January 3, 2024
Dehydration, starvation and disease ravage the Gaza Strip as World Court prepares for genocide hearing
Having killed 29 of its own soldiers through accidents and ‘friendly fire’, having obliterated more than 22,000 Palestinian lives, with numerous extended families entirely wiped out, having wounded more than 57,000 people and forced children to have limbs amputated without anesthesia, having displaced 85 percent of the population, destroyed or damaged over 70 percent of Gaza’s homes and most of the hospitals, schools, public buildings and religious and cultural centers, Israel announced on January 1 that it was withdrawing several thousand troops from the Gaza Strip.
While warning that the war would continue throughout 2024, Israel stated that the troops were being withdrawn for “scheduled training” and to alleviate “economic burdens,” and made no reference to US pressure to abandon what President Biden referred to as “indiscriminate bombing” for a more targeted war against Hamas. The January 2nd assassination by drone of Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri in the southern suburbs of Beirut could indicate that Israel is prepared to intensify the military conflict that has been taking place beyond its borders.
As for its partner in crime, even as the US has publicly pressed Israel to transition to a more ‘targeted’ type of warfare, the Biden Administration scuttled attempts by the UN Security Council to add the call for a ceasefire to a resolution urging more humanitarian aid, and then abstained from the diluted resolution that the Security Council finally passed on December 22. There have been reports that Israel is using ‘dumb’ munitions designed for massive destruction taken from the stockpile that the US had ‘pre-positioned’ in the country. On Dec. 29, the Biden administration for a second time bypassed Congress citing the “urgency of Israel’s defensive need” and approved the sale to Israel of munitions worth $147.5 million, including the kind of weapons that had caused the civilian death rate to soar.
On the same day, December 29, South Africa instituted proceedings in the foremost judicial body of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or World Court, asserting that Israel “has failed to prevent genocide and is committing genocide in manifest violation of the Genocide Convention” of 1948. Israel immediately denounced the South African claim as a “blood libel” and said it has “no factual and judicial basis and is a despicable and cheap exploitation of the court. South Africa is collaborating with a terror group that calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.”
On January 2, Prof. Francis Boyle, an international law expert who won the first two cases before the ICJ invoking the Genocide Convention, explained on Democracy Now! that if South Africa succeeds in getting the ICJ to order that Israel “cease and desist” from committing acts of genocide against Palestinians, all 153 states that have signed the Geneva Convention will be obliged “to prevent” those acts from continuing to take place. South Africa is due to present its case on January 11 while Israel will dispute those findings on January 12, possibly with the help of Alan Dershowitz, whose clients have included Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump. Prof. Boyle hopes that World Court president Joan Donoghue, whom he called a longtime State Department “legal apparatchik,” will not be in a position to undermine proceedings which could, like the lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights against the US President, Secretary of State and Defense Secretary, expose US complicity in the crime of genocide.
The 84-page ‘Application Instituting Proceedings’ South Africa submitted to the World Court details Israel’s genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza during the current hostilities as well as the devastation inflicted on the lives and livelihoods of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank well before October 7, 2023. The document reveals just how systematic Israel has been over the decades in its efforts to dehumanize Palestinians and deliberately inflict on the residents of the Gaza Strip “conditions calculated to bring about their destruction.” As the document spells out, the deprivation of water and destruction of water installations and the sanitation infrastructure have played a key role over many years in the Israeli effort “to make the daily process of living, and dignified living, more difficult for the civilian population.”
That effort is now reaching its fruition, with half the population at risk of starvation and infectious diseases rapidly spreading. The World Health Organization has described the hunger ravaging the Gaza Strip and how the “lack of sanitation and hygiene and a collapsing health system” have added to “the toxic mix.” According to UNICEF, children are being dramatically impacted by thirst and the lack of clean water, while generators, plastic pipes and other supplies needed to repair damaged water systems are stranded at the border due to constant bombing and Israel’s entry restrictions. On December 29, UNRWA reported that the Israeli army had fired on one of its aid convoys. The number of UNRWA employees killed by Israel has now reached 142.
Meanwhile, an investigation carried out by The Washington Post debunked Israel’s claims (which are upheldby the US) that Hamas had been using Gaza’s leading hospital, Al-Shifa, as a command and control center. Doctors who worked at Kamal Adwan Hospital, which was also accused by Israel of harboring Hamas, described for CNN the brutality and desecration of bodies that took place during the eight-day Israeli invasion of the hospital and bulldozing of its grounds.
As Israel continues its military onslaught on Gaza in the new year, it is presenting the ethnic cleansing of the population as the “humanitarian solution.” One poll shows that “encouraging the voluntary migration of the residents of the Gaza Strip” is strongly endorsed by 68 percent of the Israeli population. Leave or die, are the ‘voluntary’ alternatives on offer to the population. On December 28, Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said in a TV interview that states willing to take in refugees from the Gaza Strip should send him an email and be sure to include the address of their country. There is no sign so far that Egypt is prepared to be one of these countries, but financial inducements might change that. According to the Times of Israel, discussions are underway with Congo and other countries to allow in ‘voluntary’ refugees from the Gaza Strip. The US has publicly opposed the ethnic cleansing plan.
In a chilling podcast Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges compares what Israel is doing in Gaza to Nazi methods to depopulate the Warsaw Ghetto:
“Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary. The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland. There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation - for those who want to live - will be the only option….The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel. Israeli leaders are also cynically advertising the proposed ethnic cleansing as voluntary and a humanitarian gesture to solve the catastrophe they created. This is the plan. No one, especially the Biden administration, intends to stop it.”
Will a World Court ruling that Israel is indeed carrying out genocide make any difference?
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We stand out with Mass Peace Action and other allies on Dec 31, 2023.