Gaza enters 10th year of Israeli-led blockade

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Gaza enters 10th year of Israeli-led blockade

The start of 2016 sees the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip entering the 10th year of the Israeli-led and internationally-backed blockade of the territory, which is exacerbated by Egyptian support. The blockade started in the wake of the 2006 Palestinian elections, which the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, won with an overwhelming majority.

Local and international monitoring organisations described the Palestinian poll as one of the most transparent ever recorded. In Palestine, though, it is remembered with sadness as the election marked the internal political split and the start of the siege of Gaza.

The Israeli authorities closed all crossings into the territory, keeping only the Erez Crossing open for occasional pedestrian traffic (and it has been used to entrap people trying to cross), and Kerem Shalom for a few classified and highly-regulated goods. Egypt has been keeping the Rafah Crossing closed for most of the time. In 2015, the crossing was only open for 21 days; just 10,000 Palestinians were allowed through, among them pilgrims, patients and students.


The Israeli authorities imposed severe restrictions on patients and their companions travelling through Erez. Human rights groups have recorded the arrest of several patients or their companions while using the crossing into Israel. Attempts are made by the Israelis to blackmail people into becoming informers in exchange for being allowed to cross.

Gaza: The Brink of Collapse Triggers War

Quds Press has reported the chronic shortages of medicines and hospital disposables. The Palestinian ministry of health spokesman in Gaza, Ashraf Al-Qidra, says that shelves are empty due to the restrictions imposed by the Israelis on people and goods going in and out of the coastal enclave.

Independent MP Jamal Al-Khodari, who has been heading a popular committee working to end the siege, told Quds Press that Israel has been trying to “legalise” the blockade and make it last as long as possible, using all means to do so.

The plight of the Palestinians in Gaza has aroused widespread popular support across the world and many attempts have been made to break the siege by sea. Although a few small boats made the trip in the first few years, later and more ambitious attempts were stopped in international waters by the Israeli navy, often violently. In May, 2010, for example, Israeli commandos intercepted the Freedom Flotilla. Nine Turkish citizens were killed in the assault and a number of others were wounded; one died in 2014 as a direct result of his wounds. The ships were towed into port in Israel and everyone on board was arrested.

During the siege, Israel has launched four major military offensives against the people of Gaza, in 2006, 2008/9, 2012 and 2014; the latter was the most destructive. It lasted for 51 days and whole areas of Gaza were flattened by Israeli bombs; tens of thousands of people were displaced.

The strict siege and wars have shattered the Palestinian economy in Gaza, economic commentator Maher Al-Tabaa told Quds Press. “The unemployment rate in Gaza stands at 42 per cent, with the blockade deepening the economic crisis,” he explained. According to the International Monetary Fund, the unemployment rate in Gaza is the highest in the world and there are more than 200,000 unemployed people in Gaza.

Al-Tabaa warned that if the siege of Gaza continues, normal life would not be viable in the territory in 2016. Many international organisations have issued similar warnings due to the effects of the oppressive Israeli measures, which are regarded as collective punishment and are illegal in international law.

Read:

• UN stops cement supplies for 70 factories in Gaza
• Israel imposes new rules for taking goods into Gaza
• Turkey demands end of Gaza blockade to reconcile relations with Israel

Israeli Forces Kill Beloved Palestinian Doctor and Peace Activist

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Israeli Forces Kill Beloved Palestinian Doctor and Peace Activist

“I will never move until I die or we get our freedom.”

A 54 year old Palestinian physician who has devoted his life to peacefully resisting the Israeli occupation of his land was killed by IDF forces yesterday, October 21st.

Since the Hebron agreement in 1997, Hashem Azzeh was made to feel like an outsider in his own home.


“The settlers harass us by throwing stones, garbage and sometimes human shit,” Azzeh said in a 2013 interview with the International Solidarity Movement.

Bottles of urine were often thrown into Azzeh’s garden

“The children here, including my own, can’t sleep well at night,” Azzeh continued. “They always expect soldiers or settlers to come and attack. Many children still wet their pants at the age of fourteen and fifteen.”

Despite this, Azzeh fought the occupation by refusing to leave and by helping others in his community. As recently as last July, Azzeh helped a 90 year old woman who was forced out of her home by Israeli forces to not only find shelter, but also assisted her in the long court proceedings to retake her home.

Hashem Azzeh and Um Mohammad

In 2009, Isreali settlers offered Azzeh $20 million to leave his home. When he refused, the military tried to bully him out.

“The settlers who live next to me cut the water pipes that lead to my house,” Azzeh said. “I lived without water for three years.”

“They attacked my wife when she was pregnant with our first child; she lost it in her third month. She was pregnant again but the settlers beat her when she was four months pregnant and she lost that baby as well.”

Hashem Azzeh and his wife, Nizreen

According to Azzeh, over 350 families lived in his neighborhood before the occupation. As of 2013, there were only 48.

“My neighbor is the leader of the Jewish National Front,” Azzeh said. “He has two stickers posted to his wall. One of them says ‘God gave us the right to kill Arabs and we love it.’”

Despite his struggles, Azzeh never advocated hate.

“We are not against Judaism,” Azzeh said. “We are only against the occupation. Every Palestinian has close Jewish friends.”

“He was a medical doctor who had founded a voluntary clinic in his neighborhood,” said Milla Katerina Tuominen, friend of Azzeh. “He was famous for inviting everyone to his house regardless of their religious or ethnic background and served as a perfect example of non-violent resistance despite having faced a lot of violence and hardship himself.”

Azzeh died from “excessive tear gas inhalation.” No disciplinary action has been reported from within the IDF ranks.

To support Hashem’s wife and 4 young children, his friends have started a GoFundMe fundraiser, which can be accessed here.

Hashem Azzeh with one of his children

“For me personally it is clear,” Azzeh said. “I will never move until I die or we get our freedom.”

Over 52 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in the past 20 days.

Israel and the Rotten Soul of the West

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Israel and the Rotten Soul of the West

by JOHN WIGHT

The rotten soul of the Western political establishment is never more exposed than when it comes to the issue of Palestine. It is here where the hypocrisy, double standards, and political cowardice that is its truth is at its most extreme.

Bad enough that the Palestinian people have been forced to endure a decades-long negation of their human, natural, and national rights; the injustice they have suffered is compounded tenfold by the complicity of the West in denying their rightful status as an oppressed people struggling against a cruel and vindictive oppressor. Stripped of all of the embroidery and obfuscation that has been allowed to distort the contours of this struggle, here lies the root of the issue and the biblical suffering that has and continues to flow from it.

This conflict is not and never has been about Israel’s right to exist or Israel’s security. It is not and never has been about Hamas or its Charter. It is not even about a two state or a one state solution – at least not anymore it is not. It is about whether we take a stand on the side of an oppressed people or with their oppressor.

In this regard we must give thanks to Malcolm X for washing the bullshit from our eyes: “If you aren’t careful the newspapers will have you hating the people being oppressed, and loving the people doing the oppressing.”

Make no mistake, the political mainstream and its media echo chamber know exactly what is going on in Palestine, and they are well aware of its root cause. Yet, regardless, they continue to provide Israel with their unstinting and unwavering support. Even more, they genuflect at the feet of this apartheid state.

The desperate acts of violence that have erupted over the past few weeks in Jerusalem and across the occupied West Bank – mostly in the form of random stabbings and acts of violence against any Israeli anywhere – do not denote evil on the part of those responsible; instead, such desperate acts reveal the extent of the despair which the Palestinians have endured and continue to endure as a direct result of their oppression. Theirs is an extreme but understandable response to the brutal negation of their dignity, rights, even humanity at the hands of a state that has never viewed them as anything other than an inconvenient fly in the milk of their pure ethno and religiocentric state to be crushed and crushed repeatedly.

The wanton, systemic, and systematic cruelty endured by an entire people follows the egregious logic of the campaign of ethnic cleansing that gave birth to Israel in 1948. It describes a moral sickness that, if anything, has grown increasingly acute in the decades since.

A Third Intifada is incontrovertible evidence of the abject failure of the international community to impose a just settlement for a people whose abandonment is a crime, consigned to a fate akin to the Australian aborigines and Native Americans, with the best they have long been expected to expect life on a reservation.

The Palestinians’ stubborn refusal to accept such a fate, even in the face of brutal and unremitting pressure to break, describes a level of sustained tenacity that has been Herculean in scope. For as ugly as their resistance has been, it is nothing when compared to the oppression that has given rise to it.

The prison imprisons the guards as much as it does the inmates, and the chains that bind the Palestinians also bind the people of Israel. Not for a minute in a given day does the word Palestine or Palestinian not intrude on their consciousness – though sadly not conscience in the case of most – reminding them of a people who remain unbowed, despite their immiseration, just a few miles from the affluence which they take for granted. Hatred of another is the handmaiden of hatred of self, with Israel an example of how the projection of hatred on a national level eats away at said nation’s own foundations.

Terrorism and terrorist are the most value-laden words in our language today. We use them to identify the violence of those we revile and whose cause we consider unworthy and unjust. As such there is not such thing as a Palestinian terrorist or Palestinian terrorism. What there is, and in abundance, is Palestinian desperation and Palestinian despair. Attacks carried out against Israeli civilians are an awful thing; however for a people who’ve been consistently denied their own humanity they have become the only thing left by which to command the attention of an international community whose silence is a lethal weapon in the hands of their oppressor.

BDS is the greatest and most effective weapon in the arsenal of international solidarity with the Palestinians. From small and marginal beginnings in 2005, BDS has grown exponentially to the point where it now strikes fear in the breast of Israel and is the only international lifeline that the people of Gaza and living throughout the West Bank have to hold on to. Its continuing growth and effectiveness is therefore a non-negotiable condition of the struggle against both Israel’s intransigence and the West’s hypocrisy, without which the status quo would have ended a long time since.

We have passed the stage where objectivity is an acceptable response to apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the monument to injustice erected in the name of exceptionalism. The cause of the Palestinian people is the cause of humanity in our time. 

John Wight is the author of a politically incorrect and irreverent Hollywood memoir – Dreams That Die – published by Zero Books. He’s also written five novels, which are available as Kindle eBooks. You can follow him on Twitter at @JohnWight1

More articles by:JOHN WIGHT

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40% OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN DETAINED BY ISRAEL ARE SEXUALLY ABUSED; VIRTUALLY ALL ARE TORTURED

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40% OF PALESTINIAN CHILDREN DETAINED BY ISRAEL ARE SEXUALLY ABUSED; VIRTUALLY ALL ARE TORTURED

40% of Palestinian Children Detained by Israel Are Sexually Abused; Virtually All Are Tortured 

According to a new report by the independent, non-governmental, human rights organization the Palestinian Prisoners Club (PPC), at least 600 Palestinian children have been arrested in Jerusalem alone in the past five months. Of these, roughly 40% were sexually abused.

PPC attorney Mufeed al-Haj notes that this horrific, grotesque abuse is not the only crime of which the Israeli military is guilty. Israeli Occupation Forces are not supposed to engage in night and predawn raids, but they regularly conduct them.


Israeli law says that minors undergoing investigation are supposed to be accompanied by their guardians, yet Israel virtually never allows this. As should be the case with any “democracy,” authorities are also legally “required” to have warrants for the arrest of Palestinians; they rarely do. Kidnapping is a common, everyday crime. In the first 3 weeks of November 2014 alone, Israel kidnapped at least 380 Palestinians from across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Sexual abuse and rape are indeed a form of torture. Palestinian children, illegally detained by Israel without charge, are also tortured by authorities in other ways. In a June Mondoweiss article, “New Testimonies from Palestinian Children Tortured by Israeli Authorities,” I summarized a report by the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel (Adalah). The report stated that:

[Israeli] Investigators threatened children with beatings, isolation, torturing their fathers and raping their mothers and sisters; children were denied food for dozens of hours unless they confessed to the charges against them.

I also noted that, in its 2013 review of Israel’s child rights record, the UN Committee on the Rights of Children (CRC) expressed “its deepest concern about the reported practice of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian children arrested, prosecuted and detained by the military and the police, and about the State party’s failure to end these practices in spite of repeated concerns expressed by treaty bodies.”

The CRC corroborated testimonies recalling Israel’s systematic use of:

• physical and verbal violence,
• humiliation,
• painful restraints,
• hooding of the head and face in a sack,
• death threats,
• physical violence,
• sexual assault against them or members of their family, and
• restricted access to toilet, food and water.

The CRC report also explained that the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has used Palestinian children as human shields multiple times.

The following is a collection of points made in the children’s testimonies, as I outlined in my article on Adalah’s report:

• The majority of arrests were made during late-hour night raids.
• Palestinians’ homes were “violently broken into by dozens of soldiers who intimidated both the children and their families.” In 100% of the testimonies, children said they were bound and blindfolded, before being transferred hundreds of meters away in military vehicles.
• In many of the testimonies, children revealed that soldiers went into their rooms, “aggressively woke them up, and shackled their hands and feet while they were still in bed.”
• In one testimony, a child who had been sleeping in his bed when the “brutal kicks of the soldiers” woke him up, had to have his finger amputated. Israeli soldiers ignored his wounded finger, tying up his hands and feet, for over 12 hours, leading to an inoperable infection.
• When family members inquired as to why exactly their young children were being harassed, assaulted, bound, blindfolded, and taken away in the middle of the night, Israeli soldiers often replied by beating and insulting them.
• In the preponderance of the arrests, neither children nor their families knew why they were being taken away. Family members would not be allowed to accompany the minor, and they would not be informed as to where Israeli authorities would be taking them.
• While soldiers were transferring the detained children to interrogation sites, soldiers regularly “used extreme physical and verbal abuse against them, including beatings, smashing the child’s head against a wall, threats of violence, and threats of sexual assault and rape.”
• In one testimony, a child was separated from his family so that soldiers could interrogate him. When finished, the soldiers ordered in four of the child’s friends, to see their peer being beaten before their eyes. In this torturous event, the detained child “confessed” that he, along with his friends, had thrown stones. Later, however, the same child admitted he had only confessed in order to stop the beatings, and he withdrew his “confessions.”

This is what Israeli officials do to Palestinian children who they think threw a few stones.

Adalah’s press release also notes that Israeli investigators, at interrogation and detention sites, regularly employed interrogation techniques that are forbidden under international law:

• 100% of the detained children’s interrogations lasted many hours. A majority said they were denied food, water, and access to a toilet. In some cases, children, who had been denied food for dozens of hours, were told they would only be fed if they confessed.
• 100% of the detained children “were left handcuffed on both their hands and feet while seated on a low chair.”
• Most of the detained children were stripped naked and strip-searched numerous times. Those “who refused to be strip-searched while naked were violently assaulted by the wardens.”
• 0 of the investigations were conducted in the company of a lawyer or relative, in flagrant violation of Israeli law.
• When children asked to meet with a lawyer, investigators told them it was “forbidden.”
• 100% of children were held in solidarity confinement for multiple days, and in some cases even weeks. One child testified that he had been held in uninterrupted solidarity confinement for 28 days.
• 100% of children “described their cells as being in very poor conditions.” Cells were windowless and incredibly small; they held only a small mattress and a foul-smelling toilet. It was not permitted that children lean on the rough walls. The cells were also lit 24 hours per day by a bright light. This light “hurt the children’s eyes” and made it difficult for children to fall asleep; from this forced sleep deprivation, children lost a sense of time, and presumably suffered from other ailments associated with sleep loss.