In his recently published book ‘Catastrophe Nakba II’, Fintan Drury charts the first year of Israel’s response to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and sets it in the context of the 1948 Nakba and the history since. 

Here, he reflects on the famine conditions in Gaza as an Irishman whose great-grandparents survived Ireland’s famine of the 1840s.

- Famine, Liam O’Flaherty.

THE POET JOHN Montague wrote that these and the other characters in Liam O’Flaherty’s story Famine undergo ‘heartbreaking travails that anticipate the Holocaust, including the burial of their dead, without ceremony in mass graves.’

The Holocaust, in the scale of its descent of human behaviour to an unprecedented level of barbarism, could hardly have been truly anticipated, as Montague suggested. Yet, grotesque as it is, fast approaching a century after the Jewish people suffered the Holocaust, the state that claims their identity is today deliberately taking humanity to unconscionable depths of depravity.

O’Flaherty’s wonderful, if sad, book, first published in 1973, brings the almost unimaginable horror of Ireland’s Great Famine to life, making it a vivid reality. Even without it and other more prosaic accounts of that time, the famine of the 1840s would, for all Irish people, be part of our ethnic DNA.

In historical terms, it’s just a heartbeat ago; those of us whose great-grandparents lived through it carry its corrosiveness in our bones. We have no recent experience of war; our size and our remoteness have inured us from that trauma for many generations. Famine is another matter entirely. An Gorta Mór, the Great Famine, was a period of mass starvation that killed more than a million people, with over twice that number forced to leave the country, most never to return.

Mothers hold their emaciated children at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, Gaza, Palestine, on July 21, 2025. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

The Famine was the most catastrophic event in our history, which may be why we’re consumed by the latest phase of Israel’s genocide in Palestine – the famine now devouring what remains of the spirit of the traumatised people of Gaza. There’s one significant difference between our ancestors’ experience and what the Palestinians are enduring today. Ireland’s famine was due to a combination of random circumstances, including the neglect of colonial Britain, but what we’re witnessing in Gaza is an induced famine, one deliberately deployed by Israel as another means by which it hopes to achieve the Zionist objective of exterminating all Palestinians.

In my book, Catastrophe Nakba II, I refer to how there was clear evidence of an emerging famine in Gaza as early as a year ago and how the West, most especially the government of the United States, chose to ignore the pleadings of a whole swathe of witnesses who prophesied that, without intervention, a great number of Gazans were going to die of starvation.

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In late spring 2024, then-US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was advised by his department of emerging famine conditions; he chose to........

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