Israeli occupation forces drop leaflets demanding forced displacement of Palestinians from Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Palestine, on May 6. (Social media)
Israeli occupation forces begin to forcefully displace Palestinians formerly displaced to Rafah amid the increased likelihood of the start of the imminent invasion.
The Israeli occupation forces officially began, on Monday, the forceful displacement of the already-displaced Palestinian people currently seeking shelter in Rafah, which had been designated by the Israelis as an alleged “safe zone” early in the war.
With flyers dropping from the skies, SMS, and social media broadcasts, the Israeli occupation’s action on Rafah is set to be yet another episode of this live-streamed genocide.
According to Israeli spokesperson Avichay Adraee, the IOF has allegedly expanded the alleged “humanitarian zone” in the Mawasi area and is forcing Palestinians out of eastern Rafah, which was allegedly the initial “safe zone”.
The Palestinians report that the #IDF dropped leaflets over #Rafah in the south of the #Gaza Strip stating that the humanitarian area from the Moasi area in #Khan_Yunis has been expanded to the Deir al-Balah area in the center of the Gaza Strip, (1/2) pic.twitter.com/AsMWTGm7Cn
The action being taken by the Israeli occupation would forcefully displace at least 100,000 of the 1.4 million Palestinians currently displaced in Rafah. It would also threaten to hold all remaining Palestinians in Gaza hostage, as the Rafah border crossing will likely be targeted through bombardments.
After 7 months of the televised genocide, the number of Palestinian martyrs, wounded, and missing has exceeded 100,000 Palestinians.
Three IOF soldiers killed, 12 wounded in Karem Abu Salem shelling
The Israeli military admitted to the deaths of three of its soldiers and the wounding of 12 others as a result of the Palestinian Resistance’s shelling of an Israeli military outpost located near the Karem Abu Salem crossing.
Two of the killed soldiers fought with the Shaked battalion under the Givati Brigade, while the third fought with the 931 battalion under the Nahal Brigade.
Twelve soldiers were also wounded in the shelling, including two of the 931 battalion, and one of the Shaked battalion, who was reportedly in critical condition.
According to the Al-Qassam Brigades, Resistance fighters targeted the location using a 114 mm short-range Rajum missile system.
The targeted gathering was responsible for the aggression against cities in Rafah and included Israeli military and Shin Bet officers, according to a source in the Resistance.
The sources said the Resistance’s preparation for the operation, its setup, and intelligence capabilities, affirmed its capabilities to accurately and directly engage its targets.
It was simultaneously emphasized that the operation relayed several political messages, most notably the Resistance’s readiness to defend the people of Palestine against reckless Israeli aggression, as well as a military message affirming the Resistance’s capabilities and steadiness, despite the “successes” the Israeli occupation claims it is achieving.
Israeli air defenses have since stepped up their bombing of Rafah as a response to the Karem Abu Salem operation.
Rafah invasion will happen with or without exchange deal: Netanyahu
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier on April 30, that an invasion of the densely-populated Rafah city will take place regardless of whether an exchange deal with the Palestinian Resistance was reached or not.
“The idea that we will stop the war before all its goals have been achieved is irrelevant. We will enter Rafah and destroy Hamas battalions there, with or without an agreement [on hostages], to achieve absolute victory,” he told families of the captives held in the Strip.
مشاهد مرعبة من القصف المستمر على رفح.
هذا الصاروخ كان سبب في قتل 6 أشخاص من بينهم أطفال.
Hamas representative, Ahmed Abdel Hadi highlights concerns over vague language in the ceasefire proposal, and external pressures targeting the Palestinian Resistance.
The Hamas representative in Lebanon, Ahmed Abdel Hadi, in an interview with Al Mayadeen, said that although the movement is “seriously studying” the proposals for a ceasefire agreement, it is “too early to judge the results,” noting that the papers presented contain “general phrases that could suggest something ambiguous,” and emphasizing the role of the negotiators in this part.
Abdel Hadi pointed out that the only sides discussing positive outcomes from reaching an agreement are the US and Israeli sides. He stressed that no one has succeeded in pressuring the resistance to accept any deal and emphasized that “the popular support for the resistance cannot raise the white flag.”
Regarding the threat of an Israeli military operation in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, Abdel Hadi said, “Netanyahu wants to prolong the war, and he agreed to a partial cessation of it. The threat to invade Rafah is to pressure the Resistance,” he said, stressing that “many surprises will confront the Israeli Prime Minister if he decides to invade Rafah.”
On a different note, Abdel Hadi discussed the development of the protest movement in US universities, which he considered “one of the results of the Al-Aqsa flood,” and predicted that these protests will spread “to all universities in the world, and this is a very important development in terms of the Palestinian cause.”
Hamas delegation to Cairo soon
In a related context, the head of Hamas’ Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh called Egyptian Intelligence Minister General Abbas Kamel regarding the ceasefire negotiations.
Haniyeh praised Egypt’s role, affirming “the positive attitude of the movement towards studying the ceasefire proposal.”
The Hamas politburo head informed the Egyptian minister that the movement’s delegation for negotiations will arrive in Egypt “very soon,” with the intention “to continue the ongoing discussions,” with the goal of achieving “an agreement that meets the demands of the Palestinian people and stops the aggression.”
Al Mayadeen obtains a copy of the mediated Palestinian-Israeli deal
Al Mayadeen had acquired the details of the latest proposed deal between the Palestinian Resistance and the Israeli occupation, specifically related to the prisoner exchange deal and related clauses.
The framework of the agreement aims to achieve the release of all Israeli civilian and military captives, be they dead or alive, held in the Gaza Strip. The agreement will not only encompass captives taken on October 7 but all Israeli captives.
Primarily, the deal’s objective is to achieve calm in the area and work on reaching a ceasefire, the document acquired by Al Mayadeen explains.
What does the first stage of the prisoner exchange deal entail?
In the first stage of the prisoner exchange deal, Israeli occupation forces will withdraw eastward, away from densely populated areas. Forces will be relocated to areas near the separation fence between the Gaza Strip and Israeli-occupied ’48 Palestinian territories.
Israeli aircraft, both combat and reconnaissance, will be barred from flying over the Strip for a period of eight hours on a daily basis. However, on days when prisoners are being exchanged, Israeli aircraft will not fly over the Gaza Strip for a period of 10 hours.
On the seventh day of the deal and after women included in the deal are released, Israeli occupation forces will withdraw from al-Rashid Street and head eastwards, parallel to the Gaza Strip’s main road, to Salah al-Din Street.
The withdrawal of occupation forces is expected to ease the entry of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and will allow non-armed civilians to return to their homes.
On the 22nd day, and after one-third of the Israeli captives are released, the Israeli occupation forces will withdraw from the central Gaza Strip to an area near the separation fence.
The return of displaced people and the entry of aid
This process will allow Palestinians forcibly displaced from the northern Gaza Strip to return to their residences.
The entry of concentrated amounts of humanitarian aid, including relief aid and fuel, will be facilitated in all stages of the agreement.
33 Israeli captives to be released
In the first stage, Hamas will release at least 33 captives, which includes all Israeli captives that are still alive. This group includes female Israeli servicepeople, civilians, children, elderly people, wounded individuals, and patients.
In turn, “Israel” will release 20 Palestinian children and women for every female or male Israeli captive released. The names of the released detainees will be agreed upon by the sides, in pre-set lists.
In detail, Hamas will release every living Israeli captive over the age of 50, wounded Israeli captive, and sick Israeli captive. “Israel” will therefore release 20 Palestinian captives, aged over 50, wounded, or sick.
Hamas will also release every living Israeli female conscript, who was serving on October 7, 2023. In return, “Israel” will release 40 Palestinian detainees in return for every Israeli servicewoman.
This includes 20 Palestinian prisoners serving life sentences and 20 Palestinian prisoners serving shorter sentences.
Hamas will also release three captives on the first day of the deal, which will be followed by three captives every three days, encompassing female civilians and soldiers.
“Israel” will then release the agreed-upon number of Palestinian prisoners, according to the pre-set lists.
On the seventh day of the deal, Hamas will submit a list of the names of the remaining captives that it holds. These captives will be released on the 34th day of the deal.
Halting military operations and the continuity of the deal
Military operations will be halted for a number of days, determined by the number of Israeli captives remaining in captivity.
The continuity of the exchange process will be directly correlated with the Israeli side’s commitment to the clauses of the deal, including the halting of military operations, the relocation of occupation forces, and the return of the displaced people.
Among the clauses is that released Palestinian detainees must not be re-detained on charges that they had previously been detained on.
On the 14th day, an agreed-upon number of wounded Palestinian military personnel will be transferred to hospitals outside the Gaza Strip, through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, to receive adequate medical attention.
On the 16th day of the deal, the sides are obligated to participate in indirect talks for sustainable calm in the region.
During the period of every stage, the United Nations, its agencies, and international organizations will begin to work on distributing and providing aid to Palestinians across the entirety of the Gaza Strip.
Rebuilding Gaza
In the first stage, work will commence on the Gaza Strip’s destroyed infrastructure. A coordinating body will also begin delivering the necessary heavy equipment to the Palestinian Civil Defense.
Facilitating the entry of necessary supplies, to establish temporary camps to accommodate forcibly displaced people who lost their homes during the war, is also among the clauses included in the deal.
What about the second stage?
The second stage of the deal will extend for 42 days, in which both sides are expected to agree on the necessary actions to reach and implement a sustainable calm.
In the second phase, the necessary arrangements will be made for the comprehensive reconstruction of housing units, civil facilities, and civilian infrastructure.
The final stage of the deal: Exchanging bodies
The third stage of the deal will also extend for a period of 42 days, in which the bodies and remains of both killed individuals on both sides will be exchanged.
A 5-year reconstruction plan for the Gaza Strip will be implemented which will include the construction of housing units and civilian facilities and infrastructure. The Palestinian side will refrain from rebuilding military installations and infrastructure during that period.
Moreover, the Palestinian side will not import any equipment, raw materials, or other components to be used for military purposes.
According to the document obtained by Al Mayadeen, Qatar, Egypt, and the United States are the stated guarantors of the agreement.
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Basim Khandaqji is a Palestinian novelist, born in Nablus, Palestine in 1983. He studied Journalism and Media at the Al-Najah National University in Nablus. He wrote short stories until his imprisonment when he was 21 years old, in 2004. Inside prison, he registered with Al-Quds University and completed university studies in Political Science with a thesis on Israeli Studies. He also continued writing, including articles about literature, politics, female Palestinian activists and prisoners inside Israeli prisons.
The novel of Palestinian prisoner Basim Khandaqji, “A Mask, the Color of the Sky”, won the 2024 International Booker Prize for Arabic Fiction, in a new indication that the spirit of Palestinian prisoners remains unbroken despite the oppressive weight of confinement by the Israeli occupation.
Khandaqji, born in Nablus, has been imprisoned by Israeli occupation since 2004. The author is currently serving three life sentences for so-called “terrorism charges” connected to a bombing at Tel Aviv’s camel market.
During a ceremony marking the seventeenth session of the award on Sunday, Khandaqji’s brother, Youssef, and the founder of Dar Al Adab Rana Idriss, the publishing company that released “A Mask, the Color of the Sky”, received the prize.
— International Prize for Arabic Fiction (@Arabic_Fiction) April 28, 2024
Choked with emotions of both sorrow and pride, Youssef Khandaqji thanked the judges of the award and his family, whom he called the source of strength.
In a January interview, Youssef revealed that Basim Khandaqji had not been in contact with his family for four months.
Published in 2023, the novel, which was smuggled out of the jail, follows the life of a Palestinian archaeologist living in a refugee camp in Ramallah who finds the identity card of an Israeli citizen.
Nabil Suleiman, chairman of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, lauded Khandaqji for creating a portrayal of compassion despite dehumanization in a novel that skillfully balances the political and the personal as it dissects displacement, genocide and racism.
While in prison, Khandaqji completed his education, studying political science at Al-Quds University.
Palestinian prisoner Basim Khandaqji at Israeli jail (photo from archive).
Khandaqji has written several other books, including “The Eclipse of Badr Al-Din” (2019), and “The Breath of a Woman Let Down” (2020). He has also written several poetry collections, titled “Rituals of the First Time” (2010), “The Breath of a Nocturnal Poem” (2013) and “The Narcissus of Isolation” (2017). Khandaqji has also published articles about literature, politics, female Palestinian activists, and prisoners inside Israeli prisons.
The International Booker Prize for Arabic Fiction is one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the Arab world. It was established in 2008 and awards USD 50,000 to its winner, as well as USD 10,000 to its six shortlisted authors.
“A Mask, the Color of the Sky” was one of two Palestinian novels shortlisted for this prestigious prize; the other, “The Seventh Heaven of Jerusalem”, was written by Osama Al Eissa.
Nur, an archaeologist living in a refugee camp in Ramallah, finds a blue identity card belonging to an Israeli in the pocket of an old coat. He adopts the mask of the occupier in an attempt to understand the Zionist mindset. As “Nur” becomes “Ur”, he joins an archaeological dig on a settlement, and historical Palestine is revealed. In the chasm between Nur and Ur – between the blue Israeli identity card, and the pass required by Palestinians for travel within Israel; and between the character’s suppressed original narrative, and the new dominant one – will Nur succeed in throwing off his mask, triumphing over Ur and reaching the light? Publisher Dar al-Adab Nomination 2024 Winner
Organise. Act. Now! We often feel helpless, so little we can do. But we are the majority, the people on the side of life, of freedom, against colonialism, apartheid, racism. We must organise better to match the colonial powers with all their money, arms, profits, lies and media. When we organise better – with more people – we force our leaders to change their politics. Small groups of committed citizens can change the world, we know that! Don’t be alone. Organise, be active! We are the stronger part. Palestine is winning, ISrael is losing. Truth is winning, lies are losing. Our solidarity is winning. Organise. Act. Now! Dr. Mads
Isma’il Ibrahim Sha’ban Qarmout (33), married with two children, resident of Jabalia al-Balad, north of Gaza, gave his testimony to PCHR on 01 April 2024.
I lived with my family in a 4-story building of 300 sqms, a house to 5 families of 24 members, including 12 children and 6 women. My 190-sqm apartment was on the first floor and I work as a biomedical engineer.
Since the beginning of the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip on 07 October 2023, we remained in our house because our area was dubbed as a “safe zone” according to an interactive map circulating on social media and the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) urging evacuations to our area.
On 19 November 2023, we started hearing the sound of nearby bombings of homes and lands, and the roaring sound of Israeli tanks and bulldozers.
At around 02:00 on 20 November 2023, the IOF called one of the neighbors and ordered him to inform all residents of our area to evacuate, because they would bomb houses there but did not specify any. I took my handbag with 25000 shekels and 5000 US dollars inside in addition to some personal documents and clothes. We were already prepared for evacuation, and during our evacuation, my grandmother with a disability, Faitma Mustafa Qarmout (88), fell on the ground and injured her leg, so we carried her and immediately fled the area. My grandmother later suffered from gangrene affecting her foot and died due to lack of healthcare triggered by the Israeli ongoing aggression on Gaza and the continuous targeting of hospitals. (I learned of her death after I was released as I will explain later.)
Fifteen minutes after the evacuation, Israeli warplanes launched two missiles as we could hear two heavy explosions, so we returned to our homes and was shocked to find my 60-year-old uncle Nayef’s house next to ours was bombed and completely destroyed. The 350-sqm house of 5 floors housed 10 apartments and 9 families of 50 members, mostly women and children. Also, our house has become rickety and uninhabitable while other nearby houses were severely damaged, and others were partially damaged.
At approximately 06:00 on the same day, we decided to go to the south of Gaza through the so-called “safe corridor” designated by IOF during the aggression for the displaced residents of Gaza and northern Gaza heading to the south. At around 08:00, my family and I headed to the “safe corridor” in my golden Daewoo Matiz car, and about 500 meters away from the corridor, I parked near the Kuwait Roundabout and we got out of the car. I was holding my 1-year-old son, Adam, and carrying my backpack with money inside. We went towards the “safe corridor” and the road was uneven and bumpy having many sand berms that had been dug by the IOF. As I approached the Israeli soldiers stationed at the checkpoint, I raised my ID card and kept walking. Suddenly, a soldier called me from behind a sand berm and ordered me to give my son Adam to his mother, Ansaf Nayef Qarmout (28), who was behind me, and to walk towards him. When I was 4 meters away from him, he ordered me to read my ID number. After he verified the number, he ordered me to drop my backpack, but I told him it contained money (25000 shekels and 5000 USD), and he should take it in his custody, but he refused and forced me to throw it, so I did. Later, He ordered me to go behind a sand berm and forced me to strip fully naked. He then ordered me to wear my clothes again and approached me to tied my hands behind my back with a plastic zip tie, blindfolded me, and led me to another sand berm, where there were two soldiers. One of them interrogated me for a few minutes about where I was on 07 October, and whether I am affiliated with Hamas or any Palestinian faction, but I said no. He then told the soldier, “take him and shoot him”, so he took me and threw me on the ground, pulling his trigger and firing 6-7 bullets above my head. I was literally shaking in fear and begging the soldier to kill me. He suddenly kicked me while wearing his boots all over my body, especially on my back, sides and thighs. After about two hours, he left and I remained lying on the ground in shock while being tied and blindfolded. Every two minutes, the soldiers would bring a detainee and throw him next to me. After 4 hours, two soldiers picked me up and threw me at the back of a military SUV, where we were 20 detainees and two of whom were atop me. The SUV then drove us on a bumpy road for an hour and then stopped. The soldiers pulled me out of the SUV and stripped my clothes off by pulling down my pants and taking off my blouse. For whole 7 minutes, I was severely tortured that I could not recognize from where the blows come. I was constantly beaten with their rifles’ butts, feet, and batons. Afterwards, two soldiers held me from my handcuffs and two others from my feet and swung me back and forth about four times and then hit my head into the SUV, causing a bleeding cut in my head. After that, they dressed me and led me to a bus, where there were two soldiers: one in front of me on the bus stairs beating me on my legs and the other from behind hitting my calf (leg) with an iron rod that he could make shorter or longer. At the time, I did not know what to do, should I step forward or backward? and that when the soldier pushed me inside the bus and the other pressed my handcuffs tighter that made me scream out of intense pain. He seated me on the chair and then other detainees, who were tortured like me, got into the bus, among them were elderlies and children of 16 years old. I was not the only one who was subjected to torture as I could see other detainees from under the blindfold and when some of them told the soldiers that they held Canadian and Belgian passports, the soldiers would torture and beat them harder. After about 4 hours, when the bus has become full of 50 detainees, it drove away for an hour, during which, we were beaten on the heads when trying to raise our heads or move to sit in a more comfortable position.
The bus stopped and dropped us off. They then gave me a 1-cm thin mattress and a light blanket. They put us in a barrack divided into two halves, each half can take up to 150 detainees, while the barrack had a flake asphalt flooring, lined with barbed wires and roofed with tinplate. I was forced to kneel while being handcuffed and keeping our heads down. Since my first day, I asked for a doctor because I suffered a chronic stiff neck and the pain got worse due to the severe torture in addition to hand numbness. After 5 days, they took me to a doctor, and I told him what I was suffering from, but he did not give me any medication. Afterwards, they put a plastic tag around my left hand holding a number that I do not remember. It bearing in mind that all the way to the doctor, who was 10 meters ahead, I was being kicked, beaten with batons, and attacked by dogs backwards and forwards.
I was held in the barrack for 20 days, during which, I was interrogated twice and the first one was after 7 days of my detention there. They took me and 6 detainees on a bus 50 meters away and put us in a barrack of 3 caravans. Before entering those caravans for interrogation, I was stripped naked and examined with a metal detector. After that, they forced me to wear a diaper and then my clothes before they tied my hands and blindfolded me.
They put me in a 2×2 caravan with two soldiers, one was sitting on a computer. They seated me on a steel chair, tied one of my hands behind the chair and the other to the chair armrest while my feet were tied as well to the chair legs, and I was unblindfolded. One of the soldiers, whom I think was an officer, began to interrogate me about the neighbors’ houses, where I was on 07 October, and if I knew anyone from Hamas. When I denied knowing anyone from Hamas, he suddenly grabbed my face and forcefully pushed me. The interrogation continued for 5 hours and then they took me out into an area of pebbled floor. Also, while waiting to enter for the interrogation or after it, I was being shackled in the “Shabeh” position, where my hands were tied to an iron bridge above me, and my toes were barely touching the ground in the so-called “waiting barrack”. I remained in that painful position until they finished interrogating other detainees. They returned us later to the barrack in the evening.
The second interrogation was 5 days after the first one during which I was asked the same questions. They left us in the in the barrack for 3 days with our hands tied behind our backs and blindfolded, lying on the gravel floor. The soldiers gave us too little food consisted of a slice of bread with labneh or jam, and water. When I was in the barrack, I wanted to pee, so I asked one of the detainees to help me take off my clothes, and the other detainee next to me helped me to put my clothes on without cleaning myself. This was the same with every detainee, we were helping each other to relieve ourselves in the same place we were in while the soldiers were just watching, mocking us and laughing. On the third day, they took us back to the barracks at around 16:00.
After 10 days of detention, they started daily counting us 3 times a day: at 05:00, 13:00 and 23:30. While sleeping after the count, the soldiers would make loud noises or blast loud music, and when we woke up, they would scream and hit the tin plates, so we would wake up disturbed. The breakfast, lunch and dinner were mainly a loaf of bread with a little labneh spread, and sometimes there might be a tomato or a cucumber shared by 3 detainees. And when asking the detainee, who was appointed by the soldiers to help us, to take us to the bathroom, you would take your turn after half an hour. We went to the bathroom while being handcuffed and blindfolded, noting that there was no water or toilet paper, and only the appointed detainee helped us to take off or put on our clothes.
On the 18th day of detention, at around 17:00, one of the detainees asked to go to the doctor because he was suffering from shortness of breath due to a heart attack, but the soldiers refused and ordered the appointed detainee to cover him. At about 05:00, when we were being counted, the detainee, who asked to go to the doctor, did not stand up, so they ordered the appointed detainee to wake him up, but he was already dead. We then began to shout out loud “Allahu Akbar”, “translated God is Great”, so several soldiers raided the barrack and suppressed us by throwing stun grenades, beating us with batons and unleashing their dogs at us. This lasted for half an hour, after which, they took the deceased detainee whose name we did not know.
Two days later, at approximately 05:00, the soldiers called out 20 detainees, including me, and from the other barrack they called out 20 other detainees. They removed the plastic ties and tied our hands behind our backs and our feet with iron cuffs. They put us on a bus that drove us for 10 minutes. They then dropped us off, removed my blindfold, photographed me, and forced me to kiss the Israeli flag. Afterwards, the soldier blindfolded me again and hit my face against a wall, causing my nose to bleed. Then, the soldiers beat me with iron sticks and plastic brass knuckles (a melee weapon that is fitted and designed to be worn around the knuckles of the human hand to cause unbearable pain) and I was shocked by a soldier’s electric taser baton. The soldiers then threw me on the gravel ground and dragged me all the way to a closed detainee transportation bus called Al-bosta that was 4×2.5 meters long with small holes in its ceiling. In the bus, they made me sit on a chair and constantly beat me, particularly on the head with an iron stick. We were 20 detainees, and the soldiers turned on the air heating, and we started sweating, and then blew cold air and we started shivering. After 2 hours, the bus drove us for three hours, as soon as we got off the bus, the soldiers again beat us with iron sticks. Then they removed the handcuffs but kept the blindfolds and put us all sticking together in a 2.5×2.5-meter cell. Next to the cell, I could see from under the blindfold a sink and a water tap, and after few minutes I went to drink from it until one of the soldiers saw me and kicked me so hard with his foot on my waist that made me vomit. He then dragged me to a room surrounded by barbed wire, ordered me to strip naked, grabbed my genitals and lifted me up, so I fainted. I woke up from the severe beating I had been subjected to while I was unconscious, and this was repeated three or four times, after which, he ordered me to put on my clothes while the beating did not stop.
After putting on my clothes, he tied my hands behind my back with plastic zip ties and blindfolded me. He then dragged to a bus that was 20 meters away where there was an officer who asked me, “how is it going with the intelligence?” and I told him out of fear, “all fine” and he started laughing – I have never been so broken and humiliated ever in my life as that time!- He then forced me into the bus while punching me, and I stayed there for 10 minutes until the bus was full. After Maghrib prayers, they dropped us off in a corridor where the soldiers, one by one, punched and beat us with iron sticks, until we reached the last soldier who had a cutter and removed the plastic ties and blindfolds, ordering us to run forward. As we were running, the detainees there said, “do not worry, there is no beating here”, and then I fainted. The detainees poured some water on my face, and I woke up, but I could not stand up, so they carried me all the way to the tent called “cell 11”, and I learned from them that I was in the Negev prison. My throat was so dry because I was very thirsty, so they gave me water to drink and so did those who were with me. I spent the first night without a mattress, blanket, nor food as we were sticking together while sleeping to warm each other because the weather was very cold.
At 05:00, we woke up to the inmate count, and they gave us breakfast, which was a cup of yogurt, though I do not eat it. Then at 13:00, we had lunch that was a piece of bread and an egg or cheese, and dinner was white rice. From 14:00 to 15:00, they turned on water for us, so we used to fill water in the milk cups and plastic bags of the bread and hide them in the tent grabs since there are not enough bottles in the tents.
After 10 days, they took me for interrogation and asked me the same questions: “Are you Hamas? Do you know anyone from Hamas? and Where you were on 07 October?” After taking my statement, they took my fingerprints and a DNA sample from my saliva, and photographed me. Then, they took me back to the tent. After four days, I became sick for a week and could not stand up due to cramps in my back and knees as the detainees were carrying me to the bathroom. When I asked to go to the doctor, the soldiers refused.
At around 14:00 on 08 January 2024, one of the soldiers came and called 8 detainees out, including me. He took us out of the tent, tied my hands with iron cuffs in front, and blindfolded us. They put us on a bus, which was divided into iron rooms that looked like a closed cell with small holes, as every four detainees were held in one room. After driving us for 5 minutes, they dropped us off a 3×3 cell with a small observation window on the door and a bathroom inside. After an hour, we heard the soldiers calling out the names of detainees who were with us in the tent. We thought they would be released, but they brought them to our cell until we became 20 detainees. Then, they called us five by five, and took us to a room, and checked our names more than once. Afterwards, they took us back to the cell. After an hour, they called out our names and put us in the bus with cells, each three were held in one cell. The bus then drove us away for 5 hours and then dropped us off a doctor, but I fainted right before reaching the doctor because I was fasting and only ate a piece of bread. The doctor examined me as I had low blood pressure and seizures, and he gave me one pill of Relaxone and another of Acamol. They took me back to the very first barracks, so I felt very frustrated because I thought that I would remain in detention while I was blindfolded, and my hands were tied with iron cuffs, kneeling on the ground with my head down from 05:00 till 23:30. At around 23:00, the soldiers came and took us out of the barracks, untied our hands, gave us a grey suit to wear, and tied our hands again, ordering us to sleep at the barrack gate.
At 03:00 on 09 January 2024, the soldiers came, called out 5 detainees, including me, took us out of the barrack, removed the iron cuffs and replaced them with plastic zip ties while keeping the blindfolds. They put us on a bus that drove us for 3 hours, until we arrived at Kerem Shalom crossing at 06:00, and we were 80 detainees, including workers and a woman whom I did not know. The soldiers removed our handcuffs and ordered us to walk forward and never look back. We walked for 2 kilometers and then found an UNRWA bus waiting for us that drove us to the Rafah crossing gate. I took one of the employee’s cellphone and called my family. My brothers: Moussa (28), ‘Issa (26), and Sha’ban (25), who had been all displaced to Rafah, came to take me to my wife and children at Al-Razi Primary School for Girls in Rafah. Meanwhile, my father and mother remained in northern Gaza as they could not leave, and now I sleep every day at a different house belonging to a friend or a relative, who were displaced to Rafah as well, because I do not have enough money to buy a tent and it is not allowed to sleep with my wife at the school.
The Palestinian Resistance factions have issued a powerful statement, declaring their readiness for any potential scenarios in the ongoing Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip, including a ground invasion of Rafah, the southernmost city in the besieged territory.
In a joint statement released on Wednesday, the factions emphasized their determination to not stand idly by as they warned of the catastrophic and humanitarian consequences of an invasion of Rafah, where more than 1.4 million displaced Palestinians currently reside.
The factions held the US President Joe Biden’s administration and Western governments accountable for any potential Israeli aggression, stating that ongoing Western support to “Israel” despite its violation of international laws and conventions is unacceptable.
His entire family was wiped out in Rafah last night.
Meanwhile, the genocidal Zionist regime was celebrating the $26 billion of aid approved by the US Congress. Now, it can continue the slaughter of Gazan children with greater firepower.#GazaHolocaust#IsraeliNewNazismpic.twitter.com/Rh4ILpt2uY
In a call to action, the factions urged the Palestinian masses in the West Bank to rise up vehemently against the Israeli threats of invading Rafah, urging them to turn the West Bank into a fireball to combat Western and soldiers.
Additionally, the factions warned of a comprehensive escalation that could threaten regional security, especially Egyptian national security, should an invasion of Rafah take place, given its proximity to Egypt.
Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ Political Bureau, denounced Washington’s deceptive stance and affirmed that the Palestinian people will not surrender if an invasion occurs, stating that the resistance is prepared to defend itself.
A Palestinian youth mourns his relative killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip, at the morgue of the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, early Saturday, April 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ismael Abu Dayyah)
The Government Media Office in Gaza confirms the Israeli occupation forces committed a total of 3,025 massacres against Palestinians in the Strip.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza confirmed Tuesday that the number of Palestinians killed as a result of the ongoing Israeli aggression since October 7 has risen to 34,183 and those injured to 77,143.
In its daily report, the Ministry said that the Israeli occupation forces have committed three massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, resulting in 32 martyrs and 59 injuries who were transferred to hospitals in the past 24 hours.
It noted that many victims of the Israeli aggression remain trapped under rubble and on roads inaccessible to ambulance and civil defense crews.
A total of 3,025 massacres
On its part, the Government Media Office in Gaza confirmed that the Israeli occupation forces have committed a total of 3,025 massacres against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and dropped 75,000 tonnes of explosives on the enclave.
In an update on the figures resulting from 200 days of “Israel’s” genocidal war on Gaza, the Office emphasized that out of the 34,183 martyrs who reached hospitals, 14,778 are children and 9,752 are women. It added that 30 children lost their lives due to famine, confirming that 72% of the victims of the Israeli war were children and women.
According to the report, the Israeli occupation forces killed 485 medical staff, 67 civil defense crews, and 140 journalists.
It said that 7,000 are still missing and 17,000 children are now orphaned, living without one or both parents.
1,090,000 people suffered from infectious diseases
The Office mentioned that 11,000 wounded people are in need of travel for surgical procedures, while 10,000 cancer patients are facing death in need of treatment.
Touching on the collapsing health sector in the Strip, the report said that 32 hospitals and 53 health centers are now out of service due to the Israeli war on Gaza. It added that the occupation forces targeted 160 healthcare facilities and 126 ambulances.
It said that 1,090,000 people suffered from infectious diseases, and 8,000 cases of viral hepatitis infections due to displacement were reported.
In addition, the lives of 60,000 pregnant women and 350,000 patients with chronic diseases are at risk due to the lack of healthcare and medication.
According to the Office, Israeli occupation forces detained 5,000 people, including 310 healthcare professionals and 20 journalists, during its genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.
Two million people displaced
Two million people are now displaced due to the Israeli war on Gaza, with the occupation forces completely destroying 86,000 residential units and partially destroying 294,000, the report confirmed.
It added that the Israeli occupation forces destroyed 181 governmental buildings, completely destroyed 103 educational institutions, and partially destroyed 309.
The Israeli occupation forces also did not spare places of worship from its strikes, destroying 239 mosques and partially destroying 317, in addition to targeting and destroying three churches.
Elsewhere, the report said that the Israeli occupation destroyed 206 archaeological and heritage sites in the Gaza Strip.
In total, the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza has caused 30 billion dollars in direct initial losses.
Israeli forces attempting to empty schools sheltering displaced Palestinians
In a related context, Al Mayadeen‘s correspondent in Gaza reported that the Israeli occupation forces have been carrying out airstrikes on the Strip coinciding with excavation operations since last night.
Our correspondent mentioned that Israeli naval vessels opened fire toward the coast of Deir al-Balah city in central Gaza, adding that Israeli warplanes launched an airstrike east of Salah al-Din Street in al-Bureij camp.
This comes in parallel with confrontations between Palestinian Resistance fighters and the raiding Israeli occupation forces, especially in the eastern areas of Beit Hanoun and east of Jabalia camp.
According to our correspondent, Israeli occupation forces are attempting to empty schools sheltering displaced Palestinians, including the Tal al-Rabi’ and Tal al-Zaatar schools.
He mentioned that Israeli warplanes carried out a series of airstrikes on Highway 10 south of the al-Zaytoun neighborhood, adding that Israeli shelling of a house in the Nuseirat camp, in central Gaza, killed one Palestinian and injured several.
Elsewhere, our correspondent in Gaza said another Palestinian was killed by Israeli drone fire targeting a group of civilians at a playground in Beit Lahia, northern Gaza Strip.
The genocide in Gaza is the final stage of a process begun by Israel decades ago. Anyone who did not see this coming blinded themselves to the character and ultimate goals of the apartheid state.
There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonial project. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total erasure of Palestinians.
Israel has razed 77 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, nearly all municipal and governmental buildings, commercial, industrial and agricultural centers, almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings — the bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on Oct. 25, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds — and obliterated refugee camps. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on Oct. 25 killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured 280. Israel has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents.
Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza, many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed by Israel to flee. Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next to fetid pools of raw sewage.
Israel has killed at least 32,705 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000 children and 9,000 women. This means Israel is slaughtering as many as 187 people a day including 75 children. It has killed 136 journalists, many, if not most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. These numbers do not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.
Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation. Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been tracked and assassinated. Over 75,000 Palestinians have been wounded, many of whom will be crippled for life.
“Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children,” writes Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, in her report issued on March 25. “Israel failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent, i.e. adult males, were active Hamas combatants — a necessary condition for them to be lawfully targeted. By early-December, Israel’s security advisors claimed the killing of ‘7,000 terrorists’ in a stage of the campaign when less than 5,000 adult males in total had been identified among the casualties, thus implying that all adult males killed were ‘terrorists.’”
Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools – protected status. Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor Hamas fighters.
These accusations, Albanese writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”
In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures – the killing of civlians, dispossession of land, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.
The occupation and genocide would not be possible without the U.S. which gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance and is now sending another $2.5 billion in bombs, including 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82 500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.
The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up.
Zionist leaders are open about their goals.
Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, after Oct. 7, announced that Gaza would receive “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz said: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened.” Avi Dichter, the Minister of Agriculture, referred to Israel’s military assault as “the Gaza Nakba,” referencing the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, which between 1947 and 1949, drove 750,000 Palestinians from their land and saw thousands massacred by Zionist militias. Likud member of the Israeli Knesset Revital Gottlieb posted on her social media account: “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!!…Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for mercy!” Not to be outdone, Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu supported using nuclear weapons on Gaza as “one of the possibilities.”
The message from the Israeli leadership is unequivocal. Annihilate the Palestinians the same way we annihilated Native Americans, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews.
The specifics are different. The process is the same.
We cannot plead ignorance. We know what happened to the Palestinians. We know what is happening to the Palestinians. We know what will happen to the Palestinians.
But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow in humanitarian aid. Pretend there will be a ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt. Pretend the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution. Pretend there is no genocide.
The genocide, which the U.S. is funding and sustaining with weapons shipments, says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western civilization, about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom are worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence.
This lie — that Western civilization is predicated on “values” such as respect for human rights and the rule of law — is one the Palestinians, and all those in the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans have known for centuries. But, with the Gaza genocide live streamed, this lie is impossible to sustain.
We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.
The world outside of the industrialized fortresses in the Global North is acutely aware that the fate of the Palestinians is their fate. As climate change imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are flooded, as droughts and wild fires proliferate, as states fail, as armed resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies, genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next Palestinians.
(Republished from Scheerpost by permission of author or representative)
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The future always surprises us to some degree. But we make plans, anyway, based on our projections, and we adjust them when our predictions are at least partially wrong, which they always are, because they make assumptions based upon things that we take for granted, such as our health and that meteors and tsunamis will not disrupt those plans. Bearing that in mind, I will make some predictions for the immediate future of Gaza and Israel, and their relationships with the rest of the world. I’m sorry if it is not a happy picture.
First, I predict with sadness and disgust that the remaining Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza will be killed or expelled, mostly the former, despite all our efforts.
The main reason is that, Joe Biden, as recently described by Aaron David Miller, sees no compelling alternative for Israel that doesn’t include doing grievous harm to Palestinian civilians.
Properly translated, this means the greatest genocide since WWII. If this is an accurate picture of the thinking of the Biden administration, there can be little doubt that the US will continue to supply Israel with the means to make the population of Gaza disappear. The option of denying those means to Israel is simply unthinkable to Joe and his government. It might mean giving up their comfortable and prestigious futuresm presidential libraries and all.
Joe Biden is not Dwight D. Eisenhower, nor John Kennedy, nor even Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter.
We no longer have a president with the guts or the acumen to defy anyone, least of all the Zionist Lobby, and we have no prospect of ever having such a person in the White House in the foreseeable future.
Donald Trump? He needs the Israel Lobby even more than Biden, and if they weren’t comfortable with him, they would have sabotaged his candidacy a long time ago. Both of them have the same morals as Netanyahu. I rest my case.
A ceasefire? I cannot imagine it.
The week-long November pause worked because neither side gave up too much strategically and both benefited politically. There is no similar bargain on the horizon. If Hamas gives up all its captives, it has nothing left to trade. That’s why the Hamas proposal is in three stages, with the final stage being an independent Palestinian state with the right to defend itself, and with multilateral guarantees for its security and independence.
That is of course totally unacceptable to Israel, and they said so. For them, the “occupied territories” are more accurately called “greater Israel”, which has not yet been sufficiently settled by Zionist Jews to justify extending the official borders to encompass it. Too many non-Jews. They will address that problem in its turn, but for now the priority is to empty Gaza. So much for the two-state solution, which Israel embraced as long as all they had to do was sit at a negotiations table, keep the deal just out of reach and blame the Palestinians for its failure. Now they’re having none of it.
When will Israel’s genocide end, and what will the result look like? First, the Palestinian population in Gaza will have fallen by at least 2 million, the result of both murder and expulsion, as noted earlier. The orphaned children will be far fewer than the dead ones, but those who survive will be shipped to western countries for adoption, so that they will lose their names and their cultural heritage. But I’m sure they will have loving parents and become well-adjusted western citizens.
As for Israel, its world has been changing since October 7th. First, it is losing – and will continue to lose – its liberal population. It began years ago, but Israel’s population has declined by roughly 10 percent since October 7th, 2023, in parallel with the decline in the population of Gaza, but by choice instead of genocide.
The fanatics with genocidal intentions are not the ones leaving, mostly the ones who are more in keeping with traditional Jewish values of being a light unto the nations – or at least not a source of darkness. The emigrants are mainly those who are giving up on the Zionist project. They are not the only ones. American and other western Jews are losing their appetite for the Zionist menu, which allows us to maintain our respect for integrity.
This of course means that Israel will be far more isolated than previously, both from the Jewish diaspora and from the non-Jewish communities that previously supported Israel. It’s amazing how a little thing like genocide can cause your friends to turn on you. I suspect that Israeli products, institutions, and culture will be shunned by much of the world. No more trips to Israel as prizes on television game shows.
I have no doubt that Gaza will be annexed to Israel, and I imagine that developers will create Zionist dream communities along the coast, on top of the graves and rubble of their victims.
But there might be fewer new immigrants than they might have hoped for. Israel’s future, if it has one, will be as a violent fortress for Zionist exclusivism, supported by a slowly shrinking world Zionist network and their allies using the resources of other countries in much the same way that Israel is using the United States today, and enriching those individuals and interests that cooperate with them.
I leave it to you to decide if this sounds like a strategy for success.
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Paul Larudee is a retired academic and current administrator of a nonprofit human rights and humanitarian aid organization. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Ever since 8 October, when Hezbollah rallied militarily to support the Palestinian resistance in Gaza in their war against Israel, Lebanese Christian political leaders have taken a firm stance opposing the entanglement of the Shia powerhouse – or any other Lebanese faction – in the region’s myriad conflicts.
Notable figures among these are former President Michel Aoun and Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) leader Gebran Bassil – both long-term Christian allies of Hezbollah since 2006, who now vocally oppose efforts to unite forces in support of Palestine. Even influential figures like the head of Lebanon’s Maronite Church, Patriarch Mar Bechara Boutros al-Rahi, echo this sentiment.
Samir Geagea, leader of the right-wing, pro-US Lebanese Forces, never one to mince words, accused Hezbollah of seeking to “obtain the presidency and Lebanon’s government in return for withdrawing weapons from the border” with Israel. Anyone thinking of a bargain involving the presidency and the border situation, Geagea said, would be “dreaming.”
According to Geagea – who served 11 years in prison for the 1994 bombing of a church and the assassination of top Lebanese political officials and their families – Hezbollah “does not want to engage in a war, but only wants to garner internal gains, while Iran wants to garner additional gains at the regional level.”
The former warlord stressed that “putting Lebanon in the barrel of the cannon will not benefit the Palestinian cause but will bring us total destruction.”
Lebanon’s political deadlock
For his part, Samy Gemayel, Head of the Kataeb Party, claims:
Hezbollah deceives both Lebanese and Palestinians when it pretends to open a support front in the Gaza war. However, this front practically has no impact on the situation in Gaza … Any barter that protects Israel’s security at the expense of handing over Beirut to Hezbollah … Anyone who thinks that such a settlement will pass is mistaken, as we will be in the face of any new settlement that threatens our future in Lebanon.
It should be noted that the Kataeb and Lebanese Forces parties (the latter existed initially as the military wing of the former) fired the first bullet in Lebanon’s 15-year civil war at Palestinian civilians and are responsible for the notorious Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacre, in which thousands of Palestinians were gunned down over three days, all while Israeli choppers lit the night skies overhead.
Today, Lebanese political analyst Wael Najm says the country’s political parties are in limbo, “awaiting the outcome of the battle in Gaza and the confrontations in southern Lebanon. Thus, the movement in the presidential file has been frozen.”
These accusations from Lebanon’s Christian leaders come despite Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah stressing that his party would not seek to achieve political gains in Lebanon based on the results of the Gaza war.
As FPM member Rindala Jabbour tells The Cradle:
Hezbollah does not exert its military power in Lebanese internal politics. If it wanted to use its surplus power, it would have done so after the 2006 war, and there have been many opportunities to do so. Hezbollah does not impose its power. Otherwise, there would be many different equations. It would have imposed many things it wanted.
“I don’t think we are any longer in the era of political Shiism, Maronism, or even Sunnism. I think we [Lebanon] have passed those stages,” she adds.
Maronites for the Moqawama
Highlighting the interconnectedness of regional dynamics, Jabbour says, “There is an awareness that what is happening in Palestine, Syria, and the encirclement countries will inevitably affect Lebanon,” and that many Christians will ultimately support the fight against Israeli aggression.
Many Christians support the resistance because they know it has a fundamental role in protecting Lebanon and has given the country a deterrent force. This group knows that there are consequences and repercussions of the Palestinian war on Lebanon, especially if the Palestinian resistance is defeated and Israel achieves its goals.
Jabbour clarifies her party’s position: “By separating the squares, we mean not to put Lebanon in a crisis in which it cannot bear the repercussions. The Free Patriotic Movement is indeed with the separation of squares, but it appreciates the wisdom of the resistance in dealing with the different issues.”
There is a point of view that supports the resistance, but it expresses its fear of provoking an Israeli war and giving an excuse for Israel to invade Lebanon. Especially since Lebanon currently can’t handle any war.
Jabbour laments the shortcomings of some Christians who distance themselves from the resistance, expressing concerns that their words and actions may inadvertently align with Israel’s interests, as was the case with the Phalangists during the Lebanese Civil War.
Writer and researcher Qasem Qassir explains to The Cradle that many critics of Hezbollah’s battle on the southern border are so caught up in Lebanon’s endless, internal political squabbles that they can’t see the forest for the trees:
Hezbollah confirms, through all of its officials, that participation in the war has to do with confronting the Israeli enemy and supporting the Palestinian people and has nothing to do with any internal issue, regardless of the results of the war and its connotations. Hezbollah further confirms that with the implementation of the Taif Agreement and with the internal dialogue on all files, including the presidential file, no amendment will be put forward to the system and that it respects the Lebanese formula.
The Taif Agreement, for those uninitiated in Lebanon’s sect-based political system, is the 1989 deal struck between feuding Lebanese warlords to end the country’s 1975–1990 Civil War, in which all sides endorsed a plan to divide parliamentary seats equally between Muslims and Christians.
Concerning the negative repercussions that could impact Lebanese Christians in the widening regional war, Qassir believes that “First and foremost, the Israeli danger is a danger to all of Lebanon, not only to Palestine or Gaza, and there is an Israeli objective to displace Palestinians to Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. Therefore, it is important to support the resistance and face Israel,”regardless of one’s views on the region’s Iran-led Axis of Resistance.
Gaza affects Lebanon
A recent survey conducted by the Jewish People’s Policy Institute revealed that 63 percent of Israelis believe that their military should attack Hezbollah with full force at the first available opportunity or after the war in Gaza subsides. These results are consistent with the official Israeli rhetoric calling for the invasion of Lebanon – irrespective of whether a lasting ceasefire is struck with Gaza.
Speaking to The Cradle, Palestinian political analyst Iyad al-Qara laments the shortsightedness of Lebanon’s naysayers: “The positions of some Christian parties, unfortunately, were negative, both regarding the resistance operations in southern Lebanon and those they had during the Gaza war. This is surprising.”
“If Gaza falls, this could be a prelude to the occupation of Lebanon,” he warns. Qara further points out:
The steadfastness of Gaza helps protect Lebanon from Israel’s attacks. Therefore, Christians should not look at the current conflict from the perspective of disagreements and wars with some Palestinians, especially since the circumstances are different from before. They must reconsider their position because the victory of Gaza is a victory for both Lebanon and Palestine. Thus, their position should be more positive.
“The Israeli army’s attempts to displace people from Gaza will continue, whether optional or mandatory,” Qara concludes.
In this context, extremist Israeli activist Daniella Weiss, the “godmother” of the Zionist settler movement, which for the first time in Israel’s history has powerful cabinet members representing its interests at every level, recently told CNN: “No Arab, I’m speaking about more than two million Arabs. They will not stay there. We Jews will be in Gaza … 500 families have already signed up to resettle in Gaza.”
Be careful what you wish for
According to UNRWA, there are 1.2 million Palestinians in the Rafah area, south of Gaza, who are currently surviving in catastrophic humanitarian conditions.
A report by Lebanese academic and researcher Abbas Assi, published on the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace website, states, “The Christian community in Lebanon has several concerns about the ongoing war. They fear that if Israel defeats Hamas, it may be tempted to launch a full-scale war on Hezbollah in Lebanon, further impacting the already fragile Lebanese economy.”
Moreover, they worry that Israel’s success in deporting Palestinians from Gaza could impede the return of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon to their homeland, and their naturalization in Lebanon would become inevitable. As a result, the power of the Christian minority, which is already grappling with a demographic decline, would be further weakened.
Lebanese journalist Ghassan Saoud says the Lebanese Church is now working to mitigate negative fallout by crafting a national document in cooperation with several Christian political parties. Among the paper’s goals is “to be frank with others about concerns (among Christians in particular) in a calm, rational, and sober language, far from street hooliganism.”
In the final analysis, the war on Gaza should not be allowed to negatively impact Lebanon’s political fabric – especially during a period of insecurity.
Rather than banking on the downfall of Palestinian resistance or envisioning a post-Hezbollah Lebanon, Lebanon’s Christian politicos should consider the broader, more immediate ramifications of the growing regional conflict. The loss of Gaza could fundamentally alter their position in West Asia, with the refugee crisis exacerbating their demographic minority status in Lebanon.
This could potentially necessitate amendments to the Taif Agreement to align with Lebanon’s evolving demographic and political reality. Consequently, Christian political leaders – particularly those aligned with anti-Hezbollah foreign states – are advised to weigh these issues carefully before lashing out at Lebanon’s resistance, the country’s only safeguard against Israel.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
As the world increasingly reacts with alarm at Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu’s declared goal of leveling the southern Gaza city of Rafah to the ground, the spotlight has fallen on Egypt.
Will the North African heavyweight stand idly by, allowing the Tel Aviv regime to intensify its ongoing genocide in Gaza, or make good its threat to annul the so-called “peace treaty”?
Authorities in Cairo would know that plans by Israel to populate Gaza with Jewish settlements require Egypt’s collaboration to absorb Palestinian refugees into parts of the Sinai.
What it translates to is that Gaza is ethnically cleansed of 2.3 million Palestinians and replaced with an exclusively Jewish settler colony.
However, the sticky point is Rafah, where more than a million and a half Palestinians who were violently forced to evacuate their homes in the North are huddled in tents and makeshift shelters, facing death from relentless air strikes, hunger, cold and thirst.
In addition, the dire need for essential medical supplies has spawned the worst humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, something the world has never seen in the modern era.
So, the big question is, how will Egypt respond to these developments?
Egypt, of today, under the military rule of General Abdel Fateh el-Sisi, is a far cry from the leadership of Mohamed Morsi.
During the exciting but short-lived era of the Arab Spring, tens of thousands of protesters across Cairo flooded Tahrir Square demanding the removal of Hosni Mubarak from his thirty-year reign.
Following the popular mass revolt against his brutal dictatorship, Mubarak was forced to resign. It marked a period that saw the country transitioning from tyranny to democracy when Morsi was elected to lead Egypt in its first free and fair democratic election.
The change of fortunes did not sit well with Western powers that began a series of dirty tricks to oust him, notwithstanding the fact that Morsi had acquired a comfortable majority during the elections.
A classic case of a regime-change plot began to be engineered when a number of countries connived to unseat him through a bloody military coup.
America, Israel, UAE and Saudi Arabia’s candidate for regime change was the head of Egypt’s notorious secret service/intelligence unit – el-Sisi – who was also in charge of the military.
In an elaborate scheme, a rebellion against Morsi was orchestrated as a prelude to the coup. Reports subsequently revealed that the UAE government funded the uprising.
These regimes shared common misgivings about Morsi’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood (Al Ikhwan Al Muslimeen) and were reluctant to have the Arab world’s most powerful nation-state in the hands of the Ikhwan.
Chatham House reported that recordings leaked from the Egyptian Ministry of Defence and confidential testimony from US officials fingered the UAE as having provided funds to support the activity of Tamarrod, the movement that organized the rebellion against Morsi.
As soon as el-Sisi stepped in to take Morsi’s seat, Saudi Arabia and the UAE made no effort to conceal their approval. Both Western-backed oligarchs gleefully displayed their support with transfers of huge chunks of money.
The background to the massacre is well documented. According to media reports, tens of thousands of Egyptians were out in the streets and city squares to demand the reinstatement of Morsi.
To illustrate the brazeness of the UAE, its Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed led a delegation to Cairo in solidarity with coup leader el-Sisi, less than a fortnight after the horror of the Muslim Brotherhood, when around a thousand people were mowed down.
On August 14, 2013, as the protests had entered their sixth consecutive week, thousands staged a sit-in at the Rabaa al-Adawiya Square, one of Cairo’s busiest thoroughfares, as they had for more than a month.
Sisi’s forces moved in using armored vehicles and bulldozers, in addition to ground troops and snipers on rooftops carrying live ammunition, to attack the square from all sides and close off safe exits, according to witnesses and human rights organizations, as reported in media.
Morsi, the elected president, was jailed where he subsequently died, while el-Sisi has now been in power for just over a decade. To date, there has been no accountability for the Rabaa massacre.
From Rabaa to Rafah, el-Sisi’s dismal human rights record does not hold any promise that he will deter Netanyahu’s planned incursion into Rafah or stop him from expelling Palestinians from there.
Egypt under el-Sisi has been reduced to a mere spectator, observing the slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinians as the genocide intensifies in Gaza without any effort to flex its muscles.
Iqbal Jassat is an executive member of Media Review Network, Johannesburg, South Africa.
(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)
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Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah warned today that the enemy will pay the price in blood for the civilian deaths in Nabatiyeh and Al-Suwanah, emphasizing that targeting civilians will not go unanswered, citing the resistance’s missile strikes on Kiryat Shmona as a preliminary response.
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah made these statements in a televised speech broadcast live from Beirut, Lebanon, on Friday, marking Hezbollah’s Martyred Leaders Day, which annually falls on February 16.
During the ceremony, Sayyed Nasrallah reiterated the resilience of the resistance and its commitment to defending Lebanon’s sovereignty and dignity. He criticized the international community for its failure to support Gaza and called out the American administration for its hypocrisy in the Palestinian conflict.
Sayyed Nasrallah also highlighted the resistance’s role in exposing Israeli plans to displace Palestinians and establish a purely Jewish state. He called for unity among resistance factions and reaffirmed their goal of supporting Gaza’s victory.
The event concluded with Sayyed Nasrallah honoring the martyred leaders, stating that their presence remains influential in guiding the party’s path and objectives.
South Lebanon’s Massacres Won’t Go Unanswered
Sayyed Nasrallah declared that the Israeli regime would ‘pay with blood’ for the recent killing of civilians in the country’s south.
His eminence’s speech followed an Israeli strike two days prior that targeted a building in the southern Lebanese city of Nabatiyeh, claiming the lives of seven family members, including a child. Another attack by the Israeli occupation in the village of Al-Suwanah in southern Lebanon resulted in the deaths of a woman and her two children.
Condemning these Israeli strikes as ‘deliberate massacres,’ Sayyed Nasrallah stated that Tel Aviv must realize it ‘went too far’ by targeting civilians.
“The recent Israeli massacres against civilians in the south were deliberate. We are deeply entrenched in a real battle, and concerning the fighters, their martyrdom is an integral aspect of this struggle. However, when it concerns civilians, this issue is particularly sensitive and has been present since the inception of the resistance,” Sayyed Nasrallah said.
“In February 1992, the resistance formulated a strategy to protect civilians, which was formally established in July 1993,” Sayyed Nasrallah explained, warning: “We absolutely condemn any harm to civilians, and it is imperative that the enemy realizes they have crossed a red line in this regard.”
Sayyed Nasrallah asserted that the resistance’s missile strikes on Kiryat Shmona were a preliminary response to Israeli massacres of civilians in southern Lebanon. “Yesterday, we launched dozens of Katyusha rockets and several Falaq rockets at the “Kiryat Shmona” settlement as an initial response.”
He vowed that those responsible for the deaths in Nabatiyeh, Al-Suwanah, and other southern villages would face retribution, emphasizing that the price for such bloodshed would be paid in kind, not through infrastructure or military assets. “Both friend and foe will witness that the price for this bloodshed will be exacted in blood, not in structures, vehicles, or surveillance devices.” “Since October 7, there has been immense global pressure to prevent the southern front from opening up to support Gaza. The enemy’s tactic, through targeting civilians, is to coerce the resistance into halting its actions. The response to the massacre must be an escalation of resistance efforts on the front. The enemy should anticipate this response.”
It is essential for everyone to understand that in Palestine, they are confronting a people who will not retreat, regardless of the sacrifices or challenges they face, Sayyed Nasrallah said. His eminence highlighted Hezbollah’s significant missile capabilities, extending from Kiryat Shmona to Eilat, underscoring the resistance’s preparedness to defend Lebanon’s territory and people. “The Lebanese resistance possesses formidable and precise missile capabilities, enabling its reach from Kiryat Shmona to Eilat.”
Sayyed Nasrallah also addressed the ongoing conflict in Palestine, stating that the Palestinians are an unwavering people who will not yield, regardless of the sacrifices endured. “Since 1984, there has been ongoing discourse regarding the cost, price, consequences, and sacrifices associated with resistance,” he said.
Regarding regional dynamics, Sayyed Nasrallah mentioned Yemen, noting the continued targeting of ships amid American and British aggression. He emphasized the interconnectedness of regional pressure dynamics, particularly in support of Gaza. “The Yemeni brothers have persisted in targeting American and British ships, but the focal point of the main battle remains the events unfolding in Gaza.”
Sayyed Nasrallah dismissed calls for surrender, affirming that resistance remains the only viable option. He warned against distractions from the primary goal of defending Lebanon’s sovereignty and dignity, emphasizing that resistance is not about imposing political options but safeguarding the country’s honor and resources.
“In response to the American and Zionist projects in the region, we are presented with two options: resistance or surrender.”
He highlighted the dire consequences of surrender, including displacement and loss of sovereignty, contrasting this with the empowerment of Israel had the Palestinian people surrendered years ago. Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that resistance fighters understand the risks, with martyrdom being an integral part of the ongoing battle.
“The cost of surrender is steep, perilous, exceedingly high, and critically important. Surrender in Lebanon would entail Israeli political and economic dominance over our nation. Had the Palestinian people surrendered, today Gaza, the West Bank, and even the people in the 1948 territories would all be outside the equation,” Hezbollah’s leader warned.
His eminence emphasized the importance of protecting civilians and reiterated the resistance’s commitment to this principle. He denounced the enemy’s strategy of targeting civilians to pressure the resistance, emphasizing that such actions only fuel the resistance’s resolve.
Sayyed Nasrallah praised the effectiveness of popular resistance in achieving liberation and breaking the balance of Israeli deterrence. He called for a steadfast commitment to the resistance, emphasizing that its presence and capabilities are essential for deterring the enemy and ensuring a dignified life for all Lebanese.
Resistance Exposes Israeli Plans, Calls Out American Hypocrisy
Sayyed Nasrallah continued his speech by highlighting the pivotal role of resistance in challenging Israeli aggression and exposing its true intentions. Sayyed Nasrallah emphasized the impact of the “flood of Al-Aqsa” operation, which revealed Israeli plans to displace Palestinians and establish a purely Jewish state.
“The resistance in Palestine has pushed the Zionist entity into an existential crisis, with the pinnacle being Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Today, in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Iran, and throughout the region, we must never lose sight of the truth about the costs of resistance versus the costs of surrender,” he made it clear.
“Isn’t it humiliating and a sign of weakness that countries ruling over two billion Muslims are unable to deliver medicine to the people of Gaza?” he wondered.
Sayyed Nasrallah criticized the international community’s failure to provide basic necessities to Gaza, questioning the morality of countries ruling over two billion Muslims. He condemned the American administration for its complicity in the suffering of Gaza, noting that if the US halted its weapons shipments to the Zionist entity, the aggression would cease.
The Hezbollah leader condemned the media’s portrayal of Hamas as “ISIL,” emphasizing that Hamas has been unjustly accused without evidence. He called out the hypocrisy of world leaders who condemn Hamas while ignoring Israeli atrocities against Palestinian civilians. “Today, one of our responsibilities is to clarify the facts, as there has been a significant Israeli distortion of events since October 7. The Israeli media attempted to portray the resistance and Hamas on October 7 as ‘ISIL’ in a distorted manner,” Hezbollah’s S.G. said, adding: The Israelis failed to present a single slaughtered child or raped girl to the world. Instead, the settlers who were killed were actually victims of Israeli army fire.”
He regretted how some parts believed in the Israeli historical falsification regarding October 7, including countries that claim to be friends with the Hamas movement.
Sayyed Nasrallah emphasized that the US is the one willing to extend the war in Gaza.
“The greatest hypocrisy the world is witnessing today is the American administration’s stance on the events unfolding in Gaza. Israeli funds, weapons, missiles, and artillery shells currently originate from Washington. If the United States halts the air bridge to ‘Israel,’ the aggression against Gaza will cease. America is more adamant about the goal of eliminating Hamas than ‘Israel’. The American administration bears responsibility for every drop of blood shed in the region, while Israeli officials serve as mere instruments of implementation.”
Sayyed Nasrallah stressed the need for regional governments to reject the displacement of Palestinians, emphasizing the importance of unity in confronting such challenges. He reiterated the resistance axis’s goal of supporting Gaza’s victory and affirmed that they do not interfere in Palestinian negotiation processes.
“The Israeli goal was to displace Palestinians from occupied Palestine, relocating the people of the West Bank to Jordan, those of Gaza to Egypt, and those of the 1980s to Lebanon. However, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood exposed this long-standing Israeli objective of establishing a purely Jewish state extending from the sea to the river. The project of establishing a purely Jewish state not only targets Palestinians but also poses a threat to Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon.”
He affirmed the importance of popular resistance: “In memory of our martyred leaders, we reaffirm the efficacy of popular resistance as a viable option.”
“No matter how we articulate or elucidate, our words cannot fully capture the legendary resistance and steadfastness of the people in Gaza. This serves as a testament to the effectiveness of popular resistance,” he said.
Our objective, he continued, is to impose the highest possible material and human losses on the enemy, compelling them to admit defeat and withdraw. “Our aim is the resilience of the resistance, the endurance of the people of Gaza, and the steadfastness of our supporting fronts, be it through field military support or political and logistical backing.”
The Palestinian factions that delegated Hamas are primarily responsible for political negotiations, and we do not interfere in their negotiation process. All military and logistical support is directed towards Hamas and the Palestinian resistance, symbolizing the fronts of the resistance axis.
NO Political Price for Resistance’s Triumph
Sayyed Nasrallah reiterated the party’s commitment to the resistance as a means of defending Lebanon’s sovereignty and dignity, emphasizing that its purpose is not to interfere with Lebanon’s political system or sectarian balance. He also reiterated that the resistance weapon is not aimed at changing Lebanon’s political system or constitution but is solely focused on defending the country’s sovereignty and dignity.
“We call for the Lebanese army to be a strong and capable force, but it is America that hinders its strength,” he said.
“In a country like Lebanon, we must now more than ever hold onto the resistance, its weapons, and its capabilities. This is what works, what deters and frightens the enemy, and this is the strength of popular resistance,” Sayyed Nasrallah pointed out.
He assured that neither Hezbollah, the Amal Movement, nor any other participating faction on the front has discussed the imposition of a president or amendments to the quotas or political system in the current context. “The purpose of the resistance weapon is not to alter the political system, the constitution, or the system of government, nor is it to impose new sectarian quotas in Lebanon.”
“The matter of resistance transcends these considerations, as it pertains to the defense of Lebanon, the south, our people, and their dignity.”
In the context of Lebanon’s borders, Sayyed Nasrallah declared that they have been demarcated and any negotiations will be based on the principle of being out of our land. “Lebanon’s land borders have been delineated, and any negotiations will be based on the principle of ‘Get out of our Lebanese land,’” he affirmed.
Addressing the ceremony, Sayyed Nasrallah began his speech with showing pride on the resistance leaders who have a deep desire to sacrifice themselves in this divine path. “One of the fundamental aspects of this march and resistance is the willingness of its scholars and leaders to become martyrs, often alongside their honorable families.”
“The sacrifices made by the resistance movements are not merely emotional or reactionary; rather, they stem from a deep understanding, insight, and knowledge of their goals,” he said. Source: Al-Manar English Website
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Tel Aviv’s goal of dismantling the UN agency in the name of security is a strategic move aimed not only at depriving Palestinian refugees of lifesaving assistance, but completely eradicating the notion that they will one day return to the lands they were expelled from.
William Van Wagenen @WVanwagenen Know Me More..William Van Wagenen is a writer for the Libertarian Institute. He has written extensively on the Syrian war, with a specific focus on the role of US planners in sparking and exacerbating the conflict. William holds a master’s degree in Theological Studies from Harvard University and survived a kidnapping in the Sinjar region of Iraq in 2007.
The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is facing the gravest existential crisis in its 74-year history, as funding cuts by several western countries come on top of ongoing atrocities perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.
The UN agency is unique in being the only one dedicated to a specific group of refugees in specific areas, and the only relief organization that operates a full-fledged educational system. UNRWA is also the only organization mandated to work in Gaza and distribute aid to the two million people currently trapped and starved in the besieged enclave.
To compound these challenges, the occupation wants to see it dismantled.
UNRWA must be destroyed
In January, Israel alleged that Palestinian members of UNRWA’s staff participated in the resistance’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, leading the US and 18 other nations to swiftly suspend funding for the organization.
The suspensions were met with shock, as UNRWA plays a key role in providing food and medicine to starving Gazans struggling to survive Israel’s siege and bombardment of the coastal enclave.
However, Israel’s allegations are not based on any evidence. They are instead part of a classified plan prepared in advance by Israel’s foreign ministry to destroy UNRWA. It believes that UNRWA “works against Israel’s interests” by perpetuating the dream of the right of return of Palestinian refugees and the idea of armed struggle against occupation.
The foreign ministry plan leaked to Israel’s Channel 12 on 28 December, set out a three-stage process to eliminate UNRWA in Gaza, using the Hamas-led resistance operation as a pretext:
First, prepare a case alleging UNRWA’s cooperation with Hamas; second, reduce UNRWA’s field of activity and find replacement service providers; and third, transfer UNRWA’s responsibilities to another entity.
Channel 12 noted that Israel wants to move slowly, given that the US government sees UNRWA as crucial to humanitarian efforts in Gaza. The foreign ministry is seeking to gradually build the case for ousting the organization as part of the discussions on “the day after” the war – should Hamas be dismantled.
A sequence of events
According to a report by TheNew York Times, the “sequence of events” that led the US to suspend UNRWA funding began on 18 January when Amir Weissbrod, a deputy director general at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, met with Philippe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA in Tel Aviv.
Weissbrod showed Lazzarini a dossier from Israeli intelligence claiming that 12 UNRWA employees had participated in the 7 October attacks.
After the meeting in Israel, Lazzarini made no effort to confirm the validity of the claims. Instead, he flew to New York to meet with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and immediately began firing the employees, a UN official said.
The Guardianreported that Lazzarini was later asked in a press conference if he had looked into whether there was any evidence for the allegations presented to him by Weissbrod.
“No,” Lazzarini replied, “the investigation is going on now.”
Lazzarini said he made the “exceptional, swift decision” due to “the explosive nature of the claims,” rather than any evidence.
Lazzarini said he did not even read the dossier himself because it was in Hebrew. Instead, Weissbrod “was reading this and translating for me,” he said.
How did the US know?
The same New York Times report notes that UNRWA informed US officials about the allegations on 24 January. Just two days later, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the suspension of funding to UNRWA.
Shockingly, the State Department made the announcement amid reports that Gaza was on the brink of famine, and despite acknowledging that “UNRWA plays a critical role in providing lifesaving assistance to Palestinians, including essential food, medicine, shelter.”
Like Lazzarini, Blinken made the decision without seeking any evidence from Israel, but solely based on the supposedly serious nature of the allegations alone. Blinken justified his decision to suspend aid to starving Palestinians by saying, “We haven’t had the ability to investigate [the allegations] ourselves. But they are highly, highly credible.”
In a seemingly coordinated effort, other countries – including Germany, Britain, and Australia – swiftly followed suit. Even Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong acknowledged suspending aid without first receiving any evidence from Israel or even asking Lazzarini to share any evidence he might have.
The funding crisis escalated to such an extent that Juliette Touma, the UNRWA director of communications, said that after “decades of working together,” in “just over 24 hours, nine of our donors suspended funding to UNRWA.”
Another dodgy dossier
As criticism of the aid suspensions mounted, Israeli foreign ministry officials released a dossier to several foreign news organizations.
But after seeing the dossier, both the Financial Times and the UK’s Channel 4 reported that it provided “no evidence” for the claims.
Former UNRWA head Chris Gunness compared it to the “dodgy dossier” used by Tony Blair to take Britain to war in Iraq.
“There is no actual evidence. There are accusations,” Gunness concluded.
Lior Haiat, a spokesperson for Israel’s foreign ministry, tried to justify its refusal to provide any actual evidence by claiming, “the very nature of the allegations makes it impossible for Israel to share all the evidence it has with UNRWA.”
“They think that we can give them intelligence information, knowing that some of their employees work for Hamas? Are you serious?” he asked.
But Israeli propagandist and spokesperson Eylon Levy declined to say if Israel had provided evidence even to the US and UK governments. “I’m not personally aware of what material may have been passed on between our intelligence agencies,” he stated to Channel 4 when pressed for proof of the claims.
Links to Hamas?
The Israeli foreign ministry continued to implement the three-step leaked plan to destroy UNRWA by making additional allegations of UNRWA’s cooperation with Hamas.
On 29 January, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported claims based on Israeli intelligence that “1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza has links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups.”
The article also provided no evidence, citing only Israeli intelligence, and was co-written by Carrie Keller-Lynn, an American who volunteered for the Israeli military and has a personal relationship with an Israeli army spokesperson.
Even if true, the allegations are meaningless. Hamas is the governing party in Gaza, making it self-evident that many UNRWA employees would be sympathetic or have family ties to the resistance movement.
Similarly, it would be unsurprising if an employee of an Israeli NGO or aid group was sympathetic to the Israeli army or had family members in the ruling Likud party.
As Haaretz noted, UNRWA employees in the West Bank and other countries where the organization operates are usually more aligned with whatever Palestinian faction is dominant in that area.
‘We could not verify this’
The Israeli foreign ministry’s plan to paint UNRWA as linked to Hamas soon continued with new and bizarre allegations that Hamas had placed a massive data center directly underneath the UNRWA headquarters in Gaza.
The Times of Israelclaimed that the data center was “built precisely under the location where Israel would not consider looking initially, let alone target in an airstrike.”
But Israel has been bombing UNRWA schools and other UN facilities for decades, including when large numbers of civilians have been sheltering in them. No Hamas leader would imagine this would provide it any protection.
But as OSINT analyst Michael Kobs has shown, the alleged data center the Israeli army showed to foreign journalists was not under the UNRWA headquarters.
Kobs also notes that when Tageschau journalist Sophie van der Tann was taken through a tunnel to see the alleged data center, she stated, “We could not verify” it was under the UNRWA headquarters.
Erasing the right of return
But why is Israel determined to destroy UNRWA?
One reason is Israel’s ongoing effort to slowly starve Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.
At the beginning of the war on 7 October, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant notoriously ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza, saying, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” The late January campaign to suspend UNRWA funding then came at a time when “famine” was already “around the corner” in Gaza, according to UN Emergency Relief Chief Martin Griffiths. Israeli officials knew that suspending funding for UNRWA at this time would only bring famine closer. One Israeli military official acknowledged to the WSJ on 13 February that “Without UNRWA, there is no humanitarian aid in Gaza.”
But there is another reason Israel wants to destroy UNRWA, which predates the current war.
Palestinian political analyst and researcher Hanin Abou Salem explained that Israel wants to dismantle UNRWA because it transmits refugee status from generation to generation, which keeps the right of return for Palestinian refugees alive and “ensures that their hopes for returning to their ancestral homeland do not perish with the death of the original 1948 refugees.”
If UNRWA is dismantled and replaced by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), as Israel hopes, this will guarantee that Palestinians can only be resettled in third countries and never return to the homes and lands from which Israel forcibly expelled their grandparents during the Nakba.
In 2017, Israel launched a propaganda campaign against UNRWA and succeeded in convincing the Trump administration to cut around $300 million in funding to the organization the following year, only for the Biden administration to restore $235 million in 2021.
Destroying an idea
But with the start of the war on 7 October, Israel feels it has a second chance, not only to destroy the right of return, but also the “idea” of armed struggle to achieve it.
Noga Arbell, a researcher at the right-wing Kohelet Forum, recently explained that UNRWA needs to be “annihilated” because it is the “source of the idea.”
“It gives birth to more and more terrorists in all kinds of ways. UNRWA needs to be wiped out immediately – now – or Israel will miss the window of opportunity.”
UNRWA allegedly ‘gives birth to terrorists’ through its 706 schools, where some 543,075 Palestine refugee children receive free basic education.
In Gaza, UNRWA uses Palestinian Authority (PA) textbooks and supplements these with its own materials. Israel has long been irked that these textbooks include lessons on the life of one of the most famous symbols of Palestinian armed resistance, an 18-year-old young woman and Palestinian refugee born in Lebanon, Dalal al-Mughrabi.
In 1978, Mughrabi led a group of Palestinian guerrillas from PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party to carry out an operation in Israel.
According to the Israeli version of events, Mughrabi “led one of the deadliest suicide attacks in Israel’s history,” by hijacking a bus and taking its passengers hostage on the highway between Haifa and Tel Aviv. During the operation, the bus exploded, and “38 Israelis were murdered, including 13 children.”
Israel claims that UNRWA is, therefore, teaching “mass murder” by using PA books that encourage everyone to be like Mughrabi.
However, Palestinians claim that Israeli forces killed the hostages.
You can kill a revolutionary, but not the revolution
According to a 2008 report in the Guardian, Mughrabi and the Palestinian guerillas intended to attack the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv and hijacked two buses carrying civilians on the coastal road near Haifa. Along the way, they engaged in an intense 15-hour gun battle with Israeli forces.
Palestinians maintain the bus exploded, killing the guerillas and hostages, after it was fired on from the air by Israeli helicopters or elite Israel commandos, in a possible early instance of the mass Hannibal Directive.
Israeli forces implemented the Hannibal Directive on 7 October, killing large numbers of their own civilians – and burning many of them alive – using attack helicopters, tanks, and drones, while blaming all these deaths on Hamas.
Even if Israel succeeds in executing its plan to destroy UNRWA, while starving and bombing tens of thousands to death in Gaza, it will not be able to erase the spirit of Dalal al-Mughrabi and the thousands of martyrs like her who have sacrificed themselves for the freedom of Palestinians.
Within 24 hours of the unsubstantiated accusations against UNRWA, the US, the UK, and 14 other nations suspended funding to the organization the Wall Street Journal described as the “main pillar of operations to move food aid, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies into Gaza.”
The abruptness of these cuts was particularly jolting in light of the looming threat of famine, as highlighted by Griffiths, who warned that Gaza was on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
These drastic measures were instigated by allegations based on a dubious six-page dossier, arguably part of a meticulously crafted plan orchestrated by Israel’s foreign ministry, aimed at dismantling the humanitarian and educational infrastructure serving internally displaced Palestinians.
This concerted effort to undermine UNRWA is nothing short of a calculated strategy to exert control over the narrative surrounding Palestinian refugees and to once again reshape the demographics in Palestine.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
1.4 million desperate women and children living in tents as refugees in Rafah are being indiscriminately killed by the Jewish army as this is being written.
The IDF has failed against Hamas in Gaza and the Netanyahu government has rejected the Palestinian proposal for a ceasefire. Their final gambit appears to be to eliminate the existence of the Palestinian people from Israeli occupied territory.
Many left-leaning and Muslim commentators have responded to Israel’s plan to “destroy Hamas,” as in the political organization, by stating that it would be futile. Palestinian liberation movements since 1948 have taken on the lacquer of Marxism-Leninism, secular nationalism, and now an Islam-centered ideology, but in the end, the yearning for a homeland guarantees that resistance will be eternal as long as the Palestinian people exist, regardless if Hamas survives the war or not.
This view is correct, and under normal circumstances, a negotiated settlement would’ve remedied this issue by now. What these critics miss, however, is that while many believe mass racial expulsions of native people are impossible in the 21st century due to supposed enlightened liberal norms and humanitarian laws, Israel and nations with ethnically Jewish elites are working to prove this assumption wrong.
The Jewish campaign to destroy the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) aiding Palestinians is the first step in this ethnic cleansing campaign. This has long been an agenda item for the Israeli state, which has opposed UNRWA since its founding in 1949. This entity exists to serve Palestinians expelled by Jewish forces during the Nakba and subsequent assaults.
The Israeli state’s hostility towards UNRWA is centered around the legal protection Palestinians enjoy as refugees, primarily the promise of the Right of Return. This has been portrayed by Zionists as an extremist and anti-Semitic demand, but it is a right all refugees enjoy. UN protected refugees have a high rate of success when returning to their homelands, as recently seen with the case of Afghans, Somalis and others previously forced out of their countries of origin.
The second complaint from the Israelis is that the medical, food and educational services provided to Palestinians in and around Israeli occupied territories discourages them from emigrating and settling down somewhere else.
On the other hand, the counter-argument within the Jewish community on UNRWA was that Europe and America effectively financed Israel’s occupation of Palestinians. By offering humanitarian assistance, some Israelis believed this would fill a vacuum that would otherwise be met by services provided by groups like Hamas or nations like Iran. Under the terms of agreement with UNRWA, Israel was allowed to inspect everything without conditions and supervise the use of resources such as concrete. There was even a deliberate “DeNazification” angle to UNRWA’s work, as trans-national Jewry was even able to micromanage the textbooks Palestinian children in refugee camps were allowed to read, often threatening defunding if messages critical of Jews and Zionism were being taught.
Yet this was not enough to destroy the Palestinian people’s will to resist. On January 4th, Israeli policy wonk Noga Arbell — frustrated with lack of military success in combating Hamas — proposed to the Knesset that they could only “eliminate the terrorists” by destroying the “idea” of a Palestinian state, an idea she asserted was nurtured by UNRWA.
Weeks later, the United States and its subjects Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Finland, Estonia, Japan, Austria and Romania announced without warning that they would be defunding UNRWA, causing the organization to suddenly teeter on brink of financial collapse. Arab, European Union and UN leadership have condemned the decision as “collective punishment,” but Washington has ignored these complaints.
The excuse presented for cutting off money for UNRWA in the midst of one of the most brutal wars on a civilian population in history was the circulation of Israeli intelligence claiming a dozen or so aid workers (over 100 who have been killed in the war so far) were secret Hamas agents.
This intelligence appears to be an unfounded hoax. The American head of UNRWA, William Deere, has stated that every single employee of the organization is subjected to a background check and vetted by the Israeli state itself. The Israeli government has long been given the right to order the firing of UNRWA workers at will, as seen with the dozen or so employees accused of being Hamas-sympathizers being fired (or killed) despite a lack of evidence behind the charges against them. Western leaders have been tight-lipped on declaring faith in the Israeli intelligence in question. Recently, Foreign Minister Penny Wong said she doesn’t even know the real reason for why she voted to end Australia’s support for UNRWA.
How a desperate genocidal proposal travels from the Israeli parliament to become the consensus in all of the major capitals of the West in less than a month remains a mystery among those not familiar with how power is really brokered in the Washington-led liberal plutocracies.
Mass Expulsion Of All Arabs Is The End Goal
The core tenet of Zionism has always been to expel native Arabs. In 1940, Jewish National Fund leader Yosef Weitz privately plotted the subsequent ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948,
“The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They all must be moved. Not one village can remain, and not one tribe. Only through this transfer of the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come.”
In 1969, the Israeli state brokered a deal with CIA-backed Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner to pay 60,000 Gazans to move to South America, though few appear to have taken the offer.
Following the October 7th incursion, the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy released a white paper calling for the “final resettlement” of the Palestinians.
Today, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and senior official Bezalel Smotrich openly tell the Jewish public (83% of which openly support ethnically cleansing Gaza) they are actively conspiring to send Palestinians to a different country and replace them with Jews, even as figures in Washington pretend to protest.
Netanyahu withholds comments on this matter in public, but Israeli media has reported that in late December, the Prime Minister told Likud Party members that their strategy of bombing civilians and man-made famine was a deliberate tactic to terrorize Arabs into “voluntary emigration.”
At the same meeting, Netanyahu promised that his people were privately working on convincing other nations to accept millions of displaced Palestinians. The obvious destination appears to be Egypt, since it is nearby, but we should not discount the prospect of Europe as a final destination.
In late October, the Financial Times reported that the Israeli government was using the European Union to pressure Egypt into taking expelled Palestinians. Egypt has continued to insist that it will not be a party to this arrangement, not because it is against refugees (the country already hosts millions from Syria and elsewhere), but because the Arab world will perceive them as collaborators in the final destruction of the Palestinian people.
Despite early reports that Egypt was considering military action over Israel’s brazen attacks in Rafah, Fattah al-Sisi is expected to cave. In an amazing coincidence, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — which previously ceased loaning money to Egypt — has recently “reconsidered” the offer, generically citing the Gaza war as the reason. The global finance organization has yet to make a final decision on whether to disperse the promised funds.
Arab media is pulling no punches on this development. Middle Eastern journalists have concluded that Jewish world finance is privately dangling up to $12 billion dollars in loan forgiveness from American and European banks in exchange for Egypt taking in the Palestinians Israel is pushing into Sinai. Once al-Sisi agrees to go along with the plan, the credit will flow.
If Egypt accepts “money” over “lead” in this scenario, there will likely be blowback for Europe. Prior to the conflict, the Israeli government was working with the Turkish consulate to enable Palestinians to travel to Southeastern Europe, where they became the top asylum-seeking population in Greece by mid 2023. Israel uses its bureaucracy strategically to ensure that once a Palestinian agrees to leave Israeli territory, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for them to return.
The EU has been offering to bribe the Egyptian regime since the beginning of hostilities between Israel and Palestine. The EU has gone out of its way to keep resettling potential Palestinian refugees to Europe on the table during these secret negotiations, even as it pays Arab leaders elsewhere to keep some immigrants away. The Financial Times reported on this glaring omission, stating that the arrangement, “will not specifically link EU cash to Egypt’s commitment to prevent any onward migration to Europe or a possible influx of Palestinians.”
Egyptian leadership has shown exasperation with Brussels, even declaring that they would send one million Palestinians to Europe if the aggressive lobbying continues.
The Israeli government is not so subtle. Danny Danon, the lead figure working closely with Netanyahu on the Gaza expulsion plan, took to the Wall Street Journal in November to declare, “The West Should Welcome Gaza Refugees.”
This plan has been endorsed by some of the West’s most prominent anti-Muslim Zionist voices. On the idea, Breitbart editor Joel Pollak wrote, “We [America] should give civilians from Gaza temporary refuge during the war, as long as they are not a threat, and encourage regional Arab states to do the same.”
Zionist hawk Nikki Haley has also hinted at support for this idea.
In other words, the people deemed too dangerous to live in their own homes are being welcomed by the same Zionists to the West.
But the Palestinians don’t want to leave. They are fighting to the last man to stay in their land.
Ultimately, the only check that could prevent this refugee catastrophe from going according to the Zionist plan is a victory by the Axis of Resistance.
An investigation by The Guardian reveals the magnitude of Israeli destruction in Beit Hanoun, al-Zahra, and Khan Yunis.
Palestinians walk through destruction in Gaza City on Friday, Nov. 24, 2023 (AP)
The Guardian revealed findings from their full-scale investigation of the destruction of Gaza as a result of the Israeli genocide.
General findings found that in the three focal neighborhoods of the investigation, at least 250 residential buildings, 17 schools and universities, and 16 mosques were leveled to the ground. The numbers prompted experts to label the genocide as a “domicide” as it not only forces Palestinians out of their homes or shelters but also makes it impossible for them to return to them.
“Israel” defends its unrestrained attacks on Gaza by blaming the whole situation on Hamas. It claims that Hamas infiltrates civilian areas, domestic homes, and complexes, something that has been repeatedly refuted, which “authorizes” the bombing of the entirety of the Strip.
On January 17, another study of satellite images obtained by Corey Scher of the City University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University showed that 50 to 62 percent of all buildings in Gaza have been destroyed.
The Guardian‘s investigation focuses on three Gazan towns: Beit Hanoun, al-Zahra, and Khan Yunis.
Beit Hanoun is a town to the northeast of Gaza and was home to 50,000 Palestinians before “Israel” demolished it.
Beit Hanoun was also surrounded by agricultural land used for produce, but satellite images showed that those have been obliterated as well, making them a significant part of the 39% of agricultural lands in north Gaza that “Israel” destroyed.
Al-Zahra was home to 5,000 Palestinians before the genocide and was regarded as one of Gaza’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
Within its northern infrastructure were universities, tower blocks, and a large wastewater treatment plant. “Israel” destroyed everything and forged new bulldozed roads over the ravaged ones for the transportation of IOF soldiers.
In its east is al-Mughraqa neighborhood, which has seen relentless Israeli bombardment that left nothing but a visible crater where a building once stood.
The Turkish Palestinian Friendship Hospital stood in al-Zahra as well, but several of its departments had been bombed, and the roads leading to it are riddled with large holes where Israeli bombs exploded.
The israelis blow up the only surviving university, Al Israa, in Palestine’s Gaza — but the spineless US “spokesperson” is ‘hesitant’ to comment pic.twitter.com/irokjUQMig
Over 3,000 Palestinian civilians resided in the tower blocks of al-Zahra, all of which were decimated to the ground.
Khan Younis
Khan Yunis is Gaza’s main city and was sold as a “safe zone” by the IOF, who encouraged Palestinian civilians to evacuate there for safety but ambushed and bombed them and the town.
Among the destroyed infrastructure were residential buildings, schools, sports compounds, mosques, pharmacies, kindergartens, agricultural fields, and greenhouses. To be specific, over 100 greenhouses were bombed, leaving only large craters behind.
Khan Yunis also had a refugee camp that sheltered at least 41,000 people back in 2017 after they were forcibly expelled from their homes. The camp was also targeted by the IOF, resulting in damage to UN shelters and schools, as well as its hospital.
The israeli destruction of Khan Younis today: these are people’s homes & land & livelihoods & dreams, blown to bits by israeli invading savages pic.twitter.com/A22juhXlOe
By definition, domicide is “the planned, deliberate destruction of someone’s home, causing suffering to the dweller.”
Scholars have opted to use this word when describing the Israeli conduct in Gaza, saying the forced displacement of Palestinians and the bombing of different infrastructure, which renders most neighborhoods and towns uninhabitable, not just buildings and homes, is a direct consequence of the practice of “domicide”.
What “Israel” has been doing is a full-blown attack on Gaza to rid it of its rightful residents, either by killing them or by forcing them to evacuate to nearby countries, such as Egypt.
The scale of destruction adds to the fact. Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, said, “Gaza’s destruction is far worse in terms of the scale, ferocity and impact when compared to Ukraine, Syria or other conflicts.”
Ammar Azzouz, a research fellow at the University of Oxford and author of a book on domicide, also said, “Domicide’s impact unfolds with time. Its pain spreads not only across those who lost their homes in Gaza but also for those whose homes remain intact as their wider infrastructure has been targeted.”
He also pointed out how The Guardian‘s investigation and the footage obtained show the weaponization of Gaza’s architecture and infrastructure by “Israel” to create unsuitable and uninhabitable spaces, as well as its heritage sites to erase its identity.
Other scholars mentioned how the destruction of these towns and cities kills any sense of life, which might push people away.
Marin Coward, professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London, said, “If you can’t shop or learn, you can’t form a sense of belonging or call a place home.”
He then added, “The destruction of homes plays a key role in both the displacement – communities cannot return if they have no home to return to – and the destruction of communities, as homes are destroyed and families displaced so all the things that make a community cohesive are destroyed and they are scattered to many different places.”
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 