Hunger since the day he was born: how famine haunts Gaza’s children | Gaza

‘Not seen as fully human’

But it’s not just providing aid that can be fatal. Many civilians were killed while collecting it. In February, more than 100 Palestinians seeking food from aid trucks in northern Gaza were killed and hundreds of others were injured after Israeli forces opened fire on them. It became known as the ‘flour massacre’. And Fault Lines found many more similar incidents.

Fault Lines worked with open source researchers from Forensic Architecture, a research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, to investigate the data behind attacks on people seeking help. Using social media videos, news reports, health ministry data and satellite images, researchers were able to document more than 40 attacks on civilians seeking help.

“So when we hear about the flour massacre, it’s not one isolated incident that was an accident,” explains Peter Polack, researcher at Forensic Architecture. “As we investigated more of these attacks, we began to see that they were systematic in nature and not random.”

The study also found that Israeli attacks did not just kill civilians seeking help. They also destroyed important infrastructure receiving humanitarian aid. Forensic Architecture documented sixteen attacks on bakeries between October and November 2023, sometimes while people were queuing for bread. And by January, 107 shelters receiving aid had been destroyed.

“When the aid is initially distributed, flour is distributed to bakeries. Bakeries are being targeted. When it is spread to schools, schools become targets,” says Julia Ngo of Forensic Architecture.

Then, at the beginning of the new year, there were attacks on police and civilians escorting humanitarian convoys. The police have suspended their activities. Local kinship networks of influential families took over the escorts, but were subsequently attacked.

“They essentially create a chilling effect so that a clear message is sent: If you receive aid, if you plan aid, if you work with it in any capacity, you are at risk,” Polack says. say.

We asked Israeli authorities about the findings of this investigation. They didn’t respond.

But we know that the decision to withhold humanitarian aid from Gaza is popular in Israeli politics. Our team analyzed hundreds of messages in Hebrew on X from members of the Israeli government. We found that a majority of Israeli Knesset members oppose humanitarian aid to Gaza.

There were 40 posts supporting the use of famine as a weapon of war and 12 advocating a full siege of Gaza. Another 234 posts expressed their opposition to the humanitarian aid and 65 other posts argued that the aid should be conditional on the return of the prisoners.

South African prosecutors have submitted comments like this to the International Court of Justice in The Hague as evidence of Israel’s intention to starve the people of Gaza.

“The distinguishing feature of this case is not the silence as such, but the recurrence and repetition of genocidal statements in all state areas of Israel,” South African prosecutor Tembeka Ngcukaitobi told the court in January.

“It’s like a murderer just holding a knife and saying, ‘I’m going to kill these people’ and doing it… and we’re still wondering if there was foul play in this particular crime,” says Alex Smith , specialist in child abuse. and maternal health and former USAID contractor, says. USAID is the agency responsible for deploying U.S. humanitarian assistance.

Smith was scheduled to present at a USAID conference on maternal health in Gaza in March, but was told the day before that his talk had been canceled. Then he resigned.

“Decisions are made based on politics and who people are, and certain people, depending on their race and ethnicity and their geography, where they happen to live, are not seen as fully human,” he says.

The US ‘willfully denies the facts’

The US gives Israel about $4 billion in security funding every year, but the Biden administration has rejected calls to make US security assistance to Israel conditional on improving the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Instead, the US has relied on ineffective measures such as airborne landings and a now-defunct pier.

Humanitarian groups have long insisted that the most effective way to get aid into Gaza is through established ground routes.

The government even faced unprecedented dissent from within for its unyielding support of Israel, despite mounting evidence that the country was committing war crimes in Gaza. At least a dozen officials resigned in protest, and several dissenting memos denouncing Biden’s policies had been circulated from USAID at the State Department.

In April, Gilbert, the former State Department official, was asked for her input on a Biden administration report to the U.S. Congress on whether Israel committed war crimes in Gaza. Based on reporting from its partners on the ground, it recommended that Israel block aid. But when the report was released the following month, it found that Israel was not impeding the flow of humanitarian aid. Gilbert resigned as a result of that report.

“The government is deliberately denying the facts on the ground because this would have implications for cutting off security funding,” Gilbert said. “The weapons are the engine that drives this war, and we take no responsibility for our role.”

There is a US law called 620I that bans arms transfers to countries that block humanitarian aid. If the Biden administration were to acknowledge that Israel would deny aid to the Palestinians in Gaza, this would trigger the law and the weapons would have to be stopped immediately.

When asked by Fault Lines at a press conference about how the US continues to support Israel with weapons despite evidence that it is breaking its own laws, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the US has pressured its ally to open border crossings to allow more aid. in. “So I would encourage you to read the report that we released a few months ago on this issue, which looked at Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law and their work, and whether they had done a good enough job to to let humanitarian aid in, where we said there were some roadblocks that needed to be overcome,” Miller said. “And we had been working to overcome that. And we had seen Israel take steps to allow humanitarian aid in.”