Press Release: Veritas Press C.I.C.
Author: Kamran Faqir
Article Date Published: 03 Aug 2025 at 11:50 GMT
Category: Middle East | Palestine-Gaza | US-Israel At War
Source(s): Veritas Press C.I.C. | Multi News Agencies
GAZA CITY – In a grim escalation of what humanitarian groups now describe as “a systematic policy of starvation,” Israeli forces killed at least 49 Palestinians on Saturday, including 24 civilians waiting for food aid, amid deepening famine across the besieged Gaza Strip.
This latest bloodshed, reported by The Muslim News and corroborated by Al Jazeera and local health officials, underscores a disturbing trend: the mass killing of starving civilians near aid distribution sites, sites increasingly controlled not by international relief agencies, but by a controversial, opaque body backed by the US and Israel known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
“We were waiting for food. Suddenly, bullets rained down. People screamed, fell, some never got back up,” said Mohammad Abu Shaaban, a 42-year-old father of four, describing the attack near the Netzarim Corridor. His eldest son, Yasser, was killed instantly. “We were not fighting. We were just hungry.”
A Manufactured Famine:
Gaza’s Health Ministry confirmed on Saturday that seven more Palestinians died from starvation, bringing the official death toll from hunger to 175, including 93 children. That figure, officials say, may be drastically undercounted due to inaccessible areas in the north and incomplete reporting from informal displacement camps.
This crisis did not occur in a vacuum. On March 2, Israel blocked all aid coordinated through UNRWA, the primary humanitarian agency in Gaza. In its place, Israel, with US endorsement, installed the GHF, an entity with no clear mandate, no transparent operations, and no track record of humanitarian work.
Since then, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, over 1,422 Palestinians have been killed and 10,067 wounded while trying to access food, mostly near GHF-run distribution points.
“This is not a failed aid system, it’s a militarised one. It punishes people for being hungry. It shoots them for standing in line,” said Sara Musmar, a field coordinator with Doctors Without Borders (MSF), in a phone interview from Deir al-Balah.
“Famine in Gaza is not collateral damage. It is a method of war,” added Michael Fakhry, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. “Blocking food, dismantling UN aid structures, and targeting civilians seeking sustenance are war crimes.”
Targeting The Desperate:
Saturday’s attacks fit a clear, chilling pattern. Israeli strikes and sniper fire targeted at least five separate aid sites across Gaza:
- In northern Gaza, eight people were shot while waiting for food near the Netzarim Corridor.
- In Khan Younis, three were killed on Al-Tina Street, near a known GHF distribution zone.
- In Rafah, one civilian was shot dead and 25 were injured as Israeli forces opened fire near another GHF site.
- Near Wadi Gaza, six more aid seekers were gunned down, according to WAFA News Agency.
Medical personnel at Al-Shifa Hospital told Al Jazeera they received 12 bodies from just one of these incidents.
“Some were children. One had been holding a cooking pot. Another clutched a food voucher soaked in blood,” said Dr. Lina Qassem, an emergency physician at the hospital. “This is what a famine zone looks like when war criminals are in charge.”
A Dangerous Shift: From UNRWA To GHF.
The sidelining of UNRWA, long the backbone of Gaza’s aid infrastructure, has left Palestinians at the mercy of a largely unaccountable body, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
“The so-called ‘GHF’ is a political weapon dressed up as a relief operation,” said Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA, in a rare and scathing statement. “It was designed to weaken and replace us, and now it is complicit in the killing of nearly 1,400 desperate people.”
Lazzarini called the Israeli government’s refusal to allow UNRWA to resume operations “a deliberate strategy to engineer famine and fragment Gaza’s aid lifeline.”
Indeed, analysts point out that GHF distribution sites are often situated near Israeli-controlled areas such as the Netzarim Corridor and near military zones. This placement, they argue, exposes civilians to crossfire, surveillance, and sniper fire.
“This isn’t humanitarian aid, it’s bait, and Israel is treating starving civilians as military targets,” said Rania Barghouti, a political analyst and former UN field officer. “And the United States is enabling it.”
US Complicity And The ‘Airdrop Illusion’:
On Friday, US envoy Steve Witkoff visited Gaza, pledging that the Trump administration would work on a plan to deliver food and medical aid. But such visits ring hollow for many on the ground, especially given Washington’s unwavering support for Israel’s military campaign and endorsement of the GHF model.
“The US says it wants to help us. Then why are their planes dropping food on roofs while their allies shoot us on the ground?” asked Abu Fadi, a displaced man in southern Khan Younis. “They are playing both saviour and executioner.”
Critics have slammed airdrops as inadequate, unsafe, and largely symbolic, with many food parcels falling into Israeli-controlled zones or being seized by armed groups. Meanwhile, fully equipped crossings in Rafah and Kerem Shalom remain blocked or tightly restricted.
“You can’t airdrop a loaf of bread into a genocide,” said Tamara Alrifai of the Norwegian Refugee Council. “You need crossings open. You need snipers to stop shooting children. And you need a political will to end this war.”
Destruction By Air, Hunger By Design:
In addition to the killings at aid sites, Saturday’s strikes flattened multiple residential areas. In Al-Zawaida, five members of the Abu Ayesh family were killed in a single airstrike. In Sheikh Radwan, an Israeli missile struck a residential building. Drone strikes hit tent camps in northern Khan Younis, killing three from the same family.
Gaza’s already-obliterated infrastructure is deteriorating further. Sewage is overflowing, diseases are rampant, and clean water is nearly impossible to find.
“We’re treating starvation, dehydration, war wounds, and trauma all at once, and we have no medicine left,” said Dr. Rami al-Haddad, a surgeon at Nasser Medical Complex. “The hospital smells like rot because we can’t bury the dead fast enough.”
West Bank: A Parallel Nightmare.
The crisis is not limited to Gaza. In the occupied West Bank, settler violence has surged in tandem with the war.
On Saturday, Israeli settlers shot and killed 24-year-old Muin Asfar in Aqraba, near Nablus. Eight others were injured, including teenagers and the elderly. According to the Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission, settlers have carried out over 2,100 attacks in 2025 alone.
“This is state-enabled ethnic cleansing. Settlers are armed. Soldiers protect them. And Palestinians are hunted in their own fields,” said Yara Abu Odeh, a legal advisor for Al-Haq.
A Crime That Demands Consequences:
With more than 100,000 Palestinians killed and an entire population pushed to the brink of extermination, international outrage is growing, but remains largely toothless.
The International Court of Justice ruled in July that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is illegal and called for the removal of all settlements. Israel, with US backing, rejected the ruling outright.
Meanwhile, no Israeli official has been held accountable for the mass killings at aid sites, the starvation policy, or the attacks on displacement camps.
“We’re past condemnation. We’re in the territory of complicity,” said Kenneth Roth, former director of Human Rights Watch. “If global institutions don’t act now, they are signing off on the destruction of an entire people.”
Conclusion: Starvation As Strategy, Normalisation As Betrayal.
Saturday’s attacks are not isolated tragedies. They are part of an expanding architecture of annihilation, in which starvation is wielded as both punishment and policy.
Aid has become a kill zone. Food lines are now firing lines. And Gaza is being erased, body by body, child by child, meal by meal.
Until borders are opened, aid is depoliticised, and international law is enforced, the massacres will continue, and the famine will deepen. What is unfolding in Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis; it is a deliberate, state-engineered catastrophe. This is not the accidental byproduct of war, but the calculated use of starvation, displacement, and siege as weapons. Over 175 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, have already died from hunger. More than 1,400 civilians have been killed while seeking food. These are not statistics. These are war crimes.
The dismantling of UN-led humanitarian mechanisms, the imposition of the opaque and militarised Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, and the repeated killing of civilians at aid sites reflect a strategic policy of forced famine, not just military negligence. International legal experts, aid organisations, UN officials, and survivors are all sounding the alarm: Israel is using hunger to break Gaza.
But perhaps even more damning than the silence of traditional Western powers is the open normalisation of ties with Israel by several Muslim-majority states. While children starve and families are slaughtered queuing for food, Arab and Muslim governments are signing trade deals, hosting Israeli delegations, and pursuing defence cooperation agreements with the very regime accused of genocide.
“The normalisation of relations with Israel in this moment is nothing short of collaboration with an aggressor state,” said Dr. Hanan al-Khateeb, a political scientist at Birzeit University. “It signals that Palestinian lives are expendable in the pursuit of economic interests or Western favour.”
From the Abraham Accords to the quiet diplomatic handshakes happening behind closed doors, normalisation has legitimised a government that is orchestrating a campaign of annihilation against an occupied people. It has emboldened Israeli impunity and disfigured the regional consensus that once tied Arab statehood to Palestinian liberation.
Even as international courts condemn Israel’s actions and global experts call this a man-made famine, many Muslim governments have chosen realpolitik over resistance, silence over solidarity.
“They are dining with war criminals while Gaza starves,” said Fawaz Mehdi, a protest organiser in Amman. “Normalisation today is not diplomacy, it is betrayal.”
The mass killings at aid lines, the weaponisation of food, and the total devastation of civilian life in Gaza demand more than statements of concern. They demand accountability, severed ties, sanctions, and a total rupture with the machinery of occupation, not its political rehabilitation.
To normalise relations with Israel at this moment is to be complicit in its crimes. It is to abandon the Palestinian people in their darkest hour. And history will remember not only the perpetrators of famine, but also those who stood by and did nothing.
In Gaza, the world is watching a genocide unfold in slow motion. And far too many are watching with their backs turned.
The question is no longer whether a genocide is happening.
It is: Who will stop it?
Tags:
Leave a Reply