technocrit

The Gaza government’s Detainee Media Office has issued a statement slamming what it called "international double standards" in media treatment of Palestinian prisoners freed by Israel as opposed to three Israeli captives released by Hamas in a prisoner exchange on Saturday.

Media reports on Saturday focused on the gaunt and emaciated condition of the three released captives – Eli Sharabi, 52, Eli Levy, 34, and Ohad Ben-Ami, 58.

The Israeli government said that their treatment by Hamas was "a crime against humanity", with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is himself wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, threatening that their condition would “not pass without a response”.

The Israeli health ministry said that the released captives had suffered severe malnutrition.

However, the Detainee Media Office pointed out that dozens of Palestinian detainees had died as a result of malnutrition, abuse, and medical neglect in Israeli prisons without any international condemnation or media coverage, and said that this was an example of "double standards in dealing with the prisoner issue".

It said that hundreds of released Palestinian prisoners had left Israeli prisons with permanent injuries, "broken psychologically and physically" after years of abuse and torture, without the international community taking any notice.

The Detainee Media Office said that the emaciated condition of the released Israeli captives was due to Israel’s siege and its restrictions on the entry of food into the Gaza Strip, which have affected the population of the territory as a whole, causing a humanitarian catastrophe.

"Where was the outcry when [Israeli] prison cells turned into human slaughterhouses? Where was the emergency when Palestinian detainees came out of prison as shadows of their former selves, after being deprived of food, medicine, and their most basic human rights?"

While the Israeli captives released on Saturday appeared emaciated and gaunt, leading to outcry in Israel, captives released previously have appeared in better health, with no signs of malnutrition.

By contrast, Palestinians previously released by Israel have shown visible signs of starvation and severe mental and physical trauma.

183 Palestinian prisoners were released to Gaza and the West Bank in Saturday’s exchange, with at least seven being rushed to hospital as soon as they were released due to mistreatment in Israeli detention facilities.

Israel’s extreme right-wing Public Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has previously boasted about the "abominable" and "squalid" conditions Palestinian prisoners were kept in in Israel, saying that he had reduced food and shower times for prisoners.

Israeli right wing figures have also defended soldiers who brutally raped Palestinian detainees at the notorious Sde Teiman detention facility.

While hundreds of Palestinian prisoners have been released in exchanges with Hamas following the Gaza ceasefire, there are still over 10,000 in Israeli jails, including hundreds of children and hundreds held without charge or trial in administrative detention.

... over the course of Israel’s genocide, Western media have actively avoided investigating—and even downplayed—the true human costs of the war by eagerly parroting Israeli officials who cast doubt on the claims of the Gaza Health Ministry. Despite those supposed doubts, Western media default to citing the health ministry tally in day-to-day coverage of the war, while making little mention of the long-held consensus among health experts that far more Palestinians were dying than were being recorded (New York Times, 12/27/24; CNN, 8/16/24).

The downplaying can be seen in Western media’s repeated refrain that the health ministry is “Hamas-run” or “Hamas-controlled” (BBC, 12/3/23; New York Times, 10/19/23; CNN, 12/4/23) and therefore not to be trusted. More than adding doubt, labeling civilian infrastructure as “Hamas-controlled” puts Palestinians in harm’s way. Israel’s desire to paint anything Palestinian as Hamas is “an implicit association of Palestinians with evil, essentially making Palestinian lives dispensable,” writes Noora Said in Mondoweiss (12/29/23).

It stretches the mind to imagine a more pressing task for journalism than accurately reporting on an unfolding genocide. For US audiences, whose tax dollars are bankrolling the slaughter, news outlets should be making every effort to help them appreciate the full consequences of their government’s foreign policy.

That’s undoubtedly a difficult job. The sheer scale of destruction in Gaza, and its status as an open-air death camp walled off from the rest of the world, means outsiders don’t have the ability to get a complete picture of the devastation. That would require an exhaustive cross-referencing of Gaza Health Ministry documents and (Israeli-controlled) population registers, as well as a broad collection of witness testimonies that international observers just don’t have unfettered access to. But major Western media outlets need to ask themselves a question similar to what the International Court of Justice asked in January 2024: “What’s plausible?”

In addition to the most recent direct death estimate, a letter in the Lancet (7/20/24) by public health researchers took a stab at answering the broader question of all attributable deaths last July. Taking into account historical wartime data, the researchers suggested that for each death directly caused by Israeli weaponry, there could be four or more indirect deaths. “It is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza,” they wrote.

In October, 99 American medical practitioners who served in Gaza wrote a letter to then-President Joe Biden, estimating that at least 118,908 Palestinian had already been killed, directly or indirectly, by Israel. The physicians used a variety of methods, including a calculation of the minimum number of deaths likely to result from the number of civilians classified as facing catastrophic and emergency-level starvation.

Ideally, the vast resources of an outlet like the Times could be used to begin to corroborate these estimates from public health and medical researchers. At the very least, the fact that researchers estimate the true scale of death in Gaza to be three or more times the official tally should bear constant repetition in paragraphs that add context to daily news stories on the topic.

Sana Saeed, a leading critic of Western media’s coverage of Israel’s genocide, noted: "If your article can include a line about how the IDF denies yet another war crime that it’s very clearly committed, then your article can include how leading health studies are estimating that the number of slaughtered Palestinians exceeds 100,000."...

The violent insurrection, the attacks on police officers, the targeting of Black election workers, and the attempts to throw out hundreds of thousands of Black votes in Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Milwaukee were all a part of a coordinated campaign to protect the interests of white America in our two-tiered system of justice...

Sadly, Trump’s pardons are not an isolated event in American history. By pardoning these thugs and labeling them “hostages,” he continues a long and tragic tradition of sweeping the interests of Black people under the rug to protect a misplaced sense of white victimhood.

... When most of us build or buy a home, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is fire. Fire that revisits the coastal mountains several times a decade. In the past sixty years, ten of these frequent events have turned into all-consuming firestorms. The latest conflagration, the Woolsey Fire, has incinerated 1,500 homes and killed at least three people. It started in dry grasslands just south of Simi Valley, the site of the notorious trial of Rodney King’s assailants, then crossed a freeway to ignite dense coastal sage vegetation on the northern flank of the Santa Monica Mountains. The range’s deep canyons, perfectly aligned with the seasonal Santa Ana Winds, once again as bellows, accelerating the fire’s rush to the coast where it burned beach homes. The large number of residences lost attests not only to the ferocity of the conflagration but also to the amount of new construction since the 1993 firestorm.

Why more mansions in the fire-loving hills? Because of a perverse fact: after every major California blaze, homeowners and their representatives take shelter in the belief that if wildfire can’t be prevented, nonetheless, its destructiveness can be tamed. Thus the recently incorporated City of Malibu and the County of Los Angeles responded to the 1993 disaster with aggressive regulations about brush clearance and fire-resistant roof materials. Creating ‘defensible space’ became the new mantra, and it was soon echoed across California in the aftermath of other great fires, such as those that swept San Diego County in 2003 and 2007, burning 4,500 homes and killing 30 people. So instead of a long-overdue debate about the wisdom of rebuilding and the need to prevent further construction in areas of extreme natural fire danger, public attention was diverted into a discussion of the best methods for clearing vegetation (rototillers or goats?) and making homes fire-resistant. And if edge suburbs and backcountry subdivisions, in fact, could be fire-proofed, then why not add more? Since 1993. almost half of California’s new homes have been built in fire hazard areas. Yet, as a contemporary Galileo might say of defensible space, ‘still it burns.’ In the last eighteen months 20,000 homes and perhaps a 1,000 lives have been lost in one super-fire after another.

Such fires are both old and new. Two different causalities are involved. First vegetation and topography, annually orchestrated by our dry hurricanes, define persistent fire patterns and frequencies. Without human intervention, however, lots of small fires ignited by late summer lightning create an intricate patchwork of vegetation of different ages and combustibility. The one-hundred-thousand-acre firestorms that we now experience annually did occur occasionally in the aftermath of epic droughts, but in a ‘natural’ fire regime they were rare. Fire prevention in the twentieth century, however, nurtured large areas of chaparral and forest into old age, creating perfect conditions for great fires. But as long as so many California towns were surrounded by citrus groves and agricultural land, fire even in its new, larger incarnation was usually stopped before it encountered housing. Today our horticultural firebreaks are gone, strawberry fields are now aging suburbs, and the quest for beach fronts, mountain view lots and big trees has created fire hazards that were once unimaginable.

Climate change, meanwhile, is coming to California in the form of drought and extreme summer heat, along with episodes of record torrential rain. Although scientists debate whether or not median annual precipitation averaged over decades will actually decline, more of it will fall as rain not as snow, a serious concern given that our water system depends on the Sierra snowpack to store and modulate the release of the water that irrigates cities and agribusiness. Moreover, rainfall is no longer an accurate predictor of fire risk. The winter of 2016-17 was the wettest in the history of Northern California, and spring brought the most glorious wildflower display in generations. But July was torrid and coastal temperatures, usually in the 70s, broke 100°F for a week. The greenery of spring was punctually baked into a bumper crop of brown fire-starter. When the winds began to blow in October, first Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, and then Montecito, just south of Santa Barbara, caught fire. Three thousand homes were lost and several dozen people, mostly elderly and unaware of the approaching menace, died. But nature in California saves one last act and when the heavens opened up on Montecito’s bare burnt hills in January another 25 people disappeared in the fast-moving debris flows. This same encore awaits Malibu and the Sierra foothills over the next few months...

China is wide­ly regard­ed as the world’s lead­ing exe­cu­tion­er with thou­sands esti­mat­ed to be exe­cut­ed annu­al­ly, but infor­ma­tion sur­round­ing exe­cu­tions is con­sid­ered a state secret.

This was the week in which America’s ailing death penalty bit back. Such a concentrated glut of judicial killing was last seen more than 20 years ago in the US.

Across the US south and midwest – from Alabama to Missouri, Oklahoma to South Carolina, and of course in the heart of it all, Texas – states fired up their death chambers. Experts said it was a random coincidence that so many capital cases, with their convoluted legal journeys, came to a climax at once.

But there was nothing random or coincidental about the disdain for probable innocence that was on display this week. Nor about the racial animus, or the callous indifference to life animating supposedly “right-to-life” states.

“This week has exposed the reality of the death penalty in America, in all its brutality and injustice,” said Maya Foa, joint executive director of the human rights group Reprieve. “Across the US, executing states are going to ever more extreme lengths to prop up the practice.”