Gaza has become a graveyard for the hopes of a people denied the dignity of life

There are no words to articulate the dehumanisation of a population in plain sight, with absolutely no regret or attempt to hide the systematic suffocation of a people.

PART THREE - DELIBERATE STARVATION

This is part three of a four-part series in which I attempt to give voice to a people who have and continue to suffer a daily onslaught of vengeful retribution from the region’s most powerful army. Documenting it is beyond soul-destroying. I am mindful that words are cheap, but it’s the only currency I hold to contribute and highlight the suffering of people being targeted for death and starved for the sins of their leaders, whom many don’t support or were even born to vote for in 2006. They are, on the whole, a people forced to live in fear of their government, while being powerless to resist.

By way of a more detailed background to this updated assessment, you might want to consider taking a look at the piece below, which was part two of a three-part series in May, exploring the broader issue of the longstanding apartheid system that has been in operation in the occupied territories for decades. The world is fed so many propaganda talking points that Gaza has turned down statehood and other falsehoods with no context as to the price of the crumbs offered from the Israeli table. I’ll wait for the incoming on that statement.

Gaza has long been a killing field in which far too many Palestinians have been murdered for sport. From the beginning of the conflict, Israel has made a deliberate decision to block international journalists from entering Gaza. Press are only allowed in under tightly controlled rules, and even then, footage must be reviewed by censors. In the absence of international press, journalists who live in Gaza, along with a new breed of citizen journalists, have become the world's eyes and ears.

Under the Geneva conventions, media workers are not legitimate military targets. As of June 2025, 178 journalists have been killed in Gaza. 176 Palestinians and 2 Israelis. To put this into some context, in the Afghanistan War between 2001 and 2021, 81 journalists were killed in 20 years. Please take a moment to read this Guardian Article from January this year, which tells the stories of just a few of those brave men and women lost, because without their bravery, the IDF would be able to do its worst absent scrutiny.

There seems little doubt that the IDF have specifically targeted journalists, doctors, aid workers and first responders, to name but a few. What the Israeli propaganda machine has managed to do is portray anyone disagreeing with their actions or even those attempting to help the Palestinians as Hamas collaborators, supporters, or anti-Semites. It has been a very successful campaign by the Israeli government that has led to their ‘most moral army in the world’ being encouraged to kill with impunity, treating EVERY Gazan, man, woman or child as a legitimate target. We have seen numerous examples of hospitals, schools, mosques, and aid convoys being targeted with the same excuse that they were sheltering Hamas. It’s like swiping a get-out-of-jail-free card after every atrocity committed in a so-called ‘act of self-defence’.

When we have reached a point in which an army can kill civilians, aid workers, doctors and healthcare workers, knowing that there is no international press to challenge their subsequent lies, as they trot out the Hamas card, how can anyone believe a word they say? Time and time again, we see Israeli so-called spokespeople deny their actions only to have to admit later they ‘made a mistake’ and send some low-level officer home as some sort of token gesture that they care. They could not give a damn.

Seven aid workers from the US-based World Central Kitchen were targeted and killed despite providing full notification to the IDF of their aid delivery route, and driving vehicles with big WCK logos on their roofs. It made absolutely no difference. IDF went on to deny killing 15 first responders who went to find colleagues whom the army had already attacked. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society medics went in search of their missing colleagues. I highly recommend reading Lorenzo Tondo's account of events as reported in The Guardian on June 4, 2025. The IDF killed them and buried them and their vehicles. When they were later forced to admit they had killed them, they claimed the vehicles had approached with no lights on, ‘acting suspiciously and posing a threat’. IT WAS A LIE. Footage from the mobile phone taken from the body of one of the buried first responders showed the vehicles with flashing emergency lights. The truly heartbreaking revelation was that the footage provided an audio recording of their execution. This act alone is unquestionably a war crime.

This is not the most moral Army in the world; this is an army told that everything that moves is a legitimate target. Many of these soldiers are young conscripts with no real battlefield experience. This is no hyperbole; this is a fact verified by Israeli soldiers who have spoken out. It’s time for the world to wake up and understand that this is a military operation to obliterate the homes, schools, mosques and hospitals of the entire population to make the land on which they live an uninhabitable wasteland. It is, in my view, a deliberate act of what will eventually be officially designated an act of genocide. The only reason it has not been defined that right now is because that would make the US and Israel’s allies officially complicit in an act of genocide, and that is ‘unpalatable’.

If anyone in their right mind feels that if Hamas were just to release the hostages, it would be all over, then either you are complicit, or you are lying to yourself. The Israeli Army is the best-equipped, best-trained army in the region. It was clear at the outset that if the IDF wanted to destroy Hamas, it would be a fool’s errand. I said it, as did LOTS of military strategists. Conventional armies have never successfully subjugated an insurgent army. The Americans got their ass kicked in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq; they know how this goes, and US military leaders warned Netanyahu of this under Joe Biden.

Insurgent armies are fighting in their own backyard on terrain they are intimately familiar with. In the case of Gaza, just as in Vietnam, they have built miles of tunnels that crisscross the battlespace. They are hardened and well-trained fighters who understand precisely how insurgency works. They don’t stand and fight; they come from nowhere, hit the target and disappear; ‘shoot and scoot’ is the aim of the game. The simple fact is, you can’t defeat an ideology, and that is what the IDF is being instructed to do at a heavy cost to life on both sides.

At the start of the conflict, it’s estimated that Hamas had 20-30,000 fighters. The IDF makes up numbers every day for propaganda purposes back home, claiming they are killing large numbers of Hamas operatives. Hamas claim they have lost between 6000 and 7000 fighters; the Israelis estimate the number to be in the region of 20,000. The numbers are irrelevant because it’s estimated that there are around 312,000 men of military age available in Gaza. Every time the IDF kill a child, a mother or a grandmother, they simply drive otherwise non-radicalised men to the Hamas cause. It is the age-old vicious circle, and it is why the IDF simply cannot win this war.

To date, Israel has lost almost 1000 military personnel, so if the kill rate is 20:1, that does not present a problem to Hamas; it’s costing them even on Israel’s numbers, around 6,5000 fighters every year. They don’t care about the tens of thousands of civilian casualties; they just serve as an outrage bonus to influence global leaders to fracture support for Israel. Every civilian the IDF kills is a recruitment opportunity, and more pressure on the Israeli government for a ceasefire. The more children killed, the more pressure. This is the geopolitical impact of insurgent warfare.

It is also why the only way to secure the release of hostages is through negotiation, and that is how the majority who returned home gained their freedom. Military rescues are rarely without human cost, often fail, so the fantasy that Hamas can be bombed into releasing them is frankly ludicrous. Every time the Israeli air force kills hundreds of civilians, more people turn out in cities around the world to protest, and more pressure is applied to the Israeli government for a ceasefire.

The truly terrifying thing is that this has become the price Israel is prepared to pay to be rid of the Palestinians; the country is sadly drowning under the influence of far-right nationalists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who are keeping Netanyahu in power. Be in no doubt, given the opportunity, these individuals would have no problem turning the gas tap on to eliminate 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, and that, in my humble opinion, makes them no better than the Nazis, who did the same to the Jews in the holocaust. The reality is, Gaza is now Auschwitz without the gas chambers. The vermin have nowhere to hide and are now being starved to death, while the world looks on.

No opportunity to exert control is missed as starvation and suffering are commoditised. The Israeli propaganda machine deliberately did a hatchet job on UNRWA in January 2024 in an attempt to undermine the credibility of the organisation and convince donors to suspend funding. Israel offered little transparency in their accusations that 19 UNRWA staff were alleged to have been involved in the October 7th attacks. An inquiry found that there was sufficient evidence to suggest 9 of the accused may have taken part. UNRWA at the time had a staff of 30,000, so those who MAY have participated represented 0.03% of the workforce, but Israel knew that didn’t matter and countries around the world suspended funding. It is also worth noting that IDF soldiers committing war crimes who get found out are simply sent home, with no action taken.

This reputational destruction of UNRWA was the first step in Israel taking control of food distribution. To set the record straight, UNRWA has long been the largest distributor of aid in Gaza, and its expertise in the field is unparalleled. It was trusted by donors around the world to get the job done, and that’s precisely what it did. Israel knew this and had long directly targeted its warehouses and schools, killing its staff and Palestinians sheltering in its schools. However, these accusations were the seeds of the starvation we are now witnessing in Gaza.

Let us not forget that Netanyahu claims that his primary objective is the rescue of the hostages. Were that the case, does he know something we don’t? Do his missiles and bombs have some secret don’t hit hostages guidance systems fitted? As for starvation, if food is in short supply, who would you feed first, your fighters or your enemy? We need to stop believing that Netanyahu cares about the hostages; he hasn’t for some time, if ever. They are merely acceptable collateral damage in his political dance.

Enter stage left: The Gaza Health Foundation, a collaboration between the Israeli government, the US, and the private sector, to effectively provide humanitarian aid for profit. Let that sink in for a moment. Let me be clear, because this is important. GHF, as I will refer to it moving forward, has NO HUMANITARIAN AID BACKGROUND

Their online literature, per an investigative report by the BBC, listed:

Nate Mook, a former boss of the charity World Central Kitchen; David Beasley, a former World Food Program chief (listed as "to be finalised"); and Jake Wood, a US Marine Corps veteran and disaster-response expert.

The report continued:

‘… phoning around those who knew some of the background, it became clear that neither Mr Mook nor Mr Beasley was in fact part of the foundation.

The document appeared to be a wish list to try to build support and possibly private donations for the fund.’

Jake Wood did indeed become the executive director, but within a fortnight he resigned saying the project breached the humanitarian principles of "humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence", which he said he would not abandon.

This has got Trump’s fingerprints all over it. This is a poor reinvention of the wheel that is killing children and starving people; it really is as simple as that.

Additional reporting from the BBC notes :

The UN and other agencies will not cooperate with the GHF system, which they say is inhumane and militarised. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been shot dead looking for food since the GHF operation, according to the UN.

I would urge you to read the investigative report. GHF keep putting up talking heads who repeatedly accuse the UN of failing to deliver aid using a system they deliberately dismantled. GHF has no intention of sharing its aid distribution monopoly, which profits from the misery of millions.

GHF will go down in history as a template for food dangled on the end of a bullet, where soldiers shoot the starving for sport. All disguised as humanitarian relief, I am at a loss for words. I want to SCREAM! Israel has now kettled most of Gaza's 2 million people into a tiny area on the southern coast, amounting to around 17% of Gaza's land mass. Take a moment to listen to former US Special Forces soldier Anthony Aguilar on what he witnessed at GHF aid points.

Amidst the lies, the chaos, and the deflection, Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer stared into the TV camera with a straight face to claim. “There is no famine in Gaza- there is a famine of the truth”. Well, he’s not wrong there; there is a total famine of Israeli truth that is frankly sickening as we watch children die before our very eyes.

In the final chapter of this series, we take a close look at the protagonists in what, in my view, is an Israeli government out of control.