There's something very visceral in being attacked by Zionists, rockets, and bombs (for 70+ years) which makes some folks quite enthusiastic about resisting ethnic cleansing and genocide in their homeland.
The Palestinians have the right to fight just like the Israelis have the right to win. I don't see a non-violent solution to this conflict. Maybe you do.
I think it’s surprising because Israelis are very loud in their support for Netanyahu. Yeah, there are protests but it polling suggests that the overwhelming majority of Israelis support Netanyahu.
Over 60% of Israelis believe there is nobody innocent in Gaza. That’s like the core operating principle of the Netanyahu-Smotrich-Ben Gvir government. The Israeli street is thoroughly behind the Genocide and the polling has been showing this for over a year.
Looks like they are using molecular methods on post-mortem brains - all sorts of bugs can grow post-mortem and molecular methods can give false-positives as well as detect non-viable microbes, etc. But that's also based on a quick skim / haven't read the full paper yet.
Culturing from CSF in general will depend on the concentration of the microbe, whether they are viable, if antibiotics/antivirals were already initiated pre-collection, whether it's plated on the appropriate media (e.g. a rare microbe that only grows on one specific type of agar plate), etc. Culturing viruses is also hard/many hospital micro labs have moved away from that.
I think this study may suggest that we are failing to detect certain brain infections (and many are notoriously hard to diagnose if you don't catch them in the right window of time). But a brain microbiome sounds far-fetched. We even plate from brain tissue directly at times and aren't growing a bunch of organisms. I'd approach that claim with a healthy dose of skepticism.
plus we have the fact that the brain at night shifts the fluid to the periphery of the blood vessels to clear out the lactate bound NH4 which would impact any microbiome if it exists...
There are indeed restrictions on western foreign media.
"Like all foreign news organizations operating in Israel, CNN’s Jerusalem bureau is subject to the rules of the Israel Defense Forces’s censor, which dictates subjects that are off-limits for news organizations to cover, and censors articles it deems unfit or unsafe to print. ... the military censor recently restricted eight subjects, including security cabinet meetings, information about hostages, and reporting on weapons captured by fighters in Gaza. In order to obtain a press pass in Israel, foreign reporters must sign a document agreeing to abide by the dictates of the censor."
This seems reasonable to me? If a western press were outside missile factories saying "this is the only place our super missiles are built!" I would expect the department of defence to block that information from being published...
It’s very much legal in wartime, for exactly those sorts of purposes. Though I’m not sure we’ve tested the legality of it in this modern world where nobody actually formally declares war anymore—I don’t think it’s been attempted.
(Please don’t flame thinking I’m hardcore in support of a particular side in this war due to this post—you’ve very likely gotten the wrong impression. I’m commenting only on the narrow point that the US in fact can censor, including with prior restraint in certain circumstances, during war.)
The United States's last declaration of war was 83 years ago. Since then it's been all "police actions" or some such. What meaning does "during war" carry in the world of today?
My understanding is that they put a lot of pressure to block things and sometimes offer quid pro quo and sometimes even implant operatives in certain media positions, but legally they can't just come in and shut it down.
Before the Sharon/Netanyahu/extremist takeover, Israel was serious about peace. But in the last two decades, Netanyahu has seen Hamas as an asset to undermine the PA, block moderates, and eliminate the 2 state option [1,2].
Israel has killed Hamas leaders who wanted to work towards peace [3]:
>> After Israel assassinated Jabari, Reuven Pedatzur, a military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported:
>> Our decision makers, including the defense minister and perhaps also Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, knew about Jabari’s role in advancing a permanent cease-fire agreement. … Thus the decision to kill Jabari shows that our decision makers decided a cease-fire would be undesirable for Israel at this time, and that attacking Hamas would be preferable.
An Israeli government that was actually interested in peace could halt and reverse the settlements in the West Bank, end the apartheid (e.g. military vs civilian courts for Palestinians, different class of citizenships, travel restrictions, prevention from visting Jerusalem's holy sites, etc.), the blockade of Gaza, etc. Treating Palestinians as humans (and not propping up Hamas) would likely go a long way towards undermining Hamas. Most Palestinians already didn't like Hamas - 70% wanted the PA in July 2023 according to the Washington Institute.
From the article you quote, 51% of Gaza supported a 2 state solution, 75% face food insecurity, only 23% had a great deal or quite a lot of trust in Hamas, 52% had no trust at all in Hamas, most said their freedom of speech is limited or not free at all. Per the Washington Institute, 70% wanted PA to take over Gaza from Hamas in July 2023.
In regards to the 60% you quote, the question was framed as
"How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7th?"
Given the majority of Gaza has trouble accessing the news/electricity, 95% don't trust Israel's news (in the same survey), what they know about Oct 7 is not what we know about Oct 7. Whether you and I believe it or not, there are plenty who think all the targets on Oct 7 were military, any atrocities are fake news, etc. And for a people suffering under blockade for 16 years, including a year of weekly peaceful protests in 2018-2019 that were repeatedly met with violence by the IDF (~200 killed, thousands maimed/disabled), living in slums with little to no electricity [1], seeing their lives deteriorate year after year as the world has forgotten them - it would not be surprising at all for them to support a "military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance."
Furthermore, we're talking about a survey taken in the midst of war where 46% have lost their homes (same survey you shared), 80% of Gaza is displaced, and all the thousands of civilian and children deaths and tens of thousands of maiming and mutilations etc. Hospitals destroyed. Bakeries and water towers bombed. Journalists and health care workers murdered. ... Unclear how many, but probably all of the population has PTSD; 90% of the children had PTSD back in 2021 [2]. So in that context, in the midst of such immense suffering, the answer to this question should not be surprising at all. It is completely rational.
However, it would not be accurate for us to conflate their answer with supporting atrocities committed by Hamas on Oct 7 (which is not something it seems the survey asked about).
>> Many people on the ground support the conflict
Re: Gaza, the survey you link says 90% "support a ceasefire that includes a mutual cessation of hostilities." So I don't think it's accurate to say the civilians of Gaza support this conflict.
