TRT World – January 1, 2024
Killing Palestinian History and Cultural Heritage:
Targeting Archeological Sites, Churches, Mosques, Museums, Monuments
Of 325 Archaeological, Ancient Sites in Gaza, Israel 'Destroyed' 200
By TRT World
The Israeli army has destroyed more than 200 archaeological and ancient sites out of 325 that were registered across besieged Gaza in the course of its devastating onslaught since October 7, authorities in the enclave said.
The Gaza Media Office said on Friday the sites include ancient churches, mosques, schools, museums and other different historical and archaeological sites and monuments.
“The ancient and archaeological sites destroyed by the army date back to the Phoenician and Roman ages; others date back between 800 BC and 1,400, while others were built 400 years ago,” it said in a statement.
The Great Omari Mosque, the Byzantine church in Jabalia, the Shrine of Al-Khadir in Deir al Balah city in central besieged Gaza, and the Blakhiya Byzantine cemetery [The Anthedon of Palestine], northwestern Gaza City were among the sites.
It noted that other sites were severely damaged, including the Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrius Church, the 400-year-old Al-Saqqa House and the Sayed al-Hashim Mosque, which is one of the oldest mosques in Gaza.
Deliberately Destroying Palestinian Heritage
Geneva-based rights group Euro-Med Monitor said on November 20 that Israel deliberately destroyed archaeological and historical monuments in besieged Gaza and accused it of “explicitly targeting Palestinian cultural heritage.”
Gaza is an ancient and historic city that came under the rule of several empires and civilisations, including ancient Egyptians [Pharaohs], the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines then the Islamic age, among others.
Since Hamas’ cross-border surprise blitz on October 7, Israel has continued relentless attacks on the blockaded enclave, killing at least 21,507 Palestinians — about 1% of Gaza’s population — and wounding 55,915, according to local health authorities. Thousands more bodies are feared to be buried in the ruins of obliterated neighbourhoods.
The Israeli onslaught has left Gaza in ruins, with 60 percent of the enclave’s infrastructure damaged or destroyed and nearly 2.3 million residents displaced amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicines.
The civilian deaths and the destruction in Gaza from the Israeli bombardment has caused a growing international outcry, and the United States’ international image has taken a beating over its continued backing for ally Israel.
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Featured image: A view of the damaged historical Greek Orthodox Saint Porphyrius Church, where civilians took shelter, after Israeli air strike in Gaza City, Gaza on October 20, 2023. [Ali Jadallah] / Photo: AA
https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/of-325-archaeological-ancient-sites-in-gaza-israel-destroyed-200-16456033
Middle East Monitor – January 1, 2024
Israel uses Starvation as a Weapon of War in Gaza
By JehanAlfarra
“Bread in those days was like gold.”These were the words of a survivor of the siege of Leningrad, arguably one of the darkest chapters of World War II and a haunting reminder of the horrific toll exacted upon populations deliberately deprived of essential resources.
The use of mass starvation as a weapon of war echoes a historical barbarity that humanity should have long transcended. This egregious strategy, reminiscent of past sieges where starvation was deliberately employed as a tool of warfare, highlights the dire consequences of collective punishment on innocent civilians.
In Gaza, Israel has been deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food and other essentials to the besieged enclave’s 2.2 million people.
While Gaza has been under Israeli siege since 2007, on 9 October 2023 Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared a total blockade on Gaza as Israeli forces launched a full-scale war on the Palestinian territory.
In a recent report, Human Rights Watch described the Israeli government’s use of the collective starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the besieged Gaza Strip as a war crime.
“International humanitarian law, or the laws of war, prohibits the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” the report says, citing the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court established after the horrors of World War II.
Amidst this turmoil, Gaza’s local cuisine has emerged as a testament to resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity, with many utilising locally available ingredients to persevere despite limited resources.
Flour has been the ultimate treasure as bread remains at the heart of survival in Gaza. Palestinian staples such as olive oil, za’atar and duqqa with their long shelf-life have also been a lifeline for many who have been able to store or acquire them.
However, as Israeli forces continue razing agricultural areas, destroying bakeries, food warehouses, flour mills as well as roads used to transport humanitarian aid, the reliance on locally sourced produce serves only as a partial buffer for a ‘lucky few’ against the acute scarcity imposed by the siege and large-scale bombing campaign and ground invasion. Even preparing meals requires finding alternatives to cooking gas, like firewood or cardboard.
Over 80 per cent of the besieged Strip’s population has been internally displaced and their ability to move and seek sustenance has been severely restricted.
According to a report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the proportion of households in Gaza affected by high levels of acute food insecurity is the largest ever recorded by the IPC initiative globally. According to the UN-backed report, more than half a million people, a quarter of Gaza’s population, are already at starvation levels.
“It is a situation where pretty much everybody in Gaza is hungry,” the World Food Programme’s chief economist, Arif Husain, has said. In early December, the WFP reported that nine out of 10 people in Gaza cannot eat every day and skip meals for extended periods of time.
The deliberate restriction of essential supplies, including food, water, and medical aid, accentuates the plight of a populace already grappling with the harrowing realities of a full-scale offensive. In just two months, up to 20,000 Palestinians have already been killed, 70 per cent of them women and children.
The international community’s moral obligation is to condemn such egregious tactics and prioritise diplomatic efforts to not only impose a ceasefire, but to further end the siege on Gaza once military activities have ceased, ensure unimpeded access to humanitarian aid, and seek a lasting resolution that upholds the dignity and rights of civilians trapped in the occupied Palestinian territory.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231223-israel-uses-starvation-as-a-weapon-of-war-in-gaza/
Al Jazeera – December 29, 2023
The real ‘Person of the Year’
Given the ghastly course of 2023, it is obvious who deserves the coveted title: people of Gaza.
BelénFernández
It’s the end of the year, and you know what that means: lots of hubbub about Time magazine’s annual “Person of the Year,” a tradition that began in 1928 as “Man of the Year” but that now honors a “man, woman, group or concept.”
Given the ghastly course of 2023, it seems one obvious choice for “Person of the Year” would be the Palestinian doctors and medical personnel currently risking their lives to save others from Israel’s genocidal endeavors in the Gaza Strip.
Since October 7, the Israeli military has slaughtered more than 21,000 Palestinians in Gaza, among them at least 8,663 children. According to Healthcare Workers Watch ﾖ Palestine, an independent monitoring initiative co-launched by Texas doctor OsaidAlser, no fewer than 340 healthcare workers were killed by the Israelis between October 7 and December 19, including 118 doctors and 104 nurses.
Take, for example, the case of 36-year-old nephrologist DrHammamAlloh, a father of two young children, who was killed along with his own father in a November Israeli airstrike on their home. In an October interview with Democracy Now!, Alloh had responded as follows to the question of why he refused to abandon Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City and to move south in accordance with Israeli evacuation orders: “You think I went to medical school and for my postgraduate degrees for a total of 14 years so [as to] think only about my life and not my patients?”
And it is this sort of relentless altruism that has been continuously on display by Palestinian medics as Israel undertakes to eradicate the very concept of humanity by carpet-bombing civilians and targeting hospitals and ambulances. The assault on medical infrastructure and personnel has been actively abetted by a cohort of Israeli doctors who have leapt onto the military bandwagon in order to cheerlead the bombing of Palestinian hospitals.
Not only have Palestinian medics been converted into military targets, they have also had to contend with crippling shortages of fuel, medicines, and basic supplies – shortages that were already bad enough in so-called “peacetime.” Watching family members and colleagues die has effectively become part of the job, and the Israeli army has additionally busied itself abducting and torturing Palestinian healthcare workers.
In a recent interview with the Washington Post, British-Palestinian surgeon DrGhassan Abu Sittah – who has volunteered with medical teams in Gaza during numerous Israeli assaults over the years and who spent 43 days in the besieged enclave this time around – described having to make “peace with the idea” that he was not going to survive. Among his patients was a young girl, the sole surviving daughter of a female obstetrician at Al-Shifa hospital who was killed along with her other offspring in an Israeli missile strike. Abu Sittah recalled the girl: “Half of her face was missing. Half her nose, her eyelids had been ripped from the bone.”
Despite the all-consuming horror, Abu Sittah reported witnessing great “acts of love” and resistance, as well, like with a three-year-old boy who had lost his family and whose arm and leg Abu Sittah was forced to amputate: “When I went to check up on him, the woman whose son was wounded in the bed next to him had him on her lap and was feeding him and her son.”
In sum, it’s not just the doctors in Gaza who are heroes.
Speaking of heroes, Palestinian journalists have also come under increasingly lethal Israeli fire for bearing witness to the increasingly lethal savagery being carried out in the Gaza Strip. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) notes that this war has constituted the “deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992”; between October 7 and December 23, sixty-nine journalists and media workers had been confirmed dead. Of these casualties, 62 were Palestinian, four were Israeli, and three were Lebanese.
On November 20, Palestinian journalist AyatKhadura was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home in northern Gaza – just two weeks after she had shared a “last message to the world” in which she stated: “We had big dreams but our dream now is to be killed in one piece so they know who we are.”
In another deadly episode documented by CPJ, Palestinian journalist Mohamed Abu Hassira was “killed in a strike on his home in Gaza along with 42 family members” on November 7. And yet in the view of the Western corporate media, the slaughter of journalists and their extended families in Gaza has evidently been deemed less than newsworthy.
On December 15, Al Jazeera Arabic cameraman SamerAbudaqa was killed in an Israeli attack in southern Gaza, where he bled to death after Israeli forces kept ambulances from reaching him for more than five hours. Also injured was Abudaqa’s colleague, Al Jazeera bureau chief WaelDahdouh, who in a previous Israeli attack in October lost his wife, his son, his daughter, his grandson, and various other family members.
In spite of unspeakable trauma, Dahdouh has kept reporting.
The abundance of real-world heroism notwithstanding, Time magazine has selected American billionaire singer-songwriter and pop culture opiate of the masses Taylor Swift as its “Person of the Year” for 2023. As per the Time writeup, Swift is in fact the “main character of the world.” (Prior recipients of the honourhave included Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris duo, and Elon Musk – the “richest private citizen in history” who apparently charmed the Time team by “live-tweet[ing] his poops.”)
But while Swift may indeed be the current protagonist of a superficial world rapidly combusting in self-absorbed banality, one wishes more credit were given to real-world heroes. And as 2023 comes to a close with no end to genocide in sight, give me the people of Gaza as “Person of the Year” any day.
BelénFernández is the author of Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). She is a contributing editor at Jacobin Magazine, and has written for the New York Times, the London Review of Books blog, Current Affairs, and Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/29/the-real-person-of-the-year
BRICS: Hopes and challenges in 2024
.By Omar Abdel-Razek
2024 will be marked by the expansion of the BRICS group to formally include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, in addition to its current members (Russia, Brazil, China, India, South Africa). Argentina was also due to join on January 1 but withdrew its plans just at the last minute.
It’s the largest-ever expansion of the bloc and the first since South Africa joined in 2010. The move augments the group's composition to 11 nations, collectively representing 43% of the world's population and 16% of global trade.
BRICS, an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, was coined first as BRIC, without South Africa, in 2001 by Jim O’Neil, and economist from Goldman Saches.
The latest evolving chapter elicits a mixture of optimism and apprehension. Optimism stems from the prospect of catalysing a paradigm shift in the economics of the emerging economies, traditionally relegated to a mere market for industrialized nations and burdened by foreign debts.
Fortifying Africa’s influence
The bloc's steadfast refusal to align with Western sanctions against Russia amid its conflict with Ukraine, opting instead to dialogue and continuing trade with Moscow, exemplifies the potential synergy between political cohesion and economic interests.
The inclusion of Egypt – one of the biggest economies in Africa, and Ethiopia, home to the African Union headquarters, fortifies the continent's influence within the bloc. This move challenges the symbolic representation of South Africa, the smallest economy in the group so far.
Argentina's presence could have similarly bolstered Latin America's standing within the bloc.
In today's interconnected world, the inseparability of politics and economics underscores the imperative for BRICS to progress towards a stage of "multilateralism" in international politics, championed by founding members Russia and China.
A pivotal aspect of this transformative journey is the creation of a parallel system for global development, exemplified by the success of the New Development Bank (NDB), which has approved $32.8 billion for high-impact projects.
Alternative payment system
NDB is seen as the answer for the neoliberal policies imposed on the “global south” by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Washington Consensus. Russia and China's proposal for an alternative international payment system challenges the dominance of the US dollar, potentially allowing BRICS members to conduct trade in their national currencies, providing a lifeline for African nations burdened by heavy foreign debts.
Egypt, on welcoming its inclusion, anticipates a reduction in foreign currency pressure through the group's aim of diminishing dollar transactions.
Ethiopia, among the fastest-growing economies in Africa, seeks similar benefits that may enable the country to resist persistent Western pressures on issues like ‘‘human rights.’’
It is believed this move enhances Ethiopia's global profile, fostering closer coordination with major world powers and diverting discourse beyond recent civil conflicts, thereby attracting more investment.
However, amid these optimistic prospects, challenges loom large. Historical initiatives for South-South cooperation have struggled to alter the prevailing world order dominated by the West. The first documented initiative is as old as decolonisation process itself.
In 1955, Bandung hosted the first Asian- African summit, an event President Sukarno of Indonesia described as "the first intercontinental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind."
However, the world order has not changed a lot and the western dominance through the international financial institutions and multinational companies continued.
Diversities and complexities
While BRICS may not pose an immediate threat to G7 or G20 blocs, because its primary goal lies in offering an alternative to the prevailing US dollar-centric trade system, the expansion itself “could be a challenge to US hegemony and the US would be scared of that” according to the South African economic analyst Marisa Lourenco.
Challenges within the bloc itself, ranging from the sheer size and economic might of members like China and India, who represent the second and fifth largest economies in the world respectively, to the debt-laden status of others like Ethiopia and Egypt present hurdles.
Political issues, such as the border tensions between China and India, the Nile's Renaissance Dam dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia, and the regional rivalry in the Gulf between Saudi Arabia and Iran, underscore the complexities faced by BRICS in its new expanded form.
The structure of BRICS is theoretically expansive enough to accommodate these diversities without impeding development projects. The bloc relies on annual summits as key decision-making forums devoid of bureaucracy or a centralised headquarters.
The practical realisation of broad cooperation without hindering individual strategies remains to be tested amid escalating global competition between the US and its allies on one side, and Russia and China on the other.
The author, Omar Abdel-Razek, is a Sociologist and Former Editor at BBC Arabic. He lives and works in London.
https://www.trtafrika.com/opinion/brics-hopes-and-challenges-in-2024-16475847
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