These past couple weeks have been major in terms of what is happening in the world so here is a brief overview to keep you updated. On October 7, 2023, Hamas, an Islamist militant movement and one of the Palestinian territories’ two major political parties, attacked small Israeli towns, killing 1,400 people in just that one attack. Since then, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry said that more than 5,700 people have been killed since Israel began its counter-attack, a figure that could be wrong because it’s impossible to verify. Because of the Israeli response, there have been six hospitals that have had to shut down in the Gaza Strip for lack of fuel. Gaza Strip is about 140 square miles and is home to about 2.2 million people, most of them Palestinians who were displaced when they were no longer welcome to be citizens of Israel. Since this war began, diplomats all over the world have been calling for a cease-fire. After days of negotiations, on October 21, the first convoy of aid trucks made their way into Gaza from the Egyptian border. The next day, fourteen more aid trucks made their way into Gaza. The United Nations say that these trucks were loaded with “lifesaving supplies” and are carrying barely enough to address the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. None of these trucks carry fuel to help the hospitals or buildings in Gaza, most of which have shut down because of their lack of fuel, forcing doctors to work under the lights of cell phones. The most simple explanation for this is that Gaza depends almost entirely on Israel for fuel and electricity, along with other necessary living supplies. To make it simple, here is a brief explanation of the whole situation that is happening right now. In the Middle East, there is a country called Israel. In Israel, there is a little tiny piece of land called the Gaza Strip where about 2.2 million people reside and they call themselves Palestinians. There is also another parcel of land that Palestinians live in called the West Bank on the other side of Israel. For the most part (this is not true for all of Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank) Israelis are part of the Jewish faith and Palestinians are of the Muslim faith. These two countries hold different faiths, however, they share a common holy ground and this causes many disagreements between the two.
In more local news (I say local but really it’s the entire US where this is happening) Meta, the parent company for Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Messenger, and WhatsApp, has been sued by more than 3 dozen states. The reasoning behind this lawsuit is that Meta knowingly used features such as Infinite Scroll that violated consumer protection laws by unfairly capturing the attention of kids and teenagers to make them addicted. This lawsuit was led by Colorado and Tennessee but was a joint lawsuit filed by 33 states in California. Eight other states as well as Washington D.C. filed separate lawsuits on Tuesday, October 24th with similar, if not the same claims. This lawsuit is the biggest effort by the states to tackle the impacts that social media has shown to have on teenagers’ mental health. In a 233-page federal complaint, details that Meta used a “scheme to exploit young users for profit,” deceiving users about safety features and the presence of harmful content while also “harvesting their data and violating federal laws on children’s privacy,” according to an article in the Washington Post.
