By Yang Sheng | Global Times | December 19, 2023
The US-led joint patrol in the Red Sea following Houthi militia attacks against ships heading toward Israel shows that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in Gaza is not only affecting the whole region, but also the international community. Chinese analysts pointed out that the root cause of the trade route problem is the ongoing conflict in Gaza, and only a sustainable cease-fire and allowing humanitarian aid to enter Gaza via land and sea routes can solve the problem in the Red Sea.
China will pay close attention to the situation, and Chinese naval vessels that conduct UN authorized anti-piracy missions in the region will keep performing their duty, analysts said, adding that China will stick to the priority of realizing a cease-fire and clear the way for humanitarian aid for the people in Gaza, rather than joining the US to conduct any military operations without UN authorization to escalate the crisis in Gaza.
The US and a host of other nations are creating a new force to protect ships transiting the Red Sea that have come under attack by drones and ballistic missiles fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced Tuesday in Bahrain, the AP reported.
The UK, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain have joined, Austin said. Some of those countries will conduct joint patrols while others will provide intelligence support in the southern Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
The Houthi militia attacked two commercial ships in the Red Sea with naval drones on Monday. The recent attacks have caused concerns about the impact on the passage of oil, grain and other goods on what is an important global trade route, and have pushed up the cost of insuring and shipping goods through the Red Sea, Reuters reported.
The Shanghai-based news website The Paper reported on Tuesday that following other international shipping companies including Denmark’s Maersk and France’s CMA, Chinese shipping giants like COSCO and Orient Overseas Container Line (OOCL) also suspended transport through the Red Sea.
Ma Xiaolin, dean of the Institute for Studies on the Mediterranean Rim at Zhejiang International Studies University, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the trade route via the Red Sea is truly important for China as it connects Europe, Asia and Africa, so China will pay close attention to the situation.
“However, although China has naval vessels in the region, their mission is about anti-piracy, rather than intervening in regional issues and other countries’ internal affairs. Only a solution to the ongoing crisis in Gaza can effectively solve the problem in the Red Sea,” Ma said.
On December 9, Al Jazeera reported that the armed group in Yemen claimed that “it will target all ships heading to Israel, regardless of their nationality, and warned all international shipping companies against dealing with Israeli ports.”
“If Gaza does not receive the food and medicines it needs, all ships in the Red Sea bound for Israeli ports, regardless of their nationality, will become a target for our armed forces,” the group’s spokesperson said in a statement on Saturday, according to Al Jazeera.
Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the “Houthis are specifically targeting Israel, so it’s unlikely it will attack Chinese vessels. China doesn’t need to be too worried about the situation and the Chinese warships in the region will stick to their plan.”
“China will keep making efforts to realize a sustainable cease-fire and clear the way for humanitarian aid to get into the Gaza Strip. This is the real priority that needs to be done,” Wang Jin, an associate professor at the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies at Northwest University, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
If Washington and its allies want to solve the Red Sea problem, they should play a responsible role in the UN Security Council to pass a cease-fire resolution and to put concrete efforts into improving the humanitarian situation in Gaza, which would be more effective than sending warships to conduct joint patrols, experts said.
The humanitarian situation in Gaza remains severe. According to Reuters on Tuesday, Israeli missiles and air strikes on the Rafah area in southern Gaza struck three houses killing at least 20 Palestinians, Gaza health officials said on Tuesday. Tens of thousands of displaced Palestinians have crammed into Rafah on Gaza’s border with Egypt to escape Israeli bombardments.
The lack of unity in the UN that is mainly caused by the US is another key reason why the situation is far from easing. The UN Security Council delayed until Tuesday morning a vote on an Arab-sponsored resolution calling for a halt to hostilities in Gaza to allow for urgently needed aid deliveries to a massive number of civilians as members intensified negotiations to try to avoid another veto by the US, the AP reported.
Wang Wenbin, a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said at a routine press conference on Tuesday that “the UN General Assembly has adopted two resolutions with an overwhelming majority. We hope the US will listen to the voice of the international community, stop single-handedly blocking Security Council resolutions, and play its due role to promote an immediate cease-fire and prevent an even larger humanitarian catastrophe.”
By Fareed Taamallah | MEMO | December 18, 2023
Abla Lafi is 59 and from the village of Turmus Ayya, north of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. She is passionate when speaking about her olive groves, which the Israeli army and illegal Jewish settlers prevent the villagers from harvesting.
“This is our own land,” she said defiantly. “How dare they prevent us from entering it and picking olives from the trees as if we were thieves? We planted them with our own hands. The settlers are the thieves and we are the owners of the land.”
October and November make up the main olive harvest season for Palestinian farmers. Thousands of families depend on a good crop for their livelihood. Around 45 per cent of agricultural land in the occupied West Bank is planted with an estimated 10 million olive trees, producing between 32-35,000 metric tons of olive oil every year.
This year, due to the war on Gaza, settlers and the Israeli army are preventing thousands of farmers from reaching their olive groves. Last month, the occupation state’s extreme far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called on the Israeli government to prohibit Palestinians in the West Bank from harvesting their olive trees. According to Smotrich, Israel needs to establish “sterile security zones” with no Palestinian presence around settlements and settler-only roads. It looks as if the Israeli occupation forces are implementing this policy in order to block Palestinians from getting to their own land.
“Extensive damage to land and trees and stringent movement and access restrictions by Israeli forces hamper access to olive trees, especially those close to settlements,” the UN has reported. “At the end of November, an initial estimate indicates [that] 800,000 dunums of land have not been harvested due to Israeli settler violence and access restrictions.”
“Olives not only have economic importance to Palestinians, but are also symbolic of their roots, resilience and attachment to the land. For the Palestinians, the olive tree represents their spirit and identity.”
“We used to go to work on the land with joy and love for all family members, men, women, children and animals, because cultivation means belonging to the land, a feeling which we pass on to our children and grandchildren,” explained Lafi. “The olive season is like Eid for us; we celebrate its blessings with joy and happiness, even the taste of its food is different.” However, she added, since the establishment of the illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, the locals have lived through the olive season in an atmosphere of fear, anxiety and terror from the settlers and the army. “The anxiety and sadness have increased this year due to the war on Gaza.”
The head of the agricultural committee in the village, Nidal Rabie, confirmed that since the war against the Palestinians in Gaza started, the settlers and settlement guards have stopped local residents from reaching their olive groves in the plain adjacent to the illegal settlements built on lands confiscated from the village. “They expelled us as recently as today,” said Rabie. “We tried to access our land, but they came and expelled us at gunpoint.”
The 61-year-old Palestinian farmer who holds US citizenship, added: “We are now in the middle of December trying to pick our olives to no avail. Every farmer who tries to pick olives is shot at. If we wait any longer, the olives will be ruined and the quality of the oil will become low and inedible.”
Although the settlers and soldiers obstruct the olive harvest every year, explained Rabie, sometimes the Palestinians succeed in harvesting at least part within hours and days determined by the Israeli army. “This year the soldiers prevented us from harvesting any olives in the plain. I personally own 30 dunums that I am not able to harvest at all.”
A few days ago, the army even stormed Turmus Ayya at night and confiscated 50 vehicles belonging to the villagers, because they were used in agricultural work. Altogether, around 2,500 dunums belonging to the villagers but adjacent to the illegal settlements have not been allowed to be harvested. “They would have produced around 70,000 litres of olive oil,” he added.
Palestinian farmers in the village are also prevented from cultivating their own land next to which illegal settlements have been built. Mishal Al-Quq, 43, said that he used to live in the US and went back to Palestine two years ago to take care of the land and cultivate it. “This year we are facing a big problem in growing wheat in the plain east of the village as we are prohibited from working there by the occupation army, but now is the season for planting seeds. We must plant quickly, otherwise it will be too late.” Wheat is very important and is a basic crop for the villagers, he said. “We must grow it.” This was confirmed by Rabie, who pointed out that he had bought wheat and barley seeds, but did not know whether he would be able to plant them or not.
The Israeli destruction of the olive groves unmasks a fact that not many in the West know about; it’s often heard that Israelis hold dual US citizenship, but we don’t hear so much about Palestinian Americans. It is estimated that between 45-60,000 Palestinian Americans live in the occupied West Bank, according to Reuters. However, this does not stop Israel from targeting them. They are treated by the apartheid state as Palestinians and have no “American” privileges. For instance, Israel prevents Palestinian Americans from entering the US from the West Bank, an apparent violation of a recent agreement in which citizens from the US and Israel can travel to the other country without a visa. According to Rabie, most of the residents of Turmus Ayya hold dual Palestinian and US citizenship, but the US government doesn’t provide any protection to the farmers. “Some villagers who hold American citizenship contacted the US Embassy and asked for protection to work on our own land. But the embassy said that it could only assist in securing travel to the United States. This would mean displacing us from our land in Turmus Ayya.”
Although the Biden administration has declared the intention to deny visas to violent settlers, Rabie doubts that it will happen. “This was only propaganda. Biden’s true position was clear when he said that if there was no Israel, the US would have to create one. This shows Washington’s collusion with Israel.”
Abla Lafi believes that the goal of Israeli “harassment” is to seize the Palestinian land close to the illegal settlements that were established on stolen land which contains olive trees that have been cultivated for hundreds of years. “They have no right or ownership over it,” she insisted. “We inherited the land from our ancestors and we should not be prevented from entering it. Although it is more difficult this year, we have been facing this same problem every year since the establishment of the first settlement, which I remember was Shilo, in 1978, when I was 14 years old. At the beginning, there were mobile homes and the road leading to them ran through our village. The roads were built on lands confiscated from Qaryut and Turmus Ayya, after which they began to spread like a cancer and descended from the hilltop on to our land in the plain and spread to the nearby villages.”
More settlements were built, such as Rachel, Adei Ad, Amichai and other random outposts inhabited by terrorists known as the hilltop youth, she added. “They began terrorising the people, shooting, destroying property and blocking the roads. Before those settlements were built, when I was a child, we used to live peacefully, plough and plant. I have beautiful memories of the different seasons of figs, olives and wheat that we used to grow.”
Rabie confirmed that settler crimes, the confiscation of land and the cutting down and burning of olive trees in his and other villages, have been carried out constantly by settlers and the Israeli army even before Israel’s latest war against the Palestinians in Gaza. The most ferocious attack by settlers happened on 21 June this year, when hundreds of settlers stormed the village killing Omar Qutain, burning dozens of houses and cars, and hundreds of olive trees and wheat fields, destroying the village. The Israeli army stood and watched, but did not intervene.
No indictment has been filed against anyone, and this is not an exceptional case. According to Yesh Din, out of a thousand cases regarding acts of violence committed by settlers between 2005 and 2021, 93 per cent were closed without an indictment.
“These attacks did not and will not stop farmers from continuing to work on their land,” said Rabie. “If we stop cultivating the land, the Israeli authorities will exploit that to claim that the land is no man’s land, confiscate it and give it to the settlers. They did this before.”
This was a reference to Israel’s use in 1979 of an Ottoman land law of 1858 which stipulates that if private land is not cultivated for three years in a row it becomes state property. “At which point Israel hands it over to the settlers.”
Abla Lafi is determined that these Israeli attacks and policies will not discourage Palestinian farmers from cultivating their land. “I love my land and I love the fertile plain. This is the land that was watered by the sweat of the farmers and the blood of the martyrs who fell defending it: Joda Awad shot dead by the Israeli army in 1988, and Khamis Abu Awad, who was killed by a settler in 1993 while ploughing the land. Minister Ziad Abu Ain was also martyred in the plain defending the land and so was, most recently, Omar Al-Qotain this summer. We cannot give up on the land that many died to defend. We will pass it on to our children.”
By William Van Wagenen | The Cradle | December 19, 2023
“How many Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza?”
This is a persistent question that many are asking as the Israeli military’s ground campaign in the bombed and besieged enclave nears its second month.
If the army is suffering relatively low losses while inflicting massive Palestinian civilian casualties, this suggests Israel is well on its way to achieving its clear objective of eliminating Hamas, but also its unspoken goals: conquer Gaza, ethnically cleanse its 2.3 million residents, and rebuild the Gush Katif settlement bloc.
But if the occupation army is indeed suffering huge losses, this suggests the Israeli military and political leadership may need to soon end their genocidal campaign prematurely, while citing exaggerated external pressure from the White House as the pretext.
Secrecy surrounding Israeli losses
Israel’s military claimed on 17 December that 121 soldiers had been killed since its delayed ground campaign began on 27 October, when tanks and infantry began to push into Gaza’s cities and refugee camps.
But determining the true number of Israeli soldier casualties has always been notoriously difficult, as Israel’s military goes to great lengths to cover up its combat losses. A recent battle between Hamas and Israel’s vaunted Golani Brigade exemplifies this secrecy.
“We are heading to the most difficult and deepest place with a large number of enemy fighters,” boasted Israeli Lt. Col. Tomer Grinberg, commander of the Golani Brigade’s 13th Battalion, shortly before leading his troops on a ground operation in the legendary Shujaiyya (which aptly means “courageous”) neighborhood in northern Gaza.
He then added, “I promise you a resounding victory.”
But Grinberg is now dead.
According to Israeli sources, Grinberg was killed during the 12 December operation, along with nine other Golani soldiers, in an ambush by Hamas fighters.
After four of the brigade’s soldiers were injured in a firefight, others sought to rescue them amid fears they may be dragged into a tunnel. The second group was also hit by explosives, as was a third group that also tried to evacuate the wounded.
After the battle, Hamas issued a statement warning:
“The longer you stay there, the greater the bill of your deaths and losses will be, and you will emerge from it carrying the tail of disappointment and loss, God willing.”
Resistance claims higher soldier toll
But there is compelling reason to believe the number of soldiers killed alongside Grinberg in Shujaiyya is much higher than the nine announced by the army.
Security expert and retired Israeli Colonel Miri Eisin told CNN that the 12 December attack was particularly painful because so many of the dead were high-ranking officers:
“We’re hurting today… It’s always hard when soldiers are killed, but when it’s this level of command, it hits you in the gut. These are commanders that commanded hundreds of soldiers.”
This led one former US soldier to ask on X whether Israel was hiding the true number of soldiers killed in the ambush. “Where are all the privates, and the corporals, and the lower enlisted?”
Hamas, through its armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, provides an answer.
Regarding the events on 12 December, the Qassam Brigades reported killing 11 soldiers in Shujaiyya, including members of a rescue team, in an apparent reference to the deaths acknowledged by the Israeli army.
But according to Qassam, on the same day, its fighters also killed or injured 10 soldiers east of the city of Khan Yunis, killed or injured another 20 soldiers barricaded inside a building in the Sheikh Radwan area of Gaza City, and killed another 15 soldiers who attacked them in their make-shift base at the Abu Rashid Pool.
Censorship on the press and hospitals
Despite claiming to be “the only democracy in the Middle East,” Tel Aviv maintains a tight grip on information related to military casualties through the use of military censors, controlling what the press can publish concerning national security issues, including injuries and deaths of soldiers.
“The human losses announced by the security establishment are usually binding on hundreds of media institutions, and these are allowed to work basically according to this rule. The death toll always comes from one source, and no one questions it,” Hassan Abdo, The Cradle’s Palestine Correspondent, reported earlier this year.
Abdo attributes this to preserving the image of the invincible Israeli soldier “who does not fall victim to a weak, primitive opponent.”
This is “one of the main pillars of the Zionist project based on the tripartite of security, immigration, and settlement,” he added.
As The Cradle noted, even before the outbreak of war on 7 October, Israeli soldiers have had a strange tendency to die in “accidents” during periods of heightened conflict with the Palestinian resistance, including in car accidents, plane crashes, suicides, gas leaks, and even falling from balconies.
But this invincible image was shattered with the operation Al-Aqsa Flood, when Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups broke out of the Gaza Strip to attack the Israeli military bases and settlements (kibbutzim) enforcing the brutal 17-year siege on the tiny and impoverished enclave.
During Al-Aqsa Flood, Hamas killed 41 soldiers from Grinberg’s Golani battalion alone, in major battles at the Re’im and Nahal Oz military bases.
Hezbollah’s estimates and questions from within
Israel claims Hamas carried out a massacre at the Nova music festival, just a few kilometers from the Re’im base, but a major battle took place there as well. At Nova, 58 Israeli police were killed, including from elite combat counter-terror units of the Border Police, known as Yamam, who were the first to respond to the attack.
According to an Israeli police investigation regarding events at Nova, had there not been a substantial police deployment at Yad Mordechai, some 30 kilometers further north, “the terrorists would have been on their way to … Tel Aviv in 40 minutes.”
It, therefore, becomes more imperative than ever for the occupation state to hide the extent of its losses, both in the battle against the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and in the north in the battle with Hezbollah, to reestablish and maintain the myth of an overwhelmingly powerful military presence in the region.
Anecdotal evidence and estimates from Hezbollah suggest that the official count of 115 Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting in Gaza and near the Lebanese border following 7 October is likely much lower than the true figure. Reports from different sources indicate a significant discrepancy, with instances of mass casualties not officially acknowledged.
The Lebanese resistance movement estimates its attacks on settlements and military bases in northern-occupied Palestine have killed at least 35 Israeli soldiers and injured 172.
After just the first week of fighting in Gaza, the death toll, as announced by the Israeli army from fighting there, had reached 19. Among them were nine soldiers killed in just one attack. Hamas struck the “Namer” armored personnel carrier transporting the soldiers to the battle with an anti-tank missile.
Seven of the dead soldiers were 20 years old or younger, which seems to confirm the perception that Israel is sending inexperienced fighters into combat against Hamas’ battle-hardened fighters motivated by a cause, resistance to occupation, they firmly believe in.
But the occupation army spokesperson’s unit quickly learned not to announce the mass killing of soldiers of this sort.
Baruch Rosenblum, an Israeli rabbi, recalled a story from a senior officer in the army from the second week of the Gaza ground campaign. The officer explained that most of the fighting takes place at night, and that in just one operation, Hamas had killed 36 soldiers.
The rabbi explained that Hamas had attacked a convoy of three Namer armored vehicles, each carrying 12 soldiers, setting them ablaze. The army command watched via drone live feed as the soldiers abandoned the vehicles and Hamas eliminated them all with anti-tank weapons.
The senior officer chose not to disclose his name to the rabbi “to avoid arrest for revealing state secrets,” and the incident was never announced by the army or reported in the Israeli press.
On 18 November, in the third week of the ground operation, David Oren Baruch, the director of Mount Herzl Military Cemetery, provided another anecdote suggesting a soldier death toll much larger than what was publicly known.
He revealed that “We are now going through a period where every hour there is a funeral, every hour and a half a funeral.”
“I was asked to open a large number of graves. Only in the Mount Herzl cemetery did we bury 50 soldiers in 48 hours,” Baruch explained further.
Military control of the narrative
The Israeli military’s reluctance to disclose the number of wounded soldiers further adds to suspicions of underreporting.
Unlike in past wars, the Israeli military had refused to make any statement about the number of wounded in Gaza. This finally changed on 10 December, just before Haaretz planned to publish its report on the number of soldier casualties based instead on hospital sources.
Haaretz noted “a considerable and unexplained gap between the data reported by the military and that from the hospitals.” The hospital data the outlet obtained showed the number of wounded soldiers was “twice as high as the army’s numbers.”
The Israeli newspaper also highlighted the military’s tight control over the data reported by the hospitals themselves, explaining that members of the army spokesperson’s unit “are in the hospitals around the clock. Every press release regarding wounded soldiers and replies to media queries must receive their approval.”
Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth similarly reported on 9 December that, “Every day, about 60 new wounded are received only by the rehabilitation department” and that “the cumulative numbers since October 7 are astronomical: More than 2,000 soldiers, policemen and other members of the security forces have been officially recognized as disabled.”
“We have never been through anything even similar to this,” explained Limor Luria, head of the rehabilitation department at the Ministry of Defense.
“More than 58 percent of the wounded who are taken in by us have severe injuries of arms and legs, including those that require amputations. About 12 percent are internal injuries – spleen, kidney, tearing of internal organs. There are also head and eye injuries.”
In addition to thousands of horrific physical injuries, Israel is also facing “a tsunami of trauma,” the paper added. “I sat with a fighter who took three bullets. A physically torn person, a very serious injury,” Luria added, “but his main struggle is with the sights he saw.”
One injured soldier, Elisha Madan, recounted to a crowd how his fellow soldiers were killed in front of his eyes. “I came back from the dead alone. My entire squad died, and I was on the verge of death. I survived thanks to your prayers,” Madan said while seated in his wheelchair.
‘All warfare is based on deception’ – Sun Tzu
Since 7 October, the Israeli military leadership has reported falsehoods about almost every facet of that day’s events, and the war that followed.
They lied about Hamas beheading babies, they covered up burning alive their own soldiers and civilians with Apache helicopter and tank fire, and they continue to lie about pretending to care about the safety of Palestinian civilians, who they have mercilessly bombed for months with only the slightest pretext of targeting Hamas fighters and infrastructure.
As a result, while it is impossible to know the true numbers of Israeli soldiers killed in battle against the Palestinian resistance, there is ample reason to question the veracity of the information provided by the US-backed occupation army.
By Dr Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | December 19, 2023
By Zoran Kusovac | Strategic Culture Foundation | December 19, 2023
Dramatic news reports, claims and videos have emerged from both sides involved in the Gaza fighting throughout the past week.
The week started with the Israeli army releasing several videos of Palestinians stripped to their underwear being marched through urban ruins. Israel’s PR machine disregarded the Palestinian outcry that followed. Israel staunchly asserted that the men were Hamas fighters and that their alleged mass surrenders signified that the end of the Palestinian group was close, even as many Palestinians and independent observers insisted that the men were civilians who had been treated against the laws of war by being publicly humiliated.
For its part, Hamas stuck to its usual practice of pushing its cause through video releases – skilfully edited to enhance the desired effects – purporting to confirm its constant and numerous successes against Israeli invaders, mostly showing hits scored against armoured vehicles.
Then came the news that stunned Israel and put a big question mark on its official line of Hamas being on the verge of collapse. First, nine soldiers were killed in a single operation in the Shujaiya neighbourhood of Gaza City on Tuesday. That shock was followed by another one on Friday, with the Israeli army admitting that it killed three Israeli captives, having mistaken them for enemies – even though they held white flags.
So what is really happening on the ground in Gaza?
Nothing we did not predict weeks ago: The war has entered a difficult, unpredictable and bloody phase of full-scale urban warfare where gains are small and slow, and losses can be huge.
Combat in narrow and cramped streets of old cities is known to be one of the most difficult ways to fight a war. Classic military theory calls for defended cities to be surrounded and blockaded by units just strong enough to prevent the defenders from breaking out, while the main force continues advancing and taking territory.
But the fight in Gaza is not about conquering fields and beaches – Israel’s proclaimed goal is to destroy Hamas. To do that, the first step is to control the ground where the enemy operates: the cities.
In the old days, cities needed strong walls to defend themselves, but in the last 100 years, weapons have advanced at a rapid rate, causing a change in tactics. Successful resistance against enemy attacks no longer depends on huge, expensive static bastions. Nowadays, small but potent man-portable weapons whose destructive power is hugely disproportionate to their size, such as anti-tank rocket launchers, grenade throwers, small mortars, assault rifles and many others, allow the defenders to turn each house and every street into a formidable defensive position.
From the 1940s to this day, almost all attempts to conquer cities held by determined defenders have ended in failure. The few victories attackers achieved were so costly that they often ended the offensive capabilities of those armies pushing into cities.
In their own ways, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Berlin, Dien Bien Phu, Vukovar, Sarajevo, Grozny and Fallujah – some successfully defended, others eventually succumbing to attacks – all confirmed the military wisdom that urban warfare should be avoided whenever possible.
Israel could not avoid urban warfare in Gaza. To have a chance of destroying Hamas, it has to deny it its operating ground, the three biggest urban agglomerations in the strip: Gaza City, Khan Younis and Rafah.
The second phase started with Israeli forces reaching the suburbs, first of Gaza City and then, after the temporary ceasefire expired, of Khan Younis. Treading slowly and carefully in expectation of a concentrated Hamas response, the Israeli military completed the encirclement of those two urban areas.
It would be naive to assume that Israel’s generals hoped that by isolating the two biggest built-up areas in the Gaza Strip, they would seriously impair the ability of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, to fight back.
In reality, the encirclement of the two city centres is not a classic one where troops within the blockade cannot be reinforced nor receive any supplies. Hamas still has an unknown but probably major part of its tunnel network intact and can move in and out. They have some difficulties in doing so but Hamas fighters are not locked in.
Aware of the menace that tunnels present but also of the grave hazard of taking the fight into them, Israel has tried several approaches. It has destroyed as many tunnel entrances as it has found, mostly in the areas under its control, but many others that remain keep the danger acute.
After several attempts to send troops underground that ended in disaster, with troops falling casualty to Hamas booby traps, the high command abandoned that approach. It then reportedly mulled the idea of filling tunnels with seawater, claiming that the test-flooding was successful but it has not yet decided to mount a full-scale deluge operation.
This week’s Israeli actions on the ground strongly suggest that the Israeli army leadership realises that the only way towards achieving its proclaimed goal of annihilating Hamas is by taking, holding and controlling the ground throughout the currently surrounded centres of Gaza City and Khan Younis.
That in itself would not guarantee victory but could create conditions to squeeze Hamas fighters into tunnels, after which Israeli forces could block and destroy all entrances.
Flushing Hamas out would probably take weeks of heavy urban warfare with many more instances of massive losses – on both sides.
The more Israeli soldiers get killed in inner cities of Gaza, without still being able to claim the destruction of Hamas, the more the support for the continuation of the military operation would ebb. At some point, calls from Israel to stop the war could become louder than those encouraging it to continue.
Press TV – December 19, 2023
A Geneva-based rights group has called for an urgent international investigation into torture and murder of Palestinian abductees held in Israel’s “Guantanamo-like” jails.
In a statement released on Monday, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said it had gathered testimonies confirming recent reports in Israeli media about the regime’s field execution of the Gaza abductees.
The Sde Teman Israeli army camp has been turned into “a new Guantanamo-like prison,” where detainees lose their lives after being subjected to extreme torture and mistreatment, it added.
The Israeli army uses open-air chicken coops to house the inmates and withhold food or drink for long periods of time.
The rights group also noted that the Palestinians held in Sde Teman are caged in inhumane conditions, blindfolded and subjected to harsh interrogations with their hands tied.
It further said that turning on lights at night, as well as barring the abductees from using phones and meeting lawyers and representatives from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) are among the torture tactics being used at the Israeli jail.
The testimonies affirm that multiple elderly abductees endured cruel beatings and humiliating treatment, Euro-Med said.
One of the released detainees, who was speaking on condition of anonymity, said that he witnessed Israeli soldiers directly shooting and killing five abductees in separate incidents.
Earlier, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the deaths of six Palestinians in Israeli prisons since the beginning of Israel’s ongoing bloody war on Gaza.
Despite evidence of violence preceding the inmates’ death or medical neglect – their cause of death was not established, according to the report.
It added that Just 71 out of 500 Palestinians arrested during the Gaza war have been brought before Israeli courts, and that the remaining detainees have been moved to prisons run by the Israeli Prison Service or to detention facilities run by the regime’s so-called internal security service, Shin Bet.
Previously, the Euro-Med field teams documented the detention of more than 1,200 Palestinian civilians in random Israeli arrest campaigns across Gaza during Israel’s onslaught on the besieged territory.
The abductees were subjected to all forms of beatings and ill-treatment during their detention and purposefully left blindfolded, nearly nude, and kneeling on the ground upon their release.
Israel waged the devastating war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian Hamas resistance group carried out Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.
Since the start of the aggression against Gaza, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 19,453 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 52,286 others.
Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under the rubble in Gaza, which is under “complete siege” by Israel.
RT | December 18, 2023
The European Union announced on Monday that it was taking “formal infringement proceedings” against Elon Musk’s X social media platform over a recently implemented law intended to crack down on illegal content and disinformation online.
The announcement of the probe comes weeks after X (formerly Twitter) was asked to provide assurances that it was complying with the terms of the European bloc’s Digital Service Act. Under the law, which came into effect in August, a company can be fined up to 6% of its annual global income or banned from operating in the EU if it is found to have breached the sweeping legislation.
“Today we open formal infringement proceedings against X,” Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner responsible for the law’s enforcement, wrote in a post on the social network on Monday.
Breton added that the move had been taken in response to a “suspected breach of obligations to counter illegal content and disinformation; suspected breach of transparency obligations,” and “suspected deceptive design of user interface.”
The probe will also look at the effectiveness of X’s ‘community notes,’ in which users can fact-check or provide comments on the accuracy of certain posts.
Responding to the charge on Monday, X said it was “cooperating with the regulatory process,” and added that it was “important that this process remains free of political influence and follows the law.”
The platform, which was subject to a multi-billion-dollar takeover by Elon Musk last year, said it was focused on “creating a safe and inclusive environment” for its users, which it said it balances against “protecting freedom of expression.” At the time of the takeover, Musk branded himself as a “free speech absolutist.”
On October 10, the EU warned X in a formal letter that it had received “indications” that the social media platform was “being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the EU” related to Hamas’ attack in Israel on October 7.
In a letter to Breton, X chief executive Linda Yaccarino responded to say the firm was “working to address the operational needs of this fast-moving and evolving conflict.” She added that X had removed hundreds of Hamas-affiliated accounts from the service.
Earlier this year, X was among several tech giants to sign up to an EU code of conduct to prepare for the launch of the Digital Services Act in August. However, X withdrew from the agreement in May, prompting backlash from Breton. “You can run but you can’t hide,” he warned Musk and X.
By Wyatt Reed | The Grayzone | December 17, 2023
Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021.
The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists.
The fallout from December 5 House Committe on Antisemitism hearings has already cost University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill her job, while demands by billionaire pro-Israel donors and politicians for the firing of Harvard’s Claudine Gay have grown by the day. Both stand accused of refusing to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews, even though no such calls have taken place on their campuses.
Meanwhile, little attention has been paid to the forces orchestrating the carefully choreographed, heavily-funded campaign to crush Palestine solidarity activism on campus.
The law firm leading the assault on the universities has included David Friedman, the former ambassador to Israel under Donald Trump, among its partners. Until 2021, this firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres, was registered with the US Department of Justice as a foreign agent on behalf of an Israeli principal.
The firm’s clients include associates of a jailed Ukrainian billionaire who bankrolled neo-Nazi militias, along with a who’s who of corporations accused of defrauding and even killing consumers.
Meanwhile, the “Jewish student” witnesses who set the stage for the attacks on Magill and her fellow university presidents at the House Antisemitism Committee were employed on at least a semi-professional basis by Israeli lobbying cutouts.
They included Jonathan Frieden, a Harvard Law student who moonlights as president of Alliance for Israel; MIT graduate student Talia Khan, the president of MIT Israel Alliance; and Bella Ingber, co-president of NYU’s Students Supporting Israel.
Israel lobbyist moonlighting as UPenn student calls for Covid-style lockdowns on Palestine protests
The most harrowing — and clearly questionable — claims furnished during the December 5 congressional hearings came courtesy of Eyal Yakoby, an Israeli-American senior at UPenn.
“Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve… read the statement, ‘Ninety-percent of pigs are gas chambered!’ on the pavement as I walked to class,” Yakoby moaned.
The most likely explanation for the appearance of this phrase on UPenn’s Locust Walk was not the presence of chalk-wielding neo-Nazis but rather, that of animal welfare advocates, who were presumably calling attention to the fact that most pigs are killed by slaughterhouses which employ a grotesque method of gas inhalation exposed by activists in late 2022.
“‘You’re a dirty little Jew and you deserve to die’ are not words said by Hamas, but by my classmates and my professors,” Yakoby claimed during a December 5 press conference convened by the House GOP leadership. Oddly, he neglected to name a single student or UPenn employee responsible for such inflammatory remarks.
Conjuring up images of a campus overwhelmed by Hamas-linked hatemongers, Yakoby seemed to call for imposing Covid-era lockdowns on students protesting Israel’s blood-drenched assault on the besieged Gaza Strip.
“During Covid, strict guidelines governed everything from class attendance and graduation walks,” he said. “But now, when students and faculty defy policies to intimidate Jewish students, where is the same resolute enforcement?”
Lawsuits target top US campuses with flimsy, unprovable allegations
Just hours after his appearance alongside members of Congress, Yakoby filed a lawsuit against UPenn, claiming the university violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by failing to respond to antisemitism.
Yakoby’s lawsuit was filled with dubious, highly politicized accusations, including complaints about the chanting of “antisemitic slurs” such as “Intifada revolution” and “from the river to the sea.”
A closer examination of other incidents described in the lawsuit against Penn reveals a great number of them appear to have been seriously exaggerated or manufactured out of whole cloth.
The most ‘threatening’ episode described by the Yakoby, for example, consists of a man who “threateningly approached him” and “yelled ‘fuck you.’” As a result of this experience — and the agony apparently endured when the plaintiff observed other students removing posters showing Israeli captives — the suit claims that “Yakoby missed his next two classes” because he was “shaken by these escalating acts of hate.”
The vast majority of claims of overt antisemitism appear to consist of statements by students and professors who criticized the state of Israel but generally took pains to distinguish between the political ideology of Zionism and the religion of Judaism.
Elsewhere, the lawsuit accuses professors of antisemitism because they questioned now-debunked Israeli atrocity propaganda about the October 7 attacks, including a demonstrably false claim by Yakoby that the “killing of 40 [Israeli] babies” by Palestinian militants had been “confirmed.”
Many of the alleged incidents described as “assaults” fail to meet basic evidentiary standards, leaving the court with no option but to take the plaintiffs’ word that the contents of the complaint happened as described.
Claims that a Jewish student was taunted with exhortations to “keep walking you dirty little Jew,” for instance, are typical of the highly suspect claims found throughout the lawsuit.
Indeed, no proof of this alleged interaction was provided, nor did the plaintiff’s provide even a vague sketch of the assailant’s identity. Instead, the entire emphasis is placed on the supposed lack of “sympathy” subsequently shown to the student by a professor who decided not to award her an “extension on her class lecture note assignment.”
The plaintiffs also took aim at Palestinian academic and poet Refaat Alareer, who had been invited to a literary festival at Penn before being murdered in a December 6 Israeli strike described by human rights monitors as a “targeted assassination.”
The demands of the pro-Israel activists include “terminating deans, administrators, professors and other employees” who they say are “responsible for the antisemitic abuse permeating the school, whether because they engaged in it or permitted it; suspending or expelling students who engage in such conduct… the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism,” and “compensatory, consequential, and punitive [financial] damages.”
Israel lobbyists are also targeting America’s most expensive campus, New York University, leveling a litany of flimsy and unprovable antisemitism allegations to extract heavy financial damages, including a full refund of tuition. Bella Ingber, who also featured prominently at the House Republican press conference, is a leading face of the NYU lawsuit.
During the Republican presser, Ingber compared conditions at NYU to life under the German Nazi Reich.
“Since Oct. 7,” Ingber said, “the unmistakable anti-Semitism that I have experienced on campus is reminiscent of the Jew-hatred I’ve heard about from my grandparents, Holocaust survivors who experienced first-hand the deafening silence of their neighbors in Poland and Germany when the Nazis first rose to power.”
The plaintiffs of the Israel lobby-led lawsuit “request that a judgment be entered in each of their favor, and against NYU” which would see the university “terminating deans, administrators, professors and other employees responsible for the antisemitic abuse permeating the school, whether because they engaged in it or permitted it… suspending or expelling students who engage in such conduct,” and “compensatory and punitive damages.”
In other words, the lawsuit seeks campus-wide regime change, replacing any and all administrators with those willing to take instructions from the Israel lobby.
“Bibi Netanyahu’s guys in the Trump White House” lead legal assault on campus speech
If the language of the NYU lawsuit sounds familiar, that is because it was brought by the same high-powered corporate legal firm presiding over the legal action against UPenn: Kasowitz Benson Torres, best known for its work on behalf of former President Donald Trump. The firm’s leadership has been aptly described as “Bibi Netanyahu’s guys in the Trump White House.”
The law firm was known as Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman until 2017, when its partner, David Friedman left to become US Ambassador to Israel. Friedman has been credited with working alongside former presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner to pressure Trump into adopting more radically anti-Palestinian positions.
The firm was founded in 1993 by attorney Marc Kasowitz, who gained national notoriety for his work representing Big Tobacco, describing himself as one of the “most feared lawyers in the United States.” Though reports describe him as a strong Trump ally and a go-to source for the former president, financial disclosures show Kasowitz and his wife have donated thousands of dollars to Democratic politicians as well, including former President Barack Obama, current President Joe Biden, and Sen. Chuck Schumer. Also employed by the firm is former Sen. Joe Lieberman, a hardcore neoconservative who now serves as chairman of the pro-war United Against a Nuclear Iran. While in Congress, Lieberman advocated for moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem as far back as 1995.
A quick glance at Kasowitz Benson Torres’ recent handiwork reveals a lengthy track record of defending Goliath from David. For example, its website boasts of successfully defending Comcast against a class-action lawsuit by angry customers. Other high-profile clients include Israeli pharmaceutical giant Teva, best known for causing the ongoing worldwide shortage of a vincristine — a crucial drug in treating most types of childhood cancers with no known substitute — after it deemed production insufficiently profitable.
In 2019, the firm signed on to represent the US-based co-defendants of notoriously-corrupt Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who now languishes in a Kiev prison and is known for bankrolling current president Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian military’s neo-Nazi Azov Regiment. Ukrainian financial giant Privatbank maintains that Kolomoisky and his associates defrauded the bank out of billions of dollars.
A year later, Kasowitz Benson Torres was required to register as a foreign agent with the US Justice Department after agreeing to represent an Israeli real estate developer specializing in building luxury condos for ulra-Orthodox Jews living in illegal settlements.
This November, The Grayzone revealed a leaked letter signed by David Friedman and delivered to NYU administrators in advance of the lawsuit. The letter demanded NYU establish a position dedicated to “combating antisemitism,” and disband student clubs dedicated to Palestine activism.
Now, the law firm’s crusade to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists is spreading across the country. This November, two of the firm’s partners revealed that the legal team plans similar suits for Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, MIT, Stanford, and UC-Berkeley, accusing them all of “deliberate indifference” to the supposed plight of Jewish students.
MEMO | December 18, 2023
The Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs Commission has warned that Israel is subjecting Palestinian female prisoners held in Damoun Prison, especially those randomly arrested from the besieged Gaza Strip, to “inhumane” treatment and “horrific” detention conditions including severe punishments on a daily basis.
In a report issued yesterday, the rights group quoted its lawyer saying that since 7 October, Israeli occupation forces have launched a massive arrest campaign in the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem, inside Israel and in Gaza, specifically targeting female prisoners, who were tortured and abused from the moment of their arrest.
“The female prisoners were subjected to degrading treatment including beating and insults, strip searches, isolation and deprivation of the most basic rights,” the lawyer said.
The prison administration deliberately singled out female detainees from the besieged Gaza Strip for the worst type of torture, according to one female prisoner.
In her testimony, the prisoner said: “A few days ago, an elderly woman [80 years old] from Gaza arrived at the department, walking on a crutch and without a cover on her head. Her body and clothes were covered with blood and she appeared to suffer from Alzheimer’s.”
According to the report, all the female prisoners from the Gaza Strip had their clothes taken away and replaced with summer clothes, and had been tortured before arriving at Damoun Prison and were subjected to physical and verbal abuse.
“Some of them had spent seven days outdoors in the rain and in the cold, and all of them arrived at the prison in a deplorable condition both physically and psychologically.”
The report lists the case of a female prisoner from Gaza who is a mother of four children and who was forced to hand her children to an unknown man in the street when she was detained.
“Other female prisoners were also forced to leave their children in the street when they were arrested by the Israeli army forces,” the detainee said.
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By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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