Gaza’s 2.1 million inhabitants now face death by starvation as well as bombing. For the past 70 days, Israel has imposed a total siege on the Gaza Strip, preventing all food, fuel and medicine from entering the enclave. Since March 18th, when Israel broke a two-month ceasefire by resuming bombardment of the enclave, at least 2,600 more Gazans have perished. Local health officials said 106 Palestinians were killed in 24 hours from Wednesday to Thursday, including 33 in a cafe where young people gathered to use the internet.
The World Food Programme ran out of supplies on April 25th. The average Gazan eats one meal every two or three days, Sean Carroll, the president of American Near East Refugee Aid, wrote this week in the New York Times. The group’s lab technicians have detected ketones, an indicator of starvation, in one third of urine samples from Gaza. The French aid organisation Doctors of the World reports severe malnutrition among children under five and among pregnant and nursing women.
Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu this week called up tens of thousands of Israeli reservists for an “intensive” escalation of the war. “Victory over our enemies” rather than freeing the 24 Israelis still believed held by Hamas is Israel’s “supreme objective”, Netanyahu said. Israeli and US officials never mention the 9,619 Palestinians detained by Israel, most without due process, and whom the Palestinians consider hostages.
Israel will wait until Donald Trump’s visit to the Gulf ends on May 16th to step up its assault. The 365sq km strip is chopped into five segments, each isolated by “corridors” patrolled by the Israeli army. From north to south, the tiny enclaves are Beit Lahya, Gaza, Deir Al-Balah, Khan Younis and Rafah. Seventy per cent of Gaza’s territory is already under Israeli military control and off-limits to Palestinians, who are being corralled into ever smaller areas. Israel has ordered all Gazans to move to the ruined city of Rafah, on the Egyptian border.
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The far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said this week that the Gaza Strip would be “completely destroyed” and its inhabitants moved to third countries. The Israeli security cabinet has approved the establishment of a directorate within the defence ministry to facilitate “voluntarily” departures from Gaza.
[ Israel planning ‘major event’ of destruction and displacement in GazaOpens in new window ]
Israel has become “a country that lives by the sword, a country addicted to military force, a pugnacious, trigger-happy, ethno-nationalist, racially supremacist state, totally oblivious to international law,” the British Israeli historian Avi Shlaim writes in Genocide in Gaza: Israel’s Long War on Palestine, the monumental collection of Shlaim’s essays published by The Irish Pages Press.
Together, Trump’s friends Vladimir Putin and Netanyahu embody the complete breakdown of international law seen in the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for both men. Israel’s use of collective punishment, including starvation, and its declared objective of the mass expulsion of Palestinians constitute war crimes.
At its core, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always been about land. Israel bases its claim to British mandate Palestine on the Bible, to which the Palestinian leader Hanan Ashrawi replied that “God is not a real estate agent”. By coincidence Trump and his golf buddy and chief negotiator Steve Witkoff are property developers.
Standing beside Netanyahu in the White House on February 4th, Trump said of Gaza: “We’re going to develop it ... Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the US owning that piece of land, developing and creating ... something ... magnificent.”
Asked whether the Palestinians would be allowed to enjoy his planned “Riviera”, Trump replied, “Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.” The Palestinians, he promised, would be provided with a “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land” to live on. Yasser Arafat predicted that Palestinians would end up on reservations, like indigenous Americans.
On February 25th, Trump posted an AI-generated video of “Trump Gaza” resort, complete with a gold statue of Trump. Not only was the video a sick joke, but it enabled Netanyahu to embrace the “Trump vision” of an ethnically cleansed Gaza transformed into prime seafront property.
Trump does not observe US law, let alone international law. He says he’s tired of hearing about Putin’s war crimes. One of his first acts as president was to end the Biden administration’s suspension of the transfer of two-tonne “bunker buster” bombs to Israel. The 1948 UN Convention on Genocide lists complicity in genocide as a punishable crime.
Since Israel’s foundation in May 1948, the US has given the Jewish State $310 billion in economic and military assistance, says the Council on Foreign Relations. An October 2024 report by Brown University found that the US spent at least $22.76 billion on military aid to Israel in the first year of the Gaza war.
Prof Shlaim writes: “The continuing flow of American arms for Israel’s multipronged attack on Gaza and the West Bank makes America complicit in its ally’s war crimes. It is nothing less than a green light for genocide.”
[ The Irish Times view on Israel’s plan in Gaza: anatomy of a war crimeOpens in new window ]
For decades European governments issued feeble admonitions about the illegality of settlements and expressed pious wishes for a two-state solution, in the vain hope that Washington might one day “get tough” with Israel. It never happened. Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, campaigns for the annexation of the West Bank and has shut down the Office of Palestinian Affairs at his embassy.
Nothing, not the Holocaust nor the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th, 2023, nor Israel’s right to defend itself, can justify the wholesale destruction of Gaza and genocide against its people.
In a just world, Putin, Netanyahu and Trump, their enabler, would stand trial for war crimes and complicity in war crimes. At the very least, they must be subject to opprobrium.
“We are starving the children of Gaza,” Dr Michael Ryan, the Irish physician who is executive director of the World Health Organisation’s Health Emergencies Programme, said on May 3rd. “Because if we don’t do something about it, we are complicit in what is happening ... This should not be happening. It cannot continue. We have to stop it. This is an abomination.”
