The U.S. Enables Israel's Man-Made Famine in Gaza

The latest victim of the man-made famine in Gaza was a seven-month old child, Fayez Abu Ataya.

A veteran State Department official, Stacy Gilbert, resigned from the department this month to protest the administration’s policy and the department’s false claims that Israel isn’t blocking aid. She spoke to Akbar Shahid Ahmed about her resignation:

“It drives me crazy when people say, ‘You’re so principled for resigning,’” Gilbert said. “You can’t work in the government that long and be completely principled but I’m practical. I understand compromises and that there are trade-offs. But in the end, I know the difference between right and wrong. What happened in this report is wrong, and this report is being used to justify continuing to do what we’ve been doing.”

It was obvious that the department’s conclusions in the report were wrong. No one could look at the Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza for months and then honestly say that it has not been blocking the delivery of aid. If the department had followed the evidence and the recommendations of its own experts, it would have had to admit that Israel was violating international law and it would have had to conclude that U.S. arms transfers could not continue. As Gilbert says, the department leadership chose to twist the facts and make a “patently, demonstrably, quantifiably false” claim that Israel isn’t blocking aid when everyone could see that they are.

The National Security Memorandum 20 (NSM-20) report was the result of a process that the White House created as a sop to Democratic critics in Congress. Like Biden’s so-called red line, it was set up to create the false impression that there was some limit to what the administration would tolerate from the Israeli government. In both cases, the president had no intention of imposing any penalties, and the administration has done whatever it could to avoid reaching conclusions that might lead to penalties. As Sarah Harrison correctly pointed out when the process started, “it isn’t obvious how, in the context of Israel, this policy avoids being another performative measure, creating additional processes that keep policymakers and lawyers in the bureaucracy busy while maintaining the status quo with respect to arms transfers.”

The final report confirmed that the entire exercise was a farce. The administration asked the Israeli government for assurances that they weren’t violating international law, the Israeli government duly gave its non-credible, unreliable assurances, and the administration accepted them at face value. Faced with a mountain of evidence that Israel’s assurances were meaningless, the administration simply ignored it. No wonder more people are resigning in protest. What is the point of putting in the work of documenting violations when the leadership is going to give Netanyahu a pass anyway? Gilbert commented on the department’s whitewash, “It just doesn’t matter. … We could have AI write the report because it is not informed by reality or context or the informed opinions of subject matter experts.”

Letting Israel off the hook for its war crimes has deadly consequences for the people in Gaza. The Israeli government has been deliberately starving the population of Gaza for almost eight months. These starvation crimes have been well-documented throughout the war. Human Rights Watch raised the alarm late last year. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem reported on them last month:

The severe hunger that has developed over recent months in the Gaza Strip is not a result of fate, but the product of a deliberate and conscious Israeli policy. It has been openly declared by decision makers, including a member of the Israeli war cabinet, from the very beginning of the war.

Many children have been dying of starvation as a result of this policy. The latest victim of the man-made famine in Gaza was a seven-month old child, Fayez Abu Ataya, who succumbed this week. As his father said, “He became a skeleton because of the siege.” He lived his entire short life under the blockade that killed him. Fayez died because of a deliberate policy of depriving the population of basic necessities. He was just one of the many victims of the starvation crimes that the administration is enabling.

Unless there is an immediate and lasting ceasefire and a massive relief effort, many more innocent people will die in the famine that the Israeli government has created.