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By Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Impotence takes various forms.  Before the daily massacres, incidents of starvation and dispossession of Palestinians taking place in the Gaza Strip with primeval cruelty, international impotence in the face of actions by the Israeli state has become a mockery of itself.  The calls to end the war in Gaza grow in number, even among Israel’s allies, but little in substance is being done about it.  What matters are statements that speak to a wounded conscience that do little to alter anything on the ground.

One such statement, released on July 21, proved to be yet another one of those flossy effusions made by, as Macbeth might have said, idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  The idiots numbered many: 28 international partners, including the foreign ministers of 27 states and, obviously not wanting to miss out, the EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management.  All, bar Australia, were from Europe.  “We, the signatories listed below, come together with a simple, urgent message: the war in Gaza must end now.”

The statement goes on to mention the drearily obvious.  “The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity.”  The “drip feeding of aid and inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of food and water” deserved condemnation.  The deaths of over 800 Palestinians (the numbers are most certainly higher) while seeking aid was “horrifying”.  Even here, the language lacked rage.  Israel’s “denial of essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable.”  The government “must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law.”

To that end, Israel was called upon to restore the flow of aid and enable the work of the United Nations and humanitarian NGOs to resume in the Strip.  This is obviously something that the Netanyahu government is conscious of avoiding, given the systematic program of controlled starvation and deprivation being inflicted.

To add balance, the statement also notes the plight of the Israeli hostages still held by Hamas, their continued detention also something to be condemned.  They were to be immediately and unconditionally released with a negotiated ceasefire being the best way of doing so.

The signatories do go so far as to acknowledge the dangers and intentions of Israel’s administrative measures that seek “territorial or demographic change in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  The E1 settlement plan announced by Israel’s Civil Administration, if implemented, would divide a Palestinian state in two, marking a flagrant breach of international law and critically undermine the two-state solution.”  The West Bank is also recognised in similar light, with the signatories urging a cessation to the violence taking place against Palestinians and a halt to the building of settlements across the territory “including East Jerusalem”. 

These statements are always interesting for what they omit.  No toothy measures to address the maltreatment of Palestinian civilians are stipulated, other than an encouragement of “a common effort to bring this terrible conflict to an end”.  A benign, most unthreatening promise is made: the prospect of taking “further action to support an immediate ceasefire and a political pathway to security and peace for Israelis, Palestinians and the entire region.”  This may be code for recognition of a Palestinian state, fanciful given the systematic pulverisation of the people who would inhabit it.  The signatory list also omits Germany and, most importantly of all, the United States, Israel’s arch guardian and evangelical sponsor.

The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, gave us a flavour of feelings in Washington about the signatories in a post on X.  “How embarrassing for a nation to side [with] a terror group like Hamas & blame a nation whose civilians were massacred for fighting to get hostages released.”  In another post that made a vague shot at justifying the unjustifiable, the ambassador absolved Israel in its conduct; only the militant group Hamas deserved exclusive blame.  The nations in question had “put pressure on @Israel instead of savages of Hamas!  Gaza suffers for 1 reason: Hamas rejects EVERY proposal.  Blaming Israel is irrational.”

The Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, ever lurking in the twilight of alternative reality, reasoned the statement away, much as relatives would the views of a demented, unloved aunt.  “If Hamas embraces you – you are in the wrong place.”  Praise from the group was itself “proof of the mistake they [the signatory countries] made – part of them out of good intentions and part of them out of an obsession against Israel.”

While the various foreign ministers were flashing their plumage of principles and international humanitarian law, the Israeli Defense Forces had busily commenced an operation on a part of Gaza they have yet to level: Deir al-Balah.  Given its importance as a humanitarian hub that still houses UN staff and guesthouses, more slaughter is imminent. 

Till Israel assumes the status of a pariah state it seemingly craves to become, its rogue army confined and depleted, its economy humbled and isolated, the industrial appetite for slaughter and dispossession will only continue.  The Palestinians will be left to be relics of moral anguish, banished to the footnotes of bloodied history along with many more statements of concern and sheer impotence.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.

22 July 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Alex Lantier

The Zionist regime responded to international outrage over its cold-blooded massacre Sunday of 92 Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza by escalating mass murder and starvation of the population. Gaza’s Health Ministry reported that at least 130 Palestinians were killed Monday and over 1,000 wounded across Gaza, as Israeli troops assaulted the city of Deir al-Balah.

Deir al-Balah had been until now the last settlement in Gaza spared bombardment, reportedly because Israeli officials believed Israeli hostages were held there. As a result, it became a center for Palestinian refugee camps, UN aid operations and the remaining operational water treatment facilities in Gaza. An estimated 80,000 Palestinians were forced to flee Deir al-Balah after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) issued evacuation orders for several neighborhoods in the city.

One Deir al-Balah resident, Thurayya Abu Qunneis, told CNN: “The planes came and dropped many leaflets on us; the entire sky was covered with leaflets on the houses, the streets and everywhere, stating that we had to evacuate from certain areas. … We are living on edge. We can’t sleep, eat or drink. There is no flour, no anything, and we are hungry. We are dying, and our children are dying of hunger.”

Yesterday, Israeli tanks and armored personnel carriers invaded Deir al-Balah, bombarding mosques, civilian homes and UN and World Health Organization (WHO) facilities. UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said, “UN staff remain in Deir al-Balah, and two UN guesthouses have been struck, despite parties having been informed of the locations of UN premises … These locations—as with all civilian sites—must be protected, regardless of evacuation orders.”

IDF forces attacked the WHO’s staff residence and main warehouse in Deir al-Balah three times, bombing and setting them aflame and detaining two WHO staff and their relatives. “Israeli military entered the premises, forcing women and children to evacuate on foot toward Al-Mawasi amid active conflict. Male staff and family members were handcuffed, stripped, interrogated on the spot and screened at gunpoint,” WHO director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tweeted, adding: “WHO demands the immediate release of the detained staff and protection of all its staff.”

The IDF reported that one soldier, Staff Sgt. Amit Cohen, 19, had been killed and another wounded by a detonation of Israeli munitions in the Deir al-Balah area. The Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, also reported that their fighters had damaged an Israeli Merkava tank by detonating a “powerful landmine” directly under the tank as it advanced.

The IDF attack on Deir al-Balah is part of a systematic policy of genocide by denying food, water, electricity and medical treatment to the Palestinian population. Starvation is rapidly spreading in Gaza, with at least 19 people having confirmed to have starved to death in Gaza since Saturday. In the meantime, fully stocked UN food aid warehouses across the border in Egypt contain enough feed Gaza for 3 months, but food shipments are blocked by the IDF.

Medical personnel, hospitals and healthcare facilities remain a particular target of IDF forces operating with undisguised contempt for international law. In a statement Sunday, the British charity organization Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) noted that Israeli evacuation orders “endanger vital humanitarian and primary healthcare sites … and are accelerating the systematic dismantling of Gaza’s already-decimated healthcare system.”

Gaza Health Ministry officials said hospitals are running out of fuel, food and medicine, risking a collapse of medical care. Spokesperson Khalil Al-Deqran said medical staff only get one meal a day, and that hospitals are overrun with patients suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition. Yesterday, Israeli commandos south of the city of Khan Younis kidnapped Dr. Marwan al-Hams, the head of Gaza’s field hospitals, killing a journalist and wounding another near a Red Cross facility.

The Israeli genocide in Gaza is a crime against humanity unfolding thanks to the unstinting support of the major imperialist powers. The United States, Germany, Britain, France and Spain have all sent materiel shipments to Israel to arm the Zionist regime to commit genocide. As they try to push through a neocolonial conquest of the Middle East, they see the genocidal Zionist regime, in the debased words of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, as doing their “dirty work” for them.

The IDF’s ceaseless resort to atrocities and the mass murder of defenseless civilians, as in calls by top Israeli officials and US President Donald Trump to murder or expel all Palestinians from Gaza, unmistakably recalls the crimes of the Nazis.

Yesterday, Gideon Levy, a columnist for Israel’s Ha’aretz paper, told Al Jazeera: “There’s now a very systemic destruction project of whole towns and villages, one after the other. Israel is doing things that the Germans did in the early years of the Third Reich, which Israelis don’t see any similarity. … I must remind all of us: The extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust started with evacuating people to the east [of Europe]. Same plan. That’s the first stage. We should stop it here.”

Stopping the Gaza genocide requires, however, the building of an international movement against the imperialist governments in the working class. Isolated strikes have broken out against weapons shipments to Israel in US or European ports and airports. However, halting the flow of arms to Israel altogether requires fusing such strikes together in an international movement in the working class directed not only against the Zionist regime, but above all against its imperialist backers and their neocolonial wars in the Middle East.

Workers and youth must reject the illusion that pressure and moral appeals upon imperialist governments, whose hands are drenched in blood, can persuade them to oppose genocide. In reality, these governments have supported the genocide, while sometimes cynically issuing tepid criticisms of Israel, for the nearly two years the genocide has unfolded.

These cynical statements include the two-faced declaration issued yesterday by 25 countries, including Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. Criticizing “inhumane killing of civilians” in Gaza and declaring that it is “horrifying that over 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid,” it issued an impotent appeal that “Israel must comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law.”

No less horrific than the Israeli regime’s genocidal policy, however, is the bloodstained cynicism of imperialist governments that arm Israel for the very same genocide they claim to oppose. This cynicism was epitomized by the posturing of British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who said:

The Israeli government must answer: What possible military justification can there be for strikes that have killed desperate, starving children? What immediate actions are they taking to stop this litany of horrors? And what will they do to hold those responsible to account?

But the far-right Israeli regime will not answer Lammy. It will press ahead with its genocide, expecting that it will retain not only the explicit support of Washington and Berlin but the tacit support of the imperialist powers that signed this cynical document. Of these powers, one could ask:

What is their justification for arming Israel as it kills desperate, starving children? What actions can be taken to stop their transfer to Israel of weapon systems that make this litany of horrors possible? And what can be done to hold figures like Lammy responsible for their complicity in genocide?

The decisive question is building an international movement in the working class, independent of and opposed to all the capitalist governments and their petty-bourgeois supporters, against imperialist war, fascism and genocide and for socialism.

22 July 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- Twenty-five countries, including the United Kingdom, have called on Israel to immediately lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid entering Gaza. In a joint statement released Monday, the governments also condemned any attempt to forcibly change the demographics of the occupied Palestinian territories.

The statement said, “The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity.”

The signatories denounced the slow delivery of aid and the killing of civilians, including children. They urged Israel to allow the full and unrestricted flow of humanitarian assistance into Gaza without delay.

The statement described the killing of more than 800 Palestinians while seeking aid in Gaza as “horrifying”. It criticized Israel’s current method of distributing aid, calling it “dangerous” and a source of further instability.

According to the statement, suffering in Gaza has reached unprecedented levels. It also stressed that UN agencies and humanitarian groups must be allowed to operate freely in the territory.

The 25 nations also strongly opposed any plan to move Palestinians within Gaza or relocate them under the pretext of humanitarian protection. They described the idea of transferring people to a so-called “humanitarian city” as completely unacceptable.

They warned against any effort to change the population map of the occupied territories. The joint statement specifically condemned Israel’s “E1” settlement plan, calling it a “clear violation of international law” that would destroy the viability of a future Palestinian state.

The countries expressed support for efforts by the US, Qatar, and Egypt to secure a ceasefire in Gaza. They also signaled readiness to take further action to push for an immediate end to hostilities.

The group called on Israel to fulfill its legal obligations under international law and to cooperate with humanitarian actors on the ground.

the Foreign Ministers of Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and
the EU Commissioner for Equality, Preparedness and Crisis Management signed the statement.

The coordinated appeal marks a growing international push to hold Israel accountable for the deepening crisis in Gaza and to pressure it into allowing aid access and halting further displacement.

21 July 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- At least 15 Palestinians have died of starvation in the past 24 hours across the Gaza Strip, bringing the total number of deaths from hunger and malnutrition to 101, including 80 children, as Israel continues to block humanitarian aid from entering the enclave for over four months.

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry on Tuesday, 15 people died from starvation in the past 24 hours, including four children.

It added a total of 101 people, including 80 children, have died due to hunger and malnutrition since the start of the genocide in October 2023.

“This is a silent massacre. The Ministry of Health holds the Israeli occupation and the international community fully responsible. We urgently call for the immediate opening of all crossings to allow the entry of food and medicine,” it added.

On Sunday, at least one Palestinian died of hunger every 80 minutes in Gaza as “Israel maintains a systematic starvation policy against 2 million residents,” said Euro-Med Monitor.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are “on the verge of catastrophic hunger,” with one in three people in the enclave going days without food.

Health officials in Gaza issued a stark warning lately: Hundreds of severely emaciated Palestinians are on the verge of death, their bodies too weak to resist any longer.

The Director of Al-Shifa Hospital said hospitals are dealing with hundreds suffering from severe hunger and malnutrition. “We don’t have enough beds or medicine,” he said. “We’re seeing symptoms like memory loss, exhaustion, and collapse from extreme hunger.”

He added: “We have 17,000 children suffering from severe malnutrition. This is a generation being starved to death.”

According to the Government Media Office in Gaza, over 650,000 children under the age of five face an imminent and severe risk of acute malnutrition in the coming weeks, out of a total of 1.1 million children in the Gaza Strip.

Currently, around 1.25 million people in Gaza are living under catastrophic hunger conditions, while 96% of the population is suffering from severe levels of food insecurity, including more than one million children, according to the Office.

UNRWA warned on Sunday, “The Israeli Authorities are starving civilians in Gaza. Among them are 1 million children.”

Jagan Chapagain, the secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, warned that Palestinians in Gaza face “an acute risk of famine”.

“No one should have to risk their life to get basic humanitarian assistance,” he said.

On March 2, Israel announced the closure of Gaza’s main crossings, cutting off food, medical and humanitarian supplies, worsening a humanitarian crisis for 2.3 million Palestinians, according to reports by human rights organisations who have accused it of using starvation as a weapon of war against Palestinians.

An Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report in May warned that almost a quarter of the civilian population would face catastrophic levels of food insecurity (IPC Phase Five) in the coming months.

After more than 80 days of total blockade, starvation, and growing international outrage, limited aid has allegedly been distributed by the GHF, a scandal-plagued organization backed by the US and Israel, created to bypass the UN’s established aid delivery infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

Most humanitarian organisations, including the UN, have distanced themselves from GHF, arguing that the group violates humanitarian principles by restricting aid to south and central Gaza, requiring Palestinians to walk long distances to collect aid, and only providing limited aid, among other critiques. They have also said the model would increase forced displacement in Gaza.

The UN confirmed that Israel is still blocking food from reaching starving Palestinians with only a few trucks of aid having reached Gaza.

Moreover, Israeli mass killings of aid seekers near GHF aid sites have become a grim daily reality amid chaotic scenes, as desperate Palestinians are given only a narrow window to rush for food and are targeted by Israeli forces.

Palestinians in Gaza and the UN described these sites as “mass death traps” and “slaughterhouses”.

Since the GHF started its operations on May 27 in Gaza, over 900 aid seekers have been killed by Israeli forces and American mercenaries and over 60,000 others injured, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Additionally, 46 others have been reported missing after heading to the GHF sites to obtain food.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned that “weaponizing aid in this manner may constitute crimes against humanity.”

“Every day Palestinians are met with carnage in their attempts to receive supplies from the insufficient amount of aid trickling into Gaza,” MSF said.

22 July 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor

Palestinian Territory – The Israeli army has committed one of its most heinous massacres against starving civilians waiting for humanitarian aid in northern Gaza. According to Euro-Med Monitor field documentation, Israeli forces killed 67 people and injured dozens more today. The occupation army ordered the civilians to approach aid trucks with their hands raised—a clear sign of surrender—and then opened fire on them without provocation.

Euro-Med Monitor’s team documented Israeli soldiers opening fire atcivilians as they neared the route used by aid trucks north of Gaza City. This deliberate killing, committed without any military necessity, reflects an unprecedented level of brutality and constitutes a clear act of genocide aimed at eliminating the Palestinian population through a series of crimes including intentional killings, starvation, and forced displacement.

According to information gathered by Euro-Med Monitor’s field team, thousands of desperate civilians, driven by days of total flour shortages,headed early on Sunday to the Al-Waha area in northwest Gaza City after reports circulated that flour-laden trucks had entered via the Zikim crossing. In a desperate attempt to feed their families, many individuals rushed to the site.

When the first groups arrived, Israeli tanks were already stationed in the area. Soldiers then used loudspeakers to command: “Raise your hands and walk in front of the tanks—those who want flour, come forward.” Around 200 civilians complied. As they neared the aid trucks, Israeli forces suddenly opened heavy fire directly at their heads, instantly killing dozens. Others were left crawling, wounded, and bleeding. The massacre left 67 dead and more than 150 injured, many of whom are in critical condition.

In a separate incident, Israeli forces shot and killed six more starving civilians near a food distribution point run by the “Gaza Relief” organisation in Rafah as people attempted to access aid.

Notably, these attacks coincide with the peak of mass starvation across the Gaza Strip, where deaths from malnutrition are now documented and dozens have been hospitalised due to exhaustion and lack of food. Israel is deliberately using aid deliveries and distribution sites as death traps to lure in starving civilians—part of a systemic pattern of intentional killing, deprivation, and collective humiliation that flagrantly violates international law.

Euro-Med Monitor emphasises that the targeting of civilians attempting to access food, combined with the use of starvation as a weapon of war, constitutes grave breaches of international humanitarian and criminal law, including war crimes under the Rome Statute, namely: willful killing, targeting civilians, and starvation as a method of warfare.

The widespread and systematic nature of these violations meets the legal threshold for crimes against humanity, including murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts causing severe suffering or injury. These crimes are being committed as part of a large-scale, organised attack on the civilian population.

It is critical that the violations be viewed within the broader context of Israel’s systematic destruction of survival infrastructure, obstruction of aid, and imposition of deadly living conditions, along with public statementsmade by Israeli political and military leaders that reveal a clear, declared intent to destroy the Palestinian population in Gaza. The aforementioned atrocities and actions meet the definition of genocide under Article II of the Genocide Convention, particularly through the intentional killing of group members and imposing conditions of life intended to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor also places responsibility on the international community and complicit governments for enabling these atrocities, especially the operation of aid distribution points by the so-called “Gaza Relief” body, which was forcibly imposed by the Israeli military to replace the UN aid mechanism in the Gaza Strip.

Euro-Med Monitor calls for an immediate cessation of the organisation’s operations and for an independent international investigation to hold its officials accountable before domestic and international courts for their role in facilitating systematic mass killings.

All states must hold accountable not only the Israeli leadership but also any state actors who directly or indirectly support the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, whether through political, military, or financial means. Such complicity constitutes criminal participation under Article 25 of the Rome Statute. Also responsible are those states that have failed to take meaningful measures to prevent or stop the genocide, and are therefore in breach of their obligations under international law.

Further, Euro-Med Monitor calls for urgent international investigations into the role of the so-called “Gaza Relief” entity in facilitating crimes against civilians and accountability for its founders, managers, logistics coordinators, team leaders, and any staff involved—whether through planning, facilitation, direct contribution, or conscious failure to act.

Countries with universal or territorial jurisdiction are urged to launch criminal proceedings against individuals affiliated with this entity or its contracted private security firms for their roles in war crimes, including deliberate killings, starvation, and degrading treatment.

All states, individually and collectively, must urgently fulfill their legal obligations to halt the genocide in the Gaza Strip in all its forms. This includes taking concrete measures to protect Palestinian civilians in the enclave, ensure Israel’s compliance with international law and theInternational Court of Justice rulings, and guarantee full accountability for crimes committed against Palestinians. Euro-Med Monitor also calls for the enforcement of the International Criminal Court arrest warrants issued for Israeli Prime Minister and former Defense Minister, and for their swift surrender to international justice without regard to immunity.

The international community is urged to impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel and its more powerful allies, particularly the United States, for their grave and systematic breaches of international law; these sanctions should include comprehensive arms embargoes and the suspension of all forms of political, financial, military, and intelligence cooperation. In addition, Euro-Med Monitor calls for freezing the assets of responsible Israeli, US, and any complicit EU officials, banning their travel, halting their military and security companies’ access to international markets, and suspending trade privileges and bilateral agreements that facilitate Israel’s ongoing Western-backed crimes against the Palestinian people.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor is a Geneva-based independent organization with regional offices across the MENA region and Europe

21  July 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Malak Ridwan

The specter of famine has returned to Gaza, creeping through its shattered streets like a thief in the night, stealing the breath of children, the strength of mothers, and the dignity of fathers. It is a slow, cruel death—one that does not come with the sudden roar of bombs but with the silent gnawing of empty stomachs, the hollow eyes of those who have not known bread for days.

This is not Gaza’s first famine. Only last year, in January 2024, the people of the north endured a hunger no less severe than the current torment. Then, as now, flour, sugar, lentils—staples that once seemed too humble to notice—became treasures beyond reach. Families rationed grains like gold, stretching meager supplies to keep their children alive. Even then, medicine was a luxury few could afford. My own father, a diabetic, clutched his dwindling pills with trembling hands, counting each one, measuring his pain against the fear of running out.

Now, famine has returned, darker, deeper. The markets, if they can be called such, are graveyards of empty stalls. The few who find a sack of flour guard it like a secret, grinding it into coarse bread that tastes of dust and despair. Children no longer cry for sweets; they have forgotten the taste of sugar. Instead, they whimper weakly, their bellies swollen with hunger, their ribs pressing against skin stretched too thin.

And still, the world watches. Still, the trucks are stopped, the aid is delayed, the borders remain choked. Gaza starves in plain sight, while the powerful debate the arithmetic of suffering—how many calories a person needs to survive, how many grams of rice constitute a meal. But famine is not numbers. It is a father breaking his last piece of bread in half, pretending he is not hungry. It is a mother boiling water with a handful of salt, calling it soup. It is my diabetic father, counting his pills, praying they outlast the siege.

Gaza has known hunger before. It knows it too well. But how many famines must a people endure before the world remembers they are human?

Malak Ridwan is a writer from Gaza

21  July 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- At least 18 Palestinians died of starvation on Sunday alone across the Gaza Strip, as Israel continues to block humanitarian aid from entering the enclave for over four months, with warnings that Gaza is “on the verge of catastrophic hunger.”

According to the Palestinian Health Ministry, 18 people died from starvation in the past 24 hours, including a man with special needs.

It added a total of 87 people, including 76 children and 10 adults, have died due to hunger and malnutrition since the start of the genocide in October 2023.

“This is a silent massacre. The Ministry of Health holds the Israeli occupation and the international community fully responsible. We urgently call for the immediate opening of all crossings to allow the entry of food and medicine,” it added.

On Saturday, two children also died from malnutrition: Yahya Al-Najjar and 35-day-old infant Jawad Al-Anqar.

On Sunday, at least one Palestinian died of hunger every 80 minutes in Gaza as “Israel maintains a systematic starvation policy against 2 million residents,” said Euro-Med Monitor.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are “on the verge of catastrophic hunger,” with one in three people in the enclave going days without food.

Health officials in Gaza issued a stark warning lately: Hundreds of severely emaciated Palestinians are on the verge of death, their bodies too weak to resist any longer.

The Director of Al-Shifa Hospital said hospitals are dealing with hundreds suffering from severe hunger and malnutrition. “We don’t have enough beds or medicine,” he said. “We’re seeing symptoms like memory loss, exhaustion, and collapse from extreme hunger.”

He added: “We have 17,000 children suffering from severe malnutrition. This is a generation being starved to death.”

According to the Government Media Office in Gaza, over 650,000 children under the age of five face an imminent and severe risk of acute malnutrition in the coming weeks, out of a total of 1.1 million children in the Gaza Strip.

Currently, around 1.25 million people in Gaza are living under catastrophic hunger conditions, while 96% of the population is suffering from severe levels of food insecurity, including more than one million children, according to the Office.

UNRWA warned on Sunday, “The Israeli Authorities are starving civilians in Gaza. Among them are 1 million children.”

Jagan Chapagain, the secretary-general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, warned that Palestinians in Gaza face “an acute risk of famine”.

“No one should have to risk their life to get basic humanitarian assistance,” he said.

On March 2, Israel announced the closure of Gaza’s main crossings, cutting off food, medical and humanitarian supplies, worsening a humanitarian crisis for 2.3 million Palestinians, according to reports by human rights organisations who have accused it of using starvation as a weapon of war against Palestinians.

An Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report in May warned that almost a quarter of the civilian population would face catastrophic levels of food insecurity (IPC Phase Five) in the coming months.

After more than 80 days of total blockade, starvation, and growing international outrage, limited aid has allegedly been distributed by the GHF, a scandal-plagued organization backed by the US and Israel, created to bypass the UN’s established aid delivery infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

Most humanitarian organisations, including the UN, have distanced themselves from GHF, arguing that the group violates humanitarian principles by restricting aid to south and central Gaza, requiring Palestinians to walk long distances to collect aid, and only providing limited aid, among other critiques. They have also said the model would increase forced displacement in Gaza.

The UN confirmed that Israel is still blocking food from reaching starving Palestinians with only a few trucks of aid having reached Gaza.

Moreover, Israeli mass killings of aid seekers near GHF aid sites have become a grim daily reality amid chaotic scenes, as desperate Palestinians are given only a narrow window to rush for food and are targeted by Israeli forces.

Palestinians in Gaza and the UN described these sites as “mass death traps” and “slaughterhouses”.

Since the GHF started its operations on May 27 in Gaza, over 800 aid seekers have been killed by Israeli forces and American mercenaries and over 5,200 others injured, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Additionally, 46 others have been reported missing after heading to the GHF sites to obtain food.

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned that “weaponizing aid in this manner may constitute crimes against humanity.”
“Every day Palestinians are met with carnage in their attempts to receive supplies from the insufficient amount of aid trickling into Gaza,” MSF said.

The commissioner-general of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, condemned the “lethal” US-Israel aid distribution mechanism in Gaza. In a post on X, Lazzarini indicated that Palestinian lives “have been so devalued”.

“It is now the routine to shoot & kill desperate & starving people while they try to collect little food from a company made of mercenaries,” he said.

“Inviting starving people to their death is a war crime. Those responsible of this system must be held accountable. This is a disgrace & a stain on our collective consciousness.”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that the US-backed aid distribution mechanism is “inherently unsafe” and “it is killing people.”

“Any operation that channels desperate civilians into militarized zones is inherently unsafe. It is killing people,” Guterres told reporters.

Guterres said UN-led humanitarian efforts are being “strangled,” aid workers themselves are starving and Israel, as the occupying power, is required to agree to and facilitate aid deliveries into and throughout the Palestinian enclave.

“People are being killed simply trying to feed themselves and their families. The search for food must never be a death sentence,” Guterres told reporters.

According to a Haaretz report, conversations with officers and soldiers reveal that commanders ordered forces to shoot at crowds waiting for food near or at the US-backed GHF aid sites to drive them away or disperse them, despite posing no threat.

“It’s a killing field,” one soldier said.

“Where I was stationed, between one and five people were killed every day. They’re treated like a hostile force – no crowd-control measures, no tear gas – just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”

In a recent statement, the Israeli military admitted that its forces “harmed” Palestinian civilians at US-Israeli aid distribution centers in Gaza. The army claimed new field instructions were issued based on “lessons learned.”

A new Associated Press report with leaked footage also detailed how American contractors at GHF aid sites used live ammunition, stun grenades and pepper spray against starving Palestinians seeking food.

21  July 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Marwan Asmar

Gaza is starving. There has never been like it in this Israeli-induced and enforced genocide that has now been going on for about 19 months and counting.

People are literally falling in the streets and in front of the television cameras because of the biting hunger that doesn’t seem to end at the hands of a merciless Israeli enemy.

Of the people who manage to get to the dilapidated and destroyed hospitals they are dropping off on the doors of these institutions with many losing consciousness and even shrieking the last breath of death. And people die while the people in the world looks on with lavish feasts.

UNRWA says Israel is systematically and willfully starving the Palestinian population into submission; they want them either dead or expelled from their ancestral homes in the Gaza Strip. The UN refugee organization says that up to 1 million children are threatened with death through starvation. These figures are given as they are the most natural thing in the world.

This is one of the worst periods of the genocide as Arab and Israeli makers meet in Doha and elsewhere try to end this nightmare but to no avail as politics over-rides common sense and decency.

Dr Mohammad Abu Salmiyah, director of the Al Shifa Hospital says that neither patients nor medical staff nor ancillary personnel in the whole of the Gaza hospitals, which number 36 in total, have had anything to eat in the last 24 hours. 

Al Jazeera correspondent Anis Alsharif says neither him nor the other anchors have had a bite to eat since Saturday afternoon because there isn’t any. People around here walk aimless until their last breath of death. Yet people, except for the frail seems to go on, as if their is an ordained hand telling, forcing them to go on.

The Israelis have refused to let  anything into Gaza since last March when they realized that there was a possibility that Palestinians would flourish again; and this is after they threw on them around 100,000 tons of bombs, facilitated by their American benefactors – a situation that begun soon after, 7 October, 2023.

There is simply no food into the strip thanks to Israel. Even animal fodder, which Gazans had been reduced to eating in order to survive in the first period of starvation in 2024 and early 2025, has run out. Then fodder like wheat and barley was eaten to survive, but this appears to be the end game.

In this brave new world of starvation and famine, food has become a scarce, nay, non-existent commodity because of Israeli policies to beat the Palestinians with but they will not win despite the evil intentions.

UNRWA continues to appeal to the international community to force Israel to lift its tight and claustrophobic siege on Gaza and let the aid, food and medicine into the strip. Meanwhile, it says it has its cargoes lying in the Sinai Peninsula waiting to be delivered to the starving people of Gaza. It says in its storehouses, it has three months of supplies but it’s waiting for the might of Israel to upon up the borders.

Meanwhile people are continuing to die starting from Rafah, in Khan Younis in the center of the Strip to the far-northern areas in Jabalia, Biet Lahia and Biet Hanoon where fighting is still going on between Palestinian resistance fighters and the Israeli army. 

In comes the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which has since last May tried to provide food parcels at distribution centers run by US and Israeli personnel and which is today turning into a “free-shooting killing field” of starving Palestinian that has young been denounced by the United Nations as “weaponizing food” with very sinister connotations that include depopulating Gaza of its original inhabitants.

Seeing is believing. Palestinians, and on a daily basis, and under the eyes of the world are shot fatally on a daily basis. Take Sunday for example, the number of those that have been killed is already in the 60s. As they run to get their food parcels they are shot by Israeli soldiers guarding the distribution centers. They are shot with no compunctions but with a sense of hellish deliverance.  

And it is the social media who are narrating, nay “dancing” on the graves of the Palestinians. This war is probably the most documented set of atrocities, but people, the international community, gaze on with a sense of helplessness, frustration and complicity. Professor Amos Goldberg, who teaches Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University, doesn’t mince words. He says this is a “disgusting genocide”. 

Dr Marwan Asmar  is a journalist based in Amman

20  July 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Francesca Albanese

Remarks of Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, at the Hague Group Emergency Conference of States in Bogotá, Colombia.

Excellencies, Friends, 

I express my appreciation to the government of Colombia and South Africa for convening this group, and to all members of the Hague Group, its founding members for their principled stance, and the others who are joining. May you keep growing and so the strength and effectiveness of your concrete actions. 

Thank you also to the Secretariat for its tireless work, and last but not least, the Palestinian experts—individuals and organisations who travelled to Bogota from occupied Palestine, historical Palestine/Israel and other places of the diaspora/exile, to accompany this process, after providing HG with outstanding, evidence-based briefings.  

And of course all of you who are here today.

It is important to be here today, in a moment that may prove historical indeed. There is hope that these two days will move all present to work together to take concrete measures to end the genocide in Gaza and, hopefully, end the erasure of the Palestinians from what remains of Palestine—because this is the testing ground for a system where freedom, rights, and justice are made real for all. This hope, that people like me hold tight, is a discipline. A discipline we all should have.  

The occupied Palestinian territory today is a hellscape. In Gaza, Israel has dismantled even the last UN function—humanitarian aid—in order to deliberately starve, displace time and again, or kill a population they have marked for elimination. In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, ethnic cleansing advances through unlawful siege, mass displacement, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention, widespread torture. Across all areas under Israeli rule, Palestinians live under the terror of annihilation, broadcast in real time to a watching world. The very few Israeli people who stand against genocide, occupation, and apartheid—while the majority openly cheers and calls for more—remind us that Israeli liberation, too, is inseparable from Palestinian freedom. 

The atrocities of the past 21 months are not a sudden aberration; they are the culmination of decades of policies to displace and replace the Palestinian people.  

Against this backdrop, it is inconceivable that political forums, from Brussels to NY, are still debating recognition of the State of Palestine—not because it’s unimportant, but because for 35 years states have stalled, refused recognition, pretending to “invest in the PA” while abandoning the Palestinian people to Israel’s relentless, rapacious territorial ambitions and unspeakable crimes. Meanwhile political discourse has reduced Palestine to a humanitarian crisis to manage in perpetuity rather than a political issue demanding principled and firm resolution: end permanent occupation, apartheid and today genocide. And it is not the law that has failed or faltered—it is political will that has abdicated. 

But today, we are also witnessing a rupture. Palestine’s immense suffering has cracked open the possibility of transformation. Even if this is not fully reflected into political agendas (yet), a revolutionary shift is underway—one that, if sustained, will be remembered as a moment when history changed course.  

And this is why I came to this meeting with a sense of being at a historical turning point —discursively and politically.  

First, the narrative is shifting: away from Israel’s endlessly invoked “right to self-defence” and toward the long-denied Palestinian right to self-determination—systematically invisibilised, suppressed and delegitimised for decades. The weaponisation of antisemitism applied to Palestinian words, and narratives, and the dehumanising use of the terrorism framework for Palestinian action (from armed resistance to the work of NGOs pursuing justice in international arena), has led to a global political paralysis that has been intentional. It must be redressed. The time is now. 

Second, and consequentially, we are seeing the rise of a new multilateralism: principled, courageous, increasingly led by the Global Majority it pains me that I have yet to see this include European countries. As a European, I fear what the region and its institutions have come to symbolize to many: a sodality of states preaching international law yet guided more by colonial mindset than principle, acting as vassals to the US empire, even as it drags us from war to war, misery to misery and when it comes to Palestine: from silence to complicity. 

But the presence of European countries at this meeting shows that a different path is possible. To them I say: the Hague Group has the potential to signal not just a coalition, but a new moral center in world politics. Please, stand with them.  

Millions are watching—hoping—for leadership that can birth a new global order rooted in justice, humanity, and collective liberation. This is not just about Palestine. This is about all of us. 

Principled states must rise to this moment. It does not need to have a political allegiance, color, political party flags or ideologies: it needs to be upheld by basic human values. Those which Israel has been mercilessly crushing for 21 months now. 

Meanwhile I applaud the calling of this emergency conference in Bogota to address the unrelenting devastation in Gaza. So it is on this, that focus must be directed. The measures adopted in January by the Hague Group were symbolically powerful. It was the signal of the discursive and political shift needed. But they are the absolute bear minimum. I implore you to expand your commitment. And to turn that commitment into concrete actions, legislatively, judicially in each of your jurisdictions. And to consider first and foremost, what must we do to stop the genocidal onslaught. For Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, this question is existential. But it really is applicable to the humanity of all of us.  

In  this context my responsibility here is to recommend to you, uncompromisingly and dispassionately, the cure for the root cause. We are long past dealing with symptoms, the comfort zone of too many these days. And my words will show that what the Hague Group has committed to do and is considering expanding upon, is a small commitment towards what’s just and due based on your obligations under international law. 

Obligations, not sympathy, not charity. 

Each state immediately review and suspend all ties with Israel. Their military, strategic, political, diplomatic, economic,  relations – both imports and exports –  and to make sure that their private sector, insurers, banks, pension funds, universities and other goods, and services providers in the supply chains do the same. Treating the occupation as business as usual translates into supporting or providing aid or assistance to the unlawful presence of Israel in the OPT. These ties must be terminated as a matter of urgency. I will have the opportunity to elaborate on  the technicalities and implications in our further sessions but lets be clear, I mean cutting ties with Israel as a whole. Cutting ties only with the “components” of it in the oPt is not an option. 

This is in line with the duty on all states stemming from the July 2024 Advisory Opinion which confirmed the illegality of Israel’s prolonged occupation, which it declared tantamount to racial segregation and apartheid . The General Assembly adopted that opinion. These findings are more than sufficient for action. Further, it is the state of Israel who is accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, so it is the state that must be responsible for its wrongdoings. 

As I argue in my last report to the HRC, the Israeli economy is structured to sustain the occupation, and has now turned genocidal. It is impossible to disentangle Israel’s state policies and economy from its longstanding policies and economy of occupation. It has been inseparable for decades. The longer states and others stay engaged, the more this illegality at its heart is legitimised. This is the complicity. Now that economy has turned genocidal. There is no good Israel, bad Israel. 

I ask you to consider this moment as if we were sitting here in the 1990s, discussing the case of apartheid South Africa. Would you have proposed selective sanctions on SA for its conduct in individual Bantustans? Or would you have recognised the state’s criminal system as a whole? And here, what Israel is doing is worse. This comparison— is a legal and factual assessment supported by international legal proceedings many in this room are part of.  

This is what concrete measures mean. Negotiating with Israel on how to manage what remains of Gaza and West Bank, in Brussels or elsewhere, is an utter dishonor international law. 

And to the Palestinians and those from all corners of the world standing by them, often at great cost and sacrifice, I say whatever happens, Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter—not as a footnote in the chronicles of would-be conquerors, but as the newest verse in a centuries-long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, colonialism, and today more than ever neoliberal tyranny.

20  July 2025

Source: countercurrents.org

By Quds News Network

Gaza (Quds News Network)- Gaza is “on the brink of mass death” and facing an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, as Israel’s blockade continues for more than four months.

“We are on the brink of mass death due to the Israeli occupation’s closure of all border crossings for over 140 consecutive days, the prevention of humanitarian and relief aid, baby formula, and fuel from entering, the complete tightening of the blockade, the depletion of food and medicine, and the continuation of a deliberate starvation policy,” Gaza’s Government Media Office warned on Sunday.

It added, “The world watches silently as Gaza is slaughtered and exterminated through hunger and genocide.”

“We are witnessing the largest mass massacre in modern history.”

The Office said, “Gaza is heading toward an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe amid ongoing Israeli genocide through mass killing and starvation targeting more than 2.4 million people, including 1.1 million children, in the Gaza Strip.”

Starvation in Gaza has reached catastrophic and unprecedented levels, aid groups and officials have warned.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has warned that thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are “on the verge of catastrophic hunger,” with one in three people in the enclave going days without food.

Health officials in Gaza issued a stark warning lately: Hundreds of severely emaciated Palestinians are on the verge of death, their bodies too weak to resist any longer.

The Director of Al-Shifa Hospital said hospitals are dealing with hundreds suffering from severe hunger and malnutrition. “We don’t have enough beds or medicine,” he said. “We’re seeing symptoms like memory loss, exhaustion, and collapse from extreme hunger.”

He added: “We have 17,000 children suffering from severe malnutrition. This is a generation being starved to death.”

Currently, around 1.25 million people in Gaza are living under catastrophic hunger conditions, while 96% of the population is suffering from severe levels of food insecurity, including more than one million children, according to the Office.

UNRWA warned on Sunday, “The Israeli Authorities are starving civilians in Gaza. Among them are 1 million children.”

On March 2, Israel announced the closure of Gaza’s main crossings, cutting off food, fuel, medical and humanitarian supplies, worsening a humanitarian crisis for 2.3 million Palestinians, according to reports by human rights organisations who have accused it of using starvation as a weapon of war against Palestinians.

An Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report in May warned that almost a quarter of the civilian population would face catastrophic levels of food insecurity (IPC Phase Five) in the coming months.

After more than 80 days of total blockade, starvation, and growing international outrage, limited aid has allegedly been distributed by the GHF, a scandal-plagued organization backed by the US and Israel, created to bypass the UN’s established aid delivery infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

Mass killings of aid seekers near and at GHF aid sites have become a grim daily reality amid chaotic scenes, as desperate Palestinians are given only a narrow window to rush for food and are targeted by Israeli forces and American mercenaries. Palestinians in Gaza and the UN described these sites as “mass death traps” and “slaughterhouses”.

Since the GHF started its operations on May 27 in Gaza, over 900 aid seekers have been killed by Israeli forces and American mercenaries and over 6,000 others injured, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

The UN confirmed that Israel is still blocking food from reaching starving Palestinians with only a few trucks of aid having reached Gaza.

The markets are empty of all basic needs, including flour and vegetables. For the majority of people, such luxuries are unavailable except at unimaginable prices.

20  July 2025

Source: countercurrents.org