Week in Review
9/7/24
Urgent health update: Consequences of war on Gaza and West Bank/East Jerusalem-August 31, 2024
Joyce Msuya, Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, briefed the Security Council on 8/29/24. After noting that they “have briefed this Council on the unconscionable suffering of civilian women, men and children on more than a dozen occasions,” she went on to recap the toll the Israeli war on Gaza has taken, including recent attacks on aid workers and the “devastating impacts on civilians” of repeated evacuation orders. She ended: “…civilians are hungry. They are thirsty. They are sick. They are homeless. They have been pushed beyond the limits of endurance – beyond what any human being should bear… [W]hat we have witnessed over the past 11 months – and continue to witness – calls into question the world’s commitment to the international legal order that was designed to prevent these tragedies. It forces us to ask: what has become of our basic sense of humanity?
In the face of this unconscionable human suffering, we need the Security Council – and all Member States – to act… We need strict adherence to international humanitarian law and international human rights law.” Read her complete testimony here.
"It's really distressing that there are so many people who still, in the public discourse, can claim that what they care about most is the hostages when they won't call for a ceasefire. And I think that the fundamental problem in the organized American Jewish community is that the default position in the organized American Jewish community, the American Jewish establishment, is to support the position of the Israeli Government."
I would add: I find it equally distressing that several hundred thousand Israelis will turn out to protest the Netanyahu government when 6 hostages are found tragically killed, but there is no consciousness that the Israeli government is blocking an adequate response to the polio epidemic, when Palestinian health workers are being tortured and killed in Israeli jails, when over 40,000 (and likely many many more) Gazans, majority women and children, have been killed, when there have been 16 evacuation orders in the past month, with 88.5% of Gaza placed under evacuation orders with desperate levels of hunger, homelessness, illness, trauma, etc etc. This seems like a grave moral injury that will stain Israel for decades to come. And where is the outrage in the US Jewish community????
Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council Calls for a 7-Day Pause (Ceasefire) in Gaza for Polio Vaccine Campaign
833 signatures to date... SIGN TODAY AND SHARE WITH COLLEAGUES help us get to 1,000!
Beyond the immediate crisis, we call for a permanent ceasefire, an end to US weapons and funds for the Israeli military, unhindered entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the immediate rebuilding of all infrastructure, including the healthcare system, that has been destroyed by indiscriminate Israeli military attacks.
what I sent to Biden, Harris, and Adam Smith:
You say you care about Palestinians and are working for a ceasefire. On the day six Israeli hostages were killed, Israel killed 47 Palestinians. Those deaths were not noted in the western media, because Palestinian lives are deemed worthless. It is an obscenity and one that you have promoted through your actions, sending billions of dollars for weaponry that has killed over 40,000 human beings in Gaza and injured tens of thousands, mostly women and children.
Every innocent life that is violently snuffed out, regardless of ethnicity, is a tragedy of untold proportions. Yet clearly for the American administration only the Israeli lives really matter.
You must end the genocide and release hostages by promoting a total ceasefire and stop arming the state that is destroying an entire people. As a Jewish American, I am deeply appalled and ashamed by US complicity.
West Bank: Palestinian MP Khalida Jarrar faces slow death in Israeli solitary confinement; effective and immediate action needed
Medical Apartheid in Palestine; Interview with Dr. Alice Rothchild
