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How Israel destroyed Gaea's ability to feed itself

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How Israel destroyed Gaea's ability to feed itself

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How Israel destroyed Gaza’s ability to feed itself

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The annual celebration of abundant harvests has been replaced by widespread devastation and a dire humanitarian crisis.

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On 29 October, 2023, a video of a young Palestinian in Gaza went viral on TikTok. He holds a clip-on microphone and greets his audience after a period of internet and communication disruption. A soundtrack of broadcast music has been added in the video’s post-production. Behind him, people line up in what he describes

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As part of its ongoing genocide, Israel attacks 16 shelter centres in Gaza in a single month

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As part of its ongoing genocide, Israel attacks 16 shelter centres in Gaza in a single month

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As part of its ongoing genocide, Israel attacks 16 shelter centres in Gaza in a single month

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Two hundred and seventeen Palestinians have been killed in the reported attacks, while hundreds more have been injured, a large number of casualties being women and children.

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Gaza war continues to shut hundreds of thousands out of classes

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Gaza war continues to shut hundreds of thousands out of classes

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Gaza war continues to shut hundreds of thousands out of class

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Monday would have marked the start of the new school year in Gaza, but the ongoing war continues to deprive hundreds of thousands of children of this fundamental right, UN agencies have warned.

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Fear of 'lost generation' as Gaza school year begins with all classes shut down

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Fear of 'lost generation' as Gaza school year begins with all classes shut down

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Israel orders new evacuation in northern Gaza

58,000 Gazan children would have started first grade on Monday

'Usually, such a day would be a day of celebration'

UNRWA says 450,000 children received polio vaccine

CAIRO, Sept 9 (Reuters) - The new school year in the Palestinian territories officially began on Monday, with all schools in Gaza shut after 11 months of war and no sign of a ceasefire.

As fighting continued, Israel announced new orders to residents of the north Gaza Strip to leave their homes, in response to rockets fired into Israel.

Umm Zaki's son Moataz, 15, was supposed to begin 10th grade. Instead he woke up in their tent in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza and was sent to fetch a container of water from more than a kilometre away.

"Usually, such a day would be a day of celebration, seeing the children in the new uniform, going to school, and dreaming of becoming doctors and engineers. Today all we hope is that the war ends before we lose any of them," the mother of five told Reuters by text message.

The Palestinian Education Ministry said all Gaza schools were shut and 90% of them had been destroyed or damaged in Israel's assault on the territory, launched after Hamas gunmen attacked Israeli towns in October last year.

The U.N. Palestinian aid agency UNRWA, which runs around half of Gaza's schools, has turned as many of them as it can into emergency shelters housing thousands of displaced families.

"The longer the children stay out of school the more difficult it is for them to catch up on their lost learning and the more prone they are to becoming a lost generation, falling prey to exploitation including child marriage, child labour, and recruitment into armed groups," UNRWA Director of Communications Juliette Touma told Reuters.

In addition to the 625,000 Gazans already registered for school who would be missing classes, another 58,000 six-year-olds should have registered to start first grade this year, the education ministry said.

Last month, UNRWA launched a back-to-learning programme in 45 of its shelters, with teachers setting up games, drama, arts, music and sports activities to help with children's mental health.

'THE SPECIFIED AREA HAS BEEN WARNED'

Nearly all of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been forced from their homes at least once, and some have had to flee as many as 10 times.

In the latest evacuation order, Israel told residents of an area in the northern Gaza Strip they must leave their homes, following the firing of rockets into southern Israel the previous day.

"To all those in the specified area. Terrorist organisations are once again firing rockets at the State of Israel and carrying out terrorist acts from this area. The specified area has been warned many times in the past. The specified area is considered a dangerous combat zone," an Israeli military spokesperson said in Arabic on X.

The United Nations urged Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to attend medical facilities to get children under the age of 10 years old vaccinated against polio. Limited pauses in fighting have been held to allow the vaccination campaign, which aims to reach 640,000 children in Gaza after the territory's first polio case in around 25 years.

U.N. officials said the campaign in the southern and central Gaza Strip had so far reached more than half of the children there needing the drops. A second round of vaccination will be required four weeks after the first.

Later on Monday, Touma said 450,000 of the children targeted with the campaign were vaccinated.

"Tuesday is the hardest part when we roll out the campaign in the north. Hopefully, that will work so we complete the first stage of the campaign The second and final stage is planned for the end of the month when we have to do all of this all over again," said Touma.

Health officials said on Monday two separate Israeli airstrikes had killed seven people in central Gaza, while another strike killed one man in Khan Younis further south.

The armed wings of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad said they fought against Israeli forces in several areas across the Gaza Strip with anti-tank rockets and mortar fire.

The Israeli military said forces continued to dismantle military infrastructure and killed dozens of militants in the past days, including senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders.

The war was triggered on Oct. 7 when the Hamas group that ran Gaza attacked Israel, killing 1,200 and taking about 250 hostages, according to Israeli tallies. Israel's subsequent assault on Gaza has killed more than 40,900 Palestinians, according to the enclave's health ministry.

The two warring sides each blame the other for the failure so far to reach a ceasefire that would end the fighting and see the release of hostages.

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Reporting and writing by Nidal al-Mughrabi; Editing by Peter Graff and Alex Richardson

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

A senior correspondent with nearly 25 years' experience covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict including several wars and the signing of the first historic peace accord between the two sides.

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Fear of 'lost generation' as Gaza school year begins with all classes shut

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The new school year in the Palestinian territories officially began on Monday, with all schools in Gaza shut after 11 months of war and no sign of a ceasefire.

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A textbook case of Genocide by Jewish Currents

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A textbook case of Genocide by Jewish Currents

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Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening?

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SMASH Dragon Unveiled | Why An Unmanned Drone Killer UAV Is What Israel Needs Right Now

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SMASH Dragon Unveiled | Why An Unmanned Drone Killer UAV Is What Israel Needs Right Now

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SMASH Dragon Unveiled | Why An Unmanned Drone Killer UAV Is What Israel Needs Right Now

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CPI / ICC Khan Statement, Augustus 23. SITUATION IN THE STATE OF PALESTINE

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CPI / ICC Khan Statement, Augustus 23. SITUATION IN THE STATE OF PALESTINE

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‘Profiting from War Crimes’ – Lawyers Seek Arms Export Ban to UK Court

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‘Profiting from War Crimes’ – Lawyers Seek Arms Export Ban to UK Court

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By Palestine Chronicle Staff

"The UK is profiting from war crimes. This can and must be stopped."

Lawyers have submitted graphic testimonies of torture and denial of medical treatment of Palestinians in Gaza to London's High Court in a bid to stop the UK government from issuing arms export licenses to British companies supplying weapons to Israel, the Guardian has reported.

The submission of more than 100 pages includes statements from 14 witnesses including Palestinian and Western medical doctors working in Gaza's hospitals, as well as ambulance drivers, civil defense department workers and aid workers, the report said.

Women in Gaza Face 'Deepening Dehumanization' - UNRWA Commissioner-General

The case has been brought by NGOs including Al-Haq, Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), Amnesty International, Oxfam, and Human Rights Watch.

The evidence, the report said, was" designed to support a request for a court order that the UK government has acted irrationally in refusing to ban the sale of arms" to Israel.

The government had argued that there was "not a clear risk the weapons would be used to commit breaches of international humanitarian law," the report added.

No Appropriate Medicines

One of the witness testimonies was from Dr Ben Thomson, a Canadian kidney specialist, who said: "Every part of the healthcare system has been targeted and destroyed and is now completely incapable of providing care. So many people are dying from issues that are completely treatable."

He said he had "treated a patient who had been forced to stand for 48 hours, requiring a skin graft on his heel," the Guardian said.

Lack of Fuel - Al-Awda Hospital to Shut Down Operations in 24 Hours

Thomson also said he had "personally treated three children whom he could have saved if he had any access to the appropriate medicines."

He further testified that he was forced to reset bones without pain medication, and that a patient in his care had died "on the floor in a pool of his own blood and brain matter".

'Beaten in Detention'

Dr. Khaled Dawas, a consultant surgeon at University College Hospital London, said many of his patients were victims of sniper fire, adding that conditions in hospitals on both his trips "were what he imagined medieval medicine must have been like".

He said: "I understand that Israel justifies its attacks on hospitals by reference to its claim that the hospitals are overrun by militants but in my four weeks in al-Aqsa hospital I personally did not see a single one."

The doctor also said, "he met many patients who had clearly been beaten in detention camps, and one patient who had been dragged along the ground by the external fixator holding his broken limb together."

The case is "the first attempt" to place a "graphic testimony of alleged Israeli war crimes in front of a British judge," the Guardian said.

'No Blanket Ban' - Potential UK Arms Embargo on Israel under Review

According to GLAN, the value of UK arms export licenses "reached a record high in 2022 with £8.5 billion in licenses issued. The UK have approved sales of lethal weapons to Israel's military again and again."

"The UK is profiting from war crimes. This can and must be stopped," the organization said on its website.

Staggering Death Toll

Flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza.

Currently on trial before the International Court of Justice for genocide against Palestinians, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7.

According to Gaza's Ministry of Health, 40,139 Palestinians have been killed, and 92,743 wounded. Moreover, at least 11,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.

Israel Kills another Journalist in Gaza - Death Toll Rises to 169 since October 7

Israel says that 1,200 soldiers and civilians were killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7. Israeli media published reports suggesting that many Israelis were killed on that day by 'friendly fire'.

Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.

The Israeli war has resulted in an acute famine, mostly in northern Gaza, resulting in the death of many Palestinians, mostly children.

The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt - in what has become Palestine's largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.

Later in the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began moving from the south to central Gaza in a constant search for safety.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
(The Palestine Chronicle is a registered 501(c)3 organization, thus, all donations are tax deductible.)

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'Dying from Treatable Issues' - Lawyers Submit Graphic Testimonies in Bid to Halt Arms Exports to Israel

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Lawyers submit graphic testimonies of the conditions in Gaza to London's High Court in a bid to ban UK arms exports.

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Press Under Attack: Murdered and Injured: women journalists

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Press Under Attack: Murdered and Injured: women journalists

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Journalists covering the Israeli-Hamas war bear witness to stories of tragedy, despair, and resilience. CFWIJ and Women Press Freedom is following the work of journalists, especially women on the frontlines amidst the relentless torrents of war and civil unrest, risking their lives to shed light on the truth.

Since October 7, 2023, at least 113 journalists have been killed, 21 were women. 32 journalists were reported injured, 2 journalists were reported missing, 52 journalists were reported arrested.

CFWIJ and Women Press Freedom have been closely monitoring the situation in the region and making concerted efforts to provide assistance to journalists.

Section 1: Women Journalists on the Frontline

Stay updated on the latest news brought to you by courageous women journalists reporting from the frontline across Gaza and Israel on this exclusive, vetted X list. These journalists bring you direct access to voices, perspectives, and scenes from the unfolding tragic crises in the region.

If you are following the #Gaza coverage, look out for this list of #womenjournos covering the story on the ground. It's one of the most dangerous frontlines in 2023, and here are some of the most reliable journalists bravely bringing you the story. https://t.co/vq6W0Z77ha
- #WomenInJournalism (@CFWIJ) October 12, 2023

Section 2: Press Under Attack: Murdered and Injured

Since October 7, 2023, at least 108 journalists have been killed, 21 were women. 32 journalists were reported injured, 2 journalists were reported missing, 42 journalists were reported arrested.

CFWIJ and Women Press Freedom have been closely monitoring the situation in the region and making concerted efforts to provide assistance to journalists.

On July 6, 2024, a tragic escalation of violence implicated Israel in the of five Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip within a mere 24-hour period. One of the journalists killed was Wafa Abu Dabaan, a reporter linked to the Islamic University Radio in Gaza.

Reporter's Without Border's correspondent in Gaza, Ola Al Zaanoon, was hospitalized with a leg injury following an Israeli bombardment in south Gaza. She was injured after evacuating her home in Gaza City to Khan Younis.

Israeli missiles strike news crews near Alma al-Shaab, Lebanon, injuring Al Jazeera's Carmen Joukhadar. Car of Al Jazeera's crew set ablaze. The strike on October 13 killed Issam Abdallah of Reuters and injured six more journalists representing various media organizations.

Journalists covering the Israeli-Hamas war bear witness to stories of tragedy, despair, and resilience. CFWIJ and Women Press Freedom is following the work of journalists, especially women on the frontlines amidst the relentless torrents of war and civil unrest, risking their lives to shed light on the truth.

Since October 7, 2023, at least 113 journalists have been killed, 21 were women. 32 journalists were reported injured, 2 journalists were reported missing, 52 journalists were reported arrested.

CFWIJ and Women Press Freedom have been closely monitoring the situation in the region and making concerted efforts to provide assistance to journalists.

Section 1: Women Journalists on the Frontline

Stay updated on the latest news brought to you by courageous women journalists reporting from the frontline across Gaza and Israel on this exclusive, vetted X list. These journalists bring you direct access to voices, perspectives, and scenes from the unfolding tragic crises in the region.

If you are following the #Gaza coverage, look out for this list of #womenjournos covering the story on the ground. It's one of the most dangerous frontlines in 2023, and here are some of the most reliable journalists bravely bringing you the story. https://t.co/vq6W0Z77ha
- #WomenInJournalism (@CFWIJ) October 12, 2023

Section 2: Press Under Attack: Murdered and Injured

Since October 7, 2023, at least 108 journalists have been killed, 21 were women. 32 journalists were reported injured, 2 journalists were reported missing, 42 journalists were reported arrested.

CFWIJ and Women Press Freedom have been closely monitoring the situation in the region and making concerted efforts to provide assistance to journalists.

On July 6, 2024, a tragic escalation of violence implicated Israel in the of five Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip within a mere 24-hour period. One of the journalists killed was Wafa Abu Dabaan, a reporter linked to the Islamic University Radio in Gaza.

Reporter's Without Border's correspondent in Gaza, Ola Al Zaanoon, was hospitalized with a leg injury following an Israeli bombardment in south Gaza. She was injured after evacuating her home in Gaza City to Khan Younis.

Israeli missiles strike news crews near Alma al-Shaab, Lebanon, injuring Al Jazeera's Carmen Joukhadar. Car of Al Jazeera's crew set ablaze. The strike on October 13 killed Issam Abdallah of Reuters and injured six more journalists representing various media organizations.

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Gaza: Reporting Under Fire - Coalition For Women in Journalism

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Journalists covering the Israeli-Hamas war bear witness to stories of tragedy, despair, and resilience. CFWIJ and Women Press Freedom is following the work of journalists, especially women on the frontlines amidst the relentless torrents of war and civil unrest, risking their lives to shed light on

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Gaza: Women Press Freedom Condemns Israeli Military's Assault on Palestinian Journalist Salma al-Qadoum Aug 20

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Gaza: Women Press Freedom Condemns Israeli Military's Assault on Palestinian Journalist Salma al-Qadoum Aug 20

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Gaza: Women Press Freedom Condemns Israeli Military’s Assault on Palestinian Journalist Salma al-Qadoumi — Coalition For Women in Journalism

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Women Press Freedom is outraged by the shooting of Palestinian journalist Salma al-Qadoumi, who was injured by the Israeli military while reporting in Khan Younis. We strongly denounce this brutal assault and extend our wishes for al-Qadoumi’s swift recovery.

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Death rate among journalists in Gaza much higher than other professions: Reporters group Over 12% of Gaza journalists killed, mortality rate higher than even infantry soldiers, says International Federation of Journalists official Augustus 16

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Death rate among journalists in Gaza much higher than other professions: Reporters group Over 12% of Gaza journalists killed, mortality rate higher than even infantry soldiers, says International Federation of Journalists official Augustus 16

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Death rate among journalists in Gaza much higher than other professions: Reporters group

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Over 12% of Gaza journalists killed, mortality rate higher than even infantry soldiers, says International Federation of Journalists official - Anadolu Ajansı

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How did the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, demonstrate bias and double standards against Palestinian victims? Euro-Med-Monitor. Aug 18

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How did the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, demonstrate bias and double standards against Palestinian victims? Euro-Med-Monitor. Aug 18

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How did the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, demonstrate bias and double standards against Palestinian victims?

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How did the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, demonstrate bias and double standards against Palestinian victims?

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The bloodiest face of its genocide: Israel has killed 2,100 Palestinian infants and toddlers in Gaza

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The bloodiest face of its genocide: Israel has killed 2,100 Palestinian infants and toddlers in Gaza

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Palestinian Territory - The Israeli army has killed 2,100 Palestinian infants and toddlers under the age of two, out of the about 17,000 children it has killed in the Gaza Strip since the start of its genocide on 7 October 2023.

The number of Palestinian children-whether infants or children in general-killed by the Israeli army is horrifying, and the rate of their killing is unprecedented in the history of modern wars. It also represents a dangerous trend based on the dehumanisation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Israel's military targets Palestinians and their children daily, methodically, and widely in the most heinous and brutal ways possible, and virtually without pause for 10 consecutive months.

Due to the Israeli bombing of homes, buildings, residential neighbourhoods, shelter centres, and displacement tents, many children have lost their heads and limbs. This is a flagrant violation of the rules of distinction, proportionality, military necessity, i.e. the legal and moral obligation to take the necessary precautions to minimise the deaths of civilians and children.

The Euro-Med Monitor field team documented today, Tuesday 13 August, the killing of four-day-old twins Aser and Aysal Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan. The twins were killed this morning, along with their mother Juman and their grandmother, in an Israeli bombing that targeted a residential flat in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

After leaving the apartment to obtain a birth certificate for his two newborn children, the father of the infants returned to discover that all of his family members-including the twins' grandmother-had been killed in an Israeli attack on the building.

Despite its advanced technological capabilities, the Israeli army targets houses and shelter centres knowing full well that they house civilians, including women and children. Nevertheless, it bombs these targets with highly destructive bombs and missiles, aiming to cause as many civilian deaths and severe injuries as possible. This is demonstrated by the Israeli army's systematic, widespread, and repeated targeting of civilians in the Gaza Strip, as well as its use of highly destructive and indiscriminate weapons, particularly against areas with dense populations of civilians.

The case of the two babies Aser and Aysal are not unique; daily reports of child victims, including infants, are made in the Strip.

The systematic killings of Palestinian civilians, who make up at least 92% of the total number of deaths due to the genocide, will have a negative impact on the population growth rates and reproductive capacity for generations to come.

According to the Euro-Med Monitor team, an Israeli airstrike on Rafah's Al-Salam neighbourhood, in the southern Gaza Strip, killed another set of twin infants on 3 March. Six-month-old Wissam and Naeem Abu Anza were killed by the strike, along with their father and 11 other family members.

The mother of Wissam and Naeem, Rania Abu Anza, stated that she struggled for 10 years to become a mother before eventually giving birth to the two babies. "They implanted three embryos in me, two of them remained, and there they were," she explained. "They bombed the house, killing my husband, my kids, and the rest of the family in the massacre." Ten days ago marked six months since the death of the twins.

Shaimaa Al-Ghoul, meanwhile, was nine months pregnant when her home in the southern city of Rafah was bombed on 12 February. Her husband and two sons, Mohammed and Janan, were killed, and she suffered injuries from shrapnel that entered her abdomen, pierced her uterus, and ultimately lodged in the fetus.

Al-Ghoul stated that prior to her husband and two children's deaths, her husband, Abdullah Abu Jazar, had made her "dates, sweets, and a [gift] bag in celebration of his expected newborn". She said that she did give birth to a child, whom she named Abdullah, after his father, but the boy only lived one day. Baby Abduallah died from the wound caused by the shrapnel that had entered his mother. Thus, Al-Ghoul lost her husband and three children.

Euro-Med Monitor notes that numerous unborn children have died in hospitals over the past 10 months due to a lack of oxygen and electricity, inadequate care, and hospital targeting.

Israel continues to kill thousands of Palestinian men and women in the Gaza Strip, most of them in their reproductive age, including pregnant women, and thousands of children, including infants and toddlers. According to the meaning contained in the description of genocidal acts under Article (2) of the Convention on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide, there is no doubt that Israel's systematic and widespread killings of Palestinian civilians, who make up at least 92% of the total number of deaths due to the genocide, will have a negative impact on the population growth rates and reproductive capacity of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for generations to come. Approximately 50,000 Palestinians, including thousands trapped under the rubble for long enough periods of time that they are now presumed dead, have been killed by Israel since 7 October. In addition, 88,000 other Palestinians have been wounded by Israel since then. These deaths and injuries will undoubtedly affect the Palestinians as a national and ethnic group for several generations.

Every day, infant deaths in the Gaza Strip are reported as a direct result of Israeli crimes that are legally classified as acts of genocide, including starvation, thirst, blocking the entry of basic supplies like milk, and deprivation of medical care. The majority of these infant deaths are not included in the official victim count released by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, as there is no specific system to identify such victims.

Due to Israel's crime of genocide, ongoing for the past 10 months, Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip are being denied their fundamental rights and are not being protected in any way by international law. They have become primary, direct, and deliberate targets of the Israeli army, and have even been subject to premeditated killings and direct executions.

Aside from being arbitrarily detained, Palestinian children have also been the victims of crimes of sexual assault; forced disappearance; torture and other forms of inhumane treatment; starvation; siege; severe psychological harm; deprivation of education due to the widespread destruction of schools; and denial of access to healthcare and other necessities of life. Many Palestinian children are also victims of family dispersion, and have lost parental care.

One of the main objectives of Israel's genocide is to leave a lasting legacy of these crimes that will affect the victims for the rest of their lives. The majority of Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip have experienced psychological trauma that will likely be difficult to treat: Thousands of children have lost one or both parents; have had limbs amputated; have suffered severe burns or other serious injuries; and/or have suffered from hunger, malnutrition, and dehydration; all of which will have a detrimental impact on their physical and psychological development.

Most children in the Gaza Strip have lost their homes, their financial security, and members of their families, in addition to being deprived of an education. This will have serious, far-reaching consequences on their futures and their ability to enjoy their other rights, making them more vulnerable to poverty, unemployment, and exploitation. The Israeli military attacks on the Strip have caused the widespread destruction of civilian objects, including homes, private property, livelihoods, production, and the economic and commercial system, forcing Palestinians to migrate, whether directly or indirectly.

The international community must act swiftly and decisively to put an end to the crime of genocide, safeguard the lives of all Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip, prevent Israel from converting the Strip into the world's largest cemetery for children in modern history, and end the egregious double standards that are applied to Israel and its powerful Western backers and allies.

Israel and its backers must be held accountable for blatantly violating international humanitarian law by killing and targeting Palestinian children and denying them access to food, shelter, clothing, and medical assistance, including vaccinations, as specified in the Geneva Conventions and their two 1977 Protocols-protocols which should enable them to realise their rights.

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The bloodiest face of its genocide: Israel has killed 2,100 Palestinian infants and toddlers in Gaza

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The number of Palestinian children killed is horrifying, and the rate of their killing is unprecedented in the history of modern wars

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Melbourne Symphony Orchestra cancels pianist's performance after dedication to journalists killed in Gaza Jayson Gillham was scheduled to perform at Melbourne Town Hall on Thursday but he was dropped for going ‘beyond the remit of his contract’

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Melbourne Symphony Orchestra cancels pianist's performance after dedication to journalists killed in Gaza Jayson Gillham was scheduled to perform at Melbourne Town Hall on Thursday but he was dropped for going ‘beyond the remit of his contract’

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The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) has cancelled an acclaimed pianist's upcoming performance after he premiered a piece of music and dedicated it to journalists slain in Gaza.

The Australian-British pianist Jayson Gillham was scheduled to perform Mozart and Brahms at the Melbourne Town Hall on Thursday with the MSO, but Gillham's name was removed from the MSO website on Tuesday.

Tickets were still available but a note read "an update to this program's repertoire will be announced soon". The MSO made its X account private on Tuesday and also limited comments on some Facebook posts.

In an email sent to patrons, the MSO stated Gillham would no longer be performing because of "a series of introductory remarks" he made during a previous concert on Sunday.

At that concert at Iwaki Auditorium in Southbank, Gillham had performed a number of songs, including the world premiere of Witness by Connor D'Netto - which the MSO said was a late addition to the program.

The five-minute piece is dedicated to the journalists of Gaza and was written for Gillham, according to D'Netto's website. On Wednesday morning, Gillham's team released the full transcript of what he said while introducing Witness.

"Over the last 10 months, Israel has killed more than one hundred Palestinian journalists," Gillham told the crowd on Sunday.

"A number of these have been targeted assassinations of prominent journalists as they were travelling in marked press vehicles or wearing their press jackets. The killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world.

"In addition to the role of journalists who bear witness, the word Witness in Arabic is Shaheed, which also means Martyr."

The Israeli military has said there is "no policy of targeting media personnel" in Gaza, but also that it sees "no difference" between the armed wing of Hamas and those working for the media outlet al-Aqsa, widely considered to be its official network.

In its email, MSO told patrons that Witness was performed at the request of Gillham "on the basis that it was a short meditative piece" but that he made personal remarks "without seeking the MSO's approval or sanction".

"They were an intrusion of personal political views on what should have been a morning focused on a program of works for solo piano," the email read.

"The MSO does not condone the use of our stage as a platform for expressing personal views", it continued, adding Gillham's remarks caused "distress".

The Palestinian-Australian writer and composer Nahed Elrayes, who attended the Sunday performance and received a copy of the MSO email, said in an online video that Gillham also performed a song by György Ligeti, where the pianist had noted Ligeti was from a Holocaust-surviving family and he spoke about the political background of the piece.

Israel's offensive in Gaza has become the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history, with the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists recording at least 113 killings of Palestinian journalists and media workers in the war in Gaza.

In a statement to Guardian Australia, the MSO said it was "not made aware of the content [or] the remarks Mr Gillham was intending to make".

"They were made without authority and went beyond the remit of his contract," the statement said.

On its page promoting Gillham's previous event, the MSO described the musician as "one of the finest pianists of his generation".

In a statement, D'Netto told the Guardian he had written Witness "a few months back" for Gillham.

"I dedicated it to the journalists in Gaza, their bravery and sacrifice had been on my mind a lot.

"The piece isn't necessarily 'about' anything, it is a quite simple, perhaps slightly melancholy, meditative piece."

He said he had titled it Witness as he was contemplating social media and how people are seeing "horrific images" - not just from Gaza, but around the world.

"Our gut reaction might be to look away [but] it is each of our responsibility to at a minimum acknowledge these things."

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance said it was "disturbed" by reports Gillham had been "sanctioned for simply voicing a personal view" about the Gaza-Israel conflict.

The union claimed musicians with the MSO were not consulted on the decision to cancel the Gillham performance.

"Musical and artistic expression have long been a vehicle for political commentary and a lens through which we examine the world, and MEAA is concerned that freedom of expression is being compromised across the creative workforce," the statement, released on Wednesday morning, said.

"Creative workers should not feel the need to restrict the expression of their opinions for fear of damaging their careers."

The MEAA said it takes "allegations of censorship and harassment extremely seriously" and will support the freedom of members to express political opinions.

Gillham did not make any further statement beyond releasing the transcript from Sunday's performance.

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Melbourne Symphony Orchestra cancels pianist's performance after dedication to journalists killed in Gaza

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Jayson Gillham was scheduled to perform at Melbourne Town Hall on Thursday but he was dropped for going 'beyond the remit of his contract'

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As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel by Omer Bartov Aug 13

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As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel by Omer Bartov Aug 13

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On 19 June 2024, I was scheduled to give a lecture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Be'er Sheva, Israel. My lecture was part of an event about the worldwide campus protests against Israel, and I planned to address the war in Gaza and more broadly the question of whether the protests were sincere expressions of outrage or motivated by antisemitism, as some had claimed. But things did not work out as planned.

When I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students congregating. It soon transpired that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it. The students had been summoned, it appeared, by a WhatsApp message that went out the day before, which flagged the lecture and called for action: "We will not allow it! How long will we commit treason against ourselves?!?!?!??!!"

The message went on to allege that I had signed a petition that described Israel as a "regime of apartheid" (in fact, the petition referred to a regime of apartheid in the West Bank). I was also "accused" of having written an article for the New York Times, in November 2023, in which I stated that although the statements of Israeli leaders suggested genocidal intent, there was still time to stop Israel from perpetrating genocide. On this, I was guilty as charged. The organiser of the event, the distinguished geographer Oren Yiftachel, was similarly criticised. His offences included having served as the director of the "anti-Zionist" B'Tselem, a globally respected human rights NGO.

As the panel participants and a handful of mostly elderly faculty members filed into the hall, security guards prevented the protesting students from entering. But they did not stop them from keeping the lecture hall door open, calling out slogans on a bullhorn and banging with all their might on the walls.

After over an hour of disruption, we agreed that perhaps the best step forward would be to ask the student protesters to join us for a conversation, on the condition that they stop the disruption. A fair number of those activists eventually walked in and for the next two hours we sat down and talked. As it turned out, most of these young men and women had recently returned from reserve service, during which they had been deployed in the Gaza Strip.

This was not a friendly or "positive" exchange of views, but it was revealing. These students were not necessarily representative of the student body in Israel as a whole. They were activists in extreme rightwing organisations. But in many ways, what they were saying reflected a much more widespread sentiment in the country.

I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known. Although I have worked abroad for many years, Israel is where I was born and raised. It is the place where my parents lived and are buried; it is where my son has established his own family and most of my oldest and best friends live. Knowing the country from the inside and having followed events even more closely than usual since 7 October, I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered on my return, but it was still profoundly disturbing.

In deliberating these issues, I cannot but draw on my personal and professional background. I served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years, a term that included the 1973 Yom Kippur War and postings in the West Bank, northern Sinai and Gaza, ending my service as an infantry company commander. During my time in Gaza, I saw first-hand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighbourhoods. Most vividly, I remember patrolling the shadeless, silent streets of the Egyptian town of ʿArīsh - which was then occupied by Israel - pierced by the gazes of the fearful, resentful population observing us from their shuttered windows. For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people.

Military service is mandatory for Jewish Israelis when they turn 18 - though there are a few exceptions - but afterwards, you can still be called upon to serve again in the IDF, for training or operational duties, or in case of emergencies such as a war. When I was called up in 1976, I was an undergraduate studying at Tel Aviv University. During that first deployment as a reserve officer, I was severely wounded in a training accident, along with a score of my soldiers. The IDF covered up the circumstances of this event, which was caused by the negligence of the training base commander. I spent most of that first semester in the hospital of Be'er Sheva, but returned to my studies, graduating in 1979 with a speciality in history.

These personal experiences made me all the more interested in a question that had long preoccupied me: what motivates soldiers to fight? In the decades after the second world war, many American sociologists argued that soldiers fight first and foremost for each other, rather than for some bigger ideological goal. But that didn't quite fit with what I'd experienced as a soldier: we believed that we were in it for a larger cause that surpassed our own group of buddies. By the time I had completed my undergraduate degree, I had also begun to ask whether, in the name of that cause, soldiers could be made to act in ways they would otherwise find reprehensible.

Taking the extreme case, I wrote my Oxford PhD thesis, later published as a book, on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the eastern front in the second world war. What I found ran counter to how Germans in the 1980s understood their past. They preferred to think that the army had fought a "decent" war, even as the Gestapo and the SS perpetrated genocide "behind its back". It took Germans many more years to realise just how complicit their own fathers and grandfathers had been in the Holocaust and the mass murder of many other groups in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

When the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in late 1987 I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defence, to the IDF to "break the arms and legs" of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops. I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research into the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery path.

'I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered, but it was still profoundly disturbing' ... Omer Bartov. Photograph: David Degner/The Guardian

As my research had shown, even before their conscription, young German men had internalised core elements of Nazi ideology, especially the view that the subhuman Slav masses, led by insidious Bolshevik Jews, were threatening Germany and the rest of the civilised world with destruction, and that therefore Germany had the right and duty to create for itself a "living space" in the east and to decimate or enslave that region's population. This worldview was then further inculcated into the troops, so that by the time they marched into the Soviet Union they perceived their enemies through that prism. The fierce resistance put up by the Red Army only confirmed the need to utterly destroy Soviet soldiers and civilians alike, and most especially the Jews, who were seen as the main instigators of Bolshevism. The more destruction they wrought, the more fearful German troops became of the revenge they could expect if their enemies prevailed. The result was the killing of up to 30 million Soviet soldiers and citizens.

To my astonishment, a few days after writing to him, I received a one-line response from Rabin, chiding me for daring to compare the IDF to the German military. This gave me the opportunity to write him a more detailed letter, explaining my research and my anxiety about using the IDF as a tool of oppression against unarmed occupied civilians. Rabin responded again, with the same statement: "How dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht." But in retrospect, I believe this exchange revealed something about his subsequent intellectual journey. For as we know from his later engagement in the Oslo peace process, however flawed, he did eventually recognise that in the long run Israel could not sustain the military, political and moral price of the occupation.

Since 1989, I have been teaching in the United States. I have written profusely on war, genocide, nazism, antisemitism and the Holocaust, seeking to understand the links between the industrial killing of soldiers in the first world war and the extermination of civilian populations by Hitler's regime. Among other projects, I spent many years researching the transformation of my mother's home town - Buchach in Poland (now Ukraine) - from a community of inter-ethnic coexistence into one in which, under the Nazi occupation, the gentile population turned against their Jewish neighbours. While the Germans came to the town with the express goal of murdering its Jews, the speed and efficiency of the killing was greatly facilitated by local collaboration. These locals were motivated by pre-existing resentments and hatreds that can be traced back to the rise of ethnonationalism in the preceding decades, and the prevalent view that the Jews did not belong to the new nation states created after the first world war.

In the months since 7 October, what I have learned over the course of my life and my career has become more painfully relevant than ever before. Like many others, I have found these last months emotionally and intellectually challenging. Like many others, members of my own and of my friends' families have also been directly affected by the violence. There is no dearth of grief wherever you turn.

The Hamas attack on 7 October came as a tremendous shock to Israeli society, one from which it has not begun to recover. It was the first time Israel has lost control of part of its territory for an extended period of time, with the IDF unable to prevent the massacre of more than 1,200 people - many killed in the cruellest ways imaginable - and the taking of well over 200 hostages, including scores of children. The sense of abandonment by the state and of ongoing insecurity - with tens of thousands of Israeli citizens still displaced from their homes along the Gaza Strip and by the Lebanese border - is profound.

Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme.

The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re-establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation. The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction. The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self-annihilation.

The second reigning sentiment - or rather lack of sentiment - is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were "liquidated". References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness.

Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people's eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling.

Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others - the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name - only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger.

In an interview conducted on 7 March 2024, the writer, farmer and scientist Zeev Smilansky expressed this very sentiment in a manner that I found shocking, precisely because it came from him. I have known Smilansky for more than half a century, and he is the son of the celebrated Israeli author S Yizhar, whose 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh was the very first text in Israeli literature to confront the injustice of the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what became the state of Israel in 1948. Speaking about his own son, Offer, who lives in Brussels, Smilansky commented:

Offer says that for him every child is a child, no matter whether he is in Gaza or here. I don't feel like him. Our children here are more important to me. There is a shocking humanitarian disaster there, I understand that, but my heart is blocked and filled with our children and our hostages ... There is no room in my heart for the children in Gaza, however shocking and terrifying it is and even though I know that war is not the solution.

I listen to Maoz Inon, who lost both his parents [murdered by Hamas on 7 October] ... and who speaks so beautifully and persuasively about the need to look forward, that we need to bring hope and to want peace, because wars won't accomplish anything, and I agree with him. I agree with him, but I cannot find the strength in my heart, with all my leftist inclinations and love for humanity, I cannot ... It is not just Hamas, it's all Gazans who agree that it's OK to kill Jewish children, that this is a worthy cause ... With Germany there was reconciliation, but they apologised and paid reparations, and what [will happen] here? We too did terrible things, but nothing that comes close to what happened here on 7 October. It will be necessary to reconcile but we need some distance.

This was a pervasive sentiment among many left-leaning, liberal friends and acquaintances I spoke with in Israel. It was, of course, quite different from what rightwing politicians and media figures have been saying since 7 October. Many of my friends recognise the injustice of the occupation, and, as Smilansky said, profess a "love for humanity". But at this moment, under these circumstances, this is not what they are focused on. Instead, they feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out, and in the struggle between one just cause and another - that of the Israelis and that of the Palestinians - it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price. To those who doubt this stark choice, the Holocaust is presented as the alternative, however irrelevant it is to the current moment.

This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October. Its roots are much deeper.

On 30 April 1956, Moshe Dayan, then IDF chief of staff, gave a short speech that would become one of the most famous in Israel's history. He was addressing mourners at the funeral of Ro'i Rothberg, a young security officer of the newly founded Nahal Oz kibbutz, which was established by the IDF in 1951 and became a civilian community two years later. The kibbutz was located just a few hundred metres from the border with the Gaza Strip, facing the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja'iyya.

Rothberg had been killed the day before, and his body was dragged across the border and mutilated, before being returned to Israeli hands with the help of the United Nations. Dayan's speech has become an iconic statement, used both by the political right and left to this day:

Yesterday morning Ro'i was murdered. Dazzled by the calm of the morning, he did not see those waiting in ambush for him at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast accusations at the murderers today. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza's refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property.

We should not seek Roi's blood from the Arabs in Gaza but from ourselves. How have we shut our eyes and not faced up forthrightly to our fate, not faced up to our generation's mission in all its cruelty? Have we forgotten that this group of lads, who dwell in Nahal Oz, is carrying on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, on whose other side crowd hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands praying for our moment of weakness, so that they can tear us apart - have we forgotten that?...

We are the generation of settlement; without a steel helmet and the muzzle of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Our children will not have a life if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads and dig water wells. Millions of Jews who were exterminated because they had no land are looking at us from the ashes of Israeli history and ordering us to settle and resurrect a land for our people. But beyond the border's furrow an ocean of hatred and an urge for vengeance rises, waiting for the moment that calm will blunt our readiness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call upon us to put down our arms ...

Let us not flinch from seeing the loathing that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who dwell around us and await the moment they can reach for our blood. Let us not avert our eyes lest our hands grow weak. This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives - to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.

The following day, Dayan recorded his speech for Israeli radio. But something was missing. Gone was the reference to the refugees watching the Jews cultivate the lands from which they had been evicted, who should not be blamed for hating their dispossessors. Although he had uttered these lines at the funeral and written them subsequently, Dayan chose to omit them from the recorded version. He, too, had known this land before 1948. He recalled the Palestinian villages and towns that were destroyed to make room for Jewish settlers. He clearly understood the rage of the refugees across the fence. But he also firmly believed in both the right and the urgent need for Jewish settlement and statehood. In the struggle between addressing injustice and taking over the land, he chose his side, knowing that it doomed his people to forever rely on the gun. Dayan also knew well what the Israeli public could accept. It was because of his ambivalence about where guilt and responsibility for injustice and violence lay, and his deterministic, tragic view of history, that the two versions of his speech ended up appealing to vastly different political orientations.

Moshe Dayan, then Israel's minister of defence, with Henry Kissinger, US national security advisor, in 1974. Photograph: PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Decades later, after many more wars and rivers of blood, Dayan titled his last book Shall the Sword Devour Forever? Published in 1981, the book detailed his role in reaching a peace agreement with Egypt two years earlier. He had finally learned the truth of the second part of the biblical verse from which he took the book's title: "Knowest thou not that it will be bitterness in the latter end?"

But in his 1956 speech, with his references to carrying the heavy gates of Gaza and the Palestinians waiting for a moment of weakness, Dayan was alluding to the biblical story of Samson. As his listeners would have recalled, Samson the Israelite, whose superhuman strength derived from his long hair, was in the habit of visiting prostitutes in Gaza. The Philistines, who viewed him as their mortal enemy, hoped to ambush him against the locked gates of the city. But Samson simply lifted the gates on his shoulders and walked free. It was only when his mistress Delilah tricked him and cut off his hair that the Philistines could capture and imprison him, rendering him all the more powerless by poking out his eyes (as the Gazans who mutilated Ro'i are alleged to have also done). But in a last feat of bravery, as he is mocked by his captors, Samson calls for God's help, seizes the pillars of the temple to which he had been led, and collapses it on the merry crowd surrounding him, calling out: "Let me die with the Philistines!"

Those gates of Gaza are lodged deeply in the Zionist Israeli imagination, a symbol of the divide between us and the "barbarians". In the case of Ro'i, Dayan asserted, "the longing for peace blocked his ears, and he did not hear the voice of murder waiting in ambush. The gates of Gaza weighed too heavily on his shoulders and brought him down."

On 8 October 2023, President Isaac Herzog addressed the Israeli public, citing the last line of Dayan's speech: "This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives - to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down." The previous day, 67 years after Ro'i's death, Hamas militants had murdered 15 residents of the Nahal Oz kibbutz and taken eight hostages. Since Israel's retaliatory invasion of Gaza, the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja'iyya facing the kibbutz, where 100,000 people had been living, has been emptied of its population and turned into one vast pile of rubble.

One of the rare literary attempts to expose the grim logic of Israel's wars is Anadad Eldan's extraordinary 1971 poem Samson Tearing His Clothes, in which this ancient Hebrew hero crashes his way into and out of Gaza, leaving only desolation in his tracks. Samson the hero, the prophet, the subduer of the nation's eternal enemy, is transformed into its angel of death, a death which, as we recall, he ends up bringing also on himself in a grand suicidal action that has echoed through the generations to this very day.

When I went
to Gaza I met
Samson coming out ripping his clothes
on his scratched face rivers flowed
and the houses bent to let him
pass
his pains uprooted trees and got caught up in the
tangled
roots. In the roots were strands of his
hair.
His head shone like a skull made of rock
and his faltering steps tore up my tears
Samson walked dragging a weary sun
shattered windowpanes and chains in Gaza's sea
were drowned. I heard how
the earth groaned under his steps,
how he slit her gut. Samson's
shoes screeched when he walked.

Born in Poland in 1924 as Avraham Bleiberg, Eldan came to Palestine as a child, fought in the 1948 war, and in 1960 moved to Kibbutz Be'eri, about 4km from the Gaza Strip. On 7 October 2023, the 99-year-old Eldan and his wife survived the massacre of about a hundred inhabitants of the kibbutz, when the militants who walked into their home inexplicably spared them.

After 7 October, in the wake of this obscure poet's miraculous survival, a different work of his was widely shared on Israeli media. For it seemed as if Eldan, a longtime chronicler of the sorrow and pain brought on by oppression and injustice, had predicted the catastrophe that befell his home. In 2016, he had published a collection of poems under the title Six the Hour of Dawn. That was the hour when the Hamas attack began. The book contains the harrowing poem On the Walls of Be'eri, mourning his daughter's death from illness (in Hebrew the name of the kibbutz also means "my well").

In the wake of 7 October, the poem eerily seems both to forecast destruction and to convey a certain view of Zionism, as originating in diasporic catastrophe and despair, bringing the nation to a cursed land where children are buried by their parents, yet holding out the hope for a new and hopeful dawn:

On the walls of Be'eri I wrote her story
from origins and depths frayed by the cold
when they read what was happening in pain and her lights
tumbled into the mist and darkness of night and a howl engendered
prayer, for her children have fallen and a door is locked
for the grace of heaven they breathe desolation and grief
who will console inconsolable parents, for a curse
is whispering let there be neither dew nor rain, you may weep if you can
there is a time when darkness roars but there is dawn and radiance

Like Dayan's eulogy for Ro'i, On the Walls of Be'eri means different things to different people. Should it be read as a lament for the destruction of a beautiful and innocent kibbutz in the desert, or is it a cry of pain over the endless bloody vendetta between the two peoples of this land? The poet has not told us his meaning, as is the way of poets. After all, he wrote this years ago in mourning for his beloved daughter. But given his many years of quiet, precise and searing work, it does not seem fanciful to believe that the poem was a call for reconciliation and coexistence, rather than for more cycles of bloodshed and revenge.

As it happens, I have a personal connection to the Be'eri kibbutz. It is where my daughter-in-law grew up, and my trip to Israel in June was primarily to visit the twins - my grandchildren - she had brought into the world in January 2024. The kibbutz, though, had been abandoned. My son, daughter-in-law and their children had moved into a nearby vacant apartment with a family of survivors - close relatives, whose father is still being held hostage - making for an unimaginable combination of new life and inconsolable sorrow in one home.

As well as seeing family, I had also come to Israel to meet friends. I hoped to make sense of what had happened in the country since the war began. The aborted lecture in BGU was not on the top of my agenda. But once I arrived at the lecture hall on that mid-June day, I quickly understood that this explosive situation could also provide some clues to understanding the mentality of a younger generation of students and soldiers.

After we sat down and began to talk, it became clear to me that the students wanted to be heard, and that no one, perhaps even their own professors and university administrators, was interested in listening. My presence, and their vague knowledge of my criticism of the war, triggered in them a need to explain to me, but perhaps also to themselves, what they had been engaged in as soldiers and as citizens.

One young woman, recently returned from long military service in Gaza, leapt on the stage and spoke forcefully about the friends she had lost, the evil nature of Hamas, and the fact that she and her comrades were sacrificing themselves to ensure the country's future safety. Deeply distraught, she began crying halfway through her speech and stepped down. A young man, collected and articulate, rejected my suggestion that criticism of Israeli policies was not necessarily motivated by antisemitism. He then launched on a brief survey of the history of Zionism as a response to antisemitism and as a political path that no gentiles had a right to deny. While they were upset by my views and agitated by their own recent experiences in Gaza, the opinions expressed by the students were in no way exceptional. They reflected much greater swaths of public opinion in Israel.

Knowing that I had previously warned of genocide, the students were especially keen to show me that they were humane, that they were not murderers. They had no doubt that the IDF was, in fact, the most moral army in the world. But they were also convinced that any damage done to the people and buildings in Gaza was totally justified, that it was all the fault of Hamas using them as human shields.

They showed me photos on their phones to prove that they had behaved admirably toward children, denied that there was any hunger in Gaza, insisted that the systematic destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, public buildings, residences and infrastructure was necessary and justifiable. They viewed any criticism of Israeli policies by other countries and the United Nations as simply antisemitic.

Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel - namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October - but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy - the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals - and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy.

Thousands of children were killed? It's the enemy's fault. Our own children were killed? That is certainly the enemy's fault. If Hamas carry out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it's Hamas's fault for hiding close to these shelters. After what they did to us, we have no choice but to root them out. After what we did to them, we can only imagine what they would do to us if we don't destroy them. We simply have no choice.

In mid-July 1941, just weeks after Germany launched what Hitler had proclaimed to be a "war of annihilation" against the Soviet Union, a German noncommissioned officer wrote home from the eastern front:

The German people owe a great debt to our Führer, for had these beasts, who are our enemies here, come to Germany, such murders would have taken place that the world has never seen before ... What we have seen ... borders on the unbelievable ... And when one reads Der Stürmer [a Nazi newspaper] and looks at the pictures, that is only a weak illustration of what we see here and the crimes committed here by the Jews.

An army propaganda leaflet issued in June 1941 paints a similarly nightmarish picture of Red Army political officers, which many soldiers soon perceived as a reflection of reality:

Anyone who has ever looked at the face of a Red commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are like. Here there is no need for theoretical expressions. We would insult the animals if we described these mostly Jewish men as beasts. They are the embodiment of the satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity ... [They] would have brought an end to all meaningful life, had this eruption not been dammed at the last moment.

Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visits Rafah in the Gaza Strip on 18 July 2024. Photograph: Avi Ohayon/Israel Gpo/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

Two days after the Hamas attack, defence minister Yoav Gallant declared, "We are fighting human animals, and we must act accordingly," later adding that Israel would "break apart one neighbourhood after another in Gaza". Former prime minister Naftali Bennett confirmed: "We are fighting Nazis." Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu exhorted Israelis to "remember what Amalek has done to you", alluding to the biblical call to exterminate Amalek's "men and women, children and infants". In a radio interview, he said about Hamas: "I don't call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals." Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi wrote on X that Israel's goal should be "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth". On Israeli TV he stated, "There are no uninvolved people ... we must go in there and kill, kill, kill. We must kill them before they kill us." Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich stressed in a speech, "The work must be completed ... Total destruction. 'Blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.'" Avi Dichter, agriculture minister and former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, spoke about "rolling out the Gaza Nakba". One Israeli 95-year-old military veteran, whose motivational speech to IDF troops preparing for the invasion of Gaza exhorted them to "wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children", was given a certificate of honour by Israeli president Herzog for "providing a wonderful example to generations of soldiers". No wonder that there have been innumerable social media posts by IDF troops in Gaza calling to "kill the Arabs", "burn their mothers" and "flatten" Gaza. There has been no known disciplinary action by their commanders.

This is the logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood - we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before - and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood. Look at what happened to us in 1918, German soldiers said in 1942, recalling the propagandistic "stab-in-the-back" myth, which attributed Germany's catastrophic defeat in the first world war to Jewish and communist treason. Look at what happened to us in the Holocaust, when we trusted that others would come to our rescue, IDF troops say in 2024, thereby giving themselves licence for indiscriminate destruction based on a false analogy between Hamas and the Nazis.

The young men and women I spoke with that day were filled with rage, not so much against me - they calmed down a bit when I mentioned my own military service - but because, I think, they felt betrayed by everyone around them. Betrayed by the media, which they perceived as too critical, by senior commanders who they thought were too lenient toward Palestinians, by politicians who had failed to prevent the 7 October fiasco, by the IDF's inability to achieve "total victory", by intellectuals and leftists unfairly criticising them, by the US government for not delivering sufficient munitions fast enough, and by all those hypocritical European politicians and antisemitic students protesting against their actions in Gaza. They seemed fearful and insecure and confused, and some were likely also suffering from PTSD.

I told them the story of how, in 1930, the German student union was democratically taken over by the Nazis. The students of that time felt betrayed by the loss of the first world war, the loss of opportunity because of the economic crisis, and the loss of land and prestige in the wake of the humiliating peace treaty of Versailles. They wanted to make Germany great again, and Hitler seemed able to fulfil that promise. Germany's internal enemies were put away, its economy flourished, other nations feared it again, and then it went to war, conquered Europe and murdered millions of people. Finally, the country was utterly destroyed. I wondered aloud whether perhaps the few German students who survived those 15 years regretted their decision in 1930 to support nazism. But I do not think the young men and women at BGU understood the implications of what I had told them.

The students were frightening and frightened at the same time, and their fear made them all the more aggressive. This level of menace, as well as a degree of overlap in opinion, seemed to have generated fear and obsequiousness in their superiors, professors and administrators, who demonstrated great reluctance to discipline them in any way. At the same time, a host of media pundits and politicians have been cheering on these angels of destruction, calling them heroes just a moment before putting them in the ground and turning their backs on their grief-stricken families. The fallen soldiers died for a good cause, the families are told. But no one takes the time to articulate what that cause actually is beyond sheer survival through ever more violence.

And so, I also felt sorry for these students, who were so unaware of how they had been manipulated. But I left that meeting filled with trepidation and foreboding.

As I headed back to the United States at the end of June, I contemplated my experiences over those two messy and troubling weeks. I was conscious of my deep connection to the country I had left. This is not just about my relationship with my Israeli family and friends, but also with the particular tenor of Israeli culture and society, which is characterised by its lack of distance or deference. This can be heartwarming and revealing; one can, almost instantaneously, find oneself in intense, even intimate conversations with others on the street, in a cafe, at a bar.

Yet this same aspect of Israeli life can also be endlessly frustrating, since there is so little respect for social niceties. There is almost a cult of sincerity, an obligation to speak your mind, no matter who you're talking to or how much offence it may cause. This shared expectation creates both a sense of solidarity, and of lines that cannot be crossed. When you are with us, we are all family. If you turn against us or are on the other side of the national divide, you are shut out and can expect us to come after you.

This may also have been the reason why this time, for the first time, I had been apprehensive about going to Israel, and why part of me was glad to leave. The country had changed in ways visible and subtle, ways that might have raised a barrier between me, as an observer from the outside, and those who have remained an organic part of it.

But another part of my apprehension had to do with the fact that my view of what was happening in Gaza had shifted. On 10 November 2023, I wrote in the New York Times: "As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. [...] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time."

I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans - most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone - demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality - namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part", the Palestinian population in Gaza, "as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group's destruction".

These were issues that I could only discuss with a very small handful of activists, scholars, experts in international law and, not surprisingly, Palestinian citizens of Israel. Beyond this limited circle, such statements on the illegality of Israeli actions in Gaza are anathema in Israel. Even the vast majority of protesters against the government, those calling for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages, will not countenance them.

Since I returned from my visit, I have been trying to place my experiences there into a larger context. The reality on the ground is so devastating, and the future appears so bleak, that I have allowed myself to indulge in some counter-factual history and to entertain some hopeful speculations about a different future. I ask myself, what would have happened had the newly created state of Israel fulfilled its commitment to enact a constitution based on its Declaration of Independence? That same declaration which stated that Israel "will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations ".

What effect would such a constitution have had on the nature of the state? How would it have tempered the transformation of Zionism from an ideology that sought to liberate the Jews from the degradation of exile and discrimination and to put them on equal standing with the other nations of the world, to a state ideology of ethnonationalism, oppression of others, expansionism and apartheid? During the few hopeful years of the Oslo peace process, people in Israel began speaking of making it into a "state of all its citizens", Jews and Palestinians alike. The assassination of prime minister Rabin in 1995 put an end to that dream. Will it ever be possible for Israel to discard the violent, exclusionary, militant and increasingly racist aspects of its vision as it is embraced there now by so many of its Jewish citizens? Will it ever be able to reimagine itself as its founders had so eloquently envisioned it - as a nation based on freedom, justice and peace?

It is difficult to indulge in such fantasies at the moment. But perhaps precisely because of the nadir in which Israelis, and much more so Palestinians, now find themselves, and the trajectory of regional destruction their leaders have set them on, I pray that alternative voices will finally be raised. For, in the words of the poet Eldan, "there is a time when darkness roars but there is dawn and radiance".

Follow the Long Read on X at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel

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The long read: This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history - and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree

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"As healthcare professionals, we witnessed genocidal intent," said Andre, adding that they had faced difficulty reaching the European Hospital and waited four months.

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"As healthcare professionals, we witnessed genocidal intent," said Andre, adding that they had faced difficulty reaching the European Hospital and waited four months.

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All healthcare professionals working in Gaza witnessed Israeli "genocidal intent," said a French emergency room doctor.

Pascal Andre, who returned to his country after working in Gaza, told Anadolu that he worked at the European Hospital in Khan Younis between Feb. 8-22.

"As healthcare professionals, we witnessed genocidal intent," said Andre, adding that they had faced difficulty reaching the European Hospital and waited four months.

Andre said two of his French colleagues, who went to the field and worked as doctors in war zones, said they had never witnessed such wounds before.

"(My colleagues) have never seen a war zone where civilians are targeted so much, where there is no escape," he said.

He applauded the Gazan health personnel for continue working despite the fear of what will happen to their families during the bombardments.

"There are people there definitely with incredible courage. They are all civilians," he said.

Underlining that the Israeli army targets mosques, universities, schools, healthcare personnel, holy and historical places, Andre said the "idea of ​​destruction" lies behind this.

For months, Egypt, Qatar, and the US have led indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas, but no agreement has been reached due to Israel's refusal to meet Hamas' demands to end the war, withdraw troops from Gaza, and allow displaced Palestinians to return to northern Gaza.

Israel has continued a devastating military offensive in the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack despite a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire.

Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have since been killed, mostly women and children, and over 92,000 injured, according to local health authorities.

Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, which ordered it to immediately halt its military operation in the southern city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians had sought refuge from the war before it was invaded on May 6.

*Writing by Gozde Bayar

Anadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. Please contact us for subscription options.

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Doctors in Gaza spotlight Israeli 'genocidal intent'

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'Idea of ​​destruction' lies behind attacks on mosques, schools, hospitals, says French doctor who worked at European Hospital in Khan Younis - Anadolu Ajansı

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The wholesale murder by Israel's armed forces of journalists in Gaza is a cause for international concern, writes TIM DAWSON Augustus 9

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The wholesale murder by Israel's armed forces of journalists in Gaza is a cause for international concern, writes TIM DAWSON Augustus 9

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The population genetics of the Jewish people

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The population genetics of the Jewish people

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Abstract

Adherents to the Jewish faith have resided in numerous geographic locations over the course of three millennia. Progressively more detailed population genetic analysis carried out independently by multiple research groups over the past two decades has revealed a pattern for the population genetic architecture of contemporary Jews descendant from globally dispersed Diaspora communities. This pattern is consistent with a major, but variable component of shared Near East ancestry, together with variable degrees of admixture and introgression from the corresponding host Diaspora populations. By combining analysis of monoallelic markers with recent genome-wide variation analysis of simple tandem repeats, copy number variations, and single-nucleotide polymorphisms at high density, it has been possible to determine the relative contribution of sex-specific migration and introgression to map founder events and to suggest demographic histories corresponding to western and eastern Diaspora migrations, as well as subsequent microevolutionary events. These patterns have been congruous with the inferences of many, but not of all historians using more traditional tools such as archeology, archival records, linguistics, comparative analysis of religious narrative, liturgy and practices. Importantly, the population genetic architecture of Jews helps to explain the observed patterns of health and disease-relevant mutations and phenotypes which continue to be carefully studied and catalogued, and represent an important resource for human medical genetics research. The current review attempts to provide a succinct update of the more recent developments in a historical and human health context.

Electronic supplementary material

The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00439-012-1235-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Introduction

Since their emergence as a national and religious group in the Middle East over 2,000 years ago (Biran and Naveh 1993), Jews have maintained continuous cultural and religious traditions amid a series of Diasporas (Ben-Sasson 1976). Along the way, others were converted into the Jewish fold. The origins and relatedness of the various Jewish groups have been much speculated upon over the past century. Jews have described themselves as a "people", based on their shared religion, without a clear indication of the genetic lines of descent since their early history. Albert Einstein captured this uncertainty when he wrote to the Berlin rabbis in 1921 "I notice that the word Jew is ambiguous in that it refers (1) to nationality and origin, (2) to the faith" (Einstein et al. 1987).

With the advent of modern population genetics based on analysis of genetic markers in the second half of the twentieth century, investigators have attempted to categorize the origins and relatedness of Jewish people. Because relatively few polymorphic markers were available at first, the early studies focused on genetic distances between groups and established hierarchies based on these distances (Bonne-Tamir et al. 1978a, b, 1977; Carmelli and Cavalli-Sforza 1979; Karlin et al. 1979; Kobyliansky et al. 1982; Livshits et al. 1991). Population genetics has been enhanced by the identification of millions of polymorphic markers that reside in close proximity to one another along the genome and that vary in their allele frequencies among populations. These discoveries have led to greater precision for estimates of genetic distances. These discoveries have also led to new types of analyses that were not available in the past. The analyses have included deconvolution of ancestry for whole genomes or for segments of individual genomes and analysis of segmental sharing among individuals that provide greater accuracy for estimating their degree of relatedness (Atzmon et al. 2010; Bryc et al. 2010).

At the same time, genetic analyses of diseases have continued in Jewish populations. These have included diseases with a clear Mendelian basis, rare syndromes often identified first in a single family, common conditions that are more prevalent in Jewish populations, and common conditions for which the complexity might be simplified by studying Jewish populations. Interest in studying these disorders has accelerated with the advent of genomic sequence-based personalized medicine research (Ostrer 2011). Here, we provide a description of the population genetics of the Jewish people based on these recent discoveries and a progress report on the genetic basis of diseases.

History as a guide to understanding Jewish population genetics

The history of the Jewish people from Classical Antiquity onward provides a guide to understanding their population genetics and is most accurately recorded beginning at the time of the Greek and Roman Empires. Up to 6 million Jews are thought to have resided in the Roman Empire, comprising 10 % of the total population (Fishberg 1911). In the period immediately preceding the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE, adherents to Judaism were located throughout the Roman Empire, to the west, and extended into the Arsacid Empire in the east (Isaac 1998). These Jews are likely to have been the ancestors of the subsequent Jewish Diaspora populations that lived in the Middle East ("Mizrahi"), Europe ("Ashkenazi and Sephardic") and North Africa (Baron 1952). The number of adherents to Judaism residing outside of the Kingdom of Judea is thought to have greatly exceeded those residing within Judea with the largest communities in Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in contemporary Turkey. Evidence for these communities remains in the archeological record, such as the well-studied community in Dura-Europos then at the boundary of the Roman Empire and now in present-day Syria (Chi et al. 2011). Most introgression with non-Jews occurred during times of relative liberalism and tolerance, including the Hasmonean period in Classical Antiquity (140-37 BCE) and modern times (Shanks 1988). Introgression between Jewish groups also occurred following the Spanish Inquisition when Sephardic Jews left the Iberian Peninsula (1492-96 CE) and migrated to Italy, the Balkans, Syria, Morocco, and Algeria, often settling within existing Jewish communities (Stillman 1991). Although not sustaining communities that were recognizably Jewish, Sephardic Jews also migrated to the New World and contributed to the formation of contemporary Hispanic and Latino non-Jewish populations (Hordes 2005). Since the fall of the Second Temple and the end of the Judean kingdom in 70 CE, religious law and anti-Semitism in the emerging Christian and Islamic worlds favored marrying within the Jewish fold (Cohen 1999; Goldstein and Evans 2012; Wistrich 2010).

Judaism was also brought outside the Roman Empire to Yemen, Ethiopia, India, and China. Many of these communities were long-standing and were observed by Benjamin of Tudela during his travels of the twelfth century (Benjamin 1983). The origins of these communities have been the subject of considerable speculation. Some communities have been thought to be the descendants of the Lost Tribes that were forced into Assyrian exile following the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel in 622 BCE, although unsupported by historical evidence (Parfitt 2002; Gonen 2002). Some commentators have suggested that these communities may have been established by Jewish traders (usually men) who brought their ideas and genes and converted members of the local population (Goldstein 2008). Within these communities, the contemporary composition may have been influenced by the number and origins of the founders as well as by the subsequent admixture events. Forced and voluntary conversion out of the Jewish faith has been well documented and has left genetic imprint on some contemporary non-Jewish populations (Velez et al. 2011).

Population genetics as a guide to understanding Jewish history

Early population genetic studies based on blood groups and serum markers provided evidence that most Jewish Diaspora groups originated in the Middle East and that paired Jewish populations were more similar genetically than paired Jewish and non-Jewish populations (Bonne-Tamir et al. 1978a, b, 1977; Carmelli and Cavalli-Sforza 1979; Karlin et al. 1979; Kobyliansky et al. 1982; Livshits et al. 1991). These studies differed in their inferences regarding the degree of admixture with local populations. Subsequent studies of the monoallelic Y chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA haplotypes demonstrated founder effects of both Middle Eastern and local origin, but did not adequately resolve the degree of admixture. To resolve this issue and to improve the understanding about the relatedness of contemporary Jewish groups, our research teams and others have independently performed genome-wide analyses of Diaspora Jewish groups and comparison with neighboring populations (Atzmon et al. 2010; Behar et al. 2010; Campbell et al. 2012; Kopelman et al. 2009; Bray et al. 2010; Listman et al. 2010). These studies varied in the specific populations analyzed and in the number of individuals included from each population. Yet, they came to remarkably similar conclusions, providing evidence for shared genetic ancestries among major Jewish Diaspora groups together with variation in admixture with local populations.

By principal component analysis, it was observed that the Jewish populations of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East formed a tight cluster that distinguished them from their non-Jewish neighbors (Fig. 1 ). Within this central cluster, each of these Jewish populations formed its own subcluster, in addition to the more remote localization of members of some Diaspora communities. The observation of a major central tight cluster was supported by statistical metrics for genetic distances (Fst, allelic sharing distances). Nearest neighbor-joining analysis robustly supported shared origins of most Jewish populations with clearly discernible European/Syrian/North African and Middle Eastern branches (Fig. 2 ; Campbell et al. 2012). Turkish, Greek, and Italian Jews shared a common branch, with Ashkenazi and Syrian Jews forming connections to this branch. The North African populations added a sub-branch to the European/Syrian branch. In turn, this North African sub-branch bifurcated into Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian, Djerban, Libyan sub-branches. More detailed PCA analysis showed that the Tunisian Jewish group was identifiable by two clusters, one with proximity to Libyan Jews and the other with proximity to Moroccan Jews. Moreover, by PCA analysis, the North African Jewish populations were orthogonal to contemporary non-Jewish North African populations from Western Sahara, North and South Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. The Middle Eastern Jewish branch included the Iranian, Iraqi and Georgian Jews as well as the non-Jewish Adygei.

Even groups that fell outside of the shared Jewish population cluster identified by PCA such as Ethiopian Beta Israel, Yemenite, Indian Bene Israel, and Indian Cochin Jews, formed their own subclusters indicating that they were distinct, homogeneous populations. On the nearest-neighbor-joining tree, the Yemenite Jews were on a branch between Palestinians and Bedouins, and the Ethiopian Beta Israel Jews were on a distinctive distal branch. Uniparental genome region analysis provided additional insights, for example, supporting male predominant Middle East Jewish origins for the Bene Israel population (Behar et al. 2010).

The genetic sharing within and among these populations occurred not only at the single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) level, but also at the levels of copy number variants (CNVs) and, where studied, identical-by-descent (IBD) segment sharing (Fig. ​(Fig.3; 3 ; Atzmon et al. 2010; Campbell et al. 2012). The IBD segment sharing was greater within specific Jewish populations and as expected highest among Jewish populations with greater degrees of inbreeding, such as Libyan, Djerban, and Tunisian Jews. In fact, the general degree of sharing within populations was similar to what one might observe for fourth to fifth cousins. This included the Yemenite as well as the Middle Eastern, European and North African Jews. Detailed patterns of segment sharing provided still further insights. Thus, for example, a pattern of more numerous shorter segments shared among Ashkenazi Jews is consistent with a population bottleneck effect (see below). Notably, the degree of sharing between Jewish populations was also greater than the sharing between Jewish and non-Jewish populations. These studies showed that Jews have a tapestry of shared DNA threads with other Jews and that no one thread is sufficient to define Jewish ancestry.

These studies also demonstrated that the history of the Jewish Diasporas could be observed in the genomes of Jewish people by patterns of admixture. A high degree of European admixture (30-60 %) was observed among Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Italian and Syrian Jews. The North African Jewish groups demonstrated North African and Middle Eastern admixture with varying European admixture. The proportion of European admixture among North African Jewish groups increased from east to west, with Moroccan Jews demonstrating the highest proportion. In contrast, the corresponding non-Jewish North African host populations demonstrated substantially higher inferred North African ancestry and less European ancestry.

The closest genetic neighbors to most Jewish groups were the Palestinians, Israeli Bedouins, and Druze in addition to the Southern Europeans, including Cypriots. The genetic clusters formed by each of these non-Jewish Middle Eastern groups reflect their own histories of endogamy. Their proximity to one another and to European and Syrian Jews suggested a shared genetic history of related Semitic and non-Semitic Mediterranean ancestors who followed different religious and tribal affiliations. Earlier studies of Israeli Jewish, Palestinian and Druze populations made a similar observation by demonstrating the proximity of these two non-Jewish populations to Ashkenazi and Iraqi Jews (Rosenberg et al. 2001; Kopelman et al. 2009).

Monoallelic markers provide insight into founder effects

Monoallelic markers, Y chromosomal and mitochondrial haplogroups, have proven to be very useful for understanding the patrilineal and matrilineal origins of Jewish Diaspora groups. Y chromosomal analysis showed that most Diaspora Jews whose ancestors lived in the Middle East, Europe or North Africa, one to two generations ago, were descended from a smaller group of Middle Eastern men (Hammer et al. 2000). Similar Y chromosomal lineages have been found among Christian and Muslim men who live in the Middle East today. Seven Y chromosome major branches (E3b, G, J1, J2, Q, R1a1, and R1b) that are prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews account for 80 % or more of the total (Behar et al. 2004). Four of these (E3b, G, J1, J2, Q) were part of the ancestral gene pool transmitted by Jews who migrated from the Middle East, whereas R1b and certain sublineages within R1a may have entered the Ashkenazi Jewish population in Europe.

Unique founder events are evident using detailed lineage analyses of these seven Y chromosome biomarkers in the Ashkenazi Jewish population (Behar et al. 2004). The comparative frequencies of these lineages between contemporary Jews to European non-Jews led to an estimate of an overall historical male admixture rate of 5-8 % with European populations, since the founding of the Ashkenazi Jewish population. This is the same as an admixture rate of 0.5 % per generation (Hammer et al. 2000). The presence of European Y chromosomal lineages is the major difference between Ashkenazi Jews and Middle Eastern and Sephardic Jews (Nebel et al. 2001).

Yet this Middle Eastern/European distinction in the Ashkenazi gene pool may be an oversimplification. Some of these Middle Eastern Y chromosomal lineages were brought by Middle Eastern settlers during the Stone and Bronze Ages colonization of Europe, then introduced through admixture between Europeans and Jews (Semino et al. 2000). The most common Ashkenazi Jewish Y chromosomal types of European origin are R1a1 and R1b with frequencies of 7.5 and 10 %, respectively. R1a1 is very common among Russians, Ukrainians, and Sorbs (Slavic speakers in Germany), as well as among certain Central Asian groups. This may be the signal of much-speculated Khazar admixture with Ashkenazi Jews, although the admixture may have occurred with Ukrainians, Poles or Russians (Nebel et al. 2005). However, it should be noted that a Middle Eastern origin for some R1a1 lineages cannot be ruled out. R1b is the most common Y chromosome branch of Atlantic Europe. Its occurrence among Ashkenazi Jews may be an indicator of admixture that occurred in the Rhine Valley prior to the Ashkenazi Jewish migration to Eastern Europe or at later time points in certain locales (Nebel et al. 2005). This branch is also prevalent in Lebanon among the Maronite Christian community and may reflect the admixture with Crusaders following their invasions in the 11-13th centuries CE (Zalloua et al. 2008).

Analysis of Jewish mitochondrial genomes in some Diaspora communities has demonstrated limited genetic diversity and therefore, evidence for strong founder effects. Four mitochondrial haplogroups were found to account for >40 % of the total among Ashkenazi Jews, providing evidence for four founder females, with a limited number of additional female founders accounting for of the remainder (Behar et al. 2008). These haplogroups form the so-called "star phylogenies" around a coalescent, ancestral mitochondrial haplotype. At least some of these founders clearly originate in the Middle East, with an overall pattern similar to that observed for male Ashkenazi Jewish founders. Evidence for female founders has been observed in other Jewish populations. The number of founders and the relative proportion of founders vary greatly from one Jewish Diaspora population to another. There are very few founder lineages among the Jews of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Libya, Mumbai, India, and Belmonte, Portugal, and these lineages account for the majority of mitochondrial haplotypes. In all of these populations, a sole founding mother was sufficient to account for at least 40 % of the contemporary mitochondrial genomes. Among the Jews of Tunisia and Cochin (south India), two founding mothers account for 30 % of the mitochondrial genomes. In the Bulgarian, Turkish, Moroccan, and Ethiopian Jewish communities, there was no evidence for a narrow founder effect. The Bulgarian, Turkish, and Moroccan communities all received large influxes of Jewish refugees following the Spanish Inquisition. The high degree of diversity observed today probably reflects the degree of diversity that was present among the Jews of Spain prior to the expulsion in 1492, and Portugal in 1496. The diversity observed among the Ethiopian Jews reflects the variety of maternal lineages that were present during the founding and propagation of this community in East Africa. By contrast, the Iranian, Iraqi, and Yemenite communities demonstrate a degree of diversity that is intermediate to that observed in the other groups. The communities were all founded at least 2,000 years ago, and the mitochondrial genotypes are not consistent with a narrow founding event with at least six founding mothers in these populations. None of these populations is quite like the Ashkenazi Jews which have a large contemporary population base, but relatively few founders.

With two exceptions, all of the populations had mitochondrial genomes that were of Middle Eastern origin. The Ethiopian mitochondrial genomes were of African origin and the Bene Israel of Indian origin. This demonstrates that Jewish population origins have been determined not only by the flow of genes, but also by the flow of ideas, although this does not exclude the flow of genes from some now undetected founder Jewish women at the time of formation of a new Jewish community. This observation provides some resolution to the queries of the physical anthropologists, Maurice Fishberg and Joseph Jacobs, for why Indian and Ethiopian Jews bear a physical resemblance to their local populations (Fishberg 1911; Jacobs 1899).

Insights from Jewish disease genetics (please see supplementary table 1)

Genetic analyses of Mendelian diseases were utilized early on as a means of understanding the population genetics of the Jews and subsequently many other genetic isolates. Chaim Sheba and Victor McKusick were key opinion leaders in this regard, as typified by McKusick's comment, "One of my most cherished memories is of ward rounds with Dr. Chaim Sheba at Tel-Hashomer Hospital in 1964. As we passed from bed to bed, Dr. Sheba would say 'this is a Moroccan Jew. They are particularly susceptible to diseases A and B' or 'this is a Yemenite Jew. They are particularly susceptible to diseases C and D'. It was Dr. Sheba who stimulated my interest in the ethnic distribution of disease" (McKusick 1973). The advent of Israeli statehood and the resulting immigration of Jewish Diaspora groups to Israel provided an unprecedented opportunity for studying these conditions. Richard Goodman described it this way, "After the State of Israel came into being in 1948, waves of new immigrants from over 100 countries throughout the world came by land, sea and air to the country. They were literally met at their ports of entry by teams of physicians and geneticists, seeking to learn about the heritable differences and similarities of these people who had been dispersed for over 2,000 years" (Goodman 1974). These have included X-linked and autosomal dominant and recessive Mendelian disorders that occur in individual families, in specific Jewish Diaspora groups, across two or more Diaspora groups or across Jewish and non-Jewish groups (Goodman 1979; Ostrer 2001). These conditions have been identified, because they have a recognizable phenotype and commonly have an allele frequency exceeding 0.05 in a population of interest. Comprehensive characterization and cataloging has been carried out and is included as part of the Israeli National Genetic Database ( http://www.goldenhelix.org/server/israeli/) coordinated by Joel Zlotogora (van Baal et al. 2010). Molecular analysis has usually identified one or two common alleles that account for 70 % or more of the cases. Coalescence theory has demonstrated that these mutations have arisen throughout Jewish history and in some in the pre-Jewish era (Ostrer 2001; Risch et al. 2003). Disease phenotype causing mutations in a given Jewish Diaspora group have been shown to coalesce typically to the founding of that group. Both selection and drift have been proposed as mechanisms for higher frequencies of such mutations within Jewish Diaspora groups. However, the inferred geographic distribution of Ashkenazi Jewish mutation carriers in Europe supported drift over selection (Risch et al. 2003). Likewise, the observation that Ashkenazi Jewish founder mutations did not reject the neutrality hypothesis in the Slatkin-Bertorelle test also supported drift (Slatkin 2004). Malaria resistance for the G6PD Med mutation is the only proven example of a role for selection (Motulsky et al. 1966). However, many of these conditions do seem to cluster into specific categories, including lysosomal storage diseases (Tay-Sachs disease, Niemann-Pick disease, Gaucher disease and mucolipidosis IV), glycogen storage disease (types I and III), clotting factor deficiencies (factor XI deficiency, factor VII deficiency, combined factors V and VIII deficiency), steroid hormone biosynthetic defects (21-hydroxylase deficiency, 11-hydroxylase deficiency, and corticosterone methyloxidase II deficiency), and defects in DNA repair that increase susceptibility to cancer (hereditary breast-ovarian cancer susceptibility caused by mutations in BRCA1 or BRCA2, Bloom syndrome, and Fanconi anemia) (Ostrer 2001). The reason for this clustering of diseases is not known, but does favor the idea of a common selective pressure conferring advantage to the heterozygote state across disease mutations in the same cluster. Contemporary methods of genomic analysis are starting to provide evidence for selection of other variants in the genome without evidence for the selective agents (Bray et al. 2010).

The study of these conditions has been translated into public health genetics initiatives for Jews, and where the same conditions occur, non-Jews alike. These have included genetic screening programs for reproductive risks, presymptomatic identification of disease risk, and treatment of genetic disease. Screening for Tay-Sachs disease has been available for Ashkenazi Jews since the 1970s (Kaback 2001). This has taken many forms, both community-based and medically based. Thousands of people come each year for genetic testing, both pregnant couples trying to decide, whether they should have prenatal diagnosis via amniocentesis and young Orthodox Jewish men and women contemplating marriage, but wanting to obtain genetic information before developing a serious relationship. Over a million people have had Tay-Sachs carrier testing and this has decreased the number of Tay-Sachs births. Currently, 4-5 children are born each year with Tay-Sachs disease, in contrast to the 40-50 annually prior to genetic screening. Ashkenazi Jews are now screened typically for 18 conditions and this number is likely to rise. New genetic testing programs are also being developed for Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews, with the goal of preempting the tragic conception or birth of a child with a fatal genetic disease. In the past, when a couple had a child with a genetic disease, oftentimes they stopped having children. Screening for genetic diseases has been accepted into the mainstream of Judaism. It should be kept in mind that the growing accessibility of whole-exome and eventually whole genome sequence information is likely to change the landscape of such public initiatives in genetic testing for Jewish and other populations alike.

The second way in which genetic knowledge has impacted medically has been in the treatment of genetic disease. One of the dramatic examples is the treatment of Gaucher disease, a lysosomal storage disease that results in accumulation of glucocerebroside into the lysosomes of cells (Charrow 2009). People with Gaucher disease can be quite disabled with bleeding, bone pain, hip fractures, and large spleens. Knowledge of the genetic defect in Gaucher disease led to a specific therapy in which the enzyme that is missing from the people with the disease is replaced by injection. The results of treatment are dramatic with normalization of bleeding times, reduced bone pain, elimination of hip fractures. Gaucher was the first disease in which enzyme-replacement therapy was used successfully. Recent studies have also led to an appreciation of the relationship between the carrier state for Gaucher's disease and Parkinson's disease (Aharon-Peretz et al. 2005).

A third example relates to oncogenetics and in particular genetic testing for breast and ovarian cancer (Robson and Offit 2007). Clustering of some forms of cancer in families has been well documented (Goldgar et al. 1994; Simchoni et al. 2006). Some women come from high-risk families with mothers and sisters, aunts, and cousins affected with breast and/or ovarian cancer. Gene mapping studies in multiple extended families with early-onset breast and ovarian cancer led to the identification of the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes as harboring germline breast and ovarian cancer risk mutations. Among Ashkenazi Jews, three mutations are common and make genetic testing simple and relatively inexpensive (Oddoux et al. 1996). Genetic testing has led to prevention of cancers through life-preserving prophylactic oophorectomy and mastectomy. Ashkenazi Jews may also be in the vanguard for population-based genetic screening for breast and ovarian cancer risk. In 2009, Dr. Wendy Rubinstein and colleagues reported that almost half of Ashkenazi Jews identified with BRCA1/2 cancer-risk mutations have negative family histories for cancer. The absence of a family history confounds efforts toward presymptomatic carrier identification. Their model predicted that a genetic screening program would result in 2,811 fewer cases of ovarian cancer, with a life expectancy gain of 1.83 quality-adjusted life years among carriers at a cost of $8,300 (discounted) per year of quality-adjusted life gained (Rubinstein et al. 2009). Their recommendations were at odds with earlier recommendations of the US Preventive Services Task Force that population-based genetic screening for BRCA1/2 should not be offered.

Toward a personalized medicine for the Jewish people based on genomics

Genome-wide analysis holds the prospect of understanding all of the genetic risks of the Jewish people and translating these into surveillance and treatment programs that will prevent disease or optimize therapy and minimize toxicity when disease does occur. Multiple genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for common diseases have been mounted for conditions that are either more prevalent among Ashkenazi Jews (Crohn disease, Parkinson disease) or premised to have less genetic heterogeneity compared with European or European-American populations (breast cancer, diabetes, bipolar disease, schizophrenia). Notably, these GWAS have identified disease-associated variants in the AJ population that were not identified in other populations (Avramopoulos et al. 2007; Liu et al. 2011; Nishioka et al. 2010; Shifman et al. 2008). Sequencing strategies hold the possibility of identifying both common and rare variants that affect disease risk as well as response to therapy and development of toxicity.

This work will be of importance in both the United States and Israel. Ashkenazi Jews are America's largest genetic isolate, numbering some 6 million people or 2 % of the population. Based on patterns of participation in earlier genetic studies, it seems likely that members of this group will embrace new genomic medicine studies. All Jewish Diaspora groups are represented in Israel and receive their care through one of only four nationwide mandatory health care organizations. Linking their medical records (with adequate privacy safeguards) will provide an opportunity to identify the genetic factors that influence disease onset and progression and the therapeutic response.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Mait Metspalu in the preparation of Fig. 1 , Christopher Campbell in the preparation of Fig. 2 , Pier Francesco Palamara in the preparation of Fig. 3 , and Eli Balshan for assistance in the preparation of supplementary table 1. They also wish to thank Suzi Karács Nicolau for expert secretarial and technical assistance in the preparation of the manuscript.

Open Access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.

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Articles from Human Genetics are provided here courtesy of Springer

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The population genetics of the Jewish people

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Adherents to the Jewish faith have resided in numerous geographic locations over the course of three millennia. Progressively more detailed population genetic analysis carried out independently by multiple research groups over the past two decades has ...

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What is Israel's Ben Gurion canal plan and why Gaza matters

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What is Israel's Ben Gurion canal plan and why Gaza matters

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As Israel continues its onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip, talks about a long-discussed economic opportunity known as the Ben Gurion Canal Project have surfaced online.

Named after Israel's founding father, David Ben-Gurion, the project, conceived in the late 1960s, sought to create an alternative route to the Suez Canal, the primary shipping route connecting Europe and Asia.

While Israel rejects calls for a ceasefire and its military campaign on Gaza shows no sign of an immediate end, it becomes crucial to delve into the historical context of the Ben Gurion Canal Project, its proposed significance, and the intricate geopolitics surrounding the Suez Canal.

Understanding the motivations behind the proposal requires exploring the complex history of the Suez Canal, the Tripartite Aggression of 1956, and the unexpected shocks to world trade resulting from its closures.

This backdrop underscores the potential strategic importance of an alternative canal, controlled by Israel, in the ever-evolving dynamics of the region.
Who is Ben Gurion?
David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973) was a prominent Zionist leader from Poland, who was known as the founding father of Israel.

He was described as a ruthless man who gave orders to Zionist militias to see the mass explosion of Palestinians from their lands and facilitated the influx of Jewish immigrants from all over the world into Palestine. He served as the first prime minister of Israel in 1948.
What is the Ben Gurion Canal project?
The Ben Gurion Canal project was a proposal in the 1960s by Israel to connect the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea through the southern end of the Gulf of Aqaba. The route was planned via the port city of Eilat and the Jordanian border, through the Arabah Valley for about 100 kilometres between the Negev (Naqab) Mountains and the Jordanian Highlands and veered west before the Dead Sea basin, and heading through a valley in the Negev Mountain (Naqab) Range. It would then head north again to circumvent the Gaza Strip and connect to the Mediterranean Sea.

However, a connection between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea already exists through the Suez Canal - an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt that offers vessels a direct route between the North Atlantic and the northern Indian oceans, reducing journey distance and time.

The Suez Canal provides the shortest sea route between Asia and Europe and currently handles roughly 12 percent of the world's trade.
Why did Israel propose the project?
The Constantinople International Convention - signed in 1888 by the great European powers of the era - once guaranteed a right of passage via the Suez Canal to all ships during times of war and peace.

However, after the Suez Canal was nationalised in 1956 by then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt closed off access to the canal on several occasions following the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the violent displacement of Palestinians, also known as the Nakba.

Egypt blocked Israeli vessels from accessing the canal from 1948 until 1950, affecting its ability to trade with East Africa and Asia, and hampering its ability to import oil from the Gulf region.

Access to the Suez Canal was closed to all international shipping in 1956, following the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt, which involved an alliance between Israel, the UK and France who sought to regain control of the Suez Canal and remove Nasser from power.

The canal was effectively closed during the conflict, and the situation escalated into a crisis with international and economic ramifications.

The Suez Canal was also closed for a staggering eight-year period in 1967, at the beginning of the Six-Day War, also known as the Arab-Israeli War, which was fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states (primarily Egypt, Syria, and Jordan).

When all land trade routes were blocked by Arab states, Israel's ability to trade with East Africa and Asia, mainly to import oil from the Persian Gulf, was also severely hampered.

The closure of the canal was also a significant and unexpected shock to world trade and disrupted global commerce.

An alternative to the Suez Canal, especially one under the authority of key Western ally Israel, would eliminate the potential use of the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran as leverage by Egypt against Israel or its allies.
Economic gains
The Suez Canal has been critical in driving Egypt's economy forward. It earns revenues through tolls and transit fees collected from vessels that pass through the canal.

In 2021, some 20,649 vessels flowed through the Suez Canal - an increase of 10 percent over 2020. In 2022, annual revenue stood at $8billion in transit fees. The Suez Canal set a new record with an annual revenue of $9.4 billion for the fiscal year that ended 30 June 2023.

While the canal is Egypt's economic centrepiece, attracting investments to the country and leading to the development of services and industries, its primary importance remains to be its ability to facilitate international trade, making an efficient global trade route.

The Ben Gurion Canal, if constructed, would rival the Suez Canal and cause a major financial threat to Egypt.

If it goes ahead, it would be almost one-third longer than the current 193.3km Suez Canal, and whoever controls it will have enormous influence over the global supply routes for oil, grain, and shipping.
Why Gaza matters
The US had once proposed to use some 520 nuclear bombs on the Negev Desert (Naqab) to help create the canal. With Gaza razed to the ground, there have been alleged plans to literally cut corners and reduce costs by diverting the canal straight through the middle of the Palestinian enclave. However, the presence of Palestinians there would remain an obstacle.

Since Israel launched its onslaught on the besieged enclave, it has pushed Palestinians to move south by relentlessly bombing northern Gaza before carrying out a ground invasion weeks later. At least 400,000 Palestinians have been displaced from the north to the south, according to statistics from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS).

Some 800,000 Palestinians remained in areas considered "north" - namely past north of Wadi Gaza. Israel's indiscriminate bombing campaign, which has mostly targeted the north - has killed at least 11,470 people in Gaza - mostly civilians, including women and children.

The death toll has not been updated for days due to Israel's targeting of the largest hospital in Gaza, Al-Shifa, which was a centre for collecting data on deaths and the wounded.

Israel denies it has plans to annex the Strip but it had called for the "voluntary migration" of Palestinians in Gaza amid accusations that it was "ethnically cleansing" the enclave.

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What is Israel's Ben Gurion canal plan and why Gaza matters

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As Israel intensifies its Gaza onslaught, focus turns to the controversial Ben Gurion Canal Project, originally proposed in the 1960s as an alternative to the Suez Canal.

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Hundreds of Palestinian Doctors Disappeared Into Israeli Detention

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Hundreds of Palestinian Doctors Disappeared Into Israeli Detention

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The INtercepts

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I t's been two months since Osaid Alser has heard from his cousin, Khaled Al Serr, a surgeon at Nasser Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis.

Before late March, they had been in regular contact - or as regular as the shredded communication infrastructure would allow. Al Serr had created a telemedicine WhatsApp group where he and Osaid, a surgical resident in the U.S., recruited doctors from stateside, the U.K., and Europe to give advice to their overstretched colleagues in Gaza.

"He reported on a gunshot injury in a 70-year old," Osaid said, of Al Serr. "It was in her head. And really, there were no neurosurgeons at that time."

"He was sharing those cases, and he was asking for help," Osaid went on. "It was like, 'Is there any neurosurgeon that can help me? How can I fix this?'"

Al Serr was a natural vessel for the collective medical knowledge of the group chat. "He always wanted to help out, always liked to use his hands, to kind of fix a problem and have an immediate impact," according to Osaid.

In February, the Israeli military invaded Nasser Hospital. The attack left the hospital hollowed out, just one of the destroyed health care centers in a medical system savaged by an overwhelming caseload and a relentless military assault by Israel.

Still, Al Serr maintained some optimism. His last post on Instagram was uploaded in mid-March, a short video showing the exterior of the hospital from the day before, captioned with a triumphant message:

Finally!! After more than a month of cutting electricity in Naser hospital, our staff was able to fix the generator and get the electricity again to Nasser Hospital. For the last two weeks, we are trying to clean and prepare the hospital's departments to reopen the hospital again.

Six days later, on March 24, Israeli forces stormed the hospital again. Osaid had asked a few days earlier if Al Serr was alright. No response ever came. It was their last exchange.

His relatives believe that Khaled Al Serr, along with what was left of the hospital's dwindling staff, was taken prisoner by Israel.

A s early as November, reports emerged of doctors being detained and going missing in north Gaza. According to the World Health Organization, at least 214 medical staff from Gaza have been detained by the Israeli military. In early May, the detention and alleged torture of medical staff from Gaza made headlines when Israeli authorities announced the death of Adnan Al-Bursh, a well-known surgeon and the head of orthopedics at Al-Shifa Hospital. After being taken into custody in December, officials said Al-Bursh died in April while in Ofer Prison, an Israeli detention facility in the occupied West Bank.

"Dr. Adnan's case raises serious concerns that he died following torture at the hands of Israeli authorities. His death demands an independent international investigation," Tlaleng Mofokeng, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health, said in a statement last week. "The killing and detention of healthcare workers is not a legitimate method of warfare. They have a legitimate and essential role to care for sick and wounded persons during times of conflict."

Al-Bursh is one of at least 493 Palestinian medical workers who have been killed in Gaza since October 7, according to the Ministry of Health. The Israel Defense Forces has systematically targeted hospitals from the north to the south of the strip, claiming that Hamas operates in the facilities. Medical staff in Gaza's hospitals have repeatedly denied this claim. This week, Israeli forces have launched new attacks on Kamal Adwan Hospital and Al-Awda Hospital in the north, with reports on Wednesday and Thursday of medical staff being detained from Al Awda.

As ground troops made their way into southern Gaza by the end of the year, attacks on hospitals in the southern city of Khan Younis ramped up. In February, when the Israeli military was laying siege to Nasser Hospital, Al Serr was the only general surgeon there.

"He's a very dedicated doctor," Ahmed Moghrabi, a plastic surgeon who previously worked at Nasser Hospital, said of Al Serr.

Both doctors frequently posted to social media about the horrific cases that were flooding into Nasser Hospital, especially as attacks on the facility increased and international media coverage was scarce.

"I saw children, women in torn pieces," Moghrabi told The Intercept, explaining why he began posting on social media. "I wanted to show the world what is going on on the ground."

The last time he saw Al Serr was in February. "They" - the Israeli military - "surrounded the hospital and we were trapped," Moghrabi recalled. "And the hospital came under siege for three weeks. We couldn't really move from one building to another. We couldn't have a look through the windows. Otherwise the snipers could shoot us."

"We couldn't have a look through the windows. Otherwise the snipers could shoot us."

Moghrabi left the hospital in mid-February, during the first invasion. "We evacuated at midnight that day," he said. "The IDF established a checkpoint not far from the hospital gate. They checked everybody actually. My nurse, they took him at the checkpoint. He was detained for two months."

As for Al Serr, Osaid said his cousin left shortly after the February evacuation to go to Rafah and check on his parents, but that he returned to Nasser Hospital to help reopen it and treat patients.

Since the attack on the hospital in late March, there's been hardly any news about Al Serr. The only crumbs of information have been more alarming than reassuring. The first is that Al Serr was last seen signed into his WhatsApp in mid-April. "He was last active online on April 12," Osaid said, "which, to me, tells me that they confiscated his phone and they basically accessed his phone as well."

Then, a few days later on April 17, the news outlet Al Mayadeen released an interview with a Palestinian who identified himself as Ahmed Abu Aqel and said he had been detained and released by Israel. Moghrabi told The Intercept that Abu Aqel was previously a nurse at Nasser Hospital.

Clothed in a gray sweatshirt and sweatpants, a common outfit for released Palestinian detainees, Abu Aqel said he had a message from the doctors of Nasser Hospital who were being held in detention.

"They are subjected to daily beatings and killing and torture," Abu Aqel said. "There is a message in particular from the doctor, Dr. Nahed Abu Ta'imah, director of surgery at the Nasser Medical Complex. His situation is very difficult and he is suffering under very difficult, tragic circumstances. He needs treatment and needs to be seen by the Red Cross and released urgently."

"A colleague of mine was being held next to me," Abu Aqel said. "His name was Khaled. They plucked his entire beard with pliers in front of me. His beard was plucked. This is one of hundreds I know."

Osaid believes he is referring to Khaled Al Serr.

While Abu Aqel did not say where he was held - where Al Serr may still be - Osaid thinks it was likely Sde Teiman, a military base and detention center in Israel's Negev Desert. There have been numerous allegations of abuse, torture, and detainees dying at Sde Teiman.

In a statement to The Intercept received after publication of this article, a spokesperson for the Israeli military did not answer specific questions about healthcare workers in detention, but denied any widespread abuse of Palestinians in custody. "The mistreatment of detainees during their time in detention or whilst under interrogation violates IDF values and contravenes IDF orders and is therefore absolutely prohibited," the spokesperson said. "Concrete complaints regarding inappropriate behavior are forwarded to the relevant authorities for review."

Aside from Abu Aqel's vague testimony and the one blip on WhatsApp, there has been no information or updates on Al Serr's whereabouts or condition.

"It's just heartbreaking to know nothing about your loved ones," Osaid said. "We don't know if he's alive or not. We don't know if he's OK or not."

T hose Palestinians lucky enough to be released from imprisonment offer harrowing glimpses of what happens inside Israeli detention centers.

In December, Khaled Hamouda, another surgeon, was working in Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. A month earlier, he had been displaced from the Indonesian Hospital, where he normally practiced. At Kamal Adwan, Hamouda was also a patient, receiving treatment for injuries he sustained in an airstrike on his family home in Beit Lahia. His wife, daughter, father, and a brother, among other relatives, were killed in the attack.

It was about 10 days after the strike that Israeli forces ordered both medical staff and civilians sheltering at Kamal Adwan Hospital to leave. Hamouda said the hospital administration was told that people would be able to leave and go to a different hospital without being arrested.

That was not what happened. Hamouda and some of his colleagues were instead taken into custody by the Israeli military.

"When they attacked the hospital, they asked all the men and youth older than 15 years old and younger than 55 to hold their ID and to get out from the hospital," Hamouda said. Their eyes were covered, their hands bound, and they were taken to another location, though Hamouda is not sure where.

Soon after they were taken, images began to spread on social media of dozens of detainees being held by Israeli soldiers in north Gaza. In one photo, a group of men stand shirtless in the foreground as a soldier appears to take their photo. It wasn't long before people were able to identify one of the men as Hamouda.

"This is on the day they took us from Kamal Adwan hospital and they asked us to look at the camera," Hamouda said. "It's the only evidence that I was taken on this day. Nobody knew what happened to us until this photo went to the media."

Hamouda said he was eventually taken to Sde Teiman, where he and other detainees were forced to remain on their knees. If they didn't, they were punished. "They ask him to stand with his hand above his head for about three or four hours," he said of one prisoner.

"Unfortunately, when they knew that I am a doctor and general surgeon, they treated me more badly."

"Unfortunately, when they knew that I am a doctor and general surgeon, they treated me more badly," he recalled. "They attacked me, and they beat me in my back and my head." Hamouda said the soldiers wanted to know if he knew about Israelis held captive in Gaza, but he didn't know anything.

While he was detained, he also saw someone he knew from the medical community: Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh. "They brought Dr. Adnan in at about 2 or 3 a.m.. He was horribly treated. He was in pain," Hamouda said. "He told me, 'Khaled, they beat me. They attacked me violently.'" According to Hamouda, Al-Bursh also said he had a fractured rib. Hamouda was able to procure medicine and some food for Al-Bursh but, two days later, the injured doctor was taken away.

Despite his condition and the harsh circumstances of prison, Al-Bursh brought news for Hamouda. "Your mother is present in Al-Awda Hospital, and she is fine, I treated her," Hamouda recalled Al-Bursh telling him. Hamouda was grateful for the message: "This information was very, very precious for me because I didn't know any information about my family, specifically my mother. So I hugged him and kissed his head and thanked him because it's the only hope that when I get out, I will find her."

Read our complete coverage

After three weeks, Hamouda was released. He told The Intercept he and other detainees were driven to the Kerem Shalom border crossing in the south and eventually went to Rafah. His surviving children and his mother were still in the north, and it would be two months before they were able to reunite. He considers himself fortunate because he was released.

"All my colleagues, doctors who were arrested with me or after me or before me, they kept them there for about three or four or five months," he said. "Some are still being held."

E ven before the war, doctors were crucial in Gaza, especially amid the ebbs and flows of Israeli border restrictions and military attacks.

"Every two to three years," Hamouda said, "we become trapped in some war or some attack from the Israeli Army. So our work is important for people who present there."

Hamouda's father had also been a doctor and wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. "He advised me to be a doctor," Hamouda said, "because it's a benefit to people."

Fulfilling the necessity of caring for people, Hamouda believes, is why health care workers have become such common targets in this war. "It's not a coincidence," he said "They mean to attack the houses of the people who can treat the wounded people and that can change something in the condition in the north."

The sentiments were shared by Osaid, who said his cousin Al Serr would have agreed: They became doctors to help people. "With the amount of killing that has been going on for a while, we're always in need for surgeons to fix traumatic injuries that people sustain," Osaid said. "And so to me, [it] was a natural response growing up in Gaza, the desire of helping out and healing injured people."

Al Serr's posts on Instagram mostly show how he documented the flood of horrific cases that arrived in front of him: a steady stream of civilians torn apart by shrapnel and bullets, punctuated by repeated and escalating attacks on Nasser Hospital. One of his last posts, however, offered a glimmer of hope: two babies born on the day the hospital was invaded in February.

For his next post, Al Serr ventured outside the hospital, a reminder of how the war has left no one in Gaza untouched. It was a short video of his neighborhood, homes, and buildings turned to piles of rubble, with the path to his own home buried underneath it all.

"He always wanted to form a family," Osaid said of his cousin, "have kids, build a life and live in peace."

With no word from Al Serr for two months, that chapter of his life feels like an ever more distant possibility.

"He was very brave. He was doing his job. Pretty much our job as a surgeon is not just to heal the wounds and to fix wounds, but also to advocate for our patients. So he was advocating for them."

"I really hope that he's OK."
Update: May 27, 2024
This article has been updated to include a statement from the Israeli military received after publication.

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Hundreds of Palestinian Doctors Disappeared Into Israeli Detention

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Dr. Khaled Al Serr of Nasser Hospital hasn't been heard from in two months. His family assumes Israel detained him, like other Gaza doctors.

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Mandate of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. UN Special Rapporteur torture

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Mandate of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. UN Special Rapporteur torture

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or punishment

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Mandate of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. UN Special Rapporteur torture

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Mandate of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. UN Special Rapporteur torture

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or punishment

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The ICJ, Israel’s Occupation and the Realization of Palestinian Rights

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The ICJ, Israel’s Occupation and the Realization of Palestinian Rights

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The ICJ, Israel’s Occupation and the Realization of Palestinian Rights

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The International Court of Justice’s historic ruling that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal under international law is one of the most monumental decisions in the 79-year history of the United Nations’ highest court.

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All my investigations are free to access, thanks to the generosity of my readers.

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Atlantic's editor was a former IDF prison gardian and covered war crimes

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Atlantic's editor was a former IDF prison gardian and covered war crimes

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Editors' Note: In his hatchet job for the New Republic on Mearsheimer and Walt's new book The Israel Lobby, Jeffrey Goldberg dismisses their depiction of the Israel-Palestine conflict as "simply unrecognizable to anyone halfway fair and halfway learned about the Middle East," and he recommends instead his own book on the "moral failings of israel's occupation of Palestinian lands." It happens that NORMAN FINKELSTEIN, who is more than halfway fair and halfway learned about the Middle East, has plowed through Goldberg's book. Here is his entirely irrefutable and absolutely devastating report. AC / JSC

Jeffrey Goldberg is the recipient of numerous journalism awards and currently writes on the Middle East for The New Yorker magazine. On its surface his book Prisoners: A Muslim & A Jew Across The Middle East Divide interweaves the memoir of an American Jew's enchantment and subsequent disappointment with Israel, on the one hand, and the reportage of a knowing journalist covering the Israel-Palestine beat, on the other. Its main interest, however, is as a sophisticated work of ideology, one meriting more than passing attention. On a political level it registers the limits of what is currently permissible to acknowledge in enlightened liberal sectors of American Jewry, while on a personal level it registers the limits of what an enlightened believer in the faith can admit to himself. More broadly it signals the eclipse of liberal American Jewry's love affair with the Jewish state, itself integral of the beginnings of a larger American estrangement from Israel.

Eschewing Thomas Friedman's formula in From Beirut to Jerusalem (a book to which Prisoners bears obvious comparison), Goldberg does not quote a Fouad Ajami here and a Rabbi Hartmann there to lend credence to his prepackaged opinions but rather seems to speak from the authority of intimate knowledge. And indeed, Goldberg made aliyah in the 1980s and lived on a leftwing kibbutz, served as a military policeman in the Palestinian detention center Ketziot (Ansar Three) during the first intifada, and reported from the Occupied Territories during the Oslo years and the second intifada. He attached himself to one Palestinian from Gaza in particular named Rafiq Hijazi, the odyssey of this personal friendship mirroring and humanizing in Prisoners the larger drama unfolding in the Holy Land. On a side note, Goldberg depicts as an extraordinary act his forging of a personal bond with a Palestinian, and commentators have reacted in tones of hushed awe. Yet, although such a relationship between Jew and Arab might have raised eyebrows a few decades ago, in the real world it is by now a commonplace. In the hermetically sealed ghetto of American Jewry, however, it is still cause for bewilderment.

And yet it's precisely because Goldberg seems to know his subject, and knows how to convey its truth to the reader, that, depending on one's take, the cynicism of his bad faith and faux innocence or the thick-headedness of his refusal to see what's right before his eyes (probably both) not only rankles but enrages. For it must be said that this is a quite wretched book which, for all its willingness to acknowledge ugly realities about Israel's occupation, albeit realities which can no longer be concealed, nonetheless reiterates and, because of the seeming openness, revivifies the old pernicious myths and threadbare clichés sustaining the occupation, presenting them in a form less detached from reality yet processed to make them assimilable by his liberal American Jewish audience.

The heart of Goldberg's book is his stint during the first intifada (1987-1993) as a military policeman in Ketziot (Ansar Three), an Israeli prison for Palestinian detainees located in the Negev desert. It is in Ketziot that Goldberg meets his Palestinian alter ego Rafiq, and Ketziot also serves as the metaphor for his larger claim captured in the book's title that Israelis and Palestinians are both prisoners of the occupation. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, he reports, were arrested during the first intifada for both violent and nonviolent offenses. In an aside Goldberg observes that "habeas corpusis not a cherished value of Arab security services", yet it appears not to be much of an Israeli value either. He himself notes that "many of the prisoners" in Ketziot were "so-called administrative detainees. They had been put in jail without charge and without trial, by military order, for six-month terms, renewable at the discretion of a military judge, who did what the Shabak [Israel's internal security police] told him to do.The administrative detainees included many of the intellectuals and lawyers of the Palestinian national movement". Human rights organizations reported that the number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons during each of the first years of the intifada hovered around 25,000 of whom 4-5,000 were administrative detainees.

"Ketziot was a kind of appalling joke," Goldberg writes, a miniature of the equally "absurd occupation". Palestinians were "allowed to organize their lives, even their political lives, more or less as they chose," he says, and "sometimes, it seemed as if we weren't running a prison, but a vast arts-and-crafts workshop". In its annual reports, however, Amnesty described conditions at Ketziot as "harsh" throughout the intifada although reporting some improvement in 1990, when Goldberg joined the prison staff. Goldberg does acknowledge that it wasn't all fun-and-games, noting the "systemic cruelty" of Israel's ban on family visits-"Some of these men, many with children, did not see their families for two and three years"-and that "the harsh climate was in itself a form of cruelty".

Goldberg also alludes to Israeli prisons which had a meaner reputation than Ketziot such as Dahariya and Gaza Beach camp (Ansar Two). It is instructive to juxtapose Goldberg's description of Gaza Beach camp (Rafiq had been held there before Ketziot) with that of an Israeli journalist, Ari Shavit, who served there:

Goldberg: Here is where young Palestinians were assimilated into the apparatus of occupation, where the Shabak extracted from the Arabs what they could and then trucked them to the desert. The policy of Ansar Two was consistent: Prisoners being prepped for interrogation were made to stand on the basketball court under the sun for four, or five, or six hours. They were forced to raise their arms, and they were not allowed to sit, or drink. When Rafiq's arms dropped from exhaustion, he was struck.Rafiq was smacked around a bit [during interrogation]. (pp. 210-12)

Shavit: Most [Palestinians] are awaiting trial; most were arrested because they were throwing stones or were said to be members of illegal organizations. Many are in their teens. Among them, here and there, are some boys who are small and appear to be very young.The prison has twelve guard towers. Some Israeli soldiers are struck-and deeply shaken-by the similarity between these and certain other towers, about which they have learned at school.[T]he unjust analogy with those other camps of fifty years ago won't ago away.And I, too, who have always abhorred this analogy, who have always argued bitterly with anyone who so much as hints at it, I can no longer stop myself. The associations are too strong.Like a believer whose faith is cracking, I go over and over again in my mind the long list of arguments, the list of differences.But then I realize [...] that the problem is not in the similarity-for no one can seriously think that there is a real similarity-but that there isn't enough lack of similarity. The problem is that the lack of similarity isn't strong enough to silence once and for all the evil echoes, the accusing images. Maybe the Shin Bet [Shabak] is to blame for this-for the arrests it makes and what it does to those arrested. For almost every night, after it has managed, in its interrogations, to "break" a certain number of young men, the Shin Bet delivers to the [soldiers] a list with the names of the friends of the young men.[Then] the soldiersgo out almost every night to the city andcome back with children of fifteen or sixteen years of age. The children grit their teeth. Their eyes bulge from their sockets. In not a few cases they have already been beaten.And soldiers crowd together in the "reception room" to look at them when they undress. To look at them in their underwear, to look at them as they tremble with fear. And sometimes they kick them-one kick more, before they put on their new prison clothes....Or maybe the doctor is to blame.

You wake him up in the middle of the night to treat one of those just brought in-a young man, barefoot, wounded, who looks as if he's having an epileptic fit, who tells you that they beat him just now on the back and the stomach and over the heart. There are ugly red marks all over his body. The doctor turns to the young man and shouts at him. In a loud, raging voice he says: May you die! And then he turns to me with a laugh: May they all die! Or maybe the screams are to blame. At the end of the watch, you sometimes hear horrible screamsfrom the other side of thefence of the interrogation section,hair-raising human screams. Literally hair-raising.In Gaza our General Security Services [Shabak] therefore amount to a Secret Police, our internment facilities are cleanly run Gulags. Our soldiers are jailers, our interrogators torturers. In Gaza it's all straightforward and clear. There's no place to hide.

Shavit rated Gaza Beach "one of the best" Israeli prisons for Palestinians.

Goldberg treads gingerly on the subject of Israeli torture of Palestinian detainees.

In accordance with recommendations of an Israeli state commission, he reports, "some of the prisonerswere, in some sort of limited way, subject to 'moderate physical pressure,'in pursuit of certain types of intelligence-ticking-bomb intelligence". Although recording the cruelty here and there of an aberrant Israeli soldier (almost always a Sephardic Jew ) or army unit, and occasionally quoting or paraphrasing a Palestinian detainee as alleging he was tortured, Goldberg prudently eschews use of the "t" word himself. Yet human rights organizations concluded that during the first intifada "Palestinians under interrogation were systematically tortured or ill-treated" (Amnesty International); "some eighty-five percent of persons interrogated by the [Shabak] were interrogated by methods constituting torture" (B'Tselem); and "the number of Palestinians tortured or severely ill-treated while interrogated during the intifada is in the tens of thousands-a number that becomes especially significant when it is remembered that the universe of adult and adolescent male Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is under three-quarters of one million" (Human Rights Watch). One police unit "specialized in interrogating at night with methods including severe beatings with wooden sticks and electric shocks" (Amnesty). To his credit Goldberg notes that "nearly everyone was found guilty in the Gaza military court" and that "the defense lawyers were not allowed to see the evidence collected against their clients." He neglects to mention however that in "many" instances the "primary evidence" used to convict Palestinian defendants was confessions obtained by "torture, or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" (Amnesty).

It appears that Goldberg doesn't consider the standard Israeli interrogation techniques torture. He is not at all averse, however, to deploring the identical Palestinian techniques as torture. Consider what he calls one of the "many creative methods of torture" used by Palestinian interrogators acting at the behest of the Palestinian Authority during the Oslo years: "In shabeh, a prisoner is bound in a kneeling position, his arms pulled back and tied to the ankles. The prisoner is then left hooded for hours. This torture causes hellish pain in the joints, and it stimulates an overwhelming desire to die". Can Goldberg possibly be unaware that shabeh was a routine Israeli form of torture repeatedly condemned in human rights reports? It was "no coincidence that the Palestinians tortured by the Palestinian Authority describe methods that are amazingly similar to the Shabak's interrogation methods," Israeli journalist Gideon Levy observed. "Like several other things, we have bequeathed to them the art of torture, together with the concept of detention without trial."

On a couple of occasions Goldberg mentions that the punishment for even minor infractions at Ketziot was:

24, 48, or even 72 hours in solitary confinement, zinzana, in Arabic. The zinzana was the size of a refrigerator box, into which three, four, five or six prisoners were shoveled. The prisoners were seated on a cold and hard plastic floor, limbs draped over limbs, and they shat in a bucket that was emptied once a day. After a few days in the box, prisoners could no longer stand unaided. (p. 109; cf. p. 114, where he describes four Palestinians locked "in a space fit, at most, for two small dogs")

This Israeli method of torture was also repeatedly condemned in human rights reports. Although admitting that he personally sent prisoners to the zinzana, and although liberal in his outrage at the "cruelty" of the tortures Palestinians inflicted on each other, Golderg rejects (albeit indirectly) the insinuation that he himself might be an accessory to torture, if not a torturer himself. When the guards needed "someone to go solitary" for a minor infraction of prison rules, Goldberg recalls at one point , "twenty Arabs immediately volunteered." He processes this not as a demonstration of their solidarity and courage but rather as vindication that the "Arabs want to be our victim" and "the Geneva Conventionsaid nothing about prisoners who asked to be punished."

A supreme failing of Palestinians during the first intifada, in Goldberg's view, is that they embraced violence and lacked appreciation of nonviolent resistance. He adverts to this theme at multiple junctures, it becoming a mantra of his book. Lamenting that he "had not yet seen" nonviolent resistance among Palestinians, Goldberg typically writes:

The idea did not seem to exist in their moral vocabulary. It was a shame and a waste that the Palestinians had blinded themselves to the ideas of Gandhi and King. If they hadn't, they might have broken the occupation in a week. In my desire to convince Rafiq that violence was no solution, I asked him once to think about what would happen if ten thousand Palestinian men marched on an Israeli checkpoint, as Gandhi once marched on the salt sea. Imagine, I said, that these Palestinians resisted the temptation to throw rocks and Molotov cocktails, but instead simply sat in the road and blocked traffic, keeping settlers from their settlements and soldiers from their bases. It is quite possible that the Israelis would meet them with violence, just as the British met Gandhi's followers with violence. But the Israelis would stop soon enough. I was sure of that. The Israelis, like the British soldiers of India, could not sustain such one-sided violence. Germans could slaughter the defenseless at close quarters, but not Jews-not most people, especially in front of television cameras. The Israelis would be forced to negotiate with you. (p. 140; cf. pp. 106, 160)

It is surely a curiosity that Goldberg witnessed first-hand the intifada yet "had not seen" any nonviolent resistance among the Palestinians.

It seems that he managed to miss the ubiquitous boycotts of Israeli goods, tax and commercial strikes, and strike days brutally suppressed by the Israel Defense Forces; for example, the highly publicized nonviolent tax resistance of the town of Beit Sahour, and the ensuing six-week long Israeli siege and pillage of the town. (A Security Council resolution "strongly deploringthe ransacking of the homes of inhabitants" of Beit Sahour "and the illegal and arbitrary confiscation ofproperty and valuables" was blocked by a lone United States veto.) He also managed to miss the hundreds of grassroots mass organizations ("popular committees") displacing Israeli rule nonviolently that cropped up in every sphere of Palestinian life from health and education to agriculture and the judiciary. "They were extraordinarily resilient; whenever their members were arrested, others rose to fill their place," Israeli military correspondents Zeev Schiff and Ehud Yaari recounted. "The fact is that by the spring of 1988, a sprawling network of popular committees was functioning in one form or another in every city, village, and camp, spreading the web of the uprising's machinery to the farthest corners of the territories." Determined to crush these "seeds of self-government, scattered pockets of independence" on the pretext that they fomented violence, Israel "outlawed the popular committees and arrested hundreds of their members," and systematically wrecked the practical experiments in nonviolent civil disobedience; for example, "the campaign to encourage self-sufficiency by raising chickens, rabbits and vegetables fell apart when the [Israeli] Civil Administration closed the stations run by the agriculture committees."

The administrative detainees held in Ketziot included "Palestinian leaders who openly support the peace talks with Israel and dialogue to promote Palestinian-Israeli understanding" (B'Tselem), while those convicted in military courts fell victim to draconian Israeli military orders that criminalized and made punishable "by up to 10 years' imprisonment every form of political expression in the Occupied Territories, including nonviolent forms of political activity" (Amnesty).

One reason Goldberg didn't see any nonviolent resistance is perhaps that he suffered an optical impairment. "She had joined a group of foreigners, advocates of the Palestinian cause, who stood one day against a line of Israeli bulldozers," he writes of the death of Rachel Corrie during the second intifada. "She came too close to one and she was plowed under" (pp. 300-1). Just as the Twin Towers came too close to the airplanes and got plowed under.

Goldberg is precise on the number of "suspected collaboratorskilled by their brother Palestinians" during the first intifadayet, he is strangely silent on the balance-sheet for fatalities between Israelis and Palestinians, except that, in his telling, Israelis only used "rubber bullets" or "fired live rounds in the air".

Between December 1987 and September 1993, 1124 Palestinians were killed by Israelis as against 75 Israelis killed by Palestinians. In 1988 and again in 1989, for example, "over 260 unarmed Palestinian civilians, including children, were shot dead by Israeli forces, often in circumstances suggesting excessive use of force or deliberate killings" (Amnesty). To judge by these figures, Goldberg should perhaps have also preached to Israelis the virtue of nonviolence. During the intifada "it was illegal to fly th[e] flag," he reports, while "a Palestinian man holding a rifle would be shot and killed". In fact the official Israeli rules of engagement allowed for the killing of a Palestinian for hoisting the national flag or ignoring an order to halt while the unofficial or de facto rules of engagement were yet more lax. The few Israelis indicted in connection with Palestinian deaths were convicted on minor charges and received derisory punishments, whereas Palestinians convicted of throwing a stone were handed sentences of up to five years' imprisonment.

Each year of the intifada thousands of Palestinians were "beaten by Israeli forces" and "many were punitively kicked or struck with clubs or rifle butts," according to human rights organizations. "The victims included people who refused to clear road-blocks or delete graffiti, or who were suspected of having thrown stones. Many suffered severe injuries, particularly fractures" (Amnesty). More than 50,000 Palestinian children required medical attention in the first years of the intifada due to "indiscriminate beating, tear-gassing and shooting" (Save the Children). In his distillation of these atrocities Goldberg simply reports that the daily routine of Israeli soldiers "consisted of chasing rock-throwing children". He recalls having sympathized with the "symbolic violence" of these diminutive stone-throwers until he himself was hit by a rock: "There was nothing symbolic about the pain, or the blood that ran down the back of my neck" -which no doubt justified "chasing" the perpetrators.

Other Israeli measures similarly escaped Goldberg's notice. During the first intifada Israel demolished or sealed nearly nine hundred Palestinian homes. Although Israel was the only country in the world (except for Iraq under Saddam Hussein) that legally sanctioned house demolitions as a form of punishment, and although this practice was widely condemned (even a former Israeli Supreme Court justice called it "inhuman"), it merits not a single mention in Goldberg's book. He does, however, manage to devote several dramatic pages to his "shock" at the alleged rape of a Palestinian teenager in Ketziot, which "sent me back to a persistent question: If this is what they do to their own people" (pp. 164-6). Israel's indiscriminate killing, torture and beating of Palestinians and the demolition of their homes posed no such question in his mind, for the understandable reason that it never happened.

It is an abiding conceit of Goldberg's book that, locked in mutual fear and suffering comparable deprivation, Israelis and Palestinians were equally prisoners of Ketziot, and accordingly the occupation: "we were both trapped in the same desert," "we were level with the Arabs in so many things-our food came off the same trucks, our tents were all antediluvian, we all coughed up the same desert dust," "we slept on the same kind of beds as the prisoners," "we all ate the same fruit, guards and prisoners alike". He even manages to fish out a former prisoner who is said to have proclaimed "You were our prisoners"; emphasis in original). So convinced was he of the mutuality of victimhood that it comes as a revelation to Goldberg when he is reminded that, unlike the prisoners, the guards "can go home on leave and then come back again". It can only be imagined his consternation were Goldberg capable of hearing and seeing the "hair-raising human screams," the "severe beatings with wooden sticks and electric shocks," the piles of human corpses, the countless homes demolished.

A most peculiar juxtaposition of Goldberg's book is his singing the praises of gun Zionism to Jews on one page while singing the praises of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Palestinians on another. Like many an American Jew, Goldberg became enamored of Israel on account of its martial prowess. Recalling his first trip to the Holy Land, Goldberg emphasizes that what resonated for him most was Jews with guns, and not just .22s* but Uzis and M-16s and bigger guns than these, grenade-spitting guns, great barking machine guns. On a bus tour across the Galilee, we drove in the wake of a tank transport, a mammoth truck carrying a dead Jewish tank. A Jewish tank! And Jewish armored personnel carriers! It was a miracle. Enough of thinking and suffering. Let's do some shooting.

His new-found hero is Ari Ben Canaan of Leon Uris's Exodus, a "Hebrew (not, somehow, Jewish) warrior, brave and cold-eyed, who defended Jewish honor." The "lesson of the Shoah," Goldberg comes to realize, is that "it is easy to kill a unilaterally disarmed Jew but much harder to kill one who is pointing a gun at your face," while during target practice at IDF boot camp he relishes the prospect of avenging the anti-Semites who had ravaged the Jewish people and humiliated him in his youth. None of these ruminations, however, prevents Goldberg from expressing revulsion at the teachings of Muslim fanatics, who "build self-esteem" through bloody vengeance and for whom the virtue of Islam was its being a "warrior religion" that rejected the Christian value of "passive surrender" because "Muhammad would never have allowed himself to be humiliated". It is hard to make out the difference between this warrior religion and the one Goldberg worshipped after discovering Israel. Although intermittently registering some second thoughts about his initial fascination with violence, Goldberg is far from a convert to passive resistance. When a pacifist interlocutor of his questions the utility of his rifle, Goldberg's not-very-Gandhian repartee is, "[I]t solves problems.It protects people from violence", and while ultimately disavowing force for its own sake, he reports being "still partial to fighting Jews".

It is likewise cause for perplexity that Goldberg never preaches to Israelis (and their American "supporters") the wonders of pacifism. Surely he didn't forego the occasion for a lack of need. The IDF has occupied a "unique position" in Israeli society, writes Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld, "comparable, if at all, only to the status the armed forces held in Germany from 1871 until 1945." Israel's founders set as their goal "creating a race of warrior-settlers"; in the state that emerged, the "greatest compliment anyone could receive was that he was a 'fighter'" and the "highest praise one could bestow on anything was to say that it was kmo mivsta tsvai (like a military operation)," while after the June 1967 war Israel "had become one huge military laboratory." This does not sound like King's "beloved community." In this connection it merits noticing an Israeli army "joke" apparently so hilarious that Goldberg couldn't resist including it in his book:

Two soldiers, infantry-men in the Golani Brigade, were on patrol in Hebron, getting ready to enforce the six p.m. curfew. The streets were mostly empty already, but one of the soldiers saw an old Arab man hobbling down the lane in the distance. The soldier dropped to one knee, took aim, and fired, taking off the old man's head. The other soldier watched this in shock. "What are you doing?" he cried. "It's not six yet."

"I know," said the first soldier. "But I knew where that guy lived. He never would have made it home in time."

A real knee-slapper.

Consider, finally, the tenets of Israeli security doctrine. According to former head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies Zeev Maoz, the anchor of this doctrine is periodic resort to disproportionate firepower. Because key policymakers believe that "Arabs understand only a language of force," he explains, Israel (in their view) "must demonstrate every so often that it is strong and able and willing to use force." On the other hand, Maoz observes, "one almost never hears in Israeli strategic circles that perhaps the reliance on military force as the principal (or even the only) instrument of policy is fundamentally misconceived." Echoing van Creveld, Maoz points to the IDF as the principal instrument of national integration and social cohesion, the "matrix of national identity." In order to preserve the army's centrality in Israeli society, as well as to mobilize the population and divert its attention from internal conflicts, Israeli leaders have fostered a "siege mentality," promoted "militarism," and preferred war to peace. Indeed, Maoz reports that they have utilized murderous reprisal raids for combat training and nurturing esprit de corps, and the theater of war and targeted assassinations for testing high-tech weaponry. "Israel's decision makers tended to overwhelmingly and systematically rely on the use of force," he concludes,
as a favorite solution to both military and political challenges. This culture of trigger happiness characterized all of Israel's governments, regardless of period and of the person or party in power.

But it is the undoing of Palestinians, according to Goldberg, that that they "see violence as a panacea" and have "let violence into every corner of their lives". If they would only emulate Israel.

Were Palestinians to practice nonviolence, Goldberg contends, Israel would quickly enough be forced to negotiate. This is because, like Britons but unlike Germans, Israelis "could not sustain such one-sided violence, especially in front of television cameras." The basis of Goldberg's faith, however, is unclear. The first intifada was a "mass civil uprising," Schiff and Yaari recalled, "not a war fought with tanks, planes, and artillery or a border skirmish with armed men, but a challenge posed without weapons, a contest against bottles, stones, and firebombs." One of Israel's early acts of retaliation was to deport the Palestinian-American pacifist Mubarak Awad of the Center for the Study for Non-violence. Fully seventeen months into this popular civil resistance "without weapons," and notwithstanding the massive sustained force Israel had already brought to bear to break it, more than half of all Israelis supported the deployment of still "stronger measures" by the IDF while "an overwhelming 72 percentsaw no contradiction between the army's handling of the uprising and 'the nation's democratic values.'" It is of course possible that if Palestinians had found the inner wherewithal to stay the course yet longer in the face of the IDF's brutality, fissures would have opened up in Israeli society, just as, after years of acquiescence in anti-Jewish measures, Germans recoiled at the raw violence unleashed by the Nazis on Kristallnacht due to an alloy of revulsion and embarrassment. Thus, Israel's liberal, cosmopolitan milieus such as the High Court of Justice have occasionally proven to be sensitive to international opinion, the Court reversing its prior authorization of torture, for instance, after an outpouring of worldwide condemnation.

For the nonviolent civil disobedience Goldberg counsels to succeed, its practice and the violence being used to crush it must be made widely known. It is a supreme irony lost on Goldberg that it is his manner of ignoring Palestinian civil disobedience and airbrushing Israeli violence that has doomed this tactic to failure.

* * *

Goldberg's account of the rise of Hamas and the second intifada (2000-2006) conforms to the pattern already set. He repeatedly condemns Hamas, and concomitantly Palestinian society, for being "ravaged by a cult of death". The key manifestation of this death cult has been, of course, the suicide bombers. Although Goldberg makes passing reference to Palestinians killed during the second intifada, the dramatic core of his narrative is these suicide bombings, the deranged perpetrators and the decimated victims. Goldberg surely has title to his outrage at the "bestial manifestations" of Hamas's ideology. But shouldn't he have mentioned somewhere that "Israel's disproportionate response to what had started as a popular uprising with young unarmed men confronting Israeli soldiers armed with lethal weapons fuelled the intifada beyond control and turned it into an all-out war" (former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami); that the first Hamas suicide bombing during the second intifada didn't occur until five months into Israel's relentless bloodletting (Israeli forces fired one million rounds of ammunition just during the first few days, while the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed during the first weeks was 20:1); and that four times as many Palestinians as Israelis, overwhelmingly civilians on both sides, were killed during the second intifada (4046 as compared to 1017 persons)? In 2006 Israel restored its, as it were, cult of life ratio of killing 30 Palestinians for each Israeli killed (660 as compared to 23 persons).

Goldberg is appalled by a Hamas leader's "calm unperturbed by the thought of bleeding" Israeli children. He might also have mentioned-but doesn't-the widely reported counsel of Major General (subsequently Chief of Staff) Dan Halutz to the Israeli pilots who dropped a one-ton bomb on a densely populated civilian neighborhood killing nine Palestinian children: "Guys, sleep well tonight. By the way, I sleep well at night, too." Goldberg is shocked at any imputation of similarity between the deaths of Palestinian and Israeli children: "For God's sake, we don't try to kill children". Fully 811 Palestinian children were killed during the second intifada, which was more than the total number of Israeli civilians killed (711, of whom 109 were children); in 2006, 141 Palestinian children were killed as compared to 17 Israeli civilians of whom one was a child. For the want of trying to kill Palestinian children it would seem that Israelis were awfully good at it. In fact unarmed Palestinian demonstrators killed by Israeli soldiers were "on many occasionsdeliberately targeted" (Amnesty), while in other cases these unarmed demonstrators, a large proportion of whom were children, fell victim to reckless-i.e., "indiscriminate," "excessive," "disproportionate"-use of force. It further merits notice that these latter deaths did not fundamentally differ from intentional killings. "Indiscriminate attacks differ from direct attacks against civilians," Israel's leading authority on international law, Yoram Dinstein, observes
in that "the attacker is not actually trying to harm the civilian population": the injury to the civilians is merely a matter of "no concern to the attacker." From the standpoint of LOIAC [Law of International Armed Conflict], there is no genuine difference between a premeditated attack against civilians (or civilian objects) and a reckless disregard of the principle of distinction: they are equally forbidden.

Goldberg might also have mentioned-but doesn't-the notorious case of the Israeli captain who in October 2004 fired two bullets at point blank range into the head of a 13-year-old Palestinian schoolgirl while she was lying on the ground already injured, and then, after starting to walk away, turned back to riddle her body with at least 20 more bullets, including seven to her head. The officer was subsequently acquitted of all charges, received hefty monetary compensation from the State and a promotion in his rank-clearly because, for God's sake, he did not try to kill her.

After reporting the horrific Hamas suicide bombing at Netanya in March 2002, Goldberg ridicules the "credulous members of the American Colony press corps" who, during Operation Defensive Shield that followed the bombing, "accused the [Israeli] army of committing a massacre" in Jenin: "This was the opposite of the truth: The army in Jenin killed the makers of massacres". He might have mentioned-but doesn't-that Israel did in fact commit "war crimes" (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty) during its incursion, including the flattening of large swaths of the refugee camp after the fighting was already over, leaving 4,000 Palestinians homeless. One of the "makers of massacres" killed by Israeli forces was "Kamal Zgheir, a fifty-seven-year-old wheelchair-bound man who was shot and run over by a tank on a major road outside the camp on April 10, even though he had a white flag attached to his wheelchair" (Human Rights Watch)-no doubt because he was en route to a suicide bombing.

Goldberg heaps contempt on Palestinian political leaders who, he alleges, used civilians, including their own children and grandchildren, as human shields to deter Israeli attacks during the second intifada. Thus he ingeniously manages to invert Israel's policy of targeted assassinations, which constitute a "war crime" (Public Committee Against Torture in Israel), into instances of Palestinian pusillanimity. These Palestinian leaders were "unconstrained by Western notions of chivalric behavior," he continues, because it was "assumed, correctly, that Israel would respect" them. Unsurprisingly Goldberg doesn't mention that "scores of men, women and children bystanders have been killed and hundreds have been injured in the course of assassinations or attempted assassinations of Palestinians by the Israeli army.Claims that efforts are made not to harm bystanders are inconsistent with the practice of carrying out attacks on busy roads and densely populated areas" (Amnesty). One third of the 500 Palestinians killed in the course of targeted assassinations during the second intifada were civilian bystanders. What's more, Goldberg doesn't mention Israel's "systematically coercing Palestinian civilians" as human shields (Human Rights Watch), for example, chivalrously ordering Palestinian civilians to "walk in front of soldiers to shield them from gunfire, while the soldiers hold a gun behind their backs and sometimes fire over their shoulders" (B'Tselem).

The difference between Palestinian and Israeli violence during the second intifada, Goldberg explains, "is the difference between action and reaction." Indeed, he expresses indignation when a fellow journalist implies to him that a Hamas suicide bombing might be retaliatory. According to Maoz, however, Israel methodically used targeted assassinations during the second intifada to provoke Palestinian retaliation, thereby justifying massive resort to force against them:
On four separate occasions Israel violated an implicit cease-fire that the Palestinians imposed upon themselves by assassinations that caused escalation.In each of these cases, the Palestinian response was a wave of suicide bombings that resulted in Israeli encirclement of the major population centers, entry into the Palestinian cities and refugee camps, mass arrests, numerous house demolitions, and long curfews of the Palestinian population.

In addition to condemning the Palestinian death cult, Goldberg expresses extreme irritation at the Palestinians' sensitivity to their personal dignity: "Ah, yes, humiliation: the Arabs, and their insufferable egos, as fragmented as old bones"; "The smart officers [in Ketziot] understood the importance of providing their prisoners, who came to humiliation so easily, with the simulacrum of dignity". Yet, the prisoners in Ketziot, although having been degraded and tortured (including by Goldberg), although their relatives had been maimed and murdered, although their homes had been demolished and their lives wrecked-nonetheless these same prisoners, according to Goldberg, received him warmly during the Oslo years when he returned to the Occupied Territories, swapping stories with him about Ketziot "like old bunkmates from summer" and saying "all the things about peace and compromise that I hoped to hear". "We don't care what people did in the past," a Palestinian leader tells him. "We're not going back to the past". So smug is Goldberg in his disdain of Palestinians clinging to their dignity, when presumably they should have acquiesced in their degradation, that he can't see that perhaps he-Israelis, Jews-might have something to learn from them about forgiveness notwithstanding the multitudinous horrors and humiliations Israelis have inflicted.

* * *

To make sense of his personal narrative Goldberg situates it in a broader context. The core of his analysis is that the Israel-Palestine conflict springs from anti-Semitism: the Islamic world cannot abide a thriving Jewish state in its midst. "It was terribly hard for Muslims to accept," he explains,

that their inferiors-the Jews-now ruled Palestine. After the defeat at Khaybar, the Jews put up no resistance to the expansion of Islam. They accepted their second-class status. They were protected in some measure by their passivity....But then came Zionism, a movement that demanded for Jews equal rights as a nation. This made no sense in the worldview of many Arab Muslims, who, if secretly insecure about their primacy in the world, were at least sure that they were better than the Jews. The cognitive dissonance was too great. Here was Rafiq, one of God's chosen people, possessor of His final truth, the foe of His betrayers, those contemptible Jews, and yet reality presented him undeniable truths: a vital, powerful Israel, Palestine in a state of abjection, and a broken-down Muslim world, afflicted by a spectrum of troubles.

In this framework the "institutional focus" of Hamas becomes "the murder of Jews," and its members would want to kill Goldberg "merely because I was Jewish". To buttress his case Goldberg has scoured the hadith (commentaries on Mohammed's life) for anti-Semitic invective, getting so carried away in his monomania that he unwittingly recycles the same, frequently quoted, anti-Semitic hadith on different pages of book (pp. 159, 238, 245).

It is instructive to juxtapose Goldberg's contextualization against that of serious historians of the conflict. Whereas Goldberg subtitles his book A Muslim & A Jew Across The Middle East Divide, Israeli historian Benny Morris puts the accent in the subtitle of his standard study Righteous Victims not on the religious but rather the political dimension, A History Of The Zionist-Arab Conflict. Goldberg maintains that Zionists "demanded for Jews equal rights as a nation," and this aspiration evoked violent hostility. Morris contends, however, that "the heart of Zionism andthe root of the Zionist-Arab conflict" was that "from the start, the Zionists wished to make the area of Palestine a Jewish state" but "unfortunately" Palestine contained an overwhelmingly Arab population. To resolve this dilemma the Zionist movement had to expel the indigenous population, which perforce triggered Arab opposition to it:

[T]ransfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism-because it sought to transform a land which was "Arab" into a "Jewish" state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population; and because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs which, in turn, persuaded the Yishuv's leaders that a hostile Arab majority or large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure.

"The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession," Morris concludes, "was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism." In his authoritative study of Palestinian nationalism, the Israeli historian Yehoshua Porath similarly concludes that the "major factor nourishing" Arab anti-Semitism "was not hatred for the Jews as such but opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine." He goes on to argue that, if Arab opposition to Zionism took on a religious coloration, it was because the Jewish community in Palestine after massive Zionist immigration became indistinguishable from Zionism, and "a large measure of sophistication was required to make the older distinction" between Jews and Zionists, and "it was unreasonable to hope that the wider Arab populationwould maintain this distinction." In this regard it might be noted that Goldberg indicts Hamas for having "transformed the dispute between Arabs and Israelis into one between Muslims and Jews," because "there was no category called 'Israel' in [their] bifurcated understanding of the world". But neither is there a category called "Israel" apart from Jews in Zionist ideology and practice, Israel being both legally defined and upheld by Zionist proponents as the State of the Jewish People. If Hamas conflates Jews with Israel, it might be because Israel and its supporters themselves insist on this conflation.

Although grounding the Israel-Palestine conflict in Muslim loathing (and envy) of Jews is of dubious heuristic value, and although such a framework would seem to resemble the "idiosyncratic, narcissistic history" that he accuses Palestinians of peddling, it does, for Goldberg, serve the useful purpose of reversing perpetrator and victim and thereby exonerating Israel of culpability for the ensuing bloodshed. Insofar as the only scholarly authority Goldberg invokes in his book is Bernard Lewis, it is perhaps unsurprising that Goldberg's explanation of the conflict echoes his. Lewis has maintained that Arab anti-Semitism derives principally from its "feeling of humiliation" after having suffered successive military defeats at the hands of Israel. To provide "solace to wounded feelings," Arabs have imputed a preternatural evil to Jews. Arab animosity toward Jews, Lewis emphatically concludes, "has little or no bearing on the rights and wrongs of the Palestine conflict." This is the upshot of Goldberg's account as well: if Palestinians resort to violence against Israel, it is not due to Israeli actions but to an irrational hatred of Jews; and if the conflict is finally to be settled, it is not Israelis who must cease the occupation but Palestinians who must cease to be anti-Semitic. Thus it is not the brutalities of the Israeli occupation, Goldberg asserts, that drives Palestinians to commit suicide bombings, but rather it is because these Palestinians are "followers of Moloch, the pagan god, who, the Bible tells us, demanded the lives of Jerusalem's children" (and, of course, because they fantasize about "the seventy-two virgins"), just as it is solely for the "crime of living in his homeland" that an Israeli is "hunted by murderers". And it is not Israel's refusal fully to withdraw from the Occupied Territories that is the main obstacle to peace, according to Goldberg, but Palestinians' inability fully to accept "the presence of Jews in their midst," and to make "concessions to a Jew, much less a Jewish state, [which] were an abomination" to them.

Once having established that the root and branch of the conflict is Arab anti-Semitism, it stands to reason for Goldberg that all criticism of Israel must also spring from anti-Semitism. For those doubting such an inference he adduces this evidence from Red Cross visits to Ketziot to prove that it "never much liked the Jews": "I noticed a pattern in the selection of reading material. The ICRC supplied many of Orwell's works, along with a biography of Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and The Flies, by Sartre". On its most sinister interpretation this "pattern" might suggest that the Red Cross was misguidedly fomenting insurrection, but how does it demonstrate Jew-hatred? Goldberg acknowledges the absurdity of Israel banning Hamlet in the prison because in his famous soliloquy the Prince of Denmark contemplates to "take arms against a sea of troubles", yet he sees no absurdity in alleging that the Red Cross is anti-Semitic because of the "implicit endorsement of violent resistance" in Sartre's play. On Goldberg's reckoning, his mocking of Israel's censorship makes him an anti-Semite. To prove the hypocrisy of a former chairwoman of the American board of Amnesty International Goldberg notes that "she would often complain about Israel's cavalier treatment of Palestinian universities on the West Bank, for instance, without noting that there were no universities on the West Bank at all before the arrival of the Israelis," while earlier he alleges that "Israelis built the first universities in Gaza and the West Bank. Leaving aside that the mandate of Amnesty bears strictly on current human rights abuses, in fact Palestinian universities in the Occupied Territories were built not by Israel but with mostly Arab monies. Although Israel has repeatedly shut them down for long stretches, it perhaps deserves plaudits for not having demolished them, yet.

It is only by confronting the real grievances of Palestinians (and Arabs) borne of their historical collision with Zionism-grievances the existence of which Goldberg seeks to deny and discredit-that one can ever hope to reduce the conflict to manageable proportions and concomitantly attenuate the religious overtones it has taken on. "For the Palestinians, the existence of Israel is bound to remain a trauma for as far as one can think ahead," the Zionist historian Walter Laqueur sensibly observes,

the loss of part of their homeland being the greatest injustice which can be put right only by violence. It is only natural that they will want this state to cease to exist. Once they have a state of their own, however, problems of daily life will loom large and much of the energy will have to be invested in making this state work. The great urge to reconquer what was lost will not disappear, but it will not be pursued as in the days when this was the only issue. The same is true in particular with regard to the other Arab and Muslim countries and the Muslim communities in Europe.Once the Palestinians have a viable stateand once Israel has taken other steps to accommodate Muslim interests-such as the internationalization of the holy places in Jerusalem-there is a reasonable chance that Arab anti-Semitism will decrease even though it will not disappear.

Although professing to deplore Arab anti-Semitism, by propounding an apologia of pristine Zionist innocence and murderous Muslim ressentiment, Goldberg in fact diminishes the "reasonable chance" of reducing the conflict's derivative anti-Semitic component.

Goldberg's rendering of the "peace process" is cut from the same cloth as his analysis of the conflict's root cause. The Palestinian leadership and people bear, in his view, primary responsibility for the failure to achieve peace. If Goldberg cleaves closely to Bernard Lewis in his analysis of the conflict's origins, his (unacknowledged) mentor in analyzing the peace process is Dennis Ross, whom he echoes on points both large and small.

The story, as Goldberg (and Ross before him) tells it, goes like this. During the first intifada the PLO finally took the decision "to accept Israel's existence," while "Israel was educated by [Palestinians'] stones" and "six years of intifada had convinced Israelis of the futility of occupation." This process of mutual accommodation culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accord when Palestinians "adopted, for the first time in their national life, a realistic goal [of] the establishment of a state next to Israel rather than in place of Israel," and Rabin was "trying to lead his people to the Promised Land, and the Palestinians as well. He died giving birth to an independent Palestine." The disastrous second climax in the peace process came at Camp David in 2000 when "the misanthrope Yasser Arafat with a superficial largeness of spirit" and "the gallant general Ehud Barak, who put peace at the forefront of his capacious mind" met to negotiate a final settlement. Barak made Arafat the famous generous offer of "90 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of Gaza," was even "willing to sacrifice a piece of our holiest city in order to gain peace," whereas "Arafat left Camp David without even making Barak a counteroffer."

After the Camp David summit collapsed, Goldberg continues, Palestinians acting at Arafat's behest launched the second intifada "to undo the outcome of the 1948 war, the war that returned my people home." On the Israeli side in stark contrast even Ariel Sharon had "changed knows that sacrifices have to be made...knows that compromises have to be made." Indeed, Goldberg relates the touching story of an Israeli settler whose son was murdered by Palestinians, yet "Should the day come when the Muslims seem ready for peace, he said, he would be willing to hand over Tekoa to his neighbors." Herewith, according to Goldberg, lies the crux of the problem: in the "House of Islam" nowhere were to be found "right-hearted people" such as this beautiful Israeli settler "who could see the tears of Jews as well as the tears of Muslims" while "the irreducible truth remained" that no Israeli offer would be "enough to satiate the Palestinians". In the book's final pages a glimmer of hope is nonetheless espied that his Palestinian interlocutor Rafiq might yet scale Goldberg's-Israel's-peaks of mutual tolerance, respect and generosity.

It should first be noted that Goldberg is not altogether consistent in his presentation. He states that the PLO "accepted Israel's existence" in 1988 but then avers that it "for the first time" recognized Israel in 1993. Similarly he states that "six years of intifada could have been avoided-Ketziot need never have been built-if Israel had conceded to the Palestinians in 1987 what it conceded to them in 1993" , which seems to suggest that Palestinians were ready to live in peace with Israel already before the first intifada. These inconsistencies point to bigger problems in Goldberg's account of the peace process.

An international consensus began crystallizing in the mid 1970s to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict. Based on U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) and subsequent U.N. resolutions affirming a Palestinian right to self-determination, the broad international consensus called for Arab recognition of Israel within its pre-June 1967 borders and the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Although Israel (backed by the U.S.) persistently opposed this two-state settlement, the PLO signaled support for it in multiple venues long before the first intifada (let alone the 1993 Oslo Accord). Indeed, it was because the PLO sought "the establishment of a state next to Israel rather than in place of Israel" already in the early 1980s that Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. "Destroying the PLO as a political force capable of claiming a Palestinian state on the West Bank," Israeli strategic analyst Avner Yaniv concludes, was "the raison d'être of the entire operation."

Although it is true that "Israel was educated by [Palestinians'] stones" during the first intifada, the lesson it learnt wasn't the "futility of occupation" but rather the futility of maintaining the occupation on its own. The purpose of the negotiations culminating in the Oslo Accord, according to Ben-Ami, was to recruit the PLO as "Israel's collaborator in the task of stifling the intifada and cutting short what was clearly an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence." It was the belief of Israeli leaders that the PLO's desperate straits after the 1991 Gulf War would render Arafat amenable to a settlement that sacrificed "vital Palestinian aspirations such as the right of self-determination" and, concomitantly, allowed Israel to secure "strategic portions of, and key settlement areas in, the West Bank." Whereas Goldberg solemnly proclaims that Rabin "died giving birth to an independent Palestine," Ben-Ami concludes quite the contrary that "Rabin was less of a peace architect than some commentators believed him to be, neither Rabin nor, especially, Peres wanted the autonomy to usher in a Palestinian state," and Maoz similarly reports that Rabin's "vision of the final status settlement with the Palestinians" was "very narrow, consisting ofthe establishment of a Palestinian entity that was less than a state."

In his praise of Barak's offer to Palestinians of a large percentage of the Occupied Territories and even a "piece" of Jerusalem, Goldberg neglects to mention that, by right and by consensus, Palestinians were entitled to the whole of the Occupied Territories, including East Jerusalem. The generous Israeli offer was actually a land grab which would also have fragmented the West Bank. In fact judged against the standard of international law, all the concessions at Camp David-on borders, settlements, Jerusalem and refugees-came from the Palestinian side. The impasse at Camp David was due not to Palestinian but Israeli recalcitrance. "If I were a Palestinian," Ben-Ami, one of Israel's chief negotiators at Camp David, later observed, "I would have rejected Camp David as well," while Maoz concludes that the "substantial concessions" Israel demanded of Palestinians at Camp David "were not acceptable and could not be acceptable." Goldberg also neglects to mention that negotiations between Israel and the PLO resumed after the collapse of the Camp David summit but, although a final settlement was apparently within reach, the "gallant" Barak abruptly terminated them.

It is true that after taking office in 2002 Ariel Sharon came to support a Palestinian state, but Goldberg neglects to mention what sort of state Sharon had in mind. The "choice" Sharon offered Palestinians, according to The Economist, was between a "Swiss-cheese state, comprising most of the West Bank but riddled with settlements," and Israel "pulling out from up to 40% or 50% of the West Bank's territory unilaterally while keeping most of its settlements." Goldberg postulates that the fundamental obstacle to peace has been the Palestinian people's failure to reach the epiphany of Sharon and Israeli settlers, that mutual coexistence on the basis of the two-state settlement is preferable to interminable war. However, according to Meron Benvenisti, a leading Israeli authority on the Occupied Territories, "most Palestinians" support a two-state settlement on the June 1967 borders "as long as [the Palestinian state] enjoys all the trappings of sovereignty and is free of settlers," whereas "the majority of Israelis who ostensibly support a Palestinian state are vehemently opposed" to such a Palestinian state but instead "support an entity that will have partial control over about half the West Bank, with no control over the border crossings, immigration policies, water resources, coastal waters, and airspace."

The "irreducible truth" of the peace process would seem to be that no amount not of Israeli concessions but of Israeli crumbs will satiate Palestinians.

NORMAN FINKELSTEIN's most recent book is Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California Press).

Citations for this essay can be found on his website: www.NormanFinkelstein.com.

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Pre-Packaged Opinions on Israel and Palestine

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YEAR 57: A JOINT SITUATION REPORT

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Newyorker. The radicalisation of Israel's Military.

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Newyorker. The radicalisation of Israel's Military.

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In July, Israel detained ten soldiers who were suspected of raping a Palestinian man at a detention center in southern Israel. This followed reports in the international press-including from the New York Times and CNN-of widespread physical abuse at the same detention center, Sde Teiman. The soldiers detained at Sde Teiman were brought for interrogation at another military base; Israeli protesters stormed both that base and Sde Teiman to demand that the soldiers be released. (The Israel Defense Forces has denied the claim of widespread abuse and the soldiers have denied the rape allegation.) The protesters have been supported by right-wing cabinet ministers such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who referred to the accused soldiers as "our best heroes." Yoav Gallant, the defense minister, has called for an investigation into whether Ben-Gvir, who is the national-security minister, purposely delayed the police from responding to the riots; eventually, military battalions were mobilized to help protect the base where the soldiers were being interrogated.

To talk about what occurred and what it means for Israel's future, I recently spoke by phone with Yehuda Shaul, the co-founder of Ofek: The Israeli Center for Public Affairs, an independent think tank based in Jerusalem. He is also one of the co-founders of Breaking the Silence, an organization made up of former Israeli soldiers dedicated to exposing what they see as the realities of Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how the Israeli military has changed over time, whether Israel proper is at risk of becoming more like the West Bank, and what Benjamin Netanyahu really thinks of challenges to the state's authority.
How does the storming of these bases fit into the history of right-wing attempts to undermine the rule of law in Israel?
First and foremost, we need to keep in mind that we have had settler violence in the West Bank for many years, and it has been rising for years without enforcement, or close to no enforcement. So the settler community has been living for decades in a reality where they can break laws. I'll even take one step back and say the entire settlement project is a project that is drowning in criminality. This can mean building settlements against the rules, the construction of housing on private land, et cetera. It can also mean settlers beating up farmers or shepherds, going into communities and attacking them either to displace Palestinians or to create such a headache for the state that the message is "It's not worth it for you to actually enforce the law."

We have had decades of this kind of behavior in the West Bank, and unchecked violence where soldiers were given orders to stand idly by. When I was a soldier in the West Bank during the second intifada, our orders were not to enforce law on the settlers. Our job was not to protect the Palestinians. Our job was to protect the settlers.

Over the years, every once in a while you would see a video of settlers attacking Palestinians with soldiers not intervening. In the past four or five years, there was a transition. We moved from soldiers standing idly by while Palestinians were being attacked to soldiers sometimes even joining the attacks. Sometimes it was soldiers who were settlers, who were back at home in the settlement or the outpost where they live, or where their friends live, and the guys are organizing to go down and attack Palestinians, so they take their gun or come half in uniform and join the attack. Sometimes it's because specific military units were made up largely of extremist, nationalist, religious guys that the U.S. was even contemplating restricting military assistance to. But after October 7th things got even worse. Now the settlers are the soldiers and the soldiers are the settlers. [ A spokesperson for the I.D.F. told The New Yorker that "soldiers who encounter violent crimes committed by Israeli civilians against Palestinians are required to stop the incident and, when necessary, stall or detain the suspects until the police arrive at the scene." In cases where soldiers do not obey these instructions, the spokesperson added, "the incidents are thoroughly examined and actions are taken accordingly."]
So you're saying that the biggest change is in the makeup of who the soldiers are?
It's structural to the way the I.D.F. is designed. In a full-scale war, the better equipped, better trained units go to the front line. In our case, now, that's Lebanon and Gaza. So who stays in the West Bank? Reservists. But it's not only normal reserve units. It's also what are called regional-defense units. The West Bank is divided into several regional brigades. Each of them has regional-defense battalions, which are reservist units made of local settlers. So settlers who live in the area of Hebron, for example-many of them are mobilized in the area of Hebron.

And remember, as a soldier, the settlers are on our side, and Palestinians are the enemy, so we're not going to protect the enemy. Because the settlers host us for a Friday-night schnitzel, because they speak our language, because they have political power. But it's also because they are completely integrated into the system. On Friday night, they host us for schnitzel. On Sunday morning, or on Monday morning, their security officers sit in the briefings at the headquarters and get updates on what's happening. On Tuesday, they go and use our shooting range to stay in good shape, whatever. And on Thursday, we're going to arrest them?

Lawlessness and violence was allowed because the relationship between the military and the settlers on the ground became so symbiotic. It is now so symbiotic that it's not clear any more where the military starts and ends, and where the civilians start and end.
Can I stop you for a second?
Well, two more things are happening. One is the sociological change in the Army. What we see is a significant shift within the Army-a change from the old-school, secular, Labor Party-oriented people to nationalist religious people, and especially to the ultra-Orthodox nationalists. People like Smotrich.

In 1990, only two and a half per cent of graduate officer cadets in the infantry were nationalist religious. In 2015, it was nearly forty per cent. That's about three times their size in society. So you have this change, this sociological change, of middle-, high-class, secular, better educated military people going into cybersecurity and signal intelligence, more into positions that can advance their status in the economy post-military service, while the combat rank and file is being filled more with the ideologues, the nationalist-religious guys, as well as blue-collar people. In the past decade, there has been a big fight in the I.D.F. about who the real authority is. Is it the rabbi or the commander?

In 2016, two Palestinian attackers stabbed a soldier, wounding him. The Palestinians were shot. One of them was killed-the other one was neutralized, laying on the ground. Minutes later, a military medic called Elor Azaria arrived and he shot one bullet into the head of the Palestinian-basically executed him. And it was all filmed by a Palestinian activist who was living nearby. Once this came out, there was outrage. Ultimately, Azaria was indicted, but there was outrage about the fact that he was indicted. And it got to a place where even Netanyahu, who was the Prime Minister, called the shooter's parents to show support. Ultimately, Moshe Ya'alon, who was the minister of defense at the time-a right-winger and a former chief of staff of the I.D.F.-had to resign, among other reasons, because he supported the indictment. Azaria was sentenced to eighteen months for basically an execution that was filmed.

That was the moment where the rank and file within the Army, plus the political base of the Likud Party and the Israeli right, essentially rebelled against the old guard who want to say that the I.D.F. is a professional army with discipline, who want to tell a story to the world of adherence to international law, checking ourselves, investigation, accountability. Now it became, "In our Army, we have different ethics than you, and we have a different idea of rule of law than you have. And it's unacceptable that a soldier will be indicted for this." For me, that's the threshold where you understand that, at least at the level of the rank and file, the ideas had changed.

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Isaac Chotiner interviews Yehuda Shaul about how the Israeli response to alleged abuse of Palestinian detainees reveals a wider ideological war within the I.D.F.

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The skies over Gaza are abuzz with drones. Some are Israeli, some are American, and some are flying bombs made by Hamas

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The skies over Gaza are abuzz with drones. Some are Israeli, some are American, and some are flying bombs made by Hamas

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When Hamas launched its deadly attack on Israel on October 7, the militant group came armed with surprises.

Despite intense surveillance of Gaza, Hamas was able to plan its elaborate assault in secret, hacking through Israel's high-tech "smart fence" with bulldozers and bolt-cutters.

But one of the more shocking elements to its carefully-honed strike was the militant group's fleet of drones.

Many of them were commercial off-the-shelf drones, crudely rigged-up to carry explosives.

Hamas appears to have used them to take out communications towers while Israel's defence shield, the Iron Dome, was distracted by a hail of rockets from Gaza.

Nearly a month after the October 7 attack, the Israeli military has pushed deep into Gaza, bombarding the coastal enclave with air strikes, which have left about 9,500 Palestinians dead, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Drones have been integral to modern warfare for years now, but unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing a unique role in the Israel-Gaza war.

Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, Hamas militants have adopted a notorious strategy from the war in Ukraine to their advantage.

The skies over Gaza are abuzz with drones, but Israel also may use them to map out the tunnels that twist and turn below the coastal enclave.

Hamas uses hobby drones for deadly strikes

In recent days, Hamas has begun uploading propaganda videos to social media that appear to show the militant group dropping bombs on IDF soldiers from above.

In one video uploaded to X, formerly known as Twitter, a black bomb with an orange tail is tossed on a cluster of IDF soldiers in the Gazan neighbourhood of Beit Hanoun.

The ABC has reviewed the videos, but due to their graphic nature, has decided not to share them.

The footage cannot be independently verified, but it suggests that Hamas is borrowing from Russia's playbook in Ukraine.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, it has made up for shortfalls in its military arsenal by purchasing relatively inexpensive commercial drones and repurposing them as DIY bombs.

Ukraine quickly copied the strategy, turning Chinese-made DJI quadcopters, which are designed for photographers and hobbyists, into weapons of war.

"Drones have been called 'the poor man's air force,' since they provide a cheap way of gathering information and attacking from the air with relative precision, a capability that was formerly the preserve of advanced states," said Liran Antebi, a drone technology expert at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv.

"Before the appearance of these devices, armies ... needed access to UAVs such as the American Predator, which costs about $20 million, while the use of the Chinese DJI carrying explosives costs only a few hundred dollars."

Hamas also claims to have access to so-called kamikaze drones, which are capable of loitering in the air for long periods of time before crashing themselves into a target and exploding.

While the group has shown off the fixed-wing drones in propaganda videos, there is no evidence that they have caused any damage on Israeli soil.

America enters Gazan airspace with its spy drones

America was keeping its reconnaissance drone flights over Gaza a secret.

But aviation enthusiasts monitoring Flightradar24, a publicly accessible flight-tracking website, spotted one take off from a US aircraft carrier before looping above southern Gaza for several hours.

The Pentagon confirmed that it had deployed its MQ-9 Reaper drone to aid in the search for about 240 people being held hostage in Gaza.

"In support of hostage recovery efforts, the US is conducting unarmed UAV flights over Gaza, as well as providing advice and assistance to support our Israeli partner as they work on their hostage recovery efforts," said Pentagon press secretary Brigadier General Pat Ryder in a statement.

"These UAV flights began after the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel."

The MQ-9 Reaper is an elite US-made drone that costs about $US56 million.

What makes it special is that it can hover at altitudes of about 15,000 metres for up to 27 hours at a time.

It also comes with high-tech cameras, sensors, and radar systems.

While it has the ability to carry air-to-ground missiles, US officials stressed that the ones flying over Gaza are unarmed, and are only being used to gather intelligence.

It's unclear what sort of information the drone is gathering given that it's presumed the hostages are being held in Hamas's intricate network of underground tunnels.

But it could be monitoring movements in southern Gaza to determine the entry points to the tunnel system, or gathering signals intelligence (SIGINT).

That would mean the US is gathering SIGINT by intercepting phone calls, decoding messages and monitoring satellite communications in the hope that Hamas militants might accidentally give away clues about the hostages' location.

How the hunt for hostages could involve underground drones

Israeli authorities say that freeing the hostages remains one of the main aims of its military action in Gaza.

But it's not clear if they intend to broker a deal with Hamas or if they would consider going into the tunnels on a rescue mission.

The tunnel network, estimated to be 200 to 300 kilometres in length, is viewed as a death trap by the Israeli forces.

"Most military doctrines, they recommend against sending soldiers into the tunnels. Why? Because of the very high risk the subterranean environment puts the soldier in," said Dr Daphné Richemond-Barak, an expert on underground warfare who teaches at Reichman University in Israel.

"You need to develop special equipment for your soldiers. They need to get oxygen, they need to get special training, they need to be vetted specifically for this kind of claustrophobic, confined environment."

If they were to venture down there, experts say they would first likely send in ground robots and drones to figure out what lies ahead.

One Israeli drone, the Lanius, is a very small quadcopter capable of moving around confined spaces.

It is also capable of carrying an explosive the size of a grenade, which can be launched at any enemy it encounters in the tunnel.

However it's unlikely the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has ever tested its drone arsenal in the Hamas tunnels, making it unclear whether their communication and navigations systems would hold up.

But if the drones worked, they would allow the IDF's elite underground unit called Samur, the Hebrew word for "weasel", to sweep the tunnels in search of the hostages.

Dr Richemond-Barak says once the weasels go below, all their technological advantages over Hamas fall away.

"In such narrow tunnels, the soldiers essentially operate alone," she said.

"They have to be ready to face the enemy on a one-on-one basis, almost like a duel. So we're going back to very old ways of waging war."

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Hamas is armed with a deadly surprise: Cheap Chinese drones transformed into weapons of war

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As Israel deploys its fleet of sophisticated, expensive drones in its war against Hamas, the militant group has come armed with its own surprise: Cheap, off-the-shelf-drones rigged up to carry bombs.

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Israel halts PA funds transfer to Norway as 'punishment'

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Israel halts PA funds transfer to Norway as 'punishment'

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Israel halts PA funds transfer to Norway as 'punishment'

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Israel has decided to stop its transfer of Palestinian tax funds it has been sending to Norway since January as 'punishment' for recognising Palestine.

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AI-powered human extermination is no longer science fiction. It is the reality.  

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AI-powered human extermination is no longer science fiction. It is the reality.  

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Palestine is a glimpse of the dystopic future that awaits us | Israel-Palestine conflict | Al Jazeera

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Six Palestinians died in custody in recent weeks, including two in Megiddo Prison, one in Ktzi'ot, one in Ofer, and two others who were being illegally held by the military after their work permits were revoked. 5/12/23

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Six Palestinians died in custody in recent weeks, including two in Megiddo Prison, one in Ktzi'ot, one in Ofer, and two others who were being illegally held by the military after their work permits were revoked. 5/12/23

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רופאים לזכויות אדם

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Six Palestinians Die in Israeli Custody

Six Palestinians died in custody in recent weeks, including two in Megiddo Prison, one in Ktzi'ot, one in Ofer, and two others who were being illegally held by the military after their work permits were revoked.

Since the October 7 attacks, we've been receiving reports from families and legal representatives of Palestinians held in Israeli incarceration settings, all describing incidents of severe violence at the hands of prison officers. Concurrently, Israel Prison Service officials and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir boasted to the press about violating the rights of Palestinians in prisons. Soon after, media reports revealed a worsening in the incarceration conditions of Palestinians, including cutting off electricity and water and the imposition of "lockdown mode" restrictions, which include the removal of telephones, televisions, and other electrical devices from prison cells.

Six Palestinians died in custody in recent weeks, including two in Megiddo Prison, one in Ktzi'ot, one in Ofer, and two others who were being illegally held by the military after their work permits were revoked. Physicians volunteering with PHRI participated in the autopsies of three of the deceased Palestinians. Two of them, aged 25 and 58, suffered from preexisting chronic conditions for which they seemingly did not receive vital treatment. A third appears to have been attacked by IPS officers, according to the testimonies of individuals who were later released from custody.

These incidents come amid mounting first-hand accounts of humiliation, violence, and torture of Palestinians in Israeli incarceration settings. In addition, we've reviewed shocking videos that were circulated on social networks, depicting severe abuse and torture of Palestinians under Israeli custody. Some of the videos were filmed by the soldiers carrying out the arrests, while others were recorded by officers within incarceration settings. Despite the severity of the footage and our repeated contact requests, IPS officials refused to address these alleged abuses.

Various statements by senior IPS officials (directed by the national security minister) and evidence gathered in recent weeks underscore the realization that the IPS is no longer operating a lawful incarceration system. Rather than protect the "well-being, safety, and dignity" of all individuals under its custody, the IPS has transformed into a vindictive body lacking any oversight or transparency - with the sole aim of abusing and terrorizing Palestinians held in its prisons.

Furthermore, since October 7, Palestinians in Israeli incarceration settings have been severed from the outside world. Attorney visits are strictly limited, Red Cross representatives are not allowed in, and family visits are prohibited. The banning of all external communications poses severe threats to the safety of Palestinians in prisons, as it does not allow any monitoring or oversight of their safety and health conditions. These circumstances are particularly dangerous given an Israeli political climate willing to accept the harming of Palestinians, especially those held in prison.

Though state officials and courts have ignored our appeals (along with those of other rights groups) to prevent these atrocities, we will continue our struggle to expose the ongoing violence and human rights violations. We will continue urging local and international bodies to end the assault, abuse, humiliation, and torture of all Palestinians in Israeli incarceration settings.

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Six Palestinians Die in Israeli Custody | רופאים לזכויות אדם

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Since the October 7 attacks, we've been receiving reports from families and legal representatives of [...] Read more >

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How German academia contributes to surveillance of Palestinians

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How German academia contributes to surveillance of Palestinians

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[This piece is part of an investigative section called "For the Record". The New Arab believes that public interest comes first and that publishing research findings, even if not conclusive, can inform future investigative efforts].
The Max Planck Society (MPS) is Germany's "most successful research organisation, with 31 Nobel Laureates among the ranks of its scientists", according to their website. With an annual budget of nearly two billion euros ($2.16 bn), the society funds research across the sciences and humanities, "in the service of the general public".

Despite the MPS' prestige, a group of anonymous researchers called Max Planck Anti-War Machine came forward in protest of the institute's collaboration with Israeli universities. They shared with The New Arab (TNA) Investigative Unit a report that draws a connection between the Society and Israeli facial recognition technology. The researchers looked into publicly available links between the MPS' partner universities in Israel and patented technology used by the Israeli army in Palestine. In particular, they focussed on AI software developed by Israeli firm Corsight.

In its response to The New Arab, the MPS denied any involvement in research and funding that contributed to the development of Corsight's technology.

TNA was unable to establish whether the MPS had directly funded the research behind Corsight's facial recognition tech. But it was possible to determine that the Society has, at multiple times, subsidised related research by the same academics who founded the Israeli startup in question. The director of Corsight's parent company is also the head of an MPS-linked research centre that is jointly funded by the German government and Israeli universities.

On 26 January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that South African accusations that Israel was committing a genocide in Gaza were "plausible". Given the ruling, human rights organisations are questioning the role played by German political and academic institutions in potentially enabling a genocide through high-tech. To date, the German government continues to fund MPS-linked research collaboration in Israel.
Israeli-German scientific cooperation
It is common knowledge that the ties between MPS and Israeli academia run deep. The Society currently supports 24 German-Israeli research institutes (Minerva Centers) through a subsidiary called the Minerva Foundation. The German Federal Ministry for Education and Research has been its main funder with more than 350 million euro (around $380 mn) since 1964. Each Minerva Center receives up to 150,000 euro (around $163,000) a year, evenly split between Germany and Israel.

The centres are hosted in six universities and academic institutes in Israel - The Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), the Weizmann Institute of Science, Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University, University of Haifa and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The Technion, in particular, collaborates closely with weapon manufacturers such as Elbit Systems and Rafael.

TNA contacted the Technion seeking comment on the content of this article, but no response was received in time for publication.
Corsight: "We were built to find a single terrorist within a crowd"
Prof. Yehoshua Zeevi has been the director of The Franz Ollendorff Minerva Center for Information Processing and Automation (also known as the Center for Vision and Image Sciences) at the Technion since he founded it in 1985. The Franz Ollendorff Center was one of the first Minerva Centers established in Israel by the German Ministry of Science.

Prof. Zeevi is also director and chief scientist of Cortica Ltd., an AI start-up he co-founded in 2007 with Igal Raichelgauz and Karina Odinaev. According to a 2012 press release from the company, the founders developed Cortica's core technology while at Technion. As of 2015, the Technion owned 3% of Cortica's shares through its Technion Research and Development Foundation Ltd. At the time, the startup was valued at $200 million, according to Israeli business newspaper The Marker. Such a relationship between Cortica and the Technion is telling of the close ties between Israel's academia and its security-oriented tech market.

The New Arab contacted all of Prof. Zeevi, Odinaev and Raichelgauz with regards to the content of this article, but no response was received in time for publication.

The technology of Corsight AI Ltd., a fully-owned subsidiary of Cortica, was developed to assist intelligence and law enforcement agencies. In a 2020 interview with US news agency The Media Line, Corsight's Vice-President of Business Development Ofer Ronen confirmed that the Israeli police was among their clients.

Corsight's system processes information taken from surveillance cameras, photographs, and other visual sources to create a model of an individual's face - even going so far as to claim that it will soon construct these models using only genetic material. Corsight's Ofer Ronen told The Media Line: "We were built to find a single terrorist within a crowd when he's trying to disguise himself... we don't need a full face."

Several of Corsight's researchers - including its founders Raichelgauz and Odinaev - have, by their own account, served in the Israeli army's 8200 elite intelligence unit. The unit has been accused by many, including by its former members, of "infiltrating and controlling all aspects of Palestinian life."

According to Israeli military and intelligence sources quoted in a March 2024 New York Times report, the Israeli army is using an expansive facial recognition system in Gaza "to conduct mass surveillance there, collecting and cataloging the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent". The report specifically mentioned Corsight technology that would enable Israeli soldiers to pick out faces from crowds, and even from grainy drone footage, as potential targets.

However, the same military sources said Corsight was not always reliable and that they had to combine it with Google Photos - a photo storage service from US company Google - for profiling purposes. The officers apparently continued to use the Israeli software in Gaza because, unlike Google Photos, it was customisable.

TNA contacted the Israeli army to provide comments about these reports, and about Raichelgauz and Odinaev's work within the army. They declined to comment.

TNA also emailed Corsight's Vice-President of Business Development Ofer Ronen. We did not receive a reply.
"Administrative responsibility" only?
When TNA confronted the Max Planck Society (MPS) with evidence of its connections with Israeli facial recognition tech, the German research institute declined any responsibility.

Dr. Christina Beck, MPS head of communication, stated in an email exchange that "the Minerva Foundation is not involved in and not responsible for the scientific research at the Technion."

Beck added that "the [Cortica] company and the research results on which this spin-off is based have absolutely nothing to do with Minerva."

However, publicly available research output suggests that Israeli-German scientific cooperation benefited, at the very least, the development of Cortica's facial recognition technology.

The Max Planck Anti-War Machine collective, drew our attention towards two academic articles published in 2006 by Zeevi, Raichelgauz and Odinaev (' Cliques in Neural Ensembles as Perception Carriers' and ' Natural Signal Classification by Neural Cliques and Phase-Locked Attractors '), which were reportedly fundamental for the Cortica patents. In 2006 Raichelgauz and Odinaev were supervising undergraduate students at the Technion-based Ollendorff Minerva Center, of which Zeevi was the director.

The two articles have been cited at least 32 and seven times respectively in patents assigned to Cortica for which Zeevi, Raichelgauz and Odinaev are listed as the inventors.

According to a 2012 Cortica press release, research conducted by Zeevi, Odinaev and Raichelgauz into the neural networks of the brain cortex (the same topic of the 2006 academic articles) was crucial in the development of the company's facial recognition technology.

TNA was able to establish that, prior to their collaboration with Zeevi, Raichelgauz and Odinaev completed their final undergraduate project in 2003 at the Vision and Image Sciences Lab, part of the Ollendorff Minerva Center.

This project, for which they received two awards from the Technion, looked to apply "a novel theoretical framework" called " Liquid State Machines" to information processing.

The two academic papers, which are cited by the Israeli researchers in Cortica's patents, looked at expanding this framework to simulate the brain cortex for the purpose of voice and word recognition.

We were not able to determine whether the application of this same framework to image recognition is the basis of Corsight's current facial recognition technology.

In their response to TNA, the Max Planck Society also argued that, because of the source of the funding and the way funds are channelled to Israeli research institutes, they would only bear "administrative responsibility". The Society sought to distance itself from any financial responsibility, although they are the sole shareholder of the Minerva Foundation.

"The MPG [i.e. German for MPS] manages Minerva GmbH [i.e. the Foundation], but does not finance it. The funds come exclusively from the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research [BMBF]", said Beck, the MPS' spokesperson.

She explained that the Minerva Centers, which are co-financed by the Minerva Foundation with funds from the BMBF, are "neither institutions of the [...] MPG nor institutions of Minerva".

TNA contacted the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, asking whether they were aware that taxpayers' money was being allocated for research that led to the development of Corsight's facial recognition tech. The ministry declined to comment and redirected us to the MPS' press office.

With regards to Prof. Zeevi, the MPS spokesperson clarified that "each Minerva Center is headed by a director who is employed at an Israeli university [...]. This director is responsible for the organizational management of the center, but is not an employee of Minerva GmbH."

Dr. Beck also said that the Ollendorff Minerva Center run by Zeevi had been closed in August 2023, and sent parts of a contract valid from September 2011, supposedly related to the centre in question. The lifetime of a Minerva Centre is indeed always limited to an initial period of six years, which can be extended for a second final six-year term.

While the contract sent by Beck does state 31 August 2023 as its end date, it also gives the MPS the ability to unilaterally close the centre and sever ties with the Israeli host institution, if the outcome of the sixth-year evaluation is not "positive".

It is not clear what ethical considerations were taken into account when assessing the impact of the Ollendorff Center's research on Palestinians.

The MPS' claim that the centre is now closed is also disputed. On 10 June 2024, the German co-chair of the Ollendorff Center's advisory committee, Prof. Ulrich Rueckert, confirmed to TNA via email that the centre was still active.
For AI, civilians and military often look the same
Experts have warned about the use of artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology, especially in Israel. Investigations have uncovered Israel's AI "targeted" systems that are automating mass killings and destruction in its war on Gaza.

Matt Mahmoudi, Amnesty International's Advisor on Artificial Intelligence, told TNA that "there is nothing in an AI system that would enable anyone to draw a distinction between a military and [a] civilian target." Mahmoudi explained that Israeli AI systems like Lavender are "incredibly biased towards the identification of particular people to then generate a list of targets that are not really based on an actual read of whether someone is engaged in military combat, but simply [on] a probabilistic calculation of whether someone was in a particular location [...] that might be considered 'Hamas-affiliated'".

According to Marwa Fatafta, MENA policy and advocacy director at Access Now, a digital civil rights non-profit group, "facial recognition technologies are an extremely invasive form of identity verification, and our position is that this is a type of biometric surveillance that needs to be banned."

Speaking with TNA, Fatafta explained further the reasons why Access Now is supportive of a total ban, especially in the case of Palestine. "Even the smallest margin of error could mean fatal consequences [...], particularly in a context where the Israeli occupation has been inflicting ruthless and brutal violence on Palestinians from abductions, to torture, to crimes against humanity and ill treatment", she said.
Abetting genocide?
Germany has always been transparent about its commitment to security-oriented research in its cooperation with Israeli academia.

In 2008, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research published a document titled 'Germany-Israel: Science and Technology, Education and Research', in which it praised Israel's "extraordinary ability to react to new security challenges and threat scenarios in a quick and flexible manner".

The report added that "in view of the increasing risks of terrorism and natural disasters, the German Federal Government has also made civil security research a priority."

Access Now's Marwa Fatafta warned about collaboration with Israeli institutions as, in her view, there can be no separation between what goes on inside the university, and the human rights violations that are currently taking place in Gaza.

"Israeli universities are at the very core of Israel's military tech industrial complex", she said, "these universities are deeply complicit and the Technion is normalising practices of surveillance and digital oppression under the facade of academic and scientific research."

According to Fatafta, German funding of Israeli universities is "indicative of that normalisation, that it is okay to sponsor research that could potentially end up being deployed and utilised for military purposes," and particularly to commit war crimes in Gaza.

Amnesty's Mahmoudi told TNA that both research institutions and states need to abide by the provisional measures ordered by the ICJ on January 26. "So while states have a duty, entities engaged in business activities have a responsibility [to not contribute to genocide]", he said. And this would apply also to "institutions of research, to ensure that they are also not contributing to the development of tools that could further exacerbate the risk of genocide, or the unfolding genocide".

TNA contacted the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, asking what kind of measures were in place when allocating research funds, to minimise the risk of contributing to the unfolding genocide. The ministry declined to comment and redirected us to the Max Planck Society's press office.

On April 30, Nicaragua brought a case against Germany at the ICJ, accusing it of enabling the genocide in Gaza through weapons supplies to Israel, and by means of its suspension of aid destined to UNRWA. Germany was however successful in objecting, among other legal arguments, that it had scaled down military supplies to Israel from the onset of the war. The ICJ ruled that it could not issue provisional measures against the German state.

As for the responsibility of German academia towards shaping research programmes at the Israel-based Ollendorff Center, the MPS spokesperson told TNA that "an advisory board with international, Israeli and German members advises the center on its research program, approves the budget and follows up on scientific performance."

TNA contacted by email Prof. Juergen Renn, the chair of the Minerva Center Committee, in charge of appointing Minerva Centers, to ask whether the potential impact on the rights of Palestinians was factored in when allocating funds for the centres. Our questions were forwarded instead to Dr. Lou Bohlen, head of office at the Minerva Foundation, but no reply was received.

TNA also emailed current and former members of the advisory committee of the Ollendorff Minerva Center, to ask whether similar considerations were taken into account. No reply was received.
The MPS' unwavering support for Israel
The Max Planck Anti-War Machine collective toldTNA: "Our primary objective is to raise awareness about the connections between the MPS and the Israeli technology used in the Gaza genocide."

In fact, since the war in Gaza began, MPS has doubled down on their support for Israel. On 20 December 2023, the Society announced it was allocating 1 mn euro ($1.09 mn), in addition to 500,000 euro ($545,000) from German federal funds, to establish the Max Planck Israel Programme. The most important aim of the programme is to "counteract the drop-out of young talent and facilitate the early return of international researchers to Israel as well as to strengthen the exchange of Israeli scientists with Max Planck Institutes". The announcement also included the planned opening of a Minerva Foundation office in Israel.

On 12 June 2024, in response to calls for a boycott of Israeli universities, MPS President Patrick Cramer tweeted a statement by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany. "We consider it discriminatory and misguided to terminate research collaborations with Israeli scientific institutions, to exclude Israeli scientists from international conferences and awards or to reject funding applications from researchers working at Israeli institutions", the statement said.

The group of anonymous researchers counter the MPS' stance by arguing that their aim is "to ensure that the taxpayers in Germany and the academic community at large are informed about the implications of MPS' current associations".

They also call on the Society to "completely divest from Israel and sever all academic ties with Israeli institutions". This action, they say, is not without precedent; "a similar decisive step was taken when academic relations with Russia were entirely severed following the invasion of Ukraine. "

The researchers' collective believes that the MPS should learn from its history. In the past, the Society, formerly known as Kaiser Wilhelm Society, officially admitted having "co-masterminded and sometimes even actively participated in the crimes of the Nazi regime". Given this historical legacy, the researchers argue that "the MPS must take all necessary measures to ensure it does not become complicit in yet another genocide."
Editing and fact-checking: Investigative Editor Andrea Glioti and Researcher Anas Ambri.

July 18 correction: a previous version of this article stated that the ICJ had ordered Israel on 26 January to suspend "military operations in and against Gaza". This is not correct, as the ICJ did not issue such an order.

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How German academia contributes to surveillance of Palestinians

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German government and Max Planck Society have ties to Israeli centre involved in research behind AI tech used for mass surveillance of Palestinians.

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Tortures in prison : Testimonies gathered by B'tselem

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Tortures in prison : Testimonies gathered by B'tselem

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“Welcome to Hell” is a report on the abuse and inhuman treatment of Palestinians held in Israeli custody since 7 October 2023. B’Tselem collected testimonies from 55 Palestinians held during that time and released, almost all with no charges. Their testimonies reveal the outcomes of the rushed transformation of more than a dozen Israeli prison facilities, military and civilian, into a network of camps dedicated to the abuse of inmates as a matter of policy.

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Israel Admits to Targeting Journalist Ismail al-Ghoul

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Israel Admits to Targeting Journalist Ismail al-Ghoul

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We unequivocally condemn Israel's killing of journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, an Al Jazeera journalist reporting on Israel's deadly war on Gaza. al-Ghoul was killed alongside his cameraman Rami Al-Rifi when a missile struck the car. Horrific images of the aftermath showed al-Ghoul wearing his press vest and decapitated by the missile strike.

On the site formerly known as Twitter Israel confessed to targeting the journalist while boasting he was "eliminated."

"When you 'eliminate' journalists, it's much easier to hide war crimes, it's easier to spread lies, it's easier to commit genocide," said Defending Rights & Dissent Executive Director Sue Udry.

"Assassinating a journalist is a war crime under international law. As the largest supplier of arms to Israel, the US bears both legal and moral responsibility for this heinous act. Under international and domestic law, the US is obligated to cease arming Israel. The Leahy Law prohibits military assistance to military units when there are credible allegations of gross violations of human rights. An extrajudicial execution of a journalist is a gross violation of human rights. And there is no greater credible evidence than Israel's stomach churning confession that it 'eliminated' a revered journalist. President Biden and Blinken must act now to not only invoke the Leahy Law, but work for a total arms embargo on Israel. Anything less than that is active complicity in Israel's slaughter of Palestinian journalists," said Defending Rights & Dissent Policy Director Chip Gibbons.

Israel has cynically sought cover for their crime with an evidence free assertion that al-Ghoul, a well-known and much praised journalist, was a Hamas operative. Al Jazeera has rejected this baseless claim while noting "Israel's long history of fabrications and false evidence used to cover up its heinous crimes"

The murder of Al-Ghoul, and his cameraman Rami Al-Rifi, cannot be seen outside of the context of Israel's all out campaign to impose a media blackout over the atrocities committed in Gaza. al-Ghoul's murder adds to a grim statistic - according to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, Israel has killed over 140 journalists since October 7. Both al-Ghoul and al-Rifi were wearing press vests when they were killed in an airstrike. According to journalists on the scene, their car was hit by a single missile fired from a drone. al-Ghoul and al-Rifi's deaths add to a tally of journalists Israel has killed while wearing press vests, from Shireen Abu Akleh to journalists to the seven previous journalists already killed in uniform since October 7. The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate estimates that 10% of journalists in Gaza have been killed by Israel.

Defending Rights & Dissent condemns Israel's targeting of journalists and calls for an end to US military assistance to Israel. We are currently leading an effort to get press freedom organizations and journalists to publicly call on Secretary of State Blinken to impose an arms embargo on Israel over its killing of Palestinian journalists.

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Israel Admits to Targeting Journalist Ismail al-Ghoul

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We unequivocally condemn Israel's killing of journalist Ismail al-Ghoul, an Al Jazeera journalist reporting on Israel's deadly war on Gaza. al-Ghoul was killed alongside his cameraman Rami Al-Rifi when a missile struck the car. Horrific images of the aftermath showed

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The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps

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The Israeli Prison System as a Network of Torture Camps

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Betselem Aug 2024

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testimony of abducted women : Hadil a-Dahduh Zaza with her husband Rushdi Zaza. B'Tselem, 18 March 2024

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testimony of abducted women : Hadil a-Dahduh Zaza with her husband Rushdi Zaza. B'Tselem, 18 March 2024

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AP "investigation" about systematical torture in Israeli detention centers

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AP "investigation" about systematical torture in Israeli detention centers

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JERUSALEM (AP) - An Israeli military court opened an initial hearing Tuesday for nine soldiers detained over what a defense lawyer said were allegations of sexual abuse of a Palestinian at a shadowy facility where Israel has held prisoners from Gaza during the war.

The investigation has stoked tensions between the military command and hard-line nationalists in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government who advocate an even harsher hand in Israel's conduct of the 10-month-old war in Gaza.

The soldiers' detention Monday triggered angry protests by supporters demanding their release, including members of parliament and at least two government ministers. On Monday, several hundred protesters broke into the facility in southern Israel, known as Sde Teiman, and then later into the military base where the soldiers were being held. Video showed them scuffling with troops before being forced out.

Defense lawyer Nati Rom, who is representing three of the soldiers, said they were innocent and described the alleged abuse they are accused of committing as "acts of sodomy." The military has given no details on the investigation, saying only it was looking into allegations of "substantial abuse."

An investigation by The Associated Press and reports by rights groups have exposed abysmal conditions and abuses at Sde Teiman, the military base where most of the thousands detained in Gaza during the war have been held.

In a report issued in April, the main U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said Palestinians released from detention and sent back to Gaza reported instances of prisoners being forced to strip naked, of photos taken of them naked and of beatings on the genitals. The report did not specify the facility where the detainees were held.

One detainee said he was forced to sit on an electrical probe that burned his anus. They also reported beatings with iron bars, gun butts and boots, UNRWA said, adding that many of the returned prisoners had to be hospitalized due to injuries or illness.

Beyond the alleged abuse now being investigated, Israeli authorities have generally denied abuses in detention facilities for Palestinians.

The military court hearing Tuesday afternoon at the Beit Lid base in central Israel was expected to rule on whether to extend the soldiers' detention. By late Tuesday, the court did not appear to have reached a decision.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who denounced the protester break-ins at the sites, demanded an investigation into whether hard-line National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir "prevented or delayed the police response" to the riots.

He said the lack of police presence forced the military to divert forces to the bases to expel the protesters. In a letter to Netanyahu, he called on him to "act harshly against the coalition members who participated in the riots."

Ben-Gvir, whose ministry is in charge of police, responded with his own letter to Netanyahu saying the allegations he delayed police response to the riots were baseless.

On Monday, Ben-Gvir denounced the soldiers' detention as "shameful" and called them "our best heroes." Referring to conditions at detention facilities, he said "the summer camps and patience for the terrorists are over."

The defense lawyer, Rom, said the incident under investigation took place at Sde Teiman a month ago. He said the detainee attacked officers during a search, and the soldiers "used force but didn't do anything sexual." He said the detainee was a high-ranking Hamas militant.

His account of the incident or the detainee's identity could not be independently confirmed. Rom works for Honenu, a nationalist legal group that specializes in defending Israeli soldiers and civilians facing prosecution over incidents of violence with Palestinians.

Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that sparked the war in Gaza, according to official figures, though hundreds were released after the military determined they were not affiliated with Hamas. Israeli human rights groups say the majority of detainees from Gaza have at some point passed through Sde Teiman.

Israel has long been accused of failing to hold its soldiers accountable for crimes committed against Palestinians. The allegations have intensified during the war in Gaza. Israel says its forces act within military and international law and says it independently investigates any alleged abuses.

In an unrelated case, the military said Tuesday that prosecutors issued an indictment against a reserve soldier accused of inflicting "severe violence" against Palestinian detainees he was tasked with guarding, by allegedly beating them with a club or his personal weapon on several occasions. He allegedly filmed the beatings, the military said.

Military chief Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi condemned the protesters' break-ins and said he fully supports the military prosecutors' investigation. "It is precisely these investigations that protect our soldiers in Israel and the world and preserve the values" of the military, he said.

The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel said it welcomed the military's investigation but said its claims are of systemic abuse at the facility and not just one case.

In Gaza, emergency workers recovered the bodies of 22 Palestinians found dead in eastern parts of the city of Khan Younis after Israeli troops withdrew from the area following a weeks-long offensive, according to hospital officials.

It was not clear when they were killed, but workers have repeatedly found bodies in rubble or on the streets after Israeli offensives around Gaza.

Another seven people were killed by Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis late Monday and early Tuesday, according to officials at Nasser Hospital, where all the bodies were brought.

The Israeli military launched its assault in the southern city earlier in July, three months after a previous long offensive there. The military said Tuesday its troops had completed operations in Khan Younis, where it said it said it killed dozens of Hamas militants and destroyed tunnels and other Hamas infrastructure.

Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas after its Oct. 7 attacks, in which militants killed around 1,200 people and abducted 250 others. Around 110 hostages remain in captivity in Gaza, about a third of them believed to be dead.

In its campaign since, Israel has killed more than 39,363 Palestinians and wounded more than 90,900, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose count does not differentiate between civilians and combatants.

___

AP correspondent Samy Magdy in Cairo contributed to this report.

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Probe of soldiers over alleged sexual abuse fuels tension between Israeli military and hard-liners

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An Israeli military court is holding a hearing for nine soldiers detained for questioning over alleged abuse of a Palestinian at a shadowy facility where Israel has held prisoners from Gaza during the war.

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testimony of Ameena about women abducted by IDF

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testimony of Ameena about women abducted by IDF

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"All the women were stripped naked"

Exclusive interview: Ameena Hussain, a Palestinian woman recounts her time detained and details the sexual, emotional and physical abuse inflicted on her by Israeli soldiers.

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"All the women were stripped naked"

Exclusive interview: Ameena Hussain, a Palestinian woman recounts her time detained and details the sexual, emotional and physical abuse inflicted on her by Israeli soldiers. https://t.co/Bz6W1abTWi

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"All the women were stripped naked"

Exclusive interview: Ameena Hussain, a Palestinian woman recounts her time detained and details the sexual, emotional and physical abuse inflicted on her by Israeli soldiers. pic.twitter.com/Bz6W1abTWi
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) March 25, 2024

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"All the women were stripped naked"

Exclusive interview: Ameena Hussain, a Palestinian woman recounts her time detained and details the sexual, emotional and physical abuse inflicted on her by Israeli soldiers. https://t.co/Bz6W1abTWi

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"All the women were stripped naked"

Exclusive interview: Ameena Hussain, a Palestinian woman recounts her time detained and details the sexual, emotional and physical abuse inflicted on her by Israeli soldiers. https://t.co/Bz6W1abTWi

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"All the women were stripped naked"

Exclusive interview: Ameena Hussain, a Palestinian woman recounts her time detained and details the sexual, emotional and physical abuse inflicted on her by Israeli soldiers.

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I Spoke To Palestinians Tortured By Israel. What They Endured Is Unimaginable

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I Spoke To Palestinians Tortured By Israel. What They Endured Is Unimaginable

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"This call is being recorded," an automated Hebrew voice recording recited when I recently tried to reach Abu Hamza, a friend in Gaza. He had just been released from Israel's now notorious Sde Teiman prison. He heard the voice recording too. "Every time I speak on the phone, the recording comes on. But I don't care," he said.

"How are you?" I asked, painfully aware of how coldly formulaic my query sounded given what I already knew of the unspeakable ordeal he had been through. What do you ask someone somehow surviving amid a genocide? How do you 'check in' on someone twice displaced, whose home is destroyed, who now lives in a tent, and who has witnessed massacre after massacre, including the killing of his own family members?

"Glad to be alive," he answered. "I just returned from hell."

It strains my imagination to conjure what could be worse than what he already has endured, but he began to describe his monthslong detention in the Israeli army base turned torture camp.

Abu Hamza was picked up by the Israeli army after he fled with his wife, children, and grandchildren from the northern Gaza Strip to the south, crossing through what Israel cynically designated a " safe passage." Far from being safe, he found the road riddled with dead Palestinians. At one "checkpoint" - set up in early November - soldiers ordered him into a ditch at gunpoint and, from there, later transported him, blindfolded and shackled, to the prison camp in Naqab (Negev).

Abu Hamza told me about months of torture, of being blindfolded, with his body folded - knees and head to the ground for days on end; of being forced to drink urine and salt water whenever he requested water; of being denied food only to be then forced to eat food with maggots (he lost 30 kg - about 66 lbs) during his three-month abduction; of only being permitted to shower once every 50 days; of being forced to wear the same clothes for three straight months; of being beaten with a baton to the point of unconsciousness several times; and of Israeli soldiers breaking his hands and then making him crawl on all fours.

"They enjoyed it," he said. "I could hear them laughing and howling as they beat us." He could hear my voice crack as I tried to hold back my tears while speaking with him. "It's ok," he told me. "I was lucky. I got out. Others were killed while there." Throughout our call, the recorded Hebrew warning message repeated again and again.
"Engineered Torture Methods"
Days later, I navigated various new and old checkpoints scattered across the occupied West Bank to visit a friend whose cousin was recently released by Israel from Sde Teiman. Because I am a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship, I am among the privileged few who can travel in and out of Israeli checkpoints. The vast majority of Palestinians are denied the Israeli permits required to exit the West Bank. While traveling, I noticed that Israeli settlers had set up a new checkpoint, stopping Palestinian cars (those with green license plates) while letting those with yellow license plates (like mine) pass.

My friend's cousin, a young man named Bilal, had, by October 2023, been imprisoned for months. Locked up by Israel repeatedly as a young teen, Bilal, by 19, had spent more than three years of his life in Israeli prisons, always without being charged with any crime. In November 2023, he was "randomly selected" to be sent to the Sde Teiman prison camp, where he, too, endured months of torture. His account is eerily similar to what Abu Hamza told me. Bilal was tortured so severely that his captors offered medical treatment. "The doctor told me he could give me something to ease the pain but then added that it may be the last thing I ever ingest. I knew what he meant, so [I] decided to tolerate the pain of broken ribs and vomiting blood."

Bilal said some Palestinians had been injected with foreign substances. He then described what he called the "engineered torture methods" designed to break Palestinians. "What they did to us was methodically studied. They tortured us in ways to demonstrate their superiority and control over us; they were not seeking information. They want to show us that they have the power to determine our lives. At one point, I realized they were counting our daily calorie consumption (1,706 calories) to make sure we had enough." Israel has similarly counted calories in Gaza, too - and still does. Bilal, too, lost over 30 kg after five months in prison.
"Of Course Israelis See It"
Abu Hamza and Bilal are just two of the thousands of Palestinians Israel has abducted and tortured in Sde Teiman and other prisons.

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I Spoke To Palestinians Tortured By Israel. What They Endured Is Unimaginable

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Les interviews du Guardian corroborent le rapport de l'organisation de défense des droits de l'homme B'Tselem, qui estime que les prisons devraient désormais être qualifiées de « camps de torture »

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Les interviews du Guardian corroborent le rapport de l'organisation de défense des droits de l'homme B'Tselem, qui estime que les prisons devraient désormais être qualifiées de « camps de torture »

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Violence, extreme hunger, humiliation and other abuse of Palestinian prisoners has been normalised across Israel's jail system, according to Guardian interviews with released prisoners, with mistreatment now so systemic that rights group B'Tselem says it must be considered a policy of "institutionalised abuse".

Former detainees described abuse ranging from severe beatings and sexual violence to starvation rations, refusal of medical care, and deprivation of basic needs including water, daylight, electricity and sanitation, including soap and sanitary pads for women.

In a months-long investigation, B'Tselem interviewed 55 former prisoners housed in 16 Israeli prison service jails and detention centres run by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), mapping the scale and nature of abuse. The highly respected Jerusalem-based group concluded that Israel's prisons should now be labelled "torture camps".

"When we started the project we thought we would find sporadic evidence and extreme cases here and there, but the picture that has emerged is completely different," said Yuli Novak, the organisation's executive director.

"We were shocked by the scale of what we heard. It is uncomfortable as an Israeli-Palestinian organisation to say Israel is running torture camps. But we realised that is what we are looking at."

The Israel Prison Service (IPS) said it operated according to the law and under the oversight of the state comptroller. "We are not aware of the claims you described and as far as we know, no such events have occurred under IPS responsibility," it said in a statement. The IPS also claimed that several petitions regarding jail conditions filed by human rights organisations had been rejected by the supreme court.

The IDF said it "rejects outright allegations concerning systematic abuse of detainees in detention facilities" and acts "in accordance with Israeli law and international law". Allegations of abuse were thoroughly examined, a statement said. Conditions for detainees had significantly improved throughout the war, it added.

There have been multiple reports of arbitrary, cruel and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees since the Hamas attack of 7 October - the outside world's only glimpses of conditions inside the jails, since Israel has denied access to lawyers, family members and Red Cross inspectors.

In late July, multiple members of parliament broke into two military bases, backed by a far-right crowd, to protest against the arrest of nine men over the violent rape of a detainee in Sde Teiman detention centre. The MP Tally Gotliv told the crowd that Israeli troops deserved total immunity, regardless of their actions.

A former barracks that became a processing centre for people seized in Gaza, there have been suggestions that suffering at Sde Teiman is a horrific and temporary exception created by the Gaza war.

Detainees' testimony and the B'Tselem report suggest, however, that it is just one particularly violent component of an abusive system, and cases of abuse are not unsanctioned acts of violence.

Instead, it is suggested that under the direction of the far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the mistreatment has become an integral part of Israel's detention system.

At least 60 people have died in Israeli custody since the war in Gaza broke out, compared to one or two deaths a year previously.

The Guardian carried out separate interviews with eight detainees, the majority arrested without charge and released without trial, who detailed patterns of abuse matching those documented by B'Tselem.

Field researchers in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza collected dozens of testimonies, medical reports, autopsies and other evidence.

They found consistent and widespread testimony of severe, arbitrary violence, sexual assault, humiliation and degradation, starvation, deliberately unhygienic conditions, overcrowding, denial of medical treatment, prohibitions on religious worship, and denial of legal counsel and family visits.

Several witnesses the Guardian spoke to gave details of three killings: Thaer Abu Asab and Abdul Rahman al-Maari, who were allegedly beaten to death by guards, and Mohammad al-Sabbar, who died from a chronic medical condition. Cellmates said that after 7 October he was not given medicine or the special diet he needed.

Along with the use of direct violence and restrictions on movement, Palestinians have long alleged that imprisonment is a key element of Israel's 56-year-old occupation: various estimates suggest that up to 40% of Palestinian men have been arrested at least once in their lives.

Before 7 October, 5,200 Palestinians were held in Israeli jails, including 1,200 in administrative detention, which allows indefinite detention without charge or trial. Intense waves of arrests in the aftermath of the Hamas attack mean that prisoner numbers soared to 9,623 as of early July.

Another 1,402 prisoners from Gaza are classed as "unlawful combatants" under emergency legislation, which also allows detention without charge or trial. The IDF says the measure complies with international law.

Palestinians 'tortured' in Israeli prison speak out: 'We couldn't sleep from the screams'

Firas Hassan, a 50-year-old youth ministry worker from Bethlehem, was arrested under an administrative detention order in 2022. Conditions then were acceptable, he told the Guardian: there were hot showers, decent food, time outside in the yard, and about six prisoners to a cell, each with his own bunk.

In early 2023, Ben-Gvir was appointed the minister in charge of prisons. He immediately set about getting rid of what he called "perks" for Palestinian inmates, such as fresh bread, and limiting shower times to four minutes.

But those changes were nothing compared to what happened after 7 October, Hassan said. "There was respect before. But after 7 October I was sure I was going to die there. I lost all hope."

Hassan described conditions common to many of the interviews. He said he and his cellmates - up to 20 people in the same cell designed for seven - were beaten, sometimes several times a day. He said one injured cellmate claimed to him through tears after a particularly brutal incident in November that guards had raped him with a baton.

With little water and no washing facilities or clean clothes, conditions quickly became extremely unsanitary. Food for the entire room consisted of a piece of meat, a cup of cheese, half a tomato and half a cucumber in the morning, and about five spoonfuls of uncooked rice per person for dinner. There was one 2-litre bottle of water for the whole room to share.

"The guards told me, we are giving you enough to keep you alive, but if it was up to us we will let you starve," he said. On his release without charge in April, Hassan had lost 22kg in weight.

Hassan also heard the screams of 38-year-old Thaer Abu Asab, who was allegedly beaten to death in the cell next door after refusing to bow his head to guards.

Another witness, Mousa Aasi, 58, from Ramallah governorate, told the Guardian that after the beating, Asab was dragged into the courtyard in view of all the inmates. "They said he died in hospital later, but I think he was already dead," he said.

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Palestinian prisoners describe widespread abuse in Israel's jails

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Guardian interviews back up report by rights group B'Tselem, which says prisons should now be labelled 'torture camps'

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Singer Kobi Peretz was ordered to leave an IDF base in the middle of his performance for allegedly planning to sing a song commonly associated with extreme right-wing groups

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Singer Kobi Peretz was ordered to leave an IDF base in the middle of his performance for allegedly planning to sing a song commonly associated with extreme right-wing groups

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Kobi Peretz Lior Kasson

Singer Kobi Peretz claims that he was ordered to leave an IDF base in northern Israel because he had intended to sing 'May Your Village Burn Down', a song associated with extreme right-wing groups in Israel.

"For five months since the war broke out, I have been giving free performances to our dear IDF soldiers to raise their morale," he wrote on social media.

"I have held dozens of concerts, possibly more than any other singer in Israel, and sanctified God's name in public by distributing tefilin to soldiers with funds that I raised for the purpose from Jews around the world. I give my heart and soul to cheer up those who protect our country."

"Depsite my being sick, I traveled three hours to the Mahane Yarden base on the Lebanese border. An insane rocket barrage caught us while we were on the way, andI found myself lying on the ground and praying not to be injured for several minutes. I carried on to the north despite the threats and made it to the base, where I had been invited to perform by the IDF, with a time slot that had been planned more than a week in advance."

"To my shock, as I stood on the stage in front of dozens of soldiers who were waiting for me to give them a few moments of happiness, suddenly someone turned off the electricity and told me "Get out of here, you do not have a permit to perform here." I was in shock, and did not understand what was happening. then they told me "We don't want you here because you sing ' May Your Village Burn Down.'"

"I tried to protest, saying "You invited me, I traveled for hours especially for this, I'm doing this for free, and the performance was approved and published more than a week ago, why are you insulting me and the soldiers with this kind of embarrassment?"

The soldiers also tried to protest to their commander but were told: "This order comes from higher up. You don't have a permit, and need to leave." That particularly insolent officer forgot that the IDF invited me. Unlike what is said out of context in the media, I don't visit any base of my own accord."

"I am currently on my way home, with great sorrow in my heart, and asking myself - why? Is it because I sing that Gaza and all the terrorists are to be wiped out? Because I called to 'erase the memory of Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:19)? Is that what I did out of line? Have we gone crazy? Is this how the idea would like to win? Is this a fighting spirit? What is our warrior heritage - to have mercy on the cruelist individuals and pray for peace and olive branches?"

"After 150 days since the disaster and massacre the Gazans perpetrated, it is now forbidden that we curse them, because God knows what the world will say. I say that this is an embarrassment not to me, but to the state and the officers in the IDF, especially that one petty and insolent officer who disgraces the uniform he wears. You're the ones who allow this neglect towards our enemies as if we have learned nothing since October 7th."

Peretz also emphasized that he intends to continue performing for IDF soldiers.

Yesterday, it was reported that he was expelled from the base due to not having the appropriate permits although the IDF invited him, making that unlikely. It was likewise reported that he had trouble entering the base, and that once he had entered the base and begun his performance, officers on the base turned off the loudspeaker and ordered the soldiers to disperse.

Found a mistake? Contact us

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Singer expelled from IDF base for right-wing song

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Singer Kobi Peretz was ordered to leave an IDF base in the middle of his performance for allegedly planning to sing a song commonly associated with extreme right-wing groups.

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Gaza St. Hilarion Monastery listed as UNESCO World Heritage in Danger: Palestine

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Gaza St. Hilarion Monastery listed as UNESCO World Heritage in Danger: Palestine

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Palestine said on Friday that St. Hilarion Monastery in central Gaza has been added to the World Heritage in Danger list.

"This achievement was made during the 46th session of the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO, held in New Delhi, India," Palestinian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Hani al-Hayek said in a statement published by his office.

Al-Hayek praised UNESCO's emergency decision to list the site, describing it as an integral part of the exceptional Palestinian heritage with significant human value.

"This action is part of the Palestinian leadership's efforts to preserve Gaza's cultural heritage amid the brutal war and genocide faced by our people," he added.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed the UN committee's decision, calling it a "very important decision given the ongoing Israeli genocidal war on the Strip and evidence to the authenticity and history of the Palestinian people."

In a statement reported by Palestine's official news agency WAFA, Abbas said: "The State of Palestine will continue to protect this unique site for humanity as a whole."

St. Hilarion Monastery, dating back to the Byzantine era, is one of the largest and oldest monasteries in Palestine and the Middle East.

The Israeli military has destroyed approximately 206 archaeological and heritage sites since the beginning of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza Media Office.

Israel, flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire, has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza since an Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.

Nearly 39,200 Palestinians have been killed, mostly women and children, and over 90,400 injured, according to local health authorities.

Over nine months into the Israeli onslaught, vast tracts of Gaza lie in ruins amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water, and medicine.

Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, which ordered it to immediately halt its military operation in the southern city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians had sought refuge from the war before it was invaded on May 6.

*Writing by Mohammad Sio

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Anadolu Agency website contains only a portion of the news stories offered to subscribers in the AA News Broadcasting System (HAS), and in summarized form. Please contact us for subscription options.

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Gaza St. Hilarion Monastery listed as World Heritage in Danger: Palestine

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Site added to UNESCO's list of World Heritage in Danger, highlighting its cultural significance, urgent need for protection amid ongoing Israeli war - Anadolu Ajansı

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Fadel al-Utol, 43, is an archaeologist and restoration specialist working in Gaza. aug. 2

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Fadel al-Utol, 43, is an archaeologist and restoration specialist working in Gaza. aug. 2

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Fadel al-Utol. Composite: Guardian Design/Supplied image
Fadel al-Utol, 43, is an archaeologist and restoration specialist working in Gaza.
Tell me a little about your archaeological work and career in Gaza.
I am a specialist in archaeological restoration and excavation. I began my work in 1995 with the École Biblique as part of an agreement between France and the Palestinian National Authority. I have also worked with Unesco and the British Council on projects to uncover and preserve historical sites.

'Life has shrunk. Now I spend my time searching for everything for my family.' Photograph: @fadelalutol

What was the status of your work and projects when the war started?
I was working for an organisation that protects heritage in areas of conflict that mentors, trains and employs graduates in archaeology from universities in Gaza. We train them for three months and then choose the best. We would target about 50 students, then according to our budget, we would employ up to 20 of them. It was a British Council operation in conjunction with the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas (Aliph Foundation). And since 2017, I have been with First Aid Vision 2030, which supports archaeological fieldwork. The archaeological sector unfortunately did not have a lot of domestic support in Gaza. We had a government department, but as you can imagine, archaeology was not going to be more important than health or education. So the government leaned on international support.

How ha ve this work and heritage sites been affected?
Gaza was the location of some very important cultural and archaeological sites. The last project we worked on was a Roman-era cemetery. We found, for the first time, coffins made of lead, decorated with vine leaves, from the first century AD. The size and number of the graves indicate that there was a Roman city to the south of the cemetery. This was a very important discovery. Right before the war we were preparing the site for 3D photographic mapping. The site is now destroyed.

I am very, very sad about what has happened to archaeological sites and heritage in Gaza. I did not cry over my own house that was struck [in an air raid] - like the rest of the houses, it is gone. But then I saw that the Great Omari Mosque was struck. I saw Qasr al-Basha, a museum and historical building, was also struck. These were deliberate direct strikes. Afterwards, bulldozers were used. It is an extremely saddening state of affairs. I feel this war has burned humans, stones and trees. Nothing is left of Gaza and the city's beauty.

These sites and historical buildings, how were they dispersed?
They were all over Gaza. But the mosques and churches are in old Gaza City. The Byzantine church [in Jabalia], for example, was struck directly. We had, in conjunction with the British Council, erected beautiful and effective protective structures around this church that were in keeping with the style of its sixth-century design. We lined protections along the corridors and the beautiful delicate mosaics. It is very sad. These important historical locations are in Jabalia, the old city, in the north-west, and there are other locations in Khan Younis, Rafah. Thank God, fortunately, nothing has been lost in Nuseirat so far.

Where were you when the war started?
I was on a dig, on the Roman cemetery site in the north of Gaza City. Me and my team of excavators and students left 20 minutes before the war started. It was very, very difficult for me. We had to leave the site and our homes and move to the south. It was a miracle that I managed to leave. It was a very sensitive area, there were lots of strikes and phosphorus bombs. The war started on 7 October. We made it out on the eighth just before midnight. We first went to Nuseirat and sought shelter in an Unrwa school, then moved to Rafah, then when the ground operation started we moved again to Deir al-Balah. We are trying to find a safe place but there isn't a single safe area in all of Gaza.

What is your life like now?
Imagine you are living in a house and then you are living in a tent. Life has shrunk. Now I spend my time searching for everything for my family. You are running after water, trying to charge your phone, looking for solar power, then polluted water makes you sick. And inflation is 400-500%. And now it's July so it's very hot. The tents are plastic so it is as if you are boiling in an oven.

My eldest son also helps, but if there's something a bit far away that needs to be brought, I do it because I am older and can figure it out if things get risky. And then you hear that there is someone nearby who is wanted by Israel and so the area is struck. These are massive bombs. The sound and shaking of the ground puts you in a state of horror. It's something you do not even see in Hollywood movies, not even in your imagination.

We left our homes with nothing, thinking we would be back in days. I left in a T-shirt and trousers. Me and my whole family have nothing to do with political or military affairs. I am a civilian who wants to live a cultural and humanitarian life. Why are they punishing me?

Has any information reached you about the status of sites and historic buildings since the start of the war?
The team that works with me remains in Gaza. Whenever the Israeli army leaves an area, the team takes pictures and sends them to me whenever they find an internet connection. I document the extent of the destruction and keep track. The war will end one day. All wars end. And we will build Gaza back into a place that is even more beautiful than it was before.

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The Gaza archaeologist: Inflation is 500% - and the tents are like an oven

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Fadel al-Utol has worked in in Gaza for 30 years. He has witnessed the destruction of important archaeological sites - as well as his own home

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Israeli military in spotlight over ‘incommunicado’ detention of Palestinians 

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Israeli military in spotlight over ‘incommunicado’ detention of Palestinians 

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Israeli military in spotlight over ‘incommunicado’ detention of Palestinians

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A new UN report published Wednesday into alleged abuses carried out against thousands of Palestinians detained by the Israeli authorities since war erupted in Gaza last October has documented a range of serious violations that may amount to torture.

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As part of its genocide in Gaza, Israel escalates its targeting of schools housing displaced people [EN/AR] - occupied Palestinian territory

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As part of its genocide in Gaza, Israel escalates its targeting of schools housing displaced people [EN/AR] - occupied Palestinian territory

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Geneva - Israel's escalation of its attacks on UNRWA-run schools housing displaced persons in different areas of the Gaza Strip was strongly condemned by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor in a statement released on Wednesday.

The Euro-Med Monitor team has monitored intense Israeli air and artillery attacks on at least five UNRWA-run schools over the past 24 hours. These attacks have caused hundreds of casualties, and are a grave violation of the legal immunity that should be enjoyed by UN facilities.

The attacks last night and this morning targeted the UNRWA-run Palestine School in the northern Gaza Strip's Jabalia camp; Al-Falah School in the Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood, located in the south of Gaza City; the Salah Al-Din School in the Al-Ramali neighbourhood, located in the north of Gaza; and another school in the Bani Suhaila area in Khan Younes.

Dozens of additional displaced people were killed and injured yesterday, on Tuesday 5 December, as a result of Israeli attacks targeting the Ma'an School in Khan Yunis. Yesterday also saw another school being collaterally damaged as a result of artillery shelling-causing the killing of at least four displaced people and the wounding of 20 others.

The hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians who are seeking a safe haven from Israel's attacks are packed into every single UNRWA school in the Strip, Euro-Med Monitor reported.

According to preliminary figures provided by the rights group, 1.9 million of Gaza's 2.3 million residents are internally displaced, with 1.2 million people living in 156 UNRWA-run facilities across the Gaza Strip.

Since Israel started its genocide in the Strip on 7 October, UNRWA has recorded more than 120 attacks on its facilities, including direct attacks on more than 30 UNRWA-run facilities. Several of these schools, which provide refuge to displaced individuals, have been attacked more than once, including Al-Fakhoura School in the Jabalia camp.

Al-Fakhoura School was subjected to an Israeli air strike on 19 November, leaving hundreds dead or wounded, some of whom were sleeping at the time of the attack. The same school was subjected to intense artillery shelling on 4 November, causing dozens of casualties.

The Tal al-Zaatar School in the northern Gaza Strip was also subjected to several Israeli attacks, the most severe of which was on 18 November and led to the death of more than 50 people and the injury of dozens others.

Like all UN facilities, UNRWA buildings display the UN flag on their roofs, and the relevant Israeli authorities are periodically notified of the coordinates of all schools and centres that have been converted into emergency shelters for civilians.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor stressed that Israel must fulfill all its obligations in accordance with international humanitarian law. The Geneva-based rights organisation demanded that Israel immediately stop its targeting of civilians and UN facilities, and respect the basic principle of the inviolability and immunity of such international facilities under the rules of war.

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As part of its genocide in Gaza, Israel escalates its targeting of schools housing displaced people [EN/AR] - occupied Palestinian territory

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News and Press Release in Arabic on occupied Palestinian territory about Protection and Human Rights; published on 6 Dec 2023 by Euro-Med Monitor

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Gaza: Debris Generated by The Current Conflict Is 14 Times More Than the Combined Sum of All Debris Generated by Other Conflicts Since 2008

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1 August 2024, Geneva, Switzerland,- The recent conflict in the Gaza Strip has produced a volume of debris that is 14 times greater than the combined total from all conflicts over the past 16 years. This finding comes from a comprehensive assessment conducted by UN-HABITAT and UNEP.

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Two Palestinian prisoners tortured to death at notorious Israeli Sde Teiman

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Two Palestinian prisoners tortured to death at notorious Israeli Sde Teiman

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Two Palestinians tortured to death at notorious Sde Teiman base

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Palestinian groups have confirmed the deaths of Islam al-Sarsawi and Omar Junaid at the notorious Sde Teiman facility where torture and abuse are rife

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‘Clean territory’: urbicide in the West Bank  by Stephen Graham

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‘Clean territory’: urbicide in the West Bank  by Stephen Graham

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The city of Ypres during World War I

Urbicide is a term which describes the deliberate wrecking or "killing" of a city, by direct or indirect means. It literally translates as "city-killing" ( Latin urbs "city" + Latin occido "to kill"). The term was first coined by the science fiction author Michael Moorcock in 1963 and later used by urban planners and architects to describe 20th century practices of urban restructuring in the United States. Ada Louise Huxtable in 1968 and Marshall Berman in 1996 have written about urban restructuring (and destruction) in areas like the Bronx, and highlight the impacts of aggressive redevelopment on the urban social experience. The term has come into being in an age of rapid globalization and urbanization. Though urbanization trends in the last century have led to a focus on violence and destruction in the context of the city, the practice of urbicide is thousands of years old.

Especially after the siege of Sarajevo, the term has increasingly been used to describe violence specifically directed to the destruction of an urban area. At the conclusion of the Yugoslav Wars, urbicide began to emerge as a distinct legal concept in international law. The exact constraints and definition of this term continues to be debated, and because the study of urbicide intersects with a number of disciplines including international politics, anthropology, and sociology, it has been difficult for scholars and policymakers to set a finite definition which satisfies all these fields.

The term "urbicide" has its roots in the Latin word urbs, meaning "city", and occido, meaning "to massacre". In 1944, Raphael Lemkin defined genocide as "a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves". This term, however, failed to address violence not aimed at human bodies. The first recorded use of the term "urbicide" was by Michael Moorcock in the Elric novella "Dead God's Homecoming" (Science Fantasy #59, Nova Publishing, June 1963). In the wake of the destruction of Sarajevo, the term gained more common usage, examples being found in the works of Marshall Berman (1987) and Bogdan Bogdanović. In their 1992 publication "Mostar '92", a group of Bosnian architects from Mostar used the term urbicide to define the violence against the city fabric, such as the destruction of the Mostar bridge, a usage consistent with Marshall Berman's prior use of the term to describe similar acts of violence in Bosnia.

Scholars have argued that urbicide is often closely related to genocide, as to destroy people's everyday lives is to destroy them. In his book Urbicide, Martin Coward argues along a similar line. Coward uses the term to denote "the destruction of buildings qua that which constitutes the conditions of possibility of a distinctively 'urban' existential quality... the urban is characterised by heterogeneity. Urbicide is thus an assault on buildings as the conditions of possibility of heterogeneity." Coward says that urbicide follows an anti-urban logic inherent in the politics of ethnic nationalism:

Insofar as urbanity, and in particular the buildings that are its conditions of possibility, reveals the ineluctably shared and heterogeneous nature of existence (our being-in-common), it comprises a constant, agonistic provocation to the ontopolitics of ethnic nationalism. In order to assert its appeal to an origin, ethnic nationalism thus strikes at the conditions of possibility of the agonism that constantly provokes it: the (built) things that constitute existence as fundamentally shared (a being-in-common).

Urbicide therefore shares the annihilatory character of genocide, but not its focus on human beings as the object of destruction.

Urbicide can also include can also include non-military forms of urban destruction, such as white flight, urban renewal or gentrification, if they are "characterised by the widespread deliberate destruction of buildings in order to disavow of agonism in and through the constitution of antagonism."

A relief on the Arch of Titus in Rome, depicting the looting of Jerusalem by Roman soldiers.

Marshall Berman, an American Marxist writer and political theorist, acknowledges the relatively recent inception of the term urbicide, and the subsequent study of urban destruction as a distinct phenomenon. However, Berman asserts that urbicide has existed as long as cities have, calling it "the oldest story in the world." Berman cites Euripides' tragedy The Trojan Women and the Old Testament books of Jeremiah and Lamentations as some of the earliest recorded musings on the nature and meaning of urbicide. He cites themes such as the breakdown of everyday life, the inability to care for oneself, and the suffering of one's children and inability to care for or comfort them as persistent themes in urbicides of all eras. Berman also sees the breakdown of traditional norms and leadership hierarchies and a loss of meaning in life as commonalities throughout both ancient and modern literature.

For Euripides, even if there is no meaning in the universe, one's city itself turns out to be a source of meaning. Even if it is burning down-maybe especially when it is burning down-the bonds between us and our city can give our lives some solid value. Thus the Trojan women console themselves that their loved ones died for something real, in defense of their city-unlike the Greek heroes, who lived and died for conquest, for booty, for plunder, for nothing at all.

-  Marshall Berman, "Falling Towers: Life After Urbicide", Geography and Identity (1993)

In later times the Roman Empire imposed the complete destruction of Jerusalem and a similarly devastating Carthaginian peace, though these proved less than permanent. Carthage was sacked and rebuilt many times, but did not remain in ruin until Muslim armies established the port of Tunis a few miles away, diverting trade and population away from the ancient city. Other authors have cited the destruction of Tenochtitlán (1521) and Moscow (1812) as examples of premodern urbicide. The Mongols under Genghis Khan's leadership destroyed many cities, including Merv in Central Asia.

The American cities were victims of the 1970s global recession, aggravated by the decline of government and private investment, which resulted in urban decay described as the "age of rubble". This situation led to ghettoization and exodus in large areas like the South Bronx. Frank D'Hont mentions a number of cases in late 21st century Europe, and criticises how Europeans urban planners neglected the preservation of the urban fabric "in times of war and conflict" under the assumption that conflict was not a problem in modern Europe. D'Hont included the Balkans (focusing on Kosovo), Derry, Belfast, Nicosia, and even ghettoized areas of Paris.

Hamburg after the 1943 bombing. The city was completely destroyed during the Anglo-American bombing in World War II.

The Second World War saw some of the earliest and most extreme examples of the aerial destruction of cities such as Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The development of air warfare and aerial bombardment and nuclear weapons made cities and their infrastructure into targets of war in a new and devastating way.

During the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the German Army destroyed several cities in Soviet Union, causing a deliberate destruction of vital civilian infrastructure, including in Stalingrad. The city was firebombed with 1,000 tons of high explosives and incendiaries in 1,600 sorties on 23 August 1943. The aerial assault on Stalingrad was the most concentrated on the Ostfront according to Beevor, and was the single most intense aerial bombardment on the Eastern Front at that point. At least 90% of the housing stock was obliterated during the first week of the bombing, with an estimated 40,000 killed.

A German soldier sets fire to a building in Warsaw

The city [Warsaw] must completely disappear from the surface of the earth and serve only as a transport station for the Wehrmacht. No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler, SS officers' conference, 17 October 1944
During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Nazi Germany deliberately razed most of the city of Warsaw after the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. The uprising had infuriated German leaders, who decided to make an example of the city, although Nazi Germany had long selected Warsaw for major reconstruction as part of their Lebensraum policy and Generalplan Ost, the plans to Germanize Central and Eastern Europe and eliminate, ethnically cleanse, or enslave the native Polish and Slavic populations.

The Nazis dedicated an unprecedented effort to destroy the city. Their decision tied up considerable resources which could have been used at the Eastern Front and at the newly-opened Western Front following the Normandy landings. The Germans destroyed 80-90% of Warsaw's buildings and deliberately demolished, burned, or stole an immense part of its cultural heritage, completely destroying Warsaw's Old Town.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the extremes of the new levels of destruction made possible by modern military technology. Five square miles of Hiroshima were destroyed in seconds, with 90% of the city's 76,000 buildings destroyed. The urban fabric of Nagasaki faced a similar fate. A notable characteristic of the atomic bombings was the totality of the destruction; the way that "the whole of society was laid waste to its very foundations."

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses-120 war-horses-musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art.

-  Richard Rhodes, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"

Also notable is the fact that the total destruction faced by the bombed cities was brief, and quickly reversed. Though total recovery took time, water and power were restored within a week and the population of Hiroshima surged from 89,000 to 169,000 in the six months following the bombing.

The fall of Vukovar has been accompanied by destruction of the area. Castle Eltz was in ruins

The siege of Vukovar was an 87-day military campaign aimed against the eastern Croatian city of Vukovar led by the Yugoslav People's Army, supported by various Serbian paramilitary forces between August and November 1991 during the Croatian War of Independence. Vukovar suffered an indiscriminate bombardment, in which up to a million shells were fired on the city, Three quarters of the city's buildings were destroyed. Among them were schools, hospitals, churches, public institutions' facilities, factories, the medieval Eltz Castle and the house of the Nobel laureate scientist Lavoslav Ružička. Several sources, like the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia, described the systematic destruction of the city as urbicide. Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia also criticized the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2009 for not reaching a verdict for the destruction of Vukovar. Slobodan Milošević was indicted for, inter alia, "wanton destruction" of the city, but died before a verdict was reached. Goran Hadžić was also indicted in the same category and also died while awaiting trial in 2016.

Heavily destroyed apartment buildings in Sarajevo

Violence in Sarajevo was a product of the Bosnian War, which lasted from 1992-1995 in which Serb forces of the Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav People's Army besieged Sarajevo. This region was very ethnically diverse, providing homes for both Serbs and Muslim Slavs. The violence is sometimes referred to as ethnic cleansing which ended in some of the worst violence this region has ever seen. Ultimately, urbicide resulted in the complete annihilation of Sarajevo's built environment. This broke down the city's infrastructure and denied thousands of civilians food, water, medicine, etc. In the wake of this violence, Sarajevo's civilians also became victims of human rights offenses including rape, execution, and starvation. The Bosnian government declared the siege over in 1996.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted four Serb officials for numerous counts of crimes against humanity which they committed during the siege, including terrorism. Stanislav Galić and Dragomir Milošević were sentenced to life imprisonment and 29 years imprisonment respectively. Their superiors, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, were also convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

While the term "urbicide" finds its genesis in the urban destruction and targeting associated with the Bosnian Wars of the early 1990s, its meaning(s) develops historically and in the present. Recent events in Zimbabwe, while falling under the definition of urbicide as selective violence and destruction against cities, also positions urbicide outside the dynamics of genocidal warfare. Operation Murambatsvina or "Operation Restore Order" was a countrywide program of targeted violence against cities, towns, peripheral urban areas, and resettled farms, resulting in the destruction of housing, trading markets, and other "collective" structures. It was a large-scale operation, strategically resulting in the displacement of over 700,000 refugees, and "knowingly" manufacturing a massive humanitarian crisis. Beyond the obvious violations of human rights, Operation Murambatsvina is striking in its abilities to literally unhinge the urban and rural poor from the collective structures integral to everyday, grounded existence in favor of dispersal, but without active state measures to reinstitute these people within governable spaces. Though Operation Murambatsvina has been seen as urbicidal, the question has been raised as to whether an urbicidal framework seeks a different subtext.[citation needed ]

Aleppo, Mosul, Raqqa

Much of Raqqa suffered extensive damage during the battle[30]

Robert Templer and AlHakam Shaar proposed that the deliberate destruction of Aleppo during the Battle of Aleppo was a form of "urbicide".

In 2017, retired US Army officer and urban-warfare researcher John Spencer listed Mosul as one of the cities destroyed by violent combat, joining battles such as Stalingrad, Huế, Grozny, Aleppo and Raqqa.

Around 80% of Raqqa had been left "uninhabitable" after the battle, according to the UN.

Avdiivka, Bakhmut, Mariupol, Marinka, Popasna

A street in Mariupol, 2022

Since 2014, the Russian military invasion has caused significant destruction of Ukrainian cities, with the goal of "destroying heterogeneous cultural and symbolic urban space and the diversity of the urban cultural heritage". During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Army destroyed even more cities in eastern Ukraine, causing a deliberate destruction of vital civilian infrastructure, including in Severodonetsk, Kramatorsk, Mariupol and Bakhmut. It was described by the New Lines Institute as follows: "from the onset of Russian President Vladimir Putin 's invasion of Ukraine, Russia has engaged in a sustained and systematic campaign of urbicide".

The Russian Army also perpetrated wanton destruction of Ukrainian cities and cultural destruction, including confiscating and burning Ukrainian books, historical archives, and damaging more than 240 Ukrainian heritage sites. 90% of Mariupol was destroyed by the Russian 2022 siege. Marinka and Popasna were similarly completely destroyed and were described as "post-apocalyptic wasteland" and "ghost towns".

From February to June 2022, 27 Ukrainian cities were subjected to Russian shelling, bombing or street fighting every 10 days, 7 cities every fourth day, while four cities were subjected to it every second day. Moreover, cities with higher signs of Ukrainian identity were targeted the heaviest. Since March 2024, a dozen energy facilities were destroyed by Russian attacks, causing shortages of electricity and running water for millions of Ukrainians. In 2024, the UN estimated that Ukraine will need $486 billion for reconstructing the damage done by the Russian destruction, including for two million destroyed homes (accounting for 10% of Ukraine's housing network).

War destruction in Gaza City, 10 October 2023

Israeli destruction of cities in Palestine has been described as an urbicide, particularly Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war when more than half of Gaza's buildings were damaged or destroyed by January 2024. The devastation goes beyond material boundaries; it becomes a social and cultural catastrophe. Fatina Abreek Zubiedat, an assistant professor at Tel Aviv University Azrieli School of Architecture said that the wanton destruction of Gaza is reducing the urban area into "an ahistorical entity, something present outside modernity and global experience".

Human rights discourse provides another lens in which we can view urbicide, especially through the use of The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Using the term urbicide, usually refers to violence and destruction of buildings and architecture, but when also using the UN's Declaration along with urbicide, the focus is instead on people. Looking at violent acts and observing how they affect people, their culture and their safety inevitably centers on human rights and may often carry more validity for these urbicidal acts to also be cases of human rights violations.

The following cases are viewed here with a greater focus on the human rights aspect of them. The term urbicide can still apply, but human rights language may allow for a more familiar approach to these cases as many people are already aware of the general rights that people hold. These rights are explicitly stated here to fully demonstrate how fundamental rights are being violated as part of urbicide:

Article 3 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person and Article 5 states that no one shall be subjected to torture, or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. However, 20,000 Muslim women and girls were raped by Serbs, thousands were missing and/or executed. When using the term urbicide, human rights should be included because atrocities against the civilian population also affect the culture and feeling of the city. They must be taken into account when the urbicidal effects of bombings and military actions in the region are being examined because they show that the conflict was more than simply destroying the physical city buildings; there was destruction of people, their safety and of their communities.

At least 700,000 Zimbabweans were forced from their urban homes and were left to create new lives for themselves during Operation Murambatsvina in May 2005. Many say this breaks the UN's Article 25 which says: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. The government forcibly removed these citizens from where they were living knowingly displaced them, leaving them without resources and access to food, shelter and health care.

As of now there is no explicit language mentioning urbicide in international and humanitarian law. As the term has been coined and interpreted only recently, during the Yugoslav war in the 1990s, it has not reached public consciousness and public discourse to such extent as to be an instantiated into international law. If genocide and urbicide, however, are synonymous terms, as some theorists propose, it could be argued that urbicide is already prohibited by international law. It can also be argued that urbicide, as destruction of urban spaces and human habitations, is made illegal under international law and humanitarian law through the effects of other laws dealing with destruction of human-made environment and people's dependency upon it. Such laws are the rights to adequate housing, the right to life and privacy, to mental integrity, and to the freedom of movement. The most salient example of Sarajevo, where the term urbicide partly originated, clearly demonstrates the violation of these basic human rights on the civilian population of the city. Testimonies of the urbicide in Sarajevo, in the cultural production of confessional literature during the siege, clearly show the dramatic plunge in the standard of living, the overtaking and militarization of the public space, and the daily struggle of the citizens to get basic supplies such as food and water. In other cases, such as the Porta Farm evacuation and demolition of settlements by the Harare local government, there is evidence of violation of these basic human rights as specified by the International Law and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Despite the specified violations, however, it might be useful to apply, as with genocide, the umbrella term urbicide for these and other cases of urban destruction.

The prospects for a codified prohibition of urbicide might benefit from differentiating the term's legal articulation from human rights law, just as urbicide conceptually separates itself from human rights. With the city as the site of urbicide, the traditional nation-state parties to international legislation might not suffice alone as stake-holders in any legal process, customary or otherwise. However, too much localizing of the criminalization of urbicide risks exonerating by inaction the governments often implicated as aggressors against the city and its citizens. It is often against their power interest to prosecute urbicide or to establish any form of judicial framework that deals explicitly with violations of such nature.

The inclusion of governments into the process is desirable, but their willingness to submit to another kind of scrutiny: particularly under the broad definitions of structural violence that often enter discourses on urbicide. They could presumably make their way into the legal discourses, as well.

The lack of explicit terminology that would address the destruction of cities in legal terms on the international level makes it unlikely that the international courts will take the issue more seriously. The problem is also with the enforcement of these laws on the international level, which have previously unenforced, even the human rights laws already in place.

Decisions of the International court, such as the case of reparations to Bosnia by the Serbian government for crimes against humanity, in which the court, in February 2007, acquitted Serbia of the duty to give reparations, perhaps demonstrate the further need to distinguish between urbicide and genocide. In the case of Sarajevo, where the case of genocide, as legally understood, could not be unequivocally applied to cases such as the Siege of Sarajevo, the concept of urbicide might provide a better interpretive framework for the violence inflicted upon the Sarajevo populace and their urban environment, such as the shared public space and the architecture of the city. The goal of such violence may have not been to destroy a minority population and their cultural and symbolic space, as in cases of genocide but to fragment the heterogeneous population of the city into homogeneous enclaves based on the ethnicity of the population. Thus, the violence is not directed towards an ethnicity per se, but towards the city as a heterogeneous space where different cultural identities can live and interact without antagonism.

Abujidi Nurhan and Verschure Han, "Military Occupation as Urbicide by 'Construction & Destruction':the Case of Nablus, Palestine", The Arab World Geographer/Le Géographe du mond arabe, Vol.9, No.2:2006

Moorcock, Michael. "Dead God's Homecoming", in Science Fantasy #59, Nova Publishing, (June 1963)

Berman, Marshall. "Falling Towers: City Life After Urbicide," in Dennis Crow, ed., Geography and Identity. (Washington, 1996): 172-192.

Bevan, Robert. The Destruction of Memory. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.

Coward, Martin. "Urbicide in Bosnia," in Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics. (London: Blackwell, 2004): 154-171.

Graham, Stephen. "Cities, Warfare, and States of Emergency," in Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics. (London: Blackwell, 2004): 1-25.

Herscher, Andrew (2006). "American Urbicide". Journal of Architectural Education. 60: 18-20. doi:10.1111/j.1531-314x.2006.066_8.x. S2CID 219537146.

Kanishka Goonewardena, "Colonization and the New Imperialism: On the Meaning of Urbicide Today": 1-26.

Shaw, Martin. "New Wars of the City: 'Urbicide' and 'Genocide,'" in Stephen Graham, ed., Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics. (London: Blackwell, 2004): 141-153.

Clements-Hunt, Aaron (2022-06-07). "Russia's Campaign of Urbicide in Ukraine". New Lines Institute.

"Dead God's Homecoming", Science Fantasy #59, Michael Moorcock

"Falling Towers: City Life After Urbicide," Marshall Berman

"Colonization and the new imperialism: on the meaning of urbicide today," Kanishka Goonewardena

"New Wars of the City: Urbicide and Genocide," Martin Shaw

"The Pentagon as global slumlord," Mike Davis

"City and Death," Bogdan Bogdanovic

"On the natural history of destruction," W.G. Sebald

"Planet of Slums," Mike Davis.

Abujidi Nurhan and Verschure, Han (2006) Military Occupation as Urbicide by "Construction and Destruction": The Case of Nablus, Palestine.

"American Urbicide," Andrew Herscher. Journal of Architectural Education, 60:1 (September 2006).

"The Destruction of Memory," Robert Bevan

"Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics," Stephen Graham

"Urbicide: The politics of urban destruction", Martin Coward (2008)

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Urbicide is a term which describes the deliberate wrecking or "killing" of a city, by direct or indirect means. It literally translates as "city-killing" ( Latin urbs "city" + Latin occido "to kill"). The term was first coined by the science fiction author Michael Moorcock in 1963 and later used by urban planners and architects to describe 20th century practices of urban restructuring in the United States.

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“Domicide” must be recognised as an international crime: UN expert

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“Domicide” must be recognised as an international crime: UN expert

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https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/10/domicide-must-be-recognised-international-crime-un-expert

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Adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and the right to non-discrimination in this context

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Adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and the right to non-discrimination in this context

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UN adequate standard of living, and the right to

non-discrimination in this context

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Domicide, the global destruction of home, introduction

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Domicide, the global destruction of home, introduction

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Media reports describing the destruction of people's homes, for reasons ranging from ethnic persecution to the perceived need for a new airport or highway, are all too familiar. The planned destruction of homes affects millions of people globally; places destroyed range in scale from single dwellings to entire homelands.

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Guerre Israël-Gaza : le "domicide", ou la destruction du domicile, peut-il devenir un crime contre l’humanité ? January 13

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Guerre Israël-Gaza : le "domicide", ou la destruction du domicile, peut-il devenir un crime contre l’humanité ? January 13

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Guerre Israël-Gaza : le 'domicide', ou la destruction du domicile, peut-il devenir un crime contre l'humanité ?

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Depuis le 7 octobre, Israël a détruit ou endommagé 70% des 439.000 habitations et environ la moitié des bâtiments de...

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L'élimination ciblée, la vengeance systématique d'Israël en cas d'attaque depuis 1948 (RTBF, 1er août)

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L'élimination ciblée, la vengeance systématique d'Israël en cas d'attaque depuis 1948

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Le 3 janvier dernier, David Barnea, le nouveau chef du Mossad, les services secrets israéliens, déclarait lors des...

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Report on the Impact of the Recent War in 2023 on the Cultural Heritage in Gaza Strip November 23

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Report on the Impact of the Recent War in 2023 on the Cultural Heritage in Gaza Strip November 23

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Cultural Heritage in Gaza Strip - Palestine

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Israel's war triggers plague of disease outbreaks in Gaza (New arab) July 31

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Israel's war triggers plague of disease outbreaks in Gaza (New arab) July 31

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As summer temperatures rise amidst Israel's ongoing war in Gaza, the health situation in the Gaza Strip has deteriorated significantly.

Thousands of displaced Gazans are living in overcrowded shelters amidst waste and sewage, facing extreme heat and minimal access to medical supplies.

With the escalation of Israel's aggression, epidemics and infectious diseases are spreading rapidly.

Since the onset of the conflict, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that at least 150,000 people in Gaza have contracted skin diseases.

Diseases include scabies, chickenpox, lice, impetigo, and other debilitating rashes.

"I'm getting pimples all over me"

Ahmad Abu Warda, medical activities manager for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), described a troubling case from a primary health care clinic: "We saw at our clinic a two-year-old girl who developed impetigo. She also caught dermatitis and insect bites from living in a tent in this hot weather," he told The New Arab (TNA) in a recording from Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.

"These three conditions cause her severe itching. She can't sleep at night and refuses to eat, which is leading to weight loss and more complications," he continued.

Muhammad Al-Bardini, a volunteer at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, shared his personal struggle with the healthcare crisis: "I'm getting pimples all over me. Because I don't have money, I couldn't get the right medication and cream to treat it," he wrote in a message to TNA.

Tanya Haj-Hassan, a humanitarian doctor with years of experience in Gaza, reported on the widespread nature of skin diseases: "We are seeing outbreaks of pervasive skin diseases. I know of one family whose children were infected by impetigo all over their bodies, literally from head to toe," she mentioned to TNA.

Omar, a pharmacist from Gaza, expressed concern about the alarming spread of diseases: "Diseases have begun to spread in a frightening manner, especially skin diseases and Hepatitis A. Our heads have become a refuge for dandruff and lice. The temperature is very high. Honestly, if we don't die from the bombings, we will die from the disease," he recently posted on X.

Pascale Coissard, emergency coordinator for MSF in Gaza, also highlighted the worsening health crisis: "For weeks, we have been finding in primary health centers that the main morbidity is related to skin diseases," she told TNA.

"Scabies, impetigo, and fungus are quite widespread among children and others," she added.

Polio threat on the rise

The concerns do not end there; there is also a noticeable increase in other troubling infections.

Based on WHO data as of July 7, nearly one million cases of acute respiratory infections have been recorded since the start of the conflict.

Additionally, almost 575,000 cases of acute watery diarrhoea and 107,000 cases of jaundice syndrome (suspected Hepatitis A) have been documented, with the actual number of infections likely being much higher.

Since October 7, the WHO has reported 96,417 cases of scabies and lice, 9,274 cases of chickenpox, 60,130 cases of rash, and 10,038 cases of impetigo.

Health officials are warning of a significant risk of polio spreading after a variant of the virus was found in sewage samples in Gaza.

"These things are to be expected though they are preventable. It's a man-made disaster," Lindmeier said, criticising Israel for disregarding its international obligations as an occupying power to ensure that the civilian population in Gaza is "as little impacted as possible."

"That's why we need a ceasefire, and we need it now," he reiterated.

Gaza Strip healthcare collapse

This health situation is worsened by the severe damage to Gaza's hygiene and sanitation systems, as well as its medical facilities, which has greatly deteriorated health conditions in the besieged territory.

Israel has barred the entry of raw materials for washing into Gaza for more than two months. Amid Tel Aviv's current closure of all crossings, markets across the Strip have run out of essential items like shampoo, soap, disinfectants, and laundry detergents, resulting in up to a 90 percent decrease in the availability of cleaning supplies.

The remaining healthcare system in Gaza is barely operational due to continued heavy fighting. Currently, only 14 out of 36 hospitals are partially functional, and the health system has lost 70 percent of its bed capacity, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza.

Christian Lindmeier, WHO spokesperson, highlighted the collapse of Gaza's healthcare system: "The impact of the war in Gaza and the Israeli blockade on people's health is massive," he reported to TNA.

He pointed to the destruction of sewage and water systems, overcrowding, and the extremely low availability of hygiene supplies. These factors have resulted in degrading sanitation conditions and unsafe water consumption, leading to a wide range of diseases and infections.

Mohamed Abdelaziz, medical service delegate for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) MENA office, noted, "It's a perfect environment for different types of diseases to flourish and spread," referring to the destroyed healthcare infrastructure, compromised public health capacity, and severely limited access to water, sanitation, and hygiene.

With the health system dramatically overstretched, Abdelaziz added, "There is very little public health capacity to fight against the eruption of diseases."

He concluded by saying that the health system's ability to detect disease outbreaks has also been significantly hindered by the ongoing conflict and the tight Israeli siege.

Pascale Coissard emphasised the critical issue of overcrowding in the few remaining hospitals: "The biggest problem right now is overcrowding. There's no space," she said.

"At one point, we saw patients lying on the floor, in the corridors, and on the stairs," referring to Nasser Hospital, the last remaining hospital in southern Gaza. This situation is a result of the acute shortages of medical supplies and the overwhelming increase in patients that MSF teams are witnessing at the facility.

Israel's blockade deepens crisis

The worsening health situation is also driven by severe shortages of essential medicines, food, water, and fuel, all of which are a result of the Israeli blockade.

In response to the spread of epidemics and infectious diseases, water distribution is a critical part of MSF's efforts. However, the lack of fuel to pump and transport water is a major obstacle.

"Water desalination plants in Gaza are not fully operational due to the depletion of fuel needed to operate them," Coissard noted.

Similarly, Abdelaziz stressed that fuel is a very scarce but "essential resource" for keeping medical services running in Gaza.

Israel's systematic obstruction of humanitarian aid and ongoing attacks on aid operations have significantly hampered the entry and delivery of assistance.

Humanitarian staff and health workers have repeatedly come under attack, endangering their lives and further disrupting aid efforts.

A recent joint report by 14 international NGOs operating in Gaza found that over 500 healthcare workers and 274 aid workers have been killed in the last nine months.

None of the land crossings into the territory have been fully functional since October, and the north remains practically cut off from the south by the Israeli army.

The humanitarian situation in the enclave has particularly deteriorated since Israeli forces seized and subsequently closed the Rafah crossing in early May.

This closure has resulted in the restriction of main crossings and halted the movement of aid from Egypt into the coastal strip.

As of July 29, Gaza's Health Ministry has declared a polio epidemic in the region.
Alessandra Bajec is a freelance journalist currently based in Tunis Follow her on Twitter: @AlessandraBajec

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Israel's war triggers plague of disease outbreaks in Gaza

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Israel's escalating war and blockade, along with a failing health system, are worsening Gaza's health crisis, leading to the rapid spread of infectious diseases

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GAZA’S DISPLACED PEOPLE FACE A NEW PERIL: HEPATITIS A OUTBREAK

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GAZA’S DISPLACED PEOPLE FACE A NEW PERIL: HEPATITIS A OUTBREAK

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La guerre israélienne à Gaza réduit au silence ses mosquées historiques

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La guerre israélienne à Gaza réduit au silence ses mosquées historiques

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La guerre israélienne à Gaza réduit au silence ses mosquées historiques

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Alors que plus de 300 mosquées ont été endommagées, un vide se fait sentir à travers Gaza, où l'appel à la prière est désormais absent

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Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests. Amnesty International, November 8, 2023

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Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests. Amnesty International, November 8, 2023

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Israeli authorities have dramatically increased their use of administrative detention, a form of arbitrary detention, of Palestinians across the occupied West Bank; extended emergency measures that facilitate inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners; and failed to investigate incidents of torture and death in custody over the past four weeks, Amnesty International said today.

Since 7 October, Israeli forces have detained more than 2,200 Palestinian men and women, according to the Palestinian Prisoners' Club. According to Israeli human rights organization HaMoked between 1 October and 1 November, the total number of Palestinians held in administrative detention, without charge or trial, rose from 1,319 to 2,070.

Testimony from released detainees and human rights lawyers, as well as video footage and images illustrate some of the forms of torture and other ill-treatment prisoners have been subjected to by Israeli forces over the past four weeks. These include severe beatings and humiliation of detainees, including by forcing them to keep their heads down, to kneel on the floor during inmate count, and to sing Israeli songs.

"Over the last month we have witnessed a significant spike in Israel's use of administrative detention - detention without charge or trial that can be renewed indefinitely - which was already at a 20-year high before the latest escalation in hostilities on 7 October. Administrative detention is one of the key tools through which Israel has enforced its system of apartheid against Palestinians. Testimonies and video evidence also point to numerous incidents of torture and other ill-treatment by Israeli forces including severe beatings and deliberate humiliation of Palestinians who are detained in dire conditions," said Heba Morayef, Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa.

Over the last month we have witnessed a significant spike in Israel's use of administrative detention - detention without charge or trial that can be renewed indefinitely - which was already at a 20-year high before the latest escalation in hostilities on 7 October.
Heba Morayef, Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa

"The summary killings and hostage-taking by Hamas and other armed groups on 7 October are war crimes and must be condemned as such, but Israeli authorities must not use these attacks to justify their own unlawful attacks and collective punishment of civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip and the use of torture, arbitrary detention and other violations of the rights of Palestinian prisoners. The prohibition against torture can never be suspended or derogated from, including - and especially - at times like these."

Amnesty International researchers interviewed 12 people, including six released detainees, three relatives of detainees, and three lawyers working on recent arrests. Researchers also reviewed testimonies shared by other released detainees and analysed video footage and images.

Torture and humiliation

Amnesty International has for decades documented widespread torture by Israeli authorities in places of detention across the West Bank. However, over the past four weeks, videos and images have been shared widely online showing gruesome scenes of Israeli soldiers beating and humiliating Palestinians while detaining them blind-folded, stripped, with their hands tied, in a particularly chilling public display of torture and humiliation of Palestinian detainees.

In one image analysed by Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab, three Palestinian men, blindfolded and stripped of their clothes can be seen beside a soldier, wearing a green olive uniform like those worn by the Israeli ground forces. A Haaretz investigation published on 19 October found that the image was taken in Wadi al-Seeq, a village East of Ramallah, on 12 October. One of the three victims depicted in the photograph told Amnesty International that he had initially been held and beaten by settlers but two hours later an Israeli military jeep arrived:

"One of the Israeli officers who came, approached me and kicked me on my left side, then jumped on my head with his two legs pushing my face further into the dirt and then continued kicking me as I was head down, into the dirt, with my hands tied behind my back. He then got a knife and tore all of my clothes off except for my underwear and used part of my torn clothes to blindfold me. The beating to the rest of my body did not stop, at one point he started jumping on my back - three or four times - while yelling 'die, die you trash' ... in the end before this finally stopped, another officer urinated on my face and body while also yelling at us 'to die'."

The beating to the rest of my body did not stop, at one point he started jumping on my back - three or four times - while yelling 'die, die you trash' ... in the end before this finally stopped, another officer urinated on my face and body while also yelling at us 'to die'.
A victim attacked by Israeli settlers and military in East Ramallah

Amnesty International also spoke to two women who were arbitrarily detained for 14 hours at a police station in occupied East Jerusalem where they were humiliated, strip-searched, mocked and asked to curse Hamas. They were later released without charges.

In a video first published on social media on 31 October and analysed by Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab, nine detained men, who based on identifiable accents are Palestinian, can be seen, some stripped naked and others half-naked, blindfolded and handcuffed, surrounded by at least 12 soldiers wearing olive green uniforms and equipped with either M4A1 or Tavor X95 assault rifles. Both uniforms and weapons are standard issue equipment of the Israeli ground forces. One of the soldiers is seen kicking one of the detainees in the head. Another video analysed by Amnesty's Crisis Evidence Lab uploaded to platform X (formerly Twitter) on 31 October shows a blindfolded person, likely Palestinian, along with an Israeli army sergeant mocking the prisoner and dancing around him.

A recently released Palestinian detainee from occupied East Jerusalem, who spoke to Amnesty International on condition of anonymity, said how Israeli interrogators subjected him and other detainees at the Russian Compound (al-Maskoubiyeh), a detention center in Jerusalem, to severe beatings which left him with bruises and three broken ribs. He also highlighted how Israeli police interrogators beat them continuously on their heads yelling at them to always keep their heads down, while ordering them to "praise Israel and curse Hamas." He added: "even when one of the 12 detainees with us in the cell did that, the beating and humiliation did not stop."

Since 7 October, according to the Israeli authorities, four Palestinian detainees have died in Israeli detention facilities in circumstances that have not yet been impartially investigated. Two of the four are workers from the occupied Gaza Strip, held incommunicado by the Israeli army in military detention centres, whose deaths were only made public by the army after an inquiry by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Under international law, torture and other ill-treatment committed against protected persons in an occupied territory is a war crime. The detention of protected persons outside the occupied territory, as is the case of Palestinian prisoners from the OPT held in Israel, is also a violation of international humanitarian law as it amounts to forcible transfer.

Inhuman and degrading treatment in prisons

The Israeli Prison Service informed human rights group HaMoked that as of 1 November it is holding 6,809 Palestinian prisoners. On 31 October, the Israeli authorities extended by one month the "state of emergency in prisons" which grants Israel's National Security Minister virtually unrestrained powers to deny sentenced prisoners access to visits by lawyers and family members; to hold detainees in overcrowded cells; to deny them outdoor exercise and to impose cruel collective punishment measures such as cutting off water and electricity for long hours, effectively allowing for the intensification of cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees, in violation of the prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment.

The International Committee for the Red Cross has confirmed that Palestinian prisoners have been denied contact with their families and lawyers since 7 October. Sanaa Salameh, the wife of terminally ill Palestinian prisoner Walid Daqqah, told Amnesty International that since 7 October neither she nor Daqqah's attorney has been allowed to see him or to receive information about his health condition. "I don't know if he is receiving the medical care he needs; I have absolutely no contact with him, I don't even have a scrap of information to comfort me," she told Amnesty.

Palestinian lawyer Hassan Abadi, who has been visiting at least four detainees every week since 7 October, told Amnesty International that Palestinian detainees have been denied their right to outdoor exercise and that one of the forms of humiliation to which they are subjected during inmate count is being forced to kneel on the floor. He added that Palestinians in detention have had all their personal belongings confiscated and at times burned, including books, diaries, letters, clothes, food and other items. Palestinian women prisoners in al-Damon prison have had their sanitary pads confiscated by prison authorities. According to Abadi, a client he is representing told him that when she was detained and blindfolded at Kiryat Arba police station near Hebron an officer threatened her with rape.

Spike in arbitrary detention

Administrative detention of Palestinians had been on the rise throughout 2023, reaching 1,319 on 1 October 2023, according to HaMoked. As of 1 November, this figure had increased to more than 2,070 Palestinians detained and held in administrative detention. Palestinians classified by Israel as "security inmates" are often held without charge or trial, mostly under administrative detention orders that can be renewed indefinitely every six months.

Administrative detention is a form of detention under which individuals are detained by state authorities based on secret security grounds that the defendant and their lawyer cannot review, effectively circumventing due process guaranteed for all persons deprived of their liberty under international law. Amnesty International has found that Israel has systematically used administrative detention as a tool to persecute Palestinians, rather than as an extraordinary and selectively used preventative measure.

Israeli authorities have also chosen to implement the "Unlawful Combatants" Law, a category which is not recognised by international law, to indefinitely hold without charge or trial at least 105 Palestinians from the occupied Gaza Strip, who entered Israel during the Hamas led attack on 7 October. It remains unclear how many of those are held in connection with the attacks.

Israeli judicial authorities must also impartially and independently investigate complaints of torture and other ill-treatment and prosecute in fair trials those responsible for ordering and carrying out torture.
Heba Morayef, Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa

Israeli authorities have also subjected thousands of Palestinians from Gaza with permits to enter Israel, mostly workers, to a third form of arbitrary detention where they were held incommunicado for at least three weeks on two military detention bases in Israel and the West Bank. Many were released, however, there is no transparency from Israeli authorities around how many are still detained.

"Israeli authorities must immediately reverse the inhumane emergency measures imposed on Palestinian prisoners and grant them immediate access to their lawyers and families. All Palestinians arbitrarily detained must be released. We urge Israel to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to conduct urgent visits to prisons and detention facilities and to monitor conditions for Palestinian detainees," said Heba Morayef.

"Israeli judicial authorities must also impartially and independently investigate complaints of torture and other ill-treatment and prosecute in fair trials those responsible for ordering and carrying out torture."

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Israel/OPT: Horrifying cases of torture and degrading treatment of Palestinian detainees amid spike in arbitrary arrests

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Israeli authorities have dramatically increased their use of administrative detention, a form of arbitrary detention, of Palestinians across the occupied West Bank; extended emergency measures that facilitate inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners; and failed to investigate incidents of torture and death in custody over the past four weeks, Amnesty International said today.

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UNESCO Adds Historic Monastery in Gaza to List of Endangered Sites July 29

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UNESCO Adds Historic Monastery in Gaza to List of Endangered Sites July 29

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Mosaic floor inside Saint Hilarion Monastery in Gaza. Courtesy UNESCO

UNESCO has added the ancient Saint Hilarion Monastery, also known as Tell Umm Amer, in Gaza to its endangered sites list as a result of the ongoing war with Israel. The decision was announced during the 46th iteration of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in New Delhi, India.

One of the oldest, largest, and most complex monasteries, the monastery dates back to the 4th century CE. The site was home to the first monastic community in the Holy Land. Though it has been on the organization's tentative heritage list since 2012, its status was fast-tracked using emergency procedures.

A native to the area, Saint Hilarion founded the eponymous site, which boasts two churches, a baptism hall, a burial ground, and a public cemetery, as well as an audience hall and dining rooms. After it was damaged, the monastery was ultimately abandoned in the early 7th century CE. It was later rediscovered by local archaeologists in 1999.

Conservation projects undertaken by the Switzerland-based foundation Aliph and the British Council (led by Première Urgence Internationale) have helped to protect and restore the site.

"UNESCO expresses deep concern about the impact of the ongoing conflict on cultural heritage, particularly in the Gaza Strip," a statement released by UNESCO explained, adding, "The organization urges all involved parties to strictly adhere to international law, emphasizing that cultural property should not be targeted or used for military purposes, as it is considered civilian infrastructure."

Since the start of the conflict last October, more than 39,000 Gazans have been killed, according to the local health ministry, with most of the strip's 2.3 million people being forced to evacuate their homes.

There have been more than 100 cultural landmarks and historic sites destroyed in Gaza due to Israeli airstrikes. The monastery joins four other landmarks in Palestine on UNESCO's World Heritage list, which offers technical and financial assistance towards the protection and rehabilitation of each site.

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UNESCO Adds Historic Monastery in Gaza to List of Endangered Sites

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UNESCO added the Saint Hilarion monastery in Gaza to its list of endangered sites amid Israel's ongoing war in the region.

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The last thing written by the martyr Ibrahim Al-Ghula today, his house was bombed along with his wife and children. July 28

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The last thing written by the martyr Ibrahim Al-Ghula today, his house was bombed along with his wife and children. July 28

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The decimation of Gaza’s academia is ‘impossible to quantify’

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The decimation of Gaza’s academia is ‘impossible to quantify’

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The decimation of Gaza’s academia is ‘impossible to quantify’

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With thousands of faculty and students likely killed and campuses destroyed, Gaza’s universities are barely surviving Israel’s scholasticide.

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Doctors accuse Israeli troops of desecrating bodies and shooting civilians at hospital Israel says was Hamas ‘command center’ December 2023

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Doctors accuse Israeli troops of desecrating bodies and shooting civilians at hospital Israel says was Hamas ‘command center’ December 2023

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Doctors accuse Israeli troops of desecrating bodies and shooting civilians at hospital Israel says was Hamas 'command center' | CNN

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Israeli soldiers raiding a hospital in northern Gaza desecrated the bodies of deceased patients with bulldozers, let a military dog maul a man in a wheelchair, and shot multiple doctors even after vetting them, according to allegations by staffers and patients at Kamal Adwan hospital, where Israeli forces spent eight days last week.

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map Tel al-sultan point of view pro israel

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map Tel al-sultan point of view pro israel

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New evidence continues to exonerate Israel in Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan tragedy - AIJAC

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An ongoing IDF investigation into Rafah’s Tel al-Sultan fire that killed a reported 45 displaced Gazans on Monday after a targeted air strike on Hamas commanders in the neighbourhood has revealed more evidence that the fatal fire was not directly caused by Israeli munitions, but instead was caused by a secondary explosion in a Hamas…

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@MaenHouseh Israeli nazi soldiers messing around in a house they occupied in Gaza and then burning it down ! 

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@MaenHouseh Israeli nazi soldiers messing around in a house they occupied in Gaza and then burning it down ! 
 https://t.co/whQXtqsV6r

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This is an invitation to a wedding. 

Has such a thing ever been documented in any war in history? (serious question)

Such act is neither a one-time incident nor an isolated occurrence. We've seen numerous videos depicting the destruction of homes, universities, and schools as… https://t.co/Be8I7nzuUd https://t.co/vDcecBcAwO

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Israeli nazi soldiers messing around in a house they occupied in Gaza and then burning it down !
pic.twitter.com/whQXtqsV6r
— Stop the Genocide in Gaza Marwa AlGamal (@MarwaEl94317678) January 2, 2024

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@MaenHouseh Israeli nazi soldiers messing around in a house they occupied in Gaza and then burning it down ! 
 https://t.co/whQXtqsV6r

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.includes.tweets[].text
This is an invitation to a wedding. 

Has such a thing ever been documented in any war in history? (serious question)

Such act is neither a one-time incident nor an isolated occurrence. We've seen numerous videos depicting the destruction of homes, universities, and schools as… https://t.co/Be8I7nzuUd https://t.co/vDcecBcAwO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
@MaenHouseh Israeli nazi soldiers messing around in a house they occupied in Gaza and then burning it down ! 
 https://t.co/whQXtqsV6r

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
@MaenHouseh Israeli nazi soldiers messing around in a house they occupied in Gaza and then burning it down ! 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
This is an invitation to a wedding. 

Has such a thing ever been documented in any war in history? (serious question)

Such act is neither a one-time incident nor an isolated occurrence. We've seen numerous videos depicting the destruction of homes, universities, and schools as… https://t.co/Be8I7nzuUd https://t.co/vDcecBcAwO

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Schools Without Borders: The new education initiative in Gaza

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Schools Without Borders: The new education initiative in Gaza

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Schools Without Borders: The new education initiative in Gaza

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Despite the devastation of war, graduate Nour Nassar's Schools Without Borders project is bringing hope and education to displaced children in Gaza's tent camps

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Le coup d’État silencieux : changer la nature du contrôle israélien en Cisjordanie

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Le coup d’État silencieux : changer la nature du contrôle israélien en Cisjordanie

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צילום: יוסי זמיר, שתיל-סטוק

ב-29 בדצמבר 2022 הושבעה הממשלה ה-37 של מדינת ישראל. על רקע "הרפורמה המשפטית", מתקפת חמאס ב-7 באוקטובר 2023, המלחמה בעזה והמצב בצפון, מדיניות הממשלה ביחס למשטר הכיבוש בגדה המערבית נותרה בשולי השיח הציבורי. אולם בשטח מתרחש שינוי משמעותי, ו הממשלה הנוכחית מקדמת מדיניות השואפת להביא להחלת ריבונות ישראלית מלאה על הגדה המערבית , תוך ביסוס עליונות יהודית ודחיקת האוכלוסייה הפלסטינית.

כבר במסמך קווי היסוד של הממשלה ובהסכמים הקואליציוניים הצהירה הממשלה על שאיפה להחלת ריבונות מלאה, לכל הפחות על שטח C, אם לא על כלל הגדה המערבית; לפיתוח מסיבי של מפעל ההתנחלויות; להחלה מלאה של החקיקה הישראלית על מתנחלים בשם עקרון "שוויון" המתייחס כמובן לישראלים בלבד; ולמאבק במה שמכונה "תוכנית ההשתלטות הפלסטינית" על השטחים הפתוחים. דוח שמפרסמים האגודה לזכויות האזרח, יש דין, אופק ושוברים שתיקה סוקר בהרחבה את האמצעים השונים והמגוונים שבהם משתמשת הממשלה כדי ליישם את חזונה, ובהם: שינויים מבניים בשלטון הצבאי, שינויי חקיקה, תמיכה תקציבית, הרחבת מפעל ההתנחלויות, ושימוש באלימות ככלי לסיפוח וגירוש. במקביל נמשכים המהלכים להחלשת הדמוקרטיה, להגברת הפוליטיזציה של מערכת המשפט ולפגיעה בזכויות אדם בתוך גבולות ישראל הריבונית. אלה עתידים לסייע למימוש מדיניות הממשלה, שתופעל ללא ביקורת או התנגדות של שומרי הסף.

הממשלה הנוכחית מסירה מעל פניה את המסכה שהציגו עד כה ממשלות ישראל בפני העולם. מסכה זו ציירה לאורך שנים את ישראל כמי ששלטונה בשטחי הגדה המערבית עומד בחובות החוקיות החלות עליו, וכמי שעל החלטות השלטון שלה חלה ביקורת שיפוטית של בית המשפט העליון. כעת מדיניות הממשלה חותרת במוצהר לסיפוח ולביסוס עליונות יהודית בגדה. או במילותיו של השר סמוטריץ' - הממשלה הנוכחית מקדמת " שינויי רוחב מבניים שישנו את ה-DNA של המערכת להרבה מאוד שנים ".

חלוקת הסמכויות בין שר הביטחון לשר הנוסף במשרד הביטחון (סמוטריץ'), שעל בסיסה הוקמה מינהלת ההתיישבות ומונה אזרח לסגן ראש המינהל האזרחי, היא הדוגמה הבולטת ביותר לכוונת הממשלה לקדם את התהליך הזה באמצעות שינוי מבנה השלטון בגדה המערבית, והעברת סמכויות נרחבות לניהול היבטים רבים בתחומי החיים מהמפקד הצבאי לשר הנוסף במשרד הביטחון. מהלכי הממשלה מאז הקמתה מצביעים על תהליך שבבסיסו אידאולוגיה פוליטית המייצרת אסטרטגיה שתורגמה לתוכניות פעולה סדורות לטווח הרחוק, ואשר נמצא בליבת המדיניות של הממשלה גם בזמן המלחמה.

הדוח המלא: ההפיכה השקטה: שינוי אופי השליטה הישראלית בגדה המערבית

צילום: יוסי זמיר, שתיל-סטוק

ב-29 בדצמבר 2022 הושבעה הממשלה ה-37 של מדינת ישראל. על רקע "הרפורמה המשפטית", מתקפת חמאס ב-7 באוקטובר 2023, המלחמה בעזה והמצב בצפון, מדיניות הממשלה ביחס למשטר הכיבוש בגדה המערבית נותרה בשולי השיח הציבורי. אולם בשטח מתרחש שינוי משמעותי, ו הממשלה הנוכחית מקדמת מדיניות השואפת להביא להחלת ריבונות ישראלית מלאה על הגדה המערבית , תוך ביסוס עליונות יהודית ודחיקת האוכלוסייה הפלסטינית.

כבר במסמך קווי היסוד של הממשלה ובהסכמים הקואליציוניים הצהירה הממשלה על שאיפה להחלת ריבונות מלאה, לכל הפחות על שטח C, אם לא על כלל הגדה המערבית; לפיתוח מסיבי של מפעל ההתנחלויות; להחלה מלאה של החקיקה הישראלית על מתנחלים בשם עקרון "שוויון" המתייחס כמובן לישראלים בלבד; ולמאבק במה שמכונה "תוכנית ההשתלטות הפלסטינית" על השטחים הפתוחים. דוח שמפרסמים האגודה לזכויות האזרח, יש דין, אופק ושוברים שתיקה סוקר בהרחבה את האמצעים השונים והמגוונים שבהם משתמשת הממשלה כדי ליישם את חזונה, ובהם: שינויים מבניים בשלטון הצבאי, שינויי חקיקה, תמיכה תקציבית, הרחבת מפעל ההתנחלויות, ושימוש באלימות ככלי לסיפוח וגירוש. במקביל נמשכים המהלכים להחלשת הדמוקרטיה, להגברת הפוליטיזציה של מערכת המשפט ולפגיעה בזכויות אדם בתוך גבולות ישראל הריבונית. אלה עתידים לסייע למימוש מדיניות הממשלה, שתופעל ללא ביקורת או התנגדות של שומרי הסף.

הממשלה הנוכחית מסירה מעל פניה את המסכה שהציגו עד כה ממשלות ישראל בפני העולם. מסכה זו ציירה לאורך שנים את ישראל כמי ששלטונה בשטחי הגדה המערבית עומד בחובות החוקיות החלות עליו, וכמי שעל החלטות השלטון שלה חלה ביקורת שיפוטית של בית המשפט העליון. כעת מדיניות הממשלה חותרת במוצהר לסיפוח ולביסוס עליונות יהודית בגדה. או במילותיו של השר סמוטריץ' - הממשלה הנוכחית מקדמת " שינויי רוחב מבניים שישנו את ה-DNA של המערכת להרבה מאוד שנים ".

חלוקת הסמכויות בין שר הביטחון לשר הנוסף במשרד הביטחון (סמוטריץ'), שעל בסיסה הוקמה מינהלת ההתיישבות ומונה אזרח לסגן ראש המינהל האזרחי, היא הדוגמה הבולטת ביותר לכוונת הממשלה לקדם את התהליך הזה באמצעות שינוי מבנה השלטון בגדה המערבית, והעברת סמכויות נרחבות לניהול היבטים רבים בתחומי החיים מהמפקד הצבאי לשר הנוסף במשרד הביטחון. מהלכי הממשלה מאז הקמתה מצביעים על תהליך שבבסיסו אידאולוגיה פוליטית המייצרת אסטרטגיה שתורגמה לתוכניות פעולה סדורות לטווח הרחוק, ואשר נמצא בליבת המדיניות של הממשלה גם בזמן המלחמה.

הדוח המלא: ההפיכה השקטה: שינוי אופי השליטה הישראלית בגדה המערבית

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ההפיכה השקטה: שינוי אופי השליטה הישראלית בגדה המערבית | האגודה לזכויות האזרח בישראל

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ב-29 בדצמבר 2022 הושבעה הממשלה ה-37 של מדינת ישראל. על רקע "הרפורמה המשפטית", מתקפת חמאס ב-7 באוקטובר 2023, המלחמה בעזה והמצב בצפון, מדיניות הממשלה ביחס למשטר הכיבוש בגדה המערבית נותרה בשולי השיח הציבורי. אולם בשטח מתרחש שינוי משמעותי, והממשלה הנוכחית מקדמת מדיניות השואפת להביא להחלת ריבונות ישראלית מלאה על הגדה המערבית, תוך ביסוס עליונות יהודית ודחיקת האוכלוסייה הפלסטינית.

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Gaza’s Cultural Heritage Sites Under Fire Amid Conflict | Bellingcat on Scripps News

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Gaza’s Cultural Heritage Sites Under Fire Amid Conflict | Bellingcat on Scripps News

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Gaza’s Cultural Heritage Sites Under Fire Amid Conflict | Bellingcat on Scripps News

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Israel says it is exhuming bodies in Gaza to determine if they’re hostages

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Israel says it is exhuming bodies in Gaza to determine if they’re hostages

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Israel says it is exhuming bodies in Gaza to determine if they're hostages | CNN

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Israeli forces severely damaged a cemetery in Khan Younis in southern Gaza earlier this week, exhuming and removing bodies in what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) told CNN was part of a search for the remains of hostages seized by Hamas during the October 7 terror attacks.

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At least 16 cemeteries in Gaza have been desecrated by Israeli forces, satellite imagery and videos reveal

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At least 16 cemeteries in Gaza have been desecrated by Israeli forces, satellite imagery and videos reveal

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At least 16 cemeteries in Gaza have been desecrated by Israeli forces, satellite imagery and videos reveal | CNN

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The Israeli military has desecrated at least 16 cemeteries in its ground offensive in Gaza, a CNN investigation has found, leaving gravestones ruined, soil upturned, and, in some cases, bodies unearthed.

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Lawyer recounts visit to Israeli detention center

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Lawyer recounts visit to Israeli detention center

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At Sde Teiman, Khaled Mahajneh found a detained journalist unrecognizable as he described the facility's violent and inhumane conditions.

"The situation there is more horrific than anything we've heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo." This is how Khaled Mahajneh describes the Sde Teiman detention center as the first lawyer to visit the facility. More than 4,000 Palestinians whom Israel arrested in Gaza have been held at the military base in the Naqab/Negev since October 7; some of them have subsequently been released, but most remain in Israeli detention.

Mahajneh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was initially approached by Al Araby TV, which was seeking information about Muhammad Arab, a reporter for the network who was arrested in March while covering the Israeli siege of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. "I contacted the Israeli army's control center, and after providing them with a photo and an ID card of the detainee, as well as my official power of attorney document, I was informed that [Arab] was being held at Sde Teiman and that he could be visited."

When Mahajneh arrived at the base on June 19, he was required to leave his car far away from the site, where an army jeep was waiting to transport him inside. This was "something I had never encountered on any previous visit to any prison," he told +972. They drove for about 10 minutes through the facility - a sprawling network of trailers - before arriving at a large warehouse, which contained a trailer guarded by masked soldiers.

"They repeated that the visit would be limited to 45 minutes, and any action that may harm the security of the state, the camp, or the soldiers will lead to the immediate cessation of the visit. I still don't understand what they meant," Mahajneh said.

Soldiers dragged out the detained journalist with his arms and legs tied, while Mahajneh remained behind a barrier. After soldiers removed his blindfold, Arab rubbed his eyes for five minutes, unaccustomed to the bright light. "Where am I?" was the first question he asked Mahajneh. Most Palestinians at Sde Teiman do not even know where they are being held; with at least 35 detainees having died in unknown circumstances since the war began, many simply call it " the death camp."

"I have been visiting political and security detainees and prisoners in Israeli jails for years, including since October 7," Mahajneh noted. "I know that the conditions of detention have become much harsher, and that the prisoners are abused on a daily basis. But Sde Teiman was unlike anything I've seen or heard before."

'Even the courts are rife with hatred'

Mahajneh told +972 that Arab was nearly unrecognizable after 100 days in the detention facility; his face, hair, and skin color had changed, and he was covered with dirt and pigeon droppings. The journalist had not been given new clothes for nearly two months, and was only allowed to change his pants for the first time that day because of the lawyer's visit.

According to Arab, detainees are continually blindfolded and tied up with their hands behind their backs, forced to sleep hunched over on the floor without any bedding. Their iron handcuffs are removed only during a weekly, minute-long shower. "But the prisoners began refusing to shower because they don't have watches, and going beyond the allotted minute exposes prisoners to severe punishments, including hours outside in the heat or rain," Mahajneh said.

All detainees, Mahajneh noted, face deteriorating health conditions due to the poor quality of the daily prison diet: a small amount of labaneh and a piece of cucumber or tomato. They also suffer from severe constipation, and for every 100 prisoners, only one roll of toilet paper is provided per day.

"The prisoners are prevented from talking to each other, even though more than 100 people are kept to a warehouse, some of them elderly and minors," Mahajneh told +972. "They are not allowed to pray or even read the Qur'an."

Arab also testified to his lawyer that Israeli guards sexually assaulted six prisoners with a stick in front of the other detainees after they had violated prison orders. "When he talked about rapes, I asked him, 'Muhammad, you're a journalist, are you sure about this?'" Mahajneh recounted. "But he said he saw it with his own eyes, and that what he was telling me was only a small part of what was happening there."

Multiple media outlets, including and the New York Times , have reported on instances of rape and sexual assault at Sde Teiman. In a video circulating on social media earlier this week, a Palestinian prisoner recently released from the detention camp said that he had personally witnessed multiple rapes, and cases in which Israeli soldiers made dogs sexually assault prisoners.

In just the past month, according to Arab, several prisoners were killed during violent interrogations. Other detainees who had been wounded in Gaza were forced to have their limbs amputated or bullets removed from their bodies without anesthesia, and were treated by nursing students.

Legal defense teams and human rights organizations have been largely unable to counter these serious violations of prisoners' rights at Sde Teiman, and most are prevented from even visiting the facility to prevent greater scrutiny. "The State Prosecutor's Office that this detention center was going to be closed after harsh criticisms, but nothing happened," Mahajneh said. "Even the courts are rife with hatred and racism against the people of Gaza."

Most of the detainees, Mahajneh noted, are not formally accused of belonging to any organization or participating in any military activity; Arab himself still doesn't know why he was detained or when he may be released. Since arriving at Sde Teiman, soldiers from the Israeli army's special units have interrogated Arab twice. After the first interrogation, he was informed that his detention had been extended indefinitely, based on "suspicion of affiliation to an organization whose identity was not disclosed to him."

'To take revenge on whom?'

In recent months, international media outlets have published several testimonies of released prisoners as well as doctors who worked at Sde Teiman. For Israeli doctor Dr. Yoel Donchin, who spoke to the New York Times, it was unclear why Israeli soldiers had detained many of the people he treated, some of whom were "highly unlikely to have been combatants involved in the war" based on pre-existing physical ailments or disabilities.

The Times also reported that doctors at the facility were instructed not to write their names on official documents or address each other by name in the presence of patients, for fear of being later identified and charged with at the International Criminal Court.

"They stripped them down of anything that resembles human beings," one witness who worked as a medic at the facility's makeshift hospital told CNN. "[The beatings] were not done to gather intelligence. They were done out of revenge," another witness said. "It was punishment for what they [the Palestinians] did on October 7 and punishment for behavior in the camp."

Since his visit to Sde Teiman, Mahajneh has felt deep frustration and anger - but above all, horror. "I have been in this profession for 15 years ... I never expected to hear about rape of prisoners or humiliations like that. And all this is not for the purpose of interrogation - since most prisoners are only interrogated after many days of detention - but as an act of revenge. To take revenge on whom? They are all citizens, young people, adults, and children. There are no Hamas members in Sde Teiman because they are in the hands of the Shabas [Israeli Prison Service]."

In its response to queries for this article, the Israeli army stated: "The IDF rejects allegations of systematic ill-treatment of detainees, including through violence or torture ... If necessary, military police investigations are opened when there is suspicion of unusual behavior justifying it." The army denied Arab's and Mahajneh's accounts of deprivation, and insisted that detainees are provided with sufficient clothing and blankets, food and water ("three meals a day"), access to toilets and showers ("between 7 and 10 minutes"), and other amenities.

The army also added: "Since the beginning of the war, there have been deaths of detainees, including detainees who arrived wounded from the battlefield or in problematic medical conditions. Every death is investigated by the military police. At the end of the investigations, their findings will be forwarded to the Military Advocate General's Office."

Mahajneh relayed a clear message from Sde Teiman: "Muhammad Arab and the other prisoners in the detention center call on the international community and the international courts to act to save them. It is inconceivable that the whole world talks about the Israeli abductees, and no one talks about the Palestinian prisoners."

Mahajneh does not know what happened to the detained journalist after his brief 45-minute interview. "Did they attack him? Did they kill him? I think about it all the time."
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.

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'More horrific than Abu Ghraib': Lawyer recounts visit to Israeli detention center

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At Sde Teiman, Khaled Mahajneh found a detained journalist unrecognizable as he described the facility's violent and inhumane conditions.

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7 testimonies about children died by starvation

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7 testimonies about children died by starvation

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Ramallah, July 24, 2024 -"There was no formula milk due to the Israeli siege, and there was no milk in my breasts due to the lack of nutrition and the prevention of the entry of aid," the mother of three-month-old Anwar Al-Khudari from Al-Shujaiya, east of Gaza city told Defense for Children International - Palestine.

"I was displaced in Al-Shifa Hospital, along with my husband, and my only son, Anwar," she continued.

Little Anwar died in Kamal Adwan Hospital from malnutrition on February 14.

"My son cried all night from hunger. His temperature rose and he started having convulsions. He passed away four days later," said Anwar's mother.

Anwar is one of at least several dozen Palestinian children who have died in the Gaza Strip due to malnutrition and dehydration in recent months.

Israeli authorities are systematically denying Palestinian children in Gaza access to adequate food and nutrition, exacerbating starvation and malnutrition. This deliberate deprivation is leading to severe health issues, stunted growth, and an alarming increase in child fatality rates. The blockade and restrictions on humanitarian aid during the Israeli genocide are creating a humanitarian crisis and perpetuating suffering of whole population of Gaza Strip.

"Young Palestinian children are dying hungry and in pain because Israeli authorities have deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to north Gaza, which is an act of genocide," said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP. "Between the closure of the Gaza Strip and Israeli forces' nonstop attacks, we simply do not know the full scale of the starvation crisis. Without an immediate ceasefire and arms embargo enacted by the international community, more Palestinian children in Gaza will die of starvation."

DCIP field researchers collected testimonies from the parents of children who died from malnutrition and dehydration at Kamal Adwan Hospital in the city of Beit Lahia in north Gaza as a result of Israel's campaign of genocide.

"The hospital receives around 70 to 100 children every day suffering from malnutrition," Dr. Husam Abu Safia, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, told DCIP. "There are three levels of child malnutrition: mild, moderate, and severe, and most of the cases admitted to the hospital are of the moderate level, while the severe ones represent five to seven percent of the caseload. This percentage may increase if starvation continues and food supplies are not brought in."

"The spread of hunger in north Gaza and the resulting deaths of children due to malnutrition have become a stark reality. Over 25 children have died at Kamal Adwan Hospital due to hunger, with additional deaths reported in shelter centers and homes. Many were unable to reach the hospital due to the ongoing Israeli siege and aggression," Dr. Abu Safia continued.

"Karam loved playing football and photography, and he created an account for himself on TikTok," the mother of 10-year-old Karam Qadadah told DCIP.

Karam was trapped for a week along with his family in Al-Shifa Hospital amid a severe shortage of food supplies caused by the Israeli siege on the hospital. During the siege, the child was allowed to evacuate from Al-Shifa Hospital and was transferred to Al-Ahli Arab Hospital.

Karam's condition worsened due to the lack of food, medical treatment, and antibiotics at Al-Ahli Arab Hospital. His health deteriorated significantly, leading to severe weight loss. He was then transferred to Kamal Adwan Hospital.

"My son was placed in the women's section [upon arrival at Kamal Adwan hospital] because there was no room for him in the ICU. This made his condition worse, and he was later transferred to the ICU. He died after a week in the unit," Karam's mother told DCIP.

Karam died on March 30 due to malnutrition and elevated salt levels in the blood.

Kamal Adwan hospital and other hospitals in Gaza have been unable to gather comprehensive data on the extent of child fatalities due to malnutrition and dehydration due to the ongoing genocide and severe staffing shortages.

Seven-day-old Abdulaziz Salem died in Kamal Adwan Hospital on March 2 due to cardiac arrest and lack of oxygen. He was born in the same hospital without the assistance of doctors due to insufficient medical staff. Abdulaziz spent a week in an incubator while his mother was in critical condition, suffering from jaundice and the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy.

"I could not breastfeed my son because I had no food and I became sick," Abdulaziz's mother told DCIP. Her family is from Al-Faluja, west of Jabalia refugee camp in north Gaza, and were forcibly displaced at least six times during her pregnancy.

"There was no oxygen or baby formula in the hospital. My son died, suffocating and hungry," she said.

Hospitals in north Gaza are in critical condition due to Israeli authorities deliberately depriving Palestinians in Gaza of essential medical supplies, cutting off the supply of electricity, and limiting clean water that is required to provide proper health care for children.

Seven-day-old Joud Al-Barsh from Jabalia refugee camp also died in Kamal Adwan Hospital on March 2 due to malnutrition, as her mother was unable to breastfeed her as a result of the mother's malnutrition. She was placed in the hospital's nursery for a week in light of a severe shortage of milk and formula.

"Joud died of hunger, and I am left with her twin sister, whom God gave me after 10 years of marriage," said Joud's mother.

"There are hundreds of children facing the risk of death from starvation, as a result of the ongoing restrictions and war, since October 7," Dr. Said Salah, a pediatrician and nutrition official at the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza told DCIP. "More than 3,500 children under the age of five are now at risk of slow death due to the Israeli policies of starving children and blocking the entry of humanitarian aid [to north Gaza] for two months in a row."

"I am an ICU nurse at Kamal Adwan Hospital," the mother of three-year-old Mila Abdulnabi told DCIP. "My daughter died in front of my eyes and I could not save her."

"I resumed working that day [of her death] and my colleagues closed the door to stop me from coming in. But when I got in, I found my daughter dead and covered in a shroud," she continued.

Mila Abdulnabi died in Kamal Adwan Hospital on March 2 due to malnutrition and a lack of potassium and calcium.

"When the Israeli forces invaded the northern area and deprived us of food, my daughter suffered from a deficiency of minerals and remained on respirators from February 29 until the day she died. Mila was very smart and attached to me, as she was my only daughter," her mother said.

"Musab became a skeleton because of the famine," the mother of Musab Abu Asr from Al-Shujaiya, east of Gaza city, told DCIP. "The prices are extraordinarily high, and no one could afford to buy anything."

Four-year-old Musab Abu Asr was admitted to Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on February 3, before he was transferred to Kamal Adwan Hospital as the ICU was shut down due to power outages. His health deteriorated and he lost weight until he died on February 11.

"My son Musab was our first child. He was smart and bright in kindergarten. All his teachers praised him. He was sociable and joined his classmates in playing. He loved riding his bike. He loved strawberries and bananas a lot. He was the joy of my heart," said Musab's mother.

"My son was admitted to the hospital twice. The first time was because of severe crying and dehydration, and his condition improved with solutions and treatment," the mother of two-month-old Nahed Haboush from Jabalia refugee camp

Nahed suffered from health deterioration and dehydration, and was placed in the ICU where he remained on respirators for three days until he died on April 3. "Nahed died of starvation due to lack of breastfeeding because there was no food for me or baby formula because of the Israeli siege," said the mother.

At least 34 Palestinian children have starved to death, according to the Governmental Media Office. However, the official Palestinian death toll includes only those who pass away in hospitals or whose deaths are reported by their families.

The telecommunications blackout, the collapse of the medical system, the Israeli ground invasion, and ongoing Israeli aerial bombardment have prevented many Palestinians from accessing hospitals, resulting in a higher number of impacted Palestinians than officially reported.

Around 3,500 children are of death due to malnutrition and lack of necessary medical care and at least 40,000 infants did not receive the necessary immunizations and vaccinations on a regular basis, according to the Governmental Media Office.

About 82,000 children showed symptoms of malnutrition, according to the same Office, leaving more than 50,000 children requiring treatment for acute malnutrition, according to .

The lack of transportation and ambulances, along with a critical shortage of essential medications, restricts healthcare access. Women face challenges breastfeeding due to nutritional deficiencies, lack of privacy, stress, and trauma, compounded by a shortage of milk formula, limited malnutrition screenings, and inconsistent nutrition supplement distribution, according to .

Both North Gaza and Gaza Governorates are experiencing famine conditions and around 70 percent of the population, approximately 210,000 people, are in a catastrophic situation, according to the latest from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.

Starvation is considered a crime against humanity and a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), when used as a method of warfare or as a deliberate act against a population.

Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) -War crimes- of Rome Statute of the (ICC) recognizes starvation as a method of warfare and states that "intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions."

Article 54 of Protocol I (Protection of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population) to the Geneva Conventions states "Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited. It is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population, such as foodstuffs, agricultural areas for the production of foodstuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, for the specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance value to the civilian population or to the adverse Party, whatever the motive, whether in order to starve out civilians, to cause them to move away, or for any other motive."

International criminal law prohibits serious atrocities, including core crimes of genocide, the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, and provides for individual criminal responsibility for perpetrators. The crime of genocide constitutes the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group, in whole or in part. Genocide can result from killing or by creating conditions of life that are so unbearable it brings about the group's destruction. Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is an underlying act of genocide and amounts to a war crime.

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"My son cried all night from hunger": The Palestinian children starved to death by Israeli authorities

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Israeli authorities are systematically denying Palestinian children in Gaza access to adequate food and nutrition, exacerbating starvation and malnutrition. DCIP field researchers collected testimonies from the parents of children who died from malnutrition and dehydration at Kamal Adwan Hospital in the city of Beit Lahia in north Gaza as a result of Israel's campaign of genocide.

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Can you fathom the psychological disturbance driving such acts? Imagine the mindset that finds amusement in recklessly endangering people's lives and destroying their belongings as part of funny video!!! Such deranged mentalities are beyond comprehension. That is true terrorism!

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Documenting Deranged Psychopathy - IDF Psychos

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Dedicated For Documenting How The IDF Uses Destruction As A Form Of Celebration, Blatantly Endangering Lives And Destroying Property.

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EU Delegation and Missions of Belgium and Jordan launch Call to Action for Palestinian Children in the West Bank & Gaza

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EU Delegation and Missions of Belgium and Jordan launch Call to Action for Palestinian Children in the West Bank & Gaza

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EU Delegation and Missions of Belgium and Jordan launch Call to Action for Palestinian Children in the West Bank & Gaza

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On Friday, 28 June 2024, during the Humanitarian Affairs Segment of ECOSOC, the Missions of Jordan and Belgium and the European Union Delegation to the United Nations launched a joint "Call to Action for Palestinian Children in the West Bank and Gaza".

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Our registered address is: c/o Thompson Jenner LLP, 1 Colleton Crescent, Exeter, Devon EX2 4DG.
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Shortly before 6:48 AM on Thursday, October 26, 2023, at least one man was killed and a number of other civilians were injured in an alleged Israeli airstrike on the Abu al-Jadaran (Al-Jidyan) roundabout area of Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip.

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Gaza journalist killed alongside 42 relatives, news agency says November 2023

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Gaza journalist killed alongside 42 relatives, news agency says November 2023

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A Palestinian reporter has been killed alongside 42 family members, his news agency says, as a watchdog said the past month had been the most deadly for journalists since its records began.
The Wafa news agency said Mohammad Abu Hasira was killed in an Israeli air strike on Gaza City.

At least 37 journalists had been killed since the war began, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said.

These include 32 Palestinians, four Israelis and one Lebanese.

The CPJ said it was unclear whether all had been covering the conflict at the time of their deaths but said it was including them in its count while it investigated the circumstances.

The group began documenting journalist fatalities in 1992.

Last month Israel told international news organisations Reuters and AFP that it could not guarantee the safety of their journalists operating in the Gaza Strip.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was targeting Hamas throughout Gaza and accused the group of placing military operations "in the vicinity of journalists and civilians".

Israeli air strikes could additionally damage nearby buildings, the IDF said.

Airstrike interrupts BBC correspondent's live report from Gaza

On Saturday AFP called on Israel to investigate an air strike that severely damaged its office located on the top floors of an 11-storey building.

"A strike on the offices of an international news agency sends a deeply troubling message to all the journalists working in such difficult conditions in Gaza," said AFP boss Fabrice Fries.

Last week, Mohammad Abu Hatab, a correspondent for the Palestine TV news channel was killed in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip in an Israeli airstrike, along with 11 members of his family.

His colleague Salman Al-Bashir broke down in tears on air when learning of his death, removing his vest and helmet saying that the even the protective gear was not keeping journalists alive.

Two Israeli photographers, Roee Idan and Yaniv Zohar, and members of their families were killed when Hamas attacked kibbutzes Kfar Aza and Nahal Oz on 7 October.

Two Israeli reporters, Shai Regev and Ayelet Arnin, were killed during the Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival onthe same day, Israeli media reported.

AFP has asked Israel to investigate damage to its office

In Lebanon, prominent Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah was killed when covering Israeli rockets fired over the Israel-Lebanon border on 13 October. He was part of a group of journalists near the border town of Alma al-Shaab in southern Lebanon when he was hit by a rocket. Six other journalists were also injured in the strike.

Shortly before Abdallah was killed, he posted on Instagram a picture of himself wearing a helmet and a flak jacket with the word "press" written on it.

Six other journalists, including from Reuters, Al Jazeera and Agency France-Presse, were wounded. One of them, Reuters video journalist Maher Nazeh, said the teams "were filming missile fire coming from the direction of Israel when one struck Abdallah as he was sitting on a low stone wall near the rest of the group", according to a report published by the news agency.

IDF spokesman Richard Hecht said the army was "deeply regretful for the incident" and was "actively investigating it" without saying that Israeli military was behind it.

Watch: Gaza reporter removes protective gear after learning of colleague's death on air

More than 10,300 people have been killed during Israel's bombardment of the Gaza Strip, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Israel's retaliatory strikes began in response to Hamas' brutal 7 October attack, when the group killed 1,400 people and took more than 230 hostages.

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Gaza journalist killed alongside 42 relatives, news agency says

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Mohammad Abu Hasira's death comes as a watchdog says the past month has been the most deadly for journalists.

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OXFAM : Water war crimes how israel weaponised xater in its military campaign in Gaza

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OXFAM : Water war crimes how israel weaponised xater in its military campaign in Gaza

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Two years on from the escalation of the war in Ukraine, Oxfam spoke with a number of people leading the work of local and national women-led organisations (WLOs), women's rights organisations (WROs), LGBTQIA+ led organizations, and other local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) addressing the needs of women, girls and gender minorities in Poland and Ukraine. We [...]

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Water War Crimes: How Israel has weaponised water in its military campaign in Gaza - Oxfam Policy & Practice

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This report presents a detailed analysis of how the Government of Israel has systematically weaponized water against the Palestinians in its latest assault on Gaza, raising grave concerns of human rights violations and breaches of international law. It highlights ongoing violations of international laws, showing how the Government of Israel has used water deprivation to [...]

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This is a public pressure campaign to notify tech companies they are being exploited by the IDF and encourage them to deplatform the Israeli military's illegal extortion website: alkasheffgaza.net.

We got Webflow to deplatform the extortion site

We got Namecheap Hosting to deplatform the extortion site

We are currently helping GoDaddy / Host Europe GmbH realize it is in their interest to deplatform the extortion site

Call to Action

After your reporting successfully alerted Webflow and Namecheap hosting to the use of their platforms by the IDF's extortion website, the Israeli military is trying to set up their extortion website on a third hosting platform: GoDaddy / Host Europe GmbH.

We encourage you to report alkasheffgaza.net to GoDaddy's abuse department using this form:
GoDaddy's Abuse Form
Steps to Report

Select "Inappropriate Content

Page One of Form

Fill in your name and e-mail address

Page Two of Form

Domain Name: alkasheffgaza.net

Specific FULL URL: https://alkasheffgaza.net/uncovers

Details Explanation: [grab text below and PLEASE EDIT to make your own]
GoDaddy's Abuse Form
Table of Contents

Clearly an Illegal Extortion Website

The site promises to release thousands of reports of sensitive personal information, unless victims cooperate (Google Translate, June 3).

The extortion is not hidden: 'To save yourself, call the number below' (Google Translate, 3 June).

The threats are not idle. The site already contains almost 200 personal records of victims, including government ID number, name, and photograph (we redacted private information, screen capture June 3).

Webflow and Namecheap hosting deplatformed the IDF extortion website when we alerted them

It is shameful that GoDaddy / Host Europe GmbH continues to provide hosting services for the IDF extortion website.

Twitter locked the account on its social media platform

It is shameful that Telegram continues to allow the IDF extortion account to operate on its platform.

All Calls to Action

About the IDF Extortion Website

On May 17, the Israeli military dropped leaflets in Deir Balah, Gaza, for the purpose of extorting Gaza residents, including children and toddlers. The leaflets threaten to reveal Gazans' personal information, criminal records, extramarital affairs, LGBTQ identities, etc.

The IDF leaflets, designed to look like a newspaper, use the name 'The Exposer'. The IDF also developed a matching extortion website, complete with a snitch box, separate snitch Telegram and Twitter accounts, and a countdown timer.

Israel's Extortion Website in the News

Timeline of Israel's Extortion Website and our Campaign to Shut It Down

Telegram Accounts for IDF Extortion

@AlkasheffGaza

Registered: 2 April, 2024

Display Name: Alkasheff GAZA

@newgaza24

Display Name: NEWGAZA24

ID: 6431041291

@alkasheffgazabot

Display Name: alkasheff_gaza

Twitter Accounts for IDF Extortion

@NewGaza24

Registered: Sat Feb 03 20:40:57 +0000 2024

Display Name: New Gaza

ID: 1753881060100788224

@alkasheffgaza

Registered: Thu Apr 11 15:09:06 +0000 2024

Display Name: الكاشف

ID: 1778439963245256704

Notes: Locked by Twitter on 25 May for "exposing private info"

@alkasheff_gaza

Registered: Fri May 17 16:02:55 +0000 2024

Display Name: الكشاف

ID: 1791499620134072320

IDF Leaflets and the Extortion Website

Israel claims it drops leaflets as a humanitarian effort to evacuate the civilian population in Gaza. But in reality, the IDF leaflets are used to threaten or extort the Palestinians of Gaza.

Legal Disclaimer

Everything here is described to the best of our knowledge. When we use the word "deplatformed" we are referring to the extortion website leaving a hosting company after we raised awareness, by reporting the site to the hosting company. We want to be clear that neither Namecheap nor Webflow put out a public statement. It is our belief, based on the DNS changes and chronology, that both companies cancelled/deplatformed the extortion website.

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The campaign to shut down the IDF Extortion Website

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6 IDF soldiers told @OrenZiv_ of @972mag of the hell that is the war in Gaza.

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6 IDF soldiers told @OrenZiv_ of @972mag of the hell that is the war in Gaza.

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Now, let’s compare their testimonies to the official IDF response to the article.

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42 IDF reservists who were sent to fight in Gaza since Oct. 7 signed a letter of refusal to continue serving. While many in Israel debate the legitimacy of refusal, barely any are dealing with the reality those soldiers described to @lizarozovsky of @haaretzcom last week🧵

"The vibe is 'You can fire wherever you want. You have to get permission, but there will be permission. It's only bureaucratic.' I can count on one hand the times when we were told: 'You can't fire there.'"
Michael, Infantry Control Officer
haaretz.com/israel-news/20...

"You see them taking down vehicles, buildings, people [...] Many people, including me, have the experience of 'Wow, it's insane,' and there are those who say, 'We're showing them, screwing them, taking revenge.' That's the vibes you hear in the war room."
Michael

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Thread by @BtSIsrael on Thread Reader App

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@BtSIsrael: Stray dogs carry severed limbs, as soldiers burn houses, shooting at everything that moves: 6 IDF soldiers told @OrenZiv_ of @972mag of the hell that is the war in Gaza. Now, let's compare their testimon......

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A complex series of concrete walls, electronic fences, and other obstacles to control Palestinian pedestrian and vehicular movement. Palestinian access to land and communities located behind the Barrier is subject to a permit or prior coordination regime. In its 2004 Advisory Opinion, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) established that the sections of the Barrier which run inside the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, together with the associated gate and permit regime, violate Israel's obligations under international law.

On 23 July 2014, the Human Rights Council, by resolution S-21/1, decided to urgently dispatch an independent, international commission of inquiry to investigate all violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, in the context of the military operations conducted since 13 June 2014, whether before, during or after. Pursuant to resolution S-21/1, the President of the Council appointed three experts to the commission: William Schabas (Chair), Mary McGowan Davis and Doudou Diène.

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A complex series of concrete walls, electronic fences, and other obstacles to control Palestinian pedestrian and vehicular movement. Palestinian access to land and communities located behind the Barrier is subject to a permit or prior coordination regime.

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Le tribunal de district a ordonné l'évacuation de 66 Palestiniens de leur domicile à Batan Al-Hawa en faveur des colons 12/7/2024

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Le tribunal de district a ordonné l'évacuation de 66 Palestiniens de leur domicile à Batan Al-Hawa en faveur des colons 12/7/2024

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בית המשפט המחוזי הורה לפנות 66 פלסטינים מביתם בבטן אלהווא לטובת מתנחלים - שלום עכשיו

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השבוע התקיימו בביהמ”ש המחוזי בירושלים דיונים בארבעה ערעורים של 66 פלסטינים מבטן אלהווא בסילוואן. בית המשפט דחה את כל הערעורים וקבע שעליהם להתפנות מהבתים שבהם הם נולדו והתגוררו עשרות שנים לטובת מתנחלים הקשורים לעמותת עטרת כהנים. המשפחות מתכוונות להגיש בקשת רשות ערעור לבית המשפט העליון. פסקי הדין הם חלק ממהלך גדול של תביעות פינוי שנועדו... להמשיך לקרוא «

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Israeli daily report on situation in West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza Strip and South Lebanon."So that we won't say we didn't know"

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Israeli daily report on situation in West Bank, Jerusalem, Gaza Strip and South Lebanon."So that we won't say we didn't know"

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The Daily Files - The Gaza Strip | The Daily File

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Every calendar day and its events, according to the reported areas - the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 24 hours of reports on casualties, arrests, clashes, demolitions, confiscations, resistance actions and colonist attacks.

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Lancement de la mise en œuvre du projet d'usine de dessalement pour alimenter en eau 2 millions de palestiniens dans la bande de Gaza

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L'usine de dessalement fournira de l'eau potable à deux millions de Palestiniens, assurant ainsi une solution durable à la pénurie chronique d'eau et à la

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#Israel claims again this evening to have imposed no limitations on food aid coming into #Gaza. In reality, it obstructed 52% of the minimum food rations essential to the survival of the population

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#Israel claims again this evening to have imposed no limitations on food aid coming into #Gaza. In reality, it obstructed 52% of the minimum food rations essential to the survival of the population

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The journey to #Palestinian political independence and #statehood, a few milestones worth recalling in view of the decision of #Norway, #Ireland, and #Spain (and other WEOG states soon to follow):

2. By 1988, the General Assembly, recalling Res. 181, calling for the establishment of an Arab and Jewish States, affirmed the State of # Palestine right to exercise sovereignty in the territory occupied since 1967. The right to self-determination was matched with a territory - creating a 'self-determination unit.'

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Thread by @EpshtainItay on Thread Reader App

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@EpshtainItay: BREAKING: #Israel claims again this evening to have imposed no limitations on food aid coming into #Gaza. In reality, it obstructed 52% of the minimum food rations essential to the survival of the pop......

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There's not enough food in Gaza. Since October 7 the Israeli government has cut water and electricity from its territory, closed its truck crossing with Gaza, and obstructed the delivery of relief supplies to the enclave's 2.2 million people, nearly half of whom are children. The shortage of clean drinking water is especially dangerous. Israel has refused to allow fuel onto the scarce aid trucks entering via Egypt, even though it's needed to power hospital generators, ambulances, and water pumps. Israeli officials have declared that no aid will enter Gaza from Israel, and they justify banning fuel shipments, even via Egypt, on the grounds that fuel would "enable Hamas to continue its attacks on Israeli citizens." On October 15 Israel announced that it was partially restoring the water supply to Gaza's south, but without fuel to pump it, delivery is limited, and the north remains cut off.

The Israeli government continues to obstruct this desperately needed humanitarian aid even as it carries out its campaign of aerial bombardment and expands its ground operations in Gaza. The army has told more than a million people to evacuate the northern half of the enclave, but there's no safe place to go and no safe way to get there. Israeli forces are using explosive weapons in densely populated areas, a practice that predictably causes high civilian casualties. Eighty-three countries, including the United States, have signed a political commitment to refrain from using explosive weapons with wide-area effects-including heavy artillery and aerial bombs-in such areas because of how likely they are to kill and injure civilians indiscriminately. Israel's continual bombardments of Gaza-and Palestinian armed groups' indiscriminate rocket attacks on Israeli communities-magnify this concern many times over. Israel has also used white phosphorus, incendiary material that burns human flesh and can cause lifelong suffering, in populated areas in Gaza-an act that violates the laws-of-war prohibition against putting civilians at unnecessary risk.

The heavy bombardment has disrupted telecommunications, impeding emergency services. And despite its obligation to protect all of Gaza's civilians, Israel has warned the many civilians who can't or won't evacuate northern Gaza-including doctors and hospital patients-that they risk being considered "complicit with a terrorist organization" if they stay. According to Gaza's health ministry, more than eight thousand Palestinians, among them more than 3,300 children, have been killed; according to the UN, nearly half of Gaza's housing units have been destroyed or damaged.

Nothing can justify the Hamas-led massacres of Israeli civilians on October 7. These were war crimes. Neither can anything justify the war crimes that Israel is committing in Gaza-including by depriving civilians of life-saving humanitarian aid. The laws of war require parties to facilitate the rapid delivery of relief supplies, subject to inspection and monitoring to prevent diversion or arms delivery. Israel can, in other words, monitor the shipments organized by the UN, but it cannot block a life-saving supply, which is what fuel is to Gaza right now.

The current restrictions on aid are reducing food and fuel supplies to far below the " humanitarian minimum" that Israel's own officials unilaterally set for Gaza years ago. In 2007, after Hamas took over government functions in Gaza, the Israeli government launched a policy of deliberately reducing even humanitarian supplies into the Strip, saying that it was conducting "economic warfare" against Hamas and that its obligations to civilians in Gaza were limited to avoiding a "humanitarian crisis." Then, as now, Gaza, which is surrounded by walls and fences and bounded by the Israeli-patrolled coast, was dependent on Israel for supplies. As part of this policy, the Israeli government even calculated the number of calories that, it said, residents of Gaza needed to survive, based on gender and age. Israel was obligated, it argued, to allow that amount in-but not more. In 2007, together with other human rights lawyers from Gisha and Adalah, I challenged that policy, which reduced human dignity to mathematical formulas and deliberately restricted food and fuel supplies to Palestinian civilians. The Israeli Supreme Court accepted the argument that the Israeli military's minimum commitments would prevent a "humanitarian crisis" and rejected our petition.

Fifteen years ago fewer people lived in Gaza; conveyer belts still brought grain to the enclave; electricity and drinking water still flowed from Israel; farmers, fishers, and others were producing food; and hospitals were not struggling to treat 20,000 injured people. At that time, the Israeli military said that Gaza needed 106 trucks a day to meet its minimum humanitarian needs, including hundreds of thousands of liters of fuel. In the twenty-three days since October 7, a total of 117 trucks have entered Gaza, none of them carrying fuel.

The Israeli army claims that fuel and food shipments are not necessary because Gaza has enough. Hamas "is creating the public perception of a fuel shortage," the Israeli Defense Ministry told diplomats this week in briefing documents obtained by Human Rights Watch. That's not what Israel's own mathematical calculations predicted, and it's not what aid workers say. On Friday, Philippe Lazzarini, who heads UNRWA, the largest aid organization in Gaza, warned that "the last remaining public services are collapsing, our aid operation is crumbling." He reminded the Israeli government what it knows very well: UNRWA has mechanisms for monitoring shipments to prevent diversion, and aid agencies are committed to ensuring that their aid reaches its intended civilian recipients. Those recipients are growing more desperate. On Saturday thousands of people broke into UNRWA warehouses to take flour and hygiene supplies.

International humanitarian law requires Israel, as the occupying power in Gaza, to take affirmative steps to ensure the welfare of civilians. In previous hostilities, brutal as they were, the Israeli government at least partially acknowledged these obligations. In each of its four wars in Gaza since 2008, it maintained the flow of drinking water and electricity into Gaza-recognizing that civilians in the Strip depended on the grids and water pipes laid between Gaza and Israel-and found ways to open the Israeli crossings for humanitarian delivery.

In this current escalation the Israeli government is going as far as its most powerful backer, the United States, will allow. (President Joe Biden personally negotiated the meager trickle of humanitarian supplies now arriving via Egypt.) US policymakers who were rightly outraged at Hamas's war crimes against Israeli civilians should not stand by while the Israeli government commits war crimes against Palestinian civilians. The US should insist that Israel immediately allow monitored fuel and other supplies into Gaza via Egypt and its own territory, restore water and electricity to all parts of Gaza, and abide by its obligations to protect civilians in Gaza, wherever they are.

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There's not enough food in Gaza. Since October 7 the Israeli government has cut water and electricity from its territory, closed its truck crossing with

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How Israel’s war is erasing Gaza’s history and culture

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In-depth: Byzantine-era churches destroyed, 7th-century mosques bombed, artists, writers, and musicians killed. Will Gaza’s cultural heritage survive the war?

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How do you keep your children safe from bombs and missiles and also from the knowledge that they are facing genocide?

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‘It would’ve been better if they shot us’: Palestinians recount prison abuse

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‘It would’ve been better if they shot us’: Palestinians recount prison abuse

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Newly released inmates detail cases of humiliation, torture, rape threats, and a prisoner beaten to death by Israeli forces in the weeks since October 7.
Content warning: This article contains testimonies of severe abuse and threats of sexual assault.
The of 240 Palestinian prisoners and detainees during the recent temporary ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has shed light on the severe deterioration of conditions inside Israeli prisons since the war began. Restrictions imposed since October 7 by the Israel Prison Service, under the instruction of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir , include the limiting of food provisions and recreation time; the confiscation of personal items; a prohibition on hot water, shoes, and pillows; and a ban on visits by family members and lawyers. These restrictions, however, are only the tip of the iceberg.

Testimonies gathered by +972 Magazine from Palestinians released from Israeli prisons in recent weeks - both as part of the ceasefire agreement and independently of it - paint a picture of a surge in abuse and humiliation inside prison cells, in interrogation rooms, and during arrests. According to these testimonies, Israeli forces and prison authorities have used methods of torture, threatened to rape a female detainee and her young daughter, and beaten a prisoner to death - one of six Palestinians known to have died in Israeli custody since October 7.

In the two months since declaring a state of war in the wake of the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel, Israeli forces have arrested more than 3,000 Palestinians, detaining many of them without charge. This number does not include the estimated 4,000 laborers from Gaza who were in Israel when the war broke out and were detained for weeks before being deported back to the besieged Strip.

According to the human rights NGO HaMoked, among the more that 7,600 "security" inmates that Israel is currently holding in prisons across Israel and the occupied West Bank are at least 260 Palestinians that it defines as " unlawful combatants ," including those who participated in the attacks of October 7. Members of that group, say the former inmates who spoke to +972, are being held in a designated section of Ofer Prison, west of Ramallah, and their constant screams can be heard alongside the barking of dogs. Israel is concealing the names and detention conditions of many of the detainees from Gaza and is preventing lawyers and the Red Cross from visiting them.

"I was in prison for many years," Qadura Fares, the head of the Palestinian Authority's Commission for Detainees' Affairs, told +972. "There was never anything like this. I heard things that I cannot believe."

According to Amjad a-Najjar from the Palestinian Prisoners' Society, since October 7, the IPS has confiscated inmates' televisions, radios, electronic devices, clothes, shoes, medications, books, and stationery. "Ben Gvir has declared war against the prisoners," he said. "The tools of communication are batons and beatings. Death hovers over the prisons, awaiting a decision from the guards to strike any of the detainees."

Beaten to death in a cell

On Nov. 18, the IPS reported the death of 38-year-old prisoner Thaer Samih Abu Assab, a resident of the West Bank city of Qalqilya, at Soroka Hospital in southern Israel. Abu Assab was 18 years into a 25-year sentence at Ketziot Prison in the Naqab/Negev desert. His family has received no further information and have stated that he did not suffer from any pre-existing illnesses.

Mahmoud Katnani, one of the prisoners released in the exchange deal between Israel and Hamas, was in the same prison cell where Abu Assab was held. "On Nov. 18, at 6 p.m. during the security count, the forces [from the IPS's rapid response unit, Keter] began to break into the room. There were 10 prisoners in the room, and we sat as usual: kneeling with our hands over our heads and heads down. Suddenly, the forces attacked us for no apparent reason, beating us with batons and kicking us.

"The beating continued violently," Katnani went on. "They slammed the prisoner Thaer Abu Assab on the floor and dragged him to a corner near the bathroom, beating him on his head and body for several minutes. Then they exited the room, leaving Thaer covered in blood flowing heavily from his head. We approached him [and realized that] his heart had stopped beating. We pulled him to the middle of the room; he had died.

"We covered him with a blanket and began screaming at the guards for an hour and a half until a nurse, guards, and members of the same force arrived in the room," Katnani continued. "Abu Assab's body was taken away. Shortly after, a member of the force arrived and informed us of his death."

The circumstances surrounding the deaths of several other Palestinians in Israeli custody in the past two months are less clear. Two Palestinians from Gaza - including 32-year-old laborer Majed Ahmed Zaqoul who was arrested inside Israel sometime after October 7, and another whose details are not known - died at the Anatot Detention Center just outside Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank. Abd al-Rahman Ahmed Muhammad Mar'i, a 33-year-old resident of the town of Qarawat Bani Hassan in the northern West Bank, died at Megiddo Prison in northern Israel on Oct. 13, where he had been held since February without trial.

Omar Hamza Daraghmeh, a 58-year-old from Tubas in the northern West Bank and a senior Hamas member, was arrested with his son Hamza at their home on Oct. 9. He was transferred from Anatot to Megiddo prison Oct. 23, where he stood trial via video conference. Later that day, he was dead; Hamas has accused Israel of assassinating him.

Daraghmeh's brother, Abdel Hakim, told +972: "My brother was ill. Shortly before his arrest, we had conducted a coronary artery catheterization with stent transplantation for him. He required daily medication, the most crucial of which was a blood thinner to prevent clotting. My brother died in prison, where there was neither medical treatment nor care."

Killed by neglect

The sixth Palestinian killed in Israeli custody since October 7 is Arafat Yasser Hamdan. On Oct. 22, Israeli forces raided his home in the village of Beit Sira, near Ramallah. Hamdan, a 25-year-old with diabetes and pancreatic dysfunction and the father of an infant daughter, was handcuffed and had a bag placed over his head in front of his wife and mother, before being taken into custody. Two days later, Israeli authorities informed his family that he had died. The family has received no further information from them since.

S.A., a 58-year-old from southern Hebron, was with Hamdan the day he died. "On the morning of Oct. 24, we were placed in a vehicle that would take us from the Gush Etzion Detention Center to [Ofer Military] Court," he recounted. "Arafat was with me. Suddenly, he collapsed unconscious inside the vehicle, his face pale. Despite our pleas, none of the soldiers paid attention.

"After about 10 minutes, a soldier finally arrived holding a small plastic cup of water, which he gave to Arafat to drink," S.A. continued. "The soldier seated Arafat in the front of the vehicle. After another 10 minutes, the soldier returned Arafat to us, making him sit on the ground with his hands and feet cuffed like the rest of us. His condition was deteriorating."

Throughout the journey, S.A. explained, the other detainees repeatedly informed the guards that Arafat was experiencing a lot of pain due to a lack of sugar - having not eaten for two days due to the poor quality of food that they had been given - and that he needed to take his medications. "None of the soldiers paid any attention," he said. "It was as if we did not exist."

Their vehicle arrived at Ofer, where the men were transferred to a small cell measuring 3 by 4 meters, containing 20 detainees. "While waiting, we continued to request sugar and water for Arafat, who was lying on the floor," S.A. went on. "Eventually, one of the soldiers brought a small piece of chocolate - it did not exceed 1 centimeter. We remained inside the cell until 3 p.m., continuously asking for sugar. Eventually, one nurse arrived, and we told him that the young man was experiencing low blood sugar, but the nurse left and didn't return."

Over the next few hours, the detainees were transferred to different sections of the prison, and word soon began to spread that Hamdan had died. "There was not a spoon of sugar to save this young man," S.A. lamented.

'I will ask them to rape you right here'

Lama Khater, a journalist and writer from Hebron and a mother of five children, was arrested on Oct. 26 at her home in the Loza area, west of Hebron. "I could not have imagined the severity of the situation," she said, describing how the soldiers trashed the contents of her home during the arrest. "I was taken to a military vehicle where I was forced to lie down on the floor, handcuffed and blindfolded. Soldiers sat next to me until we reached a location unknown to me.

"I was brought into a room," Khater continued. "I could see with limited visibility beneath the blindfold. I asked to go to the toilet and drink water, but the female soldier refused. They claimed not to understand Arabic; I tried English, but to no avail. After an hour of detention, I was allowed to use the restroom and drank water from the tap there. The female soldier refused to allow me to close the toilet door completely."

After that, Khater was taken by a female soldier to an interrogation room, still handcuffed and blindfolded. She was seated in a chair and played an audio recording of somebody speaking about the atrocities committed by Hamas in the Israeli communities near the Gaza fence.

The interrogator "asked me my opinion about the rape of a 10-year-old [Israeli] girl," she recalled. "I stated that I didn't know anything about this. The interrogator yelled at me and insulted me using offensive language. He then said: 'You should know that there are 20 soldiers in this room - I will ask them to rape you right here.'"

According to Khater, the interrogator's threats went on. "He said: 'The girl who was raped looks like your daughter Yaman, and we could bring Yaman there and be raped, and I could go to your house and burn your children down while they sleep. Here there are no laws or rights. You are a prisoner of war, and I hope that a government will come that will allow us to do what we want with you [Palestinians].'"

At that point, Khater explained, the interrogator came right up to her and removed her blindfold. He was wearing civilian clothing and a mask, and he took photos of her before leaving the room.

Khater was then taken to HaSharon Prison in central Israel. "Another female detainee and I underwent a strip search," she recounted. "In front of the cell where we were about to enter, the guards brought out a [non-security] prisoner whose face was marked with bumps and blisters, wrapping his body in a blanket. The guards were talking among themselves, as if he had a serious infectious disease.

"We were led into the cell," Khater continued. "His clothes were lying on the floor, and the floor was full of saliva. There were two mattresses on the floor, one of which bore traces of the prisoner's vomit. The [adjoining] restroom door was open, exposed to the cell. We remained standing in the center of the cell surrounded by a pervasive odor and humidity from the restroom."

According to Khater, the detainees were held there for approximately 10 hours, without access to water. Then, the guards brought four more Palestinian women detainees into the small room. "At a later stage, food was provided, and it is difficult to describe its condition," she added.

From there, Khater was transferred to Al-Damon Women's Prison, and the mistreatment continued. "All the prisoners' belongings in the rooms were confiscated, leaving only the beds," she explained.

Later, prison guards brought in four women detainees from Gaza, who Khater learned had been arrested on Salah al-Din Street during the mass forced exodus of Palestinians from the north of the Strip amid Israel's ground invasion. These detainees, she said, were wearing light brown clothes, with the Hebrew letter "ע" written on them - the first letter of the Hebrew word for Gaza.

"The women had their hands and feet cuffed, with a rope tying their hands," Khater recounted. "They were without headscarves. They were taken into a separate room. Later, I tried to talk to them through the door window. The first request they made was for headscarves. One of them had been forced [by Israeli soldiers] to give her 2-month-old baby, who was with her at the time of arrest, to a stranger before being taken into custody."

'I refused to kiss the Israeli flag, so they broke three of my ribs'

Several other Palestinians who were recently released from Israeli prisons detailed the extensive abuse they experienced inside. Foad Hasan, a 45-year-old father of five from the village of Qusra, near Nablus, was released on Nov. 12 after spending a week in Megiddo Prison. "The conditions in Megiddo are terrible, impossible to describe," he told +972.

"They tried to make me kiss the Israeli flag, and when I refused, they beat me so badly that they broke three of my ribs," he continued. "One other guy from Jaba' [a village near Jenin] also refused to kiss the Israeli flag, and the prison guards broke his leg and ribs too. When you arrive at Megiddo, they say 'Welcome to hell.'"

Nashaat Dawabsheh, a 17-year-old from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan, was released on Nov. 26 as part of the hostage-prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas. "On October 7, the prison authority took all of our belongings and everything that we had in our cell," he told +972. "We were left with one set of clothes, that's all. We were beaten every day for no reason whatsoever - curses and humiliation every day."

Nasralla al-A'war, a 17-year-old from Silwan, who was released with Dawabsheh on Nov. 26, said that the prison guards "unleashed the dogs on us without muzzles. We were beaten and they did not stop cursing and humiliating us, and there was very little food."

Abdelkader Ali al-Hethnawi, a 46-year-old from the town of Qabatiya, near Jenin, told +972 that he was detained by Israeli forces on Oct. 30 on the grounds that they were searching for his nephew. He was taken to Megiddo Prison, where he, too, was forced to kiss the flag and was assaulted by the guards.

"Life is almost non-existent [inside the prison]," al-Hethnawi said. "Electricity was being turned off. There were no extra clothes, so we were forced to wear underwear right after washing them without time for them to dry. Some days, we fasted to allow the underage detainees to eat more food. Chronically ill detainees, suffering from conditions like hypertension and diabetes, were deprived of necessary medication. Even those injured as a result of assaults, with broken hands or teeth, were denied treatment.

"I saw blood on the floors of the solitary confinement cells," he continued. "Some faced violent assaults for not cursing Hamas. Guards would step on detainees' heads with their shoes. Detainees were beaten on their heads with belts, and hot and ice water was poured on their bodies. Guards beat detainees on sensitive areas of their bodies while telling them, 'We will deprive you of being a dad.'" Al-Hethnawi concluded his account in tears, saying: "Had they shot us and killed us, it would have been better than this torture."

'I experienced humiliation in every possible way'

Palestinians are experiencing these forms of abuse not only inside prisons but also during arrests. On Oct. 30, Israeli soldiers raided the home of Bara'a Huraini in Yatta, south of Hebron. They subjected him to severe beatings inside his home and did the same to his brother Hassan. They hit his head on the ground until he bled. The soldiers then violently removed both brothers from the house.

"They pushed us toward the side of the military jeep, blindfolding us with cloth," Huraini told +972. "One of them grabbed me by the hands, and the other from my pants, causing [the pants] to drop down to my knees. They threw me onto the floor of the jeep. When I asked to put on my pants, the response was 'Shut up.' The soldiers tightly bound my feet to a plastic cleat, leaving them outside the door. As they pushed me inside, I felt that my left foot was paralyzed.

"The soldiers started to board the jeep while stepping on me with their shoes," Huraini continued. "Before the vehicle moved, one of them pressed his shoe against my head, and this continued throughout the journey. Meanwhile, the rest of my body endured beatings with their hands and rifle butts. I experienced humiliation in every possible way."

According to Huraini, the jeep stopped after about 20 minutes, and the soldiers tried to force him out. "They tried to make me stand to get out, but I was restrained and exhausted from the beatings, causing me to fall onto the floor of the vehicle. The soldiers grabbed me again and threw me out of the vehicle. I landed on my face and felt intense pain. I tried to lift my head, and the blindfold fell off my eyes. One soldier attacked me, punching me in the face before putting the blindfold back in place.

"After that, soldiers dragged me by my arms and feet across the ground through the soil and thorns until I was seated in a chair inside another vehicle," Huraini went on. "One of them lifted my pants, and the vehicle drove forward. I needed water, but the answer was 'Shut up, shut up.' When the vehicle stopped, fear overwhelmed me due to the intense pain. I refrained from asking anything to avoid facing another round of beating."

When the vehicle stopped, Huraini was thrown on the floor again, with his brother next to him. "There was an intelligence officer who said to us: 'Treatment has changed today, Da'esh [ISIS], give the message to everyone.' After that, we were let go, and I went to hospital as there were numerous wounds on my head."

At 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 15, Israeli forces raided another home in Dura, south of Hebron, and arrested 22-year-old university student Jenin Amr, along with her 24-year-old brother Hammam. "Soldiers took me and dropped me face down on the vehicle's floor and did the same with my brother," Amr recounted after her release. "The vehicle drove until the soldiers brought another young woman and threw her on top of us.

"Throughout the journey, soldiers kicked us and beat us with rifle butts," she continued. "The car stopped in the center of a public square near Adoraim Camp, south of Hebron, and the soldiers violently removed us from the military vehicle. I fell to the ground and my headscarf slipped off my head. The soldier started laughing, saying, 'You wear beautiful golden earrings.' Only after some time did he allow me to wear my headscarf again.

"We were seated on the floor until 6:30 a.m.," Amr went on. "We were subjected to verbal humiliation from the soldiers while they filmed us with their phones. After that, we were taken onto a bus that had arrived there. As the bus started moving, one of the soldiers entered, speaking in Arabic with an Egyptian accent, and said: 'We will now send you to execution; the time has come for us to avenge October 7.'" The siblings were transferred to an interrogation center, and later released. On Dec. 3, Amr was arrested again.

Update: After publication of this article, the IPS responded to +972's request for comment with the following: "Claims such as those presented [here] are not known to us. However, we note that every prisoner has the right to file a complaint through the usual channels. In the case of all the prisoners who died since the beginning of the war, there are commissions of inquiry as required by the protocols of the IPS. Therefore, at this stage we cannot detail the circumstances of the death."
This article contains additional reporting by Oren Ziv and Meron Rapoport.

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Palestinians recount abuse inside Israeli prisons

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Newly released inmates detail cases of humiliation, torture, rape threats, and a prisoner beaten to death by Israeli forces in the weeks since October 7.

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PALCIT est une base de données constituée de citations sur la colonisation sioniste de la Palestine

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PALCIT est une base de données constituée de citations sur la colonisation sioniste de la Palestine

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Database of Palestine colonization quotes - PALCIT

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PALCIT est une base de données constituée de citations sur la colonisation sioniste de la Palestine. Certes, les citations ne remplacent pas l’Histoire. Mais il n’y a pas d’Histoire sans citations. Celles de ce site proviennent soit d’historiens reconnus, soit de médias qui ont éclairé l’actualité.

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The Guardian : massacres of beginning of July

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The Guardian : massacres of beginning of July

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Last Tuesday evening, at about 6.30pm everything was calm in Abasan al-Kabira, on the southeastern outskirts of Khan Younis in Gaza. For once the buzzing of the drones had died away, and there had been no sound of explosions for hours.

Like many other children, Rita Abu Hammad, a bright and playful eight-year-old was standing in front of the school that had been her family's home for weeks, watching the other children's games, thetraders at their ramshackle stalls, the adults talking, the teenagers trying to get an internet connection or lining up to pay a few shekels to charge phones at a small electricity supply point. In a tent nearby was her three brothers, sister and their mother, Rima Abu Hammad.

"Suddenly, we heard sound of a missile, and then a very strong explosion," said Abu Hammad, 36. "Then the sound of screaming , ashes, and blood were the only thing you could hear, see and smell. When I pulled myself together, I remembered that my daughter had been standing near the school's gate. I ran madly, and screaming her name."

Abu Hammad started looking for her daughter, stepping between the injured, the dead and the scattered body parts but could not find her.

"There were many bodies, including children, women, and men, some cut to many pieces, some burnt alive. The street was a pool of blood. But there was no trace of my child."

The airstrike in Abasan , which the Israeli military said involved a "precise munition" to target a "terrorist from Hamas' military wing" who had taken part in the 7 October attack on Israel, was only one incident during one of the most violent weeks in Gaza since the first months of heavy fighting in the territory last year.

On Saturday, an Israeli airstrike killed at least 90 Palestinians in a designated humanitarian zone in Gaza, according to the territory's health ministry. Israel said the attack targeted Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif.

More than 38,500 people have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli invasion began nine months ago. The invasion followed Hamas's surprise attacks in Israel during which 1,200 people were killed and 250 others abducted.

The surge in violence came amid a further round of ceasefire talks that were paused by Hamas after Saturday's strike. Israel accuses Hamas of using Gaza's population as a human shield, a charge the Islamist militant group denies.

UN and other humanitarian officials over the weekend described rapidly deteriorating conditions as temperatures touched 40C, shortages of vital supplies, limited water and growing anarchy.

"Any kind of high value item we try to bring in through ... is immediately looted. This isn't desperate people. This is just criminality. There is no police on the streets because they get targeted by Israel," one senior UN official tsaid. "Thirty trucks came in with flour without a problem but when eight trucks of tent came in four were immediately looted. That's 900 tents gone, and each can be sold for $400 [£315] or so on the market."

Another official described a "daily vision of horror", with limited stocks of medicine, barely adequate supplies of food and "nowhere near enough water".

"Hospitals keep reopening with fewer doctors, less machines, less medicines each time. They are run by an army of burned out heroes," they added.

Dr Mohamed Saqr, the head of the nursing at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, said the situation there was "catastrophic". Even before the surge of violence this week, the hospital was full.

"We are the only operating major hospital in southern Gaza serving more than 1.2 million residents and displaced people in Khan Younis. There were no single empty beds, even in the emergency department," Saqr said.

When the school was hit in Abasan, Nasser hospital received 23 dead and 56 injured in less than half an hour.

"The situation was very difficult. We did not have sufficient tools or equipment, not even sterilisers or even gauze to wrap wounds, even gowns for operations. We treated the injured on the floor of the reception area or in corridors," Saqr said.

Abu Hammad and her relatives searched for an hour around the site of the school bombing in Abasan but when there was still no sign of her daughter went to the hospital where they split up.

"I said to my brother, I will go to the emergency department, and you will go to the mortuary and look for her. After a long search, I found her, she was alive but badly injured with shrapnel in the back and chest," she said.

"I felt very happy and sad at the same time. I was happy because I did not lose her, she was still alive with me, and I felt sad for her condition and pain, but I still thank God for her presence and that she was not among the children who died there. It is true that the war is nine months old, and every day has been difficult, but I did not have a harder day than that day."

Much of the recent fighting in the Palestinian territory has been in the Gaza City district of Shujaiya, a former Hamas stronghold cleared by Israeli forces early in the war. Tens of thousands have fled but not Mohammed Abu Ahmed, a 48-years-old father of five.

"The situation was very difficult with the bombing and shelling continuing night and day. In the last three days, leaflets were thrown and recorded calls were made to people by [the Israelis] ordering them to move and head south, but the vast majority of people refuse to leave," he said.

"I will not leave because we have already been through a lot, and because my wife and five children are here and it's very hard to get transport. Also, my mother is disabled and needs special so it will be difficult move her and for her to live in a tent."

A final reason for not leaving cited by many others: nowhere is considered safe after a series of strikes in the humanitarian safe zone.

"I ask the world to move to stop the war and make us live freely and peacefully like the rest of the peoples of the world," Abu Ahmed said.

Among those who did flee Shukaiya was Fathi Al-Samri, 21, who moved to Nuseirat in central Gaza to live with a sister but the rest of the family of seven stayed put.

"My mother insisted that I go south because I am her only son. The rest of the family refused to leave to preserve our property because they fear that they will not be allowed to ever go back again," he said.

Khaled Abu Anza, 23, was sitting at the Abasan school gate next to his wifi stall when the airstrike hit on Tuesday.

"We were going to go and play football but we decided to stay. There was an explosion and when I looked around, I found all my friends and people around me, cut into pieces, and killed. I wanted to help people but when I looked at myself, I found that I had shrapnel in my chest, back and feet, and I was bleeding," he said.

"After about 20 minutes, a truck came and they carried me with it, and it was full of corpses ... And I was the only living person in the truck ... This is enough, we have no energy left. We are tired. We don't want anything, just to stop the war."

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'The street was a pool of blood': Gaza witnesses one of most violent weeks since first months of war

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After Israeli airstrikes on a school and a humanitarian zone, survivors and officials tell of a 'daily vision of horror'