Israel is using deadly force against children in the West Bank
“The depth of the horror surpasses our ability to describe it,” James Elder, a spokesperson with the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), said after travelling the length of Gaza this week. There is nothing left: Republicans who called for Gaza to be turned into a “parking lot” have got their wish. Amid the ruins, a traumatized and trapped population are being starved to death; an entire generation is seeing their future destroyed. “Starvation is used as a weapon of war,” the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said this week. “Israel is provoking famine.”
While the world’s attention is on Gaza, life for Palestinians in the West Bank is also growing increasingly precarious. There has been a surge in settler violence and a spike in unlawful lethal force from Israeli forces. More than 400 Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the West Bank have been killed by Israeli fire since 7 October, according to the Palestinian health ministry. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has said that about 100 of these deaths have been children, most of whom posed no credible threat to heavily armed soldiers from one of the most powerful militaries in the world.
One of those children was Rami Al-Halhouli, a 12-year-old who was recently shot dead by Israeli border police while lighting fireworks to celebrate Ramadan. The police, who still have Rami’s body, have said that the child was aiming the firework at them – but did not provide any evidence of this. The far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir celebrated the shooting, calling the 12-year-old a “terrorist” and the officer who shot him a hero.
Perhaps you think it’s OK for an Israeli soldier to shoot a boy dead because he was playing with a firework. Perhaps you can find a way to justify this to yourself. Still, the uncomfortable fact remains that there are plenty of documented cases that show Israeli soldiers firing at Palestinians without any provocation. “Cases like these happen quite regularly, but no one’s hearing about them,” said Dror Sadot, a spokesperson for B’Tselem. “The military will say that it is opening an investigation. And this investigation will last for years, probably without any media covering it. And then it will be washed down the drain.” Fewer than 1% of any investigations into the Israeli military using excessive force against Palestinians end in an indictment.
Unless you’ve been to the occupied Palestinian territories, I don’t think it’s possible to wrap your head around the way in which Palestinians are treated by Israel. Not just the impunity with which they can be killed but the dehumanization and humiliation that is part of everyday life. I remember visiting my father’s village in the West Bank when I was six and carrying spare clothes whenever we left the village in case a curfew was imposed by Israel and we couldn’t return. My diary from the time skips from eating ice-cream to being shot at with teargas by Israeli soldiers.
Unless you have experienced it yourself, I think it’s hard for some people in the west to understand the extent to which Palestinian lives are policed and controlled by Israel. We are constantly told that the situation is far too complex to parse, but when you go there, when you see how people live, it doesn’t feel complex at all.
“It’s made to sound as though you need a degree in Middle Eastern studies or some such, a PhD, to really understand what’s happening,” the acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates said after he visited Israel and Palestine last year. “But I understood the first day … I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited, where your voting rights are inhibited, where your right to the water is inhibited, where your right to housing is inhibited. And it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me.”
Amid the horrors unfolding in Gaza there is a narrative being advanced that this is all about Hamas and 7 October. It is important not to lose sight of the fact that this is not just about Hamas – who do not govern the West Bank – and history did not start on 7 October. What is happening has been a very long time in the making.
Twenty-one years ago, in 2003, American peace activist Rachel Corrie went to Gaza to defend homes in Rafah from being demolished by Israeli forces. “I couldn’t even believe that a place like this existed,” Corrie wrote in her diaries. “[N]o amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can’t imagine it unless you see it … Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.”
A couple of weeks after writing that, 23-year-old Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli soldier driving a US-made bulldozer. Nobody was ever held accountable for her death. Nobody will ever be held accountable for 12-year-old Rami’s death, either.
Saudi Arabia should not chair the UN’s top forum for women’s rights and gender equality
Saudi Arabia is the only candidate to chair the next yearlong UN Commission on the Status of Women session, several diplomats told Human Rights Watch. It seems somewhat self-evident that a country that persecutes women’s rights activists should not be leading any conversations in this area.
An increasing number of women are drinking themselves sick
One new estimate predicts women in the US will account for close to half of alcohol-associated liver disease costs in the US by 2040.
Abortions sharply increase in US despite bans in Republican-led states
There was a 10% increase in abortions performed in 2023 versus 2020, according to a new report. “It is very possible that, while access [to abortion] was dramatically curtailed for people living in ban states, access substantially improved for residents of states without bans,” the authors wrote.
The Gambia is debating whether to repeal its ban on female genital mutilation
Horrifyingly, it could become the first country in the world to overturn a ban on the practice.
Some of the most powerful lawyers and judges in the UK belong to a men-only club
The Garrick Club in London has repeatedly blocked attempts to let women in. Barrister Helena Kennedy said: “We should be outside the door with banners. It should be mentioned to senior-level judges, who are supposed to promote fairness and equality, that it’s not appropriate to be in a club that does the opposite.”
The week in pawtriarchy
Dogs can understand nouns, a new study has found. Writing in Current Biology, the scientists say the results “provide the first neural evidence for object word knowledge in a non-human animal”.
If his language skills are so great, then why doesn’t my dog listen when I tell him to stop chewing my socks? According to an expert, it’s because he doesn’t want to: “Your dog may understand what you’re saying but choose not to act.”
