/ extended-miko-110197769 To discuss Israel’s intensifying atrocities in Gaza, including its weaponization of rape, Rania Khalek was joined by Miko Peled, the son of an Israeli general and the head of the newly established Palestine House of Freedom in Washington, D.C. Peled is the author of “The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.” This is just part of this episode.
The full interview is available for Breakthrough News Members only. Become a member at / breakthroughnews to access the full episode and other exclusive content.
Lili News 029
In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Jeffrey Sachs on Israel: Netanyahu’s Mistake & Crimes! Israel Must Be PUNISHED & Wiped Out by Iran
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Jeffrey Sachs
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Jeffrey Sachs: Netanyahu's Mistake & Crimes! Israel Must Be PUNISHED & Wiped Out by Iran
Khánh Handmade Aug 8, 2024 "Impose a two-state solution" / "The US is complicit in the crimes of Israel now. Many people in the US see and understand that, see it for what it is." Jeffrey Sachs makes an impassioned plea to get the international community to force Israel to stop its heinous crimes and genocide of Palestinians, and organise a Palestinian state under UN protection and supervision.
Jeffrey Sachs Interviews - What is About to Happen is Difficult to Prevent
Global South Sees U.S. Congress Hail Israeli Killer of 39,000 of Their People Mostly Women and Kids
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Jay Janson
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Netanyahu addressing a joint session of U.S. Congress on Wednesday (C-Span screenshot)
The Health Ministry in Gaza reports that as of the end of July, 2024, more than 39,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have been slaughtered in Gaza by the Israeli military using hegemon U.S.A.'s mighty weapons of mass destruction.[1]
A good deal of people in the awakening Global South have learned that those tens of thousands precious Palestinian lives of mostly women and children were ordered taken by the criminally insane Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This week billions of majority Humanity watched on TV or heard of the obnoxious killer Netanyahu being welcomed by the assembled entire U.S. government that provides Israel with the bombs, missiles, guns, planes, tanks, ships, munitions, and diplomatic and military protection that has made the murder of those 39,000 fellow Global South men, women and children possible.[2]
Yes, those 39,000 dead Palestinians are now seen in the ever more sensitive awakening Global South as their fellows, fellows within the nations of the grand Global South of Africa, Asia and the Americas that were once conquered, colonised, enslaved and exploited by racist Europeans, and their overseas offspring.
Global South Lives Matter
Today, Global South lives are still considered less important than the lives of white descendants of the conquering colonialists, who have retained a substantial amount of hegemony over most of the planet largely through powerful international reach media.
This difference in the value and importance of lives is apparent in the Middle East now. For example, the lives of a hundred Israeli hostages certainly are being given much more importance than the lives of 39,000 Arabs and the 90,000 injured, including thousands of amputees, and another thousand buried under the ruble of what was the cities of Gaza.
The CIA overseen Western entertainment/news & information conglomerates [3] emphasise this difference with their coverage of the suffering of the families of the hostages, interviewing the family members at length, while rarely interviewing Arabs, many of whom have lost their entire family, and rarely if ever, mention the thousands of Palestinians, including women and children in Israeli prisons the hostages were taken to exchange with.
Whether watching British BBC, German DW, Tokyo's NHK, French TV, or NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, or PBS, the loss of thousands of Palestinian children's lives is only occasionally mentioned within a numerical report of the ever rising statistic of dead Palestinians.
Those of us who get our news from the Internet have been reading for nine months Aljazeera's morning report of another 40 or 60 or 80 Palestinians killed overnight during an Israeli bombing of a school or other structure where hundreds of families made homeless had taken shelter with their children. One receives such horrible news with pathos, but as the killing keeps going on and on and on regardless of all outcries (in this writer's case publishing many articles about it), one fights a feeling of hopelessness frustrated without any way to stave off the horror and pain of the pitiless attacks of tomorrows stretching out into the future seemingly forever.
Netanyahu Before the U.S. Congress Emphasises the Hostages Without Mentioning the 39,000 Massacred Palestinians [2]
The genocidal level of cruelty of the American government is made clear by its having invited this bloody madman, for whom the UN International Criminal Court has asked for his arrest for crimes against humanity.[4]
The Gaza genocide, so proudly ignored in Washington, will cause the citizenry of the nations of the Global South to remember the U.S./NATO deadly destruction of oil rich Iraq and Libya, the latter having had a higher quality of living standard than nine European countries; the grim perishing of a million Syrians at the merciless hands of Islamic terrorist organisations secretly provisioned by CIA arrangements;[5] in Somalia the never ending regime change war for a warlord regime replacing a popular Islamic courts government; the decades of U.S. led occupation war in Afghanistan; the millions murdered in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia; the massive bloodshed brought about in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, the bombing obliteration of all North Korean cities, and U.S. invasion of the South when the civil war was already over with the North easily prevailing for meeting little opposition; the bombing and invasions of Panama, Dominican Republic, Cuba and Grenada; the ruthless murder of the first President of a free Congo initiating 70 years of hellish civil wars. Not to mention CIA homicidal machinations overthrowing governments in Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973.
As people in the Global South learn of monster killer Netanyahu receiving great applause during a special session of the U.S. Congress while the horrific genocide continues in Gaza, one or more other American crimes against the humanity that is the Global South will come to mind.
Global South Lives Will Soon Matter
In our now multi-polar world led by a remarkably productive China, the lives of the majority of humanity in the Global South, (until recently disrespectfully called The 'Third' World or The 'Developing' World, earlier, The 'Underdeveloped' World and still earlier The 'Undeveloped' World), are restored to the level of the ingenious human species they never were otherwise.
It would appear that the so-called Caucasian race might be thought to be on the back foot for much considering itself of superior worth.
The lands of the non-White Global South contain the ancient empires of high civilisations of Egypt, China and India, conquered by the more primitive arising empires of the marauding Europeans, whose inhumane racism as practiced for more than five centuries, will become as non-existent as it was before the farm boy soldiers of Portugal, Spain, Holland, France and England, got to be wonder the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, the Temples of Egypt, Aztec Tenochtitlan and other sights of higher civilisations than their own.
But with the ancient non-recriminatory attitude inherent in Chinese culture soon to be influencing life throughout the world, peace and reciprocal admiration should replace today's and yesterday's era of confrontation.
5.Wayne Madsen, John-Paul Leonard, Washington’s Blog, Syrian Girl Partisan. ISIS IS US: The Shocking Truth: Behind the Army of Terror, Progressive Press, October, 2016, a panel of cutting-edge researchers tell what ISIS really is, Paperback – https://www.amazon.com/ISIS-US-Shocking-Behind-Terror/dp/1615771522
Lili News 029
In cynicism and power, the US propaganda machine easily surpasses Orwells Ministry of Truth.
Now the fight against anti-semitism is being weaponised as a new sanctimonious McCarthyism.
Unless opposed, neither justice nor our Constitutional right to Free Speech will survive this assault.
Politico Does Journalism: “We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.”
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By MARK PERLMUTTER and FEROZE SIDHWA
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The Israeli savagery in Gaza has reached such levels of sociopathy that Western media—loyal tools of the imperialist oligarchy—are having trouble hiding the truth, as they usually do, and cracks are appearing in their coverage. This is one example. The reasons why they are doing this are complicated and belong in a separate article, which we hope to do in the near future. In any case, we are glad that Politico decided to run this material. It is desperately needed. And, of course, speaking for our audience, our gratitude and admiration for Drs Perlmutter and Sidhwa is beyond measure. —The Editor
PUBLISHED UNDER US COPYRIGHT FAIR USE STATUTES
None of this would have happened if the corporate media had been doing journalism instead of disinformation from the start.
PRIMARY SOURCE
We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.
American surgeons who witnessed the [Palestinian] civilian carnage of the Israel-Hamas war.
Illustration by Erin Aulov/POLITICO (source images via Mark Pearlmutter and Feroze Sidhwa)
By MARK PERLMUTTER and FEROZE SIDHWA 07/19/2024 05:00 AM EDT
GAZA — In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.
external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.
In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.
“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”
Left: Dr. Mark Pearlmutter playing with some of the girls in the displaced persons camp around Gaza European Hospital. Right: Feroze Sidhwa, left, operates on a man who was shot. | Feroze Sidhwa, left; Mark Pearlmutter, right
The two of us are humanitarian surgeons. Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. We’re used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.
None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.
“the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.”
We have always gone where we were most needed. In March, it was obvious that the place was the Gaza Strip.
The team of healthcare workers, including Feroze (left) and Perlmutter (second from left), that volunteered to work with the World Health Organization through the Palestinian American Medical Association. | Courtesy of Feroze Sidhwa
The two of us had never met before this trip. But we both felt called to serve, so we packed our bags, leaving our lives behind in California and North Carolina.
We landed in Cairo around midnight and met up with the rest of our group of 12: an emergency nurse, a physical therapist, an anesthesiologist, another trauma surgeon, a general surgeon, a neurosurgeon, two cardiac surgeons and two pulmonary and critical care intensivists. All of us had volunteered to work with the World Health Organization through the Palestinian American Medical Association.
We find it instructive that the Gaza atrocities have reached such a level that, as expressed elsewhere, leading members of the Western mainstream media, including POLITICO, are now slowly publishing stories reflecting much of the truth about Gaza. CNN, usually a reliable megaphone for Zionist, imperial/warmongering propaganda, has done this already regarding Gaza (but not the Ukraine), and CBS, also a longstanding and highly reliable platform for hegemonist status quo lies, recently ran a segment that was certainly an example of what good journalism should be. (Please see: Children of Gaza (CBS Sunday Morning—Jul 21-2024)). We don't know if this trend will continue. Or how deeply this new, however sporadic, serious journalism phenomenon will go. The largely invisible powers that be have a huge investment in the current unipolar status quo, so narrative control is indispensable for the sustenance of their regime. They will surely find ways to keep manipulating this narrative to insure the perpetuation of their legitimacy.
who grew up in a Parsi household in Flint, Michigan and worked with a Palestinian-Jewish cooperative in Haifa after graduation from college. Neither one of us is religious. Neither one of us has any political interest in the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — other than wanting it to end.
The Rafah Crossing functions like a rural American airport: one baggage scanner, odd procedures and minimal facilities. Scanning the medical and humanitarian supplies from the dozens of aid teams one bag at a time was inefficiency defined. But it was the only reliable way to bring anything into Gaza.
noted on the Senate floor, the process for clearing aid with the Israeli authorities is opaque and inconsistent. “Items that are allowed in one day can be rejected the next….” For this reason, everyone simply brought whatever they could as personal luggage — even surgical equipment — paying exorbitant airline baggage fees instead of bulk shipping rates. Now that Rafah is closed, even this route for resupplying Gaza’s hospitals has been cut off. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has shown no signs of backing off, is scheduled to address the U.S. Congress on Monday. He will also meet with Vice President Kamala Harris.)
famous “road of death.”
ineffective process called “deconfliction.” The fact that “deconfliction” is so unreliable explains why “Gaza is the most dangerous place in the world to be an aid worker,” according to the International Rescue Committee. It works something like this: COGAT — the office of Israel’s Defense Ministry that coordinates between the Israeli armed forces and humanitarian organizations — agrees it will not attack traffic on a specific route for a specified period.
This coordination is done through — what else? — a smartphone app. When the road turns green on the app you have 15 minutes to get on and off the specified route, and you can only request deconfliction of a particular route every three hours. After a 40-minute wait, we got the go-ahead and our drivers floored it, dodging foot and donkey traffic all along the road.
The sleeping quarters for the volunteer healthcare team. Half the team slept in one room in the adjacent Palestine College of Nursing, while the other half slept in one of the hospital’s outlying patient-care areas. | Courtesy of Feroze Sidhwa
all shorter and thinner than they ought to have been. Even over their screams of joy at meeting new foreigners, we could hear Israeli drones humming overhead. We headed to our living quarters — half of our team slept in one room in the adjacent Palestine College of Nursing, while the other half slept in one of the hospital’s outlying patient-care areas — and spent our first night sleeping under continuous, room-shaking bombardment.
For our entire time there, we lived in constant fear that Israel would invade the hospital. Thankfully we never saw a single combatant, Israeli or Palestinian.
had been destroyed, while the remaining partially functioning hospitals operated at 359 percent of their actual bed capacity. The World Health Organization describes them as “partially operational.”
city of 419,000 people in southern Gaza. Now it functions as the only trauma center for well over 1.5 million people, an impossible task even under the best of circumstances. It is likely the safest and best-resourced city block in the entire Gaza Strip — and yet its horrors defy description.
Clockwise from top left: Raw sewage runs out of the displaced persons camp on the grounds of Gaza European Hospital; A child sits on the floor near the exit to the main ICU; People line the floor of the hall at the entrance to the main ICU. | Courtesy of Feroze Sidhwa
We first noticed the overcrowding: 1,500 people were admitted to a 220-bed hospital. Rooms meant to hold four patients typically had 10 to 12, and patients were housed in every possible space: the radiology department, the common areas, everywhere. Next, we noticed the 15,000 people sheltering on the hospital grounds and inside the hospital — lining and even blocking the hallways, throughout the wards, in the bathrooms and closets, on the stairs, even in the sterile processing and food preparation facilities and the operating rooms themselves. The hospital itself was a displaced persons camp.
It’s what we imagine the first weeks of a zombie apocalypse would look — and smell — like.
Gunshot wounds to the head are an entirely different matter.
We started seeing a series of children, preteens mostly, who’d been shot in the head. They’d go on to slowly die, only to be replaced by new victims who’d also been shot in the head, and who would also go on to slowly die. Their families told us one of two stories: the children were playing inside when they were shot by Israeli forces, or they were playing in the street when they were shot by Israeli forces.
(The Israel Defense Forces did not respond to specific questions for this story, but in an emailed statement, it said, “The IDF is committed to mitigating civilian harm during operational activity. In that spirit, the IDF makes great efforts to estimate and consider potential civilian collateral damage in its strikes.”)
acute hepatitis A infection in such overcrowded conditions.
Graffiti in the pediatric wing of Gaza European Hospital. Pearlmutter and Sidhwa quickly learned that their Palestinian health care colleagues were among the most traumatized people in the Strip. | Courtesy of Feroze Sidhwa
500 healthcare workers and 278 aid workers have been killed in Gaza. Among them was Dr. Hammam Alloh, a 36-year-old nephrologist at Shifa Hospital who refused to evacuate when Israel besieged the hospital in October.
why he chose to stayby an Israeli air strike on his home, along with three of his family members
other forms of mistreatment and torture.
After his home was destroyed and his family threatened, European Hospital’s director fled to Egypt, leaving an already overburdened hospital without its longtime leader. This sense of helplessness and disorientation was made worse still by the constant spread of hearsay about kidnappings, troop movements, food shipments, water availability and everything else of importance to survival and safety in a land under siege.
Cut off from the outside world and unable to access reliable information about the forces controlling whether they live or die, eat or starve, stay or run, rumors spread and amplified.
Several staff members told us they were simply waiting to die, and that they hoped Israel would get it over with sooner rather than later.
Images of Tamer from his Facebook feed that show him after he was shot and operated on (left), after he was released from Israeli custody (center) and after he was treated at Gaza European Hospital (right).
one of the highest unemployment rates in the world. When Israel raided Indonesian Hospital last November, he was assisting the orthopedics team in the operating room. He refused to leave his anesthetized patient. He said Israeli soldiers shot him in the leg, breaking his femur. His own orthopedic team cared for him, placing an external fixator to stabilize his shattered leg.
Next, Tamer told us, the Israelis came to his hospital room and took him, where exactly he doesn’t know. He told us he was strapped to a table for 45 days, given a juice box every day — sometimes every other day — and denied medical care for his broken femur. During that time, he told us, he was beaten so badly that his right eye was destroyed. As malnutrition set in, he developed osteomyelitis — infection of the bone itself — in his broken femur. Later, he said, he was unceremoniously dumped naked on the side of a road. With metal sticking out of his infected and broken leg and his right eye hanging out of his skull he crawled for two miles until someone found him and brought him to European Hospital.
When we met Tamer at the hospital for treatment, all that was left of him was the disfigured outline of a human being, his body crippled by violence, his eye surgically removed and his mind haunted by torture. A man who once healed others was reduced to constantly begging for pain medications, reliant on others for everything — and wondering if his wife and children were even alive.
Nearly all our patients arrived during mass casualty events. Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza, had been under siege and bombardment since December. By the time we arrived on March 25 the town was inhabited by a combination of displaced persons from the north and locals who had not fled south to Rafah despite Israel’s threats against them. (Israeli forces frequently drop flyers or send texts demanding that Palestinians in Gaza leave their homes or shelters.) Extended families often concentrate themselves in as few buildings as possible. They told us they hoped that gathering in numbers would keep them safe — or at the very least, that dying together was preferable to dying separately.
A view of some of the displaced persons camp as seen from the second floor of Gaza European Hospital. The town was inhabited by a combination of displaced persons from the north and locals who had not fled south to Rafah. | Courtesy of Feroze Sidhwa
We noticed that bombing seemed to peak at iftar when families were gathered together to break the fast during Ramadan with whatever food they had available.
Left: Israa, a 26-year-old woman during her operation. The mother of four said her home was bombed without warning. Right: The list of ICU patients in the main ICU. | Courtesy of Feroze Sidhwa
We took Israa to the operating room. In the United States or Israel this would have been a 5-minute transition, but in the most functional hospital in Gaza it took more than one hour to get her there — working in such a severely compromised space, there was simply no way to get a trauma patient into surgery quickly. During her surgery, we realigned her broken femur, tibia and ankle in external fixators, explored an injured artery, cut chunks of dead tissue out of the massive wound in her thigh and her burned hands (a procedure known as debridement) and stopped her bleeding. It took three experienced surgeons almost four hours to do all of this. For the next 24 hours we were at her bedside almost continuously, knowing the traumatized and exhausted local staff couldn’t be expected to care for her properly.
After three days in the hospital, Israa, a mother of four, told us how she was injured: Her home was bombed without warning. She saw all her children die in front of her when the ceiling collapsed on top of them. Her relatives confirmed that her entire immediate family was buried under the rubble of their home. We didn’t have the heart to tell Israa that some of her children were probably still alive at that moment, dying unimaginably cruel deaths from dehydration and sepsis while trapped alone in a pitch-black tomb that alternates as an oven during the day and a freezer at night.
One shudders to think how many children have died this way in Gaza.
Two days later, while we waited in the preoperative area, one of the nurses pointed to a slight and clearly sick little girl. “Can you operate on her?” she asked.
“Who is she? We’ve never met her before.”
“Debridement,” the nurse said, shrugging and walking away.
That’s how we met Juri, the 9-year-old girl with the horrific injuries.
After washing away the maggots, we positioned her on her right side and got to work. We cut away four pounds of dead flesh, washing her wounds as aggressively as we could. Then we bandaged her up and booked her for another debridement the next day.
He’ll come soon, we assured her.
“You’re lying,” she told us, calmly. “He must be dead.”
As it turns out, Juri’s father wasn’t dead. We found him waiting for her in the pediatric ward of the hospital. He was a loving and gentle man who spent all day every day scouring a land in famine for anything his precious daughter would agree to eat. He told us how Juri was maimed: The family evacuated from Khan Younis to Rafah, as Israel demanded. He and his wife left their seven children with their grandparents while they desperately searched for food and water. They came back to the house bombed and destroyed, their children all severely injured or killed. Juri’s surviving siblings were at another hospital with their mother.
Due to the inviolable sacred rights of property preceding moral duty in the collective West, and because we don't have a red sausage to buy legal counsel, nor can we trust that the recent ICJ verdict indicting Israel as the criminal party in the current conflict, and encouraging people to denounce and oppose its actions against Palestinians, will afford us any protection, we must stop this lengthy quote here. Please read the rest of the article on POLITICO. We hope, however, that you got the message intended by these heroic doctors. Now it's up to you to act.
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Gaza European Hospital and the surrounding territory to be evacuated. European Hospital is now empty, and has been looted by desperate people trying to survive.
Rania Khalek Dispatches
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