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Gaza City Under Siege: Starvation, Siege Warfare, And A Blueprint For Depopulation.

Kamran Faqir 0

Investigative Journalist:

Kamran Faqir

Press Release: Veritas Press C.I.C. Author: Kamran Faqir Article Date Published: 21 Aug 2025 at 15:17 GMT Category: Middle East | Palestine-Gaza | US-Israel At War Source(s): Veritas Press C.I.C. | Multi News Agencies

Israel has launched the opening phase of a planned ground takeover of Gaza City, calling up an additional 60,000 reservists as bombardment intensifies across Sabra, Tuffah, Shujayea and Zeitoun. UN agencies and medical staff warn that already malnourished children will not survive a new round of forced displacement. Gaza’s Health Ministry says two more Palestinians died of famine in the past 24 hours, raising recorded hunger deaths to 271, including 112 children, amid a broader death toll surpassing 100,000 since October 2023.

Method, Not Mishap: The Architecture of Starvation.

UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini, speaking in Geneva, called the crisis a “manufactured and fabricated famine,” reporting a six-fold rise in child malnutrition in Gaza City since March. “Many will simply not have the strength to undergo a new displacement. Many of them will not survive,” he said, urging emergency corridors as the offensive moves in. Israel’s military liaison (COGAT) disputes that it restricts aid, but UNRWA’s trend data and field testimony point to deliberate deprivation.

At Nasser Hospital, doctors describe a daily stream of severely wasted toddlers. “They arrive too late to save,” one paediatrician told the Associated Press, as the U.N. logged over 12,000 acute malnutrition cases in children under five in July alone. Prime Minister Netanyahu has denied a hunger crisis; clinicians on the wards say otherwise.

The Offensive Plan: Encirclement, Demolition, Displacement.

Israeli media and international outlets report the government has greenlit a Gaza City operation, often referred to as “Gideon’s Chariots/Gideon’s Chariot” with 60,000 reservists called up for the push. Military briefings describe isolating districts, then “clearing” blocks; residents describe something simpler: “They bomb, we run, they bulldoze what’s left,” a Gaza City shopkeeper told local stringers as families fled Sabra after overnight strikes.

The tactics have a familiar pattern: concentrated fire on dense neighbourhoods, successive evacuation orders, then systematic demolitions that erase the possibility of return. Witnesses in Tuffah and Shujayea say multi-story homes and municipal services are levelled “street by street,” a practice that urban-warfare analysts say aligns with depopulation by design rather than incidental damage.

Case Study, Sabra: Civilian Targets, Children Among The Dead.

Hospital sources at al-Ahli and Shifa have repeatedly reported fatal strikes in Sabra. Reuters documented at least five killed at a sandwich shop in Sabra during an earlier escalation; local medics now report additional strikes that killed women and children this week. “We pulled four children from the rubble,” a paramedic said, asking not to be named for security reasons.

The cumulative picture from field hospitals is consistent: civilians killed in homes and in queues for aid. “This is a killing field,” a Gaza City emergency responder said by phone after back-to-back retrievals in Zeitoun and Jabalia.

Aid Lines Turned Kill Zones:

Beyond starvation, multiple investigations allege repeated shootings at or near aid distribution points. Haaretz reported that some IDF units were ordered to fire on unarmed crowds near food sites; AP and The Guardian logged incidents where people seeking flour or canned goods were gunned down or shelled “on their way to aid.” “I ran with my hands up,” one survivor told a hospital intake worker in Khan Younis. “The bullets followed us.” The IDF has denied a policy to target civilians; the pattern of incidents remains under investigation.

The Numbers The War Produces:

  • Hunger deaths: 271 recorded, including 112 children, per Gaza’s Health Ministry.
  • Overall toll: approximately 62,192 killed and 157,000+ injured since Oct. 7, 2023, according to health authorities and local media agencies. Hospitals reported 70 bodies and 356 wounded in the last 24 hours alone.
  • Reservists: 60,000 called up for the Gaza City push, confirmed across Israeli and international outlets.

What Israel Says, And What The Ground Shows:

Government statements frame the operation as necessary to “obliterate Hamas” and dismantle its command tunnels; officials insist humanitarian corridors exist and accuse Hamas of diverting aid. Yet UN field teams describe access “shrinking by the day,” with one in five children in Gaza City now malnourished. “When coping mechanisms fail and access to care disappears, famine unfolds,” UNRWA warned in late July.

COGAT says aid volumes have increased and blames insecurity and theft. On the ground, Gaza’s media office counters that only 250 trucks entered over three days, far below needs, with nutritional staples blocked and convoys looted amid chaos. Independent verification is hard under bombardment; what is verifiable is the soaring child wasting seen by hospital clinicians.

Legal Lens: Starvation As A Method Of Warfare.

International humanitarian law prohibits the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and requires effective facilitation of relief. Amnesty and other monitors have previously documented patterns of strikes that suggest systemic disregard for civilian life. Lazzarini’s “manufactured famine” charge, paired with recurring attacks on people waiting for food, raises grave legal exposure for those planning and executing the campaign.

Eyewitness And Clinical Voices (Short File):

  • UNRWA (Geneva): “Many [children] will simply not have the strength to undergo a new displacement… Many will not survive.”
  • Paediatrician, Nasser Hospital: “They arrive too late to save.” (AP interview summary; name withheld).
  • Gaza City responder: “This is a killing field.” (phone account compiled with hospital logs).
  • Aid-line survivor: “I ran with my hands up… the bullets followed us.” (hospital intake account; corroborated by pattern of incidents in press reports).

Accountability Questions To Watch:

  1. Orders and Rules of Engagement: What written directives governed the use of live fire at aid queues? (Haaretz reporting suggests explicit orders; official disclosure would be decisive.)
  2. Targeting Process in Dense Districts: What was the collateral-damage estimate for strikes in Sabra and Zeitoun, and were feasible precautions taken?
  3. Humanitarian Access Metrics: Truck counts, commodity mix (especially therapeutic foods/formula), and last-mile security guarantees should be published daily by all parties claiming to facilitate aid.
  4. Depopulation Effects: With “systematic demolitions” reported, what restitution/return framework, if any, exists for residents after clearance operations?

Bottom Line:

Taken together, encirclement, sustained strikes on dense civilian areas, constrained relief, and repeated violence around aid, this is not merely a brutal battlefield. It is a policy architecture that predictably generates starvation and flight. As one UN official put it, famine here is not a natural calamity; it is “made.” The offensive now rolling into Gaza City will test, in real time, whether the laws meant to protect civilians hold any practical force.

Conclusion: Gaza As A Case Of Genocide In Real Time.

What is unfolding in Gaza City is not merely the devastation of war; it bears the unmistakable hallmarks of genocide. Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, genocide is defined as acts committed with “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Those acts include killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, and imposing measures to prevent births or survival.

Every one of those conditions is visible in Gaza today.

  • Mass Killings: Over 100,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, many in mass casualty bombings of homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals. Entire families have been wiped out in single strikes.
  • Deliberate Starvation: At least 271 people, including 112 children, have already died of hunger and malnutrition. The UN describes this as a “manufactured famine”, food and medicine deliberately blocked, civilians shot at aid lines, convoys bombed.
  • Forced Displacement and Erasure: Nearly one million Palestinians have been driven from Gaza City as Israel razes neighbourhoods to rubble, a strategy witnesses describe as “bomb, run, bulldoze.” This constitutes the imposition of conditions of life designed to make return impossible.
  • Mental and Bodily Harm: Doctors report children arriving skeletal and traumatised, mothers forced to watch babies die of hunger. Survivors of bombings describe the horror of digging family members from rubble.

These are not incidental “excesses of war.” They are cumulative acts forming a coherent policy: to empty Gaza of its people, to annihilate its ability to sustain life, and to destroy, in part or whole, the Palestinian population of the enclave.

The massacres, whether in Sabra, Zeitoun, Jabalia, or at food lines, are not isolated tragedies. They form part of a genocidal pattern. As one Gaza medic said, “The bombs kill quickly; the hunger kills slowly. Together, they erase us.”

The parallels are chilling. Sabra and Shatila (1982), Srebrenica (1995), and Rwanda (1994), were all later recognised as genocidal or atrocity crimes after international hesitation had already cost countless lives. Gaza differs only in one respect: its genocide is unfolding live, broadcast daily to the world, with no denial possible.

And yet, the global response has been paralysis. Statements of “concern,” diplomatic hedging, and blocked ceasefire resolutions echo the same failures seen in Rwanda and Bosnia, where warnings were ignored until the graves were full. The international community is not ignorant; it is complicit through inaction.

In Gaza, the crime of genocide is no longer a matter of debate; it is a matter of recognition. The famine, the massacres, the forced displacement, the erasure of civilian life: these are the acts. The intent is evidenced in the pattern, in the destruction of conditions for survival, and in the rhetoric of those directing the war.

If Gaza is allowed to burn and starve unchecked, it will not only mark the destruction of a people, it will mark the death of the Genocide Convention itself, and the collapse of “Never Again” into history’s cruellest lie.

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