For over one month, from July to August 2014, the world watched in horror as the Israeli military pounded the densely populated and impoverished territory of Gaza with bombs, missiles and shells, while deploying tens of thousands of troops against an entrapped population. The onslaught killed nearly 2,000 people, wounded over 10,000 more and left nearly half a million people displaced by the massive destruction of homes and basic infrastructure.

The Obama administration in the United States not only gave its full political support to Israel’s criminal war against the population of Gaza, it also provided the means for waging it. The US, which arms and finances Israel to the tune of billions of dollars a year, opened the huge cache of arms, known as the War Reserves Stock Allies-Israel, to restock the Israeli military’s depleted supplies of ammunition, mortar rounds, grenades and other weapons, in the middle of its war.

On July 18, 2014, the ICFI published a statement, “Oppose the Israeli invasion of Gaza,” which explained that, “What is unfolding is a calculated war crime against a defenceless population of 1.8 million Palestinians, who are trapped in the tiny strip of land of less than 200 square miles by the blockades imposed by the Zionist state in the north and east, and by the Egyptian regime in the south.”

It continued:

The actions of Netanyahu’s regime testify to the complete moral disintegration of the defenders of Zionism and the utter dead-end of its reactionary perspective of carving out a sectarian Jewish capitalist state in the Middle East. The Zionist attempt to channel the immense class and social tensions within Israel into crushing the decades-long resistance of the Palestinian population has assumed genocidal dimensions.