(Dobbs) First, Bombs And Bullets. Now, Starvation.
What Israel is achieving is a higher level of misery, a higher rate of death, and a higher degree of hate.
What the hell is Israel trying to do???
Forgive me for asking the question so crudely, but I don’t know any other way to ask it. And I certainly don’t know the answer. Does Israel?
From the get-go, after Hamas mauled the Jewish state on October 7th, 2023, I have been supportive. Israel had to wipe out its enemy because if it didn’t disembowel Hamas, Hamas would keep trying to disembowel Israel.
But it has gone beyond that. Far beyond that. Israel hasn’t just been killing off Hamas. It has been killing off Palestinians— civilian Palestinians, innocent Palestinians— who are not part of Hamas. First with bombs and bullets. Now, whether or not by design, with starvation.
Cynics argue that by failing to stand up to the terrorist group that seized their territory 18 years ago, Palestinians in Gaza are all part of Hamas. I reject that. From my own reporting from Gaza over the years, I say with some certainty, it’s just not true. When the Palestinian Authority proved so corrupt in the mid-2000s that food and medicine from sympathetic donors weren’t reaching the people in Gaza, Hamas stepped in and revived the flow. What Gazans told me was, they abhorred Hamas’s fanaticism, but appreciated the food it put on their tables again.
They might still abhor Hamas, especially after the savage storm it has brought down on them. But it’s a fair guess that now, they abhor Israel even more.
Why wouldn’t they? According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, nearly 60,000 people— men, women, and children— have died since the war started.
It doesn’t break down the figures between combatants and non-combatants but it’s a safe bet that the majority are civilians, not soldiers. What’s more, you can accuse the ministry of grossly exaggerating casualty figures from Israeli attacks, but even if you cut those statistics by half, tens of thousands is still a staggering number of deaths in a territory of just 140 square miles. That’s only twice the size of Washington DC.
And now there’s a new cause of death in Gaza.
For more than 21 months, Palestinians have been dying from bombs and bullets. But now, add starvation. You can’t just hang this on the bias of the Gaza health ministry. Death by starvation in the Gaza Strip is a real thing. The chief nurse at one of the territory’s remaining hospitals says that on Monday alone, 25 women and 10 children showed up at its door, “Some…. shivering from hunger.” For the children, this portends diminished growth and diminished intellect, even if they survive.
On and off, Israel has established blockades, which severely limit the number of aid trucks coming into Gaza, which severely limits the amount of food and fuel and even fresh water for the two million people trapped there. The World Food Program said this week that Gaza’s population has reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row.” Foreign ministers from 25 nations allied with the West issued a joint statement this week saying that Israel is “drip feeding” aid into the Gaza Strip.
For a long time, because Hamas started this war, I’ve given Israel the benefit of the doubt. Now, although I hate to say this, Israel no longer deserves it. There are children among the casualties. They’ve been indiscriminately executed in Israel’s interest of killing off Hamas. Israel’s original goals might not have substantially changed, but its morals have. It has cast off too many restraints in the pursuit of those goals. It might have spared the lives of Palestinians who had nothing to do with the kidnappings and massacres of October 7th. But it didn’t. Sometimes its excuse for strikes that kill dozens at a time is that it had targeted a terrorist from Hamas. But that violates the whole principle of proportionality in war, which prohibits casualties from an attack that exceed the benefit to be gained.
Now, the same principle might apply to what’s happening to people who are desperate to feed their families. Day after day there are stories about civilians walking for miles when they’ve heard reports of Israel-approved aid stations distributing food. So far, reportedly more than a thousand never got to walk back. According to U.N. relief agencies on the ground in Gaza, as people have mobbed the aid trucks, they’ve been shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. The Israel Defense Forces says all they fire are “warning shots” to eliminate “an immediate threat” to their troops. If the figure of a thousand dead is anywhere near accurate, that’s an unconscionable number of “warning shots.” In just such an incident last Sunday, the reported death toll rose by another 79.
The commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency called these aid stations a “sadistic death trap.” Earlier in the war, I would have dismissed such words as hyperbole. I don’t any more. It’s anarchy in Gaza.
It hardly increases confidence that Israel is hoping to ease the starvation that for the mere act of criticizing its government— for calling its policies “weaponized hunger”— this week it refused to renew the visa of the U.N. official who has been in charge of trying to distribute aid that gets into Gaza. Or that this week Israeli forces attacked a shelter for staffers of the World Health Organization, and the U.N.’s Office for Project Services.
Everyone’s playing the blame game, and inarguably there is blame to go around, but the only party to this war that can provide at least some relief is Israel. It’s not doing it.
What it’s doing is reviving accusations of genocide.
A year and a half ago, South Africa brought a charge of genocide against Israel to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Today, people are talking about it again. But just as I reject the allegation that all Palestinians support the terrorists, I reject the accusation of genocide. Where it falls short is in the definition of the word itself. In 1948, in the wake of the Nazi atrocities during World War II, the United Nations defined genocide this way: “Genocide means intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
That clearly was the aim and intent of the Nazis.
But if that were Israel’s aim with the Palestinians, the death toll in Gaza would be more like 600,000 than 60,000, or maybe all two million of its inhabitants. You could argue that some of the radical declarations by Israeli government ministers at the start of this war make the case that Israel set out to do exactly that. Two days after the massacres by Hamas, Israel’s defense minister said there would be “a complete siege” of Gaza with every iota of food and water, electricity and fuel, cut off.
If Israel was intent on committing genocide, it could have and, by now, would have finished the job.
In a commentary titled “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza,” respected conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens argued this week, “Genocide does not mean simply ‘too many civilian deaths’ — a heartbreaking fact of nearly every war, including the one in Gaza. It means seeking to exterminate a category of people for no other reason than that they belong to that category.”
So, what the hell is Israel trying to do??? There are several possibilities, from freeing the hostages to eliminating every last fighter from Hamas to forcing the whole population to leave the Gaza Strip. So far, it’s not achieving any of that. What it’s achieving is a higher level of misery, a higher rate of death, and a higher degree of hate among the two million people who live there, many or most of whom had nothing to do with starting this war.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 39-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
You can learn more at GregDobbs.net
I wish i could feel differently but agree strongly with your essay. It’s not an Israel i recognize.
Stop with the semantics. Does it matter to a starving child if what is happening can properly be called genocide? It is clearly deliberate mass starvation. And IDF target practice.