1. United States
2. Colo.
3. Letter

I’m writing to you to keep you and your staff informed about the reality on the ground in illegally occupied Gaza, Palestine. The US must immediately enact an arms embargo on Israel to adhere to domestic and international laws preventing transfer of munitions to states committing war crimes. Arwa Damon, former senior international correspondent at CNN, now the founder of the humanitarian group INARA, recently returned from Gaza on a 2 week humanitarian mission. Below are some excerpts from a recent interview on Democracy Now! “Let’s start by talking about how it is that polio reemerged in Gaza after 25 years. And it really boils down to the fact that Israel has decimated every single aspect of any sort of infrastructure within the Gaza Strip, from sewage to water to electricity to you name it. And what has happened in Gaza right now is that you have a situation where piles and piles of trash are everywhere. Open sewage is running in the streets. “Let’s talk about the fact that in Nasser Hospital alone, the head of the pediatrics department said that two children per week were dying of hepatitis A, also largely due to the lack of hygiene. Let’s talk about the fact that meningitis, that can potentially be deadly, is spreading, or this horrific skin disease called impetigo…And the more severe cases, children need to be hospitalized for that. And if they’re not hospitalized, it can lead to, you know, potential kidney failure, which can also lead to death. “A bar of soap is something that we are not able to provide to the Gazan population. The lack of hygiene and the fact that if we were able to provide Gazans with a bar of soap, studies show that that would reduce communicable diseases by about 40%, means that Gazans are suffering exponentially more now than they need to be. And very little aid is getting in. If you look at the number of humanitarian trucks that, you know, have gotten in in August and July and June, it’s roughly 60 to 70 total. “When it comes specifically to the polio vaccine…the fact that Israel is allowing this to proceed is just a smokescreen so that it can sort of continue to push forward this narrative of, “Oh, but we’re allowing humanitarian assistance. Look, we allowed the polio vaccine to happen,” and not really address the sort of bigger picture issues when it comes to the reality that humanitarian assistance is barely trickling in to Gaza, that the levels of aid that were able to provide to the people have diminished significantly, and that the number of people in need has grown drastically, and that people are being crushed into this smaller and smaller space…People there aren’t living; they’re barely surviving.” (https://www.democracynow.org/shows/2024/9/6)