Saturday, November 25, 2023

Gaza and Iraq

BBC NEWS reports:

Tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian demonstrators have marched through central London calling for a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.

It was the first London march since Armistice Day, when more than 100 counter-protesters were arrested.

Police said 15 people had been arrested at the march, though the "overwhelming majority" protested lawfully.

The protest coincided with a four-day pause in fighting between Israel and Hamas. 


The pause has seen violence.  CNN notes:

Three boys were shot and wounded with live ammunition near Ofer prison earlier Saturday evening, according to the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

A CNN team on the ground near Beitunia crossing, which is about 200 meters away from the Israeli prison, had witnessed many Palestinians waiting in the area for the expected release of the prisoners. The team heard three gunshots over the course of an hour and witnessed three boys being carried away on a stretcher over the same time period.

The Red Crescent said two of the boys were 17, and one was 16.



 CNN explains, "The Gaza Strip is 'the most dangerous place' in the world to be a child, according to the executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund."  NBC NEWS notes, "Strong majorities of all voters in the U.S. disapprove of President Joe Biden’s handling of foreign policy and the Israel-Hamas war, according to the latest national NBC News poll. The erosion is most pronounced among Democrats, a majority of whom believe Israel has gone too far in its military action in Gaza."  The slaughter continues.  It has displaced over 1 million people per the US Congressional Research Service.  Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) points out, "Academics and legal experts around the world, including Holocaust scholars, have condemned the six-week Israeli assault of Gaza as genocide."  ABC NEWS notes, "In the neighboring Gaza Strip, at least 14,854 people have been killed and 36,000 have been injured, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry."  In addition to the dead and the injured, there are the missing.  AP notes, "About 4,000 people are reported missing."  And the area itself?  Isabele Debre (AP) reveals, "Israel’s military offensive has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape. Whole neighborhoods have been erased. Homes, schools and hospitals have been blasted by airstrikes and scorched by tank fire. Some buildings are still standing, but most are battered shells."  Kieron Monks (I NEWS) reports, "More than 40 per cent of the buildings in northern Gaza have been damaged or destroyed, according to a new study of satellite imagery by US researchers Jamon Van Den Hoek from Oregon State University and Corey Scher at the City University of New York. The UN gave a figure of 45 per cent of housing destroyed or damaged across the strip in less than six weeks. The rate of destruction is among the highest of any conflict since the Second World War."


It's about destroying Gaza and that includes the living and that includes the living that provide care.  CNN notes, "The Israeli military said it is still detaining the director of northern Gaza's Al-Shifa hospital, Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya. Earlier Saturday, the World Health Organization called for the legal and human rights of detained health workers to be respected. Israel has repeatedly accused Hamas of using the hospital for combat and command purposes, which Hamas and hospital officials deny. So far, Israel has provided limited evidence of such use, with an alleged Hamas underground network having been viewed by only some Israeli reporters."  ALJAZEERA reports:


The UN office for humanitarian affairs (UNOCHA) has said that Israeli forces are reportedly arresting people moving from north and central Gaza towards the south through a checkpoint that Israel is describing as a “corridor”.

According to UNOCHA, people are being made to pass through an “unstaffed checkpoint” where they are asked to:

  • Show IDs
  • “Undergo what appears to be a facial recognition scan”

In one case in the last week, the UN says a child was left to pass through the checkpoint alone after his father was arrested at the checkpoint.

The UN is also raising concerns about the need for more child protection services to assist unaccompanied children.


Julia Conley (COMMON DREAMS) reports:


Humanitarian workers in Gaza on Thursday said their daily experiences struggling to take care of pregnant people and babies demonstrate why a four-day pause in fighting is far from sufficient to save the lives of the blockaded enclave's most vulnerable residents, including newborns who have begun to die from preventable causes.

As Israel's blockade continues to keep Gaza authorities from providing clean water, food, sanitation, and heat to homes and hospitals, babies aged three months and younger "are dying of diarrhea, hypothermia, dehydration, and infection," said Oxfam International.

Juzoor, an organization partnering with Oxfam in northern Gaza, said premature births have increased by 25-30% since October 7 when Israel began its bombardment of Gaza in retaliation for an attack by Hamas. 


Let's turn to Iraq.  Climate change is harming Iraq already.  At some point, the discoveries will become less 'fascinating' as the horrors of climate change become more clear.  For now?  EKATHIMERINI notes:

An inscription written in Aramaic and Greek that means “giver of the two brothers,” and a coin, a silver drachma, suggest to archaeologists at the British Museum in London the discovery of a temple in Iraq that was built at the request of Alexander the Great and was dedicated to Greek deities and to the warrior king himself. 

Archaeologists at the museum who are excavating the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, in the modern-day town of Tello, last year unearthed the remains of a 4,000-year-old ancient temple. They believe that within the site there was a Greek temple dedicated to Alexander and his “brother,” the demigod Hercules.

PROTOTHEM also notes this story:


One of the last acts by Alexander the Great before dying at the tender age of 32 might have been dedicating a Greek temple to honor ancient gods and confirm his own divine status. This is according to archaeologists from the British Museum working in the ancient city of Girsu in southern Iraq who have unearthed a 4,000-year-old Sumerian temple. The later Greek inscriptions, extremely cryptic and tough to gauge, had made no sense to the archaeology team, until now.

Girsu, also known as Tiris, was an ancient Sumerian city located in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now modern-day Iraq. The city flourished during the Early Dynastic and Ur III periods of Sumerian history, roughly between the 26th and 21st centuries BC. Girsu was a significant city of the Sumerian civilization, the first in the world, and played a crucial role in the development of early Mesopotamian culture.


 

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights observes:

Jassim Al-Asadi was born in a boat in the marshes of southern Iraq. Sixty-six years later, his life still revolves around the marshes, now as an environmental activist and a water-resources engineer fighting to save them from extinction.

“This used to be green pastures and reeds, but the place has dried up,” said Al-Asadi as he walked in blistering heat in a landscape of barren, cracked earth. “Over there is a house where a buffalo rancher used to live, but he abandoned it and moved near the Euphrates River. There are no more buffalo pastures.”

The Marsh Arabs, the wetlands' indigenous population of Iraq, have fished and cultivated crops here for 5,000 years, raising water buffaloes and building houses from reedbeds on floating reed islands at the place where the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers meet before flowing into the Gulf.

But climate change, water pollution, oil exploration and the construction of upstream dams are threatening the survival of this delicate ecosystem and its ancient Mesopotamian culture, which some trace back to the Sumerians.

Al-Asadi, head of the leading conservation group Nature Iraq, said a drought now in its fourth year is turning vast areas of once flourishing wetlands and agricultural land into desert. Salinity is rising in the shrinking channels and waterways, killing fish and making buffaloes sick.

“There is a change operating in the environment,” said Al-Asadi, who worked for more than 30 years as an engineer in Iraq’s Ministry of Water Resources. “One of the reasons is climate change and the effect of climate change on water levels in the Euphrates and Tigris in Iraq.”


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