Crisis at the Border
Plus: Empty place settings for the hostages, Biden doxes soldiers, my own Yeltsin moment, and more...
Humanitarian aid still hasn't arrived: Yesterday on the Reason Livestream, I cast doubt on the assumption that the humanitarian aid from the deal that President Joe Biden brokered between Egypt and Israel would actually reach Gazans quickly. The two countries had been at loggerheads earlier this week over the question of how the aid ought to be screened for weapons, and it wasn't clear whether that disagreement had actually been resolved.
Indeed. Trucks full of water purifiers, food, fuel, and medicine are waiting in Egypt near the Rafah border crossing. But authorities there are not allowing them in, despite Biden's assurances.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is on the ground trying to get the aid into Gaza, and various officials from his organization have said it will likely be delivered in the next day or two. More than 200 trucks are assembled, with more nearby in El-Arish, 30 miles from the border.
"Our children drink salt water," one Palestinian told France 24. (Water desalination plants are not operational right now.) The United Nations says there are two or three days' worth of food left in Gaza's markets. A fifth major Gaza hospital has closed, because it doesn't have any more fuel for its power generators. (Here is some good reporting from The Washington Post on the collapse of Gaza's health care system.)
Money grows on trees? Biden will reportedly request more aid for both Israel (to the tune of $14 billion) and Ukraine (to the tune of $60 billion) to assist in their ongoing war efforts against Hamas and Russia, respectively. That's not the only U.S. involvement in the Israel-Hamas conflict: "A U.S. Navy destroyer on Thursday shot down missiles from Yemen that appeared headed toward Israel," reports Axios. And "U.S. troops were fired on this week by drones in Syria and Iraq."
"The missiles and drones were launched by pro-Iranian Houthi rebels in Yemen amid a flurry of drone attacks against American troops in Iraq and Syria over the past three days," a Pentagon spokesperson told The New York Times.
Meanwhile in the Senate, "There is an emerging effort…to lump Israel aid together with Ukraine aid, border money and aid to Taiwan," reports Politico. "But Ukraine aid is an issue that splits Republicans—and deals on the border or immigration are the white whale of Congress."
Hospital attack follow-up: American intelligence officials now report that somewhere between 100 and 300 people were killed in the Al-Ahli Arab hospital blast earlier this week. The blast did not come from the Israeli military, as was initially reported by media outlets running with Hamas' account of events, but rather from the accidental explosion of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.
The American news media got this horribly wrong, but don't expect to see mea culpas. Instead, headlines were stealth-edited to be less credulous toward Hamas; reporters took to Twitter/X to kvetch about the difficulty of doing their jobs (it's all Elon Musk's fault, apparently); and nobody appears to have been fired for, say, illustrating a hospital-blast headline with an image from a wholly different city (Khan Younis). OK.
Scenes from New York:
Me, upon moving from Brooklyn to Queens earlier this week:
nyc grocery shoppers when exposed to normal american grocery store selection and prices https://t.co/Z2zy9CSI6f pic.twitter.com/EO9OsfV5kS
— Chris (@carlcicahn1) October 18, 2023
(I still wrote Roundup for you good people, despite being surrounded by piles of moving boxes! I live to serve.)
QUICK HITS
- After the hospital attack story fell apart, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D–Mich.) was breaking down in tears and telling a rally, "I continue to watch people think it's OK to bomb a hospital with children." This was after it was clearly established that the hospital was not bombed, making this a massive lie for which Tlaib will face no consequences.
- "Kill the difficult ones," says Hamas' hostage-taking handbook, according to The Atlantic's Graeme Wood.
- The hostage count has been upped to 203. Yael Bar tur shares a picture of a Shabbat table with 203 empty place settings to represent those who have been taken by Hamas, outside the Tel Aviv Museum.
- "Terrorists, rogue nations, drug traffickers and other criminals are using cryptocurrency to endanger our allies and U.S. national security," write Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Roger Marshall (R–Kansas) in a piece titled "Cryptocurrency Feeds Hamas's Terrorism." The myths that cryptocurrency is only desired by criminals, and that encryption is only really desired by bad people with something to hide, refuse to die.
- RFK Jr. loves reparations now?
- Very awkward when you dox your own soldiers.
- I'll give you my menthols when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
- On Sunday, Argentines will vote in their presidential election. After winning the most votes in the primary held in August, the self-declared anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei is the favorite to win. But polls suggest that he "will fall short of the votes needed to avoid a November runoff," reports the Associated Press.
- "When Henry was 18, he had sex with a 16-year-old he met on a dating app who said they were 18 too. The 16-year-old's parents found out, summoned the cops, and Henry was charged with a sex offense. He took a plea: no jail time, and seven years on the sex offense registry," writes Reason's Lenore Skenazy.
- What happens if Israel's Iron Dome gets overstretched?
- Good thread on how bad "Buy American" industrial policy made sugar artificially expensive and corn artificially cheap.
Ok serious question though
Nobody elected these people. Why should anyone care what they think? https://t.co/Sc5iiviyxl
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) October 20, 2023
