No matter how horrific you think Gaza is, the reality’s far worse as I discovered when attending a Parliamentary briefing from Medics and Aid workers back from there.
Oral testimony’s more powerful than anything you view or read. The personal story’s always far more haunting. I also consider myself robust having listened to many who had suffered or endured atrocities and tragedies as Justice Secretary. I’ve been close to tears with some things I’ve heard over the years. But this was worse than anything I’d ever listened too, and my eyes well up in the recounting. It was truly horrific.
A very refined lady who looked a Private School Headmistress but was in fact a Consultant Surgeon had been across. She told of a 5-year child brought in with head injuries who would shortly die but on his own with no parents to comfort him, as they’d been killed. Two siblings maybe 4 and 6 similarly orphaned. The wee boy wouldn’t survive, his sister would despite two fractures but with life changing injuries in a huge facial scar.
It wasn’t just the absence of a parent to hug or just hold their hand, there was neither morphine nor oxygen. The wee mites laid on blankets on the floor, such were pressures on the hospital, and the oxygen machine with its face mask couldn’t reach down.
The hospitals that remain are under severe pressure that’s almost unimaginable and with very limited resource to treat the thousands afflicted. Staff working 24/7 and themselves traumatised by what they’re seeing and doing. Dante’s Inferno and that’s without recounting the cancer sufferers denied drugs, new mother’s and their children dying due to the absence of even basic care and more.
As for Aid, those on the front line were clear that air drops were almost pointless. It might look as if a great deal’s being done but it’s no Berlin airlift and it won’t work. Neither will America building a port. It’s fleets of lorries in that’s needed and water and electricity restored, all which Israel has restricted or turned off.
It’s why the USA must get tough with Israel. Netanyahu’s treating Biden with frankly contempt. Israel is dependent upon the USA and suggestions that they can’t rein them in are abject nonsense. Israel’s beholden to America for arms and aid.
It always has been and that has only increased during this conflict. As the Quincy Institute reported Israel has received $318 billion, adjusted for inflation, in foreign aid from the USA from just 2022 to date. They’ve received more aid from the USA than any other country since the Second World War. Yet Israel isn’t a poor nation. It’s not Haiti or the Sudan and is amongst the top 10% of wealthy nations.
That aid goes significantly to sustain the IDF. Since the conflict started on 7th October, the USA has made over 100 arms drops to Israel. They fund Israel and they continue to fuel its war in Gaza.
Israel is also beholden to the USA. Of the 89 vetoes the USA has ever invoked at the UN Security Council over half have related to Israel and its actions in Palestine.
Israel needs stopped. Rather than being a patsy Biden must turn off the tap. Only that will stop the conflict.