While Gaza’s residents starve its “intentional erasure” is being steadily carried out with US complicity
Genocide, wrote Raphael Lemkin who coined the term, “refers to a coordinated plan aimed at destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups so that these groups wither and die like plants that have suffered a blight.”
In Gaza those essential foundations – health care, education, agriculture, water, sanitation, electricity, religious and cultural institutions, cemeteries, more than 70 percent of the housing stock and some entire neighborhoods -- have been destroyed, along with the lives of more than 31,000 people. The blight of starvation and disease may soon dwarf the daily harvest of hundreds of lives extinguished by military bombardments.
As the novelist Susan Abulhawa wrote shortly after returning from two weeks in Gaza, “How does one reckon with losing your entire family, watching and smelling their bodies disintegrate around you in the rubble, as you wait for rescue or death? How does one reckon with total erasure of your existence in the world – your home, family, friends, health, whole neighborhood and country? No photos of your family, wedding, children, parents left; even the graves of your loved ones and ancestors bulldozed. All this while the most powerful forces and voices vilify and blame you for your wretched fate. Genocide isn’t just mass murder. It is intentional erasure.”
The war crime of intentionally starving civilians
Michael Fakhri, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has declared that “we have never seen a civilian population made to go so hungry so quickly and so completely, that is the consensus among starvation experts. Israel is not just targeting civilians, it is trying to damn the future of the Palestinian people by harming their children.” On March 6, South Africa sent another appeal to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Citing the “extreme urgency of the situation” and Israel’s “continuing egregious breeches” of the Genocide Convention, it urged the ICJ “to do what is within its power to save Palestinians in Gaza from genocidal starvation.” A response has not yet been forthcoming.
By March 6, at least 16 children had died of starvation and dehydration in a single hospital, Kamal Adwan, in the north of the Gaza Strip. The number is now steadily rising, as one in six children under six suffer from acute malnutrition. According to Save the Children, 1.1 million children are facing death by starvation and disease as Israel continues to block the entry of humanitarian convoys. In the north around Gaza City there is no clean water and 300,000 desperate people have been using animal feed as a flour substitute, poisoning many children. Those supplies are now depleted, and families are “being forced to forage for scraps of food left by rats and eating leaves out of desperation.” The lack of food and water can be a death sentence for the 180 women who give birth in rubble and tents every day. In the words of the UN’s Humanitarian Coordinator Jamie McGoldrick, “hunger has reached catastrophic levels.”
This appears to be part of Israel’s war strategy. As Amnesty International has stated, Israel has been deliberately “engineering famine.” It is refusing to issue new visas or renew old ones for international humanitarian organizations, just as their work is most crucially needed. It has restricted the movements of the organization best positioned to distribute aid, UNRWA, and is attempting to eliminate it altogether by deeming it a “terrorist organization.” (The EU, Spain, Sweden and Canada, which had suspended aid to UNRWA following the US lead, have now resumed their funding). Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich refused for more than a month to allow the Port of Ashdod to release a Turkish shipment of flour that would have fed hundreds of thousands of people because he didn’t want it to be transferred to UNRWA.
Of the seven border crossings into Gaza, Israel has refused to open the five into the north and center of the Strip, and has allowed its settlers to block the entry of trucks through the Kerem Shalom Crossing in the south. More than a thousand trucks have been forced to wait for weeks at a time at the Egyptian border with Rafah before their contents are scrutinized by Israel. On March 5, a British Member of Parliament statedthat Israel would not permit 1,350 British-supplied water filters to enter Gaza because they posed a “threat.” The March 9 Times of Israel cited a report by a UN diplomat that “a truck full of aid was ordered to turn around because an Israeli inspector spotted sleeping bags that were green — the color of Hamas’s flag.”
Before the January 26 ruling by the ICJ that Israel was plausibly committing genocide and must increase the entry of humanitarian aid, an average of 147 trucks a day were permitted into Gaza, significantly fewer than the 500 trucks a day that entered before October 7. Since the ICJ ruling, only about 57 a day have been permitted to enter, and they have been routinely blocked from moving to the north. Between January 1 and February 15, Israel prevented more than half of the aid trucks from reaching the north and during that time, the UN recorded 14 cases of the shooting and shelling of people waiting for food to be delivered in Gaza City.
The most lethal attack to date has been the so-called ‘flour massacre’ of February 29, when thousands of starving people surged towards a private food convoy at the Nabulsi roundabout southwest of Gaza City. At least 118 were shot dead by the Israeli army or trampled to death and more than 750 were injured. Within hours of the ‘flour massacre’ the US had sprung into action at the UN to prevent the consideration of any Security Council resolution holding Israel responsible.
US ‘solutions’ to starvation in Gaza
In the days since then there have been at least two more instances of the Israeli army firing on Palestinians desperate for food in Gaza City. On March 6, Israel blocked 14 World Food Program (WFP) trucks from moving north, forcing the WFP to conduct air drops of food with the Jordanian Air Force.
As US Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) pointed out in a March 7 New Yorker interview, the Biden Administration could have invoked the 1995 Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act that bars funding to any government that “prohibits or otherwise restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.” But rather than using this domestic law to insist that Israel open its northern border crossings and facilitate the rapid entry of trucks at the border with Egypt, the US on March 2 collaborated with Jordan to drop 38,000 military-grade ready-to-eat meals (MREs) on Gaza (and into the Mediterranean sea) from three C-130 airplanes. Unfortunately, “MREs are generally designed to be consumed with a water source” and there is no clean water in the north of Gaza. The five air drops by the US between March 2 and March 7 have been called an ineffective and demeaning media stunt by aid agencies that say that the amount of food delivered by air is far less than that which the blocked trucks can provide. The US has denied responsibility for the killing of five people near Gaza City who were crushed when a parachute failed to open.
Humanitarian groups have been equally dismissive of the plan which Biden highlighted in his State of the Union address – building a floating pier that will be part of a maritime corridor between Cyprus (where Israel will examine cargo) and Gaza’s waters. A thousand or so US troops will be involved in its construction without putting their boots on Gaza’s ground. Spanish chef José Andrés and his World Central Kitchen plan to supply up to two million meals a day. How will they be unloaded and distributed? That is left unspecified. What has been specified by the Pentagon is that the pier will take two months to build, leaving plenty of time for famine to eradicate more of the population. The fact that Israel has approved the maritime corridor project raises the possibility that it might be connected to its plan to develop the Gaza Marine gas fields, 20 miles from Gaza’s shore.
Bread and bombs
President Biden has been attempting to assure the disaffected in the Democratic Party base in swing states that he is concerned about the looming famine and the military onslaught on civilians. He has urged Israel not to mount a ground invasion of Rafah until civilians have been evacuated, who knows where. His call for a six-week ceasefire to allow in more aid before the slaughter is resumed appears to have been rebuffed by Israel, but no matter. On March 9, Biden declared that he would never “leave Israel” and that “the defense of Israel is still critical, so there’s no red line [where] I’m going to cut off all weapons so they don’t have the Iron Dome to protect them.”
The dedication of his Administration to keeping Israel’s war machine well supplied was revealed in a Washington Post report that the US had “delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began on Oct. 7, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs, bunker busters, small arms and other lethal aid.” Sent in small batches to avoid Congressional scrutiny, these shipments are in addition to the hefty yearly arms transfers approved by Congress and the two large ‘emergency’ military cargos sent during the war on Gaza without Congressional approval.
On March 8, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestinian plaintiffs filed an expedited appeal with the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in its case charging President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin with complicity in genocide.
Decades of dehumanization
While western politicians intone about the right of Israel to self-defense and the need to wipe out Hamas, they have said little about the way the entire Palestinian population has been systematically dehumanized. Physical ill-treatment and humiliation are routine on the streets in Gaza and the West Bank, and there are numerous reports of torture and sexual abuse in Israel’s detention camps. Abu-Ghraib style pictures and videoclips posted by Israeli soldiers show their degradation and abuse of prisoners who have often been stripped naked. According to the head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, some UNRWA employees confessed under torture to being involved with Hamas. At least 27 detainees from Gaza have died in military facilities since the war began.
The dehumanization of Palestinians that is the fuel of ethnic cleansing long predates the October 7 attack. During the unarmed civil uprising known as the Intifada – when the Israeli Civil Administration, army and settlers were still located within the Gaza Strip and the newly-emerged Hamas was favored by Israel in order to undermine support for the Palestine Liberation Organization, Dr. Israel Shahak included the following in his Translations from the Israeli Hebrew-language Press:
“Haaretz, June 16, 1989
On the wall of the office of a Senior Officer of the Civil Administration in Gaza Strip, near the routine announcements of the Israeli army offices, photographs, a Swiss calendar and ‘wise’ sayings of sages about ‘what is love’, the following poem was also hanging:
Yes, it is true that I hate Arabs
I want to take them off the map
Yes, this is all (my) work.
My life passes pleasurably
One shoots a bullet and a head is flying.
It is a pleasure to feel when the bullet touches (it)
Knocks into the head and (the head) splits.
Then I feel liberated and even (feel) a pleasure
To see how the head is flying off.
There are beautiful places in the Territories
There is sea and sand and many palms
It is a pity that there are Arabs there too.”
The blight of genocide has been many decades in the making.
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World Water Day (March 22) is approaching! On Sunday March 17, join the discussion, “Israeli Apartheid in Action: Water Control.” Register at tinyurl.com/VFHL-March2024. View the videos, then join the Voices From the Holy Land Online Film Salon Sunday March 17 at 3pm ET, with panelists Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine; Mazin Qumsiyeh, Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability; Eyal Hareuveni, author of Parched: Israel's Policy of Water Deprivation in the West Bank; and moderator Jeff Halper, Israeli-American anthropologist, author, lecturer, and founder of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
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