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As I write this, more than 31,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and, as Aya Batrawy reported for NPR, thousands more are "unaccounted for -- either missing under the rubble, buried hastily in side streets, or decomposing in areas that can't be safely reached." Significant numbers of the dead are women and children, and aid for those living, thanks to an Israeli blockade, is barely entering that 25-mile strip of land. Yet the future promises mass famine, grotesque disease, and death, death, death for even more Palestinian civilians, most of them refugees who have done nothing to deserve such a fate, as TomDispatch regulars Stan and Priti Gulati Cox suggest all too vividly today.
Now, the Biden administration has finally decided to act. And no, I don't mean forcing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's wildly right-wing government to reverse course, even though his military remains significantly dependent on American armaments (which our president until recently swore never to stop delivering). Admittedly, President Biden recently claimed he might consider limiting those arms deliveries if, against his wishes, Netanyahu were to send the Israeli military into the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where an estimated 1.4 million Palestinians are (barely) sheltered. Nor do I mean opening Gaza to sufficient aid. Instead, President Biden has ordered the U.S. military to build a floating pier in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza with a causeway to the shore. From there, aid would theoretically be delivered to that embattled land.
Forget that it will take weeks, if not months, to build such a structure, and that not enough aid could possibly be transferred to Gaza via that single pier to matter greatly. Focus instead on one thing: the Israelis, as the Coxes note today, have already radically cut the number of supply trucks entering Gaza, so remind me, how in the world will the supplies from that pier even be delivered once they hit land? As Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden administration senior aid official and now president of the Refugees International aid advocacy group, put it recently: "You need drivers that don't exist, trucks that don't exist feeding into a distribution system that doesn't exist."
So, as planning for that pier proceeds, madness and horror reign in Gaza and the strangeness of it all remains hard to take in. As New York Times reporters Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt wrote recently, "It is rare for the United States to try to provide such services for people who are being bombed with tacit U.S. support." Now, let the Coxes take you deeper into the world of horror that is Gaza today. Tom
Armed by Washington, Israel Trashes the Genocide Convention
Stop Treating Gaza Like a Natural Disaster
By Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox
It's been almost two months since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop killing Gazans and destroying their means of subsistence. So let's look back and ask (1) how Israel has responded to its "orders," and (2) how hard the Biden administration has pushed Israel to abide by those orders. Spoiler alert: the short answers are (1) not well and (2) not very.
The American government has provided most of the armaments and targeting technologies being used to kill Gazans by the thousands while turning many of the rest of them into refugees by destroying their homes, offices, schools, and hospitals. Nor did the Biden administration threaten to withdraw that support when Israel blocked shipments of crucial food and fuel to the 25-mile-long Gaza Strip. It also keeps vetoing U.N. Security Council resolutions that would hold Israel accountable. And President Biden, despite an increasing amount of rhetorical shuffling, continues to back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), even though they have ignored the International Court's orders and continue committing atrocities.
Flouting the Order to Stop the Killing
On January 26th, the International Court of Justice handed down a ruling in a case brought by the Republic of South Africa accusing Israel of genocide. It ordered that Israel must "ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described" in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The court's first order prohibited "killing members" of the Palestinian population or "causing serious bodily or mental harm" to them. How did Israel respond? Consider that, between late December 2023 and January 21st of this year, the IDF had killed about 5,000 Palestinians, already pushing the death toll in the Gaza Strip past 25,000. The court's order, issued days later, would have essentially zero effect. Another 5,000-plus Palestinians would be killed by late February, raising the death toll to more than 30,000.
During the month after the ruling, Israeli troops repeatedly killed or injured civilians fleeing to, or taking shelter in, areas the IDF had advertised as "safe zones." Typically, when, on February 12th, Israeli aircraft attacked 14 homes and three mosques in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, killing 67 Palestinians, some of the survivors told reporters that they'd been inside tents in a refugee camp. Similarly, on February 22nd, Israeli warplanes struck a residential area in central Gaza, killing 40 civilians, mostly women and children, and wounding more than 100.
Worse yet, the Biden administration has enabled that ongoing killing spree by approving 100 separate military sales to Israel since the conflict began in October. As a former administration official told the Washington Post, "That's an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of U.S. support."
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