How the Israeli Right Explains the Aid Disaster It Created
Last week, in a piece for the Guardian, Nick Maynard, a volunteer surgeon at a hospital in southern Gaza, wrote, “I’ve just finished operating on another severely malnourished young teenager. A seven-month-old baby lies in our paediatric intensive care unit, so tiny and malnourished that I initially mistook her for a newborn. The phrase ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do justice to the way her body has been ravaged. She is literally wasting away before our eyes and, despite our best efforts, we are powerless to save her.” The humanitarian situation in Gaza, which was already dire, deteriorated even further in July, with sixty-three people, including twenty-five children, dying from malnutrition-related causes, according to the World Health Organization. This past weekend, Israel announced that it would pause some military activity in the territory and allow more aid in, although it remains unclear how long that pause will last.
As more reports and images of emaciated children emerge from Gaza, close Israeli allies, such as France and the United Kingdom, have issued harsh critiques, calling the current humanitarian situation a “catastrophe.” Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, announced that his country would become the first member of the G-7 to recognize a Palestinian state, and Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, has also promised to do so unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire. On Monday, even President Trump acknowledged that children were going hungry. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, has continued to insist that there is “no starvation in Gaza.”) Two Israeli human-rights groups have begun referring to Israel’s actions as “genocide.” The scale of the crisis has also caused a number of American politicians and commentators, including defenders of the war, to argue that more aid needs to be allowed into the territory, or that the war itself has become unjust.
