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‘History Is Watching’: Gaza Doctors Urge Harris to Back Israel Arms Embargo at Democratic Convention

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Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

An injured Palestinian baby is treated in al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital after an Israeli attack on Bureij refugee camp in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on August 7, 2024.
 (Photo: Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“We are here to deliver a policy that saves and improves lives,” Uncommitted National Movement co-founder Abbas Alawieh said in opening remarks at a press conference on the sidelines of the DNC.

As humanitarians opposed to the U.S. government’s support for Israel’s assault on Gaza continued to protest during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Tuesday, American doctors who recently volunteered in the besieged enclave implored the party’s presidential nominee Kamala Harris—based on the carnage and heartache they have witnessed—to embrace an arms embargo on Israel and an immediate cease-fire.

during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the Uncommitted National Movement held a Tuesday press conference at which American doctors who volunteered in Gaza implored Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, to embrace an arms embargo on Israel and an immediate cease-fire.

“We are here to deliver a policy that saves and improves lives,” Uncommitted National Movement co-founder Abbas Alawieh said in opening remarks at Tuesday’s press conference. “We are here because we want to win a better world.”

Alawieh slammed the “hypocritical action” of Biden administration officials who, while “saying they want a cease-fire,” continue “to send more and more weapons” to far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “murderous government,” which “is using those weapons to kill civilians” and is “preventing any hope for all captives, Israeli and Palestinian, to be reunited with their families.”

Such support, Alawieh added, is also “preventing any hope of a departure from the horrors that we are seeing our siblings in Gaza experience with more than 16,000 children… being killed using U.S. weapons.”

“The Uncommitted National Movement mobilized Democratic voters—more than 740,000 nationally—specifically around the idea that our candidate, regardless of who they may be, needs an updated approach to their Gaza policy,” Alawieh continued. “Specifically, our stance is that our government should embrace an arms embargo. Stop sending weapons that are being used to kill civilians.”

“Vice President Harris is engaging with us on this issue,” Alawieh added. “Her team is engaging with us on this issue. We do view that as a positive step in the right direction. We want to be very clear that what we need to see urgently is for the bombs to stop. Stop sending bombs if you want us to believe that you want a cease-fire.”

There are 30 Uncommitted delegates attending the DNC after being elected in Democratic primaries in states like Minnesota, where the movement received 18.9% of the vote, and the key swing state of Wisconsin, where it won 13.3%. As polling reveals that Democratic and Independent voters in crucial swing states would be more likely to vote for Harris if she backs an arms embargo on Israel, her campaign has made some moves to accommodate Uncommitted voices, including providing space at the DNC.

Dr. Tammy Abughnaim, a Chicago-based emergency physician, said she asked Palestinians what she should tell people in the United States about Gaza, where she saw the aftermath of “massacre after massacre” and “suffering on an entirely unprecedented scale.”

“Tell the world what you saw,” she said they told her. “We cannot afford another day of this.”

On Monday, the DNC held its first-ever panel on Palestinian rights, which featured testimony from some of those who spoke at Tuesday’s press conference, including Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, an American pediatric intensive care physician who volunteered for two weeks at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

On Tuesday, Haj-Hassan said that the American doctors who worked in Gaza “cannot unsee what we witnessed, it gives us nightmares.”

“I can personally testify that I have never seen anything so horrific, so egregious, so inhumane,” she stated. “We decided to come here and bear moral witness with the unfortunate recognition that the only way to protect civilian life is through putting pressure on the U.S. government to stop militarily supporting Israel in its campaign.”

Haj-Hassan continued:

For the past 10 months, we have witnessed civilian casualty after civilian massacre after civilian massacre. The bread massacre. The Nuseirat massacre. The multiple school massacres, where internally displaced people, who have been forcibly transferred, a war crime in and of itself… finally sought shelter only to be massacred. Entire families exterminated. Humanitarian workers and healthcare workers and journalists killed in record numbers. Children with their extremities amputated traumatically in record numbers…

Over 17,000 children have lost one or both parents in Gaza since October. We have treated children who are the only surviving members of their entire family who were killed in the same bombing. I have personally held the hands of children taking their last final gasps with no family alive… unable to comfort them during their final agonizing breaths… This phenomenon of children having their entire families killed and arriving to the emergency department is so frequent it actually has an acronym… wounded child, no surviving family, given the acronym WCNSF.

Children who are fortunate enough to survive their injuries are discharged into a Russian roulette of a hundred different ways that they could be killed… another bombing, starvation, dehydration, disease. Now we have alarming reports of an outbreak of polio. Polio is something that we were able to eradicate on the majority of this planet decades ago.

“And yet we continue to fund this,” Haj-Hassan added. “History is watching us. The world is watching us. I cannot make sense of this. I suspect you cannot too. And I hope that the Democratic Party recognizes the irony and the hypocrisy of what we continue to fund and chooses to finally stand by the values of human rights and justice that we claim to stand by.”

Harris has expressed sympathy for Palestinians suffering what she called a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza. However, like Biden, she’s also proclaimed her “unwavering” support for Israel. When asked earlier this month if Harris would support a suspension in weapons transfers, one of her national security advisers said that “she will always ensure Israel is able to defend itself against Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups” and “does not support an arms embargo on Israel.”

Human rights advocates fear that if elected to a second term, former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, would be even more supportive of Israel’s obliteration of Gaza than the Biden-Harris administration.

According to Palestinian and international officials, at least 40,173 Palestinians have been killed—most of them women and children—and nearly 93,000 others have been wounded during Israel’s 319-day assault and siege on Gaza. Gaza officials say that at least 10,000 other Palestinians are missing, believed to be dead and buried under the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out homes and other buildings.

Almost the entire Gaza population of 2.3 million has been forcibly displaced. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans are starving; dozens have died from malnutrition, dehydration, and lack of medicines and healthcare amid a crippling Israeli siege that has been cited as evidence during Israel’s genocide trial at the International Court of Justice. The blockade has also exacerbated the spread of contagious diseases including measles, hepatitis, and polio.

Original article by BRETT WILKINS republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue Reading‘History Is Watching’: Gaza Doctors Urge Harris to Back Israel Arms Embargo at Democratic Convention

‘Heinous’: Children Among 100 Killed by Israel Bombing of Gaza School Just Hours After US Weapons Approval

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Original article by JON QUEALLY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Relatives of Palestinians killed by the Israeli attack on Nuseirat refugee camp mourn as the bodies are brought to al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on August 10, 2024. (Photo by Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“It is hard to comprehend how the Biden administration can justify rewarding Israel with new weapons, despite Israel’s persistent defiance of every single plea the Biden administration has made urging a modicum of restraint.”

Just hours after the Biden administration Friday announced approval of $3.5 billion in military funds for Israel and shipments for new weaponry, an Israeli bombing of a school-turned-shelter in Gaza has killed 100 people or more, including scores of civilian men, women, and children in what was described as a “bloody massacre” that struck during morning prayers, leaving body parts scattered “in pieces” and healthcare workers overwhelmed with the dead and wounded.

The Palestinian Authority’s Fatah government in the Occupied West Bank released a statement Saturday describing the attack on the al-Tabin school in Gaza City as a “heinous bloody massacre” that represents the “peak of terrorism and criminality” by the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Committing these massacres confirms beyond a shadow of a doubt its efforts to exterminate our people through the policy of cumulative killing and mass massacres that make living consciences tremble,” said the PA.

“If the ICC doesn’t take action now, then when?”

Footage taken by volunteers working alongside Palestinian medical units in Gaza City showed wounded small children and adults being taken to local hospitals as well as scenes of carnage from the scene of the bombing [Warning: Images are graphic]. Gaza journalist Motasem A. Dalloul also posted his reporting from the scene, including footage of the carnage [Also graphic].

Al-Jazeera spoke with witnesses at the scene of the massacre, one of whom said many of the dead—which included women, children, and old people who had been praying and others sleeping when the missiles struck—were collected afterward “in pieces”:

– YouTube

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Tamer Kirolos, a regional director for Save the Children, called Israel’s attack on al-Tabin the “deadliest attack on a school since last October.”

“It is devastating to see the toll this has taken, including so many children and people at the school for dawn prayers,” Kirolos said. “Civilians, children, must be protected. An immediate definitive ceasefire is the only foreseeable way that will happen.”

Just hours before the bombing, the U.S. State Department announcement that a $3.5 billion tranche of funds—part of a larger $14.1 billion in overseas military aid approved by Congress earlier this year—would be released to the Israeli government for weapons procurement.

As CNN reported, while some of those weapons purchases made possible by the fund may take years, the “supplemental funding also allocated billions of dollars’ worth of equipment that the Pentagon can draw from its own stockpiles to send directly to Israel on a much faster timeline.”

Unverified reporting indicated that at least one of the missiles dropped on the al-Tabin school overnight may have been a U.S.-made MK-84 bomb weighing 2,000 pounds.

On Friday night, after the State Department announcement but before news of the latest bombing in Gaza broke, Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the human rights and advocacy group Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), was among those confounded by the U.S. government’s continued determination to arm the Israelis in the face of the human suffering in Gaza and the repeated massacre of civilians, day after day and month after month.

“It is mind-boggling that despite the overwhelming evidence of the IDF’s unprecedented crimes in Gaza that has shocked the conscience of the entire world, the Biden administration is greenlighting the transfer of additional lethal weapons to Israel,” said Whitson in a Friday night statement following news that the State Dept. had greenlit the release of taxpayer funds for a new round of weapons destined for Israel.

“It is hard to comprehend how the Biden administration can justify rewarding Israel with new weapons, despite Israel’s persistent defiance of every single plea the Biden administration has made urging a modicum of restraint,” she said, “and despite the very apparent fact that such sales violate black letter U.S. laws prohibiting weapons to gross abusers like Israel.”

Making a similar argument in a Saturday morning post on X, Sami Abou Shehadeh, leader of Israel’s leftist Balad Party, said that while President Joe Biden “could have stopped the genocide” by using his leverage of military aid to force the Israelis in a different direction, instead “he just released $3.5 billion for more weapons to kill civilians.”

Shehadeh warned that without any internal opposition “to the genocide” by Israel’s Zionist political parties, Netanyahu’s policies would continue, even as the region inches toward further destabilization over the crisis in Gaza that has also spread to Lebanon and beyond. Calling for the International Criminal Court to intervene, he asked, “If the ICC doesn’t take action now, then when?”

Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece and co-founder of Progressive International, asked the same on Saturday.

“Israel has now killed nearly 40,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and wounded well over 92,000 others,” said Varoufakis. “Thousands more lie, uncounted, under the debris. Some 10,000 Palestinians have been abducted by Israel’s occupying forces. Question: Where is the ICC indictment?”

“It is truly horrific,” Raed Jarrar, DAWN’s policy director told Common Dreams via email Saturday. “Last night’s massacre was another example of how Blinken and Biden have blood on their hands.”

Referencing a separate decision by the State Department to suspend an investigation into documented abuse violations by the “notorious” Netzah Yehuda Unit within the IDF, Jarrar said the “decisions of sending weapons to Israel and not sanctioning Israeli human rights abusers are not just corrupt policy decisions, they are criminal acts.”

Update: This article has been updated from its original to include additional comment from DAWN.

Original article by JON QUEALLY republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Continue Reading‘Heinous’: Children Among 100 Killed by Israel Bombing of Gaza School Just Hours After US Weapons Approval

US and UK launch 3 new airstrikes on Yemen’s Hodeidah Airport

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Original article by Aseel Saleh republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

UK RAF aircraft. Photo: UK Ministry of Defense

The Ansar Allah-led Yemeni Armed Forces announced on Thursday July 18, that Hodeidah International Airport in western Yemen was hit by three airstrikes launched from American and British jet fighters. No further details were mentioned in the announcement which was broadcasted on Ansar Allah’s Almasirah news website.

Hodeidah airport was subjected to previous airstrikes by the United States and the United Kingdom on Friday, July 12. It has also been a vital target for the US and the UK for several months due to its location in Hodeidah Governorate, which overlooks the Red Sea. The airstrikes are believed to be launched to pressure Ansar Allah to stop its activities in the regional waters in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

The Yemeni Armed Forces have begun their activity in the Red Sea since the Israeli aggression began on Gaza in the aftermath of October 7 events, by launching scores of attacks on commercial ships connected with Israel in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The airport was not the only location in Yemen to be targeted by US airstrikes during the course of the current week. “The US launched in its aggression on our country 13 raids this week in Hodeidah and Hajjah, but with no effect, neither in preventing our operations nor in limiting them,” Sayyed Abdulmalik al-Houthi, the leader of Yemen’s Ansar Allah, said during a televised speech on Thursday July 18.” We seek to increase operations targeting ships in Indian Ocean, Mediterranean Sea,” added Sayyed Abdulmalik.

The Yemeni Armed Forces’s attacks in the Red Sea have had a great impact on one of the most important maritime trade routes in the World, suspending the transit of vessels belonging to some of the biggest oil and shipping companies worldwide. Vessels had to sail additional thousands of miles around the continent of Africa instead of going through the Suez Canal due to the blockade of the Red Sea caused by Ansar Allah’s attacks.

According to the Arab Center Washington DC research organization, Ansar Allah’s attacks represent a new phenomenon in geo-economic conflict being launched by a non-state actor using asymmetric warfare in fighting conventional armed forces, and imposing targeted economic sanctions by attacking international shipment selectively. Shipping companies based in pro-Israel countries, and ships carrying cargos connected to these countries, have lost access to the Red Sea shortcut, namely the Suez Canal, between Asia and Europe and therefore endured additional cost and extended sail duration. Consequently cargo fees have witnessed an increase, including on routes that do not pass through the Red Sea.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) mentioned in a report published in March, 2024 that attacks on vessels in the Red Sea reduced traffic in the Suez Canal, through which about 15% of global maritime trade volume normally passes. The attacks obliged shipping companies to divert their ships around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa as an alternative route, increasing delivery times by an average of 10 days.

On the morning of Friday June 19, Ansar Allah claimed responsibility for a drone attack which struck Tel Aviv and killed one person.

Original article by Aseel Saleh republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

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Peace activists arrested while delivering letter to Lakenheath airbase

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/peace-activists-arrested-while-delivering-letter-lakenheath-airbase

Photo: Zoe Broughton

TWO peace activists were arrested at the weekend while attempting to deliver a letter to a Suffolk air base stating the opposition to an anticipated return of US nuclear weapons there.

Some 110 nuclear bombs were stored at the Lakenheath base until they were removed in 2008 after strong and constant protests.

But earlier this year, documents surfaced from the United States Defence Department detailing a contract to build defensive shelters for Lakenheath’s “upcoming nuclear mission.”

On Saturday, five women walked through the gates of Lakenheath, intending to deliver a letter to the base commanders, asking them to stop the nukes from returning.

Police stopped the women and two sat down peacefully, vowing to stay until a base commander could meet with them. Both were arrested and taken to Bury St Edmunds police station.

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/peace-activists-arrested-while-delivering-letter-lakenheath-airbase

Continue ReadingPeace activists arrested while delivering letter to Lakenheath airbase

Anti-nuclear weapons activists to camp outside RAF base for ten days

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/anti-nuclear-weapons-activists-camp-outside-raf-base-ten-days

An F-15E Strike Eagle of the United States Air Force’s (USAF) 48th Fighter Wing, stationed at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk, September 16, 2020

PEACE activists will camp outside RAF Lakenheath for 10 days as the Suffolk air base prepares for an “upcoming nuclear mission.”

Up to 50 members of Lakenheath Alliance for Peace set out on a three-day walk from Norwich to the United States Air Force base on Saturday and will set up camp there tomorrow until July 25 in their protest against nuclear weapons.

CND general secretary Kate Hudson said: “CND is a proud part of the Lakenheath Alliance for Peace and calls on everyone across Britain to get involved with this campaign.

“The return of US nuclear weapons to Lakenheath greatly increases the nuclear risk already faced by this country as it puts the whole of Britain on the nuclear front line.

“We call on the Labour government to explicitly refuse any US request to station their weapons of mass destruction here.”

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https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/anti-nuclear-weapons-activists-camp-outside-raf-base-ten-days

Continue ReadingAnti-nuclear weapons activists to camp outside RAF base for ten days