The illusion of aid in Gaza | The Listening Post

More than 150 days into Israel's war on Gaza, the airdrop of humanitarian aid aimed at the news, Beds, not the people who need it, Palestinians have Washington to thank for that neighbor in LC's Egypt, What is happening in Gaza is testing the limits of political origin and crimes. against memory The taking of the history and culture of a people and its elimination, have seen the images in the media covering the news headlines about the airdrop of aid by the United States to northern Gaza to feeding starving Palestinians, but also a classic case of cognitive dissonance by Washington dumping food while continuing to provide Israel with bombs to pulverize Gaza what makes the famine there different is that it is deliberate that Israel is manufacturing this famine; has systematically attacked the little aid it receives last week, more than 100 Palestinians lined up to get some flour for cooking. were massacred by Israeli troops Israel's response to that atrocity was straight out of their disinformation playbook denying, then blaming the Palestinians, then accepting limited responsibility we have seen it so many times before what is unprecedented, although it is the scale of what is now unfolding in Gaza.

The hunger, the mass killings, the rewriting of the map, and the chasm between what is happening on the ground and the outdated narratives coming out of the White House and the mainstream media has never been greater. The US airdrops in the Gaza Strip are pure theater. military planes making the first airdrop into Gaza, the United States has been supplying thousands of tons of goods to the Gaza Strip, but these are powerful explosives and then to claim that somehow this is improved by 38,000 ready-to-eat meals is Quite obscene, so to speak. politely, but that's what it's gotten to the United States of America: a superpower either unable or too afraid of the political consequences to force its relatively small ally Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza to feed the Palestinians star who now resort to airdrops that create the impression. of urgency the

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that the United States is willing to do everything possible to save Palestinian lives today The United States airlifted 24.5 metric tons or more than 54,000 pounds of humanitarian supplies from the UN to provide it was more performative than practical and it had more to do with food Media images that suggest the United States cares about more than giving Palestinians the food they need to survive.

When I saw the United States airdropping food, my first response was really anger, it was horror, that apparently this is the best thing the United States can do. Who is the superpower here? Neither in the United States nor in Israel is there anywhere that is safe, there is nowhere where you can find reliable food where people can take shelter. The Garans are exhausted, angry, and scared, and they don't believe this argument that the United States suddenly cares about them by airdropping a handful of food. People have compared these scenes to the Hunger Games, and for good reason. airdrops are something that is used in otherwise inaccessible geographic locations, on top of a mountain in the middle of the jungle, what the United States has done is provide fewer meals than would have fit on a single truck and the reason these trucks are not entering the Gaza Strip is because there is a political decision by Israel fully endorsed and supported by the United States to starve these people into submission, so the Biden Administration is essentially doing the less effective and more expensive. method of getting aid to the people who need it because Israel simply will not give in to any American pressure on this relatively simple point and there is something dystopian about these airdrops and the way they pit people against each other that I'm running the American military As if airdrops weren't absurd or insulting enough, the Biden administration has now proposed building a port to deliver aid by ship, which would cost billions and take months to build, while aid trucks are already parked in the gates of Gaza, currently on rare occasions. occasion when a truck loaded with food arrives in northern Gaza, this happens with the flower massacre in Gaza City in which at least 112 Palestinians waiting in line to receive food were killed by Israeli forces.

Israel then deployed its hasbara, its disinformation machine, to pump even more fog into northern Gaza. war zone, a mob ambushed the trucks that stopped the convoy, published aerial images purporting to show that the Palestinians were to blame for charging at Israeli troops, and removed parts showing them being shot down by Israeli tanks, which which is consistent with what has become a sickening pattern, as one Euromed observer from a human rights NGO put it, Israeli shooting of starving Palestinian civilians receiving aid has become a common practice, many Palestinians feared going there because they knew the Israelis might start shooting at them and that's exactly what happened and reports say this continued for about an hour and a half after it stopped.

The Palestinians returned to the Atri and started shooting again and this time they drove over the bodies of wounded and dead Palestinians. Now what unfolded in the media how this was reported was a chaotic incident a chaotic incident this is a word used for someone who breaks into a football field, not for someone who kills dozens of Palestinians who They haven't eaten for days for weeks. Israel claimed from the beginning that there was a crowd it was a stampede and that choice of words is very interesting because what it really suggests is an unruly crowd, these crazy Palestinians desperate for food who know what they are going to do and we, as Israeli soldiers, we are threatened and that frame that frankly too many media outlets accepted too quickly, it seems that most of those who died were crushed by a crowd rushing to get on the trucks or were run over when the gin-driven trucks began fleeing the scene of the mafia, the Israeli military, seeing the damage this massacre could cause, offered a rather ridiculous explanation to blame the Palestinians for their own deaths and quite quickly we saw this explanation fall apart, it may have happened again, like I said before, it's a war zone, if it happened, I can say it happened by mistake, Guna WS didn't come. of the aid trucks came from the Israeli army, but the United States continued with this tired Israeli explanation and did not hold Israel responsible for this massacre.

Israel is creating new facts on the ground by consolidating them into the Gaza landscape. We see it in the creation of a new buffer zone within the border wall that would take away Goins about 1/5 of its territory and in the paving of a new Israeli-built highway that will cut the strip and allow Israel to control security and the movement of people and goods, these are familiar scenes now that hunger grips the entire population, much of the Western mainstream media is struggling to find the right way to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza to find a proper terminology that frames it as a humanitarian crisis, disguises what it really is and the occupying power is committing genocide the Israelis are mapping the strip they are effectively acting as if it were theirs they are trying to sell it as a place for Israelis and Zionists specifically come to live there these are not stories that We are hearing, we still hear about the genocide and there is nothing to do when the reality is that the end is the annihilation of the Palestinians in Gaza if a ceasefire is not administered fire immediately.

That's where Israeli authorities are struggling in construction. from the news narrative getting more help for the people who need it not for the Kamas fighters we will work with our allies um but no one wants the food to go to Hamas or your allies or you but they do want it to go to the babies hungry As adept as they have been over the years at manipulating news coverage, misinforming audiences, which has proven to be no match for the evidence that the Palestinians have been publishing and that people around the world have been seeing on their feeds and targeting Palestinian journalists in Gaza, killing them in record numbers have not been enough to prevent the truth from coming to light, images reminiscent of another genocide that for Israelis closely affects the Holocaust of World War II.

Social media has been a catastrophe for Israelis, yes, on the one hand, they can get their message across pretty easily via Tik Tok Instagram, whatever the platform, but there is so much content being

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ed from the Palestinian perspective that Israel He doesn't know how to manage it. You can obfuscate and try to convince people that all Gazans are terrorists or all children. in Gaza, 5 years old, is a potential Hamas fighter, but who really believes that Israel will be tainted until the end of its days by the accusation of genocide, that is bad for any state and the difference here compared to quite recent genocides Ironically, despite Israel's best efforts to keep journalists out of the Gaza Strip, no genocidal attack has been broadcast as widely in real time as what we are seeing in the Gaza Strip over the past five months.

There have been images of Palestinians and children in particular who have been so malnourished that they are dying and which will torment not only the reputation of Israel but the entire world. We've seen these images of the Holocaust, what does watching them again tell us if it's happening without anyone picking it up? finger and, unlike the past, these images are accessible, these crimes are documented, we must ensure that history does not repeat itself, that Palestinians do not become victims of a new Holocaust in Egypt, now where journalists in the capital staged a bold protest over Gaza pointing the finger at people close to them and where the president's loyalists in the media have had to work overtime minak shiavi is here with the details since Israel launched its attack on Gaza the war has been A sensitive issue for President Abdul Fatah LCC and by extension the country's media, the gulf between public outrage against Israel and Kaido's ambiguous approach to the war has led to the censorship of news coverage and the suppression of the public protest the exception is Egypt's journalists' union Multiple demonstrations have been held, the last one last Saturday aimed at Arab governments not a single media outlet in Egypt reported on the protest, a sign of how sensitive this is issue for the CC government despite controlling, at least in theory, the Rafa crossing into southern Gaza.

Kairo has remained largely passive as Israel blocks aid trucks and massacres Palestinian civilians seeking refuge there have also prevented journalists from attempting to enter Gaza to aid their safety. The government has a large number of supporters in the media that it can count on. This is how some of them described the progress in delivering aid last week with the risk of an Israeli invasion of Rafa leading to Palestinians crossing the Egyptian border, we can expect propaganda and downward surveillance to go up a notch , thank you mea, for 5 months the

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has covered Israel's war in Gaza through the prism of the media. including the unprecedented number of Palestinian journalists killed, but what is happening in Gaza is much greater, it is a genocidal attack on Palestinian history, existence and culture, most of Gaza's museums, universities and libraries are now in ruins, too many cultural creators and custodians have been killed and when South Africa invoked the genocide convention at the international court of justice, it noted that Israel's destruction of Gaza archives and monuments is erasing Palestinian personal lives, private memories, stories and future.

This is not the first time that Palestinian culture has been the target of Israeli destruction. and looting, yet what has happened since October 7 has eclipsed everything we have seen before, including the Noca of 1948, what happens when cultural heritage is erased, who controls the historical narrative and to what effect understand the enormity of what has been lost and what it means. We spoke to writer and historian Jihad Abu Salim to understand the magnitude of the destruction in Gaza today. It is necessary to understand the nature of the war that Israel haslaunched against the Palestinians. We are not talking about conventional war.

This is a war of annihilation that targets the Palestinians. foundations of society we have seen universities bombed libraries museums Israel is trying to prevent Palestinians from recovering and restoring life in Gaza as they knew it my name is Jihad Abu Salim I am from the city of darl balah located in the middle of Gaza The Strip It's where I grew up and spent most of my life. Gaza City was the only Palestinian coastal city that was not conquered by Zionist militias in 1948 and that gave Gaza enormous importance and placed it as the beating heart of the preservation of Palestinian nationalism and the promotion of the Palestinian cause by liberation and emancipation by destroying universities, museums, libraries and archives.

Israel seeks to make our memory, whether collective institutional, inaccessible. It is an assault on continuity. They want to expel people from Gaza, but they also want to make sure that if people return to Gaza. Gaza find nothing and will for eternity in this limbo of nothingness in this void The ancient city of Gaza with its masks like or a church like the Church of Saint Poriferus testifies to its complex and multifaceted history alarm mwhich is the second mque oldest in Palestine after AA MK and from the images we have seen it seems that the mosque was deliberately attacked because there are photos that show the surrounding buildings intact while the mosque has been bombed to destruction, so Israel is trying to impose a breakup between the present and the past. and of course, the future and destroying an iconic structure like musque is just part of that effort.

The goal of targeting the uh

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archives is to make it impossible for people to reconstruct and recover what has been lost. We not only lost historical documents but also land. Land registration deeds, plans and infrastructure schemes, now we hear all these reports of people returning to their neighborhoods and not being able to recognize where the street they lived on was located.where their homes were and they think that destroying institutions or archives or Looting museums can destroy Gaza as a place and therefore prevent people from returning there or reestablishing their lives. Gaza and its district have suffered a lot in terms of attacks and destruction. of historical and heritage sites after 1967, after Gaza came under Israeli occupation, Israeli defense minister MOS Dean built an entire infamous career, in addition to being a war criminal who looted artifacts from different parts of Gaza and Palestine and stored them in his own home, but also in In the 1970s and 1980s, Israeli forces along with Israeli archaeologists looted a 4,500-year-old Canaanite cemetery located in uh derl balah, my hometown, and took everything what they were able to take to the national museum of Israel and today I go on the Internet and see artifacts that were stolen and What was looted from this site is sold all over the world and that makes one wonder if Israel's practices today are a phenomenon new or simply a continuation of a long-standing pattern of destruction and looting of Palestinian history and culture in this war alone.

Palestinians in Gaza. They have lost prominent figures in their society who shaped and defined cultural and academic life in Gaza and if there is one individual who captures the essence of this city and what it represents it is if the Lions do not have their own historians, The History of the Hunt will always glorify the hunters will always glorify the occupier. He was killed while he was taking refuge with his sister and his children before he was killed. He received a phone call from an Israeli officer warning him that he was being pursued. was murdered his sister was murdered the children were murdered and his brother was also murdered I'm an academic Probably the hardest thing I have at home is an exhibition marker but if the Israelis invade if the aret has a charge in the US, Open Door also to Massacre Us I'm going to use that marker, throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that's the last thing I could do.

He was an important teacher, a writer and a poet whose impact transcended his personal work to shape. and mold a generation of English-speaking Palestinians in Gaza who mastered the art of telling their stories, but we have also lost a large number of cultural and literary figures and, of course, many academics. This is an attack on the people who create meaning in society and who create the language that helps people understand and reflect on their reality. Israel knew what it has been doing and continues to do attacking and persecuting our cultural, literary and intellectual figures, but something like Gaza is an idea and ideas are not.

Friends may perish, cities may be destroyed, but the ideas they represent, Principles and values ​​are things that do not vanish into thin air, they continue to exist and inspire people for many years to return to where we are. The Gaza Aid crisis began, a key factor in this being the accusations that the Israeli government made in January against the largest source of Aid in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRA, when Israel alleged that the UNRA was harboring Hamas fighters, too many Western media outlets, mainly. Among them, the Wall Street Journal simply believed the story that the US and many other governments later withdrew their funding despite ridiculously little evidence that Israel provided a starving nation with the money it needs to help the Palestinians. .

The EU and Canada have now announced that they will resume funding in Canada. It will take time, something the people of Gaza simply do not have. Of all the crimes against journalism since October 7, the way the UNRA episode was reported will weigh heavily on the conscience of the journalists and news editors involved or at least We should see you next time here at the stand listen.