Media review: How to End America’s Hypocrisy on Gaza
Friday, February 09, 2024Sarah Yager, director of Human Rights Watch in Washington, described the US handling of the Israeli war on Gaza as “hypocrisy,” and the Biden administration must evaluate Israel’s behavior and hold it accountable for that.
Yager commented in an article published by Foreign Affairsmagazine that the staggering numbers of Palestinian casualties and injuries as a result of the war launched by Israel on Gaza in response to the attack by the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) on October 7 is impossible to consider without considering whether Israel has violated the law. International humanitarian aid during its war.
She added that a large amount of available information indicates that Israel did in fact do this, as human rights organizations and the media published reports of illegal collective punishment of the Palestinian population, the use of starvation as a weapon of war, air and artillery strikes, and the demolition of buildings that had no targets. A clear military operation, but it resulted in heavy civilian casualties and the destruction of property.
She pointed out that there was enough smoke to suspect a
fire, which put American officials in a dilemma, because American law obliges
the State Department to ensure that American security aid does not go to
security forces that constantly commit gross human rights violations.
She added that there is another victim of this approach,
which is the credibility of the United States, which has been damaged by what
can be considered at best inconsistency and at worst hypocrisy.
For example, in 2016, President Barack Obama condemned
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s deprivation of food and water to civilians
in Aleppo. It can be said that Israel did the same thing with the civilian
population in Gaza for more than 3 months without facing any criticism for this
method from the Biden administration. Biden Netanyahu called for opening a
corridor to Gaza to deliver more aid, but he did not directly criticize the
blockade.
She added that to begin to rein in Israel and stop the
bleeding of American credibility, the Biden administration needs to assign its
lawyers to evaluate all available information - confidential and
non-confidential - regarding the Israeli military campaign in Gaza and
determine the time and place of Israeli forces violating the laws of war, and
the results should be published and evidence submitted to Congress.
She concluded that the political costs resulting from
looking directly at the evidence and correcting the course of American policy
as necessary will not be comfortable for the president and lawmakers during the
election campaign.
But these costs are less than the cost of US authorities
acting as if the extreme suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza does not
deserve the same scrutiny as the suffering of civilians in other conflicts, a
position that gives an argument to those who claim that when it comes to
applying basic American principles and protecting inherent human rights,
Washington applies A clearly hypocritical double standard.