Israel defies Biden’s demand to increase aid, or else – Day 394

Compilation of news reports – IAK staff 

Monday was the thirty-first consecutive day of the Israeli occupation forces’ aerial, ground, and naval bombardment of northern Gaza. The siege has included blocking supplies of food, water, medicine, and fuel, destroying homes, demolishing entire residential blocks, attacking hospitals, and assassinating individuals trying to escape.

Over 1,800 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its siege of northern Gaza.

At least 17 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and 86 others injured in the past 24 hours, according to the enclave’s Health Ministry.

Israel’s attacks in Lebanon have killed at least 16 people and wounded 90 more over the past 24 hours, according to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health.

Newborn babies wounded as Israel attacks Gaza’s Kamal Adwan Hospital

Eid Sabbah, the director of nursing at Kamal Adwan Hospital, said Israel’s attack on the facility wounded newborn babies and forced the evacuation of its nursery.

“The children’s ward with the incubators was hit by Israeli warplanes and quad-copter drones. The upper floors were damaged and some of the children and newborn babies were injured,” he told Al Jazeera by telephone.

“Journalists, nurses and other medical staff were also injured,” he said.

“The nurses took the children to the lower floors but those floors don’t have the equipment needed to cater to the newborns who need incubators and intensive care. Those children and newborns came under direct fire. One child was forced to have emergency surgery. The staff were shocked by this new attack because we had already come under fire just the day before.”

As we’ve been reporting, Kamal Adwan is the last partially functioning hospital in besieged northern Gaza. The latest attacks come a week after Israeli forces raided the facility and detained dozens of people, including nearly all of its medical staff.

Four-day-old child only survivor in ICU after attack on Gaza hospital

A four-day-old child, Mohammed, is the only survivor at the intensive care unit (ICU) of Kamal Adwan’s Hospital in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, doctors told Al Jazeera from the facility, which has been under the Israeli military siege.

Israeli artillery last week targeted the hospital’s facilities, including the ICU, killing several children. Patients have been battling to stay alive amid electricity outages and a severe shortage of basic supplies, including IV solutions.

Mohammed’s family was reported to have been killed and the baby was struggling to survive after the oxygen station that aided his breathing was destroyed.

Israel to “execute” medical staff at Kamal Adwan hospital

As the assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital continues, the Director of the hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya told Al-Jazeera, “It appears that a decision has been made to execute all the staff who refused to evacuate the hospital.

“There are numerous injuries among the medical staff and patients, and the medical teams are unable to move between the hospital departments or save their injured colleagues.”

Israel reduces aid to ‘lowest’: 30 per day for 2m Palestinians in Gaza; Biden admin withholds judgment

Israel reduced the daily number of humanitarian aid trucks allowed into the Gaza Strip to just 30 in October, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said Monday.

“This is the lowest in a long time, bringing the assistance back to the level of the beginning of the war,” Philippe Lazzarini said on X, emphasizing that these 30 daily trucks “cannot meet the needs of over 2 million people, many of whom are starving, sick, and in desperate conditions.”

He noted that these trucks “represent only 6% of the supplies (commercial and humanitarian) allowed into Gaza before the war.”

On October 13, the Biden administration sent a letter to the Israeli government, giving a 30-day deadline for Israel to drastically increase aid. The implication was that failure to do so would violate US laws governing foreign military assistance, possibly triggering a halt in US military aid to Israel.

As Philippe Lazzarini pointed out, humanitarian aid has actually dropped since the letter was sent.

In a State Department briefing on Monday, spokesperson Matt Miller was asked about the humanitarian aid in Gaza, specifically in light of the letter and upcoming deadline. Here is part of his response:

So I can’t give you an assessment on the food situation. We have seen different routes open, and there were days when an increased number of trucks went in.

For the actual number of trucks per day, I don’t have an assessment standing here. It’s all public information; you can look at it from the United Nations and compare the number of trucks that go in one week versus the previous week versus a month ago or two or three months ago.

We are not at the end of where we are able to make an assessment. But I can tell you the situation has not been good enough for some time, and the situation has not improved sufficiently in the 21, 22 days, whatever it is since we sent that letter.

There are – is still a week or so to go until we reach the end of the period, but there is much more that we need to see them do.

UN still waiting to see Israel’s evidence against UNRWA

Israel has officially notified the United Nations it’s cancelling the agreement that regulated its relations with the UN relief organization for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) since 1967.

Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz ordered his ministry to notify the UN of the cancellation. Katz said the UN “was presented with countless pieces of evidence that Hamas operatives are employed by UNRWA and about the use of UNRWA facilities for terrorist purposes – yet nothing was done about this”.

In response, UNRWA director of communications Juliette Touma said in addition to a UN oversight office’s investigation, UNRWA received one formal accusation directly from Israeli authorities, alleging 100 of its staff were members of Palestinian armed groups.

When UNRWA asked to see the evidence and sought more information and cooperation from Israel about the allegations, it received no response, she said.

Mainstream media Associated Press investigates Israel’s attacks on Gaza hospitals

One of the most startling aspects of Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza has been the destruction wreaked on the territory’s health sector. Over the past 13 months, the Israeli military has besieged and raided at least 10 hospitals, saying the attacks are a military necessity because Hamas uses the facilities as command and control bases.

The Associated Press examined the raids late last year on three hospitals in northern Gaza — al-Awda, Indonesian and Kamal Adwan hospitals — interviewing more than three dozen patients, witnesses and medical and humanitarian workers as well as Israeli officials.

Israel has presented little or even no evidence of a significant Hamas presence at the three. The AP presented a dossier listing the incidents reported by those it interviewed to the Israeli military spokesman’s office. The office said it could not comment on specific events. All three hospitals have come under fire or been raided again in recent weeks.

(Read the full investigation here.)

NOTE: This is a newsworthy story because mainstream media (MSM) outlets rarely tell the unvarnished truth when it comes to the issue of Palestine and Israel (this has been the case for decades).

ALSO FROM ASSOCIATED PRESS: Still wrecked from past Israeli raids, hospitals in northern Gaza come under attack again

Israeli pogroms ravage West Bank towns

Israeli settlers carried out brutal attacks against Palestinians and their property Sunday night and Monday, including arson, in several areas of the occupied West Bank.

The attacks include attempts at land theft, according to researcher Hassan Breijeh, who said on Monday afternoon that settlers “began plowing dozens of dunams of citizens’ lands in the areas south of Bethlehem, in preparation for seizing them.”

Settlers also attacked the village of Burqa east of Ramallah earlier on 4 November, setting fire to homes and olive trees.

More than 20 vehicles in the city of Al-Bireh were torched and destroyed by the settlers.

Hundreds of Israeli terrorist settlers launched a brutal attack on the city of Ramallah, setting fire to numerous Palestinian homes and vehicles, then moved to the main road connecting Ramallah to other cities, where they targeted Palestinian cars passing by, injuring a woman by hurling stones at her vehicle.

Video shows huge blasts in southern Lebanon border village

 

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Fake document scandal reveals Netanyahu’s efforts to undermine ceasefire talks

Israeli internal intelligence arrested four Israelis, one of whom works in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, on charges of leaking and falsifying classified documents concerning the ongoing war on Gaza, an Israeli court revealed over the weekend.

The fabricated documents allegedly leaked by one of Netanyahu’s aides were falsely attributed to the late Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar.

The revelations of the recent fabrications repudiate Israeli propaganda claims of Hamas’s alleged intransigence in ceasefire negotiations throughout the war, especially during the last round of negotiations over the summer.

During those negotiations, Netanyahu had insisted that Israel must maintain a permanent military presence along the Philadelphi corridor, a strip of land bordering Gaza and Egypt, because he claimed that Hamas was using it to smuggle weapons and supplies.

At around the same time, the leaked documents falsely claimed that the Philadelphi corridor was to be used by Hamas to smuggle Israeli captives out of Gaza alongside Sinwar

These recent revelations offer further evidence that it was not Hamas that stood in the way of a ceasefire over the summer, but Netanyahu’s intransigence.

According to Israeli reports, highly classified documents acquired by the Israeli army in Gaza were misquoted, misattributed, and selectively leaked alongside fabricated information to the media in a way that served Netanyahu’s purpose of sabotaging a potential ceasefire and captives exchange deal — in service of his agenda of prolonging the war.

(Read the full article here.)

Rights Groups Demand End to ‘Heavy-Handed’ Crackdowns on Pro-Palestine Campus Protests

Three leading human rights groups on last week responded to U.S. university and college crackdowns on pro-Palestine campus demonstrations by jointly calling on higher education presidents and administrations to respect and protect “the right to protest under the First Amendment and other international human rights law,” citing potentially unlawful uses of force.

“Universities are responsible for protecting both physical safety and free expression on campus,” Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, said in a statement. “It’s deeply concerning to see universities needlessly expose students to police violence for peacefully expressing their political opinions. We’re urging schools once again to exercise restraint, practice de-escalation, and protect free speech and dissent on campus.”

In the open letter, the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote that “we are exploring claims of heavy-handed and excessive responses by some university and college administrators and police following campus protests in support of Palestinian rights. In many cases, peaceful protests were met with use of force by campus police or local law enforcement summoned by university officials.”

(Read the full article here.)

MORE NEWS:

STATISTICS OCTOBER 7, 2023 – NOVEMBER 4, 2024:

Palestinian death toll from October 7, 2023 – November 4, 2024: at least 44,159* ( 43,391 in Gaza* – 69% are women and children, according to Gaza’s Media Office). [The Ministry’s figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry, which found claims of data fabrication implausible.]

This is expected to be a significant undercount since thousands of those killed have yet to be identified – and at least 768 in the West Bank (~166 children). This does not include an estimated 10,000 more in Gaza still buried under rubble (4,900 women and children).

In July 2024, the Lancet said: “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.

Ralph Nader earlier estimated 300,000 Palestinians may have been killed in Gaza.

• At least 45 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons (27 from Gaza, 25 from West Bank).
• At least 41 Palestinians have died due to malnutrition (at least 37 of them children)**.
• About 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are currently displaced.
• Almost 500,000 Gazans are currently experiencing catastrophic levels of food insecurity.

Palestinian injuries from October 7 – November 4, 2024: at least 108,647 (including at least 102,347 in Gaza and 6,300 in the West Bank, including 830 children). [It remains unknown how many Americans are among the casualties in Gaza.]

Reported Israeli death toll from October 7, 2023 – November 4, 2024: ~1,574 (~1,139 on October 7, 2023, of which ~32 were Americans, and ~36 were children); 396*** military forces since the ground invasion began in Gaza (most recent: Nov 2); 39 military and civilians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel) and~10,000 injured.

The death toll in Lebanon since October 8, 2023 is at least 3,002, with 13,492 injuries. An estimated 1.34 million have been displaced.

NOTE: It is unknown at this time how many of the deaths and injuries of Israelis on October 7 were caused by Israeli soldiers.

*Previously, IAK did not include 471 Gazans killed in the Al Ahli hospital blast since the source of the projectile was being disputed. However, given that much evidence points to Israel as the culprit, Israel had previously bombed the hospital and has attacked many others, Israel is prohibiting outside experts from investigating the scene, and since the UN and other agencies are including the deaths from the attack in their cumulative totals, if Americans knew is now also doing so.

**Euro-Med Monitor reports that Gaza’s elderly are dying at an alarmingly high rate. The majority die at home and are buried either close to their residences or in makeshift graves dispersed across the Strip. There are currently more than 140 such cemeteries. Additionally, according to Euromed, thousands have died from starvation, malnourishment, and inadequate medical care; these are considered indirect victims as they were not registered in hospitals. 

***The figure does not include the reportedly 56 Israeli soldiers – nearly 16% of the total Israeli military deaths – killed due to friendly fire in Gaza and other military-related accidents. 

† For most of the conflict, women and children accounted for about 70% of deaths in Gaza, with children making up a little over 40% of those killed, according to official statistics.

Find previous daily casualty figures and daily news updates here.

• Human rights reports on Israel-Palestine (regularly updated)
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• How Israel’s quadcopters traumatize, maim and kill Palestinians in Gaza
• Israeli society’s dehumanization of Palestinians is now absolute
• The unpublished genocide diaries of Refaat Alareer