Monday 10th of August 2026
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no longer on the front pages of newspapers....

Some catastrophes disappear because they end. Others disappear because they continue for so long that the world grows accustomed to them. 

They cease to interrupt television schedules and Instagram reels, just as they no longer command the front pages of newspapers. 

 

Vijay Prashad: Silence on Gaza When Headlines Fade

The tapering off of media coverage of the U.S.-Israeli genocide hasn’t abated the violence. In fact, its permanence is what allows the world to look away.

 

Financial markets return to their ordinary calculations, the daily machinery of political and economic life resumes its familiar rhythm, and diplomats are asked to put away their briefing books on that tired but painful subject. 

Yet, the catastrophe remains intact: the U.S.-Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has not disappeared because of a new peace but because the permanence of the genocide makes it unmarketable news.

There was a time when every explosion in Gaza flashed across my phone – horrible images of children being pulled from rubble, medical workers trying to help patients as the hospital itself gets bombed, and families howling in grief as Israeli bombs obliterated entire Palestinian lineages. 

Israel’s attacks continue as families flee from one temporary shelter to another and children search through shattered concrete for fragments of lives they once knew. But the world’s attention has shifted elsewhere as the genocide has become routine. We have become comfortably numb.

The scale of death and destruction is impossible to comprehend. The Palestinian Ministry of Health reports that since October 2023, Israeli violence has killed at least 73,221 Palestinians (half of whom are women and children) and wounded 173,654 others. By February 2026, at least 21,289 children had been killed and 44,500 injured in Gaza. 

Even after the so-called ceasefire took effect on Oct. 11, 2025, Israeli violence has killed 1,100 Palestinians, including at least 260 children, and injured 3,546 others. That means that, on average, the Israelis have killed four Palestinians every single day since then.

There are moments in history when words lose their meaning. Not because dictionaries are rewritten, nor because language itself changes, but because political power empties words of the realities they once described. 

The word “ceasefire” has increasingly acquired this desolate quality when used by Israeli and U.S. officials. What was once understood to mean the suspension of violence, the silencing of guns, and the creation of political space for peace has become something else entirely: a managerial term for the continuation of bombardment, displacement, siege, and military control in the name of peace.

Statistics attempt to quantify the horrific destruction, but numbers cannot capture absence. Behind every number lies a family with a broken history and a child who will always remember a home that no longer exists, or, in many cases, an entire family lineage erased. 

These figures are horrifying enough on their own, as reflected in United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) reports, for which a donation is overdue. Each report from the U.N. reads less like an emergency bulletin and more like an archive of permanent catastrophe.

What is the meaning of outrage when it seems to carry no political cost for Israel’s total violation of international law? Beyond the ruins of Gaza, the map of Palestine continues to be rewritten in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

Not a day goes by without reports of land confiscations and settler expansion, the demolition of Palestinian homes and violent attacks by settlers, and the steady fragmentation of Palestinian territory.

Ir Amim (City of Peoples), a public and legal advocacy group from Jerusalem, reports that Israeli planning authorities have voted to destroy 800 houses from the Palestinian neighbourhood of Umm Lison in occupied East Jerusalem and build 450 homes for illegal settlers – part of a broader policy of expulsion and annexation. 

As Gaza is being devastated by overwhelming military force, East Jerusalem and the West Bank are being transformed through bureaucratic annexation, legalistic pretexts, permanent settlements, and the brutality inflicted upon the Palestinian population by administrative detention and home demolition. 

These attacks on the Occupied Palestinian Territory are expressions of the same project: the genocide of the Palestinian people and the seizure of their land in the name of building a so-called “Greater Israel.”

While groups such as Ir Amim continue to painstakingly document settlement expansion and dispossession, moral decay in Israeli society has metastasised with a new intensity. In 2014, Haaretz columnist Carolina Landsmann wrote with clarity that Israeli military rule over Palestinians is not a hidden mechanism operated by the army alone but “the largest, most visible project, with broader participation than any other endeavour in Israel.” 

In other words, the occupation is sustained not only by its military presence but also by the institutions, resources, habits, and everyday participation of Israeli society itself.

More than a decade later, Landsmann returned to the question of Israeli society’s internal transformation, arguing in July 10, 2026 column that the language of “Israeli” identity has been increasingly displaced by “Zionist” identity – and therefore by Zionist-military identity. 

While Israeli identity has been wedded to Zionism since its inception, this shift is significant because it indicates that even the limited possibility of a civic identity – one not wholly organised around occupation, militarisation, and Jewish supremacy – has been pushed further from view.

The psychological consequences of this social order are visible within Israeli society. As a recent report from the Israeli Centre for Addiction and Mental Health showed, one in four Israelis have turned to hard drugs to cope with the psychosocial strain produced by this Zionist-military society and its genocide against Palestinians. 

Such data should never be used to create a false equivalence between the occupier and the occupied, nor should it distract from the incomparable devastation inflicted upon Palestinians. However, it reveals something important: a society organised around permanent militarisation cannot remain untouched by the violence it inflicts. 

Fear, trauma, addiction, moral injury, and isolation have become woven into the fabric of everyday life in Israel.

My Palestinian friends in Gaza, meanwhile, tell me that they have survived bombardment before, and that they are sure they will be able to rebuild their homes. What is harder to rebuild, they said, is the Palestinian people’s confidence in their collective political life and the hope that it will lead to a better future. 

Interrupted education, untreated illnesses, repeated displacement, rampant hunger, and the loss of family networks leave scars that extend far beyond concrete walls. So too does the psychological violence inflicted on Gaza’s children, almost all of whom, according to UNICEF estimates, will require mental health and psychosocial support for decades to come.

Buildings can be reconstructed, but Gaza’s people require the reconstruction not only of place but of historical time itself: the time needed to learn, heal, mourn, organise, and imagine a future. To recover that future, they will also have to rebuild political confidence and the political instruments through which collective hope becomes collective power.

In an attempt to foreclose the future of the Palestinian people, Israel also attacks their past. The ferocious assault on Gaza alongside the continued displacement campaign in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is accompanied by the systematic destruction of memory. Israeli violence surgically targets archives, cemeteries, family photographs, galleries, libraries, municipal records, museums, neighbourhood landmarks, and theatres. 

Violence against these institutions tries to erase the material foundations through which a people remember themselves, allowing historical denial to become fact. There are the dead, and there are the injured, but there is also the terrible violence inflicted upon Palestinian consciousness.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the international conversation on Gaza has become quieter. Not because the violence has diminished in any way, but because its implications are too awful for the world to confront honestly. To confront this violence would mean reckoning with the absolute collapse of a moral order that still claims to speak in the language of human rights.

It would mean asking uncomfortable questions about arms sales and transfers, diplomatic protection, media censorship, military alliances, and the unequal value assigned to different human lives. Because of that discomfort, some names disappear before their graves have settled while others become etched in public memory and destruction is forgotten before it unsettles dinner party conversations above the sound of cutlery working its way through the best cuts of meat.

Writers and artists cannot clear rubble with the efficiency of trained rescue teams or lead the reconstruction of hospitals and schools. But we can refuse silence and insist that history is measured not only by treaties and military campaigns but by the lullabies that are interrupted, the poems left unfinished, and the voices that continue to sing through the ruins. 

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has been very clear from our inception a decade ago that the systematic violence inflicted on the Palestinian people and the amnesia about that violence are unacceptable and that we will never allow forgetting to become normal.

Watching the new music video from our friends Roger Waters and acclaimed Palestinian singer-songwriter Mona Miari reminds us of this refusal. Their song Comfortably Numb Re-imagined does not pretend that music can overcome catastrophe but sets for itself a quieter task: to prevent Gaza’s suffering from becoming ordinary. 

In a world that is being trained to look away, their song asks us to keep looking and to insist upon remembering as the basis of struggle for a better world. 

Every imperialist formation seeks not only obedience but forgetfulness. Comfortably Numb Re-imagined, whose proceeds go to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, offers the fragile yet indispensable persistence of human solidarity and a refusal to let the stories of the victims disappear from our moral imagination.

At the centre of the song is Hind’s Lullaby, a segment written by Mona Miari in honour of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza while pleading for rescuers to reach her. The lullaby turns that unbearable memory into a promise of liberation:

I hear an angel’s voice
Calling out my name
We remain the free
We remain the free
Even if exiled from earth to the sky
Palestine must be free.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow atChongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations.  His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and, with Noam Chomsky, The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/silence-on-gaza/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

 

surrender....

 

The United States of Israel

If Section 219/1217of the NDAA becomes law, we will have surrendered our Constitutional Republic to the Zionists. It will literally be the end of our country as we know it.

SCOTT RITTER

 

When I was travelling to Israel on a regular basis back in the mid- to late-1990’s as part of my duties with the United Nations, I was always struck by how closely many Israelis identified with the United States. On national holidays, many Israeli motorists would fly two little plastic flags from the windows of their cars—one the blue and white Star of David, and the other the Stars and Stripes. “We see ourselves as little America”, my Israeli host would explain when I pointed this out.

The reality was far different. 

The Israelis conspired against their American counterparts behind their backs, and the US intelligence and security services viewed Israel as a threat to US national security.

I know—I was caught up in the middle of this power dynamic, and ended up being accused by the US government of spying on behalf of Israel. The charges were eventually dropped as unfounded and politically motivated, but the sentiment behind the accusations was real—a significant part of the US defense, intelligence and security establishment of the United States viewed Israel as a threat.

Because Israel was a threat.

This doesn’t mean there wasn’t collaboration and cooperation ongoing between the US and Israel—while I was in Israel, the hotels were full of CIA officers, US military officers, and State Department diplomats who were on official business.

But there was a Chinese Wall separating the US and Israel, and interactions were governed by strict protocols that kept this wall up at all times.

After I left the United Nations, I worked for a while as an on-air analyst for NBC News. 

I also signed with a New York City speakers bureau, Greater Talent Network (GTN).

And it was these two experiences which exposed me to the level to which pro-Israeli interests had infiltrated every aspect of American media and information management.

I was approached repeatedly by NBC producers who would hand me their business cards—not the NBC ones, but rather their AIPAC cards (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, a literal front for the Israeli government.)

GTN networked me directly with AIPAC, as well as its affiliate entities that had taken root in American academia and the think tank industry.

Through these networks, I was brought into a secretive world of backroom connectivity with the US Congress, where AIPAC called the shots for influential Senators and Congressional Representatives, and Senate and House staffers openly collaborated with employees of various US government agencies to set policy.

I was offered a great deal of money by Paul Wolfowitz, who at the time of the pitch was the Dean of the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), if I would join the team. 

All I had to do was get onboard with the notion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

I declined Wolfowitz’s offer, and walked away from the AIPAC cabal.

Unfortunately America’s elected representatives have not shown such moral clarity or loyalty to the Republic they ostensibly serve.

We live in an age where the Israeli Prime Minister openly brags about having bought the US Congress.

Where AIPAC brags about spending $100 million to accomplish just that.

Where pro-Israeli operatives spent $30 million to evict Thomas Massie from the US Congress because he dared challenge the surrender of American sovereignty to Israel.

Where the US Secretary of State has openly declared that criticism of Israel is grounds for being denied a visa into the United States.

Where Israeli politicians openly advocate for the suppression of free speech in America.

And where the Chinese Wall that separated US and Israeli interests is being torn down by a compliant Congress, all the while the mainstream media, which long ago surrendered its independence and integrity to Israeli interests, remains silent.

The surrender document that signals the capitulation of the Constitutional Republic formerly known as the United States of America to a new entity which could more accurately be called the United States of Israel is the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), in particular Section 219 of the House version, and Section 1217 of the Senate’s version.

Section 219/1217 directs the Secretary of Defense to designate an Executive Agent (EA) to expand and accelerate deeper integration of Israel into US institutions. The EA authority would take precedence over the authority of the other DoD Component heads per DOD Instruction 5101.01, meaning that the EA would be able to overrule determinations by other DOD agencies such as the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) on Israeli access to US technology. This new EA would end direct Congressional oversight with supervision by the Secretary of Defense. There would be no Congressional confirmation or ability for removal of an executive agent by Congress.

In short, it is the surrendering of the constitutional duties of Congress to a politically appointment agent of the Executive branch of government. 

This is not what the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the Constitution.

Section 2191217 integrates American and Israeli research and development programs in a way which makes the United States dependent on Israel’s provision of specific technologies, thereby granting Israel a significant amount of leverage over future American policy and infrastructure, entangling defense supply chains of Israel and the United States across government, private and academic sectors, blurring the lines of territorial integrity and political sovereignty. 

Section 219/1217 targets defense related procurement and acquisition processes so that it will be impossible for future Administrations to separate Israeli technologies or agreements from major defense procurement programs, holding DOD Program Executive Offices and Program Managers hostage to the inclusion of Israeli-origin technologies in US systems. These procedures make moot current “Buy-America” provisions, and give Israeli companies access to intellectual property for weapons systems they are directly competing against.

Section 2191217 grants the EA the authority to re-allocate the funding and focus of the Defense Department by prioritizing the integration of Israel into the US’ national defense structures. It is literally subordinating the totality of the most sensitive aspects of US defense to Israel, outside the purview of Congressional oversight. 

At a time when the majority of the American people are waking up to the horrific crimes committed by Israel against the people of Palestine, and the role played by Israel in getting America involved in permanent wars in the Middle East, Section 219/1217 will permanently tie the United States to Israel, making the US Department of Defense and, by extension, all of the American people, complicit in these crimes.

The Greater Israeli Project, which seeks the territorial expansion of the Israeli State in the Middle East at the expense of Israel’s neighbors, is floundering.

Israel itself is going through an existential crisis because of its permanent state of war.

I have previously written that the relationship between Israel and the United States is like that of a parasite to its host.

Section 219/1217 would codify this status as law.

And in doing so, destroy the Constitutional Republic.

Congress has specific duties and responsibilities demanded of it by the Constitution.

Surrendering these responsibilities to a foreign nation is not one of these duties.

If Section 219/1217 becomes law, Israel will have permanently attached itself to the American enterprise.

Right now, we have a Congress which has considered criminalizing and criticism of Israel.

This, or course, is an affront to the very notion of free speech.

By making Israeli security and US security indistinguishable, as would happen if Section 219/1217 becomes law, the inevitability of the criminalization of speech critical of Israel is assured.

The 2027 NDAA is America’s last stand.

Remove Section 2191217, and we have a chance at survival.

Turn Section 219/1217 into law, and we have lost the Republic.

I swore to defend the United States of America, a Constitutional Republic.

I will never serve the United States of Israel.

And neither should anyone who calls themselves an American.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-209608724

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

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west bank....

 

Mary Robinson

What I saw in the West Bank

 

Former Irish president and UN human rights chief Mary Robinson says Israel’s annexation of Palestinian land is unfolding in plain sight, enabled by impunity and a lack of international political will.

I have just returned from my first visit to the West Bank since 2023. What I saw then was deeply disturbing, but today the situation is far worse.  It is now an emboldened and aggressive process of Israeli annexation of Palestinian land unfolding in plain sight.

Together with my fellow Elders on this visit that also took us to Lebanon and Jordan – Helen Clark, Graça Machel and Hina Jilani – I arrived at a clear conclusion: the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aims to make Palestine disappear physically, economically, culturally and politically.

This is happening on our watch. The lack of accountability that has allowed Israel to act in this way is unconscionable. The impunity must be stopped.

Travelling in the West Bank, I got a visceral sense of a land and people under ever-more repressive occupation. We visited the Palestinian village of Deir Nidham, whose inhabitants are subject to continuous harassment by violent settlers, with the support of the Israeli army. Settler attacks in the West Bank average six per day since the start of the year, according to the UN.

Israeli flags lined the road to the village – an intentional and threatening claim of ownership in what is internationally recognised as Palestinian territory.

We spoke to a farmer who has been unable to access his olive trees since 7 October 2023. The health clinic now opens only once a month because the Palestinian Authority is facing severe budget constraints due to Israel’s withholding of tax revenues.

As we stopped on the side of the road to look at settlement outposts, our convoy had to leave in a hurry as two young settlers approached. We don’t know what their intentions were. But the climate of fear and the authority they are able to exercise are both remarkable and terrifying. This is largely due to the systematic violence they carry out, enabled by the complicity of the Israeli government and its military.

While in Israel, Helen Clark and I met with President Herzog. I have valued our relationship over the years, and it was a robust exchange. He made it clear to us that, in his view, the international community doesn’t fully understand the agony Israel experienced on 7 October 2023. The Elders have always unequivocally condemned these horrific crimes against Israeli civilians, for which Hamas must indeed be held responsible, but these acts do not justify the magnitude and disproportionality of Israel’s response.  We shared a concern for the impact on Israeli society, with the increase in domestic violence and the higher suicide rates. President Herzog also spoke of a number of creative political initiatives involving both Israelis and Palestinians.

Other leaders in the region are already open to a different path, one of dialogue and diplomacy. In our conversations with President Joseph Aoun of Lebanon and Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi of Jordan, both shared the same aspiration of a dialogue with Israel based on mutual respect, and to secure a future of peace, dignity and security for the region.

The Elders believe the prospect of a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be improved by the release of Marwan Barghouti, a prominent advocate for a two-state solution, from Israeli prison. Whilst in Jordan, we met with his wife, Fadwa Barghouti, and it was harrowing to hear about his worsening mistreatment at the hands of Israeli authorities.

We concluded our visit by travelling to Brussels to share what we had witnessed with the European Union. It was deeply frustrating to see the lack of political will at the EU level to prevent trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, as the ICJ Advisory Opinion called for, or to suspend the trade pillar of the EU/Israel Trade Association Agreement given the provisions on human rights in Article 2.

And yet, at what is becoming the ‘darkest hour’ for Palestinians, there are some small seeds of hope. We noted the growing interest in a number of joint Israeli-Palestinian political initiatives, such as A Land For All – which The Elders have been supporting – as ways in which the two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, could live side by side in peace. Furthermore, there was a recent meeting in Rome of representatives of the Saudi-French Initiative which led to the New York Declaration, and a further meeting is envisaged during the UN General Assembly in New York in September. The long-standing right to self-determination of the Palestinian people cannot simply be made to disappear.

https://theelders.cmail19.com/t/y-e-fyuikht-jikuhjlrui-v/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….

 

 

concerned, very....

 

Jeffrey Loewenstein

“Very concerned” is not a foreign policy

 

While Gaza and the West Bank remain under siege, settlement and violence, Australia’s repeated support for a two-state solution sounds increasingly hollow without action.

It’s not being original to say that we are living in a dystopian universe. First, we have the appalling, continuing relentless devastation of and in Gaza and the West Bank. There has not been the much-touted peace in Gaza that was reported, in particular by Donald Trump, last October. The news cycle may have passed on from reporting on Gaza or the West Bank but these two pieces following give the lie to peace having broken out in Gaza – and that ignores the plight of the people of Gaza, such as reported on 27 July.

IDF lockdown of Nablus is blocking access to emergency healthcare, medical groups say. Checkpoints are preventing patients from reaching hospitals in Nablus, while Physicians for Human Rights says the ambulance network has been nearly paralysed.

Then there is this from Haaretz: A child a day: The Israeli Air Force continues to routinely kill Gaza’s kids.

There’s nothing new under the sun in the Gaza Strip. Homes remain in ruins. Some 1.7 million people are still living in tents. There is no electricity, no running water and no functioning sewage system. Rats and mosquitoes are everywhere. Infectious diseases are spreading and tens of thousands of people are covered in painful, itchy skin lesions. The scorching sun is relentless; the heat inside the tents is unbearable.

Above all, the Israel Air Force continues to kill children in the Gaza Strip. Since the ceasefire went into effect there last October, 282 children and teens under the age of 18 have been killed – an average of one child every day. Since October 7, 2023, more than 21,000 children have been killed in the fighting, 38 of them Israeli.

Also this: Settlers torch Palestinian homes in West Bank, residents flee village.

Days after settlers built an illegal outpost, dozens stormed the southern West Bank village, setting fire to buildings and threatening residents; the army detained suspects but failed to stop violence or prevent displacement.

And what is Israel doing to engender peace and foster inter-communal harmony with the 21 per cent of Arabs who make up the population in Israel itself? The Guardian reports on Israeli security minister joins Jewish extremists as they storm al-Aqsa mosque compound.

Israel’s far-right minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, joined thousands of Jewish extremists who stormed Jerusalem’s most sensitive holy site on Thursday.

Escorted by armed police, they prayed, waved the Israeli flag and sang the national anthem in a provocative display of political power.

Under a fragile, decades-old agreement known as the status quo, non-Muslim prayer is banned at the site, known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif compound and to Jews as the Temple Mount.

Meanwhile in Australia the royal commission grinds on with the Israel lobby having seemingly hijacked the whole commission’s process.

What has become evident is that the entire perspective of the commission has been focused on hearing from members of the Jewish community on the subject of Bondi and the life of Jews in Australia. It doesn’t appear that most witnesses have been subjected to any cross-examination or even gentle questioning – odd in itself for a royal commission. As for the commission calling non-Jewish witnesses or addressing the subject of social cohesion – which the commission is charged with looking into and considering – that has seemingly been totally AWOL.

It is also not without significance that the Israel lobby and Jewish organisations have sought to turn the discussion away from criticisms of Israel, claims that Israel has been engaged in genocide and that the news from Gaza continues to be devastating, to constantly claiming that antisemitism is rampant in Australia. Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism Jillian Segal has also asserted the claim. It is simply not the fact!

Which brings us back to the federal government and Penny Wong, the foreign minister. The government – as late as the just-concluded federal ALP conference in Adelaide – keeps on pronouncing that it wants to see a two-state solution in place.

If, as the government touts, it recognises a Palestine state, where does the government suggest that that state is going to be? Gaza? The West Bank – as the settlers with the active support of the IDF plunder more and more Palestinian land or the Israeli government sanctions/approves more and more so-called settlements and developments being established in the West Bank?

As was widely reported, the PM and his cohorts at the Adelaide ALP conference were not going to even allow debate on any resolution put forward by Ed Husic that Israel was engaged in genocide. What does that tell one about the moral position of the Australian Government and its ever-increasing hollow claim to stand for decency and justice? – and ignoring the following from Al Jazeera: Israel building earthen barrier in Gaza to entrench division of the enclave.

The Israeli army is building a giant earthen barrier to separate the more than 50 per cent of Gaza under its control from the rest of the enclave, satellite images show, fuelling Palestinian fears that most of the territory will never be relinquished by Israel.

The barrier consists of an earth berm and a trench and extends well beyond the so-called “yellow line” that is supposed to demarcate the border between Israeli-controlled and Palestinian territory under a US-backed ceasefire agreement signed in October 2025, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Haaretz said that in Khan Younis the barrier is about 400 metres (quarter of a mile) past the yellow line, and at one point in the Rafah area it reaches approximately 1,300 metres (4,260 feet) beyond the line.

Built over the past few months, the barrier is already longer than 23km (14 miles), according to the AP news agency. The entire Gaza Strip is around 40km (25 miles) long.

The barrier cuts through Palestinian communities whose homes, infrastructure, and agricultural land have already been destroyed during Israel’s genocidal war that began in 2023.

Israel has also created new roads and established bases on the ruins of Palestinian towns. Palestinians fear that they will never be able to return to their land, and some Israeli officials have openly said they intend to appropriate some of it.

And finally there is the foreign minister, Penny Wong. It is hard not to conclude that she is on some sort of sound-loop, for every time she is asked about the situation in Israel, Gaza, the taking of land by settlers in the West Bank, settler violence in the West Bank or inflammatory pronouncements by Israeli ministers, her stock response (by rote?) is that she is “very concerned”.

That’s it! Period!

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2026/08/very-concerned-is-not-a-foreign-policy/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

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         RABID ATHEIST.

         WELCOME TO THIS INSANE WORLD….