Palestine

Nearly 40,000 Palestinians have been forced to flee their homes in refugee camps in the West Bank since Israel launched a massive assault focused on the Jenin refugee camp, Tulkarm refugee camp and Nur Shams refugee camp near Tulkarm, as well as Tubas, in the northern area of the occupied West Bank.

Those refugee camps have housed Palestinians forcibly displaced from their towns and villages in historic Palestine in the aftermath of the ethnic cleansing campaign by Zionist militias and the Israeli army that forcibly expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948.

United Nations human rights agency OHCHR said these were “levels of mass displacement unprecedented in the occupied West Bank for decades.”

While Israel has insisted its military assault is to crush armed resistance in the camps, Palestinians fear that the displacement is the goal.

Testimonies gathered by the human rights office include accounts from residents who were told by Israeli forces that they would not be allowed to return to the refugee camp.

Some residents reported being told by Israeli forces to “forget” the refugee camp.

The agency even reported receiving photos from Jenin refugee camp showing “freshly bulldozed roads with new signs apparently giving several streets Hebrew names.”

This must be understood in a broader context, alongside statements and actions by Israeli government officials signaling a push toward annexing the occupied West Bank.

The Palestinian olive harvest season has come to a close, a turbulent time when families and generations come together to harvest the fruits of their land against the lingering if not present threat of settler and military violence. Often accompanied by Israelis and internationals offering their presence in solidarity, the crowds of youth and veteran activists pick olives alongside Palestinian landowners in order deter militarized settlers from unleashing their most brutal violence. What unites the old and young solidarity activists: many of them are military refusers, and not by coincidence. The connection between solidarity with Palestinians and the refuser movement is what fuels the overwhelming presence of draft dodgers in villages dotting the West Bank during the olive harvest and year-round. The work involves documenting settler and military violence, deescalating and mediating, and even putting our bodies in between the assailants and Palestinians.

Our goal is to allow Palestinians unfettered access to their own so that they can rightfully reap its fruits, against the wishes of West Bank settlers backed by the Israeli military. For those opposed to Israel's forever wars in Gaza and Lebanon — and every other war — access to land, freedom of movement and autonomy for all Palestinians are why we refuse to serve in the military, why we make our way to the olive groves. Refuser Solidarity Network is diligently documenting the olive harvest and news from the anti-war movement fighting for justice on the ground: follow our page Voices Against the War on Instagram and Twitter to inform your own solidarity work with Palestine.

On my most recent visit to the West Bank, me and my friends headed to Masafer Yatta, just south of Hebron, to join the last days of the harvest. We operated like itinerants: we started picking alongside the family we originally came to see before moving onto other groves, meeting new families we spotted from across the road and helping them wrap up their harvest. I had met a set of brothers, their wives and their children on one of these excursions. All of them hailed from a large nearby city where the brothers all worked as teachers, while they tended to their small parcel of land outside the city to make extra income from the annual olive harvest. Their extra source of side income has become a dangerous business: the settlers and the army regularly trespass on their land and physically threaten them. When they are not present on their land, their olive trees are threatened by arsonists from nearby settlements, a now ubiquitous phenomenon. The settlers are as keen to defile the land itself as they are to attack the Palestinians who tend to it.

The images of olive trees aflame that have made the rounds online are not so distant from the footage of American-made weapons enshrouding entire buildings in fire and smoke in the Gaza Strip before the ceasefire. Refusing the war also means refusing ecocide in all its forms: across Israel-Palestine, the military is determined to push people off of their land by destroying the land itself. RSN and local activists have documented some of these cases in the West Bank on our platform Voices Against the War at the same time as researchers are framing Israel's assault on Gaza as ecocide. The soil in today's Gaza is contaminated, while half of the Strip's farmland and tree cover has been decimated by some estimates. With greenhouses also destroyed throughout the Strip, Gaza's agricultural infrastructure is almost entirely decimated, a process advancing in the West Bank although at different rhythms and in different forms, which refusers and activists have witnessed during the olive harvest season and beyond.

As an anti-war and refuser movement, RSN is invested in identifying the connections between the West Bank, Gaza and Israel-Palestine as a whole. What seem like distant realities are deeply linked, notably the ecocide in Gaza and the settler and military violence destroying generations-old ecosystems in the West Bank, right before our eyes. When we refuse, we refuse the state of affairs from the river to the sea in its entirety: the genocide, the removal of people from their lands, the destruction of local ecosystems, and the sacrificing of Israeli children to advance these processes of Palestinian dispossesion. That is why our platform Voices Against the War documents resistance on a diverse range of fronts, where you will see current and former refusers on the front lines of dissent. Keep your communities informed: tell them about Voices Against the War to stay updated on internal resistance to Israel's crimes. Follow and share our Instagram and Facebook pages.

In solidarity,

Tal Marom
International Solidarity Coordinator
Refuser Solidarity Network

(Taken from an email sent to me by the Refuser Solidarity Network. Emphasis original.)

“ ✌️🔴 Statement issued by the Al-Qassam Brigades - Tulkarm Battalion In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful

“Fight them; #Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and satisfy the hearts of a believing people.”

In light of the open battle with the Zionist occupation, and with the escalation of resistance operations that are striking its collapsing security system, the enemy is trying with all its lies and deception to spread lies about the Mujahideen in order to confuse the ranks of our people and our valiant resistance.

In this context, and with the spread of news about the bombing of enemy buses in the Bat Yam area in the occupied city of Jaffa, we in the Al-Qassam Brigades - Tulkarm Battalion confirm the following clearly and unambiguously:

1- We are the ones who decide when, where and how to strike the enemy, not the lying Zionist media! The enemy is floundering and spreading lies, thinking that it is able to limit our strikes or direct the course of our resistance, but we say it clearly: Our sword is drawn and our weapon does not know hesitation.

2- We categorically deny any connection to this operation, and any claim made by the enemy regarding us is a failed attempt to confuse matters.

3- Our resistance works according to precise planning, and we choose our battles with the minds of our men and the arms of our mujahideen, not according to what the enemy or its agents promote.

Our message to the #Zionist enemy: Do not dream for a moment that you are able to manipulate the resistance or drag it into media battles. Our strikes are painful, and the decision is in our hands alone, and you will not hear about our operations until they shake your fortresses and set the ground under your feet on fire. Wait, for what is coming is greater, and the blood of our martyrs is a debt around our necks that we will not let down.

Our message to our struggling people: Believe only what is issued by the official resistance channels, and do not allow the Hebrew media or the alarmists in the city to confuse you. Our battle with the occupation is long, our weapons will not fall, and the blood of our mujahideen will turn into fire that burns the aggressors.

Our sword is raised, our decision is in our hands, and the time of defeats is gone forever! It is a jihad of victory or martyrdom”

https://t.me/qassamtulkarem/283

https://chapo.chat/pictrs/image/498c12c9-8a0c-44ea-a526-be1b297d91d3.jpeg

The Israeli military filed charges on 18 February against five reservist soldiers for torturing and raping a Palestinian detainee in July last year at the notorious Sde Teiman prison. […] Earlier this month, an Israeli military court sentenced a soldier to seven months in prison after he admitted to "severely abusing" Palestinians at the same detention facility.

(Spotted here.)

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-executive-order-sanctioning-international-criminal-court-rcna191018

“The ICC was designed to be a court of last resort,” the fact sheet on the executive order reads. “Both the United States and Israel maintain robust judiciary systems and should never be subject to the jurisdiction of the ICC.”

No problem when it sanctions Russia, Afghanistan, or any country not aligned with the west
(ideally the i.c.c. should have the power to protect from covert actions of foreign countries, and their powers/jurisdiction should stop there, without the right to sanction for internal matters, no ? And an international army would be enough to prevent overt military actions)

Reposted from @AliAbunimah on Twitter:

"I’m free! I wrote this on the plane and I’m posting it just after landing at Istanbul. On Monday evening I was brought to Zurich airport in handcuffs, in a small metal cage inside a windowless prison van and led all the way to the plane by police. This is after three days and two nights in a Swiss prison cut off from communication with the outside world, in a cell 24 hours a day with one cell mate, not even permitted to contact my family. On Saturday in a police interview in the presence of my lawyer they accused me of “offending against Swiss law” without ever telling me what crime I had committed in Switzerland or listing any charges. As far as I know I have not been charged with any crime whatsoever and I was held in “administrative detention.” On Sunday morning, they took me from my cell for questioning by Swiss defense ministry intelligence agents without the presence of my lawyer, and they again refused to allow me to contact her or my family. I refused to talk to them without my lawyer and told them take me back to my cell. During my imprisonment I refused every meal and every cup of coffee or tea they offered me except the last meal, after I knew I would be going home. I accepted only water, which is the right of every human being. All of this was after I was abducted off the street around 1:30pm on Saturday while on my way to the Palestine teach-in by undercover agents, handcuffed, forced into an unmarked car and sped straight to the prison. My “crime”? Being a journalist who speaks up for Palestine and against Israel’s genocide and settler-colonial savagery and those who aid and abet it. I came to Switzerland at the invitation of Swiss citizens to talk about justice for Palestine, to talk about accountability for a genocide in which Switzerland too is complicit. But while I was hauled off to prison like a dangerous criminal before I even had a chance to say a word, the Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who declared at the start of the genocide that there are no civilians in Gaza, no innocents, received a red carpet welcome in Davos, a carpet soaked in the blood of the more than 47,000 known victims of the genocide and the thousands more still under the rubble, or who died of deliberately inflicted starvation and denial of medical care. And on this very day Netanyahu freely travels to Poland to make a mockery of the Auschwitz commemoration despite an outstanding ICC arrest warrant. That is the perverse, unjust world we live in. This ordeal lasted three days but that taste of prison was more than enough to leave me in even greater awe of the Palestinian heroes who endure months and years in the prisons of the genocidal oppressor. More than ever I know that the debt we owe them is one we can never repay and all of them must be free and they must remain our focus. The police gave me my phone back only at the gate of the plane so I’m only seeing now the extent of the overwhelming support and solidarity from all over the world. I’m deeply grateful to each and every person who stood up for me. I’m especially grateful to my lawyer Dina Raewel and her team, to our friends in Zurich who I learned afterwards demonstrated outside the prison, to my family and my colleagues at EI and so many others. I honestly had no idea what was happening outside that concrete room! Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I want to tell the whole story of what happened, perhaps in an @intifada livestream in the next day or two, because I think it’s important for people to know the depths to which their Western so-called “democracies” have sunk in the abject service of genocidal Zionism. Right now I’m glad to be on my way home. I’m looking forward to hugging my mom and dad, taking a shower and sleeping in my own bed. Journalism is not a crime! Speaking out for Palestine is not a crime! Standing against racist genocidal Zionism is not a crime! Say it with me:

From the River to the Sea Palestine Will Be Free! ❤️🇵🇸✌️"

Hello,

This is Ablaa from Gaza.

Would you please share my GoFundMe campaign with your friends and those who are interested in helping.

I am sure you are aware of the situation in Gaza. I have 2 kids . Every day literally every day, I want to get my kids out of Gaza to safety, it scares me to death that something bad might happen to them, they are innocent humans and they deserve to live in peace.

Please help me reach my goal and tell your friends about us. Maybe someone might like to help and donate. Even a dollar would help.

Sorry for the inconvenience. 🙏🙏

Please don’t ignore my msg. 🙏

This is the link

https://www.gofundme.com/f/abla-a-mothers-search-for-hope-amidst-gazas-rubble

I got this in my dms.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/25082342

from #DropSiteNews
[you may get a request to sign up for free subscription]

Story by Rasha Abou Jalal
Jan 22, 2025

"For the children of Gaza, the carnage is unprecedented in recent history. Over 14,500 children have been killed since October 2023, according to the health ministry. Of the 1.9 million people — 9 out of 10 residents in Gaza — who have been internally displaced, half of them are children, according to UNICEF. Many of the children who survived, belong to a new generation of Palestinian orphans."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/25049986

Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Mariam Barghouti
Jan 21, 2025

from Drop Site News
[you may get a request to sign up for free subscription]

"Israel launched a major military operation on Jenin in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, raiding the city with troops, military vehicles, and bulldozers backed by airstrikes, drones, and Apache helicopters. At least nine Palestinians have been killed and more than 40 wounded in the ongoing operation, according to the Ramallah-based Palestinian health ministry, which Israel has dubbed “Operation Iron Wall.”"

Palestinian Leader Khalida Jarrar was among the dozens of Palestinian prisoners freed, most of whom were women and children. Israeli authorities have released dozens of Palestinian prisoners, including women and children, from Ofer Prison west of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

The release took place late Sunday night into Monday morning, marking the first phase of the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel, facilitated by international and regional mediators.

The freed prisoners were transported in buses marked with the emblem of the International Committee of the Red Cross, escorted by Red Cross vehicles, as they made their way back to their homes.

Among those released was Khalida Jarrar, a prominent leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who was greeted by her family in Ramallah. Journalist Bushra At-Tawil, also among the freed, arrived at her home in Al-Bireh.

In addition to those from the West Bank, Israel freed several Palestinian prisoners from Jerusalem, directly releasing them to their homes in the city.

Palestinian human rights organizations confirmed that 90 prisoners, including 20 children, were part of this first batch, a much-needed step toward alleviating the suffering of Palestinian families torn apart by the ongoing occupation.

Declassified UK's analysis reveals that the BBC has largely failed to report on the UK's support for Israel's military actions in Gaza. Key omissions include:

RAF Surveillance Flights: Despite conducting almost daily surveillance missions over Gaza to aid Israeli intelligence, the BBC mentioned these operations only four times in 15 months, with just one report since December 2023.

Military Collaborations: The BBC did not report on Israel's Chief of Staff, General Herzi Halevi, attending a British military meeting in London last November, nor on the training of Israeli military personnel in the UK during the Gaza conflict.

Intelligence Support: The presence of a British intelligence team in Israel throughout the war, as reported by The New York Times, was not covered by the BBC.

Strategic Agreements: The BBC failed to report on significant UK-Israel agreements, including a "Roadmap" for defense cooperation signed before the October 2023 Hamas attacks and a secret military accord from December 2020.

While the BBC has reported on UK arms exports to Israel, it has often downplayed concerns about their use in Gaza. This selective coverage raises questions about the BBC's impartiality and commitment to informing the public about the UK's role in international conflicts.