People march through Manchester demanding Britain impose an arms embargo on Israel, August 31, 2024Photo: John Nicholson
THOUSANDS of protesters across Britain again marched for Palestine on Saturday as Israel intensified its war on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
In major towns and cities calls were made to step up the worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel following news that international coffee shop chain Starbucks saw its market share fall by billions of dollars as customers rebel against the company’s involvement with Israel.
Protests also took place in Israel demanding a ceasefire after Hamas said that six Israeli hostages found dead in Gaza had been killed in Israeli bombing and shelling. Israel said the hostages had been murdered by Hamas as its troops approached.
Calling for more action against organisations investing in firms involved in Israel, Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) said its research has revealed that local government pension scheme funds in Britain collectively invest over £4.4 billion in companies complicit in Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.
The PSC said: “Councils must take immediate action to end ties with companies that are complicit in abuses of Palestinian rights, including by divesting pension funds they administer from companies enabling Israel’s genocide. The deferred wages of local government workers must not be used to fund injustice.”
A photo shows a World Food Program vehicle damaged by Israeli gunfire. (Photo: World Food Program)
“This is totally unacceptable and the latest in a series of unnecessary security incidents that have endangered the lives of WFP’s team in Gaza.”
The World Food Program said Wednesday that it was forced to suspend the movement of its employees in Gaza after the Israeli military fired on one of the United Nations agency’s teams as its clearly marked vehicle advanced toward an Israeli checkpoint in the Palestinian enclave.
The agency said in a statement that the WFP team was returning from a mission with two armored vehicles “after escorting a convoy of trucks carrying humanitarian cargo routed to Gaza’s central area.”
“Despite being clearly marked and receiving multiple clearances by Israeli authorities to approach, the vehicle was directly struck by gunfire as it was moving towards an Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) checkpoint,” WFP said. “It sustained at least ten bullets: five on the driver’s side, two on the passenger side, and three on other parts of the vehicle. None of the employees onboard were physically harmed.”
While the WFP’s statement doesn’t explicitly attribute the gunfire to Israeli forces, U.N. spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told reporters Wednesday that the food agency’s vehicle was “struck 10 times by IDF gunfire, including with bullets targeting front windows.”
Cindy McCain, WFP’s executive director, said the attack was “totally unacceptable and the latest in a series of unnecessary security incidents that have endangered the lives of WFP’s team in Gaza.”
“As last night’s events show, the current deconfliction system is failing and this cannot go on any longer,” said McCain. “I call on the Israeli authorities and all parties to the conflict to act immediately to ensure the safety and security of all aid workers in Gaza.”
The Israeli military’s latest attack on aid workers in Gaza came as famine continued to spread across the strip, which Israel has strangled with a blockade that has restricted the flow of food and other necessities.
Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, characterized the WFP attack as part of “Israel’s starvation strategy.” Israeli forces have repeatedly targeted humanitarian workers in Gaza, making the enclave the most dangerous place in the world for aid agency employees.
Chef José Andrés, the founder of a nonprofit whose Gaza team came under deadly attack by Israeli forces earlier this year, expressed solidarity with the WFP in a social media post late Wednesday.
No NGO employees or civilians or press corps can be never ever be targeted by anyone while delivering humanitarian aid! My support to @WFP @WFPChief @UN for their efforts and proud that we’ve work side by side in many countries! https://t.co/jl2hzplsyB
WFP did not say how long its pause on employee movement would stay in place, but any disruption to the agency’s humanitarian operations could be disastrous for starving Palestinians.
In its statement Wednesday, the U.N. food agency said that Israel’s “frequent and ongoing evacuation orders continue to uproot both families and food relief operations intended to support them.”
“Last week, WFP lost access to its third and last operational warehouse in Gaza’s middle area, while five of WFP’s operated community kitchens had to be evacuated,” the agency said. “This week, on Sunday 25 August, the evacuation orders impacted the main WFP operating hub in Deir al-Balah, forcing our team to relocate for the third time since the war started.”
Zionist Keir Starmer is quoted “I support Zionism without qualification.” He’s asked whether that means that he supports Zionism under all circumstances, whatever Zionists do.
Mass-murdering cnuts. If they collaborate and facilitate genocide aren’t they just as bad as the soldiers actually doing it? Would it happen without them facilitating it? If they’re collaborating with Fascists, aren’t they Fascists themselves?
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.”
DNC Press Conference: Uncommitted delegates discuss why they are urging Vice President Harris to unite our party, which has been divided by Biden’s horrific Gaza policies, and stop sending American bombs to Netanyahu’s far-right Israeli government. https://t.co/mVtbjUfliz
— Uncommitted National Movement 🌺 (@uncommittedmvmt) August 19, 2024
“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.
The Democratic National Convention held its first-ever panel on Palestinian rights Monday, including harrowing testimony from Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, who volunteered at a hospital in Gaza earlier this year. "We have witnessed civilian massacre after civilian massacre," she said. pic.twitter.com/BZd05zzLVH
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 republished from MEMO under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) announced on Monday that 540,000 Yemeni children under the age of five are severely emaciated. The WHO made its announcement in a post on X to mark World Humanitarian Day.
“Yemen faces a double burden of disease and conflict, whereby 17.8 million need health assistance, including 540,000 children under 5 with severe wasting,” said the UN-affiliated organisation. “With ongoing conflict and a collapsing healthcare system, it is crucial that we #ActForHumanity.”
The health sector in Yemen faces difficult challenges, amid great suffering experienced by most citizens who are in dire need of assistance due to the repercussions of the war that has been ongoing for a decade.
