Both Ha’aretz and the New York Times obscure Israeli responsibility for a missile attack meters away from a home south of Gaza City, which destroyed the structure and crushed the sleeping family inside.
Israeli F-16 strikes destroyed a house in the Mughraga area of Gaza overnight, killing five-months-pregnant Nour Hassan, 27, her two-year-old daughter Rahaf, and injuring her husband Yahya and their toddler son. All that remains of the house is a massive blast hole several meters deep and twenty meters wide amid scattered bits of clothing and personal belongings.
Youth in Gaza have begun marching to the borders to express solidarity with Palestinians protesting in the West Bank and inside Israel, as well as out of frustration with the ongoing Israeli siege. Dan Cohen reports from Gaza where yesterday, Israeli soldiers clad in full combat gear shot protestors and occasionally fired tear gas canisters into the crowd of an estimated 1,000 young men and boys, killing seven and injuring 145 along Gaza’s border area.
Dan Cohen reports from Gaza where on September 13th, the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, the Israeli government closed the border crossing to the besieged Gaza Strip, exacerbating existing fuel shortages into a full-on crisis. Since then, cars have been lined up around city blocks to obtain small amounts of fuel – only enough for a day of work. With unemployment in Gaza at a staggering 60%, many of the taxi drivers are men who took the job as a last resort and means of survival. But the fuel crisis has taken away taxi driving and frustration is high.
When Nidal Alareer, a 40-year-old father of five returned to Shujaiya after Israel’s 51-day war on Gaza, he found all three of his houses destroyed. Though promises of reconstruction have proven to be hollow, his family was able to obtain materials to rebuild their home from the Qatari government. But the labor is back-breaking and until he and his young sons finish reconstruction, his family is scattered about Gaza with no money to rent apartments. Dan Cohen spoke with Alareer as he worked on his house during Eid al Adha.
Now that thwarting the Iran deal is out of reach, Netanyahu’s political calculus demands a new threat – and stone throwers have replaced the nuclear duck.
Immediately after the firebombing of the occupied West Bank village of Duma that killed eighteen-month-old Ali Dawabshe and later his parents, Israeli politicians competed to see who could be more extreme in their denunciations. But as the young parents of baby Ali succumbed to their wounds, the politicians who had been so vociferous were largely silent. What explains this gap between rhetoric and reality? Veteran Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar tells Dan Cohen the lack of Israeli accountability for Jewish vigilante violence is not new, “The message is that you can get away with murder, literally.”
As the refugee crisis continues to reach levels of despair that haven’t been seen since World War II, Israeli politicians raced to the bottom, exploiting the horrors to bash each other for political gain.
At the moment it happened, the murder of eighteen-month-old Ali Dawabshe, and later his father, by Israeli settlers in a firebombing in the West Bank village of Duma seemed to shake the foundations of the Israeli occupation itself. Anguished cries for accountability rang out worldwide as Israeli politicians declared they would crackdown on Jewish terrorism and Israel supporters warned the legitimacy of Zionism itself could hang in the balance if the perpetrators were not brought to justice. More than a month later Israeli authorities have failed to produce a suspect directly linked to the attack. Dan Cohen spent an afternoon around north Tel Aviv’s picturesque beachfront asking Israelis for assessments of the government’s handling of the firebombing. The coastal city is often portrayed as the counterweight to the dominant right-wing – as Israel’s bastion of liberalism and intellectualism. But the Tel Avivians he talked to were largely disinterested, and some had long forgotten about the attack.
Nearly 1,200 Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers were released from Israel’s Holot detention center on Tuesday and Wednesday after the High Court ruled that asylum seekers could not be held for more than one year. Interior Minister Silvan Shalom barred the released asylum seekers from living or working in Tel Aviv and Eilat where their communities are based, effectively leaving them without a place to sleep and slim chances of earning income. Though the Ministry of Interior offered no explanation for the decision, it is the latest move to make life intolerable in order to coerce African refugees to leave Israel.