Mick Hartley

A clear-headed summary of the Gaza situation from Matti Friedman at The Free Press:

A few weeks into the Gaza war that began on October 7, 2023, we Israelis learned from every major press outlet in the West that we’d just bombed a hospital and killed hundreds of people. The devastated Al-Ahli hospital was on front pages around the world, with a New York Times headline reporting “at least 500 dead.” Furious protests erupted, and a mob burned a synagogue in Tunisia.

The story was fake. A misfired Palestinian rocket had landed near the hospital, which was intact.

Around the same time, we started reading that Israel’s response to the October 7 terror attack—a war that Palestinians started, and which had barely begun at the time—was actually a “genocide,” an ideological slur thrown at Israel by Soviet propagandists, Arab dictators, and the Western left beginning in the 1970s. In the following months, hundreds of Israeli soldiers were killed fighting house-to-house in areas where Palestinian civilians—and combatants—were warned that troops were coming so they could leave.

Reports of impending hunger engineered by Israel in Gaza have been commonplace not just since the beginning of this war but for at least a decade and a half, since Hamas seized the territory and Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade that supposedly turned Gaza into an “open-air prison.” The famine never materialized. Now we hear claims that this same period of supposedly extreme deprivation was actually a Gazan idyll that Israel has cruelly destroyed in this war.

Very little of what is reported here, in other words, is what it seems. This is nothing new. Over the years, Israelis have been accused of fake massacres and rapes. The country’s actions are lied about almost daily by people describing themselves as journalists, analysts, and representatives of the United Nations, often using statistics that are themselves untrue.

Is it different this time, though? Is there really a famine? Well…

When I asked a friend—until recently a senior government official, with connections at the highest levels here and abroad—if people are starving in Gaza, he answered honestly, “I don’t know.”…

An experienced Israeli civilian involved in the aid efforts, from an organization that works both with international aid groups and the Israeli military, said on Friday that mass starvation is not yet the reality but could be in the near future. There are already “pockets” of malnutrition and real hunger, he told me. The only way to avert a deterioration, he said, is for Israel to abandon the mistaken idea that withholding aid weakens Hamas, and to urgently flood Gaza with food. It’s the right move morally, he said, but also strategically, because the humanitarian crisis is devastating what’s left of Israel’s international support. He praised efforts by the United Arab Emirates and American-led groups like the World Food Program. Israel needs to work with them, he said, rethink its own policy, and move fast before things go from bad to worse.

This is already happening. In the meantime, news consumers worldwide were galvanized over the weekend by disturbing photos like those of the Gazan child Muhammad al-Matouq, who appeared on the front page of Britain’s Daily Express and then on that of The New York Times and elsewhere as the symbol of Israel’s cruel starvation of innocents. After the photographs were seen around the world it became clear that the child in fact suffers from cerebral palsy and other conditions unrelated to starvation. The suffering child ended up being less the intended symbol of Israeli evil than of how genuine misery can be put to use by practitioners of narrative war.

You might have thought that hunger in Gaza would work against Hamas, forcing the group to have mercy on its own civilians and accept the ceasefire desired by Israel and the U.S. and currently under discussion in Qatar. But Hamas knows that the opposite is true: The disaster they’ve engineered in Gaza fuels the global campaign against Israel. That’s presumably why the crescendo of hunger stories coincided on Friday with reports that Hamas has now hardened its positions in the talks, leading to their suspension. (One of Hamas’s top demands, according to an American official cited by The Wall Street Journal, is shutting down the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.)

One of the terrible facts of this war is that the Palestinians who started the war, and who constructed the twisted battlefield on which it has been fought, won’t act to save their own people. Starvation and death serve the Hamas plan. That means that Israel must decide how far it wants to push—and when to stop.