The Ongoing Horrors in Gaza

Another State Department official quit in frustration over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy:

Casey resigned from the state department in July after four years at the job, discreetly leaving the post unlike other recent high-profile government departures. Now seated at his kitchen table in the quiet suburbs of northern Michigan, Casey reflected on how, as one of only two people in the entire US government explicitly focused on Gaza, he became an unwilling chronicler of a humanitarian catastrophe.

“I got so tired of writing about dead kids,” he said. “Just constantly having to prove to Washington that these children actually died and then watching nothing happen.”

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Netanyahu’s Seizure of Syrian Land

The recent seizure of Syrian land on the Golan Heights by Israel is an ominous example of expansionism at its worst, in complete violation of property rights, if not a total human rights violation as well. The claim of Benjamin Netanyahu that the Golan will “forever be an inseparable part” of Israel shows utter disregard for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria. Netanyahu flippantly defied earlier treaties with Damascus using the dissolution of Syria’s internationally-recognized government after Assad’s departure as an excuse, claiming such treaties are no longer binding.

Libertarians understand that political borders are a human construct and that the individual has a natural right to self and property. The notion of national borders is an institutional contrivance, and the proper role of the state is the protection of individual rights, rather than the extension of territorial claims via aggression.

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Israel Committing ‘Extermination and Acts of Genocide’ by Depriving Gaza of Water: HRW

A Human Rights Watch report published Thursday accuses Israel of “extermination and acts of genocide” in Gaza “by intentionally depriving Palestinian civilians there of adequate access to water, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths.”

Mirroring language used in Article II of the Genocide Convention to define the crime of genocide, HRW said that Israeli officials “have deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the population in Gaza” by deliberately denying Palestinians “access to safe water for drinking and sanitation needed for basic human survival.”

“Israeli authorities and forces cut off and later restricted piped water to Gaza; rendered most of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure useless by cutting electricity and restricting fuel; deliberately destroyed and damaged water and sanitation infrastructure and water repair materials; and blocked the entry of critical water supplies,” the report states.

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