Unmute Gaza

how many millions of Palestinians have to die before the world discovers humanity?

Gaza 7.44pm

British - Palestinian Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta with team

US State Department dissent memos are in fact quite rare, numbering only about 10 per year, per the American Foreign Service Association

Luckily, I’m insom since a childhood. In these past few sleepless weeks, 38 days [at least now], I have seen images and videos that will haunt me forever. I will never forget how the world stopped and did everything to search for a couple of rich men who drowned in the Atlantic Ocean playing Dora the Explorer trying to find the Titanic but will not move an inch to stop the genocide of two million people in Gaza. The world is mad.

The purposeful lack of transparency over what weapons the U.S. is supplying to Israel is tied to the larger administration policy of downplaying the extent to which Israel will use those weapons to commit war crimes and kill civilians. The call for a ceasefire is a moral cry for humanity to find another way to achieve justice, security and peace for Israelis and Palestinians. The bloodshed must cease, hostages must be released, and aid must reach those in dire need. We’ve all become so accustomed to this stuff but it’s beyond insane that a member of the US Senate is openly claiming that the only Palestinian American member of Congress is connected to Hamas. This is so much worse than the early 2000s.

Palestinian parents carrying their children’s charred and dismembered bodies in plastic bags to makeshift morgues; whole families, across three generations, crushed under the homes they built; exhausted doctors working desperately by torchlight and operating on patients without anaesthetic; one of the oldest churches in the world, sheltering the displaced, bombed. someone please explain how saying “free Palestine” is a call for genocide but bombing hospitals, schools, bakeries, and refugee camps is not.

Palestinians have done everything to beg the world to stop this genocide. From putting the pictures of our dismembered family members for the world to see or our children and doctors holding a press conference in English asking to stop the cruelty. What more evidence do you need?

The world is changing right now as we speak. The divide between the realm of imperialism and indigenous resistance is growing by the day. You cannot watch what is happening and not feel something tug at your soul. You either have empathy or are void of emotion. That says it all.

So far more than 11,000 Palestinians have been reported killed – more, after one month, than the number of civilians killed in Ukraine after two years of war.

The Israeli war machine is always horrifically ruthless. But this time we are witnessing a level of violence not seen since the 1948 Nakba – during which about 70% of the Palestinian population was forcibly displaced and more than 500 communities were wiped out completely.

Indeed, for nearly four weeks the Israeli regime has cut off power and limited access to the internet [started Saturday October 27th, 7.50pm local time, as Ground Operation started], reducing contact with the outside and meaning the full scale of its assault has been hidden from the world. Some Palestinians in Gaza are still managing to maintain some communication by charging phones in cars and using power from what solar panels are left.

Among them are Palestinian journalists – at least 32 media workers have been killed since Hamas’s offensive on 7 October – who are risking their lives to show us the devastation that is being wrought upon them.

Yet despite the plethora of pictures, videos and testimonies that have come out in the past few weeks, Palestinians once again find themselves in a position where they are denied authority over their own experiences and seen as not credible. This was demonstrated par excellence following the Israeli army expulsion order for 1.1 million people in northern Gaza, when they told the world that they would allow for safe routes for Palestinians to head south. Yet these “safe routes” were ones that they had bombed, in one case hitting a convoy and killing at least 70 Palestinians, including children. Independent investigations confirmed what Palestinians had been saying all along – that there were no “safe routes” out of north Gaza.

While Palestinian journalists have been phenomenally brave and extensive in their coverage, too much of the international mainstream media has insisted on giving credence to Israeli regime officials: for example, when they provided “proof” of a recording of a conversation between Palestinians claiming responsibility for the al-Ahli Arab hospital bombing.

17 hours after Israeli bombing AL AHLY HOSPITAL, Plestia Alaqad and Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta in inside this hospital

Palestinians immediately argued that it was falsified based on the accents and dialogue. A Channel 4 News investigation cited two independent journalists who determined the recording was not “credible”.

What continues to be astounding is that a regime recognised under international law as the occupying power, and as one that many human rights groups agree is imposing a system of apartheid, is trusted to relay information about its own atrocities. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Gaza are questioned and interrogated at every breath they take. Even their corpses are questioned, as when Joe Biden said he didn’t have “confidence” in the numbers of Palestinians killed. Gaza’s health ministry issued a list with all the names of those killed along with their ID numbers, which are registered with the Israeli authorities.

The Israeli regime continues to dehumanise Palestinians as part of its tactic to sow seeds of doubt on their testimonies and to justify the atrocities it is committing. The Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, said they were fighting “human animals” and the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called Palestinians “children of darkness” in a now deleted tweet.

The Israeli minister for heritage even raised the possibility of dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza. So much coverage is complicit in this dehumanisation of Palestinians, as Mohammed El-Kurd found when appearing on British media. “Our death is so quotidian,” he writes, “that journalists report it as though they’re reporting the weather.” Indeed, we often see the time-old linguistic gymnastics whereby Israelis are killed yet Palestinians simply “die”.

The reality is that Palestinians have been dehumanised to such an extent, that even when they hold up their murdered children in front of cameras and display them to the world, there are those who will still say they are responsible for their own children’s deaths. But make no mistake, what we are seeing in Gaza is an unfolding genocide and Palestinians are showing the world what it looks like in real time.

I know a lot of high-ranking media, such as New York Times, Guardian, Anadolu, BILD, Spiegel, Financial Times, Strait Times, Washington Post etc subscribed my substack. Plestia ‘Bosbos’ Alaqad ready to be your Stringer inside Gaza under bombing by Israel. Plestiaa2011@gmail.com

Toddler with Plestia, before war, living in Northern Gaza and they evacuated to Southern Gaza. Since Friday, Oct 13, when Israel announced to every Gazans from northern move to southern, more than 5,000 killed in southern, not counting barbaric bombing in northern Gaza. Northern Gaza is being depopulated, while even residents in the south are ordered to evacuate as the israelis implement their ethnic cleansing. Refugee literally fulfilled Israel warning, and still killed with barbaric bombing by Israel. Documentation by Plestia Alaqad

result of QR code = link

Even, Evan Hill is Washington Post journo, not NYT / New York Times

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