Don’t Look Away From the Inferno of Extermination in Northern Gaza
15.10.24
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On Sunday night (October 13), Palestinian civilians — including children and medical patients, and others displaced by Israel’s year-long genocide — were burned alive in a truly horrifying Israeli attack on the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital, in Deir al-Balah in northern Gaza.
One of those burned alive — a young man who was also a medical patient — was captured in a video filmed by a Palestinian journalist, writhing in agony, consumed by flames, and still lying on his hospital bed with his IV drip still clearly visible.
Yesterday it was revealed that he was Sha’ban Al-Dalou, a 19-year old software engineering student at Al-Azhar University (before it was destroyed, like all of Gaza’s universities), who was on an IV drip after surviving an Israeli strike on a mosque where he was sheltering with his family a week earlier, in which 20 Palestinian civilians were killed. Handsome, kind and popular, Sha’ban loved playing the guitar, and had once had great hopes for his future, but he had been displaced five times since Israel’s genocide began. Although his father and his three younger siblings survived the attack, his mother was also killed.
Four people in total were killed in the inferno, although 70 others — mostly women and children — were wounded, with many suffering severe burns, which the hospital lacks the resources to deal with adequately.
Dr. Mohammed Tahir, a British surgeon volunteering at the hospital, told Al Jazeera that, because they were “already dealing with the overflow from mass casualty incidents … their fate is sealed, they won’t even make it to the ICU. They will die. Many children, many women with significant burns die. That’s the reality on the ground.”
He added, “It’s a horror show here. It doesn’t feel real anymore. Honestly, sometimes I feel this is not real life, that this can go on and this degree of suffering is allowed to happen in this world. It’s unimaginable.”
Israel’s war on Gaza’s hospitals
Al-Aqsa is one of three remaining partly functioning hospitals in the north, brought back into operation despite Israeli attacks that began almost a year ago, in the early days of Israel’s genocide, when Israeli forces targeted Al-Ahli Hospital, in Gaza City, on October 17, 2023.
In a post on X that he subsequently deleted, Hananya Naftali, a social media influencer who has worked as a social media adviser for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that “Hamas is launching rockets from hospitals, Mosques [and] schools”, also claiming that the Israel Air Force had “struck a Hamas terrorist base” inside the hospital.
Israel subsequently tried to pretend that the hospital had been struck by a misfired Hamas rocket, with numerous western media outlets dutifully parroting their claims, but its intended aim had been achieved: hospitals could now be targeted with impunity, based on false or unverifiable claims that they housed Hamas “command centers”, and western leaders and the mainstream media would largely stay silent.
In November, as Israel besieged Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital, in Gaza City, again using claims — never verified — that the hospital was a Hamas “command center”, and killing and/or “disappearing” doctors, medical staff and patients into its unaccountable torture prisons for Palestinians, its assault on hospitals had been so successful that 21 of the Gaza Strip’s 36 hospitals had “stopped functioning, either because of Israel’s siege on them, or because of a lack of fuel and medicines as a consequence of the total blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza since October 7”, as Al Jazeera reported.
At the time — eleven months ago — Al-Awda Hospital had been forced to close, because it had run out of fuel, as had another hospital in the north, Kamal Adwan, while the Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahiya had also “come under attack”, and was “only operating at 30-40 percent of its capacity.”
Despite Israel’s persistent claims that hospitals were used by Hamas militants, its attacks on Gaza’s entire healthcare system have just been condemned as war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination by a UN commission of inquiry, which found that, although “Israeli security forces asserted that over 85 per cent of major medical facilities in Gaza were used by Hamas for terror operations”, they “did not provide evidence to substantiate that claim.”
The planned depopulation of the whole of northern Gaza
However, although tenacious doctors and NGOs managed to bring some of Gaza’s hospitals back into service — most, at best, on a partial basis — on October 8, as though monstrously replaying the events of last year, Israel once more ordered the evacuation of Al-Aqsa, Kamal Adwan and the Indonesian Hospital, as part of a truly depraved new phase of its genocide — a plan to force the remaining 400,000 residents of northern Gaza to leave their homes, starving them into submission, and treating everyone still left in the entire territory after a week to be regarded as “terrorists”, and, therefore, as legitimate military targets.
This plan — which, of course, is completely illegal under international humanitarian law, which absolutely prohibits any notion that civilians can be stripped of their status as non-combatants if they fail to obey an evacuation order — was first publicized a month ago, and I wrote about it in my recent article, As the World Turns Away, Israel Renews Its Genocidal Assault on Northern Gaza, but western media have been slow to pick up on it.
On Sunday, the Associated Press claimed that Benjamin Netanyahu was “examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas militants, a plan that could trap hundreds of thousands of Palestinians without food or water”, seemingly unaware that the plan has already been operational for two weeks, but with a deadly twist.
Far from ordering people to leave, waiting, and then starving them or killing them as “terrorists”, Israel began the starvation policy on October 1, since when no food, water, fuel or medical supplies have been allowed into northern Gaza.
On the morning of Sunday October 6 — the day before the first anniversary of the deadly attacks on southern Israel, and the start of Israel’s genocidal response — the Israeli army issued evacuation orders for the civilian population, but, within the space of just a few hours, as the most willing refugees struggled to gather what belongings they could to take with them, the Israeli military besieged the three most built-up areas in the north — Jabalia, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya — and began a campaign of intensive bombing and artillery fire, accompanied by tanks and foot soldiers, and with snipers, armed drones and quadcopters killing many of those who were trying to flee.
Mohammed Shehab, a 27-year-old resident of Jabalia, told +972 Magazine, “Quadcopter drones are hovering low over the streets, firing at anything that moves. Snipers are positioned on rooftops, targeting anyone who steps outside. At the same time, soldiers and tanks have pushed into the camp, demolishing homes and bulldozing roads and fields.”
After the whole of the North Gaza Governorate was subjected to a forced evacuation order on October 7, instructions for the evacuation of the three hospitals were issued the day after, with Israel specifically threatening that they would face “the same fate as al-Shifa hospital, with destruction, killing and arrest”, causing panic, as doctors and medical staff tried to ensure safe transit for their most vulnerable patients.
Five premature babies in incubators were allowed to leave Kamal Adwan Hospital for the overcrowded surviving hospitals of the south — presumably because Israel recognized that their deaths, and theirs alone, might constitute a potential PR disaster — but the rest cannot leave, and, as fuel runs out, doctors have once more been forced into a predicament that they first faced a year ago: leaving their patients to die, or staying with them and risking death themselves.
Just yesterday, Dr. Eid Sabah, the director of nursing at Kamal Adwan Hospital, told Drop Site News, “The hospital has been directly targeted for over five days by drones, smoke bombs, and artillery shells near the hospital, on the hospital’s roof, and through its windows. Bombings and killings are happening everywhere. Fear and terror have spread through every street and alley. The hospital is in a terrible state.”
Reinforcing the notion that history is repeating itself, Israel has had the audacity to claim that its attack on the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital was a “precision strike” on a “command and control center” used by “Hamas terrorists”, describing this “center” as being “embedded in a compound that ‘previously served as the Al-Aqsa Hospital’”, even though the hospital is still operational, and also accusing Hamas of “systematic abuse of civilian infrastructure in violation of international law.”
As Israel continues to ramp up its slaughter in northern Gaza, not just at Al-Aqsa, and in Jabalia, but also in numerous attacks on targets including schools sheltering displaced people, with hundreds of civilians killed in the last few days, will the western media, and the west’s political leaders wake up, or are they all as slow and deluded as the AP?
On Sunday, while the AP was portraying Netanyahu as “examining a plan” that is already being viciously implemented, and in an even more callous version than the initial proposal for wholesale ethnic cleansing, Haaretz, in Israel, was telling the truth, reporting that senior defense officials had told them that “Netanyahu’s government is not seeking to revive negotiations for a hostage release deal and is pushing for the gradual annexation of large parts of Gaza.”
Haaretz, added, intriguingly, that IDF commanders in the field told them that “the recent decision to launch operations in northern Gaza was taken without any in-depth discussion”, which suggests, perhaps, that Netanyahu is sidelining the military — and, very particularly, anyone still concerned about the fate of the hostages — in favor of the annexation plan, which, I would imagine, also has the support of the far-right, especially his vile settler ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and the equally vile settler evangelist Daniella Weiss, who have all been hoping, pushing and planning for years for a Gaza Strip cleansed of all Palestinians, on which they can build new Israeli settlements.
A wake-up call for the west
The west needs to wake up, and to do so quickly. Until now, Israel has never claimed publicly that it was seeking to permanently occupy northern Gaza through its total depopulation, even though its actions obviously showed otherwise. This new declaration, however — “pushing for the gradual annexation of large parts of Gaza”, in Haaretz’s words — directly flies in the face of the International Court of Justice’s compelling advisory opinion in July, in which the Court found that Israel’s entire occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal, and must be brought to an end.
It is, moreover, a humiliating rebuke to the US, its staunchest supporter, because, just last week, on October 9, the US Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, not only spoke openly about the suffering of the Palestinians at a UN Security Council Briefing, but also reiterated “the United States’ expectation that Palestinian civilians, including those evacuated from the north be permitted to return to their communities and rebuild.”
If western leaders don’t wake up, they may well end up not only looking like fools, but also being accomplices to horrors in northern Gaza that, incredibly, may make the genocidal depredations of the last year look like a mere prelude to comprehensive extermination, in which northern Gaza becomes Israel’s Auschwitz.
* * * * *
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).
In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.
Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.
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32 Responses
Andy Worthington says...
When I posted this on Facebook, I wrote:
My update on the horrendous situation in northern Gaza, following an Israeli attack, on Sunday night, on displaced civilians and medical patients in the courtyard of Al-Aqsa Hospital, in Deir al-Balah in northern Gaza. As their makeshift tents were engulfed in flames, a video captured the last moments of one of the victims as he burned alive, his hands reaching out for unattainable help, lying on a hospital bed with his IV drip clearly visible.
The video, and screenshots from it, have gone viral, provoking widespread outrage and huge outpourings of sympathy for the victim, Sha’ban Al-Dalou, a kind and popular 19-year old student, who had been displaced five times in the last year.
We can only hope that Sha’ban’s death alerts people to the wider horrors taking place in northern Gaza, where, for the last two weeks, Israel has been implementing a truly depraved plan to empty the whole area of its 400,000 remaining residents.
The plan was first noted a month ago — when it involved issuing evacuation orders to the entire population, and then, after a week, starving them and treating everyone who remains as a legitimate military target. This, of course, is a hideous violation of international humanitarian law, but the reality of the plan’s implementation — still largely ignored in the west — is far worse.
Beginning on October 1, Israel started with starvation — by cutting off all supplies to the north — before issuing any evacuation orders, and when those were issued, to coincide with the first anniversary of the October 7 attacks, many of those who tried to comply were killed by snipers, or by armed drones and quadcopters. Meanwhile, the last three functioning hospitals, including Al-Aqsa, were ordered to evacuate, reviving the horrors of Israel’s initial war on Gaza’s hospitals a year ago, and bombing raids have intensified, on residential homes, on schools sheltering displaced civilians, and, of course, on the Al-Aqsa encampment.
In every case, Israel has alleged that it is pursuing military targets, and, with reference to the Al-Aqsa fire, has once more revived discredited claims about Hamas using hospitals as “command and control centers”, but no one should take such claims seriously, when the wider contours of the ethnic cleansing plan are so clearly visible, and the very real prospect of the elimination of the north, and of all of its remaining residents, looms ever larger.
Please keep talking about this, as, to reiterate, it is not being taken seriously enough by the western media, or by western politicians.
...on October 15th, 2024 at 4:50 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Anna Giddings wrote:
What will it take for them to be stopped and punished for all they have done? Like everyone else I feel utterly sick to death of it all and have lost faith in everyone.
Thanks, Andy.
...on October 15th, 2024 at 6:00 pm
Andy Worthington says...
It’s truly beyond comprehension, isn’t it, Anna? No “red lines” exist anymore after a year of impunity. Now they’re visiting Gaza-style civilian slaughter on Lebanon, and embarking on this ethnic cleansing/extermination plan for northern Gaza that, as I note, western media aren’t even recognizing as happening.
Imagine, after the horrors of Israel’s “war on hospitals” last year, and into this year, seeing it all happen again, and not even bothering to express any discomfort. The only ones spared are the five premature babies who were allowed to be moved from Kamal Adwan Hospital to central Gaza a few days ago.
I search in vain for someone or something that can stop it. Perhaps the ICC, whose judges seems to have been terrorized into inaction after Karim Khan’s bold announcement of arrest warrants in May? Perhaps the US government, after Biden, if Harris wins, finally listening to all its own international experts it has silenced so thoroughly for the last year?
Perhaps the best hope is for Israel to collapse economically. That certainly seems to be happening, as businesses collapse, inward investment tanks, and vast numbers of “Israelis” – dual nationals – are rushing to leave, never to return, presumably, because I can’t see a time when Israel will ever secure the lasting peace and security it claims to want, as it has psychopathically failed to realize that its actions over the last year have done the exact opposite.
A helpful report here: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240924-israeli-economy-struggles-under-weight-of-gaza-war
...on October 15th, 2024 at 6:03 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Anita Tuesley wrote:
If we find this haunts us awake and in our dreams, what must it do to the people of Gaza who are living it?
...on October 15th, 2024 at 6:45 pm
Andy Worthington says...
It’s unimaginable, of course, Anita, as we must all acknowledge, but just as torture in the “war on terror” injected a poisonous virus into the body politic of the US, so, in a more positive sense, this aching empathy is very real, and we mustn’t turn away, or let go of it. Everyone in Gaza needs our pretty much constant attention.
...on October 15th, 2024 at 6:46 pm
Andy Worthington says...
As the intense devastation of northern Gaza continues, the brave young journalist Hossam Shabat reports from a family home targeted in an airstrike, where there have been casualties. He explains that Israel “has intensified its raids, relentlessly targeting civilians in their homes” as part of its extermination plans. https://x.com/HossamShabat/status/1846215088270925929
...on October 15th, 2024 at 8:37 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Anna Giddings wrote, in response to 3, above:
I’ll have a look. Thank you. I do despair sometimes.
...on October 15th, 2024 at 9:45 pm
Andy Worthington says...
How can any of us ever be the same, Anna? And how can we be expected to ever tolerate anyone who has adamantly supported Israel’s actions? I know I can’t. I have to check celebrities’ opinions before I watch films and TV now, for example, and, of course, pretty much the entire Labour Cabinet is a no-go zone.
...on October 15th, 2024 at 9:45 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Natalia Rivera Scott wrote:
Why isn’t everyone enraged?
...on October 15th, 2024 at 11:05 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Kären Ahern wrote:
Natalia, those of us who care deeply have PTSD from this and are in deep despair. With at least 80% of our population asleep and just afraid of the deranged Trump, they care about nothing else and keep watching mainstream TV lies which give them censored news to keep them well behaved sheep who only care about their own lives.
...on October 15th, 2024 at 11:06 pm
Andy Worthington says...
As usual these days, the media bear the greatest responsibility for keeping people asleep, Kären, as they do with minimising or denying the grave and perilous effects of climate collapse, even though it’s happening right now. For the rest of us, however, trying not to be overwhelmed with grief, while also not wanting to turn away at all, because that feels so callous, is a difficult juggling act, but it’s not like we have any choice. The world has changed forever, and we have to stand up and be counted.
...on October 15th, 2024 at 11:07 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Natalia Rivera Scott wrote:
Kären, of course I exclude everyone that cares … it makes me so angry to see so much complicit silence around me, like the people around me, not the amazing community of activists and people like Andy and you. It breaks my heart. I have been commenting for a year that I’m heartbroken and full of rage.
...on October 15th, 2024 at 11:08 pm
Andy Worthington says...
It’s surely a sign of how numbness has become the defining characteristic of our times, Natalia. And while Gaza is far away, and most people, it seems, never really care about what’s happening far away, the numbness when it comes to climate collapse, when, for example, it’s actually, noticeably affecting their lives is quite extraordinary. I can’t imagine there has ever been a time in human history when people have been so detached.
...on October 15th, 2024 at 11:09 pm
Andy Worthington says...
This is very powerful. Raji Sourani, the Palestinian lawyer who “has spent more time battling Israel in the domestic and international courts than probably any other Palestinian lawyer”, in the Guardian’s words, and “was a key member of the South African legal team that took Israel to the International Court of Justice on a charge of genocide”, met Richard Hermer, the UK Attorney General, last week, “to urge him to assume a leadership role in defending humanitarian law.” Appointed by Keir Starmer, Hermer was very critical of Israel’s actions last October, but appears to have had no impact on Starmer’s unconditional support for Israel since he took office.
Sourani, 70, who had to flee Gaza for Egypt last October, after his house was targeted and bombed following an appearance on Democracy Now!, was also in London to deliver the annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture, and he told the Guardian in an interview that the west was “jeopardising something precious” by shielding Israel from the legal consequences of its actions, and fears Gaza will become “the graveyard of international law.”
As he also said, “The situation is bleak, black and bloody. There are people who want Gaza to be the graveyard of international law. In whose interest is that? Either you have the rule of law or you have the rule of the jungle. There is no in-between. At present it is the powerful and mighty that are winning.”
Sourani was particularly critical of the ICC (the International Criminal Court) for its failures to act. He first began trying to get them to address Israel’s crimes in 2015, but the then-chief prosecutor “told him he could not act against Israel without US permission.” And while Karim Khan, the current chief prosecutor, requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in May (which the ICC judges have not approved, probably because of Israeli and US pressure), he explained that “I have told him [Khan] in person that if the ICC had moved earlier, in 2015, 2020, 21 or 22, perhaps this would not have happened. The message Israel heard all along is that [it is] untouchable and above accountability. That has encouraged them to continue.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/15/gaza-at-risk-of-becoming-graveyard-of-international-law-palestinian-lawyer
...on October 15th, 2024 at 11:53 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Kären Ahern wrote, in response to 13, above:
Andy, it may be because it is all too much to bear, for some of us. it truly is. I wish I had musician friends I could lament with. I don’t know what to do with what this feels like, between wanting to scream and wail, not even able to cry. I may be harshly judging those that feel so horrific about this, even cultural guilt that they have to detach to survive. I think my husband feels this way, he has told me he can’t survive and dive into it like I do, and I don’t even want him to as he has a heart condition.
Part of me today was thinking as I worry about Fascist Trump choice or Genocide Supporters which Trump would also be, maybe this is what we humans that have fouled our nest of Earth deserve, to live in the Hell upon us. Fascism is rising everywhere, right? Canadian Universities becoming more Conservative? On and on, Germany, I am so disappointed in the Greens I had hopes in long ago. I am so glad you have your band. I need me some of it right now.
...on October 16th, 2024 at 11:59 am
Andy Worthington says...
Yes, I understand that some people can’t engage with it for long, or even at all, Kären, for perfectly valid reasons connected to their mental health. That said, I think collectively we desperately need to find ways to get people not to ignore everything that makes them uncomfortable, not because of Gaza, which, as I say, is far away, and which we seem to be powerless to do anything about, but because every human’s very existence is threatened by climate collapse, and it is simply illogical to try and turn away, or to wish it away, or to think that doing some recycling will save us.
The more we deny it, the worse its impacts will be when it comes for us, as it will for everyone. That’s an existential challenge that humanity has never faced before, and yet only a handful of brave activists – I’m thinking of Climate Defiance – are directly confronting fossil fuel company CEOs and their accomplices with the fury they deserve. https://www.climatedefiance.org
I think you’re right in assessing that we have “fouled our nest of Earth”, and deserve, somehow, “to live in the Hell upon us”, unless we find a way to put a liveable planet before our selfishness and our fears, and part of that also involves challenging the tide of denial that also threatens to overwhelm us, and which is manifesting itself in a tsunami of far-right politics, the driver of which, psychologically, I think, is to blame everyone but ourselves for the plight we have put ourselves in.
It’s so much easier to blame immigrants for everything, rather than looking in the mirror, just as it’s easier for Israel to avoid looking in the mirror by taking this inability to recognize their own failings to its darkest possible conclusion – erasing those whose existence contradicts the illusion they have manufactured about who they are.
I’m glad I have my band, and I hope you can find some like-minded musicians, but it’s the same with music as it is with everything else. People don’t want to think; they just want distraction.
...on October 16th, 2024 at 12:02 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Jacqueline Durban wrote:
It just gets worse and worse. I was going to write about him today too, Andy, but I haven’t quite managed it yet. May his memory be a blessing.
...on October 16th, 2024 at 12:04 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Good to hear from you, Jacqueline. It’s unbearable, and especially when we realize that, although we got to hear Sha’ban’s story, we’ve mostly heard nothing of the stories of all the other young people, also innocent and with bright lives and hopes, whose lives have been taken away, one every ten minutes, on average, throughout the whole of the last year. What pit have our leaders sunk into to make any of this tolerable?
...on October 16th, 2024 at 12:05 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Hanann Abu Brase posted a photo of Sha’ban, in which he had written how, via his marks, he was one of the top ten students in his first year at university.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10159682584472100&set=p.10159682584472100&type=3
...on October 16th, 2024 at 12:06 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Heartbreaking, Hanann. Really, how can this still be happening after over a year? Every day, Israel not only descends further into an abyss of depravity from which there is no returning, but so too our leaders, with their indifference or their direct encouragement and support, and all those scattered across the countries of the west who – still – angrily endorse this carnage detach themselves so fundamentally from our shared humanity that they too will be forever tarred as complicit in the most monstrous and unforgivable crimes.
...on October 16th, 2024 at 12:08 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Hanann Abu Brase wrote:
Andy 😔💔gets worse every day, all we can do is post 😢& help with what resources we have 😢
...on October 16th, 2024 at 12:08 pm
Andy Worthington says...
The powerlessness is so difficult to cope with, Hanann, but we have to hope that, in this war for the very soul of humanity, fundamental decency will eventually prevail, and to keep working towards that. We are so many, and those defending this depravity are so few.
...on October 16th, 2024 at 12:11 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Tamzin Jans wrote:
Andy, we all need people like yourself and many many others like Ilan Pappé, Norman Finkelstein, and organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, Bt’selem and Israeli Settler Watch to keep banging the drums of peace!
Pacifism is not a weakness. It is strength and courage in stopping war and murder before it happens and goes too far.
...on October 16th, 2024 at 12:12 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks, Tamzin. I do my bit, although I wish I had a greater reach, but it’s important to be witness, and to hope that my words might help somehow.
I’ve been a pacifist ever since, as a young teenager, I learned about the horrors of the Holocaust, and the slaughter of Europe’s young men in the First World War. It is the only way forward for humanity. If this descent into depravity prevails, the future, in which we are so desperately going to need to cooperate rather than compete to survive, will be very dark indeed.
...on October 16th, 2024 at 12:16 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Al Glatkowski wrote:
Once again, Andy, thanks for this posting. Keep digging it up and doing what you do.
🏴☠️🎅🏼
...on October 16th, 2024 at 12:16 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks, Al. I’m compelled to be a witness, at least, so I can say that I tried, and to try and play whatever small part I can in raising awareness. Throughout the last year, I’ve persistently been taken to the edge of endurance by the endless rolling news from Gaza, from those showing and telling us what’s happening, and, all too frequently, being targeted and killed for doing so.
I’m starting to feel that way again, when what I should really do is switch off for a few days and try to safeguard my mental health, but it’s so important for those who us who are awake to keep doing all we can to point out how it is nothing short of pure human evil for this ethnic cleansing plan to be implemented after a year of the most unforgivable horrors. Cruelty beyond belief, really, from a people who, with this development, above all, have lost all right to be considered a part of our common humanity.
...on October 16th, 2024 at 12:17 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Via Haaretz, Middle East Eye reports on confirmation, via three Israeli reserve soldiers serving in Gaza, that the “plan to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza and kill any Palestinians who remain” – the “Generals’ Plan”, also known as the Eiland Plan (after the retired general responsible for promoting it) – is already underway, as is painfully apparent on the ground, even though, officially, it “has not been adopted by top military officials who are reportedly [still] discussing it.”
A soldier stationed in the Netzarim Corridor – the militarised buffer zone, created by Israel, separating the north and the south of Gaza – was quoted as saying, “The goal is to give the residents who live north of the Netzarim area a deadline to move to the south of the strip. After this date, whoever will remain in the north will be considered an enemy and will be killed.”
The soldier also, however, expressed deep discontent about the plan, saying, “It doesn’t conform to any standard of international law. People sat and wrote a systematic order with charts and an operational concept, at the end of which you shoot whoever isn’t willing to leave. The very existence of this idea is unfathomable.”
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/evidence-generals-plan-being-carried-out-northern-gaza-0
...on October 16th, 2024 at 1:06 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Tamzin Jans wrote, in response to 24, above:
Andy, I trust you and your selfless battle for humanity!
...on October 16th, 2024 at 4:30 pm
Andy Worthington says...
🙏 Tamzin!
...on October 16th, 2024 at 4:30 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Sha’ban Al-Dalou, the student who Israel burned alive on Sunday, would have turned 20 today. Drop Site News tells his story via Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed, who spoke to his family and friends.
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/life-of-shaaban-al-dalou-burned-gaza
...on October 16th, 2024 at 7:31 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Essential reading from Owen Jones, who, in his latest article for the Guardian, writes compellingly about Israel’s extermination plan for northern Gaza (still largely ignored in the western mainstream media), and also traces the year-long advocacy for Palestinians’ eradication by the driver of the plan – retired general Giora Eiland.
Here’s the final paragraph:
“Normally, states that commit atrocities against civilians go to great lengths to cover them up. Israel’s genocidal onslaught is not such an example. Rarely has murderous intent been so shamelessly and unapologetically publicly stated on so many occasions. Every day, the ever-shrinking surviving band of Palestinian journalists document obscene atrocities, while Israeli soldiers post them on social media for public amusement. It may sometimes have troubled you: how were the great human obscenities of the past made possible, both by active complicity and silence, including by those who saw themselves as humane, reasonable, ‘moderate’, when the scale of the crime must have been obvious? Having lived through a crime that was confessed to loudly and shamelessly from day one, a crime more documented than almost any other – well, now you know.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/17/northern-gaza-israel-depraved-campaign
...on October 17th, 2024 at 12:25 pm
Andy Worthington says...
For a Spanish version, on the World Can’t Wait’s Spanish website, see ‘No le voltees la mirada al infierno de la exterminación en el norte de Gaza’: http://worldcantwait-la.com/worthington-no-le-voltees-la-mirada-al-infierno-de-la-exterminacion-en-el-norte-de-gaza.htm
...on October 29th, 2024 at 11:43 am