The escalating attacks on ships in the Arabian Sea and the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait by the Houthi movement in Yemen pose a real threat to the Israeli, Western and American economies. The Red Sea is one of the world’s busiest shipping routes for oil and gas. Most of the major shipping companies, such as the world’s largest container company, Italian and Swiss-owned Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), Denmark-based Maersk, Germany’s Hapag-Lloyd, and France’s CMA CGM have suspended their use of the Red Sea.
Due to the Houthi attacks, ships now have to go around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope, adding 4,000 nautical miles to the journey. This will result in the doubling of the shipping costs, to $4,000 per forty-foot container. According to experts, this change is due to the extra fuel cost of $1 million for each vessel going via the Cape instead of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
The Houthis are apparently applying an ethically justified approach built on the same logic used by the Israeli occupation state. Israel besieges the Gaza Strip and grants itself the right to do so. With this logic, the group grants itself the right to besiege Israel and links the opening of the strait to lifting the Israeli blockade on Gaza.
As the attacks intensify and pose a real danger to maritime routes, causing many companies to fear using the Red Sea and raising the cost of insurance and transportation, the US has announced the formation of an international naval coalition intended to protect cargo vessels. Ironically, though, the US is the largest country to impose blockades on other states and use sanctions as a weapon.
While previous US presidents considered any foreign war as an opportunity to rally the American people behind them and give themselves an electoral boost, the situation under President Joe Biden is different. He is the main advocate of the war against Russia in Ukraine, which he is losing despite throwing billions of dollars into it. Engaging in an armed confrontation with the Houthis would be a resounding failure, since the group has little to lose and does not fear war. Indeed, it would gain more legitimacy as the only force in Yemen to be fighting imperialism. Moreover, its war with the Saudi-led Arab coalition, including the United Arab Emirates, has shown that it is resilient, and able to force the coalition to freeze combat missions after years of fighting.
The outbreak of another war in this region would mean serious long-term disruption and increased transportation costs, as well as rising fuel and energy costs for end users. This would have a major impact on Europe during the winter given the already suspended supplies of oil and gas from Russia. Crude oil prices are already creeping up.
The impact of a war would be challenging for Biden as well. The US president sees himself as the, not a, world leader, but he faces difficult choices. He is accused of corruption and faces domestic issues, as does his rival, former President Donald Trump. In addition, the existing wars and crises are having long-term negative impacts on Washington’s standing and international influence.
Despite this, it seems to be impossible for Americans to consider alternative, more intelligent means to approach problems instead of military “shock and awe”. The US and its protégé Israel have always tried to play the role of gods in international politics, where what they want becomes a reality regardless of international laws and conventions. This may succeed in the short term, but it backfires in the long run, as seen in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Armed interference in all of these countries has drained the US and its people, who are generally controlled by the political, economic and media elites.
These elites combined work systemically to nurture violence among American citizens, implanting a gung-ho mentality with war seen as the most effective way to solve international problems. Hollywood and video games instill the idea of US (and Israeli) exceptionalism and invulnerability in the minds of the public, so that it becomes easy to recruit them to fight and die in the elite’s battles. The US helps to spread racism in the world by creating divisions among people and inciting them against each other. The old principle well-loved by settler-colonial states is divide and rule; people are easier to manipulate, helping to ensure the concentration of wealth in the hands of the elite that fosters racism.
A simple comparison with cinema in Iran — which the US designates as a sponsor of terrorism — reveals a stark difference. Iranian cinema only rarely focuses on humanitarian and social topics, and hardly ever depicts violence, unlike Hollywood, which thrives on screen violence, normalising it and de-sensitising the audience to the extent that people find it easier to harm their fellow human beings in the service and interests of the elite.
While the economy is failing and education is facing great challenges in America, the government is spending trillions of dollars on unjustified and futile wars, including the one which Israel is waging against the Palestinian people. Sinking more and more resources in the quagmire of the Middle East will only lead to more suffering within America and abroad. Likewise, what is happening in Yemen will have an impact worldwide, not just in Gaza.
The consequences of a war against the Houthis will be much broader, dragging the Zionist colonial project and Western imperialism into a hellish scenario. Regardless of what the Zionists and their supporters in the West believe, they did not create a safe haven for Jews when they created the state of Israel in the heart of the Arab world. The Houthis are turning the tables on everyone in their defence of the Palestinians against Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
While Israel is causing starvation in Gaza, Israeli soldiers are cheerfully filming themselves destroying food, looting, and vandalizing Palestinian property.
Defence for Children Palestine | December 18, 2023
Dunia A., 12, and her family were struck by an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip. Dunia’s family was killed and she lost her leg.
While she was recovering in Naser Hospital in Khan Younis, an Israeli tank-fired shell hit the hospital and killed Dunia. This video was filmed on November 25 during a seven-day truce between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups and Dunia was killed on December 17, 2023.
Hamas political leaders are in talks with the Palestinian Authority (PA) about how to govern Gaza and the West Bank after the war with Israel ends, with the goal of establishing a Palestinian state, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)reported on 20 December.
“We don’t fight just because we want to fight. We are not partisans of a zero-sum game,” Husam Badran, a member of Hamas’ Doha-based political bureau, stated. “We want the war to end.”
The Hamas leader’s statement marks a change from 7 October, when the armed wing of the group led an assault on Israeli military bases and settlements in which more than 1,200 Israelis were killed, both by Hamas and Israeli forces themselves due to the Hannibal Directive.
Hamas wished to break the 17-year siege on Gaza and put the Palestinian issue back on the table in the international arena.
During the attack, Hamas took over 200 Israeli soldiers and civilians captive hoping to exchange them for the freedom of thousands of Palestinians long held in Israeli prisons.
Now, after Israel has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza, Hamas’s political wing is seeking an end to the conflict.
“We want to establish a Palestinian state in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem,” Badran said.
Badran also stated Hamas wishes to join the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which represents Palestinians at the United Nations and other international forums.
“It will be a national dialogue,” Badran said. “We have always said the PLO should contain any Palestinian faction.”
Badran and other Hamas officials say the talks have also included Mohammed Dahlan, a former Gaza security chief with close Emirati and Egyptian support, and former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
“I am no friend of Hamas,” Dahlan said. “But do you think anybody is going to be able to run to make peace without Hamas?”
The Hamas political leaders indicated they would be willing to join the PLO and support negotiations for a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
But Badran said that Hamas had no plans to recognize Israel as long as the occupation continues. “The world has no right to ask when people are being killed,” he said. “It’s not logical to ask this question at this time.”
Badran denied rumors of a division between Hamas’ Gaza branch and its political leadership in Doha. “The leadership of Hamas, both inside Gaza and outside it, is in complete agreement on strategies and political positions across various issues,” he said.
Badran says Hamas is seeking a full-scale ceasefire and a full exchange of captives from both sides. “If there is a ceasefire, our stance is crystal clear: We want an exchange of all-for-all,” he said.
Israel has for years sought to foster divisions between Hamas and the PA, led by Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party, to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he has for years approved Qatari payments to Hamas in Gaza, while ensuring the PA remained weak and unable to win the establishment of a Palestinian state through peaceful diplomatic means.
Israel has also sought to use the PA security forces to dismantle Palestinian resistance groups in the West Bank.
The US and Israel appear to disagree on a final solution for Gaza. The US wants a PA security force to crack down on Hamas after the war and to administer Gaza, said Diana Buttu, a former Palestinian peace negotiator. “They essentially want the PA’s role as Israel’s security subcontractor in the West Bank to be expanded into Gaza,” she said.
Buttu said the US is willing provide renewed financial and political support for the PA to maintain what New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman this summer called the “shared fiction” of a Palestinian state. “There is a longstanding and continuing false promise of Palestinian statehood,” Buttu added.
However, Israel has vowed it will not allow the PA to take control in Gaza. Numerous Israeli political and military figures have called for destroying Gaza, forcing its 2.3 million residents to flee to Egypt or Europe as refugees, and to rebuild the Jewish settlement in Gush Katif on the Gaza coast that was evacuated in 2005.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman has strongly condemned the Israeli regime’s complicity in drafting and approving the human rights resolution against the Islamic Republic, saying the move is nothing but a big political and moral scandal for Western countries.
Nasser Kan’ani made the remarks in a statement on Wednesday, noting that the action of some Western countries in drafting and approving a resolution against Iran in the United Nations General Assembly on the issue of human rights “is a clear example of the double standard and the use of human rights as a tool for illegitimate political purposes.”
He said the human rights resolution against Iran was proposed by some Western countries while these nations are turning a blind eye to the Israeli war crimes and genocide in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and some of them are fully supporting the criminal regime.
“This regime is a criminal, and even more ridiculous is that it is also one of the co-founders of the resolution against Iran,” Kan’ani added, emphasizing that the Israeli collusion devalues the concept of human rights.
He further stressed that countries that have a long history of systematically violating human rights all over are not in a position to give human rights recommendations to the government and people of Iran, while reiterating that the resolution lacks any legitimacy or validity.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is a system based on religious democracy and has always been very serious about promoting human rights and fulfilling its international obligations, he said.
On December 19, a resolution dubbed “Situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran” was adopted in the third committee of the UN General Assembly, condemning what it claimed as “rights abuses against women” in the country.
The resolution was adopted by 80 votes in favor, 29 against, and 65 abstentions.
If the US decides to launch direct attacks on Yemeni forces imposing a blockade against Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, it will only make Washington’s tenuous situation in the Middle East worse and expand the conflict across the region at a time when the US public is increasingly opposed to such wars, a journalist told Sputnik.
Several major global shipping companies announced that they are to seek alternate routes from the Red Sea after the Yemeni militant group Ansarallah, better known as the Houthi movement, closed it to Israeli cargo traffic, throwing global trade into chaos. In response, the US has mobilized an international task force dubbed Operation Prosperity Guardian to keep the sea lanes open.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is weighing whether its patrols will be purely defensive in nature or will also include offensive strikes against Ansarallah targets in Yemen, which the group mostly controls after eight years of brutal civil war and Saudi-led military intervention.
Ansarallah’s actions, which include capturing several Israel-linked vessels in the area in recent weeks, are in response to Tel Aviv’s invasion of Gaza, which has killed nearly 20,000 people and displaced almost the entire population of 2.3 million. The group has also fired ballistic missiles at the southern Israeli port of Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea.
Beirut-based broadcaster and journalist Laith Marouf told Sputnik that the multinational task force assembled by the US includes several European allies but also Bahrain, a small Persian Gulf state that hosts a massive US Navy base, and the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean with a coast guard composed of nine small patrol boats used to combat piracy and illegal fishing.
“This is the alliance that the United States is going to face Yemen with to try to allow shipping to go through to the Zionist colony and not make it feel the pain that the Palestinians are feeling with the blockade in Gaza,” he said.
“The [recent] attack that the government in Sana’a did on the two ships in the Red Sea was the first attack recorded in any military of a ballistic missile hitting a naval target that is moving at 60-somewhat knots, which was [the speed at which] these ships were moving. So we see now that the Yemenis have actually some of the most advanced land-to-sea missiles in the world.
“Knowing that the American aircraft carrier is now parked on the shorelines of Somalia facing Yemen, they are in the range of these missiles. Probably the Yemenis will not need to hit this aircraft carrier if the United States actually attacks Yemen or any of the sites of launching these missiles from Yemen. The Yemeni forces, all they have to do is sink a few destroyers and that aircraft carrier will scurry running back home because it wouldn’t have any protection.”
“This is now a dangerous game that the United States is playing, all to defend this Zionist colony. And the American people hearing us right now must understand that the deaths of any American soldiers that are going to come in the next few days will be because the United States is defending the Zionist colony and is not defending itself. They will be dying for the sake of Israel,” he said.
“Canadian, French, British and American ships will be sinking if the United States or this coalition dares to attack Yemen. Yemen has been under attack for a decade by the United States and its vassals in the region, and even the vassals that were co-operating in the attacks on Yemen – namely the Saudi government and the United Arab Emirates government – have refused to join this coalition. Why? Because their assets will be fried if the United States attacks Yemen. And this is why we’re seeing right now: these vassals are each one of them being given a role.”
“The Emirates and the Saudis are continuing to allow trade to come through their ports on trucks to Jordan to the Zionist colony, and they’re all going to be kept out of this war. In this situation, it’s not only that their assets, their oilfields, would be attacked if they join this coalition, but also because they need to continue to be the lifeline of the Zionist colony in terms of trade in the future as this rolls out,” Marouf said.
Marouf added that “we will be entering a new stage of this war” if Yemen fires back on the coalition ships because it will trigger wider attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria by allied militia forces, which have been happening at a somewhat low intensity since early October.
The Axis of Resistance’s regional coordination against Israel and its allies “is going to be taught in military schools and strategists’ schools for decades to come,” Marouf told Sputnik.
“What has been rolling out for the last two and a half months, clearly, the Resistance Axis that includes all these groups in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Yemen and Iran are very coordinated,” he said.
“They have all now shared all their capabilities in terms of military and training. So we see units of each one of these components that fought in the different battlefields across the last 15 years in the region. And the technology knowledge on building capabilities has been passed along across this whole region. So now we have a more kind of homogeneous coalition between these groups.
“They all have one thing that they agree on, which is ending American presence in the region and then sovereignty for the peoples. So to see them, how they are playing out right now, each one of them, their own role separately is a brilliant thing to watch. And the United States and Israel are in a quagmire, and the end is clear for everybody to see.”
Growing US Public Opposition
He likewise noted that opposition to the Israeli attack on Gaza has continued to grow in the United States, where new protests are happening daily in hundreds of cities and towns, and constituents are pressuring politicians to take a stand against the war.
“For the American voters, it’s becoming problematic as we come closer and closer to the elections in the United States. Both parties are championing genocide and the Zionist colony, and the vast majority of Americans do not want to be associated with this genocide and do not want their country to carry the brunt of financing and weaponizing this genocide,” he said.
“So what happens in the next election? I think Palestine, just like Vietnam in the 1970s, is going to be one of the decisive things that drive this election and actually the conversation of the United States as a whole. And I hope people of all walks of life take advantage of how Palestine now has exposed all the true lines of power and the limitations of the so-called ‘democracy and freedoms’ that were touted to be given to them and figure out something before the next election. Maybe to push for a third party, if that’s even possible at this moment.”
“But if the United States is in a regional war that is spilling into a global war before this election, it may be that this election will never happen in the United States. I’m maybe too pessimistic, but I see things from now till next year, if this war keeps on going in the stages that are and how long these stages are taking us, as we see it now, it’s taking us two and a half months to get to the stage of real possibility of a regional war. And once this a regional war, how long is it going to take for it to become a global world war? Those are things that may be indicating that all this experiment of democracy in the West is dead.”
Israel’s Economy in Dire Straits
Marouf noted that Israel was suffering severe economic repercussions due to the war, not just from the recently imposed Yemeni blockade, but also due to the constant bombardments from Gaza, the simmering border war with Hezbollah, and simply due to having mobilized hundreds of thousands of citizens into the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
“There are 7 million ‘Jewish colonists’ in Palestine and already close to a million of them have left. And you know, many of them already have second citizenships, and we heard countries like Portugal all talk about 10,000 Israeli families applying for citizenship. These are the ones that don’t have citizenship that are already applying to European countries. And so we have an exit from the Zionist colony on a scale that we haven’t seen ever since 1948. And now we also, of course, all the economy of the state is at a total standstill because they have mobilized so many people into the military.”
“Ansarullah, the government in Yemen, has been able to shut down all trade, almost 88% of trade has stopped into the [Israeli] ports, even the ones in the Mediterranean. Because remember now, although all the ones that were supposed to go to the Red Sea port in the Aqaba Gulf had to turn around.
“So now there’s a delay in an empty space in Israeli ports for the next two weeks. So, the country is in a total standstill and it’s now living off the handouts coming from the West. And the American public has an ability to make a difference if they cut these handouts, because this country cannot continue to exist at this moment without that.”
The Malaysian government has imposed an indefinite ban on vessels owned by an Israeli shipping cargo company from docking at its ports in response to the bloody Israeli onslaught against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Ships en route to the occupied Palestinian territories and Israeli-flagged vessels will also be barred from loading cargo at any port in the largely Muslim Southeast Asian nation.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said in a statement on Wednesday that the Transport Ministry has been instructed to enforce the ban with immediate effect.
Anwar singled out Israel’s biggest shipping firm ZIM.
Malaysia’s cabinet had in 2002 authorized Israeli-registered companies to dock vessels at Malaysian ports; and in 2005, allowed Israeli-registered ships to anchor in Malaysia. However, Wednesday’s statement said that authorizations had been rescinded.
“The Malaysian government decided to block and disallow the Israeli-based shipping company ZIM from docking at any Malaysian port,” Anwar said.
“These sanctions are a response to Israel’s actions that ignore basic humanitarian principles and violate international law through the ongoing massacre and brutality against Palestinians.”
Malaysia “also decided to no longer accept ships using the Israeli flag to dock in the country” and ban “any ship on its way to Israel from loading cargo in Malaysian ports.”
Anwar said his country was confident its trade would not be affected by the decision.
Malaysia does not have diplomatic ties with Israel.
Malaysians have kept up a strong show of support for the Palestinian people’s struggle to claim their sovereign rights, and strongly condemned the cruelties being perpetrated by the Israeli regime in Gaza.
Malaysians in various parts of the country have held marches and motorcycle convoys to voice their support for the Palestinian people, who are suffering from oppression and atrocities committed by the Israeli regime.
Muslim scholars have called on all people to show undivided support for Palestine because the Palestinian issue is related to humanity and not just religion.
Israel waged the brutal war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the usurping entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
Since the start of the offensive, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 19,667 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 52,586 others.
Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under the rubble in Gaza, which is under “complete siege” by Israel.
Abla Lafi is 59 and from the village of Turmus Ayya, north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. She is passionate when speaking about her olive groves, which the Israeli army and illegal Jewish settlers prevent the villagers from harvesting.
“This is our own land,” she said defiantly. “How dare they prevent us from entering it and picking olives from the trees as if we were thieves? We planted them with our own hands. The settlers are the thieves and we are the owners of the land.”
October and November make up the main olive harvest season for Palestinian farmers. Thousands of families depend on a good crop for their livelihood. Around 45 per cent of agricultural land in the occupied West Bank is planted with an estimated 10 million olive trees, producing between 32-35,000 metric tons of olive oil every year.
This year, due to the war on Gaza, settlers and the Israeli army are preventing thousands of farmers from reaching their olive groves. Last month, the occupation state’s extreme far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on the Israeli government to prohibit Palestinians in the West Bank from harvesting their olive trees. According to Smotrich, Israel needs to establish “sterile security zones” with no Palestinian presence around settlements and settler-only roads. It looks as if the Israeli occupation forces are implementing this policy in order to block Palestinians from getting to their own land.
“Extensive damage to land and trees and stringent movement and access restrictions by Israeli forces hamper access to olive trees, especially those close to settlements,” the UN has reported. “At the end of November, an initial estimate indicates [that] 800,000 dunums of land have not been harvested due to Israeli settler violence and access restrictions.”
“Olives not only have economic importance to Palestinians, but are also symbolic of their roots, resilience and attachment to the land. For the Palestinians, the olive tree represents their spirit and identity.”
“We used to go to work on the land with joy and love for all family members, men, women, children and animals, because cultivation means belonging to the land, a feeling which we pass on to our children and grandchildren,” explained Lafi. “The olive season is like Eid for us; we celebrate its blessings with joy and happiness, even the taste of its food is different.” However, she added, since the establishment of the illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, the locals have lived through the olive season in an atmosphere of fear, anxiety and terror from the settlers and the army. “The anxiety and sadness have increased this year due to the war on Gaza.”
The head of the agricultural committee in the village, Nidal Rabie, confirmed that since the war against the Palestinians in Gaza started, the settlers and settlement guards have stopped local residents from reaching their olive groves in the plain adjacent to the illegal settlements built on lands confiscated from the village. “They expelled us as recently as today,” said Rabie. “We tried to access our land, but they came and expelled us at gunpoint.”
The 61-year-old Palestinian farmer who holds US citizenship, added: “We are now in the middle of December trying to pick our olives to no avail. Every farmer who tries to pick olives is shot at. If we wait any longer, the olives will be ruined and the quality of the oil will become low and inedible.”
Although the settlers and soldiers obstruct the olive harvest every year, explained Rabie, sometimes the Palestinians succeed in harvesting at least part within hours and days determined by the Israeli army. “This year the soldiers prevented us from harvesting any olives in the plain. I personally own 30 dunums that I am not able to harvest at all.”
A few days ago, the army even stormed Turmus Ayya at night and confiscated 50 vehicles belonging to the villagers, because they were used in agricultural work. Altogether, around 2,500 dunums belonging to the villagers but adjacent to the illegal settlements have not been allowed to be harvested. “They would have produced around 70,000 litres of olive oil,” he added.
Palestinian farmers in the village are also prevented from cultivating their own land next to which illegal settlements have been built. Mishal Al-Quq, 43, said that he used to live in the US and went back to Palestine two years ago to take care of the land and cultivate it. “This year we are facing a big problem in growing wheat in the plain east of the village as we are prohibited from working there by the occupation army, but now is the season for planting seeds. We must plant quickly, otherwise it will be too late.” Wheat is very important and is a basic crop for the villagers, he said. “We must grow it.” This was confirmed by Rabie, who pointed out that he had bought wheat and barley seeds, but did not know whether he would be able to plant them or not.
The Israeli destruction of the olive groves unmasks a fact that not many in the West know about; it’s often heard that Israelis hold dual US citizenship, but we don’t hear so much about Palestinian Americans. It is estimated that between 45-60,000 Palestinian Americans live in the occupied West Bank, according to Reuters. However, this does not stop Israel from targeting them. They are treated by the apartheid state as Palestinians and have no “American” privileges. For instance, Israel prevents Palestinian Americans from entering the US from the West Bank, an apparent violation of a recent agreement in which citizens from the US and Israel can travel to the other country without a visa. According to Rabie, most of the residents of Turmus Ayya hold dual Palestinian and US citizenship, but the US government doesn’t provide any protection to the farmers. “Some villagers who hold American citizenship contacted the US Embassy and asked for protection to work on our own land. But the embassy said that it could only assist in securing travel to the United States. This would mean displacing us from our land in Turmus Ayya.”
Although the Biden administration has declared the intention to deny visas to violent settlers, Rabie doubts that it will happen. “This was only propaganda. Biden’s true position was clear when he said that if there was no Israel, the US would have to create one. This shows Washington’s collusion with Israel.”
Abla Lafi believes that the goal of Israeli “harassment” is to seize the Palestinian land close to the illegal settlements that were established on stolen land which contains olive trees that have been cultivated for hundreds of years. “They have no right or ownership over it,” she insisted. “We inherited the land from our ancestors and we should not be prevented from entering it. Although it is more difficult this year, we have been facing this same problem every year since the establishment of the first settlement, which I remember was Shilo, in 1978, when I was 14 years old. At the beginning, there were mobile homes and the road leading to them ran through our village. The roads were built on lands confiscated from Qaryut and Turmus Ayya, after which they began to spread like a cancer and descended from the hilltop on to our land in the plain and spread to the nearby villages.”
More settlements were built, such as Rachel, Adei Ad, Amichai and other random outposts inhabited by terrorists known as the hilltop youth, she added. “They began terrorising the people, shooting, destroying property and blocking the roads. Before those settlements were built, when I was a child, we used to live peacefully, plough and plant. I have beautiful memories of the different seasons of figs, olives and wheat that we used to grow.”
Rabie confirmed that settler crimes, the confiscation of land and the cutting down and burning of olive trees in his and other villages, have been carried out constantly by settlers and the Israeli army even before Israel’s latest war against the Palestinians in Gaza. The most ferocious attack by settlers happened on 21 June this year, when hundreds of settlers stormed the village killing Omar Qutain, burning dozens of houses and cars, and hundreds of olive trees and wheat fields, destroying the village. The Israeli army stood and watched, but did not intervene.
No indictment has been filed against anyone, and this is not an exceptional case. According to Yesh Din, out of a thousand cases regarding acts of violence committed by settlers between 2005 and 2021, 93 per cent were closed without an indictment.
“These attacks did not and will not stop farmers from continuing to work on their land,” said Rabie. “If we stop cultivating the land, the Israeli authorities will exploit that to claim that the land is no man’s land, confiscate it and give it to the settlers. They did this before.”
This was a reference to Israel’s use in 1979 of an Ottoman land law of 1858 which stipulates that if private land is not cultivated for three years in a row it becomes state property. “At which point Israel hands it over to the settlers.”
Abla Lafi is determined that these Israeli attacks and policies will not discourage Palestinian farmers from cultivating their land. “I love my land and I love the fertile plain. This is the land that was watered by the sweat of the farmers and the blood of the martyrs who fell defending it: Joda Awad shot dead by the Israeli army in 1988, and Khamis Abu Awad, who was killed by a settler in 1993 while ploughing the land. Minister Ziad Abu Ain was also martyred in the plain defending the land and so was, most recently, Omar Al-Qotain this summer. We cannot give up on the land that many died to defend. We will pass it on to our children.”
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called for the execution of imprisoned members of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, for each day Israeli prisoners of war are held by the movement in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Ben-Gvir also called to “immediately stop” any talks aimed at concluding prisoner exchange deals with Hamas.
“Instead, the death penalty must be applied against the terrorists. Prisoners from elite Hamas forces must be executed for each day that passes in which the kidnapped are not released,” he posted on X.
In a clear call for carrying out war crimes, the controversial minister demanded humanitarian aid be banned from entering Gaza.
When Zionist militias, using advanced Western arms, conquered historic Palestine in 1947-48, they expressed their victory through the deliberate humiliation of Palestinians.
Much of that humiliation targeted women, in particular, knowing how the dishonour of Palestinian females represents, according to Arab culture, a sense of dishonour to the whole community.
This strategy remains in use to this day.
When scores of Palestinian women were released following prisoner exchanges between Palestinian Resistance and Israel, starting on 24 November, there was very little room to hide the facts.
Unlike the 75-year-ago Palestinian community, this current generation no longer internalises Israel’s intentional humiliation of women and men alike, as if an act of collective dishonour.
This has allowed many newly released female prisoners to speak openly, often on live TV, about the kind of humiliation that they were exposed to while in Israeli military detention.
The Israeli army, however, continues to act with the same old mindset, perceiving the humiliation of Palestinians as an expression of dominance, power and supremacy.
Over the years, Israel has perfected the politics of humiliation – a notion which is predicated on the psychological power of shaming whole collectives to emphasise the asymmetrical relationship between two groups of people: in this case, the occupier and the occupied.
This is precisely why, in the early days of the Israeli war on Gaza, Israel detained all Palestinian workers from the Strip who happened to be working inside Israel as cheap labourers, at the time of the 7 October operation.
The dehumanisation they experienced at the hands of Israeli soldiers demonstrated a growing trend among Israelis to degrade Palestinians for no reason whatsoever.
One of the worst documented episodes took place on 12 October, when a group of Israeli soldiers and settlers assaulted three Palestinian activists in the West Bank. Israeli newspapersHaaretz and The Times of Israel described how the three were assaulted, stripped naked, bound, photographed, tortured and urinated upon.
Those images were still fresh in the minds of Palestinians when new images emerged from northern Gaza.
Photos and videos published in Israeli media showed men stripped down to their underwear, being placed in large numbers on the streets of Gaza, while surrounded by well-equipped and supposedly menacing Israeli soldiers.
The men were handcuffed, tied together, forced to hunch down and then, eventually, thrown into military trucks to be taken to an unknown location.
Some of the men were eventually released to tell horror stories, which often had bloody endings.
But why is Israel doing this?
Throughout its history – violent birth and equally violent existence – Israel has purposely humiliated Palestinians as an expression of its disproportionately greater military power over a hapless, confined and mostly refugee population.
This tactic was infused more during certain periods of history when Palestinians felt empowered, as a way to break their collective spirit.
The First Intifada, 1987-93, was rife with this kind of humiliation. Children and men between the ages of 15 to 55 would be habitually dragged into schoolyards, stripped naked, forced to kneel down for endless hours, beaten, and insulted by Israeli soldiers using loudspeakers.
Those insults would cover everything that Palestinians hold dear – their religions, their God, their mothers, their holy places and more.
Then, boys and men would be forced to perform certain acts, for example spitting in each other’s faces, shouting certain profanities, slapping themselves or each other. Those who refused would be immediately overpowered, beaten and arrested.
These methods continue to be applied in Israeli prisons, especially during times of hunger strikes, but also during periods of interrogations. In the latter cases, men would be threatened with the rape of their wives or sisters; women would be threatened with sexual violence.
These episodes are often met with collective Palestinian defiance, which directly feeds into Palestinian popular resistance.
The image of the Palestinian fighter, dressed in military fatigue, brandishing an automatic rifle, while proudly walking the streets of Nablus, Jenin or Gaza, in itself does not serve an actual military purpose. It is, however, a direct response to the psychological impact of the kind of humiliation inflicted upon Palestinian society by the Israeli occupation army.
But what is the function of a Palestinian military parade? To answer this question, we must examine the sequence of the event.
When Israel arrests Palestinian activists, they attempt to create the perfect scenario of a humiliated and defeated community: the terror felt by the people when nightly raids begin, the beating of the family of the detained, the shouts of insults along with other well-choreographed horror scenes.
Hours later, Palestinian youth emerge on the streets of their neighbourhoods, proudly parading with their guns, amid the ululation of women and the excited looks of children. This is precisely how Palestinians respond to humiliation.
Palestinian armed Resistance has grown much stronger in recent years, with Gaza currently serving as a case in point.
As the Israeli military is failing to reoccupy Gaza and to subdue its population, utilising the politics of humiliation on a mass scale is simply impossible.
To the contrary, it is the Israelis who do feel humiliated, and not only because of what has taken place on 7 October, but everything else that has taken place since then.
Unable to operate freely in the heart of Gaza, Khan Yunis, Rafah or any other major population centres in the Strip, the Israeli army is forced to humiliate Palestinians in whatever little margins they can control, Beit Lahia, for example.
Frustrated by their military failure to deliver on their promises of subduing Gazans, ordinary Israelis have taken to social media to taunt Palestinians in their own way.
Israeli women, often along with their own children, would dress up in ways that would convey a racist representation of Arab women crying over the bodies of their dead children.
This type of social media mockery seems to have appealed to the imagination of Israeli society, which still insists on its sense of superiority even at a time when they are still paying the price of their own violence and political arrogance.
This time around, however, Israel’s politics of humiliation is proving ineffective, because the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis is on its way to be fundamentally altered.
One is only humiliated if he or she internalises that humiliation as a sense of shame and disempowerment. But Palestinians, this time around, are experiencing no such feelings. To the contrary, their ongoing sumud, and unity, have generated a sense of collective pride unequalled in history.
Dramatic news reports, claims and videos have emerged from both sides involved in the Gaza fighting throughout the past week.
The week started with the Israeli army releasing several videos of Palestinians stripped to their underwear being marched through urban ruins. Israel’s PR machine disregarded the Palestinian outcry that followed. Israel staunchly asserted that the men were Hamas fighters and that their alleged mass surrenders signified that the end of the Palestinian group was close, even as many Palestinians and independent observers insisted that the men were civilians who had been treated against the laws of war by being publicly humiliated.
For its part, Hamas stuck to its usual practice of pushing its cause through video releases – skilfully edited to enhance the desired effects – purporting to confirm its constant and numerous successes against Israeli invaders, mostly showing hits scored against armoured vehicles.
Then came the news that stunned Israel and put a big question mark on its official line of Hamas being on the verge of collapse. First, nine soldiers were killed in a single operation in the Shujaiya neighbourhood of Gaza City on Tuesday. That shock was followed by another one on Friday, with the Israeli army admitting that it killed three Israeli captives, having mistaken them for enemies – even though they held white flags.
So what is really happening on the ground in Gaza?
Nothing we did not predict weeks ago: The war has entered a difficult, unpredictable and bloody phase of full-scale urban warfare where gains are small and slow, and losses can be huge.
Combat in narrow and cramped streets of old cities is known to be one of the most difficult ways to fight a war. Classic military theory calls for defended cities to be surrounded and blockaded by units just strong enough to prevent the defenders from breaking out, while the main force continues advancing and taking territory.
But the fight in Gaza is not about conquering fields and beaches – Israel’s proclaimed goal is to destroy Hamas. To do that, the first step is to control the ground where the enemy operates: the cities.
In the old days, cities needed strong walls to defend themselves, but in the last 100 years, weapons have advanced at a rapid rate, causing a change in tactics. Successful resistance against enemy attacks no longer depends on huge, expensive static bastions. Nowadays, small but potent man-portable weapons whose destructive power is hugely disproportionate to their size, such as anti-tank rocket launchers, grenade throwers, small mortars, assault rifles and many others, allow the defenders to turn each house and every street into a formidable defensive position.
From the 1940s to this day, almost all attempts to conquer cities held by determined defenders have ended in failure. The few victories attackers achieved were so costly that they often ended the offensive capabilities of those armies pushing into cities.
In their own ways, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Berlin, Dien Bien Phu, Vukovar, Sarajevo, Grozny and Fallujah – some successfully defended, others eventually succumbing to attacks – all confirmed the military wisdom that urban warfare should be avoided whenever possible.
Israel could not avoid urban warfare in Gaza. To have a chance of destroying Hamas, it has to deny it its operating ground, the three biggest urban agglomerations in the strip: Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah.
The second phase started with Israeli forces reaching the suburbs, first of Gaza City and then, after the temporary ceasefire expired, of Khan Younis. Treading slowly and carefully in expectation of a concentrated Hamas response, the Israeli military completed the encirclement of those two urban areas.
It would be naive to assume that Israel’s generals hoped that by isolating the two biggest built-up areas in the Gaza Strip, they would seriously impair the ability of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, to fight back.
In reality, the encirclement of the two city centres is not a classic one where troops within the blockade cannot be reinforced nor receive any supplies. Hamas still has an unknown but probably major part of its tunnel network intact and can move in and out. They have some difficulties in doing so but Hamas fighters are not locked in.
Aware of the menace that tunnels present but also of the grave hazard of taking the fight into them, Israel has tried several approaches. It has destroyed as many tunnel entrances as it has found, mostly in the areas under its control, but many others that remain keep the danger acute.
After several attempts to send troops underground that ended in disaster, with troops falling casualty to Hamas booby traps, the high command abandoned that approach. It then reportedly mulled the idea of filling tunnels with seawater, claiming that the test-flooding was successful but it has not yet decided to mount a full-scale deluge operation.
This week’s Israeli actions on the ground strongly suggest that the Israeli army leadership realises that the only way towards achieving its proclaimed goal of annihilating Hamas is by taking, holding and controlling the ground throughout the currently surrounded centres of Gaza City and Khan Younis.
That in itself would not guarantee victory but could create conditions to squeeze Hamas fighters into tunnels, after which Israeli forces could block and destroy all entrances.
Flushing Hamas out would probably take weeks of heavy urban warfare with many more instances of massive losses – on both sides.
The more Israeli soldiers get killed in inner cities of Gaza, without still being able to claim the destruction of Hamas, the more the support for the continuation of the military operation would ebb. At some point, calls from Israel to stop the war could become louder than those encouraging it to continue.
A Geneva-based rights group has called for an urgent international investigation into torture and murder of Palestinian abductees held in Israel’s “Guantanamo-like” jails.
In a statement released on Monday, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said it had gathered testimonies confirming recent reports in Israeli media about the regime’s field execution of the Gaza abductees.
The Sde Teman Israeli army camp has been turned into “a new Guantanamo-like prison,” where detainees lose their lives after being subjected to extreme torture and mistreatment, it added.
The Israeli army uses open-air chicken coops to house the inmates and withhold food or drink for long periods of time.
The rights group also noted that the Palestinians held in Sde Teman are caged in inhumane conditions, blindfolded and subjected to harsh interrogations with their hands tied.
It further said that turning on lights at night, as well as barring the abductees from using phones and meeting lawyers and representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are among the torture tactics being used at the Israeli jail.
The testimonies affirm that multiple elderly abductees endured cruel beatings and humiliating treatment, Euro-Med said.
One of the released detainees, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, said that he witnessed Israeli soldiers directly shooting and killing five abductees in separate incidents.
Earlier, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the deaths of six Palestinians in Israeli prisons since the beginning of Israel’s ongoing bloody war on Gaza.
Despite evidence of violence preceding the inmates’ death or medical neglect – their cause of death was not established, according to the report.
It added that Just 71 out of 500 Palestinians arrested during the Gaza war have been brought before Israeli courts, and that the remaining detainees have been moved to prisons run by the Israeli Prison Service or to detention facilities run by the regime’s so-called internal security service, Shin Bet.
Previously, the Euro-Med field teams documented the detention of more than 1,200 Palestinian civilians in random Israeli arrest campaigns across Gaza during Israel’s onslaught on the besieged territory.
The abductees were subjected to all forms of beatings and ill-treatment during their detention and purposefully left blindfolded, nearly nude, and kneeling on the ground upon their release.
Israel waged the devastating war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
Since the start of the aggression against Gaza, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 19,453 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 52,286 others.
Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under the rubble in Gaza, which is under “complete siege” by Israel.
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If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
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