In Occupied Palestine
Zionism in practice
Israel’s Daily Toll on Palestinian Life, Limb, Liberty and Land
08:00, 30 August until 08:00, 31 August 2024
[Source of statistics: Palestinian Monitoring Group]
Gaza Strip
Attacks: There are no safe places for the militarily-dominated population in Gaza, who find themselves subjected to airstrikes and other missile attacks on buildings, homes and many essentialfacilities, as well as constant gunfire and invasions by Israeli forces. The Israeli Navy continues to fire missiles, targeting facilities and buildings along the entire Gaza shoreline.
Victims: 89 more people killed in Gaza now bring the total number of deaths, since 7 October, to at least 40,691. With another 205 wounded, that figure has risen to over 94,060. The daily average number of men, women and children killed in Gaza is at least 124 and, of those injured, more than 286.
Palestine today
Don’t say you didn’t know
Ali Kazak akazak@bigpond.net.au
International community silence on Israel’s genocide in Gaza
could allow it to occur in West Bank as well
Israel’s massive military operation in the northern occupied West Bank is a part of the widespread and dangerous aggression that it has been waging against the Palestinian people for decades. The current Israeli violence in the West Bank also includes the violence of armed settler groups and an expansion of the ongoing genocide that has been occurring in the Gaza Strip since 7 October 2023. The West Bank-based Euro-Med Monitor field team has observed an increase in both the number and severity of the Israeli army’s killings and crimes of storming and destruction against Palestinians there. Israel is also allowing and supporting its settlers’ attacks and violent crimes against Palestinians in different parts of the West Bank, including crimes of murder, threats, and destruction of private and immovable property, as well as the destruction and theft of agricultural crops. With the Israeli army’s recent announcement of the start of a massive military operation known as “Summer Camps” that targets the northern West Bank, the attacks have taken on an increasingly severe form.
Without the cover and co-operation of the United States and some European countries, and amid near silence from the international community, Israel’s crime of genocide could not have occurred and escalated in the Gaza Strip and now be extended to the West Bank. The majority of the world’s nations must accept their responsibilities and take concrete action to protect Palestinian civilians, halt the mass killings, and stop the genocide from being completed. As part of their international obligations, all nations must impose strong sanctions on Israel and halt all forms of military, political, and financial assistance. This includes immediately cutting off all arms transfers to Israel, including export permits and military aid; otherwise, these nations will be complicit in and partners in the Israeli crimes committed in the Gaza Strip, including the crime of genocide.
Israel launches largest Occupied West Bank offensive
Drones bomb Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas as the military begins major assault. Drone strikes were reported in the three cities as troops opened fire at Palestinians on the ground, killing at least nine people, including seven in Tubas and two in Jenin, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The assault began just after midnight local time (21:00 GMT) after undercover Israeli soldiers entered the Jenin refugee camp and the Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm. Large numbers of Israeli forces then raided the camps and besieged hospitals, preventing paramedics from reaching them, according to eyewitnesses and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.
Adnan Ghoneimi said Israeli soldiers forced medical teams to leave the station and lined them up against a wall as they searched the facility. Paramedics in the city had been blocked from reaching the camp since the raid began at midnight, he added. A siege has been imposed on all the three cities – Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas – in the northern West Bank, cutting them off from the rest of the Palestinian territory. “The three main hospitals are besieged and all the streets leading to the city are closed with dirt barriers. We have not witnessed an incursion this extensive for a long time, and it seems that it will continue for several days.” Israeli forces were “brutally” raiding home and using residents as human shields. He said at least one family was used as a cover for soldiers when they moved to the rooftop of their home to set up there.
10 killed as Israel launches biggest West Bank operation in decades
Israel has it’s biggest military operation in the Occupied West Bank in decades, with Israeli military and police operating in the cities of Tulkarm, Jenin and Tubas. Airstrikes have been reported in both Jenin refugee camp and Tubas, with 10 Palestinians being killed in the assault so far according to Palestinian news agency Wafa. Israel’s assault on the occupied West Bank comes amid its continued war on Gaza, with Wafa reporting that 17 Palestinians have been killed as a result of Israeli shelling on the enclave this morning. In an alarming statement, Israeli Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz said on Wednesday that Palestinians in the West Bank must be displaced and pushed out of their homes. The assault on Jenin comes just weeks after Israel approved the largest seizure of land in the West Bank in over 30 years. Since October Israel’s war on Gaza has killed 40,534 people and wounded a further 93,778 others as it continues its relentless bombardment of the enclave.
Israel staging largest attack on West Bank in decades
Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, indicated that this was a planned escalation, saying the military was operating in “full force.” Israeli forces on Wednesday conducted a series of deadly raids in the West Bank, killing at least 10 Palestinians in the largest assault on the occupied territory in over two decades. In coordinated raids on four cities in the northern West Bank, Israel employed hundreds of ground troops as well as fighter aircraft, drones, and bulldozers. Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, indicated that this was a planned escalation, saying the military was operating in “full force.” He called for evacuations in the West Bank, as in Gaza, and “whatever steps are required,” explaining that “this is a war for everything and we must win it.” The incursion follows a recent uptick in Israeli violence in the West Bank — five Palestinians, including two children, were killed in an airstrike there on Monday — and came on the same day that the United Nations Human Rights Office released a statement condemning it.
Humanitarian and pro-Palestinian voices denounced Wednesday’s offensive. Aida Touma-Suleiman, an Israeli-Arab member of the Knesset, called it the “Gazafication of all Palestinian land” and part of a plan to “ethnically cleanse the West Bank.” Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian physician and politician, told Democracy Now! that Israeli leaders, some of whom he named as “fascist,” are “trying to repeat the Nakba.” “They are trying to repeat the same ethnic cleansing, the same genocide that is committed in Gaza,” he added. Progressives in the U.S., Israel’s primary diplomatic ally and arms supplier, argued that Wednesday’s incursion was the direct result of American foreign policy choices.
Israeli rabbi: destroy Al-Aqsa with missile & blame it on Iran
Controversial Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi has called on Israeli officials to target Al-Aqsa Mosque with a missile and lay the blame on Iran for causing Arab states to take up arms against Tehran and allow Tel Aviv to build the ‘Third Temple’ in place of the Muslim holy site.
International Law Obligations –
Namibia blocks ship carrying ‘explosive material’ to Israel
Namibia has blocked a vessel carrying military cargo destined for Israel from docking at one of its ports citing its obligation not to support or be complicit in Israeli war crimes. “Yes, I have asked Namport (Namibian Sports Authority) via the line ministry to consider the request to not allow the vessel MV Kathrin to dock in our ports,” the Justice Minister, Yvonne Dausab, told the state newspaper New Era, adding that the request was made on Friday.
Dausab said that her position meant she was responsible for ensuring that Namibia complied with its obligations under international law, specifically the Genocide Convention, to which Namibia was a party. “As such, it was necessary to engage authorities in Namibia on issues of concern to ensure our decisions and actions domestically are aligned with our obligations in terms of international law and our policy stance of many years on Palestine,” she is reported as saying. Dausab explained that upon receiving reports that a vessel may be carrying weapons intended for Israel, “I addressed a letter to Cabinet, international relations ministry, works ministry, as well as the safety and security ministry, advising and reminding them of our international obligations, not only under the Genocide Convention but also as articulated in the recent advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).”
Palestinian healthcare workers chained, starved, sexually abused:
New HRW report on Israeli prisons
We speak with Human Rights Watch researcher Milena Ansari about the organisation’s new report detailing the torture of Palestinian medical workers in Israeli prisons. HRW spoke with eight doctors, paramedics and nurses who were picked up in Gaza before being transferred to the notorious Sde Teiman camp and other facilities, where they say they suffered beatings, starvation, humiliation, electric shocks and other forms of abuse. The men also describe threats of sexual violence during brutal interrogations and seeing another prisoner bleeding after being gang-raped with an M16 rifle by three soldiers. The findings track with other reports from researchers and survivors, and HRW has called on the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel for its attacks on healthcare workers. “We’re really ringing the alarm about the situation inside the Israeli custody and detention facilities,” says Ansari, who says evidence is mounting of a “systematic pattern of ill-treatment and abuse.”
How Israeli genocide in Gaza exposed the West’s liberal delusion
On a global scale, support for a violent settler colony is an anachronism. Western countries that would protect Israel over universal values are a shrinking enclave. One question that might puzzle future historians who scrutinise the current juncture is why the democracies of the West did nothing to stop Israel from committing genocide in Gaza. They might find their inaction perplexing as the language of human rights has been a bedrock for the US and its allies and an essential feature of western hegemony. It has long been a tool of soft power and justifies the use of military force.
Why, then, have they risked this valuable stature by supporting Israel’s war crimes in Gaza? The US and its European allies, such as Germany, the UK and the Netherlands, have been integral to Israel’s onslaught. They have transported weapons on a daily basis, attempted to protect Israeli leaders from prosecution, and done nothing to stop murderous attacks on Palestinian civilians.
The conflict goes on, but no party desires an all-out Middle East war
Israel cannot continue to ensure its security and durability based on the indefinite repressive occupation of the Palestinian territories, even with the power of the United States behind it. Israel has already experienced windows of vulnerability in the face of Hamas’s resistance, Hezbollah’s attacks and Iran’s retaliatory actions. Israel’s pre-emptive and assertive military actions have done little or nothing to maximise its security and well-being over the long-term. The country’s people have increasingly been living in fear and uncertainty; its national cohesion, economy, social services and technological edge have suffered significantly.
Without America’s all-round help, Israel is no longer in a position to defend itself against Iran and its allies on its own. As the only nuclear-armed state in the region, Israel possesses the ultimate weapons of deterrence and destruction. But Iran is now a threshold nuclear power.
The World Court has ended the Oslo ruse
The ICJ’s ruling that international law protects the rights of Palestinians, and they need not negotiate with their oppressors for those rights, dealt a definitive blow to decades of Western efforts to situate Israel outside the reach of the law. But then the ICJ did something else. On July 19, 2024, it ruled on a request for an advisory opinion submitted by the UN General Assembly, setting out with stunning legal clarity, the rights of the Palestinian people and the requirements of international law in the occupied Palestinian territory.
The Court found definitively that Israel was committing apartheid and racial segregation, that all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza are occupied territory, that the occupation is unlawful, that Israel must remove all settlements, settlers, soldiers and occupation infrastructure, dismantle the apartheid wall in the West Bank, provide reparations to the Palestinians, and allow all those forced out to return home. Equally important, the Court said that all states have a legal obligation not to recognise or assist the Occupation and are obliged to help to bring an end to Israel’s Occupation and other violations. And it found that all states must end all treaty relations with Israel that relate to the Palestinian territories, cease all economic, trade, and investment relations connected to the occupied territories. Thus, the ICJ has given clear international legal authority to the anti-apartheid movement, and to the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions.
West Bank
Israeli Army attack – 2 youngsters wounded: Ramallah – 15:15–19:25, Israeli Occupation forces, firing live ammunition, wounded two youngsters, 13-year-old Osama Adel Marzouq and Malek Basem Mahmoud Hijaz (aged 14), during the storming of al-Mazra’a al-Sharqiya.
Israeli Army attack – 1 youngster wounded: Ramallah – 19:35, Israeli forces, firing live ammunition near the town of Silwad, wounded a 17-year-old youth: Yazan Abdullah Dar Saleh.
Israeli Army attack: Jenin – Since midnight on 27 August, Israeli forces are continuing the storming of the city and its refugee camp, surrounding and isolating hospitals. An 82-year-old doctor, Tawfiq Ahmed Younis Qandil, is among seven people who have been wounded.
Israeli Army attack – 2 youngsters wounded: Qalqiliya – 15:00, Israeli troops, stationed near the Eyal checkpoint, shot and wounded a child, 12-year-old Muhammad Mahyoub Qaraan, as well as one other youngster: Ibrahim Jaidi (aged 14).
Israeli settler attack: Nablus – 16:20, an armed Israeli Occupation settler, driving his vehicle in the centre of Huwara, opened fire indiscriminately towards shops.
Israeli Army attack – 2 killed: Hebron – 00:40, the Israeli Army shot and killed two people in the city: Muhammad Ihsan Yaqin Marqa and Zahdi Nidal Abu Afifa.
Home invasion and destruction: Jenin – 04:05, Israeli Occupation forces used explosives to destroy a house in the Kharouba area.
Home invasion and violence: 20:25, Israeli settlers stormed the home of a man, Walid Kaabneh, in the Wadi al-Faw area of the North Jordan Valley, and assaulted him.
Home invasion: Nablus – 01:15–03:05, Israeli forces stormed Qabalan, as well as the village of Jurish, and searched a house.
Israeli Army – abduction: Ramallah – 19:20, Israeli Occupation forces abducted a 17-year-old Deir Birzeit villager: Othman Raafat Al-Tawil.
Israeli Army population–control: Ramallah – 15:10-17:00, Israeli forces closed the Uyoun al-Haramiya Road, between Ramallah and Nablus.
Israeli Army population–control: Bethlehem – 07:20, the Israeli Army closed the southern entrance to Bethlehem, access to the Ash Ghurab area, east of Beit Sahour, as well as entrances to the villages of Jouret al-Sham’a and al-Jab’a.
Israeli Army – armed robbery and population–control: Hebron – 16:50, Israeli troops seized a truck as well as a drilling machine, and took prisoner the owner: Abdul-Haseeb Badawi.
Israeli Army population–control: Hebron – 01:40, the Israeli military closed all entrances to the city as well as to the towns of Beit Ummar, Sa’ir, Bani Na’im, Halhul, Beit Kahil, Tarqumiya, Idhna, Dura, Yatta, al-Samou and Adh Dhahriya, and also the Arroub and al-Fawar refugee camps.
Occupation settler arson and agricultural sabotage: Ramallah – 19:25–22:00, Israeli Occupation settlers invaded Burqa village farmland near to people’s homes and set fire to crops.
Occupation settler stoning: Ramallah – 21:10, Israeli settlers stoned passing vehicles in an area between the villages of al-Mughayyir and Khirbet Abu Falah.
Occupation settler intrusion: Tubas – 22:05–23:50, Occupation settlers raided the village of Bardala.
Occupation settler agricultural sabotage: Nablus – 12:15, Occupation settlers grazed their cattle on Beit Dajan village agricultural land.
Occupation settler land-grab and population–control: Nablus – 16:20, Israeli settlers seized land in the Khirbet Tana area, east of Beit Furik, and forced off people from it.
Occupation settler terror: Jericho – 12:20–16:10, Occupation settlers invaded the Satih area, west of Jericho, and threatened to steal a flock of sheep from the owner.
Occupation settler agricultural sabotage: Bethlehem – 18:10–20:00, Israeli settlers invaded Nahalin farmland, uprooted olive trees as well as vegetable seedlings, and destroyed the irrigation network.
Occupation settler arson and pastoral sabotage – homes destroyed: Hebron – morning, Occupation settlers invaded the Jouret al-Khalil area, east of Sa’ir, stealing 300–head of sheep, assaulting people and seizing their mobile phones. The settlers also destroyed people’s mobile homes and damaged water–storage tanks.
Raid: Jerusalem – 08:20–15:45, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled al-Ram.
Raid: Ramallah – 08:10-09:35, Israeli forces raided and patrolled the village of Yabroud.
Raid: Ramallah – 08:50, the Israeli Army raided and patrolled the village of al-Lubban al-Gharbi.
Raid: Ramallah – 11:30-13:00, Israeli troops raided and patrolled the village of Umm Safa.
Raid: Ramallah – 19:15-20:20, the Israeli military raided the village of Burqa.
Raid: Ramallah – 21:30–00:50, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled Turmusaya.
Raid: Jenin – 04:45, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled the village of Kafr Dan.
Raids: Tubas – 18:55, Israeli forces raided and patrolled al-Yamoun as well as the village of al-Far’a.
Raids: Tulkarem – 18:55, the Israeli Army raided and patrolled the town of al-Yamoun and the village of al-Far’a.
Raid – rubber-coated bullets and stun grenades fired: Qalqiliya – 11:10-16:35, Israeli troops, firing rubber-coated bullets and stun grenades, raided the village of Kafr Qaddum.
Raid: Qalqiliya – 02:50–04:00, the Israeli military raided and patrolled the village of Hajjah.
Raid: stun grenades fired: Nablus – 13:30–15:00, Israeli soldiers, firing stun grenades, raided the Karem al-Nimr area in the town of Beita, in order to prevent a Resistance demonstration.
Raid: stun grenades: Nablus – 16:55, Israeli Occupation forces, firing stun grenades, raided the Ras al-Deir area, in the village of Yatma.
Raid – population–control: Nablus – 17:20, Israeli forces raided Huwara and prevented access to the town’s centre.
Raid: Nablus – 18:55-21:10, the Israeli Army raided and patrolled the village of Burqa.
Raid: Nablus – 22:10–01:20, Israeli troops raided and patrolled the town of Sebastia.
Raid: Nablus – 22:25–01:00, the Israeli military raided and patrolled the eastern neighbourhoods of the city.
Raid: Nablus – 03:40, Israeli soldiers raided and patrolled Jama’in.
Raid: Salfit – 00:30, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled the town of Burqin.
Raid – Israeli Army and settlers: Jericho – 07:30-11:50, Israeli forces, accompanying settlers, raided the village of Ein al-Dyouk.
Raids – refugee camp: Jericho – 00:25, the Israeli Army raided and patrolled the city of Jericho as well as the Aqbat Jabir refugee camp.
Raid: Bethlehem – 17:35-20:20, Israeli troops raided and patrolled the town of Tuqu.
Raid: Bethlehem – 21:55–01:45, the Israeli military raided and patrolled the city.
Raid: Hebron – 14:00, Israeli soldiers raided the town of al-Samou.
Raid: Hebron – 16:40-17:40, Israeli Occupation forces raided Sa’ir.
Raid: Hebron – 19:00, Israeli forces raided and patrolled the town of Dura.
Raid – refugee camp: Hebron – 19:15-21:30, the Israeli Army raided the al-Fawar refugee camp.
Raid: Hebron – 22:35–01:50, Israeli troops raided and patrolled the town of al-Samou.
Raid: Hebron – 23:55–01:30, the Israeli military raided and patrolled the town of Yatta.
Raid – 2 taken prisoner: Hebron – 00:35–01:50, Israeli soldiers raided the city, taking prisoner two people.
Raid: Hebron – 00:50–02:00, Israeli Occupation forces raided and patrolled the town of Halhul.
YAWN!!!!!