Gaza needs food and water immediately. There is no military excuse to deny the people of Gaza the basic conditions to maintain human life - Photo NPR
Genocide in Gaza Must Stop
By Nayyer Ali MD
Since the latest Hamas-Israel war began on October 7, 2023 with a brazen terror assault mostly against Israeli civilians, the Gaza Strip has been thoroughly devastated. Though most of the deaths occurred in the first three months, Israel has continued to pound Gaza with air strikes, artillery, tanks and infantry assaults. Hamas has responded by holding out to the bitter end, regardless of the consequences for the civilian population. The end result is a death toll that exceeds 2% of the population, and wounded that exceed 4%. These are catastrophic numbers just by themselves.
While Hamas has refused to surrender, Israel under Netanyahu has not carried out a strategy to quickly win the war. Instead, Israel has seemed content to keep the Palestinians in a state of total misery with no end in sight. Israel has the military might to sweep half of Gaza while filtering the civilian population into the other half, then reversing the process and thereby ensuring that Hamas is crushed and Israeli hostages still alive are released. But Israel has chosen to have no strategy whatsoever, either military or political. Can anyone explain how Netanyahu is planning to end this war?
Up to now, this column has been critical of Israel’s tactics and its lack of a political decision to pursue a two-state agreement with the Palestinians, an agreement which would require the Israelis to remove their settlers from the West Bank (the Israeli colonies in the West Bank are illegal under the Geneva Convention and must be disbanded) while the Palestinians will have to accept compensation for their refugees and not have a right of return to Israel itself. This is the only path that would allow a Jewish majority state and Palestinian state to exist side by side in equality in the land from the Jordan River to the sea. But this column has refrained from using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s Gaza policy.
Genocide though is what is now going on in Gaza. Israel cut off the flow of food to the two million people in Gaza in early March, stopping the flow of 600 trucks needed daily to feed the population. The inhabitants have quietly succumbed to slow motion starvation, going from three meals a day to two to one, and now there are entire families that are going days without food. The first deaths of children due to malnutrition are being reported, and images of clearly emaciated children are coming from Gaza. The true picture on the ground is almost certainly worse, but Israel has prevented international news organizations from entering Gaza to gather first hand knowledge.
Instead of hundreds of food distribution sites, Gaza has been reduced to just four. These sites are being terribly mismanaged by a US backed new NGO called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. They have no idea what they are doing, and not only have they not prevented the onset of famine conditions, the aid distribution sites are so poorly policed and run that over a thousand Palestinians have been killed as they scrambled for food. The Palestinians are starving to death and are then given a terrible choice of whether it is better to face the chaos of a GHF aid site knowing they could well be shot and killed by Israeli soldiers as they struggle to get enough food to feed their families, or simply continue to starve.
Israel has throughout this war accused Hamas of stealing food aid and selling it to raise funds for its own purposes. But a recent investigation by the Israelis themselves concluded that was not happening. There is simply no excuse for the collective punishment (another violation of the Geneva Convention) that Israel is imposing on the Palestinians.
What is really going on here is that the extreme right wing Zionists that form the core of Netanyahu’s governing coalition know exactly what they are doing. Before this war started there were 7.5 million Jews and 7.5 million Palestinians living under Israeli rule, with the bulk of the Palestinians subjected to an apartheid regime that denies them citizenship or basic human and civil rights. The Israelis see this math, and the fact that under the age of 18, the majority of the population is Palestinians, and are terrified. The left-wing Zionists saw this over 30 years ago and realized the only path forward was to give the Palestinians their own state, which is what brought Israel under Rabin into the Oslo process. But that process was strangled in its crib by a right wing Jewish extremist that assassinated Rabin, and a government led by Netanyahu that was committed to never allowing the Palestinians their own state. This put the Israeli right wing in a conundrum. They refused a two state solution, and they also refused to give the Palestinians citizenship in Israel. This left the only option of apartheid. But apartheid, whether in South Africa or in Israel has a limited shelf-life. Most recently France has joined over 140 UN member states in recognizing a Palestinian state. At some point the pressure on Israel is bound to become too much.
This is where the current policy in Gaza comes into focus. The real goal is not to destroy Hamas, or get a permanent cease-fire, or free Israel’s hostages. The real goal is to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its two million Palestinians. Next will come a similar move against the West Bank. By starving out the Palestinians, Netanyahu and his evil associates hope to empty Gaza of its Palestinians. Whether they starve to death, or move to Egypt or Morocco or God knows where is of no matter. The point is that they are eliminated. This would be a double ethnic cleansing, as most Gazans are descendants of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians living in the territory that Zionist Jews took to create Israel.
Gaza needs food and water immediately. There is no military excuse to deny the people of Gaza the basic conditions to maintain human life. By starving Gaza Israel is actively engaging in genocide. For a people who were the victims of the greatest genocide of the 20th century to inflict genocide on another is a terrible irony.
