On Saturday night, while Eurovision fans in Switzerland flick their feather boas in disapproval at Israel’s participation, principled gestures will make no difference to children scavenging for crumbs in Gaza. Virtue signalling will not put food in their stomachs. They cannot eat words of condemnation.
Gaza’s starving children are not fake news. The Israeli government and its cheerleaders want to pretend they do not exist. But we see them on our screens. Their eyes grow bigger as the blockade grinds on. Their ribs and spines protrude like fish bones. Flies crawl on their faces in images redolent of every famine the world has ever witnessed. By Tuesday, at least 57 children had reportedly died from hunger. Six-year-old Najwa Hajjaj flaps in her mother’s arms like an empty paper bag while her mother says a younger one of her children has already died from lack of food. The arms and legs of 11-year-old Dana Alhad are as thin as twigs. The BBC report carries a warning: “Distressing content”.
What luxury it is to be able to look away. To switch channels while parents in Gaza helplessly watch their children’s bodies begin to eat their own muscle tissue for sustenance. First, their electrolyte balance goes askew. They become dizzy and confused. Their heart beat slows. Their kidneys will start to fail for lack of water. They might go blind. Then their brain begins to shut down. The last organ to stop working will be the heart. Children die quicker from starvation than do adults. How quick is hard to predict. The IRA hunger striker Martin Hurson, who was 24 and had not been amputated, orphaned or repeatedly displaced and traumatised by air strikes for the previous 20 months, had only lasted 46 days when he died of dehydration after losing the ability to take in water.
On Monday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a joint venture by UN agencies, NGOs and governments that measures whether famine is happening, said 470,000 Gazans fit its “phase five – catastrophe” classification. Israel’s government is unrepentant. Binyamin Netanyahu is escalating the bombardment that has already left more than 52,000 Palestinians dead in the strip. Appealing to his sense of humanity is a waste of breath, as the families of Israel hostages, too, have learned. As for citing laws against war crimes and genocide, Netanyahu, whose arrest is being sought by the International Criminal Court, shows more respect for the rules of chess.
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Today is day 76 of Israel’s blockade on food, water, fuel and medicines entering Gaza. The onslaught that began in October 2023 has effectively destroyed the territory’s water and waste network and its desalination system, according to the Al-Mezan human rights organisation in Gaza. The place is a breeding ground for disease. With insufficient nourishment weakening the immune system, death from infection is an increasing risk. Still, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, sounds determined to continue starving the population when he says the return of aid to Gaza “before Hamas gets on its knees and releases all of our hostages would be a historic mistake”.
Fifteen months ago, his colleagues in Netanyahu’s government were proposing that Gazans should go to Ireland because “Ireland deserves it”. The ethnic cleansing strategy was evident that long ago and given succour by supporters who tried to silence its critics by accusing them of anti-Semitism. Some still see no evil. When Sharon Shaul, a doctor with the Israel-based humanitarian organisation Natan, pleaded at a meeting in the Knesset last week for medical aid to be allowed into Gaza, Haaretz newspaper reported that a parliamentarian called Limor Son Har-Melech retorted: “The only treatment needed here is for you.”
At least, when aid convoys were stopped at the border last year, France, Jordan and, laterally, the US dropped supplies from the air and Joe Biden, for all his despicable support of Netanyahu’s massacring, had a temporary pier constructed to receive sea cargo, though it proved futile. None of that is happening now, even as Israeli military officers warn that people will die if the blockade is not lifted soon.
Something else is different this time. Voices internationally and in Ireland that, until recently, were reflexively branding anyone expressing concern as a Jew-hater have grown quieter. Perhaps they have, at last, been persuaded by the brazenness of Israel’s ethnic cleansing objective. When Donald Trump suggested, in January, that Gaza should be depopulated, Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich vowed to devise a “plan to implement this as soon as possible”. Key to that plan is Israel’s stated aim, backed by Trump, to wrest the function of aid delivery from NGOs in favour of commercial companies.
To his credit, Micheál Martin has refused to be silenced, despite being called an “anti-Semite”. He has led other state leaders by plainly calling the aid blockade a war crime. But it is too late for words now. The World Food Programme has no food left in Gaza. Charity kitchens have shut down because their shelves are bare. Irreversible harm has been done. Some children who will survive this imposed starvation will be left with lifelong disabilities such as brittle bones, blindness or stunted growth of body and brain. They will be the visible and inflammatory reminders to future generations of the price the people were made to pay for the war between Hamas and Israel.
[ Ireland says Israel is carrying out war crimes in Gaza. Now it must actOpens in new window ]
The Irish Government’s plan to abandon neutrality’s triple lock is acknowledgment that the UN Security Council is an obstacle to any resolution. Therefore, the Government should bypass it and table a motion at the UN assembly for Israel to lift the blockade and, if not, for the UN to urgently deploy a mission to deliver supplies to Gaza by air drops and sea flotillas. It may not save every life, but it would show the people of Gaza that the rest of the world cares enough about them to actually do something to help.
By raising their voices in support of a humanitarian intervention, those who have facilitated Israel’s brutality in Gaza by labelling concerned others as anti-Semites might atone for having aided and abetted human slaughter.
