Shande

Children waiting to receive food in Gaza, Tuesday, photo by Mahmoud Issa/Reuters via Haaretz.

So you're maybe 13, 14 years old, in a tent somewhere in southern Gaza, watching your parents die of hunger, maybe your grandparents, and you haven't eaten anything yourself for three days, and they all try to stop you from heading out to one of the three or four distribution sites of the US-sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the southwest of the territory, perhaps four or five miles away, from which you might be able to bring back a box of pasta and rice and lentils and some cooking oil, if you're lucky (and have access to cooking gas, and water, which the displaced hardly do). Because that's not a sure thing; there's never enough there for the people who need it, and there are gangsters there with muscle to take more than others get, and the Israeli Defense Forces mobilized nearby who might start shooting live ammunition at any moment, that's a constant at all of the sites—the IDF say they're just firing "warning shots" but dozens are getting killed that way every day. Of course you're going to go anyway.

And the American mercenaries, nobody knows who's paying them, armed as well, with bullets as well as stun grenades and pepper spray:

Two U.S. contractors, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were revealing their employers’ internal operations, said they were coming forward because they were disturbed by what they considered dangerous and irresponsible practices. They said the security staff hired were often unqualified, unvetted, heavily armed and seemed to have an open license to do whatever they wished.

They said their colleagues regularly lobbed stun grenades and pepper spray in the direction of the Palestinians. One contractor said bullets were fired in all directions — in the air, into the ground and at times toward the Palestinians, recalling at least one instance where he thought someone had been hit.

Then there are the drones attacking from overhead, with missiles stuffed with nails and shrapnel, and sometimes live grenades that can be activated remotely, with the push of a button on a controller, as in a video game.

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Nick Maynard, a British surgeon who's been visiting Gaza as a volunteer for 15 years, interviewed by NPR reports on the wounds he's treating at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis:

Maynard: The Israelis are commonly using these fragmentation bombs, which release many, many thousands of very small metal pieces, which then tear through the body. I'm operating predominantly on abdominal injuries and some thoracic injuries. And the shrapnel causes the most appalling internal damage, destroying many of the internal organs. So needing very major surgery to repair them. And we're seeing a particular pattern of injuries whereby particular body parts are being targeted on particular days. So one day we will see mainly abdominal gunshot wounds. Another day we'll see head gunshot wounds. Another day we'll see neck gunshot wounds. So there is a very clear pattern that all, not just me but all of us, have seen in this hospital, whereby particular body parts are targeted on particular days

Pfeiffer: I mean, that's clearly a shocking claim. You don't think that's possibly just a coincidence that you're seeing certain body parts injured on certain days?

Maynard: I think seeing four young teenagers come in, in the space of one hour, with gunshot wounds to their testicles, which we have never seen before, is beyond coincidence. Seeing as one of my ER doctors did, seeing 12 or more patient[s], young teenagers coming in with gunshot wounds to the head and neck, all at the same time, is beyond coincidence. The clustering of symptoms is what makes it so dramatic.

I couldn't get that detail out of my mind, with the nightmare it conjures up of IDF troops sitting around discussing which body parts they should focus on that day, like a way to make the game fun.

Israeli-born Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov (gift link) has concluded that the time to start using the word "genocide" was in May 2024, when IDF ordered a million Gazans sheltering in Rafah to leave the city for an unsheltered beach area while they proceeded to destroy most of Rafah itself, and the pattern of its actions began to match the maximalist statements Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir had begun making about Gazans, shortly after the horror of October 7: that is, while the war was directed against the right-wing Islamist political party, the Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah, Hamas for short, that had organized the massacre, the rhetoric seemed directed against Palestinians or Gazans as a race:

Mr. Netanyahu had urged his citizens to remember “what Amalek did to you,” a quote many interpreted as a reference to the demand in a biblical passage calling for the Israelites to “kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings” of their ancient enemy. Government and military officials said they were fighting “human animals” and, later, called for “total annihilation.” Nissim Vaturi, the deputy speaker of Parliament, said on X that Israel’s task must be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” Israel’s actions could be understood only as the implementation of the expressed intent to make the Gaza Strip uninhabitable for its Palestinian population. I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave through bombings and severe deprivation of food, clean water, sanitation and medical aid to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.

That's the definition, and that is what has been going on, most particularly since February, when Israel suddenly rejected its treaty obligation to move on to phase two of the Biden-negotiated ceasefire and hostage exchange and started demanding some alternative arrangement (which is still supposedly being negotiated in Doha, six months later), and instituted the total blockade on humanitarian assistance that was theoretically supposed to pressure Hamas into something new. At the same time as Trump was submitting his own program to entirely depopulate Gaza and replace it with a golf resort, if I've got this straight. Trump is also very vocally angry at the Israeli judiciary for putting his friend Bibi on trial for his notorious corruption.

Haaretz newspaper, which has been a beacon of truth telling on the Gaza war putting US papers to shame, writes that while the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation claims to have distributed 85 million meals in Gaza over the past two months, it would have taken 353 million meals to maintain the population for that time.

Haaretz's Gideon Levy called it genocide back at the end of June, with specific reference to the massacring of people lined up for food aid, points out today that the rate of starvation is accelerating: if 43 Palestinians died of malnutrition in the past week, mostly children, 15 died yesterday alone, including three children and a six-month old baby:

The pictures hidden from the public by Israel's criminal local media, whose lack of coverage of Gaza will never be forgotten or forgiven, are seen by the rest of the world. These are pictures reminiscent of concentration camp survivors, pictures from the Holocaust. Concealing them is akin to denial of the phenomenon....

They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies. Yes, this too is what has become of us.

It's incredible to me that Jews, the witnesses of the Holocaust, should be responsible for these crimes. I'm glad there are Jews like Bartov and Levy setting a better example.