Keeponstalin

Notably absent from Walz’s speech was any real substance on foreign policy — including discussion of the genocide happening against Palestinians in Gaza, which uncommitted delegates and their allies have been trying to discuss for days at DNC. Indeed, most of the night, if not the week, has ignored the issue, and where it has been mentioned, Israel’s role in the genocide has been glossed over.

Uncommitted delegates in support of Palestinian liberation and an end to the genocide have requested that the DNC allow a Palestinian speaker take the podium in the United Center, to discuss a permanent ceasefire and an embargo for weapons from the U.S. to Israel, which the U.S. is legally obligated to do.

“We are learning that Israeli hostages’ families will be speaking from the main stage. We strongly support that decision and also strongly hope that we will also be hearing from Palestinians who’ve endured the largest civilian death toll since 1948,” read a statement from the Uncommitted National Movement account on X. "Excluding a Palestinian speaker betrays the party’s commitment in our platform to valuing Israelis and Palestinian lives equally. Vice President Harris must unite this party with a vision that fights for everyone, including Palestinians."

A group of uncommitted delegates, joined by interfaith leaders and their allies, staged a sit-in just outside the convention hall on Wednesday night, saying they wouldn’t remove themselves from that spot until their demands for a Palestinian speaker were met.

On Wednesday, August 21, the latest Israeli evacuation warnings fell out of the sky over the most crowded part of Gaza, Deir al-Balah in the center of the besieged enclave. The leaflets and phone calls from the Israeli army referenced a map informing people which numbered block would be targeted for an imminent invasion. These are the tools the Israeli army uses to control where people in Gaza move, forcing them to evacuate from one area to another over and over again.

In a press release last Sunday, the Deir al-Balah municipality said that the waves of evacuation reaching Deir al-Balah were housing an unprecedented number of displaced people cramped into a tiny zone. According to the statement, Deir al-Balah’s total area is 42 square kilometers, and almost a million displaced people are distributed across 200 displacement centers

On Tuesday, the Israeli army bombed the local market in Deir al-Balah, killing 9 civilians. Several hours later, the army bombarded a school in Gaza City sheltering 700 people, killing 10 people, according to the Palestinian Civil Defense.

During the writing of this report on Wednesday, the Israeli army bombed another school in the Jalaa’ area in Gaza City, killing three people. The army warned people via phone calls to evacuate the area only 5 minutes before the bombardment occurred. Survivors of the bombing at the targeted shelter, the Salah al-Din School, relayed their testimonies to Mondoweiss.

You can find testimonies from the survivors of the Deir al-Balah and the Jalaa' bombings in the article

There are enough chlorine reserves to last just one month, said the UN aid coordination office, OCHA, while double the amount of purifying solution needs to be used to be effective now.

Children are particularly at risk of waterborne diseases and the danger is set to rise during the winter months if Gazans continue to be forced to live in overcrowded shelters lacking adequate water and sanitation facilities, OCHA noted.

The UN agency added that acute shortages of soap for handwashing, laundry powder/liquid and shampoo, and a lack of disinfectants, continue to allow diseases to spread easily.

The UN agency noted that a day earlier, a strike landed at a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City. Children were reportedly killed and injured, and some burned to death, said UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini.

Seven in 10 UNRWA schools have been hit and over 500 people have been reported killed, with over people 1,700 injured despite being protected under international humanitarian law.

In its latest humanitarian update, OCHA warned that repeated displacement, including among children diagnosed with malnutrition, has made it difficult for partners to monitor their progress and for families to carry sufficient supplies to prevent and treat the condition.

Between 3 and 16 August, 26,825 children under the age of five and 12,728 pregnant and breastfeeding women received a 30-day allocation of special nutritional supplements in Khan Younis, Deir Al-Balah and Rafah, from the UN World Food Programme (WFP).

Democratic National Convention officials rejected a request to allow Palestinian Americans to speak from the conference’s main stage. In protest of that decision, a group of “Uncommitted” delegates critical of the party’s stance on the war, staged a sit-in in front of the United Center Wednesday evening as party leaders continued speaking inside

DNC organizers did not comment on the record on their decision to exclude Palestinian American speakers from the main stage at the four-day convention.

Earlier this month, they had suggested as a speaker Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care physician who most recently treated patients in Gaza with the nonprofit Medical Aid for Palestinians. Delegates also proposed a number of Palestinian American elected officials to DNC officials. Until Wednesday, Uncommitted members had expressed that negotiations with the DNC had proceeded in good faith.

As the party coalesced support around Harris in recent months, delegates committed to Harris also joined the Uncommitted movement’s push for a ceasefire and change in Israel policy. At least 200 Harris delegates signed a pledge pushing the administration to secure a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. Harris has called for a ceasefire and the protection of civilians in Gaza, though it’s not yet clear whether her administration would adopt a policy toward Israel that differs from Biden’s.

Among the Harris delegates opposing U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza were several who unfurled a banner during Biden’s speech on Monday with the message, “Stop Arming Israel.” Other delegates seated around them responded by hitting and blocking them with “We Love Joe” signs and eventually snatched the banner away. Delegate Nadia Ahmad filed a complaint with Chicago Police on Wednesday alleging that she was the victim of simple battery.

As part of its genocide in Gaza, the military registered by the UN as a violator of children’s human rights is “systematically” detaining and torturing children, according to Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP).

Like adults in Israel’s custody, children told DCIP of how troops beat them bloody; threatened to kill them; humiliated them; deprived them of food; stripped them naked; and sicced dogs on them.

This echoes other reports finding that Israeli troops are, in fact, told by military officials to use Palestinians as human shields — even as Israeli officials spread uncorroborated claims of Hamas forces using civilians as human shields that Israel often uses to justify the killing of thousands of civilians.

A recent investigation by Haaretz found that Israeli units will often dress Palestinians up as Israeli soldiers and make them walk, handcuffed, in front of troops or into tunnels and houses to serve as shields. These Palestinians are specifically selected by Israeli troops for this, presumably so that they can blend in with the Israeli military. Sometimes those who are chosen for this purpose are children.

Military officials as high as the chief of staff are aware of this practice, suggesting that it is not only okay with the military leadership, but condoned. Soldiers are told, the report found, “our lives are more important than their lives.”

Link to the DCIP Article

The Israeli military has ordered new forced evacuations in parts of central Gaza, signaling the expansion of ground operations and the latest displacement of Palestinians, many of whom have already been displaced multiple times over the course of Israel’s war on the territory. At least 50 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours, according to the Health Ministry in Gaza, pushing the official death toll past 40,200.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken ended his ninth visit to the Middle East since October without securing any breakthrough for a ceasefire deal. In Chicago, where Democrats are gathered for the DNC, Gaza has been mentioned only in passing from the main stage of the convention. The party’s official platform adopted this week does not call for an arms embargo on Israel and reasserts unwavering U.S. support for Israel.

“There’s been an almost competition between Democrats and Republicans on 'how much can we show Israel that we support them and that we have their back?'” says human rights lawyer Zaha Hassan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and previously the senior legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team during Palestine’s bid for U.N. membership. “Why should Israel ever compromise its positions if they know that by holding out, they’ll get more goodies from the U.S.?”

Immigration has become one of the central issues of the 2024 race, with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump vowing to expand the draconian policies of his first term and deport 10 million immigrants from the country amid what he calls an “invasion.”

Democrats, meanwhile, are touting their own border crackdown at the Democratic National Convention this week in Chicago. President Joe Biden celebrated his executive action to block many asylum seekers at the southern U.S. border, and Vice President Kamala Harris promises to hire thousands more border agents if she is elected.

We host a roundtable discussion in Chicago with Oscar Chacón, executive director of Alianza Americas, an immigrant rights group; Maria Hinojosa, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, founder of Futuro Media and host of the Latino USA podcast; and Marisa Franco, director and co-founder of Mijente, a national digital organizing hub for Latinx and Chicanx communities.

The Times reporting consistently condemns war crimes committed by Russia while in Gaza, it either obfuscates their nature or legitimizes Israel’s excuses for committing them. In Gaza the accusation that resistance fighters operate amongst civilians grants carte blanche for Israeli war crimes; in Ukraine the tactic is framed as that of a wily and brave resistance struggling against a military with vastly superior firepower. Ukraine’s “outgunned” army always needs more weapons, while the notion of The Times suggesting so for Hamas is absurd. And while the paper has provided in-depth coverage of the art and culture that is at risk of being lost in Ukraine, it has categorically ignored Israel’s violent campaign to erase Palestinian cultural production.

Conclusion:

The United States has a clear interest in painting Russia—one of its main geopolitical rivals—as the thuggish aggressor in Ukraine that commits war crimes for sport and presents an existential challenge to Western civilization. And it legitimizes its military aid and diplomatic support by portraying Ukrainians as the scrappy underdogs that resist in whatever way necessary (with Western weapons) to protect their homeland.

In Gaza, the United States has an interest in presenting Israel, its bedrock ally in the Middle East, as a nation defending itself from existential threats that is forced to make hard choices between destroying bloodthirsty terrorists and killing civilians en masse. Palestinian resistance has to be completely decontextualized, its motivations and history erased. It is necessarily presented as a cruel, ISIS-like beast which is driven by a single-minded desire to slaughter Jewish people.

Echoing widespread condemnation internationally and within Israel of the attack reportedly by Israeli settlers on the village of Jit on Thursday which left a Palestinian man dead and about a dozen injured, OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani described the incident as “horrific”.

She noted that the killing “was not an isolated attack”, in reference to years of violence directed at Palestinian communities by Israeli settlers, maintaining that it was “the direct consequence” of Israel’s policy of occupation.

“There have been very few investigations but even in those cases, most of the times these do not conclude with justice for the victims and for the perpetrators. There are reports of Israeli security forces standing by as attacks take place. There are even reports of weapons being distributed to the settlers. So, there is clearly a State responsibility in this regard

Despite the fact that the majority of the neighborhood is officially part of Jerusalem, Kufr ‘Aqab doesn’t receive water from the municipal water supplier, Hagihon. Instead, like Palestinian communities across the occupied West Bank, water is provided by the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) — an arm of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) — which purchases it from the Israeli national water company, Mekorot.

This is symptomatic of Israel’s system of water apartheid in the occupied territories: Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are denied control of the aquifers under their feet, and must instead buy the water back in limited quantities from Israel. While Israelis have access to an average of 300 liters of water per day, Palestinians in the West Bank enjoy only 80 liters — 20 liters less than the World Health Organization’s recommended daily quantity. For Palestinians in Gaza, it is currently as low as 3 liters.

According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has killed 2,100 Palestinian babies under the age of two since October, out of a total of 17,000 children killed.

This is a rate of about 210 babies per month, or 7 babies a day, killed by Israel’s extermination campaign, and Euro-Med reports that infant deaths are being reported every day in Gaza due to Israel’s starvation campaign, bombings and destruction of the medical system.

Most of the infant deaths to starvation and thirst are not included in the official death count from the Palestinian health ministry, which surpassed 40,000 on Thursday, due to vast difficulties in counting such deaths; the death toll is likely far higher than the official death count, experts have said. Many pregnancies have also been forcibly ended due to Israel’s assault on hospitals, the group notes.

Health officials in Gaza said Thursday that the official death toll from Israel’s 10-month war has topped 40,000, though that is believed to be a vast undercount of the true figure.

The grim milestone was reached just days after the Biden administration greenlit $20 billion in additional weapons sales to Israel, including 50 F-15 fighter jets, tank ammunition, mortar rounds, tactical vehicles and advanced air-to-air missiles. The U.S. approved the sales despite growing calls for an arms embargo on Israel.

“This is just a continuation of a policy that has been going on now for 10 months of the U.S. providing to Israel all the arms that it requests,” says Josh Paul, a veteran State Department official who worked on arms deals and resigned in protest over Gaza policy in October. “It is a dark day for American foreign policy.” We also speak with Jan Egeland, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who says it’s “incomprehensible” that the U.S. keeps supplying Israel with weapons. “There should be no more arms going into that place before there is a ceasefire.”