Commentary
By Reginald Johnson
For five
months, Israel has been conducting a brutal, some would say barbaric military
campaign to punish the people of Palestine for the attacks of October 7, when
Hamas extremists assaulted a music festival in Israel, killing over 1,200
people.
Israel says
their military operation in Gaza is only targeting individuals tied to Hamas (which is
the governing authority for Palestine) but news reports say otherwise. Israel
has carried out a carpet bombing campaign which has leveled
apartment buildings, schools, and universities. There have been airstrikes as
well on hospitals, churches, mosques, refugee camps, food centers and
ambulances. All these attacks are war crimes under international law.
At this
point, more than 31,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, have
been killed. The real fatality figure is
probably a lot higher because not everyone has been accounted for, including people
whose bodies are under the rubble of destroyed buildings.
Another 1.5
million people have been displaced from their homes.
Israeli authorities
have also blocked aid trucks from getting into Gaza,
resulting in acute food shortages. UN officials say that more and more people
are going hungry and cases of starvation have already been verified.
A group of UN
experts declared recently that “Israel has been intentionally starving” Gaza,
and that “widespread famine” in the besieged enclave is “imminent,” according
to a report in Mondoweiss.
“We’ve never
seen a civilian population made to go hungry so completely and so quickly,”
said Michael Fahkri, UN Special Rapporteur. “Never in modern history.”
Medical
care in Gaza is also collapsing, as hospitals and health facilities have been
damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombing. This has led to people dying from
inadequate medical care and disease.
The death
toll in Gaza could jump exponentially with the onset of famine and the spread
of disease. Prof. Devi Sridhar, chair of the global public health division at
the University of Edinburgh, predicts that a quarter of Gaza’s 2 million
population --- close to half of 1 million human beings --- could die within a
year.
Almost on a daily
basis, atrocities are being carried out against Palestinians, particularly in Gaza but also in the
West Bank and East Jerusalem --- territories illegally occupied by Israel for
the past 57 years.
On Thursday,
at least 21 Palestinians were killed after Israeli forces opened fire on
thousands of people waiting for aid in Gaza City in the same area that was
targeted hours earlier, according to the Al Jazeera news service. In the
earlier incident, the same food distribution point at the Kuwait roundabout,
Israel forces shot dead at least six Palestinians, according to the report.
Israeli officials claimed that it was actually Palestinians who were shooting
at their own people.
On Wednesday,
Israeli forces attacked a food distribution center in Gaza killing one worker
and injuring 22, according to the BBC.
Also on
Wednesday, in East Jerusalem, Israeli
soldiers shot and killed a 12-year-old boy who was playing with fireworks. Eyewitnesses
said the boy posed no threat to the soldiers and was using small fireworks.
On February
29, UN officials reported that 112 people were killed when Israeli forces
opened fire on a group that gathered around a food supply truck in the early
morning hours. In what is being called the "Flour Massacre,” a number of people
were killed by gunshots while others died after being trampled by the crowd
that went into frenzy after the gunfire erupted. Others died when they were run
over by the truck that began driving away to escape the chaos.
On February 15,
dozens of doctors were detained and tortured after a raid by Israeli forces on Nasser
hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, according to the BBC. The doctors
were forced to strip, were blindfolded, forced to remain in a kneeling
position, and then were beaten, One doctor was set upon by muzzled dogs, the
report said.
Israeli
spokesmen said the IDF raided the hospital because they had evidence Hamas
fighters were hiding there.
Also in February,
two little Palestinian girls, sisters, who were putting water into a bucket in the
courtyard of their home, were shot dead by an IOF tank. When their father came
out and lay down next to them, he was shot dead, too.
The atrocities, the indiscriminate killings, the
vast numbers of people being killed and the apparent attempt to engineer a
famine, all point towards one conclusion: Israel is conducting an
ethnic cleansing campaign against the Palestinians.
The
International Court of Justice reached a similar conclusion when it determined
that there was a “plausible case” to be made that Israel was carrying out a "genocide" in Gaza.
It's clear a great moral crime against humanity is taking place in Gaza.
What is happening in Palestine rivals the ethnic cleansing/genocidal campaigns that took place in the 1990s in Rwanda and Yugoslavia.
The question is, what is the world going to do about
this, if anything?
Certainly some in the UN are oriented to taking
action. Fahkri and some of his other colleagues on March 5 called for an arms
embargo against Israel until Israel ceases its military campaign.
A majority of
countries on the Security Council of the UN have also agreed to a resolution
calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.
 |
| Backers of a ceasefire in Gaza lobby for support from the City Council in Bridgeport, CT The council approved a ceasefire resolution. (Reginald Johnson photo) |
But every time a ceasefire resolution has been presented to the Security Council, the
United States has used its veto to kill it, making clear that the United States is the major stumbling block for the world taking collective action
against Israel to stop the genocide.
President Biden has talked recently, as have other Democratic Party leaders about the need for Israel to
control its military forces and avoid civilian casualties. However, talk is
cheap. The fact is Biden has not gotten tough with Israel to really back up his
words. He could threaten the cutoff of aid to Israel to force that nation to
stop the carnage, but he hasn’t done that. He could also ask the US ambassador
at the UN to vote with the other nations on the Security Council in passing a
resolution ordering Israel to stop its military operations. But he hasn’t done
that either.
So until the United States changes its position on
what Israel is doing that nation is going to continue with its grossly
immoral and totally illegal ethnic cleansing campaign in Palestine.
The United States is the key. The policy here must
change. This is why it’s so important that people on the local level continue
to speak out and press their members of Congress as well as the White House to
get on board behind a cease-fire and insist that Israel stop its barbaric
operations. It should be noted that Congress has been as bad as Biden has been
on the issue of Israel --- most members in Congress still oppose a cease-fire in Gaza, and that includes both Republicans and Democrats.
It is
somewhat of an indictment of our democracy that while a strong majority of the
American people want a cease-fire in Gaza a strong majority in Congress are
against it. This is almost entirely because of the huge contributions that are
given by pro- Israel lobbies to members of Congress in both parties. The
members of our national legislature are in Israel’s pocket.
People and voters have to make it clear to these
members of Congress that they need to change their positions and get behind a
cease-fire and in turn put pressure on the Biden administration to insist that
Israel also agree to a cease-fire, or they will be voted out.
The genocide
in Gaza must be stopped.
