Genocide will continue — even if the bombs stopped tomorrow.

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2024/04/04/if-the-war-ends-tomorrow/

As famine takes over in Gaza, the Israeli military is purposefully targeting humanitarian aid operations to ensure that its genocidal plan can continue. 

On Monday, Israeli warplanes repeatedly bombed a World Central Kitchen aid convoy as they drove away from distributing food in central Gaza, killing seven aid workers.

Chef Jose Andres, founder of World Central Kitchen and two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, described how the Israeli military targeted the aid convoy “systematically, car by car.” Israeli airstrike operators would have had full visibility of the World Central Kitchen logo on the top of the cars — a logo now with a blast hole straight through it. 

It has become increasingly clear that anyone attempting to prevent people in Gaza from starving to death is interfering with the Israeli government’s war aims — the genocide of Palestinians. They then become a target in their own right.

Aid agencies are getting the message. World Central Kitchen suspended its operations after the strike, and ANERA, another major aid agency, announced in the aftermath of the killings that it too is suspending its operations in Gaza “after six months of constant bombing and flagrant violations of international law.” UNRWA, meanwhile, has already been banned by the Israeli government from entering northern Gaza and defunded by the U.S. through 2025 following unsubstantiated allegations against a miniscule portion of its staff.

The humanitarian situation in Gaza is beyond dire. And as Israel forces aid organizations to withdraw, the few lifelines that exist are being cut.

Even if Israel’s bombs stopped tomorrow, this genocide would continue through starvation and disease alone.

The Israeli government’s determination to deepen the crisis in Gaza means that we may be looking at even more cataclysmic levels of death and hunger in months to come. 

Since October, when Israeli politicians jumped at the chance to cut food, medicine, power, and fuel from Gaza, the Israeli government has taken a two-pronged strategy: the total military decimation of Gaza, hand-in-hand with the deliberate creation of unliveable long-term conditions. Both have been carried out with the intention of killing as many Palestinians as possible. Even if the bombing ceases, the crisis conditions will remain just as deadly.

Six months later, the facts on the ground in Gaza paint a devastating picture of the crisis that the Israeli government has orchestrated.

• More than 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza have already been killed. 
• At least 6,500 more “excess deaths” can be expected, even if there was a ceasefire tomorrow – the result of injuries, hunger, and disease. 5,000 others are “missing,” likely buried under the rubble.
• This means the total number of people killed in this genocide is closer to 44,000.
• 74,000 people are currently wounded in Gaza, and receiving very partial medical care: During the genocide, the Israeli military has damaged all 36 hospitals in Gaza and 100 clinics and health institutions.
• In Gaza, children suffer from infectious diseases at a rate 23 times higher than normal. 
• 90% of children under the age of five in Gaza suffer from one or more infectious diseases. 
• 1.1 million people in Gaza are experiencing catastrophic food insecurity.
• One-third of children under two are acutely malnourished in the north of Gaza.

An internal State Department cable obtained by a journalist made it clear that the U.S. government recognizes the severity of this crisis, as it continues to do nothing to stop it. In the private assessment sent to the National Security Council, U.S. humanitarian aid experts wrote that the levels of hunger and malnutrition in Gaza are “unprecedented in modern history.”

Meanwhile, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby claimed on Tuesday that the State Department has “found no evidence of Israel violating humanitarian law.”