electronicintifada.net

Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people in Gaza are so terrible that the English language and international law seem to lack the vocabulary to encompass and convey the horror.

“We’re running out of words, we’re running out of ways to describe to the world how awful it is on the ground and how much worse it’s getting,” Louise Wateridge, an officer with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, said of the situation in Gaza on Tuesday.

That same day, the UN human rights office condemned Israel’s “repeated strikes that have led to massive civilian fatalities in north Gaza over the past five weeks.”

 

As of 10 November, more than 1,800 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s offensive in the northern district of Gaza – including Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya and Jabaliya – that began on 6 October. Another 4,000 people have been injured, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

The Palestinian health ministry in Gaza has confirmed the deaths of more than 43,600 people throughout Gaza since early October 2023, with many more uncounted under the rubble of destroyed buildings or whose deaths by siege and starvation are not reflected in the fatality count.

Israel’s siege has cut off Palestinians in northern Gaza “from humanitarian aid, medical care or emergency rescue service.”

Since the Israeli offensive in the northern district began on 6 October, Israel has allowed only one mission by the World Food Program to enter the area (on 11 November) and only limited “medical supplies provided to hospitals during medical evacuations missions,” according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

The World Food Program mission that reached Beit Hanoun on Monday “included two trucks carrying life-saving ready-to-eat rations and wheat flour, and one truck carrying bottled water” and was delivered to two shelters.

But as OCHA states, shortly thereafter, Israeli forces intensely shelled and surrounded the area where the aid was delivered and ordered families to leave.

On Tuesday morning, Israeli forces attacked a crowd of Palestinians awaiting the arrival of humanitarian aid at a roundabout northwest of Gaza City, killing and injuring dozens.

The Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor said that troops fired shells and bullets toward the group, who hadn’t received aid in around 50 days, forcing them to take cover in a nearby home.

“As soon as they reached the building, the Israeli army bombed it,” Euro-Med Monitor added. “Screams from those still inside the targeted house were heard, but the victims’ cries for help could not be answered, as the area was inaccessible to ambulance and civil defense personnel.”

In her briefing to the Security Council on Tuesday, Joyce Msuya, the acting UN relief chief, said that “the latest offensive that Israel started in North Gaza last month is an intensified, extreme and accelerated version of the horrors of the past year.”

“We are witnessing acts reminiscent of the gravest international crimes,” Msuya said.

 

Ramy Abdu, the head of Euro-Med Monitor, said that the world is witnessing “a comprehensive, systematic genocide.”

“Every moving body in the northern Gaza areas, whether in the North Gaza governorate or Gaza City governorate, is being targeted and killed,” he added.

 

Families massacred in shelters

The UN human rights office said that since the offensive in northern Gaza began, it had recorded three incidents resulting in more than 80 fatalities as Israel strikes residential buildings used as shelters. These attacks resulted “in a high number of fatalities from single families,” the office added.

On Sunday, an Israeli attack on a residential building in Jabaliya “reportedly killed 24 Palestinians, including 14 children and 5 women,” the UN office said.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights said that Muhammad Alloush, one of its field researchers, lost 24 members of his family in the Jabaliya attack, among them 14 children, the youngest only 5 months old.

“These innocent civilians were killed while they were sleeping and suffering from starvation,” the rights group said.

Strikes on shelters, siege and attacks on people fleeing “suggest Israel’s actions are aimed at creating conditions of life that are very likely to result in emptying north Gaza of its civilian Palestinian population by death or forcible transfer,” the UN human rights office said.

 

The UN office added: “We reiterate our grave concern at the risk of the commission of atrocity crimes, which includes war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.”

Israel’s crimes in northern Gaza are “taking place in a news void,” the Committee to Protect Journalists observed last week. The press safety watchdog said that Israel had stepped up its “systematic attack on journalists and media infrastructure” since the beginning of the offensive.

“Israeli strikes killed at least five journalists in October and the [Israeli military] began a smear campaign against six Al Jazeera journalists reporting on the north,” the group added.

The aim appears to prevent even local journalists from bearing witness, as Israel has prevented independent international media from accessing Gaza since early October 2023.

During Tuesday’s Security Council meeting, Ilze Brands Kehris, the assistant secretary-general for human rights, said that figures verified by the UN human rights office showed that “close to 70 percent of those killed in Gaza by strikes, shelling and other hostilities were children and women.”

“The age group most represented in verified fatalities was children from 5 to 9 years old,” Brands Kehris added.

Brands Kehris said that Israel was systematically targeting shelters in northern Gaza where “significant numbers of civilians” are present, using “weapons with wide area effects in populated areas.”

“The manner in which the Israeli military is conducting operations … suggests not only that Israel’s actions are seeking to empty northern Gaza of Palestinians … but points to further grave risks of atrocities of the most serious nature,” Brands Kehris added.

“Apocalyptic”

Recent warnings about Israel’s extermination campaign in the northern district of Gaza couldn’t have been more dire.

“The situation unfolding in North Gaza is apocalyptic,” the heads of 15 United Nations and humanitarian organizations stated on 1 November.

“The entire Palestinian population in north Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence,” they warned.

“Basic, life-saving goods are not available,” the agency leaders added. “Humanitarians are not safe to do their work and are blocked by Israeli forces and by insecurity from reaching people in need.”

An independent famine review committee affiliated with the UN warned on 8 November that “there is a strong likelihood that famine is imminent in areas within the northern Gaza Strip.”

The committee added that “immediate action, within days not weeks, is required from all actors who are directly taking part in the conflict, or have influence on its conduct, to avert and alleviate this catastrophic situation.”

On Sunday, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called on international bodies to immediately recognize that famine is already underway in Gaza. The Geneva-based group said that any additional delay “will undoubtedly result in further obstructions of life-saving aid that will lead to worsening poverty, malnutrition, starvation and deaths.”

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that 100,000 to 130,000 people have been displaced from the northernmost areas of Gaza to Gaza City since 6 October.

As many as 75,000 people are estimated to remain in the fully besieged areas of northern Gaza, according to the OCHA, and are now being deliberately cut off from life essentials.

Earlier this month, Itzik Cohen, an Israeli brigadier general, told reporters that “there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes.”

Cohen said that humanitarian aid would be allowed into southern Gaza but not the north, since there are “no more civilians left.”

The Israeli army later walked back the claim, saying that Cohen’s statement “is incorrect and does not reflect the [military’s] objectives and values.”

But the army’s assertion – likely aimed at appeasing Israel’s allies and obscuring its genocidal intent – is belied by its actions on the ground.

In the northern areas of Gaza, “drones hovered overhead broadcasting evacuation orders, which were also carried on social media outlets, audio and text messages sent to residents’ phones,” Reuters reported on 7 November.

 

“After they displaced most or all of the people in Jabaliya, now they are bombing everywhere, killing people on the roads and inside their houses to force everyone out,” a man named Ahmed told the agency.

Siege, starvation and extermination

Human rights groups have warned that Israel is carrying out the so-called “Generals’ Plan” aimed at depopulating northern Gaza through siege, starvation and extermination.

According to that scheme, anyone who remains after being ordered to leave would be treated as a combatant – effectively turning northern Gaza into an extermination zone.

The ultimate aim of the campaign appears to be the annexation of the territory and the rebuilding of Israeli settlements – grave violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

 

Israeli journalists who recently toured northern Gaza with the military observed that settlers are already setting up camp along the periphery.

“Even after traveling a few hundred meters inside the Strip, it’s easy to see that the activists in the encampment are closer to fulfilling their vision than the general public thinks,” the journalists said.

Israel is also clearing infrastructure to bisect Gaza and is “paving broad arteries designed to enable safer and easier movement for the forces in the area,” the journalists added. The military’s activities “are evidence of an attempt to establish facts on the ground for the long term.”

They observed that the resettlement of Gaza is “the only thing in the war that interests Religious Zionism and [Jewish Power],” the two parties allied with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud – “even at the price of the lives of the hostages” still held in the territory.

According to another report published by Haaretz on Wednesday, senior defense sources said that the military “is currently required to empty villages and cities of their residents” in northern Gaza.

“From conversations with field commanders and combat soldiers as well as a tour of the combat zone, it appears the [Israeli military] is systematically razing the structures that are still standing,” Haaretz added.

 

A senior commander told the paper that in recent months, “the only thing the forces are asked to do in the area is to move the population to the south.”

An officer fighting in Gaza told Haaretz that the situation on the ground indicates that the Israeli military “won’t leave Gaza before 2026.” The officer added: “When you see the roads being paved here, it’s clear that this isn’t intended for the ground maneuvers or for raids by the troops into various places.”

“These roads lead, among other places, to the places from which some of the settlements were removed,” the officer said, referring to colonies Israel had built before its nominal “disengagement” from Gaza in 2005.

“I don’t know of any intent to rebuild them, that isn’t something we’re told explicitly. But everyone understands where this is going.”

Palestinians in Gaza’s north who have endured more than a year of genocide, including starvation as a weapon of war, are not willingly going along with this mass expulsion, extermination and annihilation plan.

There is no safety anywhere in Gaza and some Palestinians say they choose death over a life of humiliation and constant displacement.

Many of those who have left the northern district only did so after troops forced people out of shelters at gunpoint and made them “start marching south (after the men were separated and taken for questioning or arrest),” as pointed out by Idan Landau in the the Israeli publication 972 Magazine.

Israel has meanwhile destroyed homes and infrastructure on a massive scale in Gaza’s northern district. Based on Israel’s long history of forcibly emptying Palestinian population centers and destroying the infrastructure to prevent their residents’ return, that appears to be the purpose in northern Gaza too.

 

Hospitals under siege

The Palestinian Civil Defense is forcibly out of service in north Gaza “and reports that people who survive the bombing and attacks often die from hunger, amid severe shortages of food,” according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“Many people in the area have been left trapped under rubble for days, without being evacuated,” OCHA added, citing the civil defense.

During its ongoing offensive in northern Gaza, Israel attacked the three hospitals that had remained partially functional in the area – Al-Awda, Indonesian and Kamal Adwan hospitals.

 

On 5 November, Adele Khodr, a regional director of UNICEF, said that Kamal Adwan’s neonatal intensive care unit had been “damaged in heavy attacks in recent days,” killing and injuring children.

“Any newborn baby fighting to sustain its breaths from inside a hospital incubator is entirely defenseless and entirely reliant on specialist medical care and equipment to survive,” Khodr said.

She added that 4,000 babies in Gaza “are estimated to have been cut off from lifesaving newborn care in the past year because of sustained attacks on the hospitals earnestly trying to keep them alive.”

Three of the eight neonatal intensive care units in Gaza have been totally destroyed since October last year, all of them in the north. Currently, there are only 54 incubators across Gaza.

In the northern area, “the number of incubators is down from 105 at the three NICUs to just nine, all at Kamal Adwan Hospital.”

“Vulnerable newborns and sick and wounded children in need of intensive care are being killed in tents, in incubators and in the arms of their parents,” Khodr said.

“That this hasn’t galvanized enough political will to end the war, represents a fundamental crisis of our humanity,” Khodr added.

Kamal Adwan hospital was hit multiple times between 31 October and 3 November, destroying recently delivered supplies and damaging water tanks. One strike injured several children, one of them critically.

 

On 4 November, the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza said that Israeli forces were bombing Kamal Adwan hospital, injuring staff and patients.

“The medical staff cannot move between the hospital departments and cannot rescue their injured colleagues. It seems that a decision has been made to execute all the staff who refused to evacuate the hospital,” the ministry stated.

Mohammed Obeid, an orthopedic surgeon with Doctors Without Borders who had been sheltering and working at Kamal Adwan hospital, was detained by Israeli forces, along with several other staff, during a raid on the facility on 26 October.

 

Kamal Adwan “has been reduced from a hospital helping hundreds of patients with dozens of health workers to a shell of itself,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of the World Health Organization, said on 1 November.

Since the current ground offensive began, six employees at Al-Awda Hospital “had been injured in attacks impacting the facility, one of whom lost a limb, and all ambulances had been rendered out of service,” the World Health Organization added.

 

On Tuesday, OCHA said that “hospitals in north Gaza are … hardly functioning with the bare minimum of capacities and resources.”

Access to the hospitals “remains severely restricted,” the UN office added.

“Due to critical fuel shortages, Al-Awda Hospital has been forced to operate its generators only three hours per day, disrupting life-saving surgeries and other healthcare services.”

Al-Awda, Kamal Adwan and Indonesian hospitals were all “besieged and raided by Israeli troops some 10 months ago,” as the AP news agency observed.

At least 10 hospitals have been besieged and raided across Gaza over the past year. Israeli forces have openly targeted health facilities “with an intensity and overtness rarely seen in modern warfare,” AP stated.

A months-long investigation by AP into the raids on the three facilities currently under fire in the north confirmed what health workers have been saying all along.

“It found that Israel has presented little or even no evidence of a significant Hamas presence in those cases,” according to AP.

A UN independent commission of inquiry has determined that “Israel has implemented a concerted policy to destroy the healthcare system of Gaza.”

“Israeli security forces have deliberately killed, wounded, arrested, detained, mistreated and tortured medical personnel and targeted medical vehicles,” the commission added. These actions constitute “the war crimes of wilful killing and mistreatment and the crime against humanity of extermination.”

The commission said that “these actions were taken as collective punishment against the Palestinians in Gaza and are part of the ongoing Israeli attack against the Palestinian people that began on 7 October [2023].”

Having met no meaningful consequences for the destruction of Gaza’s health care sector, Israel is now doing the same in Lebanon.

During its offensive in Lebanon that began on 23 September, “Israeli strikes damaged 34 hospitals, killed 111 emergency medical technicians and hit 107 ambulances, according to data compiled by the Lebanese health ministry,” CNN reported on 2 November.

“Israeli strikes have killed eight people inside the premises of four hospitals, and eight facilities have been forced to close, according to the health ministry.”

An analysis by CNN found that the Israeli military dropped bombs in “lethal range” of at least 19 hospitals in Lebanon, including 10 facilities in the southern suburbs of Beirut.

 

Firass Abiad, Lebanon’s health minister, told the network that “it’s clear that this is premeditated, that this is a state policy that Israel is following, whether in Gaza or in Lebanon.”

The targeting of Lebanon’s hospitals isn’t the only parallel with Israel’s actions in Gaza. Israel has also forced mass displacement and waged wanton destruction targeting civilians and civilian objects in Lebanon.

Israel’s attacks are aimed at engineering a new physical and social reality on the ground.

In November last year, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister at the time, said that “the citizens of Lebanon” would pay the price for any Hizballah attack on Israel.

“What we are doing in Gaza, we know how to do in Beirut,” he said.

For nearly two months, Israel has hammered Lebanon, displacing 1.2 million people from their homes and wiping out entire villages in the south and increasingly in other areas of the country.

 

Nearly 3,300 people have been killed in Israeli strikes on Lebanon since October 2023, according to Reuters, which cited the Lebanese health ministry. Most of those fatalities occurred in the past seven weeks.

“Food security crisis” in Lebanon

The situations for people in both Lebanon and Gaza are going from bad to worse.

In Lebanon, “food insecurity is set to worsen significantly due to intensifying conflict and economic strain, putting Lebanon on the list of hotspots of very high concern,” according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, citing a recent report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Program.

From April to September this year, nearly a quarter of Lebanon’s population “faced high levels of acute food insecurity.”

OCHA added that “the ongoing conflict is deepening Lebanon’s economic crisis, with [the World Food Program] reporting on the potential contraction of gross domestic production (GDP) of up to 15.6 percent.”

Tourism and agriculture have been hard hit. The fighting is exacerbating “an already severe food security crisis nationwide,” with nearly 2,000 hectares of farmland in the south damaged or unharvested “due to the ongoing conflict.”

At the end of October, Israeli lawmakers passed two laws that will effectively ban UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, from operating in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

With UNRWA serving as the backbone of the humanitarian operation in Gaza, the Israeli decision is “a new way … to kill children,” as the spokesperson for UNICEF put it.

US complicity in deliberate starvation

Hopes that the US would actually withhold assistance to Israel if it did not allow more aid into Gaza were dashed on Tuesday.

The Biden administration said that there would be no major change in policy toward Israel at the end of a 30-day period in which the secretaries of state and defense asked Israel to implement several measures to ensure a surge in humanitarian assistance in Gaza to avoid triggering US laws that would suspend military aid.

Vedant Patel, the US State Department deputy spokesperson, said that Israel had taken “some steps” to improve the situation but acknowledged that “it continues to be a crisis.”

 

Several humanitarian organizations said that Israel has failed to satisfy those demands “at enormous human cost for Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” Oxfam, one of the groups, said on Tuesday.

In a report published on Monday, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Israel severely restricted humanitarian access in northern Gaza.

But the south is not much better.

Humanitarian access remains “severely constrained due to insecurity, limited facilitation by Israeli forces and organized, armed looting fueled by the breakdown of public order and safety,” the UN office added.

On that last point, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor recently observed that Israel “frequently gives armed gangs and thieves cover to seize a significant portion of aid from the trucks in Israeli-controlled areas, preventing them from reaching their destinations” – a phenomenon also reported on by Haaretz.

The State Department admitted on 4 November that Israel hadn’t taken sufficient measures to increase aid in Gaza as Washington had requested in mid-October.

At that time, State Department spokesperson Matthew MIller wouldn’t say what repercussions Israel would face if the deadline passed without Washington’s requirements being met, only saying “we will follow the law.”

But thus far, the US has run interference for Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza in violation of domestic and international law.

In May, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, told Congress that “we do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of US humanitarian assistance.”

 

But prior to the delivery of that assessment to Congress, two US government agencies told the Biden administration that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of humanitarian aid.

US law prohibits military aid to states that block the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

Reporting by ProPublica also reveals that in March, Jack Lew, the US ambassador to Israel, “sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet … should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.”

But Lew had been “told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four US officials familiar with the embassy operations.”

“No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew told his subordinates.

Highest-ranking diplomats have justified Biden’s “policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts,” as ProPublica states.

“This makes the United States complicit in genocide and starvation, it’s nothing less than that,” Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told the BBC this week.

Fakhri called for an arms embargo and sanctions against Israel. “We can’t negotiate our way out of genocide, we must end it immediately,” he said.