Dispatch #166 White Lesbian Age 73 Considers Israel’s Campaign to Decimate Palestinian Children and Israel’s Strategy to Weaponize Bulldozers for Ethnic Cleansing

July 10th 2025 Day 170 White Supremacist Misogynist Christian Nationalist Regime

 

1113 Days Since SCOTUS Ruled American Women Don’t Have Human Rights

621 Days Since Israel Began Genocidal Campaign on Palestinians in Gaza

Reports from the devastating floods in Texas note that rescuers are particularly hard hit by finding dead children, at least 36 by the last count.  The catastrophic death of young children is uniquely gut-wrenching and soul-searing. The country grieves for these children and their families.

Over the last 21 months, Israel has killed thousands of Palestinian children at an unprecedented rate – an average of 30 children a day – more than 20,000 children.  Thousands of children are missing. Tens of thousands are grievously wounded, including what the U.N. humanitarian aid organization OCHA has described as “the largest cohort of pediatric amputees in modern history.” The medical/health care infrastructure in Gaza is destroyed – these children will never get the specialized treatment necessary to recover.

A Gaza teen joins a generation of young amputees facing an unimaginable future. | The Washington Post 10 July 2025.  www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2025/07/10/child-amputees-gaza/ 

Gaza's stolen childhood. Who were the thousands of children Israel killed? | Al Jazeera 26 March 2025.  0-1 year 11%, 2-5 years 21%, 6-10 26%, 11-14 years 23%, 15-17 19%. www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2025/3/26/gazas-stolen-childhood-the-thousands-of-children-israel-killed 

Children represent 50% of Gaza’s population of 2 million. All these children are severely traumatized by the consequences of Israel’s brutal campaign of genocide and destruction.  Hundreds of thousands have experienced loss of parents or family members, relentless bombing and drones. Starvation, malnutrition and thirst/dehydration wreak permanent damage and disability.

The War on Gaza’s Children Without safe access to food, water, or medical care, survival has become a daily gamble for the region’s youngest residents. | Isaac Chotiner | The New Yorker 7 July 2025. Chotiner interviewed James Elder, UNICEF’s global spokesperson who just returned from a visit to Gaza, about what he saw. 

One is the wounds I saw on children. There were burns on little girls and boys, fourth-degree burns I didn’t know existed. And shrapnel riddled through a body. Shrapnel is designed to go through cement, and what it does to a child’s body is horrific. On one previous trip, I saw a bus of children who spent two days trying to get from the north to the south after being held at Israeli checkpoints, and I walked in the bus, and all I could smell was children’s burning flesh.

The most lethal crisis isn’t just hunger or thirst—it’s the brutal collision of both. And those deaths are often not recorded; when children are severely malnourished, they’re eleven times more likely to die from common childhood illnesses. They’re often not getting to a hospital. The problem is that, for the vast majority of children, if you die, if you are severely, acutely malnourished and you die, it’s very unusual to have “starved to death.” You’ve died because of diarrhea, basically, or acute watery diarrhea, which is very, very commonplace now, particularly given the restrictions on water and food. You’re killed by something that a healthy child’s immune system wards off very, very easily.

There’s a level of powerlessness that I’ve noticed for a long time. I noticed it more than a year ago when a parent would explain to me that their child had realized that this parent could no longer protect them, and what a horrifying moment that was. These parents know that they’ve lost the ability to keep their children safe, so that powerlessness cuts deep into people. www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/the-war-on-gazas-children

As Trump urges End to Gaza Fighting, Half a Million Face Starvation and Israel bombs more Hospitals. | Juan Cole | Informed Comment 15 May 2025.

 Acute malnutrition is the loss of body fat and muscle. Severe acute malnutrition is the next stage. When you see children with stick-like limbs, that’s marasmus, a sure sign of severe acute malnutrition. It sentences children to a lifetime of physical and cognitive impairment. https://www.juancole.com/2025/05/fighting-starvation-hospitals.html

Seeking bulldozer drivers to demolish Gaza: how a genocide is being outsourced. The systematic destruction of Gaza is hardly a secret. Now, the IDF is posting Facebook ads for bulldozer operators to help demolish the strip. | The Guardian 9 July 2025.

Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American historian and one of the foremost scholars on genocide in the world. He has spent over 25 years teaching a class on the subject. He deals with atrocities for a living, analyzing some of the very worst things that human beings are capable of. And yet even Bartov has said he can’t bear looking at some of the excruciating images coming out of Gaza anymore.

What’s happening, Bartov says, is unprecedented in the 21st century. “I don’t know of any comparable situation. Recent estimates show that about 70% of the structures in Gaza are either completely destroyed or severely damaged,” Bartov says. “The argument that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is conducting a war in Gaza is simply cynical, there is no war in Gaza. What the IDF is doing in Gaza is demolishing it. Hundreds of buildings are being bulldozed every week. This is not a secret, but mainstream media coverage has been insufficient.”

“The idea that the bulldozer has become a major article of genocide and warfare is quite new,” says Neve Gordon, a professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London. “What is happening in Gaza is not a building here or there being demolished; it’s the destruction of whole villages and towns.”

All this bulldozing comes with a very clear end goal. “Israeli government officials and media have made [their plans] fairly public,” says Bartov, who, like many other respected scholars, characterises what is happening in Gaza as a genocide. “What they appear to be aiming for – and are in the process of implementing – is for the IDF to take over roughly 75% of the Gaza Strip and demolish it entirely, with bombs and bulldozers, many of which are massive D9s recently imported from the US. The goal seems to be to concentrate the entire Gazan population into the remaining 25% of the territory, in the al-Mawasi area, and to debilitate them to the extent that they either flee, are permitted to leave or simply wither away.” www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/09/bulldzoer-gaza-genocide-idf-meta 

Israel continues to Starve, Target Gaza Civilians in ongoing Genocide | Juan Cole | Informed Comment 6 July 2025.

That’s right, Israel is deliberately starving children. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated in mid-June that 18,741 children have been hospitalized for acute malnutrition since the beginning of the year. And mind you, few hospitals are functioning even at a basic level in Gaza, because Israeli troops have deliberately destroyed them. The harried doctors and nurses who haven’t been assassinated by the Israeli army are trying to deal with those injured in the war, and you wonder if they can do much for children with stick-like arms and distended bellies. They don’t have food aid to give out, and what food there is has become extremely expensive. That is, by the way, typical of famine situations, which usually develop not because there is no food at all but because people cannot afford what little there is. That is how a million Irish died during the Potato Famine in the mid-nineteenth century, when British landlords continued to export food from the country.

 https://www.juancole.com/2025/07/continues-civilians-genocide.html 

Israel kills over 300 Palestinians in 48 hours as Gaza runs out of graves. Israel intensifies bombardment, committing '26 massacres' in past days, local officials say.  | Middle East Eye 3 July 2025.

 According to the local Government Media Office, the latest attacks targeted densely populated areas, including shelters, displacement centres, leisure spaces, homes, markets, hospitals and aid distribution points. "The majority of the martyrs are women and children – all unarmed civilians – reflecting the occupation’s deliberate targeting of the most vulnerable groups," the office said. www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-kills-over-300-palestinians-two-days-gaza-runs-out-graves  

Israeli military used 500lb bomb in strike on Gaza Cafe, fragments reveal Experts say use of heavy munition in Monday’s strike that killed dozens may constitute a war crime   | The Guardian 2 July 2025.

The Israeli military used a 500lb (230kg) bomb – a powerful and indiscriminate weapon that generates a massive blast wave and scatters shrapnel over a wide area – when it attacked a target in a crowded beachfront cafe in Gaza on Monday, evidence seen by the Guardian has revealed.

Experts in international law said the use of such a munition despite the known presence of many unprotected civilians, including children, women and elderly people, was almost certainly unlawful and may constitute a war crime. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/02/israeli-military-bomb-fragments-gaza-al-baqa-cafe