On Monday, the United Nations Famine Review Committee (FRC) published a report on the situation in the northern Gaza Strip, concluding that there is insufficient reliable information to declare a famine. While some Israeli media outlets, including #Haaretz, perceive the report as a net positive for #Israel, the conclusion actually highlights the challenges posed by Israel's restrictions.
The FRC's inability to endorse the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) findings stems from the lack of access to Gaza, which prevents the collection of essential data required for its work. This underscores the limitations imposed by Israel's prevention of journalists and international organizations from entering Gaza and evaluating the circumstances on the ground.
Rather than being positive news for Israel, the report underscores the concerning lack of transparency and the inability of independent observers to accurately assess the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Ultimately, this lack of access and information is detrimental not only to the people of Gaza but also to Israel's stated commitment to facilitating humanitarian aid and relief efforts in the region.
[...] Firstly, all stakeholders who use the IPC for high-level decision-making must understand that whether a Famine classification is confirmed does not in any manner change the fact that extreme human suffering is without a doubt currently ongoing in the Gaza Strip and does not in any manner change the immediate humanitarian imperative to address this civilian suffering by enabling complete, safe, unhindered, and sustained humanitarian access into and throughout the Gaza Strip, including through ceasing hostilities. All actors should not wait until a Famine classification for the current period is made to act accordingly.
[...] Secondly, the FRC would like to highlight that the very fact that we are unable to endorse (or not) FEWS NET’s analysis is driven by the lack of essential up to date data on human well-being in Northern Gaza, and Gaza at large. Thus, the FRC strongly requests all parties to enable humanitarian access in general, and specifically to provide a window of opportunity to conduct field surveys in Northern Gaza to have more solid evidence of the food consumption, nutrition, and mortality situation.
#Judaism / There Are No Lights in War: We Need a Different Religious Language (Ariel Schwartz [January 16, 2024])
Ariel Schwartz comes from a right-wing, religious Zionist family, in the political dialing areas of Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. He studied at the Etzion Yeshiva, in southern Mount Hebron, and during his regular service in the settlements in the West Bank, he asked himself who those stateless Palestinians were, "who live under the daily rule of the IDF." These questions caused him to become a left-wing activist.
He tells #Haaretz […] "They took from me the thing most precious to me, my faith, and directed it against me. As religious people, we believe that our tradition demands a different moral stance, one that can restrain the war instead of fueling it."
[…] An example of this can be found in the recent words of R. Amihai Friedman, the rabbi of the Nahal brigade’s training base: “I sit and imagine that in these days there are no casualties, hostages, or injured,” he told his soldiers. “And the second I remove them from the screen, I’m left with what is maybe the happiest month in my life since I was born.”[1]
[…] R. Friedman’s words give rise to a harsh realization: around us is a religious world that is happy, in many respects, about the current war.
[…] Thus, for example, writes R. Yigal Levinstein in the pamphlet He Leaps Up Like a Lion: On the Exaltation of the Spirit and the Special Level of Life During Times of War that saw light in the situation: “The war is not a marginal thing, and we should not view it as a ‘mistake’ or a ‘mishap’ which we would have preferred to avoid. The war is a great thing and, at the end of the day, brings a great message to humanity on its wings.”[2]
[…] According to R. Levinstein, the greatness of the war is rooted in the fact that it is one of those extraordinary moments in which “the inner soul shines in all its vitality.” Indeed, for the individual, the war is a difficult event, but at the national level it calls forth great moments in which the people of Israel “reveals from within itself its mighty heights of life.”
[…] Widening segments of the contemporary religious community are seeking to wrap the war in a halo of enchantment and holiness and turn it pleasant, ideal, and even joyous from an emotional perspective. In furtherance of this aestheticization and idealization, there are those who seek to remove any ethical brakes from the war. They call for us not to differentiate between blood and blood and condone any action done in its framework. These conceptions treat the spirit of battle as the climax of the revelation of the human spirit, but within this, implicitly, it is as though they require war to happen again and again, so that this “spirit of battle” may be revealed. In light of this attempt, we must seek a different religious language―one that remembers that the Jewish horizon is not war but peace, that the goal of the Jewish nation’s existence on this land is not “to shorten the life of man but to lengthen,” and that ethical conduct even in times of war is the soul of our religious tradition.
Imagine the outcrywif this was published by a western media.
It's sickening to see ww are under such amazing censorship that ww can't even publish articles from Israeli media.
Re-publishing this would be a suicide by any European or American media, not just because of its content, but also the fact it portrays IDF as what they really are.
#Israel / IDF Data: 44 Soldiers Injured in Fighting Over the Weekend, 8 in Serious Condition
While pressure in mounting on #Netanyahu to end the war and sign a deal with Hamas to return the captives, #Haaretz is reporting that 44 soldiers have been injured since Thursday in fighting in the various sectors, eight of them seriously – according to IDF data. According to the data, 22 of the injured were in the Gaza Strip and 22 outside of it.