Palestinian Death Toll at the Hands of Israel in 2014 Was the Highest Since 1967 — Report

"Palestinian civilians across the [occupied Palestinian territory] continue to be subject to threats to their lives, physical safety and liberty from conflict-related violence, and from policies and practices related to the Israeli occupation, including settler violence. 2014 witnessed the highest civilian death toll since 1967 due to the July-August hostilities in Gaza, and a significant increase in Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank. There was also a marked increase in Israeli casualties, as a result of Gaza hostilities and from tension in East Jerusalem. Although the context in which civilians are killed or injured and their property destroyed and damaged varies, there is a pervasive crisis of accountability, with no effective remedy for the vast majority of alleged violations of international law, to ensure justice for the victims and to prevent future violations."

A destroyed ambulance in the city of Shijaiyah in the Gaza Strip. (Boris Niehaus / CC BY-SA 4.0)

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Fragmented Lives: Humanitarian Overview - 2014
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs occupied Palestinian territory

America's Fraudalent 'War On Terror' Has Killed at least 1.3 Million People — While the Military Industrial Complex Enriches Itself Even Further

Massive U.S. airstrike in Syria. The U.S. air force simply assumed no civilians were in the area. (Screen capture from YouTube video.

By Sarah Lazare
How do you calculate the human costs of the U.S.-led War on Terror?

On the 12th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, groups of physicians attempted to arrive at a partial answer to this question by counting the dead.

In their joint report— Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the 'War on Terror—Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival, and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War concluded that this number is staggering, with at least 1.3 million lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan alone since the onset of the war following September 11, 2001.

However, the report notes, this is a conservative estimate, and the total number killed in the three countries "could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely."

Furthermore, the researchers do not look at other countries targeted by U.S.-led war, including Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and beyond.

Even still, the report states the figure "is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated by the media and major NGOs.

In Iraq, at least 1 million lives have been lost during and since 2003, a figure that accounts for five percent of the nation's total population. This does not include deaths among the estimated 3 million Iraqi refugees, many of whom were subject to dangerous conditions during this past winter.

Furthermore, an estimated 220,000 people have been killed in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, note the researchers. The findings follow a United Nations report which finds that civilian deaths in Afghanistan in 2014 were at their highest levels since the global body began making reports in 2009.

The researchers identified direct and indirect deaths based on UN, government, and NGO data, as well as individual studies. While the specific number is difficult to peg, researchers say they hope to convey the large-scale of death and loss.

Speaking with Democracy Now! on Thursday, Dr. Robert Gould, president of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility and co-author of the forward to the report, said:

"[A]t a time when we’re contemplating at this point cutting off our removal of troops from Afghanistan and contemplating new military authorization for increasing our operations in Syria and Iraq, this insulation from the real impacts serves our government in being able to continue to conduct these wars in the name of the war on terror, with not only horrendous cost to the people in the region, but we in the United States suffer from what the budgetary costs of unending war are."

According to Gould's forward, co-authored with Dr. Tim Takaro, the public is purposefully kept in the dark about this toll.

"A politically useful option for U.S. political elites has been to attribute the on-going violence to internecine conflicts of various types, including historical religious animosities, as if the resurgence and brutality of such conflicts is unrelated to the destabilization cause by decades of outside military intervention," they write. "As such, under-reporting of the human toll attributed to ongoing Western interventions, whether deliberate of through self-censorship, has been key to removing the 'fingerprints' of responsibility."

Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams.

Drones — Which Nation Sells the Most?: The United States? — No, Israel

Israel's remote-control killers were perfected on Palestinians. During it's Gaza massacre last summer Israel killed at least 849 people with drone strikes alone.

Photo by Giles Thomas.

By Rania Khalek

Israel has supplied 60.7 percent of the world’s drones since 1985, according to new data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

As a result, Israel is the single greatest source of drone proliferation in the world.

In second place is the United States, which accounts for 23.9 percent of global drone exports, followed by Canada at 6.4 percent, France at 1.6 percent, Austria at 1.4 percent, Italy at 1.1 percent, Germany at 1 percent and China at 0.9 percent.

Conversely, the United Kingdom is the world’s number one importer of drones. Between 2010 and 2014, the UK bought 55 drones from Israel and six armed drones from the US, which accounted for one third of global drone deliveries in that time period.

The vast majority of the drone market is comprised of surveillance drones.

The US, UK and Israel are the only countries in the world known to have used armed drones, deployed exclusively against nonwhite predominantly Muslim populations in nations and territories that have been pillaged and destroyed by Western conquest.

The besieged Gaza Strip has served as the leading testing ground for both armed and surveillance drones.

Tested on Palestinians

Over the last decade, Israel’s use of robotic warfare against Palestinians has escalated dramatically, with each new military assault on Gaza relying more heavily on drones than the last.

Last summer, Israel’s 51-day bombing campaign against Gaza killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, including more than 500 children.

Based on data collected by the Al Mezan Center for Human rights, a Corporate Watch investigation found that at least 37 percent of those killed, or 840 people, died in drone strikes alone.

Read More

Powerful Video Shows a Syrian Toddler's ‘Rebirth’ From Under the Rubble of a Bombed Building

A screenshot of a YouTube video by Nour Media Center showing the rescue
operation

By Rami Alhames
Good news from war-torn Syria is rare these days. Just last week, the United Nations revised its death toll for the bloody conflict between forces loyal to President Bashar Al-Assad and the factions that are opposed to his rule to more than 191,000. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay lamented that there is “no end in sight.”

With the situation so grim, let’s revisit one of those rare uplifting moments to come out of Syria in the last year. To those who don't believe in miracles, here is one.

This video, which has been watched more than a million times on YouTube via various accounts, shows a Syrian toddler being saved after the young child was completely buried in the ruins of her home following an explosion from a barrel bomb attack in Syria's second largest city, Aleppo.
Originally posted in Arabic by Nour Media Center, the video of the miracle survival was shared by news site euronews and YouTube user Cometotruth on January 24, 2014.

The good news came one week after her rescue on January 29, 2014. ATJEH CYBER WARRIOR shared the English-subtitled video identifying the toddler as a girl named Ghina:

Ghina is alive again after she was pulled from under the rubble. The warplanes shell the buildings, but human beings and children are the victims. Ghina lost her mother when they were buried under the rubble due to shelling. Ghina was lucky, but her mother wasn't. Now Ghina lives with her father and six siblings in their displaced house that lacks the minimum necessities of life.

Ghina is one of thousands of Syrian children who are paying a heavy price in the civil war, now in its third year. More than 191,000 people have died in the bloody conflict for control of Syria between forces loyal to President Bashar Al-Assad and the factions that are opposed to his rule, who first rose up during the wave of Arab Spring demonstrations across the region. Ghina was a victim of the crude barrel bombs that the government has dropped on civilian areas despite international condemnation.

Want to help Syria's children? Take a look at our post “Children Crisis in Syria” to learn how.

Reprinted with permission from Global Voices.

Israeli Soldiers Used Gazans as Human Shields: Testimony Mounts As Bombs Go Silent

Abdul Rahman tells journalist Max Blumenthal that Israeli
troopsforced the Wahadans to stay home before bombing
their house.(Photo tweeted by Max Blumenthal from his
Twitter account on Aug. 27)

By Joey Ayoub
One of Israel's most repeated official claim during the latest war in Gaza was that Hamas was using Palestinian civilians as human shields. Now, several independent journalists, human rights organizations and the United Nations are accusing Israel of using Palestinian civilians as human shields.

On August 26, Israel and the Palestinian factions agreed to halt fighting indefinitely, putting an end to seven weeks of catastrophic destruction and loss of life in Gaza.

At least 2,137 Palestinians were killed, including 577 children, and 10,870 wounded, since Israel launched a massive offensive called Protective Edge against the 40-kilometer-long coastal strip on July 8.

This was Israel's third military operation in Gaza in the last six years. Excessive restrictions from Israel in the Palestinian territories of Gaza and the West Bank aggravate conditions in areas that most of the world and the United Nations considers occupied by Israel.

Seventy-two percent of Palestinians killed in this offensive were civilians, according to the UN. About a third of the wounded children, will be forced to live with permanent disabilities. One-third of Gaza's total population, over 520,000 people, have been displaced of whom 279,389 were taking shelter in 83 UN-run schools.

RELATED STORY: Human Shields, A-Bombs and the Origins of Gaza, Hamas and the Current Conflict — Big Media is Lying by Omission

When American journalist Max Blumenthal went back to Gaza following the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, he interviewed several of Gaza's residents. Here's his report for AlterNet.

Mahmoud Abu Said said Israeli soldiers used him as a human shield as they hunted his neighbors http://t.co/jxuayILtYE pic.twitter.com/hbogrETZ2k
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 27, 2014

One particular incident is worth quoting:

Mahmoud said the Israeli troops dragged him back into his house, blindfolded him and wrapped him in a blanket on the floor as they began to blow holes in the walls to use as makeshift sniper slits — what US troops in Afghanistan called “murder holes.” Then the soldiers stripped Mahmoud to his underwear, handcuffed him, slammed him against a wall and began to beat him. With an M-16 at his back, they forced him to stand in front of open windows as they hunted his fleeing neighbors, sniping directly beside him at virtually anything that moved. When they were not using him as a human shield, Mahmoud said, the soldiers left him alone in the room with an unleashed army dog who was periodically ordered to attack him.

Defence for Children International – Palestine reports the story of 17-year-old Ahmad Abu Raida from Khuza'a, who claims to have been used as a human shield. But the use of human shields during the Khuza'a Massacre were not limited to Abu Raida. His story echoes two testimonies of a 32 year-old and a 56 year-old man from Khuza'a collected by the American-Jewish news site Mondoweiss.

Israel's Use of Palestinian Civilians (Even Children) as Human
Shields Has Been Documented (On Video)
For a Long Time

The Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights also gathered testimonies from Gazans claiming to have been used as human shields. The man featured below explains how his father was killed:

“My father made a step forward, came closer and spoke to them in Hebrew. And said: we are a peaceful people, we love peace. He kept repeating it in Arabic several times. We love peace. My father was an elderly man and holds a Spanish traveling document. My dad made one step forward, hardly a step on the stairs. As he put his foot on the step, he was shot twice in the heart.”

Before himself and three children were taken to be used as human shields:

“They ordered us to take off our clothes and tied our hands up. They took us to one of the rooms and used us as shields, making us stand at the windows as if we were looking outside. I was at one window and three children from my family at another. The soldiers then began firing around us.”

It is important to note that using Palestinians as human shields is not a new Israeli practice. As early as 2002, both international and Israel NGOs reported of Israel's use of Palestinians as human shields. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch reported of its use during the Battle of Jenin as part of Israel's Operation Defensive Shield during the Second Intifada. Israeli Human Rights NGO B'TSelem reported in 2006 of a particular incident in which six civilians, including two minors, were used as human shields in Beit Hanun:

After seizing control of the buildings, the soldiers held six residents, two of them minors, on the staircases of the two buildings, at the entrance to rooms in which the soldiers positioned themselves, for some twelve hours.

The IDF admitted to using Palestinians as human shields at least 1,200 times during the Second Intifada (2000-2005). Despite the fact that the practice was banned by the Israeli High Court in 2005, it continued during the 2008-2009 war in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead). Following the war, the UN Human Rights Council condemned Israel's use of Palestinians as human shields.

Breaking the Silence, the Israeli NGO composed of IDF soldiers and veterans collecting stories of their experiences in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as well as Amnesty International, accused Israel of continuing to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing them to stay in their homes. After invading Palestinians’ homes, Israeli soldiers forced civilians, including children, to stay in one room of the house while they used the remaining rooms as military positions.

In 2013, the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child accused Israel of “continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants”

Reprinted with permission from Global Voices.