July 6, 2024
Ahmad
Abdulrahim, 38, strolled the remains of the markets in Gaza City with 150
Shekels in his pocket, the amount of money he used to feed his family of five
for a week before the genocide. Today, that amount can hardly buy a single
meal.
The markets, now
little more than bombed-out remains, are empty of all basic needs, including
vegetables, meat, and fruits. For the majority of people, such luxuries are
unavailable except at unimaginable prices. Most vegetables, rare though they
are, come from people’s gardens.
All Ahmad could
find were cleaning supplies and canned foods. Ahmad told Mondoweiss that due to
his children’s long-term dependence on these foods, they’ve started to develop
health problems. After a protracted search, Ahmad found some zucchini; he walked
faster when he noticed the seller, who had placed them in a small pile on the
ground on top of a plastic bag. When he asked about the price, he was surprised
to know that one kilogram of zucchini cost 80 Shekels ($20). Before the war, it
used to be 3 shekels per kilo (less than a dollar).
Such was the
price for most other vegetables that could be found. One kilo of green peppers
cost 250 shekels ($66), where it used to be 5 ($1.4). One kilo of cucumber and
tomato cost 90-100 shekels ($23-$26), which used to be 2-3 shekels (53-80
cents).
Ahmad said that
as he walked back home, disappointed, he was dreading his family’s reaction
when they found out that he spent almost half of their money on two cans of
beans.
“I’m starting to
deal with my kids as adults,” he said. “I’m telling them this is war, and our
enemy wants us to starve. I’m telling them that we should be thankful that we
have been able to survive so far. I promise them that when this war ends, I
will bring them whatever they want.”
The state of
starvation in Gaza has not ended. In northern Gaza, it has dramatically
increased, but in ways that are different from how it was at the war’s outset.
Protracted periods of malnutrition and deprivation from vital nutrients are
having a cumulative impact on Gaza’s population, especially for those who most
need it, such as children and pregnant women.
“Before this
crisis, there was enough food in Gaza to feed the population,” WHO
Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said back in March.
“Malnutrition was a rare occurrence. Now, people are dying, and many more are
sick. Over a million people are expected to face catastrophic hunger unless
significantly more food is allowed to enter Gaza.”
Only 0.8% of
children under the age of five were suffering from acute malnutrition before
the war, the WHO also said. By February, that figure had jumped to 12.4% –
16.5%.
Ever since those
numbers were reported, Israel’s genocidal war has only worsened the systematic
deprivation of food to the population. But Israeli propaganda would have us
believe that there is no famine, and there is no Israeli policy of deliberate
starvation. Many Israeli media outlets misleadingly focus on technical
definitions of what constitutes a famine and dishonestly misquote passages from
the UN’s ICP reports on conditions in Gaza.
The reality on
the ground tells an opposite story, one in which the systematic deprivation of
Gaza’s population from sources of nutrition is leading to long-term
consequences. Gaza health officials and medical workers have already observed
it for weeks.
Hussam Abu
Safia, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, told Aljazeera that the specter of
famine was once again sweeping northern Gaza, stressing that the lack of
availability of foods with diverse nutritional values will have a long-term
impact on the population. Since the start of the Israeli army’s second invasion
of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in Gaza City last week, access of residents in
northern Gaza to food has only worsened.
Abu Safia said
that no basic materials have entered the northern Gaza Strip for weeks, leaving
flour as the only available staple. This is far from sufficient to meet the
nutritional needs of children, the elderly, and pregnant women, all of whom
require fats and proteins, Abu Safia asserted.
“Within 14 days,
214 children have arrived at the hospital showing signs of malnutrition,” Abu
Safiya told Al Jazeera well before the second invasion of Shuja’iyya began.
“Including over 50 cases of advanced malnutrition and 6 cases in critical
condition in the intensive care unit.”
“These children
are living solely on fluid replacements, and we do not have any milk or special
food for them, which puts their lives at risk,” he said.
Eating Tree
Leaves
People in the
north of Gaza can tell that this wave of hunger is the worst to visit the strip
so far, leaving many wondering about their prospects for survival if these
conditions do not change.
Some residents
of Gaza City have resorted to using tree leaves, such as mulberry leaves, to
prepare dawali, a dish typically comprised of fragrant rice wrapped in grape
leaves.
“People are
cooking weeds,” Mahmoud Issa, a local journalist and resident of Gaza City,
told Mondowiess shortly before the Shuja’iyya invasion. “They cook leaves in
water and spices. Even using the water is risky, because there’s no power to
run the desalination plants.”
“Solar power is
no longer available in Gaza either. Israeli drones have systematically targeted
every solar panel on every roof across Gaza. They want people to lose hope and
starve,” he continued.
Issa explained
that people believe expired canned foods, when made available in Gaza, are
making their children sick. This has led some to try to avoid such foods for
fear that they would not be able to get treatment for their kids should they
fall ill, given that northern Gaza no longer has any health system to speak of.
“Families know
there is no way to treat their children if they get poisoned, so they are
abandoning canned foods,” he said.
But even though
cases of food poisoning due to the consumption of expired food products have
been reported in Gaza, reports are also emerging of additional cases of food
poisoning from forage eating.
Fruits,
vegetables, chicken, meat, and fish are all unavailable in Gaza, Mahmoud
explained.
“Three months
ago, the Israeli checkpoint in the Kuwaiti Square was closed, and the
checkpoint in al-Rasheed Street was closed, too,” he said. “The Israeli army
allows the entrance of food trucks from the Erez crossing, but that is not
enough for the population in northern Gaza.”
“When the Rafah
crossing was working, over 60 trucks used to arrive, including frozen
vegetables, meat, chicken, and other necessary food,” he explained. “We could
survive then. It was tolerable. But now every crossing is closed, and people
have started to starve.”
Khaled
Elgindy
As
hopes for a Gaza cease-fire continue to fade, the threat of a full-blown war
between Israel and Hezbollah is now greater than at any time since October 7.
Following
the release of a Hezbollah video shot by surveillance drones over various
targets in northern Israel, Israeli officials warned of “an all-out war” in
which Hezbollah will be destroyed and Lebanon would be sent “back to the Stone
Age.” Not to be outdone, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah is threatening a war
with “no restraint and no rules and no ceilings.”
Such
a war would be catastrophic for Lebanese and Israeli civilians alike, and risks
drawing Iran into wider conflict that engulfs the entire region. It would also
instantly unravel what had been one of the Biden administration’s few
achievements since October 7—preventing a full-blown regional war.
Even
as the Israel-Lebanon front heats up, however, the most serious threats to
de-escalation in Lebanon and to prospects for a Gaza cease-fire come from the
Biden administration itself.
One
need only look at realities in Gaza, where nearly nine months of war have cost
the lives of more than 37,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them women and
children, and reduced most of Gaza to rubble. Despite putting forward a
comprehensive cease-fire plan, which now has the backing of the United Nations
Security Council, the Biden administration has done little to alter the basic
cost-benefit calculations of either side—particularly Israel’s.
Despite
the massive death and destruction inflicted on Gaza, Hamas’ command and control
remains intact while Israel still has no signal achievement by which to claim
victory. Moreover, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as is widely
understood, has a personal interest in prolonging the war for as long as
possible in order to maintain his grip on power (and hence also avoid going to
jail).
Despite
the administration’s assertions that only Hamas stands in the way of a
cease-fire, even Netanyahu has dropped the pretense, noting that “we are
committed to continue the war after the pause in order to achieve the goal of
destroying Hamas. I will not give up on this.” For its part, Hamas has little
incentive to go along with a cease-fire deal that does not actually lead to an
end of the war. And despite Biden’s pledge to hold Israel to its commitments,
the administration’s record over the last several months hardly inspires
confidence.
Instead
of attempting to change the incentive structure of both sides, the Biden
administration has consistently worked to absorb, deflect, or otherwise offset
any potential costs or consequences that Israel could incur by continuing the
war, thereby prolonging it. Despite serious and growing differences between the
U.S. and Israel over both its conduct and goals of the war, the administration
has continued to provide nearly unrestricted military, political, and
diplomatic support for Israel’s military campaign at virtually every
stage—regardless of the costs for Palestinians and even when it has strongly
disagreed with those actions.
The
list of examples is as long as it is disturbing—from the administration’s
endless, and largely unheeded, pleas for Israel to do more to limit civilian
casualties, scale back its “indiscriminate” bombing, allow more humanitarian
aid to Gaza’s starved population, and lay out a clear post-war endgame for
Gaza, to the President’s supposed “red line” in Rafah, which Netanyahu has
blown through as effortlessly as he did previous ultimatums by the
administration.
With
the exception of holding up a single shipment of the 2,000 and 500-pound bombs
that had already killed thousands of innocents and annihilated most of Gaza’s
infrastructure, Biden has kept the weapons flowing, despite the
administration’s own assessment that U.S. weapons were likely used by Israel in
violation of international humanitarian law.
Not
only has Netanyahu avoided paying a price for his defiance of the U.S., the
administration has continued to reward him and his far-right government with
virtually unrestricted military, political, and diplomatic support. Even when
Netanyahu publicly accused the administration of holding back weapons, the
White House rushed to clarify that apart from the one shipment there was no
disruption in the flow of weapons.
Congress
has only amplified Netanyahu’s political impunity with its bipartisan
invitation for him to deliver a joint address to Congress this month, a move
many Israelis, including former prime minister Ehud Barak, have decried as a
“terrible mistake.”
In
announcing his cease-fire plan, which the U.S. slyly sought to couch as an
Israeli proposal, Biden made it a point to declare Hamas no longer had the
ability to carry out another October 7 and that it was “time for this war to
end,” thus offering Netanyahu a victory narrative and a ledge from which to
climb down from his impossible perch of “total victory” and destroying Hamas—an
offer the Israeli premier has pointedly declined, in large part because he
understands there is no price to pay for doing so.
Among
other things, this has put the Biden administration in the awkward position of
continuing to provide material support for a war that, for all intents and
purposes, it no longer supports politically. This fundamental contradiction
lies at the core of the repeated cease-fire failures in Gaza as well as the
escalation on the Israeli-Lebanese front.
The
same muddled message to Israel—“We’d rather you didn’t, but we’ll still back
you up when you do”—which may be the closest thing we’ve seen yet to a Biden
Doctrine—is now being extended to Lebanon. The administration has warned Israel
against an all-out invasion of Lebanon or “small regional war,” which risks
drawing Iran into an even wider and more catastrophic regional conflict, and
has intensified its diplomatic efforts to forestall such an outcome.
As
Israel and Hezbollah have inched ever closer toward blown-blown war, however,
the administration has shifted its messaging, assuring Israeli leaders that the
U.S. will continue to back Israel militarily even in the event of a full-scale
war while at the same time warning Hezbollah that U.S. cannot prevent Israel
from mounting a full-scale invasion.
What
better way to undercut U.S. diplomacy than by reinforcing Netanyahu’s
preference for military solutions over diplomatic ones.
This
basic contradiction stems from the administration’s belief that differences or
difficulties in the U.S.-Israel relationship serve as motivation for Hezbollah,
Hamas, and other members of the “axis of resistance” to continue and expand the
fighting, and thus that the best deterrent is to eliminate any public daylight
between the United States and Israel. As the past nine months (if not several
decades) have shown, however, precisely the opposite is true—the provision of
virtually restricted weapons and diplomatic support reduces the costs of
continued military action for Israel and encourages reckless behavior, such as
we have seen throughout the Gaza war.
As
Israel’s chief political enabler and weapons supplier, the United States
absolutely has the ability—even a responsibility—to constrain Israel from
taking actions that directly harm broader U.S. interests, as both an attack on
Lebanon and the lack of a cease-fire in Gaza both do.
But
for reasons of both domestic politics and the president’s own deeply held
personal views, the Biden administration has chosen not to use its substantial
leverage.
The
Biden administration no doubt understands that the surest way to prevent a
further escalation in Lebanon is to end the horrific war in Gaza, though it has
failed to grasp its own role in fueling both of these. For the U.S. to bring
about an end to the Gaza war and prevent an equally disastrous regional war,
this will have to change, including most notably by withholding the political
and military support Israel’s far-right government needs to sustain the war in
Gaza or expanding it to Lebanon.
As
long as the U.S. persists in absorbing or deflecting Israel’s costs for
maintaining the war, not only will the horrors in Gaza continue but may only be
a matter of time before extending the devastation to Lebanon as well.
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