An Italian charity has sent 15 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Gaza for distribution among the civilian population.

The aid, which was collected from donors by the charity Confederazione Nazionale delle Misericordie d’Italia, took off aboard a C-130J military aircraft from an airfield in the central city of Pisa.

“We will continue to do everything possible to alleviate the suffering of the population of Gaza. Italy does not forget those who suffer,” Defence Minister Guido Crosetto said in a post on X.

The plane will first fly to the airport in Larnaca on Cyprus and the aid will be transferred from there to Gaza by sea.

The aid will be shipped to the Strip via the Cyprus Maritime Corridor, an initiative of the Cypriot government in coordination with the United Nations and international partners such as the European Union.

The aid is expected to arrive at the Israeli port of Ashdod. Israel has long been criticised for impeding the flow of aid into Gaza, something it has always denied.

On Thursday, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that, “in the last two days alone six attempts to deliver lifesaving assistance to besieged areas in North Gaza governorate were blocked.”

The office said that 79% of Gaza’s population is under active evacuation orders, complicating aid deliveries, and accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war.

Israel denies obstructing aid

COGAT, the Israeli agency that tracks and records all aid transferred into Gaza, maintains aid is flowing into the Strip, primarily via the Kerem Shalom, Erez and Kissufim crossings. Kissufim was opened for aid deliveries on Tuesday.

According to data published on the COGAT website, more than 1.1 million tonnes of aid has passed into Gaza since the start of the war in October last year. Israel accuses Hamas of impeding aid deliveries or of stealing aid to sell on.

“In a moment of such profound suffering for the population of Gaza, we felt the moral duty to make a concrete contribution to the local community,” said Misericordie president, Domenico Giani.

“The humanitarian crisis in Gaza requires constant and coordinated commitment from the international community. It is necessary to act not only to address immediate needs, such as the distribution of food aid, but also to address the root causes of the conflict and promote a lasting solution that guarantees human rights and the safety of all citizens.”

Earlier this year, the Italian government launched its Food for Gaza initiative with an initial €12 million donation.

That initiative, led by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs together with key humanitarian actors such as the World Food Programme and Red Cross, aims to strengthen collaboration and facilitate access to food assistance in order to alleviate the suffering of the population and improve food security in the Gaza Strip.

Cities across Italy have seen months of protests, demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and criticising the Italian government for continuing to export arms to Israel.

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Italy, considered the third biggest foreign supplier of arms to Israel after the US and Germany, assured in the wake of the 7 October attacks that it would cease to supply arms to Israel.

But in March this year, the Italian Defence Ministry acknowledged orders signed before 7 October had been delivered during the war, despite Italian law banning the export of lethal weapons to countries at war.

“After the start of operations in Gaza, the government immediately suspended all new export licences and all agreements signed after 7 October were not implemented,” Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told the Senate on Tuesday.

“I want to recall that the Italian policy of completely blocking of all new licences is much more restrictive than that applied by our partners – France, Germany and United Kingdom. These partners continue to use case-by-case assessments, including for new licences. We have blocked everything.”

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Los Angeles Sparks forward Dearica Hamby insists the WNBA is misapplying case precedent concerning the prospective employment of college athletes and minor league baseball players as a way to avoid scrutiny in her employment retaliation lawsuit, a new court filing asserts.

Hamby’s attorneys filed a memorandum responding to a recent WNBA court filing where the league insisted that Hamby’s employment lawsuit fails in part because—the league maintains—the WNBA is not her employer. While Hamby contends the WNBA and the Las Vegas Aces were her joint employer during a time when she says she experienced unlawful discrimination on account of being pregnant, the WNBA argues it is not a joint employer of players who are employed by, and sign employment contracts with, privately owned WNBA franchises. 

The WNBA drew support from Lamar Dawson v. NCAA, a 2019 case where a USC football player failed to establish the NCAA and Pac-12 were his joint employers. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reasoned that while the NCAA and Pac-12 regulated the relationship between Dawson and USC–including by setting eligibility rules and football scheduling–they didn’t hire or fire Dawson and didn’t place him at USC. The WNBA described its relationship with WNBA teams in an analogous light. The WNBA regulates the employment relationship between teams and players, including by enforcing disciplinary rules and overseeing a player draft process that gives teams the chance to draft (and employ) a player. But the WNBA insists it doesn’t directly control players. 

Not so fast, Hamby argues in a brief authored by Artur Davis, Dana Sniegocki and Erin Norgaard of HKM Employment Attorneys.

Hamby maintains a key distinguishing feature between Dawson and her is that while college athletes are not (save for Dartmouth College men’s basketball players) unionized employees, WNBA players are unionized. The WNBPA negotiates a collective bargaining agreement with the WNBA that specifies terms and conditions of employment and outlines league authority. There is no such equivalent in college sports since unionization requires, among other things, employment recognition. 

As Hamby tells it, the WNBA player-WNBA arrangement empowers the league with considerably more influence over WNBA players than the NCAA or Pac-12 enjoyed over USC football players in 2019. More specifically, Hamby cites “the structure of compensation and benefits, the rules of the free agent market, and the power to discipline and police misconduct” as distinguishing the WNBA’s role. 

Hamby also points out that while Dawson was decided only five years ago, that was a different era in college sports. The world of college athlete compensation has changed dramatically since then. The days of amateurism, as that term was understood in 2019, are over and never coming back. 

To that point, in NCAA v. Alston (2021), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the NCAA is subject to ordinary antitrust scrutiny and violated antitrust law by limiting how colleges compensate college athletes for education-related expenses. That same year, the NCAA withdrew its restraint on college athletes using their right of publicity by adopting the interim NIL policy. 

Since 2021, college athletes have generated earnings in NIL deals while some NIL collectives operate as pay-for-play vehicles. The NCAA is also attempting to settle the House, Carter and Hubbard antitrust cases by paying athletes for lost opportunities to earn compensation via NIL, video games and broadcasts and letting colleges directly pay athletes for media rights, ticket sales, sponsorships and NIL in a salary-cap like model. Most on point, college athletes have had recent success arguing they’re employees. It’s logical to assume that if Dawson were litigated in 2024, its trajectory would be different in ways that better align with Hamby’s arguments.

Further, Hamby accuses the WNBA of giving short shrift to another joint employment case in sports: Aaron Senne, et al. v. MLB. That 2022 case, which concluded via a settlement, concerned minor league baseball players suing MLB, which they argued was their joint employer and on the hook to pay them no less than minimum wage and overtime pay as required by the Fair Labor Standards Act. A U.S. magistrate judge found that MLB functioned as a joint employer given its control over the entry level draft, the ability to discipline players and set first-year salaries. The WNBA reasoned Senne is inapplicable since it didn’t involve the types of claims pleaded by Hamby and didn’t concern a unionized employee like Hamby.

But Hamby argues the WNBA, which she criticizes for “cosign[ing] Senne to a footnote” in its brief, is “silent” as to whether the elements of joint control discussed in Senne apply to her case. She said it “speaks volumes” that the WNBA, at least as Hamby tells it, doesn’t adequately address analogous conduct by the WNBA in economic and disciplinary powers.

U.S. District Judge Andrew P. Gordon, who presides in Nevada, will weigh the competing arguments in deciding whether to dismiss Hamby’s lawsuit.