Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: NGO lies

Showing posts with label NGO lies. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 08, 2023

Palestinian journalists are being attacked daily - by Palestinians. World media and NGOs actively SUPPRESS this information.

Here is a list of attacks on journalists by Hamas, the PA and Palestinian protesters in just the past two weeks by the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA).

August 1:

The Palestinian General Intelligence Service had kidnapped the freelance journalist SAMI SAEED ALSAAI (43 years old) at around 12:00PM yesterday, Monday, in Nablus, and took him to an unknown place. According to the journalist’s wife, four masked men dressed in black came to the journalist’s workplace in two cars, one of which had yellow license plates, and kidnapped him at gunpoint.

MADA also strongly condemns the attack by members of the internal security of Hamas government in Gaza Strip against journalists in Gaza Strip while covering the peaceful demonstrations that took place therein, calling for an improvement in the living conditions of citizens. Individuals in civilian clothes - identifying themselves as members of the Internal Security Service - assaulted Palestine TV and Abu Dhabi TV reporter, journalist WALID ABDEL RAHMAN, while covering the peaceful event in Jabalia Camp, in the northern Gaza Strip, last Sunday. They insulted him and forced him to stop the coverage.

In the same context, the freelance journalist EHAB AL-FASFOUS was threatened by the investigation and internal security members while covering the same event in Khan Younes, southern Gaza Strip.

August 6:

The security services of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and the Internal Security Forces in Gaza Strip, have increased their aggression against journalists in a violent manner that threatens the professional work of journalists, which is a bad indicator of the reality of media freedoms that is witnessing bloody violations. For instance, the reporter, ALI AL-SAMOUDI, was injured by shrapnel in the head as a result of the shooting in Jenin camp yard, while the citizens were celebrating the shooting attack that took place in "Tel Aviv" yesterday, Saturday. The security personnel also targeted the reporter of "Quds News Network" MOHAMMED ABED with a gas bomb directly at the event.

This was preceded by a group of Al-Shabibah members assaulting a group of journalists at Hebron University a few days ago, during which journalist NIDAL AL-NATSHEH was flagrantly assaulted.

The situation in Gaza Strip is not any better than this, as the attacks of the Internal Security Service affected many journalists yesterday, Saturday, as the security services of Hamas Authority arrested a number of journalists, namely, MOHAMMED AL-BABA, the cameraman of the French Agency, and the journalist, BASHAR TALIB, for about 45 minutes inside Jabalia police station, north of Gaza City, before they were released after their cameras and mobile phones were searched.

The security members also arrested journalist MOHAMMED FAYEZ ABU AOUN, journalist YAHYA HASSOUNA, journalist MOHAMMED AL-HADDAD, and journalist IHAB AL-FASFOUS, who was attacked, and his phone was confiscated before it was returned to him. As for the journalist, MOHAMMED ISMAIL AL-HADDAD, he was threatened by a person in civilian clothes who identified himself as a member of the Investigation Department, as soon as he was filming, and informed him that "there is a decision to ban filming and asked him to stay away from the place”.

Meanwhile, journalist FOUAD JARADA and his colleague MUAMMAR ABU TABIKH were threatened via phone of a special number “not to engage in any journalistic work on the "We Want to Live" movement in Gaza”.

At least two of these journalists have received major media coverage when they were injured by Israeli forces.

Ali al-Samoudi was injured last year in the incident that killed Shireen Abu Akleh, and he was interviewed extensively at the time. This time, Palestinian and world media have not written a word about his being injured in the head by a bullet.

AFP cameraman Mohammed al-Baba was injured at a Gaza rally in 2018 by a gunshot blamed on Israel and that story was covered by wire services. But when Hamas arrests the same AFP journalist and confiscates his equipment, even AFP doesn't report it.

Perhaps even more shocking is that even though all these attacks and far more are documented by MADA, including in their monthly reports, the Committee to Protect Journalists has not said a word about Palestinian repression of press freedoms since February 2022. In that same time period they have issued dozens of alerts against Israel.

CPJ routinely reports on journalists injured and arrested worldwide - but ignores when it is done by Palestinian authorities. This means that even the major international NGO whose mission is to protect press freedoms is actively suppressing news of Palestinian violations of those freedoms.

(h/t GnasherJew)

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The first paragraph of the American Anthropological Association's BDS resolution refers to a fictional Palestinian organization (update)

This week, the American Anthropological Association voted to boycott all Israeli academic institutions.

The resolution that they approved is antisemitic. It says that Israel's very existence is "apartheid", not "settlements" or "occupation", saying that "from the onset of the Nakba, the catastrophic events of 1948 that led to the mass expulsion and displacement of Palestinians from their homes, Palestinians—including activists, artists, intellectuals, human rights organizations, and others—have documented and circulated knowledge of the Israeli state’s apartheid system and ethnic cleansing."

The first paragraph of the resolution is all the proof you need that there was no research or academic rigor that went into this decision.

Whereas, in 2005, 175 Palestinian civil society organizations, including the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE), issued a call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli state, in support of the Palestinian struggle for human and political rights, including the basic right of freedom;

The very first paragraph invokes the antisemitic BDS movement as justification for the boycott, blindly accepting whatever accusations it makes against Israel. The following paragraphs are all essentially cut and pasted from BDS materials. No one at AAA did any fact checks on the assertions in the rest of the resolution.

But what about the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees? Their support for a boycott is considered the linchpin from which the entire resolution gets is legitimacy. Who are they?

The PFUUPE does not exist in any real sense.

It has no webpage. It has no Facebook account. It has no Twitter account.

It does have a phone number, which is also the main phone number of Palestine Polytechnic University and the office number of that university's president, Dr. Amjad Barham

He is the president of the PFUUPE according to his CV.

Is it not strange that the president of a federation of unions is also the president of a university that those unions would naturally make demands of for better benefits and working conditions? There appears to be a conflict of interest there.

But not if the PFUUPE is fictional.

There is no evidence that the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees has a single member outside Dr. Barham. It apparently does not have bylaws, or membership fees, or benefits, or recruitment materials, or a board, or committees, or elections, or a vice president.

It is one person named Amjad, a man who lists being able to use a PC and the Internet on his resume, and who issues regular press releases in the name of all Palestinian academics. Nearly all of those are about boycotting Israel. He even managed to parlay his one man organization into a Guardian op-ed - again, advocating boycotting Israel, which appears to be the only purpose of this purported federation.

Many other of the "175 Palestinian civil society organizations" that signed the BDS "call" for boycotts appear to be equally fictional, tiny one-person operations created just for the purpose of appearing to be part of a greater whole. Many of them are not even based in the borders of British Mandate Palestine - these "Palestinian civil society" organizations are in Syria and Lebanon and Canada - but they are presented as "Palestinian" to promote the myth that the BDS movement was initiated by Palestinians.

The American Anthropological Association didn't check out whether the PFUUPE that they refer to in their very first paragraph is a real organization. They have no intellectual honesty at all. And any academic who remains a member of an organization that cannot be trusted to check the facts in its own resolutions is not interested in truth either.

UPDATE: GnasherJew did find a Facebook page for this union.

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UN-OCHA moving the goalposts to make Israel look bad

The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the Palestinian territories comes out with a report every month about imports, exports, entrances and exits from Gaza.

In its report on June, it says:

In June, the Israeli authorities allowed 42,220 exits of people from Gaza (in most cases, travelers exited multiple times). This is 13 per cent higher than the exits in May, and 19 per cent higher than the monthly average in 2022. However, it is 92 per cent lower than the monthly average in 2000, before the imposition of category-based restrictions by the Israeli authorities.

They are comparing the number of exits with 2000 - when thousands of Israelis still lived in Gaza and traveled freely in and out every day? Before the second intifada when checkpoints needed to be enforced? Of course the number of exits will never be nearly as high as in 2000; the borders were porous then.

If they were to compare with any previous year, they should - and normally do - compare it to the time between Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and when Israel started restrictions on Gaza after Hamas violently took over the territory in 2007. Otherwise it is comparing apples to oranges.

So let's look at previous UN charts.

Here's a UN chart from 2016 that was already deceptive: starting in 2004 when Israelis left Gaza so part of the year there were many, many more exits; and showing that in March 2006 Israel started its restrictions on Gaza workers. So if there is any year that the UN should compare against, it is 2005.

In 2005, the monthly average of exits was 31,424. Today, it is significantly higher - as mentioned, over 42,000 last month, and in fact earlier this year it surpassed 50,000 some months.

The headline should be that Israel now allows more freedom of movement for Gazans than at any time since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. But the UN cannot have a headline that makes Israel look good, can it? So instead of comparing to 2004 or 2005, as it always did before now, it makes up a new benchmark: 2000, a completely artificial and irrelevant date.

Here is UN-OCHA's new chart where they, for the first time, added the year 2000 with its "0.5 million" figure - just to minimize how much Israel is doing to make Gazan's lives easier.

This is lying with statistics.

(correction on years h/t Irene)

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Horrifying: Palestinian terror groups use children to build and plant their explosives

PCHR reported on July 3 that Israeli forces shot Ali Hani Al-Ghoul in the chest, killing him. It admitted that he was a member of an armed group and said he was 20 years old.

Later, the Israel/Palestine Timeline site said that al-Ghoul was shot in the head, and that he was 17 years old.

His mother was interviewed:

His mother brought back some of her memories with her little Ali, which she will never forget; She says, "About two years ago, Ali used to come home at night, with his clothes dusty and his eyes red, and he was suffering from severe pain, which was caused by the explosive materials he was using."

"Ali was one of the resistance fighters who made explosive devices in the Jenin camp from primitive materials, but their impact was great and effective by damaging many Israeli military vehicles," according to his mother, who expressed her pride in what her son did and what his friends say about his actions that are beyond his age.

That means that Ali al-Ghoul had been building bombs since he was 15 years old.

Now, the Jenin Brigades division of Islamic Jihad have issued a video celebrating Al-Ghoul's "martyrdom" - showing him building IEDs together with other children.

It doesn't show anyone else's faces, but you can see that the hands that are stuffing explosive powder into IEDs are not those of full grown adults.

Jenin's bomb-makers are children.

Ali's mother continues: “Before Ali left the house, he carried a sack full of explosive devices on his shoulder, and later he planted them in the streets and alleys of Jenin camp with the help of his friends, who confirmed that Ali participated with them in a confrontation with the occupation from zero distance."

Palestinian terror groups recruit children to build bombs.

They encourage kids to turn their homes into bomb depots.

They instruct children to plant these bombs in the roads of Jenin where they can kill not only the children but anyone who happens to come by.

And they freely and proudly admit this.

This is not just child abuse: this is systemic and widespread child abuse that is a source of pride to Palestinians.

Now listen to the silence from UNICEF, the UN Human Rights Council, Defense for Children-International, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

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UNRWA spreads bogus statistics to other NGOs

This is a strange one.

The Development Initiatives website used to have very extensive statistics on aid given, both from donors and to which recipients. But its latest report only discusses the top ten recipients, and this year the Palestinians are not listed among the top ten - they had been at or near the top from the early 2000s to at least 2015.

But it does mention the Palestinians in a different context.

In "Figure 2.6: The numbers of forcibly displaced people across the globe increased by almost 20% between 2021 and 2022, to more than 100 million people," it gives numbers of "forcibly displaced" people in "Palestine" for 2021 and 2022:

It says that the number of "forcibly displaced" Palestinians in the territories increased from 2.4 million to 2.9 million in only one year.

The footnotes say that it got these statistics from UNRWA: "Data is organised according to UNHCR's definitions of country/territory of asylum. According to data provided by UNRWA, registered Palestine refugees are included as refugees for Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. UNHCR data represents 2022 mid-year figures, and UNRWA data for 2022 is based on internal estimates."

First of all, it is absurd to say that the number of UNRWA registered refugees in the West Bank and Gaza increased by 21% in one year. There was no new influx of refugees to the territories and natural growth increase is nowhere near that number.

Secondly, to call people who pretend to be "refugees from Palestine" but who live in Palestine "refugees," and not even "internally displaced persons." is equally absurd.

Thirdly, UNRWA themselves publishes these statistics, so there was no reason for UNRWA to provide an "estimate" for 2022. According to them, in the fourth quarter of 2021 there were 2,400,208 "registered refugees" in the territories, in the fourth quarter of 2022 there were 2,454,903. That is an increase of 2%, not 20%.

It is possible that someone made a mistake - if a decimal point moved from an increase of 50,000 to 500,000, that would explain this discrepancy. But still, this is something that should have been checked.

One other interesting anomaly: according to this chart, a small but not insignificant number of "refugees" are seeking asylum in the Palestinian territories themselves. Where are they from? They couldn't be Palestinian - are they Africans who managed to make it to Gaza or the West Bank? The Palestinian Basic Law does not have any section about asylum seekers, and gives only a general statement about citizenship being regulated by law.

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Percentage of Israeli Arab women with academic degrees doubles, number with jobs jumps too

More indication of how absurd the "apartheid" libel is. From Globes:

According to the Labor Market Report for 2022 released today by the Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs and Social Services, over a decade, there has been a dramatic rise in the number of Arab women acquiring higher education, which has translated into greater participation in the labor market.

In 2020, the report states, a quarter of Arab women aged 30-34 held academic degrees, double the proportion in 2010, when just 13% of Arab women in this age group held degrees. In the 29-31 age group, the proportion of those with degrees reached 27% in 2020.

The figures are in line with those of the Council for Higher Education in Israel, which also show a substantial rise in the number of female Arab students. The proportion of women among Arabs studying for a first degree has remained steady in recent years at about 69%, but the proportion of Arabs in the undergraduate student body as a whole has risen from 16% in 2014 to 20% today, almost the same as their proportion in Israel’s population.

There is a correlation between higher education, participation in the workforce, and level of pay for those in work. People with academic degrees are found to earn more than those without, even after control for variables such as occupation, industry, gender, ethnic group, and location. ...

The general level of participation in the workforce by Arab women, which historically has been very low in comparison with women in other sections of the population, has also risen significantly. According to the Labor Market Report, in 2014, the rate of participation in the workforce by Arab women was just 33%....By 2022, the rate of participation among Arab women jumped to 42%.

This is a direct result from increased investment by the government into the Arab sector, a story that hardly gets any coverage in world media.

Needless to say, this is the diametric opposite of what one would expect to see in an apartheid regime. So you will never read about this in Amnesty or HRW reports, because when their lies are contradicted by facts, they try to bury the facts.

(h/t Yoel)

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UN Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs quotes antisemitic Hamas-linked newspaper

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur for the territories, tweeted:

The Quds News Network is a Hamas-affiliated news site. In this case it translated the words of Ben Gvir incorrectly - he threatened terrorists, not Palestinians. Haaretz quoted him as saying, “Our government killed the most terrorists, over 120 in the past six months, but a lot of work remains – and we have to lend a helping hand to soldiers and the police to support and strengthen them.”

But an Arab or Hamas media outlet lying about what an Israeli said is hardly news. Far more interesting is that this is where a UN representative gets her news from.

Quds News is an unabashedly pro-terror site, like most Palestinian media. But it is also explicitly antisemitic.

One article denies that Jews are a people, quoting the Khazar myth and others.

This Quds News article about the Holocaust says that Jews believe "the suffering of the Jews cannot be compared to the suffering of the rest of the peoples, since the Jews are the people chosen by the Lord El, while the rest of humanity becomes in an inferior stage of this choice, - being gentiles - and therefore the suffering of the Jews - the supreme race of all - is not similar to the suffering of inferior Gentiles." In this quote, Quds News is echoing the justifications of the Nazis for genocide.

It then says that Palestinians are the primary victims of the Holocaust, not Jews.

This is all classic antisemitism. It is hate that the news site is quite proud of and not at all ashamed of. So it is no surprise that Francesca Albanese considers an antisemitic, Hamas news site to be a reliable source for her to quote.

(h/t Israellycool for Hamas link)

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Palestinians complain that Israel halted furniture exports from Gaza. They won't mention the reason.

On May 5, Middle East Monitor reported:

Israeli authorities yesterday banned the export of furniture products from the occupied Gaza Strip.

The economic ministry said in a statement that the Israeli move aimed at "inflicting more losses on the enclave's industries that have been suffering due to the blockade."

The ministry called on the international community "to pressure Israel to allow freedom of import and export without restrictions so that the different industries in Gaza can prosper and overcome challenges resulted from the blockade."

So according to Gaza authorities, Israel just decided to stop furniture exports to punish them for no reason. And Arabic media also complains about the ban, which continued into June, asking the international community to pressure Israel to resume the exports and stop its arbitrary punishment of a specific industry.

But there was a reason.

On May 3, Israeli authorities foiled an attempt to smuggle guns, silencers and cartridges of bullets from Gaza to terrorists in the West Bank - inside furniture.

So now, Israeli authorities must update their procedures to ensure that future attempts to smuggle weapons in furniture are not successful.

Notice that the weapons appear to have been deliberately hidden in metal components, not only wood, so standard X-ray scanning might not catch them.

It will take time to come up with a solution that would catch any attempts to export weapons inside items like furniture.

Yet there is no anger for the would-be weapons smugglers, whose decision hurts all furniture manufacturers in Gaza. On the contrary, "human rights" NGOs are saying that Israeli attempts to stop weapons exports from Gaza is "collective punishment" - after all, it isn't a big deal when Jews get shot by West Bank terrorists, right?

Murdering Jews is not a violation of human rights - but a temporary ban on furniture exports is. And Israel is expected to tolerate its citizens being murdered under the pretext of "human rights."

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The number of mega-large families supported by UNRWA is ballooning. Something isn't adding up.

The more you dig into UNRWA's own website, the sketchier it looks.

UNRWA has a population dashboard showing statistics of those it gives services to (much more than their already wildly inflated "registered refugee" count.)

It shows the size of families that it helps. And some of them are unusually large.

As of the first quarter of this year, UNRWA supports 1642 families of size 15-19, 167 sized 20-24, 36 sized 25-29 and 4 with over 30 members.

The number of mega-families supported, with more than 14 members, has skyrocketed since 2020, going up an astonishing 17%, from 1585 to 1851! The number of families from 10-14 members also went up a great deal, by 14%. At the same time the number of "refugees" only went up by 4.5%.

So what's going on?

There is an outside possibility that there are a few families with over 25 members, because UNRWA allowed men with multiple wives to register. And if the patriarch is a "refugee" then his wives and children are all considered "refugees" as well.

But there is also a good chance that families simply do not tell UNRWA when family members die. Why would they? UNRWA doesn't check, as far as I can tell - they seem to ask people to register deaths on the honor system using an app. Palestinians have been known to not report deaths of family members since the agency began.

Looking at it another way, the population dashboard claims that there are 480461 "refugees" over the age of 70 today (not counting the many non-refugees receiving UNRWA services.) The total number of UNRWA refugees in 1953 was 900,000.

Does it make sense that half the people of all ages living in 1953 are alive today?

They are saying that about 9% of all "refugees" receiving services alive today are over 70, when the population of Palestinians within the area of the British Mandate over 70 stands at about 2%.

UNRWA is not reporting anything close to accurate numbers, and they are exaggerating the number of people they serve a great deal.

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Document at UNRWA site admits UNRWA's definition of "refugee" is not valid in international law

The UN Human Rights Council issued a document last week by its reliably anti-Isrsel team of "experts" demanding that Palestinian "refugees" have the right to "return" under international law.

Right of return of Palestinian refugees must be prioritised over political considerations: UN experts

2022 marked the largest ever increase in the number of forcibly displaced persons worldwide, with over 108 million people across the globe uprooted from their homes, more than half are women and girls....

This reality is all too familiar for the Palestinian people, 75 years since the Nakba - the event that shattered Palestinian lives and severed their ancestral connection to their land during the establishment of the State of Israel. Since then, they have endured forced displacement, dispossession, and disenfranchisement, with their rights to self-determination, restitution, and compensation repeatedly denied. For 75 years, their cry for justice, embodied in the demand for the right to return, has resounded with unwavering determination.

For Palestinians, forced displacement has become part of their life for generations, tracing back to 1947-1949 when over 750,000 Palestinians were forced to flee massacres and mass expulsions and forcible transfers during the birth of the State of Israel. The majority, along with their descendants, are still in neighbouring Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, while 40 per cent of them remain under occupation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since 1967. Progressively, Palestinian exile has scattered them across various nations globally.

Since 1948, both the General Assembly and the Security Council have consistently called upon Israel to facilitate the return of Palestinian refugees and provide reparations. Despite these repeated appeals, Palestinian refugees have been systematically denied of their right to return and forced to live in exile under precarious and vulnerable conditions outside the borders of Palestine.

The thing is, even the UN admits that these Palestinian Arabs are not legally considered refugees.

The UNHCR's Refugee Survey Quarterly in 2010 has an article by Riccardo Bocco, a professor at the University of Geneva, looking at the history of UNRWA. It is hosted at the UNRWA website, today. ASnd it admits what we have been writing here for years: the UNRWA working definition of "Palestine refugee" has nothing to do with international law.

In looking at who is a Palestinian refugee, there is no definitive response. The definition and the number of Palestinian refugees can differ according to the approach (administrative, juridical, political) used to define Palestinian refugees and also according to the social context of interaction between Palestinians (registered refugees or not) and others and the actors defining them. UNRWA, particularly at the beginning of its mandate, lacked a fixed definition; this changed mainly due to a need to delimit the number of relief recipients. When the Agency began its activities, it inherited a legacy of inflated registration: the United Nations Economic Survey Mission recorded approximately 720,000 people, while the number of recipients on the ration rolls of the United Nations Relief for Palestine Refugees (UNRPR) surpassed 950,000. It is the 1952 definition that has become the accepted one and has remained virtually unchanged: “a Palestine refugee shall mean any person whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period June 1, 1946 to May 15, 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict”.

Some remarks should be noted.... [T]he descendants of original registered refugees inherited UNRWA’s administrative title independently of the fact that they may have obtained a nationality and/or left the Agency’s fields of operation.

It is important to emphasize that the UNRWA definition of a Palestine refugee is an administrative one and does not translate directly into recognition by international law. Furthermore, a tacit understanding seems to prevail: UNRWA’s continued existence (and the associated Palestine refugee status) is directly linked to the realization of a permanent resolution to the Palestine refugee issue.

Four crucial facts are listed here:

1. Over 30% of the original "refugee" population UNRWA registered were not refugees, and took that status illicitly. They have never been purged.

2. The UNRWA definition of "refugee" is administrative, not legal, and has nothing to do with the legal definition of refugee under international law and the Refugee Convention.

3. UNRWA "refugees" and their descendants are still considered "registered refugees" even if they move away from UNRWA areas, even if they obtain citizenship elsewhere - not only Jordan but also EU countries and the US. This is a truly absurd situation that is impossible for any real refugee; it is axiomatic that one cannot be a refugee while simultaneously being a citizen of a state. But millions of Palestinians are. So we have an absurd situation where American multi-millionaire supermodels (whose father's family voluntarily walked away from their home in Safed in 1948) are still considered "Palestine refugees."

4. UNRWA has a conflict of interest between staying in business and a sane definition of "refugee." . This is a major reason why it does not have any cessation clauses as UNHCR does. "Palestine refugees" are forever.

All of these facts are damning,. And they are on UNRWA's own website, today.

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The horrors of Ramallah's and Gaza's "occupation" in TikTok videos

Here is a TikTok video, via the incomparable Imshin, unfortunately not translated, from an Egyptian tourist visiting Ramallah. He's mostly complaining about the high prices of everything from groceries to gasoline, claiming it is the most expensive Arab city in the world, even more than cities in the Gulf.

But the luxury he shows is commensurate with the expenses.

He features luxury mansions and apartments, the construction constantly going on, and the gorgeous Birzeit University (2:50) as well as the large amount of empty space and breathtaking scenes of the hills surrounding Ramallah.

This is luxury that Egyptians only see on TV. And it is all under "occupation."

This is a slight detour from Imshin's usual beat of showing "The Gaza You Don't See" such as this video posted also today of a luxury Gaza holiday chalet that can be rented .

Somehow, these parts of Ramallah and Gaza City have escaped the attention of the hundreds of western reporters on the scene. You never see these scenes from Reuters, CNN and the New York Times.

(h/t Yoel)

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To @AmnestyUK, swimming pools in the West Bank are apartheid. But only the ones owned by Jews.

Amnesty-UK tweeted:

Amnesty-UK is saying that thirsty Palestinians are upset by the massive amounts of water that are clearly available for their Jewish neighbors, as they stare longingly at the waste that the Jewish pools symbolize. Clearly they should be angry at the contrast between their own inability to drink a refreshing glass of water to avoid dying of thirst while the Jews frolic in wasteful swimming pools.

So Amnesty must really be upset when those thirsty Palestinians are mocked by extravagant displays of frivolous swimming pools that they see in, for example, Hebron, decorated with a Palestinian flag to twist the knife of their poverty:

Certainly Amnesty is condemning the huge waste of water there, right?

Other pools in the West Bank also include very patriotic flags:

And this one in Birzeit looks like it holds a great deal of water, too.

According to Amnesty-UK, even the smaller pools are a giant waste of water that hurts thirsty Palestinians' feelings and must be condemned:

How dare these heartless people enjoy the water when their neighbors have none!

Obviously a human rights group cannot be accused of antisemitism for treating pools owned by Jews differently from those owned by Palestinians. Perhaps Amnesty-UK is upset over Jews owning private pools while Palestinians next door are deprived of their basic water needs.

We will just have to ignore the Palestinian company Blue Blue Palestine which installs private pools for well-to-do Palestinians every day, in-ground and above ground, from small 600-shekel pools to ones costing tens of thousands of dollars.

I'm sure Amnesty is preparing a 150 page report on Palestinian waste of precious water in their many swimming pools. After all, it is the pools they are upset over, and not the religion of the owners, right? If they treat pools differently because some are owned by Jews, that is pretty blatant antisemitism - and how could that possibly be?

To Amnesty, Jewish pools are apartheid. Palestinian pools are nonexistent. And Amnesty International isn't a hypocritical, Jew-hating organization hiding its bigotry behind the fig leaf of pretending to care about human rights.

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Amnesty International again proves it twists international law against Israel

Amnesty released a quite predictable report on the mini-war in Gaza last month.

As is always the case, Amnesty assumed that ay Israeli actions were war crimes before writing a single word and then fit the facts to their predetermined conclusion.

Amnesty International investigated nine Israeli airstrikes that resulted in the killing of civilians and in the damage and destruction of residential buildings in the Gaza Strip. Three separate attacks on the first night of bombing on 9 May, in which precision-guided bombs targeted three senior Al-Quds Brigades commanders, killed 10 Palestinian civilians, and injured at least 20 others. They were launched into densely populated urban areas at 2am when families were sleeping at home, which suggests that those who planned and authorized the attacks anticipated – and likely disregarded – the disproportionate harm to civilians. Intentionally launching disproportionate attacks, a pattern Amnesty International has documented in previous Israeli operations, is a war crime.

The ICRC says

The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks against military objectives which are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.

The legal definition of proportionality demands that the attacker weigh the military advantage of the attack against the expected loss of innocent life. Israel clearly did this: Amnesty admits the targets were senior terrorist commanders, and Amnesty agrees that Israel used precision weapons meant to minimize collateral damage. But even so, it declares the attacks "disproportionate" without a grain of evidence that the military advantage was not great enough.

Of course, Amnesty doesn't have a clue as to the military advantage of killing senior PIJ terrorists. It doesn't even try to quantify that. But that is the entire point of the principle of proportionality to begin with.

Amnesty is saying that any civilian deaths, even when the attack is clearly against significant military targets, are war crimes - and that is exactly the opposite of what international law says.

Ironically, one of the ICRC's main sources for a detailed discussion of proportionality and the difficulty of defining it comes from....the Israeli High Court. Israel has teams of international law experts who approve these kinds of airstrikes. In this case, certainly Israel knew ahead of time - based on huge amounts of intelligence - that civilians were going to be killed, and it determined that this was a necessary but unfortunate consequence of defending itself legally. Amnesty, with next to no information about the military targets, breezily declares them not to be very important.

As a reminder, the international law standard on what is proportionate allows far, far more dead civilians for far less military advantage.

Amnesty's obsessive hate for Israel and willful ignorance of international law doesn't end there. It describes an airstrike that destroyed a building but didn't hurt anyone:

Israel’s deliberate destruction of civilian homes also took a heavy toll on civilians in the Gaza Strip, including on people living with disabilities.

On 13 May, Israeli forces targeted a four-storey building in the Jabalia refugee camp. The building was home to 42 people from the extended Nabhan family. Five members of the family live with disabilities, including three being wheelchair users.

Hussam Nabhan, an eyewitness to the attack, told Amnesty International he had received a call he believed to be from an Israeli intelligence officer at around 6pm, saying residents of the building had 15 minutes to evacuate. Hussam told the caller that there were people with disabilities in the building and they needed more time, but the caller just repeated the warning.

After the strike, 22-year-old Haneen Nabhan was so traumatized she found it hard to talk, saying that her wheelchair had been buried under the rubble of her home so she could no longer move around independently.

Research by Amnesty International found no evidence that the Nabhan building – and other residential buildings destroyed or damaged during the last two days of the offensive – had been used to store weapons or any other military equipment or that rockets had been launched from their direct vicinity.

“The root cause of this unspeakable violence is Israel’s system of apartheid. This system must be dismantled, the blockade of the Gaza Strip immediately lifted, and those responsible for the crime of apartheid, war crimes and other crimes under international law must be held to account,” said Morayef.

The bias here is undeniable. According to Amnesty, Israel - for no reason whatsoever - targeted a building filled with disabled people, and ensured that it was empty before attacking.

This is a blood libel.

Israel has an extensive methodology for determining valid military targets. Only the most rabid antisemite would claim that Israel went through all the effort - determining a target, warning residents, choosing the appropriate weapons - just to make civilian lives miserable. And only Amnesty International is so self-righteous to assume that their parachuting in and talking to a few residents who are frightened of Hamas is enough of an investigation to determine that the targeted buildings had no military value.

An expert on the laws of armed conflict states, accurately:

For commission of a war crime, a culpable state of mind is an essential element. Article 8 of the ICC’s Rome Statute requires a showing of either intent to harm civilians or recklessness: ordering an attack with the knowledge that the resulting harm to civilians would be “clearly excessive in relation to the … military advantage anticipated.” The high threshold for proof of a culpable state of mind is no accident. Rather, it is a recognition that a less demanding test would not adequately acknowledge the risk of harm that inevitably flows from the fog of war.

Amnesty is not interpreting international law. It is twisting international law to damn Israel - without any evidence whatsoever that Israeli actions were reckless or meant to intentionally harm civilians.

We've come to expect such libels from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, but it is important to call it out each time. Because the pattern of ignoring facts, and blaming Israel for war crimes that all evidence proves otherwise, and of determining the outcome of the faux "investigations" before they even occur - this pattern proves that these NGOs are not interested in the truth, in international law or even in human rights.

Their entire aim is to demonize Israel.

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The world says no to UNRWA's demanding money, yet no one is discussing the obvious solutions

Last Friday, UNRWA held a donor's conference at the UN headquarters in New York. The agency's head laid out its financial problems in his opening remarks.

Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) sounded the alarm about the Agency’s deepening funding crisis. Addressing this year’s Pledging Conference for UNRWA convened by the President of the General Assembly, Commissioner-General Lazzarini warned of the risk of the Agency’s collapse.

“While we are grateful for the pledges announced, they are below the funds that the Agency needs to keep over 700 UNRWA schools and 140 clinics open from September onwards,” said Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.

Some of the Agency’s most committed donors have indicated they will substantially decrease their contributions in 2023.

Today, according to reports, UNRWA announced how many new pledges it received.

The answer is - close to zero.

Sama News reports:

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees UNRWA announced shocking data today, noting that it received $13 million in new pledges during the donors' conference held in New York last Friday.

UNRWA said in a statement today, "Most of the pledges referred to in the conference were merely confirmation of the amounts already received and spent in the first five months of 2023. As expected, donors are using the pledging conference to publicly confirm the support they have already provided to UNRWA this year."

Some of the announced donations, according to the UNRWA statement, were "a public confirmation of the amounts previously discussed and agreed upon with UNRWA. This money has not yet been received, but will be transferred to the agency in the coming months. We've already factored these funds into our financial projections for the rest of the year. This money has already been calculated, and the issue of receiving it will not change our financial situation, as some of the financing pledges referred to are for the year 2024 and beyond. "

UNRWA stressed, "In short, and unfortunately, only about 13 million US dollars have been announced...This funding will help reduce the expected deficit this year. Since we need about 70 million US dollars per month to cover our basic costs, this amount will not be enough to sustain the services after September.”

I could not find this announcement on the UNRWA platforms as of this writing, but it rings true. Donors have been getting tired of forever increasing demands by UNRWA - and since UNRWA has no mechanism to take people off of their rolls, it will keep increasing forever.

We've discussed before what must be done. Some 2 million "refugees" live in Jordan as Jordanian citizens. They should not be getting a dime. Jordan is a sovereign nation and provides education and health care to its citizens; nearly all of the UNRWA recipients there are full citizens, and there is no reason for the world to pay for their shelter, doctors and schooling.

Jordan instead keeps the Palestinian and non-Palestinian citizens in separate schools, separate medical facilities and to an extent separate living areas.

Sounds like apartheid, doesn't it? But this apartheid is funded by the entire world!

There is similarly little reason for UNRWA in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority has its own schools and fairly good medical facilities, Palestinian "refugees" should be allowed to use them like every Palestinian. UNRWA funds could be redirected to the PA for a couple of years to take care of the logistics of combining the two systems, but there is no reason for the world to fund Palestinian "refugees" who live within the borders of British Mandate Palestine - they are not refugees under any reasonable definition.

Of course, nearly all UNRWA aid recipients are not refugees. But before dismantling UNRWA altogether, lets solve its financial problems in a reasonable way without causing undue hardship on those who really are dependent on UNRWA services, in Lebanon, parts of Syria and Gaza.

No one is asking these questions, at least not out loud. But without asking these questions and making the decisions to treat Palestinians just like anyone else in need, using the same criteria and the same eligibility, then things would become far worse for the Palestinians that UNRWA is supposed to be supporting.

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