Israel’s war on Gaza is now six months old. In the first three months it had already unleashed a quantity of explosives three times more powerful than the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima on a territory less than half the size of Cape Cod. At six months, the known number of dead has exceeded 33,000, with thousands more bodies in the ruins of half of Gaza’s buildings. The number of slaughtered children is higher than those killed in all the world’s wars over the last four years. Practically the entire water and sanitation infrastructure has been rendered inoperable, and 40 percent of agricultural land destroyed. The scale of environmental destruction has been termed ‘ecocide.’
And there is more. “Today we have entered a new phase of the war on genocide in which Gazans are being killed by hunger and disease,” declared the Rev. Munther Issac in his Easter sermon in Bethlehem. “They are starved to death. It is a slow death. They are hanging between heaven and earth, dying slowly, while the world is watching.”
How has this been allowed to happen?
US as enabler-in-chief
After repeatedly blocking any action by the UN Security Council critical of Israel, the US on March 25 declined to add another Israel-related veto to the 46 it has issued over the years, and instead abstained from voting on UN Security Council Resolution 2728 calling for an immediate ceasefire for the rest of Ramadan. But hoping to mollify an outraged Israel and its US supporters, the US Ambassador to the UN and other members of the Administration then repeatedly claimed the resolution was “non-binding,” an interpretation that has been rejected by other Security Council members and debunked by legal scholars. All Security Council resolutions are binding under Article 25 of the UN Charter.
The US had earlier rebuffed as “unfounded’ the January 26 World Court ruling that Israel was plausibly committing genocide. Under the Genocide Convention such a ruling makes it incumbent on Member States to take action to prevent and punish genocide, stipulations that the US has not just refused to pursue, but actively undermined. Since the World Court ruling over 7,000 Gazans have been killed by Israel.
The Biden Administration had routinely asserted that it has not seen evidence that Israel is in violation of international humanitarian law, including immediately after the April 1st targeted killing of six foreign World Central Kitchen staff members (one of them a US citizen) and their Palestinian driver, whose convoy was subjected to three separate missile strikes in three locations over a mile apart in a supposedly ‘deconflicted’ zone. Their deaths, which Israel attributed to ‘misidentification,’ brought the number of humanitarian workers killed in Gaza to over 200. On April 7, World Central Kitchen founder José Andrés told ABC’s ‘This Week’ that “this doesn’t seem like a war against terror. This doesn’t seem any more like a war about defending Israel. It really, at this point, seems like a war against humanity itself.”
Outrage over the assassination of foreign aid workers succeeded in doing what the deaths of 33,000 Palestinians had not, and on April 4, in a half hour talk with Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Biden reportedly threatened to re-consider US support for the war if Israel didn’t implement an immediate ceasefire to get the hostages out and more aid into the Gaza Strip. This appears to be the nearest that Biden has gone to remind Netanyahu that the US provision of weapons gives it a say in how Israel conducts its war, a leverage which human rights organizations and some Members of Congress have for months urged it to use.
On April 5, 40 Congressional Democrats signed a letter to Biden and Blinken expressing concern at the decision to authorize new arms transfers to Israel, and urging them to withhold the transfers until those responsible for the World Central Kitchen killings had been held responsible. As a sign of the shifting wind, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who has received $618,250 from AIPAC since 1990, signed onto the letter. On the very same day, Israel took action to discipline five officers it blamed for the attack, and said it would be assessing whether criminal charges should be brought.
Also on April 5, at the UN Human Rights Council, the US and Paraguay were the only countries to vote ‘no’ on a resolution calling for recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination and an end to the Israeli occupation, and the US was one of three (joining Paraguay and Malawi) that refused to condemn Israel’s settlements. (Israel’s single largest land takeover since 1993 - that would sever the West Bank in two - was made during Blinken’s visit on March 22). In addition, the US joined five other countries (Argentina, Bulgaria, Germany, Malawi, Paraguay) in voting against a resolution calling for the funding of UNRWA, and an end to collective punishment of Palestinians and arms transfers to Israel. The resolution was approved by 28 countries, with 13 abstentions.
In order to shield Israel, the US has not just been undermining the structure of international law enacted in the wake of World War II to preserve peace and protect civilians. It has also ignored numerous provisions of US domestic law (the Foreign Assistance Act, Arms Export Control Act, US War Crimes Act, Leahy Law, Genocide Convention Implementation Act, Humanitarian Aid Corridor Act) in order to power Israel’s erasure of Gaza with a steady supply of weapons, including the 2,000 pound bombs that have reduced much of the tiny Strip to rubble.
Indeed, according to The Washington Post, US approval for the transfer of thousands of 500-pound bombs, small-diameter bombs and bomb fuses occurred on the very day that Israel carried out the World Central Kitchen slaughter. A few days earlier President Biden had approved an arms package containing more than 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and smaller weapons, as well as the authorized transfer of 25 F-35A fighter jets valued at $2.5 billion. In the words of The Washington Post, “Biden’s decision to continue the flow of weapons to Israel has been strongly supported by powerful pro-Israel interest groups in Washington, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is spending tens of millions of dollars this election cycle to unseat Democrats it views as insufficiently pro-Israel.” The Biden Administration is currently pressing Congress to approve the transfer to Israel within five years’ time of up to 50 F-15 fighter jets worth $18 billion.
Before the World Central Kitchen assassinations, Senator Bernie Sanders, whose Vermont office was subjected to an arson attack on April 5, had been one of the few elected officials to speak out strongly against Biden’s action. He wrote on X that “the U.S. cannot beg Netanyahu to stop bombing civilians one day and the next send him thousands more 2,000 lb. bombs that can level entire city blocks. This is obscene. We must end our complicity: No more bombs to Israel.” Now more lawmakers are reportedly considering legislation options for putting constraints on the pipeline of US arms shipments.
High-tech extermination
On March 25, the day the UN Security Council demanded a Ramadan ceasefire, the UN Human Rights Council issued a searing report written by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese which found “reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The report demolishes Israel’s claim that it is complying with international humanitarian law and details how it is employing “humanitarian camouflage” to transform “an entire national group and its inhabited space into a destroyable target.”
Israel said it “utterly rejects” the report and termed it “outrageous.” Netanyahu appeared to be emboldened by the refusal of Biden to back up his rhetoric about the need to feed and protect civilians with concrete action, and by Israel’s hardline support within the US Congress. Two examples: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) said about children in Gaza “I think we should kill them all,” while Tim Walberg (R-MI), a former pastor who has been a Member of Congress since 2007, commented that Israel should get the war over quickly “like Nagasaki and Hiroshima.”
In the week after the Security Council ceasefire resolution was passed, the Israeli military killed more than 500 Palestinians, including journalists and many women and children. On April 3, the Israeli publication +972 Magazine published a chilling investigation that reveals the role the Artificial Intelligence (AI) ‘Lavender’ program has played in selecting targets for assassination. Some 37,000 “suspected Hamas militants” were reportedly put on automatically-generated lists after Lavender sifted through all the surveillance data collected on Gaza’s residents. Among those flagged were police and civil defense workers, relatives of militants, people in Whats App groups which could have included a ‘militant,’ people with similar nicknames or who were using a cellphone that once belonged to a Hamas member. An error rate of ten percent was considered acceptable, as was a very high rate of collateral damage. The preference was to carry out assassination strikes on homes after the tracking system ‘Where’s Daddy?’ identified that a Lavender target was inside: hence the wiping out of entire families in multi-story buildings. ‘Kill lists’ such as those compiled by the Obama Administration using NSA data to decide who should be eliminated by drone during the ‘War on Terror’ have come a long way.
The ceasefire resolution did nothing to stop Israel’s ferocious two-week-long assault on Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the fourth time since October the hospital had come under a military attack. Mondoweissmaintains that the renewed siege of the hospital was an assassination operation aimed at a police officer in charge of civil law enforcement, who had coordinated the successful delivery of food aid to the starving north the day before. When the army withdrew on April 1, dozens of patients and staff were reportedly found mutilated and buried under the rubble of what had once been the most advanced hospital in the Gaza Strip. According to Euro-Med Monitor, “preliminary reports suggest that over 1,500 Palestinians have been killed, injured, or are reported missing as a result of the massacre at Al-Shifa, with women and children making up half of the casualties.” Israel claimed that not a single civilian among the 6,000 Palestinians who were sheltering in the hospital was harmed.
On March 26, the Israeli army closed down the Palestinian Red Crescent’s Al-Amal Hospital in Khan Yunis, which it had shelled and besieged for 40 days. Canadian surgeon Dr. Yasser Khan described conditions in Khan Yunis hospitals, including the kidnapping and torture of doctors during Israel’s “systematic, intentional attack on the health care system,” adding that “Israeli politicians have not hidden it. They have said open statements about creating epidemics.”
Deliberately engineered famine
On March 28, in response to a petition submitted by South Africa and the Palestinian Authority, the International Court of Justice unanimously demanded that Israel take “all necessary and effective action” to increase humanitarian assistance in Gaza, including the opening of additional crossing points to allow more trucks to enter.
By then the IPC (Integrated Phase Classification) Global Initiative had found that the entire Gaza population “is facing high levels of acute food insecurity” and that “famine is imminent in the northern governorates and projected to occur anytime between mid-March and May 2024.” According to the report, the number of trucks entering Gaza had decreased from 500 per day before October 2023 to an average of 65 trucks a day during October 7 to March 9, 2024. Thousands of trucks were stuck, many for weeks, in the North Sinai awaiting inspection by Israel. Less than five percent of the aid convoys intended to reach the starving north were able to do so. Airdrops have provided negligible amounts of food and have proved to be dangerous. Mass displacement and the destruction of greenhouses, agricultural land and warehouses, irrigation wells and fishing boats have killed local food production.
Famine expert Alex de Waal writes that “Gaza is already the most intense starvation catastrophe of recent decades. The death toll from hunger and disease may soon surpass the body count from bombs and bullets,” with children being the first to die in large numbers.
On March 24, Israel blocked UNRWA - the Gaza’ Strip’s largest and most experienced humanitarian agency – from delivering aid in the north. In the words of its head, Philippe Lazzarini, “this is outrageous and makes it intentional to obstruct lifesaving assistance during a man-made famine.” Two days later, a dozen people reportedly drowned in the north while trying to reach aid dropped by a plane into the sea.
While USAID officials warned the Biden Administration that famine is likely already underway and Gaza’s collapse is “unprecedented in modern history,” Israel has continued to deny there is catastrophic hunger in the Gaza Strip. On the day of Biden’s phone call with Netanyahu, The Washington Postfeatured a graphic in depth look at hunger in the Gaza Strip and what happens to the human body when famine takes its toll. Following the phone call, Israel said it would turn on the water pipeline to the north that has been shut for six months, allow some bakeries to function and facilitate the “temporary delivery of aid” through the northern Erez Crossing and port of Ashdod, without saying when or for how long.
As demonstrations proliferate around the US and globe, a March Gallup poll shows a majority of Americans and 75 percent of Democrats disapprove of Israel’s war on Gaza. But given the agenda of Israel’s newly powerful far right and the reluctance of Biden to end arms shipments, Gaza may remain a killing field and zone of starvation for some time to come.
