Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports on the humanitarian situation in Gaza this week in the aftermath of the United Nations Security Council demand (14-0 with Russia abstaining) for a ceasefire in Gaza. It required Hamas and Israel to reply with a letter outlining their response. Hamas has done so but Israel has not, and members of the government, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have made it clear in public remarks that they will defy the Security Council and will reject the Biden peace plan.
Saddam Hussein’s apparent defiance of UNSC resolutions was given as a legitimate causus belli by the George W. Bush administration, bolstering its case for invading Iraq in 2003.
To underline this defiance of the will of the world community, between June 10 when the UNSC order came down and June 14, the Israeli armed forces killed 142 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 396. According to the professionals at the Gaza Ministry of Health, since October 7 the Israelis have killed 37,266 Palestinians in Gaza and injured 85,102, the vast majority of them women and children, with many of the rest elderly and other noncombatant men.
Doctors without Borders (French acronym MSF) points to the casualties since the start of this month as further proof of the “complete dehumanization of the Palestinians,” saying that “since the beginning of June, more than 800 people have been killed and over 2,400 wounded in intense bombing and ground offensives by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, Palestine.”
These are physicians at the few hospitals still partially functioning, so they see the influx of the wounded and dead bodies.
Brice de le Vingne, Head of MSF Emergency Unit, asked, “how can the killing of more than 800 people in a single week, including small children, plus the maiming of hundreds more, be considered a military operation adhering to international humanitarian law? We can no longer accept the statement that Israel is taking ‘all precautions’ – this is just propaganda.”
De le Vingne added, ““Catch-all phrases like ‘war is ugly’ act as blinders to the fact that children too young to walk are being dismembered, eviscerated, and killed.”
Children too young to walk. Some children begin walking as early as 10 to 11 months old.
It reminds me of when President Joe Biden dismissed Palestinian deaths, saying “people get killed in war,” or words to that effect.
MSF rejects Israeli propaganda that they are letting in aid. They’ve seen with their own eyes that it isn’t happening. Plus, they note, “Israel repeatedly bombed so-called safe zones, refugee camps, a school and multiple humanitarian warehouses, which were formally registered as ‘deconflicted’ by Israeli forces.”
Al Jazeera English Video: “Israel has ‘systematic strategy’ of making Gaza uninhabitable”
In the past month and a half, the UN’s OCHA reminds us, a million Palestinians were again displaced from the south, and 100,000 were displaced from the north. Displaced means made homeless and likely sleeping rough with few toilets or potable water or food. Most of the domiciles in Gaza have been made into rubble by the Israelis, though 16% of the displaced have tried to go home. Some erect tents over their former homes. Some 31% go to new shelters.
At “informal displacement sites” (tent cities?) in Deir al-Balah, “families reported irregular food distributions, overcrowded and dilapidated shelters with an average of eight to 10 persons per shelter, lack of sanitation infrastructure, and a range of health issues such as skin diseases, hepatitis A, gastroenteritis, and respiratory illnesses.”
Water shortages are severe among these refugees in Deir al-Balah: “average water availability per person per day was less than two litres [half a gallon] at Abo Dalal displacement site and only 0.7 litres [less than a quart] at Ard Al Ghusain displacement site. This is less than the internationally recognized minimum requirement for survival of three litres [3 quarts] per day and significantly lower than the minimum amount of 15 litres [4 gallons] per day needed in an emergency for drinking, washing and cooking.”
As for food, some 8,000 children in Gaza have been formally diagnosed with malnutrition and another 3,000 have been identified as in imminent danger of it. Given the poor state of medicine in the Strip, these figures are only the tip of the iceberg.
Israeli airstrikes have taken out water pipes, wells, and sewage treatment plants. There is only 28% the potable water in Gaza that existed on October 6. This is not an accident, as MSF pointed out. People are forced to collect surface water that is tainted with sewage, causing a range of diseases of the intestinal tract and liver.
Apparently the Israeli military has expelled all but about 90,000 people from Rafah, which had had a pre-war population of 300,000 and had swollen to 1.2 million before the Israeli invasion of early May.
Those 90,000 people have no functioning hospital, since Israel has destroyed the medical facilities there, according to the World Health Organization.
OCHA finds that “over 76 per cent of schools in Gaza are now assessed as requiring full reconstruction or major rehabilitation to be functional again.” The Israeli Air Force continues to directly target schools; this week it smashed a UN school functioning as a shelter, killing 30 refugees.
The children of Gaza have lost a school year. If they lose two more, studies suggest that they will never get back on track. Palestinians are the most educated people in the Middle East, but Israel is depriving those in Gaza of a basic education. Those who suffer malnutrition will suffer permanent cognitive losses as well as emotional problems. Others have PTSD and are traumatized, and may never be right in the head again.
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