Keeponstalin

More video and eyewitness info on Al Jazeera so far

Also reported on Common Dreams and Middle East Eye.

I haven't found any reports of any independent investigations yet, hopefully they are underway

The strangest sight at the “Conference for Israel’s Victory,” which took place on Sunday evening at Jerusalem’s International Convention Center, wasn’t the map depicting dozens of new settlements that Israeli settlers hope to establish throughout the Gaza Strip after the war is over. It was the moment when thousands of people danced around the hall singing celebratory songs — a rare spectacle in post-October 7 Israel, with most of the nation still mourning the victims of the Hamas-led attacks and fearing for the safety of the hostages in Gaza.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich began his speech with some reservation toward the joy that predominated: “I must say that I have mixed emotions when it comes to the atmosphere in this hall,” he said, before adding immediately: “But there is something natural and healthy about what’s here, in the strength, in the joy, in the devotion to the Land of Israel, which has the potential to grant enormous strength.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir talked of “voluntary migration,” apparently understanding the need to moderate his language somewhat in light of the ongoing legal proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

As for the question of what will happen to the 2.3 million Palestinians who currently call Gaza home — a question posed by many of the foreign journalists who came to cover the conference — Weiss had an answer she repeated over and over again: “The Arabs will move.” She explained that, just as Israel “doesn’t give them food” in order to pressure Hamas to release the hostages, so too should Israel “not give them anything, so they will have to move. The world will accept this.”

Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi was more direct: “There will never be a Palestinian state between the river and the sea … We have an obligation to act, for our sake, and for the sake of the supposedly uninvolved [civilians in Gaza], for voluntary migration. Even if the war that was forced upon us turns the issue of voluntary migration into coercion to the point that they say: ‘I want to [leave].’”

After the deliberations at the ICJ, Israel will have a hard time claiming that the ideas expressed at the conference don’t represent official policy. In the pamphlet that was distributed to the audience, the message was even clearer than in the speeches. On the question of how Israel should treat the Palestinian population in Gaza, the lawyer Aviad Visoli — a prominent Temple movement activist — wrote: “Nakba 2, meaning the mass expulsion of the Arabs of Gaza, is also justified by the laws of war.”

“Israeli politicians have already said that they’re going to ignore the ICJ order,” Mark Lattimer, the executive director of Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights, told Al Jazeera. “It is much harder for, particularly, the US and European states including the UK, to ignore the order because they have a much stronger record of holding or supporting the International Court of Justice.”

“The ICJ ruling puts a lot more pressure on the US and other Western allies to move on a ceasefire resolution,” Zaha Hassan, a human rights lawyer and a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Al Jazeera. “It makes it a lot harder for the US, along with Israel, to make the case to Western governments that are still very much concerned with international legitimacy, to maintain the idea that Israel is acting within the constraints of international law in Gaza and that it’s acting in self-defence.”

Some evidence suggests that Israel knows this, too. Soon after South Africa announced that it would bring a case before the ICJ, Israel’s tactics on the ground started to change, experts said.

There was “a rush to wipe out any possibility for a Palestinian return to the north of Gaza”, Hassan said, pointing to controlled bombings of universities and hospitals. “Once you have hospitals taken out, you make it impossible for people in war to stay. That’s a part of a strategy to force Palestinian population transfer and permanent displacement.”

In an interim judgment delivered on Friday, the president of the court, Joan Donoghue, said Israel must “take all measures within its power” to prevent acts that fall within the scope of the genocide convention and must ensure “with immediate effect” that its forces do not commit any of the acts covered by the convention.

The court stopped short of granting South Africa’s request to order an immediate ceasefire to the war, which has destroyed much of the Gaza Strip and killed more than 25,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities.

The ruling is not the final word from the court on whether Israel’s actions amount to genocide, but it provides a strong indication that the judges believe there is a credible risk to Palestinians under the genocide convention. Granting South Africa’s application for special measures, the court did not have to find whether Israel had committed genocide, which will be determined at a later date, but only that its acts were capable of falling within the genocideconvention and that urgent preventive action was necessary.

Some 30,000 people are sheltering at the site and the death toll could be higher, said Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA Commissioner General, who also took to the platform to lament "another horrific day in Gaza."

"The compound is a clearly marked UN facility and its coordinates were shared with Israeli Authorities as we do for all our facilities," he said, adding "once again a blatant disregard of basic rules of war."

Rafah normally has a population of around 280,000 which has swelled to an estimated 1.2 to 1.4 million as people fleeing fighting elsewhere pack into the city, setting up makeshift shelters and tents in the streets.

The squalid and unsanitary conditions have led to outbreaks of respiratory infections and Hepatitis A, both of which had been eradicated in Gaza. Meningitis and other illnesses are also emerging.

Humanitarian workers are being sent into very hostile areas “and they have no radios, they have no communications that work for them to be able to be seen to be safe”, he said, adding that they also do not have enough armoured vehicles.

Furthermore, many of the goods humanitarians are trying to bring into Gaza to support water and sanitation “seem to be prohibited by the Israelis,” he said.

Under the cover of war, a total of 16 Palestinian villages in the West Bank — collectively home to over 1,000 people — have been entirely depopulated as a result of a surge in settler violence and pogroms against Palestinian herding communities. Separated from their communities and forced to live in tents on land belonging to other Palestinians, the displaced families are all demanding the same thing: to be able to return home.

On the day of the expulsion, the settlers refused to allow them to take anything from the burning village: her husband’s ID card, vehicles, mattresses, cell phones, bags of olives, keys — “and my clothes,” one of her sons adds. Everything was left behind, and much of it stolen... In the days leading up to her family’s decision to flee the village, Abiyat would sleep outside with her children, fearing that settlers would set their house on fire while they slept, as had happened to one of her neighbors.

Southeast of Ramallah, the 180 residents of the village of Wadi al-Siq were also forcibly displaced as a result of a settler pogrom. On Oct. 12, settlers and soldiers raided the village, shot at and drove out the women and children, before kidnapping three men, handcuffing them, stripping them naked, urinating on them, beating them until they bled, and sexually abusing them

Settlers have destroyed or burned homes in several of the villages that Palestinians were forced to abandon in recent months, making it impossible for their former residents to return. In this way, settlers are finishing the job of Israeli government policy that for years has sought to force Palestinians out of Area C: refusing to recognize their villages, preventing them from accessing water and electricity, and demolishing their homes. According to data provided by the Civil Administration — the bureaucratic arm of the occupation — to the Israeli planning rights NGO Bimkom, between 2016 and 2020, it issued 348 times more building permits to Israeli settlers than it did to Palestinians living in Area C.

Roey Zweig, an officer in the IDF Central Command — which is responsible for army units that operate in the West Bank and for construction in Area C — claimed, absurdly, that settler violence has actually decreased of late due to measures that the army has begun to implement. Throughout his remarks, Zweig — who, in 2022, while serving as the commander of the Samaria Brigade, said that “the settlement [project] and the army are one” — referred to the depopulated villages as “Palestinian outposts,” repackaging the term for Israeli hilltop communities in the West Bank that are ostensibly illegal even under Israeli law.

The Israeli army is once again marketing itself as a high-tech superpower, talking up the automated weaponry and supercomputing surveillance tech being “battle-tested” in its war on Gaza. Military spokespeople hope the same old slogans will distract from the fact that Israel is far from achieving its stated goals of eliminating Hamas and bringing the remaining hostages home, despite this being one of the most destructive military campaigns in modern history. As investors drop cash on Israeli weapons start-ups at faster and faster rates, defense tech CEOs are poised to be this war’s only victors.

Moreover, and more consequentially for Palestinians, technology’s promise to bring greater precision to warfare is apparently absent from Israel’s current assault. Targeted suicide drones have not stopped the Israeli army from blasting out entire neighborhoods with 2,000-pound bombs, damaging or destroying 70 percent of the homes in Gaza. Algorithmically enhanced sniper rifles have done little to deter troops from firing at civilians, including three Israeli hostages. And AI-powered targeting systems have failed to protect the lives of more than 8,000 children killed in Israeli airstrikes. 

While Palestinians will bear the brunt of the violence enabled by new weapons and surveillance systems, it’s unclear how much Israelis will gain in the long run. The industry makes up a miniscule portion of the economy of the so-called “start-up nation,” whose civilian industries are reeling after months of war. Even former military and political leaders have publicly expressed concern that the war — with hundreds of thousands of reservists pulled from their jobs and studies, millions of dollars diverted from public budgets and toward the war effort, and the increasingly right-wing leanings of a political establishment bent on retribution — will do little to safeguard Israeli national security long-term.

Denying water to Gaza has been a key tactic of the war from the very beginning, with Israel shutting off the pipes supplying the enclave on October 7. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that Israel was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.”

At the end of October, an internal U.S. State Department report expressed concern that 52,000 pregnant women and over 30,000 babies under the age of six months were being forced to drink a potentially lethal mix of water polluted with sewage and salt from the sea. Since then, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been severely weakened by rampant hunger and disease, as well as the physical wounds inflicted on nearly 60,000 people and the mental stress of ceaseless bombardment that has taken more than 23,500 lives. All of this renders Palestinians in Gaza even more vulnerable to water-borne illnesses.

By the end of December, as WHO reported, the more than 1 million displaced Palestinians sheltering in the southern city of Rafah had access to, on average, one toilet for every 486 people, while across Gaza one shower served an average of 4,500 people. Sewage flows through the streets and contaminates the hastily erected tents in which hundreds of thousands of people now live throughout southern and central Gaza. Those who are menstruating face intense hardship, with menstrual products, toilets, and water all in direly short supply. 

There are four museums in Gaza, and two have been levelled, the International Council of Museums-Arab (ICOM-Arab) confirmed to Al Jazeera...

Gaza’s Tourism and Antiquities Ministry estimated that as many as 104 mosques have been damaged or destroyed since the start of the Israeli assault. This includes the Othman bin Qashqar Mosque in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood, which was built in 1220 at the site where Prophet Muhammad’s great-grandfather is believed to have been buried...

“All our heritage sites are clearly marked, yet the Israeli military strikes, the tanks and the bulldozers continue,” the archaeologist said. “But I have faith all this will end. Even if they attempt to destroy our past, we will build back Gaza’s future.”

Targeting intelligence — the information used to conduct airstrikes and fire long-range artillery weapons — has played a central role in Israel’s siege of Gaza. A document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act suggests that the U.S. Air Force sent officers specializing in this exact form of intelligence to Israel in late November.

...on November 21, the U.S. Air Force issued deployment guidelines for officers, including intelligence engagement officers, headed to Israel. Experts say that a team of targeting officers like this would be used to provide satellite intelligence to the Israelis for the purpose of offensive targeting. 

“They’re probably targeting people, targeting officers,” Lawrence Cline, who served as an intelligence engagement officer in Iraq before retirement, told The Intercept. Targeting intelligence refers to the identification and characterization of enemy activities including missile and artillery launches, location of leadership and command and control centers, and key facilities. “What I can see is we’ve got a lot of global assets in terms of satellites and the like and the Israelis have a lot in terms of more localized radar coverage.”

In late December, 77 groups — representing tens of thousands of lawyers, civil society leaders, and activists from six continents — filed an amicus brief in a lawsuit that Palestinian human rights organizations, residents of Gaza, and U.S. citizens with family members impacted by Israel’s ongoing assault brought against the Biden administration.

According to Law for Palestine, a human rights and legal advocacy organization, there have been at least 500 instances of Israeli lawmakers, officials, and officers inciting genocide.

Sourani said that the statements by Israeli officials, along with the actual blockade, the indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian buildings, the basic lack of safe space, and the mass displacement of millions of Palestinians makes it clear: “All of this is tantamount to genocide.”

The plaintiffs responded to the administration’s motion to dismiss on December 22, arguing that there is precedent for U.S. courts to adjudicate questions surrounding genocide and that their legal challenge is about more than the actions of a foreign state. Rather, the plaintiffs argued, their injuries are “fairly traceable” to the actions of the U.S. government. “The suggestion that the U.S. does not or cannot influence Israel borders on the absurd, not least because the Israeli government acknowledges its actions could not happen without U.S. license and support, and Defendants have boasted about their coordination with and influence over Israel,” the plaintiffs wrote.

Kenneth Roth, who was executive director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022 and oversaw production of the report on apartheid, said that Israeli authorities have long insisted that ending discriminatory policies depended on peace negotiations.

But three decades on, with no real peace process in motion, that explanation “lacked credibility,” Roth said.

Israel has continued to support Jewish settlements in the West Bank, constructing “bypass roads” accessible only to the settlers and expanding military checkpoints — moves that Roth and others say all but eliminated the possibility that the West Bank could someday become an independent, contiguous Palestinian state.

“What’s left is Swiss cheese,” he said.