Mondoweiss – January 15, 2024
‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 101:
The collapse of Gaza’s health sector the “worst man-made medical disaster in modern history”
As the confirmed death toll from Israel's assault on Gaza reaches 24,000, the U.S. is reportedly "frustrated" Israel continues to ignore calls to limit its attacks. Hamas releases video of three Israeli captives, saying fate will be revealed today.
BY LEILA WARAH
Casualties
- 23,968+ killed* and at least 60,582 wounded in the Gaza Strip.
- 387+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem
- Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,147.
- 522 Israeli soldiers killed since October 7, and at least 2,193 injured.**
- * This figure was confirmed by Gaza’s Ministry of Health on January 14. Some rights groups put the death toll number at more than 31,000 when accounting for those presumed dead.
** This figure is released by the Israeli military.
Key Developments
- Hamas releases video of three Israeli captives telling their government to stop the offensive, followed by a message saying their “fates” will be determined on Monday.
- Occupied West Bank: Five Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in three separate incidents on Sunday.
- Top House Republicans threaten U.S. government workers who participate in walkout to protest Washington’s continued support for Israel.
- U.S. fighter jet shot down Ansar Allah anti-ship cruise missile fired towards a U.S. destroyer in the Red Sea.
- Palestinian journalist Yazan Zweidi killed by Israeli shelling while working in northern Gaza Strip.
- Israeli forces arrest 25 students from Nablus’ An-Najah University, occupied West Bank.
- Three legal and human rights groups urge International Court of Justice to issue provisional measures requested by South Africa.
- Hezbollah anti-tank missile kills 70-year-old Israeli woman and her son, says the Times of Israel.
- Ansar Allahﾠpromises retaliation against U.S. and UK airstrikes on Yemen.
- NetBlocks observatory: More than 48-hour outage has left “most residents cut off” as the war in the enclave passes the 100-day mark.
- NetBlocks observatory: Two Patel repair crew killed trying to restore communication service in Gaza.
- PRCS: Emergency medical services to Gaza City and northern region of Gaza have resumed following Israeli attacks on medical centers and ambulances.
Injuries in Gaza mount amid healthcare collapse
Israel’s war on Gaza has officially surpassed 100 days, leaving the besieged enclave a shadow of its former self, filled with death, displacement, starvation, and despair.
At least 44 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli bombardment so far on Monday, including 33 people in southern Khan Younis and 12 people in a residential building in northern Gaza City, Al Jazeera reported.
Dozens of others have been injured and are left with extremely limited treatment options in Gaza as a result of Israel’s attacks on healthcare.
The World Health Organization (WHO) visited Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza and the Nasser Hospital in southern Khan Younis to call for the protection of health centers. Following the visit, WHO learned patients are fleeing out of fear, and the number of medical staff is low at Al-Aqsa Hospital.
At Nasser Hospital, the group documented a shortage of beds, with 700 patients on the premises along with about 7,000 internally displaced Palestinians.
“These facilities require sustained support and protection to remain operational. The increased hostilities in the south of the Strip are making it difficult for aid to reach them,” WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“In Gaza, the health care system is on the brink of collapse. In any conflict or crisis, access to health care is a question of life or death,” International Federation of the Red Cross Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain said on X.
“Civilian population in Gaza have suffered enough, and healthcare is one of the last remaining beacons of hope. It’s a humanitarian and moral imperative to ensure the people of Gaza can access health care,” Chapagain continued.
Similarly, Dr. Mads Gilbert, a physician who worked in Gaza for more than 20 years, told Al Jazeera, “It is a horrible situation. The healthcare capacity is not sufficient at all to handle this massive number of 61,000 injured. They are lacking everything; they don’t have antibiotics, anesthetics, IV fluids.”
In the north, the mayor of Gaza City has reported it hasn’t received “one drop of fuel” in months, and in the south, hospitals are overwhelmed with the wounded.
“This is a systematic man-made disaster. This is planned and executed by the Israeli government with the full support from the U.S. It’s the worst man-made medical disaster in modern history,” Gilbert said.
UNOCHA has said Israeli denials of access for humanitarian missions have increased since the beginning of 2024, with only about 24 percent of planned humanitarian deliveries to northern Gaza reaching their destinations in the first weeks of the year.
Similarly, Diaa Rashwan, the chairman of Egypt’s State Information Service (SIS) says Israel is the sole cause of the lack of aid entering Gaza through Rafah and other border crossings.
Rashwan added that the Rafah crossing hasn’t been closed “for a single moment” on the Egyptian side. At the same time, Israeli authorities deliberately disrupted or delayed the entry of aid “under the pretext of inspecting it.”
“Throughout these 100 days, has been the stubbornness and intentionality of the occupying Israeli authorities, at other Gaza Strip crossings, delaying the inspection of aid before allowing its passage to the Palestinian side, by virtue of its military control over the territory of the Gaza Strip,” he was quoted as saying in an SIS post on Facebook, as cited by Al Jazeera.
The UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) has said that “the massive destruction, displacement, hunger and loss of last 100 days are staining our shared humanity”.
“The humanitarian operation has become one of the most complex and challenging in the world, the continued, “due to the tight siege on the Gaza Strip, the aid delivered is not nearly enough to meet people’s needs, it said.
New normal: daily attacks on the occupied West Bank
Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces conducted yet another night of heavy violence on Palestinian neighborhoods and cities.
As a precursor to the overnight Israeli military raids, the army killed five Palestinians in three separate incidents on Sunday, including three children.
Those killed include sixteen-year-old Khaled Hmeidat and 17-year-old Suleiman Kanaan in el-Bireh, sixteen-year-old Louay Al-Sufi during a raid on the Ain Sultan refugee camp north of the city of Jericho, and two Palestinians in Sair, north of Hebron, while in a car the military said broke through a checkpoint.
Israeli forces also arrested 25 studentsﾠovernight on Sunday as they staged a sit-in on campus protesting high tuition fees in Nablus’ An-Najah University, occupied West Bank.
Wasel Abu Yousef, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told Al Jazeera that both the occupied West Bank and Gaza are part of the “Israeli genocide against Palestinians, aimed at breaking them and their collective will.”
“As Israel committed massacres in the Gaza Strip throughout 100 days of war, it continues its attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem,” Abu Yousef said.
“The occupation seeks to impose new facts on the ground and is trying to implement its plans to displace Palestinians, by dismembering the West Bank and killing and destroying,” he said.
“Through repeated raids and attacks, Israel is hoping people will leave voluntarily,” he added.
On Sunday evening, Hamas released an undated 37-second video of three Israelis taken captive on October 7, Noa Argamani, 26, Yossi Sharabi, 53, and Itai Svirsky, 38, appealing to their government to stop the offensive.
“Tomorrow, we will inform you of their fate,” the video said without giving further details.
Hours before, on the same day, Hamas’s Qassam Brigades spokesperson, Abu Obaida, said that the fate of many of the Israeli captives has become “unknown in recent weeks.”
“A lot of them have most likely been killed because of the Israeli bombardment,” Abu Obeida said.
“The rest are in danger, and the enemy bears responsibility for their fate,” he added.
Israel says 132 remain in Gaza, and 25 died in captivity. Of about 240 people seized by Hamas on October 7, nearly half were released in a November truce.
Abu Obaida also announced that in 100 days, “we carried out hundreds of operations” in a pre-recorded video message.
Since October 7, “we destroyed or disabled 1,000 Israeli military vehicles, and we carried out hundreds of operations against the occupation,” using Qassam-made weapons, he continued.
Biden said in a statement marking 100 days of war in Gaza that he is still working to negotiate a captive release.
“I will never forget the grief and the suffering I have heard in my meetings with the families of the American hostages. No one should have to endure even one day of what they have gone through, much less 100,” Biden continued, failing to mention the nearly 24,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza.
Palestine’s UN mission criticized the U.S. secretary of state on X for making no mention of the 24,000 Palestinians killed in the Gaza Strip, about half of whom are children, in his post to mark 100 days of war.
“Shame on those who remain complicit and do not call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Shame on them,” it said.
Israel considers cutting education budget to fund war
As Israel’s war on Gaza enters its fourth month, its economy is suffering as it spends billions to sustain the military’s ongoing operations in the besieged enclave.
Israel has already spent 24.7 billion Israeli shekels ($6.6bn) on the war, including reinforcing Israel’s borders and funding for the more than 100,000 people displaced from the north and south of the country, since October 7.
“There are fireworks” over how to fund the Israeli government’s war budget in 2024, which costs Israel about $269m each day, Al Jazeera reported.
Some of Israel’s funding proposals include a $239m cut in the education ministry’s budget and more than $100m in cuts to the Health Ministry’s budget. A lot of things are being affected, Al Jazeera continued.
Despite American pressure to reduce deadly strikes on civilians in Gaza, the Washington Post has reported Israeli leadership deciding to “continue its high-intensity campaign throughout January.”
According to Israeli media, the Foreign Ministry estimates that about 210 billion Israeli shekels ($54bn) will be spent on the war in Gaza between 2023 and 2025.
Tensions with the Biden administration
As Israel plans out their military budget, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the U.S. has been speaking “intensely” with Israel about a transition to “lower intensity” operations in Gaza.
The United States has urged Israel to make this shift for weeks but has rejected imposing any timeframes or red lines on the government, saying those decisions were up to Israel’s leaders.
“We believe it’s the right time for that transition. And we’re talking about doing that now,” Kirby said, according to Al Jazeera, adding that Israel has already taken some “some precursory steps” towards reducing air strikes and operating in a more limited capacity.
However, with Israeli attacks killing hundreds of Palestinians in recent days, these precursory steps are challenging to identify.
Meanwhile, Axios news agency claims that the U.S. administration is frustrated with Israel’s rejection of most of their recent requests related to the war on Gaza.
“The situation sucks and we are stuck. The president’s patience is running out,” a U.S. official reportedly told the news outlet.
“At every juncture, Netanyahu has given Biden the finger,” U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen told Axios. “They are pleading with the Netanyahu coalition, but getting slapped in the face over and over again.”
Despite reports of escalating tension between Israel’s government and the U.S., the Biden administration has continued to provide complete support for Israel in the face of International outrage in the form of munition supply and at the United Nations.
Punitive measures for U.S. government staff that call for a ceasefire
Despite rising concerns among members of the American government, the U.S. is working hard to stifle their protests against Israel’s ruthless operations on Gaza’s population.
Top House Republicans have announced they will press federal agencies to punish workers who participate in a planned walkout on Tuesday in protest of Washington’s continued support for Israel’s aggression.
“Any government worker who walks off the job to protest U.S. support for our ally Israel is ignoring their responsibility and abusing the trust of taxpayers. They deserve to be fired,” Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Mike Johnson wrote.
Johnson added he was working with the chairman of the House Oversight Committee to “ensure that each federal agency initiates appropriate disciplinary proceedings against any person who walks out on their job,”
“They deserve to be fired,” he concluded.
World Socialist Web Site - January 15, 2024
Netanyahu pledges to defy International Court of Justice as Gaza death toll mounts
By Andre Damon
In a speech Saturday marking 100 days of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue the massacre in defiance of international law.
“We will restore security to both the south and the north,” Netanyahu vowed. “No one will stop us—not The Hague, not the axis of evil, and not anyone else.”
Netanyahu pledged “to fight on to the end—until complete victory.” He continued, adding, “We will not stop until we achieve victory.”
Netanyahu angrily denounced the genocide case against Israel brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague, the Netherlands, by South Africa.
He called the case a “hypocritical attack in The Hague on the Jewish state that rose from the ashes of the Holocaust,” and “a moral low in the history of nations.” He vowed, “This international defamation campaign will not weaken our hands or weaken our determination to fight to the end.”
In the most explicit terms to date, Netanyahu sought to directly implicate the United States in the war crimes of the Israeli military, saying that he told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that “this is not only our war, this is also your war.”
Indeed, the genocide in Gaza is “America’s war.” The United States has provided over 10,000 tons of military equipment to Israel since October 7, transported in 244 cargo plane flights and over 20 ships.
On January 12, the New York Times reported that the Central Intelligence Agency is collecting “information on senior Hamas leaders” and relaying it to Israel, meaning the United States is providing targeting information for Israeli strikes that have to date killed over 30,000 civilians in Gaza.
Last week, the US massively expanded its involvement in the war throughout the Middle East, striking over 30 sites in Yemen on Thursday, followed by more strikes on Friday.
In his own statement marking the 100th day of the war, President Joe Biden did not mention, much less express sympathy with, the Gazans who have been killed or the 1.9 million Gazans who are facing starvation and displacement. Instead, the entirety of the three-paragraph statement was directed toward Israelis held hostage by Hamas, whose captivity the Netanyahu regime is using as a pretext to carry out its genocide.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed these statements, declaring, “The United States will not rest until all remaining hostages, including six Americans, are reunited with their loved ones.”
In its statement marking the 100th day of the attack, the Euro-Med monitor reported that approximately 100,000 Gazans have been killed, reported missing or wounded since October 7.
It noted that 31,497 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been killed to date by Israeli bombings. It estimated that a staggering 28,961, or 92 percent, were civilians “including 12,345 children, 6,471 women, 295 health personnel, 41 civil defense personnel, and 113 journalists.”
These statistics include both those whose bodies have been identified and over 7,000 people who have been missing for more than 14 days and are presumed dead. The monitor noted that “Hundreds of bodies that cannot be recovered due to the ongoing Israeli violence remain on the roads... particularly in areas where Israel’s army has conducted ground incursions.”
A further 1.955 million Palestinians, approximately 85 percent of the total population of the Strip, have been displaced from their homes.
Nearly 70,000 housing units have been completely destroyed, and a further 187,300 units have been damaged. These include “320 schools; 1,671 industrial facilities; 183 health facilities, including 23 hospitals, 59 clinics and 92 ambulances; 239 mosques; three churches; and 170 press offices.”
Summarizing the massive level of destruction, Euro-Med reported that “Israel is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure in order to cause as many casualties, material losses, and as much general destruction as possible as a form of retaliation and collective punishment. This is against international humanitarian law, the 1949 Geneva Convention, and amounts to war crimes according to the Rome Statute, which governs the International Criminal Court.”
In its update on the state of the offensive, the United Nations wrote: “One hundred days into the conflict, intense Israeli bombardments from air, land, and sea continued across much of the Gaza Strip on 14 January, resulting in further civilian casualties and destruction.”
In a statement on Sunday, UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini declared, “The crisis in Gaza is a man-made disaster compounded by dehumanizing language and the use of food, water, and fuel as instruments of war.”
In a statement to Al Jazeera, Lazzarini continued, “Whenever you go to a school, the kids are looking at your eyes begging for a sip of water or a loaf of bread... This 100 days feels to be an eternity.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/01/15/ceye-j15.html?pk_campaign=newsletter&pk_kwd=wsws
Common Dreams – January 15, 2024
Gaza Cease-Fire Now! No Wider War
We must join the majority of the world’s nations in building pressure on Biden and Netanyahu to declare a ceasefire, to deluge Gaza with the food, water, medicines, and fuel essential for life. We must do this with everything we’ve got and we must do it now.
By Joseph Gerson
The genocide must end. We must not sleepwalk into a catastrophic regional Middle East War. The decimation of Gaza continues because the United States refuses to demand a ceasefire and provides weapons that have transformed Gaza from an open-air ghetto prison into a compacted zone of death and despair. And if it is possible to think in still worse terms, we should be sobered by the insanity of battling Yemen’s Houthis with Tomahawk cruise missiles. That’s the kind of thinking that triggered First World War.
Even as we were shocked by and condemn the brutal massacre of nearly 1,200 Israelis on October 7 as the abominations they were, we and most of the world’s nations recoil in horror at what is widely understood as the IDF’s genocidal assault against civilians in Gaza and by the escalating settler violence and land seizures in the occupied West Bank.
An estimated 23,000 Gazans, the vast majority children and women, have been killed in Gaza. That’s roughly 20 times the number of Israelis killed in October. If we translate that proportionately into U.S. numbers, it’s the equivalent of more than three million U.S. people. 70% of Gazan homes have been destroyed, with 85% of Gazans displaced. The UN Humanitarian chief describes Gaza as uninhabitable with water, food, and fuel still in desperately short supply. Many hospitals are no longer functionin and hundreds of thousands of people—not “human animals”—face death from famine, thirst, disease, and lack of medical care.
The need for a ceasefire and a credible process toward just Israeli-Palestinian and Middle East peace based on common security are urgent necessities. And we are not powerless.
Yet the war goes on. Even as the Israeli military broadcasts that it is moving into a new and more surgical phase of the war, massive bombings continue. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledges that the war will continue for nine months to a year. And powerful currents in his government are pressing to “thin”—that is, ethnically cleanse—Gaza’s two million people. Another, and even greater, Nakba than what happened in 1948.
And as we see from the escalating attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea, from Hezbollah-Israeli exchanges along the border with Lebanon, bombings in Syria and Lebanon, and targeted assassinations in Lebanon and Iraq, the danger remains that the war could explode into a regional cataclysm.
As Richard Falk, the former U.N. Rapporteur or Palestinian Human Rights chillingly warns, faced with an unwinnable war in Gaza, a war he cannot politically afford to end without victory, Netanyahu’s only option may be to trigger a war with Iran in order to drag U.S. forces more directly into the conflict.
Beyond its immediate role in making the extended war possible, President Joe Biden’s embrace of Netanyahu is also having broader and longer-term international ramifications. The US, as we have seen in UN votes, is increasingly isolated as the hypocrisy and double standards of its claims to defend human rights and the rule of law are laid bare for all the world to see. This, in turn, accelerates the relative decline of the U.S./Western empire and the emergence of a still very fluid, and thus uncertain and dangerous, multi-polar world system.
There is also the tragic domestic fallout here in the U.S. In 1948, Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish refugee philosopher, herself a non-state Zionist, warned that justified or not, Jews around the world would be judged by how Israelis treated their Arab neighbors. The savaging of Gaza, which now compounds the abomination of apartheid, not only marks Israel as a pariah nation but also compounds the historic currents of antisemitism.
These are very hard times. The need for a ceasefire and a credible process toward just Israeli-Palestinian and Middle East peace based on common security are urgent necessities. And we are not powerless.
Senator Bernie Sanders, bless him, has wisely introduced Resolution 502B(c) which can provide the crack in Congress that can let the light in and shatter the congressional consensus for complicity in genocide. The resolution requires a State Department study on Israeli violations of human rights. That in turn should require halting all U.S. arms transfers to Israel. The resolution may not pass, but the debate itself can begin to crack the obscene and murderous consensus.
Beyond that initiative, we must join the majority of the world’s nations in building pressure on Biden and Netanyahu to declare a ceasefire, to deluge Gaza with the food, water, medicines, and fuel essential for life. We must also launch the common security diplomacy that leads to peaceful, just, and respectful Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. Please, if you can, join demonstrations and vigils. Write those letters to Congress and the editor of your local paper. Perform nonviolent civil disobedience. It is time to have those difficult conversations with family, friends, and co-workers. Turning our heads away in silence is not an option. Peace, justice, and coexistence have always been possible.
Dr. Joseph Gerson is the President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament, and Common Security. A Jew steeped in the lessons of the Holocaust. he has worked with leading Israelis and Palestinians for peaceful and just Israeli coexistence for five decades
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/gaza-ceasefire-now-no-wider-war
|
Published since July 2008 |
Your donation
is tax deductable.
The Journal of America Team:
Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott
Special Correspondent
Maryam Turab
