Israel maintains an illegal air, sea and land blockade on Gaza, not allowing anyone, including children, to escape being bombed to death.
The US government, providing Israel with warplanes, missiles, weapons, ammunition and political and diplomatic backing, is complicit in this ongoing genocide of bombing to death thousands of militarily confined civilians, mostly women and children .
The Israeli government claims the right to bomb its illegally occupied and captive Palestinians and kill all the members of their Hamas government.
As to Israel’s using the Israelis killed in the Hamas Oct 7th attack to justify the Israeli response of murdering already 12, 500 Palestinian civilians, resent investigations find that a large fraction of the bodies recovered had been charred beyond all recognition, making it very difficult to distinguish between Israelis and Hamas attackers. Since the Hamas fighters had only been carrying rifles and other small arms, all those victims must have been killed by explosive tank shells and Hellfire missiles. Indeed, newly released video footage revealed that hundreds of Israeli cars had been incinerated by such munitions, suggesting that many or most of the Israelis killed fleeing the dance festival had probably died at the hands of trigger-happy Apache pilots, who reported that they had blasted anything that moved.
Israel admits apache helicopters fired on their own civilians running from the Supernova music festival.
“The pilots realized that there was tremendous difficulty in distinguishing within the occupied outposts and settlements who was a terrorist and who was a soldier or civilian… The rate of fire against the thousands of terrorists was tremendous at first, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow down the attacks and carefully select the targets.” https://middleeastmonitor.com/20231030-report-7-october-testimonies-strikes-major-blow-to-israeli-narrative/…
Even more astounding is Israel’s claim that it is Hamas’ fault that Israeli Army, Navy and Air Force has to kill the women and children ‘shielding’ Hamas. How many little kids and babies are killed or wounded, their homes destroyed, in order to kill one Hamas fighting for the children’s future freedom? Israelis past record of its children killing ratio has been documented
B’Tselem tables of child fatalities in Israel, West Bank
& Gaza, 1987–2022
Dec. 9, 1987 – Sept. 28, 2000 — 18 Israeli 281 Palestinian children
Sep. 29, 2000 – Dec. 26, 2008 — 123 Israeli 961Palestinian children
Dec. 27, 2008 – Jan. 18, 2009 — 0 Israeli 345 Palestinian children
Jan. 19, 2009 – Oct. 31, 2012 — 6 Israeli 37 Palestinian children
Nov. 1, 2012 – Jan. 18, 2022 — 10 Israeli 840 Palestinian children
Total Israeli children killed 27— Total Palestinian children killed 2,804
Comparison: For every Israeli child death,104 Palestinian Children die
Since Oct.7, 2023 a claim that dozens of Israeli children died
Since Oct.7, 2023 more than 4,200 Palestinian children died as of Nov.16
Making the ratio Israeli children to Palestinian about 1 to 110 and rising.
Israel has been mass killing Palestinians in order to keep them militarily imprisoned in the gigantic open air concentration camp it has criminally maintained for a half century.
Since the 1948 resolution regarding the Palestinian Right of Return and/or compensation for their homes, land and property, the UN General Assembly has passed resolution after resolution (over 200) requiring Israel to protect the population in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza it militarily occupies, illegally – for example:
1979 December 6: Resolution 34/70: Reaffirms previous calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories
1983 December 19: Resolutions 38/180:
Calls all nations to suspend or sever all diplomatic, economic and technological ties with Israel. Condemnation of Israel on various topics including the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, war in Lebanon and the annexation of Jerusalem.
UN News 23 October 2019 Human Rights
The international community has a responsibility and legal obligation to compel Israel to end its 52 year-long “occu-annexation” of Palestinian territory and remove barriers preventing Palestinian self-determination.
UN News
27 October 2022 Human Rights
Israel’s occupation is illegal and indistinguishable from a “settler-colonial” situation, which must end, as a pre-condition for Palestinians to exercise their right to self-determination, the UN’s independent expert on the occupied Palestinian territory said on Thursday.
“For over 55 years, the Israeli military occupation has prevented the realisation of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, violating each component of that right and willfully pursuing the ‘de-Palestinianisation’ of the occupied territory,”
said Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, in her report to the UN General Assembly.
The Israeli occupation violates Palestinian territorial sovereignty by seizing, annexing, fragmenting, and transferring its own civilian population to the occupied territory.
Ms. Albanese called for condemning Israel’s
“intentionally acquisitive, segregationist and repressive settler-colonial occupation.”
UN News 14 Nov. 2023
UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, has rejected the notion that the war in Israel began on October 7, and rejected as well the Jewish state’s right to defend itself against a threat emanating from a territory it militarily occupies.
“No, Israel Does Not Have the Right to Self-Defense In International Law Against its Occupied Palestinian Territory · to the contrary, Israel Has A Duty To Protect Palestinians in the territory it illegally confines them.”
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addressing the UN General Assembly on October 24 put it mildly repeating a second time that: [2]
“…The October 7 Hamas attack didn’t happen in a vacuum, The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. ”
“UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a statement on Sunday, Nov. 19,
“This must stop. I reiterate my call for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.”
On Nov. 19 an UNRWA employee said.
“Just getting into one of the shelters makes you burst into tears,”“Children looking for food and water and standing in queues for over six hours just to get a piece of bread or a bottle of water. People are literally sleeping on streets here in Khan Younis as thousands keep escaping from the north.”
Attacks on schools, shelters
“I watched with sheer horror reports from an attack on the Al-Fakhoura UNRWA school-turned-shelter in northern Gaza”.
Classrooms sheltering displaced families were hit and at least 24 people were reported killed in the strike. Up to 7,000 people were in the school at the time, the UNRWA chief said. On Friday, following strikes on the UNRWA Al-Falah/Zeitoun school in Gaza City, ambulances could not reach the school, where 4,000 people were sheltering.
Since 2015, the UN General Assembly has adopted 140 resolutions criticizing Israel, mainly over its treatment of the Palestinians. The Times of Israel
A word about Israel claiming the right of self-defense and/or vengeance as a victim of ‘terrorism’ on October 7th. Israeli kin and friends of those killed in the attack grieving is entirely human and must be respected. But Israelis should not forget the famous Israeli terrorism used to conquer the land and population of the Holy Land in 1948 and many times since then – one example described in an Albert Einstein letter to the New York Times. Not to mention, the present ongoing terror bombing having already killed many thousands of Palestinian children and injured even more numerous thousands.
It may be also relevant that the Hebrew Bible (which is also held holy by both Christians and by the Qur’an 0f Islam) reports the Holy Land to be having been conquered by the Jewish God ordered city massacres of all human life including breast feeding infants.
But talk of terror is just words. Ending the murderous military occupation of Palestine by Israel is what would save lives.
This murderous imprisonment of millions has been either warmly or indifferently accepted as part of the so called ‘rules-based international order’ hailed by the hegemonist nations of Caucasian population, who also passively accept, some even proudly applaud, the massive human destruction of nearby Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan.
Surviving Palestinians like everyone else might have to look forward to a hopefully early end of the unmitigated genocidal and farcical ‘Rules-based International Order’ now still being often spoken of by a dutiful President of the United States simplemindedly representing the investors in war controlling the government, the CIA, the military and mainstream media.
Western allies are already finding it harder to obscure and justify their complicity in what are indisputable Israeli crimes against humanity. French President Emmanuel Macron broke ranks this past weekend. His message was summed up bluntly by the BBC:
“Macron calls on Israel to stop killing Gaza’s women and babies.”
Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and in the US by Dissident Voice, Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents and others; now resides in NYC; First effort was a series of articles on deadly cultural pollution endangering seven areas of life emanating from Western corporate owned commercial media published in Hong Kong’s Window Magazine 1993; Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; article China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the Howard Zinn co-founded King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign, and website historian of the Ramsey Clark co-founded Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign, which contains a history of US crimes in 19 countries up to 2006
Freedom fighters?
I disagree that the atrocities of November 7 (reported by legitimate press outlets) — mutilation (of live people) and rape of teenage girls, setting houses on fire with families inside, killing and kidnapping babies — is justified by Israeli crimes against innocent people.