Owen Jones, The Guardian.
The current hand-wringing by Keir Starmer and other western politicians is empty bluster. They knew what was happening all along.
What have we done? As the UN-backed monitor declares that “the worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip”, this should have been the question ricocheting between the walls as Keir Starmer met Donald Trump this week. Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza is, after all, a crime confessed to, designed and implemented in plain sight. Starmer has said the UK will recognise Palestinian statehood if Israel doesn’t agree to a ceasefire and a two-state solution, but don’t be beguiled: Palestinian national self-determination is an inalienable right, not a bargaining chip, and it’s the most symbolic action he could take rather than, say, imposing sweeping sanctions and ending all arms sales. The hand-wringing of western politicians and media outlets will not feed Gaza’s emaciated children, any more than it will absolve them of guilt.
Israel’s leaders have said, explicitly, repeatedly, from the very beginning, that they are deliberately starving Gaza’s people. “Man-made famine is not something that I’ve seen in my lifetime,” Martin Griffiths, the UN’s former humanitarian chief, tells me. On 9 October 2023, Israel’s then defence minister, Yoav Gallant, announced “a complete siege on [Gaza]: no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel”, justified on the grounds: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly”. The next day, the Israeli general charged with humanitarian affairs in Gaza and the West Bank – Ghassan Alian – declared that the “citizens of Gaza” were “human beasts” who would suffer “a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.”
The following week, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, promised “we will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip”. These statements were not reported at all by many western media outlets – or, if they were, it was in passing and with no explanation given about their objectively illegal intent. It’s as though these statements were being uttered in a parallel universe, because if they were accurately covered with due prominence, then our media would have been forced to cover Israel’s onslaught as a criminal enterprise, rather than a war of self-defence.
Israel’s western allies knew exactly what it was up to. In March 2024, our then foreign secretary, Lord Cameron, wrote a letter setting out many ruses used by Israel to block aid from entering Gaza, yet Britain took no action. In April 2024, two US government departments concluded that Israel was deliberately blocking aid, which legally required the administration to stop supplying weapons. This was overruled by Joe Biden’s team. Later that year, that same administration sent a public letter detailing Israeli aid obstructions, but Tel Aviv correctly calculated this was political posturing during the presidential election, largely ignored the demands and suffered no consequences for doing so.
Israel has perpetrated the biggest slaughter of aid workers in history, killing more than 400 by the spring. It waged a relentless war against Gaza’s main humanitarian agency – Unrwa, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency – and banned it from the occupied territories last October. Its military killed police officers charged with escorting aid and preventing looting. It’s not just the blocking of aid from entering. Israel’s onslaught has left nearly all agricultural land unusable, as well as damaging 80% of cropland. Nearly all livestock and most plant life is dead. Gaza’s port and fishing vehicles have been destroyed, and Palestinians defying Israel’s ban on fishing face slaughter.
The massacre of starving Palestinians looking for aid has been a consistent theme. In February 2024, more than a hundred civilians waiting for flour were butchered by the Israeli military, yet – as been the case throughout the genocide – media outlets treated its denials, deflections and lies as credible claims. A detailed investigation by CNN weeks later concluded what should always have been obvious – the Israeli military was to blame – but by then attention had moved elsewhere. In March this year, Israel imposed a total siege, and replaced the UN’s effective aid system with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose “distribution sites” are dystopian killing fields. As the UN-backed IPC notes, that aid is not only far too little, but it is often unusable because Israel has left Palestinians without cooking gas and clean water to prepare it. More than a thousand civilians have been butchered trying to access this aid. As aid agencies have noted, the GHF is designed to coax a starved population to the south, so they can be confined in what the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert described as a “concentration camp”, before being deported.
Despite Israel’s obvious, transparent, shameless guilt, its lies are indulged by western politicians and media outlets. On Monday, Donald Trump repeated that “a lot of the food is stolen” by Hamas. This lie has been contradicted by Cindy McCain, director of the World Food Programme, and widow to the hawkishly pro-Israel late Republican senator John McCain. An internal US government analysis found no proof, and Israeli officials have briefed that their military reached the same conclusion. Perversely, it is criminal gangs backed by Israel – which Netanyahu’s own former deputy noted are linked to Islamic State – that are stealing aid.
The international criminal court’s arrest warrants, issued eight months ago, centred on Israel’s deliberate starvation for a reason: the evidence is overwhelming. Yet even if Gaza were suddenly flooded with aid, many Palestinians would die because their bodies have been irreversibly ravaged by hunger. And that is not even on the agenda. The 73 trucks allowed in on Monday were forced to take an unsafe route, and then looted.
Our own prime minister has been promoting airdrops of aid. These are pinpricks, badly targeted and have killed Palestinians when they’ve fallen on their heads. All they really achieve is cover for Israel, to pretend it is doing something, deflecting from its deliberate mass starvation. But what else should we expect from Starmer, who backed Israel’s right to impose a siege on Gaza at the beginning of the genocide, then tried to gaslight us into believing he hadn’t?
What have we done? If western elites had any shame, this question would be robbing them of sleep. And the answer would be straightforward. You facilitated the mass starvation of an entire people. You knew what was happening, because of a deluge of evidence for 21 months, and because the perpetrator – your friend – repeatedly boasted to the world about its crime. Alas, the architects of this abomination will not hold themselves to account. That will be left to history – and the courts.
