How Israel is replicating Nazi starvation tactics
A displaced Palestinian youth ferries a bag of food aid on his shoulders after people stormed a World Food Programme warehouse in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on 28 May 2025
Soumaya Ghannoushi writes in Middle East Eye on 2 June 2025:
A woman kneels in the dust. She is thin, trembling – not old, but famine has aged her. Her bones protrude through a threadbare dress. Her face is ash. Her fingers claw at the ground.
Around her, others bend too – not in prayer, but in desperation, scraping at the dirt for flour. Not even full grains. Just remnants. Scraps. Whatever the wind and boots and bombs have not yet claimed.
Then she breaks. She sinks fully to the earth, as if the weight of hunger is too heavy to carry. And she cries, not softly, but with a violence that cuts through the silence of the ruined street: “My kids will eat flour scraped from the floor.”
This is not just starvation. It is the calculated breaking of a people, pushing them beyond the limits of human endurance. This is what Gaza’s “aid” looks like. Not distribution, but oppression. Not relief, but ritual debasement.
Rations of suffering
The flour had been withheld for weeks – stockpiled, blocked, used as bait. Exhausted families walked for miles, past corpses and craters, to reach the drop sites – only to find cages, soldiers and drones. When they ran towards the food, they were shot.
More than 30 Palestinians were massacred on Sunday, and more than 170 were wounded near an aid distribution site in Rafah, as Israeli forces opened fire on starving civilians trying to collect food. The drop was coordinated by the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).