#home+pool in Israel

[vieformidable]

Mountain home. Is this real or AI?

[secular-jew]

Article by Masih Alinejad, Iranian exile, journalist, writer, women's rights activist. Probably the most wanted woman by the Iranian regime.

I've spent the past four years of my life being hunted by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. They sent agents to kidnap me from my home in New York. They hired assassins to kill me on American soil. They even followed me to Davos, Switzerland, where I had to be helicoptered out from my hotel.

If not for the FBI’s protection—and the more than 21 safe houses I have shuttled between over the past few years—I might not be alive to write these words.

So yes, this moment is personal. But it is also far bigger than me.

For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran has exported terror, crushed dissent, and pushed the Middle East to the brink of war, all while robbing its own people of dignity, opportunity, and peace. Now, the regime is feeling consequences at the highest level.

Israeli air strikes have reportedly killed some of the Islamic Republic’s most senior military leaders, Hossein Salami, commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC); Amir Ali Hajizadeh, architect of the regime’s ballistic missile program; and Mohammad Bagheri, chief of staff of Iran’s armed forces.

For many people around the world, these will just be foreign names. For me and for the people of Iran, they are the monsters who have impoverished and tyrannized our families.

They are the ones who have made millions of people's lives miserable, not just in Iran, but across the entire Middle East.

While sanctions choked the economy and hospitals ran short of basic medicine, IRGC commanders lived in luxury. Today, viral images on Persian-language social media show their rooftop pools, penthouse suites, and VIP elevators, many of these destroyed in the recent strikes.

These commanders didn’t defend Iran, they defended the regime from its own people. The only people who sacrificed for the sake of the country were the poor, the women who dared to show their hair, the students shot in the streets.

This is why many Iranians are not mourning today. Despite the profound uncertainty that lies ahead, they’re celebrating.

I’ve received thousands of messages from inside Iran showing young women dancing in the streets, or families cheering in their kitchens. They remember these commanders as the ones who gave the orders to shoot protesters in the eyes, jail teenage girls, and lie to the world while building bombs in secret.

One mother in Tehran who was imprisoned for protesting the 2019 murder of her child wrote to me that “waking up to the news of Salami’s death, I started to scream out of joy that I’m seeing justice.” She told me that “soon you’ll be back to Iran and we’ll dance on the graves of these killers.”

Another woman, whose mother was shot dead by the IRGC in 2022 for protesting the brutal death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody, wrote, “We’re all happy for the elimination of the killers of our loved ones. War comes with a price. Innocent people might get killed. But we know who we should blame: the Islamic Republic.” This particular woman shaved her head over her mother’s grave—an image that soon became a symbol of resistance in Iran.

Millions of Iranians have marched, danced, sung, and bled for a better future. In 2022, after Amini’s death, the world saw the courage of young women facing armed soldiers with nothing but their hair and their hope. That movement was not crushed. It is still burning, quietly and bravely, in homes, schools, and prisons across Iran. Today we are reminded of that. The courage of these Iranians might very well spell the end of the Islamic Republic itself.

Now, the world faces a choice. It can focus solely on missiles and maps, treating this as another geopolitical chess move. Or it can recognize the human story unfolding beneath the surface, the story of a nation rising from the shadow of its captors. The story of a rising lion.

Israel’s strike may have taken out top military figures. But the real victory is still ahead: the day the Islamic Republic falls under the weight of its own crimes and the strength of the people it has tried so hard to suffocate and silence.

The Islamic Republic built its empire of tyranny on blood: of protesters, dissidents, women, children. That empire is now cracking. The people of Iran are watching to see what will come next and hoping that the world is watching, too.

[vamp0rivm]

Can u do a drabble or hcs on cuddling Ellie?

Ur writing is so good I love everything U write :>

WREATHE

warnings: not much, mostly fluff, basically the rq, mdni with my account tho😏

a/n: IM SO SORRY THIS HAS BEEN IN MY INBOX FOR I KID YOU NOT LIKE HALF A YEAR IM GENUINELY SO SORRY PLEASE FORGIVE ME 😰 thank you so much for sending the rq even though i took the piss responding, also this is a drabble bc i don’t think i’d be good at doing hcs 😭 i have some shit coming up at uni so i prolly won’t put anything out for a while but i have an idea for a new fic in the drafts !!! very excited…

ramadan has started which means israel’s violence against the Palestinian people will worsen as it does every year, purely for the sake of inflicting even more psychological torture on them. please, now more than ever, pray for them if you’re religious, talk about palestine, boycott, protest, strike, donate if you can, contact the people in charge. don’t let people forget. here’s a link to some details on the situation. everybody stay safe 💗.

10:47 - you return from a strenuous day of patrol and odd jobs around Jackson. You’re slightly tipsy, a drink or two from the Tipsy Bison churning a pool of warmth within your stomach.

The place is stagnant when you push the door open, as if coming home to nobody.

Ellie must’ve gone to bed early today.

You drift to the bathroom despite the fact that the house feels apocalyptic, and sit in the gentle rush of water, scrubbing your skin weakly with aching arms.

When you enter your room, everything is still, except for the rhythmic rise and fall of Ellie’s figure beneath the covers on the bed backed against the wall.

You throw the dampened towel that is slung over your shoulder carelessly and walk over to the bed, gently settling beside her.

For a while, you feel content. Sleep is lulling you in, the room is shadowy, the bed is warm, and the sound of Ellie’s deep-sleep-breaths (totally not snores at all, she swears) are soft like TV static in the back of your mind.

Your eyes are on the verge of fluttering closed for the last time tonight so you turn onto your side and nestle into yourself.

Then, there’s a harsh jolt and the bed shifts. You can feel Ellie’s puzzled gaze raking over you, the realisation that you’re home setting in, and your lips twist into a smile subconsciously. The night rarely ends without the inebriating buzz of affection.

A quiet sigh escapes the enclosure of her blush-pink lips before she reclines into the pillows once more, eyes never leaving the still curvature of your figure. Not a moment passes and her arms encircle your waist, warmth embracing your torso and pressing against your hair like a wreathe of absolute comfort.

A barely audible mumble tickles the helix of your ear,

“Hey, babe,” accompanied by the phantom touch of her lips against your cheeks in her half-asleep state. You scrunch your nose before turning into the love she offers you.

“Hey, Els.”

You begin to mumble butterfly details about the happenings of the day as you feel the surface of her skin raise with goosebumps under the delicate tracing of your fingertips - down her bare thighs, along the round of her hip, along her stomach and under her boobs - easing airy chuckles out of her.

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Hm? Nothin’…”

You can already picture the smirk on her dazed face,

“Ya sure there? You want somethin’, babe?”

A playful scoff and she’s looking at you with feigned shock against the weight of tired eyelids,

“Can’t I feel you? I just wanna be close to you,”

“I’d say we’re pretty close, ya know?”

“Never close enough,” you clarify and the rasp of her laugh fades into silence and she presses a kiss onto your head, and then another, straining her neck till she’s face to flushed and grinning face, stringing a blizzard of soft, dewy kisses across it.

“Alright, alright!”

“One more- mwah,” she smacks her lips against your scrunched up mouth aggressively, leaving a gross patch of saliva, and smiles dumbly to herself, tightening the hold of her arms around you to which you groan.

Tight against her gentle sway, she mutters a quiet confirmation,

“Never close enough,” and then runs the rough pads of her fingertips along the expanse of your skin, lingering a moment on your thighs.

It’s like the rustle of a spring breeze and it draws your eyes to a close.

As you drift further from the surface, you feel the soft tingle of Ellie’s foot nudging your ankle and the distant haze of her voice whispering,

“You sure you don’t want anything, baby?” and you’re asleep.

also, absolutely no one asked for this but here are some pictures of my fat ass cat (cutest patootie evah ���😆):

[sayruq]

For weeks in southern Gaza during a recent visit, I collected stories of women admitted to hospital, each of them there to recover from what they call “war wounds”. But it’s not a war, because only one side has an actual army. Only one side is a state with full military wares. These victims were mothers, wives and babies, whose slight bodies were pierced, torn, broken and burned. Their deeper injuries aren’t visible, until they open up about their lives over the past five months. Initially, they relay the broadbrush strokes: A bomb struck their homes, they were pulled from the rubble, they had severe injuries, family members were martyred, and the situation was terrible. That is the extent of what they have ever said about unimaginable horrors they endured and continue to endure. But I probe for details. What were you doing moments before? What was the first thing you saw, the first thing you heard? What did it smell like? Was it dark or light outside?I nudge them to zoom into the molecular structure of every fact – the gravel in the mouth, dust in the lungs; the weight of something; the warm liquid running down the back; the twisted finger seen but not felt; the moment of realisation; the waiting to be rescued and the fear that no one will come; the ringing in the ears; the strange thoughts; the things that moved and the things that could not; the expectation of death and the wish that it be quick; the longing for life. In the months or weeks since one of the world’s most powerful militaries targeted their lives, they had yet to visit, much less verbalise the minutiae of this genocide. As they venture beyond the outlines of their stories, their eyes darken and sometimes they begin to shiver. The slightest unexpected sound startles them. Tears pool and tears might fall, but only a few allow themselves to cry. Few let the horrors in their minds through the gates. It is not for some superhuman strength. Quite the opposite. They are numbed in a way, as if they’ve yet to comprehend the enormity of what they have endured and continue to endure.

The writer spoke to several women in Southern Gaza about the horrors they're still enduring

[nicklloydnow]

“May I be permitted to say a few words? I am an Edinburgh graduate (MA 1975) who studied Persian, Arabic & Islamic History under William Montgomery Watt & Laurence Elwell Sutton, 2 of Britain ‘s great Middle East experts. I later went on to do a PhD at Cambridge & to teach Arabic & Islamic Studies at Newcastle University . Naturally, I am the author of several books & 100s of articles in this field.

I say all that to show that I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs & that, for that reason, I am shocked & disheartened for a simple reason: there is not & has never been a system of apartheid in Israel. That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against reality should anyone choose to visit Israel.

Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that many students are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, & that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby.

Hating Israel

Being anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But I’m not talking about ordinary criticism of Israel . I’m speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies & myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a “Nazi” state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nuremberg Laws?

None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel, precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for. It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When?

No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is a way to subvert historical fact. Likewise apartheid.

No Apartheid

For apartheid to exist, there would have to be a situation that closely resembled how things were in South Africa under the apartheid regime. Unfortunately for those who believe this, a day in any part of Israel would be enough to show how ridiculous this is.

The most obvious focus for apartheid would be the country’s 20% Arab population. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims have the same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha’is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where they have their world center; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan & elsewhere, are kept safe by Israel; or anyone else; the holy places of all religions are protected by Israeli law.

Free Arab Israelis

Arabs form 20% of the university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population). In Iran , the Bahai’s (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their own universities: why aren’t your members boycotting Iran ?

Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa. They use public transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cinemas alongside Jews — something no blacks were able to do in South Africa.

Israeli hospitals not only treat Jews & Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the same operating theatres.

Women’s Rights

In Israel, women have the same rights as men: there is no gender apartheid. Gay men & women face no restrictions, and Palestinian gays oftn escape into Israel, knowing they may be killed at home.

It seems bizarre to me that LGBT groups call for a boycott of Israel & say nothing about countries like Iran, where gay men are hanged or stoned to death. That illustrates a mindset that beggars belief.

Intelligent students thinking it’s better to be silent about regimes that kill gay people, but good to condemn the only country in the Middle East that rescues and protects gay people. Is that supposed to be a sick joke?

(…)

I do not object to well-documented criticism of Israel. I do object when supposedly intelligent people single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific in their treatment of their populations.

(…)

Israeli citizens, Jews & Arabs alike, do not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edinburgh students mount no demonstrations & call for no boycotts against Libya , Bahrain , Saudi Arabia , Yemen , & Iran. They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world’s freest countries, the only country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the ME that gives refuge to gay men & women, the only country in the ME that protects the Bahai’s…. Need I go on?

(…)

Your generation has a duty to ensure that the perennial racism of anti-Semitism never sets down roots among you. Today, however, there are clear signs that it has done so and is putting down more.”

[mariacallous]

In October, 2023, a few days after Hamas’s attack on Israel, a physician named Lina Qasem Hassan filled her car with medical supplies and drove from her home, in Tamra, a town in northern Israel, to the David Dead Sea Resort and Spa, in Ein Bokek. Tourism was about to nosedive throughout the country, but the resort was busy, scrambling to accommodate hundreds of evacuees who had just arrived from Kibbutz Be’eri, one of the communities near the Gaza Strip which Hamas had struck.

Qasem Hassan, a family-medicine physician, came to help at a clinic that had been set up on the hotel’s grounds. She was soon dressing the wounds of injured people and dispensing pills to evacuees who had fled their homes without their medication. The lobby, she told me recently, resembled a refugee camp, with donated clothes scattered in piles and shell-shocked families walking around aimlessly. Yet some of the new guests acted eerily normal, “taking towels and going to the swimming pool,” Qasem Hassan recalled. “It looked like they didn’t realize what they’d been through.” The clinic stayed open for nearly two weeks. Every day, members of the kibbutz gathered in a banquet hall to hear updates about neighbors who had been kidnapped or murdered or were still missing. Sometimes the names of multiple family members were read aloud. (Ninety-seven civilians were killed at Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7th.) Although Qasem Hassan was accustomed to treating people who had suffered trauma, the experience tested her emotional endurance. “We had to be there to assist people who couldn’t stand the situation,” she said.

The atmosphere would have been difficult for any Israeli physician, but for Qasem Hassan the challenge was compounded by her background and identity. She is a Palestinian citizen of a country that, in 2018, passed a law affirming that the right to self-determination was “unique to the Jewish people”; the law also made Hebrew the country’s sole official language, downgrading the status of Arabic. Israel had since installed the most right-wing government in its history, a coalition of hard-liners and extremists who were not likely to temper the rage, or the desire for revenge, that Qasem Hassan feared the October 7th attack would unleash—not just toward Hamas fighters but toward Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In subsequent months, reports on the suffering of Gazans were drowned out in Israel by coverage of the hostages’ plight. But for Qasem Hassan the agony was immediate. On October 7th, while she was still at home in Tamra, she heard a piercing cry. It was her sister-in-law, who lived next door; she had just learned from a news report that her brother, Marwan Abu Reda, a paramedic in Gaza, had been killed when an Israeli rocket struck an ambulance in which he was travelling. Qasem Hassan had met Abu Reda and visited his family. He often sent her holiday cards. That evening, Qasem Hassan cooked dinner for her relatives and grieved with them. “It was terrible,” she said.

The clinic at the hotel was a collaborative effort that Qasem Hassan had launched with her peers at Physicians for Human Rights Israel, a nonprofit whose board she chairs. The organization, founded in 1988, produces reports on sometimes contentious subjects; a recent one claimed that Israeli prisons were systematically denying medical care to Palestinian detainees, resulting in a “widespread scabies infection,” among other problems. (The Israel Prison Service did not respond to a request for comment.) The group also provides medical care to people who lack access to it, both in the occupied territories and at a clinic in Jaffa that serves immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. In fact, at the time of the October 7th attack, Qasem Hassan and other P.H.R.I. members had been planning to visit Gaza the following week. With access to Gaza cut off, Qasem Hassan instead joined an emergency-response team and went to the Dead Sea, for reasons both personal and philosophical. “You can’t divide human pain,” she told Palestinian friends who questioned why she went to the hotel as the bombardment of Gaza intensified. “Whether you are Israeli or Palestinian, it’s the same pain.”

Before leaving the Dead Sea area, Qasem Hassan texted a photograph to a group of colleagues at a medical clinic where she worked, in Kiryat Bialik, a town on the outskirts of Haifa. It showed her standing in a white coat next to her fellow-volunteers. She added a note: “In the P.H.R.I. clinic we set up at the David hotel for evacuees from Kibbutz Be’eri.”

“Very nice!” a Jewish nurse at the clinic texted back. “Human rights for Israelis only!”

“For all people,” Qasem Hassan replied.

“Certainly not!” the nurse responded. “Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and anyone who collaborates with them don’t have rights, because they are not human beings.”

“For all innocent people,” Qasem Hassan texted.

Qasem Hassan would soon stop expressing herself so freely. Shortly after she returned to Tamra, where she lived with her husband, a sociologist named Sharaf, and their four children, a wave of arrests and investigations swept Israel. Dozens of Palestinian citizens were accused of inciting terrorism, often based solely on their social-media posts. To Jewish Israelis, the crackdown might have seemed like a necessary precaution after the worst massacre in their nation’s history. But it felt like unwarranted harassment to many of the targets, including Abed Samara, the head of the cardiac intensive-care unit at Hasharon Hospital, in Petah Tikva, who was suspended without warning for social-media posts that some interpreted as pro-Hamas, and for allegedly replacing his profile picture on Facebook with a Hamas flag after October 7th. According to Haaretz, the allegation was false—the image was of an Islamic flag, and it had been on Samara’s Facebook page since 2022. But, once the accusation spread, Samara was barraged with threats. He ended up resigning from the hospital, where he’d worked for fifteen years.

Qasem Hassan, who had sometimes posted opinions about politics on social media, stopped doing so, and she avoided discussing the war at work. But she kept her leadership role at P.H.R.I., which occasionally required her to speak to journalists. In February, 2024, she appeared on Channel 12, a popular Israeli news outlet, to discuss the humanitarian situation in Gaza. In an interview with Arad Nir, who hosts a program on international affairs, Qasem Hassan said that Israel had intentionally targeted Gaza’s hospitals, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which accord medical facilities a special protected status. Nir pushed back, arguing that Hamas used these hospitals as command centers to launch deadly attacks on Israel. Qasem Hassan replied that this claim had not been verified by a third party, and that targeting health-care facilities violated international law.

As Qasem Hassan was aware, such views were rarely voiced on Israeli television. A couple of months later, three of her patients, who’d heard the interview, sent a letter to her employer, Clalit, Israel’s largest health-care organization. The statements she’d made about the bombing of Gaza’s hospitals were proof, they wrote, that her heart was “with her murderous Palestinian brethren.” The patients called for Qasem Hassan to be suspended “in light of her solidarity with, and support for, Hamas.”

Many sectors of Israeli society, such as the public-school system, are highly segregated. But, in Israel’s hospitals and health clinics, Palestinian employees actually have an outsized presence. In 2023, twenty-five per cent of doctors in Israel were Arab—more than double the level in 2010—as were twenty-seven per cent of nurses and forty-nine per cent of pharmacists. The Israeli medical system could scarcely function without them. After October 7th, a rabbi named Meir Shmueli released a YouTube video in which he portrayed this development as a dire threat. “Do you know how many Arab doctors, may their names be erased, are in the hospitals?” Shmueli asked. He claimed that these doctors were “killing Jewish patients,” a baseless charge that Zion Hagay, the chairman of the Israeli Medical Association, denounced. Such talk could “ignite a war within us,” Hagay warned, hailing the country’s health-care system as a “beacon of coexistence and tolerance where Jewish and Arab medical professionals work side by side from day to day and have one oath and one goal: saving lives.”

In recent years, many Jewish Israelis who might have entered the medical field have instead gravitated to the tech industry, sometimes after serving in intelligence units of the Israel Defense Forces. (Most Arab citizens are not required to serve in the military, and rarely do so.) Thabet Abu Rass, a political geographer at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, told me that Palestinians have rushed to fill the resulting openings in medicine. Abu Rass, an expert on Israel’s Palestinian minority, did not downplay the level of racism in his country. “If we take the issue of land and planning, there are over thirty different discriminatory laws within the system,” he said. “The discrimination in Israeli society is very structural.” But he noted that Israel has some striking contradictory tendencies. In recent years, the government has invested tens of millions of dollars in scholarships for Palestinian students seeking to attend universities, as a way of addressing poverty and unemployment in Arab communities. Abu Rass, a member of the steering committee that oversaw this initiative, told me that the number of Palestinian citizens seeking advanced degrees grew from twenty-four thousand in 2010 to sixty-four thousand last year.

In 2016, two nonprofits, the Israel Religious Action Center and the Israel Movement for Reform and Progressive Judaism, published “Heroes of Health,” a report heralding these changes. A photograph on the cover showed a group of medical workers holding up signs—some in Hebrew, others in Arabic—that read “Jews and Arabs Refuse to Be Enemies.” That year, a Pew survey found that nearly half of Jewish Israelis supported expelling Arabs from the country. The report argued that a spirit of collaboration and openness nevertheless prevailed in the field of health care. A physician named Suheir Assadi was quoted as saying, “I feel free in this system and I feel that I can develop and do anything.” Medicine, the report suggested, was a neutral space that hospital administrators kept insulated from the headlines—which, that year, were dominated by stories about stabbings of Jews on sidewalks and in markets. Such acts of violence (and retaliatory shootings by Israeli security forces) were not discussed at work, according to administrators at several hospitals. Osnat Levtzion-Korach, the director of Hadassah Mt. Scopus Hospital, in Jerusalem, said that medical staff were expected to “leave the politics at the door.”

In 2018, Guy Shalev, an Israeli anthropologist who is now the executive director of P.H.R.I., published a dissertation arguing that this egalitarian ethos was a fiction. While doing field work at two Israeli hospitals, he discovered that Jewish doctors routinely discussed politics. Only Palestinians had to avoid such talk, he found. To have any chance of getting promoted, a Palestinian medical student noted, people like him needed to convince their superiors that they were aravim tovim, or “good Arabs.” (The student in question had been arrested at a protest when he was a teen-ager, but had scrupulously avoided such activity ever since.) Although medicine offered Palestinian citizens an “entry ticket” into Israeli society, Shalev concluded, it came at the cost of having to mute their identities.

In a study published this past February, Ghada Majadli, a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian think tank, argued that this burden has grown heavier since October 7th, as the atmosphere in Israeli hospitals has become more overtly nationalistic. A Palestinian doctor told Majadli that, at a staff meeting, a Jewish colleague said, “Let them annihilate Gaza” while staring at him. Many of Majadli’s subjects feared that pushing back on dehumanizing comments about Palestinians would cause them to be accused of disloyalty—or of supporting Hamas.

From an early age, Qasem Hassan was encouraged to speak her mind. She grew up in Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab city. Both her parents were teachers, and her mother and aunts all earned advanced degrees. They were among the first Muslim girls from Nazareth to go to college, Qasem Hassan told me, reflecting their father’s belief that Palestinian citizens of Israel couldn’t afford to waste the opportunities offered by education. As a young girl, Qasem Hassan absorbed the same message from her mother, who drilled her with puzzles and brain exercises.

As Qasem Hassan got older, she received an equally formative political education. Her mother took her to rallies at a public square in Nazareth, where she heard speeches by the famous Palestinians Emile Habibi, a novelist and a member of the Knesset, and Tawfiq Zayyad, a poet and the mayor of Nazareth. (Her mother even made her memorize one of Zayyad’s poems, which she then recited onstage in front of local dignitaries, including the author.) The political culture of Nazareth was dominated by Hadash, an alliance of the Israeli Communist Party and several left-wing groups which championed socialism and Arab-Jewish coöperation. These values were shared by Qasem Hassan’s mother, who appeared at strikes even though teachers were not supposed to join picket lines. “She wasn’t afraid,” Qasem Hassan said.

After finishing high school, Qasem Hassan enrolled in Hebrew University’s medical program, inspired by the fact that a beloved aunt had died suddenly, at the age of thirty-one, from a cause that had never been determined. In 2000, during Qasem Hassan’s third year, the second intifada began after the breakdown of peace talks at Camp David. That October, Palestinian citizens of Israel flooded the streets in support of the uprising. The Israeli police opened fire on protesters, killing thirteen people, among them Asel Asleh, the brother of a medical student in the class below Qasem Hassan’s. Political activity was barred on the campus of Hebrew University Medical School, Qasem Hassan and her fellow-activists were told. Qasem Hassan, who was among the leaders of an organization called the Committee of Palestinian Students, challenged this policy. At one point, she asked the school’s dean to explain why he’d said nothing after Asleh was shot.

The events of October, 2000, confirmed Qasem Hassan’s belief that doctors needed to speak out about social issues that affected human health, from police violence to systemic discrimination. Like many members of her generation, she became radicalized, bristling at efforts to promote intergroup coöperation which masked discrimination and inequality.

During her time in medical school, however, Qasem Hassan found a mentor in David Applebaum, an ordained rabbi and an emergency-medicine doctor who was known for rushing to the scenes of suicide bombings to tend to the victims. Applebaum ran a clinic, Terem, that provided urgent care in an ultra-Orthodox community; Qasem Hassan started working there on Saturdays, when Jewish staff observed the Sabbath. Qasem Hassan suspected that she and Applebaum held radically different views on most aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Jewish settlers, several of whom worked at the clinic. But she admired his compassion. In 2003, when he and his daughter were killed in a suicide attack at a café, she was shocked and saddened.

It was unnerving to be studying in Jerusalem during the second intifada. “Every coffee shop was a danger,” Qasem Hassan said. To earn money, she worked at a restaurant in a mall where fans of the soccer team Beitar Jerusalem, who are notorious for their anti-Arab racism, sometimes celebrated after games. Qasem Hassan would hear them chant “Mavet la’aravim!”—“Death to Arabs!” Although Qasem Hassan did not wear a hijab and spoke Hebrew so well that people sometimes assumed she was Jewish, she was terrified of being outed and attacked.

One day at the Terem clinic, a woman humiliated a Palestinian colleague of Qasem Hassan’s by saying, “Don’t touch my child—you’re Arab!” At a different facility, Qasem Hassan overheard a nurse say, after an Arab patient had given birth, “Ah, you’ve brought us another terrorist.” Palestinian medical residents faced extra obstacles when competing for positions in such fields as obstetrics and gynecology, which was Qasem Hassan’s preference. She had strong grades and recommendations, yet she had a hard time finding a hospital that would admit her to its program. She later switched to family medicine, and was accepted at the Carmel Medical Center, in Haifa.

Not long after Qasem Hassan graduated from medical school, her mother died, of cancer. At the memorial, Qasem Hassan spoke about the moral values that had been instilled in her. In 2016, she decided to act on them by appearing before the Israeli Knesset to testify about the segregation of Jewish and Palestinian mothers in maternity wards. A scandal had erupted after Israel Public Radio aired a report on the practice, which is forbidden by Israel’s health ministry. The controversy grew when Bezalel Smotrich—then a far-right Knesset member, today Israel’s finance minister—affirmed that maternity wards should be segregated. “It is natural for my wife to not want to lie next to somebody who just gave birth to a baby that might want to murder her baby in 20 years,” he tweeted. At the Knesset hearing, various hospital administrators insisted that pregnant women had been separated only to respect cultural preferences. (It was noted that Orthodox women might not want someone next to them watching TV on the Sabbath.) But Qasem Hassan testified that she had frequently seen Palestinian patients receive separate, and demeaning, treatment, including on occasions when doctors who did not speak Arabic summoned male custodial workers to ask women about their sexual histories.

Back in medical school, Qasem Hassan had been doing a rotation in a pediatric ward when she’d overheard an exchange between a Palestinian woman from the West Bank and a Jewish doctor. The woman said that she had to cross a checkpoint to get to the hospital, and asked for a letter that she could present to the soldiers there, who often gave her trouble. The doctor provided the letter, and also advised her to contact Physicians for Human Rights Israel. Qasem Hassan had never heard of the organization. She rushed to a computer and found its website. She soon became a regular volunteer.

Qasem Hassan was shaken when she heard that some of her patients had written a joint letter accusing her of being a Hamas supporter, but she was not entirely surprised. After finishing her family-medicine residency, she’d spent a decade working at a clinic in a prosperous neighborhood of Kiryat Bialik. In 2022, she moved to her current clinic, which is in a poorer area; she was eager to serve a less privileged population, but the neighborhood surrounding the new clinic was fiercely conservative.

Qasem Hassan responded to the joint letter by sending Clalit photographs of herself treating evacuees from Kibbutz Be’eri. She also sent a link to a radio interview that she’d given shortly after October 7th in which she condemned both Hamas’s attacks and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza as war crimes. Clalit, after a review, decided to dismiss the complaint against Qasem Hassan. She was relieved, but the Clalit representative who relayed this news to her then noted that her accusers, unappeased, were threatening to stage a protest or go to the media. (The letter’s authors declined to speak with me.) Other patients warned her that they’d heard negative talk about her in the neighborhood surrounding the clinic; this prompted a security guard from Clalit to offer to walk her to her car at night. Sometime later, another patient at the clinic angrily confronted her about her support for the rights of Palestinian prisoners, and told her to move to an Arab country.

After this encounter, Qasem Hassan shut her office door and cried. Privately, she wondered if she could continue working in such an environment. But she didn’t quit. One morning in February, I visited the clinic, a low-slung building with metal bars over its windows. I passed through a hallway decorated with Israeli flags on my way to Qasem Hassan’s office, a small room appointed with family photographs and gifts that patients had given her: a Gaudí figurine from Barcelona, a souvenir from Dubai.

Qasem Hassan, who is forty-seven, with chin-length brown curls and a poised bearing, told me that, after the joint complaint was submitted to Clalit, her biggest fear was that a critical mass of patients offended by her politics would switch to other doctors, as the authors of the letter had done. Since her salary depended on the number of people she treated, this could upend her ability to earn a living. She also worried that Clalit might fire her, or that the controversy would damage her relationships with patients to whom she felt close, many of them with backgrounds that were radically different from hers.

One day, she invited me to accompany her on some home visits. Our first stop was the residence of an elderly couple, Holocaust survivors she’d been treating since 2014. They sat slumped in recliners in the living room of their apartment. The husband greeted Qasem Hassan with a warm smile. His wife was less animated. For years, she’d struggled with depression, a condition that she attributed to the murder of most of her immediate family during the Holocaust, when she was a child in Romania. After I shared that my maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors from Romania, the man said, “My wife—they killed two sisters and an older brother and another.” Qasem Hassan asked the woman if she still thought about what had happened. “Of course,” she replied. Then she fell silent.

Afterward, in the car, Qasem Hassan said that she kept trying to get the woman to talk more about her past, since her refusal to do so seemed to exacerbate her suffering. Qasem Hassan had personal experience with victims who were wary of discussing traumatic experiences. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians were expelled from Israel or fled their homes in fear; in the Arab community, this is known as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Another hundred and fifty thousand became citizens of Israel. Many of these “’48 Palestinians” were also dispossessed, including Qasem Hassan’s father, whose family was evicted from the village of Tira. Qasem Hassan told me that her father belonged to the generation of Palestinians who were afraid to talk about the Nakba, a fear reinforced by the fact that Israel kept Arab towns under military rule until 1966, and treated their inhabitants as an enemy within.

Before Qasem Hassan visited the home of her next patient, she pulled over at the crest of a hill and led me down a path to an open field strewn with rocks. These were the ruins of a cemetery in Al-Damun, a Palestinian village that, according to several historians, was destroyed by the Israeli Army in 1948. The village’s fifteen hundred inhabitants fled, among them the family of Qasem Hassan’s husband, who went to Lebanon before eventually returning to the region and settling in Tamra. Qasem Hassan and her husband had taken their wedding photographs by the village’s ruins. She showed me a well that had once supplied Al-Damun with water.

After visiting the cemetery, we continued along a highway that bisects the Galilee. As we passed Tamra, Qasem Hassan pointed out a restaurant and an auto-repair shop—locals sometimes said that these were the only reasons Jewish Israelis visited the town. “ ‘We come to Tamra to eat the food, to fix the car—this is coexistence!’ ” she said, laughing. In the towns where her Jewish patients lived, Qasem Hassan told me, the roads were smoothly paved and children played in parks. In Arab towns, there were few parks, and so children played in rutted streets. Discriminatory land policies had allowed Jewish municipalities to expand while places like Tamra grew ever more constricted.

The next house call Qasem Hassan made was in an Arab town called Kabul. After welcoming us inside, three women in head scarves plied us with cashews, dried fruit, and scented coffee. They were the daughters of Qasem Hassan’s patient, a woman in her seventies. While Qasem Hassan examined her in another room, I spoke to the patient’s husband. A small man with a white beard, he told me that in his youth he’d taught himself to weave and to paint tiles; because of these skills, he had managed to earn enough to raise five sons and five daughters. When I asked where he was originally from, he said Al-Damun, the razed town that Qasem Hassan and I had just left. Then he gestured toward the TV, which showed footage of children wading through rubble in Gaza, and said that it reminded him of his own youth. He was born in 1946, he said, and although he was too young to remember the 1948 war, he vividly recalled its aftermath, when his father was expelled to Jordan and he and his siblings were destitute. “I cried—I wanted bread,” he said. “No father, no bread.”

In addition to having a roster of patients, Qasem Hassan co-taught a medical-ethics class affiliated with the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa. One day in May, 2024, the theme of the lesson was the challenge of preserving the dignity of patients. The students were given an article from Haaretz about a doctor who’d served at Sde Teiman, a facility in the Negev Desert that, after October 7th, was used to detain alleged Hamas fighters and other suspects taken from Gaza. In a letter sent to Israel’s health and defense ministers and its attorney general, the doctor wrote that he’d seen detainees blindfolded, made to wear diapers, and placed in painful constraints—conditions that, in his view, violated the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law, which Israel amended in 2023. “Just this week, two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event,” the doctor stated. This was in “violation of Israeli law, and perhaps worse for me as a doctor, in the violation of my basic commitment to patients.” In a statement, the I.D.F. told me that any mistreatment of detainees is “strictly prohibited,” and that “concrete allegations” of abuse are investigated.

The class discussion was tense. A medical resident, who was of Palestinian heritage, said that he didn’t want to talk about the subject because he feared that it was too inflammatory and divisive; several Jewish students said that they shared his concerns. Another resident, a Jewish reservist who had served at Sde Teiman, insisted that during his time there the detainees had been treated appropriately and given proper medical care.

A week later, Qasem Hassan learned that the School for Continuing Medical Education in Family Medicine, which oversaw the ethics course, had received a letter from several residents in the class. In the letter, a copy of which I obtained, the students criticized the Haaretz article as biased. They also accused Qasem Hassan of dismissing the concerns of the resident who had served in Sde Teiman and of abusing her authority by imposing her political agenda on them.

Three days later, another group of students submitted a reply. They acknowledged that the topic was emotionally charged, but they insisted that the conversation had been respectful, and that the reservist had been encouraged to express his views. They also questioned why only Qasem Hassan had been singled out for blame—the class had two Jewish instructors as well, Gila Yakov, a medical ethicist, and Amos Ritter, a family-medicine doctor. (Ritter was not present that day, but he had helped prepare the lesson.) The letter was signed by four Palestinian residents.

The course had been visited by controversy before. Years earlier, after Qasem Hassan brought in a speaker from P.H.R.I. who used the term “occupied territories,” some students raised objections. Ritter, who admires Qasem Hassan’s outspokenness, told me that, ever since then, “Lina has been marked as a left extremist.” Now Qasem Hassan and her colleagues were summoned to meet with Adi Ivzori-Erel and Merav Sudarsky, who lead the academic program at the continuing-education school. The teaching of explosive issues should be coördinated with the school’s leaders in advance, the instructors were told, and the lessons should draw on scientific papers, not on articles in Haaretz, which, in Israel, is widely seen as left-wing. Ivzori-Erel and Sudarsky reiterated this in a statement to me. “While addressing sensitive topics is not prohibited, such discussions should rely on balanced, non-partisan academic sources,” they wrote. This was not the first time that concerns had been raised about “political bias in ethical discussions within the course,” they added. Yakov told me that, in hindsight, she wished the discussion had not focussed on the Haaretz article—it had, she said, “led some students, both Jewish and Arab, to experience it as a political debate rather than an ethical one.”

In Qasem Hassan’s view, bias was not the issue—rather, the fact of prisoner mistreatment had made some students uncomfortable. Since that day in class, she noted, far more graphic accounts of abuse at Sde Teiman had emerged, including an incident, caught on video, in which a group of soldiers appeared to sexually assault a male detainee with a baton. The faculty overseeing the course, she felt, wanted to muzzle discussion of a disturbing reality, which was itself a political choice. Qasem Hassan also felt that she’d been subjected to a double standard. Back in November, 2023, Mordechai Alperin, the head of the family-medicine program, had signed an open letter endorsing the bombing of hospitals in Gaza that, the signatories said, were being used by Hamas. Nobody had accused him of political bias, though several Palestinian students had privately complained to Qasem Hassan about it. (In a text, Alperin told me he doubted that the open letter had had any impact on the situation in Gaza, and argued that “there is no place for politics in the medical system.” Ivzori-Erel and Sudarsky noted that Alperin’s action did not take place “within the framework of the program.”)

Qasem Hassan had taught the ethics class for seven years. She had recently learned that Technion would award her a diploma for excellence in teaching. But she no longer wanted to teach the ethics class. “I can’t teach medical ethics with a sword on my neck,” she said.

Qasem Hassan’s concern for the dignity of patients in extreme situations evolved from her work with P.H.R.I. For years, she’d served as a doctor for Palestinian prisoners who launched hunger strikes to protest being held under administrative detention, meaning that they had not been charged with a crime or granted a trial. It was one way she could express solidarity with Palestinians who were denied the rights and protections that Israeli citizens had. Another way was dispensing care at the mobile clinics that P.H.R.I. operated in the occupied territories. (The conditions that Qasem Hassan witnessed on these expeditions helped convince her that Israel’s sixteen-year blockade of Gaza had turned the territory into an open-air prison, a situation that was bound to explode at some point.)

In early March, I met Qasem Hassan and a group of medics at a gas station in Tayibe, an Arab town near the Green Line, which separates Israel from the West Bank. A black van had been loaded with donations and supplies, and Qasem Hassan added a bag of winter clothing that two of her children had outgrown. After crossing a checkpoint, we followed a road flanked by sloping hills toward Danaba, a town near Tulkarm, where Israel had launched a major military operation in January. Its aim, according to Smotrich, the finance minister, had been to root out militants and bolster “protection of settlements and settlers.” The campaign had displaced forty thousand Palestinians—according to some analysts, the most in the West Bank since the Six-Day War, in 1967.

The van stopped outside a white concrete building facing a courtyard decorated with a mural of the Smurfs. It was a girls’ school. After the supplies were unloaded, Qasem Hassan pulled a medical smock over her black jacket and entered a classroom decorated with diagrams of the digestive system. A throng of patients had amassed outside. For several hours, Qasem Hassan tended to their medical needs, a task made harder by the fact that many had fled Tulkarm without any possessions. A diabetic man with mud-flecked shoes told her that he was missing both his insulin and his eyeglasses. A woman in a gray hijab said that she suffered from depression and anxiety but didn’t know what prescriptions she needed, because she’d left her medicine behind when soldiers evicted her from her home. Then she showed Qasem Hassan a picture of her son, which dangled from a chain around her neck. The son, a young man in his twenties, had been shot and killed by a soldier four months earlier, she said. She provided no additional context, but her grief was palpable. Qasem Hassan held her hand, which was trembling, and wrote out a prescription for her.

An elderly man in a dark thobe shuffled into the room, pushing a walker. He was with his daughter, who told Qasem Hassan that he had myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease. The man waved three fingers in the air, one for each of the times he’d become a refugee: 1948, 1967, 2025.

The last patient left at around 2 P.M.—it was the start of Ramadan, and everyone wanted to get home before sundown. Qasem Hassan sighed and admitted, “I can’t take any more of these stories.”

On the way back to Tayibe, we passed a hilltop where some caravans were visible. It was a settlement outpost, built with the Israeli government’s tacit consent. From Tayibe, I got a ride back to the Tel Aviv area with Daniel Solomon, one of the other physicians who volunteered at the mobile clinic. Solomon, an Italian Jew who moved to Israel in 2012, works at a hospital in a politically conservative town. The staff is mixed, and when the focus is on treating patients everyone gets along. “There is definitely some degree of coexistence,” he told me. But, as in most hospitals, the majority of the leadership positions are held by Jews, he said, adding that since October 7th the atmosphere had grown jingoistic. At the hospital’s entrance, staff had hung a banner bearing the slogan “One People: Together We Win.” A whiteboard and some markers were placed next to it, so that people could write messages. In no time, Solomon said, someone had written “Flatten Gaza” alongside “Am Yisrael Chai!” (“The People of Israel Live!”)

That evening, I visited Tel Aviv’s Democracy Square, where anti-government protests are held every Saturday. The demonstrations began in January, 2023, in response to a plan by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to limit the Supreme Court’s power. More recently, the organizers have been targeting the government’s failure to secure the release of all October 7th hostages, and the willingness of Netanyahu to appease his right-wing coalition partners by prolonging the war.

The streets were crowded with demonstrators, some of whom were dressed in “Crime Minister” sweatshirts, a reference to Netanyahu’s corruption trial, which centers on accusations that he accepted lavish bribes and discussed doing political favors for a media company in exchange for positive coverage. Others wore hats bearing the words “End This Fucking War.” The mood was more sombre at Hostages Square, near the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, reflecting the week’s events. A few days earlier, a funeral had been held for Kfir and Ariel Bibas, two children who were abducted on October 7th and died while in captivity. There had also been mounting indications (soon borne out) that the current ceasefire with Hamas would unravel. The protesters waved Israeli flags and held up signs—“59 More To Go,” a reference to the hostages still in Gaza—in both English and Hebrew. I did not see any signs in Arabic. Tamar Hermann, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, told me that Arab citizens had been absent from the start. “One of the main concerns of the protesters was to show that they are very patriotic, that they served in the Army, that they are Zionists,” she said. “The inclusion of Arabs could have painted them as leftists, as collaborators and whatnot, so although certain Arab leaders were invited, they were not the more outspoken leaders. It was not a joint Jewish-Arab protest.”

Hassan Jabareen, the director of Adalah, a human-rights organization, told me that after October 7th Palestinian citizens concerned about the infliction of collective punishment on Gaza led a demonstration in the northern town of Umm Al-Fahm. A hundred police officers made eleven arrests. Since then, he said, licenses for protests in the north had been denied. Meanwhile, Netanyahu announced that the war now had four fronts: Gaza, Lebanon, the West Bank, and “within.” Scores of Palestinian citizens were brought before disciplinary committees or hauled into custody for alleged incitement.

Fears of internal violence weren’t unreasonable. In May, 2021, riots had erupted in some mixed cities, sparked partly in response to a government effort to evict Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The lack of bloody clashes in those cities after October 7th suggests that the Hamas attack didn’t inflame the same divisions, and might even have initially fostered solidarity across ethnic lines. Two scholars at the University of Haifa, Doron Navot and Hanna Diab, are conducting a research project for which they have interviewed dozens of Palestinian citizens—teachers, lawyers, doctors, journalists. Their subjects’ statements provide some evidence to support this notion. Many of them said that immediately after October 7th they felt sympathy for the victims, some of whom were residents of their own communities. “We lost people,” a Bedouin from the Negev said. But being treated as an enemy soon created alienation and resentment. “I go into Jewish schools and hear the students whispering that I’m Arab,” one subject said. “This is racism that existed before October 7th, but now it’s out in the open.”

In January, 2024, aChord, an Israeli nonprofit that studies social psychology, released the results of a survey showing that, among Jewish Israelis, there had been a sharp rise in anger, fear, and hatred toward Arabs. Ron Gerlitz, aChord’s director, told me that it would have been surprising “if we didn’t see this.” Recent surveys indicate that the animosity has levelled off. But Gerlitz said another aChord survey found that almost sixty per cent of Jewish Israelis believe it’s illegitimate to identify as both Israeli and Palestinian. The message, Gerlitz said, was that Arabs in Israel “can’t be Israelis” unless they disavow a core part of themselves.

One of the participants in Navot and Diab’s study told them, “The Palestinian in Israel lives in constant tension between a desire to belong to the broader society and the realization that this belonging is always conditional.” Others said that they no longer wanted to belong, and felt that their citizenship was worthless. Navot and Diab draw a distinction between having formal citizenship rights, which Palestinians in Israel have, and being a citizen. “You can have citizenship rights without being a citizen because society excludes you or terrifies you or doesn’t recognize you,” Navot told me. “If you go to work or to your university and you are terrified to speak up, you may have citizenship rights but not feel like a citizen.” Aside from fear, the dominant emotions their subjects expressed were disappointment and anguish, fuelled by the widespread indifference they sensed from the Jewish public toward the horrors occurring in Gaza, where more than fifty thousand residents have been killed and millions have been displaced. Navot told me that nearly all the subjects of the study had expected Israel to respond harshly to the October 7th attack. “And they accepted this,” he said. “But they didn’t expect that so many Jewish Israelis would support the continuity of the reaction for such a long time. They are shocked by this, and it is one of the reasons they don’t talk—it’s not only that they are afraid but that they feel there is no one to talk to.”

I heard echoes of this from a Palestinian citizen of Israel I met one evening in Haifa. After October 7th, she locked her social-media accounts and stopped communicating directly with friends in Gaza, worried that even a benign text could make her the target of an investigation. “I understand what October 7th meant to the Jewish community—I understand their fears,” she said. “But I can’t understand losing your humanity.” In the past, few Palestinian citizens of Israel even considered leaving the country, emphasizing the principle of sumud, or “steadfastness,” and the imperative to remain on ancestral land. But the woman told me that many people she knew were planning to relocate; indeed, she and her husband were considering emigrating from Israel next year, once their daughter graduated from high school. “I can’t see a future here,” she said. In this sense, they had something in common with Jewish Israelis, thousands of whom have immigrated to Europe since October 7th because they felt despair about the future.

“This is where I belong,” Qasem Hassan told me in Tamra, where she and Sharaf reside with their children in a house bordered by olive trees. Every year, Sharaf’s aunts harvest the trees, which supply the family with food and oil. His family doesn’t have legal title to all of their land. The government hasn’t accepted their claim to it, even though they’ve lived there for many decades; at one point, they were forced to pay the government a fee to prevent their house from being demolished.

Living in Tamra isn’t easy. There are virtually no parks in the town, so when Qasem Hassan’s two young daughters want to play in one she often drives them all the way to Kiryat Bialik. Another local problem is crime, which has soared in recent years, fuelled by gangs and, many residents feel, by the deliberate neglect of the police, which since 2022 has been run, except for a short break, by Israel’s national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist and unapologetic racist.

But Qasem Hassan wasn’t going anywhere, even as she acknowledged feeling increasingly isolated, not only from her Jewish peers but also from some of her fellow-Palestinians, including family members. Her older brother, a successful economist, and her sister, a government lawyer, have repeatedly warned her that her outspokenness could damage not only her career but theirs.

Qasem Hassan has also heard this from her father, who lives in Nazareth. She visits him often, in part to check on his health; he suffers from pulmonary fibrosis. One afternoon, she brought me along, stopping on the way to buy knafeh, a cheese pastry. When we arrived, her father was lying on a maroon couch in the living room, with a plastic breathing tube attached to his nose. He told me that he was a graduate of Mikveh Yisrael, an agricultural school that prided itself on educating the pioneers of the Zionist movement. At the same time, he noted, “I lived those ’48 years, and I saw the war with my eyes. I lived in Tira, in the triangle, near Kfar Saba. And until now”—tears welled in his eyes—“I can’t grasp how another people could throw me from my house and live in my place.”

Qasem Hassan told me that her father would sometimes express pride after hearing her on the radio talking about human rights. But then he’d urge her to censor herself. Qasem Hassan understood his conflicting impulses. “He’s a Nakba survivor, and he’s afraid,” she said. Lately, though, she hadn’t always been apprising her family of her media appearances. “I don’t want these comments,” she said. “I need support.” She summarized her dilemma: “If I speak up, I might damage someone—myself, the people around me. If I don’t speak up, I can’t live. This is what gives me purpose.”

Since October 7th, a source of comfort to Qasem Hassan has been the devotion of patients she’d feared would abandon her—people like Ellen and Shlomo, who live in Kiryat Bialik. Ellen, aged eighty-two, is originally from Philadelphia, and is the daughter of a passionate Zionist. Shlomo is a Sabra—an Israeli native—who grew up in Tel Aviv. They both told me that they adored Qasem Hassan. After Qasem Hassan discovered that Ellen had an atrioventricular block, she helped her get a pacemaker before the specialist who could perform the surgery left for the weekend. “I know she saved my life,” Ellen said. She and Shlomo were aware of Qasem Hassan’s political beliefs, which Qasem Hassan told me she didn’t conceal from her patients. (“I can’t hide who I am.”) Shlomo said to me, “We know she’s active.” It had never affected the quality of the care they received. “She doesn’t look at your color or your views,” Ellen said. “She just cares about you as a person.”

Qasem Hassan also leaned on such colleagues as Daphna Shochat, a Jewish endocrinologist I met in Jaffa, outside the office of Physicians for Human Rights Israel. She and Qasem Hassan were there to record videos that would accompany a new P.H.R.I. report, which incorporated interviews with twenty-four Palestinian medical professionals who had been held at Israeli detention facilities, where many of them said they had been tortured. According to the report, most had been captured while working in hospitals in Gaza, not while plotting acts of terrorism. (Both the Israel Prison Service and the I.D.F. denied the report’s allegations; the I.D.F. said that it detained only people “suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.”)

Qasem Hassan and Shochat—the granddaughter of Yafa Yarkoni, a legendary Israeli singer—were close, and their friendship had affirmed Qasem Hassan’s belief in the importance of forging alliances with Jewish Israelis who shared her values. Shochat, for her part, was impressed by the courage shown by Qasem Hassan, who was far more vulnerable to attack than were P.H.R.I.’s Jewish members, and by her gentle fierceness. “She somehow manages to say things as they are, without apologizing, without compromising, and without losing her dignity and compassion,” Shochat said. She quoted the poet Leah Goldberg—“Even in a time of war, the value of love is greater than the value of murder”—and said, “Lina really embodies that.”

Qasem Hassan was aware that plenty of people viewed her less flatteringly, including people in the Arab world who have seen Israel’s Palestinian citizens as betrayers. “We are not,” she insisted. “We are the people that stayed on our lands, we are the natives, and we had to pay a price for that.” She was constantly navigating encounters that pulled at the different strands of her identity. One day, a reservist came to the Kiryat Bialik clinic; he was experiencing P.T.S.D. after serving in Gaza. What would Qasem Hassan’s sister-in-law—the one whose brother was killed by an air strike—think of her helping him? Qasem Hassan pushed this thought aside and offered him care. “I never judge my patients,” she said, though she admitted that “it’s not easy.” It helped that Qasem Hassan believed that the violence of the conflict harmed not only the victims but also the perpetrators. In her view, a reservist with P.T.S.D. “is also a kind of victim.”

In recent weeks, Qasem Hassan told me, criticism of the Gaza war had intensified in Israel. She noted an editorial that the former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert published on May 27th, in which he declared, “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel.” At the same time, Qasem Hassan was deeply concerned about a bill advancing through the Knesset. It proposed that foreign donations to human-rights groups—which are currently untaxed—be taxed at a rate of eighty per cent, a change that could cut P.H.R.I.’s budget by more than a third.

Qasem Hassan also continued to feel frustrated by the strictures surrounding the discussion of certain subjects at work. One day in February, she learned that the clinic would be decorated with orange balloons, in honor of Kfir and Ariel Bibas, the child hostages who had died, whose hair had been reddish orange. Their deaths appalled Qasem Hassan. “They are babies,” she told me. At the same time, she went on, “there are seventeen thousand children in Gaza who were killed, and no one really recognizes that it’s a crime to kill them.”

This is what Qasem Hassan had feared from the start—that the horrific violence inflicted on Israelis on October 7th would be used to justify a war without limits, dehumanizing all Palestinians. As a result, she had sometimes asked herself if going to the Dead Sea after October 7th had been the right decision. She ultimately decided that she was proud of it. She told me, “I did it for myself, because it put to the test the idea I was raised on—that all people are equal and that human pain is universal.” She paused. “I did it for myself and also for my daughters. I wanted them to understand that a human being is a human being.”

[socialistexan]

Absolutely wild to see Khazar theory have a rebirth, except on the left this time.

Some of y'all are so desperate to find a counter for every Zionist talking point you've dove head first into the concrete pool that is antisemetic conspiracy theories normally too kooky for even Alex Jones.

Even if every single Israeli was 100% from the Levant, what the government of Israel is doing to the Palestinian people would still be monsterous, regardless. Regardless of whether Palestine was the ancestral home of Jews, Israel does not have the right to colonize, displace, and murder the current occupants.

You are accepting to argument of the colonizer of "if" when what we should be saying is "regardless"

Don't even argue the points for or against, you call it for what it is, a distraction from the actual issue of the genocide of the Palestinian people.

We should be doing this for every Zionist talking point, too. "Palestinians are antisemetic and homophobic" okay, regardless of whether that is true, they still shouldn't be slaughtered en masse. "Hamas has hostages" regardless of that, this level of civilian death is unacceptable.

When you get bogged down in trying to refute Zionists, you accept their framing, period, and you will be backed into a corner if you're provided with evidence and leave yourself in a position where you are susceptible to conspiracy grifters and bigots.

[1americanconservative]

A storm in the Arab world:

* The Muslim blogger, Hoda Jannat, is shocked by what she has learned about Gaza since the war began. *

In a bold post, she describes what she has learned from the war process and reveals the good and comfortable life Gaza residents and Hamas leaders practiced thanks to the consideration of israel

The post exposes the hypocrisy of the Hamas organization, the so-called condition of the Gazans was so bad before the war,

And this is how she advertises:

1. Suddenly we discovered that in the Gaza strip, where 2 million people live, there are 36 hospitals. There are Arab countries with a population of 30 million that don't have so many hospitals.

2. Surprisingly, we found out that Gaza receives free water, electricity, gas and fuel from Israel. Of course, there is not one Arab citizen anywhere else in the world who does not pay for water, electricity and fuel.

3. Suddenly we discovered that Gaza receives 30 million dollars a month only from Qatar. And $120 million a month from the UNRA. And 50 million dollars a month from the European Union. And 30 million dollars a month from America. There are Arab countries drowning in debt and can't find anyone who can give them even a million dollars.

4. Suddenly we discovered that there is no "siege" on Gaza and all the goods are flowing there and the borders are open. The Gazans traveled to Egypt and from there around the world.

5. Unexpectedly, we discovered that Arabs live better in Gaza than in many Arab countries.

6. Suddenly we discovered that our brains have been programmed by the lies of the media of the Muslim brothers.

7. Suddenly we discovered that the children in Gaza are not children as we usually imagine as children, but children of terrorists with artillery and suicidal belts who have been specially trained by Hamas.

8. Suddenly we discovered that the schools, hospitals and mosques in Gaza are organized terror headquarters and ammunition warehouses with Hamas underground tunnels.

9. Suddenly we discovered that in Gaza there is an underground Hamas "metro" that stretches over 500 km, that Israel can only envy.

10. Suddenly we discovered that the so-called doctors and teachers in Gaza turned out to be active Hamas terrorists.

11. Suddenly we discovered that rockets and mortars are held in children's rooms in Gaza.

12. Suddenly we discovered that Hitler and his book "Main Campf" were very popular in Gaza, and the translation into Arabic was in almost every home in Gaza, or a portrait of the author.

13. Suddenly we discovered that the Gazans live a luxury life, with multi-storey mansions with swimming pools and premium German cars.

14. Suddenly we discovered that there is no Israeli siege in Gaza because it still bordered by its Muslim sister Egypt.

15. Suddenly we discovered that most of the "citizens" in Gaza support Hamas and other terrorist groups, voted for Hamas in democratic elections and celebrated the massacre on October 7th.

16. We suddenly discovered that so-called reporters and journalists in Gaza working for western media CNN, AP, Reuters and others turned out to be Hamas terrorists who participated in the massacre on October 7.

17. Suddenly we have discovered that the so called 'peace activists' and 'ICO workers' of the UN, Red Cross and WHO, have turned out to be Hamas terrorists and corrupt.

18. Suddenly, we have discovered that each of the Hamas leaders is a billionaire and richer than President Trump, with a net worth of $4-5 billion each.

In conclusion, the Muslim blogger revealed the mask of hypocrisy of Hamas in Gaza in a series of tweets that shook the Arab world.

https://twitter.com/oliaklein/status/1739171908636029154...

[acti-veg]

if the occupation was ended, would Hamas take over? what would the consequences of that be?

If Israel just left, leaving Palestine in chaos with no support or way to manage a peaceful transition towards democratic rule then it is likely that Hamas or some other militant group would seize power, yes. That is often used in defence of maintaining the (illegal) occupation, but Hamas only exists because of Israel, and it continues to gain recruits because of the occupation.

The Israeli government and the IOF have destroyed Palestine, if they just get up and leave there will be no jobs, no critical infrastructure, scarce food, resources or opportunities. They have all but guaranteed another century of violence in Gaza and the rule of organisations like Hamas if they don’t do anything to help repair the damage that has been caused, which they clearly have no intention of doing.

What you have in Palestine is a whole generation of disenfranchised young people who have watched their parents and friends being butchered, who have no say in the political process, no hope for their future, no way to leave, and no way to better their situation at home. This is the pool from which Hamas recruit. Israel just leaving won’t fix any of the damage they have caused, or erase the anger they have earned.

For the violence in Gaza to end and for Palestine to become a peaceful, democratic state, Israel must be bought to heel by the international community. They must be made to lift their occupation, return and the land they stole, pay significant, ongoing reparations and recognise Palestine as a sovereign state. Until then, Israel must be the subject of stringent trade embargo, they must have their funding withdrawn and their supply of weapons stopped. Israel would crumble eventually, and then the process of rebuilding could begin, with the support of the international community to ensure a democratic transition.

Palestine needs new critical infrastructure like roads, schools, and hospitals, it needs investment and foreign aid on a vast scale. Israel, and to a lesser extent the nations who failed to stop this genocide, need to foot the bill for it. Only significant pressure from the likes of the EU, the US and the UK will end the violence at this point, and even then, it will take many years of rebuilding, diplomacy and healing.

[secular-jew]

Arab blogger Hoda Jannat exposed the lies in a series of posts on the X social media platform, together with video footage to substantiate his claims.

1. We suddenly discovered that there are 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip, where 2 million people live. There are Arab countries with a population of 30 million people, where there are not many hospitals.

2. Surprisingly, but we discovered that Gaza gets free water, electricity, gas, and fuel from Israel. Of course, there is not a single Arab citizen anywhere in the world who doesn't pay for water, electricity and gas.

3. We suddenly found out that Gaza gets 30 million dollars a month from Qatar alone. And 120 million dollars a month from UNROP. And 50 million dollars a month from the European Union. And 30 million dollars a month from America. There are Arab countries that are drowning in debt and cannot find anyone to give them at least a million dollars.

4. Suddenly we discovered that there is no “siege” on Gaza and all goods are flowing there and the borders are open. The people of Gaza went to Egypt, and from there around the world.

5. Suddenly, we discovered that Arabs live better in Gaza than in many Arab countries.

6. Suddenly, we discovered that our minds have been programmed by the lies of the Muslim Brothers media.

7. Suddenly, we discover that the children in Gaza are not the children we usually imagine, but the children of terrorists with rifles and death belts trained by Hamas.

8. Suddenly, we discovered that there are terrorist headquarters and ammunition warehouses with Hamas underground tunnels organized in Gaza schools, hospitals and mosques.

9. We have suddenly discovered that there is an underground Hamas subway of over 500 km long in Gaza, which Israel can only envy.

10. Suddenly, we discovered that so-called doctors and teachers in the Gaza Strip turned out to be active Hamas terrorists.

11. We suddenly discovered that rockets and mortars are stored in the children's rooms of Gaza homes.

12. We suddenly discovered that Hitler and his book "Mine campf" were very popular in Gaza and its Arabic translation was in almost every home in Gaza or portrait of the author.

13. Suddenly, we discovered that the leaders of Gaza live a luxurious life with high-rise mansions with swimming pools and premium German cars.

14. We suddenly discovered that there is no Israeli blockade in the Gaza Strip, as it still borders its Muslim sister, Egypt.

15. We have suddenly discovered that most "citizens" in the Gaza Strip support Hamas and other terrorist groups, elected Hamas in democratic elections and celebrated the October 7th massacre.

16. We have suddenly discovered that the so-called reporters and journalists in the Gaza Strip working for western media CNN, AP, Reuters and others turned out to be the Hamas terrorists involved in the October 7 massacre.

17. We have suddenly discovered that the so-called "peace fighters" and "international human rights organizations workers" of the UN, Red Cross, and WHO turned out to be terrorists and corrupt Hamas.

18. We have suddenly discovered that each of the Hamas leaders is a billionaire and richer than President Trump, with equity of $4-5 billion each.

[thoughtportal]

When I learned I’d been selected for a journalism award earlier this year, I felt humbled and honored. But I also felt hollow. It’s not that I’m ungrateful—far from it. But while I am recognized in exile, my colleagues who are still in Gaza remain caged in a death trap, targeted simply for the crime of reporting their own destruction. Recognition alone won’t stop the bombs. It won’t bring back the dead.

World Press Freedom Day, which was marked on May 3, is a time when we deliver speeches, pledge solidarity, and commemorate journalism’s role in holding power to account. But in Gaza, the most basic freedom—the freedom to live, let alone to report—is denied at every turn. Since October 2023, more than 210 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed, according to the latest figures from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate—a toll unmatched in any conflict in modern memory. More remain missing or are presumed dead beneath the rubble.

Most of the dead have been denied even the dignity of recognition. Their names—like Al Jazeera’s Hossam Shabat and Palestine Today’s Mohammed Mansour, both killed by Israeli air strikes in March—briefly surface in headlines and then vanish, as if their lives were as disposable as the rubble they documented.

Since Israel’s assault resumed on March 18 after a brief and faltering ceasefire, Gaza’s journalists have been pushed to the very brink. With equipment destroyed, press jackets offering no protection, and nowhere left to shelter, they keep reporting anyway—because if they don’t, no one will. Like everyone else in Gaza, most journalists are hungry, displaced, and without shelter. But they also carry the crushing weight of their duty: to keep documenting, even as their own lives are being systematically dismantled.

What the world often forgets is that Gaza’s journalists are not just filing stories but also engineering miracles. With the electricity and cell phone service cut off for days or weeks at a time, reporters race to charging points powered by car batteries and climb to the higher floors of ruined buildings hoping to catch a sliver of a cell signal. When cameras are destroyed, they borrow or pool whatever gear survives, patching together broken tripods and cracked lenses. Fact-checking is done in real time amid air raids; entire reports are dictated by voice note when typing becomes impossible. There are no safety nets, no press-­freedom hotlines, no emergency extractions. Their only network is each other—and it’s this fragile, fiercely loyal chain of colleagues that keeps the truth alive when everything else is being destroyed.

And let’s be clear: This targeting of Palestinian journalists is not incidental. It is deliberate. Press vehicles, clearly marked, have been shelled. Homes where journalists were sheltering have been bombed. Reporters have received death threats from Israeli officials. To report from Gaza is to know you are in someone’s crosshairs.

I covered the first months of this war from inside Gaza before evacuating with my family for safety. Now I carry the unbearable guilt of knowing my colleagues stayed behind. Our community of journalists is small, close-knit. I wake up to news of more dead and missing, and it feels personal every time, because it is.

I remember crouching in the corner of a half-destroyed room, clutching my press vest as though it might shield me from the next strike. I filmed funerals where the dead outnumbered the mourners, interviewed survivors whose stories I barely had time to record before the next round of shelling began. Each dispatch felt urgent yet inadequate, as I tried to capture the full weight of grief, the relentless fear, the sense of being hunted simply for doing your job.

I don’t write this from a place of survivor’s pride but survivor’s shame. While I am alive and safe, my colleagues are not only risking their lives; they are doing so under conditions that defy imagination. Their bravery inspires me daily. And it leaves me asking: What does freedom of the press mean when it is met with a missile?

As I write this, new ceasefire talks are underway again. But in Gaza, even “peace” has become a kind of theater—a brief pause to bury the dead before the next round of killing begins. The toll keeps rising. The destruction deepens. And through it all, Gaza’s journalists continue to report.

It is no longer enough for international newsrooms to issue statements of support or post solemn tributes when a Palestinian journalist is killed—if they even do that. The targeting of media workers is a war crime under international law. Where are the urgent calls from mainstream organizations for independent investigations into the deliberate targeting of media workers? Where is the coordinated push for enforceable protections and legal redress?

Palestinian journalists are bearing the brunt of a war on truth—and every reporter who believes in press freedom should see their struggle as our own. The global press corps must stop looking at Gaza as someone else’s crisis and start treating it as the front line in the fight for journalism itself. Applause for Palestinian journalists isn’t enough. Protection, accountability, and justice—that is the debt we owe.

Mohammed R. Mhawish

[girlactionfigure]

⚠️ IRAN PREPARES, HOME FRONT CHANGES, SPECIAL FORCES VIDEOS - Tuesday afternoon - events from Israel  

...‼️The United States detects preparations in Iran for a missile attack on Israel. (Amit Segal - Ch. 12)

⚠️HOME FRONT COMMAND.. as of today (Tuesday), at 14:00: added restrictions in new and wide areas throughout the country until Sat. Oct 5, 20:00.  The reason for this change is the item above.

.. Restriction on activities and gatherings: Carmel (Haifa and wide area), Wadi Ara, Menashe, Samaria (West Bank), Sharon (Central cities), Dan (Tel Aviv), Yarkon, Shefala (Beit Shemesh and wide area), Jerusalem (and wide area), and Shfela.

.. Educational activities can ONLY be held in a place where you can reach a protected space in time with capacity in case of an alert.

.. Gatherings and services can be held with a limit of up to 30 people in an open area and up to 300 people in closed spaces.

.. Workplaces can operate in a building or place where you can reach a protected space in time with capacity in case of an alert.

.. Infographic: https://IDFANC.activetrail.biz/ANC0110202493864

.. Police: The Israel Police is prepared to implement the directives of the Home Front Command to the general public, following the change in the defense policy in the last hour.  Civil discipline saves lives.

❗️PUBLIC ROSH HASHANA PRAYER EVENTS CANCELLED.. The impression is that this is a warning about a more specific and immediate event, not about a general escalation from Lebanon.

.. Mass hataras nedarim at the Hotel cancelled.

.. Event at the Sultan’s Pool cancelled.

.. The Rabbi of the Western Wall and Holy Places Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitz calls on the public to take cautionand observe the mitzvah "and be very careful for your souls" - to obey the instructions of the Home Front Command and not to come to the Western Wall plaza tonight.

.. Message passed on to the Hasidim in Gur: Do not come today for prayers to the city. and prepare for the possibility that they will not be able to come to Jerusalem for the holiday.

▪️SPECIAL OPS.. Since the beginning of the war, the IDF has conducted dozens of targeted operations in areas near the border in southern Lebanon in order to dismantle Hezbollah’s terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.  The soldiers identified and breached underground access points near the border area, exposed extensive weapon caches, assembly areas for terrorist operative operations, and more. During these operations, the troops also collected valuable intelligence and methodically dismantled the weapons and compounds, including underground infrastructure and advanced weaponry of Iranian origin.

The troops also uncovered and destroyed underground infrastructure, struck thousands of targets and hundreds of weapons storage facilities, tons of explosives, and hundreds of living areas for operatives, command centers and more. 

Footage of IDF raids on terror targets in Lebanese territory: https://bit.ly/3ZLNw4x

Footage of the destruction of terrorist infrastructure in the area of the border: https://bit.ly/4gM9wCs

There are many more videos linked here -> https://t.me/idfofficial/10605

❗️TZAV 8.. IDF: In accordance with the situational assessment, the IDF is calling up four additional reserve (combat) brigades for operational missions in the northern arena. 

▪️AIR TRAVEL.. The airport is working as usual at the moment and there is no change in the airspace.

.. Israir is expected to operate flights using six leased planes over the holidays, to help maintain aviation continuity. 

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❗️IRAN MISSILE THREAT - Tuesday afternoon - events from Israel  

ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

( VIDEO - Home Front advice for holiday synagogue service - make sure to know the path to a protected space, have enough time and capacity. And what about the children? )

⭕HEZBOLLAH JUST FIRED 4 LONG RANGE MISSILES AT TEL AVIV.. a few minutes ago - they missed, hitting the sea.  No alarms due to the wide miss.

‼️The United States detects preparations in Iran for a missile attack on Israel.  On this basis, Israel has raised Home Front restrictions in the center and Jerusalem areas.  

.. The Pentagon: Satellite images show that Iran has prepared a large number of ballistic missiles to attack Israel.

.. IDF reminds:  defenses are NOT perfect, you MUST follow Home Front commands and take shelter when instructed.

.. The US Embassy in Israel asked its employees to stay at home and be prepared to go to shelters.

.. British Foreign Secretary Lammy announced that Britain is negotiating with its Iranian counterparts and calls on that country to exercise restraint in the midst of growing tensions in the region.

.. Reuters: Oil prices jumped 3% amid reports that Iran is planning to attack Israel.

📌HOME FRONT COMMAND..  center, Tel Aviv and wide surrounding areas, Jerusalem and wide surrounding areas, Samaria

.. Educational activities can ONLY be held in a place where you can reach a protected space in time with capacity in case of an alert.

.. Gatherings and services can be held with a limit of up to 30 people in an open area and up to 300 people in closed spaces.

.. Workplaces can operate in a building or place where you can reach a protected space in time with capacity in case of an alert.

📌PUBLIC ROSH HASHANA PRAYER EVENTS CANCELLED..

.. Mass hataras nedarim at the Western Wall cancelled.

.. Event at the Sultan’s Pool cancelled.

.. The Rabbi of the Western Wall and Holy Places Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitz: do not to come to the Western Wall plaza tonight.

.. Message to Hasidim in Gur: Do not come for prayers to the city. 

❗️SPORT EVENT CANCELLED - Soccer / Football between Beitar Yerushalayim and Maccabi Haifa.

🔹IDF spokesman: "Iranian firing on the State of Israel will have consequences - I will not say more than that."

🔹IDF spokesman Brigadier General Hagari: "IDF fighters found a "plan for the occupation of the Galilee" by Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanese territory.”

🔹US Central Command: 3 additional US aircraft squadrons are on their way to the area, and one of them has already arrived.

🔹The US continues to transfer military equipment non-stop to the region.  Huge military transport planes land in Jordan and Syria almost non-stop.

🔹Haifa Municipality: In light of the unusual security situation, the city council meeting scheduled for tonight is postponed.

🔹Russia to Israel: withdraw the troops from southern Lebanon immediately.

♦️ONGOING TARGETED ATTACKS in Lebanon cities.

♦️TARGETED ATTACK in Khan Yunis, Gaza on a vehicle.

♦️SYRIAN RADAR.. A radar position of Syria that attacked and destroyed a short time ago by the Air Force in southern Syria.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this National Geographic story:

A 14-year-old boy who went swimming in a pond in India’s sweltering heat. A 13-year-old girl who bathed in a pool during a school excursion, and a five-year-old girl who took a dip in a river near her home. The three children lived in different parts of the southern Indian state of Kerala. Yet they have something in common ⸺all of them succumbed to a brain infection, Primary Amoebic Meningoencephalitis (PAM), caused by a tiny organism found in warm freshwaters and poorly maintained swimming pools. About a dozen others have been undergoing treatment in India, one of whom, a 27-year-old man, has also succumbed.

Although rare, PAM is a deadly infection with a worldwide occurrence. It is caused by Naegleria fowleri, also known as the "brain-eating amoeba”, as it infects the brain and destroys brain tissue. At least 39 countries have reported such infections so far, and the rate of infections is increasing by 4.5 percent every year. In Pakistan alone, 20 deaths are reported every year due to the disease, and in 2024, infections have been reported in India, Pakistan, and Israel. N. fowleri was also detected at a popular freshwater swimming spot in Western Australia and hot springs in the U.S’s Grand Teton National Park. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the majority of global case exposures⸺85 percent⸺have been reported during warm, hot, or summer seasons. Several studies have also observed that changes in temperature and climate may further drive a global increase in PAM incidence. A study published in May last year found that PAM infections are on the rise in the northern U.S. "N. fowleri is expanding northward due to climate change, posing a greater threat to human health in new regions where PAM has not yet been documented," the study noted.

Yun Shen, an assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Riverside, says that she considers PAM as “a potential emerging medical threat worldwide”. She explains that while warmer temperatures are likely to facilitate the survival and growth of N. fowleri, the risk of exposure may also increase as people indulge in more water-based recreational activities in hotter weather.

N. fowleri is found in warm, untreated freshwater, soil, and dust, says Karen Towne, a clinical associate professor of nursing at the University of Mount Union in Ohio, who co-authored a 2023 study on how the amoeba poses “a new concern for northern climates”. She adds that so far, PAM infections have typically occurred in cases involving swimming, splashing, and submerging one’s head in freshwater lakes, ponds, hot springs, and reservoirs. Meanwhile, less common routes of transmission have included warm hose water, a lawn water slide, splash pad use, and exposure of the nasal membrane to tap water from private well systems.

“Epidemiologically, most cases have occurred in healthy children and young adults⸺more males than females⸺who have had recent contact with untreated fresh water,” Towne told National Geographic in an email interview.

According to Barbara Polivka, an associate dean of research at the University of Kansas School of Nursing, who co-authored the study with Towne, N. fowleri enters the nose via contaminated water, crosses the nasal membrane, and follows the olfactory nerve into the brain, where it incubates for an average of five days. “PAM begins with rapid onset of severe frontal headache, fever, nausea and vomiting, which worsen into stiff neck, altered mental status, hallucinations, coma, and death,” says Polivka.

[mariacallous]

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad faces the most substantial threat to his regime in years, after rebels captured Aleppo—one of the country’s largest cities—last week, along with dozens of other towns and villages, in a surprise assault.

The move on Aleppo followed a Nov. 27 offensive by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an opposition militant group and former al Qaeda affiliate that controls much of Syria’s Idlib province, which borders Aleppo province. Aided by locally manufactured kamikaze drones, HTS appears to have caught Assad’s forces off guard, prompting them to retreat from vast areas that are now under the group’s control. Both sides have already suffered significant losses, with at least 446 combatants and civilians killed since Nov. 27, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

More than 14,000 people have been displaced due to the recent violence, according to local aid group Violet. But, for the first time in eight years, many regime dissidents are returning to towns and villages that are now under HTS control.

The Syrian civil war began in 2011 after Assad’s regime violently repressed pro-democracy protesters, triggering a conflict that has so far claimed more than half a million lives and displaced over 7 million people. Aleppo was a major opposition stronghold until 2016, when a Russian air bombing campaign retook the city for the Assad regime.

HTS leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani has instructed his fighters to protect all civilians, including Christians, as well as Syrian regime soldiers who surrender, according to Idlib-based journalist Fared al-Mahlool. Following its split with al Qaeda around 8 years ago, HTS has sought to rebrand itself as a more moderate force than its erstwhile benefactor. Now, many residents of newly captured areas are uncertain what life under HTS control might entail.

Recent escalations in northwest Syria come as Assad’s main international supporters are preoccupied with their own conflicts. Russia is prioritizing its war in Ukraine, and both Iran and its proxy Hezbollah, in Lebanon, have been significantly weakened in fighting with Israel. Still, Russian and Syrian airstrikes targeted Idlib and Aleppo provinces over the weekend, while Iranian-backed militias from Iraq—including Kataib Hezbollah and Fatemiyoun—recently crossed into Syria, according to Al Arabiya, a Saudi Arabian news channel.

“Since Sunday, the bombings are constant,” Mahlool said. “Several schools and clinics in Idlib province have already been targeted.”

On Dec. 1, an airstrike hit Aleppo University Hospital, killing at least 12 people and injuring dozens more. The strike also damaged one of Violet’s ambulances, said Yemn Sayed Issa, the media and communication coordinator with the aid group. That same day, airstrikes targeted Idlib University Hospital, Ibn Sina Hospital, Idlib’s National Hospital, and the Idlib Health Directorate. And, according to Issa, a Soviet-era warplane struck a camp for displaced people near Ma’arrat Misrin, a town just north of central Idlib, killing at least seven civilians, including five children and two women. Violet’s medical team is responding to the attacks.

“It’s extremely dangerous for everyone. Our medics and ambulances head out daily, but constantly fear being targeted,” Issa said, adding that Aleppo—home to around 2 million people—is now critically short on essentials like bread, water, fuel, and medical supplies, which had previously been shipped from other regime-held areas.

“Everything is coming from Idlib now, but it’s difficult. The humanitarian situation is tragic. People are having to find shelter wherever they can,” Issa said. “In the town of [Darkush], for example, a public swimming pool has been turned into a temporary shelter for people who have fled their villages. Most displaced families have been forced to seek shelter in open fields and farmland, without any proper shelter or basic facilities.”

HTS’s advance means Aleppo is under opposition control for the first time in eight years. The front line had remained frozen since Russia and Turkey brokered a cease-fire deal in 2020. The two countries back opposing sides in Syria.

Russia, along with Iran and Hezbollah, are Assad’s key allies, while Turkey supports the Syrian National Army (SNA), a coalition of opposition groups—excluding HTS—that fights the Assad regime and Kurdish forces such as the People’s Defense Units (YPG) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Turkey considers the latter two groups to be terrorist organizations.

Since the recent rebel offensive, Assad’s regime has effectively abandoned areas within Aleppo province and left them under Kurdish control. The SNA continues to push the Kurdish groups further east. On Dec. 1, the SNA captured the strategic town of Tel Rifaat, which is located between Aleppo and the Turkish border. For the past eight years, the area had been under YPG and PKK control—a significant national security concern for Turkey.

The relationship between HTS and the SNA has long been tense; HTS has sought control over SNA-held areas and the SNA distrusts HTS for numerous reasons, including ideological differences. But both groups share a common goal.

“The priority is to fight the regime,” said Orwa Ajjoub, a doctoral candidate at Malmo University in Sweden who researches Islamist groups in Syria. “I’ve spoken with people who are sworn enemies of HTS to this day, but now they’re putting their differences aside to fight the regime. HTS is leading these efforts. When the dust settles, we’ll see how these diverse groups manage to resolve their disagreements.”

Turkey has its own troops in Syria, primarily in Idlib, Afrin, and other areas east of the Euphrates River, mainly as part of its operations against the PKK and YPG. Around 900 U.S. troops are also in the country; mostly concentrated in northeastern Syria, they support counter-terrorism operations against the Islamic State.

Analysts have speculated over whether Turkey—which is keen to reduce the power of the PKK and YPG—gave HTS the green light for the operation. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, however, said that it would be “wrong” to try to chalk the current situation in Syria up to external intervention.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan tried to mend relations with Assad in July, following a deterioration of ties throughout the war. Yet Assad insisted that Turkish forces must fully withdraw from Syria for him to negotiate with Erdogan—a request Turkey is unwilling to meet due to its own national security concerns.

Speaking with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Dec. 1, Fidan stressed that Turkey opposes instability in the region and reiterated the importance of reducing tensions in Syria. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi arrived in Turkey on Dec. 2 to discuss the situation in Syria. “Recent developments show once again that Damascus must reconcile with its own people and the legitimate opposition,” Fidan said at a joint news conference with Araghchi. “Turkey is ready to make all the necessary contribution toward this.”

Whether Turkey knew about it or not, “this operation is definitely a win for Turkey,” Ajjoub said. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has spoken about potentially withdrawing the remaining U.S. troops in Syria, which could create a power vacuum in the region. “Having more leverage in Syria before Donald Trump takes office could be significant for Turkey,” Ajjoub said.

[msternberg]

Arab blogger Hoda Jannat (Hoda_jannat) felt that something is not right in the news she is being fed by the media. So she set herself for a real fact-checking mission. And here are the results, translated from Arabic:

1.Suddenly we discovered that Gaza, which is inhabited by 2 million people… has 36 hospitals,” Jannat wrote.

“There are Arab countries with 30 million citizens and do not have this number of hospitals.

2.Suddenly we discovered that Gaza was getting water, electricity, gas, and fuel for free from Israel.

Of course, there is no Arab citizen who does not pay water, electricity and fuel bills.

3.Suddenly we discovered that Gaza was receiving $30 million a month from Qatar alone, and $120 million a month from UNRWA, and $50 million a month from the European Union, and 30 million dollars a month from America. There are Arab countries drowning in debt and cannot find anyone to help them, even with one million dollars.

4.Suddenly we discovered that Gaza was not besieged, and all goods were entering it, as were foreigners and people of foreign nationalities. Its residents were traveling to Egypt and from there to the rest of the world, and Fafo is the biggest example.

5.Suddenly we discovered that Gaza was living better than many Arab countries…and its people were living better than many Arab peoples.

6.Suddenly…we discovered that our minds were besieged by a programmed lie…by the (Muslim) Brotherhood media.”

7. Suddenly we discovered that the children in Gaza are not children as we usually think, but children of terrorists with machine guns and suicide belts who underwent special training by Hamas.

8. Suddenly we discovered that the schools, hospitals, and mosques in Gaza are organized terror headquarters and ammunition warehouses with Hamas’ underground tunnels.

9. Suddenly we discovered that in Gaza there is an underground “metro” of Hamas that stretches for 500 km, which Israel can only envy.

10. Suddenly we discovered that the supposedly doctors and teachers in Gaza turned out to be active Hamas terrorists.

11. Suddenly we discovered that rockets and mortars are kept in children’s rooms in Gaza homes.

12. Suddenly we discovered that Hitler and his book “Mein Kampf” were very popular in Gaza, and its translation into Arabic was in almost every home in Gaza, or a portrait of the author.

13. Suddenly we discovered that Gazans live a life of luxury, with multi-story mansions with swimming pools and premium German cars.

14. Suddenly we discovered that there is no Israeli siege on Gaza because it still borders its Muslim sister Egypt.

15. Suddenly we discovered that most of the “citizens” in Gaza support Hamas and other terrorist groups, elected Hamas in democratic elections, and celebrated the massacre on October 7th.

16. Suddenly we discovered that what is called journalists in Gaza who work for Western media like CNN, AP, Reuters, and others turned out to be Hamas terrorists who participated in the massacre on October 7th.

17. Suddenly we discovered that what is called ‘peace activists’ and ‘workers of international human rights organizations’ of the UN, the Red Cross, and WHO, turned out to be terrorists and corrupt people of Hamas.

18. Suddenly we discovered that each of the leaders of Hamas is a billionaire and richer than President Trump, with a net worth of 4-5 billion dollars each.

[eretzyisrael]

By EMANUEL FABIAN

Israeli ground forces operating in the northern Gaza Strip have located Hamas rocket launchers in close proximity to a swimming pool and a playground, the Israel Defense Forces reveals.

The IDF shares footage of troops locating the rocket-launching positions, amid efforts to uncover and destroy Hamas infrastructure.

Troops of the 551st Brigade find four underground launchers some five meters (16 feet) from a children’s swimming pool, and around 30 meters from residential homes in the northern Gaza Strip, footage shows.

Another clip shows troops of the 401st Brigade locating a number of rocket launchers within a children’s playground and amusement park compound.

“This is further proof of the Hamas terror organization’s constant use of the civilian population as a human shield for terror purposes,” the IDF says in a statement.