Grotesquely, profanely, the U.S. government just approved another $8 billion in arms to Israel for its genocide in Gaza, where babies are freezing to death - parents find them "cold as ice," "stiff like a board" - famine lurks - "Hunger is everywhere" - families huddle in torn tents, toddlers caught in blasts have their legs amputated, and Israeli soldiers unwind at a resort with cotton candy. Gazans plead that the world "look at us with mercy"; Biden sent billions more to kill, maim, freeze, starve them.

In its final days, "violating US and international law one last time on their way out," the Biden administration said it will send a deadly arsenal of medium-range missiles, long range projectile artillery shells, Hellfire AGM-114 missiles, 500-pound bombs and other weapons of annihilation to help Israel continue murdering children, doctors, journalists, aid workers and other civilians, perhaps in hopes of getting the deaths of innocents to 46,000, a nice round number. Outrage greeted the news as "willful madness" from a "morally bankrupt" president who doggedly refused to use his power to urge a ceasefire, instead persisting in feeding the genocidal fire. "Only racists who do not view people of color as equally human, and sociopaths who delight in funding mass slaughter" could keep abetting Netanyahu as he "exterminates the last survivors," said CAIR. From one Palestinian-American activist, "Too many kids still alive in Gaza for Joe Biden's liking."

To many, what filmmaker Adam McKay calls the "blood spattered madness" is final sorry proof of the failings of a spineless Democratic party so afraid to take a stand - or even call genocide by its name - it stays silent before war crimes committed daily for over a year. To one critic, Biden encapsulates the Party, "this sundowning butcher, this lamest of lame ducks, doddering out of the Rose Garden to press the KILL MORE PALESTINIANS button for the 100th time." Their complicity, in turn, has spurred Israel to ever viler lows. In a letter last week, eight rightwing Israeli lawmakers urged Defense Minister Israel Katz to wrap up the genocide already with "elimination" of all energy sources, food sources and "anyone who moves in the area and does not exit with a white flag." When those actions are completed, they argue, the IDF "must enter gradually and conduct a full cleansing of the enemy nests."

Toward that end, how will Biden's $8 billion help? Let us count the grisly ways.

The $8 billion will serve to perpetuate the Israeli lie of "safe" or "humanitarian" zones amidst the carnage, like the "safe zone" of al-Mawasi along the southern coast; known as "the Basket of Food" for its fertile soil, sweet water and bountiful farming, it's now a vast displacement camp for hundreds of thousands told to go shelter there. In recent weeks, it's been hit by relentless Israeli warplanes and artillery; each no-warning, pre-dawn attack kills 7, 71, a family of 15, the Chief of Gaza's police, all buried under rubble or "shredded to pieces." In the chaos and dark of one attack, with terrified children running and crying, one resident tried to hide his paralyzed 80-year-old father, but soldiers found him and shot him dead. In another, a young woman thrown by the blast lay in the street, seemingly dead; survivors felt a faint breath and carried her to the hospital, where a medic eventually told them she had a fractured spine and could only move her eyes.

Biden's $8 billion will facilitate Israel's strikes in central Gaza. One just killed at least 26 people, including eight members of a committee who worked to secure aid convoys. In al-Maghazi, where strikes have killed up to 100 at a time, a young medic was called to a targeted civilian vehicle that held a dead woman and three injured children, one a 10-year-old boy bleeding internally and vomiting blood. The medic worked to stabilize the boy till they got him to the hospital; then he went back for the dead woman. When he uncovered her face, he saw it was his mother; shrapnel had pierced her eye, exiting through her skull. Hours earlier, she'd prepared him tea and a sandwich for work, telling him when he left to take care. In another strike on Jabalia, journalist Mohammad Hijazi was one of nearly 90 killed. "I refuse a cheap death,” he wrote in August. "l count the days we have lived as a historic achievement, while awaiting what is coming with (a) spirit that fights until the end of the road.”

Biden's $8 billion will likely embolden the war crime that has been Israel's pitiless destruction of Gaza's health system, its recent attack on and razing of Kamal-Adwan, the last functioning hospital in the north, and the arrest of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the 51-year-old pediatrician and director of the hospital who for months had kept it barely running while repeatedly refusing Israeli orders to leave. A "model of patience and rigor" and "the voice of Gaza's decimated health sector,” Abu Safiya had long pleaded for aid in increasingly distraught videos - "Instead of receiving aid, we received tanks" - while recording horrors like a bloodied intensive care unit, windows blown out, where shrapnel had shattered a nurse's skull. He'd also seen his 15-year-old son Ibrahim killed in a drone strike at the hospital gate - Israel's punishment of him for refusing to leave, he charged - and been badly wounded by shrapnel in November as he exited the operating room.

On Dec. 27, Israeli forces raided and set fire to the hospital, forced staff and patients out, ordered them to strip, beat or detained many, and after denying it, acknowledged they'd arrested Abu Safiya.for "suspected involvement in terrorist activities," aka saving hundreds of innocent lives. The last surreal images of the doctor show him trudging through rubble, still in white coat, and entering an Israeli tank to politely negotiate with murderers. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has reports he was brought to a field interrogation site in Jabalia, made to strip, whipped with thick wire, and taken to brutal Sde Teyman prison. His family has urged his release "before it's too late"; his wife said soldiers told him and other staff they'd be taken to Indonesian Hospital to care for patients, but "the Israelis were telling us lies." Euro-Med says they've heard Abu Safiya's health has deteriorated; they have

© Common Dreams