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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

UNRWA Says There Is ‘Nowhere to Go’ as Israel Orders Evacuation of Gaza Safe Zones

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

Palestinians, carrying their belongings, migrate towards areas they believe to be safer after the Israeli military issued an evacuation order for the eastern areas of Deir al-Balah in central Gaza on August 16, 2024. (Photo: Hassan Jedi/Anadolu via Getty Images)

“People remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction on a staggering scale,” the U.N. agency wrote on social media.

Following a series of evacuation orders this week, Israeli forces issued another on Friday for areas in central and southern Gaza, including “safe zones,” leaving Palestinian families gripped with fear and with “nowhere to go,” according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

Israel’s Arabic spokesperson announced on social media that people in six neighborhood blocks in various towns, several of which were part of a proclaimed humanitarian zone, must “immediately move,” leading to a scramble of evacuations in those areas.

“Once again, fear spreads as families have nowhere to go,” UNRWA wrote on social media. “People remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction on a staggering scale.”

Friday’s evacuation orders were for areas in eastern Deir el-Balah, al-Qarara, al-Mawasi, al-Jalaa, Hamad City, and Nasser, Al Jazeerareported.

An Israeli military strike on al-Mawasi, previously a humanitarian zone though long the target of Israeli strikes, killed four Palestinians including three children, the news outlet reported on Friday.

The Israeli army said Hamas had used the areas to fire mortar and rocket attacks, and explained that it had issued warning flyers and text message alerts to reduce the impact on the Palestinian civilian population, according toReuters.

Bombings and evacuations have continued this week—at least 80 Palestinians were killed in a strike on a school-turned-shelter on Sunday—even as peace talks proceeded in Doha, Qatar. A two-day session of talks finished Friday, with the United States, Egypt, and Qatar saying progress was made and they hoped to seal a deal between Israel and Hamas next week. Hamas didn’t directly participate in this week’s talks because the militant Palestinian group said Israel had added new demands to a proposal it had already agreed to in principle.

The death toll of Palestinians during the 10-month war, based on figures from Gaza’s health ministry, reached 40,000 this week—what the U.N. called a “dark milestone.”

“Most of the dead are women and children,” U.N. rights chief Volker Türk said in a statement. “This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war.”

“On average, about 130 people have been killed every day in Gaza over the past 10 months,” he added, saying the “scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools, and places of worship [is] deeply shocking.”

Türk said that both Israel and armed Palestinian groups including Hamas had committed serious violations of international humanitarian law. The armed Palestinian groups killed more than 1,100 Israelis in a shocking and horrifying massacre in southern Israel on October 7 in which they also took some 250 hostages.

Israel’s sustained assault on Gaza over the last 10 months has not only killed a disproportionate number of children but also displaced most of those who’ve survived—and separated many from their families.

A report released Friday by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) documents the scale of the separation crisis and its psychological toll on unaccompanied children. UNICEF estimates that roughly 17,000 Gazan children are unaccompanied, but the IRC warns that the real figure may be much higher.

Unaccompanied youth are at risk of labor exploitation, starvation, and mental health problems that can plague them for the rest of their lives. Gazan children, shocked by the war, are “clinging to others during loud sounds, wetting the bed, having nightmares, and are wanting to sleep under the bed to feel secure,” the report says.

The Associated Pressreported Tuesday that Israeli strikes were leaving “children without parents and parents without children,” and has previously reported that the war has wiped out entire Palestinian extended families.

Israeli violence against Palestinians has not been restricted to Gaza. Israeli settlers attacked the West Bank town of Jit on Thursday night, setting fire to cars and houses, killing one Palestinian man and seriously injuring another. Jack Lew, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said he was “appalled” by the attack and the perpetrators should be held accountable, but Israeli human rights group B’Tselem responded on social media by saying that the Israeli state and its leadership should be held accountable.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Wednesday reported that it had recorded about 1,250 settler attacks on Palestinians since October 7. The settlements are illegal under international law, according to the International Court of Justice.

The push for a peace deal is aimed not just at ending the carnage in Gaza and defusing West Bank tensions but also preventing a wider war in the Middle East. Israel is bracing for retaliation from Iran and Hezbollah after it conducted assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Tehran and Beirut in late July.

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

Continue ReadingUNRWA Says There Is ‘Nowhere to Go’ as Israel Orders Evacuation of Gaza Safe Zones

40,000 dead in Gaza a ‘milestone the world must be ashamed of’: Irish Premier

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Original artticle republished from MIMO under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Ireland’s Prime Minister Simon Harris attends a press conference at Government Buildings in Dublin on April 12, 2024 [PAUL FAITH/AFP via Getty Images]

Ireland’s Prime Minister, on Thursday, said that 40,000 dead in Gaza is a “milestone the world must be ashamed of”, Anadolu Agency reports.

“International diplomacy has failed to protect innocent children, some only days old,” Simon Harris said on X.

He called on Israel to stop the bombings in Gaza and asked Hamas to release the hostages.

In addition to his call for a ceasefire in Gaza, Harris urged the EU to reassess its association agreement with Israel.

Flouting a UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire, Israel has faced international condemnation amid its continued brutal offensive on Gaza since a 7 October, 2023 attack by Hamas.

The Israeli onslaught has since killed over 40,000 people, mostly women and children, and injured over 92,400 others, according to local health authorities.

Over 10 months into the Israeli onslaught, vast tracts of Gaza lie in ruins amid a crippling blockade of food, clean water and medicine.

Israel is accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice, whose latest ruling ordered it to immediately halt its military operation in the southern city of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians had sought refuge from the war before it was invaded on 6 May.

READ: Pope Francis calls for ceasefire in Gaza amid ongoing Israeli onslaught

Original artticle republished from MIMO under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Continue Reading40,000 dead in Gaza a ‘milestone the world must be ashamed of’: Irish Premier

‘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

youtu.be

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

Ditching two-child benefit cap would cut deaths and A&E admissions, study says

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/07/ditching-two-child-benefit-cap-would-cut-deaths-and-ae-admissions-study-says

A poverty reduction of 35% on 2023 levels could avoid 293 infant deaths, 458 childhood admissions with nutritional anaemias and 32,650 childhood emergency admissions. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA

England research shows huge benefits with resulting savings for NHS and councils

Curbing child poverty by scrapping the two-child benefit cap would save hundreds of lives a year and avoid thousands of admissions to hospital, the largest study of its kind suggests.

Keir Starmer has faced repeated demands from within Labour ranks and opposition leaders to abolish the policy, which was announced in 2015 by George Osborne, then chancellor. Almost half of all children in some towns and cities now live below the breadline.

Now researchers from the universities of Glasgow, Liverpool and Newcastle have shown for the first time the extraordinary impact that reducing child poverty with measures such as ditching the two-child benefit cap could have in England.

Tackling it would substantially cut the number of infant deaths and children in care, as well as rates of childhood nutritional anaemia and emergency admissions, with the most deprived regions, especially in north-east England, likely to benefit the most, the projections indicate.

…

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/07/ditching-two-child-benefit-cap-would-cut-deaths-and-ae-admissions-study-says

Image of Keir Starmer and a poor child.
Zionist Keir ‘Kid Starver’ Starmer. Image thanks to The Skwawkbox.
Continue ReadingDitching two-child benefit cap would cut deaths and A&E admissions, study says