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| Displaced Palestinian mother Samah Matar holds her malnourished son Ameer as her other son Youssef, also malnourished, lies on a mattress. (Mahmoud Issa/Reuters) |
| It’s a split-screen moment. On one side, you have the crushing daily reality of the Gaza Strip. The scale of mass starvation taking place in the besieged territory is so vast that medics and humanitarian staff tasked with helping provide for the hungry are themselves barely managing to stay on their feet. Aid groups are either bereft or running out of supplies amid more than four months of blockade. One in three people in Gaza are going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations. Each day brings new images of skeletal children and desperate families seeking sustenance amid Gaza’s ruins. Health officials report a surge in deaths from malnutrition as daily bombardments by Israeli forces continue to kill Palestinians. Israeli troops have opened fire repeatedly in the vicinity of the sites doling out the little food available in the territory, according to humanitarian experts, witnesses and visual evidence. On the other side, you have the surreal vision conjured by Israeli science and technology minister Gila Gamliel, who uploaded an AI-generated video this week to social media showing a vision of what a postwar Gaza Strip could look like. (It echoed an AI video posted by President Donald Trump to Truth Social in February, although that one featured an Elon Musk likeness eating hummus out of a bread bowl, golden Trump statues and statuettes, and a “Trump Gaza” song.) The minute-long clip shared by Gamliel celebrated Trump’s plan to help redevelop the war-ravaged territory into an area of gleaming high-rises, ritzy tourism and pristine new residential neighborhoods. Luxury yachts float by the Strip’s Mediterranean beaches; Jewish residents grin over platters of hummus. The catch? Most or all of Gaza’s actual population is nowhere to be seen. In her post, Gamliel pointed to the necessity of the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s Palestinian population. She’s not alone among cabinet minister in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government in calling for this outcome. Since the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, numerous Israeli politicians have not only sought the full defeat of Hamas, but cast the entirety of Gaza’s more than 2 million inhabitants as an enemy population that needs to be removed. The emptying of the Gaza Strip has never been Netanyahu’s formal policy or that of the Israeli military, but the rhetoric of many prominent Israeli officials calling for Gaza’s de facto ethnic cleansing has been central to the genocide case against Israel that’s being deliberated by the International Court of Justice, the U.N.’s highest court. Those calls were aired yet again at a far-right conference held Tuesday at the Knesset, where participants spoke of Gaza as an ideal site to relieve Israel’s housing crunch, as West Bank settlements long have, and urged the return of Jewish settlers to the enclave. | ||||||
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| Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends a plenary session to vote on a bill for applying Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank territory, at the Knesset on Wednesday. (Abir Sultan/EPA/Shutterstock) |
| “We will occupy Gaza and make it an inseparable part of Israel,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a leading far-right figure in Netanyahu’s coalition, said at the conference, which was titled: “The Gaza Riviera — from Vision to Reality.” According to Israeli media reports, some of the plans discussed included the creation of two separate cities in the narrow territory, alongside a tourist district with beachfront hotels and new industrial and agricultural zones. Smotrich said that there were plans to “relocate Gazans to other countries” and that Trump himself was in favor of this outcome.
On Thursday, the rhetorical drumbeat continued. Israeli heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu, another far-right politician who early in the war suggested dropping one of Israel’s nuclear bombs on Gaza, declared that “all Gaza will be Jewish.” The Israeli government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” Eliyahu told a radio station, describing Palestinians as indoctrinated Nazis. “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil. We are pushing this population that has been educated on ‘Mein Kampf.’” Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid spoke out against Eliyahu’s comments, describing them as “an attack on values and a public relations disaster.” But Israel’s far right appears unfazed by such criticism and contemptuous of growing international outrage over the situation in Gaza. “There’s no hunger in Gaza,” Eliyahu said in the same interview, dismissing reports of starvation as anti-Israel propaganda. “But we don’t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip. Let the world worry about it.” | ||||||
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| Palestinians transport victims to a Red Cross clinic in Rafah after they were reportedly shot as they waited to receive food at a distribution point run by the U.S. and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. (-/AFP/Getty Images) |
| Since the collapse of a brief ceasefire in March, little humanitarian aid has been able enter the territory. Israel has accused U.N. agencies and humanitarian groups of allowing Hamas to siphon aid for its purposes, and has restricted the delivery of food through a U.S.-backed initiative known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which critics say is not providing anywhere close to an adequate level of support and is delivering food in a system with foreseeable flaws that have led to unarmed, desperate Palestinians being gunned down by security forces. “When victims of Israeli strikes, shelling or gunfire reach the hospitals, photographs show, their bodies are often visibly emaciated,” my colleagues wrote.
Rachel Cummings, Gaza project lead at Save the Children International, a major humanitarian group, said GHF’s operations “lack safety or dignity for people in their most desperate times.” Speaking from Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, Cummings described a situation of total deprivation, with markets empty and cupboards bare. “Everyone is very thin, everyone is exhausted, their faces are hollowed,” she told me on Thursday. “Gaza’s few remaining hospitals now have wards for the growing number of malnourished children whose tiny bodies are just the width of their bones,” my colleagues reported. “Doctors are famished to the point that they have dizzy spells as they make their rounds, medics say, and the journalists documenting their caseloads are often too weak to even walk to the clinics.” A ceasefire is still out of reach, as Israel presses Hamas to agree to a truce that would free remaining hostages, allow the Israeli military to maintain a presence across Gaza and possibly restart hostilities in the near future. In its absence, Cummings warned of an accelerating disaster, a “perfect storm” in which limited water supplies, damaged sanitation infrastructure and widespread malnutrition lead to a spike in fatalities. Cummings relayed to me the grim words of a local colleague, reckoning with their calamity. “I can’t imagine I’m going to die of starvation after 21 months of bombing,” she said. “We are all walking toward death.” | ||||||