++Everyone in Gaza is facing crisis levels of hunger. It’s entirely preventable. +
++Every resident of Gaza is at risk of crisis levels of food insecurity — and half are at risk of famine. +
++Yes, you read that right: Nearly six months into the Israeli invasion after the October 7 attacks, every single Gaza resident is at risk of at least crisis-level food insecurity — defined as households having high levels of malnutrition or resorting to “irreversible” coping mechanisms like selling livestock or furniture to afford even an insufficient diet. +
++It’s a crisis that has unfolded at a speed utterly unprecedented this century — and also one that was repeatedly predicted and entirely avoidable if Israel were not placing severe restrictions on aid. +
++It comes as the United Nations Security Council vetoed yet another draft resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire on Friday that, for the first time since the start of the war, had the backing of the US. +
++The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the primary organization tracking food insecurity worldwide, defines five levels of food insecurity: Phase 1 (minimal), Phase 2 (stressed), Phase 3 (crisis), Phase 4 (emergency), and finally, Phase 5 (famine). More than 1 million people in Gaza could face famine by mid-July if a Rafah escalation occurs, according to a new IPC report. +
++Soon, “more than 200 people [will be] dying from starvation per day,” a UN aid spokesperson told reporters last week. +
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++Prior to the October 7 attacks on Israel, the Israeli government tightly controlled the flow of goods entering Gaza, having ramped up oversight since Hamas took over the territory in 2007 and created what many international law experts call a de facto occupation. Then, two days after the Hamas attacks, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a “complete siege” on Gaza, barring fuel, food, water, and electricity from entering the territory. (Siege warfare against an occupied territory is illegal under international law.) While Israel later allowed limited supplies, including food and medical aid, to enter Gaza, and minimal sources of clean water have been restored, none of these necessities are near the level that they were before the war started. +
++Though the Israeli government, through its official channels and to Vox, denies the possibility of famine in Gaza and disputes numbers released in the IPC report, facts on the ground show increasing desperation for the people of Gaza. +
++“If you cut off food, water, and power to a population that is fully dependent on importing, this is what you get,” Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, told Vox in an interview. “I mean, that is just math.” +
++Experts have warned about this crisis since the beginning of the war +
++Around 80 percent of people in Gaza relied on humanitarian aid prior to the invasion, putting them in an already vulnerable position. +
++And even a month into the Israeli invasion, there were many indications that hunger was spreading very rapidly in Gaza, Konyndyk said. According to reports from the World Food Program, by mid-November only 10 percent of the necessary food items were reaching Gaza through the Rafah border with Egypt, which at the time was the only open border crossing. +
++The amount of aid that has entered since has been irregular and is not nearly enough to sustain the population regardless. +
++“One-fourth of calories needed is what’s getting in,” Tak Igusa, professor of civil and systems engineering at Johns Hopkins University, a contributor to a joint Johns Hopkins and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine report on death projections in Gaza due to the war, told Vox. “So just imagine having one-fourth of what you usually eat for such a long duration. And it’s getting worse.” +
++The Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli military unit charged with overseeing civilian matters in Gaza and the West Bank, told Vox in a statement that it does not block entry of humanitarian aid to Gaza. +
++While Israel is no longer maintaining an all-out blockade as a matter of policy, accounts from NGOs on the ground show that in practice Israel prevents huge amounts of aid from entering. +
++Oxfam published a report this week accusing Israel of deliberately doing so, with aid trucks waiting an average of 20 days to enter and Israel rejecting a warehouse’s worth of supplies, including oxygen, incubators, water, and sanitation equipment. +
++James Elder, a spokesperson for UNICEF, described to Vox witnessing plentiful aid, ready and waiting to cross into the region — then seeing only a dozen trucks cross through. +
+ ++Ciarán Donnelly, the International Rescue Committee’s senior vice president for crisis, response, recovery, and development, told Vox that the organization’s partners on the ground tasked with delivering medical supplies and food to Gaza have experienced delays due to Israel’s “complicated, burdensome system of often arbitrary checks on supplies that are being brought in across the land border through Rafah.” +
++“It has taken us an inordinate amount of time to be able to get those supplies in,” he said, even if the process has sped up somewhat recently. +
++COGAT said that it requires a permit to bring in certain “dual-use equipment” intended for civilian use but that could be repurposed for military purposes. Food products are not included in the list of such equipment and are admitted to Gaza after screening without a permit, the agency said. But water testing kits and chlorine, which is necessary for treating water, have been restricted, and there are reports that at least some food items, including dates, have also been caught in bureaucratic limbo. +
++COGAT said that Israel has worked hard to improve its security screening capacity, but that “it appears that the most significant hurdle in the way of delivering the humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip residents is the United Nations organizations’ capacity to collect and distribute the humanitarian aid inside the Gaza Strip.” +
++But the UN, and particularly the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, has been a target of Israel for years for its perceived anti-Israel bias. UNWRA has recently been defunded by the US and other major donor countries over allegations that some of its workers participated in the October 7 attacks. That has real consequences: UNWRA is the “mainstay of aid administration in Gaza and it’s not possible to replace it,” Donnelly said, adding that any of the organization’s workers suspected of engaging in violence should be investigated. +
++The fighting has also made distribution difficult, with the bombardment of infrastructure — including food infrastructure such as bakeries and flour mills — and the attacks on civilians and aid operations, Donnelly said. Israel has also accused Hamas of stealing aid; however, the US envoy overseeing the delivery of aid said in February that Israel had provided “no specific evidence of diversion or theft of assistance.” +
++Famines were supposed to be in decline worldwide — but not in Gaza +
++The speed at which Gaza has reached its current depth of food insecurity is practically unheard of in the 21st century. +
++“I can’t think of another situation in which you have the entire population of an area in this level of food insecurity in such a short space of time,” Donnelly said. +
++Famines have become rarer because the world produces far more food than is necessary to feed the global population, and humanitarian networks have stepped up to address gaps in access. Though the world is starting to see the effects of climate change driving global hunger, most modern famines tend to have political causes. Those include wars and authoritarian rule, which can magnify the destructive effects of natural disasters on the food supply. +
++The IPC has only officially designated two famines since its founding in 2004: the 2011 famine in Somalia and the 2017 famine in South Sudan. But there have also been more recent food crises that threatened to become famines. +
++Somalia, for example, was again on the brink of famine in 2022 and 2023. An escalating decades-long conflict made the country increasingly reliant on grain imports from Russia and Ukraine, where supply chains have been disrupted due to the ongoing war there. Humanitarian workers have faced difficulty reaching certain parts of Somalia controlled by armed insurgent groups where there were reports of food deliveries being burned and water sources being poisoned or eliminated. +
++Those human-made problems compounded the effects of Somalia’s worst drought in 40 years and the later severe flooding that displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Though the situation has improved, nearly a quarter of Somalia’s population is still facing acute food insecurity in 2024. +
++Unlike in Somalia, however, the looming famine in Gaza has no natural causes. +
++The share of Palestinians in Gaza facing the highest levels of food insecurity as defined by the IPC system makes this one of the worst acute hunger crises in recent memory. Even at the peak of the crisis in Somalia and amid the ongoing civil war in Yemen, there was not such a high concentration of people experiencing crisis and emergency levels of food insecurity and famine. +
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++Famine in Gaza would lead to even more death +
++If the food insecurity crisis continues on its current trajectory, more Palestinians in Gaza will die of hunger. There is also the threat of infectious diseases, which should be easily preventable, attacking the weakened immune systems of hungry people. +
++“What happens after famine is really simple: People die in very large numbers,” Donnelly said. “The cause of deaths will start to shift. Whereas the majority of the 31,000 deaths so far have been from the conflict, what we will see is not just large numbers of people dying of hunger, but dying of preventable diseases, particularly children.” +
++Those diseases include diarrhea, pneumonia, measles, cholera, and meningitis — “diseases that people don’t need to be dying from in the 21st century,” he added. Similarly, some of the 43,000 excess deaths that occurred during Somalia’s droughts in 2022 were likely from such diseases. +
++Researchers at Johns Hopkins University project that by August, absent a ceasefire, the number of excess deaths in Gaza — including from disease outbreaks — could reach 67,000 and potentially exceed 85,000 if there’s an escalation in the conflict. And an escalation seems likely: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims he has no choice but to order an imminent ground invasion of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost region. +
++The Johns Hopkins researchers also estimate that as many as 46 percent of children in Gaza between the ages of 6 months and 5 years could suffer from malnutrition by August. That would represent a nearly 16-fold increase from the prewar rate of malnutrition. +
++NGOs, the United Nations, and international law experts have warned that Israel’s direct role in Gaza’s acute hunger crisis could amount to a war crime. +
++The Biden administration has insisted to its ally Israel that more humanitarian aid must be allowed into Gaza and, absent its cooperation, is coordinating airdrops of food into Gaza and constructing a port on the coast to facilitate international aid shipments by sea — moves that will provide some small help, but that some critics say simply cannot match the scale and immediacy of the need. +
++“The airdrops and the recent amount of food coming in through World Central Kitchen — every little bit helps,” Paul Spiegel, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, told Vox. But “the US plan to have a pier — that may take another four to six or even eight weeks to develop that. It’s too long. And so to address the extreme situation right now, there needs to be a massive amount of trucks coming in and it can only be through land.” +
++After vetoing multiple ceasefire proposals in the UN Security Council, the US on Thursday proposed a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire; it failed during a Friday vote, vetoed by Russia and China. +
++While that presents a significant shift in US policy over the nearly six months of the war, the White House has failed to use the real, powerful leverage it has to push for a ceasefire or even more aid — leverage that could include curtailing weapons shipments and funding to Israel, as many advocates have pointed out. +
++“The US has resorted to these expensive, complicated, frankly desperate workarounds to get aid into Gaza and to be seen as getting aid into Gaza,” Brian Finucane, senior adviser for the US program at the International Crisis Group, told Vox. +
++And what limited pressure the US has put on Israel does not appear to be dissuading Netanyahu’s government from proceeding with a likely incursion into Rafah. If that does happen, things are only likely to get worse, meaning more preventable deaths. +
++“So many, many warnings have been made,” Elder said. “And history will judge very, very poorly those who had the decision-making power — and we must be very clear, children are suffering, children are dying, dehydrating to death, because of decisions made by those in power. Children’s pain is avoidable. Their loss is avoidable.” +
++A version of this story was featured in Vox’s daily flagship newsletter, Today, Explained. If you’re interested in receiving more stories like it — plus all the day’s key news — sign up here. +
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++The Court’s decision could potentially undermine over 300 January 6 prosecutions, including Trump’s. +
++According to the Justice Department, Joseph Fischer texted his boss before the January 6 insurrection to tell him that he might need to post bail. The accused insurrectionist also allegedly warned that the protest at the US Capitol “might get violent,” and he allegedly wrote that “they should storm the capital and drag all the democrates [sic] into the street and have a mob trial.” +
++When the day of the insurrection came, Fischer allegedly yelled “Charge!” before running and crashing into a line of police inside the Capitol. The Justice Department says that video footage “shows at least one police officer on the ground after [Fischer’s] assault.” Fischer was only in the Capitol for four minutes, according to the DOJ, before he was “forcibly removed.” +
++Fischer was arrested after the FBI identified him based on a video he posted on Facebook that showed him inside the Capitol on January 6. +
++More than three years later, however, Fischer has yet to be tried. The criminal proceeding against him has been tied up in appeals after a Trump-appointed trial judge ruled that one of the criminal laws Fischer is charged with violating must be read very narrowly. That ruling is now being reviewed by the Supreme Court, in a case called Fischer v. United States. +
++The Supreme Court will hear this case next month. +
++The statute at issue in Fischer provides that anyone who “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so” commits a serious federal crime and can be imprisoned for up to 20 years. (In practice, someone convicted under this statute will likely receive far less than a 20-year sentence. Federal judges normally rely on guidelines written by the US Sentencing Commission when handing down criminal penalties, rather than mechanically issuing the maximum sentence.) +
++According to the Justice Department, “approximately 330 defendants have been charged with violating” this statute after the January 6 insurrection. One of them is Donald Trump. +
++Many of these defendants, including Fischer and Trump, have also been charged under other criminal statutes. And the approximately 330 defendants charged with obstructing an official proceeding are only about a quarter of all January 6 defendants. So, if the Supreme Court embraces Fischer’s narrow reading of the obstruction law, that would undermine many January 6 prosecutions, but it is unlikely to sabotage the entire effort to bring the insurrectionists to justice. +
++The overwhelming majority of judges have read the obstruction statute broadly enough to encompass the January 6 defendants. As the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit noted in its opinion saying that Fischer could be charged under this statute, several federal appellate courts “have applied the statute to reach a wide range of obstructive acts.” +
++Similarly, of the 15 federal trial judges who’d heard January 6 cases, “no fewer than fourteen district judges in this jurisdiction have adopted the broad reading of the statute urged by the government to uphold the prosecution of defendants who allegedly participated in the Capitol riot.” Of these 15 judges, only Judge Carl Nichols, the judge who heard Fischer’s case, disagreed with this consensus view. +
++Meanwhile, one other judge, Trump appointee Gregory Katsas, dissented from the DC Circuit’s decision. So that’s two judges against the overwhelming consensus of their colleagues. Katsas’s and Nichols’s view is hard to summarize, but they argue that the obstruction statute applies “only to acts that affect the integrity or availability of evidence,” such as if Fischer had impeded a government proceeding by destroying a document. +
++In any event, a critical mass of the justices apparently felt that the Katsas and Nichols arguments were persuasive enough that this question should be reviewed by the Supreme Court. And so the Court will now weigh whether to accept the mainstream view of the obstruction statute or the outlier view embraced by two of Trump’s judges. +
++The two competing readings of the obstruction statute, explained +
++To understand the two competing interpretations of the obstruction statute, it’s helpful to be familiar with its full text. It provides that: +
++++
+
- Whoever corruptly— + +
+
+
- alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding; or + +
+
+
- otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so, + +
+shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. +
+
+Much of the disagreement between judges who read the statute broadly and judges like Nichols and Katsas turns on the proper meaning of the word “otherwise.” +
++As the DC Circuit held in its opinion adopting DOJ’s reading of the statute, “the word ‘otherwise’ has been given its common meaning of ‘in a different manner’ when used in similarly structured statutes.” So subsection (1) covers obstruction of a government proceeding involving documents, while subsection (2) covers obstruction of such a proceeding that is achieved through some means other than destroying or manipulating a document. +
++Judge Katsas, meanwhile, read the word “otherwise” to mean the opposite. In his dissent, he accuses the Justice Department of “dubiously read[ing] otherwise to mean ‘in a manner different from,’ rather than ‘in a manner similar to.’” So, under Katsas’s reading of this word, subsection (2) only covers obstruction that is similar to destruction or manipulation of a document. It doesn’t cover a violent attempt to shut down a congressional proceeding by storming the Capitol. +
++As Judge Florence Pan, the author of the DC Circuit’s Fischer decision, notes in her opinion, Katsas’s reading of this word “otherwise” is at odds with at least two dictionaries. She quotes from the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of the word (“[i]n another way or ways; in a different manner; by other means; in other words; differently”) and from Black’s Law Dictionary’s definition (“[i]n a different manner; in another way, or in other ways”). +
++Yet, while Katsas’s reading of the obstruction statute is counterintuitive, it is less ridiculous than it might seem. The Supreme Court has sometimes said that seemingly unambiguous statutes can be read in ways that are, well, not the same way that an ordinary English speaker would read the law’s text. In their brief, Fischer’s lawyers rely heavily on a Supreme Court decision that did so. +
++Yates v. United States (2015) concerned a criminal statute that targets anyone who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object” with the intent to obstruct a federal investigation or proceeding. +
++The defendant was a commercial fisherman who caught undersized red groupers, then ordered a crew member to toss these fish overboard “to prevent federal authorities from confirming that he had harvested undersized fish.” The question in Yates was whether these undersized fish are a “tangible object” within the meaning of the federal statute. +
++This question divided the justices into three different camps, and not along familiar partisan lines. Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, wrote a dissent for herself and three of her Republican colleagues, arguing that the term “tangible object” should be given its ordinary meaning: “physical objects,” including fish. +
++Meanwhile, liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the Court’s lead opinion for herself and a bipartisan group of three other justices, arguing that the words accompanying “tangible object,” which deal with records and documents, matter. +
++According to Ginsburg, a court should “avoid ascribing to one word a meaning so broad that it is inconsistent with its accompanying words,” and thus the term “tangible object” should be read “to refer, not to any tangible object, but specifically to the subset of tangible objects involving records and documents.” (Justice Samuel Alito wrote a brief tiebreaking opinion, which concluded that the question in Yates “is close” but that largely agreed with Ginsburg’s reading of the statute.) +
++In any event, Fischer’s lawyers argue that his case is similar to Yates. So, just as Justice Ginsburg determined that the term “tangible object” must be read similarly to “its accompanying words,” Team Fischer argues that the phrase “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding” must be read similarly to subsection (1)’s reference to “a record, document, or other object.” +
++Is that a persuasive argument? Well, again, the overwhelming majority of judges to consider the obstruction statute have rejected a narrow reading and have read subsection (2) in the same way an ordinary English speaker would read it. +
++But Yates, at least, demonstrates how courts can sometimes read seemingly unambiguous statutory provisions in counterintuitive ways. And it potentially provides a roadmap for justices who want to write an opinion giving aid and comfort to the January 6 defendants. +
++The Supreme Court may also home in on the obstruction statute’s use of the word “corruptly” +
++The third judge on the DC Circuit panel was also a Trump appointee, Justin Walker. Unlike Katsas, however, Walker did not attempt to read the obstruction statute to exonerate January 6 defendants. Instead, Walker focused on the statute’s language saying that it only applies to someone who “corruptly” seeks to obstruct an official proceeding. +
++Walker worried that, if the word “corruptly” were read too broadly, then the obstruction statute could potentially be read to encompass “lawful attempts to ‘influence’ congressional proceedings,” such as “protests or lobbying.” To prevent this outcome, Walker argued that the word “corruptly” should be defined to mean that a defendant acted “with an intent to procure an unlawful benefit either for himself or for some other person.” +
++This interpretation should not hinder any January 6 prosecutions as the whole point of the January 6 insurrection was to procure an unlawful benefit for Donald Trump: a second presidential term. But it is possible that some of the justices will share Walker’s concern that the obstruction statute can be read too broadly and interpret the word “corruptly” to eliminate this problem. +
++Major reform on how the US gives money to other countries is breezing through the House with bipartisan support. +
++Today’s Congress is not exactly a well-oiled machine. Even picking a speaker has proven to be incredibly difficult for the House, which took as many floor votes on the matter in 2023 alone as in the previous 36 years combined. +
++But there’s one issue in which Congress has shown a surprising facility for bipartisan, bicameral cooperation: foreign aid. +
++Last year saw a historic deal to greatly increase funding for global health efforts, especially those targeting AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis — which together kill some 2.5 million people a year — as well as new bipartisan legislation introduced to reform the way the US Agency for International Development (USAID), America’s leading foreign aid agency, works. +
++2024 promises more bipartisan collaboration on the issue. This past week, Reps. Sara Jacobs (D-CA) and Cory Mills (R-FL) and Sens. Christopher Coons (D-DE), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Joni Ernst (R-IA), and Pete Ricketts (R-NE) introduced the Locally-Led Development and Humanitarian Response Act, another measure to reform USAID. Introduced in the House on March 19, it already passed the Foreign Affairs Committee by a unanimous voice vote on March 20. +
++The bill is meant to push USAID to distribute more of its budget to local groups in the countries where it works. The basic case for using more local groups is simple. US aid spending currently goes largely to a small group of very large contractors that are insulated from evaluation and tend toward bloated programs. +
++Giving the money instead to small local organizations would not only help develop civil society in developing countries, but likely achieve better outcomes at a lower cost. A recent review by development research group the Share Trust estimated that funding aid through local groups is roughly 32 percent more cost-effective than funding groups based in rich countries, largely because salaries and overhead in rich countries are significantly higher. +
++This isn’t new: USAID administrators going back decades have promised more funding for local programs. Raj Shah, Obama’s first USAID administrator, had a push called “Local Solutions.” Mark Green, who led the agency under Trump, had the New Partnership Initiative, with similar goals. +
++Local funding, however, is still the exception. The agency distributed $38.8 billion in fiscal year 2022, or about $30 billion excluding Ukraine aid. But that same year, only 10.2 percent of funds went to local partners: “organizations, firms, and individuals based in the countries in which we work.” Current administrator Samantha Power has pledged to increase that share to 25 percent by next year and 50 percent by 2030, ambitious targets that will be challenging to hit. +
++The Locally-Led Development and Humanitarian Response Act is meant to move toward that goal by clearing out red tape, some of it imposed by past acts of Congress, to make it easier for small local organizations to apply for support from USAID. Specifically, it: +
+-
+
- +Lets groups apply for money in languages other than English, sparing them translation costs + +
- +Grants more flexibility in accounting systems, so groups using systems common outside the US can still apply + +
- +Allowing late registrations on the System for Award Management, a federal government-wide platform for paying vendors + +
- +Lets USAID missions restrict bids to local groups on projects costing up to $25 million; currently only projects under $5 million can be restricted to local groups + +
- +Increases the share of grants allowed to be spent on administrative costs/overhead from 10 percent to 15 percent + +
+The last bit, allowing higher overhead charges, may seem on its face like a problem. After all, money spent on overhead is money not spent on direct aid. But the change is meant to address an inequity in how local organizations are currently treated compared to big contractors. +
++Right now, small local groups “only really get 10 percent of the contract for overhead,” Rep. Jacobs said in an interview, “whereas big organizations negotiate larger overhead costs and get more money for overhead.” Boosting the share to 15 percent is meant to provide an equal playing field. +
++Erin Collinson, director of policy outreach at the Center on Global Development and a development policy expert not involved in drafting the bill, argues it would be a real step forward, highlighting the changes to the overhead rate (technically called the “de minimis indirect cost rate”) as significant. “These are very much things that the agency is trying to work through,” she said of the bill’s provisions. “It sends the right kinds of signals that Capitol Hill is on board with this.” +
++The bill has considerable civil society backing from groups like Catholic Relief Services and the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network and is recent enough that I was not able to find any outright opponents. Existing vendors have natural reasons to fear the legislation, but they could also scheme to work around it. +
++Jacobs raised the prospect of large contractors hiring a token number of foreign workers, changing their names, incorporating small subsidiaries, and similar moves, to try to claim money being reserved for local groups. She concedes that USAID and Congress will have to exercise constant oversight to prevent these incumbent firms from undermining the reform. +
++But with the bill already through its House committee and garnering the backing of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans in both houses already, Jacobs is optimistic. “We think it has a really good shot of becoming law this year,” Jacobs said. “I know many people don’t think we can get anything done. Hopefully, this is one proof point that we can still do some big things.” +