Stop the War Now

The only way to stop famine from devouring tens of thousands of lives is to stop the war now.

An official from UNICEF, James Elder, recently surveyed the devastation in Gaza and warned against an assault on Rafah:

“A military offensive in Rafah would be utterly catastrophic. The last remaining water points and hospitals [in Gaza] are there and there is nowhere else to go. Khan Younis, Gaza City barely exist any more,” he said. “Rafah is Gaza’s last hope and it is utterly bewildering that a conversation on a potential military operation is still continuing.”

The continuation of the war is a death sentence for thousands and thousands more Palestinian civilians. The only way to stop famine from devouring tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of lives is to stop the war now. The U.S. has tried to have it both ways by fully backing the war while feigning concern about the humanitarian crisis, but the former is causing the latter and the latter cannot be successfully ended without ending the war.

It is clear that the U.S. is not trying to stop this assault from happening. Instead, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration is trying to “shape” the attack so that it will supposedly be less dangerous to the 1.4 million civilians that have taken refuge there. It is absurd to think that the U.S. will be able to “shape” an offensive in Rafah so that it effectively protects civilians when Washington absolutely refuses to use any leverage to pressure the Netanyahu government. It is even more ridiculous to think that the Israeli military that has laid waste to Gaza up until now will suddenly restrain itself and not do the same thing to Rafah that it has already done to the other cities. The U.S. has signaled many times that there is nothing that the Israeli government can do that would jeopardize its support, so we should assume that the Israeli government will disregard any U.S. advice that limits its options.

The choice here is between continuing the war and causing large-scale loss of civilian life on the one hand and halting the war and providing at least minimal protection to civilians. There is no scenario where the war continues and the famine does not get significantly worse. If the famine already raging in Gaza is to be contained, there must be an immediate and permanent ceasefire. Jeremy Konyndyk of Refugees International explains that the famine in Gaza is already underway:

Bottom line up front: available evidence strongly indicates that famine is getting underway in Gaza. The window to “avert” it has closed, and the focus must now pivot to containing the damage. As prospects for an enduring cease-fire remain pessimistic, tens of thousands of lives, perhaps more, hang in the balance. 

With famine already spreading, there is obviously no time to waste. The severity of the hunger crisis in Gaza cannot be overstated. Konyndyk writes:

In Gaza today, more people – 1.1 million – are assessed to be in IPC V despite a population almost six times smaller than Somalia’s. Another 854,000 people are assessed to be in IPC IV. This represents nearly the entirety of Gaza’s population. Such pervasive famine- and pre-famine- level deprivation across an entire population has no precedent in recent decades [bold mine-DL].

There are other humanitarian crises affecting more people, but this one is unusually extreme and the population has been driven to starvation in record time. It is also a wholly man-made crisis. The only good news about that is that a famine created by deliberate policy choices can also be ended by policy changes, but there must be political will to force those changes to happen.

Konyndyk adds that a Rafah offensive “would re-displace millions of already deeply vulnerable people and completely disrupt what remains of the humanitarian presence in Gaza.” He concludes, “Nothing resembling an adequate humanitarian response to this crisis is possible as long as this war persists.” A brief pause in the fighting will not be enough. Even a few weeks of respite won’t work. The war needs to end if there is any hope to save the lives of Gaza’s starving people.

Given that reality, there is no “safe” way for the Israeli military to attack Rafah. The administration’s efforts to “shape” the attack are a waste of time and they serve only to provide cover for a terrible plan. The attack cannot be allowed to go ahead. The Israeli government’s goals for this war have always been unrealistic, and in attempting to achieve them they are committing grave crimes against the civilian population for which there can be no justification. If the U.S. fails to block the attack, it will be complicit in the massive loss of life that follows.

The situation should never have been allowed to get this bad, but this was what was bound to happen when the U.S. gave Israel a blank check, diplomatic protection, and vast quantities of weapons.