SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
war crimes
'No More Money for Netanyahu's War Machine,' Says Sanders After Latest Gaza Atrocities
"Another school bombed, killing 14 people, including six U.N. aid workers," U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders wrote. "Enough is enough."
Sep 12, 2024
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders reiterated his call for an end to American arms transfers to the Israeli military on Wednesday following the latest deadly attack on a school-turned-shelter for displaced people in central Gaza.
In a social media post, Sanders (I-Vt.) highlighted atrocities committed by Israeli forces over just the past week, including the bombing of a so-called "safe zone" and the killing of an American citizen in the West Bank.
"Now, another school bombed, killing 14 people, including six U.N. aid workers," Sanders wrote. "Enough is enough. No more money for Netanyahu's war machine."
Israel's bombing of the United Nations-run al-Jaouni school in the Nuseirat refugee camp on Wednesday was the most recent in a string of attacks on displaced people who have been forced by the Israeli military's evacuation orders and relentless airstrikes to crowd into ever-shrinking slivers of Gaza.
The school was sheltering around 12,000 people at the time of the Israeli airstrikes, according to the head of the United Nations.
Israel's military
claimed it was targeting militants. Hospital officials said at least two children were among those killed in Wednesday's strike.
The Israeli attack on the tent city of al-Mawasi earlier this week appeared to have been carried out with 2,000-pound bombs supplied by the United States, killing or wounding dozens of people including entire families.
"The United States is complicit in this individual crime, as well as in Israel's genocide of Palestinians, because it continues to supply Israel with weapons, despite knowing that the Israeli army uses these massively destructive weapons to regularly kill hundreds of civilians," the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said in a statement Tuesday.
"All nations that cooperate with Israel in committing crimes by providing it with any kind of direct support or assistance must be held accountable, most notably the United States," the group added. "Giving aid and engaging in contractual agreements with Israel relating to the military, intelligence, politics, law, finance, and the media, among other domains that might help its crimes continue, is enabling Israel to commit its atrocities against Palestinians."
The United States has provided Israel with over 50,000 tons of weaponry and other military equipment since the October 7 Hamas-led attack, and the Biden administration recently signed off on a $20 billion sale of F-15 fighter jets, mortar shells, and other wares.
With U.S. support, Israeli atrocities in Gaza continue to mount.
Shortly before the school attack on Wednesday, Israeli forces bombed "a home near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, killing 11 people, including six brothers and sisters from the same family ranging in age from 21 months to 21 years old," news agencies
reported.
"A strike late Tuesday on a home in the urban Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza killed nine people, including six women and children," the news outlets added. "
The civil defense agency said the home belonged to Akram al-Najjar, a professor at the al-Quds Open University, who survived the strike."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden Rebuked for 'Outrageous' Comments on Israeli Killing of US Citizen
U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal said that "we cannot simply accept" the Israeli military's claim that its killing of Aysenur Eygi was "an accident."
Sep 11, 2024
U.S. President Joe Biden faced furious backlash on Tuesday after regurgitating the Israeli military's claim that its killing of an American citizen in the occupied West Bank last week was accidental, a narrative that eyewitnesses have denied.
Speaking to reporters, Biden said the killing of 26-year-old human rights activist Aysenur Eygi—a recent graduate of the University of Washington—was "apparently an accident," adding that the bullet that struck her in the head "ricocheted off the ground."
U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) denounced Biden's statement as "unacceptable" and "outrageous."
"We cannot simply accept the IDF's version that this was an 'accident,'" said Jayapal. "We do not know that, it's why we need an independent investigation. What accountability will there be when we keep supplying the weapons against our own laws?"
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, said in response to Biden's remarks that "if you are an American, your president not only provides Israel with the bullets that Israel uses to kill you."
"Not only does he not object after Israel has killed you," he continued. "Much worse, he even comes up with insulting excuses to exonerate Israel for murdering you."
The U.S. president's comments mirrored a statement issued earlier Tuesday by the IDF, which said its internal inquiry "found that it is highly likely" that Eygi "was hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire which was not aimed at her" but at another demonstrator whom the Israeli military described as "the key instigator" of a "riot."
"This was no accident and her killers must be held accountable."
Eyewitnesses have disputed the Israeli military's characterization of the moments before the IDF fatally shot Eygi.
Haaretzreported Sunday that it spoke to three eyewitnesses who said that Israeli soldiers shot Eygi "for no reason" and that "there had been no clashes at the time."
"First we heard a shot and it hit a dumpster that two volunteers were sitting behind and then there was a shot that hit Aysenur in the head," one eyewitness, identified as an American told the Israeli newspaper. "I was immediately just so shocked when I saw her laying on the ground, not moving. It was a direct shot to the head, it was not an accident. She was being extra safe out of all of the volunteers, she and her friends were standing the furthest back, in the safest spot that we thought."
Hours after echoing the Israeli military's findings, Biden issued a statement Wednesday saying he was "outraged and deeply saddened by the death of Aysenur Eygi," adding that "the shooting that led to her death is totally unacceptable."
The president went on to once again cite the results of Israel's internal investigation, noting that it indicated Eygi's killing "was the result of a tragic error resulting from an unnecessary escalation."
While pledging to "continue to stay in close contact with Israeli and Palestinian authorities regarding the circumstances that led to Aysenur's death" and calling for "full accountability," Biden did not pledge to launch a U.S. investigation.
Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee, released a separate statement Wednesday calling Eygi's killing "a horrific tragedy that never should have happened."
"Israel's preliminary investigation indicated it was the result of a tragic error for which the IDF is responsible," Harris added. "We will continue to press the government of Israel for answers and for continued access to the findings of the investigation so we can have confidence in the results. There must be full accountability."
Eygi's family, which has pushed Biden to order an independent probe of their loved one's killing, said Tuesday that the U.S. president has yet to call to offer his condolences directly.
Hamid Ali, Eygi's partner, said Tuesday that "for four days, we have waited for President Biden to pick up the phone and do the right thing: To call us, offer his condolences, and let us know that he is ordering an independent investigation of the killing of Aysenur."
"This was no accident," Ali added, "and her killers must be held accountable."
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Live-Streamed Genocide in Gaza Exposes US Complicity for All to See
The spiritual death of the United States has been a long time coming. It’s not just the murder and destruction—it’s the arrogance and hypocrisy of it all.
Sep 10, 2024
With a military budget greater than the next 10 countries combined, the U.S. naturally remains an international hegemon.
But it’s not the benevolent empire it once sold itself as to the globe. Now, as it transitions from post-9/11 forever wars, yet continues to engage in, finance and manufacture the weapons of a genocide, America’s decades-long spiritual decline has hit rock bottom.
Recently, a man approached me after a lecture, asking: “What makes Gaza different?” He was referring to the simultaneous international attention and inaction on the occupation’s barbarity in Gaza.
Of course, there are religious implications—Muslims naturally revere Palestine as a holy land, as do Jews and Christians.
There are historical implications, too, including an extensive history of over seven decades of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, the continuous building of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, as well as an ever-growing list of Israeli human rights abuses.
But the biggest difference that came to mind was that every detail of this genocide is being broadcast. It’s a “live-streamed genocide”, as Blinne Ni Ghralaigh, an adviser to the South Africa team at the International Court of Justice, put it.
It’s televised on your phone, your computer screen, your social media. A healthy conscience can’t simply ignore the mutilated bodies of tens of thousands of dead Palestinian children.
“It’s the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time,” she said.
It’s televised on your phone, your computer screen, your social media. A healthy conscience can’t simply ignore the mutilated bodies of tens of thousands of dead Palestinian children.
Arrogance and hypocrisy
But this isn’t the first time the U.S. has been complicit in the murder of thousands of innocent civilians.
What if the victims of the American military machine in Afghanistan and, later, Iraq were able to livestream their own death and destruction?
How many massacres has the U.S. been proxy to or carried out itself? How many victims will never be mentioned?
In 2020, under the Freedom of Information Act, the The New Yorkersued the Navy, the Marine Corps and the U.S. Central Command in an effort to obtain images from the Haditha massacre of 2005, a civilian slaughter in which US Marines killed 24 Iraqi men, women and children.
The Haditha massacre is a microcosm of not just the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but the West’s brutal attempt to engineer artificial change, secure national security interests at the expense of local populations and impose its will in the Muslim world.
The youngest victims included a three-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy named Abdullah, shot in the head from six feet away.
After a long fight lasting four years, in March, the US military apparatus released the images of the bloodbath. The perpetrators remain unpunished.
The Haditha massacre is a microcosm of not just the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but the West’s brutal attempt to engineer artificial change, secure national security interests at the expense of local populations and impose its will in the Muslim world.
In an interview with Al Jazeera’s Centre Stage last week, Middle East Eye's editor-in-chief, David Hearst, blasted the western world order amidst its complicity in Gaza.
“Nothing that the western [liberal] alliance has done in the last three decades has worked, and yet it’s still going on,” he said.
The Gaza genocide is an American one, and it is high time Americans came to terms with their government’s complicity.
From forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to Barack Obama’s "no boots on the ground" that fuelled a drone-strike heavy policy in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia, the US’s spiritual death has been a long time coming.
And it’s not just the murder and destruction—it’s the arrogance and hypocrisy of it all.
Sinister defence
“They’re using extremely illiberal means to protect their liberalism, and they’re using it against Muslims," Hearst added in his interview with Al Jazeera. "They wouldn’t dare to use that against Jews or synagogues.”
It is largely American bombs that have been dropped on the hospitals, mosques, churches and over 500 schools of Gaza.
It is an American backing of Israeli war crimes and human rights abuses that allows the occupation to continue its ongoing genocide, and it is this sinister defense of Israeli terror—often at the expense of its own citizens—that is putting the final nail in the coffin of America’s spiritual death.
For decades, Washington has remained silent and dismissive of Israel’s murder of American citizens, going to bat at State Department and White House briefings for the occupation against their own citizens.
It is an American backing of Israeli war crimes and human rights abuses that allows the occupation to continue its ongoing genocide...
In 2003, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American activist, was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza. The bulldozer was an American one, sold to Israel through a Defense Department program.
In 2022, Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist, was killed by Israeli snipers in the West Bank in 2022.
Just this week, Israeli forces shot dead 26-year-old Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a Turkish-American taking part in protests against illegal Israeli settlements south of Nablus. Israeli officials stated they “would look into it,” a dismal response echoed for decades.
And the U.S. response will remain the same: a shoulder shrug, a disapproval devoid of consequence.
The U.S. is not a negotiator, arbitrator or by any means an objective voice vis-a-vis the Israeli occupation of Palestine. It is the raison d'etre.
The Gaza genocide is an American one, and it is high time Americans came to terms with their government’s complicity in the type of war crimes they so often associate with historical hegemonic rivals.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular