Israel-Hamas war updates: Israeli ground forces expanding Gaza operations

Israel-Hamas war updates: Israeli ground forces expanding Gaza operations

Some excerpts from the linked page:

• The Gaza Strip is experiencing a near-total communications blackout, with health and humanitarian agencies warning that Palestinians across the territory have been plunged into “darkness”.
• Al Jazeera sources say negotiations, mediated by Qatar, on a ceasefire and prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas are “progressing and at an advanced stage”.
• At least 7,326 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 7, as Israel promises to continue raids into Palestinian territories. More than 1,400 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel.

 

Al Jazeera’s Safwat Kahlout says people in Gaza have suddenly lost almost all contact as internet and mobile phone networks collapse

UN chief Guterres says Gaza aid monitoring must be faster

 

The UN secretary-general said that the current aid monitoring regime, negotiated in conditions to allow aid into the Gaza, is slowing the process.

The monitoring of aid delivery from Egypt through the Rafah crossing must “adjusted to allow many more trucks to enter Gaza without delay”.

“The humanitarian system in Gaza is facing a total collapse with unimaginable consequences for more than 2 million civilians,” Guterres said in a statement.

The World Food Programme said earlier today about 40 food trucks are ready at the Egyptian border with Gaza with more than 930 tonnes of food stockpiled, including “canned fish and food parcels containing pasta, wheat flour, canned tomato paste, [and] canned beans”.

Many Issue Politics

I think one of the core difficulties I have is that I can't view politics as a hierarchy of issues where one issue takes precedence over all others for me. While I don't think everything is equally important, I think there are a lot of equally important issues.

I also think issues are interlinked, and not all ways of resolving one problem are equally laudable, even if they were to resolve that issue to the same degree, if their effects on other, equally important issues are very different. This is the weakness I see in single-issue politics.

At the same time, I know why so many people take this approach. Human limitations make it to some degree impossible to take an adequately thorough approach, and single issue politics greatly simplifies what a person needs to attend to, even if it often still can't simplify things enough. The world is just too vast and too complex.

But I cannot devote attention to only one thing and shut everything else out. I cannot even focus on only one thing while devoting some more limited energy to others. I cannot help but think about how one thing invariably links to all others. And that limits me in its own ways, because I will never be able to hold all the understanding and skills necessary to attend to all that.

But I can't shut it out, either.