No doubt you’ve heard about today’s “mass casualty event” around aid trucks near Gaza City. Thus far “at least 112” Gazans are said to have died, hundreds more crowd crippled hospitals. The IDF has called it a “stampede” and Israeli media has characterized it, or cynically mischaracterized it, as a “riot.” While the IDF admits opening fire on the crowd when it supposedly menaced them, they are also claiming (as they did early this morning to Wolf Blitzer on CNN) those shots came after the aid trucks ran over Gazans, which then led to the stampede, the menacing movements and the ensuing gunfire. Early reporting on the Times of Israel’s liveblog, which I posted on today’s RUNDOWN, quoted the IDF’s claims that “it fired at legs of Gazans in 2nd incident, with 10 casualties.” That claim was repeated by an IDF spokeperson on CNN, but it was challenged by Wolf Blizter, who asked for proof and noted the lack of evidence for the “stampede” or the IDF’s timeline for the gunfire. The IDF spokesperson didn’t have proof, made a decidedly hollow reference to the “tragedy” of civilian suffering and then went on to dismiss today’s other report putting the death toll in Gaza over 30,000. He discounted that number as unreliable because it comes from the Hamas Health Ministry, which he compared to the “ISIS Health Ministry.” That charge of unreliability has itself been shown to be unreliable.
To be fair, it is hard to come by truly reliable information in Gaza, in no small part because Israel makes it difficult to report from the de facto bombing range. Those who do report risking losing their lives in an unprecedented killing zone for journalists. Given that, and the particular fogginess of this war, it is likely we will be waiting days, if not weeks, to find out exactly what happened.
Regardless of the forthcoming details, today's bloodbath offers the clearest dividing line yet regarding the ethical justifications for this war. Israel purposely created this starvation-level crisis. Israel has been firing on aid trucks. Israel cannot say the civilians who died early this morning were "tragically" in-between their soldiers and Hamas fighters. And the video they've provided from one of the drones that perpetually circles over the miles of rubble, the mass graves and the makeshift encampments that used to be Gaza has done nothing to prove their claim that the hungry crowd was largely run-over by aid trucks. And even if they were ... and no doubt many were trampled in the chaos that came after the IDF opened fire (which they admit) ... the starvation and desperation that created that scrum was ENGINEERED by Israeli policy. Period.
That means there is no fig leaf left ... no conflation or triangulation or military objective … that justifies thousands upon thousands of women and children killed, scores of children orphaned, dozens of paramedics and hospitals attacked and well-over a million human beings displaced and deprived of food. By any account, Israel is already in contravention of the Geneva Conventions. But the weaponization of hunger and the militarization of starvation, which is what created the conditions that produced today's massacre, places Israel in a unique club of war criminals. And it's a policy they pioneered in the past. Back in 2012 we learned they concocted a "calorie count" to manage the amount of food entering Gaza. It was a formula designed to allocate just enough calories per person to ensure people could survive, but not thrive or be truly nourished. Back then the Israel government claimed it was never implemented. Critics were not convinced. What we saw today is the logical conclusion of the brutal mentality that came up with that warped idea in the first place.