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Nearly seven months of constant bombardment, siege and obstruction of aid deliveries have annihilated the healthcare system in Gaza. Last week, the Palestinian Health Ministry said that around 600,000 Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip no longer have access to any kind of healthcare. The World Health Organization has said that Israel is “systematically dismantling” the health system in Gaza. Only 11 hospitals out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are partially functioning. At both of Gaza’s largest hospitals, Al-Shifa and Nasser, Palestinians found hundreds of bodies buried in mass graves after Israel raided and destroyed the facilities. Democracy Now! speaks with Dr. Ismail Mehr and Dr. Azeem Elahi just after they volunteered at the largest hospital still operating in Gaza, the European Hospital in Khan Younis. “The healthcare system has been always in a noose, and that noose tightens at times when there’s conflict,” says Mehr. “Right now that noose has completely just hung the healthcare system.”
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Democracy Now! speaks with Hala Rharrit, the first State Department diplomat to publicly resign over the Biden administration’s policies backing Israel’s assault and siege of the Gaza Strip. Rharrit is an 18-year career diplomat who served as the Arabic-language spokesperson for the State Department in the region. “I could no longer be a part of the State Department and promote this policy. It’s an inhumane policy. It’s a failed policy that is helping neither Palestinians, neither Israelis,” Rharrit says. “We are not authorized to send military equipment, weapons to countries that commit human rights abuses. ICJ has determined plausible genocide, yet we are still sending billions upon billions of not just defensive weaponry, but offensive weaponry. It is tantamount to a violation of domestic law. Many diplomats know it. Many diplomats are scared to say it.” She adds, “I read the talking points that we were supposed to promote on Arab media. A lot of them were dehumanizing to Palestinians.” Rharrit also discusses how “corruption” in government allows for arms sales to continue. “I could not help but be concerned about the influence of special interest groups, of lobbying groups on our foreign policy and, as well, on Congress — on the people that decide whether or not some of those shipments of arms get sent. The bottom line is that our politicians should not be profiting from war. And unfortunately, we have some institutionalized corruption that enables that,” she says.
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Headlines for May 03, 2024; “This Militaristic Approach Has Been a Failure”: Meet Hala Rharrit, First U.S. Diplomat to Quit over Gaza; “Dead on Arrival”: Doctors Back from Gaza Describe Horrific Hospital Scenes, Decimated Health System
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
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This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
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Workers around the world rallied Wednesday to mark May Day, with many calling on the labor movement to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In New York, Democracy Now! spoke to demonstrators who demanded that U.S. unions apply political pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza and to stop their government’s arms trade with Israel. “Workers do have the power to shape the world,” said Palestinian researcher Riya Al’sanah, who was among thousands gathered at a May Day rally in Manhattan.
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A new report from Amnesty International finds the sale of U.S.weapons to Israel for use in its indiscriminate assault in Gaza is in violation of U.S. and international law. We speak to Budour Hassan, a Palestinian writer and contributing researcher to the report, who says the U.S. is “complicit in the commission of war crimes” and must “halt all arms transfer to Israel as long as Israel continues to fail to comply with international humanitarian law and international human rights law.” We also discuss Israel’s detention of thousands of Palestinians without charge, the inadequacy of U.S. human rights investigations into the Israeli military, and Israel’s threatened ground invasion of Rafah.
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We look at how university administrators have responded to Palestine solidarity protests by students with Frederick Lawrence, former president of Brandeis University and now the CEO of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and a lecturer at Georgetown Law School. Brandeis was founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community in the wake of the Holocaust and named after the first Jewish Supreme Court justice, the celebrated free speech advocate Louis Brandeis. Lawrence says the nationwide university crackdown on student protesters is a worrying violation of the principles of academic freedom. “Provoking people, challenging people, asking difficult questions, making people uncomfortable, that’s part of the price of living in a democracy,” he says. He also notes that what constitutes a threat to campus safety should be narrowly defined. “You are not entitled to be intellectually safe. You are entitled to be physically safe.”
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We get an update from the University of California, Los Angeles, where police in riot gear began dismantling a pro-Palestinian encampment early Thursday, using flashbang grenades, rubber bullets and tear gas, and arresting dozens of students. The raid came just over a day after pro-Israel counterprotesters armed with sticks, metal rods and fireworks attacked students at the encampment. The Real News Network reporter Mel Buer was on the scene during the attack. She describes seeing counterprotesters provoke students, yelling slurs and bludgeoning them with parts of the encampment’s barricade, and says the attack lasted several hours without police or security intervention. ”UCLA is complicit in violence inflicted upon protesters,” wrote the editorial board of UCLA’s campus newspaper, the Daily Bruin, the next day. Four of the paper’s student journalists were targeted and assaulted by counterprotesters while covering the protests. We speak with Shaanth Kodialam Nanguneri, one of the student journalists, who says one of their colleagues was hospitalized over the assault, while campus security officers “were nowhere to be found.” Meanwhile, UCLA’s chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine has called on faculty to refuse university labor Thursday in protest of the administration’s failure to protect students from what it termed “Zionist mobs.” Professor Gaye Theresa Johnson, a member of UCLA Faculty for Justice in Palestine, denounces the administration’s response to nonviolent protest and says she sees the events as part of a major sea change in the politicization of American youth. “This is a movement. It cannot be unseen. It cannot be put back in the box.”
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Democracy Now! Thursday, May 2, 2024
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As protests continue on campuses across North America, we go to the University of Southern California, where the union representing about 3,000 graduate student workers at USC has filed an unfair labor practice charge against the school to end campus militarization and drop charges against students and faculty. The “rampant violence that they inflicted on our workers” violates the National Labor Relations Act, says Margaret Davis, president of UAW Local 872. “It was a clear act of retaliation because people were engaging in pro-Palestinian free speech, which they have a right to.”
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Tuesday’s raid on Columbia University came 56 years to the day that police raided Hamilton Hall, arresting 700 students protesting racism and the Vietnam War. Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who was a student leader at the historic 1968 protest, says the violent crackdown on Columbia University and other campuses across the United States has refocused national attention on “an unjust war,” carried out by Israel with U.S. backing. “No commencement in America will occur in the next month where the war in Gaza is not a burning issue,” he says. He adds that the more diverse makeup of the protests today — led primarily by Palestinian, Muslim and Arab students — may have made school officials and police “much more willing to crack down” than when it was a mostly white protest movement.
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New York police in full riot gear stormed Columbia University and the City College of New York Tuesday night, arresting over 300 students to break up Gaza solidarity encampments on the two campuses. The police raid began at the request of Columbia President Minouche Shafik, who has also asked the police to remain a presence on campus until at least May 17 to ensure solidarity encampments are not reestablished before the end of the term. Police also raided CUNY after the administration made a similar call for the police to enter campus. Democracy Now! was on the streets outside Columbia on Tuesday night and spoke with people who were out in support of the student protests as police were making arrests. We also speak with two Columbia University students who witnessed the police crackdown. “When the police arrived, they were extremely efficient in removing all eyewitnesses, including legal observers,” says journalism student Gillian Goodman, who has been covering the protests for weeks and who says she and others slept on campus in order to be able to continue coverage and avoid being locked out. We also hear from Cameron Jones, a Columbia College student with Jewish Voice for Peace, who responds to claims of antisemitism, saying, “There is a large anti-Zionist Jewish voice on campus, and it’s also important to recognize the difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”
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Democracy Now! Wednesday, May 1, 2024
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