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israeli military
Cutting Off Lifeline for Starving Gazans, Israel Seizes Control of Rafah Crossing
"This has devastating impacts for the people of Gaza who are already on the verge of famine," said the UNRWA's director of planning.
May 07, 2024
With tanks and ground forces, the Israeli military seized control of the Gaza side of Rafah's border crossing with Egypt on Tuesday, cutting off a critical humanitarian aid route as much of the enclave's population faces imminent famine.
Israel's takeover of the Rafah crossing came hours after the country's military ordered more than 100,000 people in the southern Gaza city to evacuate ahead of a ground assault, which is moving forward after the right-wing Israeli government rejected a cease-fire proposal accepted by Hamas. Cease-fire negotiations mediated by Egypt and Qatar are expected to continue in the coming days.
Video footage posted to social media shows an Israeli tank running over a Gaza sign as Israeli forces took control of the Rafah crossing on Tuesday.
Israeli tank bulldozers Gaza sign as Israeli army captures Rafah crossing this morning.
pic.twitter.com/JNnAXKeW9h
— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) May 7, 2024
Reporting from Rafah, Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud said the Israeli military is "cutting off the only lifeline right now to the people in Gaza, particularly for the 1.5 million displaced Palestinians here in Rafah."
The Rafah crossing is closed, cutting off the life line for 1.5m people crammed into this tiny piece of land right at the southern end of the Gaza strip.
Hani Mahmoud reporting from Rafah. pic.twitter.com/kPeImrntDj
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) May 7, 2024
Two key humanitarian aid routes—the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings—have been shut down for days as the Israeli military plows ahead with its Rafah assault in the face of international outrage. More than 600,000 children are currently living in Rafah, and aid organizations say Israel has no credible plan to protect them.
Overnight, Israel launched deadly airstrikes in Rafah, describing its military operation in the overcrowded city as "very precise." One resident
toldReuters that the Israeli strikes killed his wife and children.
Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, toldThe Associated Press that Israeli authorities have denied the agency access to the Rafah crossing.
A lasting shutdown of the route, Laerke warned, "will plunge this crisis into unprecedented levels of need, including the very real possibility of a famine." He added that Israel's military is "ignoring all warnings about what this could mean for civilians and for the humanitarian operation across the Gaza Strip."
Speaking to Al Jazeera on Tuesday, the director of planning at the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—the most important aid organization operating in Gaza—said the closure of the Rafah crossing is having "catastrophic impacts on everyone in Gaza."
"Since October, this has been the main entry point of goods coming into Gaza," said Sam Rose. "There has only been a trickle of goods coming in, and since Sunday the crossing has been closed completely. And this has devastating impacts for the people of Gaza who are already on the verge of famine."
"No aid coming in means no aid distributed after a couple of days," Rose continued. "And equally importantly, Rafah and Kerem Shalom are the only entry points for fuel in Gaza, so without the fuel there's no ability for trucks to move around, there's no ability for desalination plants to operate and provide safe water, there's no electricity. It cuts off everything. Rafah and Kerem Shalom—they're the lifeblood for the small amount of goods that have been coming into Gaza since October, so absolutely devastating."
"Absolutely devastating"
This morning the IDF have seized the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing, and Sam Rose from UNRWA explains what it means now that the crossing is closed. pic.twitter.com/iC1w8AWnt5
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) May 7, 2024
Laerke of the U.N. humanitarian affairs office said that cutting off the supply of fuel to Gaza for an extended period of time "would be a very effective way of putting the humanitarian operation in its grave."
Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement that "more attacks on what is now the primary humanitarian hub in the Gaza strip are not the answer."
"First and foremost, there must be a cease-fire. Humanitarian aid must be allowed to flow freely and at scale. And the hostages and those arbitrarily detained must be released at once," said Türk. "Those that elect to flout international humanitarian law and international human rights law must be held to account."
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Israel's Conscientious Objectors Stand on the Shoulders of Giants
Refusing to fight in unjust and brutal wars is not new, but it remains a rare act of courage.
Mar 22, 2024
According to legend, the organization I lead, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, was founded in August 1914 when a British Quaker and a German Lutheran shook hands at a railway station in Cologne. With England on the cusp of joining World War I, they pledged, "We are one in Christ and can never be at war."
After Germany sunk the Lusitania ship in May 1915, American public support for joining the war swelled. But not everyone got on board.
Political activist and theologian A.J. Muste responded to his country’s gearing up for war by becoming a pacifist. His views resulted in him being forced out of his pastoral position. Likewise, pacifist and social reformer Jane Addams (who later went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize) was viciously criticized for calling the war “an insane outburst.”
Despite the pro-war hysteria that countries use to justify their military endeavors, conscientious objection remains a courageous option for those committed to peace. As the ongoing genocide of Palestinians unfolds in front of the eyes of the world, a couple of young Israelis are choosing this brave, though unpopular, path.
“Slaughter cannot solve slaughter,” 18-year-old Israeli-American Tal Mitnick said in December 2023 before receiving his first 30-day prison sentence for refusing to join Israel’s military.
The same week that Tal refused for the third time and received a third term in prison, he was joined by fellow teenager Sofia Orr. “I reject participating in the violent policies of oppression and apartheid that Israel has imposed on the Palestinian people, especially now during the war,” she said.
It’s not the sentences Tal and Sofia are enduring that make their actions exceptional. They have options. In fact, 12 percent of conscripted Israelis get out of service through notoriously easy-to-obtain mental health exemptions. Instead of the 10-year terms that Russian draft evaders face, even when Israelis are sentenced for refusing, they receive consecutive sentences with breaks in between to see if they have changed their minds.
Tal and Sofia are not being held indefinitely in overcrowded, abusive, deadly prison facilities like incarcerated Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank. But, what Tal and Sophia are doing is heroic and places them within a legacy of great peacemakers.
The earliest recorded act of conscientious objection occurred in 295 A.D. when Maximilianus refused his conscription into the Roman Army. He was beheaded for refusing to kill. Later, he was canonized as a saint.
Like Maximilianus, Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter was arrested and executed for refusing conscription by the Nazis. He wrote, "I find that [my hands being in chains is] much better than if my will were in chains. Neither prison nor chains nor sentence of death can rob a man of the Faith and his free will.”
When, in 1944, devout Quaker Bayard Rustin was sentenced to three years for refusing to serve in World War II, he devoted his prison time to racial justice work. A disciple of Gandhian nonviolence, he organized his fellow prisoners to resist segregation in the prison. He was so successful that the head of the prison described him as “an extremely capable agitator.” Upon release, he traveled the country organizing communities, including the “First Freedom Ride” in 1947.
James Lawson, also a student of Gandhi, spent 13 months in prison between 1951 and 1952 for refusing to serve during the Korean War. Lawson went on to become, along with Rustin, an essential advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King.
Since its campaigns were broadcast on TV across America, the civil rights movement challenged the public, especially American youth, to choose between justice and segregation — between equality and oppression. At the same time, there was a surge of draft evaders and conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War, including prominent leaders like “good troublemaker” John Lewis.
Refusing and avoiding conscription became so popular during the Vietnam War that President Nixon’s commission reported that the movement was “expanding at an alarming rate,” leaving the government “almost powerless to apprehend and prosecute them.”
With the majority of Israelis opposing an end to the war in Gaza and 72 percent of them supporting no humanitarian aid, Tal and Sofia are not part of a growing popular movement, like what took place during the Vietnam War. But their contributions to peace are no less important.
Whether or not other young Israelis join them in jail — Tal and Sofia were part of a group of 200 Jewish Israeli 12th graders who pledged in August 2023 to refuse military service to protest the government’s effort to overhaul Israel’s judicial system — what Tal and Sofia have done places profound marks on the pages of history.
Members and contributors to the Fellowship of Reconciliation include the likes of Jane Addams, A.J. Muste, Mahatma Gandhi, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Berrigan, Dorothy Day, James Lawson, and countless other brave conscientious objectors and peacemakers.
Today, as the world is watching a genocide take place in real-time — as of this writing, the death toll in Gaza is approaching 32,000 and famine is setting in — FOR-USA is proud to be raising money for an ad in an Israeli newspaper lifting up two of the most important conscientious objectors of our time. We invite you to join us by following Tal and Sofia’s journey at forusa.org/IsraeliRefusers.
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Majority of Americans Want Halt of US Weapons Bound for Israel: Poll
"Everyone knows that the U.S. could end this today if we wanted to," said one analyst.
Mar 05, 2024
A new poll released Tuesday revealed that a majority of Americans want to the U.S. government to stop supplying the Israeli military with weaponry to carry out its brutal assault on Gaza that has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, most of them civilian men, women, and children.
As organizers called on Democratic voters in at least seven states to vote "uncommitted" on their Super Tuesday primary ballots on Tuesday to help push the Biden administration to demand a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, the YouGov poll provided another measure of Americans' growing outrage over their government's material and political support for the "genocidal" campaign by Israel's far-right government.
Commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), the poll of 1,000 U.S. adults asked respondents whether they agreed with the statement: "The U.S. should stop weapons shipments to Israel until Israel discontinues its attacks on the people of Gaza."
Fifty-two percent of people said they agreed with the statement, while just 27% said they disagreed.
CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot noted that while the call for a cease-fire "can mean different things to different people... the support for halting weapons shipments is specific and unambiguous."
Less than two weeks after scientists projected that at least 6,500 people would likely die in Gaza in the coming months even in the case of an immediate, permanent cease-fire, Weisbrot said many Americans may have "already moved past" the idea that a cease-fire is sufficient.
"Support for stopping U.S. weapons shipments to Israel has gained traction in recent days," noted CEPR, "as the Gaza death toll has surpassed 30,000 people, about two-thirds of them women and children."
Since the Biden administration's approval of weapons shipments to Israel since October, Israel has decimated civilian infrastructure across Gaza while also blocking nearly all humanitarian aid, leaving the entire population facing "crisis-level hunger" that is approaching famine in some areas.
"We have the power to stop this. Everyone knows that the U.S. could end this today if we wanted to," said Weisbrot, posting a video of European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell calling on U.S. President Joe Biden and other Western leaders to "provide less arms" to Israel, considering Biden's stated belief that too many civilians are being killed.
We have the power to stop this. Everyone knows that the U.S. could end this today if we wanted to. This is Josep Borell, the highest official of the European Union in charge of foreign policy, telling the United States government that they need to do something, like cut weapons… pic.twitter.com/F9y8zwgPxj
— Mark Weisbrot (@MarkWeisbrot) March 5, 2024
Tuesday's poll revealed that ending weapons shipments for Israel is popular across the political spectrum.
Sixty-two percent of people who voted for Biden in 2020 agreed that the U.S. should end shipments, while only 14% disagreed.
CEPR pointed out that "Among those who did not vote in the 2020 presidential elections—a key group containing voters that both Democrats and Republicans would like to turn out this year—fully 60% agreed that the U.S. should block weapons shipments."
The latter result is one "that the Biden campaign should be worried about," said Weisbrot. "These are the voters Biden needs to turn out to expand his base."
People who voted for former Republican President Donald Trump in 2020 were the only group in which a majority opposed halting weapons shipments, with 55% saying the shipments should continue. Thirty percent said they should stop.
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