Category Archives: Issues

RT correspondent: ‘Every single day we’re lying and finding sexier ways to do it.’

BuzzFeed: Sara Firth, a longstanding London-based correspondent for Russia Today, resigned on Friday in protest at the channel’s coverage of the Malaysia Airlines crash.

Firth, who joined the channel in 2009, told BuzzFeed that she decided to resign from the Kremlin-funded news channel because she felt it was “disrespectfully” attempting to pin the blame for Thursday’s Malaysia Airlines disaster on the Ukrainian government.

“When this story broke I ran back into the newsroom and saw how we were covering it already and I just knew I had to go,” she said.

“It was the total disregard to the facts. We threw up eyewitness accounts from someone on the ground openly accusing the Ukrainian government [of involvement in the disaster], and a correspondent in the studio pulled up a plane crash before that the Ukrainian government had been involved in and said it was ‘worth mentioning’.

“It’s not worth mentioning. It’s Russia Today all over, it’s flirting with that border of overtly lying. You’re not telling a lie, you’re just bringing something up. I didn’t want to watch a story like that, where people have lost loved ones and we’re handling it like that.

“I couldn’t do it any more. Every single day we’re lying and finding sexier ways to do it.”

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U.S. media execs prefer biased reporting on Gaza

Michael Calderone reports: CNN has removed correspondent Diana Magnay from covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after she tweeted that Israelis who were cheering the bombing of Gaza, and who had allegedly threatened her, were “scum.”

“After being threatened and harassed before and during a liveshot, Diana reacted angrily on Twitter,” a CNN spokeswoman said in a statement to The Huffington Post.

“She deeply regrets the language used, which was aimed directly at those who had been targeting our crew,” the spokeswoman continued. “She certainly meant no offense to anyone beyond that group, and she and CNN apologize for any offense that may have been taken.”

The spokeswoman said Magnay has been assigned to Moscow.

Magnay appeared on CNN Thursday from a hill overlooking the Israel-Gaza border. While she reported, Israelis could be heard near her cheering as missiles were fired at Gaza.

After the liveshot, Magnay tweeted: “Israelis on hill above Sderot cheer as bombs land on #gaza; threaten to ‘destroy our car if I say a word wrong’. Scum.” The tweet was quickly removed, but not before it had been retweeted more than 200 times.

If Magnay’s use of the word “scum” was so regrettable, what would have been a more appropriate way of describing this group of Israelis?

Bloodthirsty. Savage. Callous. Inhumane. Hateful. Vengeful. Sadistic.

Any of those terms could have been accurately used by Magnay and yet there’s no doubt that CNN would have been just as apologetic.

The only way she could have reported what she was witnessing right next to her and avoided criticism, would have been to say nothing at all.

This is what American media too often now demands from its reporters who cover Israel: silence or unabashed bias in favor of the Jewish state.

Might Magnay’s removal — preceded by NBC removing Ayman Mohyeldin from Gaza — prompt a rebellion among mainstream American journalists?

If only… Unfortunately, having been duly warned, it’s much more likely that nearly everyone will decide it’s not worth taking the risk of stepping out of line.

The exceptions will remain a few curmudgeons like AP’s Matt Lee who is afforded some latitude precisely because he is an exception. (Unfortunately, Lee’s acts of rebellion are confined to briefing rooms in Washington where they get less attention than they deserve.)

But having said that, what are we to make of the vile behavior of Israelis who celebrate carnage?

Do they reveal something about the nature of Israel and the meaning of Zionism?

To some extent, yes.

Palestinians, the enemy, the other, have been reduced to a sub-human status. Their lives are viewed as worthless.

Is this not an inevitable consequence of founding a state on the idea that the rights of one group of people, of one religious identity, have the exclusive authority to run that state?

And yet, should we not also acknowledge that there are base instincts that make people everywhere capable of acting with the same callousness displayed by the “scum” in Sderot?

If you think it couldn’t happen here — wherever that might be — you’re probably wrong.

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British members of parliament accuse Israel of war crimes

“The United States Senate is in Israel’s camp,” said Senator Lindsey Graham as on Thursday evening the Senate expressed its unanimous support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.

What’s new? As Pat Buchanan once said: Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory.

Servile elected representatives, obsequiously following the directions of the Israel lobby might be business as usual in Washington, but that’s not how democracy works everywhere.

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Some of Israel’s top supporters say it’s time to end U.S. military aid

Eli Lake reports: Elliott Abrams — a former deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush and a leading pro-Israel writer and policy analyst — told The Daily Beast, “My view is over time it would be healthy for the relationship if the aid diminished. Israel should be less dependent on American financial assistance and should become the kind of ally that we have in Australia, Canada, or the United Kingdom: an intimate military relationship and alliance, but no military aid.”

That is also the view expressed by leading Israeli politicians. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s minister of economics and the leader of the right-wing Israel Home party, said in 2013, “Today, U.S. military aid is roughly 1 percent of Israel’s economy. I think, generally, we need to free ourselves from it. We have to do it responsibly, since I’m not aware of all the aspects of the budget. I don’t want to say, ‘Let’s just give it up,’ but our situation today is very different from what it was 20 and 30 years ago.”

Today Israel is prosperous. In 2000, the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was $124.9 billion. In 2013, the Israeli GDP was $291.3 billion. And that is before Israel has seen any real revenue from the fields of natural gas it recently discovered. The country has become so prosperous that legislation is now before the country’s Knesset to create a sovereign wealth fund, a state-owned investment vehicle designed to invest the surplus revenue Israel collects from selling its natural gas.

“I have heard discussions of a sovereign wealth fund, by which the Israelis mean they want to handle the revenues carefully the way Norway does and not waste them,” Abrams said. “But I do not believe a country that has a sovereign wealth fund can be an aid recipient.”

Abrams was careful to say he did not favor cutting the military aid while Obama was still president. “Were there a reduction now, it would be attributed to administration hostility to Israel and be seen as a weakening of U.S. support,” he said. “It should be done only in a context of robust American political support and close relations between American and Israeli leaders.” [Continue reading…]

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While Iraq burns, ISIS takes advantage in Syria

Michael Stephens and Sofia Barbarani write: The Islamic State (Isis) may be many things, but foolish is not one of them.

While international attention has been fixated on the disintegration of Iraq and the expansion of the so-called caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Sunni insurgents have moved their offensive back into Syria with a newly acquired haul of US-made weapons and cash.

Cushioned by the impunity offered them by a largely unresponsive international community, and the inability of the Syrian and Iraqi armies to defeat them in battle, Isis’ latest advances in Syria have further destabilised the already frail dynamics in the region.

As Bashar al-Assad attended his de-facto self-coronation affording him another seven years in power, Isis was making a mockery of the president’s pledge to “not stop fighting terrorism and striking it wherever it is until we restore security to every spot of Syria”.

In addition to Isis, Syria’s Kurds have also been busy establishing their own cantons of self-governance, backed by their militia force, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). But as their control over Kurdish areas of Syria has strengthened, it has brought them into fierce conflict with Isis.

While in neighbouring Iraq the Kurdistan Region remains largely insulated from Isis’ violent land-grabbing operations, Syria’s approximately two million Kurds have borne the brunt of the expanding “caliphate” declared at the end of June. [Continue reading…]

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Document shows it was the FBI, not the NSA, that monitored 5 Americans

electrospaces.net: [O]n July 9, 2014, Glenn Greenwald published an article which he earlier announced as being the grand finale of the Snowden-revelations. It would demonstrate that NSA is also spying on ordinary American citizens, something that would clearly be illegal.

The report is titled “Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On” and it tells the story of Faisal Gill, Asim Ghafoor, Hooshang Amirahmadi, Agha Saeed and Nihad Awad whose e-mail addresses were found in an NSA file from the Snowden-trove. Although the article confusingly mentions both FBI and NSA, many people and media got the impression that this was the long-awaited major NSA abuse scandal.

But as we will show here, the document that was published contains no evidence of any involvement of the NSA in this particular case. Everything indicates that it was actually an FBI operation, so it seems not justified to have NSA mentioned in the article. [Continue reading…]

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Israelis cheer as rockets rain down on Gaza

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that there are an estimated 57,900 children in Gaza who have experienced death, injury or loss of home over the past ten days and require direct and specialized psychosocial support.

The Palestinian fatality toll since the start of the latest Israeli assault is now 230. According to preliminary information, at least 74 percent (171 people) are civilians, 48 of whom are children and 31 women.

1,764 Palestinians have been injured, of whom 521 are children and 372 women.

22,900 displaced people hosted at UNRWA shelters are in need of emergency food assistance.

This evening, the Gaza health ministry has updated the death toll to 247, with 1910 people injured.

And meanwhile Israelis in Sderot are cheering.

Mondoweiss reports: The Israeli military has destroyed el-Wafa rehabilitation hospital in the Gaza Strip, after first targeting the facility with five missiles on July 11, 2014. The Israeli military began striking the building around 8:oo pm this evening and within two hours all hospital staff and patients had evacuated the only rehabilitation center in the Gaza Strip. As they departed what remained intact from the medical center burned to the ground.

“It’s already destroyed,” said Basman Alashi, director of el-Wafa, continuing, “I don’t know how much is left of it, but we have evacuated all of our patients. We lost power, there was a fire in the building.”

Alashi spoke to me via telephone from his house in Gaza, unable to cross the Israeli shelling to reach the hospital. “I left the hospital at seven and within two hours they had bombed the hospital.” Shells hit every floor of the building, and a fire spread throughout.

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Hamas leader says Israel must ‘lift siege’ of Gaza before any ceasefire

The Telegraph reports: Hamas has ruled out a ceasefire deal unless Israel “lifts the siege” on Gaza, the organisation’s political chief has told The Telegraph.

In his first interview since the recent conflict in Gaza, Khaled Meshaal has said his organisation will not accept a simple cessation of fire by both sides, and that the deal must include long term commitments to improve the “rights of the Palestinian people”.

With mediators gathered in Cairo in an effort find a solution to a conflict that has already seen more than two hundred Palestinians killed in Israeli air strikes, Mr Meshaal, for the first time, laid out the demands of his organisation.

He said that Israel must “stop the aggression” of air strikes against targets in Gaza, release the dozens of Palestinians detained in response to last month’s kidnapping of three Israeli students in the West Bank, and “end the siege on Gaza permanently”.

“These are our clear demands,” said Mr Meshaal. “We won’t accept an agreement that prolongs the suffering of our people anymore. In Gaza, for the past seven years of siege, its 1.8 million people have been living in a prison.”

The demands go much further than a return to the truce brokered in Cairo in 2012, to put an end to eight days of fighting in the Gaza strip.

That truce included a pledge to open a border crossing, intending to ease the blockade of the coastal enclave.

On Thursday, Mr Meshaal said that an easing of the restrictions was no longer acceptable and that Hamas would stop at nothing short of a “full and permanent” lifting of the blockade that, as well as regulating the traffic of people and goods at the border crossing, forbids trade from Gaza’s port.

Since General Abdul Fatah Sisi, who considers Hamas a terrorist organisation, became president of Egypt earlier this year, Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt has also remained mostly closed. [Continue reading…]

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Respecting resistance

Hamid Dabashi writes: Like any other richly diversified society, Palestinians are composed of followers of many religions, politics, and ideologies. Palestinians are Christian, Muslim, atheists, and agnostic. They are nationalist and/or socialists. They are secularists, Islamists, post-Islamists, and post-secularists. They are feminists, modernists, post-modernists, deconstructionists, and they are nativists at times, cosmopolitan at others, unionists, pacifists, militants, you name it. One of them was a founding figure of a school of critical thinking called post-colonial studies.

By far the most consistent and the most definitive aspect of Palestinian resistance to the occupation and theft of their homeland over the decades has been non-violent civil disobedience. Resistance for Palestinians is definitive of who and what they are. They might be a poet like Mahmoud Darwish, a novelist like Ghassan Kanafani, a film-maker like Michel Khleifi, an artist like Mona Hatoum, a feminist like Lila Abu Lughod – but in doing what they do, whatever they do, they oppose and defy the armed robbery of their homeland.

But there are also those Palestinians who have taken arms and opposed villainy by violence. As part of this resistance, Hamas is integral to the Palestinian national liberation movement, but like any other forms of resistance, Hamas is not definitive to Palestine.

What the Israeli propaganda machinery does is to reduce the entirety of Palestine, the rich and diversified tapestry of Palestinian resistance, to Hamas, then demonise Hamas. The strategy works, especially aided and abetted by major state-sponsored or corporate media like BBC, ABC, or CNN. Execute this strategy, and go on a rampage against Palestinians, maim and murder them with impunity.

Now for the sake of argument: Suppose we wake up tomorrow morning and there is no Hamas to shoot off any useless rockets towards Israel. Then what? The magnificent Israeli benevolence will move into operation and return the stolen Palestine to their rightful owners? Of course not. Suppose Hamas did not even exist since its founding in 1987. Then what? Israel would have by now returned Palestine to its rightful owners? Of course not.

Palestinians are varied and Palestinians are entirely entitled to resist and oppose the occupation and theft of their homeland by any means they deem necessary – whether it is by a beautiful song by Muhammad Assaf, a magnificent poem by Mahmoud Darwish, a film by Elia Suleiman, a novel by Ghassan Kanafani, a book on Palestinian costumes by Widad Kawar, or another on Palestinian cuisine by Rawia Bishara or by the militant Marxist organisation PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), or indeed through the Islamist ideology of Hamas.

One may not agree with Hamas, may not join them, but one cannot reduce the entire tapestry of Palestinian resistance to Hamas, or tell Hamas to disband, for Israelis are [not] about to return Palestine to its rightful owners.

So the bogus proposition that Hamas provokes Israel to attack Gaza is not only narratively false because Israeli military operations in Palestine always predate any Hamas operation, but also because Palestinians in their entirety are neither reducible to Hamas nor can they be denied the right to resist occupation in whatever form they deem necessary.

In the West, on the Left, and especially post-9/11, there has been a reluctance to acknowledge the legitimacy of armed resistance.

No doubt many people fear that if they utter anything resembling an expression of sympathy for an organization such as Hamas, they might risk being branded as a supporter of terrorism, or even worse, attract the unwelcome attention of state security services such as the FBI or the NSA.

When it comes to resistance, it’s much safer to place oneself on the side of non-violent resistance because it seems both morally and legally a much more easily defensible position to assume.

The problem is, to allow that the legitimacy of resistance might be determined by whether it is violent or non-violent, seems to misconstrue the psychological foundation upon which resistance rests: the willingness to fight back against agents of oppression.

How those facing oppression choose the means to fight back, may be a purely pragmatic choice or it might spring from moral principles.

But it was Mahatma Gandhi, the most iconic champion of non-violent resistance, who once said:

Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence… I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of dishonor.

Firing rockets into Israel might look from the outside like a pointless exercise that not only threatens the population in whose direction they fall, but also prolongs the misery of the Palestinians themselves, yet more than anything these rockets are a gesture of defiance — a refusal to cower.

What Israel wants is for the Palestinians to cower in silence — for “quietness” to be imposed by force. But the Palestinians are not cowards.

Those of us with the privilege of living in the West, have no right to pass judgement on the means of resistance the people of Gaza employ. Indeed, we should respect their refusal to bow down when facing pressures to which most of us would easily yield.

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NBC News pulls Mohyeldin from Gaza after witnessing Israelis kill four children

Glenn Greenwald writes: Despite this powerful first-hand reporting [on Israeli attacks which killed four boys on a Gaza beach yesterday] – or perhaps because of it – [NBC News correspondent Ayman] Mohyeldin was nowhere to be seen on last night’s NBC Nightly News broadcast with Brian Williams. Instead, as Media Bistro’s Jordan Charlton noted, NBC curiously had Richard Engel – who was in Tel Aviv, and had just arrived there an hour or so earlier – “report” on the attack. Charlton wrote that “the decision to have Engel report the story for ‘Nightly’ instead of Mohyeldin angered some NBC News staffers.”

Indeed, numerous NBC employees, including some of the network’s highest-profile stars, were at first confused and then indignant over the use of Engel rather than Mohyeldin to report the story. But what they did not know, and what has not been reported until now, is that Mohyeldin was removed completely from reporting on Gaza by a top NBC executive, David Verdi, who ordered Mohyeldin to leave Gaza immediately.

Over the last two weeks, Mohyeldin’s reporting has been far more balanced and even-handed than the standard pro-Israel coverage that dominates establishment American press coverage; his reports have provided context to the conflict that is missing from most American reports and he avoids adopting Israeli government talking points as truth. As a result, neocon and “pro-Israel” websites have repeatedly attacked him as a “Hamas spokesman” and spouting “pro-Hamas rants.” [Continue reading…]

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UNRWA strongly condemns placement of rockets in school

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East: Yesterday, in the course of the regular inspection of its premises, UNRWA discovered approximately 20 rockets hidden in a vacant school in the Gaza Strip. UNRWA strongly condemns the group or groups responsible for placing the weapons in one of its installations. This is a flagrant violation of the inviolability of its premises under international law. This incident, which is the first of its kind in Gaza, endangered civilians including staff and put at risk UNRWA’s vital mission to assist and protect Palestine refugees in Gaza.

Immediately after discovery, the Agency informed the relevant parties and successfully took all necessary measures for the removal of the objects in order to preserve the safety and security of the school. UNRWA has launched a comprehensive investigation into the circumstances surrounding this incident.

UNRWA has strong, established procedures to maintain the neutrality of all its premises, including a strict no-weapons policy and routine inspections of its installations, to ensure they are only used for humanitarian purposes. UNRWA will uphold and further reinforce its procedures.

Palestinian civilians in Gaza rely on UNRWA to provide humanitarian assistance and shelter. At all times, and especially during escalations of violence, the sanctity and integrity of UN installations must be respected.

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Dahr Jamail: Incinerating Iraq

Who even knows what to call it?  The Iraq War or the Iraq-Syrian War would be far too orderly for what’s happening, so it remains a no-name conflict that couldn’t be deadlier or more destabilizing — and it’s in the process of internationalizing in unsettling ways.  Think of it as the strangest disaster on the planet right now. After all, when was the last time that the U.S. and Russia ended up on the same side in a conflict? You would have to go back almost three quarters of a century to World War II to answer that one. And how about the U.S. and Iran?  Now, it seems that all three of those countries are sending in military hardware and, in the case of the U.S. and Iran, drones, advisers, pilots, and possibly other personnel.

Since World War I, the region that became Iraq and Syria has been a magnet for the meddling of outside powers of every sort, each of which, including France and Britain, the Clinton administration with its brutal sanctions, and the Bush administration with its disastrous invasion and occupation, helped set the stage for the full-scale destabilization and sectarian disintegration of both countries.  And now the outsiders are at it again.

The U.S., Russia, and Iran only start the list.  The Saudis, to give an example, have reportedly been deeply involved in funding the rise of the al-Qaeda-style extremist movement the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).  Now, facing that movement’s success — some of its armed followers, including undoubtedly Saudi nationals, have already reached the Iraqi-Saudi frontier — the Saudis are reportedly moving 30,000 troops there, no doubt in fear that their fragile and autocratic land might someday be open to the very violence their petrodollars have stoked.  Turkey, which has wielded an open-border/safe haven policy to support the Syrian rebels fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime, including ISIS and other extremist outfits, is now dealing with kidnapped nationals and chaos on its border, thanks to those same rebels.  Israel entered the fray recently as well, launching airstrikes against nine Syrian “military targets,” and just to add to the violence and confusion, Assad’s planes and helicopters have been attacking ISIS forces across the now-nonexistent border in Iraq.  And I haven’t even mentioned Hezbollah, the Jordanians, or the Europeans, all of whom are involved in their own ways.

Since 2003, Dahr Jamail, a rare and courageous unembedded reporter in Iraq, has observed how this witch’s brew of outside intervention and exploding sectarian violence has played out in the lives of ordinary Iraqis.  It couldn’t be a sadder tale, one he started reporting for TomDispatch in 2005 — even then the subject was “devastation.”  Nine years later, he’s back and the devastation is almost beyond imagining.  As he now works for the website Truthout, this is a joint TomDispatch/Truthout report.Tom Engelhardt

A nation on the brink
How America’s policies sealed Iraq’s fate
By Dahr Jamail

[This essay is a joint TomDispatch/Truthout report.]

For Americans, it was like the news from nowhere.  Years had passed since reporters bothered to head for the country we invaded and blew a hole through back in 2003, the country once known as Iraq that our occupation drove into a never-ending sectarian nightmare.  In 2011, the last U.S. combat troops slipped out of the country, their heads “held high,” as President Obama proclaimed at the time, and Iraq ceased to be news for Americans. 

So the headlines of recent weeks — Iraq Army collapses! Iraq’s second largest city falls to insurgents! Terrorist Caliphate established in Middle East! — couldn’t have seemed more shockingly out of the blue.  Suddenly, reporters flooded back in, the Bush-era neocons who had planned and supported the invasion and occupation were writing op-eds as if it were yesterday, and Iraq was again the story of the moment as the post-post-mortems began to appear and commentators began asking: How in the world could this be happening? 

Iraqis, of course, lacked the luxury of ignoring what had been going on in their land since 2011. For them, whether Sunnis or Shiites, the recent unraveling of the army, the spread of a series of revolts across the Sunni parts of Iraq, the advance of an extremist insurgency on the country’s capital, Baghdad, and the embattled nature of the autocratic government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki were, if not predictable, at least expectable. And as the killings ratcheted up, caught in the middle were the vast majority of Iraqis, people who were neither fighters nor directly involved in the corrupt politics of their country, but found themselves, as always, caught in the vice grip of the violence again engulfing it.

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Revisiting Kurdistan: ‘If there is a success story in Iraq, it’s here’

Luke Harding writes: The news from Iraq has been grim of late. Sectarian killings, political feuding and the flamboyant rise of Islamist fanaticism. Last month, Isis – the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, one of a series of radical Sunni groups – carried out a stunning military advance. Its fighters captured Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city, and Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s birthplace. They now control most of Sunni Iraq. Their goal is Baghdad and the overthrow of Iraq’s Shia-dominated government.

Meanwhile, Isis’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has declared a new Islamic state, spanning Syria and Iraq. He has proclaimed himself caliph. The international community has expressed support for Iraq’s beleaguered prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki has vowed to crush Isis. But with the army in retreat – many divisions ran away last month – he has taken other measures. They include turning off the electricity to Isis-controlled areas and bombing from the sky. Critics say Maliki’s divisive sectarian policies have brought Iraq to disaster.

One part of Iraq, however, has largely escaped the mayhem engulfing the rest of the country. It is Kurdistan, the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Its capital, Irbil, is a haven of religious tolerance and relative safety. The suburb of Ainkawa, for example, is home to a large Christian community: nuns and a Chaldean church. There’s also a pleasant beer garden where crowds gathered over the weekend to drink Efes and to watch the World Cup final on a giant screen.

Beneath Irbil’s ancient citadel are cafes where those who are not fasting during Ramadan can eat lunch – shielded by a tactful white cloth. The city is predominantly Kurdish, but also home to Arabs who escaped from Baghdad as security deteriorated, and a recent wave of refugees who fled Mosul as Isis arrived. If there is a success story in Iraq, it’s here. [Continue reading…]

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Israel intentionally kills civilians; it doesn’t have the courage to talk to Hamas

Jon Snow on Channel 4 News challenges an Israeli government official in a way you will never witness on American television:

Human Rights Watch: Israeli air attacks in Gaza investigated by Human Rights Watch have been targeting apparent civilian structures and killing civilians in violation of the laws of war. Israel should end unlawful attacks that do not target military objectives and may be intended as collective punishment or broadly to destroy civilian property. Deliberate or reckless attacks violating the laws of war are war crimes, Human Rights Watch said.

Israeli attacks in Gaza since July 7, 2014, which Israeli officials said delivered more than 500 tons of explosives in missiles, aerial bombs, and artillery fire, killed at least 178 people and wounded 1,361 as of July 14, including 635 women and children, according to the United Nations. Preliminary UN reports identified 138 people, about 77 percent of those killed, as civilians, including 36 children, and found that the attacks had destroyed 1,255 homes, displacing at least 7,500 people.

“Israel’s rhetoric is all about precision attacks but attacks with no military target and many civilian deaths can hardly be considered precise,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Recent documented cases in Gaza sadly fit Israel’s long record of unlawful airstrikes with high civilian casualties.” [Continue reading…]

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As Israel strikes Gaza, the U.S. strikes Pakistan

The Washington Post reports: A suspected U.S. drone strike killed at least 15 people in northwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, the deadliest such attack in at least a year.

The strike targeted a house in North Waziristan — where the Pakistani military is engaged in a month-old battle against the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups — as well as a vehicle that was passing nearby, local intelligence officials said. The strike killed at least 15 people, although some officials said at least 20 people died.

“The compound was being used by foreign militants, and some local terrorists were present in the vehicle that got targeted,” said one senior intelligence official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The attack near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan took place in an area suspected of housing fighters affiliated with the Afghan Haqqani network as well as Islamist militants from Uzbekistan, local officials said. One villager said he saw the drone fire at least four missiles.

The last time 15 or more people were killed by a U.S. drone was on July 3, 2013, when a missile strike killed 16 people, according to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. [Continue reading…]

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Behind the scenes, tech firms tell U.S. regulators: Make the internet a public utility

Quartz reports: As his own website crashed under the weight of public comments on net neutrality, the top communications regulator in the US was hearing protests directly from tech companies in New York City.

On July 15, at the Brooklyn office of the handicrafts e-commerce site Etsy, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler met with executives from tech companies. Attendants included Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler, Tumblr CEO David Karp, Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor, and representatives from Spotify, Reddit, Foursquare, General Assembly, Buzzfeed, and Warby Parker, participants told Quartz. While the FCC declined to comment on the event, it will be filing an official notice of an outside meeting on its website later this week.

Wheeler has been meeting with different internet stakeholders as his agency moves to write rules designed to preserve the “open internet” this year, but what that means and how to do it remains far from a settled matter. While internet service providers, or carriers, want the freedom to charge different rates for different kinds of data, these technology firms were asking Wheeler’s agency to treat internet communication as a public utility with no discrimination allowed, a so-called “Title II reclassification.” US regulators are, at the moment, caught in the middle. [Continue reading…]

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Water catastrophe looms in Gaza as Israel steps up airstrikes

NBC News reports: A humanitarian catastrophe looms in the Gaza Strip due to a lack of water, aid agencies warned as Israel intensified air attacks on Wednesday and ordered 100,000 Palestinians to evacuate border areas.

Airstrikes have caused massive damage to water and sewage infrastructure and have destroyed at least 560 homes, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) said as it declared an emergency in the area.

“Within days, the entire population of the Strip may be desperately short of water,” Jacques de Maio, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Israel and the occupied territories, said in a statement. If hostilities continue, just as temperatures soar in the region, “the question is not if but when an already beleaguered population will face an acute water crisis,” he said.

“Water is becoming contaminated and sewage is overflowing, bringing a serious risk of disease,” de Maio added.

At a news briefing, ICRC spokeswoman Nada Doumani said: “Water is a problem and it can quickly turn into a catastrophe.” [Continue reading…]

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