December 2019, Week 3

Life in Southeast Alaska vs. Life in Occupied Palestine/Israel.
Southeast: Winter Solstice! We get 6 hours 22 minutes 32 seconds of daylight. International Criminal Court not investigating anyone for war crimes around here.

 

Occupied Palestine/Israel: Winter Solstice! They get 10 hours 4 minutes 32 seconds of daylight. International Criminal Court opens investigation into Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.

December 2019, Week 3

Sunday
12.15.2019 Vacation days for new targets: Israeli officers on bombing Gaza, casualties, and political pressure. Haaretz. by Yaniv Kubovich. This article has the stench of a carefully crafted propaganda piece to convince Israelis and their supporters that their military is really composed of good people after the sons of bitches blew up an innocent Gaza family of one man, two women, five children including two toddlers, with a ninth member dying of wounds later, at 1:15 in the morning last month, leaving a twenty foot deep hole in the ground where their little home-that had no electricity or running water-was seconds before.
Two Israeli air officers, identified only as A and B, inform Haaretz that: 1) Israel rewards intelligence officers for finding more targets rather than for validating that the ones they’ve already got are still viable. 2) attacks are ordered by politicians who have their own agenda. 3) In pre-bombing meetings, young intelligence officers don’t want to speak up against more senior officers who want to go bomb something. 4) The family the Israelis killed had no strategic value whatsoever. 5) Before bombings, the senior officers want to go home on time rather than stay at meetings long enough to be sure of their targets. 6) The planners and pilots are “good people..but in the end, they are people who are evaluated on the number of targets and validations, and they also want to go home on time.” .

From IMEMC
12.15.2019 Palestinian in Jerusalem forced to demolish his own home. Another one.

12.15.2019 Two Palestinian workers wounded, others arrested inside Israel. Due to economic necessity, caused by the occupation, about 100,000 Palestinians from the occupied West Bank work inside Israel on a daily basis, and on any give day, tens of thousands of them sneak in and out. The occupiers look the other way sometimes. Other times the occupiers shoot them.

12.15.2019 Army abducts four Palestinians in Hebron. Night and fog raids. Jewish army ransacks homes again.

12.15.2019 Report: 745 Palestinian children arrested since beginning of 2019. Palestinian prisoners club (PPC) NGO report was released just prior to World Children’s Day.

12.15.2019 Updated: Two Palestinians wounded in northern West Bank. Palestinians get shot all the time trying to cross the apartheid walls Israel is building to separate farmers from their lands, or to keep workers from their jobs. In this case, the occupiers shot a 25-year-old in the leg, a 21-year-old in the shoulder.

12.15.2019 Israel planning to confiscate lands for a segregated road. Chosen people making the desert bloom again. This time by demolishing a wide swath of Palestinian farmlands for another Jews-only road.

12.15.2019 Israeli soldiers abduct three Palestinians in Jerusalem. Night and fog raids.

Monday
From IMEMC:
12.16.2019 Illegal Israeli colonists attack a Palestinian home with live fire. Jewish fanatics armed by the Jewish state with machine guns, and protected by the Jewish state army, shot up a Jeet village home with live ammunition. They also threw rocks at the place. Then they ran away. One of those common events where the thugs are never caught, much less prosecuted.

12.16.2019 Army injures several Palestinians near Nablus. Sebastia town. Jewish occupation troops attacked the community in jeeps—gassed the people—shot concussion grenades at them.

12.16.2019 Cozens of Palestinian workers suffocate on tear gas. Those gas-loving Israelis smothering Qaffin town residents in the occupied West Bank with barrages of toxic gas canisters.

12.16.2019 Settlers damage road equipment in Jordan Valley road. Jewish fanatics poured sand into Palestinian bulldozers being used to repair a road. No arrests noted.

Tuesday
12.17.2019 If Israel has to manage without it’s American strategic partner, it will still survive. Haaretz. by Anshel Pfeffer. With support from average Americans going down like a tire iron in a swimming pool, Israelis are writing columns like this to comfort themselves.

Article notes Israel is sucking up to Russia, China, India, Brazil, and other countries, several of whom do not have America’s interests at heart. And, even as Israel hides behind the 800-pound gorilla militarily, takes billions of our dollars every year, and dodges international censure for crimes against Palestinians by America blocking UN Security referendums, Pfeffer claims Israel doesn’t need us at all. He speculates that other countries, which have uniformly voted against Israel at the UN, will start voting in Israel’s favor if the U.S. stops. He posits that U.S. support for Israel “is all but guaranteed for at least another generation.” so Israel has time to form other alliances. [A generation is 25 to 35 years. Given how fast American’s opinions of Israel are disintegrating, it’s doubtful we will be supporting them for even half that.] As to finances, he calls for ending, “this needless dependence.” in the eight years left of Barak Obama’s 38 million in ten years gift to Israel before he left office.

[most of the comments section on this piece seems to be from Americans and run along the lines of, “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, ingrate.”]

From IMEMC:
12.17.2019 IPS bars entry of winter clothing as Palestinian detainees suffer harsh winter conditions. With temperatures dropping to near freezing Israeli prisons making conditions worse for Palestinians they’ve locked up by making them stand out in the cold and rain, by denying them warm clothing, and in some places, by keeping them in tents that leak rain and don’t keep out the cold.

12.17.2019 Palestinian detainee transferred to hospital after suffering a stroke. Ostensibly to block cell-phone signals, Israeli prison guards have set up more than 20 jamming devices in the cell-block where Ahmad Saada had a stroke. Palestinian prisoners say the technology causes them health problems, especially migraine headaches. Article seems to imply the arrays may be a factor in Saada’s stroke.

Wednesday
From IMEMC.
2.18.2019 Soldiers demolish a home in al-Isawiya. Article/video of Jewish occupation troops, with their combat gear and machine guns, standing around a guy in a wheel chair as Israeli occupiers with heavy equipment demolish his home. [Reading these stories you wonder sometimes if these Israelis ever experience shame.]

12.18.2019 Israel places second woman under administrative detention. Indefinite prison time with no trial or charges. Yesterday, the only democracy in the Middle East put a female journalist in prison under administrative detention.

12.18.2019 Including five children, Israeli soldiers abduct eight Palestinian women in Jerusalem. Most moral army in the world arrests the Director of ‘The Future Builders Association’, a leader in Fateh Women’s Committee, along with her daughter, and children after they attended a meeting at the General Women’s building in Shufat refugee camp.

12.18.2019 Church of Scotland calls on Israel to make Holy Sites accessible to Gazans during the holidays.

12.18.2019 Israeli settlers sabotage road equipment for a second time Colonial fanatics cut wires, pour sand in bulldozer fuel tank and engine, again.

12.18.2019 One Palestinian worker shot by Israeli forces, many others suffocate. Just as Israel has suffocated the Palestinian economy with occupation, Israel suffocates Palestinian workers forced to seek work in Israel. Increasingly, the occupiers are shooting and gassing workers who queue up at gates in the apartheid walls hoping to get through. Today, they shot one and took him away without letting other Palestinians bind his injury. Took him away. Gassed a bunch of the job seekers.

Thursday
12.19.2019 Gazan girl fights cancer alone at West Bank hospital Haaretz. by Gideon Levy. Prime example of Jewish state’s institutional cruelty. This year there have been multiple stories about the hundreds of Gaza children sent for treatment without their parents because Israel won’t let the parents travel out of Gaza stockade. The reason children are sent outside Gaza to the occupied West Bank for treatment is that Gaza hospitals can’t provide because of the Israeli siege.
In this case, 10-year-old Miral Abu Amsha is undergoing aggressive chemotherapy for leukemia at Nablus hospital without her mother or father. The occupiers allowed her grandmother to go but the old woman is distraught because she knows she’s not who the little girl needs. Her parents suffer as the little girl cries when she talks to them on the phone. Levy (who is an Israeli himself) visits the ward where most of the children don’t have their parents with them. He writes, “It’s hard to spend any length of time here. The atmosphere of distress and helplessness is unbearable. A portrait of the essence of Israeli evil.”

From IMEMC:
12.19.2019 Israel places 15-year-old under administrative detention. In prison indefinitely with no trial or charges. Jewish occupation troops shot 15-year-old Hamza al-Hreimi in the thigh. Took him to hospital. Then prison.

12.19.2019 Updated: Israeli missile kills a Palestinian in Gaza. Israeli terrorist attack killed 18-year-old Abasan al Kabeera with an aerial attack near the Gaza apartheid fence. Jewish snipers shot at medics to stop them from treating him as he bled to death. Next, body snatchers from the most moral army in the world drove armored bulldozers into Gaza to steal his body
Article notes that Israel killed his brother in 2012.

12.19.2019 Israeli soldiers assault a Palestinian and abduct him in occupied Jerusalem. Another hapless, unarmed Palestinian gets beat up by the most moral army in the world.

12.19.2019 Israel unilaterally decreases Gaza’s fishing zone. Again.

12.19.2019 Army abducts seven Palestinians in Ramallah. Night and fog raids.

12.19.2019 Updated: Soldiers abduct five Palestinians in Hebron and Jennin. Night and fog raids.

12.19.2019 Army searches many homes in northern plains. Night and fog raids. ransacked homes. stolen cell phones. The most moral army in the world also attacked a home in the Bethlehem area.

12.19.2019 Israeli settlers uproot and steal 300 Palestinian owned olive trees near Bethlehem. IMEMC/Wafa. Jewish fanatics making the desert bloom again. The thugs are squatting illegally on al-Khader village lands. Too lazy and incompetent to grow their own olive groves they steal from the Palestinians. For al-Khader this is the second such attack in two months. The thugs are protected by the Jewish state army as they work to steal more Palestinian land to expand their colony.

12.19.2019 Congress rejects funding for Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’. The Trumpster asked for $175 million (on top of the billions we already give Israel) in the 2020 budget. Congress didn’t go for it since everyone knows the deal is a non-starter. The deal would provide $50 billion(!) over ten years. $28 billion would go to Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. $7 billion to Jordan. $9 billion to Egypt. $6 billion to Lebanon.

Friday
12.20.2019 Mossad’s failed operation in Djibouti revealed Haaretz by Roni Singer. Terrible, heart-wrenching stories:
In 1986 Mossad recruited about two dozen young Ethiopian Jews to, according to the article, move to Israel. Instead of the promised short, easy journey via Djibouti the young people ended up traversing brutal country on foot without enough water, waiting months for a guide to show up. The guide raped a girl who was 13-years-old. They were taken to a house where, after a long wait, they aroused local suspicion. They were arrested, raped, tortured, and accused of being involved in a coup attempt. The 13-year-old girl was put in a Djibouti prison for fifteen months where she was beaten and raped by male guards who could do whatever they wanted to her, and did.
What the real purpose behind this operation of Israel recruiting young Ethiopian Jews, directing them, given them money, then leaving them to rot in prisons is still classified. Various Israeli intelligence people, foreign ministry people, and other government officials either pleaded ignorance about the whole thing or said they can’t remember. One Ethiopian Mossad agent did say, “It’s a clandestine matter that hasn’t yet been made public, it is very sensitive and I don’t want to ruin anything.”
Now, decades later, these people are asking for help with PTSD. Five of them have filed a lawsuit asking for recognition that they worked for Mossad so they can get compensation for their suffering. Former director of Mossad Shabatai Shavit shined off the Ethiopian’s request saying, among other things, “If the Mossad had to pay fines for operations it carried out over the years that failed, the state treasury would collapse.”

From IMEMC
12.20.2019 Illegal Israeli colonists burn two Palestinian cars, write racist graffiti, near Nablus. The Light Unto Nations at it again.

12.20.2019 Israeli air force fires several missiles into Gaza. Aerial terrorist attack against multiple sites in Gaza. Israel alleges the raids were retaliations for one projectile fired from Gaza. As with nearly all such events, the projectile from Gaza landed in a field without damage to anyone or anything.

12.20.2019 Illegal Israeli colonists attack shepherd, unleash their dogs towards him near Bethlehem. Group of Jewish thugs attacked a 53-year-old man. Sicced their dogs on him and his sheep.

12.20.2019 Situation in Palestine: statement of the ICC prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda. International Criminal Court. Youtube video 4:05 min. The Prosecutor says she’s satisfied that 1) war crimes have been committed in the West Bank, including Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. 2) Potential cases would be admissible. 3) There are no substantial reasons to believe an investigation would not serve the interests of justice.

12.20.2019 Netanyahu claims international court has ‘no jurisdiction’ to investigate Israel for war crimes. Well, well, well. Israel’s afraid the International Criminal Court is about to investigate it for war crimes. Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is always trying to establish credibility that his country is a civilized member of western world, says that the ICC has no jurisdiction to try Israel because Israel has never signed up as a member of the ICC. Predictably, he also whines that the ICC is being used as a tool to delegitimize Israel.
Chief Prosecutor of the ICC Fatou Bensouda disagrees with Netanyahu’s assessment. She says there is enough evidence to justify an investigation.

12.20.2019 Human rights watch: Israel using draconian military orders to repress Palestinians. Human rights watch is an NGO based in New York. They just published a 92-page report/expose’ called, “Born without civil rights: Israel’s draconian military orders to repress Palestinians in the West Bank.” Article notes Israel deported HRW regional director Omar Shakir last month.

Saturday
From IMEMC
12.21.2019 ICC responds to mounting calls for action, opens official investigation into war crimes in Palestine. Apparently unimpressed by Netanyahu’s bluster yesterday that the ICC had no jurisdiction to investigate Israeli war crimes, Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has announced that the ICC will open an investigation. This article lists the 200ish groups that signed a letter urging her to open the investigation.
Article also notes that the ICC isn’t the only one dragging feet on exposing Israel to world opinion. It says a 2016 UN list of companies that profit from Israel’s occupation has never seen the light of day, when a similar UN list involving Myanmar was completed in less than a year and released.

12.21.2019 Army forces West Bank famers off their land IMEMC Jewish occupation troops force farmers off their crops in Kisan Village.