What Will It Take?

Gaza's children are being killed on camera. Does the U.S. have any red lines?

Israeli forces bombed a Gaza school on Sunday night, and a tent encampment outside a Gaza hospital on Monday morning.

Both locations were serving as shelters for displaced Palestinians. At least 20 people, including children, were massacred in the school bombing. Footage from Monday’s hospital attack shows a person in the rubble of a hospital bed, burning alive. You can hear children screaming.

One year into Israel’s war on Gaza, there is no apparent upper limit on Palestinian suffering that the U.S. will not merely allow, but enable. In the New York Times last week, 44 medical workers said they had seen multiple cases of Palestinian children, younger than 13, shot in the chest or head. At least 16,480 Palestinian children were killed between Oct. 7, 2023 and Aug. 19, 2024, according to Palestinian officials. At least 17,000 children have lost parents in the war. 

These attacks are facilitated by billions of dollars in U.S. military aid, including direct transfers of U.S. weapons to Israel. For the U.S. government, these thousands of children’s lives are not enough to merit even modest measures of restraint, like conditioning aid to Israel. What red lines can possibly remain?

There are, of course, laws against arming countries with clear patterns of human rights violations. The trouble is that top U.S. officials have repeatedly dismissed internal reports that found the U.S. to be breaking those rules. This month, ProPublica reported that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has waved off three reports from government agencies, all of which argued to suspend weapons transfers to Israel on legal and humanitarian grounds.

One of those reports, written by the U.S. Agency for International Development, concluded in April that Israel was deliberately blocking food and medicine from entering Gaza, leading to a polio outbreak and widespread famine in which dozens of children had starved to death.

The existence of this report, many months and thousands of children’s deaths ago, makes the U.S. government response all the more inexcusable. On Sunday, amid news that Israel has blocked food from entering northern Gaza for the past two weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris tweeted that Israel must “do more” to help Gaza logistically.

“The UN reports that no food has entered northern Gaza in nearly 2 weeks,” Harris wrote. “Israel must urgently do more to facilitate the flow of aid to those in need. Civilians must be protected and must have access to food, water, and medicine. International humanitarian law must be respected.”

International humanitarian law must be respected… or what?

The Associated Press reports that the two-week food blockade is part of an Israeli policy to starve out northern Gaza: a plan that “could trap without food or water hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unwilling or unable to leave their homes.” We have long been beyond any pretense of a legal war, and Harris has already indicated that she will not condition military aid to Israel.

At this point, I struggle to write about Gaza. The suffering defies scale, and words feel inadequate. They feel like platitudes. In May, the writer Rozina Ali chronicled the onslaught through the superlative language, month over month, by which experts have attempted to describe an ever-worsening conflict “that has surpassed their records, expectations, and imagination, and a scale of destruction in the face of which comparisons break down.”

By the end of October 2023, for instance, a humanitarian aid group remarked that “the number of children reported killed in just three weeks in Gaza is more than the number killed in armed conflict globally—across more than 20 countries—over the course of a whole year, for the last three years.”

I cannot conjure a clearer moral duty than to stop the slaughter of Palestinian children. I don’t know what is left when words fail.