Israeli-US genocide in Gaza continues

ALMOST every day, after watching the internet news site Democracy Now! — which has very closely covered the Israeli-Hamas war, unlike most of the Western media that has largely downplayed it — I get a bit depressed seeing severely wounded Palestinian children being rushed to a hospital and, now more often, the limp bodies of murdered kids being carried by their fathers wailing in grief.

Just last week, and going viral on social media, were two photographs of a 10-year-old girl living in the Gaza Strip, Tala Abu Ajwa, the first of a beautiful child in a pose with a Mona Lisa-like subdued smile. In the second, the same girl, her face and body hidden, her pink roller skates sticking out from underneath hospital sheets in an emergency room in Gaza. An Israeli missile killed her a few minutes after her father relented at her pleas to be allowed to go out of their house to use her prized rollerblades. The strike killed eight other people, including a neighbor’s toddler son.

Her blood and those of at least 14,000 Palestinian children are not only in Israeli but also in American hands. The US has been bankrolling the weapons and other war materiel that made such atrocity possible.

How can Filipinos look up to the US as the beacon of democracy and the “international rule of law” when it is funding the most blatant barbarism occurring in our times, allowing Israel to deny Palestinians the most basic rule of law — self-determination — and letting them violate the most international rules of war as targeting civilians, killing children as well as journalists and medical workers. Not even the Israeli military-controlled media has released a photo of a Hamas soldier killed or captured. Calling the Israelis and Americans child killers won’t be a hyperbole.

As of September 2024, official estimates report that over 40,900 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the conflict escalated in October 2023. The majority of casualties include women and children. Unofficial estimates, including projections from humanitarian groups, suggest the death toll could be even higher — reaching 186,000 by one estimate published in the authoritative medical journal The Lancet — due to factors such as bodies left in the rubble of buildings destroyed, preventable diseases and worsening humanitarian conditions. This is in sharp contrast to the 1,478 Israeli Defense Force personnel that have been reported killed in the conflict, mostly in the October 7 attack.

Hamas

Yes, it was Hamas, the militant resistance organization, that provoked the carnage when it killed 1,139 civilians and 373 soldiers in its raid on Israel on October 7 last year. But nothing can justify Israel’s campaign of genocide against Gaza, which murdered at least 40,000 Palestinians, half of whom are women and children. Reports of Israeli women raped and babies killed have been incontrovertibly proven to be fake news spread by the famed — or notorious — Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. The Mossad also failed to explain why, for all its reputation that it is even better than the US CIA in intelligence-gathering, it miserably failed in detecting an attack that involved all of the Hamas’ forces right at its backdoor.

Since the Israel-Gaza war began in October 2023, the US has provided Israel with mammoth additional military aid, including at least $250 million in expedited weapons deliveries. The Biden administration also requested an emergency budget of $105 billion, part of which is designated for Israel. The US has been supplying Israel with ammunition, weapons and defense systems such as Iron Dome batteries since the conflict started. In terms of overall aid, the US has given Israel more than $260 billion in military and economic assistance since 1946, making Israel the largest recipient of US aid in the world.

If it were Russia or China funding Israel in an alternative universe, I’m quite sure the US and its allies would have even declared war on the two countries.

Without US funding, Israel couldn’t have Palestinians suffer the ferocity they have been doing. In fact, without the US, there wouldn’t be mostly Eastern Europeans invading a land smack in the middle of a Muslim world and pushing the residents there for centuries, called Palestinians, into two narrow strips of land now called Gaza and the West Bank where their movements tightly regulated, which in 2010 prompted the then British prime minister David Cameron to call Gaza the “the biggest open-air prison in the world.”

Apartheid

Two years ago, the international organization Human Rights Watch reported: “Israel’s sweeping restrictions on leaving Gaza deprive its more than 2 million residents of opportunities to better their lives, Human Rights Watch said today on the fifteenth anniversary of the 2007 closure. The closure has devastated the economy in Gaza, contributed to the fragmentation of the Palestinian people, and forms part of Israeli authorities’ crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution against millions of Palestinians.”

It is no wonder that Palestinians have formed militant organizations dedicated to resisting the Israeli occupation of their homeland, the largest of which is Hamas, the Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Resistance Movement.

Obviously, to frighten journalists from covering its genocide of Palestinians, between 116 to 134 journalists have been killed in Gaza — targeted even by snipers — to frighten them from reporting the Israeli genocide, according to reports from the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists. The vast majority of these journalists were Palestinian, with some reports citing up to 160 Palestinian journalists killed since the conflict intensified in October 2023. This has made the current war the deadliest period for media workers anywhere in the world and at any time.

Many of these deaths have occurred despite journalists being clearly marked as members of the press, leading several rights groups, including Reporters Without Borders, to accuse Israeli forces of deliberately targeting journalists.

Because of Israel and the US barbarism, there will be generations of mujahideen seeking vengeance for the killing of their children, their parents and their siblings. As we are the US puppet in Asia, they will reach our shores.

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Israeli-US genocide in Gaza continues
Source: Breaking News PH