Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets in recent days to demand that their government secure a deal that would release Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Nearly two-thirds of Israelis support such a deal — if not to put an end to the genocide, to at least put an end to the war for the sake of their own population. Why won’t their government listen?

The distance between U.S. rhetoric around Israel’s supposed democracy and the actual actions of the Israeli state became clearer than ever on July 18, when the Israeli government passed a resolution rejecting any creation of a Palestinian state — a blow to decades-old U.S. policy and growing international consensus around the necessity for Palestinian self-determination. The resolution, which rejects the establishment of a state even as part of a negotiated settlement with Israel, said “the establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel would pose an existential danger to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and destabilize the region.”

Ceasefire talks have stalled within the Knesset, the Israeli legislative body, for almost three months since President Biden proposed a deal, in large part due to the chokehold that far right ministers within the Israeli Parliament have on the coalition government. In order to understand the current moment, it is essential to understand how the Israeli Knesset works. The heart of the Israeli political system lies in the 120-member Knesset, which functions as both the Israeli legislative body and house of representatives. The Knesset also elects the president, a largely symbolic role as most of the executive power exists under the prime minister.

Even Palestinian citizens of Israel who reside within the 1948 borders ultimately lack full citizenship rights compared to Jewish Israelis. In 2018, the Knesset passed the Jewish Nation-State Basic Law, altering the constitutional framework of the state and establishing the ethnic-religious identity of the state as exclusively Jewish. The Nation-State law enshrined Jewish supremacy in the land. It codified what had been state policy of discrimination against Palestinians into a law with constitutional status, and was another nail in the coffin for the illusion of Israeli democracy. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, says the Nation-State law “denies the collective rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel.” Palestinian legal scholar Mazen Masri argued that “this act demonstrates that Israel is closer to apartheid than democracy.”

The Judicial Reform protests highlight the inherent inconsistency of the premise of Israeli democracy, a contradiction that is now more visible to the world than it was before October 7. Palestinians’ demand for freedom — in Gaza, the West Bank and the 1948 borders of the state — is being heard and acknowledged on a scale unlike ever before. As Israel faces increasing international pressure and isolation, Israelis will have to make a choice between continually escalating fascism and a transformation of the fundamental nature of the state that guarantees freedom for Palestinians, and safety, dignity, and a thriving future for everyone between the river and the sea.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, the airstrikes killed at least 19 people and wounded dozens more. It was Israel’s fifth attack on the area since designating it a place of refuge, and Tuesday’s bombings brought the total death toll from these attacks to more than 150.

The Israeli military claimed that it had “struck significant Hamas terrorists who were operating within a command and control centre embedded inside the humanitarian area.” Hamas denied the allegation.

The Israeli army began directing Palestinians to Al-Mawasi in the first months of its bombardment of the Strip. Home to only 6,000 people before the war, it quickly swelled into a mass displacement camp accommodating hundreds of thousands in makeshift tents. Israel’s invasion of Rafah in May triggered a further influx of refugees to the coastal area.

Israel’s previous bombardment of Al-Mawasi, on July 13, was even deadlier: that attack killed 90 Palestinians, with Israel claiming it had targeted Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif. The extent of the destruction on Tuesday suggests that, like in that attack, the Israeli military dropped 2,000-pound bombs on the densely-packed tent camp.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) are calling on the Biden administration to conduct an independent probe into Israel’s killing of American activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, as officials have been relying on Israel’s own flawed investigation into her death.

In a letter addressed to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the two lawmakers call for an “immediate, transparent, credible, and thorough independent U.S. investigation” into Eygi’s killing. They raise alarm that U.S. officials have allowed Israel to kill U.S. citizens in the past with impunity.

“We fear that if this pattern of impunity does not end with Ms. Eygi, it will only continue to escalate. It is imperative that the United States take concrete and decisive action to better protect American citizens,” the lawmakers said. They then asked the administration to indicate whether they will pursue an investigation and to release the knowledge they have of her killing within the next two weeks.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said that Eygi’s killing, as well as Israel’s bombings of its designated “safe zone” in Gaza this week, are the latest evidence that the U.S. must stop sending weapons to Israel.

On June 11, a week after a police training facility in Richmond, California, broke ground, organizers from the Stop Cop City Bay Area Coalition marched to the Overaa Construction headquarters in protest. Citing concerns over rising police militarization and repression in the predominantly Black and Latino area, the protesters — joined by local residents — called on Overaa workers to boycott the $30 million construction deal.

“By furthering the militarizing and surveillance of our city — and coordinating law enforcement resources across the region, including ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] — they’re actually making our cities into Cop Cities,” said Refilwe Gqajela, a community organizer with the Anti Police-Terror Project in California’s Bay Area.

The influx of these facilities parallels the emergence of the defund the police movement, which — following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 — saw thousands of people across the country mobilize to decry police violence against Black and brown communities. Within the last five years, there has been a quiet rollout of over 80 multi-million dollar Cop City-like facilities across the country.

Dozens of Atlanta organizers have been jailed and charged with domestic terrorism and racketeering. According to Franklin, this a coordinated effort to criminalize activism and scare organizers. He said a large part of the facility will be built by the end of the year, even though a poll from 2023 indicated that 59 percent of residents don’t support it.

Over the last year, repressive policing has extended beyond Stop Cop City organizers to encompass Gaza solidarity student encampments as well. Tamera Hutcherson, an organizer with Stop Cop City Dallas, said the city council held secretive meetings and used vague language around “public safety” to get voters to support a proposition that gave $50 million to a police training facility. Soon after, Texas State Troopers raided a peaceful Gaza solidarity student encampment.

An investigation conducted by The Washington Post has raised new doubts about Israel’s claim that US-Turkish activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi was killed “during a violent riot” in Beita, Nablus, in the occupied West Bank.

According to the report, Eygi was shot more than a half-hour after the height of violence between Israeli soldiers and protestors - and 20 minutes after protesters had moved further down the road. The report also confirmed that Eygi was more than 200 yards away from Israeli soldiers when she was shot in the head.

The report provides more detail on how Israeli soldiers respond to protests over Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, which violates international law.

Eygi's family has demanded the US call for an independent investigation into her killing. In a statement, they said they were “deeply offended by the suggestion that her killing by a trained sniper was in any way unintentional”.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri has said that the spread of disease and Israel’s “starvation campaign” in Gaza is “killing more people than bombs and bullets”.

He added that the damage inflicted by famine “is going to be carried by Palestinians for several generations in the future”.

His comments follow his new report to the UN General Assembly last week, in which he detailed how Israel has used starvation in Gaza “with the intent to destroy in whole or in part the Palestinian people”.

It explained that Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s food system, including the poisoning and destruction of agricultural land, and the destruction of ports and fishing vessels served to make the entire population dependent on humanitarian aid.

Israeli diplomats are being instructed to lobby members of the US Congress to pressure South Africa into dropping its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Pretoria is calling on the world court to label Israel's actions in Gaza as a genocide against Palestinians.

"We are asking you to immediately work with lawmakers on the federal and state level, with governors and Jewish organizations to put pressure on South Africa to change its policy towards Israel and to make clear that continuing their current actions like supporting Hamas and pushing anti-Israeli moves in international courts will come with a heavy price," read a cable from Israel's foreign ministry to its embassy and all consulates in the US.

According to Axios, the Israeli diplomats were also told to push for legislation against South Africa at the state and federal levels in the US, with the foreign ministry stating that "even if they won't materialize, presenting them and talking about them will be important" in influencing the African nation's policy.

"I see promise in the connections between the 2020 protests against anti-Blackness and the 2023-2024 protests against Palestinian genocide,” Palestinian American scholar Zahi Zalloua told me this summer. “I’m very invested in the reignited Black-Palestinian solidarity movement; it points to the vibrancy of an anti-racist, anti-colonial Left.”

To grapple with the horror of this ongoing genocide, I conducted this exclusive interview for Truthout with Zalloua, who is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and a professor of Indigeneity, ace, and ethnicity studies at Whitman College, as well as editor of The Comparatist. In this interview, Zalloua argues with clarity and conceptual rigor that, as he says, “Arguing for Palestinian life is not antisemitic.” We also discuss the precarity of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, the importance of pessimism and the theme of solidarity.

As Israel perpetrates a genocide in the Gaza Strip, key players in the labor movement have joined forces to strategize how unions might apply leverage to help bring about an end to the assault. Over the last year, recognizing the widespread opposition to the war among their membership and the potential for dissent inherent in cross-union solidarity, representatives of over 200 U.S. unions — from many dozens of participating locals, to the leaderships of multiple leading national unions — banded together to form The National Labor Network for Ceasefire (NLNC).

“The workers [of Gaza] need us to push back through our unions,” Dimondstein said. “These are bombs often funded by the United States of America. We don’t want our tax dollars being used … to bomb the hell out of innocent men, women and children. And about half of the known deaths in Gaza have been children. This has got to stop. The idea of the NLNC is to bring more organized strength to the issue, to educate on the issue, and to pressure the Biden administration to use their leverage to force a ceasefire and [deliver] massive humanitarian aid.”

The NLNC promises to be a continuing force in the days to come. As Dimondstein reflected, “We’ve probably had some influence on the rest of the labor movement, even if it’s [just] in words. I don’t know if a majority of the unions now have ceasefire positions, but many of them do, including the AFL-CIO. So, I think by getting organized as the National Labor Network, we’re able to put much more of a spotlight on this issue and bring some strength to the issue within the organized labor movement.” By following the early example of the UFCW Local 3000, and at the urging of its early founding members like Dimondstein, the NLNC has at least helped labor advance past a certain political hesitancy.

A 2020 CBS/YouGov survey found that a slight majority of Pennsylvanians actually oppose fracking, with 52 percent of voters opposed and 48 percent in favor. Another 2020 poll, this one by Franklin & Marshall College, reported that 48 percent of registered Pennsylvania voters supported a ban on fracking, while only 39 percent opposed such a ban. And in a 2021 poll by the Ohio River Valley Institute, a sustainability-focused think tank, less than a third of Pennsylvanians said they supported continued fracking in the state.

Popular support for fracking has declined in Pennsylvania as understanding of its adverse effects has grown. A review of more than 2,500 scientific, medical, government and media reports — many of which focused on Pennsylvania — found that fracking is linked to numerous health problems, including cancer, asthma and congenital anomalies. The evidence is staggering, but here are some particularly egregious examples: An August 2023 report by the University of Pittsburgh determined that children living within a mile of a natural gas fracking well were seven times more likely to contract lymphoma, a rare form of childhood cancer. Another study found that children within a mile of a fracking well were also more likely to develop juvenile leukemia.

Commissioned by the Arab American Institute (AAI), the online poll of 2,505 American voters conducted between July 31 and August 1 found that 44% of U.S. voters would back Harris, 40% would support Republican nominee Donald Trump, and 11% would vote third party “if the election for president of the United States were held today.”

But if Harris were to endorse a suspension of U.S. arms shipments and diplomatic support for Israel “until there was a cease-fire and withdrawal of forces from Gaza,” her national support would grow from 44% to 49%.

A majority of Democratic voters say the Gaza crisis is either very or somewhat important in determining how they vote in November, according to the AAI poll.

The new survey, which has a margin of error of 2 percentage points, is consistent with an earlier poll commissioned by the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding Policy Project, which found that Harris would bolster her chances in key battleground states if she backed an arms embargo.

“Reading the health experts, I am starting to think with horror that if it’s not stopped, Israel’s assault could end up exterminating almost the entire population in Gaza over the next couple of years,” Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, wrote on Friday on social media.

Albanese cited a recent report from University of Edinburgh global public health chair Devi Sridhar finding that the true death toll from Israel’s genocide could be estimated at 335,500 as of September.

Sridhar based this rough calculation off of an estimate by public health researchers published in The Lancet in July regarding typical indirect death counts from previous conflicts, citing research hailed as the gold standard in the field. At that time, the researchers estimated that the true death toll could be roughly 186,000, stemming from direct killings like bombings as well as Israel’s destruction of the health, food and sanitation systems in Gaza.

The death toll, then, could be between 15 and 20 percent of the population by the end of this year, Albanese said, in just over a year of Israel’s genocide. And, as Sridhar writes in her Guardian report, the calculation that she borrows from The Lancet editorial is highly conservative — meaning the death toll could be even higher than her 335,500 estimate.