“The starvation of Gaza is not a glitch in the system”

Zainab Abu Halib was only six-months old when she died in her mother’s arms on July 26, starved to death by Israel. At the time,  she weighed less than she did at birth. Another child murdered, born and killed in a world that is completely defined by a ruthless genocidal war. In the brutal clarity of her grief, Zainab’s mother Esraa spoke:

With my daughter’s death, many will follow. Their names are on a list that no one looks at. They are just names and numbers. We are just numbers. Our children, whom we carried for nine months and then gave birth to, have become just numbers.

Another life taken, another entire world destroyed.

The visible, ravaged humanity, and the deepening impact of the enforced starvation of Palestinians and the looming plans for the Zionist military’s full occupation in Gaza has provoked some criticism of Israel from some very unlikely corners. Individuals like Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of the staunchly pro-Israel J Street this week admitted that now he is “convinced that Israel is committing genocide.” A number of prominent Israeli figures, including Avraham Burg, a former speaker of the Knesset and the head of an organization tasked with encouraging settlements, signed a letter calling for “crippling sanctions on Israel” because of Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of genocide. Others, from ex-attorney generals to prominent authors, have made similar public comments.

Here in the U.S., in the gaseous bowels of the Republican party, various GOP congresspeople—who hold nothing but contempt for Palestinians—have voiced support for more food aid.  Trump himself, shockingly, has called to “get the children fed” to alleviate the “real starvation.” Marjorie Taylor Greene—one of the most hardline of the parties’ far right, “America First,” MAGA wing—has come out to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, and remarkably proposed a recent, failed, amendment to cut military aid to Israel’s missile “defense” system. None of these should be confused as allies, but the changes in their language reflect the intensity of the situation.

The changing imperial dynamics being hastened by Trump, along with the public outcry about the severely worsening conditions, has also led countries like France, the United Kingdom, and Canada to state that they would move to recognize a Palestinian state—in a month’s time. In lieu of swift action to achieve a ceasefire or attempts to resolve the humanitarian situation, these sage imperialist powers, many of whose colonial ambitions carved up the region of Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) to begin with, are making a symbolic move to recognize a two-state solution. China and the other BRIC countries have responded in similarly contradictory fashion, with some public condemenation while seeking to maintain their business and military ties to Israel. Of course, the path of a two-state solution has long been implausible, routinely rejected by a majority of Palestinians, and has merely been kept on life-support by Western liberals and soft Zionists who want to preserve an exclusionary Zionist ethnostate while giving lip service to Palestinian rights.

The contradictions and fractures among supporters of Israel, in Israeli society, and in imperialist political parties have driven some to pretend they have a semblance of a conscience when they  otherwise care nothing for the liberation of Palestine. Nonetheless, the starvation of Gaza is a dire situation demanding an expeditious resolution. Immediate aid is needed.

At the same time, an end to Israel’s barbaric starving of Palestinians is not enough to stop the genocide in Gaza. Starvation is but one component of the plan of genocide and ethnic cleansing that the Zionist entity has been carrying out on Palestinians since before 1948. Indeed, since Israel’s 2006 blockade of Gaza, the settler-colonial state has grotesquely been calibrating and facilitating hunger within the concentration camp. The calculation of calories, connected to shipments allowed in, had as its goal, as described by an advisor to then-prime minister Ehud Olmert: “ to put the Palestinians on a diet.” For years before October 7, 2023 many international humanitarian groups routinely warned of the impending “uninhabitable”conditions in Gaza. By December 2023, per the UN, 80 percent of those people in the world experiencing catastrophic hunger lived in Gaza. That “diet” has now become starvation.

Control of food is also applied by Israel to the West Bank, from the dividing up of Palestinian agricultural areas, the destruction of orchards, the attempts to restrict the olive harvest, and the control of over 85 percent of the West Bank’s water. Israel also controls the tax revenue collected in the West Bank and often refuses to turn it over to the Palestinian Authority, thus purposefully starving the West Bank of access to resources. At least $1.25 billion has been withheld from the territory by Israel since October of 2023. The current starving of Gaza is a macabre continuation and escalation of these politics of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing across historic Palestine.

The current focus of concern with the active starving of children in Gaza is depressingly welcome, just as it is criminally belated and too often skips over the role of the West and the U.S. in creating the very situation over which many are now acting surprised. Many of the same individuals who called those of us who marched and rallied to end the genocide in Gaza “antisemitic”are now admitting the genocide. To be clear, while we should wholly welcome those of our neighbors and co-workers who may, just now, be coming around to call Israel’s actions a genocide, our attitude toward the Israeli apologists in power should be nothing but scorn and contempt.

The current forced famine is a joint project of Israel and the U.S. ruling classes. It was Biden, rallying the majority of the major Western countries behind him who cut funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in retaliation for the International Court of Justice finding that Israel was committing genocide. UNRWA was the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza with over 2 million people depending on it for their sheer survival. The U.S., and much of the West, endorsed the position of forced famine. Biden then rejected and buried internal reports that Israel was restricting aid.  The UN and nearly every international aid organization issued warnings about the campaign of deliberate mass starvation.  And yet the aid that the U.S. has happily delivered is billions upon billions ($18 billion just from October 2023-October 2024) of weapons to Israel used to murder Palestinians and raze homes, hospitals, and schools.

The U.S.-backed dismantling of UNRWA, its arming and supporting of the Israeli assault on Gaza, and the maintaining of the border by the Egyptian client state have led to the dire condition we see now. The joint US-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) brings in a pitiful fraction of food aid needed. Run by a pro-Trump, Christian Zionist evangelical, the measly aid is administered under such fierce control that U.S. mercenaries and Israeli troops round up hungry Palestinians forced into the caged corrals to accept food and routinely open fire, killing roughly 1,400 Palestinians at aid centers since May of 2025. The number of roughly 400 aid distribution locations operated by UNRWA has dropped to an astonishing three or four. One ex-GHF contractor likened the aid operation to the sci-fi novel “Hunger Games.” These handful of sites located in the south of Gaza act as deadly bait to draw hungry and desperate Palestinians into what Gaza’s Government Media Office calls “weaponized humanitarian corridors.” This is part of the Israeli occupation plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza and the West Bank.

As this article is being written, Netanyahu is moving to escalate the situation further with the initiation of plans for the military occupation of all of Gaza. This corresponds with the desire of the fascist settler movement to deepen its campaign to expel Palestinians, steal Gazan land, and construct Jewish settlements. In the West Bank this means using the terroristic violence of armed settlers in conjunction with the Israeli military, working towards further annexation at a fever pitch. Israel has also made raids, led by the far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, on the Al Aqsa Mosque, the third holiest site in Islam.

Alleviating the starvation is essential; at the same time, it cannot be separated from the genocidal project that Israel is carrying out with the support, backing, and contribution of the United States. Disconnecting those two elements lets those in marble halls of power who are complicit off the hook.

It is the staunch U.S. bi-partisan support for Israel that has made this genocide possible. Democratic party politicians, who supported Biden and his policies, or rallied support for them behind lies—like the claim that Harris was “working tirelessly for ceasefire”—are complicit. Of the 44 Democrat senators who implored Trump to send more humanitarian aid, nearly half of them couldn’t even vote for a recent resolution put forward by Bernie Sanders to restrict the sale of specifically “offensive weapons” to Israel. In the House, even beloved liberals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in an act of characteristic cowardice, refused to vote on the amendment to divest Israel of money used on its Iron Dome missile system. We should also  remember the police repression carried out by Democratic party mayors to suppress the encampments on university campus calling for ceasefire of the genocide.

Beware those who may cry crocodile tears about the death of Gaza’s children by enforced hunger while they plot and fund their murder with bombs and guns, drones and planes. While immediate relief is desperately needed, we should be wary and hold as enemies those in power whose concern is merely cover for their continued support of genocide.  As writer Nisha Atalie wrote of resisting the starving a year ago: “We must learn to nourish ourselves on built solidarity rather than on the promises of liars.” In contrast with the actions of the world’s states, we have witnessed the courageous efforts of regular people, including the Freedom Flotilla activists attempting to sail aid to Gaza despite the forcible blockade by Israel’s army. We see the massive attempt of the Sumud Convoy of activists, from all across the Maghreb, to drive to the Rafah crossing stymied by Egyptian and Libyan police. We celebrate the brave sabotaging of weapons manufacture by the activists of Palestine Action. We praise the refusal of dock workers in France, Greece, Italy, and elsewhere to load or unload ships carrying Israeli weapons. We hold up the trend of Egyptian activists in the Netherlands and elsewhere padlocking embassy doors and Egyptian police stations to protest Egypt’s role in locking in the people of Gaza.

Continuing to build a movement for Palestine in the U.S. is of the utmost importance. During the rebellion against ICE in Los Angeles, we saw solidarity in the form of the flags of Mexico and Palestine being waved amidst the smoke and rage. Deepening this connection between the Palestine movement and the broader resistance against Trump and the current U.S. state is not only more possible now it greatly strengthens both. It can serve to even further deepen popular support for the Palestinian struggle while simultaneously helping to bring more of the political clarity about the bipartisan nature of the U.S. imperialist project, into the broader resistance.

The repression of the Palestine movement is one of the key lines of attacks of political reaction and has been used to undermine all of our democratic rights. Bolstering Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, initiatives like the Apartheid Free Communities campaigns should be required in our organizing within the labor movement, communities, schools and universities; it is key to fostering political independence and sustaining and building the movement. When the protests and actions in the immediate term seem inadequate in the face of astonishing brutality and misery, they are critical to nourishing and strengthening our movements. These protests facilitate the longer term orientation that we need while retaining the fierce urgency of now given the dire and immediate need to alleviate the suffering of Palestinians.

It is astonishing that the world continues to turn while Gaza suffers. Genocide and starvation, decimation and murder. And yet while most of the world’s people sympathize or solidarize with Palestine, the world’s states have abandoned them or joined in their slaughter. The leaders don’t listen, our states aren’t our own, and our regimes need to fall. As pediatrician Dr. Omar Abdel-Mannan wrote of his work in Gaza: “The starvation of Gaza is not a glitch in the system; it is the system—a system that deems some lives worth mourning and others worth erasing, a system that needs to be torn down.” The necessity of liberation for Palestine has never been more urgent.

Free Palestine!

Long live the Intifada!

Glory to the martyrs!

An injury to one is an injury to all.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Pedro Fanega; modified by Tempest.