A Pacific cohort at the Palestinian solidarity rally and march at Auckland's Te Komititanga Square today . . . they also gave an eulogy and sang a waiata for the loss of beloved Green MP and Pacific community advocate Fa’anānā Efeso Collins who died suddenly this week. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
While telling today’s Palestine solidarity rally in Auckland about the “good news” of creative humanitarian aid plans to help Palestinians amid the War on Gaza, New Zealand Kia Ora Gaza advocate and organiser Roger Fowler also condemned Israel’s genocidal conduct. He was interviewed by Anadolu News Agency after a Freedom Flotilla Coalition planning meeting in Istanbul with his views this week republished here.
By Faruk Hanedar in Istanbul
“Women, children, and families have no food. They are trying to drink water from puddles. People are eating grass.”
— Kia Ora Gaza advocate Roger Fowler
New Zealand activist Roger Fowler has condemned the Israeli regime’s actions in the Gaza Strip, saying “this is definitely genocide”.
“The Israeli regime has not hidden its intention to destroy or displace the Palestinian people, especially those in Gaza, from the beginning,” he said.
“They are committing a terrible act — killing tens of thousands of people, injuring more, and destroying a large part of this beautiful country.”
The death toll from the Israeli War on Gaza topped 29,000 this week – mostly women and children – and there were reports of deaths from starvation.
Fowler demanded action to halt the attacks and expressed hope about the potential effect of the international Freedom Flotilla — a grassroots organisation working to end the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza.
He noted large-scale protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza and emphasised efforts to pressure governments, including through weekly protests in New Zealand to unequivocally condemn Israel’s actions as unacceptable.
A Palestinian mother and family hug the dead body of their child who died in an Israeli attack in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on 18 February 2024. Image: Kia Ora Gaza
Long-standing mistreatment
He stressed that the “tragedy” had extended beyond recent months, highlighting the long-standing mistreatment endured by Palestinians — particularly those in Gaza — for the last 75 years.
Fowler pointed out the dire situation that Gazans faced — confined to a small territory with restricted access to essential resources including food, medicine, construction materials and necessities.
He noted his three previous trips to Gaza with land convoys, where he demonstrated solidarity and observed the dire circumstances faced by the population.
“Boycott is a very effective action,” said Fowler, underlining the significance of boycotts, isolation and sanctions, while stressing the necessity of enhancing and globalising initiatives to end the blockade.
“I believe that boycotting has a great impact on pressuring not only major companies to withdraw from Israel and end their support, but also on making the Israeli government and our own governments understand that they need to stop what they are doing.”
Fowler also criticised the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) “genocide decision” for being ineffective due to the arrogance of those governing Israel.
South Africa brought a genocide case against Israel to the ICJ in December and asked for emergency measures to end Palestinian bloodshed in Gaza, where nearly 30,000 people have been killed since October 7.
Anadolu journalist Faruk Hanedar talks with Kia Ora Gaza organiser Roger Fowler (left) after the recent Freedom Flotilla Coalition planning meeting in Istanbul. Image: Kia Ora Gaza/Anadolu
World Court fell short
The World Court ordered Israel last month to take “all measures within its power” to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza but fell short of ordering a ceasefire.
It also ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective” measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip.
Fowler said all nations must persistently advocate and exert pressure for adherence to decisions by the UN court.
Fowler acknowledged efforts by UN personnel but he has concerns about their limited resources in Gaza, citing the only avenue for change is for people to pressure authorities to stop the genocide and ensure Israel is held accountable.
“It’s definitely tragic and heartbreaking. Women, children, and families have no food. They are trying to drink water from puddles. People are eating grass. This is a very desperate situation. No one is talking about the children. Thousands of people are under the rubble, including small babies and children,” he said.
Roger Fowler is a Mangere East community advocate, political activist for social justice in many issues, and an organiser of Kia Ora Gaza. This article was first published by Anadolu Agency and is republished with permission.
“Gaza is starving to death” . . . a banner in today’s Palestine solidarity rally in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report“Blood on your hands” . . . a protest banner condemning Israel and the US during a demonstration outside the US consulate in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau today. Image: David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
GREEN-LEFT EXCLUSIVE: Leila Khaled talks to Peter Boyle
Leila Khaled is an iconic Palestinian revolutionary activist. A famous mural of her (pictured above) adorns an Israeli apartheid wall isolating the West Bank in Palestine. She is a member of the national committee of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and a representative on the Palestine National Council. She lives in exile in Jordan today and gave this exclusive interview to Green Left on February 18.
By Leila Khaled and Peter Boyle
As the Israeli military commences its assault on Rafah, Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime is not even pretending to abide by the interim orders of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). What is your assessment of the ICJ case and the responses of the various world powers to its interim orders and the continuing genocide in Gaza?
Leila Khaled: South Africa, which is trying to prove in the ICJ that Israel is committing genocide, is now following up the case (as are other countries like Nicaragua) because Israel is not abiding by any rules of the court.
And there is a lot of pressure on Israel now. On February 26, the ICJ will have its second meeting [on the genocide issue] and now there is a lot of pressure on the court to meet because Israel is declaring they are going to attack Rafah.
There are 1.5 million people in Rafah now because they drove people from the north and from the city of Gaza to the south. They went there but now [Israel] won’t allow them to go back to their homes, even if they were not bombarded . . .
Israel is acting like it is above international law.
Israel is now already attacking Rafah. They are not on the ground yet but they are bombarding it by planes.
Until now the United States administration is not putting enough pressure on Israel. It is the only government that can put the pressure that is needed to stop the genocide in Rafah.
Israel says that they will open a safe road [out from Rafah].
Where to? There is no safe place in the whole Gaza strip.
Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled speaks out. Video: Green Left
The Israeli military is still in Khan Younis, a city beside Rafah, and when people went out of the hospital there were snipers who killed four doctors and they arrested the other medical workers.
So people could not leave Khan Younis to come to Rafah. Rafah is also a very small district to have so many people there.
Now it is time for people who demonstrated to support the Palestinians — and against the atrocities that Israel is committing — to pressure their governments which, like in Australia, are supporting Israel.
The attitude of the Australian government is that Israel has a right to defend itself. But Israel is not defending itself, it is attacking for four months!
Most of the casualties are women and children when they bombard and destroy their homes.
People have nowhere to go today unless the Rafah border is opened. But it is not opened yet [even] to receive humanitarian aid like medicines and food, even though the ICJ ordered Israel to let aid in to all parts of the Gaza Strip, especially in the north . . .
The Egyptians have the sovereignty over the Gaza Crossing but Israel does not allow anybody to go out or in. So it is a siege . . .
Governments are supposed to abide by rules but Israel is not following the ICJ’s [interim] orders. So they should take action. For example, they can cut diplomatic relations to pressure Israel to stop its genocide.
They can boycott Israeli products. This would put pressure on Israel.
But until now the governments that follow the US government are not taking those steps. They just hear their people shouting in the streets.
The Zionist regime has told many lies about October 7 to justify its latest genocidal attack on Gaza. What is the PFLP’s understanding of the reason for and what really happened in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood?
Leila Khaled: The freedom fighters did not attack ordinary people [on October 7] , they attacked the military settlements. But when the borders were open some other people took civilians.
Neither Israel nor the Western media could prove that there were massacres.
The civilian hostages [who were released in one of the deals negotiated] said they were dealt with very kindly . . .
So why are they speaking like this about massacres? Just to say that the freedom fighters are terrorists.
In international law, people who are under occupation have the right to defend themselves with all means, including armed struggle. And this was armed struggle.
We have the right to defend ourselves from occupation and the siege of Gaza.
So they made lies because they did not have any evidence. Even when [US President Joe] Biden showed some pictures, CNN said that he did not have evidence that this was what happened on October 7.
People around the world have been demonstrating because they know about the siege of Gaza that has been going on for 17 years. Israel has carried out a lot of attacks on the people of Gaza. Four times they attacked Gaza and caused many casualties, in the first attack killing about 2000 children. The second time they killed more than 2000 children. And then there was a third and fourth attack on Gaza.
What is the real reason that the US and its closest allies — including, shamefully, Australia — support the Zionist state?
Leila Khaled: Because this was their original project in 1948 for establishing a colonial settler state, Israel, occupying the land of Palestine. Because it protects their common interests.
This is why even yesterday Biden declared he would send $15 billion to support Israel.
Those countries that share the interests of the US administration support its policy which has ended up with this war against the Palestinian people, not against Hamas . . .
Hamas is part of the Palestinian resistance and are also freedom fighters.
What is your assessment of the so-called two-state “solution” that was begun with the Oslo Accords? Has it failed? If so, what would be the alternative and how can it be won?
Leila Khaled: This illusion of the two-state solution has been set for 40 years but they didn’t implement it. So that we don’t have any freedom in our occupied country.
The Oslo Accord stated Israel will withdraw and allow a Palestinian state. But Israel did not abide by the agreements that were signed . . .
In 1949 the UN declared that there would be two states, one a Jewish state and an Arabic state — not a Palestinian state.
But Israel also turned its back on all the UN resolutions that have been taken over the years.
For us, to solve the problem it has to be recognised, first, that Israel does not have the right to occupy Palestine and, second, the right of return for the Palestinians. This is the key to solving the conflict…
The UN hasn’t implemented its resolutions up until now.
Israel has denied our right of return even though it was a condition in the 1948 UN resolution. Israel would be accepted as part of the international community and have a state in Palestine on condition that the Palestinians had the right of return.
Because of the balance of forces at the time, Israel was accepted as a nation while the Palestinians remained refugees.
I am one of those refugees as a result of the crime that happened in 1948.
Now we are calling for a democratic state, with the return of the Palestinian refugees. Then, we can altogether live in Palestine and decide what kind of state we need.
Without this, the struggle will continue from generation to generation.
The Palestinians who are fighting today are the fourth generation.
There are also refugee camps in the West Bank, like Jenin, and we have seen them attacked and houses demolished on a daily basis.
Israel has arrested about 6000 people in the West Bank on top of the 7000 people who were detained before . . . So we are calling for the release of these political prisoners in exchange for the hostages held by Hamas, who are all Israeli military.
There were no Israelis in Palestine before 1948. There were Jews who were Palestinians but we don’t discriminate on the basis of religion. The Zionist movement brought people to Palestine after World War II to establish an Israeli state, which was guaranteed by the British colonial government of that time.
We had our identity as Palestinians, including the Jews who were living with us. We didn’t drive out the Jews from Palestine. Its history, Palestine is Palestine.
Now the balance of forces is coming a little bit more in our favour. It is a step forward that people around the world have declared their support for free Palestine. “Free Palestine” has become a slogan of the peoples of the world, including in Australia . . .
But the Australian government, which is still under the British crown, is supporting Israel along with the other colonial powers.
The latest Zionist genocidal war on Gaza has cost so many Palestinian lives but the there has also been a historic global mass solidarity for Palestine and opposition to this war — on a scale not seen since the Vietnam War. A whole new generation of activists has stepped forward in this movement. What is your message to this new generation of solidarity activists? What lessons can you share from your own experience of a life in struggle?
Leila Khaled: I would say we are thankful for all those who have declared this attitude to the Palestinians and what is happening in Palestine. The peoples of the world now understand the core issues of this struggle — and we, the Palestinians, will not forget this — that in this war, Israel is doing genocide.
I saw on the TV, and from the video that comrades sent from Australia, the huge demonstrations in Melbourne and Sydney which showed that people began to realise the reasons behind what is going on.
They are demanding that the Israeli army cease fire and withdraw from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
This is what I am telling the world’s people, especially the new generation: Keep on fighting for just causes.
The Palestinian cause is a human cause. Now we are defending humanity, not only in the Gaza Strip . .
We are trying to build a new history in the region against the imperialists, especially American imperialism, because they are the ones who launch wars and they are supporting Israel with all means and new arms . . . But they don’t give anything for the children of Palestine.
Leila Khaled will be a featured international speaker at the Ecosocialism 2024 conference in Perth from June 28-30. Ecosocialism 2024 brings together ecosocialist activists from around the Indo-Pacific region. Republished from Green-Left with permission.
"Culture shocking, overwhelming" . . . speaking at COP26 on the climate crisis-threatened future of Tuvalu. Image: PINA /Wansolwara News
By Monika Singh of Wansolwara
The fourth smallest country in the world with a population of just over 11,000 people — Tuvalu — fears being “wiped off its place on the map”.
A report by ABC Pacific states that the low-lying island nation is widely considered one of the first places to be significantly impacted by rising sea levels, caused by climate change.
According to the locals the spring tides this year in Tuvalu have been the worst so far with more flooding expected with the king tides that usually occur during late February to early March.
Tuvalu residents are fighting for their home in the face of worsening tides and climate change. Image: Wahasi/ Wansolwara News
In 2021, Tuvalu’s Foreign Minister, Simon Kofe, addressed the world in a COP26 speech while standing knee-deep in the sea to show how vulnerable Tuvalu and other low-lying islands in the Pacific are to climate change.
A 27-year-old climate activist from Tuvalu said he loved his home and his culture and did not want to lose them.
Kato Ewekia spoke to Nedia Daily and said seeing the beaches that he used to play rugby on with his friends had disappeared gave him a wake-up call.
“I was worried about my children because I wanted my children to grow up, teach them Tuvaluan music, teach them rugby, teach them fishing. But my island is about to disappear and get wiped off it’s place on the map.”
First youth Tuvaluan delegate
Ewekia was also at COP26 and made history as the first youth Tuvaluan delegate to participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Despite only speaking limited English, he took to the global stage to tell the world about his home.
“Since I was the first Tuvaluan activist, people didn’t really know where Tuvalu is, what Tuvalu is,” he said.
“It was culture shocking, overwhelming. But the other youth gave me the confidence to just speak with my heart, and get my message out there.”
Ewekia has been the national leader of the Saving Tuvalu Global Campaign, an environmental organisation that aims to amplify the voices and demands of the people of Tuvalu since 2020.
“Going out there, it’s not easy. We really, really love our home and we want how our elders taught us how to be Tuvaluan, we want our children to experience it — not when it disappears and future generations will be talking about it (Tuvalu) like it’s a story.”
He shared that in the four years that he has been advocating for Tuvalu on the public stage, there have been many moments of frustration that are specifically directed towards world leaders who aren’t paying attention.
“My message to the world is I’ve been sharing this same message over and over again,” he said.
“If Tuvalu was your home and it [was] about to disappear, and you wanted your children to grow up in your home in Tuvalu — what would you have done? If you were in our shoes, what would you have done to save Tuvalu?”
Asia Pacific Report collaborates with The University of the South Pacific’s journalism programme newspaper Wansolwara.
King tide, Funafuti, Tuvalu in February 2024. Image: Wahasi/Wansolwara News
PNG's Prime Minister James Marape has pledged to Parliament that he will "restore police leadership to stabilise Enga" . . . as the PNG Post-Courier calls for a state of emergency in the province. Image: PNG Post-Courier
EDITORIAL: The PNG Post-Courier
Some people are literally making a killing in Enga.
Yes, they really are.
Hired gunmen are getting rich by the day and picking up women and girls as payments as well, leaving deaths and destruction in their wake in what is apparently becoming a booming industry.
The news is disturbing, to say the least, for a province that has got so much going at the moment.
As the illegal industry takes root by the day, we do not see this deadly business which is already stretching the limits of tolerance and the resources of the law and justice sector, ending soon.
Police Commissioner David Manning promised more manpower will be deployed into the province to assist those on the ground to curb the tribal fighting.
At the same time, he is asking for help from the provincial leaders to get down to their communities to stop the fighting and killing.
Grabbed world attention
The recent massacre in Wapenamanda has grabbed world attention again and this time the Australian government, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese describing the event as “very disturbing”, promising more technical aid to PNG to address this madness.
Tribal fighting has always been a curse in Enga for years. What started as bow and arrow affairs in the past have now gone high-tech with the deployment of drones, Google maps and high-powered guns, resulting in the high number of deaths
Genocide is the word to describe what is happening.
Powerful tribes are eliminating the weak, and leaving the disciplinary forces helplessly watching by the roadsides as the massacre continues to go.
There is no concern for the lives killed, the injuries or the plight of the hundreds of mothers and children caught up in this mayhem.
In the words of Provincial Police Commander, Superintendent George Kakas, businessmen, educated elites and well-to-do people fund these activities, hire gunmen and purchase firearms and ammunitions.
We would like to add politicians to the list because we suspect that they procured the weapons and left them with their supporters during the elections and these guns are now coming out.
How could they sleep peacefully?
How could these people find the peace to sleep peacefully in the night when their money, the technology, the guns and bullets they supplied are killing in big numbers and the murderers are uploading images of the dead bodies online for the world to see?
Prime Minister James Marape recently promised new legislation to curb domestic terrorism and we wait to see whether this law will ever get passed by Parliament.
This law is needed now to make the facilitators and the killers account for their actions.
In the interim, the government must declare a State of Emergency in Enga to deploy the full force of the law into the fighting zones to deal with the perpetrators.
They are known to the police, the leaders and even the Prime Minister.
What is stopping the police from arresting these culprits? Are they above the law? Are they protected species, vested with the power to end lives of other people in this manner?
Entire tribes wiped out
What are we waiting for?
To see entire tribes wiped out from the face of Enga before we move in to collect the bodies, take the women and children to care centres and keep watching from the roadsides.
Enough is enough. Declare the SOE in Enga. Enact the domestic terrorism legislation. Arrest those that facilitate and kill.
So much is going for Enga today and if nothing is done to end this ugly disease, Enga is doomed.
This PNG Post-Courier editorial was originally published under the title “Genocide in Enga” on 21 February 2014. Republished with permission.
All you have to do to ensure that the so-called “free press” function as propaganda services for the Western empire is make sure the mass media elevate people who are loyal to the empire while denying a voice to those who oppose it. That’s all it takes. Image: Caitlin Johnstone/Narrative
COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone
I saw a comment from an Israel defender saying “You just lack the intellect to comprehend the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict!”
Just in the last few days we learned that Israeli snipers have been deliberately picking off children in Gaza by shooting them in the head, that Israeli troops summarily executed a prisoner in handcuffs after sending him into a hospital to deliver a message to evacuate, and that Egypt has begun constructing refugee camps in the Sinai Desert to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Gazans.
“Complexities”. This isn’t complex.
“It’s complicated” is just some nonsense people say about things they don’t want you looking at too closely, like their dysfunctional relationship or their active genocide.
I’ve actually stopped following people for getting Gaza wrong. People I’d previously followed for years. I disagree with literally everyone I follow on some issues at some times, but Gaza quickly became my red line. If you can’t get that one right, nothing else you have to say is worth a damn.
I’ve never done that before, made a single-issue red line like that. In anti-imperialist circles you normally have to accept that a lot of people who get one issue right will get other issues wrong — someone who’s right on Israel-Palestine might swallow propaganda about Russia, someone who’s good on Ukraine and Syria might swallow the propaganda on China, etc.
I also frequently have ideological differences with people I agree with on foreign policy, like US libertarians.
But Gaza is just SO obvious, such a clear-cut black and white case of right and wrong, that I have to assume there’s something seriously wrong with your internal navigation system if you can’t see it. If the teens on TikTok can see it but a professional foreign policy commentator cannot, then there’s something wrong with that professional foreign policy commentator.
And after four months I have no regrets. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I try to cultivate diverse and heterodox information sources, but not so diverse and heterodox that it thinks genocide and ethnic cleansing are fine.
Keep an open mind but not so open your brain falls out, as they say.
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Next time the US-centralised empire is preparing to stage a “humanitarian intervention” to rescue the people of some resource-rich nation from their evil tyrannical overlords, remember how they backed an open genocide in Gaza.
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The claim that it’s Hitlery to say true facts about the things Israel is doing and the claim that everyone Israel wants to bomb is secretly Hamas are like lies that a child would make up if you put a child in charge of administering propaganda.
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Whenever I’m sad about a musician I like having died before their time, I comfort myself with the thought that at least they didn’t live long enough to become another Bono.
#U2 frontman Bono chanted Alexei #Navalny‘s name with the audience during his concert in Las Vegas
“Putin would never ever say his name. So I thought tonight people who believe in freedom must say his name. Not just remember it, but say it.” pic.twitter.com/lWwTwOs8Tw
All you have to do to ensure that the so-called “free press” function as propaganda services for the Western empire is make sure the mass media elevate people who are loyal to the empire while denying a voice to those who oppose it. That’s all it takes.
And that’s exactly what happens. You can’t get a prominent job in the mass media if you oppose the profound evils the US and its allies are inflicting upon our species around the world, if you seek the dismantling of the empire, if you endorse the end of capitalism.
You’ll never get a notice saying “YOU ARE BARRED FROM ALL MAINSTREAM PLATFORMS ON ORDERS OF THE EMPIRE” — you’ll just find yourself unable to get work. You’ll encounter locked door after locked door while watching your peers who toe the imperial line shoot to the top.
This doesn’t happen as part of any monolithic grand conspiracy for the most part; it primarily happens because those who are wealthy enough to control a media platform of major influence are also wealthy enough to have a vested interest in maintaining the political status quo upon which their wealth is premised.
In the early 20th century Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays began his work showing that the public can be made docile and compliant via mass-scale psychological manipulation. Flash forward a century and we’re in a mind-controlled dystopia that is saturated to the gills with a constant deluge of propaganda, and we’re allowing those who rule over us to inflict unfathomable horrors on our fellow humans in our name.
If we were living in a truth-based society instead of one where our understanding of the world is obfuscated by propaganda, government secrecy, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, and the exclusion of dissident voices from all major platforms, none of this would be happening.
The powerful wouldn’t be able to manipulate us into sitting idly by while they commit a genocide in Gaza, or while they prepare to extradite Julian Assange to a US prison for the crime of good journalism. There are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and if we didn’t consent to their actions they’d never dare stand against us.
Our consent for this has been carefully engineered by those who have a vested interest in maintaining it.
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Israel-Palestine has long been a kind of gateway drug for anti-imperialist sentiment in the West. People see that their government is backing something horrible and their media are lying about it, and they get curious where else that’s been happening and their eyes snap open.
Gaza has poured rocket fuel on this phenomenon. For months our social media feeds have been full of glaringly obvious evidence that a profound evil is being inflicted upon our fellow humans with the full support of our governments and with the propaganda cover of our media, in a much clearer and easy to understand way than the plight of the Palestinians has looked at other times.
It’s only a matter of time before this moment of clarity starts translating to other aspects of Western foreign policy. Russia. China. The Middle East. Latin America. Africa. Millions killed by US-led wars of aggression in the 21st century alone.
Hundreds of US military bases circling the planet. Nuclear brinkmanship. Starvation sanctions. Proxy warfare. Staged coups and color revolutions. Nonstop election interference. The US empire working relentlessly to subvert and destroy any nation who disobeys it, anywhere in the world.
Already we’re seeing the Biden administration’s attacks on Yemen, Iraq and Syria receiving way more pushback than such aggressions normally would, because those who’ve been shaken awake by Gaza understand those acts of military violence are related to Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians. Their consciousness has already begun to expand.
It’s not going to get any easier for the empire from here. Those eyes that have been opened will not be closed again. Insight beyond the veil of propaganda and information distortion is only going to penetrate more and more deeply. The imperial narrative managers certainly have their work cut out for them.
The initial Western media coverage of the terror allegations against UNWRA was perhaps the best example of this phenomenon of how Israel has been using legacy media organisations in the West to deceive the world . . . Image: New Zealand protest against Israel/David Robie/Asia Pacific Report
ANALYSIS: By Rami G Khouri
In the past three weeks, the Israeli government put on a masterclass on how to use the Western media to spread fake news and propaganda and to justify anti-Palestinian actions taken by the United States and its allies. It worked — but only in part.
On January 26, in a landmark preliminary ruling on South Africa’s genocide charge against Israel, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found it “plausible” that Israel is committing acts that violate the Genocide Convention; and demanded that it take “immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Israel ignored this, and within hours, launched a deception campaign to weaken UNRWA, the UN’s main humanitarian agency for Palestinian refugees, to inflict further suffering and death on nearly two million displaced, injured, sick and starving Palestinians in the Strip.
Israel passed on to Western media a “dossier” alleging that about a dozen UNRWA staff in Gaza have been working for Hamas and even participated in the group’s October 7 attack on Israel.
After the compliant media immediately relayed these unsubstantiated allegations to the world without bothering to do any independent verification, the US and other countries suspended vital funding to UNRWA.
Meanwhile, prominent politicians started calling for it to be “shut down” as Israel has long sought in its efforts to reverse the recognition of Palestinians it displaced as “refugees”, and invalidate their right of return to the lands in Israel stolen from them.
None of this was new or extraordinary.
Helped Israel spread propaganda
Mainstream media organisations in the West, from The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to CNN and NBC, have long helped Israel spread its propaganda and achieve its political aims.
For the past century, these organisations and their counterparts in Europe routinely disseminated Israeli narratives without questioning their veracity, while ignoring, downplaying or misrepresenting Palestinian perspectives. Their efforts helped Israel win the war on narratives and continue its settler-colonial assault on Palestinians with near total impunity.
Well, until recently — because the ugly tradition of Israel successfully laundering its lies and propaganda through Western legacy media is now being exposed and challenged, and appears to be starting to dissipate in the information era dominated by new media.
Indeed, since October 7, a flurry of independent investigations into events in Israel-Palestine and Western media reports about them exposed how Israel has been using legacy media organisations in the West to deceive the world, silence Palestinians and their allies, undermine international law, obscure its systemic human rights violations and further its settler-colonial agenda.
The initial Western media coverage of the terror allegations against UNWRA was perhaps the best example of this phenomenon.
Israel suddenly came up with an “explosive” dossier on alleged links between Hamas and UNRWA staff because it wanted to divert attention from the ICJ ruling on its own genocidal acts, and instead raise doubts about the crucial UN agency’s credibility.
Thanks in large part to the Western media’s uncritical reporting, Israel’s plan succeeded, at least partially, as it triggered significant funding cuts and a congressional hearing in the US on “ UNRWA Exposed: Examining the Agency’s Mission and Failures”.
Law against UNRWA
Members of Congress accused UNRWA of having “longstanding connections to terrorism and promotion of antisemitism” seemingly based on nothing other than Israeli claims circulated in the media. They also introduced a bill titled the “UNRWA Elimination Act” calling for the complete disbanding of the humanitarian agency and transfer of all its responsibilities to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
But independent reports and investigations quickly revealed major holes in the Israeli narrative that mainstream media had eagerly adopted and disseminated.
As Western journalists outside the mainstream, Global South media like Al Jazeera, activists and scholars started to ask questions about the claims against UNRWA, Israel’s story started to unravel.
Unable to provide any hard evidence on UNRWA staff involvement in the October 7 attacks, the intelligence agency that distributed the “dossier” said its information came from “interrogations of Palestinian prisoners”. The revelation further raised suspicions among journalists and scholars who follow the conflict, as Israel is known to use torture to extract false confessions from Palestinian prisoners.
Realising the global community is questioning their story, Israel’s intelligence agents simply changed it and started to say they obtained the information through surveillance.
As numerous countries stood up for UNRWA, and Israel faced scrutiny about its allegations against the US agency, and shared its shaky “intelligence documents” with even more journalists.
An analysis of the dossier by Britain’s Sky News revealed that these documents claim only six, not 12 as initially suggested, UNRWA staff entered Israel on October 7. It noted that “the Israeli intelligence documents make several claims that Sky News has not seen proof of and many of the claims, even if true, do not directly implicate UNRWA”.
No evidence provided After also analysing the documents, Britain’s Channel 4 reached a similar conclusion and said the six-page-long dossier “provides no evidence to support the explosive claim that UN staff were involved in terror attacks on Israel”.
The terror accusations against UNRWA were perhaps the most striking example of exposing major Western media for uncritically circulating Israeli fabrications and propaganda since October 7. But it was hardly the only one.
The Israeli claims about “terror tunnels” and “Hamas command centres” under Gaza hospitals, which were repeated by most Western media without any scrutiny or attempt at verification were also proved to be baseless by several open source investigations, in-depth reporting by local journalists on the ground and extensive video evidence.
In February, Al Araby TV filmed what Israel claimed was a “Hamas tunnel” it discovered under Sheikh Hamad Hospital in northern Gaza, which proved to be nothing but a water well.
Earlier, in December, an explosive New York Times report on Hamas’s weaponisation of sexual violence during the October 7 attack was criticised for its weak sources and sloppy reporting. The paper of record eventually had to pull a podcast episode it had prepared on the subject.
Speaking of the Times’ sexual violence report and podcast, The Intercept investigative site said,“the critics have highlighted major discrepancies in the accounts presented in the Times, subsequent public comments from the family of a major subject of the article denouncing it, and comments from a key witness seeming to contradict a claim attributed to him in the article.”
The Electronic Intifada published several articles and podcasts with more details of The New York Times’ investigation of its mass rape story, mostly confirming the lack of credible evidence or eye-witnesses in the stories that Israeli institutions, including the armed forces, shared with the global media.
‘We deserve the truth’
The progressive investigative website Mondoweiss explained in a report, entitled “We deserve the truth about what happened on October 7”, that “researchers cross-referencing claims against the list of terror victims maintained by Israel’s own Social Security Administration have shown that several horrifying stories first responders and [Israeli military] members initially told reporters do not reflect actual people or deaths”.
Britain’s Guardian published an extensive report on how “CNN is facing a backlash from its own staff over editorial policies they say have led to a regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza”.
The Oct7factcheck project — an exhaustive collection of claims, where they originated, who propagated them, and whether the evidence confirms or refutes them put together by the Tech for Palestine initiative — has also published the results of independent investigations into a dozen or so of the most dramatic Israeli accusations and reports about the Hamas attack, which were uncritically repeated by most of Western media, debunking most of them as untrue and lacking evidence.
They show, for example, that some of the evidence Israel submitted to the ICJ hearing — evidence republished by mainstream Western media without question — was false.
“Over the last four months, claims about October 7 have influenced the public narrative,” they noted. “Stories of atrocity, sometimes cobbled together from unreliable eyewitnesses, sometimes fabricated entirely, have made their way to heads of state and been used to justify Israel’s military violence.”
As new evidence reveals that stories that Israel offers the media about Palestinians and Hamas are fabricated, unsubstantiated, or exaggerated, international journalists tend to spend more time checking the veracity of Israel’s propaganda offerings — and more time doing their job of reporting the facts and the truth.
Dr Rami G Khouri is a distinguished fellow at the American University of Beirut, and a journalist and book author with 50 years of experience covering the Middle East. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
Westerners who don’t appreciate the extreme dysfunctionality of Western civilisation are like someone in an abusive marriage who hasn’t yet recognised that there’s a problem, or someone who had a violent and chaotic childhood who still thinks their home life was basically normal.
All of us understand that there are problems with our society, and most of us understand that a lot of of those problems are severe. But few Westerners really get just how bad it is.
In reality, we are living in a profoundly sick dystopia that is built on a foundation of human corpses and fueled by an endless river of human blood. Our news media are propaganda services, our entertainment is brainwashing, and our mainstream culture is social engineering, all built to keep us turning the gears of a vast globe-dominating empire.
There’s a widespread assumption throughout the Western world that while things might not be perfect our society is certainly much better than what people experience in a nation like China, smugly believing ourselves to be a free society full of free thinkers and free people in contrast with those unfortunate thought-controlled communist conformists.
In fact, Western civilisation is one giant thought-controlled conformity machine where people’s minds are shaped by mass-scale psychological manipulation far more effectively than anywhere else in the world, exactly because Westerners don’t know this is happening and believe they are free.
We think this dystopia is normal. Video: Caitlin Johnstone
Western minds don’t like to be told this, because it goes against everything they’ve been trained to believe about their nation, their society, and their world. Obviously we are much freer here than those poor saps to the east; here in the west we are free to choose between 197 flavours of frosted breakfast cereal and 20,000 different superhero movies.
We are free to choose between voting for warmongering capitalist authoritarian Democrats or warmongering capitalist authoritarian Republicans. We are free to sell our labour at a fraction of the value it generates to any exploitative ecocidal employer of our choosing.
We are free to think whatever thoughts we’ve been trained to think by our education systems, mass media, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation. We are free to speak our minds, which have been shaped and conditioned to serve the interests of the powerful and never to say anything that falls outside the Overton window of acceptable opinion.
Sure there are outliers in the margins, Westerners who’ve slipped outside the matrix of thought control and have gained the ability to traffick in unauthorised opinions – if you’re reading this you’re probably one of them. But our numbers are deliberately kept too small to have any political consequence, and if those numbers start getting too big for comfort we immediately see influence ops to sow division and confusion and herd people back toward the mainstream flock.
Sure we in our small numbers are free to voice unauthorised opinions on marginal platforms where we can’t have much impact – we’re free to dig a hole in the ground and whisper whatever we want into it, too.
The single biggest obstacle to our freedom in the West is our widespread belief that we are free. Until we collectively realise we’re human livestock being continually herded into our respective gear-turning stations to keep the imperial juggernaut trudging ever forward on the world stage, we’ve got no chance to break free and bring the whole abusive system crashing down.
Until this is seen we’re like the wife who thinks it’s perfectly normal that her husband controls all her finances and dictates every aspect of her life, and who’d be shocked and angered if anyone tried to tell her that this is what an abusive relationship looks like. We’re like the man who insists he had a happy childhood despite remembering a lot of body trauma and screams.
The truth is all around us — we’re marinating in it 24/7/365. But we can’t see it, because it’s all we’ve ever known. We’ve been conditioned to think that this murderous ecocidal mind-controlled dystopia is normal, and we can’t imagine it being any other way. The prospect of ending it can actually feel scary and intimidating, just as it can for someone who’s thinking about fleeing an abusive relationship.
But real freedom is just on the other side of that fear. All we’ve got to do is become sufficiently conscious of what’s really going on here.
The toll of four months of war in Gaza on journalism is “nothing short of horrifying” — Palestinian journalists killed, wounded, and prevented from working without any possibility of safe refuge, reports the Paris-based global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
RSF has strongly condemned the “eradication of journalism and the right to information” in Gaza by the Israeli army, and has called on states and international organisations to increase pressure on Israel to “immediately cease this carnage”.
In 124 days of conflict, at least 84 journalists have been killed in Gaza, including at least 20 in the course of their journalistic work or in connection with it, according to RSF statistics.
Journalists are being decimated as the days of this interminable war go by, through incessant Israeli strikes from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip, the watchdog said.
Journalists who had survived these four months were “living a daily hell” — in inhumane conditions, they suffered shortages of all kinds, particularly of equipment, as well as regular media blackouts, RSF said.
“In four months of conflict, Palestinian journalism has been decimated by Israeli armed forces with complete impunity, with a staggering death toll of more than 84 journalists killed — at least 20 in the line of duty,” said RSF’s Middle East desk in their statement.
“After filing two complaints with the International Criminal Court and making repeated appeals to States and international organisations, RSF is once again urging the UN Security Council to immediately enforce Resolution 2222 (2015) on the protection of journalists.
Journalists trapped in Rafah Journalists in Gaza have no way out or any place of safe refuge. Forced to flee to the south of the enclave since October 7, the vast majority have taken refuge in Rafah, where the crossing point with Egypt is still closed and where an invasion of the city could lead to a new bloodbath.
Rafah was described by Israel as a “security zone” at the start of the conflict. Despite RSF’s calls for the Rafah gate to be opened, the Israeli authorities continue to prevent Gazan journalists from leaving and to block access to the enclave for foreign journalists.
As Gaza killings rise, so does the toll on Palestinian journalists. Video: Al Jazeera
A chilling toll According to the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate (PJS), about 50 local and international media outlets in Gaza have been totally or partially destroyed by the Israeli army since October 7, in addition to the appalling death toll.
RSF filed two complaints with the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on 31 October and 22 December 2023 in connection with the killings of journalists and the destruction of media outlets.
In the aftermath of the killings of independent videographer Moustafa Thuraya and Al Jazeera journalist Hamza Dahdouh on January 7, RSF obtained a decision from the ICC prosecutor to include crimes against journalists in its investigation into the situation in Palestine.
Two days later, RSF called on the UN Security Council to urgently address Israel’s violations of Resolution 2222 on the protection of journalists.
The struggle of journalists in the field Against this terrifying backdrop, Palestinian reporters in Gaza are showing untold courage in continuing to report on the war.
Most have lost loved ones. Forced to move, they live in tents, with no electricity and very little food or water.
Wounded journalists have very limited access to medical care. In partnership with Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), RSF has been providing grants to Gazan journalists since the start of the war to support their reporting work.
Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.
A man visits the spot where Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli snipers on 11 May 2022 while covering an Israeli raid in the Jenin refugee camp in the north of the occupied West Bank. Image: AJ/RSF
Al Jazeera rejects Israeli forces’ attempt to justify crimes against journalists
Al Jazeera Media Network has rejected the Israeli occupation forces’ attempt to justify the killing and targeting of journalists.
In a statement this week, the network has condemned the accusations against its journalists and recalled Israel’s “long record of lies and fabrication of evidence through which it seeks to hide its heinous crimes”.
“At a time when its correspondents and field crews are making great sacrifices to cover what is happening in Gaza, Al Jazeera’s employment policies stipulate that employees are not to engage in any political affiliations that may affect their professionalism, and to adhere to the controls and directives contained in the Network’s code of ethics and code of conduct.
“Al Jazeera ensures that all its journalists and correspondents adhere to the editorial standards.
“The network recalls the systematic targeting of Al Jazeera by the Israeli authorities, which includes:
the bombing of its office in Gaza twice,
the assassination of its correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh,
the killing of colleagues Samer Abu Daqa and Hamza Al-Dahdouh,
the deliberate targeting of a number of Al Jazeera journalists and their family members, and
the arrest and intimidation of its correspondents in the field.
“Given Israel’s unprecedented campaign against journalists, Al Jazeera urges media outlets worldwide to exercise the utmost caution and responsibility when headlining Israel’s justifications for its crimes against journalists in Gaza.”
A pro-Palestinian protest in Auckland last Sunday . . . millions of people have been protesting across the world for an immediate ceasefire in Israel's War on Gaza and the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Image: David Robie/Café Pacific
ANALYSIS: By Hina Rabbani Khar
Over the past decade and a half, I have attended many meetings and conferences, and met many people in Western governments, think tanks and academia who have been concerned about the rise of autocracies across the world. Many of them believe that authoritarian tendencies are the biggest threat to the liberal world order and rules-based system.
But I beg to differ. I believe the biggest threat to the liberal world order comes from liberal democracies and not their autocratic nemeses. That is because there is a widening chasm between the values Western governments proclaim to uphold and their actual conduct.
That has triggered a credibility crisis that threatens to unravel the liberal world order.
What we say about our value system and how we project our foreign policy objectives in our statements is important, but even more important is what we do afterwards. People have eyes and ears, and when what they see is the opposite of what they hear, they lose trust.
This is what is happening now with Western rhetoric and actions in relation to Israel and Palestine. This mismatch between what is said and what is being done is, of course, nothing new.
‘In supporting Israel and enabling it to kill tens of thousands of civilians, the majority of them women and children in the name of “self-defence”, Western countries are putting themselves at the opposite end of the values and principles of multilateralism and respect for human rights they have put mammoth effort in promoting in the past.’
— Hina Rabbani Khar
I come from a region where we have suffered immensely as a result of the great liberal promise of the West; our neighbour Afghanistan faced disaster not once, but twice because of it.
As we moved from one war to another after the 9/11 attacks in the US, the Western-made liberal order started to lose its credibility faster than the West had time to realise. It left behind a debris of chaos, bloodshed and broken promises of “democratisation” and “emancipation”.
The “others” started questioning the Western narrative and its legitimacy.
Aftershocks are felt for generations
Wars leave behind devastation that persists long after the fighting and funding for “reconstruction” end and long after the media spotlight, the fervent hashtags and impassioned posts move on, as the world’s collective conscience loses interest. The aftershocks are felt in the geography where the wars are conducted for generations, as people continue to experience a conflict’s intended and unintended consequences.
I was in office when the Russian war on Ukraine started and I experienced firsthand how the US, the EU, the UK and other Western countries tried to convince many in the developing world that they must not stand on the side of aggression, that they must not be “on the wrong side of history”.
As the UN Security Council could not pass any resolution because of Russia’s veto, the West expended a great deal of political capital to bring resolution after resolution in the General Assembly in support of Ukraine. It aimed to show the world that Russia was using its veto power against the global consensus and was in fact isolated on the world stage.
And then came the war in Gaza. I watched with incredulity when pleas echoed from Gaza in the form of resolutions brought forward to the UN Security Council urging an end to the bloodshed and asking for a humanitarian ceasefire only to be vetoed by the US.
As the UN pleaded for action — calling Gaza a “graveyard for children” and reporting that more UN aid workers had died in the last few months in Gaza than in any other conflict — the West, which had historically been a champion of multilateralism, did nothing. In fact, it came in the way of those who were trying to stop the indiscriminate killing of civilians.
This forced UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to invoke in early December Article 99 — used only at times when international peace and security are threatened. Even then, the West took no action; the US vetoed a subsequent resolution for a humanitarian ceasefire at the UNSC and then voted against a nonbinding resolution at the General Assembly supported by 153 countries.
The UK abstained in both votes. Let that sink in.
More unpalatable
What makes this more unpalatable than Russia’s veto at the Security Council is that unlike Russia, the US and UK sanction people and countries on human rights violations and call for interventions on human rights grounds. How can the rest of the world have trust in the West’s self-declared “value-based leadership” when countries like the US and UK abdicate their responsibility and side with the aggressor?
This obvious hypocrisy is reminiscent of the tale of the emperor’s new clothes: Everyone can see Western rhetoric is naked.
The West talks about commitment to human rights and democratic values, while at the same time offering full diplomatic cover to the state of Israel and ensuring its impunity in massacring as many Palestinians as it desires in the pursuit of its official, declared goal of complete extermination of the Palestinian people.
In supporting Israel and enabling it to kill tens of thousands of civilians, the majority of them women and children in the name of “self-defence”, Western countries are putting themselves at the opposite end of the values and principles of multilateralism and respect for human rights they have put mammoth effort in promoting in the past.
They are going against the very fundamentals on which the United Nations was built.
I believe in the commonality of our values, I believe that the West has much to celebrate in its human rights and development records, but I also know that the West has shown glaring disregard for these principles outside of its own geography.
Anyone concerned with the US’s global leadership or retention of its status as the leader of “the free world” should certainly be asking themselves why it has decided to isolate itself on the world stage and why it is willing to pay such a high diplomatic price that will have reputational and credibility repercussions for decades.
The widening chasm between the values Western governments proclaim to uphold and their actual conduct has triggered a credibility crisis that threatens to unravel the liberal world order. My oped for @AJEnglishhttps://t.co/Vl1FvqsEZZ
Washington’s stance undermining
Washington’s stance today would not only undermine efforts to promote it as the only reliable world power, but would also sabotage its ability to play the role of a peace builder in the future.
If the US wants to save its global reputation, it should first and foremost stop standing in the way of UN Security Council resolutions demanding a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. It should also stop opposing General Assembly resolutions that commit to a two-state solution and condemn Israeli settlements; both of these elements are already part of US-stated policy.
Finally, it needs to respond to the appeals of UN institutions and stop obstructing its actions.
Those who claim the UN has failed in the wake of this crisis are grotesquely wrong. The UN continues to unambiguously report what is happening on the ground and call for global action. Whether it is the UNGA, the voice of the collective conscience of the world, or the secretary-general, or the WHO chief or the UNICEF chief — they have all made incredible efforts to get the world to act and stop the violence.
I have served in government long enough to know that as officials, we often make the mistake of thinking our job is to maintain positions on certain issues that our countries have historically held.
But this is the wrong way to go about building policy. Our job should be to hold principles not positions. Leadership requires strength to stand on the side of what is right not on the side of historical positions.
Hina Rabbani Khar is a former foreign minister of Pakistan, commissioner of the Climate Overshoot Commission and an international speaker on geopolitics. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.
The United States and more than a dozen other countries quickly moved to suspend funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, a vital lifeline for millions of people in Gaza, shortly after Israel accused a handful of the agency’s staff of taking part in the Hamas attack on October 7.
But the UK broadcaster Channel 4 obtained the intelligence dossier on UNRWA that Israel shared with allied countries, and found “no evidence to support its explosive new claim.”
The Financial Times and Sky News also reviewed the materials and came to the same conclusion.
Israel’s claims about UNRWA are just the latest example of what journalist Jeremy Scahill says is a “deliberate propaganda campaign” to justify its brutal assault on Gaza.
“This is one of the most epic frauds in modern history, reminiscent of the lies told to explain and justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq,” says Scahill, senior reporter and correspondent at The Intercept.
Jeremy Scahill on Israeli propaganda. Video: Democracy Now!
NERMEENSHAIKH: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Nermeen Shaikh, with Amy Goodman.
A key Israeli intelligence document used by over a dozen countries, including the United States, to justify defunding UNRWA, the primary aid group for Palestinian refugees, contains no evidence to back up Israel’s claims, according to several news reports.
The allegations made in the Israeli document include accusations that several UNRWA employees participated in the Hamas attack on October 7th. Britain’s Channel 4 obtained the document and found that it, quote, “provides no evidence to support its explosive new claim that UNRWA staff were involved with terror attacks on Israel.”
The Financial Times, which also reviewed the materials, came to the same conclusion, as did Sky News. Now the aid agency, which is critical to providing humanitarian support in Gaza, says it will run out of funds by March as a result of the funding cuts.
The allegations made by Israel are just the latest in what journalist Jeremy Scahill calls, quote, “Israel’s information warfare campaign,” which is aimed at, quote, “flood[ing] the public discourse with a stream of false, unsubstantiated, and unverifiable allegations.”
In his latest article, published today in The Intercept, Scahill writes, quote, “Nearly every week, sometimes every day, the Israeli government and military have unloaded a fresh barrage of allegations intended to justify the ongoing slaughter.”
He adds, “The tactic is effective, particularly because the U.S. and other major allies have consistently laundered Israel’s unverified allegations as evidence of the righteousness of the cause.”
Jeremy, welcome back to Democracy Now! If you could just begin by laying out the case that you make in your latest piece?
“Netanyahu’s war on truth: Israel’s ruthless propaganda campaign to dehumanise Palestinians.” Image: The Intercept
JEREMYSCAHILL:Well, in the early morning hours of October 7, members of Hamas from the Qassam Brigades, the Nukhba, their elite special forces, as well as members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, led a multipronged attack in Israel. Everyone is familiar with this.
And the initial targets that they hit constituted almost the entirety of Israel’s infrastructure in what Tel Aviv calls the “Gaza envelope,” and they were able to actually quite swiftly overpower the Gaza Division, the main entity of the Israeli state responsible for enforcing the prison conditions of the people of Gaza, for carrying out drone strikes, for waging war, for conducting all manner of warfare against the people of Gaza.
And then the militant Palestinian fighters made their way into a series of settlements in the area.
And the intent was quite clear: They were trying to take hostages captive so that they could negotiate the release of their own prisoners. But what they did on that day was nothing short of shattering the paradigm, of sending a message that the big lie that is promoted by Israel — not just under Netanyahu, but certainly under Netanyahu — that Israelis could somehow live in peace a stone’s throw away from what is effectively a concentration camp filled with 2.3 million people that are deprived anything vaguely resembling a human existence, that that is tenable.
And Israel was, by all accounts, caught off guard, despite the fact that its own intelligence analysts had been warning that it appeared that Hamas was preparing and training for something that was quite spectacular, and not simply some small, one-off attempts to fire rockets or even do a minor incursion into Israeli territory. And by all accounts, those were overlooked and dismissed.
And what we saw happen then, as the Palestinian fighters made their way across these various Israeli communities and overtook the Gaza Division and took many, many military personnel prisoner and brought them back to Gaza, was the Israeli government engage in sustained counteraction, including with Apache attack helicopters, with drones.
When the military did finally arrive in some of these communities — and, mind you, it was hours and hours before any official Israeli security forces were responding to some of these civilian areas — they engaged in widespread firefights.
At Kibbutz Be’eri, we know that eyewitnesses have said that Israel forces shelled a house, likely killing at least a dozen Israelis who were being held captive by Palestinian fighters. And so, the Israeli government then was reeling from the shock of having these crucial military bases overrun, communities being flooded with Palestinian fighters.
And within hours of these attacks happening, the Netanyahu government began to craft a very deliberate propaganda campaign to sell the United States, other Western leaders and the global public on a scorched-earth war of annihilation against Gaza.
And this campaign kicked into such high gear immediately. And what they did, what was central to this, is that the Israelis began showing President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, the heads of state of NATO countries and other Western nations images and videos that they then proceeded to tell an unverified story about what they depicted.
And the characterisation from Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant was that this was the greatest act of violence against Jewish people since the Holocaust, that the tactics that Hamas used included rape, beheading of babies, mutilation of bodies, torture of families, the bounding of children in groups, including in a nursery in one of the kibbutzes, and then engaging in mass execution of small children, setting children on fire.
And President Biden, Secretary Blinken and many Western leaders then started to repeat these claims.
But what happened is that when the Israeli social security agency began to actually document the deaths on October 11, they documented 1,139 deaths; 695 of them were civilians. And we started reviewing the public documentation of the deaths.
It turns out that there was only one infant that was killed in all of the attacks combined on October 7, a 9-month-old baby named Mila Cohen. And she was hit by a bullet during gunfire while she was in her mother’s arm.
There were also — I think there were 36 children under the age of 19 that died that day. Fourteen of them were actually killed in Hamas rocket attacks. So, when journalists started actually looking then at the official death toll — and you can go — the Israelis have published the stories, the photos of many, many, many of the victims — you realise that these were all lies.
It was a massive fraud that was perpetrated on the world, particularly this business about mass decapitation of babies. And Joe Biden, on numerous occasions, said that he saw actual photographic evidence of the beheading of babies and the bounding and burning alive with kerosene whole families.
And what I discovered in my research was that these stories appear to have ended up in the heads of Biden and Blinken and others based on the totally fraudulent version of events on October 7 that was offered by private Orthodox rescue operations — the most famous of them is Zaka — telling stories, you know, about a pregnant woman who had a fetus cut out of her body, and then the fetus was decapitated in front of the woman and her two children.
There’s no evidence whatsoever to indicate that that happened. In fact, there’s no documentation that any pregnant woman died on October 7. There was one pregnant woman who was shot while in her car on the way to deliver her baby. She was a Bedouin woman.
And the doctors were able to save her life. They tried to deliver the baby. The baby died some hours later. But that wasn’t Hamas cutting a baby out of a stomach.
And yet these lies were sold. And some of the most obscene things that Israel said, that we now know are false, were repeated by Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, in testimony in front of the Senate, by Joe Biden himself. And this has gone on and on and on. I’ve just given you a couple of the most graphic examples of this.
But what’s clear is that the Israeli government understood that they needed to sell this as like the worst crime against humanity in modern times, in order to justify a long-planned siege of Gaza that Benjamin Netanyahu — he represents the most extreme and violent version of the Israeli state project.
And it’s very, very clear that they sold this fraud, and the White House laundered it, and that’s why we’ve seen — and I think 27,000 people killed in Gaza is a conservative estimate. I think it’s much greater than that, because there’s an estimated 7000 or 8000 Palestinians missing, many of them in graves that are the rubble of their former home. So, this is one of the most epic frauds in modern history, reminiscent of the lies told to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
AMYGOODMAN: Jeremy, I’m wondering if we can jump for a moment to the beginning of this segment, from October 7 to the UNRWA story, that something like, what, the Israeli government was alleging 12 — and then that number got larger — members of UNRWA, which has something like 13,000 workers in Gaza, were involved with the October 7 attack. Talk about, if you will, the way you do in your piece, take apart, as Channel 4 did, as a number of news organisations have, the evidence for this, that has been used by now almost 20 countries to defund this essential organisation that supports the hospitals and the schools of Gaza for over 2 million people.
JEREMYSCAHILL:Well, UNRWA is nothing short of the most important humanitarian organisation operating in Gaza. In fact, it was explicitly established in 1949 during the Nakba, where 750,000-plus Palestinians were forced from their homes in an extermination/annihilation campaign that then paved the way for the establishment of the state of Israel in the aftermath of World War II.
And the mandate of UNRWA was to care for those Palestinians and ensure that their right of return to their homes and land was going to be protected. And so, the Israeli government, certainly under Netanyahu, but under other heads of state, as well, has always wanted UNRWA eliminated, because this represents a very serious problem for the Israeli agenda of eliminating Palestinian territory in its entirety. So, just to give that context.
But then, the Israelis decide that — immediately after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rules in favour of South Africa and orders provisional measures that include the prevention of genocidal acts, the stopping of killing Palestinians, that the court recognised as a protected group, and to allow, with immediate effect, the entry of aid sufficient to confront the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the Israeli war on Gaza, the Israelis then choose to open a new front and just blast the public and the ears of Western leaders with a propaganda campaign aimed at trying to get them to join the crusade to eliminate UNRWA.
And Israel then prepared what it called an intelligence dossier, alleging that 12 employees of UNRWA — it has 13,000 or so employees in Gaza, 30,000 employees spread out across the Middle East where displaced Palestinians reside.
And the response from the Biden administration was to immediately announce it was suspending all funding to UNRWA. And Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted publicly that the United States had not even done its own review or investigation of these assertions that 12 members of a 30,000-member organisation had some link to the October 7 attacks.
And then what happened — and this is so reminiscent of Judy Miller, The New York Times, the mushroom cloud, Dick Cheney, build-up to the War in Iraq — they go to The Wall Street Journal, and the Israelis provide the The Wall Street Journal with what the Journal then advertises as a dossier, an intelligence dossier.
And they go further than the 12. They say that a full 10 percent of UNRWA’s Gaza staff, 1200 employees, are connected to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and they say this is not just a few bad apples.
Well, this laundering of Israeli propaganda in the form of an article for a major American newspaper was — the lead author of that article was Carrie Keller-Lynn. She’s a new contributor to The Wall Street Journal. I started digging into who is this person, because she didn’t have a full bio on The Wall Street Journal website.
Well, it turns out that she is a veteran of the Israeli Defence Forces. She was a militant opponent of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement when she was at university in the United States. And her close friend, who she did a joint interview with for an organisation that takes American grad students to Israel, she credits her with, during the 2009 Gaza war, creating the social media strategy for the Israeli Defence Forces. This is the reporter that was the lead journalist writing this UNRWA story for The Wall Street Journal.
And once we started to draw attention to that and put photos of her in her IDF uniform and talking about her ties to someone she said helped create the social media strategy for the IDF during a previous war in Gaza, then these organisations she was affiliated with scrubbed all of these articles and photos from the internet. The Journal has locked her Twitter account.
But this was very, very clearly a sophisticated propaganda campaign, where they knew which journalists to go to, they knew which governments would buy into it. And what they got is the Biden administration now being actively complicit in violating the orders of the International Court of Justice, which has Israel under watch for potential plausible genocidal actions in Gaza.
AMYGOODMAN: Finally, Jeremy, do you think, on the October 7 investigation, that it wasn’t simply enough for Israel to say over a thousand Israelis and other people, majority of them civilian, were killed in the Hamas attack, was not enough of a justification to go into [Gaza] and then multiply that over 27,000 [sic] times — 27 times, to more than 27,000 dead today?
JEREMYSCAHILL:The Israelis, particularly the civilians who were killed that day, deserve the truth about what happened. The Israeli government responded with very heavy firepower. There’s indications that the Hannibal Directive may have been invoked, which says that it’s better to injure and possibly even kill Israelis than let them be taken hostage.
They also made sweeping allegations about sexual violence being systematically committed by Hamas, that they have provided no proof that such a systematic campaign took place. The victims in Israel deserve the truth. And the 30,000-plus Palestinians who have been murdered with American bombs, whose deaths have been justified by the killing of those Israelis, possibly including by their own government, they also deserve the truth, and they deserve justice.
NERMEENSHAIKH: Jeremy, I’m afraid, I’m sorry, we’re going to have to leave it there. Jeremy Scahill, senior reporter and correspondent at The Intercept. His latest piece, out today, “Netanyahu’s war on truth: Israel’s ruthless propaganda campaign to dehumanise Palestinians.”
And that does it for the show. I’m Nermeen Shaikh, with Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.
