Walking Corpses
Amjad Iraqi
In the last week it has seemed as though everyone in Gaza has been convulsed by terrible hunger. Exhausted Palestinians – including friends and colleagues of mine – can feel their bodies breaking down. They are watching children and the elderly fainting on the streets or writhing in pain. Ruwaida Amer, a journalist I used to work with who is currently in Khan Younis refugee camp, put it simply: ‘I am so hungry. I’ve never meant those words in the way I do now. They carry a kind of humiliation that I can’t fully describe ... we wake up thinking only of one thing: how to find something to eat.’ Social media is filled with images of skeletal infants and crying toddlers begging their parents for food. People are beginning to die from malnutrition, many of them children. Without immediate intervention, numbers are likely to rise sharply in the coming days and weeks.
Famine experts warned that this would happen. In early March, in the middle of negotiations to continue a ceasefire deal with Hamas, Israel blocked all aid from entering Gaza. A couple of weeks later, Israel relaunched its military offensive with even greater intensity. When it partially lifted the blockade in late May, the trickle of aid that it allowed in was directed almost exclusively through four fortified distribution centres run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a dubious US-backed private contractor, under the protection of the IDF. The results were as predictable as they were disastrous: at the GHF hubs, soldiers fired at chaotic crowds, killing dozens every day; desperate civilians trampled one another as they tried to reach boxes of dried food; criminals stole and profiteered from looted goods. Most of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents have seen none of this aid.
This experiment in ‘calibrated deprivation’, as my organisation, the International Crisis Group, describes it, has been proved reckless and catastrophic. Israel seems to believe that by overhauling Gaza’s aid infrastructure and allocating a reduced calorie count for each person, it can keep the weakened population subjugated without plunging them into full-fledged famine. Officially this policy is intended to strip Hamas of its governing capacity and force it to surrender, or at least to accept Israel’s demands. But starvation isn’t static; it worsens with every hour. Time is running out.
Far-right politicians in Israel, many of them in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, have made no secret of that fact that they hope starvation will encourage the ‘voluntary emigration’ of Palestinians from the territory. Netanyahu himself has endorsed this, repeatedly referring to it as the ‘Trump plan’ in a bid to retain US favour. Some officials have been even more blunt, calling for the ‘erasure’ of Gaza. Israeli citizens living in abundance just half an hour’s drive away are mostly reacting to the disaster with indifference, denial or worse, continuing to justify nearly seven hundred days of unprecedented warfare as an appropriate response to Hamas’s assault on 7 October 2023. Few care to hear the International Court of Justice’s warning in January 2024, or those of many experts worldwide, that what is happening in Gaza may amount to genocide.
Other Israeli officials, particularly among the upper echelons of the military, are worried about the political and security consequences of uncontrolled starvation, including the prospect of war crimes investigations abroad. But policies built on myths are hard to revise. The repeated accusation that Hamas had systematically diverted aid is unfounded, according to many agencies with experience in Gaza. Rather, Hamas authorities worked with local clans to crack down on criminal groups looting aid; some of those groups, as Israeli officials admitted, have been quietly supported by the IDF to undermine Hamas from within. And contrary to Israel’s claims, Gaza’s pre-existing system of aid distribution, run by the UN and international NGOs across four hundred hubs, worked efficiently despite tight restrictions.
Governments in Europe and elsewhere have denounced Israel’s starvation policy, insisting that the war must end. France, which is co-chairing a summit with Saudi Arabia to revive the two-state solution, just announced that it will recognise a Palestinian state. But such diplomatic gestures are a far cry from using the material leverage these countries possess. Israel’s allies are still buying time for Israel to change course or come to a deal with Hamas over how many trucks to allow in, as though food were a legitimate bargaining chip. Gazans cannot afford to wait for either. Every day that foreign governments stand by, devastating starvation becomes harder to avert.
The worst is still preventable. After finding it in breach of its human rights obligations under the Association Agreement, the EU struck a deal with Israel earlier this month to allow in more aid. But the divided bloc, which is Israel’s largest trading partner, is still choosing not to exercise its full power – trade suspensions, sanctions, arms embargoes. Arab states decry the war but are also reluctant to apply real pressure, partly for fear of upsetting Washington: none has suspended even part of its normalisation agreement with Israel. The Trump administration repeatedly claims that it wants to broker an end to the war, but defaults to Israel’s side at every turn.
‘People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive,’ an UNRWA worker told the head of the agency, Philippe Lazzarini, yesterday, ‘they are walking corpses.’ It should never have come to this. Thousands of trucks carrying food, fuel and medicine are waiting to enter Gaza. The sea offers further routes if needed. Experienced local and international aid workers are ready to help. But nothing will change so long as Israel is allowed to keep Gaza’s gates shut.
Comments
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26 July 2025
at
12:42am
Eddie
says:
Free Palestine.
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26 July 2025
at
5:35am
Podge
says:
Israel is profoundly evil.
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26 July 2025
at
5:27pm
MattG
says:
my Yiddish teacher, a Lithuanian rabbi who had managed to survive Theresienstadt, taught that the state of Israel, and Zionismus in general, is a blasphemy
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26 July 2025
at
8:50pm
dmr
says:
@
MattG
That the foundation of a Jewish ethno-state has been proven to be a bad thing on the whole recent events will have left little room for doubt. True believers, hastening to salvage what can be plucked from the moral wreck that is the contemporary State of Israel, will point among much else to the country's martial prowess as to its undeniably splendid achievements in science, technology and education, at the same time as they (rightly) celebrate such accomplishments as the revival of Hebrew as a national language ; they see however with the eye of faith and through a rose-tinted lens. The disenchanted can be forgiven for thinking that the debit side of the ledger outweighs the credit, by far. As anyone with eyes to see knows, the entire order of things - in the West at any rate - is at sixes and sevens nowadays owing to Israel's bloodthirsty aggression and its commitment to racial supremacy. We are all living out their far-reaching consequences, they reverberate however faintly or obliquely in our everyday existence; it's fair to say nobody and nothing can claim to be unaffected.
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26 July 2025
at
9:55pm
stettiner
says:
@
dmr
Let's found another Arab ethno-state instead, then. Will be much better.
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26 July 2025
at
10:13pm
dmr
says:
@
stettiner
By Jew and Gentile the State of Israel will come to be seen by future generations as a wrong turning; a brief episode in the history of the Jews, who will continue to flourish long after the adventure of political Zionism, doomed from the start and the source and cause of so much trouble, has come to its fated end.
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26 July 2025
at
11:22pm
dmr
says:
@
dmr
Recte: a brief and tragic episode.
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27 July 2025
at
6:50am
MattG
says:
@
dmr
I agree with you but I tried to make a different point.
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27 July 2025
at
7:06am
MattG
says:
@
stettiner
"Let's found another Arab ethno-state instead, then"
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27 July 2025
at
8:06am
stettiner
says:
@
MattG
See, @dmr?
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27 July 2025
at
3:54pm
dmr
says:
@
stettiner
My second comment I stand by; my first (and badly written), I disown if all it has done is attract the inane and unintelligible responses of such as Mr Stettiner, the sort of reader whose self-appointed task consists of keeping his eyes peeled for for "anti-Israel" sentiment in the LRB.
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27 July 2025
at
7:17pm
stettiner
says:
@
dmr
One more proof that each time you scratch a surface of an anti-Zionist, underneath you find a Jew hater convinced he's a normal person...
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28 July 2025
at
8:38pm
steve kay
says:
@
stettiner
Oh dear, I must introduce you to my profoundly anti- Zionist Jewish friends. And some of them are women.
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29 July 2025
at
9:39am
stettiner
says:
@
steve kay
The moment the Jewish women you know say "rape is not resistance", they'll cease to be your friends, no matter how profoundly anti-Zionist they are...
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29 July 2025
at
3:07pm
steve kay
says:
@
stettiner
Oh dear.
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28 July 2025
at
1:47pm
Graucho
says:
Ethnic cleansing can be traced back to the disappearance of the Neanderthals. One is hard put to think of any modern nation whose history has not been stained by the practice at some point in time. Israel has been practicing it covertly since its foundation, but as one famous Jew said "let he who is without sin cast the first stone". Now that it is happening overtly there is little point in insulting the intelligence of those who possess some by pretending it isn't, for now the scales have fallen from the eyes of many. When all this gets written up a couple of generations down the line one hopes there will be an examination on how the U.S.A. was conned into funding this sordid project. Machiavelli was a mere beginner in comparison.
Read moreArendt among others ( preceded in this almost half a century before by Ahad Ha' Am) was prophetic in forewarning on the eve of its establishment that a state exclusively for Jews on land inhabited by - and at the expense of - another people was a formula for disaster; the upshot has been suffering, injustice and unimaginable cruelty. and has left unresolved what the originating act was meant to settle once and for all - the role and future of the Jews in the modern world.
An unutterably sad state of affairs. At the end of this particular tunnel there appears to be no light, none whatever...
Funny you mentioned tunnels, by the way...
Sadly, we have reached the stage when Zionism is widely considered the only legitimate form of Jewish existence. For example, some universities punish and deplatform all activities which are not in accordance with the IHRA. Another example is the Labour Party which recognizes the Jewish Labour Movement (formerly Poale Zion) as the only legitimate Jewish voice.
This being the LRB, I feel entitled say: My favorite book on the subject of identity is the Wondering Stars Anthology ed by Jack Dann. But I know that alterative, non-Zionist identities by writers like Isaak Asimov, I B Singer would these days deplatformed. Don't you think your quote "a state exclusively for Jews on land inhabited by - and at the expense of - another people was a formula for disaster" would be banned from the Guardian these days?
Israel has reached a stage where some in Knesset and on social media can even message Olmert, a former head of government from a Likud tradition, as antisemitic.
you are trying to misdirect a human rights debate about genocide by employing 19th-century ethno-racist categories.
In your critic of Israel as a Jewish ethno-state, you are employing 19th-century ethno-racist categories. Do better!
A nation capable of replicating without a twinge of conscience the behaviour of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in the Gouvernement-General in 1943 is one that has forfeited its right to exist in the minds of all normal people. They can be forgiven for withdrawing from it the esteem and solidarity they were once prepared to extend to it almost without demur.
Simply that is all I have wanted to say.