Israel is deliberately starving children in Gaza—then blaming Hamas for their deaths. Now Trump is telling Israel to escalate its genocide—to “finish it off.”

Over two million Gazans are facing mass starvation. Food and water are nearly gone. People are dropping dead from hunger. A third of the population doesn’t eat anything at all for days at a time. The pangs of hunger hit children first and hardest—their desperate cries for something, anything, to eat echo across neighborhoods. Acute malnutrition is hindering many doctors, journalists and other essential workers from carrying on. “People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses,” a relief expert says.

This horror isn’t caused by a drought, a flood, or some other natural catastrophe. It’s totally man-made and totally unnecessary. Right now, the United Nations has 6,000 trucks loaded with food and medical supplies waiting on Gaza’s borders in Egypt and Jordan. But Israel refuses to let the supplies in.¹

Big Lie #1: "Hamas has stolen the food"

Why? Israel has repeatedly claimed that it couldn’t lift its blockade because Hamas² has been stealing the aid brought in by the UN and other aid organizations and using it for its own purposes. Lately it has been blaming the UN and other aid organizations for supposedly refusing to deliver the aid which Israel is allowing into Gaza.³

The U.S.—the Trump fascist regime in particular—has regurgitated these lies. On July 26, when asked about children starving in Gaza, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson replied, “Hamas has stolen the food."⁴

This past week, these claims were exposed—even more definitively—as bald-faced lies.

First, on July 25, the Reuters news agency reported that an analysis by the American government agency USAID, which had not previously been revealed, found that there was no evidence that Hamas had stolen aid. What it did find was that “of at least 44 of the 156 incidents where aid supplies were reported stolen or lost were 'either directly or indirectly' due to Israeli military actions.”⁵ Repeat: lost or stolen aid was caused 44 times by the Israel military—and 0 times by Hamas!

(The Trump fascists stuck to their lies, saying the USAID report was “likely produced by a deep state operative” seeking to discredit President Donald Trump's “humanitarian agenda.”)

The next day, the New York Times published a major expose—No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say. It reported that “the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations … according to two senior Israeli military officials.” 

Instead, these Israeli officials said that “the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.”

Big Lie #2: The UN Refuses to Deliver Aid

Israel has launched a PR campaign to blame the UN for starvation in Gaza. “Hundreds of aid trucks have entered Gaza with Israel’s approval, but the supplies are standing idle, undelivered,” the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared on X. “The reason? The UN refuses to distribute the aid.” 

Israel also distributed pictures of aid piled up. “This is important for the world to see,” said Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador (and prominent Christian fascist). “The UN has criticized the U.S. & Israel for the food actually delivered, but it's the UN who has had massive amounts sitting on pallets rotting!”⁶

Why hasn’t the UN been able to distribute all the aid it has on Gaza’s borders? What causes the pallets of rotting food? Not only has Israel put all manner of hurdles in their way, aid workers and Gazans trying to get food have been systematically attacked by the Israeli military! 

Here's but one example. On Sunday, July 20, the World Food Program (WFP) tried to deliver UN aid into Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had assured the group its forces would not fire on those seeking aid. Yet according to the WFP: 

Shortly after passing the final checkpoint beyond the Zikim crossing point into Gaza, the convoy encountered large crowds of civilians anxiously waiting to access desperately needed food supplies.

As the convoy approached, the surrounding crowd came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire. ...

There should never, ever, be armed groups near or on our aid convoys, as reiterated on many occasions to all parties to the conflict. … Without these fundamental conditions in place, we cannot continue providing life-saving support across the Gaza strip.

Over 81 Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded in this one incident.⁷

Why Do Israel and the U.S. Continue to Lie About Starvation in Gaza?

The falsehoods the U.S. and Israel repeat about what’s causing the humanitarian emergency in Gaza are, on one level, absurd lies which have been refuted many, many times over the past 20 months. With U.S. backing, Israel—not Hamas or the UN—controls Gaza’s borders, its airspace, its coastline, and now 88 percent of its territory. Israel dictates what comes in and out of Gaza, and where people and vehicles can go inside Gaza. Its military is basically unchallenged. If food isn’t coming into Gaza or can’t get distributed, it’s because of Israel and the U.S., no one else.

So the real question is why do Israel and the U.S. keep on repeating these transparent, repeatedly debunked lies? 

Because they are hell-bent on continuing what they’re doing: starving the people of Gaza as part of their criminal genocide aimed at destroying the Palestinian people’s existence as a people. Israel is making Gaza unlivable, and if that does not work, they may very well expel the Palestinians from Gaza entirely. Forced starvation has been one of their main weapons. That’s why Israel has blocked all but a pittance of food, water, fuel, medicine and other basic necessities from entering Gaza for all but a few months since October 7, 2023.⁸

And Israel continues attacking innocent people trying to get food in order to continue what Professor Alex de Waal, author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine, calls Israel’s “genocidal starvation”: 

Israeli actions stand out because there is no other case in modern history in which you have such minutely, precisely engineered starvation within an hour’s drive, or even less than an hour’s drive, of a fully capable international humanitarian operation ready to roll.

If Israel wanted every child in Gaza to have breakfast tomorrow, the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could say so, and it would happen.

That is not the case in other terrible famines, such as in Sudan today.

It is not only the suffering and death of individuals but perhaps more importantly it is that social trauma. It is that shame. It is that degradation. It is that feeling of people being reduced to the state of animals, being forced to violate profound social taboos - scavenging for food in piles of garbage, etc. This is what genocide looks like at the moment.

“Israel has done something truly incredible—Israel has managed to turn Jews into Nazis!”

—A Timely Provocation from Bob Avakian, November 10, 2023

If you can’t believe that Israel would echo the Nazis and carry out something as horrific as genocide, just listen to Israeli officials themselves. Amichay Eliyahu, a far-right fascist who heads up Israel’s Heritage Ministry, declared in a radio interview that “there is no nation that feeds its enemies” and that Israel was “rushing toward Gaza being wiped out.” 

Think about that. Israel is not and never has been “feeding” the people of Gaza. What it’s been doing is preventing anyone else from supplying Gaza with food. Just how different is that from some of the tactics the Nazis employed against the Jews during the Holocaust, such as using starvation as a punishment or deliberately limiting food supplies in the concentration camps? And then there’s his glee as the prospect of “Gaza being wiped out.”⁹

Israel Maneuvers… to Continue Its Assault on Gaza

As we’re writing, the situation is rapidly unfolding. Recently Israel responded to the global wave of condemnation by announcing it would allow some other countries to drop food aid into Gaza. On July 26, it announced the IDF would also be doing food drops into Gaza and there would be “humanitarian pauses” to enable Gazans to get aid. 

These are public relations stunts that do nothing to stop mass starvation in Gaza. Air drops, to take one example, aren’t a solution. You can’t drop nearly as much aid as you can by delivering it on trucks—certainly not enough to even dent the epidemic of mass hunger across Gaza. And air drops don't take place in an organized fashion: people are scrambling for food, often shot at by Israeli forces, and sometimes killed by the falling aid itself. 

What these moves are aimed to do is to keep Israel in full control of all food distribution Gaza and give it the cover to continue to carry out its devastating, murderous assault on the Palestinian people of Gaza.

Trump’s Ominous Threats and the Urgent Need for Massive Protests

The famine emergency in Gaza grows more critical by the hour. Since October 7, 2023, more than 122 people, including over 83 children, have died of starvation, and the crisis is escalating by the day. One hundred international aid organizations warn that the two-plus million people in Gaza now face “mass starvation.”

How has Trump responded? By green-lighting an escalation of mass slaughter in Gaza: “It got to a point where you have to finish the job,” he declared, and the Israelis "are gonna have to fight, and they are gonna have to clean it up—you will have to get rid [of Hamas]." 

In other words, even as mass starvation looms ever larger in Gaza, and Israel’s crimes and depravity stand out more glaringly—before the whole world—Trump is doubling down. 

These are extremely ominous threats, coming at an extremely dire moment for the people of Gaza. The eyes of the world are on Gaza and the outrage against Israel and the U.S. are growing and spreading, and this is also a moment which must be seized on to make a leap in protests demanding an end to the U.S.-Israeli genocidal slaughter of the Palestinian people—and against the fascist Trump regime that is so brazenly stoking it.

While the fight to defeat the fascist Trump regime and the fight against the U.S.-Israeli genocide are not identical, they do need to increasingly overlap—with each getting strength and determination from the other. 

End the Siege on Gaza Now!

Stop the U.S.-Israeli Genocide Against the Palestinian People!

In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America!
The Trump Fascist Regime Must Go—NOW!