Blood Spattered Madness

Grotesquely, profanely, the U.S. government just approved another $8 billion in arms to Israel for its genocide in Gaza, where babies are freezing to death - parents find them "cold as ice," "stiff like a board" - famine lurks - "Hunger is everywhere" - families huddle in torn tents, toddlers caught in blasts have their legs amputated, and Israeli soldiers unwind at a resort with cotton candy. Gazans plead that the world "look at us with mercy"; Biden sent billions more to kill, maim, freeze, starve them.

In its final days, "violating US and international law one last time on their way out," the Biden administration said it will send a deadly arsenal of medium-range missiles, long range projectile artillery shells, Hellfire AGM-114 missiles, 500-pound bombs and other weapons of annihilation to help Israel continue murdering children, doctors, journalists, aid workers and other civilians, perhaps in hopes of getting the deaths of innocents to 46,000, a nice round number. Outrage greeted the news as "willful madness" from a "morally bankrupt" president who doggedly refused to use his power to urge a ceasefire, instead persisting in feeding the genocidal fire. "Only racists who do not view people of color as equally human, and sociopaths who delight in funding mass slaughter" could keep abetting Netanyahu as he "exterminates the last survivors," said CAIR. From one Palestinian-American activist, "Too many kids still alive in Gaza for Joe Biden's liking."

To many, what filmmaker Adam McKay calls the "blood spattered madness" is final sorry proof of the failings of a spineless Democratic party so afraid to take a stand - or even call genocide by its name - it stays silent before war crimes committed daily for over a year. To one critic, Biden encapsulates the Party, "this sundowning butcher, this lamest of lame ducks, doddering out of the Rose Garden to press the KILL MORE PALESTINIANS button for the 100th time." Their complicity, in turn, has spurred Israel to ever viler lows. In a letter last week, eight rightwing Israeli lawmakers urged Defense Minister Israel Katz to wrap up the genocide already with "elimination" of all energy sources, food sources and "anyone who moves in the area and does not exit with a white flag." When those actions are completed, they argue, the IDF "must enter gradually and conduct a full cleansing of the enemy nests."

Toward that end, how will Biden's $8 billion help? Let us count the grisly ways.

The $8 billion will serve to perpetuate the Israeli lie of "safe" or "humanitarian" zones amidst the carnage, like the "safe zone" of al-Mawasi along the southern coast; known as "the Basket of Food" for its fertile soil, sweet water and bountiful farming, it's now a vast displacement camp for hundreds of thousands told to go shelter there. In recent weeks, it's been hit by relentless Israeli warplanes and artillery; each no-warning, pre-dawn attack kills 7, 71, a family of 15, the Chief of Gaza's police, all buried under rubble or "shredded to pieces." In the chaos and dark of one attack, with terrified children running and crying, one resident tried to hide his paralyzed 80-year-old father, but soldiers found him and shot him dead. In another, a young woman thrown by the blast lay in the street, seemingly dead; survivors felt a faint breath and carried her to the hospital, where a medic eventually told them she had a fractured spine and could only move her eyes.

Biden's $8 billion will facilitate Israel's strikes in central Gaza. One just killed at least 26 people, including eight members of a committee who worked to secure aid convoys. In al-Maghazi, where strikes have killed up to 100 at a time, a young medic was called to a targeted civilian vehicle that held a dead woman and three injured children, one a 10-year-old boy bleeding internally and vomiting blood. The medic worked to stabilize the boy till they got him to the hospital; then he went back for the dead woman. When he uncovered her face, he saw it was his mother; shrapnel had pierced her eye, exiting through her skull. Hours earlier, she'd prepared him tea and a sandwich for work, telling him when he left to take care. In another strike on Jabalia, journalist Mohammad Hijazi was one of nearly 90 killed. "I refuse a cheap death,” he wrote in August. "l count the days we have lived as a historic achievement, while awaiting what is coming with (a) spirit that fights until the end of the road.”

Biden's $8 billion will likely embolden the war crime that has been Israel's pitiless destruction of Gaza's health system, its recent attack on and razing of Kamal-Adwan, the last functioning hospital in the north, and the arrest of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the 51-year-old pediatrician and director of the hospital who for months had kept it barely running while repeatedly refusing Israeli orders to leave. A "model of patience and rigor" and "the voice of Gaza's decimated health sector,” Abu Safiya had long pleaded for aid in increasingly distraught videos - "Instead of receiving aid, we received tanks" - while recording horrors like a bloodied intensive care unit, windows blown out, where shrapnel had shattered a nurse's skull. He'd also seen his 15-year-old son Ibrahim killed in a drone strike at the hospital gate - Israel's punishment of him for refusing to leave, he charged - and been badly wounded by shrapnel in November as he exited the operating room.

On Dec. 27, Israeli forces raided and set fire to the hospital, forced staff and patients out, ordered them to strip, beat or detained many, and after denying it, acknowledged they'd arrested Abu Safiya.for "suspected involvement in terrorist activities," aka saving hundreds of innocent lives. The last surreal images of the doctor show him trudging through rubble, still in white coat, and entering an Israeli tank to politely negotiate with murderers. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has reports he was brought to a field interrogation site in Jabalia, made to strip, whipped with thick wire, and taken to brutal Sde Teyman prison. His family has urged his release "before it's too late"; his wife said soldiers told him and other staff they'd be taken to Indonesian Hospital to care for patients, but "the Israelis were telling us lies." Euro-Med says they've heard Abu Safiya's health has deteriorated; they have called for his release and warned his life is in danger "due to torture."

Evidently unbeknownst to an $8 billion-wielding U.S. administration, meanwhile, countless more Gazan lives remain in danger. Palestinian authorities say at least 3,500 children are at risk of starving, a quarter of Gaza's population faces "catastrophic" levels of food insecurity, and the entire population is enduring "acute food insecurity." Given ongoing Israeli blockades, aid workers say they're only able to bring in about a third of the basic food that's needed, and "hunger is everywhere." So is winter, with its cold, wind and, for the last few weeks, rains that have flooded hundreds of thin, tattered tents that are "nothing more than plastic bags" where thousands huddle without heat, fuel, food, electricity, or enough clothes or blankets. And still the bombings go on: In recent weeks, especially in the north, Israeli forces have launched over 100 strikes in three days, killing over 200, still mostly women and children, now shivering in tents.

Most gruesomely, America's $8 billion - which God knows could be used for how many thousands of shelters, blankets, mattresses, pillows, coats, toys, hot meals, new schools and other niceties of life - will allow more infants to freeze to death. The ghastly headlines tell of it: "20-Day-Old Baby Dies of Cold in Gaza," "Another Baby Freezes to Death," "Gaza Baby Freezes to Death as Israel Kills 88 Palestinians In A Day." Children, particularly infants, suffer the most from winter's hardships: Their small bodies, which generate less body heat, are illl-equipped to fight off the cold, especially when they're already weakened by hunger. Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, at Nasser hospital, sees more than five cases a day of children, usually infants under a month old, suffering from hypothermia. Most, he says, can be treated and saved. But some arrive in "extremely critical condition," and can't be. To date, the youngest to die has been three days old.

Most of those who've died were in al-Mawasi's “humanitarian zone,” living on a beach with brutal winds in gossamer tents with no food and sparse blankets. Aisha, Yousef, Sila. Four children shared 2 blankets, a family of eight shared four. Tents that "feel like a refrigerator." Weeping mothers: “He slept next to me and in the morning I found him frozen and dead." "Her face and lips were blue - she looked like a piece of ice.” "We can't even warm ourselves, we can't warm our children." Yahya al-Batran, 39, woke to his wife Noura screaming after she found 20-day-old Jumaa and his twin brother Ali frozen on the morning of Dec. 29. Jumaa was "stiff, like a piece of wood, his head cold as ice.” Ali was breathing slowly. They rushed both infants to Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. Jumaa was already dead. Ali survived, but died the next day. "Look at his color - do you see how frozen he is?" asks their father. "My children are dying in front of my eyes."

Biden's $8 billion also comes too late to do anything useful for Hanan al-Daqqi, three, or her 22-month-old sister Misk, who have spent four months in Al-Aqsa Hospital after an Israeli strike on their house funded by earlier American billions killed their mother Shaima, hurling her body onto a neighbor's house, and tore through both little girls' legs. Hanan, who'd been in her mother's lap, had to have both legs amputated, one above the knee, one below; she also had wounds to her face and intestines, and needed surgery to remove part of her bowels. Misk had her left foot amputated. Their father Mohammed, 31, was in intensive care for two weeks with a brain haemorrhage and chest injuries, and had several fingers amputated. The strike on Sept. 3 came the day after Shaima, who'd been so terrified for her daughters she could barely eat or sleep for months, had taken them for polio vaccines, determined they would at least have that protection.

Their father’s sister Shefa al-Daqqi, 28, who'd been on the phone with their mother when the blast hit, has been caring for her nieces. A mother of three, she alternates with their grandmother and their uncle, who stays with them at night, brings them little treats and takes them on tours of the hospital. Shefa has brought in her daughter Hala, also three, who used to play with Hanan. The first time, she painfully recalls, "I'll never forget Hanan’s look. She would stare at Hala’s legs and then at her own amputated legs, confused." Both girls cling to their aunt in fear and panic; Hanan sometimes asks, "Where's Mama?" or "Where did my legs go?" She tries to comfort them, telling them their mother's in heaven, but she broods about what to say the inevitable day when Hanan, who especially loved getting dressed up, asks for pretty dresses or shoes. "Look at what happened to our children," she mourns. "There's no future. There's no childhood."

Happily for Israeli soldiers, though, thanks to Biden's billions there is espresso, massage, barbecue, spiritual retreat and "sweet cotton-candy at the heart of the valley of killings" at a posh holiday resort where about 200 IDF soldiers can chill every ten days of their slaughter service. In the Israeli Ynet, reporter Yoav Zitun describes a destination spa with cafe, lounge, video games, popcorn machines, a desalination facility, meat on an eternal grill, a "hotel breakfast" with Belgian waffles and ice cream when it's wam where, "We make dreams come true for soldiers." Of this "bubble in a concentration camp," alongside kids scavenging for water or a scrap of food and dogs eating human body parts in the ravaged streets, one sage cites Zionism's "extraordinary talent for training its faithful to see only what serves its purposes while erasing everything else." In Gaza, it's not enough to simply erase Palestinians: "Israel must invent an entire alternate reality."

America's newest $8 billion contribution to an increasingly normalized genocide and its bloody, barbarous, macabre delusions will ensure more of the same. As Gazans plead for mercy and reason from an uncaring world, they in truth know and say they have "nothing but God." And still the bombs fall. On Monday, they killed Dr. Thabat Saleem, a volunteer neo-natal doctor who worked "tirelessly" for nearly a year, she was killed in an Israeli strike on her house in Nuseirat refugee camp. 28 Palestinians were killed in another strike; 40 were injured when a drone bombed a school sheltering hundreds of displaced people; several more were injured when Israel fired at a clearly marked aid convoy and a food distribution site as nobody blinked. And an eighth Gazan baby, Yousef Ahmad, froze to death in a tent. He was 35 days old.

IImam Abu Suaied prays over the bodies of Jumaa and another baby who died at birth in Deir el-Balah (Photo by Abdel Kareem Hana/AP)