Human Rights Should Still Matter

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Palestinian health authorities in Gaza have reported that at least 112 Palestinian civilians were killed and more that 280 wounded this past Thursday when Israeli forces opened fire on a large group of people as they were trying to get to aid trucks carrying food near Gaza City.

Israeli forces, while not denying that they fired into the crowd, attributed the "dozens" of deaths to people being trampled.

Meanwhile the World Health Organization yesterday officially listed its tenth fatality report of a Palestinian child having starved to death.

Desperate people who are starving and whose children are literally dying of malnutrition and starvation are climbing over one another through flying bullets trying to grab anything that could prolong their wretched lives.  There have been reports of humans and rats fighting over scraps of food.  The situation is horrible beyond description, beyond measure.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both accused Israel of blocking relief aid headed to Gaza.

The death toll in Gaza is now over 30,000.

There is talk of an extended ceasefire, and talks are occurring in Qatar, but Israeli Prime Minister  Netanyahu does not seem to be ready to halt the assaults on Gaza.  President Biden is talking about using the US military to air-drop food and medicine into Gaza as a way to get around Israel's blocking of aid delivery, but so far that is only talk and nothing is airborne.

Yesterday there was a photo on multiple internet news sites of a group of female Israeli soldiers standing on a rise in front of bombed-out stretch of urban landscape in Gaza.   They were smiling into their cell phones and taking "selfies."   What their cell phone cameras undoubtedly failed to capture was the misery clawing around in all of that rubble for anything edible, even garbage.

At what point will it be politically correct in the United States of America to openly refer to what is happening in Gaza as "genocide"?   When will Americans be able to complain about the overreach and cruelty of the Israeli government and military without being vilified as being "anti-semitic"?  Will there come a time when we can recognize this atrocity for what it is and quit funding it?

Human rights should still matter.

(Update:  News reports today state that the US has just dropped 38,000 prepared meals into Gaza.  Well done, Joe!  Don't stop now - keep it up!)