The Spanish Consulate in Jerusalem, established nearly 150 years ago, is the city’s oldest foreign diplomatic mission, predating the bloody establishment of the State of Israel. Initially located in the Old City, it moved to Sheikh Jarrah in the 20th century. The current building, built in 1955, is leased from the Armenian “Sevzetyan” family and lies near the former East-West Jerusalem boundary. Despite Spain not recognizing Israel until 1986, the consulate has continually operated, issuing numerous travel visas to Palestinians in 2023 alone.
Following Spain’s recognition of an independent Palestinian state on May 28, 2024, Israel demanded the consulate stop serving Palestinians, threatening closure if it maintained contact with the Palestinian Authority. Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel emphasized the consulate’s long-standing presence, predating Israel’s establishment.
The consulate’s history has been marked by several incidents. In January 1948, the vice-consul and acting consul, Manuel AllasasSalazar, was killed when Zionist gangs bombed the Semiramis Hotel in the Qatamon neighborhood of West Jerusalem. Furthermore, in 1985, Zionist settlers vandalized the consul’s car as retaliation for Spain’s recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization. These events highlight the consulate’s vulnerable position amidst the complexities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine
The Palestinian BDS National Palestinian society that is leading the global Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, salutes activists, organizations and institutions worldwide that have genocide in Gaza by escalating boycott and urgent struggle to stop Israel’s unfolding expressed meaningful solidarity with our divestment campaigns.
The spreading multinational corporations can be effective if boycotts of complicit Israeli and done strategically. Ending all state, corporate and institutional complicity with Israel’s genocidal regime is more urgent than ever. Our lives and livelihoods literally depend on it.
Targeted Boycotts vs. Non-targeted Boycotts
Rightfully shattered, enraged, and People of conscience around the world are sometimes feeling powerless. Many feel compelled to boycott any and all products and services of companies tied in any way to Israel. The proliferation of extensive “boycott lists” on social media is an example of this. The question is how to make boycotts effective and actually have an impact in holding corporations accountable for their complicity in the suffering of Palestinians? The BDS movement uses the historically successful method of targeted boycotts inspired by the South African anti-apartheid the Indian anti-colonial struggle, among movement, the US Civil Rights movement, others worldwide.
We must strategically focus on a relatively smaller number of carefully selected impact. Companies that play a clear and companies and products for maximum direct role in Israel’s crimes and where there is real potential for winning, as was the case with, among others, G4S, Veolia, Orange, Ben & Jerry’s and Pillsbury.
Compelling such huge, complicit companies, through strategic and context-sensitive boycott and divestment campaigns, to end crimes against Palestinians sends a very their complicity in Israeli apartheid and war powerful message to hundreds the complicit companies that “your time will come, so get out before it’s too late!”
Academics can’t just talk about freedom and the pursuit of knowledge, we must defend it too. But academic boycotts of Israel target institutions, not individual scholars.
Eileen Culloty
Palestinian children walk past destroyed buildings as they head to class in the Khan Younis camp, southern Gaza Strip in September 2024. Photograph: Haitham Imad/EPA
Thu Oct 10 2024 – 05:57
The devastation in Palestine has reinvigorated calls for an academic boycott of Israel. This is not simply about campus protests and the long history of student-led activism. It is more fundamentally about what, if anything, academia stands for and against.
In 2004, Palestinian academics asked international colleagues to boycott Israel in protest against the suppression of Palestinian education. While support for the boycott has grown, the Israeli occupation has also been rewarded with academic support. Israel has received more than €1 billion from EU research funds. This funding is supposed to be for civil, not military, applications and resulting technologies are supposed to be “for the benefit of individuals and societies, free from authoritarianism and respecting high ethical standards and human rights”. Yet Israel’s two largest arms companies – Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries – and universities that contribute to the occupation have all received funding.
In Ireland, DCU currently co-ordinates EU-GLOCTER, an EU counter-terrorism project with two Israeli partners: Reichman University and its affiliate ICT. The latter was cofounded by Israel’s former spy chief while Reichman University hosts an annual conference for Israel’s military and intelligence apparatus.
In 2014, the university developed a propaganda app for social media, which targeted activists and international news outlets. This app was developed in consultation with former Israeli intelligence officers, launched by Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, and funded by Sheldon Adelson, the pro-Israeli billionaire who reputedly donated $100 million to Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.
This is incorrect for two reasons. Firstly, the boycott targets institutions, not individual scholars. Academics are not asked to exclude Israeli colleagues from conferences, or to stop researching and publishing with them. Scholars are asked to boycott Israeli institutions by not attending conferences they organise or partnering with them in research projects.
Many universities have promised to divest from Israeli companies operating in the occupied territories, but declining to profit from occupation is not radical. Indeed, the International Court of Justice declares all countries obliged “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining” the occupation. Boycott advocates want universities to do more by shunning Israel’s academic institutions. Many object to this because, on the surface, it seems contrary to the spirit of intellectual inquiry.
Secondly, it is the boycott advocates who are upholding academic values. A boycott is a collective moral action, a non-violent means to express disapproval and demand change. The academic boycott takes aim at Israel’s suppression of Palestinianeducation and accuses Israeli universities of failing to defend human rights. Human Rights Watch have observed “discrimination at every level” of Israel’s education system. Palestinians are “winnowed out” of education as the hurdles they face “from kindergarten to university function like a series of sieves”.
Israel’s current war has targeted educational infrastructure. The UN reports that over 80 per cent of Gaza’s schools are damaged or destroyed. All 12 Gazan universities have been bombed, wholly or partly destroyed. Al-Israa University and the 3,000 artefacts in its National Museum were obliterated in a controlled demolition. Such attacks are not new. In 2009, three colleges and six universities were completely destroyed by Israeli bombing. In 2014, the Islamic University and Al-Quds University were bombed and more than 400 students died.
Karma Nabulsi, a professor of politics at Oxford University, calls it scholasticide – an attempt to wipe out Palestinian education and learning. The complicity of Israel’s academic institutions is wide-ranging. Ariel University is one of several institutions built on illegally occupied land. Archaeological associations conduct illegal research in a bid to rewrite history and legitimate land grabs. Israeli universities collaborate with weapons companies to develop technologies that are deployed against Palestinians and sold abroad as “battle proven”.
Many universities have promised to divest from Israeli companies operating in the occupied territories, but declining to profit from occupation is not radical
There is an idealised vision of academia as a noble enterprise that valorises learning and knowledge. It persists even though universities are now largely run as corporations, and even though the history of intellectual thought has justified abysmal injustices from the subjugation of women to slavery. Nevertheless, many of us do believe in the pursuit of academic knowledge and the transformative power of education.
Dr Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian academic and poet, believed in it. He edited the volume Gaza Writes Back, an “anthology of short stories . . . to showcase Palestinian creative resistance to injustice”. Palestinians, in common with oppressed people throughout history, find courage and resistance in words. In his final interview, Alareer said: “I’m an academic … the toughest thing I have at home is [a] marker”. He vowed to throw that marker at Israeli soldiers “even if that is the last thing that I do”.
On December 6th, Alareer and six family members were killed in an Israeli air strike. Four months later, a strike killed his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchild. The Islamic University of Gaza, where Alareer taught Shakespeare and creative writing, has been bombed to dust. That university’s president, Sofyan Taya, was killed, along with his family, last December. A professor of theoretical physics, he died in a strike on Jabalia camp, the same refugee camp in which he was born 52 years earlier.
Since 2005, the Palestinian call to boycott Israel has centred on three demands, all grounded in international law: withdrawal from the occupied territories and dismantling of the separation wall; full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel; and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. As academics, we are not violating reason when we join the call to boycott. We are defending it, and all scholars.
It is not enough merely to say nice things about academic freedom and the pursuit of knowledge during graduation ceremonies. We must also defend those things as well.
Dr Eileen Culloty is an assistant professor at the DCU School of Communications
It probably would surprise no one to learn that there are several viewpoints among critics of the current wars devastating the Middle East regarding who is actually encouraging a growing bloody conflict which might soon involve at least six countries in the region. In simple terms, there is a school of thought that believes that Israel, backed by its various powerful diaspora lobbies, is defying world opinion to continue its slaughter of its indigenous Palestinians and neighboring Lebanese. In other words, it is all about Israel acting maliciously and badly. However, another viewpoint sees instead a neocon dominated United States foreign policy exploiting Israeli truculence and its hard right wing leadership to carry out American national objectives in the region, in a sense using Israel as its proxy and actually encouraging its bad behavior. Meanwhile, a third plausible examination of developments tends to meld the two approaches, suggesting that the US and Israel are in a conspiratorial cooperative relationship and are in full agreement regarding reducing the power of the Jewish state’s neighbors. That would make Israel the preeminent military power dominating the Persia Gulf and beyond to control a large chunk of the world’s energy resources while also benefiting American weapons manufacturers and other political and Wall Street constituencies.
The problem is that there is sufficient carefully selected evidence to support every point of view including an alternative suggestion that American foreign policy is broken, adrift and does not reflect any US national interest at all, witness the recent $8.7 billion aid package sent to a belligerent Israel when Americans were dying in North Carolina in the wake of a devastating hurricane for which FEMA only provided meager assistance because it claimed it had run out of money. The steady flow of money and weapons from the US to Israel suggests that the United States is for some reason supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansion of the war against Hamas when the White House could have ended the war in a day by cutting off that support. Alternatively, Israel might be seen as continuing its slaughter in spite of perhaps insincere US objections because it presumes that its powerful Lobby in the US will keep Joe Biden in line with an election coming up lest it weigh in heavily to help Donald Trump. And, of course, if the two nations are acting in collusion it could all be Kabuki with Washington and Tel Aviv cynically intending to do whatever it takes reshape the Middle East to Israel’s benefit. Take your choice of which scenario fits best.
One needs to determine what actually justifies the reality of a multiplicity of fronts, to include providing political cover in the UN, where the United States is interacting to support “greatest ally and best friend” Israel while at the same time constantly verbalizing the apparently false claim that it is trying to avoid the conflict’s expanding into a major conflagration that could engulf the entire region and beyond, driving up energy costs dramatically just for starters. Such a managed co-escalation might also increase the risks and costs geometrically as more players get involved, up to and including the possibility that Israel will opt to use its nuclear weapons to “defend” itself or to attack Iran, which is where both Russia and the United States might become involved in a nuclear exchange to defend their respective “friends.”
So what is the truth and what are the lies and who in Washington and/or Tel Aviv is calling the shots in the Middle East? And what do they really intend and how do they see it all ending? There are four obvious US government players who are on the ground and meeting with the key figures in the nations involved in the fighting as well as with those ostensibly engaged in the what are being called negotiations to put an end to the killing with a ceasefire acceptable to all parties. One must concede that their task is a difficult one at best as all parties to the peace talks recognize that the United States is not an unbiased intermediary given its total commitment to support Israel politically as well as with arms and money while freely labeling the Jewish state’s neighbors and opponents alike as “terrorists” and “autocrats.” The four would be composed of two obvious officials Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns and Secretary of State Antony Blinken while a third and fourth are not-so-well-known, consisting of special negotiator for the president Amos Hochstein and the White House Coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk. Both Burns and Blinken have made numerous trips to the Middle East and Ukraine to convey the views of the president and make their own assessments of the situation on the ground after meeting with local officials. The role is rather unusual for Burns as a CIA Director normally operates behind the scenes and does not get involved in policy making, but Burns is not a typical director in that he has no background in intelligence. He was a highly regarded State Department officer who wound up as the US Ambassador to Russia. He very carefully worked through the nuances of the US-Russian relationship and was highly praised for explaining things from the Kremlin perspective so US planners would be able to understand very clearly the differing perspectives of the two nations. He described, for example, how very sensitive Russia was over the issue of Ukraine becoming part of NATO, a warning which was subsequently ignored by President Biden.
Blinken is, of course, better known as he served as Deputy Secretary of State during the Barack Obama administration and is regarded as a particularly close associate of Joe Biden. As Secretary of State he has been a very active traveler throughout both the Middle East and Ukraine. Blinken is Jewish and is regarded as a protector of Israel, which is, of course, also the President’s frequently enunciated view. After the Israeli assassination of Hezbollah leader Nasrallah he said that the “World is safer without Nasrallah…” whereas most of the world would quite reasonably prefer to see Benjamin Netanyahu removed. Blinken also appears to favor preemptively attacking Iran to eliminate its nuclear energy program even though there is no evidence that it is weapons-development related. He has recently come under pressure for lying about two State Department reports that indicated very clearly that Israel has been deliberately starving and killing the Gazans by blocking US supplied food and medicine supplies at the border. One large convoy of trucks containing enough food to feed most of the local people who were in danger of dying from starvation was deliberately held up at the border until the food became rotten and had to be destroyed. Blinken lied both to Congress and to the American people about the Israeli policy, saying that blocking food supplies by Israel was not taking place. It was a consequential lie as people died and are continuing to die because of it and Blinken has paid no price for what must surely be considered a major war crime.
The third policy planner is an unusual individual Amos Hochstein, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Army. He has been designated as Biden’s personal roving ambassador in the Middle East with a particular brief to work to avoid the expansion of the Gaza fighting into Lebanon against Hezbollah. In that effort, he has obviously failed as both Israel and Lebanon now consider themselves to be at war. It is presumed that Hochstein is the “active arm” in the White House campaign to shield Israel from any harm initiated by its much abused neighbors. Why anyone would select an Israeli who is a product of the Israeli Army as a negotiator of some type among the nations that the Israelis have been victimizing for the past seventy-five years has to be considered an enduring mystery. It is perhaps another gimmick move by Biden to pretend that he is neutral in the conflict while doing everything he can to turn Netanyahu free to destroy or subject all his neighbors.
Which brings us to the fourth likely top planner National Security Council Coordinator for Africa and the Middle East Brett McGurk. McGurk has been a bipartisan fixture floating around the national security and diplomatic communities for a number of years with the reputation of being a “hardliner” particularly when dealing with Arabs, which is not to say that he has learned anything beyond the fact that if one wants to survive in Washington it pays to love Israel. It is interesting to note that the Biden Administration claims that it is working hard to achieve a ceasefire in both Lebanon and Gaza but it continues to cover for Israel politically and provide it with the weapons and money to continue it genocidal activities as well as in support of its plan to occupy southern Lebanon to create a “buffer zone.” Israeli media is already reporting that real estate agents are offering attractive properties for Jewish buyers in what is still Lebanon, just as Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been peddling exclusive sea front lots in Gaza. In other words, don’t believe anything coming out of the Biden Administration as evidence for anything as it appears that its “policy makers” and press spokesmen have acquired the Israeli tendency to lie about everything.
Politico has a recent piece on both Hochstein and McGurk and it does not make one feel warm and fuzzy about what the Biden administration is up to. The article is entitled: “US officials quietly backed Israel’s military push against Hezbollah -The officials urged caution and stressed the need for diplomacy. But the timing was right for such a military shift, they concluded”. It seems that the guys who are promoted by the Biden administration as peacemakers are anything but. Politicoobtained insider information from a number of anonymous sources in both Washington and Israel and learned that Biden’s team has actually agreed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broad strategy to shift Israel’s military focus to the north against Hezbollah. This tilt, contrary to what the White House has been preaching, produced a reaction from a number of Pentagon, intelligence and State Department officials that such a move would drag the United States into the war, which is really what Netanyahu intended, but the shift in policy was approved anyway. One senior US official noted but dismissed the flaw in a policy of calling for peace while encouraging war as “Both things can be true — the US can want diplomacy and support Israel’s larger goals against Hezbollah. There’s clearly a line that the administration is toeing, it’s just not clear what that line is.”
In spite of concerns from some in the government that a reckless Israel will go too far and ignite a major regional war that could easily spread beyond the Middle East, Politico reports how Hochstein and McGurk worked “behind the scenes” to encourage Israel and they are now describing Israel’s Lebanon operations likely to include a major land invasion as a “history-defining moment” — one that will “reshape the Middle East for the better for years to come.” That would seem to confirm that the United States and Israel are in fact collaborating and the US is fully complicit and de facto supporting the genocidal intention of Netanyahu to make a new Greater Israel largely free of Arabs. For the US, the extra benefit gained from defeating Hezbollah will be that it ultimately weakens Iran, neocon Washington’s perpetual arch enemy, which relies on Hezbollah as a proxy and a resource for projecting power. Of course, it could all go the other way and the joint American-Israeli plan could come to naught. Hezbollah notably routed invading Israeli forces in south Lebanon back in 2006 and it is better trained and equipped now than it was then. And what happens if Israeli army is in trouble and the US is forced to act on its pledge to “defend” the Jewish state, thereby leading a small war to expand and include Iran and Russia? The ball will be in your court Mr. Biden, or possibly Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris. Consider carefully how you will play it but if you really do want a ceasefire, I wouldn’t send Blinken, Hochstein and McGurk around to do the negotiating.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, 25/02/24
Summary
After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the whole population has been forcibly displaced.Thousands of families have lost loved ones or have been wiped out. Many could not bury and mourn their relatives, forced instead to leave their bodies decomposing in homes, in the street or under the rubble. Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come.
By analysing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. One of the key findings is that Israel’s executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.
…
Conclusions 93. The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group. This report finds that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the following acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to groups’ members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Genocidal acts were approved and given effect following statements of genocidal intent issued by senior military and government officials.
94. Israel has sought to conceal its eliminationist conduct of hostilities sanctioning the commission of international crimes as IHL-abiding. Distorting IHL customary rules, including distinction, proportionality and precautions, Israel has de facto treated an entire protected group and its life-sustaining infrastructure as ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorist-supporting’, thus transforming everything and everyone into either a target or collateral damage, hence killable or destroyable. In this way, no Palestinian in Gaza is safe by definition. This has had devastating, intentional effects, costing the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroying the fabric of life in Gaza and causing irreparable harm to its entire population.
95. Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a longstanding settler colonial process of erasure. For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group – demographically, culturally, economically and politically –, seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources. The ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all. This is an imperative owed to the victims of this highly preventable tragedy, and to future generations in that land.
VIII. Recommendations
96. The Special Rapporteur urges member states to enforce the prohibition of genocide in accordance with their non-derogable obligations.309 Israel and those states that have been complicit in what can be reasonably concluded to constitute genocide must be held accountable and deliver reparations commensurate with the destruction, death and harm inflicted on the Palestinian people.
97. The Special Rapporteur recommends that member states:
(a) Immediately implement an arms embargo on Israel, as it appears to have failed to comply with the binding measures ordered by the ICJ on 26 January 2024, as well as other economic and political measures necessary to ensure an immediate and lasting ceasefire and to restore respect for international law, including sanctions;
(b) Support South Africa having resort to the UNSC under article 94(2) of the UN Charter following Israel’s non-compliance with the above-mentioned ICJ measures;
(c) Act to ensure a thorough, independent and transparent investigation of all violations of international law committed by all actors, including those amounting to war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide, including:
(i) cooperating with international independent fact-finding/ investigative and accountability mechanisms;
(ii) referring the situation in Palestine to the ICC immediately, in support of its ongoing investigation;
(iii) discharging their obligations under the principles of universal jurisdiction, ensuring genuine investigations and prosecutions of individuals who are suspected of having committed, or aided or abetted, in the commission of international crimes, including genocide, starting with their own nationals;
(d) Ensure that Israel, as well as States who have been complicit in the Gaza genocide, acknowledge the colossal harm done, commit to non-repetition, with measures for prevention, full reparations, including the full cost of the reconstruction of Gaza, for which the establishment of a register of damage with an accompanying verification and mass claims process is recommended;
(e) Within the General Assembly, develop a plan to end the unlawful and unsustainable status quo constituting the root cause of the latest escalation, which ultimately culminated in the Gaza genocide, including through the reconstitution of the UN Special Committee against Apartheid to comprehensively address the situation in Palestine, and stand ready to implement diplomatic, economic and political measures provided under the United Nations Charter in case of non-compliance by Israel;
(f) In the short term and as a temporary measure, in consultation with the State of Palestine, deploy an international protective presence to constrain the violence routinely used against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory;
(g) Ensure that UNRWA is properly funded to enable it to meet the increased needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
98. The Special Rapporteur calls on the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to enhance its efforts to end the current atrocities in Gaza, including by promoting and accurately applying International Law, notably the Genocide Convention, in the context of the oPt as a whole
People in Gaza are exposed to airborne particles released as Israel destroys the enclave. Inhaled, it can cause cancers.
An injured Palestinian woman covered in dust and blood hugs an injured girl at the hospital following the Israeli bombardment of Khan Yunis on November 15, 2023 [Belal Khaled/AFP]
Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza has unleashed yet another deadly, but silent enemy on the people there – asbestos.
A mineral that poses little risk to humans when undisturbed but that is highly carcinogenic when dispersed and released into the atmosphere, asbestos is present throughout much of Gaza’s structures.
Over the past year, Israel’s bombs have caused vast amounts of it to be broken into tiny, airborne particles, which can potentially cause cancer in those who breathe it in, leading experts to say cases of cancer will likely be reported “for decades” in Gaza.
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According to United Nations estimates, some 800,000 tonnes of the bombed-out debris across Gaza may be contaminated with asbestos.
This is a “death sentence” for Palestinians trapped in Gaza, leading asbestos expert Roger Willey told Al Jazeera.
‘A tragedy that will unfold in the years ahead’
The asbestos exposure of people caught in the aftermath of each of Israel’s bombing raids can be compared to that around the World Trade Center when it collapsed in New York City on September 11, 2001, Willey said.
Years later, it became apparent that toxic chemicals, including asbestos, were in the dust clouds.
“I made a prediction then [in 2001] that more people would die from the asbestos-related diseases than were killed in the September 11 attacks,” Willey said.
(Al Jazeera)
According to the World Trade Center Health Program, 4,343 survivors and first responders have died from related illnesses since the attack compared to the 2,974 people who died on September 11.
“It’s going to be exactly the same in Gaza,” Willey continued.
“[A]irborne concentrations [of asbestos] … will be enormously high, and that is guaranteed mesothelioma,” Willey said, referring to a cancer that commonly forms in the lining around the lungs or abdomen.
Asbestos exposure can also result in cancers of the lung, larynx and ovaries as well as asbestosis, which the US National Cancer Institute describes as an “inflammatory condition affecting the lungs that can cause shortness of breath, coughing and permanent lung damage”.
Marcy Borders, pictured below, survived the WTC attack and was considered lucky to be alive. But it can take decades for asbestos-related cancers to emerge.
After the September 11 attacks, a photojournalist took the now-iconic image of startled receptionist Marcy Borders, who later came to be widely known as the ‘Dust Lady’ [File: Stan Honda/AFP Photo]
The Dust Lady died of stomach cancer in 2015.
“The rescue crews on September 11 … were exposed to asbestos particles for 10 to 12 hours before continuing the next day,” Willey said.
“That’s a death sentence… that’s going to be the same for the people in Gaza.”
The comparison to September 11 is important as that was one of the only incidents in which it was possible to study asbestos exposure after an explosion, said Liz Darlison, CEO of the charity Mesothelioma UK.
“It’s very easy to be preoccupied with the immediate aftermath” of the destruction, she said.
Immediate dangers posed by ground fighting and aerial bombardments always take precedence over long-term hazards, she noted.
However, the long-term effects of asbestos exposure will constitute a “tragedy that will unfold in the years ahead”, Darlison said.
In 2016, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said occupational asbestos exposure had caused an estimated 209,481 deaths – more than 70 percent of all deaths from work-related cancers.
Ubiquitous asbestos, in the refugee camps
Due to its insulating and fireproofing qualities, asbestos was widely used in construction until the late 1980s, when countries worldwide, including Israel, began introducing restrictions. Israel fully banned the use of asbestos in buildings in 2011.
Since its war on the besieged enclave began, Israel has routinely bombed Gaza’s refugee camps where, UNEP told Al Jazeera, asbestos was found “in the older buildings and temporary sheds and extensions found in the refugee camps”.
In 2009, UNEP said it found one of the most dangerous types of asbestos, blue asbestos (crocidolite), in the same damaged buildings and sheds in the refugee camps of Gaza, as well as in sewage pipes, treatment stations and livestock facilities.
No escape, no ‘safe’ level of exposure
The best thing to do if asbestos is disturbed and becomes airborne is to “get in a car and drive as far away from it as possible”, Willey said.
A solution that is simply not possible for the more than two million Palestinians crammed in the enclave of about 365 square kilometres (141sq miles) of which, the UN has warned, only 11 percent remains considered a safe zone.
Palestinians rescue Mahmoud al-Ghol from under the rubble of a house with asbestos ceilings that was struck by Israel F-16s during Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza. In Rafah [File: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]
Furthermore, adequate clean-up processes can take years and must be carried out by professionals, Willey said.
In Gaza now, he said: “You’ve got smashed asbestos pieces on the ground, in the air from the explosion, and people are walking through it and kicking it up all the time, so it’ll never come back to a safe environment until it’s all cleared away”.
Darlison said after an explosion that releases asbestos, there would simply be no “safe level of exposure”.
“What you need is a big sign with a skull and crossbones saying ‘Do not enter’, and only specialists wearing full decontamination equipment allowed near the exposure,” she said.
Acutely aware of the damage asbestos can cause, Darlison said she “cannot bear” to watch the smoke billowing from the explosions in Gaza.
“It’s heartbreaking to know that the legacy of this war will continue for many years,” she said
