Israel has made no secret of it: it has embarked on a genocidal plan to “create conditions where life in Gaza becomes unsustainable.” And Joe Biden is its accomplice.
by Seth Ackerman
Part 2 - “It Doesn’t Get Any Worse”
In the current conflict, Israel has devoted special effort to destroying hospitals — which it openly admits to targeting. Of Gaza’s thirty-six hospitals, only sixteen remain partially functional, with occupancy rates “reaching 206 per cent in inpatient departments and 250 per cent in intensive care units,” the UN reports. “What we have been witnessing is a campaign that was planned. It was a plan to close down all the hospitals in the north,” said Léo Cans, head of mission for Palestine with Doctors Without Borders.
In the first half of January, aid groups planned twenty-nine critical missions to deliver emergency medical supplies to the northern Gaza Strip; twenty-two of them were refused by Israel. As a result of its attack on Gaza’s health system, “doctors operate on screaming children without anesthetic, using mobile phones for light,” the UN’s top human rights official said in Geneva.
In addition to direct attacks, “the Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” Human Rights Watch reports. “Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.” Israeli inspectors turn away aid trucks without providing a reason, and “if a single item is rejected,” the New York Times reported, “the truck must be sent back with its cargo and repacked to restart the inspection process.” The security alibi is bogus: as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem notes, Israel is prohibiting humanitarian organizations from purchasing food from Israel itself, a step that would obviate the need for security inspections.
Alex DeWaal, a leading expert on humanitarian crisis response at Tufts University, wrote that Israel’s starvation of Gaza “surpasses any other case of man-made famine in the last 75 years” in terms of “the rigor, scale, and speed” of its blockade of needed supplies and destruction of humanitarian infrastructure. According to the UN’s famine prevention unit, the proportion of Gaza households experiencing a life-threatening lack of access to food is currently “the largest ever recorded” by the organization, and if current conditions continue, by May a minimum of twenty thousand Gazans per month will likely be dying of famine. “I have never seen something at the scale that is happening in Gaza. And at this speed,” said Arif Husain, chief economist of the UN World Food Program. “It doesn’t get any worse.’’
He is not alone in that view. “Officials at humanitarian and health-care organizations with lengthy experience in major conflict zones said Israel’s war in Gaza was the most devastating they had seen,” the Washington Post reported in December. “For me, personally, this is without a doubt the worst I’ve seen,” said Tom Potokar, a Red Cross chief surgeon who has worked in conflicts in South Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Ukraine.
“What’s happening right now in Gaza is beyond any disaster that I’ve witnessed at least in the last 15 years or so,” said Zaher Sahloul, a doctor who heads a humanitarian medicine NGO and worked in Aleppo during the battle for the city. Martin Griffiths, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, called it “the worst ever,” adding: “I don’t say that lightly. I started off in my twenties dealing with Khmer Rouge . . . I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this before, it’s complete and utter carnage.”
Comments
Post a Comment