Help bring aid trucks into Gaza: LifeFunder
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(LifeSiteNews) — Following reports from American surgeons returning from Gaza that Israel is engaged in the “elimination of the Palestinian population,” news reports confirm a fresh U.S. package of aid totaling $8.7 billion.
Reuters confirmed on September 26 that the funding was secured to supply weapons for Israel:
The package includes $3.5 billion for essential wartime procurement, which has already been received and earmarked for critical military purchases, and $5.2 billion designated for air defense systems including the Iron Dome anti-missile system, David’s Sling and an advanced laser system.
The renewed financing of Israel’s arsenal follows harrowing reports of the intentional killing and targeting of civilians, “90 percent of whom are children,” according to American surgeon Dr. Mark Perlmutter.
Countering Israeli claims of a war targeting Hamas, Perlmutter and fellow U.S. surgeon Feroze Sidhwa reported that they “never once saw” a patient “who could remotely have been a combatant” during their mission as medical volunteers in Gaza over March and April, 2024.
Instead, they stressed that the victims they had seen killed and severely injured were “predominantly children,” with the largest group of the remainder being Palestinian medical staff – shot on the way to work at the hospital. The rest, Perlmutter says, were “women … and the elderly.”
In a statement made on Twitter on September 26, Perlmutter said Israel was committing an intentional genocide:
As an American surgeon of Jewish heritage who operated on children in Gaza, I attest that this is pure genocide.
The shredded and burned Palestinian women and children were not the unfortunate casualties of war against Hamas by the IDF, but rather their intended target all along!
Perlmutter published graphic photographs and videos of the emergency room in Gaza, receiving dead and injured children. One series of pictures shows the treatment of a deep wound on the face of a toddler.
Perlmutter is president of the World Surgical Foundation, and a former president of the U.S. branch of the International College of Surgeons. He was present at Ground Zero on 9/11, as well as having completed 40 volunteer missions over 30 years in disaster zones such as Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Haitian earthquake.
Speaking of his fellow Americans, Perlmutter said of Israel’s “genocide,” “We are responsible for this.”
Perlmutter told CBS in April that what he saw in one week in Gaza was worse than “all the disasters” he had witnessed during a lifetime of humanitarian volunteering.
This latest round of funding comes on the back of reports that Secretary of State Antony Blinken disregarded evidence that Israel had been blocking humanitarian aid – which would trigger U.S. suspension of funding.
As ProPublica reported on September 24, “Blinken told Congress, ‘We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting’ aid.”
Yet U.S. sources, such as its own Agency for International Development, had told Blinken in April that Israel had restricted the aid and had broken international law in doing so.
U.S. law prohibits the supply of financial and military aid to any nation which prevents the distribution of humanitarian relief supplies such as food and water.
Blinken “did not accept” USAID’s report, “a detailed 17-page memo in Israel’s conduct,” ProPublica records, adding:
The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.
Sources within the State Department itself had also reported that Israel had intensified actions which saw it block the supply of flour to Gaza in February, with the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration recommending that, in accordance with U.S. law, an earlier round of funding should be withheld from Israel.
The report questioned Israel’s unevidenced claim that half those killed in Gaza were Hamas fighters, noting numerous accounts of the killing of civilians and aid workers, both by government forces and by armed “settlers.” ProPublica concluded that “Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel.”
ProPublica obtained a State Department memo from April also calling for the halt of weapons sales to Israel: “USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country.”
The agency blamed Israel directly for the “looming famine” in Gaza, saying the Israelis’ “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance” had produced “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”
Aid agencies released a joint report in mid-September, claiming Israel was blocking “83 percent” of aid to Gaza. Blinken has previously defended his decision to “bypass Congress” in order to supply Israel with funding and weapons late in 2023 and has been accused of “lying to Congress” over his refusal to halt aid despite reports of Israeli war crimes.
The U.S. has shipped over 50,000 tons of weaponry to Israel between October 2023 and August 2024, according to the Times of Israel, which quotes the Israeli Defence Ministry saying the arms shipments are “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”
According to the reports of Drs. Perlmutter, Sidhwa, and one of the medics to replace them in the European Hospital in Gaza, this is a war that is intentionally targeting civilians – and children.
Lt. Col. (retired) Dr. Adam Hamawy – an American citizen and former combat surgeon – is best known “for saving the life of U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth in Iraq 20 years ago,” according to CNN. Their report showed how Hamawy’s medical team had been trapped in the same Gaza hospital as that served by Perlmutter by an Israeli siege.
Hamawy told CNN in May, “I have never in my career witnessed the level of atrocities and targeting of my medical colleagues as I have in Gaza.”
Echoing claims made by Perlmutter and Sidhwa, on his return to the U.S. Hamawy implored President Joe Biden to use his power to halt the war:
The children of Palestine are not safe. Civilians, population centers, are not safe. We, as humanitarian workers, are not safe. You have the power to end the invasion of Rafah and Gaza now.
Yet neither the pleas of U.S. medics, nor the reports of the U.S. governments’ own agencies, have been enough to convince Biden and Blinken to halt the U.S. funding on which Israel’s war machine depends.
Hamawy was one of “45 American physicians and nurses” who signed the open letter, published on July 25 by Sidhwa on X.
The U.S. medics say they are “among some of the only neutral observers permitted in Gaza since October 7,” in a letter which details how medical and humanitarian workers are routinely shot and killed by Israeli forces. Hospitals were “starved of basic medical supplies,” such as antibiotics and soap.
Against Israeli claims of inflated casualty figures, echoed initially by President Biden, the 45 medics said their own observations, together with the evidence they attached to the letter, “lead us to believe the death toll in this conflict is many times higher than that reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health.”
Reports from medical journal The Lancet, and from Israeli intelligence itself, have subsequently confirmed the published figures on identified casualties to be accurate.
In an appeal which has so far fallen on deaf ears, the medics concluded:
Every day we continue supplying weapons to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children murdered by our bullets.
With the new round of funding now secured, those days are set to continue as before. U.S. sources within and outside the U.S. government have confirmed that Israel is creating a famine and intentionally killing civilians with U.S. supplied weapons and ammunition.
There appears to be no evidence which will persuade Biden and Blinken to halt the U.S. taxpayer’s generosity to Israel.
Help bring aid trucks into Gaza: LifeFunder