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Raiding Gaza’s largest hospital, another communications blackout, Israel’s goals in Gaza – the Middle East this week.

Raiding Gaza’s largest hospital | Pushing people out of southern Gaza ‘safe zones’ | Strip being cut off from communications with the outside world  | What are Israel’s goals in Gaza? | Here is the Middle East this week:

Death haunts hospital corridors

Gaza is losing its connection with the outside world as its telecom towers lose power, which means it’s getting more difficult to bring you stories of the people trapped inside.

On Wednesday, the unthinkable happened when Israeli forces raided al-Shifa Hospital where hundreds of patients were being treated and thousands of people had sought refuge.

Many people had already been watching al-Shifa, aghast, as one premature baby after the other died at Gaza’s biggest hospital, starved as it was of the fuel needed to run its generators.

The lack of electricity — not to mention medicines — also means cancer patients face a horrific prospect.

As do the people who rely on regular dialysis treatments and babies in incubators in other hospitals who need help to breathe and thrive.

Israel says attacking hospitals is OK because it is actually attacking “Hamas operatives” hiding within them. But international law protects hospitals except in very specific cases, which al-Shifa is not one of, so who is Israel making those statements for?

And as the international community finally begins to speak up more forcefully about Israel’s targeting of civilians and health installations, we pay tribute to the Indonesian medical volunteers who chose to stay with their Palestinian colleagues.

If Gaza were your city…

Do you know how much of it would be destroyed in Israel’s bombardment? We’ve mapped the Gaza destruction onto several international capitals.

How can this much pain be comprehended?

A cheerful toddler who just took her first steps a couple of weeks ago found herself buried alive under tonnes of rubble when her home was bombed by Israel in the middle of the night.

Her nine-month pregnant mother? Dead, as were her twin foetuses who had struggled to be born when the bomb struck. Her father was also dead. Grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins … all dead. Melissa was left with one surviving aunt, a paralysed body, and pain.

There’s a man at al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah, and his job for the past 15 years has been to shroud the people who have died there. But, Abu Saher wept as he told us, those past years are nothing compared to the level of horrific human mutilations he is seeing now.

Finally, we bring you a teacher’s plea as she checks feverishly every day to see if any of her 5th graders have been killed in an Israeli attack.

What is Hezbollah thinking?

The Lebanese group, and its leader Hassan Nasrallah, have a lot of expectations to contend with. Widely seen as the region’s strongest militia, many were hoping that it would open up a wide second front with Israel, including the Palestinian refugees who live in Lebanon.

But Nasrallah has a complicated line to walk, as he balances domestic pressure against him with Hezbollah’s role as part of the region’s “Islamic resistance”.

As one skirmish follows another and Israeli attacks hit deeper in Lebanese territory, the question becomes: How long will Hezbollah hold back?

If the tunnels are the issue, why not go underground?

Israel has said repeatedly that its goal is to clear the tunnels under Gaza used by Hamas fighters.

Yet, fighting remains above ground and any victories Israel claims seem to be largely against clusters of unarmed civilians, causing incredible destruction as it draws one weapon after the other out of its large arsenal.

Our strategic analyst posits that this is likely because Israel knows that going into the tunnels will be a long, dangerous campaign for it.

He also provides a step-by-step breakdown of how Israel would have to operate in order to actually start taking over those feared tunnels.

While the world looks towards Gaza …

While Israel pounds Gaza, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and his ally Russia seem to have seized the opportunity to step up bombing rebel-held areas in the country.

Al-Assad gave an impassioned speech at an Arab-Islamic summit in Riyadh this week, decrying violations against civilians in Gaza, and eliciting a lot of contempt among the civilians being bombed in Syria.

The US is getting involved as well, in Syria and in Iraq, where its troops have been attacked and exchanged fire with enemy combatants… Will it get worse?

Briefly

Quote of the Week

“We’re working on cases now that we’ve never seen in our medical textbooks.” | Dr Ayman Harb, head of the orthopaedic department at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.

David Cameron tells Ukraine’s president that London would support Kyiv for ‘however long it takes’.

The United Kingdom’s newly appointed foreign secretary, David Cameron, has made a visit to Ukraine to underline British support for Kyiv amid its ongoing war with Russia, according to his office.

The former prime minister, making his first working trip abroad as Britain’s top diplomat, told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that his country would support Ukraine for “however long it takes”.

“I wanted this to be my first visit,” Cameron said. “I admire the strength and determination of the Ukrainian people.”

He was named foreign secretary on Monday in a surprise cabinet reshuffle.

Zelenskyy said he was grateful for Cameron’s gesture, which comes amid Israel’s war in Gaza that he worries has diverted attention from Ukraine’s drawn-out battle with Russia, in its 21st month.

“The world is not so focused on the battlefield situation in Ukraine, and this dividing of the focus really does not help,” Zelenskyy said.

The UK has been a close ally of Ukraine throughout the war, and Cameron told Zelenskyy Britain would continue to be there for moral, diplomatic and military support.

“What I want to say by being here is that we will continue to give you the moral support, the diplomatic support … but above all the military support that you need not just this year and next year, but however long it takes,” Cameron said.

He added that the UK would work with its allies “to make sure the attention is here in Ukraine”.

Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Cameron had also engaged in talks on issues related to armaments, arms production, and security in the Black Sea while in Kyiv.

Ukraine did not say when the talks took place. Due to stringent wartime security regulations, the details of foreign dignitaries’ trips are sometimes released late.

As of last month, the UK said it was second to the United States in providing military funds to Ukraine, giving 4.6 billion pounds ($5.7bn) worth of assistance and training 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers on British soil.

The much-awaited deal with the global lender is meant to save the cash-strapped country from default.

Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have reached a preliminary deal for the release of $700m from a $3bn bailout package after two weeks of talks with the global lender.

The IMF on Wednesday said it reached a staff-level agreement with Pakistan’s caretaker government on the first review of the $3bn fund.

“Upon approval [from IMF executive board], around $700m will become available bringing total disbursements under the programme to almost $1.9 billion,” IMF’s Pakistan mission chief Nathan Porter said in a statement.

The $700m fund is the second tranche of the bailout the IMF signed with Pakistan in June this year. The next month, the cash-strapped country – on the verge of default – received the first tranche of $1.2bn and was asked by the IMF to take a series of steps, including revising its budget and ending electricity and fuel subsidies.

After its two-week review of Pakistan’s economic situation that ended on Wednesday, the IMF in its statement said, “A nascent recovery is underway, buoyed by international partners’ support and signs of improved confidence.”

The statement added that inflation – which in May hit 38 percent, the highest in four decades, and is currently hovering at about 30 percent – is “expected to decline over the coming months amid receding supply constraints and modest demand”.

But the global lender cautioned the country’s economy was not out of the woods yet.

“Pakistan remains susceptible to significant external risks, including the intensification of geopolitical tensions, resurgent commodity prices, and the further tightening in global financial conditions. Efforts to build resilience need to continue,” it said.

Pakistan, home to 241 million people, has been facing financial and political instability for nearly two years. Its central bank’s foreign reserves depleted to less than $4bn, leaving just enough money for less than a month of import. It owes more than $20bn in external debt in the current fiscal year.

Meanwhile, the Pakistani rupee has lost more than 50 percent of its value against the dollar in a year.

Some analysts, however, say prudent policy decisions by the Pakistani government have improved macroeconomic fundamentals, such as inflation, which dropped to 27 percent in October.

Lahore-based economist Hina Shaikh told Al Jazeera the government has taken “bold steps” in accordance with the IMF requirements to “significantly increase” energy prices and ensure the value of the rupee is determined by market forces.

“If the government continues to meet the conditions of the IMF, it could pave the way for an elected government to negotiate for another package,” she said.

Khaqan Najeeb, former adviser to the Ministry of Finance, said Pakistan satisfying the IMF about its current economic policies was a good sign.

“It is now paramount that Pakistan stays with the IMF to meet its future external financing requirements. It is also pleasing to see the lender acknowledging the recent recovery in economy and hopeful of reduction in inflation in the coming months,” Najeeb told Al Jazeera.

With national elections scheduled in February, Shaikh said the announcement of the vote also adds “some stability” to the political situation.

“These tough measures and essential reforms were and are more likely to be rolled out during the caretaker set-up. An elected administration may hesitate to undertake difficult economic measures,” she said.

Genocide is not an event; you don’t simply wake up one morning and begin exterminating an entire people out of the blue. Genocide is a process; you have to work your way up to it.

And like all processes, genocide has its stages – 10 stages in all if we are to refer to the list prepared by Dr Gregory Stanton, founding president and chairman of Genocide Watch, an organisation that does exactly what its name implies.

One of those stages is dehumanisation. This is an important one because committing genocide is not easy; murdering men, women and children in thousands tends to take a toll on the psyche, causing one to perhaps face all kinds of uncomfortable questions, to counter all manners of unwelcome thoughts that intrude into even the most closed of minds like single spies sneaking into a well-guarded fortress.

Those who pull the trigger on children, those who drop bombs on schools and hospitals, are after all presumably as humans as the ones they murder. How then, one wonders, do they sleep at night? How do they not see the blood on their hands every waking moment, like Lady Macbeth wandering the halls of the Dunsinane castle?

The answer is simple; you live with it by convincing yourself that those being killed are not in fact human, or at the very least not as human as you are. If you do that right and repeatedly, you will successfully convince yourself that murder is not murder; it’s pest control.

Dehumanisation has to be an ongoing process, running concurrently with the actual extermination because, you see, it is not just your own public you have to convince, it is also the governments and publics of the countries that are arming, aiding, abetting and, in some cases, cheering you on while you go about your bloody but necessary business. This gets harder to do as eviscerated babies pile up in the courtyards of besieged hospitals, as body bags choke the streets, and as the world livestreams the apocalypse on smartphones.

It’s in this context that last week’s infamous Washington Post cartoon must be viewed.

On November 6, as Israel continued its deliberate and direct targeting of civilians in Gaza in bakeries, hospitals and homes, while clearly announcing its intention to eradicate the Palestinians, The Washington Post published a caricature titled “Human Shields”.

The caricature depicts a man with bestial features in a dark, striped suit, which has Hamas in bold white letters emblazoned on it. His comically large nose is jutting out from beneath sunken eyes crowned by bushy eyebrows. He has several children and a typically helpless-looking abaya-clad Arab woman tied to his body. To his left is a Palestinian flag and to his right a partial image of Al-Aqsa and, of course, an oil lamp. Just in case the symbolism was not clear enough. The cartoon ticks many boxes. In his landmark study on dehumanisation, scholar Nick Haslam writes that among the categories of dehumanisation by imagery are depictions of the enemy as a barbarian, a criminal and a harasser of women and children.

The outrage was immediate and effective; having removed the cartoon, the editor of the editorial page, David Shipley, wrote in a note to readers that while he saw the drawing purely as a “caricature” of a “specific Hamas spokesman”, the outrage convinced him that he had “missed something profound, and divisive”.

It’s not David’s fault, really. Like so many people across the world he’s grown up with media and film depictions of hooknosed Arabs as either bumbling sheikhs, bumbling bandits, or else brutal (and bumbling) fanatics. This is a phenomenon author Jack Shaheen wrote about extensively in his book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, which was later made into a documentary.

Coming back to cartoons, Arabs are not the only ones to get this treatment – far from it. Nazi Germany was replete with images (they’re just a Google search away) which depicted Jews in much the same way: Their eyes are beady and their noses are hooked or bulbous, sometimes both. All precisely calculated to produce revulsion in the viewer, to separate the righteous “us” from the bestial “them”.

Take a cursory look at anti-Japanese propaganda cartoons in World War II, some drawn by none other than famous children’s author Dr Seuss, and you see the same techniques applied. Anti-Irish cartoons published in the UK and US in the late 19th century also depict Irish immigrants as beasts, and Black Americans – or Black people in general – still find themselves portrayed as apes or monkeys. The purpose is as simple as it is insidious and effective: to tie character to appearance, and then ensure that said appearance is hideous.

The Nazis went a step further, of course, and routinely depicted Jews as rats with (barely) human faces scurrying before the cleansing Aryan broom. Proving that the classics never really go out of style, in 2015, the Daily Mail took a page out of Goebbels’s playbook by depicting rats scurrying into Europe alongside silhouetted Muslim migrants who are turbaned and carrying AK-47s. The lone visible woman was of course duly veiled and wearing an abaya. But at least the Daily Mail didn’t portray the actual migrants as rats, thereby completely dehumanising them.

That honour falls to none other than Michael Ramirez, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who drew The Washington Post “Human Shields” cartoon. In 2018, the same year as the Palestinian Great March of Return – when Israeli snipers killed 266 unarmed protestors and crippled tens of thousands more – Mr Ramirez saw it fit to draw a cartoon showing a tide of rats, carrying Palestinian flags and under fire, hurtling off a cliff while blaming Israel for their fate. Clearly, this is also something “profound and divisive” that The Washington Post seems to have somehow missed.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

EXPLAINER

The socialist Spanish politician is expected to be PM by the end of Thursday, after striking a controversial agreement with Catalan separatists.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez will seek a new term in office in a vote in parliament on Thursday after striking a controversial deal with Catalan separatists.

In exchange for supporting Sanchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), nationalists from the Spanish region of Catalonia secured a commitment from the PSOE leader to pass an amnesty law that would pardon those linked to the botched Catalan bid for independence six years ago.

More than 300 people accused of crimes in relation to Catalan independence between January 1, 2012, and November 13, 2023, could benefit from the legislation.

Those episodes included crimes during the unsanctioned October 2017 referendum, which Madrid met with a heavy police crackdown,

Will Sanchez be re-elected?

Sanchez – prime minister of Spain since 2018 – lost out to the centre-right Popular Party (PP) in the general election four months ago.

But unable to form a government, PP was forced to concede to the PSOE which has enlisted the support of Catalan and Basque nationalists and other regional parties in its bid to govern.

“I think [Sanchez] has the numbers so barring some unforeseen circumstance – which I don’t think is likely – then Pedro Sanchez will [again] be Spanish prime minister by the end of Thursday,” said Andrew Dowling, a reader in Hispanic studies at Cardiff University.

Why does the support of Catalan nationalists matter?

Sanchez’s decision to court the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) and the centre-right Junts per Catalunya – parties which support independence for Catalonia – has outraged Spanish conservatives, who decried the amnesty bill.

This despite one minister in the Spanish government, presidency minister and PSOE senior official Felix Bolanos, hailing the legislation as a way to “heal wounds and resolve the existing political conflict in Catalonia”.

Indeed, following news of Sanchez’s decision to pursue legislation intent on pardoning Catalans accused of political sedition, thousands of protestors took to the streets of Spain on Sunday to express their opposition.

On Tuesday, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, the leader of PP, appealed to the European Union itself to intervene, calling the proposed law “an unprecedented situation”.

He complained that “the amnesty [bill] is a direct payment for the votes needed for the [PSOE] to form a government. And who pays for that? The Spanish people, but also, in my opinion, Europe, because the deterioration of a democracy like Spain’s … will obviously have consequences for European institutions”.

Among those who could be pardoned is former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont, the leader of Junts and the brains behind the illegal referendum, who today lives in exile in Belgium.

What will Sanchez’s likely re-election mean for Spain’s domestic future and foreign policies?

Public hostility towards the amnesty bill is suggested by a recent poll which indicated that 70 percent of the Spanish electorate oppose the legislation. The judiciary, too, has signalled its opposition, meaning that simply passing the bill in parliament might not be enough for Sanchez to fully make good on his pledge.

However, on the international front, a newly re-elected Sanchez is unlikely to soften his criticism of Israel’s military action in Gaza. On Wednesday, the leftist leader condemned the Jewish state for its “indiscriminate killing of Palestinians” in the enclave – and vowed to “work in Europe and in Spain to recognise the Palestinian state”.

In contrast to the likes of the US, the UK and Germany, Sanchez also called for an end to the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza where more than 11,300 people have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in retaliation for the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7.

“We demand an immediate ceasefire on the part of Israel in Gaza and strict compliance with international humanitarian law, which today is clearly not respected,” he said.

Dowling, author of the 2022 book, Catalonia: A New History, told Al Jazeera that a second-term Sanchez government would also continue to be part of a “mainstream Europe” which has sought “to isolate the far-right”.

“Spain is very much a mainstream political actor within a European context,” said the academic. “And also plays a very important role with North Africa and the Arab world. And also, for reasons of culture and history, with Latin America. So those are the kind of axis of Spanish foreign policy.”