Gaza Diary: They Bulldozed Mass Graves and Called It Peace

+ A synecdoche is a figure of speech where an individual event is used to represent the whole story. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more exact and unnerving synecdoche for the Israeli genocide in Gaza than turning the strip’s largest hospital into an unmarked mass grave.

+ Palestinian Civil Defense teams in Gaza announced this week that they had recovered and transferred the bodies of 98 Palestinians from Al-Shifa Hospital, including 55 unidentified victims who had been buried inside the hospital grounds, in the shattered enclave’s courtyards and makeshift graves, during the height of the Israeli occupation’s genocide.  Forensic authorities say dozens more bodies remain inside the Al-Shifa complex.

+ The bodies were deeply buried under dirt, debris and garbage. Some were elderly.  Some young. Some showed signs of being shot at close range. The bodies from earlier mass grave sites at Al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals had evidence that the victims’ hands had been bound. Some showed signs of being shot at close range. Several had bullet holes in the skull. The bodies from earlier mass grave sites at Al-Shifa had evidence that the victims’ hands had been bound. The horrors of Gaza continue to unfold in ever more depraved chapters.

+ A CNN investigation found that the IDF gunned down starving Palestinians trying to collect flour in Gaza. Then they bulldozed the corpses into unmarked graves, where they were left to rot and be scavenged by ravenous dogs. Their deaths were never recorded, and the location of their bodies was never disclosed to their families.

+ Hossam Shaker: “How do you explain to the world that your army bulldozed a cemetery and uprooted the dead from their graves?”

+ The rubble in Gaza now exceeds 60 million tons, including 4 million tons of hazardous waste, according to the Environmental Quality Authority. This includes:  50,000 tons of asbestos, and around 100,000 tons of explosives and unexploded ordnance, posing severe long-term safety, environmental and public health risks. At least 700,000 tons of solid waste have accumulated in ad hoc dumps after official landfills and medical waste treatment sites were destroyed by Israeli bombs and bulldozers. 

+ Palestinian Civil Defense teams warn that most of Gaza’s residential landscape has been rendered uninhabitable. The UN estimates that 320,622 housing units in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, including 92% of all residential buildings. The damage is so widespread that “every house we enter is not suitable for living and must be demolished.” The buildings lack water, electricity and sewage. Even so, thousands of Palestinian families have little choice but to camp in the ruins, living under tarps and making out as best they can.

+ Mohammad Mhawish:

Life in Gaza for the past two years has been a process of losing everything visible — our families, homes, streets means losing what cannot be seen: the ability to speak without fear of being monitored by a machine…Paramedics, families, journalists, and survivors who fled through the checkpoints and cameras I once faced in Gaza describe an intimacy with the systems that tracked and scored them in seconds, mapping their homes and lives from afar.

+ The bodies of Palestinians that had been held by Israel and returned after the ceasefire arrived frozen. Medical teams in Gaza must wait for them to melt before examining them. Yet the bodies are so maimed and disfigured that they remain unidentifiable without DNA analysis, which is unavailable in the shattered hospitals of Gaza. Of the 354 bodies returned, only 99 have been identified. Others show evidence of incisions, perhaps from autopsies, though the families of the dead fear their organs may have been harvested. Khalil Hamada, the director of forensic medicine in Gaza, said the Israelis also amputated body parts before sending them back: thumbs, fingers, and feet. “They may take just the tip of a finger or the first phalanx, but they often remove the entire thumb. In most cases, these fingers are amputated for DNA purposes before the body is handed over to us,” Hamada said.

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+ In the nearly two months after the ceasefire went into effect, Israeli forces have committed 591 violations of the terms of the truce, resulting in the deaths of at least 379 Palestinians and 992 injuries. More than 627 bodies have been recovered from the rubble.

The violations include:

+ 164 incidents of direct gunfire targeting civilians, homes, neighborhoods, and displaced tents

+ 25 military incursions across the Yellow Line

+ 280 land, air, and artillery bombardments

+ 118 demolitions of homes and civilian facilities

+ 38 civilians arbitrarily detained during raids

+ The official recorded death toll from the Israeli genocide in Gaza now stands at 70,369 and 171,069 injuries (The actual death count is likely at least three times higher than the official number.)

+ Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, on post-ceasefire Gaza:

The ceasefire risks creating a dangerous illusion that life in Gaza is returning to normal. But while Israeli authorities and forces have reduced the scale of their attacks and allowed limited amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the world must not be fooled. Israel’s Genocide is not over.

Israel has inflicted devastating harm on Palestinians in Gaza through its Genocide, including two years of relentless bombardment and deliberate systematic starvation. So far, there is no indication that Israel is taking serious measures to reverse the deadly impact of its crimes and no evidence that its intent has changed. In fact, Israeli authorities are continuing their ruthless policies, restricting access to vital humanitarian aid and essential services, and deliberately imposing conditions calculated to physically destroy Palestinians in Gaza.

Palestinians remain held within less than half of the territory of Gaza, in the areas least capable of supporting life, with humanitarian aid still severely restricted. Still today, even after repeated warnings by international bodies, three sets of legally binding orders by the ICJ, and two ICJ advisory opinions, and despite Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law, both as an occupying power and as a party to an armed conflict, Israel deliberately continues not to provide or allow necessary supplies to reach the civilian population in Gaza.

Israel must lift its inhumane blockade and ensure unfettered access to food, medicine, fuel, reconstruction and repair materials. Israel must also make concerted efforts to repair critical infrastructure, restore essential services, provide adequate shelter for the displaced and ensure they can return to their homes.

The Israeli officials responsible for orchestrating, overseeing and materially committing Genocide remain in power. Failing to demonstrate that they or their Government will be held accountable effectively gives them free rein to continue the Genocide and commit further human rights violations in Gaza and in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

The ceasefire must not become a smokescreen for Israel’s ongoing Genocide. Israel’s pattern of conduct in Gaza, including the deliberate, unlawful denial of lifesaving aid to Palestinians, many of whom are injured, malnourished, and at risk of serious disease, continues to threaten their survival. The international community cannot afford to be complacent: States must keep up pressure on Israel to allow unfettered access to humanitarian aid, lift its unlawful blockade and end its ongoing genocide. Companies must immediately suspend any operations that contribute to or are directly linked to Israel’s genocide.

+ Trump on the Gaza ceasefire: “Phase two is moving along, it will happen pretty soon.”

+ That same day, Israel bombed a tent camp in Gaza, burning to death women and children.

+ Eight Arab and Islamic states — Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia — issued a joint statement expressing “grave concern” over Israeli remarks suggesting Rafah would be opened one-way, to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population.

+ The Palestinian Human Rights group Al-Haq on the Trump-Blair-Kushner plan for Gaza:

Under the GREAT Trust, Gaza would be placed under a foreign trusteeship initially administered by the US through a bilateral agreement with Israel. Israel would retain ‘overarching rights’ over all security matters, thereby formalizing and deepening its effective control.

+ It appears that Arab nations have successfully blocked Tony Blair’s bid to head the executive committee of the “Board of Peace,” the governing body for Trump’s planned trusteeship for Gaza. The front-runner now seems to be Nickolay Mladenov, a Bulgarian diplomat.

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+ In a new report, the UN Committee Against Torture determined that Israel is operating a “de facto State policy of organized and widespread torture and ill-treatment.” The report details severe beatings, electrocutions, waterboarding, rape and other forms of sexual violence, deprivation of food and denial of medical care. The least 75 Palestinian deaths in custody. The report warned that Israel’s broader policies—including the blockade on aid, forced mass displacement, and destruction of civilian infrastructure—may also constitute torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of the Palestinian population as a whole. The committee charges that Israel’s use of torture against Palestinian detainees  “gravely intensified” after October 7.

+ IDF Press Release: “The Air Force eliminated two suspects this morning in the southern Gaza Strip who crossed the yellow line, carried out suspicious activities… and approached the forces.” The two “suspects” were 8 and 10…

+ Reuters: “The children’s uncle said an Israeli drone fired on Fadi and Goma Abu Assi, brothers aged 8 and 10, while they were gathering firewood to help their wheelchair-bound father east of Khan Younis in southern Gaza.”

+ Infanticide as “Test”…

+ Test failed: On December 10, Israeli forces killed two more Palestinian children. A 17-year-old was crushed to death by an Israeli tank in Jabalia Camp. Another boy was shot in the head. The Israelis claimed both posed an “immediate threat.”

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+ According to Dr. Mohammad Hamad, “Half of kidney patients in the Gaza Strip have lost their lives during the war, after their suffering worsened due to limited dialysis sessions, severe shortages of medication, and the closure of border crossings.”

+ Palestinians in Gaza are still starving. Only 140 aid trucks are being permitted by Israel to enter Gaza daily, instead of the promised 600 trucks. UNICEF warned this week: “This is not over. Generations of families, including those being born now into this ceasefire, have been forever altered by what was inflicted upon them.”

+ Nearly 9,300 children under five in Gaza were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition in October, warning that winter conditions are increasing the risk of illness and death among displaced families, UNICEF reported. The agency stated that large quantities of winter supplies remain stuck at Gaza’s borders and called for the safe and unobstructed delivery of humanitarian aid through all available routes.

+ Only 104 cooking-gas trucks have entered Gaza since the ceasefire, out of the 660 that were scheduled, worsening the gas crisis and further hampering the essential needs of Gaza’s displaced population

+ At least 6,600 trucks await entry into Gaza, held up at the crossing by Israeli forces.

+ According to the UN, its agencies have set up 390 temporary classrooms capable of serving about 221,000 students in Gaza this year—about 567 children per learning space. Yet, fewer than one-third of Gaza’s children are enrolled in school.

+ Winter storm Byron tore across Gaza this week, lacerating the Strip with bitterly cold winds and drenching rains that flooded the tent camps packed with thousands of displaced Palestinians. At least one infant died in the storm, a nine-month-old girl, living in a tent with her family in Khan Younis. “It was raining, fiercely cold, and I had very little to keep her warm,” the girl’s mother told Al Jazeera. “I fed her and put her to sleep. I wrapped her up the best I could, but it wasn’t enough. It kept raining, and the cold was getting worse. I was panicking all night, as the cold kept creeping in. Then, suddenly, I found my little baby motionless, dead.”

+ Shimon Riklin, a talking head on Israel’s Channel 14, cheered on the storm. After the channel’s meteorologist predicted that Storm Byron would “drown Gaza,” Riklin quipped:” Happy to hear it.”

+ Palestinian officials say more than 288,000 families now lack the minimum requirements for survival and that Gaza needs roughly 300,000 tents and mobile homes to meet their needs.

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+ 77% of Democratic voters say Israel is committing genocide and 75% want to cut off weapons to Israel. But HRC is out on the road claiming that TikTok and “totally made up” videos are the blame for young people’s opposition to genocide.

+ Here’s Hillary Clinton (at a summit in NYC hosted by the Israeli daily Israel Hayom on US/Israeli relations) once again blaming social media for perverting the minds of American youth about the genocide in Gaza:

Our own students, smart young people, from our own country, from around the world. Where were they getting their information? They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok. That is where they were learning about what happened on October 7th. What happened in the days, weeks and months to follow. That’s a serious problem. It’s a serious problem for democracy, whether it’s Israel or the United States. I was shocked about how little students knew about the history and the context…When you think about how to tell Israel’s story, it’s important. It’s not just looking internally. It’s looking externally and particularly at young people. Because it’s not just the USUAL SUSPECTS; it’s a lot of young Jewish Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand.

+ Those smug, pursed lips say it all…She seethes arrogance out of every pore. It’s part of why she lost to Trump, of all people. Young people have a better understanding of what’s going on than she did as Secretary of State.

+ Why does Israel need Hillary’s help in “telling its story”? Haven’t they got the NYT, CNN and The Atlantic for that?

+ The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention condemned Clinton’s remarks as a form of “genocide denial” and defended the students Clinton attacked as being brainwashed by social media: “Young people in the US are not stupid or gullible. They simply reject genocide—something the Secretary might consider.” The Lemkin Institute is named in honor of the Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, a survivor of the Holocaust who coined the term “genocide”.

+ Raz Segal, Holocaust historian:

For Israel and its supporters, the Gaza genocide is a model. It is not only that Israeli soldiers and officers who have documented their own crimes in Gaza and uploaded them to social media are unashamed; they help spread the message of lawlessness: this is what awaits people who will dare to resist whatever measures imposed on them by extremely violent states in a world shaped by brute force, now without even the pretense of Holocaust memory and international law.

+ Shawan Jabarin, the longtime Palestinian Human Rights activist with Al-Haq, on the UN’s endorsement of the Trump “ceasefire” plan for Gaza, which gives Israel indefinite control over the Strip:

To seek, as a matter of supposed political compromise, to sideline international law would be to render the U.N. complicit in Israel’s violations, to fundamentally break the promise of the U.N. Charter and to fuel only ever intensifying human carnage.

+ Pete Hegseth is our Ben-Gvir…

+ Israel has finally consented to open the Rafah Crossing, a vital corridor for the transport of humanitarian aid into Gaza. But they’re only opening it for people leaving the Strip, most of whom Israel says it won’t allow to return. The October ceasefire agreement stipulated that the crossing must be open in both directions. So add another violation of the truce to the 500 previous ones Israel has committed in the last two months.

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+ A new documentary titled Ma Khafiya Aatham (Tip of the Iceberg), produced by Al Jazeera in partnership with the Hind Rajab Foundation, has revealed new evidence in the killing of five-year-old Hind Rajab, her family, and the rescue team that tried to reach them in Gaza City.

+ Contrary to Israel’s claims that the Rajab family and the ambulance crew were killed in an exchange of gunfire between Hamas and Israeli forces, the documentary demonstrates that the Rajabs were killed by fire from Israeli Merkava tanks, which left 335 bullet holes in the Rajabs’ car. They were part of an IDF outfit calling itself the “Vampire Empire”, under the command of Major Sean Glass, a multinational company of soldiers that is part of the 52nd Armored Battalion led by Colonel Daniel Ella. According to the documentary, the 52nd Armored Battalion, who call itself “The Breachers,” was among “the first Israeli units to enter Gaza in October 2023 and has since been involved in some of the Israeli army’s most lethal operations, including the destruction of several hospitals.”

+ According to the latest analysis by the Cost of War Project, since Oct. 7, 2023, the U.S. has spent over $9.65 billion on military activities in Yemen, Iran, and the wider region. Including military aid to Israel, the U.S. has spent over $31 billion on the post-10/7 wars.

+ The good folks at Forensic Architecture have mapped out Israel’s two-year-long genocidal assault on Gaza, resulting in more than 70,000 deaths, the complete destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and Israel in control of 53% of Gaza’s land base.

+ Trump: “Israel attacked first. That attack was very, very powerful. I was very much in charge of that. When Israel attacked Iran first, that was a great day for Israel.”

+ Since the “ceasefire” in Gaza, at least 67 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces, according to a report by UNICEF released on Friday. “That is an average of almost two children every day,” said UNICEF spokesperson Ricardo Pires. “Dozens more have been injured.” Trump is counting this as one of the 8 wars he ended…

+ I’ve read this headline five times and the full weight of it still hasn’t settled in…

+ Given that 20 Palestinians are being killed on average every day by Israelis in Gaza (37 on the day before the UN vote), it seemed a little premature for the UN Security Council to give its approval to Trump’s real estate grab / ethnic cleansing plan for the Strip.

+ The late Nguyen Co Thach, Vietnam’s foreign minister in the 1980s: “We do not have such a high regard for the UN [Security Council] as you do. Because during the last 40 years, we have been invaded by 4 of the 5 permanent members of the Security Council.”

+ Here’s Benjamin Netanyahu openly bragging about “promoting laws in most US states” to punish boycotts of Israel. One might call it “election interference” and/or espionage. This is usually the kind of machinations that get your ambassador sent home after a stern rebuke from the Secretary of State and your embassy shuttered. Here, politicians respond by soliciting you for free tours of the Holy Land and covert help in the next election cycle…

+ You have to read this talk to the Jewish Foundation by former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz on how Holocaust education has backfired by making young people, including young Jews, think that Israel’s “carnage” in Gaza should be opposed, several times to grasp just how perverse her argument is…

I think since Oct 7, and even before, there have been huge shifts in America on how people think about Jews and Israel and I think that is especially true of young people. So we are now wrestling with a new generational divide here. And I think that is particularly true in that social media is now our source for media. And it used to be the media you got in America was American media and it was pretty mainstream. You know, it generally didn’t express extreme anti-Israel views. You had to go to a pretty weird bookstore to find global media and fringe media. But today we have social media, which is a global medium. Its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews. So while in the 1990s, a young person probably wasn’t going to find Al Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them. They find them on their phones. It’s also this increasingly post-literate media, less and less text, more and more videos. You have TikTok just bashing our young people’s brains all day long with videos of carnage in Gaza. And this is why many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything we try to say to them, they’re hearing through this wall of carnage. So I want to get data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage and I sound obscene. And you know, I think, unfortunately, the very smart bet we made on Holocaust education to serve as anti-semitism education, in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit. Holocaust education is absolutely essential, but I think it may be confusing some of our young people about anti-semitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated youngsters and they think anti-semitism is like anti-black racism, powerful white people against powerless black people. So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising they think, Oh, I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is that you fight Israel, you fight the big, powerful people, hurting the weak people.

+ If she “sounds obscene,” it’s because she is obscene.

+ Recall that the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum was forced by its donors to ditch a campaign that said, “Never Again Can’t Just Apply to Jews.”

+ A senior Israeli official on Trump’s F-35 deal with the Saudis:  “There is no need to panic. First of all, it will take some years, and when it happens, the Americans will have the ability to control these planes from a distance and severely limit their capabilities.”

+ If you want an informative take on the F-35 (the Fighter that Couldn’t Fly Straight) deal with the Saudis, check out Andrew Cockburn’s piece Throwing a Dog to Bone Saw…

+ Eric Adams at the Wailing Wall on his farewell tour of…Israel:  “I wanted to come back here to Israel and let you know that I served you as mayor.”

+ JD Vance now refers to Gaza as “Israeli soil.”

Reporter: Mr. Vice President, about the Turkish role—it’s concerning for Israelis. Turkey has supported Hamas. What role will they have? Will they have troops on the ground in Gaza?

Vance: That’s up to the Israelis. We think everybody has a role to play—financial, reconstruction, or communication. We’re not going to force anything on our Israeli friends when it comes to “foreign troops on their soil,” but we do think there’s a constructive role for the Turks, and frankly, they’ve already played one.

+ Trump: “We have peace in the Middle East for the first time ever. We made a deal with Hamas that they’re gonna be very good, they’re gonna behave, they’re gonna be nice, and if they’re not, we’re gonna go and eradicate them if we have to. They’ll be eradicated.”

+ Under the alleged Trump-brokered ceasefire, around 20 Palestinians are still being killed on average each day in Gaza. Of course, the ceasefire deal always only applied to Palestinians: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders “immediate, powerful” strikes in Gaza after accusing Hamas of violating the truce…

+ Before the UN vote, both Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Interior Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir vowed to do “whatever’s necessary” to block a Palestinian state. Smotrich claims that any such state should be established in “Arab countries” or in Europe, but in the Occupied Territories,  where he said Israel will retain “full sovereignty.” Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir’s rhetoric was even more bellicose, claiming Mahmoud Abbas should be placed “in solitary confinement” and that senior PA officials should face “targeted killings” Calling Palestinians an “invented people.” Ben-Gvir told his followers that Israel must prepare arrest warrants and orders for assassinations. He said that “a solitary confinement cell is ready for him [Abbas] in Ketziot Prison.”

+ Francesca Albanese, the UN rapporteur on the Occupied Territories, on some of the dire consequences of being sanctioned by the US: “My medical insurance refused to reimburse me. I have a private medical insurance and they refused to reimburse me because I’m sanctioned by the US.”

+ The Trump administration is considering designating UNRWA a “foreign terrorist organization.” In the upside-down world of Trumpism, the humanitarians are labeled terrorists.

+ Meanwhile, on Thursday, at Ben-Gvir’s direction, Israeli police raided the UNRWA compound in East Jerusalem, ransacked the building and replaced the UN flag with the Israeli flag. How can the UN continue to tolerate a member state attacking its own workers and buildings?

+ Noura Erakat: “According to Zionists, it’s more reasonable to believe the world hates Jews than to believe that the world considers Palestinians worthy of life, equality, and dignity.”

+ The real world precedent for Trump’s shit-bombing meme…Israel spraying Palestinian houses and protesters with sewage…

+ In its annual report documenting attacks on the press, Reporters without Borders finds that Israeli forces killed more journalists than any other country for three years in a year. Globally, 67 journalists were killed in 2024, 29 of them Palestinian journalists by Israel for 43 percent of the total, making them “the worst enemy of journalists” according to the report. More than 220 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israel since October 7, 2023.

+ Photojournalist Mahmoud Wadi was killed in an Israeli drone strike on December 2, while he was on assignment in central Khan Younis, while covering Israeli operations near the Bani Suhaila roundabout.

+ More than 300 writers, scholars and public figures – including almost 150 past New York Times contributors – have committed to refusing to write for the paper’s Opinion section until the paper

1) addresses its anti-Palestinian bias;

2) retracts the widely debunked investigation “Screams Without Words,” and

3) and calls for a U.S. arms embargo on Israel.

+ According to IDF records,  279 soldiers attempted to take their own lives between January 2024 and July 2025.

+ A US colonel who investigated Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s 2022 killing by an Israeli soldier determined it was intentional, but his boss undermined that conclusion so as not to antagonize the Israelis.

+ Nitzan Alon, the former head of Israel’s hostage rescue operations, admitted this week that Israeli fire killed most of the hostages held in Jabaliya because of “intelligence gaps.” 

+ Trump has vowed to intervene in Israel’s prosecution of Netanyahu: Trump on Netanyahu:

I don’t think they treat him very well. He’s under trial for some things. We’ll be involved in that to help him out a little bit because I think it’s very unfair.

+ Netanyahu has formally asked Israel’s President Isaac Herzog for a pardon in his on-again-off-again corruption trial, claiming it is necessary for “national unity.”

+ A response to an inquiry by Member of Parliament Zarah Sultana, Defense Minister Al Carns revealed the fact that British Military personnel were trained “on educational staff courses” in Israel while the IDF was committing genocide in Gaza.

+ An investigation by Drop Site News confirmed that Jeffrey Epstein, contrary to previous claims, was de facto chief financial officer of Leslie Wexner’s pro-Israel philanthropic foundation.

+ C’mon, Bernie, has there ever been a government in Israel (right- or left-wing, whatever that really means) that hasn’t done “horrific things to the Palestinian people?”

+ The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago that Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee and his senior adviser David Milstein, met this summer in Israel with Jonathan Pollard, the former US defense analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel and sentenced to life in prison. Pollard had been released on parole in 2015 and allowed to leave the emigrate to Israel by Trump in 2017. Since returning to Israel, Pollard has aligned himself with the far right and called for the annexation of the Palestinian Territories, eviction of Palestinians from Gaza and repopulation of the Strips with Israeli Jews. Still, Pollard is no fan of Donald Trump, recently denouncing him as a “madman who has literally sold us down the drain, for Saudi gold.”

+ Speaking of Israeli spies, the Guardian reported this week that Israel has been eavesdropping on meetings between the US and its allies as they discuss aid and security logistics to implement Trump’s Gaza plan.

+ 972 magazine on Israel’s “Project Nimbus” deal with Google and Amazon: “The first prohibits Google and Amazon from restricting how Israel uses their products…. The second obliges the companies to secretly notify Israel if a court orders them to hand over the country’s data stored on their cloud platforms.”

+ Biden’s National Security spokesman John Kirby, the administration’s leading Israeli apologist and genocide denier for 16 months, has been named director of the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, a white paper mill founded by David Axelrod.

+ The “kill them all” “double-tap” strike by SEAL Team 6 on alleged drug runners in the Caribbean has been a regular tactic in Israel’s military assault on Gaza for the last two years, often targeting not only the survivors of the initial attack but also those who come to rescue the wounded.

+ Ben-Gvir, and his ghoulish claque, including Netanyahu’s Culture Minister Amichai Eliyahu( on the right), have been wearing noose-pins to symbolize their demand that Palestinian detainees from Gaza be executed.

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+ Let’s give the last word to Ralph Wilde,  professor of International Law at University College London, who denounced the UN’s endorsement of Trump’s plan for Gaza to be governed by a “board of peace” in a kind of “trusteeship”, modeled on colonial rule: 

Trusteeship conducted by individual states in the colonial era was a self-serving sham invoked in bad faith, serving as an alibi to rationalise colonial rule, which could be justified as a ‘civilising mission’. But the consequence of colonial liberation struggles after World War Two was the adoption in international law of the right of self-determination. This was a repudiation of trusteeship. This horrifies me. Trusteeship assumes a world divided between ‘child-like’ people deemed incapable of looking after themselves–a characterization now applied to the Palestinian people of Gaza–and ‘adults’ –Donald Trump, Tony Blair and others–deemed able to rule over not only their own people, but also others. Replacing an abusive trustee with another form of trusteeship is not self-determination and would be illegal.

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