900 Days of Genocide in Gaza
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ or ‘Buy’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
The ever-growing shadow of depravity engulfing the world has grown so huge in recent weeks — since the unprovoked and illegal war launched by the US and Israel on Iran, and, simultaneously, Israel’s renewed assaults on Lebanon, and an increase in its violence in the occupied West Bank — that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the original sin that led to this situation — Israel’s ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip — began 900 days ago today.
It’s also easy to overlook the fact that today also marks the first anniversary of Israel’s targeted assassination in Gaza of Hossam Shabat, the fearless 23-year old Palestinian journalist whose smile, and whose relentless energetic enthusiasm for recording Israel’s crimes, lit up phones and social media reports and news broadcasts around the world.
As he said in his final message to the world, written in anticipation that he would be killed, “If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed — most likely targeted — by the Israeli occupation forces. When this all began, I was only 21 years old — a college student with dreams like anyone else. For the past 18 months, I have dedicated every moment of my life to my people. I documented the horrors in northern Gaza minute by minute, determined to show the world the truth they tried to bury. I slept on pavements, in schools, in tents — anywhere I could. Each day was a battle for survival. I endured hunger for months, yet I never left my people’s side. By God, I fulfilled my duty as a journalist. I risked everything to report the truth, and now, I am finally at rest — something I haven’t known in the past 18 months. I did all this because I believe in the Palestinian cause. I believe this land is ours, and it has been the highest honor of my life to die defending it and serving its people. I ask you now: do not stop speaking about Gaza. Do not let the world look away. Keep fighting, keep telling our stories — until Palestine is free.”
Israel Murders Anas Al-Sharif to Create a Media Blackout For Its Imminent Annihilation of Gaza City
Please click on either of the ‘Donate’ buttons below (via PayPal or Stripe) to make a donation towards the $2,500 (£2,000) I’m trying to raise to support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist over the next three months. To get links to all my work in your inbox, please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
UPDATE: Please free free to check out my one-hour interview with Chris Cook of Gorilla Radio, recorded on August 13, in which we discussed the targeted murder of Anas Al-Sharif and his colleagues, Israel’s war on journalists and its persistent lies, as well as the self-inflicted problems created by the British government following its proscription of Palestine Action, a direct action group, as a terrorist organization.
Yesterday, at around 11.35pm, in a deliberate targeted attack on the press tent outside Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, Israel murdered the whole of the remaining crew of Al Jazeera Arabic in northern Gaza — the journalists Anas Al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqeh, the cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Mohammed Noufal, and an assistant, Moamen Aliwa. Also killed was a freelance journalist, Mohammed al-Khaldi, and Al-Sharif’s teenage nephew Musab, who had hoped to follow in his uncle’s footsteps.
My heart sank when I read the news last night. Al-Sharif, 28, was probably the most hard-working journalist in history, relentlessly chronicling the genocide for 22 months with barely a break. It’s unimaginable how, hurrying from one atrocity to another, repeatedly reporting on shattered bodies and erased families, and always enveloped by the smell of blood, he carried on working.
Well known in the Arabic-speaking world, and with millions of followers on social media, where he posted in both Arabic and English, Al-Sharif, who leaves a wife and two young children he adored, kept going even though he must have known that his days were numbered. He was the last of the tireless and ever-visible Al Jazeera journalists, surviving as his closest friends and colleagues were picked off one by one — journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul and cameraman Rami Al-Rifi, who were killed on July 31, 2024, cameraman Fadi Al-Wahidi, who was paralyzed after an attack on October 9, 2024, and Hossam Shabat, who was targeted and murdered on March 24 this year.
As Israel Murders Hossam Shabat, and the Gaza Death Toll Passes 50,000, Did you Know Israel Has Killed Over 500 Times More Children Than Were Killed on Oct. 7?
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal. Please also consider taking out a free or paid subscription to my new Substack newsletter.
I no longer know what to say or do.
Yesterday, Israel deliberately targeted and murdered Hossam Shabat, the brave, beautiful 23-year old journalist who somehow dodged death for over 17 months, reporting relentlessly from the front lines of Israel’s brutal attacks, including the four months from October last year until a ceasefire began on January 19, when Israel implemented an exterminatory “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza.
After hanging up his press vest and helmet two months ago, when the now aborted ceasefire began, he only put them on again four days ago, after it became abundantly clear that Israel had deliberately shredded the ceasefire, reimplementing a “complete siege” on all humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip on March 1, and then, under the cover of night on March 18, resurrecting its genocidal aims with renewed fury, launching a hundred simultaneous attacks across Gaza that killed at least 436 people, “including at least 183 children, 94 women, 34 elderly people, and 125 men”, as Al Jazeera explained, adding that at least 678 others were injured, “many critically, with more still trapped under the rubble.”
Just yesterday, Gaza’s beleaguered health ministry announced that these deaths — to which another 356 have been added in the following days, has pushed the official death toll to over 50,000 since October 7, 2023 — 50,021 in total, including 15,613 children, of whom 872 were under one year old. The health ministry added that over half of those killed were women and children. The figures don’t include 14,222 other people who are almost certain dead, their bodies “trapped under the rubble or in areas inaccessible to rescuers”, as Al Jazeera reported on February 3, noting that the total number of children killed or presumed dead at that time was 17,492.
As the World Turns Away, Israel Renews Its Genocidal Assault on Northern Gaza
Please support my work as a reader-funded investigative journalist, commentator and activist. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.
Today, October 9, 2024, two days into the first anniversary of the start of the State of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip, almost unimaginable horrors are taking place yet again, in the devastated northern half of the beleaguered territory, where around 400,000 of its residents remain, as Israel implements a plan for its complete ethnic cleansing, prior to it becoming a “closed military zone.”
Those who remain are those who resisted, or were unable to comply with orders to evacuate the north, which were implemented a week after the genocide began, to the consternation of US State Department officials, whose concerns about war crimes and the trampling of international humanitarian law, revealed by Reuters last week, now look like missives from a lost world in which morality still existed.
Over the last three days, untold numbers of Palestinian civilians have been killed in relentless bombing attacks, or have been murdered in the streets by armed drones and quadcopters, assassinated by snipers, and, it appears, summarily executed in house raids. The area’s three surviving hospitals — brought back into operation through the tireless dedication and ingenuity of Palestinian workers after they were shut down last November — have been ordered to evacuate, even though there is no place for the seriously ill to go, while journalists have been relentlessly targeted, with several of those who have survived Israel’s relentless execution of journalists over the last year being shot and wounded by snipers, while others have been murdered.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
