End ‘collective punishment’
Doaa El-Bey , Tuesday 7 Nov 2023
With hopes for a breakthrough in Gaza fading, Egypt is continuing diplomatic efforts to promote a ceasefire, writes Doaa El-Bey
In a meeting bringing together Arab foreign ministers with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri said Israel was using the rubric of self-defence to inflict “collective punishment” on Palestinians in Gaza.
During the meeting, Egypt — with the backing of Arab foreign ministers — demanded an immediate ceasefire and the continuous entry of aid to the Gaza Strip.
Blinken warned that such a move would be counterproductive and could encourage more violence by Hamas. “It is our view now that a ceasefire would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did,” he said.
There had been hopes the meeting would promote a ceasefire, said a diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity, but Blinken stuck to his position that a ceasefire would harm Israel’s right to defend its citizens.
The meeting ended with a US call for a humanitarian pause rather than a ceasefire, though even that was rejected by the Israeli prime minister.
Shoukri and his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Al-Safadi agreed to keep working with Blinken and others to end the war and give the Palestinian people reason to hope for a future state of their own.
The foreign ministers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan attended the meeting in the Jordanian capital Amman, alongside a senior Palestinian official.
Despite the failure of the meeting to achieve a ceasefire, Egyptian efforts to de-escalate the situation and ease the suffering of Gazans continue.
In a phone call with the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen on Sunday, President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi said Egypt’s coordination with international partners to promote humanitarian relief should not be seen as an alternative to a ceasefire and stressed that the international community has a political and moral responsibility to protect civilians and halt Israel’s policy of collective punishment.
While Egypt’s efforts to reach a ceasefire, said the diplomatic source, are primarily motivated by humanitarian concerns and a desire to ease the suffering of the Palestinians there is also a security dimension, given most people in Gaza are moving south towards Egypt.
Samir Ghattas, head of the Middle East Forum for Political and Strategic Studies, said “people in Gaza do not want to leave their land but they want to live, they want their basic needs, food, electricity, water, and medicine, and these are the supplies Egypt is working to provide.”
Fifty aid trucks were allowed to enter Gaza on Monday after the Rafah crossing reopened after a two-day closure. The UN has said at least 100 humanitarian trucks need to enter Gaza daily to cover the most urgent needs of the population.
Humanitarian ceasefires are desperately needed to allow for the delivery of food, fuel and other essentials, UN Humanitarian Coordinator Martin Griffiths said during a briefing in New York last week.
Having just returned from the region, Griffiths continued: “What we’ve seen unfold over the last 26 days in Israel and in the occupied territories is nothing short of what I think I would call a blight on our collective conscience.”
Shoukri has held a series of meetings and phone calls in an attempt to de-escalate the situation in Gaza.
He discussed the deteriorating humanitarian situation with the Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP) Cindy McCain in Cairo, stressing that a major humanitarian operation was needed to secure the basic needs of Gaza’s inhabitants. Shoukri also highlighted the logistic difficulties imposed by the Israeli side impeding the delivery of aid, including Israel’s repeated bombing of the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing.
In a meeting in Cairo on Tuesday with Jibril Rajoub, the secretary-general of Fatah’s central committee, and Volker Türk, the UN commissioner for human rights, Shoukri reiterated Cairo’s concerns about humanitarian conditions in Gaza.
Egypt’s foreign minister also briefed his Turkish and Venezuelan counterparts Hakan Fidan and Yván Gil Pinto on Cairo’s efforts to reach an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
During his visit to Cairo on Monday, Pinto said a ceasefire was urgently needed to protect the lives of Palestinians and provide humanitarian relief to civilians.
The war on Gaza has left more than 10,000 Palestinians dead, a figure expected to rise as many bodies remain trapped beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings.
More than 1.5 million people have been displaced, with 600,000 crowded in shelters run by the UNRWA which has lost 72 staff members, the highest ever death toll of UN staff in a conflict.
With hopes for a breakthrough in Gaza fading, Egypt is continuing diplomatic efforts to promote a ceasefire, writes Doaa El-Bey
In a meeting bringing together Arab foreign ministers with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukri said Israel was using the rubric of self-defence to inflict “collective punishment” on Palestinians in Gaza.
During the meeting, Egypt — with the backing of Arab foreign ministers — demanded an immediate ceasefire and the continuous entry of aid to the Gaza Strip.
Blinken warned that such a move would be counterproductive and could encourage more violence by Hamas. “It is our view now that a ceasefire would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did,” he said.
There had been hopes the meeting would promote a ceasefire, said a diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity, but Blinken stuck to his position that a ceasefire would harm Israel’s right to defend its citizens.
The meeting ended with a US call for a humanitarian pause rather than a ceasefire, though even that was rejected by the Israeli prime minister.
Shoukri and his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Al-Safadi agreed to keep working with Blinken and others to end the war and give the Palestinian people reason to hope for a future state of their own.
The foreign ministers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and Jordan attended the meeting in the Jordanian capital Amman, alongside a senior Palestinian official.
Despite the failure of the meeting to achieve a ceasefire, Egyptian efforts to de-escalate the situation and ease the suffering of Gazans continue.
In a phone call with the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen on Sunday, President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi said Egypt’s coordination with international partners to promote humanitarian relief should not be seen as an alternative to a ceasefire and stressed that the international community has a political and moral responsibility to protect civilians and halt Israel’s policy of collective punishment.
While Egypt’s efforts to reach a ceasefire, said the diplomatic source, are primarily motivated by humanitarian concerns and a desire to ease the suffering of the Palestinians there is also a security dimension, given most people in Gaza are moving south towards Egypt.
Samir Ghattas, head of the Middle East Forum for Political and Strategic Studies, said “people in Gaza do not want to leave their land but they want to live, they want their basic needs, food, electricity, water, and medicine, and these are the supplies Egypt is working to provide.”
Fifty aid trucks were allowed to enter Gaza on Monday after the Rafah crossing reopened after a two-day closure. The UN has said at least 100 humanitarian trucks need to enter Gaza daily to cover the most urgent needs of the population.
Humanitarian ceasefires are desperately needed to allow for the delivery of food, fuel and other essentials, UN Humanitarian Coordinator Martin Griffiths said during a briefing in New York last week.
Having just returned from the region, Griffiths continued: “What we’ve seen unfold over the last 26 days in Israel and in the occupied territories is nothing short of what I think I would call a blight on our collective conscience.”
Shoukri has held a series of meetings and phone calls in an attempt to de-escalate the situation in Gaza.
He discussed the deteriorating humanitarian situation with the Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP) Cindy McCain in Cairo, stressing that a major humanitarian operation was needed to secure the basic needs of Gaza’s inhabitants. Shoukri also highlighted the logistic difficulties imposed by the Israeli side impeding the delivery of aid, including Israel’s repeated bombing of the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing.
In a meeting in Cairo on Tuesday with Jibril Rajoub, the secretary-general of Fatah’s central committee, and Volker Türk, the UN commissioner for human rights, Shoukri reiterated Cairo’s concerns about humanitarian conditions in Gaza.
Egypt’s foreign minister also briefed his Turkish and Venezuelan counterparts Hakan Fidan and Yván Gil Pinto on Cairo’s efforts to reach an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
During his visit to Cairo on Monday, Pinto said a ceasefire was urgently needed to protect the lives of Palestinians and provide humanitarian relief to civilians.
The war on Gaza has left more than 10,000 Palestinians dead, a figure expected to rise as many bodies remain trapped beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings.
More than 1.5 million people have been displaced, with 600,000 crowded in shelters run by the UNRWA which has lost 72 staff members, the highest ever death toll of UN staff in a conflict.
Comforting Palestinian students
THE EGYPTIAN NGO Misr Foundation for Health and Sustainable Development (MFHSD) has launched Enta Mish Lewahdak (You Are Not Alone), reports Mai Samih.
The initiative aims to provide psychological support for Palestinian students in Egyptian universities to help them deal with the repercussions of the war in Gaza which has so far killed over 10,000 Palestinians, 70 per cent of whom are women and children.
The first steps were launched from the Faculty of Medicine of Ain Shams University in which individual and group psychological support sessions were provided by several volunteer psychiatrists and specialists, a press release said. The NGO plans to expand the service to other universities.
“We are following the events in Gaza and discovered that our assistance to the people there was limited,” MFHSD coordinator Ziad Walid said. However, Walid added, they realised they could play a role by counselling Palestinians living in Egypt, including university students who have been affected by the ongoing conflict.
Walid noted that the foundation also provides online psychological support for Palestinian women and free online testing for female Palestinian students with problems related to reproductive health.
The service began three weeks ago and is scheduled to continue for four more months or longer, said Walid. It all depends on how the events unfold as well as the needs of the beneficiaries of the service, he added.
“In these difficult moments interconnectedness and solidarity between people is very important. These help people deal with such difficult situations,” Walid stressed.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 November, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
‘Most sacrilegious murder’
Lubna Abdel-Aziz
Tuesday 7 Nov 2023
War has always been tragic, gruesome and bloody. Never has its graphic imagery penetrated the human psyche as fiercely, continuously, relentlessly as it does nowadays.
We owe it to the medium of television, voted the greatest technological invention of all time, with 5.69 billion viewers worldwide. Social media is gaining ground with 4.89 billion users in 2023, but television retains the upper hand.
Should we be grateful?
How can one speak positively of human nature, whose character so singularly tough, can endure such grotesque servings of blood and gore?
The media serves this mournful feast of human suffering and with gaping mouths we devour it eagerly and completely, secretly appreciative of their horrific offerings. Dumbly we sit and gape at their brutal array of “the naked and the dead”, the sorrowful, the unfortunate, the condemned.
Where does the perversion lie, with the viewer or with those who provide the view?
TV may indeed be technology’s greatest miracle of communication, shrinking our world with its various sounds and images into one small picture. It haunts us in our homes, living rooms, bedrooms; in our coffee-shops, offices airports. Where do we hide from its display of inhuman scenes of mass murder at its basest?
In its insatiable appetite for “Breaking News”, may we add false and biased, it has lost its way on the avenue of taste.
For decades the news’ media has been an active player in the drama of war. For decades the written press has covered wars around the globe, followed by radio broadcasting, early in the 20th century, which reached the public instantaneously. Yet neither one could offer graphic footage of dying mothers and children, squashed by the boots of the military.
How often have we witnessed victims trembling with fear, in pools of blood, or harrowing photos of a wounded child begging for water? Day after day, hour after hour, we are flooded with such brutal savagery of mass murder of the innocent, the helpless, the weak. Even the lion-hearted break out in tears.
The aggravating reality is that the news media has taken to one-sided, fraudulent, deceptive narratives.
We lament the transformation of Ted Turner’s star News Channel, now reduced to a purveyor of loathsome falsifications, fictitious fabrications, in both narrative and imagery.
If such a lop-sided display was meant to send a message of good vs evil, it has backfired. Their failure emboldens them to try harder, spewing myth and mendacity, showing no restraint, no shame, no conscience, no humanity.
How do the conveyors sleep at night after knowingly serving a platter of dishonesty and duplicity to its gullible trusting followers?
Oh for the rarity of human charity. This is not television’s finest hour.
Once upon a time news was meant to be factual, accurate, truthful, and impartial. Today one would be hard-pressed to find fairness and impartiality on any news outlet. Newsmen now follow an agenda drawn out by their employers. If the news does not comply, fake it.
They have reduced harmony to chaos, truth to fiction, humans to insects.
The reckless way which the media chooses sides is dumb, deaf, and blind.
How can there be a distinction between human and human?
It is unforgivable what today’s newsmen are doing to the once honoured profession of journalism.
The late British journalist and satirist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) once said, “the world may well be governed by a TV camera.” He called the camera “the villain, the enemy capable of infinite deception”. His words ring true today when we witness TV journalists stage scenes of unspeakable cruelty in front of a camera to influence public opinion. This is an exceedingly dangerous practice of “fooling” multitudes of viewers. How have we sunk so low?
We are governed by the images news outlets choose to show us, regardless of their veracity. Covering decisions may help determine the outcome of conflicts by swaying public opinion. The tacit stand against demonstrable errors all too obvious on TV, speaks volumes of truths.
Many a military expert expressed the theory that wars won on the battlefield may be lost in the living room.
Because of its arbitrary bias and selective process, the war waging in Gaza has never received a fair coverage from the major networks.
Had the news media responded honestly to the Palestinian struggle for existence, had it covered the horrors of the past decades, the destruction and the agony of this homeless people, we may well have had a sovereign state of Palestine by now. All the wars in the Middle East would have been eliminated.
Impartiality in television journalism requires the total truth regardless of who is angered by it.
Even-handed reporting necessitates treating similar atrocities in similar manner, more so on television, because there is no avoiding it.
Who is committing mass murder is a question that must be answered truthfully.
Distortion of reality can only undermine the work of those endowed with the qualification for the pursuit of truth. The road towards peace should remain clear of bias.
The stand of TV journalism baffles the mind and torments the heart. There can be no safety in illogical irrational positions, that mass murder is acceptable.
How easily we forget that armies cannot kill ideas.
If truth has become the bête noir of TV, will there be weeping and gnashing of teeth when truth prevails?
Will truth prevail? It is still questionable.
“O horror, horror, horror. Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Lubna Abdel-Aziz
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 November, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Gaza workers stripped naked, tortured by Israel
Tamara Nassar 6 November 2023
A Palestinian worker with a bandage covering his bleeding forehead, and another worker with a blue number tag on his ankle, after they crossed back into Gaza through an Israeli military checkpoint. Ahmed ZakotZUMA Press
Israel detained and tortured Palestinian workers from Gaza who were present lawfully in the country when the events of 7 October unfolded.
Thousands of laborers who live in the Gaza Strip had permits to work in Israel when the Hamas-led operation in Israel’s southern colonies began on that October morning.
The Israeli authorities arrested laborers who were already present inside Israel and held them in at least two facilities. The conditions of detention were “extremely dire,” according to Israeli human rights group Gisha.
Many of the laborers were released in early November and forced to return to the Gaza Strip, which Israel has been relentlessly bombing and committing daily massacres in, wiping out entire families, for 31 days.
For the duration of their captivity, workers were “cut off from the world,” according to Gisha, and allowed no legal representation.
“At a certain point, an officer told the detainees that they were being held because there were Israeli hostages in Gaza, and that as long as the Israeli hostages were in Gaza, there was no prospect of the workers’ release,” human rights groups based in Israel said in a statement.
Gisha said it had reason to believe workers were held in “inhumane conditions.”
Workers revealed how Israeli authorities physically and psychologically abused them, and even affixed blue tags bearing identification numbers around their wrists and ankles.
The resemblance was not lost on Twitter users who posted images of the tattoos bearing numbers of inmates in Nazi concentration camps.
After reentering Gaza through Kerem Shalom – an Israeli military checkpoint and crossing for goods – laborers told journalists that they had been tortured, beaten, humiliated and interrogated by Israeli authorities.
“No one showed us mercy. The army did not show mercy towards us, no Israeli authority extended any mercy,” one worker told media.
The Kerem Shalom checkpoint is the only place Israel allows goods in and out of Gaza, but it’s not generally used for the entry or departure of people. Israel closed the checkpoint to punish the entire population of Gaza since the beginning of its assault on the Strip.
The worker, not identified by the news outlet, was praying for the safety and well-being of the wives and children of the laborers.
“They did not let us work, they took our money, took our clothes and took off our shoes,” the worker continued.
“They left nothing on us,” he added.
“They left us naked, for three days I was tortured while completely nude,” the laborer added.
“This is how they stepped on our heads, beat, punched and kicked us, and even now, I am in pain from their beatings, breaking and torture.”
The worker said it was his employer who handed him over to Israeli authorities.
One worker told media that Israeli authorities interrogated him to obtain information about Hamas and the underground tunnel network in Gaza.
He added that Israeli interrogators used electric chairs against the workers.
During the weeks when the workers had been missing, human rights groups based in Israel had submitted individual inquiries, a petition and a letter to Israeli authorities demanding that they “disclose the names and whereabouts of all Gaza residents.”
Gisha and HaMoked, another Israeli human rights group, had submitted a second petition to Israel’s high court on 2 November.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, had issued an order to consider Palestinian detainees from Gaza as “unlawful combatants” in accordance with a law from 2002, Palestinian prisoners rights group Addameer reported on 19 October.
Israel had ordered that Palestinian laborers from Gaza be held in a newly-established military camp near the city of Beersheba in southern Israel, under an article of that law, Addameer added.
Before the events of 7 October, more than 18,000 Palestinians in Gaza had permits to work in Israel. Many of them were in Israel when the Hamas-led operation began that morning, but the exact number is unknown, according to rights groups.
Workers who were stranded in Israel feared for their lives, and some tried to enter the occupied West Bank for shelter.
On 10 October, COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation, revoked all permits that had been issued to Palestinians from Gaza. The permits will not be reinstated, COGAT has insisted.
Because of that move, laborers from Gaza were deemed to be “illegal aliens” in Israel, despite the fact that they entered lawfully.
“Some were detained violently in Israel, others at checkpoints en route to the West Bank, and some even in areas of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority,” human rights groups said.
The Israeli authorities decided to transfer workers back to Gaza on 2 November as part of its cutting “off all contact with Gaza,” the Israeli prime minister’s office said.
“There will be no more Palestinian workers from Gaza and the workers who were in Israel on the day the war broke out will be returned to Gaza.”
By quashing all permits for Palestinian laborers in Gaza to work, Israel has apparently resorted to a form of collective punishment.
It is not clear if all workers have been released yet, Gisha said. In the group’s understanding, the return of some workers to Gaza is a partial implementation of the Israeli authorities’ decision.
Clueless in Gaza
Neville SaronyNovember 07, 2023
No matter how the mayhem in Gaza is viewed politically, unless we are to abandon the principle of civilised behaviour that is the essence of rule based society, let alone common decency, it is impossible to stand silently by whilst children, non-combatant women and the elderly are being slaughtered.
I have to take issue with my noble and learned friends Lord Macdonald KC and Lord Pannick KC when, in their letter to The Times of 20 October 2023 they speak of lawyers finding violations of international law without regard to basic legal principles of self-defence.
These eminent and very distinguished KCs contend that insofar as Hamas has signalled its intention to destroy Israel and all Jews living within her borders, faced with an enemy bent upon its genocidal destruction, Israel has no plausible alternative to the violence that it is inflicting on the people of Gaza.
Can the legal principle of self-defence really be stretched to such an absolute and indiscriminate measure? No plausible alternative ? Surely not.
The overriding condition that constrains self-defence is that it must be reasonably proportionate to the subjective perception of the threat of force.
This is sometimes, inaccurately, exemplified by saying that you may use a gun against a gunman and a knife against a knifeman.
But, as no-one knows better than my noble and learned friends, the concept of self-defence is wide enough to accommodate even a pre-emptive strike when one is faced with an overwhelming threat of violence such that it may well be justifiable to shoot an assailant only armed with a knife. All such situations are fact sensitive.
Similarly, when faced with an unprovoked attack by a superior force, the steps taken in one’s own defence cannot be too finely measured, the instinct of self-preservation is not to be measured artificially divorced from the emotional heat of the moment when judgment is impaired.
Against these broad principles, can it be argued, honestly, that the carnage being perpetrated upon thousands of non-combatant Palestinian civilians is reasonably proportionate to the perceived threat from Hamas?
Make every possible allowance for Hamas’ threat of the violent extinction of all Jews within Israel’s borders. On what basis can that threat be ascribed to the vast majority of Palestinians who do not subscribe to Hamas or it’s twisted logic?
There is neither the time nor the space within this study to examine the historical origins of the Gaza war, regardless of whether it is approached as a clash of religions or a geopolitical contest for land.
Understanding the situation cannot ignore the seeds of conflict sown in thousands of years of suppression of the Jewish people, the Balfour Declaration, the Holocaust, the various wars such as the War of Independence, the 6 Day War, the Yom Kippur War, all of which reflect the mindset of a people with a necessarily hypersensitive instinct for survival.
On the other side of the coin the forcible displacement of millions of non-Jewish occupants of Palestine in 1948, the creation of two disconnected, barely viable and landlocked oases of land nominally considered Palestinian but contained within the borders of Israel was ripe for trouble.
Add in unremitting, creeping and illegal land annexation by Jewish settlers largely condoned by successive Israeli governments and boosted by America’s most dangerously stupid President of all time and one can well imagine how the pressure began to build.
Undoubtedly the straw that broke the camel’s back was the formation under Netanyahu of an Israeli cabinet composed of rabid religious zealots and violent racist bigots.
None of which can remotely begin to justify or exonerate Hamas’ evil criminal attack on 7th October 2023 a Jewish Sabbath day, the murder of innocent men, women and children and the seizure of hundreds of hostages.
Indisputably, this called for swift retribution. But it did not legitimise a descent to the same levels of savage inhumanity.
My noble and learned friends’ argument carried to its zero sum conclusion appears to be that threatened with total extinction by Hamas, Israel is entitled, under the principle of self-defence, to extinguish every member of Hamas regardless of the cost to the Strip’s non-combatant civilian population.
As an ex-soldier and criminal defence barrister I know of no such legal principle at International or Domestic Law.
For God’s sake, stop this pursuit of spurious legal justification and cease the killing and maiming of innocents, forthwith.
-- Contact us at english@hkej.com
NEVILLE SARONY
King's Counsel
UN Security Council fails to agree on Israel-Hamas war
The U.S. is calling for "humanitarian pauses." Many council members are demanding a "humanitarian cease-fire."
(AP Photo/Mohammed Dahman)
By AP via Scripps News
Nov 6, 2023
The U.N. Security Council on Monday failed again to agree on a resolution on the month-long Israel-Hamas war.
Despite more than two hours of closed-door discussions Monday, differences remained. The U.S. is calling for "humanitarian pauses" while many other council members are demanding a "humanitarian cease-fire" to deliver desperately needed aid and prevent more civilian deaths in Gaza.
"We talked about humanitarian pauses and we’re interested in pursuing language on that score," U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood told reporters after the meeting. "But there are disagreements within the council about whether that’s acceptable."
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres earlier Monday told reporters he wanted an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza and a halt to the "spiral of escalation" already taking place from the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Yemen.
Guterres said international humanitarian law, which demands protection of civilians and infrastructure essential for their lives, is clearly being violated and stressed that "no party to an armed conflict is above" these laws. He called for the immediate unconditional release of the hostages Hamas took from Israel to Gaza in its Oct. 7 attack.
Blinken wraps up Mideast tour ahead of imminent ground assault in Gaza
Blinken wraps up Mideast tour ahead of imminent ground assault in Gaza
Blinken's shuttle diplomacy came as Israeli troops surrounded Gaza City and cut off the northern part of the besieged Hamas-ruled territory.LEARN MORE
China, which holds the Security Council presidency this month, and the United Arab Emirates, the Arab representative on the council, called Monday’s meeting because of the "crisis of humanity" in Gaza, where more than 10,000 civilians have been killed in less than a month.
UAE Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh said all 15 council members "are fully engaged" and efforts will continue to try to narrow the gaps and reach agreement on a resolution.
THE EGYPTIAN NGO Misr Foundation for Health and Sustainable Development (MFHSD) has launched Enta Mish Lewahdak (You Are Not Alone), reports Mai Samih.
The initiative aims to provide psychological support for Palestinian students in Egyptian universities to help them deal with the repercussions of the war in Gaza which has so far killed over 10,000 Palestinians, 70 per cent of whom are women and children.
The first steps were launched from the Faculty of Medicine of Ain Shams University in which individual and group psychological support sessions were provided by several volunteer psychiatrists and specialists, a press release said. The NGO plans to expand the service to other universities.
“We are following the events in Gaza and discovered that our assistance to the people there was limited,” MFHSD coordinator Ziad Walid said. However, Walid added, they realised they could play a role by counselling Palestinians living in Egypt, including university students who have been affected by the ongoing conflict.
Walid noted that the foundation also provides online psychological support for Palestinian women and free online testing for female Palestinian students with problems related to reproductive health.
The service began three weeks ago and is scheduled to continue for four more months or longer, said Walid. It all depends on how the events unfold as well as the needs of the beneficiaries of the service, he added.
“In these difficult moments interconnectedness and solidarity between people is very important. These help people deal with such difficult situations,” Walid stressed.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 November, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
‘Most sacrilegious murder’
Lubna Abdel-Aziz
Tuesday 7 Nov 2023
War has always been tragic, gruesome and bloody. Never has its graphic imagery penetrated the human psyche as fiercely, continuously, relentlessly as it does nowadays.
We owe it to the medium of television, voted the greatest technological invention of all time, with 5.69 billion viewers worldwide. Social media is gaining ground with 4.89 billion users in 2023, but television retains the upper hand.
Should we be grateful?
How can one speak positively of human nature, whose character so singularly tough, can endure such grotesque servings of blood and gore?
The media serves this mournful feast of human suffering and with gaping mouths we devour it eagerly and completely, secretly appreciative of their horrific offerings. Dumbly we sit and gape at their brutal array of “the naked and the dead”, the sorrowful, the unfortunate, the condemned.
Where does the perversion lie, with the viewer or with those who provide the view?
TV may indeed be technology’s greatest miracle of communication, shrinking our world with its various sounds and images into one small picture. It haunts us in our homes, living rooms, bedrooms; in our coffee-shops, offices airports. Where do we hide from its display of inhuman scenes of mass murder at its basest?
In its insatiable appetite for “Breaking News”, may we add false and biased, it has lost its way on the avenue of taste.
For decades the news’ media has been an active player in the drama of war. For decades the written press has covered wars around the globe, followed by radio broadcasting, early in the 20th century, which reached the public instantaneously. Yet neither one could offer graphic footage of dying mothers and children, squashed by the boots of the military.
How often have we witnessed victims trembling with fear, in pools of blood, or harrowing photos of a wounded child begging for water? Day after day, hour after hour, we are flooded with such brutal savagery of mass murder of the innocent, the helpless, the weak. Even the lion-hearted break out in tears.
The aggravating reality is that the news media has taken to one-sided, fraudulent, deceptive narratives.
We lament the transformation of Ted Turner’s star News Channel, now reduced to a purveyor of loathsome falsifications, fictitious fabrications, in both narrative and imagery.
If such a lop-sided display was meant to send a message of good vs evil, it has backfired. Their failure emboldens them to try harder, spewing myth and mendacity, showing no restraint, no shame, no conscience, no humanity.
How do the conveyors sleep at night after knowingly serving a platter of dishonesty and duplicity to its gullible trusting followers?
Oh for the rarity of human charity. This is not television’s finest hour.
Once upon a time news was meant to be factual, accurate, truthful, and impartial. Today one would be hard-pressed to find fairness and impartiality on any news outlet. Newsmen now follow an agenda drawn out by their employers. If the news does not comply, fake it.
They have reduced harmony to chaos, truth to fiction, humans to insects.
The reckless way which the media chooses sides is dumb, deaf, and blind.
How can there be a distinction between human and human?
It is unforgivable what today’s newsmen are doing to the once honoured profession of journalism.
The late British journalist and satirist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) once said, “the world may well be governed by a TV camera.” He called the camera “the villain, the enemy capable of infinite deception”. His words ring true today when we witness TV journalists stage scenes of unspeakable cruelty in front of a camera to influence public opinion. This is an exceedingly dangerous practice of “fooling” multitudes of viewers. How have we sunk so low?
We are governed by the images news outlets choose to show us, regardless of their veracity. Covering decisions may help determine the outcome of conflicts by swaying public opinion. The tacit stand against demonstrable errors all too obvious on TV, speaks volumes of truths.
Many a military expert expressed the theory that wars won on the battlefield may be lost in the living room.
Because of its arbitrary bias and selective process, the war waging in Gaza has never received a fair coverage from the major networks.
Had the news media responded honestly to the Palestinian struggle for existence, had it covered the horrors of the past decades, the destruction and the agony of this homeless people, we may well have had a sovereign state of Palestine by now. All the wars in the Middle East would have been eliminated.
Impartiality in television journalism requires the total truth regardless of who is angered by it.
Even-handed reporting necessitates treating similar atrocities in similar manner, more so on television, because there is no avoiding it.
Who is committing mass murder is a question that must be answered truthfully.
Distortion of reality can only undermine the work of those endowed with the qualification for the pursuit of truth. The road towards peace should remain clear of bias.
The stand of TV journalism baffles the mind and torments the heart. There can be no safety in illogical irrational positions, that mass murder is acceptable.
How easily we forget that armies cannot kill ideas.
If truth has become the bête noir of TV, will there be weeping and gnashing of teeth when truth prevails?
Will truth prevail? It is still questionable.
“O horror, horror, horror. Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee.”
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Lubna Abdel-Aziz
* A version of this article appears in print in the 9 November, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
A Palestinian worker with a bandage covering his bleeding forehead, and another worker with a blue number tag on his ankle, after they crossed back into Gaza through an Israeli military checkpoint. Ahmed ZakotZUMA Press
Israel detained and tortured Palestinian workers from Gaza who were present lawfully in the country when the events of 7 October unfolded.
Thousands of laborers who live in the Gaza Strip had permits to work in Israel when the Hamas-led operation in Israel’s southern colonies began on that October morning.
The Israeli authorities arrested laborers who were already present inside Israel and held them in at least two facilities. The conditions of detention were “extremely dire,” according to Israeli human rights group Gisha.
Many of the laborers were released in early November and forced to return to the Gaza Strip, which Israel has been relentlessly bombing and committing daily massacres in, wiping out entire families, for 31 days.
For the duration of their captivity, workers were “cut off from the world,” according to Gisha, and allowed no legal representation.
“At a certain point, an officer told the detainees that they were being held because there were Israeli hostages in Gaza, and that as long as the Israeli hostages were in Gaza, there was no prospect of the workers’ release,” human rights groups based in Israel said in a statement.
Gisha said it had reason to believe workers were held in “inhumane conditions.”
Workers revealed how Israeli authorities physically and psychologically abused them, and even affixed blue tags bearing identification numbers around their wrists and ankles.
After reentering Gaza through Kerem Shalom – an Israeli military checkpoint and crossing for goods – laborers told journalists that they had been tortured, beaten, humiliated and interrogated by Israeli authorities.
“No one showed us mercy. The army did not show mercy towards us, no Israeli authority extended any mercy,” one worker told media.
The Kerem Shalom checkpoint is the only place Israel allows goods in and out of Gaza, but it’s not generally used for the entry or departure of people. Israel closed the checkpoint to punish the entire population of Gaza since the beginning of its assault on the Strip.
The worker, not identified by the news outlet, was praying for the safety and well-being of the wives and children of the laborers.
“They did not let us work, they took our money, took our clothes and took off our shoes,” the worker continued.
“They left nothing on us,” he added.
“They left us naked, for three days I was tortured while completely nude,” the laborer added.
“This is how they stepped on our heads, beat, punched and kicked us, and even now, I am in pain from their beatings, breaking and torture.”
The worker said it was his employer who handed him over to Israeli authorities.
He added that Israeli interrogators used electric chairs against the workers.
Gisha and HaMoked, another Israeli human rights group, had submitted a second petition to Israel’s high court on 2 November.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, had issued an order to consider Palestinian detainees from Gaza as “unlawful combatants” in accordance with a law from 2002, Palestinian prisoners rights group Addameer reported on 19 October.
Israel had ordered that Palestinian laborers from Gaza be held in a newly-established military camp near the city of Beersheba in southern Israel, under an article of that law, Addameer added.
Before the events of 7 October, more than 18,000 Palestinians in Gaza had permits to work in Israel. Many of them were in Israel when the Hamas-led operation began that morning, but the exact number is unknown, according to rights groups.
Workers who were stranded in Israel feared for their lives, and some tried to enter the occupied West Bank for shelter.
On 10 October, COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation, revoked all permits that had been issued to Palestinians from Gaza. The permits will not be reinstated, COGAT has insisted.
Because of that move, laborers from Gaza were deemed to be “illegal aliens” in Israel, despite the fact that they entered lawfully.
“Some were detained violently in Israel, others at checkpoints en route to the West Bank, and some even in areas of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority,” human rights groups said.
The Israeli authorities decided to transfer workers back to Gaza on 2 November as part of its cutting “off all contact with Gaza,” the Israeli prime minister’s office said.
“There will be no more Palestinian workers from Gaza and the workers who were in Israel on the day the war broke out will be returned to Gaza.”
By quashing all permits for Palestinian laborers in Gaza to work, Israel has apparently resorted to a form of collective punishment.
It is not clear if all workers have been released yet, Gisha said. In the group’s understanding, the return of some workers to Gaza is a partial implementation of the Israeli authorities’ decision.
Neville Sarony
No matter how the mayhem in Gaza is viewed politically, unless we are to abandon the principle of civilised behaviour that is the essence of rule based society, let alone common decency, it is impossible to stand silently by whilst children, non-combatant women and the elderly are being slaughtered.
I have to take issue with my noble and learned friends Lord Macdonald KC and Lord Pannick KC when, in their letter to The Times of 20 October 2023 they speak of lawyers finding violations of international law without regard to basic legal principles of self-defence.
These eminent and very distinguished KCs contend that insofar as Hamas has signalled its intention to destroy Israel and all Jews living within her borders, faced with an enemy bent upon its genocidal destruction, Israel has no plausible alternative to the violence that it is inflicting on the people of Gaza.
Can the legal principle of self-defence really be stretched to such an absolute and indiscriminate measure? No plausible alternative ? Surely not.
The overriding condition that constrains self-defence is that it must be reasonably proportionate to the subjective perception of the threat of force.
This is sometimes, inaccurately, exemplified by saying that you may use a gun against a gunman and a knife against a knifeman.
But, as no-one knows better than my noble and learned friends, the concept of self-defence is wide enough to accommodate even a pre-emptive strike when one is faced with an overwhelming threat of violence such that it may well be justifiable to shoot an assailant only armed with a knife. All such situations are fact sensitive.
Similarly, when faced with an unprovoked attack by a superior force, the steps taken in one’s own defence cannot be too finely measured, the instinct of self-preservation is not to be measured artificially divorced from the emotional heat of the moment when judgment is impaired.
Against these broad principles, can it be argued, honestly, that the carnage being perpetrated upon thousands of non-combatant Palestinian civilians is reasonably proportionate to the perceived threat from Hamas?
Make every possible allowance for Hamas’ threat of the violent extinction of all Jews within Israel’s borders. On what basis can that threat be ascribed to the vast majority of Palestinians who do not subscribe to Hamas or it’s twisted logic?
There is neither the time nor the space within this study to examine the historical origins of the Gaza war, regardless of whether it is approached as a clash of religions or a geopolitical contest for land.
Understanding the situation cannot ignore the seeds of conflict sown in thousands of years of suppression of the Jewish people, the Balfour Declaration, the Holocaust, the various wars such as the War of Independence, the 6 Day War, the Yom Kippur War, all of which reflect the mindset of a people with a necessarily hypersensitive instinct for survival.
On the other side of the coin the forcible displacement of millions of non-Jewish occupants of Palestine in 1948, the creation of two disconnected, barely viable and landlocked oases of land nominally considered Palestinian but contained within the borders of Israel was ripe for trouble.
Add in unremitting, creeping and illegal land annexation by Jewish settlers largely condoned by successive Israeli governments and boosted by America’s most dangerously stupid President of all time and one can well imagine how the pressure began to build.
Undoubtedly the straw that broke the camel’s back was the formation under Netanyahu of an Israeli cabinet composed of rabid religious zealots and violent racist bigots.
None of which can remotely begin to justify or exonerate Hamas’ evil criminal attack on 7th October 2023 a Jewish Sabbath day, the murder of innocent men, women and children and the seizure of hundreds of hostages.
Indisputably, this called for swift retribution. But it did not legitimise a descent to the same levels of savage inhumanity.
My noble and learned friends’ argument carried to its zero sum conclusion appears to be that threatened with total extinction by Hamas, Israel is entitled, under the principle of self-defence, to extinguish every member of Hamas regardless of the cost to the Strip’s non-combatant civilian population.
As an ex-soldier and criminal defence barrister I know of no such legal principle at International or Domestic Law.
For God’s sake, stop this pursuit of spurious legal justification and cease the killing and maiming of innocents, forthwith.
-- Contact us at english@hkej.com
NEVILLE SARONY
King's Counsel
The U.S. is calling for "humanitarian pauses." Many council members are demanding a "humanitarian cease-fire."
(AP Photo/Mohammed Dahman)
By AP via Scripps News
The U.N. Security Council on Monday failed again to agree on a resolution on the month-long Israel-Hamas war.
Despite more than two hours of closed-door discussions Monday, differences remained. The U.S. is calling for "humanitarian pauses" while many other council members are demanding a "humanitarian cease-fire" to deliver desperately needed aid and prevent more civilian deaths in Gaza.
"We talked about humanitarian pauses and we’re interested in pursuing language on that score," U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood told reporters after the meeting. "But there are disagreements within the council about whether that’s acceptable."
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres earlier Monday told reporters he wanted an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza and a halt to the "spiral of escalation" already taking place from the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Yemen.
Guterres said international humanitarian law, which demands protection of civilians and infrastructure essential for their lives, is clearly being violated and stressed that "no party to an armed conflict is above" these laws. He called for the immediate unconditional release of the hostages Hamas took from Israel to Gaza in its Oct. 7 attack.
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China, which holds the Security Council presidency this month, and the United Arab Emirates, the Arab representative on the council, called Monday’s meeting because of the "crisis of humanity" in Gaza, where more than 10,000 civilians have been killed in less than a month.
UAE Ambassador Lana Nusseibeh said all 15 council members "are fully engaged" and efforts will continue to try to narrow the gaps and reach agreement on a resolution.
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