The Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza continues to kill Palestinians on a daily basis. The United Nations reports that nearly 1,400 Palestinians have been shot and killed by Israeli soldiers as they’ve gathered to receive food and medical aid at four locations run by the U.S.–Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. As of Aug. 5, a total of 188 Palestinians have died of starvation and malnutrition, while Israel has only permitted 86 trucks carrying desperately needed food and humanitarian aid into Gaza per day, far short of the 600 trucks aid organizations say are needed to meet the basic needs of Gaza’s 2.3 million people. This, as The Gaza Health Ministry reports that more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.
Israeli media is reporting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to announce plans for a full military occupation of the entire Gaza Strip despite opposition from the Israel Defense Forces chief of staff. Netanyahu’s plan to escalate the war in Gaza comes as a group of 600 retired Israeli security officials, including former heads of the nation’s intelligence agencies, have written a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to pressure Israel to end their war in Gaza.
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN: Anyone who has seen aerial pictures of the Gaza Strip basically sees a post-apocalyptic landscape. For me, I think it looks worse than parts of Hiroshima and Dresden after the second world war. It looks like a landscape of ash. Building after building has been bombed, blasted to the ground. It’s rubble. The agricultural land has been destroyed.
Essentially, the Israelis already control 86.1 percent of the Gaza Strip. That’s most of Gaza, obviously, and the population, the 2 million Palestinians who live there have been — mostly forced into al-Mawasi, a so-called safe zone on the west coast of the Gaza Strip, bordering the sea and are living in tents in a new kind of — I can’t find the right words to describe it. It’s a horrible situation. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of people. They don’t have adequate food — if at all — and we’re talking about one in three Gazans now risking severe malnutrition.
Almost 200 people have now died of malnutrition, starvation in Gaza. I think 87 or so of them have been children. They have no medications to give people who get sick, no way of infusing them with liquids and glucose, this kind of thing that at least rehydrates the body. It’s really hard to find the words to describe what’s happening there today. Clearly, the Israelis want the Gazan population out of Gaza. There will be a push to get the people in the north South. That’s the first step because Israel plans to retake the northern half of the Gaza Strip up to the Netzarim corridor.
So eventually that will be gone, and it doesn’t surprise me at all to read that Netanyahu is now going to seek to retake all of the Gaza Strip. I think personally, this was long in his plan. I can’t prove that. But anybody who has been following the negotiations for a ceasefire will recognize that even when Hamas has accepted all of the conditions of the ceasefire agreement, such as they did last fall, Netanyahu then finds a way to throw a wrench in it and say it’s not sufficient. So Hamas gets blamed every time they say no ceasefire was agreed and they say that it’s demanding things that are unreasonable. Such as what? Such as a permanent ceasefire, a permanent end to the war.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you for that, Jennifer. France, Canada and the United Kingdom have both announced recently that they’re considering formally recognizing a Palestinian state, maybe this September at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. I wondered if you would comment on what, if any difference a recognition of a Palestinian state by these important European powers could make in the trajectory of this horrendous conflict, as well as ending this war that has claimed so many Palestinian lives?
But at the same time, declaring a Palestinian state is the very least they can do.
I mean, I can’t tell you how much happier I would be if these states basically said, “We’re going to sanction, Israel.” Said, “We’re no longer going to trade with Israel. We’re no longer going to sell Israel weapons. We’re no longer just going to have business as usual, as in real time. We are seeing babies’ rib cages because they don’t have any food in their bodies. I mean, this is just the sadism involved in doing that to an entire people and to seeing the smallest and the most vulnerable people suffer in this way. So to say, “Yes, we’re going to recognize Palestine this September. That’s all fine and good. Whether a Palestine will ever come into the picture, none of us really know. “But it’s not stopping this calamity. It’s not stopping. It’s not putting an end to the incredible suffering that people are experiencing day in and day out.”
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