Site where starving Palestinians were gunned down while trying to get flour by Israeli forces, their bodies later bulldozed into a mass grave. Still from footage posted to social media by the IDF.
+ A synecdoche is a figure of speech where an individual event is used to represent the whole story. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more exact and unnerving synecdoche for the Israeli genocide in Gaza than turning the strip’s largest hospital into an unmarked mass grave.
+ Palestinian Civil Defense teams in Gaza announced this week that they had recovered and transferred the bodies of 98 Palestinians from Al-Shifa Hospital, including 55 unidentified victims who had been buried inside the hospital grounds, in the shattered enclave’s courtyards and makeshift graves, during the height of the Israeli occupation’s genocide. Forensic authorities say dozens more bodies remain inside the Al-Shifa complex.
+ The bodies were deeply buried under dirt, debris and garbage. Some were elderly. Some young. Some showed signs of being shot at close range. The bodies from earlier mass grave sites at Al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals had evidence that the victims’ hands had been bound. Some showed signs of being shot at close range. Several had bullet holes in the skull. The bodies from earlier mass grave sites at Al-Shifa had evidence that the victims’ hands had been bound. The horrors of Gaza continue to unfold in ever more depraved chapters.
+ A CNN investigation found that the IDF gunned down starving Palestinians trying to collect flour in Gaza. Then they bulldozed the corpses into unmarked graves, where they were left to rot and be scavenged by ravenous dogs. Their deaths were never recorded, and the location of their bodies was never disclosed to their families.
+ Hossam Shaker: “How do you explain to the world that your army bulldozed a cemetery and uprooted the dead from their graves?”
+ The rubble in Gaza now exceeds 60 million tons, including 4 million tons of hazardous waste, according to the Environmental Quality Authority. This includes: 50,000 tons of asbestos, and around 100,000 tons of explosives and unexploded ordnance, posing severe long-term safety, environmental and public health risks. At least 700,000 tons of solid waste have accumulated in ad hoc dumps after official landfills and medical waste treatment sites were destroyed by Israeli bombs and bulldozers.
+ Palestinian Civil Defense teams warn that most of Gaza’s residential landscape has been rendered uninhabitable. The UN estimates that 320,622 housing units in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, including 92% of all residential buildings. The damage is so widespread that “every house we enter is not suitable for living and must be demolished.” The buildings lack water, electricity and sewage. Even so, thousands of Palestinian families have little choice but to camp in the ruins, living under tarps and making out as best they can.
Life in Gaza for the past two years has been a process of losing everything visible — our families, homes, streets means losing what cannot be seen: the ability to speak without fear of being monitored by a machine…Paramedics, families, journalists, and survivors who fled through the checkpoints and cameras I once faced in Gaza describe an intimacy with the systems that tracked and scored them in seconds, mapping their homes and lives from afar.
+ The bodies of Palestinians that had been held by Israel and returned after the ceasefire arrived frozen. Medical teams in Gaza must wait for them to melt before examining them. Yet the bodies are so maimed and disfigured that they remain unidentifiable without DNA analysis, which is unavailable in the shattered hospitals of Gaza. Of the 354 bodies returned, only 99 have been identified. Others show evidence of incisions, perhaps from autopsies, though the families of the dead fear their organs may have been harvested. Khalil Hamada, the director of forensic medicine in Gaza, said the Israelis also amputated body parts before sending them back: thumbs, fingers, and feet. “They may take just the tip of a finger or the first phalanx, but they often remove the entire thumb. In most cases, these fingers are amputated for DNA purposes before the body is handed over to us,” Hamada said.
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+ In the nearly two months after the ceasefire went into effect, Israeli forces have committed 591 violations of the terms of the truce, resulting in the deaths of at least 379 Palestinians and 992 injuries. More than 627 bodies have been recovered from the rubble.
The violations include:
+ 164 incidents of direct gunfire targeting civilians, homes, neighborhoods, and displaced tents
+ 25 military incursions across the Yellow Line
+ 280 land, air, and artillery bombardments
+ 118 demolitions of homes and civilian facilities
+ 38 civilians arbitrarily detained during raids
+ The official recorded death toll from the Israeli genocide in Gaza now stands at 70,369 and 171,069 injuries (The actual death count is likely at least three times higher than the official number.)
+ Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, on post-ceasefire Gaza:
The ceasefire risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal. But while Israeli authorities and forces have reduced the scale of their attacks and allowed limited amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the world must not be fooled. Israel’s Genocide is not over.
Israel has inflicted devastating harm on Palestinians in Gaza through its Genocide, including two years of relentless bombardment and deliberate systematic starvation. So far, there is no indication that Israel is taking serious measures to reverse the deadly impact of its crimes and no evidence that its intent has changed. In fact, Israeli authorities are continuing their ruthless policies, restricting access to vital humanitarian aid and essential services, and deliberately imposing conditions calculated to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza.
Palestinians remain held within less than half of the territory of Gaza, in the areas least capable of supporting life, with humanitarian aid still severely restricted. Still today, even after repeated warnings by international bodies, three sets of legally binding orders by the ICJ, and two ICJ advisory opinions, and despite Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law, both as an occupying power and as a party to an armed conflict, Israel deliberately continues not to provide or allow necessary supplies to reach the civilian population in Gaza.
Israel must lift its inhumane blockade and ensure unfettered access to food, medicine, fuel, reconstruction and repair materials. Israel must also make concerted efforts to repair critical infrastructure, restore essential services, provide adequate shelter for the displaced and ensure they can return to their homes.
The Israeli officials responsible for orchestrating, overseeing and materially committing Genocide remain in power. Failing to demonstrate that they or their Government will be held accountable effectively gives them free rein to continue the Genocide and commit further human rights violations in Gaza and in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
The ceasefire must not become a smokescreen for Israel’s ongoing Genocide. Israel’s pattern of conduct in Gaza, including the deliberate, unlawful denial of lifesaving aid to Palestinians, many of whom are injured, malnourished, and at risk of serious disease, continues to threaten their survival. The international community cannot afford to be complacent: States must keep up pressure on Israel to allow unfettered access to humanitarian aid, lift its unlawful blockade and end its ongoing genocide. Companies must immediately suspend any operations that contribute to or are directly linked to Israel’s genocide.
+ Trump on the Gaza ceasefire: “Phase two is moving along, it will happen pretty soon.”
+ That same day, Israel bombed a tent camp in Gaza, burning to death women and children.
+ Eight Arab and Islamic states — Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia — issued a joint statement expressing “grave concern” over Israeli remarks suggesting Rafah would be opened one-way, to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population.
+ The Palestinian Human Rights group Al-Haq on the Trump-Blair-Kushner plan for Gaza:
Under the GREAT Trust, Gaza would be placed under a foreign trusteeship initially administered by the US through a bilateral agreement with Israel. Israel would retain ‘overarching rights’ over all security matters, thereby formalizing and deepening its effective control.
+ It appears that Arab nations have successfully blocked Tony Blair’s bid to head the executive committee of the “Board of Peace,” the governing body for Trump’s planned trusteeship for Gaza. The front-runner now seems to be Nickolay Mladenov, a Bulgarian diplomat.
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+ In a new report, the UN Committee Against Torture determined that Israel is operating a “de facto State policy of organized and widespread torture and ill-treatment.” The report details severe beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, rape and other forms of sexual violence, deprivation of food and denial of medical care. The least 75 Palestinian deaths in custody. The report warned that Israel’s broader policies—including the blockade on aid, forced mass displacement, and destruction of civilian infrastructure—may also constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of the Palestinian population as a whole. The committee charges that Israel’s use of torture against Palestinian detainees “gravely intensified” after October 7.
+ IDF Press Release: “The Air Force eliminated two suspects this morning in the southern Gaza Strip who crossed the yellow line, carried out suspicious activities… and approached the forces.” The two “suspects” were 8 and 10…
+ Reuters: “The children’s uncle said an Israeli drone fired on Fadi and Goma Abu Assi, brothers aged 8 and 10, while they were gathering firewood to help their wheelchair-bound father east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.”
+ Infanticide as “Test”…
+ Test failed: On December 10, Israeli forces killed two more Palestinian children. A 17-year-old was shot and then crushed to death by an Israeli tank in Jabalia Camp, which ran over him four or five times. Another boy was shot in the head. The Israelis claimed both posed an “immediate threat.”
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+ According to Dr. Mohammad Hamad, “Half of kidney patients in the Gaza Strip have lost their lives during the war, after their suffering worsened due to limited dialysis sessions, severe shortages of medication, and the closure of border crossings.”
+ Palestinians in Gaza are still starving. Only 140 aid trucks are being permitted by Israel to enter Gaza daily, instead of the promised 600 trucks. UNICEF warned this week: “This is not over. Generations of families, including those being born now into this ceasefire, have been forever altered by what was inflicted upon them.”
+ Nearly 9,300 children under five in Gaza were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition in October, warning that winter conditions are increasing the risk of illness and death among displaced families, UNICEF reported. The agency stated that large quantities of winter supplies remain stuck at Gaza’s borders and called for the safe and unobstructed delivery of humanitarian aid through all available routes.
+ Only 104 cooking-gas trucks have entered Gaza since the ceasefire, out of the 660 that were scheduled, worsening the gas crisis and further hampering the essential needs of Gaza’s displaced population
+ At least 6,600 trucks await entry into Gaza, held up at the crossing by Israeli forces.
+ According to the UN, its agencies have set up 390 temporary classrooms capable of serving about 221,000 students in Gaza this year—about 567 children per learning space. Yet, fewer than one-third of Gaza’s children are enrolled in school.
+ Winter storm Byron tore across Gaza this week, lacerating the Strip with bitterly cold winds and drenching rains that flooded the tent camps packed with thousands of displaced Palestinians. At least one infant died in the storm, a nine-month-old girl, living in a tent with her family in Khan Younis. “It was raining, fiercely cold, and I had very little to keep her warm,” the girl’s mother told Al Jazeera. “I fed her and put her to sleep. I wrapped her up the best I could, but it wasn’t enough. It kept raining, and the cold was getting worse. I was panicking all night, as the cold kept creeping in. Then, suddenly, I found my little baby motionless, dead.”
+ Shimon Riklin, a talking head on Israel’s Channel 14, cheered on the storm. After the channel’s meteorologist predicted that Storm Byron would “drown Gaza,” Riklin quipped:” Happy to hear it.”
+ By Friday, the storm had left 12 dead and destroyed more than 27,000 tents.
+ Palestinian officials say more than 288,000 families now lack the minimum requirements for survival and that Gaza needs roughly 300,000 tents and mobile homes to meet their needs.
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+ 77% of Democratic voters say Israel is committing genocide and 75% want to cut off weapons to Israel. But HRC is out on the road claiming that TikTok and “totally made up” videos are the blame for young people’s opposition to genocide.
+ Here’s Hillary Clinton (at a summit in NYC hosted by the Israeli daily Israel Hayom on US/Israeli relations) once again blaming social media for perverting the minds of American youth about the genocide in Gaza:
Our own students, smart young people, from our own country, from around the world. Where were they getting their information? They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok. That is where they were learning about what happened on October 7th. What happened in the days, weeks and months to follow. That’s a serious problem. It’s a serious problem for democracy, whether it’s Israel or the United States. I was shocked about how little students knew about the history and the context…When you think about how to tell Israel’s story, it’s important. It’s not just looking internally. It’s looking externally and particularly at young people. Because it’s not just the USUAL SUSPECTS; it’s a lot of young Jewish Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand.
+ Those smug, pursed lips say it all…She seethes arrogance out of every pore. It’s part of why she lost to Trump, of all people. Young people have a better understanding of what’s going on than she did as Secretary of State.
+ Why does Israel need Hillary’s help in “telling its story”? Haven’t they got the NYT, CNN and The Atlantic for that?
+ The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention condemned Clinton’s remarks as a form of “genocide denial” and defended the students Clinton attacked as being brainwashed by social media: “Young people in the US are not stupid or gullible. They simply reject genocide—something the Secretary might consider.” The Lemkin Institute is named in honor of the Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, a survivor of the Holocaust who coined the term “genocide”.
+ Raz Segal, Holocaust historian:
For Israel and its supporters, the Gaza genocide is a model. It is not only that Israeli soldiers and officers who have documented their own crimes in Gaza and uploaded them to social media are unashamed; they help spread the message of lawlessness: this is what awaits people who will dare to resist whatever measures imposed on them by extremely violent states in a world shaped by brute force, now without even the pretense of Holocaust memory and international law.
Shawan Jabarin. Photo: Osama Eid, Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0
+ Shawan Jabarin, the longtime Palestinian Human Rights activist with Al-Haq, on the UN’s endorsement of the Trump “ceasefire” plan for Gaza, which gives Israel indefinite control over the Strip:
To seek, as a matter of supposed political compromise, to sideline international law would be to render the U.N. complicit in Israel’s violations, to fundamentally break the promise of the U.N. Charter and to fuel only ever intensifying human carnage.
+ Pete Hegseth is our Ben-Gvir…
+ Israel has finally consented to open the Rafah Crossing, a vital corridor for the transport of humanitarian aid into Gaza. But they’re only opening it for people leaving the Strip, most of whom Israel says it won’t allow to return. The October ceasefire agreement stipulated that the crossing must be open in both directions. So add another violation of the truce to the 500 previous ones Israel has committed in the last two months.
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+ A new documentary titled Ma Khafiya Aatham (Tip of the Iceberg), produced by Al Jazeera in partnership with the Hind Rajab Foundation, has revealed new evidence in the killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab, her family, and the rescue team that tried to reach them in Gaza City.
+ Contrary to Israel’s claims that the Rajab family and the ambulance crew were killed in an exchange of gunfire between Hamas and Israeli forces, the documentary demonstrates that the Rajabs were killed by fire from Israeli Merkava tanks, which left 335 bullet holes in the Rajabs’ car. They were part of an IDF outfit calling itself the “Vampire Empire”, under the command of Major Sean Glass, a multinational company of soldiers that is part of the 52nd Armored Battalion led by Colonel Daniel Ella. According to the documentary, the 52nd Armored Battalion, who call itself “The Breachers,” was among “the first Israeli units to enter Gaza in October 2023 and has since been involved in some of the Israeli army’s most lethal operations, including the destruction of several hospitals.”
+ According to the latest analysis by the Cost of War Project, since Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. has spent over .65 billion on military activities in Yemen, Iran, and the wider region. Including military aid to Israel, the U.S. has spent over billion on the post-10/7 wars.
+ The good folks at Forensic Architecture have mapped out Israel’s two-year-long genocidal assault on Gaza, resulting in more than 70,000 deaths, the complete destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and Israel in control of 53% of Gaza’s land base.
+ Trump: “Israel attacked first. That attack was very, very powerful. I was very much in charge of that. When Israel attacked Iran first, that was a great day for Israel.”
+ Since the “ceasefire” in Gaza, at least 67 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces, according to a report by UNICEF released on Friday. “That is an average of almost two children every day,” said UNICEF spokesperson Ricardo Pires. “Dozens more have been injured.” Trump is counting this as one of the 8 wars he ended…
+ I’ve read this headline five times and the full weight of it still hasn’t settled in…
+ Given that 20 Palestinians are being killed on average every day by Israelis in Gaza (37 on the day before the UN vote), it seemed
