Syrian FM: ‘Western leaders are little puppets of the Zionist enemy’
Al Mayadeen | March 10, 2024
Syrian Foreign and Expatriates Minister, Faisal Mekdad, emphasized that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide perpetrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has killed over 12,000 children and 8,000 women, and completely destroyed the Gaza Strip.
In a statement on the ministry’s X account, Mikdad said “What European Union strategists say about building a world based on rules and regulations has faded. The murderer Netanyahu has not left any rule unbroken: International law, international humanitarian law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Charter, children’s rights, women’s rights, democracy, disarmament, and peace.”
He continued to say what is more dangerous than Netanyahu and his ruling “gang’s” crimes, is the support he received from many EU leaders and the blind trust Washington has given him.
“Everyone knows that much of what the European Union leaders did before and after was a form of clowning, hypocrisy, and lies, and their defense of Netanyahu’s crimes led to pulling the rug from under all of their feet and showed them as they really are, little puppets in the hands of Zionism and enemies of peoples’ rights and aspirations,” he said, slamming the West.
Gaza’s last remaining children relief fund razed in Israeli raid
Press TV – March 10, 2024
Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), an independent humanitarian organization, says its last remaining office in the Gaza Strip has been destroyed after Israeli military aircraft carried out a strike against a neighborhood in the besieged coastal territory.
On Saturday, PCRF in a post on X (formerly Twitter), shared pictures of a building reduced to rubble, as Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza enters its fifth month.
“PCRF’s last office in Gaza was destroyed by one of Israel’s air raids today. Two other offices were destroyed in previous months by Israeli air attacks as well.
“We are thankful that no one was killed or severely injured during these bombings,” the group said.
The PCRF was founded in 1991 by Steve Sosebee, who currently serves as the organization’s president.
According to its website, the non-governmental organization provides free medical care to thousands of injured and ill children annually who lack local access to care within the local healthcare system in Palestine and other countries in the West Asia region.
NGO worker killed in Israeli attack
Meanwhile, a Palestinian aid worker employed at a US charity has been killed in an Israeli attack on his shelter in the central Gaza Strip city of Deir al-Balah.
The non-governmental organization Anera – which helps refugees in Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon – said Mousa Shawwa was killed on Friday.
It said the bombing comes despite the fact that coordinates of Shawwa’s shelter had been provided to the Israeli military for the staff safety on several occasions, including just days before the attack.
Shawwa is the fifth member of a US humanitarian aid group killed in the war on Gaza, Anera added.
At least 30,960 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have been confirmed killed and 72,524 others injured so far during Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The war began after Gaza-based resistance movements carried out Operation al-Aqsa Storm into the occupied territories on October 7, 2023.
The Israeli military campaign has devastated large swathes of Gaza and displaced a staggering 85 percent of the Strip’s 2.3 million population.
According to the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA), more than 70 percent of civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip has been destroyed or severely damaged by intense Israeli attacks.
Israel has also imposed a “complete siege” on the coastal sliver, cutting off fuel, electricity, food, and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
The hunger killing Gaza’s children has a clear cause that few are willing to name out loud
By Eva Bartlett | RT | March 10, 2024
Following the February 29 Israeli slaughter of at least 115 starving Palestinians lined up for food aid, there was little or no outrage by the same Western media which would have howled if the perpetrator were Russia or Syria.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, early morning on Thursday, February 29, Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed Palestinians waiting just southwest of Gaza City for desperately needed food aid. As a result, 115 civilians were killed and over 750 wounded.
Popular US commenter Judge Andrew Napolitano said in a recent interview with award-winning analyst Professor Jeffery Sachs, “Innocent Gaza civilians were lined up to receive flour and water from an aid truck, and more than 100 were slaughtered, mowed down, by Israeli troops. This has got to be one of the most reprehensible and public slaughterings that they’ve engaged in.”
The official Israeli version of events, unsurprisingly, puts the blame on the Palestinians themselves. The deaths and injuries were supposedly caused by a stampede, and the Israeli soldiers only fired when they felt they were endangered by the crowd. The BBC even cited one army lieutenant as saying that troops had “cautiously [tried] to disperse the mob with a few warning shots.” Mark Regev, a special adviser to the Israeli prime minister, went as far as to tell CNN that Israeli troops had not been involved directly in any way and that the gunfire had come from “Palestinian armed groups.”
Testimonies from survivors and doctors tell a different story, though, saying the majority of those treated after the incident had been shot by Israeli forces. Legacy media reports, however, use characteristically neutral wording when evidence starts to stack up against Israel. “112 dead in chaotic scenes as Israeli troops open fire near aid trucks, say Gaza officials,” a Guardian headline reads. Palestinians always seem to just “die,” not get killed, and Israeli troops seem to have just “opened fire” nearby. The skewed wording conventions persist even despite the attribution to Palestinian officials present in that same headline – officials like the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, which was quite clear in accusing Israel of perpetrating a ”massacre” as part of a “genocidal war.”
The article does eventually cite the acting Director of al-Awda hospital as saying most of the 161 casualties treated appeared to have been shot. The confusing headline was likely intentional, counting on most people not bothering to read the article in full.
In a report published on March 3, Euro-Med stated members of its field team were present at the time of the incident and “documented Israeli tanks firing heavily towards Palestinian civilians while trying to receive humanitarian aid.” The report goes on to cite Dr Jadallah Al-Shafi’i, head of nursing at Shifa, Gaza’s main hospital, saying, “paramedics and rescue workers were among the victims,” and that at Shifa “they observed dozens of dead and injured, hit by Israeli gunfire.”
The report also cites Dr Amjad Aliwa, an emergency specialist at Shifa who was also on site when Israel opened fire. According to Aliwa, the Israeli fire began, “as soon as the trucks arrived on Thursday at 4 am”
But the February 29 massacre, tragic as it is, is only a part of the current stage of Israel’s war on Gaza: the deliberate starvation of Palestinians. And like the massacre itself, the whole issue is being subjected to the hands-off wording treatment by establishment media.
On February 29, the New York Times published an article whose headline, “Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children,” suggests starvation is a mysterious malicious force with a will of its own, skirting the mention of the Israeli siege as its obvious cause.
Again, as with the Guardian article, a few paragraphs in, the NYT piece does state that the “hunger is a man-made catastrophe,” describing how Israeli forces prevent food delivery and how Israeli bombardments make aid distribution dangerous.
As Professor Sachs stated, ”… Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved! I’m not using an exaggeration, I’m talking literally starving a population. Israel is a criminal, is in non-stop, war crime, status now. I believe in genocidal status.”
Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the February 29 massacre was not the first such incident, and likely not the last. A thread on Twitter/X outlines this, noting, ”Before yesterday’s “Flour Massacre”, the IDF has been shooting indiscriminately for WEEKS at starved Gazans awaiting aid trucks at the exact same spot, virtually every single day!”
The thread (warning: graphic images!), compiled by Gazan analyst and Euro-Med chief of communications Muhammad Shehada, gives examples of Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians every single day in the week prior to February 29.
You can bet that, were these Syrian or Russian soldiers firing on starving civilians, the outrage would be front page, 24/7, for weeks. Scratch that, they wouldn’t even have to do it – just a hint of an accusation would have been enough to get the presses going.
Starvation in Syria was another matter
The NYT article mentioned above notes that “Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance.” But ‘verifying from a distance’ is precisely what the NYT and other Western media did repeatedly in Syria over the years.
In areas occupied by (then) al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam, and the other extremist terrorist gangs which the West and corporate media dubbed “rebels,” food aid was always taken by the respective terrorists and withheld from the civilian population, causing starvation in some districts. Madaya, to the west of Damascus, eastern Aleppo, and later eastern Ghouta were districts most loudly campaigned over in legacy media, providing covering fire for the broader US-led campaign to overthrow the Syrian government.
Backing the claims that the government was starving civilians were mostly “unnamed activists” or activists whose allegiance to Nusra, or even ISIS, was very overt.
As I would see and hear whenever one of these regions was liberated, ample food and medicine had been sent in, but civilians never saw it. Time and again, in eastern Aleppo, Madaya, al-Waer, eastern Ghouta, to name key areas, civilians complained that terrorist factions hoarded food and medicine, and if they sold it to the population, it was at extortionist prices people couldn’t afford.
In the old city of Homs in 2014, back then dubbed by legacy media as the “capital of the revolution,” starved residents I met told me the West’s precious “rebels” had stolen every morsel of food from them, stealing anything of value as well.
Yet, media headlines about these regions screamed about starvation, outright blaming the Syrian government, and were accompanied by disturbing images of emaciated civilians (some of which were not even from Syria) meant to evoke strong emotions among readers and viewers. The same media largely opts not to show you gaunt, starving, Palestinians in Gaza.
Tellingly, Syrian towns surrounded by terrorist forces, besieged, bombed, sniped and starved, got virtually no media coverage. It didn’t fit NATO’s narrative of “rebels”=good, Assad=bad.
But in Gaza the world watches in real time as Palestinians die from the ongoing, preventable, starvation.
Some days ago, the CEO of Medical aid for Palestinians, Melanie Ward, in an interview with CNN, named Israel as the cause of starvation in Gaza.
“It’s very simple: it’s because the Israeli military won’t let it in. We could end this starvation tomorrow very simply if they would just let us have access to people there. But it’s not being allowed. This is what they said [on October 9], ‘Nothing will go in’,” Ward said.
She described the starvation as “the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded. What that means is that children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen. And we could finish it tomorrow, we could save them all. But we’re not being able to.”
This is echoed by UNICEF. The press-release for its February 2024 report notes that 15.6 % (one in six children) under two years of age are “acutely malnourished” in Gaza’s north. “Of these, almost 3% suffer from severe wasting, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, which puts young children at highest risk of medical complications and death unless they receive urgent treatment,” UNICEF notes.
Even worse, “since the data were collected in January, the situation is likely to be even graver today,” UNICEF warns, likewise noting the rapid increase of malnutrition is “dangerous and entirely preventable.”
Professor Sachs made an important point: “This will stop when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel. It will not stop by any self control in Israel, there is none… They believe in ethnic cleansing or worse. And it is the United States which is the sole support… that is not stopping this slaughter.”
Air-dropping paltry amounts of food aid into Gaza is not the answer. It both legitimizes Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza and also makes those Palestinians who run toward the aid sitting ducks for the Israeli army to maim or kill. The only solution is to immediately open the borders and allow in the hundreds of aid trucks parked in Egypt. And end the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
Israeli rabbi calls for genocide of all Palestinians in Gaza
Al Mayadeen | March 8, 2024
The mass killing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip “is permissible according to the halakhic principles,” the head of a Jewish religious school in occupied Yafa, Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, stated according to Israeli news website Ynet.
A recording of the extremist’s answers to questions on the Gaza Strip was published a few hours ago on YouTube and is available for the public.
Halakha or Jewish Law, which also translates to “the way to behave or act,” is held as divine law among Orthodox Jews such as Mali, who called for the extermination of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
When asked about what should be done to infants and the elderly, Mali simply answered, “The same.”
Mali founded the religious school Shirat Moshe and has called upon his students to strictly follow the orders of the Israeli occupation forces, saying that if IOF soldiers do not kill Palestinians, then Palestinians will kill them. It is worth noting that Shirat Moshe students serve in the IOF, despite other schools of Orthodox Judaism refusing military service.
The extremist stressed that the main principle of the war on Gaza is that “no soul remains alive,” urging Israelis to carry on the genocide against Palestinians.
Biden Regime Exploited ‘Loophole’ to Sell Weapons to Israel – Report
By Mary Manley – Sputnik – 07.03.2024
The US has reportedly made more than 100 “quiet” weapons sales to Israel, including thousands of bombs, since the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas. Despite half-baked calls from the administration for Israel to spare civilian lives, the US has continued to restock their supply of weapons, helping to create one of the most intense bombing campaigns in military history.
The sales were reportedly made in silence—as they escaped congressional oversight—meaning they were processed without any public debate because they each fell under a specific dollar amount that requires the executive branch to notify Congress, according to a Washington, DC newspaper, which first reported the story.
But altogether, the weapons sales make up a massive amount of arms for a country that has been accused of committing a genocide.
The sales reportedly included precision-guided munitions, small diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid. Public sales to Israel already included: $320 million in precision bomb kits in November and 14,000 tank shells costing $106 million and $147.5 million of fuses and other components needed to make 155mm artillery shells in December. The deliveries made in December were made under an emergency authority.
“That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of U.S. support,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior Biden administration official and current president of Refugees International.
Josh Paul, a former State Department official who resigned in protest over the Biden Administration’s response to the conflict, said that the “arms transfer process lacks transparency by design”. He argued that foreign military sales—which is largely financed by more than $3.3 billion in US taxpayer funds—is something that US citizens deserve to know.
Matt Miller, the US State Department Spokesperson, said the Biden Administration has “followed the procedures Congress itself has specified to keep members well-informed and regularly briefs members even when formal notification is not a legal requirement.” He also said that US officials have “engaged Congress” on arms transfers to Israel “more than 200 times” since the conflict in Gaza first began.
But some US lawmakers, particularly those who belong to the same political party as US President Joe Biden, are fed up with the administration’s decisions.
“You ask a lot of Americans about arm transfers to Israel right now, and they look at you like you’re crazy, like, ‘why in the world would we be sending more bombs over there?’” said Representative Joaquin Castro (D-TX), a member of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees, during an interview.
“These people already fled from the north to the south, and now they’re all huddled in a small piece of Gaza, and you’re going to continue to bombard them?” Castro added, in reference to Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah where nearly 1.4 million displaced Palestinians are now seeking refuge.
Castro and other House Democrats have also spearheaded a group that sent a letter to Biden on Tuesday, telling him that an Israeli invasion of Rafah could violate the administration’s requirement that US military aid be used in accordance with international law.
And Representative Jason Crow (D-CO), who is also a member of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees, recently petitioned Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to provide details on the shared intelligence between Israel and the US including an “explanation of any restrictions the US has place on the Israeli government’s use of the intelligence we share”.
“I am concerned that the widespread use of artillery and air power in Gaza — and the resulting level of civilian casualties — is both a strategic and moral error,” wrote Crow, a former Army Ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“This doesn’t just seem like an attempt to avoid technical compliance with US arms export law, it’s an extremely troubling way to avoid transparency and accountability on a high-profile issue,” added Ari Tolany, director of the security assistance monitor at the Centre for International Policy thinktank.
In January, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ordered Israel to take immediate measures to reduce the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, and to prevent the genocide of Palestinians after South Africa brought the case to their attention. At the same time, The Defense for Children International-Palestine, an international NGO, also claimed that the Biden Administration violated the Genocide Convention by supplying weapons and other military equipment to Israel’s military.
The war in Gaza, which began on October 7, 2023 has resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 Palestinians as a famine now looms over the region. Reports of Israeli soldiers targeting civilians and preventing them from being able to access aid has led many experts to accuse Israel of committing a genocide against the Palestinians.
Biden’s Unpopular Wars Reap Mass Death and Nuclear Brinkmanship
By Connor Freeman | The Libertarian Institute | March 7, 2024
President Joe Biden, better known as Genocide Joe, in cooperation with a perfunctory legislative branch has mired the American people in savage, reckless, costly, and unpopular wars. The White House’s catastrophic foreign policy may force American society to a breaking point.
The American public is increasingly rejecting Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which has already cost well over $100 billion, put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation, and seen Ukrainians killed or injured by the hundreds of thousands.
As Americans are more concerned with simultaneous crises of inflation, healthcare, immigration, and crime, according to the latest Harris poll, 70% of Americans oppose Biden’s policy of unending military aid going to the Ukrainian meat grinder and instead want a diplomatic settlement.
The disconnect between those living in the country and those in Washington DC is highlighted by members of the U.S. Senate openly salivating about drawing Russian blood and funneling tens of billions of dollars into the military-industrial complex.
Arch-neocon and top State Department official Victoria Nuland is threatening Moscow that the United States will assist Ukraine to “accelerate [its] asymmetric warfare” and provide “nasty surprises on the battlefield.” At the same time, French President Emmanuel Macron says deploying NATO troops to Ukraine to fight Russia should not be off the table.
Subsequent to a meeting with other leaders in Europe concerning the effort to weaken Russia with the Ukrainian battering ram, Macron declared, “There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out.”
In response to Macron’s bluster, Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed in a speech to the Federal Assembly “[our] strategic nuclear forces are on full combat alert, and the ability to use them is assured.” The Russian leader continued, “Now they have started talking about the possibility of deploying NATO military contingents to Ukraine…They must grasp that we also have weapons—yes, they know this, as I have just said—capable of striking targets on their territory.”
Concurrently, the head of the German Air Force has been caught on a leaked tape discussing with his officers plans to provide Taurus missiles to Kiev, weapons which have a range of roughly 300 miles, in hopes of carrying out attacks against Russia. London confirmed last week that “a small number” of British troops are on the ground “supporting the armed forces of Ukraine.”
On numerous occasions last year, neo-Nazis armed with NATO weaponry and ties to Ukrainian military intelligence attacked civilian areas across the border in Russia. Using Western intelligence, Kiev has already waged drone warfare deep inside Russia.
Despite Putin’s ominous remarks and the sentiments of the American people, NATO is launching massive war games, including on Russia’s borders, in preparation for war with Moscow. As the Libertarian Institute’s News Editor Kyle Anzalone reports, “[These] latest drills are a part of NATO’s Steadfast Defender military exercises—the bloc’s largest series of war games, which will see over 90,000 troops participate in about a dozen maneuvers from January through August.”
Biden’s unpopular war with Russia has brought humanity closer to a nuclear holocaust than ever before. But perhaps more widely despised and devastating to the American soul is the genocidal campaign unleashed by Israel against the Palestinian Muslims and Christians inhabiting the besieged Gaza Strip.
Per a recent Data For Progress poll, two-thirds of the American population oppose the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel and instead want the White House to back a permanent ceasefire. 77% of Democrats, 69% of Independents, and a staggering 56% of Republicans agree regarding this issue.
However, Israel’s globally livestreamed mass killing spree—primarily against women and children—is fully supported by the White House. The same government which practically every member of America’s political class swears is “our greatest ally” has cut Gaza off from food, water, fuel, and electricity. Israel is destroying Gaza, making it uninhabitable by bombing cities, neighborhoods, apartments, homes, schools, universities, hospitals, ambulances, UN shelters, mosques, churches, greenhouses, orchards, and refugee camps.
So far, the Israeli apartheid army has butchered over 30,000 people, including more than 12,000 children. Unfortunately, these confirmed figures paint a picture less macabre than reality, as thousands of men, women, and children are buried beneath rubble and presumed dead. One can only imagine what the final death toll and excess death rate will be.
Often using dystopian AI programs to select targets, the United States and Israel have leveled a greater percentage of infrastructure in Gaza than the Allied bombings in Dresden during World War II. The Guardian recently reported, “As of 17 January, analysis of satellite data by Corey Scher of the City University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University reveals that between 50% and 62% of all buildings in Gaza have likely been damaged or destroyed.”
Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, approximately half of which are children, have been bombed everywhere. At times, this has included 2,000-pound bombs raining down on the Israeli-designated safe zones. Virtually every city in Gaza has been eradicated except Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have fled to and which the Israeli war cabinet plans to hit with a blitzkrieg this month.
Social media feeds in every American household have been flooded with graphic videos and images showing countless Palestinian babies, children, women, elderly people, and men being blown to bits, killed, shot, mutilated, or permanently disfigured with our weaponry.
Last week, in what is known now as the “Flour Massacre,” the Israeli occupation opened fire killing over a hundred Palestinians and injuring hundreds more near Gaza City as they desperately attempted to obtain what they could from a trickle of aid that was allowed into the Strip.
Biden, previously known as “Israel’s man in Washington,” is fond of reciting his assertion that “If Israel didn’t exist, [the United States] would have to invent it.” But each day, new horrors and atrocities are unearthed, revealing Israel to be nothing more than a rogue state (incidentally armed with dozens, if not hundreds, of nuclear weapons).
Caitlin Johnstone perfectly sums up the reaction of normal people with a conscience to the unending stream of Israeli barbarism reported daily:
So it turns out the IDF has been running a Telegram channel featuring homemade snuff films in which Gazans are brutally murdered by Israeli forces, captioned with celebrations of the gore and pain therein like “Burning their mother… You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear their bones crunch.” The IDF had previously denied any association with the channel, but Haaretz now reports that it was directly run by an IDF psychological warfare unit.
This is one of those many, many times where Israel is so awful that at first you’re not sure what you’re looking at. You think you must be misreading the report. Then you read it again and go “Oh wow, that’s SO much worse than I would have guessed.”
However bad you think Israel is, you can always be sure that information will come out later that proves it’s even worse.
Palestinians are being subjected to inhumane torture as well. After The New York Times analyzed a report from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the paper reported, “Detainees said they were beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused, and denied access to lawyers and doctors, often for more than a month.”
The Times article continues, “Some detainees, according to the report, told UNRWA investigators that they had often been beaten on open wounds, had been held for hours in painful stress positions, and had been attacked by military dogs.”
One prisoner was “beaten so badly that his genitals turned blue and that there was still blood present in his urine… guards made him sleep naked in the open air, next to a fan blowing cold air, and played music so loudly that his ear bled.”
This coincides with numerous Israeli media reports of torture inflicted against the occupied Palestinians at the hands of their Zionist army captors. In January, +972 Magazine reported on the hellish scenes inside Israeli detention centers holding untold numbers of civilians rounded up in Gaza:
“Israeli soldiers subjected Palestinian detainees to electric shocks, burned their skin with lighters, spat in their mouths, and deprived them of sleep, food, and access to bathrooms until they defecated on themselves. Many were tied to a fence for hours, handcuffed, and blindfolded for most of the day… Several people are known to have died as a result of being held in these conditions.”
Israel has the population of Gaza trapped in an open-air concentration camp, with 75% of Palestinians crammed into a single city. More than 90% of the Palestinians living in the Strip have been internally displaced amidst the Israeli onslaught.
Tens of thousands of bombs have been dropped in Gaza, as the United States has delivered Israel some 25,000 tons of weapons including thousands of 2,000 pound bombs and tens of thousands of artillery shells.
It is a repudiation of every treasured American value for our government to make all of us a party to such atrocities under any conditions.
The whole world sees this for what it is. Half of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 believe he is complicit in genocide. Indeed, the International Court of Justice has issued a preliminary ruling that Israel’s actions may plausibly constitute genocide. Nevertheless, our Congress is committed to financing this systematic destruction of Gaza with another $14 billion of the American people’s hard-earned money.
Palestinians are not only being ripped apart with American bombs and shells, they are being starved to death by the hundreds of thousands. As Antiwar.com News Editor Dave DeCamp reports:
At least 16 Palestinian children have starved to death in the Gaza Strip over the past few days due to the US-backed Israeli siege, and the UN’s child relief agency is warning that the number of child deaths will “rapidly increase” if conditions don’t immediately change.
“Last week, we warned that an explosion in child deaths was imminent if the burgeoning nutrition crisis wasn’t resolved,” said Adele Khodr, UNICEF’s director for the Middle East and North Africa. “Now, the child deaths we feared are here and are likely to rapidly increase unless the war ends and obstacles to humanitarian relief are immediately resolved.”
The latest Palestinian child reported to die of hunger was Yazan al-Kafarna, a 10-year-old with cerebral palsy who was in the al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah. Fifteen children have also died of malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.
The UN has previously warned that Gaza’s entire population of about 2.2 million people is facing “crisis” levels of food insecurity, and at least 576,000 Palestinians in Gaza are “facing catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation.”
Despite the dire situation, the State Department reaffirmed on Monday that it will continue to provide military assistance for Israel’s genocidal war.
The last vestiges of our deluded American exceptionalism burned up in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. with Aaron Bushnell last month. As the former member of the U.S. Air Force stated before his self-immolation in protest of the genocide in Gaza, “this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
But regardless of what excuses White House spokespeople are able to conjure up in an attempt to hide the blood on their hands, this is not normal and the American people will never accept it. As evidenced by the public opinion polls and protest movements across the country, Biden will pay dearly in the coming election for his role in the mass murder ongoing in Palestine.
NBC News revealed the Biden reelection team has taken “extraordinary steps” to avoid antiwar protesters including “by making [their events] smaller, withholding their precise locations from the media and the public until he arrives, and avoiding college campuses.”
Additionally, the more than 100,000 “uncommitted” protest votes in the Michigan Democratic primary last week foreshadows things to come for Genocide Joe and the Democratic Party establishment. Demonstrators camped out daily in front of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s residence chant “Blinken! Blinken! We see you and all the war crimes that you do!”
In his last words, Bushnell said he could “no longer be complicit in genocide.” His message was one that resonates with perhaps a majority of Americans. But in Washington, his message could not be more alien.
Americans have witnessed the true nature of the U.S. empire, its allies, partners, and proxies. They have voiced their abhorrence to their government and have been shocked at the abject lack of empathy for the Palestinian women and children being slaughtered, tortured, and deprived to death on an industrial scale.
In a video last month, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) was told by a peace activist on Capitol Hill, “I’ve seen the footage of shredded children’s bodies. That’s my taxpayer dollars that are going to bomb those kids.” Ogles responded proudly, “I think we should kill ’em all, if that makes you feel better.”
An American antiwar populace cannot be ruled by unrepentant and unAmerican warmongers in perpetuity; a breaking point cannot come soon enough.
Social media platforms block Iran’s Al-Alam accounts over coverage of Gaza war
Press TV – March 5, 2024
In a new attack against freedom of expression, a number of American social media platforms have blocked the accounts of the Iranian Arabic-language news network Al-Alam without prior notice.
Al-Alam reported on Tuesday that video-sharing website YouTube, social media giants X and Instagram have blocked its pages and accounts over the network’s support for Gaza and publishing news related to the Israeli regime’s attacks on the besieged Palestinian territory.
The latest moves prove that CEOs of American social media giants, despite their claims about freedom of speech and human rights, do not allow the publication of facts, Al-Alam said in a statement.
These social media platforms are trying to cover up the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians by disabling the accounts of networks that reflect the occupying regime’s war crimes in Gaza.
The Arabic-language news network said it will continue to support the oppressed people of Palestine and reflect the reality on the ground by creating new pages.
This is not the first time that YouTube and other social medial platforms have deleted Al-Alam accounts or pages without any prior notice or justification.
Back in March 2022 and in a similar move, Facebook “permanently” removed the page of Al-Alam TV from its platform despite the fact that the network’s Facebook page had some 6,000,000 followers at the time.
Facebook claimed the Tehran-based network had not complied with its terms regarding the publication of photos of the flags and the leaders of Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, Yemen’s Ansarullah and Palestinian resistance groups.
Over the past years, Facebook — along with YouTube, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Google — have repeatedly targeted media outlets of Iran and the countries critical of the West and the Israeli regime’s occupation of Palestine.
Gaza is paying the ultimate price for decades of media pandering to Zionist bigotry
By Jonathan Cook | March 6, 2024
The Guardian and other media continue to prioritise the ‘sensitivities’ of an ideological minority over the public’s right to protest against a genocide in which our elites are complicit
We all understand that, shamefully, a number of Zionist Jews and non-Jews identify so completely with Israel that they are not only willing to excuse the mass slaughter and starvation of civilians in Gaza but think others should not even be allowed to express disquiet at the slaughter.
Hardline Zionists tell us they find concern for the welfare of Palestinians “offensive”, and that they feel “unsafe” when others raise such concerns or call for a ceasefire to end the bloodshed.
The question for the rest of us is: How do we deal with those “sensitivities”, and how much do we prioritise the “offence” taken by hardline Zionists?
Not unreasonably, most ordinary people place very little weight on the “sensitivities” of those who believe mass slaughter and the starvation of children should be allowed to proceed, at least when weighed against the sensitivities of those opposed to mass death.
What’s so weird is the way, as far as official bodies and the western media are concerned, those priorities have been turned upside down.
Here, in typical fashion, the Guardian falls over backwards to indulge the “feelings” of a few Jewish Arsenal fans because they “felt unsafe” and “betrayed” by their club for not more aggressively stopping protests last weekend at a Women’s Super League game by other fans over the complicity of the UK government in Gaza’s genocide.
No evidence is produced by either the fans or the Guardian that any Jewish fan was in any danger whatsoever. Just that a few Palestinian flags were smuggled into the stadium, that leaflets and stickers were handed out, and that some protesters tried to “engage” with fans as they arrived at the stadium – presumably in that dangerous tradition of trying to persuade others of the validity of one’s position.
But the Guardian sympathetically dedicates a great deal of space to relaying the concerns of the handful of Jewish fans who “believe their safety was compromised by security staff not curtailing the protest” – that is, those who wanted to prevent an entirely peaceful demonstration taking place in a public space outside the ground.
The story is risible. It is news as therapy for Zionists and gaslighting for the rest of us.
But it is decades of nonsense journalism about Israel and its apologists of precisely this kind that has led us to the dismal place we are today.
The constant indulgence by the political and media class, the constant elevation of these kinds of ugly, ignoble “feelings” – feelings that dehumanise and vilify Palestinians, as well as anyone acting in solidarity with their suffering – the constant treatment of Zionist bigotry as warranted, as justified, as normal, that has gotten us to a position where Israel can commit genocide and its western allies and parts of their Jewish populations can treat it as “offensive” to raise the matter.
If we had not got so entirely used to it, we would immediately understand how completely nuts – and catastrophically inhumane – the coverage is.
Israel has killed 364 health personnel in Gaza
The wreckage of an ambulance after an Israeli attack on Wednesday in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on January 11, 2024 [Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency]
MEMO | March 5, 2024
A spokesman for the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, Ashraf Al-Qudra, has said that the Israeli occupation forces have killed 364 health personnel since 7 October. At least 269 others, including hospital directors in Khan Yunis and northern Gaza, have been detained by the occupation forces, Quds Press reported on Monday.
Al-Qudra added that the Israeli forces have destroyed 155 health institutions and put 32 hospitals and 53 health centres out of service. The occupation state has targeted 126 ambulances, and put them out of service as well, while the infrastructure of hospitals in Khan Yunis and northern Gaza has been destroyed. They are now basically just triage points.
He noted that the health situation in Gaza is catastrophic and is getting worse due to the lack of essential medical aid.
“The [Israeli] occupation has deliberately caused an unspeakable humanitarian and health catastrophe that contributed to the spread of epidemics and infectious diseases,” said Al-Qudra. He pointed out that the health ministry has recorded around one million cases of infectious diseases for which the necessary treatment is not available.
The residents of northern Gaza, he warned, are struggling with the famine arising from the scarcity of drinking water and food. This has claimed the lives of dozens of children, women and the elderly.
The Palestinian official called on the UN to activate international humanitarian law to protect civilians, institutions and health teams, and prevent the humanitarian catastrophe from getting much worse.
Canada faces legal action over arms exports to Israel
Press TV – March 5, 2024
A group of Canadian and Palestinian human rights lawyers have filed a lawsuit against the Canadian government for “contributing” to the bombardment of the Gaza Strip through sending arms to Israel.
The coalition of the lawyers filed a complaint against Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly on Tuesday over issuing permits for export of military equipment to Israel.
The group includes Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights and Al-Haq – Law in the Services of Man, an independent Palestinian NGO.
In the lawsuit, the group argued that Canada’s Export and Import Permits Act prevents the federal government from issuing permits for export of military goods and related technology to Israel because those exports can pose serious risks by undermining peace and security.
They said the weapons could be used to commit serious violations of international law and serious acts of violence against women and children in Palestine.
The lawyers said the government needs to stop contributing to Israel’s mass starvation of Palestinians and bombardment of Gaza.
Back in January, Canadian Lawyers for International Human Rights (CLAIHR), one of the groups involved in the case, urged the government to “immediately halt” all arms exports to Israel.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also stands accused of misleading the public over weapons sales to Israel.
Trudeau has repeatedly been urged to end arms exports to the Israeli regime. But his government has so far tried to downplay the country’s role in helping Israel build its arsenal.
On Friday, a group of more than 200 lawmakers from 12 countries, including the United States and Canada, signed a letter to call on their governments to impose a ban on arms sales to Israel.
Niki Ashton, a member of Canada’s Parliament was among the signatories of that letter.
Ashton said in a message on the X social media platform that the Canadian government has approved $28 million worth of weapons exports to Israel since the regime started its brutal military campaign in early October.
“That is horrifying,” Ashton said, adding, “Make no mistake. These weapons are directly used to kill and maim starving Palestinians.”
Countries supplying arms to Israel have been facing mounting pressure to halt weapons sale to Tel Aviv since the regime launched its military offensive against Gaza in early October. Israeli forces have so far killed more than 30,500 Palestinians, mostly children and women, in the besieged territory.
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From the Archives
Politicians lie
By Mazin Qumsiyeh | Popular Resistance | August 18, 2013
There is no way to say this truth nicely: Politicians lie. That includes Japanese, American, Egyptian, Israeli, and Palestinian politicians! Is there something more common sense than that? Yet, so many citizens around the world believe their own politicians or wistfully acknowledge lies but think it is part of the job needed to run things. They believe even when politicians contradict themselves blatantly. This phenomenon is rather remarkable. It is a dissonance and disconnect from reality that many seem oblivious to. It is very dangerous because it can lead to accepting rationales for going to war. These can be deadly wars that lead to millions of lives lost as happened in what was called World War 1 and WW2. Even when incredible and declassified evidence abound, politicians continue to lie and old mythologies refuse to die. Here are just a few of the countless lies told to us over the past few decades… continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Ukrainian Soldiers, Potential Mercenaries: Have Gun, Will Travel!
- Burnham’s UN debut… A masterclass in British disinformation
- Iran flights continue despite US aviation sanctions
- Global Tipping Points Lead the World Into a State of Entropy
- The day-after at the White House: USA and Xi Jinping
- The Geopolitical Balance in the Red Sea: The UAE Being Displaced by New Players
- Iraqi resistance group vows to stage airport sit-ins over Iran aerial blockade
- Turkish parliament to review Saudi-Pakistan defense pact next month
- DEATH SPIKES & RISING CANCER IN OUR YOUTH EXPLAINED
- Iran offers Trump deal before US election
- If Americans Knew
- Deconstructing Netanyahu’s pants-on-fire UN rant – Daily Update
- Trump betrayed voters with his campaign lies and prioritized a foreign country once he took office
- Netanyahu calls Israel’s war in Gaza ‘opposite of genocide’ in UN speech to near-empty hall
- Settler Kidnappings: Torture, Sexual Abuse and Terrorisation of Palestinian Abductees as Israel Deepens Annexation of West Bank
- Gaza winter nears as 162,000 tents become unusable, raising fears of humanitarian crisis
- Netanyahu says, “It’s the opposite of genocide”; UN says Gaza economy is world’s ‘most severe crisis on record’ – Daily Update
- Israel’s US-Backed Assault on Gaza Has Created the ‘World’s Most Severe Economic Crisis on Record’: UN
- ‘Protecting U.S. Citizens’… From Israel
- ‘This is where I live now, the back of a truck’: a day in the life of a grandmother in Gaza
- In UN Speech, Iran’s President Displays Pictures of Children Killed by US, Brings Attention to Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: Earth And Venus Surface Warmth Largely Explained By Convection And Lapse Rate, Not CO2 Or Radiation
- 2025 Nature Paper Claiming Worsening Global Drought Gets RETRACTED …Heavily Flawed
- New Study: ‘Global Drought Shows No Detectable Recent Acceleration Under Climate Warming’
- Economic Masterminds: German Socialists Suggest Taxing Productivity Gains Stemming From Using AI
- The South China Sea Has Not Been Cooperating With The Climate Change Narrative
- Energy Crisis: Germany Enters Heating Season With Historically Low Gas Reserve Fill Levels
- New Study: The Antarctic Ice Sheet Gained Mass From 2020-2024 Due To Staggering Snow And Ice Accumulation
- Study: Ocean Heating Rates From Thousands Of Years Ago ‘Dwarf’ Modern Ocean Heating Rates
- Climate Extremists Target, Attack Large-Scale Power Grid Infrastructure In Germany!
- New Study: Antarctic Ice Melt Has Contributed Less Than 1 Centimeter To Sea Level Rise In The Last 30 Years
