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20+ Children Among Scores Killed by IDF Strikes in Gaza and Lebanon
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he and U.S. President-elect Donald Trump "see eye to eye" on the Iranian "threat."
Nov 11, 2024
Israeli airstrikes killed scores of Palestinians and Lebanese—including dozens of women and children—over the weekend as right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he and Republican U.S. President-elect Donald Trump "see eye to eye" on perceived threats posed by Iran.
A Sunday morning Israel Defense Forces (IDF) strike on the home of the Alloush family in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza killed at least 33 Palestinians including at least 13 children and nine women, according to health and civil defense officials in the embattled coastal enclave.
Some sources said more than 40 people were killed in the attack. According to Gaza officials, more than 50 people—many of them forcibly displaced by Israel's 13-month onslaught—were sheltering in the Alloush home when it was bombed.
Witnesses to the strike's aftermath described a horrific scene of dozens of victims blown to bits.
"There was a very huge explosion," relative Abdullah al-Najjar told Agence France-Presse. "When we arrived here, all the bodies were torn apart."
The IDF claimed the strike targeted unspecified "terrorist infrastructure" that "posed a threat" to its troops, and that "numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians."
Israeli forces have killed or wounded hundreds of Palestinians in a monthlong operation in northern Gaza during which residents have been forcibly expelled, possibly permanently.
IDF troops have destroyed much of the Jabalia camp and cut its residents off from humanitarian aid. As the IDF forces people to flee from Jabalia, its drones and snipers have targeted Palestinian civilians without regard for age or gender. Survivors have reported Israeli soldiers shooting people holding white flags, first responders, and journalists trying to document what many experts say is a genocide backed by U.S. military aid and diplomatic support.
Another Sunday morning IDF strike that targeted the al-Khour family home in Sabra, south of Gaza City, killed numerous Palestinians including Wael al-Khour, the director of the Palestinian Authority's Welfare Ministry in Gaza, his wife, three of their children, and three grandchildren, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, the Lebanese Health Ministry said at least 23 people including seven children were killed in a Sunday IDF airstrike on the village of Almat north of the capital Beirut.
"Under the rubble, there are only children, elderly men and women," said Raed Berro, a lawmaker from the political and paramilitary group Hezbollah who represents the district in the Lebanese Parliament.
Lebanese officials also said that more than a dozen paramedics and civil defense volunteers were killed by IDF strikes in the Tyre district of southern Lebanon on Saturday.
The Lebanese Health Ministry said at least 3,186 people have been killed and over 14,000 others wounded by Israeli attacks on the country since October 2023. That's when Hezbollah began launching rockets at Israel in solidarity with Gaza after the Hamas-led attack and kidnappings prompted Israel's retaliatory assault that has left more than 156,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing.
The latest IDF strikes came amid a looming deadline this week imposed last month by the Biden administration for Israel to take "urgent and sustained" action to improve the humanitarian situation in northern Gaza, where United Nations officials last week warned of imminent famine.
However, with the end of the Biden administration fast approaching, Netanyahu said Sunday that he has spoken three times with Trump and that he and the U.S. president-elect "see eye to eye on the Iranian threat in all its components," including Hamas and Hezbollah, which are backed by Tehran.
On Monday, Trump confirmed that he has tapped Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) to serve as his ambassador to the United Nations. Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the peace group CodePink, last week called Stefanik a "strident genocide supporter," as she has advocated sending Israel as many U.S. weapons as it needs, without conditions, to ensure "total victory" in Gaza.
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Israel Reportedly Massacres Family of Virginia Man in Gaza, Including US Permanent Resident
"This is a documented Israeli war crime of the execution of a U.S. resident and her extended family in Gaza," said one campaigner, urging the Biden administration to "stop supplying Israel with American weapons."
Oct 15, 2024
The Muslim advocacy group Council on American-Islamic Relations on Tuesday led condemnation of Israeli airstrikes on the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza that killed at least 14 Palestinians—including the mother of an American citizen who was a permanent U.S. resident—and demanded that the Biden administration stop supplying Israel with arms.
In a statement Tuesday, CAIR "called on the Biden administration, the U.S. State Department, and elected officials in Virginia to demand that the Israeli government cease its attacks on the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza after the mother of an American citizen, a U.S. resident, and other family members were reportedly executed in a repeat Israeli attack on their family residence, despite the family's pleas to Israeli authorities to stop the bombing and allow the evacuation of surviving family members."
This, after "an American citizen and Virginia man of Palestinian descent informed CAIR that his family home in Gaza was bombed in an Israeli attack on the Jabalia refugee camp."
"There were reportedly 15 people in the house, seven of them children, including the man's mother, a lawful permanent resident of the United States," said CAIR, which did not identify any of the individuals described.
CAIR continued:
After the initial Israeli military strike on the family residence, the U.S. resident mother and an unknown number of relatives were reportedly injured but alive, trapped under the rubble. In an effort to rescue the survivors, the family contacted Israeli authorities, providing them with the residential address and GPS coordinates of their home to arrange for the safe passage of an ambulance. However, the Israeli military apparently used that information to bomb the house a second time and then targeted the ambulance as it attempted to rescue the survivors, killing the doctor and several children. Only a 7-year-old boy survived the incident.
The attacks came amid intensified Israeli bombardment of Jabalia and other parts of Gaza that killed 50 Palestinians on Tuesday, according to Reuters. Israel—which receives tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military aid and diplomatic support including vetoes of multiple United Nations Security Council cease-fire resolutions—is on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice.
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health and international agencies, Israel's 375-day assault on Gaza has killed or wounded more than 150,000 Palestinians, including at least 10,000 people who are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings. Millions more Palestinians have been forced from their homes—often several times—starved, and sickened.
"This is a documented Israeli war crime of the execution of a U.S. resident and her extended family in Gaza," CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad said in a statement. "The only option the Biden administration has is to stop supplying Israel with American weapons, funded by our nation's taxpayers, which are being used to kill our citizens, legal permanent residents, and their families."
"The Biden administration has shown little concern for the mass killing of Palestinians, but perhaps it can be moved to recover the body of a U.S. resident who is also the mother of an American citizen," Awad added. "There must be an immediate cease-fire to end Israel's genocide."
While President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris—the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee—have repeatedly affirmed their unwavering support for Israel, multiple media outlets reported Tuesday that the Biden administration recently threatened to cut off U.S. arms shipments if the Israeli government does not take "urgent and sustained actions" to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.
"No need to wait 30 days," CAIR said in a separate statement earlier Tuesday.
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'Jabalia Is Being Wiped Out': Gaza Pleads for Help as Israel Intensifies Assault
One Palestinian journalist said that "the situation in the north is horrific and very dangerous" and implored people to "please share what's happening."
Oct 08, 2024
Israel's latest dayslong assault on besieged northern Gaza intensified Tuesday as the nation's tanks advanced deeper into the Jabalia refugee camp, where terrified residents reported being fired on by the Israeli military as they tried to flee.
Citing eyewitness accounts, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other news outlets reported that Israeli forces opened fire indiscriminately at people in Jabalia, who are under Israeli evacuation orders. Residents are being told to move to Al-Mawasi, a badly overcrowded so-called "humanitarian zone" in southern Gaza that Israel's military has attacked repeatedly.
"Drones were firing at everyone passing by on the road," 28-year-old Mohammad Sultan, whose family fled their home in Jabalia, told CNN on Tuesday. Sultan said he and other civilians came under Israeli fire when he returned to grab food, water, and blankets.
"Three people were shot right in front of me," he said. "My brother and I tried to help the injured get to the hospitals, but a little girl was shot in the neck, and her father was also injured."
Reuters reported that the warning "Jabalia is being wiped out" was "repeated in many messages posted on social media by residents of Gaza" as Israeli forces assailed the refugee camp and nearby areas, killing dozens of people over the past several days.
"Jabalia is being bombed as if the war has just begun and the world is blind about it," a 60-year-old father of five told Reuters.
Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, said Tuesday that "the threat of yet another massacre in northern Gaza is very real."
"Israel must be ordered to stop assaulting the Palestinians trapped there and withdraw immediately from the occupied Palestinian territory, as already decided by the [International Court of Justice]," she added.
Hossam Shabat, a Palestinian journalist reporting from northern Gaza, wrote on social media Tuesday that "the situation in the north is horrific and very dangerous; there are currently hundreds of thousands trapped, and the shelling is nonstop."
"Please share what's happening in the north," he added.
The northern part of Gaza has been utterly devastated by the Israeli military's yearlong assault, carried out with the support of the United States and other world powers. The United Kingdom-based humanitarian group Christian Aid said Monday that mothers in northern Gaza have reported "losing up to 30kg of weight" as the region faces famine conditions fueled by Israel's suffocating blockade and relentless airstrikes.
"We often survive on one meal a day if we can find one," one mother told Christian Aid's partners in Gaza. "My children cry and fall asleep hungry, and I spend nights crying because I am helpless and heartwrenched as their tears of hunger feel like a knife cutting through me, even though I always prioritized them over myself."
Al Jazeera reported Tuesday that at least 56 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli airstrikes over the past 24 hours, while noting that "the number of deaths reported by sources vary" given the difficulties of counting casualties under Israeli bombardment.
Al Jazeera's Abu Azzoum said the Israeli army is "systematically working to empty northern Gaza."
Such an effort would be consistent with reported Israeli proposals to "liquidate northern Gaza." As +972 Magazine reported last month, prominent Israeli officials including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir have "called on the military to carry out mass extermination in northern Gaza."
"For some, it might be easy to write off Israeli proposals to 'finish the job' in northern Gaza as genocidal bombast, unlikely to be carried out," the magazine added. "Regardless of what happens over the coming months, the very fact that open proposals to starve and exterminate hundreds of thousands of people are up for debate demonstrates precisely where Israeli society stands today."
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Intensified Israeli Airstrikes Push Gaza Death Toll Over 13,000
Yet another attack on the heavily bombed Jabalia refugee camp reportedly killed more than 80 people, including 32 members of one family—19 of them children.
Nov 19, 2023
Israeli airstrikes on Gaza reportedly killed more than 100 Palestinians on Saturday—including upwards of 80 people in the hard-hit Jabalia refugee camp—bringing the Palestinian death toll in the 44-day war to over 13,000 as the Biden administration refuted reports of a breakthrough in cease-fire negotiations between Israel and Hamas.
The Gaza Health Ministry said Saturday that a pair of Israeli airstrikes on the densely populated Jabalia camp—including on a United Nations school where thousands of people were sheltering from relentless bombardment—killed more than 80 people. Among the dead are reportedly 32 members of the Abu Habal family, including 19 children.
"Shelters are a place for safety. Schools are a place for learning. Tragic news of the children, women, and men killed while sheltering at al-Fakhouri school in northern Gaza," United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths said on social media. "Civilians cannot and should not have to bear this any longer."
Philippe Lazzarini, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, lamented the "horrifying images" he saw of the bombing, while stressing that "a humanitarian cease-fire cannot wait any longer."
Previous Israeli attacks on Jabalia—including one last week that killed at least 126 Palestinians—more than half of them children—have been condemned by international experts as war crimes.
Meanwhile, Palestinian officials said Israeli bombardment of an apartment building in Khan Younis in southern Gaza—where Israeli authorities had directed Palestinians to flee for their lives—killed 26 people and injured 23 more. Six Palestinians were also reportedly killed in an Israeli attack on a house in Deir Al-Balah.
Gaza officials said that more than 13,000 Palestinians—including over 5,500 children and 3,500 women—have been killed during Israel's retaliatory war on the embattled enclave since the October 7 Hamas-led attacks that left around 1,200 Israeli and others dead and approximately 240 people taken hostage.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been injured, while as many as 1.7 million people—or about 70% of Gaza's population—have been forcibly displaced in a war that numerous experts have called "genocidal."
In the United States, the White House on Saturday refuted reports of an imminent Qatari-brokered temporary cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
"No deal yet but we continue to work hard to get a deal," White House National Security Council Spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday night that an extremely limited amount of fuel would be allowed into Gaza for the purpose of averting the spread of communicable diseases.
"This is not a change of policy but a limited, localized response in order to prevent the outbreak of epidemics," he explained.
Netanyahu also vehemently rejected international calls for a cease-fire, vowing that "we will continue to fight until victory."
Former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said on social media that Saturday's strikes show "there is nowhere safe for Gaza's civilians."
"First the Israeli military told Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza to move south to avoid being bombed. Now, as Israel bombs in the south, it tells them to move west," Roth noted. "But Hamas is throughout Gaza."
"What's next? Expulsion to Egypt and Nakba II?" he added, referring to a modern-day version of the ethnic cleansing campaign that forcibly expelled more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the establishment of the modern state of Israel 75 years ago.
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UN Experts Warn of 'Grave Risk of Genocide' in Gaza
"Time is running out to prevent genocide and humanitarian catastrophe," the special rapporteurs stressed—while other experts said such conditions already exist in the pulverized Palestinian enclave.
Nov 02, 2023
As the death toll from over three weeks of relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza from air, land, and sea topped 9,000 on Thursday, a group of United Nations human rights experts warned that "time is running out to prevent genocide and humanitarian catastrophe"—conditions that others argue already exist in the besieged Palestinian strip.
"The situation in Gaza has reached a catastrophic tipping point," the seven U.N. special rapporteurs said, noting the "dire need for food, water, medicine, fuel, and essential supplies and the risk of looming health hazards."
"We remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide," the U.N. special rapporteurs said. "The time for action is now. Israel's allies also bear responsibility and must act now to prevent its disastrous course of action."
The experts—Pedro Arrojo Agudo, Michael Fakhri, Tlaleng Mofokeng, Paula Gaviria Betancur, Irene Khan, Francesca Albanese, and Ashwini K.P.—expressed "deepening horror" at multiple Israeli bombings of the Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza's largest, in recent days. Palestinian officials said hundreds of people were killed or wounded in the strikes.
"The Israeli airstrike on a residential complex in the Jabalia refugee camp is a brazen violation of international law—and a war crime," they wrote. "Attacking a camp sheltering civilians including women and children is a complete breach of the rules of proportionality and distinction between combatants and civilians."
While the experts welcomed a nonbinding resolution passed on October 27 by the U.N. General Assembly calling for an "immediate, sustained humanitarian truce" in Gaza, they stressed that every day that passes without a cease-fire brings untold new misery to Palestinians.
"We received the resolution with hope, but the need for action is now," they asserted. "All signs are that we have reached a breaking point."
The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported "people desperately grabbing flour and other essentials from a U.N. warehouse... alarming news of children being forced to drink sea water in the absence of clean water, distressing reports of patients including children undergoing surgery without anesthetics, and persons with disabilities and older persons displaced and living in tents because houses have been turned to rubble."
"The Palestinian people in Gaza—particularly women, children, persons with disabilities, youth, and older persons—have endured decades of hardship and deprivation," the U.N. experts said. "We call on Israel and its allies to agree to an immediate cease-fire. We are running out of time."
According to OHCHR:
An estimated 1.4 million people in Gaza are internally displaced, with approximately 629,000 seeking refuge in 150 U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) emergency shelters. The UNRWA reports that 70 U.N. workers have died as a result of Israeli bombardment in Gaza.
UNRWA said Thursday that four of its shelters in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged in the past 24 hours, including a school in the Jabalia camp where 20 people died in an Israeli strike.
Numerous experts say Israel is already perpetrating genocide in Gaza, including Israeli Holocaust scholar Raz Segal and former longtime U.N. official Craig Mokhiber, who recently resigned from his OHCHR post while calling out "the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler-colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging."
Both Segal and Mokhiber called Israel's attacks and deprivation in Gaza a "textbook case of genocide."
Many Jewish peace activists in diaspora nations and even Israel itself have accused Israeli forces of genocide in Gaza, while also condemning genocidal statements by Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and members of his far-right Cabinet and ruling Likud Party.
U.S. President Joe Biden, on the other hand, has vowed his "rock-solid and unwavering" support for Israel—which includes requesting $14 billion in military aid for Israel, atop the nearly $4 billion already given annually—while drawing accusations of genocide denial for casting aspersions on casualty figures published by Palestinian agencies his administration previously cited as reliable.
Responding to the U.N. experts' warning of a "grave risk" of genocide, prominent Palestinian rights advocate Sarah Wilkinson wrote on social media: "Grave risk? What's over 9,000 murdered?"
In addition to at least 9,025 people killed by Israel's assault on Gaza—including over 3,700 children—Palestinian officials said Thursday that upward of 22,000 people have been injured and nearly 178,000 homes have been destroyed since October 7, when Israel began bombarding the densely populated strip of 2.3 million people in retaliation for Hamas-led attacks that left over 1,400 people dead in southern Israel and around 240 others taken hostage.
Meanwhile, in the illegally occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed at least 134 Palestinians, while wounding around 2,100 others. The emergence in recent days of videos showing Israeli troops torturing bound, blindfolded, and often naked men in the West Bank sparked fresh war crimes allegations against occupation forces and settlers.
While taking a more cautious approach, over 800 legal scholars earlier this month signed a public statement in which they "sound the alarm about the possibility of the crime of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."
Gustavo Petro, Colombia's leftist president, earlier this month accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. Colombia, Chile, Jordan, and Bahrain have recalled their ambassadors from Israel, while Bolivia on Tuesday became the world's first country to sever diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv, citing Israeli "crimes against humanity" in Palestine.
On Thursday, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), a Jerusalem-based advocacy group that for decades has opposed Israel's illegal settler colonization of the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, published a statement calling for "an end to Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people and the restoration of their national rights."
The group—which argued that Israel's conduct is consistent with the definition of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention—explained:
Genocide is often not a single event, but rather a series of deliberate events and processes over time whose ultimate intent is to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The Indian Wars in America lasted three centuries. If we step back from the war crime that is Israel's current assault on Gaza to the concerted effort since Israel's establishment to erase the country of Palestine and its Arab heritage, the picture that emerges is one of genocide, cultural as well as physical. Zionism's and later Israel's necessarily violent project to displace the country's Palestinian population, take its land, and replace it with a Jewish one constitutes deliberate destruction of the Palestinian people in part or in whole.
ICAHD "calls on the international community—the U.N., governments, and peoples—to hold Israel accountable for its decades of genocidal colonization," by "isolating and sanctioning Israel until its destruction of Gaza and its people ends, and the violent displacement of Palestinians from their lands and communities by Israeli settlers and soldiers cease."
"We call on the International Criminal Court to bring to trial for war crimes the responsible Israeli political and military leaders," the group added, while urging the U.N. "to enforce Article 3(e) of the Geneva Convention punishing for 'complicity in genocide' the United States, Canada, Europe, and other countries—including Arab and Muslim governments pursuing normalization with Israel."
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