It's So, So Bad, And It's About To Get A Whole Lot Worse

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Things are so, so bad in the middle east right now, and from the looks of things they’re about to get a whole lot worse. 

Israel is going full scorched-earth on northern Gaza in advancement of its long-planned ethnic cleansing of the area. The IDF is besieging and attacking civilian populations throughout the north, and the UN World Food Programme reports that no food aid whatsoever has been allowed in so far this month.

Hossam Shabat, one of the last remaining journalists in northern Gaza, reports the following on Twitter:

“The Israeli occupation has besieged us in this area, which includes Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, and the Jabalia refugee camp, for the past eight days. Since October 1st, they have stopped all food, water, and medical supplies from entering. They have threatened hospitals to shut down, stopped fuel from entering in order for hospitals to operate, and are targeting anyone who moves. So far, 400 people have been killed. People are bleeding in the streets, and we can’t reach them.”

Another post from Shabat:

“Due to the Israeli occupation siege on Jabalia camp, most injuries caused by the occupation’s bullets and shelling lead to death, as there are no medical resources or capabilities available to effectively treat the wounded.”

Another post, the most recent as of this writing:

“We are literally living our final moments. O Allah, grant us a good end.”

The western media have been working fanatically to facilitate these atrocities. 

A CNN report on the World Food Programme’s findings titled “UN says no food has entered northern Gaza since start of October, putting 1 million people at risk of starvation” does not mention the word “Israel” until the twelfth paragraph, and then somehow manages to go the entire rest of the article without making it clear that Israel is blocking the food.

A BBC report describes Israel’s policy of laying total siege to a population of hundreds of thousands of civilians as merely “controversial”, with an amazingly delicate headline that reads “‘Surrender or starve’: Attack on Jabalia hints at controversial Israeli plan for northern Gaza”.

In a recent interview on CNN, a doctor who worked in Gaza for two weeks corrected CNN anchor Kate Bolduan for absurdly referring to the results of Israel’s war crimes as a “humanitarian crisis”, saying “This is not a humanitarian crisis, Kate, and I’m gonna say it very clearly for your viewers to hear: this is genocide.”

In southern Lebanon, Israel has been deliberately targeting healthcare facilities so extensively that nearly half of the medical centers in areas of conflict have already been closed. More UN peacekeepers have been wounded by Israeli fire as Israel continues to deliberately target staff from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon. The Israeli military is now saying they’re going to start attacking ambulances because the ambulances are Hezbollah.

And as horrifying as both these developing stories are, they’re going to be shifted to the back burner as soon as Israel begins its planned attack on Iran. As we discussed previously, Iran has already said it will respond to any further attacks by Israel with attacks of its own, and that its days of restraint in this stand-off are over.

The US now reportedly has boots on the ground in Israel, with American troops set to operate the THAAD anti-ballistic missile systems that are being sent by Israel’s superpower ally. It seems inevitable that the US will become further and further involved in this conflict the more Israel escalates against Iran, and nobody in the White House seems particularly invested in preventing it from doing so.

And of course the mass media are helping to pave the way toward this next war as well. The Washington Post has published unverified documents that were given to them by the Israeli military which purport to show Hamas plotting to petition Iran for assistance in the October 7 attack, admitting all the way down in paragraph 14 that “the documents’ authenticity could not be definitively established.” The New York Times published its own report on the documents, which it claims it “verified” by asking the Israeli military and some Palestinian sources who aren’t even in Gaza if they appeared authentic.

There don’t seem to be any feet near the brake pedal on this thing. All sides seem to have concluded that backing down is no longer an option, so the only choice left on the table is to keep escalating in the hope that the other side blinks.

This could easily culminate in Israeli nuclear strikes on Iran. Nothing Israel has done this past year indicates that there is any sanity or restraint among the people who’ve been calling the shots, and if Iranian missiles start pounding Israeli cities I see no reason to feel confident that the world won’t see a mushroom cloud over Tehran in the near future. 

As bad as things are, we can’t even imagine how much worse they could soon get.

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Featured image via the IDF.