Al Mayadeen - June 10, 2024
UNSC passes Gaza cease-fire resolution for the first time
The UN Security Council adopts a US-drafted resolution welcoming Biden's Gaza ceasefire proposal.
The United Nations Security Council on Monday adopted a resolution welcoming the Gaza ceasefire proposal put forth by US President Joe Biden.
The resolution, drafted by the United States, received overwhelming support, with 14 members voting in favor and Russia abstaining.
The ceasefire proposal, announced by Biden on May 31, outlines a new three-phase plan aimed at achieving "a lasting cessation of hostilities" in the Gaza Strip and the release of all captives held by Hamas.
Hamas welcomed the ceasefire proposal. "We welcome the contents of the Security Council resolution regarding a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, complete withdrawal, the return of displaced persons, and reconstruction."
The resistance group emphasized its firm stance against any demographic changes or reduction in the area of the Gaza Strip and highlighted the need for essential aid to support the people in the territory.
The United States called on the United Nations Security Council last Monday to adopt a resolution supporting the Gaza ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal between "Israel" and the Palestinian Resistance laid out by President Joe Biden, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
US ceasefire proposal
The US circulated a one-page draft text to the 15-member council. For the resolution to pass, it requires at least nine votes in favor and no vetoes from the US, France, Britain, China, or Russia.
Failing to call on the Israeli occupation forces to end its war machine, the draft urges Hamas to accept the deal and "fully and implement its terms without delay and without condition."
The White House had earlier said Biden told the emir of mediator Qatar that he saw Hamas as "the only obstacle to a complete ceasefire" in Gaza and urged him to press the Palestinian Resistance group to accept it.
Biden claimed that this is the most effective step toward de-escalating the ongoing war, adding, "With a ceasefire, that aid could be safely and effectively distributed to all who need it."
"As someone who's had a lifelong commitment to Israel, as the only American president who has ever gone to Israel at a time of war, as someone who just sent the US forces to directly defend Israel when it was attacked by Iran, I ask you to take a step back, think what will happen if this moment is lost," he stressed. "We can't lose this moment."
"It's time for this war to end and for the day after to begin," emphasized Biden, who is under the pressure of an election year and amid the ongoing Israeli aggression, which has persisted for eight months.
But it is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office that stressed that the ongoing war on Gaza would continue until all "goals are achieved," including the destruction of Hamas' military and governing capabilities, and it is Netanyahu's extremist ministers who are threatening to leave the government in the event that he accepts the deal.
The US text also "stresses the importance of the parties adhering to the terms of the deal once agreed, with the aim of bringing about a permanent cessation of hostilities."
This proposal followed a draft resolution introduced by Algeria a week earlier, which called for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip and the release of all captives held by Hamas and demanded that "Israel" "immediately halt its military offensive" in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza, citing the International Court of Justice's recent order.
Not perfect
Algeria, however, had its reservations regarding the ceasefire proposal. The Algerian representative to the United Nations Security Council expressed cautious optimism regarding it, saying it wasn't perfect.
"The US resolution is not perfect, but it represents a glimmer of hope for the Palestinians," stated the Algerian envoy. The diplomat then emphasized that Algeria's vote in favor of the resolution stemmed from a belief that it constituted a significant step toward achieving a sustainable and immediate cessation of hostilities.
The Algerian representative also underscored the importance of international legal mechanisms in preventing future atrocities. "If the decisions of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice are not enforced, another genocide looms on the horizon," he warned.
World Socialist Web Site – June 11, 2024
Details emerge of Israel’s Nuseirat refugee camp massacre
By Andre Damon
Details have begun to emerge of Israel’s massacre at the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza Saturday, in which 274 people were killed and hundreds more were injured.
The Washington Post confirmed Sunday that Israeli forces used civilian vehicles in the military operation and that the operation was staged near the “humanitarian” port built by the US military. Gaza’s Government Media Office reported that Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers pretended to be refugees before opening fire on the camp.
The massacre was carried out under the pretext of a “hostage rescue,” although nearly as many hostages (three) were killed during the massacre as were rescued (four).
According to US media accounts, the massacre, which killed or injured nearly 1,000 and destroyed nearly 100 buildings, aimed to simply destroy everything in the path of the Israeli commando team. “The air force started shooting to give them a corridor, a wall of fire,” retired IDF Maj. Gen. David Tsur told the Washington Post.
The IDF boasts of close US collaboration in the massacre. It reported that “the US hostage cell played a decisive role in freeing the hostages” and that it used “high-precision American technology that had not been used before in the process of freeing the hostages.”
The Pentagon denied direct US military participation in the attack. “The pier facility, including its equipment, personnel and assets, were not used in the [Israeli military’s] operation to rescue hostages in Gaza,” said Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder.
He admitted, however, “there was some type of helicopter activity” by the IDF near the pier, but claimed this was “not associated” with the US military.
The Euro-Med Monitor reported that “massive, indiscriminate air and artillery attacks were launched by the Israeli army during the operation in order to conceal the withdrawal of Israeli forces.”
The massacre sent a flood of wounded people into Gaza’s overloaded hospital system. “We placed the injured along the internal corridors and in between beds. There is no room at all inside this hospital. We had them sleep in external tents,” Dr. Khalil al-Dakran of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital told Al Jazeera, noting that there are four times more wounded people at the hospital than beds.
“It’s a nightmare at Al-Aqsa,” said Samuel Johann, a Doctors Without Borders coordinator in Gaza. “There have been back-to-back mass casualties as densely populated areas are bombed. It’s way beyond what anyone could deal with in a functional hospital, let alone with the scarce resources we have here. How many more men, women and children have to be killed before world leaders decide to put an end to this massacre?”
“Israel committed a massacre in Nuseirat,” said Khalil al-Degran, spokesman for Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital on Saturday. “In this terrible state … the hospital cannot absorb the number of dead and injured. The hospital has been at full capacity for weeks.”
Karin Huster of Doctors Without Borders told the Associated Press in an interview, “We had the gamut of war wounds, trauma wounds, from amputations to eviscerations to trauma, to TBIs (traumatic brain injuries), fractures and, obviously, big burns… Kids completely gray or white from the shock, burnt, screaming for their parents. Many of them are not screaming because they are in shock.”
Some 274 Palestinians were killed during the massacre and another 700 were wounded. The dead included 64 children and 57 women. “The streets are filled with dead bodies,” one witness told the Associated Press. Eighty-nine homes or residential buildings had been bombed during the massacre.
In an interview given to The Intercept, witness Abu Nasser declared, “The area turned to ashes… I couldn’t find my wife and started calling out to those around me to ensure they were still alive.”
Paraphrasing Nasser, The Intercept wrote, “The streets were filled by a swarm of quadcopter drones equipped with small arms. Tank tracks could be heard nearby. U.S.-made Apache attack helicopters hovered. Nearby homes were hit with missiles.”
Nasser continued, “We heard people crying for help in the bombed houses… They had martyrs and injuries, but we couldn’t help them… The street was filled with civilian body parts … and many injuries bleeding out without ambulances being able to reach them.”
Martin Griffiths, UN under-secretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs, declared that the Nuseirat camp is the “epicenter of the seismic trauma that civilians in Gaza continue to suffer.” He added, “The images of death and devastation following Israel’s military operation there prove that each day this war continues, it only grows more horrific. Seeing shrouded bodies on the ground, we are reminded that nowhere is safe in Gaza. Seeing bloodied patients being treated on hospital floors, we are reminded that healthcare in Gaza is hanging by a thread.”
Since the start of the genocide, at least 37,124 Palestinians have been killed and 84,712 injured in Gaza, with countless more missing and presumed dead.
In a statement Sunday, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) called for an independent international inquiry into Israeli massacres at Palestinian hospitals, where hundreds of mass graves have been discovered.
“Israel has attacked nearly every hospital in Gaza. Hundreds of health workers and patients have been killed and detained. The discovery of mass graves in two hospitals further demonstrates that the protected status of healthcare in Gaza under international law has totally failed, with harrowing results,” said MAP’s director of advocacy Rohan Talbot.
“The families of the dead deserve to know the truth of what happened to their loved ones, and to have justice wherever serious violations of international law have occurred. This can only be achieved through thorough, prompt and impartial investigations,” he said. “The international community must therefore demand access to Gaza for independent investigators and forensic experts, so that evidence can be preserved and accountability pursued,” Talbot added.
Non-stop Israeli bombardment across the devastated Palestinian territory has continued in the aftermath of the raid. “Israeli bombardment from the air, land, and sea continues to be reported across much of the Gaza Strip, resulting in further civilian casualties, displacement, and destruction of houses and other civilian infrastructure,” the United Nations reported Monday.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/06/11/szia-j11.html
‘Operation al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 248:
Israel kills 274 Palestinians while freeing four Israeli prisoners in Gaza;
Gantz resigns from war cabinet
Blinken arrives in Cairo on his eighth tour to the Middle East since the beginning of the war in the hopes of pushing for a ceasefire and prisoner exchange dealBlinken arrives in Cairo on his eighth tour to the Middle East since the beginning of the war in the hopes of pushing for a ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal
By Qassam Muaddi
Casualties
37,084 + killed* and at least 84,494 wounded in the Gaza Strip.*
534+ Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.**
Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,140.
646 Israeli soldiers have been announced killed since October 7, and at least 3,657 have been announced as wounded.***
*Gaza’s Ministry of Health confirmed this figure on its Telegram channel on June 6, 2024. Some rights groups estimate the death toll to be much higher when accounting for those presumed dead.
** The death toll in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to the PA’s Ministry of Health on June 5, this is the latest figure.
*** These figures are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.” The number of Israeli soldiers wounded according to declarations by the head of the Israeli army’s wounded association to Israel’s channel 12 exceeds 20,000 including at least 8000 permanently handicapped as of June 1st.
Key Developments
Israel kills 430 Palestinians, wounds 1185 since Thursday, June 6, across Gaza, raising death toll since October 7 to 37,084 and number of wounded to 84,494, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Israel’s Benny Gantz resigns from Netanyahu’s war cabinet.
Israeli forces release four Israeli captives in an operation that killed at last 274 Palestinians in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip. 160 of them were women and children.
Al-Qassam Brigades say Israeli forces killed three Israeli captives, including one American citizen, during the operation that resulted in the release of four captives.
Noa Argamani, one of the four captives released by the Israeli army on Saturday, said that two other captives who were held with her were killed by Israeli bombings.
Avi Rosenfeld, commander of the Israeli army’s Gaza division resigns from his position over the failure of October 7.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken begins a tour in the region to promote a ceasefire and prisoners’ exchange deal.
U.S. mission distributes amended ceasefire resolution draft to UN Security Council members, urges council to vote on it.
Fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian resistance factions continues in Rafah, Deir al-Balah, and north of Gaza City.
UNRWA chief warns of cholera outbreak in Gaza as a result of Israel’s destruction of water infrastructure.
Israeli forces kill six Palestinians in the West Bank since Thursday, two of them on Monday.
Hezbollah conducts 11 attacks on Israeli targets since Sunday, while Israel bombs several towns in south Lebanon.
Israel commits massacre in Nuseirat while freeing four captives
At least 274 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli land, air, and sea raid on the center of the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on Saturday, the Palestinian health ministry said in an updated statement on Monday. The attack resulted in the freeing of four Israeli captives and their returning to Tel Aviv.
The four Israelis, captured by Palestinian fighters on October 7, are the only captives that Israel has been able to free by force in eight months of the ongoing war. Al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, who was holding the captives when freed by the Israeli army on Saturday, said in a video statement on Sunday that during the operation, Israeli forces killed another three captives, one of whom was a U.S. citizen. Al-Qassam released pictures of three presumably dead individuals, blurring their faces, indicating that they were Israeli captives killed in the same operation.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian health ministry announced that among the 274 victims of Israel’s massacre in Nuseirat, 160 were women and children. At least 400 were wounded, including many children, and were transferred to two of the remaining functioning hospitals in the strip, al-Awda and al-Aqsa Martyrs hospitals.
The Gaza-based government media office said in a statement that the number of wounded who arrived at the al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital following the massacre at Nuseirat exceeds the hospital’s capacity, with many wounded lying on the ground without beds, including children.
A survivor of the Nuseirat massacre told Al-Araby TV in front of one of the hospitals that “thousands of people were in the market area in the center of Nuseirat buying food, when suddenly we saw helicopters and quadcopter [drones] over the market area, opening fire.”
Mondoweiss spoke to survivors of the Nuseirat massacre and documented their testimonies.
The massacre at Nuseirat came only three days after an Israeli air strike on an UNRWA school, also in Nuseirat, killed 45 Palestinians, including 14 children and nine women.
Regular Mondoweiss contributor and Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Postmodern Literature at the now-destroyed al-Aqsa University in Gaza, Haidar Eid, described the reverberations of the Nusierat massacre in an ode to the refugee camp, where he was born:
Nuseirat is a microcosm of the genocide. The lives of four white Ashkenazi Israelis are equivalent to the lives of 274 native mothers, doctors, and children. The white world is celebrating this “victory” regardless of the “collateral damage,” as long as the victims are not like “us,” the white gods of this unjust world.
Benny Gantz resigns from war cabinet as Blinken arrives in the region
Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz announced his resignation from the Netanyahu-led war cabinet on Sunday, dealing a political blow to the Israeli Prime Minister.
Gantz, the main opposition figure to Netanyahu, had announced back in mid-May that he would resign from the war cabinet on June 8 in disagreement over Netanyahu’s leadership of the current war on the Gaza Strip.
“Netanyahu prevents us from moving forward to a real victory,” Gantz said in a televised statement on Sunday. “That is why we are leaving the emergency government today with a heavy heart, but with a whole heart.
Gantz also called for early elections to form a new government, while apologizing to the families of Israeli captives for failing to free them, calling on Netanyahu to accept the U.S.-proposed ceasefire and prisoners’ exchange deal.
Gantz’s resignation does not affect Netanyahu’s government coalition, which relies on a 64-to-120 majority in the Knesset. However, his resignation leaves the war leadership without a national consensus, splitting the Israeli political position on the continuation of the war.
Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Cairo on Monday, beginning his eighth tour in the region since the beginning of the current war. Blinken’s visit comes as the U.S. seeks to achieve a ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal between Hamas and Israel. He is scheduled to meet Egyptian, Qatari, and Israeli officials.
The U.S. proposal, which Washington claimed was designed by Israel itself, was announced by Joe Biden in late May, as Israel faces accusations of genocide, international arrest warrants against its Prime Minister and war minister, and unilateral recognitions of a Palestinian state by European countries. The international pressure on Netanyahu’s government has been coupled with internal protests and accusations of failure in achieving the war’s objectives.
In the early months of the current war, the U.S. rejected calls for a ceasefire and supported the continuation of the war, including by using its veto to block three draft resolutions calling for a ceasefire at the UN Security Council, allowing the death toll of the Israeli assault on Gaza to exceed 37,000 Palestinians, most of whom are civilians.
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