The Worsening Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza

The World Food Program said earlier this month that one million people are at risk of starvation.

The Israeli government’s intensifying siege of north Gaza continues, and conditions there have deteriorated even further. The leaked letter from the Biden administration from earlier this month had no effect:

“The situation in northern Gaza is worse today than it was when the letter was written,” said Scott Paul, Oxfam America’s director for peace and security. “The areas that are being depopulated right now have received nothing.”

Almost 800,000 people in Gaza are enduring “emergency” or “catastrophe” levels of food scarcity, according to the IPC, a multi-agency initiative for measuring food security.

The Israeli government has been blocking aid for the last year, and over the last four weeks they have reduced aid delivery in north Gaza to nothing. Netanyahu evidently brushed off the Biden administration’s empty warning from two weeks ago, and we already know that the U.S. isn’t going to do anything about it. This is a deliberate policy of starvation being carried out in full view of the world, and the U.S. has acted as an accomplice to the government responsible for causing a man-made famine.

As if this weren’t already bad enough, the Knesset passed a new bill this week outlawing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The agency is critical to supporting the civilian population in Gaza, and there is no way for any other organization to fill the gap that will be left behind. Conditions will become even more dire if the agency is not permitted to operate. Banning UNRWA’s activities in the occupied territories will cause even greater loss of life from starvation and disease. It is an act of severe collective punishment against the people of Gaza.

Human Rights Watch warned this week, Israel’s operation in north Gaza is endangering hundreds of thousands of civilians. According to the UN, the situation in north Gaza is catastrophic:

“The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying,” acting UN relief chief Joyce Msuya said this week.

The World Food Program said earlier this month that one million people are at risk of starvation. The scale of this man-made humanitarian disaster is staggering and it requires an urgent international relief effort to prevent more senseless loss of life. Humanitarian aid organizations have been pleading for a ceasefire and more help for more than a year, but to date the response from the rest of the world has been negligible.

U.S. support for the war in Gaza has led to these horrors. Every step of the way, the administration could see what it was enabling and chose to continue arming a government that has been starving millions of people to death. Even now, the administration still refuses to change its policy or to impose any consequences on Israel for what it is doing. Instead Biden rushes troops and equipment to defend the perpetrators of these crimes.

The U.S. has caused a lot of death and destruction in the Middle East over just the last thirty years, but current U.S. policy in Gaza and Lebanon stands out as being remarkably cruel and malevolent even by those standards. The U.S. and the region will be paying the price for Biden’s disastrous choices over the last year for a long time to come. The people of Gaza and Lebanon will be the ones that are made to pay most dearly for our government’s terrible policies.