Updates

15 November 2023

Israel fails to show evidence of Hamas command center at al-Shifa hospital following the military’s raid on Gaza City’s largest medical complex, encircling and besieging it for days and launching heavy attacks in the area.

“As the numbers of dead rise in Gaza, a new urgency develops among the billions of people in the Global South for Palestine,” writes Vijay Prashad. “This will not be forgotten. This will shape the way an entire generation or more will think about the need to end apartheid in Israel.”

The greatest challenge in Gaza at the moment may be finding bread. A photo essay by writer and photographer Mahmoud Nasser documents this daily struggle for survival and how Palestinians are improvising ovens as Israel bans electricity and fuel.

“War is not only having a devastating impact in Gaza,” writes Noura Selmi, who is from the besieged coastal enclave. “It inflames the hearts of Palestinians who live abroad, especially those who have families in Gaza.”

Writing from Gaza three weeks after his family was massacred in an Israeli airstrike, Ahmed Abu Artema calls for the rejection of Israel’s racist doctrine: “This can be a world where genocidal regimes, racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing will fall.”

Palestinians are suing US President Joe Biden and his secretaries of state and defense to stop them from further aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

It seems grimly apt that David Cameron should return to frontline politics at a time when a genocide is being carried out in Gaza, writes David Cronin. In one of the final speeches he gave as prime minister, Cameron described Britain as “Israel’s greatest friend.”

Girl looks out a broken window with blast marks

A Palestinian child looks through a broken window of a house damaged by an Israeli air strike in Rafah, southern Gaza, on 15 November.

Abed Rahim Khatib DPA

More than two-thirds of Americans back a ceasefire in Gaza, while support for Israel has plummeted, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll. Just 32 percent of Americans say the United States should support Israel, down from 41 percent a month earlier. At the same time 39 percent said the US should be a neutral mediator, up from 27 percent in the previous survey. The drop in US support seen in the new poll is among both Democrats and Republicans and especially among older respondents. “In a potentially worrisome sign for Israel, just 31 percent of poll respondents said they supported sending Israel weapons, while 43 percent opposed the idea,” Reuters noted.

The Israeli army dropped leaflets ordering Palestinians in areas east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip to evacuate to “known shelters,” according to the daily report from the UN Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

President Biden appears to have admitted that Israel has been bombing Gaza indiscriminately. At a press conference following a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco, Biden defended Israel’s lethal siege and assault on Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, saying he had discussed with Israel the need to be “incredibly careful.” The president added, “so, this is a different story than I believe was occurring before, an indiscriminate bombing.”

The Palestinian Red Crescent Society released a video showing the aftermath of Israeli strikes on their ambulances and medics. A paramedic describes the extensive destruction of ambulances shelled during the Israeli attacks near al-Awda hospital on 11 November.