Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"
A former Internal Revenue Service contractor, who leaked tax information about Donald Trump and other wealthy individuals to news organizations, got his job to intentionally to spread the confidential records, according to Justice Department prosecutors.
Charles Edward Littlejohn, 38, of Washington, pleaded guilty in October to unauthorized disclosure of tax return and return information. U.S. District Judge Ana Reye scheduled sentencing for Jan. 29. Prosecutors recommended Tuesday he receive the maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Hunter Biden posed a threat to public safety and cannot rely on his constitutional right to a firearm to avoid prosecution for federal gun charges, the US Department of Justice said in a court filing on Tuesday.
Lawyers for the son of the president are currently attempting to have three felony gun charges against him thrown out after he was indicted in Delaware in September over a gun purchase in October 2018 when he was in the grips of drug addiction.
Wael Fanouneh, news director of al-Quds TV, was killed as a result of Israeli bombing in Gaza City.
Fanouneh is the ninth employee of the channel to be killed in Israeli attacks. The other journalists are: Ahmed Khair El Din, Jabr Abu Hadros, Hassan Farajallah, Mohammad Nabil al-Zaq, Mohammad al-Thalathini, Hamada al-Yaziji, Mohammad Abu Huwaidi, and Mahmoud Mushtaha.
More than 100 Palestinian journalists have been killed over the past three and a half months – an unprecedented rate in modern warfare history.
Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush joined a vigil in Washington, D.C. late Wednesday to mourn and demand justice for the Palestinian journalists who were killed by the Israeli military during the first 100 days of its U.S.-backed assault on the Gaza Strip.
"The Israeli government's brutal attacks have made Gaza the most dangerous place in the world for journalists and their families," Tlaib (D-Mich.), currently the only Palestinian American member of Congress, said in her remarks at the vigil. "Despite Netanyahu's ongoing genocidal campaign, Palestinian journalists have continued reporting for Gaza under extremely dangerous circumstances to continue showing the world the truth about these atrocities."
"We call on the international community: Please come together to investigate the Israeli government's war crimes for its repeated attacks on journalists," said Tlaib.
More than 100 Gaza journalists and media workers have been killed by the Israeli military since early October, according to the territory's media office. Palestinian reporters say they are being deliberately targeted as part of an Israeli government campaign to "shut down the coverage" of its ongoing atrocities in the Gaza Strip.
In addition to being killed by Israeli bombs, Gaza journalists have faced arbitrary detention, harassment, assault, and torture at the hands of Israeli forces. The International Criminal Court said last week that it is investigating attacks on Gaza journalists as part of its broader probe of war crimes committed in the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel.
Bush (D-Mo.), the lead sponsor of a Gaza cease-fire resolution in the U.S. House, used her speech during Wednesday's vigil to call out the Biden administration's complicity in Israel's attacks on journalists—and the lack of condemnation from members of the American press as their peers "are being slaughtered for doing the very jobs they do."
"Palestinian voices are being intentionally silenced by the Israeli government and by our own government," Bush said. "This makes uncovering the truth of what's happening in Palestine not only difficult and dangerous, but essential."
"The Israeli government's silencing of and violence against journalists began long before October 7," Bush continued. "In fact, for decades, as Palestinians have lived under their illegal occupation, the silencing of their voices and stories has been a tactic to maintain control and maintain support from the West. After all, it's much easier to ignore and cover up injustice if it goes untold."
The vigil was sponsored by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which led a coalition of advocacy groups last week in imploring the Biden administration to immediately "promote the conditions for safe and unrestricted reporting on the hostilities."
AMY GOODMAN: Israel’s bombardment of Gaza from the land, air and sea continued today, much of it in the southern part of the territory in the cities of Khan Younis and Rafah. At least 163 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in the last 24 hours, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Some of the worst shelling hit the western side of Khan Younis, which was designated in the early stages of Israel’s assault on Gaza as a so-called safe zone by Israel. There’s also been intense Israeli bombardment in the vicinity of Nasser Hospital, the main hospital in the city, and tanks and armored vehicles are on the main road leading to the area. Among the places hit in Khan Younis was a school sheltering displaced Palestinians. An eyewitness described the attack.
EYEWITNESS: We saw death with all colors. The tanks entered. We saw everything vividly. It was horrible — random shelling, random fire, random killing. They are coming just to kill and go back home. This is a Nakba. They are just coming to kill children, women, elderly, in the bathroom, in the school, in the hospital, in the street, anywhere. They killed us. They are just coming to kill only. Just that. Just killing.
AMY GOODMAN: The interruption of communications and internet services in Gaza, for days, has continued for the fifth consecutive day, the longest telecommunications blackout of the war so far. This has caused delays for emergency workers to respond to airstrikes and has hampered media coverage from Palestinian journalists in Gaza.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh left Gaza on Tuesday, crossing into Egypt, then flying to Qatar to receive medical treatment. Dahdouh has come to symbolize both the suffering and resilience of Palestinian journalists in Gaza. In October, four members of his family were killed, including his wife, his 15-year-old son, his 7-year-old daughter and his grandson, in an Israeli strike on a refugee camp where they were seeking shelter after their home was bombed. Last week, his eldest son, 27-year-old-Hamza, also a journalist, was killed along with another journalist in an Israeli airstrike on their car in Khan Younis. Dahdouh will receive medical treatment in Doha for a wound he received when Israel bombed the area he was in that ended up killing his cameraperson Samer Abudaqa.
By some counts, over 110 journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7th. The Committee to Protect Journalists has found more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of Israel’s war on Gaza than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.
For more, we’re joined by two guests. Sharif Abdel Kouddous is an independent journalist and a Democracy Now! correspondent. His latest piece for The Intercept investigates the killing of Abudaqa. It’s headlined “Israel Bombed an Al Jazeera Cameraman — and Blocked Evacuation Efforts as He Bled to Death.” He’s joining us from here in New York. In Washington, D.C., we’re joined by Sherif Mansour, the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Before we talk to Sharif about the cameraman, the Al Jazeera cameraman who bled to death over five hours, can we put this in a broader context, Sherif Mansour? Talk about the astounding number, the horrific number, of journalists who have died in Gaza.
SHERIF MANSOUR: Well, thank you for having me again, Amy. I’ve already talked to you about this at least twice, and the number only goes higher. The deadly pattern we discussed become more deadly. And we have since talked, talked about the apparent pattern of targeting against journalists, their families. And specifically when we discuss Al Jazeera and al-Dahdouh’s family, they really are rewriting what it means to be a journalist today, with immense, brave and never-seen-before sacrifices. The Palestinian journalists, local journalists — so far, 76 out of 83 we’ve counted since the start of the war are Palestinians. The overwhelming majority are killed by the Israeli army. The Israeli army has killed more journalists in the span of those three months than any other entity or army have done over a course of one year since 1992. This is the most dangerous and the most — we’ve never seen any assignment like this before.
Of course, what we called on is independent and transparent and thorough investigation. We want to see the case of al-Dahdouh, his son, Al Jazeera and others that show a culpability of the Israeli army to be put to public scrutiny by allowing immediate entry to international media and international investigators into Gaza without censorship by the Israeli army. The killing must stop. And for that to happen, the record must be made public, and U.S., European and other allies of Israel need to call Israel on that record and ensure those investigations are made immediately public.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sherif Mansour, what has been the response of the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces, given the enormous number of journalists killed? Have they accepted any culpability at all for any of these killings?
SHERIF MANSOUR: The cases of precise attacks by drones against Al Jazeera, which happened at least twice in the last four weeks, included for the first time the Israeli army taking responsibility of doing those attacks, but also doing as they’ve done in the past, when they are held responsible because the case of a journalist is someone who was behind an international news organization. They said they will investigate, but they also push false narratives, claims that they are terrorists or that they were part of an ongoing crossfire, and, as we’ve seen in past incidents before this war, this time around three narratives pushed by the Israeli army, correcting and changing and providing nothing more than a questionable document, with English for the first time, coming from what they said was a terrorist group, but providing no other evidence that support their claim, and have — so far, the outlets, eyewitnesses, and the families of the journalists have denied the Israeli army narratives and showed to the contrary that, for example, Hamza, an Al Jazeera journalist, was approved to travel — before his father, Wael Dahdouh, did yesterday — after Israel vetted him. And if he was wanted by any chance, he wouldn’t have had this approval before he was killed. And other testimony and accounts that we and others are showing the contradicting nature of these narratives, this is also the same narrative we said happened before this war started, in our “Deadly Pattern” report. And it is a pattern of responses designed to evade responsibilities by throwing the word “terrorists,” by also pushing out those narratives until the world look away.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are both calling for Israel to be officially investigated for war crimes and its targeting of journalists, not only in Gaza, but outside of Gaza, because an internal Reuters investigation found that one of its journalists, Issam Abdallah, was killed by an Israeli tank shell fired on him and a group of six other journalists in southern Lebanon on October 13th. Could you talk about these attacks outside of Gaza?
SHERIF MANSOUR: So, we saw the same pattern of disregard for press insignia that we reported before this war, 13 out of 20 journalists killed by IDF fire over 21 years who wore press signs and press insignia showing that they are media personnel. And like those cases, the case of Issam Abdallah show, with independent investigation, physical proof, forensic proof from the scene, in addition to mapping, audio and visual analysis by international human rights groups and international media organizations, that show that those journalists did not pose any threat to Israeli government positions, that they have been seen by an Israeli drone at least an hour, that they were visibly expressing or showing press signs and only their cameras, and the position that they have taken was a high-vantage hill that did not obscure their location with being close to any camera or house that justified that they would have any threat. And all of this and other evidence have shown that what we show in the past, in the cases of at least three journalists that we categorized as murdered before this course, including Shireen Abu Akleh and Yaser Murtaja and Ahmed Abu Hassin, who were killed in Gaza, that there was no justification for the use of lethal force by the Israeli army. And those and other cases [inaudible] that we call for independent investigation as war crimes, because the Israeli army did not live up to their commitments and obligation under international law.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, Shireen Abu Akleh was killed May 11, 2022, outside the Jenin refugee camp. Sharif Abdel Kouddous did a George Polk Award-winning documentary on the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. He’s joining us, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Sharif, I wanted to ask you about this latest piece you did for The Intercept that’s headlined “Israel Bombed an Al Jazeera Cameraman — and Blocked Evacuation Efforts as He Bled to Death.” Give us the tick-tock, the chronology on what happened on that horrific day, when he and Wael al-Dahdouh, who is the Gaza bureau chief for Al Jazeera, went to the school that was bombed. Tell us exactly what happened.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Right, Amy. And when we talk about the killing of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, this was an incident on December 15th where much of the world watched as hours ticked by as Samer Abudaqa was wounded and prevented from getting medical care by Israel and eventually died. And so, that timeline of what happened, I think, is extremely important.
But, basically, Wael al-Dahdouh, who is Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Gaza, went with Samer Abudaqa, who’s a 20-year veteran journalist, a cameraman — they went to this school in Khan Younis which had been bombed earlier in the day, and they were accompanied by a team of Civil Defense workers. That team had received — had requested and received approval by the Israeli military through the Red Cross to be in the area. They got there around noon. They spent about two-and-a-half hours in the area. This is according to Wael al-Dahdouh. And as they were wrapping up their coverage, there were these — he said there were hardly anyone in the area. There were drones buzzing overhead. They were just about to leave and go back to the ambulance that had brought them there, when a strike hit them, at about 2:30 p.m.
Wael al-Dahdouh was thrown to the ground. He said when he got up and kind of regained awareness, he realized he was bleeding quite profusely from his arm and that he would bleed to death if he didn’t get medical attention. He looked over and saw the three Civil Defense workers who were accompanying them had been killed instantly. And then, at a small distance away, he saw his colleague, Samer Abudaqa, on the ground. He had been wounded in the lower part of his body. Wael said that he seemed like he was screaming — Wael at that point had lost much of his hearing from the blast — and that Samer couldn’t get up. Wael realized the only chance that both of them had was for him to get to medical attention and get help to bring Samer out, because he couldn’t get up. So Wael somehow stumbled across about 800 meters to the ambulance that was waiting. He begged them to go in and get Samer, but they insisted on evacuating him first to a hospital in Khan Younis and that another ambulance would go retrieve him. There are videos of Wael al-Dahdouh receiving treatment, wincing in pain, calling on people to go get Samer, telling them to coordinate with the Red Cross.
What we understand from Wael and others is that an ambulance did go immediately to try and retrieve Samer from the area, but that they were fired on, or in their area, in their proximity, by Israeli forces. At the same time, Al Jazeera’s bureau chief in Ramallah, Walid al-Omari, was making calls to the Red Cross — this is around 3:00, 3:30 p.m. — and asking the Red Cross to liaise with the Israeli military to allow for emergency crews to reach Samer Abudaqa in Khan Younis. So the Israeli military knew, at least by 3:00 or 3:30, that there was a wounded journalist who lay helpless that needed evacuation.
And at the same time, news was spreading of Samer Abudaqa’s plight, and there’s a group called the Foreign Press Association, which is a Jerusalem-based nonprofit representing reporters, mostly foreign reporters from over 30 countries, and there’s a WhatsApp group, which has about 140 of these journalists on it. One of the journalists, a freelance reporter and producer based in Jerusalem named Orly Halpern, posted just after 3 p.m. about the Samer’s plight and told the journalists, or called on them, to call Israeli military spokespeople and to demand that Samer be evacuated. And so, the FPA was getting involved. Senior members of the FPA, the Foreign Press Association, were getting involved, calling Israeli military officials, Israeli military spokespeople, senior ones, repeatedly asking for passage for Samer.
And from what we understand, at The Intercept we obtained screenshots of this WhatsApp group from multiple journalists in the group, and also from speaking with people involved in these efforts, that for hours Israel did not give approval to these ambulances. Finally, after about five hours after Samer was initially wounded, a bulldozer was finally approved to go through to reach Samer. But by then, he had already died. He had bled out. He was found with — he had seemed to have removed his flak jacket and had tried to crawl and had died. And it was incredibly tragic. He had lain there. Al Jazeera had posted a live counter of the hours and minutes since he was wounded on its broadcast, and people were just watching. And he eventually died.
And the next day, Al Jazeera announced it was preparing a legal file to submit to the International Criminal Court over what it called the assassination of Samer Abudaqa. And so did Reporters Without Borders, also included his killing in a filing with the ICC, war crimes against journalists killed in Gaza. So, you know, the world should be outraged about this killing, about all the killings that are happening to Palestinians, Palestinian journalists in Gaza.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: So, Sharif, in this particular case, there is no doubt that the highest echelons of the Israeli Defense Forces were aware that this journalist was wounded and in need of medical attention.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Yes, we have multiple journalists who told — we have screenshots of a WhatsApp group where they’re discussing having spoken to Israeli military spokespeople in those hours and saying, “No approval yet. Ambulances not cleared. Bulldozers not cleared yet.” So, this took hours. And, you know, the Israeli military must have known very early on what the situation is. They’re the ones who had repeatedly bombed the area. They knew there was rubble in the streets. There’s constant — near-constant drone surveillance of Gaza. The Red Cross, we know, was liaising with the Israeli military to try and get approval. And yet they left, or they just didn’t allow — by some accounts, firstly, ambulances were fired on that tried to reach Samer Abudaqa. They returned back — this is the Palestinian Red Crescent and Civil Defense — and they were waiting then for approval. They also asked for Red Cross teams to accompany them to the area as a form of protection. And all of this is happening while Samer Abudaqa is lying helpless. The Israeli military is not giving permission. And he eventually died.
AMY GOODMAN: And then, again, that was Wael al-Dahdouh’s cameraperson and dear colleague, who bleeds to death over five hours. And then, in the last weeks, his son, Hamza al-Dahdouh, also an Al Jazeera journalist, is killed in this Israeli airstrike, along with the AFP stringer Mustafa Thuraya, in an airstrike, a drone strike on a car. Sharif, final comments?
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Yeah, I think, look, in this country, the journalistic community should be outraged, should be vocal in their outrage, at Israel’s killing of their colleagues in Gaza. And we haven’t seen that.
And let me just end by saying, you know, in 2022, the Pulitzer Board awarded a special citation to journalists of Ukraine for their coverage of the Russian invasion and of the war. And the citation reads, quote, “Despite bombardment, abductions, occupation, and even deaths in their ranks, they have persisted in their effort to provide an accurate picture of a terrible reality,” end-quote. This is the case many times over for the journalists of Gaza, for the Palestinian journalists of Gaza. I doubt they will be receiving any such accolades. And that’s where the problem lies.
AMY GOODMAN: Sharif Abdel Kouddous, independent journalist, wrote this piece for The Intercept, “Israel Bombed an Al Jazeera Cameraman — and Blocked Evacuation Efforts as He Bled to Death.” We’ll link to it at The Intercept at democracynow.org. And Sherif Mansour, Committee to Protect Journalists’ Middle East and North Africa program coordinator, speaking to us from D.C.
Next up, we look at what Israelis see on television. Stay with us.
19 Palestinians were killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in the early hours of the morning, staff at Al Najjer hospital in the southern Gaza city of Rafah told an NBC News crew.
The hospital shared a list of the dead with names of 16 members of the Al Zamili family — 8 of them were children and 5 were women, including one who was pregnant. Three people were unidentifiable, according to the staff.
Dr. Talat Barhoum at Al Najjar Hospital also confirmed the death toll from the strike in Rafah and said dozens more were wounded, in comments to the Associated Press.
Joe Biden marked 100 days of his no-holds-barred support for Israel’s genocidal war against the people of Gaza by pretending that the killing, maiming, and displacement of the Palestinians were an apparition. “No one should have to endure even one day of what they have gone through, much less 100,” Biden wrote on January 14. But his statementOpens in a new tab, which emphasized the Israeli deaths on October 7 and the hostages who remain in Hamas’s custody, made no mention of the 10,000 dead Palestinian children and what they never should have gone through. His only reference to the plight of Palestinian civilians was an oblique one: Biden praised himself for presiding over a brief “surge [in] additional vital humanitarian aid into Gaza” when there was a temporary truce to allow the exchange of hostages and prisoners in November.
Biden’s statement is emblematic of the lip service the president has paid to “humanitarian” needs while at the same time facilitating Israel’s every move. The White House knew from the beginning exactly how gratuitous and barbaric Israel’s war of annihilation would be in Gaza, yet Biden made sure that his “great, great friend” Benjamin Netanyahu would have U.S. weapons to carry it out, would enjoy the full support of America’s extensive intelligence and targeting capabilities, and receive the political backing of Washington with no “red lines.” Biden and company ensured that Israel’s lies, no matter how grand or obscene, would be embraced and promoted from the podium at the State Department and White House every single day. Over the past 100 days, the administration has watched the carnage wrought on the people of Gaza, yet officials admitOpens in a new tab they have “taken great pains to avoid calling for a ceasefire.”
The attempts by the administration over the past months to plant stories in the media — about how Biden is “losing patienceOpens in a new tab” with Netanyahu, how Antony Blinken is concerned about the mounting pile of Palestinian corpses, how the White House seeks no wider regional war — indicates a cynical amorality that permeates the souls of those in power. “At every juncture, Netanyahu has given Biden the finger,” Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen told Axios, characterizing what he hears from senior administration officials. “They are pleading with the Netanyahu coalition, but getting slapped in the face over and over again.”
“What we’re seeing every single day in Gaza is gut-wrenching,” Blinken told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman at an event in Davos, SwitzerlandOpens in a new tab, as though he has not been one of the premiere enablers of the destruction of Gaza. “The suffering we are seeing among innocent men, women, and children breaks my heart.” He then adopted the tone of an analyst at a think tank, not the top U.S. diplomat: “The question is, what is to be done?”
These sentiments, expressed as part of a barely concealed political spin campaign, are not being promoted because they are sincerely held reservations or concerns; rather they are the linchpin of a crass effort to scatter bread crumbs the White House can later point to, including during the 2024 election, in an effort to make it seem as though they were powerless observers who just wanted to help the Israelis defend themselves but that dastardly Netanyahu took it too far. The actual scandal, in this narrative, will not be the mass murder of the Palestinians of Gaza in a genocidal campaign armed by the White House, but how Bibi and his band of rogues, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, used the just war to push their “extremist” agendas.
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