At the U.N., Palestine’s ambassador questioned the stance by some countries on Israel’s “right to defend,” saying it is a wrong understanding of history that only starts when Israelis are hurt, Peoples Dispatch reports.
Palestine’s Riyad Mansour, at podium, briefs reporters after the Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East on Sunday. On his left is Maged A. Abdelaziz, the League of Arab States’ U.N. representative. (UN Photo/Paulo Filgueiras)
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete blockade” of Gaza on Monday and said that “there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”
In his announcement Gallant stated: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
Gaza is one of the world’s most densely populated areas with a population of 2.3 million. The defense minister’s declarations come just one day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally declared war on Hamas.
Meanwhile, outside the U.N. Security Council on Sunday, Palestine’s ambassador to the U.N., Riyad Mansour, questioned the stance taken by some countries and Western media regarding Israel’s “right to defend itself” saying it was a wrong understanding of history, which only starts when Israelis are hurt.
The Security Council did not decide any immediate course of action because of disagreements among the permanent members. While the U.S. demanded condemnation of Hamas’ actions, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors refused to issue any blanket condemnation naming Hamas and instead demanded an immediate ceasefire and the start of a peace process which has been stalled for decades.
Mansour reiterated that Palestinians have been enduring Israeli atrocities for decades, which is never acknowledged, while repeated Palestinian pleas to the U.N. are ignored.
“When Israel now tries to justify yet another assault (on Gaza) by the same faulty premise, no one should say or do anything to encourage it down this path,” Mansour said. “We know only too well that the messages about ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ will be interpreted by Israel as a license to kill, to pursue the very path that led us here.”
Mansour also demanded accountability from international organizations who he said have repeatedly failed to hold Israel accountable for violating international laws. He said:
“You cannot say ‘nothing justifies killing Israelis’ and then provide justifications for killing Palestinians. We are not sub-humans. We will never accept rhetoric that denigrates our humanity and reneges our rights. A rhetoric that ignores the occupation of our land and oppression of our people.”
Mansour also questions countries like the U.S. which have expressed support to Israel, asking them how they could ignore Israel’s colonialist and racist agenda.
Fighting in Multiple Locations
Meanwhile, the U.S. is moving its U.S.S Gerald R Ford carrier strike group closer to the Mediterranean to provide support to the Israeli armed forces.
Palestinian resistance groups continue to advance with Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. The total number of Israelis killed since the operation was launched early on Saturday has crossed 800, with over 2,243 injured.
Israeli warplanes have continued to carry out indiscriminate bombings across the Gaza strip, targeting schools, mosques, civilian buildings. Israeli media reported on Monday that at least 1,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on Gaza, targeting 500 locations, mostly civilian residential areas.
According to the latest from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, a total of 560 Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli airstrikes in Gaza since Saturday, including at least 91 children. Over 2,900 Palestinians, including 244 children, have also been injured. The Israeli bombings in Khan Younis and Rafah in the early morning of Monday have led to the death of entire families.
The United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) claimed that Israel targeted a school run by them in the Gaza strip which was used as a shelter for people displaced due to the Israeli airstrikes.
According to the U.N., over 123,000 Gazans have been displaced following Israeli attacks. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) stated that around 73,000 Palestinians have taken shelter in school buildings inside Gaza. [U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Monday that number had risen to 170,00 people and that two UNRWA schools had been hit.]
Several Israeli settlements are witnessing heavy fighting between the Palestinian resistance and the Israeli ground forces. According to the Times of Israel, fighting was ongoing in at least seven or eight locations inside the 1948 borders early Monday morning. The newspaper later reported Israeli forces claim that they had taken control of all these towns and settlements from the Palestinian fighters.
Fighting was ongoing in Sderot, which was first attacked by the Palestinian resistance on Saturday, with several Israeli casualties reported.
According to Al-Jazeera, Israel has amassed over 100,000 reserve troops in preparation for a ground offensive on Gaza.
Palestinian resistance forces claimed on Monday that they have captured at least 130 Israeli troops and citizens who are being held hostage and may be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli jails.
More than 5,000 Palestinians are currently being held in different Israeli jails.
At the U.N. on Monday, Guterres said he recognized the “legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people,” but said that nothing can justify “acts of terror” against Israeli civilians. He said that while he recognized Israel’s “legitimate security concerns,” he must also remind Israel that military operations must be “conducted in strict accordance with international humanitarian law.”
This article is from Peoples Dispatch.
Views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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It would help tremendously if Israel were not allowed to contribute to political campaigns or otherwise influence pedaling to nations around the world.
There can be no peace in the world as long as the legitimate desire for justice takes the form of illegitimate desire for revenge. Revenge is immoderate, “reckes no rede,”and engenders a similar or greater response. It is one of the greatest of human passions. One speaks of the “thirst” for revenge. No one who suffers outrageous and insufferable injustice wants to hear anything other than obliteration of those who were the cause. If killing innocent people, women and children included, is a necessary, foreseeable, result of exacting revenge, then revenge says, “so be it.”
The result is more outrageous injustice, and a burgeoning spiral of viciousness. There is only one solution, and that is the extinguishing of hatreds and the very difficult job of introducing love and respect for all human beings, even one’s enemies. That does not mean countenancing wickedness. It means tempering the desire for revenge with the desire not to inflict more injustices on innocents. This is the spirit that Jesus preached, and that Joseph Rotblat exemplified in modern times. (See the NFB’s “The Strangest Dream”).
]No one who suffers outrageous and insufferable injustice wants to hear anything other than obliteration of those who were the cause. If killing innocent people, women and children included, is a necessary, foreseeable, result of exacting revenge, then revenge says, “so be it.”[
That explanation does not apply the behavior of Western politicians that (a) assume that all terrible allegations about Hamas are true (b) egg Israel to commit merciless retribution with code words “stand with Israel” and “the right to defend itself”. This right, as everybody knows, entails murders committed abroad and almost weekly unprovoked bombing in Syria. Moreover, Israel already promised bloody atrocities, and past experience explains exactly what the slightly coded language entails. Responsible statesmanship would temper the worst instincts and limit the bloodshed, if not because of morality that may be absent, then to avoid backlash and its price.
One can list few points in the backlash. Israel strives to have ratio of deaths having factor at least 10 in its favor, and since Palestinians are Arab and Muslim, this reverberates in Muslim countries, especially Arab. Our masters of foreign policy console themselves that as these countries are mostly non-democratic, this backlash does not matter much because we can cut deals with the elite. The deal with KSA that evaporated just now shows that this is overly optimistic. On top of that, it is overly cynical, clashing with the “soft-power” attempt to “gather all democracies to resist autocracies”. Second backlash is that “friendly” ruling cliques become more tottering, Pakistan comes to mind.
Youtube and other social media platforms are suppressing Palestinian voices. There are so many videos of Israeli Settler’s atrocities that is not visible to many western audiences.
There is not 2 state solution. One state, with all the Europeans and Americans who moved there since 1967 going back to their country and all Palestinians who were displaced able to return back to their country, that is the solution. Nothing else will be just
Antonio Guterres is another problem and demonstrates the toothlessness of the United Nations under the thumb of Washington.
Guterras is a puppet of the US and Israel. As long as he remains in his post, there will be no justice for oppressed people from the UN.
“Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete blockade” of Gaza on Monday and said that “there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.””
Hey, the arrogant sadistic Zionist supremacist announces to the entire world that the racist land-grabbing freaky sadistic artificial state of Israel will be committing war crimes against humanity and there’s barely a word of protest from the entire Zionist dominated Western media. Shameless functionaries.
Sadly no surprises. We never hear about Palestinians being referred to as sub-human and animals by prominent Israeli politicians and officials.
The Biden regime is sending more free weapons and money as we speak – with overwhelming bipartisan support as usual.
As I understand it, there will be no fresh water available in Gaza either. No power means pumps will not work. Gaza has 2.4 million people and is the most densely populated place in the world. If they are allowed to continue the total blockade, it will result in one of history’s worst atrocities. Let’s hope the US and vassals will pressure Israel to ease the blockade.
Hear, hear. Israel has been committing crimes against humanity ever since the Nakba. Nobody in the world denies that the crimes against the Jews by the Third Reich were unforgivable, but Palestine had no part in the Holocaust. Why, therefore, were the Palestinian people made to suffer the atrocious apartheid regime of the Zionists? It is not only unjust. It is irrational. And the foaming at the mouth hatred of Zionists (NOT representing the views of all Jews) for Muslims (again, who were not responsible for the Holocaust) is as ugly as any atrocity on earth. If any land was to be taken as compensation (as though there could be any) for the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Third Reich, it should have been Bavaria or Ukraine.
Drew: The “Western ‘international’ rules based order” in the facade of an unbiased, law-based UN. In reality, our interests, our rules, our orders. And, big surprise, the world is paying less and less attention to a compromised UN which makes all such conflicts all the more intractable.
The United Nations, like NATO, is outdated and badly in need of major reform. But both are also classic bureaucracies and almost impossible to change. Both organizations are run by and for the United States government and the USG likes things just as they are.
The best hope for the world is a multi polar world with an alternative to the US “Rules Based Order”. Much is riding on the future of the BRICS. Creating a new version of the U.N. for BRICS members is not going to be easy, but it will have to be done because there is almost no chance of meaningful change in what exists today.