“I ask you, which of us sitting in this hall would willingly submit to the indignity that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been subjected to for decades?
What peaceful means have the Palestinian people not tried? What compromises have they not accepted–other than the one that requires them to crawl on their knees and eat dirt?”
–Arundhati Roy, PEN Pinter Prize acceptance speech
+ This was the week that Israel, with the backing of the Biden administration, went to war against…the United Nations by attacking UN peacekeepers (UNIFIL) in Lebanon and seizing the UN HQ in East Jerusalem. This brazen assault comes after a year of attacks on UN aid workers in Gaza, killing more than 300. After it has bombed UN food and supply convoys, UN health clinics, UN schools and refugee camps. After it has banned UN investigators from entering Gaza and threatened UN courts and prosecutors. All with the shameful acquiescence of Biden, Blinken and Harris.
On Thursday, IDF forces fired at the headquarters of the UN peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) in southern + Lebanon, injuring two peacekeepers after they were knocked out of a watchtower. The IDF also directed fire on peacekeepers’ bunkers, damaging vehicles and communications systems.
UNIFIL: This morning [Thursday], two peacekeepers were injured after an IDF Merkava tank fired its weapon toward an observation tower at UNIFIL’s headquarters in Naqoura, directly hitting it and causing them to fall. The injuries are fortunately, this time, not serious, but they remain in hospital.
IDF soldiers also fired on UN position (UNP) 1-31 in Labbouneh, hitting the entrance to the bunker where peacekeepers were sheltering, and damaging vehicles and a communications system. An IDF drone was observed flying inside the UN position up to the bunker entrance.
Yesterday, IDF soldiers deliberately fired at and disabled the position’s perimeter-monitoring cameras. They also deliberately fired on UNP 1-32A in Ras Naqoura, where regular Tripartite meetings were held before the conflict began, damaging lighting and a relay station.
We remind the IDF and all actors of their obligations to ensure the safety and security of UN personnel and property and to respect the inviolability of UN premises at all times. UNIFIL peacekeepers are present in south Lebanon to support a return to stability under the Security Council’s mandate.
Any deliberate attack on peacekeepers is a grave violation of international humanitarian law and of Security Council resolution 1701.”
+ After hearing no objections from its arms supplier, Israel attacked UNIFIL positions again on Friday, when it dropped bombs twice at UN headquarters in Naqoura. Two peacekeepers were injured when Israeli missiles struck near a UN observation tower. UNIFIL also reported that “several T-walls at our UN position 1-31, near the Blue Line in Labbounen, fell when an IDF caterpillar hit the perimeter, and IDF tanks moved into the proximity of the UN position. Our peacekeepers remained at the location, and a UNIFIL Quick Reaction Force was dispatched to assist and reinforce the position.”
+ UNIFIL’s Andrea Tenenti said on Friday: “It looks more of a deliberate attack against our troops, who have been in the south to try to bring back stability at the moment, and it’s very, very challenging. How can this be a mistake from an army that is pretty well prepared, and they know what they’re doing?”
+ UNIFIL is composed of more than 10,000 troops from 50 nations, including China, India, France, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Finland, Nepal, South Korea and Ireland.
+ At least 35 nations who are part of the UNIFIL force in Lebanon signed a letter condemning the US-armed Israeli attacks on UN peacekeepers this week (India was a late signatory).
+ Firing at peacekeepers is a violation of International Humanitarian Law and a war crime, which the government of Giorgia Meloni’s Italy angrily pointed out after Israel shelled positions held by Italian peacekeepers.
+ What if Blinken says, “Pretty, please”?
+++
+ After a year of unrelenting attacks on Gaza, the official death toll from the Palestinian Health Ministry stands at more than 42,065 Palestinians killed and 97,886 wounded. At least 32,280 of the dead have been identified, including 10,627 children, 5,956 women, and 2,770 elderly. At least another 10,000 Palestinians are estimated to be buried under the rubble. The actual death toll, according to estimates from medical investigators at Lancet and elsewhere, probably exceeds 200,000 and perhaps much higher.
+ Dr. Thaer Ahmad: “700 infants never saw their first birthday.”
+ At least 750 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem by Israeli settlers or military forces since October 7, 2023, including 146 children.
+ Israel has revised downward the death toll of Israelis killed during the October 7 attacks from an initial estimate of 1,400 (repeated this week by Obama and others) to 1,189, some of whom (perhaps several hundred) were killed by the IDF under the Hannibal Directive.
+ The IDF says that 720 Israeli soldiers have been killed and 4100 injured in combat operations since October 7.
+ The Lebanese Health Ministry calculates that at least 2,141 Lebanese have been killed and more than 11,000 injured by Israeli attacks since October 9, 2023.
+ Israel has displace more than three million people in the last year.
+++
+ A UN report released on Thursday said Israelis have committed war crimes in Gaza and imposed “collective punishment” on Palestinians. The Israeli siege “has prevented hospitals from receiving food, fuel, water and medical supplies, and has…limited the number of patients allowed to leave Gaza for treatment.” The UN report charged that “children, in particular, have borne the brunt of these attacks, suffering both directly and indirectly from the collapse of the health system.”
+ According to the report, “Israeli security forces have deliberately killed, detained and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles while tightening their siege on Gaza and restricting permits to leave the territory for medical treatment.”
+ “Male detainees were subjected to rape, as well as attacks on their sexual and reproductive organs and forced to perform humiliating and strenuous acts while naked or stripped as a form of punishment or intimidation to extract information,” the UN report said.
+ Navi Pillay, Chair of the UN Commission of Inquiry: “Israel must immediately stop its unprecedented wanton destruction of healthcare facilities in Gaza. By targeting healthcare facilities, Israel is targeting the right to health itself with significant long-term detrimental effects on the civilian population. Children, in particular, have borne the brunt of these attacks, suffering both directly and indirectly from the collapse of the health system.”
+ Joyce Msuya, Acting Under-Secretary-General of the UN and Emergency Relief Coordinator, on the conditions in Gaza after a year of Israeli bombardment: “No statistics or words can fully convey the extent of the physical, mental and societal devastation that has taken place. But we know what must happen: The hostages must be released and treated humanely. Civilians must be protected and their essential needs met. Palestinians arbitrarily detained must be released. Humanitarian workers must be safeguarded and their work facilitated. Perpetrators must be held accountable for any serious violations of international humanitarian law. And the assault on Gaza must stop.”
+ According to Brown University’s Cost of War project, since October 7, the Biden-Harris Administration has spent $22.76 billion to support Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza. This figure includes $17.9 billion in direct “security” aid to Israel (more than in any other year since the US began giving Israel military assistance in 1959) and $4.86 billion to support US military operations in the region.
+ Laleh Khalili: “The amount of military aid the US has sent Israel in one year is more than the whole GDP of Yemen or Lebanon and it is 170% of the whole Palestinian GDP!”
+ Adam Tooze: “US taxpayers are covering 25% of the costs of Israel’s rampage when Israel has a GDP per capita on a par with Germany’s and a 60% debt to GDP level in 2023, a figure US fiscal hawks can only dream, of …”
+++
These photographs of X-rays of Palestinian children shot by Israeli forces were provided by Dr. Mimi Syed, who worked in Khan Younis from August 8 to September 5.
+ Dr. Feroze Sidwa, a trauma surgeon who volunteered at European Hospital in Khan Younis for two in March and April, was shocked by how many children he treated with gunshot wounds to the head and body. “I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8. I’ve volunteered in Ukraine and Haiti, and I grew up in Flint, Mich. I’ve seen violence and worked in conflict zones. But of the many things that stood out about working in a hospital in Gaza, one got to me: Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total.”
+ When Dr. Sidwa returned to the US, he began to poll other US medical personnel who had worked in Gaza about what they had witnessed. Dr. Sidwa was able to reach 65 American healthcare workers, 44 of whom saw children who’d been shot in the head or the chest. Here are some of their responses, which were published in the NYT.
Dr. Mohamad Rassoul Abu-Nuwar, a General, bariatric and foregut surgeon from Pittsburgh: “One night in the emergency department, over the course of four hours, I saw six children between the ages of 5 and 12, all with single gunshot wounds to the skull.”
Dr. Irfan Galaria, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon from Chantilly, Virginia: “Our team cared for about four or five children, ages 5 to 8 years old, that were all shot with single shots to the head. They all presented to the emergency room at the same time. They all died.”
Dr. Khawaja Ikram, an orthopedic surgeon from Dallas, Texas: “One day, while in the E.R., I saw a 3-year-old and 5-year-old, each with a single bullet hole to their head. When asked what happened, their father and brother said they had been told that Israel was backing out of Khan Younis. So they returned to see if anything was left of their house. There was, they said, a sniper waiting who shot both children.”
Dr. Ndal Farah, an anesthesiologist from Toledo, Ohio: “I saw many children. In my experience, the gunshot wound was often to the head. Many had non-curable, permanent brain damage. It was almost a daily occurrence to have children arrive at the hospital with gunshot wounds to the head.”
Dr. Mimi Syed, an emergency medicine doctor from Olympia, Washington: “I had multiple pediatric patients, mostly under the age of 12, who were shot in the head or the left side of the chest. Usually, these were single shots. The patients came in either dead or critical, and died shortly after arriving.”
+ Dr. Sidwa helped organize a letter to Biden and Harris from 99 American healthcare workers, urging the administration to end US support for Israel’s war on Gaza:
It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.
With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.
In Gaza we watched malnourished mothers feed their underweight newborns infant formula made with poisonous water. We can never forget that the world abandoned these innocent women and babies.”
Israel’s continued, repeated displacement of the malnourished and sick population of Gaza, half of whom are children, to areas without running water or even toilets available is absolutely shocking.
+++
+ Palestinian journalist Hassan Hamad received this message on WhatsApp, along with several calls from an Israeli officer telling him to stop filming in Gaza: “Listen, If you continue spreading lies about Israel, we’ll come for you next and turn your family into […] This is your last warning”.. Hamad didn’t comply and kept doing his job. He was killed in an airstrike last Sunday.
+ On Wednesday, the IDF targeted several journalists covering ongoing Israeli attacks in the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. One cameraman was killed and Al Jazeera photojournalist Fadi Al Wahidi was shot in the neck. He remains paralyzed and in critical condition. Two days earlier, another Al Jazeera cameraman, Ali Al-Attar, was shot while covering the plight of displaced Palestinians in Deir al-Balah. Israeli forces blocked medical teams who tried to treat his wounds. Al-Attar is also in critical condition.
+ Al Jazeera: “The deliberate targeting of journalists is a flagrant violation of international laws protecting the press and humanitarian workers in war zones. Al Jazeera urgently calls on the international community to take immediate action to ensure the safety of journalists and civilians in Gaza and hold the Israeli Occupation Forces accountable for their repeated crimes against journalists.”
+ Israel has now killed at least 180 journalists, most of them Palestinians, since October 7, 2023.
+ A documentary on pro-Israeli bias in the Western media by Listening Post shows how CNN’s Nic Robertson pushed through a debunked story about hostages being held at a Gaza hospital despite the concerns of colleagues. The IDF had planted the story.
+++
Ta-Nehisi Coates: “To recognize Palestinians are human has become a flashpoint, a red line not to be crossed in Washington discourse, an invitation to be tagged as an antisemite.”
Tony Dokoupil interrogates Ta-Nehisi Coates on CBS Mornings.
+ It doesn’t take much to summon to the surface the racist sentiments many liberals have suppressed for most of their adult lives– just a word or two of empathy for Palestinians is usually enough to trigger an eruption. Witness the treatment of Ta-Nehisi Coates after the publication of his explosive little book The Message, where he describes his awakening to the depraved treatment of Palestinians, which he compared to that of black Americans under Jim Crow. This is not a particularly radical or even original conclusion, coming 18 years after Jimmy Carter described Israel as an Apartheid state.
Coates, whose previous works–The Beautiful Struggle, The Water Dancer, and Between the World and Me–had been extolled as masterpieces by the liberal literati was now tied to the whipping post and given critical lashings for having the audacity to write about something other than his own blackness, exposing his naivete about historical matters much too complex for him to possibly understand.
Check out this revelatory paragraph in a review of Coates’ book filled with similar bigoted and incoherent graphs written by Compact editor Helen Andrews…
The problem with Israel is that it shames him. How can it be that the Jews carved their Israel out of the desert, and yet no place in Africa, least of all Liberia, remotely resembles Wakanda?
The CBS Mornings Show, usually a laidback gabfest with features about the best skin moisturizers and the latest twists in the Ben Affleck/J-Lo breakup, laid an ambush for Coates during an interview with co-host Tony Dokoupil, who began his interrogation by saying that Coates’s book could be found in “the backpack of an extremist,” which is not only offensive but a drop-dead dumb assessment of what the book is really about. If Coates’ rather sedate writing set him off, wait until Dokoupil reads something really incendiary, like the Jewish-Israeli journalist Gideon Levy’s scorching new book on Gaza. The gist of which can be summarized as, “So Coates, this book is really the story of how you became an anti-semite, right?”
Although he initially seemed surprised at the hostility of Dokoupil’s questions, Coates didn’t back down. He parried off Dokoupil’s attacks pretty smoothly and managed to give perspective on the grueling conditions Palestinians endure under Israeli Occupation. He probably sold a lot of books. Coates told Trevor Noah that Dokoupil’s reaction was “endemic of what I’m writing about” in The Message.
The Coates interview ignited an internal spat at CBS, with some staffers calling the interview “racist and xenophobic,” while CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford defended Dokopupil and, right on cue, called Ta-Nehisi Coates “a fraud.”
+++
+ John Bolton will be her National Security Advisor, right?…
+ When asked by 60 Minutes to name the foreign country she considers the US’s “greatest adversary,” Harris said: “I think there’s an obvious one in mind, which is Iran. Iran has American blood on their hands.”Iran has US blood on their hands?” The US assassinated the Iranian president, funded the Shah’s torture regime, backed Saddam’s war on Iran, which killed close to one million Iranians, and shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 passengers and crew…
+ There’s not much on the plus side of Obama’s foreign policy ledger beyond his loosening of restrictions on Cuba, his decision not to escalate after Russia seized Crimea and Assad’s likely use of chemical weapons and the Iranian nuclear deal–all of which Biden and Harris have renounced and reversed.
+ 45 words in search of a meaning: VP Harris on Israeli PM ignoring US calls for a ceasefire/humanitarian pause: “The work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements by Israel in that region that were very much prompted by or a result of many things including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”
+ Matt Duss, writing in The New Republic: “What’s happening in the Middle East was enabled by a president with ideological priors, aides who failed to push back, and a cheerleading media establishment…The story being crafted through friendly journalists is that Biden tried his best but his effort to bring the war to an end was ultimately frustrated by Netanyahu’s shenanigans. But Biden wasn’t hoodwinked He chose this path, and stayed on it.”
+++
+ Trump’s October 7 Memorial message to Israeli and American Jews: “Israel has to do one thing. They have to get smart about Trump, because they don’t back me. I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. It’s not reciprocal!”
+ Ayman Hsafadi, Foreign Minister of Jordan: “We are members of the Muslim Arab Committee, mandated by 57 Arab and Muslim countries, and I can tell you unequivocally that all of us are willing, right now, to guarantee the security of Israel in the context of Israel ending the occupation and allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state. Ask any Israeli official what is their plan for peace, you’ll get nothing. We have a plan; we have no partner for peace in Israel. There is a partner for peace in the Arab world, and that’s why the international community needs to move.”
+ Sally Stevenson, an Australian healthcare worker on an assignment with Médecins Sans Frontières in Gaza: “It is worse than you can imagine. The destruction is everywhere; as far as the eye can see, it is in the air we breathe. There is no safe place in Gaza. For anyone, especially children.”
+ Harvard’s Widener Library suspended students for holding a silent “study-in” at the library to protest Israel’s bombing and ground invasion of Lebanon. A group of students wearing kaffiyehs taped posters to their laptops reading: “Imagine It Happened Here.” More than a dozen students were cited and banned from the library for two weeks.
+ On the eve of its planned protest on October 7, Tufts University suspended Students for Justice in Palestine: “SJP must halt all activities, events, and meetings. Any attempt to continue operating during this suspension will result in serious disciplinary consequences for both the organization and its leaders.”
+++
+ After it was revealed last week that Secretary of State Blinken gave Israel the approval to strike humanitarian aid convoys it believed might be commandeered by Hamas, Miller finally admitted this week that Hamas is not hijacking aid trucks, but does so to exonerate US approval for striking aid convoys taken by Hamas: “There’s not been any widespread evidence that we have seen of Hamas actually taking convoys and commandeering them.”
+ Ahed Lemqayyad, the head of UNRWA operations, was killed by the Israelis in a targeted air strike on Jabalia in northern Gaza.
+ The Hind Rajab Foundation has filed an International Criminal Court complaint against 1000+ Israeli soldiers for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The complaint includes 8000+ pieces of evidence demonstrating soldiers’ “direct involvement in these atrocities.”
+ Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan: “History books will be written on this and countries will have to reckon, media agencies will have to reckon with their major role in the genocide of an entire population and in the destruction of humanitarian law.”
+ Matt Lee, AP: “Have you complained to Israelis about bombing the road to the Beirut airport?”
Matthew Miller, State Department: “We made clear we want those roads operational.”
Lee: “Did you say, ‘You shouldn’t have done that’?”
Miller: “I’m not going to speak to that strike…We’ve made clear we want those roads open.”
Lee: “How effective do you think that was? I just saw pictures of the road in flames.”
Miller: “It’s an ongoing situation.”
+++
+ Biden on Netanyahu, per Bob Woodward’s new book War: “That son of a bitch, Bibi Netanyahu, he’s a bad guy. He’s a bad fucking guy!” Why would you keep giving weapons to “a bad fucking guy!” Shouldn’t there be, I don’t know, like background checks before you give someone 2,000-lb bombs?
+ According to Woodward, Biden griped to his staff that Netanyahu was a serial liar. Netanyahu was obsessed with his own political survival and surrounded himself with acolytes who were as untrustworthy as the prime minister. Biden fumed that 18 of the 19 people around Netanyahu were “liars.”
+ “Bibi, you’ve got no strategy,” Woodward quotes Biden telling Netanyahu (shortly before signing off on a new weapons shipment).
+ Of course, Bibi has a strategy. It’s to kill as many Palestinians as possible, prevent a Palestinian state, annex as much of Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon as he can get away with, weaken Iran, and make the US a willing partner in the whole endeavor.
+++
+ In response to a video of IDF soldiers planting an Israeli flag in southern Lebanon, IDF spokesman Nadav Shoshani told reporters: “I’ve seen the pictures … It’s a problem we have sometimes that pictures and information go through social media. It’s part of the challenges of operating in 2024. This is just part of life.”
+ The Biden-Harris administration no longer supports an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon, says State Department spokesman Matthew Miller: “Yes, we do support Israel launching these incursions to degrade Hezbollah’s infrastructure.” Sooner or later, they always come around to the Israeli point of view…
+ After the ADL arbitrarily changed its definition of “antisemitism” to include actions that weren’t overtly antisemitic, such as “expressions of opposition to Zionist or support for resistance to Israel or Zionists,” it announced that antisemitic incidents in the US “surged to a record high.”
+ Two days after New York Jets head coach Robert Saleh, a Muslim-American of Lebanese descent, was photographed on the sidelines of a game in London wearing a Lebanese flag patch on his sweatshirt, he was fired by Jets owner Woody Johnson, Trump’s former ambassador to the UK…
+ Saleh was the first head NFL coach in over two decades to be escorted out of the building by team security after being fired. The Jets management didn’t even allow him to address his team.
+ Israeli military officials told three northern Gaza hospitals to evacuate ahead of intensifying strikes on the area: “A U.N. official described the situation in the north as ‘hell,’ with ‘at least 400,000 people’ trapped there.”
+ Yoav Gallant: “Our strike against Iran will be lethal, precise and surprising.” By “precise,” did Gallant mean they’d only destroy five surrounding apartment buildings instead of six, this time?
+ Joseph Massad: “Genocide is indeed a Western liberal value.”
+ Republican lawmakers are threatening to punish colleges and universities that permit pro-Palestinian protests on campus. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise: “Your accreditation is on the line. You’re not playing games anymore, or else you’re not a school anymore.”
“Orientalist historians and laypersons often describe Lebanon as an innately divided and sectarian society. Whatever the contradictions of pluralism in the region, our contemporary reality is shaped far more by aggressive Western colonial policy than our history.
“1) The British-French partition of the Mashriq along sectarian and geographical lines to suit colonial interests and not native ones.
2) France destroyed aspirations for a united Syria in 1920 with British connivance and created a Maronite dominated client state of Lebanon. It also divided Syria into Sunni, Druze, and Alawi regions.
3) The British backed colonial Zionism in the mandate of Palestine. Zionism, of course, was a European Jewish nationalist project to remake multireligious Palestine into a “Jewish state.” It is premised on perpetual ontological national opposition between “Arab” and “Jew.” In 1948, the Zionists destroyed ecumenical Palestine and drove out the indigenous population in the Nakba of 1948.
“We are still living the consequences of these European/Western decisions a century later.”
+ Remember those Hidden Pictures puzzles? Here’s one for you. Try to find the word “ceasefire” in this readout. I couldn’t find it, but it must be there because Biden and Harris assure us they’re working “tirelessly” to achieve one.
+ Ceasefires save the lives of hostages…
-Israeli hostages freed by the IDF: 8
-Israeli hostages killed by the IDF: >11
-Israeli hostages freed via ceasefire: 105
+ Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, during an interview with France’s Arte TV, I want a Jewish state that includes Jordan, Lebanon, and parts of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. According to our greatest sages, Jerusalem is destined to extend all the way to Damascus.
+++
+ Jason Hickle: “The Israeli assault on Lebanon must be understood as a US-backed operation of regime change and de-development. They are doing what they did to Iraq, Libya, etc, but using Israel to front the violence and war crimes in order to avoid popular political backlash. Note that the US has used Israel in this way – as a vehicle for US military policy – since at least the 1960s. Israel has run violent counter-insurgency operations and assassinations against liberation movements across the region (and beyond), allowing the US a measure of deniability.”
+ Israel is moving to confiscate the land of the UNRWA headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem and allocate it for settlements, which are illegal under international law.
+ Former US Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides: “This war won’t end because nobody is willing to blink. In the meantime, everyone is losing — hostages and their families, innocent Palestinians, Israelis displaced from northern Israel, Lebanese civilians. And it’s truly tragic.”
+ Since last October, the Biden-Harris administration has made at least 100 arms deals with Israel, the total amount of which was below the value that would require it to notify Congress of the details.
+ The Israeli military dropped US-made 2,000-pound bombs in “dangerous proximities” to nearly all hospitals in Gaza, according to a new study published in PLOS Global Health on Israel’s targeting of healthcare facilities in Gaza.
+ Sen. Chris Van Hollen on Biden and Israel: “The problem we have here is the pattern…The pattern is that Prime Minister Netanyahu ignores the United States and he gets rewarded for it.”
+ Daniel Levy: “The Biden White House has been busy building an escalatory trap for itself and burning the off-ramps.”
+ Fearing it would lose the vote because of its unconditional support for Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, the US dropped out of the UN General Assembly election for a seat on the Human Rights Council.
+++
The headline writer makes this abomination, where Israel’s blockade has put more than one million Palestinians at risk of starvation, sound like some strange natural phenomenon, as if flocks of food had inexplicably changed their normal migrational pattern to avoid Gaza…
+ An Israeli airstrike destroyed the last operating bakery in northern Gaza this week.
+ Samia Khader, a Palestinian mother in Gaza: “Since October 7, this is the 12th time that and my children, eight individuals, and I have been homeless and thrown into the streets and do not know where to go.”
+ According to the Times of Israel, Mossad Chief David “Dadi” Barnea told his counterparts in the Biden-Harris administration that Israel has a new condition for a ceasefire in Lebanon: the release of Israeli captives in Gaza.
+ The World Food Program warned that Israel’s military operations are now driving Lebanon toward famine: “More than 7 square miles of cropland has been burned…More than 45 square miles of some of the most productive farmland has been abandoned.”
+ UNICEF reports that in September, the amount of humanitarian supplies entering Gaza dropped to the lowest since at least March 2024 and warned that the situation is expected to worsen in October. A survey conducted by UNICEF in mid-September of over 2,500 recipients of humanitarian cash assistance shows that both the availability of goods and the dietary diversity of children aged 6-23 months and pregnant and breastfeeding women decreased across all areas of Gaza compared with July. More than 35 percent of children and 40 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding women had only eaten one food type the day before the survey and 30 percent in both groups had only consumed two food types. In addition, only five percent of pregnant and breastfeeding women had consumed any dairy products, and six percent of children had eaten some meat, with these percentages plummeting to one and three percent for pregnant women and children in northern Gaza.
+ A report by the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media found little progress has been made in the last year to stop the digital censorship of pro-Palestine voices on social media networks. Last December, Human Rights Watch issued a study documenting how Meta blocked or removed pro-Palestinian users’ content. Over the previous year, the Palestinian Observatory of Digital Rights Violations has recorded more than 1,350 instances of online censorship from major platforms, including Meta, TikTok, X, and YouTube.
+ On Friday, the Palestinian Red Crescent announced that they had run out of fuel in the northern Gaza Strip, bringing a halt to their rescue operations.
+++
+ This week, Bolivia joined South Africa in the genocide case against Israel at the World Court, aligning itself with Chile, Colombia, Libya, Mexico, the Maldives, Nicaragua, Palestine, Spain, and Turkey. Other nations are expected to follow suit.
+ On Friday, shortly after a meeting with the Hippie Pope at the Vatican, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called on all countries to impose an international embargo on arms sales to Israel.
+ The Middle East Institute’s Charles Lister: “Israel’s air campaign across Syria last week was the most aggressive seen in the 13yr crisis—with 17 rounds of strikes in 7 [out of] 14 of Syria’s provinces.” The airstrikes on Syria come at a time when hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees have been making a precarious return to Syria after fleeing Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon.
+ A new report by the UN Trade and Development organization shows that the economic impact of Israel’s war on Gaza has been more devastating than in previous military incursions (2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021), “marked by soaring inflation, rising unemployment in Gaza, and plummeting incomes that have left Palestinians in dire poverty. By early 2024, between 80 to 96 percent of Gaza’s agricultural assets were destroyed, crippling food production and exacerbating food insecurity. The private sector has also suffered, with 82 percent of businesses damaged or destroyed. Gaza’s GDP dropped by 81 percent in the last quarter of 2023, resulting in a 22 percent annual contraction, and by mid-2024, the economy had shrunk to less than one-sixth of its 2022 size. Two-thirds of pre-October jobs (201,000) were lost by January 2024, further worsening the economic and humanitarian crisis.”
+ Toshiyuki Mimaki after winning the Nobel Peace Prize: “I thought the prize would go to those working hard in Gaza…In Gaza, bleeding children are being held by their parents. It’s like Japan 80 years ago.”
+++
Khalidi speaking at a DSA event in NYC this September.
+ The last word this week goes to historian Rashid Khalidi, explaining why he is retiring from Columbia University: “I didn’t want to be a cog in that machine anymore. For some time now, I have been both disgusted and horrified by the way higher education has developed into a cash register – essentially a money-making, MBA, lawyer-run, hedge fund-cum-real estate operation, with a minor sideline in education, where money has determined everything, where respect for pedagogy is at a minimum. Research that brings in money, they respect. But they don’t care about teaching, even though it is the students with their tuition who provide a huge proportion of private universities’ budgets.”
Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.