+ Can you imagine being a reporter in Gaza, knowing that you’re on a target list by Israel simply because you are a reporter and feeling compelled to write a will to your young son? That’s what Maryam Abu Dagga, the tireless and brave freelance reporter for the AP, did before she was murdered this week, along with four other journalists, rescue workers and Palestinian civilians, in a targeted double-tap strike by the Israelis outside a hospital. Here’s what she wrote…
+ At least 20 people, including 4 journalists (one a freelancer for AP), a first responder and hospital staff, were killed Monday in an Israeli “double-tap” strike just minutes apart on the same location at southern Gaza’s Nasser Hospital. The double-tap strikes are meant to kill first responders sent to rescue the wounded from the initial strike…
+ Yuval Abraham on Israel’s use of double-tap airstrikes: “Source in Southern Command: ‘Another strike will be carried out to ensure that rescue efforts do not take place. First aid providers, rescuers – kill them. Attack again, on them. This is the procedure. Since October 7, it has been in place.”
Dr. Atef Al-Hout, Director of Nasser Medical Complex, described Israel’s double-tap attack on the hospital’s central surgery ward, then hit the staircase opposite the department where journalists had gathered to document events, after an earlier Israeli airstrike in the same location had already murdered Reuters cameraman Hussam Al-Masri:
What happened was that an Israeli drone bombed the surgery department, more specifically, the staircase opposite the surgery department, resulting in a number of martyrs, mostly journalists who were there to document the events. Without any prior warning or anything. And it was targeted twice, not once. The surgery department at the hospital. We are trying to finish these surgeries, as it will soon be put out of service until it’s restored. We are talking about the central surgery department here. It contains six operating rooms, roughly 70 percent of the number of operating rooms within the Nasser complex. What results from that, we will be witnessing with our own eyes very soon.
+ In the 22 months since October 2023, Israel has launched more than 800 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza.
+ While Netanyahu wrote off the Israeli attack on Nasser Hospital that killed journalists, rescue workers and civilians as a “tragic mishap,” his own favorite TV network, Channel 14, reported that “The soldiers say: the attack on the Nasser terror headquarters was approved and coordinated with the high command.”
+ Dr. Yawa Hawari offered this in response to Israel’s assertion that the airstrike that murdered 20 people at Nasser Hospital was meant to knock out a “Hamas camera” (which actually belonged to Reuters journalist Hussam al-Masri, who filmed the attack that killed him): “They want you to believe that Israeli regime surveillance is so precise that it can see a camera set up on the stairwell of a hospital building but can’t see all the journalists and civil defense workers around it.”
+ The “Hamas” camera…
…actually belonged to Reuters journalist Hussam al-Masri, who was using it to provide a live feed from the hospital.
+ The targets were the very people Israel murdered. They’ve bragged about how precise their airstrikes are, using the Habsora, Lavender and Where’s Daddy? AI systems….
+ Jerome Grimaud, Médecins Sans Frontières’s emergency coordinator in Gaza, on Israel’s double-tap strike on Nasser hospital:
We denounce in the strongest possible terms Israel’s horrendous attacks on the Nasser medical complex today – the only partially functioning public hospital in the south of Gaza. Israeli forces killed at least 20 people and injured 50 more in consecutive strikes, including healthcare workers, rescuers, and journalists.
Among them was Mariam Abu Dagga, a freelance photographer who frequently worked with MSF. We are heartbroken by her death. Mariam leaves behind a son who must now grow up without his mother. At least four other journalists were also killed today.
Some MSF staff members were forced to shelter in the laboratory as Israel repeatedly struck the building amidst rescue efforts. We are outraged as the Israeli forces continue to attack healthcare workers and journalists with impunity.
For the past 22 months, we have watched as healthcare facilities have been levelled, journalists silenced, and healthcare workers buried beneath the rubble by the Israeli forces. As Israel continues to shun international law, the only witnesses of their genocidal campaign are deliberately being targeted. It must stop now.
+ Photojournalist Valerie Zink on why she can no longer work for Reuters…
Western media is directly culpable for creating the conditions in which this can happen. As Jeremy Scahill from Drop Site News put it, “every major outlet – from the New York Times to the Washington Post, from AP to Reuters – has served as a conveyor belt for Israeli propaganda, sanitizing war crimes and dehumanizing victims, abandoning their colleagues and their alleged commitment to true and ethical reporting.”
By repeating Israel’s genocidal fabrications without determining if they have any credibility – willfully abandoning the most basic responsibility of journalism – Western media outlets have made possible the killing of more journalists in two years on one tiny strip of land than in WWI, WWil, and the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and Ukraine combined, to say nothing of starving an entire population, shredding its children, and burning people alive.
The fact that Anas Al-Sharif’s work won a Pulitzer Prize for Reuters did not compel them to come to his defence when Israeli occupation forces placed him on a “hit list” of journalists accused of being Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants.
It did not compel them to come to his defence when he appealed to international media for protection after an Israeli military spokesperson posted a video making clear their intention to assassinate him following a report he did on the growing famine. It did not compel them to report on his death honestly when he was hunted and killed weeks later. I have valued the work that I brought to Reuters over the past eight years, but at this point, I can’t conceive of wearing this press pass with anything but deep shame and grief. I don’t know what it means to begin to honour the courage and sacrifice of journalists in Gaza – the bravest and best to ever live – but going forward, I will direct whatever contributions I have to offer with that front of mind.
+ There’s never been a (well, “war” is not the word) killing spree quite like this one, where locations (schools, hospitals, places of worship) and professions (doctors, nurses, firefighters, journalists, teachers, poets) once considered off-limits to even the most martial regimes have become high-priority targets…
+ Earlier this week, Hamas once again accepted a US-brokered ceasefire deal to which Netanyahu responded, as usual…
+ Former US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller: “Netanyahu told us he intends to continue the war for decades and was imposing conditions when we sought a deal. The Israeli government has been obstructing the ceasefire and setting new demands.” Miller and his colleagues kept this salient fact to themselves during the Biden years and for 8 months into Trump time.
+ The first stop on the Jake Sullivan rehabilitation tour was The Bulwark, where he tries to dump all of the blame conveniently on Netanyahu:
I have, in fact, told a number of members who were thinking about the votes on these resolutions, that the situation as it stands today, following the breakdown of the ceasefire in March, a vote to cut off arms to Israel is a totally credible position. That is one I would support. But for me, the bigger question is about the future of the US/Isael relationship. And here, I think, it comes down to: what is the future of Israel? You know, you’re going to be dealing with a prime minister and a rightwing government for years on end or is there going to be political change in Israel, because I think that would have an impact on what the nature of the US/Israel relationship is. What is the democratic nature of Israel two, three, four, or five years from now?
From Isaac Chotiner’s interview in the New Yorker with Biden’s ambassador to Israel, Jacob Lew, who justifies the killing of Palestinian children by saying many were the children of Hamas fighters..
These Biden people are some cold-blooded ghouls.
+ Months ago, American and British trauma surgeons who had volunteered in Gaza came back and reported examining the bodies of numerous children killed by headshots from Israeli snipers (None of whom, contra Lew, were killed in Hamas bunkers on the laps of their “terrorist” fathers). It’s still happening…
+ Charlamagne tha God on Hakeem Jeffries: “I call him AIPAC Shakur.”
+ On Tuesday, DNC members rejected an amendment that urged support for the recognition of Palestine as a state and an end to all military aid to Israel. They also rejected a resolution, introduced by 26-year-old committee member Allison Minnerly, that calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an arms embargo on Israel.
+ Hours after the votes, Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said: “I believe it is time for the United States government to stop the sale of SOME offensive weapons systems to Israel as LEVERAGE to pressure Israel.”
+ Figures from the Israeli military’s own secret database show that 83% of the Palestinians it has killed in Gaza have been civilians. A May classified document leaked to +972 and the Guardian, listed 8,900 named fighters as dead or probably dead, when the overall death toll hit 53,000.
+ The percentage will prove to be much higher when the final death count is tallied. Recent studies suggest that more than 400,000 Palestinians have already or will soon perish under Israel’s genocidal lash. The CIA has estimated that Hamas’s total strength is around 30,000.
+ Can you get more explicit than this from the former head of Israel’s military intelligence unit? (By the way, Israel’s far surpassed the 50-to-1 kill ratio, so can they stop killing now? Apparently, not.)
+ Last Friday, a state of famine was declared for the first time in Gaza City. A report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared that More than half a million people in Gaza are being subjected to conditions leading to widespread starvation, destitution and preventable death. Classifying famine means that the most extreme category is triggered when three critical thresholds – extreme food deprivation, acute malnutrition and starvation-related deaths – have been breached. The analysis predicted that in the coming weeks, the famine will soon spread from the Gaza Governorate to Deir Al Balah and Khan Younis Governorates. By the end of September, more than 640,000 people will face Catastrophic levels of food insecurity – classified as IPC Phase 5 – across the Gaza Strip. An additional 1.14 million people in the territory will be in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and a further 396,000 people in Crisis (IPC Phase 3) conditions. The situations in northern Gaza and the nearly destroyed city of Rafah are believed to be even more severe than the conditions in Gaza City. But the IPC investigators didn’t have enough data to render a report.
+ According to the WHO, “malnutrition among children in Gaza is accelerating at a catastrophic pace. In July alone, more than 12,000 children were identified as acutely malnourished – the highest monthly figure ever recorded and a six-fold increase since the start of the year. Nearly one in four of these children was suffering from severe acute malnutrition (SAM), the deadliest form with both short and long-term impacts.
+ Catherine Russell, Executive Director UNICEF: “Famine is now a grim reality for children in Gaza Governorate, and a looming threat in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis,” said “As we have repeatedly warned, the signs were unmistakable: children with wasted bodies, too weak to cry or eat; babies dying from hunger and preventable disease; parents arriving at clinics with nothing left to feed their children. There is no time to lose. Without an immediate ceasefire and full humanitarian access, famine will spread, and more children will die. Children on the brink of starvation need the special therapeutic feeding that UNICEF provides.” Sara, a 14-year-old Palestinian girl living in Gaza City, to UNICEF’s Tess Ingram: “Famine, of course, I know. I’ve been starving for five months now.”
+ UN Chief Antonio Guterres: “It is a man-made disaster, a moral indictment – and a failure of humanity itself. Famine is not about food; it is the deliberate collapse of the systems needed for human survival. As the occupying power, Israel has unequivocal obligations under international law – including the duty of ensuring food and medical supplies for the population. No more excuses. The time for action is not tomorrow – it is now.”
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