Friday 29th of November 2024
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Investigate Israel for ‘war crimes’ – Human Rights Watch
Deliberate attacks on hospitals and ambulances in Gaza are an atrocity, the group said

Israel’s attacks on hospitals, ambulances and medical personnel in Gaza should be “investigated as war crimes,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday, urging the government in West Jerusalem to end such strikes immediately.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attacks are “apparently unlawful” and are “further destroying” the healthcare system in Gaza, according to HRW. Even though Israel accused Hamas of “cynical use of hospitals,” earlier this month, “no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law,” the group added.

“The strikes on hospitals have killed hundreds of people and put many patients at grave risk because they’re unable to receive proper medical care,” said Dr. A. Kayum Ahmed, HRW’s special adviser on the right to health, noting that the Gaza healthcare infrastructure was “already hard hit by an unlawful blockade.”

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 521 people – including 16 medical workers – have been killed in 137 “attacks on health care” in Gaza as of November 12. The UN has established that two-thirds of primary care facilities and half of all hospitals in the enclaves were “not functioning” as of November 10, while dealing with “unprecedented numbers of severely injured patients.”

The total Palestinian death toll in the enclave has risen to 11,000 since October 7, when Israel declared war on Hamas in the aftermath of the Palestinian group’s lethal incursion into nearby Israeli settlements that killed an estimated 1,200 people.

Israel has cut off Gaza’s supply of water and electricity. Local hospitals are running out of medicine and basic equipment, with HRW hearing from doctors that they are using vinegar as an antiseptic.

“The Israeli government should immediately end unlawful attacks on hospitals, ambulances, and other civilian objects, as well as its total blockade of the Gaza Strip, which amounts to the war crime of collective punishment,” HRW said, while calling on Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups “to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians under their control from the effects of attacks and not use civilians as ‘human shields’.”

The group urged an investigation into the IDF attacks on Gaza healthcare infrastructure, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) – which has jurisdiction over the occupied Palestinian territories – to get involved as well. 

Meanwhile, the US, UK, Canada, Germany and other countries should “suspend military assistance and arms sales” to Israel “as long as its forces continue to commit widespread, serious abuses amounting to war crimes against Palestinian civilians with impunity,” the HRW said.

https://www.rt.com/news/587276-hrw-israel-hospitals-crimes/

 

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mein adolph....

PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Banality of Propaganda

The annals of the awful art  — Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, Japan’s and America’s during World War II — show that it does not have to be sophisticated. The Israeli president’s display of Mein Kampf  just proved that again.

 

I watched a video clip Sunday of Isaac Herzog that takes all cakes in the way of silliness that also manages to be pernicious. In it the Israeli president holds a copy of Mein Kampf, translated into Arabic. 

The video was made one day after an immense demonstration in London in behalf of a ceasefire in Gaza and the freeing of Palestinians from Israel’s long, violent repression. Here is part of what Herzog had to say:

“I want to show you something exclusive. This is Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. It’s the book that led to the Holocaust, and the book that led to World War II. This is the book that led … to the worst atrocity of humankind, which the British fought against. 

This book was found just a few days ago in northern Gaza, in a children’s living room which was turned into a military operations base of Hamas, on the body of one of the terrorists and murderers of Hamas, and he even makes notes, he marked, and learned again and again of Hitler’s ideology of killing the Jews, of burning the Jews, of slaughtering the Jews. 

This is the real war we are at. So all those who demonstrated yesterday — I am not saying all of them support Hitler. But all I’m saying is by omitting to understand what Hamas ideology is all about they are basically supporting this ideology. ”

You can view a one–minute, 22–second version of this video clip here, or a longer, BBC version here. In both, we watch the Israeli head of state play the Holocaust card, the Hitler card, the Jewish victim card and the Hamas-as-murdering-burning-slaughtering-monsters card all at once. 

I cannot identify the television network that showed the shorter version of Herzog, and I am astonished that the BBC took it seriously enough to broadcast it, but this is the Beeb these days — always on for the trans–Atlantic cause. 

[Related: What We’re Not Hearing About Oct 7]

How remarkably flimsy propaganda is in most cases, I thought after watching Herzog and taking my notes. This is true in many, many cases in the annals of the awful art — Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, Japan’s and America’s during World War II. As you look at it now, none of it is very sophisticated for the simple reason it does not have to be. 

Propaganda is about forceful impact, subtlety the last thing on the propagandist’s mind. The banal will always do. The Japanese during the Pacific war were “Japs” or “Nips,” and in the plentitude of American propaganda images they had buck teeth and pencil mustaches and wore round glasses over their evil Asiatic eyes. 

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/11/14/patrick-lawrence-the-banality-of-propaganda/

 

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genocide....

US President Joe Biden and two of his cabinet members are being sued in a US federal court for aiding and abetting genocide in Gaza, Al-Jazeera reported on 14 November.

A federal complaint filed on 13 November against President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, accuses them of “failure to prevent and complicity in the Israeli government’s unfolding genocide.”

Israel, which receives $3.8 billion in military support from the US each year, has killed over 11,200 Palestinians, the majority women and children, since the beginning of its bombing campaign in Gaza on 7 October. 

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed the suit on behalf of Palestinian human rights organizations, Palestinians in Gaza and US citizens with relatives trapped in the besieged enclave.

The bombing campaign has been accompanied by statements from Israeli military and political leaders claiming that all 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip are legitimate targets, rather than just members or fighters of Hamas, the group that attacked Israel on 7 October.

“Numerous Israeli government leaders have expressed clear genocidal intentions and deployed dehumanizing characterizations of Palestinians, including ‘human animals’,” the CCR wrote in its complaint.

It said those “statements of intent”, when combined with the “mass killing” of Palestinians, reveal “evidence of an unfolding crime of genocide.”

 

https://new.thecradle.co/articles/rights-group-sues-biden-for-complicity-in-gaza-genocide

 

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