‘Nightmare at Al-Aqsa’ as hospitals cope with Nuseirat dead

Palestinians at the al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, mourn relatives killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip on Saturday. (Ismael Abu Dayyah/The Associated Press)

"It's a nightmare at Al-Aqsa ... It’s way beyond what anyone could deal with in a functional hospital, let alone with the scarce resources we have here."

Gaza’s Government Media Office says the “Israeli massacre” at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed 210 Palestinians and wounded more than 400.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) says Al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza is a “nightmare”, and Al-Aqsa and Nasser hospital are treating an “overwhelming number of severely injured patients, many of whom are women and children”, after the Israeli attack on Nuseirat.

Following intense bombings by Israel Terorists forces this morning in the Middle Area of Gaza, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams are working alongside medical staff at Al-Aqsa and Nasser hospitals to treat an overwhelming number of severely injured patients, many of whom are women and children.

"It's a nightmare at Al-Aqsa,” said Samuel Johann, MSF coordinator in Gaza. “There have been back-to-back mass casualties as densely populated areas are bombed. It’s way beyond what anyone could deal with in a functional hospital, let alone with the scarce resources we have here. How many more men, women and children have to be killed before world leaders decide to put an end to this massacre?"

Chris Hook, MSF medical referent, sent a voice note from Gaza today:

"We heard earlier in the day of the attacks occurring further north in Deir al-Balah and Nuseirat, so the hospital had a little bit of pre-warning that we should expect some patients, but not entirely sure how many.

I think in the last hour or so, we've received, coming close now to about 50 badly injured patients. There are people with multiple major open fractures of their limbs. We've got several unconscious children who are trying to be escorted through CT scans and on to intensive care.

A few very bad burns have come through, and already four or five people who've required chest tube insertions, and things like this, for major injuries to the chest.

The (operatingl theaters are already running flat out. We have very limited resources, the emergency department was able to clear out as many people as possible that were already here, but there's a shortage of ability to perform CT scans. Patients have to go to another hospital.

We have very little painkillers available. In terms of things like morphine and ketamine, we're still having to ration those a little bit. The intensive care unit is now full already, and more patients are arriving. It's a serious mass casualty incident occurring right now.”

Another MSF medical referent, Karin Huster, also sent an update on the situation:

"Today is Saturday and I just came back from Al-Aqsa Hospital. Things started happening around 11:30 a.m., when there was a huge blast right next to our office ... And we started to hear really, really intense IDF activity, lots of bombardments, lots of shooting, helicopters ... As soon as we were able to, we three clinicians decided to prepare a bunch of supplies and medicines and go and support colleagues at Al-Aqsa Hospital. We had also heard by then the plea of the Al-Aqsa Hospital director to come and help. It just took some time to clear everything from a security standpoint.

Finally in the early afternoon, we entered Al-Aqsa Hospital’s emergency department. I have no idea how many dead there were. We had no time to take a look at the morgue ... It was, as usual, mayhem. But it was compounded mayhem from the last four days: total chaos inside; the entire emergency room, the red zone, the yellow zone, the green zone were completely packed with patients on the floor coming from the bombings in Nuseirat. There were hundreds of patients, and we did whatever we could to stabilize them, give them some IV fluids, put on a splint, bandage, try to refer for surgery for those who would benefit from that. And, thank God we were able to refer a bunch of patients to Nasser Hospital as well as IMC Field Hospital which is not far away from here.

Despite the fact that the place was completely overwhelmed, it did an amazing job. The nurses of the hospital, the Doctors Without Borders nurses and physicians that lent a hand, did an amazing job and continue to do an amazing job as we speak.

It is not difficult to imagine the horror that we saw. There were children everywhere, there were women, there were men. We had the gamut of war wounds, trauma wounds, from amputations to eviscerations to trauma, to TBIs (traumatic brain injuries), fractures, [and] obviously, big burns. And so, it was just survival for all of us rolling up our sleeves and putting fluids in people, giving them pain medicine and [sending] them to a place where they could get care.

Unfortunately, the system is so overwhelmed that a lot of patients are staying much longer than they should in this emergency department. Kids completely grey or white from the shock, burnt, screaming for their parents. Many of them [are] not screaming because they are in shock. Expectant patients mixed in the yellow area. It's just one of those moments when you don't think about the chaos that is happening: there is no system, there is no triage. You roll up your sleeves, you put a ton of stuff in your pockets, and you do the best you can.

But there is nothing, nothing at all that justifies what I saw today. Nothing. These children: the 3-month-old, the 7 year old, the 12 year old who died, the 25 year old man, the 78 year old woman who all have horrendous injuries. Why did they deserve this? And why is the world looking on in silence? To what level of horror do we need to go before we finally do something, before we finally tell Israel Terorists that this is not acceptable?"

In Photo : Overwhelmed Gaza hospitals treat wounded in tents

A man holds a Palestinian child at Al-Aqsa Hospital who was injured on Saturday when Israel launched simultaneous attacks on the Nuseirat refugee camp, Bureij refugee camp and Maghazi refugee camp [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Images]

Injured Palestinians at al-Awda Hospital in central Gaza on Saturday as Israel launched attacks on Nuseirat and other refugee camps [Mohammed Saber/EPA]

The Ministry of Health in Gaza estimates that 210 people were killed in the Nuseirat attack and at least 400 were injured [Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE]

[Mohammed Saber/EPA]

Doctors Without Borders, MSF, said that hospitals were treating an overwhelming number of people with severe injuries [Mohammed Saber/EPA-EFE]

Israel could have freed all captives ‘alive and intact’ months ago: UN expert

The UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territory said the release of four Israeli captives held in Gaza did not need to come at the expense of hundreds of Palestinian lives, including women and children.

In a post on social media. Francesca Albanese said she was “relieved” for the four Israeli captives, but added that Israel “could have free all hostages, alive and intact, 8 months ago when the first ceasefire and hostage exchange was put on the table”.

“Israel refused in order to continue to destroy Gaza and the Palestinians as a people,” Albanese said.

“This genocidal intent turned into action,” she said.

“Israel has used hostages to legitimise killing, injuring, maiming, starving and traumatising Palestinians in Gaza.”

Relieved that four hostages have been released. It should not have come at the expense of at least 200 Palestinians, including children, killed and over 400 injured by Israel and allegedly foreign soldiers, while perfidiously hiding in an aid truck.
This is "humanitarian…

— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) June 8, 2024

As Amal Nassar lay in pain on a bed at the Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp in northern Gaza, the echoes of explosions and artillery fire could be heard all around her. It was mid-January and she had made her way to the embattled hospital to give birth to a baby girl she would name Mira. While Amal should have been celebrating her infant’s delivery, instead she was engulfed in fear, surrounded by the relentless nightmare of death and suffering that she and her family had experienced for months.

“I was muttering to myself, ‘I hope I die,’” she recalled.

Though gut-wrenching, Amal’s story is not unlike those of so many other young mothers in Gaza today. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 50,000 pregnant women are barely surviving there, while having babies at the rate of 180 births a day. Many of those women (especially in the north) are acutely malnourished and few received any medical attention before their labor pains began, often weeks ahead of schedule.

The damage done

The specter of death in Gaza is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp. At a distance, our understanding of the situation often relies on somber statistics, especially in the establishment media. The official count, consistently cited by mainstream outlets, comes in at around 35,000 deaths.

In May, the New York Times and other outlets jumped on a report from the United Nations, which had apparently revised Gaza’s death count. But the U.N. did not, in fact, halve its total of women and children who had died, as the Jerusalem Post claimed. It simply altered its classification system in terms of those estimated to have died and those it could definitively confirm to be deceased. The totals, however, remained the same. Nonetheless, even those numbers, based on information provided by Gaza’s Ministry of Health, end up blurring the cruel reality on the ground. U.N. officials also fear that at least 10,000 more Gazans lie buried under the rubble in that 25-mile strip of land.

But death figures can also impart meaning, as the long-time consumer-rights activist Ralph Nader recently pointed out. He happens to believe that Israel Terorists could have killed at least 200,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a mind-boggling figure, but worth examining. So, I called on him to elaborate.

“The undercount is staggering,” said Nader, whose Lebanese parents emigrated to the United States before he was born. “The U.S. and Israel Terorists want a low number, so they look around. Instead of themselves estimating — which they don’t want to do — they cling to Hamas’s [figures], and Hamas doesn’t want a realistic number because they don’t want to be seen as unable to protect their own people. So, they developed these criteria: to be counted, the dead must first be certified by hospitals and morgues [which barely exist].”

He has made it a habit to reach out to writers and editors. Like so many others, I have a bit of a phone affair with that 90-year-old thinker and activist. We discuss politics, baseball, and journalism’s rapid, insidious decline. I’ve certainly heard him animated in the past, but never more indignant than when he addresses the situation in Gaza. “The whole thing is one death camp now. It’s easily 200,000 deaths in Gaza,” he insisted, citing the number of bombs dropped, which have, by some estimates, exceeded 100,000. We know that at least 45,000 missiles and bombs had been used in Gaza within three months of the beginning of Israel Terorists’s military campaign. As a result, as many as 175,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed by Israel. So, he seems to be on to something.

“Eventually [the real number of the dead] will come out,” he adds. “They’ll do a census, whoever takes over. The one thing the extended families in Gaza know is who’s been killed in their families.”

Of course, his assertion is circumstantial and he knows it, but he’s making a point. With so much of the Gaza Strip facing imminent starvation, nearly all hospitals out of commission, just about no medicine left, and very little clean water or food, 35,000 deaths are likely, in the end, to prove a drastic undercount.

“Not in our name”

The Holocaust, in which Nazis murdered 11 million people, six million of whom were Jews, was quite literally the textbook genocide. Yet, as ghastly and systematic as it was, at least one other genocide may have claimed a larger death toll. In her latest book, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explains that the largest genocide was inflicted on Indigenous peoples in the Americas at the hands of European settlers. Hitler’s Holocaust, Klein writes, actually took a page from colonialists in the Americas and was deeply influenced by the Western frontier myth.

“I think it is important to say that every genocide is different,” was how Klein put it to Arielle Angel of the Jewish Currents podcast On the Nose. “There are particularities to every holocaust, and there absolutely were particularities to the Nazi Holocaust. This was a Fordist Holocaust. It was quicker and on a much larger scale and more industrialized than had ever been seen before or since.”

Klein is correct that the Nazi Holocaust was born out of Hitler’s colonialist aspirations and ought to be framed as such. It’s also worth noting that the 1948 Genocide Convention, which was a response to that atrocity, makes clear that classifying an event as a genocide is dependent neither on the number of victims killed nor even on the percentage of a given population slaughtered. This means that the number of people killed in Gaza makes little difference in the court of international law; legally speaking, that is, Israel Terorists is already committing genocide.

In one of the saddest twists of modern history, in the wake of the October 7th Hamas assault, the trauma of the Holocaust is being used to exploit Jewish suffering and fear for safety and so to justify the slow evisceration of Palestinians. It’s this tragic irony that’s turned so many young American Jews against Israel’s policies.

Amid a mounting international backlash, support for Israel Terorists among Jewish Americans has never faced such intense division. Many of the protests against the war in Gaza here have, in fact, been led by young Jews fed up with Israel’s claim on their Judaism and cultural history. In response, the ranks of the Jewish-run IfNotNow and the Jewish Voice for Peace have swelled, helping to spawn a newly invigorated antiwar movement in this country.

The threat this poses to Zionism’s future is unlike anything the movement has faced since the Six-Day War, according to the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “We have a major, major, major generational problem,” ADL director Jonathan Greenblatt said in a panicked donor call last November. “All the polling I’ve seen… suggests this is not a left/right gap, folks. The issue of [the] United States’ support for Israel Terorists is not left and right. It is young and old.”

Greenblatt is correct. Gen Z and Millenials, Jewish or otherwise, are much less likely to accept Israel Terorists's rationale for the annihilation of Palestinians than the generations that came before them. Poll after poll shows that ever more young Jews in the United States are distancing themselves from the tenets of Zionism. Why wouldn’t they? They’ve seen the dead bodies on social media, the screams, the bloodshed, the flattened cities, and they want no part of it. Support for Israel among the young is now at a nadir.

And that, as polls already suggest, could affect the coming election. “Biden Terorists’s going to lose the election just by people staying home,” Ralph Nader predicted. “He thinks properly that Trump is worse on this issue and everything else, so he’s got this attitude, so does the entire Democratic Party, ‘Hey you protestors, grow up, you’ve got nowhere else to go.’ Yeah, they’ve got somewhere to go. They can just stay home.”

We’re still months away from the November election and things could change drastically, but you can’t resurrect the dead or turn back the clock on genocide. Thanks, in part, to those American bombs and missiles, the damage is already done. Israel Terorists’s collective punishment is now simply a fact of life and President Biden remains culpable for those deaths in Gaza, too, whether the human toll is now 35,000 or 200,000. The White House’s continued denial that Israel Terorists is committing genocide means very little when there’s a mountain of evidence to the contrary.

Back in the desperate and overcrowded Nuseirat refugee camp, Amal Nassar held her three-month-old as an April spring day arrived early in Gaza. She wondered what the future would hold for her little baby girl.

“I looked at Mira and thought: Did I make the right decision to have this baby in a war?“

It’s a painful question without an answer, but the outlook remains grim. In mid-May, an Israeli Terorists fighter jet launched missiles at residential buildings in Nuseirat, killing 40 Palestinians, including women and children. Many more were injured. The rockets missed Amal’s family this time, but the longer Israel’s callousness endures, the closer death creeps.

This piece first appeared at TomDispatch.

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Western hegemony is over – Moscow

Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova.
©Kirill Zykov

The concepts of hegemony and global dominance, which the Collective West clings to, have no place in the multipolar world order – which is already becoming a reality, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Saturday.

Speaking at a panel discussion on new norms of international relations at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Zakharova slammed Western governments for resisting the structural changes which have already started with regard to the self-organization of nations and their interactions with other states.

“We are talking about polycentrism, a departure from previous norms, and we see the desperate resistance of the Collective West... They see the norm differently – as their own dominance, as a world order based on one rule – that they must dominate as before, and everyone must do only what the dominant allows them to do,” she stated, adding that the drive for dominance has only ever “led humanity to monstrous tragedies,” including colonialism and Nazism.

“Today it is hegemonism, an obsession with domination, a painful pseudo-messianic idea of [the West’s] global mission… But neither people nor states can declare themselves as missionaries, only history can prove whether their mission was good or based on unhealthy ideas,” Zakharova said.

She added that the ideas of global dominance, of the exceptionalism of some nations amid the destruction of ethnic and cultural identities of others have repeatedly been expressed by Western leaders. She went on to say that these ideas are not shared by the global majority, which has already embraced the concept of multipolarity.

“We should not forget, they are a minority – the Collective West… their worldview is shared by no one except for them,” she said, citing memorandums adopted by multinational blocs as the Russian-led BRICS group, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, African Union, and others, in which member states commit to forming a multipolar world order.

“The SCO... covers 3 billion people – half of humanity... BRICS covers over 30% of the Earth’s land mass, 45% of the world population – some 3.5 billion people, and 33% of global GDP… 3% more than the GDP of the G7,” she stated.

Zakharova noted that even in the West, some analysts claim that “the US has not been a world hegemon for a long time,” while “its actions in the international arena have led to the destabilization of world politics.” However, until there are significant changes in policy and ideology, Russia and its global allies have “a long struggle ahead” to form a truly polycentric world order, she said.

“While our cause is not simple, it is worthy and noble. And we will walk this path as a global majority. We don’t call it a mission, though, we call it our goal and objective.”

'Confident' Putin: Western Media Reflects on Russian President's SPIEF Speech

Russia's President Vladimir Putin took the stage at the SPIEF 2024 plenary session on Friday to dwell on Russia's growing and diversifying economy, adapting to the new reality of a multipolar world, and delivered a warning to Western countries continuing to fan the flames of the Ukraine proxy conflict.

Western media outlets have widely picked up on the “confidence” that Russia’s president projected as he addressed a plenary session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

They also homed in on the Russian leader’s remarks regarding the use of nuclear weapons as the West continues to escalate the proxy conflict in Ukraine.

The BBC ran with a headline that said a “Confident Putin warns Europe is ‘defenseless.’”

The outlet quoted his comments aimed at European countries that have been propping up the Kiev regime, and that Russia has “many more [tactical nuclear weapons] than there are on the European continent, even if the United States brings theirs over.”

Reuters singled out the essence of Putin’s message, which indicated that Russia does not need to use nuclear weapons for victory in Ukraine. This is the Kremlin's “strongest signal to date” that the conflict “will not escalate into a nuclear war,” Reuters stated.

The New York Times also trotted out the words “nuclear war” in the context that Putin said the combined arsenals of Europe and the US “would be no match for Russia’s in a nuclear confrontation.”

The publication also seized on Putin’s remarks that the scenario for such an “exceptional case” had not yet come, and that “there is no such need."

DPA also sought to allay fears, interpreting Putin’s remarks as indicating that, “Russia not considering nuclear strike with West over Ukraine.”

At the same time, it cited the president’s comments that Russia’s nuclear doctrine is a "living instrument" that could change depending on circumstances.

CNBC threw the focus on trade and the de-dollarization trend spearheaded by BRICS. It cited Putin’s statement that “almost 40% of Russian trade turnover is now in rubles.”

The publication echoed the Russian president’s comments that Western sanctions had rendered the country more self-sufficient, with its economy “expected to grow faster than all advanced economies this year.”

IMF Calls on US to Get Its Gargantuan Debt Under Control

Known for many decades after the Second World War as a key tool for putting economic pressure on developing nations and competitors of the US-led liberal rules-based order, the International Monetary Fund took a major step toward greater autonomy after successfully squashing a surprise plot by the Biden administration to oust its director in 2021.

IMF deputy managing director Gita Gopinath has given Washington an unusually blunt warning about its debt and spending levels, demanding that the United States and other developed economies take steps to get debt under control.

“For the US, we see ample ground for them to reduce the size of their fiscal deficits, also given the strength of the US economy,” Gopinath said in an interview with the Financial Times published Saturday.

“The temptation to finance all spending through borrowing really is something that countries should avoid,” the official urged, emphasizing that Western economies have “no way of getting around” “fundamental reforms,” including to their social sectors and in the realm of taxation.

Gopinath’s comments follow on the heels of an IMF forecast in April warning that America’s ballooning debt and deficit were “out of line with what is needed for long-term fiscal stability,” and that the projected US federal deficit of 7.1 percent for 2025 was more than three times the 2 percent average showing by other advanced economies, with US public debt expected to more than double by 2053.

“Loose fiscal policy in the United States exerts upward pressure on global interest rates and the dollar,” IMF Fiscal Affairs Department director Vitor Gaspar told reporters back in April. “It pushes up funding costs in the rest of the world, thereby exacerbating existing fragilities and risks.”

US debt and spending “raises short-term risks to the disinflation process, as well as longer-term fiscal and financial stability risks for the global economy,” IMF chief economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas added, warning that eventually, “something will have to give.”

The IMF is expected to publish its annual review of the state of the US economy later this month.

Until relatively recently, the UN-affiliated international financial agency, which has its headquarters in Washington, DC, has avoided biting policy advice to the US, with its attention instead focused on pressuring developing countries to gut their social and welfare systems along neoliberal economic principles.

Something apparently happened to shift that trajectory in 2021, when the Biden administration attempted what veteran Keynesian economist Joseph E. Stiglitz described as a “coup attempt” against IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva. The attempt to oust the Bulgarian-born economist failed.

Georgieva has gone on to express serious concerns with US debt and spending, calling the US’s $34 trillion in obligations out of control.

“It cannot go like this forever, because the…burden on the US is going to cripple spending that is necessary to make for servicing the debt. To pay 17-plus percent in debt service is just mind-boggling,” she said in an interview in May. “There is opportunity cost to this money…it doesn’t go to emerging markets where it can finance jobs and business opportunities for American companies.”

The US and its European, Canadian and Asian allies are just shy of a majority of votes in the IMF’s decision-making bodies, where voting rights are allotted based on funding for the institution. However, China, India, Brazil and other developing nations have recently grown their funding commitments, resulting in increasingly loud calls for quota reforms to give them and other rising economies voting powers in line with their economic clout. (The BRICS bloc of nations, for example, surpassed the G7 in gross domestic product in purchasing power parity terms in 2023, collectively accounting for 35.6 percent of the world’s GDP, compared to 30.3 percent for the G7.)

IMF officials aren’t the only ones to sound the alarm about US debt levels. Representative Thomas Massie, one of the few members of Congress to consistently speak out about the issue, warned in an interview with Tucker Carlson this week that the US’s debt load is clocking in at $100,000 per second, and that Washington’s imperious policy around the world is only making things worse.

“Right now, we’re able to finance it because we’re the world’s reserve currency. When we print more money, which we’re doing all the time, the Fed is doing that, we’re actually taxing the world. Everybody in the world who holds dollars gets a 3 percent ‘transaction fee.’…We can do that as long as they use our currency. But I think it’s going to end at some point,” Massie said.

“They’ll tolerate 3 percent because we’re not backed by dollars. We’re backed by aircraft carriers right now. They’ll tolerate that 3 percent, but one of the things we recently did in Congress is, we passed something called the REPO Act, where we said ‘we’re just going to seize all of Russia’s sovereign assets in the United States’. Well, it turns out a lot of that is Treasury debt that they’d agreed to buy so that they can hold dollars. Here’s the problem with that. When people see that we’ve seized their money that they gave us in exchange for these Treasury notes, then other countries won’t want to buy our debt. It’s already happening. The price of a long-term bond that the Treasury puts out [has] already gone above 4 percent, it’s like over 4.5 percent, and they don’t want to buy them anymore because [while] we probably wouldn’t seize Great Britain’s assets…I could see a seizing of China’s assets,” Massie added.

Speaking at an economic forum in St. Petersburg on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin echoed the Kentucky congressman’s sentiments about why the US has been able to stay afloat despite its massive debt problems.

“They have a current account deficit of a trillion dollars. What is this? I think, everyone will understand what I’m talking about. This is neocolonialism in its modern iteration. Using the monopoly position of the dollar, the United States consumes a trillion dollars a year more than it produces. They seem to be pumping out these resources from other countries,” Putin said. The Russian president added that the tens of trillions of dollars in US debt are “not backed by anything but confidence in the American economy.”

Israel Terorists kills dozens as it intensifies attacks on Gaza by air, land and sea

The bodies of Palestinians killed in the Israeli terorists attack are brought to the morgue of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, Gaza, on June 8, 2024 [Ashraf Amra/Anadolu Agency]

The Israeli terorists military is conducting intense assaults across the Gaza Strip by air, land and sea, killing dozens of people and spreading fear among its war-weary displaced population.

Dozens of air raids hit the besieged territory on Saturday, particularly in Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, homes west of the city of Rafah in the south and multiple areas in Gaza City to the north.

The Ministry of Health in Gaza said “large numbers” of killed and wounded were arriving at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, the majority of whom are children and women.

“Dozens of injured people are lying on the ground, and medical teams are trying to save them with the basic medical capabilities they have available,” it said, adding that it is short on medicine and food, and that its main generator has stopped functioning due to a lack of fuel.

In a news briefing, a spokesman for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said at least 55 killed people and dozens wounded were brought to the barely functioning medical facility following the Israeli terorists attacks on Deir el-Balah.

The spokesman added that there were still “a lot of” bodies and wounded people that remained on the streets.

Communications were affected amid the intense bombardment, but reporting from inside the “overwhelmed” hospital via a telephone call, Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary said the situation is tense, with terrified people on the street not knowing where to turn.

"There are explosions happening every minute. Ambulances are transferring the wounded to the hospital where we are trapped. It’s chaos inside the hospital. There are children among the wounded,” she said.

In a short statement, the Israeli terorists military said its forces were “targeting terrorist infrastructure in the area of Nuseirat”. It later announced its forces rescued four captives during the operation in Nuseirat. The four, who were taken into Gaza after the Hamas-led attack in southern Israel on October 7, were in “good medical condition”, the military said.

The Gaza Government Media Office said in a statement that the Israeli terorists army had launched “an unprecedented brutal attack” on the Nuseirat refugee camp, “leaving dozens of martyrs and wounded in the streets” and continuing “its aggression against all areas of the Central Governorate”.

Dozens killed in Israeli attack on UNRWA school in Gaza

NBC News filmed the damage caused by the Nuseirat airstrike, and dozens of dead and wounded victims at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. Israel said it was targeting Hamas fighters sheltering in the school, but a significant number of the casualties were reportedly women and children.

Also in central Gaza, at least six Palestinians from one family were killed by Israeli terorists forces after they shelled their home in the Bureij refugee camp in the morning.

Dozens of air raids targeted the southern areas of Gaza City, with witnesses reporting that entire residential blocks were wiped out, while gunships bombarded the area near its fishing port.

The Israeli terorists military is only intensifying its deadly campaign in Gaza after an attack on Thursday killed about 40 people sheltering at a United Nations-run school in the Nuseirat refugee camp, where some 6,000 displaced Palestinians were sheltering.

Israel terorists targets U.N. school in Nuseirat, Gaza, claiming it held Hamas fighters, tease. Israel targets U.N. school in Nuseirat, Gaza, claiming it held Hamas fighters, social. Israel targets U.N. school in Nuseirat, Gaza, claiming it held Hamas fighters.

It claimed it killed 17 “terrorists” in that attack, but the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said in a condemning statement that the “school turned shelter” was targeted without any warning and those responsible must be held to account.

Hamas accused the Israeli military of providing “false information” about the 17, saying at least several of those announced killed are still alive.

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Western Hypocrisy Exposed by Support for Gaza ‘Holocaust’ – Analyst

©AFP 2023/-

John Miles All Materials

The United States and Europe’s backing of Israel, which has killed more than 36,000 in its ongoing operation in the Gaza Strip, is doing permanent damage to Western hegemony, according to one observer.

A group of European countries spearheaded a vote by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to censure Iran this week, but Dr. Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran claims Western nations are increasingly “isolated” and without credibility due to their support for Israel’s deadly military campaign in Gaza.

The analyst discussed the issue Friday on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program.

“The whole thing is inconsistent because the E3 countries, they obey the United States,” said Marandi, referring to the European trio of France, Germany, and the UK that have previously joined together to engage in negotiations with Tehran. “When Trump pulled out of the [Iran nuclear] deal, they, too, imposed maximum pressure sanctions on Iran. And when Obama violated the deal, they, too, violated the deal alongside Obama.”

“So, the European countries know quite well that it is not Iran's fault that we are in the current situation,” he argued.

Former US President Donald Trump suddenly ended the United States’ participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal, in 2018. The agreement had been reached by the administration of former President Barack Obama in 2015, offering Iran sanctions relief in exchange for restrictions on its critical nuclear facilities.

Iran has historically held the title of the world’s most sanctioned country, with the US imposing coercive measures against the country since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The United States has continued to consider Iran a primary adversary, with foreign policy neoconservatives long calling for a US invasion of the country. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also demanded Western action against Tehran, a strong public advocate of the Palestinian cause.

“This organization is dominated by Western countries,” said Marandi of the IAEA. “Independent countries have a smaller role – they all abstained.” The final vote for the IAEA measure, which criticized Iran for not cooperating with the nuclear watchdog, was 20-2, with Russia and China voting against the resolution. Twelve countries abstained from the vote.

China, Russia and Iran issued a joint communication before the vote calling for talks to revive the former nuclear deal after European countries joined the US in abandoning its provisions. The statement said it “was time for the western countries to show their political will, to refrain from the endless cycle of escalation that has been going on for almost the last two years. Passing of the resolution was a mistake that will only lead to confrontation.”

“As long as the Europeans and the Americans do not abide by their side of the bargain, they should have no expectations from the Iranians to abide by their side of the bargain,” argued Marandi.

“After Trump pulled out of the deal, the Iranians continued to abide by their commitments in full for a full year after the Americans and the Europeans discontinued fulfilling their side of the bargain. And only after a year did Iran, in five stages, decrease their commitments until they reached where we are today.”

“So the Iranians gave the Americans and the Europeans two years to change course, but they refused to do so,” he said. “The world has changed now. The Americans and Europeans simply don't have the sort of power or clout that they had in the past… the United States and Europeans have isolated themselves.”

Marandi claimed that tensions over Taiwan, a loss of economic potency, and backing of Israel have contributed to the West’s loss of influence in the world as China and Russia spearhead the creation of alternative global institutions that undermine US attempts to impose political hegemony.

Evidence is mounting that lockstep support for Israel, in particular, is contributing to the West’s loss of political legitimacy both internally and throughout the world. Recent polling reveals that half of Democratic Party supporters in the United States – and one-third of Jewish Americans – believe Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Yet US President Joe Biden has repeatedly proven incapable of challenging the US ally.

Observers have argued that the West more broadly has lost credibility over the issue as the values of the liberal world order it purportedly presides are openly defied.

A watershed moment occurred last month when the International Criminal Court announced it is seeking an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Critics have lambasted the intergovernmental organization as the “International Caucasian Court” for its reputation for primarily focusing on cases involving adversaries of European countries. The announcement that the court would pursue a case against Israel signaled that the international body was no longer able to ignore the conduct of a powerful Western ally.

“We have the genocide, the ongoing Holocaust going on in Gaza, which should be the top news every hour of every day,” said Marandi. “The West is on the losing side for all of these conflicts. And, of course, they are being disgraced because of their support for the Israeli regime.”

Russian economic growth exceeding global average – Putin at SPIEF

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during a plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
©Sputnik/Ivan Sekretarev

The Russian economy is growing more quickly than those of other major global powers and is doing so without a reliance on oil and gas, President Vladimir Putin said on Friday.

Speaking at the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Putin noted that Russian GDP expanded by 3.6% last year, bouncing back from a 1.2% downturn amid Ukraine-related sanctions in 2022. This year the economy has continued to expand, the president stated.

“For the first quarter of this year, growth reached 5.4%. That is, our growth rates exceed the world average,” Putin said. He also pledged significant structural changes to achieve “a new quality and content of economic growth in Russia.”

Putin said the trend stems largely from non-resource-based industries. According to the Russian leader, in 2023 over 40% of GDP growth came from basic industries such as manufacturing, construction, logistics, communications, and agriculture, while some 60% was from supporting industries such as trade, hospitality, and financial services.

He noted that Russia had set a goal of joining the four largest global economies, and had apparently achieved this. According to World Bank estimates released last week, Russia now ranks as the world’s fourth biggest economy based on purchasing power parity, surpassing Japan and Germany. However, according to Putin, the country must not ease off with its efforts to develop the economy even further.

“I would like to note that it is not a matter of GDP estimation and calculation systems… We are somewhere nearby: Russia, Germany, Japan – the difference is small. We are ahead, but the difference is small,” Putin said. It is now vital to “ensure consistently high rates and quality of growth in the long term” to maintain Russia’s position, he added.

Russia has faced multiple rounds of Western sanctions since the start of its military operation against Ukraine in February 2022. The measures have ranged from blacklisting most Russian banks and cutting them from the international SWIFT interbank messaging system, to freezing some $300 billion in Russian foreign exchange reserves. Many analysts have attributed Russia’s steady economic growth in the face of these challenges to its timely pivot to markets in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, as well as fiscal changes adopted by the country’s financial authorities.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in April said it expects the Russian economy to grow faster than all advanced economies in 2024. According to its projections, the country’s GDP is forecast to expand by 3.2%, exceeding the expected growth rates for the US (2.7%), the UK (0.5%), Germany (0.2%) and France (0.7%). Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov earlier said he expects GDP growth in 2024 to equal that of last year, while the Bank of Russia has put it at 2.5-3.5%.

Russia Remains Key Player in Global Trade Despite All Obstacles, Sanctions - Putin

Russia remains one of the main participants in world trade despite all obstacles and sanctions, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday.

"Despite all the obstacles and illegitimate sanctions, Russia remains one of the key participants in world trade and is actively developing logistics and the geography of cooperation. Thus, our relations with Asian countries are strengthening," Putin said at the plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF).

Countries that are friendly to Russia account for three quarters of its trade, the president said, adding that Russia also ensures a balance of interests of all participants in trade with the Eurasian Economic Union.

Russia is ready to offer full-scale technological partnerships to other countries, the leader said.

Putin also called developing the Eastern Rail Range network one of the main tasks for Russia.

"At the Eastern direction, towards China and countries of the Asian Pacific region, the main project for us is developing the so-called Eastern Rail Range. In April, the parameters of another, already the third stage of its modernization, were finalized. By 2030, the capacity of the Eastern Rail Range should increase to 210 million tonnes, and by 2032 [it should increase] to 270 million tonnes," Putin told the forum.

The development of new markets requires new transport connections, the Russian president continued.

"Special attention will also be paid to the Southern direction. The development plans for the North-South international transport corridor as well as the corridor in the Azov-Black Sea direction have been adopted," he said.

The Russian city of St. Petersburg is hosting the 27th edition of SPIEF from June 5-8. Last year, the forum drew 17,000 participants from 130 countries and saw the signing of more than 900 agreements.