Scores of Palestinians killed, injured as Israel bombs aid truck in central Gaza
A humanitarian aid vehicle which had been the target of Israeli airstrikes resulting in the death of nine and dozens of injured in Deir Al-Balah of Gaza on March 3, 2024. [Ali Jadallah – Anadolu Agency ]
MEMO | March 3, 2024
Scores of Palestinians were killed and injured when the Israeli army dropped bombs on people collecting humanitarian aid from a truck in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Sunday, Anadolu reports.
This is the second major Israeli attack in the last five days on displaced Palestinians in Gaza who are waiting for humanitarian aid.
Earlier on Thursday, at least 112 Palestinians were killed and 760 others injured when Israeli forces shelled a crowd waiting for humanitarian aid south of Gaza City.
“Many people were killed and others wounded in an Israeli bombing that targeted an aid truck in the city of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip,” sources in the medical field told Anadolu while requesting anonymity.
So far, the number of casualties from the latest attack is not clear as neither the Health Ministry in the besieged Gaza Strip nor Israeli authorities have issued statements.
Israel has launched a deadly military offensive on the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack led by Hamas, in which nearly 1,200 people were killed.
At least 30,410 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have since been killed in Gaza, and 71,700 others injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.
Israel has also imposed a crippling blockade on Gaza, leaving its population, particularly residents in the north where the Thursday shootings took place, on the verge of starvation.
The Israeli war has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.
Jordan’s hyped aid airdrop over Gaza helps Israel more than Palestinians
By Shabbir Rizvi | Press TV | March 3, 2024
Throughout last week, Jordan’s air force, with the approval of the Israeli regime, delivered aid via airdrop to people in the besieged Gaza Strip. The move was widely hailed as heroic.
Overseen by Jordan’s King Abdullah II, the aid was dropped in large pallets of items, which included goods like ready-to-eat meals, medical supplies, and feminine care items.
These pallets were delivered through several airplane drops, causing a rush of Palestinians to flee throughout the Gaza Strip to gain access to the boxes. The airdrop itself was also used as a media opportunity for the king, who was filmed dropping parcels while awkwardly posing for cameras.
Though some aid was received by hungry and desperate Gazans, many parcels simply went missing, particularly in north Gaza where acute food shortages have caused death by starvation.
Parcels, despite being waterproof, were purportedly dropped into the Mediterranean Sea far beyond reach or even fell into the Gaza envelope – which can effectively only be accessed by Zionist settlers and military.
For the parcels dropping into the sea within reach, rowboats had to be deployed to gather the precious aid. If Gazans go beyond a specific point in the sea, they are targeted by Zionist naval forces, which have been given shoot-to-kill orders.
Unfortunately, some of these parcels will never be received by any needy Palestinian.
Other pallets landed in locations where the Zionist regime is enacting a full entry block for Palestinians. Even if the aid drop landed in an accessible street or rooftop, the occupation army would murder anyone who went to it, as they have demonstrated with what is now known as “The Flour Massacre.”
The massacre occurred when Zionist forces opened fire on Palestinians accessing designated aid trucks full of food for hungry Gazans. Over a hundred were murdered and many more were injured.
The massacre has been met with global condemnation of the Zionist regime, which has deflected and denied accusations of opening fire despite documented footage of Israeli troops doing exactly that.
Airdrops are a last resort for dispersing aid. They are ineffective, uncoordinated, and ultimately unable to predict exactly where the aid will land. Consider this with the fact that if Zionist troops are willing to open fire on designated aid trucks, traveling to a parachuted pallet is even more dangerous.
Many have criticized King Abdullah II for using these aid drops as a self-serving and self-promotional opportunity, particularly because in contrast to Palestinian aid, the Jordanian regime has not restricted any economic activity with Israel.
In fact, it has surged. Though Jordan is not part of the Abraham Accords, it is in practice a state that has normalized economic and some political ties with the Tel Aviv regime.
So much so that despite the carnage in Gaza since October 7, Jordanian exports to the regime have increased, with no signs of boycott or sanctions to condemn what’s unfolding in the besieged strip.
Jordan and Israel have been the beneficiaries of economic cooperation brokered by Arab regimes such as the UAE, which signed the Abraham Accords. For example, Jordan and Israel have partnered in an unpopular (in Jordan) energy deal meant to further a process of normalization between them.
There is also the shocking export of fruits and vegetables from Jordan to the occupied territories.
Media source Arabi Post revealed that Jordan was the second highest exporter of most fruits and vegetables to the Israeli-occupied territories from October 7 2023 to February 11, 2024, second only to Turkey.
These two countries constitute 55 percent of the total fruits and vegetables that the Israeli regime imported globally. Even more insultingly, Jordan is the final leg of the land corridor set up by some traitorous Arab states to circumvent the blockade enacted by Yemen in solidarity with Gaza.
The reality is stark. While Gazans have to rush to airdropped pallets as they starve, often while dodging Israeli sniper and tank fire, Zionist settlers get Jordanian commodities delivered right to their markets for easy consumption.
The Jordanian government is in one of the best positions to halt the Zionist economy. It shares a massive border with the occupied territories, controls a chunk of imports Israel receives from the east, and produces commodities for the occupation entity.
Yet, Jordan instead works hand in hand with the Zionist regime to coordinate airdrops that are ineffective for Gazans, who are facing genocide, all the while working against resistance factions by hosting US military bases and allowing its roads to deliver products to the Zionist entity.
It cannot be overstated that we must separate the Jordanian regime from the Jordanian people.
Jordanians have rallied for Gaza from Amman to the occupied Palestine border, calling an end to the occupation and their government’s normalization with the Zionist entity.
Furthermore, they are protesting their government’s trade routes with the occupying entity – even forming human chains to block the land corridor created to sustain Israel.
Finally, we must reckon with the most obvious reality: King Abdullah II and the Jordanian Air Force could not have had their photo shoot opportunity without the blessing of the US and the Israeli regime, which ultimately means that these aid drops play into the very hands of the Zionist regime.
By allowing for ineffective aid drops, Israel, who is facing allegations of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), can simply say they are not committing genocide because they allow countries to help aid starving Palestinians.
Meanwhile, the same aid that is dropped is either impossible to reach, or Palestinians must risk their lives under gunfire and starvation to obtain it.
It is a mix of political and media manipulation meant to obscure the reality on the ground: access to aid is systematically prevented as Gazans are being starved and hospitals are being shut down.
Jordan is ideally placed to put an end to Israeli bloodthirst, but it seems the King has prioritized flashy videos and normalization over the fate of the Palestinian people and the region.
Shabbir Rizvi is a Chicago-based political analyst with a focus on US internal security and foreign policy.
Injured survivors of Gaza aid chaos say Israeli forces shot at them
MEMO | March 2, 2024
Divergent accounts
‘Israel is destroying itself’ as Western media helps in the slaughter of Palestinians
By Ian DeMartino – Sputnik – 01.03.2024
On December 28, 2023, the “paper of record” in the United States, The New York Times, published a piece that described acts of alleged sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas during the October 7 attack. Since publication, independent media outlets have revealed significant issues with the piece.
The New York Times and other Western media outlets paved the way for Israel’s slaughter, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, an Iranian-American academic and political analyst, told Sputnik’s The Critical Hour on Thursday.
“When The New York Times published that dishonest piece about rape on October the 7th, some Israeli [media] were rejecting those claims, [but] the Western media would not accept any of this. They closed their eyes and simply repeated the accusations in order to help the Israelis justify genocide and they continue to do so today,” he said.
The Times article’s co-author was later revealed as a former Israeli Defense Force officer who had no prior reporting experience and had liked posts that called Gazans “human animals” and advocated turning the Gaza Strip “into a slaughterhouse.”
The family of one of the victims featured heavily in the article later said the newspaper misled them, and the victim’s brother-in-law and sisters denied there was evidence that their family member was raped.
The Times has since said it is reviewing the author’s social media accounts, but has not retracted the article.
“In other words, what the New York Times and others did was that they prepared the ground so that Israelis could slaughter Palestinians, and no one in the West would complain,” he continued.
Marandi noted that anyone who is denying that “Israelis are intentionally massacring Palestinians” has been “closing their eyes to reality,” especially in the wake of videos released on Thursday that appear to show IDF forces firing on Palestinians gathering food from aid trucks.
“It’s quite clear that the Israelis use the trucks as bait and when starving people gather to find food for their starving children, the Israelis open fire.” More than 100 people were killed and more than 750 injured in the attack, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
But it is the mainstream media’s portrayal and non-coverage of these events that brainwash the masses, Marandi said.
“That’s exactly why the United States is not a democracy, why it’s never been a democracy. People are not allowed to have information,” he argued. “If people are being managed, if they’re being fed information that’s divorced from reality and then they make decisions based upon that information, that’s not democratic. That’s a brainwashed society that will do as it’s told.”
Despite the propaganda, the images coming out of Gaza are so horrific that even some of Israel’s most adamant supporters are turning against the US policy of unconditional support.
“Two-thirds of Americans [oppose] the current policy, according to one poll, the majority of even white evangelicals and the majority of American Jews are [in favor of a permanent ceasefire],” Marandi explained, referring to a recent Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) poll.
“The irony is that while the Israeli regime and its allies in Washington are the ones who are preventing a ceasefire from taking place, these are the ones who are going to lose the most by continuing the war,” Marandi argued.
“They can kill more Palestinians and they want to kill more Palestinians, but they are destroying their image. They are destroying their legitimacy in the eyes of those who thought they were legitimate previously across the world. So in my opinion, Israel is destroying itself.”
MPs smear Gaza protestors, while others invent scare stories
By Yvonne Ridley | MEMO | March 1, 2024
Are the massive pro-Palestine marches in Britain being deliberately targeted and smeared as part of a concerted Zionist effort to use the law to stop people from joining the ranks of the growing anti-war movement? That would certainly explain the furore over MPs’ safety which came to a head last week when Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons and a member of the Labour Friends of Israel lobby group, cited threats to politicians in his disastrous handling of a debate on calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.
I pose the question after some extraordinary events have been picked up and anchored in a media campaign which has collectively shown nothing but hostility towards Palestinians in favour of the Zionist Israeli state as the genocidal onslaught in Gaza continues. Throw in some decidedly Islamophobic comments by prominent Conservative MPs, and there is a really toxic atmosphere brewing in advance of this year’s General Election, with Muslims — “Islamists” — cast as the bad guys.
Today, my suspicions were fuelled by none other than British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who resorted to shameless smears and scare tactics as he warned police chiefs of a “growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule”. Calling for more robust police action, Sunak used inflammatory language to insist that politicians need to be protected from intimidatory protests outside their homes.
However, the Home Office has nevertheless announced a £31 million package aimed at protecting MPs. It is said to be in response to the impact of the ongoing “Israel-Hamas conflict”.
Meanwhile, in Scotland police were called to investigate bizarre claims that the Glasgow constituency office of Labour Members of the Scottish Parliament was “stormed” by 30 pro-Palestine protesters, with MSP Paul Sweeney criticising officers for taking 27 minutes to respond even though the office staff were left “distressed”.
Police Scotland insist that the storming of the politicians’ shared office never happened as described, and rejected the claims made by Sweeney. According to him, campaigners forced their way into the office that he shares with party leader Anas Sarwar, and fellow MSPs Pam Duncan-Glancy and Pauline McNeil.
“It may well be that this entire furore over alleged threats by protestors is confected,” said Mick Napier, a co-founder of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, whose members took part in the protest. Certainly, the example of Sweeney caught flagrantly inventing threats to the staff suggests that this might be the case. Sweeney supports a party leader who endorses Israel withholding water, food and fuel from the entire population of Gaza — not only cruel, but also collective punishment, a war crime — while he complains that people opposing such barbarism raise their voices.
“Although in this case voices weren’t even raised,” explained Napier. “There seems to be something new in the shamelessness with which our politicians lie to the public. Could it be because the mainstream media have given up any pretence of investigating such fabrications?”
Despite repeated attempts to contact Sarwar, McNeil, Duncan-Clancy and Sweeney, none were prepared to offer a comment to me about the incident.
European political analyst Kevin Ovenden wrote about the incident on 22 February: “Two elected politicians have been exposed today for simply lying that they faced violent intimidation when they merely had to deal with democratic lobbying and political pressure. One is the Labour Member of the Scottish Parliament Paul Sweeney. Police in Glasgow refuted his highly charged claim that anti-war protesters stormed his office and intimidated his staff. They did no such thing, as the police concluded, having been present throughout for an orderly protest, without even any civil disobedience, by a small group of middle-aged or older women and men.
“That has not stopped the Speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle (for years a nodding-donkey Labour MP) today smearing the entire anti-war movement as in some way incubating terrorism as justification for his anti-democratic manoeuvres on behalf of [Labour Party leader] Keir Starmer.”
Ovenden blames craven support for Israel by the two main establishment parties, Conservative and Labour, for “not only leading to authoritarianism against public protest and free speech. It is now even crushing the limited democratic avenues available through parliament.”
The streets of London have witnessed some of the largest, peaceful, pro-Palestine demonstrations in the capital’s history, but that did not stop Sunak from calling an urgent meeting in Downing Street for police chiefs on Thursday. He urged them to use all of their existing powers to crack down on the alleged intimidation, disruption and subversion.
“We simply cannot allow this pattern of increasingly violent and intimidatory behaviour which is, as far as anyone can see, intended to shout down free debate and stop elected representatives doing their job,” insisted the prime minister.
Without a hint of irony, the man who has so far given his unconditional support to Israel, currently under investigation for genocide by the International Court of Justice, added: “That is simply undemocratic… I am going to do whatever it requires to protect our democracy, and our values, which we all hold dear.”
Del Babu, a former chief superintendent in London’s Metropolitan Police, said language like “mob rule” was not “helpful”. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that appealing to people to demonstrate less could have “unintended consequences” and potentially lead to more people protesting.
“We will continue to march until there is an immediate ceasefire,” said Shamiul Joarder of Friends of Al-Aqsa. The organisation is part of a coalition of groups organising the marches which have brought world attention to London’s streets.
Members from all six groups, along with Labour MP and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, and the campaign group Liberty, held a press conference earlier this week in parliament criticising unhelpful language used by politicians. They claim that anti-Muslim “hysteria” and pressure from the government had provoked the Metropolitan Police into heavy-handed and “discriminatory” policing of “peaceful mass protests”.
Home Secretary James Cleverly, meanwhile, told the BBC: “I genuinely don’t know what these regular protests are seeking to achieve. They have made their position clear, we recognise that there are many people in the UK that hold that position.”
Hours later, 104 starving Palestinians in Gaza were massacred — witnesses say that Israeli troops opened fire on them — as they gathered around an aid convoy distributing food. If Cleverly doesn’t understand the point of the street demonstrations then he has the emotional intelligence of a brick and a surname which doesn’t quite match his IQ.
Calls for a ceasefire will continue until Israel’s genocide of the people of occupied Palestine is stopped in its murderous tracks. Which bit of “Stop Killing Civilians” do our politicians not understand?
‘State-minus’: Biden’s Palestine solution
Three decades after the Oslo Lie, neither the US nor the EU are in any position to dangle the promise of a Palestinian state.
By Stasa Salacanin | The Cradle | February 29, 2024
Is it sadly ironic that the issue of Palestinian statehood – unresolved for over 75 years – has resurfaced only after Israel’s wholesale carpet-bombing of the Gaza Strip, killing over 30,000 civilians, injuring tens of thousands more, and destroying significant swathes of the territory’s infrastructure.
University of California (UCLA) historian James Gelvin states the case plainly:
“There would have been no serious discussion of a two-state solution without [the events of] 7 October. As a matter of fact, putting the Palestine issue back on the front burner of international and West Asian politics was one of the reasons Hamas launched its operation.”
As Gelvin explains it to The Cradle, Hamas has already scored several victories since its Al-Aqsa Flood operation: “The Palestine issue is back on the international agenda, it is negotiating the release of its captives as an equal partner to Israel,” and has demonstrated that it is “more effective in realizing Palestinian goals than its rival, Fatah.”
New ‘Biden Doctrine’
While the unprecedented, brutal Israeli military response has indeed illustrated the urgency for establishing a Palestinian safe haven, it is impossible to ignore that western state backers of the 1993 Oslo Accords – which laid out the essential framework for the establishment of a Palestinian state – have then so assiduously ignored and neglected that responsibility.
Even greater hypocrisy emerges from the fact that these western powers, led by Washington, have now decided to force the discussion of Palestinian statehood in the midst of Gaza’s carnage, with an Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is infamously opposed to it.
So, why is this debate possible now? Why was it ignored before 7 October – or even prior to Netanyahu’s return to the prime ministership?
After enormous public and international pressure, US President Joe Biden has, at least rhetorically, reopened the issue of Palestinian statehood. According to the New York Times, the Biden White House’s new doctrine would “involve some form of US recognition of a demilitarized Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in return for strong Palestinian guarantees that their institutions could never threaten Israel.”
In addition, the US president’s plan also envisages Saudi–Israeli normalization and a tough military stance against Iran and its regional allies. However, many analysts have already raised questions about the viability of a plan that does not reflect current ground realities.
While Netanyahu rejects the very notion of a Palestinian state, the ‘Biden doctrine’ and its offering of some limited-sovereignty version of a demilitarized Palestinian state is nothing less than humiliating for Palestinians.
Dr Muhannad Ayyash, Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University, observes that there is no fundamental change of approach by the US on this issue. In short, the Biden administration refuses to clarify what it means by a ‘Palestinian state.’ Its initiative appears mainly to advance a form of a two-state solution that would be palatable to Israel.
Ayyash points out that the key issues related to Palestinian statehood are left unanswered, including the issue of sovereignty, Jewish settlements, the status of East Jerusalem, a necessary West Bank/East Jerusalem connection with the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian right to return, and so forth.
As Israel has firmly insisted on retaining full security control over the entire territory west of Jordan – meaning, over all the territory likely to come under Palestinian (self-)rule – many experts fear that Israel would have the right to militarily enter those territories at will, without Palestinian consent, with the latter banned from assembling its own military force.
This version of ‘statehood’ is not remotely on par with that of other UN member-states, who are entitled, under the UN Charter, to exercise full sovereignty and defend their territorial integrity. Biden’s ‘solution’ of a Palestinian state with limited sovereignty is nothing more than the legalization of Israel’s perpetual occupation of Palestine.
A Palestinian ‘empty shell’
The revived debate on Palestinian statehood is also intricately connected to a big western public relations dilemma. The Atlanticists’ unconditional support for Israel’s illegal, disproportionate military assault against mostly female and child populations has deeply impacted their image and capacity to maneuver in West Asia and beyond.
This is especially true for Washington’s foreign policy objectives in the region, which are facing major, direct resistance on the ground in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.
The revival of a two-state solution is, therefore, a “desperate act to salvage some of the credibility or legitimacy of these regimes (both Arab and Western governments),” argues Dr Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Professor and Abdulaziz Said Chair for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the American University in Washington, DC.
For decades, the US has capitulated to Israeli demands on pretty much everything Tel Aviv has ever asked for. In recent years, as Gelvin describes it, the US has mainly focused “on bribing various Arab governments – the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan – to normalize relations with Israel” through the “Abraham Accords,” which, in effect, took the Palestine issue off the table.”
Meanwhile, Arab states managed regional expectations by continuing to pay lip service to Palestinian issues while scuttling any opportunities behind the scenes. With few Arab state allies left, Palestinians themselves had no cards left to leverage – until 7 October.
Now, Israel is doing all it can to negate that day’s gains. Says Ayyash:
“Netanyahu wants to dispense with all pretension about the establishment of the Palestinian state and use this moment to establish full Israeli Jewish sovereignty from the river to the sea, whereas the Biden administration prefers a quieter approach that pretends to care about the aspirations of the Palestinian people in order to maintain its close ties with Arab regimes across the region.”
The two-state solution, according to Professor Abu-Nimer, is, therefore, nothing other than a “fig leaf” to resuscitate the west’s crashing image and should not be viewed as a serious US initiative. The proposed plan is “a skeleton or an empty shell which lacks of any serious form of sovereignty.”
Nathan Brown, an American scholar of Middle Eastern law and politics at George Washington University, largely concurs:
“This is not a step toward statehood but only reviving some provisions of the Oslo Accords. Even at a maximum, it would produce what would have been called a ‘protectorate’ in the nineteenth century, not a state.”
A Palestinian state is not on the cards
Although the US and the EU could exercise immense leverage over Israel to revive the Oslo agreement and fast-track its provisions, they are doing nothing of the sort.
Today, there is a unique opportunity for Tel Aviv’s western allies to play this hand, given the utter collapse of Israel’s image worldwide and the mass public demand for the protection of Palestinians.
Instead, the Biden administration thinks that it can resurrect the two-state idea by mediating a grand regional deal – one that will deliver everything Israel wants, by dangling the promise of a rump Palestinian state.
The White House believes that the reward of normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia will offset for the Netanyahu government a reversal on the question of Palestinian statehood and withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories.
Gelvin dismisses the plan, saying it simply won’t work on so many levels. For starters, “if Netanyahu commits to a Palestinian state and withdrawal from the occupied territories, his government will collapse and he will go to jail.”
Don’t expect anything spectacular from the European Union either. Although EU High Representative for Foreign Relations Josep Borrell has said that a Palestinian state may need to be imposed from the outside without Israel’s agreement, realistically, the range and reach of European foreign policy is minimal or non-existent. According to Gelvin, “the EU has no more leverage against Israel than Costa Rica.”
Abu-Nimer likely speaks for the majority of regional observers – who have seen this game play out before: these top-down western statehood formulas do not work without genuine engagement with Palestinian political representation – in this case, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations.
Thirty-one years after the Oslo Accords promised a Palestinian state, Israel is ethnically cleansing Gaza and swallowing up the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Almost five months after the start of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, some of the leverage is back in Palestinian resistance hands, and they are unlikely to trade their gains for an unsovereign rump state which diplomats are privately calling a ‘state-minus.’
Heavy losses inflict ‘dramatic manpower crisis’ on Israel
The Cradle | March 1, 2024
The Israeli military is demanding an addition of at least 7,000 soldiers to its forces due to a serious manpower crisis.
The 7,000 are needed on top of the soldiers already enlisting, the Israeli army said on 1 March.
“The army requires standards for another 7,500 officers and noncommissioned officers, while the Treasury currently approves only 2,500. These are unprecedented numbers, which indicate the shock that befell the IDF following almost 150 days of fighting, which began with heavy losses on 7 October,” Hebrew news site Ynet reported, citing the army’s General Staff.
“The army is compiling the data that will explain how dramatic the manpower problem is,” it added.
Just one day ago, Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, called to end draft exemptions for members of the ultra-Orthodox community. Gallant said he would only support legislation allowing for continued exemptions if all members of the ruling coalition backed it.
The minister asserted that “all parts of society” must “bear the burden” of service.
Gallant’s position could result in tension with ultra-Orthodox parties in the coalition, viewed as integral to the current government’s survival, according to Hebrew media.
However, the army’s demand for a boost in manpower “has nothing to do with politics or the demand for equal burden: The situation is simply not good and does not match the threat map,” Ynet wrote.
Israel is taking severe losses in its genocidal war in Gaza and its attempt to eradicate the Palestinian resistance.
While Israel claims that Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah is the final Hamas stronghold, the group’s military wing, along with several other factions, continue to fiercely confront Israeli troops across the strip.
A source from within the resistance told Al-Mayadeen on Thursday that the Israeli army has been forced out of Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, where it had been operating over the past eleven days in an attempt to clear out Hamas fighters.
The source added that the neighborhood is a “graveyard” for Merkava tanks, and the “bloodied and torn” uniforms of Israeli soldiers are spread out across the battlefield.
Clashes between the resistance and the army continued to rage on 1 March in several areas of Gaza, including the southern city of Khan Yunis and the Jabalia area in the northern strip.
Washington blocks UNSC statement condemning Israel for ‘Flour Massacre’
The Cradle | March 1, 2024
The US, on 29 February, vetoed a UN Security Council (UNSC) statement that would have condemned Israel for the mass murder of over 100 Palestinian civilians who were awaiting the delivery of humanitarian aid in Gaza City.
“We don’t have all the facts on the ground – that’s the problem,” US deputy ambassador to the UN Robert Wood told reporters on Thursday.
He then claimed there are “contradictory reports” about the Israeli army’s latest massacre and highlighted that Washington was focused on finding “some language that everyone can agree on.”
Thursday’s veto is the fifth time Washington has blocked a UNSC statement or ceasefire resolution that would hold Israel accountable for the atrocities it has committed in Gaza.
According to Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN ambassador, 14 of the 15 council members supported the statement advanced by Algeria.
At least 112 Palestinians were killed and more than 750 wounded after Israeli troops opened heavy machine gun and artillery fire on thousands waiting for food on Gaza’s Al-Rashid Street, in what marked the first delivery of food to northern Gaza in several weeks.
“After opening fire, Israeli tanks advanced and ran over many of the dead and injured bodies,” Al Jazeera’s Ismail al-Ghoul reported from the scene.
“We had come here to get our hands on some aid. I have been waiting since noon yesterday. At about 4:30 in the early morning, trucks started to trickle in. The Israelis just opened random fire on us as if it was a trap. Once we approached the aid trucks, the Israeli tanks and warplanes started firing on us,” a witness at the scene told Al Jazeera.
The Israeli aggression triggered a stampede, adding to the chaos.
“We were going to bring flour … then Israeli snipers shot at us,” another person in the area told the Qatari news outlet. “They shot me in the leg. I’m unable to stand up,” he added.
Tel Aviv changed its story multiple times on Thursday, first claiming the majority of victims were killed by the stampede and later saying that soldiers opened fire only after feeling “threatened.” Officials have yet to explain how the crowds of underfed and displaced civilians posed any threat to them.
Colombia suspends Israeli arms purchases following attack on Palestinian crowd
The Cradle – March 1, 2024
Colombian President Gustavo Petro on 29 February announced the country would suspend all arms purchases from Israel in protest against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
“Asking for food, more than 100 Palestinians were killed by Netanyahu. This is called genocide and is reminiscent of the [Holocaust] even if the world powers do not like to recognize it. The world must block Netanyahu. Colombia suspends all purchases of weapons from Israel,” Petro said via social media after the latest massacre of civilians by Israel in Gaza.
Israel has killed at least 30,035 and injured 70,457 others in Gaza while inflicting mass destruction and shortages of basic necessities on the strip.
Colombia is among the countries that fully supported South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Petro has also continuously condemned Tel Aviv for its indiscriminate attacks against Palestinians since 7 October, taking a similar stance as the leaders of other Latin American nations like Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
“If we have to suspend foreign relations with Israel, we suspend them. We do not support genocides,” Petro said via social media on 15 October.
His comments came after Israel suspended all security exports to the South American country in response to Petro’s public stance on the genocide unfolding in Gaza.
Petro drew the ire of Israel after posting on social media: “Neither the Yair Kleins nor the Raifal Eithans will be able to say what the history of peace in Colombia is. They unleashed the massacre and genocide in Colombia.”
Former Israeli army colonel and mercenary Yair Klein in the 1980s was responsible for training fighters from the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, a right-wing paramilitary group responsible for multiple war crimes during Colombia’s internal war. Klein was later brought to Colombia to train the National Police.
Raifal Eithan, the former chief of staff of the Israeli army, served as an advisor to former Colombian president Virgilio Barco and once proposed killing the members of the Patriotic Union political party, which was born from the failed peace process with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 1984.
Far-right Colombian paramilitaries are responsible for killing tens of thousands of civilians, including social leaders, environmental activists, and campesinos, and forcing millions more out of their homes. Furthermore, all branches of the Colombian armed forces use Israeli weaponry as standard, and all have been trained by Tel Aviv in combat techniques.
Time’s ‘New Antisemitism’ is More Woke Garbage
By Adam Dick | Peace and Prosperity | February 29, 2024
We’ve all heard the “woke” assertion that some people cannot be considered racist no matter how they act or what they say while other people are destined to live their entire lives as racists no matter how they act or what they say. The key difference between the two groups of people is whether their ancestry dictates they be labeled among the oppressors or the oppressed.
People exercising rationality see through this nonsense. They can judge people’s actions and statements with no investigation of family trees required.
Reading the Tuesday editorial “The New Antisemitism” at Time one comes across a fair amount of interesting commentary. But, in the end, the editorial just ends up applying a variation of the now familiar woke garbage assertions to Israel’s ongoing war. The Israel government cannot be engaging in genocide in its war because Israel is “the Jewish state” and Jewish people have a long history of being much oppressed, plus people who say otherwise are antisemitic. That is how the author Noah Feldman wraps up the editorial.
Here is the Time editorial’s presentation of its conclusions on genocide and antisemitism:
There is something specifically noteworthy about leveling the [genocide] charge at the Jewish state—something intertwined with the new narrative of the Jews as archetypal oppressors rather than archetypal victims. Call it the genocide sleight of hand: if the Jews are depicted as genocidal—if Israel becomes the very archetype of a genocidal state—then Jews are much less likely to be conceived as a historically oppressed people engaged in self-defense.
The new narrative of Jews as oppressors is, in the end, far too close for comfort to the antisemitic tradition of singling out Jews as uniquely deserving of condemnation and punishment, whether in its old religious form or its Nazi iteration. Like those earlier forms of antisemitism, the new kind is not ultimately about the Jews, but about the human impulse to point the finger at someone who can be made to carry the weight of our social ills.
The Time editorial says people seeking to hold the Israel government to account for its actions and statements are applying a “genocide sleight of hand” rooted in antisemitism. However, critical readers will recognize that real sleight of hand is the rhetorical sleight of hand whereby the clever wording of the editorial is used in an attempt to absolve a government for its horrendous actions by defining that government as a perpetual victim and its accusers as inescapably antisemites.
US, pushed by Israel, involved in widening war despite consequences: Iran FM
Press TV – February 28, 2024
Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian says the United States is involved in the expansion of the scope of the Israeli war on Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip to other fronts across the West Asia region.
Amir-Abdollahian stressed that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is seeking to widen the Gaza war and involve the United States in a way that goes beyond the all-out support Washington and some of its allies have already provided for Tel Aviv.
“The Americans do not yet have the necessary will to stop the war, but at the same time, they are sending messages expressing their unwillingness to expand its scope because they are well aware of the danger of expanding its scope,” the top Iranian diplomat said.
“On the other hand, they are expanding the scope of the war through their joint aggression with the UK against Yemen.Today in Europe, everyone talks about the necessity of stopping the war, but Britain is playing a double game.”
He made the statement in an interview with Lebanon’s Arabic-language al-Mayadeen television news network in the Swiss city of Geneva on Tuesday,
Amir-Abdollahian added that Washington’s talk of reducing the intensity of the Gaza war, rather than stopping it, is a “mistake and malicious behavior that means giving the green light to Netanyahu” to press ahead with its months-long brutal aggression.
“I told the British foreign minister that the joint British-American aggression against Yemen is a strategic mistake that you are committing,” he said. Yemen has “proven that they do not trifle with any party regarding the security of their lands. They have been able to convey this message and clearly warned that ships carrying military cargo to Israel will be stopped.”
US hypocrisy on Gaza
The Iranian foreign minister also pointed to the US administration’s unswerving support to Israel in its brutal war on the besieged Palestinian territory and its continued supply of weapons and logistics to the occupying regime.
“Our information has it that the process of sending weapons from all American bases in the region and its warships to Tel Aviv is continuing,” he said, adding, “Islamic countries should not be turned into a place to supply weapons to the Israeli entity.”
Denouncing the US hypocrisy in dealing with the Gaza war, Amir-Abdollahian said, “Everyone agrees that if the United States abandons its military support for the occupying entity, Netanyahu will not be able to continue the war against Gaza for even an hour.”
The top Iranian diplomat also stressed that Israel did not achieve any of its declared goals in the war on Gaza, including the elimination of the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, the group’s disarmament and the arrest of its Gaza-based leader Yahya Sinwar.
“The Lebanese and Palestinian resistance movements are at their best despite all the challenges and difficulties, and that they have the material and human resources and capabilities necessary to continue to withstand a longer war than what we have seen so far,” Amir-Abdollahian said.
Praising the morale and steadfastness of the residents of Gaza and the occupied West Bank, he underlined that the Israeli plans in Rafah “will not translate into reality and the occupation will not be able to forcibly displace people to the Egyptian Sinai.”
UN performance ‘unacceptable’
Elsewhere in his interview, the Iranian foreign minister censured as “unacceptable” the United Nations’ performance regarding the situation on the ground in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, saying the UN Security Council has not fulfilled its duty in light of the United States’ use of its veto.
“The Security Council did not fulfill its duty as the US continuously and unilaterally exploited its veto power. Every prospect and proposal of a Gaza ceasefire has been rejected by the American veto, exhibiting a contradictory behavior to the banners of primary human rights. Even at the UN Human Rights Council, we still have not seen any adequate mobilization in this regard,” he said.
“Does the UNHRC not want to create a special committee that relays the facts and investigations into war crimes, genocide, and human rights violations being committed in Gaza? So far, we have not witnessed a singular decisive measure taken by any of the organizations that fall under the UN.”
Amir-Abdollahian said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had so far taken some good measures but had not been able to help the people of Gaza “in an effective and real way” through the existing mechanisms of the United Nations.
“In the Human Rights Council, we clearly see that everything is subject to the control of politicians and false human rights advocates,” he said.
Israel launched the campaign of death and destruction on October 7, after Hamas-led Palestinian resistance groups conducted the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the regime’s decades-long atrocities.
Israel has killed nearly 30,000 people and injured more than 70,000 others in Gaza since that October day.
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Secret document reveals plans for civil war in Lebanon, Israeli false flags, and invasion
By Randi Nord | Geopolitics Alert | April 5, 2019
Beirut – During his visit with US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, Lebanese President Michael Aoun reportedly received a US-Israeli document detailing plans for creating a civil war in Lebanon with covert false flag operations and possible Israeli invasion.
Although the source of the document is Israeli and created in partnership with Washington, no one knows who presented it to Aoun. The Lebanese TV station, Al-Jadeed, initially reported the document on Lebanese TV and a video on its website. Geopolitics Alert translated the report for this article. … continue
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