The façades of Israel’s ‘humanitarian’ paradigms in South Sudan and Gaza

While the entire international community is futilely discussing humanitarian aid in Gaza and allowing Israel to continue with its macabre spectacle, the settler colonial enterprise is once again embarking on flaunting its hypocritical so-called humanitarian stance in South Sudan which is facing a crisis caused by a cholera outbreak in 2024. Since September last year, 2,470 people have died and there are around 99,700 suspected cases, while in the last week, 40 people died of cholera in the country. 

Several news outlets have reported Israel being in discussions with South Sudan to ‘resettle’ – read forcibly transfer – Palestinians from Gaza as part of the ongoing ethnic cleansing. The country’s foreign ministry has denied talks on the matter, stating that the claims do not reflect official government policy. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps returning to his forced transfer plans. “All those concerned for the Palestinians and say they want to help the Palestinians should open their doors to them … We’re not pushing them out – we’re enabling them to leave,” Netanyahu recently stated, while adding that the plan needs “receiving countries.”

It is not far-fetched that Israel would offer perks to countries perceived as potential sites for Palestinians forcibly displaced from Gaza. But even if this were not the case, Israel continues to make a mockery out of humanitarian aid, exposing the weaknesses of the paradigm. 

READ: Israel sends aid to South Sudan while enforcing starvation in Gaza

Israel’s foreign ministry issued a statement saying that “in light of the severe humanitarian crisis in South Sudan” it would be providing “urgent humanitarian assistance to vulnerable populations in the country.”

Yet with the genocide in Gaza, Israel had the entire world first legitimising and protecting its security narrative, next debating humanitarian pauses and later ongoing negotiations with Israel to allow aid in, even as Israel halted UNRWA’s operations and installed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) to carry out killings under the guise of providing food packages. The measures announced by the EU after what was deemed “constructive dialogue” merely indicated an increase in humanitarian aid amid an ongoing genocide in Gaza. The EU knows that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is causing the humanitarian disaster, yet the focus remains on coverups, which is what humanitarian aid in Gaza is amounting to. Killing by one means or another. 

Israel grasps the façade of humanitarian aid much better than the creators of the paradigm. Israel is doing nothing that other countries wouldn’t have done in South Sudan, using the same carefully constructed rhetoric that is used for Gaza by the international community. In Gaza, however, for almost two years now, Israel has the international community tacitly agreeing to starvation while Hamas remains the focus of the bogus equation for genocide. Besides killing Palestinians with the humanitarian paradigm, almost half of the humanitarian workers killed last year were in Gaza. 

Israel’s humanitarian concerns are as false as those of the international community. If a crisis is perceived in South Sudan a year after the cholera outbreak, why is the humanitarian deprivation as a result of genocide discussed merely in terms of aid trucks instead of one of the several components Israel is using to obliterate Palestinians from Gaza?

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