Lynch has seen a memo entitled “Famine Inevitable, Changes Could Reduce but Not Stop Widespread Civilian Deaths,” which was produced by food security experts in US AID and the State Department, and which they sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. These US officials gave the memo a subheading that is damning for the Israeli government of PM Benjamin Netanyahu: “Israel-imposed administrative challenges are preventing the delivery” of food.

So two things are being asserted:

1. Famine in Gaza is now unavoidable and will kill many civilian noncombatants even if more food aid starts getting in now.

2. The responsibility for this starvation of children, women and noncombatant males lies squarely with Israel, which is obstructing food aid deliveries.

That is all you need to know. These experts have never seen a situation so bad.

MSNBC Video: “‘Death by starvation is slow and cruel’: famine is projected to take hold of Gaza within weeks”

Lynch quotes the memo, sent earlier this month:

“Adequate health, nutrition, and water, sanitation, and hygiene … interventions, an immediate cessation of hostilities, and sustained humanitarian access will be required. Absent these conditions, all available evidence indicates rising acute food insecurity, malnutrition, and disease will lead to a rapid increase in non-trauma deaths, particularly among women, children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities.”

It continues that the

“deterioration of food security and nutrition in Gaza is unprecedented in modern history, exponentially outpacing in six months the long-term declines that led to the only other two famine declarations in the 21st century: Somalia (2011) and South Sudan (2017).”

The National Institutes of Health concluded that “During 2010–2012, extreme food insecurity and famine in Somalia were estimated to account for 256,000 deaths.” The population of the country was then about 12 million, so that is 2.1% dead of starvation. If Gaza’s coming famine were only as bad as Somalia’s we’d expect 46,200 dead from starvation alone, more than have been killed by Israeli bombing during the past six months. But the USAID and State Department experts are saying that the Gaza famine is outpacing Somalia’s. Hence we can expect even more deaths from this cause.

The USAID/ State memo is consistent with what the World Food Program is assessing as of last Wednesday. According to UN News, Gian Carlo Cirri, WFP Director, Geneva office, said at a news conference on Wednesday of Gaza, “people are clearly dying of hunger.” So this catastrophe is not in the future. It is now.

Cirri said, “People cannot meet even the most basic food needs, they have exhausted all coping strategies, like eating animal fodder, begging, selling off their belongings to buy food. They are most of the time destitute and clearly some of them are dying of hunger.”

He called for massive food deliveries “in a very short time.” He said,

“We’ve mentioned the necessity to rebuild livelihoods, to address root causes and so on. But, in the immediate time, like tomorrow, we really need to significantly increase our food supplies. This means rolling out massive and consistent food assistance in conditions that allow humanitarian staff and supplies to move freely and (for) affected people to access safely the assistance.”

Food security experts, Cirri remarked, say that “We are getting closer by the day to a famine situation. Malnutrition among children is spreading. We estimate 30 per cent of children below the age of two is now acutely malnourished or wasted and 70 per cent of the population in the north is facing catastrophic hunger,”

Cirr added “There is reasonable evidence that all three famine thresholds – food insecurity, malnutrition, mortality – will be passed in the next six weeks.”

Reuters Video: “Gaza Strip could reach famine in six weeks, WFP says | REUTERS”

Lynch at Devex also has seen a study produced by USAID concluding that Israel is in violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and is impeding the delivery of US-funded humanitarian aid. It is therefore ineligible for US provision of offensive weaponry.

On February 8, President Joe Biden had issued a national security memo instructing Secretary of State Antony Blinken to seek written assurances from all recipients of such US military weaponry that they are abiding by IHL and not interfering with humanitarian aid shipments. Either the Israeli government has declined to proffer such assurances, or USAID has concluded that they aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.

The paper concluded that the killing of (at that time) over 32,000 persons by Israel, of which the US government assesses two-thirds or 21,120, were noncombatant women and children, could constitute a violation of International Humanitarian Law. The official death toll reported by the UN, based on Gaza Ministry of Health Statistics, has risen to over 34,000, but this number is widely considered to be a gross under-count, given that thousands of people were killed when Israeli fighter jets targeted their apartment buildings, and their bodies are under rubble, unrecovered. Many likely died a slow, agonizing death, trapped by fallen concrete blocks, thirsting to death. After 3 days without water, renal failure typically sets in. Some observers estimate that the real death toll may be 100,000, or 4.5% of the pre-war population. That is about the percentage of the non-Russian European population killed by Nazi Germany 1933-1945 (17 million out of about 400 million).

Although Israel claims to have killed 10,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, the Qassam Brigades, and other militant groups, these assertions cannot be verified and seem unlikely to be true. It is likely that many of the 10,000 were elderly or boys or were civilian men with no connection to Hamas, or were civilian Hamas party members rather than Qassam Brigade fighters. International Humanitarian Law does not permit militaries to blow unarmed civilians who do not pose an immediate threat to smithereens from the sky, regardless of their party membership.

Hordes of settlers continue to wreck havoc in Palestinian occupied territory .. another attack on Al-Mughair village near Ramallah that left a 35 year old man dead and so many houses and cars burnt. #ApartheidIsrael pic.twitter.com/pBcXuOMzqi

— Amal Jadou (@AmalJadou7) April 12, 2024

Palestinian civilians, especially in villages in area C have been abandoned by the world, and so, for that matter, have all the Palestinian populations facing the violence of armed Israeli settlers. The expansion of the Israeli settlements, considered illegal under International Law, and built on stolen Palestinian land, goes on at its fastest rate ever. Meanwhile, Israel exploits the diversion of the world’s attention by its barbaric assault on the Gaza strip to strengthen its grip on the West Bank.

According to a recent UN report which covers the period from November 1 2022 to October 31 2023, illegal Israeli settlements expanded at unprecedented rate since records began in 2017. Approximately, 24,300 units were advanced in existing Israeli settlements including 9670 in East Jerusalem. The same report also highlighted that about 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank including 465,000 mainly live in area C in the West bank and 230,000 settlers in East Jerusalem. Displacement or small scale ethnic cleansing were also carried out against Palestinian herding communities. This uprooted about 1105 Palestinians from 28 herding communities from their land between January 2022 and September 2023. Further 878 people including 435 children from 15 herding communities were displaced between 7th and 23rd of October 2023.

The figure of 700,000 settlers is particularly alarming. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, in 2002, the number of illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank was 380,000 settlers. This massive increase reflects how different Israeli governments worked tirelessly to almost double the number of settlers in the West Bank in 21 years. Such a doubling was also pursued by Israel after it signed the Oslo Accord with the PLO in1993, promising to withdraw from the Palestinian territories by 1997.

It is ironic that the Oslo Accords which were supposed to lead to peace and the creation of a Palestinian state, were followed by the creation of ever more Israeli settlements after dividing the West Bank into areas A, B and C, killing any hope for just peace. To illustrate, area A is about 18 percent of the West Bank and encompasses the main urban areas. Most matters there are under the authority of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Area B is about 21 percent of the West Bank. It is under joint control between Israel and the PA , which affects health, education and the economy. 60 percent of the West Bank is area C. It is mainly rural, and is where the Palestinians have their main agricultural land, so that it is crucial for their food security. Israel is in full control in this area.

The Israeli refusal to withdraw as agreed enabled Israel to deny the Palestinians permits to build new homes in most of the West Bank while construction in the illegal Israeli settlements was accelerated. These discriminatory policies forced desperate Palestinians to build without Israeli permission. Many of those who dared to do so had their homes demolished by Israel. Between 2009 and 2022, 9,128 Palestinian homes were demolished, causing the displacement of 13,171 Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Israeli government offers the Israeli settlers a wide range of financial incentives and subsidies, including but not exclusive of grants and preferential loans to buy property, reduced land prices, reduced taxes for individual and businesses and crucially, indemnity to compensate for any loss of income resulting from EU custom duties. This institutional racism is another manifestation of an apartheid state and settler colonialism.

CBC News Video: “West Bank engulfed by wave of settler violence”

For economic reasons, these racist policies are designed to encourage more Israelis to live on stolen Palestinian land in breach of the international law. This strategy is aimed at easing the demand on housing inside Israel and speeding up its colonization of the West Bank ahead of its declared plan to annex area C to Israel. These policies, combined with the settlers violence will force more Palestinians out of area C towards the already crowded and smaller areas of A and B. This is already causing property price inflation and decreasing affordability. Additionally, these areas are already subjected to frequent Israeli raids, sieges and extrajudicial executions. This is besides other socioeconomic problems such as unemployment and poverty caused mainly by the Israeli occupation.

While the world’s influential governments are allowing Israel to carry on with its genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, the same governments are turning a blind eye to Zionist colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in the West Bank. Alas the Palestine Authority of Mahmoud Abbas and all the Palestinian factions in the West Bank are spectators, watching as if they are neutral without even attempting to organize an effective non-violent campaign to boycott Israeli products. If things continue as they are now, it is only a matter of time before the West Bank will face an ethnic cleansing similar to what happened in the 1948 Nakbah.

The US national debt is $34.5 trillion, up $2 trillion since last summer, against a gross domestic product of $27 trillion. For the debt to run so far ahead of GDP could cause the US economy to crash. That is, the US Congress does not have $26 billion to give to Israel in the first place.

The enormous windfall will allow the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to kill or wound a Palestinian child in Gaza every 10 minutes (see below).

Israel’s bombing raids, including against designated safe areas in Gaza, continued daily this week. On Saturday, the Israeli Air Force bombed a house in the center of Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have been pushed from the north, killing six persons and wounding others. Rafah had been designated a safe zone by the Israelis when they were trying to force people down there.

Emma Graham-Harrison writes at The Guardian, “Ahmed Barhoum lost his wife, Rawan Radwan, and their five-year-old daughter Alaa. ‘They bombed a house full of displaced people, women and children,’ he told Associated Press on Saturday, crying as he cradled Alaa’s body, wrapped in a white shroud, and gently rocked her. ‘This is a world devoid of all human values and morals.'”

Saturday’s strikes brought the number of Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza since October 8 to over 34,000, Graham-Harrison reports. These numbers exclude more thousands buried under rubble when Israeli fighter-jets destroyed civilian apartment buildings. Some 77,000 Palestinians have been wounded, 12,000 of them children (see below).

On Wednesday through Friday of this week, Israeli bombing raids killed 113 Palestinians and injured 169 Palestinians.

UNICEF said this week that 12,000 children, at the very least, have been wounded by Israeli bombardment or other fire since last October.

That comes to 70 children injured every day, or nearly 3 every hour, one every 20 minutes or so. Since some 13,000 children have been killed, that means that a child has been either killed or wounded every 10 minutes.

Spokesperson Tess Ingram Ingram said,

“”I left Gaza yesterday after spending two weeks there. It was my second mission into Gaza this year. By far, what struck me most about this mission was the number of wounded children. Not just in the hospitals, but on the streets. In their makeshift shelters . . . their lives forever changed by the horrors of war.”

Half of the inhabitants of Gaza are children.

Most of the hospitals in Gaza have been destroyed by the Israeli military. Of 36, only 11 are still partially functioning, mainly as warehouses for the sick and wounded since they lack “needles, stitches, anaesthetic.” Children lie on mattresses or floors “languishing in pain.”

Despite the desperate need for medavac transportation of these children, many amputees, from Gaza, only 3,500 such requests have been granted in over six months.

Guardian News Video: “‘I can’t find food’: despair in Gaza as children face malnutrition”

WHO says that in northern Gaza, between 12% and 16.5% of children (6-59 months) have been stricken with with acute malnutrition, and 3% of children have severe acute malnutrition. In southern Gaza, 2-6% of children have acute malnutrition.

Severe acute malnutrition presents with substantial muscle wasting in the arms, unnatural thinness, and build-up of fluid and swelling in the feet. Acute malnutrition has the same symptoms but they are less exaggerated. Even a short bout of malnutrition leaves children with permanent cognitive deficits and learning disabilities.

In April, 15% of the aid missions to northern Gaza and to parts of southern Gaza that require coordination with Israel have been denied by Israeli authorities, often on arbitrary grounds.

Because Israel cut off potable water or destroyed its delivery systems with bombing, and because 270,000 tons of solid waste has accumulated in the absence of hygiene services, WHO recorded 345,768 cases of diarrhea, with 105,635 cases in children under 5. In toddlers and infants such gastrointestinal diseases can eaily lead to fatal dehydration. Without an immediate ceasefire, a team at Johns Hopkins has predicted that 11% of the deaths in Gaza over the next four months will be from epidemic diseases.

Israel is using facial recognition programs and drones to locate and kill the 37,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, but at least 10% of their identifications are wrong, and they often strike at these individuals when they are surrounded by their wives, children, other relatives, and neighbors. Israeli rules of engagement, the loosest in the world aside from the gangs of the blood diamond cartels, allow up to 20 civilians to be killed with each strike at a member of the Qassam Brigades paramilitary. Most of these members had no knowledge of the October 7 attack, which was planned and carried out by a small clique. The Israeli destruction of civilian infrastructure and the imposition of starvation on the population are forms of illegal collective punishment.

EA: Now that we’re talking about world leaders. In the past few days, we’ve seen increasing protests in Israel calling for the removal of Prime Minister Netanyahu and international condemnation after the death of World Central Kitchen aid workers during an Israeli airstrike. Do you think at this point, Prime Minister Netanyahu is more concerned about his political survival than he is in the national interest of his people?

JB: Well, I will tell you, I think what he’s doing is a mistake. I don’t agree with his approach. I think it’s outrageous that those four, three vehicles were hit by drones and taken out on a highway where it wasn’t like it was along the shore, it wasn’t like there was a convoy moving there, etc… So I what I’m calling for is for the Israelis to just call for a ceasefire, allow for the next six, eight weeks total access to all food and medicine going into the country. I’ve spoken with everyone from the Saudis to the Jordanians to the Egyptians. They’re prepared to move in. They’re prepared to move this food in. And I think there’s no excuse to not provide for the medical and the food needs of those people. It should be done now.

Univision Noticias Video: “Exclusive interview with Joe Biden on Univision”

President Biden spent six months defending Netanyahu’s brutal total war on Gaza. He said he saw pictures of beheaded babies when he did no such thing because there weren’t any, sparking a hysteria against Palestinians, Muslims and Arabs in the U.S. and helping justify the Israeli assault on ordinary people. Informed of the unconscionable numbers of dead among civilians in Gaza, Biden replied, “What they say to me is I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war. (The) Israelis should be incredibly careful to be sure that they’re focusing on going after the folks that (are) propagating this war against Israel. And it’s against their interest when that doesn’t happen.”

We now know thanks to Yuval Abraham and +972 Mag that the Israelis set Artificial Intelligence programs to kill some 37,000 persons suspected of being members of the Hamas paramilitary, and programmed in a tolerance of up to 20 civilians dead for each alleged militant. The targets were tracked by GPS and hit when they got home in the evenings, ensuring that family members were also blown away. I have pointed out that if the program functioned within these parameters, transmitting kill instructions to Israeli pilots and drone operators, they could kill as many as 740,000 Palestinians in Gaza, 99.5% of them innocent civilians (and actually much more because few of the 37,000 in the paramilitary deserved to be summarily blown away any more than their baby girls did). That is roughly a third of the entire population, which shows genocidal intent.

So Netanyahu made a fool out of Biden, telling him that the innocents killed were just “the price of waging a war” and that the Israelis were being incredibly careful that they were only killing those Qassam Brigades and al-Jihad al-Islami militants who struck Israel on October 7. Biden swallowed this Big Lie hook, line and sinker and then broadcast it to all Americans and to the world.

Biden vetoed three ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. To this day his spokesmen decline to admit that Israel has violated the international laws of war and they keep saying they haven’t seen evidence of genocide. Either they don’t know what genocide is or they haven’t been watching the Israeli total war on Gaza.

So Biden’s Univision interview is weak tea indeed, even if it is the strongest condemnation he has issued of the fascist government of Netanyahu, who brought the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis into his government.

What does he really say?

1. Netanyahu’s total war on Gaza is a “mistake.” Not an atrocity, or a war crime, or a genocide. Just a “mistake.” Taking the wrong exit off the freeway is a mistake. What Netanyahu has done to the Palestinians is not just an error of judgment.

2. Biden found it outrageous that Israeli fighter jet pilots repeatedly hit the vehicles of the World Central Kitchen volunteers, given that there was no reason to have thought that they were an enemy convoy. (North Gaza had been declared clear of Hamas fighters and was a supposed safe zone by then). But Biden has never shown as much outrage or grief about any of the 14,000 Palestinian children killed in equally brutal ways. The children still seem to be the price of waging a war, though only if you wage a genocidal war with bloodthirsty murderbots.

3. Biden wants a pause in fighting of six to eight weeks. Not a permanent ceasefire, mind you. Just a decent interval so that food and medicine can be gotten in to the noncombatant population. Presumably he is all right with Netanyahu relaunching the war after a couple of months.

Given where we are in the most vicious military action of the twenty-first century, responsible for more deaths of children than any other in this era, “mistake,” “killing 7 white people,” and a 6 to 8 week pause in fighting are woefully inadequate responses.

Biden and his foreign policy team still just don’t get it. There is widespread revulsion at their stance in the general public. It isn’t something that can be fixed with a band aid and a few words of empathy. The US public is increasingly seeing Netanyahu and his mob as the war criminals they are, and unless Biden finds a way to distance himself from Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bibi Netanyahu, they will continue to be an albatross around his neck.

Michigan’s 5th congressional district stretches across the far bottom of the state, encompassing cities such as Albion and Jackson and abutting Ohio and Indiana. I don’t have any reason to think that the district is full of merciless psychopaths and mass murderers. Jackson has a famous ice cream shop, The Parlour, where the portions are to say the least generous, and which is pleasant to visit on a hot summer day. The district has a population of 768,000 and a median household income of $64,000 (for the US as a whole it is $74,580). It is about 85% white, with Hispanics, African Americans and mixed-race persons making up most of the other 15%. It has voted for a Democratic president in every election in this century and even favored Hilary Clinton over Trump. That Walberg represents this district demonstrates the axiom that Americans buy peanut butter more intelligently than they vote.

That is, the district is represented in Congress by a cruel would-be mass murderer. His soul lacks any hint of the milk of human kindness. Walberg, a fundamentalist former Christian pastor, once ran the homophobic, far right Moody Bible Institute in Chicago while supposedly representing a Michigan district, Walberg is against everything— a woman’s right to choose, the Affordable Care Act, gay marriage, and any attempt to counter the climate crisis. He went to Uganda to voice support for that country’s Anti-Homosexuality Act, which prescribes executions for gay people.

So genocidal tendencies were already apparent. Some 14 million American adults identify as LGBT in polling and apparently Rep. Walberg would happily see them all murdered. It should be remembered that some 90,000 gay men were rounded up in Nazi Germany, with as many as 15,000 sent to death camps, where perhaps 60% were killed. The only difference between Walberg and Heinrich Himmler, who created the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, is that Walberg hasn’t yet found a way to implement his sadistic dreams.

At a meeting in Dundee with constituents on March 25, Walberg said that President Biden had spoken of our need to get aid into Gaza. He said, “I don’t think we should. I don’t think any of our aid that goes to Israel, to support our greatest ally, arguably maybe in the world, to the feet of Hamas, and Iran, and Russia. Probably North Korea is in there and China, too — with them, helping Hamas. We shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid. It should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.”

“Nuking Gaza,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3 / IbisPaint, 2024.

Unfortunately for Walberg, who likely talks like this all the time with his inner circle of fellow sociopaths, his remarks were recorded.

Michigan Congressman Tim Walberg, pastor and "good" Christian, talks about his solution for #Gaza: Give it the Hiroshima treatment. "Get it over quick."

A sitting US Rep in a secret town hall feels comfortable musing positively about genocide. Listen. Share.#DemCastMI #DemCast pic.twitter.com/6BQGfWMVjZ

— JMS 🫱🏻✋🏻 #DemCastMI (@WhitchMI) March 30, 2024

It is worth noting the bizarre conspiracy theory that any US aid money sent to Gaza would somehow benefit Russia, China and North Korea or that those three countries back Hamas. I might once have called such paranoid fever dreams abnormal, but I see them and their like normalized all around me these days.

The 2.2 million Gaza noncombatants cannot be blamed for the actions of a small Hamas guerrilla group. These civilians are in imminent danger of mass starvation and some are already dying of hunger. Half of them are children. Most of the rest are women and noncombatant men. Some 70% of them are in Gaza because Zionist gangs chased them out of their homes in 1948 in what became southern Israel, and made them stateless refugees. Now they are being killed on a scale unseen in any conflict in this century.

And, again, mass starvation was a key Nazi technique of war.

But there is a difference between theoretical law and practical legality. The latter has to be adjudicated by some official body– a court, Congress, the State Department. As America’s chief diplomatic organ,the State Department would make a pretty good arbiter here.

Unfortunately, the State Department is in the hands of a genocide-denier and -enabler, Antony Blinken, whose boss, Joe Biden, is an even bigger genocide-denier and -enabler.

So State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on March 25 of Israel’s total war on Gaza, “We have not found them to be in violation of international humanitarian law, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance. So we view their assurances through that ongoing work that we have done.”

Mr. Blinken apparently does not have a smartphone, or he could have seen the unfolding war crimes and atrocities committed by the Israeli military in real time. Most smart TVs have YouTube, so he could just watch Al Jazeera English live streaming. He’d see quite a lot of evidence that Israel is in violation of the laws of war and of the requirements it allow in to Gaza humanitarian aid.

Miller’s statement ranks up there with the Kremlin’s denial that its troops committed war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha or Bashar al-Assad’s denial that he had any role in the massive deaths racked up during the Syrian Civil War.

Just after Miller made his statement, a State Department official, Dr. Annelle Sheline, loudly denounced him, saying, “To say this when Israel is preventing the adequate entrance of humanitarian aid and the US is being forced to air drop food to starving Gazans, this finding makes a mockery of the administration’s claims to care about the law or about the fate of innocent Palestinians.” Sheline noisily resigned from State. She had “served for a year as a foreign affairs officer at the Office of Near Eastern Affairs in the Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.”

The Young Turks Video: “BRAVE State Dept. Official Resigns Over Biden’s Handling Of Gaza War”

She wrote, “Israel has used American bombs in its war in Gaza, which has killed more than 32,000 people — 13,000 of them children — with countless others buried under the rubble, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Israel is credibly accused of starving the 2 million people who remain, according to the UN special rapporteur on the right to food; a group of charity leaders warns that without adequate aid, hundreds of thousands more will soon likely join the dead.”

Sheline was supposed to have been liaising with Middle Eastern NGOs working on human rights. None of them wanted to touch the US with a ten-foot pole. You can’t enable genocide and expect to be welcome in circles that value basic human rights. So she may as well resign. Biden and Blinken made her job impossible to do. The Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor has been made a laughingstock and a pariah.

Ronna McDaniel was fired from NBC News almost immediately after she was hired, since the anchors at NBC and MSNBC denounced her for having fomented the Big Lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent. McDaniel’s behavior was egregious and she shouldn’t have been hired. The firing was entirely justified.

But Ronna McDaniel didn’t deny that it is genocide to bomb over 30,000 civilian noncombatants to death in their apartment buildings, hospitals, schools and places of worship, even in their tents once they were made refugees. Ronna McDaniel hasn’t arranged for over 100 arms sales to Israel during the past 5 months, as Joe Biden and Antony Blinken have. Maybe she would, but she didn’t.

But NBC would even now blithely bring on screen genocide denialists.

Both McDaniel on the one side and Blinken and Biden on the other are dire threats to the stability and integrity of America. McDaniel tried to undermine the state domestically, Blinken and Biden are undermining it internationally. Both are purveying the Big Lie at a time when the public can fact check it in real time.

(The Conversation) – As the casualty count on the Gaza Strip approaches 32,000 people, in itself a terrible and distressing statistic, another number also stood out this week. It is reported that in the past week, more than 100 aid workers have been killed. Twenty-three on March 19 as they waited at the Kuwait roundabout in Gaza City to receive an aid convoy, but others in raids which have reportedly focused on aid distribution centres and warehouses, according to the Middle East Monitor.

In a situation such as the one unfolding in Gaza, with millions facing critical shortages of food, fuel and medicines, aid agency staff are precious frontline workers. They perform the vital – and very dangerous – task of coordinating aid distribution to 2 million desperate people. Like medical staff in a conflict situation, they are protected by the Geneva conventions.

As always against the background of a chaotic and politically sensitive conflict, it should be noted that these reports – like the overall death toll reports – originate with the authorities in Gaza and must be treated with due caution. But UNRWA, the United Nations relief agency for Palestinian refugees, reports that 165 of its workers have been killed in the five months of the conflict.

This is complicated by Israel’s claims that UNRWA workers were involved in the vicious October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, leading it to go so far as calling UNRWA an active participant in the conflict on the side of Hamas – although so far it has offered no evidence to support these claims. Despite this, the agency – which has an estimated 13,000 workers in Gaza – has had its funding paused by several countries, including the US and UK.

Al Jazeera English Video: “WHO chief calls for immediate ceasefire in Gaza, aid delivery”

All of which makes for distressing viewing on the nightly news. It’s fair to say that in many western countries – judging by the massive and regular protests calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian intervention in Gaza – the views of significant numbers of people are out of sync with the actions of their political leaders.

Which sets up an interesting dynamic in an election year for the US. Last week, a speech by Chuck Schumer, a senior Democrat who is the US Senate majority leader and a vociferous, longtime supporter of Israel – and, until recently at least, friend of its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu – called for Netanyahu to resign and make way for an election, adding:

Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, to preserve his credibility on the world stage, to work to a two-state solution.

Schumer’s boss, Joe Biden, commented that he had made “a good speech”, adding that: “I think he expressed a serious concern shared not only by him but by many Americans.”

But, as John Strawson – an expert in Israeli politics at the University of East London – writes here, all indications are that this is highly unlikely. Manoeuvrings inside Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, Strawson believes, have actually shored up the prime minister’s position when compared with his main rival Benny Gantz.

Schumer also called for the Palestinian Authority to make changes at the top to usher in “a new generation of Palestinian leaders who will work towards attaining peace with a Jewish state”. But this looks highly unlikely too, given that the PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, has just appointed a decidedly old-school prime minister: Muhammad Mustafa is a 69-year-old political ally who hardly represents a new generation of leadership.

Schumer’s speech also bears examination for what it tells us about Washington’s attitude towards the Israeli government – at least on the Democrat side. As Dov Waxman, professor of Israel Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, tells Naomi Schalit, political editor of The Conversation US, Schumer’s speech marks “the culmination of a process that’s been underway for some time, whereby the Democratic Party has increasingly turned against Netanyahu”.

In this illuminating interview, Waxman sets out the nuances in the speech which, he believes, was aimed as much at a domestic audience of Democrat voters as at Israelis, Palestinians or the watching international community, with Schumer deliberately positioning the Democrats as pro-Israel but against the Netanyahu government and what it is doing in Gaza.

Hidden in the speech was a key phrase warning that if this goes on much longer, it will force the Biden administration to “play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course”. By this, says Waxman, Schumer means that US military aid to Israel could be on the line. Now that would be a game-changer.

By sea? By air?

As you would expect, Biden made Gaza one of the key segments of his recent State of the Union address. With a view to voters on both sides of the spectrum, he apportioned blame carefully, noting that the conflict had begun with the Hamas assault on October 7 but adding that the overwhelming majority of the victims of Israel’s reprisal operation in Gaza have been innocent civilians.

Declaring that “it’s heartbreaking”, Biden announced that he had instructed the US military to build a temporary pier in the Mediterranean to enable the delivery of aid by sea. “No US boots will be on the ground,” he noted, adding that the pier would enable a “massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day”.

But Foteini Stavropoulou of Liverpool John Moores University and Sarah Schiffling of Hanken School of Economics – both experts in aid distribution – believe this will fall far short of the capacity required to meet the urgent needs of the starving population of Gaza. Here, they outline six steps which could help get the required volumes of humanitarian aid into the besieged enclave.

There have been airdrops of aid over the past weeks. Stavropoulou and Schiffling believe this is a delivery option of last resort, but for 12 months from 1948, the US and UK maintained an airlift into blockaded west Berlin, feeding more than 2 million people cut off by Soviet forces.

Claudia Milena Adler, an expert in humanitarianism with the University of York, and Abdullah Yusuf, an expert in international relations at the University of Dundee, compare what was achieved during the Berlin airlift with what is required now, and ask whether the west can perform the same miraculous service in Gaza.

They are not optimistic. Feeding Berlin in 1948 took a clear effort of political will and western unity to achieve. It’s far from clear, they write, that the same political will exists today when it comes to Israel and Palestine.

Ramadan in Rafah

Back in January, the aforementioned Benny Gantz – a member of Israel’s war cabinet – said that unless all hostages were released, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would commence an assault on the city of Rafah by March 10 – which would coincide with the start of Ramadan. This, as the director of the Middle East Institute’s program on Palestine, Khaled Elgindy, said at the time, “adds a layer of distastefulness and outrage to an already pretty horrendous situation”.

In the event, the assault has not begun. Now we have a situation where almost daily, Biden and other senior world leaders warn Israel not to go into Rafah – where more than a million Palestinian refugees from the rest of the Gaza Strip are huddling and close to starvation. Meanwhile, Israel doubles down on its insistence that it still plans to carry out the assault.

Carlo Aldrovandi, a professor in international peace studies at Trinity College Dublin, explains the significance of Ramadan, not only to the 2 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza but the wider Islamic world. And he warns that Islam’s holiest month could see increased violence on the West Bank, where tensions remain high.

Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor, Associate Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

They said of the just-realeased Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessment, “This is unprecedented. No IPC analysis has ever recorded such levels of food insecurity anywhere in the world.” [Emphasis added.]

They continued, “Life-threatening levels of acute malnutrition have risen at an alarming rate since the last report, and we are already witnessing with horror the death of children due to starvation. Hunger cannot be used as a weapon of war. What we are seeing is not a natural hazard but a manmade disaster, and it is our moral duty to stop it.”

Borell said in Brussels, “In Gaza we are no longer on the brink of famine, we are in a state of famine, affecting thousands of people.” He added, “This is unacceptable. Starvation is used as a weapon of war. Israel is provoking famine.”

Sometimes a telling detail outweighs a statistic. Something like 25,000 babies have been born in Gaza since the Israeli campaign began.

According to reporters on the scene, many of their mothers are too malnourished to produce milk for them. Imagine the anguish and the guilt.

There is no powdered milk in the market. Most of the available water is full of bacteria, which kills newborns by giving them diarrhea and dehydrating them. One mother said that her two-month-old is like a two-week-old because of malnutrition.

Al Jazeera video: “2-month-old baby dies from hunger in Gaza | Al Jazeera Newsfeed”

The IPC review [pdf] found that 100% of the Palestinians in Gaza face food insecurity as a result of Israel’s war strategy. But matters have gone beyond the level of food insecurity in some parts of the Gaza Strip, for instance in the north.

The report says, “Famine is now projected and imminent in the North Gaza and Gaza Governorates and is expected to become manifest from mid-March 2024 to May 2024.”

We’re in mid-March. Something like 300,000 people remain in these two governorates.

People there are now suffering acute malnutrition.

Acute malnutrition, WHO explains, shows up in four broad ways: “wasting, stunting, underweight, and micronutrient deficiencies.” These conditions make people horrifyingly skinny, reducing their limbs to the dimension of sticks. Physicians measure limbs according to mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC), which tells them about the degree of Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM).

In Gaza’s children from a half-year old to 4.9 years in age, 1% were considered to be suffering from Global Acute Malnutrition according to their MUAC in September, 2023. By January it had risen to 6-9%. By February, just last month, it was 12%-16%. It has been just about doubling. So by the end of March you’re looking at at least 24%-26% of infants and toddlers and young children suffering from Global Acute Malnutrition so severely that their upper-arm circumference is tiny. But what if the numbers aren’t just doubling? The IPC provides a helpful graph of Israeli cruelty:

We don’t have the raw data to nail it down, but we probably aren’t seeing more than 2 deaths per 10,000 per day yet from malnutrition, according to the IPC. But that would be 60 people starving to death per day in north Gaza, or 1,800 a month.

The Israelis only let in half as many aid trucks in February as they had in January. That is a recipe for an exponential, not just serial increase in hunger. We could be going to half or more of north Gaza’s children suffering this extreme malnutrition. Of course, it isn’t just children, but children are half the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip.

The IPC expects a big spike in deaths from starvation beginning as early as now through May.

The worst level of malnutrition is Phase 5, which has two stages, famine and catastrophe.

The report found that fully 70% of the population of north Gaza is now in Phase 5-Catastrophe. That is 200,000 people.

An Israeli ground offensive in Rafah will push more 500,000 people into Phase 5-Catastrophe. If just 2 per 10,000 of them died daily of starvation as a result, that would be 100 per day or 3,000 a month, on top of the ones in the north. That is nearly 5,000 people a month dead of malnutrition, and that is if it stays at the rate of 2 per 10,000 per day. It won’t.

The IPC concludes, “The persistent attacks on hospitals, health posts, ambulances, water services, civilian telecoms services, and IDP sites must cease. Attacks against health care workers must cease. Civilians and civilian infrastructure must be protected, as required under International Humanitarian Law. (Already stipulated in the December 2023 FRC report.”

The authors note that the only proven way to avert famine is to deliver food to those threatened by it. Moreover, they point out that unless people are in fair health, they can’t take in the nutrition, so health care has to be restored as well.

( Human Rights Watch ) – (New York, March 15, 2024) – United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is expected to alert the Security Council in the coming days that Sudan has entered a downward spiral of extreme conflict-induced hunger, Human Rights Watch said today. The council should immediately take action, including by adopting targeted sanctions against individuals responsible for obstructing aid access in Darfur.

“The Security Council will be formally put on notice that the conflict in Sudan risks spurring the world’s largest hunger crisis,” said Akshaya Kumar, crisis advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “The Council just broke months of silence by adopting a resolution on Sudan last week, and should build on that momentum by imposing consequences on those responsible for preventing aid from getting to people who need it.”

The alert will be sent to the Council as a so called “white note,” drafted by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in accordance with its mandate under Security Council resolution 2417 to ring the alarm about “the risk of conflict-induced famine and wide-spread food insecurity.” OCHA’s alert follows warnings by international aid experts, Sudanese civil society leaders, and Sudanese emergency responders that people across Sudan are dying of hunger. It also comes on the heels of Sudan’s Armed Forces (SAF) brazenly escalating its efforts to restrict the movement of humanitarian aid.

Sudan war may spark world’s largest hunger crisis, says aid organisation | BBC News Video added by IC

In a 2023 presidential statement, the Security Council reiterated its “strong intention to give its full attention” to information provided by the secretary-general when it is alerted to situations involving conflict induced food insecurity. The council should honor that commitment and convene an open meeting to discuss OCHA’s findings. That could pave the way for decisive action, including sanctions on individuals responsible for obstructing aid delivery, Human Rights Watch said.

Since conflict broke out between Sudan’s Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023, both warring parties have restricted aid delivery, access, and distribution. Ninety percent of people in Sudan facing emergency levels of hunger are in areas that are “largely inaccessible” to the World Food Programme. “Communities (in Sudan) are on the brink of famine because we are prevented from reaching many of the children, women and families in need,” according to UNICEF executive director, Catherine Russell.

In February, Sudan’s military leader, Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said the authorities would no longer allow aid to reach areas under RSF control. Aid organizations have repeatedly said that the SAF is obstructing their delivery of aid to RSF-controlled areas. Aid groups face a maze of bureaucratic impediments, including delays, arbitrary restrictions on movement, harassment, and outright bans on some supplies.

On March 4, Sudan’s foreign affairs minister added to the restrictions, announcing that the government opposed cross-border aid delivery from Chad to areas under RSF control. On March 6, Sudanese authorities informed the UN that they would allow limited cross-border movement exclusively through specific crossings under the control of forces allied to the military. Sudanese authorities have also blocked cross-line aid movement to RSF-controlled territory, which has put Khartoum under a de facto aid blockade since November 2023 at least, aid groups told Human Rights Watch.

The UN welcomed the Sudanese authorities’ announcement identifying aid crossings. The medical charity, Doctors Without Borders, however, raised concerns that this would leave “vast areas in Darfur, Kordofan, Khartoum and Jazeera states still inaccessible.”  

Aid operations have also been choked by limited funding. As of the end of February, the UN’s appeal was 5 percent funded. That gap is exacerbated by widespread looting of warehouses, including a December 2023 incident in which Rapid Support Forces fighters looted stocks in a World Food Programme warehouse in Wad Madani that would have been used to feed 1.5 million hungry people and attacked an MSF compound, forcing the organization to evacuate its team. There have been widespread attacks on aid workers, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, including killings, injuries and detentions.

The Security Council’s latest resolution 2724 on Sudan calls “on all parties to ensure the removal of any obstructions to the delivery of aid and to enable full, rapid, safe, and unhindered humanitarian access, including cross-border and cross-line, and to comply with their obligations under international humanitarian law.” The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has said that “the apparently deliberate denial of safe and unimpeded access for humanitarian agencies within Sudan itself constitutes a serious violation of international law, and may amount to a war crime.”

The Security Council’s Sudan Sanctions Committee met in February, announcing that it “wishes to remind the parties that those who commit violations of international humanitarian law and other atrocities may be subject to targeted sanctions measures in accordance with paragraph 3 (c) of resolution 1591 (2005).”

The World Food Programme and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization found in a recent report that food security in Sudan had significantly deteriorated even faster than anticipated, and that there is a risk of “catastrophic conditions” hitting the states of West and Central Darfur “during the lean season in early 2024,” roughly from April to July.

The Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a US government-funded group that monitors food insecurity, said in February that the “worst-affected populations … in Omdurman (in Khartoum state) and El Geneina (in West Darfur state)” were expected to soon see “Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5) outcomes.” Under the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, a globally recognized scale used to classify food insecurity and malnutrition, catastrophic conditions are the fifth and worst phase. The program determines that famine is occurring when over 20 percent of an area’s population are facing extreme food gaps, and children’s acute malnutrition and mortality exceed emergency rates.

According to new figures released by the Nutrition Cluster in Sudan, nearly 230,000 children, pregnant women, and new mothers could die in the coming months due to hunger.

In Darfur, civil society and local leaders have repeatedly sounded the alarm about hunger among displaced people living in camps in areas under RSF control. Leaders shared that their communities have resorted to eating ants, tree bark, and animal feed. People currently in West Darfur include survivors of waves of attacks by the RSF and their allied militias, which Human Rights Watch has described as “having all the hallmarks of an organized campaign of atrocities against Massalit civilians.” A local government official reported in early March that 22 children had died of hunger in Murnei, a town in West Darfur that was the site of horrific RSF attacks in June 2023.

In January, Doctors Without Borders raised the alarm on malnutrition in Zamzam camp in North Darfur, warning that “an estimated one child is dying every two hours.” A camp leader from Kalma camp in Nyala (South Darfur) told Human Rights Watch that 500 to 600 children and at least 80 older people have died in the camp since the start of the conflict because of what he believed was the result of lack of food and medical supplies. “People [are] dying every day,” he said. He said that the RSF has also been limiting the amount of food supplies entering the camp since it took control of the city in October.

In Khartoum, a communications blackout has forced hundreds of communal kitchens run by Sudanese emergency response rooms, a grassroots mutual aid network, to pause operations, leaving many people without food, and reports of people dying alone in their homes of hunger. “The shutdown has a significant impact on food access and distribution,” a member of one of the emergency response rooms in Khartoum told Human Rights Watch in mid-February, “it is happening while we are facing growing food insecurity and risk of famine in the capital.”

This is the first time Sudan has been spotlighted in this kind of an alert from the secretary-general to the Security Council. Guyana, Switzerland, the US, and other Security Council members have pledged to make combating food insecurity a priority for the UN’s most powerful body. 

“Council members should show leadership by holding open discussions to develop a plan that averts the risk of mass starvation in Sudan and imposing targeted sanctions on the individuals responsible for obstructing aid,” Kumar said. “The people of Sudan need more than words. They need food.”

Via Human Rights Watch