Attention to the Unseen

Adam Serwer writes: On October 7, the Islamist militant group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, killed more than 1,400 people in Israel. Israel responded with military operations that have killed several times that number of Palestinians in Gaza, a territory described by Human Rights Watch as an “open-air prison” as a result of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade. In both cases, most of the casualties are civilians. The conflict has reverberated into other areas of the world, including the…

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Faysal Itani writes: Like many Lebanese, I spent the morning glued to my screen waiting for Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah’s first speech since the beginning of the latest Israel-Palestine war. While I haven’t lived in Lebanon for more than a decade, Nasrallah’s speeches remain important events in my life, as both a foreign policy professional and a Lebanese. So I found myself parked on the side of a Washington road in rush hour traffic, watching. After all, he was expected…

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The Intercept reports: President Joe Biden, asked last week what his government planned to do to reduce the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, responded by rejecting the idea that the numbers could be trusted. “I have no notion if Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden said on Wednesday. “I’m sure innocents have been killed and it is the price of waging war,” he added. “But I have no confidence in the number that…

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Politico reports: Joe Biden and top aides have discussed the likelihood that Benjamin Netanyahu’s political days are numbered — and the president has conveyed that sentiment to the Israeli prime minister in a recent conversation. The topic of Netanyahu’s short political shelf life has come up in recent White House meetings involving Biden, according to two senior administration officials. That has included discussions that have taken place since Biden’s trip to Israel, where he met with Netanyahu. Biden has gone…

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The New York Times reports: Nearly 300 students were seated at Columbia University on Wednesday afternoon for a two-hour lecture on women’s involvement in peace processes delivered by Hillary Clinton and Keren Yarhi-Milo, the dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. Not even halfway through the class, about 30 students stood up and gathered their computers and backpacks, as part of a planned student walkout. They joined several dozen other protesters congregating near the lobby of the building….

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Politico reports: A top Ukrainian general’s assessment that the war with Russia is a stalemate is fueling partisan passions as a debate on whether to bolster Kyiv with more weapons roils Congress. The stunning admission by Gen. Valery Zaluzhnyy, commander in chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, is reverberating on Capitol Hill — where Republicans are arguing his comments are a reason to rethink America’s as-long-as-it-takes support for Kyiv. And that could make Ukraine’s uphill climb against Russia and in the…

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Vice News reports: Israel has acknowledged that a government ministry drafted a report proposing the forced, permanent transfer of Gaza’s population to Egypt, fuelling fears of a further catastrophic dispossession of Palestinians. The 10-page document by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence, dated the 13th of October, recommends the transfer of Gaza’s population of more than 2 million people to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, as the preferred option for securing Israel’s security at the end of the assault on Gaza. The document recommended…

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Hussein Ibish writes: Israel has launched what appears to be the first phase of a massive ground incursion into Gaza, vowing that Hamas must be eliminated or somehow rendered irrelevant, even at the expense of smashing Gaza to pieces. But what then? Israeli officials have reportedly told the Biden administration that they haven’t engaged in any serious postconflict planning. That’s probably because none of their options is good and, despite a plethora of fantastical proposals, nobody is going to step…

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The New York Times reports: It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries. Publicly, Mr. Biden’s language…

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Wendy Pearlman writes: Responding to Hamas’ horrific killing of some 1,400 Israelis on Oct. 7, Israel has targeted the Gaza Strip with one of the most devastating military assaults of modern times. By day six, according to Middle East analyst Charles Lister, Israel had dropped more than twice as many bombs on this densely populated civilian area as the anti-Islamic State coalition dropped per month on an area 126 times as large. By day nine, Israel had pummeled 2.2 million…

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