Starving Children in Gaza ‘Cannot Wait’ Weeks for US Port, Aid Groups Say / by Jake Johnson

_{^{Palestinian children are pictured near makeshift tents in Deir al-Balah, Gaza on March 7, 2024. (Photo: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)}}

“They are already dying from malnutrition and saving their lives is a matter of hours or days,” said Jason Lee of Save the Children.

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

Leading humanitarian groups said Friday that starving people in Gaza, including more than a million children, are in need of immediate aid and can’t afford to wait for the U.S. military to construct a port on the enclave’s coast, a project that’s expected to take weeks.

“Children in Gaza cannot wait to eat,” said Jason Lee, country director for Save the Children in the occupied Palestinian territory. “They are already dying from malnutrition and saving their lives is a matter of hours or days—not weeks.”

At least 17 children have starved to death in Gaza, according to Defense for Children International – Palestine, and many more are currently struggling to survive.

Condemning Israel’s obstruction of ground-based aid deliveries as “a grave violation against children” and international law, Lee stressed Friday that “there is already a tried and tested system in place to effectively coordinate aid.”

“But trucks of food and medicines that could save lives are waiting at crossings, while children are starving just miles away,” Lee continued. “Airdrops, with no on-the-ground coordination of who it reaches, and maritime corridors like the one announced yesterday, are no solutions to keep children alive. Neither are substitutes for unimpeded humanitarian assistance via the established land routes.”

U.S. President Joe Biden announced during his State of the Union address Thursday night that he has directed the nation’s military to “lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters.”

The president also said Israel, whose military is armed to the teeth with U.S. weaponry, “must do its part” by allowing “more aid into Gaza”—but did not threaten any consequences if the Netanyahu government refuses.

“Israel needs to facilitate rather than block the flow of supplies. This is not a logistics problem; it is a political problem.”

Ground deliveries into Gaza have plummeted in recent weeks as Israeli forces have attacked aid convoys and prevented trucks from entering and moving through the territory. A World Food Program (WFP) official said earlier this week there’s enough food to feed Gaza’s “entire population” sitting just outside of the strip.

“We need land crossings, we need access to get it into Gaza, whether in the southern parts of Gaza or the northern part of Gaza because the situation is catastrophic. So having access is really our number one priority,” said Samer AbdelJaber, WFP’s director of emergency.

The WFP has said aid airdrops—which Biden authorized last week—are a “last resort” and “will not avert famine.” On Friday, aid packages dropped into Gaza by U.S. military planes killed five people and injured at least 10 others.

Avril Benoît, executive director for Doctors Without Borders, argued Friday that Biden’s plan for a temporary port “is a glaring distraction from the real problem: Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate military campaign and punishing siege.”

“The food, water, and medical supplies so desperately needed by people in Gaza are sitting just across the border,” said Benoît. “Israel needs to facilitate rather than block the flow of supplies. This is not a logistics problem; it is a political problem. Rather than look to the U.S. military to build a workaround, the U.S. should insist on immediate humanitarian access using the roads and entry points that already exist.”

Refugees International said in a report released Thursday that its research teams found Israel is engaged in “routine and arbitrary denial of legitimate humanitarian goods from entering Gaza,” forcing aid convoys to undergo “a highly complicated” inspection process “without clear or consistent instructions.”

“Our research makes clear that conditions inside of Gaza are apocalyptic,” the group said. “After five months of war, Palestinians are struggling to find adequate food, water, shelter, and basic medicine. Famine-level hunger is already widespread and worsening.”

Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), wrote Friday that while “more aid for Palestinians on the brink of starvation is obviously good,” the Biden administration’s airdrops and plan for a temporary port underscore “the incoherence of U.S. policy right now, in which we’re trying to ease Palestinian suffering while continuing to unconditionally arm and support the government that is intentionally inflicting that suffering.”

“The president seems to recognize that ultimately this conflict will require a political solution, but is still unwilling to bring the full weight of America’s considerable leverage to that goal,” wrote Duss.

_{Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.}

‘War Crimes, Ethnic Cleansing, Genocide’: If you were Palestinian, how would you respond? / By John Raby

_{^{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.}

Doctors Without Borders Tells Key UN Body to Stop ‘Absolute Horror’ in Gaza / by Jake Johnson

_{^{Mourners gather next to the body of a person killed in Israeli airstrikes on the city of Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip on December 2, 2023 | Photo: Mohammed Talatene/Picture Alliance via Getty Images}}

_{Reposted from Common Dreams}

“Israel has shown a blatant and total disregard for the protection of Gaza’s medical facilities. We are watching as hospitals are turned into morgues and ruins.”

The international president of Doctors Without Borders on Monday pleaded with members of the United Nations Security Council to do everything in their power to halt the Israeli military’s expanding assault on the Gaza Strip, which has killed more than 15,000 people in less than two months and decimated the territory’s healthcare system.

In an open letter , Dr. Christos Christou wrote that “words fail us to describe the absolute horror being inflicted on Palestinian civilians by Israel as it carries out incessant and indiscriminate warfare in Gaza for all the world to see.”

“Israel has shown a blatant and total disregard for the protection of Gaza’s medical facilities. We are watching as hospitals are turned into morgues and ruins,” he continued. “These supposedly protected facilities are being bombed, are being shot at by tanks and guns, encircled, and raided, killing patients and medical staff… Medical staff, including our own, are utterly exhausted and in despair. They have had to amputate limbs from children suffering from severe burns without anesthesia or sterilized surgical tools.”

Hundreds of medical workers , including four Doctors Without Borders staff members, have been killed in Israel’s weekslong attack on Gaza. Following a seven-day pause that ended last week, Israel began broadening its ground offensive and bombardment to include swaths of southern Gaza—where many fled in response to Israeli evacuation orders in the north.

A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said Sunday that the country’s ground assault now encompasses “all of the Gaza Strip,” leaving desperate Gazans—including many children—with virtually nowhere safe to go.

“The only solution is an immediate and sustained cease-fire and the unrestricted supply of aid to the entirety of the Gaza Strip.”

Since the end of the pause, Gaza hospitals supported by Doctors Without Borders—also known as Médecins Sans Frontières—have been “barely able to cope with the influx of patients,” the group said in a statement Monday as Israel continued to hammer the besieged enclave, bombing hundreds of targets including a school that the IDF claimed contained “terror infrastructure.” The IDF did not provide evidence to support the claim.

“In a military campaign that has lasted weeks, with only a brief respite, the speed and scale of the bombing continue to plumb the depths of brutality,” said Chris Hook, Doctors Without Borders’ medical coordinator in Khan Younis, a city in southern Gaza. “Almost 2 million people are left without options. The only solution is an immediate and sustained cease-fire and the unrestricted supply of aid to the entirety of the Gaza Strip.”

Christou wrote in the group’s new open letter that while Israel claims to be targeting Hamas in retaliation for the group’s deadly October 7 attack, Israeli forces are in reality waging war “on all of Gaza and its people at any cost.”

Nearly 80% of Gaza’s population has been internally displaced , and U.N. experts warned last month that “time is running out to prevent genocide” in the strip.

“Thus far, world leaders, including permanent members of the Security Council, have been complicit, either by providing Israel with diplomatic cover, by supplying Israel with seemingly unconditional military assistance, or by failing to help stem the relentless bloodshed and atrocities being committed in Gaza,” Christou lamented.

“It is time,” he added, “to choose whether the council will continue issuing half-hearted calls for the respect of international law and the protection of civilians, or will fulfill its international peace and security mandate and exercise its full diplomatic leverage to convince the state of Israel that the death sentence it has handed the people of Gaza is inhumane, indefensible, and cannot continue to be carried out.”

In the nearly two months since Israel launched its latest bombing campaign in the Gaza Strip, the U.N. Security Council has been largely deadlocked, passing just one resolution that called for the release of hostages and humanitarian pauses.

The U.S., one of five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, vetoed an earlier resolution calling for humanitarian pauses because the measure “made no mention of Israel’s right of self-defense.”

Christou urged the council to immediately “take action to uphold our shared humanity.”

“‘We did what we could. Remember us.’ These are the words our Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, who has since been killed in a hospital strike, wrote on a Gaza hospital whiteboard normally used for planning surgeries,” Christou wrote. “When the guns fall silent and the true scale of devastation is revealed, will the council and its members be able to say the same?”

_{Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.}

Global Cease-Fire Call Grows as Israel Wages ‘War Against Hospitals’ in Gaza / by Jessica Corbett

_{^{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.}