The United States continued unequivocal support for Israel’s all-out scorched earth assault on Gaza is undermining its relationships with its Arab neighbors and risks doing long-term damage to its reputation in the region. U.S. has historically stood on the right side of encouraging better human rights in countries around the world, and it sacrifices this standard, even if Israel is a best friend of the U.S.A. in the middle east. Best friends don’t enable behavior by those they care about, that is self-destructive and self-defeating.

Perennial US allies like Jordan have been publicly critical about what they see as Washington’s green light for Israel to do as it sees fit in Gaza after the October 7, 2023 brutal massacre conducted against Israelis by the armed wing of the Palestinian group Hamas, from Gaza as Hamas’s fighters killed about 1,200 and took around 240 hostages.

Despite U.S. frequent efforts of shuttle diplomacy to Israel and neighboring Arab countries, designed to advocate for limiting Israel’s war on Hamas to within Gaza, minimizing Gazan civilian casualties and mitigating against its widespread scorched earth war tactics, it has also been providing weapons to Israel without any constraints.

As per the October 27, 2023 Aljazeera report by Paul Ryan Raymond, “For its part, the US is “increasingly pushing behind the scenes for better Israeli decision-making, but it’s also providing weapons to Israel carte blanche”, said Josh Paul, a former senior official at the Department of State who publicly quit his post last week in protest at the strategy. We have tried to frame ourselves as an honest broker, but we’re removing what little credibility we had left in that role,” he told Al Jazeera.

Then there’s the political public relations scarlet letter of Israel recently being credibly accused of genocide in the 84-page complaint by South Africa before the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

The Israeli prime minister and his extreme right coalition members are at best, being two-faced as they appear to be receptive to US counsel while doing whatever they please, and the hell with all the critical background noise. Some very vocal right-wing Israeli ministers have been publicly calling for the relocation all Palestinians living in Israel to other countries and/or for their outright elimination.

How can the democrat US President Joe Biden review the intelligence regarding the devastation imposed by Israel on Gazans in response to Hamas’s brutal attack on Israelis on October 7, 2023, and continue to knowingly be complicit by not taking action? Words are not enough.

That Hamas is absolutely guilty for committing war crimes in Israel, does not give Israel the green light to outperform Hamas by conducting scorched military earth war tactics in Gaza, that ends up in Gaza’s outright destruction because of indiscriminate bombing in huge numbers.

Here are some details on specific aspects of the crisis.

The January 8, 2024 Guardian article by Archie Bland gives its readers a status report regarding the condition of Gaza after 3 months of attacks by Israel on Hamas, “Monday briefing: The numbers that reveal the extent of the destruction in Gaza…

Excerpts:

“But on even the most frequently disputed point – casualty figures from Gaza’s Hamas-run ministry of health – there are few plausible critiques of the broad scale of what is being shown. And in many cases, the numbers published by the UN, independent aid agencies and others are likely to be at the low end of the possible range. So it is reasonable to view the picture presented by these sources as a conservative account of the situation, rather than conclude that the reality is hopelessly occluded by the fog of war.”

Deaths

“Gaza’s ministry of health says that at least 22,835 Palestinians had been killed by yesterday, with another 58,416 reportedly injured. That figure does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, but an estimated 70% are women and children. 7,000 more are reportedly missing and most are likely dead.”

“Israel’s final count for Hamas’s 7 October massacre is 1,139: 685 Israeli civilians, 373 members of the security forces, and 71 foreigners. Deaths in Israel since then bring the total to about 1,200. 36 of the victims were children. The Israeli military says that 174 soldiers have been killed in Gaza, and 1,023 injured.”

“Because Gaza’s ministry of health (MoH) is run by Hamas, the tally it provides has been questioned by Israel. But last month, when the MoH figure stood at 15,899, a senior Israeli official confirmed a reported Israeli estimate of 5,000 dead Hamas militants and roughly twice as many civilians, giving a similar total of 15,000. (An IDF spokesperson called that ratio of two civilians to one combatant “tremendously positive”.) The MoH’s track record across multiple conflicts is broadly consistent with other sources: for example, after a short war between Israel and Hamas in 2014, it gave a figure of 2,310 dead, while the UN later arrived at an estimate of 2,251 and Israel put it at 2,125.”

“The 22,835 dead represent about 1 in a 100 of Gaza’s total population. They have been killed at a rate of just under 250 a day (an average that has come down a bit in the last few weeks). It is not known exactly how many of those killed were combatants, but Israel’s own ratio would suggest that on average, more than 160 civilians have died each day.”

“That is a much faster rate than in other broadly comparable recent conflicts. The US-led coalition fighting Islamic State in Raqqa killed 20 civilians a day during a four-month offensive, the BBC reported, while the nine-month battle for Mosul between US-backed Iraqi forces and IS killed fewer than 40 civilians a day.”

Internal displacement

“Because of the scale of the crisis, it is hard to maintain precise figures. But by the end of the year, the UN Palestinian relief agency, UNRWA, estimated that 1.9 million people had been internally displaced by the war in Gaza – nearly 85% of the population.”

“Many have been forced to move multiple times as the focus of the IDF campaign shifts. About 1.4 million people are sheltering in UNRWA facilities, with most of the rest staying with friends, family, or strangers, or sleeping rough. About a million people – half of Gaza’s population – are now living in and around the southern border settlement of Rafah. About 280,000 lived there before the war began. The Council on Foreign Relations estimated that by early December, only about 1,100 people had been allowed to leave Gaza via the Rafah crossing to Egypt.”

“To rank the situation in Gaza among the world’s most pressing refugee crises may be moot – but the numbers do suggest that the crisis there bears comparison to those in Sudan and Syria. In Sudan, the International Organisation for Migration says that just under 6 million of a population of 48 million have been displaced by the war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces, which started in April – a much lower percentage of the whole population, but a much higher raw number.”

Destruction

“Figures from the government media office in Gaza cited by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimate that about 65,000 residential units have been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. Another 290,000 have been damaged. That means that about half a million people have no home.”

“Analysis of satellite data cited by the Associated Press suggests that about two-thirds of all structures in the north of Gaza have been destroyed, and about a quarter in the southern Khan Younis area. Across the whole territory, about 33% of buildings have been destroyed. The AP said that the rate of devastation was worse than either the razing of Aleppo in Syria or Russia’s bombing of Mariupol.”

“That is a reflection of the intensity of the IDF campaign. Data from conflict-tracking group Airwars suggests that the US-led coalition against IS in Iraq carried out 15,000 strikes between 2014 and 2017; the Israeli military has carried out 22,000 in Gaza in less than three months.”

Critical infrastructure

“While 500,000 people have no home to return to, many more will remain displaced because of the scale of the devastation of Gaza’s crucial public facilities. The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that 23 of 36 hospitals had been rendered completely inoperable by 3 January, with a previous count of 3,500 beds down to 1,400 by 10 December amid vastly increased need.”

“Gaza’s education system has also been severely compromised: 104 schools have either been destroyed or sustained major damage. About 70% of school buildings have been damaged.”

“Meanwhile, water production stood at 7% of the pre-war supply on 30 December, and there is only one shower for every 4,500 people and one toilet for every 220. Those conditions make the spread of disease a very urgent problem: for example, the WHO said on 21 December that more than 100,000 cases of diarrhea had been reported since mid-October, half of them among children under the age of five. That is 25 times the pre-conflict rate. The WHO says that it expects the number of deaths from disease to eventually outstrip those killed directly by military action.”

“For 2 weeks at the beginning of the war, no humanitarian assistance – including food – was allowed into Gaza at all. The flow of aid has gradually increased as the war has gone on, according to figures shared by UNRWA: there were 20 trucks a day in the last 10 days of October, 85 a day in November, and 104 a day in December. But that is still way down on the pre-conflict level of 500 trucks a day.”

Humanitarian aid is meanwhile far harder to distribute because of the damage caused by Israel’s bombardment – and 142 UNRWA workers have been killed, while 128 of the organisation’s buildings have been damaged. The World Food Program (WFP) says that about one in four households are already at risk of starvation.”

Arif Husain, the WFP’s chief economist, told the New Yorker that famine would follow within six months unless conditions changed.”