Blogging Never Changes - Part Eight - It's Worse

For over a month I have been saying that things are goin g to get worse and then stay worse for a long time. Well, I think we're there. This is it - this is the "worse" I have been dreading. Not to give any false hope about this being as bad as it gets - it's going to get more bad than this for sure. But this is the "worse" conditions I feared.

No hospitals are operational in Gaza right now. None. They are all shut down.

The UNRWA has less than 48 hours of fuel themselves, so after that point in time, there will be essentially no one co-ordinating the distribution of the meagre relief supplies.

The IDF has boots on the ground. The land invasion has completely encircled Gaza City and also controls a swath of Gaza across the middle, separating the north from the south.

Bombs are in fact still dropping from the sky in incredible numbers. They have now been joined by tank and artillery shells as well as machine gun fire.

Food and water are incredibly scarce. The trickle of aid trucks - even if they were full to the brim with water - would be grossly inadequate to meet the needs. Dehydration must be rampant across the entire enclave.

Sanitation has fallen apart. There is no functional sewer system. Gaza was crowded before, and now they have been confined to much smaller and more crowded spaces. And infectious diseases are now spreading rampantly. And both the Health Ministry and the UNRWA have been crippled and will be unable to provide public health services at all.

Israel has shown zero indications that they are even close to being finished. Weeks of cajoling, including from Biden and Blinken resulted in four hour "humanitarian pauses" - which appears to be the exact same as what Israel was already doing - designating a four hour period for people to use to flee the north. Also consistent with Israel's action s on that four hour window - people following those instructions have still been shot dead. Which is why no one has noticed that these "humanitarian pauses" are supposed to be in place. Because they are completely meaningless, and that is as much as Israel is willing to concede.

And on top of it all - the collapse of Health Ministry services means that the death toll won't be updated meaningfully. So we won't see the impact of this for a while. The death toll was a severe undercount before - now it's just not meaningful at all.  The number injured in Gaza before everything shutdown was around 25K. It's possible some of these people will survive without hospital care even under the nightmarish conditions they are living under. I have no clue how much longer that Joe Biden will continue in his assistance and unwavering support of genocide. But even if Biden changes tune now, there is still a massive amount of death that will happen. Frankly, it will be a miracle if the final count at the end of it all is under 50,000. And it will of course be a lot higher than even that if the West allows Netanyahu to deliver on his promised long and drawn out war.