Carried by SeattleTimes, AP's Nov. 23 report begins:
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel’s military offensive has turned much of northern Gaza into an uninhabitable moonscape. Whole neighborhoods have been erased. Homes, schools and hospitals have been blasted by airstrikes and scorched by tank fire. Some buildings are still standing, but most are battered shells.
Nearly 1 million Palestinians have fled the north, including its urban center, Gaza City, as ground combat intensified. When the war ends, any relief will quickly be overshadowed by dread as displaced families come to terms with the scale of the calamity and what it means for their future.
Next:
The Israeli army’s use of powerful explosives in tightly packed residential areas — which Israel describes as the unavoidable outcome of Hamas using civilian sites as cover for its operations — has killed over 13,000 Palestinians and led to staggering destruction. Hamas denies the claim and accuses Israel of recklessly bombing civilians.
And:
The war has knocked 27 of 35 hospitals across Gaza out of operation, according to the World Health Organization. The destruction of other critical infrastructure has consequences for years to come.
“Bakeries and grain mills have been destroyed, agriculture, water and sanitation facilities,” said Scott Paul, a senior humanitarian policy adviser for Oxfam America. “You need more than four walls and a ceiling for a place to be habitable, and in many cases people don’t even have that.”
Across the entire enclave, over 41,000 homes — 45% of Gaza’s total housing stock — are too destroyed to be lived in, according to the U.N.
That is one fucking gigantic amount of bombing, now with follow-up ground operations. As to the offered initiating cause, the Hamas incursion into Israel resulting in hostage taking and 1200 dead by latest figures, what did Netanyahu know and when did he know it? What did he first do and when did he do it?
____________UPDATE____________
Of equal interest, a WaPo Nov. 23 carry, again by SeattleTimes:
The prevailing view throughout the Middle East is that while Israel is doing the fighting, this is an American war. Without the diplomatic cover and high-tech munitions provided by the United States, the reasoning goes, Israel wouldn’t be able to carry out the massive operation it launched in Gaza to “eradicate Hamas” that a U.N. official this week said has caused “complete and utter carnage.” Israel’s aerial and ground attack on Gaza came after Hamas massacred more than 1,200 people and abducted scores of others on Oct. 7.
International human rights groups, alarmed by the images of maimed or lifeless Palestinian children pulled from the rubble, have warned that the Israeli response is disproportionate and probably includes war crimes, a charge Israeli authorities reject. In Arab nations, where solidarity with the Palestinian cause has endured for decades, millions are watching as the only force they see as powerful enough to stop the bloodletting in Gaza instead defends it. The U.S.-backed pause in fighting set to begin Friday is generally welcomed, but it falls short of Arab calls for the United States to back a longer truce.
[...] Political analysts in the Middle East called Washington’s support for Israel’s war a reckless position that doesn’t account for the long-term diplomatic, security and economic effects of alienating a region where rivals, namely China, are carving deeper inroads. More importantly, they said, the war has toppled the United States from its moral high ground, with Biden’s lectures to Russia about safeguarding civilian life in Ukraine now juxtaposed with his more muted statements as Israel bombs schools and hospitals in Gaza.
[...] The Arab world now has “the largest youth cohort it has ever seen,” according to the United Nations, which counts 60 percent of the region’s population younger than 30. Through social media, Arab youths are connected to like-minded activists around the world. Even if they can’t be as vocal in their criticism for security reasons, they signal their views by wearing wristbands with the Palestinian flag or by sharing memes and emojis of watermelons, a popular symbol of the Palestinian cause.
Get that. 60% --- more
[...]
The United States became a party to the conflict from the outset, by dispatching warships to support Israel before sending politicians or diplomats, said Mohammed Obeid, a Beirut-based political analyst close to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group whose low-intensity exchanges with Israel already are widening the war.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that an aircraft carrier strike group had been ordered to the eastern Mediterranean a day after the Oct. 7 attack. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel four days later.
“Before sending diplomats to find a political solution, they sent their warships and weapons and threatened a response,” Obeid said. “So they actually got involved in this war for the sake of Israel, not for the sake of the United States.”
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby’s remark that “we’re not drawing red lines for Israel” is replayed ad nauseam on Arabic-language news outlets. The blank-check support for Israel isn’t new, analysts said, but some were nevertheless surprised by what they view as anti-Palestinian rhetoric coming from the president himself, coupled with the refusal to entertain any criticism that Israel’s response amounts to collective punishment. Women and children make up nearly 70 percent of the dead, according to U.N. estimates.
Biden was pilloried in the Middle East for expressing doubts about the number of Palestinian casualties because the Gaza Health Ministry, like other official functions, is run by Hamas. Independent researchers and humanitarian groups have vouched for the accuracy of the counts. Biden also repeatedly spread an Israeli government talking point about Hamas beheading babies — a specific claim that lacks clear evidence, unlike the many other documented brutalities committed by the militants inside Israel on Oct. 7.
After what many in the region saw as the naked xenophobia that marked the Donald Trump era, analysts said, Biden’s election had been viewed as a reset. Now, as Allam put it, “he’s no different from Trump.”
The similarity of Biden's stance to the even worse regard Trump had for Palestinian suffering is troubling. Biden seems tone deaf to much of the sympathy the world and much of the US population has toward the disproportionate carnage in Gaza.
The pledge to deliver more state-of-the-art armaments to Israel, billions worth, which was supported fully by House Speaker Mike Johnson and his party is equally disconcerting. Republican sentiment clearly is equally appalling, indeed worse, since the Johnson bloc tried to append questionable conditions to such aid, while loudly touting the aid itself.
Aid to kill more, to kill them more effectively, seems at odds with the propagandist presentation of The American Way fed to the people of our nation. What's done vs what's said, both parties, is shameful.
And, again get it, 60%