“Our children drink salt water,” one Palestinian told France 24. (Water desalination plants are not operational right now.) The United Nations says there are two or three days’ worth of food left in Gaza’s markets. A fifth major Gaza hospital has closed, because it doesn’t have any more fuel for its power generators. (Here is some good reporting from The Washington Post on the collapse of Gaza’s health care system.)
Money grows on trees? Biden will reportedly request more aid for both Israel (to the tune of $14 billion) and Ukraine (to the tune of $60 billion) to assist in their ongoing war efforts against Hamas and Russia, respectively. That’s not the only U.S. involvement in the Israel-Hamas conflict: “A U.S. Navy destroyer on Thursday shot down missiles from Yemen that appeared headed toward Israel,” reports Axios. And “U.S. troops were fired on this week by drones in Syria and Iraq.”
“The missiles and drones were launched by pro-Iranian Houthi rebels in Yemen amid a flurry of drone attacks against American troops in Iraq and Syria over the past three days,” a Pentagon spokesperson told The New York Times.
Meanwhile in the Senate, “There is an emerging effort…to lump Israel aid together with Ukraine aid, border money and aid to Taiwan,” reports Politico. “But Ukraine aid is an issue that splits Republicans—and deals on the border or immigration are the white whale of Congress.”
Hospital attack follow-up: American intelligence officials now report that somewhere between 100 and 300 people were killed in the Al-Ahli Arab hospital blast earlier this week. The blast did not come from the Israeli military, as was initially reported by media outlets running with Hamas’ account of events, but rather from the accidental explosion of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.
The American news media got this horribly wrong, but don’t expect to see mea culpas. Instead, headlines were stealth-edited to be less credulous toward Hamas; reporters took to Twitter/X to kvetch about the difficulty of doing their jobs (it’s all Elon Musk’s fault, apparently); and nobody appears to have been fired for, say, illustrating a hospital-blast headline with an image from a wholly different city (Khan Younis). OK
