Trump Administration Condemns Millions To Die

The following is a small part of an excellent article at Propublica.org: 

For weeks, some of the federal government’s foremost authorities on global health have repeatedly warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other leaders about the coming death toll if they carried out the Trump administration’s plan to end nearly all U.S. foreign aid around the world.

In their clearest accounting yet, top officials have estimated the casualties: One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.

Instead of acting on the repeated warnings, top administration officials, including the State Department’s director of foreign assistance, Peter Marocco, thwarted their own experts’ efforts to keep the U.S. Agency for International Development’s most vital programs up and running, according to internal memos and estimates compiled by global health leaders at the agency and obtained by ProPublica.

President Donald Trump’s political appointees, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, pressed ahead with their plan to dismantle USAID by ignoring and impeding staff who tried to protect lifesaving operations — even as the administration publicly insisted that those programs remained online.

During exchanges outlined in one of the memos, a DOGE engineer emailed staff and said they were not allowed to review the programs they were canceling. At another point, USAID’s then-deputy chief of staff, Joel Borkert, told agency personnel to take a “draconian” approach to approving waivers.

Who's To Blame For Palestinians Killed Trying To Access Aid?

Another tragedy occurred in Gaza on Thursday. While trying to access food, over 100 starving Palestinians were killed and over 700 were wounded. Who's fault is it?

There is a dispute about what happened. Palestinian spokespeople said it was because Israeli soldiers fired on the people trying to get food. Israeli spokespeople claimed it was just because the people trampled each other while trying to get food. A person who was on the ground there said most of those killed or injured were hit by aid trucks (that were trying to flee Israeli shooting).

It really doesn't matter which story you believe. The Israeli government is to blame.

Let's take the Israeli story as true. Why were those people starving and so desperate to get to the limited amount of food on the aid truck? It's because Israel invaded Gaza, and now controls it -- and has not allowed sufficient food (and medicine and shelter) to entered. There are a couple of million civilians in Gaza, but only a few aid trucks have been allowed to enter -- not nearly enough to feed all of them.

The residents of Gaza (half of whom are under the age of 18) are starving, and starvation deaths are beginning to happen. That should not be. When Israeli troops took over Gaza, that made them responsible for the well-being of the people living there. Not allowing enough food (and other necessities) to enter is a dereliction of the duty they assumed by seizing Gaza.

It is a violation of international law (and common decency) to starve a population. But that's what the Israelis are doing. And they need to stop it.

Israel had the right to strike back against Hamas. But they don't have the right to starve the civilian population. They need to allow enough humanitarian aid into Gaza to feed all the civilians living there, even if they have to initiate a cease-fire to get it done. Not doing so is just an inhumane form of genocide.