Israel’s ‘Flour Massacre’ – When A Crime Becomes A ‘Tragedy’

Media Lens

(...) Far from jumping through hoops ‘to be balanced and impartial,’ the BBC seems embarrassed even to associate Israel with its own crimes. A typical BBC headline read:

‘World Food Programme says northern Gaza aid convoy blocked’

Was there a landslide? Was Hamas playing politics with food aid? The headline should have read:

‘Israel blocks northern Gaza aid convoy’

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Or consider the damning words of the Director-General of The World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who reported this month:

‘Grim findings during @WHO visits to Al-Awda and Kamal Adwan hospitals in northern #Gaza: severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of starvation, serious shortages of fuel, food and medical supplies, hospital buildings destroyed…

‘The situation at Al-Awda Hospital is particularly appalling, as one of the buildings is destroyed.

‘Kamal Adwan Hospital is the only paediatrics hospital in the north of Gaza, and is overwhelmed with patients. The lack of food resulted in the deaths of 10 children.’

The BBC headline reporting this story read:

‘Children starving to death in northern Gaza – WHO’

Did the crops fail? If Russia had caused child starvation in Ukraine, we can be confident the words ‘Putin’ and ‘Russia’ would have appeared front and centre in BBC reporting. (...)

On 29 February, a New York Times comment piece was titled:

‘Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children’

Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook commented:

‘Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children by blocking aid.’

On 5 March, a Reuters headline read:

‘As Gaza’s hunger crisis worsens, emaciated children seen at hospitals’

Author Assal Rad responded:

‘Gaza’s “hunger crisis” is not a natural phenomenon. Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is an act of collective punishment and a war crime.’ (...)

At least 118 Palestinian civilians were killed and at least 760 were injured after Israeli tanks opened fire on civilians seeking food from aid trucks on al-Rashid street to the west of Gaza City. The BBC’s immediate headline reactions were full of mystery:

‘Israel-Gaza war latest: More than 100 reported killed as crowd waits for Gaza aid’ (...)

Clearly, then, it was a massacre; so why the lack of clarity? Why was the word ‘massacre’ not used to describe a textbook example of a massacre in a report supposed to verify and clarify the truth?

As we noted recently, the Glasgow Media Group examined four weeks (7 October – 4 November, 2023) of BBC One daytime coverage of Gaza to identify which terms were used by journalists themselves – i.e. not in direct or reported statements – to describe Israeli and Palestinian deaths. They found that ‘murder’, ‘murderous’, ‘mass murder’, ‘brutal murder’ and ‘merciless murder’ were used a total of 52 times by journalists to refer to Israelis’ deaths but never in relation to Palestinian deaths. The group noted that:

‘The same pattern could be seen in relation to “massacre”, “brutal massacre” and “horrific massacre” (35 times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths); “atrocity”, “horrific atrocity” and “appalling atrocity” (22 times for Israeli deaths, once for Palestinian deaths); and “slaughter” (five times for Israeli deaths, not once for Palestinian deaths).’ (...)

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Tags: #media #media_bias #news #journalism #journalist #bbc #the_guardian #reuters #new_york_times #israel #gaza #palestine #palestinians #war #war_crimes #starvation #massacre #aid #humanitarian_aid #weapons

Gaza: Suspending UNRWA Aid Risks Hastening Famine

Human Rights Watch

Continue Funding as UN Agency Staff Is Investigated.

Governments should continue funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), given its vital role in averting a humanitarian catastrophe and the risk of famine in the Gaza Strip, while the agency investigates allegations that 12 of its staff were involved in the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks in southern Israel, Human Rights Watch said today. (...)

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People line up for bread at a partially collapsed but still operational bakehouse in Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir al Balah, Gaza, November 4, 2023. © 2023 Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images.

After Israeli authorities provided UNRWA with information about the alleged involvement of several of its employees in the October 7 attacks, UNRWA announced that it had “immediately terminated” the contracts of the employees identified and opened an investigation to “establish the truth without delay.” (...)

“The allegations against UNRWA staff are serious and the UN appears to be addressing them seriously. But withholding funds from the UN agency most able to provide immediate lifesaving food, water, and medicine to the more than 2.3 million people of Gaza shows callous indifference to what the world’s leading experts have warned is the looming risk of famine,” said Akshaya Kumar, crisis advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. (...)

Instead of withholding critical funds, the European Union and France issued statements clarifying that they intend to “review the matter in light of the outcome of the investigation announced by the UN and the actions it will take” and “decide when the time comes.” (...)

Shortly after the October 7 attack, Israeli authorities cut off essential services, including water and electricity, to Gaza’s population and blocked the entry of all but a trickle of fuel and critical humanitarian aid, acts of collective punishment that amount to war crimes. Human Rights Watch has also found that Israeli authorities are using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. (...)

Human Rights Watch has urged Israel’s key allies—including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany—to suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel so long as its forces commit, with impunity, widespread and serious abuses amounting to war crimes against Palestinian civilians. (...)

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a multi-partner initiative that regularly publishes information on the scale and severity of food insecurity and malnutrition globally, issued a report published at the end of December concluding that the entire population of Gaza is at crisis level of acute food insecurity or worse. (...)

As the occupying power, Israel is obliged to ensure that the humanitarian needs of the population of Gaza are met. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered provisional measures on January 26 as part of South Africa’s case against Israel alleging violations of the Genocide Convention. (...)

“Despite mounting risks of famine and a binding order by the World Court in a case about genocide, Israel’s foreign minister has now announced that he will lead a brazen effort to shut down the UN agency most responsible for delivering lifesaving aid,” Kumar said. “Unless governments reverse their decisions to suspend aid to UNRWA, the main humanitarian channel into Gaza, they risk contributing to the current catastrophe.”

Complete article

> See also: The Long War on Gaza

Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #international_law #war #humanitarian_aid #unemployment #west_bank

The Long War on Gaza

The New York Review ($)

Over fifty-six years, Israel has transformed Gaza from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one.

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Palestinians in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, conducting search and rescue operations in the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, December 14, 2023

Gaza is being devastated as we watch. A stated goal of Israel’s assault, which has so far killed more than 19,400 people, is to “destroy Hamas” in retaliation for its attack that killed 1,200 in Israel’s south in October. But a number of critics, such as the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, have argued persuasively that Israel’s goal is less to vanquish Hamas—impossible in any case—than to finally expel Palestinians from Gaza without international censure or sanction. (...)

The current desecration of Gaza is the latest stage in a process that has taken increasingly violent forms over time.
In the fifty-six years since it occupied the Strip in 1967, Israel has transformed Gaza from a territory politically and economically integrated with Israel and the West Bank into an isolated enclave, from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one. It has likewise removed Gaza’s residents from the sphere of politics, transforming them from a people with a nationalist claim to a population whose majority requires some form of humanitarian aid to sustain themselves. (...)

For decades the pressure on Palestinians in Gaza has been immense and unrelenting. The damage it has done—high levels of unemployment and poverty, widespread infrastructural destruction, and environmental degradation, including dangerous contamination of water and soil, among other factors—has become a permanent condition. (...)

Israel has never known what to do with this tiny strip of land. From the beginning of the occupation, the country’s leaders recognized that Gaza would have to be pacified to preclude the creation of a Palestinian state—their primary objective—and minimize Palestinian resistance were they to annex the West Bank. During the first two decades of the occupation, from the Six-Day War of 1967 to the start of the first intifada, their preferred tactic was controlling Gaza’s economy. (...)

The first intifada made it clear that this strategy of pacification had failed. Improved living standards could no longer compensate for the absence of freedom. (...)

That year [2007] Israel imposed a blockade that severely limited both trade with Gaza and the entry of specific food products into the Strip. But the blockade—now in its seventeenth year—is only a more extreme form of measures that were already in place. (...)

Early in 1991—before Hamas started launching rockets and orchestrating suicide bombings—Israel began restricting and periodically blocking the movement of workers to and from Gaza, as well as the trade upon which its small economy disproportionately depended. (...) In January 1991 Israel canceled the general exit permit that made it possible for Palestinians to move freely through Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. (...)

The cancellation of the general exit permit marked the start of Israel’s closure policy. (...) As B’Tselem, another rights group focused on the West Bank and Gaza, has put it, “Isolating Gaza from the rest of the world, including separating it from the West Bank, is part of a longstanding Israeli policy.”

This policy of separation and containment became more explicit in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords. In 1994 Israel built a fence around Gaza, the first of several enclosures. (...)

In 2005 Israel “disengaged” from the Strip, removing all of its settlements and military forces. Israeli officials have since argued that this formally ended the country’s occupation of Gaza. According to international law, however, Israel remains an occupier, as it maintains “effective control” over Gaza’s borders (except for Rafah, which Egypt controls), sea access, airspace, and population registry. (...)

Another crucial effect of Israeli policy—more noticeable after Hamas came to power in 2007. (...) Israel in effect recast its relationship with Gaza from occupation to warfare, as evidenced by the numerous deadly assaults it launched on the territory over the past seventeen years—among them Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Hot Winter (2008), Operation Cast Lead (2008-09), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), Operation Protective Edge (2014), Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021), Operation Breaking Dawn (2022), and Operation Shield and Arrow (2023). (...)

Under this new approach, Israel dispensed altogether with the notion that Gaza could have a market economy. “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza,” US officials wrote from Tel Aviv in November 2008, “Israeli officials have confirmed … on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.” More specifically, they aimed to keep it “functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.” (...)

Since 2010, Israel has periodically eased restrictions, but the blockade has nonetheless almost entirely destroyed Gaza’s economy. On the eve of the current conflict, unemployment was at 46.4 percent. (In 2000, before the blockade, it was at 18.9 percent.) Approximately 65 percent of the population was food-insecure, meaning they could not safely access enough nutritious food to meet their dietary needs, while 80 percent required some form of international assistance to feed their families. (...)

Gaza could only experience relief, not progress. (...) “The West Bank and Gaza are now almost completely delinked,” a World Bank report stated in 2008, “with Gaza starkly transforming from a potential trade route to a walled hub of humanitarian donations.” (...)

Israel has, in other words, created a humanitarian problem to manage a political problem. (...)

For the past ten weeks, with the exception of a one-week “humanitarian pause,” Gaza has been under a total siege; Israel has virtually halted the entry of fuel and restricted the entry of food, among other critical necessities. (...)

Complete article ($)

Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #international_law #war #humanitarian_aid #unemployment #west_bank

Civilians make up 61% of Gaza deaths from airstrikes, Israeli study finds

The Guardian

Civilian proportion of deaths is higher than that in all world conflicts in 20th century, Haaretz newspaper says.

The aerial bombing campaign by Israel in Gaza is the most indiscriminate in terms of civilian casualties in recent years, a study published by an Israeli newspaper has found.

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An injured Palestinian girl in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. Photograph: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Shutterstock.

The analysis by Haaretz came as Israeli forces fought to consolidate their control of northern Gaza on Saturday, bombing the Shejaiya district of Gaza City, while also conducting airstrikes on Rafah, a town on the southern border with Egypt where the Israeli army has told people in Gaza to take shelter. (...)

In the first three weeks of the current operation, Swords of Iron, the civilian proportion of total deaths rose to 61%, in what Haaretz described as “unprecedented killing”. The ratio is significantly higher than the civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world during the 20th century, in which civilians accounted for about half the dead.

“The broad conclusion is that extensive killing of civilians not only contributes nothing to Israel’s security, but that it also contains the foundations for further undermining it,” Haaretz concluded. “The Gazans who will emerge from the ruins of their homes and the loss of their families will seek revenge that no security arrangements will be able to withstand.” (...)

The figures will make uneasy reading for the Biden administration, which is facing global criticism and isolation for vetoing a UN security council vote for a ceasefire on Friday. (...)

Human Rights Watch said the US risked “complicity in war crimes” by continuing to provide Israel with weapons and diplomatic support. Paul O’Brien, the executive director of Amnesty International USA, said: “With this veto, the US government is shamefully turning its back on immense civilian suffering, a staggering death toll, and unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.” (...)

Complete article

> See also: Genocide – The Gaze From The Abyss

Tags: #israel #gaza #palestine #palestinians #occupied_territories #war #war_crimes #international_law #collateral_damage #weapons #victims #civilian_victims #humanitarian_aid #un #united_nations #ceasefire