A group of four critical-care doctors who were recently in Gaza spoke on a UN panel about the horrors they witnessed in the besieged Strip. The doctors described multiple war crimes, horrendous injuries to children, kids dying of treatable wounds, and a shortage of supplies so severe that young patients die on the floors of hospitals without anesthetic to ease their suffering.
Addressing the UN on Tuesday, four physicians from France, the US, and Britain described the dire conditions in Gaza. “I saw the most appalling atrocities, and I saw things that I never would have expected to have seen in any healthcare setting,” Dr. Nick Maynard told the panel.
Maynard said that Israeli forces were bombing Gaza indiscriminately and intentionally attacking healthcare facilities, noting that some media outlets had uncritically repeated Tel Aviv’s assertion that it was carefully targeting Hamas. “I want to just dispel some of the narratives coming from the Israelis, [and] from some of the media,” which claimed the bombs were “only targeting Hamas.”
“I can certainly bear witness, as can any medic who’s been on the ground in Gaza in recent months, [and] dispel that notion with absolute certainty,” he continued. “There is mass indiscriminate bombing killing many, many thousands of civilians and a very clear targeting of healthcare facilities and healthcare workers.”
Maynard’s first-hand account is backed by Israeli and US sources. The White House has known for several months that Tel Aviv is bombing targets in Gaza without “solid intelligence” indicating any military value. President Biden himself previously described the Israeli onslaught as “indiscriminate,” while the Tel Aviv-based +972 Magazine detailed Israel’s intentional strikes on civilian “power targets” in what it dubbed an “assassination factory.”
Dr. Zaher Sahloul explained the toll the indiscriminate bombing has taken on the civilians in Gaza. “The number of children killed is 13,000 or so or more. Which means, one out of 100 children in Gaza has been killed and this is an astronomical number; the equivalent of that in the US would be half a million children,” he said.
“Of the 70,000 people who were injured, half of them have moderate to severe injuries. That means they will have some type of disability for the rest of their lives,” Sahloul continued before adding the numbers are likely an undercount.
Dr. Thaer Ahmad stated he was providing care to wounded Palestinians at the Nassar Hospital in Khan Younis before Israeli forces surrounded, raided, and disabled the medical center. He said aid could not enter the Strip and that doctors did not have the medicines needed to treat patients.
Extreme supply shortages have forced doctors to make “impossible decisions” at Gaza’s overwhelmed healthcare facilities, Dr. Amber Alayyan told the UN panel. Hospital officials “have to choose between whether to fully stock the operating theater, ICU, or emergency room.” She continued, “This is where you have doctors faced with horrific decisions of having to intubate and amputate children and adults without anesthetics in emergency rooms. Part of the reason for this is the lack of medications.”
At times, shortages are so severe that hospitals do not have morphine or antibiotics while doctors rewash surgical gloves.
Maynard explained the impact of the limited aid for one Palestinian girl. “One child that I’ll never forget had burned so bad you could see her facial bones. We knew there was no chance of her surviving that,” he said. “But there was no morphine to give her. So, not only was she going to die, but she would die in agony.”
The doctor continued, “And what made it even worse was that there was nowhere for her to go and die, so she was just left on the floor of the emergency department to die. And that’s just one story; we’ve all seen multiple stories like that.”
Israel has imposed tight restrictions on aid deliveries into Gaza since October 7. While the Biden administration claims it is pressuring Tel Aviv to ease its blockade, fewer than 100 aid trucks have entered Gaza each day in recent weeks – down from 200 in January and 500 in September. The White House has refused to use its considerable leverage over Tel Aviv to persuade Israel to allow more aid into the Strip and has declined to condition future US military aid on that request.
The physicians explained that Washington’s efforts to relieve the humanitarian crisis would be ineffective, saying the real issue was distribution problems that could only be solved with an end to the fighting. Additionally, they pointed to multiple Israeli attacks on aid deliveries in Gaza, including a February 29 massacre that left more than 100 Palestinians dead.
Dr. Maynard went on to warn that an attack on Rafah would have devastating consequences for the 1.5 million people in the city. “It’ll be apocalyptic, really, the number of deaths that we’re going to see,” he said. “And of course, as we’re seeing, they’ll be told to evacuate and move somewhere safe, and there is, as we’ve heard, there is nowhere safe for them to go.”
Israeli forces committed a new massacre against Palestinians late on 14 March as they were waiting for aid near Gaza City’s Kuwait Roundabout, marking the second attack of its kind in the last 24 hours.
Footage on social media shows dead Palestinians laid out across the ground, covered in dust and rubble.
The Health Ministry in Gaza said on Thursday night that at least 20 corpses and 155 injured Palestinians arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital following the attack, calling it a “new premeditated massacre.”
Gaza’s government media office said in a statement that the Israeli army targeted “a gathering of citizens while they were waiting for relief aid at the Kuwait Roundabout in Gaza City.” Israeli troops opened fire at the aid seekers with tanks and helicopters, killing and wounding at least 100, it said.
The attack is “to be added to the series of massacres and brutal attacks against the defenseless civilians who face the Zionist starvation policy,” the media office added, calling the attack “deliberate.”
“The occupation targeted aid recipients for the 20th consecutive day,” the government media office continued.
Israeli forces have repeatedly attacked aid seekers at the Kuwait Roundabout in Gaza City and elsewhere.
Israeli forces shot and killed six Palestinians waiting for aid at the roundabout late on 13 March. Hours earlier, at least five Palestinians were killed and several injured by Israeli army shelling on a UNRWA aid distribution center in the Gaza Strip’s southernmost city of Rafah.
The Rafah attack came a day after Israeli forces opened fire at dozens of Palestinians lined up for food aid near the Kuwait Roundabout.
Israeli troops committed a massacre against Palestinians seeking aid in northern Gaza’s Al-Rashid Street near the Kuwait Roundabout on 29 February. The brutal attack, which killed over a hundred Palestinians, has come to be known as the Flour Massacre.
Due to the several attacks on hungry Gazans near the Kuwait Roundabout and Al-Rashid Street, Al-Jazeera’s correspondent Hani Mahmoud said on 14 March that the area “is now known as a death trap.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to promote Brigadier General Barak Hiram, the Israeli army officer who ordered the shelling of a house in Kibbutz Be’eri on 7 October, resulting in the killing of 13 Israeli civilians, say Israeli sources. He also ordered the demolition of a university in Gaza. The move comes as a surprise to many, considering the controversial nature of Hiram’s military record.
The incident in Kibbutz Be’eri, saw Hiram apparently following the Israeli army’s Hannibal directive, a controversial policy to use maximum force in order to prevent the taking of Israeli citizens as hostages. The charred bodies of dozens of Israeli civilians recovered after the 7 October attack are believed to be the victims of the apartheid state implementing the Hannibal directive.
In addition to the Kibbutz Be’eri incident, it is reported that Hiram was reprimanded by the Israeli army’s chief of staff recently for ordering the demolition of a building at Israa University in the south of Gaza City without proper authorisation.
Despite these controversies, Netanyahu has reportedly interviewed Hiram for the role of his military secretary. The Prime Minister’s Office has refused to comment on the matter, while the military maintains that it does not provide details on how appointments are made within the army.
The potential promotion of Hiram has raised eyebrows among observers, who question the wisdom of rewarding an officer responsible for such contentious decisions during the Gaza genocide.
Syrian Foreign and Expatriates Minister, Faisal Mekdad, emphasized that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide perpetrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has killed over 12,000 children and 8,000 women, and completely destroyed the Gaza Strip.
In a statement on the ministry’s X account, Mikdad said “What European Union strategists say about building a world based on rules and regulations has faded. The murderer Netanyahu has not left any rule unbroken: International law, international humanitarian law, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Charter, children’s rights, women’s rights, democracy, disarmament, and peace.”
He continued to say what is more dangerous than Netanyahu and his ruling “gang’s” crimes, is the support he received from many EU leaders and the blind trust Washington has given him.
“Everyone knows that much of what the European Union leaders did before and after was a form of clowning, hypocrisy, and lies, and their defense of Netanyahu’s crimes led to pulling the rug from under all of their feet and showed them as they really are, little puppets in the hands of Zionism and enemies of peoples’ rights and aspirations,” he said, slamming the West.
One of the key but underreported factors of the unwavering US support for the Israeli genocidal war on Gaza is the overwhelming presence of Zionist Jews in the Joe Biden administration.
These Zionist Jews exert enormous influence in the American power corridors and enjoy unconditional support from the US president who has on numerous occasions boasted of being a “Zionist” himself.
The presence and influence of Zionist Jews in the White House has always been a point of discussion, however, since the events of October 7, it has manifested itself in many ways.
Biden administration’s vetoes of ceasefire resolutions in the UN Security Council, which drew widespread condemnation from pro-Palestine groups, rekindled the debate about the Zionist influence.
Raising the issue of the dominance of Zionist Jews in the US administration and policy circles is often seen through the prism of “anti-Semitism” in the West, even though the same people paradoxically like to boast about the disproportionate number of Jews in other fields.
The Zionist Jewishness of Biden’s cabinet was pointed out recently by The Forward, a progressive media for a Jewish American audience, as well as the Israeli right-wing newspaper Times of Israel.
Being a Jew should not be seen as a problem, but those in the Biden administration have clearly exhibited the tendencies of Zionism – not only justifying the Israeli regime’s genocide in Gaza but also lobbying for more financial and military aid to the occupying regime.
There are also non-Jewish Zionists whose support is motivated by Christian Zionism or belonging to pro-Israel lobbies, a common case in the ranks of the Republican Party.
The problem lies in the fact that everyone in the Biden administration is a radical Zionist who will uncompromisingly justify Israeli war crimes, with slight disagreements over relatively minor issues, such as illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
In the American mainstream media, voting in the UN Security Council and supporting the genocidal destruction of Gaza is treated as common sense and a natural course of action.
Biden made no secret of his Zionist inclinations, uttering the words “I am a Zionist”. And he has proved it through numerous pro-Israeli activities in his decades-long political career.
One of them is the placement of Jewish Zionists in top positions in his administration, which at the beginning of 2021 evoked a popular joke on social networks that the West Wing would have a “minyan.”
The Hebrew term “minyan” means the minimum number of males (10) required to constitute a representative “community of Israel” for liturgical purposes.
Biden’s initial lineup includes Anthony Blinken as Secretary of State, Merrick Garland as Attorney General, Avril Haines as Director of National Intelligence, Ronald Klain as White House Chief of Staff, Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary for Health, Alejandro Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security, and Janet Yellen as Secretary of the Treasury.
One level down are David Cohen as Deputy CIA Director, Eric Lander as science and technology adviser, Ann Neuberger as Deputy National Security Adviser, and Wendy Sherman as Deputy Secretary of State.
In the meantime, Victoria Nuland took the position of Undersecretary of State for political affairs, Ed Siskel as White House counsel, and Klain was replaced by Jeff Zients as chief of staff.
Others appointed by Biden include Daniel Shapiro as a special liaison to Israel on Iran, Ned Price as spokesman for the Department of State, Jennifer Klein as executive director of the White House Gender Policy Council, as well as a large number of ambassadors.
The Zionist envoys include Michael Adler, David Cohen, Rahm Emanuel, Eric Garcetti, Mark Gitenstein, Amy Gutmann, Jonathan Kaplan, Yael Lempert, Alan Leventhal, Randi Levine, Jack Lew, Jack Markell, Constance Milstein, Marc Nathanson, Marc Ostfield, David Pressman, Daniel Rosenblum, and Marc Stanley, among others.
Blinken, the top American diplomat, comes from a Zionist family. His grandfather Maurice was one of the early American Zionists and the founder of the American Palestine Institute, in the years before the declaration of the Zionist entity.
His institute funded economists to prepare a report on the economic viability of such an entity and lobbied Washington to politically support its creation.
Following Blinken’s appointment as the top US diplomat, replacing Mike Pompeo, the Israeli media praised his and Biden’s close relations with Tel Aviv during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s, noting their “lifelong support for Israel and its security.”
During the Obama administration, Blinken often justified Israeli aggressions in the region with the hackneyed phrase “the right to self-defense” and praised Trump for strengthening Israel’s regional alliances.
He was a close confidant of the Israeli ambassador to the US Ron Dermer who could call him in the middle of the night for pro-Israeli services, such as lobbying hard to have Israel’s Iron Dome air military system financed with American taxpayer money.
In his first days in office, he also made it known that the new Biden administration would support earlier Trump’s decision and keep the American embassy to the occupied territories in occupied al-Quds.
Last year, during the bickering between Biden and Netanyahu, Blinken pledged enduring US ties with Israel, seeing it as a far more important ally than NATO member Turkey.
As for Mayorkas, even the Israeli media boasted of his strong family ties to Tel Aviv and praised him for the data-sharing pact between the United States and the Zionist regime.
Even greater Zionist credit for intelligence sharing goes to CIA deputy chief David Cohen, whose career under Obama focused on sanctioning Israel’s enemies.
Thus, it is no surprise that Americans are bankrolling the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza while harping about ceasefire and aid airdrops to hoodwink the international community.
Western states are facing an acute political crisis whereby their established governing parties and leaders are fighting for survival amid a grave loss in legitimacy in the eyes of their electorates.
In the United States, incumbent President Joe Biden is vying for reelection in November with historically lowest poll numbers ever for an occupant of the White House.
Meanwhile, across the European Union, governing parties and leaders are braced for a drubbing from parliamentary elections in June.
The roots of this unprecedented loss of legitimacy among Western political establishments are manifold. But surely one cause is the rank hypocrisy of Western leaders that has now been laid bare. How can political figures expect to have any moral authority when they are seen to be inveterate liars and shamelessly corrupt?
Western governments and their servile media lecture about “democracy”, “human rights” and upholding “law and order”. They claim to be motivated by such principles in their support of Ukraine against alleged Russian aggression. Yet these same governments are complicit in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza through their unwavering support for the Israeli regime.
Western leaders have been fatally exposed and compromised by the conflict in Ukraine and Gaza. The contradiction is terminal.
That’s not just because of the blatant double standards and duplicity. Western voters are increasingly disgusted by the relentless financial and military support funneled into Ukraine to prop up a scamming regime comprised of NeoNazi ideologues. Under Joe Biden and the incumbent European politicians, the West has flooded Ukraine with weapons and hundreds of billions of dollars in what is the biggest war racket ever.
This is while Western populations, workers, farmers, and businesses are hard-pressed with numerous social and economic burdens.
Western governing parties are rightly seen as elitist and serving powerful minority oligarchic interests such as the military-industrial-corporate-financial nexus. Their declared vows about democracy are a contemptible joke.
The war in Ukraine is increasingly understood by voters to be a disastrous proxy war of choice that was pushed by U.S. and Western imperial objectives to confront Russia.
Despite the squandering of public money to propagate the war, the U.S.-led NATO axis has lost its “great game”. The proxy war has devastated Ukraine, causing up to 500,000 military deaths in two years, as well as destabilizing the rest of Europe from increased migration, fiscal impact, deindustrialization, and the shattering of agricultural industries.
Western populations are furious with their political leaders for having inflicted such chaos and waste of resources – as well as wantonly provoking tensions in international relations with Russia. Western politicians have pushed the world to the brink of an all-out war between nuclear powers. All this crazed folly is based on utter lies and deception – as the horror of Gaza and Western complicity illustrates.
In this cauldron of electoral revolt, Western political leaders are only digging a deeper hole for their eventual collapse.
American President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address this week made a disingenuous pitch to voters. He portrayed the world as facing an existential crisis from Russian “tyranny” and simultaneously claimed the fate of US democracy was under threat from his election rival Donald Trump.
In a dangerous and desperate move, Biden is conflating Trump with alleged Russian aggression. The Democrat president is fighting for political survival against Republican presumptive nominee Trump primarily because Biden is so deeply unpopular among American citizens. To boost his election prospects, Biden is making out that the country is facing an “inflection point” that requires rejection of Trump because he is “bowing down” to Russia.
Trump and many within the Republican Party are opposed to continuing the proxy war in Ukraine, recognizing that it is futile.
Biden and the Democrats, who are more aligned with the U.S. foreign policy establishment, are therefore trying to make the election about an existential “defense of world democracy and peace”. Biden claimed in his State of the Union address that if the U.S. does not supply Ukraine with another $60 billion more in military aid then Russia will overrun the rest of Europe. Biden even invoked the memory of Roosevelt supposedly facing down Nazi Germany in 1941.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the same warmongering high-stakes ruse is being pushed by French President Emmanuel Macron. Macron is calling for the deployment of NATO ground troops in Ukraine to prevent a Russian victory and an alleged threat to the rest of Europe.
The French head of state has become almost hysterical in recent weeks with war talk. He told other French political leaders this week that there would be “no limits” to France’s support for Ukraine against Russia.
What’s lying behind Macron’s belligerent rhetoric are his fears of political defeat from opposition parties in the forthcoming EU parliamentary elections. It is not just Macron who is anxious. All incumbent European leaders are dreading an expected widespread revolt by the electorate.
That is why the French president and his ruling-class ilk like European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz are seeking to dominate the public narrative with war talk and the alleged danger of Russian expansionism.
The irony is that the more the Western establishments pursue militarism and war in Ukraine the worse their states become from economic mismanagement and the more their legitimacy sinks into the gutter. They are seen more and more as a warmongering clique that has not a shred of ethical concern because of their reckless warmongering in Ukraine and their despicable complicity in the genocide in Gaza.
Elections in Western states are over-rated. As the saying goes, if voting changed anything, it would have been banned years ago. The array of current opposition figures and parties facing incumbents is not going to deliver any solutions to the endemic problems of Western systemic failure. Nevertheless, the forthcoming U.S. presidential election and the European parliamentary ballots are shaping up to deliver grievous blows of repudiation to the political establishments.
To offset the political doomsday, charlatan Western leaders like Biden, Macron, Scholz, and Von der Leyen are doing their last-ditch best to talk up war with Russia and the “threat to democracy” as a way to burnish their electioneering efforts. But such cynicism is not turbocharging their prospects. It will backfire.
The U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine is facing a historic debacle from defeat. But that makes the desperate reaction by Western incumbents scurrying for political survival a dangerous time in the next few months.
The Hamas delegation left Cairo on Thursday and will resume negotiations for a ceasefire in Gaza next week. Time is running out before the Holy month of Ramadan begins. Hamas wants an end to the war, but the U.S. is looking only for a 6-week pause, and Israel is willing to allow a pause but resume the genocide afterward.
UN experts, many world leaders, humanitarian organizations, and millions of civilians across the U.S., UK, Europe, Africa, and Asia agree on one point: the only way to prevent or end famine in Gaza is an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Israel’s unrelenting attack on 2.3 million people in Gaza, day and night for almost five months, has killed over 30,700. If the bombs and bullets don’t kill them all, then starvation will.
U.S. President Joe Biden, the one man in the world who holds the keys to a ceasefire in Gaza, refuses to demand the Israelis end the war. Biden has finally come up with a weak deal to offer Hamas to stop the slaughtering, but just for six weeks, not permanently.
Hamas proposal in Cairo
Hamas representatives have been meeting in Cairo with Egyptian and Qatari negotiators. On Wednesday, March 6, Hamas said they were continuing their efforts to secure a ceasefire in Gaza even though Israel refused to participate in the negotiations.
Osama Hamdan, in Beirut, voiced the demands of the resistance group. They want a permanent end to Israeli attacks and the withdrawal of Israeli forces to allow the people to return to their homes. He stressed that a prisoner swap could only occur after a ceasefire.
Senior Hamas official Bassem Naim said Hamas had presented its draft deal and was awaiting a response from Israel, and that “the ball now is in the Americans’ court”.
The U.S. proposal at the UN
On March 5, Biden said a ceasefire deal was in the hands of Hamas. He was referring to the U.S. deal offered to Hamas, and he never mentioned or referred to the deal Hamas offered to Israel.
Israel is willing to pause the slaughter and genocide in Gaza for a few weeks, but Netanyahu and his radical right-wing partners insist they will never stop the bombardment until Hamas is exterminated.
“It’s in the hands of Hamas right now. Israelis have been cooperating. There’s been a rational offer,” Biden told reporters.
Getting the Israeli hostages out has never been a priority for Netanyahu, but it has been for the families and friends of the hostages. They have been holding protests and marches ever since the conflict began. The families of the hostages expected their government to negotiate for their release, but Netanyahu’s war room ignored their pleas, in favor of revenge killings in Gaza.
From the very beginning of the conflict which broke out October 7, 2023, He is willing to use the phrase ‘humanitarian pause’, and his current deal offered to Hamas is only a pause, with an exact timetable attached to resume the butchery which has killed mainly women and children.
The U.S. is promoting its ‘pause’ deal at the UN, even though the U.S. has vetoed every UN resolution aimed at peace in Gaza, with the most recent U.S. veto on February 20.
Netanyahu says IDF will remain in Gaza for 10 years
The Times of Israel reported recently that Netanyahu has planned for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to remain in a military occupation of Gaza for at least 10 years. This is opposed by the U.S., EU, UN, and most world leaders. Israel may agree to a pause, but a ceasefire and withdrawal is out of the question. This means the Palestinian people and their supporters will remain resisting occupation, which is guaranteed by the Geneva Convention.
The attack was investigated by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. The attack was captured on video in which gunshots and weapon fire were heard. The victims were examined and had gunshot injuries, the scene was strewn with blood on flour sacks and aid boxes, and survivors’ eyewitness testimony attested to the Israeli attack on starving Palestinians in search of food for their families. Many of the survivors stated they were shot in the back while running away from the scene.
Israel tried to blame the deaths and injuries on a stampede in the chaos of scrambling to get the flour. However, the aerial footage the IDF released of the scene proved there were IDF tanks present. The people running in the aerial footage were running from Israeli gunfire directed at them.
After the ‘Flour Massacre’ happened, the first response from the Biden White House, as parroted by CNN on the front lawn, was the Israeli version of events: people stampeded because of chaos while trying to get some food.
However, in the video accompanying the CNN report, sounds of weapons fire are heard over and over again.
Later, Christiane Amanpour of CNN reported on information relayed to her from trusted contacts on the ground in Gaza, humanitarian groups, that those killed at the ‘Flour Massacre’ had gunshot wounds. Amanpour has a career motto: don’t be neutral, be truthful.
“The attack came after Israel has denied humanitarian aid into Gaza City and northern Gaza for more than a month,” said the UN experts, who described “a pattern of Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians seeking aid”.
In a statement, a group of UN special rapporteurs accused Israel of “intentionally starving the Palestinian people in Gaza since 8 October,” adding: “Now it is targeting civilians seeking humanitarian aid and humanitarian convoys.”
There is mounting evidence of famine in the Gaza Strip, and at least 14 similar incidents have been reported.
On Friday, March 1, the U.S. blocked a statement put forward by Algeria and backed by 15 UNSC members except the U.S. to condemn Israel for the killing of more than 100 Palestinians in the ‘Flour Massacre’. The U.S. claimed it was trying to verify how the people died in light of Israel’s denial of shooting the hungry people.
Biden doesn’t care about protests
Mitch Landrieu, national co-chair of the Biden-Harris campaign, was asked on CNN about Biden’s reaction to being taunted by protesters demanding a ceasefire immediately in Gaza.
Landrieu replied that Biden respects their right to freedom of speech, and “he has no problem with it.”
Biden and his administration, view the call for a ceasefire in Gaza as just an exercise in the right of freedom of speech as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Biden and his administration will gladly tolerate calls for a ceasefire because that is the right of every American.
However, the Biden administration misses the point. Millions of Americans are demanding an end to the slaughter in Gaza, carried out by the American weapons provided without any oversight or conditions by the U.S. State Department. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has faced resignations among his staff because of the unbridled flow of weapons to Israel, which have killed well over 30,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children as reported by the UN and humanitarian groups.
Blinken has the authority to hold up weapons transfers based on the State Department’s own rule, that no weapons can be sent to a country that may use them in war crimes, crimes against humanity, or in violation of humanitarian law. Blinken famously told Netanyahu, that he came to support Israel as a Jew. Blinken was not representing the rules and protocol of the U.S. State Department, but was instead representing his race, and his bloodline having been born of a Jewish mother. Blinken turned the secular system of the American government into a racist and sectarian system in one fell swoop.
The next big protest movement in the U.S. may well be a popular uprising against paying taxes. Americans may ask, “Why do I pay taxes, if Washington, DC. is throwing away money on wars I oppose?”
Gaza is starving
Deliberating starving people amounts to war crimes and genocide under international law. More than 15 children have died from malnutrition in Gaza. The deaths are due not only to hunger but also dehydration. The elderly and small children are very susceptible to dehydration which causes the major organs to shut down.
The humanitarian aid trucks sit parked and idle at the gate to Gaza. Israel has prevented aid from coming to over 2 million Palestinians. Biden has only to pick up a phone and order the gate to be open and the aid to flow in unimpeded, but instead, he has asked the air force to fly over Gaza and drop pallets of food.
Israel has blocked humanitarian supplies to Gaza. On January 26, the International Court of Justice recognized the plausibility of Israel committing genocide and ordered it to allow the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian services and aid to Palestinians. However, since the court’s ruling, the number of trucks Israel has allowed to enter Gaza has fallen to 57 a day – compared with an average of 147 a day before the ICJ ruling.
The hospitals are barely functioning with hundreds of wounded arriving each day, and now they are filling up with people in the last stages of starvation.
An unpublished report from UNRWA said some of its employees released from Israeli detention were tortured into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the 7 October attacks, Reutersreported on 9 March.
The testimonies are contained in a report by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reviewed by Reuters and dated February 2024.
“Agency staff members have been subject to threats and coercion by the Israeli authorities while in detention and pressured to make false statements against the Agency, including that the Agency has affiliations with Hamas and that UNRWA staff members took part in the 7 October 2023 atrocities,” the report says.
The report included allegations of abuse and torture in Israeli detention, including severe physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats of harm to family members.
Though waterboarding is widely viewed as torture by human rights groups, the Reuters report described Israeli actions only as “coercion” and “pressure” to force detained Palestinians to make false statements.
In addition to describing the torture of UNRWA employees, the report stated that Israel has subjected Palestinian detainees more broadly to beatings, humiliation, threats, dog attacks, and sexual violence. Some detainees have also died after Israel denied them medical treatment, the report added.
UNRWA communications director Juliette Touma said the agency planned to hand the information in the 11-page, unpublished report to human rights investigators at UN agencies and outside rights groups.
“When the war comes to an end there needs to be a series of inquiries to look into all violations of human rights,” she said.
Amid the torture and medical neglect, 27 Palestinians have died in Israeli prisons since the start of the war on 7 October.
Israel has accused UNRWA employees of participation in the 7 October Hamas attack on Israeli settlements and military bases. Israel provided no evidence for the claim, but 16 countries, including the US, paused $450 million in UNRWA funding in response, throwing its aid operations into crisis just as starvation was beginning to grip Gaza.
Israel’s campaign against UNRWA is part of a broader campaign started years ago to dismantle the agency, which helps keep the hope of Palestinian refugees returning to their stolen lands and homes in what is now Israel alive.
A few observations on President Biden’s building of a “temporary pier” – or what his officials are grandly calling a “port” – to get aid into Gaza:
1. Though no one is mentioning it, Biden is actually violating Israel’s 17-year blockade of Gaza with his plan. Gaza doesn’t have a sea port, or an airport, because Israel, its occupier, has long banned it from having either.
Israel barred anything getting into Gaza that didn’t come through the land crossings it controls. Israel stopped international aid flotillas, often violently, from reaching Gaza to bring in medicine. The blockade also created a captive market for Israel’s own poor-quality goods, like damaged fruit and veg, and allowed Israel to skim off money at the land crossings that should have gone to the Palestinians in fees and duties.
2. It will take many weeks for the US to build this pier off-shore and get it up and running. Why the delay? Because every western capital, including the United States, has supported the blockade for the past 17 years.
The siege of Gaza caused gradual malnutrition among the enclave’s children, rather than the current rapid starvation. By helping Israel inflict collective punishment on Gaza for all those years, the US and Europe were complicit in a gross and enduring violation of international law, even before the current genocide.
With his pier, Biden isn’t reversing that long-standing collusion in a crime against humanity. He has stressed it will be temporary. In other words, it will be back to business as usual in Gaza afterwards: any children who survive will once again be allowed to starve in slow-motion, at a rate that doesn’t register with the establishment media and put pressure on Washington to be seen to be doing something.
3. Biden could get aid into Gaza much faster than by building a pier, if he wanted to. He could simply insist that Israel let aid trucks through the land crossings, and threaten it with serious repercussions should it fail to comply. He could threaten to withhold the US bombs he is sending to kill more children in Gaza. Or he could threaten to cut off the billions in military aid Washington sends to Israel every year. Or he could threaten to refuse to cast a US veto to protect Israel from diplomatic fallout at the United Nations. He could do any of that and more, but he chooses not to.
4. Even after Biden buys Israel a few more weeks to further aggressively starve Palestinians in Gaza, while we wait for his temporary pier to be completed, nothing may actually change in practice. Israel will still get to carry out the same checks it currently does at the land crossings but instead in Lanarca, Cyprus, where the aid will be loaded on to ships. In other words, Israel will still be able to create the same interminable hold-ups using “security concerns” as the pretext.
5. Biden isn’t changing course – temporarily – because he suddenly cares about the people, or even the children, of Gaza. They have been suffering in their open-air prison, to varying degrees, for decades. If he had cared, he would have done something to end that suffering after he became president. If he had done something then, October 7 might never have happened, and all those lives lost on both sides – lives continuing to be lost on the Palestinian side every few minutes – might have been saved.
And if he really cared, he wouldn’t have helped Israel in its efforts to destroy UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinians and a vital lifeline for Gaza, by freezing its funding, based on unevidenced claims against the agency by Israel.
No, Biden doesn’t care about Palestinian suffering, or about the fact that, while he’s been busy eating ice cream, many, many tens of thousands of children have been murdered, maimed or orphaned – and the rest starved. He cares about the polls. His timetable for helping Palestinians is being strictly dictated by the schedule of the presidential election. He needs to look like Gaza’s saviour when Democrats are deciding who they are voting for.
He and the Democratic party are betting voters are dumb enough to fall for this charade. Please don’t prove them right.
A leading Establishment newspaper in Europe says that “what is driving European politics at present – is fear”. The headlines ring out with apprehension: “Germany’s élites run scared, as Putin rains down death on Ukraine”. The British Prime Minister calls an emergency press conference to warns of ‘democracy at risk’ from ‘extremism’ on the eve of a by-election win by George Galloway, an articulate, if somewhat unruly, ‘thorn’ in the side of conventional politics (but hardly any ‘extremist’).
In the US too the liberal sphere is in meltdown over the publication of a just-released book: White Rural Rage: The Threat To American Democracy, in which “rural whites are [described as] the most racist; xenophobic; anti-immigrant; anti-gay; and conspiracy-minded, anti-democratic” demography in America. They “don’t believe in an independent press or free speech”, and are “most likely to accept or excuse violence”.
Of course, the fear is being — in the first instance — diverted outwards towards the claim that this is somehow Russia’s ‘doing’ — a looming ‘menace’ further stoked by claims of President Putin’s ‘imperial aspirations’, way beyond Ukraine. There is however (to invert the usual MSM meme), absolutely no evidence for these claims (from anything Putin has said over the years).
What is spooking the West more immediately is the cascading defeats inflicted on Ukrainian forces, after the Avdeevka rout. The new Ukrainian commander, General Syrski, in the wake of the flight, announced a retreat to new defence lines, but as some had predicted, it turned out that the ‘more favourable lines’ Syrski promoted did not exist.
Ukrainian photographers Konstantin and Vlada Liberov who document the war from the ground demanded from Syrski: “So what is the next “fortetsia” – Pokrovsk? Or just Konstantinovka?”
“Where is this second line of defence?” Yuri Butusov, editor-in-chief of Censor— following his trip to this area – asks: “There are no words. Gap: here in Kiev – the supreme commander-in-chief says one thing, but at the front something completely different is happening. I want to say that no field lines of fortifications have been built beyond Avdeevka so far. I saw Russian drones attacking our soldiers in their burrows – in the middle of a field”.
There are no constructed defence lines – only hurried improvisations – whilst Ukraine resorts to simply throwing its reserves at the deficiency – so to prop up the incremental retreat. Did NATO leaders not spot this defence-line lacuna? Apparently not …
And so one leg to the current panic is just this: The EU has heavily over-invested in its Ukraine project, and now sees it fast crumbling. Hence President Macron’s hasty summons of EU states (at 24 hours’ notice) to the Elysée Palace to hear him warn that the situation on the ground in Ukraine was so critical, and the stakes for Europe so high, that: “We’re at a critical point in the conflict where we need to take the initiative: We’re determined to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes”.
What Macron in fact proposed however, shocked the gathered leaders. He advocated committing detachments of European special forces to Ukraine, not so much directly to fight the Russian forces, but to act as vulnerable strategic ‘tripwire’ deterrents to Russia – which, were they attacked, would ‘trip’ a full-throated NATO retaliation down onto the head of Russia.
These tripwire forces, Macron claimed, would form strategic deterrents to Moscow’s military room for manoeuvre — oases of ‘untouchable’ NATO, scattered through Ukraine. His colleagues, horrified, demurred; they saw the emplaced tripwires as the conveyor belt leading to WWIII: ‘Madness’, and ‘no thank you’.
The ‘other leg’ to European desperation was given away by PM Sunak’s rush to the microphone in the wake of the Rochdale by-election outcome to warn that democracy is in peril from extremism.
One commentator opined: ‘Rishi Sunak was right’: “This is not politics, not even of the radical kind … It is inchoate, incoherent rage which is ready to make common cause with anyone else, who is enraged even on contradictory grounds”.
If this reaction sounds a bit over the top – just because George Galloway overwhelmingly won in Rochdale – let us ‘join up the dots’ for you:
The same commentator (Janet Daley in the Telegraph ) avers: “To bring this right up to date, we now have an entity called the Workers Party – a name that summons up traditional Left-wing dedication to the interests of working class people – winning a by-election in Rochdale by somehow conflating the Palestinian cause in Gaza with local working class needs”.
Ouch! That is what hurts. Echoes here from the Michigan primary in the US, where a coalition of pro-Palestinian groups who had set a modest target of 10,000 ‘uncommitted’ votes — Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan in 2016 — to send a message to President Biden that voter frustration over the Gaza war could cost him dearly in the November election. In the event, however, the pro-Palestinian support blew past the 10,000 target and clocked in at nearly 101,400 votes.
Message sent — and as the electoral desperation in Democratic circles, indicates, ‘message received’.
Just to be plain: Events in Gaza and in Ukraine are unravelling long-standing political power control structures in the EU, in Europe and in the US. This is why there is panic and double-down.
Several key architects of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq 21 years ago are presenting a plan for rebuilding and “de-radicalizing” the surviving population of Gaza, while ensuring that Israel retains “freedom of action” to continue operations against Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The plan, which was published as a report Thursday by the hard-line neo-conservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, or JINSA, and the Vandenberg Coalition, is calling for the creation of a private entity, the “International Trust for Gaza Relief and Reconstruction” to be led by “a group of Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates” and “supported by the United States and other nations.”
With regard to Palestinian participation, the report by the “Gaza Futures Task Force,” envisages an advisory board “composed primarily of non-Hamas Gazans from Gaza, the West Bank, and diaspora.” In addition, the Palestinian Authority, which is based on the West Bank, “should be consulted in, and publicly bless,” the creation of the Trust while itself undergoing a process of “revamping.”
In addition to granting Israel license to intervene against Hamas and Islamic Jihad within Gaza, the plan calls for security to be provided by the Trust’s leaders and “capable forces from non-regional states with close ties to Israel,” as well as “vetted Gazans.” The Trust should also be empowered to “hire private security contractors with good reputations among Western militaries” in “close coordination with Israeli security forces,” according to the report.
The task force that produced the report consists of nine members, four of whom played key roles as Middle East policymakers under former President George W. Bush and in the run-up to and aftermath of the disastrous Iraq invasion in 2003.
The group is chaired by John Hannah, who served as deputy national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2001 to 2005 and then as Cheney’s national security advisor (2005-2009), replacing Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who resigned his position after being indicted for perjury. Libby, who was later given a full pardon by former President Donald Trump, is also a member of the Gaza task force.
Another prominent member of the task force is the founder and chairman of the hawkish Vandenberg Coalition, Elliott Abrams, who served as the senior director for Near East and North African Affairs in the National Security Council under Bush from 2002 to 2009 and more recently as the Special Envoy for Venezuela and Iran under Trump. Ironically, Abrams, who also served as the NSC’s Senior Director for Democracy under Bush, played a key role in supporting an attempted armed coup by Hamas’s chief rival, Fatah, in 2007 after Hamas swept the 2006 Palestinian elections. The coup attempt sparked a brief but bloody civil war in Gaza, which eventually resulted in Hamas’ consolidation of power in the Strip.
Amb. Eric Edelman (ret.), a fourth member of the task force, served as Cheney’s principal deputy national security adviser from 2001 to 2003 and then as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the number three position at the Pentagon, under Rumsfeld and his successor, Robert Gates, from 2005 to 2009, as U.S. troops struggled to contain the mainly Sunni resistance to the U.S. occupation in Iraq.
In addition to their collaboration during the Bush administration, the four men have long been associated with strongly pro-Israel neoconservative groups, having served on the boards or in advisory positions for such organizations and think tanks as the Hudson Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy, as well as the Vandenberg Coalition and JINSA. Indeed, such groups have promoted policies that have been generally aligned with those of the Likud Party led by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Thus, the report’s “key findings” prioritize as considerations: [these are quotes]
restoring the deterrence and security needs of Israel, both for its own people and its standing as a powerful regional ally and essential component of resisting Iran’s ambitions; and
dismantling Hamas as a military and governing force and protecting against its reconstitution through Israel’s continued freedom of action against it and against Palestinian Islamic Jihad; and by de-militarizing, de-radicalizing, and improving conditions in Gaza such that major terrorist attacks like October 7 can’t and won’t happen again…
Its proposed Trust, according to the report, should involve the United States and concerned states that accept Israel’s role in the region” and “should provide the humanitarian assistance and help to restore essential services and rebuild civil society in Gaza as intense combat and over subsequent months. Its activities should be governed by an international board composed of 3 to 7 representatives from the key states supporting the Trust, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others. At least one notable omission from the list is Qatar, which has provided tens billions of dollars in assistance to Gaza over the last decade.
In an echo of Washington’s disastrous de-Baathification campaign in occupied Iraq, the report puts special stress on “deradicalization” efforts. “The Trust, recognizing that years of radicalization by Hamas has complicated the task of reforming and restoring Gaza, should focus on a long-term program for deradicalizing the media, schools and mosques,” according to the report which adds that “Gazans and the Gazan diaspora should play an active role in developing and implementing these plans, alongside the Trust’s Arab members who have hands-on experience in successful deradicalization efforts in their own societies.” Such efforts in Gaza, it goes on, could “serve as a model to encourage a similar program there that will be essential if a credible two-state solution is to be revived.”
The task force urges the Trust to coordinate with other states’ efforts and with those of NGOs and international organizations, including the United Nations. But, in an echo of a key Likud talking point, “it should recognize that the activities of UNRWA serve to perpetuate and deepen the Palestinian crisis.”
The report said UNRWA’s immediate assistance in providing relief may be necessary, but “plans to replace it with local Palestinian institutions or other international organizations committed to peace should be developed and implemented.”
All of these efforts should be pursued within the more general context of countering “Iran’s aggressive campaign to derail regional peace efforts, including by constraining the threat posed by Hezbollah and resuming progress toward normalizing Israel and Saudi Arabia,” according to the report.
Jim Lobe is a Contributing Editor of Responsible Statecraft. He formerly served as chief of the Washington bureau of Inter Press Service from 1980 to 1985 and again from 1989 to 2015.
A humanitarian aid vehicle which had been the target of Israeli airstrikes resulting in the death of nine and dozens of injured in Deir Al-Balah of Gaza on March 3, 2024. [Ali Jadallah – Anadolu Agency ]
Scores of Palestinians were killed and injured when the Israeli army dropped bombs on people collecting humanitarian aid from a truck in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on Sunday, Anadolu reports.
This is the second major Israeli attack in the last five days on displaced Palestinians in Gaza who are waiting for humanitarian aid.
Earlier on Thursday, at least 112 Palestinians were killed and 760 others injured when Israeli forces shelled a crowd waiting for humanitarian aid south of Gaza City.
“Many people were killed and others wounded in an Israeli bombing that targeted an aid truck in the city of Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip,” sources in the medical field told Anadolu while requesting anonymity.
So far, the number of casualties from the latest attack is not clear as neither the Health Ministry in the besieged Gaza Strip nor Israeli authorities have issued statements.
Israel has launched a deadly military offensive on the Gaza Strip since an Oct. 7, 2023, cross-border attack led by Hamas, in which nearly 1,200 people were killed.
At least 30,410 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have since been killed in Gaza, and 71,700 others injured amid mass destruction and shortages of necessities.
Israel has also imposed a crippling blockade on Gaza, leaving its population, particularly residents in the north where the Thursday shootings took place, on the verge of starvation.
The Israeli war has pushed 85% of Gaza’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, while 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed, according to the UN.
Israel stands accused of genocide at the International Court of Justice. An interim ruling in January ordered Tel Aviv to stop genocidal acts and take measures to guarantee that humanitarian assistance is provided to civilians in Gaza.
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