pain. I’ve heard from people in the last week saying they don’t know if they can do this any longer. At the same time, I think there’s also a feeling of desperation and that there’s really nothing, under President Biden, that can be done or can be changed from the inside on this issue. So people are waiting to see what happens next and what happens after the election.

AMY GOODMAN: And do you see, from your vantage point as an insider, any space between Biden and Harris?

JOSH PAUL: I think that’s very hard to say. Certainly, Vice President Harris, as a candidate, has not given us much evidence that there is any space. On the contrary, she has said repeatedly that she will continue the policies set by President Biden, including of unconditional support for Israel. There are people around Vice President Harris. Her policy team are, I think, different than those around Biden. And I think, as well, that Harris is not the ideologue on this issue that President Biden is. But I do think that what we face here is a deep-rooted and very entrenched set of political, economic incentives that will make it very hard for anyone to change U.S. policy in this regard, regardless of the outcome of the election, or of this election. This is something that is going to take a long time to resolve and a lot of effort.

And to get to the point that you opened our session with, that’s why Tariq Habash and I and a group of extraordinary, remarkable leaders, including former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, have created A New Policy. This is a lobbying organization and a political action committee founded on the idea that what we face here is actually not a policy problem. We know what the policy problems are. The people in government know what the policy problems are. What we face here is a political problem. And until we fix the politics, until we play within this ugly system that we have to make it work in the interests of the American voters, the American people, American values, and the interests of all of the people in the region, we are not going to make headway. So, that is what we are out to do.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Josh Paul, if you could also respond to recent reports that suggest that Israel will launch retaliatory strikes against Iran within the next three weeks — that is to say, before the U.S. election? And although the Biden administration has reportedly won assurances from Israel that they will not attack Iranian nuclear or oil sites, of course, the implications of this would be enormous. If you could respond to that and how you think the Biden administration would respond in the event that Israel does attack Iran?

JOSH PAUL: Well, so, let’s, first of all, remember that the Biden administration also won assurances from Israel back in April that it would conduct itself in accordance with international humanitarian law and not restrict the flow of humanitarian assistance in Gaza. So, I’m not sure how much assurances from Israel at this point are worth or how credibly they can be taken.

That said, I think that one of the things that is empowering Prime Minister Netanyahu in this situation is his knowledge that America has Israel’s back, that no matter what Israel does — you know, we have deployed now a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, a THAAD system, which is our most capable and most expensive air defense system, to Israel. We have deployed several squadrons of U.S. fighter jets. We have deployed U.S. Navy ships. And I think that the problem there is that we create for Prime Minister Netanyahu this ability to escalate without concern over repercussions, and indeed, if anything, a certain attraction, one can imagine, to him of getting America involved in a conflict with Iran that he has long craved. So I think these are indeed very dangerous times, particularly as we lead into a U.S. election here.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Josh, A New Policy, the name of your new organization — A New Policy’s website says the United States policy in the Middle East should comply with American laws, reflect American values, advance peace, and peace and prosperity for all Americans. Are you saying now that the U.S. is breaking U.S. law?

JOSH PAUL: So, not only am I saying that the U.S. is breaking U.S. law, but I’ve actually heard, as have others who I’m working with, from members of Congress, behind closed doors, who will say, “We believe that what Israel is doing with our weapons amounts to war crimes, but we won’t say that publicly.” What A New Policy’s mission ultimately is, as Tariq Habash said today in the magazine Semafor, is to change that, is to fix that, is to make it so that U.S. elected officials can vote in accordance with their voters’ preferences, with their constituents’ interests, with American interests, with American values and with American law. We need to remove these structural roadblocks and these financial, frankly, roadblocks to our democracy and to the enforcement of our laws. So, if all of your listeners or viewers would like to visit, we are at www.anewpolicy.org, and happy to continue the conversation there, as well.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Thanks so much, Josh Paul, former director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs in the State Department. He resigned in protest last year. He has just launched a lobbying group called A New Policy.” Thanks so much for joining us.

Coming up, we’ll look at Israel’s threats to launch retaliatory strikes against Iran as fears grow of a broader regional war.

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“Itching for a War”: Biden Deploys U.S. Troops to Israel as Netanyahu Threatens Escalation with Iran
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 17, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/17 ... transcript

We look at Israel’s threats to launch retaliatory strikes against Iran as fears grow of a broader regional war. We speak to analyst Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, about the Biden administration sending U.S. troops and the top-of-the-line THAAD missile defense system to Israel. “There are no direct and clear U.S. interests at stake here,” says Parsi. “Every time Israel escalates the war, Biden rushes in to protect Israel from the consequences of its own escalation,” incentivizing Israel’s escalation of tensions in the region and risking drawing the U.S. into war with Iran, he adds.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh in New York, with Amy Goodman in Washington, D.C.

We end today’s show looking at the rising risk of a broader regional war in the Middle East. The Pentagon has announced U.S. B-2 bombers attacked five Houthi targets in Yemen earlier today. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the attacks came in response to Houthi’s, quote, “destabilizing behavior.” Houthi fighters have attacked vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden since November and vowed to continue until Israel ends its assault on Gaza and Lebanon.

This comes as the Biden administration is deploying an advanced anti-missile defense system and a hundred U.S. troops to Israel as Israel threatens to carry out retaliatory strikes against Iran in response to Iran’s recent ballistic missile attack on Israeli military and security sites.

Earlier today, the commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards issued a new warning to Israel. The commander, Hossein Salami, was speaking at the funeral of Brigadier General Abbas Nilforoushan, who was killed in the Israeli attack that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

HOSSEIN SALAMI: [translated] You, Israel, may imagine that THAADs can compensate for your shortcomings in defending you. This is a mistake. Do not trust the tubes of these launchers. You cannot massacre Muslim nations but remain safe, secure and live in peace. No, that cannot happen.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re joined now by Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He’s the author of several books, including Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Trita. If you could just begin by responding to this latest news?

TRITA PARSI: So, I think it’s extremely important for the American public to understand that what Biden has done here is that he has deployed U.S. troops into an active war zone in another country’s war. There are no direct and clear U.S. interests at stake here. And the Biden administration is essentially presenting this as if it is defending Israel or helping Israel defend itself, whereas, in reality, these are — the distinction between defensive and offensive weapons here is rather irrelevant, because what the Biden administration is doing is reducing the costs for Israel to escalate tensions in the region. Every time Biden does this, it makes it easier for Israel to escalate. And as a result, it has continued to do exactly that.

If Biden was not reducing the costs of escalation, it would have been costlier for Israel to do the steady escalation as we’ve seen in the last year, a widening of the war, and it would have thought twice. Perhaps the costs would even have been prohibitive. So, if the Biden administration’s actual goal is to prevent the widening of the war, prevent escalation in the region, adding defensive or any type of military capabilities to the side that actually is leading the escalation is not something that, in any way, shape or form, actually can help calm the situation down. Instead, it actually helps fuel tensions in the region and increases the likelihood of the very same widening of the war that Biden claims that he is against.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you give us, Trita, a chronology of what happened? The bombing on the inauguration of the new president by Israel of Tehran — not clear if it was an airstrike, if it was a bomb that was planted — that killed the Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, then — that was Israel. Iran waits weeks and then attacks with 180 anti-ballistic missiles that kill no one but a Palestinian who died from, not clear, the shrapnel that came down from the sky in Jericho. They said they were just targeting military sites in Israel. Is Iran coordinating, by the way, with the United States, actually, in all of this? Is there more behind-the-scenes communication than we understand?

TRITA PARSI: There is behind-the-scenes communication, undoubtedly. And there is, perhaps at a surfical level, a degree of coordination. I think the Iranians do not want to see escalation, knowing very well that they are in a weaker military position, and they know quite well that Netanyahu has been looking, itching for a war for quite some time, a war that he designs to drag the U.S. into it. And his best opportunity to drag the U.S. into this unnecessary war is in the next three weeks. So, the Iranians have been rather restrained, hoping that they would avoid walking into Israel’s trap.

This is part of the reason why, after the assassination of Haniyeh, despite the fact that they promised a response, they didn’t respond. They claim that there were promises from the U.S. and Europe that there would be a ceasefire and that they waited to give that a chance. No ceasefire came, but on top of that, instead, Israel attacks Lebanon, kills Nasrallah, as well as the senior IRGC official. And after that, the Iranians did decide to respond, and they do so by striking military targets.

And in that strike, they also demonstrate their capacity to penetrate Israel’s air defenses, which is precisely why, when the THAAD is now being deployed over there in Israel — is an indication, is an admission that the Israeli air defenses are insufficient. This, again, goes back to what I said earlier on. Every time Israel escalates the war, Biden rushes in to protect Israel from the consequences of its own escalation. That is not a strategy to prevent escalation; that is a strategy that fuels escalation.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Trita, could we also talk about what role countries in the region could potentially play in any possible retaliation against Iran? The Iranian foreign minister was recently in Riyadh. He’s now in Egypt. But people have spoken specifically about Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Israel has been trying to persuade them to, quote, “not facilitate any possible Israeli retaliation.” If you could talk about the relationship between the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Iran, the various sites at which they’ve been at odds, and where they stand at the moment vis-à-vis Iran?

TRITA PARSI: There’s been an interesting evolution of the position of the Saudis and the Emiratis. Fifteen years ago, they were not publicly, but privately, they were lobbying the U.S. quite aggressively to go to war with Iran. This was revealed by the WikiLeaks, in which the cables showed how much very senior officials, including the king of Saudi Arabia at the time, was pushing for the U.S. to go to war. This has now changed in the last couple of years. There’s both been a bit of a rapprochement between these countries, but also a clear realization on the Saudi and the Emirati side that the Iranians actually have capabilities that go far beyond what they had expected, which means that in case of a war, the Iranians would have the capacity of destroying a tremendous amount of facilities in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and as a result, those two countries would suffer tremendously in the case of a war, which is something that they previously did not think was the case.

Today, I don’t think they are, in any way, shape or form, eager for this type of a confrontation. And I think the message from the Iranian side to them has been that if they facilitate, if they allow their airspace to be used or their bases to be used for an attack against Iran, the Iranians will also retaliate against them directly. I think that message from the Iranians is sent to them in order for them to put pressure on the Biden administration to actually restrain Israel, something that the Biden administration has been unwilling to do. The Iranians don’t have a direct way of pressuring the Biden administration, but they appear to be calculating that through Saudi Arabia and the UAE, there may be a greater likelihood that the Biden administration finally will do something to prevent the Israelis from further escalation.

AMY GOODMAN: Trita Parsi, according to The Washington Post, Israel is now considering striking military sites in Iran, but not Iran’s oil or nuclear facilities. However, many in the U.S. and Israel are saying, “Take this moment to strike. Take out Iran’s nuclear facilities.” We know, of course, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal that Obama had negotiated. What exactly would this mean, what is about to take place, apparently?

TRITA PARSI: Most military analyses point to the fact that the Israelis actually don’t have the capacity of delivering a fatal blow to Iran’s nuclear facilities. They have been pushing for a larger attack, including against oil installations and economic infrastructure. The Biden administration has pushed back and has essentially delivered a list of military targets that they believe would be adequate for Israel’s response. The Israelis, reportedly, have agreed to this.

But I think it’s very important to understand that most of this is, frankly, meaningless, because once the Israelis strike, particularly if they strike against military sites and try to target military officials, as they have done in Lebanon, there will be civilian casualties. There will be an escalation, that will almost make it inevitable for the Iranians to then respond again, which then means that in the second iteration of this, the Israelis are very likely to go after economic infrastructure, oil installations, and potentially the nuclear program, as well. As long as we are on an escalatory cycle, it does not matter what the first step is. What matters is what the last step is. And as long as we are on that cycle and Biden is not preventing it, it’s, frankly, meaningless if the first step is to avoid targeting nuclear sites and economic infrastructure. This will escalate towards a war in which all of those different things will be targeted, both on the Iranian side, as well as on the Israeli side.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Trita, finally, if you could talk about, respond to the fact that Netanyahu, much like — we spoke about this in our earlier segment on Lebanon — much like as he did with Lebanon, gave a direct address to the Lebanese people? He did the same with Iran last month, saying, “With every passing moment, the Iranian government is bringing the noble Persian people closer to the abyss.” What is the significance of this, and why is he doing that?

TRITA PARSI: Well, he’s done this on previous occasions, as well, not only in the context of Gaza and Lebanon, but in the case of Iran, as well. I think the primary target of this is actually not the Iranian public. The message was in English, and the original video had English subtitles. This is a message to the Western audience in order to present Israel’s war of aggression as a defensive war, as a war that will help get rid of a very unpopular regime in Iran, and as a result, just as with the Iraq War, this deserves the support of the Western publics, because the government in Iran is so problematic, similar to the argument against Saddam Hussein. And remember, it was Netanyahu who testified in Congress back right before the Iraq War promising that an attack on Iraq would have positive reverberations throughout the entire region.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Thank you, Trita Parsi.

TRITA PARSI: We’re seeing again the Israelis —

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave it there. Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and author of several books, including Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy. And that does it for our show. I’m Nermeen Shaikh, with Amy Goodman, for another edition of Democracy Now!

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Headlines
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 18, 2024

Israel Kills Hamas Leader Yahya Sinwar, Says It Will Continue War on Gaza
Oct 18, 2024

Israel announced Thursday it had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza. A senior member of Hamas’s political bureau told the AFP, “Israel believes that killing our leaders means the end of our movement … these leaders became an icon for future generations to continue the journey towards a free Palestine.” The Israeli military released a video allegedly showing Sinwar’s final moments in which he appears to throw a stick or piece of debris at the Israeli military drone filming him. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared “this is not the end of the war in Gaza” and that Israel would continue its assault until “Hamas lays down its arms and returns our hostages.” It appears Sinwar was not killed as part of a targeted strike, but in the course of Israel’s indiscriminate assault on the Gaza Strip.

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris joined other leaders in calling for Sinwar’s death to propel a ceasefire. But inside Gaza, Palestinians say past killings of Hamas and other resistance leaders have not ended Israel’s brutality.

Kamal Abou Ajwa: “They did not only assassinate Sinwar. They also assassinated Haniyeh. They assassinated Hassan Nasrallah. And the war did not stop. We are urging for the war to stop. We are not asking for them to assassinate this person or that. They have assassinated most of our leaders, and the war has not stopped. We are calling for the war to stop.”

Yahya Sinwar became the chief of Hamas’s political operations after Israel assassinated his predecessor, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran in July. [3 whole months]

Press Groups Demand Israel Allow for Evacuation of Critically Injured Al Jazeera Reporters
Oct 18, 2024

In other news from Gaza, Al Jazeera camera operator Fadi al-Wahidi remains in a coma after he was shot in the neck by an Israeli sniper while reporting in Jabaliya earlier this month. Israeli authorities have blocked the evacuation of al-Wahidi from Gaza, as well as that of fellow Al Jazeera cameraperson Ali al-Attar, to receive urgently needed medical treatment. Press freedom groups are demanding that the two Al Jazeera camerapeople be allowed out of Gaza in order to survive.

Israeli Soldier Kills 59-Year-Old Palestinian as She Harvested Olives on Her Land
Oct 18, 2024

In the occupied West Bank, mourners gathered for the funeral of Hanan Salameh, a 59-year-old Palestinian woman who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers as she harvested olives on her land in the village of Faqqua near Jenin. At least 757 West Bank Palestinians have been killed by Israel since October 7 of last year. Hanan Salameh’s son described his mother’s killing.

Faris Salameh: “We were picking olives, and Israeli authorities had previously given us a permit to harvest the olives on the condition that we stay away from the fence 100 meters. We were farther than around 100 meters. And when they started shooting, we started packing our stuff and leaving. She was martyred. She was shot by the tractor. We were by the end of the area, far from the fence, and they shot her in cold blood. This is what happened.”

Earlier today, the U.N. said it’s recorded at least 32 attacks by Israeli settlers targeting Palestinians harvesting olives since the start of October. Thirty-nine Palestinians have been injured, and some 600 Palestinian olive trees and saplings were “vandalized, sawed off, or stolen.”

UNIFIL Says Israel Has Used White Phosphorus as Israeli Military Continues to Attack Its Forces
Oct 18, 2024

The U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon has reiterated it will remain in place despite ongoing, deliberate attacks against its members by Israeli forces. UNIFIL also said it found evidence of possible use of white phosphorus weapons near one of its bases. The use of white phosphorus is illegal. This comes as Hezbollah says it’s entering a “new phase” of its fight against Israeli forces that have invaded Lebanon, including the introduction of new weapons. Israel has killed at least 2,400 people in Lebanon and forcibly displaced over 1.34 million people over the past month.

Biden Praises Killing of Sinwar in Berlin as Western Leaders Renew Calls for Ceasefire
Oct 18, 2024

President Biden has arrived in Berlin for talks with Western leaders. During brief remarks after a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Biden said his trip was aimed at ensuring that NATO remains strong and that Ukraine prevails in its war against Russian occupation. Biden also hailed Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Biden’s final trip to Europe as president comes as several European lawmakers have called for sanctions against Israel over its bloody assaults on Gaza and Lebanon.

European Leaders Split over Response to Israel; Spanish Lawmaker Calls Out Sánchez Hypocrisy
Oct 18, 2024

On Tuesday, far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni revealed that Italy has effectively had an arms embargo against Israel in place since its invasion of Gaza last year, with arms export licenses consistently denied. Meanwhile, Ireland’s leader Simon Harris said he’s looking at ways to immediately impose trade sanctions on Israel, following a call by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on the European Commission to suspend the bloc’s free trade agreement with Israel. That drew accusations of hypocrisy from some Spanish lawmakers, who pointed to Spain’s weapons deals with Israel since October 7 worth one billion euros. This is Spanish parliamentarian Ione Belarra, who addressed the Spanish parliament Wednesday while holding a picture of the Palestinian student Sha’ban al-Dalou, who was burned to death in Israel’s attack this week on Al-Aqsa Hospital in Gaza.

Ione Belarra: “Last Sunday, Israel did this: They burned dozens of people alive in tents while they were taking refuge in a hospital. What is the difference between this and the Nazi gas chambers? I am asking you all, Mr. President. There is no difference. And we are complicit as a country in this genocide.”

Sha’ban al-Dalou’s younger brother Abdul Ruhman succumbed to his burn wounds earlier today. We’ll go to Gaza later in the broadcast to speak with Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed about Sha’ban al-Dalou and his family.

College Students at Brown, Northwestern Protest to Demand End to Gaza Genocide
Oct 18, 2024

Gaza solidarity protests are continuing across U.S. college campuses. In Rhode Island, students from across the state are traveling to Providence today to join Brown University students in a protest against their school’s rejection of their call to divest from Israeli companies complicit in war and occupation.

In Illinois, Northwestern University sent in campus police to tear down a sukkah set up by Jewish students that they dedicated to the people of Gaza. A sukkah is a temporary booth or hut constructed during the weeklong festival of Sukkot. Jewish Voice for Peace Northwestern said, “We will not allow our traditions to be exploited by those who seek death and destruction. Our ancestors, many of whom endured genocide and ethnic cleansing, taught us never to be bystanders in the face of injustice.”

In more protest news, earlier this week peace activists again blockaded the entrance to the Creech Air Force Base in Nevada to oppose the role of U.S. drones in Israel’s war on Gaza. One activist was arrested.

***

Tareq Baconi on Death of Hamas Chief Sinwar & Why Killing Palestinian Leaders Won’t Pacify Resistance
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 18, 2024
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/10/18 ... transcript

Hamas has confirmed Israel killed the organization’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, marking what could be a turning point in its yearlong war. Sinwar was apparently not killed as part of a targeted strike, but in the course of Israel’s indiscriminate assault on the Gaza Strip. “It’s not a war that’s happening against Hamas … This is an Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people,” says Palestinian analyst Tareq Baconi, author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. “The removal of someone like Yahya Sinwar will not stop the Netanyahu government from carrying out its genocide in the Gaza Strip.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Khalil al-Hayya, has confirmed in a televised address that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was killed by Israeli forces earlier this week. Al-Hayya could succeed Sinwar. This comes after Israel announced Thursday it had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, marking what could be a turning point in Israel’s assault on Gaza. Sinwar was apparently not killed as part of a targeted strike, but in the course of Israel’s indiscriminate assault on the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military released a video they say shows Sinwar moments before his death after they attacked the building he was in, in Rafah. In Sinwar’s final moments, he appears to throw a stick or debris at the Israeli military drone filming him.

Hostage families called for Israel to now focus on negotiating a deal to free the hostages. Many of them protested in Tel Aviv.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in a video statement after the killing.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: [translated] Today we clarified again what happens to those who hurt us. Today we once again showed the world the victory of good over evil. But the war, my dears, is not over yet.

AMY GOODMAN: After Israel’s announcement, Basem Naim, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau, told the AFP, quote, “Hamas is a liberation movement led by people looking for freedom and dignity … It seems that Israel believes that killing our leaders means the end of our movement … these leaders became an icon for future generations to continue the journey towards a free Palestine,” unquote.

This is a displaced Palestinian in Gaza City responding to news of Sinwar’s death.

KAMAL ABOU AJWA: [translated] We are urging for the war to stop. We are not asking for them to assassinate this person or that. They have assassinated most of our leaders, and the war has not stopped. We are calling for the war to stop.

AMY GOODMAN: Back in the United States, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris joined other world leaders in calling for Sinwar’s killing to propel a ceasefire. This is presidential candidate Vice President Harris.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Hamas is decimated, and its leadership is eliminated. This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza. And it must end such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination. And it is time for the day after to begin.

AMY GOODMAN: Yahya Sinwar was appointed head of Hamas in July after the previous leader Ismail Haniyeh’s assassination in Tehran on the day that the Iranian president was inaugurated.

For more, we go to Cape Town, South Africa, where we’re joined by Tareq Baconi, a Palestinian analyst and writer. The Palestinian Policy Network, he’s president of its board, Al-Shabaka. He is the author of the book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. His recent piece for The New York Review of Books is headlined “Accounts of the Struggle.”

Tareq, welcome back to Democracy Now! First, if you can respond to Israel’s announcement that they’ve killed Yahya Sinwar, how you understand he was killed, apparently in Rafah, and Hamas stopping short but looking like they are confirming, in fact, the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is dead?

TAREQ BACONI: Hi, Amy. It’s good to be back.

Yes, so, we’ve seen the footage now that was released by the Israelis yesterday. And just as I was coming onto the show today, the confirmation came in from Hamas that the leader, Yahya Sinwar, had been executed. Now, the footage that came out shows how unusual this situation had been. This was, as you said on the show, not an operation that was planned. It appears to have been an accidental stumbling of this unit that was training in the Gaza Strip on the group that included Yahya Sinwar.

Now, the footage that’s been circulating is one that I believe that the Israeli military will come to regret one day, because it’s showing a man in military fatigues who is fighting until his last breath. This is a leader who they had long claimed was in hiding, surrounded by hostages and preventing — or, cowering in fear from the Israeli military. And, in fact, here is a leader who’s aboveground, not surrounded by any of the captives, fighting. Now, this is going to be something that will certainly shape the way that Yahya Sinwar is remembered and the legacy that he will be thought as having made before his execution.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about who Yahya Sinwar is? And talk about his rise to power and what you think the significance of this moment is.

TAREQ BACONI: Well, Yahya Sinwar really is a strategist. He’s someone who has gone up through the ranks of Hamas from its earliest days of the establishment around the founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. He was part of that early group of leaders. And so he has been a part of Hamas and Hamas’s organizational structure in the Gaza Strip for decades.

He’s, as is well known now, someone who also served time in Israeli prisons, which meant that he was also exposed to Israeli military officials and prison wardens and had used that time to learn Hebrew, to educate himself about Israeli politics, before returning to the Gaza Strip with the prisoner exchange deal that freed Gilad Shalit in return for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners.

He came back into the Gaza Strip and slowly made his way up through the ranks in the military wing. And certainly, then, after Ismail Haniyeh was moved to Doha, he became Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip, as well. Now, this is someone who is very calculated and has always maintained a very clear and decisive position that Hamas is engaged in a war of liberation, is engaged in resistance, and not just armed resistance, but also popular resistance, against Israeli apartheid.

Now, his killing, there’s been a lot of talk about what his killing will mean for Palestinians in Gaza and for what’s happening today. And one of the things that’s really important to note is that this is a war that’s happening against the Palestinian people. It’s not a war that’s happening against Hamas, despite the framing being of a war against Hamas in the West. This is an Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. The removal of someone like Yahya Sinwar will not stop the Netanyahu government from carrying out its genocide in the Gaza Strip. As far as Hamas is concerned, this is not a movement that is dependent on a singular leader. It’s a movement that has a collective approach to decision-making. We’ll have to wait and see who they elect as a new leader, but I don’t necessarily foresee a significant change in the reality on the ground in the immediate future.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, after Israel assassinated Nasrallah in Lebanon, thousands of Lebanese Israel has killed. Do you see the same thing happening now in Gaza? I mean, you have President Biden. You have Vice President Kamala Harris You have the families of hostages in Tel Aviv. They are continuing to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. And you have Harris saying now they should move forward in that direction.

TAREQ BACONI: Well, a ceasefire in Gaza has been possible for many months now. It’s been on the table for many months. And despite all of this false equalization that it was — that the obstacles to the ceasefire were both Sinwar and Netanyahu, the reality is that Sinwar has accepted, Hamas has officially accepted a ceasefire in which the hostages would be released in return for the Palestinian prisoners who are held in Israeli jails and a permanent cessation of violence. What the Netanyahu government has time and again said, that they will only accept a release or that exchange of captives for prisoners if the ceasefire is temporary, which means that after that exchange happens, they would plan to go back in and carry out the genocide. Now, it’s not clear how they think that that would be something that Hamas would be willing to accept, giving up the captives in return for only temporary reprieve. So, the obstacle to getting a permanent ceasefire in Gaza has always been the Netanyahu government.

The U.S. administration has time and again suggested that they’re putting pressure on the Netanyahu government to achieve a ceasefire. But that’s absolutely not in line with what the American administration has done in practice, which is to arm Israel and enable it to maintain a genocide against the Palestinian people. So I think all the rhetoric that comes out from either Harris or Biden at the moment has to be seen only as political theater. I think in the best-case scenario, we have an American administration that’s been entirely coopted by the Netanyahu government and is being led into becoming complicit in genocide against its best interests and the interests of the Palestinian people. And at worst, we have an American administration that has fully embraced Netanyahu’s ideological view of exterminating the Palestinian people, regime change in the region, and carrying out that ideological project through American arms and money. So I don’t think that the obstacle to a ceasefire has ever been Sinwar and that now the removal of Sinwar is suddenly going to lead us into a ceasefire.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to President Joe Biden — he just arrived in Berlin — speaking with Western leaders as he addressed the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The death of the leader of Hamas represents a moment of justice. He had the blood of Americans and Israelis, Palestinians and Germans and so many others on his hands. I told the prime minister of Israel yesterday, “Let’s also make this moment an opportunity to seek a path to peace, a better future in Gaza without Hamas.” And I look forward to discussing Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: “A path to peace,” he says. And he ends by saying, “I look forward to discussing Iran.” Your thoughts, Tareq?

TAREQ BACONI: Well, I mean, I think this is a continuation of the same, of the same positioning that the Biden administration has been in, which is really that they’re not making any of the decisions, or at least that they’re not making any of the decisions to end a ceasefire. They’re actively making the decisions to further support the Netanyahu government and to align American interests with Israeli interests in the way that it’s understood by Israel, which is to maintain a genocide in Gaza and to expand the war in the region.

I think it’s very clear that the Netanyahu government is thinking about completely destabilizing Lebanon, of possibly carrying out some kind of operation in Iran that could lead to a regime change. What we’re seeing today is an attempt by Israel to remake the Middle East in such a way that they can maintain their reality as an apartheid state unchallenged in the region. And the Biden administration is fully accepting of that reality and hasn’t made any moves to really counter or put pressure on the Netanyahu government to either end its genocide or rethink these policies.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a clip of Yahya Sinwar himself. We recently had Hind Hassan on Democracy Now! talking about her new documentary, Starving Gaza. But two years ago, it’s believed she was the last person to interview on video Sinwar when she was working for Vice News. This was in Gaza in 2021.

YAHYA SINWAR: [translated] Israel, which possesses a complete arsenal of weaponry, state-of-the-art equipment and aircraft, intentionally bombs and kills our children and women. And they do that on purpose. You can’t compare that to those who resist and defend themselves with weapons that look primitive in comparison. If we had the capabilities to launch precision missiles that targeted military targets, we wouldn’t have used the rockets that we did. Does the world expect us to be well-behaved victims while we’re getting killed? For us to be slaughtered without making a noise? That’s impossible.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, that was Yahya Sinwar back in 2021 speaking to Hind Hassan. Tareq Baconi, speak more about what he’s saying and also about the decades he spent in an Israeli prison.

TAREQ BACONI: Well, I mean, what he’s saying, Amy, is something that many Palestinians would intrinsically and immediately agree with, which is that the expectation from the Israeli side is that Palestinians really just roll over and die, that any kind of resistance, armed or otherwise, is fundamentally unacceptable. The idea from the Israeli side is that Israeli Jews should be living in peace and security even as they maintain a brutal, violent regime of apartheid against Palestinians. Palestinians really are expected to be out of sight, out of mind.

I mean, this interview was in 2021. If you think three years before that, Palestinians engaged in one of the broadest forms of popular mobilization in Gaza, calling for return. This was the Great March of Return of 2018. And it was met by Israelis snipering off Palestinians, killing medics and journalists. More than 200 Palestinians were killed, and more than 36,000 were injured. And yet no one in the international community really engaged with this to question what this architecture of apartheid was, what it meant that 2 million Palestinians were held in Gaza behind a brutal regime blockade that was systematically a form of collective punishment against the Palestinians there.

So, the expectation is, as Sinwar is saying, that Palestinians should not resist that, that Palestinians should acquiesce to that reality. And then any resistance, whether armed or otherwise, is met with immediate condemnation from the West, a reassertion of Israel’s right to defend itself and, as we see today, a carte blanche to carry out horrific violence, the kind of sadistic violence that we’ve been watching happen in Gaza over the course of the past year.

So, I think what’s really important for us to go away with is that we have to delink the genocide that’s happening in Gaza from October 7th. October 7th might have been the trigger, and that might have been the framing for Israel to claim that it’s retaliating. But what we’re seeing in Gaza is the actualization of genocidal policies that have been in the making for years, that Israeli officials have been talking about a second Nakba for years. Palestinians like myself have been warning for years that Israel is planning ethnic cleansing to complete the Nakba, to carry out mass killing in order to end the issue of Palestine. They want to maintain a positionality of unchallenged apartheid in Palestine and across the region without any kind of resistance. And I think this is what we’re seeing today. Israel’s ability to do that with full impunity is at full display.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Tareq Baconi, if you could talk about, before October 7th, the Qatari government asking Netanyahu if they wanted Qatar to continue sending millions of dollars to Hamas — men would actually bring suitcases of money into Gaza — or if they should stop this? And according to the reports of a number of newspapers, they told them — he told them to continue. And also the role of the U.S. in asking Qatar to be the host of Hamas in order for it to negotiate?

TAREQ BACONI: Well, I mean, it’s precisely the point I was making. Now the Israeli media, Benjamin Netanyahu, certainly American media — obviously, with the exception of this platform — is on a rampage of trying to position Hamas as, and Yahya Sinwar specifically, as this image of evil, of this demon, the embodiment of evil that must be removed in order to maintain goodness in the world.

But as you say, go back just over a year, and the Israeli government was very happy to be actively engaged with maintaining Hamas as a government in the Gaza Strip, because their issue was never Hamas. Their issue was: How do they maintain Gaza as an enclave of more than 2 million Palestinians in a state of calm and in a state that does not challenge Israeli security? So the structure of apartheid, the architecture of apartheid, the blockade itself, was never in question. The question was: How do we stabilize the Gaza Strip so that it’s not a threat to Israel?

And so, that really — that goes to the heart of how Israel has been thinking about Palestinians, both in terms of the Netanyahu government and long before, which is that they have to be pacified, they have to be defanged, and they have to accept their lot that they’re living under apartheid indefinitely. Now, in order to achieve that, they worked with various Palestinian political leadership in this instance, including Hamas, to stabilize Palestinian enclaves under overarching Israeli rule. And the U.S. was not only happy with that, it was so convinced that this pacification of Palestinians was sustainable that they —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 20 seconds, Tareq.

TAREQ BACONI: — that they allowed Israel to sort of pursue negotiation agreements and ingratiate itself with the region. It was never an issue of dealing with the political demands at the heart of Palestinian liberation.

AMY GOODMAN: Tareq Baconi, Palestinian analyst and writer, president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, author of the book Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance. We’ll link to your recent piece in The New York Review headlined “Accounts of the Struggle.”

***

Gideon Levy: Death of Sinwar Won’t End Israel’s War While U.S. Gives Netanyahu Free Rein in Gaza
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 18, 2024

Israel announced Thursday it had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza, releasing a video allegedly showing Sinwar’s final moments before his death after Israeli forces in Rafah attacked the building he was in. After the announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared “this is not the end of the war in Gaza.” In Tel Aviv, Israeli families called for Netanyahu to refocus efforts on negotiating a deal to free the hostages. “They are torn because they are clever enough to understand that the killing of Sinwar does not mean the release of their loved ones,” says Gideon Levy, award-winning Israeli journalist and author, who says Netanyahu will continue to act through sheer force as he sets his sights on Iran with the full support of the United States.

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.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz is reporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is meeting today with ministers and heads of security agencies at the military headquarters in Tel Aviv.

For more, we go to Tel Aviv, where we’re joined by Gideon Levy, award-winning Israeli journalist and author, columnist for the newspaper Haaretz, where he’s also a member of the editorial board.

Gideon, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the response in Israel to Israel’s killing of the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar?

GIDEON LEVY: As you can imagine, Amy, there is a lot of sense of joy and pride. The media is encouraging it, obviously. The main headline of the most popular newspaper in Israel, Yedioth Ahronoth, says, “The Satan was assassinated.” The mood is of big content and of really feeling that justice prevailed and this Hitler was assassinated. Nobody asks what will be the day after. Nobody asks what did Israel benefit out of it. We are all celebrating the killing of the Satan.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what the families of hostages are saying, where you are, in the city of Tel Aviv? It seems like there wasn’t — they didn’t skip a beat yesterday in their protest of Netanyahu as they demanded a ceasefire.

GIDEON LEVY: Yeah, they are torn, because they are clever enough to understand that the killing of Sinwar does not mean the release of their beloved ones. On the contrary, it might even postpone it or maybe even miss it totally, because as long as Sinwar was alive, there was a partner. Now with whom will Israel deal about any kind of hostage deal, if Israel is at all interested in?

The feeling is that Netanyahu, now he’s boosted by much more support in Israel after this success, this military success of assassinating Sinwar. For him, the hostages were and still are not the first priority. And why would it now happen after it didn’t happen for a whole year? I doubt it. Why would Hamas go for it now? When it’s so beaten and there is so little to lose, why would they now care about releasing the hostages, almost their last asset? So, I understand that the families — they don’t speak in one voice, and it shouldn’t be one voice. But at least part of them are really in anxiety that maybe the last chance for releasing their beloved one was missed.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what we understand of how Yahya Sinwar was killed? He was not in the tunnels. The video that Israel is putting out of him sitting in a chair, he was in Rafah. Who the forces were who moved into that place, and the significance of that, Gideon Levy?

GIDEON LEVY: First of all, it was totally incidental. I must praise the Israeli information system of propaganda, or hasbara, as they call it. At least they admitted that it was not planned. They didn’t try to show it as if it was a very planned operation. It wasn’t. And he was killed. First they bombed this house where he was, and then a drone got into the house and showed him in his last moments. Quite pathetic video. And then they shot him in his head, as we saw, twice at least, because there are two holes in his head. And they killed him. He was masked, as you saw, trying to hide from being recognized.

But in any case, it doesn’t matter much. The fact is that Israeli intelligence couldn’t find him for one year. The fact is that Israeli intelligence couldn’t find the hostages for one year in a very small piece of land, Gaza Strip, where Israel is controlling now for one year. And finally, they found him. I mean, it was so expected. How couldn’t he be found finally, when Israel is searching after him for so long and really destructing every building and every street in Gaza? So, finally, they succeeded, obviously. It’s not a hell of a success, but in Israel they are quite happy about it. And I can understand the sentiment.

AMY GOODMAN: So, where does what Israel plans to do with Iran fit into this story?

GIDEON LEVY: I hope it doesn’t fit. And I’m very afraid that it does fit, because Netanyahu now feels much more secure. Those last so-called, or not so-called, military successes and achievements started with the beepers and the pagers and continued with the assassinations of all the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah. All those things just give him a boost to continue the same way that he believes in, the only way he believes in, namely, doing everything by force, doing everything throughout aggressive attacks on the rival, on the enemy.

And he might think the same now about Iran, because Iran is the next object. When the United States is so passive, so passive, really in a shameful way, he feels he has a free carte blanche to continue. And he has a carte blanche to continue, because the United States never stopped him, even not for a moment. He totally ignored the advices of the American administration, rightly so. Why would he bother about presidential advices if the arms continue to flow and the ammunition continues to flow? So, I’m very afraid that this will encourage him also to go to all kind of [inaudible] operations, grand operations also in Iran. And then it can be really frightening, because the outcome might be really catastrophe. And maybe he will succeed. Who knows? I mean, until now, we were all scared of invading Rafah. And look, he invaded Rafah, and nothing happened.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris praising the assassination of Sinwar as progress toward the elimination of Hamas. She spoke in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she was campaigning Thursday.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Hamas is decimated, and its leadership is eliminated. This moment gives us an opportunity to finally end the war in Gaza. And it must end such that Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom and self-determination. And it is time for the day after to begin.

AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, Gideon Levy, if you can talk about this? I mean, in a letter, apparently, from Biden saying that they will end arms sales or limit them after 30 days — a top former State Department official said, “Where is it in the law to say if they are starving Gaza, stopping humanitarian aid to Gaza, that you wait 30 days?”

GIDEON LEVY: Even before the 30 days, whatever Vice President Kamala Harris said are wonderful words. I could sign on each word and word that she said. This is really a noble idea to stop this war, to let the Palestinians have dignity and freedom and security, and to let Israel’s security — it’s wonderful. The question is: What did the American administration do to promote those things in the recent year or years? And the answer is nothing, because whatever the administration said was in total contradiction to its deeds. When you continue to supply in an unconditioned way arms and ammunition to Israel, it means you want it to use it. And what is the use of it? Killing 17,000 children in Gaza. That’s the use of the American ammunition. So —

AMY GOODMAN: Gideon Levy, we’re going to have to leave it there. I thank you so much for being with us, award-winning Israeli journalist and author, columnist with Haaretz and on its editorial board.

***

“I Could Be the Next Sha’ban”: 21-Year-Old Journalist from Gaza Reports on Teenager Burned Alive
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow!
October 18, 2024

Tributes have poured in from across the globe for 19-year-old Sha’ban al-Dalou, a software engineering student who burned to death after Israel bombed Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Deir al-Balah on Monday. Photographs and footage of his final moments shocked millions around the world as Sha’ban laid in a hospital bed with an IV attached to his arm as the flames engulfed him. His mother and youngest brother have also reportedly succumbed to their burns, and his two sisters are on the verge of dying from their injuries. “Another family is going to be wiped off the civil record,” says Abubaker Abed, a 21-year-old journalist reporting live from outside the Al-Aqsa Hospital who interviewed al-Dalou’s family and friends. Abed once dreamed of becoming a football commentator and is struggling to find food and supplies while Israel enacts a near-complete siege on Gaza. “We are young men that have nothing to do with this war. … But we are very daily being subjected to sheer violence and brutality,” says Abed. “I could be the next Sha’ban. Anyone could be the next Sha’ban, because Israel is allowed to do anything.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

Tributes have poured in from across the globe for 19-year-old Sha’ban al-Dalou, a software engineering student who burned to death after Israel bombed Gaza’s Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Deir al-Balah early Monday morning. The bombing set off a massive fire in an area packed with makeshift tents housing displaced Palestinians who had sought safety at the hospital, including Sha’ban’s family. He was an engineering student at Gaza’s Al-Azhar University who had just started his studies in September of last year. He built the tent shelter his family was living in when Israel bombed them. Photographs and footage of his final moments shocked millions around the world as Sha’ban laid in a hospital bed with an IV attached to his arm as the flames engulfed him.

This is a video of Sha’ban al-Dalou in his own words, posted as part of a fundraising campaign to evacuate him from Gaza with his family.

SHA’BAN AL-DALOU: From the tent where we reside, I’m Sha’ban Ahmed, 19 years old. I’m a student studying software engineer. In this barbaric starvation war, we have displaced five times so far. Now we are in Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the middle of Gaza, Deir al-Balah. I’m taking care of my family, as I’m the oldest. I have two sisters and two little brothers and my parents. We live in a very hard circumstances, suffering from various things such as homelessness and limited food and extremely limited medicine. And the only thing between us and the freezing temperature is this tent that we constructed by ourselves.

AMY GOODMAN: Sha’ban was at Al-Aqsa Hospital receiving care after he survived the earlier Israeli strike. Sha’ban al-Dalou would have turned 20 this week.

We go now to Gaza, where we’re joined by Abubaker Abed, a 21-year-old journalist from Deir al-Balah in Gaza. He used to be a football, or soccer, commentator, but now, as he says, he’s an “accidental” war correspondent. His new report for Drop Site News is titled “Shaaban Al-Dalou, Burned Alive in Gaza, Would Have Been 20 Today.” Sha’ban, burned alive alongside his mother, who was also killed on Monday morning. And we’ve just learned his little brother has succumbed to his injuries.

Abubaker, you wrote in your piece, “'He was then immolated along with his mother. We couldn't identify which charred body was him. But then, we searched for a gold necklace his mother used to wear. We found it on one body and knew it was her. Then, we buried them in one grave.’” You also shared the tragic news that Sha’ban’s youngest brother Abdul Ruhman has succumbed to his burn wounds. He was 10 years old. Abubaker Abed, you were about the same age as Sha’ban. Talk about how you learned of his story, and the importance of you writing it.

ABUBAKER ABED: First, thank you so much for having me.

But let me just start by saying that Sha’ban’s — after his youngest brother succumbed to his injuries and burns today early in the morning, now the other two sisters are facing the same fate. They are being treated here at Gaza’s hospitals, which lack every basic necessity inside them. So, they are on the verge of also being killed and passing away. So, we’re talking about an entire family that is going to be wiped out. Another family is going to be wiped off the civil record, which is incredibly harrowing.

Regarding the story of Sha’ban, you know, I just live a few steps away from the hospital. I’m here. I’m an original resident of Deir al-Balah. And then, pre-dawn, or before dawn exactly, an attack happened, and I was harshly awakened, as this is the norm over the course of time since this genocide started. So, when the footage and the videos really went viral on social media and everywhere, then I saw — I was just looking at the photos and the videos, and there was someone inside engulfed by flames, being burned alive in front of millions of people. That was, to me, something special, because I could not really comprehend it. I could not really stay silent. It’s my duty to honor such a memory, particularly because when I knew for the very first time that he was going to be — or, he was 19 years old, and just two days ago he turned 20, if he would have been alive, then I felt that this is my story, because no one else across the globe would really have done this story in the way I could.

We are about the same age, as you mentioned. He memorized the Qur’an. I memorized the Qur’an. He dreamt of completing his studies. I also dream of completing my studies. And our message is very clear from here. We are young men that have nothing to do with this war. We’re not a party to this war. We have no connection with Hamas. But we are very daily being subjected to sheer violence and brutality that has nothing to do with this war. It just keeps going on and on, and without any stop, even after the news of the killing of the Hamas leader. There seems to be no stop, which is incredibly devastating for us. What more should we really endure and go through so this war can stop?

So, the life of Sha’ban should be honored. I’m so proud, I’m so honored, I’m so privileged to have honored his memory, because he had a life once. Israel destroyed his house, reduced his university to rubble. He just started his university studies two years ago. And then, an entire life, a university human, just reduced to ashes. This is the barbarity and brutality of what Israel is about.

AMY GOODMAN: Abubaker, I want to tell the audience around the world who’s watching now, the noise behind you. You are right and front of Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where Sha’ban ultimately died of his injuries. Explain how he built this tent, where he had come from for his family. You also spoke to his father, and you spoke to his cousin, who was also named Sha’ban.

ABUBAKER ABED: Yes, it’s just devastating. They are now appealing to everyone on outside, the world, that we want to help the entire family. We want to help the other members that are still surviving their burns. But, unfortunately, there seems to be no end. People over all around me, they are heading to hospitals because they think hospitals are probably or are seemingly the safest places here in Gaza. But the fact is that there is no safe place in Gaza. Sha’ban fled his home from the al-Nasr neighborhood in Gaza City to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital from the very first days of this incredibly harsh genocide. And he sought refuge here, but, unfortunately, he was killed. He was immolated alongside his mother, and now his brother, his youngest brother, has passed away. We’re now talking about a very high possibility that the other two sisters of Sha’ban will join them.

Now, it’s just incredibly devastating and disappointing to hear about such innocent souls being taken, being stolen, loads of dreams and loads of things. And it’s the same fate. They are being treated now inside hospitals in Gaza, these hospitals. As Israel continues its blockade of medical aid entering the strip, the closure of the two crossings in Gaza, Karem Abu Salem and Rafah crossings, are making things very difficult to treat many patients, even here inside the facility of the hospital here. We’re talking about, like, funerals after funerals, you know, a lot of people wailing over the bodies of their loved ones. Mothers are crying and suffering in pain. Children don’t have food.

And it’s the same story for me. I just have — you know, I’m just being starved. I’m incredibly going through such a devastating and harsh time, where I can’t find anything, any means of life. It’s been a year. These people’s wounds haven’t yet been healed up. We want to talk about that, that even time doesn’t heal their wounds. We just want to bring to the world, conjure up to the world the idea that or the many reasons why this world should push for a ceasefire, should make the ceasefire, should trigger a ceasefire deal very soon. Because it seems incredibly heartbreaking, what we are seeing on a very daily basis. Even just minutes before I’m talking to you, I mean, the Israeli military has ratcheted up its attacks in central Gaza and the northern parts and here in our city. So, the overall situation we talked about is just getting dire and deteriorating every single day.

Why? The main question is: Why? What does Israel want to achieve here in Gaza after nearly obliterating every meter of Gaza? This seems incredibly and unbelievably heartbreaking.

AMY GOODMAN: Abubaker, I wanted to play Sha’ban’s uncle, Abdulhay al-Dalou.

ABDULHAY AL-DALOU: [translated] The occupation is the incinerator. The most difficult thing for a person is to be burned. This is a message to the world. I wish the world look at it and see the reactions of people regarding this burning of a Palestinian person who is being tortured day and night. Nobody looks at the Palestinian person with mercy, neither the Arab countries nor the Western countries, nor the countries of the international community.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, that is Sha’ban al-Dalou’s uncle, Abdulhay al-Dalou, talking after Sha’ban died. Sha’ban was 19. Our guest right now, Abubaker Abed, is 21. As we were showing video of Sha’ban, Abubaker, I couldn’t help think how much he looks like you. You’re similar ages. There you are in front of the hospital. And I also couldn’t help notice how skinny you are. How are you getting food? And how is your own family getting food?

ABUBAKER ABED: Honestly, as I told you, as Israel continues closing the two crossings across the besieged territory, there is no food being allowed into the strip. We just mainly depend on some loaves of bread, which is our daily struggle, to get food. I don’t know where else across the globe, across the entirety of the globe, getting food and looking for some water is an arduous journey. We are struggling. We are, you know, exerting so much efforts to just get a sip of water and then some food.

I dream — I’m talking about myself here, as someone who is struggling with my weak immune system. There’s nothing to do with this war in particular. I haven’t got any, since this genocide started, any food, any fresh food that I can really help myself with. I’m most of the time fatigued, which is a result and a symptom of Israel’s continued genocide. It’s the same thing. My family are the same. My parents are sick. We haven’t been able to provide my parents with any medications, with any needed medications over the course of the past time. So, it’s not only my struggle. It’s the struggle of every single one here in Gaza.

And because we are talking about Sha’ban, Sha’ban was starved. He was immunocompromised, as well. And he had gone through many times of — you know, many times of gastroenteritis, hepatitis A virus, before even being injured inside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Mosque, when he was injured and his head was stitched up by 20 sutures.

I don’t know when this barbarity and insanity will stop, but it just continues. And we could be — again, my message to the world is that I could be the next Sha’ban. Anyone could be the next Sha’ban, because Israel is allowed to do anything. There are no international laws that can prevent Israel from doing — from continuing its open war crimes in Gaza. There is no law. And even my understanding is that the international laws and the rights of living, rights of freedom for every human being around the world are enshrined into humanity, into our globe, as we call it, but the claim to humanity we’re talking about has just been exposed when this genocide started, because the double standards of the Western community are extremely devastating and also disgusting and just took —

AMY GOODMAN: Abubaker —

ABUBAKER ABED: They just took the lives of many, many and thousands of people.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us.

ABUBAKER ABED: We need to talk about this.

AMY GOODMAN: I hate to cut you off. Thank you so much for being with us. Abubaker Abed writes that he looks at pictures of food on the internet. He’s a 21-year-old journalist from Deir al-Balah in Gaza, standing outside the hospital where Sha’ban burned to death. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.