Omar Shakir is the Israel and Palestine Director for Human Rights Watch (Middle East and North Africa Division). Here we talk about Israel, Palestine, human rights, international law, and more.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In mid-May, what are some of the updates in some of the issues regarding Israel and Palestine, especially in light of some of the recent firings in the issue between Israel and Palestine?
Omar Shakir: Early May, we saw an escalation between Israel and armed Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip. These resulted in 25 Palestinians being killed in the Gaza Strip and 4 Israelis were killed in Southern Israel.
The Israelis were killed, 3 of whom were killed via rockets fired indiscriminately from the Gaza Strip. Those are war crimes under international law. There was a fourth Israeli targeted by an anti-tank weapon fired apparently from the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinians were killed – 23 out of the 25 – by Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip. A number of those were militants belonging to different armed Palestinian groups. Two Palestinians were apparently killed when a militant rocket misfired and hit their home.
Jacobsen: For those who may not know the prior conflicts, what tends to be the proportion of those who are military targets, who are killed or injured, or those who are civilians, who are killed or injured, on the Israeli side and the Palestinian side?
Shakir: It is hard to generalize. If we look back at the 2014 war, for example, you had a situation in which you had over 2,000 Palestinians killed. You had more 1,400 who were civilians. We have seen smaller scale flare-ups, where the number of civilians killed has been far fewer than that.
I think the issue is that when raining fire down on a very densely populated area – 2,000,000 people amid a 25×7 mile territory. It is quite likely that civilian casualties are likely to result.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Omar.
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen is the Founder of In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal and In-Sight Publishing. He authored/co-authored some e-books, free or low-cost. If you want to contact Scott: Scott.D.Jacobsen@Gmail.com.
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Photo by Cole Keister on Unsplash
War between Israel and Palestine
The Israeli people are Rabbinic European Jews for the most part and the Palestinian people are Semitic Palestinian Muslims for the most part.
If, as it seems likely, the Muslim people owe their religious heritage to migrant Messianic Jews fleeing the collapse of the Jewish state, in the first century of the common era, and these Islamic Semitic people have returned home with a brand new religious story.
The European Jews, on the other hand, have emigrated to Israel after fleeing the European Christian holocaust of modern times.
Currently the European Jews, in Israel, are embarking on a return to Temple or Messianic Judaism of the early common era when the Semitic Jews were driven out of Palestine by the Pagans.
Looking at the unwitting participants in this light we can imagine centuries old, Messianic inspired Muslims at war with newly formed Messianic European Jews.
From a racial perspective we see Light skinned religiously identified people at war with indigenous, darker skinned, religiously identified people.
Ignoring the Christian idea of what a messiah is, what we are seeing are two groups in conflict with each other who are independently aching for a spiritual leader who will lead them to global supremacy.
These messianic ideas have been at work for centuries now leading to periodic outbreaks of wars, invasions and genocides. Again, ignoring the interactions with the Christianized Pagan peoples who are dominant in Canada today.