The Civilized World Must Act Immediately over Mass Starvation in Gaza
Boycott US, Israel, and Germany
Over 23 horrific months the people of Gaza (47% children before the present Gaza Massacre) have suffered bombing, shooting, burying under rubble, near-total devastation of homes and infrastructure, and substantial deprivation from water, food, shelter, fuel, electricity, medicine, and medical care. The mass murder of 680,000 Gazans by violence and imposed deprivation has now transmuted to man-made famine and mass starvation that has galvanized the global conscience.
As estimated from data published by a succession of expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet, 136,000 Gazans died violently by 25 April 2025 with a “conservatively estimated” 4 times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths that is under-reported 10 fold by Western Mainstream media. In impoverished countries about 70% of avoidable deaths from deprivation are those of under-5 year old infants (see Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” that includes an avoidable mortality-related history of every country). It is estimated that the 680,000 dead Gazans (28% of the pre-war Gaza population of 2.4 million) included 380,000 under-5 year old infants, 479,000 children in total, 63,000 women and 138,000 men (Gideon Polya, “Gaza Genocide By Numbers: Apply BDS Over 0.7 Million Gaza Deaths From Violence And Imposed Deprivation”, 4 July 2025 ).
Now the surviving Gazans are suffering man-made famine and mass starvation while the world looks on. This crime has been perpetrated many times in history, notably in the “forgotten” WW2 Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine; 6-7 million Indians deliberately starved to death in 1942-1945 for strategic reasons in Bengal, Bihar, Assam and Odisha by the British under fervent Zionist Winston Churchill with food-denying Australian complicity) (for details of this and some 70 other genocide and holocaust atrocities see Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial & the crisis in biological sustainability”).
The World’s major powers must (a) order Apartheid Israel to immediately leave the Occupied Palestinian Territories (as demanded by the International Court of Justice), (b) immediately provide life-sustaining food and medical services to Gaza (as demanded of any Occupier for its Occupied Subjects “to the fullest extent of the means available to it” by Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention), and (c) immediately impose rigorous Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Apartheid Israel and all its racist supporters, notably the US and neo-Nazi Germany, until reparations and war crimes trials are delivered.
28 countries (all European except for Japan) have issued a statement demanding aid to Gaza, an immediate end to the killing and condemning the Zionist Israeli-imposed killing, deprivation, starving and ethnic cleansing of Gaza and Palestine. Words are cheap but something is better than nothing. Of these 28 countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK) only 9 actually recognize the State of Palestine (Cyprus, Iceland, Ireland, Malta, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Slovenia, and Spain). France will recognize Palestine at the September UN General Assembly.
Notably absent from this list of 28 concerned countries were the Zionist-perverted and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel US, neo-Nazi Germany and the perpetrator, nuclear terrorist and genocidally racist Apartheid Israel itself. The US has supplied most of Israel’s weaponry, supplied the bombs and bullets that have killed 28% of Gaza’s pre-war population, and vetoed any action by the UN Security Council. Neo-Nazi Germany has supplied 30% of Israel’s weapons imports and like the US, the UK and Australia has a rotten record of persecuting humanitarians demanding human rights for Palestinians.
Australia is second only to the US as a fervent supporter of Apartheid Israel and is complicit in the Gaza Genocide in 20 ways and lies for Apartheid Israel in 35 ways but has merely applied sanctions against 2 far-right Israeli extremist politicians – something is better than nothing. The Zionist-perverted and fervently pro-Apartheid Israel US, UK, German and Australian Governments assiduously refrained from criticizing Apartheid Israel for the nearly 2 years of the Gaza Massacre and actively sought to hide the horrors of the Gaza Genocide by hysterical and false campaigns alleging “antisemitism” by anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish humanitarians demanding equal and full human rights for the sorely oppressed Palestinians.
Australians are repeatedly told by Zionists and the fervently pro-Zionist Australian Labor Government and Coalition Opposition that there has been an asserted increase in “antisemitism” in Australia. A Jewish Zionist “Antisemitism Envoy” and a Christian Egyptian Australian “Islamophobia Envoy” were appointed to inform the government. Antisemitism occurs in 2 equally repugnant forms, anti-Jewish anti-Semitism and anti-Arab anti-Semitism (including Islamophobia) but these 3 key terms (and indeed about 80 related terms) were not mentioned in the recently released “[Antisemitism] Special Envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism” sent to the Australian Government.
I individually addressed the following Letter to major Mainstream Australian media under the Subject heading “Aussie anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against anti-racist Jews” and copied it to all Federal and Victorian State MPs (however, it was not published and the Silence has been Deafening in Australia):
Dear Editor,
For 3 decades I have been researching “deaths from violence and imposed deprivation” of subjugated peoples in the global South due to European-imposed war and hegemony, with the findings reported in a thousand huge and exhaustively referenced articles and 9 huge books (this including massively updating editions). However Google the phrase “deaths from violence and imposed deprivation” and you will find that the West simply doesn’t want to know, even though UN demographic data show that 1,500 million people have died avoidably from deprivation since 1950, 70% of them under-5 infants.
Data published by expert epidemiologists in the leading medical journal The Lancet indicate that 136,000 Gazans died violently by 25 April 2025 with a “conservatively estimated” 4 times that number (544,000) dying from imposed deprivation for a shocking total of 680,000 deaths. In Australia (as well as the US and UK) this carnage has been under-counted by a factor of 10 and deliberately masked by a massive “antisemitism hysteria” campaign that now threatens a McCarthyist curb on free speech in Australia. Also ignored by Mainstream Australian media and politicians are 30 ways Aussie anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against anti-racist Jews (anti-Zionist Jews) is entrenched in Zionist-perverted Australia (cc Mps).
Yours sincerely, Dr Gideon Polya
The Israeli military has destroyed most of the cropland in Gaza and won’t let Palestinians fish. There isn’t enough food in the Strip, and Israeli authorities are actively preventing the massive food stockpiles on the border from entering. The Israelis let a little bit of food and fuel in as a face-saving measure, but it is a drop in the bucket, and they distribute it in a way that is dangerous for the population. As Steve Hewitt points out, European immigrants did this to American Indians, al-Assad did it to Syrians, and Nazis used starvation of a besieged people at Leningrad, as well, and this episode looks awfully similar. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that:
1. Families in Gaza are now living on just one meal a day, and not a very nutritional one at that. Some people go a whole day without eating. Some people fast to stretch out the time between eating. Some cut down on the size of their meals. Some ration bread for their children. Some people are scavenging for food in garbage.
I repeat: People are scavenging in garbage for food.
2. According to Haaretz, Gaza health officials estimate that some 17,000 children are suffering from severe malnutrition. Being severely malnourished in childhood contributes, even if the child survives, to health problems later in life, including heart disease, high blood pressure with its risk of strokes, and diabetes. Severe malnutrition is marked by lack of fat on the body and by wasting of the muscles.
3. Over all, OCHA says, about 500,000 people in Gaza are in starvation and the condition is spreading. “I met many of those families who told me that there are days that their children are not eating at all and I heard mothers telling me how they’re trying to have kids not play so that they don’t draw more energy than they are able to provide them with through food,” according to the World Food Programme’s Deputy Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer, Carl Skau. The IPC says that “470,000 people facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity (IPC Phase 5).” IPC 5 is defined as “At least 20 percent of households face a complete lack of food and/or other basic needs and starvation, death, and destitution are evident; and acute malnutrition prevalence exceeds 30%; and mortality rates exceed 2/10000/day.”
To repeat, mothers are telling children not to play so as to conserve calories.
4. OCHA: : “One million people facing emergency levels of food insecurity (IPC Phase 4).” Phase 4 is “At least 20 percent of households face extreme food consumption gaps, resulting in very high levels of acute malnutrition and excess mortality; OR households face an extreme loss of livelihood assets that will likely lead to food consumption gaps.”
5. According to Haaretz, Al-Mawasi’s field hospital director, Dr. Suhaib al-Hams, predicted that very soon we will see a “wave of deaths” among internally displaced people because their organs will fail. He is quoted as saying, “The cases reaching us are of people who collapsed in the streets from lack of nutrition. All of them need food even before medicine.”
To repeat, people are fainting from hunger in the streets.
6. Some family members tried to get something to eat from the militarized food disbursal sites set up by the Israeli military with US support, but that is to risk their lives and they often come back empty-handed. Or dead. Israeli troops allegedly have been ordered to fire on aid-seekers by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
7. Doctors without Borders (MSF) teams say that they see a significant and never-before-witnessed rise in acute malnutrition among people in Gaza. In Gaza City and environs, “More than 700 pregnant and breastfeeding women, and nearly 500 children with severe and moderate malnutrition, are currently enrolled in outpatient therapeutic feeding programmes at both clinics.” MSF saw 293 cases of severe malnutrition in May, but 983 in early July. The MSF deputy medical coordinator in the Strip said, “This is the first time we have witnessed such a severe scale of malnutrition cases in Gaza.”
8. OCHA further reports, that the IPC Projection for the rest of this summer and fall in Gaza is that 100% of the analysed population (2.1 million) is projected* to face high levels of acute food insecurity classified in IPC Phase 3 (Crisis) or above.
I repeat: this is going toward 100%.
9. In the week ending July 15, aid organizations and NGOs tried to coordinate 66 aid movements across the Gaza Strip. Only about 30 of them succeeded. The Israelis turned down 17% out of hand. Another third seemed as though they were accepted but were blocked later. In 5% of cases the organizers had to withdraw the attempt for security or logistical reasons. The Israelis are constantly bombing the Strip, destroying buildings and facilities, and forcing thousands of people to relocate for a sixth or seventh time, making it hard to plan relief efforts even in the minority of cases where the Israeli authorities will permit them. There is enough food at the border to feed everyone but the Israelis are not letting it into Gaza in sufficient quantities to avert starvation.
10. Some last sad statistics that prove the point, from OSHA:
- “>92% of children aged 6-23 months and pregnant and breastfeeding women are not meeting their nutrient requirements due to lack of minimum dietary diversity (as of February 2025)
- 290,000 children under five and 150,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women require feeding and micronutrient supplements.
- ~17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women are estimated to require treatment for acute malnutrition between April 2025 and March 2026 (source: IPC Gaza Strip Special Snapshot, 12 May 2025).”
Egyptian-born Omar El Akkad had studied in the United States and been 10 years a journalist when, in the summer of 2021, he became an American citizen. Covering the War on Terror in Afghanistan and at the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay exposed him to the “deep ugly cracks in the bedrock of this thing they called “the free world.” Yet he believed the cracks could be repaired – “Until the fall of 2023. Until the slaughter.”
The slaughter was Israel’s razing of Gaza following Hamas’s rampage into Israel on October 7, 2023. The Israeli assault escalated to include massive bombardment, enforced hunger, destruction of hospitals and schools, bulldozing of dwellings deprivation of medical care, torture and the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. The onslaught caused Akkad to despair for Gaza’s Palestinians and for his adopted country, whose financing and weapons enabled it. He channelled that despair into the rage that inspired this excellent and troubling book.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is neither polemic nor memoir, although it contains elements of both. Akkad’s prose is an appeal to readers not to wait for “one day” in the distant future to resist injustice not only in Gaza, but in the wider world: “In the coming years there will be much written about what took place in Gaza, the horrors that have been meticulously documented by Palestinians as they happened and meticulously brushed aside by the major media apparatus of the western world.” When the killing ceases, as with genocides of native Americans, Tasmanians, Namibia’s Hereros and Namas, Armenians, Jews and Tutsis, it will be too late.
Akkad’s condemnation of U.S. policy in the formerly-colonized world sits uneasily beside his choice to live and raise his children in the land that torments people who, like him, are brown or Muslim or doomed to live under American-supported Arab dictators or Israeli occupation. His rationale is as simple as it is understandable: “I live here because it will always be safer to live on the launching side of the missiles. I live here because I am afraid.”
He is unafraid to speak against the Biden administration’s veto of United Nations resolutions calling for ceasefires in Gaza (“untroubled when they say a ceasefire resolution represents a greater threat to lasting peace than the ongoing obliteration of an entire people”) and its termination of funding for the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that was the primary supplier of food, medical care and education to Palestinian refugees. Yet speaking out seems futile. As the author of the award-winning novel American War and sometime columnist, he does not spare himself and other writers for political impotence: “What is this work we do? What are we good for?” He quotes Egyptian-American poet Marwa Helal:
this is where the
poets will say: show, don’t tell
but that
assumes most people
can see.
Too many seek refuge in propaganda that what is being done to Palestinians is necessary. Akkad quotes an Israeli newspaper post’s headline from seven months prior to October 7: “When Genocide is Permissible.” Palestinians are killed every day in Gaza, “but the unsaid thing is that it is all right because that’s what those people do, they die.”
This book is not devoid of hope, which he finds in resistance that can be positive (“showing up to protests and speaking out”) and negative (“refusing to participate”). He praises students “risking expulsion and defamation, risking their livelihoods, their entire careers” and Jewish protestors “being arrested on the streets of Frankfurt, blocking Grand Central Station in New York, fighting for peace.” Their efforts, however ineffective, absolve them of the culpability of waiting for everyone else to be “against this.”
Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past 50 years. He was ABC News Chief Middle East Correspondent from 1983 to 1993 and has covered wars in Lebanon, Syria, Eritrea, Rhodesia, Somalia, Iraq, East Timor and Bosnia-Herzegovina. His many books have dealt with the First and Second World Wars as well as contemporary Middle East history.
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