Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, November 26, 2023

   

BAY AREA

#CEASEFIRE MASS MEETING

Sunday, November 26

10:00 A.M. – 3:00 P.M.

Bay Resistance, Center for Political Education, APTP and AROC invite you to connect with allies and community to move into forceful action to stop the genocide in Gaza.

In this critical moment, we offer this mass meeting space to get clear on messaging and deepen our shared understanding of our organizing strategy. There will be space for political education, training on organizing skills, action planning, and spaces for arts and culture.

This event is open to everyone to get plugged in, including new people who want to learn more about this movement and activists who want to find ways to do more. We’ll have special breakout sessions for families and parents organizing at schools and in their districts.

Stay tuned for an RSVP link coming soon!  Check HERE for updated details:

https://www.facebook.com/events/267145765886103

Take Urgent Action Now!

Call Congress to Demand a Ceasefire Now!

https://act.uscpr.org/a/callforgaza?oa_ext=AROC

Email Congress to demand a Ceasefire Now!

https://act.uscpr.org/a/stop-funding-israels-massacres?oa_ext=AROC

AROC is the only organization in Northern California that builds power for our SWANA people by providing critical legal support and social services while organizing our community around issues of justice and equity.

Our team invites you to be part of the fabric that holds our work together, in the spirit of takkaful, by donating to our organization today:

https://araborganizing.networkforgood.com/projects/100246-main-giving-page

Donate to AROC:

https://araborganizing.networkforgood.com/projects/100246-main-giving-page

Copyright © 2023 Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), All rights reserved.

You are receiving this email because you have expressed interest in AROC news and events.

Our mailing address is:

Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC)

522 Valencia Street

San Francisco, CA 94110

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"The Rock" on top of Bernal Hill overlooking downtown San Francisco re-painted October 26, 2023, after pro-Israeli Zionist's destroyed it. 

Palestinians killed and wounded by Israel:

As of November 26, 2023, the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel is now over 14,854 (over 6,150 are children and 36,000 are wounded)—and more than 226 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the occupied West Bank in the past month. 

The U.N. humanitarian affairs office estimates that about 2,700 people, including 1,500 children, are missing and believed buried in the ruins. 

8,300 Palestinians are being held in Israeli prisons.

Since October 7, one in every 57 Palestinians living in Gaza has been killed or injured in Israel’s airstrikes and ground invasion.

Israelis killed and abducted by Hamas: 

A total of 1,200* Israelis killed by Hamas (30 of them children) and 239 abducted on October 7, 2023.

* Israel has revised its official estimated death toll of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, lowering the number to about 1,200 people, down from more than 1,400, a spokesman for the country’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday night.

NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!

FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA  PALESTINE WILL BE FREE!

END ALL U.S. AID TO ISRAEL!

FOR A DEMOCRATIC, SECULAR PALESTINE!

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Protesters calling for ceasefire in Gaza take over base of the Statue of Liberty

Hundreds of protesters affiliated with the group Jewish Voice for Peace staged a sit-in at the National Park Service site at 1:00 P.M., Monday, November 6, 2023 to call for a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2023/11/06/protesters-statue-liberty-gaza-israel-ceasefire

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Ann Boyer’s Powerful New York Times Resignation Letter

November 17, 2023

Read: The War Turns Gaza Into a ‘Graveyard’ for Children, By Raja Abdulrahim, Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud, Nov. 18, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/world/middleeast/gaza-children-israel.html

According to Literary Hub[1], "[Early on November 16, 2023], the news broke that Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, and poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine, Anne Boyer, has resigned from her post, writing in her resignation letter that 'the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone...'"

 

The letter in full is written below:

 

"I have resigned as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine.

"The Israeli state’s U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names. Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.

"The world, the future, our hearts—everything grows smaller and harder from this war. It is not only a war of missiles and land invasions. It is an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted throughout decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.

"Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.

"I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.

"If this resignation leaves a hole in the news the size of poetry, then that is the true shape of the present."

—Anne Boyer

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[1] https://lithub.com/read-anne-boyers-extraordinary-resignation-letter-from-the-new-york-times/

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Viva Fidel!

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PLEASE SIGN AND FORWARD WIDELY!

 

To endorse the following statement as a trade unionist, please click here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd2tpd2c62Sh5YEVDOr2vmGWTuQArt-6OPQMDwd2wUnfNi_rQ/viewform

 

To endorse as other, please click here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdzWaP1U_KOHlH-ou1R3OD8zsuI5BWW1b9H4gtPoFK_lIQB3g/viewform

 

The list of signers will be updated periodically

Contact: info@laborforpalestine.net

Website: laborforpalestine.net

 

Stand With Palestinian Workers: 

Cease the Genocide Now—Stop Arming Israel!

Labor for Palestine

 

“We need you to take immediate action—wherever you are in the world—to prevent the arming of the Israeli state and the companies involved in the infrastructure of the blockade.” An Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel (October 16, 2023)

 

The undersigned U.S. workers, trade unionists, and anti-apartheid activists join labor around the world in condemning the Israeli siege on Gaza that has killed or maimed thousands of Palestinians—many of them children—and stand with Palestinians’ “right to exist, resist, return, and self-determination.”

 

The latest Israeli attacks reflect more than a century of ongoing Zionist settler-colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, racism, genocide, and apartheid—including Israel’s establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba. Indeed, eighty percent of the 2.3 million people in Gaza are refugees from other parts of historic Palestine.

 

Israel’s crimes are only possible because of more than $3.8 billion a year (or $10+ million per day) in bipartisan US military aid that gives Israel the guns, bullets, tanks, ships, jet fighters, missiles, helicopters, white phosphorus and other weapons to kill and maim the Palestinian people. This is the same system of racist state violence that, through shared surveillance technology and police exchange programs, brutalizes BIPOC and working class people in the United States and around the world.

 

In response, we demand an immediate end to the genocide, and embrace the recent Urgent Call from Palestinian Trade Unions: End all Complicity, Stop Arming Israel:

 

1.     To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel. To refuse to transport weapons to Israel. 

 

2.     To pass motions in their trade union to this effect. 

 

3.     To take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution. 

 

4.     Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and in the case of the U.S., funding to it.

 

We further reaffirm the call on labor bodies to respect previous Palestinian trade union appeals for solidarity by adopting this statement, and/or the model resolution below to divest from Israel Bonds, sever all ties with the Israel’s racist labor federation, the Histadrut, and its US mouthpiece, the Jewish Labor Committee, and respect the Palestinian picket line for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). 

 

Initial Signers on behalf of Labor for Palestine

(organizational affiliations listed for identification only)

Suzanne Adely, Labor for Palestine, US Palestinian Community Network, Arab Workers Resource Center; Food Chain Workers Alliance (staff); President, National Lawyers Guild; Monadel Herzallah, Arab American Union Members Council; Ruth Jennison, Department Rep., Massachusetts Society of Professors, MTA, NEA; Co-Chair, Labor Standing Committee River Valley DSA; Delegate to Western Mass Area Labor Federation; Lara Kiswani, Executive Director, Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC); Block the Boat; Michael Letwin, Former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; Jews for Palestinian Right of Return; Corinna Mullin, PSC-CUNY International Committee; CUNY for Palestine; Clarence Thomas, Co-Chair, Million Worker March; Executive Board, ILWU Local 10 (retired.)

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Jewish Doctor Speaks Out on Israel and Palestine

Dr. Gabor Maté, Hungarian-Canadian physician and author describes his own life experience and expresses his view on the situation in Israel and Palestine.

“I’m personally a Holocaust survivor as an infant, I barely survived. My grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and most of my extended family were killed. I became a Zionist; this dream of the Jewish people resurrected in their historical homeland and the barbed wire of Auschwitz being replaced by the boundaries of a Jewish state with a powerful army…and then I found out that it wasn’t exactly like that, that in order to make this Jewish dream a reality we had to visit a nightmare on the local population.

“There’s no way you could have ever created a Jewish state without oppressing and expelling the local population. Jewish Israeli historians have shown without a doubt that the expulsion of Palestinians was persistent, pervasive, cruel, murderous and with deliberate intent—that’s what’s called the ‘Nakba’ in Arabic; the ‘disaster’ or the ‘catastrophe.’ There’s a law that you cannot deny the Holocaust, but in Israel you’re not allowed to mention the Nakba, even though it’s at the very basis of the foundation of Israel.

“I visited the Occupied Territories (West Bank) during the first intifada. I cried every day for two weeks at what I saw; the brutality of the occupation, the petty harassment, the murderousness of it, the cutting down of Palestinian olive groves, the denial of water rights, the humiliations...and this went on, and now it’s much worse than it was then.

“It’s the longest ethnic cleansing operation in the 20th and 21st century. I could land in Tel Aviv tomorrow and demand citizenship but my Palestinian friend in Vancouver, who was born in Jerusalem, can’t even visit!

“So, then you have these miserable people packed into this, horrible…people call it an ‘outdoor prison,’ which is what it is. You don’t have to support Hamas policies to stand up for Palestinian rights, that’s a complete falsity. You think the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by a thousand times, and it still will not meet the Israeli repression and killing and dispossession of Palestinians.

“And ‘anybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite’ is simply an egregious attempt to intimidate good non-Jews who are willing to stand up for what is true.”

—Independent Catholic News, October 16, 2023

https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/48251

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TERRORISM IN THE EYES OF THE IMPERIAL BEHOLDER - a poem

 

the French word

for rabies

is

la rage -

rage or outrage

 

and 

the French have a saying -

a man who wants to get rid of his dog

accuses it of spreading rabies

 

the people of Gaza

treated as inhuman animals

worse than dogs

are charged

with terrorism

 

come to think of it

what an honor !

 

world war two's resistance

against nazi extermination

was designated

as terrorism

by the Axis allies

 

what an honor !

 

Mandela

was monitored

as a terrorist

by the CIA

 

What an honor !

 

Tortuguita

peacefully meditating

near Israeli-funded cop city

was executed

in cold blood

on suspicion

of domestic terrorism 

 

What an honor !

 

in the spirit of Mandela

in the spirit of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising

in the spirit of Tortuguita

in the spirit of Attica

may the anti colonial outrage

of the People of Palestine

contaminate us all -

the only epidemic

worth dying for

 

 (c) Julia Wright. October 17 2023. All Rights Reserved To The family of Wadea Al- Fayoume.

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The ongoing Zionist theft of Palestinian land from 1946 to now.

77 years of brutal oppression must end!

End all U.S. aid to Israel now!

For a democratic, secular Palestine!

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Leonard Peltier’s Letter Delivered to Supporters on September 12, 2023, in Front of the Whitehouse

 

Dear friends, relatives, supporters, loved ones:

 

Seventy-nine years old. Mother Earth has taken us on another journey around Grandfather Sun.  Babies have taken their first breath. People have lived, loved, and died. Seeds have been planted and sent their roots deep below red earth and their breath to the Stars and our Ancestors.

 

I am still here.

 

Time has twisted one more year out of me. A year that has been a moment.  A year that has been a lifetime. For almost five decades I’ve existed in a cage of concrete and steel.  With the “good time” calculations of the system, I’ve actually served over 60 years.

 

Year after year, I have encouraged you to live as spirit warriors. Even while in here, I can envision what is real and far beyond these walls.  I’ve seen a reawakening of an ancient Native pride that does my heart good.

 

I may leave this place in a box. That is a cold truth. But I have put my heart and soul into making our world a better place and there is a lot of work left to do – I would like to get out and do it with you.

 

I know that the spirit warriors coming up behind me have the heart and soul to fight racism and oppression, and to fight the greed that is poisoning our lands, waters, and people. 

 

We are still here.

 

Remember who you are, even if they come for your land, your water, your family. We are children of Mother Earth and we owe her and her other children our care.

 

I long to turn my face to the sky. In this cage, I am denied that simple pleasure. I am in prison, but in my mind, I remain as I was born: a free Native spirit.

 

That is what allows me to laugh, keeps me laughing. These walls cannot contain my laughter – or my hope.

 

I know there are those who stand with me, who work around the clock for my freedom. I have been blessed to have such friends.

 

We are still here and you give me hope. 

 

I hope to breathe free air before I die. Hope is a hard thing to hold, but no one is strong enough to take it from me. 

 

I love you. I hope for you. I pray for you. 

 

And prayer is more than a cry to the Creator that runs through your head.  Prayer is an action.

 

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

DOKSHA, 

LEONARD PELTIER

Write to:

Leonard Peltier 89637-132

USP Coleman 1

P.O. Box 1033

Coleman, FL 33521

Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.

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Free Julian Assange

Immediate Repeated Action Needed to Free Assange

 

Please call your Congressional Representatives, the White House, and the DOJ. Calls are tallied—they do count.  We are to believe we are represented in this country.  This is a political case, so our efforts can change things politically as well.  Please take this action as often as you can:

 

Find your representatives:

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

 

Leave each of your representatives a message individually to: 

·      Drop the charges against Julian Assange

·      Speak out publicly against the indictment and

·      Sign on to Rashida Tlaib's letter to the DOJ to drop the charges: 

           202-224-3121—Capitol Main Switchboard 

 

Leave a message on the White House comment line to 

Demand Julian Assange be pardoned: 

             202-456-1111

             Tuesday–Thursday, 11:00 A.M.–3:00 P.M. EST

 

Call the DOJ and demand they drop the charges against Julian Assange:

             202-353-1555—DOJ Comment Line

             202-514-2000 Main Switchboard 

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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!

FREE HIM NOW!

Write to Mumia at:

Smart Communications/PADOC

Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335

SCI Mahanoy

P.O. Box 33028

St. Petersburg, FL 33733

Poetic Petition to Genocide Joe Before He Eats His Turkey 

By Julia Wright

 

Mr Genocide Joe

you have helped broker

a Thanksgiving truce

in Gaza

where your zionist partners

in war crimes

say they will stop

slaughtering "human animals"

for four days

 

but

Mr Genocide Joe

closer to home

you have your own hostages

taken in the cointelpro wars

who still languish

in cages

treated worse than animals

inhumanely

 

so

as you pardon

two turkeys

in the White House today

as you get ready to eat your military turkey

and have it too

it would at last be time

to unchain

at least two of your own "human animals" -

Mumia Abu-Jamal

and

Leonard Peltier

 

(c) Julia Wright. November 25, 2023. All Rights Reserved to Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier.

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A Plea for the Compassionate Release of 

Leonard Peltier

Self Portrait by Leonard Peltier

Video at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWdJdODKO6M&feature=youtu.be

Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier.

 

https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition

 

Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info

Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603

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Updates From Kevin Cooper 

March 23, 2023 

Dear Friends and Comrades, 

This is Kevin Cooper writing and sending this update to you in 'Peace & Solidarity'. First and foremost I am well and healthy, and over the ill effect(s) that I went through after that biased report from MoFo, and their pro prosecution and law enforcement experts. I am back working with my legal team from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP.

'We' have made great progress in refuting all that those experts from MoFo came up with by twisting the truth to fit their narrative, or omitting things, ignoring, things, and using all the other tactics that they did to reach their conclusions. Orrick has hired four(4) real experts who have no questionable backgrounds. One is a DNA attorney, like Barry Scheck of the innocence project in New York is for example. A DNA expert, a expect to refute what they say Jousha Ryen said when he was a child, and his memory. A expect on the credibility of MoFo's experts, and the attorney's at Orrick are dealing with the legal issues.

This all is taking a little longer than we first expected it to take, and that in part is because 'we' have to make sure everything is correct in what we have in our reply. We cannot put ourselves in a situation where we can be refuted... Second, some of our experts had other things planned, like court cases and such before they got the phone call from Rene, the now lead attorney of the Orrick team. With that being said, I can say that our experts, and legal team have shown, and will show to the power(s) that be that MoFo's DNA expert could not have come to the conclusion(s) that he came to, without having used 'junk science'! They, and by they I mean my entire legal team, including our experts, have done what we have done ever since Orrick took my case on in 2004, shown that all that is being said by MoFo's experts is not true, and we are once again having to show what the truth really is.

Will this work with the Governor? Who knows... 'but' we are going to try! One of our comrades, Rebecca D.   said to me, 'You and Mumia'...meaning that my case and the case of Mumia Abu Jamal are cases in which no matter what evidence comes out supporting our innocence, or prosecution misconduct, we cannot get a break. That the forces in the so called justice system won't let us go. 'Yes' she is correct about that sad to say...

Our reply will be out hopefully in the not too distant future, and that's because the people in Sacramento have been put on notice that it is coming, and why. Every one of you will receive our draft copy of the reply according to Rene because he wants feedback on it. Carole and others will send it out once they receive it. 'We' were on the verge of getting me out, and those people knew it, so they sabotaged what the Governor ordered them to do, look at all the evidence as well as the DNA evidence. They did not do that, they made this a DNA case, by doing what they did, and twisted the facts on the other issues that they dealt with.   'more later'...

In Struggle & Solidarity,

An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:

Mr. Kevin Cooper

C-65304. 4-EB-82

San Quentin State Prison

San Quentin, CA 94974

 

 

Call California Governor Newsom:

1-(916) 445-2841

Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish, 

press 6 to speak with a representative and

wait for someone to answer 

(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)

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Letter from Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

November 6, 2023

      I’m back at Red Onion. I have no lines of communication. They have me in the B-3 torture cellblock again where there is no access to a kiosk and they’re withholding my tablet anyway. Even if I had it, it’s no use with no kiosk to sync it to and send/receive messages.

      This was a hit. Came from DOC HQ in response folks complaining about my being thrown in solitary at Sussex and the planted knife thing. Kyle Rosch was in on it. The warden and AW here said he’s having me sent back out of state. In any case I don’t want be in this racist trap.

      They cut all my outstanding medical referrals to send here cuz there’s no major medical facility in this remote region. I was pending referral to the cardiac clinic at MCV hospital (Medical College of Virginia), which is on the other side of the state. Also was pending referral to urology there. They were supposed to do testing for congestive heart failure and kidney problems related to my legs, feet, and ankles chronic swelling, and other undiagnosed issues: chronic cough, fluid weight gain, sweats, fatigue, chest pain. They just cut these referrals all of which I have copies of from my medical files.

      They’ve been removing documents from my file too. Like the order I had for oversize handcuffs—which I was gassed the morning I was transferred here for asking the transferring pigs to honor. They took the order out of my file to try to cover their asses. I and others have copies of that too. At this point things are hectic. I’m back in old form now. I was somewhat in hiatus, trying to get the medical care I needed and not provoking them to avoid the bs while that was going on. But the bs has found me once again : ). I need all possible help here. At a level a bit more intense than in the past cuz I need that diagnostic care they cut the referrals for and it’s not available in this remote area. They’d have to send me back to Sussex or another prison near MCU in the VDOC’s Central or Eastern Region. I’m in the most remote corner of the Western Region. My health is not good! And they’re using the medical quack staff here to rubber stamp blocking my referrals.

      Although that lawyer may have given you a message from me, she is not helping me in any way. So no-one should assume because a lawyer surfaced that she is working on anything to aid me. Just have to emphasize that cuz past experience has shown that folks will take a lawyer’s seeming presence as grounds to believe that means some substantial help is here and their help is not needed. Again, I need all possible help here….My health depends on this call for help in a more immediate sense than the cancer situation. I’m having breathing and mobility problems, possibly cardiac related.

 

      All power to the people!

Rashid

 

We need to contact these Virginia Department of Corrections personnel to protest:: 

 

VADOC~ Central Administration; USPS—P.O. Box 26963; Richmond, VA 23261

David  Robinson Phone : 804-887-8078, Email~david.robinson@vadoc.virginia.gov

Virginia DOC ~ Director, Chadwick S Dotson, Phone~ (804) 674-3081 Email~Chadwick.Dotson@.vadoc.virginia.gov

 

Virginia Department of Corrections Interstate Compact Liaison

Kyle Rosch, Phone: 804-887-8404, Email: kyle.rosch@vadoc.virginia.gov

 

VADOC ~Central Administration

Rose L. Durbin, Phone~804-887-7921Email~Rose.Durbin@vadoc.virgina.gov

 

Red Onion~ Warden, Richard E White, USPS—10800 H. Jack Rose Hwy., Pound, VA 24279

Phone: (276) 796-3536;(or 7510)  Email~ rick.white@vadoc.virginia.gov

 

Red Onion State Prison, Assistant Warden

Shannon Fuller Phone: 276-796-7510  Email: shannon.fuller@VADOC.virginia.gov

 

Write to Rashid: 

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson #1007485 

Red Onion State Prison

10800 H. Jack Rose Hwy

Pound, VA 24279

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The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system. 

See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:

https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings

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Sign the petition:

https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/

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Tell Congress to Help #FreeDanielHale

 

I’m pleased to announce that last week our client, Daniel Hale, was awarded the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence. The “Corner-Brightener Candlestick” was presented to Daniel’s friend Noor Mir. You can watch the online ceremony here. As it happens, this week is also the 20th anniversary of the first drone assassination in Yemen. From the beginning, the drone assassination program has been deeply shrouded in secrecy, allowing U.S. officials to hide significant violations of international law, and the American Constitution. In addition to the lives directly impacted by these strikes, the program has significantly eroded respect for international law and thereby puts civilians around the world in danger. Daniel Hale’s revelations threw a beam of light into a very dark corner, allowing journalists to definitively show that the government's official narrative was a lie. It is thanks to the great personal sacrifice of drone whistleblowers like Hale that public understanding has finally begun to catch up to reality. As the Sam Adams Associates note:  “Mr. Hale was well aware of the cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment to which other courageous officials have been subjected — and that he would likely suffer the same. And yet — in the manner of his famous ancestor Nathan Hale — he put his country first, knowing what awaited him at the hands of those who serve what has become a repressive Perpetual War State wreaking havoc upon much of the world.” We hope you’ll join the growing call to pardon or commute Hale’s sentence. U.S. citizens can contact your representatives here.

Happy new year, and thank you for your support! Jesselyn Radack Director Whistleblower & Source Protection Program (WHISPeR) ExposeFacts Twitter: @JesselynRadack

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Laws are created to be followed

by the poor.

Laws are made by the rich

to bring some order to exploitation.

The poor are the only law abiders in history.

When the poor make laws

the rich will be no more.

 

—Roque Dalton Presente!

(May 14, 1935 – Assassinated May 10, 1975)[1]

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[1] Roque Dalton was a Salvadoran poet, essayist, journalist, political activist, and intellectual. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets.

Poems: 

http://cordite.org.au/translations/el-salvador-tragic/

About: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roque_Dalton

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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression

https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/

 

Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests. 

 

The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page. 

 

Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.

 

Emergency Hotlines

If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities. 

 

State and Local Hotlines

If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for: 

 

Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312

San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org

Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963

National Hotline

If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:

 

National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811

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Articles

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1) ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ Day 48: Ahead of temporary ceasefire, Israeli forces continue to terrorize hospitals

Israel is taking the opportunity to heavily bomb the Gaza Strip before the temporary ceasefire takes effect, forcibly evacuating the Indonesian hospital, arresting hospital staff, and obstructing ambulances.

BY LEILA WARAH,  NOVEMBER 23, 2023

https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/operation-al-aqsa-flood-day-48-ahead-of-temporary-ceasefire-israeli-forces-continue-to-terrorize-hospitals/

 

Casualties 

 

14,100 killed*, including 5,840 children, and 32,850 wounded in Gaza Strip.

226 Palestinians killed in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem

 

Israel revises its estimated October 7 death toll down from 1,400 to 1,200

 

*This figure covers the casualties from October 7 to November 22. Due to breakdowns in communication networks within the Gaza Strip (particularly in northern Gaza), the Gaza Ministry of Health has not been able to regularly update its tolls.

 

Key developments 

 

Qatari-mediated four-day ceasefire delayed until Friday. 

Over 60 percent of Gaza’s buildings damaged by Israeli bombardment, says Gaza’s media office.  

Number of medical personnel killed since October 7 reaches 205, says Gaza government media office.  

Number of people displaced since October 7 reaches 1.5 million people, according to Gaza government media office.  

Five Hezbollah members killed in Israeli airstrike in Lebanon on Thursday evening, reports Reuters. 

Israeli forces arrest director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City along with several other healthcare workers, AFP reports, citing Khalid Abu Samra, a department chief at the hospital.

Palestinian photojournalist Mohammad Moin Ayyash killed by Israeli airstrikes, along with a number of family members, according to Al Jazeera. 

Izz al-Din Mustafa al-Hafi, 18, shot dead by Israeli forces during raid in Balata refugee camp east of Nablus.

Israeli forces kill 46-year-old Khaded al-Sayyeh Ulawn at entrance to the village of Burqa, east of Ramallah, reports Wafa.

Christmas in Bethlehem canceled “in mourning and in honor” of the Palestinians killed in Gaza, says city municipality. 

Obama-era deputy director of the State Department’s Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs, Stuart Seldowitz, arrested following viral video of him repeatedly harassing and threatening halal food vendor.

Hospitals: ‘an area of destruction and killing’ 

 

The four-day Qatar-mediated temporary ceasefire did not come into effect as expected on Thursday morning as Israeli bombardment continued across the Gaza Strip for the 48th consecutive day, killing tens of people. 

 

As eyes are focused on the upcoming temporary ceasefire, Israel is continuing to “commit crimes” against the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza, according to Ismail al-Thawabta, director general of the government media office in Gaza. 

 

The Israeli military told everyone seeking refuge inside the hospital on Thursday morning to evacuate within four hours. Sarbini Abdul Murad, the head of the Indonesian charity, Medical Emergency Rescue Committee (MER-C), explained to Al Jazeera that the hospital has since been emptied.

 

“The doctors and the wounded were moved to the European Hospital. Our volunteers are sheltering at a school with thousands of others,” Murad said. 

 

Meanwhile, Al-Thawabta added that the Israeli military is still occupying al-Shifa Hospital and has turned it into a “military barracks, a mass grave, and area of destruction and killing.”

 

On Thursday, Israeli forces arrested the director of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City along with several other healthcare workers. 

 

“Doctor Mohammad Abu Salmiya was arrested along with several other senior doctors,” Khalid Abu Samra, a chief of the department at the hospital, told the AFP news agency.

 

On Wednesday, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) evacuated 190 wounded and sick people, their companions, and several medical teams from Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. However, the organization says many other injured along with their companions and medical staff are still in the hospital to this day.

 

Ambulances have also been a target of the Israeli military, especially those evacuating patients from northern hospitals to the south. 

 

“The evacuation process lasted for almost twenty hours as the convoy was obstructed and subjected to careful inspection while passing through the checkpoint that separates northern and southern Gaza, hence putting the lives of the wounded and sick people in danger,” PRCS said.

 

Temporary ceasefire postponed 

 

Despite the confusion regarding the temporary ceasefire due to its delay, Haaretz has clarified it is still scheduled to take place. 

 

There would be “no halt to the fighting in the Gaza Strip as long as there is no finalized timeline for the agreement with Hamas,” the Israeli news outlet reported.  

 

The agreement concerns a prisoner exchange that is set to take place during the ceasefire — 150 Palestinian women and children will be released from Israeli prisons in exchange for 50 captives held in Gaza.  

 

Daniel Hagari, the Israeli military spokesperson, called the agreement a “complex process that may take time” and has many stages. In light of the confusion, National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson clarified that the deal between Hamas and Israel “was agreed and remains agreed.” 

 

She is “hopeful that implementation will begin on Friday morning,” Watson told CNN. “The parties are working out final logistical details, particularly for the first day of implementation.” 

 

On Thursday afternoon, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majid al-Ansari told the Qatari News Agency that the exact time of the ceasefire would be announced “within hours” and that talks were “continuing in a positive way.”

 

Many international leaders are relieved to see the temporary truce and hope it will be extended, including U.S. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who “strongly supports” the brief pause in fighting in Gaza. 

 

Warren urged all parties “to extend this agreement and work to achieve an enduring end to this fighting,” calling for a possible extension of the ceasefire. 

 

“We need unfettered access to humanitarian aid and security guarantees throughout Gaza to support a long-term recovery,” said Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norweigan Refugee Council, in a statement. “A sustained ceasefire is needed to prevent further civilian deaths and provide safety for people in need of vital humanitarian assistance.”

 

“Children are traumatized, and many face a future without their parents and siblings. They need urgent, long-term help. This can only happen through a sustained ceasefire,” Egeland added, describing Gaza as the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.

 

Nebal Farsakh, the spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent, told Al Jazeera that while the distribution of aid will finally be possible during the pause, the amount of fuel that enters the Gaza Strip, if any, will be limited. 

 

“We have not been notified that fuel will be allowed to get in, particularly to…hospitals,” Farsakh said. “What we have been told, a number of trucks that have fuel will be allowed to get into the work of water and sanitation networks, but not for hospitals.”

 

Around 400 trucks will be allowed in during the four-day humanitarian pause, according to Faraskh — an increase from the 42 convoys per day but still less than the 500 trucks per day that entered Gaza before October 7. 

 

“A pause will have little worth if the killing resumes in a few days. The international community must use this brief window of opportunity to work towards a permanent ceasefire and an end to the siege,” warned Islamic Relief, a Canadian humanitarian group.

 

Despite hopes for a permanent ceasefire, top Israeli politicians made it clear they have no intention to end their war on Gaza, during a press conference in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. 

 

“The war continues. We will continue this war until all our objectives have been met, including the return of our captives and the elimination of Hamas and ensuring that the day after Hamas, Gaza will not be under the control of any party that engages in terrorism or teaches terrorism,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

 

Israel’s Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, vowed to continue fighting following the truce. Gallant said Israel would “ deepen our operations and we will do everything that is necessary” to increase pressure on Hamas and liberate more captives. 

 

“The operation is very delicate, the operation is resolute, and the operation is lethal,” he asserted, adding that Israel was “succeeding in dismantling Hamas as a fighting force.”

 

“We are winning, and we will pursue the fight until complete victory,” Netanyahu added.

 

Hamas official Abu Marzouk told Al Jazeera that while the group is seeking a permanent ceasefire, they are prepared to deal with all situations imposed by Israel.

 

Palestinian political prisoners 

 

On Wednesday, the Israeli government released a list of 300 Palestinian political prisoners eligible for release. The list mainly comprises boys aged 16 to 18, although a handful are as young as 14, and there are about 33 women. 

 

While Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCI) said it “welcomes the release of Palestinian children,” it called for “an end to the Israeli military detention system that has imprisoned children for decades.”

 

Israel is the only country in the world to prosecute children in military court, DCI said. 

 

“Israeli forces detain, interrogate, prosecute and imprison 500-700 Palestinian children between the ages of 12 and 17 each year,” the organization continued, describing the arrest of children as “business as usual” in a thread on X.

 

Hamas official Marzouk told Al Jazeera that there are no guarantees Israel will not target the Palestinians who are released from their prisons. 

 

Netanyahu told reporters that the Palestinian political prisoners to be released are “not murderers,” but are still “bad people,” promising Israel will do everything it can to ensure those released will not be a risk to Israelis. 

 

The 300 eligible prisoners are among the 8,300 Palestinians being held in Israeli prisons, Qadura Fares, head of the Palestinian Commission for Detainees and Ex-Prisoners’ Affairs, told CNN. 

 

According to Fares, over 3,000 of them are being held under what Israel calls “administrative detention,” a practice of indefinitely detaining Palestinians without charge or trial based on “secret evidence” that is not presented to the legal team of the accused. 

 

Meanwhile, the identities of the captives being released from Gaza are still unclear, and neither is the timeline for their release. 

 

Israeli news outlets have reported that Mossad chief David Barnea has received the list of captives to be released. However, Israeli officials have said they will not publish the list or notify the families until after the captives are released.

 

Israeli National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi announced that “the start of the release will proceed according to the original agreement between the parties, and not before Friday.”

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2) Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace

In less than two months, more than twice as many women and children have been reported killed in Gaza than in Ukraine after two years of war.

By Lauren Leatherby, Nov. 25, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html

Women and children account for nearly 70 percent of all deaths reported in Gaza. Credit...Yousef Masoud for The New York Times

Israel has cast the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip as a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern conflict, pointing to the heavy human toll from military campaigns the United States itself once waged in Iraq and Syria.

 

But a review of past conflicts and interviews with casualty and weapons experts suggest that Israel’s assault is different.

 

While wartime death tolls will never be exact, experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century.

 

People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.

 

Precise comparisons of war dead are impossible, but conflict-casualty experts have been taken aback at just how many people have been reported killed in Gaza — most of them women and children — and how rapidly.

 

It is not just the scale of the strikes — Israel said it had engaged more than 15,000 targets before reaching a brief cease-fire in recent days. It is also the nature of the weaponry itself.

 

Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say.

 

“It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may “have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.”

 

In fighting during this century, by contrast, U.S. military officials often believed that the most common American aerial bomb — a 500-pound weapon — was far too large for most targets when battling the Islamic State in urban areas like Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria.

 

The Israeli military points out that Gaza presents a battlefield like few others. It is small and dense, with civilians living next to, and even on top of, Hamas combatants who rely on tunnel networks to shield themselves and their weapons, putting residents directly in the line of fire, the military says.

 

Given these underground networks — which the military says enabled Hamas to wage its deadly attacks on Oct. 7 — Israeli forces say they use the “smallest available ordnance” to achieve their strategic objectives in order to cause the “minimal adverse effect on civilians.”

 

Civilian casualties are notoriously hard to calculate, and officials in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip do not separate the deaths of civilians and combatants.

 

Researchers point instead to the roughly 10,000 women and children reported killed in Gaza as an approximate — though conservative — measure of civilian deaths in the territory. International officials and experts familiar with the way figures are compiled by health officials in Gaza say the overall numbers are generally reliable.

 

The Israeli military acknowledged that children, women and older people have been killed in Gaza, but said the death toll reported in Gaza could not be trusted because the territory is run by Hamas. The military did not provide a count of its own, but said that civilians “are not the target” of its campaign.

 

“We do a lot in order to prevent and, where possible, minimize the killing or wounding of civilians,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman. “We focus on Hamas.”

 

Still, researchers say the pace of deaths reported in Gaza during the Israeli bombardment has been exceptionally high.

 

More than twice as many women and children have already been reported killed in Gaza than in Ukraine after almost two years of Russian attacks, according to United Nations estimates.

 

More women and children have been reported killed in Gaza in less than two months than the roughly 7,700 civilians documented as killed by U.S. forces and their international allies in the entire first year of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to estimates from Iraq Body Count, an independent British research group.

 

And the number of women and children reported killed in Gaza since the Israeli campaign began last month has already started to approach the roughly 12,400 civilians documented to have been killed by the United States and its allies in Afghanistan during nearly 20 years of war, according to Neta C. Crawford, co-director of Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

 

These comparisons are based on the thousands of deaths directly attributed to U.S. coalition forces over decades in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Far more people — hundreds of thousands in total — are estimated to have been killed in these conflicts by other groups, including the Syrian government and its allies, local militias, the Islamic State and the Iraqi security forces.

 

But while the overall death tolls in those wars were larger, the number of people killed in Gaza “in a very short period of time is higher than in other conflicts,” said Professor Crawford, who has extensively researched modern wars.

 

In the nine-month battle of Mosul, which Israeli officials have cited as a comparison, an estimated total of 9,000 to 11,000 civilians were killed by all sides in the conflict, including many thousands killed by the Islamic State, The Associated Press found.

 

A similar number of women and children have already been reported killed in Gaza in less than two months.

 

The bombs being used in Gaza are larger than what the United States used when it was fighting ISIS in cities like Mosul and Raqqa, and are more consistent with targeting underground infrastructure like tunnels, said Brian Castner, a weapons investigator for Amnesty International and a former explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Air Force.

 

Not only is Gaza tiny when compared with conflict zones like Iraq, Afghanistan or Ukraine, but the territory’s borders have also been closed by Israel and Egypt, giving civilians few, if any, safe places to flee.

 

More than 60,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed in the Gaza Strip, satellite analysis indicates, including about half of the buildings in northern Gaza.

 

“They are using extremely large weapons in extremely densely populated areas,” Mr. Castner said of Israeli forces. “It is the worst possible combination of factors.”

 

A War ‘for Our Existence’

 

Israeli officials say their campaign is focused on degrading Gazan military infrastructure that is often built near homes and civilian institutions — or buried underneath them.

 

“To get to that target,” Lieutenant Colonel Conricus said, the military has to use “larger bombs with a higher yield.”

 

When an Israeli government spokesman, Mark Regev, was asked in an Oct. 24 interview with PBS about the pace of the strikes, he said Israel was aiming for a shorter campaign than the United States waged in Iraq and Syria.

 

“Hopefully, we get it done quicker,” Mr. Regev said. “That’s one of our goals. But it could take longer than many Israelis would hope, because Hamas has been in power for 16 years.”

 

Israel has directed Gaza residents to evacuate areas where the bombing campaign is especially concentrated, but it has continued to strike other areas as well.

 

More broadly, Israeli officials say this is a campaign on its own borders to wipe out Hamas, a group dedicated to Israel’s destruction. “The war here is for our existence,” one Israeli war cabinet minister, Benny Gantz, told reporters on Nov. 8.

 

The brutality of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 traumatized Israelis, and some prominent members of the Israeli government have made clear that they are waging a ferocious campaign.

 

“Gaza won’t return to what it was before. Hamas will no longer exist. We will eliminate everything,” Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, said in the days after the Hamas raids.

 

After initially questioning the death toll in Gaza, the Biden administration now concedes that the true figures for civilian casualties may be even worse.

 

Barbara Leaf, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told a House committee this month that American officials thought the civilian casualties were “very high, frankly, and it could be that they’re even higher than are being cited.”

 

International experts who have worked with the Gaza Health Ministry during this and other wars say that it gathers death figures from hospitals and morgues across the enclave, which tally the dead and report the names, ID numbers and other details of people killed.

 

While the experts urged caution around public statements about the specific number of people killed in a particular strike — especially in the immediate aftermath of a blast — they said the aggregate death tolls reported by the Gaza Health Ministry have typically proved to be accurate.

 

In the last few weeks, recording the dead in Gaza has become increasingly difficult in the chaos of the fighting, as hospitals come under direct fire, much of the health system ceases to function and other government officials have begun updating the number of killed instead of the ministry. But even before those changes, the number of women and children reported dead already outpaced other conflicts.

 

Women and children account for nearly 70 percent of all deaths reported in Gaza even though most combatants are men — an “extraordinary statistic,” Rick Brennan, the regional emergency director for the World Health Organization’s Eastern Mediterranean office, said at an event this month.

 

Normally, one would expect the opposite, Mr. Brennan said. In past clashes between Israel and Hamas, for example, about 60 percent of the reported deaths in Gaza were men.

 

The Israeli military spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Conricus, said the high percentage of women and children reported killed in Gaza is another reason to mistrust the figures, adding that Israeli forces have warned civilians of strikes in advance “where it is feasible.”

 

Beyond that, Israeli officials have pointed not just to U.S. actions in Iraq and Syria, but also to the conduct of America and its allies during World War II.

 

In an address on Oct. 30, for example, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited the accidental bombing of a children’s hospital by Britain’s Royal Air Force when it was targeting the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen in 1945. And during visits to Israel by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, Israeli officials privately invoked the 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which together killed more than 100,000 people.

 

Modern international laws of war were developed largely in response to the atrocities of World War II.

 

In 1949, the Geneva Conventions codified protections for civilians during wartime. International law does not prohibit civilian casualties, but it does say that militaries must not target civilians directly or indiscriminately bomb civilian areas, and that incidental harm and the killing of civilians must not exceed the direct military advantage to be gained.

 

Two 2,000-Pound Bombs

 

In the first two weeks of the war, roughly 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in Gaza were satellite-guided bombs weighing 1,000 to 2,000 pounds, according to a senior U.S. military official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

 

Those bombs are “really big,” said Mr. Garlasco, the adviser for the PAX organization. Israel, he said, also has thousands of smaller bombs from the United States that are designed to limit damage in dense urban areas, but weapons experts say they have seen little evidence that they are being used frequently.

 

In one documented case, Israel used at least two 2,000-pound bombs during an Oct. 31 airstrike on Jabaliya, a densely populated area just north of Gaza City, flattening buildings and creating impact craters 40 feet wide, according to an analysis of satellite images, photos and videos by The New York Times. Airwars independently confirmed that at least 126 civilians were killed, more than half of them children.

 

The Israeli military said it had been targeting a Hamas commander and fighters, but acknowledged that it knew civilians were present. Lt. Col. Richard Hecht, an Israeli military spokesman, said the casualties were a “tragedy of war.”

 

The barrage on Gaza has been intense.

 

Every day, local journalists in Gaza report strikes that hit private homes, some of which kill a dozen or more people as families shelter together in tight quarters. On Oct. 19, Israel struck a Greek Orthodox church where hundreds of Gaza’s small Christian community were sheltering at dinnertime, killing 18 civilians, according to an investigation by Amnesty International.

 

Lieutenant Colonel Conricus, the Israeli military spokesman, said that Hamas and its deliberate strategy of embedding itself in — and underneath — the residents of Gaza are “the main reason why there are civilian casualties.”

 

He said that hundreds of Israeli strikes on Hamas have been diverted “because of the presence of civilians, children, women and others who appear not to be connected to the fighting.”

 

Still, Mr. Castner of Amnesty International said Israel appeared to be moving too quickly to reduce harm to civilians.

 

The United States itself has killed thousands of civilians in years of aerial bombardments. But it generally tries to assess civilians’ “pattern of life” before a strike, experts say. Analysts will watch to see whether people go out to get food or water, for example, to determine whether civilians are inside a building.

 

That kind of caution for every strike “is literally not possible for the Israelis to do if they’re doing this many strikes in as much time,” Mr. Castner said.

 

The Long Term

 

More children have been killed in Gaza since the Israeli assault began than in the world’s major conflict zones combined — across two dozen countries — during all of last year, even with the war in Ukraine, according to U.N. tallies of verified child deaths in armed conflict.

 

When civilian areas are in the cross hairs, the threat does not end when the bombing does, experts say. The destruction left in the wake of war leaves people facing a struggle to survive long after the conflict has ended. Decimated health-care systems and compromised water supplies alone can pose major public health risks, said Professor Crawford, the Costs of War Project researcher.

 

“In every war it’s like that,” she said. “But this is a scale of immiseration over such a short period of time that it’s really difficult to comprehend.”

 

John Ismay and Alan Yuhas contributed reporting.

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3) N.Y.P.D. Detains 34 Pro-Palestinian Protesters at Macy’s Parade

The demonstrators, who briefly disrupted the Thanksgiving Day parade, were protesting Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza.

By Grace Ashford, Nov. 24, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/nyregion/macys-parade-protesters-arrested.html

Four of the protesters face a range of charges, the police said, and 30 received summonses. Credit...Andres Kudacki/Associated Press

The New York Police Department detained 34 demonstrators at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade who were protesting Israel’s killings of civilians in Gaza, the authorities said on Friday.

 

The parade, which drew protesters waving Palestinian flags and chanting, was briefly stalled when some of the demonstrators, dressed in white jumpsuits splashed in fake blood, sought to glue their hands to the pavement. The action was just one of a series of demonstrations over the Thanksgiving holiday in which protesters across the country demanded a permanent cease-fire.

 

Four of the protesters face a range of charges, including harassment, obstruction of governmental administration and resisting arrest. Thirty received summonses for trespassing and disorderly conduct along the parade route.

 

Activists painted the words “Free Palestine” on the outside of the New York Public Library’s main branch and accompanied the message with handprints in red paint. The police said the investigation into the vandalism, which they defined as criminal mischief, was ongoing.

 

The protests came amid mounting global scrutiny of Israel’s bombings, which have been carried out in retaliation for the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed 1,200 people in Israel. More than 10 times as many people have been killed since then in Gaza, according to the region’s health ministry.

 

Earlier this week, Israel and Hamas agreed to a temporary cease-fire, and dozens of hostages were released from Gaza on Friday in exchange for the release of dozens more Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

 

But the lull did little to cool tempers on Thursday in New York, where the interruption of the parade drew jeers from people gathered to see the event’s signature floats and balloons.

 

Protesters turned out again a day later in several cities for a series of actions aimed at disrupting the shopping holiday of Black Friday.

 

In New York, large crowds of demonstrators marched from Washington Square Park to Herald Square. The protest was largely peaceful, and a Police Department spokesman said there were no arrests.

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4) Derek Chauvin Is Said to Have Been Stabbed in Federal Prison

Mr. Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murdering George Floyd during a 2020 arrest, was serving a sentence of more than 20 years.

By Glenn Thrush and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Published Nov. 24, 2023, Updated Nov. 25, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/24/us/derek-chauvin-prison-stabbing.html

In this image taken from video, the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin addressed the court in 2021 at the Hennepin County Courthouse in Minneapolis. Credit...Pool photo, via Court TV

Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murdering George Floyd during a 2020 arrest that set off a wave of protests, was stabbed at a federal prison in Tucson, Ariz., on Friday, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

 

The Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed that an inmate at the Tucson prison was stabbed at 12:30 p.m., though the agency’s statement did not identify Mr. Chauvin, 47, by name. No other inmates or prison staff were injured, and the situation was quickly contained, according to the people familiar with the situation.

 

Emergency medical technicians “initiated lifesaving measures” before transporting the inmate to a local hospital “for further treatment and evaluation,” bureau officials wrote. No details were immediately available on his condition, but one of the people with knowledge of the incident said that Mr. Chauvin survived the attack.

 

Mr. Chauvin was serving a sentence of just over two decades in federal prison after he was convicted of state murder charges and a federal charge of violating the constitutional rights of Mr. Floyd. Mr. Chauvin’s lawyers did not respond to requests for comment.

 

Mr. Chauvin, who is white, had knelt on Mr. Floyd, who was Black, for nine and a half minutes in May 2020 as Mr. Floyd lay handcuffed, face down, on a South Minneapolis street corner. The killing of Mr. Floyd, 46, a security guard and former rapper, was captured on video by a teenager, and the footage ricocheted around the world while people were isolating amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

The killing set off the largest protests of a generation, against police violence and racism, and led to a high-profile, televised trial in which Mr. Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder in April 2021. Three other officers who were at the scene where Mr. Floyd was killed were also later convicted of violating Mr. Floyd’s rights.

 

Mr. Chauvin had sought to appeal his conviction, but as recently as this week, the Supreme Court had rejected his efforts.

 

Part of Mr. Chauvin’s plea deal with prosecutors in his federal case was that he would be allowed to serve his sentence in a federal prison, which is generally considered safer than a state prison. Before that, Mr. Chauvin had been serving his state sentence in solitary confinement for 23 hours each day in Minnesota. A spokeswoman for the state prison system said at the time that Mr. Chauvin had been isolated because of concerns for his safety.

 

Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, who oversaw the prosecution of Mr. Chauvin, condemned the attack on him. “I am sad to hear that Derek Chauvin was the target of violence,” Mr. Ellison said in a statement. “He was duly convicted of his crimes and, like any incarcerated individual, he should be able to serve his sentence without fear of retaliation or violence.”

 

There have been several other high-profile attacks on federal prisoners in recent years, including the stabbing earlier this year of Larry Nassar, who had been convicted of sexually abusing young gymnasts, and the killing in 2018 of James (Whitey) Bulger, the mobster who was murdered in a West Virginia prison.

 

The Associated Press was the first to report the stabbing of Mr. Chauvin on Friday.

 

The Bureau of Prisons has been grappling with a widespread shortage of corrections officers and has relied on teachers, case managers, counselors, facilities workers and secretaries to fill shifts.

 

About 21 percent of the 20,446 positions for corrections officers funded by Congress — amounting to 4,293 guards — were unfilled in September 2022, according to a report in March 2023 by the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office.

 

On May 25, 2020, Mr. Chauvin and three other officers with the Minneapolis Police Department drove to a corner store after a store employee had called 911 to report that Mr. Floyd had bought cigarettes with a fake $20 bill.

 

One officer arrived to the scene with his gun drawn, and, minutes later, the police pulled Mr. Floyd out of a car. Mr. Chauvin and two other officers eventually pinned him to the pavement, where a bystander’s video captured him begging for air, saying he couldn’t breathe, as Mr. Chauvin knelt on his neck.

 

As Mr. Chauvin kept Mr. Floyd pinned down, bystanders yelled at the police officers to ease up. The chief medical examiner in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, ultimately determined that Mr. Floyd’s heart and lungs stopped functioning while the police were restraining him.

 

A paramedic testified at trial that by the time he arrived at the scene, Mr. Floyd did not have a pulse and appeared to already be dead. The paramedic, Derek Smith, testified that he and other emergency medical workers used a device to try to restart Mr. Floyd’s heart, but that nothing worked. Ultimately, Mr. Floyd was pronounced dead at a hospital a little over an hour after the police had approached him.

 

In April 2021, after three weeks of trial testimony, jurors deliberated for about 10 hours before convicting Mr. Chauvin of all of the counts he faced in the state case. Judge Peter A. Cahill sentenced him to 22 and a half years in prison.

 

At Mr. Chauvin’s sentencing in June 2021, his mother, Carolyn Pawlenty, said that her son was a good man who had been wrongly depicted as racist. She argued that he was not guilty of murdering Mr. Floyd.

 

“The public will never know the loving and caring man he is,” Ms. Pawlenty said. “But his family does.”

 

A little over a year later, a federal judge sentenced Mr. Chauvin to serve 21 years in federal prison after he pleaded guilty to violating Mr. Floyd’s constitutional rights by using excess force under the color of law.

 

Tim Arango and Julie Bosman contributed reporting.

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5) Gaza has become a moonscape in war. When the battles stop, many fear it will remain uninhabitable

By Isabel Debre, November 23, 2023

https://www.yahoo.com/news/gaza-become-moonscape-war-battles-135458471.html

Israel's military offensive has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape.' (photo: AP)

Israel’s military offensive has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape. Whole neighborhoods have been erased. Homes, schools and hospitals have been blasted by airstrikes and scorched by tank fire. Some buildings are still standing, but most are battered shells.

 

Nearly 1 million Palestinians have fled the north, including its urban center, Gaza City, as ground combat intensified. When the war ends, any relief will quickly be overshadowed by dread as displaced families come to terms with the scale of the calamity and what it means for their future.

 

Where would they live? Who would eventually run Gaza and pick up the pieces?

 

“I want to go home even if I have to sleep on the rubble of my house,” said Yousef Hammash, an aid worker with the Norwegian Refugee Council who fled the ruins of the urban refugee camp of Jabaliya for southern Gaza. “But I don’t see a future for my children here.”

 

The Israeli army’s use of powerful explosives in tightly packed residential areas — which Israel describes as the unavoidable outcome of Hamas using civilian sites as cover for its operations — has killed over 13,000 Palestinians and led to staggering destruction. Hamas denies the claim and accuses Israel of recklessly bombing civilians.

 

“When I left, I couldn’t tell which street or intersection I was passing,” said Mahmoud Jamal, a 31-year-old taxi driver who fled his northern hometown of Beit Hanoun this month. He described apartment buildings resembling open-air parking garages.

 

Israel’s bombardment has become one of the most intense air campaigns since World War II, said Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, a London-based conflict monitor. In the seven weeks since Hamas’ unprecedented Oct. 7 attack, Israel unleashed more munitions than the United States did in any given year of its bombing campaign against the Islamic State group — a barrage the U.N. describes as the deadliest urban campaign since World War II.

 

In Israel’s grainy thermal footage of airstrikes targeting Hamas tunnels, fireballs obliterate everything in sight. Videos by Hamas’ military wing feature fighters with rocked-propelled grenades trekking through smoke-filled streets. Fortified bulldozers have cleared land for Israeli tanks.

 

“The north of Gaza has been turned into one big ghost town,” said Mkhaimer Abusada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City who fled to Egypt last week. “People have nothing to return to.”

 

About half of all buildings across northern Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, according to an analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University. With the U.N. estimating 1.7 million people are newly homeless, many wonder if Gaza will ever recover.

 

“You’ll end up having displaced people living in tents for a long time,” said Raphael Cohen, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, a research group.

 

The war has knocked 27 of 35 hospitals across Gaza out of operation, according to the World Health Organization. The destruction of other critical infrastructure has consequences for years to come.

 

“Bakeries and grain mills have been destroyed, agriculture, water and sanitation facilities,” said Scott Paul, a senior humanitarian policy adviser for Oxfam America. “You need more than four walls and a ceiling for a place to be habitable, and in many cases people don’t even have that.”

 

Across the entire enclave, over 41,000 homes — 45% of Gaza’s total housing stock — are too destroyed to be lived in, according to the U.N.

 

“All I left at home was dead bodies and rubble,” said Mohammed al-Hadad, a 28-year-old party planner who fled Shati refugee camp along Gaza City’s shoreline. Shati sustained nearly 14,000 incidents of war damage — varying from an airstrike crater to a collapsed building — over just 0.5 square kilometers (0.2 square miles), the satellite data analysis shows.

 

Southern Gaza — where scarce food, water and fuel has spawned a humanitarian crisis — has been spared the heaviest firepower, according to the analysis.

 

Palestinians look for survivors under the rubble of destroyed buildings following Israeli airstrikes in Jabaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Abed Khaled, File)

 

But that’s changing. In the past two weeks, satellite data shows a spike in damage across the southern town of Khan Younis. Residents say the military has showered eastern parts of town with evacuation warnings.

 

Israel has urged those in southern Gaza to move again, toward a slice of territory called Muwasi along the coast. As of Thursday, Israel and Hamas were still working out the details of a four-day truce that would allow more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza and facilitate an exchange of Palestinian prisoners for Israeli hostages.

 

“This is our nakba,” said 32-year-old journalist Tareq Hajjaj, referring to the mass displacement of an estimated 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation — an exodus Palestinians call the “nakba,” or “catastrophe.”

 

Although publicly Palestinians reject the idea of being transferred outside Gaza, some privately admit they cannot stay, even after the war ends.

 

“We will never return home,” said Hajjaj, who fled his home in Shijaiyah in eastern Gaza City. “Those who stay here will face the most horrific situation they could imagine.”

 

The 2014 Israel-Hamas war leveled Shijaiyah, turning the neighborhood into fields of inert gray rubble. The $5 billion reconstruction effort there and across Gaza remains unfinished to this day.

 

“This time the scale of destruction is exponentially higher,” said Giulia Marini, international advocacy officer at Palestinian rights group Al Mezan. “It will take decades for Gaza to go back to where it was before.”

 

It remains unclear who will take responsibility for that task. At the recent security summit in Bahrain, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi vowed Arab states would not “come and clean the mess after Israel.”

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants the army to restore security, and American officials have pushed the seemingly unlikely scenario of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority taking over the strip.

 

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, regarded by many Palestinians as weak, has dismissed that idea in the absence of Israeli efforts toward a two-state solution.

 

Despite the war’s horrors, Yasser Elsheshtawy, a professor of architecture at Columbia University, hopes reconstruction could offer an opportunity to turn Gaza’s ramshackle refugee camps and long deteriorating infrastructure into “something more habitable and equitable and humane,” including public parks and a revitalized seafront.

 

But Palestinians say it’s not only shattered infrastructure that requires rebuilding but a traumatized society.

 

“Gaza has become a very scary place,” Abusada said. “It will always be full of memories of death and destruction.”

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6) ‘We Went Back to the Stone Age’

Life in besieged Gaza revolves around a daily struggle to find food and water. With practically no fuel or coal, families are burning doors and window frames to cook what they can scrounge.

By Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Hiba Yazbek, Abu Bakr Bashir and Ameera Harouda, Photographs by Samar Abu Elouf and Yousef Masoud, Nov. 26, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/26/world/europe/gaza-life-war.html

Filling containers with seawater at a beach in Deir al-Balah for washing and cooking. Since Israel imposed a siege on Gaza, clean water for drinking has also been hard to come by. Credit...Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times

Namzi Mwafi, 23, has one job, day in and day out: find water for his family.

 

Dozens of his extended family members are sheltering together in a two-bedroom apartment in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza near the territory’s border with Egypt, he says. The oldest, his grandmother, is 68; the youngest, a cousin, is 6 months old.

 

To keep them alive, Mr. Mwafi says he wakes up at 4 a.m., spending hours waiting for water at a crowded filling station. Sometimes, he has to fight to keep his place in line and sometimes there is nothing left when his turn comes.

 

When he is lucky, he pushes his heavy trolley home through the sand and the family rations the haul to about a glass a day each.

 

There is practically no gas or other fuel left in Gaza, according to the United Nations agencies operating there, so some people are building makeshift clay or metal ovens to cook. Firewood and coal have also largely run out, so families are burning stripped-down doors, shutters and window frames, cardboard and grasses. Some simply do not cook, eating raw onions and eggplants instead.

 

“We went back to the Stone Age,” Mr. Mwafi said.

 

In response to the devastating Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip, Israel imposed what it called a complete siege — cutting off almost all water, food, electricity and fuel for the more than two million Palestinians living in Gaza. It also launched thousands of airstrikes on the enclave and sent in ground forces to try to root out Hamas.

 

A brief cease-fire, the first since the war began seven weeks ago, began to take hold on Friday, and as part of a hostage agreement between Israel and Hamas, dozens of trucks with water and other vital humanitarian aid crossed into Gaza.

 

Still, it was far less than what typically came into the territory before the war, and there was no indication that the freer flow of aid would last beyond the four-day agreed truce.

 

Before the cease-fire, little humanitarian aid — far short of what Gazans need — had been trickling in. And so, from the north to the south, in tented camps, apartments, schools and hospitals, residents crammed together in ever-shrinking spaces have been struggling every day to meet their most basic needs.

 

Surviving has become a full-time, perilous undertaking.

 

Days start well before dawn. Tasks seem simple: Fetch water. Bake bread. Buy diapers. Stay alive.

 

But people do not always succeed.

 

Mineral water trucked into the territory in aid convoys has been enough for only 4 percent of the population, according to the United Nations World Food Program. Some desalinated water is still being distributed in the south, but the north has no potable water sources left, according to the U.N. People who cannot access the scarce mineral and desalinated water rely on brackish water from wells, which the U.N. has said is not safe for human consumption.

 

Flour, too, is running out and most wheat mills have been bombed, according to the United Nations. Humanitarian agencies have managed to deliver bread, canned tuna and date bars to about a quarter of the population since Oct. 7, but distribution is hampered by fighting and the siege, the World Food Program said. Some farmers are slaughtering their animals, trading their future livelihoods for the emergency at hand.

 

The World Food Program has warned that only 10 percent of the food Gaza needs has entered the territory since the war began, creating “a massive food gap and widespread hunger.”

 

“Wheat flour, dairy products, cheese, eggs and mineral water have completely disappeared,” in the market, Alia Zaki, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program, said this month.

 

The virtual collapse of the sewage system and displacement of about 1.7 million Gazans, who have poured into camps and crowded into relatives’ homes, have also brought on a hygiene crisis and illnesses that the World Health Organization warns could get much worse.

 

Diarrhea, scabies and lice are ripping through the population, hitting younger children particularly hard.

 

Shops Are Empty. Banks Are Closed. Power Is Out.

 

Mr. Mwafi said he graduated from college with a degree in computer engineering a month before the war. He dreamed of a life in Canada as a videographer and had just started dabbling in content creation. His social media before Oct. 7 shows a young man with a bright smile at his graduation, surrounded by friends and family.

 

His posts were unreservedly upbeat, full of Quranic quotes and pop culture affirmations about positive living, love, friendship and hope. Now they are all about staying alive.

 

“Our strategy right now is how to survive for the longest period possible,” he said.

 

“If before I had ambitions and hopes for a good future and fulfilling the dreams I had as a child,” he said, “now my utmost ambition is to be able to eat, drink water and sleep.”

 

Before the war began, Gaza had been blockaded by Israel and Egypt for 16 years, and the humanitarian situation there deteriorated quickly, with stocks depleting just days after the siege began in early October.

 

“Even before Oct. 7, 70 percent of the people in Gaza were relying on humanitarian aid of some form or another,” said Ms. Zaki, the World Food Program spokeswoman. “And the strip had some of the highest poverty and unemployment rates in the world.”

 

The vast majority of shops are now shut or empty, and people are mostly buying and selling goods informally, according to the United Nations. With electricity out and most banks closed, the few who do have funds cannot get them. Even if they could, there is not much to buy.

 

A Hygiene Crisis Grows

 

In May, Lujayn al-Borno, 35, her husband and their four children — between 1½ and 14 years old — fled Sudan, then a month into a civil war, for their native Gaza. They knew that returning to their homeland would be hard after 13 years of prosperity and relative stability in Sudan. But they had cash and family in Gaza, so they figured they were better off than most.

 

They quickly settled in an apartment in the upscale Gaza City neighborhood of Rimal in the north.

 

Then, on Oct. 7, hours after the Hamas-led attack on Israel, Ms. al-Borno said the family received a call from the Israeli military to evacuate their building because it was going to be hit in one of the war’s first airstrikes. They fled for the southern city of Khan Younis and sheltered with extended family in a small apartment that was still under construction.

 

Ms. al-Borno visits a nearby shop every day, but usually it’s empty.

 

“I go look for food for my children on foot, and I find nothing,” she said. “I cry the whole way back home.”

 

But her persistence and the cash she still has occasionally pay off. Recently, she said she managed to secure two packs of diapers for Jameel, her toddler, but only after a long trek to another part of Gaza.

 

Ms. al-Borno also bought blankets off a displaced family that had received them for free as humanitarian aid, she said. They were so desperate for food that they were prepared to go cold.

 

Aya Ibrahim, 43, is sheltering with her children in a U.N.-run school in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza.

 

“The bathrooms here are very bad. They are all blocked up because we have no water at all,” Ms. Ibrahim said. The men and boys, including her two teenage sons, sleep near the toilets, the women in a classroom one floor up.

 

“The smell is killing us,” she said. Some women prefer to relieve themselves in nylon bags in a bucket behind a makeshift curtain in the classroom where they sleep.

 

Ms. Ibrahim said the United Nations distributed one pack of sanitary pads for the 30 women sharing the classroom with her.

 

Amal, another woman in the same shelter, said she was so desperate because of the lack of sanitary pads that she had started taking birth control pills to stop her period altogether.

 

‘All Children Are Sick Here’

 

When his siblings fled northern Gaza, Ahmed Khaled said he stayed behind to keep his mother, who is unable to walk, alive. The Israeli military had warned Gazans to go south, but he said his mother was too frail to move.

 

“I can’t leave her alone,” he said by phone earlier this month. “Plus, nowhere is safe.”

 

So, as Israeli shells and bombs landed nearby, he said he moved his mother, his wife and his three daughters into a U.N. school complex in the city of Beit Lahiya, alongside thousands of other displaced people.

 

Mr. Khaled, 39, said he had been trying to make peace with that decision as the war intensified around him and life became increasingly untenable.

 

The family was surviving on rice and dirty water, he said, and the only shop still open had mostly bare shelves. Still, Mr. Khaled said, he had to go out and try to find food.

 

“I either walk or cycle to the shop, not knowing whether I’ll be back,” he said.

 

“All children are sick here,” he added. “Diarrhea and stomachache. It’s very dirty.”

 

He mentioned the hunger and illnesses almost as afterthoughts, considering the fierce warfare raging around him in northern Gaza.

 

“Bombardment is all around us all the time,” he said.

 

The day after the interview, on Nov. 18, the school where Mr. Ahmed was sheltering was bombed along with another U.N. school in northern Gaza. The U.N. secretary general said he was “deeply shocked” that two U.N. schools where families had sought shelter were struck in less than 24 hours, adding that dozens of people were killed and injured.

 

The Israeli military said it was reviewing the episode.

 

New York Times reporters have not been able to reach Mr. Khaled since.

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7) Israeli October 7 posterchild was killed by Israeli tank, eyewitnesses reveal

By Max Blumenthal, November 25, 2023

https://thegrayzone.com/2023/11/25/israels-october-7-propaganda-tank-eyewitnesses/

Eyewitnesses to the October 7 hostage standoff in Kibbutz Be’eri have exposed Israel for misleading the world about the killings of 12-year-old Liel Hetzroni, her family and her neighbors.

In a desperate bid for international sympathy, the Israeli government has sought to stir outrage over the killing of a 12-year-old girl during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7. 

 

“This little girl’s body was burned so badly that it took forensic archeologists more than six weeks to identify her,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry declared on its official Twitter/X account. “All that remains of 12 year old Liel Hetzroni is ash and bone fragments. May her memory be a blessing.”

 

Aviva Klompas, a former speechwriter for Israel’s United Nations mission and one of the country’s top English language social media propagandists, claimed on Twitter/X, “The terrorists massacred all of [the Hetzroni’s], then torched the building.”

 

Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister, chimed in to proclaim that “Liel Hetzroni of Kibbutz Beeri was murdered in her home by Hamas monsters… We’re fighting the most just war: to ensure this can never happen again.”

 

Liel Hetzroni was among the noncombatants killed in Kibbutz Be’eri when the small southern Israeli community was momentarily taken over by Hamas militants seeking captives to spur a prisoner exchange. During the standoff that ensued, she was killed instantly alongside twin brother, great-aunt and several other residents of Be’eri.

 

However, the 12-year-old Hetzroni was not slain by Hamas. According to new testimony by an Israeli eyewitness to the girl’s death, she was killed by an Israeli tank shell alongside several neighbors.

 

The revelation of Hetzroni’s friendly fire death came as the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhahu attempts to shut down the Israeli newspaper Haaretz for reporting that Israeli Apache helicopters killed Israeli citizens fleeing the Nova electronic music festival on October 7. Haaretz’s reporting confirmed a viral Grayzone investigation which highlighted disclosures by Israeli helicopter pilots and security officials of friendly fire orders throughout the fateful day. 

 

One came from a member of the security team for Kibbutz Be’eri, who told Haaretz that “the commanders in the field made difficult decisions – including shelling houses on their occupants in order to eliminate the terrorists along with the hostages.”

 

A tank battalion commander recalled receiving the same orders when he arrived on the scene, stating in a video interview, “I arrived in Be’eri to see Brig. Gen. Barak Hiram and the first thing he asks me to do is to fire a shell into a house [where Hamas members were sheltering].”

 

The decision to use heavy weapons on the small homes of Be’eri wound up costing many Israeli lives. Among them was the girl whose death has been weaponized to justify Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. And for the first time, an eyewitness to the attack has come forward with the uncomfortable truth about the killing.

 

“when those two shells hit, [Liel] stopped screaming”   

 

Yasmin Porat was among the Israelis taken hostage by Hamas militants in Be’eri on October 7. She had fled the Nova electronic music festival and sought shelter in the community when the militants arrived. In a November 15 interview with the Israeli national broadcaster, Kan News, Porat provided exclusive details of the standoff which badly undercut her government’s official narrative.

 

Under the mistaken impression that they were surrounded by Israeli troops, who were actually largely absent at the time and in a discombobulated state, the Hamas gunmen sent hostages outside the home and phoned the Israeli police in an apparent attempt to negotiate their own exit. 

 

“You see that most of the kidnappings occurred in the morning, at 10, 11, 12,” Porat said. “By 3 [in the afternoon], every [Israeli] citizen thought the army was already everywhere. [The Hamas militants] could have taken us out and back [to Gaza] ten times. But they didn’t believe that was the situation, so they asked for the police.”

 

When the Israeli special forces finally arrived on the scene, Porat said, a “ceasefire” ensued between Hamas and Israeli forces, and her own captor decided to surrender. To ensure his own safety, he stripped himself naked and used her as a human shield as he made his way toward the Israeli soldiers.

 

After Porat was freed and her captor surrendered, she said 14 Israelis remained hostage under the guard of 39 Hamas militants. Among those left behind, she said, were twin girls, Liel and Yanai Hatroni, along with their great-aunt and guardian, Ayala Hatroni. 

 

“I sat there with the commander of the unit,” Porat recalled, “and I described to him what the house looks like, and where the terrorists are, and where the hostages are. I actually drew it for him: ‘Look, here, on the lawn there are four hostages that are lying this way on the lawn. Here are two that are lying under the terrace. And in the living room there is a woman lying like this, and a woman lying like this.” 

 

Porat explained, “I told [the Israeli commander] about the twins (Yanai and Liel Hatzroni) and their great-aunt (Ayala), I didn’t see them. You know what, when I left, they were the only ones I didn’t see. I heard Liel the whole time, so I know for certain that they were there.. I tried to explain to [the commander] that from somewhere near the kitchen, that’s where I heard the screams coming from. I didn’t see her, but I heard her, and I heard where the screams were coming from. I tried to explain to them where all the hostages were.”

 

Underscoring the shoddy Israeli intelligence that made the October 7 Hamas operation possible, Porat said the soldiers did not believe that so many militants could be inside one home, or that such a large force could have penetrated the high-tech siege walls Israel had constructed around Gaza. “The first time I told [the Israeli special forces] that there are about 40 terrorists, they told me, ‘It can’t be. It seems like you’re exaggerating’… I told them, ‘There’s more of them than you.’ They didn’t believe me! It was still the naiveté of our army, as well.”

 

By 4 PM, a gun battle began to rage between the militants inside the home and the Israeli special forces stationed across the street. After failing to dislodge the Hamas fighters, the Israelis called in a tank at 7:30 PM. 

 

Porat described a sense of panic as she watched the tank trundle into the small community: “I thought to myself, ‘Why are they shooting tank shells into the house?’ And I asked one of the people that was with me, “Why are they shooting?’ So they explained to me that it was to break the walls, in order to help cleanse the house.”

 

From across the street, Porat heard two loud explosions. The tank had fired a couple of shells into the home. Laying down outside the house was her partner, Tal, another man named Tal, and the couple who owned the house, Adi and Hadas Dagan. There were also the 12-year-old twins, Liel and Yanai Hatsroni, along with their great-aunt. 

 

When the dust cleared, only Hadas Dagan emerged from the house alive.

 

Porat said Dagan later told her, “‘Yasmin, when the two big booms hit, I felt like I flew in the air… It took me 2-3 minutes to open my eyes, I didn’t feel my body. I was completely paralyzed. When I opened my eyes, I saw that my Adi [Dagan] is dying… Your Tal also stopped moving at that point.”

 

Dagan confirmed that the tank shells killed Liel Hatsroni: “‘The girl did not stop screaming for all those hours,” she told Porat, referring to Liel. “She didn’t stop screaming… [but] when those two shells hit, [Liel] stopped screaming. There was silence then.”

 

Porat concluded, “So what can you take away from that? That after that very massive incident, the shooting, which concluded with two shells, that is pretty much when everyone died.”

 

Dagan emphasized to Porat that none of the hostages had been intentionally killed by the Hamas fighters. “There were no executions, or anything like that. At least not the people with her,” Porat said.

 

In a separate interview on October 15, Porat insisted the Palestinian militants “did not abuse us. They treated us very humanely.” 

 

It is impossible to know if the standoff between Israeli and Hamas forces at the Dagan home could have been resolved without bloodshed. But it is clear that the Israeli decision to shell the home with tanks wound up killing almost everyone inside, including the child who has become a centerpiece of Israel’s international anti-Hamas propaganda campaign. All the Israelis left behind, Porat said, was “a house full of corpses.”

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