This past week Israel: continued to slaughter civilians in Gaza, and announced it is calling up thousands of reservists so it can escalate its military assault, perhaps to take permanent control of Gaza. As this was taking place, witnesses at an International Criminal Court hearing were providing abundant evidence that Israel is carrying out genocide in Gaza by blocking any aid from entering Gaza and deliberately starving the population. When international humanitarians nonviolently attempted to bring aid to Gaza, their ship was attacked by Israel. Through it all, Israel continued to have ironclad support from the U.S. and the Trump regime.
Slaughtering Civilians in “Safe Zones”
Israeli strike on Khan Younis killed at least 17 Palestinians, including this infant and 1-year-old, May 3, 2025. Photo: AP
- On April 28, Israel killed 48 Palestinians. Five children were killed in Gaza City by an Israeli drone. Four others were killed when Israel bombed a tent camp in a so-called safe zone near Khan Younis. Three were children.
- On April 29, 13 Palestinians were killed.
- On April 30, at least 39 were killed, some in massive air strikes in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Others were killed in Israel’s ongoing attacks on shelters and tents for displaced civilians in Khan Younis and al-Mawasi. Survivors say bodies of their loved ones were left unrecognizable by the air strikes on this so-called safe zone.
“Do you see the rockets that fell on us and on the children at home?” one survivor said. “They were sleeping. We were sleeping deeply, only to get us out of the house like that. And we started running with the children at midnight. It is [an] unfair, unfair, world.”
Since Israel broke its ceasefire with Hamas on March 18, over 2,325 Gazans have been killed, including 820 children. Since October 2023, Israel has killed at least 62,614 Palestinians in Gaza, including 17,492 children, and injured over 111,588 people.
Another 14,222 that can't be accounted for are missing and presumed dead, many buried under buildings collapsed by Israeli bombs and missiles. Now Israel has taken to blowing up the bulldozers Palestinian civil defense workers use to remove and search through the rubble. “These machines serve us, removing the rubble from the streets and retrieving the martyrs from under the rubble,” one Gazan said. “The Israeli occupation came and destroyed them. The occupation is still causing us harm.”1
Israel Calls Up Tens of Thousands of Reservists to Expand Gaza Onslaught
On May 3, the Israeli army announced it was calling up tens of thousands of reservists in order to expand its campaign in Gaza.2 This is an extremely ominous development.
According to Amnesty International, “Expansive ‘evacuation’ orders and no-go zones now engulf nearly 70% of the Gaza Strip,” forcing Gazans to crowd into smaller and smaller areas, most without any means of support.
Now, the New York Times notes, Israel could be planning the kind of offensive it carried out earlier in its onslaught when “Israeli troops swept through... leveling swaths of Gaza’s cities and displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.”
The Times does not mention that this time Israel would very likely be seizing and holding much more territory. And it doesn’t mention this would be part of a genocidal campaign to make it impossible for Palestinians to continue living in Gaza or as preparations to expel all or a significant portion of the population, as Trump has repeatedly called for.3
Israel’s rulers—and their U.S. backers—are more and more open about their objectives. Netanyahu and other leading cabinet members no longer pretend that their savagery is an effort to retrieve Hamas’s remaining hostages. The return of the hostages is not all that important, they say, total “victory” is.4
What does that “victory” look like? “Now Netanyahu constantly talks about a Palestinian exodus, with the perfunctory word ‘voluntary’ somewhere in the sentence,” the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports. “He raised it again at his [April 7] meeting with Trump in the White House… Defense Minister Israel Katz is busy establishing an "emigration authority" for Gazans who wish to leave… The prime minister and defense minister have taken to brazenly announcing that Israel will ‘take territory’ — Katz even said this territory would be ‘annexed to the Israeli defense system.’"
In other words, with Trump's backing, Netan-nazi is planning to ethnically cleanse all Palestinians out of Gaza—a small strip of land that Palestinians were driven to, and forcibly confined in, after Israel drove Palestinians out of their land 77 years ago.
Israel’s Other Weapons of War: Starvation and Disease
“It is about Israel destroying the fundamentals of life in Palestine while it blocks U.N. and other humanitarians from providing lifesaving aid to the population… It is about Israel turning Palestine, and particularly Gaza, into a mass grave for Palestinians and those coming to their aid.”
- Ameer
“Under the world’s watchful eye, Palestinians are being subjected to atrocity, crimes, persecution, apartheid and genocide.”
- South Africa’s representative
More than 9,000 children in Gaza have been admitted to hospitals for treatment for acute malnutrition since the start of 2025. Here a family feeds their 9-month-old in Khan Younis, May 2, 2025. Photo: AP
These are some of the statements made before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) when it opened its April 28-May 2 hearing on Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Under international law, Israel, as the occupying power, is responsible for the well-being of the people of Gaza. Yet instead of facilitating needed humanitarian aid, for the last two months it’s been blocking all food, water, fuel, medicine from entering Gaza—with U.S. backing.
Testimony to the ICJ and recent news reports point to a five-alarm emergency of starvation and disease in Gaza, and Israel’s blatant, depraved crimes in denying needed aid.
- More than 200 trucks carrying lifesaving aid and basic supplies are ready to pour into Gaza. The line of trucks extends 28 miles into Egypt from the Rafah border crossing, but Israel refuses to let them in.
- In recent weeks, the World Food Program (WFP) has been the only consistent source of food to some one million people in Gaza, half the population. On April 25, the WFP announced it had run out of food due to Israel’s blockade.
On May 3, Al Jazeera reported:
- At least 57 Palestinians have starved to death in Gaza. Most of the victims were children, as well as the sick and elderly.
- More than 9,000 children have been admitted to hospitals for treatment for acute malnutrition since the start of the year, according to the United Nations.
- Al Jazeera’s reporter witnessed heartbreaking scenes of children rifling through rubbish, “looking for whatever is left of canned food products.” Gaza had reached a “critical” point. “Finding a single meal has become an impossible quest,” one Palestinian said.
- The Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah reports that medical services were experiencing “acute shortages in more than 75 percent of essential medicines”, with only around a week of supplies left.
Israel Legalizes Starvation of Gazans, Denounces the ICJ Hearings—U.S. Backs Israel
How has Israel reacted to international condemnation and the ICJ hearings? By formally legalizing the intentional starving of Gazans, while denouncing the ICJ.
On March 27, Israel’s Supreme Court decided to deny a request to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. This ruling explicitly legalized Israel’s blockade—and the use of starvation as a weapon of war!
As for the ICJ, an Israeli spokesperson denounced the proceedings: “Israel decided not to take part in this circus. … The U.N. has become a rotten, anti-Israel and antisemitic body.” Of course Israel provided no evidence to refute the volumes of evidence of its crimes presented at the hearings.
The U.S. did send a representative to the hearings—who defended Israel.
Gaza Freedom Flotilla Conscience damaged by Israeli airstrike, May 2, 2025. Photo: Wikipedia
@GretaThunberg Instagram post talks about Gaza and the drone attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Conscience.
To top it off, on May 2, Israel bombed a ship carrying urgently needed humanitarian aid destined for Gaza which had been organized by the international Freedom Flotilla Coalition.5
“We All Have a Moral Responsibility to Act”
Amnesty International summed up the legal case against Israel’s blockade and called for international action:
Israel must immediately end its devastating siege on the occupied Gaza Strip which constitutes a genocidal act, a blatant form of unlawful collective punishment, and the war crime of using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. By blocking the entry of supplies critical for the survival of the population, Israel continues its policy of deliberately imposing conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza calculated to bring about their physical destruction; this constitutes an act of genocide.
States must take action to render Israel’s violations against Palestinians politically, diplomatically and economically unsustainable — the siege on Gaza must end now.
The world-renowned environmentalist Greta Thunberg, who was part of the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza, made this call:
The silence and the passivity, largely, from the outside world is completely deadly. And we all have a moral responsibility to act against that and to do our part to demand accountability for war criminals and our own governments’ complicity in this genocide and illegal occupation and siege.
On May 4, the New York Times reported:
- As Gaza Siege Grinds On, Gazan Children Go Hungry and Patients Die — “The effect of Israel’s total siege has become ‘catastrophic,’ doctors say. Food, water and medicine shortages are prompting a surge of preventable illnesses, and deaths.”
- “The severity of the siege means it now affects nearly every part of the lives of the roughly two million people trapped inside Gaza.”
- “As supplies of clean water, food and medicine dwindle, preventable diseases and illnesses are surging — and so is the likelihood of dying from them, doctors say.”
- Aid groups warn that humanitarian support for Gazans is “on the verge of total collapse.”
- “The only food available to many Gazans — especially among the 90 percent of the population that is displaced and mostly living in tents — comes from local charity kitchens. “Imagine you haven’t tasted meat, a boiled egg or even an apple in months,” one Palestinian said.
- “Malnutrition has had knockdown effects on the entire medical system,” accelerating the spread of disease and the difficulties in treating it.
- 91 percent of the Gaza’s population of two million doesn’t know where their next meal is coming from, and most are facing “emergency” or “catastrophic” levels of hunger. Even drinkable water is “increasingly rare.”