Six months into Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza, as of April 12, Israel has killed 33,634 people, with uncounted more buried in rubble from U.S.-supplied bombs and missiles. More than 500 people, overwhelmingly civilians, were murdered last week alone.
Six Months into Israel’s Assault, Genocidal Starvation Stalks Gaza
Famine stalks the entire Gaza Strip. Over the past week, Israel, and the Biden administration claimed Israel was “surging” food aid into Gaza. In reality, the U.S. and Israel were “surging” lies about getting food in, while maintaining a blockade on food into Gaza. And nearly half the population of Gaza, driven into desperate conditions in the southern-most city of Rafah on the Egyptian border, live with the danger of a massive Israeli invasion hanging over their lives.
All of which urgently cries out for a revolution that brings forward a whole other way in the world, REVOLUTION aimed at getting to a world without exploitation or oppression of any kind.
You will find this, from Bob Avakian, revolutionary leader, and author of the new communism, posted at revcom.us frequently, and it grows in import every day:
We, the people of the world, can no longer afford to allow these imperialists to continue to dominate the world and determine the destiny of humanity. They need to be overthrown as quickly as possible. And it is a scientific fact that we do not have to live this way.
Famine Created and Enforced by Israel, Backed by the U.S.
Israel is carrying out a genocide of the Palestinian people. One key weapon in this is systematically starving the people of Gaza. After October 7, Israel:
- Imposed an almost total siege prohibiting food from getting into Gaza.
- Bombed Gaza’s port, restricted fishing and bombed many of the territory’s farms.
- Systematically destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure and forced almost all of its population to flee their homes and cut off access to food.
- Systematically destroyed bakeries and other businesses that produced food.
- Israel targeted bombs and blockades to destroy sources of drinkable water, and prevent drinkable water from entering Gaza.
An April 11 article in the New York Times paints a partial picture of this. It quotes a UN official saying, “The food production system has been completely obliterated, and the lack of entry of emergency aid within a short time has created a free fall....”
Famine, as defined by international aid agencies, is when at least 20 percent of households are facing an extreme lack of food, at least 30 percent of children are suffering from acute malnutrition, and at least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people are dying each day from starvation or disease linked to malnutrition.
A “Surge” of Lies While Palestinians in Gaza Die
Even with all the destruction imposed by Israel’s U.S.-supplied bombs, missiles, tanks and guns, it would be possible to feed everyone in Gaza in the next few days. This would require allowing aid that is in place and ready to go into Gaza, into Gaza. And to respect and protect the aid workers who distribute it and the people who need it. But the U.S. and Israel are preventing that, even as Biden claims to be pressuring Israel to let food in.
After Israel coldly and systematically assassinated seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen who were facilitating aid distribution in Gaza, Genocide Joe Biden had what was reported to be an angry phone call with Prime Minister Netan-NAZI (aka Benjamin Netanyahu). And it was reported that Netan-NAZI made promises to allow more aid to reach Gaza. But Biden made no meaningful threats to punish Israel if these changes didn’t happen.
Netan-NAZI’s promises to Biden have either been simply ignored by Israel, or Israel has lied about keeping them.
Israel says it has nearly doubled the number of aid trucks entering Gaza since that phone call and opened a crossing point from Israel into northern Gaza to aid convoys. The “doubling” the number of trucks, according to Israel, increased the number of aid trucks to a little over 400 on one day, April 8 (the Monday after the Biden phone call). This compares to the 500 trucks of aid a day that entered Gaza before October 7. But the urgent need for food now is many, many times more massive than it was then.
The UN agency that distributes food in Gaza disputed Israel’s claim, saying only 246 trucks entered Gaza on April 8. And then by Wednesday, the number of trucks was down to 141, far, far below the number needed to have any impact on the spreading famine.
And there were more lies. Israel never opened an existing border crossing from Erez in Israel into northern Gaza, as promised. Israel claims it built a new crossing into northern Gaza but CNN reported that Israel “declined to specify the location of the crossing or the number of aid trucks” supposedly using it.
Aid trucks bound for Gaza face huge delay for entry. Video: The Online Citizen
On top of all this, since October 7, Israel insists that trucks entering Gaza be only half full to supposedly make it easier to inspect them.
On Tuesday, April 9, UN agencies reported, “There has been no significant change in the volume of humanitarian supplies entering Gaza or improved access to the north.”
When aid does enter Gaza, Israel, and the U.S., have made it much more difficult for this aid to be distributed by cutting off funding to UNRWA. This is the UN operation with the capacity to distribute food at a meaningful scale throughout Gaza. Based on unsubstantiated accusations that a handful of the thousands of UN-affiliated aid workers were part of Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel, the U.S. defunded the UN agency.
In addition to all these lies, on April 12, The Guardian newspaper reported that:
- Biden claimed that Netanyahu promised to open the Ashdod seaport north of Gaza for humanitarian aid. That has not happened.
- Israel promised Biden that it would set up protocols to prevent the massacre of aid workers like the World Central Kitchen 7, and 200 other aid workers. No steps have been taken to set up that protocol and on April 9, Israel attacked a UN food convoy, although in this case there were no reported injuries. The Israeli military in Gaza has repeatedly targeted UN aid workers. On April 9, the UK-based charity Islamic Relief issued a statement that “Six months of Israeli bombing has turned Gaza into the world’s most dangerous place to deliver aid.”
After all Biden’s demands that Israel let food into Gaza, Jeremy Konyndyk, a former senior official in the Obama and Biden administrations who is now president of the Refugees International, reported, “Very little has actually changed.”
Biden has real problems with how Israel has been carrying out its all-out war on Gaza. Even as he fundamentally “stands by Israel” in this, he is concerned that the blatantly genocidal character of it can undermine the U.S. claims to be champions of freedom and democracy around the world. Genocide Joe is both stuck with and sticking by Israel because, as he has put it, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region.” To understand why Biden said this, see the social media post by Bob Avakian, REVOLUTION 7, “Why is the U.S. supporting Israel's genocide of Palestinians.”
Bombing a Mosque During Evening Prayers and Targeting Journalists in Nuseirat
Refugee camps in Gaza are not “camps,” they are more like tightly packed housing projects. Many of the refugees living in these are descendants from the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 when Israel was founded. This is called the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe). As we post this, the Israeli air force and ground troops are pounding the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
An Israeli airstrike on a residential building in the Nuseirat refugee camp killed 14 people on April 9. On April 12, Israel bombed the main mosque in Nuseirat as people gathered for evening prayers.
Israel typically justifies bombing mosques, as it does bombing hospitals, schools, and UN shelters, by claiming they are used by Hamas. If that were the case, these are still war crimes. But if Hamas was the target, why was the mosque bombed when it was most crowded with worshippers? The only explanation that adds up is that this is consistent with the main target of Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza, the Palestinian people.
Israeli forces bomb mosque in Gaza. Video: Middle East Eye (MEE)
Also, on April 12, several journalists, including one reporting for CNN, were targeted for attack by Israel while reporting on desperate civilians fleeing for cover as Israel bombed the refugee camp, including children and elderly people.
More damning and horrific evidence came to light this week that Israel’s military strategy is to kill civilians. And that the U.S. is complicit. On April 11, an article by two U.S. surgeons who had been working at Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis shined a light on Israel’s strategy of targeting civilians, including children (see box “Surgeons’ Report-Back from Gaza: A Lens into Israel’s Overwhelming Target—Innocent Civilians” on this page).
Rafah in the Crosshairs
Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz warned that Israel would be fighting in Gaza for years to come. And that “Israel will not stop. We will enter Rafah. We will return to Khan Younis.”
Palestinians search rubble after Israeli air and ground offensive in Khan Younis, April 8, 2024. Photo: AP
Khan Younis is a city in the center of Gaza where Israeli troops have withdrawn for the moment, leaving returning residents stunned and horrified at the site of their city flattened to rubble. A video from Khan Younis surveying the devastation Israel left behind shows a bomb shell with “Made in USA” stamped on it.
The US government is directly responsible for the genocide in Gaza. Video: IG @madhoun95
The Israeli army says the temporary withdrawal from Khan Younis is so that its troops can “refresh” in preparation for an assault on Rafah. Rafah is the city in the south of Gaza into which more than a million people have fled. This is about half the population of Gaza.
Despite real conflict between Genocide Joe and Netan-NAZI over how an invasion of Rafah would proceed, Netan-NAZI continues to insist a major ground invasion is coming. And Netan-NAZI’s fascist allies in the government are threatening to oust him if he does not do this soon.
Israeli soldiers work on their tanks near the border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, April 8, 2024. Photo: AP
Stop the U.S./Israeli Genocide of Palestinians NOW!
As we wrote last week, these crimes, these dangers, are not a cause for anyone to throw up their hands in despair. These crimes and dangers pose a challenge to get into and get with the movement for a real revolution in a rare time when such a revolution is more possible than in “normal” times. Exactly because the world as people have known it, and have come to accept it, is being shaken under their feet.
In light of the horrors, and the rare moment, the call for May Day from the revcoms takes on what can and must be history-making impact:
Revolutionary Internationalist May Day 2024
We Need and We Demand
Revolution For A Whole New Way To Live,
A Fundamentally Different System
Stop the U.S./Israeli Genocide of Palestinians NOW!
Stop Capitalism-Imperialism from Stealing Our Future!
Surgeons’ Report-Back from Gaza: A Lens into Israel’s Overwhelming Target—Innocent Civilians
Palestinians wounded in Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip are brought to Al Aqsa hospital in Gaza Strip, February 22, 2024. Photo: AP
Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma and critical care surgeon at San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton, California. Mark Perlmutter is an orthopedic and hand surgeon at Nash UNC Health Care in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Their article appeared in Common Dreams on April 11. It is titled As Surgeons, We Have Never Seen Cruelty Like Israel’s Genocide in Gaza.
Their article opens with a visceral picture of conditions near the hospital they worked at, Gaza European Hospital in Khan Younis.
We were immediately overwhelmed by the overflown sewage and the distinct smell of gunpowder in the air. We made the short journey from the Rafah crossing to Khan Younis, where Gaza European Hospital stands as one of the last remaining semi-functional hospitals for the 2.5 million human beings—half of them children—in the Gaza Strip. As humanitarian surgeons we thought we had seen all manner of cruelty in the world, but neither one of us has ever experienced anything like what we found when we arrived in Gaza.
We exited the van into a sea of children, all shorter and thinner than they ought to have been. Even over their screams of joy at meeting new foreigners, the snowmobile-like hum of Israeli drones could be heard overhead. It quickly became background noise, an omnipresent reminder that violence and death can rain down on anyone at any time in this besieged and ransacked territory.
Our limited sleep was constantly interrupted by explosions that shook the hospital’s walls and popped our ears, even well after the United Nations Security Council declared a cease-fire must be implemented. When warplanes screamed overhead, everyone braced for a particularly loud and powerful explosion.
Among the observations the surgeons share is the fact that violence is “deliberately directed at civilians and even children. A three-year-old boy shot in the head, a 12-year-old girl shot through the chest, an ICU nurse shot through the abdomen, all by some of the best-trained marksmen in the world.” And, that Israel’s bombing always coincided with the fast-breaking evening meal of Muslims during Ramadan when families break their daytime fast. That is, it was timed to kill the maximum number of defenseless civilians.
The surgeons describe “the pain of being unable to treat a child who will slowly die, but also alone, because she is the only surviving member of an entire extended family. We have not had the heart to tell these children how their families died: burned until they resembled blistered hotdogs more than human beings, shredded to pieces such that they can only be buried in mass graves, or simply entombed in their former apartment buildings to die slowly of asphyxia and sepsis.”
In an interview by Democracy Now!, the surgeons documented just how intentional Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians is, including:
- The systematic destruction of hospitals including Israel killing and driving off hospital staff.
- The intensity of the earth-shaking bombs Israel drops that drive not only pieces of tile through victims’ bodies, but even drive dust and dirt through and into their bodies.
- Violence specifically directed at children, including cluster bombs.
- Systematic starvation of the population.
Thousands of Gazans Detained in Israeli Torture Chambers
Since Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza in the wake of October 7, Israel has seized and imprisoned thousands of men and women. They are subjected to degradation, brutality, and death in three Israeli concentration camps. A report in Haaretz estimated that as of April 1, there were between 2,400 and 2,600 people being tortured in concentration camps.
At the beginning of April, an Israeli doctor at one of these prisons wrote to Israeli officials that "Just this week, two prisoners had their legs amputated due to handcuff injuries, which unfortunately is a routine event." He was referring to the systematic practice of placing prisoners in brutally tight metal handcuffs, and keeping them on until, in “routine” situations, their hands or legs are so badly injured that they have to be amputated!
The doctor wrote that all prisoners are handcuffed by all four limbs, regardless of how dangerous they are deemed. They are blindfolded and fed through a straw. And he wrote that the medical staff in these torture chambers do not have anywhere near sufficient supplies to treat the resulting injuries.
These barbaric practices, which the Israeli newspaper compared to the U.S. torture chamber at Guantánamo, have resulted in the deaths of 27 detainees.