The Israeli government’s intensifying siege of north Gaza continues, and conditions there have deteriorated even further. The leaked letter from the Biden administration from earlier this month had no effect:
“The situation in northern Gaza is worse today than it was when the letter was written,” said Scott Paul, Oxfam America’s director for peace and security. “The areas that are being depopulated right now have received nothing.”
Almost 800,000 people in Gaza are enduring “emergency” or “catastrophe” levels of food scarcity, according to the IPC, a multi-agency initiative for measuring food security.
The Israeli government has been blocking aid for the last year, and over the last four weeks they have reduced aid delivery in north Gaza to nothing. Netanyahu evidently brushed off the Biden administration’s empty warning from two weeks ago, and we already know that the U.S. isn’t going to do anything about it. This is a deliberate policy of starvation being carried out in full view of the world, and the U.S. has acted as an accomplice to the government responsible for causing a man-made famine.
As if this weren’t already bad enough, the Knesset passed a new bill this week outlawing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The agency is critical to supporting the civilian population in Gaza, and there is no way for any other organization to fill the gap that will be left behind. Conditions will become even more dire if the agency is not permitted to operate. Banning UNRWA’s activities in the occupied territories will cause even greater loss of life from starvation and disease. It is an act of severe collective punishment against the people of Gaza.
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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.