CrossFireArabia, Author at CrossFireArarbia

Israel Army Deploys For Lebanese Invasion

CrossFireArabia
October 8, 2024

The Israeli army deployed a fourth division, Tuesday, for its ongoing ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

A military statement said the army’s 146th Reserve Division began ground operations in the western sector of southern Lebanon according to Anadolu.

Three other divisions – the 98th, 36th, and 91st – are already operating in the central and eastern sectors of southern Lebanon.

Israel has mounted massive airstrikes across Lebanon against what it claims Hezbollah targets since 23 September, killing more than 1,250 people, injuring 3,618 others, and displacing more than 1.2 million people.

The aerial campaign was an escalation in a year-long cross-border warfare between Israel and Hezbollah since the start of Tel Aviv’s brutal offensive on the Gaza Strip that has killed nearly 42,000 people, mostly women and children, since a Hamas attack last year.

Despite international warnings that the Middle East region was on the brink of a regional war amid Israel’s relentless attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, Tel Aviv expanded the conflict by launching on Oct. 1 a ground invasion into southern Lebanon.

Features

Video: Israel’s Destruction Tips Into Arab World

CrossFireArabia
October 8, 2024

The entire Arab world will likely face the threats of environmental disasters in the near years to come and future generations because of the Israeli wanton destruction of the Gaza Strip. Here is why.

The entire Arab world is facing threats of environmental disasters in the years to come. Here is why. pic.twitter.com/UzJ3DMnUhk
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) October 8, 2024

News

In 1st Year of Genocide Israel Kills 146 Doctors

CrossFireArabia
October 8, 2024

The Gaza Health Ministry announced, Sunday the Israeli occupation army killed 146 doctors of different specialties in its one-year of genocide in the Gaza Strip, Anadolu news agency reported.

In a statement, the ministry highlighted that in the past year the health system has been devastated whilst stressing most medical supplies and medications have been exhausted.

It emphasized that 83% of medical supplies and 60% of medications are unavailable in hospitals and health centers.

The ministry revealed there are 25,000 patients and injured Palestinians who require medical attention outside Gaza.

Targeting Medical Staff

In a report cited by the Quds News Network published 17 September, the Health Ministry said Israeli occupation forces killed 1,151 Palestinian health workers since 7 October, 2023.

A total of 986 were named in the new report, while personal data for the remaining 165 was still being verified.

The ministry said the delay in the verification process was due to Israeli authorities withholding the victims’ bodies or their remains being buried under rubble.

At least 165 of those killed were doctors, 260 nurses, 300 management and support personnel, 184 health associate professionals, 76 pharmacists, and 12 other health workers.

“The Palestinian sector has been subjected to a systematic attack by the occupation forces that has affected all its components,” the ministry noted.

Health facilities were the target of direct and repeated Israeli raids and air strikes, it added, which has crippled the health system and left hundreds of thousands of war victims facing “imminent death”.

More than 300 health workers have also been arrested by Israeli forces.

Gaza Genocide Continues

Flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza.

Currently on trial before the International Court of Justice for genocide against Palestinians, Israel has been waging a devastating war on Gaza since October 7.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, 41,870 Palestinians have been killed, and 97,166 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7, 2023.

Moreover, at least 11,000 people are unaccounted for, presumed dead under the rubble of their homes throughout the Strip.

Israel says that 1,200 soldiers and civilians were killed during the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7. Israeli media published reports suggesting that many Israelis were killed on that day by ‘friendly fire’.

https://www.palestinechronicle.com/live-blog-one-year-of-genocide-massacres-in-central-gaza-rocket-barrages-towards-israel-day-367/embed/#?secret=xh5pqP3eY2#?secret=MkAHUcDdzk Palestinian and international organizations say that the majority of those killed and wounded are women and children.

The Israeli war has resulted in an acute famine, mostly in northern Gaza, resulting in the death of many Palestinians, mostly children.

The Israeli aggression has also resulted in the forceful displacement of nearly two million people from all over the Gaza Strip, with the vast majority of the displaced forced into the densely crowded southern city of Rafah near the border with Egypt – in what has become Palestine’s largest mass exodus since the 1948 Nakba.

Later in the war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians began moving from the south to central Gaza in a constant search for safety according to the Palestine Chronicle.

Avi Shlaim: ‘I am proud of my Arab heritage and proud of my Jewish heritage’

CrossFireArabia
October 7, 2024

Editor’s Note: On the first anniversary of the bloody 7 October, 2023, I reprint the story I wrote on Professor Avi Shlaim that was scribbled early this year and published in countercurrents. Avi Shlaim is an eminent Israeli-British historian and international relations expert at Oxford University in the UK with many books on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He is part of what is called the “New Historians” who sought to provide a critical analysis of the prevailing Israeli view claiming Palestinians left their land of their own free will and were not forced out in 1948 as Israel was created.

Highly respected British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim says he has a moral duty to denounce Zionist settler colonialism and American imperialism and to stand with the Palestinian people for the struggle of peace and dignity in their own land.pic.twitter.com/00mlbrdfa9
— The Last American Vagabond (@TLAVagabond) January 31, 2024

In the light of Israel’s latest genocide in Gaza, he provides what he calls a “personal commentary” of his views as a Jewish Arab and on the current Netanyahu government.

“I am an Arab Jew. I was born in Baghdad and I grew up in Israel. My Iraqi birth certificate gives my name as Ibrahim. So, I am the real Ibrahim Al Baghdadi. The other chap is a fake. He stole my Identity,” he says in a mirthful manner.

Baghdad

“I am proud of my Arab heritage and I am equally proud of my Jewish heritage. The three pillars of Judaism are truth, justice and peace,” the historian, who left Baghdad at the age of five in 1950, emphasizes.

“The Netanyahu government is the opposite of these core Jewish values,” adding “it is the most aggressive, expansionist, overtly racist and Jewish supremacist government in Israel’s history,” Shlaim maintains.

“The essence of Judaism is non-violence.” The present government is the anthesis of this non-violence,” he laments.

“As a Jew and an Israeli, I therefore feel that I have a moral duty to denounce Zionist-settler colonialism and American imperialism and to stand by the Palestinians in the anti-colonial struggle, in the just struggle to live in peace and dignity in their own land,” he concludes.

‘This Key is The Only Thing Left of Our Destroyed House’

CrossFireArabia
October 7, 2024

Editor’s Note: On the first anniversary of the bloody 7 October, 2023, I reprint the story I wrote on Mariam Abu Daqqa that was scribbled early this year and published in countercurrents. I then wrote Journalist Abu Duqqa gave us an insight of how she felt about her demolished house in Gaza which the Israelis long destroyed. Together with her family, she lived in a six-story building of six apartments hosting scores of family members, relatives and neighbors. All this, is now rubble and wreckage. Abu Daqqa continues to report on the mayhem in Gaza despite the fact more than 120 of her colleagues were targeted and killed since 7 October, the biggest crime in the history of mankind. Today the number of journalists killed have shot up to 175.

“This small key which I hold in my hand, used to be a key to my apartment,” she tells the camera in a daze.

“This is what has remained from our house, a key to a home that no longer exists,” she laments in an absent-minded way.

“Our house had been targeted long time and was finally struck and demolished into the ground,” she says this almost tracing the steps of when it collapsed into the ground and how they escaped.

“Our house was part of a three-story building of six apartments with our storerooms in the basement where we kept the rest of our belongings, odd stand, table, chair, bric-a-bracs and other things which we thought that we might need one day.

“Too late now. No more, everything had been targeted, destroyed, perished into thin air. What remained of it is this key – the house of memories, of childhood, the home of the family, our forgotten laughter and happy times,” Mariam talks in reverie.

“From the day I knew our home was targeted I kept thinking, and on a daily basis, just thoughts that came to my mind about how are we going to live after the war, ‘where will we live, is it here, somewhere else, where, which part of town.’

Idol thoughts but very real, everything of ours is destroyed, blocks of apartments long gone and what remained turned into debris and wreckage. I don’t think that we will even find a house to rent. Thinking about this is difficult and painful, a creepy character in my head bellows in the back of my mind.

Who is going to rebuild our houses and all the other houses. I try and think about working hard again to make money to rebuild our home but what about the others all, the great majority of the people of Gaza have left their homes hastily and with just this key….”

The scale of destruction in Gaza is phenomenal. Figures can’t tell the truth. One has to see the images to fathom what the Israelis did right across the strip to be able to comprehend the extent of their vengeance – mass murder, mass destruction of property, a genocide for years to come.