Israel’s Gaza Starvation Plan Strengthens With Rafah Crossing Capture

May 22, 2024 admin Finance 0

The level of information about what is happening on the ground in Rafah is thanks to the Israeli pogrom on journalists. Israel has had the good fortune of Rafah’s reporting by suppressing seemingly major events: the prospect of an ICC arrest released from Netanyahu and his defense minister Yoav Gallant; Ireland, Norway and Spain announcing their intention to recognize Palestine; and the death of Iran’s president Raisi. Still, we’ll risk a review.

A new Wall Street Journal story explains how far Israel has come in its plan to control Egypt’s Rafah crossings. Egypt claims that Israel has taken more than 70% of that previously demilitarized territory; Israel says it only has half (Anadolu Agency says its sources say half). From the Journal:

I [Israeli] the army has doubled the number of soldiers operating in the Rafah area…

Israel says controlling the tunnel is vital to its goal of defeating a militant group it says has advanced in Rafah… But doing so could jeopardize the country’s 45-year-old peace deal with Egypt, which limits the number of troops for both sides. countries can invest in the area. Israel’s Defense Ministry declined to comment on whether it intends to fully control the southern border or has a timeline for doing so….

Israeli operations that began in Rafah earlier this month have also reduced the flow of aid through two key southern border crossings to a trickle and displaced some 800,000 people from Rafah, where more than a million had fled fighting elsewhere along the line.

A new Associated Press account reports that the UN has stopped delivering aid to Rafah:

The United Nations halted food distribution in the southern Gaza city of Rafah on Tuesday due to shortages and an unstable security situation caused by the Israeli military presence. The UN has warned that humanitarian operations everywhere are about to collapse…

The UN’s World Food Program said it is running out of food in central Gaza, where hundreds of thousands of people are living.

“Humanitarian operations in Gaza are about to collapse,” said Abeer Etefa, WFP spokesman. If food and other things don’t start coming into Gaza “in abundance, conditions like famine will spread,” he said.

But the same story notes that the Biden Administration is right about the damage done by Rafah:

A senior official in the United States said that Israel has addressed many of the concerns of the Biden administration about the Rafah attack aimed at eliminating Hamas fighters …

The official said the administration had stopped short of airing the Israeli attack plan, but said Israeli officials’ changes to the plans suggested they were taking the US administration’s concerns seriously.

If you still have doubts:

The reason Israel broke its agreements with Egypt to do so is that this move will enable it to expel the remnants of Hamas. However, Hamas has reasserted itself in the north of Gaza, so it seems doubtful that Israel can kill all the many Hamas fighters working in Rafah. However, Hamas is notorious for having multiple entry points into Egypt, and Israel intends to destroy them.

But the immediate effect is the cut off of trucked aid. Response from Middle East Eye:

Gaza’s Rafah crossing with Egypt has been closed for two weeks, after Israel seized the port during a ground operation and Cairo refused to open it on the Sinai side….

The Rafah crossing is located in an area designated as a demilitarized zone in the 1979 agreement and the 2005 agreement between Egypt and Israel.

The peace agreement and the 2005 agreement allow troops to be deployed in the border area only after an agreement between the two sides….

For the past two weeks, Israel and Egypt have been trading off the closure of the Rafah crossing, and aid trucks carrying food and medical supplies for Palestinians in Gaza have been piling up on the Egyptian side of the border.

Egypt’s Foreign Minister, Sameh Shoukry, on Monday said the Rafah crossing was closed due to the presence of soldiers and operations near the port, which he said threatened the safety of aid ships.

Israel accuses Egypt of failing to cooperate in relation to the Rafah crossing, although it is not clear what the cooperation should entail.

According to Twitter, Israel is very successful in destroying Hamas channels. But we heard that when Israel started attacking Gaza. Hamas is believed to have very little coordination, so even if Israel fires a few, it doesn’t know what proportion of the total it has injured. Indeed, a separate account by Middle East Eye describes how the US was outraged by the Israeli military’s poor display:

A top US general criticized on Monday Israel’s military strategy in Gaza, warning that the Israeli army’s failure to secure occupied territories and eliminate Hamas in northern Gaza is hampering its ability to achieve its military objectives.

“You don’t just have to go in and take out any enemy you’re facing, you have to go in, hold a place and stabilize it,” said General Charles Brown, who is the chairman of the joint chiefs. of workers, as reported by Politico…

Brown said after Israel “cleared that they are not a contender, and that allows your enemy to repopulate areas when you’re not there”.

Remember, this is coming from the US military who thought that a major war in Ukraine, without air support, would be a huge success because those lowly Slavs would flee as soon as they saw Western weapons in action.

Brown does not understand or chooses not to understand how the Hamas tunnel system works. As both Alastair Crooke and Scott Ritter have explained, most tunnels are designed to be used for one time and then pulled down again afterwards. And it’s an obvious trick to trap them. The layering of buildings on top of them also helped to create an environment ripe for surprise attacks by Hamas and the debris hindered the effectiveness of bunker-busters. So it is not hard to imagine that Hamas has a tunnel network that is too deep for even the worst bombs to destroy.

However, there are many of Israel’s victories on display:

The Middle East Eye story quoted earlier about food supplies confirms that the pier-for-aid-deliveries gimmick is a colossal failure:

According to US officials, the new floating tunnel, which started working on Friday and is called “Trident”, will help to deliver an additional 90-150 trucks to Gaza each day.

So far, only 10 trucks have been transferred to the UN World Food Program warehouse in central Gaza in Deir al-Balah on Friday. The UN says 500 aid trucks are needed every day to meet the urgent needs of Gaza, where famine is spreading.

“The pier is more efficient than efficient and Rafah remains an important piece of the puzzle to deliver adequate relief and avoid further deterioration of already dire conditions,” said Fabiani.

No aid was received on Sunday or Monday, a UN official told Reuters, and only five trucks arrived at the warehouse on Saturday and 11 were stopped and evacuated by starving Palestinians along the way.

To give some context to how dire the conditions are in Gaza, from New Arab Palestine which survives on 3% of Gaza’s minimum daily water needs:

Some Palestinians in the Gaza Strip live on just three percent of the world’s minimum daily water consumption rate, two aid groups said, as Israel’s war has destroyed the area’s water infrastructure.

The lack of clean water and sanitation facilities has led to an increase in disease and illness among Gaza’s residents, especially children, according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP)…

Deteriorating water, sanitation and hygiene conditions “have significantly increased severe diarrhea among children under the age of five, while other water-borne and communicable diseases such as Hepatitis are increasing in households without access to clean water sources,” the report found.

Families are forced to build their own latrines, with hundreds of people using one, 30 times the global minimum, say the IRC and MAP….

A BBC satellite analysis earlier this month found that more than half of Gaza’s water treatment facilities and sewage system had been damaged or destroyed by heavy Israeli bombardment.

For months now, families have been forced to spend many hours lining up with plastic bottles and gallons in water tanks, then trying to find food.

In other words, the Rafah operation appears to have the same effect as the IDF’s deployed programs: intensifying the pace of genocide. And by that measure, it succeeds admirably.




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