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And foreign direct investments too.
Bangladesh Defense
Saif
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Yes of course. Any grandiose plan for Bangladesh to play in the geopolitical arena is a fool's errand, nothing more.
As we say in Bengali, small-time Adrak-seller should not worry about port news and shipping movements (Adar byaparir jahaazer khobor nia luv nai).
We are not at that stage yet.
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Saif
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Can nothing stop Netanyahu’s genocidal mission?
For the past five months, those with a conscience have been asking: what will it take for Israel to stop its genocide against Palestinians?
Can nothing stop Netanyahu’s genocidal mission?
Israel must agree to a ceasefire immediately
For the past five months, those with a conscience have been asking: what will it take for Israel to stop its genocide against Palestinians? The UN's repeated calls for humanitarian action, mass protests across the world, and even the US pointing fingers at the country—all have, so far, failed to deter Israel. And now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that his state will push on with its offensive "against Hamas," intending to ravage the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
Far from changing his stance, Netanyahu seems even more determined. "There is international pressure and it's growing, but particularly when the international pressure rises, we must close ranks," he said. "We need to stand together against the attempts to stop the war." He added that Israel must push back against a "calculated attempt" to blame it for Hamas' crimes. This begs the question: how are killing over 30,000 Palestinians (mostly women and children), instigating a potential famine, and turning a whole region into rubble not Israel's crimes?
For the past five months, those with a conscience have been asking: what will it take for Israel to stop its genocide against Palestinians? The UN's repeated calls for humanitarian action, mass protests across the world, and even the US pointing fingers at the country—all have, so far, failed to deter Israel. And now, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that his state will push on with its offensive "against Hamas," intending to ravage the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
Far from changing his stance, Netanyahu seems even more determined. "There is international pressure and it's growing, but particularly when the international pressure rises, we must close ranks," he said. "We need to stand together against the attempts to stop the war." He added that Israel must push back against a "calculated attempt" to blame it for Hamas' crimes. This begs the question: how are killing over 30,000 Palestinians (mostly women and children), instigating a potential famine, and turning a whole region into rubble not Israel's crimes?
With Ramadan just a few days away, the whole world is hoping for an end to this atrocity. Unfortunately, talks of a ceasefire still show no sign of progress, as both Hamas and Israel refuse to capitulate. Hamas has given certain conditions: a ceasefire must be in place before hostages are freed, Israeli forces must leave Gaza, and all Gazans must be able to return to homes they have fled. Israel, however, merely wants a pause in fighting to get hostages out of Gaza and more aid in, and says it will not end its onslaught before Hamas is "eliminated." In short, Israel has proposed a delay of Palestinian deaths—an insult more than an offer. And yet, US President Joe Biden has said the deal is in the hands of Hamas.
History has shown how Israeli oppression ramps up during Ramadan. This year, the tyranny is on a whole new scale, as Netanyahu has announced that there will be no peace during this holy month. It's a depressing irony that right before the month of fasting, a large portion of Gaza's population is on the brink of famine, according to UN agencies. And it's infuriating when one reads that for Israel, this is merely a strategic "starvation campaign." As one UN expert put it, "Israel is not only denying and restricting the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel is destroying the food system in Gaza."
For 1.4 million Palestinians, this might just be the worst Ramadan they will have ever witnessed. For the sake of so many innocent, helpless, and unfortunate lives, we sincerely hope Israel will discover some humanity in itself, and a miracle will take place in the form of a ceasefire.
History has shown how Israeli oppression ramps up during Ramadan. This year, the tyranny is on a whole new scale, as Netanyahu has announced that there will be no peace during this holy month. It's a depressing irony that right before the month of fasting, a large portion of Gaza's population is on the brink of famine, according to UN agencies. And it's infuriating when one reads that for Israel, this is merely a strategic "starvation campaign." As one UN expert put it, "Israel is not only denying and restricting the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel is destroying the food system in Gaza."
For 1.4 million Palestinians, this might just be the worst Ramadan they will have ever witnessed. For the sake of so many innocent, helpless, and unfortunate lives, we sincerely hope Israel will discover some humanity in itself, and a miracle will take place in the form of a ceasefire.
Saif
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Two-state solution for lasting peace highlighted in Munich conference
Top international organisations and government officials called for a permanent settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the ongoing 60th Munich Security Conference, saying that only the two-state solution can make the region achieve lasting security....
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Two-state solution for lasting peace highlighted in Munich conference
Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha/ Xinhua . MUNICH, Germany | Published: 12:08, Feb 18,2024
-- BSS photo.
Top international organisations and government officials called for a permanent settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the ongoing 60th Munich Security Conference, saying that only the two-state solution can make the region achieve lasting security.
Addressing the conference at its opening ceremony on Friday, United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres reiterated his call for peace and better global order, highlighting the two-state solution to the crisis.
He said that the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages and a humanitarian ceasefire are the only way to massively scale up aid delivery in Gaza, and thus will lay the foundation for concrete and irreversible steps towards a two-state solution.
Josep Borrell, the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, expressed strong concern over the humanitarian situation and the wider consequences for the region. He emphasized the need to lower regional tensions and promote international efforts towards a two-state solution.
During a meeting here with Guterres, Borrell also underlined the need for increased EU cooperation with the UN in striving towards a two-state solution.
In his address at the conference, German chancellor Olaf Scholz also supported the two-state solution, saying that is the key for both Israel and Palestine to get out of the conflict and have a peaceful future.
Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said at a penal discussion that eventually, there has to be a permanent fix, a long-term fix to the conflict, otherwise ‘we’re going to see a recurrence.’
‘India has long believed in a two-state solution. We have maintained that position for many decades. And I think today many more countries in the world feel that not just the two-state solution is necessary, but it is more urgent than it was before,’ he said.
Saudi foreign minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud told the audience at the MSC that he was firmly convinced that the only pathway towards security and stability for everyone in the region is through a Palestinian state.
Addressing a panel discussion on the Middle East situation, Faisal said that the greater the consensus in the international community on the two-state solution, the closer the world will get to it.
‘We agree that the two-state solution is the right solution. And it’s now time to put all of our efforts into making that happen,’ he stressed, adding that ‘we cannot hold the future of our region, the future of our generations hostage to politics or ideology, and we must push to move forward.’
Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry said at the panel discussion that part of the reasons behind the failure of talks on the two-state solution in the past was the lack of political will.
‘I think we are totally committed and convinced that this is the only solution, a viable solution that can bring the region out of this cycle of violence and create normal conditions for everyone to prosper and to live in peace,’ he said.
Qatar’s prime minister and minister of foreign affairs Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said that what’s happening now represents ‘a wake-up call’ that the situation was not sustainable and ‘we need to step up and to look at a better future for the people in the region.’
The two-state solution guarantees an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Saif
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Prof Yunus for urgent action to create Palestine state
Calling upon all parties to cease hostilities, Nobel Laureate professor Muhammad Yunus in a statement on Sunday said that the solution to the long standing...
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Prof Yunus for urgent action to create Palestine state
Staff Correspondent | Published: 21:29, Oct 22,2023
Nobel Laureate professor Muhammad Yunus
Calling upon all parties to cease hostilities, Nobel Laureate professor Muhammad Yunus in a statement on Sunday said that the solution to the long standing conflict between Israel and Palestine lies in the creation of two states in keeping with a United Nations resolution.
‘The solution right now is the creation of two states something which the United Nations has a resolution on but which remains unimplemented. There is no way to escape from this resolution if we want to bring peace to the region,’ he said.
Underlining the need for creating the state of Palestine with extreme urgency, he said that the key actor in bringing this to reality was the United States.
‘If the US moves fast others will follow. The Biden administration must lead the world on this vital and urgent issue without delay,’ he made the appeal in the statement sent by the Yunus Centre in Dhaka.
The conflict between Israel and Palestine was a very old problem which has become much more complicated now because of the treatment that the people of Palestine have been receiving from Israel, Professor Yunus mentioned.
‘It has been brewing over time and suddenly recently it became very explosive and unacceptable against any civilised standard,’ said the statement.
It said the top-most priority right now was to implement the long ignored UN resolution on creating two states.
‘Otherwise we don't know where this conflict will lead us to. It has the potential to set the whole region on fire and suck in a larger part of the world into that fire,’ said the Nobel peace prize winner economist and entrepreneur.
He urgently called upon ‘all parties engaged in the conflict to immediately cease hostilities, ensure the safety and well-being of the innocent children and civilians caught in the midst of this crisis’.
‘It is imperative to facilitate and expedite the delivery of vital humanitarian aid to the suffering population. It is time to focus on saving human lives, protect dignity and get to work on a permanent solution,’ he said.
He called upon all concerned to join hands to put an end to the suffering, ensure uninterrupted humanitarian access, and foster an environment conducive to meaningful peace negotiations and work out the modalities to create Palestine state at the fastest pace.
‘In this day and age, we should collectively recognise that war and bloodshed are inconsistent with the values and progress of our modern civilisation,’ he said.
Professor Yunus said that the world was watching and it was their shared responsibility to work towards a future where both Palestine and Israel can co-exist in harmony and peace together with friendly collaboration.
Staff Correspondent | Published: 21:29, Oct 22,2023
Nobel Laureate professor Muhammad Yunus
Calling upon all parties to cease hostilities, Nobel Laureate professor Muhammad Yunus in a statement on Sunday said that the solution to the long standing conflict between Israel and Palestine lies in the creation of two states in keeping with a United Nations resolution.
‘The solution right now is the creation of two states something which the United Nations has a resolution on but which remains unimplemented. There is no way to escape from this resolution if we want to bring peace to the region,’ he said.
Underlining the need for creating the state of Palestine with extreme urgency, he said that the key actor in bringing this to reality was the United States.
‘If the US moves fast others will follow. The Biden administration must lead the world on this vital and urgent issue without delay,’ he made the appeal in the statement sent by the Yunus Centre in Dhaka.
The conflict between Israel and Palestine was a very old problem which has become much more complicated now because of the treatment that the people of Palestine have been receiving from Israel, Professor Yunus mentioned.
‘It has been brewing over time and suddenly recently it became very explosive and unacceptable against any civilised standard,’ said the statement.
It said the top-most priority right now was to implement the long ignored UN resolution on creating two states.
‘Otherwise we don't know where this conflict will lead us to. It has the potential to set the whole region on fire and suck in a larger part of the world into that fire,’ said the Nobel peace prize winner economist and entrepreneur.
He urgently called upon ‘all parties engaged in the conflict to immediately cease hostilities, ensure the safety and well-being of the innocent children and civilians caught in the midst of this crisis’.
‘It is imperative to facilitate and expedite the delivery of vital humanitarian aid to the suffering population. It is time to focus on saving human lives, protect dignity and get to work on a permanent solution,’ he said.
He called upon all concerned to join hands to put an end to the suffering, ensure uninterrupted humanitarian access, and foster an environment conducive to meaningful peace negotiations and work out the modalities to create Palestine state at the fastest pace.
‘In this day and age, we should collectively recognise that war and bloodshed are inconsistent with the values and progress of our modern civilisation,’ he said.
Professor Yunus said that the world was watching and it was their shared responsibility to work towards a future where both Palestine and Israel can co-exist in harmony and peace together with friendly collaboration.
Saif
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The real Gaza death toll
SINCE the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on October 7, 2023, (an unexplained collapse of Israel’s...
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The real Gaza death toll
Published: 00:00, Mar 09,2024
A medic carries an injured Palestinian child into Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli airstrike on October 11, 2023. — Palestinian News & Information Agency/Atia Darwish
Ralph Nader says it matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Gaza health ministry’s undercount
SINCE the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on October 7, 2023, (an unexplained collapse of Israel’s defensive capabilities), 2.3 million utterly defenseless Palestinians in the tiny crowded Gaza enclave have been on the receiving end of over 65,000 bombs and missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.
The extreme right-wing Netanyahu regime has enforced its declared siege of, in its genocidal words, ‘no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, no medicine.’
The relentless bombing has destroyed apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks, critical water mains — just about everything.
The US-equipped Israeli war machine has even uprooted agricultural fields, including thousands of olive trees on one farm; bulldozed many cemeteries; and bombed civilians fleeing on Israeli orders, while obstructing the few trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egypt.
With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000?
With 5,000 babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine, and clean water for any of their children, severe scepticism about the Hamas’s health ministry’s official count is warranted.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death and injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting them, and not building shelters. Hamas grossly underestimated the savage war crimes by the vengeful, occupying Israeli military superpower fully and unconditionally backed by the U.S. military superpower.
The health ministry is intentionally conservative, citing that its death toll came from reports only of those named as deceased by hospitals and morgues. But as the weeks turned into months, blasted, disabled hospitals and morgues cannot keep up with the bodies, or cannot count those slain laying on roadsides in allies and beneath building debris. Yet the Health Ministry remains conservative and the “official” rising civilian fatality and injury count continues to be uncritically reported by both friend and foe of this devastating Israeli state terrorism.
Predictions of human catastrophe
IT WAS especially astonishing to see the most progressive groups and writers routinely use the same figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza as did the governments and outside groups backing the one-sided war on Gaza. All this despite predictions of a human catastrophe in the Gaza Strip almost every day since October 7, 2023, by arms of the United Nations, other besieged international relief agencies on the ground, eyewitness accounts by medical personnel and many Israeli human rights groups and brave local journalists in that strip, the geographic size of Philadelphia. (Unguided Western and Israeli reporters and journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza by the Israeli government.)
Then came the December 29, 2023, opinion piece in The Guardian by the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Devi Sridhar. She predicted half a million deaths in 2024 if conditions continue unabated.
In recent days, the situation has become more dire. In the March 2, 2024, Washington Post, reporter Ishaan Tharoor writes:
‘The bulk of Gaza’s more than 2 million people face the prospect of famine — a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known. Aid groups have been pointing to Israel restricting the flow of assistance into the territory as a major driver of the crisis. Some prominent Israeli officials openly champion stymying these transfers of aid.’
Tharoor quotes Jan Egeland, chief of the Norwegian Refugee Council: ‘We must be clear: civilians in Gaza are falling sick from hunger and thirst because of Israel’s entry restrictions’, and ‘Life-saving supplies are being intentionally blocked, and women and children are paying the price.’
Martin Griffiths, the United Nations lead humanitarian officer, said, ‘Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.’
UN secretary general António Guterres, according to the Post, warned of an ‘“unknown number of people” — believed to be in the tens of thousands — lying under the rubble of buildings brought down by Israeli strikes.’
Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said, ‘All people in Gaza are at imminent risk of famine. Almost all are drinking salty and contaminated water. Healthcare across the territory is barely functioning’, and ‘Just imagine what this means for the wounded, and people suffering infectious-disease outbreaks… many are already believed to be starving.’
UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee, the Palestinian Red Crescent, and Doctors Without Borders are all relating that the same catastrophic conditions are getting worse fast.
Yet, and get this, in this article, the Post still stuck with the ‘more than 30,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the ongoing war began.’
Just like the entire mass media, many governments, even the independent media and critics of the war would have us accept that between 98 per cent and 99 per cent of Gaza’s entire population has survived — albeit the sick, injured, and more Palestinians about to die. This is lethally improbable!
From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.
Imagine Americans, if this powerful US-made weaponry was fired on the besieged, homeless, trapped people of Philadelphia, do you think that only 30,000 of that city’s 1.5 million people would have been killed?
Daily circumstantial evidence of the deliberate Israeli targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructures requires more reliable epidemiological estimates of casualties.
It matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the health ministry’s undercount. It matters for elevating the urgency for a permanent cease-fire, and direct and massive humanitarian aid by the US and other countries, bypassing the sadistic cruelty against innocent families of the Israeli siege. It matters for the columnists and editorial writers who have been self-censoring, with some, like the Post’s Charles Lane, fictionally claiming that Israel’s military doesn’t ‘intentionally target civilians.’ It matters for accountability under international law.
Above all, it lets weak Secretary of State Antony Blinken and duplicitous president Biden be less servile when Netanyahu dismisses the low death toll by taunting them: What about Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
As a percentage of the total population being killed, Gaza can expose the Israeli ruling racist extremists to a stronger rebuttal for ending US co-belligerent complicity in this never-to-be-forgotten slaughter of mostly children and women. (The terrifying PTSD on civilians, especially children, will continue for years.)
Respecting the more accurate casualty toll of Palestinian children, mothers, and fathers presses harder for permanent cease-fires and the process of recovery and reparations for the survivors of their holocaust.
Published: 00:00, Mar 09,2024
A medic carries an injured Palestinian child into Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli airstrike on October 11, 2023. — Palestinian News & Information Agency/Atia Darwish
Ralph Nader says it matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Gaza health ministry’s undercount
SINCE the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on October 7, 2023, (an unexplained collapse of Israel’s defensive capabilities), 2.3 million utterly defenseless Palestinians in the tiny crowded Gaza enclave have been on the receiving end of over 65,000 bombs and missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.
The extreme right-wing Netanyahu regime has enforced its declared siege of, in its genocidal words, ‘no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, no medicine.’
The relentless bombing has destroyed apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks, critical water mains — just about everything.
The US-equipped Israeli war machine has even uprooted agricultural fields, including thousands of olive trees on one farm; bulldozed many cemeteries; and bombed civilians fleeing on Israeli orders, while obstructing the few trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egypt.
With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm, and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000?
With 5,000 babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine, and clean water for any of their children, severe scepticism about the Hamas’s health ministry’s official count is warranted.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death and injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting them, and not building shelters. Hamas grossly underestimated the savage war crimes by the vengeful, occupying Israeli military superpower fully and unconditionally backed by the U.S. military superpower.
The health ministry is intentionally conservative, citing that its death toll came from reports only of those named as deceased by hospitals and morgues. But as the weeks turned into months, blasted, disabled hospitals and morgues cannot keep up with the bodies, or cannot count those slain laying on roadsides in allies and beneath building debris. Yet the Health Ministry remains conservative and the “official” rising civilian fatality and injury count continues to be uncritically reported by both friend and foe of this devastating Israeli state terrorism.
Predictions of human catastrophe
IT WAS especially astonishing to see the most progressive groups and writers routinely use the same figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza as did the governments and outside groups backing the one-sided war on Gaza. All this despite predictions of a human catastrophe in the Gaza Strip almost every day since October 7, 2023, by arms of the United Nations, other besieged international relief agencies on the ground, eyewitness accounts by medical personnel and many Israeli human rights groups and brave local journalists in that strip, the geographic size of Philadelphia. (Unguided Western and Israeli reporters and journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza by the Israeli government.)
Then came the December 29, 2023, opinion piece in The Guardian by the chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, Devi Sridhar. She predicted half a million deaths in 2024 if conditions continue unabated.
In recent days, the situation has become more dire. In the March 2, 2024, Washington Post, reporter Ishaan Tharoor writes:
‘The bulk of Gaza’s more than 2 million people face the prospect of famine — a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known. Aid groups have been pointing to Israel restricting the flow of assistance into the territory as a major driver of the crisis. Some prominent Israeli officials openly champion stymying these transfers of aid.’
Tharoor quotes Jan Egeland, chief of the Norwegian Refugee Council: ‘We must be clear: civilians in Gaza are falling sick from hunger and thirst because of Israel’s entry restrictions’, and ‘Life-saving supplies are being intentionally blocked, and women and children are paying the price.’
Martin Griffiths, the United Nations lead humanitarian officer, said, ‘Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.’
UN secretary general António Guterres, according to the Post, warned of an ‘“unknown number of people” — believed to be in the tens of thousands — lying under the rubble of buildings brought down by Israeli strikes.’
Volker Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said, ‘All people in Gaza are at imminent risk of famine. Almost all are drinking salty and contaminated water. Healthcare across the territory is barely functioning’, and ‘Just imagine what this means for the wounded, and people suffering infectious-disease outbreaks… many are already believed to be starving.’
UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee, the Palestinian Red Crescent, and Doctors Without Borders are all relating that the same catastrophic conditions are getting worse fast.
Yet, and get this, in this article, the Post still stuck with the ‘more than 30,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the ongoing war began.’
Just like the entire mass media, many governments, even the independent media and critics of the war would have us accept that between 98 per cent and 99 per cent of Gaza’s entire population has survived — albeit the sick, injured, and more Palestinians about to die. This is lethally improbable!
From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.
Imagine Americans, if this powerful US-made weaponry was fired on the besieged, homeless, trapped people of Philadelphia, do you think that only 30,000 of that city’s 1.5 million people would have been killed?
Daily circumstantial evidence of the deliberate Israeli targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructures requires more reliable epidemiological estimates of casualties.
It matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the health ministry’s undercount. It matters for elevating the urgency for a permanent cease-fire, and direct and massive humanitarian aid by the US and other countries, bypassing the sadistic cruelty against innocent families of the Israeli siege. It matters for the columnists and editorial writers who have been self-censoring, with some, like the Post’s Charles Lane, fictionally claiming that Israel’s military doesn’t ‘intentionally target civilians.’ It matters for accountability under international law.
Above all, it lets weak Secretary of State Antony Blinken and duplicitous president Biden be less servile when Netanyahu dismisses the low death toll by taunting them: What about Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
As a percentage of the total population being killed, Gaza can expose the Israeli ruling racist extremists to a stronger rebuttal for ending US co-belligerent complicity in this never-to-be-forgotten slaughter of mostly children and women. (The terrifying PTSD on civilians, especially children, will continue for years.)
Respecting the more accurate casualty toll of Palestinian children, mothers, and fathers presses harder for permanent cease-fires and the process of recovery and reparations for the survivors of their holocaust.
Saif
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Houthis target bulk carrier, US destroyers in Red Sea
American and French forces downed dozens of drones in the Red Sea on Saturday after Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis targeted bulk carrier Propel Fortune and US destroyers in the Gulf of Aden. The Houthis have been attacking ships in the Red Sea since November in what they say is a campaign of solidar
Houthis target bulk carrier, US destroyers in Red Sea
FE ONLINE DESKPublished :
Mar 09, 2024 22:34Updated :
Mar 09, 2024 23:04American and French forces downed dozens of drones in the Red Sea on Saturday after Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis targeted bulk carrier Propel Fortune and US destroyers in the Gulf of Aden.
The Houthis have been attacking ships in the Red Sea since November in what they say is a campaign of solidarity with Palestinians during Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza.
The group's military spokesman Yahya Sarea said in a televised speech on Saturday they targeted the cargo vessel and "a number of US war destroyers at the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with 37 drones".
US Navy ships and aircraft shot down 15 uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) by the Houthis in the Red Sea area, US Central Command (CENTCOM) said earlier on Saturday, Reuters reports.
The military was responding to a large-scale attack the group launched into the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden between 4 am and 6:30 am (1300-1530 GMT), CENTCOM said in a post on social media platform X.
The UAVs were determined to present "an imminent threat to merchant vessels, US Navy, and coalition ships in the region", it said.
A French warship and fighter jets also shot down four combat drones that were advancing towards naval vessels belonging to the European Aspides mission in the region, a French army statement said.
"This defensive action directly contributed to the protection of the cargo ship True Confidence, under the Barbados flag, which was struck on March 6 and is being towed, as well as other commercial vessels transiting in the area," it said.
France has a warship in the area as well as warplanes at its bases in Djibouti and the United Arab Emirates.
Three seafarers were killed on Wednesday in a missile strike by the Houthis on the Greek-operated True Confidence, the first civilian casualties since the group started its attacks on the key shipping route.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) also confirmed that there was an attempted attack on the Singapore-flagged Propel Fortune.
It said the shipping company reported two explosions in close vicinity of the bulk carrier, but all crew on board were safe and the vessel was proceeding to its next port of call.
"Based on sources, Propel Fortune, was likely targeted due to outdated US ownership data," UKMTO said in a statement.
Sarea said the Houthis would continue their attacks "until the aggression stops and the siege on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip is lifted".
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