AFP reports, "Tens of thousands of Israelis protested against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday as Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza reaches its half-year mark. Organisers said about 100,000 people converged at a Tel Aviv crossroads renamed 'Democracy Square' since mass protests against controversial judicial reforms last year." THE NATIONAL explains, "Rallies were also held in other cities, with Israel's opposition leader Yair Lapid taking part in one in Kfar Saba before a visit to Washington for talks." Australia's ABC notes, "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces pressure to resign as tens of thousands of protesters gather in Tel Aviv to call for new elections." WION adds:
The demonstrations took place after the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) recovered the body of hostage Elad Katzir. Demonstrators were reportedly chanting "elections now", and "Elad, we're sorry", urging Netanyahu to step down.
The War Criminal has assaulted Gaza for six months now. The editorial board of LE MONDE notes:
Disproportionality has become the norm, obliterating the distinction between militia fighters and civilians. A report by an Israeli investigative website serves as an allegory for this: According to the site, an artificial intelligence had been tasked with selecting thousands of human targets based on the work of intelligence services which had seen neither any of the preparations for October 7, nor the gigantic network of tunnels dug by Hamas. And what was the result? Four months after taking over Gaza's largest hospital to track down Hamas fighters, the Israeli army has found it necessary to launch another deadly and particularly destructive assault on the hospital at the end of March. To be followed by the next one.
Under the impetus of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political survival depends on the destruction of Gaza having been just as unable to free the Israelis captured on October 7 as to eradicate Hamas, Israel is reoccupying the narrow strip of land after having stifled it for 16 years. The maximalism of the most extremist government in the country's history is not only creating a humanitarian crisis on an unprecedented scale. It has also signaled the prevention of any reconstruction of Gaza, if by chance the weapons were to finally fall silent.
This Israeli drift was enabled by the blindness of the US, whose timid reservations were rightly taken for support. After the decimation of Palestinian civilians, journalists and humanitarians, it finally took the deaths of six foreigners employees of an American NGO, killed by successive Israeli drone strikes during a trip that had even been coordinated with the Israeli army, for President Joe Biden to speak out in anger. And to obtain what? A promise to facilitate the arrival of the humanitarian aid needed to prevent famine in Gaza. In other words, the bare minimum that would be expected of any democracy worthy of the name.
AP has a photo essay here documenting the six months of destruction. AP has a set of figures here and from that we'll note this on aid workers, health workers and journalists:
Aid workers killed in Gaza: 224, including at least 30 killed in the line of duty
Health workers killed in Gaza: 484
Journalists killed in Gaza: At least 95
Also killed in the last six months? Any notion that the US government could provide leadership. Patrick Wintour (GUARDIAN) offers, "Faced by this barrage, US diplomacy has not enjoyed its finest hour, as every day it seems its inability to control events becomes more apparent. It is locked in a war it had not foreseen, in a region it was seeking to leave behind, in defence of an ally that refuses to do as it asks." Jeremy Bowen (BBC NEWS) creates a measurement to determine progress in the coming weeks, "Over the next month or so, one way of assessing change is simply to count whether Israel is killing fewer Palestinian civilians, or whether increased food and medical aid can save Gaza from famine. Another test will be whether Mr Netanyahu defies American opposition and goes ahead with a ground assault on Rafah, where Israel says the remaining organised units of Hamas must be destroyed. The US says that must not happen until Israel can find a way to protect the lives of almost 1.5 million Palestinians who have taken refuge there."
AFP notes, "The World Health Organization said Saturday that Gaza's largest hospital had been reduced to ashes by Israel's latest siege, leaving an 'empty shell' with many bodies." At least 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza in the last six months -- 13,800 according to Save The Children. That's the figure right now. THE NEW ARAB explains, "By February, the number of children killed had exceeded the number of children killed in wars globally throughout the past four years." Many children are missing and many are starving. AP notes, "As the war in Gaza enters a sixth month, the WFP ]World Food Program] said malnutrition among children is spreading at record pace, and one of three below the age of two is now acutely malnourished." Peter Beaumont and Kaamil Ahmed (GUARDIAN) explain:
Two hundred and fifty calories represents two slices of supermarket wholemeal bread sold in the UK. Twelve per cent of recommended nutrition intake. Today in northern Gaza, already in the grip of a “catastrophic” level of hunger as defined by the UN, it represents an entire day’s calorific intake.
Six months into Israel’s war against Gaza, which followed Hamas’s brutal surprise attack on southern Israel’s border communities on 7 October last year which killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and saw almost 250 others taken hostage, acute hunger has become pervasive in the coastal strip.
For those who have money, food is in perilously short supply. For those with none – and with Israel, according to UN officials and other agencies, having obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid for months – finding sustenance has become a matter of life and death.
ISRAEL’S WAR AGAINST Hamas in Gaza has escalated into a “betrayal of humanity”, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief said today.
In a statement on the eve of the six-month anniversary of the war, Martin Griffiths, the outgoing under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief, called for a “collective determination that there be a reckoning for this betrayal of humanity”.
“Each day, this war claims more civilian victims,” Griffiths, who will leave his post at the end of June due to health reasons, said.
“Every second that it continues sows the seeds of a future so deeply obscured by this relentless conflict.”
At JACOBIN, Enzo Traverso writes:
All of our statesmen have gone on pilgrimage to Tel Aviv to assure Benjamin Netanyahu of their unconditional support for Israel. There is no debate, they tell us, when morality and civilization are at stake. Even now that these traditional assumptions are deeply shaken in Western public opinion by the daily spectacle of famine and the massacre of children, they combine their pleas for moderation and humanitarianism with reaffirmations of Israel’s status as a victim that must defend itself.
No one ever mentions the right of the Palestinians to defend themselves against an aggression that has lasted for decades. While Israel obstructs any terrestrial delivery of humanitarian and medical assistance, Western governments (with few exceptions) imperturbably continue to support a genocidal power both financially and militarily.
After October 7, the threshold of tolerance has greatly increased, and the number of children killed under the bombs is no longer counted. Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis, including eight hundred civilians; Tzahal, the Israeli military, has killed at least thirty-three thousand Palestinians to date, including no more than five thousand Hamas fighters.
Everything is planned: the destruction of roads, schools, universities, hospitals, museums, monuments, and even cemeteries erased by bulldozers; the interruption of water, electricity, gas, fuel, internet; the denial of displaced people’s access to food and medication; the evacuation of more than 1.5 million of the 2.3 million people living in Gaza to the south of the strip, where they are again bombed; disease and epidemics. Unable to eradicate Hamas, Tzahal started the elimination of the Palestinian intelligentsia: scholars, doctors, technicians, journalists, intellectuals, and poets.
The UN’s International Court of Justice, one of the products of the Western international order, issued a warning that the Palestinian population of Gaza is being subjected to an organized and relentless slaughter, uprooted and deprived of the most basic conditions of survival. The Israeli war in Gaza is taking on the features of genocide. Orientalism, however, is stronger than the juridical legacy of the Enlightenment.
Earlier this week, the Israeli government murdered seven people working to deliver food to the Palestinians -- Australian Lalzawmi 'Zomi' Frankcom, US-Canadian Jacob Flickinger, Polish Damian Sobol and British James Kirby, John Chapman, James Henderson and Paletinian Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha who were working with World Central Kitchen. ALJAZEERA notes, "UK support for Israel is 'not unconditional', British Secretary of State David Cameron writes in The Sunday Times, a week after it killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers, including three Britons, in Gaza." At CNN, Mobile Medics International's Teresa Gray remembers Zomi Frankcom:
I talked to Zomi the week before she was headed to Gaza. I reminded her it was dangerous — something she acknowledged herself — even though we both knew she was going anyway. Because that was what Zomi did; she went where help was needed, making sure the vulnerable got fed, that people felt loved and cared for, and that she was a beacon of hope for the hopeless.
Zomi and I met years ago while we were both working in humanitarian aid. I run an organization that provides medical care in crisis situations, while she worked for World Central Kitchen providing food for those same people.
We would often work together in foreign countries. I’d ask, “Hey Zomi, where are you taking food? Do they need medical as well?” She’d reach out and say, “Hey Teresa, where are you doing medical? Do they need food?” Eventually, through our years-long collaboration, Zomi and I saw each other so often that we became close friends.
Zomi was fierce and loyal and loving and funny. She had this amazing smile that was ever-present and she was the best hugger I’ve ever known. She was constantly forgetting something when she packed for her trips abroad. I would get a Whatsapp message in the middle of the night or a call, where she’d ask, “Hey, when you get here would you bring me socks?” or “Hey my friend, I forgot to pack shampoo, you’re coming to the earthquake, right? Bring me some.”
We also had a standing joke that she was to always bring me European chocolate and I was to bring her Alaskan salmon. Neither of us ever did, but when we saw each other, we would always ask, “Where’s my chocolate?” or “Where’s my salmon?” We’d then agree to bring those items and meet in Transylvania — the most far-flung place we could think of.
When I actually ended up traveling to Transylvania, she called me to jokingly yell at me for going without her. The silly, irrelevant jokes and conversations we had made our friendship special.
I never saw Zomi in her home country of Australia and she never saw me in my home country of America. We only ever saw each other in foreign lands, in the middle of some disaster we were both trying to help with. What mattered was that we shared a common purpose: to help when we could, where we were, with what we had.
Gaza remains under assault. Day 183 of the assault in the wave that began in October. Binoy Kampmark (DISSIDENT VOICE) points out, "Bloodletting as form; murder as fashion. The ongoing campaign in Gaza by Israel’s Defence Forces continues without stalling and restriction. But the burgeoning number of corpses is starting to become a challenge for the propaganda outlets: How to justify it? Fortunately for Israel, the United States, its unqualified defender, is happy to provide cover for murder covered in the sheath of self-defence." CNN has explained, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund." ABC NEWS quotes UNICEF's December 9th statement, ""The Gaza Strip is the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. Scores of children are reportedly being killed and injured on a daily basis. Entire neighborhoods, where children used to play and go to school have been turned into stacks of rubble, with no life in them." NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll. The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza." The slaughter continues. It has displaced over 1 million people per the US Congressional Research Service. Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide." The death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is grows higher and higher. United Nations Women noted, "More than 1.9 million people -- 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza -- have been displaced, including what UN Women estimates to be nearly 1 million women and girls. The entire population of Gaza -- roughly 2.2 million people -- are in crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse." THE NATIONAL notes, "The death toll from Israel's military offensive in Gaza has increased to 33,137 since October 7, while at least 75,815 have been wounded, the enclave's Health Ministry said on Saturday." Months ago, AP noted, "About 4,000 people are reported missing." February 7th, Jeremy Scahill explained on DEMOCRACY NOW! that "there’s an estimated 7,000 or 8,000 Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of their former home." February 5th, the United Nations' Phillipe Lazzarini Tweeted:
Six months. Death and destruction for six months, starving civilians for six months, terrorizing civilians for six months. And what's the end game? CNN's Ivana Kottasová writes:
The war in Gaza has been raging for six months and the patience of Israel’s allies is running out. As the death toll in the enclave continues to climb, it’s becoming increasingly clear that Israel has no viable plan for how to end the war or what comes next.
The determination to continue pursuing Hamas in Gaza despite the horrific humanitarian consequences is leaving Israel increasingly isolated on the global stage, with its government facing pressure from all sides.
Multiple international organizations have warned Israel may be committing genocide, and even the country’s closest allies are now openly criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Calls to halt arms shipments to Israel are growing in the United States and the United Kingdom.
And if the assault ended tomorrow? Robert Tollast, Nada AlTaher and Khaled Yacoub Oweis (THE NATIONAL) report:
Millions of Gazans without access to clean water, food or electricity and facing famine are desperate for an end to the war, now in its sixth month.
But what awaits if the guns fall silent amid one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters?
By some estimates, as of April 5 anywhere between 50 and 70 per cent of housing has been destroyed or seriously damaged, while more than 33,000 people have been killed in the Israeli bombardment.
Experts say prioritising so many sectors at once amounts to "starting from zero". For example, a country that loses an entire city in an earthquake might still have another city nearby with hospitals and emergency workers ready to assist.
But that is not the case in Gaza. That presents a challenge of “mammoth” complexity, diplomats and reconstruction experts told The National.
In the US, even politicians are starting to say "Enough." Australia's ABC reports:
US representative Nancy Pelosi, former House speaker and a key ally of President Joe Biden, has signed a letter urging a halt to weapons transfers to Israel.
Ms Pelosi signed a letter from dozens of congressional Democrats, calling on Mr Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to stop the transfer of weapons to Israel on Friday.
Julia Conley (COMMON DREAMS) adds:
U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine on Friday became the latest centrist Democrat to display a shift in tone regarding the Biden administration's continued support for Israel—and despite months of intensifying demands from progressive lawmakers and the international community for President Joe Biden to push for a change in policy from Israel, the newly minted critics have appeared to have more success.
The Virginia Democrat, who serves on both the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees, cited the killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers this week in a lengthy statement in which he said Israel's "current approach is not working" and pushed back against the White House's opposition to an independent investigation into the attack.
"The United States should join in the call for an independent and international investigation into Monday's strike on World Central Kitchen volunteers, in which an American was killed," said Kaine. The senator also renewed his call for the administration to "prioritize the transfer of defensive weapons in all arms sales to Israel while withholding bombs and other offensive weapons that can kill and wound civilians and humanitarian aid workers."
Kaine's comments came a day after Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.)—said to be Biden's closest ally in the Senate—told CNN that the U.S. is approaching a point at which it must consider placing conditions on military aid to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
"If [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu were to order the IDF into Rafah at scale... and make no provision for civilians or for humanitarian aid, I would vote to condition aid to Israel," Coons said, referring to the southern Gaza city where Israel has threatened to start a ground offensive and where 1.5 million displaced Palestinians are staying in shelters and makeshift tents. "I've never said that before, I've never been here before."
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Shaping a National Latino Museum1 day ago
