news

UN says school and staff building 'directly hit' by strikes | The Guardian

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) has said that one of its schools in northern Gaza and a building designated as a residence for UN international staff in the Rafah area were directly hit by strikes.

In its daily update on Monday, the agency said UN international staff present in Rafah had left the building 90 minutes before the strike, and that no casualties were reported. The strike "is yet another indication that nowhere is safe in Gaza", it said. It did not say who was responsible for the strikes.

The UN agency said the coordinates of the building were shared twice, including just days ago, adding:

UNRWA shares coordinates of all its facilities across the Gaza Strip with parties to the conflict.

UNRWA also said it had received "extremely concerning" reports that Israeli Security Forces (ISF) had entered one UNRWA school and two UNRWA health centres in the Gaza Strip with tanks and used them for military operations.

It cited reports that the ISF "conducted interrogations and arrests" of internally displaced people in the installations, adding:

According to the reports, IDPs were subsequently forced to leave the UNRWA installations and move south towards Wadi Gaza. Witnesses reported that Israeli Forces then struck the two health centres with artillery fire. UNRWA is further verifying these reports. If confirmed, the military use of UNRWA facilities raises serious concerns, as such use puts civilians at serious risk of harm.

At Al-Shifa the IDF is shooting at ambulances and snipers are shooting patients.

Gaza: A call from Al-Shifa | Doctors Without Borders - USA

Please note that the situation at Al-Shifa Hospital is unfolding rapidly and may change.

At 8:10 a.m. local time today, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was able to reach our staff in Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza after losing contact during relentless attacks by Israeli forces over the past few days. The situation continues to get worse. Here is what our colleague, an MSF surgeon, told us this morning while still inside the hospital.

"We don’t have electricity. There’s no water in the hospital. There’s no food. People will die in a few hours without functioning ventilators.

In front of the main gate, there are many bodies. There are also injured patients; we can’t bring them inside.

When we sent an ambulance to bring the patients—a few meters away—and they attacked the ambulance. There are injured people around the hospital looking for medical care. We can’t bring them inside.

There’s also a sniper who attacked patients, they have gunshot wounds. We operated on three of them.

The situation is very bad, it is inhuman. It’s a closed area, no one knows about us. We don’t have an internet connection—you managed to call me now, [but] maybe you’ll [have to] try 10 times before you can reach me again.

The medical team agreed to leave the hospital only if patients are evacuated first. We don’t want to leave our patients. There are 600 inpatients, 37 babies, someone who needs an ICU. We can’t leave them.

We need a guarantee that there is a safe corridor [to leave] because we saw some people trying to leave Al-Shifa and they killed them, they bombed them, the sniper killed them.

Inside Al-Shifa Hospital, there are injured patients and medical teams. If they give us guarantees and evacuate the patients first, we will evacuate."

I had a dream that I took my baby to a vigil for a Palestinian child and cried the whole time

I've been watching some fascinating speed chess games at chess.com. I knew both players were both Iranian from their flags but when I googled them I got a surprise. They're both 15 years old.

Israel's War on American Student Activists - The Nation

Monthly Review: Western Left and the U.S.-China contradiction

Significant segments of the non-Communist Western Left see the developing contradiction between the United States and China in terms of an inter-imperialist rivalry. Such a characterisation fulfils three distinct theoretical functions from their point of view: first, it provides an explanation for the growing contradiction between the U.S. and China; second, it does so by using a Leninist concept and within a Leninist paradigm; and third, it critiques China as an emerging imperialist power, and hence by inference, a capitalist economy, which is in conformity with an ultra-Left critique of China.

Such a characterisation ironically makes these segments of the Left implicitly or explicitly complicit in U.S. imperialism’s machinations against China. At best, it leads to a position which holds that they are both imperialist countries, so that there is no point in supporting one against the other; at worst, it leads to supporting the U.S. against China as the “lesser evil” in the conflict between these two imperialist powers. In either case, it leads to the obliteration of an oppositional position with regard to the aggressive postures of U.S. imperialism vis-à-vis China; and since the two countries are at loggerheads on most contemporary issues, it leads to a general muting of opposition to U.S. imperialism.

For quite some time now, significant sections of the western Left, even those who otherwise profess opposition to western imperialism, have been supportive of the actions of this imperialism in specific situations. It was evident in their support for the bombing of Serbia when that country was being ruled by Slobodan Milosevich; it is evident at present in the support for NATO in the ongoing Ukraine war; and it is also evident in their shocking lack of any strong opposition to the genocide that is being perpetrated by Israel on the Palestinian people in Gaza with the active support of western imperialism. The silence on, or the support for, the aggressive imperialist position on China by certain sections of the western Left, is, to be sure, not necessarily identical with these positions; but it is in conformity with them.

Such a position which does not frontally oppose western imperialism, is, ironically, at complete variance with the interests and the attitudes of the working class in the metropolitan countries. The working class in Europe for instance is overwhelmingly opposed to NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, as is evident in many instances of workers’ refusal to load shipment of European arms meant for Ukraine. This is not surprising, for the war has also directly impacted workers’ lives by aggravating inflation. But the absence of any forthright Left opposition to the war is making many workers turn to right-wing parties that, even though they fall in line with imperialist positions upon coming to power as Meloni has done in Italy, are at least critical of such positions when they are in opposition. The quietude of the western left vis-à-vis western imperialism is thus causing a shift of the entire political centre of gravity to the right over much of the metropolis. And looking upon the U.S.-China contradiction as an inter-imperialist rivalry plays into this narrative.

As for China being a capitalist economy, and hence engaged in imperialist activities all over the globe in rivalry with the U.S., those who hold this view are, at best, taking a moralist position and mixing up “capitalist” with “bad” and “socialist” with “good”. Their position amounts in effect to saying: I have my notion of how a socialist society should behave (which is an idealised notion), and if China’s behaviour in some respects differs from my notion, then ipso facto China cannot be socialist and hence must be capitalist. The terms capitalist and socialist however have very specific meanings, which imply their being associated with very specific kinds of dynamics, each kind rooted in certain basic property relations. True, China has a significant capitalist sector, namely one characterised by capitalist property relations, but the bulk of the Chinese economy is still State-owned and characterised by centralised direction which prevents it from having the self- drivenness (or “spontaneity”) that marks capitalism. One may critique many aspects of Chinese economy and society, but calling it “capitalist” and hence engaged in imperialist activities on a par with western metropolitan economies, is a travesty. It is not only analytically wrong but leads to praxis that is palpably against the interests of both the working classes in the metropolis and the working people in the global south.

Israeli forces assault reporters from Turkish news channel TRT Haber trying to cover the troops' violence against Palestinian worshipers at Friday prayers in occupied Jerusalem.

Mali recaptures Kidal, Western-back jihadists BTFO: https://nitter.cz/african_stream/status/1724838694308151790

More context from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali_War

Keep reading rumors about a 5 day pause in hostiles. Just in time to bury the conflict before Thanksgiving

🚨🟢 Martyr Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades: — Since this morning, Al-Qassam fighters were able to kill and wound a zionist force holed up inside a building in Juhr Al-Dik after targeting it with two anti-fortification and anti-personnel TBG shells, clashing with them with machine guns, and completely or partially destroying 29 zionist vehicles in all areas of the incursion into the Gaza Strip.
Al-Aqsa Flood.

from https://t.me/PalestineResist/20083

al-qassam has been very busy, 29 vehicles in one morning!

Hey mega friends, new disinformation documentation thread just dropped: https://hexbear.net/post/1084874

Good little article about anarchist engagement with the Palestinian liberation movement. Including criticism of a couple anarchist groups who are being useless and/or actually counter-productive on it.

Anarchist Library - Palestine, platitudes and silence by Tommy Lawson

If Milei wins, Argentina will be govern by a dead dog, and something worse than that... Mauricio Macri.

Cant wait for the Argentinian warlord era

Norm with another banger

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/11/13/if-gaza-was-in-your-city-how-much-would-be-destroyed

Texans for Palestine

Update from the meeting of the decade, that's right visited switzerland in an official capacity, the last one was eight years ago, relations cooled after switzerland decided to buy F35s instead of Rafale jets after the US made a secret offer. Short list of things that were being discussed:

-France and Switzerland standing together against anti-semitism while calling for a ceasefire

-Respecting swiss neutrality

-Switzerland working closer together with the EU ('The Swiss are europeans even if they don't know it' )

-Switzerland has 'Strength for Wisdom' which is 'required the more turbulent the world becomes' which is why a visit to the confederation becomes more important

Some of my own thoughts:

-Macron sadly didn't look miserable and looks like he enjoyed himself as people don't really know him for the devil he is.

-Switzerland is France's third largest trading partner and the largest diaspora of french people live in Switzerland so close relations are a given.

-Macron probably sees Switzerland as some way for France and the EU to regain independence from the US, maybe he sees a way to conduct actual european diplomacy through Switzerland considering how much he went on about all kinds of things and his counterpart Berset said: 'Switzerland is alone in Europe, but not isolated because we have France'