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rafah crossing
In 'Grave Breach' of International Law, Israel Orders More Evacuations in Rafah
"People have stayed in Rafah thinking it's safe and hoping that global pressure would stop an invasion. But now we are abandoned by the world and everyone feels betrayed and let down," one aid worker said.
May 11, 2024
The Israel Defense Forces ordered additional evacuations in central Rafah on Saturday, signalling that Israel will continue with an invasion of the southern Gaza city that has been the last refuge for more than 1.4 million Palestinians displaced since the country began its devastating war on Gaza in October.
The new evacuations follow orders issued Monday for residents and refugees to leave eastern Rafah. Humanitarian agencies said that approximately 110,000 people had evacuated from Rafah before Saturday and that another 40,000 joined them following the most recent orders, according toThe Associated Press.
"We are forcibly leaving after the occupation army threatened us, through recorded calls and in a post published on Facebook. We are leaving because of fear and coercion," Rafah resident Faten Lafi toldAl Jazeera. "We are leaving for the unknown and there are no safe areas at all. All the areas left are unsafe."
"Many people in Gaza are already suffering from famine, but now we are entering a new period of unprecedented hardship."
International humanitarian organizations have warned that an invasion of Rafah would be catastrophic for civilians and aid operations and that there is no credible way to safely evacuate the city.
"The Israeli army does not have a safe area in Gaza. They target everything," Abu Yusuf al-Deiri, who is now in Rafah after fleeing Gaza City, told AP.
The U.S. has said it opposes a Rafah invasion that does not include a workable plan to protect civilians, and President Joe Biden has threatened to withhold certain weapons from Israel if it moves forward with a full-scale Rafah attack, though critics have argued that Israel has made enough incursions into the city to justify cutting off arms now.
"With no guarantee of safety, proper accommodations, or return once hostilities end, this is a grave breach of international humanitarian law, not an orderly evacuation as Israel portrays it," said Itay Epshtain, a senior humanitarian law and policy consultant who works as special adviser to the Norwegian Refugee Council and the Association of International Development Agencies, on social media.
The United Nations Children's Fund has further warned that the "humanitarian area" where Israel is now directing Rafah evacuees—a coastal enclave called Al-Mawasi—is not safe because it does not have adequate supplies and because it has been subjected to air strikes in the past.
"We don't know what we will do," 54-year-old Muhammad Qahman, who arrived in Rafah in January toldThe Guardian. "We are now preparing our things to go to the area designated by the Israeli army, which is supposed to be safe and a humanitarian area, but this is just a lie," Qahman added, referring to Al-Mawasi.
The charity Islamic Relief published a statement in response to the new evacuation orders, which included testimony from a staff member.
"I feel like this is the end," the staff worker said. "It feels like we will all be either trapped and killed in Gaza, or we will all be forced out. People have stayed in Rafah thinking it's safe and hoping that global pressure would stop an invasion. But now we are abandoned by the world and everyone feels betrayed and let down."
The worker added that the humanitarian situation in Gaza had become even more difficult since Israel seized the Gaza side of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, making it impossible for supplies to get in.
"Bakeries have stopped working because they don't have fuel, so we don't have bread. We don't have any water supply as that also depends on fuel deliveries, so yesterday we had to pay $50 just to refill our tank. Cars have stopped, so people coming from Rafah to the Middle Area are either walking or packed into vans carrying hundreds of people," they continued. "Many people in Gaza are already suffering from famine, but now we are entering a new period of unprecedented hardship."
Georgios Petropoulos, who works with the U.N. humanitarian agency in Rafah, explained to AP that aid organizations were struggling to support the latest round of displaced Gazans.
"We simply have no tents, we have no blankets, no bedding, none of the items that you would expect a population on the move to be able to get from the humanitarian system," Petropoulos said.
The latest evacuations could also further destabilize Rafah's remaining healthcare infrastructure.
Hospital director Saheb al-Hams said the latest order "threatened" Kuwaiti Specialty Hospital.
"There is no other place for patients and injured people to go to but this hospital," al-Hams told reporters, calling for "immediate international protection."
In addition to the Rafah evacuation orders, the IDF also told "all residents and displaced people" to leave parts of Gaza City, Jabaliya, Zeitoun, and Beit Lahiya in the north of Gaza as it prepares to intensify fighting there.
"It's raining terror again in Jabaliya Refugee Camp and north of Gaza!" British Palestinian activist Shahd Abusalama wrote on social media Saturday. "I heard the bombs falling all around my surviving family everyone was screaming! They're gasping to breathe! My family there survived through way too much. They may not survive this one."
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Cutting Off Lifeline for Starving Gazans, Israel Seizes Control of Rafah Crossing
"This has devastating impacts for the people of Gaza who are already on the verge of famine," said the UNRWA's director of planning.
May 07, 2024
With tanks and ground forces, the Israeli military seized control of the Gaza side of Rafah's border crossing with Egypt on Tuesday, cutting off a critical humanitarian aid route as much of the enclave's population faces imminent famine.
Israel's takeover of the Rafah crossing came hours after the country's military ordered more than 100,000 people in the southern Gaza city to evacuate ahead of a ground assault, which is moving forward after the right-wing Israeli government rejected a cease-fire proposal accepted by Hamas. Cease-fire negotiations mediated by Egypt and Qatar are expected to continue in the coming days.
Video footage posted to social media shows an Israeli tank running over a Gaza sign as Israeli forces took control of the Rafah crossing on Tuesday.
Israeli tank bulldozers Gaza sign as Israeli army captures Rafah crossing this morning.
pic.twitter.com/JNnAXKeW9h
— Ragıp Soylu (@ragipsoylu) May 7, 2024
Reporting from Rafah, Al Jazeera's Hani Mahmoud said the Israeli military is "cutting off the only lifeline right now to the people in Gaza, particularly for the 1.5 million displaced Palestinians here in Rafah."
The Rafah crossing is closed, cutting off the life line for 1.5m people crammed into this tiny piece of land right at the southern end of the Gaza strip.
Hani Mahmoud reporting from Rafah. pic.twitter.com/kPeImrntDj
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) May 7, 2024
Two key humanitarian aid routes—the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings—have been shut down for days as the Israeli military plows ahead with its Rafah assault in the face of international outrage. More than 600,000 children are currently living in Rafah, and aid organizations say Israel has no credible plan to protect them.
Overnight, Israel launched deadly airstrikes in Rafah, describing its military operation in the overcrowded city as "very precise." One resident
toldReuters that the Israeli strikes killed his wife and children.
Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, toldThe Associated Press that Israeli authorities have denied the agency access to the Rafah crossing.
A lasting shutdown of the route, Laerke warned, "will plunge this crisis into unprecedented levels of need, including the very real possibility of a famine." He added that Israel's military is "ignoring all warnings about what this could mean for civilians and for the humanitarian operation across the Gaza Strip."
Speaking to Al Jazeera on Tuesday, the director of planning at the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—the most important aid organization operating in Gaza—said the closure of the Rafah crossing is having "catastrophic impacts on everyone in Gaza."
"Since October, this has been the main entry point of goods coming into Gaza," said Sam Rose. "There has only been a trickle of goods coming in, and since Sunday the crossing has been closed completely. And this has devastating impacts for the people of Gaza who are already on the verge of famine."
"No aid coming in means no aid distributed after a couple of days," Rose continued. "And equally importantly, Rafah and Kerem Shalom are the only entry points for fuel in Gaza, so without the fuel there's no ability for trucks to move around, there's no ability for desalination plants to operate and provide safe water, there's no electricity. It cuts off everything. Rafah and Kerem Shalom—they're the lifeblood for the small amount of goods that have been coming into Gaza since October, so absolutely devastating."
"Absolutely devastating"
This morning the IDF have seized the Palestinian side of the Rafah crossing, and Sam Rose from UNRWA explains what it means now that the crossing is closed. pic.twitter.com/iC1w8AWnt5
— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) May 7, 2024
Laerke of the U.N. humanitarian affairs office said that cutting off the supply of fuel to Gaza for an extended period of time "would be a very effective way of putting the humanitarian operation in its grave."
Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement that "more attacks on what is now the primary humanitarian hub in the Gaza strip are not the answer."
"First and foremost, there must be a cease-fire. Humanitarian aid must be allowed to flow freely and at scale. And the hostages and those arbitrarily detained must be released at once," said Türk. "Those that elect to flout international humanitarian law and international human rights law must be held to account."
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Theatre of Cruelty—And Its Double: From Aaron Bushnell to Biden's Gaza Airdrop
The real purpose of this spectacle was to deliver votes for the president, not meals for the starving.
Mar 04, 2024
The head of Save the Children described the Biden Administration’s recent airdrop of food into Gaza airdrop as “theater.” That it is. So is the Vice President’s sudden “demand” for a six-week ceasefire. For that matter, so is the ceasefire itself — if it happens. It’s likely to be characterized by ongoing immiseration and slow death, to be followed by the faster forms of killing.
It’s an American theater of cruelty whose real purpose is to deliver votes for the president, not meals for the starving. It will end as it began: in fire. The question is, what kind of fire and for whom?
Breadcrumbs
The American airdrop consisted of 38,000 “MRE’s,” or “Meals Ready to Eat,” those unwholesome feed bags the US military buys by the millions to feed its underpaid and undervalued soldiers. To call this gesture a publicity stunt is unfair to publicity stunts, which are hollow but rarely lethal. It’s part of a killing strategy of deflection and deception.
More than 2,100,000 people are starving in Gaza; the children are already dying. If divided evenly, every person in Gaza would receive precisely 1.8 percent of each bag pictured above – that is, if they got any of it, which is unlikely amidst all the US-backed chaos. Hunger can’t be cured homeopathically, with microscopic doses.
The average weight of an MRE is 22 ounces. (I looked it up.) That means this airdrop provided roughly one-third of an ounce of food for every man, woman, and child. That’s like a bird hunter scattering breadcrumbs for pigeons before he starts killing them again.
At the going price for MREs (I looked that up, too), the retail cost of the food dropped comes to $617,405. That’s 29 cents for every starving person in Gaza (which is pretty much all of them.) And the military probably got a discount.
Perhaps the cost should be billed to the Biden campaign. Its real purpose is to offset the growing backlash against the administration’s support for mass slaughter, which was quantified in the Michigan primary’s surge of anti-Biden “uncommitted” votes. The president has seemed publicly insensate to the deaths of children, but even his dimming organs of perception can smell unfriendly votes. And whatever he doesn’t catch, his advisors presumably will.
Meanwhile, the president and his party continue to push a bill that would provide $14 billion in military aid to Israel. That’s more than twenty-two thousand times as much as the US spent on this food drop. Roughly $10 billion of that would consist of weapons for the IDF, including “advanced weapons systems” like the ones that are currently destroying apartment buildings, schools, and hospitals.
That cost should be billed to the American conscience.
The Airdrop Show
From the Washington Post: “Critics say airdrops are expensive and ineffective, and argue diplomatic efforts should be focused on opening Gaza’s border crossing to allow aid convoys access.” But that would require confronting Israel, which the Biden Administration has yet to do in any meaningful way.
The United States could send food aid on ships to the Gaza shore with troops through the Rafah Crossing. It could confront Israel with a simple choice: fire on our military, or accept that the policy of mass starvation has come to an end. The fact that it doesn’t means that the dying will continue.
The same inaction gives the lie to Kamala Harris’ belated discovery that “people in Gaza are starving” and her lofty call for “an immediate ceasefire” – which sounds good, except that the administration is absolving Israel of all responsibility for the deaths and for the lack of a ceasefire.
The latest evidence for that was a press briefing in which two unnamed “senior administration officials” spoke on conditions of anonymity (conditions which the media should not have accepted, according to the professional standards of journalism.)
“Can you say broadly whether you feel that Israel is cooperating enough on getting aid into Gaza?” they were asked. “Do you feel that having done this, having had to do this airdrop today, is a statement at all on their cooperation?”
“The challenge is from various sources.” Replied “Senior Administration Official,” but “it is not a reflection on Israel or Israeli practices. It's a reflection on need. The need is there.”
Got that? Israel had nothing to do with it. “The need” just appeared and is now simply “there.”
Palestine is the land of biblical miracles, but that’s a new one.
Acts of Submission
Robert Ford, a much-decorated career diplomat and former ambassador to Syria, tweeted:
“I've seen Israel humiliate previous US administrations, but … forcing USA to do airdrops of aid to Gaza as if USA is no better than Egypt & Jordan is Israel's worst humiliation of USA i've ever seen.”
Even now, Biden responds to this humiliation with more acts of submission and collaboration. His unnamed officials blamed the ongoing violence solely on one party, saying it continues
“because a terrorist group holding hostages, including Americans, is continuing to fight and attack. They could stop this -- Hamas could -- tonight, instantly, and allow the free movement of assistance, medicine, care to go to the civilians of Gaza with whom, under whom, in whose homes they have embedded themselves for these past 17 years.”
This is Netanyahu’s rhetoric. But even if all these claims are true (they’re highly disputable), none justify the ongoing, criminal violence being waged on a civilian population.
The anonymous officials also proclaimed that Hamas is holding up a ceasefire agreement but insisted that Israel has “more or less” agreed to it. Hamas showed up the following day for a negotiation session; Israel did not. That was no surprise. Anyone who has done any deals at all knows that people either agree or they don’t. “More or less” is the language of the huckster, not the diplomat.
No wonder those officials remained anonymous. Perhaps they, unlike their boss, retain a vestigial sense of shame.
But I doubt it.
Starving the Victims
Neither the president nor his newly high-minded VP have renounced their own Senate bill, which provides billions to the Israeli war machine while ending all support for UNRWA — the most vital aid agency in Gaza — and pledging no minimum amount of aid in return.
Even the European Union, whose actions have largely been shameful on this issue, has reversed itself on UNRWA. Its top diplomat, Josep Borrell, has acknowledged that UNRWA is an “irreplaceable actor.”
The EU is still holding back some funds, regrettably, but it has released $54 millionand has promised additional funding after certain conditions are met. Biden and his party have yet to change their position, even as more children die of starvation.
The Importance of Burning
Which brings us to an update on the sacrifice of airman Aaron Bushnell, who immolated himself outside the Israeli Embassy while shouting “Free Palestine!” A law enforcement officer shouted, “I don't need guns, I need fire extinguishers.”
That phrase should become the guiding principle of American foreign policy.
I’ve been reluctant to write about Bushnell’s act. Not because I don’t admire it — I do — but because those of us who have struggled with depression have an intimate relationship with suicide. Perhaps too intimate to be objective.
But this wasn’t suicide. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh wrote to Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1965. In his letter, he explains the actions of the monks who immolated themselves during the Vietnam War. One sentence struck me then, just as it strikes me now:
“The importance is not to take one’s life, but to burn.”
He continued:
“To burn oneself by fire is to prove that what one is saying is of the utmost importance. There is nothing more painful than burning oneself. To say something while experiencing this kind of pain is to say it with the utmost of courage, frankness, determination and sincerity.”
My fear – and, frankly, my expectation – was that Bushnell’s sacrifice would be ignored. Instead, it has resonated. His memory has been kept alive in the discourse. Maybe, just maybe, something is awakening in the American conscience.
The Theater of Cruelty and Its Double
The French actor and playwright Antonin Artaud developed the concept of a “theater of cruelty” as a way to awaken audiences with “the fiery magnetism of its images,” until it becomes “a spiritual therapeutics whose touch can never be forgotten.”
One of Artaud’s dramas was intended to reflect “the Fall of Jerusalem, according to the Bible and history; with the blood-red color that trickles from it and the people's feeling of abandon and panic visible even in the light.”
History repeats itself, as the indigenous people of the region once again feel a sense of abandon and panic that is almost “visible in the light.”
Artaud was also fascinated by the story of Rabbi Shimon, a pioneer in the same mystical tradition that must have guided my great-grandfather as a rabbinical judge in 19th-century Russia-Ukraine.
The story of Shimon’s death as it has been sent down goes like this, as summarized in a Jewish Kabbalist website:
“On that day fire surrounded the house of Rabbi Shimon ... fire from the heavens descended and surrounded Rabbi Shimon. It gave him protection and opened a pure path for his soul ascending the upper worlds.”
Artaud wrote that Shimon’s mystical story “has the ever-present violence and force of a conflagration.” The story of the rabbi “who burns like fire,” he wrote, “is as immediate as fire itself.”
The fiery magnetism of Aaron Bushnell’s sacrifice has touched the world. The theater of cruelty, which was not designed to be cruel, has found its mirror image in love and sacrifice. I’m no theologian, but who knows? Maybe the fire that took Aaron’s life will provide protection and a pure path – for him, and those for whom he died.
But it’s not enough to hope. Action is needed now, before it’s too late, because fire comes in many forms. It can burn slowly, giving light and warmth. Or it can arise suddenly, unexpectedly, assuming the shape of inescapable justice as it moves among us.Keep ReadingShow Less
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