"LET THE CHILDREN COME TO ME AND DO NOT HINDER THEM FOR TO SUCH BELONGS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN"

  

 

“We have become inured to bestiality”—ret. U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, on the lack of response, globally, to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

 

Autopsy X-Ray of Palestinian child shot in head by Israeli sniper

IT’S HARD TO DISAGREE with Colonel Wilkerson when we look at what’s happening in Gaza. When we see how little has been done by those who could do the most and act quickest to stop the horror show that Palestinians there, and increasingly in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are living through: Children deliberately targeted by IDF (Israeli Defence Force) snipers. Starving Palestinians shot while lining up for food in southern Gaza. Over ninety percent of residences in Gaza damaged or destroyed. Fifty million tonnes of infrastructure—roads, farmland, orchards, water and sewage facilities, power plants, public buildings, places of worship, hospitals, apartments, homes, schools, colleges and universities, businesses—have been turned to rubble. A recent study found that 56% of those killed have been children up to the age of eighteen and women. It’s estimated that over 100,000 Gazans have been murdered by IDF bombs and bullets, and by disease, malnutrition, and exposure to the elements. And a similar number have been injured or wounded by Israeli’s genocidal rampage of ethnic cleansing. The University of London’s Professor Michael Spagat, co-author of a Gazan mortality study published in June, states: "I think we're probably at something like 4 percent of the population killed," Spagat says, adding, "I'm not sure that there's another case in the 21st century that's reached that high.”

 

IN EARLY MARCH, Israel once more blockaded the Gaza Strip. No food aid would be allowed in until the end of May when the newly incorporated Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was brought in to handle food distribution to the over two million Gazans, many of whom were suffering from malnutrition. From the get-go, the GHF was understood to be a tool of subjugation, offering food aid at four “aid hubs” located in the south-central and southern parts of the Gaza Strip. To receive food, Gazans must move near the aid stations, concentrating the population into the southern Rafah district where they live in tents or among the ruins. 90% of the Palestinian population has been displaced from their homes.

👉Food distribution using such a system is ineffective and wholly inadequate, “forcing two million people into overcrowded and militarized aid zones* where they face daily gunfire” from Israeli soldiers. (BBC)

 

A  RECENT STUDY suggests this is not a fault but, instead, a feature of the system. Yaakov Garb, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, published a study of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and its aid distribution network in southern Gaza.

    Four distribution hubs in Gaza for 2.1 million Palestinians

AS THE MAP shows there are four aid “hubs” set up, ostensibly to provide food aid for approximately 2.1 million Palestinians. I say “ostensively” because the GHF has been roundly criticized by the UN and 170 charitable aid organizations as being wholly inadequate for the job. Note that prior to Israel’s 2025 blockades of foreign humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) had four hundred  aid sites set up throughout the Palestinian enclave. As Garb’s study suggests, GHF’s inability to provide timely, adequate food and other supplies to Gazan citizens needing aid is, in fact, how this new system is supposed to function. Not all Gazans can travel to the aid centres and not all who do make the journey receive aid once they arrive because of supply shortages and administrative oversights. 

👉This is a feature of the system—to keep Gazans hungry and desperate and insecure. And these distribution hubs are manned by often-armed American "contractors" and the grounds are patrolled by IDF soldiers adding an element of threat for Palestinians seeking aid. Since GHF started in late May, there have been daily instances of people killed by IDF fire en route to aid centres or while they are queued. As of last Tuesday, 583 Palestinians were killed including 408 near the distribution centres. “Today, Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families." (BBC)

 

“UN Secretary-General António Guterres called the GHF's aid distribution system ‘inherently unsafe’, adding: ‘It is killing people.’ From the start the UN has opposed the plan, saying it would ‘militarize’ aid, bypass the existing UN-led distribution network and force Gazans to make long journeys through dangerous territory to get food.” (BBC)

 

Garb’s study provides helpful information on how the physical location of aid centres (in one location, forcing people to travel miles for a box of food or to relocate nearer the hubs) and reviews the physical structure of the distribution centres, their layout, fencing, sight lines etc. He concludes the aid centres are designed to accommodate military requirements for crowd control and policing:

 

“The internal layout of these compounds seems to bear the deep imprint of their military context and mindset. Their architecture is the inverse of well accepted and tested principles of food distribution in conflict or disaster areas, and liable to cause recurrent episodes of chaos and violence.” (Garb)

 

He adds, comparing true humanitarian aid systems with the cobbled together Israeli-American sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s operation:

 

“This layout is so far removed from the design principles and established guidelines for planning emergency camps and distribution sites that a comparison is almost pointless. Humanitarian design principles aim to integrate choice and dignity, reduce physical barriers, rely on community mobilizers and trained de-escalation facilitators rather than armed guards, and other facilities such as shading, toilets and water, as well as first aid posts, and dedicated lanes for vulnerable groups”  (Ibid)

 

EACH FOOD BOX is calibrated to feed 5.5 people for 3.5 days, ensuring a continual “coercive” flow through “dangerous and militarized zones” that Palestinians must regularly make. The bull-dozed, flat and fenced off reception area of a GHF aid centre is surrounded by steep embankments and guard towers, with obvious “choke points” along a ‘fatal funnel’ Palestinians must pass through. The open-air facility, with its single entrance and exit is designed to intimidate and to increase stress levels in a population already traumatized from twenty months of relentless IDF bombings and gunfire. Those same troops responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Gazans now guard the food distribution centres, adding to issues of crowd control and the all-too-quick use of lethal fire against unarmed civilians by IDF soldiers. Hence, the daily shootings we witness of dozens of Palestinians as they approach or enter GHF’s militarized aid zones.

👉Garb makes it clear that the design of the aid centres promotes insecurity and threats of being exposed with a ‘target on your back’. It’s no wonder there are chaotic scenes of overrun facilities or else crowds of Palestinians fleeing Israeli gunfire before they can get a box of food. And this, too, is a feature of the system; feeding Gazans is not the mission of the GHF. It is there to present a show of humanitarian relief, a bare minimum (if that) of food and medicines doled out, so the Israelis can tell the world: “Look, we’re trying to get the food aid distributed but Hamas….”  Blahblahblah. Shameful!

Gazan mothers are unable to breast feed because they lack enough nourishment for themselves, and baby formula is not allowed into Gaza. Meanwhile, babies are malnourished and dying.

How can this be happening? How can this be allowed to happen?

 

 

FUN FACT: UNICEF (United Nations International Children Emergency Fund) estimates upwards of 4,000 children in Gaza have one or more limbs amputated (often without anesthesia) due to Israeli bombing or gunfire. The Palestinian enclave has more child amputees per capita that anywhere else on earth. 

 

FUN FACT: During the Twelve Day War between Israel and Iran, Israeli warplanes that did not discharge all their ordnance during their mission were ordered to discharge leftover payloads on Gaza as they returned to Israeli air space. Waste not, want no, I suppose.

 

FUN FACT: "American contractors guarding aid distribution sites in Gaza are using live ammunition and stun grenades as hungry Palestinians scramble for food," according to The Associated Press. 

 

 Catelyn Stark's 'murder' GoT "The Red Wedding"

FUN FACT: The Friday, June 13 surprise attack on Iran by Israel at the start of the “Twelve-day War” had two “decapitation” sub-operations: One was the targeted assassinations of perhaps thirty Iranian Air Force leaders assembled for a meeting. This sub-operation was code-named “The Red Wedding”. A second decapitation strike, the near-simultaneous assassinations of nine top Iranian nuclear scientists, was code-named “Operation Narnia”. For those who don’t know, “The Red Wedding” was a chapter in the fantasy novel, The Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin (as well as the popular HBO television series). In it, Robb Stark, the scion of the Stark family and his attending family and troops are murdered by Lord Walder Frey as they celebrated the wedding of Frey's daughter, Roslin to Edmure Tully  at Walder’s Riverlands castle. Lord Frey orchestrated the deadly massacre  as revenge for Robb breaking a marriage pact with the Freys. Treachery and stealth were features in making Lord Frey’s bloody revenge a success, and the same holds true for Israel’s assassination plot against the Iranian military leaders).

“Operation Narnia” takes its name from C.S. Lewis’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia and suggests the plot to murder the nuclear scientists was considered a ‘fantasy’ for Israeli Intelligence operatives, one that came with a low probability for success. But succeed it did, dear reader! The decapitation strike⁺ killed the nine, long-surveilled Iranian scientists in their homes, along with 22 members of their families. Nice.

WHY DO I PICTURE A SCENE in some seedy, Tel Aviv bar, earlier this year, where a Mossad operative and his American and British counterparts toss back shooters after having spent the day hammering out the details for the June 13 attacks. I can all-but-see the CIA ‘spook’, glassy-eyed and with a world-weary cynicism, his lips curling in a half-smile-half-sneer, suggest the targeted assassination of a group of Iranian military officers be code-named the “Red Wedding”, something he recalls from a book he once read during a happier time in his life. The Brit, an MI6 spy, with his eyebrow arched in a rictus of supreme irony, suggests “Operation Narnia” for the plot to murder the nine Iranian scientists.

FOR HIS PART, the Israeli agent laughs and writes down their suggestions on the back of a paper napkin. He folds the napkin into a postage stamp size, pops it in his mouth and swallows it along with a shot of tequila, yelling “Top secret!” The table erupts into loud peals of laughter and calls for more drinks, and the group sings narcocorridor ballads until closing. 

Aslan is not amused.

 

 Cheers, Jake.  ____________________________________

* The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (a misnomer if ever there was one) purports to be in Gaza to provide food aid to the starving Gazan population but its real purpose is to militarize the food distribution system, and to corral and control the Palestinian population using armed American “contractors” (aka mercenaries). Its goal is to lure, using food aid, as many Gazans as possible into the Rafah region bordering Egypt, immiserate and control them in camps patrolled by the IDF (Israeli Defence Force) and either shove them into Egypt’s Sinai Desert, starve or kill them, or send them to other countries. [It's always good to have goals in life and plans to achieve them. Ed.]

 

+ In this case, the Israelis hoped to ‘decapitate’ or degrade the knowledge base of Iran’s nuclear program by assassinating key personnel.