The Ongoing Horrors in Gaza

Each week brings fresh stories of more atrocities that our government enables and supports.

Another State Department official quit in frustration over the Biden administration’s Gaza policy:

Casey resigned from the state department in July after four years at the job, discreetly leaving the post unlike other recent high-profile government departures. Now seated at his kitchen table in the quiet suburbs of northern Michigan, Casey reflected on how, as one of only two people in the entire US government explicitly focused on Gaza, he became an unwilling chronicler of a humanitarian catastrophe.

“I got so tired of writing about dead kids,” he said. “Just constantly having to prove to Washington that these children actually died and then watching nothing happen.”

The Biden administration’s policy in Gaza has been a cautionary tale of what not to do in response to a conflict. Biden threw his full support behind a military campaign that was sure to be brutal and atrocious, he refused to use U.S. influence to bring it to an end, he rushed to shield the perpetrators from the consequences of their aggressive actions, and he ignored the laws that required him to cut off arms transfers. In the process, he put U.S. forces in harm’s way and even launched an illegal bombing campaign in Yemen rather than apply any pressure on Netanyahu. Throughout all of it, the Biden administration has shown a ghoulish contempt for Palestinian lives.

The Israeli government’s slaughter and starvation in Gaza have been going for more than fourteen months. Each week brings fresh stories of more atrocities that our government enables and supports. Every day that passes without a permanent ceasefire and an end to the siege is another day that more innocent people are being blown up, shot, and starved to death.

The war in Gaza is a genocidal campaign. That is what Amnesty International concluded in their extensive report. This week Human Rights Watch said that the Israeli government is committing acts of genocide by deliberately depriving Palestinian civilians of adequate access to water. The U.S. has been unconditionally backing a profoundly destructive and evil war for more than a year, and we must not look away from the horrors that our government abets. Here is a brief review of some of the latest reporting and analysis of what the Israeli government has done to the people of Gaza with U.S. help.

Last month, a retired surgeon spoke before a parliamentary committee in the UK and testified about how Israeli forces would use drones to attack surviving civilians in the wake of bombings. The surgeon, Prof. Nizam Mamode, said:

The drones would come down and pick off civilians - children.

We [were] operating on children who would say: 'I was lying on the ground after a bomb had dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.'

That's clearly a deliberate act and it was a persistent act - persistent targeting of civilians day after day.

Mamode’s testimony is consistent with the accounts of many American medical workers that served in Gaza. They have also reported numerous instances of treating young children with gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

Haaretz published an extensive report on how the IDF has created arbitrary killing zones and counts the civilians they kill as terrorists:

A recently discharged Division 252 officer describes the arbitrary nature of this boundary: "For the division, the kill zone extends as far as a sniper can see." But the issue goes beyond geography. "We're killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists," he says. "The IDF spokesperson's announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200 [bold mine-DL]."

These accounts of indiscriminate killing and the routine classification of civilian casualties as terrorists emerged repeatedly in Haaretz's conversations with recent Gaza veterans.

Airwars released a study of the beginning of the Israeli bombing campaign in 2023. They found that “the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”

The intense violence and destruction have caused deep psychological harm to the survivors, especially among the children. According a new assessment from a Gaza-based NGO, the surviving children of Gaza have been so extremely traumatized that nearly half of them want to die:

A new study of children living through the war in Gaza has found that 96% of them feel that their death is imminent and almost half want to die as a result of the trauma they have been through.

Israel’s policy of deliberate starvation has also been on display for all to see for more than a year. They have been using starvation as a weapon from the start. Israel continues to block the delivery of aid into Gaza, and aid is near all-time lows. The effects of the policy have been terrible. As Alex de Waal explained in a Boston Review essay, “If the IPC [Integrated Food Security Phase Classification] data for Sudan points to the largest famine by magnitude in forty years, the data for Gaza reveals the most severe humanitarian catastrophe since the IPC began.” There is a man-made famine in Gaza, one of the worst in modern times, and our government supported and defended the state that created it. Looking at the situation in Gaza, de Waal concluded, “In my book, it’s mass starvation, it’s a famine that kills, and it’s a famine crime.”

The Biden administration could have put an end to this long ago, but it won’t. If U.S. policy is going to change, the American people will have to insist that it does.