Now that the US and Israel have stopped bombing Iran, Israel can re-focus on its core business of starving children in Gaza, and killing their parents, medical staff, journalists and anyone else who strays across their line of fire.
Since Israel shut the UN out of aid delivery, it has given the job of handing out a trickle of food to a private US entity called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF. The GHF aid sites have functioned as effective killing grounds. Reportedly, top UNRWA officials have described the GHF aid centres as a “death trap.”
Parents desperate for food to feed their starving children have been drawn to these GHF sites, where they continue to be killed in large numbers by the IDF. Since the GHF set up shop on May 27th, over 400 Palestinians have reportedly been killed at these aid sites. Here’s Tuesday’s death toll:
Israeli forces and drones have killed at least 86 Palestinians since dawn, including 56 near aid distribution centres, in the latest attacks on desperate people seeking aid in the besieged Gaza Strip, according to medical sources in hospitals. In Rafah alone, in the south of the enclave, 27 aid seekers were gunned down by the Israeli military on Tuesday.
This use of food to lure desperately hungry people into locations where they can be killed in large numbers is functioning as a cost effective feature of Israel’s machinery of genocide.
At least 92 people have been killed in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip as desperate Palestinians continue to seek food amid an ongoing hunger crisis…Starving Palestinians have gathered in the area daily to receive packages from the United States- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which the United Nations has condemned for its “weaponisation” of aid.
And again :
At least 82 Palestinians were killed across Gaza by the Israeli army on Friday, sources said, including several in an attack where jets bombed a house west of Deir el-Balah.
At least 37 people were killed in central Gaza, including 23 who were seeking aid, according to hospital sources. In Gaza City, another 23 people lost their lives, while 22 were killed in southern Gaza – 11 of whom were also aid seekers.
Not only food distribution points are being used to target groups of Palestinians. Reportedly, so are the electricity charging points, essential if the poor quality food being distributed is to be cooked. None of this butchery got much media coverage last week beyond Al Jazeera, because world attention was so distracted by the Israel/Iran conflict.
Gangster politics
We’ve seen this movie before. The boss sends his chief goon in to take down some sap who’s been getting too big for his britches. The goon, gets so into it that the boss has to swear at him to stop. Do they finish the sap off, or do they leave him to linger on, as a stark warning about the real power players are in the Middle East?
That last bit seems to be the reasoning behind the current “ceasefire.” To be clear: this conflict was never really about a a supposed threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme. No more than the 2003 invasion of Iraq was ever about finding those non-existent weapons of mass destruction. In both cases, the war was waged to remove rivals, and to establish just which neo-colonial power rules the roost in the region.
In sorting out truth from fiction in what is largely an exercise of naked power, the tut-tutting by the US and Israel about the need to keep the region safe from nuclear weapons is pretty shameless. Both countries have long opposed UN moves to turn the Middle East into a nuclear weapons free zone.
The US and Israel are both nuclear armed to the teeth. Israel is estimated to possess some 90 nuclear warheads, and the US is the only military power ever to use its nuclear weapons on other human beings. It did so twice. So…when it comes to issuing warnings about nuclear weapons, neither Israel nor the US are reliable narrators.
However, they have been extremely successful at setting the boundaries of this debate :
Myth One: Iran was building nuclear weapons and had to be stopped. Not true. Instead, it is entirely legal for member states of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Treaty (NPT) to pursue the peaceful enrichment of uranium. (Iran is a signatory of the NPT, Israel is not.)
In their latest report, IAEA inspectors found that Iran had not enriched its U-235 above 60 %. and there had been no indication of nuclear weaponisation, for which enrichment to 90% would be required. In March, US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified to Congress that US intelligence sources had indicated Iran was not engaged in building a nuclear weapon.
In other words, Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons capability posed no ‘imminent threat” to anyone – which is the necessary pre-condition needed under international law in order to justify the attacks made on its territory by Israel and the US.
New Zealand for all of its loud claims to be an honest broker that supports the norms of international law has chosen not to defend international law in this instance. Russia’s actions in Ukraine? Terrible, we said, right from the outset. But Team Israel’s actions in Iran? Different story. According to acting PM David Seymour in his best impersonation of a moral vacuum, we don’t have enough information ( about what?) and besides, no one cares what we think anyway. Truly, a leader for our time.
Channelling Diplomacy
There’s more. Through diplomatic channels, Iran had repeatedly signalled its willingness to forego nuclear weaponry in return for trade sanctions being lifted, and for gaining access to Western markets. A deal to that end was signed between the Obama administration and Iran in 2015.
In that deal, Iran agreed not to commission its Arak nuclear reactor, significantly reduced its enrichment programme and submitted to regular IAEA inspections to ensure its compliance. Even though the US never followed through on its side of the bargain, Iran also suspended its enrichment programme for two more years in the hope that the Biden administration might honour the US commitments. Biden didn’t.
Even after this track record of treachery by the US, Iran was still willing this year to negotiate an acceptable level of nuclear enrichment with the West. It was still in the middle of those talks – with more talks scheduled in Oman on June 22nd – when Benjamin Netanyahu started bombing Iran. Here’s how the former head of the IAEA Mohamed ElBaradei, has summed up the situation :
“For Israel to attack #Iran including its nuclear facilities (prohibited by international law) and for #Trump to ask Iran for “total surrender” and forego a treaty right (uranium enrichment) in a clear act of national humiliation, on suspicion that it is developing nuclear weapons (possessed by both #Israel and #US), suspicion that does not constitute an “imminent threat” as confirmed by all western intelligence agencies and was dealt with through negotiations in #JCPOA agreement of 2015 which the US withdrew from in 2018. To rely on force and not negotiations is a sure way to destroy the #NPT and the nuclear non-proliferation regime (imperfect as it is) and sends a clear message to many countries that their “ultimate security” is to develop nuclear weapons !!!”
Footnote: If Iran has shifted enrichment tools out of its official sites, it may soon (or already) have enough material to construct a “dirty bomb.”
Myth Two: Iran funds terrorism throughout the Middle East. To be sure, Iran has lent support in recent years to both Hamas in Gaza, and to Hezbollah n Lebanon. In response to the active Saudi/UAE involvement in the civil war in Yemen – which included Saudi blockades of food and essential medical supplies during an epidemic – Iran has also lent a limited amount of support to the Houthis.
Commonly, the Houthis get described by Western media as “rebels” and Iranian ”proxies” – even though they control some 70-% of Yemen, provide the nearest thing to an effective central government, and make their own foreign policy decisions (notably in support of the people of Gaza) regardless of what Tehran advises them to do. Evidently, only the bad guys have proxies. We have alliances.
Look at the map of the Middle East. Iran has few friends (Qatar, Iraq, Lebanon at best) and many, many far more powerful enemies – Israel, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, and all of North Africa. When it comes to funding ”terrorism” abroad, Iran’s exported terrorism is largely limited to its murderous attacks upon its own Iranian dissidents.
To everyone else, Iran is not the main terrorist problem. Over the past decade or more, the terrorism threat in cities across Europe has come from either right wing hate groups, or from Islamic State and other Sunni extremist groups. It has not come from the Shia clerics in Iran.
No doubt, Iran is ruled by a stupidly brutal, religiously bigoted regime that executes its dissidents. But then, that description also fits Saudi Arabia just as neatly. Yet no-one is bombing Riyadh in order to weaken or eliminate the House of Saud.
Footnote : Which country repeatedly carries most of the acts of terrorism committed across the Middle East? That would be Israel, by a long shot. Israel has not only invaded and continues to illegally occupy territory that belongs to its neighbours. According to this Washington Post count in February, over 23,000 US citizens currently serve in the IDF, in aid of Israel’s military expansionism.
On a regular basis across the Middle East, Israel kills foreign political and religious leaders, journalists, aid workers, medical staff, and scientists. Assassination has become a common tool of Israeli foreign policy. There is no equivalent elsewhere in the Middle East to Israel’s scale of state-sponsored terrorism.
The moral decline involved has been tragic to witness, given the WWII circumstances that gave birth to the state of Israel. Yet by choosing to fixate solely on their own needs and interests – the hostages! – the citizens of Israel seem to be wilfully blind to the daily round of crimes against humanity that are being committed in their name, by the Netanyahu government.
Once seen as a victim, the state of Israel now acts more like a psychotic, impervious to the suffering it is causing to others. Apart from a few notable exceptions like Ireland, Spain and South Africa, the West prefers to look the other way. For its part, New Zealand pretends not to see what is happening in Gaza.