The Biden administration has helped kill 85 members of my family. Of course I refused to meet with Antony Blinken.
I refused to provide a photo opportunity to the Biden administration because it has aided and abetted the killing of 85 members of my family. I hope they take the time to read about the nightmare all Palestinians in Gaza are living through.
A few days before his recent visit to the region, Secretary of State Antony Blinken invited several members of the Palestinian-American community to a meeting to discuss the Biden administration’s response to Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, which the International Court of Justice and a U.S. federal court ruled may amount to genocide. I was among them.
What could I say in three minutes to someone who is aiding and abetting Israel’s assault, which has killed 85 members of my family so far? How could I provide a photo opportunity to Secretary Blinken when President Biden has not only armed and funded Israel, but also just suspended funding to the most important aid agency providing humanitarian assistance to two million Palestinians facing death from US-supplied bombs, and starvation and disease caused by Israel preventing all but a trickle of food, water, and medicine from entering Gaza?
I could not, in good conscience, accept Secretary Blinken’s invitation, so I chose to boycott the meeting, as did a number of others from our community. Instead, I hope he will take the time to read about my family’s ordeal, which is a microcosm of the nightmare that all Palestinians in Gaza are living through and which the Biden administration is deeply complicit in.
In mid-October, generations of one branch of my family were killed in a single Israeli airstrike. Among those killed, Tuqa, who was supposed to be celebrating her wedding, and Esam and Jamal, who played competitive basketball and ping pong as teenagers. Shortly afterwards my cousins Hatem and Aziz were killed in Khan Younis in southern Gaza – which was supposed to be in the so-called safe zone – along with 14 other relatives, including seven children. Aziz was a pharmacist. Hatem always had a smile on his face. One child survived, with an amputation. He woke up from surgery to learn his father, uncle, and siblings were dead. Soon after, he died as well.
In November, my cousins’ home was destroyed by an Israeli missile without warning. Wael, who survived, found half of his mother’s body buried in rubble, alongside the pieces of his sister Wafaa, who was a beloved teacher. His brother Hani suffered what should have been a minor leg injury. But unable to get medical attention, Hani bled to death. The bodies of Hani’s wife and his sister, Huda, are still missing. The intensity of the Israeli bombing made it impossible to hold a proper burial; relatives buried the bodies they could recover in a makeshift mass grave.
I receive daily messages from my family: who has been killed, who needs a tent to shelter from the winter rain and cold, who hasn’t eaten. My cousin’s newborn twins have been malnourished from birth. The homes of every surviving relative are destroyed or damaged. They’re either in a tent, a UN school, or friends’ homes. They subsist mostly on bread, sometimes animal feed. Some people in Gaza have resorted to eating grass. My cousin Nael recently texted, “We have been sleeping without food for 24 hours at a time, and we have not seen flour, meat, vegetables, or fruits for three months now.” My 80-year-old uncle suffers from terrible gastrointestinal illnesses from the contaminated water.
Israel has killed more than 27,000 Palestinians in Gaza over the past four months, at least 11,500 of them children, and injured more than 66,000 others. Sixty percent of Gaza’s homes have been damaged or destroyed; 1.7 million people have been driven from their homes, most multiple times, and 2.2 million people are at imminent risk of starvation. Israel has systematically attacked hospitals and medical workers, causing Gaza’s healthcare system to almost completely collapse, bombed hundreds of schools, UN facilities, bakeries, mosques, churches, refugee camps, and destroyed entire towns and neighborhoods. There is a new medical acronym coined in Gaza which is used with horrifying frequency: WCNSF–“Wounded child, no surviving family.”
President Biden has had nearly four months to correct course and end his complicity in Israel’s brutal assault but has deliberately chosen not to do so. If the president and Secretary Blinken truly care about the lives of Palestinians in Gaza, and the interests of the Palestinian-American community they are now trying to placate, they must call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, demand that Israel allow sufficient humanitarian aid to enter Gaza, and end the continued transfer of weaponry and funding to the Israeli military.
In the bigger picture, they must pressure Israel to end its brutal, more than 55-year-old military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and dismantle its 75-year-old apartheid regime, including granting equal rights to the more than 20% of Israel’s population who are Palestinian and face widespread systematic discrimination and oppression in their own homeland. These are the causes of all the violence in the region.
Doing so won’t bring back our loved ones or repair the damage already done. But it will prevent further suffering and the risk of further escalation in the region and beyond.
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