GAZA RELIEF # 41 August 18, 2024
GAZA RELIEF # 41 August 18, 2024
YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS
We sent this week $3,000 to Haitham, of which he has transferred some amount to Moataz, who is stuck in Gaza City. Moataz managed to send us a text expressing his heartfelt thanks for the money. We also sent $2,000 each to Hamad, and to Abu Saif and Saja.
Hamad has a channel by which he can get money into northern Gaza, which reportedly has some of the worst suffering as the IDF has blocked the import of humanitarian aid and the egress of Palestinians from there more than they have done in southern Gaza.
Abu Saif and Saja use their money for the people encamped on their property in Nuseirat, which is in the middle of the Strip and south of the fortified IDF demarcation line at Netzarim.
FROM SALAH
“Yesterday, the Al Ijla family in Gaza suffered a horrific massacre due to an Israeli airstrike that targeted a house they had taken refuge in, located in the Al-Zawaida area in central Gaza. The airstrike resulted in the death of all 15 family members, including children and women. This tragedy is one of many massacres that have affected Palestinian families in recent days amid the ongoing Israeli military escalation.”
THE TALKS
It's hard to believe that the United States provides both the munitions and the diplomatic cover that have allowed this war to continue at its violent level after ten months and 40,000 deaths and another 100,000 injuries, amputations and now its first polio victim.
In doing so, we assist a country whose successive governments for the past 60 years have pursued — and now admit to pursuing — policies directly contrary to U.S. policy, international conventions to which the United States is a signatory, and U.S. national security interests.
We have little hope for the Doha/Egypt talks and for Secretary Blinken’s current visit to Israel, during which he is reported to be offering a last ditch deal that contains at least two provisions that Netanyahu rejects. The idea that Netanyahu will suddenly capitulate to the administration that just signed a $20 billion weapons deal, and knowing that he has the U.S. Congress in his pocket, is delusional.
Netanyahu will keep the war going, knowing that Congress and the Administration will continue to support him and keep the money and munitions flowing, as demonstrated by this latest arms deal, which includes F-15 jets with the range to attack Iran.
The equally likely course is that Netanyahu agrees to the ceasefire and the continuation of talks, gets some hostages back, raises hopes, and then stages an incident that generates a violent Hamas/Hezbollah response for which he can blame them for violating the ceasefire. As we have reported earlier, Ariel Sharon was the master — but not the sole Israeli practitioner — of such duplicity.
Or Netanyahu may just decide that he doesn’t need the cover of such an action and just repudiate the ceasefire once he has a few hostages back. Who would stop him?
Netanyahu knows that he could do so with impunity, as Congress — even a Congress not in the final three months of a hugely consequential election — would support him, and that Biden and Harris would be risking her candidacy by challenging him.
A REALLY, REALLY AMAZING NUMBER
AP: As Gaza death toll passes 40,000, corpses are buried in yards, streets, tiered graves
Doing the math: If you pick an average of, say, five feet for the length of each body (adult, male, female, adolescent, child, baby, and bury them head to toe with no gaps, that works out to a grave 38 miles long.
You can use the old slave ship calculation that an average adult/adolescent (few children and babies) passenger in the Atlantic slave trade could be squeezed (by the most rapacious slavers and for the entire two-month voyage) into a space 16 inches wide to come up with the number of footfall fields required for the graves.
And another calculation for excavation of soil and subsequent top coverage necessary to keep dogs from digging down to the bodies, and to reduce stench and disease.
A reminder that the entire Gaza Strip is only about five miles by 25 miles, home to 2.3 million people, much of it now covered by huge piles of building rubble. There’s no “space.”
https://apnews.com/article/gaza-war-hamas-dead-graves-40000-988d16b648e06e222f04964dc9440da0
A VIDEO NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART
Haitham forwarded a video, below, that you may not want to view. It shows a corpse recovery team trying to extricate partially burned and broken, largely naked bodies from some dangerously hanging building wreckage some distance above the ground. The team members, using ladders and makeshift scaffolding, face so many obstacles and dangerous wreckage that they eventually have to resort to using knives to dismember the bodies to extricate them from the dangerous wreckage.
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TONNAGE OF BIBLICAL PROPORTION
We have been trying unsuccessfully for months to get Senator Angus King to request of the intelligence community the tallies on tonnage by munitions fired, and numbers of various types of munitions that Israel has fired into Gaza in the past ten months. And the numbers for U.S.-provided munitions.
Here is one estimate sent to me by Haitham:
This data comes from something called Itisal, which may refer to a large Egyptian construction and logistics company, and I cannot verify its accuracy. Of importance, though, is that this diagram is out there in the world, being seen by millions of people who know exactly where all the Gaza munitions tonnage originated, and, it’s not being countered by the U.S. or Israel.
SETTLEMENT CONSTRUCTION NEVER FALTERS
For 57 years, Israeli government after government, whether led by Labor, Likud, Kadima, or other coalitions, has never slowed seizures of privately owned West Bank Palestinian land and the construction of settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, all in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, U.S. policy, and numerous UN Security Council and General Assembly Resolutions.
Finance Minister Smotrich, cited in the following articles, is not an outlier; he represents that REAL policy of Israel, the policy that we pretended for six decades was just rhetoric. My stomach always turned at the U.S. policy of refusing to publicly label the settlements illegal, or even illegitimate, and referring to them instead as “obstacles to peace,” even as whole Israeli cities sprang up on Palestinian-owned land.
Here at home, Americans absolutely HATE the entirely lawful, structured, and appealable process of eminent domain that provides for forced property acquisitions related to public need. How would those same Israel-supporting Americans react to the types of violent settler attacks and land seizures described in the following articles?
Reuters: Israel publishes plan for new West Bank settlement as regional tensions simmer
And, as we learned from the recent publication of a report by our friends Boaz Karni and Shaul Arieli of the Economic Cooperation Foundation about the massive increase in land seizures and settlement construction…
WashPost: Israel is redrawing the West Bank, cutting into a prospective Palestinian state
Israeli land grabs, settlement expansion and demolitions in Palestinian communities mark the most significant territorial changes in the West Bank in decades.
THE ONLY THING NEW HERE IS THAT THIS SETTLER VIOLENCE RECEIVED MEDIA COVERAGE
BBC: Israeli settlers torch Palestinian village in West Bank
Israel officials pledge to investigate…. The Israeli security forces can find and assassinate a Palestinian hidden deep in a bunker in a foreign country, or deep in the warrens of a squalid refugee camp amid 100,000 other refugees, but they are never able to identify Israeli perpetrators of violence against Palestinians, even those identified on video.
And a glance at the headlines from Israel.
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