2024-03-15

Starvation as a Weapon of Blogging

The Flour Massacre on Leap Day was horrible enough on its own. It had been nearly five months of the military operation, with insufficient amounts of food and water getting into Gaza. Especially Northern Gaza which by then had not received any humanitarian aid at all for over a month. There were reports of people eating animal feed and grass. Children were already dying to malnutrition. A slow and horrific way to die - starved while literally thousands of aid trucks are being held up at the fence.

In the backlash to that crime and the mounting death toll of starved children, finally more aid trucks were being let through. Only for the IDF to open fire on these aid seekers too. There have been at least four incidents where aid seekers have been mass murdered by IDF fire since the Flour Massacre. It is almost as if the inability of the international community to punish blatant and obvious war crimes prompts the war criminals to continue doing war crimes.

People trying to get humanitarian aid - food and water to keep their kids from starving to death - what threat do they pose? Even the incredibly immoral and stupid automatic defense of the genocide deniers - the whining of "BUT HAMAS!" is meaningless here. Unless the goal is to starve enough of Gaza that Hamas also runs out of food? This is a clear and obvious war crime - it is not merely collective punishment, but it is such a depraved and monstrous view of the Palestinian people that it should disgust the entire world.

No, obviously this is insane. Hamas is a terrorist organization and they have the guns. The last people in Gaza to starve will be the Hamas terrorist gunmen. Trying to starve Hamas into surrendering means first starving two million people to death.

Perhaps the goal is to discourage starving Gazans from seeking aid? That Israel realizes that they will eventually be forced to allow more aid in - which is very slowly happening now - and that they can maximize the number of dead children by scaring Gazans into not seeking the paltry aid they let through. Even if that's not the intention, it's the result. An easily predictable result. That it continues to happen means that either Israel does intend to frighten starving people away from aid delivery or that they just don't give a shit about children starving to death.

Gaza is facing a man made famine. People have been dying of starvation for weeks now and still the level of aid reaching Gaza is woefully insufficient. What possible explanation could there be for this other than genocide? What possible threat could there be to allowing more food and water in? Not even the most contrived fever dreams of the genocide denialists can justify this.

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