Abdalhadi Alijla - “What can I tell my 76-year-old mother and my 10-year-old niece? "The ICJ does not see ordering a ceasefire as necessary for your survival.” Gazans’ eyes and ears were eagerly awaiting the word “stop” or “ceasefire”.”
Abla Abdelhadi: “Please keep in mind our Palestinian people in Gaza don’t feel like celebrating incremental legal "wins”. They’re allowed to express outrage, disappointment & whatever they want. They’re still under Israel’s bombs, nothing for them to celebrate!“
Remi Kanazi: "The ICJ isn’t the authority here. Palestinians are. It is they who have experienced the genocide. It is they who have faced the gruesome crimes detailed in those halls. It is they who continue to bury the dead, search for food & hope to dodge the next bomb dropped. Ceasefire now.”
While I am happy that the Hague’s ruling is leaning towards a condemnation of Israel, we can’t relent in our efforts.
Not only because this is merely a preliminary ruling, but because the ICJ does not have executive power over the Israeli occupation. The IDF is free to violate their ruling at any time, at the cost of being deemed international criminals, which has never stopped them before.
Moreover, even if the Israeli government complied, the legal outcome alone is a return to the status quo. Gaza was under siege long before 2023, and the apartheid still stands.
I am not trying to discourage you: this is an unprecedented amount of support behind Pro-Palestinian advocacy, and we now have to decide if we’ll use this opportunity to work towards the end of Israeli occupation of Palestine, or walk away from the issue now that the genocide is reeled back in.
So if you’re tired, if you’re drained, please, let this small victory embolden you and let’s double our efforts.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.
i believe in accessibility so ive been trying to keep the tone of my posts entry-level and relatively civil. i can afford this much because im not palestinian so i have some degree of removal. but if you guys saw the state of my inbox, you would understand why refusing to justify, explain or clarify anything might be more dignified. there are almost ten thousand people dead right now. i feel like a lot of people are just not understanding the weight of this. more children have been killed in gaza in the past three weeks than in all of the world’s conflicts combined in each of the past three years. this is so far beyond crime, so far beyond mass murder, that sometimes i think entertaining questions about it at all is complicity in and of itself. in a normal world, the entire global apparatus, every international body, would be falling over itself to stop this. the prospect of so many civilians—and most significantly children—dead is actually the worst-case scenario. it is what international law was created to prevent. i say children specifically not because adult palestinians are not equally valuable, but because this is a war on children. gaza’s population is 50% children. these airstrikes are most lethal on the smallest and most vulnerable bodies. entire buildings are crumbling on kids. they are being murdered in their homes, by their homes.
deliberately. by people with the most advanced military and surveillance technology in the world. by people who know exactly where every single civilian in gaza is. by people who have their phone numbers and send them threatening texts. by people who have drones observing their every movement. by people who are watching them starve, bombing their bakeries, barricading their water. they bring down buildings on children on purpose.
it’s a genocide. and still we talk.
there are now over 21,000 dead (10,000 of them children) and thousands more still uncounted underneath the rubble. in the time since i’ve made this post israel has gone from pretending they don’t deliberately target journalists, academics, hospitals and children to openly targeting journalists, academics, hospitals and children. at least they don’t bother to lie about it anymore.
this week israel goes to the icj on trial for genocide. international law has not prevented mass death in gaza, but we shall see who has the last word: the law or the warplane.
Right now is also a good time to mention some better uses for your money during this week.
Available e-sims in Gaza are running low!!
Mirna El Helbawi and her team are working round the clock to continue to connect Palestinians as Israel does its best to cut them off from the rest of the world.
You can learn how to purchase and send e-sims here, and below you’ll find a list of what is currently needed (the areas in brackets indicate what region you should select to buy e-sims in).
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CareforGaza is an organisation that does verifiably good work, distributing supplies directly to Palestinian families.
RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — More than half a million people in Gaza — a quarter of the population — are starving, according to a report Thursday by the U.N. and other agencies that highlights the humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s bombardment and siege on the territory in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
The extent of the population’s hunger eclipsed even the near-famines in Afghanistan and Yemen of recent years, according to figures in the report. The report warned that the risk of famine is “increasing each day,” blaming the hunger on insufficient aid entering Gaza.
“It doesn’t get any worse,’’ said Arif Husain, chief economist for the U.N.’s World Food Program. “I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed.” … At the start of the war, Israel stopped all deliveries of food, water, medicine and fuel into the territory. After U.S. pressure, it allowed a trickle of aid in through Egypt. But U.N. agencies say only 10% of Gaza’s food needs has been entering for weeks.
The painting held by the protesters is “Guernica” by Pablo Picasso. It was painted in response to an event during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 where the small Basque town was bombed extensively by Nazi German and Italian forces. 1,645 people were killed and a further 889 were injured. The town was defenseless and held no military gain or strategic value to either opposing forces.
A thousand died defenceless at the hands of an unnecessary military raid. This is a war crime condemned by thousands across the globe.
Tens of thousands more are dying today in Palestine due to Israeli “defences”, yet the Western world refuses to condemn them for the same war crime, and dozens more at a much more severe rate.
Guernica communicates the same message today as an anti-war painting, however it is not a conflict if one side has the weapons and the other has their prayers.
Israel is not and never will be the victim.
Israel is an Apartheid Terrorist state.
A four day ceasefire will never be enough if Palestinians are given freedom only to be carpet bombed and buried again. They are grouping the masses to wipe them out more efficiently.
It does not stop at a ceasefire. Palestine must be liberated.
There’s a massive coordinated efforts by mainstream media and politicians to push the fake mass rape on Oct 7 by Hamas story. This is the new ‘40 beheaded babies’.
bisan’s live video on her 2nd acc is piercing my heart
she started off expressing (in arabic) how sick she is of the constant sharing, photographing, capturing, having to speak english and how she wants to speak in her native tongue instead.
she explained that the leaflets that were dropped again are ordering evacuation to rafah so they are forced into the sinai, and how impossible it is for over 2 million people to go to an area that’s only 151 square km, so many have no choice but to stay in khan younis. they are trapped and have no international passports. rafah is the southernmost point of palestine after khan younis and she said - this part in english - “after rafah there is no more palestine. if we are forced into rafah there is no more palestine.”
someone asked her if she has eaten and whether they have any food, her response was no, not at all; one loaf of bread has to be divided between everyone in her camp.
the video kept freezing because of how bad the internet service is in gaza right now so i lost bits and pieces, but at some point an older woman joined the live, a journalist outside of the country. it’s unclear whether they knew each other previously, but a lot of warmth was exchanged. the woman got tears out of bisan when she told her “dont listen to people who tell you to be strong, i don’t want you to be strong, i want you to be you. if you are sad i want to know, if you are happy i want to know.” she explained that she tried entering rafah but the occupation refuses to let any foreign journalists in anymore.
after the woman left, bisan talked about her life before october. she said her life was beautiful and fruitful and any source of strife was solely on israeli hands; namely her inability to travel or pursue placements for her education outside of palestine. other than that she had nothing to complain about. if im able to watch the video after it ends, i will add any pieces i missed
This is an incredibly sad thing to share but I feel like I have to. I’m not a defeatist but I don’t want to downplay the human toll, either.
I’d have to look up some words (it’s not in dialect) or have some help from someone better at this than me to do a better and more direct translation, but the gist of what Motaz is saying is that the pause has ended and it’s about survival now. He’s been transferred(? Moved around?) through all of it and he swears he’s done what he could in service of his country. He lives now in a new period of internal siege; there’s no escape from any direction. He is surrounded by Israeli tanks in central Gaza in a tragedy beyond imagination. He wants us to remember that Palestinians are not content to be consumed, they’re a people being murdered and a cause to protect from erasure…he ends with an expression of loneliness and abandonment and that’s why I can’t not share this. Those of us who are physically safe need to stay steadfast and keep pushing.
The fact that over 10,000 people and counting in Gaza (likely way more than that considering how many people are missing/buried under the rubble) are dead is fucking unfathomable. I don’t think some people even understand how many 10,000 out of 2.2 million people is. Nearly half a percent of the population. Nearly one in every 200 people are dead in the Gaza Strip. In my home state of Texas, this would be as if you killed roughly 135,000 people. Any number of lives lost to violent military occupation is horrific, but this is on a scale that I don’t think most of us can even wrap our heads around. And just today it was reported by the Wall Street Journal that the United States is sending $320 million to Israel to arm them with more fucking bombs. I hope no one ever forgives us. I hope we never forgive ourselves.
In a little over two weeks, the number has risen to over 14,500 and counting. And that’s at the very least. Israel has launched sieges on multiple hospitals since then, making it extremely difficult to obtain accurate casualty numbers. At least 14,500 people, dead. 1.6 million displaced, evacuating on foot, having to reckon with heavy rain and winter cold in makeshift tents. The healthcare system is collapsing while conditions become increasingly overcrowded and resources grow thinner and thinner, which will make the impact of hunger, thirst, and disease outbreaks exponentially worse. The entire population is starving, unable to find safe shelter anywhere, unable to even get basic healthcare, or clean water, or reliable internet/cell service in order to keep in touch with loved ones or call emergency services. Rescue workers and other civilians are resorting to digging through rubble with their bare hands to save anyone they can because there’s no fuel to power machinery for proper rescue missions, and while they try to rescue people they’re being targeted. 60 journalists have been killed, some in the field and some in their homes with their families. And even now that a truce has been announced, there has been confusion about when exactly it’s going to start, which could be disastrous for people in Gaza who mistakenly think that they’ll be able to move safely tomorrow. Israel is ramping up the destruction during these last 24 hours before the ceasefire starts, targeting refugee camps, hospitals, schools, and other places where people are trying to shelter. And they are promising that once the pause has ended and the exchanges have been made, they’re going to keep on bombing Gaza.
We cannot afford to give one single fucking inch. Keep pushing harder and harder until Palestine is free, once and for all.
