RT | February 16, 2024
The US-led strikes against targets in Yemen are illegitimate and have no justification under the UN Charter, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev said on Friday at a meeting of security officials from regional powers.
The US and UK, with support from allies, have launched dozens of attacks since January against the Houthis, a Yemeni armed movement. The stated intention was to protect maritime traffic from the militants, who have targeted trade vessels with raids and drone strikes in an attempt to put pressure on Israel.
”Washington and London have unleashed a war with Yemen under the pretext of securing freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. They are trying to drag other nations of the region into it,” Patrushev said. “However, their strikes on the positions of the Houthis are absolutely illegitimate and have nothing to do with the right of self-defense… contrary to what Washington claims.”
The Houthis were a major party in the civil war in Yemen and the primary opponents of the Saudi-led military intervention launched in 2015. They have emerged from the conflicts as the de-facto government of a large portion of the country.
Houthi forces have been targeting passing ships they believe to have ties with Israel in an attempt to enforce a naval blockade of the Jewish state – in retaliation for Israel’s siege of Gaza, which West Jerusalem has conducted with the stated goal of obliterating the Palestinian militant movement Hamas.
Tensions are on the rise globally, Patrushev said, claiming that the core reason for the violence is “the Western intention to hold on to its dominance in world affairs at all cost.”
“People in Washington are convinced that doing so would be easiest amid a global chaos,” he added.
Patrushev delivered the report to his counterparts from China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. The event’s main focus was on the situation in Afghanistan.
By William Van Wagenen | The Cradle | February 16, 2024
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is facing the gravest existential crisis in its 74-year history, as funding cuts by several western countries come on top of ongoing atrocities perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.
The UN agency is unique in being the only one dedicated to a specific group of refugees in specific areas, and the only relief organization that operates a full-fledged educational system. UNRWA is also the only organization mandated to work in Gaza and distribute aid to the two million people currently trapped and starved in the besieged enclave.
To compound these challenges, the occupation wants to see it dismantled.
UNRWA must be destroyed
In January, Israel alleged that Palestinian members of UNRWA’s staff participated in the resistance’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, leading the US and 18 other nations to swiftly suspend funding for the organization.
The suspensions were met with shock, as UNRWA plays a key role in providing food and medicine to starving Gazans struggling to survive Israel’s siege and bombardment of the coastal enclave.
However, Israel’s allegations are not based on any evidence. They are instead part of a classified plan prepared in advance by Israel’s foreign ministry to destroy UNRWA. It believes that UNRWA “works against Israel’s interests” by perpetuating the dream of the right of return of Palestinian refugees and the idea of armed struggle against occupation.
The foreign ministry plan leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 on 28 December, set out a three-stage process to eliminate UNRWA in Gaza, using the Hamas-led resistance operation as a pretext:
First, prepare a case alleging UNRWA’s cooperation with Hamas; second, reduce UNRWA’s field of activity and find replacement service providers; and third, transfer UNRWA’s responsibilities to another entity.
Channel 12 noted that Israel wants to move slowly, given that the US government sees UNRWA as crucial to humanitarian efforts in Gaza. The foreign ministry is seeking to gradually build the case for ousting the organization as part of the discussions on “the day after” the war – should Hamas be dismantled.
A sequence of events
According to a report by The New York Times, the “sequence of events” that led the US to suspend UNRWA funding began on 18 January when Amir Weissbrod, a deputy director general at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, met with Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA in Tel Aviv.
Weissbrod showed Lazzarini a dossier from Israeli intelligence claiming that 12 UNRWA employees had participated in the 7 October attacks.
After the meeting in Israel, Lazzarini made no effort to confirm the validity of the claims. Instead, he flew to New York to meet with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and immediately began firing the employees, a UN official said.
The Guardian reported that Lazzarini was later asked in a press conference if he had looked into whether there was any evidence for the allegations presented to him by Weissbrod.
“No,” Lazzarini replied, “the investigation is going on now.”
Lazzarini said he made the “exceptional, swift decision” due to “the explosive nature of the claims,” rather than any evidence.
Lazzarini said he did not even read the dossier himself because it was in Hebrew. Instead, Weissbrod “was reading this and translating for me,” he said.
How did the US know?
The same New York Times report notes that UNRWA informed US officials about the allegations on 24 January. Just two days later, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the suspension of funding to UNRWA.
Shockingly, the State Department made the announcement amid reports that Gaza was on the brink of famine, and despite acknowledging that “UNRWA plays a critical role in providing lifesaving assistance to Palestinians, including essential food, medicine, shelter.”
Like Lazzarini, Blinken made the decision without seeking any evidence from Israel, but solely based on the supposedly serious nature of the allegations alone. Blinken justified his decision to suspend aid to starving Palestinians by saying, “We haven’t had the ability to investigate [the allegations] ourselves. But they are highly, highly credible.”
In a seemingly coordinated effort, other countries – including Germany, Britain, and Australia – swiftly followed suit. Even Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong acknowledged suspending aid without first receiving any evidence from Israel or even asking Lazzarini to share any evidence he might have.
The funding crisis escalated to such an extent that Juliette Touma, the UNRWA director of communications, said that after “decades of working together,” in “just over 24 hours, nine of our donors suspended funding to UNRWA.”
Another dodgy dossier
As criticism of the aid suspensions mounted, Israeli foreign ministry officials released a dossier to several foreign news organizations.
But after seeing the dossier, both the Financial Times and the UK’s Channel 4 reported that it provided “no evidence” for the claims.
Former UNRWA head Chris Gunness compared it to the “dodgy dossier” used by Tony Blair to take Britain to war in Iraq.
“There is no actual evidence. There are accusations,” Gunness concluded.
Lior Haiat, a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry, tried to justify its refusal to provide any actual evidence by claiming, “the very nature of the allegations makes it impossible for Israel to share all the evidence it has with UNRWA.”
“They think that we can give them intelligence information, knowing that some of their employees work for Hamas? Are you serious?” he asked.
But Israeli propagandist and spokesperson Eylon Levy declined to say if Israel had provided evidence even to the US and UK governments. “I’m not personally aware of what material may have been passed on between our intelligence agencies,” he stated to Channel 4 when pressed for proof of the claims.
Links to Hamas?
The Israeli foreign ministry continued to implement the three-step leaked plan to destroy UNRWA by making additional allegations of UNRWA’s cooperation with Hamas.
On 29 January, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported claims based on Israeli intelligence that “1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza has links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups.”
The article also provided no evidence, citing only Israeli intelligence, and was co-written by Carrie Keller-Lynn, an American who volunteered for the Israeli military and has a personal relationship with an Israeli army spokesperson.
Even if true, the allegations are meaningless. Hamas is the governing party in Gaza, making it self-evident that many UNRWA employees would be sympathetic or have family ties to the resistance movement.
Similarly, it would be unsurprising if an employee of an Israeli NGO or aid group was sympathetic to the Israeli army or had family members in the ruling Likud party.
As Haaretz noted, UNRWA employees in the West Bank and other countries where the organization operates are usually more aligned with whatever Palestinian faction is dominant in that area.
‘We could not verify this’
The Israeli foreign ministry’s plan to paint UNRWA as linked to Hamas soon continued with new and bizarre allegations that Hamas had placed a massive data center directly underneath the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza.
The Times of Israel claimed that the data center was “built precisely under the location where Israel would not consider looking initially, let alone target in an airstrike.”
But Israel has been bombing UNRWA schools and other UN facilities for decades, including when large numbers of civilians have been sheltering in them. No Hamas leader would imagine this would provide it any protection.
But as OSINT analyst Michael Kobs has shown, the alleged data center the Israeli army showed to foreign journalists was not under the UNRWA headquarters.
Kobs also notes that when Tageschau journalist Sophie van der Tann was taken through a tunnel to see the alleged data center, she stated, “We could not verify” it was under the UNRWA headquarters.
Erasing the right of return
But why is Israel determined to destroy UNRWA?
One reason is Israel’s ongoing effort to slowly starve Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.
At the beginning of the war on 7 October, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant notoriously ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza, saying, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” The late January campaign to suspend UNRWA funding then came at a time when “famine” was already “around the corner” in Gaza, according to UN Emergency Relief Chief Martin Griffiths. Israeli officials knew that suspending funding for UNRWA at this time would only bring famine closer. One Israeli military official acknowledged to the WSJ on 13 February that “Without UNRWA, there is no humanitarian aid in Gaza.”
But there is another reason Israel wants to destroy UNRWA, which predates the current war.
Palestinian political analyst and researcher Hanin Abou Salem explained that Israel wants to dismantle UNRWA because it transmits refugee status from generation to generation, which keeps the right of return for Palestinian refugees alive and “ensures that their hopes for returning to their ancestral homeland do not perish with the death of the original 1948 refugees.”
If UNRWA is dismantled and replaced by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), as Israel hopes, this will guarantee that Palestinians can only be resettled in third countries and never return to the homes and lands from which Israel forcibly expelled their grandparents during the Nakba.
In 2017, Israel launched a propaganda campaign against UNRWA and succeeded in convincing the Trump administration to cut around $300 million in funding to the organization the following year, only for the Biden administration to restore $235 million in 2021.
Destroying an idea
But with the start of the war on 7 October, Israel feels it has a second chance, not only to destroy the right of return, but also the “idea” of armed struggle to achieve it.
Noga Arbell, a researcher at the right-wing Kohelet Forum, recently explained that UNRWA needs to be “annihilated” because it is the “source of the idea.”
“It gives birth to more and more terrorists in all kinds of ways. UNRWA needs to be wiped out immediately – now – or Israel will miss the window of opportunity.”
UNRWA allegedly ‘gives birth to terrorists’ through its 706 schools, where some 543,075 Palestine refugee children receive free basic education.
In Gaza, UNRWA uses Palestinian Authority (PA) textbooks and supplements these with its own materials. Israel has long been irked that these textbooks include lessons on the life of one of the most famous symbols of Palestinian armed resistance, an 18-year-old young woman and Palestinian refugee born in Lebanon, Dalal al-Mughrabi.
In 1978, Mughrabi led a group of Palestinian guerrillas from PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party to carry out an operation in Israel.
According to the Israeli version of events, Mughrabi “led one of the deadliest suicide attacks in Israel’s history,” by hijacking a bus and taking its passengers hostage on the highway between Haifa and Tel Aviv. During the operation, the bus exploded, and “38 Israelis were murdered, including 13 children.”
Israel claims that UNRWA is, therefore, teaching “mass murder” by using PA books that encourage everyone to be like Mughrabi.
However, Palestinians claim that Israeli forces killed the hostages.
You can kill a revolutionary, but not the revolution
According to a 2008 report in the Guardian, Mughrabi and the Palestinian guerillas intended to attack the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv and hijacked two buses carrying civilians on the coastal road near Haifa. Along the way, they engaged in an intense 15-hour gun battle with Israeli forces.
Palestinians maintain the bus exploded, killing the guerillas and hostages, after it was fired on from the air by Israeli helicopters or elite Israel commandos, in a possible early instance of the mass Hannibal Directive.
Israeli forces implemented the Hannibal Directive on 7 October, killing large numbers of their own civilians – and burning many of them alive – using attack helicopters, tanks, and drones, while blaming all these deaths on Hamas.
Even if Israel succeeds in executing its plan to destroy UNRWA, while starving and bombing tens of thousands to death in Gaza, it will not be able to erase the spirit of Dalal al-Mughrabi and the thousands of martyrs like her who have sacrificed themselves for the freedom of Palestinians.
Within 24 hours of the unsubstantiated accusations against UNRWA, the US, the UK, and 14 other nations suspended funding to the organization the Wall Street Journal described as the “main pillar of operations to move food aid, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies into Gaza.”
The abruptness of these cuts was particularly jolting in light of the looming threat of famine, as highlighted by Griffiths, who warned that Gaza was on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
These drastic measures were instigated by allegations based on a dubious six-page dossier, arguably part of a meticulously crafted plan orchestrated by Israel’s foreign ministry, aimed at dismantling the humanitarian and educational infrastructure serving internally displaced Palestinians.
This concerted effort to undermine UNRWA is nothing short of a calculated strategy to exert control over the narrative surrounding Palestinian refugees and to once again reshape the demographics in Palestine.
MEMO | February 16, 2024
An elderly Palestinian woman, Umm Muhammad Musmah, has categorically refuted the Israeli army’s propaganda that soldiers had found her last month while shackled inside a building and provided her with medical aid, Anadolu news agency reported.
Umm Muhammad. who is currently receiving treatment in the Gaza European Hospital in the city of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, told the agency that it was the Israeli army soldiers who had detained her, handcuffed and beaten her then filmed her for propaganda purposes.
She said she was chained and kept outdoors in the cold weather and deprived of food throughout her detention which lasted for nearly two weeks.
Recounting the harsh experience, Umm Muhammad said: “I was arrested [by occupation forces] with many citizens from the Ma’an area, east of the city of Khan Yunis, and [the soldiers] tied my hands, while the weather was very cold. I tried to untie myself, but could not.”
“I was left without food, and was beaten during the arrest,” she added.
In a post published on X on 26 January, the Israeli occupation army added a video of the elderly Palestinian woman being carried on an ambulance stretcher, accompanied by Israeli soldiers.
Israeli army spokesman, Avichay Adraee, claimed that an Israeli army’s drone had located the woman while combing an area in Gaza after she had taken shelter in the building while her hands were shackled and she was suffering from bad health.
“While providing medical care to her, the elderly woman told the force that all her family members had fled to the south, and that Hamas saboteurs arrived at her house wearing military uniforms and handcuffed her two days ago and ordered her to say that our soldiers did that,” he claimed, adding that the Israeli forces provided medical treatment to the elderly woman and released her later.
Israeli forces have repeatedly published claims which have later been disproven. Including claiming it didn’t bomb Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital on 17 October 2023 and kill 500 Palestinians in Gaza.
Over the past few months, Palestinians have been released from Israeli captivity and left to make their own way to shelters or to find their families in Gaza. The detainees have shown signs of torture and pictures from their detention show them being humiliated and degraded, stripped of their clothes and left outside in the winter cold.
Just this week, a detained Palestinian civilian was sent into Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis with his wrists tied together and ordered to tell those taking shelter in the hospital to evacuate it. He was then killed by sniper fire, while three Palestinians who were heeding his advice and who tried to travel through the designated evacuation route were all killed.
Just like the caged-up Palestinians
BY PHILIP GIRALDI • UNZ REVIEW • FEBRUARY 15, 2024
Over the past four months I have carried out my daily morning scan of the major online news websites increasingly concerned over what I would be seeing given the mainstream media’s reluctance to report honestly and the persistent management by government propaganda mills of what is leaked to the journalists. News regarding what is taking place with Russia-Ukraine suffered initially as the war turned sharply in Moscow’s favor late last year, so much so that the likely outcome is only being challenged on neocon dominated sites like American Enterprise Institute, Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the National Review. President Joe Biden and team are now only struggling to raise $61 billion for Volodymyr Zelensky to prolong the conflict through the US election later this year so Biden can appear to be a strong “wartime” president fighting hard to defend the United States from the threatening Red Hordes. That the money will essentially drop down the hole of Ukrainian corruption seems to bother no one in the White House, but the game goes on with Biden saying “This bipartisan bill sends a clear message to Ukrainians and to our partners and to our allies around the world: America can be trusted, America can be relied upon, and America stands up for freedom. We stand strong for our allies. We never bow down to anyone, and certainly not to Vladimir Putin. So, let’s get on with this… Are [we] going to side with terror and tyranny? Are [we] going to stand with Ukraine, or are [we] going to stand with Putin? Will we stand with America or – or with Trump?” The president is also currently pumping the line that he is somehow saving or protecting “democracy.” The fact that Ukraine, banning political parties and even religious groups and the Russian language, is no democracy does not seem to impact on the narrative. And don’t forget how the Zelensky government recently murdered American journalist Gonzalo Lira for his exercising freedom of the press!
Biden argues that standing by America’s “allies,” even when they are not actual allies, is essential to maintain confidence in the United States and its leadership mission to create a “rules based international order” and thereby save the world. Beyond Ukraine, there is, of course, America’s “best friend” and “greatest ally” Israel which also is no democracy as Palestinian citizens have limited rights, with those living on the Israeli army occupied West Bank having effectively no protection from being arrested arbitrarily or even shot on sight by rampaging soldiers and settlers, who fear no consequences for killing and robbing Arabs because there are no consequences. The bombing of Gaza into the stone age continues with hardly any coverage in the mainstream media as if it is an atrocity that will disappear from the collective conscience if no one refers to it in spite of the rows of dead women and children. The US and European media meanwhile blithely report every new “Hamas atrocity” promoted by the habitually lying Israeli Army (IDF) as if it were the truth while Biden is pulling out the stops to provide the cash ($14 billion) and weapons to enable the IDF to kill more Palestinians while at the same time mock-mourning the slaughter of the innocents that is taking place. The ghastly death toll is a direct result of Joe’s lack of any action to force the Israelis to change course, which he has the leverage to do with a phone call to Benjamin Netanyahu threatening to cut off the cash, arms and political support. But the administration has made plain that it has no intention to do anything like that.
But even given all of that excitement last week there is one story that stands out, the video of former Secretary of State and CIA Director Mike Pompeo in Israel grinning and dancing with celebrating Israeli soldiers, who presumably have just returned from Gaza after having had the pleasure of blasting a few more score of civilians, including a large percentage of children. The Israeli Army’s latest stunt is to position snipers and tanks around the last functioning major medical facility in Rafah district in the south of Gaza, the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. The Palestinians trying to survive in Gaza were previously ordered by Israel to go to Rafah where they would be “safe” but it was a self-serving lie and the military then proceeded to bomb and shoot civilians, even when they were trying to surrender, and also destroying infrastructure like hospitals and schools to make the area uninhabitable. The army snipers have now joined in the fun by shooting Gaza’s doctors and patients inside the building and on the grounds to force Nasser Hospital to evacuate and shut down. They followed up on the shooting gallery by storming the hospital, allegedly in search of “hostages.” It is all part of what is developing as Netanyahu has announced that the ground invasion of Rafah will soon begin even though the encaged Palestinians, who are already starving due to the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid, have nowhere to go and many more thousands will die one way or another.
As a taste of what is to come that is even more bizarre than what has already transpired, Israel’s “most moral army in the world” has now also gone into the entertainment business. It has begun to invite groups of Israeli civilians into detention centers and prisons that have been holding West Bank Palestinian prisoners as well as detainees from the Gaza Strip. The civilians are able to observe the detainees, stripped to their underwear, and laugh and jeer as the men are being beaten, humiliated and tortured, with many of the viewers also allowed to film what is happening on their own cell phones to share with their friends and families. Mike Pompeo, who is a Christian Zionist of dispensationalist persuasion, believes that the former Palestine belongs to the Israelis because it says so in the Bible, which he has carefully “studied.” He also, while Trump’s Secretary of State, declared that the US no longer regards the illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank as “illegal” and he similarly approved of the Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights as perfectly acceptable under international law, which it is not. Wonder what Mike as a self-identified pious Christian thinks about all those dead and mutilated Palestinian babies if he ever chooses to think about it at all?
Also in the running for god-awful narrative of the week was a piece claiming that the successful first step by way of a majority vote in the House of Representatives to bring about the richly deserved impeachment of Department of Homeland Security’s ghastly Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday was the result of an “antisemitic conspiracy theory” because he is a “Sephardic Jew,” not due to his own incompetence which he has been demonstrating regularly for the past three years. The deep hole of depression that I crawled into as I watched the fat twerp Pompeo cavorting while the midget Mayorkas touted his Jewish credentials drove me to rethink the whole issue of US foreign and national security policy. I came to the conclusion that the players are caricatures and it should not be taken seriously and should instead be regarded as a comedy routine, something like Monty Python but terribly lethal and without the intelligence and wit of John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman.
To be sure the Biden administration can always be counted upon to produce a laugh, particularly when it brings on the clowns named Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Karine Jean-Pierre and Jake Sullivan. There has been a lot of funny stuff lately, most particularly the chatter about a solution to the Palestinian genocide, even though Biden seems quite comfortable to let the Israelis finish their ethnic cleansing of Gaza before anyone looks for a place willing acquire two million more stateless and homeless Palestinians. Former presidential aspirant and totally owned Zionist stooge Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida has already declared that no Palestinians should be allowed into the US as refugees as they are “antisemites.”
Nevertheless, Biden and Blinken’s State Department want to come up with some kind of formula, if only because the worldwide blowback due to the White House’s unflinching support for Israeli brutality has begun to have consequences as it constitutes complicity in crimes against humanity. Some kind of limited sovereignty, disarmed for sure, allowed to Palestine is envisioned but Netanyahu and his political allies, long opposed to a two-state solution, have recently repeatedly rejected proposals for any Palestinian sovereign entity. Israel is even now using its formidable lobby and international press/narrative control to work assiduously against any diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state by individual countries or as a full member at the UN. Not surprisingly, the greatest effort to keep things on track is being directed against voices raised in support of Palestine in the United States. Biden is listening to be sure and is having both Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan carefully coordinate every step the administration takes with the Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs and former ambassador to Washington Ron Dermer. Even though Israel and Netanyahu definitely hold the whip hand, the president is nevertheless inevitably looking over his shoulder and is fearful of alienation of voters with the national election coming up if the carnage in Gaza continues. Not for the first time the endless farce of US internal politics will likely at least somewhat influence what eventually takes place in countries six thousand miles away. And given Biden’s propensity to avoid doing the right thing, one can be pretty sure that the result won’t be pretty!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
MEMO | February 15, 2024
Israel’s Channel 13 reported yesterday that the occupation’s prison administration transferred prominent Fatah leader, prisoner Marwan Barghouti, to solitary confinement.
It said that the prison administration “took measures against Barghouti claiming he is pushing for escalating resistance in the West Bank.”
It explained that “Barghouti was transferred from Ofer Prison to solitary confinement in another prison,” without specifying which prison, after the prison administration “received information that Barghouti is encouraging the escalation of acts of resistance against the occupation in the West Bank.”
The occupation authorities claimed that “Barghouti is working through several channels to break out a Third Intifada in the West Bank, due to the continued Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip.”
Barghouti is a prominent politician and leader in the Fatah movement. He participated in the First Intifada in 1987 and was one of the most prominent faces of the Second Intifada in 2000. He was arrested and exiled on several occasions and was subjected to failed Israeli assassination attempts. He has been sentenced to five life sentences and has been held in detention since 2002.
In spite of his incarceration he has a large following and numerous polls show that, should Palestinian elections be held, he would likely be chosen president of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The Cradle | February 15, 2024
Israeli forces stormed Al-Nasser Hospital in Gaza’s southern city of Khan Yunis on 15 February, which had been besieged by the invading troops for several weeks.
“Israel’s military stormed Nasser Hospital and turned it into a military outpost. The Israeli military destroyed the ambulance station and tents of displaced civilians and bulldozed over [mass] graves in the courtyard of the hospital,” the Gaza Health Ministry announced.
Displaced Palestinians inside the hospital were “forcibly evacuated” on 14 January before a “massive incursion” on Thursday morning, which began under intense shelling, the ministry added.
Al-Jazeera reported “heavy tank and machine-gun fire as the Israeli army entered Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis after ordering occupants to evacuate this morning.”
Intensive care patients were forced to move into one of the hospital’s older buildings, which was not equipped to care for them.
“The Israeli occupation forces the administration of Nasser Medical Complex to keep intensive care patients without medical staff, which puts their lives in grave danger,” Gaza Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra said.
According to hospital officials, seven patients were hit by Israeli fire, and one of them was killed.
The Israeli military claimed on 15 January it had “credible evidence” that Hamas kept prisoners inside Al-Nasser Hospital and that their remains may still be in the facility.
However, Hebrew media reported on Thursday that “expectations regarding finding corpses of Israeli detainees at Nasser Hospital must be lowered.”
Tel Aviv also claimed Hamas operatives involved in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood were hiding in the hospital. The Israeli army entered Khan Yunis in early December, laying siege to the southern city’s hospitals.
Over the past week, dozens of Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israeli snipers in the vicinity of Al-Nasser Hospital, including those who were trying to leave the facility.
The Israeli army stormed Khan Yunis’ Al-Amal Hospital at the start of this month.
Tel Aviv has been conducting a military campaign against hospitals in Gaza with the aim of making the strip uninhabitable for Palestinians. In November, north Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital was besieged, stormed, and transformed into a detention center by Israeli troops.
Israeli forces are now preparing to push further south into Rafah but are still facing fierce resistance from Hamas’ Qassam Brigades and other resistance groups in Khan Yunis.
By Viktor Mikhin – New Eastern Outlook – 15.02.2024
Many politicians around the world strongly condemn not only Israel’s inhumane policy in the Gaza Strip, when peaceful Palestinians are being slaughtered, but also the hypocrisy, duplicity, pharisaism and arrogance of the West. In one case, the current worthless rulers of Europe condemn the defence of their citizens in Donbass by Russia, which is complying with all international rules of engagement. On the other, when Israel started to destroy civilians in the Gaza Strip (which according to international laws is considered a policy of genocide), the West welcomes and applauds, defending its protégé in the Middle East in every possible way.
For example, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called the West’s position on Gaza, which differs from its position on Ukraine, “the height of hypocrisy.” “What happened in Gaza, has caused the West and the Europeans to lose all their reputation, all their accumulated credits (of trust). They have squandered all their political capital in the eyes of humanity, especially in the eyes of our generations,” Turkish daily Hürriyet quoted Hakan Fidan as saying. According to him, it will not be easy for the West to regain the lost trust. “It will not be easy for them to regain it. Unlike their stance on Ukraine and Russia, their stance on Gaza is the height of hypocrisy. They cannot talk about principles, virtue and morality. They ignore them completely. I see that all this is preparing the ground for a huge geostrategic rupture,” the minister said.
A huge swath of the Global South sees and criticises the double standards that guide the West’s actions in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine, as the New York Times (NYT) reluctantly reported through gritted teeth. The publication notes that for the past 20 months, US authorities have actively criticised Moscow for its special military operation in Ukraine, but now that the IDF has carried out a bloodbath in Gaza, full American support for Israel risks creating new and complex obstacles in Washington’s efforts to win over world public opinion.
The war in the Middle East, the piece says, is driving a wedge between the West and leading nations of the Global South such as Brazil and Indonesia. In addition, the West’s unconscionable double standard in defence of Israelis has been sharply criticised by leaders of the Arab world. The fact that the West treats Ukraine as a special case because it is in Europe, against the backdrop of Middle East escalation, has only increased discontent in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There, the impression is that the West is more concerned about refugees from Ukraine than about those affected by the conflicts in Arab countries. The publication has to admit that the West has failed to convince countries such as India and Turkey to support sanctions against Russia. Given the bloody events in the Gaza Strip, “Western efforts to widen the front against Russia are unlikely to be successful in the near future.”
Earlier, American businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who was seeking the nomination as the country’s presidential candidate from the Republican Party (he ended his campaign and supported Donald Trump’s candidacy in the presidential election), said that the United States should seek an early settlement of the conflict in Ukraine, which would provide for the transition of Russian-speaking regions into Russia. And he is not alone in the US, where questions are increasingly being asked as to why it is the Americans who should bear the brunt of the financial burden and supply vast quantities of weapons to the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.
Irish MEP Mick Wallace has rightly stated that the Ukrainian conflict is still going on because of the unwillingness of the United States to end it. He expressed the same opinion with regard to the situation in the Gaza Strip. The world media also noted that the International Criminal Court, at the behest of the United States, has ignored many years of genocide in Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, and therefore the ICC is “unfair in its choice of topics to explore” and has turned into “an unscrupulous legal body of the West.”
Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya has accused the United States of its position preventing the Security Council from adopting resolutions aimed at stopping the violence in the Gaza Strip, RIA Novosti reported. “It is regrettable that under these circumstances the UN Security Council has so far failed to adopt a single resolution demanding a halt to the violence because of the position of one delegation, the United States, which is blocking all efforts and initiatives to stop the bloodshed,” the diplomat said. He noted that this gave Israel carte blanche to further destroy the Palestinians.
The huge difference in the West’s attitude to the Palestinian-Israeli and Ukrainian conflicts points to hypocritical double standards, one of the goals of which is to interpret international law exactly as it suits the US. In this case, the fate of the Palestinian population is much less interesting to the hardened Western officials in terms of “domestic political points.” How many times have Western delegations requested UN Security Council meetings on Ukraine? The answer is at least twice a month, while how many times the said delegations have requested Security Council meetings on the Middle East issue – zero. Apparently, in this case comments are unnecessary, the conclusion is already on the surface. The West’s double standards “in all their glory” were also observed in the situation with the migration crisis in the EU. While Ukrainian refugees have been given all sorts of benefits, refugees from Africa and the Middle East are being “kept in camps in inhumane conditions.”
The State Department has after all decided to explain the difference in its approaches to the situation in Gaza and Ukraine in the way that yesterday’s hegemon considers, rather than in accordance with the generally accepted laws of international law. Thus, the deputy head of the State Department’s press service, Vedant Patel, responded to a journalist’s question about the difference in the approaches of the US authorities to the situation in the Gaza Strip and the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The official said that Washington sees no grounds to accuse Israel of genocide of Palestinians, and “one should be very careful when making such statements.” At the same time, when Patel was asked why US President Joe Biden “very quickly” called the events in Ukraine “genocide” in 2022, the State Department official could not give more specific explanations. He only noted that “such definitions must be made with a careful consideration of the law and the facts”, without specifying which facts he had in mind. He simply did not have a reasonable answer, and in the current circumstances he did not dare to say that this was Washington’s wish and favourable.
Incidentally, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said earlier that international law must be respected in all conflicts. This is a correct observation, but according to the Secretary General’s personal interpretation, the conflicts in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine have differences. And he personally believes that Israel, which destroys peaceful Palestinians, strictly observes international law, while Russia, which fights against the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev only on the battlefields, violates this law. Apparently, in Stoltenberg’s “enlightened” opinion, Russia will respect international law only when it, like Israel, destroys the peaceful population of our brother nation. A strange opinion worthy of a schizophrenic from a psychiatric hospital. On this occasion, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called the statement by the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, about the “senselessness of humanitarian aid supplies to the Gaza Strip” if hostilities continue there an apologetic of transhumanism. She asked her colleague whether he also considered it pointless to provide medical assistance and love “someone who will die tomorrow”. There was, of course, no reply.
The accusations against the Russian side on the subject of “indiscriminate strikes” against Ukrainian cities can best be assessed by comparing “two realities” – the situation in Ukraine and in the Gaza Strip. In this regard, we can recommend that opponents go to the Internet and familiarise themselves with Ukrainian news or watch local TV channels. On Ukrainian websites one can easily find a large number of reports on club and restaurant life in such cities as Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk and others. Ukrainian state institutions and other municipal buildings are functioning normally almost everywhere, transport continues to operate, schools and hospitals are open. This situation can be observed almost two years after Russia launched a special operation aimed at protecting the population of Donbas from the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv. All of this shows, as has been repeatedly confirmed by independent observers, that the Russian Armed Forces are conducting exclusively precision strikes against military facilities and infrastructure related to military capabilities. This policy is in sharp contrast to the crimes against humanity committed by the neo-Nazi regime in Kyiv, which is deliberately firing Western-made missiles at civilians in Donbas. And there are numerous facts and evidence to this effect, which at the very least would make for a new Nuremberg process.
The current leaders of the West should look at what their lackey Israel is doing in the Gaza Strip, which for three months now has sought to raze the territory and destroy the Palestinians living there. Not only have hospitals and schools been burned to the ground, but entire towns have been destroyed, and the death toll, including a large number of children, is appalling. And all this is happening before the eyes of the world in the 21st century, to the hooting and applause of the Biden administration and the current rulers of Europe, who have finally lost shame, conscience and simple human compassion. “Comparing these two realities, ask yourself a question: how many times have you condemned the methodical annihilation of peaceful Palestinians?” – noted Russia’s UN representative Nebenzya, when asking Western representatives whether they had ever supported calls for a ceasefire in the Middle East conflict, whether they had condemned Israel’s anti-human crimes. The answer would be only negative. Not only has the West done nothing to stop Israel’s current massacre of Palestinian civilians, it has encouraged them even more by supplying the latest lethal weapons, financially pumping in huge sums of money and defending them on the international stage. Suffice it to say that the US representative at the UN has twice vetoed Security Council resolutions to stop the deadly slaughter in the Gaza Strip, unleashing the Israeli military for even more atrocious crimes, rightly assessed by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
In the current circumstances, when the former hegemon has lost its power and authority, it has to resort more and more to hypocrisy and double standards to somehow camouflage its bankrupt policy. But no matter how hard the West, led by the U.S., tries, they will no longer be able to fundamentally influence events in the world. And the events in Ukraine, where Russia is successfully conducting a special military operation to protect the Russian population, and the bloody events in the Gaza Strip are the best evidence of this.
Victor MIKHIN is a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences.
By Dr Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | February 14, 2024
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Washington on an official visit on 8 February aimed at working jointly with the United States to make “sure that Israel has what it needs to defend itself.” If such a statement was made soon after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, the logic would be more obvious, not least because of the well-known, inherent bias of both Washington and Berlin towards Israel. Scholz made his visit and statement, however, on the 125th day of one of the bloodiest, most well-publicised genocides in modern history.
The purpose of the visit was highlighted in a press conference by White House spokesperson John Kirby, even though, hours later, US President Joe Biden admitted that Israel has gone “over the top” in its response to the Hamas attack.
If killing and wounding more than 100,000 civilians, and counting, is Israel’s version of self-defence, then both Scholz and Biden have done a splendid job in ensuring that the apartheid state has everything it needs to carry out its bloody mission. However, in this context, who is entitled to act in self-defence, Israel or Palestine?
On a recent visit to a hospital in a Middle Eastern country, which must remain nameless as a precondition of my visit, I witnessed the most horrific sights that one could ever see. Scores of limbless Palestinian children, some still fighting for their lives, some badly burned and others in a coma.
Those who were able to use their hands had drawn Palestinian flags to hang on the walls beside their hospital beds. Some wore SpongeBob T-shirts and others had hats with Disney characters on them. They were pure, innocent, and very much Palestinian.
A couple of children flashed the victory sign as soon as we said our goodbyes. They wanted to communicate to the world that they remain strong and that they know exactly who they are and where they come from. The children, though, are far too young to understand the legal and political context of their strong feelings towards their homeland.
UN General Assembly Resolution 3236 (XXIX), for example, “affirmed the inalienable right of the Palestinian people in Palestine (…), the right to self-determination, (and) the right to national independence and sovereignty.” The phrase “Palestinian right to self-determination” is perhaps the most frequently uttered in relation to Palestine and the Palestinian struggle since the establishment of the UN. On 26 January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) also affirmed what we already know, that Palestinians are a distinct “national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
Those injured Palestinian children do not need legal jargon or political slogans to locate themselves. The right to live without fear of extermination, without bombs and without military occupation is a natural right, requiring no legal arguments and unfazed by racism, hate speech or propaganda.
Unfortunately, we do not live in a world built upon common sense. It’s built on topsy-turvy legal and political systems that exist only to cater for the strong. In this parallel world, Scholz is more concerned about Israel being able to “defend itself” than a besieged Palestinian population, starving, bleeding, yet unable to achieve any tangible measure of justice.
Israel doesn’t actually have the right to claim “self-defence” when the people living under its brutal military occupation stand up for themselves and say enough is enough.
Moreover, those carrying out acts of colonial aggression — and settler-colonial occupation itself is a de facto act of aggression — should not demand that their victims refrain from fighting back.
Palestinians have been victimised by Israeli colonialism, military occupation, racist apartheid, siege and now genocide. As such, for Israel to invoke Article 51, Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations makes a mockery of international law. Article 51, often used by the major powers to justify their wars and military interventions, was designed with a completely different legal spirit in mind.
Article 2 (4) of Chapter I in the UN Charter prohibits the “threat or use of force in international relations.” It also “calls on all Members to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other states.” Given that Israel is in violation of Article 2 (4), it simply has no right to invoke Article 51.
In November 2012, Palestine was recognised as an Observer State at the UN. It is also a member of countless international treaties, and is recognised by 139 countries out of the 193 UN member states.
Even if we accept the argument that the UN Charter only applies to full UN members, the Palestinian right to self-defence can still be established under international law. In 1960, General Assembly Declaration No. 1594 guaranteed independence to colonised nations and people. Although it did not discuss the right of the colonised to use force, it condemned the use of force against liberation movements.
In 1964, the UN General Assembly voted in favour of Resolution No. 2105, which recognised the legitimacy of the “struggle” of colonised nations to exercise their right to self-determination.
In 1973, the Assembly passed Resolution 38/17 of 1983. The language, this time, was unambiguous; people have the right to struggle against colonial foreign domination by all possible means, including armed struggle.
The same dynamics that ruled the UN in its early days continue to this day, where Western countries, which represented the bulk of all colonial powers in the past, continue to give themselves a monopoly over the use of force. Conversely, the Global South, which has suffered under the yoke of those Western regimes, insists that it, too, has the right to defend itself against foreign intervention, colonialism, military occupation and apartheid.
While Scholz was in Washington to discuss yet more ways to kill Palestinian civilians, the government of Nicaragua made an official request to join South Africa in its effort to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice for the crime of genocide in Gaza.
It is interesting how the colonisers and the colonised continue to build relations and solidarity around the same old principles. The Global South is, again, rising in solidarity with the Palestinians, while countries in the North, with a few exceptions, continue to support Israeli oppression.
Just before I left the aforementioned hospital, a wounded child handed me a drawing. It featured several images, stacked one on top of the other, as if the little boy was creating a timeline of events that led to his injury: a tent, with him inside; an Israeli soldier shooting a Palestinian; prison bars, with his father inside; and, finally, a Palestinian fighter holding a flag.
He knows who he is. He knows where he comes from. And he knows where he belongs. He will never forget.
The Cradle | February 15, 2024
The Egyptian government has started building an “isolated security zone” in the eastern Sinai Desert on the border with the Gaza Strip that would serve as a buffer zone for Palestinian refugees if they are forced out of Rafah by the Israeli army, according to the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights.
Local contractors told the rights group that the construction work was commissioned by the Sons of Sinai Construction and Building Company, owned by businessman Ibrahim al-Arjani, a former warlord from the Tarabin tribe in northern Sinai who holds close ties with the family of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The construction work aims to “create an area surrounded by walls seven meters high, after removing the rubble of indigenous homes that had been destroyed.” The construction is expected to be completed in under 10 days and is supervised by the Egyptian Armed Forces Engineering Authority, with a heavy security presence.
“This morning, the Foundation’s team … monitored the construction of a seven-meter-high cement wall, starting from a point in the village of Goz Abu Waad, south of the city of Rafah, and heading north toward the Mediterranean Sea, parallel to the border with the Gaza Strip,” the Sinai Foundation said on 14 February.
“The construction work seen in Sinai along the border with Gaza – the establishment of a reinforced security perimeter around a specific, open area of land – are serious signs that Egypt may be preparing to accept and allow the displacement of Gazans to Sinai, in coordination with Israel and the United States,” Muhannad Sabry, a researcher in Sinai affairs and security in Egypt, told the Sinai Foundation.
Earlier this month, Egyptian journalist Ahmed el-Madhoun shared a video showing workers strengthening the security wall separating Egypt and Gaza. Since the outbreak of the war on 7 October, Cairo has constructed a concrete border topped with barbed wire and extending six meters into the ground.
Cairo recently boosted its military presence on the Gaza border, citing fears of a spillover of Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign onto its territory once the ground invasion of Rafah begins. Western media has also quoted Egyptian officials as saying that the government considered suspending the 1978 Camp David Accords if Palestinians were forcibly displaced into the Sinai Desert.
Nevertheless, Israel’s Army Radio reported over the weekend that Cairo informed Tel Aviv that they will not object to a military operation in Rafah as long as it is conducted without harming Palestinian civilians. Other Israeli outlets, as well as the New York Times, have reported Egyptian officials expressing fears that any influx of Palestinians could lead to a resurgence of “Islamist militancy.”
Israeli officials have repeatedly made clear their desire not only to defeat Hamas but also to force Gaza’s 2.3 million citizens to flee to Egypt or other countries as refugees. Those statements coincided with explicit plans to annex Gaza and build settlements for Israeli Jews over destroyed Palestinian homes.
Israeli settler groups and Knesset members recently held a conference to discuss building Jewish settlements in Gaza once its indigenous inhabitants have been ethnically cleansed.
By Ian DeMartino – Sputnik – 15.02.2024
At least 41 of the UK Labour Party’s 197 sitting Members of Parliament (MPs) have accepted money from the Israel lobby, according to a report by an alternative UK media outlet.
More than £280,000 have been spent by the groups, paying for more than 50 visits to Israel by Labour MPs since 1999, the report stated. It also noted that an additional £210,000 has been spent by individual pro-Israel lobbyists.
The funders include Labour Friends of Israel and its primary benefactor, Trevor Chinn, a multi-millionaire business tycoon who has long been a supporter of Israel and pro-Israeli groups in the UK.
Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) describes itself as a “Westminster based lobby group working with the British Labour Party to promote the State of Israel,” and currently counts 75 Labour MPs as supporters or officers a number that has increased even as Israel’s campaign in Gaza has intensified and that the International Court of Justice described as a “plausible” genocide in its preliminary hearing.
The organization’s UK branch is headed by former Labour MP Joan Ryan. It focuses on bringing MPs and Journalists to Israel for “fact finding” missions and often pays for the expenses of those trips.
At least one Labour MP, Margaret Hodge, has continued to accept money from the Israel lobby. Over a quarter of Chinn’s £195,210 donations to Labour members were given to Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, during his campaign for that post. He did not reveal the donations until after his election. Eleven MPs inside Starmer’s shadow cabinet have also accepted funds from Israeli lobbyists, the same outlet reported in November.
The Labour Party in the UK has not called for a ceasefire in Gaza and the UK has been one of Israel’s staunchest supporters, arguably behind only the United States. Chinn has funded LFI and other pro-Israel groups since the 1980s. Other pro-Israel donors to Labour MPs include David Menton, the former director of the British Israel Communications and Research Centre and Red Capital, a private company headed by the former chairman of LFI, Jonathan Mendelsohn.
In the past two days, Starmer has suspended two parliamentary candidates, Azhar Ali and Graham Jones, after they made comments that were critical of Israel and were accused of antisemitism.
The Cradle | February 14, 2024
The number of Israeli arrests in the West Bank since 7 October has risen to around 7,020, multiple institutions concerned with the rights of detained Palestinians reported on 13 February.
According to the human rights groups, 18 arrests were made in the West Bank overnight, including two women from Jericho alongside other children and former prisoners.
Overnight arrests made by the Israeli forces were mainly carried out in Hebron and Qalqiliya, while other arrests were made across Jericho, Nablus, Jerusalem, and Ramallah.
The Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs, the Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS), and the Addameer Prisoner Care and Human Rights Association released a joint statement revealing that the total number of arrests – including individuals from the 1948 territories – amounted to approximately 220 women and 440 children.
The number reported includes those arrested in their homes, at military checkpoints, those taken hostage, and those forced to surrender under pressure.
The statement added that 53 journalists had been detained since 7 October – 36 of whom remain imprisoned – with 21 others under administrative detention without charge or trial.
The detention campaigns are accompanied by escalating instances of abuse, beatings, and threats against the detainees and their family members. This includes the destruction of homes as well as the confiscation of vehicles, money, and jewelry.
They also reported executions targeting members of detainees’ families.
The data given by the prisoner rights groups does not include those arrested from Gaza due to Israel’s refusal to disclose such information.
The total number of Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons is estimated to exceed 9,000 individuals. Among them, there are 3,484 administrative detainees and 606 individuals classified as “illegal fighters” from Gaza.
The Cradle | February 14, 2024
The White House has no “reprimand plans” in the works to punish Israel if its army launches a ground invasion into the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where 1.4 million Palestinians are taking shelter after forcible displacement.
“Israeli forces could enter the city and harm civilians without facing American consequences,” POLITICO reports, citing three US officials speaking on condition of anonymity.
Measuring about 64 square kilometers in size, Rafah is severely overcrowded, with hundreds of thousands of civilians who fled there after the Israeli army designated the city a “safe zone” in its ongoing genocide campaign.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plans to stage a land assault on Rafah, as he announced over the past several days, where he claims the “last four battalions” of Hamas’ armed wing are entrenched.
“We’re going to do it while providing safe passage for the civilian population so they can leave,” Netanyahu said in an interview with US outlet ABC News on Sunday. The premier, however, failed to specify where such a large number of displaced civilians could evacuate, stating only that Tel Aviv is “working out a detailed plan.” He alleged that “there are plenty of areas” north of Rafah despite the Israeli army having flattened most buildings and infrastructure in that region.
US President Joe Biden reportedly told Netanyahu on Sunday that an attack on Rafah should not be launched “without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the more than one million people sheltering there,” yet he did not oppose the operation.
Hours later, bombs rained down on Rafah, killing over 100 civilians.
Over recent weeks, western media has been awash with reports that Biden is growing “frustrated” with Netanyahu, even using “disparaging terms” to refer to the Israeli premier and holding discussions about the “day after” Netanyahu.
Nevertheless, public statements by White House officials make it abundantly clear there will be no change in approach to US–Israel relations.
Newly-minted US National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby told reporters on Monday that the White House will “continue to support Israel … And we’re going to continue to make sure they have the tools and the capabilities” to continue military operations.
Asked on Wednesday what the US response would be to a ground invasion of Rafah without concern for civilian safety, Kirby refused to respond, saying, “I’m not going to get into a hypothetical game.” The senior US official has also come under fire for saying the Israeli military is doing a “better job at protecting civilians in Gaza” than their US counterparts would.
Furthermore, as international calls grow for Washington to cut arms deliveries to Israel, earlier this month, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Barbara Leaf, made it clear Washington has no plans to do such a thing.
“In a word, no – we are not contemplating that,” Leaf told reporters during a digital press briefing when asked if the White House is contemplating a reduction in the pace of arms deliveries to Israel.
In addition to fueling the mass murder of nearly 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, the US has also provided political cover for Israel. Most recently, it threatened to review its ties with South Africa after Pretoria took Tel Aviv to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide.
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By Lisa Pease | Consortium News | September 16, 2013
More than a half century ago, just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, the plane carrying UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others went down in a plane crash over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). All 16 died, but the facts of the crash were provocatively mysterious. … continue
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