The Murder of Gaza
Starvation is a slow, painful, and thorough killer. Its symptoms include
· The visible wasting away of the flesh
· The slowing of the brain
· The loss of ability to digest food as the gut muscles vitiate
· A host of complications and related conditions, such as pancreatitis
· The collapse of hormone production and with it the weakening of bones
· In cases of extreme starvation, when food suddenly becomes available, patients can die from refeeding syndrome, taking in too much food too quickly, outside of a medically-controlled environment
· Permanent brain development impacts in infants who survive the period of famine
· Immune system collapse leading to the patient succumbing to secondary infections like gastroenteritis, which causes the body to expel any remaining food it can
· An ongoing and eventually terminal decrease in heart function, blood pressure, and pulse
· Bloating, nausea, and vomiting, especially in children, who are subject to severe protein deficiencies which are eventually fatal
· With time, inevitably, death
Today, there are two million people in Gaza, and many of them – hard numbers are impossible to get – are now in the final stages of starving to death. Many will not recover even with intervention; many have already died. Between the bombings, shootings of civilians, and the enforced blockade of the strip by the IDF, and the prevalent attitude and statements made by senior members of the government of Israel, and by what they permit their citizen settlers to get away with, it has long been clear that another Holocaust is being committed openly in front of the world. It is being committed by Israel with the support of the United States.
The New York Times writes: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/world/middleeast/gaza-starvation.html
The Associated Press writes: https://apnews.com/article/gaza-israel-starvation-children-malnutrition-baby-baf865b861c9a2fd9c75068936062146
The AP reports that Gaza is now passing a tipping point and entering a population death spiral: https://apnews.com/article/gaza-palestinians-starvation-famine-israel-children-3a7403d4f6ec483a03d6cbb0c45fd06a
The AP reports that since May, over a thousand people seeking aid have been killed by Israel: https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-gaza-war-palestinians-07-22-2025-8eb90d73c1b7499d3dbc8b8d95da65cc
The Guardian reports that over a third of the recorded starvation deaths during the course of the war happened in the three days before their article was published, revealing a terminal stage of the famine; the article was published on Wednesday, and it is now Saturday: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/23/we-faced-hunger-before-but-never-like-this-skeletal-children-fill-hospital-wards-as-starvation-grips-gaza
The Atlantic reports on the sordid involvement of American capital and the Trump administration: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/07/food-aid-gaza-israel-ghf/683658/
The Atlantic reports on the settlers eagerly awaiting the chance to move into Gaza, once all the people are gone: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/settlers-theroux-documentary/683152/
More from the Atlantic on the responsibility of America in this matter: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/07/trump-gaza-mistakes/683651/
How did we let this happen? I am writing as an American in the mainstream of the traditional political establishment. Many of us in that part of the political culture have become mired in a moral paralysis, for a range of reasons – and I am not referring to the people in the administration, their supporters, or the special interests with a personal pecuniary interest or a warped religious fetish that makes them actively support a genocide.
· We tune out news of distant atrocities and evils because it seems overwhelming, because people cannot necessarily cope with the curated bad news of the entire world at once, because we are doubtful we can do anything, or because we are afraid of what we might have to do. Our screens make real Stalin’s dictum, and flatten a million deaths into a statistic we scroll past in a half-regarded glance.
· We identified with the innocent victims of Hamas’s attacks on Israel, either because of some perceived historical affinity, or simply because their middle-class lives remind us of our own, and we imagine ourselves in their shoes.
· We are reticent to adopt any solid view, out of an awareness of an impossibly complicated history and a desire to avoid making a misstep, in a conversation where missteps often feel the only possible contribution to those not wholly partisan, or those averse to conflict and rabid ire.
· We are skeptical of or put off by a protest movement associated with the type of activist we often disagree with and mutually mistrust, and who are represented to us by the worst examples of people breaking into genuine antisemitism or collapsing reality into a caricature which does not afford their ‘enemies’ the dignity of being judged and treated as individual persons.
And yet, that last crime becomes the same excuse used by Israel and the United States to commit an atrocity beyond all proportion or excuse. Our hesitation has in part allowed the metastasization of the feigned inability to morally distinguish among those pre-determined to be ‘other’ as a category, whose lives are not assigned the value given to our own. The involvement of some Evangelicals in this is in itself an abomination, as what is now transpiring in Palestine is the total antithesis of the Gospel of self-giving that Christ once preached there.
Today we are living in what seems fated to become an example of how historical atrocities play out in time before a numb audience, and people later ask how we could have let this happen – only for the atrocities to repeat, again and again, as each generation’s Cassandras are shunned as so many Chicken Littles. If there is a lesson, it is not to wait until an atrocity or any injustice has taken, in the media available to us, the same unmistakable form of the full historically-documented aftermath of the genocides we read about in textbooks. If we don’t want to functionally abet the repetition of such evils, we cannot simply wait and see, we must rather read the signs of injustice, the patterns of offenses proffered with a fig leaf of deniability or excuse, and conclude that these are already the beast of genocide assuming once again its all-too-familiar lineaments.
