International Women’s Day
Codepink March/Rally for Gaza!
Saturday, March 9, 2024, 12:00 Noon
Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, CA
Gather at Welcome Center Plaza
Southeast end of GG Bridge at 11:30 A.M.
March begins on Eastern Walkway at 12:00 Noon
Rally at Welcome Center Plaza after the march at 1:30 P.M.
Optional: Bring food to share after the rally to celebrate International Women’s Day and our shared commitment for Global Peace Everywhere, from Gaza to Ukraine!
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Art Against Imprisonment Presents
A Benefit for a New Oakland Mural
Sumud: Resistance Until Liberation
A collaboration between artists and activists that explores and confronts the deep interconnections between the brutal systems of imprisonment in the U.S. and Palestine.
Caroline Davis on Saxophone
Satya Chima, CCWP
Opium Sabbah, Oakland Jericho Movement
Sunday, March 10, 2:00 P.M.
Eastside Cultural Center
2277 International Blvd., Oakland
For more information contact:
artagainstimprisonment@gmail.com
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Thursday, March 14, 2024 at 5:30 P.M.
Jack Adams Hall
San Francisco State University
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See Gaza Strip Access Restrictions.pdf since 2007 at:
** This figure is released by the Israeli military, showing the soldiers whose names “were allowed to be published.”
Source: mondoweiss.net
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*Major Announcement*
Claudia De la Cruz wins
Peace and Freedom Party primary in California!
We have an exciting announcement. The votes are still being counted in California, but the Claudia-Karina “Vote Socialist” campaign has achieved a clear and irreversible lead in the Peace and Freedom Party primary. Based on the current count, Claudia has 46% of the vote compared to 40% for Cornel West. A significant majority of PFP’s newly elected Central Committee, which will formally choose the nominee at its August convention, have also pledged their support to the Claudia-Karina campaign.
We are excited to campaign in California now and expect Claudia De la Cruz to be the candidate on the ballot of the Peace and Freedom Party in November.
We achieved another big accomplishment this week - we’re officially on the ballot in Hawai’i! This comes after also petitioning to successfully gain ballot access in Utah. We are already petitioning in many other states. Each of these achievements is powered by the tremendous effort of our volunteers and grassroots organizers across the country. When we’re organized, people power can move mountains!
We need your help to keep the momentum going. Building a campaign like this takes time, energy, and money. We know that our class enemies — the billionaires, bankers, and CEO’s — put huge sums toward loyal politicians and other henchmen who defend their interests. They will use all the money and power at their disposal to stop movements like ours. As an independent, socialist party, our campaign is relying on contributions from the working class and people like you.
We call on each and every one of our supporters to set up a monthly or one-time donation to support this campaign to help it keep growing and reaching more people. A new socialist movement, independent of the Democrats and Republicans, is being built but it will only happen when we all pitch in.
The Claudia-Karina campaign calls to end all U.S. aid to Israel. End this government’s endless wars. We want jobs for all, with union representation and wages that let us live with dignity. Housing, healthcare, and education for all - without the lifelong debt. End the ruthless attacks on women, Black people, immigrants, and LGBTQ people. These are just some of the demands that are resonating across the country. Help us take the next step:
Volunteer: https://votesocialist2024.com/volunteer
Donate: https://votesocialist2024.com/donate
See you in the streets,
Claudia & Karina
Don't Forget! Join our telegram channel for regular updates: https://t.me/+KtYBAKgX51JhNjMx
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We are all Palestinian
Listen and view this beautiful, powerful, song by Mistahi Corkill on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQwuhbLczgI
Greetings,
Here is my new song and music video, We are all Palestinian, linked below. If you find it inspiring, please feel free to share with others. All the best!
Mistahi
We are all Palestinian
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Labor for Palestine
Thousands of labor representatives marched Saturday, December 16, in Oakland, California. —Photo by Leon Kunstenaar
Video of December 16th Labor rally for Palestine.
Bay Area Unions and Workers Rally and March For Palestine In Oakland
https://youtu.be/L9k79honqIA
For More Information:
bayarealabor4palestine@gmail.com
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
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Just Like The Nazis Did
By David Rovics
After so many decades of patronage
By the world’s greatest empire
So many potential agreements
Were rejected by opening fire
After crushing so many uprisings
Now they’re making their ultimate bid
Pursuing their Final Solution
Just like the Nazis did
They forced refugees into ghettos
Then set the ghettos aflame
Murdering writers and poets
And so no one remember their names
Killing their entire families
The grandparents, women and kids
The uncles and cousins and babies
Just like the Nazis did
They’re bombing all means of sustaining
Human life at all
See the few shelters remaining
Watch as the tower blocks fall
They’re bombing museums and libraries
In order to get rid
Of any memory of the people who lived here
Just like the Nazis did
They’re saying these people are animals
And they should all end up dead
They’re sending soldiers into schools
And shooting children in the head
The rhetoric is identical
And with Gaza off the grid
They’ve already said what happens next
Just like the Nazis did
Words of war for domestic consumption
And lies for all the rest
To try to distract our attention
Among their enablers in the West
Because Israel needs their imports
To keep those pallets on the skids
They need fuel and they need missiles
Just like the Nazis did
They’re using food as a weapon
They’re using water that way, too
They’re trying to kill everyone in Gaza
Or make them flee, it’s true
As the pundits talk of “after the war”
Like with the Fall of Madrid
The victors are preparing for more
Just like the Nazis did
But it’s after the conquest’s complete
If history is any guide
When the occupying army
Is positioned to decide
When disease and famine kills
Whoever may have hid
Behind the ghetto walls
Just like the Nazis did
All around the world
People are trying to tell
There's a genocide unfolding
Ringing alarm bells
But with such a powerful axis
And so many lucrative bids
They know who wants their money
Just like the Nazis did
There's so many decades of patronage
For the world's greatest empire
So many potential agreements
Were rejected by opening fire
They're crushing so many uprisings
Now they're making their ultimate bid
Pursuing their final solution
Just like the Nazis did
Just like the Nazis did
Just like the Nazis did
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Free Julian Assange
Immediate Repeated Action Needed to Free Assange
Please call your Congressional Representatives, the White House, and the DOJ. Calls are tallied—they do count. We are to believe we are represented in this country. This is a political case, so our efforts can change things politically as well. Please take this action as often as you can:
Find your representatives:
https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
Leave each of your representatives a message individually to:
· Drop the charges against Julian Assange
· Speak out publicly against the indictment and
· Sign on to Rashida Tlaib's letter to the DOJ to drop the charges:
202-224-3121—Capitol Main Switchboard
Leave a message on the White House comment line to
Demand Julian Assange be pardoned:
202-456-1111
Tuesday–Thursday, 11:00 A.M.–3:00 P.M. EST
Call the DOJ and demand they drop the charges against Julian Assange:
202-353-1555—DOJ Comment Line
202-514-2000 Main Switchboard
Sign the petition:
https://dontextraditeassange.com/petition/
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical Defense Fund, Official 2024
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Leonard Peltier Update - Not One More Year
Coleman 1 has gone on permanent lockdown.
The inmates are supposed to be allowed out two hours a day. I have not heard from Leonard since the 18th.
The last time I talked to Leonard, he asked where his supporters were. He asked me if anyone cared about these lockdowns.
Leonard lives in a filthy, cold cell 22 to 24 hours a day. He has not seen a dentist in ten years. I asked him, “On a scale of 1 to 10, is your pain level at 13?” He said, “Something like that.” Leonard is a relentless truth-teller. He does not like it when I say things that do not make sense mathematically.
That is why Leonard remains imprisoned. He will not lie. He will not beg, grovel, or denounce his beliefs.
Please raise your voice. Ask your representatives why they have abdicated their responsibility to oversee the Bureau of Prisons and ensure they adhere to Constitutional law.
Uhuru, The African People’s Socialist Party, has stepped up for Leonard. NOT ONE MORE YEAR.
Fight for Free Speech – YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM8GDeGv90E
Leonard should not have spent a day in prison. Click “LEARN” on our website to find out what really happened on that reservation:
www.freeleonardpeltiernow.org
Write to:
Leonard Peltier 89637-132
USP Coleman 1
P.O. Box 1033
Coleman, FL 33521
Note: Letters, address and return address must be in writing—no stickers—and on plain white paper.
Sign our petition urging President Biden to grant clemency to Leonard Peltier:
https://www.freeleonardpeltier.com/petition
Email: contact@whoisleonardpeltier.info
Address: 116 W. Osborne Ave. Tampa, Florida 33603
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Updates From Kevin Cooper
A Never-ending Constitutional Violation
A summary of the current status of Kevin Cooper’s case by the Kevin Cooper Defense Committee
On October 26, 2023, the law firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, LLP wrote a rebuttal in response to the Special Counsel's January 13, 2023 report upholding the conviction of their client Kevin Cooper. A focus of the rebuttal was that all law enforcement files were not turned over to the Special Counsel during their investigation, despite a request for them to the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office.
On October 29, 2023, Law Professors Lara Bazelon and Charlie Nelson Keever, who run the six member panel that reviews wrongful convictions for the San Francisco County District Attorney's office, published an OpEd in the San Francisco Chronicle calling the "Innocence Investigation” done by the Special Counsel in the Cooper case a “Sham Investigation” largely because Cooper has unsuccessfully fought for years to obtain the police and prosecutor files in his case. This is a Brady claim, named for the U.S. Supreme court’s 1963 case establishing the Constitutional rule that defendants are entitled to any information in police and prosecutor's possession that could weaken the state's case or point to innocence. Brady violations are a leading cause of wrongful convictions. The Special Counsel's report faults Cooper for not offering up evidence of his own despite the fact that the best evidence to prove or disprove Brady violations or other misconduct claims are in those files that the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office will not turn over to the Special Counsel or to Cooper's attorneys.
On December 14, 2023, the president of the American Bar Association (ABA), Mary Smith, sent Governor Gavin Newsom a three page letter on behalf of the ABA stating in part that Mr.Cooper's counsel objected to the state's failure to provide Special Counsel all documents in their possession relating to Mr.Cooper's conviction, and that concerns about missing information are not new. For nearly 40 years Mr.Cooper's attorneys have sought this same information from the state.
On December 19, 2023, Bob Egelko, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an article about the ABA letter to the Governor that the prosecutors apparently withheld evidence from the Governor's legal team in the Cooper case.
These are just a few recent examples concerning the ongoing failure of the San Bernardino County District Attorney to turn over to Cooper's attorney's the files that have been requested, even though under the law and especially the U.S. Constitution, the District Attorney of San Bernardino county is required to turn over to the defendant any and all material and or exculpatory evidence that they have in their files. Apparently, they must have something in their files because they refuse to turn them over to anyone.
The last time Cooper's attorney's received files from the state, in 2004, it wasn't from the D.A. but a Deputy Attorney General named Holly Wilkens in Judge Huff's courtroom. Cooper's attorneys discovered a never before revealed police report showing that a shirt was discovered that had blood on it and was connected to the murders for which Cooper was convicted, and that the shirt had disappeared. It had never been tested for blood. It was never turned over to Cooper's trial attorney, and no one knows where it is or what happened to it. Cooper's attorneys located the woman who found that shirt on the side of the road and reported it to the Sheriff's Department. She was called to Judge Huff's court to testify about finding and reporting that shirt to law enforcement. That shirt was the second shirt found that had blood on it that was not the victims’ blood. This was in 2004, 19 years after Cooper's conviction.
It appears that this ongoing constitutional violation that everyone—from the Special Counsel to the Governor's legal team to the Governor himself—seems to know about, but won't do anything about, is acceptable in order to uphold Cooper's conviction.
But this type of thing is supposed to be unacceptable in the United States of America where the Constitution is supposed to stand for something other than a piece of paper with writing on it. How can a Governor, his legal team, people who support and believe in him ignore a United States citizen’s Constitutional Rights being violated for 40 years in order to uphold a conviction?
This silence is betrayal of the Constitution. This permission and complicity by the Governor and his team is against everything that he and they claim to stand for as progressive politicians. They have accepted the Special Counsel's report even though the Special Counsel did not receive the files from the district attorney that may not only prove that Cooper is innocent, but that he was indeed framed by the Sheriff’s Department; and that evidence was purposely destroyed and tampered with, that certain witnesses were tampered with, or ignored if they had information that would have helped Cooper at trial, that evidence that the missing shirt was withheld from Cooper's trial attorney, and so much more.
Is the Governor going to get away with turning a blind eye to this injustice under his watch?
Are progressive people going to stay silent and turn their eyes blind in order to hopefully get him to end the death penalty for some while using Cooper as a sacrificial lamb?
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Mr. Kevin Cooper
C-65304. 4-EB-82
San Quentin State Prison
San Quentin, CA 94974
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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The writers' organization PEN America is circulating this petition on behalf of Jason Renard Walker, a Texas prisoner whose life is being threatened because of his exposés of the Texas prison system.
See his book, Reports from within the Belly of the Beast; available on Amazon at:
https://www.amazon.com/Reports-Within-Belly-Beast-Department-ebook/dp/B084656JDZ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
Petition: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/protect-whistleblowers-in-carceral-settings
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Tell Congress to Help #FreeDanielHale
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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1) Several nations say they will participate in a sea route for aid to Gaza.
By Monika Pronczuk and Aaron Boxerman, Mar. 8, 2024
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and President Nikos Christodoulides of Cyprus at the port of Larnaca on Friday. Credit...Andreas Loucaides/Cypriot government's Press and Information Office, via Agence France-Presse
Britain, the European Union and the United Arab Emirates will join the United States in opening a maritime route for humanitarian relief to Gaza, officials said on Friday, adding momentum to a complex and untested effort to bring urgently needed aid to the territory by sea.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the E.U. executive body, and David Cameron, Britain’s foreign secretary, announced their participation hours after President Biden outlined a U.S. plan to build a temporary floating pier off Gaza’s Mediterranean coast to support the shipment of food, water, medicine and other necessities to desperate Palestinian civilians.
Ms. von der Leyen said that the first ship carrying aid could depart the E.U. nation of Cyprus for Gaza as soon as Friday, with more to follow on Sunday. But it was not immediately clear how or where the vessels would unload their cargo or how it would be distributed amid Israeli bombardment and attacks by hungry Palestinians on aid trucks.
Gaza does not have a functioning port, its coastal waters are too shallow for most vessels and U.S. officials have said it could take 30 to 60 days to set up the floating pier.
At a news conference in Cyprus, Ms. von der Leyen offered few details. Israel’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Friday that it supported a maritime corridor as long as goods are checked “in accordance with Israeli standards” before leaving Cyprus.
Despite the many questions, U.S. and European officials emphasized the urgent need to open new routes for aid into Gaza, where relief agencies say that 2.2 million Palestinians are facing extreme hunger amid Israeli airstrikes and ground attacks against Hamas. In a joint statement, Britain, the E.U. and the United Arab Emirates said the maritime corridor must “be part of a sustained effort to increase the flow of humanitarian aid and commercial commodities into Gaza through all possible routes.”
For months, the United States and others have warned that Israel was not allowing sufficient aid by land into Gaza. Those concerns have multiplied in recent days, as Palestinian health officials reported that some Gazan children had died of malnutrition and the United Nations warned that more than 570,000 people are facing “catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation.”
Aid officials say that sea shipments — and a limited number of airdrops conducted by the United States and other nations — cannot make up for the lack of supply routes by land. Only about 100 relief trucks entered Gaza each day in February, on average, through the two open land routes, a fraction of what was going in before the war began in October. Israel has insisted on inspecting shipments into Gaza, arguing that they could be diverted by Hamas, but says it does not restrict how much aid gets in.
“We know the difficulties faced at the land borders in Gaza,” Ms. von der Leyen told reporters.
Mr. Cameron, in announcing that Britain would join the maritime effort, said in a social media post: “We continue to urge Israel to allow more trucks into Gaza as the fastest way to get aid to those who need it.”
Israeli officials have not said whether they would open more land routes into Gaza, as many aid agencies have called for, particularly into northern Gaza where relief deliveries have all but stopped because of insecurity.
Plans for the sea route began taking shape months ago. In November, President Nikos Christodoulides of Cyprus, announced an initiative to collect shipments in his country, inspect them at the port of Larnaca and sail them through a secure sea corridor to Gaza, about 240 miles away.
A spokesman for the Cyprus government, Konstantinos Letymbiotis, said that if initial shipments this weekend are successful, more deliveries would follow. He said it would take about 15 hours to make the journey, although he declined to say where the shipment would be delivered in Gaza, citing security concerns.
“As a European Union member at the heart of the region, Cyprus bears a moral duty to do its utmost to assist in alleviating the humanitarian crisis,” Mr. Christodoulides said on Friday.
Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting.
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2) ‘People Are Hoping That Israel Nukes Us So We Get Rid of This Pain’
By Nicholas Kristof, March 9, 2024
Children mourn victims of an attack in Rafah this month. Credit...Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images
When President Biden weighs American policy toward Gaza, may he think of a gentle scholar named Mohammed Alshannat.
Alshannat is a Palestinian in Gaza who at the start of the war was working remotely on his Ph.D. dissertation in linguistics for Rhodes University in South Africa. He is the opposite of Hamas, for in his writing he has criticized suicide bombings and rocket firings. He admires European democracy and argues that Arabs and Jews can live in harmony.
I have been texting him during the war, but his main outside contact has been Lindsay Houghton, a fellow doctoral student at Rhodes. With Alshannat’s permission, I am quoting from his texts to Houghton. I cannot independently verify what he writes, but it meshes with what aid workers describe. I have trimmed for length, but he wrote in English and these are his words:
Oct. 11: The situation in Gaza is very grave. Forgive me as I couldn’t reply any sooner. I was running for my life. Pray for us please!
Oct. 25: My children are very, very sick. They are sick, hungry, thirsty and scared. My kidney stone medicine has run out and I have been drinking salty water. Please pray for my children.
Oct. 26: Last night, there was heavy bombing in our area. We run for our lives and I lost two of my children in the dark. Me and my wife stayed all night searching for them amidst hundreds of airstrikes. We miraculously survived an airstrike and found them fainted in the morning. Please pray for us.
Nov. 4: Please forgive me for not being able to reply to your messages as we are constantly running from one place to another. Internet connection is not stable and one has to wait three days just to charge your mobile. My children can’t move around much as we only eat half a meal a day and I can’t carry them anymore. We defecate in the open and my children defecate on themselves and there is no water to clean them.
Nov. 14: We are eating tree leaves.
Nov. 30: We were completely cut off from the world in the last 15 days. My sister needs an urgent surgery. She is dying slowly before our eyes and we can do nothing about it. Her name is Fatemah and she is a mother of four. Pray for her and us.
Dec. 1 [after a weeklong pause in fighting]: I have managed to get some flour, gas and olive oil. This will sustain us for the following two weeks. We have clean water now. We got sleep during the past seven days. Pray for us please! The war has restarted at 7 a.m. today.
Dec. 4: Fatemah hasn’t yet had her urgent surgery. The world has abandoned us. Pray for us please!
Jan. 27: My son was seriously injured on Dec. 22. A large shrapnel entered his right flank. He is 13 years old and was injured while we were running for our lives. Hospitals are out of service and I had to carry him bleeding under heavy artillery shelling for two hours. I found a doctor who was sheltering in a school, and he took a risk and saved my son’s life. He went through a complicated surgery later and still unable to walk. He is very sick and suffers from malnutrition. I am scared and bone tired. It took me 36 days just to get this internet connection to send a WhatsApp message. Please pray for us!!
Feb. 6: My sister Fatemah hasn’t yet done her surgery and is still waiting in the hospital in the south. Her children are with us in the north and keep asking for their mother. Fatemah wants to go back to the north but Israel does not allow those in the south to go back to the north. She does not want to die alone in the hospital. She wants to die surrounded by her children and family. There is no one to help us to take her to the north to die and be buried here.
I am still in the north with my family. We are in a great famine. My injured son’s health is deteriorating because of the famine. There is no milk, meat, vegetables, fruit or anything to feed him. He lost most of his weight. Medicine and other stuff completely disappeared from the markets. My mother’s diabetes medicine has run out and she is very, very sick. My children are crying from hunger all the time. People are hoping that Israel nukes us so we get rid of this pain.
Feb. 11: Rice, on which we have been living off in the last four months, has completely disappeared from the markets. Me and my wife have decided to eat a meal every two days just to keep our kids alive as long as we can. What is left for us is hay. We have started grinding it, bake it and eat it. Because we have started eating the hay bread, we now defecate blood mixed with hay.
I lost my house, my car and my olive farm. Yesterday my cousin lost her 2-month-old baby because there is no milk to breastfeed him, because there is nothing for her to eat. He was her only and she is 45 years old. She also lost her house and her husband in December. She is a brilliant brain surgeon. She is refusing food and has not spoken a word since.
Feb. 29: When the Israeli army invades an area, we run to safer places. When they withdraw, some of the Israeli soldiers’ leftovers like tuna cans, bread, etc. remain. My cousin, Esa, thought that they have withdrawn and quickly rushed in the hope that he finds leftovers to eat.
After the Israeli army finally withdrew, we found him dead, rotten and half eaten by wild dogs. He seemed to be carrying some tuna cans. We couldn’t bury him as his body was so decomposed. We covered him with sand and left him.
His name is Esa Alshannat. He was 20 years old. He was a sophomore student in the department of computer science at Gaza university. He was a brilliant pianist who wanted to pursue a music degree in Italy. I still remember my last meeting with him. He had big dreams and was full of hope, peace and love. He was very hungry and very skinny. We were telling each other that despite what is being inflicted on us, we have nothing against the Israelis but love.
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That was the last message from Alshannat.
Roughly 1 percent of Gaza’s people today are Hamas fighters. To understand what the other 99 percent are enduring, as the United States supplies weapons for this war and vetoes cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations, think of Alshannat and multiply him by two million.
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3) Providing Both Bombs and Food, Biden Puts Himself in the Middle of Gaza’s War
The president’s decision to send aid by air and sea represents a shift prompted by the growing humanitarian crisis. But it raised uncomfortable questions about America’s role.
By Peter Baker and Michael Crowley, Mar. 8, 2024
“‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ said Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Palestine-Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington. ‘It’s akin to showing up at a five-alarm fire with a cup of water while giving fuel to the arsonist. The administration is trying to deal with a political problem, which is the optics of supporting this horrific war with these cosmetic measures that are aimed at defusing some voter anger.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/08/us/politics/biden-israel-gaza-war.html
From the skies over Gaza these days fall American bombs and American food pallets, delivering death and life at the same time and illustrating President Biden’s elusive effort to find balance in an unbalanced Middle East war.
The president’s decision to authorize airdrops and the construction of a temporary port to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Gaza has highlighted the tensions in his policy as he continues to support the provision of U.S. weaponry for Israel’s military operation against Hamas without condition.
The United States finds itself on both sides of the war in a way, arming the Israelis while trying to care for those hurt as a result. Mr. Biden has grown increasingly frustrated as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel defies the president’s pleas to do more to protect civilians in Gaza and went further in expressing that exasperation during and after his State of the Union address this past week. But Mr. Biden remains opposed to cutting off munitions or leveraging them to influence the fighting.
“You can’t have a policy of giving aid and giving Israel the weapons to bomb the food trucks at the same time,” Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, said in an interview the day after the speech. “There is inherent contradiction in that. And I think the administration needs to match the genuine empathy and moral concern that came out last night for Palestinian civilian lives with real accountability for Netanyahu and the extreme right-wing government there.”
The newly initiated American-led air-and-sea humanitarian campaign follows the failure to get enough supplies into Gaza by land and represents a sharp turnaround by the administration. Until now, American officials had eschewed such methods as impractical, concluding that they would not provide supplies on the same scale as a functional land route and would be complicated in many ways.
Airdrops are actually dangerous, as was made clear on Friday when at least five Palestinians were killed by falling aid packages, and they can create chaotic, hazardous situations without a stable distribution system on the ground. The construction of a temporary floating pier will take 30 to 60 days, if not longer, according to officials, and could entail risk for those involved, although Mr. Biden has stipulated that it be constructed offshore with no Americans on the ground.
But the administration reversed course after more than 100 people were killed and hundreds more injured last month when a crowd gathered around a convoy of aid trucks and the Israeli military opened fire. A senior American official who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations called the disaster a tipping point for the administration’s thinking.
The official said aerial video of the episode made clear the desperation of Gazan civilians. Although Israeli officials had hoped the release of the video might exonerate their troops by showing an out-of-control mob, the official said that instead it revealed conditions dire enough to make people rush a convoy at 4:30 a.m.
Critics said the supplies now floating down by parachute hardly meet the needs and only highlight the moral conflict in Mr. Biden’s approach to the war, which started when a Hamas terrorist attack killed about 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7 and prompted an Israeli response that has killed more than 30,000 people in Gaza.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Palestine-Israel program at the Arab Center in Washington. “It’s akin to showing up at a five-alarm fire with a cup of water while giving fuel to the arsonist. The administration is trying to deal with a political problem, which is the optics of supporting this horrific war with these cosmetic measures that are aimed at defusing some voter anger.”
Israelis and their supporters reject that logic. “Why are they at cross purposes?” said Eyal Hulata, who served as national security adviser to former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. “The message is — and I strongly support Biden for doing so — that he supports the elimination of Hamas, which is the source and cause of all those atrocities, while at the same time putting a lot of emphasis on assisting the civilian population of Gaza.”
“People who say that” there is a contradiction “actually don’t differentiate between Gazans and Hamas,” he added. “We do differentiate between Gazans and Hamas.”
White House officials have declined to be drawn into a public discussion of the thorny questions raised by dropping aid to the same people trying to escape American-provided arms.
“We have been very, very clear about our concerns over the humanitarian situation there and how unacceptable it is that so many people are in such dire need,” John F. Kirby, a national security communications adviser to the president, told reporters from The New York Times this past week.
Mr. Biden has strongly supported Israel’s right to defend itself and retaliate for the terrorist attack. He has been criticized by some in his own party for not expressing commensurate empathy for Palestinian civilians, many of them destitute and displaced amid the destruction of their coastal enclave.
During his State of the Union address on Thursday, though, he went further than before in lamenting the suffering. The president did not change policy, but his tone and emphasis represented an evolution of his public messaging.
“This war has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined,” Mr. Biden told a national audience. “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, most of whom are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands of innocents, women and children. Girls and boys also orphaned. Nearly two million more Palestinians under bombardment or displacement. Homes destroyed, neighborhoods in rubble, cities in ruin. Families without food, water, medicine. It’s heartbreaking.”
The president went even further in a post-speech conversation on the House floor with Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat who pressed him to “keep pushing Netanyahu,” known by the nickname Bibi.
“I told him, Bibi — and don’t repeat this — but, ‘You and I are going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting,’” Mr. Biden explained to the senator in a comment caught on a microphone.
After an aide whispered in his ear, Mr. Biden acknowledged that he had been overheard — but seemed perfectly content to have his irritation known. “I’m on a hot mic here,” Mr. Biden told Mr. Bennet. “Good. That’s good.”
The change in tone did not go unnoticed. “There was a recognition among progressives that this represents a shift in language by the president and that language matters,” said Mr. Khanna, who exchanged texts during the speech with Arab Americans in Michigan, where anger at the president has been particularly heated. “He’s becoming more public with it.”
The friction has grown especially over humanitarian assistance. United Nations officials have warned that more than 570,000 Gazans face “catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation” and that “if nothing changes, a famine is imminent in northern Gaza.” Before the war started, Gaza relied on 500 truckloads of aid a day, but the World Food Program said it is now down to 150 and needs to double that to meet some of the strip’s basic needs.
The senior American official said that Israel’s strategy during the conflict has been to allow just enough aid in to prevent starvation and nothing more. But in recent weeks, several factors have threatened to push conditions below that threshold, including Israeli protesters who have blocked aid convoys from leaving Israel on the grounds that the aid benefits Hamas and slows the release of the Israeli hostages being held. A state of virtual anarchy within Gaza has also made efficient distribution nearly impossible. One result is that malnourished babies have begun showing up at Gaza’s few functioning hospitals.
The official said that, while airdropped packets of meals would most likely make only a marginal difference, Mr. Biden’s plan for a floating pier could have a substantial effect on conditions within Gaza — eventually.
So in recent days U.S. officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, have adamantly insisted that Israel facilitate more aid into the territory without further delay.
The official added that Israeli leaders may have anticipated that a deal would be reached by Ramadan, which is expected to start on Sunday, to release some hostages and pause their military campaign. That would have allowed a major influx of aid by trucks and spared Mr. Netanyahu from making hard political concessions in a domestic environment where many Israelis oppose sending more sustenance to the place from which the Oct. 7 attack originated.
But David Miliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee, said on Friday that airdrops and a pier were “last resorts” that were “expensive and risky” without solving the underlying problem.
“All of these should not divert attention from the material evidence that only a cease-fire will provide the civilian protection, aid flows, repair of infrastructure and public health measures that are so needed,” he said. “Fourth- and fifth-best solutions should not be normalized as effective alternatives to better solutions.”
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4) There are enormous logistical hurdles to deliver much-needed aid to Gaza by sea.
By Aaron Boxerman, Mar. 9, 2024
A Palestinian boy stands among rubble of a destroyed house in southern Gaza on Friday. Credit...Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock
An international plan to bring desperately needed food, water and medicine to Gazans by boat will face enormous logistical challenges, diplomats and aid officials say, making the proposition both expensive and likely to take some time.
Aid officials have criticized the plans, saying delivering aid by truck is by far the most efficient way to help Gazans. They have called for Israel to open new crossing points in northern Gaza and to ease its entry restrictions. U.S. officials have conceded it will take weeks to establish a maritime corridor, but say it will eventually enable them to significantly increase the amount of aid.
Kerem Shalom is one of two border crossings through which aid has been allowed to enter Gaza; most of it transits through the Rafah crossing with Egypt. The U.N. has said it can be very challenging for aid to go north beyond Rafah.
Gaza does not have a functioning port, and its coastal waters are too shallow for most vessels — particularly the large barges that would be necessary to ferry the cargo necessary for hundreds of thousands of hungry Palestinians.
Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the E.U. executive body, said Friday that officials expected to test the process in the coming days during what she described as a pilot project. But it was not immediately clear how or where any vessels would unload their cargo or how it would be distributed amid Israeli bombardment and attacks on aid trucks as hunger grows in the enclave.
On Thursday night, President Biden announced a U.S.-led initiative to establish a temporary floating pier off Gaza’s coastline to enable the transit of goods. U.S. officials hope to ultimately use the pier to enable the delivery of two million meals a day for Gaza’s 2.3 million people, Here are some of the hurdles ahead.
Cost: Building the floating pier will be pricey and time-consuming. U.S. officials say the project could take up to 60 days to complete, and Gazans need more aid now. United Nations officials warn that famine is imminent in the enclave.
Two Western diplomats briefed on the project said they were told the full cost could be tens of millions of dollars over six months, although it was unclear whether that was just the port itself or included the cost of the intended supply shipments as well. Several countries, including Britain and the United Arab Emirates, have announced they will back the project, although they have not said how much they will chip in.
Some have called for Israel to fully open the Israeli port of Ashdod just north of Gaza to allow international aid to flow into the enclave. The harbor is already largely equipped to scan and process aid deliveries. After U.S. pressure, Israel began allowing some shipments of flour and other goods to enter there in January.
Security and distribution: It is also unclear who will manage and secure the temporary port area and the convoys of trucks that would be needed to distribute the aid.
In response to a question on who would secure the port, President Biden told reporters Friday that “the Israelis” would provide security. He did not elaborate further, and there was no immediate comment by Israeli officials.
Israel’s ground invasion successfully toppled Hamas’s government in northern Gaza and nothing has filled the vacuum. The result has been widespread lawlessness. Some of the few trucks ferrying food and medicine to northern Gaza have been attacked by both ordinary Palestinians and well-organized gangs, according to aid officials.
The desperation was made apparent last month when, according to Gazan health officials more than 100 Palestinians were killed after thousands of people massed around an Israeli-organized aid convoy. Witnesses described extensive shooting by Israeli forces, and doctors at Gaza hospitals said most casualties were from gunfire.
The Israeli military acknowledged firing at members of the crowd who approached them “in a threatening manner,” but said most of the victims were trampled in a crush of people trying to seize the cargo.
The remaining employees of Hamas’s civilian police could step in for security, U.N. officials have said, but their involvement would likely be unacceptable to Israel and the United States because of their connection to the militant group. In a briefing with reporters last month, Jaime McGoldrick, a senior U.N. relief official, said the organization was seeking to work with what remains of the police on crowd control. But they were hesitant to escort the convoys north, fearing Israeli airstrikes, he said.
The Israeli military could deploy to patrol the convoys, but their presence would pose a challenge for the United Nations, which takes pains to avoid being seen as too close to any side. The U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, for example, “does not provide any assistance anywhere with the presence of the Israeli Army nor does it ask it to provide security for its convoys,” said Juliette Touma, the agency’s director of communications.
One proposal on the table would be for private Palestinian contractors to handle the distribution while coordinating with the United Nations, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the situation.
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5) Sweden and Canada say they are resuming funding for the U.N. agency that supports Palestinians.
By Victoria Kim, Mar. 9, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/09/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news
Humanitarian aid at an UNRWA distribution center in Rafah, in southern Gaza, this month. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Canada and Sweden are resuming funding for the main United Nations agency supporting Palestinian refugees in Gaza, citing the spiraling humanitarian catastrophe there and saying that the agency had taken steps to improve accountability amid accusations that some of its employees had links to Hamas.
The countries were among more than a dozen that suspended payments to the aid organization, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, known as UNRWA, after accusations in January by Israel that a dozen of its 13,000 employees in Gaza had been involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel or their aftermath.
UNRWA has argued that Israel has targeted it with a “deliberate and concerted campaign” to undermine its operations when its services are most needed. Warnings of widespread hunger bordering on famine have become more urgent, and signs of desperation are growing as people resort to consuming animal feed or ambushing aid trucks.
In a government statement on Saturday, Sweden said that it would disburse a conditional first payment of some $20 million. It said that UNRWA had agreed to allow independent audits and to strengthen internal oversight.
“In this urgent situation, when the need is so great among the civilian population, it is first and foremost important to save lives,” the statement said.
Canadian officials said on Friday that they had received an interim report from the internal United Nations office investigating the claims, and that the agency had taken immediate steps to improve accountability. The United Nations has also commissioned an external review.
The European Union, one of the largest donors to UNRWA, announced last week that it was substantially increasing funds to the agency, saying that Palestinians were facing terrible conditions and should not be made to pay for Hamas’s crimes. The first tranche of 50 million euros, about $54 million, was scheduled to be disbursed this week.
The United States has said it would wait for the results of U.N. investigations before deciding whether to resume donations. The United States is the agency’s single largest donor, having pledged $344 million in 2022.
Canadian officials said that UNRWA plays a “vital role” in providing humanitarian assistance to Gaza’s 2.2 million civilians, and that other organizations depended on the longstanding agency’s expertise and infrastructure.
The international community has faced increasing pressure to act to alleviate the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Officials with UNRWA have said that without a reversal of donor countries’ suspensions, which cost it about $450 million in funding, the organization would soon run out of reserves.
The United States and other countries announced plans this week to try to get aid into northern Gaza by sea through the Mediterranean coast. In recent weeks, nations have been sending in aid via airdrops attached to parachutes.
Israel has claimed that at least 10 percent of UNRWA’s staff in Gaza is affiliated with Palestinian armed groups and that what it says are employees’ links to Hamas fundamentally compromise the agency. In a proposal for Gaza’s postwar governance last month, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel included a call for UNRWA to be closed and replaced “with responsible international aid agencies.”
Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s chief, said this week that he had not received any additional information to back up Israel’s accusations after they were initially presented to him in January, but that the agency had immediately terminated the contracts of staff members accused of involvement with the Oct. 7 attacks because of the gravity of the allegation.
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6) The U.S. plan to build an aid port could deliver two million meals to Gaza a day, the Pentagon says.
By Helene Cooper reporting from Washington, Mar. 9, 2024
Distribution of humanitarian aid from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, in Rafah, Gaza, earlier this week. Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The Biden administration’s floating pier and causeway for humanitarian aid could, when completed, help deliver as many as two million meals a day for residents of Gaza, but the project will take at least a month and maybe two to complete, the Pentagon said on Friday.
The details for the pier and causeway plan, President Biden’s latest idea to get around Israel’s blocking of aid deliveries via all but two land crossings, were outlined by the Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, in a news conference on Friday.
Aid organizations have welcomed the plan, which was announced on Thursday, days after the U.S. military began airdropping supplies into Gaza. But aid workers say that the maritime project is not ambitious enough to alleviate the humanitarian disaster unfolding as Israel continues to bombard the Gaza Strip.
General Ryder said that one of the main military units involved in the construction of the floating pier for Gaza would be the Army’s 7th Transportation Brigade (Expeditionary), out of Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Va., near Norfolk. Some 1,000 American service members, he said, will work to complete the pier and causeway.
The floating pier, General Ryder said, would be built and assembled alongside an Army ship off the Gaza coast. Army ships are large, lumbering vessels, so they will need armed escorts, particularly as they get within range of Gaza’s coast, Defense Department officials said, and officials are working through how to ensure their protection as the pier is built.
Describing the project, a U.S. Army official said that, typically, a large vessel would sit off shore of the desired location, and a “Roll-on-Roll-off Discharge Facility” — a big floating dock — would be constructed next to the ship to serve as a holding area. When any cargo or equipment is driven or placed onto the floating dock, it can then be loaded onto smaller Navy boats and moved toward a temporary causeway anchored onshore.
On Thursday, Sigrid Kaag, the U.N. humanitarian and reconstruction coordinator for Gaza, welcomed the Biden announcement.
But speaking with reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council, she added, “At the same time I cannot but repeat: Air and sea is not a substitute for land and nobody says otherwise.”
Since Israel began its bombardment and invasion of Gaza, in response to the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, only two land crossings into the territory have opened: One at Rafah, a Gazan city on the southern border with Egypt, and one at Kerem Shalom, on the border with Israel.
Aid workers have described bottlenecks for aid at border crossings because of lengthy inspections of trucks, limited crossing hours and protests by Israelis, and they have also highlighted the difficulty of distributing aid inside Gaza. Israeli officials have denied they are hampering the flow of aid, saying the United Nations and aid groups are responsible for any backlogs.
On Friday, General Ryder said that U.S. officials were “working with ally and partner nations,” as well as the United Nations and aid groups, to coordinate security and distribution of aid from the floating pier and causeway. He emphasized that “there will be no U.S. forces on the ground in Gaza.”
He also acknowledged that neither the airdrops nor the floating pier were as effective as sending aid by land would be.
“We want to see the amount of aid going via land increase significantly,” General Ryder said. “We understand that is the most viable way to get aid in.”
But, he added, “We’re not going to wait around.”
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7) The U.N. human rights chief warns that Israeli settlements could amount to war crimes.
By Nick Cumming-Bruce reporting from Geneva, Mar. 9, 2024
An Israeli settlement built in a Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank. Credit...Hazem Bader/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The United Nations human rights chief on Friday condemned Israeli plans to build more than 3,000 new settler homes in the occupied West Bank, warning that settlement expansion amounts to a war crime.
The Israeli government has shrugged off criticism from the United States and others to move ahead with its building plans, which come as tensions have soared in the West Bank since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack on Israel prompted all-out war in Gaza.
“The West Bank is already in crisis,” the U.N.’s rights chief, Volker Türk, said, “yet, settler violence and settlement-related violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state.”
Roughly 500,000 Israelis live in settlements in the occupied West Bank, where the Israeli military rules over roughly 2.7 million Palestinians. Much of the Israeli right believes Israel should control the West Bank in perpetuity, while Palestinians see the area as integral to their aspirations for an independent state.
Mr. Türk’s comments accompanied a report released by his office that said the expansion of settlements and a dramatic rise in associated violence and discrimination against Palestinians, particularly since Oct. 7, “have taken the West Bank to the brink of catastrophe.”
Settler violence had already reached record levels in 2023, with 835 incidents recorded before the Oct. 7 attack. Since then, settler violence has skyrocketed, the U.N. said, with another 603 settler attacks reported.
The U.N. reported nine Palestinians killed by settlers using firearms and 396 killed by Israeli security forces, with two other Palestinian deaths that could not be attributed.
More than 1,200 Palestinian herders had been forced from their homes as a direct result of settler violence and close to 600 Palestinians, the U.N. reported.
Israel’s latest plan to build 3,476 new settler homes follows construction of 23,000 new homes in the 12 months that ended in October, the U.N. human rights office reported, representing the fastest rate of expansion since monitoring started in 2017.
The expansion represents a transfer of Israel’s population to occupied territory, which is prohibited under international law and amounts to a war crime, the U.N. said.
The policies of Israel’s current government appear aligned to an unprecedented extent with the goals of its settler movement to expand long-term control over the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and to steadily integrate this occupied territory into Israel, the U.N. said.
It cited the appointment of Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli finance minister and a settler, as an “additional minister” in the defense ministry with widespread powers over the West Bank, including over the designation of land, planning and property demolitions. Israel had recorded 468,000 Jewish Israelis in the West Bank at the end of 2022, the report noted and, in May 2023, Mr. Smotrich presented a two-year plan to attract another half-million Israelis to move there.
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8) The 10-Year-Old Boy Who Has Become the Face of Starvation in Gaza
The harrowing image of a skeletal Yazan Kafarneh circulated widely on social media and has served as a graphic warning about the enclave’s dire food situation.
By Bilal Shbair, Vivian Yee and Aaron Boxerman, March 9, 2024
Yazan Kafarneh on his hospital bed in Rafah, southern Gaza, on Sunday. By Monday, he was dead. Credit...Hatem Ali/Associated Press
It is all too easy to trace the skull beneath the Gazan boy’s face, the pallid skin stretching tight over every curve of bone and sagging with every hollow. His chin juts with a disturbing sharpness. His flesh has shrunk and shriveled, life reduced to little more than a thin mask over an imminent death.
In one of a series of news photographs of the boy, Yazan Kafarneh, taken with his family’s permission as he struggled for his life, his long-lashed eyes stare out, unfocused. In that widely shared picture online, his right hand, bandaged over an intravenous line, contracts in on itself at an awkward angle, a visible marker of his cerebral palsy.
He was 10, but in photographs from his last days at a clinic in southern Gaza, he looks both small for his age and at the same time ancient. By Monday, Yazan was dead.
The pictures of Yazan circulating on social media have quickly made him the face of starvation in Gaza.
Aid groups have warned that deaths from malnutrition-related causes have only just begun for Gaza’s more than two million people. Five months into Israel’s campaign against Hamas and its siege of Gaza, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are close to starvation, United Nations officials say. Almost no aid has reached northern Gaza for weeks, after major U.N. agencies mostly suspended their operations, citing mass looting of their cargoes by desperate Gazans, Israeli restrictions on convoys and the poor condition of roads damaged during the war.
At least 20 Palestinian children have died from malnutrition and dehydration, according to Gazan health officials. Like Yazan, who required medicines that were in acutely short supply in Gaza, many of those who died also suffered from health conditions that further placed their lives at risk, health officials said.
“It’s often that a child is extremely malnourished, and then they get sick and that virus is ultimately what causes that death,” said Heather Stobaugh, a malnutrition expert at Action Against Hunger, an aid group. “But they would not have died if they were not malnourished.”
Gaza health officials said that two of the children who died from malnutrition were less than 2 days old. While cautioning that it was difficult to say what had happened without more information, Dr. Stobaugh said that malnutrition in pregnant mothers and the lack of formula could easily have led to the deaths of infants, who are the most vulnerable to extreme malnutrition.
That dovetailed with an account given by an aid group, ActionAid, which said that a doctor at Al-Awda maternity hospital in northern Gaza had told the group that malnourished mothers were giving birth to stillborn children.
Yazan’s parents had struggled for months to care for their son, whose condition, experts say, would have meant he had trouble swallowing and needed a soft, high-nutrition diet. After the Israeli bombardment on Gaza following the Oct. 7 Hamas-led assault on Israel, his parents fled their home, taking Yazan and their three other sons to somewhere they hoped would be safer.
Then they fled again, and again, and again, his father said, searching for somewhere better for Yazan, whose condition meant that he could not tolerate the chaotic, unsanitary shelters. Every move was complicated by the fact that Yazan could not walk.
His parents could do little but watch as his health steadily deteriorated.
“Day after day, I saw my son getting weaker,” said his father, Shareef Kafarneh, a 31-year-old taxi driver from Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza.
Eventually, they ended up in Al-Awda, in the southern city of Rafah, where Yazan died on Monday morning. He had suffered from both malnutrition and a respiratory infection, according to Dr. Jabr al-Shaer, a pediatrician who treated him. Dr. al-Shaer blamed the lack of food for weakening Yazan’s already frail immune system.
Obtaining enough to eat had already been a struggle for many in the blockaded Gaza Strip before the war. An estimated 1.2 million Gazans had required food assistance, according to the United Nations, and around 0.8 percent of children under the age of 5 in Gaza had been acutely malnourished, the World Health Organization said.
Five months into the war, that appears to have spiked: About 15 percent of Gazan children under the age of 2 in northern Gaza are acutely malnourished, as well as roughly 5 percent in the south, the World Health Organization said in February. With half of all Gazan infants fed by formula, Dr. Stobaugh said, the lack of clean water in Gaza to make the formula is compounding the crisis.
Adele Khodr, the Middle East director at UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, said this week, “These tragic and horrific deaths are man-made, predictable and entirely preventable.”
The situation has left parents frantic.
Ali Qannan, 34, does not know what is wrong with his 13-month-old son, Ahmed, who is being treated at the European Hospital in southern Gaza. Neither, he said, do the doctors at the five hospitals he has taken Ahmed to since the baby developed a swollen belly, diarrhea and vomiting a month after the war began. Ahmed has gotten ever worse, with trouble breathing and worrisome blood tests, but, given the war, the doctors say they cannot run the proper diagnostic tests, Mr. Qannan said.
Every pediatrician has had a different suggestion for what to feed Ahmed, Mr. Qannan said — boiled potatoes, bread, special fortified formula used for treating severely malnourished children — but each was either impossible to find or seemed not to help. Mr. Qannan says he is sure that malnutrition has something to do with Ahmed’s problems.
“Look at him. He’s turned into a skeleton,” Mr. Qannan said of his son on Wednesday. “I need help from someone, anyone, to help me get out of Gaza as soon as possible.”
World leaders are increasingly warning about catastrophic hunger in Gaza, and even some of Israel’s closest allies are pressing Israel to do more. On Thursday, President Biden announced that the U.S. military would set up a floating pier to help move supplies into the enclave.
On Friday, the Israeli agency known as COGAT, which regulates aid to Palestinians, said, “Israel is also exerting a constant and significant effort to find solutions that will bring aid more smoothly into the Gaza Strip, and into its northern area in particular.”
Before war tore Gaza apart, Yazan Kafarneh was gradually seeing an improvement in his long struggle with cerebral palsy, his family said.
Physical therapists provided by nonprofits treated him at home, while medicines helped improve his condition, his father said. He might not have been able to walk, but he could swim. Mr. Kafarneh carefully planned out a high-nutrient diet for his son based around soft foods, including eggs for breakfast and the bananas Yazan loved.
But the medications disappeared as the war broke out, and as the family’s food supplies dwindled, Mr. Kafarneh said he had been unable to maintain Yazan’s special diet. He swapped out eggs in the morning for bread he made into mush using tea; he struggled to find bananas, so he tried giving Yazan other sweet foods, even though the price of sugar had soared. The already difficult challenge of feeding him properly turned nearly impossible.
On Feb. 25, his family brought Yazan to Al-Awda’s pediatric wing. He had pneumonia, which his weeks of hunger and already fragile condition had aggravated. Although the doctors and nurses gave him antibiotics for the infection, they could not find a reinforced nutrition drink that had been used to nourish him before the war, said Halima Tubasi, a nurse who cared for Yazan before he died.
Mr. Kafarneh said the cause of his son’s death was no mystery.
“The foods he used to have aren’t being eaten anymore,” he said. “The medicines and supplementary foods weren’t available at all.”
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