Gaza is a mirror reflecting the world's absolute shame

Middle East Eye

21-07-2025

Razan Abu Zaher died starving.
She was four years old.
She died on the floor of a collapsing hospital, her tiny ribs rising and falling like wings too fragile to lift. Her body had no fat left to burn. Her eyes had sunken. Her voice - once a whisper of laughter - had long since vanished.
She did not die quickly. She died slowly.
She died watched by her mother, who begged her to hold on. Watched by a doctor who had no more syringes, no more saline, no more words, and by a world that tuned in - then turned away.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
Her death was not a tragedy. It was a sentence, written not in haste, but in policy.
Razan is not alone. She is one of thousands.
Between March and June - well into the total blockade - the UN agency for Palestine refugees, Unrwa, screened over 74,000 children in Gaza. More than 5,500 were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition. Over 800 were already critical.
That was months after food was declared a threat. After flour became contraband and milk became memory, now children die in their parents' arms.
Mothers hold babies who no longer cry.
Fathers dig graves with their bare hands, whispering lullabies into the dust.
Gaza has been besieged by hunger, death, Arab betrayal, and international treachery.
Those who do not die by bombs are dying of starvation - or disease.
And in the background: gunfire. Because even starvation is not safe in Gaza.
Weaponised hunger
This is not famine. This is weaponised hunger. The deliberate strangling of a people - not with rope, but with red tape.
Not just with bombs, but with bureaucracy.
War on Gaza: How Israel is replicating Nazi starvation tactics Read More »
Israel bombs bakeries, shells aid convoys, flattens farms, and blocks food shipments with logistical sabotage.
It starves Gaza with the same precision it uses to kill it.
Yes, history has known starvation as a weapon, but what is happening in Gaza is unprecedented.
Never in recent history has a civilian population been locked into a fenced strip of land - denied food, water, and fuel - while being bombed from air, land, and sea.
This is not siege. It is the world's first televised extermination.
A concentration camp under constant aerial assault.
In Bosnia, starvation was used to break will. At the Omarska death camp, 700 of 6,000 inmates died of hunger and torture.
In Srebrenica, food was deliberately denied. A Bosnian Serb soldier admitted: "We realised it wasn't really weapons being smuggled into Srebrenica that we should worry about, but food."
Before Bosnia, the Nazi Hunger Plan sought to exterminate Jews and Soviet civilians. Seven million died - not as collateral, but by design.
As sociologist Martin Shaw observes, Israel is following the pattern of the Nazi genocide, as described by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: "A daily fight literally for bread and physical survival,' which would 'handicap thinking in general and national terms."
This is not just an assault on bodies. It is a war against consciousness.
Starving journalists
A starvation meant not only to kill, but to crush the capacity to think, to organise, to hope.
Even the journalists are starving.
Al Jazeera correspondents have aired their own hunger: "We bring you the news while we ourselves are hungry. We haven't found a morsel to eat since yesterday."
A starvation meant not only to kill, but to crush the capacity to think, to organise, to hope
When the observer becomes the victim, when hunger swallows the narrator, history has passed crisis - it has reached catastrophe.
Still, Palestinians continue to queue for food - fully aware of the mortal risk.
They walk into what have become Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) starvation killing traps, sites orchestrated by the Israeli military.
They go for a sack of flour - and return as corpses.
On Sunday, 115 Palestinians were shot dead while seeking aid. Ninety-two of them were trying to collect food.
Nineteen were children.
Since 27 May, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed, and nearly 5,000 wounded, at distribution points managed by GHF - where Israeli forces open fire on starving civilians.
One father - emaciated, weeping, cradling the bloodied body of his son - was filmed after they were shot waiting for flour.
He did not scream.
He simply rocked the boy in his arms as gunfire crackled behind him, whispering his name - because it was all he had left.
This is not humanitarian crisis. It is extermination through hunger. And still the world insists this is war.
Who are the culprits?
It is not war. It is annihilation - choreographed, prolonged, and permitted.
Who are the culprits?
Israel drops the bombs and seals the gates. The United States pays for the weapons and protects it with vetoes.
And what of the Arab regimes? They stand closest. They speak of brotherhood and shared blood, but now they are wardens, jailers and enforcers
But the noose - the tightening of life - is held by others too.
Let us speak of Europe.
So proud of its enlightenment. So swift to invoke "Never Again". So silent when the bodies are Palestinian.
The European Union is Israel's largest trading partner.
It signed a deal promising that human rights were a condition of trade. That promise is now a grave.
Its own review found Israel in breach. And what did Europe do? Nothing.
To mask its complicity, the EU claimed to have reached a humanitarian agreement with Israel. A supposed breakthrough. But it was no more than theatre.
No aid flowed. No siege lifted.
It was a smokescreen - a gesture meant only to blind the public, to buy time while children starved.
As Amnesty International declared: "A cruel and unlawful betrayal of law, conscience, and Europe itself."
This will be remembered - not as policy, but complicity. Not neutrality, but partnership in crime.
And what of the Arab regimes?
They stand closest. They speak of brotherhood and shared blood, but now they are wardens, jailers and enforcers.
Palestinian children wait at a food distribution point in Nuseirat, in the central Gaza Strip, on 23 June 2025 (AFP)
Start with the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi - the general turned president, installed via an Israel-backed coup. He rules Egypt with tear gas and prisons. But most heinously, in Sinai, he has built a buffer zone to lock Gaza out.
Rafah crossing is closed. Aid trucks rot under the sun. Doctors are denied entry. Children are dying - not for lack of help, but because help is blocked. International activists are detained, interrogated and deported.
A flash of Palestinian keffiyeh is a crime.
This is not security. It is servitude.
How Egypt lost its regional power – and became complicit in Gaza's siege: One on One with Hossam el-Hamalawy Read More »
And then there's Jordan - a kingdom that sells its heritage with one hand, jails its citizens with the other.
It arrested teachers, students, tribal leaders - for waving flags, holding tents, organising aid. They say it's to combat the Muslim Brotherhood.
It's really to crush Palestine.
What Sisi does with checkpoints, Jordan does with courtrooms.
Solidarity has become a crime. Submission, a virtue.
This is the dictator's rulebook: obey the West, accommodate Israel.
Then seal your people in - and do what you want.
These are not bystanders.
They are partners - in famine, in siege, in slaughter.
World's unvarnished shame
And through it all - the slow murder, the pantomime of diplomacy - we were told to wait. To trust in negotiations.
But what kind of world makes the feeding of starving children a matter of debate?
Gaza is not just a killing field. She is a mirror - and in her reflection, we see our absolute, unvarnished shame
What kind of diplomacy turns bread into a bargaining chip?
That is what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was permitted to do - to turn food into leverage, to treat the relief of a besieged population as a prize to be bartered.
It was not just immoral. It was illegal. It was obscene.
Humanitarian access is not a favour to be granted. It is a duty bound by law.
To delay it, to debate it, to withhold it for political gain is to turn hunger into a weapon - and diplomacy into an accomplice to war crimes.
What is happening in Gaza does more than violate law - it obliterates it.
It tears through every principle of humanity, every treaty that claims to uphold it.
The world did not merely fail Gaza. It abandoned her. And in doing so, it exposed itself.
Gaza is not just a killing field.
She is a mirror - and in her reflection, we see our absolute, unvarnished shame.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.