A Million Palestinians Face Death by Starvation After Eight Months of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

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Eight months of unmitigated horror in Gaza demonstrates the absolute moral degradation of Israel, and the unparalleled moral failure of the west.

It’s eight months since Hamas and other militants broke out of the “open-air prison” of the Gaza Strip, where they, and the entire Palestinian population of 2.3 million people, had been subjected to a land, sea and air blockade for 16 years, and embarked on a brief but deadly killing spree in southern Israel, killing 1,068 Israelis (695 civilians and 373 members of the military and the police), as well as 71 foreign nationals, and kidnapping around 235 others, around half of whom were Israeli.

In response, as happened on numerous previous occasions when Israel was attacked by Palestinian military forces resisting the occupation of their land, Israel began carpet bombing the Gaza Strip, destroying key infrastructure, levelling apartment blocks with disproportionately heavy-duty bombs provided mainly by the US and Germany, and killing vast numbers of civilians.

In 2014, when Israel undertook the most savage of its many previous attacks on the Gaza Strip, a seven-week campaign killed over 2,300 Palestinians, wounded nearly 11,000 (including 3,374 children, of whom over 1,000 were permanently disabled), and led to the destruction of 7,000 homes, with an additional 89,000 damaged, before a ceasefire was finally reached.

This time around, however, the response was, from the beginning, more severe than anything that had taken place previously. Within days, the death toll had exceeded that of October 7, and the slaughter has continued, relentlessly, ever since, with, still, no sign of when it will ever come to an end. On average, and using the very lowest estimates, Israel has been killing the equivalent number of Palestinians to the number of Israelis killed on October 7 every week for the last eight months.

Instead of urging restraint from the beginning, bearing in mind the bloody outcomes of the previous attacks on Gaza as part of what Israel contemptuously referred to as regularly “mowing the lawn”, this time around Israel’s supporters in the west offered unconditional support and approval.

“Israel has the right to defend itself”, western leader after western leader intoned, as though all reading from the same prepared script. Not a single leader urged restraint, reminding Israel, for example, that, although this was a truly horrific attack, it occurred as part of a 75-year history of conflict in which, in the 15 years preceding October 7, twenty Palestinians were killed for every one Israeli (6,407 Palestinians compared to 308 Israelis).

Instead, western leaders behaved as though the October 7 attacks occurred in a vacuum, perfectly sealed off from any historical context, reinforcing their complicity in Israel’s hideously disproportionate response by amplifying lies about beheaded babies and mass rapes on October 7 (all of which have subsequently been revealed as lies) to contribute to the frenzy of self-righteous genocidal violence being whipped up relentlessly within Israel itself.

As Israel’s political leaders and media pundits indulged in shocking declarations of genocidal intent, western leaders not only remained silent; they also flew out to Israel to be photographed with the individuals responsible, even though their language was so vile that it it would not have been inappropriate to suggest that their complicity was equivalent to flying out to Germany for a photo opportunity with Adolf Hitler after the Nazi leadership had formally agreed to implement the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish question’ at the Wannsee Conference near Munich in January 1942.

So shameful was the west’s Manichean response to the events of October 7 — echoing their response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, in which, despite a context involving NATO and ‘red lines’ stretching back to the 1990s, Vladimir Putin was portrayed as the very definition of pure, unadulterated, context-free evil — that they deliberately ignored the fact that, for the previous ten months, since the last Israeli elections in November 2022, they had been thoroughly and appropriately alarmed that, to retain power, the thoroughly untrustworthy Benjamin Netanyahu — a man known to be holding onto power, at least in part, to prevent him being held accountable in court on along-standing corruption charges — had formed a coalition government that was the most far-right in Israel’s history.

In this coalition, Netanyahu gave ministerial positions to two far-right settlers and enthusiasts for the genocide of the Palestinian people — Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — who were both implicated in past actions that, even within Israel’s generally lax approach to Zionist fanaticism, were regarded as terrorism. In the cases of both these men, their malignant presence in Israeli politics ought to have triggered alarm bells in the corridors of power in the west after October 7, but as with all the other doubts and nuance and context that was swept aside, their danger was airbrushed out of history.

What made this even more remarkable and unacceptable is that Ben-Gvir, as the Minister of National Security, is in charge of Israel’s police, and yet, since October 7, he has handed out at least 10,000 assault weapons to settlers, and has approved gun licences for 100,000 more, and has actively encouraged increasing police-backed settler violence in the West Bank, as well as launching Gaza-style assaults on various Palestinian-majority towns in the West Bank, even though Hamas has no presence there. Since October 7, over 500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, and over 9,000 more (including 300 women and 635 children) have also been arbitrarily seized and “disappeared” into Israel’s brutal and unaccountable network of prisons for Palestinians.

The Holocaust: Israel’s first example of “perfect victimhood”, used to justify 75 years of relentless colonial oppression of the Palestinians

Indulged by the west, both through historic guilt regarding centuries of pogroms, and, in Germany’s case, through guilt for the Holocaust, and driven also by seven decades of intensive lobbying and bribery by pro-Israeli groups in western countries, Israel has, collectively, conceived an impenetrable notion of itself as the world’s greatest victim — and even, sometimes, the world’s only victim — which it has persistently used to justify its completely unjustifiable colonial aggression towards the Palestinians by believing that, as the perfect victim, it can do no wrong.

For 75 years, until October 7, this perfect victimhood was used a justification for the most appalling crimes, beginning with the blood-soaked founding of the State of Israel in 1948, when 15,000 Palestinians were murdered, mostly by European Jewish settlers who had arrived in Palestine over the previous three decades, and often in grotesque massacres that were often far more horrific than Hamas’ attacks on October 7. More than 500 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed, and 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, made to settle instead in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, controlled by Egypt and Jordan, or in the countries surrounding Palestine, where their descendants, now numbering in their millions, still live in refugee camps.

In the decades that followed, Israel’s violence against the Palestinians continued, largely against those who had remained in what had now become Israel, and expanding once more in 1967, when, after the Six Days’ War with its Arab neighbours, Israel seized the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Although both are formally recognized internationally as Occupied Territories, their inhabitants have, however, continued to be oppressed, and, as negotiations regarding Palestinian independence have repeatedly floundered, and conflict between the occupier and the occupied has repeatedly erupted into violence, Israel has responded with ever greater repression.

One million Palestinians have, at various times, been imprisoned by Israel since 1967 in prisons that do not conform to internationally agreed standards regarding the deprivation of liberty. Arbitrary in nature, the system holds children as well as adults, often for nothing more than throwing stones at soldiers, and those imprisoned are largely held without charge or trial, and sometimes through “administrative detention”, an unaccountable and unjustifiable process that can be renewed every six months, with no time limit. Israel’s prisons are separate from those used for Israelis, and, when cases do go to court, they take place in military courts, which have only a tangential association with internationally recognized standards of justice.

Throughout the 21st century, Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip has become ever more severe. In the West Bank, a huge dividing wall, and aggressive and often deadly checkpoints have been created, cutting Palestinian communities off from one another and facilitating the remorseless and thoroughly illegal expansion of new settlements housing over half a million settlers, with a further 220,000 settlers in East Jerusalem. In the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, Hamas’ victory in the only elections allowed, in 2006, led to Israel imposing the land, air and sea blockade that has been maintained ever since, leading to its recognition, by human rights organizations, as an “open-air prison.”

Under the blockade, no one was able to enter and leave the Gaza Strip without Israel’s permission, in a deliberate attempt to create unemployment as well as trapping the majority of its 2.3 million inhabitants. In addition, humanitarian aid, which was required because Israel had deliberately degraded Palestinians’ self-sufficiency (by, to cite just one example, largely debilitating its water supplies), was persistently and deliberately rationed, to keep the entire population generally under-fed, and in a state of dependance.

Despite this, international support (primarily, though not entirely, from Muslim countries) and the Palestinians’ own inventiveness and tenacity meant that, before October 7, the Gaza Strip was an extraordinarily lively and friendly place, its typical apartment blocks — including those built on what had been refugee camps — teeming with children, its foreign-financed hospitals and universities full of the fruits of Palestinians’ enthusiasm for education and service, and its shops and markets and cafes and restaurants full of life and culture and resilience.

October 7: Israel’s second demonstration of “perfect victimhood” and a monstrous death toll in Gaza that apparently doesn’t matter at all

Since October 7, however, Israel has grafted the atrocities of that day onto its self-declared position as the world’s only endless victim, caught in a loop of victimhood that has condensed those few deadly hours into a nightmare without beginning or end.

While not wishing to dismiss, in any way, the trauma experienced throughout Israel — and in its supporters abroad — because of the events of October 7, it is, nevertheless, unforgivable that Israel’s response, over the last eight months of unprecedented slaughter and destruction, has been so thoroughly dismissed as though it means nothing.

In terms of lives lost, Israel has killed at least 40 times as many Palestinians as the number of Israelis who were killed on October 7, although the true comparison, alarmingly, may be much, much higher — 50 times, 100 times, or even 200 times, with even worse to come if Israel’s relentless assault isn’t brought to an end as soon as possible.

In the early days of the genocide, the Health Ministry in Gaza was able to accurately collate the death toll from its records of where people lived, and of hospital admissions, but as their homes were destroyed, and the majority of the population was ordered to relocate to the south, where they have continued to be bombed in makeshift tents, and as almost the entire hospital infrastructure of the Gaza Strip has also been deliberately destroyed, along with the government’s own records, it has become impossible to assess, with any accuracy, how wide is the gulf between those whose deaths can be identified, and those whose end remains uncertain or unknown.

Corpses litter the whole of the Gaza Strip, some now reduced to skeletons as animals have devoured their flesh, and up to ten thousand corpses remain, buried and decaying, under the rubble. In addition, as Israel maintains the “complete siege” implemented by defense minister Yoav Gallant on October 9, and largely maintained ever since, as starvation and diseases stalk the ruined landscape amid the stench of death and sewage, and as, over the last month, Israel has completely shut off all means of bringing aid in, or facilitating the departure of the seriously ill, it’s reasonable to assume that the death toll continues to rise in a much more alarming manner than even the grimmest of official reports.

On June 7, the tattered remnants of Gaza’s Health Ministry assessed that 36,731 people have been killed, and 83,530 injured since October 7 (many grievously so, and including untold numbers who will not survive if this genocide is not brought to an end). In addition, these figures don’t include the 10,000 who are formally missing and only identified as lost under the rubble, whose deaths seem inevitable, and nor do they include the untold numbers dying, unseen and unremarked, through the combination of all the other factors identified above.

It’s also hugely important to recognize, additionally, that, while the attacks on October 7 caused comparatively little structural damage within Israel itself, Israel’s response, for the last eight months in Gaza, has involved the almost complete destruction of an area that is a quarter of the size of London. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which has regularly attempted to accurately assess the death toll by including those missing and presumed dead under the rubble, issued its most recent infographic on May 13, marking 200 days of the genocide, when, as well as assessing the death toll as 43,640, with 90% of those assessed as civilians, they also assessed the material destruction: 136,700 homes totally destroyed, and 298,700 homes partially destroyed.

In addition, Israel has also destroyed almost all of Gaza’s hospitals, its schools and universities, libraries, courts, police stations, records offices, mosques and heritage sites, as well as shops, restaurants, factories and agricultural fields — everything, in short, that could be used to sustain life.

As Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor also noted, the destruction or damage to most of Gaza’s housing has meant that two million people have been displaced since October 7, two million people who had homes — mostly flats in apartment blocks, where they ate and studied, ran businesses, played with their children and enjoyed a global culture of music and entertainment — but have since been made refugees in their own country, forced to flee and leave most of their belongings behind (to be used as props in hideous videos by Israeli ground troops, often before their homes were deliberately blown up).

These internal refugees have often been forced to relocate on several occasions, finding nowhere safe, and ending up in already-bombed schools, or in tents where, at any time, their lives can be ended through bombs that, if they cause a ripple of dissent internationally, will be passed off as ‘targeted’ bombing, or, occasionally, a ‘mistake’ (although one without repercussions) by their murderers.

It’s easy to get distracted by statistics, as the Associated Press did in a heartless statistical analysis on June 7, and to forget that these were all individual human being, with lives and loves and dreams, and that the majority of them were children and women, and therefore blameless civilians whose deaths are unjustifiable under any circumstances.

Above all, though, all of us have to ask how it is that Israel’s endless loop of October 7 victimhood has been allowed to erase — completely erase — its response from being perceived for what it is: the genocidal slaughter of civilians with such intensity, and in such a short amount of time, that it stands as one of the most shameful acts of human depravity in the whole of humanity’s shamefully blood-soaked history, and certainly stands as the most chilling example, in modern times, of a genocide supported, unconditionally and enthusiastically, by the countries of the west, who have continued to endorse Israel’s actions, and to supply it with the endless flow of grotesquely destructive weapons necessary for its continued slaughter of, at the bare minimum, one child every 20 minutes for the whole of the last eight months.

The prospect of a million dead Palestinians if a ceasefire doesn’t happen soon

Horrific though the last eight months have been, far worse will definitively happen if Israel isn’t somehow compelled to cease all military action in Gaza, to open up the floodgates to humanitarian aid, and to allow reconstruction to begin.

When I last wrote about the ongoing genocide two weeks ago — in an article entitled, Ending Israel’s Impunity for Genocide in Gaza, and the Threat to Those, Like Joe Biden, Who Are Most Complicit — I had some hope that an end was in sight.

Increasingly reviled and isolated around the world, Israel, which shrugged off a ruling, over four months ago, by the most significant international court in the world, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), that it was committing a “plausible genocide” in Gaza, and was ordered to take measures to address this finding (all of which it ignored), found the noose tightening three weeks ago when Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the other great trans-national judicial body, the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced his intention to seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant (and three Hamas leaders), with the Israelis specifically accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including “intentionally directing attacks against a civilian population”, “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare”, and “extermination.”

All of the above is, quite clearly, demonstrably true, as any objective analysis of the last eight months demonstrates. At the very least, what Israel has been doing is carpet bombing civilians to death in unprecedented numbers and with no sense of proportionality whatsoever; deliberately destroying almost all of Gaza’s hospitals, and cutting off medical supplies and fuel, creating circumstances that are, very evidently, a death sentence for huge numbers of the wounded, for pregnant women facing any kind of medical complications, for premature babies, and for anyone with severe underlying health issues; starving the population through the relentless blocking of supplies of food and water; and allowing communicable diseases to run rampant through a destroyed infrastructure with no functioning sewage system or clean water.

Horrendously, and unforgivably, over the last month the humanitarian crisis, already catastrophic, has become noticeably worse. When Israel callously began its assault on Rafah, in the south — ignoring a “red line” laid down by the US — it was evident that its enthusiasm was not, as claimed, because it was the last Hamas stronghold, but because Rafah was the last major population centre that it had not yet razed to the ground.

When the assault began, Israel deliberately shut down the Rafah Crossing with Egypt, which had provided what little humanitarian aid had been allowed through, and which had also provided an escape route for the seriously ill, who had, through assiduous work on the part of various humanitarian organizations, been evacuating children and adults who would otherwise have died.

The situation now is so severe that, just three days ago, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) warned that “over one million people — half the population of Gaza — are expected to face death and starvation by mid-July.”

The only solution: a permanent ceasefire now

Faced with this truly horrendous assessment, what is clearly needed is an immediate and permanent ceasefire, but, instead, having forced half of Gaza’s population to move to Rafah over previous months, and declaring it a “safe zone”, Israel is now not only bombing it relentlessly, killing civilians who once had homes and lives but are now cowering in makeshift tents wondering if they will live, in attacks for which any claimed military necessity is thoroughly risible; it is also forcing many of those who had followed to the commands to evacuate to Rafah to return north, to devastated landscapes where they too are being slaughtered in schools or in the streets where they have, once more, had to pitch their makeshift tents. In the last week alone, horrendous massacres have been taking place with unforgivably savage intensity.

Just yesterday, at least 274 Palestinians, including 64 children and 57 women, were killed (with another 698 wounded, many severely) in a horrific massacre at a crowded market in Nuseirat refugee camp (which also involved the destruction of 89 homes and residential buildings) during an operation by Israeli Special Forces to rescue four Israeli hostages — all, it should be noted, described as being “in good medical condition” by the Israeli authorities, in complete contrast to how Israel treats imprisoned Palestinians. Most reporting, shamefully, has focused obsessively on the stories of the hostages, while completely disregarding the deaths of the Palestinians, with only one western political representative, Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, condemning “in the strongest terms … reports from Gaza of another massacre of civilians”, and calling for a ceasefire and the release of all remaining hostages, adding, “The bloodbath must end immediately.”

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Saul Takahashi, professor of human rights and peace studies at Osaka Jogakuin University, and a former deputy head of office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, highlighted these shameful double standards. “There is a huge, huge double standard when it comes to human lives: that Israeli lives, Ukrainian lives, white skin lives are important, but when it comes to Palestinians, people with brown skins, Arabs in general, they are not just as important, we do not really care,” he said, also pointing out that the loss of Palestinians’ lives was “hardly reported at all in the Israeli media”, and that “it’s pretty much the same in the US media and many other international media outlets.”

Professor Takahashi also criticized widespread claims throughout Israel and the west that the manner in which the operation was conducted was lawful, stating, “The claim that the Israeli attack on Nuseirat camp was justified is completely ignorant of international law.” He added, “Israel has shown itself time and time again that it does not care about international and humanitarian laws. There are clear standards of proportionality. The loss of any kind of civilian lives and objects have to be proportionate. And it’s pretty clear that these [attacks] were not proportionate. This is something we have seen over and over again. Not just since last October but in pretty much every single offensive that Israel has engaged in in Gaza.”

While Netanyahu will obviously try to capitalize on the rescue of the hostages, using it to defend his hunger for the endless slaughter of Palestinians, it remains apparent to anyone watching closely the indiscriminate horrors of the last month that, in general, all pretence of military necessity in the “elimination of Hamas” has evaporated. And yet, as criticism of Israel has steadily increased, the obvious solution, a lasting ceasefire, nevertheless remains frustratingly out of reach. For six months, since a week-long “pause” in hostilities successfully allowed an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners, Egypt, Qatar and the US have been working with Hamas and Israel to secure a follow-up deal, but with no success.

A month ago, as I reported here, Hamas agreed to a deal, consisting of three six-week phases, which would have involved the release of all the hostages in exchange for more Palestinian prisoners, the provision of humanitarian aid, an end to hostilities and the start of reconstruction, but Israel shunned it, refusing, evidently, to let the release of hostages — one of the stated aims of their entire onslaught on Gaza — to get in the way of their main aim: the continued “extermination” of the Palestinian people under the pretence of “eliminating Hamas.” Astonishingly, Netanyahu still clings to his genocidal myopia, despite ferocious opposition within Israel itself, where family members of hostages, and a considerable number of supportive Israeli citizens, have correctly concluded that Netanyahu and his government fundamentally have no interest in the hostages’ lives — a situation that will only temporarily be relieved by the “rescue” of four hostages yesterday. As the Observer reported today, “Hostages’ families welcomed the return of the four freed on Saturday but said the military could not bring back all of those still held captive, and instead called on the government to reach a ceasefire deal to free their loved ones.” Ayala Metzger, the daughter-in-law of hostage Yoram Metzger, 80, whose death in captivity was announced this week, nevertheless refused to back further military action. “The hostages don’t have time”, she said, adding, “We can’t free everyone in operations, and we must go for a deal that will save lives.”

Just over a week ago, on May 31, it seems that a viable ceasefire plan was close to becoming a reality, when, unexpectedly, President Biden held a press conference and announced a new ceasefire plan, describing it as a plan that Israel had agreed to, and which he urged Hamas to accept, even though it was almost identical to the plan that Hamas had, in fact, already accepted. It seemed to be a ploy to finally put some sort of meaningful pressure on Israel, not, as I suggested at the time, because Biden had “suddenly discovered a concern for Palestinian lives”, but because it “reflect[ed] serious concerns within his administration that they’re running out of time to find a resolution so that they don’t lose the [forthcoming Presidential] Election”, and because “they’re genuinely concerned about Israel’s increasing isolation.”

Biden’s scriptwriters prepared a strongly worded condemnation of the quagmire that Netanyahu was in, with Biden dutifully stating, “Indefinite war in pursuit of an unidentified notion of ‘total victory’ will only bog down Israel in Gaza, draining [its] economic, military and human resources, and furthering Israel’s isolation in the world. That will not bring hostages home. That will not bring an enduring defeat of Hamas. That will not bring Israel lasting security.”

Yet again, however, Netanyahu spurned the proposal, contemptuously telling the world that, as he described it in a statement, Israel’s “conditions for ending the war” — “the destruction of Hamas military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel” — “have not changed.”

Alarmingly, while there are clearly divisions within Israeli politics regarding ongoing military activities, and the lack of a plan for “the day after”, Netanyahu’s main priority seems to be keeping his coalition government in place, which requires him to continue to placate Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, even though both men’s genocidal enthusiasms are becoming ever more extreme.

Just two days ago, Ben-Gvir posted a video of his plan for Gaza, consisting solely of a demand for the complete occupation and settlement of the Gaza Strip, and for the “voluntary emigration” of the entire Palestinian population, a solution that is, as he must know, impossible, because no country in the world is willing to help Israel to forcibly and illegally remove even the tiniest fraction of Gaza’s entire Palestinian population — meaning, of course, that genocide remains the only realistic solution.

Smotrich, meanwhile, was videoed dancing three days ago, on the same day that young Israeli settlers flooded Jerusalem and tried to lynch a Palestinian journalist, joining in with a popular song about the annihilation of the Palestinians, which includes the promise of “effacing their names from the earth.”

Both men clearly want Israel to “cleanse” the West Bank and East Jerusalem of Palestinians in the same way that they are being exterminated in Gaza, and yet still no one in the west is doing anything to intervene decisively — to cut off arms supplies to Israel, and to impose sanctions.

With the very real prospect of a million Palestinians dying of hunger within the next month, nothing is more deranged and unforgivable than the west’s constant refusal to restrain Israel’s genocidal fanatics. Just last week, Netanyahu’s national security adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, told the Israeli public broadcaster KAN that the war on Gaza was “expected to continue for another seven months”, until early 2025.

By then, if nothing is done to stop Israel, it may well be reasonable to assume that the most malignant dream of the genocidal monsters in charge of Israel — the “extermination” of the entire Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip — will have come true.

Whatever shreds of humanity still exist in this dark world — in which genocide has become mainstream and normalized, and those supporting it and facilitating it in the west twiddle their thumbs and hope that they will somehow not be held accountable for a second Holocaust — must find a way to bring these horrors to an end without any more prevaricating, or forever be tarred as the facilitators of the most monstrous crime — the elimination of an entire people — that any of us have ever seen.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

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