October 21: Israel/Palestine update

Amnesty report on war crimes in Gaza; more forensic analysis of the hospital bombing; US and UE staffers in revolt; “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”: what does it really mean?

Amidst the fog of war and propaganda, and the 24/7 non-stop information flow, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s actually happening. This is why I’ve decided to start providing these updates — every one or two days — on the Israel-Palestine war (or, more precisely, Israel’s war on Palestine), highlighting the most important stories relating to the conflict.

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In today’s post, I will be covering: Amnesty report on war crimes in Gaza; the Goldstone Report; more forensic analysis poking holes in Israel’s hospital bombing story; US and UE staffers revolt against their governments’ support for Israel; Greta Thunberg is accused of antisemitism because of a toy octopus: the hypocrisy of anti-antisemitism; “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”: what does it really mean?

Let’s start, as always, with the death toll. The latest data by the Health Ministry in Gaza puts the number of those killed so far at 4,137 — including more than 1,500 children. To put things in perspective, that’s almost 50% as many civilian deaths — and three times as many dead children — as those caused by nearly two years of war in Ukraine. This is not to say that the deaths caused by Russia’s invasion are any less tragic, but it is clear evidence of the fact that Russia’s conduct in Ukraine vis-à-vis civilians has been much less indiscriminate than Israel’s. If Russia had followed the Israeli playbook — or the American one, for that matter — in Ukraine, by now the civilian casualties would be in the hundreds of thousands. This is a self-evident fact.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International has just published a report claiming that there is “damning evidence of war crimes” in Gaza involving “killing civilians on a mass scale” and “wip[ing] out entire families”. Here’s an excerpt from the report:

As Israeli forces continue to intensify their cataclysmic assault on the occupied Gaza Strip, Amnesty International has documented unlawful Israeli attacks, including indiscriminate attacks, which caused mass civilian casualties and must be investigated as war crimes.

The organization spoke to survivors and eyewitnesses, analysed satellite imagery, and verified photos and videos to investigate air bombardments carried out by Israeli forces between 7 and 12 October, which caused horrific destruction, and in some cases wiped out entire families. In each of these cases, Israeli attacks violated international humanitarian law, including by failing to take feasible precautions to spare civilians, or by carrying out indiscriminate attacks that failed to distinguish between civilians and military objectives, or by carrying out attacks that may have been directed against civilian objects.

“In their stated intent to use all means to destroy Hamas, Israeli forces have shown a shocking disregard for civilian lives. They have pulverized street after street of residential buildings killing civilians on a mass scale and destroying essential infrastructure, while new restrictions mean Gaza is fast running out of water, medicine, fuel and electricity. Testimonies from eyewitness and survivors highlighted, again and again, how Israeli attacks decimated Palestinian families, causing such destruction that surviving relatives have little but rubble to remember their loved ones by”, said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

What people need to understand is that the policy of indiscriminate bombing/killing currently being employed by Israel in Gaza is nothing new; as I noted in yesterday’s post, it has long been Israel’s unofficial policy vis-à-vis the Strip.

For further evidence of this, consider the so-called Goldstone Report. The latter was the result of a UN fact-finding mission established following the 2009 Israeli attack on Gaza “to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, due to the current aggression”.