A four-year-old Palestinian girl who died of malnutrition and lack of medical treatment in Gaza. Photo: UNRWA.

“We live in an oligarchy, but with the humidity, it feels like a dictatorship.”

– Judah Friedlander

This was the week the worms turned. Some of them, anyway: A super majority of Americans now oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza; Bari Weiss and Donald Trump admitted Palestinians are starving (if not that they are being starved or pointing the finger at who is starving them); France, the UK and Canada announced they are ready to endorse Palestinian statehood next month at the UN; a majority of Senate Democrats voted to halt (offensive) weapons shipments to Israel; Israel’s two leading human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, finally concluded that Israel is committing genocide (Bernie Sanders still hasn’t); Zohran Mamdani is leading the polls among Jewish voters in the NYC mayoral race; Barack Obama finally said something, though exactly what isn’t quite clear; Obama’s former fixer and hatchet man Rahm Emanuel put the blame “on Israel’s doorstep…where it belongs;” and the New York Times printed a column by acclaimed Holocaust scholar Omar Bartov explaining why Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Impressive. Yet the killing and dying continues.

Despite the impression given by the rush of politicians and pundits this week expressing shock about photos of emaciated kids in Gaza, people do not begin to starve to death in a matter of days. Death by starvation usually occurs over a period of months. So it is in Gaza, where only two days after the attacks of October 13, 2023, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced Israel’s intention to impose a forced famine on Gaza. Gallant said what Israel was going to do, then Israel did it.

Since then, Israel has tightly restricted the flow of food and water into the Strip, before imposing a total embargo in March of this year. The consequences on the health of Palestinians in Gaza were immediate. By January 2024, UN famine researchers began to detect loss of weight and muscle density in Palestinians across Gaza. In December 2024, desperate to keep its weapons sales to Israel rolling, the Biden administration suppressed a report from its own State Department determining that conditions in northern Gaza exceeded the threshold for famine. Unfortunately for Biden, the report leaked and some of its authors resigned in protest. So people have known the awful truth for more than eight months, even as many continued to publicly deny it.

Then in March 2025, Israel imposed a total blockade on any food or water entering Gaza. Again, this savage act was no secret. It was publicly announced by Bibi himself, who claimed that forcing Palestinians to go without food would make them more likely to “voluntarily” leave Gaza. In other words, ethnic cleansing, or genocide, if you will, either by migration or death. As a consequence, the warnings from the UN, the World Food Program, the International Red Cross, humanitarian aid groups and medical workers on the ground about the entire population of Gaza–more than two million Palestinians–being in the grip of famine became more and more dire.

Yet only a couple of weeks ago, 14 US senators–half of them Democrats (Schumer, Schiff, Coons, Cantwell, Rosen, Klobochar, and Booker) feted and proudly stood for a photo-op with Benjamin Netanyahu. (Well, Booker tried to hide his face behind another senator, but that only served to emphasize his consciousness of guilt.) For months, these politicians and policy makers have stayed muted as Israel cut off food, water, and formula to infants, toddlers, and nursing mothers. Now, as their weakened systems shut down and they’ve started dying en masse, as predicted, no amount of performative ass-covering can exculpate them from their deep complicity in one of the most horrific crimes imaginable: children being forced to starve to death while huge stacks of aid pallets and trucks filled with food are only miles away.

How long did it take the press to go from helping manufacture a case to invade Iraq into suddenly realizing there was no case for going to war in Iraq and that they needed to start covering their asses for their complicity in the making of a catastrophe? Was Abu Ghraib the turning point (April 2004)? The leaking of the first Torture Memo (June 2004)? The Sunni Awakening (2005)? Now, here we are again.

Maryam Alwan: “As a student protester who went viral for getting arrested at the Columbia encampment, I am seeing posts saying that we were right—and I don’t want to hear it. The only thing I want to see is everyone mobilizing in the streets right now. We do not have the privilege of despair.”

Adam Tooze on Israel’s manufactured famine in Gaza:

Q. Across the hot spots of the world in 2025, what is the percentage of the population that is at risk?

Adam Tooze: In Nigeria, mainly in the north, it is one-sixth of the population. In Myanmar and the DRC, it is roughly a quarter of the population. In Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan, and Haiti–the places most commonly cited in arguments about the application of “special standards” to Israel–the share of the population at risk is between 49 and 57 percent. In Gaza, the share is 100 percent. The risk of famine is total.

Of the Palestinians who have starved to death in Gaza since the beginning of the war, 80 percent........

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