اندیشمند بزرگترین احساسش عشق است و هر عملش با خرد

Thursday, July 18, 2024

US declares 'mission complete' for Gaza Aid Pier after delivering one day's worth of food

The Pentagon announced on 17 July that the floating pier built off the coast of Gaza would be dismantled for good, declaring its “mission complete” two months after it started operations.
 
“The maritime surge mission involving the pier is complete. So there's no more need to use the pier,” Navy Vice Admiral Brad Cooper, deputy commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM), told a news briefing late Wednesday.
“Our assessment is that the temporary pier has achieved its intended effect to surge a very high volume of aid into Gaza and ensure that aid reaches the civilians in Gaza in a quick manner,” Cooper said, adding that nearly 20 million pounds of aid entered Gaza via the pier – the equivalent of about 600 truckloads.
For months, the UN and other human rights organizations have established that a minimum of 500 to 600 truckloads of aid need to enter Gaza daily to alleviate critical famine conditions. A large part of the aid that reached Gaza via the pier rotted under the sun for weeks after the US and Israel used the alleged humanitarian corridor to launch a bloody rescue operation in Nuseirat camp that killed nearly 300 Palestinians.
Cooper also announced that efforts to deliver aid to Gaza by sea would shift to the Israeli port of Ashdod. He added that, after US troops failed to re-attach the pier last week for a final time, about five million pounds of aid stranded in Cyprus and at sea will be heading to Ashdod.
“Having now delivered the largest volume of humanitarian assistance ever into the Middle East, we’re now mission complete and transitioning to a new phase,” Cooper claimed. “In the coming weeks, we expect that millions of pounds of aid will enter into Gaza via this new pathway.”
Earlier this week, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that the floating pier would be replaced with a “dedicated facility” called Pier 28 in Ashdod Port without specifying a timeline.
He also claimed that the facilities will include a field hospital to “treat Palestinian children.” “This is a significant short-term solution that will address immediate humanitarian needs until a permanent mechanism is established to evacuate and treat ill children,” Gallant’s office said.
US President Joe Biden, who announced the construction of the $230 million structure in March, expressed disappointment in the pier's ultimate failure, saying, “I was hopeful that would be more successful.”
After its launch in mid-May, the pier operated for fewer than 25 days, and aid agencies used it only about half that time due to security concerns, as the Israeli army has continuously targeted aid convoys and humanitarian groups operating in Gaza.
Barely any humanitarian aid has entered Gaza since the start of May when Israel violently took control of the Rafah crossing after Hamas accepted the terms of a US-backed ceasefire agreement. Tel Aviv is also in control of another six land crossings into the besieged enclave, which could allow for the delivery of necessary assistance that has been rotting on the Egyptian side of the border.
 
Tali Shapiro
In May this year, as part of its psychological torture campaign on the Palestinians of Gaza, Israel’s army rained down yet another batch of leaflets on the besieged population of Gaza. The leaflets stood out for many reasons, but most of all for the extortion website associated with them.
The Zionism Observer collective, made up of software developers, cartographers, translators, and archivists, traced the website’s registrar to NameCheap and the hosting service to Webflow. They immediately lodged a complaint with both companies.
Webflow removed the IDF’s extortion website within 24 hours.
“All of a sudden, in response to my thread, dozens of people were asking Webflow about this obviously immoral and likely illegal website,” says a member of the collective. “A lot of software developers — a community very important to tech companies like Webflow — got involved. People started tagging the CEO. I think people even started writing to the investors as well. Then poof! It vanished. 404 Not Found.”
This would be the first time the IDF extortion website had been taken down, and no hacking was necessary—just old-fashioned public pressure, magnified through social media.
Webflow followed up with an email to inquirers suggesting (without stating) that it never hosted the website.
‘Competent people’ in the Israeli tech scene ‘left for San Francisco or New York a long time ago‘
The collective recently began a mapping effort, looking in detail at a second IDF website. Again, they found that it was not competently built.
The extortion website was built using consumer-level tools called “no-code” designed to help people who are not software professionals. According to the Zionism Observer’s software developer, the second website containing the “evacuation” (or, more accurately, forced displacement) map was exceptionally badly built. This second website left secret data publicly available.
“We recently attempted to reverse-engineer the IDF’s forced displacement map from the IDF’s Arabic language ‘Iron Swords’ mini-site,” a member told me. “This doesn’t involve any sort of hacking or specialized tools. We literally just looked at the source code delivered to any web browser on every single page request.”
Data leaks and embarrassing errors abound. While parsing the data they retrieved, Zionism Observer’s software developers discovered that Israel’s army accidentally, through “very sloppy coding,” leaked a table from its intelligence database.
“At the start of this work, in December, we thought the IDF was high-tech competent. They accidentally delivered this data to every visitor on the map’s page. Both the English and Arabic versions! We’re starting to suspect the competent people in the Israeli ‘tech scene’ left for San Francisco or New York a long time ago.”
Second takedown and partial resurrection
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Screenshot of an email from GoDaddy responding to complaints about a website run by the Israeli Defense Forces that threatens civilians in Gaza.Screenshot of an email from GoDaddy responding to complaints about a website run by the Israeli Defense Forces that threatens civilians in Gaza.
Nine days after the initial complaint, Namecheap removed the extortion website without contacting the complainants. The IDF quickly found a new host with GoDaddy, but the site had significant changes. The child victims and ominous countdown timer were gone, its search function only partly functioning, and it never followed through with the threatened release of personal information.
“We, of course, have no idea why the IDF moderated the website and backed down from their threats,” said a Zionism Observer member, “but we strongly suspect it was the result of our public pressure campaign, the multiple de-platforms, and the IDF’s sudden realization that impunity doesn’t apply everywhere.”
The collective restarted the campaign, but GoDaddy was quick to resort to legalistic obfuscations.
“GoDaddy seems to have made a decision, at what we suspect is a higher level of management than normally would apply to questions about an abusive website on shared hosting, that they will not take down the website,” the collective said but keeps an easy-to-use call to action on the campaign website, encouraging people to make a complaint to GoDaddy’s abuse department.
Cartographic resistance
Once they reverse-engineered the army’s abusive evacuation map website, the collective cartographers were surprised at the messy data. They spent over a day cleaning up the geospatial data. According to a cartographer in the collective, the IDF “should learn more about topology.”
The collective recently recruited two cartographers and began building an interactive mapping application. The website gazamaps.com is little more than a placeholder now, but the collective expects a meaningful launch in a matter of weeks. The vision is that visitors will be able to click on an area on the map and see the genocidal TikTok videos posted by soldiers that the team collected, the relevant evacuation orders, and more.
Zionism Observer’s maps are just one of its many projects, and the collective is part of a group of software developers building Palestine-solidarity software. When it comes to web applications, solidarity with the Palestinian people might just — for the first time ever — have a tech advantage over the famed “Startup Nation.”

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