There has been no stronger defender than Olaf Scholz’s German government of Israel’s contention that the assault on the Palestinians was a necessary evil. But as evidence grew that the Israeli military was less than discriminating in the killing of thousands of civilians, and with a manufactured famine looming and Israel threatening an attack on Rafah, Chancellor Scholz went to Jerusalem last month to ask Benjamin Netanyahu whether the pursuit of Hamas could “justify such terribly high costs”. The Israeli prime minister surprised no one by saying that it could.
What Scholz will do in response, if anything, remains to be seen. But the Germans, like the Americans and the British, have been forced by mounting evidence of the horror being perpetrated on ordinary Palestinians in Gaza, where women and children account for a majority of the 33,000 dead, to at least consider that there might be more to this war than Israel’s claim that it wants only to break Hamas. In Britain, a letter signed by more than 600 prominent lawyers, including former supreme court justices, warning that the UK government is breaching international law by continuing to arm Israel, has added to the pressure on politicians to confront this reality.
The Israeli military’s killing of seven World Central Kitchen aid workers has provided the latest jolt to those who complacently repeat the Israeli mantra that its military is doing all it can to protect innocent lives. Six of the dead were citizens of countries that have given some of the strongest support for Israel’s assault – so the western world had something to say about their killings.
The British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, has told the Israeli leader that too many aid workers and Palestinians have died and “the situation is increasingly intolerable”. Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, warned Netanyahu that he was putting solidarity with Israel “to a really hard test”. And in the US, Joe Biden said that the WCK deaths were not a “stand-alone incident”, and that Israel was killing too many aid workers.
The other 200 or more humanitarian workers killed in the war have drawn less attention because they are mostly Palestinians. As objectionable as this is, the attack on the WCK convoy has thrown a global spotlight on two Israeli policies that will be increasing difficult for western governments to downplay now they are the focus of public attention: the Israeli military’s low bar for killing civilians, and its engineering of a food crisis that is creating starvation.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the WCK vehicles had been targeted because of a suspicion there was an armed Hamas member travelling with the convoy. There wasn’t. But even had there been, it is revealing that the rules of engagement deemed the mere presence of a member of Hamas as sufficient for a military drone operator to wipe out people who the army knew were not combatants.
It’s safe to say that large numbers of Palestinians, including thousands of children, have been killed and wounded under the same loose rules of engagement. Shortly before the attack on the WCF convoy, Haaretz reported that Israel had created “kill zones” in Gaza where “anyone who crosses into them is shot”, whether a combatant or not. Just on Wednesday, the Guardian reported that the Israel Defense Forces set allowances for the number of civilians who could be killed when striking a particular target. In the early weeks of the war, this included the killing of “15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants” who had been identified with the help of artificial intelligence.
Undiscriminating warfare has, in turn, contributed to looming mass starvation brought on by Israel’s tight restrictions on food deliveries to northern Gaza, including its refusal to let aid lorries through crossings just a few miles from the areas of greatest need.
International aid agencies say hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are facing famine in the coming weeks, and that half of the entire population of Gaza will be starving by the end of July if the present food crisis continues.
Israel’s restrictions forced WCK to deliver food by sea and then undertake the dangerous journey of moving it across the Gaza Strip. José Andrés, the group’s founder, said that necessity put its workers lives at risk. “The team would not have made the journey if there were enough food, travelling by truck across land, to feed the people of Gaza,” he wrote in the New York Times. “The Israeli government needs to open more land routes for food and medicine today … You cannot win this war by starving an entire population.”
Israel’s defence ministry denies any such intent, and claims it is permitting twice as much food into Gaza by lorry as was delivered before the war. It blames aid organisations in general, and the United Nations in particular, for failing to distribute the supplies.
At one point, the ministry posted a picture of what it said were dozens of lorries just inside Gaza, waiting to make deliveries. But what food there is there is far from where it needs to be, and some aid agencies say the Israeli military’s open-fire policies make it too dangerous to drive north. In addition, Israel has barred the organisation best able to distribute food – the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) – from doing so as part of a political campaign to get rid of the agency.
All this could be resolved by simply opening the northern crossing points. Instead, famine looms ever closer after charities providing hundreds of thousands of meals a day suspended operations because of concerns about their workers’ safety after the Israeli killing of the WCK staff.
In these circumstances, it is difficult not to conclude that Netanyahu is using food as a weapon to do what bombs and bullets have so far failed to, and drive out the remaining Palestinians in northern Gaza – or worse.
He won’t lose much sleep over German criticism. But Israeli politicians who are more sensitised to the consequences of alienating their country’s allies are worried. Images of Palestinians dying of starvation en masse would strip away what cover foreign politicians have to support Israel by claiming that civilian deaths have been an unfortunate but unintended consequence of war.
In Britain, the US and Europe, political leaders have already been forced by public revulsion at the scale of killing to start conditioning their support for Israel with tempered criticisms, and issuing calls for a ceasefire.
The horror of a manufactured famine would also add weight to South Africa’s claim at the international court of justice that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Before it comes to that, the mere prospect must now oblige western governments to finally stand up for the values they claim to represent.
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Chris McGreal writes for Guardian US, and is a former Guardian correspondent in Washington, Johannesburg and Jerusalem
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