A Man-Made Famine

Even Donald Trump, not primarily known for his humanitarian streak, took a break from his Scottish golfing holiday to describe the effect of seeing images of children clearly dying from hunger in Gaza. It’s a living hell on earth. Gaza, a place where medics, hooked up to drips themselves, are too famished to even treat the hungry. Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. It couldn’t have done it without the West’s moral and military support. After months of warnings that Israeli aid restrictions were tipping the strip into full-blown famine, local health officials are now reporting dozens of deaths–nearly 60 in July alone–from starvation to malnutrition. Hunger-related deaths apart, children struggling to get cooked food in line are being shot by Israeli forces, as reported by the BBC in its latest documentary on Gaza. Even mainstream American news outlets like the New York Times, which has consistently obfuscated and attempted to justify Israel’s barbarism, is now printing photos of starving children. Almost a Bengal famine scenario of 1943 during World War 11 in which millions perished. The famine was caused mainly by disruptions to rice supply engineered by the colonial British government.

The death toll in the Gaza enclave since the war began surpassed 60,000, and a leading global hunger monitor warned that ‘the worst-case scenario of famine’ is underway. For nearly two years, the Israeli military has been manufacturing a famine, carpet-bombing everything from homes to hospitals to refugee tents and systematically destroying infrastructure, including water sources, and making aid distribution by the UN agency all but impossible.

The world is watching and failing the Palestinian people. Harmless gestures by some Western countries towards the agony of Palestinians matter very little in the real world of survival. Now Canada has joined France and the UK in plans to formally recognise a Palestinian state. But this half-hearted measure is not going to stop Israel’s campaign of genocide. Everybody knows there is no taker of their proposal in the White House. They are, at worst, playing with the gallery.

Both America and Israel are dead set against a two-state solution. Meanwhile, France and Saudi Arabia co-hosted a conference at the United Nations that aimed to breathe new life into the long-standing but elusive goal of a two-state solution for Palestine and Israel. Amid growing concerns that Israel aims to depopulate Gaza annex territories through settlers’ colonies in the occupied West Bank, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres asked the organisers of UN conference to go beyond “well meaning rhetoric”. But it is unlikely to happen. Israeli government, which opposes Palestinian statehood, boycotted the event, as did the United States. What is more the Trump administration dismissed the conference as “ill-timed” and a “publicity stunt”.

The conference may have fallen short in terms of fully reviving the two-state solution, but it keeps hopes alive to get there with a joint communique–the New York declaration–that was backed by the Arab League, the European Union, and 17 others.

For one thing, the Palestine solidarity movement across the world is not small, but it is too ineffective to pressure the persons in authority to stop starvation in Gaza. The more effective way to thwart Israeli genocide is to stop arms shipments to Israel. So long as America and its Western allies continue to arm the Israeli military to the teeth, this medieval barbarism will continue. Only a powerful trade union movement worldwide could affect arms supply to Israel, but today, workers in most industrially advanced countries are under the sway of right-wing forces, rather than ultra-right political outfits, supporting Israel’s ethnic cleansing. It’s no longer the Soviet era. Nor is there any relevance of the World Federation of Trade Unions–WFTU.

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Frontier
Vol 58, No. 9, Aug 24 - 30, 2025