One of the most grisly humanitarian crises in history is happening right now in Gaza. The Israeli military has reduced the enclave to ruins with constant bombing—killing perhaps 59,000 people in the process, at least three-quarters of them civilians, and 18,000 of them children. Gaza’s economy is buried in the rubble, and it is desperately short of food, water, and medicine. Thousands of tons of aid are sitting just miles away from Gaza’s border, but the Israeli government refuses to let most of it through. On the contrary, at the handful of aid stations that remain, Israeli troops are routinely massacring dozens of people queueing for food. A total of 1,000 people have been killed seeking food since May, according to the United Nations, mostly near sites operated by the shady American contractor Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has taken over aid distribution from the U.N.
Ross Smith, director of emergency preparedness and response for the United Nations World Food Programme, recently said that “a quarter of the population [in Gaza] is facing famine-like conditions. Almost 100,000 women and children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and need treatment as soon as possible.” He added that WFP has enough supplies staged outside Gaza to provide for the whole population for two months, but the Israeli military will not let them in remotely fast enough. The Washington Post reports: “Nearly 1 in 3 people are going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations, and hospitals are reporting rising deaths from malnutrition and starvation. In a video filmed Tuesday inside Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, families fretted over babies with distended bellies and tiny fists that they clenched as they cried.”
Agence France-Presse, the French news organization, recently published an editorial explaining that its last few freelancers in Gaza are starving to death. And given that they are paid a monthly salary, it’s a safe bet that almost everyone else is doing worse.
Israel’s Minister of Heritage Amichay Eliyahu recently told a radio interviewer, “There is no nation that feeds its enemies … the British didn’t feed the Nazis, nor did the Americans feed the Japanese, nor do the Russians feed the Ukrainians now.” (For the record, Britain and America did feed their respective prisoners during World War II.) The Israeli government is “rushing toward Gaza being wiped out,” Eliyahu added.
In short, the Israeli government, with considerable support and backing from the United States, is deliberately and explicitly causing a famine in Gaza, and for good measure gunning down starving Gazans as they beg for their lives.
The endgame for Israel’s war against Palestine is coming into view: a Greater Israel, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River (and perhaps beyond), created by the destruction of Palestine and the genocide of its people. Unless Israel is stopped, Gaza will be bombed and starved until the entire population is either dead or shipped off somewhere. Then the West Bank will receive the same treatment.
Indeed, the Israeli Knesset recently passed a “non-binding” resolution to formally annex the entire West Bank, by a 71-13 margin. That comes after decades of steady theft of Palestinian land and settler terrorism against West Bank residents, which has radically escalated since the brutal attacks of October 7th. About 1,000 West Bank Palestinians have been killed by settlers or the Israeli forces since the war started, and about 7,000 injured. Back in May, the Israeli government authorized the largest expansion of West Bank settlements in decades, and this Thursday, allocated an additional $275 million in settlement funding. On this course, the same bloody dialectic that led to the starvation of Gaza will be impossible to avoid.
It can’t be denied that there is a grim logic to this that stretches back to before Israel even existed. Early Zionist settlers faced the problem of people already living in the land they claimed as their own, and the solution in 1947 was to drive 750,000 Palestinians out of their homes. Then, in 1967, Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza, and since that time its primary security problem has been what to do with millions of people under Israeli control but without voting rights—that is, under an apartheid system—and the predictable resulting blowback.
“Get rid of them” is the final, most brutal solution, and everything Israel has done since October 7th has been consistent with that goal. It also has wide support among Israeli Jews: A poll Haaretz conducted in May found a whopping 82 percent supported expelling every Gazan, and 56 percent supported expelling Arab citizens of Israel itself (who make up about one-fifth of the official Israeli population). Forty-seven percent supported straight up murdering every single person in Gaza.
With public opinion this bloodthirsty, and a government full of outright genocidal racists that needs to keep perpetual war going to mask their own corruption, the only way Israel will be stopped is by severe outside pressure. That won’t come from America anytime soon—Joe Biden did almost nothing to stop the atrocities, and Donald Trump is encouraging Israel to commit more. European nations have condemned Israeli barbarity with increasing vehemence, but as yet have been markedly reluctant to take serious action.
That might not last forever, however. The EU accounts for a third of Israeli trade, and the EU’s top diplomat said recently that “all options are on the table” if Israel fails to live up to an agreement it struck with the EU to allow more aid in. Most of the Democratic Party leadership—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), along with Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Chris Coons (D-DE), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), and Adam Schiff (D-CA), recently had a warm meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu—are wildly out of step with Democratic voters, who now sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis by a 5-to-1 margin. The next Democratic president, if there is one, will almost certainly not be as dogmatically pro-Israel as Biden was.
But it remains to be seen if Western nations will ever apply sufficient pressure, and if so, whether it will be too late.