President Biden NOT happy with US House Israel weapons Bill….
The White House said Tuesday that President Biden would veto a House GOP bill intended to pressure him to send weapons to Israel, calling it a “misguided reaction to a deliberate distortion of the Administration’s approach to Israel.”
The pushback comes ahead of an expected vote this week on the Israel Security Assistance Support Act. GOP lawmakers introduced the bill after Biden warned he would withhold certain offensive weapons for Israel if its forces invaded Rafah in Gaza.
But the White House cautioned that the legislation “would undermine the President’s ability to execute an effective foreign policy.”
“This bill could raise serious concerns about infringement on the President’s authorities under Article II of the Constitution, including his duties as Commander-in-Chief and Chief Executive and his power to conduct foreign relations,” the White House said in a statement of administration policy.
“The President has been clear: we will always ensure Israel has what it needs to defend itself. Our commitment to Israel is ironclad,” the White House added…..
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The fighting continues in Gaza….
Nearly half a million Palestinians have been displaced in recent days by escalating Israeli military operations in southern and northern Gaza, the United Nations says.
Around 360,000 Palestinians were driven out of Rafah in Gaza’s south over the past week, the United Nations’ agency for Palestinian refugees said. There were roughly 1.3 million people sheltering in Rafah before Israel began pushing into the city, which Israel says is the last Hamas stronghold.
Israeli forces are also battling Hamas militants in northern Gaza, where the army had launched major operations earlier in the war. The army’s evacuation orders issued Saturday have displaced around 100,000 people so far, U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq told reporters Monday.
No food has entered the two main border crossings in southern Gaza for the past week. Some 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza face catastrophic levels of hunger, on the brink of starvation, and a “full-blown famine” is taking place in the north, according to the U.N…..
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Palestinians mark the 76th year of their being kicked out of what is now Israel….
Palestinians on Wednesday will mark the 76th year of their mass expulsion from what is now Israel, an event that is at the core of their national struggle. But in many ways, that experience pales in comparison to the calamity now unfolding in Gaza.
Palestinians refer to it as the Nakba, Arabic for catastrophe. Some 700,000 Palestinians — a majority of the prewar population — fled or were driven from their homes before and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war that followed Israel’s establishment.
After the war, Israel refused to allow them to return because it would have resulted in a Palestinian majority within its borders. Instead, they became a seemingly permanent refugee community that now numbers some 6 million, with most living in slum-like urban refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
In Gaza, the refugees and their descendants make up around three-quarters of the population.
Israel’s rejection of what Palestinians say is their right of return has been a core grievance in the conflict and was one of the thorniest issues in peace talks that last collapsed 15 years ago. The refugee camps have always been the main bastions of Palestinian militancy….
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The Gaza dock status….
In the coming days, the U.S. military in the eastern Mediterranean is expected to jab one end of a hulking metal dock — the length of five U.S. football fields — into a beach in northern Gaza.
And that may be the end of the easy part for the Biden administration’s two-month-long, $320 million effort to open a sea route to get humanitarian aid into Gaza, with dangers and uncertainties ahead for aid delivery teams as fighting surges and the plight of starving Palestinians grows more dire.
For President Joe Biden, the Pentagon’s new floating pier and causeway are a gamble, an attempted workaround to the challenges of getting aid into Gaza from intensifying war and the restrictions its ally Israel has placed at land crossings since Hamas’ deadly attacks on Israel launched the conflict in October.
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, the Pentagon press secretary, said Tuesday that humanitarian groups were ready for the first shipments through the U.S. maritime route. “In the coming days, you can expect to see this effort underway. And we are confident that that we will be able to, working with our NGO partners, ensure that aid can be delivered,” he said….
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A questrion on the Gaza death toll …..
The death toll in Gaza has not been revised down by the United Nations, the organization confirmed, clearing up a report from one of its agencies that has been used to fuel misinformation about the veracity of figures issued by authorities in Gaza.
The 35,000 number provided by the Health Ministry “remains unchanged,” said Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson for the U.N. secretary general, at a news briefing on Monday. A lower figure that appeared last week in a report by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs represented the number of dead who have been identified.
On May 8, the OCHA published a report listing the death toll in Gaza at 24,000, with 7,700 children and 4,900 women killed — approximately half of the latest number of dead women and children provided by the government’s media office. Pro-Israel media ran with the seeming difference, and Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs suggested there was some kind of conspiracy afoot….
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May 14, 2024 – ISW Press
Israeli forces expanded clearing operations on May 14 into areas of Jabalia refugee camp that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had not previously cleared. Two IDF brigades advanced into the center of the Jabalia refugee camp. Israeli forces initially conducted clearing operations in Jabalia city and refugee camp in November 2023, but the IDF had not advanced into center of the camp before this operation.