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ARMED BY WASHINGTON, ISRAEL TRASHES THE GENOCIDE CONVENTION  
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Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox
March 19, 2024
Tom Dispatch
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_ Stop Treating Gaza Like a Natural Disaster _

Residents say 'nowhere is safe' in Gaza as the air attacks have been
targeting sites all across the enclave., [Ibraheem Abu
Mustafa/Reuters]

 

_ Introduction by Tom Englehardt_

As I write this, more than 31,000
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have been killed in Gaza and, as Aya Batrawy reported
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NPR, thousands more are “unaccounted for — either missing under
the rubble, buried hastily in side streets, or decomposing in areas
that can’t be safely reached.” Significant numbers of the dead
are women and children
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and aid for those living, thanks to an Israeli blockade, is barely
entering that 25-mile strip of land. Yet the future promises
mass famine
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grotesque disease, and death, death, death for even more Palestinian
civilians, most of them refugees
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have done nothing to deserve such a fate, as _TomDispatch_ regulars
[[link removed]] Stan and
Priti Gulati Cox suggest all too vividly today.

Now, the Biden administration has finally decided to act. And no, I
don’t mean forcing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
wildly right-wing government to reverse course, even though his
military remains significantly dependent on American armaments (which
our president until recently swore never to stop
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Admittedly, President Biden recently claimed he might
consider limiting
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arms deliveries if, against his wishes, Netanyahu were to send the
Israeli military into the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where an
estimated 1.4 million Palestinians
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(barely) sheltered. Nor do I mean opening Gaza to sufficient aid.
Instead, President Biden has ordered the U.S. military to build a
floating pier in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Gaza with a
causeway to the shore. From there, aid would theoretically be
delivered to that embattled land.

Forget that it will take weeks
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if not months, to build such a structure, and that not enough aid
could possibly be transferred to Gaza via that single pier to matter
greatly. Focus instead on one thing: the Israelis, as the Coxes note
today, have already radically cut the number of supply trucks entering
Gaza, so remind me, how in the world will the supplies from that pier
even be delivered once they hit land? As Jeremy Konyndyk, a former
Biden administration senior aid official and now president of the
Refugees International aid advocacy group, put it recently
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“You need drivers that don’t exist, trucks that don’t exist
feeding into a distribution system that doesn’t exist.”

So, as planning for that pier proceeds, madness and horror reign in
Gaza and the strangeness of it all remains hard to take in. As _New
York Times_ reporters Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt wrote recently
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“It is rare for the United States to try to provide such services
for people who are being bombed with tacit U.S. support.” Now, let
the Coxes take you deeper into the world of horror that is Gaza
today. _ Tom_

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It’s been almost two months since the International Court of Justice
ordered Israel to stop killing Gazans and destroying their means of
subsistence. So let’s look back and ask (1) how Israel has responded
to its “orders,” and (2) how hard the Biden administration has
pushed Israel to abide by those orders. Spoiler alert: the short
answers are (1) not well and (2) not very.

The American government has provided
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of the armaments and targeting technologies being used to kill Gazans
by the thousands while turning many of the rest of them into refugees
by destroying their homes, offices, schools, and hospitals. Nor did
the Biden administration threaten to withdraw that support when Israel
blocked shipments of crucial food and fuel to the 25-mile-long Gaza
Strip. It also keeps vetoing
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Security Council resolutions that would hold Israel accountable. And
President Biden, despite an increasing amount of rhetorical shuffling
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continues to back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF), even though they have ignored the International
Court’s orders and continue committing atrocities.

FLOUTING THE ORDER TO STOP THE KILLING

On January 26th, the International Court of Justice handed down
a ruling
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a case brought by the Republic of South Africa accusing Israel of
genocide. It ordered that Israel must “ensure with immediate effect
that its military does not commit any acts described” in the United
Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of
Genocide.

The court’s first order prohibited “killing members” of the
Palestinian population or “causing serious bodily or mental harm”
to them. How did Israel respond? Consider that, between late December
2023 and January 21st of this year, the IDF had killed about 5,000
Palestinians, already pushing the death toll in the Gaza Strip
past 25,000
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The court’s order, issued days later, would have essentially zero
effect. Another 5,000-plus Palestinians would be killed by late
February, raising the death toll to more than 30,000
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During the month after the ruling, Israeli troops repeatedly killed or
injured civilians fleeing to, or taking shelter in, areas the IDF had
advertised as “safe zones.” Typically, when, on February 12th,
Israeli aircraft attacked 14 homes and three mosques in the southern
Gaza city of Rafah, killing 67 Palestinians, some of the
survivors told
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that they’d been inside tents in a refugee camp. Similarly, on
February 22nd, Israeli warplanes struck a residential area in central
Gaza, killing
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civilians, mostly women and children, and wounding more than 100.

Worse yet, the Biden administration has enabled that ongoing killing
spree by approving 100
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military sales to Israel since the conflict began in October. As a
former administration official told the _Washington Post_,
“That’s an extraordinary number of sales over the course of a
pretty short amount of time, which really strongly suggests that the
Israeli campaign would not be sustainable without this level of U.S.
support.”

In other words, the backbone of the war on Gaza comes with a label:
“Made in USA.” In the decade leading up to October 7th, as the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has
reported, two-thirds
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Israel’s arms imports came from the United States. (From 1950 to
2020, the U.S. share was a whopping 83%
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In just the first couple of months of the war, the Biden
administration sent
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cargo planes and 20 ships full of military goods to Israel, a trove
that included 100 BLU-109
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(2,000-pounders designed to penetrate hardened structures before
exploding), 5,400 MK84
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5,000 MK82 bunker-busters, 1,000 GBU-39
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3,000 JDAM bomb-guidance kits, and 200 “kamikaze drones.”

Such powerful bombs, reported
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Jazeera_, “have been used in some of the deadliest Israeli attacks
on the Gaza Strip, including a strike that leveled an apartment block
in the Jabalia refugee camp, killing more than 100 people.” And yes,
such bunker-busters were widely used in the U.S. wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, but not in places as densely populated as Gaza’s
cities. Israeli sources tried to justify that particular death toll by
insisting it was necessary to kill one of Hamas’s leaders. If so,
we’re talking about a 100-to-1 ratio, or a kind of collective
punishment being supported by our tax dollars.

Worse yet, our military seems to have been participating directly in
the IDF’s operations. According to
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Ken Klippenstein and Matthew Petti, the Defense Department has been
providing satellite intelligence and software to help the IDF find and
hit targets in Gaza. An “Air Defense Liaison Team,” they report,
even traveled to Israel in November to offer targeting help, adding
that “for the first time
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U.S. history, the Biden administration has been flying surveillance
drone missions over Gaza.”

And even then, some members of Netanyahu’s government felt it
wasn’t enough. Far right-wing Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put
it this way
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it came to President Biden’s warning
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to send the IDF into the southern Gazan city of Rafah where hundreds
of thousands of refugees were gathered: “American pressure or fear
of harming civilians should not deter us from occupying Rafah and
destroying Hamas.”

The Israeli hostages held by Hamas are the excuse for so much of this,
but the way to free them would be to negotiate, as Israel did
successfully
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fall, not try to “wipe Hamas off the face of the earth
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mostly bombing
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sites in that campaign, because they’re reluctant to fight their
way
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the vast fortified network of tunnels from which the military wing of
Hamas, the Qassam Brigades, mounted a formidable resistance to the
invasion, largely with weaponry they manufactured
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along with ammunition recycled from unexploded ordnance dropped in
past Israeli attacks.

CONDITIONS OF LIFE (AND DEATH)

In the second of its orders, the International Court of Justice
prohibited “deliberately inflicting… conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part [or]
imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”

The Netanyahu government and the IDF blew off this directive as well.
In the month that followed the ruling, Israeli troops continued
to besiege hospitals
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Gaza, thoroughly crippling, if not destroying, its healthcare system,
especially two of its most important facilities: al-Shifa Hospital in
the north and Nasser Hospital in the south. Before it was put out of
service
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mid-February, Nasser was one of the last hospitals still operating
there in any capacity whatsoever. Not surprisingly, the World Health
Organization has since reported
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striking rise in respiratory infections, diarrhea, chickenpox,
jaundice, skin rashes, and scabies, among other horrors.

Israel’s military has also been making conditions unlivable by
restricting the food aid entering the territory and destroying
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fishing boats, greenhouses, and orchards. It’s a formula for mass
starvation. As Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the
right to food, told the _Guardian_
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late February, “The speed of malnourishment of young children is
also astounding. The bombing and people being killed directly is
brutal, but this starvation — and the wasting and stunting of
children — is torturous and vile.” Around the same time, UNICEF
announced that 90% of children under five
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Gaza were consuming “two or fewer food groups a day,” the
functional definition of “severe food poverty.” About the same
percentage were suffering from infectious diseases, most commonly
diarrhea, which only exacerbated their malnutrition.

The world’s top group tracking food emergencies reported
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March 17th that famine “is now projected and imminent” in
northern Gaza within six weeks, and that “half of the population of
the Gaza Strip (1.11 million people) is expected to face catastrophic
conditions,” with starvation and death expected to be widespread.
Keep in mind that, under the Geneva Conventions, it’s a war crime
to starve civilians
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“attack, destroy, remove, or render useless any items necessary for
civilians’ survival.” Attacking a hospital
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that context, here’s a thought experiment: What would President
Biden and his top officials do if they suspected any other country of
committing acts it knew could potentially lead to mass civilian deaths
from starvation and disease? Would they shower it with more weaponry?

In defiance of the International Court’s orders — and undeterred
by mild tut-tutting
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Washington — the Israeli military is also inflicting intolerable
“conditions of life” with its approach to Gaza’s water supply.
With fuel shipments blocked by the Israelis, Gazans are unable to keep
running the desalinization plants that produce a significant amount of
the Strip’s water. As a result, by late February, the water supply
had dropped to 7%
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its prewar level. In desperation, many Gazans, especially children,
have been forced to turn to polluted water sources, putting them at
risk of severe gastrointestinal disease with no functional hospitals
to help them.

Israel is also, in effect, violating the International Court’s bar
on “measures intended to prevent births,” since pregnant women are
considered especially vulnerable to the food deprivation that is now
the essence of life in Gaza. At the Deir al Balah clinic in central
Gaza, one out of five maternity patients were being treated
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malnutrition in February, causing doctors deep concern, since any
malnourished mother will be carrying a malnourished fetus (with awful
health prospects
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them). Meanwhile, the U.N. Population Fund reports
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women are miscarrying at a higher rate than before the war, while
doctors are being forced to perform emergency caesarian sections
without anesthetics, posing a high risk to both mother and child.

SMOKE AND PARACHUTES

The International Court of Justice’s third order was to “enable
the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian
assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.” Israel’s leaders are ignoring
that as well — or maybe they’ve just reinterpreted “enable” to
mean “thwart.”

In January, before the court order, the IDF had been allowing
approximately 140 aid trucks through their checkpoints into Gaza
daily, instead of the 500
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the prewar period. If Gazans’ needs were to be fully satisfied, that
flow of aid should have been steeply increased. Instead, the
Israelis _reduced_ the number of trucks allowed into Gaza to
only 96 per day
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February, all too literally feeding fears of starvation
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To make matters worse, groups of Israeli civilians have been blocking
aid convoys, some by lying on the ground in front of the trucks. On a
single day in February, 130 trucks were blocked
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the IDF made no effort to deter the demonstrators. The Association of
International Development Agencies reported
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even when their trucks were getting through the southern border
crossings, most of them weren’t managing to reach the central or
northern parts of the Strip, including Gaza City, because they were
“hindered by Israeli military operations, including constant
bombardment and checkpoint closures.”

The most notorious aid-denial incident occurred on February 27th, when
at least 118 Palestinians
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killed after Israel forces opened fire on a crush of people in Gaza
City trying to get food from a truck convoy. Most of the victims of
this “Flour Bag Massacre
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seem to have been killed either by IDF troops firing from tanks or to
have died in the crush of people desperately trying to escape being
shot.

The Biden administration did not respond to such incidents as it
should have — by threatening to cut off war funding and supplies to
Israel, as it had earlier suspended
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support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA),
Gaza’s biggest prewar supplier of food, water, and shelter. The
reason: allegations that some Palestinian UNRWA staff had, in the
past, aided Hamas. Now, however, Reuters and the _Times of
Israel_ suggest
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several agency staff members released from Israeli detention were
coerced into falsely “admitting” to Hamas affiliations through
physical beatings, waterboarding, and threats to their family members.
(U.S. aid is still being withheld from UNWRA.)

Instead of pushing the Netanyahu government ever harder to allow more
aid, the Biden administration decided to put on an airshow by dropping
pallet-loads of packaged food into Gaza from military aircraft. Aid
organizations panned the airdrops as little more than empty
“gestures
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or a “theater of cruelty
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Even a hulking C-130 cargo plane can carry only the equivalent of one
or two aid trucks
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despite similar expenditures, such airdrops can deliver
only one-eighth to one-tenth
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much food as a truck convoy. Worse yet, tons of cargo dropped from the
sky can itself prove deadly. During an airdrop over a refugee camp
along the northern Gaza coast on March 8th, a parachute failed to
open, and the heavily loaded pallet attached to it plummeted into a
group
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adults and children who had been watching the drop from a rooftop.
Five of them were killed, and 10 injured.

To Netanyahu & Co., the orders issued by the International Court of
Justice have had about as much impact as a mosquito bite. And the
United States, which could put more pressure on Israel than any other
nation, has shied away from substantive action of any sort. President
Biden and other officials continue to act largely as if they were just
bystanders and the carnage in Gaza was being caused by some random
natural disaster.

We aren’t policy experts, but it seems to us that any national
leader with a strong sense of justice, of right and wrong, would do
whatever was necessary to stop a genocide like the one now unfolding
in Gaza. He or she would at least threaten to end all military support
to Israel and press other supplying nations to do the same. He or she
would put real effort into forcing Israel to let the aid trucks roll
in and allowing Palestinians to decide their own fate.

Sadly, those aren’t our leaders. For now, Palestinians remain
trapped in a nightmare vividly evoked by a recent photo
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shows pallets of food aid parachuting earthward into Gaza as plumes of
smoke from Israeli airstrikes rise to meet them — with both the food
and the munitions courtesy of the United States of America.

_PRITI GULATI COX, (@PritiGCox [[link removed]]),
a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]], is an
artist and writer. Her work has appeared
in Countercurrents, CounterPunch, Salon, Truthout, Common Dreams,
the Nation, AlterNet, and more. To see her art please
visit occupiedplanet.com [[link removed]]._

_STAN COX, a TomDispatch
[[link removed]] regular, is
the author of The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight
Climate Change, Racism, and the Next Pandemic
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Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still
Can [[link removed]],
and the current In Real Time
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Books. Find him on Twitter at @CoxStan
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_Copyright 2024 Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox.  Cross-posted with
permission. May not be reprinted without permission from TomDispatch
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Genocide
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* International Court of Justice
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