Bi-weekly Brief~May 12, 2025
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
Children so malnourished they’re losing their sight
Children so malnourished they’re losing their sight: Inside Israel’s aid blockade on Gaza
The blockade has led to famine-like conditions for the two million people living on the Strip, and at least 9,000 children have been admitted for treatment of acute malnutrition since the start of the year
Gaza,
Wednesday 07 May 2025 17:45 BST
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Children so malnourished they’re losing their sight: Inside Israel’s aid blockade on Gaza
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The skin is drawn so tightly over the tiny bodies of the emaciated babies in Gaza that they appear both hauntingly newborn and old at the same time.
Doctors treating the daily influx of malnourished children – starving under Israel’s total blockade on aid – say some are so undernourished that they have started to lose their sight.
“The majority of cases are between one month and two years old,” says Dr Raed Al-Baba, a gastroenterologist and nutritionist at Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza. He helps treat around 100 children brought in daily, mostly because of hunger.
“Many children are stunted, suffering from severe diarrhoea and anaemia … It’s leading to rickets, bowed knees, and even the inability to move. They can’t see things well or clear as a result of malnutrition,” he adds.
“I hope our voices will reach the world ... because our children bear no guilt in this war.”
Israel enforced a full ban on aid entering Gaza three months ago, with its top officials accusing the Hamas militant group of using aid to “feed its war machine”, by stealing goods and profiting from them – something the militants deny.
The devastating move has led to famine-like conditions for the two million people living there, and at least 9,000 children have been admitted for treatment of acute malnutrition since the start of the year, according to the UN children’s agency Unicef.
The Hamas-run government in Gaza says 3,500 of them are now at death’s door. On Wednesday, the Palestinian prime minister, Mohammad Mustafa, declared Gaza “a famine zone” and called on the entire UN system to immediately activate its mechanisms.
The crisis has had a particularly devastating impact on infants and breastfeeding and pregnant mothers. According to OCHA, the UN’s humanitarian office, 92 per cent of infants aged 6-23 months and pregnant and breastfeeding mothers are not meeting their nutrient requirements.
Amnesty International has condemned it as “genocide in action”, describing it as part of a “policy of deliberately imposing conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza calculated to bring about their physical destruction”.
The World Food Programme said last month it had run out of all food stocks in Gaza and all 25 of the WFP-supported bakeries had to close. Local volunteers told The Independent they had less than one week of supplies left to deliver.
In Gaza, families have described how food prices in some cases have increased tenfold – if the goods are available at all. A 25kg bag of rotten flour is just over £220, a kilo of rice is £8, and meat is completely unavailable.
As desperation has set in, it has also triggered violent looting, with aid workers describing armed individuals trying to seize the last scraps available.
There are fears the situation will only escalate, as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced intentions to start an expanded “intensive” offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli troops have already taken control of approximately one-third of the 42km-long enclave, displacing the population and constructing watchtowers and surveillance posts on cleared land the military has designated as “security zones”. However, the new plan – which follows weeks of stalled ceasefire negotiations with Hamas – would go even further, including the indefinite seizure of parts of the Strip, the forced displacement of civilians “for their own safety”, and control over aid deliveries.
Extreme-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich has warned that with this new plan, “within a few months ... Gaza will be totally destroyed”.
Speaking at a conference for settlements in the occupied West Bank – which are deemed illegal under international law – he added that the population of Gaza will be corralled into a tiny area in the south of Gaza.
“The rest of the Strip will be empty,” he added, according to The Times of Israel.
“The Gazan citizens will be concentrated in the south. They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.”
The Independent reached out to the Israeli military, which declined to comment, and to Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, but has yet to receive a reply.
But the current operations within Gaza and the plan to expand have even worried the Israeli security establishment, with officials telling left-leaning daily Haaretz that the 59 or so remaining hostages in Gaza – also under the blockade – could be abandoned and die of starvation within days if the Gaza offensive expands.
It has deeply alarmed the international community. Six US senators, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Peter Welch, have asked Congress’s watchdog agency to investigate whether restrictions on humanitarian aid deliveries by Israel and other foreign governments are in violation of US law, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
In Gaza, families have described how they were having to live on a single meal a day.
“Bread has become a thing of the past,” says Najia Abu al-Rus, a 33-year-old mother displaced five times from the southern city of Rafah, who is reduced to feeding her children rice, salt and water. She describes how her diabetic father frequently slips into comas due to the lack of food – and how they cook over fires made from burning plastic and old clothing.
“The children are feeling dizzy, and skin diseases have spread due to the presence of insects.
“We want nothing from the world except to stop the genocide. We want nothing else,” she adds.
Mustafa al-Duhdar, 30, a volunteer relief worker, describes the situation in Gaza as “terrifying in every sense of the word”.
He says that the kitchen where he works to implement feeding initiatives was raided by armed gangs, who tried to take over the premises and were eventually beaten back by staff.
“There may have been some hungry people who stormed the premises out of extreme hunger and desperation, searching for any food to satisfy their hunger,” he says, begging the world for a single “morsel of food to satisfy hunger, a sip of clean water, a safe shelter.”
“Even if you cannot stop the massacre, do not be complicit in the silence. Our message to the world: we are not asking for luxury. We are begging for survival.
“We need the world to feel us, to hear the cry of a hungry child, and to see the tears of a grieving mother. We need life.”
The war began after Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on 7 October 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting 251. Israel says 59 captives remain in Gaza, about 35 of whom are believed to be dead.
Israel’s ensuing offensive has killed more than 52,000 people in Gaza, many of them women and children, according to Palestinian health officials.
