I want more people to know that while the Palestine Olympic team consists of only 8 athletes, at least 69 Palestinian Olympic athletes have been killed since October 2023. This includes athletes who were going to compete in these games and retired athletes such as Majed Abu Maraheel, the first Palestinian Olympian, who died of kidney failure in a refugee camp product of lack of medical treatment.
The U.N. Human rights Council has found Israel is deliberately responsible for the collective punishment of all Palestinians including noncombatant men, (pregnant) women and children; gender targeted violence; torture; using starvation as a weapon of war; and the intentional extermination of Palestinians living in Gaza.
409 bodies have been recovered last I heard and the search is not over yet. You can read the horrific accounts of what Israel did to Al Shifa Hospital in this Mondoweiss article
This is Rafah, The "safe" zone, where 1.5 million Palestinian fled to. You have to understand, what bombing Rafah means.
Please don't look away, while everybody is busy watching the super bowl, Israel commits one of its most deadly and openly genocidal attacks on Rafah. Please don't look away.
He's the Al Jazeera bureau chief in Gaza, Wael al-Dahdouh.
He became well known in October, when after listening to Israel's warnings about escalating attacks, he evacuated his family to a safer location where they were then killed. The world saw him react to their deaths and then return to reporting and continue to uplift and support other Gazans, especially children.
Today, he and his cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa were attacked. He is okay, but this is how the day unfolded for Samer:
Colleagues were pleading with Israel to allow help in as everyone could only watch the situation unfold.
Rescue teams were shot at when they tried to reach him.
Time continued to wind down, as everyone followed the agonizing live coverage on Al Jazeera or online.
And then:
That's it. No miraculous recovery or rescue, no relenting by Israel forces. A cameraman bleeding out in a school for hours.
This is what Palestinians are witnessing and living day after day.
the kingdom of flowers (made boastful by their supreme but geologically recent abundance and success): we will dominate every crevice on the planet! we will live forever!!
me (has studied ages gone by, aware that flowers only seem eternal because I live in their time): this is licherally what all the others said tbh but I am unable to picture a world where flowers have evolutionarily fallen by the wayside bc I live in the age of flowers 😔😔😔