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Daily Maverick
2 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born — now is the time of monsters
On Sunday, 13 July 2025, siblings Karam and Lulu al-Ghussain, aged nine and 10 respectively, went to fetch water for their family from a water distribution site in Gaza. Given the Israeli Defense Force's (IDF) much-vaunted proclamations of precision bombing, and that there is no indiscriminate bombing, we can assume that they identified when there were enough people and children in line, before proceeding with the bombing of the site, and dismembering Karam and Lulu. I began writing this piece on Saturday, 19 July, and during the course of Saturday 32 Palestinians were killed while seeking food and water. On Sunday, 20 July, another 73 Palestinians who had been queueing were killed. By Monday morning that figure had been adjusted upwards to 93 confirmed dead. The pope went so far as to describe the bombing as barbaric. Much of the aid now being 'allowed' into Gaza is being distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American organisation launched in February 2025 with the aim of supplying aid to Gaza. It operates in a small part of Gaza, has no website and has the full support of the Israeli government. The foundation has been accused of making starvation a bargaining chip and of being a direct accomplice in Israel's killing and starvation machine. The United Nations has estimated that since the end of May the IDF has killed more than 800 people who were trying to secure food at distribution hubs operated by the foundation. That figure is now well above 1,000. I would perhaps be somewhat cynical to suggest that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation exists simply to draw children to distribution sites to create an easy target for the IDF bombs. But am I? The population of Gaza is being systematically starved. And when, in a state of utter desperation, they seek aid, at the only site the IDF has approved, the IDF is then in a position to simply wait for enough people to arrive and to drop a bomb. Every day. Drop a bomb on children every day. Why? Because they can? This is slaughter for sport. And our response? Mostly silence, save for a few news outlets and intrepid reporters and commentators. How did we get here? How is it that the outrage is not so loud as to drown out everything else? In attempting an answer, I am going to draw on two books. The first, the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, and the second the truly remarkable Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know by Mark Lilla. Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher and journalist in the early part of the 20th century. He is most famous for his Prison Notebooks which he wrote during his imprisonment by Mussolini from 1926 until his death in 1937. Perhaps his most well-known quote is 'the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters'. This idea of a 'time of monsters' refers to what he saw (the period following World War 1) as a time when the old order and old understandings were in a state of collapse. He called this the interregnum (from the Latin, meaning 'between reigns'). In the space created, in the vacuum of social upheaval, is when the monsters emerge to take advantage of the chaos. Hitler in 1930s Germany is, of course, the prototypical example. It seems incontrovertible that we are living in a time of monsters. Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India are all prime examples. And, of course, hovering creepily above all of this is the sociopathic felon and friend of Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump. But the prize for the monster of monsters must surely be Benjamin Netanyahu. A man willing to slaughter tens of thousands of children to stay out of court, and to fulfil his messianic delusion of Israel controlling all the territory from ' the river to the sea '. How did we get to the point where these are the monsters filling the void of power and taking millions along with their brutal lies? We now live in a world where millions of people believe that vaccines cause autism; where the habitual liar Trump is seen as a visionary leader; where climate breakdown is for many people a hoax; where the head of health in the US, Robert F Kennedy Jnr, does not believe that HIV causes Aids and believes that the Covid vaccines were developed to control people via microchips; and where Edgar Maddison Welch was so convinced that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring in the basement of a Washington DC pizza restaurant that he fired shots at the pizzeria using an assault-like AR-15 rifle in an attempt to 'save' the children, eventually serving four years in jail. Lilla, in Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know, offers a potential answer as to why so many people stubbornly refuse to see the world as it is, rather holding tightly onto some kind of self-delusion. He writes: 'We willingly give up a shot to acquire true beliefs about the world out of fear that truths about ourselves will be exposed in the process, especially our insufficient courage for self-examination. We prefer the illusion of self-reliance and embrace our ignorance for no other reason than that it is ours. It doesn't matter that reliance on false opinion is the worst sort of dependence. It doesn't matter that through stubbornness we might pass up a chance at happiness. We prefer to go down with the ship rather than have our names scraped off its hull.' Lilla argues that the more difficult the truth we have to face, the more we are likely to lie to ourselves. Imagine having to face the truth that we watched as one of the most powerful armies in the world (with the open support of the most powerful one) bombed and slaughtered a classroom full of children (27 of them) every day for 653 days. Every day for 653 days. We saw it happening and we denied, rationalised, pontificated, lied, fudged, and ultimately did nothing. No wonder there is so much solace and bliss to be found in ignorance. DM
UPI
5 days ago
- Politics
- UPI
Netanyahu apologizes for bombing Gaza church after Trump call
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apologized for the Israeli Defense Force's strike on Gaza's only church. Photo by Al Drago/UPI | License Photo July 18 (UPI) -- Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apologized for the Israeli Defense Force's bombing of Gaza's only Catholic church Thursday morning. The strike killed three civilians. "Israel deeply regrets that a stray ammunition hit Gaza's Holy Family Church. Every innocent life lost is a tragedy," Netanyahu's office said in a statement. He added the incident was being investigated. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said President Donald Trump called Netanyahu to discuss the attack. Netanyahu told Trump it was a mistake. Netanyahu also expressed gratitude to Pope Leo XIV for his "words of comfort." The pope said he was "deeply saddened to learn of the loss of life and injury caused by the military attack" and reiterated calls for a ceasefire. The church's priest, the Rev. Gabriel Romanelli, was injured. Pope Francis had called Romanelli nearly every day throughout the war. Doctors at al-Ahli hospital said two women were killed, The Times of Israel reported. The third person, who died later, was male. The Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem named the dead as Najwa Abu Daoud, Saad Issa Kostandi Salameh and Foumia Issa Latif Ayyad. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa said he doubted the strike was an accident. "What we know for sure is that a tank, the IDF says by mistake, but we are not sure about this. They hit the church directly," he told Vatican media. The IDF said it did a preliminary investigation after reports of damage and casualties at the church, the Times of Israel reported. "It emerged that fragments from a shell fired during operational activity in the area hit the church mistakenly," the IDF said. "The IDF directs its strikes solely at military targets and makes every feasible effort to mitigate harm to civilians and religious structures, and regrets any unintentional damage caused to them."
Newsweek
11-07-2025
- Politics
- Newsweek
The Netanyahu–Trump Plan for Gaza Is a Crime Against Humanity
For 21 months, Israeli armed forces have been bombing Gaza into a landscape of rubble and buried corpses—a massively disproportionate retaliation for the Hamas attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed over 1,200 Israelis. The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) tactics, chosen mostly to minimize casualties among their ground troops, have by now killed over 50,000 Palestinians in Gaza. For comparison, the Gaza death toll is at least 25 times the number of Syrians killed in NATO's bombardment of Raqqa in our war with ISIS, and approaching three times the casualties in the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II, which many scholars now consider to be war crimes. A Palestinian girl reacts as people queue at a food distribution point in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, on June 23, 2025. A Palestinian girl reacts as people queue at a food distribution point in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, on June 23, 2025. EYAD BABA/AFP via Getty Images This was being done in Gaza, Israel told the world, only in order destroy Hamas—but it left unsaid that the method would be total war, namely leveling buildings holding scores of people in order to get a single Hamas fighter. Gaza would be razed, much like Dresden or Hiroshima, in order to eliminate the danger of terror attacks on Israel coming from Gaza. Yet this endless orgy of revenge by indiscriminate fire, starvation, and destruction of almost all Gazan property seems sure to produce far more young Palestinians who see no hope or worthwhile purpose for their lives other than to die trying to kill Israelis—or perhaps Americans. The level of collective trauma is unimaginable. Now, however, the true aim behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's effort to destroy all of Gaza is coming to light through his discussions with President Donald Trump this week. Netanyahu revealed some of his "vision" for postwar Gaza, and it is far worse than it seemed during the January ceasefire. The prime minister implied that he wants as many Gazans as possible to move out to other countries so that Israel can populate most of the Strip when rebuilt—a forcible expulsion that could exceed the 750,000–1 million Palestinians forced off their lands in the 1948-1949 Nakba. Trump suggested that he was looking for nations to take in Gazans by the hundreds of thousands. Elements of this horrendous idea resemble what Trump said in February. Perhaps he and Netanyahu will even try to hire mercenary regimes like the warlords of South Sudan and move Palestinians forcibly into their hands? Likewise, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Monday that the IDF is planning to turn the area in and around the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip into a "humanitarian" zone within which remaining Gazans would be concentrated and then kept there by a giant militarized fence or wall. Gaza was already an open-air prison and unbelievably, now Israel's proposal is to force Gazans who do not flee Palestine for other shores into a much smaller prison, while they turn the rest of Gaza into Israeli settlements. It goes without saying that these proposals are the textbook definition of an enormous crime against humanity called ethnic cleansing, as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum website documents. They would repeat what European governments did to Jewish populations through pogroms, attacking and killing them en mass, burning their villages, forcing them off fertile lands and into ships bound for America, or into dense "Jewish quarters" of inner cities where they could be kept sequestered—a series of crimes that culminated with the Nazis building concentration camps. It is surely staggering, then, to hear the leaders of the world's only Jewish state speak of forcing an oppressed population that they have demonized into a giant new concentration camp. If Israelis wanted to move Gazans on such a scale out of the war zone solely for temporary purposes while "clearing" out Hamas forces, they could have done this in fall 2023 before killing over 50,000 civilians. They could have set up huge camps in the Negev and helped all women, children under 16, and anyone over 70 move into them, with other men screened—all before the complete blitzkrieg of Gaza began. But it was never Netanyahu's purpose to spare any Gazan lives. His proposal is shocking but it is really just a larger version of what Likud governments have been doing to Palestinians for years in the West Bank—bulldozing their homes, forcing them off their lands into a few dense city centers, surrounding these with militarized barriers, and opening the rest to Israeli settlers. Since the 1970s, Israel's right-wing government policy has always been collective punishment by destroying buildings and forcing residents to move. Now this horror is being carried out in Gaza with the blessing and support of the U.S. government, making all Americans complicit in enormous new crimes of the kind we associate with the world's worst tyrants. Within the U.S., the forced march toward this catastrophic conclusion is supported by a sustained propaganda campaign to portray the massacre of Gazans as mere Israeli "self-defense," and to attack and threaten anyone who dares to disagree in public by threatening their deportation or condemning them as antisemites. Over a year ago, I argued that the only morally acceptable solution is for a large international force to take control of Gaza. Hamas should always have been displaced by installing a new non-Israeli transitional government, led by all credible partners in the region and financed by a large consortium of nations seeking a two-state solution, that could force Hamas to the side and resist its attacks by hunting down its ringleaders. The transitional government must then rebuild Gaza with money primarily raised by tariffs on all Israeli goods and services across the globe. The transitional authority's goal would be to create a peaceful Palestinian state in a revived Gaza, with a border policed by the international group for a long time. In the long run, this is the only morally viable alternative to the ethnic cleaning that Israel has now proposed. John Davenport is professor of philosophy and director of peace and justice studies at Fordham University. The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
The Independent
30-06-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
New satellite images show work at Iran's Fordow nuclear site after US bombing
Satellite pictures taken in the week after the US airstrikes on Iran's three nuclear sites show activity at the Fordow facility, which Donald Trump claimed was 'completely and totally obliterated' in last week's attack. Images from Maxar Technologies show construction vehicles including an excavator near one of the shafts at the Fordow nuclear facility which was struck by US bunker buster bombs on 22 June. Other images show that the bombardment had completely caved in entrance tunnels to the site. The images show several vehicles parked around the facility, as questions remain about just how much of Iran's nuclear capability was obliterated. The US Secretary of Defense hit out at media reporting of the attack, after a leaked preliminary intelligence report found the attack had likely only set Iran's nuclear programme back by a couple of months. Speaking at the Pentagon alongside the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff late last week, Pete Hegseth said 'anyone with two eyes' would recognise the damage done to Iran's facilities. 'First reports are almost always wrong. They're almost always incomplete,' he said, adding the facility had been completely 'destroyed'. Hegseth cited several experts and other reports to back his claim up, including the Israeli Defence Force, the CIA director, US director of national intelligence. He also quoted Iran's foreign ministry spokesperson as saying 'our nuclear institutions have been badly damaged, that's for sure'. General Dan Caine said the bunker-buster bombs 'went exactly where they were intended to go'. But on Sunday, the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog suggested Tehran could get its nuclear programme back up and running within months. The International Atomic Energy Agency director general Rafael Grossi previously said Iran had told the watchdog it was planning to move its enriched uranium ahead of a suspected bomb attack, and that it was unclear whether that fuel had been destroyed in the bombardment. "So some could have been destroyed as part of the attack, but some could have been moved," he said in an interview on Sunday. Israel launched an attack on Iran earlier this month, saying Tehran was on the brink of developing nuclear weapons. It sparked a 12-day war, with Iran launching missiles at Israeli cities including Tel Aviv, before the US joined in with the nuclear site attacks. Mr Grossi said the strikes on sites in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan had significantly set back Iran's ability to convert and enrich uranium, but the country still has capacity. "They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that," Grossi told CBS News in an interview. "Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there," he added, according to the transcript of the interview. Western powers stress that Iran's nuclear advances provide it with an irreversible knowledge gain, suggesting that while losing experts or facilities may slow progress, the advances are permanent. "Iran is a very sophisticated country in terms of nuclear technology," Grossi said. "So you cannot disinvent this. You cannot undo the knowledge that you have or the capacities that you have."
India.com
27-06-2025
- Politics
- India.com
Big tension for Netanyahu as Israel's intelligence report reveals Iran will have more than 10 thousand dangerous missiles by..., they will be...
New Delhi: In the recent conflict with Israel, Iran made missiles its main weapon. Iran rained missiles on Israel for 12 days and caused devastation in many of its major cities. Iran's missile capability has increased the concern of its opponents like Israel and America. This concern of these countries is going to increase even more now, the reason for this is the intelligence report of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). This report shows that the number of Iran's missiles is increasing very fast. What does Israeli intelligence say? The intelligence report of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) says that Iran's missile arsenal will double in the next three years. Iran currently has about 2500-3000 missiles. By 2028, the number of missiles is expected to increase to more than 10,000. The IDF says that the rapid increase in Iran's missile capability can bring significant changes in the regional security scenario in the coming years. How is it a challenge for Israel? The IDF report could pose a challenge to Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has repeatedly called Iran's military capabilities a threat to his country's existence. Iran's missile attacks have put Israel in trouble even before the recent conflict. Last year, in 2024, Iran rained missiles on Israel twice, in April and in October. Israeli air defense has also been seen failing many times in front of the Iranian missile and drone barrage. Iran-Israel conflict of 2024 IDF sources say that when Israel attacked Iran on June 13, Tehran had 2,500 ballistic missiles but it is engaged in missile manufacturing on a large scale. In such a situation, the IDF intelligence team estimates that Iran will have 6,000 missiles by 2026. By August 2027, Iran will have 8,800 and at any time in the year 2028 it will cross the figure of 10,000. What Israel claims IDF sources have claimed that Tehran had 400 ballistic missile launchers before the 12-day war that lasted from June 13 to 24. The IDF has destroyed half of them in the war. This has given Israel some relief about Iran's ballistic missile threat. The IDF says Iran has increased its production of missile launchers, but it is not at the level of ballistic missiles.
