Postscript: A Passion for Cruelty: A Nation Spinning Out of Control

In Gaza, Israel Lost What Remained of Its Humanity.
—Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 24 July 2024
The previous essay, “The Origins of Sadism,” was written in early June of this year. I thought I had said all there was to say about the horrible war in Gaza, naively believing it couldn’t get worse. Between then and early August, however, I began printing out articles about that war, articles from reliable sources such as CNN, The Guardian, Haaretz, and a few others. When the pile was more than an inch thick, I realized I had to arbitrarily stop reading, because there didn’t seem to be an end in sight to Israeli massacres of the Palestinians, and the gruesome, one has to say barbaric, treatment of these people.
What follows is the information I have culled from news reports published during June, July, and a few days in August. This time around, I don’t believe I have said all there is to say, because it seems that continuous war is the real Israeli agenda and a ceasefire is not. “Depressing” doesn’t begin to cover it. But it strikes me as extremely important to provide a summary of these events, put it out there, in one place, for all to see—at least for these two months. It beggars the imagination: the destruction of an entire people, and the transformation of a nation that had once cornered the market on “moral capital,” to one that is unrecognizable, one that enjoys very little respect, and is regarded by much of the planet as a pariah. It is not hyperbole to say that Israel has become the face of evil. Quelle horreur!
The sections of this summary are as follows:
A)Torture and extreme cruelty
B)Lies, denial, and attempted coverups
C)Massacres, including the targeted bombing of hospitals, schools, universities, food and humanitarian aid delivery trucks, refugee camps, and supposed “safe zones,” which are anything but
D)Palestinian death statistics
E)Conclusion: the road to suicide
A)Torture and extreme cruelty
Let’s start with the first data point listed in “Sadism.” The concentration camp I am referring to has a name: Sde Teiman (תימן שדה), which is located in the Negev, eighteen miles from the border with Gaza. In late June, the detention facility was visited by a lawyer named Khaled Mahajneh, whose report corroborated accounts of Palestinians being raped with sticks and sexually assaulted by Israeli soldiers. (The report was originally published in a Hebrew newspaper, Mekomit. Details of these horrific events were also reported by the New York Times and CNN.) Attack dogs are also used to intimidate, beat, and sexually assault detainees. The detainees, most of whom are ordinary civilians, are provided with a slice of bread and a small piece of cucumber or tomato per day.(11)
The use of attack dogs is not limited to Sde Teiman, however. They serve as a frequent “tool” in Israeli prisons, military operations, and in raids on Palestinian homes—a terror technique that, ironically enough, the Nazis used against the Jews. The IDF frequently mocks the victims of the attacks, laughs at them, even when they are starving. According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “the recent attack on Dawlat Al-Tanani, an elderly woman in Gaza City whose mauling by a dog was caught on video and went viral, is not an isolated incident.” The soldiers laughed at her while she was screaming.(12)
The use of the dogs to maul civilians is not atypical in Israel; in at least one case, it was fairly ghoulish. In late 2023, in the hospital courtyard of the Al-Shifa Medical Complex, the dogs were used to maul dead bodies, as well as displaced people. In addition, the dogs are made to rape prisoners and detainees, and also to urinate on them. It doesn’t get much more depraved than this.(13)
Or so you would think. When Gideon Levy wrote (see epigraph, above) that Israel had lost its humanity, he was referring to another ghoulish event. For no discernable reason, on July 3 the IDF (in fact, several dozen soldiers) unleashed an attack dog on a young man, Mohammed Bhar, who had Down’s syndrome (he was also autistic), in his home. The dog ripped Mohammed apart, while the soldiers drove his mother out of their house, her screams notwithstanding. He subsequently bled to death. The family was allowed to return home a week later, at which time they found his rotting body. “From now on,” wrote Levy, “only Jewish lives count. From now on, we can do anything to Palestinians. Even sic dogs on people with special needs.” The soldiers “let him die in agony, which touched the heart of almost no one in Israel in 2024.”(14)
Levy was certainly correct when he said that the Israelis can do anything they want to the Palestinians. Here is another (incredible) example of the nation’s depravity. On August 5, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, declared that “it may be just and moral” to starve two million Gaza residents until Israeli hostages are returned. Clearly, Mr. Smotrich is not a Jew in the Rabbi Hillel mold (top epigraph). What can one say in response to such sickness? A leading politician declares that it is just and moral to starve two million people. The country has apparently moved beyond the grotesque into the realm of the surreal.(15)
Moving on: at one point, the human rights group B’Tselem conducted interviews with fifty-five former prisoners who were housed in jails run by the IDF. As reported by The Guardian, they “described abuse ranging from severe beatings and sexual violence to starvation rations, refusal of medical care, and deprivation of basic needs including water, daylight, electricity and sanitation, including soap and sanitary pads for women….The highly respected Jerusalem-based group concluded that Israel’s prisons should now be labelled ‘torture camps’.” Meanwhile, in typical fashion, the IDF denied all of this, and conveniently for the torturers, the Israeli government “denied access to lawyers, family members, and Red Cross inspectors.”(16)
On July 25, a large group of American doctors and nurses who worked in Gaza sent President Biden a long letter detailing their experience there. They claimed that violence was particularly directed at children. “Specifically,” they wrote, “every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head.” (Italics in original) Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon, wrote: “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.” The letter also reported that women had to undergo C-sections without anesthesia; all that was available was Tylenol.(17)
Killing Palestinian children is apparently high priority for the IDF. A key example of this is the practice of packing weapons with shrapnel, designed to cause brutal injuries to them; which has been quite “successful.” Writing in The Guardian on July 11, Chris McGreal reports:
Israeli-made weapons designed to spray high levels of shrapnel are causing horrific injuries to civilians in Gaza and disproportionately harming children, foreign surgeons who worked in the territory in recent months have told the Guardian. The doctors say many of the deaths, amputations and life changing wounds to children they have treated came from the firing of missiles and shells – in areas crowded with civilians – packed with additional metal designed to fragment into tiny pieces of shrapnel. Volunteer doctors at two Gaza hospitals said that a majority of their operations were on children hit by small pieces of shrapnel that leave barely discernible entry wounds but create extensive destruction inside the body. Amnesty International has said that the weapons appear designed to maximise casualties.
The X-ray photos of bodies containing these fragments, which are included in the July 11 Guardian article, are pretty gruesome. The embedment of these fragments in the body often requires amputation of limbs, and UNICEF estimates that during the first ten weeks of the war, about 1,000 children lost one or both of their legs to these operations.(18)
I’d like to close out this section with just a bit more evidence on Israel’s loss of humanity. I’m referring to the far-right riots at two military bases on July 29, attacks that actually included members of the Knesset (Parliament). The Israeli military has been engaged in an investigation into the alleged rape of a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman detention camp. Ten reserve IDF soldiers were suspected of participating in this crime. This investigation triggered an angry confrontation between the military and police forces and the IDF (which actually used pepper spray on the police). The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel had this to say: “Instead of absolute condemnation [of the protesters], some Israeli far-right leaders have rallied to support the suspects of abuse, which is emblematic of the root causes that enable such abuse to happen in the first place.” Haaretz said the event was evidence of a “deep moral deterioration” caused by the occupation. (Duh!) Unfortunately, most Israelis would not agree. The truth is that the views of the protesters are pretty much those of mainstream Israeli society. Owen Jones, commenting on YouTube on August 2, said that “Israeli citizens are rioting in the streets in support of the right to rape Palestinians while Israeli politicians are debating the right to rape.” Israel, he concluded, is in the grip of a “genocidal mania.”(19)
B)Lies, denial, and attempted coverups
This section will not require a lot of evidence. Lies, denial, and coverups constitute the Israeli national sport; all of this is in the historical record, and I don’t feel a great need to prove it. They’ve been doing it for decades, and they continue to do it today. It especially applies to war crimes, illegal activities, violations of international law, and anything that might reflect badly on the state. In my own experience, arguing with a Zionist is a colossal waste of time. If, for example, you refer to the work of Ilan Pappe (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which is rich in photos and data), the response will be (which it actually was, once) that he is “a poisoned propagandist.” No attempt to wrestle with his empirical evidence; no, just come out with an emotional, ad hominem argument. The slightest critique of Israel is immediately met with charges of antisemitism—a fraudulent game Zionists have been playing for ages now. The German word for this is totschlagargument: a deathblow. It’s so massive, that there is no way to win it. If you point out that you are not opposed to Judaism, but rather to Zionism and the gruesome destruction of the Palestinian people, you simply won’t be heard (most Israelis, as well as most American Jews, are always ready to play the race card). If you happen to be Jewish, you are obviously a “self-hating Jew,” an old canard designed to shut you up. You can respond by saying that no, you are proud to be a Jew, in the mold of Rabbi Hillel, but that genocide committed by Jews makes you sick to your stomach—all to no avail.
A major reason for this is that the Jews were traumatized by the Holocaust, and rightly so. I also lost family members to mass graves in Poland, and my disgust with Holocaust deniers is second to none. But it’s a trauma that many, if not most, Jews can’t seem to get over, as though they were living in Germany during 1941-45. And so, in Edward Said’s famous phrase, the Palestinians are “the victims of the victims.” Genocide received, genocide passed on. Damaged people damage people. And so on. Lies, denial, and coverups follow naturally from the terror that is embedded in the Jewish psyche. In 1948, after all, the foundation of the Israeli state was understandably seen as salvation, a haven in a heartless world. It must be protected at all costs, at the expense of others if necessary.
Why has Netanyahu been the longest running prime minister, then? The answer is not hard to fathom: he loathes the Palestinians and sees them as the ultimate threat to Israel. So most Israelis are not bothered by the fact that he goes to Washington on July 24 and gives what Nancy Pelosi rightly called “the worst presentation of any foreign dignitary invited and honored with the privilege of addressing the Congress of the United States.” She’s right: it was a pile of crap. But happily, a tiny handful of leading Israeli figures regard Bibi, not the Palestinians, as the real threat to Israel. On July 23, a group of more than thirty prominent Israeli figures—former national security officials, eminent academics and businessmen—sent American congressional leaders a blistering letter arguing just that. The list included a Nobel laureate in chemistry, two former presidents of Ben Gurion University, five former members of Mossad(!), and a billionaire entrepreneur (Morris Kahn). One month earlier, retired Mossad director Tamir Pardo called on Congress to disinvite Netanyahu, calling the invitation a “terrible mistake.”(20)
Unfortunately, these folks don’t represent mainstream Israeli opinion. Netanyahu came to Washington, and delivered his speech—gaslighting his enemies and delivering a pack of lies that sounded like a typical Trump speech. Fact-checking the speech exposes all of this; it reveals that he made a number of claims that were false, or lacking in context, or lacking any evidence to back them up. As might be expected, neither the Israeli people, nor the US Republican party, found this problematic. Thus he argued that Israel allowed more than 40,000 aid trucks to enter Gaza. This obscures the fact that many of the deliveries never reached their intended recipients; that many of these trucks were carrying commercial goods, not humanitarian aid; and that the criteria for entry were typically arbitrary and/or extremely strict.
Second example: Netanyahu claimed that there were no civilian deaths resulting from the attack on Rafah, except for one accidental one. Totally untrue. There were numerous Palestinian deaths as a result of Israel’s military assault on the city.(21)
And the list goes on: the ratio of combatant-civilian casualties, Iran supposedly funding US protesters, Gazans supposedly not starving (they were, and are), and if they were it was due to Hamas stealing their food. All of this b.s. has been refuted by empirical evidence and reliable testimony. But Bibi remains the poster child for genocide, and for the Israeli practice of outright dishonesty. Would it really be a stretch to call him a psychopath? And if not, what does this say about the Israeli people as a whole, who kept returning him to office?
C)Massacres and targeted bombing, inter alia
Let’s start with the Israeli claim about the existence of “safe zones.” On July 13 Israel attacked the supposed “humanitarian zone” of al-Mawasi, in Gaza, killing ninety Palestinians. The IDF dismissed this as collateral damage of targeting Hamas, and that they were operating based on “precise intelligence.” (Always an excuse, as I discussed in section B, above) Ori Goldberg, who teaches at Reichman University in Herzliya, had this to say:
[It is] impossible to exaggerate the level of criminality, immorality, and crass, murderous stupidity that come together in the massacre Israel carried out in al-Mawasi this morning….Israel forces ‘evacuation’, Israel bombs, Israel knows, Israel attacks and kills, Israel sets conditions, Israel balks. Israel has run out of options. It knows only death.”(22)
Several days later, Israel shrank the “humanitarian zone” of the Gazan city of Khan Younis and attacked it. Dozens were killed, and 400,000 were forced to flee, being given something like thirty minutes warning that there would be an attack. They were not told where they should go. Again, Israel trotted out the “we were after Hamas” excuse. The massacres pile up, and the data on the massacres also pile up.(23)
The IDF has also been busy killing or detaining Gaza’s doctors. Five hundred killed, 300 detained, according to the World Health Organization, and as reported in the New York Times for August 2. Some of the doctors who were released reported being tortured in Israeli jails; others died in custody. (The Israeli prison service has declined to comment.) The Times article provides a partial list of doctors to whom these things happened. Meanwhile, Israel began to prevent physicians with Palestinian heritage from entering Gaza. (Documented in internal memos from the World Health Organization) Again, there is an eerie parallel to the Nazi program of trying to define who was a Jew. For the Nazis, as for the Israelis, one Jewish/Palestinian grandparent would do it.(24)
It doesn’t stop there. Israel began to restrict the entry of medical supplies into Gaza. Frequently rejected items include anesthetics, oxygen cylinders, ventilators, maternity kits, and cancer meds. The UN reported that thirty-two out of thirty-six hospitals have been damaged or destroyed—this in addition to the 500 health care workers murdered, as mentioned above.(25)
One of the more bizarre developments in the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza is the decision of the US and Israel to allow tax-deductible donations to far-right groups that have blocked those deliveries--! Three groups that have done this (including one accused of looting the supplies) have raised more than $200,000 from donors in the two countries. An incredible policy, it seems to me; “sick” would probably be a more accurate word for it.(26)
D)Let’s move on to the death estimates
The official Israeli figure for Palestinian deaths is around 37,000. The problem with this number is that it is based on direct killing; it does not take what is called indirect killing into account. This got addressed by the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, in July. We need to quote this in extenso:
Armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases. The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; [and] the population’s inability to flee to safe places….
In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.(27)
The British author and award-winning journalist, Jonathan Cook, has also weighed in on the subject, claiming that the official Israeli death toll figure is a lie. For one thing, he points out, it ignores death by famine, which has been going on for several months. To this we need to add conditions such as lack of water, the weakened health of the Palestinians (including chronic illnesses), and epidemics (possibly including polio). The Lancet figure of 186,000, he notes, represents 8 percent of the population. But, he goes on to say, “that figure assumes that Israel’s current slaughter and starvation policies come to an immediate halt, and that international organizations are able to bring in emergency aid. There are precisely no signs that Israel is going to allow any of that to happen.” Thus medical experts for The Lancet estimate that the actual death toll could rise to 600,000—25 percent of the population. This would suggest that my claim in my “Sadism” article, that the real goal of the Israeli government is not the defeat of Hamas, but the extermination of the Palestinians, has some validity. At this point, it hardly seems far-fetched.(28)
E)Conclusion: The road to suicide
Recall my quote from Ori Goldberg in section C, above: “Israel has run out of options. It knows only death.” This is the tragedy of Israel’s deep-seeded hatred of the Palestinians, and its desire to wipe them out. It can only redound on Israel: karma with a vengeance. If you pursue death, death will eventually pursue you. Israel is seen by many, if not most, countries of the world as a pariah state, in denial of the genocide it commits on a daily basis. Kenneth Roth, attorney and human rights activist, writes that the IDF has destroyed much of Gaza, once home to 2.1 million Palestinians. It has “attacked, with little if any military justification…all twelve of Gaza’s universities and 80 percent of its schools, as well as libraries, museums, and cultural heritage sites.” Meanwhile, the whole world is watching, taking note of Israeli cruelty. The International Criminal Court, led by the British lawyer Karim Khan (he has served as Prosecutor for the ICC since 2021), has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for their starvation strategy being wreaked on the Palestinians. Ultimately, Israel won’t get away with its program of butchery. I personally believe it is on the road to self-destruction, with no ability to turn back. It is also very hard for me to realize that it is Jews who are doing all this. Haven’t we always stood for justice, freedom, equality? But the Israelis are hardly Rabbi Hillel’s type of Jews. What the fuck happened?(29)
Signs of the times: Israel has lost a great deal of support from its traditional sponsor, the United States. To win pro-Israel elections in America (defeating candidates like Cori Bush, or Jamal Bowman), Aipac (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) now has to spend huge sums of money, whereas in the past it was not necessary for pro-Israel interest groups to insert themselves into American electoral politics. Their cultural hegemony, writes Yousef Munayyer (head of the Palestine/Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington), assured them victory with very little effort. Those days, he argues, are over. “A Pew poll from March 2023 found that for the first time, Democrats had more sympathy for Palestinians than Israelis.” The barbarity displayed by Israel in its 2014-15 war on Gaza was a turning point in this regard, and the current campaign of mass atrocities will be an even greater one. Dozens of countries, he notes, believe Israel is committing genocide. And this time, a lot more gruesome, sadistic imagery flashes around the globe—often posted on social media sites by the Israeli soldiers themselves. In a word, the whole world is watching, and it is horrified by what it is seeing. What this amounts to, I believe, is the Israeli sunset. The worse it makes things for the Palestinians, the worse it makes things for itself.(30)
In a word, it’s the end-game for Israel; I can’t imagine it making it to its one-hundredth birthday (2048). It chose a path that was sad, and stupid, not to say horrific, and is now paying the price.
©Morris Berman, 2024
Notes(11-30)
1.“Hamas Massacre: Documented War Crimes,” at hamas-massacre.net.
2. Palestinian death toll in Gaza tops 36,000: health authorities-Xinhua (news.cn)
3. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/23/whistleblowers-allege-widespread-abuses-at-israeli-detention-camp-sde-teiman; Sde Teiman: Israel phasing out use of desert detention camp after CNN investigation detailing abuses | CNN; Sde Teiman: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in shadowy detention center | CNN. See also these two videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_2RGyUCYaU and CNN exclusive: Israeli whistleblowers detail abuse of Palestinians in Sde Teiman prison - YouTube.
4. Israeli Settlers Are Terrorizing Palestinians In Record Numbers (youtube.com); David Shulman, “Israel: The Way Out,” New York Review of Books, 9 May 2024, pp. 10 and 12.
5.https://x.com/OwenJones84/status/1792180925201109153 and 'No longer justifiable': Israel faces international condemnation for strike in Rafah | The Times of Israel; Israeli forces launch new ground and air assault on central Gaza, killing at least 15 Palestinians | CNN
6. Most Israelis dislike Netanyahu, but support the war in Gaza – an Israeli scholar explains what’s driving public opinion (theconversation.com); Shulman, “Israel: The Way Out,” p. 10.
7.The following is taken from my portrait of Adler in my book Healing (Independent publication, 2023), pp. 6-13.
8.Both Ya’alon and Eitan are quoted in my book Dark Ages America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), pp. 197-98. Eitan was implicated in the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982.
9.On this and the following see Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), and Wikipedia, “The Denial of Death.” The frenzy for meaning was studied extensively by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951).
10.Ernest Becker, “The Spectrum of Loneliness,” Humanitas, 10 (1974), pp. 237-46.
11.Middle East Monitor, “Lawyer visits Israel’s ‘death camp’ and gives harrowing account of rape of Palestinian detainees,” http://www.middleeastmonitor/com/20240627; Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “Gaza: Israeli army systematically uses police dogs to brutally attack Palestinian civilians, with at least one reported rape,” https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6383/Gaza. Note that Sicha Mekomit is a website; the words mean Local Call.
12.Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, “Gaza…” (see n.11).
13.Ibid. Another echo of Nazi practice: they would break into a synagogue and force the rabbi to urinate on the Torah scrolls.
14.Gideon Levy, “In Gaza, Israel Lost What Remained of Its Humanity,” Haaretz, 24 July 2024; Fergal Keane, “Gaza man with Down’s syndrome attacked by IDF dog and left to die, mother tells BBC,” bbc.com, 19 July 2024.
15.Dana Karni, “Israeli minister says it may be ‘moral’ to starve 2 million Gazans, but ‘no one in the world would let us’,” CNN, 6 August 2024.
16.Bethan McKernan et al., “Palestinian prisoners describe systemic abuse in Israel’s jails,” The Guardian, 5 August 2024.
17.Chris McGreal, “US medics who volunteered in Gaza demand arms embargo over ‘unbearable cruelty’ inflicted by Israel,” The Guardian, 25 July 2024.
18.Chris McGreal, “Israeli weapons packed with shrapnel causing devastating injuries to children in Gaza, doctors say,” The Guardian, 11 July 2024. This practice is reminiscent of the use of cluster bombs by other nations, although Israel did use these bombs in Lebanon in 1978 and the 1980s. This off the Internet: “The United States has used cluster munitions with devastating consequences in Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam) in the 1960s and 1970s, the Persian Gulf (Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia) in 1991, the former Yugoslavia (now Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo) in 1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002, Iraq in 2003, and Yemen in 2009.” More recently, it supplied the Ukraine with these weapons. Cluster bombs release small bomblets which are difficult to locate and remove (as in the case of shrapnel). They can kill or maim civilians long after a war is over.
19.Ruth Michaelson et al., “Israeli inquest into alleged abuse of Palestinian detainees sparks far-right fury,” The Guardian, 29 July 2024; Bethan McKernan, “‘Deep moral deterioration’ being normalized in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” The Guardian, 30 July 2024. In 2016, an IDF soldier, Elor Azaria, walked over to Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, who was lying on the ground, and shot him in the head. More than half of the Israeli public was on Azaria’s side. He served nine months in jail for manslaughter, and when he was released in 2018, it was to a hero’s welcome.
See also the following videos on YouTube: Democracy Now!, “Israel’s Torture & Rape of Palestinian Prisoners Defended by Knesset Members, Far-Right Mobs,” 2 August 2024; Owen Jones, “Israelis Riot in Support of Torture,” 2 August 2024; and Novara Media, “Israelis Storm Prison After IDF Soldiers Arrested For Sexual Assault Of Palestinian,” 30 July 2024.
20.Alex Marquardt, “Israeli former national security officials and business leaders blast Netanyahu ahead of his speech to Congress,” CNN, 23 July 2024.
21.Zeena Saifi, “Fact-checking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress,” CNN, 25 July 2024.
22.Julia Conley, “At Least 90 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Massacre in ‘Safe Zone’ of al-Mawasi,” commondreams.org, 13 July 2024.
23.Abeer Salman et al., “Dozens killed and thousands flee as Israel shrinks ‘humanitarian zone’ in Gaza,” CNN, 23 July 2024; Malak Tantesh and Ruth Michaelson, “‘Like judgment day’: evacuees tell of fleeing Israel’s assault on Khan Younis,” The Guardian, 27 July 2024. On additional massacres (e.g.): Ruth Michaelson, “Wave of Israeli airstrikes kills at least 50 people in Gaza,” The Guardian, 27 July 2024; Ami Kaufman and Bianna Golodryga, “Palestinian homes were destroyed ‘for revenge’, says Israeli soldier who served in Gaza,” CNN, 1 August 2024; Kareem Khadder et al., “At least 30 killed in Israeli strike on two Gaza school shelters: Palestinian Civil Defense,” CNN, 4 August 2024—etc. and etc.
24.Anjana Sankar, “Many of Gaza’s Medical Workers Have Been Detained or Killed,” New York Times, 2 August 2004; Yahya Abou-Ghazala and Alex Marquardt, “Israel is blocking physicians with Palestinian heritage from entering Gaza,” CNN, 24 July 2024.
25.Abou-Ghazala and Marquardt, “Israel is blocking…” (see n.23).
26.From the Associated Press in Jerusalem, “US and Israel allowed tax-deductible donations to groups blocking Gaza aid,” The Guardian, 16 July 2024.
27.Rasha Khatib et al., “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential,” thelancet.com, Vol. 404, 20 July 2024.
28.Jonathan Cook, “The Official Death Toll in Gaza Is a Lie. The Casualty Numbers Are Far, Far Higher,” antiwar.com/blog/2024/07/31, 31 July 2024; The Cradle, “Gaza death toll could reach half a million: Lancet,” at thecradle.co/articles-id/25821, 8 July 2024.
29.Kenneth Roth, “Crimes of War in Gaza,” New York Review of Books, 18 July 2024, pp. 34-39.
30.Yousef Munayyer, “US support for Israel is collapsing. And Aipac knows it,” The Guardian, 7 August 2024.