- Extremely rare moment of sensibility from Sean Hannity

Further escalations of violence continued in Gaza on Friday. 
 

• Israelis continued to mourn the dead from Saturday’s attack and to wonder after the fate of the estimated 130 hostages thought to be in Gaza. Many non-Israelis did, too, like the family of Americans Judith and Natalie Ranaan. The mother and daughter were on vacation in Israel and are thought to have been taken hostage. “Their only crime was being Jewish,” Judith’s sister told the New York Times. President Biden spoke with the families of 14 Americans who remain unaccounted for in a call he called “gut-wrenching.” The State Department organized charter flights to get thousands of American citizens out of Israel, the first of which departed on Friday. More flights are expected in the coming days. No such measure has been announced for the 500 American citizens trapped in Gaza. The USS Gerald R. Ford strike group, led by the largest aircraft carrier in the world, has been deployed to the region.
   

• The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) gave more than 1 million Palestinians 24 hours to evacuate the Gaza Strip on Friday in response to Saturday’s terrorist attacks by Hamas that claimed 1,200 Israeli lives. The United Nations “strongly appeal[ed]” for any such order…to be rescinded.” The U.N. said it saw no way for the movement to take place “without devastating humanitarian consequences” and other international aid groups agreed. “Ordering a million people in Gaza to evacuate, when there’s no safe place to go, is not an effective warning,” senior legal advisor for Human Rights Watch Clive Baldwin said in a widely-quoted statement. Nearly 1,800 people have been killed in Gaza according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. A videographer for Reuters was killed and six others were wounded by Israeli artillery in Southern Lebanon.
   

• The International committee of the Red Cross said it would be impossible for humanitarian aid organizations to operate while Gaza is under siege. White House National Security Spokesman John Kirby said that the evacuation is a “tall order,” but that the United States would not second-guess the decision. The Palestinian Health Ministry reported that at least 70 people were killed and more than 200 injured when the IDF carried out airstrikes on three convoys of Palestinians trying to flee Gaza, after the IDF asserted that it would not strike any evacuation routes before 8pm. This week’s Israeli airstrikes responding to Saturday’s Hamas terrorist attacks have shut down Gaza’s southern border with Egypt, and many roads and other infrastructure have been destroyed, making an evacuation, particularly for one million people along a densely-populated warzone, virtually impossible. Calls for a humanitarian corridor have been rebuffed by Gaza’s neighbors Egypt and Jordan.

As millions of civilian lives hang in the balance, all eyes are on the Israeli and United States governments. 
 

• President Joe Biden changed his tone at a Friday speech in Philadelphia, where he condemned Hamas as “pure evil” but added, “We can’t lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas…They’re suffering as well.” He went on to emphasize that his administration is working to ensure that “Israel has what it needs to defend itself,” and that at his direction, the United States is “working in the region, including communicating directly with the governments of Israel, Egypt, Jordan and other Arab nations and the United Nations, to surge support for the humanitarian consequences [from the] Hamas attack to help Israel.” 

• Israel reported that its military had carried out raids inside the Gaza Strip on Friday, the first announcement of a shift from airstrikes to ground operations. Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Friday that all citizens of Gaza are responsible for the October 7 attack by Hamas. He stated at the press conference: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” Still, rights groups have emphasized that half of the population in Gaza are under age 18, raising questions about whether Herzog considered them culpable as well. 

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The Supreme Court heard arguments this week in a case about gerrymandering in South Carolina. The results could make it even more difficult to win legal challenges to maps drawn with the clear intent of marginalizing racial minorities. The case involves the relocation of 30,000 Black South Carolinians redistricted from the 1st district to its sixth by the state’s Republican-majority legislature. The decision whether or not to redraw the map is likely to determine Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace’s future in the House.

A conservative Republican New York City Councilwoman, Inna Vernikov, was arrested on Friday and charged with criminal possession of a firearm after photos showed her carrying a gun in the waistband of her pants at a pro-Palestinian rally on Thursday at Brooklyn College.

Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) wore his Israel Defense Forces military uniform to Capitol Hill on Friday, and made a verbal jab at Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), the only Palestinian-American member of Congress, for keeping the Palestinian flag outside of her office door. Mast is an evangelical Christian who volunteered for the IDF in 2015, which is, uh, a little different than having a flag celebrating your heritage.

The German literary association Litprom has cancelled an award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair next week that was set to honor Palestinian author Adania Shibli for her book “A Minor Matter,” which tells the true story of a 1949 rape and murder of a Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers. Litprom stated that the decision to cancel the ceremony was made jointly with Shibli due to the outbreak of the war between Israel and Hamas. 

Jim Jordan is back! The silver medalist in the GOP speaker election is now the Republican nominee for Speaker of the House of Representatives. Last time, Jordan came in behind Steve Scalise, who got the party’s nomination but couldn’t actually get the whole party to elect him speaker. Scalise, who once (correctly!) described himself as “David Duke without the baggage,” was handicapped by his appalling associations with Duke and Duke’s European-American Unity and Rights Organization, a white nationalist group to which Scalise spoke in 2002. At least that’s what his opponents say. Back here in reality, it seems a lot like Scalise isn’t much of an improvement on alleged kid-toucher Matt Gaetz, who has sandbagged all the candidates for speaker so far, or established sex pest ignorer Gym, sorry, Jim Jordan.

As an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University, Jordan is said by his athletes to have asked them to “please leave me out of it” when they confronted him about school doctor Richard Strauss, who preyed sexually on his patients. “Do you really want a guy in that job who chose not to stand up for his guys?” Mike Schyck, a former OSU wrestler who sued the school over Strauss’s behavior, asked NBC News. NBC’s David Gregory expressed frustration with Democrats over the vacant position on Friday, attributing the problem to “identity politics.” It’s a little strange that of the two political parties, the Republicans are always the ones standing around demanding to know who shit their pants and the Democrats are always the ones expected to clean it up. The House is in recess until Monday, so Jordan has the weekend to beg everybody to vote for him. As a matter of interest, if Hakeem Jeffries gets a mere five Republicans to vote for him, he will be the Speaker of the House. The public is probably also tired of white pervert identity politics, too.

Kaiser Permanente has reached a tentative deal with its frontline healthcare workers union as of Friday. Inadequate pay and staffing from the healthcare giant led to the largest strike in the history of the American medical sector. 

A Trump-appointed(!) federal judge ruled that Galveston County, TX violated the federal Voting Rights Act in drawing its 2021 precinct maps which “denies Black and Latino voters the equal opportunity to participate in the political process and the opportunity to elect a representative of their choice to the commissioners court.” The judge ordered Galveston to redraw the map by October 20.