The Hunger War

Is anything fair in war? Unfortunately, if contemporary times have brought anything—especially since the 20th century—it has been unbridled warfare, targeting civilians: bombings of cities, sieges, starvation, rape... The Second World War marked a shift toward new forms of barbarism, with destructive air raids on urban centers, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the extermination camps, and the gulags. Armies no longer just fought and continue to fight each other; they also punish the defenseless population, sometimes obsessively and fanatically, sometimes with calculated coldness. Technology—now with drones—has made the execution of terror daring and dehumanized.

What is happening now in Gaza is part of this spiral of violence against civilian victims. The Israeli government, against all global cries for compassion and respect for international law, continues with its plan of extermination. He doesn't spare hospitals, schools, or refugee camps. He doesn't see children dying under bombs or starving, but potential Hamas terrorists. He doesn't aim for a military victory, but for the annihilation of an entire people. He doesn't want control of the Strip; he wants to leave a scorched, uninhabitable, unlivable land. He's certainly achieving it. The images of destruction, which the authorities in Tel Aviv are trying to censor in their country and prevent their dissemination by murdering journalists, are shocking. And the question inevitably arises: how can Israel, a state created as compensation for the Jewish people for the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis, be committing such an atrocious war crime today?

The UN has just formalized what was already a global outcry: the Integrated Food Security Classification (IPC) system, recognized globally by 21 humanitarian organizations, has confirmed that the extreme conditions in which one million people live in Gaza meet the criteria. Since its creation in 2004, the IPC had only recognized four episodes of famine, all in sub-Saharan Africa, the last of which, in 2024, was in Sudan. These were humanitarian disasters. The famine in Gaza has another dimension because it was deliberately caused by Israel. The head of the UN Human Rights agency, Jeremy Laurence, has held the Netanyahu government directly responsible and believes it could constitute a "war crime." And the Secretary-General of the UN itself, António Guterres, called it a "man-made disaster" and "a failure of humanity itself."

And yet, the Israeli army has decided to push ahead with the invasion of Gaza City. This means that in the coming days, without regular food supplies, with hospitals overwhelmed, and infrastructure devastated, the new exodus of civilians will only exacerbate hunger and the Palestinian humanitarian crisis. Only the United States could stop Netanyahu's madness, but there is absolutely no indication that this has to occur to Donald Trump.