Countercurrent – July 17, 2024
Sadistic Israeli torturing of Palestinians – Ignored by US led Europe and their Arab stooges
by Latheef Farook
Demonstrating its cruel and evil nature sadistic form of torturing Palestinians has been underway in Israeli prisons ever since the artificial state of Israel was established in Palestinian lands for Jewish migrants in 1948. However this cruelty intensified ever since Hamas attacked Southern Israel on 7 October 2023.
Innocent Palestinians have been arbitrarily arrested, detained and subjected to savage forms of torture by Israel with the support of United States and Europe supplying latest destructive weapons and bombs to slaughter Palestinians .
Since the beginning of Israel’s air, land and sea military strikes in Gaza on 8 Oct. 2023 Israel has detained thousands of Palestinians, including women, children and members of health and civil defense teams. The fate of the majority remains unknown, with no official statistics available.
In an article titled “how an immoral global leadership allows Israel’s savage slaughter in Gaza to continue “columnist Ghada Agee said Palestinians who manage to survive Israeli military attacks risk being abducted from their homes and taken from the open-air prison of Gaza to Israeli detention and torture centers. If they do survive this collective punishment, Palestinians also risk being abducted and disappeared from their homes during the night?”.
A joint article by columnists Ahmed Aziz,Lubna Masarwa and Simon Hooper in the website Middle East Eye said “iron bars, electric shocks, dogs and cigarette burns: How Palestinians are tortured in Israeli detention “ . Palestinian men detained by Israeli forces told how they were physically tortured with dogs and electricity, subjected to mock executions, and held in humiliating and degrading conditions.
Ramy Abdu, the chair of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said the testimonies of Palestinians released from Israeli detention reveal a systematic pattern of abuse, including forced strip searches, sexual harassment, threats of rape, severe beatings, dog attacks and denial of necessities such as food, water, and access to restroom facilities. “The use of such brutal tactics, particularly against vulnerable groups such as women, children and the elderly, is reprehensible and constitutes a gross violation of human dignity and international law.”
In testimonies one man, who was taken by Israeli forces from a school in Gaza where he had sought refuge with his family, described how he had been handcuffed, blindfolded and detained in a metal cage for 42 days. During interrogations he was given electric shocks, as well as scratched and bitten by army dogs. Other men also described being electrocuted, attacked by dogs, doused with cold water, denied food and water, deprived of sleep and subjected to constant loud music.
“They did not spare anyone. There were 14-year-old boys and 80-year-old men,” said Moaz Muhammad Khamis Miqdad, who was taken prisoner in Gaza City and held for more than 30 days.
According to Geneva based Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor “Palestinian prisoners and detainees from the Gaza Strip are being subjected to premeditated murder and arbitrary execution outside the purview of the law and the judiciary”.
Euro-Med Monitor stated that Israeli prisons and detention centers have become more brutal replicas of Guantanamo. Ill treatment and degrading disregard of human dignity, deprivation of the most basic rights, and horrible forms of torture including those that result in murder have been documented despite numerous international condemnations and demands to ensure the rights and safety of prisoners and detainees.
Israeli forces physically assaulted and strangled a 14-year-old Palestinian boy Majid in the Palestinian village of Qalqilya in the West Bank in Israeli custody during detention and interrogation. Majd and his friends were walking in the western neighborhood of Azzoun when two Israeli military vehicles approached them.
“We felt very afraid and ran away, but the military vehicles chased us, and one of the military jeeps almost ran me over. I had to stop running, while my friends managed to escape and disappear,” Majd told . “Around 10 soldiers exited the two military vehicles, pointing their guns at me and started physically assaulting me for 30 minutes.”
“I was screaming and crying in fear and pain. They cuffed my hands behind my back with a single plastic tie, and I was blindfolded, thrown inside a military vehicle,” Majd said, and added that two soldiers assaulted him inside the vehicle for about 10 minutes.
“One of them put his boot on my mouth while stomping on my chest with his other boot,” Majd said. The military vehicle stopped at an Israeli military checkpoint located at the northern entrance to Azzoun. Majd was taken out of the vehicle, forced to stand still and a soldier repeatedly assaulted him with the stock of his rifle on the chest, head, and waist while directing insults at him.
“I was begging him to stop hitting me but to no avail. He then wrapped his hands around my neck, pressed with all his strength, and said in Arabic, ‘I’ll kill you by strangulation.’” Majd passed out and regained consciousness around 5 p.m. and found himself in a room, lying on the ground and surrounded by a soldier, a cat, and a military dog.
“I felt really scared, mostly because the sounds of the dog were terrifying. I started screaming out of fear because the cat scratched my face many times,” Majd told . “The soldier said in Arabic, ‘I will let the dog eat you.'”
Israeli forces continued torturing Majd until around 2 a.m, slamming his head against a wall several times, causing him to collapse and ask for water, but his request was rejected and they forced him to remain silent.
Majd was released around 12:30 p.m. on April 30 at the intersection of Haris village, near Ariel settlement. He couldn’t move or stand and remained lying on the ground until a Palestinian vehicle pulled over and drove him to his village, then transferred him to Azzoun Hospital.
Israeli forces unleashed an attack dog on a four-year-old Palestinian boy Ibrahim Hashash in the northern occupied West Bank this week.
A 17-year-old Palestinian boy Omar Ahmad Abdulghani Hamed, was shot in the head and killed. Israeli forces severely beat a 15-year-old Palestinian boy Amir in Hebron on his way to buy bread. Three Israeli soldiers approached 15-year-old Amir and began beating him near his home in Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank,
“Then, they dragged Amir about 10 meters (33 feet) along the street towards a nearby wall, pushing him against it. While facing the wall, he continued to slaps, punched his face and stomach. He has been suffering from breathing difficulties for a long time, and targeted painful and forceful slaps to face, causing him to lose vision in eyes due to the severity of the beating,” Amir told . 21 July 2024
Latheef Farook, Senior journalist, is based in Colombo. Sri Lanka
Palestinian Information Center – July 17, 2024
Shattered Dreams of Gaza
In Gaza, where daily life has become a battle for survival, the stories of Palestinians who lost their homes in the midst of the genocidal war waged by Israel on the Strip for the last 10 months reflect the suffering of an entire people, carrying with it bitter human details of what it means for someone to lose their home.
The Al-Sayyid family was living in peace until that fateful night. “The night had fallen, and suddenly, we heard the sound of a huge explosion. Then the voices of the remaining neighbors shouted ‘I had to evacuate the area because there was a threat to blow up the residential tower opposite my house,’” Ahmed, the father, tells the Palestinian Information Center.
At first Ahmed’s family of a wife and seven children moved to a shelter school in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood south of Gaza City, and as the Israeli ground invasion expanded, they moved to Al-Aqsa University in Khan Younis but when the Israeli army withdrew from the city, they went back.
“I did not wait a minute after I learned of the occupation army retreat to the northern parts of Gaza Strip. Me and my brother rushed to inspect our three-story house. As soon as we arrived there, we were shocked by what happened to the place,” Ahmed told the PalestineIn formation Center Tuesday.
“I found a large part of the house destroyed by artillery shells and burning furniture. It was harsh moments. This is the first time I have faced such an experience like thousands of others who repeatedly lost their homes in previous Israeli wars.”
The man, who is in his 50s, stresses “losing a house is not an easy matter. You are not lose stones here. You feel as if someone has token you to a distant world, erasing a lifetime from your memory. In every corner of the house there are memories, feelings, emotions and life experiences.”
Israel has systematically and extensively destroyed homes in Gaza, completely destroying hundreds of thousands of housing units and in just 283 days, it has turned their owners and residents into homeless people living in tents and shelters.
Israel warplanes bomb houses over the heads of their residents resulting in their instant deaths. In many times the people mostly women and children are deeply buried in the rubble of these homes. This is not to forget the aerial bombardment of blowing up residential blocks.
Residents ask why is this happening to us? There is no need for it. International organizations protest and condemn but to no avail.
Ahmed points out the psychological and social pain is more severe than the material loss. “Many a time, my tongue twists and turns when my children ask ‘we are going to get back to our house, how long will it take to repair it, how long do we have to stay here?,” Ahmad waves his hands at a loss.
“How can children feel safe in a temporary shelter? They have lost everything, even their small toys.”
Satellite images by the United Nations Satellite Center show 35% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip are either completely destroyed or extensively damaged due to this Israeli war of annihilation. This means the number of buildings razed to the ground is 88,868.
In its last March assessment, the center used high-resolution images taken by satellites and collected on 29 February, and compared them with images taken before and after the outbreak of the war.
Dreams crushed
Whenever she remembers her home and her memories there, Aya Ahmad, is reduced to tears. “I had a private room and/or a suite. All my memories, books, and office are gone now.”
“I am a medical student at the beginning of my third year, and at the beginning of my university studies, my father prepared the second floor of our house, bought me a large collection of medical books, and prepared a special room for me with an office, on the walls of which I wrote my hopes and ambitions,” Aya told the Palestinian Center
The 23-year-old girl lives in the city of Khan Yunis, and she has never been forced to move in previous Israeli wars on Gaza, as in this war.
“This is the first time I have been displaced, and when we were forced to do so at the beginning of December 2023, we cried a lot then. We took a few of the house’s belongings in the hope that we will get back.
But this wasn’t so, its been 10 months now since the war started, it hasn’t stopped, we were not able to return to our house which we lost subsequently due to the bombing, and we lost most of our personal belongings there. We moved between tents, and we lost many loved ones, and then the destruction of the house increased our pain. My certificates, my clothes, and my memories were all crushed, and with them many dreams were lost too.”
The garden of the house was Aya’s refuge after the rigors of a long university day. She had pleasant evenings with her parents under the palm and lemon trees on summer nights. But no more, for all of the family now are sheltering in tents of those that were forcefully displaced.
“My wish was to return home, I even wanted to return to it after the occupation forces retreated from our area. At the time, it was still standing and was only partially damaged, but the occupation army returned months later and bombed.”
Aya is still confident about rebuilding her house and whatever
the occupation destroyed, despite the pain she experiences whenever she looks at pictures of her former home and the social memories of each moment there.
A UN assessment found it would need a fleet of more than 100 trucks working for 15 years to remove the 40 million tons of rubble in Gaza. Such an operation could between $500 and $600 million.
According to the assessment by the UN Environment Programme, last month, 137,297 buildings were damaged in Gaza alone not to say anything about the destroyed buildings.
Not stones!
As for Abeer Abu Salem, resident in the Beit Lahia Project in the north Gaza, the smell of gunpowder still haunts her, as if it had just happened. “I will never forget what I experienced that evening, and it cannot be erased from my memory. I cannot describe the scene because of the horror of what I saw.”
Abeer recounts what happened: “I heard the sound of an explosion and saw the walls collapsing and columns flying. I tried to escape but could not, and with the air closing in, I found myself in the second room. I cannot imagine that I am still alive. It all happened in seconds, turning my life upside down.”
Abeer stayed in the Indonesian hospital for about a month, before the occupation army forced them to flee to the south of the Gaza Strip. When asked about what it means to lose a house, she answers:
“It is not easy to lose your house you grew up in. The house is full of precious memories. We worked hard for many years so that my father could build it for us as an apartment above the family home.”
She points out the fear she experiences is not related to their ability to rebuild the house that was leveled, as much as it is to the emotional feelings of seeing what happened to the family home.
“We are now displaced. We do not know the fate that awaits us after the end of this cursed war. We cannot think about whether we will truly return to Beit Lahia or whether we will live what our ancestors lived when they forcibly left their homes 76 years ago in the Nakba of 1948 and died on “I hope to return,” she laments.
This article has been translated into English by Dr Marwan Asmar from the original Arabic in from the Palestine Information Center website. His website is CrossfireArabia.com
https://countercurrents.org/2024/07/shattered-dreams-of-gaza/
The Conversation – July 17, 2024
Hopes for Gaza Ceasefire Fade Again
Sam Phelps
Northern and central Gaza have been hit by Israeli airstrikes this week as troops return to battle Hamas fighters in areas they claimed to have cleared many months ago. The intensified military offensive unfolded just days after mediators thought they were making headway in negotiations for a ceasefire. On Friday, Hamas reportedly dropped its insistence on a “complete” ceasefire as a prerequisite for talks.
But hope of progress was brought to an abrupt halt. It emerged that an Israeli delegation led by spy chief David Barnea had travelled to Doha not to finalise a ceasefire deal, but to instead issue further demands on Hamas. Since then, the group has said that Israel’s renewed offensive in Gaza City could “reset the negotiation process to square one”.
Ceasefire plans are yet again hanging by a thread. According to Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford, this is not a surprise. He argues that the chances of reaching a ceasefire deal are, and always have been, slim.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemingly learned shortly after the start of the war that the complete destruction of Hamas would not be possible – a fact now being proved regularly as the group resurfaces in some of Gaza’s hardest-hit areas. But he has pressed on with the military campaign anyway.
Rogers argues that continuing with the war is the only way Netanyahu can maintain support from influential factions within his government. Two of his ministers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose parties help Netanyahu’s coalition secure a small majority in parliament, remain steadfast in their opposition to striking any deal before Hamas is destroyed. On July 8, Smotrich took to social media to say that making a ceasefire deal now would be “senseless folly”.
Smotrich, who is finance minister and the leader of the ultranationalist Religious Zionist party, has gained huge influence over government policy over the past couple of years. As Dalia Alazzeh of the University of the West of Scotland and Shahzad Uddin of the University of Essex explain, Smotrich has used his influence to cripple the Palestinian economy.
He has blocked the transfer of – and has made deductions to – the tax revenue that Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority. The result of these measures has been devastating.
The Palestinian Authority is facing a huge gap between incoming revenue and the amount needed to fund public expenditures. At the time of writing, it is only able to pay public sector workers up to 70% of their salaries, and famine is spreading throughout the Gaza Strip.
Alazzeh and Uddin point to a World Bank report that suggests the financial situation of the Palestinian Authority “dramatically worsened” in the three months leading up to May, raising the prospect of an “imminent fiscal collapse”.
Palestine’s beleaguered economy does, however, look set to be given a brief reprieve. In late June, Smotrich announced that he would finally unfreeze tax revenue and extend a waiver that allows cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian banks.
But there would be a catch. This would come in return for approving five outposts – or Israeli settlements – in the occupied West Bank that are widely regarded as illegal under international law.
Meanwhile, it was made public on July 3 that Israel had approved its largest seizure of land in the West Bank in over three decades. The move follows a series of similar land grabs that have happened so far this year.
According to Serag El Hegazi from the University of Bradford, these actions are part of a strategy to expand Israel’s control over the West Bank and choke off the possibility of a Palestinian state. This is something Smotrich is all too happy to admit. He has previously described thwarting the establishment of a Palestinian state as his “life’s mission”.
Britain’s unclear position
The stance of Smotrich towards Palestine is clear. But the same cannot be said for the Labour party in the UK, which swept to power last week. As James Vaughan from Aberystwyth University explains, the Labour party has a complex historical legacy when it comes to Israel and Palestine. The new prime minister, Keir Starmer, has a difficult line to tread.
On we go
So, with tensions as high as they have been at any point in the war, what might happen next? Rogers argues that the war in Gaza will probably rage on.
Israel looks increasingly unlikely to be able to defeat Hamas and end the war on its own terms. And, given the deep anger directed at Israel, ending the war on almost any terms is not as paramount among Palestinians as one might think.
The US has leverage and could force Israel to accept a ceasefire. But that is unlikely due to the support Israel has within the US, as well as the fact that Biden finds himself preoccupied with speculation over his fitness to run for a second term.
There are other issues that could influence the likelihood of a ceasefire too, says Rogers. These include the position of the new Iranian government. According to Arshin Adib-Moghaddam of SOAS, University of London, the election of a known democrat in Masoud Pezeshkian should be seen as a positive development in the sphere of foreign affairs.
But, ultimately, the main challenge to Netanyahu may come from senior members of his military, who are becoming convinced that the war is unwinnable and increasingly wary of escalation with Hezbollah.
https://www.juancole.com/2024/07/hopes-ceasefire-again.html
World Socialist Web Site – July 17, 2024
Global Wealth Report 2023: An orgy of enrichment for the super-rich
Andy Niklaus, Carola Kleinert
Multimillionaires around the world have benefited from the inflation year 2023, while the German super-rich alone increased their wealth by 10 percent to more than €2.1 trillion. This money could be used to finance thousands of new hospitals, schools, universities, housing estates, etc., modernise Germany’s entire rail and road network and end world hunger.
The global wealth produced by the international working class is concentrated in the hands of 73,000 super-rich people, the so-called “ultra high net worth individuals,” as financial market analysts call them.
These “individuals” stand in contrast to hundreds of millions of workers who barely know how to meet the ever-increasing costs of basic necessities such as food, energy and rent each week or month.
In a press release from Zurich, the analysts behind the Global Wealth Report 2023 by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) celebrate: “After a weak year in 2022, global net wealth rose significantly again last year.”
The NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, which is devouring immense monetary, economic and human reserves, and the slaughter of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip, have not affected the profit margins of the super-rich in the slightest. Quite the opposite!
The net wealth of the ruling classes in all nation-states rose by more than 4 percent to over €400 trillion in 2023, as the Global Wealth Report reveals. Worldwide financial assets (cash, account balances, bonds, shares and investment funds as well as pensions) rose by 7 percent to €231 trillion. The largest increases were in North America (€8.7 trillion), Western Europe (€1.8 trillion) and Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (€2.5 trillion). Global tangible assets (real estate, precious metals and other physical assets) rose by 2 percent to €220 trillion.
The BCG report is intended to show the capitalist financial aristocrats and oligarchs, “in times of geopolitical uncertainty, such as recently during the conflict in Ukraine ... clear trends in trans-border asset flows, the so-called cross-border assets.” Michael Kahlich, BCG partner in Zurich and co-author of the study, praised last year as “another significantly better year on the international financial markets. Investors in North America and Western Europe in particular benefited from this.”
As the leading financial power, North American financial capital once again increased its wealth the most in both absolute and percentage terms. At €100 trillion, it is still clearly at the top of the global ranking of financial assets.
Last year, North America’s financial capital increased by just under 9 percent or €8.4 trillion. Compared to its German rival on the global market, the report states that the “increase in financial assets in the USA last year was equivalent to more than half of the total net assets in Germany.”
The US is home to the most super-rich individuals (26,000), with Elon Musk ($251 billion), who is notorious among workers worldwide, at the top of the list, followed by Jeff Bezos ($218 billion) and Mark Zuckerberg ($189 billion). With 8,300 super-rich people, China ranks second in the global comparison. Some 3,300 super-rich people now live in Germany (an increase of 300 compared to 2022), which puts Germany in third place in the global ranking—with a much smaller population.
In-depth research by the Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit (Tax Justice Network) has identified over 237 billionaires by name, although there are no official wealth statistics in Germany and assets can therefore only be estimated.
In first place, the Netzwerk Steuergerechtigkeit lists the Boehringer and von Baumbach family (Boehringer Ingelheim company), whose assets are believed to be between €50 billion and €100 billion. In second place is the Quandt and Klatten family (BMW) with an estimated €40.5 billion, followed by the Schwarz family (Schwarz Group, Lidl) with €39.5 billion, the Merck family with €32 billion, the Kühne family (Kühne & Nagel) with €28.5 billion, the Albrecht and Heister family (Aldi Süd) with €26.5 billion, the Porsche family (VW/Porsche) with €23.8 billion, the Albrecht family (Aldi Nord) with €18.5 billion, the Henkel family with €15.2 billion and the Otto family with €13.7 billion, to name just the first 10 super-rich “families” on the network’s list.
These enormous fortunes contrast with the rapid impoverishment of working people. The poverty rate in Germany is now more than 20 percent. Single parents, those with large families, people with low educational qualifications and a large proportion of senior citizens are particularly affected by poverty. Child poverty is also at a record high: one in five children in Germany is affected by child poverty, which means that almost 3 million children and young people under the age of 18 are living in poverty.
While in the early 1990s, according to broadcaster ZDF, “the average wealth of the richest 10 percent [of the population] was 50 times higher than that of the poorer half,” “it is now 100 times higher.”
Over 20 years ago, the anti-working-class policies of the Social Democratic-Green Schröder/Fischer coalition (1998-2005) laid the foundations for the widespread impoverishment of the working class and the financial elite’s orgy of enrichment with its “Hartz” welfare and labour “reforms” (today’s “Citizens Allowance”) and its creation of a nationwide low-wage sector. Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US had implemented similar measures in the mid-1980s. In Germany, the spread of low-wage labour contributed to the rise of the German economy to become Europe’s leading economic power.
Significantly, the Schröder government did not reintroduce the wealth tax abolished in 1997 by the Christian Democratic (CDU/CSU) government under Helmut Kohl. Instead, the top tax rate was reduced from 53 to 42 percent. In fact, the richest financial oligarchs still pay just 1 percent tax today, as Jochen Breyer found out in his research for ZDF, “In the world of the super-rich.”
Meanwhile, the bottom half of the population only owns 1.3 percent of total wealth. The top 10 percent, on the other hand, own two-thirds of total wealth. Among these 10 percent, the top hundredth of the rich elite concentrate 35.3 percent of total wealth in their hands, and among them the super-rich (0.1 percent of the population) hold nearly a quarter (23 percent) of Germany’s total wealth.
According to the BCG report, the distribution of wealth in Germany is “disproportionately unequal.” And in its latest article on the subject, Der Spiegel warns that this extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of the few will “reinforce the above-average level of inequality.”
Maintaining this “above-average inequality” is not possible by democratic means. Since the beginning of the 2020s, strikes and class struggles against low wages, speed-up, poor working conditions and the risk of infection in the coronavirus pandemic have been increasing worldwide.
Today, the European and global working class is also confronted with the growing threat of nuclear war in Europe, which is being pushed by the NATO powers—above all Germany and the US—against Russia. At the same time, the preparations for war against Iran and China are being accompanied by escalation of the genocide in Gaza. The millions spent on the military actions of the imperialist powers are to be borne by the working class, which is already struggling with low wages, job losses and social cuts.
The obscene wealth of the financial aristocracy and the deep impoverishment of ever broader sections of the population inevitably lead to an intensification of class confrontations. For this reason, in order to suppress the class struggle, the ruling class is relying on stepping up the powers and arsenal of the police apparatuses and the radical right-wing camp, on the one hand, and on the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) and its affiliated trade union bureaucracy and their pseudo-left lackeys, on the other.
In view of the incredible sums, calls for the fairer taxation of the wealth of millionaires and billionaires have recently been voiced again in the media. However, they are not aimed at the core of social inequality but are only intended to alleviate it slightly. Even such tame demands cannot be realised in the face of the interests of the financial aristocracy, which will not tolerate even the slightest curtailment of its profits, all the less so as the imperialist struggle for the re-division of the world requires, in its view, the subordination of all society and the economy to a pro-war policy.
What is needed, therefore, is not “fairer” taxation of the super-rich, but their expropriation and the subjugation of the banks and corporations to the social control of the working class, based on a socialist programme.
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