JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN, sarinj111@gmail.com
Loewenstein is former Associate Director of Middle Eastern Studies and Senior Lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She founded the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project in 2003 and is currently active in Jewish Voice for Peace-Tucson and AZPAL, the Arizona-Palestine Network. She is a freelance journalist and editor. She highlights a series of critical recent reports:
Responsible Statecraft recently reported in: “Washington is not telling truth about the Gaza pier” that the World Food Program “announced that it ‘paused’ distribution of any more humanitarian aid from the pier due to security concerns after a U.S.-backed Israeli operation killed nearly 300 Palestinians the day before. WFP is the UN agency in charge of coordinating deliveries from the pier into Gaza.
“The 492 tons of aid the Pentagon just boasted about will sit in warehouses on the beach until further notice. Meanwhile, the UN says that all humanitarian operations in Gaza are on the brink of collapse.”
From the AP: “The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group warns archenemy Israel against wider war,” which reports: “A nearly 10-minute-long video allegedly filmed by a Hezbollah surveillance drone and released Tuesday shows parts of Haifa — a city far from the Israel-Lebanon border. Nasrallah in his speech Wednesday said Hezbollah has much more footage — an apparent threat it could reach sites deep in Israel.
“Hezbollah’s attacks escalated after Israel expanded its offensive last month into the southern Gaza city of Rafah and spiked further last week after an Israeli strike killed high-ranking Hezbollah commander Taleb Sami Abdullah, the most senior militant killed so far during the Israel-Hamas war. …
“Also Tuesday, the Israeli army said it has ‘approved and validated’ plans for an offensive in Lebanon, although the decision to actually launch such an operation would have to come from the country’s political leadership. …
“Only a cease-fire in Gaza would halt the Lebanon-Israel border fighting or the attacks on Western and Israel-linked targets from Yemen’s Houthi rebels and Iraqi militias allied with Hezbollah.” See summary of recent speech by Nassrallah by Renee Levant. See clip of Hezbollah video and report on Al Jazeera English.
