Gaza is a ‘killing field’ where people are being starved. How long will the world tolerate this? | Arwa Mahdawi

Where do I even start? In recent weeks I’ve sat down to try and write about Gaza and, every time I steel myself to write about one atrocity, another atrocity is committed. Palestinian journalists have been burned alive, babies have frozen to death, medics have been executed and buried in mass graves, kids are being killed in their sleep. Meanwhile, in the US and Germany, speaking out about dead Palestinian babies can land you on a deportation list. Arguing that international human rights law should be respected can put you at risk of being snatched off the street and stuck in a detention centre.

I don’t know where to start and I don’t know what is really left to say at this point. After 18 months of endless carnage, it should be clear to everyone that this is not a war. That this is not self-defence. What is happening in Gaza is, quite simply, annihilation. A litany of genocide experts have stated this. Respected international organizations like Amnesty International have concluded that Israel is committing genocide – and yet our politicians are still funding this.

Palestinians aren’t just being exterminated with US-supplied bombs. The more insidious killer now is disease and starvation. On 2 March – more than a month ago – Israel cut off supplies to Gaza in an attempt to change the terms of the ceasefire agreement. Calling this an “aid blockade”, as headlines tend to do, doesn’t do justice to the horror of what is happening: this is not an “aid blockade” so much as it is a starvation campaign.

Gaza, after all, has been reduced to rubble; it’s not like there is food growing in the strip that people can rely on. An analysis of satellite imagery by the UN in November found that more than 90% of cattle had died and about 70% of land for crops in Gaza has been destroyed or damaged since the beginning of this iteration of the war in the territory.

Water is also being used as a weapon of war. In early March, a week after stopping any food or other humanitarian supplies from getting into Gaza, Israel cut off the electricity supply to Gaza’s main operational desalination plant. The situation now could not be more desperate. “Gaza is a killing field, and civilians are in an endless death loop,” the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said on Tuesday.

Emboldened by Donald Trump and his visions of building hotels and casinos on top of these killing fields, Israel is not even trying to hide its aims any more. It wants to rid Gaza of Palestinians and annex the West Bank. And it will starve, kill and terrorize Palestinians until they “voluntarily” agree to leave en masse to somewhere like Sudan or Somalia – those being a couple of the countries the US and Israel have recently floated as potential relocation areas.

“We will see to the general security in the Gaza Strip and will allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration,” Benjamin Netanyahu recently said. “This is the plan. We are not hiding this and are ready to discuss it at any time.”

The deputy parliament speaker Nissim Vaturi, meanwhile, recently went on Kol BaRama radio, to call for the Gazafication of the West Bank. “We need to separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza. We are being too considerate,” Vaturi said. “We will soon turn Jenin [in the West Bank] into Gaza,” he added.

If this is the first time you’ve seen this statement, by the way, it’s because it wasn’t covered by the same mainstream western outlets that have devoted thousands of words to asking if a college student saying “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call for genocide. Although, to be fair, if the western media did cover every public incitement to genocide made by Israeli politicians and thought leaders, then there would be no space to cover anything else.

Rather than calling out these incitements, certain elements of the media seem keen to normalize the people making them. Last month, for example, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s former defense minister, joined the ADL for a fireside chat in New York with CNN’s Bianna Golodryga. The international criminal court, let me remind you, has issued an arrest warrant for Gallant for war crimes. The court found “reasonable grounds” to believe Gallant and Netanyahu “bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts”. CNN, I should note, has done some excellent reporting on Gaza. But for the network to sit down for a cozy “fireside chat” with Gallant – while Palestinian journalists are being burned alive, no less – is appalling.

Normally, when I write an opinion piece, it feels like I’m having a little tete-a-tete with the reader. But I don’t really know who I’m writing this piece for. If you’ve read up to here then there’s a good chance you already agree with me, that you’re already appalled by what’s happening and that you’re using your own voice as best you can. And if you are not devastated at this point, then there is simply no convincing you to care.

I have written a lot of op-eds where I’m essentially just begging people – including some of my colleagues in the western media – to give a damn about Palestinian suffering. To remember that Palestinians are humans too. To remember that starving civilians is a war crime, one which should not be sanitized with the passive voice and obfuscating language. To understand that this isn’t some distant foreign policy issue: this genocide is US-taxpayer funded. Meanwhile, unprecedented attempts to suppress free speech in the US on Palestine have turned this into a domestic issue.

I’m done begging people to care about Palestinians now. I’m writing this not because I hope to change any minds, but because the only power I have – the only power that many of us have – is to continually raise our voices and say that we do not consent to this.

“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this,” the journalist Omar El Akkad wrote. When that day comes, nobody can pretend they didn’t know.