Biden’s legacy is genocide.

As the dust settles around Biden’s decision to drop out, his consistent support for the Israeli government’s genocide has been cemented as a major part of his legacy.

Since the very beginning of this genocide, our demands to the Biden administration have been clear: an immediate ceasefire and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel.

Instead, the Biden administration has remained stuck on a disastrous policy: continuing to arm the genocidal Israeli military and refusing to impose any real consequences on an extreme-right-wing Israeli government that seemingly hasn’t met a war crime it doesn’t like. Along the way, the U.S. has undermined any organ of international law, from the UN to the ICC to the ICJ, that has tried to hold the Israeli regime accountable for its ongoing genocide of Palestinians.

It didn’t have to be this way.

But the Biden administration ignored the majority of Americans who supported a ceasefire. It continued its catastrophic policy of arming Israel’s genocide. And as a result, we’re witnessing a spiral of disaster claiming more lives by the day.

“The Israeli Guantánamo”

On Monday, nine Israeli soldiers were indicted by a military court, “accused of raping and attacking a Palestinian prisoner at the Sde Teiman detention centre so violently that he was taken to hospital in critical condition,” according to the Guardian.

An Israeli organization wrote in a report that this center “was a place where the most horrible torture we had ever seen was occurring.” Another group described Sde Teiman as “the Israeli Guantánamo.”

In response to the indictment, protestors in Israel — including members of the Israeli government — raided two different Israeli detention camps in an attempt to prevent the soldiers accused of torture and sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners from being taken into custody.

For decades, countless Palestinians have spoken out about the horrifying abuses they faced while in Israeli captivity. At Sde Teiman detention center, at least 38 Palestinians from Gaza have been murdered. Survivors of Israeli military prisons have described vicious beatings, rape and sexual assault, starvation, and the amputation of limbs due to torture and medical neglect.

This abuse has intensified during the genocide, particularly as the number of Palestinians in Israeli military prisons has skyrocketed. A Palestinian lawyer who visited Sde Teiman in June described it as “more horrific than anything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”

Skeptical observers have pointed out this week that the Israeli military’s prosecution of these soldiers may be only an attempt to protect against higher levels of international investigation and accountability, trying to send a signal that Israel can “investigate itself” — particularly given the fact that torture and abuse of Palestinian detainees is a systemic practice of the Israeli military, not an isolated incident.

The fact that even this minimal form of accountability for horrific torture and abuse was met with an intense protest and raids is evidence of just how far the culture of impunity has spread throughout the Israeli government and military. And this impunity starts at the top: with the U.S. continuing to fund the Israeli military no matter how many war crimes it commits.

Blocking food and water — as a weapon of war

The Israeli military is starving Gaza outright, engineering famine as a tool of mass murder. And it’s using water deprivation as a weapon of war, by destroying water and sanitation infrastructure and refusing to allow aid to enter. 

Since the beginning of the genocide, Israeli forces have damaged or destroyed five water and sanitation infrastructure sites every three days. The Israeli military has also destroyed 70% of all sewage pumps and 100% of all wastewater treatment plants, as well as the main water quality testing laboratories in Gaza. As a result, over 25% of Gaza’s population has fallen ill from preventable diseases. 

Now, the Gaza Health Ministry has declared a polio epidemic, a highly infectious disease that causes long-term health problems like paralysis. The Israeli government is now offering the polio vaccine to Israeli soldiers entering Gaza — but not to the Palestinians trapped there.

Escalating towards a regional war

While the Israeli military’s genocide intensifies, Israeli leaders are also escalating attacks in Lebanon and Iran, dragging the entire region ever closer to full-scale war.

As previously reported in the Wire, the Israeli military has been regularly bombing southern Lebanon since October, but Netanyahu has recently been pushing to expand military operations to open another theater of the war — partly in order to protect his grip on political power in Israel.

In the latest round of escalations, this weekend, a missile originating from Lebanon killed 12 Druze Arab people in the Golan Heights, Syrian territory illegally occupied by Israel since 1967. Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, denied responsibility, but people in Lebanon braced for Israel’s inevitable response.

On Tuesday, Israeli warplanes bombed an apartment building in Beirut, in a targeted assassination that killed at least three people, a woman and two children, in the capital of Lebanon. The same day, Israel carried out an assassination in Iran, killing a Hamas leader. These attacks are significant escalations, not only further undermining the months-long ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, but threatening to ignite a war in the entire region.

The consequences of impunity

At this point, evidence that the Israeli regime is a rogue, extremist, genocidal power set on torturing and murdering Palestinians mounts and overflows.

Still, for nearly ten months, the Biden administration has played a key role in maintaining the Israeli state’s impunity, continuing to ship the Israeli military weapons used to slaughter Palestinians and airplanes used to bomb schools and water treatment facilities.

This culture of impunity for brutal violence against Palestinians has long existed in Israel. But the U.S. government continuing to hand the Israeli military a blank check as it commits a genocide has expanded this impunity exponentially, and we’re all witnessing the total chaos that has resulted — from unspeakable torture to mass slaughter to the Israeli government charging ahead into a region-wide war.

Tell Congress: Stop starving Gaza.

As the Israeli government uses the deprivation of food and water as a tool of genocide in Gaza, the U.S. has stood by its decision to cut funding to UNRWA, the largest aid organization in Gaza, until March of next year.

Write to your Congresspeople now and demand that they immediately reinstate this lifesaving funding.

Everyone knows Israel is committing a genocide.

Israel’s international impunity at the Olympics.

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