Biden Sends More Bombs to Israel, Violating His Red Line Promise | Palestine Policy Roundup 07.12.2024
Welcome to the Palestine Policy Roundup, a weekly publication of the IMEU Policy Project.
👀 ICYMI: MEMBERS OF CONGRESS SPEAK OUT
Rep. Rashida Tlaib in response to Israel bombing a school in Khan Younis: “It's sick how the government of Israel intentionally targets Palestinian civilians over & over again while world leaders watch and say absolutely nothing. Some even fund it proudly. This is genocide. Targeting civilians like this is a war crime. ICC, where are the arrest warrants?”
DC DEVELOPMENTS
💣 BIDEN ADMIN UNPAUSES PART OF WEAPONS SHIPMENT, SENDS MORE BOMBS TO ISRAEL
The Biden administration is reportedly unpausing the shipment of 1,700 500-pound bombs to be sent to Israel. These bombs were a part of the shipment that President Biden paused in response to concerns about the use of heavy munitions in the Israeli invasion of Rafah, along with 1,800 2,000 pound bombs that remain paused.
During a CNN interview following his initial decision to pause the shipment of munitions, President Biden established a “red line” and vowed to pause weapons shipments to Israel if it invaded Rafah. As Israel moved forward with its invasion, including bombing a tent camp in the Tal al-Sultan neighborhood of Rafah using US weapons, decimating Rafah and turning it into a ghost town, and displacing more than one million people who had already been displaced during the Israeli assault on Gaza, President Biden has not lived up to his “red line” promise.
Speaking to the Washington Post about the resumption of the weapons shipment, Janet Abou-Elias, a research fellow at the Center for International Policy, said: “In Gaza’s densely populated areas, the difference in the destructive impact between a 500-pound and a 2,000-pound bomb is negligible, both causing immense destruction and civilian casualties”. This shipment will only further greenlight the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and cause more death and destruction.
📷 PHOTOS: Foreign journalists were guided by Israeli forces into Rafah this week. Israel has not allowed foreign journalists into Gaza before and during its assault on Rafah, and photos of the devastation published by Al-Jazeera and others are the first pictures of Gaza to come from foreign outlets in months.
🏛️ BIDEN ADMIN RESIGNEES URGE THE PRESIDENT TO CHANGE COURSE IN GAZA
Twelve resignees from the Biden administration released a joint statement urging a change in the president’s course on Gaza, calling the current policy “a failure and a threat to U.S. national security” that “dehumanizes both Palestinians and Jews”. The resignees called for the application of laws such as the Leahy Law and Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act, for reforms related to transparency and oversight of the Executive Branch and how it handles dissent, and for the US to support the self-determination of the Palestinian people.
Multiple signatories spoke to the Huffington Post before the release of the statement, describing a culture of censorship within the Biden administration and explaining why they felt the need to resign and push for change from the outside. Hala Rharrit, a former State Department diplomat, said she had “never witnessed this level of silencing and self-censorship on any policy”, and Harrison Mann, a former Army Major who resigned from his position at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said that “[t]here have been a lot of moments where I felt, against reason, quite hopeful that we could see a change, and I think what we all understood – some of them faster than me – is that outside pressure is the only thing that’s going to move the ball on this”.
The statement also featured two previously unknown resignees from the administration: Anna Del Castillo, former Deputy Director in the Office of Management and Administration and the first known White House official to resign in April over Gaza, and Maryam Hassanein, former Special Assistant at the Department of Interior, who announced her resignation just days before the statement was released. Speaking about her resignation, Hassanein said: “I came to understand that even if the agency I’m working at is not producing foreign policy, serving in the administration in any capacity does essentially make you complicit in the genocide of the Palestinians”.
These resignations continue to demonstrate the growing wave of dissent against the Biden administration’s policy in Gaza, both among those outside the administration and those within it. The Biden administration must heed the calls and warnings of these resignees and halt all weapons to Israel.
IN THE NEWS
❌ MORE THAN 186,000 MAY HAVE BEEN KILLED BY ISRAEL’S GENOCIDE IN GAZA
More than 186,000 people may be dead as a result of Israel’s assault on Gaza, according to a study published by The Lancet medical journal. If accurate, that would mean nearly eight percent of Gaza’s pre-war population has been killed by Israel. While the study explains that this number was reached using a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths for every direct death, the authors note that indirect deaths in recent conflicts have reached up to fifteen times the number of direct deaths. The Lancet study’s death toll is much higher than the 38,000 published by the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, noting that the ministry does not take into account bodies buried under rubble or indirect deaths caused by the destruction of health facilities and other public infrastructure. The study also notes that more than 10,000 people may be buried under rubble and that the bodies of thirty percent of the more than 35,000 dead as recorded at the time of the study remain unidentified.
Even if Israel immediately ends its assault on Gaza, the report also notes that the death toll will continue to grow “in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and non-communicable diseases” due to “destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA ”.The US is fully culpable for possibly hundreds of thousands of deaths in Gaza. From defunding UNRWA and failing to use its leverage to increase the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza, to providing the bombs that destroy Gaza’s infrastructure and bury Palestinians and render them unidentifiable, the US is very clearly responsible for the death and destruction that has already taken place and for what is to come. The Biden administration can and must change course on Gaza to prevent further mass death and destruction.
🔑 KEY TAKEAWAY: “An immediate and urgent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip is essential, accompanied by measures to enable the distribution of medical supplies, food, clean water, and other resources for basic human needs. At the same time, there is a need to record the scale and nature of suffering in this conflict. Documenting the true scale is crucial for ensuring historical accountability and acknowledging the full cost of the war. It is also a legal requirement. The interim measures set out by the International Court of Justice in January, 2024, require Israel to ‘take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of … the Genocide Convention’. The Gaza Health Ministry is the only organisation [sic] counting the dead.”
⚖️ UK GOVERNMENT CONSIDERING DROPPING CHALLENGE TO ICC’S ARREST WARRANTS FOR NETANYAHU, GALLANT
The newly elected Labour government in the UK is reportedly considering dropping the former Conservative government’s legal challenge against efforts to approve arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant by the International Criminal Court. Last month the ICC ruled that it would allow the UK to bring a challenge to the court's jurisdiction over Israeli citizens, which threatened to delay the court’s decision on issuing the warrants. Many international law experts criticized the challenge and highlighted that the jurisdictional issues raised by the UK were addressed by the court’s ruling on its jurisdiction over crimes committed in Palestine in 2021.
As Benjamin Netanyahu prepares for his address to Congress on July 24th, he is reportedly going to extreme lengths to prevent his arrest by an ICC member state. He has decided to travel directly from Israel to the US with a limited entourage rather than risk being arrested during a stopover in Europe, which would be necessary if his plane carried a full load of passengers. The US is also reportedly pressuring the Labour government to maintain the challenge to the warrants. The US must not get in the way of accountability for all at the International Criminal Court. As Netanyahu prepares for his address to Congress, members of Congress must reject his speech, and the Biden administration must allow the Labour government to drop its challenge to the warrants and stop all attacks on the ICC.
🔴 INVESTIGATION REVEALS ISRAELI FORCES’ APPROVAL OF FREE-FOR-ALL VIOLENCE IN GAZA
A report by +972 Magazine and Local Call revealed that Israeli forces in Gaza are authorized to open fire on Palestinians “virtually at-will”. Speaking with six Israeli soldiers who returned from Gaza, the investigation found that international law requiring militaries to distinguish between combatants and civilians is being flagrantly violated, with one soldier testifying that “There was total freedom of action … It’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman.” Another soldier explained that while shooting at schools, medical infrastructure and religious institutions required higher authorization, he could “count on one hand the cases where we were told not to shoot. Even with sensitive things like schools, [approval] feels like only a formality.” If true, these allegations would be considered gross violations of human rights under the Leahy Law, and would compel the US to immediately halt any weapons that it may be supplying to these units.
PALESTINE/ISRAEL DEVELOPMENTS
🏫 ISRAEL KILLS FIFTY PALESTINIANS IN STRIKES ON FOUR SCHOOLS IN FOUR DAYS
Israeli forces struck four schools over four days late last week and early this week, killing at least fifty Palestinians and wounding countless more. Israeli forces struck the al-Jaouni school in Nuseirat on Saturday, killing sixteen displaced Palestinians who were sheltering there. On Sunday, Israel killed four Palestinians in an attack on the Holy Family School in Gaza City. That school was also sheltering hundreds of displaced Palestinian civilians, according to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, which runs the school. Another school in Nuseirat was reportedly struck on Monday, according to a report from a local hospital. On Tuesday, Israeli forces bombed the Al-Awda school near Khan Younis, killing thirty displaced Palestinians. An investigation by the New York Times found that a US-made GBU-39 bomb was used in the attack on the Al-Awda school.
These attacks come as thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate from all of Gaza City and 250,000 people have been displaced from Khan Younis as Israeli forces intensify their attacks across Gaza. Nearly two million people - up to ninety percent of Gaza’s population - have been displaced, according to UNRWA. Israel is not only attacking schools, which is a war crime, but it is also attacking displaced people who are sheltered there.
🔑 KEY TAKEAWAY: UNRWA Secretary-General Phillipe Lazzarini: “Since the war began, two thirds of UNRWA schools in Gaza have been hit, some were bombed out, many severely damaged. Schools have gone from safe places of #education & hope for children to overcrowded shelters and often ending up a place of death & misery. Nine months in, under our watch, the relentless, endless killings, destruction and despair continue. Gaza is no place for children. The blatant disregard of international humanitarian law cannot become the new normal.”
📺 WATCH: Video published by Al Jazeera shows that a soccer game was being played at the Al-Awda school near Khan Younis when it was struck and features the aftermath of the strike.
✂️ ISRAEL APPROVES LARGEST THEFT OF PALESTINIAN LAND IN THE WEST BANK IN DECADES
The Israeli government has approved the largest seizure of Palestinian land in the West Bank since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, according to Israeli rights group Peace Now. More than 3,000 acres of land in the West Bank near Jericho was converted to state property. This designation essentially erases Israeli recognition of private ownership of the land by Palestinians, and is one of the primary methods of seizure used by the Israeli government. This move comes as Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was recently recorded outlining a plan to seize more land and create more settlements in the West Bank in order to prevent a Palestinian state. Israel also recognized five more illegal settlements in the West Bank in exchange for releasing some tax revenue owed to the Palestinian Authority.
🏥 HEAD OF AL-SHIFA HOSPITAL RELEASED FROM ISRAELI DETENTION WITHOUT CHARGE
Mohamed Abu Salmiya, the head of Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, was released from Israeli detention without charge after seven months. Abu Salmiya was arrested in November on accusations of working with Hamas as Israeli officials claimed that the hospital was a command center for the group, but a Washington Post investigation later found that the evidence presented by officials did not support that claim. During a news conference after his release, Abu Salmiya alleged that he was “subjected to torture almost daily”. Issam Abu Ajwa, another doctor released last week, described the torture during his detention: “They poured cold water on us, they turned on the air conditioners and air fans, forced us to stand on our tiptoes and tied us by our hands to the ceiling … They would untie us every six hours for 10 minutes.” These allegations come after Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh and Dr. Iyad al-Rantisi both died in Israeli custody, allegedly killed by the torture they endured.