Int'l community responsible for Israel's war crimes in Gaza — PA media office

Israeli forces resume its deadly attacks on Gaza soon after humanitarian pause ended on Friday morning.


The Israeli army targeted many houses and civilian areas in Gaza.

 / Photo: AA


The Palestinian government in Gaza held the international community responsible for “the continuous Israeli war crimes” in Gaza, as Israel resumed attacks on the enclave soon after the humanitarian pause ended.

"The occupying Israeli army has resumed its brutal war against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip,” the government’s media office in Gaza said in a statement on Friday morning.

The Israeli army targeted many houses and civilian areas in Gaza, the office said, stressing: “The international community bears responsibility for the continuation of Israel's war against the Gaza Strip.”

The health authorities in Gaza have reported that 32 Palestinians were killed in ongoing Israeli bombardments.


Israeli warplanes targeted several areas in Gaza early on Friday.

“The international community, especially the United States, US President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, are responsible for the crimes of the Israeli occupation and its brutal war against civilians, children and women in Gaza,” it added.


It said: “The law of war and international humanitarian law are violated. The international community gave Israel the green light to continue its attacks on the Gaza Strip.”




Several air strikes

“The Palestinian people have the right to defend themselves in every way, to gain their freedom and independence, to establish a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital in accordance with international laws, and to completely clear their lands of occupation,” it said.

Israeli warplanes targeted several areas in Gaza early on Friday, according to an Anadolu correspondent on the ground.


Palestinian search and rescue team and civilians gather to conduct search and rescue operation among rubble of buildings following the end of the week-long 'humanitarian pause' after Israeli attacks on Al Maghazi refugee camp.

The pause between Israel and Hamas, which went into effect on Nov. 24, ended on Friday morning.

Heavy gunfire and Israeli artillery shelling in eastern Gaza also resumed.

Clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian resistance factions are also underway in northern and central Gaza, the correspondent reported.

UN chief 'deeply' regrets resumption of fighting in Gaza

UN chief Antonio Guterres has said he deeply regretted the resumption of hostilities between Israel's army and Palestinian resistance fighters in Gaza and hoped that a truce could be re-established.

"I deeply regret that military operations have started again in Gaza. I still hope that it will be possible to renew the pause that was established. The return to hostilities only shows how important it is to have a true humanitarian ceasefire," the United Nations secretary-general said on X, formerly Twitter.

1003 GMT — Israel publishes map dividing Gaza into ‘evacuation zones’

The Israeli military released a map carving up Gaza into hundreds of numbered parcels and asked residents to familiarise themselves with the number related to their location in case of an eventual evacuation.

The parcels were crudely drawn, with lines cutting across streets in some cases. The map, which Israel said would eventually be interactive, was published hours after Israel-Hamas fighting resumed, ending a weeklong truce that had been negotiated by Qatar, Egypt and the United States.

Before the truce, the main combat zone was in northern Gaza, the focus of Israeli ground forces. Now, the Israeli military's attention appears to have shifted to southern Gaza, packed with some 2 million Palestinians, including hundreds of thousands who fled the north.

 

Israel Knew Hamas’ Attack Plan More Than a Year Ago

Ronen Bergman and Adam Goldman
Fri, 1 December 2023 

Evgenia Simanovich runs to the family home’s reinforced concrete shelter, moments after rocket sirens sounded in Ashkelon, Israel on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023. (Tamir Kalifa/The New York Times)

TEL AVIV, Israel — Israeli officials obtained Hamas’ battle plan for the Oct. 7 terrorist attack more than a year before it happened, documents, emails and interviews show. But Israeli military and intelligence officials dismissed the plan as aspirational, considering it too difficult for Hamas to carry out.

The approximately 40-page document, which Israeli authorities code-named “Jericho Wall,” outlined, point by point, exactly the kind of devastating invasion that led to the deaths of about 1,200 people.

The translated document, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not set a date for the attack, but described a methodical assault designed to overwhelm the fortifications around the Gaza Strip, take over Israeli cities and storm key military bases, including a division headquarters.

Hamas followed the blueprint with shocking precision. The document called for a barrage of rockets at the outset of the attack, drones to knock out the security cameras and automated machine guns along the border, and gunmen to pour into Israel en masse in paragliders, on motorcycles and on foot — all of which happened Oct. 7.

The plan also included details about the location and size of Israeli military forces, communication hubs and other sensitive information, raising questions about how Hamas gathered its intelligence and whether there were leaks inside the Israeli security establishment.

The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders, but experts determined that an attack of that scale and ambition was beyond Hamas’ capabilities, according to documents and officials. It is unclear whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or other top political leaders saw the document, as well.

Last year, shortly after the document was obtained, officials in the Israeli military’s Gaza division, which is responsible for defending the border with Gaza, said Hamas’ intentions were unclear.

“It is not yet possible to determine whether the plan has been fully accepted and how it will be manifested,” read a military assessment reviewed by the Times.

Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.

But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by the Times.

“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”

“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”

Officials privately concede that, had the military taken these warnings seriously and redirected significant reinforcements to the south, where Hamas attacked, Israel could have blunted the attacks or possibly even prevented them.

Instead, the Israeli military was unprepared as terrorists streamed out of the Gaza Strip. It was the deadliest day in Israel’s history.

Israeli security officials have already acknowledged that they failed to protect the country, and the government is expected to assemble a commission to study the events leading up to the attacks. The Jericho Wall document lays bare a yearslong cascade of missteps that culminated in what officials now regard as the worst Israeli intelligence failure since the surprise attack that led to the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary.

The Israeli military and the Israeli Security Agency, which is in charge of counterterrorism in Gaza, declined to comment.

Officials would not say how they obtained the Jericho Wall document, but it was among several versions of attack plans collected over the years. A 2016 Defense Ministry memorandum viewed by the Times, for example, says, “Hamas intends to move the next confrontation into Israeli territory.”

Such an attack would most likely involve hostage-taking and “occupying an Israeli community (and perhaps even a number of communities),” the memo reads.

The Jericho Wall document, named for the ancient fortifications in the modern-day West Bank, was even more explicit. It detailed rocket attacks to distract Israeli soldiers and send them hurrying into bunkers, and drones to disable the elaborate security measures along the border fence separating Israel and Gaza.

Hamas fighters would then break through 60 points in the wall, storming across the border into Israel. The document begins with a quote from the Quran: “Surprise them through the gate. If you do, you will certainly prevail.”

The same phrase has been widely used by Hamas in its videos and statements since Oct. 7.

One of the most important objectives outlined in the document was to overrun the Israeli military base in Re’im, which is home to the Gaza division responsible for protecting the region. Other bases that fell under the division’s command were also listed.

Hamas carried out that objective Oct. 7, rampaging through Re’im and overrunning parts of the base.

The audacity of the blueprint, officials said, made it easy to underestimate. All militaries write plans that they never use, and Israeli officials assessed that, even if Hamas invaded, it might muster a force of a few dozen, not the hundreds who ultimately attacked.

Israel had also misread Hamas’ actions. The group had negotiated for permits to allow Palestinians to work in Israel, which Israeli officials took as a sign that Hamas was not looking for a war.

But Hamas had been drafting attack plans for many years, and Israeli officials had gotten hold of previous iterations of them. What could have been an intelligence coup turned into one of the worst miscalculations in Israel’s 75-year history.

In September 2016, the defense minister’s office compiled a top-secret memorandum based on a much earlier iteration of a Hamas attack plan. The memorandum, which was signed by the defense minister at the time, Avigdor Lieberman, said that an invasion and hostage-taking would “lead to severe damage to the consciousness and morale of the citizens of Israel.”

The memo, which was viewed by the Times, said Hamas had purchased sophisticated weapons, GPS jammers and drones. It also said Hamas had increased its fighting force to 27,000 people — having added 6,000 to its ranks in a two-year period. Hamas had hoped to reach 40,000 by 2020, the memo determined.

Last year, after Israel obtained the Jericho Wall document, the military’s Gaza division drafted its own intelligence assessment of this latest invasion plan.

Hamas had “decided to plan a new raid, unprecedented in its scope,” analysts wrote in the assessment reviewed by the Times. It said that Hamas intended to carry out a deception operation followed by a “large-scale maneuver” with the aim of overwhelming the division.

But the Gaza division referred to the plan as a “compass.” In other words, the division determined that Hamas knew where it wanted to go but had not arrived there yet.

On July 6, 2023, the veteran Unit 8200 analyst wrote to a group of other intelligence experts that dozens of Hamas commandos had recently conducted training exercises, with senior Hamas commanders observing.

The training included a dry run of shooting down Israeli aircraft and taking over a kibbutz and a military training base, killing all the cadets. During the exercise, Hamas fighters used the same phrase from the Quran that appeared at the top of the Jericho Wall attack plan, she wrote in the email exchanges viewed by the Times.

The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.

The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’ ability to pull it off.

“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.

The back-and-forth continued, with some colleagues supporting the analyst’s original conclusion. Soon, she invoked the lessons of the 1973 war, in which Syrian and Egyptian armies overran Israeli defenses. Israeli forces regrouped and repelled the invasion, but the intelligence failure has long served as a lesson for Israeli security officials.

“We already underwent a similar experience 50 years ago on the southern front in connection with a scenario that seemed imaginary, and history may repeat itself if we are not careful,” the analyst wrote to her colleagues.

While ominous, none of the emails predicted that war was imminent. Nor did the analyst challenge the conventional wisdom among Israeli intelligence officials that Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, was not interested in war with Israel. But she correctly assessed that Hamas’ capabilities had drastically improved. The gap between the possible and the aspirational had narrowed significantly.

The failures to connect the dots echoed another analytical failure more than two decades ago, when American authorities also had multiple indications that the terrorist group al-Qaida was preparing an assault. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were largely a failure of analysis and imagination, a government commission concluded.

“The Israeli intelligence failure on Oct. 7 is sounding more and more like our 9/11,” said Ted Singer, a recently retired senior CIA official who worked extensively in the Middle East. “The failure will be a gap in analysis to paint a convincing picture to military and political leadership that Hamas had the intention to launch the attack when it did.”

c.2023 The New York Times Company

 

UK

Rail misery continues as train drivers vote to go on strike for another six months

1 December 2023

Aslef train drivers have voted to go on strike. Picture: Alamy

By Kit Heren

@yung_chuvak

Chaos on the railways is set to continue for the next six months after train drivers with the Aslef union voted to go on strike

The train drivers have agreed to walk out as part of an ongoing dispute over their salaries.

It comes as the Aslef union, which counts representing 96% of train drivers in England, Scotland, and Wales as members, has promised rolling strikes between 1 and 9 December.

Meanwhile RMT members agreed yesterday to a backdated pay rise of 5% for 2022-2023, as well as job security guarantees.

Announcing the new strike action, Aslef General secretary Mick Whelan said: "We are in this for the long haul. Our members who have not had a pay rise for nearly five years now are determined that the train companies and the Tory government that stands behind them do the right thing.

Read more: Rail strike threat ends until at least Spring as RMT union votes to accept pay deal

Read more: Will your train journey be affected over the Christmas period? December strikes explained

Watch again: Andrew Marr is joined by Mick Lynch

"The cost of living has soared since the spring and summer of 2019, when these pay deals ran out.

"The bosses at the train companies - as well as Tory MPs and government ministers - have had increases in pay. It's unrealistic and unfair to expect our members to work just as hard for what, in real terms, is considerably less."

Aslef said they hadn't met Transport Secretary Mark Harper for around a year, and the private train companies sicne April.

The Aslef strikes over the first nine days of December are a "rolling programme" of walkouts, with different train companies affected on each day.

A spokesperson for the Rail Delivery Group, which represents train companies, said of the December strikes: "This unnecessary and avoidable industrial action called by the Aslef leadership has been targeted to disrupt customers and businesses ahead of the vital festive period, where people will be attending events and catching up with friends and loved ones.

"It will also inflict further damage on an industry that is receiving up to an additional £175 million a month in taxpayer cash to keep services running, following the Covid downturn.

"The Aslef leadership are blocking a fair and affordable offer made by industry in the spring which would take average driver base salaries for a four-day week from £60,000 to nearly £65,000.

"We urge them to put it to its members, give Christmas back to our customers, and end this damaging industrial dispute."

 

Two Nights in Santiago With Roger Waters

Vijay Prashad | 29 Nov 2023

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“Stop the Genocide” in white letters against a red background appears on the screens above the band’s head, as the guitars tear through the night.

Roger Waters performing.

No one does a stadium show like Roger Waters. The music, of course, is resplendent, but so too are the soundscape, the images, the giant sheep and pig, the lasers, the films, the energy of the fans who—despite the language differences—sing along… “Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?” It is a riot of emotions. The quiet calm of Santiago is broken by familiar sounds and necessary feelings: yes, we are here; yes, we exist; yes, we must resist. Santiago is a city blistered by social inequality. For two nights, Roger Waters played at the Estadio Monumental in Macul, a commune of Santiago that is more middle-class than the rest of the city although still not immune from the sharp divides that produced the massive social unrest of 2019. Then Roger sang a version of Víctor Jara’s El derecho de vivir en paz, with new lyrics for the new moment:

I can hear the Cacerolazo I can smell you, Piñera All fucking rats smell the same.

The Cacerolazo is the banging of pots, a social protest that resounded from Buenos Aires (2001) to Santiago (2011 and then again from 2019 to 2022). There is a good reason to walk on the streets and bang pots every day given the permanent condition of austerity reproduced by people like Chile’s former president Sebastían Piñera, one more of the “fucking rats” that make life hell. There is the austerity, the demise of social welfare and decent work, and the rise of poverty and social despair. Then there are the sharpened contradictions, the anger that sometimes gives rise to hope in madmen (Argentina’s incoming president Javier Milei is one of them) and at other moments, it gives rise to disorganized and organized forms of dissent. A sheep flies over the tens of thousands of people in the stadium. It is the physical cognate of the song that flies off the stage, a paean to the atomisation of people in society by this State of Permanent Austerity and of the necessity of resistance.

Through quiet reflection, and great dedication Master the art of karate Lo, we shall rise up, And then we’ll make the bugger’s eyes water

Why not? Why not rise up? Sure, run like hell, run as fast as you can from the forces of repression that want to manage the contradictions of austerity. But then—as Roger does, as that sound of the hammer battering down your door quietens—take off the shirt that says, “run like hell” and put on one that says, “Resist.” The guitars tear through the night, the lasers flash to infinity, and the desire increases to rip off one’s fear of the State of Permanent Austerity and to rush into protest. But the images are chosen carefully. This is not a call for action without strategy. “Master the art of karate,” sings Roger. Like the karateka, dedicated study is needed, and the battlefield must certainly be approached with care to “make the bugger’s eyes water” and to do that with careful strategy. The hammer’s sound is both that of the march of the police—in Chile the hated Carabineros—and the banging of the tools of the people, including the pots and pans. The stadium is engulfed by the madness of the electric guitar (particularly when Dave Kilminster has his eyes closed and his fingers aflame), heartbeats symphonised drawing people into Roger’s bar, a bottle of mezcal on the piano, Roger with his arms in the air, the night sky clear and hopeful because not far away is the dawn. Universal Human Rights About 5 kilometers from the Estadio Monumental is the Estadio Nacional, where Víctor Jara was assassinated by the coup regime of Augusto Pinochet 50 years ago. A few days before Roger’s show in Santiago, Victor’s wife, Joan Jara died, but their daughter Amanda was there to listen to Roger recognise the assassination of Víctor Jara and to Inti-Illimani open the show with a tribute to Víctor, including singing a full-throated version of El derecho, itself a tribute to Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese fighters.

Donde revientan la flor Con genocidio y napalm (Where they burst the flower With genocide and napalm)

Jorge Coulón from Inti-Illimani belted out those lines with a kufiyah around his neck. Roger, with his acoustic guitar and kufiyah and with the haunting voice of Shanay Johnson alongside him, sings, lay down Jerusalem, lay your burden down.

If I had been god I would not have chosen anyone I would have laid an even hand On all my children everyone Would have been content To forgo Ramadan and Lent Time better spent In the company of friends Breaking bread and mending nets.

“Stop the Genocide” in white letters against a red background appears on the screens above the band’s head. Roger was born in England in 1943 to a communist mother, Mary Duncan Whyte (1913-2009). His father—Second Lieutenant Eric Fletcher Waters, also a communist—was killed in Italy in 1944 (immortalized in my favorite song, The Gunner’s Dream from Final Cut, 1983). Five years later, the United Nations crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That text is the foundation of Roger’s beliefs (“I don’t know when I first read it,” Roger tells me after the show, but he refers to it often, including in his shows). The fierce defense of human rights governs Roger, his anti-war sentiment shaped by the loss of his father. It is this universal faith that drives Roger’s politics. “Are there paranoids in the stadium?” Roger asks. We are paranoid not because we are clinically ill, but because there is an enormous gulf between what we know to be true and what the powers that be tell us are supposed to be true. Roger Waters stands for human rights, including the rights of the Palestinians. We know that to be true because that is what he says, and he acts according to that belief. But the powers that be say that what Roger says is not true and that in fact, he is antisemitic. A consequence of the powers that be is that they tried to cancel his show in Frankfurt and—weirdly—all the hotel owners in Argentina refused to allow him—but not his band—a room in their establishments (he had to stay at a friend’s house in Uruguay). When Katie Halper and I asked him about this attack on him, Roger responded:

My platform is simple: it is [the] implementation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights for all our brothers and sisters in the world including those between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. My support of universal human rights is universal. It is not antisemitism, which is odious and racist and which, like all forms of racism, I condemn unreservedly.

Roger says this over and over again, and yet, over and over again the powers that be malign Roger. “I will not be cancelled,” Roger said in Birmingham at a concert. And why should he be? The attempt to cancel critics of Israel had some impact in recent years, but no longer carries weight: the atrocities of Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza have produced new generations of people who see the hideousness of the Occupation and refuse to bow down before the powers that be. “We need more than a pause” in the bombing of Gaza, Roger said from the stage in Santiago, “but a ceasefire that lasts forever,” the soundtrack to that sentiment produced by the saxophone of Seamus Blake and the lap steel of Jon Carin. The show opens with Pink—the lead figure from The Wall (1982)—in a wheelchair, comfortably numb. In the second half, Roger is in the wheelchair in a straitjacket, thrown in there by orderlies of the powers that be. Is this the life we really want? It better not be. I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon. Roger Waters’s This is Not a Drill tour moves on to Lima, Peru (November 29), San José, Costa Rica (December 2), Bogotá, Colombia (December 5), and ends in Quito, Ecuador (December 9).

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The views are personal.

Source: This article was produced by Globetrotter.

INDIA

Ujjain: Outrage After Queer Teenager Dies by Suicide, Faced Online Bullying

Newsclick Report | 29 Nov 2023

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Pranshu was a self-taught makeup artist who often faced online bullying on their social media handle.

Image Courtesy: Instagram

Delhi: Pranshu, a 16-year-old queer make-up artist and social media influencer from Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, died by suicide on November 21 following rampant online bullying. Their death has sparked outrage among queer activists and allies on social media and raised the question of how safe online spaces are for queer people. 

NewsClick cannot independently confirm whether the online bullying led to their suicide. However, the last post on their instagram handle @glamitupwithpranshu that shows them wearing a saree on the occasion of Diwali went viral and received many hateful comments. Several social media handles speaking on the incident have alleged that the hatred faced by Pranshu led up to their suicide. 

“Why is no attention being paid to the fact that a 16-year-old faced hate comments online for doing something they not only loved, but were also good at? This negativity needs to be checked and curtailed,” said Preeti Yadav, Pranshu’s mother, while speaking to The Quint. 

Preeti added that her child was inspired by American YouTuber and makeup artist James Charles . She further said, “My child was supremely talented. They did nothing wrong. I am proud of them.” She also mentioned that she lived with Pranshu alone and supported their work. 

Speaking to the media, the local police said that Pranshu was alone at home when they died by suicide. The police added that they have seized Pranshu’s mobile phone for investigation and will take in account theirs social media handles and WhatsApp. A six-member SIT team has also been formed to probe into the matter, The Print reported.  

Pranshu was a self-taught makeup artist and had garnered nearly 22,000 followers on Instagram. They  posted makeup and beauty content from their handle and often received hateful comments homophobic in nature. It escalated immensely after their Diwali reel was posted, which received thousands of comments, mostly containing abusive content. 

Following Pranshu’s death, demands for justice for the teenager were raised at the Delhi Queer Pride parade on November 27 where many were seen shouting slogans and carrying banners and placards regarding the same. 

Expressing pain over Pranshu's death, noted transgender actor of the 'Made in Heaven' fame, doctor and content creator Trinetra Haldar Gummarahu said on Instagram, "A child is gone. Just like that. So, so angry. How many more queer children do we lose? There was Arvey Malhotra, today there is Pranshu, and tomorrow there will be more."

Trans rights activist Kalki Subramaniam posted on X condemning the online bullying that allegedly led to Pranshu taking their own life. https://x.com/QueenKalki/status/1728926319784927518?s=20 

Calling the incident a “social murder”, the Student Federation of India's JNU unit urged the bullying to be protested.

”Pranshu, a 16 year old artist from Ujjain died by suicide following consistent queer phobic bullying they faced online. SFI JNU strongly condemns the hate and attack against Pranshu and calls for a strong united struggle for queer liberation and gender justice,” the SFI JNU instagram handle said. https://www.instagram.com/p/C0GoHWbPTGP/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link