ON A MORE SERIOUS NOTE:

Israel's military has struck a school near Deir al-Balah, a city in central Gaza, killing at least 30 Palestinians and injuring more than 100, according to the Hamas-run ministry of health. 

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said on Telegram that a Hamas command and control centre was embedded inside the Khadija School. 

The IDF added that Hamas used the compound as a hiding place to direct and plan attacks and store weapons. 

Gaza’s health ministry said footage showed the victims were civilians and most of them were children. The BBC verified a video that shows children among the injured.

Gaza's civil defence service said the school was sheltering displaced people. Hamas said in a statement on Telegram that the report the school was being used for military purposes was "false" and "displaced, sick and wounded people, most of whom were women and children" were killed.

Witness Mustafa Rafati told the BBC the explosion shook his body and he fell from the blow. Afraid, he said he ran inside the school and saw body parts in a "terrifying scene." 

"I was shocked," he said. 

Verified video from the scene shows a chaotic situation, with people running around a compound covered in rubble. Men carry two bloodied children in their arms while a woman hugs another, and a group carries an injured man on a stretcher. A body lies on the ground covered in a blanket. 

The IDF said that before the strike it took steps to reduce the risk to civilians "including the use of appropriate munitions, aerial surveillance and additional intelligence”. 

Gaza's health ministry said 53 people had been killed and 189 injured since Saturday morning due to IDF bombing in Deir al-Balah and the southern city of Khan Younis. 

The strike occurred as Israel continues its months-long military campaign in Gaza that has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza's health ministry. 

The war started when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, killing around 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage. 

EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell spoke out against the Deir al-Balah strike on X, writing that it occurred "at the same time an already very fragile population is asked to relocate again and again, with no end in sight". 

"Ceasefire has to happen now," he wrote. 

Ceasefire talks, led by the head of the CIA, Bill Burns, are scheduled to begin on Sunday between representatives from Qatar, Egypt and Israel. 

The Deir al-Balah strike was reported as the IDF ordered civilians on Saturday morning in southern parts of Khan Younis to evacuate to an "adjusted humanitarian area" in al-Mawasi, a region along the coast.

The IDF said it was about to “forcefully operate” after reporting “significant” rocket fire towards Israel from southern Khan Younis and “precise intelligence indicating that Hamas has embedded” infrastructure in the humanitarian area. The Israeli military warned civilians that “remaining in this area has become dangerous”.

The IDF released maps showing a further reduced humanitarian area in al-Mawasi. The military shrank the zone on Monday when it ordered the evacuation of part of the humanitarian area ahead of an operation against Palestinian fighters who had apparently regrouped there.

After the evacuation orders, Gaza's health ministry said at least 70 people were killed by Israeli strikes around Khan Younis.

Also on Saturday, in the West Bank, a 17-year-old and a 24-year-old were killed and 22 people were injured in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus as a result of Israeli military action, the Palestinian Authority's ministry of health said.

The BBC has contacted the IDF about the reports.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e5y8ny1l4o

READ ABOUT THE DEVIL:

SEE ALSO: https://consortiumnews.com/2024/07/27/patrick-lawrence-no-more-silence/

....

Here are the stories. 

Juri 

One is about a 9-year-old girl named Juri. She was malnourished, unconscious, and in septic shock when Perlmutter and Sidhwa came upon her at the hospital. They operated immediately, and when they did, they found, among other things, she was missing part of a femur and most of the flesh on one thigh. Her buttocks were cut so severely her pelvic bones were exposed. As they proceeded, maggots fell in clumps from Juri’s body.

“Even if they saved her,” my partner said, “she will live a life of severe disability and constant pain.”  

Tamer

The other story concerns a nurse who was serving at the Indonesian Hospital last November when Israeli terrorists raided the facility. Tamer, a young man with two children, was assisting the orthopedics staff in the operating room at the time. When he refused to leave an anesthetized patient, an Israeli soldier shot him point blank in the leg. 

After the orthopedics team treated him, leaving external rods to stabilize his leg, terrorist soldiers went to his room, dragged him away, and held him —somewhere, Tamer did not know where — strapped to a table for 45 days. No medical care, one glass of juice most days, though sometimes not even that. His bone became infected — this is called osteomyelitis — and he was beaten so severely one eye fell out of its socket. 

Perlmutter and Sidhwa: 

“Later, he said, he was unceremoniously dumped naked on the side of a road. With metal sticking out of his infected and broken leg and his right eye hanging out of his skull he crawled for two miles until someone found him and brought him to European Hospital.”

The Politico piece is illustrated with many photographs taken by Feroze Sidhwa. One showed Tamer during his treatment just after he was shot: a strapping, vigorous man lying in a hospital bed. Another showed Tamer after he returned from his 45 days in captivity: emaciated, looking 20 years older, stripped of all vitality, his face set in what psychiatrists call flat affect. 

“When it is no longer difficult to read or watch videos of the Israelis’ merciless barbarities, the Zionist army will have bombed and bulldozed our consciences as thoroughly as it has any Gazan or West Bank village.”

My mind snapped as my partner offered summaries of these two stories. “That’s it!” I shouted. “It’s impossible to go on this way any longer.” I began asking in desperate tones what someone trying to be human can do while a nation run by terrorists disgraces all of those now living but for the Palestinian people and the Perlmutters and Sidhwas who give of themselves to them. I thought of Randy Kehler and all those honorable people who started the famous — back then, anyway — tax revolt during the Vietnam War. I thought of Camus and his invocation of Sisyphus: the futility of all action, the necessity of any.

I eventually returned to the headline atop the Politico piece. Yes, what Perlmutter and Sidhwa saw was unspeakable, there is no arguing this. If you read what they have written, and I urge everyone to do so, you must brace yourself for your reaction to it, as my own case may suggest. These two surgeons saw unspeakable things during their time in Gaza, but now they speak of them. And when they speak of the unspeakable, there is the potential for transformation in what they say. We must not miss this. We must not fail to see the power of language when put to its highest purpose. 

“What can we do?” is surely a question on the minds of millions of people as apartheid Israel proceeds with its genocide in Gaza — and now escalates its criminal conduct in the occupied West Bank. What makes this question so serious a conundrum is that the Gaza genocide and America’s direct participation in it have pushed in our faces the reality that, American democracy in ruins, there are no mediating institutions any longer available to us through which to express our will.

As I sat to write this, Caitlin Johnstone, the Australian journalist, sent around a message posted on “X” by someone going by ThePryingEye, who makes a point that simply takes my breath away. “What is happening in Gaza is awful,” ThePryingEye has it, “but asking people to give up what they need to survive for morals is an unfair card to play. People are suffering here already, and when it can possibly get worse, it’s not that people don’t care about Gaza or we are selling the[sic] out for a taco.” 

I hope my editors and readers will forgive my French, but what kind of fucking drip would say such a thing? ThePryingEye is, first, the lumpen exemplar of Western humanity’s long decline into moral slovenliness and what I call consumer nihilism. In this I would love to learn ThePryingEye’s idea of what people “need to survive” — apart from tacos, of course. 

But there is something else here we must not miss: Whoever this pitiful person is, he or she is the victim of decade upon decade during which power has cynically abused language and images to strip eyes of the ability to see, ears of the ability to hear, minds of the ability to think, and — these most of all — tongues of the ability to speak and bodies of the ability to act. ThePryingEye is exactly how this is intended to turn out: a taco-eating dolt perfectly at home with “Nothing” as the answer to “What can we do?”

When we face at last the reality that we have been deprived of any institutional means to mediate our politics, it follows that we are forced back upon ourselves. And when we become self-reliant in this way, it will come to us that, as Perlmutter and Sidhwa have very clearly demonstrated, there is power in language, in speaking of the unspeakable.  

“When they speak of the unspeakable, there is the potential for transformation in what they say. We must not miss this. We must not fail to see the power of language when put to its highest purpose.”

I am not at all surprised that the Israelis and the Biden regime — along with the Germans and others — have radically escalated their long-running attack on clear language, most obviously but not only in their patently nonsensical effort to condemn as “antisemitic” even simple expressions of sympathy for Palestinians. Isn’t the objective here obvious? Isn’t it plain that these people understand the power of language and the necessity to control it if Western populations are to remain in ThePryingEye’s condition?

Among the many striking things in the Politico piece, two now come to mind. One is Perlmutter’s and Sidhwa’s description of their Palestinian colleagues: Many were jaundiced, suffering from hepatitis, malnourished; all were physically and mentally unwell, and — most striking, this — devoid of all empathy for those they were treating. “Several staff members told us they were simply waiting to die,” the two Americans write, “and that they hoped Israel would get it over with sooner rather than later.” 

The other image I mention here confirms this impression: It is a photograph of a wall in the pediatric wing of the European Hospital, where one of Perlmutter and Sidhwa’s Palestinian colleagues has scribbled: “#Gaza We don’t care anymore about anything.” An illegible signature follows. 

Isn’t this the kind of thing we read in accounts of Holocaust survivors? Giorgio Agamben went long on just this topic in Remnants of Auschwitz (Zone Books, 1999), wherein he examined the reduction of those in the camps to dehumanized ghosts — psychologically destroyed, many of them beyond retrieval.

“I will be satisfied if Remnants of Auschwitz succeeds only in correcting some of the terms with which we register the decisive lesson of the century,” he wrote in a preface, “and if this book makes it possible for certain words to be left behind and others to be understood in a different sense. This is also a way — perhaps the only way — to listen to what is unsaid.” 

Let us take some inspiration from the Italian philosopher and correct some terms while understanding others differently. This is my reply to “What can we do?” It is to refuse any longer to let our opinions and our expression of them be either policed or self-policed. Perlmutter and Sidhwa can liberate us in this way if we let them. 

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Biden announced his intention to drop out of the race July 21 and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the party's nominee.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Former President Barack Obama threatened Joe Biden with removal from office under the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution if he did not withdraw from the presidential race, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has claimed.

Obama told Biden he had gotten the approval of Vice President Kamala Harris to invoke the safeguard against presidential incapacity, Hersh wrote in a blog post on Substack.

The journalist noted that, in accordance with the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, the US president may be removed from power in the event they are judged to no longer be able to carry out their duties, with the vice president stepping into the role.

Hersh claimed that by the time Obama called Biden, it was already clear Harris would receive Democratic leaders' approval to run as the party's candidate.

Obama's call to Biden came amid discontent among Democratic Party donors, who threatened to withhold funding over concerns about Biden's health.

The US presidential election will take place November 5. It was assumed Biden would again appear on the ballot, but figures within the party began to express concern after a widely-panned debate performance against former President Donald Trump in June. Biden announced his intention to drop out of the race July 21 and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the party's nominee.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240728/obama-threatened-biden-with-removal-from-office-under-25th-amendment---sy-hersh-1119537682.html

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