Gaza flooding is a catastrophe by design - and the spineless West is complicit

It’s a great time to be a war criminal. You can trade your stolen gold in Dubai and bank your money there, no questions asked. You can do your Christmas shopping on Oxford Street, or maybe catch a West End musical. The Metropolitan Police will not bother you. When one war finishes, another soon beckons. Consider yourself a travelling salesman. From Yemen, to Sudan, and now to Tigray, your services will always be in demand. You can even get a lucrative gig on US President Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”, and news programmes will be queuing up to interview you. Of one thing you can be sure: you will never face justice. The Nuremberg Trials and The Hague were so last century. So forgive me for asking one question, in the blizzard of feverish speculation that Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are about to be thrown out of the White House and Beit Aghion respectively: what has changed? New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters Let’s start answering that question from a flooded tent in Gaza. Nahla al-Majdoub, 48, carries a wound sustained when her intestines were shredded by shrapnel from a missile. She is in constant pain, and the cold is making it worse. Her tent was destroyed in the recent storms. She needs 170 shekels ($53) a week to pay for her medication. Her seven-year-old daughter has diabetes, Majdoub told Middle East Eye. “I woke up soaking wet. I looked at my children, who were also wet and surrounded by water. We cried helplessly, not knowing what to do or how to protect them,” she said. Eventually, the wind blew her tent away altogether. “I am sorry that my family’s biggest dream now is just to have a strong tent that can withstand heavy rain and protect us from the cold,” she said. 'Have mercy on us' Or take Mansour al-Sakni, 33, who lives with his wife and four children in a makeshift shelter on the roof of a building in Gaza City’s al-Tuffah neighbourhood. Sakni had just sold two water barrels to buy new sheets to keep them dry and sheltered. “It was no use,” he told MEE. “Last night we were again flooded by the rain.” Before the war, he sold newspapers. Now he relies on food given out by a community kitchen. He can’t afford to buy his daughter the glasses she needs. A friend gave him 200 shekels ($63) to buy a pair, he said, but he used the money to buy wood to reinforce the shelter. “We are poor people in Gaza,” Sakni said. “We want to live. We do not want to die from the bombing or the cold. Enough. Have mercy on us.” The latest killer of Palestinians in Gaza is not an act of God, as the flooding is currently being portrayed. The dying is by design. It has been carefully planned These are not isolated victims of the weather. Some 65 percent of Gaza’s population, about 1.4 million people, live in these conditions, according to United Nations data. But mercy is in short supply, too. The latest killer of Palestinians in Gaza is not an act of God, as the flooding is currently being portrayed. The dying is by design. It has been carefully planned. Last December, Israel banned 37 international NGOs, including the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Doctors Without Borders and Oxfam, from operating in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. While the ban was subject to a temporary injunction, Israel continues to bar aid groups from bringing supplies and international staff into the territory. Alongside the ban issued against Unrwa, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, this has meant that the majority of shelter aid is brought in bilaterally through committees run by the Egyptian, Qatari, Emirati and Saudi governments. The NRC reported last month that Israeli authorities were allowing just 15 trucks carrying dual-use items into Gaza once a week. “The stockpiles inside of Gaza from INGOs are extremely low,” Shaina Low, the NRC’s communications adviser in Palestine, told MEE. “This is part of Israel’s plan to push us out, to not let us bring in the aid that we need in order to respond to people. And so the committees are the ones that seem to be able to get more aid in.” Gratuitous suffering Israel’s policy, supported by all but one of its Zionist parties, is to make conditions in Gaza as unliveable as possible, in an effort to force the Palestinian population out. The denial of aid during heavy storms is just the latest weapon in their armoury, and the more suffering they cause, the greater the smile on the faces of the vast majority of Zionists in Israel. A lengthy list of issues is making Israelis unhappy with Netanyahu, but conditions in Gaza are not one of them. Making Palestinians suffer gratuitously is one of the few things that unites the fractious tribes of Israel. Furthermore, they all know by now that they can get away with it. As heavy rains swamp Gaza's tents, Israel must face sanctions Read More » Ramiz Alakbarov, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, said this week that 150,000 tents in aid lorries were stuck outside Gaza, while stocks of essential shelter and winter items inside the enclave were exhausted. Israel refuses to let aid in until Hamas has been disarmed. The Board of Peace raised eyebrows by issuing a veiled admonishment, but that is about it. It does nothing. The policy of allowing Israel to prevent tents, medical and aid supplies from entering Gaza goes all the way up to Chuck Schumer, who is currently battling to remain Democratic leader of the Senate. Schumer refuses to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide. He told The New York Times last year: “Criticism of Israel and how it conducted the war is not antisemitic. But it begins to shade over… And a lot of the slogans that people use either are or slide into antisemitism. “The one that bothers me the most is genocide,” he continued. “Genocide is described as a country or some group tries to wipe out a whole race of people, a whole nationality of people. So if Israel was not provoked and just invaded Gaza and shot at random Palestinians, Gazans, that would be genocide. That’s not what happened. In fact, the opposite happened. And Hamas is much closer to genocidal than Israel.” Schumer apparently does not know international law. He ignores the opinions of Holocaust scholars. But Schumer marches blithely on, and will be difficult to shift - even as a new wave of Democrats has just been elected on a mandate that is a total repudiation of the policy he continues to support. Party of war The midterms were not just a verdict on Washington’s foreign wars. They were a verdict on its party of war. This is bipartisan, and includes every shade of political opinion. It is also a real group of Republicans and Democrats who actively supported the seven wars in the Middle East and Central Asia that their country has launched since 9/11. And why shouldn’t the likes of Schumer assume he can tough it out? Everyone else around him is. You don’t have to have had your finger on the trigger of a sniper rifle, or operated the drones that killed thousands and injured many more at Gaza’s aid distribution points, to be warmed by the sight of tents collapsing in harsh storms. Business continues to be good for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), whose former employees include Netanyahu and UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s chief of staff, James Purnell. The Boston-based consultancy helped to establish the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which ran four aid distribution sites where Palestinians seeking food were deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers or US security contractors hired by the foundation. Last year, the Financial Times reported that BCG was paid more than $4m for its work with the GHF on a project codenamed “Aurora”, which involved senior members of the firm. Two months after Trump posted his vision for “Trump Gaza”, in which the enclave would be emptied of its population and turned into a “Riviera of the Middle East”, BCG modelled the cost of “relocating” hundreds of thousands of people from Gaza. It’s little surprise, then, that Burnham - who apologised for Labour’s policy on Gaza under his predecessor, Keir Starmer - is now turning to BCG to draft a plan to end neoliberalism in the UK. His chief of staff, Purnell, worked as an adviser to BCG after stepping down as an MP in 2010. Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader, pondered: “I wonder how they got that contract.” Formidable influence Meanwhile, British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband is launching a promising career as an influencer on Instagram. But that is all he is. Implementing the sanctions he announced on Israel could take up to nine months, but Israel’s reaction was immediate. It expelled the British consul and 19 other diplomats, and downgraded the consulate in occupied East Jerusalem to a mission - a deal negotiated by British National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell. One assumes Powell was humiliated by the deal, but on the other hand, that is just a working assumption. These days, one cannot be sure whose side anyone in the British government is on. Miliband is also apparently facing stiff resistance from the Sir Humphrey Applebys of Charles Street, who are determined to keep the policy of supporting Israel alive. And so it is that the British government has awarded £10.7m ($14.4m) in public contracts to firms linked to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. This was after the new policy of boycotting all companies engaged in providing services to the illegally occupied territories was announced. The architects and planners of this genocide know that anyone who is not actively trying to stop the carnage is abetting it And do you know what? I think Israel and its backers are right to keep calm and carry on - because they are a long, long way from being shown the door. They continue to run a formidable operation of political influence in Washington, London and every European capital. They don’t fear sanctions or laws that ban the sales of arms to Israel, because their arms firms are embedded in each military-industrial complex. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this month: “We stand steadfastly by Israel’s side, ensuring that there exists a country, a state in which Jews are not a vulnerable minority, and that they can find protection should barbarism once again prevail in their homelands.” For a German chancellor to say this about a state where Palestinians face the daily barbarism of Jews telling them to leave, with a genocide that is entering its fourth year, only confirms Israel’s confidence in being able to weather the storm. The architects and planners of this genocide know that anyone who is not actively trying to stop the carnage is abetting it. Tony Blair and Starmer will go down in history as the prime ministers who were the architects and cheerleaders of the wars in Iraq and Gaza respectively, causing between them millions of deaths, and dealing blows from which the region has not started to recover. Both men are counted by Israel as assets. Only months into office, Burnham is well on track to become the third Labour prime minister to perform the same function. For all his intentions, spineless leadership will ensure his administration is as much a part of the genocide as his predecessors were. While Burnham and Purnell triangulate, babies are freezing to death in Gaza. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.