[🇧🇩] Israel and Hamas war in Gaza-----Can Bangladesh be a peace broker?

[Saif]

Israel accused of genocide in Gaza

Amnesty International accused Israel Thursday of ‘committing genocide’ against Palestinians in Gaza since the start of the war last year, saying its new report was a ‘wake-up call’ for the world.

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Israel accused of genocide in Gaza
Agence France-Presse . Jerusalem 07 December, 2024, 01:18

Amnesty International accused Israel Thursday of ‘committing genocide’ against Palestinians in Gaza since the start of the war last year, saying its new report was a ‘wake-up call’ for the world.

The London-based human rights group said its findings were based on satellite images documenting devastation, fieldwork and ground reports from Gazans as well as ‘dehumanising and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials’.

Israel dismissed the findings as ‘entirely false’, denouncing the report as ‘fabricated’ and ‘based on lies’.

Amnesty chief Agnes Callamard accused Israel of treating the Palestinians in Gaza ‘as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them’.

‘Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now,’ she said in a statement.

Hamas, which has been fighting Israel in Gaza, welcomed the report as a ‘message to the international community... on the need to act to bring an end to this genocide’.

Israel’s offensive has killed at least 44,580 people in Gaza.

Independent UN human rights experts have accused Israel of genocide several times, and South Africa brought a case against Israel to the UN’s top court in December 2023 accusing it of ‘violating the genocide convention by promoting the destruction of Palestinians living in Gaza’. The case is still ongoing.

Callamard insisted at a press conference in The Hague that ‘the existence of military objectives does not negate the possibility of a genocidal intent’.

She said Amnesty had based its findings on the criteria set out in the UN Convention on the Prevention of Genocide.

But an Israeli army spokesperson said the report’s findings ‘fail to account for the operational realities’ it has faced.

Amnesty International said it ‘deeply regrets that some members’ of its Israel branch ‘have chosen to distance themselves’ from the report.

‘Amnesty International stands by its rigorous research and conclusions,’ a spokesperson said.

Amnesty’s 300-page report points to ‘direct deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructures where there was no Hamas presence or any other military objectives’ as well as the blocking of aid deliveries, and the displacement of 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.4 million people.

Palestinians have been subjected to ‘malnutrition, hunger and diseases’ and exposed to a ‘slow, calculated death’, Amnesty said.

The rights group, which is also due to publish a report on the crimes committed by Hamas, cited 15 air strikes in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and April 20, which killed 334 civilians, including 141 children, for which the group found ‘no evidence that any of these strikes were directed at a military objective’.

The Amnesty report also referenced dozens of calls by Israeli officials and soldiers for the annihilation, destruction, burning or ‘erasure’ of Gaza.

Such statements highlighted ‘systemic impunity’ as well as ‘an environment that emboldens... such behaviour’.

‘Governments must stop pretending that they are powerless to terminate Israel’s occupation, to end apartheid and to stop the genocide in Gaza,’ Callamard said.

‘States that transfer arms to Israel violate their obligations to prevent genocide under the convention and are at risk of becoming complicit.’​

 

[Saif]

Saudi slams genocidal Israel

A senior Saudi royal termed Israel ‘genocidal’ and an ‘apartheid’ state on Saturday, as he called on incoming US President-elect Donald Trump to bring peace to the Middle East.

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Saudi slams genocidal Israel
Agence France-Presse . Manama 07 December, 2024, 22:16

A senior Saudi royal termed Israel ‘genocidal’ and an ‘apartheid’ state on Saturday, as he called on incoming US President-elect Donald Trump to bring peace to the Middle East.

Prince Turki Al Faisal, who was Saudi Arabia’s intelligence chief for more than two decades, also said he hoped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be brought before the International Criminal Court.

‘Israel today, according to international human rights groups, is not only an apartheid colonial state, but it is also a genocidal one,’ Prince Turki said.

‘It is committing genocide on the people of Gaza.’

He added: ‘It’s about time for the world to... take the necessary steps to bring those who are charged by the International Criminal Court to justice.’

The ICC issued warrants for Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant last month on suspicion of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Saudi’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also accused Israel of genocide at a joint Arab League and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation summit in Riyadh last month.

Amnesty International levelled the same charge this week in a new report that was dismissed by Israel as ‘fabricated’ and ‘based on lies’.

The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 44,612 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to figures from the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.

Prince Turki, also a former Saudi ambassador to the US, said Trump’s ‘strong mandate’ from American voters ‘can enable him to provide the statesmanship that is highly needed in the world.

‘Friendly countries in the region are hoping that Mr. Trump pursues what he started before, to bring peace with capital letters to the Middle East,’ he said.

‘It is time for America, under your presidency, to change the course of this troubled region,’ he added.

During Trump’s first administration, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco signed the Abraham Accords recognising Israel, a break with the long-held Arab consensus that there should be no ties without the creation of a Palestinian state.​

 

[Saif]

Observing the international day of solidarity with the Palestinian people

On November 29, the world observed the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People-- a day established by the UN in 1977 to emphasise global support for Palestinian rights, including self-determination, independence and a just resolution to the issue of Palestinian refugees. The int

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Observing the international day of solidarity with the Palestinian people
Muhammad Zamir
Published :
Dec 09, 2024 00:38
Updated :
Dec 09, 2024 00:38

On November 29, the world observed the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People-- a day established by the UN in 1977 to emphasise global support for Palestinian rights, including self-determination, independence and a just resolution to the issue of Palestinian refugees. The interesting thing is that the date was chosen as it marked the anniversary of the UN General Assembly's adoption of Resolution 181 in 1947, which proposed the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states.

This year, amidst Israel's continuing war on Gaza, fifteen countries - Armenia, Slovenia, Ireland, Norway, Spain, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Barbados, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Colombia, Saint Lucia, Holy See, Sweden and Haiti - have formally recognised the State of Palestine, reflecting growing international support for this entity.

This means that now, at least 146 UN member states recognise the State of Palestine, as does the Holy See, the governing body of the Catholic Church and Vatican City, which holds UN observer status.

Recognising Palestine strengthens its global standing, improves its capacity to hold Israeli authorities accountable for the occupation, and pressures Western powers to act on the two-state solution. This represents the fact that the State of Palestine is recognised as a sovereign nation by 146 countries, representing 75 per cent of United Nations Member States.

At this point one needs to recall the brief history of Palestinian recognition.

On November 15, 1988, in the early years of the first Intifada, Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, proclaimed Palestine as an independent State with Jerusalem as its capital. Following the announcement, more than 80 countries recognised Palestine as an independent State, with strong support from the Global South, including nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Arab world. Most of the European countries that recognised Palestine during this time, also did so as part of the former Soviet bloc.

A few years later, on September 13, 1993, the first direct talks between Palestinians and Israelis led to the signing of the Oslo Accords, which were supposed to bring about Palestinian self-determination in the form of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. This was never achieved.

It would be useful at this point to recall the Oslo Accords. This was the first direct Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement. This measure was meant to initiate future peace talks with the desired goal of a two-State solution, which has unfortunately never been achieved.

The agreement was negotiated in Oslo, Norway, and signed at the White House in Washington, USA on September 13, 1993 between Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister of Israel and Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the PLO in the presence of US President Bill Clinton.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, nearly 20 countries recognised Palestine, followed by 12 more between 2000 and 2010 - mostly from across Africa and South America. By 2011, all African countries, except for Eritrea and Cameroon, recognised Palestine.

In 2012, the General Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority (138 in favour, 9 against, 41 abstentions) agreed to change Palestine's status to "Nonmember Observer State", and in 2014, Sweden became the first country in Western Europe to recognise Palestine.

On May 22, 2024, in a positive gesture - against what was taking place in Gaza- Norway, Ireland and Spain, in succession, announced that they were recognising Palestine according to the pre-1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In response, Israel recalled its Ambassadors from the three European countries and promised to expand illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank as punishment.

On June 4, Slovenia became the latest European country to recognise a Palestinian State. Other European nations, Malta and Belgium, are also discussing whether and when to recognise Palestinian statehood.

Unfortunately, however, none of the G7 countries - Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom or the United States - have recognised Palestine.

Analyst Sumaya Mashrufa has correctly observed that the war that is currently being carried out by Israel with the support of some of its Western allies has spiraled, and appears to have seemingly merged into genocide. In this context, lands, as Edward Said once described, "lived on and owned by others," are stripped away under the guise of right, erasing histories etched into the soil. The denial from the West has also not unfortunately been accidental. It has been deliberate, woven into the fabric of imperial complicity. What is unfolding over more than two years is not chaos, but a design-a slow, systematic unmaking of a people.

Geo-strategists have noted that since October 7, 2023, nearly17,000 children have been killed, including 700 infants under the age of one, as reported by the UN. Such a scenario can only be described as an example of extermination. When 700 babies, still learning to crawl are killed before they can -how do you process that? Human rights activists have also referred to the pain being suffered by 17,000 childless mothers. One can imagine the suffering and grief they are going through being given the connotation by Israeli activists that all those killed (apparently including crawling babies), were deemed dangerous to an Israeli existence. Nothing demonstrates gross human rights violations more unambiguously than the reality of Palestinian women, stripped of their dignity and subjected to unimaginable horrors.

At this juncture question arises about what happened with the expected Western indignation over such decimation of human rights. Analyst Sumaya Mashrufa has correctly observed that these same Western voices, are however, swift to condemn and paint Muslim men as oppressors who apparently all cover their women in burqas. One can only note that when the perpetrators of violence do not fit the convenient Western narrative of barbarism, it is difficult for them to express their anger.

At this point, however, one also needs to condemn the manner in which Hamas carried out the initial attack on Israeli citizens that started this unfortunate war. Those guilty of these crimes need also to be taken to task through a legal process.

Sumaya Mashrufa has also observed that "I shouldn't have to seek the West's condemnation, nor wait for permission to call the deaths what they are-genocide! I shouldn't need anyone's approval to count my own loss. I can see with my own eyes that my mothers and brothers are gone. Yet this is the world we live in, where the veto-wielding powers must grant me the right to mourn my unbloomed sisters, my brothers who will never fulfill their potential".

Such an evolving scenario in Gaza leads one to also refer to the fourth report presented in March 2024 by Francesca Albanese, an international lawyer and expert in Middle Eastern human rights serving as the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights since 2022, to the United Nations, titled, "Anatomy of a Genocide." Supported by three prominent Israeli scholars of genocide and the Holocaust-Professors Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg, and Omar Bartov-the report concluded that Israel is committing genocide. The existing challenge today lies not merely in acknowledging that genocide is taking place in Gaza and Lebanon but in proving it to a world that demands evidence while turning a blind eye to the unfolding atrocities.

Geo-strategists have correctly observed that simply cataloguing these acts as "crimes against humanity" is insufficient. Most of us have seen how such a description has now become more or less ineffective since 1949, long before the recent surge in violence. The current paradigm also includes what has been happening since 2017 in Myanmar with regard to more than 700,000 Rohingyas who had to flee across the border from the Rakhine Province and seek shelter in Bangladesh because they were Muslims. Their number has now grown to over 1.2 million.

Analyst Sumaya Mashrufa has also correctly described genocide as being "systemic, calculated, a machine of annihilation". It is also unfortunate that the names of leadership might change in some G7 countries but policies remain the same. Such a scenario urges one to point out that in the contemporary world national interest overrides any responsibility associated with human rights.

In this context, it has been touching how students from Jahangirnagar University and in different parts of Bangladesh have expressed their concern about what is happening not only in Gaza but in other parts forcibly occupied by Israel. The Palestinian flag has become a symbol of what needs to be respected.

One also has to understand that the United Nations with the principle of Veto power also continues to cast a long shadow over offences created through discrimination and contravention of international law. It is difficult to accept that in the contemporary world genocide and atrocities have become only statistics and nothing more.

Muhammad Zamir, a former Ambassador, is an analyst specialised in foreign affairs, right to information and good governance.​

 

[Saif]

1m displaced Palestinians face extreme cold: UN

Nearly one million displaced Palestinians in Gaza are at risk from extreme cold and rain this winter, the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) has warned.

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1m displaced Palestinians face extreme cold: UN

Nearly one million displaced Palestinians in Gaza are at risk from extreme cold and rain this winter, the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) has warned.

"Displaced people in Gaza need protection from the rain and cold. Only around 23 percent of this need has been met, leaving 945,000 people at risk of exposure this winter," the UN agency said in a statement on Sunday. "Aid is urgently required to address the overwhelming needs as the crisis deepens."

The United Nations also renewed its call for a ceasefire in Gaza as Israeli airstrikes demolished homes and casualties increased.

The health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said yesterday that at least 44,758 people have been killed in more than 14 months of Israeli offensive in the enclave.

"In Deir Al Balah and across Gaza, people search through the rubble of their destroyed homes, trying to salvage what little remains after an Israeli airstrike," the UN's agency for Palestinian refugees said in a post on X.

"As strikes continue, civilian casualties rise, and homes and vital infrastructure are reduced to ruins. The human cost of this war is unbearable. We need a ceasefire now."

In a separate development, more than 4,000 amputations and 2,000 cases of spinal and brain injuries have been recorded in Gaza since the start of the Israeli offensive last year, a news agency reports.​

 

[Saif]

Israeli strikes kill 38 in Gaza

Israeli air attacks across the Gaza Strip killed at least 38 Palestinians yesterday, most of them in an airstrike on a house in Beit Lahiya town in the north of the enclave, medics said.

www.thedailystar.net

Israeli strikes kill 38 in Gaza
Women, children among dead; several trapped under rubble

Israeli air attacks across the Gaza Strip killed at least 38 Palestinians yesterday, most of them in an airstrike on a house in Beit Lahiya town in the north of the enclave, medics said.

The Beit Lahiya strike killed at least 22 people, including women and children, health officials said. Relatives listed the names of the dead on social media.

More than 30 people were living in the multi-storey building before it was struck, and several family members remained missing as rescue operations continued through the morning, the Palestinian WAFA news agency said.

At least 44,805 Palestinians have been killed in Israel's military offensive on Gaza since October 7, 2023, the Gaza health ministry said in a statement yesterday.

In nearby Beit Hanoun, where the Israeli forces have operated since October, medics said an Israeli airstrike killed and wounded several people, without giving an exact toll. Rescue workers said several people were trapped under rubble.

Earlier yesterday, at least seven Palestinians were killed and several others wounded in an Israeli airstrike on a house in the Nuseirat camp in central Gaza, medics told Reuters.

The Palestinian Civil Emergency Service and medics said four other people were killed in separate Israeli airstrikes on two houses in Gaza City.

The Israeli military said in a statement that two rockets were fired from the central Gaza Strip into Israel, but fell in open areas and caused no injuries. It signalled the ability of Hamas rebels in Gaza to continue to stage rocket attacks despite 14 months of devastating Israeli aerial and ground offensives.

Later yesterday, the Israeli military ordered residents in the Al-Maghazi camp in central Gaza to evacuate, citing rocket launches from the area. It urged them to head towards a humanitarian-designated zone near the Mediterranean coast.

Palestinian and United Nations officials say there are no safe areas in the devastated enclave. Israel accuses Hamas of hiding among the civilian population, a charge Hamas denies as a pretext by Israel to "justify its indiscriminate attacks".

Israeli forces have been operating in Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya and the nearby Jabalia refugee camp since October 5.

The UN General Assembly was set to vote yesterday on a draft resolution that seeks an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, a symbolic gesture after the US previously vetoed a similar action in the UN Security Council.​