The Palestinian population is threatened with erasure as the world watches
November 13 looms. This date marks the end of the 30-day respite given Netanyahu by the Biden Administration to demonstrate that Israel is permitting aid to “surge” into Gaza or possibly face the consequences of the US enforcing its own law barring weapons from being sent to countries that prevent the entry of US humanitarian aid.
With Israel’s leaders jubilant over the election of Trump whom they believe will give Israel even more of a free hand than Biden who is now a lame duck president, it seems likely that nothing will be done to reverse conditions in northern Gaza which UN officials have called “apocalyptic.” They state that the “entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.” Biden may leave office without doing anything about the 500 or so reports that Israel has used US weapons to cause unnecessary harm to civilians in violation of domestic and international law. US taxpayers have funded 70% of Israel’s wartime expenses.
And now the genocide is intensified, unimpeded by international action. The multiplying atrocities that have brought the death toll to more than 43,600 – as many as 70 percent believed to be women and children - have received scant media attention. According to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, at least 365 familieshave lost 10 or more family members. Among the recently slaughtered are nearly 100 civilians in the Oct. 30th bombing of a residential building in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza and those wiped out in the Nov. 4thshelling of Kamal Adwan Hospital where child patients were killed and dozens of medical staff were wounded and arrested. The hospital director Hussam Abu Safiya is one of only two doctors remaining in the hospital which is still under attack. “I refused to leave the hospital and sacrifice my patients,” Dr. Abu Safiya told +972 Magazine, “so they punished me by killing my son.”
According to the Palestinian media office, since Israel’s siege of the north and obliteration of the towns of Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, Al-Attatra, and the Jabalyia refugee camp began in early October, Israel has blocked 3,800 aid trucks from entering the area, and “deliberately starved nearly 400,000 people there, including more than 100,000 children.” On Nov. 6 , an Israeli general stated that Israel was completing the evacuation of northern Gaza bordering Gaza City, and would not permit residents to return home. Israel appears to be carrying out the ‘General’s Plan’ to ethnically cleanse the northern quarter of the Gaza Strip. Erasure by Design, a report by the UK Action for Humanity, gives a damning assessment of the more than 65 Israeli evacuation orders that have forced over a million people into a so-called ‘humanitarian zone’ covering 13 percent of Gaza, that is devoid of sufficient shelter, food, sanitation, water and medical services. Only 30 trucks per day are now permitted to enter the southern Gaza Strip, a tiny fraction of the 500 or so which supplied Gaza before the war.
Meanwhile, Israel continues to reduce parts of Lebanon to ruins, with the death toll now exceeding 3,000. Little media attention has been given to the destruction of entire villages in the south and the strikes on Beirut, Baalbek, Sidon and Tyre. Will Massad Boulos, the Lebanese father-in-law of Trump’s daughter Tiffany, be able to negotiate the truce he reportedly said he would work to bring about as soon as Trump takes power?
The ‘war for Judea and Samaria’ is now spreading through the West Bank, as armed settlers terrorize towns, villages and refugee camps. There have been at least 177 settler attacks related to the olive harvest. Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese writes in her latest report that “genocidal conduct in Gaza set an ominous precedent for the West Bank. The deliberate strategy of Israel to render Palestinian life unsustainable has markedly intensified everywhere in the occupied Palestinian territory, with devastating consequences for Palestinian survival…. Advancing its goal of ‘Greater Israel’ threatens to erase the Indigenous Palestinian population.” The next Israeli ambassador to Washington, Yechiel Leiter, an American-born Israeli settler and former member of Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League that the US listed as a terrorist group, will likely make achieving that goal a top priority.
Israel also appears bent on eradicating components of the United Nations apparatus which sustain Palestinian life and uphold human rights. Its outlawing of 75-year-old UNRWA was called by UN General Secretary Guterres “a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.” This move drastically impacts distribution of aid in Gaza and life in the West Bank where UNWRA runs 96 schools and 43 health centers and gives monetary aid to refugees.
The request by International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan for ICC judges to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Defense Minister Gallant and three Hamas leaders has gone nowhere. Since the request was made last May, 7,000 more Palestinians have been killed, including the named Hamas leaders, Gallant is no longer in the cabinet, and Khan - who with his predecessor had been subjected to nine years of threats from Israel – remains under relentless pressure.
On Oct. 28 South Africa submitted 500 pages of evidence to the International Court of Justice to meet the deadline given by the Court to back up its claim that Israel was committing genocide. But don’t expect a ruling anytime soon. Israel has a deadline of July 2025 to submit its rebuttal and oral arguments are anticipated for the following year. By then the erasure of Palestinians could be nearly complete.
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