Chris Hedges Damns Israeli Bombing of Gaza, Not ‘Self-Defense,’ but a War Crime

May 15, 2021 (EIRNS)—Chris Hedges, who was the New York Times Bureau Chief in the Mideast for several years, speaks Arabic, and spent many weeks living in Gaza, published an article in ConsortiumNews May 14 titled: “Israel, the Big Lie.” The kicker reads: “Israel is not exercising the ‘right to defend itself’ in the occupied Palestinian territories. It is carrying out mass murder, aided and abetted by the U.S.” He describes the conditions in Gaza, long before the current mass bombing, as

“the world’s largest open-air prison, where over 2 million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror.... I know the crimes of the occupation—the food shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the lack of health services, the near constant electrical outages due to the Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.”

Hedges continues:

“Israel’s indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And, while I oppose the indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged by groups such as Hamas.”

As to the U.S. role, Hedges writes: “The United States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Israel is not defending the rule of law. Israel is not a democracy. It is an apartheid state.”

Hedges now hosts a political commentary program on RT.