Keeponstalin

At least nine people have been killed and 2, 750 wounded in Lebanon on Tuesday after pagers used by Hezbollah - and medics- exploded in unison, in an attack that the movement and Lebanese government blamed on Israel.

Among the dead was a 10-year-old girl, who was killed in eastern Lebanon's Bekaa Valley when the pager of her father, who is allegedly a Hezbollah member, exploded. Many have posted a photo of the girl on their X accounts and Instagram stories to pay their condolences.

Several social media users drew attention to the reckless and casual nature of the attack which targeted many people including civilians. A human rights lawyer on X cited the International Humanitarian Law Databases of the ICRC, saying that “there was no way to know if they would be in shopping markets, homes, or streets with busy traffic”, pointing to the indiscriminate nature of the attack.

Anthropologist and researcher Philip Proudfoot cited a section on indiscriminate attacks of the ICRC Geneva Conventions of 1949 and said that Israel is committing a war crime due to the indiscriminate nature of this attack with possible collateral damage. Many other users cited the same section of the convention, drawing attention to the fact that people had no means of knowing who was holding the explosive devices when they went off.

In July the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a historic advisory opinion concluding that Israel’s decades long occupation and annexation of Palestinian territory is unlawful because it violates some of the most fundamental tenets of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and denies Palestinians their human rights.

The ICJ opinion also concludes that all states have an “obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” and “not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Meanwhile, the virtually unconditional transfer and sale of weapons, parts, and ammunition by governments where there is clear risk of use in harming civilians and violating international law has continued.

As the UN General Assembly prepares to vote on a resolution this week that would seek to bring the occupation to an end, the undersigned organizations call on all governments, including the UN Security Council and its members, to adhere to the ICJ’s advisory opinion, including through the halting the transfer and sale of weapons, parts and ammunition.

Humanitarian, development and human rights organizations, many of us with decades of experience working throughout the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, delivering lifesaving assistance and other services, have witnessed first-hand the humanitarian consequences of Israel’s occupation, and its devastating impact on the Palestinian population, including the well-being of children.

This includes but is not limited to:

In a long statement released Friday, Sanders said that the Biden administration is on the wrong path if it truly wishes for “full accountability” for Eygi’s killing in the occupied West Bank, as President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have called for. He called on the Department of Justice and the FBI to open their own independent investigations into the attack and the many others in which Israel has killed American citizens.

“Let’s be clear: there will be no accountability if the United States defers to the extremist Israeli government to investigate its own actions,” Sanders said.

The senator directly refuted Biden and Harris’s false claims that Eygi’s killing was an accident, and pointed out numerous incidents in the past two years in which Israeli forces have killed Americans with “no accountability” for their deaths.

Indeed, as many advocates for Palestinian rights have pointed out in recent days, Israeli forces have killed at least five Americans in the occupied West Bank since Biden took office, including 17-year-olds Tawfiq Ajaq and Mohammad Khdour; Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh; retiree Omar Assad; and now, Eygi. Sanders brought up Israel’s targeting of American journalist Dylan Collins, who was shot at by Israeli tanks while reporting in Lebanon in October.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets in recent days to demand that their government secure a deal that would release Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Nearly two-thirds of Israelis support such a deal — if not to put an end to the genocide, to at least put an end to the war for the sake of their own population. Why won’t their government listen?

The distance between U.S. rhetoric around Israel’s supposed democracy and the actual actions of the Israeli state became clearer than ever on July 18, when the Israeli government passed a resolution rejecting any creation of a Palestinian state — a blow to decades-old U.S. policy and growing international consensus around the necessity for Palestinian self-determination. The resolution, which rejects the establishment of a state even as part of a negotiated settlement with Israel, said “the establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel would pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and destabilize the region.”

Ceasefire talks have stalled within the Knesset, the Israeli legislative body, for almost three months since President Biden proposed a deal, in large part due to the chokehold that far right ministers within the Israeli Parliament have on the coalition government. In order to understand the current moment, it is essential to understand how the Israeli Knesset works. The heart of the Israeli political system lies in the 120-member Knesset, which functions as both the Israeli legislative body and house of representatives. The Knesset also elects the president, a largely symbolic role as most of the executive power exists under the prime minister.

Even Palestinian citizens of Israel who reside within the 1948 borders ultimately lack full citizenship rights compared to Jewish Israelis. In 2018, the Knesset passed the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, altering the constitutional framework of the state and establishing the ethnic-religious identity of the state as exclusively Jewish. The Nation-State law enshrined Jewish supremacy in the land. It codified what had been state policy of discrimination against Palestinians into a law with constitutional status, and was another nail in the coffin for the illusion of Israeli democracy. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, says the Nation-State law “denies the collective rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel.” Palestinian legal scholar Mazen Masri argued that “this act demonstrates that Israel is closer to apartheid than democracy.”

The Judicial Reform protests highlight the inherent inconsistency of the premise of Israeli democracy, a contradiction that is now more visible to the world than it was before October 7. Palestinians’ demand for freedom — in Gaza, the West Bank and the 1948 borders of the state — is being heard and acknowledged on a scale unlike ever before. As Israel faces increasing international pressure and isolation, Israelis will have to make a choice between continually escalating fascism and a transformation of the fundamental nature of the state that guarantees freedom for Palestinians, and safety, dignity, and a thriving future for everyone between the river and the sea.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, the airstrikes killed at least 19 people and wounded dozens more. It was Israel’s fifth attack on the area since designating it a place of refuge, and Tuesday’s bombings brought the total death toll from these attacks to more than 150.

The Israeli military claimed that it had “struck significant Hamas terrorists who were operating within a command and control centre embedded inside the humanitarian area.” Hamas denied the allegation.

The Israeli army began directing Palestinians to Al-Mawasi in the first months of its bombardment of the Strip. Home to only 6,000 people before the war, it quickly swelled into a mass displacement camp accommodating hundreds of thousands in makeshift tents. Israel’s invasion of Rafah in May triggered a further influx of refugees to the coastal area.

Israel’s previous bombardment of Al-Mawasi, on July 13, was even deadlier: that attack killed 90 Palestinians, with Israel claiming it had targeted Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif. The extent of the destruction on Tuesday suggests that, like in that attack, the Israeli military dropped 2,000-pound bombs on the densely-packed tent camp.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) are calling on the Biden administration to conduct an independent probe into Israel’s killing of American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, as officials have been relying on Israel’s own flawed investigation into her death.

In a letter addressed to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the two lawmakers call for an “immediate, transparent, credible, and thorough independent U.S. investigation” into Eygi’s killing. They raise alarm that U.S. officials have allowed Israel to kill U.S. citizens in the past with impunity.

“We fear that if this pattern of impunity does not end with Ms. Eygi, it will only continue to escalate. It is imperative that the United States take concrete and decisive action to better protect American citizens,” the lawmakers said. They then asked the administration to indicate whether they will pursue an investigation and to release the knowledge they have of her killing within the next two weeks.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said that Eygi’s killing, as well as Israel’s bombings of its designated “safe zone” in Gaza this week, are the latest evidence that the U.S. must stop sending weapons to Israel.

On June 11, a week after a police training facility in Richmond, California, broke ground, organizers from the Stop Cop City Bay Area Coalition marched to the Overaa Construction headquarters in protest. Citing concerns over rising police militarization and repression in the predominantly Black and Latino area, the protesters — joined by local residents — called on Overaa workers to boycott the $30 million construction deal.

“By furthering the militarizing and surveillance of our city — and coordinating law enforcement resources across the region, including ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] — they’re actually making our cities into Cop Cities,” said Refilwe Gqajela, a community organizer with the Anti Police-Terror Project in California’s Bay Area.

The influx of these facilities parallels the emergence of the defund the police movement, which — following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 — saw thousands of people across the country mobilize to decry police violence against Black and brown communities. Within the last five years, there has been a quiet rollout of over 80 multi-million dollar Cop City-like facilities across the country.

Dozens of Atlanta organizers have been jailed and charged with domestic terrorism and racketeering. According to Franklin, this a coordinated effort to criminalize activism and scare organizers. He said a large part of the facility will be built by the end of the year, even though a poll from 2023 indicated that 59 percent of residents don’t support it.

Over the last year, repressive policing has extended beyond Stop Cop City organizers to encompass Gaza solidarity student encampments as well. Tamera Hutcherson, an organizer with Stop Cop City Dallas, said the city council held secretive meetings and used vague language around “public safety” to get voters to support a proposition that gave $50 million to a police training facility. Soon after, Texas State Troopers raided a peaceful Gaza solidarity student encampment.

An investigation conducted by The Washington Post has raised new doubts about Israel’s claim that US-Turkish activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was killed “during a violent riot” in Beita, Nablus, in the occupied West Bank.

According to the report, Eygi was shot more than a half-hour after the height of violence between Israeli soldiers and protestors - and 20 minutes after protesters had moved further down the road. The report also confirmed that Eygi was more than 200 yards away from Israeli soldiers when she was shot in the head.

The report provides more detail on how Israeli soldiers respond to protests over Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, which violates international law.

Eygi's family has demanded the US call for an independent investigation into her killing. In a statement, they said they were “deeply offended by the suggestion that her killing by a trained sniper was in any way unintentional”.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri has said that the spread of disease and Israel’s “starvation campaign” in Gaza is “killing more people than bombs and bullets”.

He added that the damage inflicted by famine “is going to be carried by Palestinians for several generations in the future”.

His comments follow his new report to the UN General Assembly last week, in which he detailed how Israel has used starvation in Gaza “with the intent to destroy in whole or in part the Palestinian people”.

It explained that Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s food system, including the poisoning and destruction of agricultural land, and the destruction of ports and fishing vessels served to make the entire population dependent on humanitarian aid.

Israeli diplomats are being instructed to lobby members of the US Congress to pressure South Africa into dropping its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Pretoria is calling on the world court to label Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide against Palestinians.

"We are asking you to immediately work with lawmakers on the federal and state level, with governors and Jewish organizations to put pressure on South Africa to change its policy towards Israel and to make clear that continuing their current actions like supporting Hamas and pushing anti-Israeli moves in international courts will come with a heavy price," read a cable from Israel's foreign ministry to its embassy and all consulates in the US.

According to Axios, the Israeli diplomats were also told to push for legislation against South Africa at the state and federal levels in the US, with the foreign ministry stating that "even if they won't materialize, presenting them and talking about them will be important" in influencing the African nation's policy.

"I see promise in the connections between the 2020 protests against anti-Blackness and the 2023-2024 protests against Palestinian genocide,” Palestinian American scholar Zahi Zalloua told me this summer. “I’m very invested in the reignited Black-Palestinian solidarity movement; it points to the vibrancy of an anti-racist, anti-colonial Left.”

To grapple with the horror of this ongoing genocide, I conducted this exclusive interview for Truthout with Zalloua, who is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a professor of Indigeneity, ace, and ethnicity studies at Whitman College, as well as editor of The Comparatist. In this interview, Zalloua argues with clarity and conceptual rigor that, as he says, “Arguing for Palestinian life is not antisemitic.” We also discuss the precarity of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, the importance of pessimism and the theme of solidarity.

As Israel perpetrates a genocide in the Gaza Strip, key players in the labor movement have joined forces to strategize how unions might apply leverage to help bring about an end to the assault. Over the last year, recognizing the widespread opposition to the war among their membership and the potential for dissent inherent in cross-union solidarity, representatives of over 200 U.S. unions — from many dozens of participating locals, to the leaderships of multiple leading national unions — banded together to form The National Labor Network for Ceasefire (NLNC).

“The workers [of Gaza] need us to push back through our unions,” Dimondstein said. “These are bombs often funded by the United States of America. We don’t want our tax dollars being used … to bomb the hell out of innocent men, women and children. And about half of the known deaths in Gaza have been children. This has got to stop. The idea of the NLNC is to bring more organized strength to the issue, to educate on the issue, and to pressure the Biden administration to use their leverage to force a ceasefire and [deliver] massive humanitarian aid.”

The NLNC promises to be a continuing force in the days to come. As Dimondstein reflected, “We’ve probably had some influence on the rest of the labor movement, even if it’s [just] in words. I don’t know if a majority of the unions now have ceasefire positions, but many of them do, including the AFL-CIO. So, I think by getting organized as the National Labor Network, we’re able to put much more of a spotlight on this issue and bring some strength to the issue within the organized labor movement.” By following the early example of the UFCW Local 3000, and at the urging of its early founding members like Dimondstein, the NLNC has at least helped labor advance past a certain political hesitancy.