Megan K. Stack

“You do whatever you want”, President Trump said he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

Mr. Netanyahu, it seems, took Mr. Trump at his word.

Israel has clamped Gaza back under near-total siege, barring desperately needed humanitarian aid and other goods from entering the hungry and bomb-decimated enclave. Food, medicine, tents, fuel — for the past week and a half, supplies have not been permitted into Gaza, where some two million Palestinians are trying to survive in the wreckage. And Mr. Netanyahu keeps tightening the screws: On Sunday, Israel cut off the last trickle of electricity into Gaza, forcing a key desalination plant that provides drinking water to slow operations.…  Seguir leyendo »

The elephant in the room will be impossible to ignore when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel addresses Congress on Wednesday, turning attention to the bloody spectacle that both major parties have been taking pains not to mention: the ongoing death and destruction in Gaza.

That U.S. politicians from both major parties invited Mr. Netanyahu to Washington at all — let alone to lecture our lawmakers in the people’s house — is a disgrace. Mr. Netanyahu’s war on Gaza has already killed at least 39,000 Palestinians (many of them women and children), according to the health ministry in Gaza, displaced some 1.9 million people and spread what experts describe as a famine across the besieged enclave.…  Seguir leyendo »

It was the pictures of Palestinians swimming and sunning at a Gaza beach that rubbed Yehuda Shlezinger, an Israeli journalist, the wrong way. Stylish in round red glasses and a faint scruff of beard, Mr. Shlezinger unloaded his revulsion at the “disturbing” pictures while appearing on Israel’s Channel 12.

“These people there deserve death, a hard death, an agonizing death, and instead we see them enjoying on the beach and having fun”, complained Mr. Shlezinger, the religious affairs correspondent for the widely circulated right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We should have seen a lot more revenge there”, Mr. Shlezinger unrepentantly added. “A lot more rivers of Gazans’ blood”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Standing over a tiny bundle wrapped in a sheet on a hospital bed, a young father drapes his hand across his face in despair. Mousa Salem, a Gaza photographer who videotaped this sad tableau and sent it to me, said the sheet swaddled 2-month-old Mohamed al-Zayegh, who died on Friday in Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City. “Nutrition? What nutrition?” a staff member in scrubs says in the video. “The mother gave birth to him during the war”.

“The health of the mother affects the health of the baby”, he added. “This is very well known in the science of medicine and health.…  Seguir leyendo »

The men came alone that morning, leaving families and sheep behind, and climbed the hill to see what was left of their village. On the sun-bleached crest, they found a scene of wreckage: The windows of the makeshift clinic had been smashed, household furniture lay shattered; sections of the schoolhouse had been burned to ash. There were drifts of clothing and stray shoes spread on the ground throughout the abandoned village, small things dropped in haste when the families fled.

The Palestinians who live (or lived) in this hilltop hamlet had decamped in terror a few weeks earlier. A gang of Israeli settlers — their neighbors — had been tormenting them for weeks, they explained, beating them up and threatening murder if they didn’t leave.…  Seguir leyendo »

Getting bombed from the sky is a particular horror: The sense that death hangs quite literally over your head, invisible until it’s too late, and maybe it will hit you. Maybe this moment. Or this. Or this. Every heartbeat hammering through your skull.

I’ve watched U.S. warplanes attack Afghanistan; barely escaped a direct strike from a Russian MiG in Georgia, and lived for weeks under relentless Israeli bombardment in Lebanon.

The images from Gaza bring back memories I usually keep buried. The thunder of the bombs, drifts of broken glass and twisted rebar where houses and shops once stood, dust and the smell of blood mixing in the throat.…  Seguir leyendo »