22 feb 2019
Palestinian Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, from Jerusalem, has revealed that Israeli occupation authorities issues permits to large pharmaceutical firms to carry out tests on Palestinian and Arab detainees, the Felesteen news site reported, according to Al Ray.
The Hebrew University lecturer also revealed that Israeli military firms are testing weapons on Palestinian children and carry out these tests in the Palestinian neighbourhoods of occupied Jerusalem.
Speaking at Columbia University, in New York City, Shalhoub-Kevorkian said that she collected the data while carrying out a research project for the Hebrew University.
“Palestinian spaces are laboratories,” she said. “The invention of products and services of state-sponsored security corporations are fueled by long-term curfews and Palestinian oppression by the Israeli army.”
In her talk, entitled “Disturbing Spaces – Violent Technologies in Palestinian Jerusalem”, the professor added: “They check for which bombs to use, gas bombs or stink bombs. Whether to put plastic sacks or cloth sacks. To beat us with their rifles or to kick us with boots.”
Last week, Israeli authorities refused to hand over the body of Fares Baroud, who passed away inside Israeli prisons after suffering from a number of diseases. His family fears that he could have been used for such tests and Israel is afraid that this could be revealed through forensic investigations.
5,000 tests on prisoners
In July 1997, Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported remarks for Dalia Itzik, chairman of a parliamentary committee, acknowledged that the Israeli Ministry of Health had given pharmaceutical firms permits to test their new drugs of inmates, noting that 5,000 tests had already been carried out.
Robrecht Vanderbeeken, the cultural secretary of Belgium’s ACOD trade union, warned in August 2018 the population of the Gaza Strip is being “starved to death, poisoned, and children are kidnapped and murdered for their organs.”
This follows previous warnings from Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour who said the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces “were returned with missing corneas and other organs, further confirming past reports about organ harvesting by the occupying power.
The Hebrew University lecturer also revealed that Israeli military firms are testing weapons on Palestinian children and carry out these tests in the Palestinian neighbourhoods of occupied Jerusalem.
Speaking at Columbia University, in New York City, Shalhoub-Kevorkian said that she collected the data while carrying out a research project for the Hebrew University.
“Palestinian spaces are laboratories,” she said. “The invention of products and services of state-sponsored security corporations are fueled by long-term curfews and Palestinian oppression by the Israeli army.”
In her talk, entitled “Disturbing Spaces – Violent Technologies in Palestinian Jerusalem”, the professor added: “They check for which bombs to use, gas bombs or stink bombs. Whether to put plastic sacks or cloth sacks. To beat us with their rifles or to kick us with boots.”
Last week, Israeli authorities refused to hand over the body of Fares Baroud, who passed away inside Israeli prisons after suffering from a number of diseases. His family fears that he could have been used for such tests and Israel is afraid that this could be revealed through forensic investigations.
5,000 tests on prisoners
In July 1997, Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported remarks for Dalia Itzik, chairman of a parliamentary committee, acknowledged that the Israeli Ministry of Health had given pharmaceutical firms permits to test their new drugs of inmates, noting that 5,000 tests had already been carried out.
Robrecht Vanderbeeken, the cultural secretary of Belgium’s ACOD trade union, warned in August 2018 the population of the Gaza Strip is being “starved to death, poisoned, and children are kidnapped and murdered for their organs.”
This follows previous warnings from Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour who said the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces “were returned with missing corneas and other organs, further confirming past reports about organ harvesting by the occupying power.
29 jan 2019
Like Israel’s former politician generals, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, Gantz is being portrayed – and portraying himself – as a battle-hardened warrior, able to make peace from a position of strength.
Before he had issued a single policy statement, polls showed him winning 15 of the 120 parliamentary seats, a welcome sign for those hoping that a centre-left coalition can triumph this time.
But the reality of what Gantz stands for – revealed this week in his first election videos – is far from reassuring.
In 2014, he led Israel into its longest and most savage military operation in living memory: 50 days in which the tiny coastal enclave of Gaza was bombarded relentlessly.
By the end, one of the most densely populated areas on earth – its two million inhabitants already trapped by a lengthy Israeli blockade – lay in ruins.
More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the onslaught, a quarter of them children, while tens of thousands were left homeless.
The world watched, appalled. Investigations by human rights groups such as Amnesty International concluded that Israel had committed war crimes.
One might have assumed that during the election campaign Gantz would wish to draw a veil over this troubling period in his military career. Not a bit of it.
One of his campaign videos soars over the rubble of Gaza, proudly declaring that Gantz was responsible for destroying many thousands of buildings. “Parts of Gaza have been returned to the Stone Age,” the video boasts.
This is a reference to the Dahiya doctrine, a strategy devised by the Israeli military command of which Gantz was a core member. The aim is to lay waste to the modern infrastructure of Israel’s neighbours, forcing survivors to eke out a bare existence rather than resist Israel.
The collective punishment inherent in the apocalyptic Dahiya doctrine is an undoubted war crime.
More particularly, the video exults in the destruction of Rafah, a city in Gaza that suffered the most intense bout of bombing after an Israeli soldier was seized by Hamas. In minutes, Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment killed at least 135 Palestinian civilians and wrecked a hospital.
According to investigations, Israel had invoked the Hannibal Procedure, the code name for an order allowing the army to use any means to stop one of its soldiers being taken. That includes killing civilians as “collateral damage” and, more controversially for Israelis, the soldier himself.
Gantz’s video flashes up a grand total of “1,364 terrorists killed”, in return for “three-and-a-half years of quiet”. As Israel’s liberal Haaretz daily observed, the video “celebrates a body count as if this were just some computer game”.
But the casualty figure cited by Gantz exceeds even the Israel army’s self-serving assessment – as well, of course, as dehumanising those “terrorists” fighting for their freedom.
A more impartial observer, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, estimates that the Palestinian fighters killed by Israel amounted to 765. By their reckoning, and that of other bodies such as the United Nations, almost two-thirds of Gazans killed in Israel’s 2014 operation were civilians.
Further, the “quiet” Gantz credits himself with was enjoyed chiefly by Israel.
In Gaza, Palestinians faced regular military attacks, a continuing siege choking off essential supplies and destroying their export industries, and a policy of executions by Israeli snipers firing on unarmed demonstrators at the perimeter fence imprisoning the enclave.
Gantz’s campaign slogans “Only the Strong Wins” and “Israel Before Everything” are telling. Everything, for Gantz, clearly includes human rights.
It is shameful enough that he believes his track record of war crimes will win over voters. But the same approach has been voiced by Israel’s new military chief of staff.
Aviv Kochavi, nicknamed the Philosopher Officer for his university studies, was inaugurated this month as the army’s latest head. In a major speech, he promised to reinvent the fabled “most moral army in the world” into a “deadly, efficient” one.
In Kochavi’s view, the rampaging military once overseen by Gantz needs to step up its game. And he is a proven expert in destruction.
In the early stages of the Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, the Israeli army struggled to find a way to crush Palestinian fighters concealed in densely crowded cities under occupation.
Kochavi came up with an ingenious solution in Nablus, where he was brigade commander. The army would invade a Palestinian home, then smash through its walls, moving from house to house, burrowing through the city unseen. Palestinian space was not only usurped, but destroyed inside-out.
Gantz, the former general hoping to lead the government, and Kochavi, the general leading its army, are symptoms of just how complete the militaristic logic that has overtaken Israel really is. An Israel determined to become a modern-day Sparta.
Should he bring about Netanyahu’s downfall, Gantz, like his predecessor politician-generals, will turn out to be a hollow peace-maker. He was trained to understand only strength, zero-sum strategies, conquest and destruction, not compassion or compromise.
More dangerously, Gantz’s glorification of his military past is likely to reinforce in Israelis’ minds the need not for peace but for more of the same: support for an ultranationalist right that bathes itself in an ethnic supremacist philosophy and dismisses any recognition of the Palestinians as human beings with rights.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is jonathan-cook.net.
Other posts by Jonathan Cook.
Related: 10 dec 2018 Senior Israeli Lawmaker: “The Israeli army has enough bullets for every Palestinian.”
19 oct 2018 Ex-Israel PM: We killed 300 Palestinians in 3 minutes
Before he had issued a single policy statement, polls showed him winning 15 of the 120 parliamentary seats, a welcome sign for those hoping that a centre-left coalition can triumph this time.
But the reality of what Gantz stands for – revealed this week in his first election videos – is far from reassuring.
In 2014, he led Israel into its longest and most savage military operation in living memory: 50 days in which the tiny coastal enclave of Gaza was bombarded relentlessly.
By the end, one of the most densely populated areas on earth – its two million inhabitants already trapped by a lengthy Israeli blockade – lay in ruins.
More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the onslaught, a quarter of them children, while tens of thousands were left homeless.
The world watched, appalled. Investigations by human rights groups such as Amnesty International concluded that Israel had committed war crimes.
One might have assumed that during the election campaign Gantz would wish to draw a veil over this troubling period in his military career. Not a bit of it.
One of his campaign videos soars over the rubble of Gaza, proudly declaring that Gantz was responsible for destroying many thousands of buildings. “Parts of Gaza have been returned to the Stone Age,” the video boasts.
This is a reference to the Dahiya doctrine, a strategy devised by the Israeli military command of which Gantz was a core member. The aim is to lay waste to the modern infrastructure of Israel’s neighbours, forcing survivors to eke out a bare existence rather than resist Israel.
The collective punishment inherent in the apocalyptic Dahiya doctrine is an undoubted war crime.
More particularly, the video exults in the destruction of Rafah, a city in Gaza that suffered the most intense bout of bombing after an Israeli soldier was seized by Hamas. In minutes, Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment killed at least 135 Palestinian civilians and wrecked a hospital.
According to investigations, Israel had invoked the Hannibal Procedure, the code name for an order allowing the army to use any means to stop one of its soldiers being taken. That includes killing civilians as “collateral damage” and, more controversially for Israelis, the soldier himself.
Gantz’s video flashes up a grand total of “1,364 terrorists killed”, in return for “three-and-a-half years of quiet”. As Israel’s liberal Haaretz daily observed, the video “celebrates a body count as if this were just some computer game”.
But the casualty figure cited by Gantz exceeds even the Israel army’s self-serving assessment – as well, of course, as dehumanising those “terrorists” fighting for their freedom.
A more impartial observer, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, estimates that the Palestinian fighters killed by Israel amounted to 765. By their reckoning, and that of other bodies such as the United Nations, almost two-thirds of Gazans killed in Israel’s 2014 operation were civilians.
Further, the “quiet” Gantz credits himself with was enjoyed chiefly by Israel.
In Gaza, Palestinians faced regular military attacks, a continuing siege choking off essential supplies and destroying their export industries, and a policy of executions by Israeli snipers firing on unarmed demonstrators at the perimeter fence imprisoning the enclave.
Gantz’s campaign slogans “Only the Strong Wins” and “Israel Before Everything” are telling. Everything, for Gantz, clearly includes human rights.
It is shameful enough that he believes his track record of war crimes will win over voters. But the same approach has been voiced by Israel’s new military chief of staff.
Aviv Kochavi, nicknamed the Philosopher Officer for his university studies, was inaugurated this month as the army’s latest head. In a major speech, he promised to reinvent the fabled “most moral army in the world” into a “deadly, efficient” one.
In Kochavi’s view, the rampaging military once overseen by Gantz needs to step up its game. And he is a proven expert in destruction.
In the early stages of the Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, the Israeli army struggled to find a way to crush Palestinian fighters concealed in densely crowded cities under occupation.
Kochavi came up with an ingenious solution in Nablus, where he was brigade commander. The army would invade a Palestinian home, then smash through its walls, moving from house to house, burrowing through the city unseen. Palestinian space was not only usurped, but destroyed inside-out.
Gantz, the former general hoping to lead the government, and Kochavi, the general leading its army, are symptoms of just how complete the militaristic logic that has overtaken Israel really is. An Israel determined to become a modern-day Sparta.
Should he bring about Netanyahu’s downfall, Gantz, like his predecessor politician-generals, will turn out to be a hollow peace-maker. He was trained to understand only strength, zero-sum strategies, conquest and destruction, not compassion or compromise.
More dangerously, Gantz’s glorification of his military past is likely to reinforce in Israelis’ minds the need not for peace but for more of the same: support for an ultranationalist right that bathes itself in an ethnic supremacist philosophy and dismisses any recognition of the Palestinians as human beings with rights.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His new website is jonathan-cook.net.
Other posts by Jonathan Cook.
Related: 10 dec 2018 Senior Israeli Lawmaker: “The Israeli army has enough bullets for every Palestinian.”
19 oct 2018 Ex-Israel PM: We killed 300 Palestinians in 3 minutes
20 jan 2019
Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) submitted a joint report to United Nations investigators, last week, detailing Israeli forces’ killing of Palestinian children during mass protests in the Gaza Strip, conduct amounting to war crimes, said DCIP in a press release.
The 57-page report, [pdf] drafted in collaboration with the Human Rights and Gender Justice Law Clinic (HRGJ), at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, provides background and context to mass protests in Gaza, highlights Israeli forces’ unlawful killing of Palestinian child protesters, and details serious violations of international law by Israeli forces.
The report was submitted to the UN Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), which was established during a special session of the UN Human Rights Council in May of 2018.
According to WAFA, the report notes that, of the 56 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the OPT during 2018, a total of 45 children were killed in the Gaza Strip since March 30, according to evidence collected by DCIP. In the overwhelming majority of cases, DCIP was able to confirm that children did not present any imminent, mortal threat or threat of serious injury when killed by Israeli forces.
The report concludes that Israeli forces and officials are responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious violations of international law for the killing of Palestinian child protesters in Gaza.
“Israeli armed forces have regularly been implicated in widespread and systematic human rights violations against Palestinian children, yet systemic impunity is the norm,” said Brad Parker, Senior Adviser, Policy and Advocacy at DCIP. “The Commissioners must pursue accountability by analyzing alleged violations of international criminal law falling within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and naming perpetrators.”
In order to challenge systemic and seemingly perpetual impunity and increase protections for children, DCIP and HRGJ strongly urged the Commission to analyze alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, name specific perpetrators and assign criminal responsibility to higher-ranking Israeli armed forces’ members or other officials, where applicable.
Due to the deteriorating human rights situation in the OPT, the UN Human Rights Council convened a special session on May 18, 2018 in Geneva. The council adopted a resolution creating an independent, international commission of inquiry to investigate all alleged violations of international law in the OPT, in the context of mass protests that began on March 30, 2018.
The “Great March of Return” civilian demonstrations began in the Gaza Strip on March 30, 2018, in protest of Palestinian refugees’ inability to return to properties lost during events surrounding the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and also to demand an end to Israel’s 11-year near total closure of the Gaza Strip.
These mass civilian protests, which have taken place weekly in the area along the Israeli-installed Gaza perimeter fence, or near the Mediterranean shore, have drawn large and diverse crowds of demonstrators, including women, children, and elderly people.
While Israeli authorities have selectively opened their own investigations into several incidents occurring since March 30, Israeli authorities have persistently failed to impartially and independently investigate alleged violations of its armed forces in accordance with international standards, said DCIP.
Children affected by armed conflict are entitled to special respect and protections under international law, but Israeli armed forces have consistently violated these protections through indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks that result in the unlawful killing and maiming of children amounting to war crimes, according to evidence collected by DCIP.
01/02/19 DCIP: 2018 Reigned Deadly Force On Palestinian Children
The 57-page report, [pdf] drafted in collaboration with the Human Rights and Gender Justice Law Clinic (HRGJ), at the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, provides background and context to mass protests in Gaza, highlights Israeli forces’ unlawful killing of Palestinian child protesters, and details serious violations of international law by Israeli forces.
The report was submitted to the UN Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), which was established during a special session of the UN Human Rights Council in May of 2018.
According to WAFA, the report notes that, of the 56 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the OPT during 2018, a total of 45 children were killed in the Gaza Strip since March 30, according to evidence collected by DCIP. In the overwhelming majority of cases, DCIP was able to confirm that children did not present any imminent, mortal threat or threat of serious injury when killed by Israeli forces.
The report concludes that Israeli forces and officials are responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious violations of international law for the killing of Palestinian child protesters in Gaza.
“Israeli armed forces have regularly been implicated in widespread and systematic human rights violations against Palestinian children, yet systemic impunity is the norm,” said Brad Parker, Senior Adviser, Policy and Advocacy at DCIP. “The Commissioners must pursue accountability by analyzing alleged violations of international criminal law falling within the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and naming perpetrators.”
In order to challenge systemic and seemingly perpetual impunity and increase protections for children, DCIP and HRGJ strongly urged the Commission to analyze alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, name specific perpetrators and assign criminal responsibility to higher-ranking Israeli armed forces’ members or other officials, where applicable.
Due to the deteriorating human rights situation in the OPT, the UN Human Rights Council convened a special session on May 18, 2018 in Geneva. The council adopted a resolution creating an independent, international commission of inquiry to investigate all alleged violations of international law in the OPT, in the context of mass protests that began on March 30, 2018.
The “Great March of Return” civilian demonstrations began in the Gaza Strip on March 30, 2018, in protest of Palestinian refugees’ inability to return to properties lost during events surrounding the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and also to demand an end to Israel’s 11-year near total closure of the Gaza Strip.
These mass civilian protests, which have taken place weekly in the area along the Israeli-installed Gaza perimeter fence, or near the Mediterranean shore, have drawn large and diverse crowds of demonstrators, including women, children, and elderly people.
While Israeli authorities have selectively opened their own investigations into several incidents occurring since March 30, Israeli authorities have persistently failed to impartially and independently investigate alleged violations of its armed forces in accordance with international standards, said DCIP.
Children affected by armed conflict are entitled to special respect and protections under international law, but Israeli armed forces have consistently violated these protections through indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks that result in the unlawful killing and maiming of children amounting to war crimes, according to evidence collected by DCIP.
01/02/19 DCIP: 2018 Reigned Deadly Force On Palestinian Children
14 jan 2019
Israeli settlers are advancing plans to expand the illegal settlement of Rahalim, east of Salfit in the central occupied West Bank, at the expense of tens of dunums of private Palestinian agricultural land, local sources said.
Eyewitnesses reported that dozens of Israeli settlers have recently leveled agricultural land in Yasuf and Iskaka towns, east of Salfit, for new settlement units.
According to Palestinian figures, roughly 640,000 Jewish settlers now live on 196 settlements (built with the Israeli government's approval) and more than 200 settler outposts (built without its approval) across the occupied West Bank.
Israel's settlements in the West Bank are a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, according to the UN, which forbids states from transferring their citizens to occupied land, as well as a presumptive war crime under the 1998 Statute of Rome that set up the International Criminal Court.
Eyewitnesses reported that dozens of Israeli settlers have recently leveled agricultural land in Yasuf and Iskaka towns, east of Salfit, for new settlement units.
According to Palestinian figures, roughly 640,000 Jewish settlers now live on 196 settlements (built with the Israeli government's approval) and more than 200 settler outposts (built without its approval) across the occupied West Bank.
Israel's settlements in the West Bank are a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, according to the UN, which forbids states from transferring their citizens to occupied land, as well as a presumptive war crime under the 1998 Statute of Rome that set up the International Criminal Court.
1 jan 2019
Over the course of 2018, the United Nations has voted to adopt some 27 condemnations — the vast majority of which were directed at Israel.
According to Hillel Neuer, executive director of United Nations Watch, 21 of the 27 condemnations were aimed at Israel.
Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russia, Myanmar and the United States each received one.
The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas had none.
Weeks ago, the UN refused to pass a U.S.-led resolution that would have condemned Hamas for allegedly firing on Israel.
According to Hillel Neuer, executive director of United Nations Watch, 21 of the 27 condemnations were aimed at Israel.
Iran, Syria, North Korea, Russia, Myanmar and the United States each received one.
The Islamic Resistance Movement Hamas had none.
Weeks ago, the UN refused to pass a U.S.-led resolution that would have condemned Hamas for allegedly firing on Israel.
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