Month: July 2014

Our “Best Hope” To Rein In The NSA?

Jason Koebler offers a primer on the new bill that has tech companies and some civil libertarians excited:

On Tuesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy introduced the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would completely end mass surveillance under Section 215 of the Patriot Act – a loophole in the law that effectively let NSA agents scoop up metadata and other information about American citizens. If this sounds at all familiar, it’s because earlier this summer, the House of Representatives also passed the USA Freedom Act – after a House committee completely gutted any teeth it had and also added in new loopholes that would let bulk surveillance continue unscathed. Leahy’s bill looks much closer to the one that many civil liberty groups initially endorsed before the House had at it, and it’s expected to go straight to the Senate floor, where it will have less chance of being ruined by back room White House dealings or in closed committee hearings.

Andrea Peterson details the bill’s contents:

The legislation would curb bulk collection of domestic phone records, provide new transparency measures and add an adversarial component to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The Senate bill would replace bulk collection with the ability to collect call record details within two hops on a daily basis when the government can demonstrate a “reasonable, articulable suspicion” that search terms are associated with a foreign terrorist organization under section 215 of the Patriot Act. This would limit the government from being able to broadly collect information by geographic region, such as by Zip code or area code, which critics feared might be the case in the version of the Freedom Act that passed the House earlier this summer. …

Leahy’s new version of the Freedom Act would require the government to report how many individuals’ information has been collected under certain surveillance authorities and how many of those are likely Americans – as well as the number of queries run on Americans in some databases, with exceptions for figures not possible to generate with current technology. It also expands how private companies can publicly report on government requests for information.

Russell Brandom is among the enthused:

Even before the bill was public, it was hailed by the New York Times as “a breakthrough in the struggle against the growth of government surveillance power,” and being named by reformers as congress’s best hope for a meaningful response to NSA overreach. Looking at the bill itself, you can see why. The table of contents is a laundry list of the major NSA authorizations detailed in the Snowden leaks. Leahy’s bill puts major restrictions on the FISA court, pen registers, and business records requests (the method used to collect bulk metadata from phone companies, among other things). It would also add new transparency measures to National Security Letter requests, allowing companies to report how many customers have been affected in more detail than ever before.

But political scientist H. L. Pohlman sees reason for concern:

[T]here is one crucial provision that the civil libertarians that support Leahy’s bill have overlooked. Namely, that the bill includes the same language contained in the House bill that created a “backdoor” authority to collect phone records that evade all the limitations just listed. I noted this provision in a post on this site last May, and called it my “most serious concern” with the House version. … The bottom line is that Leahy’s bill is a continuation of the intelligence community’s efforts to at best confuse – and at worst, mislead – the American people (and perhaps their legislative representatives) through the clever use of legalese.

Similarly, Jennifer Granick notes:

As surveillance reform followers know, one of the most serious problems with content surveillance taking place under section 702 is that the NSA, CIA and FBI use selection terms connected to US persons to search through repositories of data collected from targeting foreigners, a practice called “back door searches,” since ordinarily investigators would need a particularized warrant based on probable cause to get access to that information.

USA Freedom would not end back-door searches. It would require NSA and CIA to count the number of times they do it and report to Congress. But it exempts the FBI from the reporting requirement. Wha?! As the public recently learned, FBI is searching these databases for evidence it uses in criminal prosecutions, the FBI doesn’t currently count how often it searches for Americans, and the number is, according to Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, substantial.

Meanwhile, Dustin Volz evaluates the the bill’s political future:

[I]t remains unclear if Leahy has the votes in a historically gridlocked Senate that will have most of its attention diverted to the midterm elections when lawmakers come back to Washington. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein has been an influential backer of the NSA’s surveillance programs, and early indications are that she and other defense hawks are less than receptive to Leahy’s new proposal. The California Democrat, according to several sources, wants to push a data-retention mandate that would require phone companies to keep customer data for a certain amount of time that would exceed current requirements set at 18 months. Multiple privacy advocates said such a mandate would amount to a “poison pill” and would likely prompt a cascade of groups to drop their support for the Freedom Act.

However, Leahy has several factors working in his favor. For one, the administration is on board with his version of the Freedom Act, an alliance that could undercut protests from Feinstein’s cohort. And Sen. Ted Cruz is among the 13 original cosponsors, marking a partnership that could shore up GOP support. The Texas Republican and potential 2016 presidential hopeful has been remarkably quiet on NSA spying before endorsing Leahy’s measure.

And Julian Hattem observes, “One way or another, Congress has to pass some kind of NSA bill”:

The legal authority for the agency’s phone records program expires next June. Without reauthorization, that leaves the possibility that the program could be cut off entirely, an outcome that intelligence officials have said would leave the nation vulnerable to attacks. The looming deadline could force lawmakers to put their heads together over the August recess and find a way to advance the bill before the end of the year.

The Fruits Of Liberal Intervention, Ctd

Frederic Wehrey cautions against buying into the conventional wisdom about what’s going down in Libya:

Outside observers are often tempted toward a one-dimensional reading of Libya’s turmoil. It is easy to trace Libya’s breakdown as a political struggle between Islamists and liberals: The Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Justice and Construction Party and more rejectionist, jihadi factions like Ansar al-Sharia versus the “liberals” under the National Forces Alliance (NFA). Another level of conflict seems to be regional: A contest between the towns of Zintan and Misrata for economic power and political leverage in Tripoli, or amongst federalists and their opponents in the long-marginalized east. Yet an additional layer is between remnants of the old order – ex-security men, long-serving and retired officers, former Gaddafi-era technocrats – and a newer, younger cadre of self-proclaimed “revolutionaries,” often Islamists, who were either exiled and/or imprisoned during the dictator’s rule.

Elements of all these dimensions are at play, but none of them alone has sufficient explanatory power. At its core, Libya’s violence is an intensely local affair, stemming from deeply entrenched patronage networks battling for economic resources and political power in a state afflicted by a gaping institutional vacuum and the absence of a central arbiter with a preponderance of force. There is not one faction strong enough to coerce or compel the others.

Meanwhile, Friedersdorf lays into the hawks who supported our role in overthrowing Qaddafi:

When Ivo H. Daalder and James G. Stavridis declare that the cost of intervening in Libya was “$1.1 billion for the U.S. and several billion dollars overall,” I can’t help but think that GiveWell estimates that one of the most efficient mosquito-net charities saves a life for every $3,400 that it spends. That’s 882,352 lives saved for the cost of the Libya campaign. Given present conditions in Libya, how confident are we that the NATO-aided ouster of Qaddafi saved even half that many lives? Development aid is far from perfect, but my instinct is that it saves lives more reliably than wars of choice and virtually never results in violent blowback.

Most of all, I am struck by the willingness of prominent interventionists to have publicly declared their instincts in Libya vindicated when the country’s future remained very much in doubt, as if they couldn’t conceive of an intervention that would result in more lives lost than the alternative even as the possibility of that outcome was extremely plausible. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Washington, D.C. foreign-policy establishment seemed to perform no better at foreseeing how events would unfold than non-expert commentators who simply applied Murphy’s Law. At the very most charitable, the common interventionist claim that Libya vindicated them in their dispute with non-interventionists was wildly premature. Perhaps the lesson to take from the NATO campaign is that even the most thoughtful interventionists have no idea how geopolitical events will unfold.

Can Israel “Win” This War? Ctd

Brent Sasley says yes to that question:

When the dust settles, Israel will also have restored some of its deterrence against its enemies. Against Hamas specifically, it demonstrated it’s gotten over what we might call Cast Lead Syndrome: recoiling from the type of international opprobrium that war generated against Israel because of the scale of Palestinian deaths. In that conflict, between approximately 1,100 and 1,400 Gazans were killed, depending on what source one looks to for casualty figures. Yet already in Operation Protective Edge, more than 1,000 Palestinians may have been killed. Though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has become a cautious administrator since his first term in office, the temptation to keep going to destroy Hamas’ tunnel infrastructure has overcome his reluctance to use large-scale force. And the Israeli public has rallied behind him.

In a debate among Brookings experts, Michael Doran contends that whether or not Israel is “winning”, Hamas is definitely losing:

Six months from now, many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, will ask themselves what all the pain and destruction that Hamas brought down on them was worth. Their disgruntlement will not weaken Hamas’s grip on power, because it is a dictatorship supported by foreign money. But the organization, as it stands before its people and lectures them on the need for more sacrifice, will surely clock the sullen faces that stare blankly back. As for the “support” that Hamas gets from public opinion in other parts of the Arab world that will certainly dissipate. Of course, it’s never been worth much anyway, throughout modern Arab history, because it never translates into lasting change in the behavior of states, the true power brokers in the region. Meanwhile, Hamas will have lost considerably on the battlefield.

But Shadi Hamid is not so sure:

Even if Hamas “loses” in the ways that you describe, it seems to me that they’re likely to at least be better off than they were before the conflict started.

It’s hard to envision any ceasefire arrangement that won’t include easing the blockade in some way (Hamas has little incentive to agree to a ceasefire that doesn’t alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza). The West Bank surge in pro-Hamas sentiment isn’t just about public opinion; it’s about closing the gap between Hamas and Fatah. If the developments in the West Bank underscore anything, it’s the real, and growing, desire for Palestinian unity. Last week on MSNBC, Mustafa Barghouti said that a new uprising had started. He may be getting ahead of himself, but if a ceasefire doesn’t hold in the coming days, there will be more instability in the West Bank (and corresponding anti-Palestinian sentiment) and that can only strengthen Hamas hand during post-ceasefire negotiations over contours of unity government. Also, the expectation, which I suppose is implicit in these Israeli deterrence operations, is that at some point Palestinians will blame Hamas more than they blame Israel. But, there’s little to suggest this is how most Palestinians process the results of Israeli military operations.

Aaron David Miller considers Hamas the winner, so far:

It’s impossible to predict a winner or loser at this stage. Israel is determined to prevent a Hamas victory or even a stalemated outcome that might appear to represent one. The situation is, as they say, remarkably fluid. But three weeks in, if I had to do a tally now, I’d say Hamas has taken round one in what is likely to be an ongoing struggle. And here’s why:

Survival counts as a win: As in previous confrontations, the organizational imperative dominates Hamas’s tactics and strategy. Against a militarily and technologically superior Israel, Hamas can afford to waste a couple of thousand rockets and lose a few dozen tunnels, but the main goal is keeping both its military and political leadership intact, and not giving into Israel’s superior firepower. Indeed, in a way Hamas wins just by not losing.

And even if Hamas is utterly destroyed in this war, Scott McConnell worries about what would come next:

Suppose Israel succeeds in destroying Hamas. How many terror cells will it have created thoughout the Middle East? Will those cells content themselves in mounting operations against Israel? Or would they also seek vengeance against the superpower which enables, and could even be seen as encouraging, Israel’s annihilation of them. In 2002, a not-very-sophisticated home-grown sniper traumatized the Washington metropolitan area for weeks. If the predictions of one of America’s leading anti-terror officials are correct, Israel is setting the table for much more complex terror operations, in which American civilians will become targets. Sad as it is to contemplate, if that happens, people all over the Mideast will believe we are only getting what we deserve.

Previous Dish on what an Israeli “victory” would entail in the Gaza war here.

The Worst Ebola Outbreak In History, Ctd

Keating looks at why the current epidemic has been so severe:

As political scientist Kim Yi Dionne notes, a number of factors have combined to make this the most deadly Ebola outbreak in history, and most of them are political rather than biological.

For one thing, none of these countries has experienced an outbreak of the disease before, so knowledge of it is low. For another, the fact that it’s spread to multiple countries makes a coordinated response more difficult. (Liberia has now shut almost all of its borders.) As Dionne notes, all three countries have poor health infrastructure, due in part to years of civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Liberia has just .014 doctors per 1,000 people, and a common joke is that JFK Medical Center, Monrovia’s main hospital, has long had the unflattering nickname “Just For Killing.”

Which is why a major Ebola outbreak in America is unlikely. Olga Khazan tries to determine how this outbreak started:

Researchers still don’t know the exact cause of this particular outbreak, but it might have to do with the local practice of eating bats for food, according to Jonathan Epstein, an epidemiologist at EcoHealth Alliance. “It’s unclear whether it occurred due to butchering a bat, exposure to bat bodily fluids, or eating some food or fruit that was contaminated by saliva, urine, or feces from the bat, which may contain Ebola virus,” he said. Pig farms in Africa also often attract bats, which also may have been a cause.

Once the infected person begins to show symptoms—flu-like aches, nausea, and vomiting—local customs continue to play a big role. There aren’t enough doctors or supplies available to treat all the Ebola patients in the area, but even if there were, many locals are suspicious of Western medicine.

John Herrman reflects on the West’s detachment from these kinds of diseases:

I’ll read almost anything about infectious diseases, and in retrospect, most of this reading was cold and sociopathic. Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone was an escapist thriller; The Great Influenza was an apocalyptic period piece; The Coming Plague was an engrossing feat of science fiction world-building, about a planet that contrives, almost at random, new and hideous microscopic monsters to destroy sophisticated life, and that will not give up until it has succeeded. Nature finds a way, a narrator intones, except that this narrator is a doctor who has spent her whole life watching people die in pain and confusion, and I’m just sort of dozing off, because I’ve been reading too long and it’s time for bed.

This is of course an insane way to read about deadly diseases. It is also standard in areas of the world where these rare viruses feel utterly remote. It provides comfort that your incidental version of civilization at least shields you from the most vividly horrific diseases.

An Ebola vaccine is still at least a few years away:

There are quite a few preventative vaccines in development, with three to five that have been shown to completely protect nonhuman primates against Ebola. Some of these vaccines require three injections or more and some require just a single injection. Most of them are being funded by the U.S. government, so they’re in various stages of development, but none of them are ready to be licensed.

The hang-up point with these vaccines is the phase I trials in humans. That’s where scientists get frustrated because we know these vaccines protect animals and we don’t quite understand the regulatory process of why things can’t move faster. I can’t give you an answer as to why it’s taking so long.

The Economist maps current and former Ebola hot-spots. All the Dish’s coverage of the latest epidemic is here.

We Won’t Make Israel Make Peace

After John Kerry’s efforts to broker a ceasefire in the Gaza war crashed and burned, Zack Beauchamp asks why the $3 billion in aid we give Israel every year doesn’t seem to buy us any leverage:

Talk to Middle East analysts, and you get a clear sense that the US really could box Israel in a corner if it wanted to. “In theory, of course the US has enormous leverage over Israel,” says Nathan Thrall, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. But in “the very unlikely event” that “the US were to threaten the very alliance with Israel,” he says, it’d put immense pressure on an Israeli Prime Minister to bend.

Clearly, the United States doesn’t want to do that. But it has successfully pressured Israel before. For instance, the Bush administration forced Israel to back off an arms deal with China in 2005 by threatening to cut off military cooperation on certain projects. The US refused to give Israeli aircraft friend-or-foe codes during the Gulf War, effectively keeping Israel out. It refused to give American support for an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program, which amounted to vetoing it.

So it’s not that the US can’t ever push Israel. It’s that American policymakers aren’t willing to threaten the foundations of the US-Israeli relationship — aid, diplomatic support, and the like — over a ceasefire in Gaza or even a final status peace agreement.

Drum, on the other hand, is skeptical that the US could do anything to make peace between parties whose objectives are fundamentally incompatible. As long as that’s the case, he argues, we should just stop trying:

Quite famously, we all “know” what a deal between Israel and the Palestinians needs to look like. It’s obvious. Everyone says so. The only wee obstacle is that neither side is willing to accept this obvious deal. They just aren’t. The problem isn’t agreeing on a line on a map, or a particular circumlocution in a particular document. The problem is much simpler than that, so simple that sophisticated people are embarrassed to say it outright: Two groups of people want the same piece of land. Both of them feel they have a right to it. Both of them are, for the time being, willing to fight for it. Neither is inclined to give up anything for a peace that neither side believes in.

That’s it. That’s all there is. All the myriad details don’t matter. Someday that may change, and when it does the United States may have a constructive role to play in brokering a peace deal. But that day is nowhere in the near future.

I can see Kevin’s grim point. But as long as we are financing and subsidizing Israel’s wars, we are not neutral. Only if we cut off our aid can we afford the luxury of viewing the entire conflict as irresolvable. Everything else is complicity.

Correction Of The Day II

It’s an honorable apology and correction. But it’s hard not to see in the eight tweets that David sent out questioning the integrity of these harrowing images of grief and murder a desperate need not to see what is in front of our noses. The mind-boggling trauma and terror that Gazan civilians are now experiencing is so very hard to watch, when this country is partly financing it. For those attached to Israel, the experience must be particularly wrenching. Denial is a perfectly understandable response when confronted with nearly 250 dead children.

Best Cover Song Ever?

From the latest round of nominees:

Faith No More’s “Easy”, a Lionel Richie cover. The deadpan, the guitar solo, the bored drag queens … Love it:

Another adds:

The ironic thing about this cover? It’s not really that ironic. A little tongue-in-cheek perhaps, but it really is a tribute from a band as far removed from the R&B/soul genre as could possibly be.

The next nominee also avoids irony:

If you’ve never heard this before, prepare yourself. Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” is so beautiful that it gives me chills. I’m not a fan of re-imagined versions of childhood favorites, but this is transcendent:

Another adds, “There’s no way a 500 pound Hawaiian dude should have the voice of an angel.” Another elaborates a bit:

It may certainly seem cliche’ at this point to put in this entry, especially nearly a decade after his death and this song’s exposure in a few Hollywood films, but the song still resonates something very beautiful. First off, Bruddah Iz was not exactly your typical “American Idol” wannabe pop icon.  He lacked the looks – indeed, he had an untimely death due to his health problems related to his obesity – YET he remained true to his very smooth and mellow style, that was still able to capture the hearts and minds of so many people in the world … and in turn introducing much of us to a then largely unknown and small aspect of local/regional music in our country.

How?  Not by any real big commercial push from the local Hawaiian music producers, but rather appearing in a few popular films and TV shows during some of their most memorable moments. Who does not remember hearing this song during Dr. Mark Greene’s final moments in “ER?”  The song hit the top 40 in 10 countries around the world, and the album itself went double to triple platinum in 3 – not through any creative use of an autotune, a sexy/controversial music video, nor even by showing any cool/slick dance moves.  All it took was a very humble man, with a voice and heart that was bigger than the island from which he was raised, and accompanying himself with an instrument that was shorter than one of his upper limbs.

Finally, his message still has a lot of meaning for us today, especially in light of the recent international crises we are facing; It helps us believe that despite all this, there are still many people and aspects about our world that will always be “wonderful.”

One more fan concedes:

Yes, it’s overly sentimental, but, in times like these, I need this.

So It Really Is All About Sex Then, Rod?

The compulsively readable and admirably honest blogger, Rod Dreher, had an epiphany the other day. He was trying to define what he means by “traditional Christianity.” And what he means by the term is the following:

It seems to me that “traditional Christian” is political code for “Christians who adhere to traditional teaching about sex and sexuality.”

That is a really striking statement – though not one that exactly comes as a surprise to those familiar with Rod’s evolution over the years. It’s striking because it doesn’t actually concern itself with doctrine, the critical content of a faith tradition, like, say, the Resurrection of Jesus or the doctrine of the Trinity. It is not about a literal reading of Scripture as the only avenue to truth; it is not about whether doctrine can evolve; it is not about a belief in a personal, intervening God as opposed to a more distant and absent one. It is entirely about how one manages one’s private parts. Rod is pretty frank about that:

When I deploy the phrase “traditional Christians” in my writing, I’m not thinking about ecclesiology, sacramental theology, or any other thing that separates Protestantism, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy. What I’m thinking about — what we are all thinking about — is this: what separates “traditional Christians” from “modern Christians” (or “progressive Christians”) in our common discourse is their beliefs about sex. Nothing else, or at least nothing else meaningful.

He later clarified that he was talking about Christianity as it relates to the public square. And I can certainly see how, as an empirical matter, the sex issue has become central to public debates over abortion, homosexuality, marriage and so on. But the difference between me and Rod – and what I’d argue is the actual dividing line between modern and traditional Christians in the public square – is that I do not regard sexual jesus.jpgmatters to be that important in the context of what Christianity teaches about our obligations as human beings in the polity and the world. The difference between moderns and trads is that the trads see sex as the critical issue, and we moderns see a whole host of other issues.

My mum once told me as a kid that “sex outside marriage is a sin, but not that big a sin.” That remains my position. It’s up there with over-eating, excessive consumerism, the idolatry of money and profit, and spoliation of our environment – except the powerful sex drive in humans and the absence of any direct harm to another, gives sexual sin, I’d argue, a little more lee-way. The sexual obsession among trads, in other words, can be deeply distortive. It elides and displaces other vital issues. Access to universal healthcare and asylum for children escaping terror, for example, matter far more in traditional Christianity than whether my long-term relationship is deemed a civil marriage or a civil union. Torture is exponentially more sinful than a pre-marital fling – and yet it is embraced by evangelical “traditional” Christians most of all. The Catholic hierarchy has devoted far far less time and effort to combating torture than to preventing birth control as part of the ACA – to its eternal shame. And the centrality of sex to celibate traditional Christians has a lot to do with it.

I’d go further and argue that placing sex as the critical, core rampart of traditional Christianity is a very dangerous game. It’s dangerous because sexual repression is a very potent psychological tool. A key part of traditional religion’s success in luring and keeping adherents can be by leveraging sexual sacrifice into a greater collective sense of belonging and meaning. If people have to give up sex to be a faithful adherent to religion, they are much more likely to attach themselves strongly to that faith, if only to justify their sacrifice. They are also more likely to want others to join in – to help buttress their commitment. I think that’s where Rod’s point is strongest.

But it’s also where it’s weakest. Faith should surely not be a function of sexual repression. And sexual repression should not be a tool for religious faith.

Introduce that element as the critical one, and you are using social and personal pressure to buttress religious claims that should stand or fall on their own merits. And when sexual restraint or repression is what defines your religious experience, you’ve lost your way. Within religious institutions the sexual repression can also have terrible effects. It is not an accident that cults use sexual control as ramparts of their enterprise. The mind plays games with us on this subject – so powerful and so close to home.

That doesn’t mean that traditional arguments about sexuality should be dismissed. The glibness with which some gay activists now scorn traditional sexual moral codes as mere bigotry is deeply depressing. Damon Linker makes a good point about the scale and novelty of the West’s experiment in sexual freedom over the last half a century or so. And there are obvious developments – like the rise of single parenthood and children outside marriage – that can be shown to harm people’s prospects in life.

But is it a harbinger of social collapse? I look around me and see a sexually liberated society with much lower crimes rates, boundless cultural innovation, declining divorce rates and more stable gay couples. I do not see catastrophe. This “Family Week” in Provincetown I see some of the worst excesses of sexual novelty, as far as trads are concerned – gay couples with children everywhere. But I fail to see the ominous social implications of happy children playing on the beach, or of their two dads’ often super-vigilant parenting. I see a pretty healthy model of family life. And when I look back on the great era of sexual repression, I see evidence of horrifying sexual abuse of children by priests and many others, women treated as prisoners of their husbands, and homes for illegitimate children with mortality rates far higher than average. What I see today, in contrast, is a society not less open to Jesus’ core commandments to love one another, but rather a society less willing to excuse the abuse, distortion and repression of the deepest human longings in inhuman and cruel ways.

I see, actually, in the demise of what Rod calls traditional Christianity the emergence of a calmer, gentler Christianity less obsessed with social control and more open to divine truth. I see hope where Rod only sees calamity. Well, I guess we’ll both find out soon enough.

Gaza Goes Dark

How can you punish a people more than bombing their schools, hospitals and playgrounds? Knock out their only power plant:

The plant’s general manager, Jamal Dersawi, told NBC News that the loss of the structure is a “major disaster” for Gaza’s 1.8 million residents, whose electricity has already been limited by damage to power lines from Israel. According to Reuters, the plant provides two thirds of the energy in Gaza, including the area’s water sanitation facilities and pumps. (Residents are now being told to be careful with their water consumption.) The structure could be out of operation for up to a year.

Jesse Rosenfeld doubts it was an accident:

This is not the first time Israel has knocked out Gaza’s power plant and targeted essential infrastructure. Indeed, this is almost part of a standard playbook. Following Hamas’ kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006, Israel plunged Gaza into darkness with a retaliatory strike on the power plant.  The bombing and escalation in Gaza set off a series of events that led to a full-on war in Lebanon as well as Gaza. …

It is people like the al Wakeel family who pay the harshest price for this military duel. They fled the Al Shajaya neighborhood under intense shelling last week, and 55 family member are now crammed into a three bedroom apartment in Gaza City. With little water and only a few hours of electricity a day they were unable to shower or bathe the 25 children in the apartment. Now that the power plant has been hit, they have no water and no electricity.

Noting that the power outage also curtails the flow of information out of the strip, Juan Cole attempts a tally of the destruction:

Israel has completely reduced to rubble some 5,000 homes and damaged 26,000. If you figure that Palestinians in Gaza live on average 5 in a dwelling, there would be roughly 340,000 domiciles in Gaza. Israel has therefore destroyed or damaged about ten percent of the housing stock. This is on top of past campaigns of indiscriminate and wanton bombing campaigns. Since Israel keeps Gaza under blockade, it won’t receive the necessary materials to rebuild. The Israelis, having bald-facedly stolen the homes and farms of the people of Gaza, won’t be satisfied until they are forced to sleep in open fields.

Israel has forced some 200,000 Palestinians to flee their homes. But since the Gaza Strip is so small, they have no place to go. Israel won’t let them leave the Strip, but is intensively bombarding it. Some of the places they have taken shelter, including schools and UN refugee shelters, have themselves been bombed by the Israelis.

Another UNRWA school in the Jabaliya refugee camp was bombed this morning. Hayes Brown passes along the news:

For the second time in as many weeks, a United Nations-run school in the Gaza Strip was hit with with artillery fire, with reports that as many 90 Palestinians were wounded in the attack that killed an estimated 19 people. The shelling that struck in Jabaliya landed around 5 a.m. early Wednesday morning, reportedly falling in rapid succession. Around 3,300 Palestinians had been using the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) school for shelter from the Israeli campaign to root out Hamas and other militant groups in the strip when the explosions began. “One hit the street in front of the entrance, according to several witnesses,” the New York Times reported. “Two others hit classrooms where people were sleeping.” …

Meanwhile, the death toll continues to escalate, according to the latest report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA). So far in the three week war, 1,118 Palestinians have been killed — including “at least 827 civilians, of whom 243 are children and 131 are women” — and 56 Israelis. More than 240,000 Palestinians are currently displaced, or more than ten percent of the Gaza Strip’s population of 1.8 million. “UNRWA has exhausted its absorption capacity in Gaza City and northern Gaza, while overcrowding at its shelters raises concerns about the outbreak of epidemics,” OCHA wrote.