Extensive war crimes in Donbass from July 2 to July 24, 2014. Kiev’s warmongers/zionists continue genocide of civilian population and deliberate destruction of Eastern Ukraine’s infrastructure – schools, hospitals, kindergartens, power plants, train stations, etc. The majority of the footage and interviews you will see in this documentary film have never been shown on TV.
Map courtesy of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
To protect itself from Hamas rockets and tunnels, Israel is forcing tens of thousands of people out of their homes, turning their old neighborhoods into a no-man’s land.
This narrow strip of land that used to be called “the Gaza Strip,” already one of the more densely populated places on Earth, is growing dramatically smaller. The Israeli military, relentlessly and methodically, is driving people out of the 3-kilometer (1.8 mile) buffer zone it says it needs to protect against Hamas rockets and tunnels. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the buffer zone eats up about 44 percent of Gaza’s territory.
What that means on the ground is scenes of extraordinary devastation in places like the Al Shajaya district approaching Gaza’s eastern frontier, and Beit Hanoun in the north. These were crowded neighborhoods less than three weeks ago. Now they have been literally depopulated, the residents joining more than 160,000 internally displaced people in refuges and makeshift shelters. Apartment blocks are fields of rubble, and as I move through this hostile landscape the phrase that keeps ringing in my head is “scorched earth.”
It’s not like Israel didn’t plan this. It told tens of thousands of Palestinians to flee so its air force, artillery and tanks could create this uninhabitable no-man’s land of half-standing, burned-out buildings, broken concrete and twisted metal. During a brief humanitarian ceasefire some Gazans were able to come back to get their first glimpse of the destruction this war has brought to their communities, and to sift through their demolished homes to gather clothes or other scattered bits of their past lives. But many were not even able to do that.
Full article at The Daily Beast
US President Barack Obama meets with Ukraine Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C. on March 12, 2014 (Photo: The New York Times)
By Eric Zuesse
The Ukrainian leadership has resigned, because of their unwillingness to impose the IMF’s terms, which would impoverish the population within months. That impoverishment would be extracted from the Ukrainian public in order to repay the IMF’s loans, which had been skimmed off by Ukraine’s oligarch billionaires into secret bank accounts in Switzerland and other tax-havens.
Two of the four parties in Ukraine’s ruling coalition have bolted, refusing those IMF terms on loan-repayment; and, so, on July 24th, Ukraine’s Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who had been appointed by Obama’s agent Victoria Nuland, tendered his resignation, and he announced: “The fact is that today you failed to vote for the laws, and I have nothing (with which) to pay wages of policemen, doctors, teachers; nothing to buy a rifle with, nothing to fuel an armored personnel carrier with. Today you failed to take a decision to fill the gas storages to allow us to live through the winter, to at last free ourselves from dependence on Russian gas.”
As the great journalist Michel Chossudovsky, reported on July 24th, Ukraine’s figurehead President, Petro “Poroshenko believes that when sanctions [against Russia] are not working, there are grounds for appeal to the United States Congress to grant Ukraine the special status of a major ally outside NATO (like Israel, Australia, and the Philippines) to enable it to solve its security problems. The granting of the ‘status of ally outside NATO’ would set the stage for the possible deployment of US and NATO forces inside Ukraine in the context of joint military operations with the Ukraine Armed Forces and National Guard.”
Consequently, there is now being promoted in Kiev “a bill foreseeing the expansion of U.S. military and technical aid.”
In other words: The government that Obama installed in February is now seeking direct U.S. support in order to continue its ethnic cleansing campaign, which is aimed at getting rid of the people who had elected the man, President Viktor Yanukovych, whom Obama’s February coup in Kiev had overthrown. The people that Obama then placed into control there are now expecting direct U.S. assistance, to complete that ethnic-cleansing campaign, which is being carried out in the ethnic-Russian portions of Ukraine, so as to eliminate the Ukrainians who would be opposing the placement into Ukraine of nuclear missiles within a mere ten-minute flight-time to annihilating Moscow.
Full article at OpEdNews
Palestinian protestors throw stones toward Israeli police during clashes in the Shuafat neighborhood in Israeli-annexed Arab East Jerusalem, on July 2, 2014, after a Palestinian teenager was kidnapped and killed in an apparent act of revenge for the murder by militants of three Israeli youths. (AFP PHOTO / AHMAD GHARABLI)
If Israel insists, as the Bosnian Serbs did in Sarajevo, on using the weapons of industrial warfare against a helpless civilian population then that population has an inherent right to self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The international community will have to either act to immediately halt Israeli attacks and lift the blockade of Gaza or acknowledge the right of the Palestinians to use weapons to defend themselves.
No nation, including any in the Muslim world, appears willing to intervene to protect the Palestinians. No world body, including the United Nations, appears willing or able to pressure Israel through sanctions to conform to the norms of international law. And the longer we in the world community fail to act, the worse the spiral of violence will become.
Israel does not have the right to drop 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on Gaza. It does not have the right to pound Gaza with heavy artillery and with shells lobbed from gunboats. It does not have the right to send in mechanized ground units or to target hospitals, schools and mosques, along with Gaza’s water and electrical systems. It does not have the right to displace over 100,000 people from their homes. The entire occupation, under which Israel has nearly complete control of the sea, the air and the borders of Gaza, is illegal.
The failure of the international community to respond has left the Palestinians with no choice. The United States, since Israel’s establishment in 1948, has vetoed in the U.N. Security Council more than 40 resolutions that sought to curb Israel’s lust for occupation and violence against the Palestinians. And it has ignored the few successful resolutions aimed at safeguarding Palestinian rights, such as Security Council Resolution 465, passed in 1980.
Full article at Truthdig
Abby Martin features an interview with Alison Weir, founder of ‘If Americans Knew’ going over the history of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and breaking the misconceptions about conflict.
Cartoon by David Dees
On Wednesday, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted on a heavily one-sided resolution condemning “in the strongest terms the widespread, systematic and gross violations of international human rights and fundamental freedoms arising from the Israeli military operations” in Gaza. The Geneva-based council, which has a long history of anti-Israel bias, also declared a new “international commission of inquiry” into the events currently unfolding in Israel and Gaza, in what observers are calling a new Goldstone report.
Only the United States voted against the resolution. Twenty-nine nations voted in favor, among them not only the usual suspects such as Saudi Arabia, Algeria and South Africa, but also some ostensible friends of Israel, including Russia, Kenya, India and Mexico.
Equally hurtful for Israel, if not more so, were the abstentions of the nine European Union member states who had the right to vote: Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Romania, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and the United Kingdom.
Full story at The Times of Israel
SAY #iSupportGaza LIKE 535.000 PEOPLE WORLDWIDE DO!
The Ministry of Health Gaza expresses its horror and outrage at the latest Israeli massacre moments ago at an UNRWA school sheltering displaced persons in Beit Hanoun. Ten people have been killed and there is a large number of wounded.
This follows hard on the heels of yesterday’s massacre in the governate of Khan Younis.
In the farming village of Khuza’a at least 25 civilians are believed dead and 16 wounded. Two thirds of the homes have been destroyed and 60 percent of the population has fled, while the rest are prevented from leaving by ongoing attacks and sniper fire.
Israeli tanks and special forces are currently surrounding emergency vehicles and ambulances seeking to retrieve the dead and wounded, and have seized some of the critically-wounded victims.
In the neighbouring villages of Abasan and Bani Suheila 17 people have been killed, and another seven in Al Qarara, including pharmacist Dr Ibrahim al Halaq.
Medical staff are afraid to travel to their work, and risk death from the Israeli bombardments.
In the last 24 hours, Balsam Hospital in North Gaza was attacked for the second time.
Three hospitals have now been forced to evacuate their patients following Israeli strikes, causing overcrowding in other hospitals, such as Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, which is struggling to cope.
Full article at Global Research
The special relationship between Israel and the United States goes deep…real deep. It’s based on security, conflict and most of all money. Most of it for the Israeli military. But with over 600 killed in Gaza just this July and the Israeli military’s long list human rights abuses, is this special relationship worth the price?
Cartoon by Carlos Latuff
By Chris Hedges
Raul Hilberg in his monumental work “The Destruction of the European Jews” chronicled a process of repression that at first was “relatively mild” but led, step by step, to the Holocaust. It started with legal discrimination and ended with mass murder. “The destructive process was a development that was begun with caution and ended without restraint,” Hilberg wrote.
The Palestinians over the past few decades have endured a similar “destructive process.” They have gradually been stripped of basic civil liberties, robbed of assets including much of their land and often their homes, have suffered from mounting restrictions on their physical movements, been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling of produce, and found themselves increasingly impoverished and finally trapped behind walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West Bank.
There will never be transports or extermination camps for the Palestinians, but amid increasing violence against Palestinians larger and larger numbers of them will die, in airstrikes, targeted assassinations and other armed attacks. Hunger and misery will expand. Israeli demands for “transfer”—the forced expulsion of Palestinians from occupied territory to neighboring countries—will grow.
The Palestinians in Gaza live in conditions that now replicate those first imposed on Jews by the Nazis in the ghettos set up throughout Eastern Europe. Palestinians cannot enter or leave Gaza. They are chronically short of food—the World Health Organization estimates that more than 50 percent of children in Gaza and the West Bank under 2 years old have iron deficiency anemia and reports that malnutrition and stunting in children under 5 are “not improving” and could actually be worsening. Palestinians often lack clean water. They are crammed into unsanitary hovels. They do not have access to basic medical care. They are stateless and lack passports or travel documents. They live with massive unemployment. They are daily dehumanized in racist diatribes by their occupiers as criminals, terrorists and mortal enemies of the Jewish people.
The last time Israel mounted a Gaza military assault as severe as the current series of attacks was in 2008, with Operation Cast Lead, which lasted from Dec. 27 of that year to Jan. 18, 2009. That attack saw 1,455 Palestinians killed, including 333 children. Roughly 5,000 more Palestinians were injured. A new major ground incursion, which would be designed to punish the Palestinians with even greater ferocity, would cause a far bigger death toll than Operation Cast Lead did. The cycle of escalating violence, this “destructive process,” as the history of the conflict has illustrated, would continue at an accelerating rate.
When all this does not work, when it becomes clear that the Palestinians once again have not become dormant and passive, Israel will take another step, more radical than the last. The “process of destruction” will be stopped only from outside Israel. Israel, captive to the process, is incapable of imposing self-restraint.
Full article at Truthdig
Nepal’s Himalayan mountain range is one of the most picturesque places in the world. But its stunning beauty is fading from view for many of the villagers who call the region home. Exposure to ultraviolet rays at such high altitudes is causing many to lose their sight.
Ophthalmologist Dr Sanduk Ruit has made it his life mission to bring sight to everyone who needs it, regardless of their ability to pay. Known in Nepal as the “God of Sight”, Ruit has helped more than 100,000 people blinded by cataracts see again. His surgeries often take him into the remote mountains, where patients are too poor and weak to travel to his clinic in the capital, Kathmandu.
In such isolated landscapes, the doctor and his team set up eye camps, performing free, astonishingly fast surgeries using a stitch-free simple surgical technique called ‘Ruitectomy’, which he pioneered. The procedure is now replicated across the developing world.
His assembly line-like surgeries are astonishingly fast. During his time in the Bamti district, he aims to complete 50 surgeries each day while doctors in the West only do 10 to 15 on a busy day.
Full story at Al Jazeera
Against the Grain 