Bi-Weekly Brief: February 12, 2024
Rafah a “pressure cooker of despair” as US remains reluctant to exert pressure on Israel
On January 31, just days after the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel was “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza, Judge Jeffrey White of the US District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed on jurisdictional grounds the Center for Constitutional Rights case charging President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin with complicity in genocide.
But he also voiced his regret in having to do so, stating that “the undisputed evidence before this Court comports with the finding of the ICJ and indicates that the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law.”
The language of Judge White’s ruling is so unusual that it is worth quoting at length:
“There are rare cases where the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the Court. This is one of those cases. The Court is bound by precedent and the division of our coordinate branches of government to abstain from exercising jurisdiction in this matter. Yet, as the ICJ has found, it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide. This Court implores Defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.”
The Biden Administration has turned a deaf ear to the Court’s plea, even as it dismissed the ICJ ruling as “unfounded.” Instead, it has declined to use the leverage presented by US military aid and diplomatic cover to curb Israel’s killing spree. The lives of nearly 2,000 Palestinians have been extinguished in the 2 ½ weeks since the ICJ ruling, bringing the Gaza Health Ministry’s death total to more than 28,300. Now 100,000 residents of Gaza are either dead, wounded or missing and presumed dead, and the US remains opposed to any Security Council resolution that would call for a “humanitarian ceasefire,” as did a draft put forward recently by Algeria which will soon be re-submitted. The slaughter has now reached Rafah where muddy tent encampments shelter over a million people who have been forced to flee south. As heavy bombardments shatter the city, the US posture of backing ‘Israel’s right to defend itself’ while calling on it to abandon the indiscriminate killing of civilians appears calamitous, cynical and totally ineffectual.
Hapless diplomacy
In pursuit of the Biden Administration’s prime foreign policy goal of ‘normalization’ with Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State Blinken during his fifth trip to the region was informed by the Saudis on February 6 that “there will be no diplomatic relations with Israel unless an independent Palestinian state is recognized on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and that the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip stops and all Israeli occupation forces withdraw from the Gaza Strip.” He did not fare much better in Israel, where Netanyahu dismissed Hamas’ negotiating proposals as “delusional” and reportedly rebuffed Administration efforts to reach a “sustained pause” during which hostages could be released. Instead, the Israeli prime minister directed the IDF to prepare for a “massive operation” in Rafah and plan the evacuation – where to? - of its population, who are penned in by the Egyptian border and the sea. White House spokesperson John Kirby said such a military operation will be a “disaster.”
While Biden on February 8 referred to Israel’s conduct in Gaza as “over the top,” he has nevertheless been urging Congress to give Israel another $14.1 billion for weapons purchases. On the same day, as voting began on the foreign aid package including the additional funds for Israel, he issued a national security memorandum requiring the State Department to get written assurances that countries receiving US weapons will abide by US standards and international law and mandating an assessment by the Departments of Defense and State that weapons are being used appropriately, with unspecified consequences to follow if they are not. An unnamed official hastened to say the memorandum was crafted for the more than 100 countries that receive US weapons and not with Israel in mind, and the Administration “did not believe the country was failing to meet U.S. standards.” And on Feb. 10 the White House stated that Biden’s “over the top” comment did not mean there would be any change in US policy.
The Biden Administration has meanwhile been ramping up military attacks on what it maintains are Iran-backed militias in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. In the words of Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, “America is apparently willing to risk being further entangled yet again in Middle East wars, because it is unwilling to stare down an Israeli leader who has his own political survival at stake — perhaps that’s true of the president here, as well — and who is insistent on maintaining his apartheid regime.”
The war on UNRWA
While hesitating to put significant pressure on Israel, the Biden Administration has been swift to embrace Israel’s version of events, even when unaccompanied by evidence. On January 26, within an hour of the ICJ ruling, the US announced that it was suspending aid to UNRWA because Israel had evidence that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza were involved in the October 7 attack. Sixteen countries and the EUimmediately followed suit.
But Britain’s Channel 4, The Financial Times and Sky News reviewed Israel’s 6-page dossier against UNRWA which had been given to donors, and found it contained no evidence to back up the allegations. UNRWA pointed out that the names of all 13,000 of its employees in Gaza were routinely screened against various terrorism lists and given to Israel for its own vetting.
Will the lack of evidence make any difference? Already eight Congressional bills have been filed with names like “The UNRWA Elimination Act’ (H.R. 7111), which variously call for UNRWA to be denied funds forever, for countries which fund UNRWA to be denied US aid, and for the UN to be denied aid until UNRWA is abolished. One bill (S.3723) terms UNRWA a terrorist organization and declares that anyone who has ever worked for it can be considered to be engaged in terrorist activity. The larger aim of the bills is to achieve a long-time Israeli goal of eliminating the Palestinian refugee issue – even if that means physically eliminating Palestinian refugees by abolishing their chief humanitarian lifeline.
Using food as a weapon
UNRWA – whose funding runs out by the end of February - is the main organization coordinating relief, shelter, medical care and education for Gaza’s largely refugee population, and already half of its people are at risk of starvation. People in the north of Gaza are eating grass and drinking polluted water. In January, only 16% of the planned aid convoys were able to reach northern areas, where “they were surrounded by large crowds of starving people.” In open defiance of the ICJ ruling, the entry of humanitarian aid has for weeks been blocked by the army and far-right settlers calling themselves Tzav 9 at Israel’s Kerem Shalom Crossing, who say they will block all aid from entering Gaza until the hostages are freed. According to Haaretz, Blinken had to abandon a planned visit to the Crossing to evaluate the entry of aid because of potential disruption by Tzav 9. On February 6, Israeli naval gunfire struck a UN aid convoy as it tried to reach the north where Israel is still busy demolishing entire neighborhoods.
The humanitarian convoys that manage to enter through the Rafah Crossing in the south are only meeting a fraction of the needs of the 1.6 million people who took refuge there and where the impact of hunger, thirst and lack of sanitation is compounded by some 700,000 cases of infectious diseases in the shelters. With starving mothers unable to produce breast milk, tiny babies are being fed with hard food. In Tom Stevenson’s words, “Gaza has the highest percentage of people facing acute food insecurity ever recorded,” with a quarter of its population facing catastrophic famine, which represents 80 percent of people worldwide currently in that category. UNRWA director Philippe Lazzarini reported on February 9 that 1,049 shipping containers of food donated by Turkey have been stuck for weeks in the port of Ashdod near Rafah, after Israeli customs officials barred releasing goods intended for UINRWA.
As well as turning Gaza into what UNICEF has called “a graveyard for thousands of children,” Israel’s war has created a population of 17,000 unaccompanied children who have lost their parents and are in a state of shock. The abbreviation W.C.N.S.F (“Wounded Child, No Surviving Family”) is now common in the medical centers that are still operational. The horror extends to the cemeteries themselves, at least 16 of which have been totally destroyed by the Israeli army in the search, it claims, for the bodies of hostages.
Committing ecocide
On January 30 the Israeli army acknowledged that it was pumping seawater into tunnels in the Gaza Strip, “confirming what had been an open secret for several weeks.” Israel had carried out a three-day test run in mid December and declared the flooding of tunnels near Gaza City to be a success.
It apparently has not been deterred by the outcry from environmentalists who warn that flooding tunnels with sea-water would irrevocably destroy what remains of sweet-water in the fragile Coastal Aquifer. Add this to the bulldozing of Gaza’s best agricultural land, the smashing of its entire infrastructure and half of its buildings, the contamination of its soil with explosives, white phosphorous, and other toxic materials and heavy metals, and it appears that Gaza’s entire environment is being made unlivable for many years if not decades to come.
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