Israel launches an ‘investigation’ into killing of Hind Rajab

In January 2024, 335 bullets were fired into a car containing five-year-old Hind and six of her family members in Gaza. When paramedics came to help, they were killed too. IDF vehemently denied responsibility for this atrocity, despite investigations making it obvious that its military was responsible. This week, Israel finally admitted its troops fired into the car and said there would be an investigation. Which is not particularly reassuring: Israel’s investigations into itself rarely result in any sort of accountability. Wesam Hamada, Hind’s mother, is demanding an independent inquiry, which is the least Hind deserves.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/22/natalie-harp-republicans-feminists 

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  The Voice of Hind Rajab, a film about a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in 2024, has been nominated for best international feature film... Palestinian actor, Motaz Malhees, who plays the role of a call center operator attempting to help the girl, can’t attend Oscars because of US travel ban

   

  The Voice of Hind Rajab gets record 23-minute ovation at Venice premiere

   

  Anne Frank 1929-1945 Hind Rajab 2018- 2024 ... NEVER AGAIN MEANS NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE !

   

  Young lives cut short on an unimaginable scale: the 18,457 children on Gaza’s list of war dead- Many of the children who survived attacks have life-changing wounds... More than 40,000 children have been injured in the war, according to the UN. Gaza is now home to more child amputees than any other place in the world.

   

  How much is your support for Israel worth? Try $1 billion [that we know of]... Israel is spending wads of cash on public diplomacy in a desperate attempt to reverse waning American support for the country after it stands accused of genocide in Gaza and pushing the U.S. into the Iran war.

   

  America's "Trail of Tears" refers to the forced relocation of approximately 60,000 native First Peoples tribes who were cruelly displaced from their homes and communities by white settlers between 1830 and 1850. Times and technology have changed since then. We now know that forced displacement is wrong. Very very wrong... So why we are arming Israel to disenfranchise and forcibly displace and/or kill indigenous Palestinians?!!!

   

  Never Forget! Hind Rajab- a little 5 year old Palestinian girl hit by 355 bullets fired by Israel's IDF in Gaza

   

  "When future generations read about Gaza with horror and wonder how the western world, with all its moral superiority, its rule-based order and its focus on international human rights law, allowed a livestreamed genocide to happen, what will you say? " What did you do during the genocide in Gaza? Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian

   

  Dear America - Please stop funding and fueling Israel's wars and the ongoing destruction of historic Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria... and Iran.

Assal Rad - headline fixer extraordinaire in search of the actual truth courageously uncovers constant HASBARA/Zionist Propaganda in America's mainstream news headlines & stories that fuel Israel's war machine, escalting injustice, and monstrous bigotry

"“Settlers” What a weird name for illegal occupiers, TERRORIZING Palestinians in their homes.   (Israel sends troops into West Bank homes besieged by Jewish settlers)"

"“Israeli curbs” is such an absurd way to say Israel destroyed the healthcare system and blocks medical aid."

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

Fixed it for you

@nytimes

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[ISRAELI] Settlers and soldiers cut off water and electricity to [PALESTINIAN] homes, and block medical care in campaign of terror: “Every night, the [ISRAELI] settlers throw stones, use obscene language and shout during the night. We are living in a state of terror,” [PALESTINIAN] Hassan said. His mother, brother and sister, and three neighbours have also been blockaded inside, and their power and water have been cut off.

Refqa Hassan watches as Israeli settlers besiege her family home for the fourth consecutive day in the town of Qusra. Photograph: Alaa Badarneh/EPA

Israeli militants besiege two Palestinian families in their West Bank homes

Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem

Thu 13 Aug 2026

Israeli militants have besieged two Palestinian families in their homes since the weekend, aiming to take over their properties in the West Bank village of Qusra through a campaign of terror.

A group of settlers and soldiers set up a tent outside the home of Yousef Hassan’s family on Sunday afternoon, trapping him inside with his wife and two young daughters.

The Israeli men gathered just metres away from the spot where 28-year-old Amir Moatasem Odeh was killed by a settler in March. Another attacker stabbed his father. No one has been arrested over the murder and assault.

“Every night, the settlers throw stones, use obscene language and shout during the night. We are living in a state of terror,” Hassan said. His mother, brother and sister, and three neighbours have also been blockaded inside, and their power and water have been cut off.

Settlers used the same tactics to steal another Palestinian home in neighbouring Jalud village, driving the al Tubasi family out in July after a months-long siege.

They cut off water and electricity to the homes, although a solar panel allows Hassan to keep some devices charged in Qusra. They have also blocked medical care.

When his younger daughter, aged two, fell ill with vomiting and a high fever on Monday, settlers blocked an ambulance from reaching the house. The girls and their mother were eventually evacuated on Tuesday.

Hassan said those in the house were short on food and were drinking water and juice delivered by the ambulance that came to collect his daughter. “The situation is extremely dire.”... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/12/israeli-militants-besiege-two-palestinian-families-in-their-west-bank-homes

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“Despite a ceasefire nominally in force since October 2025, Israeli forces have killed about 160 Palestinians in Gaza in July alone, bringing the death toll in the ravaged enclave since the so-called ceasefire to more than 1,200. This includes women, children, older persons and others who had taken shelter in tents and areas to which they had been directed for their own safety,”

UN experts condemned the sharp escalation of #Israeli attacks against #Palestinian civilians across the occupied Palestinian territory, incl. Gaza & West Bank, in July, registering a sharp deterioration of an already catastrophic human rights situation.

UN experts condemn escalation in attacks against Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank

10 August 2026

GENEVA – UN experts* today condemned the sharp escalation of attacks against Palestinian civilians across the occupied Palestinian territory in July, registering a sharp deterioration of an already catastrophic human rights situation.

“Despite a ceasefire nominally in force since October 2025, Israeli forces have killed about 160 Palestinians in Gaza in July alone, bringing the death toll in the ravaged enclave since the so-called ceasefire to more than 1,200. This includes women, children, older persons and others who had taken shelter in tents and areas to which they had been directed for their own safety,” the experts said. “Most killings occurred in densely populated displacement zones such as Al-Mawasi, far from the so-called yellow line. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.”

The experts reported with alarm that entire residential blocks receive evacuation orders just before fighter jets destroy them, deepening the already severe shelter crisis. “The continuous westward advancement of the so-called yellow line, the construction of a 23-kilometre barrier along it and the systematic detonation of residential buildings are re-engineering the geography of illegally occupied Gaza through force and displacement,” the experts said. They also condemned strikes on hospitals and shelters, the killing of police officers and UN-contracted staff, attacks on fishers, and abductions and abuses by armed groups reportedly collaborating with the Israeli military, as well as the killing of humanitarian workers, who through their work protecting and promoting fundamental human rights, are human rights defenders. “The genocide is continuing unabated,” the experts said.

They warned that food aid is still not entering Gaza freely, while products brought in through commercial channels are ultra-processed and neither nutritionally nor culturally adequate.

“With farmland and clean water inaccessible and agricultural inputs blocked, Palestinians are unable to feed themselves,” said the experts, adding that the burden is falling heaviest on children, older persons and those with disabilities. They also warned that food insecurity is fuelling a rise in gender-based violence and child marriage, as well as endangering women in their daily searches for food.

In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the experts deplored the killing of at least 14 Palestinians in July, most of them in the final 10 days, as well as deaths resulting from movement restrictions, among them the death of a four-month-old baby and a pregnant woman's miscarriage after ambulances were blocked at military gates. “When checkpoints and gates threaten the lives of infants, pregnant women and their unborn children, movement restrictions become lethal instruments,” they said.

The experts were particularly shocked by the surge in settler terror... READ MORE  https://waps.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2026/08/un-experts-condemn-escalation-attacks-against-palestinians-gaza-and-west

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For 2,000 years, Christians have called the Holy Land home. CNN’s Clarissa Ward travels from Jerusalem to the occupied West Bank to examine how Israeli ultranationalist extremism is reshaping that reality.

 The quiet erosion of Christian life in the Holy Land

0:00 Losing Ground: Christians in the Holy Land  

3:32 Anti-Christian Incidents in Jerusalem are rising  

8:01 Christian Palestininans are leaving faster than most

13:24 A confrontation with the Israeli army

From 400 hives to 35: the Gaza beekeeper refusing to let war end his life’s work - Ibrahim al-Dabba continues to care for his colonies despite losing his home and most of his hives and equipment. Story by Lina Abu Zayed, photographs by Omar Ashtawy

Ibrahim Naji al-Dabba, 49, (in green) working with his sons. He was displaced from the Shuja’iyya area, east of Gaza City to Tel al- to the south

    "Beekeeping... is our life, our livelihood, and our future."  

The Guardian picture essay 

Each morning, Ibrahim Naji al-Dabba climbs to the roof of a damaged residential tower in Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood, where rows of beehives sit surrounded by shattered concrete and the scars of war. The rooftop is far from an ideal place for beekeeping, but for the 49-year-old father of seven, it is the only place where he can continue the profession that has sustained his family for decades.

Before the war, al-Dabba owned more than 400 beehives spread across eastern Gaza. His apiaries, equipment, storage facilities, and four-wheel-drive vehicle allowed him to manage a thriving beekeeping business that supported his family. Today, almost everything he built over years of work has disappeared.

“Beekeeping is not just a business,” he says. “It is my family’s only source of income. It is our life, our livelihood, and our future.”

Al-Dabba, who also serves as president of the Gaza Beekeepers’ cooperative society, says beekeeping became a passion long before it became a profession. Over the years, he specialised in producing honey, breeding queen bees, and developing bee strains adapted to Gaza’s climate. Before the war, Gaza’s beekeeping sector had continued to grow despite years of blockade, with hundreds of beekeepers producing honey and supporting local agriculture through pollination.

That changed after the war erupted.

Unable to reach his apiaries because of bombardment and displacement, al-Dabba watched his life’s work vanish. He lost his home, more than 400 beehives, honey-processing equipment, storage facilities, and nearly all the tools required for his trade... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jul/29/gaza-beekeeper-refusing-to-let-war-end-lifes-work

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The Power of BDS: Our Impact So Far In 2026 ... DIVESTING from Genocide

BDS movement

 

@BDSmovement

 

To mark 21 years of the BDS movement here is just a sampling of the remarkable BDS impacts achieved in the first half of 2026 — proof that organizing strategically and acting collectively can bring us closer to ending Israel's genocide and dismantling its regime of settler-colonial apartheid against Palestinians. Find even more impacts here: https://loom.ly/Uby_XbY

 

 https://x.com/BDSmovement/status/2075251263524978801

 https://bdsmovement.net/news/The-Power-Of-BDS-Our-Impact-So-Far-In-2026

 The Power of BDS: Our Impact So Far In 2026

Despite the continuing unspeakable grief over the ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, the seeds of our collective struggle are bearing fruit. The Palestinian people's miraculous sumud and popular resistance, combined with your sustained solidarity, has pushed Israel's settler-colonial apartheid regime into the deepest isolation of its 78-year history. 

We are witnessing tangible proof that BDS is working—our movement, active in some 130 countries, is effectively changing policies, making complicit corporations pay a dear price, and building the international pressure that will ultimately bring justice.

The recent wave of sanctions, divestments, and boycott impacts demonstrates what happens when people of conscience refuse to be complicit in genocide. From Spain and Belgium to Indonesia and California, from academic halls to cultural institutions, from trade unions to city councils and beyond — we can see the concrete results of our pressure. 

Below is just a sampling of the remarkable BDS impacts achieved in the first half of 2026 — proof that organizing strategically and acting collectively can bring us closer to ending Israel's genocide and dismantling its regime of settler-colonial apartheid.... READ MORE   https://bdsmovement.net/news/The-Power-Of-BDS-Our-Impact-So-Far-In-2026

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"Suffice to say that, if the tables were turned and Hezbollah had been the one psychotically eradicating 5,000 years of cultural heritage and "collective humanity", western audiences would be hearing a lot more about the depravity of it all." Belen Fernandez

Debris covers ancient stone pillar bases near the archaeological site of the Roman Baths in Tyre, south Lebanon, a day after Israeli air strikes on the city, on 8 June 2026 (AFP/Kawnat Haju)

Israel and the US are erasing Iran and Lebanon's ancient heritage

Belen Fernandez

21 June 2026 

 

The Taliban's 2001 bombing of the Bamiyan Buddhas was condemned worldwide, but the US and Israel's destruction of Tyre's ruins and other ancient sites barely registers

 

 In early 2001, the Taliban blew up two giant Buddha statues in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan, which dated from the sixth century.

The world erupted in outrage at the destruction of cultural heritage, and western media engaged in handwringing over the loss of statues that most people presumably had not known existed in the first place but were nonetheless symbolic of our "collective humanity".

Philip T Reeker, deputy spokesman for the State Department of the United States, issued a press statement declaring the US to be "distressed and baffled" by the Taliban's decision to demolish the Buddhas and other ancient artefacts: "Deliberate destruction of statues and sculpture held as sacred by peoples of different faiths is incomprehensible."

Of course, when the US launched the so-called "war on terror" later that same year and undertook to bomb Afghanistan to smithereens, there was no similar distress over the "deliberate destruction" or the mass slaughter of "peoples of different faiths".

But such hypocrisy is part and parcel of an imperial mindset predicated on orientalist dehumanisation, selective cultural concern and the weaponisation of "heritage".

While the prevailing Bamiyan narrative was that the Taliban had done away with the Buddhas because they were idolatrous, The New York Times presented a slightly different version of events in an article published on 19 March 2001.

The article quoted Taliban envoy Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, who claimed that the destruction had instead been ordered by a council of religious scholars enraged by European and other foreign offers of money to preserve the statues – but not to assist a million Afghans facing starvation.

The scholars had been "so angry" at the misplaced priorities, the envoy told the outlet, that "they said, 'If you are destroying our future with economic sanctions, you can't care about our heritage.' And so they decided that these statues must be destroyed".

War on civilisation

Fast forward a quarter of a century to the 2026 war on Iran by the US and its genocidal buddy Israel, and the Bamiyan Buddha hypocrisy once again comes to mind. Iran, after all, is home to a lot of cultural heritage and ancient sites, many of which have been damaged in the months-long assault.

But because it's Us and not Them doing the destroying, no one is terribly up in arms over the loss of history - to say nothing of the vast loss of life. In one of the war's opening salvos, a US cruise missile strike on an elementary school in the city of Minab killed more than 175 people, most of them schoolgirls... READ MORE https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-and-us-are-erasing-iran-and-lebanons-ancient-heritage 

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"Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map." Gaza is not an aberration - Israel planned this genocide decades ago. In October 2023, Israel found an excuse to breathe new life into an old story of slaughter and expulsion. The chief differences this time have been of scale and duration

A Palestinian girl wounded in an Israeli strike on a tent encampment for displaced families, according to medics, is carried at Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip on 25 May, 2026 (Reuters)

Jonathan Cook

11 June 2026

The truth slowly comes to light: Israel's genocide in Gaza was planned decades ago.

Listen to the testimonies of four Israeli soldiers who served in Gaza. 

Soldier 1: “Human lives didn’t matter. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you. But it’s not a good feeling. It mainly kills your humanity.”

Soldier 2: “At first I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting [that is, civilians]. Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”

Soldier 3: “We caught guys, lined them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”

Soldier 4: “We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges... Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp’, and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”

No, these testimonies are not new. The whistleblowers did not serve in Gaza during the current, ongoing genocide there. These accounts are nearly 60 years old, published last week by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz under the headline "We were ordered to kill”. 

Israeli soldiers interviewed shortly after the 1967 war - often referred to as the Six-Day War - not only confessed that they and others routinely committed war crimes but they pointed out that they did so under orders from their commanders. 

The accounts were compiled into a book, The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War, by Avraham Shapira, though many testimonies were not included because they were too shocking.

None of this should be simply of historical interest. These accounts are a vivid reminder that what Israel has been doing during its current, near three-year destruction of Gaza - levelling all homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries and government offices; murdering tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian civilians; and blocking aid and starving the population - is part of a decades-old pattern of Israeli military conduct. 

Nothing “started” on 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out for a single day of the Gaza “concentration camp” - the plight of Gaza’s Palestinians noted 59 years ago by Soldier 4. 

Rather, Israel found an excuse that day to breathe new life into an old story, one in which it has been slaughtering and expelling Palestinians for decades. The chief difference this time is simply one of scale and duration. 

Washington and other western capitals have given Israel the time and space to finish in Gaza what, earlier, it had only been able to achieve in part. Israel’s much greater firepower today, provided by modern munitions supplied by the United States, has allowed Israel to realise what before it could only dream of doing: wiping Gaza off the map.

Policy of starvation

The whistleblowing soldiers of 1967 admitted their job was not to “fight the enemy” - or “eradicate the terrorists”, as Israeli leaders now term it. It was to kill and terrorise Palestinian civilians under cover of war. 

Few soldiers were shy of saying why they were committing atrocities. Their task was to create a reign of terror, integral to Israel’s efforts to expel as many Palestinians as possible from the last remaining parts of the Palestinian homeland, the territories captured by the Israeli military in 1967 and then illegally occupied.

This was seen as a new opportunity to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign begun by Zionist militias in earnest in 1947 and 1948 as the British Mandate authorities withdrew from Palestine. By the end of that campaign, some 80 percent of Palestinians had been expelled from their homes inside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state. 

Many ended up in refugee camps in neighbouring states such as Lebanon and Syria. But some fled into the surviving pockets of historic Palestine in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza - the 22 per cent of their homeland that had been shielded from further Israeli advances in 1948 by Jordan and Egypt. 

The 1967 war was... READ MORE  https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-not-an-aberration-israels-genocide-gaza-was-planned-decades-ago

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