A sustained refusal by Israel for food aid from the international community to be allowed into Gaza – where children are starving to death – has been compared to the holocaust by world leaders.
Israel, which has destroyed much of Gaza by indiscriminately dropping US-supplied bombs into crowded civilian areas, has so far killed or maimed approximately 100,000 mainly women and children, and created an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe.
The 2,000lb munitions Israel is dropping from US fighter jets into Gaza’s refugee camps and areas it designated safe zones for evacuees are four times larger than the bombs used against Isis during the Iraq war. US military analyst Mark Garlasco has said it is the heaviest bombing campaign since the Vietnam War.
Experts in February put the bill to rebuild Gaza at $20 billion, as the World Health Organization’s Director warned “Gaza has become a death zone.”
The IDF department Colgat, responsible for all of Gaza’s borders – which Israel sealed when it imposed a land, air, and sea siege on the strip over 15 years ago – is refusing to allow in food and medical aid against the demands of the United Nations and World Food Programme.
This week, Britain dropped medical supplies to Tal Al-Hawa Hospital in Northern Gaza via a Jordanian Air Force military plane after the IDF refused land access.
In 2010, a flotilla of vessels from Istanbul was attacked by Israel in international waters as it tried to deliver 10,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Gaza. IDF soldiers stormed the flagship Mavi Marmara killing its crew of nine staff as they attempted to get essential provisions to the people of Gaza.
Israel’s deliberate man-made famine in Gaza is widely seen as collective punishment for Palestinian attacks on Israelis on 7/10. The short-term as well as long-term consequences of malnutrition for Gaza’s children are expected to create debilitating illnesses into their adult lives, warn aid agencies.
British charity ActionAid, Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of paediatrics at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, said his team had “lost a significant number of children in recent days from widespread malnutrition”.
Israelis, for their part, have said publicly everyone over four years old in Gaza should be starved to death.
In a recent interview on Israeli television, former Mossad official Rami Igra said all Palestinians in Gaza over the age of 4 are “involved” and deserve to face Israel’s collective punishment policy of withholding food and humanitarian aid.
“In Gaza, everyone is involved. Everyone voted for Hamas. Anyone over the age of four is a Hamas supporter,” he said.
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said Israel’s military campaign was between a “highly prepared army and women and children,” comparing its actions to the Holocaust.
IDF soldiers routinely fire on international aid trucks as well as Gazans as they attempt to collect food from them.
Israel successfully achieved the defunding of Gaza’s main source of food and essential supplies provision UNWRA after the ICJ began hearing claims it is committing genocide in the strip, alleging a couple of the agency’s staff participated in the 7/10 attacks, but has not provided any proof.
This week, the Israeli military’s top lawyer issued a warning to troops against “improper conduct” in Gaza which includes the unjustified use of force and looting among other “criminal” actions.
Major-General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi said it was “difficult to exaggerate” the “severity” of the soldiers’ actions over nearly five months of the war.
Irfan Galaria, an American doctor who worked in Gaza this year described children at his hospital arriving with IDF sniper bullet injuries to their heads, all of whom subsequently died.
Over 126 media workers and 500 medics and aid workers have so far been killed by the IDF in Gaza, an unprecedented amount in any historical conflict, while their organisations have sometimes reported they were targeted specifically by drones and snipers.
This year saw the cases of three Israeli hostages waving white flags being shot dead by the IDF in Gaza. Also, catching the world’s attention, was the case of trapped six-year-old Hind Rajab who called for help while under attack and was subsequently murdered by IDF soldiers who waited for Palestinian medical workers to arrive before opening fire on all of them.
Millions of people around the world have marched on their capitals since the IDF began bombing Gaza five months ago. They say their elected officials are too fearful of upsetting their relationships with Israel to represent their humanitarian concerns, such as in the UK and US.
In February, a national march in London attended by over a quarter of a million people on the Israel Embassy was held back by police so it couldn’t finish near its embassy.
The highest court in the world, the ICJ, is currently investigating Israel for the world’s most serious crime, genocide, after South Africa brought the case.
Many media outlets continue to report that Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis on its botched military operation on 7/10, when many Gazans took advantage of breaches it made to Israel’s security fence to cause chaos at a music festival and nearby illegally-built settlements.
On 9 July, 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that Israel’s building of the barrier in the occupied Palestinian territory was illegal and said construction must stop immediately and Israel should make reparations for any damage caused. Israel ignored the order and expanded the length of the wall.
Hamas says it was attempting to capture Israeli army aggressors to swap them for the thousands of Palestinians that Israel has abducted from their homes over the years, which Israel holds without charge, sometimes until they die in prison. In such cases, Israel is known to hold the bodies of dead prisoners in the basements of their prisons to serve out their sentences, and thereby disallow families from burying them.
Israeli survivors of the 7/10 attacks have described the IDF as arriving at the scene and indiscriminately opening fire on ‘everyone’, killing many of its own people under its established Hannibal Directive.
Israel has refused to investigate or report on exactly how many people it killed on the day, after firing on the crowds with Apache hellfire missiles and tank shells, creating the widely-publicised images of hundreds of burnt-out cars and destroyed houses.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the beginning of his country’s attack on Gaza, invoked the story of Amalek: “Now go and smite Amalek, utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but kill both man and woman, infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey”.
His Defence Minister, who controls the IDF, Yoav Gallant then said: “I have released all the restraints… You have seen what we are fighting: human animals”.
The former head of Mossad’s Captive and Missing Division, Rami Igra claimed, during an interview broadcast on Israeli state television, that all civilians in Gaza are guilty and deserve to face Israel’s policy of collective punishment, which prevents food, medicine, and humanitarian aid.
In November, the Israeli occupation Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu said that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza is a possible solution to destroy it and an option that must be studied.
Eliyahu, a member of the extremist Otzma Yehudit party headed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, explained in statements to the Israel Hayom newspaper: “Death does not frighten the residents of Gaza, and we must know what scares and terrifies them, in order to force them to leave and wipe them off the face of the Earth. They should tremble in fear and terror.”
In mid-October, Israeli President Isaac Herzog incited the killing of civilians in the Gaza Strip, asserting that everyone in Gaza was involved in the war.
May Golan, Israeli Minister of Social Equity, told the Israeli parliament in February, that she is ‘proud of the ruins of Gaza’.
US politicians are complicit…
Senator Lindsey Graham wants to see Gaza flattened. Graham described the conflict as a “religious war” and called on the Israelis to “level the place”.
Congressman Max Miller said the laws of war should be swept aside. Miller called on the Biden administration “to get out of Israel’s way and to let Israel do what it needs to do best”. He said there should be “no rules of engagement”.
A former US ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, suggested that Palestinians as a whole were responsible for Hamas’s crimes.
