(FYI: Haaretz, Aug 5, 2025: Large Majority of Israeli Jews Untroubled by Reports of Famine in Gaza, Poll Finds
A vast majority of Israeli Jews – 79 percent – say they are "not so troubled" or "not troubled at all" by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza, according to a poll released Tuesday)
The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, B’Tselem:
July 2025 Report: Our Genocide
And Physicians for Human Rights, Israel:
July 2025 Position Paper: Destruction of Conditions of Life: A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide
"Israel's oldest daily, Haaretz," which was was sanctioned by the Israeli government on Nov. 24, 2024
Gideon Levy, Opinion, July 27, 2025: Denying Gaza's Starvation Is No Less Vile Than Denying the Holocaust
July 28, 2025: For the First Time, Israeli Human Rights Groups Say Israel Is Committing Genocide in Gaza, Call for International Intervention
Genocidal intent throughout': According to the reports by B'Tselem and Physicans for Human Rights – Israel, the Israeli attack on Gaza caused 'massive, indiscriminate bombardment of population centers' and the 'starvation of more than two million people as a method of warfare' against the Palestinians.
...The report concludes that the combination of the reality in Gaza and statements by senior Israeli officials led them to "the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip … and committing genocide against Palestinians."
..."The evidence shows a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza's health and life-sustaining systems through targeted attacks on hospitals, obstruction of medical aid and evacuations, and the killing and detention of healthcare personnel," PHRI's report says.
To date, numerous organizations and legal experts have concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Among those reaching this determination are Amnesty International, the European Center for Human Rights, the International Federation for Human Rights and Doctors Without Borders.
Human Rights Watch has also said in a report that Israel is committing crimes of extermination that may amount to genocide.
Several Israeli legal scholars and genocide researchers have also arrived at this conclusion, including Holocaust and genocide experts Daniel Blatman, Omar Bartov, Shmuel Lederman, Amos Goldberg, Raz Segal, legal scholar Itamar Raz and historians Lee Mordechai and Adam Raz, among others.
[decades-long
inhuman occupation compressed]
to one-day attacks
reponding with the red glow
of missiles in Gaza's night sky
this endless loop:
October 7, October 7 ....
[and yet
the decades before
and the day after...] bloodshedding
each bombed-out house:
an album with no photos
but with people
living, wounded and dead
pressed between its pages
anything new
under Gaza's smeared sun?
smoky rubble
beyond smoky rubble, and yet
again smoky rubble
And Analysis, July 29: Famine by Design: How Israel Ignored Warnings Over Hunger and Starved Gaza
"I've worked on this issue for four decades, and since World War II there has been no case of famine as carefully planned and controlled as this one. Every stage was foreseeable," said global famine expert Alex de Waal.
a dull-eyed baby
with loose skin over bone ...
red glow of Gazan skies
Reprinted in Haikuniverse, July 26, 2025
+972 Magazine, July 28 2025: Israel’s aid concessions merely offer Gazans survival on a leash
To deflect international outrage, Israel’s strategy is clear: maintain enough control to kill with impunity, and enough relief to look humane while doing it.
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.
-- Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate
To conclude today's "Special Feature" post, I would like to share with you the latest entry of Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCX:
written in response to The New Yorker, July 28, 2025: Israel’s Zones of Denial
Amid national euphoria over the bombing of Iran—and the largely ignored devastation in Gaza—a question lurks: What is the country becoming?
Tel Aviv's beach party
the faint boom, boom, boom
from Gaza
FYI: Tel Aviv ranks among world's top ten beach cities (and party cities) in new National Geographic poll
And here are relevant excerpts and remarks taken from The New Yorker, July 28, 2025: "Israel’s Zones of Denial:"
When we go to the beach, you can hear the booms from Gaza. When you eat a lollipop or an ice cream, you hear things being blown up... Not only is reality horrible, you also don’t know what the real story is.
Etgar Keret, Israeli writer and Tel Aviv liberal
What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.
-- Ehud Olmert, former Israeli Prime Minister.
... the war in Gaza has produced a people “who have lost everything and feel only humiliation and abandonment—and despise hypocritical Western moralism. This will feed future militants, and how they behave will be shaped by old grievances and new technologies—which Israel masters today, but they could master, too.” In the familiar pattern, today’s resolution is tomorrow’s tinderbox.
-- Malley Agha, who was once a peace negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Haaretz, July 31: The Victim Identity Israel Built Over Generations Now Fuels Its Denial of Genocide in Gaza
Genocide does not require a single, explicit directive; rather, it's the result of a process in which rhetoric, policy, political discourse, collective dehumanization and repeated patterns of action converge into mass acts of destruction.
But the saddest chapter in Israel's increasing tendency to deny the genocide in Gaza is reserved for Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. The historians who work there and devote days on end to investigating the events of the Holocaust are choosing to silence their mouths and pens when it comes to the horrors of Gaza. In light of the flood of statements at the beginning of the war by Israeli politicians calling for mass killings there, a group of local scholars turned to Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan and requested that the institution publish a public condemnation of the declarations, specifically those calling for genocide. But in January 2024 Dayan replied to Prof. Amos Goldberg, who initiated the move: "The six million Jews who were murdered in the Shoah are entitled to an institution that deals with them and with them alone. Therefore, Yad Vashem doesn't deal with genocide as such but only with its interface with the Shoah… Our area of activity is the Shoah, and only the Shoah."
The comments written by the Yad Vashem chairman are unsettling not only because of his silence, but also because his words are wrapped in a cloak of ostensible institutional integrity, while turning an arrogant back to the sense of historic responsibility that is supposed to inform the memorialization of the Holocaust. "Six million Jews are entitled to an institution that deals with them alone," writes Dayan – suggesting an exclusivity of the memory of murdered Jews as an excuse for hardheartedness, for closing one's eyes and maintaining silence in the face of ongoing war crimes and tens of thousands of slaughtered and starved people. All part of the terrible crime being perpetrated by the descendants of another genocide, the Shoah, among others.
Wasn't the murder of six million Jews also enabled due to many around the world washing away responsibility? Yad Vashem's entrenchment in the claim that their expertise are limited to the Holocaust is an act of moral bankruptcy, of disavowal of responsibility based on institutional convenience and the ideological adoption of a governmental policy responsible for horrific war crimes. It is a dire betrayal of the values of liberty, justice and the sanctity of human life, which the memory of the Holocaust is supposed to teach us.
For the past three generations Israel has been constructing an identity of victimhood, ranging from acts perpetrated during the Holocaust to those of Hamas on October 7. It denies its own crimes and is therefore living in a permanently distorted reality. Any attempt to speak about Israel's crimes against the Palestinians is seen as a threat not only to the image of the nation but to its very survival. The defensive narrative has become foundational to Israel's national identity, and any criticism of this narrative is met with the kind of institutional and public violence we are witnessing today
And Haaretz, July 31: Americans Should Ask Not Only What War Has Done to Gaza, but Also What It's Done to Israel
Israeli TV debates have shown just how far the local media is willing to go to look away from Gaza. Since the war began, Israeli audiences have largely been shielded from the reality of Gaza's devastation. It's not just censorship – it's that most Israelis would rather not know.
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