Due to the length of time since we posted about the ground battles in Gaza, we have listed some of the key issues

1. Aid Convoys destroyed
2. The True purpose of the Pier Exposed & the  Nuseirat Massacre
3. Destruction of Hospitals
4. Deliberate destruction of life & infrastructure
5. By the numbers
6. The school massacre
7. The Israeli prison rape scandal
8. Battleground realities
9. The Jabaliya cauldron & the North
10. The Rafah cauldron & the South
11. The Resistance breaks the back of the IOF
12. Abu Obeida statement
13. The cease fire hoax
14. The other fronts
15. The Arab/Muslim street

Our last article on Gaza was dated six months ago – 10^th and 20^th January, 2024. This is an update on the situation in Gaza as a lot has happened in that time period. This was followed by an article was titled: “GAZA- THE GENOCIDE CONTINUES”. https://behindthenews.co.za/gaza-the-genocide-continues-part-4-of-a-4-part-series/. In this we highlight a bit more, but also on the magnitude of problems Israel is facing, especially how its vaunted military machine is being torn apart. We focus on the key events from May 6^th till 15^th August – a period of 3 months by focusing on the strategic aims of Israel in Gaza over this period. We divide the fronts into two: north of the Netzarim Junction, and south of the Netzarim junction.

We have entered a period of breakdown and violence, as the forces pulling apart the old status quo cascade and mutually reinforce one another. See the map below. This was the destruction till end March. The level of destruction has increased over the past four months since. Notice how the north is more heavily destroyed than other parts of Gaza.

Now, remember the original plan by the Rockefellers was as follows:-

1. Destroy the north
2. Push the residents from the north to the south
3. Kill any residents returning to the north
4. Destroy any civic institution, such as hospitals, schools, mosques etc, so that there is nothing for the residents to fall back on
5. Divide the Strip into 2 parts – accomplished by the build out of the Netzarim corridor- then build a pier linked to this,  which would act as an entry point for American and Israeli military forces into Gaza
6. Build a fence/wall right around Gaza to create a buffer zone
7. Kill all those within the buffer zone
8. Destroy all civic institutions in the rest of the Strip
9. Push the remaining residents to the Rafah border in the south
10. Continually bomb them at Rafah and other areas until they flee into Egypt, provided Egypt opens its borders to allow the Gazans to enter Egypt
11. Finally, when all is done, get local Arab puppets to administer it on our behalf
12. Sign the new gas agreement after the PA cedes ownership of the 2 gas fields offshore north Gaza – Marine 1 and 2.
13. Then re-build Gaza into another Dubai on the Med.

After 7 October, it became more and more clear with every passing week that the Israeli goal had nothing to do with retribution over 7 October. It was a campaign to systematically destroy or kill the population of Gaza. This will make it easier to accomplish the game-plan as explained above and in the previous article.

So, Phase One of this conflict has ended, and Phase Two is opening.  We shall now discuss the situation in Gaza.

1. Aid Convoys Destroyed

Remember the aim is to starve the Gazans, by destroying outside aid and help.A UN official described the pier on Gaza’s coast as a ‘wasteful distraction’ as famine looms and Israel continues to limit aid deliveries to the strip’s 2.3 million people by land

The first humanitarian aid transported via the US-built floating pier has reached the Gaza shore, on 17 March, as warnings of looming famine due to the Israeli siege and bombardment of the enclave continue. The first arrival of aid follows two months of work by US forces at a cost of about $320 million and forms part of a larger maritime corridor between Cyprus and Gaza, as Gaza has faced the threat of mass starvation.  

Since the start of the war on 7 October, Gaza received an average of 200 trucks of humanitarian aid per day, according to UN and Israeli military figures, down from 500 before the war.

The pier route has the capacity to handle 150 trucks a day, while the UN estimates that some 1,000 are needed each day for several weeks to compensate for the massive shortages of food, water, medical supplies, and other items that have built up over the past months. The actual number of trucks delivering aid via the pier was 137!!

In June, for a few days, more than 350 trucks entered Gaza, the vast majority either from Israel directly or the Palestinian private sector in the occupied West Bank.

2. True Purpose of the Aid Pier Exposed – the Nuseirat Massacre

The fact that the pier lands at the end of the Israeli-military controlled corridor suggests the IDF wants to be to control the flow of people, military movements and aid. The corridor also links up with “Gate 96,” a new access point on Israel’s border with central Gaza that has recently been opened for aid trucks.

In the early hours of Saturday morning, 8^th June,  Israeli ground forces   hid inside a truck used for the delivery of humanitarian aid to infiltrate the Nuseirat refugee camp on 8 June and perpetrate a new massacre of more than 300 Palestinians.  The aim was to release the four captives in the central Gaza Strip. A wounded Palestinian eyewitness describes the Israeli forces that snuck into Al-Nuseirat refugee camp in a humanitarian aid truck coming from the American pier. “A truck arrived carrying humanitarian aid and clothes, and suddenly 10 soldiers got out and shot me, once in the chest and twice in the feet. The artillery shelling started, and I saw dozens of citizens on the ground, including people with their heads cut off,” a Palestinian man who survived the massacre told reporters.

“The truck came from the American port that the occupation established in the Gaza Sea,” he adds.

“They were in a truck carrying clothes and cooking pans” Israeli media confirmed the troops hid inside a truck described as being used for “furniture delivery.”

 The deadly Israeli attacks on Nuseirat took place around 3:00 AM on 9 May. Israeli jets launched airstrikes on the sprawling Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday morning, The IOF used fighter jets to bomb the Nuseirat camp, and ships offshore also shelled the area, plus artillery shelling. So, the attack on this camp happened from 3 directions- air, sea and land. The captives were withdrawn to the US-built floating pier using the same truck. Gaza health officials have reported that over 300 Palestinians, the majority women and children, were killed during the operation that was launched with the aid of the US army. An additional 400 were wounded.

Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), told Al Jazeera that Al-Aqsa Hospital “is a complete bloodbath … it looks like a slaughterhouse.” “There is blood everywhere. There are many people missing, extremities. It was so horrific.”

“By committing horrific massacres, the enemy was able to free some of his captives, but at the same time, he killed some of them during the operation. The operation will pose a great danger to the enemy prisoners and will have a devastating impact on their conditions and lives,” the statement by Abu Obeida reads.

Several hours later, the IDF announced that a team of police and military commandos had rescued four hostages from Hamas captivity in Nuseirat, taking heavy fire on the way in and out of the camp.

Shortly after the hostages were returned to Israel, reports of massive Palestinian casualties began to surface. Gaza’s health ministry said that “large numbers” of wounded, the majority of them women and children,  arrived at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital shortly after the raid. Videos shared on social media showed dead bodies strewn along the streets of Nuseirat, many of them missing limbs. Several children could be seen among the dead.

One Israeli counterterrorism officer was fatally wounded in the rescue operation, and died shortly after the team returned to Israel, police said in a statement.

 Abu Obeida, “We confirm that what was revealed by American and Hebrew media about American participation in the criminal operation that was carried out today,” Hamas said in a statement, adding that Washington’s involvement “proves once again the complicit role of the American administration and its full participation in the war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip.”

“We call on our Arab and Islamic peoples, and the free people of the world, to put more pressure and escalate the movement denouncing the aggression and genocide in Gaza … We must work to stop it and bring its perpetrators to justice to hold them accountable for their crimes and killing of children and civilians in cold blood,” the statement adds.

 “The enemy was able to free some of its captives, but at the same time, it killed some of them during the operation.”Gaza will remain “a graveyard for invaders.”

Dozens of Palestinians were killed by on Gaza overnight on 9 May as Israel continues to pound the strip indiscriminately in response to the stiff resistance it faces from local fighters. Al-Aqsa TV reported on 19 May that the bodies of 31 Palestinians were recovered from under the rubble of several homes after Israeli bombardment of the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza hours earlier. Israeli attacks persisted across the entirety of the Gaza Strip late on Saturday and early Sunday. Israeli warships also struck the coastal areas of Rafah.  Abu Obeida said on 17 May said the Palestinian resistance in Gaza is prepared for a “long war of attrition” against the Israeli army and revealed that 100 “Zionist military vehicles” have been taken out over the past 10 days across Gaza. 

3. Destruction of Hospitals

Israel deliberately destroyed all of Gaza’s hospitals with US approval and support. There’s not a single functional medical facility left in the enclave, while the direct and indirect death toll could be approaching 200,000.

While the United States government attempts to lecture the world about its supposed “rules based order,” it‘s aiding, arming and providing diplomatic cover for Israel’s unprecedented assault on Gaza’s already collapsed healthcare system. In fact, Israel’s attacks, justified by Washington in some cases, have resulted in the territory being left without a single functional hospital.

It was only two months into the war in Gaza that no functional hospital was standing in the north of the territory. One month later, there a few in southern Gaza that remained partially functional. Today, there is not a single functioning hospital in the entirety of Gaza, with some medics still trying to use the facilities that haven’t been destroyed by bombardment for shelter in which to treat patients with limited supplies, often to no avail. According to the UN, “more healthcare workers have been killed in Gaza since October than were reported killed in all conflicts globally in 2021 and 2022 combined.”

For those medical professionals who remain, Doctors without Borders has reported that some doctors being forced to choose between treating their own family members and other patients. In one horrifying case, Palestinian doctor Hani Bseiso was to amputate the lower part of his teenage daughter’s leg on a kitchen table without anesthetic and using little more than a pair of scissors and gauze. She miraculously survived. Another Palestinian doctor wasn’t as lucky; as he was forced see his son slowly die while amputating his leg without anesthetic. Perhaps the most concerning fact, however, is that hospitals have openly been declared a primary target of the Israeli military’s ground offensive. In November, Israel destroyed the largest medical complex in the besieged coastal enclave. After Israel’s army had violently invaded the hospital, killing dozens of civilians in the process, an analysis published by the Washington Post found “that a tunnel complex had been used by Hamas under the hospital.

Despite the US-Israeli claims having been debunked, Washington did not even issue an apology; as Israel moved on to invade the city of Khan Younis the next month.  “At the heart of the Israeli invasion of Khan Younis was the objective of taking over Gaza’s second-largest medical complex, Nasser Hospital.

Israel would then go on to re-invade both the Nasser Hospital and Al-Shifa Hospital a number of times, ultimately putting both out of service and leaving behind mass graves containing more than 300 crudely buried bodies at both sites. The total number of dead, wounded and missing after the latest re-invasion of Al-Shifa Hospital was reported to be around 400.  In total, all 36 hospitals in Gaza have been either completely or partially destroyed in bombing attacks, or are unable to function as regular hospitals due to a lack of fuel, supplies, sanitation and damage to equipment or facilities. Even more concerning was a recent study conducted for the Lancet medical journal, which concluded that the true Gaza death toll, including indirect deaths, could plausibly be higher. If this conservative estimate is true, that would mean that Israel’s war on the besieged territory has wiped out around 8% of the total civilian population.  The Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll currently sits at roughly 40,000, with around 100,000 plus reported injured and more than 15,000 reported missing under the rubble. Now that the health sector has collapsed, it has severely hindered the ability of healthcare professionals in Gaza to calculate the number of deaths each day, as there are no ways of recovering the remains of many who are frequently found scattered across the streets.  The true number of injuries is even more difficult to know, as most people do not have any access to proper treatment, not bothering to register their injuries with healthcare workers already burdened by an unthinkable number of serious and critical cases. In addition to this, more than 1 million cases of infectious diseases have spread, affecting around half of the entire territory’s population. Due to the dismantling of the health and hygiene systems in Gaza, even basic illnesses are now potentially deadly. With dirt, sanitation, sewage and garbage and the return of diseases not seen in recent memory inside the enclave, the UN has warned that 1.1 million children could be at risk of dying due to the spread of disease. Among these diseases, polio is at the top of the list. Just last week, Israel denied entry of 1 million polio vaccines that could have helped the Gazans.

Unprecedented is an understatement, and explaining what is happening to the people of Gaza due to Israel’s systematic targeting of hospitals and medical workers defies the English language. Yet, the US government continues to supply Israel with all the arms it seeks, protecting its actions in front of an international community in shock. Washington knows all of the details listed above and more, but it continues to aid and abet the horror story unfolding inside the Gaza Strip.

4. Deliberate Destruction of Life & Infrastructure

Israel’s assault on Gaza could lead to between 149,000 and 598,000 Palestinian deaths if it were to end immediately, as estimated by experts for The Lancet. But counting the dead and injured has become increasingly difficult for the ministry as the war drags on, now entering its tenth month, the contributors wrote.  On the 5^th July, the medical journal highlighted that both direct and indirect deaths should be considered. Confirming the number and identities of the dead is also difficult because many are buried under the rubble of homes and apartment buildings bombed by Israeli forces, often in the middle of the night as Palestinians sleep. As a result, the ministry has begun reporting identified deaths, where the victim’s name is known and unidentified deaths, where it is not.

Further, the Gaza Health Ministry count is likely an underestimate, the authors argue. For example, Airwars, a non-governmental organization that became known for tracking deaths during the 2003 US war in Iraq, has found that not all names of identifiable victims are included in the Gaza Health Ministry’s list. The writers point to another crucial factor in determining the number of those killed by Israel’s assault on Gaza: indirect deaths.

“Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years” due to disease, destroyed healthcare infrastructure, and severe shortages of food and water, the authors write. For example, “Children in Gaza have been dying from starvation-related complications since the Israeli government began using starvation as a weapon of war,” Human Rights Watch in April.

“In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. 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,” the authors concluded. Such a “conservative estimate” of the death toll would amount to 7.9 percent of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million. If the conflict was to end immediately with 37,396 direct deaths, and the upper bound of 15 indirect deaths per direct death is used, a total death toll of 598,336, or 26 percent of the population, would be expected. The lower bound of 3 indirect deaths per direct death would result in an estimated 149,584 total deaths.

Because Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza shows Israeli assaults on hospitals, schools, and water infrastructure was not random, and that the IOF is destroying the infrastructure needed to support human life, the mortality rate among Palestinians may remain high long after the assault has stopped.

5. By the Numbers 7 Oct till 20^th June 2024 (8 months and 2 weeks)

• 1,900,000 IDPs in Gaza
• 100,000 plus Gazans injured, 28% adult male
• 70,000 tons of explosives dropped on Gaza (equal to 5 Hiroshima nukes)
• 90,000 housing units completely destroyed
• 200,000 Israeli IDPs from Lebanon border
• 150,000 Israeli IDPs from Gaza border
• 1 million + Jews fled Israel -80% never to return
• 45,000 bombs dropped in Gaza
• 43,000 Gazans killed, including buried under rubble
• 33,000 Gaza targets attacked
• 20,528 Palestinians in Israeli prisons as hostages
• 15,000 rockets launched from Gaza
• 24,520 Gazan children martyred
• 11,000 arrested by Israelis in the West Bank in 2023/4
• 21,000 Palestinians in prison – without charges
• 10,000 Gazans missing under the rubble
• 9,920 Gazan women martyred
• 90,000 IDF needing psychological assistance
• 4,700 sites targeted in Lebanon
• 2,100 Gazan women are missing
• 20,000 Israeli officers and soldiers killed since the start of the war
• 600 + West Bank Palestinians martyred
• 21,000 Palestinian children are missing- and I believe many have been abducted to be sold in sex slavery and many others to be used in satanic rituals- very loved by the Talmudic/Zionist crowd.
• Many of the children may be trapped beneath rubble, detained, buried in mass graves, or lost from their families. Save the Children estimates that at least 17,000 are unaccompanied and separated from their families, while around 4,000 are likely missing under the rubble.

A child protection specialist from the agency stated that “every day we find more unaccompanied children, and every day it is harder to support them. We work through partners to identify separated and unaccompanied children and trace their families, but there are no safe facilities for them – there is no safe place in Gaza.” Thousands of children continue to suffer in Gaza due to severe malnutrition.

6.The School Massacre on 10^th August

The strikes targeted the prayer hall of al-Tabin school in Gaza City as dozens of people lined up to perform the dawn, or Fajr, prayer around 4.30am.  

The school had been turned into a shelter for people displaced from elsewhere in the city due to the destruction of their homes in Israel’s relentless 10-month long bombing campaign. 

Al-Jabri came with her extended family to the school two weeks before the Saturday attack, after their home in the al-Shujaiya neighborhood was destroyed in an Israeli strike that killed seven of her grandchildren.

Zainab al-Jabri, 80, was asleep in a classroom full of displaced women when three explosions rocked the school. She woke up to a scene of panic and chaos, as people rushed to the school’s prayer hall, the target of the air strikes. That’s when she became immediately concerned for her only two sons and their children, who were there to pray. “I used my walker and moved while calling ‘Ziad… Ihab… my sons,’” she recalled. “When I saw the burned pieces of bodies, I realized no one survived.”

Bottom of Form

Al-Jabri’s sons and grandchildren were among more than 100 killed in the Israeli attack on Saturday. My children were the light of my life, but they stole them from me’. “I’m an old, sick woman,” she said. “My children were the light of my life, but they stole them from me. If they left at least one for me,” she added. “The school was full of young, peaceful children, women and old men. We are all peaceful people. I ask God for revenge.”

The Israeli military was quick to take responsibility for the attack. It claimed the prayer hall contained a “military facility” and that 31 of those killed were “terrorists” operating from school. This is a common lie the IOF uses when asked. But, by now, the world has caught onto the “empire of lies” that is the Zionist state and its supporters.

Noah al-Shagnobe, a civil defense worker, told that “most of those killed were children and elderly people”, and they were reduced to shreds and burned body parts due to the intensity of the air strikes. All of the people who were praying in the mosque were killed, and many others were sleeping upstairs – – – We had to walk on the dead bodies trying to get the wounded out of the place. Most of the dead bodies were unrecognizable because they were torn apart.” The Saturday strikes shocked many around the world and sparked international condemnation of Israel. 

In Gaza, the attack was seen as one of the most devastating in the war so far, leaving survivors still grappling with what happened. 

Rebhi Naser, 57, was known for always attending the dawn prayer in the front row of the mosque. On Saturday, he was late to the prayer, a delay that saved his life. The bombs hit the prayer hall as he was making his way over from another corner of the school.  “The pressure and flame of the air strikes knocked me to the ground, I fainted for seconds, and my hands were shaking. I couldn’t move for 20 minutes,” he said. 

Naser, who is originally from Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, had sought refuge at the school in November with 30 family members after their homes were destroyed. 

“Most people in the school used to pray in this small prayer hall, asking God to protect us and end this genocide, – – – We are not terrorists, as they claim. We are all known as peaceful displaced civilian people here, with no interest in politics or causing a threat to anyone. We are human beings of flesh and blood, and we can’t bear pain and more loss. How much more loss must we endure to end this genocide?” he said. Naser, who lost 10 members of his family in the Saturday strike, said he hoped the world could finally look at them as equal people. 

7. The Israeli Prison Rape Scandal

The IOF was hit with yet another  sexual torture scandal, whereby nine soldiers were arrested on 29 July for allegedly physically and sexually torturing men, was depicted in western media as a deviation from Israel’s usual torture methods. Four of the arrested soldiers were later released/charged following widespread riots.Bottom of Form

But this is hardly a new development in the cruelty of the Israeli colonial-settler regime. The Israeli army has been systematically using physical and sexual torture against Palestinians since at least 1967. Indeed, sadism has been characteristic of the Zionist colonists’ treatment of Palestinians since the 1880s, as even Zionist leaders at the time. This sadism and the sexual torture that often accompanies it are rooted not only in European colonial hubris but also in orientalist views that Arabs only “understand force” and are allegedly more susceptible to sexual torture than white Europeans.

The Israeli army’s arrest of the errant soldiers who allegedly gang-raped the Palestinian prisoner has precipitated a furious storm among right-wing Israelis, who make up a majority of the electorate. Dozens of settlers along with members of the Israeli Knesset, attempted to storm two military facilities and a judicial building where the soldiers were being held with the intention of liberating them. Israeli rioters break into the Beit Lid military base holding signs that read ‘The hero soldiers should be released’, following the arrest of soldiers accused of sexually abusing a Palestinian detainee on 29 July. Several Israeli government ministers have also stated the rape of Palestinian prisoners as “legitimate”. This reaction comes even though the Israeli human rights organization reported that Israel has been following a policy of systematic prisoner abuse and torture since last October, subjecting Palestinian detainees to acts of violence – including sexual abuse.

Israeli Channel 12 releases a video showing soldiers allegedly sexually abusing a Palestinian prisoner at Sde Teiman prison, just north of Gaza, on 7 August 2024 (Reuters)

One of the alleged Israeli rapists was masked, who went on to Israeli TV to defend the rapes. He later posted a video on unmasking himself, expressing pride in his unit and its treatment of Palestinians.  Meanwhile, many in the establishment have been calling for the head of whoever leaked the video of the rape to human rights groups, labelling them a “traitor” to Israel.

Israel is hardly alone in such practices.

Following the 2004 revelations of American systematic physical and sexual torture of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib   prison in 2003, veteran American journalist Seymour Hersh   revealed that the notion that “Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq”.

According to Hersh, American neocons learned of such”vulnerability” from Israeli orientalist Raphael Patai’s notorious 1973 book “The Arab Mind”. Hersh says a source that referred to the book as “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior”. The source further asserted that in the discussions of the neocons, two themes emerged: “One, that Arabs only understand force and, two that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

 Hersh continues: “The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything – including spying on their associates – to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, ‘I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.’ The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn’t effective; the insurgency continued to grow.”

Such racialized torture is emblematic of imperial cultures, both in the present and throughout history. Here is one such called “Desiring Arabs “:

“The types of torture employed are varied. They include beatings with fists and [stomping] with boots… as well as using canes for beating and flogging to death. They also included… the penetration of the rectums of the victims with canes, and then moving the cane left and right, and to the front and back. They also included pressing on the testicles with the hands and squeezing them until the victim loses consciousness from the pain and until they [the testicles] get so swollen that the victim would not be able to walk or move except by carrying his legs one at a time… They also included the starving of dogs and then provoking them and pushing them to devour his flesh and to eat off his thighs. It also included urinating on the faces of victims… [Another form of torture included the soldiers’] sodomising them, as it seems that this was done to a number of people.”

This report describes, in almost identical terms, what Iraqi prisoners experienced in 2003 at the hands of the Americans and what Palestinian prisoners have been experiencing since 1967 under Israeli custody. Written in August 1938, it details how British and Zionist Jewish soldiers treated revolutionary Palestinians during the 1930s Palestinian anti-colonial revolt. The author of the report was a Palestinian political prisoner called Khadra, detained in the Acre Prison. He learned about the torture of these prisoners, which had taken place in Jerusalem, after they were transferred to Acre. The prisoners recounted their experiences to him and showed him the physical signs of torture on their bodies. With regard to the motives of the British torturers, Khadra concludes: “This was not an investigation in which forceful methods are used. No. It was a vengeance and a release of the most savage and barbaric of instincts and of the concentrated spirit of hatred that these rednecks feel towards Muslims and Arabs. They mean to torture for the sake of torture and to satisfy their appetite for vengeance, not for the sake of an investigation nor to expose crimes.”

The mixture of sex and violence in an American (or European or Israeli) imperial setting characterized by racism and absolute power is a uniform occurrence.

Israeli rape of Palestinian women was weaponized during the 1948 war and afterwards, driven by similar sadistic racism. During the “first” Gulf War, from 1990 to 1991, American fighters    spent hours watching movies to get themselves in the right mood for the massive bombing they were to carry out in Iraq. In Vietnam, US soldiers’ rape of Vietnamese women guerrillas was not only normalized during the US invasion and occupation of the country, but was even part of US army manual. The same orientalist and sexist paradigm that informs Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian prisoners reigned supreme in the eyes of the Americans in Vietnam. Indeed, Israeli rape of Palestinian women was common during the 1948 war and driven by similar sadistic racism. Israeli sexual torture and abuse of Palestinian men and women has also been rampant in the West Bank and Gaza over the last 10 months, as many human rights groups have reported. The pretense that the Israeli army is a professional  one ,  “let alone the “most moral army in the world”, as often claims, is no more than yet another public relations attempt to cover up Israel’s decades’ long genocide  against the Palestinian people.

The story continues in Part 2 ….