“Gaza is hanging by a thread” as US continues to defy world opinion while giving lip service to international law
Today, February 26, is the deadline for the report that Israel has been asked to submit to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) detailing what it has done to prevent genocidal killing and to provide “urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance” to the people of Gaza. On February 16, the Court - in its response to South Africa’s request for additional provisional orders - reiterated the need for Israel to carry out the measures laid out in its January 26 ruling, and to fully comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention
How can such an Israeli report – assuming one is presented to the World Court – finesse the killing of approximately one thousand residents of Gaza every week since the ICJ ruled that Israel is “plausibly” committing genocide, with the number of the dead now approaching 30,000, not counting the thousands under the rubble? How will it airbrush away the facts that considerably fewer trucks (a 30 percent drop according to Human Rights Watch) have recently been permitted to enter Gaza than earlier in the war and that Israel has stopped issuing visas to international NGO employees who deliver aid? How can it explain why humanitarian convoys are frequently blocked at the Kerem Shalom Crossing by Israeli settlers and fired on by the military while starving people have been shelled while waiting for rare food and water deliveries?
The impact of starvation and disease
On February 20, the UN World Food Program (WFP) announced it was forced to suspend attempts to deliver food to northern Gaza because “unprecedented levels of desperation” had led hungry crowds to seize food from trucks “amidst high tension and explosive anger.” The WFP reported that “food and safe water have been incredibly scarce and diseases are rife, compromising women and children’s nutrition and immunity and resulting in a surge of acute malnutrition. People are already dying from hunger-related diseases.”
In its update for February 21, OCHA stated that “catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity are reportedly intensifying across Gaza,” and cited “a steep rise in malnutrition among children and pregnant and breastfeeding women.” With the destruction of at least 26 miles of water pipes, with the only operating water pipeline from Israel producing less than half of its full capacity, with 83 percent of Gaza’s groundwater wells, its largest desalination plant and all wastewater treatment plants no longer functioning, infectious diseases are rapidly spreading. Reported cases of acute respiratory infections now exceed 300,000 and cases of acute diarrhea have risen above 200,000, mostly among children. Ninety percent of children under five are suffering from one or more infectious diseases.
According to a project carried out by Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that predicts the health consequences of the “Crisis in Gaza”, over the next six months an additional 85,000 of Gaza’s residents could die of injuries and disease. Their analysis finds that even if there is an immediate sustained ceasefire and no new infectious disease outbreak, the impact of the war could produce an additional 6,500 deaths.
In a February 16 USA Today op ed, leaders of prominent international aid organizations wrote that “most people who die in a famine are actually killed by disease rather than outright starvation – their bodies so weakened that routine infections become death sentences. Gaza no longer has medical services to mitigate these risks, with only 14 of 36 hospitals even partially functional…Once people facing such acute hunger approach death, specialized medical treatment is required to bring them – especially children – back to life. Half of Gaza’s
population is under 18. The alarm bells are blaring. The time to act is now.”
The war on hospitals
But given the shattering of the Gaza Strip’s health sector, where is that “specialized medical treatment” going to come from? Especially lethal has been the mid February week-long siege, bombing and army takeover of the Nasser Medical Complex, Gaza’s second largest medical facility where thousands had sought shelter. Israel claimed the raid on the hospital was undertaken because of reports that hostages were being held there. No hostages were found. A hundred Palestinians were arrested, including patients and medical workers, and the critically ill and babies in incubators perished when a power cut deprived them of oxygen. Some patients were killed by snipers when they attempted to leave the hospital. On February 18, the head of the World Health Organization reported that the hospital “is not functional anymore.” Two days later the army fired on a building near Rafah bearing a large Medecins Sans Frontières sign, killing two family members of an MSF staff person and wounding several others.
The destruction of Gaza’s health care infrastructure is the subject of a February 2024 report by the Israeli group Physicians for Human Rights, which points out that there is no independently-verified evidence that Hamas has utilized 34 out of the 35 medical facilities that Israel has targeted and concludes: “Even if it were proven that Hamas used some medical facilities for military operations, the extensive destruction caused by Israel raises concerns that it is strategically undermining Gaza’s healthcare system to impair Gazan society’s capacity to exist.”
In the words of Irfan Galaria, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who spent a week as a volunteer in Khan Younis’ European Gaza Hospital: “I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war – it was annihilation.”
UNRWA is at “a breaking point”
So writes Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner General of UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency), which has since its establishment in 1949 by the UN General Assembly been chiefly responsible for supplying refugees (70 percent of Gaza’s population) with humanitarian aid, shelter, medical care and education.
Israel has presented no solid evidence that 12 members of UNRWA’s 13,000-strong Gaza staff participated in the October 7th attack, an allegation that led the US and 15 other countries to immediately suspend aid to the organization. US intelligence has reportedly seen nothing suggesting the wider involvement of UNRWA claimed by Israel. This has not prevented Members of the US Congress from filing bills and Israel from undertaking actions that amount to a death sentence for an organization whose services are more urgently needed now than ever. The $95 billion aid package to mainly Israel ($14 billion) and Ukraine that recently passed the Senate specifically bars any funds from going to UNRWA.
As well as bombing UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters, Israel has demanded that it vacate its East Jerusalem headquarters and the Kalandia Vocational Training Center it has occupied since 1952. It has limited visas for UNRWA’s international staff to one or two months, has refused its local staff access to Jerusalem, and has introduced bills that will exclude it from UN privileges and immunities and prevent “any activity by UNRWA in Israeli territory.”
The ‘day after’ plan which Netanyahu presented to his cabinet on February 22 demands that UNRWA is shut down, and that Israel retains a military presence within Gaza, including along its borders with Israel and with Egypt, and security control of all land west of the Jordan River. Under the plan, which is critiqued here, ‘local officials’ – not the Palestinian Authority - will serve as the Gaza Strip’s administrators. The possibility of building new Israeli settlements in Gaza is not featured in the plan; nor is the Biden Administration’s revived fantasy of a ‘two-state solution.’
The US is increasingly isolated on the world stage.
Early in January 2023, the UN General Assembly asked the ICJ to issue an advisory opinion about the legality of Israel’s military occupation. Israel shunned the six days of hearings (February 19-26, 2024) and most of the 52 countries that testified were critical of the 56-year-long occupation, with 22 citing Israel’s apartheid practices. But the US on February 21 urged the Court to recognize Israel’s “very real security needs” and not to call on it to withdraw from occupied territory until peace was achieved through the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The previous day the US for a third time vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, and this time it was only country to do so, with the UK abstaining.
Simultaneously, it circulated its own draft resolution (the text is here) that repeatedly invokes the need to adhere to international humanitarian law, to prevent a “major ground offensive” in Rafah, and to increase the amount of aid entering Gaza, even as it calls for an investigation of the organization best positioned to deliver that aid, namely UNRWA. It also calls for “support for a temporary ceasefire in Gaza as soon as is practicable” – whatever that means. The resolution, which has not yet been presented for a vote, further rejects “any attempt at demographic or territorial change in Gaza that would violate international law.” Meanwhile, a short distance from Rafah, Egypt appears to be preparing for just that eventuality by constructing a walled camp for the displaced - or could it really be an enclosure for trucks delivering aid, as the head of Egypt’s State Information Service has claimed?
While the Biden Administration is urging Israel not to invade Rafah without an evacuation plan for the more than a million people who have sought refuge there (which Netanhayu now claims has been put together), it is considering sending Israel a new massive shipment of MK-82 bombs and fuses, among other military equipment, according to a February 17 report in The Wall Street Journal. A Dutch judge has meanwhile barred the Netherlands from sending Israel F-35 fighter jet spare parts that the US is storing in the country. Spain, Belgium, Italy and a Japanese company have ceased their arms transfers, while UN experts on February 23 urged an arms embargo on Israel.
Determined to keep Israel flush with weapons – possibly with an expansion of regional warfare in mind - the US has at the same time attempted to put modest pressure on Netanyahu’s government. At the beginning of February, shortly before visiting the swing state of Michigan where many Arab Americans have pledged to vote ‘uncommitted’ in the state’s February 27th presidential primary, President Biden imposed financial sanctions on four Israeli settlers who had perpetrated “extremist settler violence.” Between October 7 and February 20, there were 573 recorded attacks by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and 394 Palestinians have been killed by settlers and soldiers, including 100 children.
However, Biden declined to sanction the two settler cabinet members (Smotrich and Ben-Gvir) who have been orchestrating the take over of Palestinian land and expansion of settlements. On February 15, Finance Minister Smotrich promised new Jewish immigrants who settle in the West Bank special financial benefits. On February 22, just a day after the US had argued before the ICJ that an advisory opinion calling for Israel’s “unilateral withdrawal” from occupied territory would hurt negotiations for a two-state solution, Smotrich showed what he thought of Palestinian self-determination when he announced that 3,000 new housing units will be built in West Bank.
The next day Secretary of State Blinken called settlements “inconsistent with international law” as the Biden Administration finally distanced itself from one of Trump’s gifts to Israel: deeming settlements to be legitimate. But will the rhetoric be translated into action? According to Palestinian commentator Yousef Munayyer, in the context of Israel’s entrenched apartheid practices and US support for Israel’s war on Gaza, “this is like showing up to a five-alarm fire with a cup of water while giving fuel to the arsonist.”
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