“ACROSS northern Gaza there is no way of telling where the destruction starts or ends. No matter from what direction you enter Gaza City, homes, hospitals, schools, health clinics, mosques, apartments, restaurants — all completely flattened. An entire society now a graveyard.”

Those were the words posted by eye witness Louise Wateridge accompanying her November 6 video as she drove through a desecrated landscape of sand and rubble.

Wateridge works for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the vital UN agency that provides aid to now desperate Palestinians as they seek to escape complete erasure from the genocidal forces of the Israeli government.

“Nearly 70 per cent of people killed in Gaza are children and women,” Wateridge wrote several days later. “Families tell us their relatives, their children, are still buried under bombed homes. Everyone is trapped. Those alive are trapped under siege: injured, displaced and starving. Those killed are trapped under the rubble.”

Those nightmare visions were evoked again by British surgeon, Nizam Mamode, who testified last week before a British parliamentary committee after returning from hospital work in Gaza.

Day after day, he said, he found himself operating on children who told him “I was lying on the ground after a bomb dropped and this quadcopter came down and hovered over me and shot me.” This was, Mamode said, “a persistent act” of targeting civilians.

In October, the Israeli parliament passed a law banning UNRWA from operating inside Israel, another potentially fatal blow after the agency was already stripped of funding by dozens of countries, including European Union members, based on unproven accusations that some of its workers had participated in — or were supportive of — the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas. 

Although most countries have since restored support to UNRWA, the US will not do so until March 2025 at the earliest. By then the country will be under a Donald Trump presidency whose position on Israel is best indicated by his recent words and present actions. 

Late last month during a phone call with Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump told the Israeli prime minister to “do what you have to do” in Gaza. The nomination of Republican extremist and former Arkansas governor, Mike Huckabee, to be ambassador to Israeli signals another death warrant for Palestinians. 

During his failed presidential run in 2015, Huckabee declared all of the occupied West Bank as part of Israel, suggesting that if the Palestinians wanted a homeland of their own they should look elsewhere.

During an interview in 2017, Huckabee said of the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, “There’s no such thing as a settlement. They’re communities, they’re neighbourhoods, they’re cities. There’s no such thing as an occupation.”

Meanwhile, the bombing and the annihilation continues. Over the past year, the Biden administration has supplied Israel with $17.9 billion worth of weaponry. It has no plans to end that lethal largesse. 

Instead, the White House has said it will continue sending arms to Israel, claiming the country has met its 30-day deadline to improve the flow of aid to Gaza.

That prompted a furious response from Maryland senator, Chris Van Hollen, a leading voice in the Democratic Party against his country’s continued support of Israel’s barbarism.

In a rare reprimand of a sitting president from a member of his own party, Van Hollen called Biden’s inaction “shameful,” during an interview with broadcast journalist Mehdi Hassan. “I mean, there's no other word for it.”

Biden has “essentially been played by Netanyahu from day one,” Van Hollen said. “And every time the president of the United States says ‘this is what we the United States think is in our interests, please do it,’ he gets the back of the hand from Netanyahu and refuses to take any action.”

Biden’s claim that more aid is getting through to Gaza is belied by reports from those attempting to deliver it. “UNRWA has been denied access to its besieged north for over a month,” says Wateridge of efforts on the ground in Gaza. “More than 1.7 million have gone without food rations.”

It’s hard to understand how anyone with a shred of humanity left can shut their eyes to this.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.