‘Lt. Col. Dor Yoetz isn’t exaggerating: Khirbet Khizaa, a Palestinian town that once housed over 15,000 people, no longer exists. A newly obtained photo shows the scale of the destruction. He joined battalion commander Meir Duvedvani who wiped most of it in Jan 2024- the two officers wiped it out. This is genocide.’ Credit: @ytirawi.
“This is the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded. That means children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”
In the ruins of gutted buildings, in tents pulverised by Israeli airstrikes, Palestinian men, women and children starve. Some collapse from hunger, others die of dehydration and malnutrition. Mothers cradle skeletal infants. Medical workers, overwhelmed and undersupplied, can do little for the emaciated who flood their wards. This is not collateral damage. This is Israeli policy.
The Israelis deny that famine is sweeping Gaza but in private they acknowledge it as a reality. From the earliest days of the war, Israeli officials made no secret of their intent to use starvation as a tool of war - not as a consequence of conflict, but as deliberate policy. On October 9, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant declared a “complete siege” of Gaza, stating: “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
That same week, Energy Minister (and later Foreign Minister) Israel Katz reinforced the blockade: “No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home... Humanitarianism for humanitarianism.” These were not rogue statements - they reflected state doctrine. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right settler leader with a long record of incitement, was even blunter: “Gaza should be flattened... no electricity, no fuel, no food, no water — nothing.” He has also said Gaza must be “repopulated” - a chilling euphemism for ethnic cleansing - and stated in August, 2024 that it “no one in the world would let us starve and thirst two million citizens, even though it may be just and moral.”
Former UN ambassador and Likud MK Danny Danon insisted that “there is no room for fuel, food, or any sympathy” until hostages were returned. Knesset member Tally Gotliv called for a complete halt to all humanitarian aid, declaring: “We owe Gaza nothing.” Even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while more guarded in his language, backed a strategy of total isolation, reportedly telling Likud colleagues that Gaza must be “starved of resources” to prevent Hamas from ever rebuilding. These statements form a consistent picture: the starvation of Gaza was not collateral damage - it was a calculated form of collective punishment, aimed at subjugating an entire population. In their words, Gaza’s famine was policy - not tragedy, but intention.
The army has responded in kind, deploying the resources to throttle Gaza. Record numbers of aid workers have been killed, including those delivering food and critical supplies to civilians. Israeli soldiers. By winter of 2023, it was estimated that 22% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been razed since the start of the conflict and 70% of Gaza’s fishing fleet has been reportedly sunk. The agricultral land that is now unusable has rised to an estimated 95%.
The spectre of men, women and children being slaughtered as they sought aid began long before the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation arrived in Gaza. One of the most horrific incidents was the “Flour Massacre” on February 29, 2024, when Israeli forces opened fire on thousands of starving civilians gathered around an aid convoy near Gaza City. At least 118 people were killed, and hundreds more wounded - many shot in the back as they tried to flee with sacks of flour. Witnesses and medical personnel described a scene of carnage, with Israeli tanks reportedly positioned to encircle the crowd.
Despite video evidence and survivor testimony, Israeli officials blamed the deaths on a stampede and insisted their soldiers acted in self-defence - a claim dismissed by human rights groups and UN observers. This was not an isolated case: similar attacks on aid seekers occurred in March and April, with multiple incidents of Israeli forces firing on civilians gathered near aid trucks or drop zones, even as hunger intensified. These killings have come to define a broader pattern in which the search for sustenance is criminalised, and survival itself is punished - reinforcing that in Gaza, even hunger can be a death sentence.
The farce surrounding the Gaza Humanitarian Organisation, armed U.S. mercenaries shooting civilians is but the extension of these crimes, and a support network for the Israeli army to continue butchering and humiliating civilians. The current orgy of killings form a brutal pattern: in Gaza, the search for food has been criminalised. Hunger itself is punished. Even aid corridors, nominally meant to preserve life, have become death traps.
Israeli officials have repeatedly claimed that Hamas is seizing humanitarian aid intended for civilians in Gaza - a narrative that has been widely amplified by media outlets, but consistently lacks credible evidence. These assertions, often made without verification, serve to justify the blocking of vital aid and deflect responsibility for the unfolding famine.
Israeli government spokespeople and military officials have alleged that convoys are being “diverted” or “commandeered” by Hamas, yet aid agencies on the ground, including the UN, WFP, and Red Crescent, have pushed back, stating there is no systematic looting by Hamas and that distribution networks are largely intact when access is granted.
The repetition of these claims - often based on isolated or unconfirmed incidents - forms part of a broader strategy to undermine trust in humanitarian corridors, frame Palestinians as complicit in their own suffering, and launder Israel’s starvation policy through a veil of plausible deniability. In reality, it is Israel’s siege, bombardment of convoys, targeting of aid workers, and bureaucratic strangulation of entry points that has caused Gaza’s humanitarian collapse - not the spectre of Hamas theft.
The murderous assault on Gaza long ago stopped being about the October 7 attacks and hostages. Israel has shattered Hamas’s military power in the enclave and significantly debilitated its fighting power and has given its allies, Hezbollah and Iran, bloody noses. The Lebanese paramilitary and Hamas’s conduit, given form by the Assad regime, has collapsed in Syria under its own corruption and exhaustion after 15 years of civil war.
Yet Israel marches on, exhausted, traumatised and traumatising in a red mist, bloodied as the world waits for it to come to its senses from the horror it has unleashed on the Middle East and the world. Territories, from Gaza to the West Bank to Lebanon to Syria, have been illegally seized, occupied and annexed.
Over 60,000 are dead in Gaza alone but the numbers are likely well over 100,000, when the missing, those dying from starvation, disease and dehydration, are accounted for. Thousands more are dead and maimed in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. For all the horrors of October 7, the Israeli death toll that day is now but a sliver of the devastation its army has unleashed. Any global sympathy - already tenuous given decades of occupation - has been squandered. Israel’s diplomatic soft power lies in ruins.
Military victories mean nothing if they are not converted into political solutions. But Israel has no partners for peace, no prospects for stability, and no plan beyond destruction. Inside, zealotry, economic crisis, and political paralysis eat away at the state. Zionism as an ideology has been hollowed out - replaced by Kahanism, a virulent strain of Jewish supremacy blending the racism of the Ku Klux Klan with the segregationism of apartheid South Africa. Projects like these can endure for years - but they rarely survive in the long run.
In razing Gaza to the ground out of spite - through torture, bombing, enforced disappearances, starvation, sexual violence, mass graves, and executions - Israel has not only committed atrocities, it has bound itself to them. In doing so, it becomes a pariah: a broken, isolated nation, shackled to its war crimes, feared but unloved, condemned and alone. It has deepened its embrace with the darkest forces of history and sown the seeds of its own undoing. Eventual collapse, whether in a decade or several centuries, is an inevitablity.
But the wheels of hunger have been turning for nearly two years now. This didn’t begin yesterday. On March 4, 2024, horrifying images circulated of 10-year-old Yazan al-Kafarneh - emaciated, hollow-eyed, starving - shortly before his death from malnutrition and lack of medical care. His photo spread across social media, a portrait of Gaza’s engineered descent into famine. That same week, UNICEF confirmed that 10 children had died from dehydration and hunger in Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza. Some families, driven beyond the limits of human endurance, had already begun to feed their children with grass, garbage, bird food, animal fodder, leaves. Others were slaughtering horses and donkeys to eat. Even the animals in Gaza’s zoos withered and died from starvation.
“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” wrote Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University. Melanie Ward, the director of Medical Aid for Palestinians, was even more blunt: “This is the fastest decline in a population's nutrition status ever recorded. That means children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.” These statements were issued over twelve months, and Israel’s allies in the United States and Europe have stood by as the Israeli army has intensified its siege of Gaza.
To invoke famine is to invoke history: the Armenian genocide, the Siege of Leningrad, the Great Bengal Famine, the Ethiopian famines of the 1980s, and the Holodomor - the engineered starvation of Ukrainians by Stalin’s regime in the 1930s. These were not accidents. They were acts of policy. So too is Gaza’s hunger. It is calculated. It is deliberate. It is, in the words of Holocaust and genocide scholar Raz Segal, “a textbook case of genocide unfolding in real time.”
There will come a reckoning. Whether through the International Court of Justice, where South Africa has accused Israel of genocide, or through the tribunal of history, this crime will not be forgotten. The images of starving children, the massacres perpetrated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the Israeli army as starving civilians came for bread, of aid workers killed for trying to feed the hungry - these will endure long after the missiles fall silent.
“There is a particular evil in watching people - children - waste away while denying them the means to live.”
For the current Israeli leadership and its decades-long military occupation, there is no return from this. The war crimes and crimes against humanity - from deliberate starvation to mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, and genocidal violence - have not only littered its campaign in Gaza and the West Bank; they have condemned it before history.
Benjamin Netanyahu will be remembered as the architect of Israel’s collapse - a man who sacrificed his country’s future and Palestine’s very existence at the altar of power. This famine is not a tragic event, but the bitter fruit of Netanyahu’s thirty-year descent through the corridors of politics, leaving behind a legacy of corruption, division, and death. Where he walks, ugliness follows: he has emboldened zealots, legitimised supremacists, dismantled the rule of law, and extinguished hope for peace.
Facing criminal prosecution and historic unpopularity, Netanyahu has clung to power like a tyrant on borrowed time, fanning the flames of genocide in Gaza to prolong his political life. He has incited ethnic cleansing, sabotaged ceasefires, and buried the two-state solution under the weight of settlements and apartheid.
This is not failure - it is design. Netanyahu has not just enabled Israel’s descent; he has choreographed it, weaponising fear, faith, and nationalism to turn a once-divided nation into a machine of annihilation. History will remember him not merely as Israel’s worst prime minister, but as a genocidal strongman who damned his people - and Palestine - to catastrophe. Netanyahu, like Walter White, is an arch manipulator and a practiced liar. He cloaks cruelty in strategy and mass suffering in the language of necessity.
Yet the rot runs deeper than him: Netanyahu is not an aberration, but the inevitable product of a settler-colonial project steeped in dispossession, myth, and messianic exceptionalism. He is both symptom and executioner.
It is the famine that may ultimately haunt us the most. Bombs are visible. Starvation is silent. It destroys not only bodies but the fabric of life itself. It hollows out futures, breaks families, and annihilates dignity. Starvation is not just a war crime - it is among the most intimate and prolonged forms of violence imaginable, reducing human life to the struggle for a single meal, a sip of clean water. There is a particular evil in watching people - children - waste away while denying them the means to live. It is slow death as spectacle. A society does not recover from that. Nor, now, can Israel.
The men and women who engineered this - who drew up siege maps, cut supply lines, blocked convoys, and watched children die with bureaucratic detachment - are damned. They are monsters in the truest, most literal sense of the word. And so too are those who excuse them: those who deflect, deny, distract, and rationalise.
Their complicity is not abstract - it is active. In excusing, justifying, lying, profiting from and even celebrating such suffering, they have plumbed the deepest strata of inhumanity. And nothing they say or do will ever scrub the stain from their souls.
History will not absolve us. The famine will speak. And it will ask: where were you, when Gaza starved to death?