A Palestinian child wounded in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip is treated in a hospital in Deir al-Balah, September 23, 2024
MORE women and children have been killed by Israel in Gaza in the last 12 months than perished in the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past 20 years, damning new research published by Oxfam today shows.
The charity highlights conservative figures that estimate 6,000 women and 11,000 children in Gaza have been killed by the Israeli military in the past year.
But the numbers exclude those among the 20,000 who are unidentified or missing.
No other conflict has caused such a high number of child or women fatalities within a 12-month period, over the past two decades.
Indian doctors take part in an August 17, 2024 protest in Guwahati, Assam against the rape and murder of a trainee physician in a Kolkata hospital. (Photo: David Talukdar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“This is both about the Kolkata doctor who was brutalized and every woman who has faced sexual violence or harassment in the country,” said one protester.
Indian doctors and healthcare workers on Saturday ramped up a nationwide strike in response to the rape and murder of a trainee physician in a state-run hospital in Kolkata, shutting down all hospital services except for emergency care in a bid to force action to protect women from sexual assault.
The August 9th murder of the 31-year-old doctor at R.G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata sparked massive demonstrations that began Monday and continued throughout the week. On Wednesday, protesters at a “Reclaim the Night” march attacked the hospital where the woman was killed. Protests also took place in cities including Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Pune.
Saturday’s strike, which was organized by the Indian Medical Association, is set to last for 24 hours, during which all treatment in government hospitals and outpatient clinics has been canceled. The IMA condemned the “crime of barbaric scale and the lack of safe spaces for women” in the world’s most populous nation.
“This is both about the Kolkata doctor who was brutalized and every woman who has faced sexual violence or harassment in the country,” one Kolkata protester toldThe Guardian. Other demonstrators in the West Bengal capital shouted slogans including, “We want justice,” “Enough is enough,” and “Hands that heal shouldn’t bleed.”
Hospitals and clinics across India turned away patients except for emergency cases as medical professionals went on strike for 24 hours in protest the rape and murder of a trainee doctor in Kolkata https://t.co/33Ax1GiA93pic.twitter.com/8EQJ2Is7Ye
“We don’t feel safe,” Antara Das, a medical student who joined the Kolkata protest, told Al Jazeera. “If this happened inside a hospital that is second home to us, where are we safe now?”
Indian physicians called for the implementation of the Central Protection Act, a proposed law meant to shield healthcare workers from violence.
“We just want to be safe while we are doing our duty,” Sapna Rani, a 27-year-old female doctor in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera.
One man has been arrested in connection with the doctor’s rape and murder. According to the Indian Express, the suspect’s wife filed multiple complaints with police accusing him of assault, including while she was pregnant. The suspect is reportedly a “civic volunteer” who worked closely with police.
In stark contrast to the nationwide protests, local police and the principal at the victim’s medical college, Dr. Sandip Ghosh, claimed the murdered doctor, who was sleeping in the hospital’s seminar hall when she was attacked, killed herself.
Ghosh then claimed that the victim—who was found bleeding from her eyes, mouth, and genitals, and who had extensive traumatic injuries to her body—was still to blame for her own death.
“It was irresponsible of the girl to go to the seminar hall alone at night,” he said, according to The Wire.
Ghosh was interrogated Saturday by India’s Central Bureau of Investigation. Earlier in the week, he tendered his resignation from R.G. Kar. Instead of accepting his resignation, the government transferred him to serve as principal of Calcutta National Medical College, where students staged a protest against the move.
India Today reported Saturday that the West Bengal government has canceled Ghosh’s transfer.
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.
Republican vice presidential nominee and U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) speaks at a campaign rally at Radford University on July 22, 2024 in Radford, Virginia. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Vance “meant no disrespect to cats, but he did mean to demean women and still holds the view in 2024 that they should be punished for not having children.”
After days of condemnation from critics including actress Jennifer Aniston and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Sen. JD Vance was given the opportunity on Thursday to clarify his remarks from 2021 in which he said the Democratic Party was run by “childless cat ladies.”
Instead, the Ohio Republican and running mate of former President Donald Trump assured SiriusXM host Megyn Kelly on “The Megyn Kelly Show” that while he has “nothing against cats,” he meant what he said in terms of “the substance” of his argument.
Vance made it clear, said Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff for Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), “that he meant no disrespect to cats, but he did mean to demean women and still holds the view in 2024 that they should be punished for not having children.”
The comments in question were made by Vance to then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson when Vance was running for the Senate.
Calling out Buttigieg—who, the secretary disclosed this week, was struggling at the time to adopt a child with his husband—and Vice President Kamala Harris, a stepmother of two and the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Vance said people without biological children “don’t really have a direct stake in” the future of the country and therefore shouldn’t hold higher office.
In separate remarks that same year, Vance said parents should “have more power” at the voting booth and that “if you don’t have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
He also specifically categorized people who don’t have children as “bad” in an interview in 2021, saying the government should “reward the things that we think are good” and “punish the things that we think are bad,” with people taxed at a lower rate if they have children.
While a spokesperson for Vance told ABC News that the senator’s taxation proposal was “basically no different” than the child tax credit supported by the Democratic Party, Democrats who have pushed for the credit have heralded its proven ability to slash child poverty rates and help families afford groceries, childcare, and other essentials, rather than viewing the tax savings as a way to reward people for procreating.
In his interview with Kelly on Thursday, Vance attempted to pivot away from his own comments, saying his point was to criticize “the Democratic Party for becoming anti-family and anti-child” and claiming without evidence that the Harris campaign had “come out against the child tax credit”—a signature policy of the Biden-Harris administration.
“I’m proud to stand for parents and I hope that parents out there recognize that I’m a guy who wants to fight for you,” said Vance. “The Democrats, in the past five, 10 years, Megyn, they have become anti-family. It’s built into their policy, it’s built into the way they talk about parents and children. I don’t think we should back down from it, I think we should be honest about the problem.”
Vance and Kelly went on to lament the anxiety “hardcore environmentalists” and progressive lawmakers such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have expressed about the damage fossil fuel extraction is doing the planet, accusing them of pushing people to forgo having families—but said nothing about Republican policies that have made child-rearing less accessible.
In recent years, the entire Republican caucus in Congress was joined by conservative then-Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia in blocking the extension of the enhanced child tax credit, which had been credited with cutting the national child poverty rate in half. Republicans also allowed a pandemic-era universal school meal program to expire, while several Democratic-led states have passed state-level programs to ensure all children can have meals at school, regardless of their family’s income.
Under Republican abortion bans, numerous stories have cropped up of pregnant people who have been forced to carry pregnancies to term despite finding out that their fetuses had fatal abnormalities and would die soon after birth—as have stories of children who were forced to give birth or had to cross state lines in order to get abortion care.
As with his position that nonparents should be “punished” for not having children, “who else does ‘pro-child/family’ Vance think should ‘face consequences and reality’ by way of curtailing choices, rights, and freedoms?” asked writer Alheli Picazo. “Women and girls who become pregnant through rape/incest.”
University of North Carolina law professor Carissa Byrne Hessick said that one could test “empirically” Vance’s claim that Democratic policies are anti-family.
“But I haven’t heard the GOP talk much about things that would help my family and my kids,” she said, “like reducing childcare and tuition costs.”
Pelosi questioned, highlighting Trump’s history of bigoted remarks targeting women, the LGBTQ+ community, and people of colour.
The former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has slammed former prime ministers Liz Truss and Boris Johnson for their endorsements of Donald Trump, in a stinging rebuke.
Pelosi made the comments during an interview with BBC One’s Laura Kuenssberg, where she took apart the arguments of the likes of Truss and Johnson who claim that the world would be safer under a Trump presidency.
Earlier this month, Truss claimed that the world would be safer under a Trump presidency. She also told the BBC: “I do agree that under Donald Trump when he was president of the United States, the world was safer.
