On Sunday, June 16, the Israeli military announced that it had implemented a “tactical pause” in attacks along a 7.5-mile route (Salah al-Din Road from the Karem Shalom border crossing with Israel, north to the European Hospital in Khan Younis), starting on June 15 and continuing indefinitely. 

This was treated seriously in the U.S. media as a “humanitarian” move by Israel. NPR reported that the Israeli military aimed to “increase the flow of aid to other parts of Gaza, including Khan Younis, Muwasi and central Gaza.” The Associated Press wrote that the pause “could help address the overwhelming needs of Palestinians that have surged in recent weeks with Israel’s incursion into Rafah.” 

This was and is bullshit—the so-called “pause” is nothing but a paper-thin attempt to cover up what Israel is actually doing, which is systematically starving the Palestinian people, destroying vital civilian infrastructure, and trying to eliminate Palestinians in Gaza as a people—i.e., genocide. It is hardly a coincidence that this fake maneuver was announced three days after a major UN report condemned Israel for “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity,” including using starvation as a weapon of war.

Here's a sample of what Israeli “humanitarianism” is like on the ground since the June 15 “pause” began:

• One or two days later, Israel destroyed what had been the most important entry point for humanitarian aid, the Rafah crossing on the Egypt/Gaza border. Israel seized the Rafah crossing on May 7 and it has been closed ever since. Now, not only is there zero aid coming through there, but even the possibility of reopening it is more remote. 
• On June 17, at least nine Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces while waiting for aid trucks on the Salah al-Din Road—the very road Israel named in the “pause”!
• On June 21, Israeli tanks and artillery attacked refugee tents in al-Mawasi (sometimes spelled “Muwasi”) killing 25 and wounding at least 50. Al-Mawasi is a desolate beach area that Israel had designated as a “humanitarian zone” for the one million people in the city of Rafah when the attack on Rafah began on May 6. [I]t is now “home” to close to one hundred thousand refugees. Al-Mawasi was also supposed to be one of the areas that would “benefit” from the pause.
• Also on June 21, just south of al-Mawasi, Israeli airstrikes hit near an International Red Cross compound, killing at least 22 refugees who were camped there for safety. Senior Red Cross official William Schomburg described three explosions rocking the compound, and then a “flood of wounded people” came in seeking help. “There were piles of dead bodies, blood everywhere.” Schomburg pointed out that “Our office here in Rafah, like all of our buildings and facilities, are all marked with the Red Cross emblem and are known by all parties.”

Humanitarian organizations say that the “pause” has brought little to no expansion in urgently needed aid deliveries. On June 21, Richard Peeperkorn, the representative for the World Health Organization (WHO) in Palestine said that “we did not see an impact on the humanitarian supplies coming in since that... unilateral announcement of this technical pause.” And a UN representative said that “This has yet to translate into more aid reaching people in need.”

The same day, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said it had been unable to bring any medical supplies into Gaza since April, due to the “closure of the Rafah border crossing, following Israel’s offensive in the south of Gaza in early May, coupled with the endless red tape imposed by Israeli authorities, [that] have dramatically congested the flow of humanitarian aid.” As a result, it may have to “stop or drastically reduce” its medical aid operations in Gaza.

Genocide: Ongoing and Escalating

It’s not just that Israel is blocking aid rather than making it easier to come in. Israel is also continuing its campaign to fundamentally break and destroy the Palestinian population of Gaza, including by destroying civilian infrastructure on a truly massive scale.

Here are some things that have come to light or become more sharply clear in just the past week:

Israel is destroying agriculture in Gaza. Though Gaza has always depended on food imports, Gazan agriculture produced a significant amount of the food supply. On June 19, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that Israeli attacks and other military activity had damaged 57 percent of the farmland in Gaza, as well as one third of the greenhouses, 537 barns and 256 agricultural warehouses, “severely disrupting” Gaza’s food supply chain. Israel has also targeted bakeries and other food processing and production facilities. 

Israel is destroying Gaza’s sanitation system: On June 19, the UN Environment Programme reported that “Gaza’s five wastewater treatment plants have shut down, with sewage contaminating beaches, coastal waters, soil, and freshwater,” and “Five out of six solid waste management facilities in Gaza are damaged.” The Deputy Executive Director of the World Food Programme described “driving through rivers of raw sewage” in his tour of Gaza. Amnesty International reports that “some 90-95 per cent of the water supply is contaminated and unfit for human consumption. Israel does not allow water to be transferred from the West Bank to Gaza, and Gaza’s only fresh water resource, the Coastal Aquifer, is insufficient for the needs of the population and is being increasingly depleted by over-extraction and contaminated by sewage and seawater infiltration.”

Israel is destroying Gaza’s cities: In the opening months of the war, Israeli bombs, tanks and artillery virtually leveled two major cities—Gaza City and Khan Younis. Over a million people fleeing this carnage were funneled by Israel into Rafah. On May 6, Israel launched the invasion of Rafah. As part of the U.S. unyielding support for the mass slaughter, the Biden administration has claimed that this was not “a major ground operation” and that instead it was “more targeted and limited.” 

These are just more lies to cover over the genocide. 

On June 21, the New York Times reported on the “six-week battle that has left a critical border crossing in ruins and wide stretches of the city severely damaged.… Images of the destruction throughout Rafah are reminiscent of scenes in Gaza City and Khan Younis, where Israel’s bombardment, and street battles between Israeli forces and Hamas militants embedded in civilian areas, have left behind islands of rubble and craters where there had been buildings and roads. ‘We’re worried that the city will be rendered unlivable,’ said Ahmed al-Soufi, the mayor of Rafah.”

Eoghan Darbyshire, a senior researcher at the UK-based Conflict and Environment Observatory, said "[I]t is my opinion that large areas of Gaza will not be recovered to a safe state within a generation, even with limitless finance and will." [Emphasis added]

“Targeted and strategic”? Before the invasion, Rafah’s population (mainly refugees) was well over a million people. OCHA reports that as of May 17, 750 people remained in Rafah City, the rest having been driven out by the Israeli invasion, fleeing to live in rubble and ruins with no water system or steady food supply. 

Israel is destroying Gaza’s children: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) reported on June 15 that over 50,000 children now require immediate medical treatment for malnutrition. OCHA also reported “visible wasting among children” (“wasting” is acute malnutrition) as well as “a critical lack of milk and formula for babies.”

On June 20 a child psychologist reported a pervasive sense of terror among children, and says that when he held sessions with kids to help them deal with the trauma, sometimes they “had to shout to be heard, to overcome the sound of drones and bombs.” A mother spoke of her yearning for the war to end so that “I will be able to go to bed at night with my child and promise her she can wake up.”

On June 21, OCHA (citing the Gazan Ministry of Education) reported that “some 625,000 students have been out of school in Gaza since October 2023 due to the escalation of hostilities and, as of 11 June, more than 7,000 students and 378 educational staff have been killed in Gaza.”

United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) spokesman James Elder, who is now in Gaza, spoke to this:

So, there is such a constant war of words here. But we just need to look at evidence.… we have for many months called this a war on children. And like everything here, we do that based on evidence. We don’t do that seeking a headline. We do that because of all the conflicts where UNICEF operates, or all the frontlines, from Afghanistan to Yemen to Ukraine to Syria, we have not seen the percentage of civilians injured, maimed, killed as high on children as here. That’s why. The evidence speaks to this being a war on children.” [Emphasis added.]

Among many powerful examples, Elder reports:

UNICEF was treating 3,000 children with the most dangerous form of malnutrition here in Rafah, and then we had the military offensive in Rafah, that we all begged not to happen but somehow feared would. That, quote-unquote, “limited military offensive,” limited offensive that led to a million people being displaced, it also meant that our stabilization center there, treating 3,000 children, was inoperable in a minute. Children getting treatment are suddenly—and they’re gone. Now we have to try and go back into those communities, back into these tented hellholes, to find these children, to find those families, because without that treatment, they will die.

Elder brings out that when there is large scale malnutrition among children it permanently impacts them, damaging their overall physical and mental health in multiple ways, and limiting their future productivity. So besides the immediate horror, damaging a whole generation of children profoundly weakens a people as a whole—for example, the ability of younger people to care for their elders as they age.

This is truly “one of the most barbaric moments in human history.”¹  Everything Israel has done it has done with the full backing (including massive military aid) and fundamentally at the service of the system of U.S. capitalism-imperialism, which relies on Israel as its attack dog in the strategic Middle East, making it an indispensable pillar of U.S. wealth and power.