Relatives of these Palestinians were killed when heading to an aid distribution hub, June 18, 2025. Photo: AP
As the U.S. and Israel escalate their totally unjust war on Iran, Israel’s massive U.S.-backed crimes against humanity in Gaza continue relentlessly.
A June 20 Reuters report said, “Israeli fire killed at least 44 Palestinians in Gaza on Friday, many who were seeking food aid, local officials said, while the United Nations children’s agency said the scarcity of drinking water was at a crisis point. At least 25 people awaiting aid trucks were killed by Israeli action south of Netzarim in central Gaza, the Hamas-run local health authority said.”
The death toll from Israel’s slaughter in Gaza—mounting by the hundreds every week—is now over 55,000 Palestinians since October 2023, including more than 50,000 children killed or injured. These are official figures from the Gaza Health Ministry—there may be many thousands more dead that are unaccounted for, buried in the rubble from Israel’s massive bombing.
Deliberately blocking almost all aid from coming into the occupied territory, Israel has pushed all of Gaza’s two million people, nearly half of them children, to the edge of starvation. And with the almost total collapse of the water system because of Israeli attacks, “Children will begin to die of thirst,” according to a UN official.
On March 2, Israel forbade Gaza’s largest aid organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), from operating. After forcing people in Gaza to starve for over two months, in late March Israel and the U.S. set up “aid stations” operated by the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.” This bogus “foundation” was recently thrown together by the Rev. Johnnie Moore, a Christian-fascist fanatic and longtime Trump backer.1 These sites provide very meager aid that comes nowhere near what is needed. But with the whole of Gaza facing starvation from Israel’s aid cutoff, people are desperate, and many rush to the sites whenever they hear one is open, in the hope of getting even a small amount of food, especially for the children. But instead, they are often being met with deadly gunfire from Israeli forces.
One survivor in Gaza compared this to the fictional novel and movie series The Hunger Games. Others have invoked the popular TV show Squid Game. Both are works of art that show people in fictional settings who are forced by an alien force standing above them to fight against other oppressed people like themselves merely to stay alive. But what’s happening in Gaza is all too real—watch this video clip to get just a sense of the horrors that the people of Gaza are being subjected to as they try to get some food aid for themselves and their families:
This is genocide of a whole people, rapidly escalating before the eyes of the whole world. It must be urgently opposed and stopped!
