Dear friends--
There. Are. No. Words.
No words in the English language, or really any other human language-- except perhaps a primal scream-- can convey or encompass the depravity of an international system that allows a project of the deliberate starving of two-plus million people to proceed.
As a U.S. citizen, I want to be clear. This project of starving the Palestinians of Gaza is not just a U.S.-allowed Israeli project. It is not just a U.S.-supported Israeli project. It is a project being jointly undertaken by my government acting as a full partner alongside the Israeli government. And we citizens here in the United States-- a strong proportion of whom are opposed to Israel's actions in Gaza-- are currently powerless to end our government's active participation in this genocidal project.
Yesterday, Pres. Trump abruptly withdrew his envoy Steve Witkoff from the "proximity" negotiations over a Gaza ceasefire that Witkoff has been conducting in Qatar with representatives of Gaza's leading resistance movement, Hamas. Trump blamed Hamas-- and only Hamas-- for the breakdown of the talks. And he gave a clear green light for escalated Israeli military actions in Gaza, when he added this about Hamas: " I think what’s going to happen is they’re going to be hunted down.”
For their part, the Hamas leaders responded that:
to hear this stance (from the US) is truly a strange position, and we did not expect something like this, especially given what was reported that negotiations would resume...
As for us, we are... serious about reaching an agreement that ends this war completely and permanently, and also resolves the issue of prisoners held by the resistance.
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In Gaza, the Israeli military has been engaged in at least three different kinds of extremely damaging actions. First, they've been bombing and shelling various locations-- sometimes (possibly?) to attack suspected armed resistance fighters and sometimes to try to empty entire regions of their remaining residents, and to concentrate these people into ever smaller and smaller zones.
These two maps, from the UN on July 16 (left) and July 23 (right) show how this process of concentration has been going. Israeli military orders in Gaza "allow" Gaza's people to remain only in the zones that are not shaded either purple or red:
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Second, they've sent demolition squads riding massive armored bulldozers to systematically raze to the ground vast swathes of Gaza's densely built environment.
And third, they've sent armored and special forces units to work alongside hired American mercenaries to control, terrorize, and oftentimes attack the crowds of desperate Gazans thronging around the "aid" distribution centers run by the appallingly ill-named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Yesterday, the BBC ran a short, very important interview with a retired lieutenant-colonel from the U.S. military called Anthony Aguilar, who said he'd worked with the GHF's all-mercenary guard force in Gaza until the gross abuses he had witnessed there forced him to resign in protest.
Most of the abuses he described had been committed by Israeli military units working alongside the mercenary force: "Without question, I witnessed war crimes by the IDF," he said.
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The Trump administration's scofflawry, domestic and global
I've been using the term "scofflawry" a lot over the past 21 months to describe (mainly) Washington's complete disregard of the requirements of international law. Actually, what I like about the term is that it goes further than conveying just a disregard for the requirements of a legal system: beyond that, it also conveys a desire to scoff at, to mock, or even to actively seek the dismantlement of a whole system of law.
As I wrote in my newsletter last week, that attitude of scofflawry has marked the policies of the U.S. government toward the Palestine Question, and all the requirements of international law pertaining to it, for several decades now. And it became intensified after Israel's mid-October 2023 launching of its policy of genocide in Gaza. Pres. Biden scoffed at any notion that Israel's response to the October 7, 2023 breakout from Gaza needed to be guided by such requirements of international humanitarian law as that it be proportional to military goals sought, or that Israel should take active steps to prevent harm to non-combatants. Instead, he just piled ever larger and larger batches of U.S. weapons onto planes and ships to send them to Israel, while he crowed loudly about the "ironclad" strength of his support for Israel and worked ceaselessly to prevent any effective UN action on a ceasefire.
And now we have Pres. Trump, who scoffs openly at any suggestion that his administration's actions need to be guided by the requirements of any broader legal system-- both internationally and domestically. In his six months in office he has gleefully torn up many of the constraints that the U.S. Constitution should have placed on him, in both spheres.
Domestically, he has ridden roughshod over fundamental constitutional values including the separation of powers between the administration and the legislative and judicial branches, all of which were designed to function as "co-equal" branches of the federal system. We have seen this in his use of the (quite extra-legal) DOGE cabal to over-rule, in many instances, the idea that Congress should uniquely control the "power of the purse." We've seen it in the (often quite illegal) harshness and cruelty of his actions against immigrants. We've seen it in the attacks he's launched against universities and the whole concept of academic freedoms. And we're seeing it now unfolding in his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein file.
(Have you noticed how, in many of these actions, there has been a clear pro-Israel or anti-Palestinian connection? In the campaign against immigrants and the actions against universities, the whole "Gaza issue" proved to be tightly embedded within the broader Trump-era campaign of repression...)
At the global level, meanwhile, Trump's scofflawry has made Biden's look penny-ante by comparison. As I've noted before, he doesn't even bother to pay heed to any notion of the kind of "rules-based order" that has pertained between states of European origin since 1645, the year when the Treaty of Westphalia codified the idea of different nation states coexisting in a system in which they did not seek to overthrow each other's rulers on ideological grounds.
With Trump it's been, "Let's take Greenland!" "Canada as our 51st state!" Partnering ever more openly with Israel in its pursuit of genocide in Gaza and a completely illegal military attack against Iran. Trashing the international trading system. Storming out of venerable international bodies.
Many great civil-society organizations here in the United States have worked hard to end this active scofflawry-- both regarding Gaza, and now, in the Trump era, at the broader level too. But we have been quite unable to succeed. And it's true that there's been a significant and welcome increase in public support here for the idea that Palestinians are people too and deserve to have their full human rights... But still, the extreme clunkiness, the disregard of public opinion, and the grossly distorting role that money plays in the U.S. electoral system between them mean we're unlikely to see any domestically motivated change in U.S. policies on Palestine any time soon.
And meantime, our friends, our colleagues, and our brothers and sisters in Gaza are dying-- are being deliberately killed by Israel, in numerous ways-- in ever greater numbers.
All of us who care about this carnage (or indeed, about the international rule of law, more broadly) need to see concerted action by the rest of the world to over-rule Trump's genocidal collusion with, and protection of, Israel at the earliest possible date.
In the early 1940s, the Axis powers besieged Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) for 872 days. The city's 3.2 million people suffered an estimated 1.5 million deaths, many from starvation, before the Soviet Red Army was able to break the siege in January 1944. Now, 80 years later, how can the siege of Gaza be broken?
![]() There are various small projects underway to try to do this. The courageous activists of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition set sail from Gallipoli, Italy, last Sunday, aiming to take some aid and a lot of hope and solidarity over to their friends and colleagues in Gaza. Just hours before they sailed, they suffered some serious sabotage: "The truck sent to deliver fresh water to our boat for washing and cooking on the journey, carried not water, but sulfuric acid. It splashed on a crew member’s leg, causing chemical burns... " Read more about that, here.
Their boat, the Handala, is nearing Gaza now. Track it in real time here.
And the Jordanian government is reportedly also gearing up to do a repeat of the aid air-drops into Gaza that it did last year (to very little effect.)
But none of those efforts will end the now-occurring mass starvation in Gaza, or indeed the broader US-Israel campaign of genocide of which it is a part.
The Commissioner General of the UN Agency UNRWA notes that,
UNRWA frontline health workers, are surviving on one small meal a day, often just lentils, if at all. They are increasingly fainting from hunger while at work.
When caretakers cannot find enough to eat, the entire humanitarian system is collapsing...
Allow humanitarian partners to bring unrestricted and uninterrupted humanitarian assistance to Gaza.
We, at UNRWA, have the equivalent of 6,000 loaded trucks of food and medical supplies in Jordan and Egypt.
But the US-Israel alliance continues to prevent the UN from carrying out its full, unimpeded humanitarian mission in Gaza... While it also continues to block any progress toward the ceasefire that is so desperately needed, along with any progress toward ending the illegal, 58-year-long Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which lies at the root of the region's towering mountain of woes.
Back on June 14, the Just World Ed board issued a Call To Humanity that argued that only concerted action by China, the European Union, the BRICS nations, ASEAN, and other nations can, "nullify Washington’s veto on Middle Eastern issues and thereby... regain for the United Nations the degree of diplomatic leadership with respect to war prevention and global security that was promised to the peoples of the world in the UN Charter."
We repeat this call, with even more urgency, today.
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Two more powerful PalCast episodes
![]() I just want to note that since I last wrote this newsletter, our amazing friends and colleagues Yousef Aljamal and Tony Groves have released two more episodes of the PalCast that bring to listeners the powerful voices of writers and thinkers who've been continuing to struggle against all the odds in Gaza. These were their conversations with writer Huda Skaik, and then with journalist and academic Ahmed Al-Najjar.
You can catch Huda's episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Or Ahmed's, also on Apple or Spotify. It is so important to have these testimonies, live from within the this ongoing genocide's "heart of darkness."
Our deep thanks for bringing us these podcasts, Yousef and Tony.
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Well, I guess for someone who said she had "no words" for what is happening Gaza, I've penned quite a lot of them here. Sorry if you think I went on too long...
You stay well! Such terrible days we're living through.
Onward to building the better future that we know is possible--
~ Helena
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