FORCED STARVATION: Israel is preventing much-needed aid getting to Gaza
Barely 100 trucks enter as bombs kill another 60
ISRAELI bombing killed at least 60 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip yesterday as Tel Aviv continued to block aid deliveries that would help to stave off the region’s mounting humanitarian crisis.
The dead included 10 people in the southern city of Khan Younis, four in the central town of Deir al-Balah and nine in Jabaliya refugee camp in the north, according to the Nasser, Al-Aqsa and Al-Ahli hospitals where the bodies were brought.
Israel has continued to ignore growing international condemnation of its invasion of Gaza.
The Strip has been under an Israeli food and aid blockade for nearly three months. Experts have warned that many of Gaza’s two million residents are at high risk of famine.
Amid mounting pressure, Israel has started letting in small amounts of aid. Israeli officials claimed yesterday they let in more than 100 trucks of flour, food, medical equipment and drugs through the Kerem Shalom crossing.
But United Nations agencies say the amount is woefully insufficient, compared with around 600 trucks a day that entered during a recent ceasefire to meet basic needs.
Islington North Independent MP Jeremy Corbyn told the Star: “Let’s be clear: Palestinians are not ‘facing’ starvation. Israel is starving Palestinians to death, and it is beyond unconscionable that our government is still providing military support.”
The former Labour leader added: “Enough! The world has got to wake up and stop this genocide.”
UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.Vote For Genocide Vote Labour.
A Palestinian medic carries an injured child from an ambulance as the wounded being transported to Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital for treatment following an Israeli attack on the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in Gaza City, Gaza on January 01, 2025. (Photo by Dawoud Abo Alkas/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Organizing together under the name Taxpayers Against Genocide, constituents served notice that no amount of rhetoric could make funding of genocide anything other than repugnant.
On the last day of 2024, the deputy general counsel for the House of Representatives formally accepted delivery of a civil summons for two congressmembers from Northern California. More than 600 constituents of Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson have signed on as plaintiffs in a class action accusing them of helping to arm the Israeli military in violation of “international and federal law that prohibits complicity in genocide.”
Whatever the outcome of the lawsuit, it conveys widespread anger and anguish about the ongoing civilian carnage in Gaza that taxpayers have continued to bankroll.
By a wide margin, most Americans favor an arms embargo on Israel while the Gaza war persists. But Huffman and Thompson voted to approve $26.38 billion in military aid for Israel last April, long after the nonstop horrors for civilians in Gaza were evident.
Back in February — two months before passage of the enormous military aid package — both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International found that, in the words of the lawsuit, “the Israeli government was systematically starving the people of Gaza through cutting off aid, water, and electricity, by bombing and military occupation, all underwritten by the provision of U.S. military aid and weapons.”
When the known death toll passed 40,000 last summer, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights said: “Most of the dead are women and children. This unimaginable situation is overwhelmingly due to recurring failures by the Israeli Defense Forces to comply with the rules of war.” He described as “deeply shocking” the “scale of the Israeli military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship.”
No one should put any trust in the court system to stop the U.S. government from using tax dollars for war. But suing congressmembers who are complicit in genocide is a good step.
On Dec. 4, Amnesty International released a 296-page report concluding that Israel has been committing genocide “brazenly, continuously and with total impunity” — with the “specific intent to destroy Palestinians,” engaging in “prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention.”
Two weeks later, on the same day the lawsuit was filed in federal district court in San Francisco, Human Rights Watch released new findings that “Israeli authorities are responsible for the crime against humanity of extermination and for acts of genocide.”
Responding to the lawsuit, a spokesperson for Thompson said that “achieving peace and securing the safety of civilians won’t be accomplished by filing a lawsuit.” But for well over a year, to no avail, the plaintiffs and many other constituents have been urging him and Huffman to help protect civilians by ending their support for the U.S. pipeline of weapons and ammunition to Israel.
Enabled by that pipeline, the slaughter has continued in Gaza while the appropriators on Capitol Hill work in a kind of bubble. Letters, emails, phone calls, office visits, protests and more have not pierced that bubble. The lawsuit is an effort to break through the routine of indifference.
Like many other congressional Democrats, Huffman and Thompson have prided themselves on standing up against the contempt for facts that Donald Trump and his cohorts flaunt. Yet refusal to acknowledge the facts of civilian decimation in Gaza, with a direct U.S. role, is an extreme form of denial.
“Over the last 14 months I have watched elected officials remain completely unresponsive despite the public’s demands to end the genocide,” said Laurel Krause, a Mendocino County resident who is one of the lawsuit plaintiffs.
Another plaintiff, Leslie Angeline, a Marin County resident who ended a 31-day hunger strike when the lawsuit was filed, said: “I wake each morning worrying about the genocide that is happening in Gaza, knowing that if it wasn’t for my government’s partnership with the Israeli government, this couldn’t continue.”
Such passionate outlooks are a far cry from the words offered by members of Congress who routinely appear to take pride in seeming calm as they discuss government policies. But if their own children’s lives were at stake rather than the lives of Palestinian children in Gaza, they would hardly be so calm. A huge empathy gap is glaring.
In the words of plaintiff Judy Talaugon, a Native American activist in Sonoma County, “Palestinian children are all our children, deserving of our advocacy and support. And their liberation is the catalyst for systemic change for the betterment of us all.”
As a plaintiff, I certainly don’t expect the courts to halt the U.S. policies that have been enabling the horrors in Gaza to go on. But our lawsuit makes a clear case for the moral revulsion that so many Americans feel about the culpability of the U.S. government.
To hardboiled political pros, the heartfelt goal of putting a stop to the arming of the Israeli military for genocide is apt to seem quixotic and dreamy. But it’s easy for politicians to underestimate feelings of moral outrage. As James Baldwin wrote, “Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world.”
Organizing together under the name Taxpayers Against Genocide, constituents served notice that no amount of rhetoric could make funding of genocide anything other than repugnant. Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson are the first members of Congress to face such a lawsuit. They won’t be the last.
In recent days, people from many parts of the United States have contacted Taxpayers Against Genocide (via classactionagainstgenocide@proton.me) to see the full lawsuit and learn about how they can file one against their own member of Congress.
No one should put any trust in the court system to stop the U.S. government from using tax dollars for war. But suing congress members who are complicit in genocide is a good step for exposing — and organizing against — the power of the warfare state.
An aerial photography taken October 10, 2023 shows a neighborhood of Gaza City destroyed by Israeli bombardment. (Photo: Al Araby/Wikimedia Commons)
“Save this for the next time you hear that the Israeli military does everything possible to avoid harming civilians, and that the level of civilian harm in Gaza is less than other comparable conflicts,” said one advocate.
The world’s foremost monitor of civilian harm caused by aerial bombardment published a report Thursday calling the first 25 days of Israel’s ongoing U.S.-backed annihilation of Gaza the worst assault on noncombatants it has ever seen.
U.K.-based Airwars—which over its decadelong existence has meticulously and painstakingly documented civilian casualties in various campaigns of the U.S.-led so-called War on Terror, Russia’s bombing of Ukraine and Syria, Turkish attacks on Syria and Iraq, and other conflicts—published a “patterns of harm analysis” examining the first few weeks of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.
“By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign,” Airwars said in a summary of the report. “It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”
At least 5,139 civilians were killed in Gaza in 25 days in October 2023, nearly four times more civilians reported killed in a single month than in any conflict Airwars has documented since it was established in 2014;
In October 2023 alone, Airwars documented at least 65 incidents in which a minimum of 20 civilians were killed in a particular incident, nearly triple the number of such high-fatality incidents that Airwars has documented within any comparable timeframe;
Over the course of 25 days, Airwars recorded a minimum of 1,900 children killed by Israeli military action in Gaza, nearly seven times higher than even the most deadly month for children previously recorded by Airwars;
Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their homes, with more than 9 out of 10 women and children killed in residential buildings; and
On average, when civilians were killed alongside family members, at least 15 family members were killed—higher than any other conflict documented by Airwars.
“The international community has raised grave concern about Israeli military practice and the unprecedented scale of civilian harm,” the report notes. “The United Nations has repeatedly warned that Israel is breaching international law and even United States President Joe Biden, a staunch ally of Israel, eventually labeled the military response ‘over the top.’ In January 2024, South Africa brought a claim of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice.”
As of Friday, Gaza officials say that at least 44,875 Palestinians have been killed and 106,464 have been wounded in Gaza. At least 11,000 others are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings.
Throughout the new report, Airwars compares Israel’s bombardment of Gaza to two other campaigns it has extensively analyzed, the battles for Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria during the U.S.-led coalition war against the so-called Islamic State. Airwars concluded that more Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli forces during the first 25 days of the Gaza campaign than were slain in Raqqa during the entire four-month period studied and the deadliest month in Mosul—combined.
The report also pushes back on claims that Israel “does everything possible to avoid harming civilians,” and that “the level of civilian harm in Gaza is broadly consistent with, and even favorable to, other comparable conflicts in recent decades.”
Save this for the next time you hear that the Israeli military does everything possible to avoid harming civilians, and that the level of civilian harm in Gaza is less that other comparable conflicts…gaza-patterns-harm.airwars.org
“The manner in which Israel has conducted the war in Gaza may signal the development of a concerning new norm: a way of conducting air campaigns with a greater frequency of strikes, a greater intensity of damage, and a higher threshold of acceptance for civilian harm than ever seen before,” the authors wrote.
Airwars leaves readers with the ominous prospect that, while it is “expecting the overall trends to remain, magnitudes of difference—where measures of civilian harm in Gaza outpace those from previously documented conflicts—are expected to grow.”
Israeli soldiers sit on top of a tank along the so-called Alpha Line that separates the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights from Syria, in the town of Majdal Shams
ISRAEL was condemned today for its invasion of Syria in the wake of the fall of its president, Bashar al-Assad, as the United States joined Tel Aviv in widespread bombing of targets within the country.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said yesterday that Israeli forces have seized a buffer zone in the Golan Heights, established by a 1974 ceasefire agreement with Syria.
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Stop the War vice-chairman Chris Nineham told the Morning Star: “We condemn the bombing of various sites in Syria.
“Not content with conducting genocide in Gaza, Israel, the US’s main ally in the Middle East, is contributing to the growing chaos and instability in the region.”
A demonstrator is seen wearing a placard that calls for the arrest of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the rally. Pro-Palestine demonstrators joined the 21st demonstration organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) since October 2023. (Photo by David Tramontan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The live-documented ethnic cleansing in Gaza, much like in 1948, alongside the expansion of Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank, underscores the true undeclared objectives in Israel’s ostensible “total victory.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel’s war on Gaza will continue until achieving what he terms “total victory.” Instead of critically examining Netanyahu’s vague and open-ended objectives, much of the Western media and many governments frame the onslaught as self-defense, and some even normalize the genocide as a “humane” attempt to “free” Israeli captives.
At the same time, the same pundits decontextualized the Palestinian right to self-defense by ignoring that the October 7 revolt was a direct response to over two decades of Israel’s imposed “starvation diet” blockade on Gaza. Exactly, as the West turns a blind eye, and continues to enable Israel’s theft of Palestinian-occupied land in the West Bank to benefit Jewish-only colonies.
Meanwhile, these media outlets downplay or dismiss Israel’s treacherous undeclared war objectives, even to the detriment of Israeli captives and the immense civilian suffering in Gaza.
For over a year, Netanyahu has prioritized an agenda to reoccupy and to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza rather than engage in negotiations for prisoner’s swap. Especially since the release of Israeli captives would undermine one of Netanyahu’s primary pretexts for pursuing his sinister objectives.
This is only possible in the wake of Western leaders embracing Netanyahu’s racist perspective, focusing only on the well-being of Israeli captives, while ignoring the over 10,000 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli jails, and the welfare of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. For instance, Joe Biden has expressed recently his concern over Netanyahu potentially delaying action to secure the release of Israeli captives until January 20, 2025, while expressing no sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians in 2024 and beyond.
With the conspicuous silence or impotence of world bodies, the Israeli captives became a convenient fig leaf under which Netanyahu saw as an opportunity to reoccupy Gaza. It is worth recalling that in 2005, Netanyahu resigned from the Israeli government in protest against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to “disengage” and remove the Jewish-only colonies from the Gaza strip.
Immediately following October 7, Netanyahu launched a genocidal war, disregarding the Palestinian Resistance’s proposal for prisoner’s exchange. His decision to pursue war instead of negotiations was motivated by several factors:
a) Deflect responsibility for the intelligence failure under his watch. b) Evade scrutiny of his role in facilitating external funding to Hamas. c) Execute a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing to reoccupy Gaza.
The strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza was openly advocated by Israel’s racist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who three months following October 7 called for Palestinians to leave Gaza. The scion of an Ukrainian immigrant repeated the century-old European Zionist myth of blooming the desert⎯a narrative that not only ignores historical and geographical realities but also contradicts his own Old Testament that once described Canaan, the land of the Filastin (Palestine), as the “land of milk and honey,” before the ancient Hebrews migrated from their original homes to Palestine.
Further, and on January 1, 2024, Smotrich’s fellow racist National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir declared in a Knesset speech that Israel should never withdraw from any territory it occupies and explained that the establishment of new Jewish-only colonies in Gaza as “an important thing.” The following day, on January 2, Ben Gvir doubled down, stating that displacing “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians from Gaza would help pave the way for the creation of the new Jewish-only colonies.
More recently, on Monday, November 25, Smotrich declared to the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing the Jewish-only colonies in the occupied West Bank, “We can and must conquer the Gaza Strip.” He claimed there is “a unique opportunity” with Donald Trump’s election to halve Gaza’s population—a veiled euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Last Thursday, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir echoed similar calls to “reoccupy the Gaza Strip.”
On the ground inside Gaza, the tools of occupation were more explicit in defining the meaning of Netanyahu’s ostensible mantra: “total victory.” Israeli soldiers posed before an orange banner that read, “Only (Jewish-only) settlement (in Gaza) would be considered victory!” Notably, the orange color harkens back to the banners used by the settler movement in 2005 to protest Sharon’s decision to evacuate the Jewish-only colonies from Gaza.
On November 29, Ajith Sunghay, head of the U.N. Human Rights Office for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, stated after visiting Gaza that the “U.N. had been unable to deliver any aid to northern Gaza” due to “repeated impediments or outright rejections of humanitarian convoys by the Israeli authorities.”
Regarding the genocide by terror, U.N. Human Rights Chief Volker Türk reported that residents of northern Gaza are subjected to “non-stop” bombing. Simultaneously, hundreds of thousands have been ordered to evacuate, likely to make way for new Jewish-only settlements.
As part of the forced depopulation of Gaza’s northern region—the most fertile land in the strip—Israel is constructing a topographic barrier to isolate this area from the rest of Gaza. Beginning in early October, Israel carried out extensive controlled explosions, demolishing multi-story buildings to clear a path for a 5.6-mile road cutting across the strip. This road divides Gaza City from the northern towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has characterized this widespread forced displacement as part of an official government policy amounting to “crimes against humanity.”
On November 30, former Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon confirmed HRW findings, stating that Netanyahu and “far-right” (racist) elements are waging a war of “occupation, annexation, and ethnic cleansing.” He added, “There is no Beit Lahia, there is no Beit Hanoun.”
The live-documented ethnic cleansing in Gaza, much like in 1948, alongside the expansion of Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank, underscores the true undeclared objectives in Israel’s ostensible “total victory.” In this contest, Netanyahu’s deliberate undermining of U.S.-led negotiations for prisoner’s swap exemplifies his quintessential diabolical persona: exploiting the predicament of his own Israeli captives to further his cynical undeclared agenda of slaughtering the “Amalek,” and ethnically cleansing Gaza to pave the way for new Jewish-only colonies.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAGenocide denying UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy says that UK is suspending 30 of 350 arms licences to Israel. He also confirms the UK government’s support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and the UK government and military’s active participation in genocide.
FORCED STARVATION: Israel is preventing much-needed aid getting to Gaza
