On May 20, 2025, UN Humanitarian Chief, Tom Fletcher warned that more than 14,000 babies face imminent death due to starvation as a direct result deliberate blockade of food, water and medicine in Gaza. Despite hundreds of aid trucks ready to go in, Israeli authorities have repeatedly blocked their entry into Gaza. This extremely dire deliberately created humanitarian crisis raises urgent and important questions about the complicity of U.S. medical societies including the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association and American Pediatric Association, by maintaining silence in the face of this genocide.
The 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, which was ratified by the U.S. government in 1988, defines genocide as
- Killing members of the group.
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Leading humanitarian organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have concluded that indiscriminate killing of at least 60,000 civilians, including 20,000 children constitutes genocide. The International Court of Justice has issued orders to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza and the International Criminal Court has issued warrants against the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity. ….more
