❧ We are now one year into Israel’s destruction of Gaza, and there is no end in sight. Yesterday marked the first anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, in which the militant group killed 1,200 people, including an estimated 809 civilians, and took more than 240 hostages—which is a war crime under international law. It was a horrific day that left countless Israelis in grief and trauma. In return, over the next year, Israel’s government has exacted an indescribable toll upon the people of Palestine, dropping more than 75,000 metric tons of explosives in an overtly genocidal military campaign greater in scale than any in recent memory. A few statistics to put this in perspective:
The official tally from the Gaza Health Ministry puts the death toll at 42,000, but this number is likely a vast undercount—at least 10,000 more are estimated to be buried beneath rubble. And due to the destruction of health infrastructure within Gaza, maintaining an accurate count has become all but impossible. In July, the Lancetmedical journal estimated that the death toll could be as high as 186,000 if you include “indirect” deaths due to famine, disease, and water shortages, which are really direct effects of the war. According to a report released last week by Oxfam, “More women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades.”
Al Jazeera’s video listing the names of the dead runs for almost an hour. The first five minutes are children four years old and below.
More than 97,000 people in Gaza—1 in 23— have been injured, including tens of thousands of severe limb injuries, according to the World Health Organization. In March, a UNICEF report covered by the New Yorker revealed that more than a thousand children injured in the war were had become amputees.
A video from Reuters shows how children have been forced to undergo amputations with inadequate medical care.
84 percent of Gaza’s health facilities have been damaged or destroyed, according to the United Nations, and nearly 1,000 medical workers have been killed. 65 percent of the buildings in Gaza have been damaged by Israeli airstrikes. Nearly all of Gaza’s water wells have been destroyed, leaving the average person with less than a single toilet flush worth of water per day, according to Oxfam.
As Israel has deliberately restricted the entry of food aid into the Strip—something even the U.S. government has acknowledged—more than 96 percent of the population faces severe lack of food, and more than a quarter meet the international definition of starvation.
A Front Lines documentary by Al Jazeera documented the starvation of children due to Israel’s blockade of aid.
The U.N. reports “a frightening increase” of Hepatitis A spreading among children. In August, a ten-month-old child was diagnosed with Polio, the first case in Gaza in 25 years. Israel has routinely denied medical supplies entering the Strip. The destruction of sanitation infrastructure has led to many Gazans living in open sewage, which has contributed to more than three-quarters of the population being infected with contagious disease.
More than 90 percent of Gazans have been displaced from their homes—close to 2 million people. Many of them have been forced to move multiple times, having been told by the IDF to flee to a “safe zone” only to find that area coming under siege as well.
As if all this weren’t bad enough, the Israeli military also admits there’s a “high probability” it killed three of the very hostages it claims to be fighting for during a November 2023 airstrike.
In a video for AJ+, journalist Bisan Owda documented her continued displacement over six months of bombing.
Yesterday, many American politicians paid extensive tribute to the Israeli victims who were killed on Oct. 7. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this—we should mourn all innocent people killed in war. But it’s hard not to notice the stark difference in tone used when describing the deaths of Israelis vs. the deaths of Palestinians. A statement from Kamala Harris mourned “1,200 innocent people…massacred by Hamas terrorists,” saying that “What Hamas did that day was pure evil.” But when describing the destruction of Palestine, Harris omitted any mention of the perpetrators, saying that “I am heartbroken over the scale of death and destruction in Gaza over the past year—tens of thousands of lives lost, children fleeing for safety over and over again, mothers and fathers struggling to obtain food, water, and medicine.”
Who caused those lives to be lost? Why can’t those innocent people obtain food, water, and medicine? Who’s to say? Without context, you’d be left to assume that some unprecedented natural disaster had befallen the people of Gaza rather than a historically destructive military campaign that has been backed to the hilt by the United States with tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons. It’s possible that Harris truly is “heartbroken” by the wholesale massacre of innocent people in Gaza. But it means nothing if she is unwilling to wield her power to stop it.
Satellite imagery from the UN Satellite Center shows how Israeli bombings have reduced areas of Gaza to rubble.(Photo: UNOSAT, via NDTV)
In other news…
As they have done with the West Bank, some Israeli settlers want to conquer Southern Lebanon as well. Back in August, as Israel’s push into Lebanon was ramping up back in August, Jewish Currents published an investigation into the group Uri Tzafon, which has more than 3,000 members who regularly post in group chats about their dream of colonizing the sovereign nation to Israel’s north.
Leaders regularly share photos of explosions in northern Israel and Lebanon; detailed critiques of Israel’s supposedly-docile policy in the region; suggestions for Hebrew names with which to replace the names of existing Lebanese towns; and advertisements for future kayaking trips in southern Lebanon, featuring the words, “it’s not a dream; it’s reality.”
Since the article’s publication, Israel has launched a bombardment of Lebanon that has displaced more than 1.2 million people and mainstream Israeli publications like the Jerusalem Posthave begun discussing the colonization of Lebanon openly.
Screenshot from the Jerusalem Post
(Note: The article has since been deleted, but is still viewable with the Wayback Machine)
The United Kingdom is handing over the remote Chagos Archipelago—which houses a secretive military base that has served as a detention center for migrants—over to the African island nation of Mauritius, formerly a British colony. The military base will remain on the island, but the U.K. is offering to let the Tamil migrants who have been stuck there for three years to migrate to Romania for six months before receiving possible asylum in Britain. (BBC)
The military government of Burkina Faso, led by Captain Ibrahim Traoré, has announced that it will end the contracts of some foreign gold-mining companies and replace them with domestic miners. It’s part of a larger push to bring the country’s mineral resources under local control, which saw Burkina Faso nationalize two gold mines at the end of August. (Business Insider Africa)
Tunisia, the nation that sparked the Arab Spring back in 2010, held an election on Monday and re-elected its president, Kais Saied, with more than 90 percent of the vote. Unfortunately, amid widespread repression of dissidents, the imprisonment of opposition candidates, and dismal turnout of just 29 percent, the result can hardly be considered “free and fair.” Tunisia was considered the one nation to emerge from the Arab Spring with an actual democracy, but since then, Saied has steadily chipped away at its institutions to consolidate his control. (Washington Post)
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Oklahoma’s policy mandating Bibles in schools appears to be a massive scam to benefit Donald Trump. Back in June, Ryan Walters—the state superintendent of education for Oklahoma, and a vocal anti-LGBTQ activist—declared a new policy in which “Every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom, and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom.” Walters claims that reading the Bible is necessary “to have a complete understanding of Western civilization, to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system”—a reference to Christian nationalism, or the idea that the United States is inherently a Christian country from its founding. (It was not, at least according to the founders themselves.)The policy raises serious First Amendment concerns, and several school districts in Oklahoma are now loudly objecting to Walters’ attempt to impose a religious point of view on them. But there’s a new development too, as it seems the Bible mandate is also an enormous financial scam.
Walters announces his Bible mandate on June 27. (Image: Tulsa World via YouTube)
You see, Walters wants to purchase 55,000 Bibles—enough to supply every classroom in Oklahoma. To do it, he needs a total of roughly $6 million. He claims he already has half the money allotted, but for the other half, he’s requesting permission to transfer $3 million from the Oklahoma State Department of Education payroll—something the legislature has not actually approved. Even Republicans like Representative Mark McBride of Moore, Oklahoma are raising objections, saying that “You can’t take money from one place and just put it in another.” But that’s not even the worst part.
The real capstone to the whole scheme is where all that money, literally taken from people’s paychecks, would go. As it turns out, the language in Walters’ spending proposal was oddly specific, requiring that the school Bibles “must include copies of The United States Pledge of Allegiance, The U.S. Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution, and The U.S. Bill of Rights” and “must be bound in leather or leather-like material,” along with using the King James version of the text. Now, there are thousands of different Bibles for sale in the United States, but very few of them also contain political documents like the Bill of Rights. Wisely, publishers have usually kept religion and government as separate subjects. In fact, theOklahoman reports that none of the 2,900 Bibles available from Mardel Christian & Education, a prominent religious bookstore, fits the bill. But one Bible is a perfect match: the “God Bless the USA” Bible, which is being sold for $59.99 by Donald Trump and country music star Lee Greenwood.
In other words, it appears that Ryan Walters’ whole Bibles-in-school crusade was motivated partly by a desire to siphon $6 million from the public coffers and give it directly to Donald Trump. So far, there’s no evidence that Trump himself was aware of the scheme, although it’s easy to imagine him getting onboard with something like this—and he has called Walters personally in the past to get his endorsement, so the two at least know each other. But with or without Trump’s involvement, the plan was amazingly bold, like something George Santos would have cooked up in his heyday.
Walters almost got away with it, too. If it hadn’t been for local reporters at the Oklahoman, the details might have stayed buried in obscure funding documents, where nobody would read them. Now, the hyper-specific conditions that made the Trump Bible practically the only option have been dropped—although the mandate itself remains—and lawmakers like Rep. McBride are calling for Oklahoma’s attorney general to make a “comprehensive investigation.” The whole mess is a reminder of why investigative reporting is so important, and why education, religion, and politics don’t mix. Apparently in all his Bible-pushing, Walters never read Proverbs 10:9—Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but he who makes his ways crooked will be found out.
Just over a week after Hurricane Helene devastated the American Southeast, another category five hurricane is barrelling toward Florida and is predicted to make landfall Wednesday night, causing many counties to issue evacuation orders. Hurricane Milton may be the worst storm faced by Florida in 100 years and one of the worst ever to come out of the Atlantic. The storm sped up by more than 100 mph within just a single day, which is unprecedented. Climatologists point to the record heat of the Gulf of Mexico, which causes water to evaporate more quickly, as the primary culprit. (Vox)
Austin Davis, a humanitarian activist who founded the nonprofit AZ Hugs, has been banned from public parks in the city of Tempe, Arizona—all for the “crime” of feeding the homeless without a permit. (NBC 12 News)
Where did they go, Ms. Mayor? What did you do with them?
Roughly 2,700 healthcare workers at the Michigan Medicine hospital in Ann Arbor—which is run by the University of Michigan—are planning a one-day strike for October 15. Organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), they say the university has refused to negotiate on wages, benefits, and other key concerns, and have voted to authorize the strike by an overwhelming 98 percent. (World Socialist Web Site)
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has bashed FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene as a “massive failure.” However, when President Biden requested Congress to hold an emergency session to pass more funding for the emergency response agency, Johnson said no. Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas warned that FEMA does not have enough federal funding to make it through hurricane season. But even with another Category 5 storm bearing down on Florida, Johnson told “Fox News Sunday” that “We’ll be back in session immediately after the election.”
We can’t truly know the motivations behind this. But with a month before election day, Republicans have every incentive to ensure that the response to these natural disasters is hamstrung, since the Biden/Harris administration will likely be blamed. This is something they have done before, when they tanked a Democratic border bill that Senator James Lankford (R-OK) described as “by far the most conservative border security bill in four decades” so Trump could continue running against immigration as an issue during election season. Republicans have already used the hurricane response, like with every issue, as an excuse to blame immigrants. Many have falsely claimed that FEMA has siphoned off hundreds of billions of dollars from disaster funds to help resettle migrants instead, like Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt who claimed that “FEMA has run out of money for the rest of hurricane season because Kamala Harris used the funds for free giveaways to illegal immigrants.” (While FEMA has helped distribute funding from the Department of Homeland Security’s Shelter and Services Program, none of the money actually comes from FEMA’s budget.) The claim is made all the more ironic when you consider that many of the Republicans making it voted againstfunding hurricane relief last week, just before Helene hit.
Helene and Milton are bad, but Mike is an even bigger threat.
This incident has shown the profound cynicism of Republicans, who are willing to weaken the response to a hurricane that has already killed 230 people just for a campaign talking point. But this is also what the structure of our government incentivizes. Unlike a parliamentary system, where the executive is the leader of whatever party or coalition receives majority support in the legislature, our system allows for Congress and the presidency to be controlled by opposing parties. Because people are more likely to blame the president for things when they go wrong, this basically incentivizes the party that doesn’t control the White House to make things as shitty as possible in hope that the president takes the heat for it. Republicans seem to be betting that a shoddy response from FEMA will be blamed on the Biden administration rather than them. And while this is deeply evil, it is also arguably the rational thing to do from a purely electoral perspective. Needless to say, a system that rewards a party for purposely doing a bad job is probably one that needs reform.
In other news…
Donald Trump’s rhetoric is becoming more openly eugenic than ever before. During an interview with the right-wing talk radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump claimed that immigrants were bringing “bad genes” into the United States, saying: “Now, a murderer, I believe this; it's in their genes. And we've got a lot of bad genes in this country right now.” Once again, this sounds disturbingly close to Nazi propaganda from the 1930s—and it’s especially worrying since Trump could very well win in November. (Newsweek)
Trump also held a rally with Elon Musk in Butler, Pennsylvania, returning to the scene of the assassination attempt against him from July. This should have been a compelling moment for Trump, but its gravitas was somewhat undercut by Musk doing his trademark Awkward Little Jump onstage, which quickly became a meme. (Rolling Stone)
Kamala Harris is carrying out a “charm offensive” to woo Wall Street financiers away from supporting Trump. According to the Financial Times, Harris has hosted the CEOs of CVS, Visa, and Motorola at her Washington residence and assured two finance executives that she was planning to oust the chairs of the Federal Trade Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission for more business-friendly appointments. As with immigration, climate, and foreign policy, her strategy to defeat Trump continues to be “act exactly like him.”
In Idaho, a Republican state senator (and former cop) named Dan Foreman recently yelled “go back where you came from!” to a Native American candidate for the state’s House of Representatives. This is incredibly silly, as Senator Foreman (who is white, although you probably knew that from context already) is actually a newcomer to the American continent by comparison. But nobody said racists were smart. (Idaho Statesman)
In a sequel to her theory about wildfires being caused by a “laser beam” controlled by “Rothschild Inc,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been spreading the theory that the recent hurricanes occurred because “they control the weather.” She did not specify who she meant by “they,” but she suggested that it was being done deliberately to Republican-leaning areas. It’s, of course, ironic that Greene does not believe in human caused climate change but apparently does believe that the government can conjure a Category 5 hurricane out of thin air. (Rolling Stone)
The hooded pitohui is one of the world’s only poisonous birds!
The pitohui looks a lot like a Baltimore oriole, and they’re actually related—but the pitohui, which is found throughout New Guinea, has a formidable defensive weapon that its northern cousin lacks. A graduate student named Jack Dumbacher found that out in 1989, when he was netting and studying various birds in the woods of New Guinea. He found that, whenever he got a cut or a scrape after handling a pitohui, it hurt a lot more than usual—and “When he put his cut finger in his mouth to ease the wound… his mouth started to burn as well.”
Dumbacher sent some feathers to a lab for analysis, and the results were shocking: they contained batrachotoxin, the same chemical compound that’s found in poison dart frogs. In the frogs, there’s so much neurotoxin that just brushing one can be deadly. In the pitohui it’s a lower concentration, and touching its feathers just gives you a nasty rash—but that could be enough to discourage predators from eating one. Some scientists speculate that both the birds and the frogs get their toxins by eating beetles from the Choresine family, but so far that’s unconfirmed. (And as usual, indigenous people had known all this for centuries, and call the pitohui the “rubbish bird” in their own language because it’s no good to eat.)
Presumably, whoever’s holding this pitohui was really itchy the next day.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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