Starvation in Gaza: Israeli lies and the tail that wags the dogs
The engineered starvation in Gaza, supported by the US, has always been a central pillar of Israel’s psychological warfare. FILE PHOTO: AFP
Whenever Israel yields to international pressure and allows aid trucks into Gaza, it devises other methods to ensure that food is never delivered. On July 26, Israel announced airdrops and "humanitarian corridors" for the United Nations convoys. Its forces also murdered 53 people seeking aid in those corridors on the same day. Rather than feeding the starving population, Israel turns the aid distribution points into killing zones. Time and again, Palestinians have been paying with blood for a loaf of bread or a bottle of water.
In less than two months, death by Israeli bullets at the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has reached over 1,054, averaging about 20 killings daily. Since July 26, when Israel announced the new "humanitarian corridors," the death toll has more than doubled—325 last week alone—from the number of Palestinians killed daily at GHF distribution centres. Meanwhile, the tokenistic airdrops by Arab collaborators are nothing short of a disgrace.
The $60 million that Donald Trump brags about giving to GHF is funding the deaths of hungry Palestinians. For the starved, GHF stands for Gaza Humiliation Front—not a lifeline, but an Israeli murder-line. Instead of wasting American taxpayer money on these death traps, Trump should consider restoring US funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the only agency that has offered real hope to Palestinian children for more than 75 years.
Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff's visit to a GHF centre in Gaza, followed by his statement that there is no starvation, was a textbook case of confirmation bias. His tour did not reveal the absence of starvation, but rather his willful blindness to see it. Witkoff sought out information that would reinforce his predetermined narrative to whitewash starvation.
To be honest, no one had seriously expected him to witness starvation at a carefully staged (safe) site, far removed from the people. He declined an invitation to visit a hospital in Gaza to see the starved children and hear directly from the life-saving medical professionals. Instead, he chose a photo op and listened to the mercenaries of death at GHF.
The engineered starvation in Gaza, supported by the US, has always been a central pillar of Israel's psychological warfare; a calculated strategy aimed at expelling the population or driving them into a survivalist frenzy. Israel and the US-funded GHF have become the perfect linchpin of this Israeli-designed contraption. Replacing a well-established UN infrastructure that operated 400 distribution centres, GHF offered only four aid points. These limited sites made it easier for Israel to surveil, shoot at the starving, and leave the survivors to fight over the meagre crumbs that remained.
GHF's role was exposed by Anthony Aguilar, a retired US Special Forces officer and recipient of the Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Choking back tears, Lt Col Aguilar recounted the story of a child who "walked 12 kilometres to reach" one of GHF's food distribution sites. "He got nothing but scraps, thanked us for it…" and then he was shot dead by the Israeli army.
Still, the "free" Western media has too often acted as Israel's public relations arm. It downplays Israel's horrific crimes and markets Israeli falsehoods, such as the baseless claim that Hamas steals food aid. This narrative persisted even after USAID concluded that Israel failed to provide any evidence supporting that food aid was being diverted. Other than for Israeli military hindrance, under UN oversight, there have been no issues delivering food to all of Gaza. Israel's objective is simple: deflect responsibility by blaming the starving for their own starvation.
Early last June, I wrote on the Israeli scheme to "lie, deny, and distort the truth." In the article, I detailed a long list of Israeli lies and how the US media disseminated the disinformation with little to no effort to verify or challenge. You see, Israel does not just enjoy political impunity from the US administration; it also has the freedom to lie with complete immunity from the US media.
The daunting question remains: how many lies must Israel tell before the media call them out, just as they do with the US President Donald J Trump, or other leaders and nations?
A recent example of how the Israeli-managed "free" media misrepresents facts is the failed ceasefire talks. Listening to the Western media, one might conclude that the Palestinian negotiators rejected a "generous" offer for a ceasefire. In reality, the talks collapsed because Netanyahu sought only a pause to secure the release of captive Israeli soldiers, refusing to agree to end the war or the starvation blockade.
No rational party would accept, let alone consider, such a half-measure. When Palestinians rejected a proposal short of a lasting ceasefire, Netanyahu cried foul. President Trump and Witkoff rushed to absolve Netanyahu's intransigence to accept a permanent ceasefire, and then blamed the Palestinians.
The reluctance, and perhaps intimidation, of Arab mediators like Qatar and Egypt to publicly challenge Washington's pro-Israel stance has only deepened the media distortions. The mediators' silence allowed Netanyahu's false narratives to dominate international discourse.
Nonetheless, the tide could be turning. France and the UK's recent promise to recognise the state of Palestine, although long overdue, signals the growing frustration with Netanyahu's lies and deceit. The European officials made it clear, they were no longer willing to tolerate the Israeli farce. The symbolic act, however, would never atone for Britain's original sin—the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised European settlers a homeland in Palestine while failing to enshrine the rights of the indigenous Palestinians on their land. Nor does it exonerate France, which conspired with Britain in the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement to carve up the eastern part of the Arab world.
Still, recognition matters. Fourteen other countries are poised to follow France's lead next month. The growing calls demanding Netanyahu agrees to a ceasefire are also telling. These governments have finally realised what their subjects had long known, that the absence of peace is not due to Palestinian rejectionism, but to Netanyahu's deception and insatiable thirst for the never-ending wars.
Despite the dominance of Israeli-embedded journalists and pundits in Western media, the world is finally waking up to the true face of Israel. Alternative media has, to a great extent, succeeded in piercing through the wall of Israeli lies, offering an unfiltered view into the lived horrors of starvation and genocide. No amount of Israeli propaganda can obscure the images of skeletal ribs jutting from the bodies of dying children. The sight of starving infants suckling on their bony fists indicts the liars.
To that end, a recent Gallup poll shows a clear shift in the US, where American support for the Israeli military action in Gaza has dropped to 32 percent, and disapproval has soared to 60 percent. For a while, Israel was enabled to "fool all the people some of the time," and it continues to "fool some of the people all the time," but ultimately, and as the latest poll shows, it "cannot fool all the people all the time."
Yet, babies are starving, the genocide continues, and there is no ceasefire in sight. This is only possible because Netanyahu and AIPAC continue to wag the dogs of Washington.
Jamal Kanj is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues.
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