Israel is forcibly disappearing Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

On October 28, Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari took to X – the platform formerly known as Twitter – with an “urgent message” for the residents of the Gaza Strip. For their “immediate safety”, Hagari said in a message entirely in English, residents of northern Gaza and Gaza City were urged to “temporarily relocate south”.

The performance was grotesquely preposterous for a variety of reasons, not least of them that English is the official language of neither Israel nor Palestine – which suggests that the intended audience was not, in fact, the population whose “immediate safety” was supposedly of such concern to Hagari & Co.

Indeed, if safety were actually a concern, the Israeli army would not have slaughtered more than 8,000 Palestinians in three weeks, among them more than 3,000 children. Nor would Israel have continued to carpet-bomb both northern and southern Gaza following its previous warning to Palestinians in the north of the enclave to evacuate south. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Guterres, Gaza and the consequences of countering ‘Israelspeak’

 Al Jazeera English

On top of its genocidal escapades in the Gaza Strip, the state of Israel is now also having a hissy fit.

The tantrum is primarily directed at United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who in recent remarks before the UN Security Council in New York had the audacity to point out the bleeding obvious. “It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres said, in reference to the October 7 Hamas operation that Israel sees as justifying the slaughter of more than 7,000 Palestinians in less than three weeks.

The Secretary-General continued: “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Had Guterres wanted to fill in the vacuum a little more, he could have mentioned the past 75 years of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and massacres suffered by Palestinians at the hands of Israel, which has now added forced starvation to its deadly anti-Palestinian arsenal. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

A PR stunt amid a massacre in Gaza

 Al Jazeera English

Friday, October 20 was supposed to be a particularly humanitarian day for the “world’s most moral army”, ie, the one that has slaughtered more than 4,000 humans in the Gaza Strip over the past two weeks, half of them children.

According to United States President Joe Biden – who continues to wholeheartedly back the Israeli slaughter-fest in Gaza both morally and financially while pretending to care a tiny bit about the victims of the whole arrangement – Israel had agreed to allow some 20 humanitarian aid trucks to enter the besieged Palestinian enclave on Friday via the shuttered Rafah crossing from Egypt. Depending on how that went, the US president said, more aid trucks could then follow.

A statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office on Wednesday affirmed that, “in light of President Biden’s demand, Israel will not thwart humanitarian supplies from Egypt as long as it is only food, water and medicine for the civilian population in the southern Gaza Strip”.

Biden, it seems, was a tad more excited about the PR stunt than everyone’s favourite “moral army”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Israel and the weaponisation of empathy

 Al Jazeera English

On October 9, two days into the current Israel-Hamas war – in which the Israeli army appears intent on semi-obliterating the Gaza Strip – the website of the New York-based magazine Women’s Health published some guidelines on “How To Cope With The Trauma Of Violent Images And Videos Of Hamas’ Attack on Israel”.

It is unsurprising, of course, that the potential for trauma has been detected solely as a reaction to Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel and not to, say, the past 75 years of Israeli violence and ethnic cleansing of Palestine – the cumulative depraved barbarity of which is what prompted Hamas’s actions in the first place.

After all, Israel’s carefully crafted monopoly on victimisation and the attendant dehumanisation of Palestinians means that footage of the ongoing Israeli terrorisation of Gaza has never compelled US media outlets to prescribe “steps to protect your mental health”.

And yet the Women’s Health intervention constitutes a novel sort of twist on the victimisation theme, in which even the vicarious trauma that is allegedly intermittently experienced by US audiences trumps the unmitigated trauma suffered by the people upon whom Israel wages perpetual war. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

What’s behind the Washington, DC murder spike?

 Al Jazeera English

The capital of the United States of America is threatening to reclaim its reputation as the nation’s murder capital, as well.

According to preliminary data for 2023 from Washington, DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, a total of 214 homicides had been committed in the metropolis as of September 29, constituting a 37 percent increase over last year. This is the first time in a quarter-century that Washington’s homicide count has exceeded 200 before October.

Victims include 10-year-old Arianna Davis, who received a stray bullet to the head on Mother’s Day; 16-year-old Jamal Jones, shot near his high school on September 25; and 31-year-old father of four Nasrat Ahmad Yar, a Lyft driver shot on Capitol Hill in July.

Ahmad Yar had fled Afghanistan after serving as a translator for the US armed forces, only to end up a casualty of US gun violence in imperial headquarters itself – a morbid twist, no doubt, on the theme of “bringing the war home”. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.