Our Wednesday News Analysis | What do Palestinians in Gaza want?

Netanyahu said that Israel was set to maintain “security responsibility” over the Gaza Strip for “an indefinite period.” (AFP)

What is taking place in the Occupied Territories is not a conflict but a straightforward case of illegal military occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and outright genocide.

Those who insist on using “neutral” language when depicting the crisis in Palestine are harming the Palestinian people beyond their seemingly innocuous words.

This morally noncommittal, middle-ground language is now particularly at work in Gaza. Here, the harm of this “impartiality” is greatest.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” the late South African anti-apartheid activist Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said. His wisdom will always ring true.

While most countries and peoples around the world are certainly not taking the side of the Israeli oppressor, some, wittingly or otherwise, are.

There are those who are taking Israel’s side by directly fueling and funding the Israeli killing machine in the Gaza Strip, while blaming the Palestinians for the war and its devastating impact.

But supporting Israel does not only take place in the form of weapons, trade, or shielding it from accountability before international law...

Read more: What do Palestinians in Gaza want?

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WE’VE SHOWN GAZA’S SUFFERING FOR OVER 200 DAYS. DON’T LOOK AWAY NOW

Source: + 972 Magazine
https://www.972mag.com/gaza-suffering-palestinian-journalists/

By Mohammed R. Mhawish
Published May 3, 2024

Palestinians have been the sole journalists persistently reporting from the ground in Gaza. Yet it feels that the world is losing interest in our stories.

Palestinians at the site of an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, April 18, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

As Israel’s cruel war on Gaza surpasses 200 days, the toll it inflicts on the Palestinian people grows ever deeper. Both the land and population of the besieged Strip have been obliterated to a degree not seen since the Nakba of 1948. Famine and malnutrition have tightened their grip, leaving hundreds of thousands of families in the north and south desperate for food and medical aid as they attempt desperately to flee the bombing campaign that hasn’t ceased since October.

The losses that we’ve suffered — and are still counting — over the past seven months are immeasurable. They reflect not just homes and livelihoods, but also the dreams and aspirations of entire generations. And with Israeli military and government officials promising an imminent incursion into the overcrowded city of Rafah, which is now home to nearly two-thirds of Gaza’s population, further pain and suffering appear to be in store.

And yet, despite this dire situation, the world’s attention is turning away. The international community seems to be growing increasingly indifferent to our torment. It is painful to see how our identity has condemned us to disproportionate suffering and being treated as less than human by those beyond our borders.

Rather than offering hope, news of the fruitless ceasefire negotiations has become a form of psychological warfare. Every failed back-and-forth over the last seven months has only broken the spirits of the people of Gaza further. Diplomatic efforts have fallen short of meeting the urgent needs of the people, who demand nothing less than recognition of their basic humanity and dignity. The disappointing coverage by the international media, which often amplifies the voices of the oppressors rather than the oppressed, only adds to the sense of betrayal and complicity in the ongoing massacre of innocent lives...

Read more: We’ve shown Gaza’s suffering for over 200 days. Don’t look away now

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THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA WILL ALSO BE THE END OF ISRAEL

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/05/the-genocide-in-gaza-will-also-be-the-end-of-israel/

By HAIDAR EID
Published May 1, 2024

The more resistance that the colonized shows, the more brutal the colonizer becomes. Genocidal Israel is now walking in the footsteps of all other settler colonies on their deathbed.

EDUCATIONAL LESSONS FOR STUDENTS IN A CAMP FOR THE DISPLACED IN DEIR AL-BALAH, THE CENTRAL GAZA STRIP, APRIL 28, 2024. (PHOTO: NAAMAN OMAR/APA IMAGES)

It has been 207 days since the beginning of the Gaza genocide. Over 34,200 civilians have been killed, including 14,500 children and 10,000 women. Over 10,000 people are still buried under the rubble. Mass graves have been uncovered at hospitals in the north and the south of Gaza. At the time of writing, hundreds of dead bodies have just been discovered in a huge mass grave at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Mothers are still trying to identify the bodies of their sons and daughters. Two thousand people are still missing.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has documented 140 mass and unmarked graves so far in Gaza. The barbarity by Israel is unprecedented. Among the deceased in the mass graves at al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals, some people had been stripped of their clothes and buried with their hands tied. According to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a child is killed every 10 minutes in Gaza on average. Ghebreyesus paints a gloomy picture: “Nowhere and no one is safe.”

Almost all Gazans have been displaced, waiting for the day when they will return home as a first step towards their return to the towns and villages from which they and their parents were ethnically cleansed in 1948. Now, nothing is left. The beautiful coastal strip is no longer recognizable. Two-thirds of its houses have been destroyed; roads, hospitals, schools, universities, factories, shops, cemeteries, libraries, mosques, churches, restaurants, stadiums, farms, water wells, electricity generators…all have been erased.

Yet that does not seem to be enough for genocidal Israel, the United States of America, and the colonial West! They have decided to starve the people of Gaza by closing all the crossings and banning all kinds of food, clean water, and medicines. Even UNRWA has been defunded — despite an independent UN commission saying that Israel had failed to offer evidence for its smears against the aid agency — and for one reason only: to kill more Gazans.

The decision taken by major colonial powers to defund UNRWA has led the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention to sound the alarm and state:“[This] represents a shift by several countries from potential complicity in genocide to direct involvement in engineered famine.”...

Read more: The genocide in Gaza will also be the end of Israel