NK: You know, when we talk about these hundreds and hundreds of people being killed around aid distribution sites, what are Palestinians in Gaza telling you? What are your staff members there telling you about the kinds of choices people are having to make right now?AS: It's very difficult. I mean, to be honest with you, we are lost for words to describe how things are in Gaza. Two-point-two million people are suffering, and not necessarily all dying, but in different ways. In that background -- against that background -- we see, and I have to say, you know, before the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation stepped in to distribute food, there were 400 places -- 400 centres -- where the UN and its partners were distributing food. That is for 2.2 million people. That's been reduced to about four centres. And now, three centres in the last few days. We're talking about 700,000 people squeezed into each centre trying to get food. It is chaotic, and people are being shot. And this has happened over the last six weeks. We see 700-plus people who have been shot and killed while trying to get food. They are not a threat to the Israeli Defense Force. So, why are they being shot? This is a crowd control issue. So, you can imagine, after six weeks, when people have been shot and killed every day trying to get food, they still go. And that is because their choices are just to either starve and die, or go to these places, struggle, step on each other, fight for this meagre resource, and get shot. And that's a very, very difficult choice to make. And they say we know the risk, but we will take that risk. We'd rather die one way or the other. So, it's that desperate.
A column at The Guardian collected some of the more outrageous statements by Israeli politicans in the past couple years:
“All of Gaza’s infrastructures must be destroyed to its foundation and their electricity cut off immediately. The war is not against Hamas but against the state of Gaza,” said May Golan, minister for social equality and the advancement of the status of women of Israel on 7 October 2023.
“Flatten everything [in Gaza] just like it is today in Auschwitz,” David Azoulay, council leader for the northern Israeli town of Metula, said in an interview with an Israeli radio station, December 2023.
“Now we all have one common goal – erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth” Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament, wrote on X 7 October 2023. Vaturi also wrote: “The war will never end if we don’t expel everyone.” (2 November 2023) and “To wipe out Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us … Don’t leave a single child there, expel all the remaining ones in the end, so they have no chance of recovery.” (9 October 2023)
“The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death,” Yitzhak Kroizer, a member of national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party, said in a radio interview. This did not get much international coverage but was cited in the letter sent to the attorney general at the end of 2023 accusing the country’s judicial authorities of ignoring incitement to genocide.
“The children in Gaza have brought this upon themselves,” said Meirav Ben-Ari from Yair Lapid’s opposition party Yesh Atid in response to a Palestinian lawmaker bemoaning the loss of civilian life on 16 October 2023.
“There should be 2 goals for this victory: 1. There is no more Muslim land in the Land of Israel ... After we make it the land of IL, Gaza should be left as a monument, like Sodom …” said Likud member of the Knesset Amit Halevi on 16 October 2023.
“They [the children] are our enemies,” said Simcha Rothman, a member of the Knesset for the National Religious party, part of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. Rothman was responding to a question from a Channel 4 (UK) interviewer asking “the children are your enemies?”
World Central Kitchen teams in Gaza have again run out of ingredients to cook warm meals. We served 80,000 meals yesterday, emptying the last of our replenished stocks while aid trucks remain stuck at the border.Our brave teams are still baking bread and delivering water each day—essential lifelines for Gazan families.Our Field Kitchens are prepped and ready to resume cooking the moment new supplies arrive. Every second counts. Families in Gaza rely on these hot meals.WCK’s commitment remains steadfast. We are on the ground, working alongside local chefs and partners, ready to ramp up operations the moment food can safely reach our kitchen.
At least 32 people were killed and more than 100 injured on Saturday morning when Israeli troops opened fire on crowds of Palestinians seeking food from two aid distribution hubs in southern Gaza, according to witnesses and hospital officials.People on the scene described it as “a massacre”, and claimed Israel Defense Forces fired “indiscriminately” at the groups of Palestinians – reported to be mostly young men – who were making their way towards the hubs run by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).Most of the deaths, which a civil defence agency spokesperson, Mahmud Bassal, attributed to “Israeli gunfire”, occurred in the Teina area, about two miles from a GHF aid distribution centre east of Khan Younis.Medical sources told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that many of the wounded are in a serious condition, while witnesses at the scene said many of the dead and injured were children and teenagers.The Nasser hospital in Khan Younis received 25 bodies, as well as dozens of wounded people, while nine others were killed near a centre north-west of Rafah, the civil defence agency said.Dr Atef al-Hout, director of Nasser hospital, described the situation as “an unprecedented number of casualties in a very short time”, warning that the actual death toll could be higher.“We’re unable to provide adequate medical treatment as we lack equipment, medicine and personnel,” he told Haaretz.
Those Guardian quotations are almost inconceivable. What a disgusting heart one must have to say such things. And my country trying to navigate its way around the politics of it all, without the courage to condemn properly.
ReplyDeleteIf one looks at the dates of the quotes in The Guardian article, one might notice that several are close on the weeks following the barbarous incursion into Israel by Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad, and sundry hundreds of Gazan citizens. After the Jewish people had suffered two millennia of prejudice, slaughter, rapine, plunder and exile, one might think it indeed conceivable that some Jews, on seeing yet another pogrom carried out - in their own country! -, could think, and say, those things. Enough, already! might understandably be their theme.
DeleteAs for The Guardian and Ms Mahdawi, perhaps a mention of some comments from the other side might be appropriate for balance but I guess they don’t give a damn about that. Perhaps quoting some of Hamas’s charter might show why some of those quotes have been made:
″Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam invalidates it, just as it invalidated others before it″
“The Day of Judgment will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'”
Or maybe from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin Husseini, who spent World War 2 in Berlin with his pal Hitler, and had this to say about the Jews:
“Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honour. God is with you.”
And, as Golda Meir said, “How can you negotiate with someone who has come to kill you?”
“It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” Golda Meir
Delete10:51 a.m. PDT, July 23, 2025
DeleteGaza facing man-made "mass starvation," WHO chief says
From CNN’s Max Saltman
Alaa Al-Najjar mourns her three-month-old baby Yehia, who died due to malnutrition according to medics, in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Sunday.
Alaa Al-Najjar mourns her three-month-old baby Yehia, who died due to malnutrition according to medics, in Khan Younis, Gaza, on Sunday. Hatem Khaled/REUTERS/REUTERS
Palestinians in Gaza are suffering a man-made “mass starvation” due to the aid blockade on the enclave, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned reporters at a briefing Wednesday.
“Parents tell us their children cry themselves to sleep from hunger,” Ghebreyesus said. “Food distribution sites have become places of violence.”
Ghebreyesus’ answer was unambiguous when asked whether he agrees with a statement this week from over 100 aid organizations that Gaza is experiencing “mass starvation.” Earlier in the briefing, one of the WHO chief’s colleagues expressed reservations about using the term.
“Mass starvation means starvation of a large portion of the population,” Ghebreyesus said. “And a large proportion of the population of Gaza is starving. I don’t know what you’d call it other than mass starvation. And it is man-made, and that’s very clear.”
“This is because of (the) blockade,” Ghebreyesus continued. “And then of course there is an opening now, but it’s not enough. It is just a trickle and people are starving.”
“I don’t know why we’re even splitting hairs here,” Ghebreyesus added.
The WHO chief pointed to a UN report from this week noting that over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed seeking aid since late May, hundreds of them at sites managed by the Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The organization said in a statement to CNN that the UN statistics are “false and exaggerated.”
Israeli officials have blamed Hamas for any hunger in the Gaza Strip.
Unbelievably vile!! And sickening that our tax dollars have been funding this holocaust against the innocent children of Palestine
ReplyDeleteSeems that not only do they strive to remember the holocaust, they also have picked up some pointers from it. Shameful country.
ReplyDeleteKilling starving people desperate for food is unconscionable. Holocaust redux.
ReplyDeleteI take some hope from the photo of the march, but the population of Tel Aviv is about 5% Arab. Guessing that's who's doing the protesting.
ReplyDeleteThe population of Israel is about 20% Arab, and they are the same people as the Gazans and Palestinians in the West Bank, but they decided to live at peace with Jews in the land of Israel. Some are doctors, some run successful businesses, some are cabinet members. Not everything is perfect, but their presence belies the idea that Jews and Arabs can't live together quite well.
DeleteTel Aviv is 5% Arab and in wider Israel the Arab population is about 20%. It's no secret that the Arab population experiences discrimination. Pointing out anomalies or "success stories" is not particularly useful other than to give cover to an apartheid state. From Wikipedia: "[Arabs] live in Arab-majority towns and cities, some of which are among the poorest in the country, and generally attend schools that are separated to some degree from those attended by Jewish Israelis."
DeleteRegarding the title to this post, reading what John Spencer (the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies @warinstitute and Executive Director @urbanwarfareins) has to say on Twitter on the subject of the Palestine "genocide": https://x.com/SpencerGuard/status/1948010761957052628
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/24/israel-genocide-gaza
Deletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/world/middleeast/gaza-starvation.html
Deletehttps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/29/israel-gaza-palestinians-genocide-scholars-letter
DeleteTaner Akçam, Marianne Hirsch and Michael Rothberg are founding members of the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network.
This is so hideous -- thank you for speaking up about this holocaust that Israel is inflicting on the citizens of Palestine
ReplyDelete