"What’s “extremist” about Ben Gvir is that he says out loud what Israel’s mainstream political establishment prefers to do quietly under the false pretense of “fighting terrorism.” At the height of the genocide, Israel was murdering a far greater daily number of children " Omar Baddar

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Jewish Voice for Peace

@jvplive

Ben-Gvir has been making genocidal threats for years. And, as the Israeli National Security Minister and part of Netanyahu’s government, he’s been able to act on them. 

 

 The Israeli government has always worked towards the same goal—maximum land with minimum Palestinians. And now Israeli officials are saying all the quiet parts out loud. The question is, when will our elected officials actually do something?

https://x.com/jvplive/status/2089403921391349950

Omar Baddar عمر بدّار

@OmarBaddar

·

Aug 16

What’s “extremist” about Ben Gvir is that he says out loud what Israel’s mainstream political establishment prefers to do quietly under the false pretense of “fighting terrorism.” 

 

At the height of the genocide, Israel was murdering a far greater daily number of children 

 

https://x.com/OmarBaddar/status/2089085650410553584

 

https://x.com/jvplive/status/2089403921391349950 

 
 

*  Jewish Voice for Peace

@jvplive

·

Over the weekend, Itamar Ben-Gvir said the Israeli military should “kill 30 or 40” people in Gaza every night.”⁣ He also called for the targeted killing of Palestinians, declaring, “Not just those who pose an immediate threat. There are people there who don’t deserve to live… They are not even people.” This is genocidal speech, dehumanizing hate speech. But for Ben-Gvir, it’s just another day advocating mass death and suffering.

 

Ben-Gvir isn’t a random individual—he’s a senior Israeli minister openly calling for the daily killing of Palestinians. He controls Israel’s police and prison services, giving him jurisdiction over Palestinian detainees in the occupied West Bank. He spearheaded legislation imposing the mandatory death penalty by hanging on Palestinians, which the Knesset approved earlier this year. Ben Gvir is also a follower of Kahanism, an extremist Jewish political ideology stemming from Zionism; Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994, was also a Kahanist.

 

Ben-Gvir’s words are grounded in Jewish supremacy and Zionism, the intertwined ideologies that are the foundation for the Israeli state, and used to justify an apartheid regime run on land stolen from massacred and forcibly exiled Palestinians. 

 

Instead of being held to account for its countless war crimes, the US government continues to provide support, weapons and funds to the Israeli government. We demand a complete end to US backing to Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Join us: Call Congress today and tell them to stop arming Israel

 

Tell Congress: Vote NO to funding war.

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resource/tell-congress-vote-no-to-funding-war/

AMERICAN DOCTOR: ‘Can we accept what we have done or not done?’: harrowing film follows doctors in Gaza. American Doctor follows three volunteer doctors as they try to save lives on the frontline and then return to the US to become advocates in congress

"... But the moral weight of American Doctor lies not just in its depiction of Gaza but its unflinching examination of the political and media machinery that enables it." 

Feroze Sidhwa in American Doctor.

Photograph: Watermelon Pictures

When she wanted to confront Americans about the consequences of their actions – or inactions – in Gaza, Poh Si Teng reached for a genre with mass popular appeal: the medical drama.

“Whether it’s The Pitt, Grey’s Anatomy, House, ER, even a comedy like Scrubs, you name it,” the documentary film-maker says via Zoom from her New York apartment. “I thought to myself, there’s something about medical dramas and doctors and human mortality in this space so let’s make The Pitt. The difference is it’s real and it’s set in Gaza and maybe this is the way to bring Palestine back to the United States.”

The result is American Doctor, a 93-minute film directed by Teng and co-produced with Kirstine Barfod and Reem Haddad, which premiered at the Sundance film festival and is out now in US cinemas.

The documentary follows three doctors from different cultural and religious backgrounds – Thaer Ahmad, a Palestinian-American emergency doctor; Mark Perlmutter, a Jewish orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina; and Feroze Sidhwa, a Zoroastrian trauma surgeon based in California – as they volunteer on the frontlines of Gaza’s collapsing hospital system.

They return to the US as advocates in the halls of Congress, which continues to send military aid to Israel. The film highlights the unique position of American doctors as witnesses whose professional standing makes their testimony difficult for politicians and even rightwing media to dismiss as propaganda.

The journey of Teng to making the film began in the fall of 2024, a year into the military campaign in Gaza. The Malaysian-American had spent years as a producer, documentary commissioning editor for Al Jazeera English and creative director at ABC/Disney but felt suffocated by the professional and political silence surrounding what she does not hesitate to call a genocide.

 “I was so frustrated and it felt like nothing was changing,” the 41-year-old explains. “In our journalism circles, even though we were seeing so many Gazan journalists being targeted and executed, it felt like in the western part of the world – specifically where I was situated in New York – that people were still whispering about Palestine... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/aug/17/gaza-doctor-documentary

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Iraq’s ghost villages: Islamic State drove people away – now a new enemy is preventing their return. Nearly a decade after fighting ended in northern Iraq, the climate crisis has brought extreme heat and a water shortage, making life almost impossible

Rivers in the Sinjar region have dried up as rainfall has become more erratic and temperatures have risen

The village of Faka in Sinjar was overrun by Islamic State in 2014 and retaken in 2017. All [16] photographs: Chris Huby/Le Pictorium 

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/aug/18/northern-iraq-villages-islamic-state-climate-crisis 

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By Chris Huby, in Sinjar

The first thing that strikes visitors arriving in Faka, a small village in Sinjar district, northern Iraq, is the silence. No children play in the streets. No shops are open. Roofless houses stretch across the hillside, their walls pockmarked by shellfire, while weeds and wild grasses grow through collapsed living rooms.

A decade after Islamic State (IS) swept across the region, war remains visible everywhere. But according to the people who returned, another enemy has quietly taken its place.

“Today, the problem isn’t only IS,” says Rajab Mohammed, 62, the village’s mukhtar, standing above the ruins of Faka. “It’s water. It’s jobs. It’s the future.”

Across Sinjar, abandoned houses now outnumber occupied ones. The battle against IS has ended. The battle to save the villages against drought and neglect has only just begun, and time is not on its side.

Before August 2014, about 150 families lived in Faka. When IS fighters seized the Sinjar region, residents fled as frontlines advanced across north-western Iraq. In August 2014, IS launched what the UN has recognised as a genocide against the ethnic minority Yazidi community. Thousands were killed and more than 6,000 people, mostly women and children, were abducted.

While Faka and the nearby village of Qubq escaped the mass killings that devastated other nearby villages, coalition airstrikes and ground fighting left much of the area destroyed. Today, only about 20 families have returned. The rest have settled elsewhere, discouraged by the lack of reconstruction, jobs and basic services in a region where the climate crisis is making rural livelihoods such as farming increasingly precarious.

“People ask why families don’t come back. The answer is simple. Where would they live? How would they earn a living?” says Aqil Ridha from Qubq.

The UN has ranked the country the fifth most vulnerable to declining water and food availability and extreme heat. Iraqi authorities project that by 2050 the country’s average annual temperature will have risen by 2.5C, with 24 additional days a year crossing extreme heat thresholds. Temperatures in Sinjar this summer have approached 50C.

Rainfall has become increasingly erratic and summers are hotter and longer, while prolonged droughts are reducing agricultural production. The UN’s special representative for Iraq has warned that the country will be able to meet only 15% of its water needs by 2035 if current trends continue.

In rural areas, where farming remains the principal source of income, the issues of climate and migration have become inseparable. The International Organization for Migration has recorded more than 186,000 people displaced by climate-related factors across Iraq as of September 2025.

In the village of... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/aug/18/northern-iraq-villages-islamic-state-climate-crisis 

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The real refugee crisis is the failure to make peace. Refugees flee war, conflict and persecution. End the wars that force people to run for their lives.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency

@Refugees

The real refugee crisis is the failure to make peace. Refugees flee war, conflict and persecution. End the wars that force people to run for their lives.

The first anti-AI protester to be jailed has a message for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta: ‘Regain your humanity’: “It’s absolutely frightening and appalling that these CEOs and AI experts know the dangers and they are pursuing it anyway,” Kaufmyn said before she was imprisoned. “That to me is unconscionable and reprehensible.”

A protest against AI outside OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco, California, on 11 July. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

Kaufmyn in front of her home in Berkeley, California. Photograph: Winni Wintermeyer/The Guardian

Wynd Kaufman, 69, chained and locked the front doors of OpenAI’s headquarters last year with members of StopAI

Robert Booth

Sun 16 Aug 2026 04.00 EDT

An activist who blocked the entrance to one of the world’s biggest AI companies is believed to have become the first person jailed for protesting against artificial intelligence as supporters dub her the “Rosa Parks of AI risk”.

Wynd Kaufman, 69, surrendered herself on Friday to authorities in San Francisco. She was found guilty by a jury for her role in an action last year that saw members of the group StopAI chain and lock the front doors of OpenAI’s headquarters in protest against the pursuit of artificial superintelligence.

The retired teacher from Berkeley, California, refused to move from a sit-in protest in February 2025 and pleaded not guilty to multiple misdemeanor charges. She was convicted in June of interfering with a business, trespassing with intent to interfere with a business, unlawful assembly and refusal to disburse a riot. On Friday, sheriff’s officers handcuffed her as fellow campaigners sang to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic (Glory, Glory Hallelujah): “Rise up, rise up and join us/Do not let the tech bros destroy us.”

“It’s absolutely frightening and appalling that these CEOs and AI experts know the dangers and they are pursuing it anyway,” Kaufmyn said before she was imprisoned. “That to me is unconscionable and reprehensible.”

She said she was willing to go to jail not because she was a martyr but because it was an “issue of sounding the alarm, challenging the system and hopefully trying to get the message out”... READ MORE   https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/16/california-openai-protester-wynd-kaufman

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*Meanwhile, more than a thousand researchers at frontier AI labs this summer signed a letter warning of “a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems”. 

Assal Rad - headline fixer extraordinaire in search of the actual truth courageously uncovers constant HASBARA/Zionist Propaganda in America's mainstream news headlines & stories that fuel Israel's war machine, escalting injustice, and monstrous bigotry

"“Settlers” What a weird name for illegal occupiers, TERRORIZING Palestinians in their homes.   (Israel sends troops into West Bank homes besieged by Jewish settlers)"

"“Israeli curbs” is such an absurd way to say Israel destroyed the healthcare system and blocks medical aid."

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

 

Assal Rad

@AssalRad

Fixed it for you

@nytimes

.

Even during the ceasefire, Palestinians in #Gaza continue to face daily threats from unexploded ordnance left behind by the fighting. Overall, about 82% of the structures in Gaza – about 200,000 buildings – are damaged.

© UNICEF/Eyad El Baba A nine-year-old girl outside her damaged home in Nuseirat camp in central Gaza.

 Gaza: Destruction of buildings rises by nearly 10 per cent since ceasefire

 https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/08/1168138

13 August 2026 Peace and Security

New satellite assessments show the destruction of buildings in Gaza has climbed by nearly 10 per cent since October’s faltering ceasefire between Hamas and Israeli forces aim to end the two-year war, which reduced cities to rubble and displaced more than one million people, UN agencies said on Thursday.

Even with the guns largely silent, Palestinians in Gaza continue to face daily threats from unexploded ordnance left behind by the fighting.

Key points

• UN agencies are struggling with shortages of fuel and other essential items
• Teenager injured by unexploded ordnance
• Aid efforts underway include mine action, summer school and food package distribution

At least three Israeli airstrikes have been reported since Wednesday, including one near Al Amal Hospital in Khan Younis earlier on Thursday, UN Associate Spokesperson Daniela Gross told reporters.

"Airstrikes on populated areas in Gaza risk increasing harm to civilians," the UN aid coordination office (OCHA) warned.

Meanwhile, a 13-year-old was injured by explosive ordnance earlier this week in northern Gaza.

Explosive hazard threats         

Against a landscape of rubble, the threat of explosive hazards is ever present in the shattered enclave.

More than 15,000 people participated in awareness-raising sessions related to explosive ordnance last week alone, and mine action partners have carried out 18 assessments to pave the way for rubble removal, the setting up of new shelters and the resumption of farming.

“While our partners still lack the permissions and equipment to remove explosive ordnance safely, they are also helping protect people by marking hazards and by educating civilians on how to beware of explosive items,” Ms. Gross said.

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More buildings destroyed

A new assessment by the UN Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) estimated that the number of destroyed structures across Gaza has increased by nine per cent since the declaration of a ceasefire in October 2025, according to the latest situation update the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNWRA. 

Since the ceasefire, UNRWA has received “reports of demolitions affecting schools and other UN facilities in areas under Israeli military control, however, these reports could not be independently verified due to ongoing access restrictions”, the UN agency said.

Overall, about 82 per cent of the structures – about 200,000 buildings – in Gaza are damaged, with two thirds of them destroyed, UNRWA said.

Prolonged shortages

UN agencies and partners are facing mounting challenges that are affecting the delivery of essential services across Gaza, choking humanitarian movement and operational capacity.

“The prolonged shortage of lubricant oil and other critical supplies required to maintain generators, vehicles and operational equipment is placing additional strain on already overstretched service delivery systems,” UNRWA said.

The situation risks of disruptions to health, education and other lifesaving interventions amid persistently high levels of need, the agency said.

Aid efforts continue

Finding safe shelter also continues to be a challenge.

Aid partners provided more than 3,300 households with emergency shelters and other items last week. 

The provisions included nearly 500 new tents, a similar number of tarpaulins, thousands of bedding items and thousands of solar lanterns to keep people safer at night.

Despite robust efforts, more support is needed to serve the recovering population of Gaza, according to Ms. Gross, who said “more funding is needed as well as approvals to bring in longer-lasting shelter items”.

Here’s a snapshot of other ongoing efforts:

• From 1 to 9 August, UN partners provided monthly food assistance to nearly 60,000 households, each receiving three parcels and one 25-kg flour bag, which is enough to cover more than 100 per cent of people’s minimum caloric needs.
• With UN partner support, every day about 100 kitchens prepare 700,000 meals served at more than 1,000 locations, and over two dozen subsidised bakeries produce roughly 100,000 two-kg bread bundles for people in need
• A new UNRWA temporary learning space opened in Jabalia, northern Gaza, on 10 August, and its summer learning activities have reached 41,849 children between 3 and 9 August

Learn more about how the UN is helping ordinary Gazans here.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/08/1168138 

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