Israel's Endgame Is Obliterating Palestine [View all]

Gaza is being deliberately starved. The West Bank is next.

by Ryan Cooper July 25, 2025


One of the most grisly humanitarian crises in history is happening right now in Gaza. The Israeli military has reduced the enclave to ruins with constant bombing—killing perhaps 59,000 people in the process, at least three-quarters of them civilians, and 18,000 of them children. Gaza’s economy is buried in the rubble, and it is desperately short of food, water, and medicine. Thousands of tons of aid are sitting just miles away from Gaza’s border, but the Israeli government refuses to let most of it through. On the contrary, at the handful of aid stations that remain, Israeli troops are routinely massacring dozens of people queueing for food. A total of 1,000 people have been killed seeking food since May, according to the United Nations, mostly near sites operated by the shady American contractor Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has taken over aid distribution from the U.N.

Ross Smith, director of emergency preparedness and response for the United Nations World Food Programme, recently said that “a quarter of the population [in Gaza] is facing famine-like conditions. Almost 100,000 women and children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition and need treatment as soon as possible.” He added that WFP has enough supplies staged outside Gaza to provide for the whole population for two months, but the Israeli military will not let them in remotely fast enough. The Washington Post reports: “Nearly 1 in 3 people are going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations, and hospitals are reporting rising deaths from malnutrition and starvation. In a video filmed Tuesday inside Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, families fretted over babies with distended bellies and tiny fists that they clenched as they cried.”

Agence France-Presse, the French news organization, recently published an editorial explaining that its last few freelancers in Gaza are starving to death. And given that they are paid a monthly salary, it’s a safe bet that almost everyone else is doing worse.

SNIP* Indeed, the Israeli Knesset recently passed a “non-binding” resolution to formally annex the entire West Bank, by a 71-13 margin. That comes after decades of steady theft of Palestinian land and settler terrorism against West Bank residents, which has radically escalated since the brutal attacks of October 7th. About 1,000 West Bank Palestinians have been killed by settlers or the Israeli forces since the war started, and about 7,000 injured. Back in May, the Israeli government authorized the largest expansion of West Bank settlements in decades, and this Thursday, allocated an additional $275 million in settlement funding. On this course, the same bloody dialectic that led to the starvation of Gaza will be impossible to avoid.
https://prospect.org/world/2025-07-25-israels-endgame-obliterating-palestine/

As Starvation Rises, Israeli Minister Says Israel Is ‘Driving Out’ Gazans
Amichay Eliyahu’s comments came amid growing hunger in the territory, where Israel controls the delivery of food.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/world/middleeast/israel-minister-gaza-driving-out.html

Amos Goldberg: 'What is happening in Gaza is a genocide because Gaza does not exist anymore'
Given the scale of the massacres and destruction perpetrated by the Israeli army in Gaza, the Israeli historian, a specialist of the Holocaust, says in an interview with Le Monde that his country 'criminally overreacted' to the October 7 massacres.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2024/10/29/amos-goldberg-what-is-happening-in-gaza-is-a-genocide-because-gaza-does-not-exist-anymore_6730881_23.html