Western government and media complicity in Israel’s Palestinian genocide. Through genocide, displacement, and denial we are vanishing an Indigenous and native population from its rightful and legal home.
Sul Nowroz / Real Media*
The Olympics play on television, ice cream vans are parked up on street corners, school is out and airports and train stations hum as people travel from home to holiday. Supermarkets sell bags of ice, shops put out bowls of water for pets while petrol stations sell gaudy inflatables – beach balls, dinghies, lilos. Apparently, life is okay – only it’s not. This week marks the 300th day of a genocide against Palestinians, and despite public marches and protests, demonstrations and boycotts, most governments remain unmoved. The world’s institutions – in large part due to the United States and Britain – are paralysed, legal findings are dismissed, and Israel is welcomed, whether at Eurovision, the Olympics or the White House.
Imagine a world without Palestine – a possibility that is growing ever more feasible.
Through genocide, displacement, and denial we are vanishing an Indigenous and native population from its rightful and legal home.
And that vanishing is happening because the genocide has been normalised by Israel, through its lies and propaganda, by its sponsor states and their censorship and intimidation, and by the world’s mainstream media, with their othering and misleading use of language (conflict rather than genocide, died rather than murdered, famine rather than food blockade). The net result – we’re in danger of losing a nation and her people because we have been deliberately and purposely numbed.
Journalist Maram Humaid aptly captured this phenomenon: “A woman told me on Wednesday that the world is tired of us [Palestinians] and our news. Bored of the war on Ghazzah, indifferent to our suffering. She was right!”
Humaid continued: “But from now on, I won’t ask where the world is. What world? There is no world here. Not even our blown-up heads … or the dismembered bodies of our children changes anything.”
This week Palestinians have again been scarred by evil and sadness, and if we don’t act, rise and defend them, humanity will have lost. All is not okay – your brothers and sisters are being persecuted and slaughtered. Show them you are not bored of their pain, their loss, their genocide.
The arrests
It began with ten arrests on Monday morning, including a Major. All were reservists of Force 100 – a specialist unit within Israel’s military, set up specifically to administer Palestinian detainees. Their insignia: a snake inside the Star of David. All ten were based at the Sde Teiman detention centre, nicknamed ‘the Israeli Guantánamo.’
The facility is severely overcrowded, and despite testimonies of barbaric torture from several hundred released inmates, Israel has denied human rights groups, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, access to the compound and to its detainees, all of whom are Palestinian.
The whistle-blowers
With the outside world denied contact, several whistle-blowers took it upon themselves to reveal the horrors of Sde Teiman in an April 2024 report titled ‘Medical Ethics and the Detention of Residents of Ghazzah.’ It summarised the various forms of torture regularly used by Israeli interrogators, including prolonged physical restraint, blindfolding, humiliation, and violence and abuse, resulting in at least thirty-seven deaths. The report concluded Sde Teiman was “an apparatus of retribution and revenge”.
Two additional accounts of life inside Sde Teiman appeared in June, one by the Associated Press, the other by The New York Times. Both were highly damning and referenced an incident during which a detainee was “forced to sit on an electrical probe that burned his anus.” The New York Times article went on to quote doctor Yoel Donchin, a lieutenant colonel and physician serving at Sde Teiman, who disclosed: “officials [at Sde Teiman] feared they could be identified and charged with war crimes.” The New York Times described how doctors at the facility were instructed “not to write their names on any official documentation and not to address each other by name in front of the detainees” to ensure anonymity.
The rape
In late June, Donchin was asked to treat a patient detainee. What he saw appalled him, and last week he shared the experience with Israel’s leading news outlet, Haaretz. He described a young man, Palestinian, who had been gang-raped by Israeli soldiers.
The rape was sadistic and involved several objects. There was severe anal trauma, fractured ribs and a ruptured bowel caused by violent and repeated penetration. The detainee needed immediate surgery. Donchin didn’t speculate on the patient’s psychological state.
The Israeli government was forced to act, and arrested ten reservists on Monday 29th July. As news spread several hundred protestors gathered at Sde Teiman demanding their release. The crowd, whipped up by parliamentarians including Zvi Sukkot and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, broke through the main gate and made their way to the administrative building, where they were met by soldiers and police. On Tuesday, the accused were transferred to a military court hearing at the Beit Lid base in central Israel. Two defendants were subsequently released, eight had their custody extended until Sunday.
Our best heroes
Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, is on summer break, but several members called for an emergency meeting on Wednesday to defend the arrested soldiers. At the meeting National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir spoke of the ‘shameful’ detention of the soldiers’ whom he described as ‘our best heroes.’
He acknowledged that conditions inside Israeli prisons ‘have indeed worsened,’ adding that was something he was proud of. Afterwards, he would take to social media posting: ‘Take your hands off the reservists.’
During the same meeting Knesset member Hanoch Milwidsky was asked: “To insert a stick in a person’s rectum, is that legitimate?”
“Yes, if he is a Nukhba [terrorist], everything is legitimate” shouted Milwidsky in reply.
It is reported the rape victim has been returned to Sde Teiman.
The other assassination
Ismail al-Ghoul was wearing a press flak vest when he was decapitated by a missile launched from an Israeli drone. He was twenty-seven years old and had not seen his wife and two-year-old daughter in months.
On Wednesday al-Ghoul, a Ghazzah-based reporter for Al Jazeera, was reporting on the assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, who had just been blown up in Tehran. Several journalists, including al-Ghoul, had gathered at Haniyeh’s house west of Ghazzah City. al-Ghoul had just completed an interview with Haniyeh’s daughter-in-law, Enas Haniyeh, when he heard the dull hum of a drone hanging over the dwelling. According to those in the house the noise intensified shortly before a loud explosion was heard. The drone had released a missile hitting and destroying the western side of the building. Luckily no one was hurt.
Journalists are prey in Ghazzah – 165 have been murdered by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) since October 7th 2023. al-Ghoul and his cameraman Rami al-Rifi didn’t hang around.
Having filed their story, they left the damaged house and got into their white hatchback, which carried external ‘Press’ markings.
Eyewitnesses tell of a drone following the car. A second missile was launched at around 5pm hitting the vehicle.
Passers-by rushed to the car and one, a man in a white t-shirt, wrenched open the blood-stained front door. al-Ghoul had been decapitated. There were no more missile strikes that day west of Ghazzah City.
A third Palestinian, sixteen-year-old Khaled Al-Shawa, was also killed in the strike.
al-Shifa Hospital
In March, al-Ghoul was reporting from al-Shifa Hospital when it was attacked and occupied by IOF. al-Ghoul was stripped to his underwear, blindfolded, and forced to lie on his stomach with his hands tied behind his back. He was subsequently arrested, taken to a detention facility, and beaten. His equipment was trashed by his captors. On his release, al-Ghoul remained steadfast and resolute in his journalistic obligations commenting: “We face a great responsibility to convey the pain of the citizens.”
The Last Words are Ismail’s
Before his murder al-Ghoul sent a message to a friend:
“Let me tell you, my friend, that I no longer know the taste of sleep. The bodies of children and the screams of the injured and their blood-soaked images never leave my sight. The cries of mothers and the wailing of men who are missing their loved ones never fade from my hearing.
I can no longer bear the sound of children’s voices from beneath the rubble, nor can one forget the energy and power that reverberates at every moment, turning into a nightmare.
It is no longer easy for me to stand before the rows of coffins, which are locked and extended, or to see the dead people more than the living who are fighting death beneath their homes, not finding a way out to safety and survival.
I am tired, my friend.”
*Article and photos originally published in Real Media,
(Photos: Real Media, authorised for this publication)
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