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