Water Fact – December 18, 2023
While US blocks a cease-fire, Israel pursues genocide and ecocide in the Gaza Strip, and the ‘Gaza-ification’ of the West Bank
As the 75th anniversaries of both the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Dec. 9) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Dec. 10) came and went, the US demonstrated its utter disdain for international law.
On Dec. 8, it vetoed the UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire. The vote was 13-1, with the UK abstaining. On Dec. 9, the Biden administration skipped the usual Congressional review process to rush Israel 13,000 rounds of tank ammunition valued at more than $106 million. It has serviced Israel’s war machine with US manufactured Mark 84 2,000-pound bombs and tens of thousands of guided and unguided bombs, artillery shells and other armaments, enabling Israel to intensify its slaughter in the Gaza Strip. According to a Dec. 9th headline in Haaretz, “The Israeli Army Has Dropped the Restraint in Gaza, and the Data Shows Unprecedented Killing.” During just the first two months of the onslaught, one of every 150 children has been killed, the equivalent of four million child deaths in the US. On December 12, the US cast a negative vote when the UN General Assembly called for “an immediate humanitarian cease-fire” that was supported by 153 nations, with 23 abstentions. The handful of countries that stood alongside the US and Israel against most of the world were Austria, Czech Republic, Guatemala, Liberia, Micronesia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, and Paraguay. On December 17, three of the abstaining countries, Britain, Germany and France, called for a sustainable cease-fire, leaving the US increasingly isolated in its pro-war stance.
Gaza a ‘living hell’
The impact on the ground of US complicity in the genocidal war could hardly be more grim. By Dec. 14, the known death toll had reached 18,787 – 70% women and children - with perhaps thousands more under the rubble. The figures could not be updated because of a total three-day communications blackout imposed on Gaza.
The news that did get through gives a sense of just how little care the army takes with its use of firepower: on Dec. 15, three shirtless Israeli hostages waving a white flag were reportedly shot dead by the army “by mistake.” As OCHA reported, the Israeli army surrounded two hospitals in the north of the Strip where thousands were sheltering, striking a maternity ward at Kamal Adwan Hospital and killing pregnant women and some medical staff. Staff members were prevented from giving support to babies in intensive care. On Dec. 16, Israeli bulldozers reportedly drove over tents sheltering displaced and injured people, burying many alive and killing an unknown number of them.
More than 50,000 are injured and only eight of 36 hospitals are functional. The two main hospitals in the south which are also sheltering thousands of displaced persons are operating at three times their bed capacity, with severely limited fuel and medical supplies.
As cold winter rains swamp the streets already flooded with sewage from the blasted infrastructure and drench hastily constructed tents and tarpaulins, diseases are spreading rapidly, with dangerous virusesdetected in the blood of some of the released hostages. Some 360,000 cases of infectious diseases have been reported by the World Health Organization, among them meningitis, chickenpox, hepatitis A, dysentery, acute respiratory infections, a 66% surge in diarrhea among children under five, skin diseases, kidney failure caused by extreme dehydration, sepsis and starvation.
The trickle of aid that has been permitted to enter has done little to ease the disastrous shortages of food and clean water, as two million people are being corralled in the south of the Gaza Strip where there are no services of any kind. Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees head Mustafa Barghouti states that “half of Gaza is now starving.” “South Gaza’s Horror Scenario: 18,000 People per Square Km Without Water or Power” is a Haaretz headline. In the words of Dr. Tarek Loubani, “We’ve already had our first starvation deaths…. the next few weeks it will be like falling from a cliff, and we will see 20,000, 30,000 people dying.”
Making water an offensive weapon of war
On Dec. 12, the Israeli army began pumping sea water into the tunnels a mile north of Shati refugee camp in partly demolished Gaza City. The Wall Street Journal had reported that the action “could destroy the tunnels and drive the fighters from their underground refuge but also threaten Gaza’s water supply.”
On Dec. 15, the army declared the initial flooding trial had been a success and asserted that Israel would take care not to endanger hostages who might be confined underground if it continued to pump thousands of cubic meters of seawater each hour into the tunnel network, which is believed to extend some 300 miles (see tunnel graphic).
Environmentalists have voiced concerns that the flooding of tunnels could destroy what remains of sweet-water in the fragile Coastal Aquifer, which is already 97% contaminated. Prof. Eilon Adar, a water expert at Ben-Gurion University, said that Israel itself would not be affected by Israel’s action because the water in the aquifer flows from Israel south to Gaza – but still he would “hesitate about destroying a massive natural resource.”
The Gaza-ification of the West Bank
While Gaza has had the world’s attention, the murder, arrests and forced displacement of West Bank Palestinians have accelerated. Those killed by the army and settlers between Oct. 7 and December 15 is reported to be 278, including 70 children – that’s about four a day. On Dec. 17, five more young men were killed during a military raid and drone strike in the Nour Shams refugee camp in Tulkarm. There have been at least 344 settler attacks since October 7.
On Dec. 14, Israeli forces withdrew from Jenin, after using a drone strike and armored vehicles to kill a dozen people during their 60-hour-long operation, including a boy who was shot and prevented from reaching the hospital. According to Mohammad Sabaghi, the head of the committee that runs Jenin refugee camp, the latest Israeli assault is “collective punishment… There’s nothing that hasn’t been damaged or destroyed. Water, electricity, phone lines, the sewage system – everything.”
There have been some 4,520 arrests in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and there is considerable evidence that Palestinians are tortured in prison as a matter of routine and vengeance. Meanwhile, at least 13 Palestinian villages have been ‘cleansed’ of residents by military violence, settler terrorism and the outright denial of water to rural communities.
As Israeli activist Hagai El-Ad spells out in an important New Yorker piece on “the Gaza-ification of the West Bank,” Israel’s tactics to displace Palestinians are part of a state project that has been “unfolding in the West Bank for more than half a century already.” With eyes fixed on the Gaza Strip, Israel is “trying to accomplish as much displacement of Palestinians as possible while paying the minimal international price.”
Please plan to join our Stand Out for Gaza on Wednesday, December 20, 3:30 – 4:30, at Ruggles T station in Boston, Columbus Avenue entrance.
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