At least 100 Palestinians were killed on Wednesday by Israeli army bombs, more than 60 of them in Gaza City. In just one day, 37 Palestinians were also shot by military snipers as they desperately tried to reach a food distribution center, including 16 people in the northern city of Rafah, according to the management of Nasser Hospital. In fact such attacks have become common practice for the Zionist army, which regularly targets Gazans desperate to get food to their hungry families.
In addition to such murders, the State of Israel has continued to use starvation and famine as a weapon of war. The Gaza Ministry of Health, for instance, reported that eight people, including three children, died of starvation on August 13. This makes for at least 106 children who have died from hunger-related causes since October 2023, out of a total of 235.
As the director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, explained on X: “This is in addition to more than 40,000 children reportedly killed or injured due to bombing and airstrikes, at least 17,000 unaccompanied and separated children, and one million children deeply traumatized and without access to education.”
The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, Tlaleng Mofokeng, and Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory, stated that the Gaza health system has also been targeted by the Israeli army, amounting to “medicide.” They denounced Israel for deliberately attacking hospitals, doctors, paramedics, and ambulance drivers to ensure that medical care is not available in the Strip. None of this would be possible without the complicity and sponsorship of European and US imperialism. However, this genocide, which millions of people around the world are watching unfold in real time on social media, only contributes ot the delegitimation and isolation of Israel and the countries that continue to support it.
While Netanyahu’s cabinet approved the plan to occupy the Gaza Strip, which, in the words of Israeli Gideon Levy “involves confirming the slaughter of thousands of people, demolishing the living conditions of more than two million people living on the streets and carrying out the final destruction of a crowded and overcrowded strip of land,” internal opposition to the genocide is growing, with sectors of a new generation beginning to reject the Zionist project of the Israeli state. Intellectuals and political analysts are debating whether Israel is headed towards becoming a “pariah state.”
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As international protests against hunger and the destruction of the Gaza Strip continue, the only way to stop the genocide against the Palestinian people is to continue to build a movement and struggle, within and outside the imperialist core, against the state of Israel and its enablers.
Originally published in Spanish on La Izquierda Diario on August 14
Translated and revised by James Dennis Hoff