At least 93 Palestinians were killed when an Israeli attack flattened a five-storey residential building housing displaced people in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahiya, October 29, 2024. Photo: Screengrab from Al Jazeera
In his social media message @BobAvakianOfficial, REVOLUTION #99, “While denouncing ‘terrorists,’ the rulers of this country openly support terrorism,” revolutionary leader Bob Avakian (BA) posted:
Terrorism involves the deliberate killing of innocent people, which is something all decent people should strongly oppose.
Well, by this definition—by any reasonable definition—Israel is a rogue terrorist state, which claims for itself the right to defy international law, even to the point of committing genocide, as it is doing in Palestine.
And the fact is that Israel could not so easily, and repeatedly, carry out massive crimes against humanity and war crimes, if it weren’t fully backed by the U.S.…
I’ll return to what BA says about why this is so. But first, evidence.
The world is watching the situation in Gaza in horror. At the end of October, UN officials reported that the situation in north Gaza was “apocalyptic,” and that "The entire Palestinian population in North Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence." And "Humanitarian aid cannot keep up with the scale of the needs due to the access constraints. Basic, life-saving goods are not available. Humanitarians are not safe to do their work and are blocked by Israeli forces and by insecurity from reaching people in need."
That is because Israel has shut off all aid going into northern Gaza!
Yet Another Bullshit “Warning” from the U.S.
It was in this light that on October 13, the Biden-Harris administration gave Israel a 30-day “warning” that it must allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.
These “warnings” to Israel are not new. Less than a month after Israel seized on the Hamas attack of October 7 to attempt to brutally crush the Palestinian people in Gaza, Biden and Harris warned Israel of “dire consequences” for continued U.S. military aid if Israel didn’t reduce the scale of humanitarian suffering caused by systematic Israeli targeting of Palestinian refugee camps. Israel ignored that “warning.”
The genocide escalated. The flow of U.S. weapons did too.
In April 2024, Biden declared he would stop “weapons that have been used historically” by Israel if Israel all-out invaded Rafah. After Israel did all-out invade Rafah, on September 11, 2024, Israel used U.S.-supplied 2,000-pound bombs on desperate refugees in tents in Al-Mawasi. And Harris has been literally in the middle of all this.
Oh… but this time, the Biden-Harris administration supposedly ramped up the “warning.” U.S. Secretary of State Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin sent a letter (widely reported in mainstream news and leaked on social media) to Israel’s Defense Minister that included what might be the closest thing yet to specifically threatening to cut off weapons.
The letter invoked a U.S. law that bans arms transfers to countries that interfere with the distribution of U.S. aid.1 And it specifically warned Israel not to interfere with the work of UNRWA, the UN agency that distributes almost all aid that gets into Gaza. The letter explicitly linked not interfering with UNRWA’s work2 to the status of U.S. weapons transfers. And it gave Israel 30 days to comply.
So, how did Israel respond to this “warning”? By passing a law making UNRWA illegal!
You can’t do much more than that to blatantly interfere with UNRWA’s work, and to impede humanitarian aid to Gaza!
But have U.S. arms transfers to Israel been stopped? Not at all! While Israel is openly defying this “threat,” U.S. bombs, intel, and funding are enabling escalating genocide, particularly now in northern Gaza.
Israel Puts a Target on Humanitarian Aid in Gaza
Palestinians receive bags of flour distributed by UNRWA, the U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees, in Deir al Balah, central Gaza Strip, November 2, 2024. Photo: AP
The UN relief agency UNRWA handles almost all distribution of aid in Gaza. In areas where Israel has prevented UNRWA from operating, starvation is rampant. What little food and other basic necessities are available on the open market costs more than almost anybody in Gaza can afford ($180 for two pounds of tomatoes, $60 for two pounds of sugar, hundreds of dollars to buy winter clothes for a family sleeping in unheated tents in the coming Gaza winter).
Israel’s law, passed on October 28, makes UNRWA illegal in Israel, not in Gaza (which is Palestinian territory seized in war and illegally occupied by Israel). But it makes it virtually impossible for UNRWA to operate in Gaza. The only transit points into Gaza are through Israel; if UNRWA is banned in Israel, it will be impossible to organize shipments of aid.
And Israel already has a record of attacking aid distribution and killing aid workers in Gaza. UNRWA’s director warned that the new Israeli law will make it impossible to operate in Gaza “without being subject to possible attack.”
Every major player in the Israeli government signed on to Israel's law to ban UNRWA.
Oh… and on October 28, the U.S. State Department issued yet another “warning” that Israel must do "much more" to allow international aid to enter Gaza.
Israel Murders Dozens in Terrorist Bombing in Beit Lahia
Not only has Israel blatantly violated the supposed conditions for getting U.S. arms by outlawing the aid agency that distributes aid in Gaza, it has also intensified bombing. The Israelis are terrorizing northern Gaza, making it literally unlivable.
As part of a weeklong reign of terror in Beit Lahia in north Gaza, on October 29, Israel bombed a five-story apartment complex at 4:30 am. This terrorist attack was timed to kill as many innocent civilians as possible, as they slept. It was carried out without any pretense that it was aimed at active Hamas combatants. At least 93 people were killed or wounded including 25 children.
After reporting all these facts, the liberal ruling class newspaper the Washington Post slavishly twisted reality to claim the target of this massacre was “Hamas militants.” And in doing so, the Washington Post provided more evidence of what revolutionary leader and author of the new communism Bob Avakian recently posted in his social media messaging:
Unlike the fascists, for “mainstream” ruling class representatives (like the politicians of the Democratic Party and those who run major media like CNN and the New York Times) reality does matter—BUT when reality gets in the way of the interests of this system of capitalism-imperialism, they will distort reality and lie as grossly as the fascists. (See REVOLUTION #98, What is the difference between fascist ruling class liars and “mainstream” ruling class liars?, @BobAvakianOfficial).
Israel Destroys the Only Hospital in Northern Gaza
On October 28, Israeli forces ended their deadly siege of Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of northern Gaza’s last functioning medical facilities. The Israelis had been carrying out air strikes and rampaging through the hospital for a week. Hundreds of patients, medical staff and displaced Palestinians who had sought shelter at Kamal Adwan Hospital were detained by Israeli forces. Israel systematically sends Palestinians seized at random into its vast network of torture camps. Among the disappeared was the orthopedic surgeon Dr. Mohammed Obeid, who was sheltering and working in Kamal Adwan. Obeid is a member of Doctors Without Borders, a well-respected international medical aid group that sends medical personnel into dangerous war zones as neutral parties.
Footage filmed inside Kamal Adwan Hospital by an NBC News crew in Gaza showed no evidence of the supposed terrorist weapons, but “equipment, blankets, medical supplies and ceiling panels scattered across the floor, and fallen furniture blocking doors and walkways.”
After the siege, Dr. Hossam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician who had tended to hundreds as the hospital’s director, mourned the death of his young son, Ibrahim, who was killed by the Israeli strikes. Near the hospital, Israeli strikes killed at least 30 people and demolished several houses including in Beit Lahia’s Al-Khazan neighborhood. And Israeli forces fired on rescue crews.
When asked what steps the U.S. is taking in response to the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller recited the U.S. template of genocide-enabling bullshit: “I’ll say that we have raised this issue with the Government of Israel… we continue to make clear that food, water, and medicine need to make it into all areas of northern Gaza.”
…And yet again, the U.S. continues to arm, fund, enable, and defend Israel’s crimes against humanity.
WHY Does the U.S. Enable Israel’s Terrorism Over and Over and Over?
Let’s return to BA’s social media message @BobAvakianOfficial, REVOLUTION #99, “While denouncing ‘terrorists,’ the rulers of this country openly support terrorism.” BA posted:
Terrorism involves the deliberate killing of innocent people, which is something all decent people should strongly oppose.
Well, by this definition—by any reasonable definition—Israel is a rogue terrorist state, which claims for itself the right to defy international law, even to the point of committing genocide, as it is doing in Palestine.
And the fact is that Israel could not so easily, and repeatedly, carry out massive crimes against humanity and war crimes, if it weren’t fully backed by the US. As I put it plainly in message number 7:
Here is the entire ruling class of the U.S., and all its major politicians, both Democrat and Republican, fully supporting an apartheid state, Israel, carrying out the genocidal slaughter of Palestinians in front of the whole world.
Why? BA cuts to the heart of that:
... Biden—and basically the entire government and ruling class of the U.S., definitely including Kamala Harris—is supporting Israel in carrying out genocide against the Palestinian people, before the whole world, 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.
Even under 15 years of siege that prevented most imported food and farming materials, Gaza farmers and fishermen helped supply the minimal diets on which Palestinian people in Gaza survive. With Israel’s fast-track, escalated genocidal response to Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, farming and fishing in Gaza have been systematically destroyed.
Israel has murdered 120 fishermen off the coast of Gaza in the Mediterranean Sea so far this year. Yet people still risk their lives to feed themselves and others. Israel does not claim Hamas operates out of small fishing boats near the Gaza shoreline, it only declares that the coastline is a combat area.
The New York Times interviewed Yousef Saqer, a 24-year-old farmer whose land, tractors, solar panels (for greenhouses), irrigation ditches and other farm equipment were destroyed by Israel. He describes farming under the constant threat of Israeli tanks.
Yousef Saqer and his family continued to farm, planting vegetables using hoes, pitchforks, and shovel until he was murdered by an Israeli airstrike on October 21.
The bombs that killed Yousef Saqer and over one thousand others in northern Gaza were made in the USA. The intelligence that guided that war crime was delivered to Israel by the USA (and its closest allies). And the genocidal-enabling bullshit that covers Israel’s crimes over and over, and now northern Gaza: straight out of the Biden-Harris State Department (see War Crimes Enabled and Whited Out by USA State Department).
