Al Mayadeen – July 13, 2024
Al Mayadeen: Commander Muhammad al-Deif is alive, well
After the Israeli occupation's claims of targeting Resistance leaders in the al-Mawasi in the Khan Younis area, the occupation partially retracts its narrative.
The Israeli occupation has begun to backtrack on claims of assassinating the general commander of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Muhammad al-Deif, after "near confirmation about this in the past hours," according to Israeli media citing a political source.
This comes after a reliable source had previously confirmed to Al Mayadeen that Commander Muhammad al-Deif is well, stressing that the Israeli allegations about his injury are baseless.
In the same context, the Hamas movement confirmed that the Israeli occupation's claims about targeting leaders are false, noting that this is not the first time the occupation has claimed to target Palestinian leaders, only for it to be proven false later.
The movement emphasized in a statement that the purpose of these allegations is to cover up the horrific massacre committed by the Israeli occupation in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
It also explained that the Khan Younis massacre indicates the occupation government's continuation of its genocidal war against the Palestinian people, through the repeated and systematic targeting of unarmed civilians, in tents, displacement centers, and residential neighborhoods, committing the most heinous crimes against them.
Hamas also pointed out that the occupation's disregard for international law and treaties, and the widespread violations it commits against unarmed civilians, would not have continued without the support provided by the US administration to the Israeli occupation's extremist government and its "terrorist" military.
It noted that this support is provided by covering up Israeli crimes, supplying the Israeli occupation with all means of political and military support, and paralyzing international justice from playing its role regarding these crimes, making Washington a full partner in them.
In a statement to Reuters, Hamas leader Sami Abu Zuhri affirmed that the report broadcast by the Israeli occupation's Army Radio, stating that a raid on Khan Younis targeted the general commander of the al-Qassam Brigades, is "nonsense."
Abu Zuhri added that "all the martyrs are civilians," stressing that "what is happening is a dangerous escalation of genocide amid American support and global silence," and further noted that the massacre is a practical message from the occupation indicating that it "is not interested in any agreement."
Media Office in Gaza: Do not circulate the occupation's false narrative
The Government Media Office in the Gaza Strip confirmed that the Israeli occupation has been spreading false news, lies, and unfounded rumors related to the targeting of Palestinian leaders.
The office emphasized that the aim behind these false Israeli claims is to divert attention from the horrific crime committed by the occupation forces in the al-Mawasi, Khan Yunis area.
It added that the claims made by the occupation are a failed attempt to justify the horrific massacre that has so far resulted in 71 martyrs and 289 injured.
Additionally, the Government Media Office noted that the occupation has been practicing a policy of deliberate deception since the start of the genocidal war against the Gaza Strip, in an attempt to cover up its failures and crimes against civilians and the forcibly displaced Palestinians.
In light of this, the office called on media outlets and journalists to exercise the utmost caution and to be very careful when preparing news and journalistic reports related to such massacres.
It also urged not to circulate the occupation's narrative or be dragged behind it, condemning the use of media deception methods, and the spread of false news, rumors, and lies by the occupation, in an attempt to divert attention from its ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people.
Furthermore, the Government Media Office held the Israeli occupation and its supporting U.S. administration fully responsible for the continuation of these massacres, as well as the use of media deception to divert public opinion from the truth.
It also called on the international community, the United Nations, various international organizations, and all free countries of the world to pressure the occupation and Washington to stop the ongoing genocide and to legally pursue the occupation to stop this farce that tries to mislead public opinion.
These statements come after the Israeli occupation committed a major massacre by bombing the refugee camps in al-Mawasi in Khan Yunis, which led to the martyrdom and injury of more than 350 Palestinians, according to the preliminary toll announced by the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip.
In turn, the Palestinian Resistance factions condemned the massacre, affirming that it strengthened their adherence to their just demands for the Palestinian people, and to the conditions set by the resistance for accepting an agreement to end the war and lead to a prisoner exchange.
In addition to the massacre in al-Mawasi, Khan Yunis, the Israeli occupation forces committed another massacre in the Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, targeting the White Mosque, where at least 17 martyrs were killed and dozens injured.
The martyrs of the two Israeli massacres in al-Mawasi, Khan Yunis, and the Shati refugee camp are added to more than 38,440 martyrs and 88,480 injured recorded since October 7th, according to the latest statistics published by the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, several martyrs remain under the rubble and in the streets, with rescue and ambulance crews unable to reach them due to the intense and continuous bombing.
Israeli forces commit series of gruesome massacres across Gaza Strip
Dozens of bodies were found across Gaza City on Friday, while three children were killed in an Israeli strike on Khan Younis.
Israeli occupation forces committed several gruesome massacres across several towns and neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip which were discovered on Friday, with the reported toll reaching 140 killed in Gaza City.
Occupation forces' withdrawal from al-Shujaiya neighborhood, in eastern Gaza City, has also unraveled the scene of horrifying war crimes. As emergency workers arrived in the neighborhood, following two weeks of Israeli onslaught, more than 60 bodies of Palestinian martyrs were recovered on Friday.
The Palestinian Civil Defense in the Gaza Strip explained that dozens of others' bodies are yet to be recovered as they remain stuck under the rubble caused by Israeli strikes and shelling and many residents' whereabouts are yet to be determined.
Authorities said that multiple Israeli quadcopter drones, equipped with rifles, are still swarming the city, arbitrarily hunting down Palestinians.
In southwestern Gaza City, in Tell al-Hawa, occupation forces have launched another incursion into the neighborhood that has lasted for a couple of weeks. On Friday, occupation forces made it seem as though they had retreated from certain areas, luring citizens who had been displaced back to their homes,
As soon as Palestinian civilians arrived in the area, they were targeted and multiple Palestinians were killed.
The spokesperson for the Civil Defense, Mahmoud Bassal, said that occupation forces are still positioned in western Tell al-Hawa, across Street 8.
Bassal urged civilians not to head toward the areas until Israeli occupation forces completely withdraw from the neighborhood.
Palestinian commission documents Israeli war crimes in Gaza City
The International Commission to Support Palestinian People’s Rights (ICSPR) said that following the withdrawals in al-Shujaiya and areas in Tell al-Hawa, emergency workers recovered 60 martyrs in Tell al-Hawa, and 80 martyrs in al-Shujaiya. The bodies were found in residential blocs and streets in the two neighborhoods. Most of the martyrs found in the areas were children and women and some of the bodies had decomposed.
In the case of decomposed bodies, white flags were found next to the bodies, indicating that those killed had been unarmed.
The families of Palestinian victims in al-Shujaiya, al-Tuffah, al-Daraj, and other neighborhoods told ICSPR that their relatives were subject to cases of summary execution by Israeli occupation forces.
The victims of summary executions are of various families, including Zaydiyah, Sursour, al-Badri, and al-Ghalayini. Investigators also confirmed the reports of the Civil Defense, regarding the dozens of bodies stuck under the rubble caused by Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip.
Three children killed in Central Gaza Strip
Moving southwards, Israeli occupation forces committed multiple massacres in the central Gaza Strip, striking a home in Deir al-Balah, where four people were martyred, including three children aged less than 10 years, Al Mayadeen's correspondent reported.
In the Nuseirat refugee camp, several strikes impacted the home of the Akel family. Seven people were wounded, suffering severe injuries.
Israeli warplanes also struck a home in Bani Suheila, a town in eastern Khan Younis in southern Gaza Strip.
PFLP points to humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza
Commenting on the recently discovered massacres in Gaza City and the intense Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip on Friday, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) pointed to the occupation-committed fully-fledged war crimes in Rafah, Khan Younis, Tell al-Hawa, and al-Shujaiya.
The front stressed the horrific scenes discovered by paramedics in neighborhoods that occupation forces had invaded and withdrew from.
It emphasized that "children were not spared from these horrific massacres, as seen in the targeting of a children's gathering, reflecting the magnitude of the humanitarian catastrophe suffered by the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip."
Day 281: 38,443 martyrs, 88,481 wounded in Gaza
Gaza's Health Ministry announced that "Israel" committed four massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, killing 61 and injuring 129 over the past 24 hours.
The number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli occupation in Gaza since October 7 has risen to 38,443 martyrs, with 88,481 injured, the Ministry of Health in the Strip confirmed on Saturday.
In its daily report, the Ministry announced that "Israel" committed four massacres against families in the Gaza Strip, killing 61 and injuring 129 over the past 24 hours.
The report noted that several victims are still trapped under the rubble and on the roads, as emergency and civil defense teams cannot reach them.
Earlier, Israeli occupation forces committed several gruesome massacres across several towns and neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip which were discovered on Friday, with the reported toll reaching 140 killed in Gaza City.
Occupation forces' withdrawal from al-Shujaiya neighborhood, in eastern Gaza City, has also unraveled the scene of horrifying war crimes. As emergency workers arrived in the neighborhood, following two weeks of Israeli onslaught, more than 60 bodies of Palestinian martyrs were recovered on Friday.
The Palestinian Civil Defense in the Gaza Strip explained that dozens of other bodies are yet to be recovered as they remain stuck under the rubble caused by Israeli strikes and shelling and many residents' whereabouts are yet to be determined. Authorities said that multiple Israeli quadcopter drones, equipped with rifles, are still swarming the city, arbitrarily hunting down Palestinians.
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/day-281--38-443-martyrs--88-481-wounded-in-gaza
Srebrenica to Gaza: Things that changed, things that stayed the same
The failure of nations and intellectuals to agree on the definition of genocide has resulted in massacres that defy all norms of civilised behaviour. Israel’s war on unarmed Palestinians is the latest example.
By Ahmet Yusuf Ozdemir
How to characterise what we’ve been witnessing in global politics is the primary intellectual struggle. An answer can be found in two symbolic phrases.
The first is a quote from 19th-century French critic and journalist Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
The second slogan one can hear throughout the last one-and-a-half centuries is “Never Again”.
In addition to these two sentences, a spectre of a word is haunting the West, a spectre that must not be named. What has been happening in Gaza since October 7 can be regarded as a breaking point for international, regional, and local relations because that spectre was given a name – genocide.
It created a division in the “international community” whether what Israel is doing in Gaza is suitable for the ‘G word’ or not.
Yet amid all this chaos, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution for another genocide titled the “International Day of Reflection and Commemoration of the 1995 Genocide in Srebrenica.”
Eighty-four countries voted for the resolution, 19 voted against it, 68 countries abstained, and 22 did not vote.
On the 29th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, which cases should be called genocide continues to be a contentious issue.
Curious case of amnesia
Every “new world order” is built upon genocide. This might come as a bold statement to make, but this was the case with Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the “new world” that is now known as America in 1492, and the same year coincided with the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Andalusia, Spain, after a campaign called Reconquista (Reconquest).
The late 19th and early 20th centuries were no different than the 15th century on the issue of genocide. Mass slavery and colonialism of European empires that expanded from South America to Africa and South Asia lay the footsteps of what was to become the Holocaust.
It came as a shock to many people at the time to discover what had happened to millions of Jews in Europe under Nazi occupation during World War II.
Concentration camps established for the sole purpose of exterminating Jews left a massive scar on the writings of intellectuals that followed.
Particularly, the Auschwitz camp in Poland that was liberated from the Nazis in 1945 kept its place as a symbol of this brutality to this day.
Historic events regarded as turning points paved the way for implementing new vocabulary. It was the case for the word Holocaust, a particular term used to define what happened to Jews under Nazi rule and occasionally used for others who were killed, such as Soviet prisoners of war, Romas, and disabled people.
Holocaust was used interchangeably with genocide, but the reverse was not the case. No other genocide was named the Holocaust afterwards.
In the years that followed, we started to hear new words for killing people in large numbers. “Mass killings,” “ethnic cleansing,” or “mass atrocity crimes” are some new terminologies that were invented in the 20th century.
This not only applies to the Holocaust or genocide, but it was also the case for “torture” after the attacks on 9/11.
A similar kind of amnesia and disappearance showed itself during the long decade of the US’s so-called war on terror, where the word torture was replaced with “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, another “new world order” was about to be established as the US claimed victory.
However, the first signs of this new system were once again seen in the two major genocides against the Bosnians and the Tutsis in Rwanda. The first occurred in the centre of Europe, whereas the latter happened in the heart of Africa.
The international community, symbolised in the form of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force, was aware of what was happening in both countries yet was unable to stop genocides.
“Never Again” was the famous slogan that was engraved in public memory, which referred to the fact that something like the Holocaust should never be lived or repeated.
However, horror stories have been heard across the world ever since. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
Decades of genocides and denials
The war in Bosnia, the siege of Sarajevo, and the mass killings of 8,372 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica became symbols of ethnic cleansing in the 1990s.
Human rights organisations around the globe, as well as public intellectuals such as American writerSusan Sontag and the lead vocalist of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden,Bruce Dickinson, were mobilising support to break the occupation of the Serbs. Recognition of the Srebrenica massacre as a genocide came after a long journey of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
The decision to bring the two words Srebrenica and genocide together triggered controversies among intellectuals of the era.
This was the case for famous American linguist Noam Chomsky, whosaid, “The mass slaughter in Srebrenica, for example, is certainly a horror story and major crime, but to call it "genocide" so cheapens the word as to constitute virtual Holocaust denial, in my opinion.”
This goes beyond technical or legal terminology on how to define genocide and ends up with whose deaths can be associated with that word.
Intellectual attitude towards Srebrenica opened a new form of “mass atrocity denial,” whichcontinued and still proceeds after the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court’s rulings, which define Israel’s atrocities in Gaza after October 7 as genocide.
Considering all these disputes over genocide, then how should one understand the UN General Assembly’s resolution on Srebrenica?
Although it can be regarded as a symbolic win, the distribution of votes indicated that it was not a smooth and easy vote.
It is one of the rarest resolutions where division within the UN Security Council's five permanent members with veto power became clear when Russia and China voted against the resolution, as others, the US, United Kingdom, and France, voted in favour.
Those who want to align with these powers and those who don’t want to antagonise both camps either voted against or abstained.
Despite ethical and moralclaims regarding international communities’ “responsibility to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity,” this was never appropriately achieved.
Ahmet Yusuf Ozdemir is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations Department at Ibn Haldun University.
https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/srebrenica-to-gaza-things-that-changed-things-that-stayed-the-same-18181904
Despite Islamophobia, UK voters grant Muslims 25 parliamentary seats
Of the 25 elected MPs, 18 belong to the Labour Party, four are independents, two represent the Conservative Party, and one is a member of the Liberal Democrats.
A record number of Muslims have been granted seats by voters in Britain's parliamentary elections despite rising Islamophobia, a major Muslim news outlet has reported.
About 25 Muslims, up from 19 in 2019, were elected to the House of Commons, the lower house of parliament, said the Muslim Network.
Among those elected, 18 are from the Labour Party, four are independents, two are from the Conservative Party, and one is from the Liberal Democrats.
The outlet highlighted that Muslim voters' support for Gaza significantly influenced the election, with five independent candidates, including four Muslims, winning seats.
Noting that 3.4 million Muslims are living in the country, it said the election marks a significant milestone in the UK's political landscape, reflecting the increasing diversity and the impact of Muslim communities on British politics.
Key victories
Among the key victories in the Labour Party are Sadik Al Hassan in North Somerset, Abtisam Mohamed in Sheffield Central, and Zubir Ahmed in Glasgow South West.
Others outside of the Labour Party are Ayoub Khan, Iqbal Mohamed Hussain, Adnan Hussain and Shockat Adam Patel as independents.
Nus Ghani and Saqib Bhatti were reelected as Conservatives, while Munira Wilson was reelected as a Liberal Democrat.
In the 2017 election, only 15 parliamentary seats were given to Muslim candidates.
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