Our Wednesday News Analysis | Top UN court breaks silence on Israeli occupation

"In a world of constant and increasing violations of international law, it is our moral duty to reaffirm our unwavering commitment to all ICJ decisions in a consistent manner, irrespective of the subject in question ...”

Josep Borrell
Foreign Policy Chief
European Union

TEHRAN, 23 July(MNA) – The 15-judge panel of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has slammed the Israeli occupation of Palestine as “illegal," breaking the deafening silence against continued Zionist crimes in the Gaza Strip.

Middle East Eye quoted the EU's bloc’s Foreign Policy chief Josep Borrell as saying.

Although the ICJ's opinion on the crimes of the Zionist regime is nonbinding, over 80-page opinion shows the international community has to recognize the rights of the Palestinian nation.

The unprecedented step indicates the world can no longer remain silent in dealing with the crimes committed by the regime.

The health ministry in Gaza said that the death toll from the ongoing Israeli bombardments and shooting attacks, which started on October 7, climbed to 38,983 martyrs and the number of the wounded surged to 89,727 people.

In a historic move, the UN court has ordered the Israeli regime to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories “as rapidly as possible” while also calling on Tel Aviv to make full reparations for its “internationally wrongful acts.”

The court found multiple breaches of international law by Zionists including activities that amounted to apartheid.

“The court considers that the violations by Israel of the prohibition of the acquisition of territory by force and of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination have a direct impact on the legality of the continued presence of Israel, as an occupying power, in the occupied Palestinian territory,” Nawaf Salam, the president of the ICJ, said while reading the court’s opinion on Friday...

Read more: Top UN court breaks silence on Israeli occupation

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SEARCHING FOR GAZA’S MISSING CHILDREN

Source: Jews for Justice for Palestinians
https://jfjfp.com/searching-for-gazas-missing-children/

Ibtisam Mahdi writes in +972 July 18, 2024

Buried under rubble, lost in the chaos, decomposed beyond recognition: the desperate struggle to find thousands amid Israel’s ongoing war.

“We have been decimated,” Anas said of his family. “What was their crime, to be killed like this? None of them belonged to any faction or organization, and we weren’t targeted in any previous wars.”

Every day for the past seven months, 28-year-old Anas Juha and his surviving relatives have visited the ruins of their family home in the hope of finding the remains of their missing loved ones. On Dec. 6, a single Israeli airstrike crushed their five-story building in Gaza City’s Al-Fayoumi neighborhood, killing 117 members of the family. Fifty-seven bodies were recovered and identified; 60 others have remained trapped under the debris ever since.

By sheer coincidence, Anas had left his wife and children at home that morning while they ate breakfast to run an errand at his father’s house nearby. Upon hearing the powerful blast, he rushed back to check on his family and was horrified to find only a cloud of smoke and dust. “The whole building was reduced to rubble,” he told +972. “All I could think about was the 140 people who were inside.”

Anas began desperately searching for his family, together with his wounded cousins Mohammad and Naji, who had survived the strike after the force of the explosion propelled them out of the collapsing building. They conducted the initial search-and-rescue efforts alone, without the help of Gaza’s Civil Defense, which is tasked with locating survivors and martyrs after Israeli airstrikes; with internet and communication networks cut off across the Strip at the time, the survivors were unable to inform the emergency services of the attack. Ambulances arrived at the scene only after the first group of wounded people reached Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in private cars, and reported the location of the strike.

Anas’ wife, Lena, and their two children, 5-year-old Kariman and 3-year-old Fayez, were not among those pulled out of the rubble. Nor were Lena’s parents and siblings.

After grasping the magnitude of the tragedy that had befallen him, Anas began writing down the names of those whose bodies could not be retrieved. Initially, the shock was so severe that he couldn’t recall many of their names, including those of his wife and kids. But with time, he managed to note down all 60.

“We have been decimated,” Anas said of his family. “What was their crime, to be killed like this? None of them belonged to any faction or organization, and we weren’t targeted in any previous wars.”...

Read more: Searching for Gaza’s missing children

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PALESTINE LETTER: THE SORROW AFTER THE MASSACRE

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/07/palestine-letter-the-sorrow-after-the-massacre/

By Tareq S. Hajjaj
Published July 17, 2024

A person may feel great sadness following the Gaza war on television and social media, but experiencing the genocide firsthand, researching it, knowing its victims, and listening to their stories, is something else entirely.

A PALESTINIAN PASSES A DESTROYED BUILDING DURING AN ISRAELI MILITARY OPERATION IN THE AL-NUSEIRAT REFUGEE CAMP IN SOUTHERN GAZA, FEBRUARY 19, 2024. (PHOTO: © MOHAMMED SABER/EFE VIA ZUMA PRESS APA IMAGES)

"How can a person recover from the sight of the trained dog that attacked an older woman in her home in Jabalia and bit her arm while she was screaming? Every Palestinian who saw this older woman felt
she was his mother or grandmother.”

Editor’s Note | For the sake of our Planet’s insanity, The Voiceless Must Be Heard.

How can a person recover from the horror of what he saw? How can he live an everyday life after everything that happened to him and all this displacement, destruction, killing, and death? How can an ordinary person witness all these massacres and see how a person becomes a pile of body parts? Some are on the ground, and “Unknown No. 15” remains are written next to them. These scenes continue to play out every day for months. Can a person ever heal?

An ordinary person who follows the course of the war on television and social media may experience great sadness due to what he sees. But experiencing the massacre and genocide firsthand, researching its details, seeing its victims, listening to their stories and their helpless words, then writing their stories, word after word, feeling after feeling – is something else entirely. The writer listens to these stories repeatedly, each reminding him of his personal experience, to the point that he becomes weak and has no choice but to break down in tears.

Not a single story that I have published from October until now has been devoid of every single one of these emotions. There is not a single story devoid of its owners’ crying. Every family I went to meet in Gaza, the family was sitting in front of me with tears streaming down their face during a conversation. They could not stop, and in every story, I was in front of these people. Despite my persistent attempts to control my tears, I always failed and found myself crying with them and quickly trying to focus again and maintain my role as a journalist.

Working in the journalistic field during this genocide has never been more complicated than it has been in my entire life. For example, I had to go to meet children who had lost all of their families, and all that remained of them was the child whom I was going to meet.

When I went to meet these children, I always felt that asking my questions might be like walking in a minefield. A word or question could make this child lose his senses, burst into tears, or scream. They had lost all of their family. But I always tried to carry sweets and toys with me, talk to them, meet them, and seek help from the people who care for them and take care of them inside the hospitals.

When I went anywhere in the southern Gaza Strip, I would see many buildings whose destroyed walls bore the writing: “The people from this family that were bombed are still under the rubble.” They remained under the rubble for weeks and months without anyone being able to get them out...

Read more: Palestine Letter: The sorrow after the massacre

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AS NETANYAHU ADDRESSES CONGRESS, AGONY IN GAZA ENDURES

Source: The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/24/netanyahu-congress-speech-gaza/

Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor
Published July 24, 2024.

Thanks to U.S. lawmakers, Israel’s polarizing leader gets to eclipse Winston Churchill. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday afternoon will mark the fourth time he has been invited to deliver such an address, surpassing the wartime British prime minister whose bust once sat prominently in the White House.

Netanyahu has frequently styled himself as Israel’s indispensable warrior statesman, but it’s unlikely his statue will grace the Oval Office anytime soon. The Israeli premier has a long history of turning friendly U.S. presidents into pawns in his own political battles, and using set pieces in Washington as platforms for his own campaigns in Israel.

“One thing Netanyahu’s four speeches to Congress as premier have in common is that they were all made at the invitation of a Republican leadership on Capitol Hill and during the term of a Democratic president who had major policy differences with him,” Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer noted. “In each case, Netanyahu sought to demonstrate, with the help of his GOP allies, that his influence in America transcended the White House.”

The first time Netanyahu addressed Congress was nearly three decades ago in 1996, when he and his right-wing allies had just come to power in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzakh Rabin, whose efforts toward forging peace with the Palestinians that Netanyahu had opposed. His last address to Congress was in 2015, when he came to grandstand against the Obama administration’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran just weeks before Israeli elections...

Read more: As Netanyahu addresses Congress, agony in Gaza endures