Hordes of settlers continue to wreck havoc in Palestinian occupied territory .. another attack on Al-Mughair village near Ramallah that left a 35 year old man dead and so many houses and cars burnt. #ApartheidIsrael pic.twitter.com/pBcXuOMzqi

— Amal Jadou (@AmalJadou7) April 12, 2024

Palestinian civilians, especially in villages in area C have been abandoned by the world, and so, for that matter, have all the Palestinian populations facing the violence of armed Israeli settlers. The expansion of the Israeli settlements, considered illegal under International Law, and built on stolen Palestinian land, goes on at its fastest rate ever. Meanwhile, Israel exploits the diversion of the world’s attention by its barbaric assault on the Gaza strip to strengthen its grip on the West Bank.

According to a recent UN report which covers the period from November 1 2022 to October 31 2023, illegal Israeli settlements expanded at unprecedented rate since records began in 2017. Approximately, 24,300 units were advanced in existing Israeli settlements including 9670 in East Jerusalem. The same report also highlighted that about 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank including 465,000 mainly live in area C in the West bank and 230,000 settlers in East Jerusalem. Displacement or small scale ethnic cleansing were also carried out against Palestinian herding communities. This uprooted about 1105 Palestinians from 28 herding communities from their land between January 2022 and September 2023. Further 878 people including 435 children from 15 herding communities were displaced between 7th and 23rd of October 2023.

The figure of 700,000 settlers is particularly alarming. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, in 2002, the number of illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank was 380,000 settlers. This massive increase reflects how different Israeli governments worked tirelessly to almost double the number of settlers in the West Bank in 21 years. Such a doubling was also pursued by Israel after it signed the Oslo Accord with the PLO in1993, promising to withdraw from the Palestinian territories by 1997.

It is ironic that the Oslo Accords which were supposed to lead to peace and the creation of a Palestinian state, were followed by the creation of ever more Israeli settlements after dividing the West Bank into areas A, B and C, killing any hope for just peace. To illustrate, area A is about 18 percent of the West Bank and encompasses the main urban areas. Most matters there are under the authority of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Area B is about 21 percent of the West Bank. It is under joint control between Israel and the PA , which affects health, education and the economy. 60 percent of the West Bank is area C. It is mainly rural, and is where the Palestinians have their main agricultural land, so that it is crucial for their food security. Israel is in full control in this area.

The Israeli refusal to withdraw as agreed enabled Israel to deny the Palestinians permits to build new homes in most of the West Bank while construction in the illegal Israeli settlements was accelerated. These discriminatory policies forced desperate Palestinians to build without Israeli permission. Many of those who dared to do so had their homes demolished by Israel. Between 2009 and 2022, 9,128 Palestinian homes were demolished, causing the displacement of 13,171 Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israeli government offers the Israeli settlers a wide range of financial incentives and subsidies, including but not exclusive of grants and preferential loans to buy property, reduced land prices, reduced taxes for individual and businesses and crucially, indemnity to compensate for any loss of income resulting from EU custom duties. This institutional racism is another manifestation of an apartheid state and settler colonialism.

CBC News Video: “West Bank engulfed by wave of settler violence”

For economic reasons, these racist policies are designed to encourage more Israelis to live on stolen Palestinian land in breach of the international law. This strategy is aimed at easing the demand on housing inside Israel and speeding up its colonization of the West Bank ahead of its declared plan to annex area C to Israel. These policies, combined with the settlers violence will force more Palestinians out of area C towards the already crowded and smaller areas of A and B. This is already causing property price inflation and decreasing affordability. Additionally, these areas are already subjected to frequent Israeli raids, sieges and extrajudicial executions. This is besides other socioeconomic problems such as unemployment and poverty caused mainly by the Israeli occupation.

While the world’s influential governments are allowing Israel to carry on with its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, the same governments are turning a blind eye to Zionist colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Alas the Palestine Authority of Mahmoud Abbas and all the Palestinian factions in the West Bank are spectators, watching as if they are neutral without even attempting to organize an effective non-violent campaign to boycott Israeli products. If things continue as they are now, it is only a matter of time before the West Bank will face an ethnic cleansing similar to what happened in the 1948 Nakbah.

The US national debt is $34.5 trillion, up $2 trillion since last summer, against a gross domestic product of $27 trillion. For the debt to run so far ahead of GDP could cause the US economy to crash. That is, the US Congress does not have $26 billion to give to Israel in the first place.

The enormous windfall will allow the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to kill or wound a Palestinian child in Gaza every 10 minutes (see below).

Israel’s bombing raids, including against designated safe areas in Gaza, continued daily this week. On Saturday, the Israeli Air Force bombed a house in the center of Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have been pushed from the north, killing six persons and wounding others. Rafah had been designated a safe zone by the Israelis when they were trying to force people down there.

Emma Graham-Harrison writes at The Guardian, “Ahmed Barhoum lost his wife, Rawan Radwan, and their five-year-old daughter Alaa. ‘They bombed a house full of displaced people, women and children,’ he told Associated Press on Saturday, crying as he cradled Alaa’s body, wrapped in a white shroud, and gently rocked her. ‘This is a world devoid of all human values and morals.'”

Saturday’s strikes brought the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 8 to over 34,000, Graham-Harrison reports. These numbers exclude more thousands buried under rubble when Israeli fighter-jets destroyed civilian apartment buildings. Some 77,000 Palestinians have been wounded, 12,000 of them children (see below).

On Wednesday through Friday of this week, Israeli bombing raids killed 113 Palestinians and injured 169 Palestinians.

UNICEF said this week that 12,000 children, at the very least, have been wounded by Israeli bombardment or other fire since last October.

That comes to 70 children injured every day, or nearly 3 every hour, one every 20 minutes or so. Since some 13,000 children have been killed, that means that a child has been either killed or wounded every 10 minutes.

Spokesperson Tess Ingram Ingram said,

“”I left Gaza yesterday after spending two weeks there. It was my second mission into Gaza this year. By far, what struck me most about this mission was the number of wounded children. Not just in the hospitals, but on the streets. In their makeshift shelters . . . their lives forever changed by the horrors of war.”

Half of the inhabitants of Gaza are children.

Most of the hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli military. Of 36, only 11 are still partially functioning, mainly as warehouses for the sick and wounded since they lack “needles, stitches, anaesthetic.” Children lie on mattresses or floors “languishing in pain.”

Despite the desperate need for medavac transportation of these children, many amputees, from Gaza, only 3,500 such requests have been granted in over six months.

Guardian News Video: “‘I can’t find food’: despair in Gaza as children face malnutrition”

WHO says that in northern Gaza, between 12% and 16.5% of children (6-59 months) have been stricken with with acute malnutrition, and 3% of children have severe acute malnutrition. In southern Gaza, 2-6% of children have acute malnutrition.

Severe acute malnutrition presents with substantial muscle wasting in the arms, unnatural thinness, and build-up of fluid and swelling in the feet. Acute malnutrition has the same symptoms but they are less exaggerated. Even a short bout of malnutrition leaves children with permanent cognitive deficits and learning disabilities.

In April, 15% of the aid missions to northern Gaza and to parts of southern Gaza that require coordination with Israel have been denied by Israeli authorities, often on arbitrary grounds.

Because Israel cut off potable water or destroyed its delivery systems with bombing, and because 270,000 tons of solid waste has accumulated in the absence of hygiene services, WHO recorded 345,768 cases of diarrhea, with 105,635 cases in children under 5. In toddlers and infants such gastrointestinal diseases can eaily lead to fatal dehydration. Without an immediate ceasefire, a team at Johns Hopkins has predicted that 11% of the deaths in Gaza over the next four months will be from epidemic diseases.

Israel is using facial recognition programs and drones to locate and kill the 37,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, but at least 10% of their identifications are wrong, and they often strike at these individuals when they are surrounded by their wives, children, other relatives, and neighbors. Israeli rules of engagement, the loosest in the world aside from the gangs of the blood diamond cartels, allow up to 20 civilians to be killed with each strike at a member of the Qassam Brigades paramilitary. Most of these members had no knowledge of the October 7 attack, which was planned and carried out by a small clique. The Israeli destruction of civilian infrastructure and the imposition of starvation on the population are forms of illegal collective punishment.

Israel’s government was so furious at Joe Biden for abstaining rather than vetoing the resolution that it has canceled a planned trip to Washington. But this intransigence in the face of international law and international institutions could end up hurting Israel severely. Since the state is already under scrutiny for committing genocide by the International Court of Justice, its truculence and defiance of the UNSC can only harm its case.

In a further blow to Israeli policy, Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 of the UN Human Rights Council, issued a report Monday entitled “Anatomy of a Genocide.

Albanese, an attorney with degrees from Pisa and SOAS in London, has worked for a decade with the UN on human rights law. She is also at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University as an Affiliate Scholar.

Her report begins, “After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza.” She points out that the Israeli military has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, included over 13,000 children, and has wounded 71,000. She says that not only has 80% of the population been made refugees but 70% of the areas where people lived have been destroyed. So they have no place to return to. Corpses have decayed “in homes, in the street or under the rubble.”

The report concludes that Israel’s policies in Gaza give “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”

The Special Rapporteur finds that Israeli authorities are misusing and distorting the international law governing the prosecution of war (jus in bello), disregarding their function in protecting innocent civilian noncombatants, “in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.” In other words, Israeli officials’ invocation of international humanitarian law is nothing more than a “camouflage.”

The Special Rapporteur argues that genocidal projects are inherent in settler-colonial states. She cites the mass killings of the Native Americans in the US, the First Nations in Australia, and the Herrero in Namibia. Since the settler-colonial state covets the land and the resources of the native people, it has a motive for provoking the disintegration of the native people’s social institutions and very identity.

AJ+ Video: “How Israeli TV Sells Gaza’s Destruction”

The report alleges, “Israel’s settler movement and leaders have framed Gaza as a territory to be ‘re-colonized’ and its population as invaders to be expelled. These unlawful claims are integral to the project of consolidating the ‘exclusive and unassailable right of the Jewish people’ on the land of ‘Greater Israel’, as reaffirmed by Prime Minister Netanyahu in December 2022.”

One of the problems for the Israeli government’s attempts to defend itself against charges of genocide is how openly and volubly Netanyahu and his cronies have proclaimed their intentions and the racist bases for them.

Turning to the charges of genocide, the report notes that in just the first few months of the current Israeli campaign against Gaza, the Israeli army deployed

a) over 25,000 tons of explosives (equivalent to two nuclear bombs) on countless buildings

b) that these targets were chosen using Artificial Intelligence

c) that the Israeli military dropped 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs in “densely populated areas” and even on the “safe zones” declared by that very Israeli military.

d) The Israelis killed an average of 250 people a day in this period, including 100 children a day, destroying entire neighborhoods and necessary infrastructure.

Albanese points out that by early December, the Israeli government was alleging that it had killed “7,000 terrorists” in Gaza. But at that point only 5,000 adult males had been killed, so it is clear that the Israeli authorities considered all of them terrorists.

In a compelling bit of reasoning, she points out that “This is indicative of an intent to indiscriminately target members of the protected group, assimilating them to active fighter status by default.” That is, the Israeli government’s triumphalist statistics are themselves genocidal.

She estimates moreover, that 10 children are dying of acute malnutrition daily that that over 500,000 Palestinians could die from malnutrition and poor health conditions in 2024.

So that’s the first element of genocide, “Killing members of the group.”

The report then goes down the other criteria for genocide. “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group?” Check. This includes depriving them of needed medicines and inflicting psychological harm.

Then there is “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Check.

Here she mentions the destruction of 77% of healthcare facilities, 68% of telcoms, almost 50% of roads, and 60% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, all the universities, 60% of schools, etc.

What about “Genocidal intent”? Check.

The Israeli officials have made this one a no-brainer. Albanese writes,

50. In the latest Gaza assault, direct evidence of genocidal intent is uniquely present. Vitriolic genocidal rhetoric has painted the whole population as the enemy to be eliminated and forcibly displaced.150 High-ranking Israeli officials with command authority have issued harrowing public statements evincing genocidal intent, including as follows: (a) President Isaac Herzog stated that “an entire nation out there…is responsible” for the 7 October attack, and that Israel would “break their backbone”;151 (b) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Palestinians as “Amalek”152 and “monsters”.153 The Amalek reference is to a biblical passage in which God commands Saul “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”.154 (c) Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals”,155 and announced “full offense” on Gaza, having “released all the restraints…”

Finally, the Israeli military has subverted basic principles of international humanitarian law, which makes a key distinction between combatants and noncombatants. In essence, Israel’s government has treated all Palestinians in Gaza as combatants. Moreover, the Israeli military has declared all civilian institutions to be Hamas “power centers,” obliterating the distinction between hospitals and military garrisons. While such “objects” can be legitimate targets if they are used by the enemy for military purposes, they are only targets while they are so being used. Israel’s army is treating them as legitimate targets if they ever were or potentially might be used by Hamas. It is thus ignoring the distinction between military and civilian objects.

He continued, “It is not a war between soldiers and soldiers. It is a war between a well equipped army on the one hand and women and children on the other.”

Lula is not the first world leader to compare Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Hitler over his actions in Gaza — Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan made the same comparison.

Since Hitler murdered six million Jews, the comparison is hurtful. It could also be rejected on grounds of scale. Hitler not only killed all those European Jews, he also killed 6 million Poles. And consider Ukraine: “of the 41.7 million people living in Ukrainian Soviet Republic before the war, only 27.4 million were alive in Ukraine in 1945. Official data says that at least 8 million Ukrainians lost their lives: 5.5 – 6 million civilians, and more than 2.5 million natives of Ukraine were killed at the front. The data varies between 8 to 14 million killed, however, only 6 million have been identified.”

The Times and the Sunday Times Video: “Brazil’s Lula likens Gaza war to Holocaust”

While Netanyahu’s policies are not like those of Nazi Germany in almost any respect if we consider absolute numbers and consider the scale of killing, Lula is not completely in error if we consider more qualitative aspects of history and look to European fascism as a whole and not just the German National Socialists (who were peculiar in many ways).

FIRST: KEEPING PEOPLE STATELESS ON THE BASIS OF ETHNICITY

For instance, the Fascists stripped citizenship from millions of people and made them stateless, without the rights that come from a direct relationship to a state of their own. Chief Justice Earl Warren defined citizenship as “the right to have rights.”

Hitler took citizenship from German Jews but also from the Roma and from persons of African heritage.

Netanyahu keeps 5.5 million Palestinians in the occupied territories stateless and without citizenship. So his policies in this narrow regard are similar to those of the National Socialists in the 1930s. In essence, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are living under something like the Nuremberg Laws. Their establishments and homes are attacked by militant Israeli squatters with impunity in a sort of rolling Kristallnacht.

Note that by Israeli law, Israeli squatters in the occupied Palestinian territories have all the citizenship rights of other Israelis. So the lack of rights on the West Bank is not territorial. It is by ethnicity.

Netanyahu has boasted about derailing the Oslo Peace Accords and presents himself as the only one who can prevent a Palestinian state from being established. He reiterated his opposition to any international diplomatic track that leads to a Palestinian state just this weekend.

SECOND: DEPRIVATION OF BASIC INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS

Another feature of Fascism, underlined by Robert Paxton, is the elimination of individual rights. Israel’s regime over the occupied, stateless Palestinians fully demonstrates this feature. Palestinians can be arrested under “administrative detention” without charge or trial or habeas corpus and held for months or years. We have seen a treatment of detained Palestinians in Gaza that constitutes war crimes. It is alleged that forms of torture are practiced.

THIRD: TOTAL WAR

Netanyahu’s Gaza campaign has demonstrated a reckless disregard for the lives of innocent noncombatants, who make up nearly all of the nearly 30,000 people so far killed, and who have been deprived of domiciles and sufficient food and potable water by the Israeli military.

Total war was adopted as a military strategy by fascist states, according to historian Alan Kramer. One academic summarized his argument: “Kramer indicated a very interesting question regarding the specificity of the kind of war implemented by fascist regimes during the thirties and the forties, characterized by its genocidal nature and opened, according to him, with the colonial war launched by Italy in Abyssinia [Ethiopia] in 1935. Kramer underlined that the specificity of this particular way of waging war typical of fascism would define itself by the final elimination of the «distinction between combatants and non-combatants», pointing how in the six years of this conflict between 350.000 and 760.000 Ethiopians were killed, victims of an asymmetric war based on the overwhelming use of air force, chemical weapons and politics of collective terror against any sign of real or imagined resistance.”

The fascist way of war eliminates the distinction between combatants and non-combatants and wreaks mass death on the latter to achieve military aims. There doesn’t seem much doubt that Netanyahu is waging total war on Gaza and Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and a whole plethora of Israeli officials have repeatedly insisted that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza. This, even though half of Gaza’s population consists children.

Total war easily leads to genocide, of course, which is why the International Court of Justice has found it at least plausible that Netanyahu is waging a genocide in Gaza, attempting to destroy a people in part or in whole because of who they are.

So, no, Netanyahu is not a Hitler. But, yes, his policies bear a strong resemblance to those of inter-war Fascism.

@saribashi | –

( Human Rights Watch ) – It has been almost four months since Israel began its strikes on Gaza, following the massacre of hundreds of civilians by Hamas-led gunmen in the country’s south. Roughly 80 percent of the Strip’s 2.2 million residents have been internally displaced, more than a million of whom are sheltering in Rafah, on the Egyptian border. Over 26,000 people have been killed, including at least 10,000 children, according to local authorities.

Even as the hostilities continue, attention is turning to what to do when the fighting subsides. The US government has said that Gaza’s internally displaced residents should be allowed to return to their homes, a right safeguarded by international law. But many will not have homes to return to. The UN has reported that more than 60 percent of the Strip’s housing units have been damaged or destroyed. The electricity grid, water and sewage system, health system, mills, agricultural lands, and other civilian infrastructure have also been badly damaged. Most people in Gaza, moreover, are already refugees or descendants of refugees who fled or were expelled from territory that became part of the state of Israel. To which homes, then, do Palestinians in Gaza have a right to return?

Aljazeera English Video: “Overnight Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip kill dozens of Palestinians”

I’m an Israeli American Jew, married to a Palestinian refugee from Gaza. Our family histories suggest an answer to that question. The first time the Israeli military drove my mother-in-law from her home, she was about five years old (she has no birth certificate). In 1948, as Israeli soldiers neared her village in what is now the southern coast of Israel, her family fled to Gaza, among more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled in the war that led to the creation of the state of Israel. (Palestinians call that mass displacement the Nakba, or catastrophe.) They lived in a tent in a refugee camp before moving into a small concrete house with an asbestos roof. In the camp she married a man from her village, which the Israeli authorities eventually demolished. They had five children together.

The second time the Israeli military destroyed her house, she was a single mother in her thirties, raising the children on her own – her husband had fled to Egypt during the 1967 Israeli conquest of the Gaza Strip. The occupying Israeli military demolished her home in the1970s, presumably to provide more space for military maneuvering through the overcrowded refugee camp. She and her children then lived with relatives. In the 1990s, after Israel turned over much of Gaza’s land management to the Palestinian Authority, she was allocated a place in the camp on which to build a family complex of three apartments, one for herself and one each for two sons and their families.

She was eighty when the Israeli military forced her from her home a third time. This past October she fled to Rafah with her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, after the Israeli military ordered northern Gaza’s one million inhabitants to flee south. Soon after they fled, my brother-in-law got a call from an Israeli military official warning him to evacuate the family home, which was going to be bombed in ten minutes. “I’m not leaving,” he replied, even though he was already in Rafah. My brother-in-law has a resilient sense of humor.

Since October, the rest of my mother-in-law’s children and grandchildren have either witnessed their homes destroyed or received similar telephone warnings. We fear that she and they are among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza who are newly homeless. Meanwhile, statements by Israeli officials telling residents of Gaza to leave the Strip raise the specter of forcible displacement, a war crime. They also feed into intergenerational trauma, for my mother-in-law and about 1.7 million refugees living in Gaza – 77 percent of the population. For seventy-five years, the Israeli government has refused to allow them to return to the places they left behind – one of the serious violations of international human rights law fueling the current escalation of hostilities.

My mother-in-law has a right to choose where to return – to the home she lost in October or to where she lost her home in 1948. If US policymakers want to hew closely to international human rights law, they should not only oppose forcible displacement from northern Gaza, as they have appropriately done, but also support the right of refugees to decide for themselves where to return and rebuild, including in areas that are now part of Israel. That’s because the right of return – enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – persists even when sovereignty over a territory has changed hands, as long as refugees and their descendants, regardless of where they were born, have maintained enough links with the area that it would be considered their “own country.” That right can’t be negotiated away.

The other side of my family also has a collective experience of displacement. Five years after my mother-in-law lost her home in1948, my father lost his home in Baghdad, after the Iraqi government there made life all but impossible for Jews in the aftermath of the creation of the state of Israel. As a condition of letting him and his parents leave, the Iraqi government stripped him of citizenship. He found refuge in Israel, where he became a citizen. For my father and many other Israeli Jews, the prospect of Palestinian refugees returning to Israel ignites fears of losing both the safe haven that the country represents for them and the Jewish majority they want to maintain.

Many Israeli Jews carry intergenerational memories of the Holocaust in Europe – which was made still deadlier by the refusal of countries around the world to admit European Jews as refugees – and of having to flee Arab countries after 1948. For many Jews, the October 7 war crimes against Israeli civilians exacerbated this trauma. Everyone has a right to a safe haven, and international human rights law gives the Israeli government broad latitude both to set immigration policies – including promoting Jewish immigration – and to take measures to protect its citizens and residents. But no safe haven, it stipulates, should come at the expense of violating Palestinians’ right to safety and other fundamental rights, including the right to return.

What should be done? Absent radical changes in the policies of the Israeli and US governments, my mother-in-law is not going to be able to rebuild the home she lost as a child anytime soon. I’ll be relieved if my in-laws are merely allowed to return to northern Gaza and receive support to rebuild a house there. If the Israeli government won’t let Palestinian refugees in Gaza return to their original homes, it should at least not forcibly displace them from the refugee camps where they built new lives. But if we want to put an end not just to the current violence but also to the cycle of repression engulfing Israel-Palestine, we should adopt a consistent, rights-based approach – however uncomfortable or frightening some might find it – which addresses that violence’s root causes. That includes respecting Palestinian refugees’ right to ret

Via Human Rights Watch

(The Conversation) – Israel has emerged as one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists, according to a newly released census compiled by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Each year, the committee releases a snapshot of the number of journalists behind bars as of December 1 2023 was the second highest on record with 320 in detention around the world.

In a small way, that is encouraging news. The figure is down from a high of 363 the previous year.

But a troublingly large number remain locked up, undermining press freedom and often, human rights.

China takes out unenviable top spot

At the top of the list sits China with 44 in detention, followed by Myanmar (43), Belarus (28), Russia (22), and Vietnam (19). Israel and Iran share sixth place with 17 each.

While the dip in numbers is positive, the statistics expose a few troubling trends.

As well as a straight count, the Committee to Protect Journalists examines the charges the journalists are facing. The advocacy group found that globally, almost two-thirds are behind bars on what they broadly describe as “anti-state charges” – things such as espionage, terrorism, false news and so on.

In other words, governments have come to regard journalism as some sort of existential threat that has to be dealt with using national security legislation.

In some cases, that may be justified. It is impossible to independently assess the legitimacy of each case, but it does point to the way governments increasingly regard information and the media as a part of the battlefield. That places journalists in the dangerous position of sometimes being unwitting combatants in often brutally violent struggles.

China’s top spot is hardly surprising. It has been there – or close to it – for some years. Censorship makes it extremely difficult to make an accurate assessment of the numbers behind bars, but since the crackdown on pro-democracy activists in 2021, journalists from Hong Kong have, for the first time, found themselves locked up. And almost half of China’s total are Uyghurs from Xinjiang, where Beijing has been accused of human rights abuses in its ongoing repression of the region’s mostly Muslim ethnic minorities.

The rest of the top four are also familiar, but the two biggest movements are unexpected.

Iran had been the 2022 gold medallist with 62 journalists imprisoned. In the latest census, it dropped to sixth place with just 17. And Israel, which previously had only one behind bars, has climbed to share that place.

That is positive news for Iranian journalists, but awkward for Israel, which repeatedly argues it is the only democracy in the Middle East and the only one that respects media freedom. It also routinely points to Iran for its long-running assault on critics of the regime.

The journalists Israel had detained were all from the occupied West Bank, all Palestinian, and all arrested after Hamas’s horrific attacks from Gaza on October 7. But we know very little about why they were detained. The journalists’ relatives told the committee that most are under what Israel describes as “administrative detention”.

17 arrests in Israel in less than 2 months

The benign term “administrative detention” in fact means the journalists have been incarcerated indefinitely, without trial or charge.

It is possible that they were somehow planning attacks or involved with extremism (Israel uses administrative detention to stop people they accuse of planning to commit a future offence) but the evidence used to justify the detention is not disclosed. We don’t even know why they were arrested.

Video added by Informed Comment, Democracy Now! “Israel’s War on Journalists”

Israel’s place near the top of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ list exposes a difficult paradox. Media freedom is an intrinsic part of a free democracy. A vibrant, awkward and sometimes snarly media is a proven way to keep public debate alive and the political system healthy.

It is often uncomfortable, but you can’t have a strong democratic system without journalists freely and vigorously fulfilling their watchdog role. In fact, a good way to tell if a democracy is sliding is the extent of a government’s crackdown on the media.

This is not to suggest equivalence between Israel and Iran. Israel remains a democracy, and Israeli media is often savagely critical of its government in ways that would be unthinkable in Tehran.

But if Israel wants to restore confidence in its commitment to democratic norms, at the very least it will need to be transparent about the reasons for arresting 17 journalists in less than two months, and the evidence against them. And if there is no evidence they pose a genuine threat to Israeli security, they must be released immediately.

Peter Greste, Professor of Journalism and Communications, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Speaking at a special session organised by the WHO executive board on the health situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, Tedros emphasised the catastrophic impact of conflicts on the health situation in Gaza, Anadolu Agency reports.

“More than 17,000 people are reported to have died in Gaza, including 7,000 children and we don’t know how many are buried under the rubble of their homes. More than 46,000 injuries have been reported,” he said.

World Health Organization: Dr Tedros’s remarks at the opening of the WHO #EBSpecial on the health conditions in oPt

As many as “1.9 million people have been displaced – almost the entire population of the Gaza Strip – and are looking for shelter anywhere they can find it. Nowhere and no one is safe in Gaza,” he added.

He emphasised that health should never be a target, saying on average, there is one shower unit for every 700 people and one toilet for every 150 people, and there are worrying signals of epidemic diseases including bloody diarrhoea, and jaundice. According to him, only 14 hospitals out of the original 36 are partially functional.

“As more and more people move to a smaller and smaller area, overcrowding, combined with the lack of adequate food, water, shelter and sanitation, are creating the ideal conditions for disease to spread,” he said.

The WHO chief emphasised their support for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ call for a permanent and urgent humanitarian cease-fire to ensure the delivery of critical aid to those in urgent need in the Gaza Strip.

“A cease-fire is the only way to truly protect and promote the health of the people of Gaza. I deeply regret that the Security Council was unable to adapt a resolution on such a cease-fire last Friday,” he said, referring to the US veto blocking the international calls for a truce.

Israel, in response to the Oct. 7 attack by Palestinian group Hamas, launched air and ground attacks on the besieged enclave, killing thousands of Palestinians, mostly civilians, and forced some 1.9 million people to flee their homes. Gazans also face severe shortages of food, water and other basic goods as only a trickle of aid is allowed in.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.