Consider this: For the past three decades, we’ve been living through a period in which the risk of nuclear war has been far lower than at any time since the Nuclear Age began — so low, in fact, that the danger of such a holocaust has been largely invisible to most people. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the signing of agreements that substantially reduced the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles eliminated the most extreme risk of thermonuclear conflict, allowing us to push thoughts of nuclear Armageddon aside (and focus on other worries). But those quiescent days should now be considered over. Relations among the major powers have deteriorated in recent years and progress on disarmament has stalled. The United States and Russia are, in fact, upgrading their nuclear arsenals with new and more powerful weapons, while China — previously an outlier in the nuclear threat equation — has begun a major expansion of its own arsenal.

The altered nuclear equation is also evident in the renewed talk of possible nuclear weapons use by leaders of the major nuclear-armed powers. Such public discussion largely ceased after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when it became evident that any thermonuclear exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union would result in their mutual annihilation. However, that fear has diminished in recent years and we’re again hearing talk of nuclear weapons use. Since ordering the invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to employ nuclear munitions in response to unspecified future actions of the U.S. and NATO in support of Ukrainian forces. Citing those very threats, along with China’s growing military might, Congress has authorized a program to develop more “lower-yield” nuclear munitions supposedly meant (however madly) to provide a president with further “options” in the event of a future regional conflict with Russia or China.

Thanks to those and related developments, the world is now closer to an actual nuclear conflagration than at any time since the end of the Cold War. And while popular anxiety about a nuclear exchange may have diminished, keep in mind that the explosive power of existing arsenals has not. Imagine this, for instance: even a “limited” nuclear war — involving the use of just a dozen or so of the hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) possessed by China, Russia, and the United States — would cause enough planetary destruction to ensure civilization’s collapse and the death of billions of people.

And consider all of that as just the backdrop against which the next president will undoubtedly face fateful decisions regarding the production and possible use of such weaponry, whether in the bilateral nuclear relationship between the U.S. and Russia or the trilateral one that incorporates China.

The U.S.-Russia Nuclear Equation

The first nuclear quandary facing the next president has an actual timeline. In approximately 500 days, on February 5, 2026, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining nuclear accord between the U.S. and Russia limiting the size of their arsenals, will expire. That treaty, signed in 2010, limits each side to a maximum of 1,550 deployed strategic nuclear warheads along with 700 delivery systems, whether ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), or nuclear-capable heavy bombers. (That treaty only covers strategic warheads, or those intended for attacks on each other’s homeland; it does not include the potentially devastating stockpiles of “tactical” nuclear munitions possessed by the two countries that are intended for use in regional conflicts.)

At present, the treaty is on life support. On February 21, 2023, Vladimir Putin ominously announced that Russia had “suspended” its formal participation in New START, although claiming it would continue to abide by its warhead and delivery limits as long as the U.S. did so. The Biden administration then agreed that it, too, would continue to abide by the treaty limits. It has also signaled to Moscow that it’s willing to discuss the terms of a replacement treaty for New START when that agreement expires in 2026. The Russians have, however, declined to engage in such conversations as long as the U.S. continues its military support for Ukraine.

Accordingly, among the first major decisions the next president has to make in January 2025 will be what stance to take regarding the future status of New START (or its replacement). With the treaty’s extinction barely more than a year away, little time will remain for careful deliberation as a new administration chooses among several potentially fateful and contentious possibilities.

Its first option, of course, would be to preserve the status quo, agreeing that the U.S. will abide by that treaty’s numerical limits as long as Russia does, even in the absence of a treaty obliging it to do so. Count on one thing, though: such a decision would almost certainly be challenged and tested by nuclear hawks in both Washington and Moscow.

Of course, President Harris or Trump could decide to launch a diplomatic drive to persuade Moscow to agree to a new version of New START, a distinctly demanding undertaking, given the time remaining. Ideally, such an agreement would entail further reductions in the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals or at least include caps on the number of tactical weapons on each side. And remember, even if such an agreement were indeed to be reached, it would also require Senate approval and undoubtedly encounter fierce resistance from the hawkish members of that body. Despite such obstacles, this probably represents the best possible outcome imaginable.

The worst — and yet most likely — would be a decision to abandon the New START limits and begin adding yet more weapons to the American nuclear arsenal, reversing a bipartisan arms control policy that goes back to the administration of President Richard Nixon. Sadly, there are too many members of Congress who favor just such a shift and are already proposing measures to initiate it.

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In June, for example, in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025, the Senate Armed Services Committee instructed the Department of Defense to begin devising plans for an increase in the number of deployed ICBMs from 400 of the existing Minuteman-IIIs to 450 of its replacement, the future Sentinel ICBM. The House Armed Services Committee version of that measure does not contain that provision but includes separate plans for ICBM force expansion. (The consolidated text of the bill has yet to be finalized.)

Should the U.S. and/or Russia abandon the New START limits and begin adding to its atomic arsenal after February 5, 2026, a new nuclear arms race would almost certainly be ignited, with no foreseeable limits. No matter which side announced such a move first, the other would undoubtedly feel compelled to follow suit and so, for the first time since the Nixon era, both nuclear powers would be expanding rather than reducing their deployed nuclear forces — only increasing, of course, the potential for mutual annihilation. And if Cold War history is any guide, such an arms-building contest would result in increased suspicion and hostility, adding a greater danger of nuclear escalation to any crisis that might arise between them.

The Three-Way Arms Race

Scary as that might prove, a two-way nuclear arms race isn’t the greatest peril we face. After all, should Moscow and Washington prove unable to agree on a successor to New START and begin expanding their arsenals, any trilateral nuclear agreement including China that might slow that country’s present nuclear buildup becomes essentially unimaginable.

Ever since it acquired nuclear weapons in 1964, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) pursued a minimalist stance when it came to deploying such weaponry, insisting that it would never initiate a nuclear conflict but would only use nuclear weapons in a second-strike retaliatory fashion following a nuclear attack on the PRC. In accordance with that policy, China long maintained a relatively small arsenal, only 200 or so nuclear warheads and a small fleet of ICBMs and SLBMs. In the past few years, however, China has launched a significant nuclear build-up, adding another 300 warheads and producing more missiles and missile-launching silos — all while insisting its no-first-use policy remains unchanged and that it is only maintaining a retaliatory force to deter potential aggression by other nuclear-armed states.

Some Western analysts believe that Xi Jinping, China’s nationalistic and authoritarian leader, considers a larger arsenal necessary to boost his country’s status in a highly competitive, multipolar world. Others argue that China fears improvements in U.S. defensive capabilities, especially the installation of anti-ballistic missile systems, that could endanger its relatively small retaliatory force and so rob it of a deterrent to any future American first strike.

Given the Chinese construction of several hundred new missile silos, Pentagon analysts contend that the country plans to deploy as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030 and 1,500 by 2035 — roughly equivalent to deployed Russian and American stockpiles under the New START guidelines. At present, there is no way to confirm such predictions, which are based on extrapolations from the recent growth of the Chinese arsenal from perhaps 200 to 500 warheads. Nonetheless, many Washington officials, especially in the Republican Party, have begun to argue that, given such a buildup, the New START limits must be abandoned in 2026 and yet more weapons added to the deployed U.S. nuclear stockpile to counter both Russia and China.

As Franklin Miller of the Washington-based Scowcroft Group and a former director of nuclear targeting in the office of the secretary of defense put it, “Deterring China and Russia simultaneously [requires] an increased level of U.S. strategic warheads.” Miller was one of 12 members of the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States, a bipartisan group convened in 2022 to reconsider America’s nuclear policies in light of China’s growing arsenal, Putin’s nuclear threats, and other developments. In its final October 2023 report, that commission recommended numerous alterations and additions to the American arsenal, including installing multiple warheads (instead of single ones) on the Sentinel missiles being built to replace the Minuteman ICBM and increasing the number of B-21 nuclear bombers and Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines to be produced under the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion nuclear “modernization” program.

The Biden administration has yet to endorse the recommendations in that report. It has, however, signaled that it’s considering the steps a future administration might take to address an expanded Chinese arsenal. In March, the White House approved a new version of a top-secret document, the Nuclear Employment Guidance, which for the first time reportedly focused as much on countering China as Russia. According to the few public comments made by administration officials about that document, it, too, sets out contingency plans for increasing the number of deployed strategic weapons in the years ahead if Russia breaks out of the current New START limits and no arms restraints have been negotiated with China.

“We have begun exploring options to increase future launcher capacity or additional deployed warheads on the land, sea, and air legs [of the nuclear delivery “triad” of ICBMs, SLBMs, and bombers] that could offer national leadership increased flexibility, if desired, and executed,” said acting Assistant Secretary of Defense Policy Vipin Narang on August 1st. While none of those options are likely to be implemented in President Biden’s remaining months, the next administration will be confronted with distinctly ominous decisions about the future composition of that already monstrous nuclear arsenal.

Whether it is kept as is or expanded, the one option you won’t hear much about in Washington is finding ways to reduce it. And count on one thing: even a decision simply to preserve the status quo in the context of today’s increasingly antagonistic international environment poses an increased risk of nuclear conflict. Any decision to expand it, along with comparable moves by Russia and China, will undoubtedly create an even greater risk of instability and potentially suicidal nuclear escalation.

The Need for Citizen Advocacy

For all too many of us, nuclear weapons policy seems like a difficult issue that should be left to the experts. This wasn’t always so. During the Cold War years, nuclear war seemed like an ever-present possibility and millions of Americans familiarized themselves with nuclear issues, participating in ban-the-bomb protests or the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign of the 1980s. But with the Cold War’s end and a diminished sense of nuclear doom, most of us turned to other issues and concerns. Yet the nuclear danger is growing rapidly and so decisions regarding the U.S. arsenal could have life-or-death repercussions on a global scale.

And one thing should be made clear: adding more weaponry to the U.S. arsenal will not make us one bit safer. Given the invulnerability of this country’s missile-bearing nuclear submarines and the multitude of other weapons in our nuclear arsenal, no foreign leader could conceivably mount a first strike on this country and not expect catastrophic retaliation, which in turn would devastate the planet. Acquiring more nuclear weapons would not alter any of this in the slightest. All it could possibly do is add to international tensions and increase the risk of global annihilation.

As Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan research and advocacy outfit, put it recently: “Significant increases in the U.S. deployed nuclear arsenal would undermine mutual and global security by making the existing balance of nuclear terror more unpredictable and would set into motion a counterproductive, costly action-reaction cycle of nuclear competition.”

A decision to pursue such a reckless path could occur just months from now. In early 2025, the next president, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will be making critical decisions regarding the future of the New START Treaty and the composition of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Given the vital stakes involved, such decisions should not be left to the president and a small coterie of her or his close advisers. Rather, it should be the concern of every citizen, ensuring vigorous debate on alternative options, including steps aimed at reducing and eventually eliminating the world’s nuclear arsenals. Without such public advocacy, we face the very real danger that, for the first time since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, nuclear weapons will again be detonated on this planet, with billions of us finding ourselves in almost unimaginable peril.

Copyright 2024 Michael Klare

Via Tomdispatch.com

(The Conversation) – Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has expressed his intention, if elected to a second term, to use the U.S. armed forces to suppress domestic protests. The New York Times reports that Trump’s allies are marshaling legal arguments to justify using National Guard or active-duty military troops for crowd control.

Moreover, as the Times notes, Trump has asserted that if he returns to the White House, he will dispatch such forces without waiting for state or local officials to request such assistance.

I am a historian who has written several books about the Vietnam War, one of the most divisive episodes in our nation’s past. My new book, “Kent State: An American Tragedy,” examines a historic clash on May 4, 1970, between anti-war protesters and National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio.

The confrontation escalated into violence: Troops opened fire on the demonstrators, killing four students and wounding nine others, including one who was paralyzed for life.

In my view, the prospect of dispatching troops in the way that Trump proposes chillingly echoes actions that led up to the Kent State shootings. Some active-duty units, as well as National Guard troops, are trained today to respond to riots and violent protests – but their primary mission is still to fight, kill, and win wars.

Federalizing the Guard

The National Guard is a force of state militias under the command of governors. It can be federalized by the president during times of national emergency or for deployment on combat missions overseas. Guardsmen train for one weekend per month and two weeks every summer.

Typically, the Guard has been deployed to deal with natural disasters and support local police responses to urban unrest, such as riots in Detroit in 1967, Washington in 1968, Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992, and Minneapolis and other cities in 2020 after the death of George Floyd.

The 1807 Insurrection Act grants presidents authority to use active-duty troops or National Guard forces to restore order within the United States. However, presidents rarely deploy Guard troops without state governors’ consent.

The main modern exceptions occurred during the Civil Rights Movement, when Southern governors resisted federal orders to desegregate schools in Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama. In each case, the troops were sent to protect Black students from crowds of white protesters.

The standoff at Kent State

The war in Vietnam had grown increasingly unpopular by early 1970, but protests intensified on April 30 when President Richard Nixon authorized expanding the conflict into Cambodia. At Kent State, after a noontime anti-war rally on campus on May 1, alcohol-fueled students harassed passing motorists in town and smashed storefront windows that night. On May 2, anti-war protesters set fire to the building where military officers trained Kent State students enrolled in the armed forces’ Reserve Officer Training Corps program.

“Kent State,” Digital, Dream / Realistic v2 / Clip2Comic, 2024

In response, Republican Gov. Jim Rhodes dispatched National Guard troops, against the advice of university and many local officials, who understood the mood in the town of Kent and on campus far better than Rhodes did. County prosecutor Ron Kane had vehemently warned Rhodes that deploying the National Guard could spark conflict and lead to fatalities.

Nonetheless, Rhodes – who was trailing in an impending Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat – struck the pose of a take-charge leader who wasn’t going to be pushed around by a long-haired rabble. “We’re going to put a stop to this!” he shouted, pounding the table at a press conference in Kent on May 3.

Hundreds of National Guard troops were deployed across town and on campus. University officials announced that further rallies were banned. Nonetheless, on May 4, some 2,000 to 3,000 students gathered on the campus Commons for another anti-war rally. They were met by 96 National Guardsmen, led by eight officers.

There was an edge of confrontation in the air as student anger over Nixon’s expansion of the war blended with resentment over the Guard’s presence. Protesters chanted antiwar slogans, shouted epithets at the Guardsmen and made obscene gestures.

‘Fire in the air!’

The Guardsmen sent to Kent State had no training in de-escalating tension or minimizing the use of force. Nonetheless, their commanding officer that day, Ohio Army National Guard Assistant Adjutant General Robert Canterbury, decided to use them to break up what the Department of Justice later deemed a legal assembly.

In my view, it was a reckless judgment that inflamed an already volatile situation. Students started showering the greatly outnumbered Guardsmen with rocks and other objects. In violation of Ohio Army National Guard regulations, Canterbury neglected to warn the students that the Guardsmens’ rifles were loaded with live ammunition.

As tension mounted, Canterbury failed to adequately supervise his increasingly fearful troops – a cardinal responsibility of the commanding officer on the scene. This fundamental failure of leadership increased confusion and resulted in a breakdown of fire control discipline – officers’ responsibility to maintain tight control over their troops’ discharge of weapons.

When protesters neared the Guardsmen, platoon sergeant Mathew McManus shouted “Fire in the air!” in a desperate attempt to prevent bloodshed. McManus intended for troops to shoot above the students’ heads to warn them off. But some Guardsmen, wearing gas masks that made it hard to hear amid the noise and confusion, only heard or reacted to the first word of McManus’ order, and fired at the students.

The troops had not been trained to fire warning shots, which was contrary to National Guard regulations. And McManus had no authority to issue an order to fire if officers were nearby, as they were.

Many National Guardsmen who were at Kent State on May 4 later questioned why they had been deployed there. “Loaded rifles and fixed bayonets are pretty harsh solutions for students exercising free speech on an American campus,” one of them told an oral history interviewer. Another plaintively asked me in a 2023 interview, “Why would you put soldiers trained to kill on a university campus to serve a police function?”

A fighting force

National Guard equipment and training have improved significantly in the decades since Kent State. But Guardsmen are still troops who are fundamentally trained to fight, not to control crowds. In 2020, then-National Guard Bureau Chief General Joseph Lengyel told reporters that “the civil unrest mission is one of the most difficult and dangerous missions … in our domestic portfolio.”

In my view, the tragedy of Kent State shows how critical it is for authorities to be thoughtful in responding to protests, and extremely cautious in deploying military troops to deal with them. Force is inherently unpredictable, often uncontrollable, and can lead to fatal mistakes and lasting human suffering. And while protests sometimes break rules, they may not be disruptive or harmful enough to merit responding with force.

Aggressive displays of force often heighten tensions and worsen situations. Conversely, research shows that if protesters perceive authorities are behaving with restraint and treating them with respect, they are more likely to remain nonviolent. The shooting at Kent State demonstrates why force should be an absolute last resort in dealing with protests – and one fraught with grave risks.

Brian VanDeMark, Professor of History, United States Naval Academy

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

For the merchants of war, the collective pain and misery of whole nations is dwarfed by the lucrative deals of billions of dollars generated from weapons sales.

The great irony is that some of the loudest advocates of human rights are, in fact, the ones who are facilitating the global arms trade. Without it, human rights would not be violated with such impunity.

The Geneva Academy, a legal research organisation, says that it currently monitors about 110 active armed conflicts worldwide. Most of these conflicts are taking place in the Global South, though many of these cases are either exacerbated, funded or managed by western powers or western multinational corporations.

Of the 110, 45 armed conflicts are taking place in the Middle East and North Africa region, 35 in the rest of Africa, 21 in Asia and six in Latin America, according to the academy.

The worst and bloodiest of these armed conflicts is currently taking place in Gaza, one of the poorest and most isolated regions in the world.

To estimate the future death toll resulting from the war in Gaza, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, the Lancet, undertook a thorough research entitled “Counting the dead in Gaza: Difficult but essential“.

The approximation was based on the death toll figure produced as of 19 June, when Israel had then reportedly killed 37,396 Palestinians.

The Lancet’s new number was horrifying, even though the medical journal said that its conclusions were based on conservative estimates of indirect deaths vs direct deaths that often result from such wars.

Should the war have ended on 19 June, 7.9 per cent of the population of the Gaza Strip would die because of the war and its aftermath. That’s “up to 186,000 or even more deaths,” according to the medical journal.

Palestinians in Gaza are not dying because of an untraceable virus or a natural disaster, but in a merciless war that can only be sustained through massive shipments of arms, which continue to flow to Israel despite the international outcry.

On 26 January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) resolved that it had enough evidence to suggest that genocide was being committed in Gaza. On 20 May, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, added his voice, this time speaking of deliberate acts of “extermination” of Palestinians.

Yet, weapons continued to flow, mostly coming from western government. The main source of weapons is, unsurprisingly, the United States, followed by Germany, Italy and Britain.

Despite announcements by some European countries that they are curtailing or even freezing their weapons supplies to Israel, these governments continue to find legal caveats to delay the outright ban. Italy, for example, insists on respecting “previously signed orders” and the UK has suspended the processing of arms export licenses “pending a wider review”.

Washington, however, remains the main supplier of arms to Tel Aviv. In 2016, both countries signed another Memorandum of Understanding that would allow Israel to receive $38 billion of US military aid. That was the third MoU signed between the two countries, and it was intended to cover the period between 2018 to 2028.

The war, however, prompted US policymakers to go even beyond their original commitment, by assigning yet another $26 billion ($17 billion in military aid), knowing full well that the majority of Gaza victims, per United Nations estimates, are civilians, mostly women and children.

Therefore, when the US urges an end to the war in Gaza while continuing to flood Israel with more weapons, the logic seems utterly flawed and entirely hypocritical.

The same hypocrisy applies to other, mostly western countries, which brazenly pose as defenders of human rights and international peace.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute  (SIPRI), the world’s top ten exporters of major arms between 2019 and 2023 include six western countries. The US alone has a 42 per cent share of global arms exports, followed by France at 11 per cent.

The total arms export of the top six western states amounts to nearly 70 per cent of the global share.

If we consider that the vast majority of armed conflicts are all taking place in the Global South, the obvious conclusion is that the very West that purportedly champions global peace, democracy and international law is the very entity that also fuels wars, armed conflicts and genocide.

For the Global South to take charge of its future, it must fight against this obvious injustice. They cannot allow their continents to continue to serve as mere markets for western arms. The blood of Arabs, Africans, Asians and South Americans should not be spilled to sustain the economies of western countries.

True, it will take much more than limiting the arms trade to end global conflicts, but the free flow of weapons to conflict zones will continue to feed the war machine, from Gaza to Sudan and from Congo to Burma and beyond.

One can continue to argue that Israel must respect international law, and that Burma must respect human rights. But what use are mere words when the West continues to provide the murder weapon, with no moral or legal accountability?

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

—
Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Here’s what’s in the US’s $20 billion weapons package to Israel | Al Jazeera Newsfeed”

(The Conversation) – Less than a month into summer 2024, the vast majority of the U.S. population has already experienced an extreme heat wave. Millions of people were under heat warnings across the western U.S. in early July or sweating through humid heat in the East.

Death Valley hit a dangerous 129 degrees Fahrenheit (53.9 C) on July 7, a day after a motorcyclist died from heat exposure there. Las Vegas broke its all-time heat record at 120 F (48.9 C). In California, days of over-100-degree heat in large parts of the state dried out the landscape, fueling wildfires. Oregon reported several suspected heat deaths.

Extreme heat like this has been hitting countries across the planet in 2024.

Globally, each of the past 13 months has been the hottest on record for that month, including the hottest June, according to the European Union’s Copernicus climate service. The service reported on July 8, 2024, that the average temperature for the previous 12 months had also been at least 1.5 C (2.7 F) warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.

Today Video: “Record heat wave is blamed for several deaths across 6 states”

The 1.5 C warming threshold can be confusing, so let’s take a closer look at what that means. In the Paris climate agreement, countries worldwide agreed to work to keep global warming under 1.5 C, however that refers to the temperature change averaged over a 30-year period. A 30-year average is used to limit the influence of natural year-to-year fluctuations.

So far, the Earth has only crossed that threshold for a single year. However, it is still extremely concerning, and the world appears to be on track to cross the 30-year average threshold of 1.5 C within 10 years.

We study weather patterns involving heat. The early season heat, part of a warming trend fueled by humans, is putting lives at risk around the world.

Heat is becoming a global problem

Record heat has hit several countries across the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia in 2024. In Mexico and Central America, weeks of persistent heat starting in spring 2024 combined with prolonged drought led to severe water shortages and dozens of deaths.

Extreme heat turned into tragedy in Saudi Arabia, as over 1,000 people on the Hajj, a Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, collapsed and died. Temperatures reached 125 F (51.8 C) at the Grand Mosque in Mecca on June 17.

Hospitals in Karachi, Pakistan, were overwhelmed amid weeks of high heat, frequent power outages, and water shortages in some areas. Neighboring India faced temperatures around 120 F (48.9 C) for several days in April and May that affected millions of people, many of them without air conditioning.

In Greece, where temperatures were over 100 F (37.8 C) for days in June, several tourists died or were feared dead after going hiking in dangerous heat and humidity.

Japan issued heatstroke alerts in Tokyo and more than half of its prefectures as temperatures rose to record highs in early July.

The climate connection: This isn’t ‘just summer’

Although heat waves are a natural part of the climate, the severity and extent of the heat waves so far in 2024 are not “just summer.”

A scientific assessment of the fierce heat wave in the eastern U.S. in June 2024 estimates that heat so severe and long-lasting was two to four times more likely to occur today because of human-caused climate change than it would have been without it. This conclusion is consistent with the rapid increase over the past several decades in the number of U.S. heat waves and their occurrence outside the peak of summer.

These record heat waves are happening in a climate that’s globally more than 2.2 F (1.2 C) warmer – when looking at the 30-year average – than it was before the industrial revolution, when humans began releasing large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions that warm the climate.

While a temperature difference of a degree or two when you walk into a different room might not even be noticeable, even fractions of a degree make a large difference in the global climate.

At the peak of the last ice age, some 20,000 years ago, when the Northeast U.S. was under thousands of feet of ice, the globally averaged temperature was only about 11 F (6 C) cooler than now. So, it is not surprising that 2.2 F (1.2 C) of warming so far is already rapidly changing the climate.

If you thought this was hot

While this summer is likely be one of the hottest on record, it is important to realize that it may also be one of the coldest summers of the future.

For populations that are especially vulnerable to heat, including young children, older adults and outdoor workers, the risks are even higher. People in lower-income neighborhoods where air conditioning may be unaffordable and renters who often don’t have the same protections for cooling as heating will face increasingly dangerous conditions.

Extreme heat can also affect economies. It can buckle railroad tracks and cause wires to sag, leading to transit delays and disruptions. It can also overload electric systems with high demand and lead to blackouts just when people have the greatest need for cooling.

The good news: There are solutions

Yes, the future in a warming world is daunting. However, while countries aren’t on pace to meet their Paris Agreement goals, they have made progress.

In the U.S., the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act has the potential to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half by 2035.

Switching from air conditioners to heat pumps and network geothermal systems can not only reduce fossil fuel emissions but also provide cooling at a lower cost. The cost of renewable energy continues to plummet, and many countries are increasing policy support and incentives.

There is much that humanity can do to limit future warming if countries, companies and people everywhere act with urgency. Rapidly reducing fossil fuel emissions can help avoid a warmer future with even worse heat waves and droughts, while also providing other benefits, including improving public health, creating jobs and reducing risks to ecosystems.

This is an update to an article originally published on June 26, 2024.

Mathew Barlow, Professor of Climate Science, UMass Lowell and Jeffrey Basara, Professor of Meteorology, UMass Lowell

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The New Techno-Enthusiasts

While some in the military and the Pentagon are indeed concerned about the future risk of AI weaponry, the leadership of the Defense Department is on board fully. Its energetic commitment to emerging technology was first broadcast to the world in an August 2023 speech delivered by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks to the National Defense Industrial Association, the largest arms industry trade group in the country. She used the occasion to announce what she termed “the Replicator Initiative,” an umbrella effort to help create “a new state of the art — just as America has before — leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains — which are less expensive, put fewer people in the line of fire, and can be changed, updated, or improved with substantially shorter lead times.”

Hicks was anything but shy about pointing to the primary rationale for such a rush toward robotic warfare: outpacing and intimidating China. “We must,” she said, “ensure the PRC [People’s Republic of China] leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression, and concludes, ‘today is not the day’ — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond.”

Hick’s supreme confidence in the ability of the Pentagon and American arms makers to wage future techno-wars has been reinforced by a group of new-age militarists in Silicon Valley and beyond, spearheaded by corporate leaders like Peter Thiel of Palantir, Palmer Luckey of Anduril, and venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.

Patriots or Profiteers?

These corporate promoters of a new way of war also view themselves as a new breed of patriots, ready and able to successfully confront the military challenges of the future.

A case in point is “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,” a lengthy manifesto on Anduril’s blog. It touts the superiority of Silicon Valley startups over old-school military-industrial behemoths like Lockheed Martin in supplying the technology needed to win the wars of the future:

“The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who, nevertheless, do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need… These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of defense.”

In contrast to the industrial-age approach it critiques, Luckey and his compatriots at Anduril seek an entirely new way of developing and selling weapons:

“Software will change how war is waged. The battlefield of the future will teem with artificially intelligent, unmanned systems, which fight, gather reconnaissance data, and communicate at breathtaking speeds.”

At first glance, Luckey seems a distinctly unlikely candidate to have risen so far in the ranks of arms industry executives. He made his initial fortune by creating the Oculus virtual reality device, a novelty item that users can strap to their heads to experience a variety of 3-D scenes (with the sensation that they’re embedded in them). His sartorial tastes run toward sandals and Hawaiian shirts, but he has now fully shifted into military work. In 2017, he founded Anduril, in part with support from Peter Thiel and his investment firm, Founders Fund. Anduril currently makes autonomous drones, automated command and control systems, and other devices meant to accelerate the speed at which military personnel can identify and destroy targets.

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Thiel, a mentor to Palmer Luckey, offers an example of how the leaders of the new weapons startup firms differ from the titans of the Cold War era. As a start, he’s all in for Donald Trump. Once upon a time, the heads of major weapons makers like Lockheed Martin tried to keep good ties with both Democrats and Republicans, making substantial campaign contributions to both parties and their candidates and hiring lobbyists with connections on both sides of the aisle. The logic for doing so couldn’t have seemed clearer then. They wanted to cement a bipartisan consensus for spending ever more on the Pentagon, one of the few things most key members of both parties agreed upon. And they also wanted to have particularly good relations with whichever party controlled the White House and/or the Congress at any moment.

The Silicon Valley upstarts and their representatives are also much more vocal in their criticisms of China. They are the coldest (or do I mean hottest?) of the new cold warriors in Washington, employing harsher rhetoric than either the Pentagon or the big contractors. By contrast, the big contractors generally launder their critiques of China and support for wars around the world that have helped pad their bottom lines through think tanks, which they’ve funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually.

Thiel’s main company, Palantir, has also been criticized for providing systems that have enabled harsh border crackdowns by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as “predictive policing.” That (you won’t be surprised to learn) involves the collection of vast amounts of personal data without a warrant, relying on algorithms with built-in racial biases that lead to the systematic unfair targeting and treatment of people of color.

To fully grasp how the Silicon Valley militarists view next-generation warfare, you need to check out the work of Christian Brose, Palantir’s chief strategy officer. He was a long-time military reformer and former aide to the late Senator John McCain. His book Kill Chain serves as a bible of sorts for advocates of automated warfare. Its key observation: that the winner in combat is the side that can most effectively shorten the “kill chain” (the time between when a target is identified and destroyed). His book assumes that the most likely adversary in the next tech war will indeed be China and he proceeds to exaggerate Beijing’s military capabilities, while overstating its military ambitions and insisting that outpacing that country in developing emerging military technologies is the only path to future victory.

And mind you, Brose’s vision of shortening that kill chain poses immense risks. As the time to decide what actions to take diminishes, the temptation to take humans “out of the loop” will only grow, leaving life-and-death decisions to machines with no moral compass and vulnerable to catastrophic malfunctions of a sort inherent in any complex software system.

Much of Brose’s critique of the current military-industrial complex rings true. A few big firms are getting rich making ever more vulnerable huge weapons platforms like aircraft carriers and tanks, while the Pentagon spends billions on a vast, costly global basing network that could be replaced with a far smaller, more dispersed military footprint. Sadly, though, his alternative vision poses more problems than it solves.

First, there’s no guarantee that the software-driven systems promoted by Silicon Valley will work as advertised. After all, there’s a long history of “miracle weapons” that failed, from the electronic battlefield in Vietnam to President Ronald Reagan’s disastrous Star Wars missile shield. Even when the ability to find and destroy targets more quickly did indeed improve, wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, fought using those very technologies, were dismal failures.

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation suggests that the new generation of military tech is being oversold as well. The Journal found that small top-of-the-line new U.S. drones supplied to Ukraine for its defensive war against Russia have proved far too “glitchy and expensive,” so much so that, irony of ironies, the Ukrainians have opted to buy cheaper, more reliable Chinese drones instead.

Finally, the approach advocated by Brose and his acolytes is going to make war more likely as technological hubris instills a belief that the United States can indeed “beat” a rival nuclear-armed power like China in a conflict, if only we invest in a nimble new high-tech force.

The result, as my colleague Michael Brenes and I pointed out recently, is the untold billions of dollars of private money now pouring into firms seeking to expand the frontiers of techno-war. Estimates range from $6 billion to $33 billion annually and, according to the New York Times, $125 billion over the past four years. Whatever the numbers, the tech sector and its financial backers sense that there are massive amounts of money to be made in next-generation weaponry and aren’t about to let anyone stand in their way.

Meanwhile, an investigation by Eric Lipton of the New York Times found that venture capitalists and startup firms already pushing the pace on AI-driven warfare are also busily hiring ex-military and Pentagon officials to do their bidding. High on that list is former Trump Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. Such connections may be driven by patriotic fervor, but a more likely motivation is simply the desire to get rich. As Ellen Lord, former head of acquisition at the Pentagon, noted, “There’s panache now with the ties between the defense community and private equity. But they are also hoping they can cash in big-time and make a ton of money.”

The Philosopher King

Another central figure in the move toward building a high-tech war machine is former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. His interests go far beyond the military sphere. He’s become a virtual philosopher king when it comes to how new technology will reshape society and, indeed, what it means to be human. He’s been thinking about such issues for some time and laid out his views in a 2021 book modestly entitled The Age of AI and Our Human Future, coauthored with none other than the late Henry Kissinger. Schmidt is aware of the potential perils of AI, but he’s also at the center of efforts to promote its military applications. Though he forgoes the messianic approach of some up-and-coming Silicon Valley figures, whether his seemingly more thoughtful approach will contribute to the development of a safer, more sensible world of AI weaponry is open to debate.

Let’s start with the most basic thing of all: the degree to which Schmidt thinks that AI will change life as we know it is extraordinary. In that book of his and Kissinger’s, they asserted that it would spark “the alteration of human identity and the human experience at levels not seen since the dawn of the modern age,” arguing that AI’s “functioning portends progress toward the essence of things, progress that philosophers, theologians and scientists have sought, with partial success, for millennia.”

On the other hand, the government panel on artificial intelligence on which Schmidt served fully acknowledged the risks posed by the military uses of AI. The question remains: Will he, at least, support strong safeguards against its misuse? During his tenure as head of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board from 2017 to 2020, he did help set the stage for Pentagon guidelines on the use of AI that promised humans would always “be in the loop” in launching next-gen weapons. But as a tech industry critic noted, once the rhetoric is stripped away, the guidelines “don’t really prevent you from doing anything.”

In fact, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and other good government advocates questioned whether Schmidt’s role as head of the Defense Innovation Unit didn’t represent a potential conflict of interest. After all, while he was helping shape its guidelines on the military applications of AI, he was also investing in firms that stood to profit from its development and use. His investment entity, America’s Frontier Fund, regularly puts money in military tech startups, and a nonprofit he founded, the Special Competitive Studies Project, describes its mission as to “strengthen America’s long-term competitiveness as artificial intelligence (AI) [reshapes] our national security, economy, and society.” The group is connected to a who’s who of leaders in the military and the tech industry and is pushing, among other things, for less regulation over military-tech development. In 2023, Schmidt even founded a military drone company, White Stork, which, according to Forbes, has been secretly testing its systems in the Silicon Valley suburb of Menlo Park.

The question now is whether Schmidt can be persuaded to use his considerable influence to rein in the most dangerous uses of AI. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm for using it to enhance warfighting capabilities suggests otherwise:

“Every once in a while, a new weapon, a new technology comes along that changes things. Einstein wrote a letter to Roosevelt in the 1930s saying that there is this new technology — nuclear weapons — that could change war, which it clearly did. I would argue that [AI-powered] autonomy and decentralized, distributed systems are that powerful.”

Given the risks already cited, comparing militarized AI to the development of nuclear weapons shouldn’t exactly be reassuring. The combination of the two — nuclear weapons controlled by automatic systems with no human intervention — has so far been ruled out, but don’t count on that lasting. It’s still a possibility, absent strong, enforceable safeguards on when and how AI can be used.

AI is coming, and its impact on our lives, whether in war or peace, is likely to stagger the imagination. In that context, one thing is clear: we can’t afford to let the people and companies that will profit most from its unbridled application have the upper hand in making the rules for how it should be used.

Isn’t it time to take on the new-age warriors?

Copyright 2024 William D. Hartung

Via Tomdispatch.com

The Palestinian Red Cross Society (PRCS) released a statement on Monday, noting that, “The occupation forces deceived people by disguising themselves under the cover of aid that civilians desperately need amid their suffering from severe food insecurity.”

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese said in a post on X: “This is ‘humanitarian camouflage’ at another level,” while noting that Israel was possibly aided by foreign soldiers to commit this massacre. “Israel could have freed all hostages, alive and intact, 8 months ago when the first ceasefire and hostage exchange was put on the table,” Albanese continued. “This is genocidal intent turned into action. Crystal clear.”

And it takes a genocidal government to celebrate the mass slaughter in Nuseirat.

“Only Israel’s enemies complained about the casualties of Hamas terrorist and their accomplices,” gloated Foreign Minister Israel Katz.

Al Jazeerah English Video: ‘Horrible massacre’ in Nuseirat refugee camp is evidence of ‘genocide’: Gov’t media office”

Meanwhile, in France, US President Joe Biden praised “the safe rescue of four hostages that were returned to their families in Israel.” Not a word about Israel’s massacre of Palestinians which wiped out whole families. Killing 274 Palestinians was less of an issue than rescuing four hostages kept safe during Israel’s relentless destruction of Gaza since last October. And now that the starvation of Palestinians has become a normalised genocidal strategy, Israel is building upon its previous atrocities to kill more of them in a single operation, by not only weaponising aid, but also using the vehicles and infrastructure used to transport aid.

World leaders decry Israel’s atrocities while investing in even more diplomacy and military aid to aid and abet Israel’s genocide, because Palestinians do not matter in the grand scheme of protecting colonial interests, even when Israel is clearly manipulating the humanitarian paradigm and using it as a genocidal weapon. Palestinians are now caught in the cross hairs of humanitarian aid; between coercion to seek aid as a result of deprivation, and such deprivation being used by Israel to commit genocide. The international community is witnessing the atrocities it paved the way for and silence still prevails, because the hostage narrative disseminated by Israel is more compelling than the fact that over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed by the rogue state, with the entire population of Gaza forcibly displaced to facilitate genocide.

Ever since the start of the ongoing Nakba in 1948, Palestinians have been forced into the humanitarian paradigm to accommodate settler-colonial interests. These interests have now appropriated the humanitarian paradigm, to the point that aid is equivalent to murder. Can the UN truly claim not to have foreseen the genocidal intent of a European colonial ideology that built its own settler entity upon indigenous land, bodies and blood? Why can’t the UN see that Israel is creating new definitions of humanitarian aid that befit genocide and have nothing to do with relieving desperate poverty and food insecurity?

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

After more than 90 days of war in Gaza, in which at least 22,000 Palestinians are reported to have been killed, Israeli officials have shifted their attention to what happens once the fighting has ceased.

There has been considerable controversy over proposals from far-right members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The pair, who Netanyahu needed to include in his coalition to form a government last year, have advocated for Palestinians in Gaza to be resettled in countries around the world, making space for Israeli civilians to reoccupy the area.

Israel’s allies, who have thus far supported its war aims, have been quick to condemn the proposal. The United States released a press statement on January 2 rejecting the plan as “inflammatory and irresponsible”. Washington confirmed its support for Gaza as Palestinian land. The statement further claimed that Netanyahu had reassured the US that the proposal does not reflect government policy.

But while Smotrich and Ben Gvir represent the most extreme factions of Israel’s ruling coalition and were frozen out of the war cabinet, it would be unwise to dismiss their comments as merely another incident of incitement against Palestinians.

The pair have the power to bring down the ruling coalition and Netanyahu if their demands are not heeded. And they have considerable support within the settler movement, which has been influential in the policy and practice of settlement building throughout Israel’s history.

And it is also important to note that proposals to relocate Palestinians from the Gaza Strip were initially proposed by Israeli lawmakers considered to be more moderate.

‘West should welcome Gaza refugees’

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on November 13, 2023, two Israeli lawmakers – former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon and centre-left politician Ram Ben-Barak, formerly deputy director of Mossad, wrote that countries around the world should accept some of Gaza’s population who “have expressed a desire to relocate”.

They criticised the international community for not fulfilling “their moral imperative” to “help civilians caught in the crisis”.

Intelligence minister, Gila Gamliel – who represents Likud, the mainstream conservative nationalist party led by Netanyahu – reiterated this proposal in an article in the Jerusalem Post on November 19, 2023. She referred to Gaza as “a breeding ground for extremism” and called for the “voluntary resettlement” of Palestinians outside the Gaza Strip.

Both these proposals suggested humanitarian concerns for Palestinians alongside security concerns for Israelis. But others who also support the plan do so out of strong religious ideology.

Return of the settlers?

As documented by political geographer David Newman, the Israeli settler movement mainly comprises religious Zionists who believe the greater land of Israel was promised to the Jewish people by God. In light of this, many believe that settling the land is an opportunity to fulfil God’s promise.

Following the 1967 and 1974 wars, they rejected those who believed returning land to the Arab countries would secure peace. Instead they advocated for the establishment of Israeli settlements to ensure the land was never relinquished. They have had significant influence on Israeli policy and practice and now find themselves represented in the corridors of power by Smotrich and Ben Gvir.

The movement was dealt a severe blow following the decision by former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan in 2005. Sharon evicted about 8,000 Israeli settlers from 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip.

Settlers have been quick to respond to the current conflict, seeing it as an opportunity to fulfil the religious promise. At the end of December last year, the leader of the Nachala Israeli settlement movement, Daniella Weiss, appeared on mainstream television calling for Palestinians to be cleared from Gaza.

This was so that Israeli settlers “can see the sea … There will be no homes, there will be no Arabs – it’s just an elegant way of saying, I want to see the sea.” She declared that Gaza City had always been “one of the cities of Israel. We’re just going back. There was a historical mistake and now we are fixing it.”

Middle East Eye: “‘Erase Gaza so settlers can see the sea’: Head of Israeli settlement movement”

What these positions fail to fundamentally understand is the deep connection Palestinians have to the land and their steadfastness in remaining there.

Deep divisions

Weiss’s position – and the aspirations of the settler movement – appear to have been dealt a setback by Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who has presented his plans for Gaza after the destruction of Hamas.

On January 5, he said: “Gaza residents are Palestinian, therefore Palestinian bodies will be in charge, with the condition that there will be no hostile actions or threats against the State of Israel.” Gallant further proposed that there should be no Israeli civil presence in Gaza.

An account in the Times of Israel said that the cabinet meeting at which Gallant outlined his proposal ended in acrimony, exposing the deep divisions in Netanyahu’s government.

Gallant’s proposal comes days before US secretary of state Antony Blinken is due to visit to discuss “transitioning to the next phase” of the war. The proposal has been presented to the US administration, although it does not yet form official policy.

As attention turns towards the end of the hostilities, Netanyahu will have a difficult juggling act in placating the different factions of his coalition and the Israeli public, as well as satisfying demands from the US. What is missing from the discussions thus far is the voice of the Palestinians – which must be put at the centre of any future solutions.

Leonie Fleischmann, Senior Lecturer in International Politics, City, University of London

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Some countries are cutting financial support to the very local organizations that are best positioned to respond to Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.

By Tania Principe | –

( Waging Nonviolence ) – Almost a month has passed since the Hamas militant group launched a deadly attack on Israel, killing 1,400 people and taking over 230 innocent civilian hostages. In retaliation Israel declared war on Gaza, implemented a siege, cut the civilian population off from basic necessities — such as food, water, fuel and electricity — and launched ongoing ground and air offensives.

The U.N. estimates that over half of Gaza’s inhabitants have become homeless. The death toll has surpassed 10,000; at least 4,000 of those are children. That is more conflict-related child deaths than the annual number of children killed in all of the world’s conflict zones since 2019 according to Save the Children.  

To call this a humanitarian catastrophe is an understatement. 

While humanitarian aid remains committed, and in some cases increased by donor countries, several European governments are re-thinking their financial aid to human rights and civil society organizations in the region.

On Oct. 10, Sweden and Denmark announced they would suspend financial support indefinitely to organizations in Palestinian territories, citing a need to conduct thorough reviews to ensure no funds are given to organizations that do not unequivocally condemn militant groups. The European Commission also announced that it is reviewing its development assistance to Palestinian organizations. On Oct. 25, Switzerland was the latest country to suspend its financial support to six Palestinian and five Israeli human rights organizations, while it carries out an in-depth analysis of whether the organizations’ communications are in compliance with the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Code of Conduct and anti-discrimination principles. Prior to the current war, these well-respected organizations were long-standing, funded partners of these same donors and organizations like the Nobel Women’s Initiative, where I work.

“Israeli Blockade Hinders Aid Delivery to Gaza, Palestinian Envoy Speaks Out | India News9

National and local civil society organizations play a crucial role peacebuilding and supporting democracy in the region. Donors recognize this. There has been a welcome trend in Western donor communities to bypass international organizations, and instead fund local organizations directly — precisely because they are best positioned to identify and respond to the most pressing needs of civilians, including marginalized groups.

Increasing aid to humanitarian organizations, while cutting it to local civil society goes directly against the trend. For example, the EU announced an additional $26 million in humanitarian aid for Gaza, delivered via UNICEF and other international organizations. Germany announced an additional $53 million to Palestinian territories through the World Food Programme, UNICEF and UNWRA.  

During conflict a functioning civil society is critical — human rights violations escalate, as does misinformation, and those who are most vulnerable suffer the harshest consequences. Human rights and civil society organizations, regardless of their mandate, pivot to provide psychosocial support, shelter and services for victims of violence, and facilitate access to limited humanitarian aid. Equally important, local civil society organizations, also witness and document violations of human rights and international law, thus ensuring that, eventually, justice and accountability can be sought, and a truthful historical record created.Few organizations in Palestine are willing to publicly raise concerns about the suspension of their funding for fear of jeopardizing relationships and losing even more support, now or in the future. But the implications of such cuts are devastating. In Gaza and the West Bank, transferring and receiving funds in the best of times is challenging, yet these organizations rely on this funding to plan their activities, staffing and programming. Sudden cuts to already committed funds, especially in times of crisis, can result in paralysis, loss of staff, a further reduction in services and potentially increased loss of lives.  

As this crisis persists with no end in sight, the work of civil society is life-saving. These organizations have local expertise living the humanitarian catastrophe, seeing first-hand what is needed and responding to it under unbearable conditions. For years, international donors and agencies have championed localization. This is the time to put their money where their mouth is. They should be putting their efforts into negotiating a cease fire, not ceasing aid.

Tania Principe

Tania Principe is the Interim Executive Director of Nobel Women’s Initiative. She has over two decades of experience working globally and locally in women’s rights and gender equality leading efforts to end systemic and cultural inequality with organizations like Gender at Work, AWID, and WITT National Network.

Waging Nonviolence

@saribashi

( Human Rights Watch ) – The Israeli government is deliberately deepening the suffering of civilians in Gaza by refusing to restore the flow of water and electricity and blocking fuel shipments. Willfully impeding relief supplies is a war crime, as is collectively punishing civilians for the actions of armed groups.

On October 7, Hamas-led fighters crossed into southern Israel and committed the worst civilian massacre in Israeli history, gunning down families, burning people in their homes, and taking more than 200 hostages. Those atrocities were war crimes.

The fact that Palestinian fighters committed unspeakable war crimes against Israeli civilians does not justify Israeli authorities committing war crimes against Palestinian civilians.

Gaza’s infrastructure relies on the flow of electricity and drinking water from Israel and supply trucks entering via the Israeli crossings, but Israel cut those supplies following the attacks. By blocking objects necessary for the survival of Gaza’s 2.2 million residents, nearly half of whom are children, Israel is punishing all of Gaza’s civilians for Hamas’s attacks.

Israel, as the occupying power in Gaza, is required under the Geneva Conventions to ensure civilians have access to basic goods, and, as a party to the armed conflict, it must facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid. During previous hostilities, it has maintained electricity and water supply to Gaza and found ways to open its truck crossings. Not this time. “We will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last week.

As of October 24, the Israeli military has allowed a total of 34 supply truckloads, overseen by UN agencies, to enter via Egypt’s Rafah crossing with Gaza, far fewer than the 100 daily truckloads aid agencies say are the minimum needed. Israeli authorities have also refused to allow fuel, saying Hamas diverts it for its use. Fuel is desperately needed for hospital generators, water and sewage pumping, and aid delivery. While the laws of war allow a warring party to take steps to ensure shipments do not include weapons, deliberately impeding relief supplies is prohibited.

The roots of the violence in Israel-Palestine are multiple and run deep; the October 7 atrocities triggered another round of violence and tragedy for civilians in Israel and Palestine. All parties should respect international humanitarian law and not commit unlawful attacks on civilians. Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups should immediately release all civilian hostages. Israel should restore the flow of electricity and water, allow monitored fuel into Gaza via Rafah, and take the necessary steps to open its own crossings into Gaza for humanitarian aid.

Via Human Rights Watch