In fewer than two years, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. About 19,000 of them were children.
The widespread carnage inflicted by an unhinged and unrestrained Israeli government has now been made even more gruesome by a government-imposed campaign of starvation and famine.
It is indisputable that the Israeli government has conducted a mission of genocide in Gaza and must be stopped. This is state-sanctioned mass killing.
That’s the assessment of nearly every credible world government and organization, the majority of European powers and even far-right Trump sycophant and top congressional supporter of Israel, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia.
“It’s the most truthful and easiest thing to say that Oct. 7 in Israel was horrific and all hostages must be returned,” Greene said Monday in a social media post. “But so is the genocide, humanitarian crisis, and starvation happening in Gaza.”
The World Health Organization reported this week that there have been 63 malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza in July, including 24 children under the age of 5. That’s an increase from 11 such deaths during the previous six months.
Gaza’s health ministry said the number of starvation deaths is even higher. It cited 14 in the past 24 hours.
The ministry, which operates under the Hamas-run government, is headed by medical professionals and is seen by the U.N. as the most reliable source of data on casualties. U.N. agencies also often confirm numbers through other partners on the ground.
Beyond a humanitarian crisis, this is a cataclysmic failure of moral leadership of a government and a genocidal campaign run by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It has left blood on the hands of the international community, and especially the United States, for complicitly standing by as the Israeli government has carried out its modern genocide with relative impunity.
The war began following Hamas’ abhorrent Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, which killed approximately 1,200 people and took hundreds more hostage. That brutal day rightly drew outrage in Israel and across the globe. But what followed has gone too far beyond any legitimate military retaliation. It has become a campaign of systematic destruction, displacement, starvation, and slaughter.
Whether the indiscriminate mass killing is the product of an unscrupulous Netanyahu regime, or its total incompetence, it must be stopped immediately.
A Gaza health system on its knees continues to count the dead with grim regularity. They have reported 145,000 wounded among the tens of thousands killed. These are mothers and fathers crushed beneath rubble. Infants starved to death. Children were shot while reaching for bags of flour. Families vaporized in tents.
In recent days alone, Israeli airstrikes killed 30 people in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Among the dead, 12 were children, 14 were women. Dozens more were gunned down around an aid convoy. Fourteen more died near an Israeli-backed aid contractor site. As of this week, more than 1,000 desperate Palestinians have reportedly been killed while simply trying to access food.
Even as famine stalks Gaza’s residents, Israel continues to control the flow of aid with an iron grip. Promised “humanitarian corridors” have been lies. The Israeli military claims to shoot “warning rounds,” but the bodies piling up around food convoys tell another story.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called the situation “a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportions.” The evidence backs him. This is engineered starvation. It is cruel, deliberate and an inarguable violation of international law.
To deny food and medicine to a civilian population is not an unfortunate consequence of war. It is a war crime. To strike children and women seeking shelter in refugee camps is not a tactical misstep. It is an atrocity.
The Israeli government remains, however, unmoved. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar dismisses the world’s concern about hunger as a “distorted campaign.”
Meanwhile, in Gaza, fathers are swimming into the sea to retrieve food air-dropped into the wrong zone, emerging with soaked packets of biscuits and cans of beans. One man nearly drowned trying to grab what little aid had been dropped from the sky, according to Associated Press reports.
This is what a siege looks like in 2025. This is not just a war of indiscriminate slaughter by missiles and tanks. It’s elevated by starvation as a strategy and displacement as a doctrine.
The world’s silence and inaction are complicity.
The defense offered by Israel, that Hamas embeds itself among civilians, does not justify the wholesale destruction of civilians. A military’s obligation under international law is to distinguish between combatants and civilians, even when the enemy does not.
The scale of Palestinian casualties, especially among women and children, makes a mockery of Netanyahu’s claims that they’re doing the best they can.
Israel insists that it targets only “Hamas infrastructure.”
An infant buried in rubble is not an enemy combatant. A young mother incinerated in her sleep was not part of a militant network. A 5-year-old starving to death is not a legitimate target.
Most of Gaza remains inaccessible to humanitarian workers, and what aid does enter cannot reach those who need it most, due to a collapse in order and a state of near-anarchy created by the very war Israel continues to escalate.
The numbers tell the story. There are 60,034 dead at the hands of the Israeli government, and nearly half of them were children and women. Those facts do not call for any kind of embellishment. They demand accountability.
Never again is now.
When you have a regime like Hamas, that considers the lives of it’s people expendable, for the greater cause of Islam, it is difficult to care for and protect individuals. Hamas has regularly used its citizens as human shields and benefits from their deaths by achieving world sympathy. As such, they greatly exaggerate the number of deaths and lie about the causes. Israeli forces use extraordinary care to avoid hurting civilians while Hamas does not. This is not a genocide by any definition.
Maybe the lesson here should be, don’t start an existential conflict if you’re not prepared to play by the rules of the game.