By Ralph Nader
July 12, 2023
In
the early weeks of Israel’s massive bombardment and invasion of Gaza,
the Israeli military was killing anyone who moved and destroying
anything that stood. In response to telephone calls from President Joe
Biden and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urging Netanyahu to
minimize civilian casualties reportedly he would respond: Don’t lecture
me, look at what you did to Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden.
The
combined official death toll from these two atomic bombs and the
firebombing of Dresden was around 239 thousand civilians. After nine
months of the Israeli government’s relentless day and night genocide war
machine, bristling with the latest U.S. weaponry, Israel has killed far
more than that number of Gaza civilians. In a tiny enclave with 2.3
million people (compared to the total population of Japan and Germany in
World War II of 152 million), at least 300,000 Palestinians, mostly
women and children, have been killed with more dying every day. Daily
annihilations by F-16s, tanks, and arbitrary executions, combined with
Israeli bans on food, water, medicine, electricity, and fuel have
generated starvation, diseases, untreated injuries, homelessness for
almost all Gazans. The destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and healthcare
facilities adds to the military-caused casualty toll.
Forty-five
thousand babies have been born into the rubble since October. Infants
are plagued by contaminated water, poor nutrition, and a dire shortage
of healthcare. Their mothers are starving. What about the plight of a
similar number of one- or two-year-olds? What about fifty thousand
serious diabetics without insulin? An even larger number of cancer
patients are denied their medicine and care. Hundreds of healthcare
workers were killed with the hungry, exhausted, sick, and injured
survivors staggering bravely to those broken down hospitals that haven’t
been entirely demolished.
It
isn’t as if major global health and food program organizations have not
been sounding the alarms of famine, epidemics and military violence
under the unfolding eradication of Gaza’s trapped defenseless
inhabitants. Organizations such as UNICEF, the Global Food Program,
Oxfam, the UN Humanitarian Agency, The Integrated Food Security Phase
Classification (IPC), USAID and Biden’s own Humanitarian adviser, David
Satterfield, know the looming numbers that spell omnicide for the
families of Gaza.
Back
in December, Devi Sridhar, the chair of global health at the University
of Edinburgh estimated half a million Gazans will likely die in 2024 if
conditions causing tens of thousands of deaths in the last three months
of 2023 continue. Conditions have gotten worse as the causes of
mortality have grown and intensified week by week.
In
an admittedly conservative estimate, three researchers published in the
prestigious British medical journal “The Lancet,” that, as of mid-June,
“it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more
deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.”
Why
then does the media stick to the official Hamas Health Ministry’s huge
undercount now at about 39,000 deaths? First, early on, the Ministry
took its figures from names of the deceased provided by hospitals and
morgues which are now devastated and inoperative. The Hamas regime
doesn’t mind this undercount since it lessens the criticism that it
cannot protect its own people and shelter them from what they knew was
coming after October 7th from the most racist, genocidal, and
expansionist Israeli regime ever.
Netanyahu
– who has boasted over the years to his Likud Party, that he has backed
and helped fund Hamas due to its opposition to a two-state solution –
likes the vast undercount of his mass slaughter.
But
there are other reasons for this adoption of the low Hamas figures. For
Biden, it keeps down the intensity of domestic protests demanding
decisive White House pressure on Netanyahu for a permanent ceasefire,
the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, and an end to the blockade
to allow in the thousands of trucks carrying humanitarian aid paid for
by the U.S.
Netanyahu’s
long-time prohibition of all Israeli and foreign war correspondents
from entering Gaza as independent reporters has concealed from the world
much of the carnage in these killing fields. Finally, finally, on July 11, 2024, more than 70 media and civil society organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP, CNN and the BBC signed an open letter demanding that Israel “give journalists independent access to Gaza.”
Palestinian
journalists in Gaza are being hunted down by Netanyahu, who allows
killing scores of reporters and their families. The survivors are
bravely trying to report on the devastation for outsiders and social
media. Nonetheless, the mainstream press, to do its job, has to have
reporters on the ground.
Netanyahu
is a master at biding his time and stalling to keep his job. Despised
by three out of four Israelis for both his domestic tyrannies and for
collapsing his multi-tiered border defense on October 7, he is also
under indictment for political corruption by Israeli prosecutors.
Israeli street protests are getting larger by the week and the majority
of Israelis want new elections now!
The
reckoning over what Netanyahu’s savage terror state has done to
innocent Palestinians from infants in incubators to the elderly in
wheelchairs is coming to Israeli society. As the soldiers return, some
will be narrating the horrors they saw and were ordered to produce.
Already six reservists have told an Israeli magazine that they were
encouraged to shoot and kill any Palestinian they saw on the street or
in their homes. There are no operating rules of engagement as required
by international law. They gave examples of the target practice, as they
told the reporter they would no longer serve in Gaza.
Such soldiers are called “refuseniks,” who became a courageously articulate, if harassed, protest group about twenty years ago. (See Israeli Refuseniks Forsake Army Despite Post-October 7 Nationalist Frenzy, The Intercept January 2, 2024)
As
more information flows through the weakening Israeli censorship system,
the many Israeli human rights associations will be strengthened (See December 13, 2023, an open letter titled, “Stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe” to
President Biden by 16 Israeli human rights groups which appeared in the
New York Times). The exaggeration of the Hamas threat to Israel,
following a one-time homicide-suicide mission through a mysteriously
open border into Israel on October 7, 2023 will become evident. Hamas
had a militia of some 20,000 fighters with small arms and dwindling
ammunition, hiding in tunnels against a military, nuclear-armed
superpower with over 400,000 army soldiers, hundreds of tanks and 1500
F-16 pilots.
Joe
Biden has just authorized another arsenal of 500 lb. bombs for
Netanyahu to use against the remnants of Gazan civilian life. He touts
his refusal to send Israel any more 2000 lb. bombs capable of destroying
entire neighborhoods.
Meanwhile,
deep in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies, analysts are
creating scenarios of what forthcoming retaliation against our country
could look like. With cheap, advanced armed drones increasingly
producible by more makers anywhere, these scenarios are not the stuff of
science fiction.
By
kicking the two-state solution down the road for decades, favoring
Israel, with supine Congressional backing, our presidents have assured
that our own national security, not to mention our tradition of free
speech in the U.S., is increasingly vulnerable.