Hamas Tunnels Under Hospitals
Plus: Trump's immigration crackdown, housewives and groceries, QAnon Shaman update, and more...
Hospitals encircled: In Gaza City, Israeli forces have surrounded several hospitals, including Al Shifa, which Israeli intelligence says is strategically situated above critical Hamas tunnels used by the terrorist group to conduct its operations. Other hospitals threatened by advancing Israeli troops include Al Quds, Rantisi, and Al Nasr. Two of the hospitals (Rantisi and Al Nasr) were successfully evacuated whereas the others (Al Quds and Al Shifa) have endured power outages from bombardment that have threatened doctors' abilities to provide life-saving care to patients.
According to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Hamas tunnels are not only located under hospitals—using civilians as human shields and making it harder to actually target terrorists—but also siphon away electricity, diverting it away from patients in need and toward Hamas' own evil ends.
Israeli intelligence officials have shared evidence of these tunnels and their locations, most notably situated below Al Shifa, with the U.S. government and with American journalists. Intelligence officials at home "are confident that Hamas has used tunnel networks under hospitals, in particular Al Shifa, for command and control areas as well as for weapons storage," according to The New York Times.
Al Shifa is no longer functioning as a hospital, according to United Nations officials, because conditions are so bad that people no longer receive competent medical care. Power outages killed six people, including two premature babies, over the weekend, according to the Gazan health ministry (which is controlled by Hamas and thus unreliable). Decomposing corpses, which have not been stored properly, are sitting in the hospital courtyard, where they could spread diseases.
The U.S. conducts airstrikes: Yesterday, the American military conducted airstrikes on Iran-backed forces in eastern Syria. Though not the first of its kind in recent weeks, many report that this is an escalation conducted in response to increasingly frequent strikes on U.S. soldiers in the region.
Pentagon officials say that Iranian proxies have conducted 41 attacks on U.S. bases and facilities in Syria and Iraq since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The American strikes conducted over the weekend hit a training camp and a safe house.
Trump's horrible immigration plans: Over the weekend, The New York Times published a long investigative feature detailing Donald Trump's immigration policy plans for if he wins a second presidential term. They're essentially an escalation of his first-term agenda and would involve trampling all over due process and expelling massive numbers of people from the country.
"Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis," reports the Times.
"He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year" and "the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled" while people with "undesirable attitudes"—according to the administration—would not be granted visas in the first place. Temporary protected status recipients would have their protections revoked and be forced to return to the countries they came from.
Trump would allegedly do all of this by redirecting the military budget toward immigration enforcement.
"Any activists who doubt President Trump's resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown," former White House aide Stephen Miller, who engineered much of Trump's first-term policy, told the Times. "The immigration legal activists won't know what's happening."
Scenes from New York:
Markets in everything (but the idea of listening to amateur DJs makes me want to die).
QUICK HITS
- Caitlin Flanagan escaped timeshare hell (and wrote about it).
- Disappointing exactly zero people, Tim Scott has made the decision to suspend his presidential campaign.
- More on that Nord Stream blast.
- QAnon Shaman running for office as a Libertarian, natch.
- Very good comparison:
The average hourly wage in 1947 was about $1 per hour, meaning it took 12.5 hours to buy these groceries. With 12.5 hours of work at the average wage ($29) today, you would have $350 -- more than enough for 2 weeks of groceries pic.twitter.com/88bqroen2v
— Jeremy 'adjusted for inflation' Horpedahl ???? (@jmhorp) November 12, 2023
- Though I appreciate a passion for slashing the size of government, Vivek Ramaswamy is not in fact full of very many good ideas. He always gives high-school-sophomore-in-debate-club vibes:
On Day 1, *instantly* fire 50% of federal bureaucrats.
Here's how: if your SSN ends in an odd number, you're fired.
That downsizes government by half. Absolutely *nothing* will break as a result.
It doesn't violate civil service rules because mass layoffs are exempt.
SHUT IT…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) November 12, 2023
- What exactly is this Washington Post editor calling for?
This is a gem I hadn't seen before. I might expect this from an Oberlin college student, but from the world opinions editor @washingtonpost? pic.twitter.com/m1fXnb7dBg
— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) November 12, 2023
