The United States and Israel stand united
while the rest of the world coalesces to condemn atrocities in Gaza
Yesterday, the United States once again withdrew from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This move follows the Trump administration also departing the World Health Organization (WHO) and Human Rights Council and placing sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigating alleged war crimes committed by Israel.
Overlooking, at least for now, the potential power vacuum a foreign power like China could fill, the United States is cementing its anti-woke agenda on the international stage. In the State Department’s official statement regarding UNESCO:
UNESCO works to advance divisive social and cultural causes and maintains an outsized focus on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy. UNESCO’s decision to admit the “State of Palestine” as a Member State is highly problematic, contrary to U.S. policy, and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization.
Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar called America’s withdrawal “a necessary step, designed to promote justice and Israel's right for fair treatment in the UN system."
Meanwhile the world community is coalescing to condemn Israel.
Francesca Albanese, the UN-appointed independent expert on the Occupied Palestinian Territory who was sanctioned by the United States for working with the ICC to investigate Israeli actions in Gaza, spoke last week at a Hague Group Emergency Summit to 'Halt the Genocide in Gaza':
For too long, international law has been treated as optional – applied selectively to those perceived as weak, ignored by those acting as the powerful. This double standard has eroded the very foundations of the legal order. That era must end.
The two day emergency summit held in Bogotá, Colombia included representatives from 30 nations spanning Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas “to take collective action grounded in international law.”
Twelve nations signed off on their official statement and then on Monday 28 countries, including the UK, France, Canada and Japan, signed a joint statement with a clear and direct message:
The war in Gaza must end now..
The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity. We condemn the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food..
Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law.
Recent developments in Gaza have extended far beyond horrors documented before.
Dr. Nick Maynard, a British surgeon who has been going to Gaza since 2010 and is currently working in Nasser hospital, told NPR in an interview Monday:
Each time I've come, I saw the signs of malnutrition on both my previous trips in December '23, January '24 and then later that year. But the malnutrition now is much, much worse..
The Israelis are commonly using these fragmentation bombs, which release many, many thousands of very small metal pieces, which then tear through the body..
I think seeing four young teenagers come in, in the space of one hour, with gunshot wounds to their testicles, which we have never seen before, is beyond coincidence..
I think what we're witnessing is a very deliberate plan to erase the Gaza population from this land. I do not believe for a minute this is just about destroying Hamas. They are deliberately killing many, many, many thousands of innocent civilians by their withholding of aid and medicines and food.
The Intercept published a story documenting what it was like for a local named Khalil going to a Gaza aid distribution site:
He stood in line with hundreds of others. There were children, women, and elderly men. “Some were barefoot, some had been waiting since the night before,” he recalled.
As his group inched closer to the point where they hoped they would be able to grab a parcel of items, gunshots rang out. Khalil ran for his life.
“They began shooting directly at unarmed civilians,” he said. “The bullets were chasing us as if we were targets on a shooting range, and not just hungry people. We scattered under a hail of bullets. I got closer to death that day than a piece of bread.”
Yesterday the UN human rights office declared more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed attempting to get food, most of them while in close proximity of aid sites. Of course, the Israeli military and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) which runs the current aids sites claim they have ever only fired warning shots.
The GHF is legally registered in the state of Delaware, and in recent months has replaced the UNRWA which Israel believed was not careful to remove members of Hamas working for them. The GHF currently has only 4 distribution hubs in Gaza, a region with a population exceeding 2 million. The UN World Food Programme says the levels of starvation in Gaza have reached "new and astonishing levels of desperation."
Today, a joint statement signed by 115 aid groups was released:
Massacres at food distribution sites in Gaza are occurring near-daily.
The Government of Israel’s restrictions, delays, and fragmentation under its total siege have created chaos, starvation, and death. An aid worker providing psychosocial support spoke of the devastating impact on children: “Children tell their parents they want to go to heaven, because at least heaven has food.”
Doctors report record rates of acute malnutrition, especially among children and older people.
The UN-led humanitarian system has not failed, it has been prevented from functioning.
States can and must save lives before there are none left to save.
Israeli government spokesman David Mencer responded "there is no famine" in Gaza and claiming “suffering exists because Hamas has made it so.”
In an op-ed posted today in the Times of Israel, founding editor David Horovitz wrote:
Israel has proved unwilling and/or unable to foster any kind of alternative to Hamas for the governance of Gaza — not via local clans, not via the Palestinian Authority, and not via any kind of regional or US-directed mechanism.
Thus the development that would most trouble Hamas — the prospect of another entity or entities displacing it in ruling a postwar Gaza — has not been advanced..
The Gaza terror state built by Hamas in its ongoing declared goal of destroying Israel is largely in ruins, largely uninhabitable, and the Gazans that Hamas most deliberately placed in harm’s way are indeed suffering terrible harm — but with Israel, not Hamas, now having chosen to make itself responsible.
In the United States, it would seem the most pressing issue is what are in the Epstein files as evidenced by the Democrats on the House Oversight Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement securing the vote to subpoena Jeffrey Epstein files before the August Congressional recess.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) even admitted after the vote, “In some fashion, in some way, [Speaker Mike Johnson] is going to have to handle it and deal with it. And it sounds like, yeah, that’ll be a September [issue].”
As we all know, President Trump remains furious about the ongoing Epstein debacle wishing his MAGA base (and the media) were more focused on trade deals, NATO nations agreeing to significantly increase their share of defense spending and the president’s “big, beautiful bill.”
This week, the Trump administration went ahead and released thousands of federal records covering Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and is now accusing former President Barack Obama of treason for manufacturing and politicizing intelligence suggesting Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Given the timing of these events, they are likely meant to distract from the current political narrative consuming DC; the JFK and RFK assassination files were released earlier this year, and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat on the then Senate Intelligence Committee which “concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election through social media bots and the hacking and leaking of Democratic emails.”
Yes, there is a moral case to be made that the American public should know about any and all known associates of Jeffrey Epstein who participated in illegal acts.
There is a much more powerful moral case that the United States needs to reexamine its relationship with Israel when overwhelming evidence strongly suggests Israel is openly condemning international humanitarian law.
In the UN Declaration of Human Rights co-drafted by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in the aftermath of the the Allies defeating fascism in WWII, the preamble states:
disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people