Daily Sabah – December 18, 2023
Israel kills 110 Palestinians over just 24 hours in northern Gaza
At least 110 Palestinians were reported killed and dozens of others injured in Israeli strikes in northern Gaza over 24 hours, the Gazan Health Ministry said early Monday.
In a brief statement, the ministry said: "There were 50 martyrs in occupation strikes on houses in Jabalia," bringing the number of deaths to 110 in the area since Sunday.
At least 90 others were wounded and many others are still under the rubble, local sources said.
"The Israeli warplanes also targeted a house in Deir al-Balah refugee camp in the middle of the Gaza Strip, killing about 12 citizens and wounding dozens, the majority of whom were already displaced," the agency also reported.
"When planning a target, the IDF (Israeli army) devotes significant time and resources to preparing the attack and where feasible, uses various tools, including advance warnings, roof knocking, street knocking, target clearing operations and a variety of professional calculations," the army told Agence France-Presse (AFP) when asked about the strikes in Jabalia.
On Friday, the Gazan Health Ministry said at least 18,800 people had been killed since Israel launched its retaliatory offensive in Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas incursion.
4 killed in West Bank
Meanwhile, four more Palestinians were killed in an Israeli raid at the al-Far'a refugee camp near the city of Tubas in the occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Monday.
The raid marked the second such incident within two weeks, a ministry statement said.
In a separate statement, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) said that its teams provided medical assistance to six seriously injured people in the al-Far'a camp and that they have been rushed to hospitals.
According to an Anadolu reporter, the Israeli army withdrew from the refugee camp after a two-hour raid in the area.
Three Palestinians were detained during the raid, local sources said.
The latest deaths brought the tally of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the West Bank to 301 since Oct. 7, in addition to more than 3,100 others injured, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.
The Israeli army raided the camp Monday morning and witnesses told Anadolu Agency (AA) that clashes erupted between Palestinians and Israeli forces.
Last Friday, B'Tselem, an Israeli NGO, published two videos documenting the Israeli army's execution of two Palestinians at a close range in the West Bank during the raid on the al-Far'a camp on Dec. 8.
Yeni Safak – December 18, 2023
Another journalist killed in Israeli strike in Gaza, tally rises to 96 since Oct. 7
Another Palestinian journalist was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip on Monday, taking the tally to 96 since Oct. 7, the government media office said.
Abdullah Alwan lost his life in the strike that targeted Jabalia city in the northern Gaza Strip, the media office said in a statement.
A female journalist, Haneen al-Qashtan, was killed earlier Monday in an Israeli strike on her home in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza Strip.
Israel's air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas have killed more than 18,800 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to health authorities in the enclave.
The war has left Gaza in ruins with half of the coastal territory's housing stock damaged or destroyed, and nearly 2 million people displaced within the densely-populated enclave amid shortages of food and clean water.
Nearly 1,200 Israelis are believed to have been killed in the Hamas attack, while more than 130 hostages remain in captivity.
Yeni Safak – December 18, 2023
Mossad, CIA chiefs to meet Qatari PM for talks on new hostage swap deal with Hamas
Israeli Mossad chief David Barnea and CIA Director William Burns are scheduled to meet with Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani for talks on a new hostage swap deal with Hamas, Israeli media reported on Monday.
The three officials will meet in the Polish capital, Warsaw, to discuss a number of possible outlines for negotiations on a new deal to free Israeli hostages held by Hamas, Israeli Channel 12 reported.
Mediators have discussed ideas for a new swap deal with Hamas in recent days, the broadcaster said, without providing any further details.
The meeting comes as Israel's war cabinet is set to convene later Monday.
On Sunday, senior Hamas member Khalil al-Haya ruled out a new hostage swap deal with Israel until Tel Aviv halts its offensive on the Gaza Strip.
Under a previous swap deal, 84 Israelis and 24 foreigners were released by Hamas in exchange for 240 Palestinians from Israeli jails, including 71 women and 169 children.
Israel's air and ground attacks on the Gaza Strip since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas have killed more than 18,800 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to health authorities in the enclave.
The war has left Gaza in ruins with half of the coastal territory's housing stock damaged or destroyed, and nearly 2 million people displaced within the densely-populated enclave amid shortages of food and clean water.
Nearly 1,200 Israelis are believed to have been killed in the Hamas attack, while more than 130 hostages remain in captivity.
Countercurrent – December 17, 2023
TFF Statement On the Genocide in Gaza
As the brutal slaughtering in Gaza unfolds in increasingly horrific proportions, we, as an experienced research foundation for peaceful conflict resolution and peace-making since 1986, feel the urge to contribute our analytical points, sentiments and constructive conflict-resolution ideas.
The Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research (TFF) also wants to be on record with this Statement so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see who stood with whom and who advocated peace instead of ongoing genocide.
The killing has to stop, and we call, together with the UN and so many others, for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire.
After two months, these are the facts:
> 7.900 children bombed to pieces, hundreds of them trapped under the debris, thousands of children mutilated, a whole young generation traumatised forever.
> 17.500 dead. Crying doctors in utterly dysfunctional hospitals, operating without anaesthetics.
> The homes of tens of thousands of people in shambles, 24 of 36 hospitals, schools, mosques, libraries, the beautiful university of Gaza – destroyed, erased to the ground.
> 1,9 million out of 2.2 million people forced out of their homes into the streets, deliberately starved of food, water and medical help, trapped under more and more bombing without any possibility to escape – it is a war crime of monstrous proportions.
> More than 100 UN staff members and over 60 journalists and media people have been killed, 54 of them Palestinians.
https://countercurrents.org/2023/12/tff-statement-on-the-genocide-in-gaza/
World Socialist Web Site – December 18, 2023
As Gaza genocide continues, US prepares major escalation of war throughout Middle East
By Andre Damon
As Israel continues to massacre hundreds of Gazans each day and starve the entire population of 2.2 million, a series of US officials are traveling to Israel to coordinate US support for the genocide and prepare a military escalation throughout the Middle East.
Last week, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan traveled to Israel to hold high-level meetings with Israeli officials. During the trip, Sullivan reiterated the United States’ open-ended support for Israel’s onslaught against the population of Gaza.
“We are going to continue to support Israel in its campaign against Hamas,” Sullivan declared, “because we see Hamas as an ongoing threat to the State of Israel, and Israel has not just a right but a duty to go after it, and the United States will support Israel with that.”
During his visit, Sullivan asserted, “there will be a transition to another phase of this war, one that is focused in more precise ways of targeting the leadership and on intelligence-driven operations.” The New York Times reported that “four US officials said Mr. Biden wants Israel to switch to more precise tactics in about three weeks.”
Similar statements abounded in the run-up to Israel’s onslaught on southern Gaza, which the United States insisted would see Israel reduce the number of civilians it kills. But the assault on southern Gaza has been even more brutal, if that is even possible, than the massacres in north.
In the 71 days since the start of the genocide, 18,787 Gazans have been killed, or 265 per day—70 percent of them women and children. At that rate, 5,500 more people, including 3,800 women and children, will be massacred before Israel moves to what the Times speculates could be a “lower intensity” conflict.
Over the weekend, Israeli forces gunned down three hostages previously held by Hamas as they were making their way toward Israeli troops waving a white flag. The killing demonstrates a basic reality of Israel’s “war” in Gaza: Israeli forces have a deliberate policy of shooting everyone they see, without any effort to distinguish between Hamas fighters and civilians, or in this case, released hostages.
Moreover, Israel has already destroyed or damaged 60 percent of Gaza’s housing and destroyed most civilian infrastructure capable of supporting human life, from hospitals to schools, bakeries and power distribution centers. By the time of Sullivan’s “transition,” in other words, almost the entirety of Gaza will lie in ruins.
As Sullivan was in Israel, the IDF on Thursday shut down all telecommunications in Gaza, in the most prolonged such shutdown to date. On Saturday, Israel attacked Kamal Adwan hospital in Gaza. During the attack, Israeli bulldozers ran over the tents of refugees, burying people alive in the wreckage, killing at least nine.
An Israeli strike Sunday on the Jabaliya refugee camp killed 90 Palestinians, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported. And Israel continued its daily targeted assassination of journalists in Gaza, with 64 members of the media killed so far. On Friday the IDF killed Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abudaqa and wounded Al Jazeera Gaza bureau chief Wael Dahdouh.
Israeli officials are increasing their use of openly genocidal rhetoric. In a radio interview, David Azoulai, head of Israel’s regional Metula Council, called for displacing the population to Lebanon and said that Gaza should be made to look like “Auschwitz.”
Tell everyone in Gaza to go to the beaches. Navy ships should load the terrorists onto the shores of Lebanon. The entire Gaza Strip should be emptied and levelled flat, just like in Auschwitz.
Israel continues to launch attacks throughout the Middle East. Late Sunday, its warplanes carried out a strike in the outskirts of Damascus, Syria, together with long-range strikes into Lebanon.
In his remarks over the weekend, Sullivan explained that the United States is preparing for a much broader conflict, within which Israel’s genocide is just one component, targetting both the Houthi rebels in Yemen, and, even more centrally, Iran.
Sullivan declared, “What the Houthis are doing is a threat not just to Israel, but to the entire international community; it is a threat to freedom of navigation, it’s a threat to commercial shipping; it is a threat at a critical chokepoint, a critical artery in global commerce. And so the United States is building a coalition of countries to help protect freedom of navigation.”
He added, “We’re talking about the Houthis. But who’s behind the Houthis? Who’s arming, equipping, and enabling them? It’s Iran.”
Over the weekend, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Charles Q. Brown Jr. left for a multi-day visit to Israel and other US allies in the Middle East.
On Sunday, the Guardian reported that the United States will announce a new military operation, tentatively titled Operation Prosperity Guardian, targeting Houthi rebels in Yemen aligned with Iran.
On Friday, the Associated Press reported that Austin has ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier to remain in the Mediterranean Sea, after it was originally scheduled to return to the US for the holidays.
The US will maintain two aircraft carriers in the region, as part of an armada of 19 ships deployed throughout the Middle East. There are seven US warships in the Mediterranean Sea and a dozen more throughout the Red Sea, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.
A shooting war has already begun in the waters off the coast of Yemen. US Central Command reported in a Twitter post that on December 16 the US Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS Carney engaged over a dozen drones launched from Yemen.
The US media is, meanwhile, agitating for the Biden administration to target both Yemen and Iran. In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal wrote, “The press is reporting that the Biden Administration is contemplating the use of military force in response to continuing attacks on commercial shipping by the Houthi militia in Yemen. It’s about time. The Houthi missile attacks pose the most significant threat to global shipping in decades, and they will continue unless a global coalition unites to stop them.”
The Journal continued, “The question is whether the U.S. and other Western navies are merely going to play defense and catch missiles as the Houthis set the terms of battle. Sooner or later a Houthi missile may get past U.S. naval defenses and kill American sailors. Then the White House will have little choice other than to strike back.”
The Journal demands that the US escalate against Iran, declaring, “Eventually Iran’s rulers have to know that their assets—military and nuclear—are at risk if they continue to foment disorder, attack U.S. allies, and target American bases or ships.”
These statements make clear that dominant factions of the US political establishment see US support for the genocide in Gaza as a critical component of its decades-long effort to dominate the Middle East through military violence, with Iran as a central target.
And this conflict is just one arena of what the Biden administration sees as a global war for world domination, targeting Russia in Europe and China in the Pacific, that will see mass death eclipsing even the bloodbath in Gaza.
Millions of workers and young people have marched in every continent against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But this movement confronts imperialist governments that are committed to a global expansion of war and militarism.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/18/ytuk-d18.html
Chris Hedges – December 18, 2023
The Death of Israel
by Chris Hedges
Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception.
Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians. Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals. Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.
But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.
Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.
Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.
Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.
When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers. The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the Empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.
All Israel has left is escalating violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship and during Britain’s conflict in Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal.
“You might say that the battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” the British historian Alistair Horne observed, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”
The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas fighters into heroes in the Muslim world and the Global South. Israel may wipe out the Hamas leadership. But the past — and current — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance. The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They are prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.
Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society.
Israel was far down this road on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that resemble the racistﾠNuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.”
Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.
The Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its occupation of the Palestinians, it would give rise to a corrupt Rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”
The global mystique of the U.S., after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally. The Biden administration, in its fervor to unconditionally support Israel and appease the powerful Israel lobby, has bypassed the congressional review process with the Department of State to approve the transfer of 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.” At the same time he has cynically called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties.
Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded. Half of Gaza’s population is starving, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewer systems, housing, schools, governmentﾠbuildings, cultural centers, telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed. Israel has assassinated at least 80 Palestinian journalists alongside dozens of their family members and over 130 U.N. aid workers along with members of their families. Civilian casualties are the point. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinians. The objective is to kill or remove 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza.
The shooting dead of three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but a glimpse of Israel’s rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are — kill anything that moves.
As the retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who formerly headed the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth, “[T]he State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in…Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” he wrote. Major General Ghassan Alianﾠdeclared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”
Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate through diseases and violence nearly the entirety of their indigenous populations. Old World plagues brought by the colonizers to the Americas, such as smallpox, killed an estimated 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America. By 1600 less than a tenth of the original population remained. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another 9 million in the diaspora.
The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel’s genocide. It will try to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it will funnel the billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel — including $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the $3.8 billion in annual aid — to “finish the job.” It is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project.
Israel is a pariah state. This was publically on display on Dec. 12 when 153 member states at the U.N. General Assembly voted for a ceasefire, with only 10 — including the U.S. and Israel — opposed and 23 abstaining. Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza means there will be no peace. There will be no two state solution. Apartheid and genocide will define Israel. This presages a long, long conflict, one the Jewish State cannot ultimately win.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. His most recent book is “America: The Farewell Tour” (2019).
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