Scores of people have been killed and injured in the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank and southern Lebanon within the last 24 hours. The new massacres coincided with the United States’ approval of a USD 20 billion arms sale package on Wednesday, August 14.
The Pentagon announced in a statement on Wednesday that the package includes 50 F-15 jets and equipment valued at around USD 19 billion, tank cartridges valued at USD 774 million, explosive mortar cartridges valued at over USD 60 million, and army vehicles valued at USD 583 million.
“The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to US national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defense capability,” the State Department commented on the arms sale approval.
While the United States provides Israel with the needed destructive tools claiming that Israel is launching a large-scale war out of self-defense, Israel has massacred thousands of civilians across West Asia in the course of 10 months.
The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza, announced on Tuesday that the death toll in besieged strip has risen to 39,965 since October 7. Israel’s mass killing has also swept through the West Bank and Southern Lebanon, although the number of casualties in both areas is much fewer than what Gaza has endured.
The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) killed at least 36 people and wounded dozens of others in airstrikes launched on different parts of Gaza on Wednesday, August 14. The IOF also assassinated 5 Palestinians in Tubas and Tammun in the northern occupied West Bank on the same day. While one of the Palestinian people was killed during a raid carried out by the Israeli army at dawn in Tubas, the other four were killed in a drone attack that targeted a group of men in Tammun.
An Israeli drone attack also targeted a motorcycle and two cars in Al-Abassieh town in southern Lebanon injuring at least 10 people on Wednesday. The attack was followed by another drone strike, which hit a car in the town of Marjeyoun, in southern Lebanon, killing at least two people and injuring 4 others on Wednesday night.
Wednesday’s events within Israel’s multi-front war proved again the hypocrisy of the US administration’s policies. During his visit to the Lebanese capital of Beirut on Wednesday, US Presidential Envoy Amos Hochstein alerted warring parties in the region that the clock was ticking for a Gaza ceasefire that could also help end cross-border attacks between Hezbollah and Israel. However, Hochstein’s warning holistically contradicts the US uninterrupted endeavors to fuel the Israeli war machine, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives in the region during less than one year.
“The more time goes by of escalated tensions… the more the odds and the chances go up for accidents, for mistakes, for inadvertent targets to be hit that could easily cause escalation that gets out of control,” Hochstein stated from Beirut during a news conference.
This article was published in Peoples Dispatch and is republished here under a creative commons license.
Comments
Post a Comment