Gaza crisis: Joe Biden can stop war by cutting US aid to Israel – Kenny MacAskill

Horrific accounts of the suffering of innocent Palestinians should prompt the US to get tough with Benjamin Netanyahu’s government

No matter how horrific you think Gaza is, the reality’s far worse as I discovered when attending a parliamentary briefing from medics and aid workers back from there. Oral testimony’s more powerful than anything you view or read. The personal story’s always far more haunting.

I consider myself robust, having listened to many who had suffered or endured atrocities and tragedies as Justice Secretary. I’ve been close to tears with some things I’ve heard over the years. But this was worse than anything I’d ever listened too, and my eyes well up in the recounting. It was truly horrific.

A refined lady who looked a private school headmistress but was in fact a consultant surgeon had been across. She told of a five-year-old child brought in with head injuries who would shortly die, on his own with no parents to comfort him, as they’d been killed. Two siblings, aged maybe four and six, had been similarly orphaned. The wee boy wouldn’t survive, his sister would, but with life-changing injuries in a huge facial scar.

A young Palestinian girl has her hand held by a relative at a hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip (Picture: Mohammed Abed/AFP via Getty Images)

It wasn’t just the absence of a parent to hug or just hold their hand, there was neither morphine nor oxygen. The wee mites laid on blankets on the floor, such were pressures on the hospital, and the oxygen machine’s face mask couldn’t reach down.

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The hospitals that remain are under severe, almost unimaginable pressure, with very limited resources to treat the thousands afflicted. Staff are working 24/7, traumatised by what they’re seeing and doing. Dante’s Inferno and that’s without recounting the horrors of the cancer sufferers denied drugs, new mothers and their children dying due to the absence of even basic care and more.

Netanyahu’s contempt for Biden

As for aid, those on the frontline were clear that air drops were almost pointless. It might look as if a great deal’s being done but it’s no Berlin airlift and it won’t work. Neither will America building a port. It’s fleets of lorries in that’s needed and water and electricity restored, all which Israel has restricted or turned off.

It’s why the USA must get tough with Israel. Netanyahu’s treating Biden with frankly contempt. Israel is dependent upon the USA and suggestions that they can’t rein them in are abject nonsense. Israel’s beholden to America for arms and aid. It always has been and that has only increased during this conflict.

Israel beholden to US

As the Quincy Institute reported, Israel has received $318 billion in foreign aid from the USA from just 2022 to date. They’ve received more aid from the USA than any other country since the Second World War. Yet Israel isn’t a poor nation. It’s not Haiti or Sudan and is amongst the top 10 per cent of wealthy nations.

That aid goes significantly to sustain the Israeli Defence Force. Since the conflict started on October 7, the USA has made over 100 arms sales to Israel. They fund Israel and continue to fuel its war in Gaza. Israel is also beholden to the USA. Of the 89 vetoes the USA has ever invoked at the UN Security Council, over half related to Israel and its actions in Palestine.

Israel needs stopped. Rather than being a patsy, Biden must turn off the tap. Only that will stop the conflict.

Kenny MacAskill is Alba MP for East Lothian