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The BBC, Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse have all called on Israel to allow journalists in and out of Gaza as starvation there becomes imminent. In a statement, the news outlets said, "We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families." We speak with Afeef Nessouli, a journalist who just returned from Gaza, where he volunteered as an aid worker. "It has been an incredibly awful experience to see people sort of become sicker and sicker from hunger," says Nessouli, who describes visiting community kitchens in Gaza that have run out of food. "Many of us would just have one meal a day," he says of his seven weeks in Gaza. Now his colleagues who remain in Gaza "are having one meal every three days."
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Virginia Commonwealth University is withholding the diploma of a Palestinian American student because of her campus activism. In a hearing Tuesday, officials examined the case of VCU student Sereen Haddad, who was told she would not receive her diploma at her graduation this year because of her participation in a peaceful memorial commemorating violent police arrests at a student encampment for Palestine in 2024. Sereen Haddad is the daughter of Tariq Haddad, a cardiologist who grew up in Gaza. Dr. Haddad made headlines last year for rejecting an invitation to meet with then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken because of the Biden administration's support for Israel's actions in Gaza. The Haddads have lost more than 200 members of their extended family in the nearly two-year-long assault.
We speak to the duo about the repression and retaliation that Sereen has faced for her student activism as she awaits a final decision by the university on the conferral of her degree. "Whatever VCU decides, I have made peace with the fact that I don't need a university who is materially invested in a genocide's approval," she tells Democracy Now! "I am on the right side of history, and I don't need a university to tell me that."
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The starvation crisis in Gaza is deepening under Israel's brutal blockade and amid regular massacres of civilians attempting to secure aid at the only officially sanctioned aid sites, run by Israeli troops and American mercenaries. The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the onset of famine are the subjects of a new report by analysts Davide Piscitelli and Alex de Waal for the research organization Forensic Architecture on the "architecture of genocidal starvation" in Gaza. "I've been working on this field of famine, food crisis and humanitarian action for more than 40 years, and there is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today," says de Waal, who is also the author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.
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Israel launched airstrikes that destroyed part of the Syrian Defense Ministry and a facility near the presidential palace in Damascus on Wednesday, killing three people. This comes weeks after Israel launched unprovoked strikes on Iran, which led to a brief war that killed over 900 Iranians and 29 people in Israel. Adam Shatz, U.S. editor at the London Review of Books, says Israel's motivation in the Middle East is to "settle accounts with any force in the region that might challenge its domination." He also notes violent language around foreign policy has become "banal" in many Western countries. "It's not simply Trump and the far right who speak blithely about overthrowing foreign governments, about bombing other foreign populations. It's people who have a reputation … for being liberals and moderates," says Shatz.
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