Biden’s Final Days Are Spent Immiserating Gaza as Palestinians Report Unimaginable Conditions

In northern Gaza, Palestinians are being made to endure days without food, as Israel’s blockade prevents 83 percent of food aid from entering since the onset of the genocide. Those who manage to survive Israel’s aerial attacks are left with injuries that range from burns, to broken bones, and amputations, all without pain relief. The amputee crisis in Gaza is so profound that the Strip is now home to the most child amputees per capita, globally, and these amputations are being done without anesthesia.

In January, Palestinian orthopedist Hani Bseiso amputated a portion of his niece’s Ahed’s right leg atop a kitchen table with little more than a kitchen knife and a sewing kit to stitch up a large artery in order to prevent her from bleeding to death after an Israeli airstrike. In an interview with Al Jazeera, Hani explained how a fully conscious Ahed had begged him not to amputate the rest of her leg while he worked to save her life. Among other challenges for the people of Gaza are life-threatening weather conditions—and with winter quickly approaching, there have already been deaths caused by the bitter cold. In one such case, a 20-day-old child, Aisha Sufyan al-Qassas, who was born in a tent in Khan Younis, displaced alongside her family, died of hypothermia.

Joe Biden’s final days in office are fast approaching, and his legacy has been written in blood. Muhammad Hamed, a father displaced in Gaza alongside his wife and three children, told Splinter that for the people of Gaza, the Biden administration has “given Israel permission to kill us, until the very last child” and that the consequences of his final term in office will be felt by Palestinians “for generations to come.”

“This bloodshed is unlike anything we or our elders have witnessed,” Hamed said. “It’s on a scale that no human can imagine unless they see it with their own eyes, and believe me when I tell you that what you see on social media, and what you see in the news, is only a fraction of our daily horror. This is what Joe Biden and the United States created in Gaza: a legacy of death and destruction.”

Historian and author Vijay Prashad tells Splinter that Joe Biden “will be remembered as a man who worked with Netanyahu to obliterate Gaza in a genocide, who armed the Israelis to the teeth, who colluded with them to hit Hezbollah and to overthrow the Syrian government – both mechanisms to weaken Iran’s forward position.” Prashad, who is also the director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, fears “that these moves could lead to a false belief that the U.S. can now strike Iran.”

Nearly 450 days have passed since the start of the genocide in Gaza, and the United States has made it abundantly clear that the current administration, with a lame duck presidency waiting out its final days, will not deviate from its current path on Israel, no matter the cost. What we are witnessing in Gaza is not a failure of foreign policy, but the purest distillation of U.S. hegemony, with all the shock and awe that so often comes with it.