The Imminent Assault on Rafah and the
Coming Regional War in the Middle East
Steven Starr / Special to Environmentalists Against War
https://www.youtube.com/live/kjbC1ALxm0k?si=d_rS5xENlpOVB8ta
(February 19, 2024) — Today the International Court of Justice in the Hague (i.e. the “World Court”) held hearings on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian Territories. The Palestinian Minister presented the map, which is copied below, to the World Court:
Disappearing Palestine
The map on the far left depicts Palestine before it was partitioned by the UN in 1947 (notice that the original boundaries of Palestine shown in this image are exactly those of Israel today). The 1947 UN Resolution 181, which created the partition of Palestine, recommended the creation of two separate states, one Palestinian and the other Israeli. However, the Palestinian state was never established and has been made impossible over the years by the actions of the Israeli state.
The image second from the left depicts the 1947 partition of Palestine, which relegated the Palestinians to the green areas. The third and fourth images depict the results of the full occupation of Palestine by Israeli forces and the subsequent establishment of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories, which were designed to prevent the possibility of ever establishing a separate Palestinian state. Gaza became an “open-air prison“, surrounded by 30-foot high concrete walls, with no ships allowed to dock and no airplanes allowed to land in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s map does not include Palestine.
Greater Israel
The 3-month-long Israeli blockade of water, food, electricity, and medical supplies to Gaza, is now on the verge of killing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians through disease and starvation. More than 100,000 Palestinians have already been killed and wounded by the massive Israeli bombardment of Gaza, only made possible by the continuous flow of massive bombs, artillery shells, tank ammunition, rockets, rockets, and other weapons to Israel, as well as by targeting information provided by the US to Israeli forces. According to the Wall Street Journal, the US has supplied Israel with more than 21,000 precision-guided bombs and rockets since last October.
Israel is about to launch a massive ground assault on more than one and a half million Palestinian refugees now sheltering in the border city of Rafah. Egypt’s Foreign Minister has announced that an Israeli attack on Rafah will have “severe repercussions”.
It is important to the Biden administration that it does its part in this upcoming genocidal act against the Palestinians in Rafah. In anticipation of this attack, the US is preparing to send Israel one thousand MK-82 500-pound bombs and one thousand KMU-572 Joint Direct Attack Munitions that turn unguided munitions into precision-guided bombs.
Israel intends that those Palestinians who survive the coming massacre will be driven into the Egyptian Sinai desert, never to be permitted to return to their lands in Palestine. However, Egypt has strenuously objected to this plan and is constructing a wall to prevent the influx of more than one million Palestinian refugees.
This massacre may only be the prelude to a much larger war that Israel is about to unleash against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Israel has already evacuated 200,000 Israeli “settlers” who were living (on lands stolen from the Palestinians) on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. The Israeli Defense Minister is on record saying that Israel needs to control (i.e. conquer) the land in southern Lebanon “beyond the Litani River”. Hezbollah and Israel are already fighting on the Lebanon border; the fighting continues to escalate and now it is increasingly likely that a full-scale Israeli-Hezbollah war will soon result.
Regional War
If Israel attacks Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon, a regional war will result. Hezbollah will (perhaps not initially, but at some point) respond with a massive missile attack on Israel. In 2021, the CSIS estimated that Hezbollah had an arsenal of 134,000 missiles, which include ballistic, anti-air, anti-tank, and anti-ship missiles. see https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/publication/180705_Williams_HezbollahMissiles_v3.pdf This arsenal has surely gotten larger during the last two years and is quite capable of destroying the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Israel is likely to use its nuclear weapons if it believes its survival is at stake.
I think it is likely that an Israeli-Hezbollah war will expand to include many other nations that surround Israel, including Iran and Turkey. Pakistan has reportedly promised to provide Turkey with nuclear weapons in the event Israel initiates nuclear war.
This level of conflict is likely to draw in the other nuclear weapon states, creating the distinct possibility of a World War.
Biden could prevent this war with a single phone call to Netanyahu. All that is required is for Biden to inform Netanyahu that all US military and financial aid stops now unless there is an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
But just the opposite is occurring. The US continues to supply weapons and targeting information to Israel, making it fully complicit in genocide. Biden and his neocons have put a black stain on the US that will never be forgotten.
The specter of Armageddon looms above us all.
Steven Starr MPH, MT(ASCP)BB
Adjunct Assistant Clinical Professor
University of Missouri
starrst@missouri.edu
Website: https://nuclearfamine.org/
