Netanyahu lectures Americans, makes case for ‘total victory’
'Our enemies are your enemies,' the prime minister insisted, setting up confrontation with Iran

---

---

The ICJ’s damning verdict (FT EB)
Court ruling should prompt a rethink of the west’s policies towards Israel

If there was any lingering ambiguity about the illegality of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory, it should have been quashed by a landmark ruling from the world’s top court. In a detailed 83-page advisory opinion released last week, the International Court of Justice probed Israel’s activities in Palestinian lands it has controlled since 1967. The result was damning.

The UN court found that virtually every Israeli action in the territory violated international law. The settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that are home to some 700,000 Israeli Jews. The restrictions on the free movement of Palestinians. Their forced displacement and the demolitions of their homes. It concluded that Israel’s practices amount to annexation of large parts of the occupied territory, adding that they are designed to “create irreversible effects on the ground”. Israel’s presence was “unlawful” and it was obliged to end it as “rapidly as possible”.

The opinion is non-binding, and it will not temper the behaviour of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government, which includes ultranationalist settlers who advocate annexing the West Bank. Indeed, settlement construction has accelerated under Netanyahu’s watch as he has boasted of thwarting Palestinian ambitions for statehood. Israel also has a history of ignoring UN resolutions and international court judgments critical of its actions, with the quiet acquiescence of its western allies.

But the findings of the ICJ — which is also hearing a separate case brought by South Africa alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza — are significant. They have put a microscope on the full extent of Israel’s illegal practices in the occupied territory at a time when the war triggered by Hamas’s horrific October 7 attack has put renewed focus on the need for a two-state solution. (...)

The World Court has just cleared the fog hiding western support for Israel’s crimes
The legal ruling by the world's highest court obliges western states not just to end their persecution of the boycott movement but to take up that cause as their own

---

Biden staffers who resigned over Gaza say US has destroyed international law and endangered Americans
The Biden administration is suppressing widespread dissent over its Gaza policy within its ranks, enforcing a "culture of silence," say some who resigned.

Knesset advances 3 bills aimed at shutting down UNRWA

---

We Volunteered at a Gaza Hospital. What We Saw Was Unspeakable.
American surgeons who witnessed the civilian carnage of the Israel-Hamas war.

In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, that’s exactly what we did.

We have no idea how Juri ended up in the Gaza European Hospital preoperative area. All we could see was that she had an external fixator — a scaffold of metal pins and rods — on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.

In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.

“Jesus Christ,” Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, “she’s just a fucking kid.”

The two of us are humanitarian surgeons. Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, we’ve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. We’re used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.

None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring. (...)

Palestinian with Down syndrome ‘left to die’ by Israeli soldiers after combat dog attack
Muhammed, who was 'like a one-year-old', was separated from his family after an Israeli dog mauled him. His decomposed body was found a week later

Two peas

‘I’m bored, so I shoot’: The Israeli army’s approval of free-for-all violence in Gaza
Israeli soldiers describe the near-total absence of firing regulations in the Gaza war, with troops shooting as they please, setting homes ablaze, and leaving corpses on the streets — all with their commanders’ permission.

 R_P wrote:
How out-of-their-minds can people be? Don't put any trust in such so-called morale regardless of it's wind's direction, because money is what makes the world go round.

The capitalist fascists, powered by the financial-military complex are making you think worse than you ever dreamt of being able to. Especially after WWII.

Deep down in my gut, I have a sense that this form of violent radicalism will meet the same kind of force in me. And it wasn't me invoking it... an eye-for-an-eye is still much prevalent, due to an unsatisfied, ubiquitous hunger for power and money.

Spiritually speaking, these energies reside at the lower end of our spine, even lower than our sexual desires. Check out the Vedic chakra-system, corresponding with classical Chinese wisdom from thousands of years ago.

The Jewish Kaballah (think of Merkaba meditation) isn't far from it, as mysticism always is non-sectarian, regardless of their historical, cultural, or religious roots.

In that  sense, learning to meditate on the spiritual eye between the eyebrows would be a good counter-measure to any further decadence or even perversion that man is ready to play to the universe (no chance for good luck with that   ! ! !   ).

Israel turbocharges West Bank settlement expansion with largest land grab in decades

Ben Gvir calls for execution of Palestinian prisoners with 'shot in the head'
Israel is holding almost 10,000 Palestinians in its prisons and detention camps, where torture is widespread

---

Arab League revokes Hezbollah’s designation as terror group