August 5, 2024
Israeli forces
killed dozens of displaced Palestinians—mostly children—on Sunday with attacks
on a pair of United Nations-run schools in the Gaza Strip as diplomats in the
region worked to prevent all-out war from breaking out in the aftermath of
Israel's latest assassination spree.
Rescue teams recover the bodies of those killed in an Israeli attack on schools in Gaza City, Gaza on August 4, 2024.(Photo: Mahmoud Issa/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Al Jazeera reported
that 80% of the roughly 30 people killed in the Israeli attacks on two schools
in Gaza City were children. The strikes came shortly after Israel's military
bombed a hospital complex in central Gaza, killing at least five people.
"This is
beyond horror now," David Shoebridge, an Australian senator, wrote in
response to the attacks on schools-turned-shelters.
Tareq Abu Azzoum
of Al Jazeeranoted that rescue teams were still searching the rubble of the two
schools for survivors on Monday.
"At least
16 Palestinians are still missing, including children, under the remnants of
these areas that were targeted by Israel without any prior warning,"
Azzoum wrote. "Civil defense crews have been using only their bare hands
in order to look for survivors. They have been saying that sometimes the
process for recovering and pulling out victims can take days simply because
there isn't enough fuel to operate the vast majority of bulldozers, and due to
the Israeli attacks on bulldozers at the municipal facilities, used in the
initial months of the war to rescue victims."
Israel's
monthslong war on the Gaza Strip has devastated the territory's children,
killing more than 14,000, wounding more than 12,000, and leaving over 20,000
missing. The physical toll has been compounded by what one Gaza mother recently
described as the "complete psychological destruction" of the
enclave's youth.
Becky Platt, a
British pediatric nurse who recently returned from Gaza after a stint at a
field hospital there, wrote Monday that "the psychological distress that I
witnessed among children and young people is like nothing I'd ever seen before."
"It's very
easy to be overwhelmed by the numbers when we watch the news or read about
what's happening in Gaza," Platt continued. "Remember that each one
of those numbers is one person, a child who has been forever changed by what's
happened. Then multiply that one child by thousands. That's the work that needs
to be done."
Israel's attacks
came after a round of cease-fire talks in Cairo concluded without a deal to end
the assault on Gaza. Critics, including some Israeli officials, believe Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is actively sabotaging cease-fire talks in a
bid to remain in power.
Axiosreported
Sunday that "Israeli officials and families of hostages are concerned
Netanyahu, who recently toughened his demands and presented new conditions for
a hostage and cease-fire deal, sent the delegation [to Cairo] only to create an
appearance of negotiations to relieve some of the pressure from" U.S.
President Joe Biden, who has called for a cease-fire while continuing to
provide military support for the war on Gaza.
"Hamas
rejected Netanyahu's new conditions, which include forming an international
mechanism to prevent weapons transfers from southern Gaza to the north,"
according to Axios. "Israeli officials say this and other new demands are
making a deal impossible."
Meanwhile,
diplomats are trying to prevent the region from descending into full-scale
military conflict following Israel's assassination of a Hezbollah commander and
Hamas' political leader.
Iran's supreme
leader has reportedly ordered an attack on Israel in retaliation for the
killing of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, and U.S. Secretary of State
Antony Blinken told G7 nations on Sunday that Iran's military response could
begin as soon as Monday.
Late last week,
the Pentagon announced it would "deploy additional fighter jets and Navy
warships to the Middle East" as lawmakers and anti-war campaigners warned
of deepening U.S. involvement in the regional war.
"Americans
do not want to fight another war in the Middle East," Jamal Abdi,
president of the National Iranian American Council, said last week, "and
the path out of the unimaginable death and destruction in Gaza that threatens
to engulf the region is through a cease-fire."
Juan Cole
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On
Sunday, the Los Angeles Times reports, “In Deir al Balah, Gaza, an Israeli
strike hit a tent camp for thousands of displaced Palestinians in the courtyard
of Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, killing four people and injuring others, Gaza’s
Health Ministry said.”
In addition, the Israeli newspaper
Arab 48 reports, fighter jets of the Israeli Air Force fired rockets at two
schools, al-Nasr and Hassan Salamah, in Gaza City, killing 30 persons, 80
percent of them children. That would be 24 children and 6 adults blown to
smithereens. Some 18 were, in addition, wounded. Thousands of people were
gathered in these shelters.
No warning was given to the
refugees.
The strikes brought the number of
school shelters bombed by Israel in a 24 hour period Sunday to three, all of
them in Gaza City.
The Israeli military justified the
air strikes on schools functioning as shelters, a grave war crime, by saying
that the schools were being used as “command and control centers” by operatives
of the al-Qassam Brigades, the paramilitary of the Hamas Party. Arab 48
elaborated that the Israeli military “claimed that it targeted “saboteurs who
operated in Hamas command and control complexes and who were hidden” inside the
schools.”
Any allegation that the schools
themselves were command and control centers is ludicrous, as it has been every
time the Israeli government has trotted it out almost daily for the past nine
months.
And why would al-Qassam Brigades
need to exercise command and control from a refugee school? Some 63 percent of
buildings in Gaza are destroyed or damaged. There are lots of places to hide
from aerial surveillance, and surely it is easy to move around at night.
And what kind of command and control
could they exercise? They can’t possibly be using cell phones.You may as well
just blow your own self up as use easily tracked electronic communications.
Plus, could you even be heard over the wailing of babies and the running around
of the children and the moans of the injured in a refugee center housing
thousands of civilians?
Are the fighters sending out
couriers? What vantage would they have from a refugee school? And with what
information? That the Israelis are attacking?
So if these two schools functioning
as refugee shelters were not in fact major “command and control centers” of
Hamas, why did the Israeli Air Force shoot these particular fish in a barrel?
Israeli investigative reporter
Abraham Yuval revealed in +972 Mag that the Israelis are using artificial
intelligence programs with names such as “Lavender” and “Where’s Daddy?” to
systematically track down and kill the 30,000 members of al-Qassam Brigades and
the 7,000 members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other small guerrilla
groups. I presume that by now the tracking is mainly being done by drones and
facial recognition programs, since as I said, only morons would carry around a
cell phone in Gaza if they were militants. I have suggested we call these AI
programs “murderbots.”
Yuval Abraham reported on Sunday
that American Big Tech firms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud,
and Microsoft Azure are storing massive amounts of information about the Gaza
war in the cloud for Israel. The Israelis have collected enormous databases of
pictures and other information about each Palestinian.
So if we cut through the propaganda
smokescreen, why did Israeli fighter jets fire on the al-Nasr and Hassan
Salamah school shelters? It was because Lavender or Red Wolf or whatever AI
program the Israelis are running to track Al-Qassam members by drone identified
one them going into one shelter, and one of them going into the other. The AI
program then ordered hits on the buildings, with minimal human involvement. The
pilots got the cue and carried out the attacks. Bada bing bada boom.
Now, killing 24 children to get at a
couple of alleged members of the al-Qassam Brigades — who did not pose an
immediate threat to an Israeli soldier — is a major war crime.
This damning character of the action
is why the Israeli army says risible things like that these two schools were a
command and control center, or that the two “saboteurs” were part of a command
and control center, because then they can represent them as menacing and so
more of a legitimate target. Likely, the Israelis are just continuing their
routine gargantuan program of assassination.
Another problem is that the Lavender
program, according to Yuval, yields a false positive in at least 10 percent of
cases. My guess is that in conditions like Gaza, it is rather more.
So some quadcopter with a video
attachment connected to an Amazon or Google database saw someone going into a
school shelter that looked at least vaguely like one of the fighters in the
massive Israeli database. So whether this individual was a fighter or not, the
Israeli Air Force scrambled to strike the shelter, at a robot’s orders.
Maybe they killed a fighter. Maybe
they didn’t. They did kill 24 children and some women. And that is all right
with Tel Aviv, since their rules of engagement, the most monstrous of any
military I know, allow the killing of 15 to 20 noncombatants for every militant
killed, according to Yuval.
You just have to extrapolate out
from, say, two possible militants possibly killed, one in each of the schools,
and 28 others killed, and that would be 14 noncombatant deaths for each
fighter, which is well within the Israeli ROE.
What the Israelis did on Sunday was
a feature, not a bug. And it is these AI-guided procedures that are massacring
Palestinian children and other civilians and inexorably producing the genocide.
This unconscionable carnage is being
paid for by American taxpayers and the Israeli ammunition and weaponry
stockpiles are being replenished by the Biden administration every day.
Qassam
Muaddi
Casualties
- 39,583 + killed* and at least 91,398 wounded in the Gaza Strip. 28,903 Palestinians have been fully identified, and around 10,000 more are estimated to be under the rubble.*
- 606+ Palestinians have been killed in the occupied West Bank including eastern Jerusalem. These include 140 children.**
- Israel revised its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,140.
- 690 Israeli soldiers and officers have been recognized as killed, and 4096 as wounded by the Israeli army, since October 7.***
* Gaza’s branch of
the Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed this figure in its daily report,
published through its WhatsApp channel on August 4, 2024. Rights groups and
public health experts estimate the death toll to be much higher.
** The death toll
in the West Bank and Jerusalem is not updated regularly. According to the
Palestinian Ministry of Health on August 4, this is the latest figure.
*** These figures
are released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were
allowed to be published.” Israeli daily Yediot Ahranot reported on August 4,
2024 that some 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or
wounded since October 7. The head of the Israeli army’s wounded association
told Israel’s Channel 12 the number of wounded Israeli soldiers exceeds 20,000
including at least 8,000 permanently handicapped as of June 1. Israel’s Channel
7 reported that according to the Israeli war ministry’s rehabilitation service
numbers, 8,663 new wounded joined the army’s handicap rehabilitation system
since October 7, as of June 18.
Key
Developments
- Israel has killed 138 Palestinians and wounded 335 across Gaza since Thursday, August 1, raising the death toll since October 7 to 39,583 and the number of wounded to 91,398, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
- Israel bombed three schools sheltering civilians in two days, between Saturday and Sunday in Gaza City, killing 47 Palestinians, 80% of whom were women and children according to the Palestinian Civil Defense.
- WHO says it will send 1 million polio vaccines to Gaza days after announcing it detected a spread of the disease in the strip.
- Israel suspends army vacations in preparation for expected Iranian and Hezbollah retaliatory attacks.
- According to Israeli media, Israel’s negotiating team returned from Cairo a day after arriving, following differences with Netanyahu.
- Netanyahu adds new conditions to the ceasefire deal negotiations, including deporting released Palestinian prisoners, according to Israel’s Channel 13.
- Thousands of Israelis protest in front of Israel’s war ministry to demand a ceasefire and prisoners’ exchange deal and early elections, amid police arrests.
- Israeli families of captives in Gaza say that Netanyahu “gave up on the captives to stay in power,” demanding members of Israel’s negotiating team speak out on Israel’s real stand from the deal negotiations.
- For the first time in months Hamas’s military wing, al-Qassam Brigades, launched a rocket strike from Gaza on Ashdod, hitting an Israeli factory directly.
- U.S. Central Command chief General Michael Kurilla arrived in the Middle East on Saturday to coordinate efforts to defend Israel against an expected Iranian attack.
- The Pentagon says that U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin will lead forces deployment in the Middle East in preparation for an Iranian attack on Israel.
- West Bank: Israel has killed 12 Palestinians in the West Bank in the past four days.
- West Bank: Israeli settlers injure four Palestinians and torch dozens of olive trees in the villages of Mughayyir, east of Ramallah, and Sourif, south of Hebron.
- West Bank: Palestinians attack an Israeli settlers’ bus station west of Bethlehem with Molotov cocktails, provoking a fire in the station.
- Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot reports that 10,000 Israeli soldiers and officers have been either killed or wounded since October 7 during its assault on Gaza and that 1,000 soldiers join the war ministry’s rehabilitation services every month.
- Israeli doctor Yoel Donchin says on the Israeli ‘Kan’ channel that during his work at the Sde Teiman Israeli detention center, he examined a Palestinian prisoner showing injuries of sexual abuse that he reported he was unable to treat, due to their severe nature.
- Israeli doctor Guy Shalev, director of Physicians for Human Rights, says on the Israeli ‘Kan’ channel that his organization has information about some ten other cases of sexual abuse in Sde Teiman and about more cases in Israeli detention centers, calling it “a phenomenon.”
- Lebanon: Hezbollah attacks the headquarters of the Israeli army’s 91st division with drones. Israel admits one soldier and one officer were wounded.
Israel kills 47 Palestinians in strikes on three schools
sheltering civilians in Gaza
Israeli
forces bombed three schools sheltering civilians in less than 48 hours, killing
47 Palestinians in Gaza City over the weekend.
On
Saturday, Israeli warplanes struck twice the Hamama school in the Sheikh Radwan
neighborhood, west of Gaza City, killing 16 people. The school was crowded with
displaced families who took shelter in it. The Palestinian Civil Defense said
that the strike wounded dozens of Palestinians, some of whom were critically
wounded. According to the civil defense, Israeli forces struck the school a
second time while civil defense teams were recovering the wounded.
On
Sunday, Israeli strikes targeted two schools sheltering civilians at the same
time; the Nasr school and the Hasan Salameh school, in the western Gaza city,
killing at least 30 Palestinians. Both schools were sheltering displaced
families. The Palestinian Civil Defense said that 80% of the victims were women
and children.
The
Israeli army said in a statement that it had intelligence that Hamas used the
Hamama school as a headquarters, without providing any evidence.
The
Gaza government office said in a statement on Sunday that Israeli forces have
targeted 172 sheltering centers in the Gaza Strip since October 7, killing
1,040 Palestinians. According to the UN, 86% of the Gaza Strip has been
impacted by Israeli ‘evacuation orders’, ordering the majority of Gaza’s
population to move to limited ‘safe zones’, which have also been targeted by
Israeli strikes.
Israel has killed 12 Palestinians in the West Bank since
Thursday
Israeli
forces continued to escalate their attacks on the West Bank, killing 12
Palestinians since Friday, August 2, raising the number of Palestinians killed
by Israeli forces or settlers in the West Bank since October 7 to 606,
including 140 children.
On
Friday, August 2, the Palestinian Health Ministry confirmed the death of Tamer
Saqr, 21, an ambulance volunteer from Nablus, after succumbing to wounds caused
by an Israeli bullet in the head, received during an Israeli raid on the city,
a week ago.
The
Palestinian death toll in the West Bank jumped on Saturday, after two Israeli
drone strikes in Tulkarem during a raid in the city. In a first strike, Israeli
forces targeted a car traveling east of Tulkarem, killing four Palestinians.
Later in the same day, another Israeli strike killed five Palestinians in a
hilly area near Tulkarem. The nine men were identified as Haitham Bledi, 33,
Ahmad Mahajnah, 20, Jamal Abu Haniyeh, 19, Ali Bakr, 20, Abdel Jaber Sabbagh,
21, Yazan Shafea, 22, Momen Masharqah, 25, Thaer Hmeidi, 22, Momen Qaraawi, 22.
The
armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad – PIJ mourned four of the men as
its fighters. The armed wing of Hamas mourned one of the other five men as one
of its fighters. The Israeli army said that all of the men killed were
fighters.
On
Sunday, Israeli forces killed Ammar Odeh, 34, from Salfit in the northern West
Bank, after a stabbing attack that killed two Israelis in Holon, south of Tel
Aviv. The Israeli police said that Odeh was the perpetrator of the attack.
Early
on Monday, the Ibn Sina Hospital in Jenin announced the death of Wafaa Jarrar,
50, after succumbing to injuries caused by Israeli forces during her arrest
from her home in Jenin, two months ago. Israeli forces had arrested Jarrar
during a raid on Jenin last May, and later transferred her to an Israeli
hospital for treatment of injuries caused during her arrest. Both of Jarrar’s
feet were amputated due to her injuries, and the Israeli army issued an
administrative order against her.
Israelis accuse Netanyahu of sabotaging ceasefire talks as
Israel braces for Iranian attack
Thousands
of Israelis protested late on Saturday in several locations, including in front
of Israel’s war ministry to demand a ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal and
early elections. The protests came after Israel’s negotiating team returned
from Egypt after differences with Netanyahu, according to Israeli media.
Israeli
opposition leader Yair Lapid accused Netanyahu of ‘giving up on the hostages
despite the will of all parties to reach a deal.” Israel’s Channel 13 reported
that Netanyahu has added new conditions to the deal that would sabotage it.
These conditions include, according to reports, the deportation of some 150
high-ranking Palestinian prisoners who would be released outside of the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile,
the Israeli army announced suspending all army vacations amid preparations for
an expected attack from Iran and Hezbollah, in response to last week’s
assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr in Beirut, and Hamas’s
politburo chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
Israeli
media reported that Israel’s internal security service ‘Shabak’ is preparing
underground shelters for the government in case of a potential all-out war with
Iran. The Israeli government also ordered factories in the northern areas, near
Lebanon’s border, to reduce the quantities of flammable and explosive chemical
materials.
On
Saturday, the chief of the U.S. Army’s central command, General Michael
Kurilla, arrived in the Middle East to coordinate efforts to face an Iranian
attack, similar to the interception of Iranian drones and missiles during
Iran’s response to the Israeli strike on its embassy in Damascus, last April.
Both
Iran and Hezbollah have pledged a “harsh response” against Israel, after the
assassinations that took place in the space of a few hours, provoking an
unprecedented escalation, and bringing the possibility of a regional war in the
Middle East closer than ever.
Ramzy Baroud
Great orators in history would not
have been recognized as such if their words carried no value. Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is neither a great orator, nor did his speech
before a joint Congressional session on July 24 have actual worth. It was an
expression of his desperation, if not defeat, on all fronts.
This is not new. For years,
Netanyahu has served the role of a social media meme. During his United Nations
General Assembly speech in September 2012, the Israeli leader displayed a bomb
diagram to fan the flames for another Middle East war.
His equally bizarre map of the ‘New
Middle East’, which he also carried during another UNGA speech on September 22,
2023, also invited mockery.
But on both occasions, as on others,
Netanyahu’s strategy was never intended for humor. His spectacles were carried
out with the knowledge that global media would not miss the opportunity to
highlight his performance with much interest. His rhetoric would often go
unchallenged.
Moreover, until October 7,
Netanyahu’s possible risk factors, resulting from what may seem to us as
outrageous behavior and outlandish speeches, were quite minimal. To the
contrary, for his Israeli constituency, appearing on the world stage with such
media fanfare was always a reason for yet greater approval.
To his followers, Netanyahu served
the role of the ‘modern-day prophet‘.
“There are very few leaders left in
Israel or around the world with the capacity to fully grasp and articulate the
historical and prophetic relevance of what is happening in Israel, the Middle
East and around the world today,” David Lazarus wrote on October 9, 2020 –
almost exactly three years before the Hamas operation in southern Israel, and
the most destructive Israeli war which followed.
But the supposed visionary has
failed to read all the signs, not only in the lead-up to the war, but to the
disastrous impact of the genocide, which will haunt his country for many years
to come. Since then, the majority of Israelis have abandoned their prophet,
numerous Israeli opinion polls continue to tell us.
Yet, Netanyahu appears unperturbed.
He spoke at the Congress with near total lack of awareness of the new reality
emanating from his failed policies and botched reading of history.
For those who may not know,
Netanyahu also sells himself to Israelis as an intellectual. His intellect
involves “exposing the deception”, of the centrality of the Palestinian cause
to the Middle East, or the so-called “theory of Palestinian centrality”.
To counter that “big lie”, Netanyahu
dedicated to the notion of the ‘reversal of causality’, as in challenging the
notion that Israel – namely the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other Arab
lands – is the main cause of problems in the Middle East.
Until recently, the man’s theories
have garnered much traction, enough, in fact, to temporarily marginalize the
Palestinian cause, and to invest in new ways of shaping a ‘new Middle East’,
where Palestine simply is not on a map.
These illusions, however, have and
continue to crumble. Instead of pushing a reset button that would shape the
Middle East according to Israeli priorities and interest, the Palestinians
pushed it.
This time around, Netanyahu has no
theories, no actual solutions, no prophetic visions, not even a ridiculous map
to save his life or career. Isolated by much of the world, he rushed to the
only place where he would feel safe, where people would clap for him
unconditionally, even before he spoke: The US Congress.
And, indeed, they did – 39 times,
including 23 standing ovations, and a total of 10 minutes and 55 seconds to be
exact. But even the jolly bunch of US representatives who agreed to be part of
that tragic charade will not save Netanyahu.
Here, a quick pause is needed, in
appreciation for those who refused to attend Netanyahu’s speech of lies, and
admiration for US-Palestinian Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, who held a sign
throughout the whole event, reminding us, and the world, that Netanyahu is a
“war criminal” and “guilty of genocide”.
Netanyahu is not a pathological
liar, as he is often accused by his enemies and detractors, in Israel and
elsewhere. He lies, because, at times, not telling the truth is convenient,
especially when there is no accountability for lying, time and again.
In his Congress speech, however,
Netanyahu did more than simply lie. He had the audacity of calling millions of
Americans who protested the war “Iran’s useful idiots”, while perpetuating the
right-wing language on the “clash between barbarism against civilization”.
Still, a few were truly impressed.
Even his closest allies are abandoning him. Former US Speaker, Nancy Pelosi
described his speech as “by far the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary
invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United
States”. Many others found him insincere, including his own people.
When Netanyahu mattered, his
speeches often led to wars, or major regional instability. But Netanyahu no
longer matters, except for a few US politicians vying for re-election.
The Israeli leader had hoped to
press the reset button and return to his silly theories about the irrelevance
of Palestine to the Middle East, and the world. He was proven wrong, again,
making him a false prophet or, at best, a failed leader.
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