Fishing for cephalopod DNA allows for efficient marine surveying

Kobe University

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

In the technique known as “environmental DNA metabarcoding,” probes are designed to target specific DNA fragments, similar to how anglers use specific bait to catch a particular species. The challenge is creating probes that are specific enough to just the group one tries to detect, but also general enough to catch anything within that group.

view more 

Credit: WU Qianqian

New DNA probes allow for efficient surveying of the hidden lives of squids and octopuses in the deep sea. This development by Kobe University provides an effective tool for marine ecological research and conservation efforts.

Squids and octopuses eat and are eaten, and in between that they move around a lot. “Cephalopods play an important role in marine ecosystems, contributing to the distribution of energy and nutrients in the food web,” explains Kobe University marine ecologist WU Qianqian. And while for ecological research it is therefore essential to know about the distribution of the various species of squids and octopuses, collectively known as cephalopods, their deep-sea habitat is largely inaccessible to direct surveys. Wu says, “The deep sea covers a large portion of Earth’s surface and is home to many unknown organisms whose ecology remains largely unexplored.”

Wu and her team therefore set out to develop a detection system based on DNA released to the environment. In the technique known as “environmental DNA metabarcoding,” the environmental DNA is probed with small pieces of DNA specific to the target, similar to how anglers use specific bait to catch a particular species. The challenge is creating probes that is specific enough to just the group one tries to detect, but also general enough to catch anything within that group. “For this, our lab, which is renowned for its environmental DNA research, worked together with researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) who have developed a system for collecting large amounts of deep-sea samples,” says Wu.

In the journal Marine Environmental Research, the Kobe University researcher now reports that they developed DNA probes, called “primers,” that could specifically detect DNA from a broad range of cephalopod species. This worked both in mock samples created from tissues from the Osaka Museum of Natural History and in sea samples from the surface all the way down to 2,000 meters deep. In the latter, their ability to detect some species of cephalopods in the waters around Japan for the first time is a testament to the power of their technique. One possible key element in their success was that Wu and her colleagues were fishing for longer DNA fragments than had been attempted before. Although longer DNA fragments might degrade more quickly, this is not as big of a problem in the deep, cold sea, and it also ensures that the DNA is relatively “fresh,” more accurately representing the distribution of species. Having more DNA per sample also allows for more precise identification of exactly what species it came from.

The Kobe University team detected octopus DNA only in samples from the deepest seas. From their trials with mock samples, the team can be confident that this is not because their primers don’t work properly; rather, they see it as their technique’s ability to even infer the target organisms’ lifestyle from the results, as octopuses are mostly ground dwelling, hidden and solitary.

“In future studies, we need to nevertheless revise our sampling strategy to account for life history and behavioral patterns of different cephalopods. In addition, we need to resolve issues with misidentification of species due to errors in the DNA databases, and for this we intend to strengthen the collaboration between molecular biologists and taxonomists” says Wu. She adds: “Nevertheless, our technique is expected to open new possibilities for deep-sea cephalopod research and to serve as a foundation for marine life conservation.”

This research was funded by the Ministry of Environment of Japan. It was conducted in collaboration with researchers from Kyoto University, the Osaka Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum and Institute, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) and the Okinawa Churashima Foundation.

Kobe University is a national university with roots dating back to the Kobe Higher Commercial School founded in 1902. It is now one of Japan’s leading comprehensive research universities with nearly 16,000 students and nearly 1,700 faculty in 10 faculties and schools and 15 graduate schools. Combining the social and natural sciences to cultivate leaders with an interdisciplinary perspective, Kobe University creates knowledge and fosters innovation to address society’s challenges.

“For this research, our lab, which is renowned for its environmental DNA research, worked together with researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) who have developed a system for collecting large amounts of deep-sea samples,” says Kobe University marine ecologist WU Qianqian.

Credit

WU Qianqian

---

Journal

Marine Environmental Research

DOI

10.1016/j.marenvres.2025.107094 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Animal tissue samples

Article Title

Development of universal PCR primers for the environmental DNA metabarcoding of cephalopod (Mollusca) diversity

Article Publication Date

14-Apr-2025

 

New method for detecting nanoplastics in body fluids

Together with the company BRAVE Analytics, researchers at TU Graz have developed a method for detecting nanoplastics in liquids and determining their composition

Graz University of Technology

Facebook

XLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

The sensor platform uses laser light to detect nanoplastic particles in liquids. Image source: Lunghammer - TU Graz

view more 

Credit: Lunghammer - TU Graz

Microplastics and the much smaller nanoplastics enter the human body in various ways, for example through food or the air we breathe. A large proportion is excreted, but a certain amount remains in organs, blood and other body fluids. In the FFG bridge project Nano-VISION, which was launched two years ago together with the start-up BRAVE Analytics, a team led by Harald Fitzek from the Institute of Electron Microscopy and Nanoanalysis at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) and an ophthalmologist from Graz addressed the question of whether nanoplastics also play a role in ophthalmology. The project partners have now been able to develop a method for detecting and quantifying nanoplastics in transparent body fluids and determining their chemical composition. As an exemplary application of the method, the research team is investigating whether intraocular lenses release nanoplastics. There have been no such studies to date, and initial results have already been submitted to a scientific journal.

Scattered laser light reveals concentration and composition

Micro- and nanoplastics are detected in two steps. The sensor platform developed by BRAVE Analytics draws in the liquid to be analysed and pumps it through a glass tube. There, a weakly focused laser is shone through the liquid in or against the direction of flow. If the light hits any particles, the laser pulse accelerates or decelerates them – larger particles more strongly than smaller ones. The different velocity values allow conclusions to be drawn about the size of the particles and their concentration in the liquid. This method, called optofluidic force induction, was developed by Christian Hill from BRAVE Analytics at the Medical University of Graz.

What is new is the combination of optofluidic force induction with Raman spectroscopy. Now the spectrum of the laser light scattered by individual particles in the liquid is also analysed. A small part of the light, the so-called Raman scattering, has a different frequency to the laser itself and thus allows conclusions to be drawn about the composition of the particles. “Depending on the material of the focused particles, the frequency values are slightly different in each case and thus reveal the exact chemical composition,” says Raman spectroscopy expert Harald Fitzek. “This works particularly well with organic materials and plastics.”

Intraocular lenses: Tests on the possible presence of nanoparticles

The Institute of Electron Microscopy and Nanoanalysis is currently conducting further investigations into the extent to which intraocular lenses yield nanoplastics spontaneously, after mechanical stress or when exposed to laser energy. The findings from these tests are extremely important for ophthalmic surgeons and lens manufacturers and will be published in a scientific journal.

“Our method for detecting micro- and nanoplastics can be applied to clear body fluids such as urine, tear fluid or blood plasma,” says Harald Fitzek. “However, it is also suitable for the continuous monitoring of liquid flows in industry as well as drinking and waste water.”

Harald Fitzek, Christian Hill and Christian Neuper (from left) at the sensor platform, which uses laser light to detect nanoplastic particles in liquids. Image source: Lunghammer - TU Graz

Credit

Lunghammer - TU Graz

Journal

Analytical Chemistry

DOI

10.1021/acs.analchem.3c04657 

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Optofluidic Force Induction Meets Raman Spectroscopy and Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry: A New Hyphenated Technique for Comprehensive and Complementary Characterizations of Single Particles

 

Pioneering research reveals Arctic matter pathways poised for major shifts amidst climate change

University of Bristol

Facebook

XLinkedIn
MessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Image shows the German research icebreaker Polarstern moored to an ice floe during the polar night.

view more 

Credit: Steffen Graupner / Alfred Wegener Institute

A new study has shed unprecedented light on the highly variable and climate-sensitive routes that substances from Siberian rivers use to travel across the Arctic Ocean. The findings raise fresh concerns about the increasing spread of pollutants and the potential consequences for fragile polar ecosystems as climate change accelerates.

The international research, published today in Nature Communications and led by the University of Bristol, in the UK, provides the clearest ever picture of how the underlying transport system, known as the Transpolar Draft, operates. It also uncovers the various factors controlling this major Arctic surface current, including warmer temperatures which could increase the spread of human-made pollutants.

The Transpolar Drift carries sea ice, fresh water, and suspended matter from the Siberian shelves across the central Arctic towards the Fram Strait channel, which connects to the Nordic Seas.

This cross-Arctic flow influences the delivery of both natural substances, such as nutrients, gases, organic compounds, and human-made pollutants – including microplastics and heavy metals – from Siberian river systems into the central Arctic and the North Atlantic. This material affects Arctic biogeochemistry and ecosystems, while the fresh water itself alters ocean circulation.

As the Arctic Ocean is a highly changeable environment, rather than following a steady course, river-sourced matter takes diverse, seasonally shifting routes shaped by changing shelf conditions and ocean currents, along with the formation, drift, and melting of sea ice. This results in rapid and widespread redistribution of both natural and pollutant matter.

Lead author Dr Georgi Laukert, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Oceanography at the University of Bristol, UK and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, US, said: “We found pronounced changes in the composition of Siberian river water along the Transpolar Drift, demonstrating this highly dynamic interplay. Seasonal shifts in river discharge and dynamic circulation on the Siberian shelf drive ocean surface variability, while interactions between sea ice and the ocean further increase the redistribution of river-borne matter.

“Another key discovery is the increasingly central role of sea ice formed along the Transpolar Drift – not only as a passive transport medium, but as an active agent in shaping dispersal patterns. This sea ice captures material from multiple river sources during growth, unlike most coastal sea ice, creating complex mixtures that are transported across vast distances.”

To decode these complex pathways, the international research team analysed seawater, sea ice, and snow samples using oxygen and neodymium isotopes, along with measurements of rare earth elements to produce geochemical tracer data. This geochemical fingerprinting allowed the researchers to track the origins of river-sourced matter and follow how it evolved along its route through the central Arctic over a year-long period.

The study draws on samples from MOSAiC, the largest-ever Arctic expedition and among the most ambitious polar research efforts, involving seven ice breakers and more than 600 global scientists.

Co-author Dr Dorothea Bauch, Researcher at Kiel University in Germany, said: “The findings represent unprecedented year-round observations. Previously, we only had summer data because it was too slow and hard to break through the ice in the winter. This sustained, interdisciplinary Arctic evidence offers important and comprehensive insights, which help us better understand highly complex ocean systems and the possible future implications.”

As summer sea ice continues to retreat due to warmer temperatures, circulation and drift patterns are changing.

Co-author Professor Benjamin Rabe, Research Scientist from the Alfred Wegener Institute and Honorary Professor at the University of Applied Science, in Bremerhaven, Germany said: “These shifts could significantly alter how fresh water and river-derived matter spread through the Arctic, with far-reaching implications for ecosystems, biogeochemical cycles, and ocean dynamics.”

The research also challenges a long-standing perception of the Transpolar Drift as a stable conveyor of river water. First observed during Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen’s historic Fram expedition in the 1890s, these latest findings discovered more than 130 years later indicate the Transpolar Drift is highly variable in both space and time.

Dr Laukert added: “While the study does not focus on individual compounds, it illuminates the underlying transport mechanisms—a critical step for predicting how Arctic matter transport will evolve in a warming climate. If even this iconic current is so dynamic, then the entire Arctic Ocean may be more variable and vulnerable than we thought.”

Image shows scientists retrieving seawater from different depths using a carousel water sampler deployed through a hole in the sea ice.

Credit

Josefa Verdugo

Journal

Nature Communications

Article Title

‘Dynamic ice–ocean pathways along the Transpolar Drift amplify the dispersal of Siberian matter’

Article Publication Date

14-Apr-2025

MAKE IT A  LIVING WAGE: $20

Bernie Sanders Demands a $17 Minimum Wage as Trump’s Tariffs Embarrass GOP

Hungry for an economic populism that challenges Trump, Democrats line up behind Sanders’s latest minimum wage push.

By Mike Ludwig ,

Truthout

April 10, 2025

Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a press conference to introduce the "Raise the Wage Act" on April 8, 2025, in Washington, D.C. The "Raise the Wage Act" would raise federal minimum wage over the next 5 years to at least $17 an hour.

Kayla Bartkowski / Getty Images

With whirlwind tariffs and a looming trade war with China threatening to raise prices, government services halted by sweeping staffing cuts and Republicans in Congress moving to slash the social safety net to pay for tax cuts that would primarily benefit the wealthy, experts say the GOP agenda coalescing under President Donald Trump poses a “triple threat” to the economic well-being of millions of low- and moderate-income families in the U.S.

On the campaign trail, Trump wooed swing voters with promises to tackle the affordability crisis and make the United States “wealthy again.” The U.S is among the world’s richest nations, but inequality has ballooned since the 1970s as wages stagnated and incomes for the ultra-rich soared. Wealth is also disappearing from retirement portfolios as stock market values plummet in response to tariffs unilaterally imposed by Trump. Tariffs are taxes on imports the president is leveraging to initiate painful trade negotiations with other countries, but much of the cost is passed on to U.S. consumers.

After several days of watching the global economy suffer completely avoidable damage, Trump abruptly changed course and announced on Wednesday a 90-day pause on his steepest global tariffs, but kept sky-high tariffs on China, a top supplier of affordable consumer goods. Economists across the political spectrum have panned Trump’s approach to tariffs as flawed and warn that rising prices could cost the typical household up to $3,800 a year and spark a global recession.

Republicans in Congress may be wary (if not terrified) of challenging the president on tariffs and other destructive policies, at least in public, but they are already lining up against raising the minimum wage, a widely popular policy that would help protect workers and lower-income families from the potential economic fallout of Trump’s policy gambles.

Earlier this week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) forced a vote on an amendment to the Senate budget resolution that would have called on lawmakers to gradually raise the federal minimum wage from a paltry $7.25 to $17 over the next five years. The Senate’s Democratic minority united behind the amendment along with one Republican, but the GOP majority voted against the minimum wage hike before sending the controversial budget blueprint to the House for approval.

Determined to make Republicans own their opposition to raising wages during a moment of acute economic anxiety and popular backlash to the Trump regime, Sanders and Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Virginia) introduced the Raise the Wage Act of 2025 on Tuesday. Backed by 85 civil society groups and the vast majority of Democrats in Congress, the legislation would gradually increase the federal minimum wage to $17 by 2030. This would provide a pay raise for more than 22 million workers, or 15 percent of the U.S. workforce, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Since Congress last raised the federal wage floor in 2009, the purchasing power of the $7.25 minimum wage has dropped by 32 percent to the lowest overall value since 1956, Sanders pointed out.

“We need the Republicans to understand that workers in their states can’t make it on $7.25 and $10 an hour, they have got to join us and help us raise that minimum wage to $17 an hour,” Sanders said during a press conference with labor activists on Tuesday.

As economists point out, raising the minimum wage would disproportionately benefit lower-wage employees in red states, particularly in the South, where workers have been left behind by decades of post-Jim Crow policies designed to maintain a pool of cheap labor. As a result, poverty rates across much of the South are higher than the rest of the country and often concentrated in Black and Brown communities.

“There’s some kind of mythology out there that the only people working for minimum wage are kids trying to make some extra spending money … and that is not the case,” Sanders said. “The vast majority of minimum wage earners are adults trying to make money to support their families.”

Last year, nearly one in four U.S. workers made less than $17 an hour, which is well below the living wage needed to make ends meet for a family of two working adults and at least one child in all 50 states. Meanwhile, workers saw the cost of housing and other essentials explode over the past two decades. In 2024, homelessness across the U.S. spiked by 18 percent. And last week, a Gallup survey found that 35 percent of Americans say they could not afford high quality health care if they needed it today, suggesting that lack of access has reached a new high in a nation that spends more on health care than any other.

“I sleep on the floor so my son can have the bed. I rent out rooms in my house just to keep a roof over our heads,” said Thomas White, a ramp worker at Dulles International Airport and member of Airport Workers United, during the press conference on raising the minimum wage. “I work full time at the airport and still can’t afford to live.”

The federal “subminimum wage” for tipped workers has been stuck at $2.13 per hour since 1991, and the current median wage for at least 38,000 workers with disabilities is just $3.50 per hour. The Raise the Wage Act would gradually phase out these subminimum wages for tipped workers, workers with disabilities and youth workers, assuring all workers earn at least $17 an hour by 2032.

While Trump has proposed eliminating taxes on tips in an effort to please working-class supporters, Republicans are still debating how to pay for such a policy without raising taxes on higher-income earners or adding to the federal debt, which many in the GOP oppose.

On the other end of the spectrum is Sanders, who argues that service workers are unable to stay out of poverty as long as the federal subminimum wage floor remains stagnant at $2.13 an hour plus tips.

“In the year 2025, in the richest country in the history of world, nobody should be forced to work for starvation wages,” Sanders said.

We’ve been here before. Along with a handful of progressive Democrats, Sanders has been the leading voice in Congress pushing for a minimum wage hike for years. In 2021, the House passed legislation to raise the minimum from $7.25 to $15 an hour, but it failed in the Senate despite a slim Democratic majority after eight centrist Democrats voted against the measure. Sanders introduced legislation to raise the minimum wage again in 2023 to push reluctant Democrats on the issue, but Congress failed to act before President Joe Biden left office.

Now that the GOP controls all branches of the federal government, a majority of Democrats in both the House and Senate are backing Sanders’s latest minimum wage push as party leaders prepare for a partisan showdown over federal spending reductions to pay for Trump’s signature tax cuts.

In a letter to GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson this week, Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries challenged the Republican from Louisiana to a one-on-one debate over the budget resolution currently before the House. Jeffries and other Democrats say Republicans are playing games with the budget numbers to conceal from public view drastic cuts to Medicaid, Medicare and other popular programs that are needed to pay for tax cuts that “primarily benefit wealthy billionaires like Elon Musk.”

If Democrats are finally finding their voice when it comes to pushing back on Trump’s economic policies with their own ideas, then Sanders has just the legislation to rub in Republicans’ faces. After years of congressional inaction, the bill would finally raise the minimum wage past $7.25 as the fallout from Trump’s federal power grab and tariff gambit become painfully clear to millions of people.

This Passover, We Must Reckon With Israel’s Massacre of Children in Gaza

The Passover story decries a ruler who inflicts atrocities on children. The Israeli military is doing that now in Gaza.

By Brant Rosen ,

Truthout

April 11, 2025

Palestinian children play in Gaza City, on March 30, 2025.Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto via 

By Brant Rosen , TruthoutPublishedApril 11, 2025

Content Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of violence to children.

As the Jewish community prepares to observe Passover this year, I’m thinking a great deal about the centrality of children to the Exodus story we tell around the seder table. In particular, I’m struck that this narrative from the Torah begins with a terrifying description of atrocities committed against children. As Exodus opens, a new pharaoh arises over Egypt who openly dreads the demographic growth of the Israelite minority. After oppressing them with forced labor, he orders Hebrew midwives to kill newborn male children. When they resist his demand, he charges the Egyptians to throw all baby boys into the Nile. Shortly after, Moses is born and is saved from this decree of death by his mother, his sister and the pharaoh’s daughter, who adopts him.

Among other things, the Exodus story drives home the tragically familiar truth that children are not mere casualties of wartime atrocities, but are actually targeted by state violence. According to a 2014 report in The New Yorker, “The specific targeting of children is one of the grimmest new developments in the way conflicts have been waged over the past fifty years.”

Those who participate in the Passover seder are required not only to read the story of the Exodus, but to examine its relevance, as the Haggadah instructs us, “in every generation.” As such, the opening of the narrative presents us with all too disturbing parallels — and a critical moral challenge. This Passover — the second to come amidst the ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza and mass forced displacement in the West Bank — we would be grievously remiss if we failed to acknowledge the scores of children who have been killed, maimed and traumatized by Israel’s ongoing military onslaught.

The official death toll in Gaza has now broken the 50,000 mark, including more than 17,000 children. (The medical journal The Lancet has concluded that the total number of those killed is likely 40 percent higher.) On March 18, the day that Israel broke a two-month ceasefire, the Israeli military killed more than 400 Palestinians, including 183 children and 94 women — on what observers call the single bloodiest day of the genocide.

More recently, on April 3, Israel bombed the Dar al-Arqam School-turned-shelter in Gaza City, killing 29 people, 18 of whom were children. In its report on the attack, Al Jazeera quoted a spokesperson from Gaza’s emergency rescue workers: “What is going on here is a wake-up call to the entire world. This war and these massacres against women and children must stop immediately. Children are being killed with cold blood here in Gaza.”

Related Story

We Charge Genocide: The Shofar Calls Us to Account on Rosh Hashanah
In the Jewish new year, we must confront the carnage that Zionism has wrought.
By Brant Rosen , Truthout October 3, 2024

For those who stand in solidarity with Palestinians, certain reports and images have become seared into our hearts and minds. For many, the tipping point moment into the abyss occurred in early 2024, with the phone recording of 6-year-old Hind Rajab, pleading with her mother for rescue before the Israeli military shot 335 bullets into her family’s car. One month later, the world was horrified by the image of Sidra Hassouna, a 7-year-old Palestinian girl from northern Gaza, hanging dead off the ledge of a destroyed house with half her body missing.

On May 26, 2024, a 1-year-old baby, Ahmad Al-Najjar, whose headless body was held aloft by a terrified, grief stricken man following what has come to known as the Rafah Tents Massacre — a night in which 45 Palestinians, most of them women and children, were killed, burned alive and beheaded. One doctor who witnessed the carnage commented, “In all my years of humanitarian work, I have never witnessed something so barbaric, so atrocious, so inhumane. These images will haunt me forever… And will stain our conscience for eternity.”

Denial can take many forms. For some, it is rooted in racist dehumanization of the other; others may be just too overwhelmed to allow themselves to comprehend the massive slaughter of children in such a heinous fashion; still others rationalize the truth of it away, dismissing mass murder as “collateral damage” or Hamas’s use of “human shields” (a cynical claim that has been consistently debunked by human rights observers).

For Israel’s supporters, it is even more unthinkable to face the increasing evidence that the Israeli military might well be intentionally targeting children for mass murder. A recent Al Jazeera “Fault Lines” documentary, “Kids Under Fire,” makes a compelling case for this claim, with extensive eyewitness interviews with volunteer American health care workers and human rights experts. Their accounts, corroborated across hospitals and over time, suggest a systematic pattern: increasing numbers of child victims were not injured as a result of bombing raids, but of direct gunshot wounds, often to the head. One of the doctors interviewed in the film, Tammy Abughnaim, an American emergency physician from Chicago, commented:

More and more, I started to see children with penetrating injuries like gunshot wounds. After five, six, seven, eight, I came to the realization that somebody is shooting children. I didn’t want to believe that children were being shot. Nobody wants to believe that. Nobody wants to think that other humans are capable of annihilating children in that way.

Abughnaim’s testimony is corroborated in the film by Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina: “The target at the end of a scope is unmistakable. They are a young human being, and when that trigger gets pulled on that target, it is not by accident. At all. Ever.”

At one point, the interviewer asked Miranda Cleland of Defense for Children International – Palestine, “How you ever thought through ‘what’s the strategic reason to shoot a child? What message should we take from a military that would target children?’” Cleland’s reply: “I’ve thought about it a lot and the only conclusion I can come to is that Israeli soldiers are shooting Palestinian children because they want to. And I think they do it because they are allowed to and nobody has stopped them.”

Nabeel Rana, a vascular surgeon from Peoria, Illinois, put a finer point on it: “You’re wiping out a certain number, maiming a certain number and permanently mentally and emotionally disabling the rest. And that’s going to be passed down to the next generation. So, this is how you cripple a society.”

As centuries of state violence against oppressed communities have long demonstrated, the most direct way to undermine and even eradicate a society is to target its children. In December 2024, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) released a report, “Generation Wiped Out: Gaza’s Children in the Crosshairs of Genocide,” examining Israel’s crime of genocide against Gazans, including the genocide of children. The PCHR report concluded:

The killing of children, infliction of serious physical and mental harm, and subjection to harsh living conditions that destroy their lives cannot be dismissed as mere collateral damage of military attacks. Instead, these actions are part of a systematic strategy aimed at erasing Palestinian identity and annihilating future generations.

There are ominous indications that this annihilation is well underway. A Reuters analysis of data from the Gaza Health Ministry revealed that at least 1,238 families — defined as married couples and any children they might have — have been totally erased, with no survivors. In an AP article on this issue last year, Omar Shabaan, a Gazan researcher and economist, observed that of Gaza’s 400,000 families, none have been spared, causing permanent harm to Gaza’s society, history and future. “It is becoming clear,” he said, “that this is a targeting of the social structure.”

This dramatic upsurge in the killing of Palestinian children is not limited solely to Gaza. According to a recent report on the “Gazafication” of the West Bank, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem found that Israel is now using the military tactics of its assault on Gaza throughout the Occupied Territories, “where Palestinians face mass forced displacements, a surge in airstrikes and a sharp rise in attacks on children and other civilians.” B’Tselem reported that 180 children have been killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank since the Gazan genocide began, making it the deadliest period of Israel’s nearly 60-yearlong occupation for adults and children alike.

Reports of violence against children are indeed reminiscent of reports from Gaza. In an article entitled “Child Deaths Surge Amid ‘Gazafication’ of the West Bank,” the Guardian, interviewed Rigd Gasser, the father of 14-year-old Ahmad Rashid Jazar, who was shot in the chest in the village of Sebastia by an Israeli soldier while on an errand to get bread in January. Gasser was in a cafe when he heard the gunshots and rushed out when he heard calls for help. “I got closer and recognized my son. I knew him by his clothes, his body was all covered in blood,” he said.

The article also reports on the killing of cousins Reda Basharat (8) and Hamza Basharat (10) who were killed near home by an Israeli drone strike on January 8. The children were sitting outside with their 23-year-old cousin Adam when Hamza’s mother Eman heard the explosion. When she ran outside, she found Hamza injured and struggling to breathe. “He died in my arms,” she said. Eman added, “When I think about what happened to my son and remember the images of their bodies, and I see what is happening in Gaza on TV, I felt suddenly that they are doing the same thing.”

While these individual reports portray unspeakable cruelty, it’s important to bear in mind that it ultimately serves a larger purpose. Just like the violence inflicted by the pharaoh in the Exodus story, Israel’s violence toward children stems from the view of an entire people as a “demographic threat.” This view itself stems from Zionism: an ideology and movement that seeks to create and maintain a majority Jewish nation-state in historic Palestine. As such, the targeting of children is part of a larger effort to ethnically cleanse Gaza through a variety of means, including demolition of homes, population transfer and, as the PCHR report puts it, “erasing Palestinian identity and annihilating future generations.”

In this regard, Israel’s open fire policy toward Palestinian children is inseparable from other draconian actions that clearly seek the depopulation of Gaza and the West Bank. As of this writing, the AP has reported that Israel now controls 50 percent of Gaza as it enlarges its buffer zone, razing Palestinian homes, farmland and infrastructure to “the point of uninhabitability.” The military has also destroyed 90 percent of the southern city of Rafah, after issuing evacuation orders to its residents.

If there could be any doubt as to Israel’s intentions, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi, of the Likud party, like so many other Israeli politicians and military leaders before him, recently made Israel’s end game all too clear. In a radio interview he said pointedly that Israel should “wipe Gaza off the face of the earth,” adding, “There are no innocents there.… I have no mercy for those who are still there. We need to eliminate them.” More recently he commented in a TV interview: “You can’t live with these creatures next to us.… There is no peace with anyone here.… Every child born now — in this minute — is already a terrorist when he is born.”

Notably, Vaturi has also made similar comments about the West Bank region of Jenin, where 40,000 Palestinians were displaced by Israel in the month of February alone. “Erase Jenin. Don’t start looking for the terrorists — if there’s a terrorist in the house, take him down, tell the women and children to get out.” While Israel’s apologists dismiss comments such as these as hyperbole, it is critical to note that these very clear statements of intent are being backed up by very clear action.

As a congregational rabbi, I’ve been asked recurring questions over the last two Passovers. How can I celebrate this holiday while a genocide is being committed in my name? How can I observe a festival of Jewish liberation while a Jewish nation-state is acting as a pharaoh over an entire people? While I understand the anguish behind these questions, I believe the Passover ritual actually offers us an important opportunity: to squarely face the way the Exodus narrative is playing out in a very real way in our own day, to ask hard questions and avoid the simple, pat answers.

In his searing book about Israel’s genocide, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, writer Omar El Akkad writes:


A woman’s leg amputated, without anesthesia, the surgery conducted on a kitchen table. A boy holding his father’s shoe, screaming. A girl whose jaw has been torn off. A child, still in diapers, pulled out of the tents after the firebombing, his head severed from his body.

Is there distance great enough, to be free of this? To be made clean?

This Passover, the season for asking questions, El Akkad’s challenge pounds insistently on the collective conscience of the world.

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.


Brant Rosen is the rabbi of congregation Tzedek Chicago and co-founder of the Jewish Voice for Peace Rabbinical Council.