Words won’t feed Gaza Strip

I have no words. I have a million words, I want to speak about Gaza, but what can I add about Gaza? More words won’t feed anyone, yet people are starving; no, being starved to death. Because this is an entirely manmade famine.

Just a few kilometres away, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) has 6 000 truckloads of food and medical supplies lined up to enter Gaza, but Israel blocks them. Even Unrwa’s own staff in Gaza are weak with hunger, though they still have salaries to buy food. The reality is there’s just no food.

Meanwhile, as over 100 aid agencies warned of a humanitarian catastrophe in the region, on Saturday, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government declared it would start airdropping wheat, sugar and tinned food, a sop to the international outcry.

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Here is a settlement of Palestinian refugees, packed in tight, with nowhere to go. It was always difficult, the political landscape intractable, rights and wrongs on both sides, and people – like me – were wary of saying anything because it was complex, fearing accusations of anti-Semitism, but now it’s become impossible.

Now it is a systematic attempt to destroy a particular group of people, also known as genocide. They say when someone tells you who they are, you should listen, so the recent words of far-right Israeli government minister Amichai Eliyahu should be noted.

“There is no nation that feeds its enemies,” he said on the radio, likening the situation to Russia feeding Ukraine, as if Gaza were an autonomous country, adding that the Israeli government was “rushing toward Gaza being wiped out”, and “driving out the population that educated its people on the ideas of Mein Kampf.”

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Netanyahu responded that this wasn’t government policy, but actions tell a different story. Eliyahu is correct about the decimation: 70% of buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed, over 58 000 are dead, 2 000 families have been entirely wiped out.

This is not a country they’re annihilating in Gaza so much as a vast refugee camp created after the 1948 Palestine War, which Israel has continued to encroach upon, control and occupy, contrary to international convention and law.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that existing arrest warrants for war crimes do not faze Netanyahu, who reasons his people were ever victimised. Yet he forgets that sometimes victims become abusers too.

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