After U.S. Veto Ensures Israel's Genocide In Gaza Will Continue, Biden Enjoys Lavish Fundraiser At Israeli-American Billionaire's Home
The US is providing the bombs for Israel's war crimes, while pretending to care about casualties. Current Body Count: 29,000, including 11,500 children.
Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza has been described as a “death zone” by doctors and other officials from the World Health Organization, who have been “shocked” by the “catastrophic” and “indescribable” destruction they witnessed.
“Nasser Hospital has no electricity or running water, and medical waste and garbage are creating a breeding ground for disease,” according to WHO officials. The area around the hospital “was surrounded by burnt and destroyed buildings, heavy layers of debris, with no stretch of intact road.”
Nasser was one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza. As of February 18, 2024, it is “completely out of service”.
Israeli forces have bombed and attacked every hospital in Gaza over the past four months — and that would not have been possible without the generous assistance of the Biden administration, which circumvented Congress in order to quickly send hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons. Under international law, it is a war crime to target hospitals unless they are shown to have been “used to commit an act harmful to the enemy”. No such evidence has been produced regarding any hospital in Gaza.
Jake Johnson of Common Dreams writes:
Israeli forces stormed Nasser last Thursday, claiming without providing evidence that Hamas had used the facility to hold hostages. Power cutoffs stemming from the raid killed several oxygen-dependent patients, according to Gaza health officials, and at least one person was killed by an Israeli attack on Nasser’s orthopedic department.
Israel reportedly arrested several of the facility’s doctors.
“Where is the humanity? Why this is happening to us?” Dr. Ahmad Moghrabi, head of plastic surgery at Nasser, asked in an interview with Al Jazeera. “How many of us have to die just to listen to us to stop these crimes?”
The Biden administration remains deaf to those cries.
At the same time the U.S. sabotaged a third cease-fire resolution prepared by the U.N. Security Council, Joe Biden was on his merry way to a lavish fundraiser at the Los Angeles home of Haim Saban, a Israeli-American billionaire and AIPAC’s largest individual donor.
Meanwhile in Gaza, doctors perform amputations and other surgeries with unsterilized instruments on hallway floors, on patients forced to endure these emergency procedures without anesthesia. Pregnant women are undergoing caesareans without anesthesia. Post-surgery pain medications are not available.
Abby Zimet, Common Dreams, February 18, 2024:
The grotesque madness of history’s first live-streamed genocide persists as Israel daily commits acts once unimaginable. They are bombing hospitals, shooting doctors, forcing Palestinian prisoners to issue evacuation orders before murdering them, starving women and children before targeting them as they scavenge for grass, leaves, animal feed, terrorizing civilians desperately fleeing first south, then north when in truth “there is no sanctuary.” And still — what the ever-loving-fuck — America sends more arms.
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) is suing Joe Biden for failing in his duty under international and U.S. laws to prevent this genocide. The complaint, filed on behalf of several Palestinian groups and individuals, alleges that Israel’s actions since October 2023, including “mass killings”, the targeting of civilian infrastructure, and forced expulsions, amount to genocide. The 1948 international convention against genocide requires the U.S. (and other countries) to use its power and influence to stop the mass murder.
Numerous Israeli officials have spoken publicly over the past four months about the extermination of all Palestinians from Gaza. Major General Ghassan Alian said: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
The CCR’s lawsuit asks the court to bar the U.S. from providing weapons, money and diplomatic support to Israel. In 2004, the CCR won a landmark case in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004, establishing the rights of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp.
Biden has made a few pathetic attempts at feigning concern for the nearly 30,000 dead in Gaza (an extremely low estimate, to be sure). He said any country receiving weapons from the U.S. must adhere to international law. (Oh. Well, okay, then.) And the U.S. is also investigating whether Israel is misusing these U.S. weapons. (What constitutes misuse? Using them for something other than killing people?)
Biden is already a deeply flawed candidate for re-election. He will be running against a civilly-liable rapist facing nearly 100 federal felony charges, a decades-long fraudster who now owes more than half-a-billion dollars in fines, who attempted a multi-pronged “self-coup” rather than concede defeat, who openly admits he will rule as a vengeance-seeking dictator even as he slides deeper into paranoia and incoherence. That’s merely a few of his opponent’s flaws — and yet I would not feel confident betting on Biden winning in November. If you believe the polls, it’s basically a toss-up right now — or Biden loses.
Biden, who has also lost more than a few mph off his fastball (which wasn’t exactly elite to begin with), has lost support from young voters who are rightly appalled by his unwavering support for genocide (if that word is too strong a description for you, how about “unrelenting mass slaughter of innocents”? ). Biden has failed to declare a climate emergency, although he claims to have “practically” declared one. And despite the encroaching threat to all American women of their reproductive rights coming under the purview of a dictatorial and misogynistic government and pre-teen girls being forced by law to carry a pregnancy caused by rape to term and give birth being extremely important concerns for voters going into November’s election, Biden remains absolutely allergic of even saying the word “abortion” in public.
Julia Conley, Commons Dreams, February 20, 2024:
As a United Nations agency halted aid deliveries in northern Gaza, where acute malnourishment is rampant among children, citing a “breakdown of social order” fueled by Israel’s bombardment of and blockade on the enclave, the United States for a third time on Tuesday vetoed a cease-fire resolution at the U.N. Security Council—saying it was an inopportune time to demand that Israel end its massacre of Palestinians.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the cease-fire resolution, proposed by Algeria, would “negatively impact” negotiations for a truce that are ongoing.
Amar Bendjama, Algeria’s ambassador to the U.N., said the U.S. ambassador’s lone vote against the resolution “implies an endorsement of the brutal violence and collective punishment inflicted upon” Palestinians in Gaza.
Thirteen countries supported the resolution, while the U.K.—which has veto power, like the U.S., China, France, and Russia—abstained from voting.
The vote marked the third time the U.S. has vetoed a cease-fire resolution at the U.N. Security Council (UNSC). Meanwhile, the Biden administration has approved weapons transfers to Israel without the oversight of the U.S. Congress since the assault began in October, and has vehemently defended the bombardment as being focused on defeating Hamas, even as Israel has killed more than 29,000 Palestinians including more than 11,500 children. . . .
As the U.S. rejected the cease-fire resolution, Al Jazeera reported on the chaos that has erupted in northern Gaza as Israel has blocked aid trucks from reaching starving civilians there.
The World Food Program (WFP) said Tuesday it was pausing deliveries after crowds of desperate people overwhelmed aid workers.
As Al Jazeera reported, children collected flour that spilled from an aid truck in Gaza City, before Israeli forces began firing on the crowd. . . .
The WFP and the U.N. Children’s Fund said Monday that starvation is particularly severe in northern Gaza, with 1 in 6 children under age two—more than 15%—acutely malnourished. . . .
In December, 15 agencies including the WFP warned that northern Gaza is at risk for a famine by May unless conditions significantly improve.
The United States’ veto of Algeria's resolution on Tuesday, said Bendjama, should be understood as “approval of starvation as a means of war against hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.” . . .
World Peace Foundation executive director and hunger researcher Alex de Waal has studied famines across the world for decades — and he says Israel’s minutely orchestrated famine in Gaza is unprecedented. “Nothing is comparable in terms of the speed and the concentrated effort at destroying what is essential to sustain the life of people — nothing compares to Gaza over the last 75 years. The speed of deterioration of humanitarian conditions is absolutely terrifying,” de Waal said.
Since the IPC [the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification] was adopted 20 years ago, there have been major food emergencies in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia’s Tigray region, north-east Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Yemen. Compared to Gaza, these have unfolded slowly, over periods of a year or more. They have stricken larger populations spread over wider areas. Hundreds of thousands died, most of them in emergencies that didn’t cross the bar of famine. Never before Gaza have today’s humanitarian professionals seen such a high proportion of the population descend so rapidly towards catastrophe.
For months, Israeli forces have blocked food, water, and other basic necessities from reaching Gaza. A majority of Palestinians are now reduced to eating grass, weeds, and leaves and drinking contaminated water. More than 700,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza are in danger of starving to death.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on the planet. Roughly two million people made their home within its 141 square miles — an area roughly the size of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Hoboken, New Jersey.
In the first week following Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel dropped approximately 1,000 bombs per day on Gaza. By the end of November, over 22,000 U.S.-produced bombs — about 90% of them were between 1,000 and 2,000 pounds each — had been dropped. By the end of the year, 70% of Gaza’s homes had been destroyed.
US military officials — not exactly pacifists — felt that even 500-pound aerial bombs were too large to use on most urban parts of Iraq and Syria. Israel is using bombs up to 2,000 pounds despite having thousands of smaller U.S.-made bombs that are “designed to minimize damage”.
In the first 89 days of its assault, Israel dropped 45,000 bombs — weighing a combined 65,000 tons. Nearly half of those bombs were unguided, dropped indiscriminately on the small area shown above. Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone in Gaza is still alive.
Marc Garlasco, a military advisor for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon, told the New York Times that ferocity of Israel’s attack is “beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career”. Garlasco said he might “have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War” to find another example of such devastating weaponery being used on such a small area.
There is also visual evidence of Israel dropping 2,000-pound bombs on locations where Gaza’s civilians had be ordered to move for safety. Israeli has also bombed hospitals after assuring Palestinians that it was safe to seek shelter there. And they have bombed several refugee camps, hitting some camps more than once.
Irfan Galaria, a surgeon from Philadelphia, was part of a group of physicians and nurses volunteering in Gaza with the humanitarian aid group MedGlobal. He arrived in southern Gaza on January 29, 2024. From last Friday’s Los Angeles Times:
I have worked in other war zones. But what I witnessed during the . . . 10 days in Gaza was not war — it was annihilation. . . .
[It] felt like the first pages of a dystopian novel. Our ears were numb with the constant humming of what I was told were the surveillance drones that circled constantly. Our noses were consumed with the stench of 1 million displaced humans living in close proximity without adequate sanitation. . . .
As we approached the European Gaza Hospital the next day, there were rows of tents that lined and blocked the streets. . . . People also spilled into the hospital: living in hallways, stairwell corridors and even storage closets. . . . A hospital designed to accommodate about 300 patients was now struggling to care for more than 1,000 patients and hundreds more seeking refuge. . . .
I began work immediately, performing 10 to 12 surgeries a day, working 14 to 16 hours at a time. The operating room would often shake from the incessant bombings, sometimes as frequent as every 30 seconds. . . . We performed amputations of arms and legs daily, using a Gigli saw, a Civil War-era tool, essentially a segment of barbed wire. Many amputations could’ve been avoided if we’d had access to standard medical equipment. . . .
I listened to my patients as they whispered their stories to me . . . The majority had been sleeping in their homes, when they were bombed. I couldn’t help thinking that the lucky ones died instantaneously, either by the force of the explosion or being buried in the rubble. . . .
I stopped keeping track of how many new orphans I had operated on. . . . On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. . . . None of these children survived. . . .
This week, Israeli forces raided another large hospital in Gaza, and they’re planning a ground offensive in Rafah. I feel incredibly guilty that I was able to leave while millions are forced to endure the nightmare in Gaza. As an American, I think of our tax dollars paying for the weapons that likely injured my patients there. Already driven from their homes, these people have nowhere else to turn.
Galaria also spoke with Democracy Now (videos at link):
“I thought I was going to be prepared, but I was not prepared for what I saw.” He witnessed “a collateral humanitarian crisis of an unimaginable scale,” involving the “deliberate attempt” to both target civilians with military assault and to deprive them of aid.
The humming from the drones was very eerie. And it began haunting us within a few minutes of entering, crossing over the border into Gaza. These are what we were told were surveillance or attack drones, and they’re flying 24/7. No matter where you are, what you’re doing, you hear the constant humming and buzzing. . . . It’s constantly consuming you. As a matter of fact, to be very frank, this is how disturbing those sounds were. I returned after just 10 days of being in Gaza, and during this time back, even ’til this day, I still hear the buzzing shaking in my mind. And this is just after 10 days. Imagine the emotional trauma that the sound alone is providing that the people there have to endure.
Thanks for this.
The Israeli military is also destroying and burning libraries in Gaza, 14 at last count.
https://lithub.com/israeli-forces-have-burned-down-the-library-of-al-kalima/
The deliberate destruction of tens of thousands of books, including numerous rare volumes and 150 years of Gaza historical records, is additional evidence of Israeli's genocidical mission: erasing all traces of Palestine and its people from the face of the earth. The United States is supplying most of the bombs for this latest obscenity, and it has committed these crimes in countless locations over the decades and centuries, while also enslaving, abusing, and murdering tens of millions of people.
Dan Sheehan, Lit Hub:
As reported earlier this week by Ramy Abdu, Chairman of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the Israeli army has burned down the the publishing house and library of Al-Kalima in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood in Gaza.
Toppled bookshelves, stray pages, and piles of ash are now all that remains of the library, which was also the home of its founder, Atef al Durra—a refugee from the Bureij camp in central Gaza who established Al-Kalima in 2006.
At least 14 libraries have now been badly damaged or destroyed entirely by Israeli forces since October 7.
This includes the Gaza University Library (which was destroyed on October 9), the IBBY Children in Crisis Library (which had previously been destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in 2014), the Diana Tamari Sabbagh Library (which contained tens of thousands of books and had been sheltering hundreds of displaced Palestinians before it was shelled by Israeli forces on November 25), and the Al-Israa University Library and National Museum (which was looted by the Israeli military before it was destroyed by controlled demolition on January 18).
The Central Archives of Gaza (which contained 150 years of records pertaining to Gaza’s history) and the Great Omari Mosque (which contained one of the most significant collections of rare books in Palestine) have both also been destroyed.