Meanwhile, in Gaza, children are starving to death.
No, that’s not quite accurate. Children are being starved to death.
An obvious outcome of the deliberate, methodical policies of the government of Israel as carried out by the Israeli Defence Force, in retaliation for the atrocity visited upon Israel by the terrorists of Hamas on October 7, 2023.
As the world’s attention is captured by the attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the words of a rapper nobody above the age of 30 has ever heard of, hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza face the prospect of famine this summer.
And it is all entirely avoidable.
A wholly unfit operation called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, established three months ago and operated from Delaware, is the sole distributor of aid to the civilian population, a joint US-Israeli operation. By its own admission, it is inadequate to the enormity of the task.
Since their operation began, after a two-month-long total blockade on aid by the Israeli government, more than 400 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli Defence Force while attempting to fetch aid from one of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s food hubs.
The United Nations has appealed to the Israeli Defence Force to “stop shooting people trying to get food.”
Humanitarian aid trucks from agencies of global standing including Save the Children, Unicef, Oxfam, the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières, loaded with medical supplies and the type of nutrition, such as peanut butter paste, specific to alleviating and reversing the malnutrition of infants, wait at the border of Gaza, barred from entry by the government of Israel.
According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, 470,000 people in northern Gaza have reached Phase 5 – catastrophic food insecurity. Not threatened by famine. Not at risk of it. In it.
Meanwhile, in the UK, home secretary Yvette Cooper proscribes a group of activists called Palestine Action under section 3 of the Terrorism Act, for spray painting an RAF plane at Brize Norton. An act described by Cooper as a “disgraceful attack.”
Cooper’s order criminalising membership of the organisation also outlaws the invitation of support for them. Wearing a t-shirt with their logo on it is now potentially punishable by up to six months in jail.
Last weekend, prime minister Keir Starmer made time to condemn the “appalling hate speech” of rapper Bobby Vylan, who had chanted “Death to the IDF” from his Glastonbury Festival set, broadcast by the BBC.
On Monday morning, the front-page splash of the Daily Express read: “Why did BBC not pull plug on vile chants?” The front page of the Daily Mail read: “BBC chiefs ‘should face charges’ over Glastonbury.” The front page of the Daily Telegraph demanded that the rapper should be jailed for several years. The Sun splashed on: “Keir Glasto Fury… No Excuse For BBC Hate”.
Neither the Sun, nor the Express, nor the Mail, nor the Telegraph have so far this year seen fit to splash on the prospect of a mass famine on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Nor, for completeness, has the Guardian, the Mirror, the Times or any other mainstream national newspaper in the UK.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, children and their families survive in makeshift tents, in increasingly sweltering summer conditions, amid the devastation of war, desperate for adequate food and clean drinking water.
This is how Save the Children’s Shaima Al-Obaidi, who recently returned to the UK from Gaza, described to me the situation on the ground:
“Mothers are choosing which of their children to feed. Many have been displaced 20 times or more. They live in a constant state of fear with the bare minimum for human survival. Everyone is in survival mode – they are always on the move and have nothing. Young children have seen things no child should ever see. Being a child in Gaza means having to pick up the remains of your loved ones. The psychological damage is obvious.
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“The children forage for scraps in the rubbish. What little food there is in what’s left of the markets is unaffordable. Malnutrition is widespread. Some children have been fed animal feed to survive. There is a total absence of safety. At night, starving dogs roam the camps. Corpses and body parts get eaten by the dogs. Children are often attacked by the dogs. The summer heat is increasing now. It’s getting worse by the day.”
Al-Obaidi has worked for Save the Children in Somalia, Afghanistan and South Sudan. She tells me nothing she has seen comes close to the situation in Gaza today.
Meanwhile, in the UK seven weeks ago, on May 19, Keir Starmer issued a joint statement alongside the leaders of France and Canada, decrying Israel’s announcement the day before that it would allow minimal aid into Gaza as “wholly inadequate.” The statement said: “The level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable.”
On June 4, in parliament, Keir Starmer described the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza as “appalling, counter-productive and intolerable.” He said he was considering further action but added: “we need the hostages, who have been held for a very long time, to be released and we desperately need more aid, at speed and at volume, into Gaza.”
Six days later, on June 10, the UK sanctioned two of the far right Israeli ministers upon whom Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fragile coalition depends. One of the men, Netanyahu’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, had said “not even a grain of wheat” should be allowed into Gaza.
UK foreign secretary David Lammy called their comments “monstrous”. Neither Smotrich nor security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir are now allowed to travel to the United Kingdom.
Keir Starmer has resisted calls for a complete ban on arms sales to Israel.
Neither Keir Starmer nor David Lammy have added to their public statements on the unfolding and worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza since June 10.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, child victims of bombings face the impossibility of adequate medical care. Many of the roads in Gaza, including the main arterial north-south Salaheddin Road, have been closed by the Israeli Defence Force, preventing movement.
According to aid agency staff I have spoken to, the barely functioning main hospitals, with necessary facilities including blood banks, CAT scanners and dialysis machines, are now inaccessible to tens of thousands.
Smaller field hospitals cannot treat the consequences of either child malnutrition – organ failure, stomach ulcers, fragile bones – or the war injuries suffered by children, including loss of limbs, shrapnel wounds and internal injuries requiring scanning diagnostics.
Nor are there any of the things children should expect. School, playgrounds, being cared for, playing. These have been replaced with new childhood routines; scavenging, bereavement, injury and nightmares.
There is no “yes, but” when it comes to the deliberate starving of children. It is a crime without mitigation or justification.
There is no legal justification. Article 55 of the Geneva Convention states clearly it is the occupying power’s obligation to ensure food and medical supplies for the civilian population. Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court outlaws “Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival.” When you control every road, dictate the movement of population, and deny access to an area by aid agencies, your claim not to be an occupying force is untenable.
There is no logistical justification. Aid waits at the border. The claim that Hamas will snatch it away for its fighters does not bear scrutiny. What use does an adult have for peanut butter paste, for children’s wheelchairs, for prosthetic limbs? For nappies? Even if, as Israel claims, Hamas tunnels are replete with food for their fighters, it remains an explicit war crime under the Geneva Convention for an occupying power to deny its own obligations to civilians. And for what it’s worth, it’s also an explicit obligation for third party nations to prevent breaches of the Convention.
There is no strategic justification. The depths of suffering inflicted on this generation of children will haunt us all for a generation or more. As a famous Spanish civil war poster phrased it, beneath a photograph of a baby killed by the fascists in the siege of Madrid: If you tolerate this, your children will be next.
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How does the government of Israel imagine these children will grow up?
In 2020, David Miliband, as CEO of the International Rescue Committee, described our time as an age of impunity: “After the second world war, pioneering leaders recognised that where there is no floor under the protection of the most vulnerable, there is no limit to the abuses of the most powerful… But the cheques written out in 1945 to the most vulnerable people in the world – cheques marked ‘international humanitarian law,’ cheques marked ‘civilian protection’ – are bouncing.”
Meanwhile, in Gaza, no checks exist against the Israeli government’s behaviour. Gaza is the 21st century’s most acute expression yet of this age of impunity.
The rule of international law, as a progressive concept to live by, is being mocked, in full view of the world. Because, ultimately, this is what distinguishes this crime. What makes it unique in our time. Not only its stupid, avoidable cruelty, but its visibility. All this is happening today, 250 miles from the beaches of Cyprus.
An entire population – two million people, half of them children – teeters on the precipice of famine.
As politicians and media in the UK articulate their outrage at a rapper at Glastonbury, a humanitarian disaster so vast, so brutally predictable, and so easily preventable is coming to pass without comment.
