"Who is the fu****g superpower here?" President Bill Clinton asked his aides after meeting Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time as president.
The world came together to support Israel after Hamas terrorists outdid ISIS in the ferocity of the murders, kidnapping, and torture of Israeli citizens on October 7, 2023. Governments supported the retaliation and the effort to destroy Hamas. When Gaza was invaded, aerial bombing with American bombs delivered death from above to destroy terrorist cells. They also killed and are killing thousands of citizens. The invasion was shocking, and most believe war is hell and to be expected during a time like this. Few dared to criticize Netanyahu for fear of hostile reaction and career-ending ramifications of doing so. But as the atrocities continued unabated, people began to question the horrors and terrors of what civilians were experiencing and recognize what they saw as genocide. Hamas has been destroyed, and they will not ever come back again, so why continue with the policy? The assassination of World Central Kitchen staff is the final straw for me, and I no longer feel alone in keeping my thoughts to myself. It feels like a tipping point, a revelation about the evil of Israel's prime minister.
To be fair to ourselves, civilians in Gaza did not get much attention from the American media. The US has been the strongest friend Israel has ever had, and under Netanyahu, we have been betrayed. Joe Biden has been betrayed.
The indiscriminate bombing and murder by IDF snipers of civilians, which includes three of their hostages, has finally broken through. Netanyahu and his cabinet are committing war crimes, and they were always planning to execute them.
First, there is some recent history by Neve Gordon and Muna Haddad from their recent book The Road to Famine in Gaza.
In the days that followed Hamas’s heinous October 7 attack on military bases, kibbutzim, towns, and the Nova music festival, several high-ranking Israeli officials announced that they intended to deprive Gaza’s civilian population of its most basic needs. At the time, over 80 percent of the goods entering the Gaza Strip came from Israel, which has kept the area under strict blockade for seventeen years. On October 9, following two days of extensive aerial bombing, the country’s minister of energy and infrastructure, Israel Katz, announced that he had ordered water, electricity, and fuel to be cut off. “What was,” he said, “will not be.”
The same day, the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, demanded a “complete siege” of the enclave: “there will be no food, there will be no fuel.” (His reasoning has since become notorious: “we are fighting human animals.”) On October 17 the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, insisted that “as long as Hamas does not release the hostages in its hands…not an ounce of humanitarian aid” would enter Gaza—only “hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force.” The next day Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put the matter in similarly stark terms: “We will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip.”
These were all declarations of an intent to deprive the Palestinians in Gaza “of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies”—the legal definition of “using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” a crime against international law under the Rome Statute. Israeli newspapers, television, and social media, meanwhile, were saturated with calls to destroy the population, in whole or in part: to “erase” Gaza, “flatten” it, turn it “into Dresden.” On October 13—the day that Israeli authorities ordered 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to evacuate their homes within twenty-four hours—the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, said publicly that there were “no innocent civilians” in the Strip.
Starvation has now come to Gaza, particularly Northern Gaza, say US military experts and State Department officials. I look at social media, and it has happened for some time. The World Central Kitchen murders have been a tipping point that has been coming for some time. I'm glad it's here.
The response by Biden officials is tortured logic, embarrassing, and pathetic. There will be no more sugarcoating, which will work to give Netanyahu cover; people are on to him and his tricks. It is more than time to stop providing him with bombs and send those to Ukraine instead while insisting that food aid be brought in immediately by truck through their border crossings.
Netanyahu pitched a fit after the US vote at the UN recently. Biden should go to the Knesset and tell our ally why. "Who is the fu****g superpower here?" the administration needs to take notes from Bill Clinton.
I am embarrassed for John Kirby. Nobody believes him, nobody.
I am happy he is furious; I eagerly await the infliction of pain on the prime minister and his cabinet.
After Chef Andres suspended food aid and recalled a food-laden ship back to Cyprus, others followed. There is no substitute, no knight in shining armor to save the day. We will be forced to watch imagery of hundreds of thousands, if not millions die of starvation. I do not want to watch or read about what is happening to many innocent people. We will see what famine looks like from agricultural crop failure crises due to global warming in the years and decades to come. I don't want to witness it now.
The Biden administration’s plan to install a floating pier off the Gaza coast as part of a broad international initiative to feed starving Palestinians will endanger the U.S. service members who must build, operate and defend the structure from attack, military experts say, a risk with enormous political consequences for the president should calamity strike.
The effort, U.S. officials say, could deliver up to 2 million meals per day into the war-ravaged territory, where a famine is feared amid Israel’s sustained bombardment and what critics say are its extreme restrictions on the flow of food, medicine and other humanitarian aid.
While the Pentagon maintains that no U.S. troops will deploy into Gaza, it has disclosed little about how long the operation could last and how it intends to ensure the safety of those involved, alarming some in Congress and other critics of the president’s plan. Military officials declined to answer questions from The Washington Post about where the pier will be located and what security measures will be taken, citing a desire not to telegraph its plans.
It’s not worth the risk, President Biden. Any deliveries via this proposed pier will not dent the problem. Food and other aid have to come from Israel border crossings.
Famine is already probably present in at least some areas of northern Gaza, while other areas are in danger of falling into conditions of starvation, the US state department said on Friday a day after the world’s top court ordered Israel to admit food aid into the territory.
“While we can say with confidence that famine is a significant risk in the south and centre but not present, in the north, it is both a risk and quite possibly is present in at least some areas,” a state department official told Reuters.
The US comments add to a growing and powerful consensus that Israel’s military offensive in the Palestinian coastal territory has triggered a famine.
The number of trucks distributing aid in south and central Gaza had nearly reached 200 a day, an increase on a month ago, but more were needed, the state department official said.
“You need to address the full nutrition needs of the population of Gaza of all ages. That means more than just that minimal survival level feeding,” the official said, adding that malnutrition, and infant and young-child mortality was a significant, growing problem.
“It has to be addressed by additional assistance coming and the right kind of assistance coming in,” he said.
From another Guardian article:
While Israel bears much of the responsibility for this human-made famine, it’s not alone. Joe Biden and his administration are also complicit in this unfolding catastrophe: the UN and international relief groups have been warning about the potential for widespread starvation in Gaza since December. The Biden administration could have acted then, pressuring Israel to allow more aid into the territory and enforcing an existing US law that bars weapons shipments to US allies that obstruct humanitarian aid.
Instead, the US president and his aides dithered, as they have done repeatedly since Israel launched its war against Gaza after the 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas. And it’s now too late to prevent a famine. As Martin Griffiths, the UN’s top emergency relief official, wrote on Twitter/X: “The international community should hang its head in shame for failing to stop it … We know that once a famine is declared, it is way too late.”
The aid group Refugees International was even more direct, noting that the “opportunity to avert famine in Gaza has been lost. A famine is now getting underway.” The group’s president, Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden administration official, wrote on X that a formal declaration of famine is retroactive, and often lags behind reality on ground. (For example, about half of the estimated 260,000 people killed by starvation in Somalia, between 2010 and 2012, had already died by the time a famine was formally declared in 2011.)
The Biden administration and Israel’s other supporters in the west can’t claim that they did not know the severity of the hunger crisis in Gaza, and the impact of Israel’s policy of intentionally starving a population of 2.3 million into submission.
The top United Nations court on Thursday ordered Israel to take measures to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza, including opening more land crossings to allow food, water, fuel and other supplies into the war-ravaged enclave.
The International Court of Justice issued two new so-called provisional measures in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of acts of genocide in its military campaign launched after the 7 October attacks.
Thursday’s order came after South Africa sought more provisional measures, including a ceasefire, citing starvation in Gaza.
Israel, which had urged the court not to issue new orders, said it places no limits on aid entering Gaza and vowed to “promote new initiatives” to bring in even more assistance.
In its legally binding order, the court told Israel to take measures “without delay” to ensure “the unhindered provision” of basic services and humanitarian assistance, including food, water, fuel and medical supplies.
It also ordered Israel to immediately ensure that its military does not take action that could harm Palestinians' rights under the Genocide Convention, including by preventing the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
One further thought: this catastrophe could jeopardize Democrats' chances in 2024. Are we going to sacrifice our democracy to save Netanyahu's ass from going to prison? I trust Joe Biden to make the right call; it is what I campaigned for and why I voted for him.