Palestine

By Katherine Hearst

Published date: 9 September 2024 15:41 BST

By Ahmed Alsammak

Published date: 15 September 2024 11:17 BST

Nikhil Singh

Fri 17 May 2024 07.00 EDT

“Mystery Strikes” and Deaths

There’s a perverse insistence in Western news that the deaths of innocent children, women, disabled, and the elderly in Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gazan residential areas are casualties of ‘war’. Again and again, they acquit Israel of any wrongdoing by claiming that these killings are due to ‘war’ rather than a genocide, despite UN claims. The civilian death toll in Gaza is higher than any other conflict in the 21st century.

As I demonstrated with a 1937 newspaper headline in Part 1, the use of pro-Zionist Media to create a pro-Israel narrative is nothing new. Here’s an example from 2018, where BBC changed its headline to make sure that Israel is once again the victim.

Let’s get back to the present Israeli genocide now:

NYT protects Israel's role in enforcing illegal famine in Gaza. A NYT piece blames Gazans for not displaying orderly queue at an aid convoy. Absolves Israel of creating famine conditions by not mentioning Israel’s role, and how IDF soldiers shot Gazans looking for food. Credit: NYT

A mysterious strike has killed people in Gaza. Makes you think who attacked, could it have been Israel? Credit: Sky News

Takeaway

Headlines are viewed in a vacuum. They have the responsibility to convey the entire story. With the rise of pay-walls and subscriptions, most readers aren’t allowed to look at anything except the headlines, especially in Western news websites. These headlines thus serve to reinforce a view that Israel is fighting a ‘defensive’ war in Gaza, and not all ‘strikes’ are committed by Israel.

Prem Thakker

Sep 13, 2024

As Israeli demolitions and settler attacks escalate, Palestinians in the village of Umm al-Khair stare down the possibility of expulsion.

Maya Rosen

July 11, 2024

By Dania Akkad

Published date: 13 September 2024 19:12 BST

UCLA students arguing that Zionism is a First Amendment-protected religious belief have joined a powerful right-wing legal project.

Raphael Magarik

September 13, 2024

Patrick Wintour

Diplomatic editor

Fri 13 Sep 2024 11.38 EDT

Melissa Hellmann, Gloria Oladipo and Adria R Walker

Fri 13 Sep 2024 07.00 EDT

Prem Thakker

Sep 13, 2024

Sunjeev Bery

September 11 2024, 2:02 p.m.

Andrew Roth in Washington

Thu 12 Sep 2024 14.30 EDT

By Martin Belam

Thursday, September 12, 2024 09:54 EDT

UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, has survived 75 years of Israeli-Palestinian strife. Can it survive the latest conflict?

By Ben Hubbard

For this article, Ben Hubbard conducted more than three dozen interviews and visited refugee camps in the West Bank. He has spent more than a decade covering the Middle East, and reported from inside Gaza for The Times during the Hamas-Israel war in 2014.

Sept. 12, 2024

Next month, the band will take the stage with an unlikely musical guest: legendary "king of Mizrahi music" Zohar Argov. Unlikely, because Argov has been dead for 37 years. His appearance at the Revivo show will be via hologram. "The first of its kind ever to be used in Israel," the correspondent said with breathless excitement.

In 1978, he was tried and found guilty of raping a woman who refused to go home with him and spent a year in prison. Nine years later, while on furlough from a prison sentence he was serving for stealing a pistol from a police station, Argov attempted to rape the girlfriend of his friend and fellow singer Yishai Levi.

But it's not only dead singers accused of rape who are given a pass in mainstream Israeli society. All of which pale in comparison to Israel's most recent, and arguably most glaring, example of rape denial and apology: the Sde Teiman prison facility, where nine reserve soldiers were accused of severely sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee.

News of the allegations prompted many on social media to speak out in their defense, calling the soldiers "national heroes" and "completely innocent of any wrongdoing," even as the evidence began to mount against them. When it was discovered where the suspects were being detained, dozens of protestors, including Knesset members, stormed the base and entered the military court inside while soldiers attempted to stop them.

The one thing we have not done, or at least done enough, is look inward at our own biases. Alongside the worthy #MeTooUNlessURaJew social media campaign, it's time for Israel to collectively declare that rape is rape is rape, no matter the victim, no matter the perpetrator, and certainly no matter the use of angled lights and lasers to create a three-dimensional illusion that appears to move and exist in real space.

By MEE staff in London

Published date: 10 September 2024 22:02 BST

By Simon Hooper

Published date: 9 September 2024 16:25 BST

After every successive war crime and crime against humanity perpetrated by Israel in its current genocidal rampage, the single most common refrain of Western government officials (and of Western corporate media) is that “Israel has a right to defend itself.”

No, it does not.

In fact, as a matter of international law, this is a double lie.

A temporary exception to the prohibition on the use of force is codified in Article 51 of the UN Charter for self-defense from external attacks. But importantly, no such right exists where the threat emanates from inside the territory controlled by the state.

This principle was affirmed by the World Court in its 2004 opinion on Israel’s apartheid wall. And the Court found then, and again in its 2024 opinion on the occupation, that Israel is the occupying power across the occupied Palestinian territory. Thus, Israel, as the occupying power, cannot claim self-defense as a justification for launching military attacks in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or the Golan Heights.

Of course, Israel, from within its own territory, can lawfully repel any attacks to protect its civilians, but it cannot claim self-defense to wage war against the territories it occupies.