No more starvation, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing genocide. Let Gaza Live.

________________________________

As the Israeli military is systematically destroying everything essential to human survival in Gaza, we have a moral obligation to name Zionism as the root cause behind this state-made famine and to mobilize every effort to end this genocide. Zionism, the ideology underpinning the Israeli state, has always aimed to create an ethnostate with maximum land and minimum Palestinians.

________________________________

Claims of increased food and medical aid reaching Gaza are either completely bogus or so greatly exaggerated as to be irrelevant. What is getting in is more symbolic than real, just another way to to respond to growing global disgust, anger and disapproval of the U.S.-Israeli genocide unfolding in Gaza. In the past few days, understanding that their support for Israel’s policies is increasingly being compared to the Nazi genocides of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Soviets, homosexuals, and Marxists of all stripes etc., Western governments have tried – unsuccessfully I might add – to begin to distant themselves from the bitter fruit of their policies.

Much of the world is aware – and horrified – that Israel’s policies of genocide in Gaza and profound racism against Palestinians could not be undertaken without the aid and support of the Trump Administration (and Biden Administration before it) as well as European governments of U.K, France, Germany and Italy. Their attempt to justify these murderous policies by claiming they are opposing Hamas and not the Palestinian people as a whole are wearing thin to a world watching children starve to death or being blown to bits, to the thousands of United Nations aid volunteers whose trucks that have been waiting for months to gain entrance to Gaza.

The current feeble efforts – dropping food packages from the air haphazardly as is starting up again – might have minor public relations value but hardly addresses the starvation setting in on Gaza’s 2.1 million residents. The United Nations has condemned airdrops on Gaza, warning they risk killing the starving Palestinians they are intended to help.  Dumping food packages from the back of pickup trucks onto the ground and forcing people already dying of hunger to fight frantically among themselves for such crumbs as the misnamed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation does. is not only degrading but is, in itself, barbaric, a weaponization of aid. There is never enough to feed even in need1/100 of those in need. It little more than a key element in the U.S-Israeli systematic genocide against the Palestinian people.

How bad is the situation in Gaza? Death by starvation deepens.

“85% of Gaza’s population have entered the ‘fifth stage’ of malnutrition — the most critical and dangerous phase, which is often irreversible even if food becomes available in the future,” says a Palestinian reporter. Palestinians are now collapsing in the streets and dying of hunger because the Israeli government refuses to allow in food, water, or medicine. And the limited food distribution points are increasing sites of massacre, with Israeli forces firing at Palestinians lined up for food, reports a Palestinian photojournalist. This isn’t just starvation, it’s mass extermination by hunger. “There is no case since World War II of starvation that has been so minutely designed and controlled,” says Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation, speaking to Democracy Now!

At least 71 children have died of malnutrition since the beginning of the Israeli military’s genocide, while an additional 60,000 are suffering from symptoms of malnutrition, the Palestinian Health Ministry says. Yet the true death toll is undoubtedly far higher,

Meanwhile, the Israeli government continues to block hundreds of trucks loaded with life-saving food and aid at the Egyptian border. At the same time, the Israeli military continues to carry out deadly attacks on Palestinian civilians at US-backed “humanitarian” death traps, killing over 60 Palestinians in northern Gaza just yesterday as they tried to access food. The Israeli military’s campaign of starvation is more catastrophic and life-threatening than ever before.

As the Israeli military is systematically destroying everything essential to human survival in Gaza, we have a moral obligation to name Zionism as the root cause behind this state-made famine and to mobilize every effort to end this genocide. Zionism, the ideology underpinning the Israeli state, has always aimed to create an ethnostate with maximum land and minimum Palestinians.

How can it be argued that Israel has a plan to starve the people of Gaza and that the current starvation there is not an accident? Easy. The Israeli government itself is telling us so. Although one could site many other statements of Israeli intent to wipe out the entire Palestinian population of Gaza, one of the latest captures the spirit of Israel’s genocidal campaign, that of Israeli Heritage Minister, Amichai Eliyahu, who a few days ago admitted that Israel is advancing the destruction of Gaza and that the Strip will be made.  Jewish fascist that Eliyahu is, he gleefully continues “The [Israeli] government is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out. Thank God, we are wiping out this evil … all Gaza will be Jewish”. Predictably – Netanyahu has recently said the same (“There is no starvation in Gaza, no policy of starvation in Gaza”) – Eliyahu denies that Gazans are not getting enough food. “There is no hunger in Gaza,” he said.
But we don’t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip. Let the world worry about it.”

How bad is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)? 

Can’t get much worse actually than GHF – a part of the U.S. Israeli Gaza genocide program masked as a humanitarian food distribution organization, not just the “weaponization” of humanitarian aid but its full blown Nazification. It is essentially a criminal enterprise and as such is an integral element of the U.S.-Israel plan for ethnic cleansing and genocide of Gaza. Nothing less. Over 1000 Palestinians, many who have walked as far as ten, twenty kilometers for a food package, have been shot and killed by Gaza Humanitarian Foundation “employees,” many of whom are little more than mercenaries, former snipers. Others have been gassed by the IDF from the air or machine gunned to death. Key to the U.S.-Israeli ethnic cleansing strategies is the eliminate the United Nations and its well-tested humanitarian relief organizations so vital to Gaza in the past. This has been accomplished by alleging that the United Nations relief effort in Gaza is run by Hamas, although no proof of this allegation has been provided.

While the U.S. gives political support to this smearing; Israel prevents U.N. relief efforts from entering Gaza. Previously there were over 400 U.N. relief points in Gaza, all of which have been eliminated. United Nations efforts to regain access to Gaza to provide aid have been rejected by Israel. The United Nations organization that has organized Gaza (and other Palestinian relief) is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or “UNRWA”. In support of Israel’s genocidal plans for Gaza, the Trump Administration and Biden Administration before it has done everything possible to discredit UNRWA, get it kicked out of Gaza and replace it with their own self-made monster, Gaza Humanitarian Fund. Trump destroys an efficient, professional aid organization effective in relief work with the totally useless and murderous GHF; this is necessary, the logic goes to accelerate the suffering and genocide by limiting denying Gazans needed food and medical aid delivered by an agency scraped together by U.S. Neo-Cons and the likes of Miriam Adelson.  There is NO pressure from the Trump Administration to reinstate UNRWA in Gaza.

Thus 400 U.N. aid stations have been reduced to 1 – that of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. A former GHF guard, an admitted mercenary, spoke about what he saw at the GHF station – essentially a concentration camp. He cited the unprecedented lethal force used against unarmed, innocent civilians. The term “concentration camp” is not an exaggeration. The GHF site is scheduled to be exactly that, a place for all Gaza Palestinians to be herded to where 500,000 people will be concentrated and won’t be allowed to leave unless they agree to leave Gaza permanently.

In a signed statement, drawing attention to the war crimes GHF is committing, 115 international organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, Mercy Corps and Save the Children, have warned that a mass starvation epidemic in Gaza has already unfolded. While Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu denies that starvation is taking place in Gaza or that it is an Israeli policy, these organizations warn of “record rates of acute malnutrition,” and describe the dire food shortage in Gaza as “mass starvation”. Speaking obliquely of GHF’s actions the organizations involved warn that “some aid workers are now joining food lines in Gaza, saying they are “risking being shot just to feed their families.” The letter blamed Israeli restrictions and “massacres” at aid distribution points. Witnesses, health officials and the U.N. human rights office say Israeli forces have repeatedly fired on crowds seeking aid, killing more than 1,000 people. Israel says its forces have only fired warning shots and that the death toll is exaggerated. Repeated deadly shootings around aid distribution centers have killed hundreds, according to the United Nations. The starvation campaign includes shutting off Gaza water supplies (controlled by Israel). World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press conference Wednesday, “90% of Gaza’s population face difficulty accessing water.”

The Gaza Genocide and the Broader Geo-political perspective.

The Trump Administration’s feigned concern for Gazan Palestinians (or those in the West Bank) belies their actions – continued arming of Israel, providing political cover and unending financial aid. The main point that needs to be made that despite a continued growth of opposition here in the United States to Israel’s Gaza genocide, that there are no signs – a few empty comments and editorials to the contrary aside – that the United States is doing anything to temper the savage, sadistic beast that is Israel. None whatsoever. The general strategy of denying the Palestinians a state in any form continues, the genocide in Gaza, increased ethnic cleansing in the West Bank have intensified. Israel’s role as a a murderous U.S. aircraft carrier doing Washington’s regional dirty work has, if anything, intensified. Israel’s role in the implosion and partition of Syria continues and through Syria now, Israel is also targeting Iraq and Iran. Lebanon is being threatened. The region’s “democratization” is little more than a cover for the continuation of Washington’s divide and conquer policies, the continued partitioning of the region which has characterized both British colonial and U.S. colonial and neo-colonial policies there as well. All is not bleak as the emergence of the Axis of Resistance suggests. A loose coalition of practical but not ideological coordination it has proven to be an adversary that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv can ignore, and the Axis has limited the U.S.-Israeli regional expansionist plans and at times given both something of a bloody nose. Neither Trump nor Netanyahu have the kind of free hand without consequences that they have enjoyed unti recently.

And Gaza, the broader fate of Palestine, has emerged, through its suffering and its resistance to be the human rights challenge of the world entire.