IDF Killed 64 Children While Freeing 4 Hostages
An Exchange Instead Would Have Brought Happiness
NBC Rare Coverage of Israeli Defence Force Killing of 64 Children During Its Freeing of 4 Hostages
8 Months of Western Media Tight Focus on Hostages
Ever since October 7, 2023, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN, PBS, along with BBC, DW, NHK other Western entertainment/news conglomerates and wire services like AP, UPI, Reuters and Israeli media have sought to keep their viewers, readers and listeners attention on the hostages and away from any explanation, reason or justification of Palestinians seeking to exchange the hostages for some of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
This is of course consistent with underreporting the Palestinians suffering the illegal military occupation, subjugation and often murderous treatment from the Israeli military which operates largely with impunity within Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
Western media focus on the hostages is even more important in justifying Israel’s wholesale annihilation of much of the population of Hamas governed Gaza, homes, apartment buildings, mosques, schools, stores, bakeries, playgrounds all claimed by Israel to be in defence of the Palestinian guerrilla attack of Israel on October 7, 2023.
However, since U.S. has built up the Israel military to be one of the most powerful in the world and perfectly capable of defending itself against any subsequent Hamas guerrilla attack, the Israeli obliteration of Gaza’s cities and its people is obviously not defensive, and after Israel’s generations of crimes against Palestinians, the October 7, invasion was hardly unexpected. UN Secretary General António Guterres said as much right after the October 7, 2023 event. Guterres noted that “these attacks did not happen in a vacuum”—highlighting the impact of 56 years of occupation on the Palestinian people. (United Nations Press).
Israel’s Responsibilities as an Occupying Power Under International Humanitarian Law
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, regarding Israel’s right to self-defense in the context of Israel’s (illegal) military occupation of Palestinian lands and people:
“Israel has the right to defend itself, but it cannot invoke this right to perpetrate acts that violate international law against a people it is occupying.”
In her report to the UN General Assembly in October 2022, Rapporteur Albanese noted,
“An occupying power has a duty to protect the occupied population and cannot invoke self-defense to justify the use of force against its own protected persons.”
Western news outlets refer to Palestinian freedom fighters as ‘terrorists’ constantly reporting that some Western governments list Hamas and other armed groups fighting the Israeli occupation as terrorist organisations, however, China, as a permanent member of the Security Council, has backed the right of the Palestinian people to use arms.
“The struggle waged by peoples for their liberation, right to self-determination, including armed struggle against colonialism, occupation, aggression, domination against foreign forces should not be considered terror acts”
– Zhang Jun, China’s UN ambassador
Addressing the ICJ on Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land, February 22, 2024,
Beijing’s envoy said there were “various people (who) freed themselves from colonial rule” and they could use “all available means, including armed struggle”.(seemed an indirect reference to the American War of Independence from Britain.)
As a conscientious peoples historian activist I have allowed myself to be subjected to anti-Chinese, anti-UN, anti-Hamas, pro-Israeli news slants in the interest of knowing just how the average mainstream media addict comes to accept genocide as an inevitable condition of modern warfare and wars as an unpreventable source of financial gain.
Therefore NBC’s very poignant, even painful to look at and read coverage of the Israeli Defence Force killing of 64 children during its freeing of 4 hostages on June 8, 2024, came as a surprise to this writer and life long sympathiser of the Palestinian inhuman predicament. This sorrowful coverage of the horrendous head wound and death of a lovely four year old boy and the sight of a seven year old girl alive but with more than half her face gone, is perhaps one indication that just perhaps even the racist inclined CIA overseen media of the hegemonic Western nations can no longer tolerate Israeli genocide in its ever more outrageously gruesome aspects.
Readers are invited to share some grief with Arab Palestinian families suffering soul crushing amount of anguish for the sheer numbers of the dead and dying children and the catatonic state of surviving kids. Just click on the hyperlink below:
NBC News June 8, 2024
Gazan families mourn children killed during IDF’s hostage rescue
WEB Gaza’s Health Ministry says at least 64 children were killed by Israeli fire during the June 8 raid to rescue four hostages being held by Hamas.
The four hostages — Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Shlomi Ziv and Andrey Kozlov — were safely extracted from the Gaza Strip and cameras captured their emotional reunions with their families after eight months of captivity.
The joy experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis during the first hostage exchange as they fell into the loving arms of waiting family and friends could have been repeated instead of this horrific bloodbath of some 270 Palestinians, among them 64 precious children on June 8, 2024
Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Shlomi Ziv and Andrey Kozlov will most likely never forget that their homecoming was one sided. No Palestinian got to welcome home family members long imprisoned with or without having been charged as seems to the case for so many incarcerated and more being seized every day.
… and how shall the four Israelis back home with their families ever put out of their mind the unspeakable horror and indescribably intense suffering of the families of the 64 Arab children slain as the price of their release?
Actually, how shall any of us ever forget that Americans have been backing and supplying these abominations of using weapons of mass destruction upon fellow human beings and their children in full knowledge of the profits being made by U.S. corporations.
Post Script
Post Script
What of those buried beneath the ruble and the amputees ?
Post Script
,,, and those already starved to death and those starving to death and those who will starve to death
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, in Germany & Sweden Einartysken,and in the US by Greanville Post, Dissident Voice; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents; Minority Perspective, UK,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, https://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/which contains a history of US crimes in 19 nations from 1945 thru 2012.
