When Israeli Warplanes Rain Death on Gaza, the Copilot is Uncle Sam - TomDispatch.com

When Israeli Warplanes Rain Death on Gaza, the Copilot is Uncle Sam - TomDispatch.com Stan Cox, Washington Doubles Down on Arming Israel Posted on January 12, 2025 Yes, when Hamas attacked Israel brutally on October 7, 2023, at least two tiny children (and possibly more) died. In response, in the year and a quarter since then, the Israelis have slaughtered untold numbers of children in Gaza. And now, in a winter in which food and sometimes water are desperately lacking, news reports indicate that children there are dying in unknown but clearly staggering numbers. With so many of their parents having been driven from their homes by Israeli bombings and living in tents during the Gazan winter, some are even freezing to death. Talk about an all-too-literal hell on earth, even if, at the moment, the temperatures are now running in the opposite direction! Almost every day (even New Year’s Day), there have been fresh reports of Israeli bombings or other attacks on the Gaza Strip — known as a “strip” because more than two million Palestinians are living (and dying) in an area only 25 miles long and, at most, seven-and-a-half miles wide — and daily there are reports of more dead children. Under the nightmarish, increasingly chaotic circumstances, no one can truly know how many children have died there since October 8, 2023, but Palestinian authorities estimate more than 17,000, an official number that’s still rising (and, given what we don’t know, may even prove to be a distinct underestimate). This is a kind of payback by the Israelis that’s hard to imagine if you aren’t close at hand, but a distinctly day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute one if you are. And of course, to add nightmare to nightmare, little of this would be possible if it weren’t for not just the government and military of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but my government, too. As the New York Times put it in a recent devastating report on deaths in Gaza, “The risk to civilians was also heightened by the Israeli military’s widespread use of 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs, many of them American-made, which constituted 90 percent of the munitions Israel dropped in the first two weeks of the war.” In other words, while it’s true that the Israeli military is slaughtering Gazans by the thousands, the weaponry being used has largely been coming — nonstop! — from my own country. Now, let TomDispatch regular Stan Cox take up that very subject, a distinctly all-American nightmare that is only likely to get worse during the second presidency of Donald J. Trump. Tom