Gaza Is Unlike Anything I’ve Ever Seen, Says NGO Head/Ex-CNN Journalist Arwa Damon - YouTube
Award-winning journalist Arwa Damon has just returned from a humanitarian trip to Gaza in her capacity as the founder of INARA, the International Network for Aid Relief and Assistance, a nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children. Damon describes the overwhelming need for aid under Israel’s siege of the territory. "
Who has the right to self-defence, the occupier or the occupied? – Arena
To say Israel has the right to defend itself is like saying a chronic abuser has the right to defend himself because his victim hit him. Israel is not an innocent party under attack and defending itself, as it is being portrayed by much of the international media. It is a settler-colonial apartheid regime, established on the ruins of Palestine at the expense of the Palestinian people in 1948.
Colonialists, occupiers and apartheid regimes do not have the right to defend their occupations and apartheid systems. It’s the occupied who have the right under international law to defend themselves and to liberate their countries. Most of the Jewish settlers are armed and members of Israel’s reserve army; Israel knew the risk it was taking by perpetrating the Catastrophe (al-Nakba) of 1948, occupying someone else’s country and denying Palestinians their rights because they are not Jews, in what was established as a Jewish state.
Impact of climate change on marine life shown to be much bigger than previously known
Alter and her colleagues calculated the consequences of three projected scenarios of carbon dioxide increase, and thus of ocean warming and ocean acidification: extreme increase, moderate increase at the current speed and—due to possible measures—mitigated increase.
Alter says, “Our new approach suggests that if ocean warming and acidification continue on the current trajectory, up to 100% of the biological processes in fish and invertebrate species will be affected, while previous research methods found changes in only about 20 and 25% of all processes, respectively.”
Record-breaking rain in recent months has drastically reduced the amount of food produced in the UK, farming groups have said.
Livestock and crops have been affected as fields have been submerged since last autumn.
It has been an exceptionally wet 18 months. According to the Met Office, 1,695.9mm of rain fell from October 2022 to March 2024, the highest amount for any 18-month period in England in recorded history. The Met Office started collecting data in 1836.
The UK will be reliant on imports for wheat in the coming year and potentially beyond because of the drastic reduction in yields.
In a country beset by sky-high rates of femicide, a mutual support movement has helped women seize back public spaces – and make a living
The ‘human shields’ lie has been conclusively, irrefutably debunked - Pearls and Irritations
One aspect of the recent revelations about the IDF’s Lavender AI system that’s not getting enough consideration is the fact that it is completely devastating to the narrative that Israel has been killing so many civilians because Hamas uses “human shields”.
… a major report from +972 revealed that Israel has been using an AI system called Lavender to compile kill lists of suspected members of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad which have been carried out with hardly any human verification. One automated system, psychopathically named “Where’s Daddy?”, tracks suspects to their homes so that they can be killed along with their entire families. The IDF has been knowingly killing 15 to 20 civilians at a time to kill one junior Hamas operative, and up to 100 civilians at a time to take out a senior official.
The Israeli publications +972 and Local Call have exposed how the Israeli military used an artificial intelligence program known as Lavender to develop a “kill list” in Gaza that includes as many as 37,000 Palestinians who were targeted for assassination with little human oversight. A second AI system known as “Where’s Daddy?” tracked Palestinians on the kill list and was purposely designed to help Israel target individuals when they were at home at night with their families
Recommended podcast episode: Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: “Decolonization Is Not a Discourse, It Is a Material Process”. An interview with:
Leila Shomali is a Palestinian PhD candidate in International Law at Maynooth University Ireland and a member of the Good Shepherd Collective.
Lara Kilani is a Palestinian-American researcher, PhD student, and is also a member of the Good Shepherd Collective.
A focal point of the interview was the recent publication of their article “Anti-Zionism As Decolonisation” . Other topics covered in the discussion: settler colonialism, the limits of human rights discourse and international law for Palestinians.
Check out the work of the Good Shepherd Collective.
More grassroots anti-war activism in the US:
Walkouts, Blockades, and Student Occupations in Solidarity with Palestine Continue | It’s Going Down
Resistance to the US backed Israeli war and genocide against Palestinians living in the occupied territories remains ongoing, with a chorus of mass protests, sabotage, occupations at US universities, and blockades of weapons suppliers continuing into the spring, as a call grows “to disrupt and blockade economic logistical hubs and the flow of capital” on April 15th.
A carefully presented and well researched video by Randahl Fink: Genocide in Gaza — is Israel guilty? - YouTube
#Gaza #Israel #Genocide
UN Human Rights Council calls for halt to weapons shipments to Israel : NPR
GENEVA — The U.N.’s top human rights body called on countries to stop selling or shipping weapons to Israel in a resolution passed Friday that aims to help prevent rights violations against Palestinians amid Israel’s blistering military campaign in Gaza.
The sweeping measure takes aim at an array of Israeli actions such as impeding access to water and limiting shipments of humanitarian aid into Palestinian areas. It also calls on U.N.-backed independent investigators to report on shipments of weapons, munitions and “dual use” items — that have both civilian and military applications — that could be used by Israel against Palestinians.
Evidence that grassroots, progressive activism in the US is still alive and capable of changing world events. While it’s still early days it seems that the Biden administration may finally be shifting its position on Israel. The killing of the 7 aid workers of the World Central Kitchen seems to have been the tipping point but for weeks efforts by on-the-ground activists in Michigan and most recently Wisconsin have rung Biden’s alarm bells.
Of course, this is only a sign of an early shift directly related to getting food and aid into Gaza. Will enough aid flow in fast enough to blunt the worst case scenario of famine from unfolding? We will soon find out.
Will Israel still launch a large scale offensive into Rafah? Will there be deeper, long term shifts in military aid to Israel or is this just a temporary shift? What comes next? What’s the goal? Is it a ceasefire or something more lasting?
The Perserverance of Dignity – Abolition Media
The Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico have been working for 30 years to create and expand real, local democracy.
Young Liria nodded excitedly with a smile that lit up her face like the Mayan sun. Her small frame rocked back and forth with emotion. She had been at the 30th anniversary celebration of the EZLN in the Caracol of Dolores Hidalgo, and still vibrated with the energy of it. Along with thousands of her peers, she witnessed as people from around the globe streamed into the remote canyons of Chiapas to celebrate, and to listen to the Zapatista youth as they enacted their stories before an international audience. She witnessed for the first time the global reach of their movement that her grandparents and parents had built, and that she, should she choose to, would be charged with carrying on.
‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza
The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties
Schools close and crops wither as ‘historic’ heatwave hits south-east Asia | The Guardian
Thousands of schools in the Philippines have stopped in-person classes due to unbearable heat. In Indonesia, prolonged dry weather has caused rice prices to soar. In Thailand’s waters, temperatures are so high that scientists fear coral could be destroyed.
A “historic heatwave” is being experienced across south-east Asia, according to Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist and weather historian.
Biden is not passively funding the slaughter of Palestinians, he’s working hard to do so, bypassing Congress at least twice. And his supposed “outrage” at Israel’s genocide is not convincing. With each week Biden seems determined to hand the election over to Trump.
The activist, progressive, empathetic left of the base has been protesting loudly while the wealthier, white, comfortable middle class portion of the Democratic base generally seems more self-concerned. My outsider perspective is that while this wealthy Democratic base has generally dominated the party it may be that Biden’s active support of war crimes and genocide might prove a tipping point.
Almost 50,000 Wisconsin voters just told Biden to stop the Gaza war. Will he listen? | The Guardian
The protest vote in Wisconsin has made clear that this campaign is bigger than Biden. The many people calling for a ceasefire aren’t merely swing voters or bitter castoffs who have long left the party. Many involved in the uncommitted campaigns have, until now, been committed Democrats. But they fear a critical mass of voters may permanently leave the Democratic party if Biden and other leaders don’t implement a ceasefire in Gaza, and quickly. For some voters, even that may be too little, too late.
In this Majority Report clip about Israel’s recent slaughter of WCK aid workers in Gaza Emma Vigeland refers to the IDF as the Israeli Genocide Force.
Calling things out for what they are.
See also:
- US billionaires: Oligarchs
- The Republican Party: The Fascist Party
War Crimes: “Sniper shots to the brain. They were seven or eight years old.”
Dr Fozia Alvi was making her rounds of the intensive care unit on her final day at the battered European public hospital in southern Gaza when she stopped next to two young arrivals with facial injuries and breathing tubes in their windpipes…
Children account for more than one in three of the more than 32,000 people killed in Israel’s months-long assault on Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry.