Forty Thousand Bombs
Two dead and thirteen wounded in Tal al-Hawa on the thirteenth of September, when an Israeli strike hit a civilian vehicle hard enough that medical staff described the bodies as dismembered. The military said it had been aiming at two Hamas fighters. Two days later, four more Palestinians were killed within hours of each other and roughly a kilometre apart: a double drone strike on Sheikh Radwan that witnesses say returned a second time for the people trying to pull survivors out, a sixty-five-year-old man shot east of the Jabalia camp where he was already displaced, and a passerby killed in Sheikh Ajleen. None of it happened during a war. All of it happened during what the world has been calling a ceasefire since October of last year.
The same week, six UN workers and the civilians they were sheltering were killed when a school housing displaced families was struck, pushing the cumulative toll of UN personnel killed since October 2023 to at least 393. UNRWA’s acting head, Christian Saunders, said the safety of humanitarian staff, premises, and operations had been blatantly disregarded since the war began, a sentence that has needed updating so many times it has stopped sounding like news. The children killed this week have names: Bana, six, and Lana, twelve, in an airstrike on Beit Lahia. Wafaa, eight, in Gaza City. Saadi, three, and Obaida, nine, by gunfire. Hilal, fourteen, who died of his injuries days after the strike that caused them. Since the truce took effect, at least 1,372 Palestinians have been killed and 4,659 wounded. Since the war itself began, the toll runs past 74,000 dead and 174,000 wounded, across a strip of land the UN estimates is ninety percent destroyed.
On the sixteenth of September, the Trump administration informed Congress of a $2.8 billion sale to Israel: forty thousand two-thousand-pound bombs, Mk84s and BLU-117s, financed through the foreign military financing programme, meaning American taxpayers cover the bill. These are the same bombs whose delivery the Biden administration put on hold two years ago, specifically because of the mass-casualty risk they posed to Gaza’s civilian population. That hold is gone. This sale follows $6.67 billion in arms approved in January and nearly $3 billion in bombs approved the year before. A government that keeps telling reporters it wants the killing to stop is, in the same week people are dying under a ceasefire it brokered, restocking the exact category of weapon responsible for a share of that killing, and doing it with public money.
Reconstruction, meanwhile, is nowhere. Nickolay Mladenov, the Board of Peace’s high representative for Gaza, said on the seventh of September that the process is still far from starting, that Israeli troops haven’t fully withdrawn, and that the roughly seven billion dollars pledged in late August isn’t enough to move past the ceasefire’s first stage. Reconstruction was always conditioned on a withdrawal that keeps not happening, set entirely by the same government that just bought forty thousand more bombs. Both halves are the same policy: the siege runs on one clock, and reconstruction waits on a second clock that answers to it.
I don’t have a lever that reaches the Board of Peace, and neither does anyone reading this from outside a blockade that decides who gets to eat, sleep indoors, or bury their dead intact. What we have is money that can move faster than a UN pledge, and attention that costs nothing to redirect. Below this piece sits this week’s list of mutual aid requests. Open them. Give what you can move today. Share what you can’t fund, because a request that reaches further has a better chance of being answered than one more headline about a ceasefire that keeps a body count.
A note before the list: mutualaidspace.org’s submission form is live. Submitting a request there gets it federated as @comrade, automatically tagged for wider reach, and listed publicly under Comrades & Community or Victims of Empire, whether or not the person asking has a Fediverse account of their own. No verification process, no proof of suffering required. More on the project itself: mutualaidspace.org/about
✨Mutual Aid Roundup✨
@AnthonyJK @broodcoffee @ellespeaks @OshunThaGreat @monaant @kaylar @yellow @QuyetPawz @foxtrotluna @kitwinter
✨Palestinian Campaign Spotlight✨
Help Salama Save His Family
Salama describes donations in Gaza as what secures food, medicine, and basic necessities for his family’s survival, not a minor gesture. He asks that his pain not be ignored, and that whoever is able gives directly toward it now. [View original post]
Save Sharif’s innocent children please
Sharif Al-Amoudi needs surgery and ongoing treatment his family cannot afford on zero income, while his infant son Ahmed also remains sick in Gaza; give directly toward the medical care neither of them can access right now on their own. [View original post]
🗣️Support Corner🗣️
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This space is held together by a disabled Indonesian Muslim woman. Monthly support keeps me fed, medicated, and connected, and helps me keep resisting corporate funding and the humanitarian-industrial complex through my writing and mutual aid projects.
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