A World for Cynics

By Randy Alonso Falcón on December 4, 2023 from Havana

“Truth is the first casualty of war”-Aeschylus

Truth remains the first victim of these conflicts. It is not counted like the dead and wounded; but, it can weigh as heavily as they do in the course of events. Genocidaires annihilate it with the same speed and viciousness as they do their adversaries. They try to impose theirs as they please, as much as they try to dominate the actions with bombs and sophisticated rockets.

Lies are the weapon of choice of the bullies of these times. It is at the forefront of their operations of domination and extermination. It is cheaper than the rest of the weapons in the arsenal of the powerful.

This is what the Israeli power has done since last October 7, when they were surprised by an unprecedented military operation of Hamas and began a real scorched earth genocide against Gaza.

NOVA

“We survived by playing dead,” Esther Borochov, one of the young women participating in the “Tribe of Nova” open-air music festival in the Negev desert, a few meters from Israel’s militarized border with Gaza, which ended up bathed in blood, told France 24. “We saw terrorists killing people, burning cars, screaming everywhere,” Shoam Gueta, who was identified as one of the attendees of the October 7 festival, told NBC News at the time. The mother of Briton Jake Marlowe, 26, told the Jewish News the next day: “Yesterday I was a security guard at a rave party and she called me at 4:30 in the morning to tell me that rockets were flying.

All the Israeli and mainstream American and British media that day rushed to tell of a horror scenario caused by “Hamas terrorists.” “They have massacred people in cold blood in an inconceivable way,” Moti Bukjin, a spokeswoman for the Israeli rescue service Zaka, told the AFP agency.

More than a month later, journalist and researcher Max Blumenthal revealed in The Grayzone (and published in Spanish by Cubadebate) that Israeli army Apache helicopters arrived in the Negev early that morning with the task of shooting down anything that moved in those parts.

“The Apache helicopters appear to have targeted vehicles returning to Gaza from the NOVA electronic music festival and nearby kibbuts, targeting cars with the apparent knowledge that Israeli captives might be inside. They also fired at unarmed people getting out of cars or walking on foot through fields on the Gaza periphery.

“In an interview with the Israeli news outlet Mako, an Apache pilot reflected on the torturous dilemma of whether to shoot at people and cars returning to Gaza. He knew that many of those vehicles might have held Israeli captives. But he chose to open fire anyway…”

[…] “Yasmin Porat, a Nova music festival attendee who fled to Kibbutz Be’eri, told Israeli radio that when Israeli special forces arrived during a hostage standoff, “they took out everyone, including the hostages, because there was very, very heavy crossfire.”

“After crazy crossfire,” Porat continued, “two tank shells were fired at the house. It’s a small kibbutz house, nothing big.”

And it wasn’t just the massacre after the music festival. Blumenthal states that “Israel’s army was ordered to shell Israeli homes and even its own bases as they were overwhelmed by Hamas militants on Oct. 7. How many Israeli citizens said to have been ‘burned alive’ were actually killed by friendly fire?”

In turn, the leading Israeli media outlet Haaretz would confirm on November 18, in an article by journalist Josh Brenner, that “an IDF helicopter gunship that arrived at the site (of the music festival) from the Romat David base fired at the terrorists and apparently also hit some of the revelers who were there”

“It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel honored by the humiliation of their fellow men.” –Mahatma Gandhi

Nazism did horrors against Jews, communists and all those who were not Aryans or who confronted its racist ideology. Zionism does the same against Arabs, leftists and anti-Zionists. Yesterday’s victims are today’s ferocious victimizers.

To cover up its crimes, Israel labels the Palestinians as terrorists; it tries to show them as ferocious, murderous, heartless. It murders as many as it can, and imprisons as many as it likes. The prisons of the occupying power are full of unique “terrorists”: women and children.

“You are always afraid” of being arrested, 14-year-old Palestinian teenager Hisham told Save the Children in research published last July. While Yusef, another teenager interviewed last year and killed by the Israelis this 2023, had told pollsters, “I want to see the things I always imagine. I don’t want to smell gas or see soldiers everywhere. I don’t want to be afraid to go out on the street. I don’t want my mother to be afraid that I might get hurt or walk the streets looking for me for fear that Israeli soldiers have hurt me.”

Meggido

Yasser Zimieh is one of 123 Palestinian children recently released in the concluded truce. He was in “Meggido” prison, one of the Israeli prisons that holds Palestinian children and adolescent boys.

Speaking to Palestinian media after his reception in Gaza, he said, “The year I was in prison was difficult. We were treated with a lot of violence and repression. On October 30 they beat many prisoners. Prisoners died in their hands. From the news we learned that three prisoners were martyred” (…) There were others, small children, whose heads were split open by the beatings. Small children, 10 and 12 years old, were being beaten. We were treated to the most intense violence.”

Some 200 Palestinian minors are today in various Israeli prisons, where they are subjected to torture and mistreatment.

A statement from the Committee for Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs warned that the Ofer, Megiddo and Damon prisons “lack the minimum necessities of life and human integrity.”

Children deprived of their liberty are subjected to methods of torture and degrading treatment that contradict international human rights standards, the document states.

Osama Naif Marmash, another child recently released during the truce, confirmed the abhorrent reality with his testimony:

“Every week, the Israeli Army comes to beat us, takes all our clothes, blankets and mattresses,” Marmash, who had been held in administrative detention without charge for five months, told Turkey’s Anadolu Agency.

The boy from the northern occupied West Bank city of Nablus said that on the day of the release they had been forced to stay in the cold from 8:00 a.m. “until the Red Cross arrived” and took us out of Ofer prison.”

“That morning, Israeli soldiers came and sprayed the prisoners with water despite the cold weather,” he added.

The aforementioned Commission for Prisoners and Ex-Prisoners Affairs counts that since 2000 more than 17,000 Palestinian minors were arrested by Israeli security forces.

A recent report by the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society warned that many of them are captured at night in their homes, beaten in front of their families, handcuffed, kept without food and drink for long hours and subjected to interrogations without the presence of their parents.

On Thursday, November 30, 18-year-old Palestinian Zeina Abdo, a resident of East Jerusalem, was released. She spent eight months under house arrest, aged just 16, until she was transferred to an Israeli prison in 2021. Last July she was sentenced to five and a half months in jail.

She was arrested by surprise when she was walking down the street. She complained that during her arrest and detention she was assaulted and brutally beaten. She was accused of “incitement on social networks” to violence. After the October 7 attacks she was, as other Palestinian prisoners have reported, subjected to solitary confinement and isolation for 49 days in her cell. “My whole childhood has been through the Israeli occupation and prison,” she told Al Jazeera after her release.

His account tells of a lack of food and hygiene in prison, constant insults and intimidation, and structural violence, including assaults after the Palestinian attacks in October. “We did not see the sun… we were deprived of food, there was no mattress or anything. A lot of our clothes were thrown in the garbage,” reports Ansa news agency.

According to human rights organizations, more than 750,000 Palestinians have passed through Israeli jails since Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem during the Six-Day War in 1967. There are currently 7,200 Palestinians in Israeli jails, according to Qadura Fares, director of the Palestinian Prisoners Club. Since October 7 alone there have been some 2,000 arrests.

A large number of the recently released Palestinian prisoners have never been tried. According to various Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations, the Jewish state makes regular and unabashed use of so-called “administrative detention”, both in Jerusalem and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

According to the Israeli organization B’tselem, this legal figure consists of “imprisonment without trial or charge, on the grounds that a person plans to commit a crime in the future. It has no time limit and the evidence on which it is based is not disclosed”, neither to the detainees themselves nor to their lawyers.

The Israeli army, the most modern and sophisticated in the world, knows who it kills. It does not kill by mistake. It kills out of horror. Civilian casualties are called collateral damage, according to the dictionary of other imperial wars. In Gaza, out of every ten collateral damages, three are children. And there are thousands of mutilated people, victims of the technology of human dismemberment, which the military industry is successfully testing in this operation of ethnic cleansing.

And it is always the same: in Gaza, one hundred to one. For every hundred Palestinians killed, one Israeli. -Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan Journalist and Writer

The genocidal ones go to the root. They do not want any traces or future to remain. For the Zionists, it is not enough to massacre the adult population; children must be killed. Every ten minutes one is killed in the ferocious military offensive against Gaza.

This is nothing new.  In April 1948, the Zionist leadership began to outline more clearly their policy towards the remaining population in the villages they occupied during the ethnic cleansing. One of their clear directives was to kill or send to a prison camp, at the discretion of the commander on the spot, “men of fighting age”. The order clearly defines what is meant by men: anyone over the age of ten.

Gradual infanticide is sometimes replaced by more intensive killing of children. During the First Intifada, according to the Association of Israeli and Palestinian Physicians for Human Rights, every two weeks a child under the age of six was shot in the head by the Israeli army.

During the Second Intifada, 600 Palestinian children were killed. Five thousand children were injured.

Even without the Gaza massacre, already in the middle of the year, Save the Children denounced that 2023 is the year with the most Palestinian children killed by the Israeli occupation in the West Bank.

More than 5300 children have been killed in 48 days of Israeli bombardment of the Gaza population. “Today, the Gaza Strip is once again the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. After a seven-day lull of horrific violence, the fighting has resumed. More children will surely die as a result,” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said on Friday, December 1.

The genocidaires do not even respect hospitals, ambulances or the sick. Nothing stops the killing machine.

Hospitals of Horror

Closing November, images, not sufficiently reported by the mainstream media, showed horrific scenes of decomposing baby corpses in incubators at the Al Naser Pediatric Hospital in northern Gaza.

The Israeli army attacked the health facility and forced all patients, medical teams and displaced civilians to leave. The evacuation followed days of direct shelling of the hospital.

“The parents of the babies, according to their testimonies, were forced to say goodbye to their babies and leave,” says a news report by the Al Mashhad network.

The Red Cross promised the families that they would evacuate the babies. However, the Israeli army prevented the evacuation.

Euro-Med Monitor emphasized that nothing could have been done to save their lives during the evacuation, as patients and staff were forced to leave against their will, and vulnerable newborns would have had to be transferred to another medical facility accredited by the Israeli military, which never happened. Instead, the babies were left on the machines and left to die in silence.

The bodies remained in the hospital after the Israeli army refused to allow them to be buried.

The Gaza Ministry of Health maintains that the Israeli Army did not treat the minors because it “was too busy fabricating videos of alleged evidence in the basement of the Al Rantisi and Al Naser pediatric hospitals” to try to prove that their basements or under their structures housed Hamas’ main command centers.

Israel has insisted throughout the offensive that the hospitals are used by Hamas to hide from Army attacks and are therefore considered military targets.

It even went so far as to claim that under Al Shifa Hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, was the main Hamas command center, an allegation it downgraded after barely being able to show a few rickety rifles and a well in the outer areas of the facility.

“The only thing they were able to demonstrate is their own soulless depravity and lack of humanity,” a ministerial statement maintained.

In mid-November, 6 babies died in Al Shifa Hospital after days without power and under siege by Israeli troops. Another 8 died in recent days after being evacuated from that facility.

“The world cannot remain silent as hospitals, which should be safe havens, are transformed into scenes of death, devastation and despair,” said World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

After the destruction and death, Israeli soldiers posed for the press with incubators they had brought for a hospital that had been without electricity for several days. Total cynicism.

But the horrors of the occupiers do not end there. The Israeli army has been holding the bodies of dozens of Palestinians killed during its genocide in the Gaza Strip.  Euro-Med Monitor, a human rights organization, has documented the Israeli army’s confiscation of dozens of bodies from the Al-Shifa medical compound, the Indonesian Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip, and others in the vicinity.

Euro-Med Monitor raised concerns about probable organ theft, based on reports from medical professionals in Gaza who quickly examined some bodies after their return by the occupiers. These medical professionals found evidence of missing cochleae and corneas, as well as other vital organs such as livers, kidneys and hearts.

Israel is the world’s largest center of the illegal global trade in human organs, according to a 2008 investigation by U.S. broadcaster CNN, which also revealed that Israel was involved in the theft of organs from dead Palestinians for illegal use.

In recent years there have been several reports of the illegal use of Palestinian corpses held by Israel, including the theft of organs and their use in Israeli university medical school laboratories.

Israeli Dr. Meira Weiss, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jeruslan, revealed in her book Over Their Dead Bodies that organs removed from dead Palestinians were used in medical research in Israeli university medical schools and transplanted into the bodies of Jewish-Israeli patients.

Chilling also are the confessions of Yehuda Hess, former director of Israel’s Abu Kabir Institute of Forensic Medicine, about the theft of human tissues, organs and skin from dead Palestinians over a period of time without the knowledge or approval of their relatives.

“To the Zionists, the life of one Israeli is worth the life of 100 Palestinians”, Galeano wrote.

“No one is more hated than he who speaks the truth.” –Plato

Being a journalist is dangerous, in all times. Your life can be worth very little, especially if you upset the powerful. For the genocidal, whether narco, fascist or Zionist, the journalist must either be bought or eliminated as a nuisance. It is necessary to silence the truths.

Since the beginning of the massacre in Gaza, Israel has assassinated more than 70 journalists; some may have died by chance among so many bombs dropped on the Strip, others have been targets selected by the Zionist criminal; perhaps some were even chosen by Artificial Intelligence in the so-called “Gospel” platform, as denounced by The Guardian in a recent investigation.

Muntasir, Abdullah, Amal and many more

Muntasir al Sawwaf, a cameraman for the Turkish news agency Anatolia, stationed in the Gaza Strip, was killed on December 1 as a result of an air strike by the Israeli armed forces, who resumed their offensive on the Palestinian enclave on the same Friday after several days of truce.

He is the latest victim of killings in the journalistic sector by the occupier.

“Israel is killing especially journalists who are trying to announce to the world the humanitarian tragedy in Gaza despite all the difficulties. As a result of Israel’s attacks, more than 60 journalists have been killed so far,” Turkish President Recip Tayyid Erdogan said during an International Strategic Communication Summit organized by the Turkish Presidency.

On the same day, the Government Media Office in Gaza denounced the murder of Al-Quds TV cameraman Abdullah Darwish.

According to this Palestinian entity, among the dozens of martyred journalists, several were bombed along with their families, others killed while reporting in hospitals, refugee shelters, forced displacement caravans.

Mohammed Abu Hatab is another of them. He died last November 2 under Israeli bombardment along with 11 members of his family in their home in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. An hour before his tragic end, the 52-year-old journalist had appeared on Palestinian TV.

The Palestinian journalist, Amal Zuhd, died with her family as a result of Israeli shelling which targeted her home in Gaza City on November 24.

Likewise, two Lebanese colleagues, the young Al Mayadeen correspondent Farah Omar, the channel’s cameraman Rabih Al-Maamari and collaborator Hussein Aquil were killed by Zionist troops.

The incident occurred on the outskirts of the southern town of Tayr Harfa, while they were carrying out their professional duty of covering the situation on the Lebanese-Palestinian border.

In just three days, between November 18 and 20, ten Palestinian journalists were killed. At least three of them were killed in the course of or because of their work. Hassouna Sleem , director of the Palestinian online news agency Quds News , and freelance photojournalist Sary Mansour were killed during an Israeli assault on the Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip on November 18. They had received an online death threat in connection with their work 24 hours before their deaths.

Well-known journalist Bilal Jadallah was killed by an Israeli strike that directly hit his car as he attempted to evacuate Gaza City through the Zeitoun district on the morning of November 19. A prominent figure within the Palestinian media community, he held several positions, including chairman of the board of Press House-Palestine, an organization that supports independent media and journalists in Gaza.

The number of journalists killed in Gaza by Israeli fire in nearly two months of fighting is very close to the number of all media workers killed worldwide during the year 2022. Palestinian sources already count 77. How far will the killing go?

“War cannot be covered objectively because it is made by men and they are responsible for it…war is not something abstract; for me it is a horror and I cannot pass as objective in the face of horror….. War is a human tragedy in which no one ever wins. Everyone loses.” –Ryszard Kapuscinski, 2001

War leaves death and destruction; it leaves wounds that never heal. War feeds hatreds and encourages senselessness. On both sides the traces remain. It is perhaps the worst expression of the human soul.

Palestinian and Israeli civilians have been victims of war in recent weeks. Albeit in incomparable proportion. It is the direct consequence of 75 years of humiliation, humiliation and murder by the Zionist power and its dreams of Greater Israel, endorsed by the criminal Netanyahu in the middle of the UN General Assembly.

“We arrested, killed, mistreated, robbed, protected massacring settlers, visited Joseph’s Tomb, Otoniel’s Tomb and Yeshua’s Altar, all in the Palestinian territories, and of course visited the Temple Mount – more than 5,000 Jews on the last holidays. We shot innocent people, gouged out their eyes and smashed their faces, deported them, confiscated their land, looted them, kidnapped them from their beds and carried out ethnic cleansing. We also continue the unreasonable siege in Gaza, everything will be fine,” wrote Israeli writer and journalist Gideon Levy, an outspoken opponent of Zionism’s crimes, in Haaretz on October 8, 2023.

Asymmetries

Two Palestinian attackers opened fire at a bus stop during the morning rush hour on Thursday, November 30, at the entrance to Jerusalem, killing at least three people and wounding eight others, Israeli police said.

The number of Israeli civilians killed is estimated at about 800 people, among the 1400 deaths recorded in that country since last October 7, and is the highest number of Israeli civilians killed in a war in the history of this country.

Meanwhile, this Sunday the Gazan cities of Khan Yunis and Rafah were practically razed to the ground. More than 700 people were killed in the last 24 hours by the Israeli offensive.

The Israeli army has carried out some 10,000 air strikes on Gaza since the start of the war, a military spokesman said.

Donia Abu Mohsen, 13, is one of the children who survived the brutal bombardment. But she lost her right leg, was orphaned and lost two of her siblings after being hit by a missile in southern Gaza.

Her story is revealed in an article in the Financial Times. Like Donia, thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza have been injured or lost their parents, or both, in weeks of relentless Israeli bombardment of the densely populated Gaza Strip.

The battle and hatred extends beyond the Middle East, equal in intensity and disproportion.

During the night of Monday, November 6, a synagogue in the Canadian town of Dollard-des-Orneau, Congregation Beth Tikvah came under attack. The synagogue quickly contacted the local police, who are now investigating the case as an attempted arson.

What was found were scorch marks on the door of the synagogue, after a group of people threw Molotov cocktails.

It is one of the growing anti-Jewish expressions in recent weeks, encouraged in part by the systematic genocide against the Palestinian people.

Meanwhile, in the United States, in an abominable event, Wadea Al Fayoume, a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy, died after being stabbed 26 times by the landlord of the home his family was renting. The boy’s mother, Hanaan Shain, 32, who was also a victim of the attack, claimed that the landlord shouted “you Muslims have to die!”

At the same time, on the night of November 25, three young Palestinian college students in their early 20s, enrolled in U.S. universities, were shot in Vermont by a 48-year-old man.  Two of the three were wearing the kefia, the traditional Palestinian headscarf.  Many Palestinians and Palestinian advocates wear the kefia to identify themselves and express support for those suffering in Gaza.

Hisham Awartani, Kinnan Abdalhamid and Tahseen Ali Ahmad were on their way to Thanksgiving dinner at Awartani’s grandmother’s home in Burlington, Vermont, when a white man fired a gun at them. One of the bullets struck Awartani’s spine and he is paralyzed from the chest down. He may never walk again.

In a statement he sent to a vigil at his Brown University, Awartani urged students to see what happened to him as part of a much larger context.

“I am just one victim in this much larger conflict. If I had been shot in the West Bank, where I grew up, the medical services that saved my life here would probably have been held by the Israeli army. The soldier who would have shot me would return home and never be convicted,” he said. “That is why

when you send your wishes and then candle for me today, your mind should not focus only on me as an individual, but rather as a proud member of the oppressed people.”

“Isn’t the entire history of humanity, from its very beginning, the history of a crime? European nations are constantly reminding each other of the Jewish holocaust, but was it the only one? In which city was the genocide of Namibia (1904-1908) decreed? In which month was the genocide of Armenia (1915-1923), of Ukraine (1929), of Spain (1936-1975), of the Gaza Strip? Do we remember it? -Chantal Maillard Hispanobelga writer 1951

Genocide and cynicism are related. The genocidal is cynical by nature. His accomplices are as cynical, if not more so. An Israeli general speaks of trying to kill fewer civilians while bombing more; an American official speaks of ordering fewer civilian casualties while supplying more bombs and shells to the Zionist army.

Cynical slaughter

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza has announced that it already counts 15,523 dead since the war began on October 7.

Israeli military operations launched in Gaza also left 41,316 wounded, said Health Ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidreh.

The Euro-Mediterranean Observatory for Human Rights puts the Palestinian death toll at 20,031, including 8,176 children.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, has insisted that “there is no longer any safe place in the Strip” following the resumption of fighting between the Israeli army and Hamas on Friday due to the breaking of the truce. “Hundreds of thousands of people are confined to smaller and smaller areas in the south,” Turk has said. According to the United Nations, 1.8 million people – 75% of the population – have had to flee their homes.

More, for the White House, Israel is “making efforts” to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza since the resumption of fighting after a seven-day truce.

“We think they’ve been receptive to our messages about trying to minimize civilian casualties,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told ABC on Sunday.

It is the same cynicism with which the empire acts at the United Nations, as denounced by former UN official Craig Mokhiber:

“We have a formula at the United Nations that applies to virtually every other conflict situation. But when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian situation there is a different set of rules, apparently. And I think that’s where a lot of my frustration comes from. Where is the transitional justice process? Where are the UN forces to protect all the civilians? Where is the court for accountability? Where is the action by the Security Council, the only mechanism in the UN that has enforcement power to ensure the protection [of civilians] in the Occupied Territories? Obviously, every effort in the Security Council is vetoed by the United States, a further indication of the kind of complicity to which I refer.”

Under that complicity, Israel kills, destroys, annihilates. It wants to erase the Palestinian people:

“We are back to ground zero. This conflict is back to square one. There is no solution and there is no Palestinian state. It is as if we were in 1948. Israel wants to erase the other: the human beings, the stones, the trees, the houses… In the face of this there is a modest human attempt that the Palestinians are making, which is called resistance. It is a right of all peoples, but the Palestinian is not allowed. All peoples can resist except the Palestinian people”, Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah told eldiario.es.

It is time to stop the genocide. Stop the hypocrisy, complicity and cynicism. Stop the language of weapons. Speak the language of the people.

“If we want a world of peace and justice we must resolutely place intelligence at the service of love.” -The Little Prince

PS: In Rafah, Reuters reports that a bombing at one site overnight Sunday had opened up a crater the size of a basketball court in the earth. The bare feet and black pants of a dead boy peeked out from under a pile of rubble. The men struggled with their bare hands to move a chunk of concrete that had crushed the child.

Later they cried as they marched through the ruins carrying the body in a bundle and that of another small boy wrapped in a blanket.

“We were asleep and safe, we were told it was a safe area, Rafah and all,” said Salah al-Arja, owner of one of the destroyed houses at the site.

“There were children, women and martyrs,” he said. “They tell you it’s a safe area, but there is no safe area in the entire Gaza Strip, it’s all lies and manipulations.”

Source: Cubadebate translation Resumen Latinoamericano-English