The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation, has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.
By Chris Hedges
Let Them Eat Dirt – by Mr. Fish
There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.
Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza.
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UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.”
UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective.
The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000 employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors, including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA relief trucks.
More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the rubble.
More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza, according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.
“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”
The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March.
Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.
I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as in Gaza, did little to intervene.
The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.
Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, they become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.
It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.
I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families.
In the abandoned town of Mayen Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattered strips of clothing. The palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane arrived. No one buried the dead.
Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count. They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is Israel’s masterplan.
There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.
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Comments
15 responses to “Let Them Eat Dirt”
It is time isn’treal vanishes from the face of the earth.
BE BRAVE.. HAVE COURAGE …; WRITE THE REAL WORD ‘ISRAEL’ .. INSTEAD OF MIS-SPELLING IT; IT’S THE ZIONIST ISRAEL WHO IS EVEN MISTREATING ALL THEM INNOCENT JEWS LIVING INSIDE THE SHAM COUNTRY FORCE MADE IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE ;
Not the first time certain people try to push the native population out of a country.
This time it’s the Palestinians, those from Gaza are pushed to Sinai Peninsula and once that is done, mark my words, the West Bank will be bombed and Palestinians either go to Jordan or die.
If you think that’s the end think again.
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, part of Saudi Arabia and, I bet, the Sue Canal are next on the list.
WHY SO MEEK & SCARED ?? ….CERTAIN PEOPLE ?? HAVE THE COURAGE TO SAY “ISRAEL” ITS THEM ZIONISTS WHO ARE DOING THIS .. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THEY MADE HITLER NAZIS DO IN EUROPE.. STARVE THE INNOCENT JEWS.. ; NOW THEY ARE DOING SAME TO PALESTINIANS.. SUCH CRIMINAL HABITS ARE IN THEIR GENES..
Now is the time for Hezbollah to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza and to destroy any force that tries to prevent delivery.
YOU THINK IT’S FUNNY ?? ……SO YOU ARE A COMEDIAN ….REALLY ??
Cromwell set the program in Ireland with his ‘To Hell or to Connaught’ expulsions of the native populations into the badlands/reservation of beyond the river Shannon while planting British settler-colonists on the fertile plains, a pattern repeated across the British empire from Turtle Island (aka the U$ of AmeriKKKa) through Australia and Africa.
The war will not be over until Geronimo is vindicated.
When this is over, and it will be over one day, the zio savage squatters will be the most hated on earth. They will be shunned and the will deserve it. If there is any US backed zio savage squatter reading this, I pray you feel it to the marrow of your decrepit bones. May you not even have dirt to eat
LONG LIVE PALESTINE
LONG LIVE RESISTANCE
Growing up in this country, I’ve watched the USA bomb other nations because they understood that they could do so without limits. Now they are just giving money and munitions to Israel to do what they would do, themselves, if it suited them. Beware, Americans, the day may come when the so called “leaders” of this nation will just as happily murder their own people if it gives them some advantage or profit.
I think the lack of response here indicates shock. Reading it, my mind freezes. It’s beyond anything my entire life has prepared me for.
My own mind numbing is due to the fact that Israel does not have the right to enforce it’s illegal occupations, and yet, no one seems to understand this. I know Chris understands it, but I guess it’s one more fact that gets buried under the story of tragedy. Not a legal right nor a moral right. That fact demolishes any justification Israeli leaders are using to murder and starve and otherwise decimate the lives of millions of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Why are the Jews getting away with it? Yet, the fundamental reason these poor people are being murdered is because Palestinians are not Jews. If Jews had always regarded Palestinians exactly as they regard their fellow Jews, they would never have committed such atrocity.
This Jewish behavior suggests that the vast majority of Jews regard their Jewishness higher than they regard their humanity. Call it Jewish Supremacy. This is a modern form of “Jewish values.” Other groups of people behave similarly. But there’s no group on the planet that can come close at the present time. This includes the North Koreans. And Israeli Jews are conducting demented policies not even the Nazis contemplated. Only Judaism accomplishes such depravity. A measure of it’s success is to include the enrollment of Western nations into the land theft, ethnic cleansing, Apartheid, crimes against humanity, and the genocide committed. Not even Hitler could do that. Thank you Judaism for damaging our democracy with such devastation.
To me, it looks like Judaism suffers a cultural, Biblical form of PTSD: they must do unto others the horrible things others have done unto them. They need counseling on how to be a member of human society, to know their Jewishness is less than their humanity. Then they won’t murder Palestinians for not being Jews. Importantly, that counseling would probably mean that their maniacle obsession to keep their Tribe going for all eternity be abandoned. After all, it’s mainly their corrupt leaders that demand it becuase the Tribe for them is a tremendous business model granting wealth and power. What else is new?
The mechanism by which this works is the US Jewish Lobby, which consists of the thousands of Jewish leaders who head over 270 US Jewish political groups. A list of these organizations is in the link below. They are funded to levels of hundreds of millions of dollars a year, with endowments in the billions.
https://articlebiz.com/article/1052218096-the-jewish-lobby
As the German people finally became aware of how far they led themselves astray and as they were made to pay restitution, so too is Judaism in store for such awakening. When that happens, will Judaism repent and repair the damage it perpetrated? Tikkun Olum? Zionist Judaism = Nazi Germany = Holocaust 2 = Nakba 1 = Nakba 2.
Israel always gets to “take its gloves off” while anyone doing that against Israel is a “terrorist”! The world will “never forget” October 7 to whenever and the total brutality and savagery Israel has once again displayed! The American people should get rid of EVERY politician who did NOT oppose Israel’s deadly intent and call for an investigation as to what REALLY happened on October 7. There are as many questions about Israel’s actions on O7 as there are in the J6 false flag! The Israeli people should get rid of Nutty Yahoo and his merry band of butchers!
People running this government should be limited to having citizenship in the USA and nowhere else. People with dual citizenships with other nations, as well as our own, should be banned from ALL government positions. Those that want to be citizens of Israel should move there and stay out of our government here.
Help me understand. I thought it was very clear that international law states that any nation imposing an illegal occupation does not have the legal right to violently impose the occupation against the violent resistance of the prisoners, which is deemed legal. In other words, Israel does not have the right to defend itself in this massacre.
Isn’t this what happened in WWII in France, when the French Resistance legally killed German troops in their country? I believe the resistance fighters could be anybody, civilians, armed militia, even children. We humans have the legal right to resist illegal occupation.
What’s going on here? I never hear any spokesmen refer to this. Not long ago, I did a search, and indeed, it’s the general concensus that Israel is illegally occupying Gaza, the WB and the Golan Heights.
I can believe that the only restrictions placed on the violence of the resistance fighters is that they cannot legally kill “noncombatants” belonging to the occupying power. Thus, Hamas committed war crimes on Oct 7. But any state-sponsored military personnel are open game. With Israel, it’s the IDF and the IOP (Occupational Police). I haven’t checked, but I believe the location of the violent resistance can be either inside the occupied territory, or in the country of the occupying power.
I’m very frustrated because it looks to me to be the most heinous and cynical style of reporting by the MSM. Can you clarify?
I asked a similar question on websites, in conjunction with the ICJ case now being heard, and some people are telling me that the ICJ is considering that. I’m sure that’s true, but I don’t read about any of it. Do you?
Why should anyone care about those useless, worthless creatures in this fucking shithole called Gaza? Kill those fucking Arab scum or push it into the desert where it came from!!!!
Be careful what you wish for. Throughout history Jews have been chucked out of every place they lived, and for good reasons. They are thieving and murdering maniacs.
History has a funny way of repeating itself.