BY DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR – DPA
GENEVA MAR 15, 2024 – 6:45 PM GMT+3
A boy looks out from inside a tent in al-Roj camp, Syria, Jan. 10, 2020. (Reuters File Photo)
Avast majority of Syrians are still in need of humanitarian aid due to the implications of 13 years of war, according to a statement made by the U.N. on Friday.
The latest data shows 16.7 million people, 70% of the people in Syria, need aid, the highest number since the conflict broke out 13 years ago, U.N. Syria Envoy Geir Pedersen said in a statement.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that around 23.2 million people live in Syria.
The international community must exert more pressure to get the talks between the Syrian government and the opposition back on track, he said.
“We must prioritize peace,” Pedersen said. “If we do not do so, the grim downward trends across nearly all indicators in Syria will only continue in the year ahead. The Syrian people deserve better than this.”
A lack of donations means aid organizations in Syria are having problems reaching people in need, reported the UN coordinators for Syria aid, Adam Abdelmoula and Muhannad Hadi. Many people do not have enough to eat, they said.
More than 12 million Syrian children, women and men have fled to neighboring countries or within Syria since 2011.
“Please don’t forget displaced Syrians at home or abroad,” said Matthew Saltmarsh, spokesman for the U.N. Refugee Agency UNHCR in Geneva.
So far this year, donor states have only provided a fraction of the necessary funds for refugee aid, he added.
The violence in Syria has escalated again recently and is exacerbated by the effects of the war in Gaza and associated regional tensions. Syria has been hit by military attacks and counter-attacks involving Israel, the United States and pro-Iranian militias.
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LAST UPDATE: MAR 15, 2024 8:19 PM
KEYWORDS – SYRIAN CRISIS UNITED NATIONS HUMANITARIAN CRISIS
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Israel Is Now Killing Palestinians in Gaza by Starvation: Media Downplaying This Are Complicit in These Preventable Deaths
By Eva Bartlett
Global Research, March 14, 2024
In Gaza 10 March 2024
Region: Middle East & North Africa
Theme: Law and Justice, United Nations
In-depth Report: PALESTINE
Following the February 29 Israeli slaughter of at least 115 starving Palestinians lined up for food aid, there was little or no outrage by the same Western media which would have howled if the perpetrator were Russia or Syria.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, early morning on Thursday, February 29, Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed Palestinians waiting just southwest of Gaza City for desperately needed food aid. As a result, at least 115 civilians were killed and over 750 wounded.
Popular US commenter Judge Andrew Napolitano said in a recent interview with award-winning analyst Professor Jeffery Sachs,
“Innocent Gaza civilians were lined up to receive flour and water from an aid truck, and more than 100 were slaughtered, mowed down, by Israeli troops. This has got to be one of the most reprehensible and public slaughterings that they’ve engaged in.”
The official Israeli version of events, unsurprisingly, puts the blame on the Palestinians themselves. The deaths and injuries were supposedly caused by a stampede, and the Israeli soldiers only fired when they felt they were endangered by the crowd. The BBC even cited one army lieutenant as saying that troops had “cautiously [tried] to disperse the mob with a few warning shots.” Mark Regev, a special adviser to the Israeli prime minister, went as far as to tell CNN that Israeli troops had not been involved directly in any way and that the gunfire had come from “Palestinian armed groups.”
Testimonies from survivors and doctors tell a different story, though, saying the majority of those treated after the incident had been shot by Israeli forces. Legacy media reports, however, use characteristically neutral wording when evidence starts to stack up against Israel. “112 dead in chaotic scenes as Israeli troops open fire near aid trucks, say Gaza officials,” a Guardian headline reads. Palestinians always seem to just “die,” not get killed, and Israeli troops seem to have just “opened fire” nearby. The skewed wording conventions persist even despite the attribution to Palestinian officials present in that same headline – officials like the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, which was quite clear in accusing Israel of perpetrating a ”massacre” as part of a “genocidal war.”
The article does eventually cite the acting Director of al-Awda hospital as saying most of the 161 casualties treated appeared to have been shot. The confusing headline was likely intentional, counting on most people not bothering to read the article in full.
In a report published on March 3, Euro-Med stated members of its field team were present at the time of the incident and “documented Israeli tanks firing heavily towards Palestinian civilians while trying to receive humanitarian aid.” The report goes on to cite Dr Jadallah Al-Shafi’i, head of nursing at Shifa, Gaza’s main hospital, saying, “paramedics and rescue workers were among the victims,” and that at Shifa “they observed dozens of dead and injured, hit by Israeli gunfire.”
The report also cites Dr Amjad Aliwa, an emergency specialist at Shifa who was also on site when Israel opened fire. According to Aliwa, the Israeli fire began, “as soon as the trucks arrived on Thursday at 4 am.”
But the February 29 massacre, tragic as it is, is only a part of the current stage of Israel’s war on Gaza: the deliberate starvation of Palestinians. And like the massacre itself, the whole issue is being subjected to the hands-off wording treatment by establishment media.
On February 29, the New York Times published an article whose headline, “Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children,” suggests starvation is a mysterious malicious force with a will of its own, skirting the mention of the Israeli siege as its obvious cause.
Again, as with the Guardian article, a few paragraphs in, the NYT piece does state that the “hunger is a man-made catastrophe,” describing how Israeli forces prevent food delivery and how Israeli bombardments make aid distribution dangerous.
It mentions the hunger, “is caused but also partly hidden by a pitiless war that has obliterated hospitals, flooded morgues and damaged communication networks, leaving us to cobble together what’s happening from scraps of information.”
The pitiless Israeli war on Gaza has been documented live since October 7. Cobbling scraps of information is not necessary; Israel’s destruction of Gaza has been done with the whole world watching.
As Professor Sachs stated,
”…Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved! I’m not using an exaggeration, I’m talking literally starving a population. Israel is a criminal, is in non-stop, war crime, status now. I believe in genocidal status.”
Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the February 29 massacre was not the first such incident, and likely not the last. A thread on Twitter/X outlines this, noting, ”Before yesterday’s “Flour Massacre”, the IDF has been shooting indiscriminately for WEEKS at starved Gazans awaiting aid trucks at the exact same spot, virtually every single day!”
Before yesterday’s “Flour Massacre”, the IDF has been shooting indiscriminately for WEEKS at starved Gazans awaiting aid trucks at the exact same spot, virtually every single day!
A 🧵of some of these incidents:
Feb 28: IDF soldiers take potshots at famished desperate Gazans pic.twitter.com/8dOztIzvdk
— Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) March 1, 2024
The thread (warning: graphic images!), compiled by Gazan analyst and Euro-Med chief of communications Muhammad Shehada, gives examples of Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians every single day in the week prior to February 29.
The final post in the thread, referencing February 18, shows a Palestinian man splayed on the ground, “shot in the head by the IDF at the Rasheed street as he came looking for food.”
You can bet that, were these Syrian or Russian soldiers firing on starving civilians, the outrage would be front page, 24/7, for weeks. Scratch that, they wouldn’t even have to do it – just a hint of an accusation would have been enough to get the presses going.
Starvation in Syria Was a Media Trope
The NYT article mentioned above notes that “Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance.” But ‘verifying from a distance’ is precisely what the NYT and other Western media did repeatedly in Syria over the years.
In areas occupied by (then) al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam, and the other extremist terrorist gangs which the West and corporate media dubbed “rebels,” food aid was always taken by the respective terrorists and withheld from the civilian population, causing starvation in some districts. Madaya, to the west of Damascus, eastern Aleppo, and later eastern Ghouta were districts most loudly campaigned over in legacy media, providing covering fire for the broader US-led campaign to overthrow the Syria government.
Backing the claims that the government was starving civilians were mostly “unnamed activists” or activists whose allegiance to Nusra, or even ISIS, was very overt.
As I would see and hear whenever one of these regions was liberated, ample food and medicine had been sent in, but civilians never saw it. Time and again, in eastern Aleppo, Madaya, al-Waer, eastern Ghouta, to name key areas, civilians complained that terrorist factions hoarded food and medicine, and if they sold it to the population, it was at extortionist prices people couldn’t afford.
In the old city of Homs in 2014, back then dubbed by legacy media as the “capital of the revolution,” starved residents I met told me the West’s precious “rebels” had stolen every morsel of food from them, stealing anything of value as well.
Yet, media headlines about these regions screamed about starvation, outright blaming the Syrian government, and were accompanied by disturbing images of emaciated civilians (some of which were not even from Syria) meant to evoke strong emotions among readers and viewers. The same media largely opts not to show you gaunt, starving, Palestinians in Gaza.
Tellingly, Syrian towns surrounded by terrorist forces, besieged, bombed, sniped and starved, got virtually no media coverage. It didn’t fit NATO’s narrative of “rebels”=good, Assad=bad.
But in Gaza the world watches in real time as Palestinians die from the ongoing, preventable, starvation.
Open the Borders
Some days ago, the CEO of Medical aid for Palestinians, Melanie Ward, in an interview with CNN, named Israel as the cause of starvation in Gaza.
“It’s very simple: it’s because the Israeli military won’t let it in. We could end this starvation tomorrow very simply if they would just let us have access to people there. But it’s not being allowed. This is what they said [on October 9], ‘Nothing will go in’,” Ward said.
She described the starvation as “the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded. What that means is that children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen. And we could finish it tomorrow, we could save them all. But we’re not being able to.”
This is echoed by UNICEF. The press-release for its February 2024 report notes that 15.6 % (one in six children) under two years of age are “acutely malnourished” in Gaza’s north. “Of these, almost 3% suffer from severe wasting, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, which puts young children at highest risk of medical complications and death unless they receive urgent treatment,” UNICEF notes.
Even worse, “since the data were collected in January, the situation is likely to be even graver today,” UNICEF warns, likewise noting the rapid increase of malnutrition is “dangerous and entirely preventable.”
Professor Sachs made an important point:
“This will stop when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel. It will not stop by any self control in Israel, there is none…They believe in ethnic cleansing or worse. And it is the United States which is the sole support…that is not stopping this slaughter.”
Air-dropping paltry amounts of food aid into Gaza is not the answer. It both legitimizes Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza and also makes those Palestinians who run toward the aid sitting ducks for the Israeli army to maim or kill. The only solution is to immediately open the borders and allow in the hundreds of aid trucks parked in Egypt. And end the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
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Featured image source
The original source of this article is In Gaza
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New Book Claims White Nations ‘Love Jews’ Only When They Are ‘Dead’
By CFT Team — 13 Comments
(Jerusalem Post) Dara Horn — the author of the jewishly provocative book entitled People Love Dead Jews — has found a new and maudlin way of looking at Jewish “suffering” that allows them to continue to wallow in self-pity and retain their proudly coveted title as the world’s most universally loathed people.
The Jerusalem Post published an interview with Dara Horn which gave her the opportunity to critique “gentiles” for allegedly using the suffering and death of Jews in order to feel better about themselves — that somehow when we show sympathy for dead Jews, we feel morally superior — a mental projection that says more about Jews than it does about “gentiles”:
[Excerpt]
People Love Dead Jews….is a collection of anecdotes, her own and of others, reports and stories, all highlighting the seeming paradox of non-Jewish Western society accepting – even showing interest and fascination in – the stories of Jews but having trouble allocating space in the present world for ones who exist now.
Nearly a year after its initial release,….[Horn] discussed the year, the book and the impression its release has left on her and on the world at large:
JP: Your book addresses live issues, issues that any Jew in the Diaspora has to deal with.
“It’s very emotionally different from novels. As a writer, you’re thrilled when people want to read your book and are interested in it, but with this one, I kind of wish people liked it a little less.”
Why?
“I don’t want to be right about this, [and] I was much more right than I thought I was. That’s been disturbing.”
As an author, especially of a book like this, Horn gets reader mail, but the ones from Jews stand out, and all have a slightly similar structure.
“The Jewish readers are from all walks of life but all say the same thing: ‘I’ve felt uncomfortable my whole life and I never knew why. Your book articulated this for me, thank you.’”
They always follow with a retelling of an uncomfortable interaction they had that follows the model of the book.
One woman wrote to her about how, as an actress, she had been going to auditions for two years, and every casting director would tell her that she looked too Jewish for the part, even when it was a Jewish part. The woman is now a voice actor.
Another told of his [student] exchange experience at a university in Germany, where he received a warm welcome and was even asked to do a presentation for Kristallnacht. The end of semester exam was scheduled for Saturday, so the student asked the professor for an accommodation. The professor said they couldn’t accommodate, and the student failed the course.
That’s poignant.
From schoolchildren wondering aloud in the Dallas Holocaust Museum if Jews still exist today to the bizarre experience Horn’s children had in their elementary school study of ancient civilizations, she is convinced the root of the problem is a combination educational and cultural.
In her school district, sixth grade is when students study ancient civilizations. “At some point during the year, each kid came home very confused because they learned about all these ancient civilizations. But at home, for each of these civilizations, we have a holiday about how they tried to kill us. Are they great or are they not?
“There are some baseline problems in the way that people talk about Jewish history in non-Jewish societies,” she said, “and people want this problem solved.
“Across America, you have so many people who just don’t know [enough] because most Jewish communities are concentrated, not spread out. The only thing they know about Jews is what they learned in their high school history textbooks, which is that they died in the Holocaust.”
What’s missing?
“Jewish civilization is this counterculture that runs through the whole history of the West, challenging it. That’s why people don’t want to talk about it because it would ruin the story to see Jews as anything other than powerless victims,” she explained. When, in reality, “it’s hard to understand the history of the West without understanding Jewish history. The textbook model doesn’t fit with that.
Does Israel have a place in this conversation?
“Israelis don’t need this book because Israelis have solved this problem: Israelis don’t understand antisemitism because they don’t have to,” Horn explained.
“For Israelis, antisemitism is only about violence, so they only understand it as that. The psychological compromise with people who don’t respect you is not there. That’s the triumph of Zionism.”
That’s why it resonated.
“What’s been really heartening is the responses from non-Jews. People have a lot of goodwill [and want to learn more,] which is encouraging,” Horn said, adding that other minority groups have reached out saying they identify with the problem…
Yes, Jews just can’t figure out why white civilizations don’t bend over backwards to accommodate them — or any other racial minorities — who are trying to subvert them from within.
If white people go to live in Japan, they don’t complain about being treated differently and demand laws be changed to make them feel accepted — only Jews do that.
Only Jews spend millions of dollars each year conducting surveys — and even operating a centralized “command center” — to monitor and determine how much they are hated in every country in which they happen to dwell.
And when they act as the “counterculture” in white nations — a revolutionary fifth column — they become universally resented — and then complaining that a white nation doesn’t “understand” Jews or their culture is the essence of Jewish culture — they must feel to be outsiders to feel Jewish.
This demand for attention and accommodation — while at the same time insisting on remaining separate and subversive — shows a profound pathological narcissism.
Why should white people accommodate — that is, judaize — their own nations just so that Jews feel welcomed and “normal”?
To do so would be national suicide — erasing our heritage and identity and replacing it with a universal Jewish zeitgeist which is irreconcilable with our values and traditions.
Horn claims that white people like Jews only when they are dead — and she couldn’t be more wrong — because when they are dead — or alleged to be dead — they never let us forget it and force our children to study dead Jews in our own schools from the time they are barely able to read so that they won’t grow up and hate Jews.
After that non-stop “education” about Jewish suffering, the Jews turn around and claim that the only thing we know — or want to know — about Jews is their suffering.
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Wikipedia
On 17 July 1555, Paul IV issued one of the most infamous papal bulls in Church history. The bull, Cum Nimis Absurdum (the title stemmed from its opening phrase, “Since it is absurd”) ordered the creation of a Jewish ghetto in Rome. The pope set its borders near the Rione Sant’Angelo, an area where large numbers of Jews already resided, and ordered it walled off from the rest of the city. A single gate, locked every day at sundown, was the only means of reaching the rest of the city. The Jews themselves were forced to pay all design and construction costs related to the project, which came to a total of roughly 300 scudi. The bull restricted Jews in other ways as well. They were forbidden to have more than one synagogue per city—leading, in Rome alone, to the destruction of seven “excess” places of worship.
All Jews were forced to wear distinctive yellow Jewish hats, especially outside the ghetto, and they were forbidden to trade in everything but food and secondhand clothes.[13] Christians of all ages were encouraged to treat the Jews as second-class citizens; for a Jew to defy a Christian in any way was to invite severe punishment, often at the hands of a mob. By the end of Paul IV’s five-year reign the number of Roman Jews had dropped by half.[12] Yet his anti-semitic legacy endured for over 300 years: the ghetto he established ceased to exist only with the dissolution of the Papal States in 1870.
Its walls were torn down in 1888.
BIG BROTHER in the 21. Century 