Despite Condemnation of Mass Starvation in Gaza, Israel Steps Up Its Extermination and Plans to Annex the Whole of Gaza and the West Bank

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For a moment, there seemed to be hope.

After 21 months of Israel’s incessant bombing of Gaza, and the relentless flow of photos and videos of shredded babies, children and adults, which somehow failed to stir any noticeable outrage from the majority of those with power and influence in the west, photos last week of starving children in Gaza finally prompted a tsunami of criticism and even condemnation from world leaders, the mainstream media and prominent individuals worldwide.

In response, Israel reluctantly promised to lift some aspects of the genocidal siege it imposed on the whole of the Gaza Strip on March 1, claiming that it would allow airdrops of food (by Jordan and the UAE), and that it would create safe humanitarian corridors for aid deliveries by the UN and other aid organizations, while ceasing military activities for ten hours a day in three regions of Gaza.

This sounded positive. The recovering Zionist Shaiel Ben-Ephraim wrote on X that an IDF source had told him, “Everything we have done in the last few months has failed. The government has finally realized that. The pictures broadcast around the world have weakened our hand and strengthened Hamas.”

The Palestinian-American poet Mosab Abu Toha, meanwhile, stated that Israel was enabling “safe movement of UN convoys delivering food and medicine”, and was “reconnect[ing] a power line to a Gaza desalination plant, boosting daily water output to 20,000 cubic meters.” He asked, “What happened all of a sudden?” and replied, “I will tell you. Some countries applied some pressure on Israel. Which means, these same countries can stop the genocide.”

Since then, however, the extent of Israel’s betrayal of even these meager promises has become increasingly evident. The air drops have been insufficient, constituting in total less than one truckload of aid, and dropped for the most part in militarized zones that are a death sentence for any Palestinian venturing into them. In addition, when the first air drops landed, some killed civilians, while another drop, caught on film, showed desperate people, dehumanized by hunger, fighting each other to secure whatever they could.

Moreover, the convoys that were allowed in — a meager ten on the first day, 73 on the second, and 109 yesterday — were largely looted by Israeli-backed gangs, which have been operating in Gaza for months. The “safe movement” of UN and other international aid convoys simply hasn’t materialized, and nor has there been much sign of any suspension of military activities.

For those paying attention, Benjamin Netanyahu signaled his intentions in a video in Hebrew (for his home audience, rather than meddling foreigners), when he stated, explicitly, “In any path we choose, we will be forced to allow the entry of minimal humanitarian aid.”

The key word, clearly, was “minimal.”

What Gaza needs is the unfettered delivery of humanitarian aid in vast quantities — matching, or preferably far exceeding the 600 to 700 trucks a day that were allowed in during the ceasefire. All of this is possible. Trucks are waiting at the border, and UNWRA and other aid agencies have months’ worth of supplies in warehouses in Egypt and Jordan.

But Netanyahu doesn’t want that. He believes — wrongly, I hope — that he can continue the mass starvation, and the deliberate destruction of almost all clean water supplies, as condemned by UN experts today, while pretending to allow aid in, but my suspicion is that he will be caught out, unable to stop the steady flow of images of increasing horror emerging from Gaza’s shattered hospitals and its destroyed streets and homes.

The voices of medical experts, in particular, are absolutely essential right now, as those who have worked in Gaza explain how the effects of advanced starvation cannot be easily remedied, and as Jeremy Kondynyk, the President of Refugees International, also explained in a compelling thread on X that I shared on Facebook.

As Mark Brauner, an American emergency physician who worked in Nasser Hospital in June, recently explained to the Huffington Post, “The tipping point has already occurred, unfortunately, for a large number of children and infants and toddlers and adolescents — these are definable age categories where the level of starvation and malnutrition has passed the tipping point.”

He proceeded to explain, “July already saw a large escalation in the number of deaths but August is going to be significantly higher because a lot of the children have already passed the point of no return where their physiology has eroded to the point where even refeeding could potentially cause death itself. The gut lining has started to auto-digest and it will no longer have adequate absorptive capacity for water or for nutrition. Death is unfortunately imminent for probably thousands of children” — and the same is also undoubtedly true for significant numbers of the elderly.

The background to the mass starvation: a ferocious five-month siege

To give some context regarding the extent of the siege that has led to the mass starvation that finally appalled so many previously silent western commentators, it began when Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire deal with Hamas, which had lasted for six weeks, and announced its intention to starve the entire population until Hamas surrendered.

Having somehow succeeded in avoiding international condemnation despite its very public admission of a colossal war crime — starving an entire civilian population for a military aim — Israel followed up, on March 18, with the resumption of its intensive bombing campaign on civilian targets, while claiming, if asked by largely incurious western journalists, that it was in fact attacking Hamas military targets, without ever providing any evidence.

On May 15, the severity of Israel’s attacks increased still further, with the launch of “Operation Gideon’s Chariots”, a plan to invade and occupy three-quarters of the Gaza Strip, accompanied by increased bombing at night, which was so intense that those able to communicate with the outside world called it the worst nights yet. On the first night, airstrikes killed over 400 people and injured another thousand, as Israel blithely claimed that it had hit 670 “Hamas targets.”

Meanwhile, ever since the unprecedentedly ferocious siege began in March, Palestinians in Gaza, visiting doctors and international aid agencies have been desperately trying to sound the alarm about the rapidly degenerating health situation in Gaza — the starvation brought about through a complete ban on all food supplies, and the inability of Gaza’s few surviving hospitals to deal with both the critically malnourished and the regular and ongoing influx of the severely wounded from Israel’s relentless airstrikes, because of Israel’s refusal to allow in any medical supplies or medical equipment.

Desperate reports from inside Gaza established that even baby formula milk was prevented from reaching starving and premature babies, and alarms were also sounded about life-saving equipment, including baby ventilators, having to shut down because of a lack of fuel.

On May 21, Israel partly lifted its siege, but the trickle of food that arrived was then stolen by the criminal gangs supported by Israel itself that I mentioned above. A further nail in the coffin of international aid, previously supplied by UNRWA and numerous other well-established international aid agencies, which Israel hates, came on May 26, when a joint Israeli-US project, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), ostensibly took over food distribution, establishing four aid points at remote locations in Gaza that required desperately starving civilians to make huge journeys to reach them, only for them to be then gunned down randomly, and on a daily basis.

The scandal of the GHF “death traps” — most recently made clear by a whistleblower, Anthony Aguilar, who is a former Green Beret — certainly contributed to the increasing unease of western leaders, and the revulsion of those more in touch with their emotions, as did vile claims by Israel’s permanently deranged defense minister and former terrorist Israel Katz that the entire surviving population would be herded into a “concentration camp” in the south. However, it wasn’t until the photos of skeletal babies expiring began to emerge that significant outrage began to stalk the corridors of power in the west.

Israel’s lies and its diabolical plans for the complete annexation of Gaza and the West Bank

Shamefully, however, but not surprisingly, given Israel’s obsession with lying, and with prolonging its genocidal activities for as long as possible, almost none of the promised aid has arrived, as noted above, and the bombing of civilians has continued unabated, with the dead and wounded matched by those who are still being picked off at the GHF sites, which are still conducting their deadly premeditated business of pretending to offer aid while in fact being generators for random executions.

While Netanyahu tries to fool his allies, Israel has also embarked on a sickening barrage of lies and distortions about the dead and the dying, which only reveals the depths of their moral depravity. Some sources have been claiming that the dead children whose images have shocked the world weren’t actually starved, but had pre-existing health conditions that weren’t declared (ignoring the role that the decimation of the entire healthcare sector has played in this), while some of the more repulsive pundits on Israeli TV have been openly mocking the dead, asking why the mothers of dying children look well-fed, for example, as though children and the elderly are not always the first to succumb to starvation.

Most chilling of all, however, are the machinations behind the scenes. Netanyahu’s promise of “minimal” aid was aimed primarily at the fanatical genocidal ministers in his coalition government, keeping him in power and preventing his trial on corruption charges from proceeding — Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, both of whom want nothing less than total occupation and extermination, while dangling the mirage of “voluntary migration” for foreign consumption. If you can bear it, check out this clip of the permanently violently enraged Ben-Gvir shouting about how “the only thing that should be sent to Gaza is shells — to bomb, conquer, encourage emigration and win the war.”

Back before the genocide began, and even sometimes during it, western leaders have claimed that Israel militarily occupying Gaza on anything but a temporary basis was a “red line.” Over the last few months, however, Israel has steadily been occupying more and more of Gaza — through its establishment of militarized “buffer zones” and its endless stream of evacuation orders for people with nowhere to go, so that it has now succeeded in militarily occupying 88% of the entire Gaza Strip without anyone in the west raising alarms.

As Haaretz reported yesterday, no doubt encouraged by this, Netanyahu’s latest plan is to further appease Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of the far-right Religious Zionism party, who fantasizes relentlessly about dispossessing the Palestinians from all their land, by proposing the complete occupation of the Gaza Strip, unless Hamas immediately agrees to a ceasefire deal that removes them from power, and secures the return of the surviving hostages.

As Haaretz described it, “The move will be presented to cabinet members following Netanyahu’s decision to increase humanitarian aid entering the Strip, which was accepted despite opposition from the Religious Zionism party. According to the plan Netanyahu is expected to present, areas in the buffer zone will be annexed first, followed by areas in the northern Strip adjacent to the Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon.”

Haaretz added, “The process will continue gradually until the entire Strip is annexed. According to details presented by Netanyahu in talks with ministers, the plan has received approval from the Trump administration”, although it should be noted that Trump himself was not present at the meeting where this was reportedly agreed, which took place between Israel’s Minister for Strategic Affairs, Ron Dermer, and the compliant US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

That the complete annexation of the Gaza Strip is being discussed at all in Israel’s most prominent political circles is surely yet another sign of the complete contempt that Israel has for the rest of the world, and how, fundamentally, it has no interest in stopping its mass starvation, its extermination policy, or its territorial ambitions.

Moreover, after nearly 22 months of unfettered genocidal expansionist excess, its ambitions are not even focused solely on Gaza. While the eyes of the world have largely been focused on Gaza, Israel’s aggression in the West Bank — building on decades of illegal settlements, and ferocious apartheid and brutality — has been increasing relentlessly for the last 22 months, and just last week, by 71 votes to 13, the Knesset passed a symbolic measure calling for the annexation of the the whole of the occupied West Bank, “applying Israeli sovereignty to Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley”, as the motion, proposed by Smotrich, himself an illegal settler, described it.

How far will this madness go? Just over a year ago, the International Court of Justice issued a legally-binding advisory opinion declaring that Israel’s entire occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since they were seized and occupied in 1967, was illegal. ordering them to withdraw from the entire Occupied Palestinian Territory, and to pay reparations. The Court also reminded the rest of the world that the opinion applied to them too, and that they must cease all cooperation with Israel that contributed in any way to its illegal occupation.

The world shrugged, just as it has shrugged at almost every unimaginable horror inflicted by Israel on the Palestinians for the last 663 days. Images of dead, starved children recently woke the world up, but world leaders need to stay awake, and not be distracted again. The intentions of Netanyahu and his government are still nothing less than the extermination of the entire Palestinian people,

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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”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

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. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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