Sunday 10 March 2024

US has a bombing and feeding strategy in Gaza

There is something bizarre and unsettling about a policy which involves helping a country to bomb its enemies while at the same time airlifting and shipping food into the combat zone to prevent the population under fire from suffering starvation and malnutrition. This is what the US is doing in Gaza, all for the right humanitarian reasons but it still doesn't stand quite right. The problem for the Biden administration is that it wants to support Israel in its determination to rid Gaza of the Hamas terrorists who killed 1,200 Israelis on October 7 but it also desperately does NOT want the Israel Defence Forces to bomb and shell every town and city in the thin strip of territory, causing massive collateral damage to the civilian population. Yet the US continues to provide munitions for the IDF so that they can do exactly that. It's a huge contradiction and as every day passes it is becoming more and more difficult to justify. The decision by Biden to send 1,000 US troops to build a temporary port for the delivery of food to the Palestinians is another ingredient in this contradictory strategy. Meanwhile, the Americans and Jordanians and others are air-dropping pallets of food onto the Gaza beaches. Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is unrelenting in his aim of annihilating Hamas and won't stop until his troops have found, captured or killed the organisation's leaders who have remained unscathed so far. Biden has appealed to him to limit military operations and to refrain from attacking the town of Rafah where more than 1.2 million Palestinians are trying to survive. Netanyahu, I suspect, will ignore Biden. But has the US president threatened to stop providing munitions? Not yet. So the bombing and feeding contradiction will continue for the foreseeable future.

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