In Just Eight Days, Israeli Aircraft Attacked Nine Schools In Gaza City

History Has Been Erased, Genocide Normalised And Language Brutalised. 
Mainstream journalism insists that its core function is to investigate the actions of the most powerful people in society.
The BBC’s editorial guidelines state: “We must always scrutinise arguments, question consensus and hold power to account with consistency and due impartiality”.
According to AG Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times: “Journalists hold power to account by exposing corruption and abuse. Journalists reveal injustice and inequality”.
Nowhere has this myth been more thoroughly exposed than in news coverage of the war crimes that have been committed in Gaza since October 7, 2023.

Critics have identified how Palestinians have been consistently dehumanised and marginalised in the media and highlighted the fact that established news outlets have firmly reproduced a consensus on Israel’s unambiguous right to “self-defence”.
History has been erased, genocide normalised and language brutalised when describing massacres as “precision air strikes”.
Much of the criticism of this coverage has understandably focused on the most visible and outrageous examples of bias.
But there’s another side to the problem of the media: the stories that are not covered and the uncomfortable truths (for Israel and its supporters) that are not acknowledged.
( Des Freedman, 21.06.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

Israeli Finance Minister Says His Life’s Mission Is To Thwart The Establishment Of A Palestinian State.
Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, has described in explicit terms his active effort to annex the West Bank in Palestine to Israel, days after the Guardian revealed how the pro-settlement politician and his allies had quietly gained significant new legal powers to that end.
Speaking at a meeting of his Religious Zionism party, Smotrich told colleagues that he was “establishing facts on the ground in order to make Judea and Samaria (an Israeli term for the illegally-occupied West Bank) an integral part of the state of Israel”.
“We will establish sovereignty – first on the ground and then through legislation. I intend to legalise the young settlements (illegal outposts),” Smotrich said in comments reported by Haaretz. “My life’s mission is to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
Annexation and the acquisition of territory by military conquest is forbidden as one of the founding principles of international law including the UN charter.
( Peter Beaumont, 24.06.2024 )  ..  theguardian.com

Palestinian Girl Shot In The Head By Israeli Forces As She Looked Out Of The Window Of Her Home In The Illegally-Occupied West Bank.
A funeral has been held for a 16-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in the north of the illegally-occupied West Bank on the seventh day of a wide-scale Israeli operation.
Lujain Musleh’s father said she was shot in the head as she looked out of a window of her home in Kafr Dan, just outside Jenin, after soldiers surrounded a neighbouring house.
The Palestinian health ministry says 30 Palestinians, including several children, have been killed since Israel launched what it called an operation to dismantle “terrorist cells”.
There has been a spike in violence in the West Bank since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and the ensuing attack on Gaza.
( BBC News, 04.09.2024 )  ..  bbc.co.uk

Why Is A Leading Israeli Lobbyist In The UK’s House Of Lords?
A leading lobbyist who described his appointment to the UK’s House of Lords as a “once in a lifetime opportunity” to advocate for Israel is claiming thousands of pounds in public funds for his parliamentary work.
Stuart Polak, who led the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) for 25 years, has claimed almost £250,000 since he was made a peer by then-Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015.
Polak’s expenses as a member of the House of Lords are entirely legitimate.
Members do not receive a salary but can claim a non-taxable daily attendance allowance of £361 (£342 before April 2024).
They may also opt to claim a reduced allowance or none at all.
But Polak’s place in parliament, and his entitlement to draw on public money while continuing to advocate for Israel, has been called into question at a time when Israeli leaders face accusations of genocide and war crimes over their conduct in the attack on Hamas in Gaza, in which more than 38,000 Palestinians have been killed.

Alan Duncan, a former foreign office minister, raised concerns about CFI’s relationship with the Conservative Party.
He announced that he had been cleared of anti-semitism by a party disciplinary panel and suggested there had been a “witch hunt” against him.
The case against Duncan came after an interview with LBC radio in April 2024, in which he said that CFI was “doing the bidding” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
He also accused Polak of “exercising the interests of another country, not that of the parliament in which he sits” and called for his removal from the House of Lords.

Polak stepped down as head of CFI to take his place in the UK parliament’s unelected upper house as a Conservative peer in 2015.
However, he remains the lobby group’s honorary president and registered director and is still considered to be one of the most important pro-Israel voices in Westminster.
Of the 40 questions he has asked since becoming a member of the House of Lords, only seven have not been related to Palestine, Israel or the Middle East.
Polak has already made three trips to Israel in the first quarter of this year.
The first trip, in January, was described by CFI as a “special solidarity visit” by Conservative parliamentarians and included a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
The trip was funded by the European Leadership Network (Elnet), an organisation created to “counter the widespread criticism of Israel”.
( Simon Hooper and Phil Miller, 19.07.2024 )  ..  middleeasteye.net

U.S. Congress Members And Pro-Israel Donors.
U.S. Congress members who were more supportive of Israel at the start of the attack on Gaza received over $100,000 more on average from pro-Israel donors during their last election than those who most supported Palestine.
Those who took more money most often called for U.S. military support and backed Israel’s response, even as Gaza’s civilian death toll mounted.
About 82% of Congress members were more supportive of Israel, and just 9% more supportive of Palestine during this period.
The remainder had “mixed” views.The volume and breadth of the donors’ spending is considerable: over $58million went to current Congress members, and all but 33 received donations.
If there was no lobby pushing Congress in a particular direction, the position of the U.S. Congress on the attack on Gaza would, without doubt, be very different.
( The Guardian, 10.01.2024 )  ..  theguardian.com

UN Human Rights Experts Accuse Israeli Soldiers Of “Deliberate Targeting And Extrajudicial Killing” Of Palestinian Women And Children In Gaza.
A group of United Nations human rights experts denounced the Israeli military on for “credible” allegations of execution and sexual assault against Palestinians in Gaza.
The independent experts affiliated with the U.N. Human Rights Council said the allegations constitute “egregious human rights violations,” adding to criticisms of the Israeli attack on Gaza.

They also condemned the “arbitrary detention” of hundreds of Palestinian women and children with “inhuman and degrading treatment,” including going without medical supplies and food.

“We are particularly distressed by reports that Palestinian women and girls in detention have also been subjected to multiple forms of sexual assault, such as being stripped naked and searched by male Israeli army officers,” the experts said.
“At least two female Palestinian detainees were reportedly raped while others were reportedly threatened with rape and sexual violence.”
Photographs of women in degrading circumstances had been distributed online by Israeli soldiers.
( Nick Robertson, 19.02.2024 )  ..  thehill.com

Mainstream Media Ignores UK Military Support For Israel.
Straight after October 7, 2023, mainstream journalists were quick to promote the deployment of planes and personnel to support “our ally” in the region.
While the Sun newspaper splashed photos of British jets and frigates heading to the eastern Mediterranean with the headline “United We Stand”, the BBC basically reproduced a Ministry of Defence press release in its story, “UK to deploy Royal Navy ships to Middle East to ‘bolster security’.”
On December 2, 2023, the Ministry of Defence released a short statement on UK military activity in the region, ostensibly to secure the release of (only) Israeli hostages.

The BBC, along with other news outlets, immediately ran a story repeating the MoD’s words verbatim (with a sprinkling of additional text from the Pentagon) as if these were to be innocent “surveillance flights” despite the fact that over 15,000 Palestinians had already been killed in brutal air strikes since October 7, 2023.
This was followed by a flurry of highly bullish coverage of two further military interventions directly related to bolstering UK support for Israel – evidence of the “extensive defence and security cooperation” between the two countries that was embedded in the ‘Roadmap’ agreement signed in 2023 (and ignored by the media).

First, a series of gung-ho stories earlier this year celebrated UK participation in the US-led air strikes against Houthi groups targeting ships in the Red Sea linked to Israel.
Second, there was no shortage of headlines welcoming the deployment of British Typhoons from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus to shoot down Iranian drones launched in response to Israel’s strike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus in April.
The objective, as several headlines put it, was to “protect Israel” even if it meant further destabilisation of the wider region.
But other than those stories on active military operations against the Houthis and Iranian drones, there have been very few pieces in the UK media exploring the underbelly of British military relations with Israel.
( Des Freedman, 21.06.2024 ) ..  declassifieduk.org

In Just Eight Days, Israeli Aircraft Attacked Nine Schools In Gaza City.
The Israeli army is increasingly targeting schools that provide shelter for the displaced population in Gaza City, killing and wounding hundreds of them in the process.
It has also issued orders for the illegal forced evacuation of Gaza from the north to the south, in a systematic effort fueled by revenge to drive residents from their homes and places of displacement and rob them of any stability.
In just eight days, Israeli aircraft attacked nine schools in Gaza City that served as shelters for thousands of displaced people.
They destroyed the schools above the heads of the occupants, killing 79 Palestinians and injuring 143 more, mostly women and children, in addition to several other victims who were buried beneath the rubble and could not be retrieved due to the lack of the necessary tools.
( Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, 09.08.2024 )  ..  euromedmonitor.org

We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel.
It was always a settler colonial project.
And like other settler colonial projects – from the U.S. and Australia to South Africa and Algeria – it always viewed the native people as inferior, as non-human, as animals, and was bent on their elimination.
What is so obviously true today was true then too, at Israel’s birth. Israel was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin.
We in the West abetted its crimes in 1948, and we’re still abetting them today.
Nothing has changed, except the excuses no longer work.
( Johnathan Cook, 08.08.2024 )  ..  johnathan-cook.net

Israeli Finance Minister Implies It Might Be Justified And Moral To Cause Two Million Palestinians In Gaza To Die Of Hunger.
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich implies he believes that blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is “justified and moral” even if it causes 2 million civilians to die of hunger, adding however that the international community won’t allow this to happen.
“We are bringing in aid because there is no choice,” Smotrich says at a conference in Yad Binyamin hosted by the Israel Hayom outlet.
“We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned. Humanitarian in exchange for humanitarian is morally justified, but what can we do? We live today in a certain reality, we need international legitimacy for this war.”
( The Times of Israel, 05.08.2024 )  ..  timesofisrael.com

The Israeli army ordered the Hannibal Directive – a controversial Israeli military policy aimed at preventing the capture of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces at any cost – on October 7, 2023, an investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has revealed.
In a report, the newspaper, based on testimonies of Israeli soldiers and senior army officers, said that during Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, the Israeli army started making decisions with limited and unverified information, and issued an order that “not a single vehicle can return to Gaza”.

“At this point, the Israeli army was not aware of the extent of kidnapping along the Gaza border, but it did know that many people were involved. Thus, it was entirely clear what that message meant, and what the fate of some of the kidnapped people would be,” the report said.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas captured dozens of Israelis, many of whom are still in captivity or have been killed in Israeli air strikes on Gaza, according to the Palestinian resistance group.
But many of those captured were civilians and not soldiers, to whom the Hannibal Directive does not apply.
The death toll in Israel from the Hamas-led attacks is estimated to be 1,139, while nearly 250 others were taken as captives, Israeli authorities say.
( Al Jazeera, 07.07.2024 )  ..  aljazeera.com

Arms for Israel have been quietly shipped through British airspace amid the genocidal war in Gaza.
Items sent on the Israel-bound planes have included sniper ammunition, explosives for use in military aircraft, and detonators.
The total weight of the cargo amounts to over 55 tonnes.

All of the eight flights identified by Declassified departed from JFK International Airport in New York, entering Britain’s sovereign airspace over Wales and exiting it over Dover.
The flights then passed through Liège, Belgium, before reaching their final destination in Tel Aviv.
They were all operated by the Challenge Airlines group, which has a base in Israel.

Flights carrying dangerous goods or munitions of war through British airspace typically require special clearance from the Civil Aviation Authority.
This indicates that the UK government has greenlit the passage of numerous arms shipments to Israel since the Gaza bombing began.
The eight arms shipments to Israel which passed through British airspace took place between October 2023 and March 2024.
( John McEvoy, 04.09.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org