Palestinian Women And Girls Are Being Subjected To Multiple Forms Of Sexual Assault

Report Alleges Widespread Abuse Of Palestinians In Israeli Detention Centres.
An internal UN report describes widespread abuse of Palestinian detainees in Israeli detention centres, including beatings, dog attacks, the prolonged use of stress positions and sexual assault.
The report says that just over 1,000 detainees have been released since December 2023.
But it estimates that more than 4,000 men, women and children have been rounded up in Gaza since the start of the current conflict on October 7, 2023.
The UN report said that among the 1,002 detainees released since December 2023 at the Kerem Shalom crossing, there were 29 children as young as six (26 boys and three girls), 80 women and 21 UN staff.
Some had chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s or were cancer patients.

The report says: “Methods of ill-treatment reported included physical beatings, forced stress positions for extended periods of time, threats of harm to detainees and their families, attacks by dogs, insults to personal dignity and humiliation such as being made to act like animals or getting urinated on, use of loud music and noises, deprivation of water, food, sleep and toilets, denial of the right to practice their religion (to pray) and prolonged use of tightly locked handcuffs causing open wounds and friction injuries. The beatings included blunt force trauma to the head, shoulders, kidneys, neck, back and legs with metal bars and the butts of guns and boots, in some cases resulting in broken ribs, separated shoulders and lasting injuries. While in an off-site location, several individuals reported being forced into cages and attacked by dogs, with some individuals including a child exhibiting dog bite wounds on release.”
( Julian Borger, 05.03.2024 )  ..  theguardian.com

Pro-Israel forces currently have control in the UK of the NHS, the Foreign Office, the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence data.
Your data.
( Lowkey, 15.02.2024 )  ..  doubledown.news

Politics in the UK is awash with dark money raised from opaque members’ clubs, special interest groups and anonymous dining societies.
Since Rishi Sunak became prime minister in 2022, the three main political parties have brought in almost £5.3million from “unincorporated associations”, with much of this untraceable money poured into the marginal constituencies that will determine the general election.
Unincorporated associations are groups that two or more people can set up without complicated legal structures.
This light-touch regulation is ideal for running a local football club or a community hall.
But it also allows details of the individual donors pumping millions into our divided politics to remain entirely hidden.
While all three major parties receive money from unincorporated associations, the Tories bag the lion’s share.
Powered by fine dining societies and exclusive members’ clubs on the London circuit, which often offer privileged access to ministers, the Tory party has raked in £3million during Sunak’s premiership.
( Goodlaw Project, 26.04.2024 )  ..  goodlawproject.org

The West Is Enabling This Crime Against Humanity.
To understand how Western publics are being manipulated, just look to the coverage – especially from those outlets most closely aligned not with the right but with supposedly liberal values.
How have the media dealt with the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza being gradually starved to death by an Israeli aid blockade, an action that lacks any obvious military purpose beyond inflicting a savage vengeance on Palestinian civilians?
After all, Hamas fighters will outlast the young, the sick and the elderly in any mediaeval-style, attritional war denying Gaza food, water and medicines.

A headline in the New York Times, for example, told readers, “Starvation is stalking Gaza’s children”, as if this were a famine in Africa – a natural disaster, or an unexpected humanitarian catastrophe – rather than a policy declared in advance and carefully orchestrated by Israel’s top echelons.
The Financial Times offered the same perverse framing: “Starvation stalks children of northern Gaza”.
Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children.
It renews that policy each day afresh, fully aware of the terrible price being inflicted on the population.
As the head of Medical Aid for Palestinians warned of developments in Gaza: “Children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”

The West is enabling this crime against humanity – day after day, week after week – by refusing to exert its power to punish Israel, or even to threaten to punish it, for blocking aid.
Not only that, but the U.S. and Europe have helped Israel starve Gaza’s children by denying funding to the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, the main humanitarian lifeline in the enclave.
All of this is obscured – meant to be obscured – by headlines that transfer the agency for starving children to an abstract noun rather than a country with a large, vengeful army.
( Jonathan Cook, 20.03.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

Israeli Women And Children Settlers Abused In Evacuee Hotels.
Reports have emerged indicating that Israeli women and children are facing instances of sexual violence within hotels designated for evacuees.
A welfare expert informed the authorities that an Israeli girl residing in a hotel designated for evacuees from settlements was subjected to sexual assault by an Israeli man who also lived in the same hotel.
Israeli media reported that the accusation was made during a special meeting addressing high rates of instances of sexual and physical abuse involving women and minors evacuated to hotels following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

Maya Oberbaum of the Association of Rape Crisis Centres in Israel told the committee: “An evacuee resident exposed himself and urinated in front of children at the entrance of a hotel.”
Oberbaum provided additional instances of sexual and physical violence experienced by women and children within the hotels, and said that there have been accounts of sexual abuse within educational facilities set up for evacuated settlers, adding that a security guard has reportedly assaulted a young girl.
An Israeli police representative said that 116 cases involving evacuees residing in hotels have been opened, with 40 of them being related to domestic violence.
Hotels designated for Israelis evacuated in the past months amid the Israeli aggression on Gaza are grappling with a surge in crime, violence, and sexual assaults.
( Al Mayadeen, 13.02.2024 )  ..  almayadeen.net

Israeli F-35s Bombing Gaza Have Had Access To Britain’s Airbase In Cyprus.
After anonymous British officials reveal Israeli F-35s bombing Gaza have had access to Britain’s sprawling air base on nearby Cyprus, the UK military refuses to deny the visits, raising further suspicions about complicity in war crimes.
RAF Akrotiri has long been the staging post for British bombing campaigns in the Middle East, and sits 180 miles from Israel’s capital, Tel Aviv.
The flight time is 40 minutes.
( Matt Kennard, 15.03.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

Britain’s Foreign Minister Has Played The Lead Government Role In Defending The Indefensible.
Britain’s foreign minister Andrew Mitchell has consistently defended and apologised for Israel’s war on Gaza since it launched its brutal campaign following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
His support, delivered in numerous parliamentary debates and questioning, is part of the UK government’s extraordinary backing of Israel.
This includes substantial military activities not reported by Britain’s mainstream media, defence of Israel at the United Nations and ongoing negotiations to increase trade between the two countries – all taking place as Israel has killed over 30,000 Palestinians.
( Mark Curtis, 18.03.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

Gaza Is Being Subjected To Astonishing Levels Of Brutality And Sadism From Israeli Troops.
A report by the UN revealed that 21 of its staff, humanitarian aid workers, had been snatched by Israel.
They were then tortured to extract confessions, most likely false, of involvement in Hamas’ October 7 attack.
Their torture included beatings, waterboarding and threats to family members.
Those confessions were cited by Western allies as the grounds, in fact the only known grounds, for cutting off funding to the UN relief agency UNRWA, the last lifeline for Gaza’s starving population.
It was these claims, extracted through torture, that helped Israel rationalise its imposing of a famine on Gaza.

Gaza is being subjected to astonishing levels of brutality and sadism from Israeli troops, quite aside from the carpet bombing and enforced starvation of civilians.
Israeli snipers have fired into Gaza’s hospitals, killing medical staff and patients there.
The Israeli military has used Palestinians as human shields, including one man sent into a hospital, his hands bound, to announce an Israeli order to evacuate the premises.
Israeli forces executed him on his return.

Those trying to follow such evacuation orders, waving white flags, have been shot at.
Medical facilities have been repeatedly invaded by the Israeli military in stark violation of international law..
Those who could not be evacuated, such as premature babies, have been left to die unattended, even while Israeli soldiers were occupying the building.
The BBC have interviewed medical staff who reported being tortured, savagely beaten and having attack dogs set on them inside the Nasser hospital in Khan Younis after Israeli soldiers stormed it.
Dozens more medics are believed missing, presumed to still be in Israeli detention.
( Jonathan Cook, 15.03.2024 ) ..  middleeasteye.net

British Unelected Lords Linked To Israel’s Arms Trade.
Over a dozen members of Britain’s unelected upper chamber work for, or profit from, arms firms linked to Israel.
Seven peers work for arms firms involved with Israel’s weapons trade, while another six hold shares in companies that supply the Israeli military.
The value of these individual shareholdings is likely to be over £100,000 each, and is certain to have increased since October 7, 2023.
( John McEvoy, April 17, 2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

Is Hamas Really So Evil And Such A Threat That It Requires The Mass Slaughter Of Innocents?
From obscuring the West’s role in starving Gaza to sensationalised accounts of mass rape by Hamas, journalists are playing the role of propagandists, not reporters.
How do we keep the faith when the world’s leading liberal democracies, invariably referred to as “the West”, are complicit in the crime of crimes: genocide?
Not just law-breaking or a misdemeanour, but the extermination of a people.
And not just quickly, before the mind has time to absorb and weigh the gravity and extent of the crime, but in slow motion, day after day, week after week, month after month.

What kind of system of values can allow for five months the crushing of children under rubble, the detonation of fragile bodies, the wasting away of babies, while still claiming to be humanitarian, tolerant, peace-seeking?
And not just allow all this, but actively assist in it.
Supply the bombs that blow those children to pieces or bring houses down on them, and sever ties to the only aid agency that can hope to keep them alive.
The answer, it seems, is the West’s system of values.
The mask has not just slipped, it has been ripped off.
What lies beneath is ugly indeed.

When Western depravity is fully on show, the public’s gaze has to be firmly directed elsewhere: to the truly evil ones.
They are given a name.
It is Russia, it is Al Qaeda, it isIslamic State, it is China, and right now, it is Hamas.
There must be an enemy.
But this time, the West’s own evil is so hard to disguise, and the enemy so paltry – a few thousand fighters underground inside a prison besieged for 17 years – that the asymmetry is difficult to ignore.
The excuses are hard to swallow.

Is Hamas really so evil, so cunning, so much of a threat that it requires mass slaughter?
Does the West really believe that the attack on October 7, 2023 warrants the killing, maiming and orphaning of many, many tens of thousands of children as a response?
To stamp out such thoughts, Western elites have had to do two things.
First, they have tried to persuade their publics that the acts they collude in are not as bad as they look.
And then that the evil perpetrated by the enemy is so exceptional, so unconscionable it justifies a response in kind.
Which is exactly the role Western media has played over the past five months.
( Jonathan Cook, 20.03.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org

UK Tory Government Spent Over £1 Million Of Taxpayers’ Money On Ads On GB News.
Despite GB News often platforming racists and conspiracy theorists, and facing record numbers of Ofcom investigations, the UK Tory Government have spent more than £1million of taxpayers’ money on advertisements since the channel launched in 2021.
That works out at an annual cost of around £340,000 to taxpayers, who subsidise a network owned by a Dubai hedge fund and billionaire Conservative Party donor Paul Marshall, which posted losses of £73million in its first two years.
( Dan Evans and Tom Latchem, 09.04.2024 )  ..  bylinetimes.com

What Are They All Defending When They Speak Of Israel’s ‘Right To Defend Itself’?
Israel’s annihilistic campaign in Gaza is not the first genocide in modern history.
Not the first time openly fascist forces have fused a violent, supremacist ideology with a seemingly limitless commitment to wipe out a people they consider a demographic threat.
What is unique, at least since the era of open colonialism and its genocides, is the unity this carnage has inspired among political elites in the Global North, and to some extent beyond it.
After all, when fascism rose in Europe in the 1930s, it had powerful supporters in our political classes, but it also had powerful opponents.
That is far less true today.
All across what passes for a political spectrum, from the rabid far right to the mealy-mouthed centre left, we have witnessed powerful actors putting their partisan differences aside to come together in active support of these crimes against humanity.

And so, we must ask: On what precisely do they all agree?
What are they uniting behind?
What are they all defending when they speak of Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’?
It’s too simple, I’m afraid, to say they are united in defence of a single state.
They are, of course, but they are also united in defence of a shared belief system.
Amidst the reality of global economic apartheid and accelerating climate breakdown, they are united in a shared supremacist vision of safety and security for the few.
This vision is the flip side of their steadfast refusal to in any way address the underlying drivers of these crises: capitalism, limitless growth, colonialism, militarism, white supremacy, patriarchy.
( Naomi Klein, 02.03.2024 )  ..  redpepper.org

Arrogant South West Water bosses are claiming they have no legal obligation to keep rivers and seawater clean of sewage in its defence against a Devon swimmer who is taking the water company to court.
In its defence, the water company states no one has a legal right to swim in the sea.
Despite owning the sewage network in Devon and Cornwall, South West Water also claimed it has no legal responsibility to keep the rivers and sea in the counties clean and clear of sewage.
Water companies are, however, subject to regulation enforced by the Government and Environment Agency (EA).
( David Parsley, 29.03.2024 )  ..  archive.ph

The UK Ministry of Defence is refusing to disclose which repressive regimes it is aiding through a secretive pilot training scheme that parliament barely even notices, and refuses to disclose the nationalities of pilots trained through a decades-old scheme with close links to arms manufacturers.
Its aircraft include fighter jets, drones and helicopters that can be loaded with weapons and are of types used by countries such as the United States, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Israel.
( Molly Antigone Hall, 02.04.2024 )  ..  declassifieduk.org