Israel Has Bombed Gaza Into 42 Million Tons of Rubble

The results of unconditional U.S. backing are there for all to see.

The U.S. has sent more than 50,000 tons of weapons and equipment to fuel Israel’s war in Gaza:

Five hundred transport planes and 107 ships have delivered more than 50,000 tons of armaments and military equipment from the United States to Israel since the start of the war in Gaza last October, the Defense Ministry said on Monday.

The Israeli military could not have waged such an intense and destructive campaign without these shipments. U.S. deliveries of weapons have not slowed despite overwhelming evidence that the IDF is routinely violating international law in its conduct of the war. The Biden administration openly flouts U.S. law by continuing these deliveries. This has enabled the Israeli military to behave as recklessly as it likes. As Haaretz reported back in March, Israel’s “reckless conduct apparently reflects Israel's absolute assumption that the United States will continue to arm and finance it.”

Israel’s war effort depends heavily on U.S. backing. Israel’s Defense Ministry says that the shipments are “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.” The U.S. has the leverage to not only rein in the Israeli government’s excesses, but to force an end to the war itself. The U.S. can and should pull the plug and shut this war down. Our government should have done that right away when it saw the kind of war that Israel was waging. Unfortunately, we all know that the Biden administration will not use that leverage no matter how many war crimes Israeli forces commit with U.S.-made weapons.

The results of unconditional U.S. backing are there for all to see. The Israeli government has killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and injured many tens of thousands more. Gaza’s civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, its health care system is in ruins, and the people are living in unsafe, unsanitary conditions. Almost everyone in Gaza faces acute food insecurity, and at least half a million people live in man-made famine conditions. Disease is rampant, and even polio has returned to paralyze Palestinian children. Virtually the entire population of Gaza has been displaced from their homes, and the majority of those homes has been destroyed. Bloomberg reported on the extent of the devastation in terms of sheer tonnage of rubble left behind:

So far, Israeli air strikes have left more than 42 million tonnes of debris across the Strip, according to the UN. That’s enough rubble to fill a line of dump trucks stretching from New York to Singapore. Removing it all may take years and cost as much as $700 million. The task will be complicated by unexploded bombs, dangerous contaminants and human remains under the rubble.

The majority of the debris is destroyed housing, and its distribution across the Strip roughly mimics Gaza’s population density before the war.

Even when the fighting stops, there will be no safe place for millions of people to go. The process of clearing the rubble will be long and dangerous. It will be even longer before rebuilding can begin, and that is assuming that there will be sufficient funding for reconstruction. In the meantime, sheer amount of debris threatens the health and safety of the surviving civilian population. There is already widespread environmental contamination at a time when normal sanitation and hygiene have also collapsed.

It is impossible to overstate how completely the Israeli government has devastated Gaza in the last ten months. Israel has reduced Gaza to rubble, and it has driven its people into one of the worst modern famines on record. It could not have done this without the blind support of our government. Our govermment still has the means to end this horror, but there must be the political will to use it. Every day that the U.S. fails to use the leverage it possesses is another day of enabling mass starvation and genocide.