Gideon Levy

Israel’s plan for the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip is proceeding apace, maybe even better than expected. In addition to significant achievements in systematic killing and destruction already chalked up, the last few days have seen one more critical achievement: the deliberate starvation has started to yield results. 

The effects of this policy are spreading rapidly, felling victims in numbers that do not lag behind the number of deaths caused by shelling. People who don’t die while waiting for food have a good chance of succumbing to hunger.

The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza “Humanitarian” Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success. Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who don’t manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most of these are children and babies.

On Wednesday alone, 15 people died of hunger, including three children and a six-week-old baby. One hundred and two have died since the war began, including 80 children, with the graph on the upswing in recent days.

The pictures hidden from the public by Israel’s criminal local media, whose lack of coverage of Gaza will never be forgotten or forgiven, are seen by the rest of the world. These are pictures reminiscent of concentration camp survivors, pictures from the Holocaust. Concealing them is akin to denial of the phenomenon.

The skeletons of babies and infants, living and dead, whose bones stick out through wasted fat tissue or muscles that have withered, their eyes and mouths opened wide, their expressions dead.

They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies. Yes, this too is what has become of us.

Turning deliberate starvation into a legitimate and acceptable weapon among Israelis, whether through open support or through chilling indifference, is the most demonic stage so far in the war Israel has launched on the Gaza Strip.

It is also the only one for which one cannot invent any justification, excuses or explanations. Even Israel’s boundless propaganda apparatus can’t manage to find any. Starvation has become a legitimate weapon since it is another means for attaining the objective: ethnic cleansing.

One has to internalize this fact and view the continuation of the war in this light. Just as Israel benefits from the deaths caused by gunfire, it also gains from the hunger that kills hundreds. Only thus will it be possible to turn Gaza into a place that is unliveable, and only thus will its residents leave “willingly,” first to the “humanitarian” city, and from there to Libya, or God knows where.

Starvation is now visible on everyone. Palestinian journalists in Gaza who have not yet been shot to death by the IDF report that they have not eaten a thing for two or three days.

Even physicians from overseas spoke on Wednesday about what they had eaten, mainly what they hadn’t eaten. A Canadian doctor at the Nasser Hospital said that in the preceding two days she had only eaten one tiny bowl of lentils. She will not be able to continue caring for the sick and wounded this way. That too is good for Israel.

A team from Al-Jazeera accompanied a young man who went in search of food for his children. He searched and searched, until he found two bags of Israeli flour and a bottle of oil at a market stall. The price was hundreds of shekels a bag, and he returned home empty-handed, to his starving children. The TV studio then gave details of the three stages leading to death by starvation. This man’s children were at the second stage.

This deliberate starvation has turned this war into the most horrific of Israel’s wars, certainly the most criminal of them. We have never starved two million people this way.

However, there is only one thing that is worse than deliberate starvation: the indifference with which it is received in Israel. An hour and a half away by car from the location in which another baby, Yussef al-Safadi, died on Wednesday. His family couldn’t find any milk substitute for him.

While he died, Channel 12 was broadcasting a cooking show, and the ratings were excellent.

Republished from HAARETZ, 24 July 2025

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/07/the-disgrace-of-deliberate-starvation-israels-war-of-hunger-in-gaza/

Israelis do not see the images of skeletal corpses of Palestinian children who they have starved to death as a curse. They do not see the slain families they gun down at food hubs — designed not to deliver aid but lure starving Palestinians into a massive concentration camp in the south of Gaza in preparation for deportation — as a war crime. Israelis do not look at the savage bombing and shelling that kill or wound dozens of Palestinian civilians, where an average of 28 children die daily, as anything extraordinary. They do not see the wasteland of Gaza, pulverized by bombs and methodically being torn down by bulldozers and excavators, leaving virtually the entire population of Gaza homeless, as barbaric. They do not see the destruction of water purification plants, decimation of hospitals and clinics, where doctors and medical staff are often unable to work because they are weak from malnutrition, as savage. They do not blink at the assassinations of doctors as well as journalists, 232 of whom have been murdered for trying to document the horror.

Israelis have blinded themselves morally and intellectually. They view the genocide through the lens of a bankrupt media and political class that tells them only what they want to hear and shows them only what they want to see. They are intoxicated by the power of their industrial weapons and license to kill with impunity. They are drunk on self-adulation and the fantasy that they are the vanguard of civilization. They believe that the extermination of a people, including children, condemned as human contaminants, makes the world, especially their world, a happier and safer place.

They are the heirs of Pol Pot, the killers that carried out the genocides in East Timor, Rwanda and Bosnia and, yes, the Nazis. Israel, like all genocidal states — no population since World War II has been dispossessed and starved with such speed and ruthlessness – has a final solution that would have earned the stamp of approval from Adolf Eichmann.

Starvation was always the plan, the preordained final chapter of the genocide. Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies. It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of Oct. 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.

Over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers and U.S. mercenaries in the chaotic scramble to get one of the few food packages distributed during the brief blocks of time, usually an hour, at the four aid sites set up by the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to the U.N. Human Rights Office.

Once Gaza was turned into a moonscape after 21 months of saturation bombing, once Palestinians were forced to live in tents, under crude tarps or in the open air, once clean water, food and medical aid became nearly impossible to find, once civil society was obliterated, Israel began its grim campaign to starve the Palestinians out of Gaza.

One in three people in Gaza are going multiple days without eating, according to the U.N.

Starvation is not a pretty sight. I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took an estimated 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs — scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not.

I watched hundreds of skeletal figures, ghosts of human beings, trudge at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never got up. Many were the remains of entire families.

The starved lack enough calories to sustain themselves. They eat anything to survive — animal feed, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from constant diarrhea. They have trouble breathing because of respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it in a vain attempt to hold off the gnawing hunger pains.

Starvation reduces the iron needed to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, which affects heart and brain function. Anemia sets in. The body, in essence, feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.

It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.This is the future Israel has preordained for the two million people in Gaza.

But it is not the future Israelis see. They see paradise. They see an ethno-nationalist Jewish state where Palestinians, whose land they stole and occupied and whose people they have subjugated and forced into an apartheid existence, do not exist. They see cafes and hotels rising up where thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of bodies lie buried under the rubble. They see tourists frolicking on the Gaza beachfront, a vision enhanced by an Artificial Intelligence-generated video uploaded to social media by Israeli Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology, Gila Gamliel. It is what a Gaza devoid of Palestinians would look like, echoing the absurdist AI video posted by Donald Trump.

In the new video, carefree Israelis eat at seaside restaurants. Anchored in the sparkling Mediterranean are luxury yachts. Gleaming hotels and office high rises, including a Trump Tower, dot the beachfront. Attractive residential neighborhoods stand where now there are broken, jagged mounds of concrete. The video shows Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, as well as Trump and Melania, strolling along the seaside.

Gamliel, like other Israeli leaders and Trump, cynically uses the term “voluntary emigration” to describe the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. This omits the stark choice Israel actually offers the Palestinians — leave or die.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has called for a “security annexation” of the northern Gaza Strip and vowed that Gaza will become an “inseparable part of the State of Israel.” He made the remarks at a Knesset conference called “The Gaza Riviera — from vision to reality,” which presented proposals for the building of Jewish colonies in Gaza. Smotrich said Israel would “relocate Gazans to other countries,” and that Trump endorsed the plan.

Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, who once proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, declared that “All Gaza will be Jewish.” The Israeli government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu said. He described Palestinians as Nazis. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.’”

Genocidal killers embrace fantasies of eradicating a native population and expanding their ethnonationalist state. The Nazis carried out their genocidal assault, which included mass starvation, on Slavs, Eastern European Jews and other indigenous people, dismissed as Untermenschen, or subhumans. Colonists were then to be shipped to Central and Eastern Europe to Germanize the occupied territory.

These killers do not reckon with the darkness they unleash. The upscale beachfront properties dreamt of by Israel will never appear, just as the modern, exclusively Serb capital, with its golden domed cathedral, imposing presidency building, 15-story clock tower, state-of-the-art medical center and national theater with a 72-foot revolving stage was never built on the ruins of Bosnia.

Rather, there will be ugly apartment blocks, populated by the usual miscreants, proto-fascists, racists and mediocrities who live in the Jewish colonies in the West Bank. These ultranationalists, who have formed rogue militias to seize Palestinian land and joined the Israeli army in murdering over 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank since Oct. 7, will define Israel. They are the Israeli version of the 3-million-strong Pancasila Youth — Indonesia’s equivalent of the Brown Shirts or the Hitler Youth — that in 1965 helped carry out the genocidal mayhem that left half a million to one million dead.

These rogue militias, equipped with automatic weapons provided by the Israeli government, lynched Saifullah Musallet, a 20-year-old Palestinian-American, who was attempting to protect his family’s land two weeks ago. He is the fifth U.S. citizen killed in the West Bank since Oct. 7.

Once these Israeli goons and thugs are done with the Palestinians, they will turn on each other.

The genocide in Gaza signals the abolition, for Israelis as well as Palestinians, of the rule of law. It marks the obliteration of even the pretense of an ethical code. Israelis are the barbarians they condemn. If there is any warped justice in this genocide it is that Israelis, once they finish with the Palestinians, will be forced to live together in moral squalor.

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https://scheerpost.com/2025/07/27/chris-hedges-the-gaza-riviera/

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         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 SEE ALSO: https://sputnikglobe.com/20250727/hunger-death-toll-in-gaza-up-to-133---health-ministry-1122498652.html?

Gaza: Israeli soldiers admit destroying thousands of tons of humanitarian aid

by Mehmet Nuri Uçar, Mustafa MM Haboush  

Israeli soldiers have admitted destroying more than 1 trucks of humanitarian aid containing food, drinking water, and medical supplies, which were left to rot in the sun at the Kerem Abu Salim border crossing, where their entry into the Gaza Strip was blocked.

According to Israeli public broadcaster KAN, an officer confirmed that the aid was buried or burned, and that thousands of packages still awaiting delivery risk the same fate if their access to Gaza remains blocked.

"We buried everything in the ground. Some aid was also burned," he confessed.

This destruction is exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where famine is intensifying.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health reports 122 deaths from hunger and malnutrition since October 2023, including 83 children.

Images circulating on social media show people weakened by hunger, some fainting or unable to walk.

The World Food Programme warns that one-third of Gaza's residents are suffering from famine, with the risk of it spreading further.

Since March 2, Israel has blocked hundreds of aid trucks, refusing to implement ceasefire agreements, contributing to the deaths of thousands of civilians.

source: Anadolu Agency

https://en.reseauinternational.net/gaza-les-soldats-israeliens-admettent-avoir-detruit-des-milliers-de-tonnes-daide-humanitaire/

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.