“There’s no flour and no food to feed the children, nor the adults. Everyone is hungry. No one is eating. No one is eating. If you find a kilo of rice today to prepare, you won’t find it tomorrow. You would have to divide it over two days and feed the children little by little.”

—Fatma Ahmed, Gaza City

"Gaza is the hungriest place on Earth. … It's the only … country or defined territory within a country where you have the entire population at risk of famine. 100 percent of the population at risk of famine." 

—United Nations humanitarian aid coordinator

Nearly 90 days. That’s how long Israel, with backing from Trump and his fascist regime,¹ has blockaded all food, water, fuel, medicine, and other life-sustaining essentials from entering Gaza. 

Who is this hitting the most cruelly? Gaza’s children, who make up half the population. 

Six-year-old Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, whose arms are thin as twigs and ribs jut out from her shrunken frame, is one of them. Severe malnutrition has caused her to lose over 40 percent of her weight in just the last two months—dropping from 34 pounds to a mere 21. 

Since Israel launched its ruthless onslaught in October 2023,²  some 17,000 children have been killed and over 34,000 wounded—“making it the deadliest conflict for children in recent memory,” according to the executive director of UNICEF.

Israeli bombs aren’t the only thing stalking Gaza’s children—so is the Israeli-created famine. According to UNICEF, “The entire population of Gaza now faces acute food insecurity. Nearly half a million people are teetering on the edge of starvation. We estimate that over 71,000 children and 17,000 mothers will suffer from acute malnutrition, characterized by rapid weight loss and low weight-to-height ratio, in the next 10 months without sufficient humanitarian aid and treatment.”³ Such acute malnourishment can impact children for the rest of their lives.

And yet, somehow, it gets still worse. Here are three ways the truly horrific genocidal nightmare is being ramped up.

“Aid” Hubs for Ethnic Cleansing, Courtesy of Israel and the U.S.

Last week the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”—conceived and created by Israel with assistance from a U.S. foundation and private security run by a former CIA operative⁴—opened three sites for distributing food aid. It was immediately clear its aim was never to end acute hunger in Gaza.

On Tuesday, a site opened on the ruins of what was once the southern city of Rafah. Thousands of hungry Gazans—men, women and children—showed up. Some had walked many miles, often through hazardous rubble and terrain, for desperately needed food, only to be funneled into crowded, fenced-in enclosures. When security was overwhelmed by this flood of desperately starving humanity, Israeli forces outside the compound fired warning shots to disperse the crowds. Similar scenes were repeated at a different site outside Khan Younis on Thursday, where tanks fired machine guns and security forces used stun grenades to try and control the crowds.

By the end of the week, dozens of Palestinians had been killed and many, many more wounded for trying to get a few morsels of food at these Israeli-run sites. There are reports the U.S. contractors in charge of security conducted ID checks and used eye scans, and that the Israeli military interrogated and detained some Palestinians trying to get to the aid distribution hubs.⁵

By June 1, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation claimed that it had distributed 67,200 aid boxes, with each one feeding “5.5 people for 3.5 days.” That totals food for just 369,600 Gazans—out of two million! United Nations aid officials called it, “less than a drop in the ocean.”

And that’s not all or the worst of it:

• The distributed “aid” boxes included only basic food items such as oil, sugar, salt, flour, pasta, and fava beans but not “essential food items like meat, eggs, baby formula, fruits, and vegetables,” a World Food Program official said, indicating the goal is to provide just enough to “keep people from dying of hunger.” (See our article last week on Israel’s deliberate tactic of letting in a trickle of aid to stave off global outrage, while actually escalating its genocide in Gaza.)
• Israel claims that this new organization is needed because Hamas has been stealing the aid being brought in by humanitarian organizations and using it for its own purposes. This is a lie. Before Israel’s blockade, the United Nations, UNRWA and other organizations operated a massive and effective system to distribute aid through 400 different locations across Gaza. While Israel claims to have lifted its blockade  of Gaza, it’s still preventing all but a relative handful of aid getting to the population because it refuses to ensure its safe delivery. (See, for example, Children in Gaza Are Starving. Let the U.N. Do Its Job, New York Times, May 29.)
• Israel’s decision to open a few aid stations in southern Gaza, near its border with Egypt, is meant to use food as bait to displace Gaza’s entire population into a “sterile zone” in the south, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (aka Netan-Nazi) puts it. This sets up and accelerates the push to forcibly expel Palestinians from Gaza, as Trump has repeatedly advocated and Israel regularly cites as its plan. 

Israel’s Relentless U.S.-Backed Genocide Rushes Ahead

As the media and world’s attention was being focused on Israel’s new “humanitarian” moves, its genocide in Gaza continued to press ahead. 

Thursday, May 29, marked the 600th day of Israel’s onslaught in Gaza. On Friday and Saturday combined, almost 150 people were killed and hundreds wounded. 

As this slaughter was continuing, Israel’s military issued a sweeping evacuation order for much of northern Gaza, warning the population that a new, expanded “offensive activity” was coming. Its goal: to clear much of northern Gaza.

Earlier in the week, the Israeli military announced plans to take control of three-quarters of Gaza within the next two months and force Palestinians into just a quarter of Gaza’s territory. As this announcement was being made, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was visiting Jerusalem and touring Gaza’s border.

Half of Gaza’s Children Are Suicidal

Let’s return to where we began, with Gaza’s children. Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma and critical care surgeon who has volunteered in Gaza, recently told the BBC that the situation for Gaza’s children was so “horrendous” it was hard to describe. Along with the lack of food and health care, Dr. Sidhwa said, “the psychiatric devastation the children are facing is absolutely unprecedented, I suspect in all of world history.” Citing a recent report, Dr. Sidhwa said: “Almost half of Gaza’s children are suicidal… and 96 percent expect to die in this war. That’s just outrageous! So the situation for children is that they’re not allowed to be children anymore.” 

Let that sink in. Nearly half of Gaza’s children—human beings who should have their whole lives ahead of them—are suicidal. And most expect to die in this system-enforced slaughter. 

Ask yourself: what is your responsibility to these children dying under American made bombs and America approved starvation?

The New York Times reports that “international demands intensified on Friday [May 30] for Israel to allow an urgent influx of aid to keep all of the territory from tipping into famine.” That international outcry is important, but it must urgently be joined and amplified by a surge of mass protest in this country, the U.S., whose government is enabling all of this terrible killing, wounding, starvation, and needless suffering through military, political and diplomatic backing. 

Mass protest reaching into every corner of society, growing broader, deeper and more determined demanding that this genocide must stop now!

End the Siege on Gaza! Stop the U.S./Israeli Genocidal Slaughter of the Palestinian People!

This Whole System Is Rotten and Illegitimate—We Need And We Demand: A Whole New Way To Live, A Fundamentally Different System!