17 cases filed against pro-Palestine protesters across 7 states in India: Report
MEMO | September 16, 2024
Yemeni forces shoot down another American spy drone, third in a week
Press TV – September 16, 2024
Yemeni Armed Forces have shot down another advanced American drone in support of Palestinians, who have come under a US-enabled Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip, and in protest at Washington’s aggression against Yemen.
The MQ-9 Reaper was struck in the airspace of Dhamar Province in western Yemen on Monday.
The heavy aircraft, which is used for dual combat and spying purposes, is worth around $35 million.
The drone was the third aircraft of the type to be brought down by the forces in the span of a week and the 10th one to face such a fate since October 7.
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The forces have been carrying out numerous strikes against the occupied Palestinian territories since that day, when the Israeli regime began the war on Gaza.
Their most daring pro-Palestinian strike of the type came on Sunday, when they attacked an Israeli military site in Tel Aviv with a new hypersonic ballistic missile.
Also on Sunday, leader of Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement once again underscored the country’s support for Palestinians in the face of the Israeli genocide, saying the operations would continue until the regime ended the war and the siege.
At least 41,206 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been killed so far during the brutal Israeli onslaught, which enjoys unquestioning political, military, and intelligence support on the part of the United States.
The forces have also been targeting Israeli ships and vessels heading towards or away from the occupied territories as means of trying to force the regime into stopping the war and a siege that it has been simultaneously imposing on Gaza.
The United States has, on the other hand, been staging attacks against Yemen as means of trying to stop these operations.
Palestinian fighter from Shatila refugee camp dies after 38 years in Austrian prison
By Dieter Reinisch | Press TV | September 15, 2024
On Friday, September 13, 2024, Tawfiq Chaovali, alias Imad Omran, a Palestinian resistance figure, passed away in Stein prison in Krems, Austria, after almost 40 years of incarceration.
Chaovali joined the Palestinian resistance at a young age and was actively involved in the fight against the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982 as a Palestinian refugee in the country.
Following the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut in September 1982, he participated in a retaliatory operation targeting the Israeli airline El Al at Vienna-Schwechat Airport in 1985.
Born in 1960, Chaovali grew up in the Shatila refugee camp, established in southern Lebanon in 1949 for Palestinian refugees. At the young age of 16, in 1975, he joined the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).
His father was killed in an Israeli air raid near Sidon, a city in southern Lebanon.
In the summer of 1982, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Chaovali fled to Tunisia. However, he returned to Lebanon a year later. Upon his return, he joined the Abu Nidal Organization, a Fatah-affiliated resistance group, to fight against the Israeli regime.
In late 1985, Chaovali traveled to Austria via Hungary. Just days after his arrival, on December 27, 1985, an operation was carried out at Vienna-Schwechat Airport, which coincided with a similar operation at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport.
At around 9:00 AM, three attackers stormed a section of the departure hall at the Vienna airport, throwing a smoke grenade and three hand grenades toward the check-in counter for El Al and opening fire with machine guns.
Four people, including one of the attackers, were immediately killed, and 45 others were injured, 18 of them critically. Two victims were en route to Tel Aviv to permanently settle in the occupied territories.
Some reports claimed that passengers on board included Israeli military pilots involved in the Lebanon invasion. This claim, however, was later refuted by the PLO.
The Abu Nidal group fighters had entered Austria using Tunisian passports obtained in Libya. Two of the attackers were wounded and captured after a lengthy car chase, while Abdel Aziz Merzoughi, one of the gunmen, died after their vehicle was stopped on a road near the Slovak capital, Bratislava.
Chaovali and Mongi Ben Saadaoui, the other two attackers, were subsequently arrested by Austrian police with severe injuries.
Initially, both men refused to provide statements. “They had no ID cards. When asked if they were Palestinians, they answered, ‘I speak English,’” reported the Austrian newspaper Die Presse on December 28, 1985.
It later emerged that both of them were Palestinian refugees from the Sabra and Shatila camps, and Chaovali had witnessed the horrible massacre firsthand.
They had been trained for the mission in Lebanon and had met with the Rome attackers in Switzerland. The Abu Nidal Group, also known as the Fatah Revolutionary Council, claimed responsibility for the attacks in Vienna and Rome as retaliation for the massacres committed by Israeli forces and their allies in Lebanon.
Notably, the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, carried out on September 16, 1982, by the Israeli occupation and the Phalangist militia, resulted in the rape, torture, and murder of between 2,000 and 3,500 Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians.
Chaovali and his comrades sought revenge for these atrocities, as well as for numerous other massacres carried out by Israeli forces and their proxies in Lebanon.
One of the attackers who survived the Rome assault had also lost his father in the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
On the evening of December 27, 1985, an anonymous caller contacted a Spanish radio station, claiming that the Abu Nidal Organization, or Fatah Revolutionary Council, was responsible for the attacks in Vienna and Rome. The group later officially claimed responsibility under the name “Cells of the Arab Fedayeen.”
This was not the first attack carried out by the Abu Nidal group in Vienna. On May 1, 1981, Heinz Nittal, head of the Austria-Israel Friendship Society, a Zionist lobby group, was killed in a similar operation.
Founded by Abu Nidal in 1974 after his split from the PLO, the Abu Nidal Organization operated out of training camps in Lebanon and Libya. British journalist Patrick Seale, in his book about Abu Nidal, recounts an incident in Vienna in 1988, where he met a woman who had survived the airport attack:
“I attended a party hosted by the Friends of Palestine and was struck by a woman who spoke passionately about the Palestinian cause. A former Austrian foreign minister, who was also present, told me that she had been a passenger at Vienna airport during the attack,” he stated.
“A grenade had landed at her feet but failed to explode. Despite this, she remained a fervent supporter of the Palestinians, saying, ‘They do these things out of despair. I support them even more now.’”
In 1987, Chaovali and Ben Saadaoui were sentenced to life imprisonment in Austria. Ben Saadaoui was released in 2008 after serving 22 years and was banned from re-entering Austria for ten years.
Chaovali, meanwhile, received an additional 19-year sentence for attempting to escape in 1995 and his involvement in a hostage-taking incident at Graz-Karlau prison in 1996.
Abu Nidal himself died under mysterious circumstances in Baghdad in 2002, with some reports suggesting he was killed by West-backed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s secret service.
After 38 years in Austrian prisons, Chaovali passed away at the age of 64 in Stein prison, Lower Austria, on the morning of Friday, September 13, 2024.
His friends and supporters told Press TV that Chaovali was known for his courage and steadfast commitment to the Palestinian cause. He died without ever giving up his claim for the freedom and liberation of Palestine from the Israeli occupation.
Dieter Reinisch is a Press TV correspondent based in Vienna, Austria.
Yemen says hit south of Tel Aviv with new hypersonic ballistic missile
Press TV – September 15, 2024
The Yemeni armed forces have struck an Israeli target near Tel Aviv with a new hypersonic ballistic missile after the occupying regime failed to repel the attack and intercept the long-range advanced projectile.
Brigadier General Yahya Saree, the Yemeni army’s spokesman, announced in a brief televised statement on Sunday that the missile force in the military had carried out a qualitative operation striking a military target of the Israeli enemy in the Jaffa area, south of Tel Aviv, in occupied Palestine.
“The operation was carried out with a new hypersonic ballistic missile that managed to reach its target, and the enemy’s defense systems failed to intercept and confront it,” Saree said.
“It crossed a distance of 2040 km in 11 and a half minutes, and caused a state of fear and panic among the Zionists, as more than two million Zionists headed to shelters for the first time in the history of the Israeli enemy.”
The spokesman said the operation was part of the fifth phase of the battle against the Israeli enemy, and successfully reached its target by overcoming all obstacles, including American and Israeli interception systems on land and sea.
“The geographical challenges, the American-British aggression, and the monitoring, espionage and interception systems will not prevent beloved Yemen from performing its religious, moral and humanitarian duty in solidarity with the Palestinian people,” Saree underlined.
“The Israeli enemy should expect more strikes and specific operations to come as we approach the first anniversary of the blessed October 7th Operation, including responding to its criminal aggression on the city of Hudaydah, and continuous supportive operations for the oppressed Palestinian people.”
Nasruddin Amer, a member of the political bureau of Yemen’s popular Ansarullah resistance movement, earlier said in a Hebrew-language post on X that the missile fired from Yemen reached Israel after “20 missiles failed to intercept” it.
Amer also described the Yemeni attack as the “beginning.”
Leader of Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement Abdul-Malik al-Houthi censured in a televised speech on Saturday the Israeli regime’s nearly year-old onslaught on the besieged Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank with US-made lethal munitions.
The Ansarullah leader said the United States is definitely a partner in Israel’s crimes in Palestine, fully supporting the regime’s interests and willing to act against any Arab country.
He also warned that the Israeli enemy continues to impose a siege, torture prisoners, and engage in other brutal practices against Palestinians.
Yemenis have declared their open support for Palestine’s struggle against the Israeli occupation since the regime launched a devastating war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, after the territory’s Palestinian resistance movements carried out a surprise retaliatory attack, dubbed Operation Al-Aqsa Storm, against the occupying entity.
The Yemeni Armed Forces have said that they won’t stop their attacks until unrelenting Israeli ground and aerial offensives in Gaza end.
So far, Israel has killed at least 41,182 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 95,280 others.
Israel far from defeating Hamas in Rafah, ‘Israel’ in an ‘endless tunnel’
Al Mayadeen | September 13, 2024
The Israeli military has not managed to defeat even a single battalion or company of the Hamas Resistance forces in Rafah, a member of the Israeli Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Security Committee said on Saturday.
Amit Halevi’s criticism came after the Israeli occupation forces (IOF) announced on Thursday that it had “defeated Hamas’ Rafah Brigades,” and that it now has “completed operational control over the entire urban area.”
Halevi, quoted by the Israeli Channel 7website, stated that the army claims to have killed over 2,000 fighters in Rafah, however, the actual number is significantly lower, noting that the inflated figure “doesn’t even represent 25%” of the Resistance’s fighting force.
He further highlighted that “Israel” had only destroyed a small fraction of the underground tunnels in Rafah, adding however that “even those (tunnels) were not all destroyed, but rather sealed, making it easy for Hamas to reactivate them.”
The senior Israeli official noted that the Resistance in Rafah holds a massive stockpile of weapons, and the amount uncovered by the IOF is minimal in comparison. He emphasized that “Israel remains far from defeating or destroying Hamas.”
Elsewhere in his criticism, Halevi described the messages coming from the Israeli army spokesperson as misleading for the public and the government.
“Every soldier who entered Khan Younis for the fourth time or the al-Zaytoun neighborhood for the fifth time knows that nothing has been defeated,” he said in reference to the repeated Israeli incursions into these areas, despite previous declarations that they were “under control” and claims that the Resistance groups there had already been “defeated”.
“With the current operational methods, the matter will never be settled, because for every [Resistance fighter] killed, two more are born; for every injured [fighter], three new fighters are recruited; and for every piece of weaponry seized by the Israeli army, five more are produced underground in Gaza.”
Halevi further remarked that the method the occupation army uses in the “war of shafts,” as described by the head of Shin Bet, cannot lead to defeating Hamas in quantitative terms, referring to the number of fighters and the weapons they possess in Gaza.
Therefore, “Israel” has no strategic achievements but is instead in an “endless tunnel,” according to Halevi.
Israeli forces restrict access to scene of Turkish-American activist’s killing
Press TV – September 13, 2024
The Israeli regime’s forces have restricted access to the murder scene of a Turkish-American activist, who was killed by the Israeli military last week while protesting the regime’s illegal settlement construction activities.
Reporting on Friday, the official Palestinian Wafa news agency said the forces had placed military checkpoints at intersections in the town of Beita, south of the city of Nablus, in the northern part of the occupied West Bank.
Mahmoud Barham, head of the Beita Municipal Council, said the troops would prevent Palestinians from crossing the intersections to reach Mount Sabih, where the atrocity had taken place.
The activist, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, was killed last Friday while protesting alongside locals in Beita against the settlement of Evyatar.
An autopsy report confirmed that the 26-year-old had been killed by an Israeli sniper’s bullet to the head, Nablus Governor Ghassan Daghlas said on Saturday.
The Israeli military has alleged that Aysenur was killed during an effort by the forces to quell a “riot.”
Available footage of the protest as well as numerous witness accounts, however, contradict the claim.
The United Nations has called for an investigation of the crime.
“I can tell you that we would want to see a full investigation of the circumstances and that people should be held accountable,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said at a news conference following the activist’s death.
According to Wafa, Aysenur is one of 17 people who have been killed since the Evyatar settlement’s emergence in 2021.
Israel Suddenly Has A Problem With Attacks On Population Centers
By Caitlin Johnstone | August 13, 2024
Israel has been loudly and melodramatically fretting about an impending retaliatory attack from Iran and Hezbollah which it claims will likely include strikes in the vicinity of civilian population centers. This is of course rich coming from the regime that has spent ten months turning Gaza into a flattened wasteland of rubble and civilian corpses.
A Washington Post article titled “Israel anticipates direct attack from Iran; U.S. deploys more vessels to region” contains the following interesting paragraph:
“Israel has communicated to Iran and Hezbollah that targeting civilian population centers would be considered a red line for Israel, which is preparing for a spectrum of scenarios, including one in which Hezbollah attacks first and is joined by Iran afterward, said Yoel Guzansky, a former official on Israel’s National Security Council who is now a senior fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.”
Israel’s fretting about attacks on its population centers is echoed in a recent Axios post titled “New Israeli intelligence suggests Iran prepares to attack Israel within days,” whose Israeli intel sources “said the attacks by Hezbollah and Iran are likely to be bigger than the one conducted by Iran last April and include the launching of missiles and drones at military targets in central Israel, including in the vicinity of civilian population centers.”
This claim that Iran may launch attacks “in the vicinity of civilian population centers” is funny in a couple of different ways. Firstly, the IDF headquarters is located smack dab in the heart of Tel Aviv, so any attack on the hub of the Israeli war machine would necessarily occur in the vicinity of civilian population centers. Secondly, it’s funny because Israel has spent years justifying its attacks on Palestinian population centers by claiming Hamas is using “human shields” by surrounding themselves with civilians to deter attacks.
Placing a legitimate military target in the heart of a civilian population center and then declaring a “red line” against attacking civilian population centers where legitimate military targets are located—after launching an insanely escalatory assassination in Tehran — is obviously using civilians as human shields. And what’s wild is that Israel’s own claims about Hamas using human shields in the same way have been conclusively debunked, firstly by the self-evident fact that the presence of civilians obviously doesn’t deter Israeli attacks at all, and secondly by revelations that the IDF deliberately waits to launch airstrikes on suspected Hamas members until they are at home with their families, thereby ensuring the maximum number of civilian deaths possible.
It goes without saying that Israel does not have any sincere concern for civilian lives, at least for anyone who’s paid attention to its actions at any time between the state’s inception and today. But it is worth highlighting these contradictions anyway, to contextualize all the histrionic garment-rending we’re going to witness should an attack on or near civilian population centers occur in the coming days.
‘Israel’s’ Bloody Negotiations Strategy in Gaza
By Jamal Kanj | Al Mayadeen | September 12, 2024
Fifty-two years ago, almost to the day, on September 8, 1972, I survived the first of many air and sea raids on my refugee camp in northern Lebanon. I was less than two hundred yards from the area across the river where a group of us young kids met every day, between 4 and 5 p.m., to play in the large field, swim in the river, or the Mediterranean Sea.
At first, I heard what sounded like a humming plane. Before I could even turn my head to look up at the sky, I was startled by the booming sound of low-flying fighter jets passing overhead, dropping massive rockets onto the open field. The first bomb exploded in the northwest area of the field, creating a massive fireball—a black column of smoke intertwined with a glowing red blaze. The shockwave threw me off my bike. Soot filled the air and fragments rained down like strafing bullets all around me.
In less than 15 minutes, the once grassy green play area of approximately 20 acres was transformed into a lunar landscape, pocked with craters. One pit was so large and deep that groundwater filled the hole.
If the Israeli air raid had occurred just five or ten minutes later, I would have been in the middle of the field, playing with other 14-year-old kids. My friend Barakat, who was already there and likely had been eagerly anticipating my arrival, was killed. The raid left many unexploded devices and time-delayed bombs, making it difficult to recover his body until the next day. Our neighbor Mahdi was also killed, buried under the plowed soil. Years later, his skeleton was discovered when the area was being graded.
I’m reminded of this today, September 10, 2024, as I watch footage of the huge crater left behind by an American-made 2,000-pound MK-84 bomb. The bombs were dropped in the middle of the night on 20 tents housing displaced civilians in an Israeli-designated “safe area” in al-Mawasi, southern Gaza.
Early in the morning, the Israeli army issued its disinformation boilerplate communiqué, declaring the raid was a “precise strike” on senior resistance members. But videos from the crater, where tents lay buried under the sand, suggest that “Israel” targeted civilians in a supposed safe area.
Reading about the “precise strike” on a BBC site took me back 52 years. Almost three hours after the raid on my camp, I remember my father and our neighbors gathering around the radio to listen to the 7 p.m. BBC Arabic news. I still recall how they stopped breathing, their eyes wide, mouths agape, as the BBC quoted an Israeli army spokesman claiming “Israel” had targeted a military base in Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon.
While I don’t remember the exact number of the killed and injured that afternoon, I know for certain that 100 percent were civilians—mostly young boys and girls, with at least one elderly man among them. I felt then as helpless as many of those who were sleeping on September 10 in their “safe” tents, unable to tell their story to the world. The photos left behind by the US-manufactured 2,000-pound bombs, however, expose “Israel’s” lies and the complicity of the managed Western media.
It is utterly despicable that the lecterns at the White House and the State Department have become platforms to market such lies, emboldening “Israel’s” intransigence and whitewashing its genocide. Especially egregious is the disinformation spread by White House National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby, who blamed the Palestinians as “the main obstacle” to a ceasefire. This brazen lie comes less than a week after the leak of a document pointing to new conditions that were added in late July by Benjamin Netanyahu to Joe Biden’s proposal from May 27, which torpedoed the ceasefire agreement.
After the Palestinians rejected Netanyahu’s new conditions in late July, “Israel” intensified its systematic campaign of bombing displaced civilians in safe areas, including 16 UN schools converted into mass shelters. Unable to compel a ceasefire on its terms, “Israel” is using these attacks on designated safe areas as part of its bloody negotiation strategy to exert pressure by inflicting maximum suffering on civilians through murder and starvation.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to supply “Israel” with the means to commit these war crimes, while using the White House platform to spread disinformation, making “Israel’s” “lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
Debate Debacle: Our Bleak Foreign Policy Future
By Daniel Larison | The Libertarian Institute | September 12, 2024
The first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump presented a bleak picture of the future of U.S. foreign policy no matter who wins in November. On the most urgent and important foreign policy issue of the year, the war and genocide in Gaza, Harris repeated empty platitudes about a “two-state solution” and Trump fell back on tired “pro-Israel” rhetoric. Neither candidate offered voters any hope that there would be a meaningful change from incumbent Joe Biden’s policy of unconditional support for the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians.
Trump absurdly said that Harris hates Israel, but aside from her perfunctory expression of support for Palestinian self-determination there was unfortunately very little to distinguish the two of them on this issue. Like Trump, Harris backs Israel to the hilt, and the main difference is that she pays lip service to Palestinian rights while doing nothing to protect them. She says some of the right things about the need for a ceasefire, but the Joe Biden administration isn’t willing to use its leverage to secure one and Harris refuses to call for the halt to U.S. arms transfers that U.S. law requires.
Harris has had many opportunities in the two months since Biden dropped out to separate herself from the president on this issue. She squandered them all by sticking to the official administration line. The vice president would rather tout her support from the likes of Dick Cheney than try and win the support of antiwar voters across the country. Harris has been catering mostly to hawks this summer, and she prefers attacking Trump for being “weak” instead of using his policy failures against him.
For his part, Trump returned to his old obsession with Iran and criticized the Biden administration because “they took off all the sanctions that I had.” Unfortunately for diplomacy with Iran, Biden never lifted any Iran sanctions, and the small amount of sanctions relief that he was prepared to grant was never delivered. Biden kept Trump’s dangerous Iran policy in place with similarly poor results, and there is no evidence so far that Harris is interested in pursuing a policy of diplomatic engagement.
The candidates had almost nothing to say about diplomacy during the debate. It was telling that the only time the word diplomacy was uttered during the debate was when Harris was criticizing the Trump administration’s negotiations with the Taliban that led to the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Trump mentioned negotiating an end to the war in Ukraine, but he offered no specifics on how he would bring the belligerents to the table or what he would do to secure an agreement.
Harris also repeated the president’s strange lie that the United States isn’t at war anywhere. She said, “There is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.” That would come as a surprise to the soldiers recently injured during a raid in Iraq and to the sailors waging Biden’s war in Yemen. It would also be news to the American forces fighting in Somalia and the troops illegally stationed in Syria. The U.S. Navy has said that its ships have been engaged in the most intense combat since World War II in the Red Sea, but as far as Biden and Harris are concerned it isn’t even happening.
Meanwhile, the U.S.-backed war in Gaza continues to claim innocent lives. Israeli forces bombed yet another tent encampment filled with displaced civilians on Tuesday, killing dozens of them. According to analysis of the damage, they used 2,000-pound U.S.-made bombs to do it. These bombs are so large and so powerful that using them in a densely populated area is obviously criminal. That was just the latest in a string of attacks on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on at least sixteen schools where displaced people had taken shelter. The official death toll is now over 40,000, but informed estimates from doctors that have worked in the territory suggest that the real number is more than double that.
During the debate there was no mention of that massacre in a so-called humanitarian zone, nor did anyone bring up the name of Aysenur Eygi, the American citizen murdered by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank just last week. People watching the debate would have had no idea that one of the worst man-made famines in modern times is currently raging in Gaza, and they wouldn’t know that the famine is the result of an Israeli campaign of deliberate starvation. The victims of the monstrous bipartisan foreign policy consensus in Washington are usually invisible in American debates, and this was no exception.
Walaa Tanja ordered to 6 more months of arbitrary imprisonment without charge or trial
Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | September 11, 2024
Walaa Khaled Tanja grew up in Balata refugee camp (Nablus), in a family with a strong history of resistance for Palestinian liberation. At the age of 15, she received her mother, Latifa Abu Dara, on Al-Quds Street near the Huwarra checkpoint, when she was released as part of the Wafaa Al-Ahrar prisoner exchange in 2011.
Her mother was later martyred due to cancer and her brother has also been repeatedly pursued, imprisoned and wounded by occupation soldiers.
Walaa was arrested on August 20th 2022, with Tahrir Abu Sariya and Maryam Arafat, and accused of attempting to carry out an armed operation in retaliation for the murder of Ibrahim Al Nabulsi. The occupation claimed that they opened fire on soldiers at the “Kedumim” illegal colonial settlement near the occupied Palestinian cities of Nablus and Qalqilya.
Walaa was released on November 24th 2023, as part of the first batch of the Al-Aqsa Flood prisoner exchange deal, in which 13 Israeli women and children were exchanged for 39 Palestinian women and children who were held hostage by the occupation.
This interrupted Walaa’s original 7-year sentence and she was welcomed home by her family. However, due to the heavy repression by the occupation, no big celebration was possible.
After her release, Walaa expressed her feelings about her liberation thanks to the Resistance in Gaza.
On March 12th 2024, while she was arriving to Tulkarem from Nablus together with her 16-year-old cousin, occupation special forces attacked the car with their guns pointed at them, and seized Walaa once again. She was taken to a military camp, then to Hasharon crossing and then to Damon prison.
Her abduction clearly broke the prisoner exchange agreement, which has now been done several times by the occupation.
Walaa was ordered to six months in “administrative detention” — arbitrary imprisonment without charge or trial, indefinitely renewable. On 11 September 2024, her detention was extended for another six months. We urge immediate liberation for Walaa Khaled Tanja, together with the liberation of all Palestinian prisoners and all of Palestine, from the river to the sea.
Follow the Dismantle Damon campaign for more updates on Palestinian women prisoners.
ISM response to Biden’s statement on the murder of Aysenur Eygi
International Solidarity Movement | September 11, 2024
On 11 September 2024, President Biden claimed to be “outraged” and “deeply saddened” by Israel’s murder of our comrade Aysenur Eygi, but his actions tell a very different story. While he described the shooting as “unacceptable,” he is refusing the family’s demand for an independent, transparent investigation and continuing to trust the murderers to investigate themselves. Aysenur’s family and the ISM have been clear that we have no confidence in any Israeli investigation, given the Israeli army’s longstanding practice of using investigations as exculpatory coverups. We continue to demand a transparent and independent investigation.
For the United States government to accept the results of Israel’s internal military investigations is a complete dereliction of the US government’s responsibility to its own citizens, but it is nothing new. In 2003, the US did nothing to hold the Israeli killers of Rachel Corrie responsible for that murder. In recent years, the US has done nothing when Palestinian Americans, like Shireen Abu Akleh, have been murdered by Israel. President Biden is pursuing business as usual and allowing Israel to continue to kill both US Citizens and Palestinians with total impunity.
President Biden’s disrespect for Aysenur’s family and community extends even further. Although Aysenur’s family is mourning the death of a US citizen, his administration has yet to pick up the phone and call the family to offer condolences. He asserts that he will remain in contact with Israeli and Palestinian authorities but is unwilling to communicate with the ordinary people who were closest to Aysenur.
In his statement, President Biden asserts that he treats “violent extremist Israeli settlers” and “Palestinian terrorists” equally and implies that the violence in the West Bank is equally the fault of both groups. Both assertions are false. President Biden’s administration arms the violent Israeli extremists, as ISM volunteers can testify to based on our extensive experience doing protective presence work in the West Bank face to face with Israeli settlers armed with US weapons. These are the same weapons that make the US complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As long as the US continues to send weapons to Israel to kill Palestinians, in Gaza as well as in the West Bank, the US is sustaining the violent extremism of the Israeli settlers and the Israeli government. Meanwhile, President Biden’s false equivalence between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank elides the fact that the current violence has its roots in over a hundred years of settler colonial terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and now genocide, all perpetrated by Israel. Contrary to what President Biden asserts, it is Zionist colonization that is the obstacle to peace.
Ultimately, it is hypocritical for President Biden to attempt to change the focus to Israeli settlers alone, given that the Israeli army killed Aysenur with weapons likely provided by the Biden administration, which is fully aware that they are used to attack people protesting or witnessing demonstrations against illegal settlements. As one American ISM volunteer who wishes to remain anonymous says, “When I was detained by the Israeli army for my nonviolent work with ISM, everything I saw in the army van was stamped with ‘made in the USA’ or ‘property of the USA.’” As Amado Sison, another American citizen shot by Israel in August during the weekly demonstrations in Beita noted, “The money I pay in my taxes as a teacher probably funded the bullet they have run through me.” President Biden and his administration are complicit in Aysenur’s death and his statement today attempts to elide what the whole world knows: Israel’s violence is funded, sustained, supported, and endorsed by the US. Honoring Aysenur’s memory requires a complete change of policy, starting with an independent, transparent investigation and extending to an arms embargo.
Buffer zones, new Israeli means of seizing control of West Bank
By Fayha’ Shalash | Al Mayadeen | September 10, 2024
In mid-August, Alaa Srouji was surprised when the Israeli army handed him a notice to remove his greenhouses near Tulkarm.
The official reason was that he did not have a permit for them, but when the other farmers in the area received similar notices at the same time, concerns were raised. Many now suspect that “Israel” may be planning to establish a buffer zone in the Shweika Plain area.
Israeli media reported that settlers have been calling for the establishment of buffer zones, under the pretext of preventing armed infiltration of Israeli-occupied territory, similar to what happened on October 7.
However, Palestinian human rights and research centers have confirmed that these allegations cover dangerous goals: seizing additional Palestinian land to further settlement expansion.
Will be demolished at any moment
Srouji is a member of the Sun Roots Agricultural Cooperative Society, which plays a major role in helping farmers in Tulkarm in the face of Israeli policies.
But these efforts became subject to restrictions after the Israeli army handed them notices to demolish two greenhouses in the Shweika Plain under the pretext that they were not licensed.
“Although the greenhouses have been there for 14 years and provide livelihoods for many farmers and locals, Israel now intends to remove them,” he told Al Mayadeen English.
At the same time, six other farmers were told to disassemble their greenhouses or refrain from accessing their cultivated lands in the same area, all under the same pretext.
The association submitted an objection but didn’t receive any response. With the deadline for objections passing in early September, the greenhouses now face the imminent threat of demolition at any moment.
“When we submitted the objection, we learned that the reason for the notice was the proximity of the facilities to the Beit Hefer settlement, even though it is about 400 meters away,” he added.
Forbidden lands
The establishment of buffer zones in the West Bank is divided into two parts: one separates the Palestinians from the apartheid wall that “Israel” erected in 2002, encircling the Palestinian lands, while the other surrounds the settlements scattered throughout the West Bank.
Last November, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich emphasized “the necessity of establishing buffer zones around West Bank settlements to protect them from any attack,” according to the Jerusalem Post.
In February, the Israeli army issued a decision to seize 18 dunams of land from the village of Deir Dibwan, east of Ramallah, citing “urgent military purposes” as the justification.
However, the villagers soon discovered that the decision was actually aimed at establishing a buffer zone around the Mitzpe Dani settlement, which was built on their lands.
The mayor of Deir Dibwan, Imad Musbih, told Al Mayadeen English that the seizure of these lands expresses the actual implementation of the buffer zone concept proposed by Smotrich last year.
The landowners were taken aback by this decision and tried to file objections, but to no avail, according to him. The Israeli goal, he said, is clear and resolute, and Palestinians are not allowed to stand against it.
“No one has been able to access the seized lands. They cannot cultivate them, nor graze livestock on them, nor even approach them under any circumstances”, he added.
In conjunction with the decision, the intensity of attacks by settlers coming from this settlement increased. They began to cross the seized lands and reach the village where they burned Palestinians’ vehicles, slaughtered their livestock, or destroyed their property.
All of this was done in front of the Israeli army and without any intervention to stop them. Rather, the soldiers attacked the Palestinians with gas and sound bombs and arrested them in case they tried to repel settler attacks.
New old policy
The sequence of events in the West Bank indicates that this policy is not new, but rather dates back to around three years, coinciding with the arrival of the current extremist Israeli government.
Raed Mukadi, a researcher at the Land Research Center, told Al Mayadeen English that about a year ago, an Israeli military decision was issued before the start of the olive harvest season, declaring certain areas off-limits to Palestinians. These restricted areas are concentrated south of Nablus, near Salfit, and parts of Tulkarm.
At the same time, there was another military decision in the al-Jalama area, north of Jenin, to stop building and removing facilities around the apartheid wall under the pretext of security reasons.
“It is an Israeli plan aiming to evacuate Palestinian lands close to the apartheid wall and settlements,” he explained.
According to him, the most dangerous thing is that preventing access to these lands might be a prelude to expanding settlements, constructing roads, or establishing military camps and army headquarters under security pretexts. This would effectively block their agricultural use or construction, leading to significant losses for the Palestinians.
“After the aggression on Gaza, many areas were closed off, including large tracts of land in the West Bank. For instance, access was blocked to 18,000 dunams in the Ya’bad Plain south of Jenin, with these areas being completely shut off. It remains unclear whether this closure is temporary or permanent, which complicates the ability to determine the total area of land that has been converted into buffer zones,” he said.
Coinciding with the aggression against Gaza, the Israeli government announced a state of emergency, which means giving full authority to the Israeli army to act and make unfair military decisions, according to the prevailing conditions.
The IOF actually began to seize vast areas near the settlements, settlement streets, military towers, and the apartheid wall, all of which were issued by senior Israeli authorities under the pretext of preventing Palestinian attacks, as he said.
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From the Archives
A superpower and “the world’s sickest warrior state”
By Paul J. Balles | March 8, 2010
Living through five or six major wars has hardened me to what I thought were the extremes of inhuman cruelty and brutality.
Two things made those extremes almost bearable: the brutality always revealed – at least according to the media coverage – the viciousness of the enemy. It was therefore quite understandable when our “brave men and women” pulverized the enemy.
Films of Japanese torturing captive Americans somehow justified holding Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II; and only a small percentage of Americans found the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki unreasonably vengeful at best, at worst, depraved.
The media giants in America portrayed the North Koreans as barbaric beasts with their captives, quite unlike their southern counterpoints – our allies during the Korean War. No one ever felt the need to explain how the South Koreans were a civilized breed while the North Koreans were absolute savages, at least according to the official line.
In Vietnam, our warriors justifiably (or so the media made us believe) dropped napalm on the North Vietnamese who had the gall to hide in villages and tunnels to ravage our invaders. At least it was accepted practice until some rogue photojournalist filmed a young girl screaming down a Vietnamese road in flames. … continue
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