World Socialist Web Site – January 18, 2024
Nasser hospital targeted in Gaza, ten killed in the West Bank
By Thomas Scripps
According to the human rights organization Euro-Med Monitor, at least 120 mass graves have been established to bury the dead, including in residential neighborhoods and courtyards, wedding halls, stadiums, hospital courtyards, schools and mosques.
Israel’s murderous campaign in Gaza claimed another 163 lives between Tuesday and Wednesday and injured another 350. Close to 25,000 people have now been officially recorded killed since October 7, and over 61,500 injured.
According to the human rights organisation Euro-Med Monitor, at least 120 mass graves have been established to bury the dead, including in residential neighbourhoods and courtyards, wedding halls, stadiums, hospital courtyards, schools and mosques.
At least 12 existing cemeteries have been attacked by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Euro-Med reports, with graves bulldozed and bodies and tombstones destroyed or removed.
Hundreds of thousands more Palestinians face death by famine and disease. On Tuesday, the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights warned “every single person in Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population is starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water, and famine is imminent.”
Writing at the end of last year, Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh Professor Devi Sridhar referred to a study in the Lancet in the early 2000s which found that crude mortality rates are on average increased sixty times by conflict and mass displacement. Applying that prediction to Gaza, Sridhar explained, “the world faces the prospect of almost a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million population—close to half a million human beings—dying within a year.”
This and more is the fascist Israeli government’s intended outcome. According to Israel’s Channel 12, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told heads of local councils located near the border with Gaza that he anticipated the war continuing into 2025.
The genocide is being sped along by the IDF’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure—21 of the 35 hospitals in Gaza are no longer functioning.
Early Wednesday morning, a staff member and a patient in intensive care were wounded by Israeli fire in the Jordanian field hospital in Khan Younis. Jordan accused Israel of a “flagrant breach of international law.” The nearby Nasser hospital has also come under repeated attack.
Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud expressed Gazans’ fear that the same destruction will be visited on the south as in the north of the Strip, where “the vast majority of healthcare facilities were attacked, destroyed and left severely damaged to the point that they’re pushed out of service completely”.
On Wednesday night residents reported the most intense assault on the area so far, with tanks just metres way from the hospital. “We were in terror. All the kids were screaming and crying,” Yasser Zaqzouq told the BBC. “We are living in fear and terror,” said another. One described fleeing “under fire” to the city of Rafah with “a few blankets” and now “not knowing where to go.”
A nurse told NBC News the situation inside the hospital was “disastrous”.
Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum, reporting from Rafah, explained, “The strikes have not stopped over the last few hours across the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that Israel says that they’re moving to a completely new phase with low-intensity bombing,” referring to the United States government’s lying claims that Israel is scaling back its offensive.
Israeli forces are also disrupting the distribution of extremely limited supplies of aid. According to United Nations spokesperson Stephane Dujarric, between January 1 and 10, just three of a planned 21 deliveries of humanitarian aid were able to reach the northern part of Gaza, with convoys blocked by the IDF.
Returning from his fourth visit to the Strip, head of the UN’s Palestinian Refugee agency Phillipe Lazzarini described, “Hundreds of thousands of people living now in the street, living in these plastic makeshift tents, sleeping on the concrete… They don’t see how they can continue to bring up their children in this type of environment. People start to have difficulties to project how the future will look like.”
This is proceeding under another communications blackout, this one lasting six days—the longest since the war began—with “near-total” telephone and internet outages, according to monitoring group NetBlocks.
Palestinians in the West Bank are also being silenced, writes the Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media, “for simply expressing their views or opinions on various online platforms, through a variety of measures including censorship, surveillance and arrests.”
Hundreds are also being killed in the West Bank—365 since October 7. At least another 10 were killed in drone strikes and shooting in the Balata and Tulkarem refugee camps on Wednesday, amid IDF raids.
Palestinian Red Crescent Society medical workers reported their ambulances being blocked and fired on in responding to the scenes of the strikes. Two staff were wounded in Tulkarem. Only a week ago, four PRCS medics and their two patients were killed in central Gaza when their ambulance was targeted by an Israeli strike.
Residents in Tulkarem described IDF soldiers going house to house, blowing doors off hinges, carrying out mass arrests and interrogating Palestinians. Reporting from the camp for Al Jazeera, Nida Ibrahim explained, “Israeli forces have been raiding Palestinian homes one after another. They took many Palestinians to two areas. What we’ve seen a lot of lately is the Israeli practice of taking Palestinians out and detaining them for hours and hours for what they call ‘field interrogations’.”
Elsewhere in the West Bank, raids were carried out in al-Eizariya, Beitin, the Jazalone camp and nearby towns. Checkpoints were expanded and tightened in East Jerusalem and Ramallah. At least 85 Palestinians were detained, according to the Wafa news agency.
Overall, nearly 6,000 have been taken into custody in the West Bank since October 7, with the IDF carrying out 40 raids a day on average.
On Tuesday, Palestinian shopkeeper Abu Ras reported being used as a human shield during a raid in Dura—as he was marched ahead of an IDF soldier using his shoulder as a prop to balance his rifle. “He told me that he will use me as a human shield, that young people shouldn’t hurl stones,” Ras told Reuters, “‘You will walk in front of me.’ That’s what happened and he took me toward the center of the town.”
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/01/17/yckc-j17.html
Countercurrent – January 18, 2024
100 Days of War and Resistance:
Legendary Palestinian Resistance Will Be Netanyahu’s Downfall
By Dr. Ramzy Baroud
Law number one in the ‘law of holes’, is that “if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” Law number two, “if you are not digging, you are still in a hole”.
These adages sum up Israel’s ongoing political, military and strategic crises, 100 days following the start of the war on Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was faced by the unprecedented challenge of having to react to a major attack launched by Palestinian Resistance in southern Israel on October 7.
This single event is already proving to be a game changer in the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Its impact will be felt for many years, if not generations, to come.
Netanyahu was already in a hole long before the Al-Aqsa Flood operation took place, and he has no one else to blame but himself.
To stay in power and to avoid three major corruptionﾠcases and subsequent trials, Netanyahu labored to fortify his position at the helm of Israeli politics with the help of the most extreme government ever assembled, in a state whose very existence is an outcome of an extremist ideology.
Even the anti-Netanyahu mass protests throughout Israel, which also took place for months prior to the war, did not alert the Israeli leader that the hole was getting deeper, and that the Palestinians, living under a perpetual military occupation and siege, could possibly find in Israel’s political and military crises an opportunity.
He simply kept on digging.
October 7 should not be perceived as a surprise attack, since the entire Gaza Division, the massive Israeli military build-up in the Gaza envelope, exists for the very purpose of ensuring that Gaza’s subjugation and siege were perfected according to state-of-the-art military technology.
According to theﾠGlobal Firepower 2024 military strength ranking, Israel is number 17 in the world, mainly because of itsﾠmilitary technology.
This advanced military capability meant that no surprise attacks should have been possible, because it is not humans, but sophisticated machines that scan, intercept and report on every perceived suspicious movement. In the Israeli case, the failure was profound and multi-layered.
Subsequently, followingﾠOctober 7, Netanyahu found himself in a much deeper hole. Instead of finding his way out by, for example, taking responsibility, unifying his people or, God forbid, acknowledging that war is never an answer in the face of a resisting, oppressed population, he kept on digging.
The Israeli leader, flanked by far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Amichai Eliyahu worsened matters by using the war on Gaza as an opportunity to implement long-dormant plans of ethnically cleansing Palestinians, not only from the Gaza Strip but also the West Bank.
Were it not for the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and strong rejection by Egypt and Jordan, the second Nakba would have been a reality.
All mainstream Israeli politicians, despite their ideological and political differences, unanimously outdid one another in their racist, violent, even genocidal language. While Defense Minister Yoav Gallant immediatelyﾠannounced that “there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed” to the Gaza population, Avi Dichterﾠcalled for “another Nakba”.
Meanwhile, Eliyahuﾠsuggested the ‘option’ of “dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza”.
Instead of saving Israel from itself by reminding the Tel Aviv government that the genocidal war on Gaza would also bode badly for Tel Aviv, the US Biden Administration served the role of cheerleader and outright partner.
Aside from an additional $14 billion of emergency aidﾠpackage, Washington has reportedlyﾠsent, as of December 25, 230 airplanes and 20 ships loaded with armaments and munitions.
According to a New York Times report on January 12, the CIA is also activelyﾠinvolved in collecting information from Gaza and providing that intelligence to Israel.
US support for Israel, in all its forms, has been maintained, despite the shocking reports issued by every respected international charity that operates in Palestine and the Middle East.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)ﾠsaid that 1.9 million out of Gaza’s entire population of 2.3 million people have been displaced. Israeli rights group B’tselemﾠsaid that 2.2 million are starving. Save the Children reported that over 100 Palestinian children are killed daily. Gaza’s government media office has said that about 70 percent of the Strip has been destroyed.
Even the Wall Street Journalﾠconcluded that the destruction of Gaza is greater than that of Dresden in WWII.
Yet, none of this concerned US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited the region five times in less than 100 days, with the same message of support for Israel.
What is so astonishing, however, is that Gaza’s threshold of resilience continues to prove unequaled. This is how determined the Palestinians are to finally achieve their freedom.
Indeed, fathers, or mothers, in a scene repeated numerous times, would be carrying the bodies of their dead children while howling in pain, yet insisting that they would never leave their homeland.
This dignified pain has moved the world. Even though Washington has ensured no meaningful action will be taken at the UN Security Council, countries like South Africaﾠsought the help of the world’s highest court to demand an immediate end to the war and to recognize Israel’s atrocities as an act of genocide.
South Africa’s efforts at the International Court of Justice soon galvanized other countries, mostly in the Global South.
But Netanyahu kept on digging, unmoved, or possibly unaware that the world around him is finally beginning to truly understand the generational suffering of the Palestinians.
The Israeli leader still speaks of ‘voluntary migration’, of wanting to manage Gaza and Palestine, and of reshaping the Middle East in ways consistent with his own illusions of grandeur and power.
100 days of war on Gaza has taught us that superior firepower no longer influences outcomes when a nation takes the collective decision of resisting.
It has also taught us that the US is no longer able to reorder the Middle East to fit Israeli priorities, and that relatively small countries in the Global South, when united, can alter the course of history.
Netanyahu may continue digging, but history has already been written: the spirit of the Palestinian people has won over Israel’s death machine.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out’. His other books include ‘My Father was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth’. Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website isﾠwww.ramzybaroud.net
BRICS Symbolizes the Richness of a Multipolar World: Lavrov
Historical development allowed the emergence of new centers of economic and political influence, the Russian FM stated.
On Thursday, the Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergei Lavrov exemplified the advancement of multipolarity by highlighting that about 30 nations are interested in joining the BRICS group, which is led by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
During the presentation of the annual report on Russian diplomatic efforts, he pointed out that the West had ruled the world for 500 years "without serious competitors," becoming accustomed to playing the role of a hegemon.
However, historical development has allowed the emergence of "new centers of economic growth, financial power, and political influence, which significantly outpace the U.S. and other Western countries," Lavrov stated, stressing the interest of dozens of countries in becoming part of the BRICS group.
The Russian Foreign Affairs Minister indicated that his country's main goal in 2024 will be to rid itself of any dependence on Western-based supply chains and financial systems.
Regarding the conflict in Ukraine, Lavrov asserted that there is no possibility of a Russian defeat and emphasized that negotiations on the terms to end the conflict should be conducted with the West.
However, "we see no interest whatsoever from the U.S. or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in reaching a fair solution to the current Ukrainian conflict," he said and blamed the White House for perpetuating the war situation.
Lavrov also mentioned that the relations between Russia and China "are at the best stage in their centennial history," assuring that ties between both countries are stronger, more reliable, and more advanced than "a military alliance in the traditional sense of the Cold War era."
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