[News] Gaza: Genocide by starvation

[Anti-Imperialist News]

english.almayadeen.net
<https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/opinion/gaza--genocide-by-starvation>
Gaza: Genocide by starvation
Jamal Kanj
March 6, 2024
------------------------------

Children, if alive, are still hungry and cold at home, watching through a
broken window aid parcels parachuting from the skies alongside the roar of
an American-made jet delivering 2000-pound bombs over their heads.
[image: 71217008-d148-4dce-b71e-c3670218a42f.jpg]

   -
   Starvation in Gaza not due to a drought or natural disaster, but an
   Israeli-made catastrophe enabled by Biden (Illustrated by Batoul Chamas; Al
   Mayadeen English)

Imagine you are at home, with your wife and children. It’s dinner time
before you put your three children to sleep. The room is cold, the propane
cooking cylinder is empty, and there is no food, no electricity, and no
drinking water.

Your youngest child, Manar, cries, “I’m hungry. We haven’t had food for the
last four days.” She rubs her dry bluish hands together, “Uhf-uh-ih-ih-uhhf
… I’m cold.” The words escape her chattering teeth.

You, let’s say your name is Nader, look at Manar’s feeble body, her pale
skin has lost color. The once bouncy curly black hair had become tangled
and knotted like a cluttered eagle nest, unwashed for more than a month.

Ahmad asks his wife, “Noora, did you search the cabinets and closets for
dry food?”

Noora takes a deep breath, “More than ten times, our kitchen is as empty as
our stomachs.” She looked at the cold floor in despair, her face twisted
into a sorrowful mask.

“Press this against Manar’s stomach,” he said in a low voice and handed
Noora a bag full of sand. “It’ll help her sleep, again.”

It wasn’t the first night they put their children to sleep with a sack of
sand on their stomachs. This has become a common method for the people of
Gaza to suppress hunger. It was after midnight when Manar stopped crying,
and that is when Nader and Noora had a chance to close their eyes, not
knowing how miserable the next day would be.

Unsure of the time, Nader jumps from the floor mattress to a strong
pounding at the door. Loud pandemonium and commotion outside, he looks at
his watch, 3:45 am. His first thought was that the Israeli military was
ordering residents to vacate the building before blowing it up, as they had
done dynamiting blocks of buildings
<https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video;_ylt=Awr.2lWCTOVlN3MMEQBXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3BpdnM-?p=Isareli+soldiers+celebrating+blowing+up+homes&fr2=piv-web&fr=yfp-t-s#id=4&vid=7bb45c604e1a56d8c5ff5e6326d23f79&action=view>
in his neighborhood a week earlier. Noora and the children are awake. Manar
crawls to the corner with her siblings and wraps herself around her mother.

Nader leaps to the door to find his brother, Ali, who is also his neighbor
on the other side panting for air.

“Come Nader … come, let’s go.” He stopped to catch a breath after running
up the stairs. “Flour trucks". His chest ballooned and deflated several
times, until he eventually said, “Trucks arriving at the Nabulsi
roundabout.” Ali moved sideways to make way for neighbors clumping down the
stairs.

The children’s faces lit up. Their eyes like laser light, wide open, were
waiting for Nader’s response.

“There were Israeli tanks at the roundabout. They ordered me to stay home
yesterday and didn’t allow me to bring water,” Nader said.

“The UN is distributing the flour. The Israelis allowed the trucks in.” Ali
looked down the stairs, “Let’s go before it’s too late.” He urged Nader.

Nader turns his head toward his children. Manar’s laser-focused eyes turn
into a vacant stare, open mouth. He clenched his teeth, pulled the winter
coat from the hook, closed the door behind him, and followed his older
brother Ali down to the street.

The above is not a work of imagination, but a reality of life endured by
thousands of individuals in Gaza for more than 150 days. It is exactly what
happened in the Flour Massacre on February 29 to thousands of starving
fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters in north Gaza. "Israel" used aid
trucks to lure, murder, and injure almost 900 hungry civilians
<https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/29/middleeast/gaza-food-truck-deaths-israel-wwk-intl/index.html>.
The blood of the starving, young and old, man and woman, soaked the flour
sacks meant to feed hungry children.

In its efforts to render life in Gaza uninhabitable, "Israel" has not only
targeted essential infrastructures, such as hospitals, universities, water
treatment plants, and roads but has also directed attacks toward civilian
police. This deliberate targeting of police aimed to exacerbate the
suffering and provoke a collapse of law and order. Despite warnings from
the US
<https://www.axios.com/2024/02/24/gaza-humanitarian-aid-israel-hamas-police-biden>
against targeting civilian police who maintained public safety and managed
the orderly distribution of food, "Israel" dismissed such concerns, seeking
to create lawlessness and chaotic conditions to worsen starvation and
justify its actions as in the case of the Flour Massacre.

In covering the story, Western media became willing outlets to market
Israeli disinformation cloaked in euphemisms to obscure the grim reality on
the ground. Outlets like *CNN, *along with other print media, and the *BBC,
*for example, referred to the death of at least 115 and the injury of 760
hungry human beings as “Gaza food aid carnage” or “a chaotic encounter with
Israeli troops,” blaming the death on stampedes and truck drivers. They
then broadcasted, unquestionably, Israeli-manipulated videos showing the
product of the Israeli-designed chaos and claiming the hungry crowd posed a
threat to its soldiers.

This wasn’t different from earlier misinformation propagated by *CNN*'s
Wolf Blitzer when hosting Mark Regev, the Israeli version of the German
Joseph Goebbels, on his show, The Situation Room, on November 15, 2023,
where he started the show by saying, “Happening now, the Israeli military
says it uncovered Hamas weapons and a command center inside Gaza's largest
hospital
<https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/the-situation-room-with-wolf-blitzer/episodes/fd90e144-4cd7-11ee-b7c3-23f2ccdef237>.”
Needless to say, it was all false. Despite Regev’s abject disregard for
basic truth, the Israeli Goebbels was brought again to *CNN *this week to
market the flour truck massacre, spinning lies, unchallenged, and claiming no
Israeli involvement
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/israel-gaza-large-number-gunshot-054329164.html>
in the gunfire and blaming the shooting on "Palestinian armed groups."

Unarguably, *CNN*, much like most of the American and European news
outlets, has become a platform for disinformation with Israeli-embedded
hosts
<https://theintercept.com/2024/03/03/wolf-blitzer-aipac-israel-si-kenan-cnn/>,
such as Blitzer who honed his journalistic prowess as a pro-"Israel"
propagandist <https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/wolf-blitzer> working
for "America Israel Public Affairs Committee," serving as an editor for its
Near East Report in the mid 1970s.

It wasn’t until certain international media outlets showed the “chaotic”
scene amid heavy gunfire around the food truck, along with footage
revealing bullet injuries in the upper bodies of victims, that some US
outlets, such as *The New York Times*, which espouses faux professionalism,
couldn’t continue ignoring the flagrant Israeli lies. The outlets revisited
the Israeli drone video that was made available to the compliant US media
outlets. After careful review, they concluded that the footage had been
altered with “multiple clips spliced together
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/02/29/world/middleeast/gaza-aid-trucks-map.html>.”
The edits conveniently erased the events just before the crowd dispersed in
all directions, evading bullets, scrambling over trucks, seeking cover
behind vehicles and structures, and falling to the ground from direct
gunshot wounds.

It is important to point out that the targeting of aid trucks at the
Nabulsi roundabout is neither the first nor the last of Israeli attempts to
obstruct the delivery of food aid in Gaza. Approximately three weeks prior,
on February 6, "Israel" opened fire on a crowd gathering at the Kuwaiti
roundabout, while naval gunboats targeted UNRWA humanitarian food trucks
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0o3EagOjNg>. More recently, or three days
following the Flour Massacre, on March 3rd, Israel once again opened fire
on a hungry crowd awaiting food trucks at the Kuwaiti roundabout, resulting
in the deaths and injuries of several civilians.

The submissive prostration of Western media, providing unchallenged
platforms to Israeli PR spokespersons, is unprecedented in the so-called
“free world". By agreeing to Israeli directives restricting media access
into Gaza, Western mainstream media has no presence to report from the
theater. Gone AWOL, the media have been transformed into an active
participant in whitewashing Israeli genocide where the Gaza coverage has
been regulated, directly and indirectly, by an Israeli Hasbara manifested
by the managed evidence and narrative of the Flour Massacre. Or to
paraphrase the original Goebbels, Western mainstream media have become a
“keyboard on which Israel plays.”

In fact, Western, particularly American, genuflection to "Israel" extends
beyond the media. Case in point, almost two weeks ago, the White House
National Security Communications Advisor, John Kirby, disparaged his own US
army, praising the Israeli forces for taking actions to protect civilians,
stating that he was "not sure our own (American) military would take
<https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/white-house-spokesperson-john-kirby-slammed-for-saying-that-israel-is-doing-a-better-job-at-protecting-civilians-than-our-own-military/ar-BB1ifviN>"
similar actions.

When asked about the murdering of the hungry civilians in Gaza, Kirby’s
boss, Joe Biden pled ignorance
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2024/feb/29/middle-east-crisis-live-updates-israel-hamas-war-latest-today-gaza-death-toll-hamas-health-ministry?page=with:block-65e0aec88f08b6f9684f4c43>,
stating, “There’s two competing versions of what happened. I don’t have an
answer yet.”

In avoiding answering the question, the US President accorded equal
credence to the Israeli disinformation machine. In keeping up with his
standing, Biden is consistent in his anti-Palestinian bias hyperbolizing
Israeli victimhood, while downplaying Israeli crimes against Palestinians
under the pretext of not having enough information.

This week and after five months of pleading for "Israel" to allow more aid
trucks into Gaza, Biden joined other inept Arab dictators in an
inconsequential gesture dropping 38,000 meals to 2,4 million in Gaza; a
stunt by the incompetent leaders that is aimed more at mollifying
international outrage against "Israel" than a genuine desire to alleviate
the mounting starvation levels in Gaza.

The made-for-TV theatrical airdrop of a mere 38,000 meals
<https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-military-aircraft-airdrop-thousands-144336773.html>
was like a grain of sand on the beach of Gaza. The parachuted meals were
equivalent to providing a minuscule 0.005 of the daily meal for every
citizen of Gaza, or the equivalent of offering 5 loaves of bread per 1000
individuals. This is a farce and rings hollow from an administration that
plans to send "Israel" almost $15 billion, in addition to the weapons and
political cover that empower "Israel" to carry out the very siege the air
drops purportedly intend to mitigate. The starvation in Gaza is not due to
a drought or a natural disaster, but an Israeli-made catastrophe enabled by
Biden, Western governments, and blessed by Arab dictators.

As you read this, remember Nader, who joined his brother Ali to feed his
hungry child, Manar. He would have been most likely one of those killed or
injured in the February 29, Flour Massacre. His children, if alive, are
still hungry and cold at home, watching through a broken window aid parcels
parachuting from the skies alongside the roar of an American-made jet
delivering 2000-pound bombs
<https://www.cnn.com/gaza-israel-big-bombs/index.html> over their heads.

Manar, if she wasn't among the more than 15 children who tragically perished
<https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/least-15-children-dead-malnutrition-dehydration-gaza-hospital-gaza-health-2024-03-03/>
this week from malnutrition and dehydration, will always recall how the
Israeli-made starvation drove her father to death.
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