The attack on Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on Tuesday left several hundred people dead | The strike on a Gaza hospital that left hundreds dead should serve as a signal both to Palestinian armed groups and Israel to end the hostilities, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday. ● Speaking to journalists at China’s Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, Putin described the powerful explosion that rocked Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, killing at least 500 people according to local authorities, as a “tragedy” and a “terrible incident.” ● “Hundreds of dead and wounded, of course, this is a catastrophe... especially in a humanitarian place. I expect this to be a signal that this conflict should end as soon as possible. In any case, it should lead to the start of some kind of contacts and negotiations,” he said.

■ LIVE: Israel accused of committing a ‘crime of genocide’ after hospital bombing, which killed hundreds (MEE)

■ Dmitry Medvedev (Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council) | The monstrous attack on the hospital in the Gaza Strip is certainly a war crime. And the final responsibility for it lies with those who cynically capitalize on wars in different countries and on different continents. Who recklessly hand out huge sums of money for weapons, loading their military-industrial complex. Who falsely broadcast their global mission to protect democratic values. The United States of America. (T)

Defense officials in Washington have expressed worry over the situation in Palestine and the threat it may pose to US forces across West Asia | Washington has provided its forces occupying Syria's northeastern Deir Ezzor and Hasakah governorates with additional equipment, Turkish media reported on 15 August, in anticipation of attacks by Syrian government forces backed by Iran. “The US provided its forces in Deir Ezzor governorate with radar systems,” Anadolu Agency (AA) said on Sunday, citing local sources. The radars aim to deter "foreign terrorist groups supported by Iran," which are responsible for several attacks this year and last year against US occupation bases and US-occupied oil fields in Syria.

■ U.S. Deploys Large Force - Eyes On Syria
■ US faces defeat in geopolitical war in Gaza (M. K. BHADRAKUMAR)

[The] Israeli government actively and directly participated in creating and propping up Hamas in the service of its own political machinations. | Bibi Netanyahu and his ideological ilk represent more of an existential threat to the continued existence of the Israeli state – and possibly the world if it gets dragged into its geopolitical melodrama -- than any foreign adversary ever could hope to. What many casual news consumers might not know, even ones who consider themselves “informed” – in large part because MSNBC/CIA-funded Washington Post would never tell them – is that Hamas is in no small measure a creation of the Israeli state. Straight from the horse’s mouth, here’s how Netanyahu schemed behind the scenes for years to promote the terrorist group he now publicly decries and postures as the savior from. 💬 [...] ‘Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,’ he told a meeting of his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” On learning that Netanyahu told his comrades this, one might ask obvious questions: Why would Netanyahu be interested in keeping Palestine balkanized politically?

Raz Segal | Israel has been explicit about what it’s carrying out in Gaza. Why isn’t the world listening? | Indeed, Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed. Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly, though there are exceptions.

■ Israel’s campaign to displace Gazans—and potentially expel them altogether into Egypt—is yet another chapter in the Nakba, in which an estimated 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes during the 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. But the assault on Gaza can also be understood in other terms: as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes. I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians. I have written about settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy in Israel, the distortion of the Holocaust to boost the Israeli arms industry, the weaponization of antisemitism accusations to justify Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the racist regime of Israeli apartheid. Now, following Hamas’s attack on Saturday and the mass murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst of the worst is happening.

■ Under international law, the crime of genocide is defined by “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” as noted in the December 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent. Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant declared it in no uncertain terms on October 9th: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.” Leaders in the West reinforced this racist rhetoric by describing Hamas’s mass murder of Israeli civilians—a war crime under international law that rightly provoked horror and shock in Israel and around the world—as “an act of sheer evil,” in the words of US President Joe Biden, or as a move that reflected an “ancient evil,” in the terminology of President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen. This dehumanizing language is clearly calculated to justify the wide scale destruction of Palestinian lives; the assertion of “evil,” in its absolutism, elides distinctions between Hamas militants and Gazan civilians, and occludes the broader context of colonization and occupation.