As the official death toll in Gaza passes more than 42,400, the true number may be impossible to know until Israel’s war is over. But medical workers who witnessed the carnage in Gaza’s hospitals are speaking out. We speak with Dr. Feroze Sidhwa about his op-ed in The New York Times that features harrowing stories from dozens of healthcare workers and CT scans of children shot in the head or the left side of the chest.
The Times called the corresponding images of the patients too graphic to publish. “I personally wish that Americans could see more of what it looks like when a child is shot in the head, when a child is flayed open by bombs,” says Sidhwa. “I think it would make us think a little bit more about what we do in the world.”
We also speak with Palestinian nurse Rajaa Musleh, who worked at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. “I will never forget the dogs were eating the dead body inside Shifa Hospital at the front of the emergency department.
This will be stuck on my mind for my whole life,” says Musleh. “My message for the whole world: We are human beings. We are not numbers. We have the right to receive healthcare inside Gaza.”
But there are bills currently in congress going for approval that will target the EU specifically, such as the one mentioned on my previous comment, where US companies would face fines for joining boycott movements promoted at a EU level. Whether they will succeed or not is still not determined, but there are actors inside the US trying to push this agenda towards the rest of Europe. I do hope the EU does as you say and not fold on the US pressure, because i really don’t want to see our union bundled together with US foreign policy as it has been since the 2000s.
What the US politicians think, decide and legislate is irrelevant: the US actually targetting EU nations would directly yield counter-sanctions from the whole of the EU because that’s a core part of the EU Membership Treaties (so, not the kind of thing that can just be blocked by a veto from a US-friendly EU member nation), and those would seriously impact the US Economy, not to mention the indirect impact on the US’ broader geostrategical influence from treating the EU as an adversary.
For the EU it would be something like Brexit - even if the EU loses from a hard posture, it cannot afford to let the other side get away with it without very painful consequences because that would result in them doing even worst things later and would incentivise others to do the same - only in this case the EU would suffer way less from playing hardball with the US than it did from doing it with Brexiting Britain.
For the US it would basically be comitting Trade Suicide at the feet of China.
If the US Congress and Senate are too stupid and actually pass those laws and POTOS too is too stupid and actually uses it, all without the companies that are going to get screwed the most by counter-sanctions (mainly Tech) lobbying that proposal away into nothing, thats a lot more a US problem than an EU problem and there is no way at all that the upsides are close to even just begin to justify the downsides.
(Sure it would hurt the EU, just a lot less than doing nothing about it would).
Personally I would love for the US policians to try it and find out.