In a piece she wrote for Foreign Policy columnist Amy Mackinnon didn’t leave much room for optimism. Under the heading – “What Gaza’s Future Might Look Like After the War,” she said the monumental challenge of reconstruction will likely cost billions of dollars. “Amid periodic outbreaks of hostilities between Israel and Hamas over the past decade, Gaza has been in a nearly constant state of reconstruction. Efforts to rebuild homes and infrastructure destroyed by war have been hamstrung by unfulfilled donor pledges and complicated screening mechanisms put in place to prevent construction materials from falling into the hands of Hamas.”
Israel too is beginning to assess damage
caused by the Gaza war and is making budgetary amendments.
In a press conference held recently, Finance
Minister Bezalel Smotrich said the 2023-2024 national budget was no longer
relevant.
He estimated that the direct cost of the war at about $246 million a day. Smotrich added that he did not yet have an
assessment of the indirect costs on an economy partly paralysed by the mass
mobilisation of military reservists and civil defence
needs.
The finance minister no doubt is consoled by the
knowledge that in recent years Israeli arms sales have increased considerably. Furthermore,
Israeli air-defence systems are performing exceptionally well, notably the Iron
Dome and Arrow 3 systems. Therefore, it’s reasonable to expect an additional increase
in export sales of air-defence systems.
Two weeks ago, the Washington Post published
an analysis of President Biden’s dismissal of the reported Palestinian
death toll in the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
“I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about
how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the
price of waging a war. … I have no confidence in the number that the
Palestinians are using.”
Biden’s dismissal of the ministry’s statistics — that he had “no
confidence” in them — was striking. The State Department has regularly
cited ministry statistics without caveats in its annual human rights
reports. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(OCHA), which tracks deaths in the conflict, has found the ministry’s
numbers to be reliable after conducting its own investigation. “Past experience
indicated that death tolls were
reported with high accuracy,” an OCHA official told Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s editor and chief writer of ‘The Fact Checker’ since 2011. Kessler
is one of
the pioneers of political fact-checking.
My comment- Who checks the fact checker who
relies largely on OCHA reports?
Currently in Australia, heading for New Zealand UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese is bent on gaining support for her insidious mission to demonise Israel.
About the time she received her commission a report by UNwatch
titled “Mandate to Discriminate.” (UNwatch is an NGO that analyses and monitors
the activities of the United Nations) discovered a serious omission in the
conflicts of interest form submitted by Albanese for her UN candidacy. She
reportedly failed to declare that her husband, Massimiliano Calì, previously
worked for the Palestinian Authority.
“Israel has a right to defend itself, but can’t claim it when it
comes to the people it oppresses [or] whose land it colonises,” she tweeted on
April 8.
In other words, Ms. Albanese means Israel has no right to defend
itself against Palestinian terrorism, depending on which side of the supposed
‘green line’ its citizens are. Only in the Orwellian world of the United
Nations, could a senior official put forward such a warped proposition
justifying the murder of Jews.
The Israeli government has demanded her dismissal, labelling her language as
hate-filled, that of an anti-Semite, and symptomatic of an anti-Israeli mindset
that underplays the country’s legitimate security concerns. It refuses to
cooperate with her as it has done so with her predecessors. She was appointed
to a six-year term in 2022.
Albanese’s arguments have gained traction and a wide audience in Arab and parts of the western media. She argues that Israel cannot invoke the right to self-defence under the UN charter since the threat comes not from a state, but a military group, in a territory that Israel occupies militarily. Israel rejects the idea that it has occupied Gaza since withdrawing its forces in 2005, but the UN and other global bodies consider the occupation to have continued since then as it has maintained effective control over the small territory by land, sea and air.
Israel argues that controlling access to
the Gaza Strip is vitally important to ensure its security. Hamas and other
terrorist organisations in Gaza have often voiced their intention to annihilate
Israel. The closure on Gaza helps prevent arms being smuggled into the enclave.
However, this is just the latest in Ms. Albanese’s long history of relentless, systematic and visceral bias against Israel.
The Israel Air Force has dropped leaflets over Gaza that warn
civilians to distant themselves from Hamas operatives making clear Israel’s intention to minimise
civilian casualties. Since the operation began, Hamas has repeatedly instructed
Palestinians to ignore these warnings.
The IDF has gone to extraordinary lengths
to protect innocent bystanders
As early as 2006 the IDF began warning the residents of buildings in Gaza that were about to be
attacked because they harboured terrorists and
their munitions.
Roof knocking was used during the 2008–2009 Gaza
War, Operation Pillar of Defence in 2012, and Operation
Protective Edge in 2014. In the six months prior to its
use, Israel collected data on Hamas members,
which they used to issue warnings. Typically, Israeli intelligence officers
and Shin Bet security agents contacted residents of a building in which they suspected storage
of military assets and told them that they had 10–15 minutes to flee the
attack, although in some cases the delay has been as little as five
minutes.
In 2016,the US military adopted the Israeli battlefield
tactic(roof knocking) in its war against Islamic State. It was used in an attack against an ISIS storage facility
in Mosul, Iraq. As women and
children lived in the house, a Hellfire missile was
initially shot at the roof as a warning.
During the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, CNN reported that many people in Gaza said
the IDF had abandoned the "roof knocking" policy. In October 2023, a
senior Israeli official stated that the practice would no longer be the norm
and would only be used under certain circumstances. An IDF officer told
the New York Times that instead of the "roof knocking"
policy, Israel is issuing mass evacuation orders and leaflets stating that people sheltering near Hamas terrorists are risking their lives.
In some cases, residents who were warned about an impending bombing
climbed up voluntarily to their roofs to show they would not leave. When faced
with similar defiance situations, IDF
commanders have either called off the bombing or launched a a low-charge warning missile at empty areas of the roof, in order to frighten
the people gathered on the roof into leaving the building.
The New York Times stated that according to Israeli reports, Hamas asked residents to stand on the roofs of buildings to dissuade Israeli pilots from attacking their homes.
A NATO report confirmed the practice, describing it as an example of lawfare. However,
Amnesty International argued that Hamas' purported call may have been
"motivated by a desire to avoid further panic" among civilians because Gaza lacked adequate shelters.
The Israeli Government stated "While these warnings, could not
eliminate all harm to civilians, they were frequently effective," and that
aerial video surveillance by IDF forces showed civilians leaving targeted areas prior to an attack as a direct result of the
warnings. In November 2014, the most senior US military official, General Martin Dempsey, cited "roof knocking" as an example where Israel "did some
extraordinary things to limit civilian casualties" during Operation
Protective Edge.
Israeli officials have said they will take steps to limit civilian
casualties, but it fell to a Pentagon official, Dana Stroul, to provide more
detail during a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the
Israeli-Gaza war.
"They have dropped 1.5 million leaflets in Gaza asking
civilians to evacuate," Stroul said. "They have sent over hundreds of
thousands of text messages and made phone calls to cell phones. In our
conversations with the Israel Defence Forces they have made clear they assess
collateral damage estimates before they take strikes."
I’ll conclude by thanking the many friends concerned
about my safety.
Take care.
Beni,
16th of November, 2023.
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