Latest news with #atrocities
Yahoo
13 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Contributor: Dehumanizing and starving Gazans has been a strategy all along
An Israeli soldier would position his leg against the wall in the narrow corridor to our school, then order us: 'Pass under my leg, or no school.' That was a recurring event for us children during the early 1990s in our Al-Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza, the "beach camp." Read more: Famine's toll on the children of Gaza: The world shouldn't look away It took us some growing up to understand it as systematic humiliation, an experience that would define most of our encounters with the Israeli army. That left many of us feeling helpless and outraged, as it seemed an attack on our humanity. This is why when former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant called us 'khayot adam' (human animals) after Hamas' bloody attack on Oct. 7, 2023, it was not a surprise. Yet, this time, there was an eerie feeling that Gallant was thinking beyond the typical Israeli dehumanization of us. Read more: What does it feel like to be dehumanized? Just ask any Palestinian 'It was a prelude to dismantling what was left of us as a people,' Yousri al-Ghoul, a novelist from Gaza, told me over Whatsapp, in one of many ongoing conversations I maintain with contacts, friends and family in Gaza. Throughout history, dehumanization preceded and justified atrocities. The Nazis before the Shoah, and the Hutu against the Tutsi before the 1994 Rwanda genocide. Before Israel's 1948 inception, the Zionist movement in Palestine negated our national consciousness, calling us merely 'Arabs,' suggesting an absence of a unique identity. And by viewing us much as colonial powers viewed their subjects, we were perceived as inferior and less worthy of statehood. Many Israelis today see Palestinians as Palestinians — a people with an identity — but still hang on, at least unconsciously, to the notion of superior Israeli Jews. This hierarchical thinking has normalized the occupation, so that Palestinian resistance against it is perceived as aggression against the natural order. Decades of undermining our agency has evolved to a monstrous level, destroying what was left of our physical existence. Seemingly, it's now not enough to besiege, indiscriminately bomb, displace and starve us. We're now asked to die for food. 'We were lured into death traps labeled as humanitarian aid,' says Ahmed, a history teacher in Gaza, referring to the new system of food distribution under the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. 'Even our bodies, the last pasture of dignity, are reduced to breathing corpses,' he added. 'Corpses' is the word the commissioner-general of the U.N. aid agency for Palestinians, Philippe Lazzarini, used to describe Gazans. Quoting a colleague in Gaza, he said they 'are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.' This is a metaphor my uncle, a professor of English literature, has used to describe Gazans under Israeli siege since 2007. He quoted T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land' to paint an image of a Gaza engulfed with despair and spiritual aridity. To Ahmed, 'corpses are not people, so no compunction killing them.' Indeed, the Gaza war is the bloodiest in recent memory. Palestinian numbers point to 59,000, including 18,000 children, killed by the Israeli military as of July. A study by the University of London estimates the death toll to be 100,000. More than 85% of those who remain alive are displaced, squeezed into only 20% of the narrow strip of land. Many of them are facing famine, while the rest are months into sustained malnutrition. A dire situation has weakened many Gazans' sense of self. No longer do they care if they live or die, many have told me. Over a thousand aid-seekers were killed as they tried to reach Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites, but people still went knowing they may not come back. 'The U.S. contractors manning the aid treat our desperation as savagery, and the IDF shoots us like rats,' Ahmed angrily said, referring to Israel Defense Forces. And the hungrier and more deprived people become, the less 'like us' they appear. Al-Ghoul, the novelist, lamented how the 'hunger games' turned some people against each other, driven by basic survival instincts. He added: 'Don't talk to me about civility when my children are fading to skin and bone.' Meanwhile, Gaza writer Mahmoud Assaf told me that as the war fractures Gaza's society, 'personal survival tops everything. Very few people are now concerned with culture, education or morality, things that Palestinians typically took pride of.' Assaf was offered money to sell his cherished library to be burned as fuel in the absence of basic petroleum-based products or wood. 'I actually considered the offer to feed my children,' he said. 'You lose your soul hopping hungry from a displacement tent to another while herded by Israeli drones and tanks. You feel you don't deserve to live,' he added. But in the ocean of despair, there are those who find salvation in faith to reclaim some of their humanity. My mother, 65, is losing the strength to walk because of malnutrition, as I watch helplessly from the U.K. But she tells everyone to keep faith, because through faith 'she feels complete as a human being.' A comforting outlook for many Palestinians, in a world they feel has abandoned them. 'The world says the Holocaust happened because they didn't know about it. But the Gaza bloodshed is live-streamed,' my friend Murad told me. He added, 'What can I do to prove my humanity to be worthy of saving?' 'Shall I show them my blond blue-eyed daughter so they can relate to us? How about our malnourished cats?' Our conversation was after an Israeli airstrike killed Murad's sister and her family in Al-Shuja'iyya, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City. We spoke as he searched for water to wash up following hours digging out his sister's family from the rubble. Murad's niece, 5, died from malnutrition a week ago. And like all Gazans, he's deprived of grieving his loved ones. 'No time to grieve,' he said, because one has to shut down such natural human instincts to physically survive. And in doing so, one loses part of their soul, the sense of self as a human being. To close the circle of dehumanization, they deny our right to feel pain. Emad Moussa is a Palestinian British researcher and writer specializing in the political psychology of inter-group and conflict dynamics. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times. Solve the daily Crossword
New York Times
a day ago
- Politics
- New York Times
‘Revenge Is Not a Policy': Israelis Voice Dissent Against the War in Gaza
Abhorrence of Israel's devastating war in Gaza has resonated for months in capitals and in university campuses abroad. Now, a growing number of Israelis are speaking out against what they describe as atrocities carried out in their name in the Palestinian enclave. Israeli protesters are holding aloft portraits of Palestinian children killed in Gaza. Academics and authors, politicians and retired military leaders are accusing the Israeli government of indiscriminate killing and war crimes. In the early months of the war, the vast majority of Israelis considered the offensive a just and necessary response to the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, even if they were skeptical that the government's long-term goal of eliminating Hamas was attainable, opinion polls showed. Despite that, a majority of Israelis have long wanted a deal that would end the war in exchange of the release of all the hostages still held in Gaza and relieve soldiers exhausted by months of deadly conflict, according to the polls. But in recent months, a small but increasingly vocal minority has made anguished calls to end the war on moral grounds, even if many Israelis aren't even aware such protests are even happening. Many of the protesters may have supported Israel's right to self-defense after the Hamas attack, but many now say it has gone way too far and contravenes their values. 'We are on the edge of the abyss,' said Tamar Parush, 56, a lecturer in sociology at Sapir College in southern Israel, speaking at a recent antiwar protest attended by hundreds of Israelis at the busy Shaar Hanegev junction near the border with Gaza. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Arab News
4 days ago
- Politics
- Arab News
Paramilitary attacks kill 30 in Sudan village
PORT SUDAN: Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces killed at least 30 civilians in a two-day assault on a village in the country's western region of Kordofan, a war monitor said Friday. In recent months, as the war between the paramilitary troops and the regular army roared into its third year, Kordofan has emerged as a key battlefront, with the paramilitaries seeking to consolidate their control in the west after losing the capital Khartoum. The Emergency Lawyers, a group that has documented atrocities throughout the war, said paramilitary fighters attacked the village of Brima Rasheed on Wednesday and Thursday, killing three civilians in the first raid and 27 others the following day. It added in a statement that the dead included women and children. • In recent months, as the war between the paramilitary troops and the regular army roared into its third year, Kordofan has emerged as a key battlefront. • The Emergency Lawyers, a group that has documented atrocities throughout the war, said paramilitary fighters attacked the village of Brima Rasheed on Wednesday and Thursday. The Emergency Lawyers said the paramilitary troops' 'indiscriminate killing' of civilians constituted 'a serious violation' of international law. Casualty figures are nearly impossible to independently verify, with most health facilities shut down and large swaths of Sudan inaccessible to journalists. The monitor said sporadic clashes were also reported between paramilitary fighters and armed civilians in Brima Rasheed village, near the RSF-held city of En Nahud in West Kordofan state — a key transit point once used by the army to send reinforcements further west. The Emergency Lawyers said that in recent days violence has spread across En Nahud, with reports of dozens of civilians killed and residential areas attacked. The group added that the RSF also stormed major medical facilities in the city, expelling patients and using hospitals to treat wounded paramilitary fighters. Those who resisted were beaten or detained, the Emergency Lawyers said. Meanwhile, the UN said Friday that more than 1.3 million people who fled the fighting in Sudan have headed home, pleading for greater international aid to help returnees rebuild shattered lives. Over a million internally displaced people have returned to their homes in recent months, UN agencies said. A further 320,000 refugees have crossed back into Sudan this year, mainly from neighboring Egypt and South Sudan. While fighting has subsided in the 'pockets of relative safety' to where people are beginning to return, the situation remains highly precarious, the UN said. In a joint statement, the UN's IOM migration agency, UNHCR refugee agency and UNDP development agency called for an urgent increase in financial support to fund the recovery as people begin to return. It said humanitarian operations were 'massively underfunded.' Sudan has 10 million IDPs, including 7.7 million forced from their homes by the current conflict, they said. Over 4 million have sought refuge in neighboring countries. Sudan is 'the largest humanitarian catastrophe facing our world and also the least remembered,' the IOM's regional director Othman Belbeisi, speaking from Port Sudan, told a media briefing in Geneva. He said most of the returns (71 percent) had been to Al-Jazira state, while 8 percent had been to Khartoum. Other returnees were mostly heading for Sennar state. Both Al-Jazira and Sennar are located southeast of Khartoum. With the army controlling Sudan's center, north and east, and the RSF holding nearly all of the western Darfur region, Kordofan in the south has become the main battleground of the war in recent weeks. 'We expect 2.1 million to return to Khartoum by the end of this year but this will depend on many factors, especially the security situation and the ability to restore services in a timely manner,' Belbeisi said. He said the 'vicious, horrifying civil war continues to take lives with impunity,' imploring the warring factions to put down their guns. 'The war has unleashed hell for millions and millions of ordinary people,' he said. 'Sudan is a living nightmare. The violence needs to stop.'
Washington Post
5 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
The next Iranian massacre is unfolding in plain sight
Stephen J. Rapp was chief of prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone. He served as U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues from 2009 to 2015. As a former international prosecutor, I am compelled to speak out against a pattern of escalating human rights violations in Iran, a pattern that evokes the darkest chapters of that country's history and demands a sustained international response. At stake is not only justice for the victims, but also the world's credibility in preventing mass atrocities.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Why are we reluctant to recognize Israel's genocide in Gaza?
Why is it so difficult for some to accept that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza? The case for genocide is compelling, but some governments and members of the public resist acknowledging it. The reason lies in not only Israel's history as a haven for the Jewish victims of genocide but also an unduly narrow understanding of the meaning of the term, by both the public and the international court of justice (ICJ). Israel benefits from a halo effect associated with the Holocaust. Because the state of Israel was founded in response to the Nazi genocide, it is harder to accept that the Israeli government in turn would commit genocide. One obviously does not preclude the other, but Israel benefits from the cognitive dissonance. One would have hoped that a history of genocidal victimhood would yield an appreciation for human rights standards that prohibit oppression, but some leaders seem to have drawn the opposite lesson. They interpret the vow 'never again' to mean that anything goes in the name of preventing renewed persecution, even the commission of mass atrocities. Indeed, they weaponize the genocidal past to suppress criticism of their current atrocities. That was the experience in Rwanda. The genocidal slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsis in 1994 was stopped by the Tutsi-led Rwanda Patriotic Front, an exile rebel group based in neighboring Uganda. Under the military leadership of Paul Kagame, who went on to become Rwanda's long-serving president, the RPF executed some 30,000 Rwandans during and immediately after the genocide. Kagame's government went on to repeatedly invade neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire), ostensibly to chase remnants of the genocidal forces that had fled there but, these days, mainly to capitalize on Congo's mineral wealth. An estimated 6 million Congolese have died from the violence and resulting humanitarian crises. Meanwhile, the Rwandan government imprisons critics on the spurious grounds that they are promoting a vaguely defined 'genocide ideology'. The Israeli government has followed a similar logic, using increasingly brutal means to crush any perceived threat. Like Kagame, Benjamin Netanyahu and his predecessors have used ostensible self-defense as a pretext for a land grab. Israeli settlements have gradually cannibalized large portions of the occupied West Bank, and the prime minister is now threatening to forcibly deport 2 million Palestinians from Gaza. Meanwhile, the government and its partisans dismiss critics as 'antisemitic'. Israel also benefits from a public misconception of what genocide is. The Genocide Convention, which 153 states have embraced, prohibits various acts with the intent to destroy a specified group 'in whole or in part' as such. The proscribed acts of greatest relevance to Gaza are 'killing' or 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part'. Both the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide were examples of genocide targeting a group 'in whole'. After a certain point, the Nazis in Germany and the Hutu extremists in Rwanda tried to kill as many Jews or Tutsis as they could get their hands on. Genocide was the primary purpose. But what does it mean to target a group 'in part'? That requirement might be met when the killing is not targeted at every member of a specified group but at enough to accomplish another goal. For example, in 2017 the Myanmar military executed some 10,000 Rohingya to send 730,000 Rohingya fleeing for their lives to Bangladesh. Genocide in that case was a means to the end of ethnic cleansing. That is a better way to understand what the Israeli government today is doing in Gaza. Although the Netanyahu government has displayed a shocking indifference to Palestinian civilian life there, it has not tried to kill all Palestinians. Rather, it has killed enough of them, and imposed conditions of starvation and deprivation that are sufficiently severe, to force them to flee, if things go according to plan. The far-right Israeli ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have openly articulated that goal, as has Netanyahu. There is little doubt that Israel's actions are sufficient to meet the requirements for genocidal conduct. More than 57,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since Hamas's attack of 7 October 2023. A November 2024 study found that nearly 70% of those killed at the time had been women and children, and clearly many male victims were not combatants either. The number of civilians killed thus far exceeds the 8,000 killed by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1994, which an international tribunal found to constitute genocide. Although many of the dead in Gaza were not deliberately killed, their deaths were the product of Israel's disregard for Palestinian civilian life – for example, by devastating Palestinian neighborhoods with enormous 2,000-lb bombs, attacking military targets knowing that the civilian toll would be disproportionately high, or repeatedly killing starving Palestinians as they seek food. Meanwhile, Israel has imposed a punishing siege on civilians in Gaza, blocking access to food and other necessities for lengthy periods. In addition, at least 70% of the buildings have been leveled. It confines surviving Gazans to primitive camps that it regularly moves or attacks. And it has destroyed the civilian institutions needed to sustain life in the territory, including hospitals, schools religious and cultural sites, and entire neighborhoods. These conditions are believed to have contributed to several times the official death toll in indirect deaths. When the ICJ considers the merits of South Africa's genocide case against Israel, the key contested issue is likely to be whether Israel has taken these steps with the requisite genocidal intent – does it seek to eradicate Palestinian civilians in whole or in part as such? Some genocidal statements by senior Israeli officials have become notorious. Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, said about Hamas's 7 October 2023, attack that 'this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved' is false because civilians 'could have risen up' against Hamas (which is a brutal dictatorship). The former defense minister Yoav Gallant spoke of fighting 'human animals' – not, as some claim, referring to only Hamas but in discussing the siege, which affects everyone in Gaza. Netanyahu himself invoked the biblical nation of Amalek, in which God is said to have demanded the killing of all 'men and women, children and infants'. Yet other Israeli officials in their public utterances hew more closely to legal requirements to spare civilians. So the ICJ will likely also examine whether genocidal intent can be inferred from Israel's conduct in Gaza. That is where the court's conservative jurisprudence introduces a complication. In its 2015 decision in Croatia v Serbia, the court ruled that genocidal intent could be inferred from conduct if it 'is the only inference that can reasonably be drawn from the acts in question'. Because the killing in that case was also committed with the aim of forced displacement, the court ruled it could not give rise to an inference of genocidal intent. Ignoring the possibility of two parallel intents – one to commit genocide, another to advance ethnic cleansing – the court's ruling suggests, anomalously, that the war crime of forced displacement could be a defense to a charge of genocide. That makes no sense. The issue should be whether a charge is conclusively proved, not whether it is the only criminal activity under way. The ICJ will have a chance to correct its jurisprudence in the Gambia v Myanmar case about the Myanmar military's attacks on the Rohingya, which should be decided before the Israel case. The court would be well advised to find that Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya for the purpose of ethnically cleansing them – that forced mass deportation was a motive, not a defense, for genocide. That would lay the groundwork for a similar ruling against Israel. Why would the ICJ have adopted this rule in the first place? It never explained, so we can only speculate. But its rationale may have rested in part on the view that genocide should be about killing maximally – killing 'in whole', like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide – rather than killing or creating deadly conditions 'in part', as a means to an end. But that's not what the Genocide Convention says. And that is not how we should assess Israel's conduct in Gaza. That there is an illicit purpose to Israel's unspeakable cruelty should not be a defense to the charge of genocide. Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. His book, Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments, was published by Knopf and Allen Lane in February
