Gaza Needs Massive Famine Relief Now
The current aid “plan” supported by the U.S. adds insult to injury.
Gaza is still facing widespread famine because of Israel’s deliberate starvation of the population:
Israel is blocking all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said, with almost no ready-to-eat food entering what its spokesperson described as "the hungriest place on earth".
Spokesperson Jens Laerke said only 600 of 900 aid trucks had been authorised to get to Israel's border with Gaza, and from there a mixture of bureaucratic and security obstacles made it all but impossible to safely carry aid into the region.
"What we have been able to bring in is flour," he told a regular news conference on Friday. "That's not ready to eat, right? It needs to be cooked... 100% of the population of Gaza is at risk of famine."
Permitting a trickle of aid is useless when a flood is needed. Letting only a small amount in after months of total siege is obviously not providing real relief, and it isn’t intended to. The Israeli government allows some token deliveries in so that they can distract attention from their ongoing starvation crimes. They let the people they have been starving to death have a few crumbs and then congratulate themselves on their benevolence.
It is a deeply cynical tactic. It is meant to reduce international pressure on Israel so that their government can continue its genocidal campaign. Finance Minister Smotrich said earlier this month that their government would permit only the “minimum necessary” into Gaza so “that the world does not stop us and accuse us of war crimes.”
The distribution of even this small amount of aid has already been marred by chaos and violence. The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation backed by the U.S. cannot deliver aid on the scale required by a starving population, and it isn’t meant to do that. Commenting on the shooting of hungry Palestinians, Ahmad Ibsais said, “It was the logical endpoint of a system not designed to nourish the hungry, but to control and contain them.”
The entire operation is an insulting farce. That is why no reputable humanitarian organizations are cooperating with it. The U.N. and aid groups have correctly said that it would weaponize aid, and they will not participate in that. The head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Jonathan Whittall, condemned the plan and said, “The newly developed distribution scheme is more than just the control of aid. It is engineered scarcity.” Like other U.S.-backed stunts, this plan is an attempt to make it look as if the U.S. is doing something to address the humanitarian catastrophe Israel has created while doing as little as possible to solve the problem.
Gaza needs a massive independent relief effort. The people there have been in desperate need of assistance for the last year and a half. The current aid “plan” supported by the U.S. adds insult to injury. It is wholly inadequate for feeding the population, and it subjects the population to degrading and dehumanizing treatment. Ibsais put it very well: “True humanitarian aid would dismantle the siege, not manage its consequences.”
The war has to end and the siege must be completely lifted. Anything less than that puts the lives of two million innocent people in grave jeopardy.
Surely you know by now that the famine is entirely intentional on the part of the United States and Israel. Those people starve to death because the United States and Israel want them to starve to death.
I figured out from the get-go that the goal was the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and barring that, outright genocide.
We are the Evil Empire. The sooner you acknowledge this blindingly obvious fact, the sooner you will get wise. We are not led by well-meaning earnest do-gooders who sometimes make mistakes in their enthusiasm, but by full-blown sociopaths and psychopaths.
I don't think so. Ukraine is part of the European land mass (obviously). It is easy for us and our allies to resupply Ukraine, and (again obviously) Poland and other eastern European nations don't want Russia expanding. Taiwan is an island. There is no reason why China would not interdict U.S. supply efforts, leading to "conflict". Nellie is also calling for the U.S to counter the expansion of Chinese naval power in the Pacific. The U.S., of course, is the only country with a navy capable of matching the Chinese. We don't have anyone in the Pacific to fight our battles for us. I spent a year in Vietnam in a 105 howitzer battery. Take it from me, the U.S. should not be fighting wars in countries 6,000 miles (and more) from our shores.