FACTIFADA: Reference tools for navigating the Israeli-occupied Internet

The following Security Council press statement was issued today by Council President Pascale Christine Baeriswyl (Switzerland).

Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt, writes: “Genocide is a complex and insidious crime; proving destructive intent is an onerous task – yet not when it is so ostentatious, sustained by a political doctrine of ideological hatred and articulated through institutional structures and policies.”

Today the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian land, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza.

Published 15 March 2024. Updated 18 June 2024. “I, Lee Mordechai, write this document as a historian and Israeli citizen, as my testimony to the horrible current situation in Gaza as events are unfolding. I write my personal opinion as an academic, partially because of the disappointing general silence on this issue among many international and Israeli academic institutions, especially those that are well-positioned to comment on it, even as some of my colleagues have bravely spoken out. I do not believe this document will convince many others to change their minds. Rather, I write this publicly to testify that during the war there were and remain Israeli voices who strongly dissented from Israel’s actions.”

What’s notable about this excellent, 47-minute Al-Jazeera investigation is how its simple timeline and stating of the facts of Israel’s relentless destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, uncover an obvious genocidal intent. Israel’s weak propaganda can not hide its undeniably intentional, no doubt Israeli army quadcopter-documented, massacres of people sheltering in hospitals.

The ICJ today ruled to reaffirm its previous rulings and issue new orders to Israel to cease its Rafah offensive. It also ordered Israel to open the Rafah crossing with Egypt for humanitarian aid and international inquiries. It also ordered Israel to report back in one month.

Video and text of statement. “Today’s applications are the outcome of an independent and impartial investigation by my Office. Guided by our obligation to investigate incriminating and exonerating evidence equally, my Office has worked painstakingly to separate claims from facts and to soberly present conclusions based on evidence to the Pre-Trial Chamber.”

Lily Greenberg Call, a special assistant to the chief of staff in the Department of the Interior, became the first Jewish political appointee to resign her post in protest of U.S. President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Army Major Harrison Mann, an active-duty officer with the U.S. Army, publicly announced his resignation on Monday from the Defense Intelligence Agency and US Army over US policy on Gaza―the latest official to leave their post in protest of the Biden administration’s continued support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

THE HAGUE, 10 May 2024. South Africa today filed an urgent request with the Court for the indication of additional provisional measures and the modification of provisional measures previously prescribed by the Court in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel).

Overviews of destruction and eyewitness reports.

The ICJ reaffirmed its 26 January provisional orders to Israel, with only the Israeli ad hoc judge and Judge Sebutinde again voting against, and ruled unanimously in favor of South Africa’s 6 March 2024 request for additional provisional measures to stop the famine in Gaza. The court also ordered Israel to not commit any of the crimes of genocide and to report back in one month.

Israel has been relentlessly casting Al-Shifa as a HAMAS command center for months before the ground war even began. A look back at five months of failed Al-Shifa propaganda.

The IDF’s Twitter account today posted a video declaring: “Hamas terrorist funds found inside Shifa Hospital. Along with the funds themselves were notes thanking the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists for their ‘good work’.” The only problem with this latest piece of failed IDF propaganda was that the video attached to the tweet shows the exact opposite.

On 15 March 2024, OXFAM International released a 26-page briefing paper, “Inflicting Unprecedented Suffering and Destruction: Seven ways the government of Israel is deliberately blocking and/or undermining the international humanitarian response in the Gaza Strip”, to outline how Israel blocks and undermines international humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Les Roberts is an Epidemiologist and Professor Emeritus at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He has taken part in the field measurement of mortality in crises including: Rwanda 1994, more than 30 health Zones in the Democratic Repoublic of Congo 1999-2002, Iraq 2004, Zimbabwe 2007, the Central African Repbulic 2009, 2018, and 2022, and Sierra Leone 2000 and 2014.

Israel—and its supporters—regularly claim that Palestinians lie about how many Palestinians have been killed and injured as a result of Israeli violence. Experts who watch the statistics closely, disagree.

Aaron Bushnell was a US Air Force serviceman who self-immolated outside the US Embassy in Washington DC shouting “Free Palestine” on Sunday 25 February 2024, after explaining in a Twitch livestream that he could no longer be “complicit in genocide” (among other connections to the Israeli military, the USAF acts as the United States’ FedEx for weapons deliveries to Israel.

This latest journalism catastrophe by the Jerusalem Post is comparable to that time it reported on 1 December 2023, with a straight face, that a dead Gazan baby was in fact a ‘rubber doll’ and that video of the devastated relatives holding her corpse was a “Pallywood” production, Israel’s favorite phrase to delegitimize vile things it actually did by claiming visual evidence is just a Palestinian studio video production.

It should go without saying that, with life in the border town of Rafah already an experience of failed ‘shelter’ in tents fashioned from plastic sheets, almost no water or access to medical services, and people subsisting on a few pieces of bread a day, that there is no way to conduct any “evacuation” that would merit being described as “humanitarian.”

The United States announced that it had cut off aid to UNRWA immediately following the International Court of Justice’s ruling in South Africa’s genocide case but the United States—along with every other country in the world—has not taken even a single action against Israel, the party violating the Genocide Convention!

“In light of the ongoing Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and as our people continue their battle for independence, dignity and breaking-free from the longest-ever occupation during which they have drawn the finest displays of bravery and heroism in confronting the Israeli murder machine and aggression. We would like to clarify to our people and the free peoples of the world the reality of what happened on Oct. 7, the motives behind, its general context related to the Palestinian cause, as well as a refutation to the Israeli allegations and to put the facts into perspective.”

Today, on 9 January 2024, COGAT turned up the dial on its gaslighting stove to the very highest setting. Knowing that all the aid Israel has permitted to enter has averaged 76 trucks a day since October 7th, COGAT’s social media team cooked up a 1-minute video featuring spokeswoman Shani Sasson, introduced with the obviously false claim that, “Before the war, an average of 70 food trucks entered Gaza every day. The average last week was 109.”

Israel is conducting genocide by starvation. In mid-December, Israeli government and hasbara accounts began posting links to a new website from the IDF’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), “Operation Swords of Iron: Humanitarian Efforts“. The website offers updates about the humanitarian aid that Israel gives permission to enter Gaza after an intentional, complicated ‘inspection’ process.

While Internet claims of HAMAS atrocities perpetrated against Israeli babies had circulated from October 7, the “HAMAS beheaded 40 babies” story started to spread in earnest after the IDF arranged a October 10 tour for foreign journalists of the Kfar Aza town in Israel.

+972 Magazine was founded in 2010 as an independent, online, nonprofit magazine run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists. Local Call was established in 2014 by +972 Mag to promote citizen journalism, by Just Vision (a team of filmmakers, journalists, storytellers and human rights advocates), and by photographer collective Activestills.