The slaughter in Gaza entraps and attacks the helpless, turning shelters into mass graves, erasing entire families, weaponizing nutrition and famine. The spiraling violence shrieks for our attention, screams for effective protection. Who will save innocent people from snipers, aerial attacks, tank-fired missiles, poisoned water, and starvation? The U.S. and many allies instead work to insulate Israel from accountability.<\/p>\n
\u201cOvercoming this cocoon\u00a0of protection,\u201d said international human rights lawyer and former UN official Craig Mokhiber<\/strong><\/a>, \u201crequires solidarity between movements, unions, religious\u00a0communities, and like-minded states working to isolate the Israeli regime and to impose\u00a0economic, trade, travel, diplomatic, cultural, and other consequences to compel change.\u201d<\/p>\n In NYC, on day fourteen of a Veterans for Peace and Allies Fast for Gaza<\/a>, a former US Marine who helped initiate the fast, Phil Tottenham, urges us to care about Leqaa Kordia<\/a>, a Palestinian woman whose witness on behalf of Palestinians apparently led to her unjust imprisonment.<\/p>\n The current administration has slated her for deportation purely on the grounds that she criticised the government of a foreign country. Far from her home in New Jersey, she is trapped in a Texan county jail. Her plight makes me think of another prisoner, Ron Feiner<\/a>, an IDF soldier who chose to face prison rather than continue attacking people in Gaza. \u201cI\u2019m horrified by the never-ending war in Gaza,\u201d said Feiner, \u201cby the abandonment of the hostages, by the continued killing of innocent people, and by the complete lack of political vision.\u201d\u00a0 He is now on day nine of what could be a quite dangerous twenty-day sentence in an Israeli military prison.<\/p>\n The director of Gaza\u2019s now-demolished Kamal Adwan Hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya<\/a>, is suffering a longer and much more perilous sentence at Israel\u2019s grim Ofer Prison, where his work to heal the sick has seen him designated an \u201cenemy combatant,\u201d and where multiple, protracted beating sessions, – torture sessions really \u2013 have possibly cost him an eye.<\/p>\n I think of pediatrician Dr. Alla al-Najjar, whose valuable work at the Nasser medical complex has cost her the lives of her the lives of all but one of her ten children, as well as her husband, also an M.D. They were taken from her in a targeted strike on her home while she was at the hospital complex attempting to save other Gazan children. Now she continues her work, trying mightily to save 11 year old Adam, her only surviving child.<\/p>\n We must also note the appalling conditions of ordinary Palestinian prisoners, many of them held without charge. \u201cThey are subjected to a systematic campaign of abuse, starvation, and deliberate medical neglect,\u201d said a recent Adameer<\/strong><\/a> report which goes on to describe \u201cwidespread arrest campaigns across cities, villages, and refugee camps, which have led to a massive increase in the number of prisoners and detainees.\u201d Prisoners survive on minimal rations, and many endure brutal and life-threatening treatment.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, all of Gaza remains an open-air prison containing numerous centers where people, including children, are tortured by Israel\u2019s starvation, siege and bombing.<\/p>\n None of this has been inflicted for the purposes of freeing the remaining hostages captured by Hamas and by the other armed groups who flooded into Israel on one day of rebellion, twenty months ago. The ceasefire agreed upon last November would, had Israel and the U.S. honored it, have provided for the release of all the hostages. But Prime Minister Netanyahu and his extremist collaborators would have lost their excuse for ethnically cleansing Gaza, and after that the West Bank.<\/p>\n