Our Wednesday News Analysis | War on Children: Gaza kids are unvaccinated, hungry and orphaned

Palestinian children carry pots of soup near a food distribution point in the Jabalia refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip on August 21, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas.
Image Credit: AFP

The Israeli war on Gaza has become a war on Palestinian children. This was as true on Oct. 7 as it is today.

"Of the 309 schools, 290 have been destroyed as a result of Israeli bombing.
This has left 630,000 students with no access to education.

While homes and schools can be rebuilt,
the precious lives of killed children cannot be restored.

Is there an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy
the Palestinian education system,
an action known as ‘scholastic side’ …?”

On Aug. 17, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a seven-day ceasefire to allow children in Gaza to be vaccinated against polio. “I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away, guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign,” he said.

The first such case of the devastating epidemic was discovered in the town of Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

“It is scientifically known that for every 200 virus infections, only one will show the full symptoms of polio, while the remaining cases may present mild symptoms such as a cold or a slight fever,” Palestinian Health Minister Majed Abu Ramadan said that same day.

This means that the virus may have spread to all parts of Gaza Strip, where the entire healthcare system has been largely destroyed.

The ten-month-old Palestinian baby who was first to contract the poliovirus, like many more, never received a vaccination dose against the disease.

To prevent an even greater disaster in war-stricken Gaza, the World Health Organisation (WHO), along with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said that they have to vaccinate 640,000 children throughout Gaza within a short period...

Read more: War on Children: Gaza kids are unvaccinated, hungry and orphaned

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CEASEFIRE NEGOTIATIONS AS A WEAPON OF WAR

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/08/ceasefire-negotiations-as-a-weapon-of-war/

By Malak Hijazi
Published August 25, 2024

Our hope for a ceasefire has been weaponized against us. Every time politicians issue statements, mediators shuttle between capitals, headlines promise a breakthrough, and then it all falls apart. And every time, my hope breaks me.

The aftermath of an airstrike in Nuseirat refugee camp, February 28, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)

After each failure of ceasefire negotiations,
I question the purpose of the ongoing war:

What does Israel honestly want?

A regional war?
The complete eradication of Palestinians in Gaza?
The forced displacement of Palestinians into Egypt?

What plans are being devised behind closed doors?

I find myself overanalyzing every statement
from Israeli leaders and American presidential candidates.

Our lives seem to be controlled by criminal psychopaths."

I have lost count of how many times I have clung to the hope of a ceasefire, only to watch it crumble into dust. As the war in Gaza stretches into the summer of 2024, the promise of ending this suffering has become nothing more than a cruel illusion. Every time the news mentions new negotiations, I feel a flicker of hope — a tiny, fragile flame that maybe, just maybe, this time will be different. But deep down, I know the pattern all too well.

As time seemed to stand still in October, my life was suspended in a state of uncertainty. I made a list of what I would do on the first day after the war ends: reconnect with loved ones in Southern Gaza whom I cannot meet now, take a deep breath of freedom, contemplate what lies ahead, and grieve for those lost. In Gaza, we don’t have the privilege of properly mourning. Our days are consumed by an unforgiving routine: evacuating from one place to another, listening to the news, carrying water, searching for food, and gathering wood to make a fire. Soon, the familiar pattern emerges —negotiations collapse, the blame game begins, and hope slips through my fingers like sand.

Every month follows the same script: politicians issue statements, mediators shuttle between capitals, and headlines tout the promise of a breakthrough. There’s some progress, then a significant step forward, but Israel holds firm, and it all falls apart...

Read more: Ceasefire negotiations as a weapon of war

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ZIONISM IS THE RACIST IDEOLOGY THAT DESTROYS, KILLS AND PERSECUTES

Source: Middle East Monitor
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240830-zionism-is-the-racist-ideology-that-destroys-kills-and-persecutes/

By Sayid Marcos Tenório
Published August 30, 2024

People, including a young woman holding a sign that reads: ‘Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism,’ chant slogans and carry Palestinian flags as they arrive at Potsdamer Platz during a “Freedom for Palestine” protest march that drew thousands of participants on November 04, 2023 in Berlin, Germany. [Sean Gallup/Getty Images]

"Israel and its proxies know that they have already lost
the battle in Gaza, Lebanon, and world public opinion.

The only achievements Israel can boast of are war crimes, genocide, the mass murder of children and women, the destruction of infrastructure, and the elimination of all aspects of life in the Gaza Strip."

The more than ten months of massacre, destruction, and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip have brought to the news topics hitherto restricted to academia and small circles. There is always talk of the “Zionist regime” or “Zionist occupation” of Israel, which is a mix of state, colonial enclave, and Zionist entity. The actions of Israel showed the world the true face of Zionism, that racist ideology that resembles Nazism by its methods and its deeds, not only in Palestine but in various regions of the world.

Let it be clear that Zionism and Judaism are different things. The practice of this ancient and respectable religion has nothing to do with the ideology born in Europe at the end of the 19th century. Being a practitioner of Judaism does not bind its adherents to the fascist practices of Zionism, which appropriated Judaism as a way to support its racist and supremacist theses when we know that not all Jews are Zionists or support Israel’s atrocities.

After all, what is Zionism, this markedly colonialist, racist, fundamentalist, extremist, ultra-nationalist, xenophobic supremacist, murderous, arabophobic, Islamophobic, Christianophobic, anti-Semitic, genocidal, infanticidal, interventionist, expansionist, militarist, organ trafficker ideology?...

Read more: Zionism is the racist ideology that destroys, kills and persecutes