UN Report Finds Israel Guilty of Genocide and Extermination Against Women and Girls in Gaza, Through “Systematic Destruction” of Reproductive Healthcare
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On March 13, a devastating report, “‘More than a human can bear’: Israel’s systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023”, was issued by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
The report’s most alarming findings are that, since October 2023, as described in an accompanying press release, Israel has engaged in “acts which amount to the crime against humanity of extermination”, through the deaths of women and girls “from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth due to the conditions imposed by the Israeli authorities which have denied access to reproductive healthcare.”
In addition, “through the systematic destruction of sexual and reproductive healthcare”, which has “destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza as a group”, the Commission found that Israel has engaged in acts “amounting to two categories of genocidal acts in the Rome Statute and the Genocide Convention”; namely, “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians and imposing measures intended to prevent births.”
Trump Unites the World in Support of the Palestinians Through His Call for Ethnic Cleansing and the US Takeover of Gaza
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Last Tuesday, the full delusional derangement of Donald Trump’s narcissistic opinion of himself as a god-like emperor entitled to reshape the world according to his whims was on full display.
At a press conference at the White House with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the first foreign leader that Trump has met with since he took office, despite Netanyahu being a wanted war criminal — he called for the complete ethnic cleansing, or, to put it another way, the forced displacement of the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, outrageous crimes under international law, which he nevertheless sought to dress up as a benevolent humanitarian intervention, and then, seemingly out of nowhere, pledged to take over the entirety of the Gaza Strip, and to rebuild it as “the Riviera of the Middle East.”
Middle East Eye helpfully transcribed and posted the whole of the press conference and the Q&A session that followed it, including the following section in which, in his typically rambling and frequently incoherent manner, Trump announced his ethnic cleansing plan:
The Horror of Israel’s Bragging, Self-Righteous, Live-Streamed Genocide in Gaza That Also Seeks to Eliminate Fundamental Human Decency
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It’s over two weeks since I’ve written about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, but it’s not because I’ve “moved on”, or forgotten about it. On the contrary, it still consumes my every waking hour, an aching anguish that only ever goes away when I somehow manage to distract myself through immersion in some other activity: my long-running work on Guantánamo, for example, or working on my music, or managing to snatch some precious time with my family on a recent weekend break in Dorset.
Mostly, though, the horror engulfs me permanently — the unending horror of one group of people, the State of Israel, whose leaders, media and citizens in vast numbers are committed, with a delirious, maniacal and alarmingly self-righteous enthusiasm, to the annihilation of another, the Palestinians, trapped in the Gaza Strip, a small sliver of land where their ancestors were ethnically cleansed when the State of Israel was created 76 years ago.
Everywhere I look, I see other people struggling to maintain their mental equilibrium in the face of the relentless slaughter that, over the last four months, has claimed 36,671 lives, including 14,031 children and 8,122 women — with the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which compiled the figures, estimating that 33,590 of those killed (91.6%) were civilians, and also pointing out that an additional 70,180 people have been wounded, many of them severely. Over a thousand children have lost one or both legs, with many amputations having to be conducted without aesthetic, because of Israel’s refusal to allow medical supplies into Gaza, and over 17,000 have been orphaned, known by a new designation of Israel’s making: ‘WCNSF’, which stands for “wounded child, no surviving family.”
Genocide in Gaza: Death Toll Surpasses That of Srebrenica Massacre; 8,525 Palestinians Killed, Including 3,542 Children
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As you read this, the death toll in Gaza, since Israel began bombing its 2.3 million captive civilians on October 7, has surpassed the number of people killed in the Srebrenica Massacre, during the Bosnian War of 1992-95, when, in a 72-hour period between July 13 and July 15, 1995, 8,372 Muslim men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serb and Serbian soldiers, in what the Guardian, in 2020, described as “the only massacre on European soil since the second world war to be ruled a genocide.”
As of yesterday, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported that at least 8,525 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli military bombardment began 25 days ago — a rate of 340 deaths a day, or 14 every hour, or one every four minutes, meaning that, by the weekend, it can be expected to reach 10,000.
Shamefully, however, although human rights experts and experts in international humanitarian law are already talking openly about Israel’s actions in Gaza being a genocide, the silence from political leaders in the west, and the mostly complicit mainstream media, is profoundly shocking. What, when this all over — as it must be one day, one way or another — will they say in their defence?
Who's still at Guantánamo?
