Drones
Video: Israel targeted SIX international aid groups that had shared their coordinates
Groups hit repeatedly when IDF knew where they were, killing aid workers and their families
A still from the NYT video shows a traumatised aid worker
A New York Times investigation has revealed that at least six international aid groups working to help starving Palestinians in Gaza were targeted by Israeli forces – hit despite having repeatedly shared their locations with the Israeli military. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) from France, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) based in the UK, the US International Rescue Committee, Anera from the US and the Red Cross/Red Crescent from Switzerland were all hit, along with the well-known repeat attack on three World Central Kitchen (WCK) vehicles spread across a 2.4km distance.
The analysis of photographic evidence and communications between the groups and the IDF has been published today. The IDF claimed that the WCK attack was a ‘mistake’ and admitted that the WCK workers had reported their locations and movements as requested to – but the attacks on five other groups also known to have communicated their positions establishes what was already clear: the attacks were intentional.
Some of the attacks targeted the aid workers’ homes, killing them and multiple family members including children. Watch below:
The UK continues to arm and assist Israel, despite several British citizens being among those murdered. Israel has slaughtered well over forty thousand civilians since 7 October, mostly women and children, and is starving two million more. The country is on trial for genocide before the ICJ, which has repeatedly ordered Israel to stop killing and starving Palestinians.
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In Gaza The Sniper Drones Are Crying Like Babies
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
https://medium.com/media/6253d993dc77cb18808a5e43dd03c8b6/href
They’re hunting civilians with armed quadcopters in Gaza.
The drones play recordings of crying babies and women screaming in distress in order to lure people out into the open, and then shoot them.
This is reportedly happening at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, where people live in total darkness at night and have no connection to the outside world.
Other times the drones play the sounds of explosions and gunshots and rolling tanks, and sometimes songs in Hebrew or Arabic, all to terrorize these refugees hiding in the darkness afraid for their lives.
This is the sort of report that a critical thinker would normally dismiss as absurd atrocity propaganda if it was being made about any other military power, but this is the IDF we’re talking about, and this specific allegation is pretty well-supported now.
Ryan Grim on Twitter: "Also @Hind_Gaza confirmed this is happening: the IDF has quadcopters luring people to them with recordings of the sound of women and children screaming, then firing on them https://t.co/1ANe4myWLx / Twitter"
Also @Hind_Gaza confirmed this is happening: the IDF has quadcopters luring people to them with recordings of the sound of women and children screaming, then firing on them https://t.co/1ANe4myWLx
When the destruction of Gaza first began I used to read the jarring claims about the horrific things the IDF were doing and often think, “No, no way. That can’t be the whole story. It’s too cartoonishly evil. There must be some information missing.” Then a few days or weeks later confirmation would come out, showing it’s even worse than I thought before.
I don’t experience that kind of dubiousness when reading such stories anymore. There are only so many atrocities you can see documented, so many videos of IDF troops recording themselves gleefully behaving like monsters, so many hospitals you can see attacked, so many journalists you can see assassinated, before you read a new report about new unfathomable acts of depravity and find yourself saying “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
This baby-crying-sniper-drone story is something else, though. It’s like something out of a weird post-apocalyptic horror movie or something. It’s the kind of information that makes you sort of re-evaluate your previous assumptions about humanity, the world, and the kind of reality we’re experiencing here.
It is really astonishing, how cruel people can be. How cruel a whole nation of people can be made to be, if they’re indoctrinated just right. You spend your whole childhood being indoctrinated into the belief that one group of people are inferior to your own and don’t deserve the same rights and treatment your group receives, and before you know it you’re blockading aid trucks from bringing that group food, and playing recordings of crying babies on an assassination drone in order to murder civilians at a refugee camp.
That’s how Nazi Germany happened, it’s how the genocidal apartheid state of Israel has happened, and it’s how the murderous US-centralized empire has happened. It turns out it’s not all that hard to manipulate a population into supporting shocking abuses at mass scale with modern propaganda and indoctrination from early childhood. It turns out the human mind is a lot more hackable than we’d like to believe it is, and that this can be used to unleash living nightmares upon our world a lot more easily than we’re comfortable acknowledging.
This is how the entire western world has been manipulated into accepting nonstop war, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, imperialism and exploitation as fine and normal, and into assuming that a better world isn’t possible. As long as the powerful are able to manipulate the way a sufficiently large percentage of the population thinks, speaks, acts and votes, we’re going to be stuck in this horrifying dystopia where the sky rains fire upon the innocent, where war profiteers reap vast fortunes from machines which rip apart human bodies, and where sniper drones cry like babies.
We can help weaken the empire’s propaganda machine by spreading awareness of what it’s doing and how it operates, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. Help people to see the ways in which the mass media are deceiving them, point out all the signs that we live under an empire of lies, and help spread awareness of what’s really true and what’s really possible.
All positive changes in human behavior of any scale are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Spreading awareness is the first step toward a healthy world, and we can each do that in our own small way every single day.
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Woman walking 450 miles to fund legal costs of Israeli pro-Palestine activist
Lucy Boyle hopes to raise tens of thousands of pounds for Palestine Action activist Ronnie Barkan, who was convicted at Bristol Crown Court
Activist Lucy Boyle is hiking 450 miles in an attempt to raise funds to cover the legal costs of an Israeli Palestine Action activist facing a potential custodial sentence for defending Palestinian lives.
Ronnie Barkan, a co-founder of Israeli BDS group Boycott from Within, was convicted on Monday, alongside Stavit Sinai, Eliza Sarson-Diment, Archie Sadler, Finton Owens, Jarvey Georgson and Paul Shortt on one count of burglary and one count of criminal damage, after damaging equipment and spray-painting ‘Free Palestine’ at a factory owned by Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit Systems, who produces weapons used against Palestinians. The UK government has intensified its legal pursuit of Palestine Action in an attempt to quell protest, in both prosecutions and intimidatory arrests.
Barkan’s own crowdfund has raised £24,000 of the £50,000 costs he faces. Ms Boyle is hoping to cover the remainder.
Her fundraising page says of Barkan:
He has given his life in pursuit of Palestinian freedom and universal human rights, co-founding the Boycott From Within movement in Israel amongst many inspirational campaigns and actions. Many of these have led to repeated arrest, imprisonment and at times violent suppression.
Israeli dissidents are amongst the strongest, most noble of people and deserve the highest level of solidarity.
I am planning an approx 450 mile hike across Northern Spain to try and raise funds to help Ronnie pay his £50,000 legal fees as a result of this trial. Please sponsor this hike not only for Palestine and Ronnie but for all people in the world who resist what is clearly and fundamentally wrong.
Even historical figures involved in direct action will have at times felt daunted when faced with the damaging outcomes of their activism at huge personal expense. I hope that this hike and any money raised will show anyone brave enough to resist that there is solidarity. That they matter to us and that what they do matters to the world. No donation is too small.
In a 2023 video, Barkan explained why he takes action against Elbit and Israeli apartheid:
The group will be sentenced on 22 March. The crowdfund page can be found here.
IDF admits killing 3 escaped Israeli hostages in Gaza
Yet more Israelis killed by so-called ‘friendly fire’ after mass deaths 7 October as hostages shot dead
Yotam Haim, one of three Israeli hostages murdered ‘in error’ by Israeli forces
The Israeli army has admitted shooting dead three Israeli hostages who had escaped captivity in Gaza, claiming soldiers ‘mistook’ them for a Hamas threat, prompting a furious reaction among Israeli families against the Netanyahu regime.
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari claimed the IDF feels ‘deep regret’ over the deaths of Yotam Haim, Samer Talalka and an as-yet unnamed Israeli.
The deaths have been reported by some UK media – unlike the hundreds of Israeli victims now known to have been killed by so-called ‘friendly fire’ from tanks, helicopters, drones and troops during the 7 October Hamas raid, as IDF forces killed indiscriminately under the ‘Hannibal doctrine‘ to prevent hostage-taking.
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Al Jazeera news crew hit by Israeli missile as they reported on bombed South Gaza UN school
Wael Al-Dadouh’s family was killed in earlier Israeli airstrike targeting journalists’ homes
Al-Dahdouh receiving treatment after the missile strike
At least two Al Jazeera journalists have been hit by an Israeli missile as they reported on Israel’s overnight strike on a UN relief agency (UNRWA) school in southern Gaza that killed twelve people and seriously wounded at least twenty-five others. The victims were mainly women and children sheltering in the school after being driven from northern Gaza to the supposedly ‘safer’ south.
Wael Al-Dahdouh, whose family was killed in an earlier strike, was wounded but able to walk clear of the attack zone, while his cameraman was severely wounded and could not be reached by ambulances as the vehicles came under attack from Israeli forces. Al Jazeera showed footage of Mr Al-Dahdouh, bloodied and shaken, receiving treatment for shrapnel wounds:
Israel has been accused of targeting the homes and families of journalists and of Palestinian academics and artists, including poet and professor Refaat Alareer last week. The apartheid regime has also hit Al Ahli hospital in northern Gaza, which it bombed early in its genocidal assault killing more than five hundred people, with multiple strikes from drones and jets overnight.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that at least sixty-three journalists in Gaza have been killed by Israel since 7 October: fifty-six Palestinians, four Israelis and three Lebanese, plus another fourteen missing and nineteen arrested, with more deaths reported but still to be confirmed. At least one more has been murdered in southern Lebanon and another lost her leg in a tank shelling.
Update: camera operator Samer Abu Daqqa has died of his wounds, the 64th journalist (some calculate 78th) confirmed murdered by the genocidal apartheid Israeli regime.
SKWAWKBOX needs your help. The site is provided free of charge but depends on the support of its readers to be viable. If you’d like to help it keep revealing the news as it is and not what the Establishment wants you to hear – and can afford to without hardship – please click here to arrange a one-off or modest monthly donation via PayPal or here to set up a monthly donation via GoCardless (SKWAWKBOX will contact you to confirm the GoCardless amount). Thanks for your solidarity so SKWAWKBOX can keep doing its job.
If you wish to republish this post for non-commercial use, you are welcome to do so – see here for more.
Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community – review
In Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community, Katherine Millar analyses “support the troops” discourses in the US and UK during the early years of the global war on terror (2001-2010). Millar’s is a nuanced and powerful study of shifting civilian-military relations – and more broadly, of political community and belonging – in liberal democracies, writes Amy Gaeta.
Read an interview with Katherine Millar about the book published on LSE Review of Books in March 2023.
Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community. Katherine Millar. Oxford University Press. 2022.
Find this book: 
Katherine Millar’s Support the Troops identifies the emergence of calls to “support the troops” in the US and UK and asks what this discourse not only represents about political community and gender relations, but how this call mobilises public support for wars they may also oppose.
Millar contextualises “support the troops” within the normative construction of civilian-military relations in liberal democracies, and in doing so, challenges what she calls “the good story of liberalism” by tracing how liberalism has feigned moral superiority and structure by distancing itself from the military violence upon which it relies for maintenance (xx).
Millar contextualises ‘support the troops’ within the normative construction of civilian-military relations in liberal democracies, and in doing so, challenges what she calls ‘the good story of liberalism’
Across eight chapters, Millar assembles an impressive and varied archive of calls to support the troops, including speeches, media reports, government press releases, bumper stickers, adverts, and more. The book is guided by the feminist methodological impulse to confront uncertainty and partiality in our objects of study. In other words, it is refreshing that Millar admits this impressively researched book is guided by a series of unanswered questions that emerged in her personal experience of living in Canada during the Iraq War. These questions include, “can you oppose a war while still living in community” (x) and “why do we think we have to [support the troops]?” (xi). Also impressive is Millar’s choice to not focus on individuals’ reasons for why they do or do not support the troops. By focusing on the larger patterns in discourse, Support the Troops offers a more applicable and comparative work that enables readers to appreciate the slight, yet telling difference in US and UK civil-military relations and their formation.
Millar refuses easy equations and assumptions, namely the notion that “support the troops” is yet another site of militarism.
In this exploration, Millar refuses easy equations and assumptions, namely the notion that “support the troops” is yet another site of militarism. Rather than providing an answer, Millar instead demonstrates that militarism is simply not a productive analytical framing. Using the analytic of “discursive martiality,” she treats the military as a “discourse of gendered obligation and socially generative violence” and aims to follow how it moves and what it forecloses (35).
The idea that serving and thereby being willing to go to war and possibly die or become disabled for one’s country, is a key quality of what it meant to be a ‘good citizen,’ a deeply masculinised and racialised ideal.
Central to her investigation of support the troops discourse is the liberal military contract, a binding element of modern-day liberal democracies. Namely, the contract is the idea that serving and thereby being willing to go to war and possibly die or become disabled for one’s country, is a key quality of what it meant to be a “good citizen,” a deeply masculinised and racialised ideal. In earlier 20th-century wars, namely the World Wars, attacks on the domestic front, such as the aerial bombing of civilian areas in the UK, cultivated a shared sense of vulnerability among publics with the military and therefore obligation to sacrifice something in service of the war, Millar argues. As such, by World War Two, the expectation that everyone should do one’s part for the war – no matter the war – became domesticated, “experientially, affectively, and ideologically within the US and UK” (52). Structurally then, this further sedimented the feminisation of the domestic front – providing charity and care labour and making sacrifices at home – and the masculinisation of the war front – being willing to die to protect their nation and the feminised home front.
Particularly illuminating about Millar’s project is her tracing of how different wars produced different discursive formations of military personnel and therefore civilian-military relations. A memorable example is the refrain of “our boys” during the Vietnam War which framed soldiers as innocent, emphasising their youth and pre-empting how the experience of war would rush them into “manhood” (55). The innocent angle also firmly contrasts the horrors of the Vietnam War enacted by US soldiers.
The pluralised and more passive formation of the “troops” still requires the support of the public, posing important questions about what the troops need support for, and what support the military and government are failing to provide them that the public must supplement.
Once again, today, civilian-military relations are in flux for civilians living in liberal democracies. War is something that happens “over there,” and no longer do eager citizens enlist in hoards and go to war overseas, nor are they drafted, although military recruitment campaigns are still going strong. In tandem, many military service jobs appear as rather mundane, and this may impact the social importance and status of soldiers and soldiering to classed, racialised, and gendered ideas of civilised and ultimately “good” citizenship. Millar argues that these changes contribute to a shift in the gendered structure of the liberal military contract’s relationship to normalising violence. Whereas in past wars, where killing and dying for the state were key to masculinised normative citizenship, now “violence is presented as incidental to war, something that ‘happens’ to the vulnerable, structurally feminized troops” (102). The pluralised and more passive formation of the “troops” still requires the support of the public, posing important questions about what the troops need support for, and what support the military and government are failing to provide them that the public must supplement.
Millar’s text is extremely pertinent in a political era of cyberwar, drone warfare, and other forms of warfare that do not require the same degree of physical and geographical mobilising of troops.
Millar’s text is extremely pertinent in a political era of cyberwar, drone warfare, and other forms of warfare that do not require the same degree of physical and geographical mobilising of troops. As an academic working across questions of disability, gender, and contemporary US militarisation, I found Millar’s project to offer generative questions about how political community emerges differently when the ready-to-die cisgender-heterosexual-male idea of a solider and the violence inflicted by war is moved out of the view of the domestic front, especially when that figure is not even physically present in geographically defined spaces of conflict and war.
The book did leave me wanting a more robust analysis of the relationship between “good citizenship,” Whiteness, and masculinity, all of which are deeply shaped by the violence that underpins the “good” story of liberalism and civilian-military relations – although Millar certainly does not ignore or deny those connections. Yet, this may also be read as an opportunity for scholars to examine how changes in military service expectations and roles affect the ways that racial structures shift in accordance.
Millar’s investigation of the discursive patterns around “support the troops” begs questions about what happens when a minority or a wider segment of the public refuses to give such support.
Support the Troops is a powerful text that invites readers to think carefully about the present-day formation of political community and belonging in liberal democracies. Millar’s investigation of the discursive patterns around “support the troops” begs questions about what happens when a minority or a wider segment of the public refuses to give such support. As large waves of state-critical activism and civil protests continue to sweep across the US and UK, among other parts of the world, Support the Troops is a crucial touchpoint for understanding the “good story of liberalism” and the types of social contracts it relies upon for cohesion between the state, the military, and citizens.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.
Image Credit: CL Shebley on Shutterstock.