“Airwars, a team of conflict researchers affiliated with the University of London, went back and cross-checked the casualty lists from the first 25 days of the Israeli air campaign against news reporting, social media, and other local sources. And unlike the Palestinian ministry, they differentiated between civilians and fighters, using data such as social media funeral notices to determine Hamas affiliation.
The Airwars report, released on Thursday, shows a rate of civilian slaughter “incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.” The Palestinian ministry reported 8,525 wartime deaths, including 3,542 children, from October 7, 2023, to October 31, 2023. Airwars was able to verify a minimum of 5,139 civilians killed by Israeli air raids in that timeframe, including at least 1,900 children.
Most of them were not the collateral damage of combat against Hamas. Out of 606 incidents of civilian casualties studied by Airwars, only 26 overlapped with the death of a militant. And in those 26 incidents, the killing was still incredibly lopsided, with 32 militants killed in total, at a cost of 522 civilian lives.”
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“”Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their homes,” the Airwars report states. Over 90 percent of women and children killed by Israeli air raids died in their homes, and in 95 percent of cases where a woman was killed, at least one child was also killed, according to the Airwars report.”
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“Although the Israeli government and its supporters often argue that its military tactics are more humane than the American “war on terror,” Airwars found the exact opposite to be true. Before October 2023, the deadliest month for civilians ever recorded by Airwars was March 2017, when a U.S.-led coalition was battling the Islamic State group for Mosul, Iraq. That campaign killed 1,470 civilians, only one-fifth of the verified Palestinian civilian death count in October 2023. Children made up 9 percent of casualties in Mosul overall, and 36 percent of casualties in Gaza in October 2023.
These numbers are a conservative estimate, based on the minimum reported casualties in cases that Airwars was able to verify were Israeli bombing rather than Hamas misfires. And the study only covers one month of the war. More than a year later, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reports that 45,600 people have been killed and 11,000 are missing. Again, unlike the Airwars report, these numbers don’t distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters.
But with hospitals overwhelmed, communications cut, and thousands of bodies left in the street or trapped under rubble, 45,600 deaths is possibly an undercount. Other researchers have estimated that the total death toll from war, starvation, and disease in Gaza could be greater than 100,000 or even 300,000.”
“Video clips purporting to show torture of Palestinian civilians by the Hamas militia in the Gaza Strip during the years 2018 to 2020 were published by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Sunday.
The IDF said the material had been found during its operations in the area and proved “severe abuse perpetrated by the Hamas terrorist organization against the civilian population,” along with human rights violations and oppression of those opposed to its rule.
The videos are reported to show torture carried out by Hamas operatives in so-called “Outpost 17″ in Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip.
The material shows people with bags over their heads, tied up, sometimes into twisted and painful positions. One of the men is suspended by his feet from the ceiling and beaten on the soles of his feet with a stick.
The victims are reported to include political opponents of Hamas, suspected collaborators with Israel, suspected adulterers and homosexuals.”
“A new study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University pinned down exactly what that cost is: at least $22.76 billion from October 7, 2023, to September 30, 2024. The bulk of the money, $17.9 billion, was spent on U.S. aid to the Israeli military—both financial grants given to Israel to purchase weapons, and the cost of replacing munitions such as artillery shells sent directly from American stockpiles to the Israeli army.”
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“The study only counts the direct burden on the U.S. military budget. It doesn’t include indirect costs, “such as increased U.S. security assistance to Egypt, Saudi Arabia or any other countries, and costs to the commercial airline industry and to U.S. consumers.” Nor does it count the $1 billion in U.S. humanitarian aid to Palestinians.”
“The resulting pier mission did not go well.
It involved 1,000 U.S. troops, delivered only a fraction of the promised aid at a cost of nearly $230 million, and was from the start beset by bad luck and miscalculations, including fire, bad weather and dangers on shore from the fighting between Israel and Hamas.”
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“The U.S. military aimed to ramp up to as many as 150 trucks a day of aid coming off the pier.
But because the pier was only operational for a total of 20 days, the military says it moved a total of only 19.4 million pounds of aid into Gaza. That would be about 480 trucks of aid delivered in total from the pier, based on estimates by the World Food Programme from earlier this year of weight carried by a truck.
The United Nations says about 500 truckloads of aid are needed daily to address the needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
Just days after the first shipments of aid rolled off the pier in Gaza, crowds overwhelmed trucks and took some of it.
Israel’s killings of seven World Central Kitchen workers in April and its use of an area near the pier as it staged a hostage rescue recovery mission in June also dented the confidence of aid organizations, on whom the U.S. was relying to carry the supplies from the shore and distribute to residents.
A senior U.S. defense official acknowledged that aid delivery “proved to be perhaps more challenging than the planners anticipated.”
One former official said Kurilla had raised distribution as a concern early on.
“General Kurilla was also very clear about that: ‘I can do my piece of this, and I can do distribution if you task me to do it,'” the former official said.
“But that was explicitly scoped out of what the task was. And so we were reliant on these international organizations.”
Current and former U.S. officials told Reuters that the United Nations and aid organizations themselves were always cool to the pier.
At a closed-door meeting of U.S. officials and aid organizations in Cyprus in March, Sigrid Kaag, the U.N. humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, offered tacit support for Biden’s pier project.
But Kaag stressed the UN preference was for “land, land, land,” according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The United Nations declined to comment on the meeting. It referred to a briefing on Monday where a spokesperson for the organization said that the U.N. appreciated every way of getting aid into Gaza, including the pier, but more access through land routes is needed.
The underlying concern for aid organizations was that Biden, under pressure from fellow Democrats over Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza, was pushing a solution that would at best be a temporary fix and at worst would take pressure off Netanyahu’s government to open up land routes into Gaza.
Dave Harden, a former USAID mission director to the West Bank and Gaza, described the pier project as “humanitarian theater.”
“It did relieve the pressure, unfortunately, on having the (land border) crossings work more effectively.””
https://www.reuters.com/world/how-bidens-gaza-pier-project-unraveled-2024-07-25/
“A 21-year-old Yazidi woman has been rescued from Gaza where she had been held captive by Hamas for years after being trafficked by ISIS.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Thursday that Fawzia Amin Sido was freed this week in an operation coordinated between Israel, the United States and other international actors.
Fawzia told CNN that she has been returned to Iraq after enduring years of captivity.
She said that she was initially kidnapped by ISIS as a child in August 2014 when the group captured the city of Sinjar in the Nineveh Governorate of northern Iraq, executing Yazidi men and boys and committing acts of sexual violence and rape against women and girls, among other crimes.
Over the next few years, Fawzia was trafficked to different locations across several countries.
“We ended up in Al-Hol camp (in Syria) before we were smuggled to Idlib in 2019, and from there, we went to Turkey. In 2020, they arranged a passport for me in Turkey so I could fly from Istanbul to Hurghada, Egypt, and then to Gaza,” she said.
She told CNN that she stayed in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip for a year, where life was “unbearable.”
“Hamas constantly harassed me due to my Yazidi background and contact with my family, even going so far as to format my phone [erase its contents] during their investigations. After a year, they moved me to a guest house.”
When the Israel-Hamas war broke out in 2023, she was again moved around frequently – until October 1, when she said an NGO rescued her.
The IDF said that her captor was killed, “presumably during IDF strikes” in Gaza, allowing her to flee to a hideout, from where she was rescued and taken to the Kerem Shalom border crossing.”
“A diplomatic solution, perhaps one in which Hezbollah agrees to remove its positions close to Lebanon’s southern border, is certainly possible. That would allow Israelis to move back to their homes in the north. Whatever the outcome, however, Israel will likely not be able to eliminate Hezbollah, just as it has failed at eliminating Hamas. And continued aggression could lead to more extreme outcomes in the future.”