Israel Is Now Blaming the UN for Its Famine. Here’s the Reality.
Source: Drop Site News
The Israeli government has pivoted to a new deflection: The famine in Gaza is not the result of Israel’s publicly announced March 2 blockade of all food entering Gaza, nor is it connected to the Israeli- and U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which replaced the UNRWA aid system Israel shut down with its own militarized version in late May. Instead, according to the new Israeli campaign, the blame lies with the United Nations. “Hundreds of aid trucks have entered Gaza with Israel’s approval, but the supplies are standing idle, undelivered,” the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared on X. “The reason? The UN refuses to distribute the aid.”
Clearly sensing a turning-point in world opinion, as the death toll from starvation mounts exponentially in Gaza, Israel brought dozens of sympathetic journalists to a crossing to wage a PR campaign on Thursday.
Israel’s insistence that the UN must do more when it comes to aid clashed with its position in “ceasefire” negotiations. In its response submitted to mediators Thursday, Hamas insisted that any agreement must allow the UN to resume aid distribution. Israel has rejected that idea. Prior to March 2, aid was distributed through 400 non-militarized points throughout Gaza in a system coordinated by the UN. The GHF operates four points—three in the far southern end of Gaza—all in heavily militarized zones where Palestinians are shot and shelled on a daily basis as they try to access them. Even though Israel in the negotiations has been pretending to demand that the UN distribute aid, Israel has insisted that the GHF remain in control of aid distribution. Today alone, 19 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid, according to Al Jazeera, and at least one woman was killed during a women-only distribution organized by GHF, Gaza’s medical sources told Drop Site.
The focal point of the Israeli accusation against the UN is a collection of some 900 aid trucks that have already crossed into Gaza but which have been unable to distribute the aid. Yet Israel has actively prevented the UN from distributing aid. Tamara Alrifai, a spokesperson for UNRWA, told Drop Site that Israeli restrictions on the movement of the organization’s staff have made distribution impossible. “Claiming that the UN isn’t picking up food and other urgent supplies, and promoting images that these goods are just sitting near the crossing is disingenuous to say the least,” she said. “Since the collapse of the ceasefire, the government of Israel tightened its already stringent restrictions even more, giving even less permission to the UN to move around the Gaza Strip.… The rule is that a UN convoy moves after getting consent. We as the UN have not been getting sufficient permission to move.”
The UN is eager to deliver aid if Israel is serious, she said. “So the ask is: let us do our work, give us movement permits, fulfill your obligation under IHL to protect our passage, then tell us whether we are fulfilling our job,” said Alrifai. “It’s truly cynical to accuse the UN of not doing its work after weeks of seeking to bypass the UN via the GHF and in reality failing to deliver through that so-called ‘humanitarian foundation.’”
At its briefing Thursday, the UN gave its most detailed explanation yet for why the aid was languishing, with Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson for the Secretary-General of the United Nations, citing “a number of interdependent factors, including bureaucratic, logistical, administrative, and other operational obstacles imposed by Israeli authorities; ongoing hostilities and access constraints within Gaza; and incidents of criminal looting, as well as shooting incidents that have killed and injured people gathering to offload aid supplies along convoy routes.”
Last Sunday morning, a UN aid delivery was made by the World Food Programme (WFP). Head of the WFP Cindy McCain, widow of Sen. John McCain, condemned what happened next.
“Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza, the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies,” she said. “As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire. We are deeply concerned and saddened by this tragic incident resulting in the loss of countless lives.”
The Israeli military had assured her they would not fire on aid seekers, McCain claimed, yet they did so almost immediately. “Today’s violent incident comes despite assurances from Israeli authorities that humanitarian operational conditions would improve; including that armed forces will not be present nor engage at any stage along humanitarian convoy routes,” she said. “There should never, ever, be armed groups near or on our aid convoys, as reiterated on many occasions to all parties to the conflict.”
“Without these fundamental conditions in place, we cannot continue providing life-saving support across the Gaza strip,” she said. Over 81 Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded near the Zikim crossing that day. The incident left hundreds of trucks with aid still to be delivered, with Israel immediately beginning to roll out its campaign to deflect blame to the UN.
UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric called the Israeli accusation “the theater of the absurd.” He added, “I think we have seen what happens when Israeli soldiers are near a UN convoy. Right? We saw it. We saw what happened on Sunday in North Gaza. We saw the victims, and we saw the death.… Kerem Shalom is not a McDonald’s drive-thru where we just pull up and pick up what we’ve ordered. And, frankly, I think there’s a lack of willingness to allow us to do our work.”
Israel continues to reject UN requests by staff to move around Gaza, and raided the office of the World Health Organization in Deir-al-Balah this week while pressuring other UN and related organizations to evacuate. “Despite our repeated requests, Israel has not allowed the UN to be present at the crossings, which are militarized areas,” Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told the AFP news agency. “We therefore cannot verify the amount of supplies currently at the crossing.”
The same day as the Sunday massacre, Israel moved to expel the head of OCHA, Jonathan Whittal, from the country, and announced it would grant only one month visas to OCHA officials.
In order for distribution to be successful, Laerke explained to AFP, “they must provide the green light for trucks without unnecessary delays; allow teams to use multiple, safer routes; and order troops to stay away from the convoys, and never shoot at civilians along the allocated routes – or anywhere else…Without the full set of conditions in place, safe and principled delivery cannot take place at scale. So even when approved, those missions are often impeded on the ground.”
During an interview on Channel 4, UNRWA Acting Director Sam Rose was asked about Israel’s claim that it had given permission to the UN to retrieve the trucks. “They are bombing central Gaza, where the vast majority of the UN’s capacity right now is situated. There’s literally no way for United Nations personnel to get out of that area. So no, it isn’t true. It isn’t true at all,” he said.
Despite the incoherence of the Israeli arguments, the U.S. stepped in Thursday to elevate them. “This is important for the world to see,” said U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, sharing the Israeli footage of aid at the crossing. “The UN has criticized the US & Israel for the food actually delivered, but it’s the UN who has had massive amounts sitting on pallets rotting! Let’s hope the press will tell the truth about the UN.”
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce, apparently the last one to get the memo that the famine is now being acknowledged and pinned on the UN rather than denied, put forward a wildly different assessment at her briefing this week, telling reporters that the work GHF was doing has been “a tremendous success.”
“GHF did it differently, and the different approach has worked,” said Bruce.
Meanwhile, international pressure on Israel continues to build momentum. 28 countries, including major European powers like France and England, issued a joint statement on Monday, saying “the Israeli government to immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and to urgently enable the UN and humanitarian NGOs to do their life saving work safely and effectively.” Likewise, four of the world’s largest media institutions—AP, AFP, BBC News, and Reuters—declared “We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.” Increasingly, Israel’s supporters are facing international scrutiny.
The Israeli government’s defiant new PR campaign comes, however, as supporters of Israel are finally acknowledging that the situation has become desperate, and has created a major problem for Israel on the world stage. “It’s actually real and beginning now in a desperate way and the Israelis had better not allow it and massively uptick aid in a huge strategic way,” Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur said on a podcast hosted by The Free Press, a pro-Israel news outlet in the United States. Rettig Gur cited a new paper by Yannay Spitzer, an assistant professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who studied prices of food in the markets in Deir-al-Balah, finding that they have exploded to catastrophic levels.
Amit Segal, another outspoken defender of Israel, cited the same report in raising a similar alarm, warning that a famine “would see Israel lose even its most strident supporters.”
The Silent Cries of Gaza: A Legacy of Innocence Lost and the Urgent Call to Confront Genocide
Henry Giroux
July 25, 2025
Photograph Source: Ashraf Amra – CC BY-SA 4.0
The bronze sculpture by Marie Uchytilová, Memorial to the Children Victims of the War, depicting the 82 children of Lidice murdered at Chełmno in 1942, serves as a haunting reminder of the barbarity that defined the Nazi-led Lidice massacre. In reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis razed the village of Lidice, executed its men, and deported its women and children to death camps.
The murder of these innocent children, whose faces are forever memorialized in Uchytilová’s sculpture, resonates deeply today, as we witness the suffering of children in Gaza, where the cycle of violence continues unabated. The massacres of these children, then and now, serve as stark symbols of the ongoing tragedy of war and genocide, linking past and present in an unbroken chain of human suffering.
In Gaza, the atrocities visited upon children are unspeakable, a violence that staggers the imagination. Omer Bartov, a distinguished scholar of Holocaust and Genocide studies, reports in The New York Times that more than 17,000 children have been slaughtered in Gaza, 870 of them infants, not yet one year old. He further reveals that Gaza now has the highest rate of child amputations per capita in the world. These chilling figures unravel the brutal truths of modern warfare, a sickening continuation of the horrors we dared to believe had been consigned to history’s darkest pages, alongside Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
But the genocide in Gaza, like the slaughter at Lidice, cannot be hidden. It stands as an undeniable, grotesque monument to the unchecked power of the state and the monstrous machinery of war. This tragedy is different from past atrocities in one disturbing respect: the suffering of Gaza’s women and children, the use of starvation as a weapon, the unrelenting bombardment, and the spectacle of mass murder are laid bare for all to see. The grotesque violence is not concealed, it is flaunted, glorified in the guttering language of demagogues and amplified by the shameful silence of the mainstream media. In addition, as a testament to the grotesque violence of gangster capitalism, entire villages are being bulldozed in the interest of appealing to private investors who can turn Gaza, in the words of President Trump, into a “riviera of the Middle East.”
Jonathan Cook observes that “a cabal of Israeli investors, one of the world’s top business consulting groups and a think-tank headed by former British prime minister Tony Blair had been secretly working on plans to exploit the ruins of Gaza as prime real estate.” According to the Financial Times, the secret consortium was actively exploring ways to realize Donald Trump’s vision of transforming Gaza into a high-end investment hub and luxury destination—an enclave remade for the wealthy—once its Palestinian population had been forcibly removed. The plan exposes a chilling logic: to turn the site of mass suffering into a profitable venture by erasing its people, commodifying their dispossession, and masking genocide behind the language of development.
The collapse of conscience is not a distant abstraction but a visceral reality, carved into the bloodstained bodies of women and children, their lives and futures obliterated by the ruthless forces of war. It is etched into the hands of those who perpetuate this unbearable violence against a defenseless yet resilient people. This erosion of humanity is also made explicit in the chilling words of Israeli politicians. Take, for instance, former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin, who pushed this rhetoric to unspeakable extremes in a 2025 interview on Israeli Channel 14. He declared, “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamas, nor is it the military wing of Hamas … We need to conquer Gaza and colonize it and not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory.” Feigin’s words lay bare a harrowing truth: this is no longer a war, but a calculated and dehumanizing military campaign, a ruthless genocidal war, aimed at erasing not only the most vulnerable—Palestinian children—but an entire people from existence.”
Dr. Yasser Khan, a witness to the horrors unfolding in Gaza, shared his testimony alongside Mehdi and Naomi Klein. His words give a voice to the unimaginable suffering that children endure in this modern-day slaughter. He recalls treating a 14-year-old girl who had been struck by shrapnel in both eyes, her eyeballs shattered and leaving her blind. Her plight is compounded by the fact that she is now orphaned, her family victims of the violence. With no infrastructure, no access to food, water, or electricity, and constant bombardment, these children are left to die alone, without care or hope.
Nowhere is the heartlessness of the Netanyahu government and the Israeli state, and the shameless indifference of most of the world. more evident than in the deliberate starvation of an entire people. Because of the enforced blockade of aid to Gaza, 81 people have died from starvation, while Gaza’s health ministry reports over 28,000 cases of malnutrition, including more than 5,000 children. “According to U.N. spokesperson, Thameen Al-Kheetan, “as of July 21st, 1,054 people have been killed while simply trying to obtain food.” This is not merely a humanitarian catastrophe—it is an act of collective punishment, a slow, grinding extermination. Infants wither in their mothers’ arms, their tiny bodies hollowed by hunger. Mothers, themselves starving, have no milk to give. Children gaze with sunken eyes and swollen bellies, their cries of hunger echoing into a silence broken only by the roar of bombs. The smell of death is everywhere-with no shame, only the hunger of extermination. The deliberate starvation and murder of those seeking bread, the withering of children before the eyes of the world, is more than a moral stain or a violation of international law—it is the mark of a state descending into the savagery and cruelty of genocidal authoritarianism. And yet, the silence of much of the world remains deafening.
The atrocities occurring in Gaza are not merely a crisis–they are a profound moral catastrophe, one that forces us to confront the global collapse of conscience. As we bear witness to the brutal, real-time images of children being torn apart by bombs, snipers, and the Israeli Defense Forces, we are confronted with a global moral collapse. The major powers continue to arm Israel, while academic institutions remain silent and corporate-controlled media either ignore or vilify those who dare to speak out against the Israeli government’s actions. We are witnessing what could be described as the Hiroshima of our time, an event that signifies not only the destruction of lives but the erosion of our collective conscience.
Dr. Khan’s account is more than a mere testimony; it is an urgent call for action. His words, raw, visceral, and filled with anguish, urge us to confront the inescapable truth: we are complicit in this suffering if we continue to look away. The pain and terror faced by these children is not just their burden; it is a tragedy that belongs to us all. Every child, everywhere, is our child. The call for understanding is not enough. We must act.
The parallels between the children of Lidice and the children of Gaza are undeniable. Both are casualties of power, victims of regimes that see them as expendable. Yet, in the erasure of history, in the paralyzing censorship that pervades many parts of the world, we risk forgetting the lessons of the past. The ghosts of genocidal violence are not distant echoes, lingering only in the forgotten corners of history, they are present, shaping the policies that continue to devastate innocent lives. To ignore these lessons is to abandon our moral compass, to deny our shared humanity, and to let history repeat itself.
We stand at a crossroads. The violence and brutality we are witnessing today demand more than passive observation; they demand collective moral action. The tragedy unfolding in Gaza is not an isolated incident; it is part of a broader pattern of state violence and genocide. It is a global issue, one that transcends borders and affects us all. It is time to acknowledge the atrocities being committed and to act with the urgency that the situation demands. The children of Gaza are not just casualties of a distant conflict; they are the children of humanity, and it is our collective responsibility to ensure their suffering does not continue unchecked. The time to dismantle the machinery of death and state terrorism is now.
Our collective responsibility is no longer a choice, it is an imperative. Every child is our child. This is not a hollow slogan but a profound truth, a declaration of our boundless commitment, our unwavering love, and our shared hope for all children, for whom we bear an irreplaceable responsibility. It is a call to action, an urgent demand for justice that transcends mere words, and a vision of hope as a fierce, militant force resisting the childcide that stains our world. It is a rallying cry against the gangster militarism and ruthless authoritarianism that enable such horrors, a reminder that our fight for the future is inextricably bound to the lives of the youngest among us.
Note from the publisher: You can call your representatives via Code Pink’s Congress Action page. They provide a script that urges congress to:
Support a ceasefire and open humanitarian corridors
Vote NO on future weapons shipments to Israel
Demand aid for Gaza, not bombs
Dial (202) 224‑3121 as your voice from your ZIP code.
Find the contact link here.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
Sumud and the Children of Palestine
July 25, 2025
Photograph Source: Jj M Ḥtp – Wall in Bethlehem – CC0
Sumud: an Arabic word, embodies the ability to withstand hardship and maintain a sense of identity and purpose despite the challenges of living under occupation.
A nation that maims, kills and starves men, women and children is unlikely to survive. Also, leaders of nations who have aided in those atrocities will likely face the same fate.
The Gaza Tribunal, newly created to counter the complicity of many Western countries in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, tells us: “Gaza represents a breaking point in the historical journey of humanity, when a global system based on power, not justice, prevails.” Richard Falk, the tribunal’s president, at its first session in Sarajevo, characterized Gaza as the “moral challenge of our time.”
It is Gaza’s children, Palestine’s future, who have born the brunt of Israel’s atrocities. The United Nations Children’s Fund calls Gaza the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. And the commissioner general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, Philipe Lazzarini, concluded about Israel’s war on Gaza, “This is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.”
Two-thirds of the Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israel’s self-declared “moral army” have been women and children. One in ten children in Gaza are malnourished because of Israel’s engineered blockade of humanitarian aid. And, more than 40,000 have war-related disabilities as a result of its attacks: “Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world.”
A child psychiatrist with Medicines Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders in Palestine, observes that there’s never a ‘post’ in post-traumatic stress syndrome. It’s ongoing trauma, it’s protracted trauma, it’s one war [Israeli] after the other.”
As I agonize over the unimaginable suffering and trauma of Gaza’s children, the refrain from Billie Holiday’s 1941 mournful song, “God Bless the Child,” keeps coming back to me: “God bless the child that’s got his own.”
The soulful lament is tailored for all who experience physical and mental pain. Its lyrics seem as if they were written with Palestinians in mind.
The poem encourages reliance on one’s strength and resourcefulness to survive the painful inequalities and harsh realities of life. Despite its melancholic tone, it makes a powerful statement about self-determination and defiance in the face of adversity. With time, it has become an anthem of independence and self-reliance.
Generations of Palestinians have experienced countless injustices and have had to struggle for survival on their own. Sumud, a core value in Palestinian society, has been their lodestar.
For decades, U.S.-financed Israeli regimes have resorted to systematic cruelty and overwhelming force to crush Palestinian resistance. Their ruthlessness, however, has made Palestinians stronger and more inventive in resisting Zionist oppression.
The Palestinian struggle for freedom has begun to bring the world together and across generations. Palestine has come to mean freedom, especially to the disposed and disenfranchised.
Despite the ready availability of the U.S. military arsenal, Israel has been unable to defeat a guerrilla force, with no real means of defense. The Israeli military has murdered countless Palestinian leaders, relentlessly bombed their country from the air, turned historical Gaza into rubble, but they have not succeeded to crush the spirit of sumud.
Significantly, the image of a democratic, civilized and moral Israel has been exposed for the sham it is. The global community has come to recognize the Zionist entity for what it has always been: a brutal lawless settler-colonial project in the heart of the Islamic world, striving to be the undisputed regional hegemon. While engaged in unbridled barbarism in occupied Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has attacked Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
Unfortunately, Washington has committed itself financially, militarily and politically to Israel’s genocide. The Arab regimes, 23 of them (excepting Yemen), with a combined population of nearly 500 million, are weak, corrupt and dependent on the United States.
There is much the entire Arab world can and should learn from Palestinian sumud. Their liberation energy and persistence bear witness to what is possible: a new unified regional order that says NO to U.S.-Israel hegemony.
Interestingly, after World War I and II, Arab leaders of those years understood the necessity of forcefully opposing the implantation of Western imperialism in the region generally and in Palestine particularly.
For example, Egyptian diplomat and first secretary-general of the newly established Arab League, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, known also as Azzam Pasha, explained the League’s position regarding Palestine and the Zionist claim during a 1946 public hearing of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in Cairo. The commission, assembled at the end of World War II, was tasked with investigating the impact of settling 100,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors in Palestine.
At the Cairo hearings, Azzam Pasha advanced an independent way forward:
“The Zionist, the new Jew [European], wants to dominate and he pretends that he has got a particular civilizing mission with which he returns to a backward degenerate race in order to put the elements of progress into an area which wants no progress. Well, that has been the pretension of every power that wanted to colonize and aimed at domination….The Arabs simply stand and say NO. We are not reactionary and we are not backward….We have a heritage of civilization and of spiritual life. We are not going to allow ourselves to be controlled….”
Azzam Pasha, like other Arab leaders of his time, rejected the establishment of an exclusive Jewish state, proposing instead an autonomous Palestine that respected the will of the Arab majority while safeguarding the equality of all inhabitants, regardless of religion. It is regrettable that the current leadership in the Arab world is deaf to it.
Palestine is not the native land of the Zionists and their progeny, who have for 77 years illegally occupied stolen land and sustained themselves on pilfered resources. It explains the Israeli regime’s complete absence of regret or reservations about destroying 5,000-year-old Gaza.
Since October 2023, the Israeli Occupation Forces have systematically leveled Gaza, a war crime under Article 53 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the destruction of already occupied land by an occupying power. Since it withdrew from the March 2025 ceasefire, Israel has carried out planned controlled demolitions across bombed-out Gaza and has virtually flattened Rafah, whose history spans thousands of years.
Palestinians, like their cherished olive trees, have lives deeply rooted in the soil of Palestine. And like them, they have refused to be uprooted by British, Zionist and American imperialists.
The October rebellion has internationalized the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe). Palestine can no longer be ignored. The survival of international order and the rule of law is linked to the viability of the Palestinian nation.
Support of the global community for the Palestinian struggle is more crucial today than ever. That passive support must be transformed into concrete action has
finally been deemed vital by some nations. Increased concern has lead to the formation of a number of international groups: the Gaza Tribunal, the Hague Group and Madrid Group, among them.
The Gaza Tribunal, also known as the People’s Tribunal, a civil society initiative, draws on the expertise of a broad group of intellectuals, academics, lawyers, human rights activists, moral and cultural figures and civil organizations to serve as a “court of humanity and conscience,” specifically regarding Gaza.
At the Emergency Conference of the Hague Group in Bogota, Colombia on 15 July 2025, for example, all 30 countries agreed that “the era of impunity [of Israel] must end—and that international law must be enforced.”
The stated aim of the Madrid Group, a coalition of over 20 European and Arab countries, is to end Israel’s war and blockade of Gaza.
After 22 months of barbarism, the foreign ministers of Britain and 27 other countries finally “sharply criticized” Israel for its conduct in Gaza. As hard as they have tried, they could no longer ignore the daily slaughter of starving Gazans desperately trying to get food. Over 1,054 have been killed in the area of the aid sites since the Gaza “Humanitarian” Foundation—an Israeli-backed U.S. contractor—seized control and militarized aid distribution on 26 May 2025.
On Tuesday (22 July 2025), UN humanitarians warned that the lifelines keeping people in Gaza alive are collapsing. And on the same day, the last functioning hospitals there reported that 21 children had died in the past three days due to malnutrition and starvation. Israel’s cruelty has no end.
Billie Holiday’s lamentation about resilience and the endurance of the human spirit: “God bless the child that’s got his own…that’s got his own”—is urgently felt for everyone in Palestine, especially for the children.
“Everything Beautiful in Their Lives is Gone:” US Physicians Read Aloud the Searing Testimony of Desperate Doctors and Patients in Gaza
July 25, 2025
Photograph Source: Ashraf Amra – CC BY-SA 4.0
“I have a cold. And in one hour, I’ll have finished a twenty-four-hour shift, heartbroken again. I lost a cardiac patient because we had no medication. Another patient shot in the head, was left to die slowly because we had no ventilator. A child with a shattered skull and exposed brain matter just died in front of me. I also just found a kidney patient collapsed on the bedroom floor. He had a seizure due to brain damage because he has not had dialysis in three months. A diabetic man hadn’t eaten in four days. He cried when I asked why. I gave him fluids and some money to buy flour. I’m so sorry for the starving, for the children we couldn’t save, for the mothers, for the elderly, for the vulnerable. Not a single shift has passed without having me shattered.”
This is the reality in Gaza right now for the medical profession struggling to save an overwhelming amount of patients, not only from the bombings and gunshot wounds but now also from starvation. And the starvation has reached everyone, including the doctors themselves, some of whom have passed out on the floors of what remains of Gaza’s hospitals, then picked themselves up and gone back to work.
Those opening words belonged to Dr. Ali Tahrawi, an emergency room doctor at Alqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza.They were read aloud at a recent Washington, DC press conference by Dr. Ashraf Abou El-Ezz, a physician from Indiana who knows he has all the resources he needs.
But somehow, the words are never loud enough and even though they were spoken in the shadow of the US Capitol building, those inside had already left for the summer recess. And in any case, most of them are not listening. Only US Representative Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Democrat and the sole Palestinian American in Congress, remained behind to host the press conference.
“I dread the moment Hanan and Misk will ask me about their legs,” continued medical student Sharad Wertheimer, a member, like the others, of the US-based global network, Doctors Against Genocide (DAG), reading the words of Hala Sha’sha’aj, a 40-year old mother of five from Gaza city.
“What will I tell them? When I go to buy shoes for my children, what will I do when Hanan and Misk ask why I don’t buy them any? If they say, ‘I want to play’, ‘I want to dance’, ‘I want to ride a bike,’ what will I say to them? They lost their father, the love, compassion and security he gave them, and they also lost their legs, the ability to move and play. Everything beautiful in their lives is gone. Their childhood was stolen. What did they do to deserve such devastation?”
One after another, the doctors in their white coats and scrubs stepped forward to read the words of their colleagues, friends, relatives and people they don’t know at all, just human beings who matter and who are trapped in the concentration camps and free fire zones that Gaza has now become under the Israeli bombardment and forced starvation.
The doctors have heard these stories over and over for 22 months, during which time the situation has continued to get worse and the inaction by the US and other governments more criminal. But now, in the heat of late July, having lobbied members of Congress, protested, disrupted meetings and been arrested, they are running out of patience.
“We will not be polite”, warned John Reuwer, a retired ER doctor and member of DAG, who said he had been to five war zones but had never seen anything as bad as the current situation in Gaza. “We are here to say ‘no more’”, he said. “We will not stop. And we will not forget.”
And so the doctors continued to bear witness on behalf of the besieged and desperate Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
“On the 28th of March, the soldiers called me and two other civilian prisoners, aged around 16 and 17, by name,” came the words of Dr. Khalid Alseer, read by Dr. Qurat-ul-ain Syedain. “It was night. They tied us very tightly at our wrists and ankles and put us in a military car. No one told us anything. We drove for around two hours into the hills. All the while they beat us, kicking us and humiliating us. They were laughing. I was trying to explain in English that the ties on my wrist were too tight, but they just said I was a doctor so I would be okay.
“At around 4 am I heard one say in Arabic, ‘these three are to be hanged.’ I thought it was the end. I was in pain. They had broken my ribs. Even when they said I was going to be hanged, I didn’t care. I just wanted it to end.” Dr. Alseer was eventually released in late September, reunited with his parents for whom he is the sole provider.
“In mid-April 2024, Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison,” read Dr. Roxana Samimi from an eyewitness account by a captive at the notorious detention center in the occupied West Bank and as told to Sky News. “The prison guards brought Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body. The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms. A few minutes later, prisoners were heard screaming from the room they went into, declaring Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was dead.”
How many more such testimonies need to be heard, the doctors wondered? What has happened to our humanity if we can live in a country that allows such a genocide to continue and our tax dollars to support it? Included in that so-called support is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israel-US front that distributes aid as a form of Russian roulette, where young children are picked off by snipers, running barefoot to faster escape the bullets while trying to get food to feed their families.
“This is not a war, this is an extermination campaign,” said Dr. Nidal Jboor, a Michigan internal medicine specialist and a co-founder of DAG. “From the concentration camps of the Holocaust, to the killing fields of Cambodia, to the concentration zones Israel is building across Gaza, and now the American-backed death distribution centers, the genocide is the same.”
“This institution is not moving with the majority of their constituencies,” said Tlaib, pointing to the Capitol dome behind her. “And it’s shameful because if they polled their constituents to ask if they wanted another dime spent on continuing to support another war crime in Gaza, they would tell you ‘hell no’,” she said. “We say enough is enough.”
The Israeli government has pivoted to a new deflection: The famine in Gaza is not the result of Israel’s publicly announced March 2 blockade of all food entering Gaza, nor is it connected to the Israeli- and U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which replaced the UNRWA aid system Israel shut down with its own militarized version in late May. Instead, according to the new Israeli campaign, the blame lies with the United Nations. “Hundreds of aid trucks have entered Gaza with Israel’s approval, but the supplies are standing idle, undelivered,” the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared on X. “The reason? The UN refuses to distribute the aid.”
Clearly sensing a turning-point in world opinion, as the death toll from starvation mounts exponentially in Gaza, Israel brought dozens of sympathetic journalists to a crossing to wage a PR campaign on Thursday.
Israel’s insistence that the UN must do more when it comes to aid clashed with its position in “ceasefire” negotiations. In its response submitted to mediators Thursday, Hamas insisted that any agreement must allow the UN to resume aid distribution. Israel has rejected that idea. Prior to March 2, aid was distributed through 400 non-militarized points throughout Gaza in a system coordinated by the UN. The GHF operates four points—three in the far southern end of Gaza—all in heavily militarized zones where Palestinians are shot and shelled on a daily basis as they try to access them. Even though Israel in the negotiations has been pretending to demand that the UN distribute aid, Israel has insisted that the GHF remain in control of aid distribution. Today alone, 19 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid, according to Al Jazeera, and at least one woman was killed during a women-only distribution organized by GHF, Gaza’s medical sources told Drop Site.
The focal point of the Israeli accusation against the UN is a collection of some 900 aid trucks that have already crossed into Gaza but which have been unable to distribute the aid. Yet Israel has actively prevented the UN from distributing aid. Tamara Alrifai, a spokesperson for UNRWA, told Drop Site that Israeli restrictions on the movement of the organization’s staff have made distribution impossible. “Claiming that the UN isn’t picking up food and other urgent supplies, and promoting images that these goods are just sitting near the crossing is disingenuous to say the least,” she said. “Since the collapse of the ceasefire, the government of Israel tightened its already stringent restrictions even more, giving even less permission to the UN to move around the Gaza Strip.… The rule is that a UN convoy moves after getting consent. We as the UN have not been getting sufficient permission to move.”
The UN is eager to deliver aid if Israel is serious, she said. “So the ask is: let us do our work, give us movement permits, fulfill your obligation under IHL to protect our passage, then tell us whether we are fulfilling our job,” said Alrifai. “It’s truly cynical to accuse the UN of not doing its work after weeks of seeking to bypass the UN via the GHF and in reality failing to deliver through that so-called ‘humanitarian foundation.’”
At its briefing Thursday, the UN gave its most detailed explanation yet for why the aid was languishing, with Farhan Haq, deputy spokesperson for the Secretary-General of the United Nations, citing “a number of interdependent factors, including bureaucratic, logistical, administrative, and other operational obstacles imposed by Israeli authorities; ongoing hostilities and access constraints within Gaza; and incidents of criminal looting, as well as shooting incidents that have killed and injured people gathering to offload aid supplies along convoy routes.”
Last Sunday morning, a UN aid delivery was made by the World Food Programme (WFP). Head of the WFP Cindy McCain, widow of Sen. John McCain, condemned what happened next.
“Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza, the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies,” she said. “As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire. We are deeply concerned and saddened by this tragic incident resulting in the loss of countless lives.”
The Israeli military had assured her they would not fire on aid seekers, McCain claimed, yet they did so almost immediately. “Today’s violent incident comes despite assurances from Israeli authorities that humanitarian operational conditions would improve; including that armed forces will not be present nor engage at any stage along humanitarian convoy routes,” she said. “There should never, ever, be armed groups near or on our aid convoys, as reiterated on many occasions to all parties to the conflict.”
“Without these fundamental conditions in place, we cannot continue providing life-saving support across the Gaza strip,” she said. Over 81 Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded near the Zikim crossing that day. The incident left hundreds of trucks with aid still to be delivered, with Israel immediately beginning to roll out its campaign to deflect blame to the UN.
UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric called the Israeli accusation “the theater of the absurd.” He added, “I think we have seen what happens when Israeli soldiers are near a UN convoy. Right? We saw it. We saw what happened on Sunday in North Gaza. We saw the victims, and we saw the death.… Kerem Shalom is not a McDonald’s drive-thru where we just pull up and pick up what we’ve ordered. And, frankly, I think there’s a lack of willingness to allow us to do our work.”
Israel continues to reject UN requests by staff to move around Gaza, and raided the office of the World Health Organization in Deir-al-Balah this week while pressuring other UN and related organizations to evacuate. “Despite our repeated requests, Israel has not allowed the UN to be present at the crossings, which are militarized areas,” Jens Laerke, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told the AFP news agency. “We therefore cannot verify the amount of supplies currently at the crossing.”
The same day as the Sunday massacre, Israel moved to expel the head of OCHA, Jonathan Whittal, from the country, and announced it would grant only one month visas to OCHA officials.
In order for distribution to be successful, Laerke explained to AFP, “they must provide the green light for trucks without unnecessary delays; allow teams to use multiple, safer routes; and order troops to stay away from the convoys, and never shoot at civilians along the allocated routes – or anywhere else…Without the full set of conditions in place, safe and principled delivery cannot take place at scale. So even when approved, those missions are often impeded on the ground.”
During an interview on Channel 4, UNRWA Acting Director Sam Rose was asked about Israel’s claim that it had given permission to the UN to retrieve the trucks. “They are bombing central Gaza, where the vast majority of the UN’s capacity right now is situated. There’s literally no way for United Nations personnel to get out of that area. So no, it isn’t true. It isn’t true at all,” he said.
Despite the incoherence of the Israeli arguments, the U.S. stepped in Thursday to elevate them. “This is important for the world to see,” said U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, sharing the Israeli footage of aid at the crossing. “The UN has criticized the US & Israel for the food actually delivered, but it’s the UN who has had massive amounts sitting on pallets rotting! Let’s hope the press will tell the truth about the UN.”
State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce, apparently the last one to get the memo that the famine is now being acknowledged and pinned on the UN rather than denied, put forward a wildly different assessment at her briefing this week, telling reporters that the work GHF was doing has been “a tremendous success.”
“GHF did it differently, and the different approach has worked,” said Bruce.
Meanwhile, international pressure on Israel continues to build momentum. 28 countries, including major European powers like France and England, issued a joint statement on Monday, saying “the Israeli government to immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid and to urgently enable the UN and humanitarian NGOs to do their life saving work safely and effectively.” Likewise, four of the world’s largest media institutions—AP, AFP, BBC News, and Reuters—declared “We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.” Increasingly, Israel’s supporters are facing international scrutiny.
The Israeli government’s defiant new PR campaign comes, however, as supporters of Israel are finally acknowledging that the situation has become desperate, and has created a major problem for Israel on the world stage. “It’s actually real and beginning now in a desperate way and the Israelis had better not allow it and massively uptick aid in a huge strategic way,” Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur said on a podcast hosted by The Free Press, a pro-Israel news outlet in the United States. Rettig Gur cited a new paper by Yannay Spitzer, an assistant professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who studied prices of food in the markets in Deir-al-Balah, finding that they have exploded to catastrophic levels.
Amit Segal, another outspoken defender of Israel, cited the same report in raising a similar alarm, warning that a famine “would see Israel lose even its most strident supporters.”
July 25, 2025
Photograph Source: Ashraf Amra – CC BY-SA 4.0
The bronze sculpture by Marie Uchytilová, Memorial to the Children Victims of the War, depicting the 82 children of Lidice murdered at Chełmno in 1942, serves as a haunting reminder of the barbarity that defined the Nazi-led Lidice massacre. In reprisal for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazis razed the village of Lidice, executed its men, and deported its women and children to death camps.
The murder of these innocent children, whose faces are forever memorialized in Uchytilová’s sculpture, resonates deeply today, as we witness the suffering of children in Gaza, where the cycle of violence continues unabated. The massacres of these children, then and now, serve as stark symbols of the ongoing tragedy of war and genocide, linking past and present in an unbroken chain of human suffering.
In Gaza, the atrocities visited upon children are unspeakable, a violence that staggers the imagination. Omer Bartov, a distinguished scholar of Holocaust and Genocide studies, reports in The New York Times that more than 17,000 children have been slaughtered in Gaza, 870 of them infants, not yet one year old. He further reveals that Gaza now has the highest rate of child amputations per capita in the world. These chilling figures unravel the brutal truths of modern warfare, a sickening continuation of the horrors we dared to believe had been consigned to history’s darkest pages, alongside Auschwitz and Hiroshima.
But the genocide in Gaza, like the slaughter at Lidice, cannot be hidden. It stands as an undeniable, grotesque monument to the unchecked power of the state and the monstrous machinery of war. This tragedy is different from past atrocities in one disturbing respect: the suffering of Gaza’s women and children, the use of starvation as a weapon, the unrelenting bombardment, and the spectacle of mass murder are laid bare for all to see. The grotesque violence is not concealed, it is flaunted, glorified in the guttering language of demagogues and amplified by the shameful silence of the mainstream media. In addition, as a testament to the grotesque violence of gangster capitalism, entire villages are being bulldozed in the interest of appealing to private investors who can turn Gaza, in the words of President Trump, into a “riviera of the Middle East.”
Jonathan Cook observes that “a cabal of Israeli investors, one of the world’s top business consulting groups and a think-tank headed by former British prime minister Tony Blair had been secretly working on plans to exploit the ruins of Gaza as prime real estate.” According to the Financial Times, the secret consortium was actively exploring ways to realize Donald Trump’s vision of transforming Gaza into a high-end investment hub and luxury destination—an enclave remade for the wealthy—once its Palestinian population had been forcibly removed. The plan exposes a chilling logic: to turn the site of mass suffering into a profitable venture by erasing its people, commodifying their dispossession, and masking genocide behind the language of development.
The collapse of conscience is not a distant abstraction but a visceral reality, carved into the bloodstained bodies of women and children, their lives and futures obliterated by the ruthless forces of war. It is etched into the hands of those who perpetuate this unbearable violence against a defenseless yet resilient people. This erosion of humanity is also made explicit in the chilling words of Israeli politicians. Take, for instance, former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin, who pushed this rhetoric to unspeakable extremes in a 2025 interview on Israeli Channel 14. He declared, “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy. The enemy is not Hamas, nor is it the military wing of Hamas … We need to conquer Gaza and colonize it and not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory.” Feigin’s words lay bare a harrowing truth: this is no longer a war, but a calculated and dehumanizing military campaign, a ruthless genocidal war, aimed at erasing not only the most vulnerable—Palestinian children—but an entire people from existence.”
Dr. Yasser Khan, a witness to the horrors unfolding in Gaza, shared his testimony alongside Mehdi and Naomi Klein. His words give a voice to the unimaginable suffering that children endure in this modern-day slaughter. He recalls treating a 14-year-old girl who had been struck by shrapnel in both eyes, her eyeballs shattered and leaving her blind. Her plight is compounded by the fact that she is now orphaned, her family victims of the violence. With no infrastructure, no access to food, water, or electricity, and constant bombardment, these children are left to die alone, without care or hope.
Nowhere is the heartlessness of the Netanyahu government and the Israeli state, and the shameless indifference of most of the world. more evident than in the deliberate starvation of an entire people. Because of the enforced blockade of aid to Gaza, 81 people have died from starvation, while Gaza’s health ministry reports over 28,000 cases of malnutrition, including more than 5,000 children. “According to U.N. spokesperson, Thameen Al-Kheetan, “as of July 21st, 1,054 people have been killed while simply trying to obtain food.” This is not merely a humanitarian catastrophe—it is an act of collective punishment, a slow, grinding extermination. Infants wither in their mothers’ arms, their tiny bodies hollowed by hunger. Mothers, themselves starving, have no milk to give. Children gaze with sunken eyes and swollen bellies, their cries of hunger echoing into a silence broken only by the roar of bombs. The smell of death is everywhere-with no shame, only the hunger of extermination. The deliberate starvation and murder of those seeking bread, the withering of children before the eyes of the world, is more than a moral stain or a violation of international law—it is the mark of a state descending into the savagery and cruelty of genocidal authoritarianism. And yet, the silence of much of the world remains deafening.
The atrocities occurring in Gaza are not merely a crisis–they are a profound moral catastrophe, one that forces us to confront the global collapse of conscience. As we bear witness to the brutal, real-time images of children being torn apart by bombs, snipers, and the Israeli Defense Forces, we are confronted with a global moral collapse. The major powers continue to arm Israel, while academic institutions remain silent and corporate-controlled media either ignore or vilify those who dare to speak out against the Israeli government’s actions. We are witnessing what could be described as the Hiroshima of our time, an event that signifies not only the destruction of lives but the erosion of our collective conscience.
Dr. Khan’s account is more than a mere testimony; it is an urgent call for action. His words, raw, visceral, and filled with anguish, urge us to confront the inescapable truth: we are complicit in this suffering if we continue to look away. The pain and terror faced by these children is not just their burden; it is a tragedy that belongs to us all. Every child, everywhere, is our child. The call for understanding is not enough. We must act.
The parallels between the children of Lidice and the children of Gaza are undeniable. Both are casualties of power, victims of regimes that see them as expendable. Yet, in the erasure of history, in the paralyzing censorship that pervades many parts of the world, we risk forgetting the lessons of the past. The ghosts of genocidal violence are not distant echoes, lingering only in the forgotten corners of history, they are present, shaping the policies that continue to devastate innocent lives. To ignore these lessons is to abandon our moral compass, to deny our shared humanity, and to let history repeat itself.
We stand at a crossroads. The violence and brutality we are witnessing today demand more than passive observation; they demand collective moral action. The tragedy unfolding in Gaza is not an isolated incident; it is part of a broader pattern of state violence and genocide. It is a global issue, one that transcends borders and affects us all. It is time to acknowledge the atrocities being committed and to act with the urgency that the situation demands. The children of Gaza are not just casualties of a distant conflict; they are the children of humanity, and it is our collective responsibility to ensure their suffering does not continue unchecked. The time to dismantle the machinery of death and state terrorism is now.
Our collective responsibility is no longer a choice, it is an imperative. Every child is our child. This is not a hollow slogan but a profound truth, a declaration of our boundless commitment, our unwavering love, and our shared hope for all children, for whom we bear an irreplaceable responsibility. It is a call to action, an urgent demand for justice that transcends mere words, and a vision of hope as a fierce, militant force resisting the childcide that stains our world. It is a rallying cry against the gangster militarism and ruthless authoritarianism that enable such horrors, a reminder that our fight for the future is inextricably bound to the lives of the youngest among us.
Note from the publisher: You can call your representatives via Code Pink’s Congress Action page. They provide a script that urges congress to:
Support a ceasefire and open humanitarian corridors
Vote NO on future weapons shipments to Israel
Demand aid for Gaza, not bombs
Dial (202) 224‑3121 as your voice from your ZIP code.
Find the contact link here.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections: Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of Truthout’s board of directors.
Photograph Source: Jj M Ḥtp – Wall in Bethlehem – CC0
Sumud: an Arabic word, embodies the ability to withstand hardship and maintain a sense of identity and purpose despite the challenges of living under occupation.
A nation that maims, kills and starves men, women and children is unlikely to survive. Also, leaders of nations who have aided in those atrocities will likely face the same fate.
The Gaza Tribunal, newly created to counter the complicity of many Western countries in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, tells us: “Gaza represents a breaking point in the historical journey of humanity, when a global system based on power, not justice, prevails.” Richard Falk, the tribunal’s president, at its first session in Sarajevo, characterized Gaza as the “moral challenge of our time.”
It is Gaza’s children, Palestine’s future, who have born the brunt of Israel’s atrocities. The United Nations Children’s Fund calls Gaza the most dangerous place in the world to be a child. And the commissioner general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine, Philipe Lazzarini, concluded about Israel’s war on Gaza, “This is a war on children. It is a war on their childhood and their future.”
Two-thirds of the Palestinians killed in Gaza by Israel’s self-declared “moral army” have been women and children. One in ten children in Gaza are malnourished because of Israel’s engineered blockade of humanitarian aid. And, more than 40,000 have war-related disabilities as a result of its attacks: “Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world.”
A child psychiatrist with Medicines Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders in Palestine, observes that there’s never a ‘post’ in post-traumatic stress syndrome. It’s ongoing trauma, it’s protracted trauma, it’s one war [Israeli] after the other.”
As I agonize over the unimaginable suffering and trauma of Gaza’s children, the refrain from Billie Holiday’s 1941 mournful song, “God Bless the Child,” keeps coming back to me: “God bless the child that’s got his own.”
The soulful lament is tailored for all who experience physical and mental pain. Its lyrics seem as if they were written with Palestinians in mind.
The poem encourages reliance on one’s strength and resourcefulness to survive the painful inequalities and harsh realities of life. Despite its melancholic tone, it makes a powerful statement about self-determination and defiance in the face of adversity. With time, it has become an anthem of independence and self-reliance.
Generations of Palestinians have experienced countless injustices and have had to struggle for survival on their own. Sumud, a core value in Palestinian society, has been their lodestar.
For decades, U.S.-financed Israeli regimes have resorted to systematic cruelty and overwhelming force to crush Palestinian resistance. Their ruthlessness, however, has made Palestinians stronger and more inventive in resisting Zionist oppression.
The Palestinian struggle for freedom has begun to bring the world together and across generations. Palestine has come to mean freedom, especially to the disposed and disenfranchised.
Despite the ready availability of the U.S. military arsenal, Israel has been unable to defeat a guerrilla force, with no real means of defense. The Israeli military has murdered countless Palestinian leaders, relentlessly bombed their country from the air, turned historical Gaza into rubble, but they have not succeeded to crush the spirit of sumud.
Significantly, the image of a democratic, civilized and moral Israel has been exposed for the sham it is. The global community has come to recognize the Zionist entity for what it has always been: a brutal lawless settler-colonial project in the heart of the Islamic world, striving to be the undisputed regional hegemon. While engaged in unbridled barbarism in occupied Gaza and the West Bank, Israel has attacked Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
Unfortunately, Washington has committed itself financially, militarily and politically to Israel’s genocide. The Arab regimes, 23 of them (excepting Yemen), with a combined population of nearly 500 million, are weak, corrupt and dependent on the United States.
There is much the entire Arab world can and should learn from Palestinian sumud. Their liberation energy and persistence bear witness to what is possible: a new unified regional order that says NO to U.S.-Israel hegemony.
Interestingly, after World War I and II, Arab leaders of those years understood the necessity of forcefully opposing the implantation of Western imperialism in the region generally and in Palestine particularly.
For example, Egyptian diplomat and first secretary-general of the newly established Arab League, Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, known also as Azzam Pasha, explained the League’s position regarding Palestine and the Zionist claim during a 1946 public hearing of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in Cairo. The commission, assembled at the end of World War II, was tasked with investigating the impact of settling 100,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors in Palestine.
At the Cairo hearings, Azzam Pasha advanced an independent way forward:
“The Zionist, the new Jew [European], wants to dominate and he pretends that he has got a particular civilizing mission with which he returns to a backward degenerate race in order to put the elements of progress into an area which wants no progress. Well, that has been the pretension of every power that wanted to colonize and aimed at domination….The Arabs simply stand and say NO. We are not reactionary and we are not backward….We have a heritage of civilization and of spiritual life. We are not going to allow ourselves to be controlled….”
Azzam Pasha, like other Arab leaders of his time, rejected the establishment of an exclusive Jewish state, proposing instead an autonomous Palestine that respected the will of the Arab majority while safeguarding the equality of all inhabitants, regardless of religion. It is regrettable that the current leadership in the Arab world is deaf to it.
Palestine is not the native land of the Zionists and their progeny, who have for 77 years illegally occupied stolen land and sustained themselves on pilfered resources. It explains the Israeli regime’s complete absence of regret or reservations about destroying 5,000-year-old Gaza.
Since October 2023, the Israeli Occupation Forces have systematically leveled Gaza, a war crime under Article 53 of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the destruction of already occupied land by an occupying power. Since it withdrew from the March 2025 ceasefire, Israel has carried out planned controlled demolitions across bombed-out Gaza and has virtually flattened Rafah, whose history spans thousands of years.
Palestinians, like their cherished olive trees, have lives deeply rooted in the soil of Palestine. And like them, they have refused to be uprooted by British, Zionist and American imperialists.
The October rebellion has internationalized the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe). Palestine can no longer be ignored. The survival of international order and the rule of law is linked to the viability of the Palestinian nation.
Support of the global community for the Palestinian struggle is more crucial today than ever. That passive support must be transformed into concrete action has
finally been deemed vital by some nations. Increased concern has lead to the formation of a number of international groups: the Gaza Tribunal, the Hague Group and Madrid Group, among them.
The Gaza Tribunal, also known as the People’s Tribunal, a civil society initiative, draws on the expertise of a broad group of intellectuals, academics, lawyers, human rights activists, moral and cultural figures and civil organizations to serve as a “court of humanity and conscience,” specifically regarding Gaza.
At the Emergency Conference of the Hague Group in Bogota, Colombia on 15 July 2025, for example, all 30 countries agreed that “the era of impunity [of Israel] must end—and that international law must be enforced.”
The stated aim of the Madrid Group, a coalition of over 20 European and Arab countries, is to end Israel’s war and blockade of Gaza.
After 22 months of barbarism, the foreign ministers of Britain and 27 other countries finally “sharply criticized” Israel for its conduct in Gaza. As hard as they have tried, they could no longer ignore the daily slaughter of starving Gazans desperately trying to get food. Over 1,054 have been killed in the area of the aid sites since the Gaza “Humanitarian” Foundation—an Israeli-backed U.S. contractor—seized control and militarized aid distribution on 26 May 2025.
On Tuesday (22 July 2025), UN humanitarians warned that the lifelines keeping people in Gaza alive are collapsing. And on the same day, the last functioning hospitals there reported that 21 children had died in the past three days due to malnutrition and starvation. Israel’s cruelty has no end.
Billie Holiday’s lamentation about resilience and the endurance of the human spirit: “God bless the child that’s got his own…that’s got his own”—is urgently felt for everyone in Palestine, especially for the children.
Photograph Source: Ashraf Amra – CC BY-SA 4.0
“I have a cold. And in one hour, I’ll have finished a twenty-four-hour shift, heartbroken again. I lost a cardiac patient because we had no medication. Another patient shot in the head, was left to die slowly because we had no ventilator. A child with a shattered skull and exposed brain matter just died in front of me. I also just found a kidney patient collapsed on the bedroom floor. He had a seizure due to brain damage because he has not had dialysis in three months. A diabetic man hadn’t eaten in four days. He cried when I asked why. I gave him fluids and some money to buy flour. I’m so sorry for the starving, for the children we couldn’t save, for the mothers, for the elderly, for the vulnerable. Not a single shift has passed without having me shattered.”
This is the reality in Gaza right now for the medical profession struggling to save an overwhelming amount of patients, not only from the bombings and gunshot wounds but now also from starvation. And the starvation has reached everyone, including the doctors themselves, some of whom have passed out on the floors of what remains of Gaza’s hospitals, then picked themselves up and gone back to work.
Those opening words belonged to Dr. Ali Tahrawi, an emergency room doctor at Alqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza.They were read aloud at a recent Washington, DC press conference by Dr. Ashraf Abou El-Ezz, a physician from Indiana who knows he has all the resources he needs.
But somehow, the words are never loud enough and even though they were spoken in the shadow of the US Capitol building, those inside had already left for the summer recess. And in any case, most of them are not listening. Only US Representative Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Democrat and the sole Palestinian American in Congress, remained behind to host the press conference.
“I dread the moment Hanan and Misk will ask me about their legs,” continued medical student Sharad Wertheimer, a member, like the others, of the US-based global network, Doctors Against Genocide (DAG), reading the words of Hala Sha’sha’aj, a 40-year old mother of five from Gaza city.
“What will I tell them? When I go to buy shoes for my children, what will I do when Hanan and Misk ask why I don’t buy them any? If they say, ‘I want to play’, ‘I want to dance’, ‘I want to ride a bike,’ what will I say to them? They lost their father, the love, compassion and security he gave them, and they also lost their legs, the ability to move and play. Everything beautiful in their lives is gone. Their childhood was stolen. What did they do to deserve such devastation?”
One after another, the doctors in their white coats and scrubs stepped forward to read the words of their colleagues, friends, relatives and people they don’t know at all, just human beings who matter and who are trapped in the concentration camps and free fire zones that Gaza has now become under the Israeli bombardment and forced starvation.
The doctors have heard these stories over and over for 22 months, during which time the situation has continued to get worse and the inaction by the US and other governments more criminal. But now, in the heat of late July, having lobbied members of Congress, protested, disrupted meetings and been arrested, they are running out of patience.
“We will not be polite”, warned John Reuwer, a retired ER doctor and member of DAG, who said he had been to five war zones but had never seen anything as bad as the current situation in Gaza. “We are here to say ‘no more’”, he said. “We will not stop. And we will not forget.”
And so the doctors continued to bear witness on behalf of the besieged and desperate Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
“On the 28th of March, the soldiers called me and two other civilian prisoners, aged around 16 and 17, by name,” came the words of Dr. Khalid Alseer, read by Dr. Qurat-ul-ain Syedain. “It was night. They tied us very tightly at our wrists and ankles and put us in a military car. No one told us anything. We drove for around two hours into the hills. All the while they beat us, kicking us and humiliating us. They were laughing. I was trying to explain in English that the ties on my wrist were too tight, but they just said I was a doctor so I would be okay.
“At around 4 am I heard one say in Arabic, ‘these three are to be hanged.’ I thought it was the end. I was in pain. They had broken my ribs. Even when they said I was going to be hanged, I didn’t care. I just wanted it to end.” Dr. Alseer was eventually released in late September, reunited with his parents for whom he is the sole provider.
“In mid-April 2024, Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison,” read Dr. Roxana Samimi from an eyewitness account by a captive at the notorious detention center in the occupied West Bank and as told to Sky News. “The prison guards brought Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body. The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms. A few minutes later, prisoners were heard screaming from the room they went into, declaring Dr. Adnan Al-Bursh was dead.”
How many more such testimonies need to be heard, the doctors wondered? What has happened to our humanity if we can live in a country that allows such a genocide to continue and our tax dollars to support it? Included in that so-called support is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an Israel-US front that distributes aid as a form of Russian roulette, where young children are picked off by snipers, running barefoot to faster escape the bullets while trying to get food to feed their families.
“This is not a war, this is an extermination campaign,” said Dr. Nidal Jboor, a Michigan internal medicine specialist and a co-founder of DAG. “From the concentration camps of the Holocaust, to the killing fields of Cambodia, to the concentration zones Israel is building across Gaza, and now the American-backed death distribution centers, the genocide is the same.”
“This institution is not moving with the majority of their constituencies,” said Tlaib, pointing to the Capitol dome behind her. “And it’s shameful because if they polled their constituents to ask if they wanted another dime spent on continuing to support another war crime in Gaza, they would tell you ‘hell no’,” she said. “We say enough is enough.”
Issued on: 25/07/2025 -
⚠️ This content includes explicit materiel. Viewer discretion is advised. The medical charity Doctors Without Borders said Friday that a quarter of all young children and pregnant or breastfeeding women screened at its clinics in Gaza last week were malnourished. The aid group, known by its French initials MSF, said the "Israeli authorities' deliberate use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza has reached unprecedented levels, with patients and healthcare workers themselves now fighting to survive".
Video by: Ava LUQUET
United Nations (United States) (AFP) – UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday slammed the international community for turning a blind eye to widespread starvation in the Gaza Strip, calling it a "moral crisis that challenges the global conscience."
Issued on: 25/07/2025 - FRANCE24
"I cannot explain the level of indifference and inaction we see by too many in the international community -- the lack of compassion, the lack of truth, the lack of humanity," Guterres told Amnesty International's global assembly via video link.
"This is not just a humanitarian crisis. It is a moral crisis that challenges the global conscience. We will continue to speak out at every opportunity."
Aid groups have warned of surging cases of starvation, particularly among children, in war-ravaged Gaza, which Israel placed under an aid blockade in March amid its ongoing war with Hamas. That blockade was partially eased two months later.
The trickle of aid since then has been controlled by the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, replacing the longstanding UN-led distribution system.
International Committee of the Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric said Friday "there is no excuse for what is happening in Gaza."
"The scale of human suffering and the stripping of human dignity have long exceeded every acceptable standard -- both legal and moral."
Spoljaric said the ICRC has more than 350 staff in Gaza, "many of whom are also struggling to find enough food and clean water."
Aid groups and the United Nations have refused to work with the GHF, accusing it of aiding Israeli military goals.
Guterres said while he had repeatedly condemned the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas on southern Israel, which triggered the war in the Palestinian territory, "nothing can justify the explosion of death and destruction since."
"The scale and scope is beyond anything we have seen in recent times," he said.
"Children speak of wanting to go to heaven, because at least, they say, there is food there. We hold video calls with our own humanitarians who are starving before our eyes... But words don't feed hungry children."
Guterres also condemned the killing of more than 1,000 Palestinians trying to access food aid supplies since May 27, when the GHF began operations.
"We need action: an immediate and permanent ceasefire, the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, immediate and unimpeded humanitarian access," Guterres said.
He added that the United Nations was ready to "dramatically scale up humanitarian operations" in Gaza should Israel and Hamas reach a ceasefire deal.
© 2025 AFP
Doctors warn of man-made famine in Gaza
Issued on: 25/07/2025 - AFP
Gaza is suffering man-made mass starvation caused by a blockade on aid into the Palestinian enclave, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Wednesday. He spoke following an appeal by more than 100 aid agencies warning of hunger in Gaza while tons of food, clean water and medical supplies sit untouched just outside the territory. Antonia Kerrigan reports.
Video by: Antonia KERRIGAN
More than 100 aid organisations warned on Wednesday of “mass starvation” across Gaza, with their staff severely affected by widespread shortages. Israel is under mounting international pressure as the humanitarian crisis in the enclave worsens, with more than 2 million people enduring 21 months of conflict.
Issued on: 24/07/2025 - 14:34
By:Melissa Chemam with RFI
In a statement, 111 organisations, including Mercy Corps, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Refugees International, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Save the Children and Oxfam, said mass starvation was spreading – even as tonnes of food, clean water and medical supplies sit untouched just outside Gaza, with aid groups blocked from accessing them.
France also warned of a growing "risk of famine" caused by "the blockade imposed by Israel".
France's top diplomat calls for foreign press access to Gaza
The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) also weighed in, saying that a large proportion of the population of Gaza is starving.
"I don't know what you would call it other than mass starvation, and it's manmade," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.
The humanitarian organisations said in a joint statement that warehouses with tonnes of supplies were sitting untouched, while people were "trapped in a cycle of hope and heartbreak, waiting for assistance and ceasefires".
Health crisis
Israel cut off all supplies to Gaza from the start of March, reopening access with new restrictions in May. It says it is committed to allowing in aid but must control it to prevent it from being diverted by militants.
"I asked them for dietary supplements, but they told me they only gave them to children under five," Oum Oussama, a resident of Gaza City, told RFI's correspondent in Gaza, from the Al Shifa hospital.
"What will he eat? My son only has one kidney. The water we drink is contaminated. I have nothing left to give him to eat. Now he's skin and bones."
The emergency manager of the hospital, Moatez Harara, sees the arrival of fragile, sick people, deprived of treatment due to the disastrous living conditions, daily. And he says they are the first to die.
"They are unable to eat properly," he told RFI. "They eat whatever they can find, which makes their condition worse. Hunger makes the body adapt and transform proteins into sugars to survive.
"The world must stop this. We must reopen the crossings and let food in. Otherwise, the sick and hungry will continue to arrive, and the hospitals will no longer be able to respond. They will collapse."
Dying children
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 16 children died of starvation in July alone.
The Ministry reports that an increasing number of Palestinians are dying from hunger each day, with the total number of starvation-related deaths now reaching 111. Most of these fatalities have occurred in recent weeks, as a wave of hunger sweeps through the Palestinian enclave.
The United Nations and aid groups trying to deliver food to Gaza say Israel, which controls everything that comes in and out, is choking delivery.
Israeli troops are also reported to have shot hundreds of Palestinians dead close to aid collection points since May.
"We have a minimum set of requirements to be able to operate inside Gaza," Ross Smith, the director of emergencies at the UN World Food Programme (WFP), told Reuters news agency.
"One of the most important things I want to emphasise is that we need to have no armed actors near our distribution points, near our convoys," he added.
In New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) added its voice to the appeal, accusing Israel of "starving Gazan journalists into silence", after reporters from the AFP news agency in Gaza said they were being affected by the lack of food.
Israel hit back on Wednesday at growing international criticism that it was behind chronic food shortages in Gaza, instead accusing Hamas of deliberately creating a humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian territory.
Israel has also accused the United Nations of failing to act in a timely fashion, saying 700 truckloads of aid are idling inside Gaza.
"It is time for them to pick it up and stop blaming Israel for the bottlenecks which are occurring," Israeli government spokesman David Mercer said on Wednesday.
Faltering peace talks
The war between Israel and Hamas has been raging since 7 October, 2023, when the militant branch of Hamas killed at least 1,100 Israelis, mostly soldiers, and took 251 hostages from southern Israel in the deadliest attack in Israel's history.
Israel has since killed nearly 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza, decimated Hamas as a military force, reduced most of the territory to ruins and forced almost the entire population to flee their homes multiple times.
The United States said on Wednesday its top Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, was heading to Europe for talks on a possible Gaza ceasefire and an aid corridor, raising hopes of a breakthrough after more than two weeks of negotiations.
But the deadly Israeli strikes continue across the territory.
Talks on a proposal for a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas are being mediated by Qatar and Egypt, with Washington's backing. They could include the release of more of the 50 Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza.
However, since the collapse of a ceasefire in March, successive rounds of negotiations have failed to achieved a breakthrough.
(with newswires)
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