There is no mass starvation in Gaza, deliberate or otherwise. There’s no genocide. There’s no ethnic cleansing. There is a war.
Civilians suffer during wartime. Somewhere around 40 million noncombatants died during World War II. Around 2 million during the Vietnam War. It’s likely that hundreds of thousands of civilians perished during the Iraq War. None of that is to even speak of the food insecurity, anarchy, and penury triggered by virtually every military conflict in history. Nearly 3 million people have been displaced by the conflicts in Sudan, not that you’d know it from the lack of coverage. There are no “colonizers” to be mad at.
The Palestinians, perhaps the most bellicose and self-destructive people in the modern world, certainly aren’t immune from this reality. If you detest war, one suggests you stop engaging in endless conflict. Hand back the hostages. Surrender.
It is the governing authority of Gaza, a death cult that brought an unwinnable war on its people, which steals humanitarian aid from its own civilians. It hoards it, profits from it, and uses it to extort the population. Is there another example in modern history of an army deliberately undermining the safety of its own population?
From mid-May to the end of July, nearly 90% of aid trucks sent by the United Nations have failed to reach their destination due to looting and “forcefully armed actors.” It’s not the Israelis making this claim. It’s the U.N. Office for Project Services. Of the 2,604 aid trucks the U.N. sent into Gaza from mid-May to early August, only 295 vehicles, or around 12%, made it.
For months, however, the same media that uncritically repeat Hamas’s fictitious casualty numbers for their credulous readers reported that there was no evidence that anyone was intercepting trucks.
The U.N. has failed to feed Palestinian civilians. Israelis are trying to do it. Here, too, I’m unsure if there are any historical examples of an army putting itself into harm’s way in the middle of a war to ensure that supplies reach those who want them dead. They do this while fighting against an enemy that is embedded with civilians, holds civilian hostages, and has been incentivized by allegedly normal Western governments in Canada, France, and Britain to avoid entering a ceasefire.
The claim that Israel has engaged in systemic attacks aimed at civilians, or “genocide,” is severely undermined by the fact that it has helped send 100 million meals to Palestinians over the past few months, including over 1 million meals on a single day this week. Israel creates humanitarian corridors and often clears out population centers before operations against Hamas.
Israel does all of this in Gaza, which might be the only place in the world where the martyrdom of civilians is the preferred policy outcome of the governing authority. The late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar called his people “necessary sacrifices” in the manipulation of Westerners. It works.
Refugees, for example, are typically allowed to flee war zones. Hamas regularly stops them from escaping battles. As does the world. You will recall that the Western world accepted millions of people from Syrian conflicts. Indeed, we were told that it was our moral duty as a civilized society to welcome Muslim refugees into Europe and the United States. This is not the case for Gazans, who are not only largely unwelcome in the West, but in the Palestinian-majority state of Jordan and bordering Egypt, and anywhere in the Muslim world.
From the day Arabs rejected a 23rd state and launched a war against Jews in 1948, millions of their people have been relegated to permanent “refugee” camps and indoctrinated in hate and mired in conflict. At the same time, Israel welcomed and assimilated hundreds of thousands of Jews who’d been expelled from the Islamic world.
The Palestinian movement, conceived to bludgeon Israel, first by the Soviets and the Arab world, who not only invented this new subethnicity but funded its terrorist movement, and then by Iran and Western fellow travelers, does not exist for the betterment of its people.
One of the most accurate ways to detect an ignoramus or propagandist in this debate is to see if they function under the ahistorical misapprehension that Israel has a desire to “occupy” or annex Gaza. Israel has been trying to rid itself of that godforsaken strip of land since it took it from Egypt in 1967. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat didn’t want Gaza in the Camp David Accords. Nearly 20 years ago, the Israeli government handed autonomy to the Palestinian Authority. Everyone knows what it did. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just announced that Israel would temporarily occupy Gaza to dismantle remnants of Hamas and then hand the territory to an international body to govern. Good luck, I guess.
None of this is to say that Hamas has been unsuccessful in convincing credulous Westerners otherwise. Israel haters love to point out that polls show Americans, especially younger ones, are turning against the Jewish state. Considering the intense decadeslong propaganda efforts the public is subjected to on social and legacy media, it’s a miracle support remains as high as it is.
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times ran a harrowing front-page photo of a malnourished 18-month-old Gazan named Mohammed Zakaria al Mutawaq under the headline, “Young, Old and Sick Starve to Death in Gaza: ‘There Is Nothing.’” Other irresponsible news organizations such as the BBC and CNN followed.
As it turned out, the picture was another example in the decadeslong tradition of staged Palestinian photos. Al Mutawaq suffers from a genetic disease, and his physical appearance had nothing to do with hunger. This fact would have been obvious if the New York Times hadn’t cropped al Mutawaq’s healthy older brother out of the picture. But the paper knew exactly what it was doing, as even some editors questioned the honesty of running the picture. When caught, the New York Times clarified the mistake in a self-aggrandizing post on the paper’s public relations X account, which has 89,000 followers, rather than the main account on which it sent out the original story, which has 55 million followers.
That same week, Osama al Rakab, a 5-year-old suffering from cystic fibrosis, was widely disseminated in the press and online. Not only did Israel not starve the boy, but it also coordinated his evacuation to a medical facility in Italy. This week, German media outlets Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bild reported that Gaza-based photographers have been staging photos of civilians with the concocted depictions of “chaos and destruction” and starvation for propaganda purposes. One of the pictures was on the cover of Time. The staged picture is used endlessly in the media. This is just from the past two weeks. It is relentless propaganda. There are probably scores of similar staged shots that haven’t been exposed.
Perhaps the only image we have of someone starving in Gaza is of the tortured and emaciated 24-year-old Evyatar David, who is seen digging his own grave in a dank tunnel somewhere in Gaza. Hamas knows that Israel expends unprecedented efforts to bring back its people, even its dead, often handing back scores of terrorists for a single citizen. And that’s one of the reasons the nation is still mired in this war. Don’t look for David’s picture on the front page of the New York Times. You won’t find it. Though New York Times columnist Ezra Klein did recently have on Mahmoud Khalil, the Syrian antisemitic leader of the Columbia University riots and fan of Oct 7, 2023, on his popular podcast this week.
HOW FOOD GETS IN AND OUT OF GAZA — AND WHO GETS IT
Is the Israeli government above criticism? Of course not. Like any society, it makes mistakes. There are ugly, open debates and protests going on within Israel right now regarding its handling of the Gaza situation. Israel isn’t some theocratic sheikdom. We shouldn’t forget that the other side targets civilians as the central tactic of its war, engaging in infanticide, the murder of the elderly, and sexual violence, then gleefully taping it all as the population celebrates. Let’s not even mention years of lobbing missiles at civilian centers. Or the decades of murder that preceded it. Israel is tasked with both beating this nihilistic enemy and protecting its population from harm, as well. It is virtually impossible — one that no other country has ever been asked to perform.
Yet, the propagandists have successfully distorted the central moral truth of this conflict, which should be evident to anyone with a conscience or rudimentary comprehension of history.