The Israeli aggression destroyed more than 30% of Gaza’s buildings, according to United Nations (French) estimates.
As the Israeli aggression on the Gaza Strip enters its seventh month, it seems that the green light that Washington gave to Tel Aviv and the unconditional support for Israel that many Western countries announced at the beginning of the war has turned into the opposite with the daily massacres and crimes committed by the occupation against defenseless civilians in the Strip in full view of the world. .
Yesterday, Friday, the Axios news website quoted a senior Israeli official as saying that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his aides were surprised by US President Joe Biden’s request to stop fighting in Gaza outside the context of the prisoner exchange deal, in their last call the day before yesterday, Thursday, which was described as the most difficult since the beginning of the war.
The website said that informed sources confirmed that Biden warned Netanyahu that the American administration would not be able to support him unless Israel changed its course in Gaza.
Biden also called on Netanyahu - during the call - to “announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, human suffering, and the safety of aid workers,” according to a statement issued by the White House in this regard.
Some believe that this change in Biden’s position regarding unconditional support for Israel at the beginning of the war and his rejection of calls to stop it, to the threat of stopping American support and the call to stop the war, was dictated by electoral calculations and the increasing local and international pressures on Washington to stop the hand of its ally, which has plunged into the blood of Gaza civilians.
The New York Times said that one of the strongest voices pressuring the US President to end the killing of civilians in Gaza is the voice of the people closest to him, his wife, Jill Biden.
American pressure
The shift in Biden's language towards Israel appears to be the tip of the iceberg in a wave of shift in the positions of many American politicians from the Democratic and Republican parties. Former President Donald Trump called on Israel to urgently stop its war in Gaza and stop killing civilians.
Trump - the Republican Party's candidate for the upcoming presidential elections - said that Israel had suffered a major loss in the field of public relations, and warned that it was continuing to lose a large part of the world and a lot of support.
Trump is considered one of the most prominent supporters of Israel, and often describes himself as its loyal ally. He recalls his decision to move the American embassy to occupied Jerusalem and the role of his administration in the negotiations of the normalization agreements in 2020 between Israel and Arab countries, such as the UAE and Bahrain.
Yesterday, Friday, lawmaker and former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, signed a letter addressed to Biden and his Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, demanding that they stop supplying weapons to Israel.
The letter was signed by 40 Democratic representatives in which they called on the Biden administration to stop supplying Tel Aviv with weapons, and said that this was unjustified in light of its targeting of civilians and relief workers and the continuing humanitarian crisis afflicting the residents of the Gaza Strip.
The move by Pelosi - a veteran member of the Democratic Party and an ally of Biden - is evidence that the position of stopping the supply of American weapons to Israel is the prevailing position among Democrats.
European rebuke
European pressure on Tel Aviv has increased with the continuation of the war and daily massacres against defenseless civilians in Gaza. Western anger over Israeli disregard for civilian lives reached its peak after the Israeli raid last Monday, which targeted 3 cars carrying foreign employees of the World Central Kitchen Corporation and resulted in the deaths of 7 people.
Several voices were raised in European countries calling for an end to arms exports to Israel, and countries - including Britain, Poland and Australia - summoned their Israeli ambassadors to protest the killing of their citizens in Gaza as a result of an Israeli raid.
The Associated Press quoted a senior Canadian government official as saying last Wednesday that the embassies of Canada and other countries would send a joint official diplomatic rebuke to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs over the killing of the seven aid workers in Gaza.
In a press conference in Paris, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken called for a “swift, impartial and impartial” investigation into the incident.
The European Union also condemned the attack, and European Union spokesman Peter Stano said during a press conference in Brussels that the European Union demands a comprehensive investigation to uncover the circumstances of the incident and identify those responsible for it.
United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Martin Griffiths, expressed his anger at the killing of aid workers in Gaza.
As for the UN rapporteur in the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, she said that Israel crosses all red lines and completely escapes punishment.
Calls to stop arming Israel
In light of the wave of condemnation and denunciation, the pressures aimed at stopping the supply of weapons to Israel gained momentum in Europe, as positions of parliamentarians and Western officials demanded this successively.
In France, 115 parliamentarians sent a letter to President Emmanuel Macron in which they asked him to stop all arms sales to Israel, and warned that not taking that step would entail risks that would make France a partner in genocide against the Palestinian people.
The parliamentarians said that stopping the sale of all types of weapons to the far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would enhance peace efforts in the region.
They called on Macron to follow the example of other countries such as Canada and the Netherlands that have taken similar decisions to ban the sale of weapons to Israel.
In Germany, a number of German lawyers announced yesterday, Friday, the filing of an urgent lawsuit against the German government to oblige it to stop the export of weapons to Israel commissioned by Palestinians in Gaza, on suspicion that these weapons are “used in gross violations of international law.”
UN resolutions
Yesterday, Friday, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution banning the export of arms to Israel against the backdrop of its continued war on the Gaza Strip, which is the first position the Council has taken regarding the war on Gaza.
The resolution - adopted by the UN Council - called for Israel to be held accountable for possible war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, with a majority of 28 votes, against 6 countries objecting, and 13 abstentions.
Despite questions regarding the feasibility of some non-binding UN resolutions, this resolution and others remain a means of pressure on countries that supply Israel with weapons to stop doing so. These resolutions also translate into the international community’s acknowledgment of the crimes committed by Israel against civilians in Gaza, according to political analysts.
In the same context, the emergency meeting held by the UN Security Council yesterday, Friday, to discuss the threat of famine in Gaza witnessed several demands for Israel not to obstruct the arrival of aid to the Strip, and to stop targeting humanitarian organizations, after the killing of the World Kitchen Foundation team.
On March 25, the Security Council adopted a resolution for the first time to establish an immediate ceasefire in Gaza during the month of Ramadan, after the failure of three previous resolutions due to the United States using its veto power against it.
Despite the contradictory estimates regarding the extent of their binding, UN resolutions are putting increasing pressure on Tel Aviv, contributing to the erosion of Western support for it and worsening its isolation before the world that rejects the massacres it is committing against civilians.
So far, all of the above-mentioned pressures have not succeeded in breaking Israel’s intransigence and the insistence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist government to continue its policy of escaping forward and continuing its aggression against the Gaza Strip, which has so far led to the martyrdom of about 33,000 Palestinians and the injury of more than 75,000 others, in addition to a catastrophe. Dangerous humanitarian and famine has been afflicting the residents of the besieged Strip since last October 7.
Source: Al Jazeera