Living in Gaza now requires a choreography of absence. We don’t walk; we drift. We don’t eat; we search. We don’t sleep; we remain alert, ears tuned to the sound that will send us running. Survival is a ritual of adaptation in a world that offers none…And yet I persist. I speak. I write. Because silence would be a deeper form of defeat. Testimony, even if cracked and uncertain, is the only offering I can still give. To keep it locked inside would be to let this hunger consume even the voice that names it.
– Alaa Alqaisi
July 17 – July 23
+ Do people still try to rationalize these daily Israeli massacres of children or just ignore them? “Each child was holding a water bucket, lying dead in place, covered in their own blood. The shrapnel had torn through their small bodies and disfigured their faces. The smell of gunpowder filled the area.”
+ An internal State Department memo says that Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts graduate student who was abducted on the street by ICE, imprisoned and threatened with deportation for co-writing an op-ed against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, admitted she has no association with antisemitism or terrorism. Öztürk’s lawyer: “The lack of evidence has proven what we have said all along, that Rümeysa was targeted for her free speech.”
+ As Ireland moved to enact legislation banning trade with Israeli-occupied territories, the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, warned that the Irish had better “sober up.”
+ Trump is making a strong bid to win the Nobel Peace Prize by picking up the pace of his airstrikes. In the last five months, he’s dropped more bombs and missiles than Biden did in his entire presidency. His overall body count still trails Kissinger and Obama, though…
+ In the wake of Israel’s shelling of the Holy Family Church, the only Catholic church in the Palestinian enclave, Pope Leo XIV spoke of his “deep sorrow” and called for an end to the “barbarity of war.”
+ Israel’s airstrikes on Syria, whose government just received Trump’s blessing, apparently pissed off Trump’s inner circle, with one official calling Netanyahu “a madman” and another telling Axios that “the Israelis need to get their head out of their asses.” But if Netanyahu’s a madman, he’s Trump’s useful madman, just as he was Biden’s.
+ Ravi Mangla: “Mamdani has been asked more times about a phrase he hasn’t said [Globalize the Intifada] than Cuomo has been asked about the women he sexually harassed.”
+ Statement from the World Food Program on the latest slaughters of starving Palestinians waiting for parcels of food by Israeli forces…
On the morning of 20 July, a 25-truck WFP convoy carrying vital food assistance crossed the Zikim border point, destined for starving communities in northern Gaza.
Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza, the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies.
As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers, and other gunfire.
We are deeply concerned and saddened by this tragic incident resulting in the loss of countless lives. Many more suffered life-threatening injuries. These people were simply trying to access food to feed themselves and their families on the brink of starvation. This terrible incident underscores the increasingly dangerous conditions under which humanitarian operations are forced to be conducted in Gaza.
Today’s violent incident comes despite assurances from Israeli authorities that humanitarian operational conditions would improve, including that armed forces will not be present nor engage at any stage along humanitarian convoy routes.
There should never, ever, be armed groups near or on our aid convoys, as reiterated on many occasions to all parties to the conflict. Shootings near humanitarian missions, convoys and food distributions must stop immediately. Any violence involving civilians seeking humanitarian aid is completely unacceptable.
We stand firmly by our principles of operating with independence, impartiality and neutrality. It is one of the many reasons why communities trust us.
The World Food Programme continues to call for the protection of all civilians and aid workers delivering life-saving assistance. WFP teams accompanying convoys should not have to risk their own lives in the effort to save others. Without these fundamental conditions in place, we cannot continue providing life-saving support across the Gaza Strip.
Gaza’s hunger crisis has reached new levels of desperation. People are dying from a lack of humanitarian assistance. Malnutrition is surging, with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment. Nearly one person in three is not eating for days. Food aid is the only way for most people to access any food – as the cost of a one-kilogram bag of flour has surged to over USD100 in local markets.
Only a massive scale-up in food aid distributions can stabilize this spiraling situation, calm anxieties and rebuild the trust within communities that more food is coming.
An agreed ceasefire is long overdue. All hostages should be released, and humanitarians should be able to reach the civilian population in Gaza with critical food supplies in a consistent, predictable, orderly and safe manner — wherever they are across the Gaza Strip.
WFP is ready. We have food supplies nearby, experienced teams on the ground, and proven systems in place to respond at scale. We did it before and we can do it again.
We urgently call on the international community and all parties to advocate for, and facilitate, the delivery of life-saving food aid to starving populations inside Gaza – safely, securely, wherever families are, and without obstruction.”
+ On July 20th, 20 nations, led by France and the UK, condemned the “inhumane killing of civilians” and humanitarian aid sites and called for an end to the “war” in Gaza. But what does “call for” mean? Are they going to stop supplying Israel with weapons? Embrace a boycott of Israeli goods? Send the Israeli ambassadors back to Tel Aviv? Enforce the ICC warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant? Force open the crossings into Gaza so food can reach 2 million starving Palestinians?
+ The countries, all members of the OECD, published a joint statement, urging the Israeli government to
Immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and to urgently enable the UN and humanitarian NGOs to do their life-saving work safely and effectively. The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths. The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity. We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food… The Israeli Government’s denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable. Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law.
+ Countries signing the letter: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK. (EU nations who didn’t sign: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta. Romania, Slovakia)
+ Famine expert Alex de Waal on Israel’s policy of enforced starvation in Gaza…
“I’ve been working on this topic for more than four decades and there is no other case since WW2 of starvation that has been so minutely designed and controlled. This is preventable starvation. It is entirely manmade. Every stage of this has been predicted. And at every stage, action could have been taken by Israel, by the international authorities, the international community, those who back Israel, to prevent what is happening now. And those steps have simply not been taken. And in the last couple of months, what we saw was a total siege of Gaza, followed by a partial lifting. But the partial lifting was not to bring in the kind of humanitarian program that we have been familiar with as humanitarians over the past decades. It was to bring in a type of ration program that is simply an arm of the Israeli military.”
+ On July 2oth, the Israeli forces attacked the staff residences for the WHO in Deir al Balah three times. It also shelled the WHO’s main warehouse. WHO: “Israeli military entered the premises, forcing women and children to evacuate on foot toward Al-Mawasi amid active conflict. Male staff and family members were handcuffed, stripped, interrogated on the spot and screened at gunpoint. Two WHO staff and two family members were detained. Three were later released, while one staff member remains in detention. 32 WHO staff and family members were evacuated to the WHO office once access became possible.”
+ Prem Thakker on what took place in 24 hours between July 19th and 20th…
+ Shortly before publication, Harvard canceled an entire issue of the esteemed journal Harvard Educational Review devoted to Palestine. “If the universities are not willing to stand up for what is core to their mission, I don’t know what they’re doing. “What’s the point?” said Thea Abu El-Haj, a Palestinian-American anthropologist of education at Barnard College, the women’s school affiliated with Columbia University, who was one of the solicited authors.
+ On any other planet, this would shock the conscience of the world, but not this one, apparently…
+ Maryam Iqbal: “Columbia just suspended 80 students at once, ranging from 1-3 year long suspensions & Barnard hasn’t even released their sanctions yet. They have also been systematically targeting students by tripling tuition or removing our financial aid altogether with no explanation.”
+ Smotrich: “Gaza will be an inseparable part of Israel.”
+ Moshik Temkin: “What we are seeing now, in all sorts of powerful ways, is the huge chasm between the overwhelming majority of the public, who are not sociopaths, and the political leaders we have, who overwhelmingly-and unfortunately-are. That is a major problem we, the people, need to overcome.”
+ Doctors in Gaza are becoming so weak from lack of food and water that they’ve begun fainting in the operating rooms.
+ The tide is turning…
Among 18-29 Year Olds – “Who do you sympathize more with?”
Palestinians: 44%
Both Equally: 19%
Israelis: 14%
Unsure: 23%
YouGov / July 21, 2025
+ Naomi Klein: What’s most pressing in your mind when you think of those people in Gaza who you’ve treated who have survived?
Dr. Yasser Khan: “One thing I want to emphasize is that any kind of visibility in Gaza is a death sentence. I had a 14-year-old girl who had bilateral globe ruptures, shrapnel to her eyes, eyeballs, and they’re shattered. And she’s blind with no family because many of them, most of them, are orphans. And that’s a death sentence because with no infrastructure, with constant bombardment, with famine, no electricity, fuel, water, and no family, how are you going to survive? So, it’s a death sentence…I took 23 eyes out in the almost three weeks that I was there, combined between the two trips. I don’t even know if those patients are alive. I don’t know….We have to advocate to let humanitarian aid in and for a ceasefire so the bombing stops…That’s a very simple, simple ask, you know. Why is it so hard to do?”
+ Dr. Kahlil Daqran, spokesperson for Gaza’s Health Ministry, told Al Jazeera that thousands of Palestinian children are being starved because their mothers are too malnourished to produce milk and Israel has blocked the entry of baby formula into Gaza:
These children, their mothers also have malnutrition because there is no food, so the mothers cannot produce milk. Now, our children are being fed either water or ground hard legumes, and this is harmful for children in Gaza.
July 24 – August 1
+ This was the week the worms turned. Some of them, anyway: A super majorityof Americans now oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza; Bari Weiss and Donald Trump admitted Palestinians are starving (if not that they are being starved or pointing the finger at who is starving them); France, the UK and Canada announced they are ready to endorse Palestinian statehood next month at the UN; a majority of Senate Democrats voted to halt (offensive) weapons shipments to Israel; Israel’s two leading human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, finally concluded that Israel is committing genocide (Bernie Sanders still hasn’t); Zohran Mamdani is leading the polls among Jewish voters in the NYC mayoral race; Barack Obama finally said something, though exactly what isn’t quite clear; Obama’s former fixer and hatchet man Rahm Emanuel put the blame “on Israel’s doorstep…where it belongs;” and the New York Times printed a column by acclaimed Holocaust scholar Omar Bartov explaining why Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Impressive. Yet the killing and dying continues.
+ Despite the impression given by the rush of politicians and pundits this week expressing shock about photos of emaciated kids in Gaza, people do not begin to starve to death in a matter of days. Death by starvation usually occurs over a period of months. So it is in Gaza, where only two days after the attacks of October 13, 2023, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced Israel’s intention to impose a forced famine on Gaza. Gallant said what Israel was going to do, then Israel did it.
Since then, Israel has tightly restricted the flow of food and water into the Strip, before imposing a total embargo in March of this year. The consequences on the health of Palestinians in Gaza were immediate. By January 2024, UN famine researchers began to detect loss of weight and muscle density in Palestinians across Gaza. In December 2024, desperate to keep its weapons sales to Israel rolling, the Biden administration suppressed a report from its own State Department determining that conditions in northern Gaza exceeded the threshold for famine. Unfortunately for Biden, the report leaked and some of its authors resigned in protest. So people have known the awful truth for more than eight months, even as many continued to publicly deny it.
Then in March 2025, Israel imposed a total blockade on any food or water entering Gaza. Again, this savage act was no secret. It was publicly announced by Bibi himself, who claimed that forcing Palestinians to go without food would make them more likely to “voluntarily” leave Gaza. In other words, ethnic cleansing, or genocide, if you will, either by migration or death. As a consequence, the warnings from the UN, the World Food Program, the International Red Cross, humanitarian aid groups and medical workers on the ground about the entire population of Gaza–more than two million Palestinians–being in the grip of famine became more and more dire.
Yet only a couple of weeks ago, 14 US senators–half of them Democrats (Schumer, Schiff, Coons, Cantwell, Rosen, Klobochar, and Booker) feted and proudly stood for a photo-op with Benjamin Netanyahu. (Well, Booker tried to hide his face behind another senator, but that only served to emphasize his consciousness of guilt.) For months, these politicians and policy makers have stayed muted as Israel cut off food, water, and formula to infants, toddlers, and nursing mothers. Now, as their weakened systems shut down and they’ve started dying en masse, as predicted, no amount of performative ass-covering can exculpate them from their deep complicity in one of the most horrific crimes imaginable: children being forced to starve to death while huge stacks of aid pallets and trucks filled with food are only miles away.
+ How long did it take the press to go from helping manufacture a case to invade Iraq into suddenly realizing there was no case for going to war in Iraq and that they needed to start covering their asses for their complicity in the making of a catastrophe? Was Abu Ghraib the turning point (April 2004)? The leaking of the first Torture Memo (June 2004)? The Sunni Awakening (2005)? Now, here we are again.
+ Maryam Alwan: “As a student protester who went viral for getting arrested at the Columbia encampment, I am seeing posts saying that we were right—and I don’t want to hear it. The only thing I want to see is everyone mobilizing in the streets right now. We do not have the privilege of despair.”
+ Adam Tooze on Israel’s manufactured famine in Gaza:
Q. Across the hot spots of the world in 2025, what is the percentage of the population that is at risk?
Adam Tooze: In Nigeria, mainly in the north, it is one-sixth of the population. In Myanmar and the DRC, it is roughly a quarter of the population. In Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan, and Haiti–the places most commonly cited in arguments about the application of “special standards” to Israel–the share of the population at risk is between 49 and 57 percent. In Gaza, the share is 100 percent. The risk of famine is total.
+ Of the Palestinians who have starved to death in Gaza since the beginning of the war, 80 percent are children.
+ There’s nothing left to say…
+ Mark Brauner, an emergency room physician from Eugene, Oregon, who just returned from volunteering in Gaza: “A lot of children have passed the point of no return…The gut lining has started to auto-digest and will no longer [absorb] water or nutrition. Death is imminent for 1000s.”
+ Trump is mad because starving families in Gaza haven’t said thank-you for the pittance of food he’s sent to Gaza…
REPORTER: Should Israel be doing more to allow food into Gaza?
TRUMP: Say it, again?
REPORTER: Should Israel be doing more to allow food into Gaza?
TRUMP: What is she saying?
SOMEONE ELSE: Should Israel be doing more to allow food in Gaza?
TRUMP: We gave $60 million two weeks ago and no one even acknowledged it for food. And it’s terrible, you really at least want to have somebody say thank you. We gave $60 million two weeks ago for food for Gaza. And nobody acknowledged it. Nobody talks about it. It makes you feel bad when you do that and you have other countries not giving anything. None of the European countries, by the way, gave…nobody gave but us. And nobody said, Gee, thank you very much. It would be nice to have at least a thank you. And I took a lot of heat. You know, when I do that, a lot of people aren’t happy about that because they say, Well, why are we doing it and nobody else. But I think we had a, uh, humanitarian reason for doing it. What’s going to happen, I don’t know. I can tell you that Hamas, as I said, would happen at the end. You know we’ve gotten back a lot of hostages, a tremendous number of hostages. Most of them. Now we have dead hostages and the mothers want them back.”
+ Nick Maynard, a surgeon who volunteered at a hospital in southern Gaza, wrote in The Guardian:
I’ve just finished operating on another severely malnourished young teenager. A seven-month-old baby lies in our paediatric intensive care unit, so tiny and malnourished that I initially mistook her for a newborn. The phrase ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do justice to the way her body has been ravaged. She is literally wasting away before our eyes and, despite our best efforts, we are powerless to save her.
+ Pope Leo from the Southside: “Starving people to death is a diabolical way of waging war. It must end.”
+ From the findings of a new study on the life expectancy of Palestinians in Gaza reported in The Lancet this week:
Life expectancy at birth reportedly declined by approximately 35 years in 2024. This represents a greater collapse in longevity than that recorded during the genocide in Rwanda, where life expectancy at birth declined from age 42·9 years in 1993 to age 12·2 years in 1994.
+ Now that it’s impossible to deny that Palestinians in Gaza are being starved to death, the genocide-deniers have blamed this atrocity not on Israel’s embargo but on Hamas (naturally) stealing the dribble of food that Israel allows into Gaza. Yet, even US AID could find no evidence this is the case, and they had a lot of incentive to find or even manufacture a case against Hamas. Even the Israeli military admitted the same this week.
+ As a former contributor to the late, lamented Lies of Our Times (LOOT), not much shocks me about the New York Times anymore. But describing the daily massacres of starving Palestinians at food stations as a “crude form of crowd control” made me gasp in astonishment…
+ International Crisis Group: “Gaza is tipping from mass starvation toward mass death.”
+ The NYT has apparently recruited new editors from the ranks of the health insurance industry, who have used their vast experience deny claims to now minimize the import of Palestinian kids who’ve died of starvation by claiming they have “pre-existing conditions”–the same vile assertion made by Holocaust deniers about Anne Frank, that typhus, not the Nazis, killed her.
+ The NYT’s clarification is a more delicate way of saying what the German journalist Tobias Huch, in a full-frontal embrace of his nation’s Nazi “past,” said explicitly…
+ The Washington Post published the names and ages of more than 18,500 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Palestinian kids have been killed at the rate of one-an-hour since October 13, 2023. At least 900 Palestinian infants were killed before reaching their first birthday.
+ The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen reporting on an Israeli aid drop flight over Gaza: “Israelis don’t want us to film outside the window at the devastation in Gaza…communities in the north of Gaza are flat, there’s nothing left…Israel will not allow reporters, like myself, to enter Gaza to report the story and they don’t want us to see it.”
+ More than two-thirds of Democratic primary voters in NYC agree with Zohran Mamdani’s positions on Israel, including arresting Netanyahu. 57% say they might oppose Dems who don’t endorse Mamdani for mayor, including the party’s two Brooklyn-based leaders in Congress.
+ Trump on the Israeli (no one ever mentions the 3350 Palestinian hostages held by Israel) hostages: “Not one person said there was any love from anybody. In other words, you have hundreds of people, and you see it in the movies where somebody is a prisoner and somebody is helping. You even see it with Germany, where people would be led into a house and live in an attic in secret. I said Did you see anything like did they wink at you, say Don’t worry, you’ll be okay?”
+ Jonathon Sumpton, a historian and former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from 2012 to 2018, has written an important legal essay on whether Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza constitutes the ultimate war crimes, concluding:
I sometimes wonder what Israel’s defenders would regard as unacceptable, if the current level of Israeli violence in Gaza is not enough. It is impossible for any decent person to be unmoved by the scale of arbitrarily imposed human suffering, or the spectacle of a powerful army brutally assaulting a population already on its knees. This is not self-defence. It is not even the kind of collateral damage which can be unavoidable in war. It is collective punishment, in other words, revenge, visited not just on Hamas but on an entire population. It is, in short, a war crime.
+ Note the date on this article in JEWISH CURRENTS by the JEWISH-ISRAELI genocide scholar and historian Raz Segal…The intent (mens rea) to commit genocide was clear a week into the war and no one–not the UN, the US, the UK, France, Russia, or China–has stopped them in the 665 days since.
+ An Israeli soldier told the leading Israeli newspaper, YNet, about forces shooting civilians near a hospital and abducting children:
I was stationed in front of a hospital in Gaza and it took a few days until the company commander ordered not to shoot the elderly and children. For a few days, that’s what happened. It was clear that it was bad. But you are under the influence–some acted out of a sense of revenge, some were very afraid and some were simply tired and when you are tired you don’t think. There was an incident that stuck with me. We took teenagers and used them as human shields. They walked in front of the force, opened doors in case there was an explosive device or terrorists. We just took people from the humanitarian axis. The whole time they were with us, they were blindfolded and handcuffed. You have to take them to the bathroom and open their underwear and you see them shaking.
+ Emnan Abdelhadi: “Every editor who canceled a story about Palestine brought us here. Every boss who censored an employee. Everyone who said “not this way” to protesters. Every university admin calling the cops. Bloody. All your hands are bloody, and we will never forget.”
+ After two years of silence in the face of a genocide, Obama finally offers his version of “thoughts and prayers”…
+ Mouin Rabbani: “Samantha Power, who has built her career and reputation as a fearless and determined opponent of genocide, has, after almost two years, put out a statement about the Gaza Genocide:
End of statement.”
+ Maine Senator Angus King: “I cannot defend the indefensible…I am through supporting the actions of the current Israeli government and will advocate—and vote—for an end to any United States support whatsoever until there is a demonstrable change in the direction of Israeli policy.”
+ Keir Starmer now says Israel has gone too far and is demanding a ceasefire. Starmer also warned Netanyahu that the UK would vote to regognize Palestinian statehood, unless Israel opened Gaza to humanitarian aid. But this well-after the last minute reversal shouldn’t save Starmer from The Hague…
+ There should be a number affixed to the names of professional Tweeters for the number of days it took them to cover their ass on the genocide taking place in Gaza. Piers Morgan’s number is: 657.
+ Support for Israel’s genocidal military actions in Gaza has collapsed among U.S. adults, with only about one-third approving, according to Gallup.— a drop of 20% from the beginning of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, when about half of Americans approved of Israel’s operation.
+ High school grads: 63%-28% disapprove
+ <$50k income: 65%-26% disapprove
+ Non-white: 71%-18% disapprove
+ Under 35: *82%-9%* disapprove
+ He just can’t say the word…Sen. Bernie Sanders on Gaza: “Genocide is a legal term. What is going on now clearly is absolutely horrific…But the important point is not what you call it — it is horror — the answer is what the hell do we do about it? Should the United States taxpayer should your taxpayer dollars go to support a government that is doing it? That is the most important issue.”
+ Sanders was able to force the Senate to vote on a new bill that would halt US “offensive” weapons sales to Israel. The bill failed, with all Republicans voting against it, but for the first time, garnered a majority of Democrats, including three top recipients of AIPAC largesse: Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Tammy Baldwin, all of whom received over $265,000 in 2024. So, there’s a sliver of hope.
+ Here are the 14 Democratic senators who voted to continue sending weapons to Israel for use in a genocide:
+ My late pal the environmental activist Larry Tuttle grew so disgusted with Ron Wyden’s habitual sell-outs that he started holding weekly “Weenie Roasts” on Friday afternoons outside Wyden’s Portland office.
+ In Gaza, no one can hear the shots now, just the screams…
+ As of Saturday morning, 169 Palestinians have been killed by Israel’s policy of enforced starvation since Oct 2023, including 93 children.
+ Bob Vylan: “Watching politicians and mainstream media suddenly change their rhetoric on the genocide makes me feel like I’ve truly gone crazy. Can someone please confirm that a few weeks ago they villainized us on the front pages for being against this while they were very much pro-genocide?”
+ Rashid Khalidi has canceled his fall course at Columbia in protest of the university’s deal with the Trump administration and the adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-semitism:
Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning into a shadow of its former self, an anti-university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls, a place of fear and loathing, where faculty and students are told from on high what they can teach and say, under penalty of severe sanctions. Disgracefully, all of this is being done to cover up one of the greatest crimes of this century, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a crime in which Columbia’s leadership is now fully complicit.
+ On Monday, Yuval Abraham, co-director of No Other Land: “An Israeli settler just shot Odeh Hathalin in the lungs, a remarkable activist who helped us film No Other Land in Masafer Yatta. Residents identified Yinon Levi, sanctioned by the EU and US, as the shooter. This is him in the video firing like crazy.” A few hours later, Yuval posted that “Odeh died. Murdered.” On Tuesday, Yuval said, “After killing Odeh [Hathalin], Yinon [Levi] pointed at his family and instructed soldiers to arrest 4 of them. They are still jailed while he was just released on house arrest. A system which punishes the victims (who are under military law) and rewards the shooter (who is under civilian law).”
Odeh Hathalin.
+ The Israeli police are still refusing to release Odeh’s body back to his loved ones. Sixty women, from his village, led by his mother-in-law, are now on hunger strike. Listen to his courageous mother-in-law, Fatme Hathaleen:
We, the women, are on hunger strike. Sixty of us. We have been on strike since Thursday until now. Until they return the body of Awdeh (Odeh) and we can give him a proper burial that he deserves. I am Fatme Hathaleen from Umm al-Kheir, Awdeh’s mother-in-law, mother of his wife, not just the mother of his wife. I’m like his mother from the day he was born. He and my sons were like brothers. He is very dear to me. Awdeh was very compassionate and kind. He was targeted by the settler who shot him, deliberately. He was an activist and a great man. Our hearts are in pain for him. We already had dizziness and fainting from hunger and thirst. Doesn’t matter. Whatever happens to us, we will continue until he is returned to us and we are able to bury him without conditions, a funeral he deserves, whatever the occupation forces will do, whatever the settlers do. We will persist.
+ Two months ago, Odeh Hadalin was invited to the US at the invitation of Jewish groups—he was detained at San Francisco International Airport and deported without explanation.
Odeh’s killer, Yimon Levy, had been removed from the sanctions list by Trump.
+ On Tuesday, Brazil’s foreign chancellor, Mauro Vieira, announced diplomatic, commercial and military retaliation measures against Israel:
“When faced with credible allegations of genocide, invoking international law is not enough—we must enforce it with determination.”
+ US labor leader Christian Smalls, co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union, was seized by the IDF while trying to bring food into Gaza on the latest Freedom Flotilla. After he was taken into Israeli custody, Smalls was beaten by seven uniformed Israelis, who also choked him and kicked him in the legs.
+ Rep. Summer Lee: “Chris Smalls—a Black American labor leader—was trying to feed Palestinians being starved in Gaza. The IDF detained and beat him for it. This assault must not go unnoticed and he must be freed immediately. Israel must be held to account. Let aid through. End the genocide.” (Smalls was finally released by the Israelis on Thursday and is now in Jordan.)
+ “Wow!” 147 out of 193 nations have (or soon plan to) recognized Palestinian statehood, including India, Vietnam, the UK, and half the EU nations you just boasted about cutting a trade deal with…
+ The countries that haven’t endorsed Palestinian statehood or cut off arms supplies and trade with Israel by this point are the countries most likely to put their own and neighboring populations under military occupation.
+ Jeff Shuhrke: “For the crime of being right *all along*, countless young people in the US have been physically attacked, doxxed, smeared, detained, suspended, expelled & denied their diplomas. They’ve more than earned the right to decide who is & isn’t welcome in the anti-genocide ‘coalition.'”
+ Everyone opposed the death camps after the Soviets liberated them…
+ In the latest Gallup poll, only 8% of Democratic Party voters support Israel’s actions in Gaza. Meanwhile, 88% of Democratic Party elected officials support Israel’s actions in Gaza.
+ Ben-Gvir is not some whacko “outlier”. He’s the Security Minister for Israel. He speaks for the regime as much as Netanyahu does.
+ Yet, we have politicians in the US Capitol building who are to the right of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir…
+ The Dutch security agency accused Israel of attempting to influence politics, public opinion through disinformation, raising concerns of pressure on international justice institutions
+ He’s smirking, but he’s not joking. It’s happening.
Brad Lander: “The mass starvation & killing of Palestinians in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli gov’t is a chillul hashem, a desecration of God. Jewish leaders who criticized Zohran Mamdani for three words he doesn’t use should raise their voices loudly here as well.”
+ I didn’t know much about Lander until his arrest by ICE while trying to protect people showing up for their immigration hearings. Than his principled alliance with Mamdani. Now speaking out forcefully against the silence of Jewish leaders in the US on the enforced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. Impressive person, who could and should emerge as a leading political figure in the progressive movement.
+ 225 murdered Palestinian journalists later…
+ Ichak Kalderon Adizes: “If I, a Shoah survivor, shout out, I’ll be called antisemitic. Even when the criticism is aimed at the war in Gaza, which former Israeli defense and security chiefs now call futile, the response is always the same.”
+ Let’s give the last word to Ms. Rachel, still undefeated…
Zohran Mamdani. (Photo: Bryan Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons)
The Meaning of Zohran Mamdani’s Victory
New York Won’t Have Socialism But Let’s Feel Good Anyway
June 29, 2025
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/02/a-world-in-search-of-its-conscience/
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