humanitarian intervention – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

_{^{Seven-month-old Palestinian baby Fayez Abu Ataya, who died due to malnutrition, being carried by his father in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on May 30, 2024. (Ashraf Amra / Anadolu via Getty Images)}}

A seven-month-old child, Fayez Abu Ataya, starved to death yesterday in central Gaza. He lived his entire brief life under Israeli siege. How many more Palestinian children must die?

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Fayez Abu Ataya, a newborn from Gaza, had been wasting away for days from lack of milk and medicine as a result of Israel’s crippling blockade and deliberate starvation of Gaza. A bone-chilling video showed the child dying in real time.

Yesterday morning, Abu Ataya succumbed to starvation, dying in his father’s arms at Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. Held by his weeping father, he resembled a bare skeleton. Aged seven months at the time of his death, he was born and died in genocide.

In a heartbreaking interview with Al Jazeera, the grieving father said:

Thank God, he was born in the war, at the school (shelter), and he was martyred here at the hospital. We found him this morning in this condition, like a flower. We had asked to move him out but were denied travel as the crossings were all closed. A medical delegation had operated on him. All he wanted was milk, food, necessary nourishments, and clean air. He became a skeleton because of the siege.

“The infant Fayez Abu Ataya has died as a result to malnutrition and lack of medical treatment in Deir al-Balah,” a medical source told reporters. He added that “Fayez was born during Israel’s war on Gaza and suffered from lack of treatment due to Israel’s closure of all the crossings to Gaza.” He further lamented that “Baby Fayez needed special milk and medication, which both are no longer available in Gaza.”

The Al-Aqsa Hospital itself is on the brink of collapse as Israel continues to deprive hospitals in Gaza of the fuel necessary to operate the generators.

Following Abu Ataya’s death, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), America’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, posted: “We apologize for sharing such a graphic image, but this is the daily reality of the genocide that President Biden is enabling in violation of US law, which forbids arming foreign governments that block US humanitarian aid.”

Abu Ataya was not the first child to die of starvation in Gaza. In March, Yazan al-Kafarneh, a ten-year-old Palestinian boy, died in his mother’s arms at a local hospital in Rafah, after lying in bed for weeks with a skeletal body, sunken cheeks, bare bones, and hollowed eyes. He weighed eleven pounds when he died. A month before, Mahmoud Fattouh, a two-month-old Palestinian boy, died from starvation in northern Gaza, having gone days without milk.

So far, over thirty Palestinian children and newborns have perished due to starvation because of Israel’s inhumane blockade of Gaza — and more such deaths are imminent due to Israel’s cruel denial of milk and medicine to starving Palestinian children in the besieged strip. Aid groups warn that humanitarian aid in Gaza has plunged since Israel invaded and occupied the Rafah crossing, Gaza’s last link to the outside world. The World Food Programme (WFP) reports that humanitarian operations in Gaza are nearing total collapse, warning that “if food and humanitarian supplies do not begin to enter Gaza in massive quantities, desperation and hunger will spread.”

This is a war against humanity. Israel’s deliberate starvation of Palestinians like Fayez Abu Ataya makes a brutal mockery of international appeals to allow aid into the besieged enclave.

Last month, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem issued a damning report warning that Israel was manufacturing famine in Gaza, and thus committing the crime of starvation. “The severe hunger that has developed over recent months in the Gaza Strip is not a result of fate, but the product of a deliberate and conscious Israeli policy. It has been openly declared by decision makers, including a member of the Israeli war cabinet, from the very beginning of the war.”

Abu Ataya’s death comes amid reports that the United Nations may finally put Israel on its “list of shame” of child-killing states, which is unlikely to stop Israel from starving more children in Gaza. Emboldened by the United States’ unconditional support, Israel has sealed off all the seven land crossings to Gaza, including the Rafah border crossing with Egypt. Israel has destroyed all bakeries in Gaza and the southern city of Rafah and routinely bombed Palestinians seeking food aid for their starving families. The Guardian reports that Israeli soldiers have backed settler groups blocking, attacking, and looting aid trucks bound for Gaza. The Israeli army has destroyed and burned food supplies in Gaza, while Israeli soldiers have film ed themselves stealing humanitarian aid bound for starving Palestinians in Gaza.

Western governments, led by the Biden administration, are complicit in Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe. Instead of forcing Israel to open the land crossings before the queuing humanitarian convoys, the Biden administration has acted powerless. Embarking on political theatrics, the United States built a floating aid pier off Gaza, which has only made matters worse for starving Palestinians, as observers believe that Gaza was receiving more aid before the US aid port was built.

People in Gaza are looking down into the abyss. Without real global action to stop it, more children will die if Israel’s inhumane starvation of Gaza is allowed to continue.

_{Seraj Assi is a Palestinian writer living in Washington, DC, and the author, most recently, of My Life As An Alien (Tartarus Press).}

_{^{Darna, Libya after dams collapsed in the wake of storm Daniel. (Photo: AP/Jamal Alkomaty)}}

_{South Paris, Maine}

Prodigious rainfall and the failure of long-deteriorated earthen dams caused a rush of waters through Derna, in Libya, on September 11. Thousands of residents died, infrastructure was destroyed, and buildings ended up in the Mediterranean. Failure to protect residents, maintain the dams, and sustain the lives of all Libyans point to societal collapse.

There is also the environmental crisis. Climate change provoked the enormity of storm Daniel that had drenched the eastern Mediterranean area ahead of the disaster. The association of climate change and terrible storms is known and so too is the role of human activities in causing great amounts of greenhouse gases to be released into the atmosphere.

The focus here is on the social disruption that transformed Libya. That’s because predisposing factors may not be clear. There are lessons to be learned. The two crises are actually joined by virtue of both having developed out of a single impulse for domination.

Nationalist rebels led by Muammar Gaddafi deposed the embattled Libyan regime of King Idris on Sept. 1, 1969. Between 1973 and 1977, a Yugoslavian company contracted by the new government built two dams on the Wadi Derna River for the sake of flood control and irrigation. Maintenance of the dam would be lax.

A 1998 study revealed cracks and deterioration. After delays, a Turkish company began repairs on the dams in 2010. When the Gaddafi government was ousted in the following year, the work stopped. Some $2.3 million was on hand for finishing the project. It disappeared.

Anti-government protests ─ the Arab Spring ─ had broken out throughout the region in 2010. An anti-Gaddafi insurgency making headway in early 2011 prompted the military forces of the United States France, Great Britain, and a host of other countries to carry out a self-styled humanitarian intervention in March. Gaddafi’s murder seven months later ended the intrusion.

U.S complaints had centered on an “opaque political and economic system,” widespread corruption, and Gaddafi’s autocratic proclivities. There had been mutual, and occasionally lethal, provocations. Gaddafi’s increasing financial and banking influence in Africa raised eyebrows.

Gaddafi had offended by nationalizing 51% of oil companies’ assets in 1973. According to one expert, “in 2006 the oil sector in Libya … made up ninety-five percent of export earnings, ninety-two percent of government revenue, and seventy-three percent of GDP.”

The foreign assailants could not have overlooked the reality that a government with tight control over oil was in trouble with an insurgency. It was no mean prize. Libya’s oil reserves now rank first in Africa and nineth in the world.

Their forces carried out air operations, inflicted civilian casualties, assisted with the rebels’ ground actions, blockaded ports and embargoed weapons deliveries. They had a convenient tool.

Writer Eve Ottenberg a decade later accuses NATO, instrument for intervention, of “fattening the wallets of war profiteers and weapons moguls and wreaking havoc in places like Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, now Ukraine.” Today France , Holland, and the United States are looking at French Guyana as a “forward-operating base for NATO” in Latin America, reports Guyanese activist Maurice Pindard.

In its own review of “past and present” missions, NATO, with planetwide ambitions and unlimited potential for destruction, is, as expected, bereft of even a hint at repairing places left in chaos after its wars.

NATO departed from Libya, and ever since a government in the West of the country has been vying with a militarized counterpart in the East, where Derna is located. Cities have been bombed and occupied; Derna was subject to Islamic State rule from 2014 to 2016. Mercenaries, militias, and tribes jostle with one other. Milita groups control oil fields and extort vast sums. There’s “pillage on a vast scale,” plus drug-trafficking and exploitation of migrants heading to Europe.

Now one third of Libyans live in poverty; 13% of them require humanitarian aid, according to one estimate. By 2016, oil production, the source of social spending, had fallen to 75% below Gaddafi-era levels. It’s risen recently.

The troubles experienced by Libya’s people were new. The Ghaddafi government had achieved much. The 2010 UN Human Development Index, a composite measure of health, education and income, ranked Libya 53rd in the world and first in Africa. By then, Libya was registering the highest per capita income in Africa, the lowest infant mortality, and the highest life expectancy. Schooling and healthcare were provided without Libyans having to pay.

Under Gaddafi, more than 95% of Libyans were adequately nourished; the government had abolished taxes on food. Literacy increased from 25% to 87% during the Gaddafi era. Almost 10% of Libya’s youth received scholarships for study abroad. Beginning in 1983 the government developed a massive water-delivery system with 1,100 new wells and 4,000 kilometers of pipelines.

Had the Gaddafi government not disappeared, the social advances and protection might have remained. Some of the progress might have continued under another government, if there had been no intervention.

What’s certain is that previous arrangements for sustaining the population disappeared following NATO’s military action. Adverse conditions now allowed for the dams to disintegrate and for Libya’s people to not be rescued.

Pointing to a planetary “double crisis,” an ecological crisis and a social one, analyst Jason Hickle insisted recently that the two crises be dealt with simultaneously: “Attempting to address one without the other leaves fundamental contradictions entrenched.” He adds that, “the two dimensions are symptoms of the same underlying pathology … [which is] the capitalist system of production.”

Derner is witness to Hickle’s double crisis. The unprecedently heavy rainfall reflects climate crisis. A decade of turmoil and neglect of the dams attests to social crisis. The two share the same root cause.

Capitalism requires perpetually increasing production of goods, which led to overuse of fossil fuels, which has translated into climate change. Under capitalism, natural resources in the world’s peripheral regions are plundered. Popular forces may be suppressed. Devices like NATO come into their own. If it had occurred a little earlier, Jason Hickle could have used the catastrophe to illustrate the main point of his article.

_{W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.}