Sunday, August 17, 2025

War Crimes Against Those Who Risk Everything to Tell the Truth

 


As noted in Truthout and other media, this week, Israel openly acknowledged assassinating Anas al-Sharif, the 28-year-old Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist hailed as “the voice of Gaza.” An Israeli airstrike deliberately targeted Anas al-Sharif and five of his Al Jazeera colleagues—staff and freelancers—while they sought refuge in a tent designated for journalists outside Al-Shifa Hospital.

Killing journalists is not a “tragic mistake”; it is a calculated act of terror against those who dare to bear witness. He made clear through his fearless reporting the horrors of genocide. He showed that Israel’s policy of forced starvation is not a byproduct of war; it is a deliberate policy, an ancient weapon wielded with modern precision against a trapped and desperate people. He also showed the fierce resistance on the part of Palestinians refusing to surrender to attempts to by Israel to exterminate them

As Amnesty International notes: "The targeted killing of Anas al-Sharif and five other journalists on Sunday means at least 242 Palestinian journalists have been killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of October 2023. No conflict in modern history has seen a higher number of journalists killed. The intentional targeting and killing of journalists is a war crime. As is the strategy of Israeli authorities that wants to stop its war crimes from being exposed and those responsible being brought to justice."

Netanyahu’s fascist politics thrive on these crimes. They are not aberrations; they are the scaffolding upon which his right-wing regime stands. The bombing of homes, the silencing of cameras, the reduction of children to statistics, these are the tools of a political order that measures its success in erasures, ethnic and racial cleansing, and a unfathomable politics of disposability--as we saw in Augusto Pinochet's Chile, Nazi Germany, and other fascist regimes.

And when confronted with the evidence, Netanyahu once again offers the cameras the smirk, the shrug, the arrogance of a man devoid of any moral responsibility, while spewing endlessly the blatant lies that cover up unimaginable war crimes-committed no less as a designated war criminal.

What we are witnessing with the indiscriminate killing of thousands women and children in Gaza are not signs of reckless military operations, accidental deaths, Hamas induced defense actions, but declarations of power, genocidal madness; reminders that in this machinery of annihilation, not only are the bodies of Palestinian people under siege and subject to ethnic cleansing, but that truth itself is a target.

In Gaza and the West Bank, the project is not merely to occupy land, but to obliterate a people’s memory, dignity, and claim to justice. It is a war on the possibility of history itself, waged with the confidence of those who believe they will never be held to account. This is the essence of fascism: the conviction that some lives are disposable, some voices intolerable, and some crimes untouchable.


-Henry Giroux



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