HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Human Wrongs Watch

By Yuval Abraham | +972 Magazine – TRANSCEND Media Service*

+972 Magazine

Palestinians arrested in the northern Gaza Strip describe how Israeli soldiers systematically abused civilians and combatants alike, from severe deprivation to brutal physical violence.

5 Jan 2024 – In early December, images circulated worldwide showing dozens of Palestinian men in the city of Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip, who were stripped to their underwear, kneeling or sitting hunched over, then blindfolded and put into the back of Israeli military trucks like cattle. The vast majority of these detainees were civilians with no affiliation to Hamas, Israeli security officials later confirmed, and the men were taken away by the army without notifying their families of the detainees’ whereabouts. Some of them never returned.

Human Wrongs Watch

By Norman Solomon

Members of the UN Security-Council gather for a meeting on the maintenance of international peace and security in the Red Sea. 10 January 2024. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías

It’s grimly laughable, but the nation’s media outlets routinely take such claims seriously and credulously. Overall, the default assumption is that top officials in Washington are reluctant to go to war, and do so only as a last resort.

The framing was typical when the New York Times just printed this sentence at the top of the front page: “The United States and a handful of its allies on Thursday carried out military strikes against more than a dozen targets in Yemen controlled by the Iranian-backed Houthi militia, U.S. officials said, in an expansion of the war in the Middle East that the Biden administration had sought to avoid for three months.”