IDF soldier carries a shell amid Israeli\/Hezbollah clashes near the Lebanese\/Israeli border<\/p>\n
Nearly a decade ago, a leading Israeli<\/a> human rights activist divulged to me a private conversation he\u2019d had a short time earlier with one of Europe\u2019s ambassadors to Israel. He had clearly been shaken by the exchange.<\/p>\n The ambassador\u2019s country was then widely seen as one of the most sympathetic in the West to the Palestinian<\/a> people. The Israeli activist had expressed concerns about Europe\u2019s inaction in the face of relentless Israeli attacks on Palestinian rights and systematic violations of international law.<\/p>\n At the time, Israel was enforcing a lengthy siege on Gaza<\/a> that had deprived more than two million people there of the essentials of life, and it had repeatedly bombed urban areas, killing hundreds of civilians.<\/p>\n In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel had intensified its expansion of illegal Jewish settlements, leading to a surge in violence from settler militias and the Israeli army. Palestinians were being killed and driven off their land.<\/p>\n The activist asked the ambassador a simple question: What would Israel need to do for his government to act against it? Where was the red line?<\/p>\n The ambassador paused as he thought hard. And then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he responded: there was nothing Israel could do. There was no red line.<\/p>\n A decade ago, that comment might have been interpreted as evasive. A year into Israel\u2019s erasure of Gaza<\/a>, it sounds utterly prophetic.<\/p>\n There is no red line. And more importantly, there never has been. That conversation took place many years before 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out of Gaza and killed more than 1,000 Israelis.<\/p>\n That date is not quite the turning point, the rupture, that it is universally presented as.<\/p>\n Hamas\u2019s brief jail-break from Gaza certainly triggered an explosive desire for revenge among Israelis, who had grown used to being able to subjugate and dispossess the Palestinian people cost-free.<\/p>\n But more importantly, it offered a pretext for Israel\u2019s leaders to erase Gaza<\/a> – to carry out a plan they had long harboured. And similarly, it offered western states the pretext they needed to stand with Israel and excuse its savagery as Israel\u2019s \u201cright to defend itself\u201d.<\/p>\n Call the events unfolding over the past 12 months in Gaza what you will: self-defence, mass slaughter, or a \u201cplausible genocide<\/a>\u201d, as the world\u2019s highest court has termed it. What can\u2019t be debated is that it has been a horror show.<\/p>\n In the first two months alone, Israel destroyed more of Gaza proportionally than the Allies managed in Germany during the entire Second World War. It carried out more air strikes<\/a> on Gaza than the US<\/a> and UK<\/a> did against the Islamic State<\/a> group over a period of three years in Iraq<\/a>.<\/p>\n The official figures are that Israel has so far killed more than 42,000 Palestinians<\/a> in Gaza – more than\u00a0half<\/a> of them women and children – through relentless and indiscriminate bombing of the tiny, overcrowded enclave.<\/p>\n According to human rights groups, more children were killed<\/a> by Israel in the first four months of its bombing campaign in Gaza than were killed in four years of all other global conflicts combined.<\/p>\n Oxfam reported<\/a> last week that in the past two decades, no conflict anywhere else in the world has come close to killing so many children over a 12-month period.<\/p>\n But the true death toll is far higher. Gaza, bombed<\/a> into 42 million tonnes of rubble, lost the ability to count its dead and wounded many months ago.<\/p>\n Last week, a group of nearly 100 American doctors and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza\u2019s healthcare system as Israel has systematically eviscerated it wrote an open letter to US President Joe Biden. They estimated<\/a> that the death toll was nearly three times higher than the official figure.<\/p>\n They added: \u201cWith only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.\u201d<\/p>\n Back in July, a letter published<\/a> in the Lancet medical journal put the figure still higher. Using standard modelling techniques, drawing on data from previous wars in which densely populated urban areas were destroyed, a team of experts concluded that Gaza\u2019s death toll would reach much closer to 200,000, based on conservative parameters.<\/p>\n That would amount to nearly 10 percent of Gaza\u2019s population killed outright by Israeli bombs, disappeared under rubble, dead from medical conditions that could not be treated, or dying from mass malnutrition after a year of an Israeli medieval-style blockade of food, water and fuel.<\/p>\n Israel appears certain that there are no red lines, and as a result, things have only gotten worse since the Lancet letter.<\/p>\n In September, deliveries of food and aid into Gaza sank to their lowest level in seven months, according<\/a> to figures from the United Nations and Israel.<\/p>\n In other words, Israel\u2019s stranglehold on aid to Gaza\u2019s starving population has actually intensified since May, when Karim Khan, the British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), requested arrest warrants<\/a> for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n One of the main charges was that the pair were using starvation as a weapon of war.<\/p>\n Israeli leaders are so confident that the US and Europe are watching their backs that, according to a Reuters report last week, Israel\u2019s military authorities have in recent days been blocking<\/a> UN-chartered aid convoys from entering Gaza.<\/p>\n Netanyahu clearly isn\u2019t worried about being dragged to the dock of a war crimes tribunal at The Hague any time soon.<\/p>\n If western politicians have no red lines when it comes to Israel, much the same can be said of the West\u2019s establishment media.<\/p>\n They barely report on conditions in Gaza anymore, apart from the occasional headline figure of deaths from Israel\u2019s latest bombardment of a school shelter, refugee camp or mosque.<\/p>\n Media outlets marked the anniversary of 7 October this week but, predictably, most did so from an exclusively Israeli perspective – as the day when 1,150 Israelis<\/a>\u00a0and foreigners were killed during Hamas\u2019s attack, and a mix of some 250 captured soldiers and civilian hostages were taken into the enclave.<\/p>\n The BBC, for example, has been heavily promoting its documentary We Will Dance Again<\/em>, recounting the experiences<\/a> of Israelis who attended the Nova rave close to Gaza, which turned into a killing field.<\/p>\n Similarly, Britain\u2019s Channel 4 aired a documentary<\/a> titled One Day in October<\/em>, billed as \u201can intimate and shocking account of the Kibbutz Be\u2019eri atrocity\u201d. Some 100 kibbutz inhabitants were killed<\/a> that day and 30 hostages seized.<\/p>\n Notably, more than a dozen of those residents in Be\u2019eri might have been killed not by Hamas, but by the Israeli army, after an Israeli tank was ordered to fire<\/a> into one of the homes where Hamas was holed up with them.<\/p>\n Israeli army commanders on 7 October invoked the highly controversial Hannibal directive, authorising soldiers to kill their comrades to stop them from being taken captive. On that day, Israel appears to have applied the directive<\/a> to civilians too. One of the people who died after the Israeli tank fire in Be\u2019eri was a 12-year-old girl, Liel Hetzroni.<\/p>\n Western media outlets have so far almost completely\u00a0<\/strong>avoided drawing attention to the role Israel\u2019s Hannibal directive played that day.<\/p>\n This week, in a sign of how one-sided the media\u2019s portrayal has become, the Guardian hurriedly removed from its website a review<\/a> criticising the Ch4 film for failing to provide any context for the Hamas attack on October 7 – decades of military oppression and siege conditions on Gaza.<\/p>\n The review provoked a predictable storm of protest from leading Zionist journalists.<\/p>\n 7 October was not only the day Hamas launched its surprise attack on Israel; it was also the day Israel began its slaughter of Palestinians in revenge.<\/p>\n The day marks the start of what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has concluded amounts to a \u201cplausible genocide\u201d – one that Israel has barred foreign correspondents from covering in person. Instead, the slaughter has been live-streamed<\/a> for 12 months variously by the population under attack, and by the Israeli soldiers committing war crimes in plain view.<\/p>\n Why is the ‘liberal’ media peddling the vilest genocide apologism?<\/p>\n I can’t put this strongly enough. Howard Jacobson’s article in today\u2019s Observer newspaper may be one the vilest pieces of journalism published in Britain in living memory, arguing that any reporting of Israel’s\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/gILWIOmEFk<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 6, 2024<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\nHorror show<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Medieval-style blockade<\/strong><\/h2>\n
One-sided anniversary<\/strong><\/h2>\n
No consequences<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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