For nine months, Israeli forces have held 2.2 million Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip in a death grip, subjecting them to massive bombing and shelling. By conservative estimates,¹  at least 38,000 people have been killed, including at least 15,000 children; 85,000 are wounded; and about 10,000 are missing and presumed dead.

For nine months, despite some minor complaints and secondary criticisms, this genocidal slaughter has been backed and funded by the U.S. with Genocide Joe Biden’s “ironclad” support. Biden told the truth when he bragged to fascist Trump at their debate, “We are the biggest producer of support for Israel than anyone else in the world.” 

What exactly are Biden and the U.S. supporting? Why? And what does this tell you about what we need to be doing now?

For nine months, nearly the entire population of Gaza has been driven out of their homes by Israeli attacks and are living as refugees in tents or in ruins, forced to flee again… and again… and again, each time losing hope, strength and loved ones. 

And for nine months, Israel has completely or partially closed the entry points through which food, medical supplies and other humanitarian aid necessary for survival of the people in Gaza can come in. Only a tiny fraction of aid is getting through. At times, thousands of trucks loaded with food and other supplies have been backed up at checkpoints, food rotting as people in Gaza starve. (For an on-the-ground glimpse of what this means in the lives of Gaza’s people, see Interview with Dr. Majed Jaber in Gaza: ‘We Had a Huge Number of These Children Dying Just Because We Can’t Do Anything About It’.)

“Half a Million Gazans Face Starvation” … and Threat of Famine Looms Throughout Gaza

On June 24, an organization dedicated to making scientific assessments of food crises, Integrated Phase Food Security Classification (IPC), issued a report² saying that “almost half a million Gazans face starvation because of a catastrophic lack of food.” The IPC defines five levels of hunger crises—Level Five is the worst. They classified about one in four people in Gaza as being at Level Five, at which point IPC says people “experience an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion of coping capacities.” 

What does “exhaustion of coping capacities” mean? It refers to the fact that already people are forced to eat grass and animal feed, have to sell their clothes to buy food, have to spend hours every day trying to find a bare amount of food and clean water for their kids. They live on a diet with no meat, fruits, vegetables, and a small fraction of the calories the human body needs. They can’t sleep because of the bombs and drones and the constant fear. They drink polluted water that spreads diseases, from diarrhea to cholera.

And at a certain point, people just can’t do this anymore. They give up, they collapse, they succumb to illnesses that they would otherwise survive. They watch their children wither and starve in front of them over the course of agonizing weeks, days, hours. This is what the U.S. and Israel have done to millions of people already.

And the report projects that unless there is an end to Israel’s military operations and the opening of all border crossings, “96% of the population of Gaza—more than 2 million people—will face crisis, emergency, or catastrophic levels of food insecurity through at least the end of September.”

The report also says that “A high risk of Famine persists across the whole Gaza Strip as long as conflict continues and humanitarian aid is restricted.” (Emphasis in original.) 

Famine is a situation in which “acute malnutrition” afflicts 30 percent of the children and 20 percent of the adults in an area. It brings “starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition.”

U.S./Israel Respond to Danger of Famine—With Lies

The report warns that under the current super-stressed conditions, the population could rapidly “collapse into famine.” It emphasizes that to head this off, there needs to be an immediate ceasefire and an end to Israel’s restrictions on humanitarian aid.

Israel responded immediately—with bald-faced lies. The Israeli military claimed that “More and more aid is entering Gaza”!! Israel’s ambassador to the UN claimed that “the problem was and remains in the collection and distribution of this aid by the United Nations,” as well as alleged attacks on aid convoys by Hamas (for which there is no evidence). 

This is nonsense. First, people involved in the aid efforts—from many different countries and organizations—are unanimous that the main problem is that Israel is blocking aid from coming into Gaza. Many point out that whenever Israel loosens up the restrictions at a crossing, the most intense crisis subsides. But Israel refuses to open the main crossings in an ongoing way. 

On top of this, Israel has been targeting and attacking aid organizations, workers and convoys. Human Rights Watch (HRW) documented eight such Israeli attacks—in all cases, Israeli officials had the coordinates (the exact location) of those they targeted. As of April 30, 254 aid workers have been killed, including 188 from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which Israel has also targeted with lawsuits, and false accusations of being a front for Hamas. At one point Israel and the U.S. got most of UNRWA’s international funding cut off, virtually crippling them for a time. And now Israel has the audacity to say that the problem is with the UN!

In short: Israel, with U.S. backing, is deliberately using starvation as a weapon of war—and targeting those who are seeking to prevent this starvation!

The U.S., while claiming that it has been “urging” Israel to do better, then came out with its own version of Israel’s cover story. A spokesman for the U.S. State Department claimed that “the problem was not lack of aid, but the breakdown of law and order that made delivery difficult.” 

It is true that some of the aid trucks that make it into Gaza are looted by criminal gangs, or by starving people, before they can reach their destinations. But to the extent that this is a problem, it is a byproduct of what Israel has done. First, if you starve hundreds of thousands of people you are guaranteeing this kind of looting. Second, Israel has systematically targeted and destroyed all civic and governmental organization in Gaza, so there actually is no force of any kind that could protect the aid—other than the Israeli armed forces, which have repeatedly slaughtered people when they gather to receive aid.

The U.S./Israel Responds to Threat of Famine—With Escalating Military Attacks... and More Lies

In the face of this horrifying situation and the clear connection between Israel’s military action and mass starvation, Israel is intensifying their genocidal slaughter, including against refugee camps and so called “safe” areas. Since the IPC report was released on June 25:

• On June 28, an Israeli attack on al-Mawasi killed at least 11 Palestinians and wounded 40. Al-Mawasi was designated by Israel as the safe place to flee when Israel attacked Rafah.
• The same day, Israeli tanks drove through parts of Rafah, forcing thousands of displaced people there to leave their tent camps and head northward to nearby Khan Younis. Just a few months ago, many of these same people were forced out of Khan Younis and told to go to Rafah!
• On June 27, bombs, artillery shells and fire from drones rained down on the Shajaiye neighborhood in Gaza City in the north. At least 15 people were killed, and dozens wounded. Israel has forced 60,000 to 80,000 people to flee Shajaiye and other parts of Gaza City. Gaza City was the first city destroyed in Israel’s genocidal war. Residents fled to central Gaza, then to south Gaza. When the south too came under attack, many former Gaza City residents filtered back to their ruined homes, only to be forced to flee once again.

The U.S.’s answer to the rising death toll of Palestinians in Gaza is not to do anything to stop it, but to censor reporting of the number of people killed! The House passed an amendment last week that would prevent the State Department from citing the Gaza Health Ministry’s official numbers of people killed. This has to go before the Senate to be voted on, but if approved it would be an official form of genocide denial. The Gaza Health Ministry is the only official entity tracking the number of dead in Gaza, and they have confirmed the names of most of the people killed—even as they recognize, as stated before, that this is likely to be a serious undercount of people killed.

In spite of the steady hum in the news media about U.S. “differences” with Netanyahu’s genocidal slaughter of the Palestinian people, the reality is that in all the ways that matter, the U.S. continues to fully back Israel—diplomatically, economically, militarily. 

Why is Biden, and basically the U.S. as a whole so determined in their support of Israel? 

As the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian makes plain in his social media dispatch Revolution #7:

This is not because of “the power of the Jewish lobby”—or because of some ignorant, ridiculous and outrageous notion that “Jews are controlling everything.” It is because Israel plays a “special role” as a heavily armed bastion of support for U.S. imperialism in a strategically important part of the world (the “Middle East”). And Israel has been a key force in the commission of atrocities which have helped to maintain the oppressive rule of U.S. imperialism in many other parts of the world.

It’s the system! The system of capitalism-imperialism that Biden serves. The system he has to serve—the system that anybody and everybody has to serve if they want to hold office, and especially “high office,” like president, within this system. That is why Biden is doing what he’s doing—what all these politicians are doing—above and beyond their more narrow personal interests.

It’s the system! This system of capitalism-imperialism that embodies and enforces white supremacy, patriarchal male supremacy and other brutal oppression— this system resting on ruthless life-stealing exploitation of masses of people in this country and literally billions of people worldwide, including more than 150 million children—all enforced with massive violence and destruction, of people and the environment, posing a very real threat to the future and the existence of humanity.

This system that needs to be overthrown at the soonest possible time, through an actual revolution.