UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, International Criminal Court Prosecutor, International Court of Justice President: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Indigenous Palestinian People.
While I was in Beirut another doctor told me the story of a child from Gaza who, after coming to Lebanon, learned that a man had died a natural death. The child did not understand. He did not know that death could come this way. It had to be explained to him, that people die of old age. The only cause of death the child knew was Israel. And he knew it well.
Continue reading at https://archive.md/sfayI#selection-1157.0-1167.11
Mind-body, brain-body, however we do it, we do it to get to wellness, vitality, beauty—not in pursuit of vanity but for holistic reasons. Sexual fitness inevitably follows. “Why Are Israelis So Sexy?” reads a headline in the Times of Israel, published almost two years into the genocide. We start off strong, with farmers in South Africa. We learn about another love child, the zorse, from “the conjugals” of a zebra and horse, an animal that has “hybrid vigour.” So it goes for the Israelis, although there is more “to this sexiness than just the healthy cross-pollination of our genomic ingathering.” There are layers beyond eugenics: For example, Israelis “know how to get their hands dirty, do the hard work—clean the house, fix their own stuff, pull together as a unit, function in community. They help each other. This is native to the culture.” What else is “native” to the settler nation? Well, before they gave us the normalization of genocide, took pictures of themselves posing for dating apps next to lingerie, in the homes of women they displaced, there was a need to “direct all this sexiness somewhere.” So, the “Israelis basically birthed the trance music scene in the late 1980s in Goa, and it spread like oil on a suntanned back, the world over. They made the world party, and party hard.”
Continue reading at https://thebaffler.com/latest/warrior-pose-turfah
Khalas (خلاص —“enough”), the West is no longer flirting with the liberal welfare state. It is now practicing pure violence—and all of its institutions are going along with it, including the humanitarian sector. Since World War II, the humanitarian sector was necessary for the West to portray its cultural superiority. Since the genocide, it is clear that we are down to the bare-knuckle fight of racial superiority. The humanitarian sector—through organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)—is indicating that it’s prepared to also make that turn. The image is that of a Red Cross bulldozer in a Palestinian neighborhood, surrounded by flattened buildings holding Palestinian bodies that have not been retrieved, digging for a single Israeli body. It’s already signaling that it is prepared to engage with Trump’s reservation model. And effectively, Trump’s plan for Gaza is a Native American reservation. With the casinos, with the local managers working for a white man that’s never seen the place—all of it.
I’m in contact with the Ministry of Health (MOH) in Gaza, and they are being inundated with multi-million dollar offers from international humanitarian organizations to buy the remaining hospitals in Gaza.
Continue reading at https://proteanmag.com/2026/04/02/health-sovereignty-in-palestine-a-conversation-between-mary-turfah-and-dr-ghassan-abu-sittah/
The final section, called “My Psychological Torment: Between Ruins and Imagination,” is not quite an ending. The genocide has “shattered the stability of my mind and infected me with a strange psychological syndrome,” he writes, one that he believes “haunts every soul in Gaza.” He sees his own crushed skull scattered, his blood saturating the pages of his books. He sees in a flash thousands of dismembered bodies outside a bakery, “their blood soaking the bread.” He sees a friend walking toward him, very much alive, and then his friend is “body parts exploding in my face,” even as his friend embraces him and asks, “Why are you crying?” He sees his mother headless. At night, the nightmares persist, and every day he is no longer sure whether he is alive, because awake, asleep, trapped in his mind, “all are the same.” The last three lines of Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide read,
If I stay alive, I will finish the story . . .
This is all I could write . . .
The rest is being written now . . . in
blood.
Continue reading at https://www.bookforum.com/print/3203/between-ruins-and-imagination-62572
Examining the bodies returned to their people after the most recent so-called ceasefire, Palestinian doctors noted that, in some bodies “the rib cage and ribs were clipped with a sharp saw—a medical saw, a bone saw—and the sternum, along with the central part of the ribs, [were] lifted to allow for the removal of the heart and lungs without damage to the organ being taken.” Organ procurement, with few exceptions like skin and cornea, requires that the body be either alive—via brain death—or just-dead—via circulatory death. It is plausible that some Palestinian prisoners’ torture led to brain death. It is also possible their torturers felt no need to wait. Palestinian witnesses have reported that some prisoners were alive at the time they were taken for organ extraction. In one batch of bodies, the organs removed were those commonly transplanted: heart, liver, lungs. The transplant surgeon waits for a person to die; the soldier can’t. The settler surgeon wields his mastery over the body to serve the state. Here, the surgeon acts as—is—a soldier.
Continue reading at https://thebaffler.com/latest/im-not-done-with-you-turfah
The piece—written by Yasmeen Abu Fraiha, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Israelis Noam Alon and Avner Halperin, and Abdalrahman Ahmed, a Palestinian from Gaza—rejects any rigorous accounting of Israel’s crimes against Gaza’s medical infrastructure in favor of gauzy platitudes about how healthcare can be an avenue for “building trust” between two warring populations. “The four of us, Palestinians and Israelis, firmly believe in the need to foster hope and build trust,” the authors write. “While watching hospitals turn into battlefields, we’ve also witnessed firsthand the power of healthcare to overcome animosity and bridge the divides between populations in conflict.” It takes great pains to describe the destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and the deaths of its doctors and patients as an unfortunate byproduct of war, as though bombs simply fell from the sky independent of anyone motivated by genocidal intent and without any connection to a long-standing colonial project.
Fraiha, Halperin, and Alon have appointments at Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative, which last year hosted Jared Kushner to discuss “finishing the job” in Gaza so as to clear the way for developing Gaza’s “very valuable, from a real estate perspective…waterfront property.” (Ahmed’s work is based at Brandeis University.) In a conspicuous conflict of interest that is omitted in NEJM’s author disclosure forms, at least one of the authors, Alon, worked for nearly three years in the IDF Special Intelligence Unit, according to her own LinkedIn page. (The length of compulsory military service for Israeli women is two years, meaning that Alon actively chose to serve in the Special Intelligence Unit for the remaining years.)…Also unusual for an author published in the NEJM is the fact that Alon, according to her LinkedIn profile, has no background in medicine, public health, or health policy.
Continue reading at https://www.thenation.com/article/society/new-england-journal-of-medicine-gaza-genocide/
Some days, Israeli military leaders feign the urge to protect enemy civilians. Yet measured rhetoric is not politically viable in Israel. When used, it’s aimed at the West: in 2022, the commander of Israel’s Palmachim Airbase, Brigadier General Omri Dor, described the work of his forces as “starting with a very surgical event of finding a person or a single launcher and neutralizing it without causing collateral damage or harm to another person.” In June 2024, almost 10 months into carrying out a genocide, the head of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit described a so-called rescue operation as “a surgical operation, like a brain operation; it has to be so accurate.”
Continue reading at https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-most-moral-army/
In the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust—the first case of genocide recognized by international law—many Zionists looked at the victims and recoiled at their weakness. They committed themselves to “never again,” even if it meant perpetrating a genocide to avoid being perceived as such. However, this motivation did not dictate the timing or rationale behind the displacement of Palestinians; the settler colonial project was already well underway by the 1930s. Instead, this outlook informs how today’s Zionists see themselves.
Continue reading at https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/israels-reality-principle
- The cruelty itself, on display in videos like the one taken from the vantage point of Israeli soldiers driving their tank over the “I Love Gaza” sign (that greets visitors entering Gaza through the Rafah crossing), is somehow less disturbing than that it is presented with naked glee—no trace of the sober air that marks a person “doing what needs to be done” or an awareness that the rest of the world might not welcome overt, genocidal sadism as enthusiastically as the average Israeli. It’s like they can’t see us seeing them.
Continue reading at https://thebaffler.com/latest/running-amok-turfah
One of the first posts on @GazaMedicVoices, a social media page that provides firsthand accounts from healthcare workers on the ground in Gaza, was shared on October 12, 2023. It presented the testimony of a consultant surgeon in Gaza, dated to just three days into Israel’s extermination campaign—before, to many, it was recognizable as such. “Having spent five days without leaving the hospital, I find myself at a loss for words,” the surgeon pleaded. “Never before in my entire life have I witnessed anything like this, and I am unable to articulate what I have seen. I am left speechless.”
Continue reading at https://res.cloudinary.com/restless-beings/image/upload/v1715610887/restless-beings-report-2024.pdf