This brilliant graph by Nicki Drapershows what the killing rate for journalists in Gaza actually is. The initial graph is bad enough, but adjusted for time it shows that this is not an average loss of life in a risky job. Does anyone really think that this can be anything other than a deliberate policy, to kill the eyes and ears, stifle the witnesses, carry on the genocide in silence and darkness?
The scale of the killing of journalists by Israeli forces in Gaza has been so great that their colleagues in Western media can’t avert their eyes anymore.
Though the framing is still often grotesque. Jonathan Crook’s question How is it possible for a BBC reporter to have made the following obscene observation in his segment on Israel’s murder at the weekend of Al-Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif: “There’s the question of proportionality. Is it justified to kill five journalists when you were only targeting one?” goes to the heart of the racist double standards applied by the Western media to their own colleagues in Gaza. How much collateral damage is OK?
As Cook points out, if studio with Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet, Yollande Knell, Lucy Williamson and Jon Donnison was been hit by an Israeli strike, and all five killed: would any BBC reporter ask “There’s the question of proportionality. Is it justified to kill five journalists when you were only targeting one?”
The reporter’s question is also absurd. The IDF does not target individual journalists. It targets journalists. No one from outside is allowed in. Anyone on the inside has a target on them.
They do not want the facts getting out. They would prefer it if everyone went about their lives in an innocent bubble, untroubled by disturbing images and news.
But we see them. We know. The bloody tooth paste is out of the tube and you will never get it back in. We will tell others. We will mobilise. This will end.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” W B Yeats
The decision by the Israeli war cabinet to try to fully occupy Gaza to “eliminate Hamas” will kill many, many more people, with intensified military action adding even more to the steadily mounting total of people being starved to death; and, as a side effect that Netanyahu is well aware of, ensure the deaths of all the remaining hostages. As the Duke of Warwick says in Shaw’s St Joan; “It was nothing personal. Your death was a political necessity”.
The reported stand up row with IDF commanders, and the letters from thousands of reservists and nearly 600 retired Israeli security officials and former intelligence agency heads who see no achievable military objective, also reflects the strain that the war so far has placed on the IDF itself and Israeli society more broadly.
Their casualties are tiny by comparison with those suffered by the Palestinians in Gaza of course. The 60,199 fatalities for which the Gaza Health Ministry has records are generally accepted to be a serious underestimate.
There is no doubt that, unless a change of course is forced, there will be many more dying very soon. 12,000 children under five alone are reported as suffering from acute malnutrition in July; and this number is growing as the trickle of food aid forced in by international pressure and condemnation is spread thinner and thinner as time drags on.
Nevertheless, the impact of the war on the IDF is far from negligable, and this will accelerate once they move into the quagmire of Gaza City.
So far, they have lost 454 fatalities and 2,870 injured in the 22 months since October 7th.
To think of that in UK terms, with a population almost ten times bigger – that would be 4,358 dead and 27,552 injured.
To put that into perspective, 179 UK soldiers were killed in Iraq, and 457 in Afghanistan (the latter over nearly 20 years); roughly a tenth as much at a much slower rate. It led to quite a strong sentiment against overseas interventions, even with a proffessional armed forces, that is still a factor to be taken into account.
In US terms, with a population 48 times bigger, that would be 21,798 soldiers killed and 136,320 injured. To put that in perspective, that would be at a rate almost twice as fast as the 58, 281 soldiers the US lost in their nine year invasion of Vietnam.
The Vietnam comparison is instructive, because the US and its allies killed over a million Vietnamese. And they were still defeated, partly because the scale of their murderousness became globally apparent, its inability to stop the Vietnamese became apparent with it, the morale of their conscripted soldiers was crumbling, and draft resistance fuelled a counter culture that was letting all sorts of dangerous ideas loose; so they had to cut their losses and bide their time.
What we are seeing in Gaza is a level of barbarism even more concentrated than when B52s were carpet bombing Vietnamese cities and dropping Agent Orange all over the countryside. The Gaza City invasion will make this much worse.
However, Israel is more capable of sustaining this than the US, even with conscripts, because the war is right in their faces, not in “a land far away”, a high proportion of their population are settlers on a mission to drive Palestinians out, and most see the conflict as zero sum communalism, “us or them”; which has a genocidal dynamic.
Nevertheless, the strains are real. Up to the end of 2024, 672,000 people, mostly young and educated, had left the country. Thats almost 10% of the population. This is paralelled by a 10% hit on its economy, which any Gaza City invasion will compound.
The question now is how bad things have to get before Netanyahu runs out of road, or their society cracks, or the US makes the calculation that the damage to its own global standing from underwriting all this is worse than the salutory effect of the apocalyptic warning it gives to the whole global South of what could happen to you if you step out of line, and pulls the plug. Which it could have done at any point since this began, It hasn’t.
When Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian has (almost) given up on apologetics and even Tim Stanley can write in the Daily Telegraph that “its now impossible to ignore the nevidence of human suffering (try as you have, Tim) or the sham of the official Israeli narrative that says no one is starving or, if they are, its because Hamas stole all the food“; the tectonic plates have already shifted and Netanyahu is standing on thinner and thinner ice, and every bomb he drops cracks it more.
In the period ahead, we will have to mobilise more and more against this, and break the complicity of our government in it.
“Dead or dying children in a Calcutta Street. Photograph published by the Statesman, Calcutta, on August 22nd, 1943.”, Public Domain
Even right wing newspapers now have front pages showing Palestinian children who look just like these with headlines like “For Pity’s sake stop this” (Daily Express 23/7/25) without saying how. The limitations of the Excpress approach are well explored here.
The latest UN Report states
Gaza’s one million children continue to bear the brunt of continued bombardment, deprivation of access to life’s essentials, including food, water and adequate health care, and exposure to traumatic events. In a briefing to the UN Security Council on 16 July, Catherine Russell, Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), stated that more than 17,000 children have reportedly been killed and 33,000 injured in Gaza over 21 months, which is the equivalent of a classroom of 28 children killed in Gaza on average each day.(My emphasis)
Starvation is already the common lived experience of everyone in Gaza.
Genocide by industrialised intent.
In the 1940s, the Nazi’s industrialised the mass extermination of people, mostly Jews, that they considered “untermensch”, lesser humans. Around 6 million were killed, initially by being shot by Einsatzgruppen, marching them out into the woods (see Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning) then by mass gassing, starvation and being worked to death in the extermination camps. No one kept exact records, but the scale and horror of it is in no doubt.
Genocide by neglect.
In the same decade, around 3 million colonial subjects of the British Raj in Bengal starved to death in the Bengal famine. Again, no one kept exact records, and estimates vary from just under a million to just under 4 million, but the scale and horror of it is in no doubt.
It is, however, much less well known. They died “from starvation, malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions, poor British wartime policies and lack of health care.” What Wikipedia describes as “poor British wartime policies” covers limiting food aid overall, on the argument that this was needed for the war effort, and manipulation of what food aid there was to communities that were considered politically loyal. This was a material factor in exacerbating communal tensions that were later to explode at partition.
Without food, people can survive for just over two months before they starve to death. In 1981, the longest lasting IRA Hunger Striker, Kieren Doherty, survived for 73 days, the shortest, Martin Hurson, died after just 46. Most died after 60, 61 or 62 days. Two months. And these were fit young men who were able to drink clean water.
Without food, the entire population of Gaza is a risk of starving to death by the end of the summer. 43 have died in the last three days, and this is accelerating.
The deliberate, calculated, performative cruelty of the GHF “aid” operation will slow the pace of this a little, spin out the suffering, but also aims to destroy community. As Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation puts it, “You can’t approach starvation as a biological phenomenon experienced by individuals, but it is also a collective social experience. Very often that societal element – the trauma, the shame, the loss of dignity, the violation of taboos, the breaking of social bonds – is more significant in the memory of survivors than the individual biological experience. All these traumas are why the Irish took almost 150 years before they could memorialise what they experienced in the 1840s. Those who inflict starvation are aware of this.”
So are we. This cannot be allowed. Demonstrate on Friday. Let’s break our government’s complicity in it. The six demands of the Bogota Declaration are a good basis for getting beyond David Lammy’s stance of wringing his hands while passing the ammunition.
Local actions so far
Thursday, 24 July
Hastings: Murial Matters House, TN34 3UY, 6pm
Friday, 25 July
Abergavenny: St. John’s Square, 6pm
Birmingham: Barclays Bank, 79-84 High Street, B4 7TE, 5pm
Cambridge: Addenbrooke’s Roundabout, 6pm
Cardiff: UK Government Building, Central Square, CF10 1EP, 6pm
…are written on the subways walls, and tenement halls” or, very often, the walls of pub toilets. In the toilet at the Chandos pub, wedged between St Martin in the Fields and the Colosseum, and reached up a narrow twisting staircase lined with black and white photos of opera singers, you’d expect something classy.
Above a startlingly black and white diamond floor, someone has written gnomic messages in the tiny capitalised writing of the obsessive along the grout between the wall tiles. “The World is flat”. “The World is grey”. “Trump is a bump in the road” The last of which can’t help but make you wonder “Where to?” Rather than clean up these rather faint assertions, the pub management has drawn over them in coloured marker; which paradoxically draws attention to them and makes decoding what you can and can’t see underneath a bit of a mission.
Behind the cistern, someone has written, bolder, larger, in green, red and black, “Free, Free Palestine!” then poignantly added “please!” drawing an angry retort in scrawled biro, most of which has been equally angrily scribbled over so only the sentiment “Let us finish the job” can be read. A third person, presumably the one who scribbled it out, has drawn an arrow to the sentiment and added “You did that in 1948”. So, at the pub toilet in the Chandos, as in the Oxford Union, its evident that Israel’s exercise of its “right to defend itself” has blown away any pretence it had at moral standing with every bomb it has dropped, every tactical success lays the ground for strategic failure; and the writing is now on the wall.
Graffiti in pub toilets varies with the clientelle. Back in the seventies in York, when I was more inclined to be a regular than the very occasional visitor I am now, the Spread Eagle in Walmgate seemed to specialise in satire at the expence of John Smiths brewery. Just above the urinal, someone had written, “You don’t buy the beer here, you rent it”. Somone else had added “Don’t take the piss out of John Smiths bitter – you might remove its entire liquid content”. In the more sophisticated refuge of the York Arms, a cosy mostly gay pub tucked snugly in behind Bootham Bar, there was a line in arch and witty comments about anything and everything. Most were a fleeting laugh, but, for a reason that is mysterious to me, this one has stuck. “To be is to do” Rousseau. “To do is to be” Sartre. “Oo be do be do” Sinatra.
A similar mixture of the cod profound and the down to earth was written on the whiteboard on the concourse of Piccadilly Circus tube station that was crowded with people rushing hither and thither in an even busier than usual pre Xmas crush, giving a Hallmark sentiment a practical punch line. “Life is about the journey, not the station – SO KEEP MOVING”.
A sticker in the tube car read “My girlfriend said it was her or Reading – I still miss her sometimes”. My initial thought was that Reading is a nice place, definitely deserves to be a city, but not so nice as to break up over living there, and that this was a strange way to promote its charms; until I tumbled that it was about the football club. The same thought applied though…
Another tube advert illustrated the limitations of synthetic phonics as a method of teaching reading. It read “Whne yuo cna’t dceipher thier priicng bnudles”. I expect that most people reading this will have had no trouble working out what that said, because you’d have been using your sense of meaning and syntax to work with your knowledge of possible letter/sound correspondences (which can vary in English, vowels being especially slippery, as in “I like reading in Reading” or “Gove loves to move”). If the sentence had had a jumbled word order as well as a jumbled letter order, it would have been much harder to work out.
The problem with an over dogmatic phonic approach to reading is the insistence that meaning follows decoding, when it is necessarily very often the other way round. Even when learning the phonemes themselves, its a lot more effective to do so from a word that has meaning for the learner (like their name, or words like “Mum”) than a random list.
The brain works like a very sophisticated version of the spellcheck/predictive text systems that are now on phones. As you type, the system will give you possible options for words that might make sense if they come next. As you type more letters, the words change as the possibilities narrow.
This perception is important from the off, as without making sense being built into the process, there is a danger of what used to be called “barking at print”, where a child might learn to decode the sounds and pronounce the words, but be reading them as a random list. This might get good marks in the phonic screening children in Year 1 have to do, which is set up exactly as a random list, many of them as “non words” to eliminate any input from meaning contaminating the purity of the letter,sound correspondences; but it doesn’t allow lift off into self sustaining reading for pleasure or information – because the activity is abstracted from all that.
More creative mishears. In a discussion on the antecedents of the HTS in the Al Nousra Front and Jolani’s split from ISIS, I misheard the name of the ISIS caliph Abu Bakr Al Bagdhadi as Big Daddy, which conjured a different image altogether.
Howard Jacobson’s article (Tales of infanticide have stoked hatred of Jews for centuries. They still echo today Observer 6/10/24) is evidence of an inability to reconcile support for Israel with a belief in himself as a moral person who would “never dream” of doing what the IDF is actually doing.
The deaths of children in Gaza is not a malevolent racist fiction, like the blood libel he refers to, but a horrific reality that is going on and on and on. When the names of all the people killed in Gaza that it has been possible to identify were published, the first fourteen pages were children under one year old. He knows this. Which is why it is so unbearable to see it night after night on the news; as he says “what you cannot bear to see done”.
But, lets be clear, “Jews” are not committing the genocide in Gaza. The Israeli state is. A growing number of Jewish people around the world oppose it, organise against it march against it. Howard Jacobson does not, chooses to identify himself with the state that is doing it, and that sets up the psychic stress between what that state is doing and how he sees himself. If Howard cannot bear to see this, he should oppose it.
Editorial
A year ago, in response to your first editorial about October 7th, I wrote you the following letter.
Since the turn of the century the casualty rate from the conflict in Israel Palestine has been twenty Palestinians killed for every Israeli. Given that the suffering on the Palestinian side is so much higher, why does your editorial find calls for violent vengeance from Israel “understandable”, but consider that violent actions from Palestinians “defy comprehension”?
Perhaps you should write another editorial explaining the asymmetry of your empathy.
Your editorial this year, describing the “unfathomable hatred” of Palestinians, and the questions that Israelis ask “reasonably enough”, begs the same question.
The hypocrisies and biases of a political stance are often revealed starkly by keeping the grammar of a statement intact but reversing its terms. The result puts whats being said, and, crucially, what isn’t, into a sharp relief.
This is very clear in Keir Starmer’s statement on the Iranian retaliation for succesive Israeli assassinations and terror attacks and their latest assault on Lebanon.
For ease of understanding I have kept in the original word in brackets.
“I utterly condemn this attempt by the Israeli (Iranian) regime to harm innocent Palestinians (Israelis), to escalate this incredibly dangerous situation, and push the region ever closer to the brink”
“It cannot be tolerated. We stand with Lebanon (Israel), and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression. Israel (Iran) must stop these attacks”.
Israel (Iran) “has menaced the Middle East for far too long, chaos and destruction brought not just to Palestine (Israel), but to the people they live amongst in Lebanon and beyond.”
“We stand with the people of Palestine (Israel) and we recognise her right to self-defence in the face of this aggression,” adding that Britain supports “the Palestinian People’s (Israel’s) reasonable demand for the security of its people.”
Its Conservative Party Conference week, so we are spoiled for choice.
Liz Truss announced that she wasn’t going to back any of the 4 candidates for Party leader. The sighs of relief from the candidates could be heard from coast to coast.
Kemi Badenoch – and has no one noticed that her name is an anagram of Bad Enoch (its even in the right order) – said that she was shocked that so many recent immigrants to this country “hate Israel”. Given that Israel has spent the last year killing over 41,000 people and bombing Gaza to rubble, accelerated the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, been indicted for genocide at the International Criminal Court and, to return its 60,000 internal refugees to their northern border, has just killed another 1,000 people in Lebanon invaded the country and displaced a million people there, what’s not to love?
Her team in the leadership campaign released an odd pamphlet arguing that 21st century politics is different from 20th century politics because – although everything can best be understood in the form of a triangle – in the old days the triangle was divided horizontally and the bottom of society supported the Left while the Right defended the top, today the triangle is divided vertically; to indicate that both Left and Right have support from top to bottom, but without any acknowledgement that the right still defends the interests of the people at the top, while it is the role of the Left to fight for the bottom.
Confused? You will be. Just to make things even clearer, in their diagram the Left is on the Right and the Right is on the Left. This might indicate that the Tory Right approach the world in an inverted way, but it also might simply be a Freudian slip, implying that somewhere deep in their heart of hearts they know that the Left is, ultimately, right.
Another way of looking at it is that they don’t know which way is up. Bottoms up chaps!
Another gem from Badenoch is that her way of dealing with the problem that highly educated people tend to lean Left is to have fewer highly educated people. All those “pointless university degrees” that make people think have got to go.
Meanwhile, Miriam Cates, speaking on Politics Live, unravelled the full insanity of the Right’s line on immigration. On the one hand the country can’t afford to have all these people coming in, but at the same time it needs people coming in to fill job vacancies because, in Cates’ view “we’re not having enough babies”. So, the country isn’t full up after all. Breed damn you! Breed!
Jo Coburn, the anchor of Politics Live, noted that the Tories were obsessively discussing immigration while most of the electorate are concerned about energy bills and the cost of living, the NHS and the state of public services; without reflecting that Politics Live itself obsessively discusses the issue “we can’t talk about” almost every time it comes on. Anyone would think there was an agenda somewhere to push this under everyone’s noses at every opportunity, carpet bombing us with BS.
Robert Jenrick – a small, cheap embodiment of petty minded mean spiritedness, best known for his order as immigration minister to paint over a mural in a child refugee centre to make it less welcoming – dropped an honest bollock when he said that the problem with the European Court of Human Rights is that it meant that UK Special Services were having to shoot terrorists rather than arrest them because the EHRC would order them released. While this is an absurd claim in itself, its notable that none of the people who criticised Jenrick for this statement denied that UK Special Forces do indeed breach the Geneva Convention in this way. There are a number of cases from Afghanistan that the SAS kept locked away for years to maintain the fiction that they didn’t happen. But its now well known that they did. But to everyone from his rivals for the Tory leadership to “a Labour source”, its just terribly bad taste, and awfully insulting to our brave boys to say that they have done what they have done.
Jenrick also criticised the police for dealing with peaceful demonstrators calling for an end to genocide and a ceasefire in Gaza more gently than rioters who were trying to burn refugees alive in hostels, threw bricks at the police, attacked people in the streets and trashed their neighbour’s houses. Quite inexplicable.
And two from last week.
A delegate at the Reform Conference, interviewed on Politics Joe, opined that the rivers are polluted, not because of the water companies failing to invest – “I think they are being scapegoated” – or too much toxic runoff from farmers overfertilising their fields – its because all those immigrants are coming over here and overwhelming our overloaded sewage system with all their poos. Talk about S*$t.
And David Lammy at the UN last week saying “I know Imperialism when I see it”. A question for David. When you go to work as the British Foreign Secretary at the Foreign Office, and you walk past that statue of Robert Clive, and stride along corridors resplendently decorated with paintings of Britannia and all the rest of it (which you can see here), perhaps through the “Durbar Court”, and you look at all that, what exactly do you see?
Travelling on the bus up Golders Green Road, the hoardings just opposite Grodzinski’s bakery (now modernised but smaller than it was) are covered with A3 posters of the Israeli hostages. 97 of them are still alive. If you were to stick pictures like this of them up alongside the road in a single line they would stretch for approximately 100 metres. About the length of three semi detached houses side by side.
As of April this year, Israel was holding 3,660 Palestinian prisoners in adminstrative detention, that’s to say without trial. Hostages by any other name. Rarely mentioned on the news. No imperative to release them. Effectively invisible. No pictures of them up on hoardings anywhere. But if you were to stick them up in a single line of A3 posters, it would stretch for about 1,220 metres. On a street of semis that would not stop at number 6, as it would with the Israelis, but at number 73.
If you were to stick up posters of the Israeli victims of the Oct 7th attack on the same street it would not get so far. About 400 metres, just to number 24. You could walk it in a couple of minutes. Doing the same for the 41,534 Palestinians killed so far in Gaza since, and you’d need a road more than ten kilometres long. Walking at an average 3mph it would take you more than two hours to get to the end.
When shameless Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu calls the UK government’s block on just 30 of 350 arms export licences to Israel a “shameful decision”, he is speaking as a man indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court and corruption, including including breach of trust, accepting bribes, and fraud, in Israel’s own courts. Watching him its hard to imagine that he has any self awareness at all.
He also seems incapable of grasping that his description of Hamas, as “a genocidal terrorist organization that savagely murdered 1200 people on October 7”, begs the question of how anyone objective would define his own armed forces; who have killed 40 times as many people since. A lot of weight is being put on the adverbs and adjectives in this description. Are those 40,000 deaths not murders? Are the killings not savage? Are the people of Gaza not being terrorised? Is this not genocidal? The International Criminal Court has made an interim ruling saying that it is.
The comment on this limited ban below by UK Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis (in italics) is similarly morally compromised; which is shown when you consider the situation in the round (not in italics).
“It beggars belief that the British government, a close strategic ally of Israel, has announced a partial suspension of arms licences, at a time when Israel is fighting a war for its very survival on seven fronts. The “war for its very survival” takes the form of a massacre in Gaza courtesy of US arms supplies and diplomatic backing, escalating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and a nervous stand off in the North with Hezbollah. Any other “fronts”, like the Red Sea, Eastern Med or Persian Gulf are being covered by gigantic US aircraft carrier task forces; with a few Royal Navy frigates to show willing.
But clearly, for Sir Ephraim, the over 40,000 people killed by the IDF in the Gaza strip since October 7th and the further 502 in the West Bank are not enough. Many more have to die to ensure Israel’s survival as an apartheid state. For Mirvis, because Israel is a “strategic ally”, we should be prepared to turn a blind eye to what it is doing and keep passing it the ammunition so it can keep doing it. The UK complicity here is its usual auxiliary effort to the main supply from the United States, which is rushing just under two arms shipments a day; which it would not be doing if it didn’t think doing so was in its own interests.
And that means that all too often the game that is played in the media is to treat Israeli victims as rounded human beings deserving of sympathy and identification, while Palestinian victims are just statistics. Because large numbers tend to blur in the mind, it might bring the reality home more to condiers just the casualties of the Israeli assault in the last three days.
On 1 September, 11 Palestinians were killed and tens of others injured when Safad school hosting Internally Displaced Persons was hit in Az Zaitoun neighbourhood, east of Gaza city.
On 29 August, nine Palestinians, including three children (of whom two were newborn), and two women (of whom one was pregnant), were killed when the upper floor of a residential tower was hit in western An Nuseirat Refugee Camp, in Deir al Balah.
On 29 August, five Palestinians were killed and at least 13 others injured in Deir al Balah.
On 29 August, five Palestinians were killed and others injured when internally displaced people’s (IDP) tents were hit in Wadi Saber area, east Khan Younis.
On 31 August, seven Palestinians from the same family were killed when a house was hit in As Sabra neighbourhood in Gaza city.
On 31 August, five Palestinians, including three females and a doctor, were killed when a house was hit in southern Khan Younis.
On 31 August, five Palestinians, including four females, were killed and 15 others injured when a house was hit in southern Khan Younis.
Mirvis goes on that such action has been forced upon it (Israel) on the 7th October, as if the genocidal scale of the reaction is not Israel’s responsibility and without reflecting that,
before Oct 7th, 20 Palestinians were being killed in the conflict for every Israeli
and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank was proceeding slowly but surely in the face of world indifference.
This is odd because he is very well aware of the latter, having taken part in National Day demonstrations in East Jerusalem in which settlers march through Palestinian Streets while chanting “death to Arabs” and “may your villages burn”.
He emphasises that this is “at the very moment when six hostages murdered in cold blood by cruel terrorists were being buried by their families” – without reflecting that had Netanyahu not sabotaged the recent ceasefire deal those hostages would probably still be alive. This has not gone unnoticed in Israel itself, leading to a General Strike and furious demonstrations last Monday.
He also does not mention the 184 Palestinians killed over the weekend by the IDF. Does he think those 184 people were not killed in cold blood? Or that their killers were kind? And consider the numbers. 184 to 6. Thirty one times as many people. Nearly three Grenfells. Half a primary school full.
That ratio of 31 deaths to 1 indicates how little these lives weigh in the balance. Their names will not be published. Nor will their pictures. Their relatives will not be interviewed. Their stories will barely be acknowledged. So, Sir Ephraim can look, and not see. Truly eyeless in Gaza.
On the same page, on the same day, as part of his pitch for the Conservative leadership, Tom Tugendhat called for the UK to be “willing to stand by our allies” (Israel) by continuing to supply it with arms as it, according to Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Joyce Msuya, creates a “situation in Gaza that is beyond desperate… Civilians are hungry. They are thirsty. They are sick. They are homeless. They have been pushed beyond the limits of endurance – beyond what any human being should bear,” including
Severe overcrowding, coupled with the lack of clean water, sanitation facilities and basic hygiene items like soap, which is taking a heavy toll on children, with skin infections continuing to increase among them. As of 30 June, WHO had already recorded 103,385 cases of scabies and lice, 65,368 cases of skin rashes and 11,214 cases of chickenpox in the Strip.
With MSF support, the Palestinian Agricultural Development Association (PARC) has been providing emergency latrines, solar water pumps and basic health care to some of the displaced people arriving in the Al Mawasi area of Khan Younis. “Every day, we see between 300 to 400 people at the medical clinic, of which 200 cases are related to skin conditions,” explained PARC pediatrician Dr. Youssef Salaf Al-Farra, underscoring that children are the most affected by highly contagious skin conditions.
MSF claims that, for three months, it has been trying to import 4,000 hygiene kits, comprising items such as soap, toothbrushes, shampoo and laundry power, to improve living conditions in Khan Younis, but the importation has not been allowed by Israeli authorities (my emphasis).
As Tugendhat puts it, if you can’t “stand by an ally” at times like this when it is busily reducing children to misery, “what is the point of an alliance?” So true. Because in an alliance, what “our” allies do gets brushed under the carpet, understated, justified, euphemised out of existence.
UK defence secretary, John Healey’s comment that that Britain remained “a staunch ally” of Israel and that the ban on just 30 liscences out of 350 would not “have a material impact on Israel’s security” shows that he hopes this level of gesture will be enough to defuse the pressure of the solidarity movement on the government, while it continues to “stand by an ally” no matter what it does. It won’t be. Israel reacts so aggresively to these gestures not because they undermine its practical capacity to keep killing on a mass scale, but because they undermine its perceived legitimacy in doing so. When even “unshakable” allies like the UK feel compelled to take even a symbolic distance, the ground is moving under its feet.
The arrest of Medhurst – who was held for 24 hours – was under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act 2000 which makes expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organisation an offence punishable by up to 14 years in prison. This means that it doesn’t matter what is true. In a conflict in which
our government defines one side as “terrorist” and the other side as a “democracy with a right to defend itself”
and a context in which it is increasingly normative to describe inconvenient facts as ideologically driven opinions
reporting on facts that put that ally in a bad light can be framed as being supportive of a proscribed organisationespecially if they are true. I must admit a certain trepidation in writing this, in case 16 counter-terrorism officers in balaclavas descend my home at 7.30 in the morning, and sieze this laptop and my phone for “content posted online” like they did to Helen Wilkinson.
At the same time, the police look as though they are angling for a confrontation at Saturday’s first mass solidarity demonstration of the Autumn by putting such restrictions on its assembly point and timing that will give them many excuses to make arrests, no matter how peaceful the demonstrators are.
The statement condemning this has so far been signed by
“I made it clear that if they go into Rafah – they haven’t gone in Rafah yet – if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities – that deal with that problem,”President Biden. May 8th
On the face of it, this is a very strange statement. Israeli troops had already entered Rafah two days before Biden said they hadn’t done it yet. But, although this statement was already out of date at the point that Biden made it, on the other hand, it is “clear”, or seems to be from this statement, that “if they go into Rafah” – no caveats about that – the US would cut off “supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, with the cities…”
What happened since is that the Israelis have continued sending troops into and occupying Rafah, while shelling and bombing the parts of it that they do not occupy.
The UN puts the impact of that like this.
Ground incursions and heavy fighting also continue to be reported, particularly in Rafah. Intensified hostilities following the issuance of evacuation orders and the Israeli military operation in Rafah have so far forced the displacement of about one million people, amid a decline in the entry of humanitarian aid. Between the afternoons of 29 and 31 May, according to MoH in Gaza, 113 Palestinians were killed and 637 were injured, including 60 killed and 280 injured in the past 24 hours.
In Rafah, only three field hospitals are still operating, one of them partially. The World Food Programme (WFP) calls for the immediate opening of all access points, emphasizing that its ability to support people in need is deteriorating. Health and environmental risks are on the rise due to fuel shortages, limited access to clean water, sewage overflow, accumulation of solid waste, and infrastructural damage, UNRWA and partners warn.
The US, in response, made a tokenistic gesture of blocking one weapons shipment. This had the same performative media feed quality as their aid air drops and the pier they built to deliver aid that has now began to sink.
The International Court of Justice ruled on May 24th that Israel “must halt” its military offensive “immediately”. That was a week ago. The Israelis have ignored the ruling. They are in breach of international law and therefore, as the saying goes, “the rules based international order”.
The film below of National Security Council spokesman and former Rear Admiral John Kirby, a man who definitely has “something of the night about him”, slipping and sliding under pressure from reporters on this question is a study in squirming self righteous evasiveness that becomes embarassingly revealing.
His line can be summarised as …“the Israelis say that they didn’t do the bombing, it “might have been” a Hamas ammo dump spontanously combusting, and anyway they used their smallest bombs, a teeny, tiny bomb, and if they did it was somewhere else, and an accident, and they are investigating it; so I really can’t comment until their investigation is complete. And of course we will not rush to judgement until they have had time to judge their own actions, and there will be nothing self serving about this because they are a “democracy”. We haven’t been able to verify any of the evidence we have seen. We will ask the Israelis about this and accept what they say. Any critical view about this is conjecture that does not fit the facts, even though I’ve just said that we won’t know what the facts are until the Israelis decide what they are. As far as red lines are concerned, there is no mathematical formula, so, trust me, trying to pin me down on this will be like trying to nail blamange to the wall. A great deal of aid has gone into Gaza but I am not going to specify how much because I know damn well how far short it falls. We have a red line against a major incursion, but no matter how major the incursions have been so far, they won’t be major enough for us to actually do anything; and we are in constant talks with the Israelis so we are on the same page on whatever this is going to be. Trust me. Anyway, all this could be avoided if Hamas came out of their tunnels and lined up with big targets on their heads so the IDF could shoot them without having to, sadly, drop 2,000 lb bombs on thousands of people trying to shelter in tents; because its very worrying that the Israelis are having to send troops back into areas that they had already flattened and thought they had “cleared”; so there needs to be a plan for the day after, though for goodness sake don’t ask me what that might be.”
Watch it for yourself. Its an education.
“You cannot make judgements in the midst of a conflict”John Kirby. Exept that the US judgement to cut funding from UNWRA after Israeli accused 7 UNWRA personel of taking part in Oct 7th was immediate, and in the midst of the conflict, even though the Israelis presented no evidence at the time; and the funding remains suspended even though the Israelis have presented no evidence since. This is complicity in using famine as a weapon.
Urban ramblings 