ANALYSIS: HOW THE UK AND US MEDIA DEHUMANISE PALESTINIANS
BY CLAIRE LAUTERBACH AND NAMIR SHABIBI | DECLASSIFIED UK | NOVEMBER 22, 2023
Nazis. Beneath animals.
This is a small sample of what Palestinians have been called by commentators speaking to Western media outlets in the last month of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict – examples of the bestiary of zoological terms natural to a coloniser’s view of the colonised.
Political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote during France’s colonial war in Algeria of “hordes of vital statistics”, “hysterical masses”, “faces bereft of all humanity”, and “children who seem to belong to nobody”.
These are all terms that could describe how western media covers the suffering of Palestinians — “a tide of humanity… a teeming mass of Gazans”, as the BBC put it (15 October). This is all sharply in focus since Hamas’ October offensive, and Israel’s genocidal razing of the Gaza strip.
We analysed the front page coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza by five major US and UK news media — the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, and the BBC (the news landing page at 7am daily) between 7-26 October.
Over these three weeks following Hamas’ offensive, the mechanics of the Western press’ dehumanisation of Palestinians in death and life are revealed as clinical and routine.
Israelis are murdered, Palestinians die
The dehumanisation process begins (or ends) with questioning who counts in death, and how the killer and the victim are portrayed.
In the UK-US mainstream media, Israelis die actively. They are either killed or murdered by Hamas, or “after a surprise Palestinian attack”. “The Palestinians” stands in for “Hamas” for sloppy or ideological editors, for example in the Guardian on 8 October.
Palestinian civilians, by contrast, die passively – and yet it is they who have done most of the dying since 7 October; over ten times the number of Israelis killed.
Gazans aren’t killed by Israeli forces or Israeli government policies. They “dehydrate to death as clean water runs out” (Guardian, 18 October) while Israeli airstrikes “continue to pound the Palestinian territory”.
On 9 October, the BBC ran with “700 people have been killed on the Israeli side with more than 400 also dead in Gaza”, presumably succumbing to shock or an act of God.
On 8 November, the Times of London noted: “Israelis marked a month since Hamas killed 1,400 people and kidnapped 240, starting a war in which 10,300 Palestinians are said to have died”, which is of course qualified.
Palestinian deaths are natural, undifferentiated. This is only possible because the media treat Israel’s blockade of Gaza as wholly logical, proportionate and even restrained.
Violations of international law
Collective punishment, which is essentially what Israel is doing by striking civilian “targets” and totally blockading the “open prison” (in former prime minister David Cameron’s words), is also illegal. This is the view of EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, UN human rights chief Volker Türk and Human Rights Watch, among others.
When UN chief António Guterres noted Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestine and called for an end to the siege, Israel’s UN representative demanded he resign. At least one of Guterres’ colleagues, the head of the New York office of the UN high commissioner for human rights, Craig Mokhiber, resigned of his own accord, protesting Israel’s “genocide unfolding before our eyes” in Palestine.
However, in none of the three weeks’ of front-page headlines and lead paragraphs for the five UK-US media analysed for this article are Israel’s serial violations of international law mentioned.
The exclusion of this important context on Israel’s crimes is important. As journalists we’re trained to account for the fact that most people don’t read beyond the headlines or first paragraphs.
Off the front page, some media published separate analysis pieces, such as the New York Times’ “Israel, Gaza and the laws of war” (12 October). This unsurprisingly goes nowhere near calling Israel’s crimes what they are: crimes.
Despite discussing at length how civilians cannot be targeted or disproportionately harmed for military purposes, the closest the New York Times gets to criticising the action of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is quoting the opinion of an expert on siege law.
This was that Israel’s siege is “an unusually clear-cut example of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, which is considered a violation of international humanitarian law, a crime against humanity and a war crime” (emphasis added).
A swift qualifier follows: “Jurisdiction over some war crimes would depend on whether the conflict is considered inter-state.” So some crimes are not a crime as long as Palestine or Palestinians don’t exist, as Israeli prime minister Golda Meir asserted over 50 years ago, repeated by current Israeli politicians.
By contrast, Hamas’ actions are, to the same cited expert, “not close calls”.
Preventable deaths
Moving on from, or ignoring completely, both the illegality of Israel’s total siege of Gaza, the UK-US media portray the starvation and preventable deaths resulting directly from it in almost entirely passive, naturalistic language.
For example, the Washington Post’s print version front page: “Civilian harm in Gaza looms over Biden’s visit; Rising human toll from attacks could threaten Israel’s global backing” (harm arising of course from Israel’s battering).
On 13 October, from the New York Times : “300,000 homeless in battered Gaza as food runs low” (because Israel is blocking food from entering Gaza). It continues: “Hospitals overwhelmed and fuel scarce” (because Israel is blocking medical supplies and fuel from reaching Gaza) “as Israel strikes back at Hamas.”
That’s fine then – the reader should feel at ease since Israel’s crushing of hospitals is merely an act of “self-defence”.
The Israeli military is not much a fan of Gazan hospitals – it regularly bombs them. It ordered 23 hospitals in northern Gaza to evacuate on 13 October, and seems to have been picking them off, with patients inside, ever since.
When Israel might have gone too far, as it did in almost certainly bombing Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on 17 October, most outlets covered the strike by repeating both Israel’s and Hamas’ “he said-she said” accusations against the other.
Nevertheless, the New York Times gave the IDF’s denial more weight with “Hamas fails to make case that Israel struck hospital” (23 October, emphasis added), which is a catchier headline than “We don’t know, and don’t want to work it out ourselves”.
Meanwhile, the Times ran with “Strike kills up to 500 in Gaza”, swiftly adding that “Israel denies responsibility and blames jihadis”, with no comment from a Palestinian voice.
Mirroring the discrepancy between how Palestinians have died (passively, often with no mention of Israeli actions) and Israelis have died (actively, directly attributed to Hamas or “Palestinian” actions) is how the media describes child victims of both sides.
Discussing a prisoner exchange, a Washington Post columnist described Israel’s “children hostages” while referring to Palestinian children as “young people”. Under Military Order 1591, the Israeli government can hold minors as young as 12 without trial and potentially indefinitely in “administrative detention”, UNICEF reports.
When Gazan civilian deaths from siege and strikes against civilian infrastructure are shown as authorless natural disasters rather than as war crimes, any access Gazans get to essential goods becomes “aid” or “relief”, and every tiny amount allowed to reach them is an act of Israeli mercy.
For example, the New York Times (19 October): “Deal lays groundwork for aid to reach desperate Gazans”. Or the Washington Post (12 October): “Closed borders, falling bombs choke Gaza; thousands injured as supplies wane”, adding “humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens” (due to Israeli siege, let’s not forget).
Also in the Washington Post is the incredible headline (16 October) “As Palestinian death toll rises, aid stuck in Egypt”, as if it couldn’t physically fit through the door, which ignores the fact that Israel prevented aid from entering Israel via Rafah, demanding proof it would not be diverted to Hamas.
The numbers
Having reduced Palestinians to numbers, the work then becomes to cast doubt on these numbers.
When Israel’s flattening of Gaza began raising international alarm, Biden said he didn’t trust that “Palestinians” (or the Hamas government, since to him the distinction is irrelevant) “are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
His statement was the latest in a time-honoured tradition of US administrations disputing the number of deaths wreaked by their allies abroad, from Suharto’s Indonesia, to Salvadoran death squads in the 1980s and Saudi Arabia today, as historian Bradely Simpson notes.
No one seriously disputes the Gazan Ministry of Health’s numbers as too high. If anything, they are likely a serious undercount given how many bodies are trapped under rubble.
Nevertheless, the attribution of figures to the “Gaza Ministry of Health” is now almost always prefaced by “Hamas-government” or followed by “controlled by Hamas”. This would seem an odd waste of words, considering that everyone from the UN to the US State Department cites Gazan health ministry casualty data, and Gaza’s government is run by Hamas.
Dead Palestinians are simply irrelevant for some media. The first mention of Palestinian deaths in Times headlines occurred 11 days after Hamas’ assault: “Strike kills up to 500 in Gaza”. It had by then run several front page pieces about specific, named Israeli victims, including an in-depth profile (with portrait) of a kibbutz family horrifically killed by the Hamas-led offensive [or not].
Unsurprisingly, on 12 October, the Telegraph published the number of Israelis killed in factors of “9/11s” in a striking infographic which didn’t even bother to include an estimate of Palestinian deaths.
Double standards
Once a people are truly dehumanised, it becomes logical – necessary, even – to apply a wholly different standard of (in)decency to them.
UK-US media report Palestinian deaths passively, as if through apparent acts of God, often couching the deaths in language suggesting that they were mostly Hamas or Hamas-adjacent, or at least that they inconveniently stood in missiles’ way.
For still-breathing Palestinians, it is not enough to have somehow escaped being killed by the almost 6,000 bombs Israel launched in its first six days punishing the densely populated territory. This is more than the US, not usually known for its restraint, deployed in any single year of its war in Afghanistan.
A living Palestinian must justify his or her continued aliveness by disavowing Hamas. A viral example of this can be seen in BBC Newsnight’s interview of the head of the Palestinian mission to the UK, Husam Zomlot.
Presenter Kirsty Wark barely flinched upon hearing Zomlot describe in detail how members of his family had been killed by Israeli strikes in the previous days before repeatedly demanding Zomlot condemn Hamas’ actions.
To reverse this, in other words, to ask every Israeli who had lost a family member in this conflict to first begin by condemning Israel’s murders and collective punishment of civilian Gazans would be rightly seen as outrageous. Unsurprisingly, we have not seen any examples of such in the Western press.
The UK-US press also tells us that to support Palestinians is to support Hamas, in case anyone doubted the conflation.
The BBC declared London’s peaceful pro-Palestine protesters as providing “backing for Hamas.” It later retracted its “poorly phrased” comments.
Sky News did no better in using images of peaceful protesters bearing Palestinian flags to accompany its discussion of efforts by the London Metropolitan Police to “tackle extremism”.
These “slips” pale in comparison with the virulently offensive terms guests on BBC programmes have called Palestinians, completely unchallenged by their hosts.
For example, BBC Arabic hosted former Israeli intelligence veteran-turned academic, Mordechai Kedar who refused to recognise popular Israeli racism towards Palestinians, claiming that bestial comparisons of Palestinians are “denigrating to animals.”
Tellingly, the BBC Arabic host neither ejected Kedar from the interview, nor did she admonish him and demand an apology. Instead, the host pivoted away from Kedar’s genocidal language with the comment “that’s your opinion”.
Platforming Israeli justifications
UK-US media have also taken to running pieces platforming Israeli justifications for the IDF’s actions when the staggering number of dead Gazan civilians was becoming harder to write around.
“How Israelis justify scale of airstrikes” ran the New York version front page of the New York Times on 26 October. It was later rewritten as “Israel’s strikes on Gaza are some of the most intense this century”.
It is unthinkable that a Western newspaper would carry a piece platforming in the same benign-to-neutral terms Palestinian rage, or worse, justifications for Hamas’ crimes.
Another trend is to normalise Israel’s actions by focusing not on its costs in Gazan lives, but its intentions which, of course, are shown as benign. (Note: intentions don’t matter in the laws of war.)
Three days into Israel’s illegal total blockade of Gaza, the BBC asked: “Could an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza meet its aims?” (14 October). Charitably characterising Netanyahu as “risk-averse” (for Israelis, not Palestinians), the New York Times ran with “All-out war is untried ground”, comforting readers that “limited strikes in past were safe politically”.
Dissenting voices: harder to hear
Journalists at the BBC and Agence France Presse (AFP) who have been critical of their agencies’ bias against Palestinian lives and minimisation of Israeli war crimes told Declassified that there is no space to discuss editorial concerns.
Palestinian commentators have seen their segments edited out of mainstream news programmes. Palestinian Americans report their events are being cancelled while they’re called Hamas supporters.
Meanwhile, a senior editor at US publication Newsweek called for Gaza to be flattened to resemble a parking lot, apparently without censure.
Elsewhere in the media ecosystem, an official of the UK’s communications regulator OFCOM, Fadzai Madzingira, was suspended for a social media post criticising UK support for “ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians” and “this vile colonial alliance”.
None of these points – that Israel may be committing genocide, that it continues to ethnically cleanse Palestinian land or that Israel was founded as a colonial project which still uses settler outposts to consolidate territorial control – is outside of reasonable analysis of historical facts.
It’s looking an awful lot like the beginning (or end, depending on your starting point) of a genocide.
The IDF has instructed all Palestinians to flee south of the Wadi Gaza area “for their safety” from Israeli strikes. Some were struck as they were evacuating, and Palestinians are still being shelled by the IDF in southern refuge areas.
Soldiers plant Israeli flags on Gazan beaches, while Israel’s intelligence agency floats the idea of permanently expelling Gazans to Egyptian Sinai as a preferred solution. Netanyahu invokes a Bible passage where God orders the Israelites “to put to death men and women, children and infants” of a rival kingdom.
Still, the New York Times uncritically presents Netanyahu as “seeking [a] permanent end to threat but not a reoccupation” (13 October).
That last bastion of dissent, gallows humour, is also at grave risk. Michael Eisen, editor of science journal eLife, was sacked for posting on Twitter an article from humour site the Onion, with the headline “Dying Gazans criticized for not using last words to condemn Hamas”.
The Guardian’s cartoonist Steve Bell’s contract was not renewed after his sketch of Netanyahu preparing to operate on his own stomach with an outline of Gaza was deemed too reminiscent of the “pound of flesh” anti-semitic trope.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post published a cartoon of a Hamas official with Gazan children and women strapped to him saying “How dare Israel attack civilians”. It’s since been deleted following racism complaints.
Yet the cartoonist is still drawing for mainstream media. Last week he published another cartoon in the Las Vegas Review showing a (fat, black) woman with a Black Lives Matter t-shirt holding up a sign saying “Terrorist Lives Matter: Blame Israel, Support Hamas”.
How dare Israel attack civilians indeed.
Claire Lauterbach is an independent investigative journalist and producer. She is the former Head of Investigations at Privacy International where she investigated the use and abuse of surveillance and military technologies, and a former Senior Investigator at Global Witness. Claire previously investigated war crimes in Goma, DR Congo for Human Rights Watch.
Namir Shabibi is an independent investigative journalist, visiting lecturer in Geopolitics at the University of Westminster, and PhD candidate researching covert paramilitary action in the ‘War on Terror’. He is a former International Committee of the Red Cross delegate investigating breaches of the Geneva Conventions in Darfur and Guantanamo Bay.
Spain blasts Israeli accusations after criticizing Gaza genocide
Press TV – November 25, 2023
Spain has lashed out at Israel for “terror” accusations, calling them “false and out of place” after Madrid criticized Tel Aviv for killing more than 14,000 Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares condemned Israel’s allegations against prime ministers of Spain and Belgium as “unacceptable”, vowing “a response.”
Albares’ comments came hours after Israeli foreign minister Eli Cohen said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo were “giving support to terrorism,” and summoned both nations’ ambassadors in Tel Aviv for a “harsh rebuke.”
Albares stressed that Israel’s “false” accusations were “especially serious” given the fact that Spain is representing the European Union as the current president of the EU Council, a position that will be handed over to Belgium on January 1, 2024.
Speaking with Spanish media, Albares had criticized “unbearable number of Palestinian victims, including children” killed by Israeli attacks during a tour of West Asia.
“This is not incompatible with the message we’ve been repeating since day one … the right to defend itself must be with the scrupulous respect toward international humanitarian law,” he had said.
Sanchez is visiting Israel, Palestine and Egypt in a bid to put an end to Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians.
“Violence will only lead to more violence. We need to replace violence with hope and peace,” said Sanchez on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing on Friday.
His tour, however, ended in a diplomatic blow-up with Israel.
On Friday, Barcelona City Council suspended the city’s relations with the Israeli regime as long as the latter continues its ongoing deadly war against the Gaza Strip.
Spanish PM ‘whitewashing war criminal Netanyahu,’ outspoken ex-minister suggests
Ione Belarra, Spain’s former minister for social rights
Press TV – November 24, 2023
A former Spanish minister, who has been openly censuring the West’s silence over the Israeli regime’s genocidal war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, persists with her outspoken criticism.
Ione Belarra was Spain’s minister for social rights until she was removed from her post by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez on Monday over her targeting of the “deafening silence” of her country and the regime’s other Western allies on Tel Aviv’s ferocious ongoing warfare against Gaza.
Belarra, currently secretary-general of Spain’s ruling left-wing Podemos Party, fired her latest jab at Madrid on Thursday.
Posting on X she said she and her colleagues were “concerned” that a trip made by Sánchez to the occupied territories earlier in the day “could be used to whitewash [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, who is a war criminal.”
Sánchez should be instead traveling to Brussels, where decisions were made that could “truly exert pressure on Israel and Netanyahu to achieve a permanent ceasefire.”
The Israeli regime launched the war on October 7 following an operation, dubbed al-Aqsa Storm, by Gaza’s resistance groups.
More than 14,800 Palestinians, including over 6,150 children, have been killed in the war so far.
Belarra said, “In Brussels, exemplary economic sanctions against Netanyahu and his political leadership could be agreed upon…”
Sánchez should be working with European leaders in Brussels towards suspension of diplomatic relations with Tel Aviv, she added.
“From our point of view, people are exhausted, tired of the EU (European Union)’s doing absolutely nothing while a genocide against the people of Palestine is taking place, and we need concrete actions.”
Health Ministry stops coordination with WHO until detainees released
Palestinian Ministry of Health spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra
Palestine Information Center – November 23, 2023
GAZA – The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza on Thursday held the Israeli occupation forces fully responsible for the lives and safety of the doctors, who were detained on Wednesday.
It announced that it will stop coordinating with World Health Organization (WHO) on the rest of evacuations until the international agency submits a report on the Israeli detention of medical personnel and until they are all released.
The spokesman of the Ministry, Ashraf al-Qudra, said in a press conference at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, “The United Nations bears full responsibility for this event, and we await appropriate and urgent measures on their part to address this situation”.
He pointed out that they were informed by the United Nations about coordination with WHO to evacuate those who were present in the Al-Shifa Medical Complex, which is subject to Israeli siege, raids, and destruction, and were stranded inside the hospital with no food, water, medicine, electricity, or security.
Al-Qudra explained that a convoy from the United Nations, represented by WHO, moved on Wednesday to evacuate some of the patients and medical staff who were subjected to the most horrific Nazi practices in addition to starvation.
“We were surprised that this convoy was stopped by the Israeli checkpoint separating the north from south of Gaza, for about seven hours, during which Israeli occupation forces maltreated the patients, their companions, and the medical staff, before arresting a number of them, including Director General of Al-Shifa Medical Complex, Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya,” Al-Qudra said.
Mohammad Abu Salmiya, director of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. (By AFP)
He pointed out that WHO has not yet submitted any report to the ministry to clarify what happened, including the numbers and names of detainees, stressing that the inability to communicate with Al-Shifa Medical Complex made them unable to know who was arrested.
The Ministry’s spokesman expressed his concerns over potential liquidation of those detainees.
Russian journalist dies after Ukrainian drone attack – media
RT | November 23, 2023
Boris Maksudov, a Russian journalist from Russia 24 TV who was injured on Wednesday in a Ukrainian drone attack, has died in hospital, several news outlets reported on Thursday morning.
Maksudov was injured during a working trip to Zaporozhye Region, through which the front line of the Ukraine conflict passes. He was among a group of reporters who were targeted by a swarm of Ukrainian drones.
The Defense Ministry said at the time that the fragmentation injury he sustained was not deemed life-threatening. He had been evacuated to a military hospital, the statement added.
Russia 24 reported the crew was hit by two quadcopters, which targeted them with grenades. In a grim foreshadowing earlier in the day, Maksudov recorded a video in which he remarked that drones pose a threat in the area despite the poor weather conditions offering some degree of safety.
Dmitry Kiselyov, the head of the Rossiya Segodnya media group, suggested that Ukrainian forces deliberately attack journalists. Reacting to Maksudov’s reported death on Thursday, he told RIA Novosti : “Unfortunately, the journalistic profession today is increasingly colored in khaki, and too often covered with blood on top.”
Arguably, the first notable incident in which Ukrainian forces were accused of targeting media professionals occurred in 2014, when a volunteer fighter, Nadezhda Savchenko, directed artillery fire at a group of reporters. Two of them, Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin, were killed.
Savchenko was taken into Russian custody and tried, while Kiev turned her into an international celebrity, claiming to be a victim of persecution. She was sentenced to 22 years in jail in 2016, but was pardoned by President Vladimir Putin and returned to Ukraine, where she was later elected to parliament.
The conflict has claimed the lives of many Russian media professionals. In July, RIA Novosti war correspondent Rostislav Zhuravlev was killed by shelling in Zaporozhye Region.
RT holds an annual international photography competition in honor of Andrey Stenin, a Russian photojournalist who was killed by Ukrainian small arms fire in Donetsk Region in 2014.
UK GOVERNMENT BLOCKS MP QUESTIONS ABOUT GAZA-RELATED ACTIVITY AT ITS CYPRUS BASE
BY MATT KENNARD AND MARK CURTIS | DECLASSIFIED UK | NOVEMBER 20, 2023
The British government has blocked MPs asking any questions about activity at RAF Akrotiri, its vast air base on Cyprus, Declassified can reveal.
Blocking all parliamentary questions from MPs is a highly unusual move.
Government departments routinely refuse to answer specific questions about military operations for reasons of “national security”, but blocking all questions by elected parliamentarians goes far beyond the usual level of Whitehall secrecy.
It comes after Declassified revealed the RAF has made over 30 military transport flights to Tel Aviv since Israel began bombing Gaza. The Ministry of Defence refused to provide us any detail of the cargo or personnel on the flights.
Just this morning an A400M Atlas military transport aircraft operated by the RAF landed in Tel Aviv from Akrotiri. The aircraft can carry 116 soldiers, a Chinook helicopter or a payload of 37 tonnes.
RAF Akrotiri sits 180 miles from Tel Aviv with a flight time of 40 minutes.
Declassified has also reported that the US is moving arms to Israel using RAF Akrotiri, which has become an international military hub supporting Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza. Half of US planes flying from British Cyprus are said to be carrying weapons for Israel.
Kenny MacAskill, Alba MP for East Lothian, told Declassified he put down a number of parliamentary questions concerning what military support the UK is providing to Israel and the role of RAF Akrotiri in the supply of military equipment.
“Your question has been queried because it is subject to a block by Government,” he was told in an email. “The Department [Ministry of Defence] has stated that it will not comment on operational matters at this base.”
MacAskill, a former Scottish justice secretary, told Declassified: “This is totally unacceptable in a democracy. Genocide is being perpetrated in Gaza and we have a right to know what our Government is doing about it.”
MacAskill said he had never experienced such a ‘block’ on asking parliamentary questions before.
He added: “The failure to call for an immediate ceasefire is bad enough but any complicity raises issues of participating in war crimes. We need openness and transparency by our government. This is not in our name.”
Secrecy
The UK military-run Defence and Security Media Advisory (DSMA) Committee – better known as the ‘D-Notice’ committee – has also sent out an ‘advisory’ to all British media to suppress reporting on UK special forces’ activity related to Gaza. The SAS was previously reported to have deployed a force to Cyprus.
No British mainstream media outlets have reported on Declassified’s recent findings about RAF Akrotiri and Gaza despite the President of Cyprus Nikos Christodoulides having to defend his government from accusations of complicity in Israel’s bombing of Gaza.
In answer to questions about the use of RAF Akrotiri by Cypriot journalists over the weekend, Christodoulides said: “There is no such information, our country cannot be used as a base for war operations”.
However, RAF Akrotiri has long been the staging post for British bombing campaigns across the Middle East. Declassified also recently revealed that 129 US airmen are also permanently deployed at the base.
The censorship of information requests from MPs makes it all but certain that RAF Akrotiri is being used for covert military purposes that the government does not want the public to know about.
It is likely the UK is sending material military aid to Israel during its bombing of Gaza, which has now killed over 12,000 Palestinians, although it previously told Declassified it was not providing “lethal aid”.
US to continue supplying Israel with artillery shells, guided missiles
MEMO | November 22, 2023
The Pentagon said it continues to supply Israel with 155mm artillery shells, precision-guided munition, M and air defence systems, despite international concern over Israel’s disregard for civilian lives in Gaza.
In a statement issued yesterday, the Pentagon added that it “provides military aid to the [Israeli] forces from the American base’s stockpiles inside [Israel] and from other places.”
The administration of President Joe Biden has pledged $14.3 billion in military aid to Israel, in addition to the traditional annual aid of $3.4 billion. Unwavering military support to Israel is one of the rare issues that brings together Democrats and Republicans in the Congress and Senate.
A report by the Congressional Research Service revealed that since 7 October, the Biden administration has accelerated the provision of military and security aid to Israel, including “small diameter bombs (250 pounds), interceptor missiles, joint direct attack munitions, and 155mm artillery shells.”
More than 30 relief organisations have sent a letter to US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin urging him “not to send 155 mm shells in particular, as they are indiscriminate shells in nature which are being used in the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas in the world.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that some lawmakers are wondering whether the proposed $34 million worth of direct commercial sale of 24,000 assault rifles to Israel might end up in the hands of illegal settlers, wreaking havoc in the occupied West Bank.
For the 46th day in a row, the Israeli occupation forces, with support from the United States and mercenaries, have been launching a devastating aggression against the besieged Gaza Strip, killing at least 14,128 Palestinians, 5,840 of them children, with nearly 6,800 others still reported missing, in addition to over 30,000 wounded persons.
Spanish minister removed after urging end to Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza
Press TV – November 21, 2023
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has removed Ione Belarra, minister for social rights from the Cabinet, after she harshly criticized the West’s “deafening silence” on Israel’s war crimes in the Gaza Strip.
Sánchez, who was reelected last week to lead the country, unveiled the new Cabinet for his progressive coalition government on Monday. He substituted Belarra with Pablo Bustinduy.
Through her social media pages, Belarra has unequivocally called for an end to Israel’s horrendous war crimes in the besieged coastal strip and sought the intervention of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
In the latest post on X she said the ICC has “finally opened an investigation into war crimes in Gaza,” hoping that the body “acts quickly and decisively” to end the Gaza genocide.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, she criticized “a deafening silence of so many countries and so many political leaders who could do something,” to end the war on Gaza.
“I speak about what I know well, which is the European Union. It seems the display of hypocrisy which the European Commission is showing is unacceptable.”
She also reiterated that the regime of Israel was committing “planned genocide against the Palestine people.”
“Why can we give lessons in human rights in other conflicts and not here when the world is watching in horror? “The deaths of thousands of children, the mothers desperately shouting because they are witnessing the killing of their children.”
Belarra called on Madrid and other EU countries to break diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv since the regime launched its relentless air and ground attacks against the besieged Palestinian territory, which have killed more than 13,300 people, including over 5,500 children, in six weeks.
The European Union and the United States have so far failed to publically denounce the regime’s grave violations against Palestinians.
Spain is one of the EU member states where public support for the Palestinian cause is overwhelming, according to a recent survey conducted by YouGov, a market research and public opinion company.
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