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Blinken shelves special request to probe Israeli war crimes: Report

The Cradle | April 18, 2024

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken has failed to act on a State Department proposal to bar certain Israeli police and army units from receiving US funds over human rights abuses of Palestinians.

Blinken has disregarded this despite the growing concern over Israeli army conduct in Gaza, according to current and former State Department officials.

A special panel at the State Department made the proposal months ago. Recommendations for action against Israeli units were sent to Blinken in December but have “been sitting in his briefcase since then,” one official told ProPublica on 17 April.

The Israeli rights abuses in question mainly took place in the occupied West Bank before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October. They include the execution of Palestinians by Israeli border police, as well as torture and rape during interrogation.

“This process is one that demands a careful and full review … and the department undergoes a fact-specific investigation applying the same standards and procedures regardless of the country in question,” ProPublica cites a State Department spokesman as saying.

“Blinken’s inaction has undermined Biden’s public criticism [of Israel], sending a message to the Israelis that the administration was not willing to take serious steps,” according to several officials at the department who have worked on Israeli relations.

US President Joe Biden has publicly expressed frustration with the unprecedented number of Palestinian civilians killed in the Gaza Strip. However, US funds and arms continue to fuel the Israeli war effort, and no formal effort has been made to investigate the growing number of documented war crimes committed by Israel against Palestinians in the strip.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post published an in-depth investigation detailing Israel’s role in the killing of a six-year-old and her family who were trapped in a car in northern Gaza. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Washington will ask Tel Aviv “for further information” on the matter.

The US has said it would look into several incidents, including late February’s Flour Massacre against dozens of starving and desperate aid seekers. Yet no US probe has been launched into the matter since an internal Israeli army investigation absolved Israel of blame, and Washington refused to condemn the killings.

The Guardian reported in January, citing interviews and State Department documents, that “special mechanisms have been used over the last few years to shield Israel from US human rights laws.”

The ProPublica report comes days after dozens of Palestinians detained by Israel in Gaza were released, with many giving testimonies of horrific treatment by Israeli forces, including humiliation and torture.

April 18, 2024 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Over 350 Humanitarian Sites and Convoys Have Been Attacked in Gaza

By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | April 16, 2024

Prior to the Israeli military’s slaughter of seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers in Gaza this month, Middle East Eye (MEE) reports that at least 357 humanitarian-run sites and convoys had been attacked.

As with the incident involving the slain WCK workers which included an American citizen, the humanitarian orgs shared their coordinates in advance of operations with the warring parties. Israel hit them anyway and UN officials have warned of great difficulty in repairing the broken humanitarian notification system.

Current data shows that at least 216 aid workers have been killed during Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and relentless war on the Palestinian people trapped in the besieged, highly dense, coastal enclave. Aid workers told MEE the “scale of the incidents was unprecedented, even compared to the most dangerous war zones and emergencies they have experienced.” The vast majority of aid workers slaughtered have been employed by UNRWA, the UN aid agency for Palestinian refugees.

Nearly 34,000 people have been confirmed killed so far amidst Israel’s genocidal campaign, including more than 20,000 women and children. Brice de la Vingne, the head of the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) emergency unit said “To be frank, every single day we are discussing internally whether to leave Gaza. We should not be there.” He added, “The level of risk we are taking, I’ve never seen.”

He explained that aid operations in other wars are conducted outside the areas of actual fighting but the entire Strip has become a war zone. “In Gaza, we are in this nightmarish hell scenario where we are working in an environment where people are not supposed to be,” Vingne lamented.

According to the report, “The majority of the hits to deconfliction humanitarian sites – 352 – were to locations run by UNRWA, the largest aid organization operating in Gaza, including a food distribution center and schools sheltering thousands of civilians.”

MEE also found there were at least five other occasions where humanitarian sites or convoys were attacked including “a compound in Al-Mawasi housing staff working for the International Rescue Committee and Medical Aid for Palestine, the Gaza City offices of Doctors of the World, a [MSF] convoy in Gaza City and an MSF shelter in Al-Mawasi, and an American Near East Refugee (ANERA) shelter in Deir al-Balah.”

Despite Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s announcement of a new deconfliction cell for humanitarian aid groups, Jamie McGoldrick, the outgoing top UN aid official in Gaza, told the outlet “nothing substantive” has changed. Two weeks after the high-profile massacre of the WCK employees, communication between aid workers and the Israeli military regarding their location remains broken down or non-existent.

McGoldrick, whose final day at the post was last Friday, maintains that aid workers in the Gaza Strip require not only a hotline to correspond directly with the IDF but also must be provided with satellite phones and two-way radios. In other conflict zones, this is standard operating procedure. Not so amid Israel’s onslaught in the Strip, however, these devices are not furnished to aid workers ostensibly because the IDF fears they will fall into the hands of Hamas.

As Israel uses starvation as a weapon of war, the entire population in Gaza is on the brink of famine. Officials from the State Department and USAID have admitted that famine is already taking place in the northern parts of the Strip, where McGoldrick has warned that despite Israeli assurances the aid distribution system has seen no improvement.

The broken deconfliction system for aid workers in the Strip will only spell more deaths of deprivation, experts estimate that the death toll will surpass 100,000 by August if the situation remains unchanged. Moreover, Gaza’s medical system and infrastructure has been decimated by the Israeli campaign. Last month, the World Health Organization released statistics exposing that in excess of 400 medical facilities have been hit, killing nearly 700 people.

The Israeli air, land, and sea blockade imposed on the illegally occupied enclave 17 years ago was severely tightened after the October 7th Hamas attack on southern Israel. Gallant announced days later that the “human animals” living in the Strip, which includes more than a million children, will be indefinitely cut off from food, water, fuel, and medicine.

After the WCK massacre, the group ended its operations in Gaza along with ANERA. WCK had been providing more hot meals in Gaza than UNRWA and the World Food Program combined. In January, Israel launched a propaganda war against UNWRA by accusing some of their employees of having ties to Hamas and the October 7th attack.

More than a dozen Western countries including the United States stripped funding for the vital agency, over Tel Aviv’s claims which were supported by no evidence. UNRWA has since revealed that its aid workers were subjected to rape and waterboarding at the hands of the IDF seeking to extract just such spurious confessions.

During previous Israeli wars against Lebanon and Gaza, there was significant communication between the UN and COGAT, the Israeli agency overseeing the occupied territories, as well as its ancillary the Civilian Liaison Administration which is focused on the Strip. This is now not taking place.

If aid workers experience a security risk or incident, when they are enroute to a destination or attempting to pass through a checkpoint, it is not possible to communicate with the IDF.

McGoldrick explained to MEE, the UN “should have pushed harder earlier in the conflict to get closer to the Israeli military, if not physically embedding someone in a joint operations room, then at least being able to have a face-to-face conversation online, in real time.” This is imperative for two reasons, he said, “First, they understand better what you do and how you do it. Secondly, you can build trust in terms of what your expectations are on both sides.”

According to Grisha Yakubovich, the former chief of COGAT until 2016, previous Israeli bombing sprees against the open-air concentration camp saw UN and COGAT officials meet on a virtually daily basis to share plans for the next 24 hours. Yakubovich told the Washington Post this is not the case anymore because Israel’s military practically refuses to work with the UN. The IDF cites their lies about UN employees’ alleged ties with Hamas to justify the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe the Israeli war has wrought.

Other aid agencies besides the UN have expressed great frustration over the lack of a clear response, if any, when their sites are bombed by Israeli pilots. For instance, the International Rescue Committee and Medical Aid for Palestine says the Israeli authorities gave six different explanations for why an F-16 jet targeted one of their stand-alone compounds with a 1,000 pound “smart bomb” in January, weeks after their coordinates had been shared.

“It is clear from this experience that the Israeli military and government are either unable or unwilling to properly investigate this serious incident,” the group stated.

April 17, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Gaza authorities slam Israel for torturing Palestinian children

Press TV – April 16, 2024

Authorities in the besieged Gaza Strip say the Palestinian children the Israeli regime recently freed have recounted instances of physical abuse, torture, and deliberate starvation.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Gaza’s Government Media Office said the testimonies include accounts from children younger than 12.

The accounts underscore “extreme torture, mistreatment and cases of medical neglect.”

The office called on rights groups and the international community to take action in respect of the “horrifying” testimonies.

“These testimonies from the affected individuals prove yet again the monstrosity of this criminal army.”

“It is yet another example of how it violates international and humanitarian laws as it continues committing war crimes and genocide against our people in Gaza,” the office stated.

According to multiple reports, corroborated by the Palestinian Health Ministry as well as the Defense for Children International (DCI) NGO, one child is being killed in Gaza every 10 minutes.

Aid agencies have warned that “nowhere and no one is safe” under Israel’s relentless onslaught.

Israeli forces have been denounced for mistreating Palestinian children, including by torturing those in custody and using others as human shields during the savage campaign in the besieged territory.

The death toll from the regime’s genocidal campaign in Gaza now tops 33,800.

The Save the Children organization is deeply alarmed by the toll and sufferings being exacted on children in the Gaza Strip.

According to the charity, more than 14,500 of Gaza’s 1.1 million children have been killed since October 7, 2023. And thousands more are missing, presumed buried under the rubble, their deaths unmarked.

The life-saving aid which families rely on has either been drip-fed or denied by Israeli authorities – while essential services have been decimated by ongoing Israeli hostilities.

The Global Education Cluster estimates that as of March 30, 87.7% of all school buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed.

April 17, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Abu Ghraib survivors to get their day in court

RT | April 12, 2024

Twenty years on from reports that the US military was torturing prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, three survivors will finally get a chance to bring their claims before an American jury.

A trial in the civil lawsuit filed by former Abu Ghraib inmates against the US military contractor that they blame for their suffering is scheduled to begin on Monday in a federal court near Washington. The private security contractor, CACI International, has strung the case along for 16 years by making over 20 unsuccessful attempts to have the lawsuit dismissed.

CACI, which supplied the interrogators who worked at Abu Ghraib, has insisted that its employees weren’t accused of abusing detainees. The Virginia-based company also has argued that as a Pentagon contractor, it should be protected by the government’s sovereign immunity against the torture allegations.

However, the plaintiffs claimed that CACI set the conditions for their torture by directing or encouraging abuses by military guards, at least partly to “soften up” prisoners for interrogations. All three of the former detainees are Iraqi civilians who were held at Abu Ghraib until eventually being released without charges.

The trial will be “an exceedingly rare opportunity for accountability for the egregious harms suffered by Iraqis after the US invasion in 2003,” according to a statement earlier this month by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a US group that is representing the plaintiffs. “In fact, this is the first lawsuit where victims of US post-9/11 torture will get their day in court.”

The Abu Ghraib scandal first came to public attention in April 2004, when photos of abused prisoners and their smiling US guards were published. At the time, CBS News aired a report describing the abuse and showing American soldiers taunting naked prisoners. The abuses included stacking nude prisoners in pyramids or dragging them by leashes around their necks. Others were threatened by dogs or hooded and attached to electrical wires.

One of the plaintiffs, former Al-Jazeera reporter Salah Al-Ejaili, claimed he was forced to wear women’s underwear, terrorized by dogs, deprived of sleep, and put in stress positions that caused him to vomit black liquid. Another survivor, Suhail Al-Shimari, has claimed that he suffered beatings, electrical shocks, and sexual assaults.

CACI has argued that its employees weren’t in a position to give orders to military police and that the US government was responsible for setting the conditions at Abu Ghraib. The company has continued to receive lucrative US government contracts for the past two decades, and only low-level soldiers were criminally prosecuted for the abuses.

A Pentagon investigation found that acts of “brutality and purposeless sadism” occurred at the prison at the hands of military police and US intelligence agency personnel. Retired US Army General Antonio Taguba, who led the investigation, concluded that at least one CACI interrogator should be held accountable for directing military police to set the conditions that led to abuses. Taguba will reportedly testify at the Abu Ghraib trial.

April 12, 2024 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel kills over 400 during Al-Shifa Hospital siege

The Cradle | March 31, 2024

Israeli forces have killed more than 400 people, including patients, the displaced, and medical workers during their 13-day siege of Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s government media office reported on 31 March.

The ministry added that during the siege on Gaza’s largest medical facility, where thousands of patients and displaced people are sheltering, Israeli troops have detained and tortured hundreds while destroying and or setting fire to 1,050 nearby houses.

On 27 March, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reported that Israeli forces had killed 13 children between the ages of 4 and 16 during operations in and around Al-Shifa in the previous week.

“Some of the fatal shootings occurred during an Israeli army siege while the victims’ families were inside their homes; others occurred when the victims attempted to escape via routes that the Israeli army had designated as ‘safe’ after forcibly evacuating them from their homes and places of residence,” the report stated.

Islam Ali Salouha, who lives close to Al-Shifa, told Euro-Med that Israeli forces killed his sons Ali, nine, and Saeed Muhammad Sheikha, six, while the family fled the area after being expelled from their home. Israeli forces specifically targeted the children with live bullets, he said.

Euro-Med reports that according to Salouha, on the afternoon of Sunday, 24 March, the Israeli army ordered everyone in the vicinity, through loudspeakers, to leave their homes or their homes would be bombed. He and his family fled on a corpse-strewn road that the Israeli army had designated for travel.

After walking only 10s of meters, Israeli forces opened fire on the family, killing the two children.

Salouha said that as they attempted to pull his two children off the ground, Israeli forces opened fire on them again, forcing them to leave Ali and Saeed on the ground and flee.

Safa Hassouna, a Palestinian woman living near Al-Shifa, told The National how she was forced to leave her home near the hospital when Israeli forces “broke in and forced them to leave.”

When Israeli forces began launching repeated raids on Al Shifa almost two weeks ago, Ms. Hassouna had decided to remain in her home to avoid shelling. However, Israeli forces later raided her home.

“They bombed the door and forced us out,” she said.

Hassouna said Israeli forces abducted her husband and two sons and told her to flee south with her daughter.

“They forced my husband and my sons to take off their clothes. They took them, and me and my daughter left,” she said.

Hassouna said her husband and one son have been released, but the fate of her other son is unknown. As he was escorted away, Israeli troops used him as a human shield for their tank.

“I don’t know anything about him, and I am worried,” she told The National from southern Gaza, where she is now staying.

“We are experiencing all the sorrow and sadness. Enough is enough.”

March 31, 2024 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Ukraine Tortures Russian Prisoners of War in 2023-2024 – UNHRC

Sputnik – 28.03.2024

Russian prisoners of war have been tortured in Ukraine between December 2023 and February 2024, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said.

The employees of the OHCHR visited 44 Russian prisoners of war in Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Lvov, Nikolayev, Sumy, Vinnitsa and Zaporozhye regions of Ukraine from December 2023 to February 2024.

“While these Russian POWs did not make any allegations of torture occurring at these facilities, they provided credible accounts of torture or ill-treatment in transit places after their immediate evacuation from the battlefield,” the OHCHR said in a report on Tuesday.

Ukrainian authorities do not sufficiently prosecute those responsible for torture, violence against civilians and prisoners of war, the OHCHR said.

“OHCHR has documented arbitrary detentions, enforced disappearances, and the use of torture and ill treatment, including sexual violence, by Ukrainian authorities during the detention of conflict-related civilian detainees and Russian POWs, as well as the summary execution of at least 25 Russian servicemen hors de combat (all in 2022 and early 2023),” the report said, adding that “Ukrainian authorities have launched at least five criminal investigations into allegations of violations committed by their own security forces, involving 22 victims.”

These results show a lack of progress in the investigation and prosecution of such violations, the OHCHR said.

The Russian-speaking minority in Ukraine is subjected to discriminatory treatment in comparison to other linguistic minorities that speak EU languages, the OHCHR stressed.
OHCHR examined the law adopted by the Parliament of Ukraine on December 8, which amends a number of legislative acts related to the rights of national minorities.

“While the law is a significant step forward in improving the rights of national minorities, it maintains a discriminatory differential treatment between, on the one hand, national minorities speaking an official language of the EU, and on the other hand, national minorities whose languages are not official languages of the EU, such as Russian, Armenian or Romani. Although the first category of national minorities saw their rights broadened, as described above, national minorities whose language is not an EU language will not be able to enjoy the same rights,” the OHCHR highlighted.

Ukrainian authorities continued intimidating the priests and worshipers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church from December 2023 to February 2024, the OHCHR pointrd out.

“Clergymen and parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) continued to experience intimidation during the reporting period. OHCHR recorded six cases across five regions where groups of people forcefully broke into UOC churches, justifying their actions with decisions from local authorities to register new religious communities of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) at the same address as existing UOC communities,” the OHCHR said.

March 28, 2024 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

Israel executed 13 children in Gaza in front of their families, says human rights NGO

MEMO | March 27, 2024

Documented testimonies have been collected regarding the execution of Palestinian children in Gaza by the Israeli occupation forces in and around Al-Shifa Hospital, at a time when a UN expert has confirmed her belief that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor confirmed that it has “documented the execution of 13 children by the Israeli occupation forces in Al-Shifa Hospital and its surroundings.”

The NGO also confirmed that it had received “identical statements and testimonies regarding the crimes of executing Gaza children between the ages of 4 and 16.” Two of the children, named as Ali Islam Salouha. 9, and Saeed Mohammad Sheikha, 6, are said to have been killed “in cold blood in front of their families and residents of the area having been targeted deliberately using live bullets.”

Some of the children were killed while surrounded by the occupation army inside their homes with their families, said Euro-Med. Others were displaced and following routes that the occupation army had specified as “safe” for them to use.

“The documented cases of the execution of Gazan children embody a flagrant violation of international law, including international humanitarian law, and constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity in and of themselves,” the NGO pointed out, “and have been committed in the context of the crime of genocide to which the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip have been subjected for six months.”

It also emphasised that the occupation army has committed and continues to commit horrific crimes systematically during its military operations lasting for more than a week inside and around Al-Shifa Hospital. “These crimes include premeditated killings and extrajudicial executions of Palestinian civilians.”

March 27, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti beaten by guards

MEMO | March 19, 2024

Prominent Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti has been attacked with clubs by Israeli prison guards and suffered bleeding in his eye, Al-Arabi Al-Jadeed reported the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs and Barghouti’s family saying.

Barghouti, 64, who is a member of the Central Committee of Fatah, is being subjected to isolation, torture and humiliation, said his wife, Fadwa Barghouti.

Fadwa explained that her husband’s life and the lives of other prominent prisoners are in great danger, adding that the Israeli prison administration “deliberately brutalises them in order to break their morale.”

“Marwan was subjected to continuous attacks, which we learned of on 6 and 12 March [through lawyers], which caused bleeding in one of his eyes, while the prison’s repressive forces constantly threatened him,” she added, explaining that he had been relocated five times during the last three months, and each time he was assaulted and his prison conditions were tightened.

In four prisons he was put in solitary confinement, she said, warning of a “real war” being waged against Palestinians prisoners and their leaders, which hurts their morale.

For its part, the Free Marwan Barghouti and All Palestinian Political Prisoners campaign said in a statement that lawyers who had visited Megiddo Prison learned of the brutal attack on Barghouti and other prominent prisoners by the prison’s special repression units, adding that many of them had been placed in solitary confinement.

The campaign said it had contacted a number of international figures, including diplomats, parliamentarians and human rights institutions, as well as leaders of the Fatah movement and the National and Islamic Action factions, calling on them to provide protection to the Palestinian people including political prisoners in Israeli jails.

Barghouti was arrested in 2002 and later sentenced to five life terms on charges of “killing and injuring Israelis.”

In parallel with the onslaught on the Gaza Strip that has killed more than 31,000 Palestinians, Israel has increased raids and arrests in the occupied West Bank, arresting more than 7,000 people, alongside a campaign of harassment against prisoners in Israeli jails, resulting in the deaths of at least 13 prisoners since 7 October 2023.

March 19, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

On Israel and rape

By Robert Inlakesh | The Cradle | March 13, 2024

While Israel’s unsubstantiated claims of rape on 7 October have dominated western media headlines, credible documented cases of rape against Palestinians and Israeli-on-Israeli sexual assault have received far less attention.

Israel’s scourge of sexual violence and rape incidents did not originate five months ago – its roots go deeper and farther back than that, and there is a crucial context essential for understanding the country’s domestic environment of abuse.

Israel’s massive sexual violence problem

On 8 February, Haaretz brought to light a harrowing revelation: 116 separate files detailing instances of sexual assault and domestic violence against women and minors among Israelis ‘displaced’ from their illegal settlements due to the ongoing military conflicts with Gaza and Lebanon.

The cases surfaced during a special Knesset committee on the Status of Women and Gender Equality, where “committee chair MK Pnina Tamano-Shata [National Unity Party] chastised police representatives for failing to collect accurate data from each hotel regarding violence and sexual attacks.”

Although there were disputes over a lack of complete data, disturbing incidents were highlighted, including a case of pedophilia involving a 23-year-old establishing a “relationship with a 13-year-old girl, both living in the same hotel” and a rape committed after a man followed a woman to her room. It also noted that elevators were places of particular vulnerability for sexual assault and violence.

Cases of sexual assault were not confined to the approximately 200,000 ‘displaced’ settlers. There have also been credible claims by a female soldier that she was raped by a fellow serviceman during the ongoing brutal military assault on Gaza.

Sexual harassment and violence are nothing new among Israel’s armed forces. According to a Haaretz report, “a third of female conscripts in the military had suffered sexual harassment at least once in the previous year [2022].”

Haaretz noted that most victims avoid reporting what happened to them and that “70 percent of those young women who did report what happened to them stated that their report was not handled at all, or not handled sufficiently.”

In 2020, the Israeli army’s sexual violence crisis was recognized after only 31 indictments were filed out of 1,542 sexual assault complaints registered within the military establishment.

That’s a stunning indictment of the ‘world’s most moral army.’ And it isn’t just Israel’s war establishment afflicted with the rape bug.

Rape, normalized in Israel

In addition to being a regional hub for human trafficking and a haven for pedophiles, Israel consistently ranks the highest in West Asia for documented cases of rape and sexual assaults. 

In 2020, protests erupted across Israel after 30 men gang-raped an intoxicated 16-year-old girl, which prompted Ilana Weizman, of the Israeli women’s rights group HaStickeriot, to disclose that a shocking one in five Israeli women was raped during her lifetime, with 260 cases reported every day.

In March 2021, a series of gang rapes against minors, with the youngest victim being just 10-years-old, sparked widespread concern in Israel over the prevalence of sexual assault. APCCI said that the rate of violent sexual offenses in Israel was 10 percent higher than the average for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, labeling it as an “epidemic.” A Knesset report from the same year revealed that nearly half of the sexual abuse cases between 2019 and 2020 involved underage girls.

Back in 2016, activists from Jewish Community Watch warned that Israel was becoming a “safe haven for pedophiles,” noting that sexual offenders were using the Israeli Law of Return, which allows any Jew to claim citizenship and live in occupied Palestine. Years later, in 2020, CBS News released a report entitled ‘How Jewish American pedophiles hide from justice in Israel,’ which demonstrated how wanted individuals were walking free in Israel, leaving behind a spate of unresolved criminal cases.

To add insult to injury, Hebrew media reported that 92 percent of civil rape investigations were closed without charges in Israel.

According to the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel (ARCCI), despite the country’s ‘good laws’ on sexual assault, inadequate enforcement of these laws means that people use “legal tricks” to avoid retribution for assaults, with many assailants avoiding prosecution. In short, “people are not afraid to hurt. There is no fear or retribution.”

Occasionally, in high-profile cases of rape and sexual assault, the Israeli judicial system has been known to act, as evidenced by the conviction of former Israeli president Moshe Katsav in 2010 for raping an aide and sexually harassing two other women.

However, Katsav’s release after serving just five years of a seven-year sentence ignited a debate on the early release of sex offenders. In 2022, APCCI reported that 75 percent of sexual offenders in Israel are released before completing their full sentence.

Israel, weaponizing rape against Palestinians

From the time of Israel’s founding, rape has been extensively documented in its use as a weapon of war against Palestinians. In a 2022 documentary named after the Israeli massacre in the Palestinian village of Tantura, horrific admissions of rape committed by the Alexandroni Brigade were acknowledged for the first time on camera.

There are also various other reported cases of rape from that period: at least three rapes, one committed against a 14-year-old Palestinian girl, that occurred during the Safsaf massacre in October of 1948.

Because rape and other forms of sexual violence are often difficult to prove conclusively, it is essential to note that early Zionists also weaponized the threat of sexual violence, especially surrounding the massacre of Deir Yassin in 1948.

As documented by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” stories of explicit gendered atrocities were deliberately spread to encourage residents of other villages to flee. In a recent series of interviews conducted with two Nakba survivors, both revealed that they fled their villages specifically due to the rape atrocities in the village of Deir Yassin.

Today, that same attitude of sexualizing vulnerable Palestinians is apparent in the countless snuff films published widely on social media with the approval of the Israeli military, featuring male Israeli soldiers going through the underwear drawers of Palestinian women and even mockingly wearing their lingerie.

This, coupled with what a UN panel of experts recently said were “credible allegations” of sexual assault against Palestinian women by Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza, indicate a clear pattern of gendered violence taking place in the war.

At least two cases of rape, along with numerous cases of sexual humiliation and threats of rape, have also been recorded. Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, has noted that “We might not know for a long time what the actual number of victims are.”

Systematic sexual humiliation 

In 2002, during the Second Intifada, Israeli occupation soldiers took control of Palestinian TV networks in the West Bank city of Ramallah to broadcast pornography on several channels. Knowing that Palestinian society is a socially conservative one, it is clear that this was done with the intent of humiliation.

A prominent case of recent sexual humiliation in the West Bank occurred just last year near the city of Al-Khalil (Hebron) and was investigated in a joint Haaretz-B’Tselem report. On 10 July, between 25–30 Israeli soldiers burst into the Ajluni family’s home, forcing five Palestinian women to strip naked at gunpoint and threatening to unleash army attack dogs on them.

One woman named Amal was taken into a private room with her children and forced to take off her clothes. The report states: “the children also had to witness their mother being ordered to turn around while naked as she sobbed over the humiliation. About 10 minutes later she and the children were taken out of the room pale and trembling.”

While it is not possible to note every single case of sexual violence perpetrated against Palestinian women by Israeli forces, it is well documented that female prisoners have been subjected to some of the worst forms of it.

During the Second Intifada, there were countless allegations of sexual violence against women and girls in Israeli military detention, a trend which Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reports is again on the rise. The rights group said that the Palestinian female detainees recently released in the Hamas–Israel prisoner exchange were subjected to “threats of rape” and “were humiliatingly strip-searched several times” after their violent arrests.

The following is part of 47-year-old Lama al-Fakhouri’s testimony, recorded by B’Tselem after her release from detention:

An interrogator came in and asked me in English what I thought about what Hamas did. He swore at me and called me a ‘whore.’ He said there were 20 soldiers in the room and that they would rape me like Hamas–ISIS raped Jewish women in southern Israel. He kept swearing at me and threatening me and my family. Then, a female soldier came and took me to another room with more female soldiers, who told me: ‘Welcome to hell.’ They sat me in a chair and started laughing at me and calling me ‘whore’ again and again.

Speaking to the media following her release from Israeli detention late last year, Baraah Abo Ramouz said the following about the “devastating” conditions faced by female Palestinian prisoners:

They are being constantly beaten. They’re being sexually assaulted. They are being raped. I’m not exaggerating. The prisoners are being raped.

In 2022, the Shin Bet dropped a case of sexual assault against a Palestinian woman detained in 2015 over “lack of evidence.” This is despite the fact that a doctor and female soldiers had admitted to inappropriately touching the woman’s private parts, while the company commander in control admitted to giving the order. The victim’s filed appeal states:

In a situation in which there is no dispute that acts that constitute rape and sodomy were committed, [in which] there is sufficient evidence, and when no one is punished, it’s outrageous and unbearable.

According to former US State Department official Josh Paul, after he and his colleagues received credible evidence that Israeli forces had raped a 14-year-old Palestinian boy in Al-Moskibiyya detention center, Israel raided the offices of the human rights group that passed the information on to the State Department, later declaring it a terrorist organization.

False narratives fueling war crimes 

While the Israeli government pushes the story that Hamas implemented a pre-planned systematic rape campaign on 7 October, for which there has been no independent investigation or evidence produced, documented cases of sexual violence are undermined and ignored.

The mere fact that Israel’s notorious ZAKA rescue service relied upon heavily for testimonies of rape on 7 October, was founded by serial rapist Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, nicknamed the ‘Haredi Jeffrey Epstein,’ is telling.

The wholly unsubstantiated rape claims of the Israeli government – widely amplified and parroted by western media – are impossible to take seriously when a known propaganda outfit like ZAKA is the source.

The UN Office of the Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict recently released a report after its Special Representative Pramila Patten completed an eight-day trip requested by the Israeli government.

The report on sexual violence allegations was produced by a team of nine UN experts and had no investigative mandate. Yet statements from it made headlines in western media, suggesting that the UN had confirmed Israel’s narrative, although the report in no way substantiated it.

In the case of sexual violence allegations made about Kibbutz Be’eri, from where the majority of the allegations emerged, there was no evidence found. Two cases were debunked by the UN team as having been “unfounded.”

In one, widely cited as proof of rape, a woman was found separated from her family with her underwear pulled down. The UN team said that the “crime scene had been altered by a bomb squad, and the bodies moved.”

The UN report also noted that the interrogations of alleged participants in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood by Israeli intelligence agencies were not considered as evidence, another major blow to Israel’s body of claims.

In Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where the report concluded “the recurring pattern of female victims found undressed, 18 bound, and shot – indicates that sexual violence, including potential sexualized torture, or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, may have occurred,” it also notes that “verification of sexual violence against these victims was not possible at this point.”

Given that the UN team found that Israelis had altered other crime scenes, an independent investigation would be needed to confirm that the crime scenes weren’t equally compromised.

The human cost of Israel’s lies 

It should also be noted that the recent New York Times scandal – where its investigation into sexual violence on 7 October was directly discredited by the family members of a woman they tried to claim was raped – dealt a massive blow to the credibility of Israel’s narrative.

During Primila Patten’s press conference, in which she addressed the findings of her UN mission, she admitted that they had not interviewed any victims and did not find a systematic campaign of sexual violence, nor was the team able to attribute sexual violence to any specific Palestinian resistance group.

To make matters worse, a thread on X showed that the head of the Israeli National Center of Forensic Evidence, Chen Kugel, was responsible for sharing debunked atrocity propaganda himself, such as the beheaded babies lie.

Amidst the recurrent circulation of unverified claims lacking independent investigation, these graphic and unsubstantiated allegations fuel widespread sexual violence against vulnerable Palestinians.

Israel, grappling with its own internal sexual assault issues, has a troubling history of utilizing gender-based violence within its military jurisdiction. The disproportionate lack of attention towards the ongoing atrocities perpetrated by the occupation state illustrates a clear double standard perpetuated by western mainstream media.

March 13, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israel Tightens Grip on Aid Entering Gaza

By Kyle Anzalone | The Libertarian Institute | March 12, 2024

The head of the UN aid organization for Palestinians, UNRWA, reported that Tel Aviv has rejected aid shipments for Gaza because the supplies included children’s scissors and other life-saving mediations. Israel has used a multitude of tactics to reduce the flow of aid to a trickle, as top UN officials warn of an intentional famine in Gaza.

On Monday, UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini explained that the Israeli restrictions on Gaza are getting even more severe, to the point that child scissors were rejected. “A truck loaded with aid has just been turned back because it had scissors used in children’s medical kits,” he posted on X. “Medical scissors are now added to a long list of banned items the Israeli Authorities classify as ‘for dual use.’”

Aid groups have repeatedly condemned Tel Aviv’s tight restrictions on aid, pointing to its policy of rejecting entire shipments even if one banned item is found. According to Lazzariri, the list of prohibited goods includes “basic and lifesaving items: from anesthetics, solar lights, oxygen cylinders, and ventilators, to water cleaning tablets, cancer medicines, and maternity kits.”

Aid shipments in the Strip have plummeted from 500 to under 100 per day. Tel Aviv has deployed a series of bureaucratic and military obstacles to prevent aid from reaching the starving Palestinians. Israeli officials have blocked aid deliveries from being offloaded at the port while government agencies continue to reject visas for international aid workers.

Israeli citizens have also helped to block aid shipments by staging large protests at checkpoints, with the military standing by as demonstrators prevent the transit of life-saving aid. Additionally, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have attacked several aid shipments and the police that escort the convoys.

Michael Fakhri, special UN rapporteur on the right to food, told Mondoweiss that the Strip is now on the brink of famine, also noting the official death toll of 31,000 is an undercount. “We’ve never seen children pushed into malnutrition so quickly. This was all preventable.” He continued, “I have no doubt – and this is again in consultation with experts all over the world – we all have no doubt that the horror, the numbers, the degree of hunger, the degree of death from malnutrition will be higher than we’re able to measure right now.”

Last week, a group of seven UN experts said the famine in Gaza was a deliberate Israeli policy of collective punishment. “Israel has been intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October. Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys,” the UN experts said. “Israel must end its campaign of starvation and targeting of civilians.”

While President Joe Biden has repeatedly stated over months that he is pressing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to allow more assistance into Gaza, less aid has reached the Strip. Rather than use Washington’s substantial leverage over Tel Aviv to reverse course, the White House has resorted to complicated and deadly methods of bringing small amounts of aid into the Strip.

The US and several other countries have used air drops to get food to starving Gazans. However, people on the ground report the drops are often difficult to access, while a botched airdrop resulted in five people being crushed to death last Friday.

During his State of the Union address, Biden declared the US would establish a temporary pier allowing aid to reach Gaza via a sea corridor. Tel Aviv says it will only permit the shipments if it has control over the process, all but ensuring Israel will continue severe restrictions on life-saving medicine even if the military can build a functioning dock.

March 12, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

‘We Are the Masters of the House’: Israeli Channels Air Snuff Videos Featuring Systematic Torture of Palestinians

Mondoweiss | March 9, 2024

Over the past month, mainstream Israeli television channels have aired what can only be described as snuff films. They depict the systematic torture of Palestinians from Gaza in Israeli jails. Such videos have aired on at least three occasions — twice on Channel 14, and once on the public broadcaster, Channel 13. While Channel 14 is considered right-wing, so is about two-thirds of the Israeli public, and the more “mainstream” Channel 13 has shown no qualms about airing similar footage.

The broadcasts follow prison officials into detention centers to document the mistreatment of prisoners, which seems to be something that the officials — and apparently the viewers — find satisfying rather than revolting. The airing of these snuff films is a demonstration of societal sadism.

As Yumna Patel has recently reported, several rights groups have sounded the alarm over the widespread and systemic abuse that Palestinian prisoners face at the hands of the Israeli authorities. These groups’ calls have been unintentionally buttressed by Israeli soldiers’ unapologetic videos of themselves torturing or demeaning Palestinian detainees, which they boastfully post on social media. Now, it seems that the phenomenon has expanded to mainstream Israeli television.

The two aforementioned reports on Channel 14 (threads with subtitles can be found here and here) contained footage of actual interrogation sessions during which torture was used. The Channel 13 report did not, but it exposed some of the worst prison conditions to be broadcast to the public. These conditions include forcing prisoners to live in inhumane conditions and subjecting them to torture and harassment. Here’s the 11-minute video with translated subtitles.

‘The feeling is one of pride’

“Here, we see the cells in which the Nukhba terrorists are held,” the narrator says.

The “Nukhba” refers to elite Hamas-led fighters who carried out the October 7 attack. In the cell, viewers notice metal bunkbeds without mattresses, and instead of a toilet, there is just a hole in the floor. The room is almost completely dark throughout the day, and prisoners have their hands and legs chained together.

We hear attack dogs barking constantly as prisoners are made to kneel while bound and blindfolded, their heads touching the floor.

“This is how it should be,” a guard says. “This is how a Nukhba prisoner should be… what happened on October 7 will never return.”

In another scene, a guard shouts at prisoners as dogs continue to bark incessantly. “Heads down! Heads on the floor!” he yells.

“There are many prisoners here that I personally saw at the [October 7] events,” a prison official says, taking pride in humiliating them. “The difference is that this time, he is afraid, shaking, with his head on the floor…no Allahu Akbar, nothing. You won’t hear a squeak from him.”

“They have no mattresses,” says a warden shift commander. “They have nothing…we control them 100% — their food, their shackling, their sleep…[we] show them we are the masters of the house.” Even without knowing the background to that phrase, to hear him say it is chilling.

“Masters of the house” was the election slogan of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish Power leader and current Minister of National Security. Ben-Gvir declared war on Palestinian prisoners long before October 7, and this has included shutting down bakeries that supply bread to prisoners — described by Ben-Gvir as an “indulgence” — and drastically limiting prisoners’ water use. So now it’s become much worse.

While one is tempted to believe that all prisoners here are “Nukhba” members, it turns out that many of them aren’t even suspected of that. Rather, they were rounded up in Gaza after October 7, during mass arrests in which hundreds of Gazan men were stripped and paraded in a most sadistic demonstration of power. The mass arrests also included hundreds of women, including pregnant women detained with their babies. Israeli security officials told Haaretz that by their own estimate, “only 10 to 15 percent of the hundreds of the semi-naked and bound Gazan men arrested in the Strip during the recent days are Hamas members or those who identified with the organization.”

Back to the Channel 13 coverage, viewers can hear the nonstop blasting of the Zionist anthem, Am Israel Hai (“the people of Israel live”).

“The prison authorities claim that it is meant to boost the morale of the staff,” the narrator declares. “But it is clear that this is another part of the psychological warfare against the prisoners.”

Torture, in other words.

It’s hard to imagine the depths to which Israeli society has sunk. The official tells the Channel 13 reporter that “the feeling is one of pride.”

The reason such sadism has become formalized as a matter of policy is because this is what the Israeli public demands. The Israeli Democracy Institute released a survey last week showing that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis oppose “the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents at this time,” even if “via international bodies that are not linked to Hamas or to UNRWA.” For right-wing voters, the opposition to aid jumps from 68% to 80%.

This is not Israel’s Abu Ghraib moment, because when Abu Ghraib was revealed, most Americans were revolted. Israeli society, on the other hand, is thirsting for genocide. No wonder they consume such videos as entertainment on mainstream TV.

March 9, 2024 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , , | Leave a comment

UNRWA staffers tortured by Israeli troops to falsely admit ‘Hamas links’

The Cradle | March 9, 2024

An unpublished report from UNRWA said some of its employees released from Israeli detention were tortured into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the 7 October attacks, Reuters reported on 9 March.

The testimonies are contained in a report by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reviewed by Reuters and dated February 2024.

“Agency staff members have been subject to threats and coercion by the Israeli authorities while in detention and pressured to make false statements against the Agency, including that the Agency has affiliations with Hamas and that UNRWA staff members took part in the 7 October 2023 atrocities,” the report says.

The report included allegations of abuse and torture in Israeli detention, including severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.

Though waterboarding is widely viewed as torture by human rights groups, the Reuters report described Israeli actions only as “coercion” and “pressure” to force detained Palestinians to make false statements.

In addition to describing the torture of UNRWA employees, the report stated that Israel has subjected Palestinian detainees more broadly to beatings, humiliation, threats, dog attacks, and sexual violence. Some detainees have also died after Israel denied them medical treatment, the report added.

UNRWA communications director Juliette Touma said the agency planned to hand the information in the 11-page, unpublished report to human rights investigators at UN agencies and outside rights groups.

“When the war comes to an end there needs to be a series of inquiries to look into all violations of human rights,” she said.

Amid the torture and medical neglect, 27 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since the start of the war on 7 October.

Israel has accused UNRWA employees of participation in the 7 October Hamas attack on Israeli settlements and military bases. Israel provided no evidence for the claim, but 16 countries, including the US, paused $450 million in UNRWA funding in response, throwing its aid operations into crisis just as starvation was beginning to grip Gaza.

Israel’s campaign against UNRWA is part of a broader campaign started years ago to dismantle the agency, which helps keep the hope of Palestinian refugees returning to their stolen lands and homes in what is now Israel alive.

March 9, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

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