Latest news with #ethniccleansing
Al Bawaba
19 hours ago
- Politics
- Al Bawaba
Ben-Gvir, Smotrich banned from entering The Netherlands
Published July 29th, 2025 - 06:07 GMT ALBAWABA - The Netherlands on Monday barred Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich from entering the country for inciting violence against Palestinians and calling for ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip and the expansion of illegal settlements. Also Read Itamar Ben-Gvir's son forms anti-Palestinian special force The Dutch government also decided to summon the Israeli ambassador to The Hague to a reprimand session at the office of Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Waldekamp. According to Dutch media, Waldekamp wrote to members of parliament that "the situation in Gaza is unbearable and untenable." In turn, Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schopf said via the X platform that his country would push during the European Union session to suspend the European trade agreement with Israel and impose restrictions on arms exports to the country if it is determined that it has not adhered to its humanitarian commitments in the Gaza Strip regarding unhindered and safe access to aid. © 2000 - 2025 Al Bawaba (
Yahoo
a day ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Israel Is Committing Genocide In Gaza, Israeli Human Rights Groups Conclude
Two major Israeli human rights groups released separate reports on Monday concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, joining a growing number of international voices that have made similar accusations against the country that has been destroying the Palestinian territory over the last 22 months. In their comprehensive reports, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights lay out how Israel, as an occupying power, has used its government and military to systematically obliterate Gaza in a way that both destroys the Palestinian people and renders the territory completely uninhabitable. 'We are seeing a combination of genocidal practices – meaning mass killing, starvation and destruction of civilian infrastructure, and you can add destruction of cultural institutions – and a policy whose aim or declared aim is ethnic cleansing, all combined with statements by many senior Israeli officials throughout the war that the goal is destruction of Gazan society as a group,' genocide researcher Shmuel Lederman said in a B'Tselem video announcing the group's report, 'Our Genocide.' As with previousallegations of genocide, the Israel Defense Forces said Monday that the reports' claims are 'unfounded' and that the Israeli military is rooting out Hamas while 'taking unprecedented measures to prevent harm to civilians.' Both human rights groups have said that wanting to take down Hamas does not justify the mass starvation and killing of Palestinians. B'Tselem explains that while decades of Israeli occupation and dehumanization of Palestinians set the stage for the current catastrophe, a genocide requires a trigger or rationale — and for the Israeli government and its Western allies, that was Hamas' attack that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel and took hostage about 250 more on Oct. 7, 2023. 'The trauma fell on fertile ground for the most extreme right-wing government Israel has ever had. A messianic government that believes this is 'a miraculous time,'' said Sarit Michaeli, the group's international advocacy director. 'It's simply their chance to advance an agenda.' Both reports detail the violence by Israeli soldiers and U.S. bombs that has killed more than 55,000 Palestinians — a Gaza Health Ministry figure believed to be a gross undercount — and led to mass starvation, displacement and disease. The Israeli airstrikes, Gaza's destroyed health system, Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid and mass arrests that have essentially resulted in torture camps reveal an effort to exterminate the Palestinian people, the groups argue. 'Systemic failure became self-reinforcing: displacement led to overcrowding, overcrowding accelerated disease, and disease spread unchecked amid collapsing sanitation,' PHRI said in its report, 'A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide.' 'The siege deepened this collapse: medical evacuations were halted, crossings were sealed and the little remaining humanitarian aid dried up entirely,' it continued. 'Malnourishment surged – especially among children, whose bodies deteriorated rapidly in the absence of food, water and medical care.' The reports conclude that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has met at least some of the articles of the U.N.'s 1948 genocide convention, but stress that the world must also recognize the violence as genocide and stop it, even if the International Court of Justice has yet to issue a final ruling on South Africa's charge that Israel is committing genocide. PHRI warns that even if Israel stopped its offensive today, the decimation of health care and life-sustaining infrastructure has already ensured the Palestinian people in Gaza won't recover for years. B'Tselem warns that unless the world immediately puts a stop to Israel's campaign of violence, the genocide it concludes has been occurring in Gaza will also encompass the Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and in the State of Israel. 'Preventing genocide is not just a moral duty. It is also a legal obligation. So the leaders cooperating with Israel's policies are accomplices to this crime,' Michaeli said. 'People and governments must use every means available under international law to make the Israeli government stop the genocide in Gaza now.' Related... Past 'The Point Of No Return': Doctor Describes How Starvation In Gaza Is Driving Mass Death Senate Democrats Demand U.S. Stop Funding Deadly Aid Sites In Gaza Trump Thinks He At Least Deserves A 'Thank You' For Sending Money To Starving Gaza
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Israel trying to deflect blame for widespread starvation in Gaza
Israel is pursuing an extensive PR effort to remove itself from blame for the starvation and killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is responsible. As dozens of governments, UN organisations and other international figures have detailed Israel's culpability, officials and ministers in Israel have attempted to suggest that there is no hunger in Gaza, that if hunger exists it is not Israel's fault, or to blame Hamas or the UN and aid organisations for problems with distribution of aid. The Israeli effort has continued even as one of its own government ministers, the far-right heritage minister, Amichai Eliyahu, appeared to describe an unapologetic policy of starvation, genocide and ethnic cleansing that Israel has denied and said is not official policy. Amid evidence of a growing number of deaths from starvation in Gaza, including many child deaths, and shocking images and accounts of malnutrition, Israel has tried to deflect blame for what has been described by the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) as 'man-made mass starvation'. That view was endorsed in a joint statement this week by 28 countries – including the UK – which explicitly blamed Israel. 'The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths,' the statement said. 'The Israeli government's aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazan's of human dignity. 'We condemn the drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.' Some Israeli officials have been marginally more cautious in public statements, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has promised vaguely that there 'will be no starvation' in Gaza. But a recent off-the-record briefing for journalists by a senior Israeli security official has pushed a more uncompromising position, stating that there 'is no hunger in Gaza' and claiming that images of starving children on front pages around the world showed children with 'underlying diseases'. David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesperson, told Sky News this week: 'There is no famine in Gaza – there is a famine of the truth.' Contradicting that claim, Médecins Sans Frontières said a quarter of the young children and pregnant or breastfeeding mothers it had screened at its clinics last week were malnourished, a day after the UN said one in five children in Gaza City were suffering from malnutrition. Israel's attempts to deflect blame, however, are undermined by its single and overarching responsibility: that as an occupying power in a conflict, it is legally obliged to ensure the provision of means of life for those under occupation. And while Israel has consistently tried to blame Hamas for intercepting food aid, that claim has been undermined by a leaked US assessment, seen by Reuters, which found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group of US-funded humanitarian supplies. Examining 156 incidents of theft or loss of US-funded supplies reported by US aid partner organisations between October 2023 and May 2025, it said it found 'no reports alleging Hamas' benefited from US-funded supplies. Israel has also recently intensified efforts to blame the UN for the problems with aid distribution, citing a 'lack of cooperation from the international community and international organisations'. Israel's claims are contradicted by clear evidence of its efforts to undermine aid distribution. Despite international warnings of the humanitarian risks posed by banning Unrwa, the main UN agency for Palestinians and the organisation with the most experience in Gaza, from Israel, its operations were closed down, complicating aid efforts. Instead Israel, backed by the US, has relied on the private, inexperienced and controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation; its sites have been the focus of numerous mass killings of desperate Palestinians by Israeli soldiers. Israel's attempts to hamper with aid efforts have continued. Last week it said it would not renew the work visa of Jonathan Whittall, the most senior UN aid official in Gaza; and a UN spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, told reporters on Thursday that Israel had rejected eight of the 16 UN requests to transport humanitarian aid in Gaza the previous day. He added that two other requests, initially approved, led to staff facing obstruction on the ground as he described a pattern of 'bureaucratic, logistical, administrative and other operational obstacles imposed by Israeli authorities'. All of which has injected a new sense of urgency into the catastrophe in Gaza as UN agencies warned that they were on the brink of running out of specialised food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children. 'Most malnutrition treatment supplies have been consumed and what is left at facilities will run out very soon if not replenished,' a WHO spokesperson said on Thursday. More starvation deaths appear inevitable.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Israel tries to deflect blame for widespread starvation in Gaza
Israel is pursuing an extensive PR effort to remove itself from blame for the starvation and killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is responsible. As dozens of governments, UN organisations and other international figures have detailed Israel's culpability, officials and ministers in Israel have attempted to suggest that there is no hunger in Gaza, that if hunger exists it is not Israel's fault, or to blame Hamas or the UN and aid organisations for problems with distribution of aid. The Israeli effort has continued even as one of its own government ministers, the far-right heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu, made comments this week describing an unapologetic policy of starvation, genocide and ethnic cleansing which Israel has suggested is not official policy. Amid evidence of a growing number of deaths from starvation in Gaza including children, and shocking images and accounts of malnutrition, Israel has tried to deflect blame for what has been described by the head of the World Health Organization as 'man-made mass starvation'. That view was endorsed by a joint statement this week by 28 countries – including the UK – which explicitly blamed Israel. 'The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths,' the statement said. 'The Israeli government's aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazan's of human dignity. 'We condemn the drip-feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.' Some Israeli officials have been marginally more cautious in public statements, including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has promised vaguely that there 'will be no starvation' in Gaza. But a recent off-the-record briefing for journalists by a senior Israeli security official has pushed a more uncompromising position, stating that there 'is no hunger in Gaza' and claiming that images of starving children on front pages around the world showed children with 'underlying diseases'. David Mencer, an Israeli government spokesperson, told Sky news this week: 'There is no famine in Gaza – there is a famine of the truth.' Contradicting that claim, Médecins Sans Frontières said that a quarter of the young children and pregnant or breastfeeding mothers it had screened at its clinics last week were malnourished, a day after the UN said one in five children in Gaza City were suffering from malnutrition. Israel's attempts to deflect blame, however, are undermined by its single and overarching responsibility: that, as an occupying power in a conflict, it is legally obliged to ensure the provision of means of life for those under occupation. And while Israel has consistently tried to blame Hamas for intercepting food aid, that claim has been undermined by a leaked US assessment seen by Reuters which found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group Hamas of US-funded humanitarian supplies. Examining 156 incidents of theft or loss of US-funded supplies reported by US aid partner organisations between October 2023 and May 2025, it said it found 'no reports alleging Hamas' benefited from US-funded supplies. Israel has also recently intensified efforts to blame the UN for the problems with aid distribution, citing a 'lack of cooperation from the international community and international organisations'. Israel's claims are contradicted by clear evidence of its efforts to undermine aid distribution. Despite international warnings of the humanitarian risks posed by banning Unrwa, the main UN agency for Palestinians and the organisation with the most experience in Gaza, from Israel, its operations were closed down, complicating aid efforts. Instead Israel, backed by the US, has relied on the private, inexperienced and controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose sites have been the focus of numerous mass casualty incidents, where desperate Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers. And Israel's efforts to hamper with aid efforts have continued. Last week it said it would not renew the work visa of Jonathan Whitall, the most senior UN aid official in Gaza; and a UN spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, told reporters on Thursday that Israel had rejected eight of the 16 UN requests to transport humanitarian aid in Gaza the previous day. He added that two other requests, initially approved, led to staff facing obstruction on the ground as he described a pattern of 'bureaucratic, logistical, administrative and other operational obstacles imposed by Israeli authorities'. All of which has injected a new sense of urgency into the catastrophe in Gaza as UN agencies warned that they were on the brink of running out of specialised food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children. 'Most malnutrition treatment supplies have been consumed and what is left at facilities will run out very soon if not replenished,' a World Health Organization spokesperson said on Thursday. More starvation deaths appear inevitable.
The Guardian
5 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Far-right Israeli politicians and settlers discuss luxury ‘Gaza riviera' plan
A group of far-right Israeli politicians and settlers met in parliament this week to discuss a plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza, annex the territory and turn it into a hi-tech, luxury resort city for Israelis. The scheme, titled 'The master plan for settlement in the Gaza Strip', envisions the construction of 850,000 housing units, construction of hi-tech 'smart cities' that trade cryptocurrency and a metro system that runs across the territory. It took its inspiration from an idea shared by the US president, Donald Trump, in February, where he pledged to turn Gaza into the 'Riviera of the Middle East'. 'The right of the people of Israel to settle, develop and preserve this land is not just a historical right – it is a national and security obligation,' the text of the plan said, boasting of economic benefits that it would bring to Israel. The plan, seen by the Guardian, would require Gaza's existing population of about 2 million to be emptied out. Legal experts warn that forcible displacement on such a grand scale would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing. 'This is a plan for ethnic cleansing. Under international law, this would amount to a crime against humanity because deportation is a war crime when committed on a small scale and a crime against humanity when it is committed on a massive scale,' said Michael Sfard, one of Israel's leading human rights lawyers. The plan was discussed on Tuesday in the Knesset during a conference called 'The Riviera in Gaza: From Vision to Reality'. Among the speakers was the minister of finance, Bezalel Smotrich, and the settler activist Daniella Weiss. The conference drew criticism from other politicians, including Gilad Kariv from the Democrats party, who accused Smotrich of calling for war crimes to be committed. Weiss told the Guardian over the phone: 'Gazans will not remain there. They will go to other countries. Supporters of Hamas we will fight. But those who want to live a normal life, they will have to leave Gaza because of the 7 October attack.' Palestinians would be relocated to Egypt and other unspecified 'African countries', she added. Weiss said that she had a list of 1,000 Israeli families who had signed up already to live on land in Gaza, once Palestinian residents were pushed away. 'My plan is to make [Gaza] paradise, to make it Singapore,' she said. Weiss represents a small, but increasingly influential group of radical settlers within Israel who seek to illegally occupy the Gaza Strip. Their calls to create Israeli settlements have grown stronger after the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attack which killed about 1,200 people and the Israeli war in Gaza which has killed more than 60,000 so far. The war in Gaza has levelled much of the strip and destroyed basic civilian infrastructure and most cities. The Gaza riviera plan would build luxury resorts on the ruins of Gaza, once Israel stopped bombing it. Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has denied any plans to resettle residents of Gaza, though his defence minister, Israel Katz, has suggested transferring residents into a so-called 'humanitarian city' in southern Gaza. Legal experts have called the plan a blueprint for crimes against humanity and the Israeli military itself pushed back on the idea, which it said would be a security nightmare. Trump has also floated the idea of expelling the population of Gaza, suggesting at one point that neighbouring Jordan take in those displaced. Trump suggested that the US could assume control over Gaza to 'develop' the strip – which drew the ire of rights organisations across the world. As the conference was held, Gaza's starvation crisis continued to worsen. At least 113 people have died of hunger in Gaza, 45 of whom died over the last four days, health authorities said. Aid organisations have blamed Israel's virtual blockade of aid into the strip for the growing levels of extreme hunger. Human rights experts said the suggestion of displacing Gaza's residents inside and outside the territory should not be viewed in isolation. Rather, this is part and parcel of a displacement policy. 'When an occupying power creates a coercive environment by, for instance, withholding food, and that coercive environment leaves no choice to the civilian population but to move, then this can amount to the war crime of forced displacement,' said Janina Dill, the co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict.
