Israel nearing ‘all-out war’ – foreign minister
Hezbollah “crossed all lines” with a rocket attack that killed ten people, Israel Katz has said

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz has vowed to launch a “disproportionate”response after Hezbollah allegedly killed ten people in a rocket attack on a football field in the Golan Heights. The incident has brought Israel to the brink of “all-out war” with the group, Katz has warned.

Most of the dead were children, and more than a dozen were injured by the strike in the town of Majdal Shams on Saturday, according to Israel’s Magen David Adom ambulance service. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) blamed the attack on “the Hezbollah terror group.”

“There is no doubt that Hezbollah crossed all red lines,” Katz told Israel’s Channel 12 News. “We are facing an all-out war” with the group, he continued, adding that Israel “will respond disproportionately.” 

Katz said that he would “not go into detail” on what such a response would look like, but claimed that Israel has the “full backing” of the US and Europe to escalate against Hezbollah.

https://www.rt.com/news/601747-israel-katz-war-hezbollah/

MEANWHILE:

Art and popular resistance: truth telling from ANU to Gaza to Sudan
By ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment Members

Palestinian liberation movements on this continent are intertwined with Blak liberation and resistance movements for restorative land justice around the world. To organise for Palestinian liberation, to organise for First Nations liberation on this continent and globally, is to call for a drastic restructuring of settler identity and cultural awareness of the role of settler colonialism and genocide in the current world order.

Writings from the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment – Part 6

This is Part Six of a six-part series of articles from the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment. Apart from the Introduction by Emeritus Professor Tamara Jacka (here), all articles are written by student members of the encampment. To protect the authors against identification, we have kept them anonymous.

Art and popular resistance: truth telling from ANU to Gaza to Sudan

I am a student at the Australian National University (ANU). I am writing from tents, camp chairs and hammocks at the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment, which has stood for more than 70 days on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging, and express my solidarity with First Nations mobs organising for land justice and liberation. Palestinian liberation movements on this continent are intertwined with Blak liberation and resistance movements for restorative land justice around the world. To organise for Palestinian liberation, to organise for First Nations liberation on this continent and globally, is to call for a drastic restructuring of settler identity and cultural awareness of the role of settler colonialism and genocide in the current world order.

Art plays a crucial role in popular resistance. Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, who visited the ANU encampment in May, describes popular resistance in terms of coalition and collective; diverse groups of people working through diverse means in common struggle. In popular resistance, art increases our capacity for collective risk, emboldens the movement, and helps us realise the possibility of new worlds. Art, including music, poetry and painting, connects us across time and space. As artists, we organise to disrupt violent colonial systems and practise restorative justice through truth-telling and world-making (Gwendolyn).

Public art is non-violent resistance, but it is increasingly criminalised on this continent and across the world (Landry, 2019).]]]]]] Military rhetoric connects public art to urban disorder and anxieties around instability and insecurity.

https://johnmenadue.com/art-and-popular-resistance-truth-telling-from-anu-to-gaza-to-sudan/

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• Funerals have been taking place for the victims of a rocket strike in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights

• At least 12 people, mostly children, were killed on Saturday when a rocket hit a football pitch in Majdal Shams

• The White House issued a statement saying the "horrific" strike was from a Hezbollah rocket, launched from an area the group controls

• Israel has blamed Hezbollah, but the Lebanese militant group strongly denies any involvement

• Early on Sunday, the IDF said it had conducted air strikes against seven Hezbollah targets "deep inside Lebanese territory"

• Israel and Hezbollah have been exchanging fire regularly since October, when the Israel-Gaza war began

• Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said Hezbollah would "pay a heavy price", but US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he didn't want to see the conflict escalate

• According to the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry 66 Palestinians have been killed and 241 injured over past 24 hours due to Israeli operations in Gaza

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c6p2979yyyzt

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Israeli soldier from the combat engineering corps sharing footage on his personal account blowing Rafah’s water reservoir in Tel Sultan neighborhood “in honor of Shabbat” as he describes it.

https://x.com/ytirawi/status/1816965332952555683?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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SOUTH LEBANON (Sputnik) - The Israeli army shelled 15 settlements in eastern and southern Lebanon with heavy artillery after threats against Lebanese movement Hezbollah, which Israel accused of shelling the Golan Heights on Saturday, Lebanese broadcaster Al Manar reported on Monday.

According to the broadcaster, the Israelis shelled the city of Taraiyya in the Baalbek region in eastern Lebanon with heavy artillery.

In the Bint Jbeil district in southern Lebanon, they bombed the settlements of Ayta ash Shab, Yaroun, Ramyeh and Aitaroun, and in the Marjaayoun district near the border with Israel, they bombed the cities of Khiam, Kfarkela, Meiss El Jabal and Markaba.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240729/israeli-army-shells-15-settlements-in-lebanon---reports-1119550438.html

Netanyahu Halts Medical Evac of Injured Children in Gaza

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned from the United States early to discuss the recent explosion in Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that killed 12 Arab Druze children.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has delayed a flight that was scheduled to carry more than 150 injured and sick Palestinian children to the United Arab Emirates for treatment. It is not known if or when the flight will be rescheduled.

Last week, Netanyahu instructed his government to develop a plan to transfer patients out of Gaza and into a third country. Citing government officials, Israeli media reported on Sunday that Netanyahu made the decision after an explosion on a football field in Israel-occupied Golan Heights killed 12 Arab Druze children. Israel blames Hezbollah for the attack, but the Lebanese group denied the accusations and said it was an Israeli air defense missile that fell on the field.

Golan Heights is part of Syria and has been illegally occupied by Israel since 1967 and was unilaterally annexed by Israel in 1981, a move condemned by the United Nations Security Council.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240729/netanyahu-halts-medical-evac-of-injured-children-in-gaza-1119550838.html

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    by Eric Margolis

New York – According to Britain’s esteemed medical journal, The Lancet, 186,000 Palestinian adults and children have so far been killed or died of disease in Gaza. Nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed on the Israeli-occupied West Bank. 10,000 Palestinians languish in Israeli prisons.

The official Arab death toll to date is 39,670, including more than 15,000 children. Close to 80,000 Palestinians have been wounded.

Israel says 1,139 Israelis were killed. Half of Gaza’s homes have been destroyed by constant shelling, bombing and tank fire. Polio has just broken out in Gaza and the UN repots mass starvation there. Animals in Gaza – mainly horses and donkeys – have suffered terribly.

This is not a `war,’ as the media calls it. It’s an ongoing massacre, shooting fish in a barrel.

The two men who made possible this huge massacre, Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu and outgoing US President Joe Biden, met this week in Washington to talk about their ‘success’ in Gaza. Many members of US Congress applauded Netanyahu like trained seals.

Meanwhile, the US shipped thousands more 500lb and 2,000lb bombs and 105mm tank shells to Israel in violation of America’s own arms export laws. The arrest warrant issued against Netanyahu by the International Court of Justice was ignored by the US, which refuses to recognize the world court. And for good reason. Former President George W. Bush who committed a massive war crime in the trumped-up war against Iraq would have been arrested and put on trial. Add Biden and Tony Blair to this list of malefactors.

The US atomic bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki killed an estimated 40,000. That puts the current death and wounded toll in Gaza within the range of Nagasaki – just at a slower pace. The number of dead and wounded at Hiroshima was around 70,000. Mass sickness and starvation ensued – as it is today in Gaza.

Many misinformed Americans and supporters of Israel still applaud Biden. They are wrong. He has blackened America’s name and disgraced the nation with its role in the Gaza massacre and made a mockery of the UN.

At least presidential candidate Kamala Harris has done the right thing by calling for the creation of a Palestinian state. She is already under fire from Israel’s extreme right-wing parties. They are obsessed by the potent Palestinian birth rate. Inside Israel, they talk about ways to slow down the Arab birth rate in the West Bank and Gaza. 2,000 bombs are an effective way.

Many Americans know nothing of this genocide. Their very biased news networks show little of the horrors of Gaza. The only network that does effective reporting from Gaza is Al-Jazeera. I expect it will soon be banned ‘for supporting terrorism.’ The next target of the far right will be social media. Young Americans who watch internet news are demonstrating across the country precisely because they have more access to real news than older Americans who watch the heavily censored biased major networks.

At the base of American politics vast sums of money remain the dominant factor. Half of the money flowing to the Biden administration has reportedly come from pro-Israel Democratic sources. Wall Street remains the giant cash cow for pro-Israel forces. Donald Trump is being given $100 million alone by the billionaire Israeli-American widow of Las Vegas gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson. That will buy an awful lot of the small-town used car salesmen who make up our corrupt Congress.

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/the-real-boss-of-congress-comes-to-town/

A FAIR study finds that since October 7, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal have overwhelmingly applied the term “brutal” to violence committed by Palestinians rather than by Israelis. In doing so, journalists helped justify US support for the assault on Gaza and shield Israel from criticism, particularly in the early months of the onslaught.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has been nothing if not “brutal.” The indiscriminate use of US-supplied artillery that shred Palestinian bodies and bury them alive under rubble has killed at least 33,000, mostly women and children. The blockade of food and water into Gaza has caused the sharpest decline of a population’s nutrition status on record. Marauding Israeli soldiers frequently post videos on social media (Al Jazeera, 1/18/24) mocking people whose homes they have destroyed, and in many cases have killed—playing with children’s toys, fondling women’s underwear (Mondoweiss, 2/19/24). The total variety of indignities that characterize the “brutal” human toll in Gaza are too numerous to summarize here.

But to US newspapers, brutality appears to be less about actions or outcomes than about identity.

FAIR recorded each instance in which the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal used the word “brutal” (or variants like “brutally,” “brutality” etc.) to characterize Palestinians or Israelis, over the five-month period from October 7 to March 7.

Using the search terms “brutal” and “Israel” in the Nexis and Factiva news archiving services, FAIR distinguished between characterizations made by sources and those in a journalist’s own voice. When the word was used by a source, FAIR noted their occupation. FAIR also noted if a “brutal” claim came in an opinion piece or a news story. 

If an occurrence of “brutal” was not clearly attributed to a party in the conflict, it was labeled “unattributed” and not included in the data analysis. For instance, the statement “most news and commentary describes the war in Gaza as the latest brutal episode in the conflict between Israelis and Arabs” (Wall Street Journal, 11/6/23) does not clearly attribute “brutal” to a particular side. On the other hand, if a statement called both parties “brutal”—such as a Palestinian source’s statement, “Fear makes us brutal to each other” (New York Times, 1/31/24)—then it was counted as two instances, one for each party.

Looking at all attributions, 77% of the time when the word “brutal” was used to describe an actor in the conflict, it referred to Palestinians and their actions. This was 73% of the time at the Times, 78% at the Post and 87% at the Journal. Only 23% of the time was “brutal” used to describe Israel’s actions—even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.

Out of the 350 “brutal” mentions that were analyzed, 246 came from straight news stories—in quotes from sources and in journalists’ own words—while 104 came from op-eds. The lopsided rate at which “brutal” was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories: 77% of “brutal” mentions in news reports and 77% in op-eds were applied to Palestinians.

That publications were just as likely to describe Palestinians, as opposed to Israelis, as “brutal” in a straight news story versus an op-ed indicates a blurred distinction between these categories. Describing violent actors or their actions as “brutal,” after all, is an opinion, not a fact. That opinion may be well-justified, but it remains subjective.

The New York Times, in fact, distributed an internal memo in November (leaked to the Intercept, 4/15/24) instructing reporters to refrain from using “incendiary” language in their reporting on the war on Gaza, because “heated language can often obscure rather than clarify.” The memo highlighted the risks of double standards, asking, “Can we articulate why we are applying those words to one particular situation and not another?” 

Our study found a clear pattern of the tendentious word “brutal” being applied overwhelmingly to one side of the conflict, supporting the concerns that Times staffers expressed to the Intercept that the memo—which also prohibited the use of the term “occupied territory”—reflected a deference to Israeli talking points under the guise of journalistic objectivity. 

READ MORE:

https://fair.org/home/brutal-is-a-word-mostly-reserved-for-palestinian-violence/

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By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net

BBC coverage of the attack on a football field in the Golan Heights on Saturday has been intentionally misleading.

The BBC’s evening news entirely ignored the fact that those killed by the blast are a dozen Syrians, not Israeli citizens, and that for decades the surviving Syrian population in the Golan, most of them Druze, has been forced to live unwillingly under an Israeli military occupation.

I suppose mention of this context might complicate the story Israel and the BBC wish to tell — and risk reminding viewers that Israel is a belligerent state occupying not just Palestinian territory but Syrian territory too (not to mention nearby Lebanese territory).

It might suggest to audiences that these various permanent Israeli occupations have been contributing not only to large-scale human rights abuses but to regional tensions as well. That Israel’s acts of aggression against its neighbours might be the cause of “conflict,” rather than, as Israel and the BBC would have us believe, some kind of unusual, pre-emptive form of self-defence.

The BBC, of course, chose to uncritically air comments from a military spokesman for Israel, who blamed Hezbollah for the blast in the Golan.

Daniel Hagari tried to milk the incident for maximum propaganda value, arguing: “This attack shows the true face of Hizbullah, a terrorist organisation that targets and murders children playing soccer.”

Except, as the BBC failed to mention in its report, Israel infamously targeted and murdered four young children from the Bakr family playing football on a beach in Gaza in 2014.

Much more recently, video footage showed Israel striking yet more children playing football at a school in Gaza that was serving as a shelter for families whose homes were destroyed by earlier Israeli bombs.

Doubtless other strikes in Gaza over the past 10 months, so many of them targeting school-shelters, have killed Palestinian children playing football — especially as it is one of the very few ways they can take their mind off the horror all around.

So, should we — and the BBC — not conclude that all these attacks on children playing football make the Israeli military even more of a terrorist organisation than Hizbullah?

Note too the way the Western media are so ready to accept unquestioningly Israel’s claim that Hizbullah was responsible for the blast — and dismiss Hizbullah’s denials.

Viewers are discouraged from exercising their memories. Any who do may recall that those same media outlets were only too willing to take on faith Israeli disinformation suggesting that Hamas had hit Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital back in October, even when all the evidence showed it was an Israeli air strike.

(Israel soon went on to destroy all Gaza’s hospitals, effectively eradicating the enclave’s health sector, on the pretext that medical facilities there served as Hamas bases — another patently preposterous claim the Western media treated with wide-eyed credulity.)

The BBC next went to Jerusalem to hear from diplomatic editor Paul Adams. He intoned gravely:

“This is precisely what we have been worrying about for the past 10 months — that something of this magnitude would occur on the northern border, that would turn what has been a simmering conflict for all of these months into an all-out war.”

So there you have it. Paul Adams and the BBC concede they haven’t been worrying for the past 10 months about the genocide unfolding under their very noses in Gaza, or its consequences.

A genocide of Palestinians, apparently, is not something of significant “magnitude.”

Only now, when Israel can exploit the deaths of Syrians forced to live under its military rule as a pretext to expand its “war”, are we supposed to sit up and take notice. Or so the BBC tells us.

Update:

Facebook instantly removed a post linking to this article — and for reasons that are entirely opaque to me (apart from the fact that it is critical of the BBC and Israel).

Facebook’s warning, threatening that my account may face “more account restrictions,” suggests that I was misleading followers by taking them to a “landing page that impersonates another website.” That is patent nonsense. The link took them to my Substack page.

As I have been warning for some time, social media platforms have been tightening the noose around the necks of independent journalists like me, making our work all but impossible to find. It is only a matter of time before we are disappeared completely.

Substack has been a lifeline, because it connects readers to my work directly — either through email or via Substack’s app — bypassing, at least for the moment, the grip of the social-media billionaires.

If you wish to keep reading my articles, and haven’t already, please sign up to my Substack page.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021.He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East(2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support. 

This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/30/more-bbc-news-channelling-israeli-propaganda/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.