Looted Antiquities, Billionaire Collectors, and the Politics of Return: "...This is ongoing. Since the genocide in Gaza began, over 20,000 rare artifacts spanning the prehistoric to the Ottoman periods, housed in Gaza City's Pasha's Palace museum, have gone missing or been looted. Israeli forces have fully or partially destroyed more than 316 archaeological sites and buildings in Gaza. Meanwhile, a 2025 study by Palestinian researchers found that, as the war in Gaza continued, archaeological theft in the West Bank skyrocketed...."

Syro-Hittite Female Idol. Source: New York District Attorney’s Office, press release.

The Institute for Palestine Studies: The IPS blog, Palestine Square, is a lively forum for the dissemination of ideas by opinion makers on the latest developments concerning Palestine. It hosts analysis and commentary by IPS researchers as well as by contributors to its books, journals, and conferences.  https://www.palestine-studies.org/

https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1659622#

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Date:  October 06 2026

Author: Laila AlQaddumi

 

".... Of the 180 objects seized, 40 came from Palestine. 

The Palestinian-origin objects included a stele, Bronze Age ivory figurines, incense burners, a red carnelian sunfish amulet that is still missing, and five Neolithic stone masks worth more than $2 million. Dating to around 7000 BCE, the masks are among the oldest known in the world. About 15 such masks are known, all found in the West Bank and near the Dead Sea. One of the oldest, the al-Ram mask, was reportedly taken from a Palestinian villager at al-Ram by Thomas Chaplin, a British missionary doctor and scientist who wrote for the Palestine Exploration Fund.

Today, these masks are scattered across museums in New York, London, Paris, and Jerusalem — largely inaccessible to West Bank Palestinians, who need a permit to enter Israel. Steinhardt alone held eight, which he displayed in his New York home beside his Picassos.

Death mask dating from 6000 to 7000 B.C. Source: New York District Attorney’s Office, press release.

Two of the five masks remain at the Israel Museum, where a plaque crediting Steinhardt's collection was recently removed due to its contested provenance. One of the masks at the museum was taken from the West Bank in 1970 by then-Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, who inscribed his own name inside it. Dayan illegally amassed a large archeological collection routinely using military resources to collect artifacts across the West Bank and Gaza, intimidating Palestinians into selling artifacts at a fraction of their value. 

Although Steinhardt was ordered to repatriate his Palestinian-origin items, New York prosecutors argued that the looting had occurred either inside Israel or in areas Israel exercises authority over, and slated the objects to be returned only to Israel, including pieces from areas under Palestinian Authority control such as the West Bank.

 

 Ivory cosmetic spoon dating from Assyrian civilization 700-800 BC, looted from Hebron. Source: New York District Attorney’s Office, press release.

In January 2023, a small Assyrian "cosmetic spoon” dating to between 700 and 800 B.C.E. was handed to the PA's Tourism and Antiquities Minister Rula Maayah by George Noll, head of the U.S. Office of Palestinian Affairs, in the first U.S. repatriation of a cultural object to the Palestinian Authority. 

Israeli antiquities dealer Gil Chaya sold the spoon, originally from the small Palestinian village of Khirbet al-Koum in Hebron in the Occupied West Bank, to Steinhardt in January of 2003. 

According to a report filed by prosecutors with a New York court, many of Steinhardt's purchases from Chaya, who was licensed by the Israel Antiquities Authority, were artifacts sourced from looters across the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Emails obtained during the investigation show Chaya pressuring hired "peasants" to continue searching for a missing artifact fragment. The Manhattan DA's office says Chaya remains under investigation for trafficking illegal antiquities. 

Gold Masks dating back to roughly 5000 B.C.E. Source: New York District Attorney's Office, press release.

The same Israel Antiquities Authority that licensed dealers like Chaya also appears as a beneficiary of American collector philanthropy. Shelby White, widow of Wall Street pioneer Leon Levy, chairs the Friends of the Israel Antiquities Authority, a U.S. charity funneling tax-exempt donations directly to the Israeli government agency. The Shelby White & Leon Levy Lod Mosaic Archaeological Center was built around a Roman mosaic in the ethnically cleansed town of Lydda.

In 2023, a Manhattan DA investigation that had begun years earlier culminated in the seizure of 89 antiquities valued at $69 million from White's collection. The U.S. returned two looted sculptures worth $275,000 to Iraq and seized 17 more objects on loan from her at the Met, including a Chinese funerary piece that had sat in storage, still dirt-caked, for over 20 years.

The Ivory Plaque, depicting a human headed winged sphinx, from the period of King Sargon I (721-725 BCE) in Nimrud. Likely looted from Northern Iraq in the 1990's. Source: New York District Attorney's Office, press release.

In 2010, the arts-and-crafts chain Hobby Lobby, whose president, Steve Green, had inspected objects in the UAE, purchased more than 5,500 ancient artifacts smuggled out of Iraq, worth more than $1 million. The artifacts were sold by an antiquities dealer from the UAE and two other dealers from Israel who claimed the artifacts belonged to a dealer from Israel who was not present. One Israeli dealer provided a statement of provenance claiming that the objects had been “legally acquired in the late 1960s by [the third Israeli dealer's] father, from local markets.” 

The cuneiform tablets and objects were destined for the Green family's Museum of the Bible in Washington before the artifacts were seized.

Hobby Lobby's ties to Israel extended beyond antiquities acquisitions. The company donated $25,000 to organizations based in illegal Israeli settlements, including archaeological groups active in Palestinian territory, while the Green family's Museum of the Bible gave $15,000 to the University of the Holy Land, a Christian graduate school whose late co-founder pioneered in Qumran studies — the West Bank site of the Dead Sea Scrolls, often invoked to support Israeli claims to Palestinian land on biblical grounds. 

Green also co-sponsors the “Covenant Journey,” which brings young Evangelicals — among Israel's strongest U.S. political allies — to Israel to turn them into pro-Israel advocates. The program was modeled directly on Birthright Israel, which Steinhardt co-founded. The Green family has also funded a Bible-centered public-school curriculum that an Oklahoma school district shelved in 2014 after civil liberties groups challenged it; a version adapted for secular Jewish public schools was later used in Israel.

The same structure repeats: objects of cultural value are removed from their regional contexts during periods of war and political upheaval, and circulated through a small network of dealers and collectors for profit or political, ideological, and religious purposes. Many of the objects found in the homes of wealthy collectors and in prestigious museums were removed during periods of conflict and occupation, whether during the Lebanese Civil War, the Syrian war, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, or Israel's Occupation of Palestine.

Israel stands alone in the region with a legally sanctioned private antiquities trade, and it has never ratified the 1970 UNESCO Convention against illicit trafficking. Scholars have estimated that approximately 8.4 million archaeological objects were looted or trafficked from the Palestinian territories between May 1967 and June 2019. 

This is ongoing. Since the genocide in Gaza began, over 20,000 rare artifacts spanning the prehistoric to the Ottoman periods, housed in Gaza City's Pasha's Palace museum, have gone missing or been looted. Israeli forces have fully or partially destroyed more than 316 archaeological sites and buildings in Gaza. Meanwhile, a 2025 study by Palestinian researchers found that, as the war in Gaza continued, archaeological theft in the West Bank skyrocketed...."  READ MORE https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1659622

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The world is finally watching Palestine. But who gets to narrate its story? As courts and sports stadiums turn towards Palestine, a quieter struggle runs beneath the headlines over memory, heritage and the right of Palestinians to speak for themselves

A demonstrator waves a Palestinian flag as protesters march towards the Azteca Stadium during the opening of the World Cup in Mexico City on 11 June 2026 (Carlos Tischler/Eyepix Group via Reuters)

 

"To burn a people's archives and raze their universities is not incidental to a genocide; it is central to their annihilation" 

Nour A Munawar, James Symonds, and Ihab Saloul

6 September 2026

Palestine did not qualify for this summer's Football World Cup. It hardly needed to. Activists opened the tournament by forming a human Palestinian flag in Mexico City, and at the Egypt-Iran match in Seattle, Palestinian flags flew behind the goals while chanting for Gaza.

When Bosnia and Herzegovina, a nation that survived its own genocide, reached the knockout rounds, its supporters filled stadiums with choruses of "Free Palestine" for a people enduring another.

Palestine had no team on the pitch, yet became one of the tournament's defining presences. In the past three years, the Palestinian flag has emerged not only as a symbol denouncing Israeli genocide, but as a global gesture against victimisation, injustice and colonial oppression.

The tournament ended in July, with Palestine emerging as its true winner. 

That visibility now comes with a measure of accountability. Last September, a UN commission of inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, where the health ministry has recorded more than 73,000 dead, around half of them women and children. Some 2,700 families have been wiped from the civil register.

The world's highest court is weighing a genocide case brought by South Africa and joined by more than a dozen states.

The International Criminal Court, meanwhile, has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare.

Likewise, Palestine's growing visibility and support are reflected in global public opinion. Gallup found in February that, for the first time in a quarter-century of its polling, more Americans sympathise with Palestinians than with Israelis, while majorities in most of the 36 countries surveyed by Pew this spring view Israel negatively.

And yet, simultaneously, Palestinians are being exterminated; their homes and hospitals, schools, archives and universities are being destroyed - and with them the means to tell their own story.

This is the paradox of Palestine in a polarised world: never so widely seen, and never so thoroughly written about by others. The question is no longer only whether Palestine will be free, but who will have the permission and power to narrate it.

War on memory

Israel's destruction of Palestinian life has never been only physical. It has always carried a second purpose: to erase and unmake Palestinian memory.

As Munawar has argued elsewhere, the erasure of Palestinian heritage did not begin with this war. It reaches back to the 1948 Nakba and the villages emptied and renamed: an ongoing Nakba that Palestinian and Arab communities have long met with grassroots efforts to safeguard what state power seeks to erase.

By March 2026, Unesco had verified damage to 164 cultural sites in Gaza - mosques, churches, museums and archives - though Palestinian officials put the true figure far higher. UN experts recorded the destruction of all 12 of Gaza's universities and the burning of the Central Archives of Gaza, and questioned whether it amounted to "scholasticide".

The assault also targets those documenting it: more than 200 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 2023, while the Committee to Protect Journalists says the Israeli military has carried out more targeted killings of the press than any other government's military on record. Foreign reporters, meanwhile, remain barred from Gaza.

Even the dead are not spared: Israeli forces have bulldozed and desecrated at least 16 of Gaza's cemeteries, unearthing bodies as they advanced. The UN's genocide commission likewise counted attacks on cultural and religious sites among the acts that constitute war crimes.

To burn a people's archives and raze their universities is not incidental to a genocide; it is central to their annihilation. In Gaza, that strategy has reached its most total form as an attack not only on the living and the dead, but on a people's capacity to speak for itself.

This is why Palestine has become the sharpest test of a term western universities use freely, often carelessly: "Decolonisation." As Munawar has argued, decolonising heritage means more than revising a syllabus or a reading list.

It requires redistributing the power to decide what is preserved, restored and remembered, and who does the remembering. No case makes that argument more starkly than Palestine's.

Competing narratives

The question of who does the remembering was central to the 12th annual conference of the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture, which we convened at the University of Amsterdam this June. Participants asked what decolonial thinking has disrupted, dismantled and dreamt anew - and whether those gains can hold as resurgent nationalisms press back.

One of the conference's two keynote panels, "Decoloniality in Palestine: Law and Narrative Sovereignty", brought together the international crimes scholar Alette Smeulers, the Genocide Convention specialist Marieke de Hoon and the Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb, author of Decolonizing Palestine: The Land, The People, The Bible.

The panel proceeded from the premise that international law functions in Palestine not as a neutral arbiter but as another site of struggle. It also examined how the religious and cultural narratives of Christian Zionism, long used to justify dispossession, are themselves ripe for unsettling. Panellists challenged Europe's selective invocation of international law: quick to cite against adversaries, slow against allies.

What the conference kept returning to was a discomfort closer to home. For decades, western institutions have lent their authority to Palestinian erasure, too often treating Israeli accounts as taken-for-granted facts while dismissing Palestinian accounts as untrustworthy opinions, recasting a colonised people's dispossession as a quarrel between equals.

Panels on contested memories and competing narratives asked what it means for scholars, especially Arab and Palestinian scholars working in the West, to refuse that reflex and restore Palestinians as authors of their own knowledge.

That refusal is visible inside the lecture hall and beyond. From Columbia to Amsterdam, students have held protests and encampments demanding that their universities reckon honestly with the genocide.

The school has also launched a new book series, "Palestine: Past, Present and Future Narratives", edited by one of us (Saloul) and devoted to countering "Eurocentric, orientalist traditions and hegemonic modes of knowledge production" about Palestine.

For a place so relentlessly described by outsiders, no task matters more than reconstituting Palestinian authorship. Set against the scale of the loss, this is a modest instrument. But narrative sovereignty is built from exactly such work: the patient work of ensuring Palestinians speak in their own voice and are heard.

Rebuilding over the rubble

The question of authorship now hangs over Gaza's reconstruction. The so-called "Board of Peace", devised and chaired by Donald Trump with no Palestinian representation on its executive tier, has pledged billions and delivered almost nothing.

Meanwhile, glossy renderings of a "New Gaza" of towers and marinas circulate as if Gaza were a blank coast awaiting investors.

The consequences of that hierarchy have only become clearer since Hamas dissolved the committee through which it governed Gaza in July, passing day-to-day administration to a technocratic body that answers, ultimately, to the board.

Israel has even rejected the logo of that Palestinian committee because it resembles the Palestinian Authority's emblem. Not even the symbols of Palestinian administration escape the veto.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/world-watching-palestine-who-narrates-gaza

 

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Gaza’s archaeological heritage was destroyed in Israel’s genocide. These volunteers are trying to salvage it from the rubble: Israeli forces systematically and deliberately targeted many of Gaza’s archaeological sites, including ancient churches. Before the war, Gaza was home to archaeological sites and artifacts from periods spanning more than 5,000 years of continuous human civilization. Some looted artifacts have quietly resurfaced in a Paris exhibition

contact@ifamericansknew.org  

August 31, 2026  

Archaeology destroyed,  

destruction in gaza,  

israeli apartheid,  

khan younis,  

violation of international law

Tareq S. Hajjaj, reposted from Mondoweiss, August 31, 2026

MEMBERS OF THE HERITAGE GUARDIANS VOLUNTEER TEAM, AFFILIATED WITH THE MAYASEM ASSOCIATION FOR CULTURE AND THE ARTS, EXAMINE AND DOCUMENT HISTORICAL ARTIFACTS RECOVERED FROM BENEATH THE RUBBLE IN GAZA, KHAN YOUNIS, JUNE, 2026.(PHOTO: YOUSEF ABADLA)

Salvaged artifacts by the Mayasem Association for Culture and the Arts, Khan Younis, Gaza, June, 2026.(Photo: Yousef Abadla) (Anadolu Ajansi)

In the rubble of a bombed site in Khan Younis, a group of volunteers in yellow high-visibility vests work in near silence.

They have no tools but their hands, relentless determination, and the knowledge that what lies beneath the debris is irreplaceable. Carefully, they lift carved stone fragments and pottery vessels by hand, wrap ceramic pieces in whatever protective material they can find, and admire ancient statues, shattered on the ground, dating back thousands of years.

The volunteers are part of the Heritage Guardians Team, an initiative affiliated with the Mayasem Association for Culture and Arts. Although Israeli shelling never stopped rocking Gaza, they’ve been trying — carefully, methodically, and with bare hands — to save what remains of the Strip’s archaeological heritage before it disappears entirely under the rubble. 

According to Hamouda al-Dahdar, director of the Department of Archaeological Sites and Excavations at Gaza’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, Israeli forces systematically and deliberately targeted many of Gaza’s archaeological sites, most of which had remained closed throughout the war. “They were attacked without any apparent military justification,” he told Mondoweiss.

Before the war, the Gaza Strip was home to archaeological sites and artifacts from periods spanning more than 5,000 years of continuous human civilization. Nearly every part of the territory contained an archaeological site or historical remains, while five major museums preserved the vast majority of artifacts unearthed across Gaza.

But the ongoing genocide has left virtually nothing untouched. Beyond the destruction of homes, civilian infrastructure, and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, the war has also devastated archaeological sites and artifacts painstakingly excavated and preserved over decades. Many have also been taken out of Gaza, in what the Strip’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities regards as theft....READ MORE  https://israelpalestinenews.org/gazas-archaeological-heritage-was-destroyed-in-israels-genocide-these-volunteers-are-trying-to-salvage-it-from-the-rubble/

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"It was not Hitler or Himmler who abducted me, beat me, and shot my family... It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbor- who recieved uniform and then believed they were the master race." Karl Stojka, Auschwitz survivor

Painting by Karl Stojka's sister Ceija Stojka Arrest and Deportation,​ 1995. Courtesy of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.  https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rm-g-dragon-8-k-pop-boy-band-idols-collect-art

Art as Memory – the Documentary Canvases of Karl Stojka, a Roma in Auschwitz-Birkenau

https://www.sarahmatthias.co.uk/articles/art-as-memory-the-documentary-canvases-of-karl-stojka-a-roma-in-auschwitz-birkenau/ 

 

Fear at Auschwitz-Birkenau, June-July 1943

 

Buchenwald: ‘Half people, half faces.’

"Birkenau", oil on canvas, approx. 60 x 70 cm, signed, dated 1990

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum 

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/id-card/karl-stojka

#ProtectTheFacts

 

Karl Stojka was 12 when the Nazis initiated mass deportations of thousands of Austrian Sinti and Roma to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. He was arrested at his school right in the middle of a lesson and sent to the concentration camp with his family. There, he was known as “Z-5742”, a serial number tattooed on his left forearm. Z stood for “Zigeuner”, or “Gypsy” in German. Karl was assigned to work in the canteen, which allowed him to occasionally sneak some leftovers off the table to his family – a huge relief amidst starvation. When the news about the Soviet army approaching started to spread in the summer of 1944, Karl, his mother, brother and sisters – those deemed fit for continuous labour to exhaustion – were deported to other camps.

We know the story of Karl and his family because, on 2 August 1944, they were fortunate to escape death. That was the day the so-called “Gypsy family camp” in Auschwitz-Birkenau ceased to exist – and not because it had been liberated. That night, thousands of its Roma and Sinti prisoners never were able to experience freedom again because they were killed in the camp’s gas chambers. Karl’s uncle Lulo, his wife, and three children were among these victims.

Some 500,000 Roma people were systematically persecuted and murdered by the Nazi regime, its allies and collaborators during the Second World War. Many more were subjected to criminal medical experiments, forced labour and torture. The Roma genocide is still under-researched and widely unknown by the general public, often leading to denial and distortion of facts about this dark chapter of history.  For decades following the war, the Roma were not recognized as victims of Nazi persecution and the crimes committed against them remained unacknowledged.

After the liberation, Karl Stojka and his sister Ceija both became famous artists. They used their visibility to actively campaign for the importance of learning and acknowledging the facts about the crimes perpetrated against Roma and Sinti communities during World War II. Along with other activists, they also reminded that the Roma genocide didn’t spring out of nowhere: a centuries-long history of anti-Roma racism and discrimination could have laid the grounds for these atrocities... READ MORE  https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/shedding-light-roma-genocide-take-part-protectthefacts-campaign

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Dear America- Invest in the people's needs... Be for real freedom, justice, true equality, and respect for all of humankind!

 Dear America,

Today, Thursday June 26th 2025 is Charter Day.  80 years ago, 50 nations met in San Francisco, USA, to create a new organization for peace, prosperity & human rights.  https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter

Big beautiful human rights & dignity should always be our priority! 

Please in every budget prioritize funding Libraries and PBS and museums and parks and true charity and healthcare for those in need so that we the people are free to learn and study and appreciate the world- and free to be better citizens.  

Don't be an Israeli-firster & war monger. Seek to invest in peace and diplomacy and real democracy in every possible way:  Be for real freedom, justice, true equality, and respect for all of humankind!

America's Israel-firsters push money away from American needs into weapons of war so that Israel armed with American money and weaponry can target, bomb, and destroy any individual, family, home, refugee camp, hospital, school, organization, or country that dares object to the continued persecution and impoverishment of Palestinians. 

Today, ignoring Israeli violence and Zionist cruelty as Israeli policies and warfare guarantee that babies starve and die in Gaza makes America look bad- and very very stupid. 

Utterly incompetent our fourth estate- our free press, our elected politicians, and far too many of our religious leaders foolishly ignore racist Israel's escalating violations of international law and the very real plight and suffering of the native non-Jewish men, women, and children of historic Palestine.

America should be supporting and funding the United Nations & UNWRA not that Israeli-American killing zone concoction called the GHF, the Gaza "Humanitarian" Foundation.  

Peace, prosperity and human rights. The ideals spelled out in the United Nations Charter are even more relevant today in this age of interconnected technology and sophisticated weaponry. We need more brains- not brawn.

Invest in the people's needs.

Sincerely,

Anne Selden Annab

NOTES https://anniesnewletters.blogspot.com/search/label/Notes

LETTERS https://anniesnewletters.blogspot.com/search/label/letters

WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life....

"The new mechanism [Israeli-American GHF] is an abomination that costs lives. It humiliates and degrades desperate people, concentrating them in ghetto-like hubs, from which they can be more easily displaced. This is the grotesque culmination of 20 months of inaction and impunity, during which more than 55,000 people have been reported killed – mostly women and children... [PLUS] The occupied West Bank is now under lockdown. Additional restrictions on the movement of people and goods, are intensifying the impact of brutal military operations by the Israeli Security Forces, and rampant violence by Israeli settlers."

 The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was mandated by the UN General Assembly in 1949 to provide services for registered Palestine refugees in the Middle East. For 75 years, UNRWA has been the primary humanitarian provider for nearly 6 million refugees across the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, delivering emergency assistance and development services like education, primary healthcare, food, and shelter. 

On October 28, 2024, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) passed a devastating vote to ban UNRWA from operating in the occupied Palestinian territory...

Harvard-linked study finds Israel ‘disappeared’ nearly 400,000 Palestinians in Gaza, half of them children: Report The study by a Ben Gurion University professor uses data-driven analysis and spatial mapping to highlight a severe decline in Gaza’s population since October 2023

She dreamed of becoming a journalist. Yaqeen (12 years old) was killed by Israel in Gaza.

MC Abdul - Shouting At The Wall (Official Video)

Dear Israel, When you get bombed after bombing 5 other countries YOU ARE NOT THE VICTIM ! Hands off the Middle East !

The Guardian view on Israel, the US and Iran: you can’t bomb your way out of nuclear proliferation- The age of disarmament is over. But military action only increases the dangers instead of ending the threat

God protect us all from all the idiocy and murderous propaganda...

 Dr. Omar Suleiman

@omarsuleiman

It’s so important for folks in the West to watch media from other parts of the world. The brainwashing colonial era tropes are so potent, especially with populations that have never traveled beyond their borders. God protect us all from all the idiocy and murderous propaganda.

Red line after red line has been crossed in Gaza [by Israel]. Schools bombed [by Israel]. Children killed [by Israel]. Aid centres turned into killing grounds [by Israel].... STOP SUPPORTING WAR CRIMES Red Line for Palestine

"Now, with the genocide in Palestine, we’re faced with a reality in which tens of thousands of Americans are actively involved in war crimes. They are part of an army responsible for the murder of more than 20,000 children in Gaza, where the Economist estimates that Israeli soldiers have killed between 77,000 and 109,000 people, or 4-5% of the territory’s population in 2023."

Tens of thousands of Americans serve in Israel amid genocide, investing in and propagating occupation

In 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were displaced from their towns and villages. 77 years later, Palestinians continue to be forcibly displaced. Since the war in #Gaza began, around 1.9 million people have been forced to flee their homes. #WorldRefugeeDay

"The West Bank is on lockdown. This means that the gates Israel spent the last ten years erecting at every village and town entrance are closed— effectively caging Palestinians in their own homes. For years Palestinians protested these practices, non violently, and yet nothing changed. The world still normalized Israel and told Palestinians “it’s not a big deal.” As Palestinians are caged in, Israel has also spent the past two years ensuring agricultural destruction. This means in the West Bank, people don’t have access to lands or farms. It means Palestinians must purchase food from Israel, and everything has become more expensive. Palestinian homes are being rampaged, ransacked, and turned to military bases. Israel has also mass destroyed and demolished thousands of Palestinian homes, and displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians in the last few years. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements are expanding deeper into Palestinian towns and cities, drying water sources, destroying lands, killing & maiming people. What is happening to Palestinians as a whole population is extermination." Mariam Barghouti

Israeli leaders are accusing Iran of war crimes after it struck an Israeli hospital. Israel has been bombing hospitals in Gaza for over 21 months, destroying almost all of them.

Mosab Abu Toha: This young man who was killed yesterday while seeking aid on the Rasheed Street in Gaza was put on a pallet as others carried him to the hospital. That same pallet that had sacks of flour before other people managed to get them.

Dear America- Stand up for international law and Human Rights, not the weapons industry.

Antisemitic and Islamophobic violence is rising in the United States. Both must stop: We have a duty to call out antisemitism when we see it. We also have an equal duty to remember that Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims are also being targeted

Let's use the best tool we have: EDUCATION against ignorance, prejudice, hatred, genocide

More journalists have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza than in most major wars combined.

The MATH of modern GENOCIDE & the US weapons industry.

"The Holocaust did not start with gas chambers. This hatred gradually developed from words, stereotypes, and prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanisation and escalatin violence" Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau

Building a Culture of Peace ...

"The United Nations was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell." ~Dag Hammarskjöld, second Secretary-General of the United Nations

"Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world..."   https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights