“Israeli forces and an Israeli-backed gang fired on Palestinians near an aid distribution point in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Monday, killing 14 people, The Associated Press has reported. The report cited witnesses to the massacre who said gunfire came from a gang led by Yasser Abu Shabab, a criminal who has been involved in looting aid trucks. It was just recently revealed that Israel has been arming the gang, which has members who have ties to ISIS.”

“Thousands of law enforcement officials have traveled to Israel to learn new repression strategies and surveillance techniques from the Israel National Police, Israel Defense Forces, and the Shin Bet, who inflict violence, crowd control, and surveillance onto Palestinians.”

“The Israeli regime has just attacked and commandeered the humanitarian ship #Madleen, in blatant violation of international law.” Mokhiber lists a litany of other illegal acts by Israel and states: “The UN has a duty to respond to threats to international peace and security and to defend human rights. Expel, isolate, embargo, and sanction the regime now. #UnitingForPeace.”

Eight CUNY (City University of New York) students, staff, and faculty, began their “hunger strike on the steps of the CUNY Graduate Center demanding the university divest” from Israel ten days ago. See their most recent news release. The group states: “The hunger strike, which has occupied the main entrance to the CUNY Graduate Center building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan now for over a week, has become a bustling community of political education and mutual aid

AP reports: “The U.N. Security Council scheduled a vote Wednesday on a resolution which demands ‘an immediate, unconditional and permanent ceasefire in Gaza respected by all parties.’ U.N. diplomats said the United States is likely to veto it.” … Mokhiber noted that in the face of the U.S. veto, the U.N. General Assembly “should call out the genocide by name, strip Israel of its credentials, convene under Uniting for Peace to mandate a protection force, call for a complete military embargo and robust sanctions against the regime, demand a ceasefire, and take action to hold all perpetrators to account. …”

The DNC leadership “remains largely within a bubble insulated from the anger and disgust – toward the party – that is widespread among countless Democrats and other Americans. They want the Democratic Party to really put up a fight, while its leaders mainly talk about putting up a fight.

“The UNGA should call out the genocide by name, strip Israel of its credentials, convene under Uniting for Peace to mandate a protection force, call for a complete military embargo and robust sanctions against the regime, demand a ceasefire, and take action to hold all perpetrators to account — whether political officials, soldiers, settlers, or complicit private or third state actors. The lives of millions are at stake. The credibility of international law is at stake. And the future of the UN itself is at stake. The time to act is now.” 

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said today: “I am appalled by the reports of Palestinians killed and injured while seeking aid in Gaza yesterday.” Last year, Guterres stated: “We have failed the people of Gaza.” The following have been fasting since May 22 outside the U.S. Mission to the UN, just across the street from UN headquarters in New York. Their demands are: 1) Full humanitarian aid to Gaza under UN authority and 2) No more U.S. weapons to Israel.

Their petition urges the DNC to “convene an emergency meeting of all its members—fully open to the public—as soon as possible.” The petition adds that “the predatory, extreme and dictatorial actions of the Trump administration call for an all-out commensurate response, which so far has been terribly lacking from the Democratic Party.” Among the 7,000 signers are more than 1,500 people who have written individual comments.

“The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation had promised something revolutionary with this initiative. … What it delivered instead was the purest distillation of colonial humanitarianism — aid as an instrument of control, dehumanisation, and humiliation, dispensed by armed contractors under the watchful eye of the occupying military.”