May 17, 2024
-Israeli
military has intensified its bombardment of Jabalia camp with at least six
people reported killed and many wounded.
·
-Israel’s
lawyers argued at the United Nations top court that the country has the right
to move ahead with a full-scale offensive on Rafah in southern Gaza.
·
-Thousands
of Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza are cut off from water and food after
a week-long Israeli incursion that has led to heavy casualties on both sides.
· -Israel
plans to deploy more troops and “intensify” its ground invasion of southern
Rafah where hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians are sheltering in
the war-battered city.
·
-An
estimated 630,000 people have fled Israeli attacks in Rafah in the past week
and another 100,000 in Gaza’s north.
·
-At
least 35,303 people have been killed and 79,261 wounded in Israeli attacks on
Gaza since October 7. The death toll in Israel from Hamas’s attack is 1,139
with dozens still held captive.
Sharon
Zhang
Current
and former Biden administration staff are saying that the U.S. bears direct
responsibility for the famine that Israel has caused in Gaza and threatens to
grip the entire population.
Palestinians in Rafah, Gaza, queue to receive food distributed by
aid organizations on March 15, 2024. Jehad Alshrafi / Anadolu via Getty
Images
A
sprawling report by The Independent published this week lays out an extensive
account of ways that U.S. officials have been publicly and internally notified
of Israel’s starvation campaign but have declined to intervene, despite having
numerous pathways to do so over the past seven months.
The
investigation highlighted actions that staffers in the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID), which oversees U.S. foreign aid, have taken
to draw attention to the famine that has been ignored by senior officials. The
continued refusal to stop the famine, in the face of vast amounts of evidence
of its existence, points instead to an implicit endorsement of Israel’s policy
of starvation, current and former staff said.
“I
believe the U.S. to be complicit in creating the conditions for famine,” an
anonymous USAID employee told The Independent. “Not only has our response been
woefully inadequate, but we’re actively responsible in large part for it.”
The
USAID staffer said leadership was saying “nothing” about the famine and that
the U.S. has pursued “no real effort to force Israel’s hands” to increase
humanitarian aid. Senior officials and USAID administrator Samantha Power have
failed to change course in spite of receiving numerous letters and memos from
staff critical of the U.S. support for Israel’s slaughter.
In
fact, there has been a historic amount of dissenting memos within USAID over
Gaza — at least 19 since October. A former senior adviser to Power, Jeremy
Konyndyk, said that is “an extraordinary number,” noting that he hadn’t seen a
single dissent memo in five years serving under former President Barack Obama
and Joe Biden.
The
administration’s actions go further than just ignoring “the man-made starvation
of an entire population, it is direct complicity,” former State Department
official specializing in foreign arms deals Josh Paul told The Independent.
The
report lays out a timeline showing the numerous moments when the U.S. could
have intervened in Israel’s starvation campaign over the past seven months.
The
first moment was Israel’s immediate and extreme reaction to the October 7
attack. The humanitarian aid blockade, cutting off of water and electricity,
and targeting of humanitarian workers combined with the constant bombardments
of civilian areas made it extremely difficult to deliver aid within Gaza.
Israel has a long history of weaponizing food access that began before October
7, and humanitarian aid groups began warning that Israel was using starvation
as a weapon of war weeks after Israel’s genocidal campaign began.
Then,
in December, a major warning came from a UN-backed report. The Integrated Food
Security Phase Classification (IPC), informed by international hunger experts,
warned that a quarter of the 2.2 million people of Gaza were already facing
famine, while the rest were in an acute hunger “crisis.” Experts already called
this one of the worst modern famines ever seen — and then, in March, the IPC
released another report warning that famine had spread to half of the
population and that it was “imminent” across the region.
“When
the warnings start signaling that risk, there should be a forceful reaction,
both on the relief aid front and on the diplomatic front,” Konyndyk told The
Independent. “Nothing about the Biden administration’s response to the December
famine forecast demonstrated that kind of hard pivot toward famine prevention.”
Internal
assessments also found famine was underway. A USAID cable circulated to other
agencies like the State Department said that officials had found famine
conditions were “severe and widespread” in northern Gaza and spreading to
southern areas.
Despite
warnings that famine could end up taking more lives than Israel’s bombing and
that the starvation will stunt surviving Palestinian children’s growth and
development for life, Biden has to this day not recognized the famine in public
remarks.
U.S.
officials responded to The Independent report by pointing to times the U.S.
asked Israel to open aid access, even though Israeli officials rebuffed these
requests and the U.S. continued sending weapons. The U.S. did make one airdrop
of aid to Gaza in March, though air drops, Konyndyk has noted, are typically
considered a last resort due to being an extremely inefficient form of aid
delivery.
Further,
humanitarian groups have said for months that only a ceasefire combined with
huge influxes of aid could stop the famine. The U.S. has, at many points,
undermined ceasefire talks.
The
U.S. has also contributed to the crisis due to its ongoing suspension of
funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the
primary humanitarian aid agency for Palestinians. The U.S. suspended funding
for the agency in January following allegations made by Israel against the
agency — but Israel still has yet to provide evidence to support its claims,
reports have found.
Since
October, Biden officials have been providing thousands of weapons to Israel as
it continues its genocide. Just yesterday, a week after Israel further
escalated its humanitarian blockade, reports found Biden was pursuing a
shipment of another $1.2 billion worth of weapons to Israel that could aid in
its goal of the “total annihilation” of Rafah.
Under
current conditions with the Rafah siege, humanitarian experts say it is now
“impossible” for groups to distribute resources to combat the famine, meaning
it will now spread even quicker than before if the current humanitarian crisis
continues.
“Famine
relief efforts require water, sanitation, proper infrastructure, healthcare,”
said UNRWA director of planning Sam Rose in an interview with Al Jazeera
English. “We have half a million people on the move in Rafah. It’s simply
impossible to provide those services in these conditions.”
At
the same time, Palestinians are dying en masse due to starvation — and the
exact death toll will likely not be known for many years as the Palestinian
government’s official death count, which currently sits at 35,000, doesn’t take
into account deaths by hunger.
“We
have children here at the age of 10 and 12 years old who have the weight of
children aged four or five years old,” a U.K. doctor working in a hospital near
Khan Yunis told The Independent. “There’s chronic malnourishment and
malnutrition across most of the children — if not all of them — and it’s
absolutely heartbreaking to see what’s happening to them.”
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