juicy

The protest group, called No Tech for Apartheid, now has more than 200 Google employees closely involved in organizing, according to members, who say there are hundreds more workers sympathetic to their goals. TIME spoke to five current and five former Google workers for this story, many of whom described a growing sense of anger at the possibility of Google aiding Israel in its war in Gaza. Two of the former Google workers said they had resigned from Google in the last month in protest against Project Nimbus.

However, truck owners involved in the food deliveries, mostly Egyptian hauliers, are reluctant to let their vehicles be used inside Gaza for fear of them bombed or ransacked by starving Gazans. There is also a shortage of willing drivers after repeated incidents of aid trucks coming under fire, of which the WCK bombing has been the worst but far from an isolated incident.

The planned coordination centre, whenever it is finished, may not be sufficient to address this fundamental obstacle to delivering food, as long as much of Gaza is a free fire zone, aid workers argue.

Turkey, a staunch critic of Israel’s military actions in the territory, announced that it was restricting exports of 54 types of products to Israel with immediate effect. They include aluminum, steel, construction products, jet fuel and chemical fertilizers. In response, Israel said it was preparing a ban on products from Turkey.

Nearly six in 10 buildings in the Strip have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks and its largest medical complex is an ‘empty shell,’ according to the WHO

...

The entire population of the Strip is suffering from malnutrition, one million people have lost their homes, and two out of three have been displaced, according to a report by the U.N. and the World Bank

Approval requires at least nine votes in favour, with no vetoes. The UNSC’s five permanent members – the US, Russia, China, France and Britain – hold vetoes.

But the US has indicated that its opposition to Palestinian member status in the UN, in the absence of a broader deal with Israel, stays intact.

“Our position has not changed,” Robert Wood, US deputy ambassador to the UN, said last week.

When in 2020 the ICC announced an investigation into potential war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Western invasion of Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the US government went so far as to impose political and economic sanctions on ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and her staff. Since then, and more than 20 years after the alleged crimes happened, the case is still stuck in the initial “investigation” phase.

The United States on Tuesday rejected charges that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in its war against Hamas. 

“We don’t have any evidence of genocide being created,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the Senate Armed Services Committee in a hearing.

A broad coalition of political forces, from Israel's far right to the Zionist left, have differing motivations for turning the war into the new normal.

...

In the typical style of Israel’s center-left governments between the 1950s and 1980s, especially that of the self-righteous Golda Meir, they say they are sorry for the Palestinian suffering, “but we have no choice.” They barely mention military and settler brutality and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem. And, of course, they strongly oppose the cases being brought against Israel in The Hague. The result is an updated version of “conflict management” — one that, despite their other differences, unites virtually all currents of Israeli politics. 

And make no mistake: Israel is getting away with it. All you have to do to understand that is to look at the aftermath of the WCK attack.

It has severely damaged the pipeline of aid into the region, and sent a stark message that nobody—not even the most benign, apolitical, high-profile organization—is off-limits. In exchange, Israel endured some light criticism from Biden, while receiving assurances that the flow of weapons will continue. Overall, Israel must count the attack as a huge success.

According to NBC News, another guest, Dr. Nahreen H. Ahmed, “was taken aback when she showed Biden prints of photos of malnourished children and women in Gaza—to which Biden responded that he had seen those images before. The problem, the doctor said, was that she had printed the photos from her own iPhone.” Biden was clearly making up the fiction of having seen the pictures before as a way not to have to look at them. As Ahmed rightly notes, Biden’s behavior “speaks volumes to the dismissive nature of the administration when it comes to strong-willed action towards a permanent cease-fire or, at a bare minimum, a red line on the invasion of Rafah.”

As flour ran out, they started grinding animal fodder and barley to make bread to eat along with the khubeza or with broth made from animal bones.

...

According to Yaseen, her granddaughter had gone from 40 kgs to 20 after months of eating only broth and what little bread could be made from the animal feed. The girl is now on a saline drip for her survival.