Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

Palestinians in Gaza have endured more than a year of Israel’s constant bombardment, ground assaults with tanks and troops, sniper fire, displacement and starvation. Armed drones constantly buzz overhead, a reminder that no place in Gaza is safe, and that death could come at any moment. Over 42,000 Gazans have been killed already.

Prior to Hamas’s raid on Israel on October 7th, 2023, the Gaza Strip was considered the world’s largest open-air prison, with its impoverished population of 2.3 million walled in by the Israeli military since 2006. Half of the population of Gaza is under the age of 18, born under siege, raised while denied adequate access to clean water, education, employment, nutrition, and freedom of movement.

The scale of the violence that Israel, with full US support, is raining on Palestinians in Gaza is without precedent, and is widely considered an ongoing genocide. One of Israel’s stated goals has been to kill Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, which it claims to have done in Rafah on Wednesday. Will Israel now accept a ceasefire, and will the hostages in Gaza come home? Apparently not. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the war will go on. The protests in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu, led by the families of hostages, continue.

News of the situation in Gaza is hard to obtain, as Israel has barred foreign journalists from entering. Palestinian journalists in Gaza have been doing remarkable reporting, but Israel has killed well over 120 of them in the past year.

Some of the best, first-hand accounts of the horrors have come from foreign medical workers. This week, the New York Times published an opinion piece titled, “65 Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics: What We Saw in Gaza,” written by Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who volunteered for two weeks at the European Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza. Sidhwa wrote,

“I worked as a trauma surgeon in Gaza from March 25 to April 8…Nearly every day I was there, I saw a new young child who had been shot in the head or the chest, virtually all of whom went on to die. Thirteen in total.”

The article included three X-ray images showing the upper body of different Palestinian children. Each showed a bullet lodged in the head or neck.

“It’s pretty clear that when there’s a pattern — every time any international has been around, for an entire year, on a daily basis, a child has been shot in the head in a place of 2 million people, it seems unlikely to me that that’s an accident,” Dr. Sidhwa said on the Democracy Now! news hour.

Rajaa Musleh is a Palestinian nurse who grew up in Gaza. She worked in Gaza City, trapped at one point in the Al-Shifa Hospital for over 40 days.

“We received a huge number of injured persons coming to the emergency department, and the majority of the cases, unfortunately, women and children,” Musleh said on Democracy Now! “Many children come without legs, without arms…I witnessed a father holding his children in two bags.”

She described the guilt she felt when compelled to leave a dying ten-year-old girl, in order to attend to others who had a chance of living:

“Ninety percent of her body was burned. She asked me to stay beside her and hold her hand. I will never, ever forget her burned skin in my hands. I feel guilty because I did not stay beside her in the bed…I feel guilty when she asked me about her mother and father and sister, brothers, and I didn’t respond because the whole family had been killed during the bombing of her house.”

Rajaa Musleh continued, “I will never forget the dogs, eating a dead body inside Al-Shifa Hospital at the front of the emergency department.”

Netanyahu and his war cabinet are agitating for a wider war, promising an imminent attack on Iran as the United States has sent Israel a high-tech missile defense battery and 100 US troops to operate it. The US also used B2 Stealth bombers to strike Yemen this week.

Forgotten amidst the geopolitics, beneath the warplanes and the uninterrupted flow of arms from the US to Israel, are both the Palestinian civilians, trapped with no place safe in Gaza, and the remaining Israeli hostages, seemingly sacrificed by Netanyahu as just another cost of his endless war.

Meanwhile, trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa will continue telling the world what he saw in Gaza: “I personally wish that Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs, it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.”

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET.

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“Helene” and “Milton” could be a favorite aunt and uncle; instead, they have become emblems of the deepening climate disaster as the names of hurricanes that have brought death and destruction. Amidst these two epic storms, an historic election is underway, with one political party actively spewing lies and disinformation about the cause of the hurricanes and the deployment of disaster relief – lies that can take lives. Meanwhile, marginalized communities, like prisoners and farmworkers, suffer heightened risks from extreme weather events but, like the mention of climate change itself, rarely appear on the major networks’ nonstop coverage. One lesson from these back-to-back hurricanes: the climate emergency is real and it impacts us all.

As this column goes to press, Floridians are still assessing Milton’s impact. The storm threatened to devastate Tampa, with one projection that a direct, Category 5 hurricane impact on that low-lying city could cause over $230 billion in damage–not to mention the lives lost. While Milton’s path diverged slightly from that worst-case scenario, early damage assessments still paint a dire picture.

More than 100 tornado warnings were issued as the powerful, climate-fueled weather system approached Florida’s Gulf Coast. One tornado touched down on Florida’s east coast, killing at least 4 people. Rescuers were still sifting through the wreckage on Thursday, searching for more victims.

Scientists are speaking with ever more precision about the impact of the human-induced warming climate on hurricanes and other extreme weather events. Exceptionally warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico supercharged both Helene and Milton. NASA’s Earth Observatory noted, “Sea surface temperatures helped fuel [Milton]’s rapid intensification …with winds increasing from 80 to 175 miles per hour in 24 hours.”

The World Weather Attribution project, researching links between climate and extreme weather, reported “climate change is enhancing conditions conducive to the most powerful hurricanes like Helene, with more intense rainfall totals and wind speeds,” predicting hurricanes will be more frequent – at least 1.5 times as likely – and stronger, as a result of human-caused climate change.

While the science is clear, Republicans like presidential candidate Donald Trump and Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia have been spreading lies with alarming success, falsely claiming that the federal government is directing emergency response funds to immigrants, or, in Green’s case, claiming the government is actually controlling the weather to hurt red states.

“I think we’re entering into a really dark new phase reckoning with the climate crisis,” David Wallace-Wells, a columnist with The New York Times, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “Many people are choosing to retreat into little cocoons of disinformation and paranoia. That scares me, in some ways, even more than the weather itself.”

While demagogues distract, real people continue to suffer. Far from the 24-hour Milton coverage on cable networks, Florida’s roughly 28,000 incarcerated people were trapped in prisons and jails. Jordan Martinez, an organizer with the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons, pressured officials to evacuate incarcerated people before the hurricane hit.

“The ongoing situation in Florida has been one of almost complete neglect and fiction writing by the Florida Department of Corrections and various county sheriff’s offices, jails, etc, claiming that incarcerated people are in fact, being evacuated,” Martinez said on Democracy Now!

“We were able to achieve one evacuation of the Orient Road Jail in Hillsborough County. But Manatee County, Lee County, Pinellas County, as well as St. Johns County on the eastern coast, all left prisoners in mandatory evacuation zones in the jails.”

The Intercept reported that during Hurricane Helene, prisoners in North Carolina, stranded without power, were forced to drink water from toilets and to store their human waste in plastic bags, abandoned by prison guards who protected themselves.

Florida’s vast and largely immigrant agricultural workforce also face extraordinary and largely unreported hurricane risks, including inadequate housing.

“[Most workers’] mobile homes are really, really old. They are not safe places to be,” Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a farmworker and organizer at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in southwest Florida said on Democracy Now! “Sadly, the conditions of vulnerability, living conditions especially, are horrible in most agricultural communities. It’s all the dangers of climate change. This time, we were lucky that it didn’t hit us directly, but we know that other communities are suffering and are going to be needing support that are in a desperate situation right now. We will be taking steps to try to support them as much as we can.”

The Atlantic hurricane season typically runs through November. How many more Helenes and Miltons, how many more preventable climate deaths and wasted billions of dollars, not only here but around the world, will it take before the United States, the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gas pollution, rises to the challenge and genuinely confronts this devastating climate emergency?

Democracy Now! is a daily independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Visit democracynow.org to watch and listen to the latest interviews, read through show transcripts, search the vast news archive or to make a donation to support our nonprofit news program. Livestream weekdays 8 a.m. ET. Follow Democracy Now! on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, SoundCloud and iTunes.

Democracy Now! Wednesday, October 9, 2024 by Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! Tuesday, October 8, 2024 by Democracy Now!