The US will begin air dropping food aid to the people of Gaza, President Joe Biden announced on Friday, as the humanitarian crisis deepens and Israel continues to resist opening additional land crossings to allow more assistance into the war-torn strip.
Speaking in the Oval Office, Biden said the US would be “pulling out every stop” to get additional aid into Gaza, which has been under heavy bombardment by Israel since the October 7 Hamas terror attacks.
“Aid flowing to Gaza is nowhere nearly enough,” the US President said, noting “hundreds of trucks” should be entering the enclave.
Biden said the US is “going to insist that Israel facilitate more trucks and more routes to get more and more people the help they need, no excuses”.
He also noted the efforts to broker a deal to free the hostages and secure an “immediate ceasefire” that would allow additional aid in.
Children always make up a huge chunk of civilian casualties in war. Why is it any surprise it’s absurdly high when Hamas is using entire cities as human shields?
A lack of food, water, shelter and sanitation continues to put children’s lives at risk as they suffer under relentless airstrikes with no safe place to go, said UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who recently returned from the enclave.
The UNICEF spokesperson explained that the “safe zones” were “anything but safe” because they had been designated unilaterally by Israel alone and lacked “sufficient resources for survival”: food, water, medicine, protection.
Mr. Elder added that more than 130,000 of children under two are not receiving “critical life-saving breastfeeding and age-appropriate complementary feeding” such as micronutrient supplementation.
‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza
Compared to previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the current war — which Israel has named “Operation Iron Swords,” and which began in the wake of the Hamas-led assault on southern Israel on October 7 — has seen the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks, which sources say the army defines as “power targets” (“matarot otzem”).
The massive attacks on power targets and private residences came at the same time as the Israeli army, on Oct. 13, called on the 1.1 million residents of the northern Gaza Strip — most of them residing in Gaza City — to leave their homes and move to the south of the Strip. By that date, a record number of power targets had already been bombed, and more than 1,000 Palestinians had already been killed, including hundreds of children.
Although it is unprecedented for the Israeli army to attack more than 1,000 power targets in five days, the idea of causing mass devastation to civilian areas for strategic purposes was formulated in previous military operations in Gaza, honed by the so-called “Dahiya Doctrine” from the Second Lebanon War of 2006.
Not only has the current war seen Israel attack an unprecedented number of power targets, it has also seen the army abandon prior policies that aimed at avoiding harm to civilians. Whereas previously the army’s official procedure was that it was possible to attack power targets only after all civilians had been evacuated from them, testimonies from Palestinian residents in Gaza indicate that, since October 7, Israel has attacked high-rises with their residents still inside, or without having taken significant steps to evacuate them, leading to many civilian deaths.
Such attacks very often result in the killing of entire families, as experienced in previous offensives; according to an investigation by AP conducted after the 2014 war, about 89 percent of those killed in the aerial bombings of family homes were unarmed residents, and most of them were children and women.
Yeah the people in Gaza lie constantly about what happens. None of them are ever members of Hamas. Nobody ever saw anyone using tunnels. Nobody knows who is launching the rockets.
Yeah the unarmed families and the houses, it’s horrible. Unfortunately, digging tunnels under your house and using them to launch terror attacks for decades on end is as good as packing your family into the car and driving them right into a war zone. Who would do that? Hamas members and loyalists. They call it martyrdom. They literally stand on the roof of buildings after being warning of an incoming airstrike, trying to get a pension.
Palestinians have been terrorized for generations by Israel under occupation and apartheid. Armed resistance groups don’t pop into existence for no reason. You don’t understand the history or meaning of a Martyr in Palestine. Literally anyone who dies at the hands of the Israeli Occupying Force is considered a Martyr. You are being delusional and racist if you think Palestinian people including women and children want to die. They have hopes and dreams like anyone else, you’re doing dehumanizing rhetoric. Palestinians are being exterminated in Gaza every day, and people like you are defending it without a second guess.
