By John Pickard
While attention has inevitably been drawn towards the Israeli attack on Iran and its consequences, the murderous policy of the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force in Gaza has continued. If anything, it has intensified. Without even the flimsy pretext of targeting Hamas militants, 265 Palestinians have been killed in one week alone, most of them for the ‘crime’ of being desperate for food.
The Middle East Eye, recounts events in Gaza for just the five days from last Monday to Friday:
Monday – death toll: 20
Israeli troops kill 20 and wound more than 200 people waiting to collect food. Civil defence spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP that the IDF opened fire near the al-Alam roundabout in the southern city of Rafah, “where many were waiting to reach an aid distribution site”. The head of the paediatric department at the nearby Nasser Hospital told AFP that people “are hungry, they didn’t get any food since nearly four months ago”.
Tuesday – death toll: 80
The IDF kill at least 80 and wound hundreds, in two attacks at US-run aid distribution centres in the southern Gaza Strip. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, approximately 30 people were killed in the al-Alam area of Rafah, while the death toll rose to nearly 50 in the al-Tahlia area of Khan Younis. These attacks occurred as residents gathered at aid distribution points, where they came under artillery shelling from Israeli forces.
Wednesday – death toll: 33
At least 33 were killed in Israeli fire across the Gaza Strip, including aid seekers. “Bassal, the civil defence spokesman, told AFP that 11 people were killed and more than 100 wounded after the occupation forces opened fire and launched several shells… at thousands of citizens” (Middle East Eye) who had gathered to queue for food in central Gaza.
Thursday – death toll: 72
Israeli forces killed at least 72 people, including 21 who had gathered near aid distribution sites. Six were killed while waiting for aid in the southern Gaza Strip and 15 others in a central area known as the Netzarim corridor, an Israeli-controlled strip of land that bisects the Palestinian territory.
Friday – death toll: 60
Gaza’s civil defence agency said 31 Palestinian aid seekers were among at least 60 people killed by the IDF. Five were killed waiting for aid in the southern Gaza Strip and 26 others near the Netzarim corridor, where thousands of Palestinians have gathered daily in the hope of receiving food rations.
The total killed in Gaza now is well over 55,000, although some estimates put the figure, including those unaccounted for and buried under rubble. as three or four times that number.
Israel and its chief armourer, the USA, try to cast doubt on the figures given by the Gaza Health ministry for the death toll, but as the BBC’s International Editor, Jeremy Bowen wrote a week and a half ago, “the ministry’s figures are used by the UN, foreign diplomats and even, according to reports in Israel, the country’s own intelligence services. When the work of the ministry’s statisticians was checked after previous wars, it tallied with other estimates”.
Bowen added, “According to Unicef, by January this year” – more than five months out of date, therefore – “14,500 Palestinian children in Gaza had been killed by Israel; 17,000 are separated from their parents or orphaned; and Gaza has the highest percentage of child amputees in the world”.
The bombardment of Gaza was horrific enough; it has rendered most of the urban areas completely uninhabitable, and intentionally so. This small area has suffered destruction on a scale greater than most European cities caught up in the Second World War.
Deliberately manufactured famine
But by deliberately manufacturing famine, through the denial of humanitarian aid, and rationing food through ‘official’ distribution centres, the Israeli government’s actions have reached a new low. Those seeking the meagre rations available, the IDF try to herd into barbed-wire-enclosed compounds. It is a humiliation and a degradation beyond belief. Had it not been for the resistance of the Egyptian government, these unfortunate people would by now have been expelled, starving, broken, penniless and thirsty, as they are, to Egypt. Two million of them.
Jan Egeland, veteran head of the Norwegian Refugee Council and former UN humanitarian chief, told Jeremy Bowen, “I’m shaken to my core…I haven’t seen a population like this being so trapped for such a long period of time in such a small, besieged area. Indiscriminate bombardment, denied journalism, denied healthcare”. This experienced refugee worker may be “shaken to the core”, but it is clear that many western politicians – to their undying disgrace – are mostly indifferent.
British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, are so much influenced by the Labour Friends of Netanhayu, that despite the mountain of evidence, they will not bring themselves to say outright that Israel has been and still is committing war crimes on a monstrous scale.
When the word “genocide” is on the lips of every aid and humanitarian agency around the world, Starmer and Lammy find weaselly words to wriggle out of saying it themselves. We have long known they are not socialists, but it is abundantly clear now that they have no humanitian principles either. Their behaviour will not be forgotten, or forgiven.
