No end to US-enabled carnage and Israel’s territorial ambitions as 2024 winds down
Water is life, and by cutting off Gaza’s water, fuel and electricity supply, blocking water-related aid from entering the Gaza Strip, and damaging or destroying over 84 percent of Gaza’s water and sanitation infrastructure Israel is “committing the crime against humanity of extermination,” according to a 185-page report released on Dec. 19 by Human Rights Watch.
Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water follows in the wake of the Amnesty International report on Israel’s genocidal war. It details what it is like to live on between 2 -9 liters of water a day, when the WHO calculates that 50-100 liters are required for basic needs and it takes 24.6 liters for a single toilet flush. It describes people drinking seawater, diseases proliferating as sewage flows through the streets, and the army methodically wiring reservoirs with explosives, and bombing 31 of Gaza’s 54 water reservoirs, municipal wells and desalination plants, and then firing on workers trying to repair the damage. As the known death toll from military attacks soars above 45,000, the report paints a harrowing picture of the impact of water denial and starvation on pregnant women and babies, and estimates that more than 60,000 Palestinians died from malnutrition between October 2023 and June 2024.
On the same day, Dec. 19, Médecins Sans Frontières brought out another damning report entitled Gaza: Life in a death trap. It documents Israel’s ethnic cleansing of large areas of the Gaza Strip, the obliteration of Gaza’s health care sector and what it is like to be “deprived of water, submerged by waste.”
It is not just in Gaza that the water infrastructure is being destroyed. Israeli troops, who have occupied 500 square kilometers of Syria including the Syrian side of Jabal al-Sheikh (Mt. Hermon) on the Golan Heights, have reportedly smashed pipes supplying drinking water in Syrian villages in order to force residents to flee and seized control of the rich water sources of Quneitra. On Dec. 17, Netanyahu visited the summit of Mt. Hermon and said that Israeli troops would be there indefinitely. The family of Muhammad al-Jolani, the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that led the overthrow of Assad’s government, had been expelled from the Golan Heights by the Israeli army in 1967. Israel now intends to double the number of its settlers living on the Golan Heights.
For Israel, a country without declared borders, the crippling of Hezbollah offers the opportunity to expand its territory in both Syria and southern Lebanon, where it has violated the truce, sometimes with deadly results, more than 130 times. The map of a proposed ‘national home’ presented by the World Zionist Organization to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 included territory all the way up to a prime water source, Lebanon’s Litani River, which may now be ripe for the seizing. Meanwhile, Israel and the US - which has some 2,000 troops based in Syria - have been subjecting Syria to devastating bombardments, with Israel striking what it describes as military sites well over 800 times, and the US using B-52s, F-15s and A-10 war planes in the effort to eliminate ISIS. According to a Dec. 16 report by veteran war analyst Elijah Magnier, “The bombing of Tartus with 16 missiles caused an earthquake measuring 3.5 on the Richter scale, underscoring the expanding scope of Israel’s strategy. These strikes go far beyond Israel’s publicly stated objective of countering Iranian influence in Syria. They represent an assault on Syrian sovereignty and infrastructure, aiming to strip Syria of its defensive capabilities and render it strategically impotent.”
Meanwhile, the self-appointed ‘leader of the free world’ is looking increasingly isolated on the world stage. The US delivered another ‘no’ vote in the UN General Assembly on Dec. 17, this time to oppose a resolution affirming the right of Palestinians to self-determination and calling for an end to the occupation. Standing with the US were just six countries: Israel, right-wing Argentina and Paraguay, two island nations where US bases are located (Micronesia and Papua New Guinea) and Nauru. One hundred and seventy-two countries voted in favor of the resolution, including European nations and even Hungary, which had lined up with the US on Dec. 3 and again on Dec. 12 to oppose similar General Assembly resolutions.
Will the US be similarly isolated in its refusal to implement International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant? Probably not. A piece in Mondoweiss about the recent gathering of the ICC’s Assembly of State Parties in The Hague describes the tactics of intimidation used against the ICC, including by US politicians who helped push H.R. 8282, the ‘Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act’ sanctioning the ICC through the House of Representatives, and the reluctance of some governments to say they would enforce the warrants if given the opportunity to do so. Palestinian human rights attorney Raji Sourani demanded of wavering delegates, “Do you want Gaza and Palestine to be the graveyard of international law?”
A renewed push is underway to stop Gaza from being the graveyard of US domestic law as well. On Dec. 17, five Palestinian plaintiffs with ties to Gaza filed a federal law suit against Secretary of State Blinken in the Washington DC District Court with the assistance of DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now). Their suit demands that Blinken end the ‘Israel exception’ to the 1997 Leahy Law, which bars US military support to army units that are implicated in gross human rights violations. Israel has reportedly never been sanctioned under the law despite its abysmal human rights record. On the same day, 20 House members wrote a letter to Blinken and Secretary of Defense Austin demanding that they enforce US laws and stop sending arms to Israel because of how they are being used in Gaza. Meanwhile, as Biden’s April 2024 delay in shipping 2,000 pound bombs to Israel has continued to fuel criticism of the Biden Administration by both Netanyahu and Republicans, the US is thwarting Spain’s efforts to impose an arms embargo by shipping weapons for Israel to and from its Spanish naval station.
As Gaza fades from the headlines, the carnage largely inflicted by US weapons is unrelenting. The repeated strikes, sometimes with one-ton bombs, on the tented ‘humanitarian zone’ of Mawasi in southern Gaza have “simply vaporized” bodies, according to a UN official and made residents in northern Gaza reluctant to follow Israeli evacuation orders. In the north, during Dec. 14-16 Kamal Adwan Hospital was subjected to non-stop bombing and targeting by snipers, adding an orthopedic surgeon and nurse to the grim statistic of more than one thousand healthcare workers killed since the war began. On Dec. 16, at least 43 people were killed and “shredded bodies” left everywhere when Israel fired missiles at a school in Beit Hanoun where some 1,500 people had taken shelter. Later on the same day, Israel attacked a schoolhousing the displaced in a supposed ‘safe zone’ in the southern town of Khan Younis, killing 20 people, including many women and children, who were blown to pieces in the blast. One survivor lost 14 members of his family in the missile strike. On Dec. 20, a family of 10 was slaughtered in their Jabalya home, including seven children.
The sentiment that “there are no innocents in Gaza” dominates the 4.3 mile wide Netzarim Corridor separating the north from the south of the Gaza Strip where Israel has dug in to stay. Haaretz gives a particularly gruesome description of the consequences of regarding everyone in the area as a terrorist, to be killed on the spot, including children annihilated by missiles fired from combat helicopters. One soldier described four unarmed people who “despite clearly not appearing as militants” were mowed down by tank fire. The sole survivor – who had been trying to reach his uncles in northern Gaza -- was put in a cage, stripped of his clothes and left there, as “soldiers passing by spat at him…Finally, a military interrogator came, questioned him briefly while holding a gun to his head, then ordered his release….Later, officers praised us for killing ‘terrorists.’ I couldn’t understand what they meant.”
Around the West Bank, where residents have experienced a surge of harassment, brutality and arrests, the Israeli army and settlers have killed nearly 1,000 Palestinians since Oct. 7, 2023. Refugee camps and farmers in their fields have been prime targets. On Dec. 19, four people were killed by a missile strike on a vehicle in Tulkarm refugee camp and an 80-year-old woman with a hearing disability was slain in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus. Jenin refugee camp – where Israeli military operations have damaged the water infrastructure - has been among the hardest hit. On Dec. 14, security forces of the Palestinian Authority (PA) surrounded the camp to confront armed resistance fighters, as the US pressured it to do more to restore ‘law and order.’ According to one report, the Biden Administration has asked Israel to strengthen the PA in its fight against militants by allowing the US to provide it with more military assistance.
Israel has meanwhile been accelerating its demolition of Palestinian homes and other structures, including in Oslo-designated ‘Area B’ where the PA is supposed to have some say in construction enforcement. Settlers led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich prefer a weak PA to prevent it, in Smotrich’s words, from establishing “a terrorist state that threatens our security.”
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
