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An American soldier killed in No Man's Land of World War 1
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Purchased With Blood and Lies

Another Memorial Day: boasts, insults, "self-defense strikes," cheap clichés from a "Secretary of War" prattling about dead boys "delivered from the battlefield into the arms of a loving Lord and savior." Spare us. And maybe revisit the war to end all wars, which didn't - its "infinity of waste" and trenches with skulls in the sides where "he who had a corpse to stand on was lucky." Pat Barker: “A society that devours its own young deserves (no) unquestioning allegiance.”

"Happy Memorial Day to all," babbled our ever-unseemly Idiot-In-Chief, "including the Dumocrats, who disrespect our Military and all of the tremendous success that it has had over the last year," because obviously the best way to honor the dead is to not acknowledge their sacrifice but to denigrate half the ravaged country they died defending. Also, at Arlington National Cemetery, the infinitely hollow, "Wherever the American soldier (falls), he does it for the destiny of a nation like no other - there’s never been anybody like you." Also, noted Private Bone Spurs, 18,000 Williams, over 20,000 Johns, and other names fell, but "not too many" Donalds. Huh.

Adding to the day's eloquence with a much-needed "monster truck rally vibe" was inexplicably non-veteran, Hegseth bestie, tawdry aging rock star Kid Rock. Because "Tokyo Rose wasn't available," he was chosen by the Pentagon to honor American service members' ultimate sacrifice in a hoodie, fedora, gold chain and sunglasses, looking like "a creature you’d expect to hiss at you from the dank depths of a garbage bin" and intoning, "We are remembering the sacrifice and service of so many who are not with us today...It’s a special day. We’re thinking of them... Keep on Kid Rocking in the free world."

Then there was bombastic, dime-store-cliché-spouting Christo-fascist Pete Hegseth urging we "remember our republic was forged and purchased with blood, American blood," evidently only male according to his pronouns. Ever a fatuous buffoon, he declaimed "the sacred names of bygone eras to the 13 souls of Epic Fury (who) answered the call when it mattered the most (and) gave the last full measure of devotion," even when he failed them in an Iranian strike in Yemen: "They stood against the darkness of the world wearing the breastplate of righteousness (and) raced to the brink so we could walk in freedom and prosperity (and) may almighty God bless our warriors." Jesus weeps.

It remains unclear how many of the up to 22 million dead, both military and civilian, and over 20 million wounded, "the butcher's bill" of World War One, came to be blessed by almighty God, especially in its Western Front's godforsaken trenches teeming with sludge, rats, mud, blood, water and disease. The war's "inconceivable loss" and "purposeless waste of a generation" is perhaps best exemplified by the Battle of Verdun, where the French, set upon by German forces, adopted a "They Shall Not Pass” mantra that in the end saw over 700,000 dead on both sides - ultimately, vast "heaps of bones."

For many, the horrors of "the greatest conflagration the world had seen" live on through the searing literature, both prose and poetry, that emerged from them. Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est epitomizes the bitter, bloody tone that often prevailed amidst its "guttering, choking, drowning" victims - Hegseth's benighted "warriors." "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks/ Knock-kneed, coughing like hags," cursing, gargling, limping bootless through sludge, "blood-shod...deaf even to the hoots/Of gas-shells dropping softly behind," they reject, "The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori."

Siegfried Sassoon lived the privileged life of a British country gentleman, writing poetry and fox hunting, until the start of World War 1, when he served as an officer with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in France. He was awarded a Military Cross, was later wounded in action, and refused to fight any longer to protest "a senseless slaughter." On June 15, 1917, he wrote "A Soldier's Declaration" as "an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those how have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers."

"I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust," he wrote. He was protesting, he made clear, "against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed...against the deception which is being practiced on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise."

His letter was read before the House of Commons and printed in The London Times. He expected to be court-martialed; instead, he was declared "mentally unsound" and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, where Dr. William Rivers was charged with restoring Sassoon’s “sanity” and sending him back to the trenches. The story of their real-life encounter, wherein Rivers came to diagnose war's "shell-shock" and share Sassoon's view, is powerfully told in Pat Barker's historical novel Regeneration, the first in a trilogy about the psychological carnage of war. "It (was) the Great White God de-throned. We assumed we were the measure of all things," Rivers says. "(But) nothing justifies this. Nothing nothing nothing."

Siegfried Sassoon's 1918 Suicide in the Trenches mourns "a simple soldier boy/Who grinned at life in empty joy" until he goes to war: "In winter trenches, cowed and glum/With crumps and lice and lack of rum/He put a bullet through his brain./No one spoke of him again./ You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye/Who cheer when soldier lads march by,/Sneak home and pray you'll never know/The hell where youth and laughter go." Too many of those young lie in a cemetery near Ypres, where one Inscription stands out in a sea of "For King and Country" headstones. It was written on the grave of Arthur Young by his father, a diplomat wiser than any vacuous Hegseth: "Sacrificed to the fallacy that war can end war."

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Fuel Prices Have Spiked More in ‘Energy Independent’ US Than in Nations That Have Moved Away From Oil and Gas
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Fuel Prices Have Spiked More in ‘Energy Independent’ US Than in Nations That Have Moved Away From Oil and Gas

Average gas prices in the United States are quickly climbing toward $5 per gallon this week as US President Donald Trump's war with Iran shows little sign of resolution.

Where average prices were about $2.98 the day before the war's launch, they had shot up to $4.48 as of Tuesday, according to AAA's gas price tracker, as Iran's restriction of ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz has squeezed global oil shipping and the shipping of other fuel sources like liquefied natural gas (LNG), causing global price hikes.

And while Trump has touted America’s supposed “energy independence” as an ace in the hole, achieved by ratcheting up fossil fuel production while canceling solar and wind power projects, data shows that the US has been hit harder by the price shocks than any other major economy in the world, with those that have embraced renewable energy being especially resilient.

Although the US leads the world in oil production by a large margin, data from JP Morgan Commodities research, analyzed Friday by MarketWatch, showed that between February 23 and April 27, the US experienced about a 42% increase in gas prices, the fifth-highest in the world.

"The spike in US gasoline prices over the past two months has outpaced everywhere except Southeast Asia, the region most dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf," explained Yahoo Finance geopolitics reporter Jake Conley.

Rebecca Babin, senior energy trader and managing director at CIBC Private Wealth, explained to MarketWatch last week that while increased fuel production gives the US a "buffer," oil is a global market and "it doesn’t operate in a vacuum." She said, "Global tightness and domestic bottlenecks still show up in gasoline prices."

Meanwhile, some of the countries that have best survived the price hikes include France and Spain, which derive large shares of their power from nuclear energy and renewables, respectively.

Craig Hanson and Jessica Isaacs, a pair of researchers at the World Resources Institute, explained last month that while a mix of factors is at play, countries less reliant on fossil fuels generally "find themselves in a better position to withstand the current crisis."

"Every country has homegrown access to at least two clean energy resources—the sun shines, and the wind blows just about everywhere at some point," they said. "The same cannot be said of oil and gas, where production is concentrated in a small number of countries and exposed to geopolitical disruption."

"Renewable resources like wind, solar, and geothermal have zero fuel costs, and the fuel cost of nuclear power is quite low. Again, the same cannot be said of fossil fuels, which have costs set by volatile global markets," they added. "These two advantages are why some of the world’s clean energy frontrunners are faring better than other countries amidst the Iranian energy crisis."

As Reuters reported in late April, the contrast between Europe's biggest gas guzzlers and green energy adopters is particularly stark.

While Albania has kept energy prices in check and even lowered them compared to last year by using its large system of hydroelectric dams, which supply much of its power, countries like Germany and Italy, which still rely heavily on gas, have seen electricity prices spike.

Hanson and Isaacs noted that while clean energy investments have helped soften the blow of global price shocks, the effects are not the same across the board. While price hikes for the electricity used to power factories, homes, and cars have been blunted by the availability of alternative energy sources, others, like heat—which are more reliant on natural gas—have still been affected.

Still, though, they said the crisis has shown that in addition to environmental sustainability, "clean energy systems’ greatest benefits today might actually be price stability and domestic energy resilience."

While Trump has continued his efforts to choke off any federal investment in renewable energy and double down on oil and gas production, other nations have taken the war’s price hikes as a sign to further accelerate their transition away from fossil fuels.

Germany and several other European Union members, for example, have announced expedited timelines to expand offshore wind and solar investments, explicitly citing the volatility in oil markets caused by the war.

Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the energy price shocks showed that "the only real energy independence from the Middle East is renewables."

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Jeff Bezos
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'Keep Digging': Progressives Welcome Jeff Bezos' Entrance Into Tax-the-Billionaires Debate

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' decision to wade into the tax the rich debate raised eyebrows Thursday, as progressives who have long demanded a wealth tax for billionaires said they'd be happy to include him in the ongoing discussion about how the US tax system can be reformed to benefit working people.

In an interview with CNBC this week, the world's fourth-richest person claimed that doubling his taxes would do nothing to help working people, and attempted to shift the conversation on the tax system to a proposal that the bottom 50% of earners in the US should pay nothing in income taxes.

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens," said Bezos. "I promise you.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani replied, "I know a few teachers in Queens who would beg to differ." The democratic socialist has been relentlessly focused on making the city more affordable for working people and last month announced his plan to tax second homes valued at more than $5 million.

Critics of Bezos were quick to point out this week that the 1% effective tax rate the billionaire paid between 2014-18 was due to his avoidance of the income tax that working Americans have to pay, with the executive "offsetting earned income with other investment losses and various deductions."

Progressive leaders like Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have argued that billionaires including Bezos pay a lower effective tax rate than working people because a vast amount of their wealth comes from unrealized capital gains and other investments instead of income from labor.

Bezos has also not faced a tax on his immense overall wealth of $275.4 billion, which US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other progressives have long called for, saying that taxing a relatively tiny amount of the assets held by billionaires like Bezos, Tesla founder and President Donald Trump megadonor Elon Musk, and other tech and business executives could fund essential services for the rest of society—including many that have contributed to the affordability crisis for working families.

"Let's have that debate" regarding reforms to the US tax system, Sanders said Thursday evening, addressing Bezos on Musk's platform X.

The senator has proposed a 5% annual wealth tax, which he said would leave Bezos still sitting on $269 billion in total wealth, while providing enough revenue to fund guaranteed universal childcare, an expansion of Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing care for senior citizens, a nationwide starting salary of $60,000 per year for public school teachers, and more.

In his interview with CNBC and on social media this week, Bezos repeatedly attempted to shift attention away from his taxes and onto the income taxes paid by the bottom 50% of earners, claiming that the "top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes."

"The United States has the most progressive tax system in the world," he asserted. "We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group."

Paris School of Economics professor Gabriel Zucman, who has also called for a wealth tax and last month co-authored a Guardian op-ed with Mamdani explaining how the regressive tax system of the US has helped ensure the top 0.0001% of the global population holds the equivalent of 16% of the world's wealth, said Bezos was misrepresenting the conclusions of global economists regarding the US system.

"Your claim that the top 1% pays 40% of taxes and the bottom 50% only 3% is misleading: It captures just one tax—the federal income tax—and ignores all the rest: payroll taxes, state income taxes, sales taxes, excise duties, etc., many of which are regressive," said Zucman.

Bezos continued debating the issue on social media on Wednesday, sharing an article that explained how numerous analyses have determined he has paid an effective tax rate hovering around 1%.

"Great to see Bezos keeps bringing up his own massive tax avoidance. Keep digging! This travesty needs a real public debate," said historian Rutger Bregman, sharing a graph from Zucman's research, which shows how the average tax rate of the richest Americans has plummeted in recent decades.

At Newsweek on Wednesday, the magazine's editors wrote that Bezos was correct in his CNBC interview that "one billionaire's larger tax bill will not fund a modern state by itself."

"The deeper issue is whether the tax system asks comparable civic seriousness from wages, capital gains, inheritances, consumption, and payroll," wrote the editors. "A nurse's paycheck is easy to tax because it is visible. A billionaire's wealth can grow through assets that may remain untaxed until sale, or perhaps sheltered safely in some offshore domain."

"The political danger in Bezos’ argument" to allow the bottom 50% of American earners to pay nothing in income tax, the editors added, "is that it lets billionaires sound generous while leaving the structure of wealth largely untouched."

Thom Hartmann of The Hartmann Report said Bezos' push to eliminate income taxes for a huge swath of Americans benefits him and other billionaires in three ways, while ultimately harming those he claims to be trying to help save money:

First, it gets millions of Americans on the “we shouldn’t ever pay any income taxes at all” train that’s been rolling for billionaires ever since [former President Ronald] Reagan first gutted our tax code, leading to an explosion of the morbidly rich.

Second, it gets those same average, tax-paying voters on board with Bezos’ second claim, that America’s debt problem isn’t because we’re taxing too little but because we’re “spending too much.”

If we just got rid of—or privatized/profitized—all those pesky “socialist” programs like Medicaid, food stamps, free public highways, fire and police departments, Social Security, food and drug regulation and inspection, air traffic control and TSA, housing subsidies, Pell grants, free public schools, etc., then even billionaires could safely live tax-free.

Third, it means that Bezos will be able to reduce his own labor costs, because the marketplace in which pay rates exist are always exclusively reacting to “after tax” dollars.

Hartmann highlighted Bezos' resistance to a wealth tax and a fair tax rate with an anecdote about "a very wealthy German businessman" he once saw interviewed by an American reporter on Bloomberg News.

The businessman asked the reporter "how he could possibly live in a country" that taxes "very wealthy and successful people" at about 60%.

"Why don’t you lead a revolt against those high taxes?" he asked, his tone implying the businessman was badly in need of some good old American rebellion-making.

The German businessman paused for a long moment and then leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees, his clasped hands in front of him pointing at the reporter as if in prayer.

He stared at the man for another long moment and then, in the tone of voice an adult uses to correct a spoiled child, said simply, "I don’t want to be a rich man in a poor country."

In contrast, Hartmann wrote, "the billionaires and foreign oligarchs who fund the Republican Party and right-wing media think it’s perfectly fine to rip the financial and political guts out of their own nation and turn its people against each other if it lets them keep a few extra bucks."

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Platner Says His Anti-Private Equity Ad Targeting Red Sox Owners Was 'Taken Down' During Game Broadcast
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Platner Says His Anti-Private Equity Ad Targeting Red Sox Owners Was 'Taken Down' During Game Broadcast

Maine Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner on Saturday said that a campaign ad that aired during a Boston Red Sox game was "taken down" after it took aim at the team's ownership.

The ad in question features Platner discussing the role that private equity firms play in the US economy, including sports teams.

"Private equity is destroying our favorite baseball team, stripping them for parts," Platner says at the start of the ad. "Private equity is buying up our homes, our sports, and our lives. I will reverse the private equity curse."

Platner concludes the ad by saying that he approves this message "because I miss Mookie Betts," the star player whom the Red Sox traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2020 in a deal that was widely decried by local fans as a salary dump.

According to Platner, his campaign began airing the ad Friday on the New England Sports Network (NESN), the cable TV station owned partially by Fenway Sports Group, the conglomerate that owns the Red Sox.

However, he said that "midway through the game the ad was taken down" by NESN, after which the Red Sox proceeded to blow a 4-0 lead, losing to the Minnesota Twins by a final score of 8-6.

Platner, an oyster farmer and upstart candidate who has never before held political office, became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee for the 2026 US Senate race in Maine last month after his top rival, Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills, dropped out of the race.

In recent weeks, Platner has pivoted to challenging incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who has held the seat since 1996 and is now running for her sixth term in office.

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Health Officials Race To Contain Deadly Ebola Outbreak In Congo
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Trump Admin's Insistence That Ebola Is Other Countries' Problem Is 'Opposite' of Successful 2014 Response

The United Nations' emergency relief office on Thursday was mobilizing $60 million to fight the rapidly spreading Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the body's under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs saying relief teams are "fully mobilized" and "applying lessons from previous outbreaks," with a focus on building community trust and communicating with governments.

But with the Trump administration having dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and slashed funding and staffing for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) global efforts, the response is largely missing a key feature that helped with containment during the 2014 and 2019 outbreaks—the involvement of the US government and public health teams—and Secretary of State Marco Rubio signaled on Thursday that was unlikely to change.

In comments to the press, Rubio said the Trump administration's top priority is that Ebola doesn't reach the US—even if that means imposing travel restrictions against the guidance of the World Health Organization (WHO)—and described an approach that one disaster relief leader said was antithetical to the actions the US took in previous Ebola outbreaks.

"Our number-one objective on Ebola, before anything else, and we think it's terrible what's happening there to the people... Our number-one thing has to be, we can't have it affect the United States," said Rubio. "We can't have Ebola cases coming here."

The secretary of state noted that an Air France flight that had been headed for Detroit was diverted to Montreal on Wednesday after a passenger from Congo was found to have boarded the plane "in error."

The Department of Homeland Security announced new restrictions this week saying that all travelers who have been in the DRC, Uganda, and South Sudan in the past 21 days—including US citizens and permanent residents—can only enter the US through Washington Dulles International Airport.

When WHO declared the Ebola outbreak a public emergency of international concern last weekend, the agency noted that "no country should close its borders or place any restrictions on travel and trade."

"Such measures are usually implemented out of fear and have no basis in science," said WHO in its guidance, which also noted "state parties should be prepared to facilitate the evacuation and repatriation of nationals (e.g. health workers) who have been exposed" to Ebola.

Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and a former USAID disaster relief official, said the message sent by Rubio was "insanely counterproductive."

By sending the message that the US is prioritizing that Ebola stays outside US borders above all, said Konyndyk, the Trump administration is telling "any US health workers that if they get infected trying to contain the outbreak, they won't be allowed home."

"In the 2014 outbreak we did the opposite, because we knew that posture would undermine the response and extend the outbreak," he said.

Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, who specializes in infectious diseases and deployed to West Africa in 2014 to help fight the Ebola outbreak that killed more than 11,000 people, said she did so "with the understanding that if something happened my government would take care of me."

"Unsure how any US citizen would feel comfortable deploying, knowing our government would not make sure they are okay if something happened," said Kuppalli.

The Trump administration's refusal to directly help US healthcare workers impacted by the outbreak has already resulted in two doctors being sent to European countries including Germany and the Czech Republic for treatment.

As he emphasized that Ebola cannot reach US shores, Rubio sent out messages of thanks to German and Czech officials for admitting the two medical workers to their hospitals.

With more than 170 deaths and about 750 infections suspected in the "rapidly" spreading Ebola outbreak and cases reported in Uganda as well as the DRC, public health experts are warning that the crisis is likely to "get worse before it gets better" and that its impact has likely already reached farther than initial numbers show due to a lack of surveillance on the ground.

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield told NewsNation on Thursday that "normally when we have these Ebola outbreaks, and I had three of them when I was CDC director, all of which were in the DRC, normally we recognize them when we have five, 10 cases, you know, at most."

"This one really wasn’t picked up until there was over 100 cases," he said.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday that the risk assessment for Ebola is "very high at the national level, high at the regional level and low at the global level."

As Common Dreams reported earlier this week, experts have pointed to President Donald Trump's cuts to foreign assistance and public health initiatives as reasons the outbreak had already spread as far as it did when the emergency was declared this week.

The State Department announced on Monday it was mobilizing $13 million in assistance to help contain the outbreak; the US spent more than $5 billion to fight to 2014 epidemic that hit several countries in West Africa.

"The United States cannot quickly reverse our abdication of leadership on the global health stage," wrote Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician who helped treat Ebola patients in 2014 and survived the disease himself. "But we can bolster our response to this crisis. There should be a steadfast commitment to working closely and coordinating with essential partners like the WHO. We need to mobilize funding and experts, speed up the development of new treatments, and increase resources for protective equipment and expanded testing."

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Lebanese Medics Mourn Colleagues Killed By Israeli Strikes
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Israel Denounced for 'Killing Spree' of Rescue Workers in Lebanon

Israeli attacks killed at least seven rescue workers in southern Lebanon on Thursday and Friday in violation of a US-brokered ceasefire, part of what critics say is a pattern of deliberate targeted murders of first responders that mirror the genocidal massacres committed in Gaza.

On Friday, paramedics from the al-Risala Association rushed to the site of an Israeli strike in Deir Qanun al-Nah, Tyre district, that reportedly killed a young girl and the village barber, identified by L'Orient Today as Ali Allameh. As they arrived on the scene, the paramedics were hit by a so-called "double-tap" strike—a follow-up bombing meant to eliminate survivors and first responders—that killed would-be rescuers Ali Abboud, Hussein Kassir, and Ahmad Hariri.

Hariri was also a well-known photojournalist who earlier this week documented an Israeli massacre of 14 people—including four children and 11 members of one family—in Deir Qanun al-Nah.

L'Orient Today reported that Israeli forces bombed two Islamic Health Committee centers in Hanouiyeh overnight Thursday, killing four rescue workers and wounding two others. Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli airstrike near the Tebnine Hospital reportedly killed two people and injured another while damaging all three floors of the facility.

Lebanon's Ministry of Public Health said more than 3,100 people have been killed by Israeli attacks since March 2, in addition to the more than 4,000 people, including nearly 800 women and over 300 children, slain in Israel’s 2023-25 attacks on its northern neighbor, where the militant resistance group Hezbollah is based. The dead from the current round of Israeli attacks include nearly 300 women, more than 210 children, and 123 medical and healthcare workers.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says 15 media professionals have also been killed in Lebanon since October 2023. One of them, Al-Akhbar correspondent Amal Khalil, was wounded last month by an Israeli strike while reporting on a previous bombing. Khalil was trapped under rubble, and as Red Cross workers attempted to extricate her, Israeli forces dropped a stun grenade on them as a warning to disperse. They were unable to rescue Khalil, who later died.

As in Gaza—where Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 250,000 Palestinians since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023—attacks by Israel have devastated Lebanon's healthcare infrastructure.

Israel's continued slaughter of Lebanese first responders comes as World Health Organization (WHO) member states gathered this week in Geneva, where they overwhelmingly backed a declaration of alarm over “the impact of the ongoing war on the Lebanese health systems, including attacks on health facilities and health workers, and the closure of dozens of primary healthcare centers and hospitals."

The measure, which also called on the WHO to "scale up" support for Lebanon's health system, passed by a vote of 95-2—with Israel and Honduras against—and 18 abstentions.

"Israeli military action has had unacceptable impacts on civilians and medical care," the United Kingdom said in an explanation of its vote in favor of the declaration. "The conflict has led to the displacement of over 1 million people and the closure of several hospitals and health facilities. The WHO has reported over 150 verified attacks against healthcare, with over 100 healthcare workers killed."

As Drop Site News reported Friday:

Israel’s wanton killing of rescue workers and targeting of medical infrastructure in Lebanon has been one of this war’s most brazen features. For the past five weeks, the relentless Israeli aerial and ground assault has continued despite a nominal ceasefire being announced by President Donald Trump on April 16. Last week, Israel and Lebanon agreed to a 45-day extension of the “ceasefire” after holding their third round of direct talks in Washington, of which Hezbollah is not a part. The declaration of a ceasefire has not stopped the Israeli military from continuing its bombardment of Lebanon, mostly in the south and the eastern Bekka Valley.

Rescue teams describe a pattern of repeated Israeli attacks directly targeting their members, often in double—or triple-tap strikes—where after a site is struck, it is struck a second or even third time as emergency crews arrive on the scene.

“We try to be careful and take safety precautions before interventions, like waiting 10 minutes to avoid the double taps,” Abdullah Halal, who leads a Civil Defense rescue team in Nabatiyeh, told Drop Site News.

"But," the outlet noted, "even those precautions have not always been enough. Last week, Halal lost two of his two colleagues in a double-tap strike."

Ali Saad, who is with the Lebanese Red Cross, told UN News on Wednesday that his colleagues share coordinates with Israeli forces and other belligerents, but rescue workers are still being targeted.

“This is why the Red Cross volunteers hug each other and say goodbye before every mission,” he said.

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