Starvation in Gaza

Yes! There is starvation in Gaza.

People are starving to death.

Innocent souls deprived of food, water, air, light, sanitation, privacy, human warmth. They are shackled, beaten, tortured and viciously abused. Their suffering is interminable… days, weeks, months, a year, more than a year of unbearable, indistinguishable days and nights.

They are hostages of Hamas.

Miraculous survivors of this murderous mistreatment bear witness. The pain of families whose loved ones are still in the hands of the assassins throbs and pounds their battered hearts.

Yes! There is a genocide in Gaza. Every one of those hostages is a target and a sample of the genocidal project. The genociders can’t exterminate the Jewish people in one fell swoop, so they exert the full force of their hatred on the captives.

We don’t count human beings. Each individual is unique. The death of one single starved hostage, this genocide one by one, is an indelible tragedy for his loved ones and a sorrow mourned by the whole community. When a captive is liberated, brought home to loving arms, the joy is boundless…but a shadow hangs over their blessed relief, haunted by the distress of those who are still in captivity.

How should we describe the suffering of Gaza’s civilian population? None of them live on half a pita a day, shut up in the depths of darkness, filthy, bitten by rats and bugs, sleeping on the hard damp ground, in chains, not free to go to the bathroom, to wash, to drink clean water, deprived of all human contact except with the evil creature that wants him dead, that wants to exterminate his people.

Gazans are civilians in a war-torn land. Yes and no. In this war, the distinction between civilians and combatants is blurred. The democratically elected Hamas government deliberately intermingles desperate families and ferocious killers in close quarters, living together in children’s bedrooms, hospitals, schools, and humanitarian tent camps.

Hamas does its utmost to ensure the suffering of Gazans. The misery of Palestinians in Gaza is acceptable to their fellow Muslims, acceptable to the putative intermediaries supposedly trying to bring an end to the war, accepted by the democracies and the international institutions that beg and exhort Israël to stop fighting, to cave in to Hamas, anything, just stop the war.

If we close our eyes and visualize the pressure exerted on the Jewish state since the infamous October 7th, we can measure its weight and dimensions. It’s a gigantic concrete block about the size of Russia. And what kind of force is put on Hamas? A pillow fight! And Hamas picks up the pillows and plumps up its sofas.

The world gets accustomed to this revolting state of affairs.

How do they dare say a word, a single word about the crying need for humanitarian aid for the Palestinians of Gaza without saying at the same time with the same voice that the captives must be decently fed? They need food and water. They need it now. Not theoretically, not eventually. Now. It is indecent to demand hundreds of truckloads of life-saving nourishment for Gaza without insisting that the hostages get their share of the rations.

There should be no talks, no negotiations, no ceasefire proposals, no promises of freeing hundreds of Palestinian prisoners with blood on their hands without first and beforehand demanding that the hostages be humanely nourished.

It’s so wearisome to keep repeating the same obvious truths for decades. We line up the facts, and they get scrambled again in the prevailing disjointed discourse. OK, let’s say it once more, briefly: monstrous sums of money are poured into the coffers of the Palestinian cause to no good end. It’s hijacked. Like the humanitarian aid trucked into Gaza since the atrocities of October 7th. Today, this is feeding Hamas. Every day for decades and years, it feeds the dream of destroying the Jewish state.

A black hole in the collective conscience.

A hostage, stricto sensu, is held as a bargaining chip to help the kidnapper achieve his goals. But if the goals are not negotiable, are the captives really hostages? Hamas aims, in the long term, to exterminate the Jews, erase them from the face of the earth, and, in the short term, to maintain military and political control in Gaza to use as a base of operations against Israël.
These conditions are unacceptable. There is no middle ground. The negotiations are fake.

Unable to satisfy its grand genocidal ambitions, the enemy plays them out in scale model…on the captives. Lost in the orgasmic pleasure of killing an Israeli slowly, mercilessly, day by day, minute by minute, ounce by ounce, the killers might be losing sight of their long-term goals. Running the risk of losing control of the Strip.

Especially now, with some twenty captives whose hearts are still beating. Their superhuman power of resistance could falter and fail. With no hostages, what would be left for Hamas to haggle over?

Though the genocidal motivations of this mass kidnapping are obvious, certain war-weary European powers dress it up with an invented palatable aspiration that they could satisfy with the fabrication of a Palestinian state. Knowing full well that the sole purpose of such a state would be to destroy and replace the Jewish state.

Which explains the implacable operation underway in the Gaza Strip.

“Never again” is not a solemn promise made by the civilized world. It’s not a UN guarantee. Not even a life-insurance policy drawn up by the American ally. “Never again” is a vow made by the Jewish people to themselves.

Israelis are the soldiers of this “Never Again.” They dare to defend themselves militarily and morally, generation after generation, to face mortal danger, to invent arts and arms of war, to not lose hope in unbearable situations, to not give up when indispensable loved ones are torn from their hearts, leaving them forever broken. “Resilience” is by far too weak to express the depth and breadth of the responsibility they shoulder.

In a way, the panic that grips the nations and pushes them to curse those they should recognize as comrades in arms is an indication of Israel’s strength. If an Islamized Brussels invaded France … No, there’s no valid comparison …

There’s something better: the war on our doorstep. The brutal rupture of the transatlantic alliance. Ukraine, fighting bravely to defend its existence. The European conscience, with a few exceptions, is in tune with this determination. But it can’t translate conscience into hard power. The geopolitical analysis is correct, but the hand is paralyzed. Europe is stuck in the role of a bystander witnessing what could be a tragic defeat with global consequences instead of rising to the challenge and acting with all its might to force Putin to retreat.

The Europe that can’t give Ukraine the decisive military support it needs to defeat Russia stubbornly denies Israel the moral support it deserves when it could deal a crushing blow to the Islamic Republic of Iran and its foreign battalions. Instead of helping Ukraine get back Crimea, Donbass and some blessed relief from violent aggression, European powers, including France, want to “recognize” a non-existent Palestinian state! Just what’s needed to show the forces of jihad the benefits they can reap from the abominable atrocities committed on October 7th .

Meanwhile, 14,000 Palestinian children will be dead in the next 48 hours.

What’s this? Artificial intelligence? An IT bug? A typographical error that multiplied the blood libel by 14,000?

No, it’s a communication from the UN.

And again, thanks to the UN, we have the extraordinary statistics on the genocide of Palestinians: 5,500 of the 50,000 women currently pregnant in Gaza will give birth in the coming month.

Interviewed on Libya’s Al-Tanasuh TV on March 30th 2025, Sami Abu Zuhri, head of the Hamas Political Department Abroad, took delight in announcing that 50,000 babies were born in Gaza during the war, matching exactly the number of martyrs that were killed.

Fortunately, we haven’t lost our sense of humor.

Translated by the author of the original French version published by Tribune Juive