Amnesty International – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

_{^{Palestinians carrying some belongings walk past ammunition containers left behind by Israeli troops as they flee Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, on Feb. 2, 2024. Photo: Mahmud Hams/AFP}}

_{Portland, Maine}

As this column goes to press, the Israeli government has just charged members of the UN Relief and Works Agency in Gaza with being active in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general, has fired the people so charged and pledged a through investigation to determine the accuracy of Israel’s allegations. None of this news negates what is not a case of strange arithmetic, though it may be a case of strange fruit. The details follow.

Since last October’s start of the current war between Israel and Palestine, the Israeli armed forces have killed over one percent of Gaza’s population, with 63,000 wounded. Forty percent of the dead are children. Add the women killed, and the proportion rises to 70 percent. Among those still living, everyone is food insecure, and one-half are starving. Ever since December, easily preventable contagions have been spreading. Almost all their homes have been reduced to rubble. Ever since the Israeli authorities began restricting food, fuel, and medical supplies to Gaza starting in 2007, anemia and stunted growth among Gaza’s children have been commonplace. In one particularly grisly incident in December, an Israeli detachment ran bulldozers over sick and injured people who were taking refuge from bombardment in a hospital, crushing them to death. Among the dead were children.

If you were Palestinian, how would you respond? Imagine the same proportions in the United States: 9,300,000 wounded and 3,900,000 dead; of the dead, 1,500,000 children and 1,200,000 women; nationwide, all of us food insecure, with 165,000,000 starving. With almost all our hospitals flattened and almost no food, fuel, clean water, or medical supplies allowed in, how would we minister to our ill-fed, sick, and wounded? How would we deal with increasing disease? With almost all our homes destroyed, where would we shelter, now that it’s winter? Where would we put the corpses, and who would be left strong and available enough to bury them? As an American, how would you respond?

Then there’s the West Bank. Ever since 1967, Israeli settlers have been steadily shoving Palestinians off the land, demolishing their homes, uprooting their olive orchards, and from time to time shooting to kill or merely blow away their knees. This has been going on under the protection of the Israeli armed forces, who have joined in the shooting every so often, and who arrest and detain Palestinians without a formal indictment or due process as a matter of routine. Those so detained have often spent years in prison. It should come as no surprise that from time to time, desperate Palestinians have replied with gunsmoke of their own, on a scale far smaller than what Israeli settlers and the IDF have wrought.

In response, the UN General Assembly passed a series of resolutions in 1982, with only the United States and Israel voting no. Here are excerpts from those resolutions:

_{· That Israel desist from the removal and resettlement of Palestinian refugees in the territory occupied by Israel since 1967 and from the destruction of their shelters.}

_{· That Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan, are illegal.}

_{· That all measures and actions taken by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory are in violation of the Geneva Convention.}

_{· That Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territory, its diversion of water resources, its depletion of natural and economic resources of the occupied territories, and its displacement of the population of those territories, are without legal validity.}

_{· That the Israeli occupation is contradictory to the basic requirements for the social and economic development of the Palestinian people. That hunger constitutes an outrage and a violation of human dignity.}

_{· That historical injustices have contributed to the poverty, marginalization, social exclusion, and instability that affect many people in the world.}

_{· That no derogation from the prohibition of racial discrimination, genocide, and the crime of apartheid is permitted.}

Lest all the foregoing seem like special pleading, consider this: how many of you have donated to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, or the International Red Cross? All five of these organizations see the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza as war crime, ethnic cleansing, or genocide. Meanwhile, the United States continues its unrestricted weapons shipments to the Israeli armed forces, all paid for with American taxpayers’ money. It all adds up. As was once written long ago, where our treasure is, there lie our hearts also.

_{John Raby is a retired history teacher and conscientious objector who is currently co-chair of Peace Action Maine. From 2014 to 2021, when he lived in New Hampshire, he was active with New Hampshire Peace Action and wrote the clean energy policy for New London, New Hampshire. He centers his activism around war and peace, environmental, and social justice issues.}

_{^{Palestinians perform Friday prayer as Israeli attacks continue at the courtyard of Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza on November 10, 2023 | Photo: Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images}}

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

“Children in Gaza are hanging by a thread,” said a UNICEF director, calling for attacks on healthcare facilities to stop immediately and the urgent delivery of supplies to hospitals.

As Israeli forces waged what al-Shifa’s director described as a “war against hospitals” in Gaza on Friday, United Nations officials, human rights groups, and doctors demanded the protection of medical facilities and renewed calls for a cease-fire.

“Half of the Gaza Strip’s 36 hospitals and two-thirds of its primary healthcare centers are not functioning at all,” World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the U.N. Security Council. “Those that are functioning are operating way beyond their capacities. The health system is on its knees, and yet somehow is continuing to deliver some lifesaving care.”

Since the Hamas-led attack on October 7 that killed around 1,200 Israelis, the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) assault of Gaza has devastated civilian infrastructure, displaced about 70% of the strip’s 2.3 million residents—about half of whom are children—and killed over 11,000 Palestinians, including more than 4,500 children. Tens of thousands more are injured or missing.

“The only way to prevent further loss of civilian lives and allow lifesaving aid to reach those in desperate need in Gaza is for states to act now to demand an immediate cease-fire.”

“The situation on the ground is impossible to describe: hospital corridors crammed with the injured, the sick, the dying; morgues overflowing; surgery without anesthesia; tens of thousands of displaced people sheltering at hospitals; families crammed into overcrowded schools, desperate for food and water,” Tedros explained Friday. “Nowhere and no one is safe.”

“WHO continues to call for unfettered access to deliver humanitarian aid to the civilians of Gaza, who are not responsible for this violence, but are suffering in ways that we in this room cannot imagine,” he added, also calling on Hamas to release hostages; Israel to restore supplies of electricity, water, and fuel; and both sides meet their obligations under international humanitarian law.

“We continue to call for a cease-fire, to prevent further deaths of civilians and further damage to Gaza’s hospitals and health facilities,” he said. Tedros also argued the Security Council must be reformed and recalled his memories of war in Ethiopia, saying, “I understand what the children of Gaza must be going through, because as a child, I went through the same thing.”

United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Middle East and North Africa Regional Director Adele Khodr declared Friday that “children’s right to life and health is being denied,” especially in northern Gaza, where the IDF has pressured civilians to evacuate amid its ongoing bombardment.

“Children in Gaza are hanging by a thread, particularly in the north,” Khodr warned. “Thousands and thousands of children remain in northern Gaza as hostilities intensify. These children have nowhere to go and are at extreme risk. We call for the attacks on healthcare facilities to stop immediately and for the urgent delivery of fuel and medical supplies to hospitals across all Gaza, including the northern parts of the strip.”

According toThe Washington Post, “At least seven hospitals reported being under siege or in proximity to the fighting in Gaza City.”

Baqr Qaoud, director of al-Nasr Hospital, told the newspaper that thousands of people left his facility, along with al-Rantisi Cihldren’s Hospital and the Gaza Eye Hospital. Noting the IDF forces in the area on Friday, Qaoud said, “We were carrying white flags, and when we walked out, we passed by the tanks; I was meters away from one.”

Steve Sosebee of the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, which runs al-Rantisi’s pediatric cancer unit, said Friday that the hospital had been “overrun with thousands of internally displaced people while continuing cancer treatments for patients.”

“These are kids with cancer. They’re starting to relapse and fall out of remission,” he continued. “According to the Israeli army, hospitals are legitimate military targets. The [Gazan] health sector has completely collapsed. Thousands of innocent children—on ventilators, on dialysis, with cancer, with heart conditions, amputees with trauma injuries, and hundreds [of kids] in the burn department—are not getting care anymore. That should be on the conscience of the entire world.”

Sosebee added that “we have transferred 13 children out. They are mostly in Egypt now.” The WHO also confirmed Friday that some children with cancer or other blood disorders have been evacuated to Egypt or Jordan to continue treatment.

Gaza’s largest hospital is al-Shifa, and thousands of the estimated 50,000 to 60,000 people who had sought shelter in and around it fled for the south on Friday, as the IDF closed in, according toThe Associated Press.

The Israeli military has claimed Hamas’ main operation is under al-Shifa, which the hospital’s director called “utter lies.” The IDF and Hamas on Friday traded accusations of blame for a blast at the hospital that health officials said killed 13 people.

As Amnesty International announced Friday that its petition demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza now has over a million signatures, Erika Guevara-Rosas, the group’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, asserted that “Israeli authorities continue to dehumanize Palestinians in their rhetoric as Israeli forces bomb densely populated refugee camps, hospitals, U.N.-run schools, bakeries, mosques and churches, roads, and civilian homes, wiping out entire families.”

“The only way to prevent further loss of civilian lives and allow lifesaving aid to reach those in desperate need in Gaza is for states to act now to demand an immediate cease-fire,” she said. “A cease-fire will also provide opportunities to secure the release of hostages and for independent international investigations to take place into the war crimes committed by all parties to address long-standing impunity. Ultimately, justice and reparation for all victims and dismantling Israel’s entrenched system of apartheid against Palestinians are essential to ending the cycle of recurrent horrors.”

Some advocates of a cease-fire have focused pressure on U.S. President Joe Biden, who is pushing to put $14.3 billion toward the Israeli war effort, on top of the nearly $4 billion that Israel already gets annually.

“We urge President Biden to wield all the influence and power of the U.S. government to help secure a cease-fire and stop this devastating spiral of violence in Gaza, which threatens to engulf people living across the region,” Avril Benoît, the U.S. executive director of Doctors Without Borders, known globally as Médecins Sans Frontières, wrote Friday.

“The U.S. government has been staunchly supportive of Israel’s military operation. It has also expressed concerns about mitigating the impact of the conflict on civilians, calling on the Israeli government to conduct its military operations within the bounds of the laws of war,” Benoît noted. “The horrors unfolding before our eyes in Gaza show that these calls are going unheeded. Working purposefully to reach a cease-fire is the most effective way to ensure the protection of civilians.”

_{Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.}