UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals
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With grimly appropriate good timing, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel issued a hugely significant report on October 10 in which it found that, as described in an accompanying press release, “Israel has perpetrated a concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system as part of a broader assault on Gaza, committing war crimes and the crime against humanity of extermination with relentless and deliberate attacks on medical personnel and facilities.”
The timing was grimly appropriate because, although its focus on Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s hospitals only covers the period from October 7, 2023 to August 2024, a terrible, genocidal version of Groundhog Day is currently taking place yet again in the Gaza Strip, where, although its relentless slaughter has not stopped for the last year, it is currently amplifying its horrors in northern Gaza, ordering the evacuation of the last three remaining partly-functional hospitals there, as part of a new plan to ethnically cleanse the whole of the north — where an estimated 400,000 civilians remain, having refused, or been unable to comply with evacuation orders issued a year ago — with a renewed depravity plumbing previously unthinkable depths.
Because the wheels of international justice revolve so slowly, it has taken over three years for the Commission’s report to be compiled and published. It was initially commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021, with a brief to investigate “all alleged violations of international humanitarian law and all alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law leading up to and since 13 April 2021.”
Genocide Continues in Gaza, Exposing The Unending Depravity of Israel, and the Ongoing Criminal Complicity of the West
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For 47 days, from October 8 until November 23, the State of Israel relentlessly bombed the 2.3 million trapped civilians of the Gaza Strip — held in “an open air prison” since 2007, when Israel imposed a total blockade on its inhabitants — with such ferocity that 20,031 people were killed, including 8,176 children and 4,112 women, according to the Geneva-based NGO Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. The NGO also noted that over 36,350 people had been injured — many gravely so — and that 1.7 million people, almost three-quarters of the entire population, had been displaced, as nearly a quarter of a million homes were completely or partially destroyed.
To give some necessary perspective to those statistics, what it meant was that, for 47 days, Israel was killing 174 children every day — seven children every hour, or one every eight and a half minutes. To understand quite how grotesque and unprecedented the killing of children on this scale is, on November 7 Al Jazeera analyzed the death rates of children in other major conflicts of the 21st century — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen — establishing that the death rate of children in those conflicts was between 0.6 and three children per day.
This was carpet bombing on an industrial scale, using some of the heaviest and deadliest bombs ever invented by the depraved individuals who work in the arms industry, many of which were supplied by the US, and yet, despite international experts almost immediately recognizing that this was the collective punishment of an entire civilian population, in response to attacks by Hamas militants on October 7, in which, according to initial reports, 1,400 Israelis had been killed (a figure most recently revised down to 1,200), western leaders were united in their uncritical support for Israel’s unqualified “right to defend itself.”
Where Is The Outrage About Israel’s Profoundly Illegal ‘War on Hospitals’ in Gaza?
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Where is the outrage from western leaders, and the western mainstream media, about Israel’s ‘war on hospitals’ in Gaza?
Today, we hear that staff and patients at Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest hospital, which was invaded by Israeli soldiers three days ago, have been ordered to evacuate, on foot, to the south of Gaza, even though that is impossible for the seriously ill and for the 35 premature babies who are still alive, after their incubators stopped working days ago because the hospital ran out of fuel.
Four of these babies have died in the last few days, but the rest are tenaciously clinging on to life, although Al-Jazeera noted that another five are now “severely ill.” Yesterday, doctors at the hospital reported that everyone in the intensive care unit had died as a result of the fuel ban.
Most of those in the hospital — nearly all of the many hundreds of patients and their families, most of the medical staff, and thousands of internally displaced people whose homes were destroyed in Israel bombing raids, and who have been sheltering in the hospital’s grounds — were made to leave the hospital this morning, with numerous witnesses, including Dr. Adnan Al Barsh, Al-Shifa’s Head of Orthopedics, explaining that they were “forced to leave at gunpoint.”
The Siege of Gaza and Israel’s Premeditated Murder of Premature Palestinian Babies
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For several days now, I’ve been haunted by a photo posted by doctors in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City — the largest hospital in the Gaza Strip — of premature babies huddled together as doctors and medical staff attempt to keep them alive.
The babies were previously being kept alive in incubators, but as a result of Israel’s medieval-style “complete siege” of Gaza, imposed 38 long, blood-soaked days ago, on October 8, when Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant announced that there would be “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed”, adding, “We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly”, the fuel required to power the generators to provide electricity to the hospital has run out.
The plight of these premature babies — the death sentence to which Israel has subjected them, unless the siege is lifted — is particularly poignant for me, because my own son, now a healthy 23-year old man, was also born prematurely, at 30 weeks.
Who's still at Guantánamo?
