Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version

[Magda Hassan]

Five Israeli Talking Points on GazaDebunked

Israel claims that it is merely exercising its right to self-defense and that Gaza is no longer occupied. Here's what you need to know about these talking points and more.

Noura Erakat
July 25, 2014


Israel has killed almost 800 Palestinians in the past twenty-one days in the Gaza Strip alone; its onslaught continues. The UN estimates that more than 74 percent of those killed are civilians. That is to be expected in a population of 1.8 million where the number of Hamas members is approximately 15,000. Israel does not deny that it killed those Palestinians using modern aerial technology and precise weaponry courtesy of the world's only superpower. In fact, it does not even deny that they are civilians.
Israel's propaganda machine, however, insists that these Palestinians wanted to die ("culture of martyrdom"), staged their own death ("telegenically dead") or were the tragic victims of Hamas's use of civilian infrastructure for military purposes ("human shielding"). In all instances, the military power is blaming the victims for their own deaths, accusing them of devaluing life and attributing this disregard to cultural bankruptcy. In effect, Israelalong with uncritical mainstream media that unquestionably accept this discoursedehumanizes Palestinians, deprives them even of their victimhood and legitimizes egregious human rights and legal violations.
This is not the first time. The gruesome images of decapitated children's bodies and stolen innocence on Gaza's shores are a dreadful repeat of Israel's assault on Gaza in November 2012 and winter 200809. Not only are the military tactics the same but so too are the public relations efforts and the faulty legal arguments that underpin the attacks. Mainstream media news anchors are inexplicably accepting these arguments as fact.
Below I address five of Israel's recurring talking points. I hope this proves useful to newsmakers.
1) Israel is exercising its right to self-defense.
As the occupying power of the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian Territories more broadly, Israel has an obligation and a duty to protect the civilians under its occupation. It governs by military and law enforcement authority to maintain order, protect itself and protect the civilian population under its occupation. It cannot simultaneously occupy the territory, thus usurping the self-governing powers that would otherwise belong to Palestinians, and declare war upon them. These contradictory policies (occupying a land and then declaring war on it) make the Palestinian population doubly vulnerable.
The precarious and unstable conditions in the Gaza Strip from which Palestinians suffer are Israel's responsibility. Israel argues that it can invoke the right to self-defense under international law as defined in Article 51 of the UN Charter. The International Court of Justice, however, rejected this faulty legal interpretation in its 2004 Advisory Opinion. The ICJ explained that an armed attack that would trigger Article 51 must be attributable to a sovereign state, but the armed attacks by Palestinians emerge from within Israel's jurisdictional control. Israel does have the right to defend itself against rocket attacks, but it must do so in accordance with occupation law and not other laws of war. Occupation law ensures greater protection for the civilian population. The other laws of war balance military advantage and civilian suffering. The statement that "no country would tolerate rocket fire from a neighboring country" is therefore both a diversion and baseless.
Israel denies Palestinians the right to govern and protect themselves, while simultaneously invoking the right to self-defense. This is a conundrum and a violation of international law, one that Israel deliberately created to evade accountability.
2) Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005.
Israel argues that its occupation of the Gaza Strip ended with the unilateral withdrawal of its settler population in 2005. It then declared the Gaza Strip to be "hostile territory" and declared war against its population. Neither the argument nor the statement is tenable. Despite removing 8,000 settlers and the military infrastructure that protected their illegal presence, Israel maintained effective control of the Gaza Strip and thus remains the occupying power as defined by Article 47 of the Hague Regulations. To date, Israel maintains control of the territory's air space, territorial waters, electromagnetic sphere, population registry and the movement of all goods and people.
Israel argues that the withdrawal from Gaza demonstrates that ending the occupation will not bring peace. Some have gone so far as to say that Palestinians squandered their opportunity to build heaven in order to build a terrorist haven instead. These arguments aim to obfuscate Israel's responsibilities in the Gaza Strip, as well as the West Bank. As Prime Minister Netanyahu once explained, Israel must ensure that it does not "get another Gaza in Judea and Samaria…. I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan."
Palestinians have yet to experience a day of self-governance. Israel immediately imposed a siege upon the Gaza Strip when Hamas won parliamentary elections in January 2006 and tightened it severely when Hamas routed Fatah in June 2007. The siege has created a "humanitarian catastrophe" in the Gaza Strip. Inhabitants will not be able to access clean water, electricity or tend to even the most urgent medical needs. The World Health Organization explains that the Gaza Strip will be unlivable by 2020. Not only did Israel not end its occupation, it has created a situation in which Palestinians cannot survive in the long-term.
3) This Israeli operation, among others, was caused by rocket fire from Gaza.
Israel claims that its current and past wars against the Palestinian population in Gaza have been in response to rocket fire. Empirical evidence from 2008, 2012 and 2014 refute that claim. First, according to Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the greatest reduction of rocket fire came through diplomatic rather than military means. This chart demonstrates the correlation between Israel's military attacks upon the Gaza Strip and Hamas militant activity. Hamas rocket fire increases in response to Israeli military attacks and decreases in direct correlation to them. Cease-fires have brought the greatest security to the region.
During the four months of the Egyptian-negotiated cease-fire in 2008, Palestinian militants reduced the number of rockets to zero or single digits from the Gaza Strip. Despite this relative security and calm, Israel broke the cease-fire to begin the notorious aerial and ground offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians in twenty-two days. In November 2012, Israel's extrajudicial assassination of Ahmad Jabari, the chief of Hamas's military wing in Gaza, while he was reviewing terms for a diplomatic solution, again broke the cease-fire that precipitated the eight-day aerial offensive that killed 132 Palestinians.
Immediately preceding Israel's most recent operation, Hamas rocket and mortar attacks did not threaten Israel. Israel deliberately provoked this war with Hamas. Without producing a shred of evidence, it accused the political faction of kidnapping and murdering three settlers near Hebron. Four weeks and almost 700 lives later, Israel has yet to produce any evidence demonstrating Hamas's involvement. During ten days of Operation Brother's Keeper in the West Bank, Israel arrested approximately 800 Palestinians without charge or trial, killed nine civilians and raided nearly 1,300 residential, commercial and public buildings. Its military operation targeted Hamas members released during the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange in 2011. It's these Israeli provocations that precipitated the Hamas rocket fire to which Israel claims left it with no choice but a gruesome military operation.
4) Israel avoids civilian casualties, but Hamas aims to kill civilians.
Hamas has crude weapons technology that lacks any targeting capability. As such, Hamas rocket attacks ipso facto violate the principle of distinction because all of its attacks are indiscriminate. This is not contested. Israel, however, would not be any more tolerant of Hamas if it strictly targeted military objects, as we have witnessed of late. Israel considers Hamas and any form of its resistance, armed or otherwise, to be illegitimate.
In contrast, Israel has the eleventh most powerful military in the world, certainly the strongest by far in the Middle East, and is a nuclear power that has not ratified the non-proliferation agreement and has precise weapons technology. With the use of drones, F-16s and an arsenal of modern weapon technology, Israel has the ability to target single individuals and therefore to avoid civilian casualties. But rather than avoid them, Israel has repeatedly targeted civilians as part of its military operations.
The Dahiya Doctrine is central to these operations and refers to Israel's indiscriminate attacks on Lebanon in 2006. Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot said that this would be applied elsewhere:

What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. […] We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.

Israel has kept true to this promise. The 2009 UN Fact-Finding Mission to the Gaza Conflict, better known as the Goldstone Mission, concluded "from a review of the facts on the ground that it witnessed for itself that what was prescribed as the best strategy [Dahiya Doctrine] appears to have been precisely what was put into practice."
According to the National Lawyers Guild, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Israel directly targeted civilians or recklessly caused civilian deaths during Operation Cast Lead. Far from avoiding the deaths of civilians, Israel effectively considers them legitimate targets.

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5) Hamas hides its weapons in homes, mosques and schools and uses human shields.
This is arguably one of Israel's most insidious claims, because it blames Palestinians for their own death and deprives them of even their victimhood. Israel made the same argument in its war against Lebanon in 2006 and in its war against Palestinians in 2008. Notwithstanding its military cartoon sketches, Israel has yet to prove that Hamas has used civilian infrastructure to store military weapons. The two cases where Hamas indeed stored weapons in UNRWA schools, the schools were empty. UNRWA discovered the rockets and publicly condemned the violation of its sanctity.
International human rights organizations that have investigated these claims have determined that they are not true. It attributed the high death toll in Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon to Israel's indiscriminate attacks. Human Rights Watch notes:

The evidence Human Rights Watch uncovered in its on-the-ground investigations refutes [Israel's] argument…we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields and valleys, that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started, and that Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared positions outside villages.

In fact, only Israeli soldiers have systematically used Palestinians as human shields. Since Israel's incursion into the West Bank in 2002, it has used Palestinians as human shields by tying young Palestinians onto the hoods of their cars or forcing them to go into a home where a potential militant may be hiding.

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Even assuming that Israel's claims were plausible, humanitarian law obligates Israel to avoid civilian casualties that "would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated." A belligerent force must verify whether civilian or civilian infrastructure qualifies as a military objective. In the case of doubt, "whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used."
In the over thee weeks of its military operation, Israel has demolished 3,175 homes, at least a dozen with families inside; destroyed five hospitals and six clinics; partially damaged sixty-four mosques and two churches; partially to completely destroyed eight government ministries; injured 4,620; and killed over 700 Palestinians. At plain sight, these numbers indicate Israel's egregious violations of humanitarian law, ones that amount to war crimes.
Beyond the body count and reference to law, which is a product of power, the question to ask is, What is Israel's end goal? What if Hamas and Islamic Jihad dug tunnels beneath the entirety of the Gaza Stripthey clearly did not, but let us assume they did for the sake of argument. According to Israel's logic, all of Gaza's 1.8 million Palestinians are therefore human shields for being born Palestinian in Gaza. The solution is to destroy the 360-kilometer square strip of land and to expect a watching world to accept this catastrophic loss as incidental. This is possible only by framing and accepting the dehumanization of Palestinian life. Despite the absurdity of this proposal, it is precisely what Israeli society is urging its military leadership to do. Israel cannot bomb Palestinians into submission, and it certainly cannot bomb them into peace.
www.thenation.com/ar/FFC1k

[Peter Lemkin]

1050 dead [over 85% non-combatants], untold thousands injured, tens of thousands homeless - having lost their homes entirely. Disgusting! - as is the silence of all too many countries, as well. This occupation, illegal confiscation of country, homes, property, lands and dignity must be ended. How the British [especially] can play blind to who is really the 'terrorists' here is amazing - as the Israelis clearly directed terrorist actions against the former British forces there, as well as at the Palestinians (who 'magically' and counter-intuitively (sic) had longed lived in a 'land without people, for a people without a land'). History and historical myths are written by the powerful to the disadvantage of those with less power. This racist apartheid system must end. If one has not, please find and see the fantastic film called 'The Promise' or watch several great documentaries - with documentary footage [available on Al Jazeera and internet] - of Israeli removal of the Palestinian people from their homes and cities, confiscation of their books and culture, destruction of their businesses and way of life, killing of many of them, ghettoization of the rest, continued repression and collective punishment, and refusal to even acknowledge let alone compensate/correct these historic and ongoing injustices.

[Peter Lemkin]

Armed robbery in Gaza - Israel, US, UK carve up the spoils of Palestine's stolen gas

Nafeez Ahmed
24th July 2014

Israel desperately covets Gaza's gas as a 'cheap stop-gap' yielding revenues of $6-7 billion a year, writes Nafeez Ahmed. The UK's BG and the US's Noble Energy are lined up to do the dirty work - but first Hamas must be 'uprooted' from Gaza, and Fatah bullied into cutting off its talks with Russia's Gazprom.

It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement.

"Israel's current offensive in the Gaza Strip is by no means an energy war", writes Allison Good in The National Interest in a response to my Ecologist / Guardian article exposing the role of natural gas in Israel's invasion of Gaza.
This "has not stopped conspiracy theorists from alleging that the IDF's Operation Protective Edge aims to assert control over Palestinians gas and avert an Israeli energy crisis."
Describing me as a "self-proclaimed" international security journalist engaging in "shoddy logic, evidence and language", Good - who works as a contractor for Noble Energy, the Texas-based oil major producing gas from Israel's reserves in the Mediterranean Sea - claims that:
"Israel is nowhere close to experiencing an energy crisis and has no urgent or near-future need for the natural gas located offshore Gaza. While Israel gains nothing for its energy industry by hitting Gaza, it stands to lose significantly more."
If you don't like the evidence - ignore it
Yet Good's missive is full of oversimplifications and distortions. She points out that Israel's recently discovered Tamar and Leviathan fields together hold an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet of gas - which, she claims "are expected to meet Israel's domestic energy needs for at least the next twenty-five years" while simultaneously sustaining major exports.
"Israel is not using Operation Protective Edge to steal the Gaza Marine gas field from the Palestinians, and it is irresponsible to claim otherwise", she asserts. Yet her blanket dismissal simply ignores the evidence.
In early 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed new negotiations with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas Abu-Mazen over development of the Gaza Marine reservoir.
"The proposal was made in view of Israel's natural gas shortage following the cessation of gas deliveries from Egypt", reported the Israeli business daily Globes.
US-based Noble's Gaza gas grab
But since 2012, Israel began unilaterally developing the Noa South gas reserve in the Mediterranean off the coast of Gaza, estimated to contain about 1.2 billion cubic metres.
According to Globes, Israel had previously "refrained from ordering development of the Noa field, fearing that this would lead to diplomatic problems vis-à-vis the Palestinian Authority" as the field is "partly under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority in the economic zone of the Gaza Strip."
Allison Good's employer, Noble Energy, "convinced" Israel's Ministry of National Infrastructures that the company's drilling would "not spill over into other parts of the reserve."
"Israel wanted to cooperate with the Palestinian Authority to develop Israel's Noa South reservoir, which spreads into Gaza's maritime area", reported Globes. "In the end, Israel decided to develop the Noa reservoir without any official agreement."
Israel's secret gas talks
Despite repeated breakdowns in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to exploit the Gaza Marine gas reserves, Israel's interest only accelerated.
In May last year, Israeli officials were in "secret talks" for months with the British Gas Group (BG Group), which owns the license over Gaza's offshore resources, over development of the reserves.
According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Gaza Marine holds about 1.6 trillion cubic feet in recoverable gas, and "offshore Gaza territory may hold additional energy resources."
Determining the size of these additional resources requires further exploration which, however, is limited by "uncertainty around maritime delineation between Israel, Gaza, and Egypt."
Senior Israeli sources said that the Gaza gas issue was expected to come up in US President Barack Obama's talks with Israeli leaders during his visit to Israel at the time.
The Palestinians - who own the gas - were excluded
The talks also included Netanyahu's personal envoy Yitzak Molcho and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in his capacity as Quartet (US, UK, EU, Russia) special envoy to the Middle East.
Palestinian leaders, though, were excluded from these talks due to "political sensitivities and the complex relationship between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas."
By October that year, the Financial Times reported that Netanyahu remained "very supportive" of the Gaza Marine gas project "which would see the fields exploited on behalf of the Palestinian Authority by investors led by BG Group."
If all went ahead, the fields could be producing gas by 2017, generating "$6bn to $7bn of revenues a year." An "energy industry source" cited by FT told the newspaper that:
"Israel may now see Gaza Marine as providing a useful alternative source of gas, especially at a time when its pipeline imports from Egypt have been disrupted due to unrest in the Sinai peninsula.
"Mr Netanyahu's government faces criticism and a court challenge from opposition politicians over its plans to export up to 40 per cent of natural gas produced from its own, much larger Mediterranean gas reserves.
"Israel, the industry source said, may feel that gas from Gaza would allow it to reduce its reliance on the consortium led by Noble and Delek Energy now developing Israel's Tamar and Leviathan offshore gasfields."
Quashing the gas deal
But as Good herself noted in the same month in Dubai's The National, there remained one problem:
"Hamas retains de facto jurisdiction over the Gaza Strip and, consequently, over Gaza Marine. The PA cannot negotiate on behalf of Hamas, and any agreement that Israel could make with Ramallah would certainly be declared null and void in Gaza. Israel also still refuses to negotiate with Hamas."
And despite negotiations to exploit Gaza's gas speeding ahead between Israeli government and BG Group officials, Netanyahu "quashed" a $4 billion economic stimulus initiative proposed by US Secretary of State John Kerry which "included a proposal for the exploitation of Gaza Marine."
Why was Netanyahu simultaneously pushing forward negotiations over Gaza's gas, while also blocking and excluding any deal that would grant any Palestinian entity inclusion in the deal?
Israel's gas reserves inflated, consumption understated

As noted in my article, and ignored by Noble Energy contractor Allison Good, the drive to access Gaza's gas was likely magnified in the context of a report by Israeli government chief scientists Sinai Netanyahu and Shlomo Wald of the Energy and Water Resources Ministry.
That report was submitted to the Tzemach committee tasked with drafting a national gas policy, but was covered up until Ha'aretz obtained a leaked copy.
The Tzemach committee recommended the government to export 53% of its gas - reduced to 40% this June - amidst widespread allegations of "improper conduct" and deliberate inflation of reserve figures.
Indeed, according to the report of the Israeli chief scientists, the government's gas policy is based on underestimating future Israeli demand and overestimating the country's gas production potential.
In reality, the scientists said, Israel will need "50% more natural gas than has been forecast until now and its offshore reserves will be empty in less than 40 years."
Israel's looming gas crunch
The most optimistic estimate received by the Tzemach committee was that Israel would need 364 billion cubic meters of gas. In contrast, the chief scientists argued that by 2040, Israel would need 650 billion cubic meters, after which the country would consume 40 billion cubic meters of gas per year.
At this rate, "even if Israel chooses not to export any gas, it will entirely exhaust its offshore reserves" by 2055. This assessment, further, ignores that "not all the gas is likely to be commercially extractable."
The upshot is that Israel cannot simultaneously export gas and retain sufficient quantities to meet its domestic needs.
And if Israel exhausts its gas resources "it will be forced to return to oil to meet its energy needs, even though global oil production is expected to start declining by 2035." The scientists noted that "if oil output drops by even 15%, its price is likely to spike by 550%."
These concerns are compounded by the consistent under-performance of several of Israel's recent gas discoveries compared to the hype, such as in the Sara, Myra, Ishai, and Elijah-3 reserves.
As Israel faces a 2015 gas shortage, Gaza's gas is a cheap stop-gap
Sohbet Karbuz, head of hydrocarbons at Observatoire Méditerranéen de l'Energie (OME) in Paris, points out that much of the gas was not in hindsight commercially recoverable. As he writes in the Journal of Energy Security,
"There is no certainty that it will be commercially possible to produce any percentage of contingent resources."
Israel's gas export policy, he thus remarks with reference to the much-vaunted Tamar and Leviathan fields, is based "partly on a mixture of hype and hope on the one hand, and reserves and prospective resources on the other."
Drilling in Israel's Leviathan reserves which was supposed to begin in December 2013 has been postponed to later this year due to high gas pressures at lower depths. In the meantime,reports Jewish Business News,
"Postponing Leviathan's development could have major repercussions on Israel's economy, which will face a natural gas shortage from 2015."
Israel needs the Gaza Marine as a stop-gap, but wants it cheap, and is unwilling to exploit the reserves through any Palestinian entity.
UK Foreign Office - 'Israel won't pay the full whack'
Official British Foreign Office (FCO) documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Palestinian think-tank Al-Shabaka based in Washington DC shine new light on this.
According to email correspondence between the FCO's Near East Group and the British Consulate General in Jerusalem in November 2009, Israel had refused to pay market price for Gaza's gas. One Foreign Office official said:
"Israel won't (i) pay the full whack [for the gas] (ii) guarantee to give a certain cut direct to the PA. So BG aren't getting the gas out of the sea-bed. They are content to exploit other reserves and come back to this one when the price is right."
Another email dated 29[SUP]th[/SUP] June 2010 noted that despite large reserves of gas discovered between Israel and Cyprus giving Israel the opportunity to become a net gas exporter, Israeli officials saw potential for the Gaza Marine to function as "a stop-gap measure before the new finds come fully on stream."
On 8th February 2011, UK ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould wrote to the FCO explaining that Israel intended to therefore seek the development of Gaza's gas reserves as this would
"enhance Palestinian opportunities; reduce Gaza's dependence on Israel; and diversify Israel's sources of gas. [redacted] added that this last point had been given added topicality by the attack this weekend on the gas pipeline from Egypt."
British Gas and Israel collude to exclude Hamas
The biggest obstacle as far as Israel is concerned is Hamas, the Palestinian Authority (PA), and the prospect of a strong independent Palestinian state.
An April 2014 policy paper for the European Parliament's directorate-general of external policies points out that "distrust" between all these parties, particularly "political divisions on the Palestine side" have "hindered the negotiations."
After Hamas was elected to power in the Gaza Strip in 2006, the group declared from the outset that Israel's agreements with the PA were illegitimate, and that Hamas was the rightful owner of the Gaza Marine resources.
But BG Group and Israeli officials had come up with a strategy to bypass Hamas. A BG official told the Jerusalem Post in August 2007 that
"BG and Israel have arrived at an 'understanding' that will transfer funds intended for the PA's Palestinian Investment Fund into an international bank account, where they will be held until the PA can retake control of the Gaza Strip."
Under this plan, "Both Israel and BG intend that until the PA is able to remove Hamas from power in the Gaza Strip, the money will be held in an international bank account. Neither side wants the money to go to fund terror-related activities."
Hamas must be uprooted from Gaza
The plan was, according to an Infrastructures Ministry official cited by the Jerusalem Post, about "circumventing the possibility that Israeli money will end up in the wrong hands" by arranging "a payment plan" that would "completely exclude Hamas".
In the same year, incumbent Israeli defence minister Moshe Ya'alon - then former IDF chief of staff - explicitly advocated that the only way in which Gaza's gas could be developed was through an Israeli military incursion to eliminate Hamas.
Ya'alon's concern was that "Palestinian gas profits would likely end up funding terrorism against Israel", a threat which "is not limited to Hamas" and includes the Fatah-run PA. As preventing gas proceeds from "reaching Palestinian terror groups" is "impossible", Ya'alon concluded:
"It is clear that without an overall military operation to uproot Hamas control of Gaza, no drilling work can take place without the consent of the radical Islamic movement."
Ya'alon's concerns voiced in 2007 - and the prospect of using military force to begin gas production in Gaza - remain relevant today. As the man in charge of Israel's current war on Gaza, Ya'alon is now in a position to execute the vision he had outlined a year before Operation Cast Lead.
Extending Israeli sovereignty over Gaza
Thus, the exclusion of Palestinian representatives - whether Fatah or Hamas - from the latest negotiations between Israel and BG Gas is no accident.
While PA president Mahmoud Abbas was independently seeking to reach a deal with Russia's Gazprom to develop the Gaza Marine, Netanyahu had already "made explicitly clear that he could never, ever, countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state" - which is why he deliberately torpedoed the peace process, according to US officials.
The other factor in this equation is the legal challenge to the Gaza gas proposals from Yam Thetis, a consortium of three Israeli firms and Samedan Oil.
Samedan is a subsidiary of the same US oil company, Noble Energy, that employs National Interest contributor Allison Good, and which has been operating in the Noa South field that overlaps Gaza.
Yam Thetis' principal argument was that "BG had no right to drill in Palestinian waters as the Palestinian Authority is not a state and cannot grant such a right to drill in offshore Gaza."
The upshot is that Noble Energy's consortium should have the right to extend its drilling into the Gaza Marine on behalf of Israel - and at the expense of the Palestinians.
Removing the obstacles - Hamas and the PA
Since the Oslo Accords, although the PA's maritime jurisdiction extends up to 20 nautical miles from the coast, Israel has incrementally reduced Gaza's maritime jurisdiction by 85% from 20 to 3 nautical miles - effectively reversing Palestinian sovereignty over the Gaza Marine.
But with Israel's determination to access Gaza's gas accelerating in the context of the risk of a 2015 energy crunch, the fundamental obstacle to doing so remained not just the intransigent Hamas, but an insufficiently pliant PA seeking to engage the west's arch-geopolitical rival, Russia.
Israel's own commitment to blocking a two-state solution and bypassing Hamas meant that its only option to bring Gaza's gas into production was to do so directly - with, it seems, the competing collusion of American and British energy companies.
The IDF's Gaza operation, launched fraudulently in the name of self-defence, is certainly though not exclusively about permanently altering the facts on the ground in Gaza to head-off the PA's ambitions for autonomously developing the Marine gas reserves, and to eliminate Hamas' declared sovereignty over them.

[Peter Lemkin]

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Who Shot Down MH17 over Ukraine?

By William Boardman [/TD]
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By William Boardman -- Reader Supported News


U.S. Government Backs Some War Crimes, Not Others

MH17 remains, July 17, 2014



Are Ukraine and Gaza both part of the samewar?
The same day that Israeli tanks crossed into Gaza, to continue killing civilians and the occasionalHamas fighter, MSNBC decided to ignore the Israeli invasionin favor of wall-to-wall coverage of the presumed shoot-down of MalaysianAirliner MH17 over eastern Ukraine. Why would MSNBC make a choice that looks somuch like propaganda?
The last time the Israelisinvaded Gaza, in 2009, more than 100 Palestinians died for each Israeli killed. The 13 deadIsraelis were soldiers on the attack, the 1,400-plus dead Palestinians weremostly civilians with nowhere safe to go. That hasn't changed much.
The last time someone in Ukraine shot down a civilian airliner, on October 4, 2001, the Kiev government killed 78 people on a Russian plane flying in an international airway to Russia fromIsrael. Kiev denied the shoot-down for nine days before acknowledging that it wasprobably responsible for "an accidental hit from an S-200 rocket firedduring exercises" in Crimea. Ten years later, Kiev issued a report denying thisexplanation, without offering a new one.
What's happening thesedays in both Ukraine and Gaza shares some ugly and dangerous aspects. In bothplaces, quasi-proxies of the United States are on the offensive. The Kievgovernment's assault on separatist-held areas has been as lethal for civiliansas Israel's assault on Gaza (but the war in Ukraine goes almost unreported).Both the governments of Ukraine and Israel prefer to use force against weakeropponents, rather than mediating long-standing, legitimate issues on bothsides. Both Ukraine and Israel are protected by the same patron, the U.S.government, with its apparent determination to dominate both regions, atwhatever human cost is necessary to those who live there.
Even the propagandaspinning through much of the media is the same for both, focusing on ademonized caricature of an enemy, whether Hamas or Putin/Russia.
What do we know, and how do we know it with anycertainty?
The MH17 shoot-down storybroke with a quote from Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko calling it a "terrorist attack." Any time someone uses the word "terrorist" to characterizeanything, it's a red flag signaling manipulation. In Poroshenko's mouth,"terrorist" is also routine Kiev propaganda that always refers to the Ukrainianseparatists as "terrorists," and usually "pro-Russian" as well. Despite theobvious unreliability of accepting any Kiev version of events as accurate, theU.S. government (including president Obama and vice president Biden) andAmerican media ran with unconfirmed and unconfirmable formulations.
MSNBC especiallyreiterated the Kiev story about Russian missiles and how the Russians must haveeither done it or trained the separatists to do it. As MSNBC's Rachel Maddowand others presented it, there was no other possibility. Not even asked was thequestion: does the Kiev government have the same surface to air missilecapability? That seems like a pretty basic question to go unasked in the midstof a story developing with little reliable evidence. Especially since theanswer is that Kiev has the same missiles.
Why hasn't Kiev releasedair controller conversations with MH17? Kiev released dubious tapes ofpurported Russians taking credit for the shoot-down. Why hasn't the U.S. (oranyone else with satellites) released satellite coverage of theshoot-down? One reason, posed by Robert Parry, might be:
WhatI've been told by one source, who has provided accurate information on similarmatters in the past, is that U.S. intelligence agencies do have detailedsatellite images of the likely missile battery that launched the fatefulmissile, but the battery appears to have been under the control of Ukrainiangovernment troops dressed in what look like Ukrainian uniforms.
Thesource said CIA analysts were still not ruling out the possibility that thetroops were actually eastern Ukrainian rebels in similar uniforms but theinitial assessment was that the troops were Ukrainian soldiers.
This is the sort of careful, information-based speculationthat Parry regularly takes mainstream media to task for avoiding. Using theconventional means-motive-opportunity analysis, the Kiev military quicklybecomes one of the obvious suspects. Not only has the Kiev military shot downan airliner before, shooting down MH17 and blaming it on the separatists couldprove useful.
Additionally, theSecretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, the man in charge of the military, is Andriy Parubiy, who achievedhis position after the Kiev coup in February. Parubiy was among the more militarized elements of the Euromaidan protests and has a long history of neo-Naziactivity. (As Parry pointed out, the Washington Post quoted Parubiy as a sourcewithout mentioning any unpleasant truth about him.)
Is there enough evidence yet to indict anyone?
A week after theshoot-down, it's not at all clear who's responsible, or even if it was adeliberate act.
The Russian government ismaintaining a relatively low profile, while seeming to behave appropriately --calling for a neutral investigation, voting with everyone else at the UnitedNations (despite Samantha Power's over-the-top ranting and raving and all butbanging her shoe on the table).
Nobody calls the Donetsk People's Republic government particularly competent, or even much ofa government, but they've managed to get some things right -- retrieving andproperly refrigerating most of the bodies, turning over the black boxes (whichare red) to the Malaysian government, allowing increased access tointernational investigators (including Australians). To get the black boxes, the Malaysian governmentin effect recognized the government of the Donetsk People's Republic --something even the Russians haven't done.
The Kiev government hasboth withheld relevant evidence and put out scare stories unsupported byevidence. Given that MH17 went down in a war zone where the Kiev government hasbeen on the offensive, one might expect Kiev to call for a ceasefire to allowfor a safer clean-up. Instead the offensive continues, on the ground, in theair, and out of the mouth.
The U.S. governmentcontinues to fulminate and froth, but can't seem to think of anything actuallyhelpful to do, unless withholding evidence is helpful.
Kiev air controllers diverted MH17 about 200 miles to the north, over the Donetsk war zone. When the pilot asked to fly at 35,000 feet, the air controllers ordered him to fly at 33,000 feet. Part of the political attack on Russia is theclaim that Russia provided the missiles that shot down MH17, which Kiev and Washington say they knew inadvance. This raises the question of why MH17 was ordered to fly within rangeof known missiles with a range up to 70,000 feet.
The conventionalinternational lemming view still being pushed by the U.S. and othersis that somehow Putin is responsible for whatever happened and Putin can fixit. This is even less credible than arguing that Obama is responsible forwhatever Ukraine or Israel does, and Obama can fix that.

[Peter Lemkin]

The Palestinians' Right to Self-Defense

By Chris Hedges

A relative inspects a Palestinian family's apartment, destroyed by an Israeli strike in Beit Lahiya last week. AP/Lefteris Pitarakis


If Israel insists, as the Bosnian Serbs did in Sarajevo, on using the weapons of industrial warfare against a helpless civilian population then that population has an inherent right to self-defense under Article 51of the United Nations Charter. The international community will have to either act to immediately halt Israeli attacks and lift the blockade of Gaza or acknowledge the right of the Palestinians to use weapons to defend themselves.
No nation, including any in the Muslim world, appears willing to intervene to protect the Palestinians. No world body, including the United Nations, appears willing or able to pressure Israel through sanctions to conform to the norms of international law. And the longer we in the world community fail to act, the worse the spiral of violence will become.
Israel does not have the right to drop 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on Gaza. It does not have the right to pound Gaza with heavy artillery and with shells lobbed from gunboats. It does not have the right to send in mechanized ground units or to target hospitals, schools and mosques, along with Gaza's water and electrical systems. It does not have the right to displace over 100,000 people from their homes. The entire occupation, under which Israel has nearly complete control of the sea, the air and the borders of Gaza, is illegal.

Violence, even when employed in self-defense, is a curse. It empowers the ruthless and punishes the innocent. It leaves in its aftermath horrific emotional and physical scars. But, as I learned in Sarajevo during the 1990s Bosnian War, when forces bent on your annihilation attack you relentlessly, and when no one comes to your aid, you must aid yourself. When Sarajevo was being hit with 2,000 shells a day and under heavy sniper fire in the summer of 1995 no one among the suffering Bosnians spoke to me about wanting to mount nonviolent resistance. No one among them saw the U.N.-imposed arms embargo against the Bosnian government as rational, given the rain of sniper fire and the 90-millimeter tank rounds and 155-millimeter howitzer shells that were exploding day and night in the city. The Bosnians were reduced, like the Palestinians in Gaza, to smuggling in light weapons through clandestine tunnels. Their enemies, the Serbslike the Israelis in the current conflictwere constantly trying to blow up tunnels. The Bosnian forces in Sarajevo, with their meager weapons, desperately attempted to hold the trench lines that circled the city. And it is much the same in Gaza. It was only repeated NATO airstrikes in the fall of 1995 that prevented the Bosnian-held areas from being overrun by advancing Serbian forces. The Palestinians cannot count on a similar intervention.The number of dead in Gaza resulting from the Israeli assault has topped 650, and about 80 percent have been civilians. The number of wounded Palestinians is over 4,000 and a substantial fraction of these victims are children. At what point do the numbers of dead and wounded justify self-defense? 5,000? 10,000? 20,000? At what point do Palestinians have the elemental right to protect their families and their homes?
Article 51 does not answer these specific questions, but the International Court of Justice does in the case of Nicaragua v. United States. The court ruled in that case that a state must endure an armed attack before it can resort to self-defense. The definition of an armed attack, in addition to being "action by regular armed forces across an international border," includes sending or sponsoring armed bands, mercenaries or irregulars that commit acts of force against another state. The court held that any state under attack must first request outside assistance before undertaking armed self-defense. According to U.N. Charter Article 51, a state's right to self-defense ends when the Security Council meets the terms of the article by "tak[ing] the measures necessary to maintain international peace and security."
The failure of the international community to respond has left the Palestinians with no choice. The United States, since Israel's establishment in 1948, has vetoed in the U.N. Security Council more than 40 resolutions that sought to curb Israel's lust for occupation and violence against the Palestinians. And it has ignored the few successful resolutions aimed at safeguarding Palestinian rights, such as Security Council Resolution 465, passed in 1980.
Resolution 465 stated that the "Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949 is applicable to the Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem." The resolution went on to warn Israel that "all measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity and that Israel's policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War and also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East."


Israel, as an occupying power, is in direct violation of Article IIIof the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War. This convention lays out the minimum standards for the protection of civilians in a conflict that is not international in scope. Article 3(1) states that those who take no active role in hostilities must be treated humanely, without discrimination, regardless of racial, social, religious or economic distinctions. The article prohibits certain acts commonly carried out against noncombatants in regions of armed conflict, including murder, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture. It prohibits the taking of hostages as well as sentences given without adequate due process of law. Article 3(2) mandates care for the sick and wounded.
Israel has not only violated the tenets of Article III but has amply fulfilled the conditions of an aggressor state as defined by Article 51. But for Israel, as for the United States, international law holds little importance. The U.S. ignored the verdict of the international court in Nicaragua v. United States and, along with Israel, does not accept the jurisdiction of the tribunal. It does not matter how many Palestinians are killed or wounded, how many Palestinian homes are demolished, how dire the poverty becomes in Gaza or the West Bank, how many years Gaza is under a blockade or how many settlements go up on Palestinian territory. Israel, with our protection, can act with impunity.
The unanimous U.S. Senate vote in support of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the media's slavish parroting of Israeli propaganda and the Obama administration's mindless repetition of pro-Israeli clichés have turned us into cheerleaders for Israeli war crimes. We fund and abet these crimes with $3.1 billion a year in military aid to Israel. We are responsible for the slaughter. No one in the establishment, including our most liberal senator, Bernie Sanders, dares defy the Israel lobby. And since we refuse to act to make peace and justice possible we should not wonder why the Palestinians carry out armed resistance.
The Palestinians will reject, as long as possible, any cease-fire that does not include a lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza. They have lost hope that foreign governments will save them. They know their fate rests in their own hands. The revolt in Gaza is an act of solidarity with the world outside its walls. It is an attempt to assert in the face of overwhelming odds and barbaric conditions the humanity and agency of the Palestinian people. There is little in life that Palestinians can choose, but they can choose how to die. And many Palestinians, especially young men trapped in overcrowded hovels where they have no work and little dignity, will risk immediate death to defy the slow, humiliating death of occupation.

[Peter Lemkin]

1101 dead. Israel intensifies its attacks. More neighborhoods destroyed. Main electric generator station bombed and will be out for many months, minimum - remaining supplies of electricity only enough for a few hours per day on some days per week. If this isn't a modern-day 'Warsaw Ghetto', I don't know what is.

[Magda Hassan]

1101 dead. Israel intensifies its attacks. More neighborhoods destroyed. Main electric generator station bombed and will be out for many months, minimum - remaining supplies of electricity only enough for a few hours per day on some days per week. If this isn't a modern-day 'Warsaw Ghetto', I don't know what is.

I'm just lost for words. And the media hypocrisy....

[Tracy Riddle]

The Israeli plan to take over Gaza by widening the buffer zone.

[Peter Lemkin]

If they triple that 'buffer' zone, they can effectively drive all into the sea or make Gaza a 'free-fire zone' - and use their nukes. The whole thing is SO disgusting and the most of the World is silent or impotent - or both. Over 100 murdered in their homes today, alone..... hundreds of thousands not in their homes....a large % of them have lost their homes. No water. 2 hours of electricity every 48 hours....and worse....and Israel wants this to go on in episodic wars until all the Palestinians either accept being prisoner-slaves or are dead. Almost never in history has an occupying army won in the end...but the death, suffering and cost is so immense, cruel, heartless, wrong....

[Peter Lemkin]

1300 dead and rising fast! Israel just bombed last night a UN school - killing children sleeping with their parents - all having been told to leave their homes so they'd be safe...ha!