Almost every week, a high official of the U.S. government visits Israel to seek to coordinate strategy and planning for their joint genocidal assault against the people of Gaza.
As reported in the NEW YORK TIMES news item transmitted below, this week it is the turn again of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, this time accompanied by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country's top military officer.
This report says that Secretary Austin's visit "is part of a full-court press by the administration to urge Israel to wrap up the high-intensity part of the war" and to "transition to a more focused phase" which would involve "conducting more precise, intelligence-driven missions to find and kill Hamas leaders, rescue hostages and destroy tunnels."
Such reported American objectives, if accurate, should give rise to a fundamental question: What other objective do the decision-makers in the U.S. government believe that Israel has been seeking to achieve through the savagery of the current "high-intensity" phase?
For anyone with a functioning brain, it should be clear that the deaths, destruction and deprivation of basic necessities for sustaining human life which Israel has been inflicting on the Gaza Strip and its people for the past ten weeks make no military sense, no political sense and no diplomatic sense. They only make sense -- and make perfect sense -- if Israel's objective has been to make the Gaza Strip so literally unlivable that its entire population has no choice but to "evacuate" in order to survive.
It is difficult to believe that Messrs. Blinken, Sullivan and Austin are so stupid or delusional as not to recognize this, but they are not their government's ultimate decision-maker.
A week ago, the World Food Program warned that half of Gaza's population was already starving and that nine out of ten cannot eat every day (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67670679). AL JAZEERA has today been showing live images of "humanitarian aid" trucks being blocked and assaulted as soon as they enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing by desperate people who are throwing boxes of food or bottled water off them and helping themselves to these life-sustaining supplies. The World Health Organization has been warning of massive deaths from rapidly spreading diseases which the few hospitals still functioning, already struggling to cope with those wounded by Israeli bombardments, are unable to treat.
Prime Minister Netanyahu repeated yesterday that Israel will need to continue the "high-intensity" phase for more than another two months. This report cites U.S. officials as saying that "Mr. Biden wants to switch to more precise tactics in about three weeks."
Two more months of what Gaza has experienced during the past ten weeks should be more than ample to turn the Gaza Strip into a total wasteland and to achieve the "humanitarian evacution" of its entire population. Indeed, as the unsustainability of human life continues to accelerate, even Mr. Biden's preferred further three-week prolongation of the current "high-intensity" phase could be sufficient.
Who could prevent this Israeli/American "success", and how could it be prevented?
U.S. defense secretary travels to Israel to push leaders there to scale back war.
Mr. Austin will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant to discuss in detail when and how Israeli forces will carry out a new phase that American officials envision would involve smaller groups of elite forces that would move in and out of population centers in Gaza, conducting more precise, intelligence-driven missions to find and kill Hamas leaders, rescue hostages and destroy tunnels, U.S. officials said.
While the secretary is expected to voice support for Israel’s campaign to destroy Hamas’s ability to wage military operations, he will also reinforce the importance of taking civilian safety into account during operations and the critical need to increase delivery of humanitarian assistance, a senior Pentagon official said.
As a former four-star head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, Mr. Austin is deeply familiar with the painful lessons the American armed forces learned in the past two decades as they transitioned from major ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to more targeted operations and wants to share those lessons with Israeli officials, the Pentagon official said on condition of anonymity to discuss internal assessments.
In a sign of the urgency of this moment in the war, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will join Mr. Austin in Israel.
Ten weeks after Hamas’s initial attack on Israel, the death toll in the Gaza Strip has climbed to nearly 20,000, according to local health officials, and international rights group warn the humanitarian crisis there is spiraling even further. And the peril faced by the people kidnapped by Hamas and other armed groups — there are believed to be at least 100 individuals still being held captive — was evident on Friday, when Israeli forces mistakenly killed three Israeli hostages.
Mr. Austin’s visit, his second to Israel since Hamas killed about 1,200 people there on Oct. 7, is part of a full-court press by the administration to urge Israel to wrap up the high-intensity part of the war. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, met with Israeli leaders on Thursday about the direction of the conflict. Mr. Sullivan did not specify a timetable, but U.S. officials said Mr. Biden wants Israel to switch to more precise tactics in about three weeks.
The secretary will also travel to Bahrain, home of the U.S Navy’s Fifth Fleet, largely to discuss freedom of navigation and maritime security in the region. The United States is in discussions with its allies to expand a maritime task force to guard ships traveling through the Red Sea after several recent attacks by Houthi rebels on commercial vessels in what appears to be an escalating extension of Israel’s war with Hamas by Iranian-sponsored proxy forces.
Mr. Austin will then visit Qatar, where the Pentagon operates a major command center at Al Udeid air base. Mr. Austin will meet with senior Qatari officials who have played an important role in facilitating the release of hostages seized by Hamas fighters on Oct. 7.
Finally, the secretary is expected to visit briefly with the crew of the aircraft carrier Gerald Ford, which was dispatched to the eastern Mediterranean Sea near Israel in the days after the Hamas attack as the first of two U.S. carriers sent to the region to deter Iran and its proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq from widening the war in Gaza.
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