According to Al Jazeera, the U.S. and Great Britain have sent over 6,000 military flights of cargo planes to Israel in the last year, and over 1,200 of them carried weapons, in a pipeline of genocide.

The October 24, 2024 Al Jazeera exposé is based on open source flight data. It paints a picture of the enormity of the “air bridge” the U.S. and Great Britain have operated to pump weapons of mass destruction, death, and terror into Israel to use against the people in Gaza. 

The Al Jazeera investigation also revealed how deeply embedded the U.S. and Great Britain are in directly facilitating Israel’s genocidal massacre through carrying out reconnaissance missions in the skies over Gaza. These missions produce data to reveal and target Palestinian civilians, essential infrastructure, aid deliveries, attacks on hospitals and more. Only 20 percent of all of Israel’s reconnaissance missions were carried out by the Israeli military while 80 percent of them were carried out by the U.S. and its partner-in-war-crimes, Britain. (The U.S. relies on Great Britain for many of these flights from its base in Cyprus.)

For several months, the British organization Declassified UK (UK stands for the United Kingdom, another name for Great Britain) has been exposing the role of the British base in Cyprus, and flights from there to Israel and over Gaza. On October 10, the organization reported that the UK has allowed a “surge” in U.S. military flights to Israel from Cyprus since July. And Declassified UK has been working to piece together a picture of the relationship between these flights and U.S. commandos whose presence has been reported (in very buried articles in U.S. mainstream media) on the ground in Israel. 

“Official explanations” from the U.S. and UK governments are that the reconnaissance flights and on-the-ground operations in Israel are purely intended to “support hostage rescue.” Seriously!? A letter from 99 medical professionals who have been to Gaza over the past year documents that “it is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.” And that “It is impossible that [documented] widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities....” In the midst of massive Israeli bombing, on October 22, 2024, the head of the main UN aid agency for Gaza declared “The smell of death is everywhere” in northern Gaza. Every attempt to come to a ceasefire agreement to actually free those hostages has been torpedoed by Israel. And yet, the U.S. and Britain claim all the bombs they are sending to Israel, all the intel they are providing to guide those bombs, is about freeing hostages! 

There is much more that needs to be dug into in terms of direct in-the-air and on-the-ground involvement of the U.S. and British air forces and ground operations in Israel’s genocide. But this much is emerging from what is known: 

Not only is the U.S. supplying Israel—up to the present time—with 2,000-pound bombs (which on September 11 Israel most recently dropped on refugees in tents in al-Mawasi).

Not only is the U.S. sending billions of dollars of every other kind of death machinery to slaughter people on the ground in Gaza. 

Not only have the U.S. and its partner in war crimes, Britain, turned the route from the west into Israel into a massive pipeline in the sky to carry out genocide…. 

The U.S. and the UK themselves operate the overwhelming majority of flights over Gaza, generating the data that directs those U.S.-supplied bombs, missiles, tanks, and snipers to kill civilians and destroy hospitals, water, sewage and electrical infrastructure, and create a generalized state of terror.

And here is the result of that pipeline of death and the specific intelligence the U.S. and Great Britain are providing to Israel, just this week…

October 26: “Entire population of north Gaza at risk of dying.” 

Israel’s ferocious new waves of what a UN spokesman described as “non-stop” bombing have turned northern Gaza into a death camp. Hundreds of thousands of people there are trapped, unable to leave. There has been no meaningful food aid delivered for three weeks. Israel is bombing everything including refugee tent encampments, homes, and hospitals. On October 26, UN Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Joyce Msuya posted this on X:

Hospitals have been hit, health workers detained and first responders prevented from rescuing people trapped under the rubble. Shelters have been emptied and burned down…. Families have been separated, and men and boys taken away by the truckload.

Hundreds of Palestinians have reportedly been killed [since the Israeli military launched new, massive attacks on northern Gaza in early October, 2024]. Tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee again. 

The entire population of north Gaza is at risk of dying. Such blatant disregard for basic humanity and for the laws of war must stop.

“The whole health system in Gaza has been under attack for over a year”

On October 26, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), posted:

The situation in northern #Gaza is catastrophic. Intensive military operations unfolding around and within healthcare facilities and a critical shortage of medical supplies, compounded by severely limited access, are depriving people of life saving care…. 

@WHO cannot stress loudly enough that hospitals must be shielded from conflict at all times. Any attack of healthcare facilities is a violation of international humanitarian law. The only path to safeguarding what remains of Gaza's collapsing health care system is an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. Lives depend on it!

Friday, October 25, 2 am Gaza time, a massive Israeli assault and massacre killed at least 87 Palestinians in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya

On October 25, Israel bombed, besieged, attacked, invaded, kidnapped medical staff, and killed patients at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia in a reign of terror that lasted at least two days. Israeli troops attacked the hospital, after Israeli jets dropped U.S.-supplied bombs on residential buildings in the nearby Jabalia Refugee Camp.

The assault on the hospital began with air strikes that hit the hospital and its courtyards, including the medical oxygen generator, which led to the death of children in the hospital and wounded medical staff. A few hours after the air strikes, Israeli troops raided the hospital. Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, the hospital director, told CNN that Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered the hospital compound late Thursday and began firing at parts of the complex, adding that “all departments of the hospital are under direct shelling.” At least 45 men working at the hospital were seized by Israel, most of them remain unaccounted for, and Israel has systematically filled its torture chamber prisons with Palestinians seized at random.

What is it like to be driven to flee for your life five times in a year? 

Writing in Al Jazeera on October 24, Musabah F M Almadhoun asks: Can you imagine what it feels like to be told that you and your family may be killed if you do not leave your home? It happened to him. He describes what that is like:

Five times now, my family has been forced from safety. Sometimes we are “warned”. Orders are handed down by the Israeli military demanding that we must move on within hours. Other times, we only know to leave when the bullets crack against the walls of our shelter. In these cases, we have to run with nothing but the clothes on our backs and what little we can hold in our hands.

Each displacement comes with the fear that our homes will either be destroyed or looted while we are gone. Right now, I’m sheltering in a home belonging to a friend who fled south. More than four families are sharing this space. The buildings across from us have been flattened. Turned to rubble. Every night I worry that we’re next.

Entire streets, neighbourhoods and communities have been wiped from the map. The place I grew up in is unrecognisable, it is just rubble – everything has been and is being taken from us. The constant bombardment creates an atmosphere of fear, and it feels like nowhere is safe. I’ve lost my uncle, some of my family members, colleagues, and friends. It’s devastating. There is no home here that hasn’t lost someone – it’s a shared tragedy across our community.

What Will You Do?

It has been no secret that the U.S. and its allies are arming, funding, and providing diplomatic cover to enable Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza. And it should be clear by now, with Hamas’s leadership decimated and Gaza bombed to rubble, that claims that the mass murder of civilians is “carefully targeted attacks on Hamas operatives” are a pretext. The target is the Palestinian people. 

The new revelations from Al Jazeera on the scale of the U.S./British pipeline of weapons and the vast amount of surveillance data they are turning over to Israel pose, once again, a serious and urgent question to people in this country:

YOUR government is enabling Genocide in Gaza. WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?