What sort of society lets Gaza starve?
The whole world knew this was coming. And yet here we are.
The mass starvation unfolding in Gaza is a horror beyond comprehension. On our phones and in the mainstream media, we are seeing images from Gaza that no human being should ever have to see, much less endure. Babies so malnourished that their bones protrude through their skin as they gasp their dying breaths. Children begging their parents for bread when there is none to be found. Women crawling in the dust, looking for specks of flour. Human beings forced to choose between starvation or being massacred in aid lines by the IDF—already the fate of more than one thousand people.
Kilometres away, aid trucks are lined up on the Israeli border. A few more kilometres from that are fully stocked supermarkets. Yet in Gaza, people are starving to death.
Starvation is “a very cruel, slow death” according to Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, a paediatrician and neurologist who has volunteered in Gaza and spoke to Al Jazeera. “You basically just waste away”, he said. First, the body uses up glycogen storage, then fats. At the acute stage, the body begins to consume itself, breaking down protein and shrinking muscles to provide energy to the heart and brain. Wounds cannot heal: the body simply doesn’t have the building blocks. Eventually the heart stops, or the body is overcome with infection, too weak to fight.
Murder by starvation was the fate of 86 people in Gaza in July alone, according to hospital reports made to the Gaza Ministry of Health, including at least 24 children under 5. One in five children under 5 are now classified by the UN as “acutely malnourished” in Gaza City.
The situation is so dire that those who are attempting to help and document the atrocities are becoming too weak to go on. Citizen journalists are unable to tell their stories. Medical workers are passing out from hunger. Aid workers are too hungry to distribute the aid.
As more than 100 humanitarian and aid organisations have pointed out, this is an entirely preventable catastrophe. For almost two years doctors, aid organisations and the Palestine movement have warned that Israel’s blockade of Gaza, explicitly designed to prevent food and baby formula from entering, was pushing the strip’s 2 million inhabitants to the brink of starvation. Yet across the world, from Israel to the West, those in power made a decision to allow it to happen, and continue to support it materially.
Israel obviously bears the greatest responsibility. Israeli spokespeople are coming across as increasingly deranged and genocidal in the face of this crisis. Their attempts to deny the reality of mass starvation in Gaza are routinely contradicted by their own statements and actions: statements like “There is no nation that feeds its enemies”, made by Israeli heritage minister Amihai Eliyahu last week. Foreign doctors entering Gaza say they are screened specifically for baby formula and prevented from taking it in. The starvation of Gaza is the logical conclusion of Israel’s never-ending war to destroy the Palestinian people.
Not far behind are the Western governments that have given Israel unlimited military, ideological and material support and have enabled the starvation everyone knew was coming.
The current “aid” system is a joint initiative of US president Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, run by the recently founded US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. As humanitarian organisations predicted, the system is about using aid as a weapon by helping Israel displace and control the Palestinian population. US mercenaries herd desperate people who wait all day for the hope of a package to feed their starving families. Massacres at these aid sites have quickly become part of normal life in Gaza.
In Australia, the Labor government has changed its tone and some of its rhetoric in relation to Gaza. But it continues to support Israel. It continues to allow shipments of military supplies to Israel, and it will not sanction Israel’s actions. And it continues to treat pro-Palestine activists—the very people who have been warning about the starvation for months—as criminals.
The media are no better. For years they have parroted every lie the Israeli government has used to justify its genocide. Now they seem to have clocked on to the fact that starvation and collective punishment might be a bad thing. “At some point there has to be a reckoning of, does a child starving need to be the victim because Hamas is not behaving as they should?”, asks one Australian journalist on our national broadcaster’s podcast. It seems this is the first time she has considered the question. Or maybe it’s the first time she’s considered the answer isn’t yes. But it is too late to be asking.
Millions of people around the world are now asking, what sort of society is it that could let Gaza starve? There are two answers to this question.
The first answer is: a capitalist one. Capitalism is a system of violence, exploitation and domination, in which people are of value only in so far as they help to enrich the already wealthy or help them extend their power and control around the world. The consequence of this inhumanity is evident in the images of starving Gazans: it should be seared into our minds. That capitalist class, and the governments that serve it, are unfit to rule for a second longer.
The second answer is that it is a society that is screaming out for radical change, in which all our rulers are driven from power and nothing like this is ever allowed to happen again. That world is a socialist society, in which human life is valued, and production is harnessed to provide for people, not to enrich the few. It’s our only hope.
