Zoeken in deze blog 🔎🔎

zaterdag 11 juli 2026

Israel continues to commit genocide by deliberately targeting Palestinian children

PRESS RELEASES INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION

Israel continues to commit genocide and other atrocity crimes by deliberately targeting Palestinian children

23 June 2026

The Commission reiterates that the deliberate targeting of children is one of the key elements establishing genocidal intent of the Israeli authorities and security forces to destroy the Palestinian group, in whole or in part, in Gaza.

“The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted and killed by the Israeli security forces,” said Srinivasan Muralidhar, Chair of the Commission. “Even after the October 2025 ceasefire, children continue to be killed and seriously injured, with continued disregard by Israel for the ceasefire and for the protection owed to Palestinian children under international law.”

Severe physical and mental injuries, mass trauma, orphanhood, separation, disability, repeated displacements, starvation, and the collapse of education and healthcare have erased childhood and will continue to affect children in Gaza throughout their lives.

Palestinian children have been arrested and subjected to torture and other severe forms of mistreatment in Israeli prisons and detention facilities, with no information on their whereabouts. Israeli security forces have also used sexual violence against children as part of the collective shaming and oppression, entrenched within a prolonged, ethnic, gendered, and intergenerational pattern of Israeli occupation and hostilities.

Israel’s targeting of neonatal and maternity care centers in Gaza have directly harmed the survival of newborns and Palestinians’ reproductive future, including rises in miscarriages, birth defects and lasting vulnerabilities among newborns, resulting in the destruction of Palestinian newborn life and the population’s continuity. Starvation imposed by Israel through blockade and siege have further caused the death of Palestinian children and severely impacted the health of many others, depriving them of essential nutrition and increasing disease risks amid reduced immunization, food insecurity and destroyed health services.

In parallel, the dismantling and destruction of orphanages and education facilities in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, have obstructed children’s cognitive, social and emotional care and development and disrupted the foundations of Palestinian society.

“Even if the bombs and guns fall silent in Gaza and West Bank, Palestinian children will not simply recover overnight,” said Muralidhar. “The destruction of their health, education and development is irreversible.”

Palestinian children have suffered immense psychological harm, having been stripped of any sense of safety and future. Mental harm is an intergenerational condition, producing a distinctive “occupied psyche” in which the freedom to play, imagine, hope, and develop an identity has been eroded.

By targeting children, Israel is eroding the foundational structure of Palestinian society, weakening the demographic vitality, and overall capacity of the Palestinian people to sustain and exercise its right to determine its future as a people.

“The protection, care and survival of Palestinian children are inseparable from the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination,” said Muralidhar. “By targeting children, Israel is attacking the very capacity of the Palestinian people to exist and to determine their future.”

The Commission calls for Israel to cease committing violations and crimes against and affecting Palestinian children. The Commission further calls for the end of Israel’s continuing presence in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in compliance with the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice.

The Commission has identified military units within the Israeli security forces responsible for killing and injuring of Palestinian children and makes recommendations to Israel and to all Member States to ensure accountability for such crimes.

The international community as a whole must uphold their international legal obligations and call for an end to the hostilities, for Israel to end its occupation and to prioritize accountability and access to justice for victims as an integral component of any political process, grounded in the meaningful participation of Palestinians, including children.

Read the full report in English.

ENDS

Background: The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel was established by the UN Human Rights Council on 27 May 2021 to “investigate, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel, all alleged violations of international humanitarian law and all alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law leading up to and since 13 April 2021.” Resolution A/HRC/RES/S-30/1 further requested the commission of inquiry to “investigate all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity.”

For media queries, please contact: Todd Pitman, Media Adviser for the UN Human Rights Council’s Investigative Bodies: todd.pitman@un.org / +41766911761; or Pascal sim, Human Rights Council Media Officer: simp@un.org.

Follow the Human Rights Council’s Investigative Bodies on Social Media: 
X | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn

Tags

VIEW THIS PAGE IN:

 

 

vrijdag 10 juli 2026

The Zombification of America

 

OPINION

GUEST ESSAY

The Zombification of America

Photo illustration showing an “America First" sign with black X’s over the A, R, I, C and final A of America so that the sign reads, “Me First.”
Credit...Photo Illustration by Aaron DuRall

The rupture of the world order is going much better than expected.

At first there was rage at America’s betrayal, when President Trump called for the annexation of Canada, threatened Greenland, imposed tariffs on its friends and began his campaign to undercut NATO, which continued at its latest meeting this week, in Ankara, Turkey. Now, a strange feeling is emerging in some of the countries that used to be known as America’s allies: optimistic determination. There’s an established principle in chess that applies to geopolitics as well: “The threat is stronger than the execution.” The possibility of U.S. abandonment of the world order was terrifying. The reality turns out to be a new beginning.

Canada, America’s neighbor, was the first to see it, naturally. Since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term, American bullying on trade has been ferocious. As a result, Canada has had to consider what American favor or disfavor is worth. The Bank of Canada recently ran a scenario in which the United States imposed a 25 percent tariff on everything Canada exports to the United States. Canada’s growth of its gross domestic product would slow by about 2.4 percentage points, which over a period of adjustment is well within Canada’s capacity. A disaster, to be sure, but not the end of the world. That’s the worst-case scenario.

A recent study by economists at the Canadian Shield Institute, commissioned for the podcast “Gloves Off,” which I host, found that Canadian merchandise exports to the United States last year fell by over 30 billion Canadian dollars, (21 billion U.S. dollars), or over 5 percent of exports to the United States. But that loss was offset by nearly 29 billion Canadian dollars in new demand from the rest of the world. When services were included, total exports from Canada increased by almost 7 billion dollars. America can make whatever threats it likes, but if you have the aluminum or oil or potash, somebody will buy it.

At the NATO meeting in Ankara, where Mr. Trump berated allied nations — especially Spain — and repeated his call for U.S. control of Greenland, the leaders of Spain and Denmark took Mr. Trump’s comments as the idle threats they self-evidently are. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada may well say that Mr. Trump “won the argument” on NATO members raising their spending levels for defense. The reason they are spending more now may be that they know that American military power is in retreat. American support, whatever that even means anymore, guarantees nothing.







It’s not just NATO. Bureaucracies once defined by their lethargy are moving at surprising speed to limit their exposure to both the U.S. government and the companies that serve as outposts of American power. Since taking office a little over a year ago, Mr. Carney’s government has made just over 100 international trade deals. The European Union has expanded its defense procurement deliberately to avoid integration with American military forces. Disentanglement from American technology will be the thorniest knot to undo, but the work is already underway on this, too: The European Union has switched from Google to the French Qwant as a default search engine in its official systems, while Belgium and Finland have both moved away from Amazon Web Services.

The post-American reality is not a world without America, of course. As a geopolitical actor, the United States has become a kind of lumbering zombie — a beast that can be startled into reflexive actions but lacks higher functions. Much of the world understands that another round of elections in the midterms or in 2028 won’t solve anything. The American people are so divided that the future will be chaotic whoever wins, many outside the United States feel. They fear a sane Republican or Democratic president would not be able to guarantee a stable American policy or consistent application of even the vaguest principles in international relations.

“What is America?” is no longer a grand theoretical question. It is a practical matter. Governors of a number of U.S. states have rational political programs. American institutions survive. Some Americans have even kept their ideals. But as for the entity known as the United States of America, there’s no there there. There’s no America to deal with. An increasingly isolationist America is no longer the leader of the free world. How can it be, when it’s no longer the leader of itself?

Zombie America creates, at least in the short term, contradictions. In Canada, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, jointly operated with the United States, continues to be our most important alliance. Yet civil servants here have also started training with drones for the possibility of asymmetrical conflict with the United States. Real security can be found only by removing your country from American influence, on every front as far as possible.















“The threat is stronger than the execution” was the wisdom of Aron Nimzowitsch, a leading figure of the hypermodern school of chess. The reason it applies to the chessboard is that all the time and energy you spend trying to figure out how to avoid a disaster turns out to be worse than the disaster itself. Once the worst has happened, you can focus on incremental improvement rather than avoidance. You can become active rather than passive. In geopolitics, too, so much of power is the appearance of power.

Everybody who believes in freedom and democracy and the dignity of the person and the right of nations to self-determination should be working toward the destruction of the United States’ capacity to project power — to end the strange hold it has over the world so we can all move on. So far, no one is helping more than the United States itself.


Propaganda Campagne van Joodse Staat

Onair58-2 @_Innocent_99 @AnisJadib zegt nooit zomaar iets. Dit is ronduit schokkend om te horen. @NOS Inderdaad. Dit heeft zóveel nieuwsw...