MASSACRES AT ISRAELI "AID STATIONS" (update, 6/4/25)

(UPDATE #2, 10:15 a.m. on Thursday, June 5: Thanks to all of you, we've put together roughly $2,750 of the $4k, but it just occurred to Amjad that Eid is this weekend, which means banks and all means of moving/withdrawing money will be shut down for 48 hours, starting tomorrow in Gaza, which is about 6 p.m. Central in the US. I don't know exactly when the shutdown takes effect – if I remember this right, it would be noon on Friday there, so 4 a.m. CST – but things could get dire if the freeze kicks in before Amjad's cousin has the money to get into whichever facility the surgery will be performed in. 2 days is a very, very long time to them right now. I know I've brought so many of this emergencies to you all, and Amjad hates having to bring them to me, but anything you can do today, Thursday in the US, spreading the link or telling one person or whatever is manageable, means more than I can express to these unthinkably brave people who have lived for so long now on the edge of a straight razor.)

(Just updating so the post will be sent out again: Amjad's family has raised about $800, but in the constant chaos, they're being forced to move from clinic to clinic – this happens all the time; I don't know all the details, and it would probably be stupid to publish them if I did, because anything too specific creates a target – and time is very much of the essence. Anywhere you can repost the link, whatever gets eyes on it, I and he and his whole family would very much appreciate – M)

This sudden IDF willingness to "dispense aid" is exactly what you think it is, a way to get Palestinians in one place and come up with a pretext to start killing, and the actual "dispensing" involves more American PMCs than you'd hire for anything but premeditated slaughter.

So, at some point in the last 24 hours, Amjad's uncle and cousin – that uncle's last living son – went to get some of the food aid they've been promised. While they they waited in line, the IDF, either accidentally or (I would tend to suspect) completely intentionally, crashed one of their quadcopter drones into a wall, and used that as a pretext to open up the guns. We're probably never going to know how many people got shot, and how many of the killers were IDF, Americans, whatever subhumans-for-hire are stalking Gaza right now, but one of the victims was Amjad's cousin.

He's alive, but in critical condition, and because Gaza now has no medical infrastructure at all, his only chance to survive is treatment at one of the few remaining half-improvised private clinics. That treatment will cost something like €4,000. (Amjad's original message actually said "£4,000" – I don't know if that was a misprint, or an artifact of the different auto-translate software everyone seems to be using now, or if the pound has become the circulating currency for any of a hundred reasons involving scalpers and proxy banks, etc. The pound is at $1.35 and €1.18 right now, and it's an estimate to begin with, so my best guess is that we're talking about €4,000-4,300.)

Apart from the gaunt details of physical position and currency exchange, and entirely outside the temptation (certainly not my goddamn temptation) to sermonize, all I really know how to say at this point is what hammers against the inside of my own skull now, and I've probably said it before, god knows someone else has most certainly said it, but I think, for the thousandth time – or I do not "think" at all, there's no subject + verb, there is only the inability to see anything outside the broad but thinning aperture – of the last few lines of a Robinson Jeffers poem, something he wrote 2 days before the official beginning of World War II:

Wrath and laughter

Are quite irrelevant. Clearly it is time

To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert,

And look for God – having seen man.

Thank you

M