From June 1 to June 11, Israeli forces killed over 800 Palestinians and wounded over 2,400 as they carried out bombardments and raids across Gaza, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported. This is an average of over 72 Palestinians killed each day at the hands of Israeli forces.
This includes Israel’s assault of Nuseirat refugee camp on Saturday that killed 274 Palestinians, including 64 children, and injured 698 others, with Israeli forces carrying out one of the most deadly single attacks of their genocidal siege so far in order to retrieve four Israelis held hostage in Gaza. The attack was carried out on a bustling civilian center in the middle of the day, raising questions about whether Israeli forces violated international law.
The 11-day death toll also includes at least 70 Palestinians killed and over 300 wounded due to heavy Israeli shelling in central Gaza on June 4, MSF said; and at least 40 Palestinians killed and 74 wounded on June 6, when Israel bombed a UN school-turned-shelter in Nuseirat. The killings of hundreds of Palestinians in other Israeli attacks, ranging across southern, central and northern Gaza, in the first days of June have otherwise been largely ignored by news outlets, and are hardly documented by official sources.
Behind each death is a horrifying story of a Palestinian who lived through months of displacement, constant bombardment, hunger and likely the loss of family members, bearing witness to the 37,000 people killed by Israel in Gaza over eight months just to themselves be killed by Israeli forces. Survivors recall horrors, like children who recount being pulled out of the rubble of their homes, and the pervading smell of death.
Rounding difference aside, yes, the stunting and lifelong effects of malnutrition especially in a population as adolescent as Gaza, which existed prior to the present state of war, too, right?
Also, yes, sometimes when a state actor, or even a quasi state actor, as it is, starts a war, it exacerbates existing problems with food security. The singular reason that Gaza didn’t have famine rival to that of Darfur prior to the current state of War is the generosity of the West enabled Hamas to plunder Gaza for generations such that Gaza’s primary export became international terror.
Hamas caused and continuez to cause the present state of war by starting it and then refusing to surrender or follow any international law whatsoever. Criminal enterprises have no legitimate right to statehood, or to make demands for diplomacy. It’s almost as if the present state of things is exactly what Hamas hoped for on October 6.
Gaza should have people in charge that will not take billions of dollars from Iran and other “Group of Friends” countries and use every penny to build the most elaborate tunnel system the world has ever known while it’s people grow up malnourished as you’ve described, and instead spend some of it on food infrastructure. This is what people mean when they talk about UNRWA and certain NGOs being an obstruction to peace in Gaza; the people of Gaza wouldn’t tolerate, let alone aid and abet Hamas, if they had to bear the actual consequences of Hamas, such as the food insecurity invited by Hamas by having turning not just its air, water, and land ports of entry into instruments of a criminal enterprise, but every school, hospital, and apartment building along 450 miles of tunnels, too, decade after decade.
How many more millions of Gazan’s should live and die malnourished anyway under an actual far right fascist regime?