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Last week, President Joe Biden joined President Emmanuel Macron and World War II veterans in France to commemorate D-Day and recall the horrors of that war. The refrain emerging from the ashes of World War II was "Never Again." But those words ring hollow today as engineered starvation and other war crimes occur two thousand miles away at the hands of one of the United States' closest security partners and allies—with U.S. weapons.
The death toll in Gaza has surpassed a staggering 37,000 people. The government of Israel's unlawful blockade of the Gaza Strip has made the delivery of humanitarian assistance nearly impossible. Famine is setting in while bombs are still dropping and killing Palestinian civilians on the ground. As the occupying power, Israel has a duty to ensure the protection, security, and welfare of Palestinians in Gaza, an obligation it not only has failed to uphold but has openly controverted.
In the years since the end of World War II, the United States of America has joined other nations to codify rules to keep civilians safe, build institutions to strengthen the rule of law, and set global norms to ensure the many atrocities of that war didn't happen again. This includes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the many human rights treaties that followed, as well as the Geneva Conventions that protect non-combatants in warfare. Human rights and the protection of civilians became the foundations for freedom, justice, and peace.
Washington's purported commitment to these ideals and institutions is waning. Instead of advancing human rights, the U.S. has equivocated on the binding nature of UN Security Council resolutions and attempted to discredit the international justice system. In fact, President Biden's support of the government of Israel as it continues its unlawful siege, engineered famine, and attacks on Palestinian civilians has done untold damage to the international human rights system that has grown since the end of WWII.
On an afternoon in April, a munition landed in the middle of a market street in al-Maghazi refugee camp where children were playing around a foosball table. Ten children between the ages of four and 15, as well as a barber, a falafel seller, a dental assistant, a football coach, and an older man with a disability were killed. More than a dozen other residents, most of them children, were injured.
Ten-year-old Rajaa Radwan told Amnesty International: "I was playing at this foosball table.... I told my friends to continue, and I went to the shop next door and then went home... I was lucky that I was not injured, but my friends Raghad and Shahd were both killed." Mohammed Jaber Issa, a 35-year-old science teacher who lost relatives in the strike, said that the attack killed Shahd Odatallah, 11, as she was buying cookies at the supermarket: "She died while holding a cookie in her hand."
Since October 2023, Amnesty International has conducted in-depth investigations into 16 Israeli air strikes that killed 370 civilians, including 159 children, and wounded hundreds more. In those investigations, Amnesty International has found no evidence of military targets, but found evidence of war crimes by Israeli forces, including direct attacks on civilians or indiscriminate attacks, as well as other unlawful attacks and collective punishment of the civilian population. Many of these killings involved U.S.-origin weapons.
We keep uncovering evidence of emblematic cases with the same horrific pattern—no effective warning, no discernible military target, and no response from the Israeli government when we ask questions. These are war crimes. And it's time the U.S. government stops its complicity and acts to prevent genocide. It must immediately halt arms transfers to Israel.
This unconscionable suffering; catastrophic death toll; widespread destruction of homes, hospitals, and schools; engineered hunger and malnutrition; deliberate denial of humanitarian aid as part of an unlawful siege; and racist and dehumanizing rhetoric by Israeli officials, against the backdrop of Israel's apartheid system and brutal occupation, are all warning signs of a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
President Biden has said that a ceasefire is needed. This week, the U.S. advanced a resolution at the UN Security Council demanding an end to the bloodshed and mass humanitarian suffering in Gaza, and the return of civilian hostages, raising hopes that an end may finally be in sight. President Biden must now do everything in his power to make it a reality, pressing the Israeli government to ensure unimpeded access for humanitarian aid throughout Gaza and an immediate stop to this horror.
Paul O'Brien is Executive Director of Amnesty International USA.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
