Well, Iran and their allies’ response may happen sometime this week and apparently they aren’t talking to the US in order to negotiate how and where they will hit Israel (and Shoigu arrived in Tehran rather auspiciously), the Bangladeshi government just fell, F16s have been given to Ukraine, there are fascist riots in the UK, and Japan just had its worst stock fall since 1987 and seems to be taking several other countries/corporations with it. I don’t really know where to look right now.
The COTW (Country of the Week) label is designed to spur discussion and debate about a specific country every week in order to help the community gain greater understanding of the domestic situation of often-understudied nations. If you’ve wanted to talk about the country or share your experiences, but have never found a relevant place to do so, now is your chance! However, don’t worry - this is still a general news megathread where you can post about ongoing events from any country.
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Israel-Palestine Conflict
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel’s destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
More telegram channels here for those interested.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Defense Politics Asia’s youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don’t want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it’s just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists’ side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR’s former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR’s forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster’s telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a ‘propaganda tax’, if you don’t believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Is anyone else worried that Israel is going to do biological warfare on Palestinians? It would just be a repeat of the US playbook and they can go “teehee I guess the natives all just died from natural causes there’s nothing we could have done”. According to Russia the US was studying targeted biological warfare in one or some of their bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
They don’t really have to do biological warfare. If you bomb away all healthcare facilities, sewage treatment, fresh water supply, housing, food distribution etc. disease and death follows all by itself. We are seeing this now with diseases like polio, something that nobody should suffer from in 2024, becoming an epidemic in Gaza.
They have been doing this for years, by the way. Even before the Al-Aqsa Flood when there was “peace” almost all of Gaza’s water supply was polluted and unfit for human consumption. As a result Gazans were suffering alarmingly high rates of cancer that would often go untreated as the occupiers were preventing patients from accessing care.
Reminder that Anne Frank (and so, so many others obviously) died of typhus in a concentration camp
I mean Polio has already made a resurgence in Gaza. I doubt isisrael will intentionaly release any bio weapons so close to home for the same reasons they wont use nukes. They are stupid but not that level of suicidal. The famine and destruction of water and health infrastructure will be more than enough to make diseases run rampant in gaza, no reason to release some new bio weapon.
The Zionist entity has been doing biological warfare since its inception, check out Benny Morris and Benjamin Z. Kedar’s Cast Thy Bread: Israeli Biological Warfare During the 1948 War. The article pieces together documents on Operation Cast Thy Bread, which poisoned wells across Palestine and Egypt and caused a typhoid epidemic. Ben-Gurion even ordered the poisoning of wells in Cairo as a pre-emptive strike.
Egyptian Prime Minister Nuqrashi Pasha told the UN Mediator for Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte, at their meeting on 29 May, shortly after the Egyptian capture of the two Arab Platoon operatives outside Gaza contaminating ‘the water supply of the Egyptian army’ with ‘vials of cholera and dysentery germs’: ‘The Egyptian Government held the Jewish authorities responsible for this since this sort of thing had to be planned inasmuch as it was not possible to buy germs for such purposes in retail shops. Scientists and high officials had to be involved… [in] such well-planned acts.’
If they destroy the water supply and health facilities and induce starvation then they can say “but the natives died of natural causes” like they say for America or Australia and wash their hands of the fact that they caused the famine and set the conditions for disease by pretending somehow it was a force of nature that allowed the “fittest to survive”.
It’s colonial genocide.
That rare deadly fungus disease that the IOF was being infected with. Probably it backfired on them. Wouldn’t put it past them to have already done it. Wouldn’t put it past them to have used dirty bombs too, but they want to occupy the land permanently so there is that selfish incentive to not completely fuck the land.
More recently israel provided the PA only with expired COVID vaccine doses
It worked on Native Americans because they didn’t have immunity.
I guess they could try poisoning water sources like the Japanese did.
“Israel” was founded on biological warfare
To study Palestine you should study Korea. The US used biological warfare in Korea.