LONDON: Last Sunday, 10-yearold Abdullah collected his family’s jerrycans and headed towards one of the water distribution points in the urban Nuseirat camp in central Gaza. Water shortages in Gaza are worsening daily because of the lack of fuel and spare parts for desalination, pumping and sanitation facilities. Children queueing up by the side of the road every morning with their yellow jerrycans waiting for the daily water truck to arrive is therefore a common sight across the Gaza Strip.
Each child is allowed to collect 10 litres of water for the family, which is used for washing, cleaning, cooking and drinking. On arrival, little Abdullah stood patiently in a queue with other thirsty children. Minutes later he was dead, his body parts scattered among the adjacent destroyed building. Along with 5 other children and 4 adults, Abdullah was killed by a bomb from an Israeli warplane. Sixteen others were severely injured.
On Thursday, 10 children and 3 women were also killed as they waited for nutritional supplements outside a clinic in the nearby town of Deir al-Balah. Such deaths are common all the time across Gaza. According to Sam Rose, the acting Gaza director for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), “in every single day, since the start of the war, an average of a classroom of children has been killed.” The Israeli military always responds by saying that they had targeted a Hamas “terrorist” and regretted harming any civilians. When asked about the death of little Abdullah, an Israeli military spokesman said “the munition fell dozens of metres from the target as a result of technical error”, adding that “the incident is under review”.
This was of small consolation to Abdullah’s grieving father, Mahmoud Abdul Rahman Ahmed, as he stood alongside other wailing parents holding the corpses of their children, while others scrambled to find their loved ones beneath the destroyed structure and clusters of yellow plastic jerrycans. Following the murderous attack by Hamas on innocent Israeli citizens on 7 October 2023, in which 1,200 were brutally slaughtered, raped, mutilated and sexually assaulted, and 240 hostages seized, Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has reduced much of the enclave to rubble, displacing most of its 2.3 million inhabitants.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly insists that Israel’s war aims are to defeat Hamas and free the remaining hostages, although many experts agree he will fail and he is only continuing the war in order to avoid jail. Since Hamas’s brutal attack, Israeli troops have controlled all aid entering Gaza. In May this year, after imposing a total blockade on Gaza for months, deliberately starving the population and shutting down the operations of the United Nations (UNWRA) and other aid organisations, the Israeli military took over the distribution of food and other humanitarian aid through a shadowy group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Established in Delaware USA in February this year, the GHF is funded to the tune of about $30 million per month by the US government and operates from 4 “secure distribution sites” across Gaza, 1 in the north and 3 in the south. While the GHF has delivered tens of millions of meals to the starving Gazan population, it has become mired in claims of being staunchly political and the source of numerous deadly incidents. Since late May, some 800 Palestinians have been killed at or near GHF distribution sites trying to get food, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, highlighting deep concerns about their safety and neutrality. Professor Nick Maynard, a British surgeon who has been visiting and operating in Gaza for years, told the BBC last week that in addition to the usual mass casualties, he and his colleagues are now seeing evidence of young teenage boys being wounded by shots fired by Israeli soldiers into the same body parts on the same days, simply for going to the GHF distribution points to get food for their starving families.
On some days the boys are shot in the abdomen and chests, other days the wounds would be in the head or neck, on other days they would be shot in the testicles. Maynard also described the dire straits of new-born babies in Gaza who are dying because of the lack of baby food. “There is simply no formula-feed for babies to be found anywhere in Gaza”, he said. The Israeli Defence Forces deny all such claims. Given the horrors emanating from the GHF, it’s not surprising that the UN and more than 170 aid groups and NGOs have condemned Israel’s takeover of aid distribution, claiming it is weaponizing food to forcibly displace Palestinians.
Hani Almadhoun, the senior director of UNWRA USA and co-founder of Gaza Soup Kitchen, claims that the GHF is a “front group established by Israel as a tool of control and, if we take Israeli government officials at their own words, ethnically cleanse Palestinians.” Almadhoun also claims that the GHF is “currently run by a right-wing evangelical Christian Zionist pastor with close ties to Netanyahu and President Trump.” Stressing that every credible humanitarian group has condemned GHF’s takeover, Almadhoun accuses the Israeli military of using the GHF to force Gaza’s population into concentrated areas in the south, next to the border with Egypt. He also claims that through its new government agency, “Bureau for Voluntary Emigration”, Israel and the US have been trying to “convince other countries to take in large numbers of displaced Palestinians”.
As forced displacement of Palestinians to other countries has so far been unsuccessful and remains unlikely, Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, with support from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this month directed the Israeli Defence Force to design a plan to build a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah in southern Gaza. Their idea is to initially house about 600,000 Palestinians, expanding in due course to envelope Gaza’s entire population of more than 2 million. Each Palestinian would be screened on entry and once inside could only leave if they chose to emigrate abroad. Unsurprisingly there was an explosion of anger across the civilised world about the plan. Even in Israel.
A collective of Israeli international law scholars warned last week that the plan constitutes war crimes, crimes against humanity, and could even amount to genocide, citing forcible population transfer, deprivation of liberty, and persecution. Even the IDF leadership reportedly labelled the plan “unworkable”, warning it could take over a year to build at a cost of 15 billion shekels ($4 billion), jeopardise ongoing hostage and ceasefire negotiations and divert military resources. This received a sharp rebuke from Netanyahu who demanded “a more realistic” proposal, one that is more cost effective and delivered within days.
Noting the criticism, he quickly framed the relocation as “voluntary”: Palestinians would choose to move there, not be compelled, and had the choice of leaving Gaza if they wished. Former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, joined in the criticism. “It’s a concentration camp. I am sorry”, he told the Guardian last week. “If they (Palestinians) will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing”. That would be “the inevitable interpretation” of any attempt to create a camp for hundreds of thousands of people, he added. Perhaps the sharpest criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza came from the distinguished American political scientist and international relations scholar, Professor John Mearsheimer, currently the Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
When interviewed by Judge Napolitano on his hugely popular podcast “Judging Freedom” last week, Mearsheimer described the current rhetoric used by the Israeli government as “Orwellian”. When asked for his reaction to Netanyahu’s “humanitarian city”, Mearsheimer replied “You know, they talk about voluntary transfer, as if the Palestinians are voluntarily going to leave. They talk about a ‘humanitarian camp’ as if this were a humanitarian camp.
The more time goes by, Judge, and I hate to say this, and I say it reluctantly, but I believe it›s true. The Israelis look like the Nazis. Their rhetoric, their behaviour, it›s truly appalling, and it›s hard to believe that a Jewish state is behaving much the way the Third Reich did in the ‹30s and ‹40s’.” Wow! What an astonishing claim! The State of Israel compared by a distinguished academic to Hitler’s Third Reich, that starved and murdered more than 6 million Jews! What kind of Israel is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu creating?
