Israel’s Deliberate Starvation Campaign Kills Palestinians as World Watches

There was a time during the first few months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza that the level of depravity from the so-called “most moral army in the world” was theoretically beyond comprehension.

Take, for example, Israel’s live-action interpretation of Netflix’s “Squid Game,” when they forced people to evacuate certain areas of Gaza, only to rain down munitions on designated “safe zones” where Palestinians were instructed to flee.

Or when it was reported that Israel was using a diabolical AI program codenamed “Where’s Daddy?” so the military could track “targets”—also developed by dubious AI tools—and obliterate them as soon as they returned home, also killing their family members.

Nothing was done then to stop the madness, logically creating a sense of impunity among the Israeli government and its soldiers, enabling them to operate a mass-death and destruction campaign in full view.

When it comes to trying to prevent Israel from committing mass slayings, day after day after day after day, the so-called rules-based order magically becomes impotent:

• The country financing and helping support the genocide—the United States—won’t even bring a halt to the bloodletting despite Israeli settlers killing an American in cold blood.
• Twenty-nine countries on Monday reacted to the endless wave of killings with a cautiously worded letter calling for an end to the “war.”
• President Trump, as was the case with his predecessor and fellow genocider in chief, Joe Biden, is “frustrated” with Netanyahu.

That brings us to the latest and somehow more sinister phase of Israel’s right-wing government’s depraved experiment in Gaza: its intentional forced-starvation campaign, or non-fictional “Hunger Games.”

Not only did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government block any aid from entering Gaza on March 2, but it only decided to allow a small amount into the Strip two months later out of fear that the scenes of malnourished Palestinians would put a halt to its genocide.

Gaza Humanitarian Foundation: Death Traps Disguised as Aid

To settle nerves in Washington, it concocted this months-in-the-making aid scheme with the United States under the umbrella of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which operates four militarized sites—all of which have become death traps.

Since the aid scheme became operational in late May, more than 1,000 starving Palestinians have been killed simply trying to get food—slayings Israeli soldiers themselves have admitted are deliberate.

The Israeli-plotted starvation campaign is now having horrific implications, with Palestinians collapsing from extreme hunger, malnourished babies and children dying—“killed” is a more apt characterization given the weaponization of aid—and people succumbing to treatable wounds or other genocide-enabled health impacts because their bodies are too weak.

Earlier this month, Amnesty International reported that at least 66 children died from “malnutrition-related conditions.”

That figure, according to the human rights group, doesn’t include “the many more children who have died as a result of preventable diseases exacerbated by malnutrition.”

Susan Maarouf, a nutritional expert at the Nutrition unit in the Patient Friends Benevolent Society Hospital in Gaza City, told Amnesty that it opened a department last summer to treat children between 6 months and 5 years old specifically to treat severe malnutrition. Since April of this year, as many as 15 percent of the upwards of 250 children screened daily “showed signs of severe or moderate malnutrition.”

Pregnant and new mothers are trapped in their own Israel and U.S.-manufactured crisis, with baby formula difficult to secure due to Israeli prohibitions, and some struggling to breastfeed, Amnesty reported.

“There is a milk crisis in Gaza overall. Also, we notice that new mothers, because they themselves are not eating properly or because of the panic, trauma and anxiety, are unable to breastfeed,” another doctor told the organization. “So, to secure baby formula at all is a struggle.

But if your child has allergies, it’s almost impossible to find special formula in any of Gaza’s hospitals for infants—the failure to secure special baby formula can be a death sentence.”

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), known in the United States as Doctors Without Borders, said on July 11 it’s “witnessing a sharp and unprecedented rise in acute malnutrition.”

Children Dying as Malnutrition Reaches ‘Unprecedented’ Levels

Two MSF-run clinics in Gaza have seen the “highest number of malnutrition cases ever recorded by our teams in the Gaza Strip,” it reported, adding that enrollment is up four-fold from May to July. Among the patients are 326 children between 6 and 23 months old.

“The starvation of people in Gaza is intentional, it can end tomorrow if the Israeli authorities allow food in at scale,” said Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, MSF deputy medical coordinator in Gaza.

Aside from two limited ceasefires, there’s effectively been nowhere safe for Palestinians in Gaza, 90 percent of whom are internally displaced. Even venturing out for aid is a game of Russian roulette.

Professor Nick Maynard, a U.K.-based gastrointestinal surgeon operating in Gaza, gave a devastating account to The Telegraph, saying that snipers were intentionally aiming for “certain body parts on different days, such as the head, legs or genitals,” adding that severe malnutrition is at “unprecedented levels.”

“These are mainly from the militarized distribution points, where starving civilians are going to try and get food but then report getting targeted by Israeli soldiers or quadcopters,” he said.

Target Practice

Maynard’s description is eerily similar to that of Dr. Feroze Sidhwa and dozens of other American healthcare workers working in Gaza who saw children admitted to various hospitals with gunshot wounds to the head and chest, which he detailed in a New York Times op-ed in October 2024.

Speaking to the News Beat podcast about his multiple experiences in Gaza, Sidhwa said: “We have no clue how many people we’re even killing in Gaza. We have no clue how many children we’re starving to death in Gaza. We have no idea how many pregnant women we’re starving to death in Gaza.”

In one of the deadliest aid site slaughters to date—that this is a common occurrence is breathtaking on its own—at least 80 Palestinians were killed on July 20 waiting for aid to be distributed by the U.N. World Food Program (WFP).

“As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire,” WFP said in a statement, adding that “these people were simply trying to access food to feed themselves and their families on the brink of starvation.”

“Malnutrition is surging with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment,” WFP added. “Nearly one person in three is not eating for days.”

Netanyahu: Wanted for War Crimes

The reports of fatal malnutrition and slaughters at aid sites come after months of attacks that have devastated Gaza’s healthcare network, including its workforce. More than 1,000 healthcare workers have been killed during the genocide, including 70 who died within a recent 50-day period. Among them was Dr. Marwan al-Sultan, director of Gaza’s Indonesian Hospital.

Most recently, Dr. Marwan al-Hams, director of Abu Youssef al-Najjar Hospital, was kidnapped by Israeli forces during an operation that caused the slaying of a local journalist.

In an interview with the U.K.’s Channel 4 outlet, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, Israel’s special envoy for trade and innovation, when asked why doctors are being abducted, referred to them as “so-called doctors,” implying they’re terrorists.

All this as Netanyahu remains an international fugitive on various war crimes including using starvation as a method of war.

Image Source

• Ashraf Amra, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.