Gaza
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Israel used Gaza as a testing ground for development of drones.[1]
Contents
Water
Israel has been charged with carrying out a "systemic and willful campaign to deny Palestinians access to clean water" in Gaza. It has been called "a comprehensive violation of one of the most basic human rights. It consists of a two-pronged approach: the visible mass destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure, reinforced by invisible policies of closure and occupation, siege and confiscation that block the repair of infrastructure. Together, these tactics prevent the existence of sustainable Palestinian communities, driving people from their land, their homes, and communities."[2]
Gas reserves
Nafeez Ahmed noted that Gaza has large reserves of natural gas, which no doubt play a part in Arab-Israel matters: "The Israel-Palestine conflict is clearly not all about resources. But in an age of expensive energy, competition to dominate regional fossil fuels are increasingly influencing the critical decisions that can inflame war."[3]
Related Quotations
Page | Quote | Author | Date |
---|---|---|---|
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War | “There had already been a significant increase in violence by Israeli settlers this year, even before the Hamas attack, according to UN data, with more than 100 incidents reported each month and about 400 people driven from their land between January and August.
Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem told the BBC that since the attack, it had documented "a concerted and organised effort by settlers to use the fact that the entire international and local attention is focused on Gaza and the north of Israel to try to seize land in the West Bank". Partial data compiled by B'Tselem, covering the first six days after the Hamas attack, recorded at least 46 separate incidents in which it said settlers threatened, physically attacked or damaged the property of Palestinians in the West Bank. "A lot of shepherding families and communities have fled because they were threatened in the past week by settlers," said Roy Yellin, a spokesman for B'Tselem. "Settlers have been giving residents a deadline to leave and telling them if they don't they will be harmed. And some villages have been totally emptied out."” | BBC Joel Gunter | 2023 |
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/Israeli invasion of Gaza | “When I was first asked to work there [at Shifa], I was told there was a part of the hospital I was not to go near, and if I did, I’d be in danger of being shot. No, but implicit was that it was being used for non-medical purposes. I stayed away, but I saw a few dodgy-looking non-medical characters going in and out all the time. It was a ward leading to a basement. As I said, I didn’t go there; so I behaved myself. I was welcome everywhere else, and as I say the doctors and nurses there were very welcoming and very kind and the hushed tones under which this was said was very consistent with all the other hushed tones with which Hamas was discussed. You know people were genuinely fearful. I cannot emphasise too much, the air of collective paranoia that existed there. If hospital staff were 10 per cent frightened of possible Israeli airstrikes, they were 90 per cent frightened of being persecuted by Hamas.’” | Daily Mail Nick Pisa | 2023 |
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/Israeli invasion of Gaza | “UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said after a key Hamas operations center was discovered right beneath his headquarters that he had no idea. That's absurd. There was a very advanced tunnel with electrical cables, which supplied a Hamas server center with power. That came directly from UNRWA's electricity grid. Moreover, a few years ago, UNRWA staff noticed that an entire parking lot above it was starting to subside. So what do you mean, we couldn't have known anything?” | Hillel Neuer | 2024 |
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/October 7 | “Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.
Hamas had "decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope," analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by The Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division. But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet. On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing. The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by The Times. The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out. The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off. “In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.” | Ronen Bergman Adam Goldman | 2023 |
Craig Murray | “The International Court of Justice has stated definitively that the Israeli occupation is illegal and it is the duty of states not to support it. Yet in UK law it is perfectly legal to state that you support the IDF and hope that they kill all the Palestinians in Gaza But it is illegal in the UK - and carries 14 years in jail - to express support for named Palestinian organisations engaged, legally in international law, in armed resistance to illegal occupation.” | Craig Murray | 20 August 2024 |
Ronald Plasterk | “All the more exasperating that in the reactions to Hamas's horrific pogrom, in which more Jews were murdered in one day than at any time since the Holocaust, first, it is pretended that it is indeed symmetrical, and the major media such as the NOS news even ostentatiously takes sides with Hamas and against Israel (see, for example, holding Israel directly responsible for that bomb on the hospital, without any check, and then no neat response).
You can have all sorts of objections to the Netanyahu government, and because Israel is a democracy (the only one in the Middle East) there are many people even within Israel who voice those objections. You can insist on observing borders when counterattacking. If you recognise Israel's full right to defend itself, there are always limits anyway; remember, for example, that Israel is a nuclear power. But even if you keep the balance right, it is important to have in mind why the situation between Israel and Hamas is anything but symmetrical. There are civilian casualties on both sides. A first fundamental difference is that Hamas, as a terror organisation, is out to inflict as many civilian casualties as possible, while the Israeli army is trying to hit Hamas while inflicting as few civilian casualties as possible. You might perhaps think that they should take even more of a margin on that point, but in any case the intention is a completely different one from Hamas’. A further difference is that Israeli soldiers may be willing to die in war, but still prefer to come home to their families in one piece. Hamas has a death culture, with the highest good being to blow yourself up, for which you are rewarded with sex with 72 young virgins (not wondering if those 72 young women feel like it). Then taking civilians hostage as human shields, including very young children. That is a serious war crime, and one would expect that all responses would constantly insist that Hamas must first release those hostages. On top of that, Hamas is also preventing its own civilians from leaving locations where Hamas posts are located, precisely with the intention of those civilians being killed in attacks from Israel. Another criminal tactic that Israel does not use.” | Ronald Plasterk | 2023 |
UNRWA | “UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said after a key Hamas operations center was discovered right beneath his headquarters that he had no idea. That's absurd. There was a very advanced tunnel with electrical cables, which supplied a Hamas server center with power. That came directly from UNRWA's electricity grid. Moreover, a few years ago, UNRWA staff noticed that an entire parking lot above it was starting to subside. So what do you mean, we couldn't have known anything?” | Hillel Neuer | 2024 |
Events
Event | Description |
---|---|
2018 Gaza Massacre | A massacre of at least 135 unarmed protestors including many women and children, and the wounding of many thousands more by Israeli IDF sniper teams, during the Palestinian 'Great March of Return' and the weeks following its end on 15 May 2018 |
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War | Hamas attack on dozens of illegal Israeli settlements in Southern Israel provoking mass retaliatory killings by Israel. Corporate media call it the Israeli "9-11", while critics of Israel refer to "10-7" as a staged, military operation in order to manufacture consent for a disproportionate response. |
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/Israeli invasion of Gaza | After October 7, Israel invaded Gaza with widespread international support. The IDF went on a widely reported revenge killing spree. Even by Israel's own account, they killed 19,500 Palestinian civilians after half a year of bombing hospitals, schools and civilian towers, utilising numerous condemned tactics. |
2023-2024 Israel-Hamas War/October 7 | Hamas attacks Israeli settlements in Southern Israel, mass raping and abducting, which get called an Israeli "9-11" by CCM. The NYT and Al Jazeera claimed the Israeli government knew of the impending attack, ignored warnings, shot some of their own civilians, made up several stories and used the resulting increased death toll to go on a revenge killing spree in the 2023 Israeli invasion of Gaza. |
Gaza War (2008–09) | Three weeks of assault launched against Gaza by Israel, including the use of white phosphorus, leaving over 1000 people dead and over 5000 injured. |
Suez Crisis |
Group
Group | Start | Description |
---|---|---|
Hamas | 1987 | "Terrorists" according to the West, largely founded, financed and brought to power by Israel, Hamas has led Palestine into becoming an enemy image to the western world since 2006. |
Related Documents
Title | Type | Publication date | Author(s) | Description |
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Document:Al Quds Day letter to Tony Blair | letter | 3 September 2010 | Lauren Booth | Lauren Booth writes a scathing open letter to her brother-in-law, Tony Blair... |
Document:Biden’s pier for Gaza is a hollow gesture that will change almost nothing | blog post | 8 March 2024 | Jonathan Cook | President Biden needs to look like Gaza’s saviour when Democrats are deciding who they are voting for. He and the Democratic party are betting voters are dumb enough to fall for this charade. Please don’t prove them right. |
Document:British Jewish Zionist MP Gerald Kaufman says Israel acting like Nazis in Gaza | Speech | January 2009 | Gerald Kaufman | "However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis' real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools." |
Document:Ex-Israeli Supreme Court chief Aharon Barak appointed as ICJ judge for genocide case | Article | 8 January 2024 | The New Arab Staff | Aharon Barak argued that the rules of collateral damage permit the killing of Palestinian fighters even if led to the deaths of children. This was approved by Barak himself in a 2006 Supreme Court ruling, as cited in a report by a Canadian news outlet. |
Document:Former Labour leader honoured by Palestinian Forum | Article | 19 December 2021 | Steve Walker | Jeremy Corbyn receives award for ‘remarkable efforts’ to support Palestinians against oppression |
Document:Gaza - is annexation Israel's 'permanent solution' | Article | 31 July 2014 | Oliver Tickell | The UN Security Council stands supine, knowing that the US will veto any attempt to hold Israel and its military accountable. We are not in the "realm of accountability", but precisely where we have always been as far as Israel's crimes are concerned - in the realm of impunity. |
Document:Goliath's Revenge - Israel and Apartheid South Africa | Article | 5 January 2024 | Christopher Nicholson | "During the apartheid years I practised as a human rights lawyer and one of my colleagues defended a young boy, charged with assaulting a police officer. He had thrown a stone at the man, who was on board a tank-like military vehicle, but had arrogantly left his helmet off. A law in force with regard to firearms required a warning shot to be fired in certain circumstances. The prosecutor then demanded of the latter-day David: ‘Why did you not throw a warning stone?’" |
Document:International justice: the South African complaint against Israel for “genocide” in Gaza | Article | 10 January 2024 | United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe | |
Document:Jeremy Corbyn says “I Condemn Violence Against All Civilians, Why Can’t Keir Starmer?” | Article | 12 October 2023 | Jeremy Corbyn | In an interview with LBC, Keir Starmer was asked whether “cutting off power and water” to 2 million people, half of whom are children, was appropriate. He agreed that Israel “has that right”. Where is the empathy for Palestinians who have lost their loved ones, their homes and their futures? What happened to the universal application of international law? |
Document:Meeting the Gaze of the Ghost in the Rubble | Article | 28 February 2024 | George Gunn | Meanwhile the ghost still looks out from the rubble of Gaza. Her stare searches across the ocean of our conscience like the beam of a lighthouse. The ghost in the rubble asks of us all: why can we not stop this madness and feed the people? |
Document:Only a failing US empire would be so blind as to cheer Netanyahu and his genocide | Article | 26 July 2024 | Jonathan Cook | Members of the US Congress roared “USA!” to their satrap from Israel, just as Roman senators once roared “Glory!” to generals whose victories they assumed would continue forever. Every empire falls. Its collapse becomes inevitable once its rulers lose all sense of how absurd and abhorrent they have become. |
Document:Putting Palestinians on a Diet | article | Unknown | About the Israel blockade of Gaza and the manner in which the Western commercially-controlled media contrive to ignore it. | |
Document:The Israel-US game plan for Gaza is staring us in the face | Article | 30 April 2024 | Jonathan Cook | "The western media is pretending the West’s efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza are serious. But a different script has clearly been written in advance by Israel and the United States. Our job is to do everything in our power to stop them making their plan a reality." |
Document:The Israeli Terrorist State | blog post | 31 July 2024 | Craig Murray | "For me it is now axiomatic that there is no two state solution and that apartheid Israel must be completely dismantled as an entity. I believe that more and more people around the entire globe believe that now. "And if we have to dismantle our own political and media classes to get there, so be it." |
Document:The Presence of Evil | Wikispooks Page | 25 July 2024 | Craig Murray | Netanyahu’s slanderous attacks on the institutions of international law were applauded to the rafters by America’s political leaders. The whole world was watching, and took note. The Zionist project per se is evil. To steal another people’s land and subject them to long and progressive genocide is about as evil a deed as can be imagined. |
Document:The official death toll in Gaza is a lie. The casualty numbers are far, far higher | Wikispooks Page | 31 July 2024 | Jonathan Cook | In July 2024, researchers to The Lancet medical journal very conservatively estimated that the total number of Gazans who will die over the coming months – not just from bombs but as a result of the lack of medical care, insanitary conditions and famine – is 186,000, or 8 per cent of the population. |
Document:The tears of Gaza must be our tears | speech | 5 August 2010 | Chris Hedges | |
Document:We Are The Bad Guys | Wikispooks Page | 12 August 2024 | Craig Murray | In the United Kingdom it falls to the Celtic nations to try to break up the state which is a subordinate but important imperialist engine. The paths of resistance are various, depending where you are. But find one and take one. |
Document:What is Left for Palestine? | blog post | 17 May 2021 | Craig Murray | It was a beautiful day in Glasgow yesterday for the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign demo, and it was great to be able to meet up again with so many magnificent and public-spirited people. It was an especially young crowd, which was excellent, and I was able to meet many Palestinians who drew comfort from the public support at a traumatic time. |
Document:Why I No Longer Stand with Israel, and Never Will Again | Article | 15 October 2023 | Scott Ritter | "I stand with Palestine, because I stand for the children of Israel and Palestine, knowing full well that the only chance they have of a future where they can live together as neighbours united in peace, instead of enemies united in war, is for a free and independent Palestine to exist." (Scott Ritter) |
Document:Your Man in the Hague (In a Good Way) Part 1 | blog post | 11 January 2024 | Craig Murray | The fact of genocide is incontrovertible and had been plainly set out. But several of the Judges are desperate to find a way to please the USA and Israel and avoid countering the current Zionist narrative, the adoption of which is necessary to keep your feet comfortably under the table of the elite. |
Document:Your Man in the Hague (In a Good Way) Part 2 | blog post | 14 January 2024 | Craig Murray | "These two days in the Hague were absolutely crucial for deciding if there is any meaning left in notions of international law and human rights. I still believe action by the Court could cause the US and UK to back off and provide some measure of relief. For now, let us all pray or wish, each in our way, for the children of Gaza." |
File:Attack when the world is not watching.pdf | paper | 1 May 2015 | Ruben Durante Ekaterina Zhuravskaya | An analysis of the timing of Israeli military attacks on Gaza relative to important breaking news in the US and Europe |
File:UN-Gaza-monitor-2010-04.pdf | report | April 2010 | ||
Stop the Worsening Undercount of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza | Article | 5 March 2024 | Ralph Nader | From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour. |