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May 9, 2024, 1:33 p.m. ET11 minutes ago

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Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

Months Late, Biden Uses His Leverage on Israel

For seven months, President Biden has called on Israel to show more restraint in its war in Gaza and to allow more aid into the territory, and he has been mostly ignored. Now, belatedly and reluctantly, he is doing what presidents do all over the world: He is applying leverage.

Biden has delayed the transfer of 3,500 bombs to Israel and has warned that an all-out Israeli invasion of the packed southern Gaza city of Rafah would lead to further suspensions in the weapons flow. It was the only way to get the attention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership.

Republicans have denounced Biden’s move as weakening Israel and impeding its war effort, but the United States is continuing to provide defensive weaponry to Israel. The new moves affect only munitions that would be used to pulverize Rafah and cause thousands more civilian casualties there.

President Ronald Reagan likewise delayed arms shipments after Israel’s reckless invasion of Lebanon in 1982 led to enormous civilian casualties.

As I see it, Biden had to act, for both humanitarian and practical reasons. United Nations agencies have been warning that an invasion of Rafah would result in a catastrophic civilian toll. The United States would be complicit in that blood bath, through the use of American munitions and American backing for the war.

I only wish that Biden had taken such actions months ago. That might have saved the lives of so many Gazan children and prevented people from starving to death as aid flows were constricted.

It’s not clear how Israel will respond. Netanyahu may defy Biden, seeing an invasion of Rafah as his path to staying in power by retaining support from extremist parties in his country.

While Biden’s focus is on preventing an all-out invasion of Rafah, I hope he will also use this leverage to press Israel to allow more aid into the territory. Cindy McCain, the head of the World Food Program, warns that there is already full-blown famine in parts of Gaza, even as trucks with food are lined up outside the Israel-controlled entry points on the border. This is unconscionable.

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | Reasons to Have Hope – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

• May 9, 2024

Mr. Kristof is the author of a new memoir, “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life,” from which this essay is adapted.

“More than three-quarters of Americans say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. This year, for the first time, America dropped out of the top 20 happiest countries in this year’s World Happiness Report. Some couples are choosing not to have children because of climate threats. And this despair permeates not just the United States, but much of the world.

This moment is particularly dispiriting because of the toxic mood. Debates about the horrifying toll of the war in Gaza has made the atmosphere even more poisonous, as the turmoil on college campuses underscores. We are a bitterly divided nation, quick to point fingers and denounce one another, and the recriminations feed the gloom. Instead of a City on a Hill, we feel like a nation in despair — maybe even a planet in despair.

Yet that’s not how I feel at all.

What I’ve learned from four decades of covering misery is hope — both the reasons for hope and the need for hope. I emerge from years on the front lines awed by material and moral progress, for we have the good fortune to be part of what is probably the greatest improvement in life expectancy, nutrition and health that has ever unfolded in one lifetime.” . . . . .

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | The Loss in Gaza Captured in One Photo – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

“An American surgeon who volunteered in Gaza sent me a photo that sears me with its glimpse of overwhelming grief: A woman mourns her young son.

I’ve known the surgeon, Dr. Sam Attar, a professor at Northwestern University School of Medicine, for a decade. He has worked in war zones around the world, from Ukraine to Iraq to Syria, but Gaza has been particularly harrowing for him, in part because so many children have suffered or died.

He performed amputations and other orthopedic surgeries recently at Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. He was preparing to go into the operating room one day when a woman called him over and asked him to photograph her young son, Karam, in his bed in the I.C.U. Sam went over and only then realized that the boy was dead.

“Every time staff wanted to cover him fully with a blanket, she would flip it back and say, ‘No!’” Sam told me. “And she would start talking to him, asking him where he went.” 

“Every time staff wanted to cover him fully with a blanket, she would flip it back and say, ‘No!’” Sam told me. “And she would start talking to him, asking him where he went.”

The nurses and other doctors who were in the I.C.U. that day said that Karam died of complications from malnutrition. The United Nations confirms that Gazan children have starved to death.

The nurses wanted to remove Karam’s body after he died an hour earlier, but his mother wouldn’t allow it. In her grief, she told Sam that Karam was a prince and she wanted Sam to share the boy’s photo. Perhaps she thought this was a way of commemorating her son.

I’ve criticized the way Israel has conducted the war in Gaza and President Biden’s strong support for it, for a child is killed or injured in the war every 10 minutes, according to the United Nations. More than 14,000 children have been killed in the war, according to the Gaza health authorities. But that’s a number; this photo captures a preventable tragedy.

As I argue that it’s time to end this war, I think this photo has a persuasive power greater than my words, so I’ve given my column space over to this image. As we discuss Gaza, let’s keep in mind that the war unfolds through lives like Karam’s.”  -30-

David Lindsay Jr.

Hamden, CT NYT comment:

Thank you Nicholas Kristof. I salute you and your work. Dear Joe Biden, Do your really want to go down as the enabler of ethnic cleansing of over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, unarmed, men, women and mostly, children. Several journalists in the New York Times, including Nicholas Kristof, and in Time Magazine, quote historians who say, the Israeli government only takes our advice when we threaten to withdraw our support. It is way past the time to get tough. One writer, maybe Kristof, in the NYT wrote, when the UN put forth a resolution, that it would take over the inspection of trucks going into Gaza, for the Israli Defense Forces, the US blocked the measure. It is time to unblock this measure, and let the trucks into Gaza. InconvienientNews.net

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | How Protesters Can Actually Help Palestinians – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

“Student protesters: I admire your empathy for Gazans, your concern for the world, your moral ambition to make a difference.

But I worry about how peaceful protests have tipped into occupations of buildings, risks to commencements and what I see as undue tolerance of antisemitism, chaos, vandalism and extremism. I’m afraid the more aggressive actions may be hurting the Gazans you are trying to help.

I’m shaped in my thinking by the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Students who protested then were right on the merits: The war was unwinnable and conducted in ways that were reckless and immoral.

Yet those students didn’t shorten that terrible war; instead, they probably prolonged it. Leftist activists in 1968 didn’t achieve their goal of electing the peace candidate Gene McCarthy; rather, the turmoil and more violent protests helped elect Richard Nixon, who pledged to restore order — and then dragged the war out and expanded it to Cambodia.

I think that history is worth remembering today. Good intentions are not enough. Empathy is not enough. I’m sure we all agree that it’s outcomes that matter. So the question I would ask you to ask yourselves is: Are your encampments and sacrifices — more than 1,000 protesters have been arrested so far, and unknown numbers have been suspended or expelled — actually helping Gazans?

I’ve been strongly criticizing Israel’s conduct in Gaza since last fall, and President Biden’s unconditional support for the war. So while my heart’s with the cause, it seems to me that the campus upheavals have distracted from the crisis in Gaza, rather than called attention to it.

After all, what are we talking about right now? It’s not hunger in Gaza. It’s not a potential invasion of Rafah, which the U.N. humanitarian chief said this week would be “a tragedy beyond words.” ” . . . . .

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | Gaza Is Biden’s War Now – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

• April 19, 2024

“During the Darfur genocide and humanitarian crisis two decades ago, then-Senator Joe Biden passionately denounced then-President George W. Bush for failing to act decisively to ease suffering. Biden expressed outrage at China for selling weapons used to kill and maim civilians, and he urged me to write columns demanding the White House end needless wretchedness.

Darfur and Gaza are very different, of course, but I recall the senator’s compassion and urgency — and I wonder, where has that Joe Biden gone?

Gaza has become the albatross around Biden’s neck. It is his war, not just Benjamin Netanyahu’s. It will be part of his legacy, an element of his obituary, a blot on his campaign — and it could get worse if Gaza cascades into a full-blown famine or violent anarchy, or if a wider war breaks out involving Iran or Lebanon. An Israeli strike on a military base in central Iran early Friday underscored the danger of a bigger and more damaging conflict that could draw in the United States.

Consider just one example of America’s fingerprints on this war under Biden’s leadership. In January, the Israeli military dropped a bomb on a compound in Gaza used by the International Rescue Committee, a much-respected American aid organization that is supported in part by American tax dollars. The International Rescue Committee says that the near-fatal strike was caused by a 1,000-pound American-made bomb, dropped from an American-made F-16 fighter jet. And when an American-made aircraft drops an American-made bomb on an American aid group in an American-supported war, how can that not come back to Biden?

“Biden owns that,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden and Obama administration official who now runs Refugees International, another aid group. “They’ve provided the matériel that sustains the war. They provided political support that sustains the war. They provided the diplomatic cover at the U.N. that sustains the war.” . . . . . .

“Biden’s efforts to persuade Netanyahu to allow more aid trucks into Gaza were, at least until recently, so ineffectual that the White House had to drop food from planes. In 1948, the United States organized the Berlin Airlift to overcome Soviet obstructionism; that meant confronting our adversary and constituted a show of strength. In 2024, the United States was reduced to organizing the Gaza airlift to get around the intransigence of our longtime aid recipient; that reflected Biden’s failure to confront our ally and amounted to a show of weakness.

Instead of organizing an airdrop (which has killed some people when aid fell on them), Biden had an opportunity to do something much more substantial to avert starvation. In December the United Nations Security Council tried to set up a U.N. system to inspect trucks entering Gaza rather than letting them get stuck in the Israeli inspection bottleneck. Reports were already coming in of catastrophic starvation in Gaza, yet the Biden administration effectively blocked this alternative by watering it down to nothing, according to people close to the negotiations. The upshot: Children starved to death.

The administration also tolerated a ferocious crackdown and land grab by Israeli West Bank settlers who operate with the backing of Netanyahu’s extremist cabinet. The United Nations reports that almost 5,000 Palestinians in the West Bank have been injured since Oct. 7 in confrontations with Israeli troops and settlers, who periodically steal Palestinians’ sheep or drive them from their homes. By the U.N.’s count, 451 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank in this period, including 112 children (nine Israelis were killed in the West Bank during this time). Then last month, Israel announced the largest seizure of West Bank land since the Oslo peace accords in 1993. It was a slap in the face of Biden, who has mostly turned the other cheek.” . . . .

“As time went on and Israel leveled entire neighborhoods and killed large numbers of women, children and aid workers, Biden became more critical of Israel. But while his rhetoric changed, his policies didn’t — and he repeatedly allowed his calls for restraint to be ignored. Indeed, in the first months of the war, Biden’s first serious move to impose accountability wasn’t aimed at Netanyahu but at UNRWA, the United Nations agency working desperately to prevent famine in Gaza.

After allegations in January that a dozen (later 14) of the agency’s 30,000 employees may have joined the Hamas terrorist attack and that many others were Hamas members, Biden suspended funding for UNRWA without waiting for confirmation. Investigations are now underway, and a small number of UNRWA staff members may have been involved in the Hamas attack, but there are growing doubts about the larger Israeli allegation of fundamental UNRWA complicity.

“They’ve been saying UNRWA is an arm of Hamas,” Senator Van Hollen told me. “There’s nothing — nothing! — in the intelligence to support that claim. That’s a flat-out lie.”

It now appears that while Biden was too slow to confront Netanyahu for killing Gazan children, he acted too hastily against the U.N. agency trying to save Gazan children. “We contributed,” Van Hollen noted, “to punishing over two million civilians who relied on UNRWA.” ” . . . . .

David Lindsay:  Joe Biden needs to immediately refund UNRWA, to organize the feeding the people of Gaza and let the UN take control of examining aid going in for weapons, instead of leaving it to the Israeli Defence Force, who reduce the flow of aid to a trickle.

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | President Biden, You Have Leverage That Can Save Lives in Gaza. Please Use It. – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

“President Biden is sounding tougher toward Israel these days and showing more compassion for people starving in Gaza. “There are a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying,” Biden said. “And it’s got to stop.”

But it’s not going to stop on its own — indeed, it may get worse if Israel invades Rafah, or if hunger tips into famine. And Biden’s concern for Palestinians rings hollow to me because he has been unwilling to lean hard on Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to make it stop.

So we’re now in a bizarre situation: American bombs and American aid are both falling from Gaza’s skies.

In 1948, the United States and its allies undertook the famous Berlin Airlift to rescue West Berlin from a Soviet blockade. Now we are engaged in another humanitarian airlift — this time because of the actions not of an enemy but of our partner. Israel is insisting on painstaking inspections of every aid truck going into Gaza. A senior administration official told me that Israel was turning back entire truckloads if they contained emergency birthing kits, apparently because these include a small scalpel for cutting umbilical cords. UNICEF tells me that Israel is refusing to allow it to bring in portable toilets. Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley visited the Gaza border and found that Israel has blocked water purifiers. A British member of Parliament said that Israel had blocked 2,560 solar lights.

Because Biden couldn’t persuade Israel to ease up on this nonsense and allow in enough aid to avert starvation, he moved to airdrops and a sea corridor — better than nothing and also woefully inadequate. Cindy McCain, head of the United Nations World Food Program, warns that road access to Gaza is essential, and that “if we do not exponentially increase the size of aid going into the northern areas, famine is imminent.”

Diplomacy is about arm-twisting as much as persuasion, but Biden seems unwilling to act in ways that give force to his words. Simply put, Netanyahu ignores the White House because there is no cost to doing so.

That’s not entirely new. “Our American friends offer us money, arms and advice,” the Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan told a visiting American Zionist leader in 1967. “We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice.”

Avi Shlaim, the historian, recounts that the visitor asked what would happen if America said that Israel would get aid only if it took the advice. Dayan replied: “Then we would have to take the advice, too.”

Under tough-minded presidents, that has occasionally happened. My first visit to the Middle East involved backpacking through a battered Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion, which left many Palestinians dead but hasn’t improved Israel’s security. I didn’t know that behind the scenes President Ronald Reagan called up Prime Minister Menachem Begin after one particularly horrific artillery barrage and, instead of pleading for a halt, commanded it.

“I was angry,” Reagan wrote in his diary, as The New York Review of Books noted. “I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately and said the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off.”

“Twenty mins. later,” Reagan added, “he called to tell me he’d ordered an end to the barrage and pled for our continued friendship.”

I wish Biden would show similar mettle. He could attach end-use restrictions to shipments of offensive arms, limiting how they can be used (as he does with Ukraine). He could simply adhere, as eight senators have urged, to American law that ends military support to any country when the president finds that it “restricts, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”

Under congressional pressure, Biden last month issued National Security Memorandum 20, which amplifies the law and will require Israel to confirm by late March that it is allowing humanitarian aid delivery; otherwise, it risks its supply of offensive weapons. That is leverage, but only if Biden is willing to use it.

The president can also publicly urge Egypt to let aid trucks now stalled at the border while awaiting Israeli inspections to pass into Gaza even without Israeli approval. (It could do its own inspections if necessary.) Egyptian-Israeli security cooperation is important, but not if it keeps food from Gaza.

The U.S. can also abstain on humanitarian resolutions at the U.N. instead of vetoing them. Biden can bypass Netanyahu and speak directly to Israelis — maybe at the Knesset — and make the case for humanitarian aid, a cease-fire and a path to a two-state solution.

Biden might deny that he actually has much leverage. It’s a fair point: Israelis were shattered by the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack and aren’t in the mood to hear outsiders who are sitting safely in distant lands call for restraint. One depressing poll last month found that 68 percent of Israeli Jews oppose allowing food and medicine into Gaza.

On the other hand, Israel has responded — albeit inadequately so far — to public pressure and criticism. Just in the last few days, officials have signaled that they want to see more humanitarian assistance, with a military spokesman saying it was trying to “flood” Gaza with aid. A convoy of six aid trucks was allowed to enter northern Gaza directly from Israel, which was encouraging.

The truth is that we don’t know how much leverage Biden has because he hasn’t truly tested his power. When Biden seemed to suggest this month that invading Rafah would cross a red line and might have repercussions, the White House immediately walked his statement back.

Perhaps Biden believes he is projecting friendship and loyalty to a beleaguered ally. To Netanyahu and most of the world, it looks like weakness.

Meanwhile, Gazans starve unnecessarily, and this may become part of Biden’s legacy.

To explain how the present policy is failing, I’ll give the last word to the Gaza linguistics scholar Mohammed Alshannat, whose texts I quoted in my column last week. In a new message, Alshannat told how he tried to collect food from an airdrop to avert starvation:

“Me and my wife decided to go to the beach hoping that we get something to feed our children. There were dozens of thousands of people waiting. Around 2:20 three planes started to drop their parachutes across the beach. People started chasing them. We chased one of these parachutes. However, when it was opened, we found water bottles and vinegar bottles. Two children died of stampede. Because we are so malnourished and have not eaten anything, it took us three hours to get back home, as we had to take a rest every 10 minutes. We wept all the way back.” ” -30-

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | Israel, Gaza and Double Standards, Including Our Own – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

“Does the West have a double standard when it comes to Israel, pouncing on everything it does with undue harshness?

When he was challenged about the bloodshed in Gaza on “Face the Nation” last weekend, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel responded, “What would America do” after something like the Oct. 7 Hamas attack? “Would you not be doing what Israel is doing? You’d be doing a hell of a lot more.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier in The Jerusalem Post condemned “an unprecedented double standard” that relentlessly criticizes Israel’s bombing of Gaza but is unbothered by the Allied bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan in World War II. And the World Jewish Congress cites “criticizing Israeli defensive operations, but not those of other Western democracies” as an example of antisemitism.

All this strikes me as both right and wrong, a fair point and a false one. I’ll come to why it’s wrong in a moment, but it is undeniably true that the world applies more scrutiny to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians than to many other horrors.

In 2023, for example, the United Nations General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions critical of Israel, and only seven resolutions critical of all other countries in the world together, by the count of one pro-Israel group. Does anyone think that represents even-handedness?

People are more focused on Israel than on what Unicef describes as a “wave of atrocities” currently underway against children in Sudan, while the number of children displaced by recent fighting in Sudan (three million) is greater than the entire population of Gaza. University students in America and Europe protest about Gaza but largely ignore the 700,000 children facing severe acute malnutrition in Sudan, after a civil war began there last April.

The Darfur region of Sudan two decades ago endured what is widely described as the first genocide of the 21st century. Now bands of gunmen once more are killing and raping villagers belonging to particular ethnic groups. I was seared by my reporting from Darfur during the genocide, and it staggers me that the world is ignoring another round of mass atrocities there.

Meanwhile, some of the worst mistreatment of Arabs in recent years was inflicted by Arab rulers themselves, in Syria and Yemen.

So is there a double standard in global attention? Absolutely. Defenders of Israel have every right to point all this out, and sometimes it does reflect antisemitism. Yet — now we get to the other side — it also strikes me as unconscionable to use the world’s hypocrisy, however invidious, to justify the deaths of thousands of children in Gaza.

That would be an echo of Russian whataboutism: How can you talk about our war in Ukraine when you Americans invaded Iraq and tortured people there?

It’s also true that while some university campuses may be guilty of selective outrage, that is not true of all observers. Some of the most incisive critics of Israel’s actions are from the very U.N. agencies and human rights groups whose staffs are risking their lives in the field to save lives in Sudan, Ethiopia and other countries.

In any case, there is a reason to focus on Gaza today, for it is not just one more place of pain among many contenders but, in the judgment of Unicef, the world’s most dangerous place to be a child.

Consider that in the first 18 months of Russia’s current war in Ukraine, at least 545 children were killed. Or that in 2022, by a United Nations count, 2,985 children were killed in all wars worldwide. In contrast, in less than five months of Israel’s current war in Gaza, the health authorities there report more than 12,500 children killed.

Among them were 250 infants less than 1 year old. I can’t think of any conflict in this century that has killed babies at such a pace.

Of course Israel had the right to respond militarily to the Oct. 7 attacks. Of course Hamas leaders should give up their hostages. But none of this excuses Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing, in the words of President Biden, and restrictions on food and other assistance.

Because of America’s support for Israel’s invasion and diplomatic protection for it at the United Nations, this blood is on our hands, and that surely justifies increased scrutiny.

Yet here’s another double standard: We Americans condemn Russia, China or Venezuela for their violations of human rights, but the United States supports Israel and protects it diplomatically even as it has engaged in what President Biden has called an “over the top” military campaign.

“How can the U.S. condemn Russia’s bombing of civilians in Ukraine as a war crime but fund Netanyahu’s war machine, which has killed thousands?” Senator Bernie Sanders asked.

So it’s fair to talk about double standards. They are real. They run in many directions, shielding Israel as well as condemning it. And in a world where we are all connected by our shared humanity, I believe we should never let our very human tangles of double standards and hypocrisies be harnessed to deflect from the tragedy unfolding today for the children of Gaza, or America’s complicity in it.” -30-

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | The Addiction Recovery Story We Don’t Hear Enough – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Photographs by Barrett Emke

Mr. Kristof is an Opinion columnist, reporting from Tulsa, Okla. Mr. Emke is a photographer based in Kansas City, Mo.

• Feb. 14, 2024

This is the seventh in the series “How America Heals,” in which Nicholas Kristof examines the interwoven crises devastating working-class America and explores paths to recovery.

“Twenty women with felony records and a history of drug use are standing on the stage in a crowded auditorium in Tulsa, and the audience is rising in a standing ovation. The women are teary as they see the cops who arrested them, applauding wildly. It’s the happiest of graduations, and through the raucous cheering one glimpses a better way of dealing with drug and alcohol abuse.

You see, against all odds, this is an uplifting article about America’s curse of addiction.

The graduation was from the single best program I know of to fight substance use. It’s called Women in Recovery, and it’s a diversion program for women in the greater Tulsa area who otherwise face prison for drug-related offenses.

Women in Recovery says that 70 percent of women who start the program complete it, and of those who graduate, just 3.7 percent have returned to prison within three years of graduation. Roughly 130 women are in the program at any time.

As I watched the graduation, my imagination soared: What if everyone with a drug problem who was caught up in the criminal justice system had access to a comprehensive and long-term recovery program like this?” . . . .

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion | In Gaza, We Can’t Justify This Much Suffering – The New York Times

By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

There’s a whip-smart 10-year-old girl in Gaza who speaks good English, displays a radiant smile and seemed to have a bright future. The daughter of an X-ray technician, she had been accepted to an international exchange program and was supposed to be leaving soon.

Instead, she’s lying in a hospital bed with a badly infected wound in her thigh from a bomb blast. A photo shows a football-size open wound, with a chunk of her femur missing.

“She was supposed to be in Japan,” said Dr. Samer Attar, an orthopedic surgeon who cared for the girl and told me about her. “Now she’s lying in bed deciding whether to have her leg removed.” I’ve known Dr. Attar for a decade, ever since he volunteered to work in secret hospitals in Aleppo, Syria, to save victims of Russian bombings. A professor at Northwestern University School of Medicine, he has worked in war zones and crisis areas around the world, including Ukraine and Iraq — and recently, at hospitals in Gaza, through the medical volunteer organizations Rahma Worldwide and IDEALS.

Dr. Attar said the girl needed an amputation at the hip to save her life. Her dad, struggling to come to terms with how his and his daughter’s lives have collapsed, is resisting for now.

Over the years, I’ve covered many bloody wars and written scathingly about how governments in Russia, Sudan and Syria recklessly bombed civilians. This time, it’s different: My government is on the side engaged in what President Biden has referred to as “indiscriminate bombing.” This is not the same as deliberately targeting civilians, as those other countries did — but this time, as a taxpayer, I’m helping to pay for the bombs.

Gaza is also different from Syria and Ukraine, of course, in that Israel did not start this war. Instead, Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas in a rampage of murder, torture and rape. Any government would have struck back, and Hamas maximized the suffering of civilians by using them as human shields.

Yet military response is not a binary choice; it exists on a continuum. Israel, traumatized by the attack it suffered, elected to retaliate with 2,000-pound bombs, destroy entire neighborhoods and allow only a trickle of aid into the territory, which is now teetering on the brink of famine. The upshot is that this does not feel like a war on Hamas but rather a war on Gazans.

In November, I wrote about Mohammed Alshannat, a doctoral student in Gaza who was desperately trying to keep his children alive. I offer a sad update: One of his sons has been gravely injured.

“He is 13 years old and was injured while we were running for our lives,” Alshannat wrote in a WhatsApp message. “I had to carry him bleeding under heavy artillery shelling for two hours. I found a doctor who was sheltering in a school, and he took a risk and saved my son’s life.”

“He went through a complicated surgery later and still unable to walk. He is very sick and suffers from malnutrition,” Alshannat wrote.

How can Alshannat’s American friends face him and his son after the war?

Many Americans are conflicted about the war. They may keep quiet rather than enter a debate that is bitter and polarizing and may cost friendships, or they may avert their eyes. But the great Elie Wiesel described indifference as “the most insidious danger of all” and observed, “Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere.”

The suffering of children — and half of Gazans are children — should particularly concern us. UNICEF estimates that in the chaos of war and displacement, at least 17,000 children in Gaza are unaccompanied or separated from their parents.

Two teenage brothers with mangled bodies haunt Dr. Attar. One boy had his leg amputated at the hip; he died on the operating table as the anesthesiologist wept. The other, who had lost much of the skin on his body, survived overnight but died in the morning.

The hospitals were short of nearly everything, Dr. Attar said, and patients spent weeks on the floor waiting in great pain for care. A woman’s screaming lingers in his ears: She was pleading for help for her husband, whose wounds had been untreated for a week in the chaos of the hospital, and maggots were crawling in the flesh.

Some will blame all this on Hamas: If it had not attacked Israeli civilians, there would be no Israeli bombing. That’s true, but to me it seems an evasion of moral responsibility. Israel and America have agency, and the atrocities suffered by Israeli civilians do not justify the leveling of Palestinian neighborhoods.

President Biden should search his soul: He excoriates Russia for bombing civilians and undermining the rules-based international order, even as we supply bombs that can wipe out neighborhoods in Gaza, even as we give diplomatic cover to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while Gazans face looming starvation.

Biden has suspended funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, which is responsible for delivering assistance to Gazans — without outlining any viable alternative plan to distribute aid. He is right to be outraged that a dozen UNRWA staff members (out of 13,000 employees) allegedly participated in the Oct. 7 attacks, and it’s good that the U.N. promptly fired those workers.

Still, if UNRWA is unable to function because of the suspended funding, Gazan children will die.

It would be unconscionable if Hamas terrorists sheltered in the ranks of a U.N. agency. And it would be unconscionable if children end up starving as a result of our actions — even as we tell ourselves we’re taking the moral high ground.

Decisions about waging war are wrenching because, invariably, innocent civilians suffer. This requires a calculus of strategic gain versus human cost. People will weigh the trade-offs differently, but let’s resist the tendency to otherize those of different races, faiths and ethnicities. When we are caught in a conflict, we tend to dehumanize the other side; we can fight that impulse by asserting our shared humanity and recognizing that all lives have equal value.

One life, as precious as that of any American or Israeli child, belongs to a bright 10-year-old girl in Gaza who should be excitedly planning a trip to Japan. Instead, she smiles bravely through excruciating pain and must endure an amputation if her life is to be saved — and we Americans should face our complicity in her tragedy and all Gaza’s.” -30-

A Ruling for the Starving Children of Gaza – Nicholas Kristof – The New York Times

Jan. 26, 2024,

Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist

A Ruling for the Starving Children of Gaza

“The International Court of Justice ruling on Israel and Gaza today won’t please those who wanted a decisive ruling for or against a cease-fire. But its provisional ruling that Israel must allow more aid into Gaza could save lives — if the Biden administration insists that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu obey it.

I’ve covered many conflicts — in Congo, Sudan, the Central African Republic and elsewhere — in which most of the deaths do come not from bullets but from hunger and disease that follow displacement. That’s likewise a risk in Gaza, unless Israel permits more trucks carrying aid to enter the territory and then allows access for aid workers to distribute the food.

More than 90 percent of Gazans said they regularly went without food for an entire day, according to the United Nations, which added that half of Gazans are at risk of starvation. Some 570,000 Gazans may already be in famine conditions. Human Rights Watch said that constitutes a war crime by Israel.

I’ve been in touch with a scholar in Gaza — a secular man with no sympathy for Hamas — who has been trying to keep his starving children alive by feeding them leaves.

Children are most vulnerable to famine, and even those who survive often suffer lifelong cognitive deficits. It would be unconscionable for the world to permit a famine in Gaza when it is so easy to remedy.

Israel suffered a horrific attack on Oct. 7 by Hamas and endured unimaginable atrocities, and Hamas’s pattern of hiding among civilians makes a war in Gaza difficult to prosecute. But that cannot justify the mass starvation of children in Gaza. Netanyahu seems to think that his legacy will be crushing Hamas; instead, it may be crimes against humanity.

The United States and the Biden administration bear responsibility as well. It is our bombs that have destroyed neighborhoods and displaced families. After previously giving Israel a blank check, Biden has been pushing Netanyahu to allow more aid into Gaza. But he obviously needs to push much, much harder.

The court ruling should be a wake-up call for Washington: Every ounce of pressure must be brought on Netanyahu to permit more aid and avert starvation. That’s now a matter of international law, but more simply, it’s a matter of basic humanity.” -30-