Newsletter comment from 25th March
Babies are being born in Gaza today to mothers who have been so drastically malnourished in their pregnancy that their little child is already on the brink of death at birth. If the mother has other children, what is she to do? She sees her newborn already wasted; hospital care bombed out of existence – how does she tell her other children she cannot find anything decent for them to eat?
The reality for pregnant women in Gaza is grim beyond words; no homes, no functioning health service, possibly no living husband/mother/sister/father – all the people who normally rally round and nurture the mother as she moves towards labour, gone – and now no food.
It was not always thus: As Dr Margaret Harris of the World Health Organisation pointed out: “This is entirely man-made, everything we’re seeing medically; this was a territory where the health system functioned well,” adding that malnutrition was “non-existent”.
But 28 Palestinian children have so far starved to death – by the time you read this, the number will have increased. Hundreds of thousands in Gaza are in the grip of hunger and face imminent famine, all of it deliberately engineered by Israel and tacitly approved by Israel’s Western allies, including the UK, grabbing, with an unswervingly instinctive obeisance, to the coat-tails of “Genocide Joe”.
This famine is made in Israel and packaged in the West.
Aid trucks, laden with food, are held at the border by Israel. A mere trickle is allowed in and we have seen what happens next: Israel attacks the people desperately trying to get food. In the February “Flour Massacre”, Israeli forces slaughtered over 100 Palestinians. The Guardian, a supposedly liberal paper, wrote that “Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks”.
“Food aid-related deaths”? Heaven forfend that we “complicate peace talks” by calling a massacre a massacre and a war crime a war crime.
The West is complicit with Israel in these crimes: Tokenistic aid drops from aircraft please the BBC but do nothing meaningful to relieve famine. Talk of a USA-funded pier to get aid into Gaza is a distraction: months to build, no distribution network available AND a perfectly good port to the north and trucks waiting at the border. All these distractions buy Israel time, allow the genocide to continue, appease the Zionist lobby and try to pull the wool over credulous people’s eyes.
Israel is weaponizing famine as part of its genocidal war. The US administration professing humanitarian concern for Gazans, while suppling Israel with its weapons of destruction and doing nothing to lift its siege, is cynical and hypocritical.
You only have to see one picture of a starved child to know what a morally debased set of “leaders” we have – no rage in our leaders against Israel’s inhumanity, no passionate commitment to the rule of law – scarcely a mention of the international Court of Justice’s order to Israel to prevent genocide.
We see little that is good, strong and true coming from the top – it really is up to us to lead.
Sheffield’s Emergency Aid to Gaza:
Page for donations is here
Read all the updates here.
