“Netanyahu insists that these initiatives “reward” terror. On the contrary, they make his espoused goal more likely: a regional deal in which Hamas is isolated by the Arab world, and the Palestinian Authority, which long ago agreed to the two-state solution, takes the lead in legitimizing and helping to buttress a new Gazan administration.”
“Dangerous viruses that cause severe paralytic illness are thriving in Gaza, where starving children living under an Israeli blockade can’t access the food or treatments they need to recover.
For months, health officials have warned that the destruction of the Gaza Strip’s sanitation facilities by Israel could fuel the surge of infectious diseases, as seen in last year’s polio outbreak. Now, doctors are reporting a surge in cases of acute flaccid paralysis, a rare syndrome causing muscle weakness that can make it hard to breathe and swallow.
Cases in Gaza include acute flaccid myelitis, which mostly affects children, and the better-known Guillain-Barré syndrome, said Ahmed al-Farra, head of pediatrics at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza.”
The Israel-Hamas conflict is surrounded by so much misinformation, and people latch on to the misinformation and propaganda so unquestionably, that it makes it hard to tell what’s going on and many professionals don’t want to even touch the story. Everything is so he-said-she-said and stories always change after bad information has already spread, that it is difficult to know what the truth is.
DC has record low crime, yet Trump is acting like it is out of control and using exaggerations to take over the policing of the city. He describes how people do what they want to police, yet he pardoned the January 6th attackers who were actively trying to hurt police.
A doctor in Gaza says all his patients are noticeably not eating enough food. He says Gaza has violent gangs that work for Israel.
“Huge numbers of Palestinians need something to eat. Can Israel do more to get them some food?
“It’s as if anything that doesn’t qualify as famine isn’t a problem,” one humanitarian organization official told me. A second aid official said the Israelis in particular talk about such hunger crises as if “it’s a binary — on, off — rather than a sliding scale. It’s a sliding scale.”
Words are among the many tools being weaponized by multiple sides in several ongoing global conflicts. “Famine,” “genocide,” “terrorism,” “antisemitism,” “occupation” and “apartheid” are just some of the terms whose definitions inspire public relations, legal and policy fights.
The war of words is increasingly exhausting and alarming to policymakers and others who deal with humanitarian issues. Several told me they worry the semantics — especially in a conflict such as Gaza — could hurt efforts to save lives or forge peace, including by hardening the positions of people accused of wrongdoing.
…
Activists who push to use the term “genocide” often seem to suggest that if any label short of that is used, it means that a group’s suffering doesn’t matter.
This is unfortunate, Malinowski and others say, because other legal terms that could apply, such as “war crimes” or “crimes against humanity,” are still very grave offenses whose perpetrators should be held accountable.
A government’s decision to accuse another country of genocide often comes down to politics.”
Israel is committing war crimes. However horrible a terrorist organization is, whatever that organization will or will not agree to, holding a civilian population hostage is not justifiable. The U.S. makes mistakes in its wars, but has not tried the mass starvation of civilians.
When people say MSNBC is on the left and Fox News is on the right, they are misunderstanding what Fox News is. Fox News isn’t an honest conservative news network, it acts as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Its creator cynically created Fox News to spread bullshit in favor of his ideology.
MSNBC had a liberal bent, but its hosts don’t go help a current or running president campaign. Each host has his own thing, but there isn’t an overarching propaganda goal to the organization.
Fox News may be unique in the Western World when it comes to a supposed news network designed as a partisan and ideological propaganda arm.