Dispatch #132 White Lesbian Age 71 Considers US Again Vetoes UNSC Resolution for Immediate Ceasefire as Israel Destroys Another Hospital & Kills Palestinians Lining Up for Food Aid

February 20th 2024   1126 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

269 Days Until 2024 Presidential Elections 11/5/2024

606 Days Since SCOTUS Ruled American Women Don’t Have Human Rights

137 Days Since Israel Began Genocidal Assault on Palestinians in Gaza

Global outrage at US veto of ceasefire resolution as ICJ ponders Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine.

One in six children in Gaza City is acutely malnourished as Israel maintains a deadly blockade on all food, medicine, and fuel to tens of thousands of Palestinians, according to a UNICEF study, as the Israeli war on Gaza enters its 137th day and the US veto of a UN Security Council resolution leaves Gaza under continued Israeli assault. https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/518043.aspx 

US condemned for veto of UN ceasefire resolution 

“The message given today to Israel with this veto is that it can continue to get away with murder,” Palestine’s United Nations envoy Riyad Mansour says. Rejecting a UN Security Council (UNSC) ceasefire resolution shows “approval of starvation as a means of war”, says Algeria’s ambassador to the UN, Amar Bendjama. www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/2/21/israels-war-on-gaza-live-us-ceasefire-veto-a-new-low-as-hunger-spreads 

Everyday without a ceasefire Israel kills more than 100 Palestinians and wounds more than twice that number.  Israel is building a highway cutting Gaza Strip in two that will prevent Palestinians from returning to their homes in the north on Salah al-Din Street. https://mondoweiss.net/2024/02/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-137-israel-builds-highway-cutting-gaza-strip-in-two/ 

Israel Has Created a Medical Apocalypse in Gaza. The hospital system is barely functional. Disease is running rampant. Medical workers are being kidnapped, tortured, and killed. And the world is letting it happen.

Before October 2023, I was under the naïve impression that medicine was something like a universally sacred institution during wartime. I thought that the explicit targeting of medical infrastructure would not be tolerated or would, at least, be unequivocally condemned. 

Meanwhile, at Al-Shifa, Kamal Adwan, Al-Awda, and elsewhere, doctors, especially those with specialty training, have been rounded up and taken to undisclosed locations and interrogated, tortured, and/or disappeared. As of January, at least 61 healthcare workers, including hospital directors, had been arrested by Israeli forces in Gaza. At the time of this writing, the whereabouts of the medical directors of the three hospitals listed above (named, respectively, Dr. Abu Salamiya, Dr. Al-Kahlot, and Dr. Muhanna) remain unknown, weeks after they were abducted while treating patients.

Outside Al-Nasser hospital around this time, a message blared from an Israeli bulldozer, “Get out, ya hayawanaat,”—you animals. Dr. Haitham Ahmad, an emergency medicine physician stationed there, stressed, “We’re living through fear and anxiety amid attempts to evacuate the people sheltering in the hospital. Many civilians have been shot by snipers, most of them within the hospital parameters.” Ahmad and other physicians were taken hostage by the Israeli forces when they raided Al-Nasser. Several patients were killed. Dr. Israa Abu Rogaa, leading a group of evacuees to Rafah, was targeted by a drone and severely wounded. No explanations were given; none, by legacy media, were asked of Israel. The WHO now says that Al-Nasser is no longer functional. www.thenation.com/article/world/gaza-medical-crisis/ 

What I Saw Wasn’t War — It Was Annihilation Says US Doctor Who Volunteered in Gaza Hospital. Dr. Galaria, who has worked in conflict zones around the world, says he and his team witnessed “a collateral humanitarian crisis of an unimaginable scale,” involving the “deliberate attempt” to both target civilians with military assault and to deprive them of aid. “I thought I was going to be prepared, but I was not prepared for what I saw,” he says. www.democracynow.org/2024/2/20/dr_irfan_galaria_gaza_hospital www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-02-16/rafah-gaza-hospitals-surgery-israel-bombing-ground-offensive-children 

Western leaders are clamoring that Victor Navalny’s death in a Russian prison be decried and sanctioned as violating International Human Rights Law. Hmmm. These leaders have apparently not understood that the US and Israel effectively dismantled the Rules-Based Order established after World War II.  Denigrating and dismissing the authority of the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, Israel, with unconditional support from the US, continues its genocidal assault on Palestinians in Gaza steadily normalizing viciously brutal behaviors forbidden by International Law and International Human Rights Law.  Does one murdered Russian rank above 38,000+ murdered Palestinians?

Gaza and the End of the Rules-Based Order. What the Israel-Hamas War Means for the Future of Human Rights and International Law. 

Although there were rehearsals for events in Gaza that showed extreme disregard of international law, the war there may well signal a curtain call. The risk of genocide, the gravity of the violations being committed, and the flimsy justifications by elected officials in Western democracies warn of a change of eras. The rules-based order that has governed international affairs since the end of World War II is on its way out, and there may be no turning back.

The consequences of this abandonment are all too apparent: more instability, more aggression, more conflict, and more suffering. The only check on violence will be more violence. The end of the rules-based order will also bring spreading and palpable anger across all layers of society, in all corners of the earth, except among those positioned to reap whatever sullied rewards can be extracted from the breaking international system.

www.foreignaffairs.com/israel/gaza-and-end-rules-based-order

And yet again, the New York Times publishes another propaganda post from Netanyahu and IDF’s Public Relations Department. In the February 20th The Morning, New York Times daily newsletter, David Leonhardt writes Three Questions About Rafah: A looming battle in the southern Gaza city embodies the brutal dynamics of the conflict. Leonhardt, referring to unidentified experts, Israel military assertions, and speculative intelligence, weighs the pros and cons of Israel’s planned invasion of Rafah and concludes that “inside Rafah, many people are simply scared. “We’re trying to live with the war conditions, but they are very difficult,” Salem Baris, 55, who has fled to Rafah, told Al Jazeera.” www.nytimes.com/2024/02/20/briefing/rafah-israel-gaza-war.html

WTF. Israel is relentlessly terrorizing Palestinians 24/7 with bombings, quadcopters and drones, Israeli snipers are shooting to kill anyone they see, Israeli tanks are shelling cars, homes and tents, 1.5M Palestinians are displaced in Rafah with no access to food, water, healthcare, and shelter.  Having ordered 1.5M Palestinians to go to Rafah for a safe haven, Israel is now bombing Rafah and planning to invade. But, really, people are simply scared?? OMG WTF!!  Completely terrorized and utterly traumatized are the appropriate terms.

More Than 50 Countries Argue Before World Court Against Israeli Occupation of Palestine. Arguments are underway at the International Court of Justice, where more than 50 countries are asking the World Court to issue a nonbinding legal opinion against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza since 1967 – this is the largest-ever participation in the World Court’s history. These 6 days of hearings are separate from South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ. Ahmed Abofoul of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, which submitted an advisory opinion on the case, discusses the hearing.

Israel has been instrumentalizing the rules of international humanitarian law … to further its settler-colonial project in Palestine, Abofoul says. I have no doubt that the court will decide that Israel’s occupation is illegal. 

The whole body of occupation — of the law of occupation shows us that occupation was not intended to last that long. Occupation is temporary in nature. But the way Israel perpetuated the occupation shows that Israel is not interested in ending that occupation, but it actually needs that occupation to further implement its strategy to acquire more land by force with the least number of Palestinians as possible.

And therefore, the premise of this case, I think there are three main legal arguments that Israel is violating what we call international law, peremptory norms from which no derogation is permitted. So, the first norm that Israel is violating is the acquisition of territory by force or the threat of the use of force. The second is Israel’s violations of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination, which is also a peremptory norm. And the imposition of regime of racial discrimination and demographic manipulation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and beyond, that is a regime of apartheid imposed on the Palestinian people as a whole, denying them their unalienable rights, including Palestinian refugees, who continue to be denied their right to return to their homes and villages.  www.democracynow.org/2024/2/20/icj_palestine_ahmed_abofoul 

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. 

And you have to do it all the time.”  Angela Davis