From the start of the conflict I have been most concerned, not with the bombing, as bad as it is (6x as much as the US dropped on Iraq during the last war in postage-stamp sized open-air prison) but by the cut-off of food and water. Israeli protesters have been blocking much of what little humanitarian aid is sent, the main aid agency has been defunded by the largest donor countries, most Gazans are starving and most of what little water they have is dirty.
The report finds at least 90 per cent of children under 5 are affected by one or more infectious disease. Seventy per cent had diarrhoea in the past two weeks, a 23-fold increase compared with the 2022 baseline.
We don’t tend to take diarrhoea seriously, because we have medicine and enough water and we aren’t malnourished and underweight to start with, but historically diarrhoea is a mass killer. Without hospital care (and there is almost none left in Gaza), water or medicine, Gazans, and especially children, are going to start dropping like flies.
I am also seeing that due to malnutrition new mothers can’t breast feed, and there isn’t much if any formula meaning death of newborn babies will be astronomical.
Moving on to the military situation: the Israeli military remains unable to destroy Hamas, but destroying Hamas has never been the goal: the goal is ethnic cleansing.
Egypt is building camps in the desert near Gaza. Egypt has, in the past, refused to allow ethnic cleansing into their country, on the grounds it would be destabilizing and they can’t afford it (and a pretense of caring about ethnic cleansing, which is true of the population but not the ruling caste), however it appears a deal between Israel, the US and Egypt may have been cut.
If this is so, Israel will win the war unless Hezbollah and Syria attack before the ethnic cleansing. Remember, the real Israeli goal is, and always has been, to get rid of the original occupants of Palestine by any means possible. Once the Gazans are pushed out, the Palestinians in the West Bank, who don’t even have a Hamas, will be dealt with: indeed settler, police and military violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, and seizure and bulldozing of homes is way up.
There are multiple players here, but unless the war expands or I’m wrong about Egypt, which I could be, I don’t see how this doesn’t end in an Israeli “victory”.
They learned well what the Nazis taught.
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jack smith
test
mago
Savage barbaric hateful vindictive, these are but a few of my favorite words. . .
Instant karma’s coming home to you hoo hoo hoo . . .
Joe
What’s almost never acknowledged is the Gaza Marine gas field, an estimated 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas lying about 20 miles off the Gaza Strip. Palestinians have rights to that treasure, until they are gone. Add riches via fossil fuels as another prime mover in this slaughter.
Raad
God awful news but it’s been like this for a long time now, I don’t honestly understand the reluctance of people nearby to do *something* but I guess I’ve never lived through a genocide.
This garbage changes you and in awful ways >:((
On a side note (and a good one too), new banner is awesome 👍
Feral Finster
The Israelis and their American thugs see every Palestinian child’s death as a victory. Those Tiktoks that the Israeli soldiers make is basically their way of giving the word the Double Bird.
“We’re committing genocide, and Biden enables us. What are you going to do about it?”
Ian’s writings on torture come prominently to mind.
marku52
I hope you are wrong,…..but fear you aren’t.
Oakchair
First they came for the Iraqis
And I did not speak out
Then they came for the Afghanistanis
And I did not speak out
Then they came for the Libyans
And I did not speak out
Then they came for the Syrians
And I did not speak out
Then they came for the Gazanias
And I did not speak out
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me
Wonder what the people of the Middle east would think about this modified poem.
sy rosenbaum
They learned well what the Nazis taught
Their strain of supremacism well predates the Nazis.
Where is the “international community” to destroy this cancer and put it on trial before the world? How does tiny Israel – the Jewish State whose Jewish soldiers use weapons with Jewish religious symbols on them and which is currently entirely Judaizing an area of the world that for millenia has been the intersection of the three Abrahamic belief systems, not to mention all manner of non-believers – how do they have such extraordinary power both in the Middle East and around the world?
Putin is kept in line by his buddy Leviev et al and the entire Chabad community, which he is very close to. They are essentially no degree of separation from crackpot Menachem Mendel Schneerson and his Chabad Lubavitch.
There was a power play within the already enormously powerful Jewish community inside Russia early on in Putin’s reign. Rabbi Berel Lazar, an orthodox Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic adherent who is close to Leviev and Putin, won the battle.This Haaretz article well explains how the situation was evolving back in the early 2000’s:
https://archive.ph/d0oar#selection-945.0-967.301
Fast forward to 2014 and Joshua Keating reports in his article “Putin’s Chosen People: What’s behind the Russian president’s close relationship with an Orthodox Jewish sect?”:
https://archive.ph/dHyvB#selection-1029.0-1029.414
In 2007 The New Yorker published “Meet the Mogul” when Leviev bought the New York Times Building to add to his staggering portfolio of assets.
https://archive.ph/r4Dar#selection-1131.199-1131.217
https://archive.ph/gm8Rz#selection-3107.109-3135.117
Putin is kept in line by his buddy Leviev et al and the entire Chabad community, which he is very close to. They are essentially no degree of separation from crackpot Menachem Mendel Schneerson and his Chabad Lubavitch.
Come on man. Sure, Chabad and Schneerson are nuts, but they’re just a small sect with no real power to speak of either inside Russia or beyond.
Oh? Wikipedia reports that:
https://archive.ph/omyA9#selection-6657.0-6811.60
Where is China? We could get into their history with Zionist supremacists and Israel-firsters:
<Until I saw the documentary “The Revolutionary” at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival, I mistakenly thought that China during the revolutionary period was one country that had not felt the Jewish embrace. In fact, 85 to 90% of the foreigners helping the Chinese at the time of the Communist takeover were Jewish. This included the daughter of the founder of the brokerage firm Goldman Sachs, who left the comfort of her Park Avenue home to assist the Chinese.>
How un-self-involved of the precious Goldman Sachs daughter and her brethren! As Ian always says when it comes to left-wing takeovers of the government: Get control of that media apparatus:l
https://archive.ph/ijk9e#selection-797.410-797.559
GrimJim
You should fix your title — these are not child deaths, these are child murders. Premeditated and with malice aforethought.
anon1
The Gaza Strip 2024 is the Warsaw Ghetto 1941. The oppressed are now the oppressors.
Call it the Gaza Ghetto.
“The Nazis sealed the Warsaw ghetto in mid-November 1940. German-induced overcrowding and food shortages led to an extremely high mortality rate in the ghetto. Almost 30 percent of the population of Warsaw was packed into 2.4 percent of the city’s area. The Germans set a food ration for Jews at just 181 calories a day. By August 1941, more than 5,000 people a month succumbed to starvation and disease.”
mago
As Raad said, great new banner.
I watch ravens circling the skies daily and listen to their cries.
Ancient Tibetan texts speak to their prophetic callings, such as three short calls from the southwest portend a dawn accident. And so on.
Could be superstition, but there are many examples and stories about ravens and their messages. Having witnessed some examples, I tend to be a believer.
Nice choice, Ian.
Dan Lynch
Depends on how you define victory.
Israel has lost global support, except among the olds in the West, and the olds won’t be around much longer. Israel will not survive long without Western support, and may not survive long even with Western support. Israel is getting weaker while Iran and the “Resistance” are getting stronger. Israel is surrounded and outnumbered. Israel is not secure, and never will be secure thanks to the availability of drones and missiles. The boycott of Israel’s products will continue and expand. I don’t see a bright future for Israel.
Lots of Palestinians will suffer and maybe die, and that’s a sad thing, but there is no going back to pre-Oct 7. The world order is changing. I can’t predict exactly how this will play out, but there is no going back.
Ian Welsh
Pretty sure those are crows, but all Corvids rock. 🙂
GrimJim
The problem with an Israeli collapse is the Samson Option.
Assuming they have even a portion of the nukes they supposedly have, and assuming those can be delivered globally, should Israel fall, they’ll take modern civilization with them.
It only takes a handful of nukes to create an EMP blanket that takes out the US, Europe, western Russia, and China, leaving them plenty to turn direct enemy capitals to glass.
One small nuke at Aswan drowns most of Egypt. Hit the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the remaining fertile zone of the Middle East is radioactive for 10,000 years.
The Gaza Genocide shows that there are no depths to which Israel will not sink to get what it wants, let alone to protect itself.
And if we see and know about those nukes, imagine what we do not know about…
The US and Russia have also always proclaimed a similar fate for their enemy… So have, essentially, all nuclear powers, in the event of their being conquered, so who can blame them…