Gaza
In a place with hundreds of thousands of heartbreaking stories, it is one of the most shattering. Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza City last year when they peppered a car she was trapped in with bullets. Hind was stuck in the car along with the bodies of her aunt, uncle, and three cousins. Her pleas for help in a phone call with the Palestinian Red Crescent while trapped haunted people all over the world. After three hours, the Israeli army finally allowed an ambulance to go and get her. But it was also bombed. Now, a documentary, The Voice of Hind Rajab, has been released, which focuses on her final hours and that desperate call with the Red Crescent. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival last night and received the longest standing ovation in the festival’s history at 24 minutes. We should never forget Hind, or the more than 16,000 other Palestinian children who have been so mercilessly killed over the last 23 months. You can find out more about the film in this piece.
And from Al Jazeera here.
Guyana
Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali has claimed victory in an election that centered on how the country should spend its huge windfall since vast oil reserves were discovered in 2019. Though final results have yet to be tallied, Ali, the incumbent, appears to have amassed an insurmountable lead in early results. The 45-year-old ran on a pledge to use the oil money to improve the country’s infrastructure and tackle poverty. Since the initial discovery of oil, ExxonMobil says it has found billions of barrels’ worth, effectively quadrupling the state budget. With a small population of 800,000, the country now has the highest amount of oil per capita in the world. Opposition parties said the spoils were not being fairly shared.
More from BBC here.
DR Congo
Ebola is a word you never want to see in a headline. But today the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) confirmed a fresh outbreak and said there had so far been 28 suspected cases and 15 deaths. The outbreak is centered on the southern Kasai province and is believed to have begun when a pregnant woman attended a hospital reporting bleeding. She died within a week and hospital workers who had been in contact with her also fell ill. It is the sixteenth outbreak in DRC since 1976 and some of the previous outbreaks have killed hundreds of people. Several countries in east and central Africa, though, such as Uganda and DRC are experienced with successfully containing the virus.
More from Africa News here.
Although the Israel Defense Forces’ use of starvation as yet another means of war against innocent Palestinian non-combatants, including many children, may occasionally be internationally 'condemned' as ‘intolerable’, the atrocities will ultimately be tolerated, if not implicitly encouraged, by those nations with any ability to hinder the Israeli state's crimes against humanity.
Therefore, such condemnations — which are relatively few when considering the seriousness and scope of the atrocities committed — are but paper tigers, if not simply the cruelest frauds.
Yet, significantly, there are many Jews/Semites, both inside and outside Israel, who are vocally condemning their nation’s prolonged and heartless IDF onslaught. ... It indeed must be difficult for decent Jews/Semites with such a strong conscience when they publicly denounce Israel’s atrocities and are then denounced and referred to as “self-hating” by the extreme-Zionism powers, likely in large part to try shaming them into self-censoring.
I've long been, and still am, vocally critical of the clear decades-long maltreatment (to put it mildly) of the general Palestinian populace by the Israeli government and security/defense agencies. But I was pleasantly surprised at reading the cutline below the large photo accompanying a June 26 story (headlined “UK’s largest Jewish group punishes members who broke silence on Gaza genocide”) posted on the Middle East Monitor’s website:
“A young Charedi Orthodox Jew holds a placard during the demonstration. Orthodox Charedi Jews joined many thousands of pro-Palestinian protestors outside Downing Street accusing Israel and Zionists of genocide in Gaza.”
They may see that all lives and needless suffering should matter to us all, yet that’s much easier for a conscience to dismiss when one considers another an innately much lower lifeform. ... As a ‘gentile’, I can only try to imagine how I would act if in their position; if I could be as conscientiously strong-willed and brave.
So glad to see the news about Guyana’s elections mentioned here. Thanks Barry! It is a big win for the PPP party. I recently visited and attended their big pre-election rally.