Palestinian Political Groups Reject Israel’s Proposal to Send Arab Troops to Gaza – Hamas
Sputnik – 30.03.2024
TUNIS – Political groups making up the Alliance of Palestinian Forces have rejected Israel’s proposal to send Arab troops to the Gaza Strip, Palestinian movement Hamas said on Saturday.
On Friday, Axios reported, citing two senior Israeli officials, that Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, during his recent visit to the United States, suggested forming a multinational contingent with Arab troops to bolster Gaza’s law and order and ensure safe humanitarian aid delivery.
“The factions of the Alliance of Palestinian Forces reject the Israeli proposal to send Arab forces to govern Gaza and warn against its consequences,” Hamas said in a statement.
The statement also claimed that the Israeli proposal was “a new Zionist trap and a lie.”
“Turning to certain Arab countries for help, it [Israel], together with the US, seeks to avoid a horrible defeat they have suffered … to get the occupation army out of the huge moor it finds itself trapped in the Gaza Strip,” the statement read.
Aside from Hamas, the Alliance includes Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and several other organizations that have their own military wings.
On Thursday, the International Court of Justice said that Israel must ensure the unhindered access of humanitarian aid and all necessary services to the Gaza Strip.
More Young People Getting Cancer — What’s Behind the New ‘Public Health Crisis’?
By Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D. | The Defender | March 27, 2024
Catherine, Princess of Wales, who on March 22 announced she has cancer, “is part of an unfortunate new trend of more and younger cancer cases,” according to Dr. Pierre Kory and journalist Mary Beth Pfeiffer.
Kory and Pfeiffer addressed Princess Catherine’s diagnosis in an op-ed published Tuesday in The Washington Times, in which they said there’s evidence suggesting that the marked increase in cancers among young people may be linked to COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and pandemic policies, such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates.
“We are facing an emerging toll of illness and death in the young,” they wrote. “We cannot shirk from asking what is causing it.”
Kory — president and chief medical officer of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance — told The Defender that early-onset cancer and excess deaths are “poised to become the next public health crises that our medical system is not equipped to manage.”
This latest op-ed is Kory and Pfeiffer’s fourth. Their three prior op-eds — which appeared in USA Today, Newsweek and The Hill — also called attention to excess mortality and disability rate spikes occurring after the global COVID-19 vaccine campaign.
“Our intention for writing the op-eds is to raise the profile of this important issue to prepare for a future crisis and advance the conversation on possible causes and treatments,” Kory said.
In their latest op-ed, Kory and Pfeiffer said an “unthinkable twist” in cancer rates is occurring and it has garnered the attention of the American Cancer Society, Yale Medicine and the Harvard Gazette.
According to the American Cancer Society’s 2024 report, about 2 million people in the U.S. will develop malignancies this year — and a larger share of the more than 600,000 who are estimated to die will be younger than before.
CDC data show ‘red flags’
Kory and Pfeiffer cited cancer death records through 2023 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that included data two years beyond what was in the American Cancer Society report.
“The later data, which is provisional,” they wrote, “shows a cancer pattern that appears to have gone from slow simmer to rapid boil in the heat of a pandemic.”
They found that cancer deaths across all ages rose by 2% from pre-pandemic 2019 to 2023 — and in people 15-44 years old, cancer-related mortality rose at double that rate.
“Why is this happening now?” Kory and Pfeiffer asked. “Moreover, what will be done to address it?”
They saw additional “red flags” in the CDC data including:
- Deaths from colorectal cancer rose 17% among people ages 15-44 in 2019-2023 — 4 times the population-wide increase.
- Uterine cancer deaths rose 37% among people ages 25-44 from 2019-2023, and 15% overall.
- There were much larger increases, from 2019-2022, in liver and pancreatic cancer mortality in young adults than in the overall population.
The U.S. Society of Actuaries also reported 76% and 101% increases in death claims among insured workers ages 25-34 and 35-44. “COVID-19 was ruled out as the cause,” Kory and Pfeiffer said.
The public needs to explore the role of lockdowns, top-down treatment protocols and vaccines that were often mandated as a condition of employment, they said.
“By top-down treatment protocols,” Kory told The Defender, “I’m referring to how the public health and medical authorities made edicts on treatments that had to be followed and could not be questioned without consequence.”
“These same authorities were not open to understanding the novel treatments showing promise on the frontlines and instead allowed information to flow only one way — from the top down,” he said.
‘Just a tragic coincidence?’
In a March 27 Substack post about the data exposed in the op-ed, Kory said he and Pfeiffer compiled and interpreted these and other data from government and professional society sources after “bearing witness to so much medical carnage.”
“Just a few weeks ago,” he said, “a 20-year-old patient of mine died of glioblastoma.”
He added:
“If that is not tragic enough, her parents told me that a 20 year-old man in her college friend group had died of the same a few weeks earlier. Unsurprisingly, their university had a vaccine mandate.
“Just a tragic coincidence right?”
But reviewing cancer facts and figures has convinced Kory that such cases aren’t just a coincidence.
“We believe that the data strongly if not definitively implicates the COVID mRNA vaccine as the most proximate cause.”
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
Israeli forces kill Palestinian teenager in northern West Bank raid
Deceased Palestinian teenager Moatasem Nabil Abu Abed
Press TV – March 30, 2024
Israeli forces have killed a 13-year-old Palestinian teenager in the West Bank, according to the Palestinian health ministry, amid relentless aerial and ground offensives by the occupying regime’s military against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that the shooting occurred early on Saturday in the city of Qabatiya, as Israeli forces stormed a local neighborhood overnight, resulting in clashes.
Local sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Israeli troops broke into several homes and deployed snipers on the rooftops of several buildings and homes amid violent confrontations.
Israeli forces also rounded up a Palestinian father along with his son after they barged into a house. The forces ransacked several houses in the town as well, and inflicted damage to their contents.
Israeli troops then opened heavy gunfire at two young men, critically injuring one of them.
Fawaz Hammad, Director of al-Razi Hospital in Jenin, said that Moatasem Nabil Abu Abed was killed after being seriously injured by live bullets.
Israeli forces prevented Palestinian ambulances and paramedics from entering Qabatiya and transporting wounded locals to the hospital.
On Friday, Israeli troops detained at least 25 Palestinians, including children, a woman and prisoners freed from Israeli jails, during separate raids across the West Bank.
The Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs Commission and the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society (PPS) stated that the arrest campaigns focused on occupied al-Quds, as hundreds of worshipers headed to the area to perform Friday prayers at al-Aqsa Mosque.
Other detentions took place in the governorates of al-Khalil, Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqilia.
This brings the total number of Palestinians arrested since early October to nearly 7,870, including those who were detained from their homes, at military checkpoints, those who surrendered under pressure and those who were taken as hostages.
More than 400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank since October 7, when Israel waged the war on Gaza after Hamas carried out a historic operation against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
The Israeli aggression has so far killed at least 32,552 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 74,980 others in Gaza. The Tel Aviv regime has imposed a “complete siege” on the territory, cutting off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
White House eases sanctions on violent Israeli settlers
The Cradle | March 29, 2024
The US has dramatically softened the sanctions it imposed on seven violent Israeli settlers by allowing them to use their accounts at Israeli banks, Israel Hayom reported on 29 March. The move makes the US sanctions, which allegedly were meant to punish the settlers for violent acts against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, essentially meaningless.
The US Treasury sent a letter to Israel’s finance ministry clarifying that Israel is not required to prevent the sanctioned settlers from making routine use of their bank accounts.
Earlier this month, The Atlantic magazine had referred to the sanctions as President Biden’s “doomsday option” against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his religious settler supporters.
However, according to Israel Hayom, the US announcement empties sanctions against the settlers of any practical content since freezing the bank accounts of the seven men was the only step that affected them in any practical way.
The sanctions continue to prevent the settlers from doing any financial transactions with US banks or traveling to the US, but as far as is known, they do not own assets in the US and have no intention of traveling there.
The US Treasury letter comes two weeks after Finance Minister Smotrich announced that he would not renew the Israeli state’s agreement to compensate banks in Israel that maintain relations with financial entities linked to the Palestinian Authority (PA).
Israel Hayom reported that Smotrich refused to renew his signature on a document that protects from lawsuits to the Israeli banks, Discount and Hapoalim, which have financial ties with Palestinian banks.
Without this protection, the Israeli banks were expected to sever ties with the Palestinian banks, fearing that they would be exposed to international lawsuits on the charge of transferring funds to terrorists.
Since the PA’s economy depends on the relationship with Israel, this meant an immediate freeze of economic activity in the occupied West Bank, which is under PA control.
Israel Hayom added that the White House softened the sanctions on the settlers in response to Smotrich’s threat.
However, it is unclear if the sanctions were meant to punish the settlers or Prime Minister Netanyahu in any significant way.
The Guardian reported in February that according to Aaron David Miller, who served six US secretaries of state as an adviser on Arab-Israeli peace talks, the sanctions against the settlers are not a serious effort to pressure Netanyahu to agree to a Palestinian state, end Jewish settlement construction on Palestinian land, or end Israel’s mass killing in Gaza.
“They have all kinds of levers they could pull to demonstrate that they’re not just frustrated and annoyed but they’ve reached the point where it’s difficult for them to consider him to be a partner, or his government,” he said.
“They could have slow-walked a restricted military assistance, particularly munitions. They could have abstained on a UN security council resolution. Or they could have basically said we need a cessation of hostilities, and joined with the international community in pressuring the Israelis to stop. They have levers they could have pulled, but they haven’t done it.”
How Zionist interests are behind British gov’s attempted definition of ‘extremism’
By David Miller | Al Mayadeen | March 28, 2024
The British government has been grappling with the question of extremism for years now. It has failed even to define extremism in any clear fashion, and has been struggling to fight back against an avalanche of criticism that its counter-extremism policies are Islamophobic.
The genocide in Gaza has focused minds in the British elite, because of the massive sympathy for the Palestinians visible on the streets.
The desperate attempts to cast pro-Palestine protestors as genocidal is a desperate attempt to split the movement. The government is trying to reframe “extremism” in such a way that more radical supporters of Palestinian liberation are demonised, criminalised and disavowed by the rest of the movement.
Michael Gove
The minister leading this is the toxic Michael Gove, the most pro-Zionist minister in the government. He has a history of involvement with Zionist lobby groups, and for example, was the first chairman of the Neoconservative and Islamophobic think tank Policy Exchange.
It’s no coincidence that the new policy he is introducing was dreamt up by Policy Exchange in a paper published in 2022. It recommended: Firstly, a consolidated Centre for the Study of Extremism within government, dedicated to the research and diagnosis of Islamist and other forms of extremism. Secondly, a separate communications unit dedicated to publicly combatting disinformation about the Government’s counter-terrorism and counter-extremism strategies. Thirdly, a due diligence unit, which develops and monitors criteria for engagement with community organisations.
Lord Shawcross
All of its main proposals were adopted by Lord William Shawcross in his review of Prevent, published in 2023. Shawcross is famously Islamophobic and his review was even denounced by Amnesty. He was appointed as a senior Fellow at the Policy Exchange in 2018, prior to being appointed to the Prevent Review in 2021.
Shawcross’s recommendations were all accepted by the government, and thus the new policy has effectively been written by a leading Islamophobic think tank.
Blacklisting agency
Among the innovations are a new blacklisting agency in Gove’s department (a so-called counter-extremism centre of excellence) and a change in the status of the Commission for Countering Extremism which changes from being an advisory to an enforcement agency.
Behind Policy Exchange
But behind Policy Exchange lies a shadowy group of foundations which provide cash for its work. Though they are secretive, we can reveal at least two.
The first and most significant is the Charles Wolfson Charitable Trust, which donates almost every year and has given Policy Exchange more than £3 million between 2007 and 2022. The Wolfson family, which runs the trust, are the owners of the Next retail chain. The boss, Simon Wolfson, declined his bonus in 2020-21, and despite this earned almost £3.4 million that year.
The Wolfson family also funds Beit Halochem, which channels money to the occupation forces which it describes as “heroes”. The family also gives money to the Jerusalem Foundation, which is engaged in promoting illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem.
Another source of funds is the Rosenkranz Foundation, which has given support to the think tank for more than a decade. Along with other Islamophobic causes. Its director, Robert Rosenkranz, was appointed a director of Policy Exchange in 2010.
In other words, British government policy on extremism is captured by Policy Exchange and Policy Exchange is in part a front for Zionist interests.
Defining ‘extremism’
The British government is in a bind. It can’t define extremism and yet it wants to pretend that it can. An amazing display of the lack of support the proposals have was shown on the BBC Question Time programme, where the presenter Fiona Bruce, after weathering many criticisms asked plaintively: “Let me just ask in the interests of balance, is there anyone here who welcomes what Michael Gove had to say?” She was greeted, as she put it with “not a hand up”.
The government claims that its new policy contains a “new definition” of extremism. But there was never an old definition. And the text they have published is not a definition either. There is still no legal definition of extremism, and this is why the government is at pains to point out that “This definition is not statutory and has no effect on the existing criminal law.”
The reason for this is that the government knows that if it tries and create a statutory definition, it will be subject to legal challenge which it will most probably lose. There is a nervousness about this which is intriguing.
First of all, Michael Gove named five “extremist” organisations under Parliamentary privilege, because he knows he would be subject to legal action were he to name them outside the House.
Disrupting the Palestine solidarity movement
Secondly, though the aim here is to destroy and disrupt the Palestine solidarity movement, primarily, no Palestine-related groups were named.
But pro-Palestine group Friends of al-Aqsa was named in drafts of the speech leaked to the media. It also named the Muslim news site 5Pillars and FoA as “divisive forces within Muslim communities”. The government was too nervous even to name them in Parliament.
Gove stated in the Commons that “Islamism is a totalitarian ideology which … calls for the establishment of an Islamic state governed by sharia law”. He named three groups, the Muslim Association of Britain, Cage, and Mend, all perfectly legal organisations.
Mend immediately challenged Gove “to repeat his claims outside of parliament and without the protection of parliamentary privilege… [to] provide the evidence… that MEND has called for the establishment of an ‘Islamic state governed by sharia law’”.
Even normally staunch allies, such as government adviser John Mann have criticised the policy. He stated that ministers should be prioritising “bringing communities together”. “The government needs to listen to people who are advising that the politics of division will not work,” he told the BBC.
Sophisticated engagement
The division appears to be between those pushing for a Likudnik scorched earth approach and those who favour a “sophisticated engagement” strategy – as it was described by the Zionist think tank Reut and their collaborators the US Zionist spy agency, the Anti-Defamation League in a report in 2016. Back in 2010, the Reut Institute urged Israel’s “intelligence establishment” to “drive [a] wedge between soft and hard critics” abroad. The former should be subject to “sophisticated engagement strategies” while the latter should be subject to “sabotage” and “attack”, it said.
This is not just a political and strategic difference, but a question of defending the millions in state and Zionist funding ploughed into the maintenance of hundreds of jobs in sophisticated engagements, such as the interfaith industry.
Underlying all this, the danger is that the definition best fits genocidal Zionist groups and their supporters within government, most notably Michael Gove himself. The penetration and capture of key elements of security policy by the Zionists is nothing if it is not, as the new so-called definition puts it, an attempt to “undermine, overturn or replace the UK’s system of liberal parliamentary democracy and democratic rights” in the service of attempting to “negate or destroy the fundamental rights and freedoms of others”, most obviously Muslims and Palestinians and their supporters.