A barrage of articles in the bourgeois press, along with statements by Democratic Party politicians, President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and reports from United Nations bodies, all claim that large numbers of children are starving to death in Gaza because of Israel’s war against Hamas.
This provides cover for Hamas apologists who charge that Israel is withholding food and medicine to carry out “genocide” against the Palestinian people, without a shred of evidence.
Most of their reports rely on statements by the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas, a Nazi-like group whose goal is to destroy Israel and expel or kill all Jews there.
One widely disseminated picture of an emaciated child helps expose the falsity of the latest worldwide anti-Jewish propaganda campaign. That’s one of 18-month-old Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, featured in a July 25 New York Times article and media worldwide as the epitome of starving Gazan children.
In fact, Mohammed suffers genetic conditions that require special diets and affect his appearance. An additional photo includes his mother and brother. Neither shows signs of starvation. Five days after its publication the Times printed a “correction,” admitting that the child had “pre-existing health problems.” But it still uses the photo as an example of “impending famine.”
A Dec. 23, 2023, article by TRT World stated, “The UN says Gaza is now on the verge of famine.” Sound familiar? So-called aid groups have proclaimed this over and over ever since.
There are serious food shortages in Gaza. But this is primarily because Hamas uses aid to keep its thugs fed, to try to ensure loyalty from its declining number of supporters and to sell to provide income to fund its brutal dictatorship.
“No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid,” claims a headline in the July 26 New York Times. It’s evidence? Two anonymous Israeli army officials and an “internal” U.S. government report.
Has the Times considered asking the people in Gaza? In December 2023, an Al Jazeera reporter filming live from Khan Younis asserted that aid was getting to the people.
An elderly Palestinian woman challenged him. “A lot of aid comes in, but it doesn’t reach the people,” she told the reporter in a scene captured on video, explaining it goes to Hamas.
U.N. complicity
The United Nations has worked in complicity with Hamas in Gaza in setting up schools that indoctrinate children to become suicide bombers to “terrorize the enemy.” The U.N. looked the other way as Hamas built command posts and tunnels underneath their hospitals, schools, U.N. buildings and residential neighborhoods in preparation for its Oct. 7, 2023, pogrom.
Hamas still holds in abominable conditions 20 remaining hostages it kidnapped Oct. 7, along with the bodies of another 30 believed to be dead. Hamas repeatedly says it doesn’t care how many Palestinians die, its goal is to carry out more massacres like Oct. 7 “again and again.”
Amid the challenging conditions, thousands of Palestinians have taken to the streets of Gaza to demand “Hamas, out! Out!” most recently in Khan Younis July 21. Many protesters also call for freeing the Israeli hostages. These actions offer a glimpse of the possibilities for working people — whatever their religion or nationality — to come to defend their common interests throughout the region. The bourgeois press barely mentions these actions.
Trying to prevent Hamas from continuing to divert aid or to sell it at a profit, the Israeli government set up a new distribution system managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, with some aid from Washington. Despite numerous problems and poor planning, it has distributed tens of millions of food packages.
But Hamas see this as a threat to its hold on power. It has threatened to kill any Gazan who helps GHF distribute food. And it made ending the GHF program a central demand in stalled ceasefire negotiations.
The Israeli government has allowed the U.N. and other aid groups to send hundreds of trucks of aid to Gaza, but the U.N. had been refusing to distribute their contents, claiming it’s too risky and that the trucks are frequently attacked by looters.
So why is the U.S. government promoting the “verge of famine” deception?
The U.S. rulers are not concerned about Palestinians or Jews. For them, joining Hamas supporters in charging Israel with causing a famine is one more way to pressure its government to end the war on the thug outfit, which Washington sees as an obstacle to its goal — stability for U.S. imperialism’s plunder of the labor and natural resources of the Middle East.