Contemporary genocide and Fascism. It should not be possible, there should be no chance and yet we’ve had a year of it.
continuing
How are they not Fascists?
We have to oppose these Fascist scum and governments that are supporting genocide. We have to be Internationalist in our approach.
We have to oppose our Genocide-supporting governments. Genocide is not acceptable and Starmer supporting and facilitating genocide is not acceptable. He should be arrested as a war criminal
A broken stethoscope and surgical glove are seen after Israeli warplanes bombed a building in the Bachoura area of Beirut, Lebanon on October 3, 2024. (Photo: Murat Sengul/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“I’m afraid first about my safety and about my family’s safety because there’s no safe place in Lebanon now,” said one physician.
The head of the United Nations World Health Organization said Thursday that Israeli forces killed 28 healthcare workers in Lebanon over the previous 24 hours, and that 73 medical personnel are among the nearly 2,000 Lebanese killed during Israel’s bombing and invasion of its northern neighbor.
“In southern Lebanon, 37 health facilities have been closed, while in Beirut, three hospitals have been forced to fully evacuate staff and patients, and another two were partially evacuated,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference in Geneva. “And yet healthcare continues to come under attack. In Lebanon alone, 28 health workers have been killed in the last 24 hours.”
Tedros said the WHO “calls on urgent facilitation of flights to deliver health supplies to Lebanon,” adding, “Lives depend on it!”
The health system’s capacity in #Lebanon is deteriorating. @WHO’s medical supplies cannot be delivered due to the almost complete closure of Beirut’s airport.
WHO calls on urgent facilitation of flights to deliver health supplies to Lebanon. Lives depend on it! pic.twitter.com/zyCdS1bVZF
Lebanese Health Minister Firas Al-Abiad said separately Thursday that more than 40 paramedics and firefighters have been killed by Israeli forces over the previous three days.
Dr. Abdinasir Abubakar, the acting WHO representative in Lebanon, said that “most of those healthcare workers killed in the last 24 hours, most of them—actually, all of them—were on duty.”
“Some of them were in the ambulances, some of them were in the health facilities,” Abubakar added. “They were on duty trying to help civilians who have been wounded in the conflict.”
Dr. Fathalla Fattouh, the head cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon at Rafik Hariri University Hospital (RHUH) in Jnah, just outside Beirut, described the chaos he witnessed firsthand, including “a surge of nearly identical injuries—amputations, eye trauma, and shattered hip and femur bones—straining the hospital’s capacity to a near-breaking point.”
“We were forced to make difficult decisions,” he added. “I believe that we did our best relying on available capacities, but with the escalation of events we need to plan for the worst.”
Sara, a surgeon at the hospital, said that “there are only two hospitals in Lebanon prepared to treat burn patients, and once they were at capacity, we were left with nowhere to send the patients we received.”
“It was a feeling of helplessness that we had never experienced before,” she added.
Some doctors admitted fearing for their lives.
“It’s hard to work in fear,” Dr. Mohammad Taoube, who heads the emergency room at an undisclosed hospital in southern Lebanon, told Sky News on Wednesday. “I’m afraid first about my safety and about my family’s safety because there’s no safe place in Lebanon now.”
According to figures provided by the WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, Israeli forces have killed 1,974 people in Lebanon—including at least 127 children—while wounding 9,384 others in recent weeks.
— WHO Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean (@WHOEMRO) October 4, 2024
At least one American has been killed by Israeli bombing of Lebanon this week. Hajj Kamel Ahmad Jawad, 56, of Dearborn, Michigan was killed Tuesday while in Nabatieth in southern Lebanon caring for his sick mother and volunteering to help elderly, disabled, and injured patients at a local hospital.
The Nabatieth area has come under heavy Israeli bombardment. Local journalists said the city’s main hospital “came under direct Israeli fire” on Friday and that two nurses were killed.
Lebanese officials said Friday that more than 1.2 million people have been forcibly displaced amid Israel’s recent bombing and invasion of their country. The Israeli campaign comes amid attacks by the political and paramilitary group Hezbollah, whose rockets and other projectiles have killed or wounded scores of Israelis and forced tens of thousands from their homes.
Residents of southern Lebanon described the terror of coming under Israeli bombardment and having to flee for their lives. One woman, Fatima, and her 14-year-old daughter Zeinab said they were in their home preparing for a school exam when the shelling started.
“My mother told us to pack our things quickly, and we left in a rush,” Zeinab told the U.N. Children’s Fund on Thursday. “My siblings were crying. The journey was terrifying.”
“The shelling was all around us, and the sound of explosions echoed everywhere,” she said while crying. “We miss home dearly and yearn to return.”
Tedros noted that since last October, when Hezbollah began launching rockets at Israel in solidarity with Gaza after Hamas-led militants attacked Israel, over 1 million Lebanese have been displaced, with many seeking refuge in neighboring Syria.
He also said that “since the 7th of October last year, more than 1,500 people have been killed in Israel, almost 42,000 in Gaza, and more than 700 in the West Bank.”
“In addition,” Tedros added, “more than 10,000 people are missing in Gaza, and 1.9 million people are displaced, while 101 hostages taken from Israel remain in Gaza.”
Hundreds of Palestinians working in the health sector have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces, who have deliberately targeted medical workers. Israeli troops have also allegedly tortured doctors and other medical workers after kidnapping them from the coastal enclave.
Tedros on Thursday stressed the need for “deescalation of the conflict; for healthcare to be protected and not attacked; for access routes to be secured and supplies delivered; and for a cease-fire, a political solution, and peace.”
The UK government has announced it will invest almost £22 billion in carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects over the next 25 years. The technology works by capturing CO₂ as it is being emitted by a power plant or another polluter, then storing it underground.
This sounds great in theory. However, it seems Labour has been swayed by the fossil fuel lobby, which has pushed CCS for years. This announcement represents a massive bet on a still unproven technology, and will lock the UK into fossil fuel dependence for decades to come. The Climate Change Act mandates the UK should achieve net zero emissions by 2050, yet this will be impossible if carbon capture leads to the UK building new gas power stations instead of wind and solar farms.
I was one of several leading climate scientists who recently signed a letter to the energy security and net zero secretary, Ed Miliband, in which we pointed out the many issues with the current plans.
Even if the technology worked perfectly, it still locks the UK into a reliance on natural gas (which is basically methane, a potent greenhouse gas) for generations to come. This will result in the UK being reliant on imported natural gas past 2050, which has significant upstream emissions from methane leaks, transport and processing.
That then exposes the UK to the continued volatility of the global energy markets, which in part caused the country’s cost of living crisis. (Renewables don’t have this problem, since the wind and sun don’t need to be imported from overseas.)
Overpromising, underdelivering
In the letter, we pointed out that carbon capture projects have a very poor track record of overpromising and underdelivering. Most current CCS capacity is within natural gas processing facilities, where CO₂ must be separated out to produce marketable products. Almost 80% of the CO₂ captured is reinjected into oil fields to facilitate oil extraction.
The track record of adding carbon capture to power plants is much worse, with the vast majority of projects abandoned. Just two commercial-scale coal-fired power plants are operating with CCS: Boundary Dam in Canada and Petra Nova in the US. Both have experienced consistent underperformance, recurring technical issues and ballooning costs.
In any case, Britain just closed down its last coal power plant. And it’s actually harder to capture CO₂ from gas power plants than from coal, since CO₂ is found in lower concentrations in the emitted gases.
Britain’s last coal power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar, has been shut down. Chris Dukes / shutterstock
One argument for CCS is that it can be used in the production of so-called “blue hydrogen”, which is derived from natural gas and can in theory be used to heat homes or power cars. Yet many projects doing this around the world have beenabandoned.
A wide range of uses have been promoted for hydrogen, but not all are practical or competitive. The claim that hydrogen should have a significant role in heating buildings has been comprehensively disproved, while direct electrification is increasingly emerging as a better solution for industrial process heating.
Better ways to spend £22 billion
That £22 billion earmarked for CCS projects should instead be invested in proven technologies such as renewable energy, and on upgrading the UK national grid.
We do not deny that both carbon capture and “green” hydrogen (derived from water not methane) may be needed for specific uses in a zero-carbon economy. Carbon capture and storage should be used on existing fossil fuel infrastructure to reduce its emissions as it is phased out, while green hydrogen will be an important way of storing and transporting green energy around the world. It will also be essential to reduce the emissions from steel production.
As the world leaders agreed and declared at the most recent UN climate summit, COP28 in Dubai, we must transition away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly and equitable manner in order to achieve net zero by 2050. This will not happen if the UK and other countries lock themselves into a fossil fuel-based pathway with inevitable upstream emissions, displacing genuinely zero or low-carbon electricity generation.
