Girl in Gaza on her way to get food. Photo by Jaber Jehad Badwan/Wikimedia Commons.

After reneging on its January ceasefire agreement with Hamas, Israel imposed a total blockade on aid into Gaza on March 2 and cut off remaining electricity supplies a week later. It resumed its military assault on March 18. Since then, Gaza’s health authorities have recorded a further 8,196 fatalities and 30,094 injuries. The death toll from IDF actions since the present “war” began on October 7, 2023 has now passed 60,000.

United Nations data show that throughout July the IDF has been killing one person every 12 minutes. “An average of 119 Palestinians are being killed daily so far in July—the highest rate since January 2024. More than 401 Palestinians a day are being wounded, the highest figure since December 2023.”

To put this in perspective, this means that in the last month Israel has killed, on average, more people in Gaza every week than the 736 Israeli civilians who died during Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel (many of them casualties of Israeli “friendly fire”)—the event that triggered, and has repeatedly been used to justify, Israel’s present “war.”

Aid agencies have been warning of imminent famine for months, threatening the lives of Gaza’s 2.1 million inhabitants—or whatever portion of them have survived nearly two years of IDF bombardment—who have no means of escape from the besieged enclave. Deaths from hunger are now rising exponentially, beginning with the most vulnerable.

As Nesrine Malik explains:

On July 29, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC—the world’s official famine watchdog—for the first time issued a famine alert for Gaza, as distinct from a warning, stating that:

Recent days have seen a tsunami of horrific headlines, illustrated by graphic photos of starving children. In the UK, the Guardian’s July 23 lead story blared: “‘We faced hunger before, but never like this’: skeletal children fill hospital wards as starvation grips Gaza.” The article was illustrated with a mother-and-dying-child image that seems destined to become as iconic as Nick Ut’s famous Vietnam War photo “Napalm Girl.”

The front page of the Daily Express—a right-wing populist tabloid—carried the same photo, captioning the image “For Pity’s Sake, Stop This Now.” The accompanying article was headlined “The suffering of little Muhammad clinging on to life in Gaza hell shames us all.” The paper’s head of news Callum Hoare posted on X:

Spain’s El País showed a child’s outstretched hand holding a crust of bread under the headline, “Hunger in Gaza sparks global outcry to stop the war.” India’s Economic Times paired a front-page editorial calling Israel’s actions “genocidal” with a photo of empty cooking pots outside a damaged building. The Washington Post led with “Mass Starvation Stalks Gaza” and a photo of a another Palestinian woman holding another emaciated infant.

Western newsrooms are no longer taken in by IDF propaganda videos purportedly showing “senior Hamas terrorists boasting about their meals in underground terror tunnels” while gorging on fresh fruit—a tall order, since Israel has been blockading the Strip since March 2. Nor are they uncritically accepting Israeli official statements as statements of fact, as most of them have shamefully done for the last two years.

BBC News—which has repeatedly, and justifiably, been accused of systematically downplaying Palestinian sufferings and whitewashing Israeli war crimes—issued a joint statement on July 24 with AFP, AP, and Reuters, which backhandedly conceded that the IDF indeed is using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. It began:

The statement neglected to mention that in the interests of keeping the genocidal truth under wraps, Israel has banned international media from Gaza and so far killed 232 local journalists in the course of its........

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