(Dobbs) “That’s real starvation stuff…. You can’t fake that.”

Trump is less divorced from reality than Netanyahu.

Everyone has their breaking point. Even prime ministers and presidents.

Last week, during the drumbeat of stories about starvation in the Gaza Strip, French president Emmanuel Macron put up a post on X that said, “I have decided that France will recognize the State of Palestine.”

Then yesterday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer followed suit. Starmer called the situation in Gaza “simply intolerable” and said that unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire, and to a pledge not to annex any more of the West Bank, the United Kingdom also will recognize a Palestinian state. Back at Downing Street after his meeting in Scotland with President Trump, Starmer declared, “Statehood is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people.” This from the leader of the nation that pushed more than a hundred years ago for a “national home for the Jewish people.”

Trump himself, aboard Air Force One on his way home, didn’t link arms with his French and British counterparts. He told reporters, "I’m not in that camp, to be honest.” His secretary of state, Marco Rubio, made it clear on X that at least for now, the U.S. will not go that far. “This reckless decision,” he wrote, “only serves Hamas propaganda and sets back peace. It is a slap in the face to the victims of October 7th.”

But at least Trump has, in his own inelegant way, acknowledged that the starvation in Gaza is a crisis. After seeing television reports from the ground there, he said, “That’s real starvation stuff…. You can’t fake that.” He even invoked his wife’s sympathy for what she has seen: “She thinks it’s terrible. And she sees the same pictures that you see, that we all see. And I think everybody, unless they’re pretty cold-hearted, or worse than that, nuts, there’s nothing you can say other than it’s terrible when you see the kids.”

Still though, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu has divorced himself from reality. He insisted on Monday against so much evidence, ”There is no starvation in Gaza.” Trump was asked if he agreed. “I don’t know. Based on television, I would say not particularly, because those children look very hungry.”

Very hungry indeed. One worker with the U.N. Relief and Works Agency says there are people in Gaza who "are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.” The World Food Program reports that a third of them go for days without a morsel of food.

There are still deniers living in Netanyahu’s camp. After I wrote last Friday, “Death by starvation in the Gaza Strip is a real thing,” several readers sent me essays that called it a lie. One asked why the photos out of Gaza only show children who are down to skin and bones. One laid even those pictures on A.I.

It’s another case of, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?”

The human implications of starvation in Gaza are immediate. Accounts from the ground say roughly 150 malnourished people already have died. Their immunity is weakened, their body starts consuming itself, their organs shut down, and they die. I saw the bodies of IRA hunger strikers in Northern Ireland who had starved themselves to death, and they were some of the most petrifying corpses I’ve ever seen.

Up against the war’s overall death toll compiled by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which it now puts at more than 60,000, including non-combatants and combatants alike— and remember, if the ministry is not to be trusted, even cutting that number in half would yield a horrific number— 150 deaths don’t sound like much. There are still more people killed by bullets and bombs. But you can add in the number of Palestinians who’ve been shot to death while descending on aid stations because within their families, starvation was imminent. That’s a thousand more. Reportedly another 19 were shot at food kitchens just yesterday.

But there are political implications too. An independent Palestinian state, recognized by the wider world, has been on and off the table for decades. Beginning in the 1970s and clear into this century, I covered efforts to create an independent state where, in the ideal outcome, Palestinians and Jews would live in peaceful coexistence. Israelis always were wary, and with decades of terrorist attacks against them, they had reason to be, but the level-headed ones called it the lesser of two evils. The greater evil was the status quo, where Israel controls the lives of every Palestinian and because of that, arguably most Palestinians resent and detest the Israelis.

The attacks by Hamas on October 7th brought that home.

When French President Macron made his announcement last week about recognizing a Palestinian state, Israel’s Netanyahu called it existentially dangerous, “a launchpad to annihilate Israel.” Where he’s got it wrong is this: there is no Palestinian state today, yet Hamas used the Gaza Strip as a launchpad to try to annihilate Israel. An independent Palestinian state eventually might— might— take some of the heat off.

With or without President Trump, there is momentum among our allies for an independent state. Not that it might make any difference, but European governments in Norway, Spain, and Ireland already had announced their support, along with roughly 140 other members of the United Nations. Today, France and Saudi Arabia will end their three-day conference at the U.N. in New York to revive the search for what’s long been known as the “two-state solution.”

The Saudis are important parties in the equation of peace in the Middle East— especially important to the Israelis— and the Saudi foreign minister said as the conference opened, “This is not merely a political stance, but a firm conviction that an independent Palestinian state is the true key to peace in the region.”

That mirrors what the longtime Middle East envoy, Ambassador Dennis Ross, wrote earlier this month in The Washington Post: “A ‘one-state solution’ is no solution at all, providing instead a sure recipe for forever war. Palestinians will never give up their national identity and will continue to resist. And their resistance will continue to fuel radicalism across the region.”

Whether it was years of consideration about the creation of a Palestinian state, or shock this month from seeing children starving just across the fence from a prosperous Israel, President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer now are voting with their feet to avoid a “forever war.” Trump’s not onboard…. but maybe that sentence should say, “not onboard yet.” Unlike Netanyahu’s divorce from reality, maybe finally Trump will embrace it. Given his erratic way of making decisions, maybe seeing “real starvation stuff” will move him too and when Donald Trump is moved, no one can predict what he’ll do.

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