Attention to the Unseen

Annelle Sheline, PhD, served for a year as a foreign affairs officer at the Office of Near Eastern Affairs in the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor: Since Hamas’ attack on October 7, Israel has used American bombs in its war in Gaza, which has killed more than 32,000 people — 13,000 of them children — with countless others buried under the rubble, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel is credibly accused of starving…

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An analysis Michael Barnett wrote in March 2023: At a conference hosted by Haaretz on Wednesday, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that “the village of Hawara needs to be wiped out. I think that the State of Israel needs to do that—not, God forbid, private individuals.” Hawara has been in the news lately because of an Israeli assault that claimed the lives of ten Palestinians and injured over one hundred. Although Smotrich prefers to see Hawara’s demise through public…

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The Associated Press reports: The United Nations Security Council on Monday issued its first demand for a cease-fire in Gaza, with the U.S. angering Israel by abstaining from the vote. Israel responded by canceling a visit to Washington by a high-level delegation in the strongest public clash between the allies since the war began. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the U.S. of “retreating” from a “principled position” by allowing the vote to pass without conditioning the cease-fire on the release…

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The Washington Post reports: Congress voted early Saturday to strip hundreds of millions of dollars from the United Nations agency that distributes most of the food, medicine and basic services to Palestinians in Gaza and across the Middle East, marking what critics say is a devastating blow to a region in crisis. The United States, along with several other countries, suspended funding for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in January after Israel alleged that 12 of the agency’s…

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The Associated Press reports: The U.N. Security Council is set to vote on a resolution demanding a humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, but the United States warned the measure could hurt negotiations to halt Israeli-Hamas hostilities. The resolution, put forward by the 10 elected council members, is backed by Russia and China, who vetoed a U.S.-sponsored resolution Friday that supported “an immediate and sustained cease-fire” in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. The 22-nation Arab…

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The Guardian reports: An aid official who travelled the length of Gaza this week has described scenes of “utter annihilation”, with “nothing left” of what were once thriving and crowded cities in the territory. “The depth of the horror surpasses our ability to describe it,” said James Elder, a spokesperson with the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef). “As soon as you drive through the north, you get that universal gesture of hunger of people putting their hands to their mouths….

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Patrick Wintour writes: After months of vetoing other UN security council resolutions in an effort to defend Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, the US has in recent weeks gone on to the diplomatic front foot in New York, drafting and tabling its own resolution that was put to a vote on Friday before being vetoed by Russia and China. The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said the resolution would send “a strong signal”. But what was that signal precisely?…

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The New York Times reports: The memories are indelible. Screaming families carrying bloodied loved ones through the doors of an overcrowded hospital. A boy trying to resuscitate a child who looked not much older than himself. A 12-year-old with shrapnel wounds to his head and abdomen being intubated on the ground. What he saw that January day at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis in southern Gaza — after a missile strike on an aid distribution site — has haunted…

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The Guardian reports: The US has drafted a new UN security council resolution calling for an “immediate ceasefire” and hostage deal in Gaza, amid mounting pressure on Israel to halt its military campaign and allow the delivery of substantial amounts of humanitarian aid into the Palestinian territory. The CIA and Mossad spy chiefs, William Burns and David Barnea, were expected to arrive in Qatar on Friday in the hope of clinching an elusive truce-for-hostages deal between Israel and Hamas. Speaking…

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Alex de Waal writes: Gaza is already the most intense starvation catastrophe of recent decades. The death toll from hunger and disease may soon surpass the body count from bombs and bullets. The Famine Review Committee reported this week that Gaza is facing “imminent famine”. The Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) system, set up 20 years ago, provides the most authoritative assessments of humanitarian crises. Its figures for Gaza are the worst ever by any metric. It estimates that 677,000 people,…

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The Guardian reports: A delegation of American and British doctors is in Washington DC to tell the Biden administration the Israeli military is systematically destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure in order to drive Palestinians out of their homes. The doctors, who have recently returned from volunteering at Gaza’s besieged hospitals, are expected to meet White House officials and senior members of Congress this week to warn that pledges of increased aid to Palestinians under bombardment are largely meaningless without an immediate…

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CNN reports: Famine is imminent in northern Gaza where 70% of the population are already suffering with catastrophic levels of hunger, a UN-backed report said Monday, as the EU’s top diplomat accused Israel of using “starvation as a weapon of war.” All 2.2 million people in Gaza do not have enough food to eat, with half of the population on the brink of starvation and famine projected to arrive in the north “anytime between mid-March and May 2024,” according to…

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The Daily Beast reports: Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has offered his own solution to the mass bloodshed and displacement in Gaza: some good, old-fashioned real estate development. During an interview with Tarek Masoud, the faculty chair of Harvard’s Middle East Initiative, Kushner proposed moving Palestinians to Israel’s arid desert region to “clean up” Gaza’s “valuable” waterfront. “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable to—if people would focus on building up livelihoods,” Kushner said, without clarifying who exactly would profit…

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The Guardian reports: Famine is imminent in northern Gaza with people suffering “catastrophic levels of hunger”, a coalition of aid groups has warned. The situation was called “man-made starvation”, as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a group that includes the World Food Programme and the World Health Organization, said that 1.1 million people, half of Gaza’s population, faced famine. The IPC report came as Philippe Lazzarini, the head of Unrwa – the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees –…

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