United Nations vehicles carrying aid drive along the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom crossing, in the Gaza Strip, December 19, 2024
DELAYS and obstructions by the Israeli military have meant only 12 trucks have delivered aid to northern Gaza since October, Oxfam warned today.
Israel has continually prevented humanitarian agencies from delivering much-needed aid to the region since it escalated its siege of northern Gaza on October 6, the charity said.
The UN has warned that famine is imminent and estimates that up to 75,000 Gazans remain trapped without access to food, water or power.
According to Oxfam, 34 trucks were permitted to enter the area but most of them were blocked from delivering the aid.
Three of the 12 that did manage to make it through delivered aid to Mahdia al-Shawa school, where displaced families were sheltering.
But within hours of the aid being distributed, soldiers and remote-controlled quadcopters fired on the school, which was then shelled the next day by the Israeli military.
Staff at the charity said that humanitarian access everywhere in Gaza is at an “all-time low” and that all crossings are barely functional.
An Israeli soldier sitting on an armored personnel carrier as it moves out of Gaza on February 26, 2024. (Photo: Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images)
“Everyone knows that the U.S. could end this today if we wanted to,” said one analyst.
A new poll released Tuesday revealed that a majority of Americans want to the U.S. government to stop supplying the Israeli military with weaponry to carry out its brutal assault on Gaza that has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, most of them civilian men, women, and children.
As organizers called on Democratic voters in at least seven states to vote “uncommitted” on their Super Tuesday primary ballots on Tuesday to help push the Biden administration to demand a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, the YouGov poll provided another measure of Americans’ growing outrage over their government’s material and political support for the “genocidal” campaign by Israel’s far-right government.
Commissioned by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), the poll of 1,000 U.S. adults asked respondents whether they agreed with the statement: “The U.S. should stop weapons shipments to Israel until Israel discontinues its attacks on the people of Gaza.”
Fifty-two percent of people said they agreed with the statement, while just 27% said they disagreed.
CEPR co-director Mark Weisbrot noted that while the call for a cease-fire “can mean different things to different people… the support for halting weapons shipments is specific and unambiguous.”
Less than two weeks after scientists projected that at least 6,500 people would likely die in Gaza in the coming months even in the case of an immediate, permanent cease-fire, Weisbrot said many Americans may have “already moved past” the idea that a cease-fire is sufficient.
All this is to say that the American public may have already moved past the idea of a “ceasefire.” We all see the images on TV. The heartache of 30,000+ dead– most of them women and children.
“Support for stopping U.S. weapons shipments to Israel has gained traction in recent days,” noted CEPR, “as the Gaza death toll has surpassed 30,000 people, about two-thirds of them women and children.”
Since the Biden administration’s approval of weapons shipments to Israel since October, Israel has decimated civilian infrastructure across Gaza while also blocking nearly all humanitarian aid, leaving the entire population facing “crisis-level hunger” that is approaching famine in some areas.
“We have the power to stop this. Everyone knows that the U.S. could end this today if we wanted to,” said Weisbrot, posting a video of European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell calling on U.S. President Joe Biden and other Western leaders to “provide less arms” to Israel, considering Biden’s stated belief that too many civilians are being killed.
We have the power to stop this. Everyone knows that the U.S. could end this today if we wanted to. This is Josep Borell, the highest official of the European Union in charge of foreign policy, telling the United States government that they need to do something, like cut weapons… pic.twitter.com/F9y8zwgPxj
Tuesday’s poll revealed that ending weapons shipments for Israel is popular across the political spectrum.
Sixty-two percent of people who voted for Biden in 2020 agreed that the U.S. should end shipments, while only 14% disagreed.
CEPR pointed out that “Among those who did not vote in the 2020 presidential elections—a key group containing voters that both Democrats and Republicans would like to turn out this year—fully 60% agreed that the U.S. should block weapons shipments.”
The latter result is one “that the Biden campaign should be worried about,” said Weisbrot. “These are the voters Biden needs to turn out to expand his base.”
People who voted for former Republican President Donald Trump in 2020 were the only group in which a majority opposed halting weapons shipments, with 55% saying the shipments should continue. Thirty percent said they should stop.
