A Preventable Catastrophe in Gaza

The nightmare scenario that opponents of the war have been warning about is unfolding. Our government could have prevented this, but it chose to let it happen instead.

Israel’s offensive in Rafah has been every bit as catastrophic as humanitarian aid organizations feared:

Israeli military operations this month against Hamas in Gaza — from the last, desperate refuge for Palestinians in the southern city of Rafah to the devastated refugee camps of the north — have displaced nearly a million people, according to the United Nations, and further sealed off the territory to outside aid. Aid groups say it has deepened the enclave’s humanitarian crisis and reversed their recent gains in staving off starvation and disease.

Any attack on Rafah was guaranteed to worsen the humanitarian crisis, and that is exactly what this offensive has done. We knew months ago that Biden’s “red line” on Rafah was meaningless, and now we have confirmation. Arms transfers to Israel continue, the administration refuses to follow the law governing those transfers, and U.S. officials are still more concerned with running interference for the war criminals at the top of the Israeli government than they are in stopping a major famine. The nightmare scenario that opponents of the war have been warning about is unfolding. Our government could have prevented this, but it chose to let it happen instead.

The people fleeing Rafah have nowhere safe to go. The “humanitarian” zone in Al-Mawasi is no refuge at all. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people are densely crowded in unsanitary conditions without basic supplies. The Wall Street Journal reports on the dire conditions there:

Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general for the U.N.’s agency for Palestinian refugees, warned on Saturday that the areas people are fleeing to don’t have safe water supplies or sanitation facilities.

Al-Mawasi “lacks the minimal conditions to provide emergency humanitarian assistance in a safe and dignified manner,” he said. “The place is crammed and cannot absorb more people.”

The Guardian reported the same last week:

Medicals and aid officials describe “horrific and dehumanising conditions” in the zone, with acute shortages of shelter, water, food and sanitation.

These are the conditions that more than 800,000 people are being forced into by this offensive. For many of them already weakened by hunger, being forced to live in such conditions is a death sentence. The Israeli government may not be bombing or shelling those that flee into this hell, but it is killing these people all the same.

It was obvious that attacking Rafah would lead to this disaster, but for months the U.S. has indulged the absurd idea that there could be some way for Israel to launch the attack without condemning more than a million people to displacement, disease, and death. Instead of pressing for a halt to the war as they should have been doing for months, the administration kept trying to have things both ways. The administration wouldn’t oppose an offensive, but it feigned concern about the terrible consequences that an offensive would inevitably have.

The result has been a series of stunts and bits of humanitarian theater on the part of the U.S. to make it seem as if our government is trying to get aid to starving people. The stunts are a distraction at best, and the floating pier that the president announced in his State of the Union address has proven to be useless:

Ryder said that as of Tuesday 569 metric tons of aid has been delivered to the secured area at the Gaza port. Some of it remains there, however, because distribution agencies are working to find alternative routes to warehouses in Gaza.

Asked if any aid from the pier had yet reached Gaza residents in need, Ryder said, “I do not believe so.” He said aid had resumed moving Tuesday from the secured area into Gaza, after what had been a two-day halt following Saturday’s disruption. He gave no immediate details.

The pier was never part of a serious effort to combat famine in Gaza. It was a half-baked scheme that the administration cooked up to distract from their unwillingness to pressure Israel to open the land crossings and to stop impeding the delivery of aid. As things stand now, it is bringing in a paltry amount of aid while the Rafah offensive has cut off the main lifeline to the entire territory. Jeremy Konyndyk of Refugees International summed things up yesterday: “The pier has sucked up a huge amount of diplomatic and political energy at huge financial cost - yet has delivered little and is irrelevant to the fundamental last-mile access impediments.”

What little aid that was making it in earlier in the year has now been shut off. Last week the U.N. said that it had run out of tents and food to distribute to people in Gaza. The assault on Rafah is now “potentially the darkest chapter in this horrendous war that started seven months ago,” according to Ricardo Pires, a spokesman for UNICEF. The administration’s failure to prevent this catastrophe is one of its costliest failures yet.