Steve McGookinCalls Grow For Cease-Fire As Gaza Crisis Escalates
The latest outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas entered a seventh day on Sunday and has escalated to its worst level since 2014.
With another 42 Palestinians killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, pressure was growing on the United Nations and the US to press for a cessation in the fighting. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the conflict was heading for an “uncontainable security and humanitarian crisis.”
“The fighting must stop. It must stop immediately,” he said.
Almost 200 Palestinians, including more than 50 children, have been killed in the past week.
The Israeli military said there had been more than 3,000 rockets fired into Israel from Gaza over the past week, the “highest daily rate of rocket fire that Israel has faced in the history of the country.”
Israel officials on Sunday said a cease-fire “is not on the table right now” and that the Gaza operation would continue. Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden has come under pressure from his own party over his support for Israel’s “right of self-defence.”
Biden expressed concern about the situation when he spoke by phone with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas after Israel destroyed a building housing media organizations on Saturday.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, who is trying to form a coalition government after Netanyahu’s mandate expired, suggested that political considerations were behind Israel’s current military operation. “The fire always breaks out precisely when it’s most convenient,” he said. Netanyahu told CBS ‘Face The Nation’ on Sunday that such an idea was “preposterous.”
There were demonstrations in support of Palestine in cities around the world this weekend, with an estimated 100,000 people protesting in London.
See Also:
Could Israel Bid Farewell To Bibi?
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More Concerns Over Covid ‘Indian Variant’
As England, Scotland and Wales prepare for a further relaxation of Covid restrictions on Monday – Northern Ireland must wait another week – Boris Johnson’s government is under growing pressure over the spread of the so-called Indian Variant.
While there is “increasing confidence” that existing vaccinations will protect against the new strain, related cases have nearly tripled in the past week, and the Prime Minister warned there could potentially be “serious disruption” to plans for lockdown easing on June 21.
“I have to level with you that this new variant could pose a serious disruption to our progress and could make it more difficult to move to step four in June,” he said, adding: “I urge everyone to exercise the greatest caution because the choices we each make in the coming days will have a material effect on the road ahead.”
The government also defended its failure to shut down flights out of India as the virus worsened there.
In the US, the Centers for Disease Control somewhat surprisingly issued new guidance on mask-wearing and social distancing which left many people confused about how to tell whether or not non-mask wearers were actually vaccinated. Less than 40% of Americans are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC.
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Life Is Harder Right Now, We Should Be Kinder To Ourselves
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Unionism’s New Leaders Face Protocol Challenge
The new leader of the DUP, Edwin Poots, said he “would not rest” until Brexit’s Northern Ireland Protocol was removed and would “strike pacts” with other parties to protect the union. But the likely next leader of the UUP, Doug Beattie, says “not so fast…”
Interesting choice of “target date”…
Elsewhere, a coroner this week ruled that the ten people killed over three days in Ballymurphy in 1971 were “entirely innocent of any wrongdoing”. The families of the deceased were angered by Boris Johnson’s attempt at an apology.
Malachi O’Doherty writes in The Guardian that the verdict “shows the need to examine the unresolved killings of the Troubles.”
See Also:
Where Now For The Legacy Of The Troubles After The Ballymurphy Verdicts?
Rethinking: Mandatory Coalition
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Ransomware attack disrupts Ireland’s HSE
Ireland’s Health Service shut down its IT systems this week after “possibly the most significant cybercrime attack on the Irish state,” apparently targeting healthcare records. Emergency services were not affected, but systems for arranging Covid vaccinations were among those disrupted.
Officials on Friday said it would take “a number of days” before the systems might be able to safely restart. Taoiseach Micheál Martin rejected the idea of paying any ransom to the attackers.
The Irish attack comes as gasoline supplies on the US East Coast are slowly returning to normal after a ransomware attack shut down a crucial oil pipeline, prompting a wave of panic-buying. The operators reportedly paid the hackers $5m. As The Guardian reports, these type of attacks are part of a growing trend in the US.
The New York Times reported that 26 government agencies have been hit by ransomware attacks since the beginning of this year, while the number of private companies targeted is, understandably, difficult to calculate.
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As if we don’t have enough conspiracies…
After decades of official denial, the Pentagon now grudgingly admits the existence of unidentified aerial phenomena – effectively what we have popularly characterized as UFOs. Last year authorities released an official Navy video, taken from a fighter jet of a 2015 encounter off the Florida coast.
Now, the US Senate intelligence committee has ordered the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to deliver a report on the mysterious sightings next month.
On Sunday, CBS 60 Minutes previewed the report, highlighting claims that UFOs have been “regularly spotted in US restricted airspace,” and interviewed several service personnel with direct experience of monitoring such incursions.
The committee’s acting chairman, Sen Marco Rubio, called for a more serious approach to the issue, saying “Anything that enters an airspace that’s not supposed to be there is a threat.”
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