12/03/2023

Bay Area United Against War Newsletter, December 4, 2023


Oakland City Council UNANIMOUSLY passes Ceasefire Resolution!

 

San Francisco Ceasefire Resolution will be Introduced Tuesday!

 

Join us on Tuesday, December 5th at 2:00 P.M. at San Francisco City Hall to call on the Board of Supervisors to support a permanent ceasefire!

 

Supervisor Dean Preston plans to introduce a permanent ceasefire resolution at Tuesday's Board of Supervisor meeting.

 

Palestinian residents of San Francisco have lost many, many of their loved due to Israel’s indiscriminate warfare against the people of Gaza.  At the same time anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic bigotry, discrimination, and violence is running rampant.

 

By introducing a resolution that calls for a ceasefire to the war on Gaza, our elected representatives are putting forth a common-sense position that reflects the interests and voices of the vast majority of our city’s diverse communities. It is urgent that they put pressure on the US government to call for a permanent ceasefire. That is the only solution to the violence in Gaza and the rise in racist attacks in our own backyard. A ceasefire resolution also honors our city’s rich history of championing human rights. We wholeheartedly support the work of our supervisors raising their voices for peace in these critical times.

 

Click here to send an email to your Board of Supervisor NOW to ask them to support this critical resolution:

https://www.araborganizing.org/sfresolution/

 

Join us Tuesday so we can make clear that San Franciscans DO NOT want our tax dollars to be used for genocide.

 

Let’s make history, San Francisco!

 

Text “SF” to 833-633-0604 to stay updated.


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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 December 3, 2023the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel is now over 15,500 (over 6,150 are children and 40,752 are wounded)and more than 250 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. More than 2,000 Palestinians have been arrested since Oct. 7.

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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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




[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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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


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.

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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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) My Son Should Not Have to Pay for My Decision to Stay in Gaza

By Atef Abu Saif, Dec. 2, 2023

Atef Abu Saif is a writer and minister of culture in the Palestinian Authority who lives in Ramallah, on the West Bank.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/opinion/gaza-family-palestinian-leaving.html
Taysir Batniji

Atef Abu Saif was visiting family members in Gaza with his 15-year-old son, Yasser, before Oct. 7 and has kept a diary of the war since it began. Here is his entry for Nov. 21, the day he decided to leave the Jabaliya neighborhood in the north of the territory for southern Gaza, en route to the Rafah crossing into Egypt.

 

We cannot stay here any longer. We have decided.

 

The shells over the last two nights have been so close to the apartment we are staying in that I didn’t just see the light and hear the thunder of their explosions. I saw them pass right by my window. The Israelis are getting closer every minute. Most of the outer regions of the camp are under full occupation now. Overnight, troops advanced a couple of streets closer from the north. Our street came under continuous shelling from the tanks.

 

I never closed my eyes. “I want to be awake when I die,” I told my brother Mohammed, who has been with us for most of the war. “I want to see it happening.” Before going to sleep, my son Yasser said he felt more afraid than ever. For the last 45 days, he has shown great strength in the face of everything, but we all have our limits. “Let’s see,” I told him. “In the morning we’ll decide.”

 

This was two nights ago. So, yesterday morning, I went to see my dad to ask if he’d consider moving with us. It was a hard “no.”

 

“But most people have left already,” I said. He’s staying put, he insisted, come what may. Then, as I was leaving he shouted back to me: “Get that boy to safety.”

 

That helped convince me. As I lay on my mattress last night, I realized it was not fair that my 15-year-old son should pay for my decision to come to Gaza and stay so long in the north. He might have survived 45 days, but would he survive the next 45? The chances of escaping death are growing narrower and narrower. I do not have the right to decide for him. In her last call to me from our home in Ramallah, on the West Bank, my wife, Hanna, said simply: “I want my boy. You took him to Gaza. You bring him back.”

 

Talk of a truce fills the news, and this might be a good time to head south to Rafah and be near the border with Egypt in case it opens. I have a job in the ministry in Ramallah to get back to, after all.

 

The sight of the shells flying past my window the night before also made it clear that it was time to leave: sometimes it is better to be wise than correct, if that makes sense. The wise thing is to give everyone a chance to live, even if the correct thing is to not let the Israelis get away with a second Nakba — yet another expulsion from our land.

 

When this morning finally comes, the driver we have hired for the first leg of our journey arrives. My father-in-law Mostafa and his wife Widdad, who uses a wheelchair, are traveling with us. My in-laws want to stay with their granddaughter Wissam, 23, at the European Gaza Hospital in Khan Younis, in the south. Wissam is recovering from triple amputation surgery, after surviving a bombing in the first week that killed her parents and most of her siblings. Wissam’s surviving sister, also named Widdad, can take care of her grandmother as well as Wissam.

 

I carry my mother-in-law into the car. As the car sets off, we all try to prepare ourselves mentally for the long journey ahead. We get out at the Kuwait traffic junction and negotiate the hire of two donkey carts to carry us all to a gathering area along Salah al-Din Street, the main north-south route already called “New Nakba Road” by some.

 

The ride takes only seven minutes. In normal times, a donkey-cart ride might be something we would do for fun, on a family day out, perhaps at the beach. But this is a grim day out. When we get to the gathering area, thousands of other displaced people, just like us, are lining up, waiting for the Israelis to let them pass. This is the first time I’ve seen Israeli soldiers, in the flesh, inside Gaza since 2005.

 

Knowing that we might become separated in the chaos, I tell Yasser in no uncertain terms that he is in charge of his grandmother; not just that he is pushing her wheelchair and keeping her comfortable, but that he is her primary caregiver should the soldiers want to arrest him. I stay as close to them as I can, carrying two shoulder bags. One of them is particularly heavy. Before leaving this morning, I bundled all our official papers, including birth certificates, diplomas and deeds of ownership, into this bag, along with several photo albums. These are our memories. These we must keep.

 

We move on and arrive at a checkpoint at 7:20 a.m. Tanks line our route on the left-hand side. I see Israeli soldiers lounging about on top of them, sipping Arabic coffee. The soldiers closer to us shout at anyone who even looks at them. Take out your phone in front of them and you won’t be seen again.

 

Children standing in front of me are shaking. They are too afraid to talk in case they say something that would annoy the soldiers and cause them to start firing. I glance up occasionally to see if I can work out which one is in charge, which one will decide if we live or die, if we’re allowed through or taken prisoner.

 

After half an hour of waiting, a soldier speaks to us through an amplifier. He repeats the orders about moving in a straight line, not looking left, not looking right. We must only face forward.

 

“The faces of babies should not be covered,” the soldier adds. At around 8 a.m. the voice tells us to start moving. This is the hardest part of the journey. The road is covered in mud and the asphalt is damaged, cratered everywhere, and scattered with rubble and garbage. Yasser is struggling with the wheelchair. On several occasions I have to help him lift my mother-in-law and the wheelchair together over a crater. We have to move carefully. Three times the old woman falls out of the chair and I have to pick her up and put her back in.

 

After 20 minutes we are funneled through a temporary structure, a strange kind of room, erected in the middle of the road. After that we have to stand in a line and raise our ID cards. Now, finally, we are allowed to turn our faces to the left. In fact we’re ordered to do so, so that the soldiers can look at us and compare us with our IDs. They are many yards away, and seem to be checking our details through binoculars. Are they really too afraid to be any nearer?

 

Random individuals are summoned to approach the line of soldiers to be detained. A soldier might call out: “The one with the white T-shirt and the yellow bag — come.” Or “The one with the mustache — come.” Each is then asked to throw their bag to one side, and kneel on the mud and wait to be interrogated.

 

As we walk past, a soldier calls out, “You with the dark pullover.” Yasser is wearing a dark pullover. I whisper, “Don’t move. If they meant you, they would have said ‘the one pushing the wheelchair.’ Insha’allah.” I was right.

 

For another two kilometers we struggle on, eventually reaching a stretch of road where the Israelis no longer flank us. My back hurts, my shoulders and my arms are sore, but we’re relieved to be walking on an ordinary road again.

 

But this is the hardest part. Although we’re no longer being told where to look, I give Yasser my own strict orders. “Don’t look,” I tell him. “Don’t look.” Scores of bodies are strewn along both sides of the road. Rotting, it seems, into the ground. The smell is horrendous. A hand reaches out toward us from the window of a burned-out car, as if asking for something — from me, specifically. I see what looks like two headless bodies in a car, limbs and precious body parts just thrown away and left to fester. “Don’t look,” I say to Yasser again. “Just keep walking, son."

 

We carry on walking for another kilometer or so, until we arrive at a point where donkey carts are gathered and available to take people the rest of the way to where taxis and other cars are waiting.

 

We regroup in front of the cars. We are safe now. We have made a great step toward our survival. I struggle to find a driver willing to take us to the European hospital, which is on the eastern road connecting Rafah with Khan Younis. It will be our final stop before heading back to Khan Younis and then Rafah.

 

The driver of a truck crammed full of people agrees to take us. We lift the wheelchair up onto the back of the truck and jam it firmly into a corner. Mohammed and Yasser keep a firm grip on it the whole way. There are about 40 of us on the truck. I can’t imagine what we must look like: refugees, clinging to the side of a truck heaving with other refugees, holding on to a wheelchair for dear life. We eventually arrive at the European hospital and we manage to get my mother-in-law in a bed in the same room as Wissam. I have to find the manager of the hospital to thank him for accommodating us in this way.

 

Now, finally, I can rest.


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2) Israel’s Military Expands Evacuation Orders in Southern Gaza

By Vivian Yee, Iyad Abuheweila and Ameera Harouda, Dec. 3, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/12/03/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
A column of smoke rises in the distance as people carry chairs and other items along a road.
Palestinians fleeing on Saturday, December 2, 2023 near Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. Credit...Fatima Shbair/Associated Press

Confusion and fear gripped much of southern Gaza on Sunday as Israel’s military ordered more residents to clear out and fighting there intensified.

 

The Israeli military’s latest evacuation orders appeared to be setting the stage for a ground invasion in the south since hostilities started again after the collapse of a weeklong truce with Hamas. They evoked similar orders given by the Israeli military before it invaded northern Gaza in late October. But the announcements were prone to change with almost no notice, leaving many Gazans confused and with little time to flee.

 

“Dear residents of Gaza, obeying evacuation instructions is the safest way to preserve your safety, your lives and the lives of your families,” Israel’s military wrote on Arabic-language accounts on Facebook and X on Sunday, providing a growing list of areas that were under the evacuation order.

 

The list of areas had swelled from 19 the previous morning to 34 on Sunday, all clustered southeast of the city of Khan Younis. The Israeli military marked each on a map of Gaza that divided the territory into nearly 2,400 “blocks,” advising residents to pay attention to Israeli announcements about whether their block was being evacuated.

 

Some families whose homes and shelters were not included in the initial evacuation areas announced by Israel’s military, and who had thought they would be able to stay put, said they had later received recorded calls ordering them to leave.

 

Many people under evacuation orders had already been displaced at least once before, forced to leave northern Gaza when the fighting and the airstrikes began. Now they found themselves once again at a loss for where to go in an already overcrowded area under threat of bombardment.

 

“I cannot overstate the fear, panic & confusion that these Israeli maps are causing civilians in Gaza, including my own staff,” wrote Melanie Ward, head of the humanitarian organization Medical Aid for Palestinians, on social media, adding that “people cannot run from place to place to try to escape Israel’s bombs.”

 

On Sunday afternoon, a spokesman for the Gazan health ministry, Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra, said 316 people had been killed in Israeli strikes “in the past hours.” He said that more than 15,500 people had been killed since Oct. 7, when the war began.

 

Hospitals in the south were also under pressure. A team from the World Health Organization visited a hospital in Khan Younis on Saturday that was three times over its capacity, according to the agency’s head, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

 

“Countless people were seeking shelter, filling every corner of the facility,” he wrote on X. “Patients were receiving care on the floor, screaming in pain.”

 

Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that the military was trying to protect civilians as it pushed toward its goal of eliminating Hamas. “We’re going to do it in the deliberate fashion because we are very conscious of having civilians there, and getting them out of harm’s way,” he said. “If we wanted to do it fast, we’d harm a lot more civilians.”

 

Mr. Dermer added that he did not know how long it would take for Israel to achieve its goal. “I don’t know if it’s going to be months,” he said.

 

The Israeli military’s evacuation map showed big orange arrows directing people toward already-overflowing shelters or what it called the “humanitarian zone” in Al-Mawasi, an agricultural area toward the Mediterranean Sea.

 

But it was not clear whether the zone provided sufficient supplies or shelter, with some Gazans who fled there describing little awaiting them and no visible presence of humanitarian aid.

 

The idea of “safe zones” in Gaza, as was envisioned for Al-Mawasi, is opposed by the United Nations. Last month, U.N. agencies and other groups said they would not participate in setting up any such zones in Gaza.

 

Yara Bayoumy contributed reporting.


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3) What the Scale of Displacement in Gaza Looks Like

By Zach Levitt and Amy Schoenfeld Walker, Dec. 2, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/02/world/middleeast/gaza-map-displaced-people.html






































Sources: ReliefWeb Response (shelter populations); Israeli military (evacuation zone boundaries) Note: Shelter locations shown are primarily schools; data for medical facilities and other buildings serving as shelters was not available. Data is as of Nov. 28. Where displaced people are staying at United Nations and government shelters. Each circle represents the total number of displaced people in shelters within one square kilometer.


Up to 1.8 million Gazans — around 80 percent of the population — have been forced to leave their homes since Israel began its bombardment in response to Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7. That number is expected to rise after Israel issued a new evacuation order on Saturday for areas in the south.

 

Gaza has never experienced so much internal displacement in such a short time. Earlier conflicts forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, but refugee experts said the current war was unprecedented for the number of people displaced within the enclave’s 140 square miles.

 

With Israel barring most Gazans from leaving and shelters swelling to many times over their capacity, humanitarian aid workers say there is no safe place to go as the fighting continues.

 

There are at least 14 government and United Nations shelters within the new evacuation zone that Israeli forces announced on Saturday. These shelters had registered more than 68,000 displaced people as of Nov. 28.

 

“People are sleeping on the streets and sidewalks without any means of protection,” said Yousef Hammash, an advocacy officer for the Norwegian Refugee Council, who fled from his home in northern Gaza in mid-October to stay with more than 40 relatives in a two-room home in Khan Younis. “And people in the shelters are trying to convince themselves that it’s a bit more safe than being in the street.”

 

“The situation before was unimaginable, and now they want to move people again,” he added.

 

About 1.4 million Palestinans have found shelter in or outside of Gaza’s schools, medical centers, mosques and churches. The rest — as many as a half a million people — are thought to be staying with relatives and even strangers, often sleeping outside in courtyards or crammed into small apartments.

 

A majority of the displaced have moved south, as intense air- and ground strikes by Israeli forces have destroyed much of the north, making it unlivable. But tens of thousands are estimated to remain in the north, including many who are unable to travel, such as the sick and disabled.

 

Humanitarian organizations warn that shelters, even in the south, are not protected from fighting. The U.N. reported on Nov. 23 that since the start of the conflict, an estimated 191 people in shelters had been killed and 798 had been injured.

 

Many schools housing displaced people have been damaged since the war began, according to a UNICEF tracker, which relies on reports from other organizations on the ground.

 

At least 28 government schools functioning as shelters have sustained major damage in the North Gaza and Gaza regions, making them no longer usable, and 122 others across the territory have sustained moderate or minor damage.

 

The U.N. has estimated that most of its shelters are at four times their capacity, at minimum, and unable to accommodate more people.

 

“You have to wait in line for two hours, just to use the bathroom,” Mr. Hammash said. “To have a shower is kind of a dream.”

 

The shelter population has soared in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war, especially in the central and southern regions of Deir al Balah, Khan Younis and Rafah, areas to which Israeli forces have told Palestinians to evacuate.

 

Close quarters and limited access to safe water and bathrooms is contributing to the spread of disease, along with the onset of winter, according to the World Health Organization. The agency has reported thousands of cases of acute respiratory infections, diarrhea and skin rashes in Gaza on average each day.

 

During the seven-day cease-fire that ended on Friday, some people temporarily left shelters to return to their homes to investigate any damage. Some people displaced in the south even tried to go back to the north, according to the U.N.

 

The safety of displaced people is uncertain as the fighting continues into its ninth week, and people are once again forced to move to new locations.

 

“We are going to a new level of madness and bombardment,” Mr. Hammash said. “Now it’s the turn of the south.”


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4) A university president was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, Palestinian officials say.

By Gaya Gupta, Dec. 3, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/12/03/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news







Professor Suflan Tayeh


A university president and well-known physics professor was killed along with his family on Saturday in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education said.

 

The professor, Sofyan Taya, a longtime and prolific scholar in the field of optics who served as the president of the Islamic University of Gaza, was slain when Israeli warplanes hit buildings in Jabaliya just north of Gaza City, the ministry said. It did not identify the other members of his family.

 

Mr. Taya was listed on Stanford University’s compilation of most-cited scientists around the world in 2021 and 2022, with a listed specialty of optics. His research has amassed more than 3,700 citations, according to his Google Scholar page. He wrote in his profile on ResearchGate, a social network for scientists, that his research focused on fibers, optical sensing and slab waveguides.

 

Mr. Taya was also a chair in astronomy, astrophysics and space sciences for UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization. The position was meant to partner up the Islamic University of Gaza and UNESCO to facilitate research.

 

An Israeli military spokesman declined to comment on Mr. Taya’s death.

 

It remained unclear if Mr. Taya was a target of the airstrike. The Israeli military has claimed that the Islamic University of Gaza is linked to Hamas operations. In October, the Israeli military struck the university, claiming that it was an “important operational, political and military center” belonging to Hamas and that it had been used as a training camp for Hamas military intelligence operatives, according to a statement. The Israeli military has also said that the university maintained close ties with the senior leadership of Hamas.


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5) Tracing the Deep Roots of Ireland’s Support for Palestinians

In a country with its own history of a seemingly intractable conflict, the majority of people in Ireland are sympathetic to Palestinian civilians, while also condemning the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7.

By Megan Specia, Dec. 2, 2023

Reporting from Dublin

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/world/europe/ireland-palestinians-support.html
A large crowd fills a wide street, with some waving Palestinian flags and people at the front holding a banner that reads, “Freedom & justice for Palestine.”

Demonstrators gathered in Dublin in solidarity with the Palestinians last month. Credit...Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters


Under the light drizzle of a Tuesday morning last month, Ríonach Ní Néill and a group of friends set up a small platform in front of the United States Embassy in Dublin.

 

Then they took out a stack of papers. For the next 11 and a half hours, Ms. Ní Néill and others took turns reading out thousands of names — each one a person killed since Israel started bombarding Gaza in the war, according to a list released by the Gazan health authorities.

 

It was an attempt to convey the enormity of the loss of life, she said.

 

“I think the baseline really in Ireland is that human rights are valued, and what’s happening now is the destruction of universal human rights,” said Ms. Ní Néill, 52, an artist from Galway. “This is not something that can be ignored.”

 

In Ireland, support for Palestinian civilians runs deep, rooted in what many see as a shared history of British colonialism and the experience of a seemingly intractable and traumatic conflict, which in Ireland’s case came to a close with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

 

Since the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7 that killed about 1,200 people, according to the Israeli authorities, and the subsequent bombardment of Gaza, Ireland has emerged as something of an outlier in Europe for its stance on the conflict.

 

While condemning the Hamas atrocities, lawmakers across Ireland’s political spectrum were among the first in Europe to call for the protection of Palestinian civilians and denounce the scale of Israel’s response, which has left more than 15,000 people dead, according to health officials in Gaza — a rate of casualties with few precedents in the 21st century.

 

Last month, Leo Varadkar, Ireland’s prime minister, said he strongly believed that Israel had the right to defend itself, but that what was unfolding in Gaza “resembles something approaching revenge.”

 

Ireland’s president, Michael D. Higgins, whose post as head of state is considered above the political fray, described “unanimous revulsion” at the Hamas attacks, but said that Israeli strikes that killed civilians threatened to leave human rights agreements “in tatters.”

 

Those views are mainstream in Ireland. In a poll published last month, about 71 percent of respondents classified Israel’s response as “disproportionately severe.” About 65 percent also said that Hamas should be officially proscribed as a terrorist organization. Tens of thousands have taken part in weekly protests calling for an end to Israeli attacks on Gaza.

 

Jane Ohlmeyer, a history professor at Trinity College Dublin and author of “Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World,” said that the country’s status as a former British colony had “undoubtedly shaped how people from Ireland engage with post-colonial conflicts.”

 

That history sets Ireland apart from a number of other countries in Western Europe, many of which were themselves imperial powers, she added, while giving it common ground with Palestinians.

 

After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Britain was given administrative control over the area then known as Palestine. Britain’s foreign secretary at the time, Arthur James Balfour — who was previously Britain’s chief secretary for Ireland, and known for his sometimes brutal suppression of Irish demands for independence — had laid out his country’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

 

A few years later, Britain granted independence to much of the island of Ireland but held on to the six counties that still make up Northern Ireland and remain part of the United Kingdom. That legislation provided the template for partitions in other former British colonies, including India and Pakistan in 1947, “and Israel and Palestine” the following year, said Dr. Ohlmeyer.

 

British officials have drawn their own parallels between the Irish and the Palestinians. Ronald Storrs, who was governor of Jerusalem from 1917 to 1926, wrote in his memoir that if enough Jewish people moved to Palestine, it could “form for England a ‘little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism” — a reference to English settlers who were sent to Northern Ireland in what became known as the “plantation of Ulster.”

 

Maurice Cohen, the chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, said in an interview that public sentiment in Ireland had initially supported Jewish efforts to create a state of Israel and the struggle against British rule — a fact that he said was often overlooked in modern Ireland.

 

“Maybe because we have always felt that we are the underdogs here, so we are always rooting for the underdog,” said Mr. Cohen, 73. “When I was growing up, there was always a great affinity to the Israelis, because they were deemed to be the underdog as well.”

 

Yet that support later shifted toward the Palestinian cause, he said, amid rising criticism of the Israeli state’s expansion of settlements and the displacement of Palestinian communities.

 

Ireland has a small Jewish population of about 2,700, according to 2023 statistics, out of a total population of 5.3 million. And Mr. Cohen said that while antisemitic rhetoric online had risen since the Hamas-Israel conflict began, that had not spilled over into major violence in Ireland. In addition, although he mourned that the conversation about the current conflict had lost depth and nuance, he said that the leaders of all of the country’s political parties had assured him “that they will not brook any antisemitism in Ireland.”

 

Yet even as Ireland, like the rest of Europe, has for decades favored a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and engaged with leaders from both sides, its relations with Israel have soured in the weeks since Oct. 7.

 

On Sunday, Israel summoned the Irish ambassador for a rebuke over a post by Mr. Varadkar on the social media platform X in which he described the release of a young Israeli-Irish hostage as “an innocent child who was lost has now been found and returned.”

 

Israel’s foreign minister, Eli Cohen, suggested on X that the Irish prime minister was seeking to disguise the truth about Hamas’s hostage-taking and had lost his “moral compass.”

 

Many Irish commentators pointed out that Mr. Varadkar’s language was metaphorical and echoed biblical references to being lost and found.

 

In an interview with Ireland’s public broadcaster on Wednesday, President Isaac Herzog of Israel, whose grandfather was Ireland’s chief rabbi, said he disagreed with the foreign minister’s criticism of Mr. Varadkar, but also questioned what he called Ireland’s “indifference to the pain endured by Israelis.”

 

For some who lived through the late-20th-century conflict in Northern Ireland, the war in Gaza calls to mind the trauma of the past but also the possibility of hope. Less than a week after the Hamas attacks, Patrick Kielty, who hosts “The Late Late Show,” the Friday night Irish television staple, offered a message to “all the families whose lives this week have been ripped apart in Israel and Palestine.”

 

Mr. Kielty grew up in Northern Ireland and his father was killed in 1988 by a paramilitary group that supported the territory’s ties to Britain. “There were days when we thought it would never end,” he told the audience.

 

“We are currently living our own miracle on this island, because we are living in peace,” Mr. Kielty added. “For all those in Israel and Palestine tonight, it might not seem like it, but there’s always hope, and we hope that your miracle comes soon.”


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6) Israel orders more evacuations ahead of a possible invasion of southern Gaza.

By Andrés R. Martínez, Dec. 4, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/12/04/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news




Screenshot




































As Israel widened its military campaign against Hamas into southern Gaza, it redoubled its orders on Monday for people to leave parts of Khan Younis, the area’s largest city, and head to shelters farther south including to Rafah, on the Egyptian border.

 

But aid agencies warned that the shelters there were already overcrowded, and Israeli warplanes struck the Rafah area early Monday, according to Palestinian news outlets and photos, which showed people carrying bodies swaddled in blankets away from scenes of destruction.

 

The Israeli warnings, and the heavy bombardment of southern Gaza, confronted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with the urgent and frightening choice of whether to stay in areas that the Israeli military has signaled will be the focus of the next phase of its war or to heed its orders to evacuate to places that were already coming under attack.

 

Israel has signaled that it is preparing a ground invasion of the south, with the military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, saying late Sunday that it “continues and expands its ground operations against Hamas strongholds all across the Gaza Strip.”

 

A senior official with Hamas, the armed group that controls much of Gaza, said late Sunday that Israeli ground troops had not entered the south. But Hamas’s military wing said that its fighters had targeted a tank and personnel carrier north of Khan Younis and several Israeli military vehicles in central Gaza. The claims could not be verified, and with communications networks disrupted, it was not possible to gain an independent assessment of the fighting.

 

The Israeli military has expanded its evacuation orders in the south, echoing similar orders it gave before sending troops into northern Gaza in late October. The military has said it intended to move civilians out of harm’s way.

 

Many Gazans were confused by the announcements, which were posted on social media in Arabic and accompanied by a map of Gaza that divided the territory into nearly 2,400 zones. On Monday, a spokesman for the Israeli military posted a map calling on people to move to areas southeast of Khan Younis and in Rafah, which the United Nations’ humanitarian office said “are already overcrowded.”

 

The Israeli military advised residents to pay attention to announcements about whether their zone was being evacuated, but the United Nations said it was unclear whether many Gazans were able to see the online map given disruptions in electricity and communications.

 

After more than a month of fighting concentrated in northern Gaza — and a weeklong cease-fire that expired last Friday — Israel believes that the Hamas leaders who planned the Oct. 7 attacks that officials say left at least 1,200 people dead in Israel are hiding in the south. Israel’s military has responded to the attacks with nearly two months of airstrikes and a ground invasion of northern Gaza that have killed more than 15,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health officials, and pushed an estimated 1.75 million Gazans south.

 

Hundreds of people have been killed since hostilities resumed on Friday, according to Gazan health officials, who have warned that medical facilities remain desperately short of supplies as Israel has sharply restricted the amount of humanitarian aid allowed to enter the enclave.

 

“The level of human suffering is intolerable,” said the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, who visited Gaza on Monday. In a statement, she said: “It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible.”

 

Fighting has continued elsewhere in the enclave. The Israeli military reported the deaths of three of its soldiers on Sunday, two in battles in northern Gaza and one in a battle in the central part of the strip.

 

Vivian Yee, Iyad Abuheweila, Peter Baker and Karoun Demirjian contributed reporting.


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7) Confusing evacuation orders leave Gazans to make painful decisions.

By ivian Yee and Ameera Harouda, Dec. 4, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/12/04/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news

A wounded man is carried by a group of young men through a crowded street.

An injured man is carried through Rafah following Israeli strikes on Sunday. A spokesman for the Health Ministry in Gaza said 316 people had been killed, and 664 wounded, in airstrikes “in the past hours.” Credit...Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


Palestinians trying to make sense of a new, confusing round of Israeli evacuation orders were left to make painful decisions on Sunday, as the Israeli military appeared to be setting the stage for a ground invasion in southern Gaza.

 

Abu Yousef, 42, and his family were among those who left the city of Khan Younis on Saturday night and headed to Al-Mawasi, a narrow agricultural area near the coast. They had seen on social media that the neighborhood where they were staying — their second temporary shelter after leaving their home in northern Gaza — might be marked for evacuation, but were not certain.

 

Scanning a map that the Israeli military had provided, he could not tell whether they should go. Then they got a recorded call from the Israeli military ordering them to leave.

 

“You can’t imagine the tough situation,” he said. “Your mind will stop working, because you have children, you have elderly that you have to move.”

 

He wondered: What should they take with them? Water? Batteries? Mattresses?

 

“It’s a lot of thinking,” he said. “And you don’t know where to go.”

 

Other neighbors, clinging to the hope that their homes did not fall under the evacuation orders, decided to stay, he said.

 

Mr. Yousef said his family had already moved twice, from the northernmost part of Gaza to Gaza City and then to Khan Younis, before packing up again for their third displacement on Saturday night. Every time they thought they had found a solution, he said, “you evacuate again.”

 

In Al-Mawasi, Mr. Yousef said his family was staying under a nylon tarp stretched over some wood and sharing one bathroom at a relative’s house nearby. Asked how he planned to get food for his family, he responded: “I don’t know. I don’t have an answer.”

 

On Sunday afternoon, a spokesman for the Gazan health ministry, Dr. Ashraf Al-Qudra, said 316 people had been killed in Israeli strikes “in the past hours.” He said that more than 15,500 people had been killed since Oct. 7, when the war began.

 

Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s news agency, reported on Sunday that 60 people had been killed in airstrikes in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, along with dozens more in Jabaliya, a long-established camp, and Beit Lahia, a town in northern Gaza. It said dozens of others were also killed in Al-Zaytoun and Al-Shuja’iya, both neighborhoods in Gaza City.

 

There was little safety to be found in northern Gaza, where Israeli troops have resumed ground operations following a weeklong pause. The aid group Doctors Without Borders said Israeli tanks had destroyed some of its marked vehicles outside of its clinic in Gaza City on Sunday and started a fire that consumed trees and electrical wiring nearby.

 

“My colleagues were in the clinic, and I was afraid the fire could reach them,” an unidentified staff member who filmed the attack said in a video the group shared on social media.

 

“It was a horrible scene,” he added.

 

Iyad Abuheweila contributed reporting.


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