Gaza: From colony, to open air prison, to killing field—Part One

Jean Shaoul

Aerial footage from social media shows the unprecedented scale of the devastation wrought by Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza. Entire neighbourhoods have been obliterated. More than a million people have been forced from their homes. Israel’s sealing of Gaza’s borders and cutting off the supply of food, fuel, electricity and even drinking water has caused unimaginable suffering.

The daily death toll is horrific.

A man sits on the rubble as others wander among debris of buildings that were targeted by Israeli airstrikes in Jabaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2023. (AP Photo/Abed Khaled)

With its targeting of hospitals, schools and other places of refuge, it is ever more apparent that Israel’s twin policies of carpet bombing and deprivation of all means of existence are aimed at driving the Palestinians out of Gaza and ensuring they never return. This is a pre-planned policy that Israel has for years sought to achieve via the forcible displacement of Gaza’s population into Egypt’s Sinai desert, as leaked documents written by Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence and interviews in the Israeli press have revealed. On Sunday, the Hebrew-language publication Mekomit reported, “the document recommends the forced transfer of the population of the Gaza Strip to Sinai permanently, and calls for the international community to be harnessed for the move.”

With the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories now slightly outnumbering Jews, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his fascist government view a war and ethnic cleansing as the only solution to the “demographic problem.” Addressing the nation, he pledged that Israel’s response to the Palestinians’ October 7 attack on Israel would “change the Middle East” and that “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.”

This genocidal war against civilians in Gaza is an escalation of policies pursued by the Israeli bourgeoisie for decades, aimed at dispossessing the Palestinian people of their lands, property and homes, about which the ruling elite assumes a collective historical amnesia.

Since capturing the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, including military and political repression, have become ever tighter. Gaza has suffered 16 years of a suffocating blockade by Israel, the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Egypt that the United Nations had in 2012 predicted would make the besieged enclave uninhabitable by 2020, only to warn in 2017 that this was happening faster than it had predicted.

These events flow inexorably from Israel’s establishment as the answer to the problem of the European persecution of the Jews—where they would find a safe haven, social justice and equality. The state was in reality based upon the dispossession of another people and maintained through escalating wars, territorial expansion and repression, alongside social inequality at home.

The front page of the Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan memorandum, presented to UK Parliament in December 1922, prior to it coming into force in 1923. [Photo: British government - Archive.org]

Precipitating a war with its Arab neighbours that lasted until 1949, Israel was established in 1948 on 80 percent of the land controlled by the British under the League of Nations-granted Mandate, with King Abdullah of Transjordan, Britain's client state, seizing the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza Strip. This was less than any of the various Zionist factions wanted. But Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, took a pragmatic approach: first establish a Jewish state and change the boundaries later.

The 1967 war and the plundering of Israel’s new Palestinian colonies

The 1967 War provided Israel with the opportunity to change the boundaries, denying its seizure of the West Bank and Gaza constituted an “occupation” of foreign territories since they had been part of Palestine, not Jordan and Egypt.

In June 1967, after a period of escalating conflict with Syria, Israel seized the opportunity presented by Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser’s grandstanding as the leader of the Arab nation to launch a pre-emptive but long-planned strike against its Arab neighbours, aimed at “improving” and enlarging Israel’s 1949 borders. It seized Syria’s Golan Heights, the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and East Jerusalem, which it immediately annexed, and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, as well as the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip.

Israeli tanks advancing on the Golan Heights during the Six Day War, June 1967 [Photo by Government Press Office (Israel) / CC BY-SA 4.0]

While Israel gave back Egypt’s Sinai after signing the Camp David Accords in 1979 with Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat, and part of Syria’s Golan after the 1973 war, it retained most of the Golan, the West Bank and Gaza—home to around 1.4 million Palestinians, many refugees, having fled or been driven from their homes in what became Israel in 1948.

Israel moved swiftly—with some measures taken even before the six-day war ended—to incorporate its newly conquered territories into its economy. In effect, the Palestinian territories were to constitute a latter-day colony—even after the European powers had been forced to grant formal independence to their colonies in Africa and Asia—with a devastating impact on every aspect of Palestinian life, while benefiting Israel’s commercial elite.

Israel’s Labor government under Levi Eshkol imposed military rule to defend its colonisation policy on the ground and to subjugate the Palestinians. The Palestinians were required to carry identity cards and were subject to restrictions on their freedom of movement with curfews and roadblocks. Resistance was met with collective punishment, house demolitions, forced deportations and detentions without trial.

Israel took control of the financial and monetary institutions, obliging those seeking start-up loans to comply with Israeli regulations and making it virtually impossible for the Palestinians to industrialise and compete with Israeli firms. It replaced the Jordanian, Egyptian and Syrian currencies with its own and tightly controlled Palestinian trade.

By 1983, Israel had expropriated over 52 percent of the West Bank, most of its prime agricultural land. On the eve of the 1993 Oslo Accords, these confiscations covered more than three-quarters of the territory. During the first 10 years of the occupation, when the Labor Party held power, the first settlements were built around the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem and in the Jordan Valley to block the expansion of the city’s Palestinian neighbourhoods and “encourage” them to leave. By 1977, there were 4,500 Israelis living in the West Bank and 50,000 in East Jerusalem.

The election of a Likud government headed by Menachem Begin in May 1977 turned settlement building into an ethno-religious project. The settlements were built with a raft of financial incentives in the biblical heartland of the West Bank adjacent to major Palestinian towns and cities. By 1983, the number of settlers in the West Bank had risen to 28,400.

Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin delivers an address upon his arrival in the US in 1978 for a state visit. Location: Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland.

Restrictions on building and infrastructure development and access to aquifers blocked development, including of agriculture on which very many Palestinians depended, and forced them off the land, only for the authorities to confiscate land left uncultivated. Its former occupants were forced to seek work in Israel, particularly in construction and agriculture, where they formed a cheap labour pool for Israeli employers.

By 1974, one third of the Palestinian workforce was employed in Israel, and an even higher proportion from Gaza. This dependency later allowed Israel to use unemployment as a collective punishment, closing the borders during periods of tension and the Intifadas of 1987-93 and 2000-05. At the same time, rising oil prices in the Gulf states encouraged skilled Palestinian workers to seek work there. In the years after the war, around 700,000 were to leave for good, including more than a few who were expelled.

These policies were aimed at increasing Israel’s control over the Palestinians and undermining support for Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) leader Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), with its commitment to achieving a Palestinian state through armed struggle. In the immediate aftermath of the 1967 War, the West Bank’s economy grew at 15 percent a year and Gaza’s at 11 percent, as they recovered to their pre-war levels. But at the same time, industry’s share of the Palestinian GDP fell from 9 percent in 1968 to 7 percent in 1987.

Rally for the anniversary of Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah) in Gaza City [Photo by Fars Media Corporation / CC BY 4.0]

According to the UN, the loss of revenue to the Palestinian economy from 1970 to 1987 was $6-11 billion, or 13 percent of GDP. These changes rapidly transformed Palestinian territories from a diversified society of peasants, small businessmen and professionals into a working class and a reserve army of labour for Israeli employers, subject to the economic and political dictates of Israeli capital.

Broader international developments also took their toll. Following the stock market crash on 1987-88, falling oil prices, fewer work opportunities in the Gulf, the deflationary policies pursued in the United States, the mounting costs of the occupation and the resultant budget and trade deficits, were to lead to a major economic crisis in Israel, as inflation soared. For the Palestinians, this meant a sharp fall in the value of their wages, ever deteriorating working conditions—already far below those of their Israeli counterparts—fewer job opportunities and lower budgetary support. Settlements built on confiscated Palestinian land and land seized to build settler-only roads and secure the settlements expanded, further undermining the Palestinian economy.

The economic downturn was one of the factors—along with anger over Israel’s 20-year-long military occupation and its war on the Palestinians and their allies in Lebanon—that led to the outbreak of the first Intifada (uprising) in 1987. It erupted largely outside the control of the PLO, whose leadership was then based in Tunis after being driven out of Jordan in 1970 and Lebanon in 1982 and abandoned by the Arab regimes.

These conditions, along with the broader turn to Islamist politics in the Arab world following the collapse of Nasser’s pan-Arabism, benefitted the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement), a bourgeois clerical group that Israel at first sponsored and encouraged in opposition to Fatah. But Hamas, with its religious fundamentalism, offered only a more extreme form of nationalism, articulating the interests of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, not those of workers and peasants.

Oslo tightens the noose

The Intifada began on December 1987 in Gaza’s Jabaliya refugee camp after an Israeli Defence Forces truck crashed into a civilian car, killing four Palestinian workers, including three from the camp. It was to take Israel six years to suppress the uprising at a cost of more than 1,000 Palestinian lives, 175,000 arrests and 2,000 homes demolished. The conflict devastated the Palestinian economy, with the standard of living falling by a massive 30-40 percent.

Barricades during the First Intifada [Photo by Abarrategi / CC BY-SA 4.0]

The uprising convinced Israel’s Labor party leaders, out of power since 1977, of the need to reach some sort of accommodation with PLO leader Arafat and Israel’s Arab neighbours. The establishment of a Palestinian statelet would, they believed, help to ensure Israel’s stability and development and maintain its Jewish majority. Arafat and a Palestinian Authority (PA) would take over Israel’s role of controlling the Palestinian masses, in return for the PLO’s acceptance as the sole representative of the Palestinian people. This autonomy would, Israel’s rulers hoped, ensure continued economic dependency, while also opening new markets than Israel’s garrison state could ever deliver and potentially transforming it into a regional economic power.

UK COVID Inquiry reveals how Johnson government planned mass murder

Robert Stevens

The official UK public inquiry has lifted the veil on discussions within Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government that were intent on a policy of mass infection and the death of hundreds of thousands, before being forced to retreat from the “herd immunity” strategy out of fear of the explosive response in the working class. Johnson’s own belief was that Covid was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people.”

During Tuesday’s hearing, Lee Cain, then Downing Street’s Director of Communications, was questioned on evidence made available in the notebooks of Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK government’s chief scientific adviser during the pandemic. In one entry, in December 2020 dealing with Johnson’s opposition to impose a further lockdown, Vallance wrote, “He [Johnson] says his [Conservative] party ‘thinks the whole thing is pathetic and Covid is just nature’s way of dealing with old people – and I am not entirely sure I disagree with them’.”

A diary entry from five months earlier, in August 2020, reports that Johnson favoured “older people accepting their fate and letting the young get on with life”.

Johnson went on national TV to publicly promote herd immunity on March 5, 2020, declaring on the This Morning show, “One of the theories is, that perhaps you could take it on the chin, take it all in one go and allow the disease, as it were, to move through the population, without taking as many draconian measures.”

The government was forced to change course just 18 days later, on March 23, 2020, and impose a national lockdown amid massive public anger at the growing numbers of COVID deaths and fears that the National Health Service (NHS) would collapse. But less than two months after the lockdown was imposed, on May 10, 2020, Johnson announced that restrictions would start to be lifted. Imran Shafi, a former private secretary to Johnson attributes to him the statement, made in March 2020, that there are “Large ppl [large numbers of people] who will die, why are we destroying economy for people who will die anyway soon?”

Johnson is a political criminal who should be put on trial for what he did during the COVID pandemic. But his position was dominant not only within his government but among its leading advisers, including Vallance, and England’s chief medical officer Sir Chris Whitty, and the top civil servants involved.

Another entry in Vallance’s diary, written after a Cabinet Meeting in Downing Street in December 2020, notes: “Chief whip [Mark Spencer] says ‘I think we should let the old people get it and protect others’.”

Vallance himself said at a press conference alongside Johnson on March 12, 2020, “It’s not possible to stop everyone getting it and it’s also not desirable because you want some immunity in the population to protect ourselves in the future.”

Sir Christopher Wormald, who remains the most senior civil servant in the Department of Health and Social Care, in early 2020 felt it his responsibility to stiffen Johnson’s resolve in pursuing herd immunity. Then Civil Service head Mark Sedwill sent a message March 12 to Wormald, “I don't think PM [prime minister] & Co have internalised yet the distinction between minimising mortality and not trying to stop most people getting it.” Wormald replied, “Indeed presumably like chickenpox we want people to get it…”

To this roll call of shame must be added the Labour Party, which under Jeremy Corbyn and his Blairite successor, Sir Keir Starmer, pledged only “constructive” opposition to the government. Corbyn admitted that he was briefed on the government’s herd immunity strategy in early 2020 but said nothing publicly until August.

Similar discussions would have taken place in the United States, Germany, France and in government circles around the world. In every country measures to contain the pandemic were opposed by a ruling class that prioritises profits over lives.

The only reason why so much is known of official criminality during the pandemic in the UK is that Johnson’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings became a whistleblower. Much of what is known about this homicidal policy would never have come to light had Cummings and his ally Cains not been sacked from government by Johnson in late 2020. A right-wing fanatic who led Johnson’s successful Brexit campaign to leave the European Union, Cummings responded by going public amid bitter factional infighting within the government.

He was involved in every major discussion on the pandemic response. Among his revelations was the detailed testimony he gave before Parliament’s Health and Social Care Committee and Science and Technology Committee in May 2021. This included showing a series of slides, and pictures of whiteboards in Downing Street, featuring a Public Health England exercise outlining scenarios based on up to 800,000 people dying of COVID-19.

The architects of social murder in Downing Street worked on a Plan B, assuming over a quarter a million would die, in Cummings’ words by “choking to death,” after being forced to discard this Plan A.

The evidence uncovered by the UK inquiry has confirmed every word written by the World Socialist Web Site on the actual policy of mass death represented by anodyne appeals for a strategy of “herd immunity”.

A March 24, 2020 Perspective, “Message from big business on coronavirus pandemic: Save profits, not lives”, stated:

“From the beginning, the ruling class has viewed the pandemic not as an issue of public health, but as a potential impediment to generating profit. Its sole concern has been how the crisis will impact its bottom line. Now that it has secured a massive government bailout, the ruling class wants to ensure that business returns to normal.

“This form of socially sanctioned euthanasia has a distinctly fascistic character, not dissimilar to the argument by the Nazis that the disabled were “undesirable” elements who should be eliminated. In the face of the greatest crisis facing American capitalism, the ruling class is revealing itself to be not just parasitic, but homicidal.”

The mass deaths of the elderly, as Johnson makes clear, was considered a positive economic boon serving to reduce pension obligations and other social welfare spending. Telegraph columnist Jeremy Warner wrote at the pandemic’s outset, “Not to put too fine a point on it, from an entirely disinterested economic perspective, the Covid-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents.”

The human cost of the refusal to implement the measures necessary to curb and eventually eliminate the pandemic is staggering. Britain has to date seen over a quarter of a million deaths. Over 92 percent were aged over 60. Less than a year after the first lockdown was put in place, the Office for Budget Responsibility reported that the amount the government would have to spend on state pensions was to fall by £1.5 billion by 2022.

The pandemic was a turning point in the decay of the world imperialism as the ruling class everywhere responded to a staggering level of indifference to mass deaths and human suffering. The pandemic has cost over 27 million lives globally and left many millions more suffering the debilitating impact of Long COVID.

After more than two decades on the decline, US infant death rate rose significantly in 2022

Benjamin Mateus

On Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released their provisional report on infant mortality in the United States for 2022. They noted that the rates of infant mortality—covering a period from birth to one year of age—had significantly increased by 3 percent from the preceding year, the first such significant rise in more than two decades. This rise comes as the number of births in the US had only increased by 0.09 percent from 2021 (3,664,292) to 2022 (3,667,758).

A nurse makes a video of a newborn baby in the maternity ward to send to the parents, as visiting hours are restricted because of the coronavirus pandemic at Frimley Park Hospital, in Camberley, England, May 22, 2020. [AP Photo/Steve Parsons/Pool via AP]

This stark finding is only the latest in a series of statistics that confirm the social illnesses brought on by capitalism and rising inequality are taking a lethal toll on the working class in the US, including among those who have barely started their life.

In absolute terms, the rate increased from 5.44 infant deaths for every 1,000 births to 5.6. In total 20,538 infants died in 2022 up from 19,928 in 2021 or 610 more than the previous year, nationwide. The year-to-year increase was also noted for the provisional neonatal mortality rates—infant deaths less than 28 days (3.49 to 3.58 per 1,000; 3 percent higher)—and post neonatal mortality rates—infant deaths from 28 days to 364 days (1.95 to 2.02 per 1,000; 4 percent higher). 

Although news media like the New York Times usually prefer to spin these figures along racial lines—pointing in particular to developments related to African Americans as proof of supposed systemic racism as the root of all social ills—the infant mortality rates had increased significantly only for American Indian/Alaska Natives and whites.

For the other sections, the changes were not statistically significant although mortality rates for infants of black mothers remains the highest in the nation and has much to do with the socioeconomic dynamics and the geographic areas with dwindling quality and quantity of services available where mothers live.

Deaths had increased most in four states – Georgia (+116), Iowa (+43), Missouri (+61), and Texas (+251). Only Nevada (-45) saw a significant decline.

The provisional infant mortality rate impacted women ages 25 to 29. However, for women under 20 years of age, infant mortality rates are the highest with almost 10 deaths per 1,000 births. The most pronounced death rates were for preterm deliveries and those that were male. The leading cause of infant deaths were due to maternal complications and bacterial sepsis of the newborn. 

That these two factors, but by no means the only ones, are significantly contributing to infant mortality rates link the baby’s health to that of its mother. Congenital malformations, sudden unexpected infant death and higher unintended injuries are more pronounced among those giving birth in rural regions.

This speaks volumes to the inadequacy of prenatal care for many women and their vulnerability after delivery, when support from healthcare providers is paramount in ensuring the mother and baby have access to health, nutritious food, and safe and clean-living environment. Access to all of these is directly linked to poverty and rurality—socioeconomic factors that create dangerous conditions affecting maternal and infant health. 

Report after report has underscored the relationship between poverty and the decreasing access to maternity care across the country. In 2022, almost seven million women of childbearing age and a half-million babies had limited or no access to care. The March of Dimes estimated that 36 percent of US counties, mostly in the Midwest and South, are considered maternity care deserts where there are either no obstetric hospitals or obstetric providers.

A 2019 study published in the journal BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, found that among those living in high poverty counties, the neonatal mortality was 38 percent higher and the post neonatal rate 47 percent higher for term infants, compared to low poverty counties.

The report notes, “Two-thirds of term births occurred among mothers residing in high poverty counties. High poverty counties saw the highest births in non-metropolitan areas, the highest teen pregnancy rates and the highest birth rates to mothers with high school education or less. Mothers residing in high poverty counties were less likely to be married and more likely to be [non-Hispanic]-black or Hispanic compared to those residing in medium or low poverty counties.” 

As the authors state, these women are less likely to have any prenatal care, let alone access to care in the late stages of their pregnancy when undiagnosed medical conditions can cause serious complications for their gestation. 

The COVID-19 pandemic and the impoverishment of the population caused by the ruling elites’ response to the ongoing health crisis has only further exacerbated these grim statistics that can only be explained by the rise in social inequity.

Stacey D. Stewart, the president and CEO of March of Dimes noted in a press release, “With an average of two women dying every day from complications of pregnancy and childbirth and two babies dying every hour, our country is facing a unique and critical moment as the infant and maternal health crisis continues intensifying. With hospital closures, inflation, and COVID-19 limiting access to care, the compounding issues of our time are bearing down on families, forcing them to extend themselves in new ways to find care they need and ways to afford it.”

Arjumand Siddiqi, professor of population health at the University of Toronto, told the Wall Street Journal, “The US is falling behind on a basic indicator of how well societies treat people. In a country as well-resourced as the US, with as much medical technology and so on, we shouldn’t have babies dying in the first year of life. That should be super rare, and it’s not.”

The social implications of the bond market turmoil

Nick Beams

The headline financial news this week, announced on Wednesday afternoon, was the US Federal Reserve decision to maintain interest rates on hold for the second meeting in a row. But a more significant decision came that morning with the move by the US Treasury to slow the pace and change the composition of its issuance of new debt to be raised on financial markets.

Specialist Dilip Patel works at his post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023. Wall Street is sinking sharply as it focuses on the downside of a surprisingly strong job market. [AP Photo/Richard Drew]

The US Treasury decision did not make it as a top news story, but it was closely followed in financial circles because it related to the all-important question of liquidity—that is, the ability of financial markets to continue financing the ever-growing US government debt without disturbance and ructions.

It is more than three years on, but the experience of March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Treasury market froze for several days because there were no buyers for US government debt, is still fresh in memories in leading financial circles. The US Federal Reserve halted the crisis with a massive intervention by buying up bonds and other financial assets to the tune of around $4 trillion.

The immediate crisis was resolved but the underlying issue was not. Since then, liquidity in the $25 trillion US Treasury market has been an ongoing issue.

To understand it, an analogy may be useful. If a rock is dropped in a deep pool of water, then its entry creates little disturbance—a few ripples across the surface. But if the pool is shallow then the entry of the rock causes a major splash and waves.

If the Treasury market is liquid then the issuing of new debt, even in large amounts, has little effect. That was the situation in the “normal” times of the past. Those times have gone. The market is now illiquid and so an increase in issuance has a major effect.

That was seen in August when the US Treasury announced a large-scale issuance of debt, especially at the long end of the market—10-year and 30-year bonds—to finance the burgeoning US budget deficit.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday, economics commentator Stephen Bartholomeusz described what happened.

“Investors were spooked by the sheer scale of the supply of bonds, particularly longer-dated bonds, scheduled to hit the market when the price-sensitive private sector investors are the primary source of demand, given that the Fed is allowing the securities it acquired with its quantitative easing program in response to the pandemic to mature without reinvestment and other central banks are largely absent as buyers.”

That August decision set off a wave of bond selling which sent the yield on the 10-year bonds from around 4 percent to as high as 5 percent at some points. (Yields and bond prices have an inverse relation.) Such a movement, where shifts in yields are normally a fraction of a percentage point, was extraordinary.

Bartholomeusz noted: “It was a bond market rout—one that inflicted losses of multi-billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars for investors in the $25 trillion market.” It was triggered by the “amount of long-term debt the market was being asked to absorb as a result of the $1.7 trillion US budget deficit.”

Fearing a repeat, on Wednesday the US Treasury modified the profile of its debt issuance for the last quarter, saying it would slow the pace of 10-year and 30-year bond issues. In August, it said it would raise the auction size of 10-year bonds by $3 billion a month and that of 30-year bonds by $2 billion a month. In the latest decision, the increases were cut to $2 billion and $1 billion respectively, while increasing issuance of two- and five-year bonds.

Overall, the Treasury said in the quarterly refunding auctions next week it would sell $112 billion worth of debt, down from $114 billion in the previous quarter.

The Treasury move, as well as the Fed decision not to lift interest rates, has calmed the bond market, at least temporarily. There was something of a rally on Thursday, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury moving down by 0.3 percentage points in two days.

But such a shift, large by historical standards, is itself a cause for concern because it is an expression of the volatility in the most important financial market for the US and the global financial system.

Moreover, there is a negative feedback loop at work. Interest rates are being driven up because of increased government spending, especially on the military, while the government must make higher interest payments on its debt.

The US federal deficit increased by $320 billion to $1.7 trillion in the year to September. Half of this rise was due to rising interest costs. They will increase further in the future.

The worsening situation in government finances extends around the world and is going to lead to deep attacks on the working class.

Writing in the Financial Times last weekend, the deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Gita Gopinath, said there had been a focus on monetary policy after the pandemic but the recent turbulence in the bond markets meant the winds were shifting and calling for a “renewed focus on fiscal policy.”

She noted the increase in government spending over current outlays, not least because of rising military outlays, could surpass 7 percent of gross domestic product ($6 trillion) in advanced economies and more than 8 percent of GDP ($5.3 trillion) in emerging market and developing economies by 2030. Gopinath added that “by any scale, these numbers are enormous.”

Gopinath said that with record high debt levels, higher for longer interest rates and the weakest growth prospects in two decades, “restraint” was required, even for reserve currency issuers, above all the US.

The US has some of the biggest deficits in relation to GDP, expected to be 8 percent this year. Interest payments as a percentage of revenue are set to rise from 8 percent of revenues ($486 billion) in 2019 to 12 percent by 2028 ($1.27 trillion).

As one of the voices of finance capital, the IMF has made clear where the response to the crisis must be directed. “For several advanced economies with ageing populations, entitlement reforms are inescapable,” Gopinath insisted.

It will not just be Social Security in the US. Social services across the board, such as health, education and other facilities for life in modern society, are in the firing line. That is, the working class must be made to pay for the deepening crisis of the financial system, exacerbated by the eruption of militarism.

Israeli military bombs hospitals, ambulance convoys and schools

Kevin Reed

The bombing of Al Shifa hospital

The Israeli military, with the backing of the Biden administration, has targeted hospitals and medical staff for missile strikes in Gaza over the past 24 hours. On Friday, Israel carried out an airstrike on an ambulance at the gate of Al Shifa hospital, killing 15 people and injuring 60 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. The strike near the hospital, located in the neighborhood of North Rimal in Gaza City, was confirmed by the Israeli government, which claimed the ambulance was being “used by a Hamas terrorist cell.” The Israeli allegation was “rejected by Health Ministry spokesmen.”

The Palestine Red Crescent Society issued a statement condemning the bombing of the ambulance convoy. The statement said, “Upon the arrival of Palestine Red Crescent society’s ambulance (Mercedes 3-1242-55) at the hospital gate to unload the injured (Najwa Toutah, 35 years old, shrapnel in the chest and leg, in an ICU condition), who was destined for Rafah Crossing to receive the required medical treatment in Egyptian hospitals, the vehicle was struck by a missile fired by the Israeli forces, only at a distance of about two meters from the hospital gate.”

The New York Times reported that “an explosion” occurred near the hospital at 4:30 p.m. local time on Friday. The Israeli strike was carried out after a spokesman from the Palestinian Health Ministry announced at a news conference that a convoy carrying “a large number of injured people” would be heading south on the coastal road of Al Rasheed near the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.

A graphic video at the scene at the gate of the Al Shifa hospital was posted on Twitter/X showing the death and destruction from the airstrike.

The post by Al Jazeera journalist Muhammad Shehada included the following description: “Israeli just bombed the main gate of al-Shifa medical compound where over 30,000 refugees are sheltering. Dozens killed & wounded; literal pools of blood everywhere! Multiple ambulances were damaged as they attempted to transport the critically wounded to Rafah.”

Speaking after the attack, Ashraf al-Qudra told the press that the convoy had left the hospital and made its way to a nearby roundabout when it was hit by an airstrike. The Times reported that al-Qudra said, “The convoy turned back, and when it got back to the entrance of Al Shifa, it was hit again.”

The Health Ministry and international aid groups say Al Shifa hospital is running out of fuel and has curtailed services amid the cutoff of electricity and fuel by Israel. Doctors have reported that large numbers of people have been wounded in airstrikes and are being treated without enough medicine and supplies.

In addition to the strike on the Al Shifa medical facility, Al Jazeera reported that Israel also struck the Indonesian Hospital in Bait Lahia located in the North Gaza Governorate. The report said people in the area were combing through the rubble using their cell phones as torches. The report also said, “Large plumes of smoke could be seen in the evening sky as small fires had broken out amid the mounds of debris.”

Al Jazeera also reported an air raid in the vicinity of the al-Quds hospital in the Tel al-Hawa area of Gaza City. A post on Twitter/X said that Israeli jets targeted the hospital and that there were “several casualties.” The al-Quds facility is providing shelter and basic needs for 14,000 people, mainly women and children.

The Palestine Chronicle reported on Friday that Israel struck the Osama Ben Zaid school on Friday afternoon, killing 20 people and injuring dozens of others. The school was being used to house displaced people whose homes have been destroyed by the war.

Numerous media outlets are reporting that Israeli forces have surrounded Gaza City on three sides and are operating within the city, fighting in close combat. In a televised statement, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, the Israel Defence Forces chief of staff, said Israeli forces “are in the heart of northern Gaza, operating in Gaza City, surrounding it.”

The siege of Gaza City is the latest in the ethnic cleansing operation of the Zionist state against Palestinians which has so far killed more than 9,200 people, mostly women and children, and injured at least 32,000 others. The death toll in Gaza is horrific and is without precedent in the history of Israeli violence against Palestinians, recalling the crimes of the Nazis in World War II.

Well aware that the Palestinian death toll will climb dramatically in the coming days, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was dispatched to Israel on Friday for the purpose of backing the genocide and covering up the scale of the crimes being committed.

The global charity Oxfam issued a statement on Friday saying it was “gravely concerned for the lives of around 500,000 Palestinians, alongside any of the more than 200 Israeli and other hostages, currently trapped in a ‘siege within a siege’ in northern Gaza.”

The Oxfam statement also said, “Israel’s decision to deprive civilians in Gaza of items essential to their survival such as food, water, fuel, medicines, and other aid amounts to collective punishment and a violation of international humanitarian law.”

On Friday, the World Health Organization (WHO) also released a statement saying that women, children and newborn infants are “bearing the burden of the escalation of hostilities in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

The WHO statement went on to say, “As of 3 November, according to Ministry of Health data, 2,326 women and 3,760 children have been killed in the Gaza Strip, representing 67% of all casualties, while thousands more have been injured. This means that 420 children are killed or injured every day, some of them only a few months old.”

The WHO said that there are an estimated 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza with more than 180 giving birth every day. The statement goes on, “These women are unable to access the emergency obstetric services they need to give birth safely and care for their newborns. With 14 hospitals and 45 primary health care centers closed, some women are having to give birth in shelters, in their homes, in the streets amid rubble, or in overwhelmed healthcare facilities, where sanitation is worsening, and the risk of infection and medical complications is on the rise.”

The WHO statement reports that over half of the population of Gaza is being sheltered at UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) facilities “in dire conditions, with inadequate water and food supplies, which is causing hunger and malnutrition, dehydration and the spread of waterborne diseases.”

Food bank usage in Canada up one-third in a year as social crisis dramatically worsens

Penny Smith

Recent nationwide reports from Food Bank Canada paint a dire picture of the soaring number of Canadians living in poverty and suffering food insecurity.

The charity’s annual Hunger Report explains that food bank usage has reached “unthinkable levels,” with a record 1.9 million visits to food banks in Canada in the month of March alone—a 32 percent increase year on year, and the highest numbers since the agency began collecting data in 1989. 

Volunteers pack boxes of food outside of a food bank [AP Photo/Ashley Landis]

Accelerating inflation at levels not seen in 40 years has driven up costs for basics such as transportation, food and shelter, while wages have not kept pace. Although the main cause of food insecurity is low income, as one food bank recipient in Ontario explains, “since September 2022, the cost of food and housing have been major issues.”

The increasingly precarious conditions for the country’s most vulnerable is underscored by the fact that children comprise over a third of all food bank recipients despite representing only 20 percent of the population. Additionally, seniors on a fixed pension income represent 8 percent of Canadian food banks users, rising at a rate far outpacing other age groups. Moreover, more than a quarter of food bank recipients are immigrants who have been in Canada for less than a decade, a usage rate that has doubled since 2016.

Notably, the expanding pool of food bank patronage—often the desperate last resort for people once all other avenues are exhausted—is no longer limited to those in the lowest-income households, such as people dependent on social assistance. As the report explains, “Never before have food banks seen such a high level of need among the working population,” and more and more of those in higher income brackets are turning to food banks for the first time. According to the Food Bank survey, one in five food bank recipients have employment and over a quarter live in a two-parent household.

Skyrocketing rents, the outcome of the decades-long privatization and deregulation of the housing stock by all the official political parties, are eating into an ever greater share of Canadian incomes. The Food Bank survey reveals that nearly 70 percent of food bank clients live in rental housing, 36 percent of whom pay more than a third of their income on housing and 13 percent of whom pay more than half of their income on rental expenses. Additionally, single person households account for 43.8 percent of food banks users in Canada, while representing 29.3 percent of the population.

The report also notes that Canada’s Indigenous population, where one in four live in poverty, is also disproportionately represented among food bank users at 12 percent, while making up only 5 percent of the general population.

Not included in the Food Bank report is data for Canada’s three impoverished northern territories, where the majority Indigenous population suffers from the highest rates of food insecurity in the country. In the largest and northernmost territory of Nunavut, the food insecurity rate has reached a catastrophic 57 percent, prompting doctors to declare food insecurity among Indigenous children an “urgent public health crisis.”

Across the country, funding-starved food banks are struggling to meet the explosion in demand. In Ontario, Toronto-based Charity Daily Bread reported Toronto’s largest food bank is at “breaking point” and cannot keep up with the organization’s quadrupling in patronage, from an estimated 65,000 client visits per month before the pandemic to an estimated 275,000 visits per month. Demand at the Food Bank of Waterloo Region has reached a “crisis” level and annual funding needs to double to more than $1.6 million to keep up with demand. One food bank in Newfoundland said former donors are now coming to their doorstep for help themselves, and another in Prince Edward Island has been forced to turn people away.

As millions of Canadians struggle to feed themselves, the grocery giants rake in record profits. Loblaws, Sobeys, and Metro reported a combined $100 billion in sales and $3.6 billion in profits in 2022. In June, public outrage over the corporate profit gouging compelled Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make a hollow appeal to Canada’s top five grocery giants—Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro, Walmart and Costco—to voluntarily curb food prices before the Thanksgiving holiday. Yet corporate profits continue unmitigated and the cost of food in Canada increased 5.9 percent in September year-on-year. 

The Trudeau government continues to show callous indifference to what Food Banks Canada calls a “dire situation” confronting the one in five Canadians living with food insecurity. In the face of the greatest cost of living crisis in 40 years, it has allocated a pathetic $10 million in its 2023 budget for food infrastructure needs. 

The “historic” Affordable Housing and Groceries Act tabled in September with the ostensible aim of curbing the affordability crisis amounts in reality to yet another tax exemption for private sector developers who exploit the loose definition of “affordable” to win subsidies for near market value housing. The “affordable” price tags are still out of reach for most Canadians.

Trudeau’s cynical scapegoating of the grocery giants is rhetorical in content and will do nothing to resolve the problem of food insecurity and only deflects from the underlying political issues driving the affordability crisis. The efforts of the scrambling food charities, as crucial as they are in providing emergency relief, amount to a bandage on a haemorrhage.

The decades-long erosion of the social position of the working class steadily undermined by the austerity policies and corporate enrichment of governments of all political stripes with the aid of the trade unions has left wide swathes of the Canadian population living in poverty and food insecurity. Despite these bleak statistics, the Liberals, propped up by the New Democratic Party, have committed to a 70 percent increase in the military spending budget, costs which are being redirected from essential social services and protections that vulnerable people rely on.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain disruptions served as an accelerant to this underlying process and provided the pretext for corporate profiteering. The escalating war against Russia in Ukraine that the Canadian government plays an outsized role in triggered a worldwide food and energy crisis and runaway inflation.

The cost of living crisis is being met with growing opposition internationally, from France to Sri Lanka, stoking fear in the Canadian ruling class that this spontaneous strike and protest action will quickly galvanize into a politically conscious movement against imperialist war and austerity.

The atrocities now being committed by the Israeli government and backed by all the imperialist powers against the defenceless population of Gaza mark a new stage in the imperialist effort to carve up the energy-rich Middle East. 

Under the guise of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” the Canadian political establishment has given unanimous support for the continuation of the bloody massacre in Gaza that has now killed over 9,000 innocent Palestinians—almost half of whom are children. This underscores the hypocrisy and cynicism behind the $60 million in humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and surrounding areas Trudeau has pledged, which is really intended to paper over Canada’s predatory role in the region as the junior partner to US imperialism.

Israel strikes Jabaliya refugee camp for third day running as war crimes pile up in Gaza

Jordan Shilton

The Israeli regime is carrying out horrendous war crimes on a daily basis, with Thursday marking the third day in a row that the Jabaliya refugee camp was struck. As the official death toll among Palestinian civilians surpassed 9,000, the Israel Defence Forces also reportedly struck four schools within 24 hours and is preparing a horrific massacre of civilians in Gaza City.

The latest attack on Jabaliya, where over 195 were confirmed dead in two previous strikes Tuesday and Wednesday, hit a school used by the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) as a shelter. At least 20 people were killed in the bombardment, according to UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini. Schools were also struck by the IDF in the Beach refugee camp in northern Gaza, killing one child, and the Al-Bureij refugee camp, killing two people and injuring 31.

The locations struck by Israel are hosting some 20,000 displaced civilians, the UNRWA reported. Underscoring the systematic targeting of infrastructure designed to provide humanitarian support for the civilian population, the UNRWA wrote, “Since the start of the war on 7 October, nearly 50 UNRWA buildings and assets have been impacted, with some being directly hit. Like today’s, this includes UNRWA buildings used as shelters where UNRWA is currently hosting around 700,000 people. Twenty-five of these shelters are in northern Gaza, hosting 112,000 people.”

A brutal slaughter of thousands of civilians is looming in Gaza City, which the Israeli military claims to have “encircled” as part of its ground offensive. Al Jazeera journalist Youmna ElSayed, reporting from the city, noted that one of the main escape routes to the south is entirely blocked, while another is being closed off. “Many civilian cars have been shot at as they’re trying to evacuate from the north of Gaza or from Gaza City to the south,” she said.

“There are thousands of people who had returned to the northern Strip and to Gaza City itself, and there are thousands that did not evacuate.

“We saw at the Jabaliya camp, as it has been bombarded over three days, how many people were still in their homes. We’re talking about huge numbers.”

Speaking from the city’s Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, Dr. Marwan Abusada described the conditions as “beyond catastrophic.” “The corridors are full of injured people,” he continued. “The ER rooms are beyond full. We have zero capacity to treat all the injured people.

“The high number of displaced people are no longer sheltering in the courtyard of the hospital but are now inside the hospital, including in the corridors. There is a high chance of infectious diseases spreading between patients and those displaced.”

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs confirmed that the Israeli military advance in northern Gaza “is impeding the delivery of humanitarian aid to about 300,000 displaced people.” A separate group of UN experts issued a statement warning that the Palestinian people face “a grave threat of genocide.”

Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari dismissed any talk of a ceasefire to allow the thousands of civilians to depart Gaza City, asserting that this is “not on the table.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated that no fuel shipments will be allowed into the Gaza Strip as part of the trickle of aid trucks crossing the Rafah entry point from Egypt. At least 16 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals have stopped operating due to a lack of fuel, with the remainder running on low supplies. Al-Shifa and the Indonesian Hospital are reportedly at risk of imminent collapse as their generators run out of fuel.

Bakeries have also been directly targeted, contributing to the shortage of food. Al Jazeera reported Thursday that five bakeries have been directly targeted across Gaza in air strikes, while another eight suffered so much damage in nearby strikes that they are now out of service.

Under these conditions, the report that US secretary of State Anthony Blinken will seek to achieve “humanitarian pauses” of a few hours in the fighting during his trip Friday to Israel is akin to providing morphine to a dying patient. The few additional aid trucks that would reach Gaza during these brief windows of respite would still be prevented from transporting fuel, furthering the total collapse of any medical care in the enclave. Moreover, the Israeli regime demonstrates every day its utter disregard for any limits on its genocidal savagery, which would continue after any “pause” orchestrated by Blinken.

In a cynical statement Thursday, Blinken performed the necessary hand-wringing by noting that civilians are “bearing the brunt” of attacks by the IDF. However, he hastened to stress, “Israel has not only the right but the obligation to defend itself and also to take steps to try to ensure that this never happens again.”

Blinken claimed that the “pauses” would allow aid to reach Gaza and hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October to be freed. In reality, Israel’s savage onslaught is showing almost as little concern for the lives of the hostages—who are most likely being held in Hamas’ underground tunnel network—as for the Palestinian population. According to the IDF, soldiers will not enter Hamas tunnels but will use robots and explosive devices to collapse and destroy them. A senior army commander said, “It will become a death zone.”

Underlining US imperialism’s attitude to the genocide in Gaza, White House spokespersons made clear Thursday that the Biden administration remains opposed to calling for a “ceasefire.” There is bipartisan backing for the provision of over $14 billion in additional military aid to Israel. The European imperialist powers are no less enthusiastic. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called Netanyahu Wednesday following the Jabaliya massacre to reaffirm Berlin’s “unwavering” support for Israel, while at home the German government is criminalizing protests against the genocide. France announced the dispatch of a second warship to the region Thursday, citing the threadbare pretext of providing additional medical care to Gaza residents.

One especially barbaric aspect of the Israeli regime’s onslaught on Gaza that has gone almost entirely unmentioned by the imperialist powers is its deliberate targeting of journalists. Mohammed Abu Hatab, a correspondent with Palestine TV, became the 30th Palestinian media worker to be killed since Israel’s bombardment began. According to a colleague, Hatab was killed in an air strike on his home in Khan Younis when he returned from work to check on his family.

A systematic witch-hunt on journalists in the Gaza Strip is being whipped up in the Israeli media. The Jerusalem Post reported Thursday that it had identified “around five dozen individuals associated with Hamas” who “are often seen sporting blue press vests and helmets” and have been “waging a propaganda campaign against Israel on various social media platforms.” Echoing Israeli military propaganda, the newspaper continued that they have “found refuge in Al-Shifa Hospital, which the IDF recently disclosed serves as a Hamas command and control centre.” The implication is clear: the targeted killing of further journalists will be justified as a blow against “Hamas terrorists.”

The IDF’s genocidal onslaught on Gaza over the past three-and-a-half weeks has gone hand-in-hand with a dramatic escalation of violence by the military and far-right settler gangs in the occupied West Bank. Military raids on Wednesday night led to the detention of 49 Palestinians, bringing the total taken into custody in the West Bank since 7 October to more than 1,200.

After clashes between Palestinians and Israeli settlers led to the fatal shooting of an Israeli reservist Thursday morning, a gang of settler thugs descended on the Palestinian village of Deir Sharaf, where they torched cars and shops, and threw rocks at Palestinian residences. Israeli security forces killed three Palestinians in the West Bank Thursday, bringing the death toll there since 7 October to at least 135.

Fighting also intensified on the Lebanese border Thursday, where Hizbollah claimed it had fired at 19 IDF targets. Hamas’ Lebanese wing also claimed responsibility for a rocket barrage on the northern city of Kiryat Shmona, where two people were injured. The Israeli military responded by striking a series of positions in southern Lebanon.