War between Hamas and Israel

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https://www.msn.com/en-ie/entertainment ... 82bb&ei=30

Offered without comment as I'm not really qualified

[N.E. Brigand]

ABC: "President Biden to announce U.S. military mission to build a pier off Gaza coast to deliver aid." He'll announce this in the State of the Union address.

Apparently the U.S., partnering with other nations, will spend several weeks building something like this:



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Meanwhile in the Red Sea yesterday, a Houthi attack killed three people aboard a Liberian-owned, Barbados-flagged cargo ship. All three sailors killed were Philippine nationals. I saw some attempts to justify this attack yesterday by reference to one of the ship's owners being Jewish and thus complicit in Israel's military operation, but 1. his company had actually sold the ship recently and 2. ew, that's grossly Antisemitic.

[N.E. Brigand]

Maybe not the best metaphor, but:

[N.E. Brigand]

I have to question how dire the hunger situation in Gaza really is if Palenstinian activists are mocking the MREs that the United States has been airdropping. As was recently mentioned in another thread, MREs may not be the most palatable meals, but they are indeed what U.S. servicemembers survive on in the field.

[N.E. Brigand]

From The Guardian: "Jared Kushner says Gaza's 'waterfront property could be very valuable'"; he said this during an interview with a Harvard professor eleven days ago, adding "from Israel's perspective I would do my best to move the people out" (he suggested moving them to the Negev desert in Israel) "and then clean it up." Would the current residents be allowed to return to Gaza after that work is done? He says, "I don't think that Israel has stated that they don't want the people to move back there afterwards." To me, that phrasing implies that Kushner has talked to Israeli officials about the possibility of this plan coming to fruition, but when prodded, he said he was just speculating. But he also said, "I am not sure there is much left of Gaza at this point. If you think about even the construct, Gaza was not really a historical precedent [sic]. It was the result of a war. You had tribes in different places and then Gaza became a thing. Egypt used to run it and then over time different governments came in." And he apparently dismissed the idea of Palestinian statehood as something that "would essentially be rewarding an act of terror".

[Voronwë the Faithful]

But by all means vote against Biden in order to help the people of Gaza.

[N.E. Brigand]

"Russia, China veto US resolution calling for immediate cease-fire in Gaza."

[Frelga]

I have to question how dire the hunger situation in Gaza really is if Palenstinian activists are mocking the MREs that the United States has been airdropping. As was recently mentioned in another thread, MREs may not be the most palatable meals, but they are indeed what U.S. servicemembers survive on in the field.

I suspect that these "Palestinian activists" are nowhere near Gaza.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The UN Security Council has "demanded" an immediate ceasefire and release of all hostages, with the U.S. abstaining from the resolution but resisting Israeli demands to veto the resolution.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/un ... 5000&ei=10

[N.E. Brigand]

New York Times: "Israeli Soldier’s Video Undercuts Medic’s Account of Sexual Assault. Kibbutz residents concluded that two sisters killed on Oct. 7 were not victims of sexual violence." Notably, the medic's apparently inaccurate account was previously reported by the Times itself. Mind you, these teenage girls are still dead at the hands of Hamas. That hasn't changed. But there was no need to pile onto the horrors.

[N.E. Brigand]

There's something to be said for Josh Barro's summation of this story in The Atlantic about pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters at Stanford University -- which opens with a provocative story in which a computer science major calls for President Biden to be executed for having supposedly ordering a genocide in Gaza (that student also would prefer that the U.S. be run by Hamas than by the current administration): students aren't being assigned enough homework and have too much free time on their hands.

Edited to note that it appears that particular student is "a religiously conservative Muslim and not a movement leftist."

Edited to add that he's now defending his position by comparing President Biden to Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden.

[N.E. Brigand]

New York Times: "Israeli Soldier’s Video Undercuts Medic’s Account of Sexual Assault. Kibbutz residents concluded that two sisters killed on Oct. 7 were not victims of sexual violence." Notably, the medic's apparently inaccurate account was previously reported by the Times itself. Mind you, these teenage girls are still dead at the hands of Hamas. That hasn't changed. But there was no need to pile onto the horrors.

To be sure, the United Nations issued a statement a few weeks ago finding that some of Hamas' victims had been raped, and now there's a new piece in the New York Times in which Amit Soussana, who was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7th and subsequently released, says she was sexually assaulted while a prisoner of the terrorist group in Gaza.

[N.E. Brigand]

Congressman Tim Walberg, Republican of Michigan, this week said that the U.S. should drop nuclear bombs on Gaza.

Later he claimed that when he said this, he was merely referring to nuclear weapons in the metaphorical sense.

[N.E. Brigand]

The Times of Israel is reporting that the large anti-government protest in Israel shown below includes families of hostages held by Hamas:



And NBC had a report yesterday that may be important: "Israeli court halts subsidies for ultra-Orthodox who don't serve in army. The ruling could imperil the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he wages war with Hamas in Gaza and clashes with key ally the United States."

[N.E. Brigand]

Don't know if this belongs here or in the world news thread, but it's being reported by several outlets that Israel launched an air strike against the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria that killed Mohammed Reza Zahedi, who is "the top commander in the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) for Lebanon and Syria" as well as five to six others IRGC members. This is apparently comparable to the U.S. attack that killed Qasem Soleimani in Iraq in January 2020.

[RoseMorninStar]

Seven from World Central Kitchen killed.
With famine looming, Israeli strike kills 7 aid workers and halts food charity's operations in Gaza

[N.E. Brigand]

Seven from World Central Kitchen killed.
With famine looming, Israeli strike kills 7 aid workers and halts food charity's operations in Gaza

That's just so awful. Here's Israel's top military official responding to what happened:

[RoseMorninStar]

This (the killing of these aid workers) and that military aid has not been cut will be a huge problem for the Biden administration.

[N.E. Brigand]

This appears to be a good summary of a tense meeting between members of the U.S. and Israeli governments this week regarding Israel's intent to invade the populous southern city of Rafah (moreso now because people have fled there from other parts of Gaza), which would first require the evacuation of one million civilians, and regarding the likelihood that the situation in Gaza would soon be officially declared a famine.

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I'm seeing arguments that Israel intentionally killed the World Central Kitchen workers in an effort to force relief agencies to leave Gaza for Israel to ravage. I think that's no more true than claims that the U.S. intentionally bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 or that Iran intentionally shot down Ukrainian flight 752 in 2020. Israel forces deliberately (but apparently without authorization) attacked the WCK convoy (three times!) because they thought there was a Hamas fighter embedded within it. That's sufficiently horrible. But Israel does not want the end of relief. As previously noted, when we learned a couple months ago that UNRWA was employing people who were also working for Hamas, and lots of countries pulled their support for UNRWA (those countries have been reinstating their support over the past week, by the way), one country that didn't argue for pulling funding was Israel itself, because even Netanyahu's government, awful as it is, knows what would happen if that agency were gone.

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Benny Gantz, the former deputy prime minister and alternate prime minister who is serving on the wartime unity cabinet but leads the political opposition to Netanyahu, today called for early elections this September. (I believe they're currently not scheduled until 2026.) This is the first time he's done so since Hamas's attack.

[N.E. Brigand]

Some analysis here argues that the way Israeli forces are operating in Gaza -- as regards consideration given to the civilian population -- is more like how Russia operates in Ukraine than how NATO nations have operated in similar war zones. That report on the meeting of U.S. and Israeli officials I cited above mentioned that the U.S. was urging Israel to take a different and more precise approach in Rafah.