First Starve Them, Then Slay Them

Anthony McIntyre ☠ When later this morning we assemble in West Street, our solidarity will primarily be with the victims of Israel's Nazi-like genocide in Gaza.

But in the face of overwhelming contempt for humanity we will not overlook the contribution made to that very same humanity by those who have travelled into the Occupied Territory for the purpose of saving lives and alleviating suffering. One such person is a British doctor who returned home from Gaza last week and spoke to the media. Professor Nick Maynard, who specialises in oesophageal surgery, witnessed Israeli war crimes first hand. The doctor did not seek to spare his listeners the gore when speaking to RTE, describing what is taking place in Gaza as:

almost like the Israeli soldiers were having target practice . . . One day we would see mainly gunshot wounds to the head and neck. Another day we would see gunshot wounds mainly to the abdomen or the chest. Another day, the legs and even on one day, about 12 days ago, we saw four young teenage boys coming in, all of whom had been shot in the testicles.

He tried to explain this appalling inhumanity: 'it was as if soldiers were saying "we're going to shoot for the head today, the abdomen tomorrow, the testicles, the day after that". He stated that the clustering of injuries was so dramatic that it was "inconceivable that it was coincidental".

Dr Maynard spoke of operating 'on children, even newborns I saw who were dying of malnutrition, so it was worse than I had expected." Doctors who tried to bring in baby formula to offset the effects of malnutrition experienced by the new born of Gaza had "every single carton of formula taken away from them. It's barbarism at its very worst."

He was particularly scathing of the British government:

We're seeing these strong words from David Lammy, our Foreign Secretary, from Keir Starmer, but they're words, that's all they are. And in my view, they're worthless. We need actions and we're not getting any actions. My government is still supplying arms to Israel, part of the F35 jets, they are still running daily reconnaissance flights from Cyprus over Gaza, giving information to the Israelis. They are still hosting senior members of the Israeli government and the military in the UK. They have failed to call out that there is indeed a genocide and multiple war crimes being carried out.

Nor did he let the Dublin government off the hook in his comment to the Irish Times that:

Israel is continuing with this because they are being allowed to continue by western governments, particularly America, but also the UK and the Irish governments.

The slaughter of the starving takes place in close proximity to the Gaza Humanitarian Farce hubs. These hubs are concentrated in four locations in contrast to the UN which had four hundred food distribution centres. Starving Palestinians lured into the death traps by the need for sustenance are then slaughtered by the IDF murder machine. The concentration of famished human beings makes it as easy for the IDF death squads as shooting fish in a barrel. The accounts of witnesses make it impossible to see any discernible difference between what is happening in Gaza and what happened in 1941 at the Babi Yar ravine when Nazi Einsatzgruppen systematically butchered Jewish men, women and children.

Netanyahu has denied that there is any starvation in Gaza, a suggestion that even Donald Trump has ridiculed with his observation: “Those children look very hungry. … That’s real starvation stuff. I see it, and you can’t fake that.”

When confronted with images of emaciated children the Israeli state is are eager to deflect blame by accusing Hamas of theft. However, a body within the US Agency for International Development found that there was no evidence of any systematic theft by Hamas of humanitarian supplies. In June Jonathan Whittall, the head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in occupied Palestinian territories, said:

Theft of aid since the beginning of the war has been carried out by criminal gangs, under the watch of Israeli forces, and they were allowed to operate in proximity to the Kerem Shalom crossing point into Gaza . . . The message that is being sent through the establishment of these militarized hubs appears to be that in Gaza, survival is a privilege, granted only to those who comply with a military plan that has been described by an Israeli minister as being to “conquer, clear and stay.”

So there we have it: the sustenance subterfuge that allows Israel to first starve them, then slay them. The last word on this should go to Professor Maynard who concludes that the Israeli strategic objective is:

a very very deliberate dismantling of the whole infrastructure of living in Gaza to make it uninhabitable and to make them to want to leave . . . to ethnically cleans it as part of their genocide, to completely eradicate the population from Gaza . . . it is indisputably a genocide.

And our government, while better than many, is simply not doing anywhere near enough, because it is embedded in the Western political and economic system, and this is a Western genocide, funded by the West, armed by the West and denied by the West. In a week where two Tel Aviv human rights bodies have accused the Israel of genocide, we can take inspiration from the fact that it is Westerners like ourselves who turn out week in, week out, who are forcing this sea change, not Western governments.

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