Ziofascist Israel’s 2023 to 2024 Genocide of Palestinians, Part 34: October 18 to 25, 2024–The Erasure of Jabalia and North Gaza
A documentation of Ziofascist Israel’s 2023 to 2024 genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians from October 18 to 25, 2024. (Part 33)
October 18: The Ziofascist Israeli Destruction of North Gaza and Jabalia Continues
On Ziofascist Israel’s plans to settle Gaza after genociding and displacing Palestinians (from) there:
“There’s an event being held: Preparing to Settle Gaza. This is being hosted in Israel by members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s […] party […] .
We knew this was coming: They want to expand their state like they’ve done in the past. They oppress the population, they poke sticks at them, they keep a knee on their neck so they can barely breathe, and when they fight back, that’s when they say: ‘Oh, we’re just defending ourselves.’ And then they have the excuse to do and take whatever they want. […]”
Britain:
Guardian censorship:
The article was published by Novara Media instead:
Susan Abulhawa saw the censor’s hand before it even touched her piece. “As the Guardian doesn’t typically publish people like me,” she cautioned her editor at the paper, “I want to be sure the edits don’t ‘dilute’ the piece to make it more palatable for their readers. We know a very different Israel than the one presented by the media for decades, and the tendency is to ‘soften’ Palestinian voices.”
“I absolutely understand and I am going to do my best to protect and fight for your piece,” the series editor V (formerly known as Eve Ensler) assured Abulhawa, adding: “I have the profoundest respect for you and your writing.”
It would be hard not to: Abulhawa’s debut novel Mornings in Jenin has sold over 1m copies in 32 languages since it was published in 2006, making her by some counts the most widely read Palestinian author in history.
Yet by the following month, the Guardian had stopped responding to Abulhawa’s emails.
In July, Guardian US invited Abulhawa to contribute to “rise against fascism”, a series of opinion pieces about the global far right due to be published in September. Abulhawa agreed and submitted a short piece about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, based in part on her own experience: she visited the strip twice this year.
After several rounds of increasingly fraught back-and-forth, the paper and Abulhawa parted ways. The disagreement had centred on Abulhawa’s insistence on using the term “holocaust” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Israel is committing the holocaust of our time,” Abulhawa wrote in a draft, published today by Novara Media, “and it is doing it in full view of a seemingly indifferent world.” Unable to find an alternative wording that both parties would accept, the Guardian refused the piece.
“Please pass on my deepest fuck you to Betsy [Reed, editor-in-chief of Guardian US] and her racist core,” Abulhawa wrote in her final email. Yet it wasn’t Reed who had ultimately spiked the piece: Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s global editor-in-chief, had intervened at the eleventh hour.
Six Guardian journalists who spoke to Novara Media said they understood why Viner had resisted Abulhawa’s use of the term “holocaust”; doing so would have kicked off a media storm. What they don’t understand is why Viner seems happy to repeatedly weather such storms for advocates of Israel. This, they suggest, points to a pattern of deference towards the paper’s pro-Israel critics, one that has shifted only slightly as Israel’s assault on Gaza has intensified.
“Is the Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely,” said one long-serving staff member.
The Guardian did not respond to Novara Media’s request for comment.
Rationalising infanticide.
After 7 October, staff say that the Guardian’s editor-in-chief has maintained a vice-like grip over the paper’s output on Israel and Palestine — or at least one side of it. Some desks say that in the initial weeks and months following the Hamas attack, every piece on the subject was sent to Viner for approval, delaying and sometimes halting publication.
“Everything is scrutinised,” said one senior staff member. “You’re under such an amount of suffocating control, it’s like throwing sand in the gears [to] deliberately… frustrate the smooth running [of the paper].”
In two cases, Viner overruled section editors to withdraw pieces by Palestinian contributors, Abulhawa and Dylan Saba. Both were commissioned by the Guardian US, whose distance from the paper’s London headquarters has emboldened it to push left on certain issues where the UK edition tends right (notably gender, though also Palestine).
Viner’s censoring instinct has been perhaps clearest in her treatment of Owen Jones: Viner is widely understood to have banned the longstanding Guardian columnist from writing about Palestine between late November and mid-January, during some of the most intense months of Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip.
One senior staffer pointed out that Viner’s control is not exercised consistently, however — “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel.”
The Guardian publishes few if any pieces explicitly defending Israel’s actions in Gaza. Instead, contributors will often claim that criticism of Israel is cover for the “new antisemitism” — or “alibi antisemitism”, as Dave Rich, author of The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism, described it in a recent Guardian op-ed.
“It’s a perverse landscape right now, where it’s not… that you’re pro-Palestine or pro-Israel,” said one senior staffer. “You’re pro-Palestine or you’re anti-antisemitism.” Howard Jacobson’s piece fell into the latter category.
On 6 October, the day before the anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel’s Gaza borderlands, the Observer published a piece by the acclaimed British Jewish author (the Observer shares an owner with the Guardian, though in mid-September it emerged that Guardian Media Group was in talks with media startup Tortoise Media to sell the Sunday paper; the paper has its own editor-in-chief, though in reality Viner has final say in what is published in both papers). The piece argued that the media’s attempts to draw attention to Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian children — 16,756 have been recorded killed in Israeli attacks since 7 October, though scholarly estimates are far higher — are reviving the antisemitic blood libel that Jews ritually sacrifice children.
“Here we were again, the same merciless infanticides inscribed in the imaginations of medieval Christians,” Jacobson wrote. “Only this time, instead of operating on the midnight streets of Lincoln and Norwich, they target Palestinian schools, the paediatric wards of hospitals, the tiny fragile bodies of children themselves.”
“There has been a massive backlash to it internally,” said one senior Guardian staff member. “People are disgusted and horrified and just dismayed and embarrassed that that was published.” One long-serving Guardian staffer said it was “amazing” that the Observer would publish the piece, which they described as “abominable”. Several Guardian staff and contributors complained about the piece to Observer editor Paul Webster; they received pro forma responses or in some cases, none at all.
The piece attracted widespread scrutiny outside of the Guardian, prompting The New Yorker to run a coruscating interview with Jacobson entitled “Rationalising the horrors of Israel’s war in Gaza”. “Howard, I think maybe we’re in a bit of a worrisome place if you see photos of dead children on television and your first thought is, They’re trying to make me, a Jew, hate my people,” the magazine’s sharp-tongued interviewer Isaac Chotiner challenged Jacobson. The Observer has since published a response to Jacobson by a Jewish contributor, as well as several letters.
One long-serving Guardian journalist suggested the reason the Observer ran the piece is that Jacobson is “supposed to be one of the great writers” and a “staple of the paper”. Jacobson has written for the Observer since at least 2000; between 2017 and 2018 it published a weekly diary by him. Yet while Jacobson’s piece sailed smoothly to publication, another “great writer” was struggling to pass the Guardian’s rigorous — or partially rigorous — editorial process.
‘Please leave this word.’
On 13 September, six weeks after she’d filed her piece, Abulhawa received an email from the Guardian with a final round of edits. She accepted almost all of them besides the suggestion to change the word “holocaust” to “genocide”. Abulhawa was confused, since the term hadn’t been picked up in previous rounds of editing.
“Please leave this word,” Abulhawa said in a comment. “It is not the property of any group. It is a word in the English language that is not exclusive to anyone.”
The Guardian pushed back. “We favor substituting ‘genocide’ for ‘holocaust’ there, which is still strong and does not blunt the impact of Susan’s piece,” Guardian US editor Betsy Reed wrote to Abulhawa’s editor, V. Novara Media understand that Reed’s email was sent after consultation with Viner.
V forwarded Reed’s email to Abulhawa, who replied with a five-point explanation of why the term holocaust was appropriate. “Given the magnitude, the unceasing horror, the hateful glee and sadism at our suffering,” Abulhawa wrote, “the only word I have at my disposal that comes close to capturing what’s happening is ‘holocaust’.”
“I understand Susan’s reasoning,” Reed replied, “but I wonder if we could find a solution that captures the meaning she wants without invoking the holocaust in that way.”
Abulhawa refused. “I’ve compromised a lot, but I’m not bending further. We’re watching faceless, headless, limbless, burned, crushed, and mangled bodies in inconceivable gore every day, over and over. … I am not going to play this western media game of tiptoeing around the feelings of our tormentors. Nazis were not so cruel.
“Holocaust is an English word in the English dictionary. It is frankly not big enough to capture the annihilation, torment, degradation, and horror being inflicted on Palestinians for decades now.
“I really don’t care if they run my piece or not.”
Abulhawa sent a further email shortly afterwards: “I’m sick of this hypocrisy. they cannot fathom our humanity. That’s the issue. They do not see us as human. If our people in Gaza were Jewish, or other Europeans, no one would hesitate to use that word and worse.”
After receiving no reply from V for over a week, Abulhawa inquired about the status of her piece. V confirmed that the Guardian had declined to run it: “They don’t seem to be budging on the last edits. The world is a horror. Thank you for your courage and voice,” V wrote.
In an email to Novara Media, V wrote: “I commissioned Susan because I believe she is a really important voice on Gaza and Palestine. I believe she wrote an excellent piece; the Guardian, of course, makes the ultimate decisions.”
Abulhawa would not be appeased. “Please pass on my deepest fuck you to Betsy and her racist core,” she replied. The Guardian’s rise against fascism series was published in early September, including 15 pieces on subjects including India, Italy, the climate crisis and human psychology. None were on Israel and Palestine.
In a message to Novara Media, Abulhawa explained why she’d expressed her anger at Guardian editors. “I think Betsy reserves th[e] word [“holocaust”] for one people only. … In [the] western imagination, there is nothing more horrific than the mass slaughter of their own western citizens. Brown people don’t count.”
Several genocide scholars who spoke to Novara Media said they were comfortable with Abulhawa’s use of the term holocaust to describe events in Gaza.
“I accept [the word holocaust] is not the property of any group,” Mark Levene, an emeritus fellow at the University of Southampton whose research focuses on genocide and Jewish history, told Novara Media. “Who am I or who is anybody to deny her?”
“She’s [using the term] for the purpose of making a point, and she has … the perfect right to make the point, even if one might demur on whether [she is correct].”
John Cox, director of Holocaust, genocide and human rights studies at the University of North Carolina, concurred. “I think it’s acceptable to use holocaust to refer to other genocides,” he wrote in an email to Novara Media, “though I do it very sparingly, given the possibility of being misunderstood. But I support Abulhawa’s decision and right to use the term, and I fully agree with the quote from her that you provided.”
Abulhawa had used the term holocaust to describe what she saw in Gaza on several occasions prior to her Guardian piece, including in a video for the leftwing US broadcaster Democracy Now!, an article for pro-Palestine outlet The Electronic Intifada and on her social media channels. But for the Guardian, even “genocide” was a stretch.
Levene had discovered this himself when he submitted a letter to the Guardian on 11 October, four days after the Hamas attack, saying that “Israel is on the cusp of committing genocide in Gaza”; the letter was rejected. It would be several months before the term genocide crept into the paper following the International Court of Justice’s interim judgement in January that said Palestinians had the plausible right to be protected from genocide; it is still understood to be impermissible in the UK edition except with careful explication. The Guardian files coverage of the genocide under a section previously entitled “Israel-Hamas war”, now “Israel-Gaza war”.
One longtime Guardian staff member said they understood Viner’s decision not to allow Abulhawa to use the term holocaust. “Why is she [Abulhawa] so wedded to using this word, knowing how provocative it is for large numbers of Jewish people? Is she through the back door trying to draw a parallel with the Nazi Holocaust?”
They added the paper may have been more cautious with Abulhawa’s piece in order to leave itself latitude to be more forthright in other areas. “I think … they’re buying themselves the ability to say other things by avoiding these fights.”
Another senior Guardian journalist said they felt that “Palestinians are constantly tone-policed in a way no other group is”, though in this case Reed’s suggestion of the word genocide was “perfectly reasonable”. Speaking to Novara Media, they said that including the word holocaust would “completely detract from the piece, because that’s all anyone will talk about”. “It’s a huge uphill battle to get the Guardian to write about genocide,” they added. “Unfortunately, we have to just be a bit practical about how best to get our message across.”
A pattern on Palestine.
“I’ve been a writer for a long time,” Abulhawa wrote in a message to Novara Media. “Of course I anticipated they’d reject my piece. … They don’t publish us [Palestinians] unless we accept watered-down versions of what we say so they can pretend to have a semblance of journalistic integrity while they push state and corporate propaganda.”
This was not the first time in recent months that the Guardian has refused to publish pieces by Palestinian contributors at the eleventh hour. In October last year, Viner cancelled a piece by Dylan Saba, a US lawyer with Palestinian and Jewish heritage, about the suppression of pro-Palestine sentiment; a spokesperson for the paper claimed Saba’s piece “did not meet” the Guardian’s “high standards”.
A few weeks after Abulhawa’s run-in with Reed, Stuart Jeffries had his own with Guardian editors in London. The former staffer has worked for the paper since 1990 in various roles, and continues to freelance for it. In early October, the paper published Jeffries’ four-star review of One Day in October, a documentary about the 7 October Hamas attack.
While mostly praising the documentary, Jeffries reserved a single star for what he felt was its failure to contextualise the attack, or to characterise Palestinians as anything other than terrorists. “If you want to understand why Hamas murdered civilians, though, One Day in October won’t help,” Jeffries wrote. “Indeed, it does a good job of demonising Gazans, first as testosterone-crazed Hamas killers, later as shameless civilian looters, asset-stripping the kibbutz while bodies lay in the street and the terrified living hid.”
The review triggered a deluge of criticism, including from former Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman, Jews Don’t Count author David Baddiel, the Telegraph and several Israeli and Jewish media outlets. The review was removed from the paper’s website within a few hours of being published with a note explaining that it was “pending review”.
The Guardian elaborated minimally on this note in a statement to Novara Media, however on Monday, the Guardian readers’ editor Elisabeth Ribbans explained further: “The Guardian considers the article did convey the harrowing footage and powerful survivor interviews and condemned the attack’s perpetrators. But the unacceptable terms in which it went on to criticise the documentary were inconsistent with our editorial standards.
“This was a collective failure of process and we apologise for any offence caused.”
All of the six Guardian journalists who spoke to Novara Media agreed that the treatment of Abulhawa and Jeffries pointed to a stark inconsistency in how the Guardian treats Israel and Palestine.
“Is there a double standard between running Howard Jacobson and not running Susan Abulhawa? Clearly there is, yes,” said one long-serving staffer. “If you’re prepared to run Howard Jacobson then it does seem out of kilter, if your only objection is about that language, then yeah. I understand why that decision might’ve been made, but does it seem that there is an inconsistency there? Yes.”
The roots of this discrepancy reflect a broader media ecosystem, one in which powerful Israel advocacy groups and media monitoring outfits have forced even the most prestigious publications on to the defensive by launching viral smear campaigns and by flooding editors’ inboxes with complaints: on 15 October the New York Times published a response to criticism of a guest essay based on testimony of 65 US-based medical workers who had worked in Gaza, saying that it had photographic evidence to corroborate its claims of Israel’s sniper attacks on children.
Guardian journalists say Viner is particularly susceptible to such targeted campaigns. “Kath just loathes being embarrassed,” one told Novara Media, “and that benefits the pro-Israel lobby, because they’re more powerful and respectable than advocates for Palestine, and can cause her more personal embarrassment.”
A related driver for the Guardian’s caution are fears of antisemitism. Such fears, its journalists say, were exacerbated by the Labour antisemitism crisis to which some see the paper as having contributed. “I think there’s a lot of … fear of dismissing people’s fears of antisemitism [and] of being perceived as antisemitic, and that has unfortunately permeated throughout the whole of journalism,” said one Guardian writer. Others say that Viner’s concerns about being perceived as antisemitic have abated somewhat as Israel’s assault on Gaza has escalated — over the summer the paper changed its style guide to describe the “Hamas-run health ministry” as the “Palestinian ministry of health”, a small but significant break with media convention in the UK.
Nevertheless, says one Guardian journalist, “to have quashed [Jacobson] would’ve been an admission of antisemitism in the eyes of a certain readership, I guess, and in the eyes of the editorial board of the Guardian. I think [the Guardian and Observer] were in an invidious position, because they had a [controversial] article on their hands, and I think they did entirely the wrong thing, [but] put it the other way and they reject Jewish writer’s opinion piece.”
Another Guardian journalist suggested that the paper’s decision to censor Abulhawa is not only demonstrably unfair but also out-of-step with its own audience. “Obviously this is a question of double standards. A Palestinian writer is spiked on the basis that describing a genocide of her own people in [what editors felt were] excessively inflammatory terms isn’t acceptable, then you have someone who isn’t Israeli who has written a piece which doesn’t even try to refute the violent killing of 16,000 children as if [people who draw attention to that fact were] committing a hate crime? I think the Guardian is playing a very dangerous game with its own readership.”
They added that Viner allowing the publication of Jacobson’s piece suggests that the Guardian believes the horrors unfolding in Gaza are a debatable matter — a grotesque notion to much of its audience.
“The Guardian’s readership overwhelmingly would expect the Guardian to take a clear, unambiguous stand about what is clearly a crime of monumental proportions,” they said, “rather than basically suggest[ing] that different people have the right to express different perspectives, up to saying that discussing the biggest slaughter of children in a generation is a hate crime.
“That means that the home of progressive opinion thinks that’s a legitimate position to be debated and discussed. Most Guardian readers would find that abhorrent.”
USA:
A tweet from June 6 that was reposted on October 18:
Matthew Miller: “They’re embedded near civilians. Israel has a right to try and target those civilians, but they also have the obligation to minimize civilian harm. […]”
The United States’ secretive Special Operations Command is looking for companies to help create deepfake internet users so convincing that neither humans nor computers will be able to detect they are fake, according to a procurement document reviewed by The Intercept.
The plan, mentioned in a new 76-page wish list by the Department of Defense’s Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, outlines advanced technologies desired for country’s most elite, clandestine military efforts. “Special Operations Forces (SOF) are interested in technologies that can generate convincing online personas for use on social media platforms, social networking sites, and other online content,” the entry reads.
The document specifies that JSOC wants the ability to create online user profiles that “appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world,” with each featuring “multiple expressions” and “Government Identification quality photos.”
In addition to still images of faked people, the document notes that “the solution should include facial & background imagery, facial & background video, and audio layers,” and JSOC hopes to be able to generate “selfie video” from these fabricated humans. These videos will feature more than fake people: Each deepfake selfie will come with a matching faked background, “to create a virtual environment undetectable by social media algorithms.”
The Pentagon has already been caught using phony social media users to further its interests in recent years. In 2022, Meta and Twitter removed a propaganda network using faked accounts operated by U.S. Central Command, including some with profile pictures generated with methods similar to those outlined by JSOC. A 2024 Reuters investigation revealed a Special Operations Command campaign using fake social media users aimed at undermining foreign confidence in China’s Covid vaccine.
Last year, Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, expressed interest in using video “deepfakes,” a general term for synthesized audiovisual data meant to be indistinguishable from a genuine recording, for “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns.” Such imagery is generated using a variety of machine learning techniques, generally using software that has been “trained” to recognize and recreate human features by analyzing a massive database of faces and bodies. This year’s SOCOM wish list specifies an interest in software similar to StyleGAN, a tool released by Nvidia in 2019 that powered the globally popular website “This Person Does Not Exist.” Within a year of StyleGAN’s launch, Facebook said it had taken down a network of accounts that used the technology to create false profile pictures. Since then, academic and private sector researchers have been engaged in a race between new ways to create undetectable deepfakes, and new ways to detect them. Many government services now require so-called liveness detection to thwart deepfaked identity photos, asking human applicants to upload a selfie video to demonstrate they are a real person — an obstacle that SOCOM may be interested in thwarting.
The listing notes that special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used.
This more detailed procurement listing shows that the United States pursues the exact same technologies and techniques it condemns in the hands of geopolitical foes. National security officials have long described the state-backed use of deepfakes as an urgent threat — that is, if they are being done by another country.
[…]
October 19: Various Massacres
‘The most moral army in the world’:
Mohassen Al-Khatib:
The Ziofascist targetting of hospitals:
Dr Mads Gilbert: “This is an operational tactic from the Israeli forces. And now it is hitting Al Awda and the Indonesian Hospital. These two hospitals in North Gaza have been besieged, denied power, water and food for days.
They are full of patients and staffers, and the international medical community and the international decent community needs to stop these attacks on the health care and the hospitals in Gaza.”
Ziofascist Israel targets and murders four Oxfam water workers:
Oxfam condemns in the strongest terms the killing in Gaza today of four water engineers and workers from the Khuzaa municipality who were working with our strategic partner the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU).
The four men were killed on their way to conduct repairs to water infrastructure in Khuzaa, east of Khan Younis. Despite prior coordination with Israeli authorities their clearly-marked vehicle was bombed. Oxfam stands in solidarity with the CMWU, their partners and the families of the victims.
Their deaths deepen the catastrophic humanitarian crisis in Gaza where access to clean water is already severely compromised.
Dozens of engineers, civil servants and humanitarian workers have been killed in Israeli airstrikes throughout this war. They were all working on essential services to keep Gaza’s fragile infrastructure running. Despite their movements being coordinated with the Israeli authorities by the CMWU and the Palestinian Water Authority, to ensure their safety, they were still targeted.
Attacks on civilian infrastructure and those who maintain it are clear violations of international humanitarian law. Those responsible must be held to account. Such attacks are part of the crime of using starvation as a weapon of war.
Oxfam demands an independent investigation into this and other attacks on essential workers. We reiterate our calls for a ceasefire, an immediate halt to arms transfers to Israel, and the international community to ensure Israel is held accountable for its continued assault on civilians and those working to deliver life-saving services.
From physical and mental health care workers:
The consequences of this lethal year for the long-term physical and mental health of the citizens of Gaza, and the impacts on the functioning of its communities, are incalculable.
As mental health practitioners, we share our profound outrage, sorrow and collective shame at the enormity of what has been, and continues to be, inflicted on the people of Gaza. We take stock at this juncture of the impact of a year of continuous bombardment, killing, catastrophic injury, displacement, starvation and disease.
[…]
Loss of childhood
Children in Gaza, if they survive, have been dealt a legacy of terrible injury, including disabilities that will require years of rehabilitation, in the absence of any resources to enable this.
They have been evicted from their homes, but also from childhood itself — either by the loss of parents and extended family, or by having to take on adult tasks beyond their capabilities.
One year is the entire life of a baby, half the life of a toddler, and a quarter of the life of a four-year-old. A child of 10, surviving this past year, has the legacy of at least two previous lethal bombardments of their homes, families and communities.
Children in Gaza, for whom education has been a major source of resilience and pride, now have no school buildings to return to, and no prospect of any such provisions. Unrwa, the main provider of schooling, has been under severe attack by Israel, which also denies the entry of adequate supplies of food into Gaza.
Uniquely among world conflicts, the citizens of Gaza have no means of escape from Israel’s relentless bombardment, snipers and killer drones.
The wanton slaughter of civilians, destruction of vital infrastructure, devastation of the built and natural environment, and killing of healthcare and aid workers, have led to unparalleled outrage and protest across civil society worldwide.
Shock at Israel’s genocidal onslaught has intensified with every passing month. And yet, despite rulings by the International Court of Justice and a request by the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defence minister, the slaughter continues.
It does so because of the active collusion and complicity of the major western powers that, over decades, have granted Israel absolute impunity to pursue its aggressive policies of settler-colonial expansion, land theft, ethnic cleansing, incarceration and violent suppression of human rights.
Western collusion
As mental health practitioners, we know that when no external boundaries are set and no restraints are imposed on abusive and violent behaviour, the perpetrator is empowered to pursue their own interests only, objectifying and dehumanising others.
As we have seen in Gaza, in the rest of occupied Palestine, in the torture chambers of Sde Teiman, and now in the massacre of Lebanese civilians, cruelty and sadism flourish in conditions of impunity. […]
Germany:
Ziofascist propagandist Annalena Baerbock: “Self-defence(!), of course, means not only attacking terrorists(!), but destroying them. That is why I have made it so clear when Hamas terrorists hide behind people(!), behind schools(!), then we get into very difficult issues, but we wont shy away. That’s why I made it clear to the UN that civilian places can also lose their protected status because terrorists abuse it.”
Britain:
Censorship and oppression:
From that September 30, 2024 article:
Internal government documents show that Home Office ministers and staff tried to influence police and prosecutors to crack down on activists targeting the UK factories of an Israeli arms manufacturer, campaigners have claimed.
Briefing notes, obtained through freedom of information (FoI) requests by Palestine Action, show details of government meetings, predating the 7 October Hamas attacks and Israel’s response in Gaza, intended to “reassure” Elbit Systems UK, an Israeli arms manufacturer, which is subject to a direct action campaign by the campaign group.
Prosecutions of Palestine Action activists, who say they are trying to protect Palestinian lives and stop war crimes, have led to some convictions, including for burglary and criminal damage, but also acquittals by juries and magistrates despite defendants admitting their actions.
As well as Home Office ministers attending meetings with Elbit Systems representatives, the heavily redacted briefing notes show that one was attended by a director from the Attorney General’s Office said to be representing the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). They also show that Home Office officials contacted the police about Palestine Action.
Tim Crosland, a coordinator of Defend Our Juries, which claims that jurors’ absolute right to acquit a defendant according to their conscience is being eroded by judges placing limits on what defendants can say about their motivations, said: “These disclosures, despite the extensive redaction, are the smoking gun on what has been obvious for a while: the government has been trying to put a stop to juries acquitting those who expose and resist corporate complicity in violations of international law and mass loss of life.
“Such political interference is a national scandal that goes right to the top — the corruption of democracy and the rule of law by those with wealth and power.”
A private secretary note dated 2 March 2022 for a meeting between the then home secretary, Priti Patel, and Martin Fausset, the chief executive of Elbit Systems UK, said: “Palestine Action’s criminal activity is for the police to investigate and though they are operationally independent of government meaning we cannot direct their response, my officials have been in contact with the police about PA.”
A briefing note dated 19 April last year for a meeting between Chris Philp, then a Home Office minister, and Elbit, said: “A director from the Attorney General’s Office will be attending to represent the CPS. The CPS declined to participate in this meeting to preserve their operational independence.”
The contents of a section titled “past lobbying” were redacted.
A spokesperson for Palestine Action said the manifestations of independence were contradicted within the same sentences in which they were made.
“What’s going on behind closed doors demonstrates clear evidence of collusion between government, a foreign private arms manufacturer, the CPS, the Attorney General’s Office and the police,” they said. “This clear abuse of power shows how the state is prioritising the interests of Elbit Systems over the rights and freedoms of its own citizens.”
Documents previously revealed through FoI requests suggested Israeli embassy officials in London attempted to get the Attorney General’s Office to intervene in UK court cases relating to the prosecution of protesters. […]
October 20
Meet the genocidal Ziofascist Israeli Lieutenant Colonel Yakhin Zik:
The killing of high-ranking IDF officer Ehsan Daxa:
Palestinian child amputees:
Japan:
USA:
Another comparison of the Zionist entity to Nazi Germany:
October 21: Another Jabalia Massacre
A Ziofascist Israeli massacre in Jabalia:
Jabalia Refugee Camp in northern Gaza, where I was born and raised, has been facing relentless, indiscriminate Israeli bombing, targeting concentrations of displaced Palestinians.
Entire neighbourhoods have been razed to the ground. Torn bodies are bleeding to death in the streets or amongst the rubble while paramedics and firefighters are denied safe passage to evacuate the killed and injured.
The remaining survivors in my family there have been displaced multiple times, with some of them besieged inside their homes under heavy and constant bombardment. They are dispersed, dispossessed and grieving their losses while expecting to be the next victim of Israel’s killing machines at any moment.
My family have been experiencing what they describe as “the worst stage of genocide”. This is contrary to the misleading news of Israel classifying Gaza as a “secondary battleground” and shifting most of its military resources to fight Hezbollah on its northern front in Lebanon.
It feels like genocide is being repeated all over again, but on a wider scale and at a faster pace, undeterred and unlimited to any boundaries.
Nearly half a million Palestinian refugees have remained north of the Gaza Valley, resisting Israel’s criminal “evacuation” orders — the forced displacement and dispossession of Palestinians which re-escalated soon after 7 October 2023.
Those refugees include most of my uncles, aunts, cousins and their children, dear neighbours, teachers and childhood friends. They refused to follow Israel’s orders to “head south” because the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948 and uninterrupted violence that shaped their lives ever since taught them that perceived temporary displacement can become a permanent reality.
Israel’s collective punishment which they have been enduring for resisting forced displacement, leaves me at loss for words to give justice to its gruesome and apocalyptic nature.
Siege
Earlier this month, on 5 October, for the third time since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, Israeli forces imposed a siege on northern Gaza, including the areas of Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, Jabalia Refugee Camp and Jabalia Town, completely segregating it from the south.
Since 1 October they have also cut off all humanitarian supplies to the north, leaving people to die if not by bombs, then by forced starvation.
This brutal siege is part of the “Generals’ plan” which would, if successful, “change the reality” on the ground in Gaza, as reportedly described by retired Israeli General Giora Eiland. He has envisioned emptying northern Gaza of civilians and starving out or killing anyone who stays as a legitimate “target”.
While Israeli media are publicly speaking about Israel’s ambitions to empty and annex northern Gaza, Western media continue to repeat its official talking lines, presenting this third major invasion of the area in terms of “self-defence” to eliminate the regrouped Palestinian resistance.
Last month, in a closed meeting between members of the Israeli parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Eiland proposed this siege plan as an “effective military tactic” to “destroy Hamas”. “What matters to [recently assassinated Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar is land and dignity, and with this manoeuvre, you take away both land and dignity”, he said.
This “Generals’ Plan” is now playing itself out for people in northern Gaza, including the surviving members of my family.
Unimaginable times
In my previous article for Declassified, I reported Israel’s killing of my cousin Yousef on 1 November 2023, for whom we continue to grieve amid the consistent shrinking of my extended family.
In an unanticipated turn of events, however, Yousef’s younger brother Wasim and his wife Mona welcomed their first baby on 7 October 2024 amid this recent siege on northern Gaza. They called their newborn boy Yousef, insisting on his memory as a reminder of our people’s desire to live and determination to ensure justice, freedom and dignity for future generations.
Baby Yousef arrived during unimaginable times that led to the displacement of his family twice in the span of one week.
He is one of 22 relatives now crammed together in a partially destroyed house in Gaza City that was left abandoned by its original owners.
With no access to clean water, food or other necessities of survival, Mona’s wounds from the birth of Yousef are not healing, causing inflammations, extreme pain and breastfeeding difficulties.
Her stitches from birth keep reopening because of malnutrition and lack of sanitation and medical care.
[…]
It has never been as crystal clear that Israel is systematically eliminating the Palestinians from their land under the rubric of eliminating Hamas.
Even as Israel proclaimed “victory” for the elimination of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the southern district of Rafah, and allies from the US to the UK and Germany rushed to offer their congratulations, news of endless massacres continued to flood in from northern Gaza.
[…]
Settler scum Daniella Weiss, the daughter of two Zioterrorists:
West Bank:
Depression and mental health issues among reporters:
From the testament of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar:
Australia:
USA:
The Jeremy Loffredo affair:
A pitymongering CNN Ziofascist propaganda piece:
October 22: Kamal Adwan Hospital Siege and Massacres
Another attack on UNRWA:
A market turned into a graveyard:
Two summaries:
It’s ethnic cleansing:
Two ‘blasts’ from the past:
Zionism is not Judaism:
Intelligence-run concentration camps:
The Biden administration has approved the deployment of 1,000 CIA-trained private mercenaries as part of a joint U.S.-Israeli plan to turn Gaza’s apocalyptic rubblescape into a high-tech dystopia.
Starting with Al-Atatra, a village in the northwestern Gaza Strip, the plan calls to build what the Israeli daily Ynet calls “humanitarian bubbles” — turning the remains of villages and neighborhoods into tiny concentration camps cut off from their environs and surrounded and controlled by mercenaries.
This comes as Israel carries out daily massacres and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, enacting the proposal known as The Generals’ Plan, originally crafted by former national security chief Giora Eiland to turn Gaza into “a place where no human being can exist.”
The plan, approved by White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, calls for the Israeli military to clear out pockets of Palestinian resistance, which it has failed to achieve, demonstrated by the recent killing of Israeli Colonel Ehasn Daksa, the highest ranking officer to lose his life in the year long war.
48 hours after stamping out resistance, they plan to erect separation walls around the neighborhood, forcing its residents, and no one else, to enter and exit using biometric identification under the CIA contractors’ control. Those who do not accept the biometric regime would be refused humanitarian aid.
This plan, first reported by Israeli journalist Shlomi Eldar, allocates $90 million for the residents to rebuild their homes, and calls to appoint a “local sheikh” to the position of “head of the council.”
The plan is a 21st century reboot of Washington’s infamous, failed Strategic Hamlet Program during its war in Vietnam in the 1960s, updated with a modern biometric program the US military-industrial complex has incorporated into its operations since, in particular, the beginning of the so-called “War or Terror.” (The U.S. has even created a little known agency called the Defense Forensics and Biometrics Agency to advance this).
‘Uber for war zones’
The company at the forefront of this plan is called Global Delivery Company, described in its promotional materials as a “Uber for war zones.” Israeli-American businessman Moti Kahana owns it and employs several top Israeli and American military intelligence officials, including retired U.S. Navy Captain Michael Durnan, retired U.S. Special Forces captain Justin Sapp, former Israeli military intelligence division head Yossi Kuperwasser, and former Israeli military chief intelligence officer David Tzur.
Kahana has played a key role in the dirty war against Syria in the 2010s and worked with the CIA-backed Free Syrian Army to provide food and medical care to militants and civilians alike. GDC has also been involved in Ukraine, where it collaborated with the Zionist organization, the American Joint Distribution Committee, to operate a refugee camp in Romania near its border with Ukraine. He has also been in negotiations to free the former Israeli military intelligence officer Elizabeth Tsurkov, who was detained in Iraq in 2023.
Kahana’s Gaza plan has been in the works since at least February, 2024. He presented the plan to establish these electronic cantons — what Jewish News referred to as “gated communities” — to the White House, State Department, and Defense Department, as well as Netanyahu. U.S. officials did not respond. While the Israeli military had agreed, the Israeli prime minister shot it down. “What’s the rush?” he quipped.
The Israeli military has also been in talks with Kahana to deploy its mercenaries to secure the Netzarim corridor, which bisects the Gaza Strip.
The GDC’s CIA mercenaries would be in full control of humanitarian aid, thereby supplanting Hamas and ending its governance, they figure, achieving a long-term goal of the Israeli war.
“If the pilot goes through successfully, it will be the model for the rehabilitation of Gaza and will result in the suppression of Hamas’s civilian control in the Strip,” notes Eldar.
The plan resembles a proposal published in the U.S. Department of Defense’s top journal, written by Likudnik think tanker Omer Dostri, who was appointed as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesperson in August 2024.
Another comparison of the Zionist entity to Nazi Germany:
Britain:
USA:
October 23
Ziofascist Israel’s destruction of Palestinian civil defence:
Ziofascist Israel’s lie-based targetting of journalists:
By contrast:
‘Hamas uses human shields’:
From the Ziofascist propagandist Hen Mazzig:
A minor positive development:
USA:
October 24
Kamal Adwan hospital:
Palestinian journalists Anas Al-Sharif and Hossam Shabat:
‘The most moral army in the world’:
‘Hamas uses human shields’
UN:
Netherlands:
USA:
Ziofascists at Penn State:
October 25
Kamal Adwan hospital:
Indonesian hospital, Dr Mohammad Zahir killed by Israel:
West Bank:
UN:
Francesca Albanese:
ICC:
Britain:
USA:
Antony The Butcher Blinken: “Far too many have lost their lives in Gaza.”
Gideon Levy: “No Mr. Blinken, too many journalists were killed by the Israeli army.”
The Jeremy Loffredo affair:
