In an open letter to the UN Security Council, the organization pleads with the international body to push for an end to the wanton bloodshed. Palestinians evacuate survivors of the Israeli bombing in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 22, 2023. (AP Photo/Hatem Ali)

Dr. Christos Christou / MSF

In an open letter, MSF International President Dr Christos Christou writes to the United Nations Security Council, asking they use their leverage and help stop the bloodshed being committed in Gaza.

I am writing to you on behalf of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to implore you to do everything within your power to ensure an immediate and sustained ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. You must demand that the Israeli government stop the deadly attacks on Palestinian civilians and allow crucial humanitarian aid to enter Gaza.

A seven-day truce, after weeks of relentless violence, was a welcome respite for the people of Gaza. However, these seven days were not nearly enough to organize the delivery of sufficient aid and essential supplies, to meet the immeasurable needs. Now that the truce has ended, there is a return to death and destruction.

My colleagues and I, like so many people around the world, were distressed and shocked by Hamas’s attack on Israeli civilians. Now, after 58 days, words fail us to describe the absolute horror being inflicted on Palestinian civilians by Israel as it carries out incessant and indiscriminate warfare in Gaza for all the world to see.

Words fail us to describe the absolute horror being inflicted on Palestinian civilians by Israel as it carries out incessant and indiscriminate warfare in Gaza for all the world to see.

Israel has shown a blatant and total disregard for the protection of Gaza’s medical facilities. We are watching as hospitals are turned into morgues and ruins. These supposedly protected facilities are being bombed, are being shot at by tanks and guns, encircled and raided, killing patients and medical staff. The World Health Organization (WHO) has documented 203 attacks on health care that have led to at least 22 fatalities and 59 injuries of health workers on duty. Medical staff, including our own, are utterly exhausted and in despair. They have had to amputate limbs from children suffering from severe burns without anaesthesia or sterilised surgical tools. Due to forcible evacuations by Israeli soldiers, some doctors have had to leave patients behind after facing the unimaginable choice between their lives or those of their patients. There is no justification for the atrocious attacks on healthcare.

MSF recently sent an international emergency team to Gaza to support our Palestinian colleagues in providing medical and surgical capacities. Regrettably, their activities have been severely limited due to the scale of casualties, destruction of infrastructure, lack of essential supplies such as fuel, and the ongoing insecurity. We want and ought to be able to do so much more. Today it is impossible for us to adequately respond to medical needs in Gaza due to the siege and the unrelenting, generalised warfare being unleashed by Israel.

Four of our MSF staff have been killed; many more have lost family members. Numerous other colleagues have been injured. Other humanitarian organisations have reported dozens of their staff have been killed.

Gaza, under an Israel-imposed blockade since 2007, is indeed the world’s largest open-aired prison. From the start of its military campaign on 7 October, the Israeli government has enforced a “complete siege” on Gaza, banning the entry of water, food, fuel and medicinal supplies for the 2.3 million people trapped in the enclave. Added to this, unyielding restrictions have been put on humanitarian access and are preventing much needed aid from reaching anyone who needs it. Subjecting an entire population to collective punishment is a war crime under International Humanitarian Law (IHL).

We are witnessing the fundamental principle of humanity being openly disgraced.

Despite Israel’s claims, its all-out assault is not being waged just on Hamas. It is being waged on all of Gaza and its people at any cost. Even wars have rules, but Israel is clearly trading them in for its own military strategy based on disproportionality. In the early days of this unbearable offensive, the spokesman for Israel’s Defence Forces (IDF) announced that the “emphasis” of this flagrantly excessive reprisal was to be on “damage and not accuracy”. It is safe to say Israel’s actions have spoken louder than its words.

We are witnessing the fundamental principle of humanity being openly disgraced.

Northern Gaza is being erased from the map. The health system has collapsed. More than 15,500 people have been killed, half of whom are children, according to Gaza’s health authorities. That’s one out of every 200 people in Gaza. Tens of thousands of people have been injured. Families are digging their dead loved ones out from under the rubble. At least 1.8 million people have been displaced, according to the United Nations. These civilians are being repeatedly and forcibly ordered to move further and further south, but Israel is bombing the entire Strip. Nowhere is safe.

Our emergency team in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, has reported massive influxes of wounded after intense bombing. Last Saturday, 60 dead and 213 injured people arrived at the emergency room of Al-Aqsa hospital. These strikes are also hitting overcrowded, squalid refugee camps, where people are barely surviving on the sparse humanitarian aid available. If the bombs do not get them, infectious diseases and starvation will.

A sustained ceasefire is the only way to stop the killing of thousands of more civilians and allow for the scaled-up delivery of desperately needed humanitarian aid. MSF also calls for the establishment of an independent mechanism to oversee the adequate flow of humanitarian supplies into Gaza. Furthermore, we call for the implementation of secure and long-lasting medical evacuation routes to third countries for people suffering from severe injuries. In the short-term, the evacuation of these patients to Egypt through the Rafah crossing could be an option, and MSF is willing to contribute to scaling up necessary medical capacities.

Indiscriminate and relentless attacks must stop now. Forcible displacement must stop now.

Assaults on hospitals and medical staff must stop now. Restrictions on aid and the siege must stop now.

It must ALL STOP NOW.

We call on you to be part of the solution and exert all means in your power to prevent further carnage.

Our medical teams in the West Bank also report attacks on health care with a surge in violence, persecution and harassment, in which nearly 240 Palestinians have been killed since 7 October, either by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) or Israeli settlers, according to the United Nations.

Thus far, world leaders, including permanent members of the Security Council, have been complicit, either by providing Israel with diplomatic cover, by supplying Israel with seemingly unconditional military assistance, or by failing to help stem the relentless bloodshed and atrocities being committed in Gaza.

We urge you to take action to uphold our shared humanity.

It is time to choose whether the Council will continue issuing half-hearted calls for the respect of international law and the protection of civilians, or will fulfil its international peace and security mandate and exercise its full diplomatic leverage to convince the State of Israel that the death sentence it has handed the people of Gaza is inhumane, indefensible, and cannot continue to be carried out.

We urge you to take action to uphold our shared humanity.

“We did what we could. Remember us.” These are the words our Dr Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, who has since been killed in a hospital strike, wrote on a Gaza hospital whiteboard normally used for planning surgeries. When the guns fall silent and the true scale of devastation is revealed, will the Council and its members be able to say the same?

The transfer has included thousands of 2,000-pound bombs that have been used to devastate Gaza.

by Kyle Anzalone, Antiwar. com, December 1, 2023s

The Wall Street Journal published details about the White House’s secretive arms transfers to Israel since October 7. The US has provided Israel with 57,000 artillery shells and 15,000 bombs, including over 5,000 with 2,000-pound warheads.

According to a list of weapons obtained by the Journal, the US has shipped Israel “more than 5,000 Mk82 unguided or ‘dumb’ bombs, more than 5,400 Mk84 2,000-pound warhead bombs, around 1,000 GBU-39 small diameter bombs, and approximately 3,000 JDAMs.”

The US has additionally shipped 57,000 155 MM shells to Israel. NBC News previously reported in October that Washington sent Tel Aviv artillery rounds that are cluster munitions.

Mick Mulroy, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense and officer in the Marine Corps, described the weapons as those the US would use in non-urban areas. “They are kind of the weapons of choice for the fights we had in Afghanistan and Syria in open, non-urban areas,” he said. “The US may use them in more urban areas, but first it would do a lot of target analysis to make sure the attack was proportional and based on military necessity.”

By contrast, Gaza is about 140 sqare miles and home to 2.3 million people—one of the most densely packed regions on earth. Additionally, Israel has relied on an AI program to rapidly generate lists of suspected low-level Hamas members to target, without respect to civilians in proximity.

The Israeli policy has led to the widespread devastation of Gaza. At least 15,000 civilians have been killed. The number of dead Palestinian children exceeds the number of Hamas fighters Israel has claimed to kill by many thousands. Nearly 100,000 buildings in Gaza have been damaged by Israel’s bombing campaign, including the destruction of universities, hospitals, schools, and entire residential neighborhoods.

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that Israel was killing civilians in Gaza at a “historic pace.” The outlet added that part of the explanation for the huge death toll was Tel Aviv’s willingness to drop 2,000-pound American-made bombs on various civilian centers.

Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon analyst who advises the Dutch organization PAX, told the Times that he’s never seen anything like it. “It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” he said. Garlasco added that to find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, one would have to “go back to Vietnam or the Second World War.”

Israeli officials and American politicians have attempted to justify Tel Aviv’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by referring to the allied bombings of Tokyo during World War II. In a single night during the bombing of Tokyo, more than 100,000 people were burned to death by American napalm bombs.

The White House has made some requests to Tel Aviv to try to curb civilian casualties. However, the Biden administration has refused to condition future weapons shipments to Israel on reducing the civilian death toll.

The US has primarily relied on aircraft for quick shipment to Israel hundreds of millions of dollars in arms during the past two months. Unlike weapons shipments to Ukraine, the Biden administration has refused to provide the public with information on the arms it is providing to Tel Aviv.

Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com, news editor of the Libertarian Institute, and co-host of Conflicts of Interest.

Senior Campaign Manager at Amnesty International Isra Chaker speaks during a press conference on the delivery of close to 1 million supporters calling on President Biden to help bring about a ceasefire in Israel and Gaza at the White House on November 29, 2023 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images for MoveOn)

Biden can get more humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza simply by enveloping them with the American flag and daring Israel to delay, obstruct or destroy these carriers of live-saving food, water, fuel and medicine. But he is too weak and too cowardly to do so.

Ralph Nader, Common Dreams, Dec 2, 2023

A letter to President Joe Biden, dated October 24, 2023, on the Israel-Hamas war by international law specialist, Bruce Fein and me, prompted this form letter Biden response.

Apart from the usual saying one thing and doing the opposite (e.g., standing for the protection of civilians and a two-state solution while fully arming and backing Israel’s genocidal destruction of everything in Gaza—children make up nearly half the population of Gaza) — Biden’s letter completely ignores key issues in our letter.

We asked why he wants Congress to make U.S. taxpayers pay another $14.3 billion for a prosperous country’s colossal military and intelligence operations, especially since Israel’s leadership failed to protect its people on October 7^th.

We cited David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, who said: “If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country.’ … Why would they accept that?”

In response to Biden’s repeated urging that Israel comply with the “laws of war” we described how Benjamin Netanyahu and his regime are doing just the opposite with its brutal terror campaign against defenseless Palestinian civilians and their critical public support structures.

Biden knows that the Israeli government is implementing what its ministers ordered on October 8^th – a total siege with no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, and no medicine which meets the definition of the crime of genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Israeli videos provide the grisly evidence of over 20,000 bombs and missiles striking homes, apartment buildings, schools, markets, water mains, bread bakeries, hospitals, clinics, ambulances and places of worship. After many days, the terror-stricken civilians, fleeing from one place to another in Gaza while being attacked, are also dying of disease, hunger, thirst, and a lack of critical medicines, such as insulin, with the bodies of infants and children still under the rubble in numbers too many to be counted.

Israel’s extremist right-wing politicians use words such as “human animals,” “annihilation” and “extermination” as declared objectives of their mass terrorism. (See, Amy Goodman’s interview with Yuval Abraham this week on Democracy Now!).

Biden can get more humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza simply by enveloping them with the American flag and daring Israel to delay, obstruct or destroy these carriers of live-saving food, water, fuel and medicine. But he is too weak and too cowardly to put strong U.S. leverage behind his sugarcoating wishes for saving the civilian mothers, fathers and children of Gaza.

He has made the U.S. a co-belligerent by unconditionally supplying abundant weapons, military intelligence and political cover, including vetoes of United Nations resolutions.

Biden has another apprehension—the near total control of Congress by the “Israel’s government can do no wrong” lobby. The indentured rubber-stamping Senators and Representatives have no problem supporting Israel’s violent repression and land dispossession in what is left of the original Palestine and its five million encircled Palestinians. Would these politicians deploy such eagerness in helping poor American children and their families in our country?

These callous legislators know little of this history, and little of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s long support for funding of Hamas to break up any two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority. Moreover, they and their predecessors have blocked any Congressional public hearings featuring prominent Israeli and Palestinian peace advocates. Congress is importing censorship of those who wish to wage peace. (For the full list of our letters to Joe Biden, see nader.org).

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Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of “The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future” (2012).