Rogue states get away with murder only so long. Eventually their crimes catch up with them. Israeli policies are self-defeating.

How long can killing civilian men, women, children, infants, and the elderly be called self-defense?

Palestinians and eyewitnesses explain best. Mondoweiss contributor Adie Mormech saw smoke rise after Israeli bombs exploded.

"Words fail me," he said. Bombing feels almost constant.

"I can barely write a sentence with more news."

Six injuries from one bombing.

A four-year old child struck playing in the street.

An elderly Zaytoun neighborhood man killed. Four others injured.

The same scenario plays out across Gaza. Trapped civilians have nowhere to hide. Israel terrorizes them. World leaders blame Palestinian victims. They're complicit in Israeli crimes.

It was an unguarded comment that may have strayed close to the truth: Britain's Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said he believes tensions over Iran were behind the Israel-Gaza violence.

That remark - made in a radio studio when he thought he was off the air - echoes a theory that Tehran's fingerprints are all over the current escalation of violence.


Realizing that he was actually live on air, Sacks did not elaborate on his theory but Western intelligence agencies and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) do agree that longer-range rockets being fired toward Tel Aviv are Iranian-manufactured Fajr-5 missiles.

The Fajr-5s are assembled locally after being shipped from Iran via Egypt's Sinai region from where they are smuggled into Gaza through tunnels, the IDF says on its own public information site.


Israel believes weapons travel via Sudan - a theory underlined when it launched airstrikes on an apparent arms factory there last month, killing two people

As Israel continues to pound Gaza, the Palestinian death toll of the latest round of violence has crossed the 100 mark. Thus far, the American media has given Israeli officials and spokespersons a free pass to shape the narrative of this conflict with falsehoods. Here are the top 5 lies the media doesn't challenge about the crisis in Gaza:

1. Israel Was Forced to Respond to Rockets to Defend Its Citizens

CNN, like many other American outlets, chose to begin the story of the latest round of violence in Gaza on November 10th, when 4 Israeli soldiers were wounded by Palestinian fire, and the IDF "retaliated" by killing several Palestinians. But just two days before, a 13 year old Palestinian boy was killed in an Israeli military incursion into Gaza (among other fatalities in preceding days). Is there any reason why those couldn't be the starting point of the "cycle of violence"? The bias was even more blatant in 2008/09, when Israel's massive assault on Gaza (which killed 1400+ Palestinians) was cast as self-defense, even though it was acknowledged in passing that Israel was the party that broke the ceasefire agreement in place at the time. Are the Palestinians not entitled to self-defense? And if indiscriminate Palestinian rocket fire is not an acceptable response to Israeli violence (which it absolutely isn't), how can indiscriminate Israeli bombings of Gaza ever be acceptable? And why is the broader context, the fact that Gaza remains under Israeli blockade and military control, overlooked?

'Surgical air strikes', 'rooting out terror', and 'cyber-terrorism' cannot conceal reality

Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror. Here we go again. Israel is going to "root out Palestinian terror" - which it has been claiming to do, unsuccessfully, for 64 years - while Hamas, the latest in "Palestine's" morbid militias, announces that Israel has "opened the gates of hell" by murdering its military leader, Ahmed al-Jabari.

Hezbollah several times announced that Israel had "opened the gates of hell" for attacking Lebanon. Yasser Arafat, who was a super-terrorist, then a super-statesman - after capitulating on the White House lawn - and then became a super-terrorist again when he realised he'd been conned by Camp David; he, too waffled on about the "gates of hell" in 1982.

And we journos are writing like performing bears, repeating all the clichés we've used for the past 40 years. The killing of Mr Jabari was a "targeted attack", it was a "surgical air strike" - like the Israeli "surgical air strikes" which killed almost 17,000 civilians in Lebanon in 1982, the 1,200 Lebanese, most of them civilians, in 2006, or the 1,300 Palestinians, most of them civilians, in Gaza in 2008-9, or the pregnant woman and the baby who were killed by the "surgical air strikes" in Gaza last week - and the 11 civilians killed in one Gaza house yesterday. At least Hamas, with their Godzilla rockets, don't claim anything "surgical" about them. They are meant to murder Israelis - any Israelis, man woman or child.

Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world's elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet's largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.

In the new global landscape, as in Israel's occupied territories and the United States' own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self-determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are routinely tortured and "disappeared." The severance of food and medical supplies is an accepted tactic of control. Lies permeate the airwaves. Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized. Missiles rain down on concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed villagers, gunboats pound refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead, including children, line the corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and medicine.

The Syrian army killed 230 terrorists and destroyed 12 cars in heavy clashes with armed rebels in the Northwestern city of Aleppo.

The clashes took place near al-Kendi Hospital in Aleppo's al-Ghouta neighborhood.

Abu Hamzeh, a notorious terrorist commander, and several foreign nationals, including a Libyan and a Jordanian, were among those killed in the clashes.

Today, the Syrian army also killed dozens of terrorists with Saudi, Egyptian and Tunisian nationalities in the Western Homs province.

The terrorists were killed during the army's fresh operations to purge the Homs province of terrorists.

As is now widely known, in the early morning hours of 18 November during Israel's continued escalation of its military assault on Gaza, the army targeted two buildings in Gaza City that housed international and Palestinian media outlets. The attacks left at least eight journalists injured. Twenty-year old cameraman Khader al-Zahhar had his right leg blown off when a rocket shot through the roof. At the time of writing, Israel has killed 72 Palestinians - 26 just today - since Wednesday, 14 November.

According to a press release today by the human rights organization Adalah:

"The Israeli army bombed Al-Shoroq Tower (or the "Journalists' Tower") in Gaza City. The 15-story building housed both local Arab and international media agencies such as Al Arabiya, Al Quds TV, Sky News, France 24, and Russia TV. Local media sources reported that eight journalists were injured in the initial attack. According to [Palestinian human rights group] Al-Mezan field reports, building occupants later received warnings about the Israeli army's intent to demolish the entire building, and were told to evacuate."

By the Israeli army's own admission, they knew journalists were in the building at which they fired: "We obviously knew there were journalists in the building, so we did not attack other floors in the building. But my advice to journalists visiting Gaza is to stay away from any Hamas position, site or post for their own safety," army spokesperson Avital Leibovich told the press today (BBC Middle East Bureau Chief Paul Danahar recorded her admission).

I just returned from my latest trip to Palestine, or at least to the part of Palestine I still have access to as a Palestinian Christian. You see, we Palestinians from the Bethlehem area (the birthplace of Jesus) are now denied entry to over 90 percent of Palestine and even to our capital and major economic center, Jerusalem (which is merely 7 miles from Bethlehem).

Israeli colonies dot the landscape from the Mediterranean to the River Jordan on land stolen from the native people. Six of the 10 million Palestinians in the world are now refugees or displaced people and the remaining Palestinians live in increasingly shrinking and impoverished ghettos (à la South African Bantustans at the time of Apartheid).

As you Americans sit down with your family on this Thanksgiving Day, think of the Gazans that have nothing to thank you for. Think of the over 1500 citizens of Gaza that were murdered with weapons made in your country. Think of the additional 3 Billion dollars that will be spent on warplanes bound to Israel soon to continue the process of genocide.