The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) killed at least 81 Palestinians in Gaza in the 24 hours beginning dawn Tuesday, as part of the Zionist regime’s stepped-up offensive this week targeting all areas of the Strip, including the city of Deir al-Balah, which had previously been spared heavy bombardment.
According to Gaza health authorities, 31 of the dead were aid-seekers. The total number of starving Palestinians shot dead by Israel while seeking food now exceeds 1,000 since the establishment in May of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
On Tuesday, United Nations (UN) human rights office spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan told the Associated Free Press: “As of July 21, we have recorded 1,054 people killed in Gaza while trying to get food; 766 of them were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites and 288 near UN and other humanitarian organisations’ aid convoys.”
The US- and Israeli-controlled foundation is a mechanism for corralling Palestinians into the southernmost part of the Strip, where they are routinely gunned down by Israeli forces. The aim is to prepare the expulsion of the Palestinians from Gaza entirely, while legitimising Israel’s ban on all genuine aid organisations transporting desperately needed supplies into the Strip.
On Sunday, the IDF massacred 92 aid-seekers. On Monday, it responded to global shock and horror by murdering some 130 Palestinians. Together with the killings on Tuesday, that takes the three-day toll to at least 303.
The direct killings are being accompanied by a rapid rise in the number of Palestinians dying of starvation as a deliberate consequence of the Israeli blockade.
On Tuesday, 15 Palestinians succumbed to starvation. Among them were four children, including 13-year-old Abdulhamid al-Ghalban, who died at a hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis, and six-week-old baby Yousef al-Safadi.
The baby’s uncle, Adham al-Safadi, told Reuters that the family had been desperately trying to find baby formula for days. “You can't get milk anywhere, and if you do find any it’s $100 for a tub,” he said.
At least 21 children have starved to death in the past three days. Of the 101 Palestinians confirmed to have died from hunger, 80 were children, almost all perishing over recent weeks.
On Tuesday, Professor Nick Maynard, a British surgeon volunteering in the last functioning hospital in the south of the Strip, detailed the horrific conditions on the ground.
In a report published in the Guardian, Maynard stated: “I’m writing this from Nasser hospital in southern Gaza, where 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,” Maynard wrote. “We are witnessing deliberate starvation in Gaza right now.”
The hospital has run out of baby formula so it is forced to use “10% dextrose (sugar water), which has no nutritional value.” Mothers are frequently too malnourished to breastfeed. When an international doctor sought to bring formula into Gaza for use at Nasser Hospital, it was confiscated by the Israeli authorities.
Growing numbers of patients, Maynard reported, are dying after surgeries, because they are too weak to fight off infections. He warned that the “enforced malnutrition” would imminently claim “thousands” of lives.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres made a similar warning to a meeting of the Security Council in New York this week, describing the situation in Gaza as a “horror show, in the level of death and destruction without parallel in recent times.”
“Malnourishment is soaring. Starvation is knocking on every door, and now we are seeing the last gasp of a humanitarian system built on humanitarian principles. This system is being denied the conditions to function, denied the space to deliver, denied the safety to save lives.”
Guterres denounced Israel’s deliberate targeting of UN and international humanitarian facilities, noting that it was a violation of international law.
That targeting has continued with Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Deir al-Balah. The city in central Gaza is the only one not to have previously been hit with massive aerial raids in the 21-month long genocide.
The IDF reportedly believes that a number of the remaining Israeli hostages are held in the city. Israeli human rights’ groups and some relatives of hostages responded to this week’s offensive against the city by noting that it again shows that the Israeli regime has no interest in repatriating the hostages and is simply using them as a pretext for the war on Gaza.
Because it had been relatively unscathed, Deir al-Balah had become a refuge for tens of thousands of civilians forced to flee other parts of Gaza. Several international aid organisations headquartered their operations in the city for the same reason.
As the IDF launched a massive aerial bombardment, tank incursion and shelling of the city Monday, they were a central target. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) main warehouse was bombed as were the residential quarters of its staff. WHO employees and their families were then handcuffed and stripped by IDF soldiers, with four being detained. The WHO was compelled to evacuate its staff, effectively crippling its operations.
The invasion of Deir al-Balah is part of a broader escalation of the Israeli offensive. 13 of the Palestinians killed yesterday died in an IDF shelling of tents for displaced families at the al-Shati refugee camp north of Gaza City.
The escalation underscores the fraud of claims by the major imperialist powers and much of the Western press that a new ceasefire agreement may be imminent. To cover over their complicity in the unfolding horrors, the leaders of 25 countries issued a statement this week criticising the killing of civilians, including aid seekers, and the enforced starvation.
The countries which issued the call for Israel to “comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law” are either directly arming the IDF to commit the genocide, such as the UK and Australia, or have politically backed it throughout.
Such statements present the atrocities in Gaza in isolation, and as the result of excesses, rather than deliberate policy. In reality, the aim of Israel since October, 2023 has been to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, as part of a “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem,” and an attempt to redraw the geopolitical map of the Middle East in partnership with American imperialism.
The same countries issuing crocodile tears either openly hailed or tacitly endorsed the expansion of this program in the US airstrikes on Iran last month.
The intensified offensive against Gaza has gone hand in hand with stepped-up Israeli operations in the West Bank, where at least 1,000 Palestinians have been murdered since the genocide began. Over the past 24 hours, the IDF has raided the Am’ari refugee camp, having earlier stormed the Sateh Marhaba neighbourhood in nearby Ramallah.
The ongoing regionwide war was the subject of a meeting between Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz and the IDF’s top generals on Tuesday night. The Jerusalem Post reported that Katz told the military chiefs that “actions” had to be taken to “resolve” Gaza in line with “aggressive offensive policy,” while they should also “be prepared for further forceful action” in the West Bank.
Katz spoke of the need to deepen offensive operations against Yemen, and hailed Israel’s bombardment of Syria last week. He reportedly declared that Israel would “consider resuming its campaign against Iran.”
This broader context of an eruption of imperialist militarism underscores the reality that opposition to the genocide cannot be confined to single-issue protests. Nor can such opposition go forward through appealing to the very governments responsible for the atrocities to change course.
In a statement Saturday, the World Socialist Web Site called on the millions of workers and young people seeking to end the genocide to focus their attention on the expansion of the class struggle globally.
It explained: “A new strategy is needed—one that bases the fight against the Gaza genocide on the industrial and political mobilization of the international working class. Workers all over the world are being drawn into struggle against the same ruling class that is sponsoring mass murder in Gaza.”