Israel unveils plan to starve and empty Gaza as the world stands passively by
“Civilized people do not starve children to death,” Sen. Bernie Sanders told Congress on May 8. “What is going on right now in Gaza is a war crime committed openly and in broad daylight and continuing every single day….What we are seeing now is a slow brutal process of mass starvation and death.” After describing in vivid terms what is happening on the ground and the US weapons and $20 billion in aid supplied for the war by American taxpayers, he concluded: “History will not forget our complicity in this nightmare.”
While some western leaders are sounding increasingly alarmed about the situation in Gaza, they have as yet done nothing concrete to match words with significant action, such as placing sanctions on Israel, and some have – like the US – continued to supply Israel with weapons. The question now looms: do they have the will to avert what human rights experts have called “ the moral abyss we are descending into”? Are institutions that bolster the so-called ‘rules-based world order’ capable of arresting that descent?
Back to the ICJ
Beginning on April 28, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague held five days of hearings to consider whether Israel as a member of the United Nations could unilaterally block the operations of a UN body, UNRWA, and whether it had a legal obligation to “ensure and facilitate the unhindered provision of urgently needed supplies essential to the survival of the Palestinian civilian population.” Compared to the January 2024 ICJ hearing on the South African case alleging Israel was committing genocide – for which a final ruling is still awaited - it is striking how little public attention has been given to this latest hearing, which featured some spellbinding presentations, such as this one by attorney Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh speaking on behalf of the State of Palestine.
This time thirty-seven states, the UN and three international organizations made oral arguments opposing Israel’s refusal to allow food and other humanitarian assistance into Gaza and condemned the ban imposed on UNRWA, which was called “indispensable” in the provision of aid to Gaza. Israel submitted only written testimony to the court justifying its refusal to allow humanitarian assistance into Gaza on ‘defense and security’ grounds. On the day the hearings began, Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar denounced them as part of a “systematic persecution and delegitimization of Israel,” saying “the UN has become a rotten, anti-Israel, and antisemitic body.” Only two states – the US and Hungary – gave oral testimony in support of Israel. The US declined to condemn the blockade, ignored the situation on the ground and argued that Israel’s obstruction of UN agencies such as UNRWA was potentially lawful.
By the time the ICJ issues its advisory opinion, starvation may be considerably more deadly than Israel’s daily military onslaughts for Palestinians who have been totally deprived of deliveries of food, water, fuel and medicine since March 2, while the prices of what very limited supplies remain in Gaza have soared by 500 percent.
The ‘logic of elimination’
As 5,000 trucks of life-saving aid are stranded at Gaza’s sealed crossings, at least 57 Palestinians have died of starvation while over 70,000 children require urgent treatment in Gaza’s damaged hospitals for severe malnutrition which has, according to Dr. Ahad Khalaf, led to “blood poisoning, organ failure, liver and kidney damage, bacterial and microbial infections, and weakened immunity.” The population has nothing but salty water to drink – the escalating water crisis is described here. In the words of Sean Carroll, head of ANERA (American Near East Refugee Aid), “a full-blown humanitarian emergency in Gaza is no longer looming. It is here, and it is catastrophic.”
In their scorching piece headlined “Israel is starving Gaza to death, and still the world does nothing,” Dr. Mads Gilbert, Dr. James Smith and Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah - who have all worked in Gaza - described Israel’s decades-long history of depriving Palestinians in Gaza of food and declared that “we hold complicit every state that continues to actively and passively support Israel. The Israeli regime has resolutely exposed the ‘logic of elimination’ inherent to its settler-colonial ambitions. Only immediate and concerted action will protect the Palestinian people from this latest stage in Israel’s campaign of genocidal eradication.”
US pushes for ceasefire
But where is that ‘concerted action’ to come from? It is becoming increasingly clear that President Trump is not in lockstep with Netanyahu over Iran and Gaza. Anxious to have something solid to show Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE during his trip to the region this week (which does not include a stop in Israel), Trump has tried to pressure Netanyahu to reach a truce with Hamas and let food into Gaza. On May 11, it was reported that Hamas will release Israeli-American hostage Edan Alexander as a goodwill gesture to President Trump and that the US has informed Israel that the release would trigger new negotiations towards a ceasefire. According to The Jerusalem Post, US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, who will be visiting Israel on May 12, told hostage families that “we want to bring the hostages home, but Israel is not willing to end the war.”
House Democrats are also growing increasingly restive about Netanyahu’s stance on Gaza. On May 7, 96 of them signed a letter to Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter deploring the blockade and urging the Israeli government to immediately “resume the flow of aid into Gaza” and return to a ceasefire. They also expressed reservations about Israel’s “new plan” for distributing aid, which has been condemned by the UN and by some European leaders and human rights groups (which are now threatened by Israel’s new visa requirements), as both logistically unworkable and against international law.
A dystopian plan
Under Israel’s plan - which the Cabinet endorsed on May 4 and which is due to be implemented after President Trump’s visit to the region is over - Israel would permanently take over the north of the Gaza Strip through its ‘Operation Gideon’s Chariots’ ground offensive and the civilian population would be pushed to a ‘sterile zone’ in southern Gaza near the Egyptian border. About 60 trucks of aid per day cleared by the Israeli army would then be permitted to enter the Gaza Strip at the Kerem Shalom Crossing - that’s only a tenth of the 600 trucks that were supposed to enter during the ceasefire and not nearly enough to feed the population.
In a statement reminiscent of the calorie counting that Israel carried out before allowing food to enter the Gaza Strip after Hamas took over its government in 2007, one former military official said that “we did the entire operational planning of how we can deliver the aid needed – the exact amount needed and not an ounce more – directly into the hands of the people in Gaza and make sure Hamas doesn’t get it.” The plan is opposed by only one Cabinet member, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who declared “I don’t understand why we need to give them anything – they have enough food there. We should bomb Hamas’ food reserves.”
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was more upbeat, sensing the opportunity to bring about a new Nakba. "Gaza's citizens are being concentrated from the Morag corridor south, in a humanitarian space where there is no Hamas and no terrorism. From there, they begin to leave for third-world countries. Our hostages have returned to their homes. The IDF continues to purify and destroy infrastructure." High on the list of those ‘third-world countries’ that Israeli and US officials have approached to take Palestinian refugees are war-torn, famine-ridden Somalia and Sudan.
The US appears fully involved in the launch of a newly established, Swiss-registered Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which would by pass UN agencies and oversee the distribution of aid in four ’Secure Distribution Sites’ (SDS) guarded by American security contractors. The sites would initially supply just 1.2 million people (out of a population of over 2.2 million) with pre-packaged rations and hygiene kits. Palestinians would be screened by facial recognition technology and other surveillance checks before being able to access aid. In the attempt to make the new Foundation more credible to international donors, the Trump administration is hoping to recruit former World Food Programme head David Beasley to lead it. Former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness said the plan “is a cynical attempt…to use aid to hide the fact that what’s actually going on is people being starved into submission.”
Israel has already designated more than 70 percent of the Gaza Strip as either a no-go zone or area from which Palestinians are being evacuated, and no longer recognizes any part of the Strip as ‘safe’. As the known death toll reported by OCHA approaches 53,000, Israel’s bombing is unrelenting. Scores of Palestinians are being killed on a daily basis, among them a well-known young singer, 14-year-old Hassan Ayad, who was murdered in a May 5th air strike, and two journalists on May 7. On May 6, air strikes on schools in central Gaza killed at least 48 Palestinians, seven of them children.
Opposition stirs within Israel
In addition to US opposition to its expanded war plans, Israel is also facing push back from its own population. A quarter of the tens of thousands of army reservists who have been sent call-up orders are refusing to respond to them, soldiers have signed letters calling for the war to end, the families of hostages have denounced Netanyahu’s unilateral breaking of the ceasefire and, after being banned from holding pictures of children killed in Gaza, some demonstrators in Tel Aviv have done exactly that. “We must not allow this campaign of death and destruction to continue,” declared Haaretz’s lead editorial on May 6.
Israeli forces continue to strike Syria, Lebanon, and Sanaa international airport and other sites in Yemen, after the Houthis succeeded in hitting Ben Gurion airport with a missile they called ‘hypersonic’ (traveling at five times the speed of sound) on May 4. Israel has refused to take the Houthis up on their offer to stop their attacks when Israel stops attacking Gaza. But after dumping more than 2,000 bombs on Yemen the US did make such a deal, with Trump announcing on May 6 that the US would be ending its near daily strikes on Yemen in exchange for an end to Houthi attacks on US ships in the Red Sea. Israel is also believed to be behind a crippling May 2nd drone strike on a boat named ‘Conscience,’ part of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Coalition anchored off Malta. Greta Thunberg was among the activists from 21 countries who were intending to board the vessel and sail with a cargo of aid to break the siege of Gaza.
Demolition blitz in the West Bank
The West Bank is yet another front for Israel’s military joined by armed settlers, whose persistent aggression against Palestinians is documented here. Israel has been on a “demolition rampage” to enable it to seize Palestinian land for settlement expansion. Over a hundred additional homes in the largely destroyed Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps are now slated for demolition in what the army calls an “operational necessity” while most of the village of Khallet al-Daba in the Masafer Yatta region was demolished on May 5, along with its ten water tanks and seven wells. Elsewhere Palestinian agricultural land has been torched by settlers. On May 8, Israeli police permanently shut down six UNWRA-run schools in Shuafat refugee camp and other East Jerusalem locations and forced students and teachers to leave at gunpoint, depriving some 800 studentsof schooling.
Action taken by the new US ambassador to Israel, Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, to shut down the direct line that the Office of Palestinian Affairs in Jerusalem had maintained with the US State Department is seen as a sign that the US will not interfere with Israel’s ongoing land grab. On May 6, Finance Minister Smotrich discussed his plans for 15,000 new housing units in the E1 area of the West Bank that would divide the north from the south: “This is how you bring in a million residents,” he said, adding that this would pave the way to Israeli sovereignty throughout the West Bank and kill any potential Palestinian state.
Palestinian voices
In the US, two developments demonstrate that Palestinian voices are breaking through despite massive efforts to silence them. Mosab Abu Toha, a poet from Gaza, won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for four pieces published in The New Yorker depicting “the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza.” And Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi, a refugee from the West Bank who was detained at his interview for American citizenship, was ordered to be released by a US District Court judge in Vermont on April 30. In a moving May 2nd New York Times op ed he wrote:
“My only ‘crime’ is refusing to accept the slaughter of Palestinians, opposing war and promoting peace. I have simply insisted that international law must be respected. I believe the way to a just and long-lasting peace for Palestinians and Israelis is through diplomacy and restorative justice….Americans must decide whether to support war or peace, oppression or democracy. If we cannot speak up against the killing of children and what human rights experts have called a genocide in Gaza, what can we speak out against?”
Nancy Murray, Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine