Bayan Saqer is lying on a bed. Her mother is supporting her, holding her head. She's 10 [years old], very thin, frail and weak. Her body is limp. She weighs 17 kilograms (37 pounds). "That's the weight of a 4-year-old," says Dr. Ahmed al-Farra, director of the pediatric department in Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip. "She's not suffering from any disease, only malnutrition." Two months ago she weighed 24 kilograms [52 pounds], the girl's mother says.

Dr. al-Farra shows Bayan's protruding ribs, her scrawny hands. She squeezes his hand and manages to sit up during the examination, but her eyes are lifeless. He asks her to say something; she has to make an effort to say her name. During our conversation it emerges that the father of the family was wounded at the start of the war and lost a leg. Obtaining food became an impossible task.

— Haaretz, 'Starvation Is Everywhere': Virtual Tours of Gaza Clinics Expose the Scale of the Horror, August 21

Just when it seems there are no words left to describe the living hell in Gaza, a new one has been added: “famine." 

— UN Secretary General António Guterres

Starvation, Destitution and Death

Famine is the most extreme form of a hunger crisis. It means a population is facing a severe, widespread shortage of food, leading to malnutrition, starvation and death. 

This past week a new report from the United Nations' expert body on food security, the IPC, revealed that acute malnutrition, shrinking access to food, and death by starvation had all risen in Gaza, crossing the threshold from mass hunger to famine. The IPC is the "Integrated Food Security Phase Classification," which is made up of experts who monitor world hunger. They have never before declared this level of mass starvation in the Middle East.

The numbers in Gaza are staggering: Over 270 people have died from starvation. Over 2,000 people have been shot to death while trying to obtain food from "aid sites" that are death traps. (See: U.S. “Humanitarian Foundation” Fires on Palestinians Seeking Food Aid) More than 500,000 people go days without eating. Over 41,000 children are acutely malnourished and face a serious risk of dying. Almost all of Gaza’s 2.2 million people, including its 1.1 million children, are facing severe hunger.

This nightmare of famine has not been caused by a flood, a drought, a heat wave, or some other natural disaster. It’s “man-made.” It’s been deliberately created by Israel with full U.S. backing. Deliberately created by over 22 months of nearly constant Israeli attacks and repeated forced displacement of Palestinians. Deliberately created by Israel’s near total blockades of food, water and medicine, and its destruction of Gaza’s health care, water, sanitation and agriculture systems. All of this part of a conscious, coherent strategy: GENOCIDE. 

“It is a famine in 2025, a 21st-century famine, watched over by drones and the most advanced military technology in history. It is a famine openly promoted by some Israeli leaders as a weapon of war,” said Tom Fletcher, the top U.N. humanitarian official. “It is a famine, the Gaza famine… food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel. It is a famine within a few hundred meters of food.”¹

U.S.-Israeli Response, Part 1: Attack the Report, Not the Famine

The IPC stated that the Gaza famine could be “halted and reversed” because it was “entirely man-made.” It warned that "Any further delay [in allowing in food aid]—even by days—will result in a totally unacceptable escalation of famine-related mortality." It concluded, “The time for debate and hesitation has passed…. Starvation is present and is rapidly spreading.”

Haaretz reports that the IPC report “is causing unease in Jerusalem. Earlier this week, military and government representatives held a meeting to discuss starvation in Gaza.” 

Israel controls everything that comes in and out of Gaza. And yes, they discussed starvation in Gaza—not to stop it, but about how to fashion a PR campaign of lies, cover-ups, and blame shifting, so they could continue the starvation and genocide!

The Israeli government agency overseeing Israel’s operations in the West Bank and Gaza put out a statement full of lies, that the IPC report is "false and relies on partial, biased data and superficial information originating from Hamas, a terrorist organization, often laundered through organizations with vested interests." In other words: anyone who doesn't agree with their forced starvation is Hamas. The only proof? "Because we say so!"

The Christian fascist U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, backed up this transparent bullshit, reposting Netanyahu's attacks on the IPC report, adding his own racist twists, "Tons of food has gone into Gaza but Hamas savages stole it, ate lots of it to become corpulent, sold it on black market but they didn't give it to the hostages.”

U.S.-Israeli Response, Part 2: Attack Gaza City, Escalate the Genocide

Netanyahu made clear that neither growing famine nor Hamas’ reported agreement to a U.S.-backed ceasefire plan would stop Israel’s assault on Gaza City and beyond, stating Israel intended to take over the whole of the Gaza Strip, regardless of whether there was a ceasefire deal agreed on with Hamas.

And Israel’s air and ground offensive of mass murder and terror against the million-plus Palestinians in Gaza City, which began in Zeitoun, the city’s largest quarter, continued to escalate. 

Israel’s “Precise and Targeted” Operation = Mass Slaughter

Middle East Eye reports:

According to eyewitnesses speaking to Middle East Eye and local reports, the neighbourhood has endured more than a week of deadly shelling and bombardment, with over 400 homes demolished…

The neighbourhood's residents have also reported Israel's use of killer robots capable of demolishing entire residential blocks. “In al-Zeitoun, the army is now close to my house, and I fear they will target it or that a robot could approach, explode and kill us all,” Sakani said.... [R]obots roaming the neighbourhood are “destroying everything around them” alongside the intense shelling, and that civilians—young and old—are being targeted without reason. 

Jawad also cited the use of booby traps and the apparent testing of new weaponry in the neighbourhood, describing a deafening mix of bombing, robot explosions, booby-traps and building detonations.”²

Dozens are being massacred by Israeli attacks nearly every day, with tens of thousands more fleeing the city in terror.

This is what Israel’s promise to first evacuate civilians, and then conduct a “gradual, precise and targeted” operation in and around the city looks like.

Israeli Defense Minister: “Gates of Hell Will Open” 

This is only the beginning of what Israel is calling the second phase of Operation Gideon’s Chariots in Gaza, which it launched in May. It has already called up some 60,000 reserve troops and has plans for another 70,000 beyond that. 

Now Israeli officials are openly promising mass murder and devastation. Israel’s Defense Minister warned that the “gates of hell will open” over Gaza City. 

Think about this: As we wrote last week, "Gaza City has existed for most of recorded history. It was founded around 3,000 BC along a key trade route. It’s now Gaza’s largest city and currently home to as many as one million or more of Gaza’s 2.2 million people." People are being forced to evacuate but there is almost nowhere for them to go.

Another top Israeli official brags that Operation Gideon’s Chariots will turn Gaza City into a wasteland: “Gaza City itself should be exactly like Rafah, which we turned into a city of ruins.” 

As this is taking place, Israel has created a “Population Relocation Unit” to oversee the forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza,³ and is in talks with South Sudan to forcibly displace and relocate Gaza’s Palestinians there. 

A Genocidal Slaughter of Civilians

As one unimaginable horror after another unfolds in Gaza, Israel and Netan-nazi keep repeating the lie that they are waging a war on Hamas. Israel said that every hospital and home blown up was a Hamas target. Every journalist and aid worker, a Hamas operative. But as it turns out, even the Israeli government has known this was a lie!

According to an internal Israeli intelligence database, at least 83 percent of Palestinians killed in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza were civilians.⁴ Let us repeat: the Israeli military KNEW that every 8 out of 10 Palestinians murdered by Israel was not a Hamas operative, but a civilian! And they still keep dropping bomb after bomb, slaughtering families, burning tents, bombing shelters. The official death toll in Gaza is 62,004 (with another 156,230 people wounded). The actual toll is much, much higher, but thousands are still buried in the rubble. Again, according to Israel's own statistics, they have knowingly killed over 51,000 who were civilians. 

This is a conscious systematic war crime of historic proportions.

These revelations—and a mountain of evidence before—obliterate the lie that Israel is simply targeting Hamas, not civilians. That it’s now attacking Gaza City because it’s a Hamas “stronghold of regime and military terror”—a lie! That Hamas could end this bloodbath tomorrow by laying down its arms and surrendering? A lie.

Again, this is not principally a war against Hamas. It’s a genocidal war against the Palestinian people. (And recently some 600 former high Israeli officials wrote that Hamas had been so shattered it was no longer any threat to Israel.)

Fascist Trump Regime: Soaked in Palestinian Blood

The American fascist-in-Chief Donald Trump is also soaked in the blood of the Palestinian people. He, his regime, and the U.S. ruling class as a whole, are directly involved in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Just this week: 

• Trump called Netanyahu a “good man” and “a war hero.” He was directly referring to Israel’s attack on Iran, but this was also a big thumbs up for the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
• This past week, Trump directly supported Netanyahu's position on Gaza: “We will only see the return of the remaining hostages when Hamas is confronted and destroyed!!!... The sooner this takes place, the better the chances of success will be.”
• Netanyahu has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). This week, as the Netanyahu-led genocide in Gaza was escalating, the U.S. issued new sanctions—not against Netanyahu, but against four officials at the International Criminal Court.⁵
• This week Trump’s State Department fired its top press officer for Israeli-Palestinian affairs. Why? Because being an otherwise dutiful pro-genocide mouthpiece, he favored expressing condolences for the Palestinian journalists recently killed in Gaza and for opposing the forced displacement of Palestinians.⁶

A Criminal Genocide, A Criminal Regime and System Behind It

After a team of Haaretz reporters surveyed the situation of children in Gaza’s hospitals, they concluded:

Based on our conversations, a simple fact emerged: Anyone who claims that the images of starvation in the Gaza Strip are a result of acute genetic or other diseases, and not due to a grave shortage of food, are lying to themselves.

Much the same could and should be said for anyone who, at this point, with all the evidence available, is denying that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and the U.S. is backing it: they’re either totally ignorant and brainwashed or lying to themselves. 

People also need to face another reality: that the starvation and genocidal horror unfolding in Gaza is not, as the head of the UN put it in an otherwise critical statement, a “failure of humanity.”

First it’s not a “failure”—this is a towering crime carried out by Israel and the United States, in particular the fascist Trump regime. 

Second, the fault lies not with humanity, but with the system—the system of capitalism-imperialism headed by the U.S.—with Israel its key attack dog and military base in the Middle East. It’s this system which drives powers based on exploitation and oppression to again and again carry out monstrous crimes. That too is a reality people must face, which they can do HERE, HERE, and HERE.