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In Gaza, The Israelis Are Staging Hunger Games

Aid distribution sites in Gaza have turned into dystopian killing fields. And yet the world continues to turn a blind eye. When The Hunger Games books came out in the late 2000s to much acclaim, probably few readers expected scenes from these dystopian novels would take place in the world they live in. But they now do – here in Gaza, every day. We have been suffering under a full Israeli blockade since the beginning of March. Starvation has spread over the entire strip. Most families have just one meal per day. Some do not eat at all for days. In late May, the United States- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began limited aid deliveries to the strip. Since then, Palestinians have been forced into a deadly game to secure some food. None of my family members has dared go to a GHF aid distribution point, but some of my neighbours and friends have. All I have heard from them are horror stories. The first time we heard about the aid zone that the Israelis call the “Netzarim Corridor”, we imagined there would be tents, queues, order. But those who risked going there found only chaos and death. The aid distribution takes place in a fenced area near Salah al-Din Street, close to the eastern edge of Gaza – in a zone so dangerous, locals call it the death corridor.  It is surrounded by sand and guarded by foreign military contractors. There are Israeli tanks and soldiers stationed nearby. There is no clear schedule for the aid deliveries. Sometimes, the GHF opens the gates at 4am and sometimes later. Palestinians wait starting at sunset the night before. When the gates finally open, the crowd floods in. There are no queues, no staff, no signs. Just noise, dust and fear. Overhead, drones circle like vultures. Then, a voice from a loudspeaker shouts: “Four minutes! Take what you can!” Food boxes are left in the middle of the sand, but there is not enough of them. They are never enough. People rush towards the pile, shoving and climbing over each other. They push each other. Knives come out. Fistfights erupt. Children scream. Men fall. Women crawl through the sand. Few people are the lucky ones who are able to grab a box and hold onto it. Then gunfire starts. The sandy square becomes a killing field. People run for their lives. Many get hit. Some manage to crawl out with injuries. Others are carried by friends or relatives or even strangers. Others bleed alone into the sand. Since the end of May, more than 500 Palestinians have been killed when the Israeli army has opened indiscriminate fire on people gathered to try to get aid. More than 4,000 have been wounded. Subhi, the father of my friend Nour, was one of them. The family had no food left, so he felt compelled to risk his life to get some aid. On the morning of June 14, he left for the aid hub in Netzarim. He never came back. Nour told me how they waited by the door. Hours passed. No word. No call. The internet was cut. The silence was unbearable. Then suddenly, they heard the sound of shooting in the distance. They immediately knew something had gone wrong, but they had no way to reach him. Later, paramedics found his body. He was killed while trying to carry a bag of food home to his children. Another friend, Hala, told me the story of another victim of the GHF death trap, Khamis, the brother-in-law of her sister. He had been married for just two years and had no children yet, but he carried the weight of an entire household on his back. He had started taking care of his brother’s children after he was killed earlier in the war. When their food ran out, Khamis’s friends managed to convince him to go with them to try to pick up some aid. On the morning of June 24, they were waiting near the aid hub when someone shouted: “They’ve opened the gates!” Khamis stepped out of their hiding place – just slightly – to see for himself. A bullet from an Israeli quadcopter pierced his shoulder, then lodged in his heart, killing him. He left behind a grieving widow and hungry nieces and nephews. There are countless other stories – just as painful, just as heartbreaking – that will never be known. Gaza’s Ministry of Health has called these incidents “aid massacres”. Legal experts have called them war crimes. But they really are “hunger games”. Hunger changes people. It doesn’t just weaken the body – it tests the soul. It undermines trust and solidarity between people and unleashes the most basic of instincts. The occupier knows that, and it is weaponising it. It is no coincidence it viciously attacked and banned the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. UNRWA’s aid distribution system was a model of organisation and fairness. Each family registered with the agency had an identification card with which it could receive aid distributed through a careful, transparent process. Priority was given to the most vulnerable – widows, orphans, the elderly and disabled people – ensuring that those who need help the most received it first. Its system reduced the risk of deadly stampedes and violent clashes because there was order, dignity and respect for human life. The occupier does not want any of that. That is why it designed aid distribution in the form of “hunger games”. These are orchestrated traps designed to cause chaos and disorder so Palestinians fight each other and the social order and solidarity that hold Palestinian society together break down. For a month, Israel and the GHF denied that there were any mass killings happening at the aid hubs – another Israeli lie that was widely believed. Now, the Israeli media themselves have reported that Israeli soldiers were ordered to shoot at the crowds of Palestinians trying to get aid at the GHF hubs. Will the world believe us now? Will it take action? What is happening in Gaza is not fiction. It is not a horror movie. The “hunger games” are real and so is the genocide they are part of. That the world is allowing such dystopia to unfold is damning evidence of its own loss of humanity. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. Follow Al Jazeera English:...

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The Attacks On Iran Didnt Achieve Anything More Than Harm Nonproliferation

The conclusion many states may now draw is that complying with the NPT is no longer a guarantee of nuclear security. After launching direct attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, United States President Donald Trump was quick to declare victory. His administration claimed “the world is far safer” after the “bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons”. But in the aftermath of the strikes, there has been much deliberation about the extent to which the Iranian nuclear programme was really set back. As the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, pointed out, craters reveal little about what survived deep below layers of concrete. The Trump administration admitted that at least one site was not targeted with bunker-busting bombs because it was too deep underground. The fate of Iran’s centrifuges and stockpile of 60 percent-enriched uranium remains unknown. While the extent of the damage that the Iranian nuclear programme sustained remains unclear, the nonproliferation regime that kept it transparent for years has been left in tatters. Instead of curbing nuclear proliferation, this short-sighted military action may well intensify the nuclear threat it sought to contain, making not just the Middle East but also the entire world a far more dangerous place. Until this month’s attack, Iran’s nuclear programme had remained a largely peaceful one. It was launched in the 1950s with help from the US Atoms for Peace initiative. Over the following decades, it expanded to include a number of nuclear facilities. Among them are the Arak heavy water reactor, which is now nonoperational; the Tehran Research Reactor, an installation built with US help in 1967 and used for medical isotope production; the uranium conversion and fuel fabrication complex in Isfahan; the Natanz nuclear facility, which is the country’s main enrichment site; the Fordow underground plant near Qom; and the Bushehr nuclear plant, which relies on Russian-supplied fuel and is the only one currently operational in Iran. In addition, Iran is constructing two other nuclear installations – the Darkhovin and Sirik power plant projects – but those remain in early stages. All aspects of the Iranian nuclear programme were under meticulous surveillance by the IAEA for decades. The country became a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968, legally committing itself to forgo the pursuit of nuclear weapons and placing all nuclear materials under IAEA safeguards. Iran signed a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement in 1974 and declared 18 nuclear facilities and nine locations outside facilities (LOFs) where nuclear material was used. These included enrichment plants, research reactors, conversion and fuel fabrication facilities, laboratories and hospital sites using radioisotopes. At times, especially after previously secret sites came to light in 2002, the IAEA carried out more intrusive verification measures and pressed Iran to implement the Additional Protocol, an agreement for expanded inspections. The country did so voluntarily from 2003 to 2006. In 2015, Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with the US, United Kingdom, China, Russia, France and Germany. It accepted strict ceilings on uranium enrichment and agreed to reduce its uranium stockpile by 97 percent in exchange for sanctions relief. The IAEA was granted even greater access to Iran’s programme than before and was allowed to install cameras and remote sensors at nuclear sites, permitting real-time monitoring. This expanded access covered all the major sites of Iran’s nuclear programme, including Natanz, Fordow and Isfahan, the three facilities recently attacked by the US. The JCPOA proved highly effective while it remained in force. In 2018 during his first term as president, Trump decided to pull out of the JCPOA, claiming that under its provisions Iran received “too much in exchange for too little”. Despite repeated pleas from European allies to preserve the accord, the US reimposed sanctions and launched a “maximum pressure” campaign to cripple Iran’s economy. The consequences of Trump’s withdrawal were swift. Deprived of the deal’s benefits, Iran began reducing its compliance with the agreement. In 2020, after a Trump-ordered air strike killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, Tehran announced it would no longer be bound by any operational limits in the nuclear deal. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s actions made any new negotiations with Iran far more difficult. US officials under the second Trump administration tried to restart talks with Iran and conducted several rounds of indirect discussions. Iranian leaders demanded guarantees that a new deal would not be undermined or sanctions reimposed again unilaterally, and in response, Washington showed little flexibility, instead making even more stringent demands. From Iran’s perspective, what was proposed was a less favourable deal than the JCPOA, and it came from a country whose promises had proven unreliable. The US-Israeli attacks all but killed the efforts to revive negotiations. Within hours of the attacks, Iran scrubbed another round of talks with the US in Oman and ordered its negotiators home. In the days after the bombing, Iran’s parliament started drafting legislation to quit the NPT.  If Iran goes through with it, a withdrawal could rupture the cornerstone treaty of global arms control. For half a century, the NPT has limited the nuclear bomb to a handful of states. Iran quitting now would mark the treaty’s most consequential breach since North Korea, which walked away from the NPT in 2003 and tested a nuclear weapon four years later. Outside the NPT, Iran would no longer be bound by any limits or inspections, leaving the world in the dark about its activities. An opaque Iranian nuclear programme would likely spur other regional powers to do the same, shredding decades of restraint. Leaving the NPT is not meant to be easy. It requires three months notice, a public rationale, continued liability for past violations, and the handover or continuous safeguarding of all imported nuclear technology. These are steps the treaty depositories and the United Nations Security Council could use to pressure any would-be quitter back to the table, assuming the quitter still sees any value in remaining at the table. While Iran has not yet declared it is leaving the NPT, its parliament passed legislation to stop all cooperation with the IAEA. This is a clear sign that the prospects of Iran’s continued adherence to multilateral diplomacy are dim. By bombing facilities under active IAEA safeguards, the US in effect told every nonnuclear state that cooperation buys little safety. The strikes set a dangerous precedent: A country that opened its sites to inspectors and remained within a negotiated framework nevertheless faced military force. If states conclude that adhering to the NPT and allowing inspections won’t protect them from attack or coercion, they may well decide that developing a nuclear deterrent is the only reliable security guarantee. After all, we don’t see the US contemplating strikes on North Korean nuclear facilities after it made clear it has a nuclear weapon. Whatever temporary setback this ill-conceived show of force was meant to achieve, it now risks causing a strategic unravelling of the wider nonproliferation regime and regional stability. The US still has a chance to stop a nuclear arms race from erupting in the Middle East and the rest of the world. To do that, it must double down on diplomacy and confront the deep distrust it created head-on. Striking a deal is essential, but for that, American diplomacy must return to realism in negotiations. Washington should abandon the maximalist demand of “zero enrichment”. Arms control experts noted that insisting Iran have no enrichment capability is unnecessary for nonproliferation and also unrealistic. The JCPOA already proved that a tightly limited enrichment programme paired with rigorous monitoring can effectively block Iran’s pathways to a bomb. The US needs to signal it is willing to accept such an arrangement in exchange for security assurances and sanctions relief. For its part, Tehran has signalled its willingness to ship out its stockpile of highly enriched uranium and cap enrichment levels again if offered a fair deal, even though it refuses to relinquish its right to enrich entirely. Ultimately, diplomacy and sustained international engagement remain the most effective tools for managing nuclear proliferation risks, not risky unilateral actions. The strikes have been a grave strategic error. Repairing the damage will require an equally dramatic recommitment to the hard work of diplomacy. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance. Follow Al Jazeera English:...

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