by Abdel Bari Atwan

The Hamas leadership in Gaza has not yet officially responded to the ceasefire proposal emerging from last weekend's quadripartite meeting in Paris between the intelligence chiefs of the US, Israel, Egypt and Qatar. This delay is most likely deliberate, and if the agreement is approved, it will be conditional on meeting the resistance's demands, namely the total withdrawal of Israel and a definitive end to its war against the Gaza Strip.

 

These leaders, who benefit from the massive support of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, must know that the objective of this draft agreement is to save the Israeli occupation state, to consolidate the declining influence of the United States in the Middle East and reduce the prospects of the war spreading, after it became clear that it would be impossible to destroy or defeat Hamas. After nearly four months of incessant Israeli aggression, Hamas retains intact more than 80% of its weapons, its defense forces, its tunnels and its weapons factories.

Benjamin Netanyahu seeks the release of as many captives as possible, particularly civilians, in order to be able to implement, without internal or external pressure, his plan to depopulate the Gaza Strip through forced evacuation or “volunteer”. This would be a prelude to placing Israel under military rule, the theft of its enormous offshore oil and gas reserves and the reestablishment of the 16 Israeli settlements that were dismantled in 2005 when direct occupation ended in due to the increasing number of victims among settlers and soldiers at the hands of the resistance.

With typical duplicity, the US is trying to sell this Israeli plan by dangling a “demilitarized” Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip once the Gaza war is over. The US State Department revealed on Thursday that Blinken was considering the possibility of recognizing such a state and had asked his aides to propose models of "demilitarization" that could be applied to it.

 

Amorim, Brazil 

 

A popular saying goes that the bigger the lie, the better it gets. This applies to the leaks from the USA and Great Britain on this issue. The two allies who together launched all the recent devastating wars in the Middle East are trying to set a new trap for the Palestinian resistance and people by once again selling them the same old illusion. Their real goal is to reverse the victory achieved by last year's October 7 raid and reduce Israel's material and human losses.

Caution is therefore required. There is no shortage of evidence of this duplicity.

On Wednesday, the US Congress voted by an overwhelming majority (422 votes to 2) to ban all members of the PLO, Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad from entering US territory. How can Washington support the creation of a Palestinian state while barring entry to members of the PLO who signed the Oslo Accords, recognized Israel, ceded 80% of the territory of historic Palestine and recruited 60 security agents to protect the settlers and repress his own people?

The US sponsored the Oslo Accords and held their signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden 30 years ago. Yet over the past twenty years, they have used their veto power in the United Nations Security Council to defeat the General Assembly's decision to grant Palestine full membership of the United Nations. united. It seems that if the USA one day recognizes such a state, it will only be for the UN archives, without doing so on the ground.

 

Abdellah Derkaoui, Morocco

 

The US administration has always affirmed that a Palestinian state could only come into being with the agreement of Israel and that it must be demilitarized. How can a demilitarized state survive alongside an enemy that practices genocide and ethnic cleansing and without having the means to defend itself against further aggression?

Today, it is not Joe Biden who is calling the shots in Washington, but Benjamin Netanyahu. This is evidenced by Israel's repeated refusal to respond to US calls to put an end to the massacres and massive displacements of civilians in the Gaza Strip.

The USA has already committed to guaranteeing the ceasefire and reconstruction agreements in Gaza, notably the Sharm El Sheikh agreement which followed the 2013 war. But it has never respected this commitment and has not never pressured Israel to comply. Thousands of houses and towers destroyed during this assault remain in ruins to this day, despite the allocation of $5 billion for their reconstruction.

The Hamas leadership, which inflicted Israel's greatest defeat since its founding 75 years ago, should stick to its own terms in full. She must not accept the trap deal that US and Arab intelligence agencies have designed and are trying to sell her. Its main objectives are to spare Israel from defeat or to reduce its impact, to impose conditions on Palestinian resistance through terror and genocide, to defuse growing popular anger against the USA and to Israel in the Arab world and to anticipate rebellions against complicit leaders.

The US sponsor of the agreement, as well as most of its European allies, never demanded an end to the genocidal war in Gaza, but supported it in the name of "self-defense". He has never opposed the banning of humanitarian aid or the deliberate starvation of the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip who can barely find a mouthful of bread or a drop of milk to keep their children envy.

Victory requires patience and its achievement is fast approaching. 550 Israeli soldiers failed to fully control the Gaza Strip, crush the resistance, kill or capture its leaders. The occupying state has received a hammer blow which has shaken the pillars of its existence and wants, with the help of the USA, to uproot the resistance by destroying the population which shelters it.

https://en.reseauinternational.net/le-piege-de-la-proposition-de-treve-de-paris-la-duplicite-us-sur-un-etat-palestinien-sert-lagenda-genocidaire-disrael/  READ FROM TOP.  FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW, PLEASE.......................

Israel’s Assault on Gaza Is Unlike Any War in Recent Memory

BY

BRANKO MARCETIC

From the rate and scale of civilian slaughter to the killing of protected groups and the type of munitions, Israel’s war on Gaza is an exceptionally brutal campaign unlike almost anything we’ve seen.

It took just two months for the Israeli government to kill more than 17,000 Palestinians in Gaza — a death toll that’s been recognized as accurate by leading humanitarian groups, the US State Department, a senior Biden administration official, the esteemed Lancet medical journal, and even the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

That’s an important statistic, because it’s maybe the leading indicator — but by no means the only one — that what we are seeing play out in Gaza daily is not “just another terrible war” but something altogether different.

Consider the verdict of those who have spent their lives and careers in the world’s worst war zones. Martin Griffiths — a long-serving United Nations humanitarian official who started his career in genocide-ravaged Cambodia and served everywhere from Yemen to post-earthquake Syria — has called Gaza the “worst ever” humanitarian crisis he’s seen. Other UN officials have called Gaza “a living nightmare” and “absolutely unprecedented and staggering,” and have described the conditions on the ground as “apocalyptic.”

“I feel like I am running out of ways to describe the horrors hitting children here,” said UNICEF spokesperson James Elder. European Union foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell has similarly called the situation in Gaza “catastrophic, apocalyptic,” with the scale of destruction “even greater than the destruction suffered by the German cities during the Second World War.”

These statements are borne out by the numbers, which clearly show that Israel’s military campaign has been exceptional in its indiscriminate brutality. True to Borrell’s words, a Financial Times analysis found that after only six weeks, northern Gaza had been reduced to rubble on a scale comparable only to the carpet-bombing of German cities in World War II. With 68 percent of buildings damaged or destroyed in northern Gaza by the start of this month, the flattening of that area is worse than the notorious bombings of Dresden and Cologne, and approaching the 75 percent destruction rate of Hamburg.

Furthermore, roughly 70 percent of Palestinians killed so far have been women and children. This is a staggering proportion that sets Gaza apart from some of this century’s worst wars.

At the height of the Syrian civil war in 2015 and 2016, a conflict considered especially deadly for women and children, those two groups comprised 25 percent of the civilians killed by one count, or 37 percent by another. When civilian deaths in Afghanistan reached an all-time high in the first half of 2021, women and children comprised 46 percentof all civilian casualties. Over the first two years of the Iraq War, that figure was just under 20 percent. In Yemen — generally considered one of this century’s ghastliest wars — from 2018 to 2022, women and children made up 33 percent of civilian casualties, according to data compiled by the Civilian Impact Monitoring Project on the consequences of armed violence. (If indirect causes of the war like starvation and disease are accounted for, Yemen’s numbers are significantly higher.)

“Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children,” UN secretary-general António Guterres said last month. Sure enough, Gaza’s children, who made up nearly half of the enclave’s population before the war, have been killed on a scale unmatched by other recent conflicts.

After only three weeks of attacks, Israeli forces had killed more children in Gaza than the number of children killed in all the world’s conflicts over an entire year, outstripping that total for every year since 2019. In fact, with the death toll for Gazan children now standing at more than 7,870, Israeli forces have killed almost the same number of children as those killed in all of the world’s wars over those three years combined (8,174).

According to Al Jazeera, in just two months, the IDF has killednearly the same number of children that were killed over the eleven years of the Afghanistan War (8,099) and nearly double the official number of kids killed over seven and a half years of the Yemen war (3,774). Even if we take the appalling higher count of children killed in Syria’s twelve-year-long civil war (30,127), its seven-child-deaths-a-day average is still far outpaced by the 160-per-day rate achieved by Israel — a rate that, if it remains consistent, would overtake the Syrian war’s child death toll in less than a year.

The Casualties of This War Are Outstripping Similar Conflicts

These figures are bad enough. But even if we look beyond the child death toll and compare Israel’s campaign to war zones where children don’t make up as high a proportion of citizenry as they do in Gaza, this war is still exceptionally brutal.

Indiscriminate and disproportionate killing is nothing unusual when it comes to Israel’s various wars on Gaza over the years. But this one stands apart even among those. According to an analysis by Open University of Israel sociology professor Yagil Levy, even a very conservative estimate of the civilian death toll in Israel’s current war — 61 percent — would put it at a far higher proportion than Israel’s previous military campaigns in the territory, higher even than the average civilian death toll over every war fought from World War II until the 1990s.

According to the United Nations, at the time of writing, 19,453 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with women and children comprising more than 13,000 of the dead, putting the total Palestinian civilian death toll somewhere between these two figures (not counting those missing or buried under rubble). Israeli officials claim they’ve killed 5,000 Hamas fighters, a dubious figure that would effectively mean almost every single Palestinian man killed in the war has been a noncivilian — and it’s even more dubious when we consider that Hamas’s 30,000fighters comprised only 1.4 percent of Gaza’s prewar population.

In any case, compare this to the 15,000 civilians killed by direct military action from 2015 to 2019 in Yemen, generally considered one of this century’s worst wars. The number of Palestinians killed so far, after just over two months of Israeli bombardment and ground invasion, is more than the yearly death toll of most of the years of Yemen’s conflict, by one conservative estimate.

The Israeli campaign has also outpaced the brutality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the focus of much of the world’s outrage over the past two years. It took twenty-one months for the civilian death toll to cross 10,000 in Ukraine, including more than 560 children killed. By contrast, it took Israel only forty-five days to cross the threshold of 10,000 women and children killed, and it had killed at least 583 Palestinian children after just six days.

Or consider the Syrian city of Aleppo, virtually synonymous with senseless human carnage throughout the 2010s. Around 31,000 people died as a result of the notoriously cruel and indiscriminate four-year campaign by the Syrian government to retake the city, which means Israel is already more than halfway to reaching that total in a fraction of the time. In fact, the monthly average of 8,589 Palestinians killed by December 7 is far beyond the deadliest months and even some years of the Syrian war as a whole, a war considered so brutal it inspired constant calls for military intervention, attempts at regime change, and years of crippling US sanctions and bombings of the country.

The 2011 civil war in Libya and dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s threats of reprisal against rebel forces likewise triggered impassioned pleas for Western military intervention to protect civilians. Those pleas were soon acted on and morphed into a disastrous regime change operation. According to Airwars, the highest estimates count 3,400 civilians killed over the eight months between that war’s start and Gaddafi’s murder, with the dictator responsible for as many as 2,300 of those deaths — about one-fifth of just the number of women and children Israeli forces had killed in a quarter of the time.

Israel’s campaign doesn’t fare much better next to some of the worst US wars, either. The 2016–2017 battle against ISIS in the Iraqi city of Mosul was widely held up as a shocking exhibition of Donald Trump’s scandalous disregard for innocent lives, claiming as many as 11,000 civilians over nine months — a total and rate of killing that both fall short of what Israel’s managed so far.

In fact, Israel has already killed more women and children than all the civilians US forces killed in both the first and second years of the Iraq War, and at least nine other years of that invasion. They’ve killed more civilians than the US military killed over nearly two decades in Afghanistan. The Palestinian death toll is already approaching the 21,000 civilians killed over the first two years of US bombing of Vietnam, today considered one of the most shameful episodes in US history and an event that destroyed the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson.

Journalists, Medics, and UN Workers Are Being Slaughtered

But it’s not just the civilian death toll that points to the exceptional violence of this war, which has been uniquely lethal to groups that are generally considered off-limits in modern warfare.

Take journalists. By whatever count you use — estimates range from fifty-six killed, on the low end, to as many as sixty-eight — journalists’ rights groups are in agreement that this has been an extraordinarily deadly war for reporters, inarguably the worst this century, if not the worst since journalist deaths started being tracked in the early 1990s, according to two separate organizations. It has been “a scale and pace of loss of media professionals’ lives without precedent,” the International Federation of Journalists recently said. And some of those deaths have been deliberate assassinations.

After only a month of fighting, the United Nations (UN) had seen 101 of its staff killed in Gaza, the largest loss of life among its workers in a single conflict in the organization’s entire history. That death toll is now up to 130. This news has come as Israeli officials have verbally attacked top UN officials, charged the organization with being “contaminated with antisemitism,” threatened to expel it from the Palestinian territories (and did so), and accused UN workers of being part of Hamas. Israeli bombing has now also killed a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor and his family, as well as a French diplomat.

The war has likewise been a bloodbath for medics. The Palestinian health minister put the health care worker death toll in Gaza at 250 earlier this month, while the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations recently placed it at 283. Either total is more than all of the health care workers killed across all of the world’s conflicts during the entirety of 2022, which was declared the most violent year of the past decade for health care workers by the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition. And it is more than the total killed in every year documented by the organization going back to at least 2017. By comparison to the first year of the Ukraine war, Russian forces carried out far more attacks on the Ukrainian health sector, but they killed sixty-two health workers — a shocking figure that nevertheless pales in comparison to the number in Gaza.

A large part of the reason for this level of lethality is the unique ferocity of the Israeli bombing campaign, coupled with a new level of disregard for civilian casualties. After just five days, Israel had dropped six thousand bombs on Gaza. That’s approaching the highest number of bombs and other munitions dropped on Afghanistan in a single year since 2006 (7,423), and the total number of bombs and missiles dropped by NATO over the entire Libyan intervention (7,600). It’s also far more than the average number of bombs dropped per month on Iraq and Syria (2,500) in the battle against ISIS.

Since then, Israel has reportedly dropped a total of 29,000 munitions on Gaza, or an average of nearly 500 bombs per day. That’s about the same amount the United States and UK dropped on Iraq in that invasion’s first month — a country 1,200 times the size and about one-hundredth of the population density of Gaza in 2003 — and more than the total number of bombs dropped by the United States in all countries over the entirety of 2016.

https://jacobin.com/2023/12/israel-defense-forces-gaza-palestine-civilian-death-casualties-women-children-journalists-war

 

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 By

 Jeremy Kuzmarov

  Unfazed by the International Court of Justice’s Genocide Case Brought by South Africa, Even More Deadly Weapons Are on the Way

ATimes of Israel report on January 25 noted that more than 250 U.S. cargo planes and 20 ships have delivered more than 10,000 tons of munitions and military equipment to Israel since its onslaught on Gaza began in October.

The same article stated that Israeli Defense Ministry Director General Eyal Zamir visited Washington in late January to finalize the purchase of 25 F-35 stealth fighter jets, 25 F-15 fighter jets and 12 Apache helicopters from the U.S.

In late December, The Times of Israel reported that the Israeli Defense Ministry had made almost $2.8 billion in additional purchases from the U.S. since the war started—in addition to the $3.8 billion in military aid that the U.S. provides to Israel annually.[1]

 

On January 26, a 17-judge panel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague issued a ruling that South Africa had solid foundation to bring its case of genocide before the world’s highest court. 

As of this writing, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have killed more than 26,000 civilians in Gaza and injured 65,000 more while reducing much of Gaza to rubble following the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.

The ICJ case may very well implicate the U.S., which has provided most of the weapons used to kill Palestinian civilians in violation of the laws of war.

Palestinian journalist Ramzy Baroud wrote that “the fingerprints of U.S. weapons are on the body of every Palestinian killed in Gaza, from the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, to UN schools, to every house and every street.”

According to Baroud, “never before in the history of the U.S.’s relationship with the Middle East has Washington been so directly involved in an Israeli war. The closest was the 1973 war, and even then, the U.S. involvement arrived a week later, and was hardly as direct.”[2]

READ MORE: https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/02/02/250-u-s-cargo-planes-and-at-least-20-ships-have-delivered-more-than-10000-tons-of-armaments-and-military-equipment-to-israel-since-war-on-gaza-started/

 

 

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BY CRAIG MURRAY

 

In finding there is a plausible case against Israel, the International Court of Justice treated with contempt the argument from Israel that the case should be dismissed as it is exercising its right of self-defence. This argument took up over half of Israel’s pleadings. Not only did the court find there is a plausible case of genocide, the court only mentioned self-defence once in its interim ruling – and that was merely to note that Israel had claimed it. Para 41:

That the ICJ has not affirmed Israel’s right to self-defence is perhaps the most important point in this interim order. It is the dog that did not bark. The argument which every western leader has been using is spurned by the ICJ.

Now the ICJ did not repeat that an occupying power has no right of self-defence. It did not need to. It simply ignored Israel’s specious assertion.

It could do that because what it went on to iterate went way beyond any plausible assertion of self-defence. What struck me most about the ICJ ruling was that the Order went into far more detail about the evidence of genocide than it needed to. Its description was stark.

Here Para 46 is crucial

The reason this is so crucial, is that the Court is not saying that South Africa asserts this. The Court is saying these are the facts. It is a finding of fact by the Court. I cannot emphasise too strongly the importance of that description by the court of the state of affairs in Gaza.

The Court then goes on to detail accounts by the United Nations of the factual situation, quoting three different senior officials at length, including Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner General of UNRWA:

This of course explains why the immediate response to the ICJ ruling was a coordinated attack by Israel and the combined imperialist powers on UNRWA, designed to accelerate the genocide by stopping aid, to provide a propaganda counter-narrative to the ICJ judgment, and to reduce the credibility of UNRWA’s evidence before the court.

The Court works very closely with the UN and is very much an entrenched part of the UN system. It has a particularly close relationship with the UN General Assembly – many of the Court’s cases are based on request from the UN General Assembly. In a fortnight’s time the Court will be starting its substantive hearings on the legal position in the Occupied Territories of Palestine, at the request of the UNGA. There are five specific references to the UNGA in the Order.

The Court spent a great deal of time outlining the facts of the unfolding genocide in the Gaza Strip. It did not have to do so in nearly so much detail, and far too little attention has been paid to this. I was equally surprised by how much detail the court gave on the evidence of genocidal intent by Israel.

It is especially humiliating for Israel that the Court quoted the Israeli Head of State, the President of Israel himself, as giving clear evidence of genocidal intent, along with two other government ministers.

Again, this is not the Court saying that South Africa has alleged this. It is a finding of fact by the Court. The ICJ has already found to be untrue Israel’s denial in court of incitement to genocide.

Now think of this: the very next day after President Herzog made a genocidal statement, as determined by the International Court of Justice, he was met and offered “full support” by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission and Roberta Metsola, President of the European Parliament.

When you take the detail of what the Court has found to be the actual facts of the case, in death and destruction and in intent, I have no doubt that this is a court which is currently minded to find Israel guilty of genocide once the substantive case comes before the Court.

All of Israel’s arguments were lost. Every one. The substantial effort Israel put into having the case dismissed on procedural grounds was brushed aside. So was self-defence. And in its findings of the facts, the Court plainly found to be untrue the Israeli lies about avoidance of civilian casualties, the responsibility of Hamas for the damage to infrastructure, and the access of relief aid to Gaza.

Those are the facts of what happened.

Do not be confused by the absence of the word “ceasefire” from the Court order. What the Court has ordered is very close to that. It has explicitly ordered the Israeli military to stop killing Palestinians.

That is absolutely clear. And while I accept it is tautologous, in the sense it is ordering Israel to obey a Convention which Israel is already bound to follow, there could be no clearer indication that the Court believes that Israel is not currently obeying it.

So what happens now?

Well, Israel has responded by killing over 180 Palestinian civilians since the Order was given from the International Court of Justice. If that continues, South Africa may return to the Court for more urgent measures even before the ordered monthly report from Israel is due. Algeria has announced it will take the Order to the UN Security Council for enforcement.

I doubt the United States will veto. There has been a schizophrenic reaction from Israel and its supporters to the ICJ Order. On the one hand, the ICJ has been denounced as antisemitic. On the other hand the official narrative has been (incredibly) to claim Israel actually won the case, while minimising the coverage in mainstream media. This has been reinforced by the massive and coordinated attack on UNRWA, to create alternative headlines.

It is difficult to both claim that Israel somehow won, and at the same time seek to block UNSC enforcement of the Order. My suspicion is that there will be a continuing dual track: pretending that there is no genocide and Israel is obeying the “unnecessary” order, while at the same time attacking and ridiculing the ICJ and the wider UN.

No matter what the ICJ said, Israel would not have stopped the genocide; that is the simple truth. The immediate reaction of the US and allies to the Order has been to try to accelerate the genocide by crippling the UN’s aid relief work. I confess I did not expect anything quite that vicious and blatant.

The wheels of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The ICJ having flagged up a potential genocide so strongly, it may well fall to judges in individual nations to restrain international support for the genocide. As I explained in detail, the Genocide Convention has been incorporated into UK law by the International Criminal Court Act of 2001.

There will, beyond any doubt, have been minutes issued by FCDO legal advisers warning of ministers being at risk of personal liability in UK law for complicity in genocide now, should arms shipments and other military and intelligence cooperation with the Israeli genocide continue. In the US, hearings started already in California on a genocide complicity suit brought against Joe Biden.

Of course I wish this would all work faster. It will not. The UN General Assembly may suspend Israel from the UN. There are other useful actions to be taken. But this is a long slog, not a quick fix, and people like you and I continue to have a vital role, as everybody does, in using the power of the people to wrest control from a vicious political class of killers.

This was a good win. I am pleased that this course for which I advocated and lobbied has worked and increased pressure on the Zionists, and that my judgment that the International Court of Justice is not just a NATO tool like the corrupt International Criminal Court, has been vindicated.

It cannot help the infants killed and maimed last night or those to die in the coming few days. But it is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

 

 

https://www.unz.com/article/has-international-law-survived-or-has-the-western-political-class-killed-it/

 

 

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