October 26: Israel/Palestine update

Further evidence of plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza; atrocity propaganda; unanswered questions about October 7; a desperate appeal from Palestinian Christians; the Netanyahu-Hamas alliance.

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 few days — on the Israel-Palestine war (or, more precisely, Israel’s war on Palestine), highlighting the most important stories relating to the conflict.

This content is for paying subscribers only. Putting out high-quality journalism requires constant research, most of which goes unpaid. So if you like my writing, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription: you will get access to tons of exclusive stuff such as this, on top of staying updated about my writings elsewhere. I want to thank all the recent subscribers for the support, it means a lot. Judging from the feedback, it looks like a lot of people are finding these updates very useful, which I’m glad for.

I apologise if a few days have gone by since my last update; I was busy researching and writing this article for UnHerd where I debunk several myths about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — and explain how a serious proposal for the establishment of a Palestinian state was never really on the table. Disturbingly, a thread that I wrote on the article has been heavily censored by X (presumably because I don’t subscribe to the established narrative on the Israel/Palestine/Gaza issue, but I can’t be sure), as you can see in the following video:

This isn’t the only form of censorship I’m experiencing: my posts are also definitely getting deboosted, and other users aren’t getting notified for my likes or replies. This is what is known as shadowbanning — a particularly Kafkaesque form of censorship because it’s not readily apparent to the user and not easy to prove.

It also means the user has no way of appealing the decision, though this is often true even for more overt forms of censorship, such as the one used on my thread. X, for example, has a procedure for appealing account blocks and suspensions but not account “limitations” such as the ones that I’m experience. This is very concerning, especially considering that Elon Musk had promised to put an end to shadowbanning.

Funnily enough, this is happening just a few days after we launched an international anti-censorship appeal known as the Westminster Declaration. Anyway, it shows that online censorship is still rampant — even on X — and that pro-Palestinian voices are the ones most heavily targeted at the moment. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: all wars are also information/propaganda wars — today more than ever. As Alan McLeod writes:

Almost as important as its military campaign for Israel is its battle to control its public image. Even as it kills thousands of people in Gaza, [Israel] is spending millions of dollars on a propaganda war, purchasing ads on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other online apps. At the same time, an army of pro-Israel trolls has invaded the Community Notes function on X/Twitter, attempting to influence the online debate around the ongoing crisis.

[UPDATE: shortly after posting this, the thread was de-shadowbanned!]

Okay, now let’s get down to what is actually happening in Gaza (and the wider Middle Eastern region). In today’s post, I will be covering: air strikes on southern Gaza after Israel told people to take shelter there; further evidence of plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza; Israel’s use of atrocity propaganda; unanswered questions about October 7; a desperate appeal from Palestinian Christians; the UN-Israel spat; the Netanyahu-Hamas “alliance”, and much more.

Let’s start, as always, with the death toll. According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, at least 6,546 Palestinians, including 2,704 children, have been killed, and 17,439 have been wounded, in the Israeli assault on Gaza since October 7. These numbers are so shocking — we’re talking around two-thirds of all civilian deaths in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, almost two years ago, and five times as many dead children — that Israel has taken to accuse Hamas (which controls the Health Ministry in Gaza) of making them up. It’s hard to imagine a more callous behaviour than massacring thousands of civilians while flat-out denying you’re doing so, but there you go.

To make things worse, the US is fully endorsing the Israeli whitewashing of its crimes in Gaza. When asked by a reporter whether Hamas’ statistics suggest that Netanyahu is ignoring US calls to minimise civilian casualties in Gaza, Biden responded:

What they say to me is that I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s a price of waging a war.

However, Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director of US-based Human Rights Watch, told the Washington Post that there is no reason for doubting the Health Ministry’s number:

Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable. In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.

Moreover, when considering the scale of the destruction being by wrought on Gaza, with entire neighbourhoods being razed to the ground, those numbers appear easily believable.

Indeed, the infrastructural damage in Gaza is almost mind-boggling:

In a particularly cruel twist, Israel, which until recently had mostly limited its bombing to the northern part of Gaza, in the past days has also started hitting residential buildings in southern Gaza, where Israel had told civilians to take shelter after ordering the evacuation of the entire population of northern Gaza.

One overnight attack levelled a four-storey residential building in the southern city of Khan Younis, killing at least 32 people and wounding dozens of others, survivors told The Associated Press news agency.

In one these raids, Al Jazeera Arabic’s bureau chief in Gaza, Wael Dahdouh, lost his wife, son, daughter and grandson. Shortly after learning the news, he said:

What happened is clear. This is a series of targeted attacks on children, women and civilians. I was just reporting from Yarmouk about such an attack, and the Israeli raids have targeted many areas, including Nuseirat. We had our doubts that the Israeli occupation would not let these people go without punishing them. And sadly, that is what happened. This is the “safe” area that the occupation army spoke of.

But people in Gaza aren’t just dying from the Israeli bombs, but also from the direct and indirect effects of Israel’s “total siege” of Gaza — the cutting of food, water, medicine and fuel to the Strip. Just the other day, five UN agencies warned that the situation in Gaza is “catastrophic”. “Pre-positioned humanitarian supplies have already been depleted. Vulnerable people are at greatest risk and children are dying at an alarming rate and being denied their right to protection, food, water and health care”, they said. 

Several aid trucks have crossed from Egypt to Gaza since Sunday, but not nearly enough to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe, according to the UN. Jeremy Laurence, spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), said: “The aid which resumed from Egypt over the weekend is a mere drop in the ocean of what is needed”.

Fuel, which has been left out of the deliveries due to the agreement with Israel, was crucial, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said. “Fuel is extremely urgent because, without fuel, the trucks themselves cannot move”, UNRWA spokesperson Tamara Alrifai said. “Without fuel, the generators cannot produce electricity for hospitals, for bakeries and for the water desalination plant”.

As I told TalkTV (full interview here), it is amply clear that Israel’s operation in Gaza has nothing to do “taking out Hamas”, but is rather aimed causing as much death and destruction in Gaza as Israel can get away with (which happens to be a lot), in the hope of displacing and/or expelling as many people as it can get away with.

Indeed, according to the UN Rapporteur for Palestine, we may be on the verge of the “largest instance of ethnic cleansing” in Middle Eastern history. Meanwhile, nearly 800 lawyers and scholars have signed a statement warning of the possibility of genocide in Gaza: