内容摘要：Design automation software makers, including Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA, were told via letters from the US Commerce Department to stop supplying their technology to China.

Design automation software makers, including Cadence, Synopsys and Siemens EDA, were told via letters from the US Commerce Department to stop supplying their technology to China.

In late March 2022, as the scale of the corporate exodus from Russia became clear, Moscow legalised parallel imports - the import of products without the permission of the trademark owner.Parallel imports are not banned under international law and are allowed by some countries for certain goods, including Japan and the United Kingdom.

“More commonly, it is used to ensure supply of essential medicines but here, Russia has expanded its lists to more commonplace consumer goods”, Justine Nolan, the director of the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW Sydney, told Al Jazeera.The case of Apple, whose products in many cases fall under Western sanctions, provides a typical example of how Russia’s parallel imports regime works in practice.Russia’s largest retailer of Apple products, re:Store, closed for several months "to assess the situation" following the tech giant’s exit.

When re:Store reopened in September 2022, the retailer had changed its name to Restore: and expanded its range, selling not only Apple products but also hairdryers, gaming consoles and smart home appliances from other manufacturers.Restore: does not go to great lengths to hide its use of unofficial supply chains.

When Al Jazeera called Restore:’s technical assistance line posing as a customer, a customer service representative said it sold genuine Apple items sourced from China and Dubai.

“After the sanctions were imposed, suppliers found ways around and continued essentially uninterrupted shipments”, the customer service representative told Al Jazeera.The problem with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s failed initiative was not only the dehumanising and dangerous way in which it attempted to deliver aid at gunpoint. The aid itself was humiliating in both quality and quantity.

What people were given was not enough to survive on, let alone to restore any sense of human dignity. The boxes handed out contained just enough calories to prevent immediate death – a calculated cruelty designed to keep people alive on quarter-full stomachs while their bodies slowly consume themselves. No vegetables for nutrition. No seeds for planting. No tools for rebuilding. Just processed food, engineered to maintain a population in permanent crisis, forever dependent on the mercy of their destroyers.Photos from the distribution centre – showing desperate human beings visibly worn down by hunger, disease, and relentless war, corralled into metal lanes like livestock, waiting for scraps as they stared down the barrel of a gun – drew comparisons with well-known images of suffering and death from the concentration camps of the last century.

The similarity is not accidental. The “aid distribution centres” of Gaza are the concentration camps of our time – designed, like their European predecessors, to process, manage, and contain unwanted populations rather than help them survive.Jake Wood, the foundation’s executive director, resigned days before the collapse of the Tal as-Sultan operation, stating in his resignation letter that he no longer believed the foundation could adhere to “the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence”.