Headlines for October 07, 2024

A senior Pentagon official warned the White House last October that Israel’s plan to uproot more than a million Palestinians from their homes in Gaza would be a humanitarian disaster and could violate international law, leading to war crime charges against Israel. That’s according to Reuters, which reports the warning came in an October 13 email to the White House from Dana Stroul, then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East. Stroul wrote that an assessment by the Red Cross predicting a “humanitarian catastrophe” from Israel’s mass expulsion order had left her “chilled to the bone.” Despite those concerns and similar dire warnings from the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the White House expedited the transfer of weapons to Israel, including thousands of precision-guided missiles and 2,000-pound bombs.

Meanwhile, Drop Site News is reporting Secretary of State Antony Blinken last October signed off on a plan by Israel to bomb trucks bringing humanitarian aid into Gaza. Blinken’s approval came after he joined an emergency meeting of Israel’s war cabinet at the Israeli military’s headquarters in Tel Aviv last October 16 and 17. After the talks, Cabinet member Bezalel Smotrich said, “We in the cabinet were promised at the outset … that aid trucks hijacked by Hamas and its organizations would be bombed from the air, and the aid would be halted.”