US Congress 'Deeply Concerned' Bodies Too Hard to Count in Gaza
The story: Gaza's Civil Defence attempts to retrieve 20 bodies from collapsed buildings, a grim task made harder by ongoing bombardments and torrential rain. The unspoken reality? These 'collapsed buildings' are the direct result of a campaign backed by U.S. taxpayer dollars. For context, as of 2023, the U.S. has poured over $300 billion in aid to Israel since 1948, making it the largest recipient
of U.S. foreign assistance. This includes the precision munitions reducing Gaza to rubble, ironically creating the very conditions that impede body recovery. One might wonder if the same members of Congress who fast-tracked $14.5 billion in additional military aid to Israel in February 2024 (HR 815, passed 225-195), after many of them received substantial donations from groups like AIPAC (Rep.
Smith, for example, took $450K from AIPAC in 2023 per OpenSecrets.org), will now fast-track search-and-rescue equipment. Or perhaps the 'deep concern' about the difficulty of body recovery is simply a performance, while the actual bodies are mere collateral damage in a policy bought and paid for.