Reply With QuoteThanks for making the donation TOBW - very grateful for your practical response. Actions speak louder than words!Originally Posted by the other bob wilson
Gofer.
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A massive coming together of different thoughts on faith,
but they both proved things can change for the better.
Thanks for making the donation TOBW - very grateful for your practical response. Actions speak louder than words!
Gofer.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...l-report-finds
A report from Amnesty International alleges that Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip constitutes the crime of genocide under international law, the first such determination by a major human rights organisation in the 14-month-old conflict.
The 296-page report examining events in Gaza between October 2023 to July 2024, published on Thursday, found that Israel had “brazenly, continuously and with total impunity … unleashed hell” on the strip’s 2.3 million population, noting that the “atrocity crimes” against Israelis by Hamas on 7 October 2023, which triggered the war, “do not justify genocide”.
Israel has “committed prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction” with the “specific intent to destroy Palestinians” in the territory, the report said.
....
The main allegations in the report are:
The unprecedented scale and magnitude of the military offensive, which has caused death and destruction at a speed and level unmatched in any other 21st-century conflict;
Intent to destroy, after considering and discounting arguments such as Israeli recklessness and callous disregard for civilian life in the pursuit of Hamas;
Killing and causing serious bodily or mental harm in repeated direct attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, or deliberately indiscriminate attacks; and
Inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, such as destroying medical infrastructure, the obstruction of aid, and repeated use of arbitrary and sweeping “evacuation orders” for 90% of the population to unsuitable areas.
Well worth the time to read the whole interview:
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/11/ant...ever-surrender
This is the situation in Israel — alongside genocide, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, atrocities, occupation, and persecution of Palestinians in their territories, there’s also fascism growing stronger in Israel by legislation and by the persecution of citizens, arresting people, beating people, etc. Israel is on the verge of a full-fledged fascist regime.
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More personally, I do not compare the ongoing situation in Gaza to the Holocaust. I do compare it to what happened in Germany during the 1930s, but absolutely not what was going on during the 1940s. I hope I won’t have a reason to compare the two in the future.
But the family of my grandparents on my mother’s side were all butchered by the Nazis. All of them were killed. Nobody survived apart from my grandparents, who left Poland before the war. I often ask myself what could have happened if there had been many more people who spoke out against those crimes. Perhaps they could have saved millions of people, including my family.
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Israeli society is also mine, and I want my society to be a just one. This is part of the struggle. They want to silence us, and me in particular, because they don’t want that. They are smearing us as anti-Israeli, as antisemites, and me personally as a self-hating Jew. All those lies are because they want to silence us. And they want to persecute us because they don’t want us to tell the truth in order to amend reality. I shall never surrender.
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org...cles-for-you_1
Extract:
If the roles were reversed…
Because if the roles were reversed—if Palestinians had spent the last eight decade stealing Jewish homes, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, poisoning, torturing, raping and killing them; if Palestinians had killed an estimated 300,000 Jews in one year, targeted their journalists, their thinkers, their healthcare workers, their athletes, their artists, bombed every Israeli hospital, university, library, museum, cultural center, synagogue, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where people came watch their slaughter as if a tourist attraction;
If Palestinians had corralled them by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents, bombed them in so called safe zones, burned them alive, cut off their food, water, and medicine;
If Palestinians made Jewish children wander barefoot with empty pots; made them gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; made them bury their siblings, cousins and friends; made them sneak out from their tents in the middle of the night to sleep on their parents’ graves; made them pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world anymore, and terrorized them so utterly that their children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and made those as young as 4 and 5 year old were die of heart attacks;
If we mercilessly forced their NICU babies to die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, died and decomposed in the same spot;
If Palestinians used wheat flour aid trucks to lure starving jews, then opened fire on them when they gathered to collect a day’s bread; if Palestinians finally allowed a food delivery into a shelter with hungry Jews, then set fire to the entire shelter and aid truck before anyone could taste the food;
if a Palestinian sniper bragged about blowing out 42 Jewish kneecaps in one day as one Israeli soldier did in 2019; if a Palestinian admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Jews with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads;
If Palestinians were systematically raping Jewish doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, and fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with Dr Adnan alBursh and others;
If Jewish women were forced to give birth in filth, get C-sections or leg amputations without anesthesia; if we destroyed their children then decorated our tanks with their toys; if we killed or displaced their women then posed with their lingerie…
If the world were watching the livestreamed systematic annihilation of Jews in real time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide.
Thanks for posting these articles, Jon. Makes you realise what a shit planet we live on.
Very powerful but sad.
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org...cles-for-you_1
A Massive Database of Evidence, Compiled by a Historian, Documents Israel's War Crimes in Gaza
A woman with a child is shot while waving a white flag . Starving girls are crushed to death in line for bread. A cuffed 62-year-old man is run over, evidently by a tank. An aerial strike targets people trying to help a wounded boy. A database of thousands of videos, photos, testimonies, reports and investigations documents the horrors committed by Israel in Gaza.
Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War by "Lee Mordechai, 42, a former officer in the IDF Combat Engineering Corps, (who) is presently a senior lecturer in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem."
A tough read, but thanks for those links Jon. I was struck by the bit that said the person would not compare whats happened to the Holocaust, but it matches what was going on in Germany in the thirties. Almost as bad is the way that many leaders of western democracies still back the line that Israel is defending itself - that line stopped having any justification a year and more ago.
Great work they are doing, have shared this and donated, Shalom
Both PCRF and FAJR seem to be doing similar work in Gaza, so I have donated to each to cover both bases! I also wrote a kind of "thank you email" to both organisations to thank them for what they are doing. I think they deserve to be acknowledged and encouraged about the work they are doing, in what must be the most difficult of circumstances.Great work they are doing, have shared this and donated, Shalom
A very brave guy to speak up like that I should think, especially considering where he is employed.
Thanks for the other articles - unbelievably harrowing stuff.
Now we have the Syrian uprising situation to add to the mix. I have been speaking with our Syrian refugee family today about this latest news as they still have relatives in the Deraa district which is where the rebel fighters are now. The Syrian mum's mother is living near Deraa City and she told the family over the phone last night that there are armed rebels where she is and she is scared. On the news we see a mixture of reactions from the people - some are euphoric with joy and others are scared, fleeing from their homes. On the one hand the family will be pleased to see Assad toppled (the civil war was the reason they fled their home in 2013 and ended up in Wales) but they are conscious of the likely chaotic future for their country with so many different factions involved - nightmare.
I suspect Assad will do a runner soon as Damascus will be next. I assume he would not be universally accepted elsewhere - Russia or Iran?
Indeed, and TEAR Fund who we have supported since the 1980's have also stepped up as you would expect.
Yes, as Christians we have been supporters of Tearfund too for many years. This time I felt an affinity with these other two smaller charities who are directly involved with what is particularly on my heart i.e. helping seriously injured Palestinian children go abroad to get the urgent surgical care they need, rather than a more general humanitarian aid approach (which is no less vital of course and where Tearfund via IHP are working).
Do you have any information on how much the population has dropped in Damascus over recent years?
Hezbollah reeling, Assad gone, Hamas Fooked. It's all gone wrong for the ayatollahs since October 7th! Tough times amongst the elite in Tehran
I had a quick look on the web. In 2010 (pre civil war) the population of Damascus was 2,694,000 and this year is 2,685,000 so not much change it seems.
Assad gone, and so suddenly. A classic case of unexpected consequences. Sadly it could all end up as a case of Iraq Mk.2 with all the different factions battling for power.
It's possibly the best opportunity for the Kurds to have their own state.
Also an opportunity for Turkish-backed groups to have a pop at the Kurds! Happy days.
I have started a thread specifically about the Syrian uprising as I am conscious that I am hi-jacking the Hamas vs IDF thread!
A very big worry.
Fingers crossed. Did read that there has started to be a bit of infighting between Kurdish leaders. Hopefully they get themselves sorted
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...za-study-finds
A new study of children living through the war in Gaza has found that 96% of them feel that their death is imminent and almost half want to die as a result of the trauma they have been through.
A needs assessment, carried out by a Gaza-based NGO sponsored by the War Child Alliance charity, also found that 92% of the children in the survey were “not accepting of reality”, 79% suffer from nightmares and 73% exhibit symptoms of aggression.
“This report lays bare that Gaza is one of the most horrifying places in the world to be a child,” Helen Pattinson, chief executive of War Child UK, said. “Alongside the levelling of hospitals, schools and homes, a trail of psychological destruction has caused wounds unseen but no less destructive on children who hold no responsibility for this war.”
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The estimated death toll in Gaza is more than 44,000 and a recent assessment by the UN Human Rights Office found that 44% of the fatalities it was able to verify were children.
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About 1.9 million Palestinians in Gaza, approximately 90% of the territory’s total population, have been displaced, many several times. Half of that number are children who have lost their home and been forced to flee their neighbourhoods.
More than 60% of the surveyed children reported having experienced traumatic events during the war and some had been exposed to multiple traumatic events.
An estimated 17,000 children in Gaza are unaccompanied, separated from their parents, although the study notes the real number may be much higher.
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The sense of being doomed has become pervasive. Almost all the children (96%) felt their death was imminent, and 49% actually wished to die, a feeling that was much more prevalent among boys (72%) than girls (26%).
What a heartbreaking report. The survivors will form Hamas Mk.II for sure.
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