While the world watches: “Gaza has become a place of death and despair”
As Israel’s onslaught on Gaza passed its 100th day the ghastly superlatives are piling up.
Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian trauma surgeon who worked in the Gaza Strip for nearly 20 years, called it “the worst man-made medical disaster in modern history.” Save the Children reported that ten children on average each day have lost one or more limbs during the last three months, and many have had legs amputated without anaesthetic. In the words of Save the Children country director Jason Lee, “the impact of seeing children in that much pain and not having the equipment, medicines to treat them or alleviate pain is too much for even experienced professionals. Even in a war zone, the sights and sounds of a young child mutilated by bombs cannot be reconciled let alone understood within the bounds of humanity.” By January 15 only 15 or Gaza’s 36 hospitals were partially operational and doctors at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, now home to 10,000 displaced Palestinians, are living inside the operating room to care for the injured.
The mass destruction of homes and other buildings (‘domicide’) and killing of civilians in such a short period time is unprecedented in the 21st century. The 6,000 bombs dropped on Gaza in just the first week of the war surpassed the annual total dropped by the US on Afghanistan. By January 4, over 45,000 bombs and missiles weighing in excess of 65,000 tons, many of them US-made and supplied, had been dropped on the 25-mile-long, 5-mile-wide Gaza Strip. At least 24,285 Palestinians had perished by January 16, with thousands more dying under the rubble. The number of wounded now exceeds 61,000.
Ecocide is another by-product of the war, as Gaza’s entire environment is being made unlivable for years to come. By one estimate, 18% of Gaza’s best agricultural land has been destroyed.
Hundreds of wells have been smashed. The soil has been badly contaminated by white phosphorous and 281,315 metric tons of carbon dioxide – the equivalent of what 75 coal-fired power plants produce over the course of a year – have been emitted by US supply flights, Israeli bombardments from the skies, artillery, armored tanks and Hamas rockets.
Man-made famine looms. The UN World Food Program’s Arif Husain called what is happening in Gaza“unprecedented” in terms of the magnitude, severity and the speed with which Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing starvation, while a UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report found “the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity that the IPC initiative has ever classified for any given area or country.” In words of the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, “Everyone in Gaza is going hungry…The Gaza Strip was already in the throes of a humanitarian crisis before the war, mainly due to Israel’s 17-year blockade…Given this starting point, it is clear why Gaza plummeted into a full-blow catastrophe so quickly…The horror is growing by the minute, and the danger of famine is real. Still, Israel persists in its policy.” According to Tufts University’s Alex Dewaal, who heads its World Peace Foundation, “In the historical catalogue of famines and incidents of mass starvation (de Waal 2017; World Peace Foundation nd), it is hard to find a close parallel with the situation in Gaza. Few combine such a comprehensive siege with such comprehensive destruction of OIS [‘objects indispensable to survival’]… .The rigor, scale and speed of the destruction of OIS and enforcement of the siege surpasses any other case of man-made famine in the last 75 years.”
Israeli officials continue to deny there is hunger in the Gaza Strip.
What US Senators found at the Rafah Crossing
US Senator Chris Van Hollen from Maryland and Senator Jeff Merkley from Oregon were stunned by their visit on January 6 to the Egyptian side of the Rafah border. There they found a line of trucks stretching for miles waiting – sometimes for weeks - to be processed by an Israeli inspection team and cleared to enter Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid. In a warehouse they saw items that were denied entry, including medical kits for delivering babies, oxygen cylinders, tents and generators. Solar powered equipment is also on the banned list.
“When one item on a truck is rejected, the entire truck is rejected,” Senator Van Hollen said, citing the example of a UNICEF truck being turned away because water filtration systems were included in its cargo. He also cited the dangers facing humanitarian workers and stated that international NGOs that have worked in crisis zones around the globe have “never seen a worse process for ensuring the safe delivery of humanitarian assistance.”
During the first week of January, some 120 trucks entered each day, well below the 500 trucks that entered daily with supplies before the war. The Gaza Strip is now receiving only seven percent of the trucked and piped water that it had access to before the war. Only a fraction of planned deliveries have reached the devastated north of the Gaza Strip where, according to Martin Griffiths, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, there are corpses lying on the ground and people who are visibly starving are searching in vain for something to eat. On January 11, Israeli forces reportedly fired on people gathered for food in northern Gaza.
Martin Griffiths stated on January 5 that “areas where civilians were told to relocate for their safety have come under bombardment. Medical facilities are under relentless attack. The few hospitals that are partially functional are overwhelmed with trauma cases, critically short of all supplies, and inundated by desperate people seeking safety. A public health disaster is unfolding. Infectious diseases are spreading in overcrowded shelters as sewers spill over. Some 180 Palestinian women are giving birth daily amidst this chaos. People are facing the highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded. Famine is around the corner. For children in particular, the past 12 weeks have been traumatic: No food. No water. No school. Nothing but the terrifying sounds of war, day in and day out. Gaza has simply become uninhabitable. Its people are witnessing daily threats to their very existence — while the world watches on.”
The ICJ hears South Africa’s genocide complaint
Martin Griffiths’ statement was quoted by Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC, a member of the seven-person South African team, during its powerful and comprehensive January 11th presentation before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) urging the court to take “provisional measures” to halt Israel’s attacks that it calls “genocidal in character.” A ruling is expected soon on whether the court will uphold all, or some of the nine measures South Africa is requesting (see pg. 82-83), the first of which is for an immediate halt to Israel’s military operations. After that, the court could take years to investigate whether Israel has in fact breached the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
To describe why an immediate halt to the war is crucial, Attorney Ní Ghrálaigh recited some of the daily statistics that have led UNICEF to call Israel’s actions a “war on children”: on average 247 Palestinians are killed each day, including a daily toll of 48 mothers and over 117 children. She concluded: “The international community continues to fail the Palestinian people, despite the overt dehumanising genocidal rhetoric by Israeli governmental and military officials, matched by the Israeli military’s actions on the ground; despite the horror of the genocide against the Palestinian population being livestreamed from Gaza to our mobile phones, computers and televisions screens — the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate — so far vain — hope that the world might do something. Gaza represents nothing short of a ‘moral failure’, as described by the usually circumspect International Committee of the Red Cross.”
On January 12, the Israeli team argued before the court that Israel had a “right to defend itself’” – a right that does not in fact extend to an occupying power which the UN Security Council in its December 22, 2023 resolution affirmed Israel to be in the Gaza Strip. Israel claimed that it was Hamas that was carrying out genocide against Israel, ignoring the fact that even if that were indeed the case, genocidal actions can never be the appropriate response. Asserting that South Africa had close ties to Hamas, it dismissed as simply rhetoric the numerous statements by Israeli officials that South Africa had introduced to show “genocidal intent,” and it flatly denied that Israel is obstructing the entry of humanitarian aid or bombing hospitals. Rather, it said, Hamas is stealing the aid and is responsible for the killing of civilians and much of the destruction of the Gaza Strip through its boobytraps and the misfiring of its rockets. It urged the case to be thrown out on various procedural grounds.
The US response
Before legal arguments were presented to the ICJ, US National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby denounced the genocide claim as “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.” Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said it was both meritless and galling, and a distraction from the pursuit of security and peace.
‘Ceasefire’ remains a dirty word to the Biden Administration, which is widening the war even as it says it wants to contain it. On the day the Israeli team gave its testimony before the ICJ, President Biden bypassed both Congress and the Constitution to launch a major military strike with the UK on some 70 targets in Yemen. Yemen’s Houthi militia has been firing on ships bound for Israel through the Red Sea and said they would stop doing so when there was a ceasefire, which President Biden still shuns.
On January 15, South African lawyers announced they were bringing charges in civil court against the US and the UK for complicity in Israeli war crimes.
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