Who, and what, to believe? The warnings coming from the UN, from every aid agency, and from governments normally friendly to Israel, that famine stalks Gaza – or the complacent denials of the crisis by Benjamin Netanyahu, who states that “you don’t see one, not one emaciated from the beginning of the war to the present”, and dismisses claims to the contrary as “the current fad, the current lie”, which “spreads like wildfire”?
Anyone in any doubt only needs to glance – and these are not easy for the eye to linger upon – at the heart-rending images of skeletal children in Gaza starving to death. The Israeli government has long refused to allow foreign media into the war zone in Gaza, a suspicious policy in itself, but that has not prevented journalists already there and in the region from revealing the harrowing truth about the situation.
What is happening in Gaza is obscene. As one UN official puts it, the Gaza Strip has become “an abyss”. It is an outrage that Israel, the occupying power ignoring its obligations to treat civilians properly, should behave in this manner; it is an even greater act of shame that the world should continue to tolerate it.
The recent deterioration in a situation already dire only adds to the credibility of the grave charges of crimes against humanity levelled at Israel at the International Court. The evidence is mounting. Indeed, the facts speak for themselves.
Since the last fragile ceasefire collapsed in March, the people of Gaza have been under continual bombardment; moved and moved again into “safe spaces” that are anything but; seen their last bits of infrastructure, notably hospitals, blown up; and now deprived of food and medicines.
For three months – until the very latest, pitifully small truck movements – all deliveries to the Gaza Strip were suspended by the Israeli authorities, with no food or medical supplies allowed to enter the enclave. On Wednesday, four people were reportedly killed at an aid distribution site in Rafa, where thousands of starving Palestinians overran fences and Israeli soldiers fired warning shots.
The UN agencies and charities best suited to deliver aid have been excluded by Mr Netanyahu, in favour of the ironically named Gaza Humanitarian Fund controlled by the Israeli authorities and using American armed guards, and which has proved hopelessly inadequate to the task. The fund’s chief, Jake Wood, has even resigned because it is “clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence, which I will not abandon”.
All of this only heightens emerging fears about what is unfolding in another of Israel’s occupied or controlled Palestinian Territories, the West Bank. Emboldened by the free hand the United States has given the Netanyahu government in Gaza, extremist ministers have been pushing for the legalisation of unlawful Israeli settlements on land properly owned by Palestinians.
Unlawful, that is, even under Israeli legislation, let alone international law and UN resolutions – simply another intentional and brazen violation of Israel’s obligations as an occupying power of areas taken during the 1967 war. Mr Netanyahu’s most nationalistic cabinet colleagues talk more freely about exercising a claim to Israeli “sovereignty” over the entire area, based on disputed history and not, in any case, founded in international conventions on the right to self-determination.
The forcible expulsion of the Palestinian people seems to be a policy option for the present government of Israel. It has not been discouraged by President Trump’s bizarre vision of turning a depopulated Gaza Strip into a Mediterranean beach resort, albeit one administered by the United States rather than Israel. Either way, it is not intended by either party to become part of an independent Palestinian state living in peace with its neighbour.
The clue to the way Israel has conducted its disproportionate and merciless war is given in the recent remark by Mr Netanyahu that he aims to make Hamas operatives “like fish without the water”, that “without the tool for governance which they use, and that’s basically […] the humanitarian aid that they loot”. True or not, that means the end of humanitarian aid on anything like the scale needed to sustain life.
A Hamas leader was a recent casualty of the Israeli airstrikes, but that does not justify the use of indiscriminate bombing, nor does it justify starving innocent people to death.
That such things are happening is obviously, and primarily, the responsibility of the administration that Mr Netanyahu heads, with any individual Israeli official or troops violating the laws of war. It has always been said, and rightly, that Israel has an inalienable right to defend itself, and it should have done so after the terrorist atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October. However, that does not mean, and never has meant, that Israel can act as it wishes, above humanitarian considerations and international law.
Administrations that have encouraged or abetted Israel also have a case to answer. Latterly, Western governments have begun to speak out, and take the mildest of diplomatic steps to exert some pressure – but not the Trump White House, which appears to regard any expression of sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people as vicious antisemitism.
While America is happy to allow Mr Netanyahu to carry on as he is, with only the vague hope of another ceasefire, it falls to other nations to do more to stop the crisis. It may already be too late to save all the lives now in jeopardy.
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